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0,Chrono Cross ,10," Chrono Cross may not have had the largest budget, but it has the largest heart.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/3/6/2210936-box_ccross.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/chrono-cross-review/1900-2545933/,pos,"
Square's Chrono Trigger got everything right. The self-proclaimed ""dream team"" of scenarist Yuji Hori (Dragon Quest), producer Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy), and character designer Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball Z) created a quirky, enjoyable romp through time with a cast of endearing characters, memorable environments, solid RPG gameplay, and unparalleled presentation. Needless to say, fans have clamored for a sequel ever since.   Which is why, after nearly five years of silence, the announcement of Chrono Cross drew so much ire. Where was the legendary dream team? (Only Sakaguchi contributed to Chrono Cross.) Where was the cast of characters we had grown to know and love? And who the hell was that Thundercats reject named Lynx? Things looked grim for the Chrono Trigger faithful. When Chrono Cross was revealed to have over 40 playable characters, many lost faith in the game entirely. Had Square thrown all pretense of a coherent story out the window?   But fortunately for series fans, Chrono Trigger's dream team doesn't have a monopoly on RPG innovation. As with the first SNES title, everything in Chrono Cross ""clicks"" in a way most games wish they could imitate. The different parts combine into an instant RPG classic.   The story begins with the hero, Serge, who is thrust into a parallel world where he died under mysterious circumstances over a decade ago. He teams up with a rowdy adventurer, Kid, and sets out in search of the mysterious Frozen Flame, an artifact that lets the holder reshape time and space on a whim. The enigmatic Lynx, a regal man-cat who hunts the Frozen Flame for his own purposes, opposes them. In his quest to return home, Serge will accrue both allies and foes, and he'll find himself thrust into an adventure that reveals his heritage, purpose, and ultimate destiny. Only by crossing between the two dimensions can Serge find the answers to his questions.   Without revealing any more of Chrono Cross' excellent storyline, it can be said that it successfully pulls off the difficult balancing act every sequel faces. It's not a rehash of the original Chrono Trigger, but neither does it exploit the characters and setting of Chrono Trigger for name recognition alone. Instead, it sets up an equally valid, separate, and well-developed world, then slowly and responsibly weaves in elements, characters, and events from the first title. It doesn't continue the original Chrono Trigger mythos so much as it expands it. Gamers will be stunned by the resolution of the disparate plot threads. And with features like a unilaterally taciturn hero, an accommodating attitude toward interdimensional travel, and a new game+ mode, Chrono Cross manages to maintain the ineffable Chrono Trigger feel.    The battle system deviates slightly from the RPG norm. The traditional ""active time bar"" has been replaced with a bar of seven stamina points. While the engine is still ostensibly turn-based, any character can take a turn at any time as long as they have at least a single stamina point remaining. Enemies can even interrupt your characters' attacks. Party members can unleash weak, medium, and strong attacks, which require one, two, and three stamina points, respectively. Even though the game pauses while waiting for input, the ability to start and end a character's turn whenever you please makes for a more frantic, ""real-time"" experience.   Elements, Chrono Cross' magic system, is divided into six colors: black and white, red and blue, and green and yellow. The characters all have a ""color alignment,"" which determines their affinity to certain elements. Once you obtain a spell, you place it in an acceptable empty slot on a character's element grid. For example, a spell with level ""5+/-2"" is a level five spell, but can be placed in any slot from three to seven with the expected drop or rise in effectiveness. Successfully landing a weak, medium, or strong attack adds one, two, or three bars to a characters' element grid. A character with sufficient element bars can cast a spell, but the cost is seven stamina points, temporarily dropping him or her out of action. Combine building element grids and plummeting stamina bars with the dynamic nature of characters' turns, and battles become a constantly shifting endeavor - yet always remain under the player's total control. Once you understand the intricacies of the battle system, encounters are always over quickly.   Two other features of the battle system are dual techs and the color field. As in the original Chrono Trigger, characters can combine their special techniques for dual attacks; while dual techs are not as prevalent as you might expect, they are there to be discovered. The color field keeps track of the color of the last three spells cast. If the field becomes a single color, characters with that color alignment gain a statistical boost. Moreover, a monochromatic field is the only time when one of the game's mighty summons can be unleashed. Manipulating the field to a single color is trickier than you might expect, as the interference of your opponents' spells can't be ignored.   Chrono Cross has to be the most battle-friendly RPG ever released. All opponents are visible onscreen before the battle sequences begin, making battles easy to engage in or avoid. Even more pleasantly, every battle can be escaped whenever you like with a 100-percent success rate. Even boss battles. Don't like the way the battle is going? Your three red magicians hopelessly doomed against a blue powerhouse? Don't reset your console - just run away, regroup, and re-engage. And last but far from least, the option to automatically heal at the end of a battle is a boon from the RPG gods. Don't misunderstand; the game doesn't cure your party for free. But it will intelligently dig through your available spells and stocked inventory and use the necessary elements to return your party to fighting shape. So long, post-battle trips to the status screen, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.Chrono Cross also features a list of key items that can be selected and used on the overworld map and field screens. These items advance the plot, bypass obstacles, and recruit characters to your cause. While no one will fall head over heels in love with this gameplay ""innovation,"" it does add an old-school adventure game feel and an element of interaction with the environment that most console RPGs lack.   Surprisingly, Chrono Cross' seemingly endless supply of characters works to its benefit, not its detriment. The secret to its success? Every last one of the 40-plus members is a unique, story-driven, and valuable contributor. Unlike many cast-of-thousands RPG epics, each character in Chrono Cross is an interesting and worthy addition to your team. Everyone has a beautiful character model, excellently animated attacks, and three unique ""limit break"" type special skills. There's even a miniquest or special requirement for every character's best skill - that's a lot of extra adventuring! While you'll certainly have your own handful of favorites, you'll never add someone to your party and wonder, ""Why is this character in the game?"" There are no disposable placeholders in Chrono Cross.   Even more surprising is the amount of unique text in the game. There is no dialogue spoken by ""assorted other party members."" Every character has his or her own reaction to and take on the story's events, expressed in his or her own special dialect, speech pattern, and dialogue style. Moreover, many exchanges are only found by having certain characters in your party. If your opponent has a history with one of your members, the two of them will hash it out before you fight. If one of your members has had an experience they feel pertains to the situation at hand, they'll share it with you.   Square's localization team has done an incredible job with a comprehensive set of uniquely English dialects. The Japanese language has a broader base of vocabulary with which a writer can express a character's social class, self-perception, politeness level, maturity, and so forth. It would have been easy to dismiss maintaining the dialects as ""impossible"" and just do a straight translation - but Square did not. While some choices may seem odd at first (Kid as a foul-mouthed Australian sheila? Harle as a compassionate French belle?), the richness of the language soon becomes as much a credit to the game as the diversity of characters.   Graphically, Chrono Cross is nothing short of stunning. While Square's Final Fantasy is glossy and polished, Chrono Cross has an organic feel lacking in the former's ""perfect"" environments. Vibrant color, creative design, and just the right amount of ambient effects bring the settings to life. Again, while Final Fantasy drops your characters into a small subsection of a large, epic environment, Chrono Cross lets you explore every nook and cranny of scandalously detailed towns, buildings, and dungeons. While we don't intend to slight Final Fantasy's excellent graphics and design, many gamers will prefer the more down-to-earth, personal, and ""gritty"" feel of Chrono Cross. The environments are well worn and lived in, not just-constructed movie sets.   The battle graphics are also excellent. Characters and enemies are universally well modeled, textured, and animated. Camera movement, for the most part, always offers a great view of the action. Special accolades should be given to the spell effects - while they're impressive and suitably over-the-top, they're also short and fast.   Thankfully, the sound and music more than match the graphics. Sound effects are varied and always match the situation at hand. The music is, in a word, gorgeous, and it will undoubtedly be many players' favorite part of the Chrono Cross experience. Chrono Trigger composer Yasunori Mitsuda has returned and crafted a masterpiece. Composition and sample quality are both outstanding, and the soundtrack runs the emotional gamut, presenting everything from playful mambo jams to sorrowful violin solos. While many songs are new and unique to Chrono Cross, the influence of Chrono Trigger can definitely be heard. Some songs are rearrangements of Chrono Trigger tunes, while other songs tactfully reference a three- or four-note phrase that only the most devoted series fans will recognize.   With Square agonizing over every detail of its flagship property, the Chrono Cross team was apparently left mostly to themselves. Consequently, the game shares an all-out enthusiasm and joie de vivre found in the best 16-bit titles - back before games became multimillion dollar properties that had to answer to glaring shareholders. Chrono Cross may not have had the largest budget, but it has the largest heart.
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1,"Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The ",10," Ocarina of Time definitely follows in the footsteps of the previous games, and the result is a game that can't be called anything other than flawless.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/1/8/3/2215183-box_tlozoot.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-the-review/1900-2543677/,pos,"
The Legend of Zelda is one of those magical series of games that always cause huge amounts of excitement. It sprung onto the NES scene in 1987, and it was a runaway success. Remember the chip shortages that delayed the 1988 release of the Adventure of Link? Or what about the first time you saw pictures of the Japanese version of 1991's A Link to the Past? With the possible exception of Mario, no Nintendo series has caused such a level of hysteria or left behind so many great memories. Ocarina of Time definitely follows in the footsteps of the previous games, and the result is a game that can't be called anything other than flawless.  You begin the game as a child of the forest. But by the time you're done, you'll be a fisherman, an errand boy, the hero of time, and, yes, even a traveling mask salesman. The game is chock-full of minitasks and subgames that run alongside the main quest, saving Hyrule from Ganondorf's evil. This leads to an extreme feeling of freedom, even though a good portion of the game must be executed in a linear fashion. Stuck at the water temple? Then why not go scout around for some extra heart containers while you think about your dilemma? The control really holds the game together. Most 3D game designers still haven't mastered the art of controlling characters in a 3D environment, but that's not the case here. Link moves beautifully, and controlling his various actions is a breeze. Essentially, your B button will always attack with the sword. The A button, however, acts as an action button, performing every non-item-related task in the game. At various times, A lets you climb, grab, dive, talk, and lots more. Three of the C buttons are used for items, any of which can be assigned to any of the three buttons. The top C button zooms in to a first-person perspective, which allows you to look around. The R shoulder button is used for blocking with the shield. The Z trigger is perhaps the most important button when it comes to dealing with enemies in the 3D realm. Hitting Z while looking at an enemy will cause you to lock on to that opponent. From there you can circle-strafe around them, hop from side to side, and always block in their direction. This is key to fighting all but the most basic of enemies and is extremely well conceived. While there are some tough monsters, the main enemy in Zelda is the puzzle aspect of the game. Ocarina of Time forces you to think before you act, with numerous puzzles spread throughout the entire game. Some puzzles must be solved simply to exit a room, while other, larger puzzles sometimes cover an entire area. Some of the game's puzzles are totally optional, usually rewarding you with a piece of a heart container - which you'll need, but you won't have to collect every single one as long as you're quick with the Master Sword.The game's items are the usual assortment you've come to expect from a Zelda game. The boomerang is an invaluable tool for young Link, as is the slingshot. These weapons are mere toys for Link's adult body, however, so you'll be using the bow and the hookshot (or grappling hook) for most of the game's latter portions. Bombs, of course, come in handy no matter how old you are. The ocarina is probably the most-used item in the game. Throughout the entire game, you'll learn various tunes for the ocarina. Playing these tunes does a lot of different things, such as turning night to day, opening certain doors, calling your horse, and warping from place to place. In a world as large as Hyrule, warping is an extremely useful time-saver. Time plays an important role throughout the game. As you proceed, time passes, and day quickly becomes night. At night, the fields of Hyrule can be a dangerous place. Time travel also comes into play, allowing you to jump seven years into the future and back again. The two times act similarly to the light and dark worlds in the SNES Zelda game, A Link to the Past. Things you do as a child will affect locations, and a few puzzles require the use of both time periods. Graphically, Ocarina of Time is simply unmatched. Everything about the game just looks fantastic. You can see Death Mountain in the background of some portions of the game, complete with various smoke effects depending on what stage of the game you're in. The cinematics, which, of course, use the game engine, look absolutely spectacular, and the effects used (the time travel sequence is especially sweet looking) really give the game a spectacularly majestic look. The game's sound is also really quite amazing. Every tune in the game perfectly relates to the onscreen action. Even the songs you play on the ocarina are hummable. The sound effects are also perfect. The speech consists of mostly laughter, gasps, and battle yelps (heavy on the ""hi-yah!"") and works very, very well. The game also takes your location into consideration. Dungeons and large canyons sound appropriately echoey, while underwater, noises are nice and warbled. In a way, Ocarina of Time is a textbook example of retro done right. It manages to combine small aspects from all the previous Zelda games, giving you the same Zelda feel but in an entirely new way. Even in its huge, fiercely 3D world, the game retains a truly classic feel. This is a sequel at its finest, expanding on previous themes and bringing plenty of new stuff to the table. Even if you're specifically looking for it, it's hard to find fault in Ocarina of Time. OK, to be fair, there's a slight bit of slowdown in a couple locations, such as the water temple, but it isn't frequent or harmful enough to even matter. The game offers a nice challenge, a stunningly well-told story, and the gameplay to back it all up. This game is the real thing. This is the masterpiece that people will still be talking about ten years down the road. This is the game that perfectly exhibits the ""quality not quantity"" mantra that Nintendo has been touting since the N64 was released. In a word, perfect. To call it anything else would be a bald-faced lie.


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2,Soul Calibur ,10, Think state of the art.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/1/0/4/2215104-soulcalibur_cover.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/soul-calibur-review/1900-2540664/,pos,"
Let's get one thing out of the way: Soul Calibur is the best 3D fighting game ever released in the arcades. Better than Virtua Fighter 3. Better than Tekken 3. If that weren't enough, the Dreamcast version one-ups the original arcade release in just about every way imaginable. Now that we've established that, let's explore why, and what it is about the Dreamcast version that raises the bar on fighting games in general.    From its debut at the 1998 Electronics Entertainment Expo, tucked away in a remote corner of Namco's booth, it was obvious that Soul Calibur was something special. Namco had pushed the PlayStation-based System 12 hardware farther than anyone had a right to expect from such a modest chipset. Namco took what it had learned from Tekken 3 and built on the ambitious, but limited, Soul Edge fighting engine. Soul Calibur was not only a substantial leap in graphics, but in gameplay as well. Employing a new eight-way directional system in conjunction with a physics engine that took weapon weight into account, Soul Calibur's gameplay reached new heights in both complexity and depth. Perhaps one of the most crucial additions was the inclusion of the tech-roll found in Tekken 3. No more lying on the ground as your opponent rained down attacks from the sky. Just a quick tap of the guard button and you were back on your feet, quick as a whistle. Graphically, the game was a fireworks display of particle effects, complex polygonal character models, and a light-sourcing tour de force, all running at a blazing 60 frames-per-second.    The short of it is, if you haven't played Soul Calibur, you need to. For sheer adrenaline working in tandem with eye-melting graphics, nothing could touch it. What then, does the Dreamcast version (Namco's first ""real"" game developed for archrival Sega in ages) of Soul Calibur do to leapfrog past its arcade counterpart in every way possible?    To begin with, the most obvious enhancement are the graphics. Despite the lack of a prerendered FMV intro, the likes of which we're used to seeing from Namco, the opening offered here will drop more jaws than Muhammed Ali. Think of the intros usually seen in Capcom games like Marvel vs. Capcom, but rendered in full, hi-res, 60fps 3D (with a splash of Samurai Shodown thrown in for good measure), and you're not even close to imagining how awesome the intro to Soul Calibur for the DC looks. Picture a first-person camera zooming in over some sandy horizon, as weapons slam into the foreground. Keep going until the weapons are replaced by a swiftly approaching Kilik (the staff user in SC). Trigger an impressive sequence of character cameos and a dynamic soundtrack, and there you have it. This has to be seen in person to appreciate. It looks so good it might as well be CG, because five years ago, graphics like these were impossible. The reason the arcade version couldn't be ported home to the PlayStation was due to hardware limitations. Despite the fine conversion of Tekken 3 to the PlayStation, Soul Calibur on System-12 used an extremely high amount of RAM to enable effects like Z-buffering and other processor-taxing effects - effects that were not present in Tekken 3. The Dreamcast, on the other hand, represented the perfect solution to Namco's problems. With hardware roughly ten times as powerful as the PlayStation, the DC can not only manage Soul Calibur's graphic fireworks, but also enhance them by leaps and bounds. With characters boasting not only improved polygon counts, but high-resolution textures, each member of Soul Calibur moves around each stage looking larger, tougher, more solid, and more detailed than ever before. For example, Astaroth's alternate costume sprouts Godzilla-like spikes out of his back (these spikes wobble as he moves), along with a tall Alfalfa-esque hairdo that swings and sways depending on what direction he's moving in. Soul Edge alumni and Siegfried's alter ego, Nightmare, wields the Soul Edge itself, with an eyeball set in the center that looks around at the proceedings independently of the sword. Details like hair, clothing, and accessories all move in rhythm with an extremely realistic physics model. Improving the quality of the characters wasn't enough for Namco's programmers though. They also added a muscle-flexing system that causes pectorals to ripple during victory poses, breasts and buttocks to jiggle realistically (read: subtle, not exaggerated as in Dead or Alive), and skin to stretch in a most natural way, with not a polygon tear in sight. These characters look incredible, and some benefit from the enhancements more than others (Lizardman's tail no longer looks like a polygonal mess). Everything looks perfectly smooth (especially faces), with minimal blockiness, putting the models in VF3tb to shame. This is an extremely solid-looking game. The characters have also been outfitted with an extensive set of facial expressions that add greatly to the game experience. Take Mitsurugi, for example. With every sword slash accompanied by a grunt or yell, his face synchronizes the appropriate expression as well. Even during win poses, each character mouths his own victory speech. Even little things like fingers are individually rendered.Weapons are also impressive enough to simply sit back and watch: The blades on Voldo's twin katars move independently; Kilik's bo flexes with each swing; and metallic weapons like Mitsurugi's sword feature specular highlighting (think Gran Turismo, but better) that reflects the environment around it. Other things, like head tracking, dust clouds kicked up by the characters' feet, and amazing real-time shadows (check out Ivy's flaccid whip-sword in practice mode for a good idea of how cool simple shadows can be), round out the visual impact. Soul Calibur is so detail-intensive that even your character's breath can be seen on some stages. However, what good are beautiful-looking characters without beautiful-looking stages for them to jump around on? With the power of the Dreamcast, Namco didn't have to make compromises here, as they had in the PlayStation version of Tekken 3. All the 3D backgrounds of the arcade version are reproduced faithfully here. Perhaps ""faithfully"" is the wrong word though, since every texture has been rerendered in an ultra-high resolution. Additional 3D elements have been included to give the game some of the most stunning locales ever seen. Structures far back in the distance look as crisp as the details closer to you. Stages like Yoshimitsu's Water Vein, which places you on a raft speeding down an underground river, is nothing short of breathtaking. If it's architecture you crave, then one glimpse at Siegrfried's City of Water, replete with eye-searing sun flares, or the Indian Port with its distant temples, all rendered in 3D, will have you near tears. Extra touches like the rats in Voldo's stage or weather effects like rain are in abundance too. Despite the complexity and size of the backgrounds, there is never so much as a stutter in the frame rate. Amazing.    Beyond the obvious visual enhancements are the sound and soundtrack supporting it. Making good use of the Dreamcast's powerful Yamaha soundboard, Soul Calibur cranks out crystal-clear weapon effects, recorded at the highest sample rates. While certain effects (like falling in the water) lack some clarity, it's hardly as important as the metallic clanging you hear. Other ambient sounds like footsteps take on a different tone depending on whether you're running on stone or wood. Voice samples are also extremely clear, currently spoken in robust Japanese. The music is an appropriately medieval-sounding score, presumably recorded with a full symphonic orchestra. The numerous compositions have been written with a dynamically epic feel, although there are moments when the cacophony takes a backseat to quieter, more florid pieces.    As far as the line-up is concerned, original members Mitsurugi, Taki, Voldo, and Sophitia return for another go, while newcomers Xianghua, Kilik, Maxi, Nightmare, and Astaroth bring up the rear. The majority of the newcomers are enhanced clones of the characters they replaced from the Soul Edge (Xianghua = Hwang Sung Kyung, Kilik = Seung Mina, Maxi = Li Long, Nightmare = Siegfried, Astaroth = Rock), although those characters (with the exception of Li Long) are all hidden in the game as secret combatants. Other notable additions to the roster include Lizardman, Edge Master, and Tekken stalwart, Yoshimitsu. The interesting thing about Yoshimitsu is that this is probably the first time you'll ever see him effectively use his weapon. In Tekken he looks more like he's punching with a sword in his hand. Here he really goes for it, slicing and dicing with his sword, although some of his throw moves are the same. Edge Master is essentially like the final boss, Inferno, in that he uses a different weapon and move set every time, making your knowledge of each warrior's arsenal important. He's also fast as hell, making him an extremely dangerous opponent. Also improved from the original arcade release is something Namco's designers wanted to implement, but couldn't, due to the System-12's hardware limitations: improved character motions and an increased number of moves. While this may throw off some gamers used to the arcade version, it quickly becomes apparent that these changes are subtle, keeping the original gameplay intact, while enriching the experience.What most gamers curious about Soul Calibur will want to know are what sort of exclusive features are included. Namco, after all, is known for its superlative home conversions, adding awesome modes and numerous other features, which vastly increases the replay value of the usually short arcade experience. Aside from the usual arcade mode, there are versus, team battle, time attack, survival, extra survival, practice, Internet, mission battle, and museum modes. While the majority of these modes are by now considered staples in the fighting game genre, the mission and museum modes that will pique most people's interest. Like the Edge Master mode in Soul Blade (the PlayStation version of Soul Edge), mission battle tests your all-around skill in a variety of settings. You execute the fundamental moves (throws, guard cancels, etc.) against the Edge Master, who acts as your tutor, or fight against numerous opponents. Unlike Soul Blade, which rewarded you with a wide assortment of weapons with practically every task completed, the mission battle mode instead rewards you with points. These points can then be ""cashed in"" at the museum. The museum mode features an extensive art gallery filled with black-and-white drawings, anime-style artwork, and CG renders. To unlock all the artwork, you will be playing for a very long time indeed. ""Buy"" enough of these pictures and you'll unlock all kinds of things, including new character outfits, new stages, a character-profile option, and a lot more. The character-profile option lets you view the characters in any of their costumes, from almost any angle, while checking out the stats on their weapons, their history, and their stage. You can also listen to their voice samples while watching the characters faces lip-sync, as well as view their endings. Very, very cool stuff. Another point of interest is how well the Dreamcast controller would emulate the arcade control. The answer is: incredibly well. Considering the DC pad has roughly the same layout as the PlayStation controller, which is what the Soul Edge/Calibur button layout is based on, it's hard to imagine anyone having problems with this setup. You can use either the analog pad or the digital pad. The D-pad seems to work a little better since the game relies on precise inputs, making the analog pad seem a little too loose for this game. However, some may find it preferable, so, thankfully it is an option. Response times are right on the money, with sole character Maxi seemingly a problem. The difficulty in using Maxi (the nunchaku expert) is that his motion-capture sequences often continue without your deliberate input, making him a tricky character to control. This is a game-design issue, rather than a controller issue, so once you master Maxi, anticipating his quirks will most likely be compensated for. Team-battle mode allows you to choose anywhere from one to eight characters, for a possible eight-on-eight melee (King of Fighters style). Internet mode, unfortunately, does not permit you to play your friends online, but instead forwards you to a Soul Calibur web page where you can view more gallery-style images and whatnot.    With all this technological wonder going on, you might wonder if there are any quibbles at large. Not really. Perhaps the only areas of the game that are mildly disappointing are the endings, which consist of some text and a couple of black-and-white drawings. This, however, is more of a wish than a detriment, and doesn't take away from the game at all. An extensive weapons collection, like the one in Soul Edge, would have been nice, but perhaps there's one buried deep in the many layers of this game. As it is, this is truly a flawless game. In years past, Namco has built a bulletproof reputation for delivering arcade-perfect conversions of their already excellent arcade games into your home, with a gaggle of consumer-exclusive features that made you want to cry out of happiness. In the case of Soul Calibur, Sega should be crying tears of joy. Namco has amply displayed exactly how conversions of this nature should be done. This time, however, the ""house that Pac-Man built"" has done even better. This time around it has taken the best 3D fighter out of the arcades, given it a major facelift, and reshaped it until it was light years beyond the original, both graphically and in terms of value, and then brought it home for under 50 bucks. And the company has made only scant changes to bring the game to the states. The voices in the US version are indeed the same as in the Japanese version, but now there is an option to turn on English subtitles; one of Voldo's outfits has had its crotch spikes removed; and the Internet mode is gone. So Soul Calibur has reached US shores virtually unscathed, keeping it the game that will show the world how powerful the Dreamcast really is. Kicking out an unprecedented number of special effects at an unassailable 60fps, all in mega-high resolution, with supercharged gameplay nailing it all down, the only way this game will look any better is to play it using Sega's PC monitor-compatible VGA box. If you have one of those, the game is on a completely different visual level than anything else out there. While it may seem bandwagon-esque to say this game is worthy of a perfect score, it really isn't much of a stretch to say it is. Yes, it is a fighting game, a genre with a fairly limited scope, but insofar as fighting games go, Soul Calibur is mind-numbing perfection. Namco has taken the best and made it considerably better. The level at which the company has done so is practically unprecedented. Think state of the art. Absolutely brilliant in all aspects, as far as games of this type go, Soul Calibur is the undisputed king of the hill. It is essential in any gamer's collection.
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3,Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 ,10, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 strikes a perfect balance between new and old and renders the two previous entries in the series almost completely obsolete in the process.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/6/4/5/2211645-box_thps3.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-pro-skater-3-review/1900-2820972/,pos,"
Making a great sequel to an already successful product is a tricky endeavor, especially when you're talking about a game series that is moving from one platform to another. It would be extremely easy for a developer to stick way too close to the previous title, using the new console's power to give the game a nice graphical overhaul and pumping up the difficulty so that hard-core fans have something new to play with. On the other hand, too many changes could potentially alienate the original game's fan base by getting away from what made the previous games in the series stick out. The Neversoft and Activision team has already proved that it can do sequels right with the September 2000 release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Now, the team is releasing a new game in the series on a new console, the PlayStation 2. Thankfully, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 strikes a perfect balance between new and old and renders the two previous entries in the series almost completely obsolete in the process.   For those of you new to the series, the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games put you on a skateboard and in a level with goals to accomplish. As you accomplish these goals, which range from simple score targets to more difficult skateboard trickery of the ""how the heck am I supposed to get all the way up there"" variety, more levels are opened up. The game isn't exactly the most accurate simulation of skateboarding in the world, as it has some pretty outrageous physics and lets you get away with things that make Tony Hawk's much lauded 900-degree spin look commonplace by comparison. As the series has progressed, it has gotten more and more combo-friendly, conceivably allowing you to continually do one string of tricks around the entire level, lasting the entire length of your two-minute run.   Like the previous Tony Hawk game, THPS3 features a collection of professional skaters. The roster hasn't changed much this time around--still on board are Steve Caballero, Kareen Campbell, Rune Glifberg, Eric Koston, Bucky Lasek, Rodney Mullen, Chad Muska, Andrew Reynolds, Geoff Rowley, Elissa Steamer, Jamie Thomas, and of course, Tony Hawk. Bob Burnquist, who was in the first two games, is not in Tony Hawk 3, as he has jumped ship over to Konami's ESPN skateboarding game. Replacing Bob is Bam Margera, perhaps most famous for his dad-beating antics on MTV's ""Jackass"" and his self-produced CKY videos. The create-a-skater and create-a-skate park have also been expanded quite a bit this time around. In create-a-skater, you can select different faces, skin tones, hairstyles, heights, and weights. Once you've got the base down, you can decorate your skater with different shirts, pants, shorts, shoes, socks, helmets, pads, glasses, hats, tattoos, watches, bracelets, and more. The pro skaters can be edited to a certain extent, so you can add hats and remove or change shirts if you so desire. You can also create female skaters. Rounding out the skater lineup is a collection of wild and, in some cases, completely unexpected hidden skaters, each of whom has a few new special tricks. While the skaters may look different and start with different stats and tricks, you can configure their tricks (both normal and special) and stat points in any way you see fit. The level editor is more varied and lets you be far more productive--the only thing missing is the ability to use your created parks while playing online.   In Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, you could combine grinds and other street-style tricks by manualing (in essence, popping a wheelie on your board) just as you touched ground. But there was no way to work vert ramps into the middle of a combo, only the end. As a result, the game became a little one-dimensional, as everyone simply looked for the longest grind lines and ignored ramps almost entirely. Tony Hawk 3 remedies this imbalance by adding a trick called the revert. The revert is a quick 180 spin that is done just as your skateboard touches the ramp when you're coming down from vert or lip tricks. Doing the revert lets you pop up into a manual, after which you can roll over to something else to do more tricks. Just as the manual revolutionized the Tony Hawk world back in Tony Hawk 2, the revert does the same here in Tony Hawk 3. The combo potential of other moves has also been increased. You can now move from one grind to another without actually leaving the rail. Lip tricks also work the same way. Some kick tricks can be doubled or tripled by quickly doing the trick two or three times--holding left and tapping square three times, for example, does a triple kickflip. Other less-noticeable combos are also included. Doing a kickflip and immediately doing an indy afterward gives you--in the eyes of scoring, anyway--a new trick called ""kickflip to indy.""In addition to all the new trick enhancements, the game's levels have improved. Some of the levels are based on actual locations, like Skater Island, an indoor skate park in Rhode Island, which serves as the game's second competition level. Most of the levels are rather large and significantly more interactive. The most dramatic example is in the Los Angeles level, where you'll start an earthquake that rattles a freeway apart, giving you new places to skate. The game is packed with tiny cutscenes that play with the completion of some goals, showing you dumping snow onto a bully, making a car fall off a freeway onto the surface streets below, causing a cruise ship to deploy its safety nets, or activating a satellite dish by clearing away branches from its power lines. The goal structure in the game remains largely the same, with each noncompetition level containing nine goals. Three of those goals are score based, one involves finding a hidden videotape stashed somewhere on the level, and the rest involve collecting items, breaking items, and doing specific tasks. For example, in the Canada level, you have to ""Get Chuck Unstuck."" Poor Chuck has his tongue stuck to a frozen pole, and skating into him is the only way to rip his tongue off the pole. Some goals have two parts: In the airport, you have to deliver plane tickets from the counter to the gate. So first you have to grab the tickets; then you have to make it all the way down to the gate to deliver the tickets. Two goals change depending on your chosen skater. Each level has a trick-specific goal. So with a vert skater, you might have to do a cannonball over a half-pipe, but a street skater will have to find a specific rail and do a 50-50 grind on it. The letters that spell the word ""skate"" also must be collected in each level, and there are a handful of different configurations for these letters in each level, which change depending on the skater you're currently using. In addition to the standard goal-based levels, Tony Hawk 3 has three competition levels that score you based on how well you can do on a one-minute run. Doing well here gives you a gold medal and opens up the next level. Every level has a few optional items in it as well. Five stat points and a new deck are in every level, and their placement changes from skater to skater. Earning stat points is crucial, because certain level goals later in the game will be significantly more difficult if you haven't become powerful enough. Stat points can be placed in any category and can be rearranged at any time. Stat categories include rail, lip, and manual balance, as well as ratings for your ollie, air, hang time, spin, switch-skating ability, and speed.    Each time you complete the game, you're given some new things to play with. Earning three gold medals gives you a new video to watch. Most of the videos are standard biographical stuff for the pro skaters, combined with footage of them skating. Like in the previous games, the hidden and created skaters unlock other videos, such as footage of the pros bailing and lots and lots of footage of the Neversoft team goofing around. Needless to say, the increased storage capacity of the DVD format doesn't go to waste here. Aside from the main career mode, you can skate around any level with no time limit or skate a single two-minute session on any level in an attempt to set one of the many records that the game keeps track of for every course. The nicest mode addition is a brief tutorial that shows you the basics of the game--something that Tony Hawk 2 definitely could have used. The tutorial takes you through a step-by-step guide to the game, narrated by Tony himself. Here, you'll learn how to manual, how to revert properly, how to determine what makes good combos, and how to wall-ride effectively. It's brief, but it goes a long way toward making the game friendlier to first-time players.   Completing every goal in the game with one skater unlocks something else, like a hidden skater, hidden level, or cheat mode. Once you've gotten the hang of the game and figured out all the goals a few times, beating the game should take around an hour, but the lure of hidden stuff combined with the varied placement of certain level items from skater to skater makes the game very replayable. But single-player replayability isn't the only thing Tony Hawk 3 has going for it.Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 has the unique distinction of being the very first online game available for the PlayStation 2. As of this writing, Sony's own online adapter isn't available, but Neversoft has included support for USB modems and USB Ethernet adapters. The game features a pretty intuitive network setup screen, allowing you to enter IP, gateway, and DNS information if you need it or dial-up settings if you're using a narrowband connection. If you're on a network that uses DHCP, you should be able to just plug your Ethernet cable into a supported USB Ethernet adapter, hit network from the main menu, and start playing. The game uses the standard PC model for online games, meaning one of the players in the game will be acting as the server. Being the server means you call the shots when it comes to game and level selection, as well as banning unruly players. Joining a game is also simple. When you are connected to the lobby, you're given a choice of three West Coast and three East Coast master servers. After selecting a master, you'll see a list of games running, and you can sort them by ping, number of players, game type, level, and so on. Pick a game, wait for it to load, and you're skating with up to three other people. You can skate freely around a level with other players, chatting with either a slow onscreen keyboard or by plugging a USB keyboard into the PS2.   Aside from free skate, there are a handful of games you can play online. Trick attack is a simple score-based battle. Graffiti was in previous Tony Hawk games and challenges you to mark more territory than your opponents by doing tricks on them. The pieces of the level you use for your trick are changed to your color. Anyone doing a higher-scoring trick on that object can steal the piece from you. King of the hill is a slight reworking of tag from THPS2, and it forces players to fight for a crown that changes hands whenever the king is bumped by another player. Whoever can hold the crown for two minutes (or more if the server operator decides to choose a longer time period) first wins. Slap! is the game's answer to Quake-style deathmatch. When two skaters collide, the faster skater knocks the other one down and earns one point. Whoever has the most points at the end wins. All these modes can also be played in a split-screen two-player mode. Horse, a multiplayer game that has been in all of the Tony Hawk games, can be played only in this offline two-player mode. Needless to say, the multiplayer element of the game gives it a nearly infinite amount of replay value.   In addition to playing amazingly well, Tony Hawk 3 looks terrific. The game is designed to run at 60 frames per second, and with a few hardly noticeable exceptions, it does just that. The huge levels look great up close or at a distance, with nice-looking, colorful textures and a nicely controlled draw distance. While some rails and other edges do have that jaggy, aliased look that the PlayStation 2 has become infamous for, it doesn't stand out as much as it does in some other PS2 products. Plus, the skaters all look nice and smooth. While some of the standard trick animations from the previous games in the series seem to be reused here, the tricks transition very well from one to the next, and the animation is both smooth and full of little nuances. For instance, spinning in the air while doing tricks looks way more realistic now, as the skaters' torsos actually twist separately from their legs. Even grinding and lip tricks look better now, as the skaters get a little twitchy as they try to keep their balance. A ton of new wreck animations have been added as well. These situational animations make bailing look a lot more realistic--and a lot more painful. Blood that streaks the sides of walls and ramps when you wipe out and remain in that spot for quite some time afterward definitely adds to the painful effect. Another nice feature is the ability to look around at will by moving the right analog stick. You can even lock the camera in any position you wish, though it's obviously pretty difficult to skate while you're staring directly at the front side of your skater.The soundtrack is a perfect mix of old and new material that crosses many genres. Bands on the soundtrack include CKY, Motorhead, AFI, Alien Ant Farm, Xzibit, KRS-One, Rollins Band, Redman, Del the Funky Homosapien, Ozomatli, and more. A playlist function lets you turn off tracks that don't fit your tastes, but the long soundtrack will almost certainly contain something you can skate to. Like the previous Tony Hawk games, Tony 3 gets the sounds of skating down perfectly. You can hear the cracks in the sidewalk as you skate over them, different surfaces make different noises when you skate on them, and there is a seemingly unlimited number of cool little voice clips and other minor sound effects that really make the game come alive. Pedestrians throughout the levels will talk, some of them having funny conversations amongst themselves, while others will call out to you, telling you to ""bust something out"" and proclaiming that your tricks are ""dope"" when you do something nice right in front of them. The voicework is also absolutely hilarious. The kids in the Canada level talk with a Canadian accent, and their dialogue is peppered with the word ""eh."" Security guards in the airport level and some of the people in the Los Angeles level tend to talk with a funny sort of ""Eddie Murphy doing an impression of an uptight white guy"" flavor, speaking very deliberately when they proclaim your tricks to be ""sick.""   The Tony Hawk series has always had style. The first game reinvented a genre and set off a series of clones and pretenders that still flood the market today. The second game refined the formula, but its higher level of difficulty and steeper learning curve turned off casual players. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 brings it all together in one package that makes everything before it almost unplayable by comparison. The game has a lower level of difficulty at the beginning and some basic tutoring to appeal to new players but has enough hidden items and harder optional goals later on to keep the Tony Hawk experts interested as well. Add to that the greatly expanded and very balanced trick system and a heavy dose of sleep-stealingly addictive online play and you've got a game that you'll be playing right up until the day that Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 is released, if not longer. We highly recommend that you cancel whatever plans you had for Halloween and buy a copy as soon as possible.
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4,Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots ,10, Metal Gear Solid 4 is an awe-inspiring synthesis of dramatic storytelling and entertaining gameplay.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/4/1/2219241-ps3_mgs4gunsofthepatriots_8.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metal-gear-solid-4-guns-of-the-patriots-review/1900-6192543/,pos,"
  Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the most technically stunning video game ever made. It's also a fine example of storytelling prowess within its medium, combining gameplay and narrative so slickly and beautifully that it's impossible to extricate one from the other. It's likely you will emerge awestruck from your first play-through, wishing the experience would continue yet nonetheless satisfied with its conclusion. It's difficult not to sound hyperbolic when discussing MGS4 because every part of its design seemingly fulfills its vision, without compromise. There is no halfway.    The story is both convoluted and compelling.   Fully realized, lengthy story sequences will come as no surprise to anyone who has played a Metal Gear game. You'll spend a good half of MGS4 watching cinematics, but it would be a grave misinterpretation to assume that great gameplay takes a backseat to the story. Rather, these two elements are tightly intertwined, and this tapestry is held together by an important technical thread: Cutscenes that are rendered fully in real time within the game engine. It's impressive enough that these scenes look as good as any prerendered cinematic you've ever watched. It's even more amazing when those same scenes transition without pause into gameplay, and the same hulking mech you watched lumber about in the cinematic is looming above you. The subtle animations, the lush environments, and the rich textures are the same in and out of story sequences, and the effect is so seamless it may take your breath away. You can skip past the scenes if you prefer, but doing so would soften the experience. The story sequences carry more weight because of the intense gameplay that precedes them--and the gameplay feels more compelling because the story gives you powerful reasons to care about your mission. The high point of this fusion occurs in an exciting and memorable split-screen sequence that simply must be experienced.    Talking about what, exactly, is going on in the plot in the midst of MGS4's grand sweeping gestures is to risk spoiling each little surprise as it emerges. Snake, suffering from the rapid onset of aging, now must cope with stiff joints in addition to the looming specter of Liquid Ocelot's newest plans. This is Snake's final hurrah; yet as the story reaches one height after another, the juxtaposition of huge set piece battles and formidable bosses with Snake's deteriorating body creates tension and gravity even beyond the series' usual pretensions. Some new plot strands emerge while others get tied up, and old friends (and enemies) refuse to be forgotten. You'll also bear witness to a few reunions--some bloody, some teary, and some legitimately shocking. Parts of it are overblown, to be sure. The musical score gets heavy-handed and the voice acting and writing are frequently dogmatic, so while there are plenty of subtle moments, subtlety isn't really MGS4's strong suit. But it doesn't need to be. After all, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, and judging from a few silly attempts at humor that don't work, developer Kojima Productions was wise to err on the side of melodrama.     The gameplay proper is familiar to fans, but it's been cleaned up and expanded, holding as many twists and surprises as the story. For starters, both gunplay and close-quarters combat are more satisfying. Regarding melee, the controls have been streamlined, making it less cumbersome to grab an enemy soldier or perform a stealthy blade kill. Shooting mechanics are even more improved, so much so that shooting your way out of a pickle is just as enjoyable as sneaking around it. There are a huge number of weapons to play with; so many that you'll probably finish the campaign without using many of them. Yet, quality wasn't sacrificed for quantity: Every weapon feels just right, from your handy operator sidearm (best when upgraded with a silencer) and standard issue assault rifles to a powerful railgun. The standard over-the-shoulder view is fine for the most part, but you can gaze down the sights from a first-person perspective. Both views can be further improved with various enhancements, such as laser sights and scopes.     Not that you don't have all the tools for completely avoiding your enemies if you choose that route. Snake's got the basics covered: crawling, hugging walls, peeking around corners, and hanging from ledges, for example. Cover mechanics are tighter than ever, so you can crouch and take potshots from behind cover with ease. There are also a number of important gadgets that will make your life easier in this regard. The most obvious of these is your OctoCamo suit, which takes on the texture of your surroundings when you're prone or pressed against cover. Not only does this make it simpler to avoid watchful eyes, but it's also a cool visual effect. Eventually, you'll be able to camouflage Snake's head, and a few of the available camo options are bound to stir some fans' nostalgia. The Solid Eye is your other major tool, as it expands your compass into a sonic-sensitive radar and allows you to use night vision and a tactical first-person view. These are helpful gadgets indeed, even during boss fights, like a stirring encounter in a blinding blizzard.   Shooting is always a viable option if you don't want to sneak.   Other gadgets, such as portable hiding places (cardboard boxes and rusty barrels) and the Metal Gear Mk. II (a stealthed robot that you can command as a scouting device), are useful to anyone who prefers the sneaky approach. Not every gadget is a welcome addition, though. For example, the much-ballyhooed iPod is a neat touch, but to use it, you cannot have another gadget equipped, so you'll quickly forget the option even exists. But aside from these nitpicks, one of the things that makes the core gameplay so enjoyable is that you're rarely strapped into a single style of play. Shooting your way through requires more thought and care than you'd put into a standard action game, but you never feel as though the gun mechanics are stuffed uncomfortably into a stealth game. If you'd rather sneak, you never have the impression that stealth was shoehorned into a game that's meant to be played as a shooter. Sure, you're Solid Snake--you're not supposed to get caught. But if you're stuck in a jam, breaking stealth isn't a death sentence, and in fact, facing certain enemies head-on is often a heart-pounding, challenging experience. The few levels that do force you into one style, such as one in which you shadow your target through an Eastern European city, are still great, if not quite as impactful.     You'll need to keep an eye on Snake's stress levels and psyche. Though these aspects are more peripheral than health levels, they fit nicely within the plot. When Snake gets stressed (if he gets cold or encumbered, for example), his psyche gauge starts to deplete. The lower the gauge, the slower you will move and the less quickly you replenish health. Generally speaking, the psyche meter is rarely a factor, and should you notice Snake groaning a bit more, there are items like compresses you can use for a pick-me-up. Should the meter get too low, you won't be able to hold up your weapon or rush for cover. This doesn't happen often though, and while you'll need to keep a close eye on your health for obvious reasons, you won't need to pay too much heed to psyche.    Regardless of the tactics you use, the level design and enemy artificial intelligence work in tandem to create unparalleled gameplay. If you go stealth, hiding in that rusty barrel isn't a perfect solution. Your foe may look at it suspiciously, kick it a few times, and eventually blow your cover, so don't expect to be able to trick your way through as you might in other stealth games. In full-on firefights, enemy teams will flank you, use cover to their advantage, and throw grenades with precision to force you out of hiding. Most of your surroundings, inside and out, are littered with objects and cover opportunities, from a trek through a South American jungle to a nostalgic journey through a snowy island base. Each level is more-or-less linear, but within the confines of these areas, you still have remarkable room to explore the various gameplay options and test the limits of your foes. Some enemies are standard soldiers, though many others are wonderfully imaginative. The colossal mechanical Gekkos, for example, are unpredictable and keep you on your toes, while female operatives that pounce from wall to wall intensify an early escape scene.   There are ample cover opportunities.  Later in the game, a few set piece battles deepen the core gameplay even further, including a few peerless on-rails sequences. One of these, a motorcycle chase, is as close as any game has gotten to translating the excitement of similar moments in films to a game format. Another level, which features a gigantic automaton, showcases destructible environments where walkways collapse on top of each other and the screen fills with smoke. In all of these cases, the controls are excellent, with the exception of that same mech's third-person view a bit later on (the first-person view works infinitely better). The interpretation of Metal Gear Solid as an interactive film still applies, but in a way you may not have expected: These levels make you feel like the star of your own action movie.   Boss battles are stimulating, though they aren't all that difficult. Nevertheless, a few of them are tricky and require you to put some thought into your tactics because just riddling the boss with bullets isn't going to ensure victory. Early on, it's clear that you'll be encountering the four members of the Beauty and the Beast unit--female supersoldiers that are as psychologically complex as they are fun to battle. These battles are long and normally require you to fight other enemies in addition to your primary target. In one of them, you can use your night vision to track your target's footprints and use the wind direction to your advantage. In another, you'll dodge missiles from flying creatures while taking on the main boss.    The gameplay and story would, perhaps, not be as effective if Metal Gear Solid 4 did not look and sound so impressive, but truth be told, it's an amazing piece of technology. From the gritty textures of concrete walls to the effective lighting and shadowing, there are few aspects you could reasonably fault. In the biggest battles, billows of smoke fill the screen and blood splatters against the camera--all while meticulously designed helicopters fly overhead and ad-hoc team members take potshots from behind grungy dilapidated vehicles. Yet in the midst of the visual drama, it's the little things that are likely to provoke awe. Small details, such as how Snake rubs his sore back when his stress levels get high or the authentic manner in which he ascends staircases, create as much atmosphere as cluttered underground tunnels and war-torn Middle Eastern cities. You will have to wait through some scattered install periods (just under 20 minutes worth, in total) and the occasional loading screen, and you may find some frame rate drops and low-res textures here and there, but these aren't issues in light of MGS4's impressive graphical accomplishments.   The sound design comes together nearly as well. The soundtrack on its own is rather pompous, but in context, it works just fine to create the appropriate mood for any given cutscene or battle. The voice acting follows suit but succeeds far better. Because the growling voice of David Hayter's Solid Snake is so good, the rare hamming from the mostly excellent supporting cast is easily forgotten. But the sound effects are unforgettable and excellent across the board. The Gekkos emit blood-curdling moos like gargantuan cows, explosions are outstandingly obnoxious, and everything from the clicks of the Solid Eye to the laughter and screams of the beastly bosses are top-notch.  Snake's final hurrah is a remarkable technical achievement.  On top of it all, Metal Gear Solid 4 offers some enjoyable online 16-player action to complement its superb single-player experience. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are represented, of course, and they play just fine, assuming you don't approach the online component as a standard shooter. The maps are beautifully rendered and packed with detail, and while not every mechanic is as wonderful in multiplayer as it is in single-player (hiding in your cardboard box won't usually get you far, for example), it's all good fun once you adjust to the pace. The multiplayer star, however, is sneaking mode, a Team Deathmatch variant in which one player plays as Snake and another supports him as the Metal Gear Mk II. Shooting others is amusing--but sneaking enthusiasts will enjoy the violent, stealthy game of hide and seek you play as Snake. Playing support is equally entertaining because as Mk. II, you can go invisible, creep up on other players, and zap them with your electronic tentacle. It's a blast. Other modes include base mission, in which teams compete to conquer bases; a capture and defend mode; and rescue mission, which is similar to the same mode in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. Unfortunately, the process of creating an online account is laborious, so expect to take a few minutes to enter a litany of information (a pain if you aren't using a keyboard). Thankfully, the variety of customization options and sheer numbers of players online mean that this process is quickly forgotten.   If the story-heavy presentation of previous Metal Gear games taxed your patience, Metal Gear Solid 4 won't change your mind. For anyone who appreciates games that rise above the simple act of pushing a few buttons and pulling a few triggers, Metal Gear Solid 4 is a stimulating ride that you won't soon forget. You'll want to see what happens next, yet when its long campaign draws to a close, you'll wish it would continue. That's not just because it's a well-told tale, but because that tale is woven through a thoroughly impressive game that tops its predecessors. 


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5,Grand Theft Auto IV ,10, A superb single-player story mode and online support for up to 16 players make this the best Grand Theft Auto game yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426741-2219072-gta_1446_a023.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grand-theft-auto-iv-review/1900-6190025/,pos,"
  Stepping off a boat in the shoes of illegal immigrant Niko Bellic as he arrives in Liberty City at the start of Grand Theft Auto IV, you can tell immediately that Rockstar North's latest offering is something quite special. Yes, this is another GTA game in which you'll likely spend the bulk of your time stealing cars and gunning down cops and criminals, but it's also much more than that. GTAIV is a game with a compelling and nonlinear storyline, a game with a great protagonist who you can't help but like, and a game that boasts a plethora of online multiplayer features in addition to its lengthy story mode. It's not without some flaws, but GTAIV is undoubtedly the best Grand Theft Auto yet.   Liberty City has changed a lot since 2001.   One of the many things that set GTAIV apart from its predecessors is Liberty City, which is more convincing as a living, breathing urban environment than anything that you've seen in a game before, and bears little resemblance to its namesake in 2001's GTAIII. Liberty's diverse population believably attempts to go about its daily business, seemingly unaware that several criminal factions are at war in the city. Niko has no such luck. He's compelled to start working for one of the factions shortly after arriving, when he learns that his cousin Roman has some potentially fatal gambling debts. Niko's military experience makes him a useful freelancer for employers in the business of killing each other, and though his reluctance to carry out their orders is often apparent, he does whatever is asked of him in the hope that completing missions for other people will ultimately give him the means to complete his own.    Actually, Niko doesn't have to do everything that is asked of him. On several occasions as you play through his story, you'll be presented with decisions that afford you the option of doing what you think is right rather than blindly following instructions. You don't necessarily have to kill a target if he or she promises to disappear, but you have to weigh the risk of your employer finding out against the possibility that the person whose life you spare might prove useful later in the game, or even have work for you in the form of bonus missions. To say anything more specific on this subject would be to risk spoiling one of GTAIV's most interesting new features, but suffice it to say that every decision you make has consequences, and you'll likely want to play through the game at least twice to see how the alternatives unfold.    Grand Theft Auto IV's story mode can be beaten in less than 30 hours, and there are so many optional activities and side missions to take part in along the way that you can comfortably double that number if you're in no hurry. The majority of the story missions task you with making deliveries and/or killing people, and play out in much the same way as those in previous games. With that said, most of the missions are a lot easier this time around, partly because Niko is a more agile and efficient killer than any of his predecessors, and partly because the LCPD seemingly has better things to do than hunt down an illegal immigrant who's gunning down undesirables all over the city. Some of the more imaginative missions sprinkled throughout the story include a kidnapping, a bank heist, and a job interview. The cinematic cutscenes associated with story missions are superbly presented and are the sequences in which the game's characters really shine. Without exception, the characters you encounter benefit from great animation, great voice work, and superbly expressive faces. They're not always so impressive when they join you on a mission and refuse to do what they're supposed to (for example, not following you on an escort mission, or failing to negotiate a doorway). Nevertheless, these problems are few and far between, and they're made less painful by the new ""replay mission"" option that you're presented with whenever you fail.   He's a gun for hire, but Niko Bellic is the most likeable GTA protagonist to date.   New abilities in Niko's arsenal include scaling fences and walls anywhere he can get a foothold, shimmying along ledges, and, most importantly, taking cover behind objects. The ability to stick close to walls, parked cars, and the like at the touch of a button makes GTAIV's gunplay a huge improvement over that in previous games, and, in tandem with the new targeting system, it also makes it a lot easier. Enemies are rarely smart enough to get to you while you're in cover, and given that you can lock your targeting reticle on to them even when they're hidden, all you have to do is wait for them to poke their heads out and then pick them off with a minimum of effort. Locking on to enemies targets their torso by default, but you can use the right analog stick to fine-tune your aim and kill them more quickly with a headshot or two. Playing without using the lock-on feature make things more difficult, but you’ll need to master the technique so that you can shoot blindly at enemies from positions of cover when you dare not poke your own head out to line up the shot.     Given the amount of trouble that you get into as you play through the story mode, it's inevitable that the police are going to get involved from time to time, even when their presence isn't a scripted feature of your mission. Liberty City's boys in blue are quick to respond when you get flagged with a wanted level of between one and six stars, but they're not nearly as tough to deal with as their counterparts in previous GTA games. They don't drive as quickly when pursuing you, they rarely bother to set up roadblocks, and you'll need to blow up practically an entire city block before the FIB (that's not a typo) show up. Furthermore, you're given an unfair advantage in the form of your GPS system; when you're not using it to plot a valid route to any waypoint of your choosing, it doubles as a kind of police scanner. Any time you have a brush with the law, the GPS shows you the exact locations of patrol cars and cops on foot in your area, and highlights the circular area (centered on your last known whereabouts) where they're concentrating their search. To escape, all you need to do is move outside the circle and then avoid being seen for 10 seconds or so, which is often best achieved by finding a safe spot and just sitting there. It's not a bad system in theory, but in practice it makes dodging the law a little too easy, especially when your wanted level is low and the search area is small.   The new cover system makes gunplay much easier than in previous games.   When you're not running missions for criminals, taking part in street races, stealing cars to order, or randomly causing trouble, you'll find that there are plenty of opportunities to unwind in Liberty City. Some of these optional activities offer tangible rewards that can prove useful in missions later on, whereas others are just a fun way to kill time and take in more of GTAIV's superb humor. For example, you can watch television, listen to numerous different radio stations, check out some genuinely funny shows (including some big-name acts) at cabaret and comedy clubs, and use a computer to surf the in-game Internet.     GTAIV's Internet is filled with spoofs of all the kinds of Web sites that you'd only ever look at accidentally or when you know there's no danger of getting caught. Some of them can be found only by clicking on links in spam e-mails, whereas others are advertised prominently on the search page. There's plenty of amusing stuff to find if you spend some time in one of the ""TW@"" Internet cafes, but the most interesting site by far is an online dating agency through which you can meet women who, if they like your profile, will agree to go on dates with you. Dating and socializing with friends is something you can spend as much or as little of your time doing as you like, and though the people you meet can occasionally be demanding to the point that they become irritating, keeping them happy invariably benefits you in some way.       Keeping friends and dates happy means spending time with them and doing things that they enjoy, and all of them have different personalities. Some friends like to join you for minigames such as tenpin bowling, pool, or darts, whereas others prefer to go out for a meal, get drunk, or take in a show. Of course, dates are much fussier than regular friends, and their opinions of you are influenced not only by whether you pick them up on time, where you take them, and whether you try your luck when dropping them at home, but also by a number of much more subtle factors. Dates will comment on stuff like the car you drive, how you drive it, and the clothes you wear. They'll even notice if you wear the same outfit two dates in a row, though not all of them will be bothered by it. The rewards that you get when another character likes you enough vary depending on who it is. Without wishing to give away specifics, befriending a lawyer can prove useful if you're having trouble with the cops, for example, and having a nurse on your friends list can literally be a lifesaver.   GTAIV's friends invariably come with benefits.   You'll keep in touch with your dates, friends, and some of your enemies using another of GTAIV's great new features: a cell phone. It's hard to believe that something as simple as a cell phone could add so much to a game like this, but it's implemented so well that it's hard to imagine leaving any of Niko's safe houses without it. If you've ever used a cell phone in real life, you'll have no problem operating this one and, given that it's controlled using only the D pad and a single button, it's easy to call up acquaintances and take calls even while driving. There's no unwieldy conversation system to deal with; you simply choose which friend you want to call, what you want to talk about (it could be work, a fun activity, or asking for a favor) and then, assuming that he or she answers the phone, the conversation plays out. Incoming calls are even easier, though they occasionally come at inopportune (or amusing) times; hearing your cell-phone's signal interfere with your car radio is the least of your worries when you consider the possibility of a date calling you while you're with a prostitute or embroiled in a gunfight with the Mafia. Incidentally, new ringtones and visual themes for your phone can be purchased via the in-game Internet, which is typical of the incredible attention to detail that you'll come to take for granted as you play.    To give you some idea of just how much thought has clearly gone into the crafting of GTAIV, even the act of stealing a parked car, which is still achieved by pushing a single button, can now result in any number of different things happening. If the door is locked, as is often the case, Niko will smash a window with his elbow or his foot to get inside. Once inside the car, he may need to hot-wire it to get it started; you can speed up the process slightly by using the shoulder buttons on your controller. If the car has an alarm, it'll sound for several seconds and cause the headlights to flash on and off as you drive away--practically begging any nearby cops to come after you. Stealing cars with drivers and/or passengers inside opens up lots more possibilities, the most amusing of which is someone (possibly you) getting an arm caught in a door and dragged along as the vehicle speeds away.    Most of the vehicles in GTAIV, like those in previous games, have very loose handling that makes it easy for you to perform Hollywood-style U-turns, skids around corners, and the like. You can play through most of the missions without ever violating a traffic law if you really want to, but you can get away with (and will have a lot more fun) driving like a lunatic, provided that you don't collide with any police vehicles or mow down too many pedestrians. A neat touch when driving with the default camera view is that the camera, which is positioned a few feet behind the rear bumper of the car, centers on you rather than on the vehicle, effectively offering the vehicular equivalent of an over-the-shoulder view. When you take the control of something sporty, the camera also positions itself much closer to the ground, which adds to the sensation of speed.   The police are rarely far away, but escaping from them is easy for the most part.   The vehicle handling is difficult to fault, regardless of whether you're in a sports car, a garbage truck, a motorcycle, a speedboat, or a helicopter. However, while driving, you might notice one odd quirk that has been a constant ever since GTAIII: When taking the controls of certain vehicles, you'll suddenly notice a lot more of the same vehicle on the roads. It's not a big deal, and it isn't detrimental to the gameplay, but it's a little jarring if you get into one of the more unusual vehicles in the game--for example, the equivalent of either a Ferrari or a pickup truck--and suddenly find that the city is filled with them. That particular quirk is pretty common in some of the multiplayer modes as well, though you'll likely be too busy keeping an eye out for other players to take any notice when you venture online.    Getting online in Grand Theft Auto IV couldn't be easier. You simply select the multiplayer option on your cell phone, choose which type of game you want to host or join, and then enter a lobby and wait for the game to start. You won't be getting bored staring at a list of names while you're waiting, though, because when you enter a lobby you actually enter an online version of Liberty City in which you and up to 15 other players are free to do anything. There are weapons scattered all over the place to ensure that things don't stay too friendly for very long.     There are more than a dozen different multiplayer modes to choose from, and although some of them are variations on similar themes, there's certainly no shortage of variety. As the host of a multiplayer session, you also have the freedom to greatly customize all of the game types with variables such as friendly fire, police presence, weapons sets, traffic levels, radar functionality, and many more. You can choose where you'd like your game to take place as well, considering that many gameplay modes can be played either on a specific Liberty City island or across the entire map.     Even conventional 16-player modes such as Deathmatch and Race feel quite different than anything that you've played before. And in addition to those, there are objective-based games in which you're tasked with completing missions similar to those in the single-player game: a team-based Cops 'n Crooks mode, a Turf War mode in which teams compete for control of territories, a carjacking mode, three cooperative missions that support up to four players, and more. With the right group of people, there's no reason why you can't have a lot of fun with every single mode that's available. We experienced a few frame-rate issues and lag that caused other players and their vehicles to jump around the screen at times, but for the most part GTAIV's online play is a real treat. One especially neat touch is that, as a passenger in a vehicle being driven by another player, you can mark waypoints on the GPS system for your driver using a map that tracks the locations of other players and objectives.    Multiplayer games are an opportunity for up to 16 players to get together in Liberty City.   If you're wondering about differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Grand Theft Auto IV, the truth is that there aren't many. The PS3 version can only be played after a mandatory install that takes around 10 minutes, and its load times are a little shorter and less frequent as a result. The visuals, which don't always hold up to close scrutiny but are impressive during typical gameplay, are comparable and feature the same quirks (shadows that flicker, for example) on both consoles. Likewise, the audio, which can take a lot of the credit for why Liberty City feels so alive, is exceptional regardless of which console you have and how many speakers it's hooked up to. True to form, GTAIV's soundtrack has plenty of great licensed songs and, unlike other games we could mention, it doesn't force the artist and track information down your throat with pop-up windows that detract from gameplay. However, if you want that information, you can simply dial up a song-recognition service on your cell phone and, after a few seconds, receive it in a text message. Genius.    In case you haven't guessed already, Grand Theft Auto IV is a game that you simply have to play. The single-player game, which you can still play long after you complete the story, is the series' best by far, and the multiplayer features are good enough that you'll likely have no problem finding people to play with for many months to come. The minor flaws that you'll experience are no more difficult to overlook than those in previous GTA games, and they're greatly outnumbered by the features that will impress and surprise you anytime you think you've already seen everything that the game has to offer. There's lots to see in Liberty City, so you'd best get started.   


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6,Grand Theft Auto IV ,10, A superb single-player story mode and online support for up to 16 players make this the best Grand Theft Auto game yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426741-2219072-gta_1446_a023.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grand-theft-auto-iv-review/1900-6190027/,pos,"
  Stepping off a boat in the shoes of illegal immigrant Niko Bellic as he arrives in Liberty City at the start of Grand Theft Auto IV, you can tell immediately that Rockstar North's latest offering is something quite special. Yes, this is another GTA game in which you'll likely spend the bulk of your time stealing cars and gunning down cops and criminals, but it's also much more than that. GTAIV is a game with a compelling and nonlinear storyline, a game with a great protagonist who you can't help but like, and a game that boasts a plethora of online multiplayer features in addition to its lengthy story mode. It's not without some flaws, but GTAIV is undoubtedly the best Grand Theft Auto yet.   Liberty City has changed a lot since 2001.  One of the many things that set GTAIV apart from its predecessors is Liberty City, which is more convincing as a living, breathing urban environment than anything that you've seen in a game before, and bears little resemblance to its namesake in 2001's GTAIII. Liberty's diverse population believably attempts to go about its daily business, seemingly unaware that several criminal factions are at war in the city. Niko has no such luck. He's compelled to start working for one of the factions shortly after arriving, when he learns that his cousin Roman has some potentially fatal gambling debts. Niko's military experience makes him a useful freelancer for employers in the business of killing each other, and though his reluctance to carry out their orders is often apparent, he does whatever is asked of him in the hope that completing missions for other people will ultimately give him the means to complete his own.    Actually, Niko doesn't have to do everything that is asked of him. On several occasions as you play through his story, you'll be presented with decisions that afford you the option of doing what you think is right rather than blindly following instructions. You don't necessarily have to kill a target if he or she promises to disappear, but you have to weigh the risk of your employer finding out against the possibility that the person whose life you spare might prove useful later in the game, or even have work for you in the form of bonus missions. To say anything more specific on this subject would be to risk spoiling one of GTAIV's most interesting new features, but suffice it to say that every decision you make has consequences, and you'll likely want to play through the game at least twice to see how the alternatives unfold.    Grand Theft Auto IV's story mode can be beaten in less than 30 hours, and there are so many optional activities and side missions to take part in along the way that you can comfortably double that number if you're in no hurry. The majority of the story missions task you with making deliveries and/or killing people, and play out in much the same way as those in previous games. With that said, most of the missions are a lot easier this time around, partly because Niko is a more agile and efficient killer than any of his predecessors, and partly because the LCPD seemingly has better things to do than hunt down an illegal immigrant who's gunning down undesirables all over the city. Some of the more imaginative missions sprinkled throughout the story include a kidnapping, a bank heist, and a job interview. The cinematic cutscenes associated with story missions are superbly presented and are the sequences in which the game's characters really shine. Without exception, the characters you encounter benefit from great animation, great voice work, and superbly expressive faces. They're not always so impressive when they join you on a mission and refuse to do what they're supposed to (for example, not following you on an escort mission, or failing to negotiate a doorway). Nevertheless, these problems are few and far between, and they're made less painful by the new ""replay mission"" option that you're presented with whenever you fail.   He's a gun for hire, but Niko Bellic is the most likeable GTA protagonist to date.  New abilities in Niko's arsenal include scaling fences and walls anywhere he can get a foothold, shimmying along ledges, and, most importantly, taking cover behind objects. The ability to stick close to walls, parked cars, and the like at the touch of a button makes GTAIV's gunplay a huge improvement over that in previous games, and, in tandem with the new targeting system, it also makes it a lot easier. Enemies are rarely smart enough to get to you while you're in cover, and given that you can lock your targeting reticle on to them even when they're hidden, all you have to do is wait for them to poke their heads out and then pick them off with a minimum of effort. Locking on to enemies targets their torso by default, but you can use the right analog stick to fine-tune your aim and kill them more quickly with a headshot or two. Playing without using the lock-on feature make things more difficult, but you’ll need to master the technique so that you can shoot blindly at enemies from positions of cover when you dare not poke your own head out to line up the shot.     Given the amount of trouble that you get into as you play through the story mode, it's inevitable that the police are going to get involved from time to time, even when their presence isn't a scripted feature of your mission. Liberty City's boys in blue are quick to respond when you get flagged with a wanted level of between one and six stars, but they're not nearly as tough to deal with as their counterparts in previous GTA games. They don't drive as quickly when pursuing you, they rarely bother to set up roadblocks, and you'll need to blow up practically an entire city block before the FIB (that's not a typo) show up. Furthermore, you're given an unfair advantage in the form of your GPS system; when you're not using it to plot a valid route to any waypoint of your choosing, it doubles as a kind of police scanner. Any time you have a brush with the law, the GPS shows you the exact locations of patrol cars and cops on foot in your area, and highlights the circular area (centered on your last known whereabouts) where they're concentrating their search. To escape, all you need to do is move outside the circle and then avoid being seen for 10 seconds or so, which is often best achieved by finding a safe spot and just sitting there. It's not a bad system in theory, but in practice it makes dodging the law a little too easy, especially when your wanted level is low and the search area is small.   The new cover system makes gunplay much easier than in previous games.  When you're not running missions for criminals, taking part in street races, stealing cars to order, or randomly causing trouble, you'll find that there are plenty of opportunities to unwind in Liberty City. Some of these optional activities offer tangible rewards that can prove useful in missions later on, whereas others are just a fun way to kill time and take in more of GTAIV's superb humor. For example, you can watch television, listen to numerous different radio stations, check out some genuinely funny shows (including some big-name acts) at cabaret and comedy clubs, and use a computer to surf the in-game Internet.     GTAIV's Internet is filled with spoofs of all the kinds of Web sites that you'd only ever look at accidentally or when you know there's no danger of getting caught. Some of them can be found only by clicking on links in spam e-mails, whereas others are advertised prominently on the search page. There's plenty of amusing stuff to find if you spend some time in one of the ""TW@"" Internet cafes, but the most interesting site by far is an online dating agency through which you can meet women who, if they like your profile, will agree to go on dates with you. Dating and socializing with friends is something you can spend as much or as little of your time doing as you like, and though the people you meet can occasionally be demanding to the point that they become irritating, keeping them happy invariably benefits you in some way.     Keeping friends and dates happy means spending time with them and doing things that they enjoy, and all of them have different personalities. Some friends like to join you for minigames such as tenpin bowling, pool, or darts, whereas others prefer to go out for a meal, get drunk, or take in a show. Of course, dates are much fussier than regular friends, and their opinions of you are influenced not only by whether you pick them up on time, where you take them, and whether you try your luck when dropping them at home, but also by a number of much more subtle factors. Dates will comment on stuff like the car you drive, how you drive it, and the clothes you wear. They'll even notice if you wear the same outfit two dates in a row, though not all of them will be bothered by it. The rewards that you get when another character likes you enough vary depending on who it is. Without wishing to give away specifics, befriending a lawyer can prove useful if you're having trouble with the cops, for example, and having a nurse on your friends list can literally be a lifesaver.    GTAIV's friends invariably come with benefits.  You'll keep in touch with your dates, friends, and some of your enemies using another of GTAIV's great new features: a cell phone. It's hard to believe that something as simple as a cell phone could add so much to a game like this, but it's implemented so well that it's hard to imagine leaving any of Niko's safe houses without it. If you've ever used a cell phone in real life, you'll have no problem operating this one and, given that it's controlled using only the D pad and a single button, it's easy to call up acquaintances and take calls even while driving. There's no unwieldy conversation system to deal with; you simply choose which friend you want to call, what you want to talk about (it could be work, a fun activity, or asking for a favor) and then, assuming that he or she answers the phone, the conversation plays out. Incoming calls are even easier, though they occasionally come at inopportune (or amusing) times; hearing your cell-phone's signal interfere with your car radio is the least of your worries when you consider the possibility of a date calling you while you're with a prostitute or embroiled in a gunfight with the Mafia. Incidentally, new ringtones and visual themes for your phone can be purchased via the in-game Internet, which is typical of the incredible attention to detail that you'll come to take for granted as you play.    To give you some idea of just how much thought has clearly gone into the crafting of GTAIV, even the act of stealing a parked car, which is still achieved by pushing a single button, can now result in any number of different things happening. If the door is locked, as is often the case, Niko will smash a window with his elbow or his foot to get inside. Once inside the car, he may need to hot-wire it to get it started; you can speed up the process slightly by using the shoulder buttons on your controller. If the car has an alarm, it'll sound for several seconds and cause the headlights to flash on and off as you drive away--practically begging any nearby cops to come after you. Stealing cars with drivers and/or passengers inside opens up lots more possibilities, the most amusing of which is someone (possibly you) getting an arm caught in a door and dragged along as the vehicle speeds away.    Most of the vehicles in GTAIV, like those in previous games, have very loose handling that makes it easy for you to perform Hollywood-style U-turns, skids around corners, and the like. You can play through most of the missions without ever violating a traffic law if you really want to, but you can get away with (and will have a lot more fun) driving like a lunatic, provided that you don't collide with any police vehicles or mow down too many pedestrians. A neat touch when driving with the default camera view is that the camera, which is positioned a few feet behind the rear bumper of the car, centers on you rather than on the vehicle, effectively offering the vehicular equivalent of an over-the-shoulder view. When you take the control of something sporty, the camera also positions itself much closer to the ground, which adds to the sensation of speed.   The police are rarely far away, but escaping from them is easy for the most part.  The vehicle handling is difficult to fault, regardless of whether you're in a sports car, a garbage truck, a motorcycle, a speedboat, or a helicopter. However, while driving, you might notice one odd quirk that has been a constant ever since GTAIII: When taking the controls of certain vehicles, you'll suddenly notice a lot more of the same vehicle on the roads. It's not a big deal, and it isn't detrimental to the gameplay, but it's a little jarring if you get into one of the more unusual vehicles in the game--for example, the equivalent of either a Ferrari or a pickup truck--and suddenly find that the city is filled with them. That particular quirk is pretty common in some of the multiplayer modes as well, though you'll likely be too busy keeping an eye out for other players to take any notice when you venture online.    Getting online in Grand Theft Auto IV couldn't be easier. You simply select the multiplayer option on your cell phone, choose which type of game you want to host or join, and then enter a lobby and wait for the game to start. You won't be getting bored staring at a list of names while you're waiting, though, because when you enter a lobby you actually enter an online version of Liberty City in which you and up to 15 other players are free to do anything. There are weapons scattered all over the place to ensure that things don't stay too friendly for very long.     There are more than a dozen different multiplayer modes to choose from, and although some of them are variations on similar themes, there's certainly no shortage of variety. As the host of a multiplayer session, you also have the freedom to greatly customize all of the game types with variables such as friendly fire, police presence, weapons sets, traffic levels, radar functionality, and many more. You can choose where you'd like your game to take place as well, considering that many gameplay modes can be played either on a specific Liberty City island or across the entire map.     Even conventional 16-player modes such as Deathmatch and Race feel quite different than anything that you've played before. And in addition to those, there are objective-based games in which you're tasked with completing missions similar to those in the single-player game: a team-based Cops 'n Crooks mode, a Turf War mode in which teams compete for control of territories, a carjacking mode, three cooperative missions that support up to four players, and more. With the right group of people, there's no reason why you can't have a lot of fun with every single mode that's available. We experienced a few frame-rate issues and lag that caused other players and their vehicles to jump around the screen at times, but for the most part GTAIV's online play is a real treat. One especially neat touch is that, as a passenger in a vehicle being driven by another player, you can mark waypoints on the GPS system for your driver using a map that tracks the locations of other players and objectives.    Multiplayer games are an opportunity for up to 16 players to get together in Liberty City.  If you're wondering about differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Grand Theft Auto IV, the truth is that there aren't many. The PS3 version can only be played after a mandatory install that takes around 10 minutes, and its load times are a little shorter and less frequent as a result. The visuals, which don't always hold up to close scrutiny but are impressive during typical gameplay, are comparable and feature the same quirks (shadows that flicker, for example) on both consoles. Likewise, the audio, which can take a lot of the credit for why Liberty City feels so alive, is exceptional regardless of which console you have and how many speakers it's hooked up to. True to form, GTAIV's soundtrack has plenty of great licensed songs and, unlike other games we could mention, it doesn't force the artist and track information down your throat with pop-up windows that detract from gameplay. However, if you want that information, you can simply dial up a song-recognition service on your cell phone and, after a few seconds, receive it in a text message. Genius.    In case you haven't guessed already, Grand Theft Auto IV is a game that you simply have to play. The single-player game, which you can still play long after you complete the story, is the series' best by far, and the multiplayer features are good enough that you'll likely have no problem finding people to play with for many months to come. The minor flaws that you'll experience are no more difficult to overlook than those in previous GTA games, and they're greatly outnumbered by the features that will impress and surprise you anytime you think you've already seen everything that the game has to offer. There's lots to see in Liberty City, so you'd best get started.    


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7,Super Mario Galaxy 2 ,10," Super Mario Galaxy 2 is even more varied, challenging, and fun than its superb predecessor, making it the new standard for platformers.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/3/3/2222733-sb4_b_illust01_03_ad.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-mario-galaxy-2-review/1900-6263170/,pos,"
  It may be easy to take one look at Super Mario Galaxy 2, see the same gravity-altering traps and spherical worlds from its predecessor, and dismiss this as a by-the-numbers sequel to the superb original. But by assuming you know what to expect from Mario's latest adventure, you would be doing yourself and this game a great disservice. This is not only the new standard against which every 3D platformer must now be judged, but it also seamlessly integrates so many elements from Mario's 2D roots that it stands toe-to-toe with even its genre-defining progenitors. Every aspect of this game is absolutely bursting with joy. The vibrant artistic design immediately welcomes you into this colorful world, and the catchy soundtrack deftly mixes classic tunes with new compositions to provide the perfect backdrop for your goomba-stomping, star-snatching fun. But it's the expertly designed levels that will keep you coming back, even after you've seen everything this game has to offer, just to experience it one more time. This is an instant classic that belongs alongside the best games Nintendo has ever created.      Things are once again rotten in the Mushroom Kingdom. Bowser has taken Princess Peach prisoner for the umpteenth time, forcing Mario to momentarily put his plumbing gig on hold to rescue his fair lady. The best thing that can be said about the story is that it mostly stays in the background. A few lighthearted exchanges between Mario and his foes precede major battles, but there is only a brief break in the action before you get back to flinging fireballs and cracking shells. In fact, Galaxy 2 is much more streamlined than its predecessor. The elaborate hub world that has appeared in each of Mario's previous 3D adventures has been scrapped and replaced by an easy-to-navigate map that lets you hop right into the next level. Galaxy 2 has less downtime than the original, ensuring you're always engaged and entertained.     And you'll be happy to jump right into the action because Galaxy 2 is a long and often challenging adventure. There are lots of different activities to take part in, but everything comes with the same prize: a shining star. It takes 70 of these celestial bodies to make it to the end of the game, but there are many more hidden throughout the universe waiting to be discovered. No matter what you're doing in Galaxy 2, everything feels just right, thanks to the ultraprecise controls. It's a breeze leaping between walls, performing deadly butt-stomps, or jumping across lava-filled pits. There is an unabashed joy in movement that makes even running around the colorful worlds and taking in the uplifting atmosphere feel special. The camera does an admirable job of framing the action, giving you a clear view even when you're dancing on the ceiling in a reverse-gravity room or leaping between floating meteors in space. There are a few times where the angle is less than ideal, making it difficult to line up an exact jump, but for the most part, the camera performs its duty with flying colors.    Even with a belly full of pasta, Mario is still lighter than air. 	  The wealth of different objectives in Galaxy 2 is mind boggling. Just about every star introduces at least one new mechanic, generating a truly stunning degree of variety. Whether you're grabbing onto the talons of a powerful bird, competing in score-based challenges for a monkey that's wearing sunglasses, or slamming into enemies while ice skating, you're constantly presented with a new activity. Even though many of these situations only appear once or twice during the course of the game, they're all fully fleshed out and incredibly fun. It's really interesting how varied objectives can be even within the same level. The first time you enter a level, you may have to zip down a sand slide at breakneck speed, dodging cactuses and nabbing coins all the while. But when you enter the level again to try for a different star, you may have to navigate an underground obstacle course from a side-scrolling perspective. Because your goals are constantly changing and always at a high level, Galaxy 2 never gets stale or predictable.   	  If the huge variety of goals doesn't sound like a big enough change, there are also power-ups that further mix things up. One of the few weak spots in the original Galaxy was a lack of interesting power-ups to play around with, but that has been rectified here. The most notable addition is Yoshi, the lovable dinosaur with the prehensile tongue. Once on this green fellow's back, you can point at enemies or objects with the remote and swallow them whole. You can snatch up a spiny and then shoot it like a projectile, inhale a pepper to receive a massive speed boost, or chow down a bulb to light up hidden pathways. There's also a power-up that lets Mario roll around like a Goron from the Zelda series, a special suit that gives you the ability to create clouds in midair, and a drill for digging through soft dirt. All of these power-ups build on their most basic functions as you get deeper into the game, forcing you to look beyond your preconceptions to use them in unique ways.      Although most of the game is in 3D, letting you explore the environments with few restrictions, there are also 2D sections that are just as entertaining to run through. These stages are exceptionally well designed, going much further than the standard running and jumping for which Mario is known. In certain cases, gravity is your biggest opponent. Rooms will change their gravitational pull at a moment's notice, turning the walls or even the ceiling into your temporary floor. At other times, you'll be running along without a care in the world when you'll come across a pool of water floating above your head. These brief forays into swimming give you a chance to avoid cheep-cheeps and slow-moving urchins before you exit once more onto dry ground. Levels freely shift between the two perspectives. You'll be floating lazily around as bee Mario and then all of a sudden you'll be in a 2D world, swinging on vines and nabbing coins without an extra dimension to distract you. These 2D levels are a great changes of pace from the free-roaming action and are as inventive and fun as every other section of this game.      While attempting to nab every star within these stages you should also keep an eye out for hidden comet coins. These special tokens summon a comet that gives you a new challenge to experience. Sometimes, you need to sprint through a world as fast as possible, running at top speed and performing long jumps so you can shave off precious seconds. Other times, you must collect purple coins or defeat a boss without taking any damage. The comet challenges are the most difficult goals in the game, but it's a blast to sink your teeth into these levels to try to overcome their punishing traps. In one stage, you create clones of Mario with every step you take and you lose health if you touch one of the clones. Trying to coordinate your movements so you can still make it to the end without running into your clones can be difficult, but when you finally outsmart yourself and nab that star, it's extremely rewarding. Most of Galaxy 2 starts out relatively easy for platforming veterans, but there are plenty of stars that will push you to your limits, and these prove to be the most satisfying to earn.     Many of the levels end in boss fights, which are just as varied and exciting as the other aspects of the game. One of the early battles has you take on a slithering dragon that floats above a craterous moon. It flies dangerously overhead, showing off its colossal might, before it dives toward the surface and borrows underground. That's your chance to attack its glowing red pustules, but it's not easy. Dragons don't like to be punched, and it floods the screen with a wall of fire to keep you from poking its weak spot. Every boss requires a different strategy to overcome, and it's a real treat figuring out what needs to be done and then going in for the kill. The Bowser battles are particularly impressive. He is absolutely gigantic in this game, and striking him down is immensely satisfying. There is nothing quite like bringing down a treacherous foe who has been hounding you, and Galaxy 2 does a fine job of making its bosses big and imposing enough to ensure they are rewarding to conquer.    The incredible action is tied together beautifully by the visuals and music. This is a gorgeous-looking game. The levels may be home to snapping piranha plants and explosive bullet bills, but they are eminently welcoming. The attention to detail is outstanding. From the puffs of smoke billowing from the chilly rabbit's snow-covered cabin to Mario's graceful spin when performing a triple lutz, every aspect of this game looks incredible. But the music is even more impressive. Using a great combination of classics and new material, all of the music fits the action perfectly. The older songs have been remixed, and what's most interesting is how they sound even better than they did before. For instance, the haunting theme from Bowser's levels that first appeared in Super Mario 64 now has a choir singing the higher sections, and it adds an eerie note that will send shivers down your spine. Galaxy 2 is a game you do not even have to touch the controller to enjoy. The sights and sounds are so enthralling that you can just sit back, relax, and take in everything.   Even Luigi gets a chance to take part in the star-grabbing action.   Super Mario Galaxy 2 is simply an outstanding game. It never rests on its laurels for a second, constantly presenting new objectives and mechanics to push you to never before seen places. Even the two-player mode offers new abilities and delights, making it even more fun to play with a friend by your side. Everything is so well designed and so entertaining that it's easy to get sucked into this world for hours. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is so phenomenal that it's difficult to imagine where Mario could possibly go in the future. But that's hardly your concern now. Mario proves that he is still the king of fun.  


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8,"Guntu Western Front June, 1944 (Import) ",1.7," In the words of the immortal Luke Skywalker, ""What a piece of junk.""",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/1/3/8/1086-4138.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/guntu-western-front-june-1944-import-review/1900-2545968/,neg,"
Guntu Western Front June, 1944 is the worst gun game available for the Sony PlayStation. Pathetic graphics and lame level design will have you reaching for your real revolver long before you ever pick up the light gun to play this one again. In fact, don't even read this review. Just click the back button and we'll both forget you even asked about this piece of junk. All right, if you really wanna know.... Graphically, the game is extremely primitive. We're talking 8-bit at best - like early 8-bit. None of the enemy soldiers has distinguishable features. All the tanks, planes, buildings, and backgrounds are blocky and devoid of detail. And there's little, if any, graphical variation from screen to screen, level to level, so get used to looking at the same tired army encampments. And plan on looking at the same individual screens for what feels like hours. The level design is abysmal. Certain screens just plop you in one perspective, staring at a bunker and some large brown squares - presumably shipping crates? - for literally 15 minutes at a time. You're stuck there, endlessly shooting the same bunch of guys in the same eight positions and maybe a lone artillery unit that lobs an explosive device at you every ten seconds, like clockwork. It's so repetitive, there's no way it could possibly be challenging. You can figure out the pattern in seconds: shoot three guys, shoot toward artillery to blow up the explosive charge, shoot three different guys, shoot toward artillery - endlessly. It seems silly, really, with Time Crisis less than a year old, that a designer could backtrack this far. Mysteriously, you need to hit targets twice to kill them. Mysteriously, many of the game's screens scroll by, not caring whether you take out enemy soldiers before the camera passes them or not - you can just let them disappear offscreen, never to be seen again. Mysteriously, you are awarded bonus hit points by killing enemies and blowing up incoming explosives before they harm you. So, you can completely ignore the gunfire of some of your enemies in order to take out incoming explosives, since you're generally given bigger hit point bonuses than those you lost by absorbing bullets in order to make the shot. Guntu has one of the worst reloading interfaces in light gun gaming, and coupled with the game's autofire, it makes for extremely unchallenging play. The trigger, by default, is set to autofire, and ammunition is depleted as long as you hold it down. Reloading occurs instantly upon releasing the trigger. This setup encourages thoughtless, skill-less, slaphappy playing, since the most effective style of play is to just hold the trigger down and wave the gun around at the screen, watching the little yellow burst line up with each target, occasionally lifting the finger for a fraction of a second to reload. It feels more like hosing down your driveway than shooting Nazis in World War II. In the words of the immortal Luke Skywalker, ""What a piece of junk."" There's just no excuse for this level of thoughtless game design. The graphical elements are archaic and ugly. The level design is so repetitive, it borders on sadism. The gun interface is just plain dumb. By all means, if you're looking for a gun game, take a good look at Time Crisis. If you already have Time Crisis, well... play it some more. And hopefully, this one will never hit US shores.
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9,Gravity Games: Street Vert Dirt ,1.7," If you avoid only one awful game this year, Gravity Games is the one to miss.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/0/2/2222502-box_ggbsvd.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gravity-games-street-vert-dirt-review/1900-2873959/,neg,"
Every time a trendsetting game is released to critical and commercial acclaim, a bevy of also-rans and clones are bound to follow. This isn't anything new. More often than not, the clones are uninspired rehashes of existing concepts, yet at least they usually manage to be competently done. Midway's latest sports game, Gravity Games: Street Vert Dirt, bucks this trend by being an absolutely unplayable piece of trash that looks, sounds, and plays like it was shipped about six months too early. If you avoid only one awful game this year, Gravity Games is the one to miss.  Gravity Games may look like just another alternative sports game... Like Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX or Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX, Gravity Games puts you in the role of a BMX biker and gives you a handful of levels to ride around in. Most of the levels have goals that must be accomplished to unlock later levels. Goals in this game include the obligatory score-based tasks, as well as collecting items--in this case, each level has letters throughout it that, when collected, eventually spell the word ""gravity."" There are also level-specific goals, such as breaking 10 lights by grinding on them or freeing a ""chick"" who has been tied to a set of train tracks. Other levels are competition-based, and you simply must score highly with the judges to earn a medal and proceed. You are allowed to replay each level as many times as you like, but you can only play in three-minute chunks.   On paper, it sounds like just another clone of the other alternative sports games. But the execution is where Gravity Games loses all of its points. The control scheme is a bit like that in the Dave Mirra games, in principle. One button is used for doing tricks, while another can be used to modify those tricks, turning supermans into one-handed supermans and so on. But the control in this game is so insanely stiff that it's difficult to jump at the right time, let alone effectively do tricks. The timing on the trick modifiers is seemingly split-second--you'll have to bust out the modifier move almost instantaneously after performing the base trick. Grinds and stalls are stupidly easy to balance, and the game's trick system actually rewards you for doing one trick over and over again, meaning the easiest way to score points is to merely stall the bike on a lip and continually jump up and down, landing a lip trick each time. By the time you've done this seven or eight times, the points will be counting up at a ridiculous speed, and the balancing act is so easy to maintain that you could easily just rack up points for the entire three minutes of your run, achieving both score goals and the overly ambiguous ""land a sick trick"" goal all at once. The game has manuals, which, if done properly, will let you string tricks together and extend combos, but the timing on the manuals is also a complete mess. The game's one not-so-weak point is that it has pretty large levels. Unfortunately, the level designers forgot to include items to ride and trick off of, giving most levels a cavernous, empty feel.   Further hampering the gameplay is a long list of bugs that, if Midway had cared more about finishing the game than it did shipping the game on time, should have been fixed. After a wreck, the game respawns your bike close to where you crashed rather than relying on set respawn points or some other safe mechanism. The result is that it's very easy to respawn inside a piece of the level geometry with no hope of escape. Sometimes you'll even crash through walls and locked gates only to appear on the other side without having to actually open the gate via conventional means. It's also extremely easy to get hung up in corners and have no way to turn the bike around, because the front tire will just continually bump up against the walls. Getting hung up on the lips of ramps and other awkward areas is also a constant hassle.   ...but it plays much, much worse. Graphical glitches also pop up throughout the game. For example, a lot of times you'll notice that you aren't so much riding on the ground as you are in the ground--the bike actually rides lower than the floor plane in some segments of the levels. Shadows break up from time to time, and the rider animation is very jerky. Aside from that, the game has a few decent textures (and a lot of product placement), but for the most part the game has a drab, dull look to it that seems more like something you'd expect to find on the PSOne. The game's sound is almost entirely nonexistent. Most of the levels are eerily silent, except for some occasional pedal noise and the sound of you crashing or landing. The soundtrack features a lot of music, but most of it consists of generic uninspired tracks, including a handful of rap tracks recorded specifically for the game by people who are credited as ""special guest rappers"" in the manual. Licensed songs include tracks from Sugar Ray, 311, and Disturbed.   Not even a set of multiplayer options ripped out of every other alternative sports game on the market can make up for the broken nature of Gravity Games' gameplay. In short, the game plays like an unfinished product rushed out the door and has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. One would hope that Sony's third-party approval process would catch junk like this before it makes it out onto store shelves, but unfortunately, that was not the case this time. As such, do not, under any circumstances, buy, rent, or look at this game.
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10,Mistmare ,1.7, You might want to play Mistmare only if you're exploring the benefits of primal scream therapy.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/8/0/6/2217806-mist.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mistmare-review/1900-6073275/,neg,"
 Mistmare is more punishment than game. No matter what the box says, this isn't so much a fantasy role-playing game as it is a medieval torture device right up there with the rack and the iron maiden. Slovenian developer Sinister Systems has gotten almost nothing right here, shipping an unfinished product that contains hundreds of bugs, abysmal play mechanics, and Byzantine dialogue littered with typographical errors.  The hero Isador ponders such weighty topics as graphical slowdown and camera problems.  Both out of the box and with the version 1.6 patch, the third-person wannabe role-playing epic is all but unplayable due to graphics and control problems. The mouse cursor floats around the screen, always a split-second behind your hand. Graphical slowdown turns even simple movements into a frustrating slideshow. Even on a machine that far surpasses the recommended system requirements, many areas drop the frame rate down to 10 frames per second or so. One of these locations includes about a third of the monastery where the game begins, so you can forget about starting off on a good note.  You can add to these problems a twitchy camera system that pans back by itself and begins to rotate when the cursor gets anywhere near the edge of the screen. The resulting combination makes accomplishing basic tasks such as opening chests and casting spells excruciating. Clicking on dialogue responses and maneuvering the cursor into the right spot so you can navigate a standard hallway are challenges in themselves. Getting to a doorway without stutter-stepping into every nook and cranny in a room is cause for celebration.  The game's point-and-click melee combat is even more frustrating. The unreliable mouse and camera controls make it hard to get your cursor onto stationary objects, let alone moving monsters that are trying to kill you. Thankfully, you only have to double-click an enemy once to activate the automatic combat mode that keeps you swinging your sword no matter where the cursor is situated.  These crippling problems overshadow everything about Mistmare, even its few good points. Sinister Systems has at least come up with an original gameworld set in an alternate reality where history went off the rails in the 13th century. After the Christian church discovered a way to end the Black Death by using magic, an evil fog descended on much of the continent. Southern Europe was cut off from the rest of the world, keeping Columbus at home in 1492 and dragging the medieval era into the late 20th century. When you take the role of Isador, a warrior monk tasked by the Vatican with finding a man condemned by the church, the calendar may say 1996, but the cobblestone streets and torchlit rooms indicate a much earlier era.  But very little is done with this interesting locale. Plot points are weighed down with ridiculously overwritten (the typical paragraph is at least 200 words in length), typo-strewn dialogue that twists and turns and has no payoff at the end. Adding insult to injury, the developers keep you awake through these interminable conversations by forcing you to manually scroll the text window. The voice acting matches the extravagant text, in that it's so florid and enthusiastic that it practically comes off as sarcastic.  The game's graphics are barren and dark. Although Mistmare was developed with the same LithTech engine that powers the cheerful No One Lives Forever series, this game's grim color palette sticks to earth tones that never stray far from the funereal. This is perhaps fitting for a land shrouded in spooky fog, but Sinister Systems could at least have provided a way to increase the brightness so that we could actually see some of this soul-crushing gloom and doom. As it is, the game might as well be set in a closet.  Character development in Mistmare mainly consists of stock fantasy RPG material. Isador's character sheet tracks attributes like strength and agility and learned combat skills. A journal runs down all of the current objectives. Items are stored in your inventory or enabled with a single click. Most of these items are also standard RPG stuff. While this may be a Christian world more beholden to St. Paul than J.R.R. Tolkien, you still wield magical swords and gulp down healing potions while fighting gargoyles, giant insects, demons, and so forth.  Gloomy graphics make it too dark to see what you're doing, let alone get into the purportedly moody atmosphere.  Spells (also called chords) are based on ""liturgical magic,"" a sound-based elemental system further split into schools featuring harmonies and shrieks. The former consists of standard protective spells that increase strength, agility, and so on, while the latter includes offensive spells with the power to strike enemies with such things as lighting bolts and storms of hot sand. Even so, the magic system seems pretty similar to your typical Dungeons & Dragons-inspired abracadabra. The only really unique thing about it is the Scythe of Sharpness, which can be used in conjunction with harvesting gems to capture monsters and can be summoned to fight on your behalf whenever you're in a tight spot.  Finally, in Mistmare, you can expect to encounter loads of bugs. In addition to the game's performance problems, you'll experience random drops to the desktop, lockups that cause the dialogue screen to pause or blurt out entire conversations in one massive chunk of text, and audio that masquerades as dead air most of the time.  You might want to play Mistmare only if you're exploring the benefits of primal scream therapy. As a frustration generator, it's unmatched. As a game, it's a complete mess. 
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11,Double Dungeons ,1.7, Double Dungeons is a pointless and miserable dungeon crawl that should be avoided.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/9/7/2219397-box.png,TG16,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/double-dungeons-review/1900-6168910/,neg,"
  Some old games are worth revisiting once in a while for no other reason than to savor the warm rush of nostalgia, but other games should be left to rot in the annals of video game history. Double Dungeons for the TurboGrafx-16 is one of the latter games. It's an extremely crude dungeon crawler that originally appeared on the TurboGrafx-16 in 1990 and has now been revived on the Wii Virtual Console with a price of 600 points ($6). That might not seem like much money to blow on any game, but for Double Dungeons, it's way too much.   Here is the first dungeon in the game…   The setup for Double Dungeons is almost nonexistent. Before jumping into the first maze in the game, you're given a sentence about a king who wants you to find a treasure in a dungeon. That's it—just a generic character searching a generic dungeon for a generic ""treasure."" It doesn't get any more involved from there. You enter a dungeon and move around a large and complex maze looking for the key that will open the door to the boss of the dungeon. Once you beat the boss, you can move on to another dungeon that looks identical but has a different layout. There is no map to guide you through these dungeons, and there are no landmarks or visual cues other than the enemies you encounter.     The enemies include such role-playing standards as skeletons, spiders, and blobs, but fighting them is dull. You run up to an enemy, hit the attack button, wait to get attacked by an enemy, then attack again until one of you dies. There's no strategy or thought involved in battle in this game. Heck, there isn't even any animation. You just see a picture of an enemy and some text telling you what happened. Needless to say, it's extremely boring. You do gain experience from killing monsters, so eventually you level up to dish out and absorb more damage, which enables you to kill some of the tougher enemies blocking your path. But your level and items don't carry over to the next maze, which makes all your work seem pointless. There are 22 mazes in all, and many of them are ridiculously complex, so much so that you could easily waste hours aimlessly wandering around hoping to stumble upon the right path. Of course, you can map each dungeon yourself, but there's a much better solution: Don't play this game.     The only interesting aspect of Double Dungeons is that it can be played by up to two players. When playing this way, the players start at a different points in the dungeon and can work together or alone to conquer all of the enemies and eventually kill the boss. It sounds like an interesting concept, but usually you'll both end up lost, dead, or bored stupid—just like in the single-player game.    …and here is the last. Can you spot any difference?   Double Dungeons doesn't look good either. All of the mazes look the same, and the handful of enemies are all so horribly pixelated and blurry that you'll hardly be able to tell what you're fighting. In the single-player game, all of the ""action"" takes place in the upper-left quarter of the screen, with the rest of the screen being taken up by plain and useless text. This text shows your level and how much gold you have, as well as a large Double Dungeons logo so you don't forget what game you're playing. In the multiplayer game, the screen is split vertically down the middle, but the character menu and game logo have been removed. The sound in the game is no better than the visuals, with some distorted sound effects and repetitive music to assault your ears.     There are no redeeming qualities in Double Dungeons. It's about as much fun as watching an even lower-fidelity version of that awful maze screensaver that came with Windows 95. The game looks bad, but it's also frustrating and pointless. Although it will take you a long time to clear all 22 dungeons, you certainly won't have fun doing it. There's absolutely no reason to waste your time or money on Double Dungeons.  
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12,MLB Slam! ,1.7," MLB Slam! is the first baseball game for the N-Gage, and, to be blunt, it's horrible.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/1/6/2222516-mblslmafb8.jpg,NGE,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-slam-review/1900-6086097/,neg,"
 MLB Slam! is the first baseball game for the N-Gage, and, to be blunt, it's horrible. While it does attempt to stand up to other stat-heavy sports games by offering realistic roster and player statistics, the game itself is so simplistic that these numbers don't even come in to play in the slightest. Baseball fans looking for a realistic experience will be sorely disappointed by this game, and even the most casual of players will be bored within minutes by a baseball game that simply isn't fun to play.  Despite being chock-full of statistics, MLB Slam! doesn't use them.  Featuring all 30 Major League Baseball teams with rosters accurate for the 2003 season, MLB Slam! offers baseball fans the chance to play as their favorite teams with all the players you'd expect. It also has a handful of modes, such as the ability to play a full season or to play against other player via the N-Gage's built-in Bluetooth capabilities. However, the realism stops here. As a baseball game, and the first offering of its kind for the N-Gage, this game is far behind the times in terms of gameplay. While it is easy enough to pick up and play, it is also addled with bugs and quirks that make the game both simplistic and frustrating at the same time.  As previously mentioned, every MLB team is represented with an accurate roster. However, the players on the field and in the batter's box all look the same, save for a change in skin tone when appropriate. In addition to this, all batters share an identical strike zone, and they perform identically regardless of their real-life skills at the plate. Hitting a ball is as easy as moving a target to where the pitch will cross the plate and pressing the swing button at the correct time. Within just a few innings, you'll find yourself scoring a huge number of runs with little opposition.  On the defensive side, MLB Slam! takes a similarly simple approach. Fielding is generally taken care of automatically, although on occasion, your player simply won't even attempt to move after a ball that's been hit into play. Likewise, sometimes he may fail to respond when instructed to move. This alone makes the fielding portion of the game frustrating. Stranger still, you can make infield plays to first base before your infielder even has possession of the ball, which makes ground balls easy outs every time. In short, this portion of the game is, for all intents and purposes, unfinished.  Finally, pitching--as you might expect--is also rudimentarily presented. You're given an assortment of two to four pitches to choose from, a target within the strike zone where you'd like the ball to cross the plate, and a basic power meter to determine how fast your pitch will be. By carefully working the corners of the strike zone, you can easily overpower the opposing team's batters every time. In all, MLB Slam! is a simple baseball game that fails to play solidly, let alone implement the player statistics that it contains. To make matters worse, the longer you play the game, the worse it runs. As your game stretches on into the later innings, you'll often find the game slowing down, and you'll encounter some considerable difficulties with button response to presses, thus making the game virtually unplayable at times.  Not even the game's Bluetooth multiplayer support can save you from its terrible gameplay.  Visually, MLB Slam! looks and sounds as good as it plays. As mentioned before, every player on the field looks exactly the same, and each is poorly rendered with just a few frames of animation. You're given the choice of several different stadiums to play in, and, of course, they all look the same. Additionally, the game is also mostly silent. While the game does offer sound that is triggered by certain events, such as a strikeout or a home run, the audio is heavily compressed and sounds tinny. Just as outfielders won't chase after balls on occasion, the game's sounds also fail to trigger some of the time.  In all, MLB Slam! is a game that is impossible to recommend to anyone. Its poorly designed gameplay and boring, bug-filled graphics would prevent even the most rabid baseball fan from enjoying what is presented.
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13,WWE Raw ,1.7," Saddled with horrific controls, broken fighting mechanics, and ugly presentation, WWE Raw for mobile phones is like a steel chair to the face.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwe-raw/1900-6142431/,neg,"
  Just when you thought that WWE Aftershock for the N-Gage had shown you just how far down wrestling gaming can go on mobile phones, along comes WWE Raw, a disaster of handheld proportions. Raw is sort of like a severely condensed version of that old NES game WWF Wrestlemania, where wrestlers would wander up, down, and around a 2D plane made to look like a wrestling ring, blindly kicking and punching at one another, and occasionally doing some kind of body slam. OK, in all fairness, this game is running on modest technology, but even that excuse goes flying out the window the moment you get your hands on the controls and realize how completely inept and near broken the combat itself is.    Even the WWE television product hasn't gotten bad enough to justify a pile of garbage like WWE Raw for mobile phones.   On paper, Raw seems like it has the right ideas. The roster is somewhat out of date, but it does include 14 superstars and divas, including the likes of Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Randy Orton, Batista, Kane, and Chris Jericho. Of course, the only reason you'd know that would be because the character-selection screen specifically displays their names. When you're in the game, the character sprites are so teensy and squished that the only way you can tell the difference between guys is by the colors of their tights. There's only one specific match type in Raw (single matches, that is), but there are a couple of different modes, including quick play, career, and create-a-wrestler. The create-a-wrestler mode is completely worthless, however, due to the aforementioned squished sprites. The only differentiating factors you can really mess with are the length and color of the tights, and skin color. The mode lets you change heads, but the smallness of the sprites makes it impossible to see the difference in any of them.     But, whatever, having modes is only a meaningful distinction if the underlying gameplay works to any effect, and it most definitely does not in WWE Raw. You move your wrestler around the ring with the phone's 2, 4, 6, and 8 buttons, but the responsiveness of the movement controls is lacking, at best. There are times when you'll be trying to move backward, but either because the game just isn't registering the button presses properly, or because you're caught in some sort of never-ending loop of getting punched by your opponent, you won't be able to go anywhere.     Attack buttons aren't much more responsive. You've got punches and kicks you can use in button-mashing combinations, but their effectiveness is highly suspect. If you can magically get an opponent to drop his guard or not walk one centimeter off to the left, up or down (which is too far for you to reach, apparently), you might be able to stun him or her long enough to do a grapple. Once you're in a grapple, you have to hammer on the 5 button to build up a meter, while your opponent does the same. If you beat your opponent, you'll do some kind of heinous-looking slam move. Incidentally, this is just about the only real ""wrestling"" move you're capable of doing in the game.    Because of the awful controls, every single match basically degenerates into a weird cat-and-mouse game where you and your opponent sort of wander around the ring, trying to find that sweet spot where you're just out of his reach, but you can magically hit him. Usually, all you need to do is either hold down the block button forever (which is just as exciting as it sounds), or move slightly below or above your opponent on the ring plane, where you'll find a spot where his hits don't even register, but yours do. Maybe your opponent will eventually figure out what you're doing and move slightly in one direction or another, and maybe he won't. It's anybody's guess.     There are a couple of other moves you can pull off, like running clotheslines and diving elbow drops, but they're basically worthless, too. Trying to make your wrestler actually run is mostly a fool's errand. You have to double-tap either the 4 or 6 button, but it takes about eight or nine tries to actually get your player to run. Then when you run in and attack, the opponent barely seems to register the hit. Ground attacks would only be useful if you could actually knock your opponent down, which you can't do until near the end of the match. By that point, you'll be so desperate for the match and your suffering to just end, that going for the pin every time is an altogether better solution.   Calling this a 'wrestling' game is kind of a horrible lie. You don't so much wrestle as you kick at air until you hit something.   The severely ugly wrestler sprites have already been mentioned, but that isn't even the worst of the game's presentational follies. The animation is stilted and horrible. All the wrestlers move like they have a steel rod for a spine, and the moves all look pretty much like crap. Yes, mobile games are rarely havens for spectacular animations, but the vast majority of mobile action games are able to work wonders compared to the pathetically lazy movements these wrestlers have, especially on a system like the Sony Ericsson S710a. As for the audio, there's an intensely lousy MIDI song that plays over menus, and you get a few lousy punching and grunting sound effects during matches, and that's about it.    WWE Raw is about as lackluster as any sort of action-oriented game on a mobile phone could get. The action (if you can even call it that) is so infuriatingly dull and half-baked that it's simply impossible to envision anyone making it through more than a full match's worth of this unpleasantness, let alone the full volley of matches needed to complete the career mode (which is really just a series of matches against all the other wrestlers on the roster, with no bells or whistles to speak of). WWE Raw most definitely should be avoided by even the most rabid of wrestling fans.  
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14,Pimp My Ride ,1.7," Pimp My Ride was shoddy enough as a console game, but the PSP version goes that extra mile and makes it completely unplayable.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/7/1/2219371-box_pmr.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pimp-my-ride-review/1900-6169552/,neg,"
  How do you break a bad game? Ask the developers of Pimp My Ride for the PSP, as they have achieved this dubiously wondrous feat. Based on the hit MTV car-customization show starring the self-proclaimed Mr. Black Bruce Willis himself, Xzibit, Pimp My Ride was originally released late last year on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2. Mixing a lousy driving game with completely pointless minigames that barely tied everything together into something that vaguely resembled the concept of the show, it was a poor piece of work. Now the game has come to the PSP, and it is with no amount of exaggeration that we state that Pimp My Ride is, hands down, the worst console-to-PSP port to date. Think of every single issue that's ever plagued a console game translated to the PSP, combine them all with a game that was already no fun to begin with, and you'll have a pretty good idea of where this game stands. Toss in the fact that Activision is charging $40 for this busted piece of junk, and Pimp My Ride goes from merely awful to outrageously abysmal in a split second.    This is actually a video clip. The frame rate is just so atrocious that it makes it look like a screenshot.   Pimp My Ride takes place in the glorious metropolis known as Pimp City. The residents of Pimp City like to drive pimped-out rides. So, what's an up-and-coming car-customization nerd like you to do when tasked with making the unpimped rides of the town's more hapless citizens into full-on works of pimp-flavored art? Why, drive around doing lame ghost riding and cruising minigames to earn cash so you can drive around in the customer's clunker to get new parts and make it into a gaudy monstrosity, of course. And then you do this exact same sequence of events over and over and over again until the game concludes, or you simply can't stomach the lame gameplay any longer.     Odds are, the wrecked frame rate and abysmal driving controls will cause you to give up long before you get anywhere near the end of this thing. Pimp My Ride has the worst frame rate of any game in the PSP library. It stays somewhere in the teens at its best moments and drops into single-digit territory every chance it gets. It's so bad that at times the game actually becomes nauseating, even if you're not the type to get that sensation from games. As if that weren't enough to ruin the driving aspects of the game, the steering controls make matters significantly worse. They were already loose enough on consoles, but the PSP version is 10 times as squirrelly. There's nothing even remotely resembling actual physics here. When you wreck into an object, your car will start doing the electric slide for several feet before spinning around for no reason whatsoever, or it will just dead stop with no reaction or movement. And that's with the same object. Simply trying to steer around turns is equally unpredictable. Sometimes you'll start sliding around like crazy, and sometimes your tires will play like they're glued to the street. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it. Making Pimp My Ride any form of a driving game seems like a bad idea to begin with, and when you consider how bad the driving mechanics are, that decision seems even more ill-advised. And if for some reason these problems aren't enough to completely sink the game for you, how about having the game crash on you on a semi-regular basis while loading or autosaving, thus corrupting and killing your save file? That ought to do it.    Even apart from this port's specific and mind-blowing flaws, nothing about the game's progression makes any sense, nor is it any fun. When you're driving around trying to earn money, you're limited to a specific section of Pimp City but can take part in specific events around the map for which there are a few icons. When you go to a ghost-riding event, you take part in an idiot-simple rhythm minigame that isn't all that rhythmic. You just press a displayed sequence of buttons as quickly as you can for each stage of the game, and all the while, your dude dances alongside the car like all those horribly awesome Internet videos you and your buddies used to think were hilarious but stopped caring about back when it was still 2006. There's also a hot steppin' event, but in actuality, that's just a new name for yet another ghost-riding event. You have to press buttons with a different sense of timing--but that's it. The worst part about the ghost-riding games is that they never change. The game slowly and surely tries to ramp up the difficulty, but it does it so slowly that you'll barely even notice. The game can't even be bothered to change the hip-hop beat that plays behind you--it's the same beat every time.    The other minigame, cruising, is almost not worth mentioning, except that it's so hysterically stupid. You drive up to a group of gawking hip-hop kids, holding down a button to put your car into 10mph cruise mode. As you drive by, you press a quick series of buttons to send the kids into some kind of spastic frenzy and earn yourself some cash. That's it. It's even less fun in practice than it sounds on paper.    As you keep driving around, you'll also be wrecking into other cars and various billboards, which earns you cash for some weird reason. Eventually, you'll earn enough cash to meet the budget for your next customer. You then drive to the customer and a cutscene pops up that is similar to the sort of sequence you'd see on the TV show: a squealing 19-year-old girl with a horrid car and a heart of gold. Xzibit makes fun of the car for a while, and you're treated to some truly atrocious voice acting from the kids. Finally, you get the keys, and the pimping can begin. Of course, the pimping isn't all it's cracked up to be because the catch is that there's a rival pimper of rides out there competing with you on every job. When you get a car to work on, your rival gets the same car. So you and the other driver drive around the city under a time limit, trying to get to as many part suppliers as possible. The car with the highest rating at the end wins.    It sounds neat and all, but there's almost nothing to it. When you get to a part supplier, you get to choose from several different types of parts, some of which are very expensive and some of which are not. The trouble is that there's no reason not to pick the most expensive parts every single time. The most expensive parts translate into bigger boosts to your meter, and you're never hurting for cash. Sometimes you can choose from multiple types of parts that cost the same, especially when it comes to the crazy custom parts the show is known for (a trunk-mounted anvil for an aspiring metal worker or an in-bed tattoo parlor for the pickup truck of an apprentice tattoo artist), but you never get to use or experience those parts. You can drive around the cars you pimp, but you don't do anything with them except travel from place to place or engage in the occasional bout of ghost riding. There's no reason to put much thought into the ride-pimping aspect of the game, beyond picking the most expensive part and deciding which part shop you can get to most quickly.    The single, solitary thing that Pimp My Ride had going for it on consoles was its presentation, and in the PSP version, that one feather in its cap has been removed, tossed to the ground, and stomped upon with golf cleats until it's shredded, tattered, and unrecognizable. The problems go well beyond the broken frame rate. As you might expect, the graphics have been scaled back considerably from the console versions of Pimp My Ride, and that might not be such a terrible thing except that because of the frame rate, you're often getting what equates to still-frame looks at every ugly texture. The pimped rides still have a bit of aesthetic appeal, but that isn't nearly enough to make up for every other sin this game commits visually.   Ghost riding the whip is already played out. This game doesn't do it any favors.   The game's audio has remained mostly unmolested from the console versions of Pimp My Ride, save for some skipping problems that pop up when the UMD loads in the background. Those issues aside, the audio isn't bad. Xzibit does a good job with the less-than-stellar dialogue that has been written for him. This is less true of other voice actors, but at least X has a bit of fun with what is a pretty silly concept. You can almost hear him snicker as he explains the rules of Pimp City. There's also a decent roster of songs on the soundtrack, many of which are from Xzibit's new album. The soundtrack could have used a bit more variety, but what's there is mostly quality stuff.    Oh, did we mention the 45- to 60-second load times that crop up every time you need to load a minigame, a cutscene, or any other aspect of the game, even if you're replaying something you just played? Considering all of the other horrible problems Pimp My Ride has, crummy load times almost seem moot by comparison. While you might not expect a whole lot from a quick-and-dirty port of a lame console game, there is a reasonable expectation that the port not be completely apathetic and half-baked to the point of being unplayable. There is no version of Pimp My Ride worth recommending to anyone, but the PSP version is definitely the one that should be most actively avoided.  
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15,Catfight ,1.6," Let's just get right down to the nitty gritty: Catfight is, without a doubt, the worst computer game ever released.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/9/6/7/2223967-catfite.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/catfight-review/1900-2538331/,neg,"
Let's just get right down to the nitty gritty: Catfight is, without a doubt, the worst computer game ever released. Touted as “the ultimate female fighting game,” what's most surprising about Catfight is not how offensive it is, but on how many different levels it manages to offend.  The worst thing about Catfight (and, believe me, that's a hefty accomplishment) is that the gameplay is just so damn bad. On the surface, the game seems like another generic, mano-a-mano fighter. There's the obligatory story (evil person summons great fighters to otherworldly arena, yadda yadda yadda), plus diverse characters with special moves. Unfortunately, the game steals all of these characters and moves from other games, without managing to steal any of the fun. From the opening options screen, the game is almost impossible to control. If you're lucky enough to be playing with a gamepad, the control is merely bad. With the keyboard, however, playability sinks to horrible. On the keyboard, all of your character's special moves are single keystrokes, but even with this “advantage” it's almost impossible to defeat the computer opponent (not because of cunning AI, but because of the terrible response time). To counteract this obvious problem, the designers have included an “easier” difficulty level, which (get this) turns the computer completely off, pitting you against an opponent who just stands there.  And I'm just getting started here. Catfight's graphics are blocky and pixelated, and the color palette is horrible. The digitized actresses look like paper dolls moving at unnatural angles. The soundtrack consists of annoying and repetitive squeals backed by bad heavy metal guitar. And, adding insult to injury, turning the sound off in the options menu has absolutely no effect.  Catfight's sexism is almost too blatant to mention. In case you haven't guessed, Catfight's unique spin on the genre is that all the combatants are scantily clad women. Strangely enough, Catfight isn't even that offensive, just pathetically juvenile. The “Mortal Kombat meets mud wrestling” concept has potential for some humorous kitsch, but the designers seem too preoccupied with their prepubescent sexual fantasies to see any irony in their project.  No, what's truly offensive is that the designers (who, not surprisingly, use pseudonyms in the credits) seem to think there is an army of like-minded social misfits, all more than willing to fork over their hard-earned money to see buxom boxing beauties. But if this frightening target audience does exist, and if there are people out there salivating at Catfight's premise, they should heed this advice: buy Mortal Kombat or Battle Arena Toshinden and play mirror matches with Sonja or Sofia to your heart's content. You'll thank me, and I'll sleep easier knowing there will never be a Catfight 2.
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16,Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 ,9.9," As most major publishers' development efforts shift to any number of next-generation platforms, Tony Hawk 2 will likely stand as one of the last truly fantastic games to be released ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/7/5/2209175-box_thps2.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-pro-skater-2-review/1900-2630641/,pos,"
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. The mere concept of a sequel to last year's surprise hit is enough to send chills down the spines of the game's die-hard fans. Luckily, those chills are not in vain - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is the perfect example of how to make a sequel to an already amazing game. The levels are bigger, the trick catalog is more plentiful, the number of goals per level has been doubled, and the already stunning gameplay has been honed even further.   All of the professional skaters from the first game have returned, and new skaters like Rodney Mullen, Eric Koston, and Steve Caballero have been added to the roster. Also, you can create your own skater, choosing from different skin and model types. All of the first game's modes are back. You can opt to skate a two-minute single session, freely skate around a level with no time limit, or enter the career mode. The career mode here is much more  than the first game's. Completing level goals in career mode earns cash, and you spend that cash on higher attribute points, new boards, and new tricks. This makes the game pretty customizable - if you don't like your skaters tricks, a little money and some time on the trick screen and you can set any trick to almost any button combination you want.   With the exception of the three competition levels, each level in the game has ten different goals, each with a different dollar value assigned to it. Three of the goals are score-based, and you still have to spell skate and collect a hidden tape as well. Four of the goals are fairly level specific. In New York, you'll do things like collect subway tokens, 50-50 grind on a sculpture, and grind on a set of subway rails. In Philly, you'll have to drain a fountain, find four lips and do lip tricks on them, and collect small liberty bells. In Venice, you'll ollie over five ""magic"" bums, tailslide the Venice Ledge, collect spray paint cans, and find four specially marked transfers. Finally, the goal in each level is completed when you've completed the other nine goals and collected every piece of spinning money. In competition levels, you earn 90 percent completion by earning the gold medal, and the remaining 10 percent comes from collecting all the cash in the level. Later levels are opened up when you've collected a certain amount of cash. You don't need to get 100 percent completion in each level to beat the game's final level, but you'll be too addicted to the game to settle for anything less.   The multiplayer game is just as exciting as it was in the original. With the exception of horse, all of the other modes are played simultaneously. Trick attack is a timed score contest. Graffiti tags a surface with your skater's color when you include it in a trick - if you do a better trick on a surface owned by your opponent, it switches to your color. Tag gives each player a timer, which only counts down when you're ""it."" The first player to run out of time loses. The game still runs at full speed in the two-player split screen modes, though most of the levels have been altered a bit for multiplayer - for instance, the Skatestreet level loses its outdoor areas, and the Bullring no longer allows you to get up into the stands, which have been replaced by draw-in shrouding fog.   Tony Hawk 2 looks so good that you may occasionally have trouble believing it's a PlayStation game. The textures are large and colorful, and some levels include lots of nicely detailed graffiti. The levels themselves are absolutely enormous, each containing at least one hidden area. Yet even with the large levels, the game runs at a nice, solid speed at all times. The camera works extremely well in almost any situation, though it would have been nice to see a look function in the game, like the skater's eye function found in Sony's extremely Hawk-like Grind Session.The only real problem with the original Tony Hawk's audio was that the soundtrack was a little singular - if you didn't like that style of music, you were essentially out of luck. Tony Hawk 2 breaks up the monotony nicely, a wide range of artists including Naughty By Nature, Powerman 5000, Rage Against the Machine, Dub Pistols, Papa Roach, Anthrax (featuring Public Enemy), and Bad Religion. The game's sound effects are outstanding, mixing a nice balance of ambient sound (nearby cars, trains, announcers at the skate competitions, and so on) and the sounds of skating, such as the clink of your trucks hitting a rail, the different textured sounds of varying surfaces, and, of course, the sound of your skater's body slamming to the pavement.   The first game already had extremely tight gameplay - the levels were designed with big trick combos in mind, but there was room for personal style and innovation. Tony Hawk 2 opens up the concept even further with the addition of manuals - essentially front or back wheelies - which you can use to link trick combos together when crossing flat land. The larger levels of Tony Hawk 2 are extremely manual-friendly, yet the manuals never give the game a gimmicky feel. Instead, they really give you even more control over your skater and open up the scoring for even bigger combos. Also, the first game had gaps - small bonuses that gave you points for transfers, jumps, and long rails. Tony Hawk 2 is packed with these gaps; some levels have well over 40 different gaps. A gap checklist on the options screen helps you keep track of which gaps you've yet to find.   Another amazing addition is the skate park editor. The editor gives you an empty room and lets you fill it up with rails, ramps, pools, boxes, and just about anything else. It's extremely easy to use, and you can set it up for single-player and multiplayer play. Also, in case you aren't feeling terribly creative, Neversoft has stashed a ton of levels on the disc for you to mess around with. The skate park editor is great on its own, and it justifies owning DexDrive, as well. Surely a smattering of fan sites will offer large collections of created levels for download to such a device.   Near the end of a platform's life , most of its software falls into one of two categories. The first is shovelware - cheaply produced games hoping to cash in on the platform's large installed user base. Games in this category fail to innovate and come off as games that would have been decent three or four years ago, but simply can't compete with a system's better offerings. The second category is a fairly elite club, containing games from developers that clearly know how to exploit the aging hardware for all its worth. The PlayStation's final year is coming to a close, and in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Neversoft has put together a game that clearly belongs at the top of the second category. As most major publishers' development efforts shift to any number of next-generation platforms, Tony Hawk 2 will likely stand as one of the last truly fantastic games to be released on the PlayStation.
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17,Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 ,9.9, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is a must-own Dreamcast game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/7/5/2209175-box_thps2.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-pro-skater-2-review/1900-2651275/,pos,"
The original Tony Hawk for the Dreamcast was hardly a surprise. The game had already received rave reviews on both the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, so all Dreamcast owners had to do was sit back and wait patiently for the best version of the game. Then, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 came to both the PlayStation and the PC, and it received similar reviews. Now, after waiting patiently once again, Dreamcast owners can enjoy what is easily the best version of the game to be released thus far.   Tony Hawk 2 is a textbook example of how to make a sequel. It takes everything that made the first game great and basically bumps it all up a notch. As a result, levels are larger, the level goals are much more varied, there are more tricks, more options, and so on. All the professional skaters from the first game have returned, and new skaters like Rodney Mullen, Eric Koston, and Steve Caballero have been added to the roster. Also, you can create your own skater by choosing from different skin and model types. All the first game's modes are back. You can opt to skate a two-minute single session, freely skate around a level with no time limit, or enter the career mode. The career mode here is much more than the first game's. Completing level goals in career mode earns you cash, and you spend that cash on higher attribute points, new boards, and new tricks. This makes the game pretty customizable - if you don't like your skater's tricks, a little money and some time on the trick screen and you can set any trick to almost any button combination you want.   With the exception of the three competition levels, each level in the game has ten different goals, each with a different dollar value assigned to it. Three of the goals are score based, and you still have to spell skate and collect a hidden tape as well. Four of the goals are fairly level specific. In New York, you'll do things like collect subway tokens, 50-50 grind on a sculpture, and grind on a set of subway rails. In Philly, you'll have to drain a fountain, find four lips and do lip tricks on them, and collect small Liberty Bells. In Venice, you'll ollie over five ""magic"" bums, tailslide the Venice Ledge, collect spray paint cans, and find four specially marked transfers. Finally, the last goal in each level is completed when you've completed the other nine goals and collected every piece of spinning money. In competition levels, you earn 90 percent completion by earning the gold medal, and the remaining ten percent comes from collecting all the cash in the level. Later levels are opened up when you've collected a certain amount of cash or medals. You don't need to get 100 percent completion in each level to beat the game's final level, but you'll be too addicted to the game to settle for anything less.   The multiplayer game is just as exciting as it was in the original. With the exception of horse, all of the other modes are played simultaneously. Trick attack is a timed score contest. Graffiti mode tags a surface with your skater's color when you include it in a trick - if you do a better trick on a surface owned by your opponent, it switches to your color. Tag gives each player a timer, which only counts down when you're ""it."" The first player to run out of time loses. The game runs at the same speed in split-screen mode, but the frame rate definitely takes a hit. However, the game is still ultraplayable. Also, most of the levels have been altered a bit for multiplayer - for instance, the Skatestreet level loses its outdoor areas, Philly loses its skatepark, and the Bullring no longer lets you get up into the stands. It would have been nice if the chopped levels were broken up into two separate levels in multiplayer, which would then have allowed you to choose between the fountain section or the skatepark section of Philadelphia, but there's still plenty of different arenas for your multiplayer pleasure.The first Tony Hawk on Dreamcast didn't go too far above and beyond the call of duty, when compared to the original PlayStation source material. The models and textures were cleaned up, end-of-level animations were added, and that's about it. Tony Hawk 2 goes a little further. The game is extremely more colorful when compared to the PlayStation version, and the textures are amazingly clean. But more impressive than that, the models have been tweaked and redone a bit. Now, things like T-shirts flap around in the wind as you skate, and the animation just looks simply amazing. The draw-in distance is nice and far away, letting you see most of the enormous parks at any given time. The frame rate, save for a few minor, hard-to-find spots, is rock solid. The only real problem with the original Tony Hawk's audio was that the soundtrack was a little singular - if you didn't like that style of music, you were essentially out of luck. Tony Hawk 2 breaks up the monotony nicely with a wide range of artists including Naughty By Nature, Powerman 5000, Rage Against the Machine, Dub Pistols, Papa Roach, Anthrax (featuring Public Enemy), and Bad Religion. The game's sound effects are outstanding, mixing a nice balance of ambient sound (nearby cars, trains, announcers at the skate competitions, and so on) and the sounds of skating, such as the clink of your trucks hitting a rail, the different textured sounds of varying surfaces, and, of course, the sound of your skater's body slamming to the pavement. When compared to the PlayStation version, the Dreamcast release has higher quality sound - everything just sounds a whole lot clearer, crisper, and cleaner.   While much of the core gameplay of the original remains, that's not to say that Tony Hawk 2 is without improvements. The most influential of these improvements is the addition of manuals - essentially front or back wheelies - which you can use to link trick combos together over a much greater distance. Now, you can do a set of rail tricks, land in a manual, and roll over to another set of rails, all in the same combo. This complements the game's large, occasionally open level design amazingly well, and it doesn't unbalance the game a bit. While manuals are the key to insane scoring, you don't need to really rely on them constantly to succeed. The first game had lots of gaps - small bonuses that gave you points for transfers, jumps, and long rails. Tony Hawk 2 is packed with these gaps; some levels have more than 40 different gaps. A gap checklist on the options screen helps you keep track of which gaps you've yet to find.   Another amazing addition is the skatepark editor. The editor gives you an empty room and lets you fill it up with rails, ramps, pools, boxes, and just about anything else. It's extremely easy to use, and you can set it up for both single- and multiplayer play. It would have been nice if the game took advantage of the Dreamcast's online capabilities, which would have let you play online, register your high scores, or even transfer your skateparks to friends or a centralized server, but alas, this is not the case.   Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is a must-own Dreamcast game. The game's career mode presents an awesome challenge, yet it's a challenge that you'll want to undertake again and again, unlocking characters and cheats as you progress. But even after everything is unlocked and completed, Tony Hawk 2 is enough of a pick-up-and-play type of game that you'll be coming back to it months after you've completed the challenges.
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18,NFL 2K1 ,9.9," In the end, NFL 2K1 is a deeper, more refined version of the original game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/8/0/2209080-nfl2k1.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nfl-2k1-review/1900-2626325/,pos,"
NFL 2K was considered by many to be one of the most amazing football games of all time, but it wasn't without flaws. Once you got into NFL 2K, it became a predictable game. Visual Concepts, the developer of the game, realized this as well, and the team has improved everything it possibly could in an attempt to correct this. We played NFL 2K1 for a considerable amount of time, and the results of Visual Concepts' work over the past year are clearly evident. The game is a much more refined, balanced, and complete version of the first game and is not only amazing for its online gameplay capabilities but also for its improved running game and greater overall depth.    The most obvious change is the addition of online play. NFL 2K1's network options make it possible to play with or against other players over the Internet, as well as download team roster updates throughout the season - all you need is an active phone line and a service provider. From there, you need to enter four lines of information into your Dreamcast to enable your connection. If you don't have an ISP, you can sign up for Sega's very own service provider, SegaNet. NFL 2K1 has an easy-to-use interface that will hook you up with SegaNet. Once your Dreamcast is properly configured, selecting ""network"" from the main menu hooks you up to the NFL 2K1 online servers. There are three different regional divisions (east, west, and central), and each region has a dozen or so city-specific servers to choose from. If you and your opponent have a solid connection, meaning that you and your opponent have good phone lines and are connected to the closest regional server, the experience of playing NFL 2K1 online is as if your opponents were sitting right next to you. If you don't have a solid connection, the game occasionally freezes for brief periods of time during play, or you'll notice a lag time between controller commands and onscreen player reactions. Of all the games we've played online, using various ISPs, the majority have had a slight but noticeable delay. However, we did play a few games against online opponents near and far, which were just as good as multiplayer games played on one console. As is usually the case with online gaming, your mileage may vary.   The new franchise mode lets you take a team through multiple seasons and lets you deal with tons of managerial tasks such as drafting players, releasing players, and signing players. You even have to take into account a player's age when signing him, since some players retire at the end of a season. The franchise mode adds a new depth to the series, which will undoubtedly keep you playing NFL 2K1 for a long time to come.    While the additions of the franchise mode and Internet-play capability are huge, fans of the first game will find the subtle control and AI improvements to be just as important. The running game of NFL 2K, for instance, was one of the areas many players felt could use some tweaking, which is exactly what the design team at Visual Concepts did. The ball carrier's force is now more momentum-based, meaning that if he's running at full speed, it really takes a solid hit to bring him down. In the previous game, any contact would basically stun the ball carrier for a moment, a moment that usually lasted longer than it would take for another defender to come along and finish the job. In NFL 2K1, the ball carrier is able to spin off of opponents who don't make solid contact, which in turn allows you to realistically break tackles. Running up the middle, breaking tackles, and actually busting out with a surprise 70-yard dash to the end zone can actually happen now. All the moves from the first game are included, although the stiff-arm's effectiveness has been toned down substantially. A new juke move has been added that allows you to cut across the field a bit faster. The computer AI is a bit tougher and is much quicker in adapting to your style, meaning that if you find a play that allows you to make a substantial gain, it's not likely that the computer will allow you to pull it off again right away. The team-specific playbooks are, for the most part, specific to offensive plays, and the defensive playbooks are actually rather weak.    Visually, the game looks almost identical to the original NFL 2K. The game does, however, feature graphical additions such as real-time lighting reflections off the players' helmets, an animated crowd, and field deterioration. The game also has new motion-captured animations for tackling, running, catching, tripping, and just about everything else. In all, NFL 2K1 features somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 motion-captured animations. The game looks very smooth, and it doesn't appear to suffer from any of the slowdown that plagued the first game. The game does have some minor graphical problems - the details on the players pop up rather suddenly as the camera gets closer to them, and it isn't nearly as subtle as in the first game. Overall, the players look a little more polygonal and not quite as detailed as in the first game. The front-end menus look a little sharper this time around, as do the play-selection screens.    In the audio department, the game is incredible. The commentary is more insightful and situational than any other sports game before. The commentators make references to plays, players, and teams right on cue and in amazing detail. The players on the field yell back and forth to one another and actually taunt each other before the plays and sometimes even call each other by name. The sound effects and stadium announcements are, for the most part, identical to those of the first game.    In the end, NFL 2K1 is a deeper, more refined version of the original game. The vastly improved running game makes all the difference in the world, since now you can truly mount an offensive attack that consists of a true-to-life air-and-ground assault. The game plays faster, more precisely, and closer to the real thing than any football game has before. The addition of the online gameplay feature and franchise mode is more than enough reason for you to upgrade to NFL 2K1. If there's still any doubt in your mind that NFL 2K1 is anything less than revolutionary, squash it and get to your local video game retailer before it sells out. The game is just that good.
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19,GoldenEye 007 ,9.8, GoldenEye is the type of game N64 owners have been waiting for since they finished Mario 64.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/9/7/2/1049-3972.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/goldeneye-007-review/1900-2544509/,pos,"
Upon first seeing GoldenEye at the E3 convention, I was underwhelmed. I mean, here was yet another first-person shooter, with the only features setting it apart being the neat-looking sniper rifle and the fact that it was based on a movie that just about everyone had forgotten about. I couldn't have been more wrong. GoldenEye not only lives up to the ""quality, not quantity"" mantra that Nintendo continues to tout, it surpasses it. The sheer joy experienced by putting a bullet in some Russian's head with the sniper rifle, from 200 yards, never gets old, and the countless mission objectives spread across 12 different environments and three difficulty levels ensure that the game has the staying power of - dare I say it - Mario 64. GoldenEye closely mirrors the plot of the 17th James Bond movie, starting with the daring bungee jump sequence and ending with a showdown between 007 and Alec Trevelyan atop a huge antenna. In between, you'll shoot scads of soldiers, plant explosives, escape from a train seconds before it explodes, and execute other decidedly Bond-like maneuvers. The entire game takes place from a Doom-like perspective, except that holding down the R button allows you to aim anywhere on the screen, and with the sniper rifle, zoom in for a nice, clean head shot. The graphics in GoldenEye are incredible. From installations deep under the snow to lush Cuban jungles, each environment looks really good, with a decent amount of detail. There is a slight bit of fogging at the edge of your view, but hey, St. Petersburg is a foggy place. The sniper rifle alleviates some of the fog, enabling you to zoom up and peep the action long before the guards are alerted to your presence. Also, the characters in the game look really good. When you run into Boris, he actually looks like Alan Cumming. The only character who doesn't transfer favorably into the 3-D world is Natalya, who looks a little too square. The music in GoldenEye is absolutely perfect, and adds a lot of ambience to the game. For instance, one of the later levels starts in an elevator, complete with laid-back elevator music. When you exit the elevator, the level's real soundtrack kicks in. A minor point, sure, but it demonstrates the detail of the game. The only thing that could make GoldenEye's sound better is the inclusion of speech. GoldenEye is the type of game N64 owners have been waiting for since they finished Mario 64. It has outstanding graphics and sound, and contains a certain depth in its gameplay that really entices you to finish it on all three difficulty levels. If more N64 games use this as a model, as opposed to Cruis'n USA or KI Gold, then perhaps the system really does have a shot at toppling the PlayStation's reign as the dominant game platform.
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20,Wario Land 3 ,9.8," As far as platformers go, Wario Land 3 is a game that fires on all cylinders.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/9/4/4/2216944-box_wl3.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wario-land-3-review/1900-2583810/,pos,"
What a difference two years make. Wario Land 2 was a high-quality platformer, but it didn't fully express the quirkiness or fun factor that Nintendo refined over the years with its Mario series. The concept of an invincible character, along with a somewhat short quest served to deliver a game steeped in gameplay but lacking longevity. Now, Nintendo is back with its third title in the series, Wario Land 3, aiming to remedy prior complaints while taking run-and-jump gameplay to new heights of enjoyment.   Right from the initial anime-style intro, you can tell Wario Land 3 is going to be a unique experience. Cartoon-quality animation leaps from the screen as Wario finds himself sucked into a dream world contained within a music box. His future is uncertain, until a hidden figure offers an escape. If Wario collects the five music boxes that will free this ghostly power from its prison, the hidden figure will return Wario to his physical self. Sure, Wario realizes that the old guy has his own agenda, but what does he care? Wario is greedy, happy-go-lucky, and quite fond of his freedom.   Upon exiting the master's cave, Wario finds himself at the first of the game's 20 initial levels. Throughout each rests four treasure boxes, each of which can either unlock a later level, transform prior levels, yield a sacred object, or reward Wario with a power-up. Making things interesting, some chests require power-ups from later levels to reach, while others remain inaccessible until an environmental disaster transforms the terrain. Because of this nonlinear quest, Wario is constantly traversing back and forth through the game's four main areas, with each level constantly offering something new to discover.   Many factors serve to make the Wario 3 experience enjoyable. First, since it's a dream world, Wario can't be killed. His invincibility exists as both a hindrance and a tool for guiding him through levels. Contact with enemies results in a variety of status changes, such as setting Wario ablaze, causing him to float, or just bouncing him toward a waiting goal. These status changes, along with the game's ten various power-ups, are what give you a near-limitless selection of abilities. Since Wario can't die, the difficulty level is tempered by puzzles, lots of mind-numbing, near hair-pulling puzzles. Thankfully though, crashing into enemies no longer causes Wario to lose the coins he's collected within a level, removing one of the more aggravating elements of the prior Wario title. Using these coins, Wario can access a Mario Golf-inspired minigame, which yields even greater access to levels and the secrets they hold. One would think that the constant traveling back and forth would bring about monotony, but the constant reward of finding new secrets and power-ups, coupled with a number of hilarious boss characters, makes it all worthwhile.   While a standard-sized review is barely enough to do a description of Wario 3's gameplay justice, it's even more difficult to describe the game's visuals. Imagine the level of animation that Nintendo delivered with Bionic Commando, then double it. Now, add in a few more colors, amusingly detailed characters, and vibrant backgrounds, and you might scratch the surface of how great this game looks. Cutscenes leap from the screen with hundreds of vibrant colors, in-game graphics are cartoonlike in both appearance and quality, and little niceties such as flowing water and glittering ice only help to further bring across the game's beauty. When it comes to looks, Wario 3 is the first game to deliver SNES quality visuals within the confines of a Game Boy Color game.   Further keeping with the game's overall quality, Nintendo has managed to execute a near-flawless auditory experience. Sound effects are crisp and clean, offering constant amusement while never sounding tinny. Background music is both catchy and nonrepetitive, delivering tunes that will remain etched in your minds for years to come. Though some could say the game's sound quality isn't quite up to par with Bionic Commando or Zelda DX, it's a pretty difficult comparison to make. It's like comparing a fully topped pizza with one with extra cheese. Both are great, and for some people, one's a tad better. However, some people prefer their pizza with less cheese, and as such, many will find Wario 3's sound quality equal to, if not superior to, that of Nintendo's prior efforts.   As far as platformers go, Wario Land 3 is a game that fires on all cylinders. Massive replay value rounds out perfect gameplay, a battery save keeps your progress, and a plethora of cutscenes further serves to delight one's senses past the point of pleasure. Additionally, a variety of plot twists and gotchas helps to make the story one of the more engrossing in recent memory, with an end boss that simply has to be seen to be believed. In many ways, it's as if Nintendo set out to make Wario 3 into a 2D RPG. Whatever the intent, Wario 3 raises the bar that all other platformer titles must meet in terms of fun, eye-candy, and replay value.
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21,Halo ,9.7," Not only is this easily the best of the Xbox launch games, but it's easily one of the best shooters ever, on any platform.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/4/0/2210040-box_halo.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/halo-review/1900-2823816/,pos,"
Even if you bear in mind the company's well-earned reputation for creating excellent games for the Mac and PC, Bungie's epic Xbox first-person shooter is of such a staggeringly high level of quality that you can't help but be surprised. Halo is a complete thrill ride from beginning to end, an experience perhaps best described as a 16-hour-plus version of the siege scene from the film Terminator 2. Those who've spent the last few years looking for a first-person shooter as good as Rare's GoldenEye 007 or Valve's Half-Life will be happy to hear they need look no longer.    You play Halo through the eyes of a character known as the Master Chief, an enigmatic cyborg commando whom you don't know much about but whom everyone in the game seems to have heard of and talks about reverentially (""He's taller than I thought."" ""Glad you're here, sir."" ""We were worried before you showed up, sir.""). Halo takes place in a space-faring future, where Earth's forces have come into conflict with an alien race known as The Covenant. In the beginning of the game, you're awakened out of a cryo sleep and learn that The Covenant are trying to obtain a mysterious artifact--perhaps a weapon--on an artificial ring-shaped world known as Halo, and it's up to you to prevent that from happening.   Before you arrive on the planet, your ship is boarded by Covenant troops, whom your marine allies engage while your commander briefs and arms you. As you attempt to sweep the ship clean of enemies, you come across numerous instances of marines and Covenant forces engaged in firefights from behind hastily erected barricades. The first time you enter a scene like this, Covenant soldiers attempt to flank you by sneaking up from a passageway to the side, but you can repel them and turn their technique against them, attacking the main nest of them from the right while your allies keep their front line busy. This sort of combat is par for the course in Halo, making the simple days of running and gunning down enemies down the center of a corridor seem like a thing of the past. The Covenant know how to work together as a team and will send in point men to hunt for you in the last place you were seen if you back off to momentarily lick your wounds and let your shields recharge.   You quickly discover that you can carry only two weapons at a time in Halo--a realistic touch that many game players assumed for years would detract from first-person shooters but that lends a nice strategic element to this one. This forces you to choose wisely which weapons you pick up from fallen foes and allies and to learn each weapon well. You have to go into each situation knowing that if you, say, pick up that rocket launcher, you might be able to take out a large unit like a tank with it, but if you don't have a weapon that carries multiple, rapidly fired rounds, you might get overtaken by hordes of oncoming ground troops. Necessity will eventually cause you to realize that the weapons in Halo are very well balanced. Each one has positive and negative traits that might not be apparent at first. The pistol is very basic, but its scope can help you fire on troops who are hiding behind rocks in the distance. The rifle carries many rounds but isn't as effective as energy weapons against foes whose suits possess force fields. The appropriately named needler shoots explosive glass shards that home in on targets, but they often miss their mark if your enemy hides behind an object or runs far enough away. There aren't an enormous number of weapons in the game, but there isn't one that you won't find useful in some way.The combat in Halo is challenging and never gets old or repetitive because the enemy AI is so good that your foes react in a variety of different ways depending on the situation. If there's a cannon or vehicle nearby, they might get into it. If you blast a volley of glass shards at them from the needler or if their force field's shields are low, they'll likely run behind a rock and hide. If one is close to death, expect him to rush into close quarters and attempt to bludgeon you to death with his gun. Or one might lob a grenade at you from behind a pylon or provide cover fire for an ally attempting to move around to attack you from behind. And your marine allies are just as smart. If you hop into the Warthog jeep and a marine is nearby, he'll jump in back and man its machine gun turret. If another marine is there, he'll climb in and ride shotgun. The marine AI is so lifelike that sometimes you'll find yourself assisting them, instead of the other way around. In one section of the game, you have the opportunity to provide cover for a marine armed with a sniper rifle who's staked out a plateau above a valley where Covenant dropships are letting off troops. He's able to pick off a decent number of them before they draw near, but for both of you to survive, you have to guard the entrance to the plateau to keep anyone from sneaking up, providing the marine with enough time to properly thin the herd. Suffice it to say, if you found yourself replaying the marine sections of Half-Life: Opposing Force to try to keep all your troops alive, you'll be spending a lot of time with Halo.   Not surprisingly, the computer AI provides the game with an immense amount of replay value. You could play the same section a dozen times--and some are so tough that you'll have to--and not have the same events happen exactly the same way twice. Random elements, such as where enemies are located in a level and where those on watch begin making their rounds, are thrown in often. You'll also discover that you have a lot of freedom to choose how to beat a level. There's rarely only one right way of doing something. For example, in several areas, you'll come across Covenant grunts sleeping in place on the floors. You can sneak around and dispatch them with the butt of your rifle, or you can choose to fire a rocket and wake the whole place up--or any variation in between. Unlike in many other games, there's no penalty for not choosing stealth in the stealth sections.   There are also many choices available to you in the parts of the game where vehicles appear. At some points you even have the opportunity to pick from multiple vehicles, such as the Warthog jeep, the Ghost hovercraft, the Scorpion tank, or the Banshee attack craft. You'll have a very different experience depending on which one you choose. If you take the Ghost, you can quickly maneuver around your enemies. If you get in the Banshee, you can rain fire down on them from the sky. If you use the Scorpion tank, up to four marines can hop on the outside. If one of the marines on board has a sniper rifle, he'll start picking off enemies who get too close, while you concentrate on larger targets like cannons and other tanks. Between segments like this and another where you can--if you're fast enough--hijack a Banshee and use it to fly down to a valley below to combat enemies you wouldn't normally confront for another half hour, it should be easy to understand why the vehicle sections of the game are worth playing over and over again. They contribute greatly toward making Halo feel more like a 3D version of classic shooters like Contra and Ikari Warriors than just another first-person shooter by giving it that one-man-army feel.One of the best things about Halo is that it manages to attain that perfect level of difficulty that provides you with plenty of challenge but little or no frustration. You'll play a tough sequence a dozen times and keep trying different tactics until you make it to the next checkpoint, but you won't be cursing when you die because you're simply having a great time. The checkpoint system is a large factor in keeping you from getting frustrated because it rarely starts you too far back in the level when you die, making it somewhat commensurate with being able to save anywhere in a PC shooter.   Another great thing about Halo is what it doesn't do: It avoids elements like platform jumping and boss battles that have detracted from first-person shooters like Half-Life and Red Faction, focusing instead on pure action and story and expertly keeping either from getting in the way of the other. Its visceral yet smart Doom/Soldier of Fortune-style gameplay is punctuated by numerous scripted events and story sequences that can be somewhat awkward at first but then soon become very compelling.    The main reasons Halo will end up drawing as many comparisons to action movies as other games is that its levels are huge and your goals shift from moment to moment as events happen around you. Unlike mission-based shooters such as GoldenEye 007 that require you to accomplish a specific number of tasks, Halo instead sets you in an environment and expects you to think on your feet and react to a series of quickly changing, hostile situations. It's not inappropriate in the least to call Halo action-packed; it's crammed full of more than 16 hours of fighting for your life. Things just keep happening like some long, consistently exhilarating action movie, making it very hard to stop playing. The game continuously loads in new sections of the level, similar to Half-Life, except here the loading times are one second long (you'll mistake them for a skip in the frame rate at first). There are only nine or 10 times throughout the entire game when you'll see a loading screen, and that's when a new level with a completely new environment is loading. Usually, this is after an important story sequence, so it doesn't even feel like a real break in the action. And after some of the firefights you'll experience, you'll appreciate a momentary breather.   The control in Halo is excellent. It earns the nicest compliment that you can give a console first-person shooter: You won't find yourself constantly wishing for a keyboard and mouse. The vehicle control can take awhile to get used to (especially for the Warthog jeep, which you essentially drive using the game camera), but once you get it down, you'll discover that the vehicle sections are among the best parts of the entire game.    It might sound like a bold claim, but Halo's single-player game is worth picking up an Xbox for alone. It's so good that you'll find yourself looking forward to playing the game over again before you even beat it the first time, and the excellent AI and variety of options for accomplishing your goals will ensure that you'll have unique experiences every time you do. Halo sets new standards for both console and PC first-person shooters, reshuffling the deck to make even recent games like Red Faction--once considered at least near the forefront of console first-person shooters--look dated by comparison.   Halo's a stunning-looking game, full of huge environments that are packed with eye candy. Turn on your flashlight in a hallway, and you'll see a plastic reflective sheen to the wall. Walk up close to a marine, and you'll notice that the visor on his helmet reflects light too. Throw a grenade outside, and the explosion will send up a cloud of dust. Turn your jeep sharply, and clumps of dirt go flying. The game isn't as hyperdetailed as Quake III Arena, but its immense levels, excellent textures, and great special effects put it in the same class.One of only a few possible complaints that can be lodged against Halo's graphics is that its frame rate is only 30 frames per second. Fans of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark won't even notice this (and people who sometimes get nauseous playing first-person shooters will in fact appreciate it), but those who've been playing games like Quake III Arena for the last few years will be constantly checking for a run button. That said, the game keeps a rock-solid frame rate in the single-player mode, even when there are numerous enemies onscreen, explosions happening everywhere, Banshees flying by, cannons firing at you, and so on (although there are some dips in frame rate during multiplayer matches).   Halo sounds even better than it looks. With its outstanding sound effects, solid voice acting, and exceptional soundtrack, the sound in the game contributes greatly toward improving an already extraordinary experience. Your marine allies and The Covenant grunt troops have more than a dozen different lines that they say in reaction to events. For instance, if you're crouched down sneaking around and a grunt spots you, he'll scream and run off or he might yell ""He's over here!"" or ""There he is!"" The marines can be heard shouting lines like ""How does it feel to be dead?!?"" at fallen foes, and some even have different accents, which helps make them distinct from one another. (""Hey! Mira! It's a Mark V!"") The game's soundtrack ranges from the ghostly opening vocal track to a pounding somehow-noncheesy guitar theme, and all points between (one of those points being a surprisingly appropriate lounge theme that plays when you come into a room where Covenant grunts are sleeping). You probably won't notice at first how good the sound effects in Halo are, because they've done such a good job of immersing you in its world. From the whoosh of an overheating plasma rifle to the soon familiar explosion of a plasma grenade, you're not busy admiring the sounds, you're just there.    The single-player experience in Halo is so strong that it's easy to regard the multiplayer side of the game as secondary, and to a large extent, it is. As in Rare's Perfect Dark, you can play through the entire game in split-screen cooperative mode with a friend. If one player dies, he or she will respawn quickly once the other player either backs away from combat or finishes the fight. Working in tandem with another player is great fun and makes all the game's surprises seem new again. It's an excellent way to play through the game a second or third time.   Halo's other multiplayer modes aren't quite as strong as the rest of the game, due to the omission of computer-controlled foes or allies (known as ""bots"" in most first-person shooters and ""simulants"" in Perfect Dark). You can play with up to four people at one time using a split screen, or you can link up to four systems and TVs--using either link cables or a LAN connection--to play with up to 16 people at one time. It has to be said that playing the game over multiple Xboxes with more than six people is fantastic, especially rounds of capture the flag with the addition of either Warthog jeeps or Scorpion tanks. But the cost and setup required to play Halo in this way simply make it impractical for most game players. Unfortunately, most of the game's multiplayer levels are very large and seem created around having more than four people playing, and so do its game modes (capture the flag isn't the same with only four people). Only a few levels are made for groups of four. In most, you'll spend more time looking for someone to shoot than you will engaging in combat. And if you play with fewer than four, you're essentially just playing tag. If the game had included computer-controlled foes or allies, the two- to four-player experience would be much more akin to the great time you can have with five to 16 people.    Still, it's hard to say enough good things about the game. It's one of the few first-person shooters that manages to transcend its genre, meaning that it's not only an excellent first-person shooter, but it's an excellent game, period. Fans of Half-Life, GoldenEye 007, the Marathon series, and any other major single-player first-person shooter will be impressed by Halo, as should anyone else. Not only is this easily the best of the Xbox launch games, but it's easily one of the best shooters ever, on any platform.


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22,Metroid Prime ,9.7," It's not just one of the single most atmospheric games ever created, but it's also quite simply one of the best.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/1/1/2216611-box_metroidp.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metroid-prime-review/1900-2897768/,pos,"
Let's get right to the point: Metroid Prime is the best GameCube game to date. It's one of the best games on any platform this year, and, for good measure, it's also the best game yet in Nintendo's highly acclaimed Metroid series. Many were rightfully skeptical about whether an unknown Texas-based developer could take the classic open-ended, side-scrolling action adventure gameplay formula of the Metroid series and successfully translate it into 3D. And these are the people who will no doubt come away most impressed of all with Metroid Prime, which is in every respect a pure and true successor to the series of games that inspired it. At the same time, those who have never played a Metroid game before are likely to be just as taken with Metroid Prime. This first-person action adventure game is filled with so much detail, style, and originality that literally every gamer should play it.  Samus Aran is back in the biggest, best Metroid game yet.  It's not a first-person shooter. Metroid Prime doesn't play like any other game that's come before it, and it emphasizes exploration and investigation at least as much as pure action. So the pacing is deliberate at times, though the going is never slow. As in all other Metroid games, you'll assume the role of interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran, whose objective this time out is to search the planet Tallon IV for signs of illicit activity on the part of the Zebesian space pirates and put a stop to them once and for all. Clad in her distinctive red-and-gold power suit, Samus is a self-sufficient and versatile, and controlling her is quite a bit different from what you may be used to in first-person games.   Don't expect some sweeping space opera of a story. This game draws you in not with storytelling but with a vast, seamless 3D world that sprawls out in front of you in all directions, just waiting for you to discover all its many secrets. These secrets are justified: Samus' unique body armor was crafted by a mysteriously vanished race of birdlike scientist-philosophers who colonized Tallon IV and hid away its greatest treasures for their own kind. All this is suggestive of one of the most impressive accomplishments of Metroid Prime: It never breaks you out of the experience of the game. The far-flung futuristic technology and the imaginative alien world come across as surprisingly believable.   While Metroid Prime isn't plot-driven, it provides you with lots and lots of context. One of the game's key mechanics is Samus' ability to switch between a number of different ""visors,"" which are essentially different types of heads-up displays. Her default view, the combat visor, provides a clear, straightforward picture of her surroundings and features a helpful radar display for tracking enemy movement. In this mode, Samus can easily target and accurately fire upon any enemies in the vicinity. Meanwhile, the other visor she starts out with requires her to lower her weapons, but it allows her to analyze various objects of interest, from Tallon IV's numerous alien creatures to environmental anomalies to alien technologies. You scan objects the same way you'd normally target them: by pressing and holding the controller's left shoulder button, which commences a quick scan that then reveals key information using concisely written text. Objects that can be scanned are denoted with colored icons visible only in scanning mode, and truly important objects are clearly highlighted, effectively giving you the option to bypass all the other unknown items of lesser import.   While the notion of reading pseudo-scientific text while playing Metroid Prime may not sound very appealing, it actually works pretty well as a sort of storytelling device. When you eventually raid the space pirates' stronghold, you'll feel a chill as you read about their various genetic experiments and look over their reports on the damage you've caused. Also, scanning enemies generally clues you in on whatever weaknesses they may have, though it's a bit odd that the action pauses for your reading convenience. Every new creature species or other important piece of information you scan is stored in a logbook, and you'll likely enjoy reviewing this material every now and then, since it's all written using such a cohesive style.  Retro Studios has done the impossible: This truly is Metroid in 3D.  In addition to her combat visor and scan visor, Samus will eventually find a thermal visor used for detecting heat signatures of living creatures or energy sources and an X-ray visor used for detecting illusions or incorporeal objects. You can easily switch between the four visors by pressing different directions on the D pad, and you can likewise switch between your four different primary weapon modes (assuming you've found them all) by pressing in different directions using the controller's right analog stick. The classic Metroid weapons are all here. Samus' default semiautomatic power beam rapidly fires bursts of superheated energy. Her wave beam's electrical charge is especially good at disrupting energy-based opponents or triggering long-dormant energy sources. Her ice beam can freeze foes in their tracks, making them brittle enough that they can be shattered. And her plasma beam shoots intensely hot lavalike rays that can disintegrate victims on the receiving end. Samus gains the ability to charge up an especially powerful blast from each of these weapons, and she can also fire a limited number of ballistic missiles that can be combined with any of the main weapons for a number of extremely damaging special attacks. Unlike in previous Metroid games, none of Samus' weapons are ever replaced--her arsenal only grows in size, and all her available armaments remain tactically useful throughout the game. The rest of Metroid Prime's controls do an excellent job of capturing the classic feel of the Metroid games in full 3D and, in their own right, of simulating what it might be like to be in Samus' armor-plated boots. The left analog stick is normally used to move forward and backward and turn left and right. Strafing from side to side is accomplished by holding the left trigger in while moving the analog stick in the desired direction, while looking up or down is handled by holding the right trigger in while moving in the desired direction. This may seem a bit awkward at first, but it's intentionally so. You'll actually see Samus clasp her free hand on her blaster when she aims up or down, and she has some difficulty craning her neck all the way forward or back, as well she should in that hefty suit of hers.  It may look like a typical first-person shooter, but it isn't. Metroid Prime is fresh and innovative.  That's not to say Samus is sluggish or ungainly. In fact, she has all the grace, poise, and skills that made 1994's Super Metroid such a great game to play. While targeting a foe, she can perform quick lateral evasive leaps to stay out of harm's way, and her own aim is almost flawless. The typical first-person shooter challenge of manually targeting enemies really isn't a consideration in Metroid Prime, as Samus' integrated targeting systems aim for you at the touch of a button. For this reason, even from the get-go, you'll distinctly get the impression that Samus is very powerful, and that few enemies could stand toe-to-toe with her. This makes sense, as she didn't become an interstellar bounty hunter for nothing. But fear not, because Samus will assuredly have to contend with some extremely strong adversaries, many of which require some vastly different tactics to defeat. Some of Metroid Prime's enemies are throwbacks to previous games in the series. Notably, you'll get to square off against the jellyfish-like metroids, which will latch onto you and drain your energy if you aren't careful. The space pirates also make for some fine adversaries, as these hulking, mantislike creatures come in a number of dangerous varieties and can be quite clever in a fight. You'll also engage in some memorable, protracted battles against a number of big, tough boss monsters--another signature element of the series.   Just as Metroid Prime focuses equally on action and exploration, so does its challenge equally stem from dangerous enemies and environmental obstacles. For one thing, Samus will need to do a lot of jumping to get where she needs to go. Jumping mechanics are notoriously bad in almost every single first-person game, but Metroid Prime miraculously bucks this trend. It's difficult to explain precisely why the jumping in Metroid Prime feels so right. Part of it is that Samus' perspective automatically tilts slightly with the trajectory of her leap, a logical touch that frees you from ever having to adjust your perspective in midair. Another part of it is that Samus naturally jumps high and far, especially once she upgrades her jumping ability, so that suddenly she's able to make leaps that are huge and dramatic but still controlled. Yet another part of it is Metroid Prime's level design, which is so exceptional that calling it ""level design"" seems almost derogatory.   In fact, the game has no levels. It's all one vast, continuous world that somehow manages to blend numerous, starkly different environments, from lush tropics to dusty caverns to frigid fields of ice to hellish lakes of fire. Metroid Prime has no loading times whatsoever, not when you first turn on your GameCube, and not when you run through miles of Tallon IV's incredibly detailed vistas. Using a classic convention of the Metroid series--areas of Tallon IV are walled off by iris-shaped doors that must be shot open using your beam weapons--the game manages to quietly, invisibly stream new content in the background as you move along. This is similar to a technical feat first seen in Crystal Dynamics' imaginative Soul Reaver games, only Metroid Prime's environments are even more detailed and the background loading is even more transparent than in those games.    The benefits to there being no loading times in the game cannot be overstated. One way to put it is, after playing Metroid Prime, you may find that most level-based games seem somehow primitive to you. At any rate, the sheer size, the remarkable detail, and the continuous nature of Metroid Prime's setting are huge parts of what makes the game so fantastic. You'll see tremendous variety in the scenery, from tight, claustrophobic corridors to flooded passageways to vast, elaborate temples, and it all looks natural and lifelike and yet isn't confusing or bewildering. When you can jump to reach a certain area, you'll know. When something is out of your reach, you'll know why. How the designers were able to make environments that have a natural feel and yet are easy to explore without seeming contrived is an utter mystery. One thing's for certain: The designers at Retro Studios are extremely talented.  The detail and variety in the game's environments is amazing.  Metroid Prime has as much variety in its gameplay as it does in its environments. Metroid fans will be thrilled to find that the mechanics of Samus' morph ball ability are more enjoyable here than in any previous game in the series. At the same time, those unfamiliar with Metroid will be really surprised when they first see Samus roll up into a perfect sphere that can hurtle about like a living bowling ball. Samus can switch to morph ball mode at any time, causing the game to casually switch to a third-person point of view, in which Samus can move about very quickly or creep her way into otherwise inaccessible areas. She'll learn to drop energy bombs in morph ball mode, and fans of the classic games will be overjoyed to find that she can still use those bombs to propel herself in different directions, or even to juggle herself high into the air by detonating bombs with proper timing. Later, she'll even gain the ability to ride along magnetic rails up walls, onto ceilings, and all around. Like some space-age skateboarder, she'll even be able to use her momentum to roll higher and higher up what are honest-to-goodness half-pipes. Samus' ability to roll up into a ball has always been one of the strangest, most distinctive parts of the Metroid series, and in Metroid Prime, the morph ball makes for some of the game's most amusing and most surprising moments.Considering the vastness of Tallon IV, finding your way around is surprisingly manageable. By pressing the Z button at any point during play, you can call up a 3D map of the area that, at first, looks terrifying, with winding passageways veering off in every direction. Yet you'll find that this 3D map is in fact very effective, clearly displaying your position in the area, all possible (unhidden) exits to other areas, and key points of interest that you've either discovered or whose location you've downloaded. The game's plot, such as it is, moves along as you receive sporadic updates that encourage you to head off to previously unexplored regions. So the early going is actually fairly linear, though you always have the option to put off your next objective and see what you can find off the beaten path. But you might as well wait until later on in the game when you're well equipped with all of Samus' various powers, which let her explore quickly and efficiently. The gameplay really opens up toward the end, as once you've essentially gotten all of Samus' powers, you'll then have to use them to explore places you've already been to, only with the intent of uncovering things that you didn't even know were there the first time through. It would have been nice if the map allowed you to plot waypoints, but it still greatly facilitates your exploring.  Metroid fans will be happy to find that almost all the series' conventions are intact.  Ironically, the criticisms that can be leveled against Metroid Prime are associated with certain conventions that are integral to the Metroid series and must have been deliberately put into this game to keep things faithful. For instance, the notion of having to backtrack through previously explored areas has grown unpopular with gamers over the years, and yet backtracking is certainly required in Metroid Prime. But this is a good kind of backtracking--you'll reenter the same areas from different directions and equipped with vastly different abilities, and you'll enjoy blasting to smithereens those same enemies that caused you a lot more trouble your first time through. That's another thing, actually: Just like in past Metroid games, enemies in Metroid Prime respawn soon after you leave an area. It's not necessarily realistic that your foes will keep reappearing, but it does keep things lively. Additionally, all the jumping, even though it's done so well, will be a sticking point for some, mostly for those who approach Metroid Prime as a shooter and not as an action adventure. These players should at least appreciate that Samus never sustains damage from falling (another Metroid convention) and that there are no do-or-die jumps in the game. If you fall, you can try again. The lack of any real narrative might also disappoint some players, and finally, someone, somewhere will complain that Metroid Prime has no multiplayer features. But we'll leave that for someone, somewhere to complain about, since it's hardly relevant.   Metroid Prime grows on you as you play. For instance, at first you might not see what's so remarkably impressive about its visuals, since Metroid Prime at first looks like any old sci-fi-themed shooter. But then you'll start to see more and more amazing little details. You'll see water streak down Samus' visor when she emerges from a lake. You'll see light seem to bend into the intense radiation of the supercharged energy blasts from her beam weapon. You'll see Samus' own face reflected in her visor when there's a bright flash of light nearby. And you'll even see the skeletal frame of Samus' hand toggling switches within her blaster when you change primary firing modes while using the X-ray visor. These are subtle points that you'll deeply appreciate rather than overlook. You'll also continue to wonder at how the game manages to produce such vivid landscapes without stopping to load them. Crisp, clean textures and complex geometry can be seen throughout, and while not all the graphics are jaw-dropping, all the little things add up to give the game an unparalleled visual presentation. For good measure, Metroid Prime supports progressive-scan displays.    It also supports Dolby Pro Logic II setups for some great surround sound. Though the visuals are spectacular and really pull you into the experience, the game's audio also makes a significant contribution to Metroid Prime's atmosphere. There's no speech whatsoever, but a large variety of sound effects accompany all the various weapons, creatures, and environments that you'll see. Some of the creatures sound really menacing, and the weapons shriek with the sort of intensity you'd hope for. But the environmental audio is probably what's best. The game is loaded with hidden items that boost Samus' missile capacity, energy capacity, and more, and you'll learn to listen for the distinct low whirring that signifies the proximity of these objects. To actually find these items, you'll often have to switch visors, but the thermal and X-ray visors make their own noises that all but drown out the ambient sound of the power-up. At any rate, sound is a critical part of the game. Metroid Prime's musical score is also by and large very successful. Though the tracks are heavily synthesized and sound as though they could have come from 1994's Super Metroid, they help evoke suspense, intensity, calm, or panic mostly at all the right moments. Metroid fans will also really appreciate that a majority of the game's music actually consists of remixed tracks from previous installments in the series.  You don't need to be a Metroid fan to see that this is one incredible game.  Metroid Prime is a lengthy game that should take approximately 20 hours to finish the first time through, though you could easily spend a lot more time in the game trying to find everything that's hidden away. Successfully completing Samus' mission unlocks a harder difficulty mode in which enemies are considerably tougher, and chances are you'll want to give this tougher setting a shot. Furthermore, those who own a Game Boy Advance, a GameCube-to-GBA link capable, and a copy of Metroid Fusion (an original GBA Metroid game released simultaneously with Metroid Prime) can unlock a couple of other nice features. One is a real treat: a straight port of the original 1987 Metroid game, which actually holds up pretty well. Another is purely cosmetic, allowing you play through Metroid Prime in Samus' funky yellow-and-fuchsia suit from Metroid Fusion. But you shouldn't need these extras to compel you to play Metroid Prime. It's not just one of the single most atmospheric games ever created, but it's also quite simply one of the best. 


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23,NBA 2K2 ,9.7," The improvements in the game, although subtle on the surface, are substantial for serious fans of the NBA.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/5/2/2209052-box_nba2k2.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-2k2-review/1900-2820299/,pos,"
Those still not familiar with Sega's NBA 2K series--take notice. Last year's NBA 2K1 was easily one of the best basketball games on the market. This year's version--which comes complete with revamped animation, new zone defenses, and improved AI--garnishes that winning formula to create the most true-to-life simulation of the National Basketball League to date. Sure, NBA 2K2 has the upgraded teams and rosters, including ""His Airness"" Michael Jordan, all the rookies, and new free-agent signees, but it is also a more polished and realistic product than last year's game. Primarily due to the smoother, more detailed animation in the game, the gameplay in NBA 2K2 feels more fluid and effortless. Transition between sequences, such as rebounds and outlet passes and dribble moves and dunks, blend together to give the game a continuous flow. Complementing this, the players in NBA 2K2 respond slightly quicker to button commands, which generally leads to faster gameplay overall.  In the post, Visual Concepts has found a happy medium between the unstoppable spin to the basket from NBA 2K and the complete lack of a post spin from last year's game. NBA 2K2 features a realistic drop-step move, which lets you drop the offensive post player's lead leg in the lane or toward the baseline side so that you can make a move to the basket. If you're able to catch the defender leaning the wrong way, you're left open to complete the move. However, the defensive player can stop the post spin by anticipating the direction of the drop step and beating his man to the spot. The jumper animation is also now more complex and actually has an effect on the gameplay, as it is doubly important to release the ball at the top of the jumper. These are subtle details for sure, but it is this type of attention to detail that permeates throughout NBA 2K2. The game's AI has also improved in general. In last year's game, the computer-controlled players were a bit laid-back on offense, as they would run the clock down before putting up shots, effectively slowing the pace of the game. Although there is still quite a bit of room for improvement, this year's AI players are more adept in that area. They are more aggressive and are able to take greater advantage of defensive mistakes, particularly against the game's new zone formations. Still, the AI players hardly exploit mismatches on the floor. This is one of the major strategies used in basketball, and one that continues to go ignored in hoops simulations. NBA 2K2 retains the primary modes of play from last year's game. The exhibition, practice, tournament, and franchise mode return virtually unchanged. The network and street modes feature marginal enhancements. Visual Concepts has included new outdoor courts in the street mode, while options like the ability to track wins and losses are available in the network mode. With all these gameplay modes, particularly the robust franchise mode, NBA 2K2 has plenty of replay value, as players are able to virtually replicate actual league matchups at will or take to the street courts with both current and legendary NBA players. Although there have been quite a few notable enhancements in the gameplay department, the same cannot be said for the game's graphics. NBA 2K2 looks almost identical to last year's game, which isn't such a bad thing. It means that the game features smooth player models, detailed courts, and the most true-to-life player faces seen to date in basketball games. Also included are the pregame player introductions and a variety of cutscenes during free throws and after big plays. In terms of the audio, the announcing team returns for NBA 2K2, with a handful of new phrases in tow. The commentary is usually spot-on, and the tongue-in-cheek banter of the two announcers, although a bit cheesy, is usually quite bearable. The sound effects return unchanged. Players will talk trash on the floor and coaches will bark out orders, just as in last year's game. Ask fans of sports video games, and most will generally agree that basketball is the toughest sport to simulate. The evidence is in the myriad of NBA and college hoops games that have been released throughout the years--there have been quite a few poor efforts. However, of any hoops game to date, NBA 2K2 comes the closest to simulating the actual strategy, player tendencies, and general look and feel of the NBA game. The improvements in the game, although subtle on the surface, are substantial for serious fans of the NBA.
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24,Only If ,2," Its conclusion may be putrid, but Only If's primary redeeming feature is that it does eventually end.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2617274-steamworkshop_collection_227312118_collection_branding.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/only-if-review/1900-6415830/,neg,"
The first time Only If induced rage was when I returned to its single major choice--a point at which you must choose one chess piece over another. No matter which piece I chose, the game surged forward in the same manner, leaving me to wonder if it were passing judgment on the illusion of player agency in video games. Given the way the dialogue often focuses on the player character's lack of control, it was easy to presume that the Italian-American caricature that guides you through the game was playing a role similar to the narrator in The Stanley Parable, pointing out the limitations of the medium through humor and self-aware gameplay. As it happens, I was giving Only If too much credit: the game had simply broken, and returning to the title menu was not a proper fix. Only after closing the game and restarting it did it function properly, shattering not the illusion of player control, but the assumption that I was playing a working product.The second time Only If induced rage was when the player character called the apparent mafioso taunting him a ""pedophilic faggot,"" a homophobic outburst that may have worked had the character using the phrase been a full-fledged human being rather than a randy adolescent with no empathetic characteristics. Only If had already toyed with homophobia with a bit of throwaway dialogue about ""giving the kid the D,"" but that conversation lingered because of how it informed the plot, not because of its blatant offensiveness. The sputtered ""faggot"" accusation came later, after I had come to suspect that the game was not in fact a clever mystery but instead a perverted display of bro-dude self-expression. My suspicion was confirmed when Only If concluded with a story ""twist"" that M. Night Shyamalan might have concocted if he were a drug-addled, sexually frustrated high school senior.Welcome to the parlor. Pay no attention to the jittery mouselook.Only If's ending marked the third time the game induced rage, and it was a rage that dogged me as I played the game a second and then a third time, hoping to find signs of a message with greater meaning than the disgusting finale let on, but if such a message exists, it is either too subtle to notice or too unnecessary to care about. Perhaps Only If means to parody games like Proteus or Gone Home, experiences that use simple forms of player interaction to reveal greater truths and subvert expectations, but I don't believe this game has such noble ambitions.If my thought process is all over the place, it's because Only If itself brings with it no apparent logic, jumping between gameplay styles faster than Mario leaps between platforms. Games have successfully played with player perception of genre and game logic, of course--Thirty Flights of Loving is one great example of this kind of thematic skewing--but Only If's gameplay is frequently busted and typically uncomfortable. It all begins after you've awakened after an apparent night of intoxicated debauchery and sexual romping, with an angry voice taunting you via old-fashioned radio.In this level, references to ""crack"" and ""pot"" are what pass for clever dialogue. Soon after, the voice leads you to an opulent room in which a chessboard rests on a table and landscapes adorn the walls. Only If then presents a choice that's meant to be uncomfortable, but most discomfort comes from the game's own screen tearing and jittery behavior in these early minutes. At this stage, you might suppose Only If is a puzzle game, but if it is, it's a terrible one, providing the exact steps to the task at hand both here and elsewhere, and never allowing your imagination to blossom. In any case, the choice leads to one of the game's two branches, one of which leads back to this same parlor and forces you to make the other decision anyway. So much for facing the consequences of your own selfishness, which the foul-mouthed narrator intimates is the purpose of the 45 minutes of gameplay that follow.Those 45 minutes are indeed a punishment, but for you the player, as opposed to the manchild you control from a first-person view. A few vignettes are sewn together, each providing an arbitrary rule for you to follow, such as running toward an orb before the walls of the surrounding limbo close on you, determining whether the button prompts wish you to press the assigned key or quickly mash it, or navigating a marsh without colliding with a patch of floating darkness or inadvertently wandering out of the level. This is trial and error gone wrong, with Only If chastising you not for failing to overcome an obvious challenge, but rather for not being able to read the creator's mind. After these random scenes of weirdness, you must escape a house where more capricious rules govern your direction, and where puzzles are so tedious that even the main character himself complains about them.Hopelessness. Despair. Unclear rules. In spite of the clumsy gameplay and abysmal storytelling, a few ideas glimmer just brightly enough to grab your attention. On specific occasions you hear the voices of armed pursuers and see the beams of their flashlights, and while these unseen stalkers can catch you, you never see their bodies or faces. Such moments provide a twinge of intensity, forcing you to run away or find the prescribed hiding place so that you can catch your breath. The other story branch brings with it a new set of environments and metaphysical exploration, and there, too, you notice beacons of hope: puzzles in which you type out commands on your keyboard, attractive pastoral music that matches the beauty of the vibrant flowers and blooming trees that surround you, and enough enigmatic visual and audio cues to make you wonder about the nature of this world and your place within it.Any goodwill Only If earns only fuels further disappointment, however, dwindling away during a tragic platforming sequence that highlights the game's unresponsive controls and incessant glitches. Eventually, the bite-size levels lose any sense of continuity, with every new pseudo-clever mechanic seemingly pulled from an ever-rotating bingo ball cage, and each sequence glitched or bugged in some manner or another. The insulting finale may be devoid of creative worth, but it at least signals the end of an experiment that was best left unperformed.What does it all mean? Nothing. Well, it's the straight-up answer to a puzzle. But nothing beyond that.Given the appropriation of elements associated with narrative-driven exploration games like The Stanley Parable, you'd suppose that Only If were trying to communicate something meaningful. After all, buggy behavior and clunky locomotion make it a mechanical failure, leaving the story and themes to make good where gameplay could not. Alas, irredeemable characters and loathsome dialogue aren't appropriate pillars upon which to erect a substantial tale. The collapse was inevitable; Only If's wretched ending only ensures that the construct's remnants are reduced to unrecognizable rubble.
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25,Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma Volume One ,2, Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma is an irredeemable mess.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2882756-afrosamurai2.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/afro-samurai-2-revenge-of-kuma-volume-one-review/1900-6416258/,neg,"
The first volume of Afro Samurai 2 has so many problems that aren't just glaring, but offensive, be it to your eyes, ears, or moral sensibilities, that no one will finish this slog without something to complain about. Revenge of Kuma is the first game in the episodic follow-up to 2009's well-received Afro Samurai. Like its predecessor, it portrays a society that embodies an unusual mix of samurai and hip-hop cultures. The soundtrack's strong beats and confident rhymes set the mood as you clash swords over the course of your journey, but any goodwill earned by Revenge of Kuma's tone is rapidly discounted when you try to engage with it on any other level.The game introduces neophytes to Jinno, an orphan-turned-martial-artist who failed to take his own life in the first Afro Samurai game. He's been rebuilt as the bionic warrior, Kuma, who dons the head of a stuffed bear. Goofy headgear aside, Kuma has potential on a conceptual level: more machine than man, he is insusceptible to the dark temptations that surround him. This potential is never realized.Revenge of Kuma is anything but subtle.Your interest in Kuma's character is lost the moment Afro Samurai 2 attempts to explore the depths of his past. As you traverse Kuma's old stomping grounds, you're meant to confront the phantoms of those he's lost. It's an emotionally ripe setup, but when your mission objective is so literal--""Confront the reality that everyone you love is dead, and their memories are all you have""--there's nothing to glean from walking in Kuma's shoes. You walk up to characters frozen in time while shrill screams fill the air, one after another. Revenge of Kuma doesn't go to the trouble of working for your sympathy; it naively demands it.The script at large is drowned in impish indulgences, including references to modern-day celebrities--musician Drake and former boxer Mike Tyson come up in conversation--and needless, rampant swearing. I have no problem with such language in principle, but like Moira Burton in Resident Evil: Revelations 2, Afro Samurai 2's script is soured by this forced edginess.Afro Samurai 2 needlessly objectifies women for the sake of nothing but titillation and attitude. The reverb from this particular blare of ignorance is deafening.One scene in particular stands out as egregiously offensive and juvenile. Upon entering a bar filled with women in g-strings (and nothing else), you're confronted by slow zooms and pans on a stripper in the center of the room. An equally-naked DJ calls for your head, but not before the camera shifts to a close-up of her exposed, undulating body. This scene is justified by the plot as a place where men gather, but that premise--because the setting could have been a number of other less salacious locations--is a farce. There's no explicit need to showcase nipples for minutes on end for the story to accomplish its goal. To add insult to injury, upon meeting your mark after your battle with the DJ, he repeatedly refers to her as ""that dead bitch."" Afro Samurai 2 needlessly objectifies women for the sake of nothing but titillation and attitude. The reverb from this particular blare of ignorance is deafening.No, I'm not referring to the soundtrack, which is the only thing resembling ""good"" in the game. Elsewhere, Afro Samurai 2's audio can be literally painful. There are countless moments when one character or sound effect becomes many times louder than anyone or anything else, leading to extreme discomfort. While I may not have picked up on the nuanced lyrics as I engaged in combat, the soundtrack got under my skin, instilling bravado in ways the game otherwise fails to do, fleeting as it is.I don't feel so good.I wish I could say that its combat mechanics shine through as an exception to Afro Samurai 2's myriad problems, but they're as sloppy and incoherent as the rest of the game. You primarily use one button to create simple combos and another to block incoming attacks. When an enemy comes in for an attack, a button prompt appears over their head. In theory, you would have the full duration of the prompt to deflect an incoming attack, but there's instead a vague window of success within the life of a prompt. You stand a better chance of winning if you simply remain on the offensive, though the wild, needlessly acrobatic animations often take you halfway across the screen.You eventually learn special attacks that are tied to three different fighting styles, but it's a hollow system--with zero added benefit--that unnecessarily complicates things. As you engage with your enemies, you randomly earn skill points. In one fight with a few common enemies, I earned eight, and I had no idea why. The arbitrary dispersal is magnified by the fact that you only need 28 points to unlock everything under Kuma's three skill trees, though you can't unlock the final abilities in each tree because they're locked until the next episode. Just as confusing is the structure of skill trees themselves. Reaching a point on a skill path doesn't mean you can unlock the next buff or ability--the game wants you to jump to another branch of the tree first in some cases, negating the reason for the tree-like structure in the first place.Every moment brings new problems to light, and it doesn't take long before you want to put the controller down and walk away.You probably get by now that Revenge of Kuma isn't worth your time, and I haven't even mentioned the confusing world map, the abrupt transitions between cutscenes and gameplay, the horrible frame rate, the dumbed-down boss fights, and the litany of technical glitches I encountered, including getting stuck in geometry or having to restart the game because it crashed altogether. Every moment brings new problems to light, and it doesn't take long before you want to put the controller down and walk away. Revenge of Kuma makes for a better album than a game, but I wouldn't recommend buying it for that reason either, since you're required to suffer the game to listen to music that's trapped within.In the words of Revenge of Kuma: Confront the reality that everything you loved about the first Afro Samurai game is dead, and your memories are all you have.
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26,Underworld Ascendant : Going Under,2," Underworld Ascendant misses the mark with almost every shot. Even when freed from the expectations its historical baggage brings, it is a clear failure.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/8/6/5/450289-586865.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/underworld-ascendant-review-going-under/1900-6417042/,neg,"
Ultima Underworld was a game ahead of its time. A first-person action-RPG released in 1992, it foreshadowed the kind of creative problem-solving sandbox that would later be popularized through Deus Ex, Bioshock, and Dishonored. The legacy of Ultima Underworld is a design approach that prioritizes player-authored experiences. It was, essentially, the immersive sim that first asked the questions: Do you want to fight your way in? Sneak your way in? Or set off a chain reaction of chaotic, physically simulated interactions and emergent gameplay your way in?Crowdfunded via Kickstarter and then signed by publisher 505 Games, Underworld Ascendant was first pitched as a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld developed by a veteran team featuring several people who worked on the original, most notably its lead designer Paul Neurath.Unfortunately, far from a tribute to an influential classic, the result is both a crushing disappointment for Underworld fans and a genuinely bad game in its own right. Ascendant is riven with technical glitches. Every player-empowering feature is undone by a series of bafflingly ill-conceived design choices. And wherever you go your progress is constantly chafed by an all-pervading lack of refinement.The story, for what it's worth, tells an oblique tale of warring gods and carries only tenuous links to the original Underworld games. You play as a familiar chosen one burdened with the sole responsibility of saving the world from imminent catastrophe. The game's primary antagonist bellows his ghostly threats at the beginning of each new area as another hour ticks by on the doomsday clock, but it's all bluster. Nothing about the world feels imperiled until the game over screen descends and you're left feeling bemused rather than defeated.One of Ultima Underworld's great strengths was its sense of place. The Stygian Abyss of its subtitle was a multi-level, interconnected dungeon populated by diverse, warring tribes who observed what felt like distinct cultural practices. Ascendant's version of this is composed of seven discrete levels whose haphazard design (here's a swamp, inside a fort, inside a volcano) obliterates any suggestion of internal consistency and a huge but empty hub area that is so tiresome to traverse it becomes genuinely frustrating to return to between missions.Again unlike the original game, which let you wander freely throughout the dungeon and pick up quests from its inhabitants, Ascendant takes a more modern and compartmentalized approach. There's a job board in the hub from which you select one of four missions before you step through a portal to the relevant location. Critical path missions require you to find the abyssal key lost in each of the seven worlds, but other missions--each set by one of three factions with whom you can gain favor--may have you kill a particular enemy or collect a number of a specific item. You can only accept one mission at a time, however, so there's a lot of trekking back and forth between hub and dungeon level. And, oddly, any mission that asks you to collect items will ignore any of said items already in your possession and force you to collect fresh ones instead.None of the missions are complex and all ultimately boil down to entering the dungeon, fighting or sneaking your way to a certain spot, picking up or killing what you need, and legging it back to the nearest portal to warp to the hub. There are no NPCs to talk to, no conversations to have, no story choices to make, nothing but a bunch of what feel like procedurally-generated fetch quests delivered over and over again. If you recall the random quests given to you by the various Jarls throughout Skyrim, that's pretty much the entire game here--except repeated over seven static dungeon levels instead of spread across a whole seamless continent.The closest Ascendant comes to honoring Underworld's legacy is in how it affords players the ability to customize their playing style. During character creation, there is no choice of class as such, but once you begin earning ""memora"" you can purchase skills on a tree with three clusters of branches representing the typical Fighter, Mage, and Thief archetypes. Of course, you're free to mix and match these skills to tailor your character's strengths. Maybe you're an axe-wielding fighter who has also mastered healing magic? Or perhaps you'd rather dash from shadow to shadow and avoid enemies altogether?In a nice touch, spells aren't simply a replacement for weapons, but are better suited to the more cerebral player who wants to use the environment to their advantage. One spell lets you create a ball of fire, for example, but it's not a typical fireball that you hurl at an enemy; it's instead used to set other things on fire to, say, collapse the walkway that enemy was standing on, or more mundanely, burn down a fence that was blocking your way. The skill tree is flexible and allows you to craft a character that reflects the way you want to play, and leaves plenty of room to experiment with alternative play styles should you ever want to roll a new character.The chances of doing that are slim, sadly. Underworld Ascendant isn't just a bare-bones action-RPG, it's also full of bugs and glitches and carries a really weird save system. I've encountered glitches that I'd classify as trivial: frequent gaping, untextured holes in the world geometry; lines of dialogue repeating on loop until you leave the area; getting stuck momentarily on a staircase; struggling to get out of a knee-deep pool of water because the current is absurdly strong; standing too close to a chest when opening it and having the physics fling you across the room. These issues, and many more, I can cope with. They're irritating, sure, but they're not game-breaking.But the bugs become game-breaking when, for example, your character gets trapped between two bits of geometry and the only way out is to reload. Or when you can no longer use your bow even though you still have loads of arrows equipped. Or when you can actually use your bow and see the arrow shoot across the world but it seemingly passes right through the enemy without doing any damage. Or when an enemy spots you and simply runs into a corner and keeps trying to run through a wall while you attack it from behind until it dies. Or when you pull a lever and a rolling spike trap vanishes from the world but is still actually there and kills you. Or when an enemy gets caught in a cycle of jumping in the air and throwing a smoke bomb at its feet. These issues, and many more, are ones I can't cope with.But perhaps most crucially of all, I can't cope with the save system. To begin with, you cannot save wherever you like. You can save whenever you like, but loading this save will see you restart from the beginning of the level with your inventory intact but any changes to the level reset. You can, however, plant a tree sapling at certain points throughout a level to act as a respawn point if you die, similar to the Vita-Chambers in Bioshock. This would be okay if Underworld Ascendant was a run-based game where you're primarily interested in how far you can get and what loot drops. But it's not. It's a mission-based game where you're exploring a level for upwards of an hour each time, trying to complete a specific objective. You're already revisiting the same level over and over again by virtue of having to return to the hub to cash in a mission and pick up the next. Having to restart a level from the beginning each time you load a save is just adding insult to injury.For many players, especially the time-poor, the save system alone will be enough to render Underworld Ascendant unplayable. But even if it were addressed, and a more conventional system patched in, it would be impossible to recommend this game to anyone. Framed as a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld, Underworld Ascendant misses the mark with almost every shot, much like my aforementioned hapless archer. At the same time, even freed from the expectations its historical baggage brings, it is a clear failure. The spirit of Ultima Underworld lives on elsewhere.       
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27,The Quiet Man  - Silence Is Not Golden,2," The Quiet Man is an almost completely silent beat-em-up that combines badly staged live-action drama with a clunky, broken combat system.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/9/2/4/483383-675924.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-quiet-man-review-silence-is-not-golden/1900-6417030/,neg,"
The interactive movie--that nebulous, hard-to-define genre briefly fashionable in the mid-1990s, when CD-ROM technology made it possible for developers to integrate live-action footage into games--is not exactly remembered for its high quality. But even in the tradition responsible for such notorious follies as Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and Who Shot Johnny Rock, The Quiet Man is astonishingly dire--a graceless, outdated game that belongs squarely in the era of laserdiscs and the Philips CD-i. When it isn't an interactive movie, it's a simple 3D beat-em-up of the kind once ubiquitous at arcades. But an interest in the past does not make The Quiet Man a love letter to video game history, and its ideas are poorly realized.The Quiet Man boasts a formal conceit that is at least moderately interesting. You play as a svelte blonde 20-something named Dane, who is deaf, and as a consequence the game is almost totally silent. You hear only the muffled patter of footfalls while walking, some indistinct notes of synthesizer to represent voices, and a faint patina of generic ambience elsewhere. The marketing materials describe this as an effort to allow the player to ""experience the world in the way Dane does."" But we clearly do not experience the world as Dane does. Dane reads lips; he communicates extensively and effortlessly with every character he encounters. So why are these conversations not subtitled? In one lengthy scene of dialogue after another, people talk with Dane, presumably advancing the story. Meanwhile, we have no earthly clue what's being said or what's going on.This sort of inexplicable design is entirely typical of The Quiet Man. It’s difficult to understand so much of what transpires. Consider an early narrative sequence in which Dane meets either a colleague or a friend--the relationship was not apparent to me and only gets more confusing over the course of the story--and converses with him in his office. In a series of mundane closeups the other man speaks as Dane nods along, rapt; the nature of their discussion is opaque, and their performances, amateurish and hammy, are abysmal. You can imagine this scene being staged in such a way that the content would be clear even without sound or subtitles. The Quiet Man doesn't even try.When these mystifying, interminable full-motion-video scenes at last end, the actors are switched out for crudely animated substitutions, many of whom bear such a poor resemblance to their real-life counterparts that it is frequently unclear who's who. It's never hard to pick out Dane in the heat of battle, though, because he's the only one who's white. The endless procession of villainous henchmen you're asked to brutally dispatch are uniformly latino, broad caricatures of ""cholos"" in street-gang garb who sneer at you between pummelings. You fight them pretty much exclusively throughout. The political implications of the game's demographic makeup are appalling, in this fraught time of wall-building especially, and the end result is plainly, unforgivably racist.In any case, it's quite fitting for the enemies to be the same cliched type repeated ad nauseam, because repetitiveness is the very nature of The Quiet Man's beat-em-up combat system. Brawling has what might generously be described as an arcade-like simplicity: one button to punch, one to kick, and one to dodge, plus a finishing move that can be triggered on occasion. It would be more accurate to call this rudimentary. Almost every battle boils down to a dull frenzy of button-mashing, as enemies rarely block, scarcely fight back, and practically never come at you more than one at a time. Though waves of 10 or even 20 must be defeated to clear a given room, they don't change their approach or vary their style, and mostly seem to stand around awaiting their turn to be vanquished. There's no way to vary your own attacks, either, which gives every encounter the air of a chore.Boss battles aren't much different in terms of character or technique. They distinguish themselves instead in terms of overwhelming difficulty. I almost never lost a fight in the course of regular gameplay; each of the handful of boss battles, though, kept me stuck for a long time, as I labored through dust-ups with enemies that seemed absurdly overpowered and virtually invulnerable to damage. Worse than simply losing these battles was how consistently vague they proved to be. Seldom is it apparent why you might be losing a fight. The game doesn't track damage or show the enemy's health, and it's never certain whether your hits are landing or registering much effect--hitboxes are indistinct and attacks almost always clip through bodies, which makes the whole process feel at once feeble, confusing, and outrageously imprecise.Simplistic, ungainly combat is all the more surprising given that it is The Quiet Man's only gameplay mechanic. From beginning to end there is nothing else to do--no places to navigate, no items to collect, no weapons to wield, no puzzles to solve. It's just those same mind-numbing punches and kicks broken up by extended narrative scenes that by virtue of the enforced silence you can't hope to follow or understand. The broad contours of the plot are vaguely discernible: the drama involves childhood trauma, a seedy metropolitan underbelly, various acts of conspiracy and revenge. As for the details, it's impossible to say. The game's final moments tease an upcoming addition that will allow you to play it through a second time with the sound restored. This feels like both a preposterous cop-out--that's the main conceit!--and a cruel punishment. With sound the story will surely make more sense. But having suffered through The Quiet Man once, I can't bear to try it again.
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28,WWE 2K20 : Botchamania,2, WWE 2K20 is a calamitous new entry in the wrestling franchise.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/6/6/9/500607-722669.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwe-2k20-review-botchamania/1900-6417355/,neg,"
WWE 2K20 feels like a transitional entry in 2K's pro wrestling series. With longtime developer Yukes splitting from 2K in August this year, Visual Concepts took over sole development of the series after the two developers previously worked on the games together. The end result is a buggy mess of a game that takes several Big Show-sized steps backwards from its predecessor. It doesn't just lower the bar, it breaks it.The problems begin with the sheer abundance of bugs and glitches found in almost every match and menu screen in 2K20--it borders on the absurd. I've seen superstars teleport across the ring and float in midair. Oftentimes objects will violently vibrate on the spot or sink into the floor. Characters have a tendency to get trapped inside the ropes, whereby their bodies will stretch and contort in ways the human body isn't supposed to. Sometimes wrestlers are invisible in cutscenes or duplicated in matches. Other times they'll completely stop moving, forcing you to restart the match over again. If you put a custom logo on your created wrestler, the game will crash whenever you try to start the MyCareer mode--this is something I frequently experienced and also has been widely reported as an issue. It will also crash if you try to create an arena, or during loading screens for no reason at all. Commentary will suddenly become fixated on talking about attacks to the core, even if you're hitting your opponent in the head, while every online match begins with around a minute of lag that's so bad the in-ring action resembles a slideshow.Not all of these issues are entirely new considering the series has been riddled with glitches for a number of years now. But their pervasiveness is much more frequent in 2K20, with some kind of bug appearing in near enough every match if you're unlucky enough. Obviously, your mileage will vary when it comes to technical issues like this, but with the plethora of glitches lurking in every nook and cranny of 2K20, it's a matter of when you'll be afflicted and not if. Some of these glitches are hilarious, there's no denying that, but it doesn't take long before they lose their charm--even if they do add a goofy element of entertainment to matches that are painfully dull otherwise.This is because the actual wrestling in 2K20 is significantly worse than it has been in previous years. The only new addition to gameplay is a reworking of the controls that makes it slightly less cumbersome to perform certain actions. Beyond this, the in-ring action is still overly-reliant on a binary reversal system and plodding combat. It's an acquired taste, for sure, and it's been solid enough in the past, but 2K20 undoes all of that goodwill by removing any semblance of the series' previous competence. Targeting and hitboxes are frequently terrible, resulting in numerous whiffs between both yourself and the AI, particularly when weapons are involved. The controls are unresponsive a lot of the time, and sometimes the reversal prompt will just refuse to appear. The AI will also occasionally forget it's in a wrestling match and stand still for 10 seconds at a time, or it will continuously run into things and wind up jogging on the spot until you bother to interrupt it. Some of the animations look good, but they're mostly stitched together with missing frames that just make everything feel slightly off. There's no real flow to the combat either, or any sense of hair-raising momentum. Matches are lifeless affairs that lack any sort of excitement, falling into the category of being either mind-numbingly boring or incredibly frustrating.In terms of game modes, this year's MyCareer puts you in the laced-up wrestling boots of platonic best friends Tre and Red. The story begins with the pair reminiscing about their wrestling careers before they're inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, charting a course from high school to the main event of WrestleMania 2029 as they try to complete a literal to-do list of WWE dreams. The writing in MyCareer falls into a lot of the same pitfalls as modern WWE shows, presenting smug, unlikeable babyfaces that continually make poor decisions and lack any sort of depth or character development. Red is the angry hothead with lines like ""I'm going to give your grandmother bed sores!"", while Tre is an idiot who turns everything he says into a painful joke. Wrestling is inherently corny, but the writing in 2K20 is often insufferable, and its protagonists are impossible to care about.The writing in MyCareer falls into a lot of the same pitfalls as modern WWE, presenting smug, unlikeable babyfaces that continually make poor decisions and lack any sort of depth or character developmentMyCareer is at its best when you're interacting with current WWE superstars. Samoa Joe turns in an excellent performance as one of Tre's main rivals, and there's a delightful scene with Broken Matt Hardy when you're on a journey into the underworld to find the Undertaker. While the characters we see on TV each week are confined to the realms of reality, the writers on 2K20 are able to indulge in otherworldly fantasy elements and play around with the WWE's more eccentric personas. These moments are few and far between, though, and it takes far too long before you eventually reach the WWE. The first few hours of MyCareer are spent fighting on the indies in meaningless matches where the focus is entirely on Tre and Red and the inconsequential secrets they're hiding from each other, while the final act centers on Red's boring rivalry with her old school bully. The story's overlong and just drags for the vast majority of its runtime, making it a chore to play through.Character progression is another sticking point in MyCareer, both in regards to customizing your characters and leveling them up. Almost every item included in 2K20's substantial creation suite--including hairstyles, attires, moves, taunts, and so on--is locked. The only way to gain access to all of this content is by praying to the RNG gods that you get what you want in loot boxes, or by buying each item outright for a considerable portion of your in-game currency. Thankfully, there's no real money involved, but structuring unlocks in this way is still a needless hassle that arbitrarily restricts your ability to create the kind of character you want to create--which is only exacerbated now that you have two characters to customize.Leveling up each character isn't much better, either. At the outset you're asked to choose from a number of wrestling archetypes, such as luchador and technician, before gaining access to a mammoth skill tree. The problem with this is that the vast majority of said skill tree is hidden until you unlock an adjacent hex, making it impossible to plan out your character's build beyond the next few upgrades. Admittedly, this would be more annoying if improving your characters wasn't as unsatisfying as it is. The attributes you unlock provide such minuscule increases in your skills that they're almost imperceptible once you're out in the ring, to the point where I would go hours without bothering to level anyone up.The other significant mode in 2K20 is Showcase Mode, which focuses on the Four Horsewomen of the WWE: Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks, Charlotte Flair, and Bayley. It explores how the four superstars ushered in WWE's women's revolution, focusing on the most important matches of their careers thus far, from the tremendous fatal-fourway between the four competitors at NXT Takeover: Rival, Sasha, and Bayley's redefining match at NXT Takeover: Brooklyn, and culminating with the main event of this year's WrestleMania between Becky, Charlotte, and Ronda Rousey. The video packages before each match are enjoyable if you have a fondness for these characters and those early days of NXT, even if the video quality is abysmal. But the matches themselves run into the same problems as the Showcase Modes of the past. During each match you're tasked with completing myriad objectives in order to recreate what actually happened to a certain degree. This results in some matches lasting upwards of half an hour, and with no mid-mission checkpoints, losing a match either because you were pinned, the AI was pinned, or because one of the glitches caused the game to break, is incredibly disheartening.WWE 2K's annual release schedule has felt superfluous for a number of years now. This has never been more apparent than with WWE 2K20, a game that's not only riddled with frequent technical issues, but one that's notably worse than its predecessor in almost every area--whether it's the dull and unenjoyable combat, the fact half the roster look like terrifying goblin facsimiles of themselves, or MyCareer's obnoxious and tedious story. This is the moment the WWE 2K series hit Rock Bottom. 
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29,Boombots ,1.9, Boombots is without a doubt in the running for the worst game of the year.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/5/0/8/2214508-boombots.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/boombots-review/1900-2546840/,neg,"
Clay animation and video games: Is it a winning combination? Given The Neverhood's track record of developing weak games based on clay animation (the self-titled Neverhood for the PC and Skullmonkeys for the PlayStation), the answer is no. Boombots is yet another game that tries to merge clay with gaming. But unlike Interplay's old and only marginally better Clay Fighter for the SNES, this fighting game has absolutely nothing going for it. Cat aliens have stolen all of Earth's house cats. It's up to you, as one of several goofy-looking robots, to fight other goofy-looking robots until you can return the cats to their rightful homes. The fighting is similar to Midway's abysmal 3D fighter, Bio F.R.E.A.K.S., in that it takes place in a 3D arena. Most of the fighting is based on three types of projectile attacks - correction - the fighting would be about the three types of projectile attacks, but since the computer fighters are so susceptible to being thrown, you can simply run after your opponent while pounding on the R2 button and win every time. You can get out of throws if you're crafty - which the computer player obviously isn't. Against a human, you'll simply stay far away from each other, lobbing projectiles back and forth until you simply can't take any more - depending on your pain threshold, this will be anywhere between five and ten minutes. Graphically, the game looks rough. The textures are plain and ugly, and the effects are just as drab. But the FMV cutscenes, completely rendered in clay, look pretty good, even if they are firmly on the just-plain-stupid side of the humor scale. The soundtrack sounds as though it was ripped from a Genesis game and only adds to the frustration factor. Boombots is without a doubt in the running for the worst game of the year. The fighting is ill-conceived every step of the way, and the presentation doesn't bring anything to the table either. I shouldn't have to tell you to save your money, but just in case you're the type of person who skips to the end of every review, here it is in plain English: Stay as far away from this game as you possibly can.
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30,Spirit of Speed ,1.9," One could go on for hours ripping this game apart, harping on its intolerable load times, useless physics engine, or haphazard AI, but it all boils down to one inescapable ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/5/7/1/2213571-21c7f4j.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/spirit-of-speed-review/1900-2616088/,neg,"
Have you ever see the film The Great Race, directed by Blake Edwards and featuring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Larry Storch, and various other '60s-era comedians? With its combination of 1930s vehicles, rustic roadways, and a lengthy European road race, the film inevitably conjures joyous fantasies of quitting one's job and touring the countryside. It must be this exact feeling that LJN was striving for with its Dreamcast release of Spirit of Speed 1937. Similar to The Great Race, '30s roadsters, period scenery, and wacky antics abound. However, unlike the classic film, Spirit of Speed 1937 is neither inspiring nor endearing. The valiant attempt known as Spirit of Speed 1937 begins with its features: four race modes, 15 cars, and nine tracks. Quick race lets you practice the game's courses, while the single and championship modes lock you into tournament-style competition. You can also take part in a scenario mode, in which you're placed behind the wheel of a difficult situation and asked to finish on top. The game's tracks - such as Montana, Tripoli, and Italy's Monza - are designed in a manner faithful to the architecture of the time. As far as cars, you have your choice of a number of '30s-era Mercedes-Benz and Alfa Romeo vehicles, as well as specialized roadsters such as the Duesenberg or Bugatti 35B. Unfortunately, any attempt at an adequate feature list ends here. There's no multiplayer whatsoever, as Spirit of Speed 1937 is single-player only. The ten scenarios are challenging, but no different than using a slow vehicle within the championship mode, so they compose a moot option. You can't vary the number of laps or cars per race, either, making quick races impossible. Furthermore, while 15 cars may seem adequate, the CPU always opts for the faster vehicles. Sure, you can use that slow Bugatti if you wish, but you'll never win - not ever. Thus, Spirit of Speed 1937 lacks key options and imposes ugly constraints on the features it does have. After you've chosen a race and a vehicle, it's time for some old-time raceway gallivanting. Given a cursory glance, Spirit of Speed plays well. Acceleration varies depending on the car you've chosen, while actual speed affects a vehicle's handling characteristics in numerous ways. The Alfa Romeo series has decent acceleration, but performs poorly in turns, whereas the Mercedes class can turn on a dime - if you ever get enough speed, that is. Careful turning is important, and - as an added bonus - skilled braking is actually required to navigate the game's more difficult twists. All this is nice, but upon closer inspection, the game goes to hell in a handbasket. Once you've achieved any semblance of speed, controller responsiveness dies, leaving you guiding a stiff vehicle through an endless array of hairpin turns. Miss a turn and you'll crash. Twitch a little bit and you'll crash. If skill prevented this, that would be one thing - however, the game randomly throws your car into skids or sticks it to walls, utterly without warning or explanation. The courses themselves are so large that a single lap takes four or more minutes to complete, resulting in races that take upward of 30 minutes to finish. Simply put, Spirit of Speed is pain personified. Even more disappointing than its frustrating gameplay, though, are Spirit of Speed's visuals. One would literally be hard pressed to find any PlayStation or Nintendo 64 racer that doesn't outdo this game graphically. Car models are boxy, tires are nigh octagonal, and reflection mapping is nonexistent. The game's tracks exhibit an attempt at scenery variation, but possess nowhere near the level of detail of F1 World Grand Prix, Tokyo Extreme Racer, or even Disney Magical Racing Tour. The majority of trees and signage are 2D sprites, while roadside structures exemplify the kind of six-sided polygons and flat texture maps displayed by early Nintendo 64 titles. If these issues weren't bad enough, texture warping, polygon dropout, and chop-inducing slowdown abound. After all of the above, forget about Spirit of Speed's audio. There's no background music to speak of, the crash effects are silly, and the engine effects simply don't fit the vehicles. The game sounds worse than Virtua Racing 32X, and that's not an exaggeration. One could go on for hours ripping this game apart, harping on its intolerable load times, useless physics engine, or haphazard AI, but it all boils down to one inescapable fact: Spirit of Speed 1937 is abysmal.
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31,Charlie's Angels ,1.9," Charlie's Angels is a beat-'em-up through and through, but a very, very bad one.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/0/3/2219903-box_cangels.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/charlies-angels-review/1900-6071834/,neg,"
 Gaming history is littered with lackluster games based on movies that do little except serve as cheap advertising ploys for their respective films. Few of these games, however, can compare to the horrific display of ineptitude that is Charlie's Angels. The game doesn't follow the plot of the most recent film, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, instead focusing on an ""original plot"" that puts the film's three sexy heroines--Natalie, Dylan, and Alex--on a quest to stop a master thief from stealing the world's national monuments. Along the way, the angels will travel to numerous badly designed environments, perform an extremely limited list of martial-arts moves on an even more limited list of ridiculous-looking enemies, and sleepwalk their way through their poorly written lines with just barely enough energy to form actual syllables.  Charlie's Angels somehow manages to take a no-brainer style of beat-'em-up gameplay and completely break it.  Charlie's Angels is a beat-'em-up through and through, but a very, very bad one. The game utilizes an extremely rudimentary control system that consists of punch, kick, block, and jump buttons. Each of the three angels has her own ""fighting style,"" but this term can only be used loosely, as all three styles make use of some similar-looking kick and punch animations. Furthermore, you'll have a range of only two to three moves per attack, as the game's idea of a combo system seems to entail stringing together two punches and two kicks over and over again in a highly repetitive and tedious fashion, and then finishing with a cheap-looking special move that occurs seemingly at random and frequently causes the game's frame rate to completely fall apart. Jump moves don't fare much better, as there's only one jump punch and only one jump kick, and trying to actually land either one is a pretty harrowing experience.   Adding to the horrific gameplay is the completely asinine storyline and mission structure. The plot of the game is rather silly, but by itself it isn't much worse than most of the stories in this genre. Rather, the bulk of the problem lies in the fact that every mission in the game feels utterly meaningless in every capacity. As you play, you'll get to enjoy performing such wonderful tasks as running through a level and beating up every dumb enemy in sight until you get to a computer terminal, or perhaps running through a level and beating up every dumb enemy in sight until you find a button to press or a statue to move to make a door open or something. Occasionally you'll climb a really, really long ladder, or fight an obscenely easy boss, but really, there's nothing that salvages Charlie's Angels' awful gameplay.  Further adding to the conglomeration of problems in Charlie's Angels is a hefty list of bugs and underdeveloped gameplay elements. The biggest offense is the game's difficulty, in which the fault falls squarely on the AI. Enemies run at you mindlessly, brandishing their fists or knives, or just stand there when confronted, blocking every attack you throw and occasionally mounting an offensive. Simply running straight at every enemy and mashing the attack buttons is enough to progress past the onslaught of dim-witted bad guys. And if you get into a tight spot, you can always just run around in a circle while the bad guys aimlessly follow you. Charlie's Angels is also rife with bugs, including such gems as having an enemy somehow manage to sink knee-deep into the ground, and yet continue to fight you, even without the benefit of shins. Additionally, in a couple of instances, knocking an enemy backward in an indoor environment somehow managed to trap him behind an open door to the point where he was unable to escape, and we were unable to progress until he had been defeated. The solution was, of course, to just knock the enemy out by punching right through the solid door.   Even if the game were devoid of graphical bugs, it'd still be a horrid-looking affair. The in-game character models for Natalie, Dylan, and Alex are unbelievably bad, with some of the cheapest and dirtiest facial maps, textures, and animations you'll ever find in this generation of console gaming. None of the enemies look much better, and rarely do they ever make any sort of contextual sense in the level they're assigned to. For instance, when running through the inside of a large boat, you'll suddenly find yourself surrounded by a butler, a construction worker, and a guy in a wet suit. The camera used in Charlie's Angels is also in the running for the most poorly designed of all time. It will frequently veer off in the opposite direction of the angle that would be most useful to you, and it somehow manages to always find the most unattractive angle possible. The only possible exception here are the game's CG cutscenes, which are used for mission briefings and at the end of some levels. The work done on these is far and away superior to anything you'll see during the gameplay, though they're still pretty unappealing overall.  You will never find an uglier game based upon the concept of attractive female action stars.  Topping off the game's never-ending list of issues is its audio. The biggest draw here has to be the fact that Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, and Drew Barrymore provide the voices for their characters in the cutscenes, as well as a few moments during the game. Unfortunately, it's abundantly clear that the developer was only able to get the actresses for an extremely limited amount of time, as their collective line delivery is laughably bad, showing all the emotion and enthusiasm of a brick, and giving the impression that they had each individually been roused from a bad hangover and thrown in front of a microphone. Bernie Mac didn't bother to reprise his role as Bosley, so instead we're treated to a bad voice actor doing his worst Bernie impression. What's even more atrocious is that most of the voice tracks skip and distort pretty badly, making the whole thing a sorely wasted effort. Rounding out the game's nightmarish audio are some astoundingly awful sound effects--especially the perplexing noises characters make when dying or being hit--and some generic background music that's totally forgettable. There are a couple of licensed songs from the movie's soundtrack available, but only in limited situations, and really, they're just as meaningless as everything else in the game.  Perhaps the sole saving grace of Charlie's Angels is that it's mercifully short--the whole game can be finished in about three hours (perhaps four, if you set the game to hard). In the end, Charlie's Angels is the personification of the ""game as a marketing tool"" mentality, as this game serves no meaningful purpose, except to rob you of your time and money. Do yourself a favor and just stay away.  


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32,NFL 2K3 ,9.6," If you're a fan of NFL football, then you owe it to yourself to pick up NFL 2K3.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/6/1/2214161-box_nfl2k3.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nfl-2k3-review/1900-2877237/,pos,"
     Sega's NFL 2K3 for the PlayStation 2 features a number of improvements on last year's game. The ESPN license has now been integrated into the series, providing the game with a TV-style presentation. The graphics have been significantly improved to the point that a large portion of the players can be recognized by their faces as opposed to the numbers on the back of their jerseys. Online play is already up and ready for the August 27 release of the PlayStation 2 network adapter, and, most importantly, the gameplay has been honed to near perfection.  Sega's NFL 2K3 for the PlayStation 2 features a number of improvements on last year's game. There are several modes to choose from in NFL 2K3. You can jump right into a game by choosing the quick game option or the exhibition option (you can also play as dozens of classic teams in these modes). Likewise, you can create your own tournament with up to 16 teams, or immediately jump into a playoff situation. There's also a practice mode that will help you become familiar with the fundamentals of NFL 2K3's gameplay. You can practice special moves while running with the ball, practice plays in your team's playbook with no defense, or hold a full scrimmage with a randomly selected defense, which is helpful since it essentially replicates a game-time situation and gives you a chance to get a feel for your team's strengths and weaknesses. In the Sega Sports challenge mode, you play games on default rules and options settings and then receive a password that corresponds to the stats you put up in each game. You can then use that password on segasports.com to rank yourself against other players and their statistics.     Perhaps one of the more intriguing options is the situation mode, which lets you edit everything from the score and the amount of time left on the clock to the line of scrimmage. So, for example, you could set up a game so it starts in the fourth quarter with two minutes remaining, and your team has the ball but it's losing by six points. You can create just about any scenario with this feature, and it can present quite a challenge for even veteran players, but if you're looking for something with a little more depth, then you'll find it in NFL 2K3's season mode.     The season mode lets you take a team through a single season of football and the playoffs. Along the way, you can set and tweak your roster, release players, and engage in trades. You can view any injuries that occur over the course of the season and adjust your roster as necessary. The season mode also provides you with a number of coaching-related options. In the coach game plan, you can place an emphasis on particular types of plays, so you can have your defense focus on blitzing or have your offense lean toward running. In addition, you can edit your team's playbook by searching through other teams' formations and plays and selecting the ones you want to add. Of course, most teams already have a large number of plays to choose from, but there may be a few occasions when it seems like your team doesn't have a play that's suited to its particular strengths or a specific situation. The season mode can be quite fun for those who don't necessarily want to get involved in the deeper layers of the sport, but those who do enjoy those deeper layers will undoubtedly be impressed by NFL 2K3's franchise mode.   The online play in NFL 2K3 functions much like that of its Dreamcast predecessors. Before you even dive into the franchise mode, there are a few customizable options to mess around with. You can decide whether or not to have a preseason, a trade deadline, or a fantasy draft, and you can also decide if the computer should handle drafting, re-signing, and other contractual dealings--though, part of what makes the franchise mode so entertaining is being able to handle such things yourself. In addition, you can create an entirely new league by moving teams into different divisions and importing players from NCAA 2K3. When you've set these parameters, you can then select your team and edit the coach's name and physical appearance.    From there, you're brought into an office area, which serves as your team's headquarters. This is where you can monitor upcoming games in the season, adjust your roster, look at injury reports, edit the playbook, and take care of other general coaching duties. If you select the front office option, you'll be sent to an entirely different office area where all the behind-the-scenes work is done. You can view the current status of individual player contracts and then choose to release players, renegotiate contracts, initiate trades, or put players on the trading block.The PlayStation 2 version of NFL 2K3 seems to be on par with the Xbox version, though it doesn't appear to have the special effects that the Xbox version has. Trades are a fairly straightforward affair in NFL 2K3, as you can select up to three players at once and offer them to another team. The other team will decline your offer if it doesn't think the trade is fair, but you can continually badger it by offering different players. The trading block option is separate from the main trade feature, but it's probably the more useful of the two. Essentially, you can put any player you want on the trading block, indicating to other teams that this particular player is up for grabs and that any team can make an offer for him over the course of the season. The trading block is useful if you have a high-salary player who sits on the bench, but usually, teams will make counteroffers, asking you for another player before going through with the trade. If you're not sure which positions you have needs in, the front office has a team needs option that basically tells you how many players you have at each position and how many you actually need. For example, the 49ers have five quarterbacks in NFL 2K3, but you only need four, so you can either release that extra quarterback or attempt to make a trade. Lastly, you can also keep track of a huge number of statistics, including team, individual, and rookie stats.   With its in-depth franchise mode, online play, excellent running and passing gameplay, and detailed graphics, NFL 2K3 is one of the best football games to date. There's just as much to do during the off-season as there is during the season. You'll have to jump back into the office and make roster adjustments to compensate for players who might've retired, renegotiate expired contracts, sign free agents, evaluate trades, and release players. More importantly, you'll also have to prepare for the draft. NFL 2K3 gives you a brief look at rookies and their abilities before the start of the draft, but to get a better idea of their skills, you'll have to participate in the NFL combine. In this mode, you'll have access to a list of the rookies who will be in the upcoming NFL draft, as well as some of their basic physical statistics, such as their 40 time and jumping ability. To get more information on these players, you have to devote scouting hours to them. Since there are only a certain number of hours in each day of the combine, you can either sink three or so hours into a few players to get a detailed rundown of their abilities, or you can just use a single hour for several players to get a general idea of where they are. The reports you receive will specify what the rookies' strengths and weaknesses are and what skills they'll be able to improve. When the combine is finished, it's time for the draft, but before you jump into it, you can hold a mock draft to get a general idea of how teams will select certain players so you can adjust your strategy as necessary. At the draft, you'll get to see which players have already been selected and which players are currently available. In addition, you'll be provided with a list of the players you've scouted on a separate screen and a number of suggested picks on a PDA located on the desk in the draft center. Finally, you'll have to sign any players you've picked up in the draft, make final roster adjustments, and then start the next season. Needless to say, NFL 2K3's franchise mode is pretty deep, and it will undoubtedly keep you busy for hours on end.    Of course, NFL 2K3's gameplay isn't exactly a slouch either, as it offers some of the most balanced football gameplay to date. The running game in NFL 2K3 is excellent, and the running backs are easy to control and have a nice assortment of moves, including jukes and stiff-arms. In addition, when you're running the ball through the line, your running back will turn his torso slightly so he can slip past his blockers and the defensive line, which almost solves the problem of not being able to get by the linemen in most previous football games. Similarly, if a defender or a member of your team falls to the ground, your running back can leap over him and pick up a few additional yards. The run blocking is also excellent, as the fullback and guards will almost always pick up the linebackers or any linemen who happen to break through the line.Online play is already up and ready for the August 27 release of the PlayStation 2 network adapter. Passing the ball in NFL 2K3 can be difficult at first because of the excellent defensive back AI, but you'll start to adjust once you learn how to read defenses and get the timing down. In fact, timing is a crucial aspect when the defense is playing zone, as you have to throw the ball when the defensive backs are switching up coverage. For example, when the cornerback lets his man go because he thinks the safety is coming over to help, you'll see a perfect opportunity to throw a midrange strike. Likewise, for shorter passes, the key is to throw the ball quickly before any of the defensive backs or linebackers pick your receiver up in the zone. The only annoying aspect about the passing game (and perhaps NFL 2K3's biggest problem) is the defensive backs' propensity to time tackles perfectly so your receiver can't hold on to the ball--just when you think you have a completion, a safety will come running in and hit the receiver the second the ball makes contact with his hands. Of course, this encourages you to look for receivers who are a little more open, but it happens so frequently that it seems a little unfair at times.     Otherwise, you'll find that the defensive game is almost as balanced as the offense. Linebackers will sit back in passing lanes and knock the ball down or make key interceptions, and as previously mentioned, the safeties will actually come over and help cover or assist in tackles, much as they do in the NFL. However, blitzes seem to be a little unbalanced. Obviously, a defense running a blitz should be punished if the quarterback can get a pass off to open receiver in time, but to have the offense burn you for a touchdown almost every time on a quick pass play seems a little unfair, especially considering that the blitz has become an integral part of quite a few defensive schemes in the NFL. Still, it's not as bad as it may seem, since you can call an audible if it looks like the offense has the potential to get the ball off on time, or you can shift the defense around to attack the line if it looks like a run play.     The online play in NFL 2K3 functions much like that of its Dreamcast predecessors. Upon registering your account name and logging on, you'll be presented with several different lobbies located across the country. When you choose a particular lobby, you'll see a list of the players who are currently there, as well as their connection speed, the number of games they've dropped from, and their win-loss records. There's also a chat area where you can send messages to other players and a find-user feature that allows you to find out if someone is online. In the online games we played, there were a few lag issues, particularly during the start of the game and near halftime, and the frame rate seemed to take a small hit. But for the most part, the games were enjoyable and there weren't any substantial problems.  If you're a fan of NFL football, then you owe it to yourself to pick up NFL 2K3 for the PlayStation 2. In terms of graphics, the PlayStation 2 version of NFL 2K3 seems to be on par with the Xbox version, though it doesn't appear to have the special effects that the Xbox version has. All the players in the game are accurately modeled, and their faces look absolutely amazing. You'll be able to identify most players almost immediately if you're an avid NFL fan. There are also plenty of facial animations, which go a long way toward giving the players some life and personality. The stadiums in NFL 2K3 are accurate and feature most, if not all, of the details of their real-life counterparts.     NFL 2K3 also features incredibly high-quality commentary that sounds quite natural and flows really well. The commentators will even go so far as to talk about what's been happening in the game, and the only time commentary is consistently recycled is in the introductory sequences and the presentation of the defensive and offensive lineups at the start of each game. Both members of the commentary team provide nice insight into the game and generally seem to be enjoying themselves, which helps make the commentary seem more authentic. The stadium noise is pretty generic, with the usual chants and crowd noise, but there's some pretty good chatter between players.     With its in-depth franchise mode, online play, excellent running and passing gameplay, and detailed graphics, NFL 2K3 is one of the best football games to date. If you're a fan of NFL football, then you owe it to yourself to pick up NFL 2K3 for the PlayStation 2.
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33,Grand Theft Auto: Vice City ,9.6, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City provides just about everything you'd want in a follow-up to an outstanding game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/6/6/2217366-vcus.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grand-theft-auto-vice-city-review/1900-2895954/,pos,"
Last year, Grand Theft Auto III took the world by surprise. While the first two games in the series had a small, hard-core following, their simple 2D graphics and lack of a focused narrative structure limited their appeal. On the other hand, GTAIII featured a massive, clockwork world that was really impressive to behold, and it refined its predecessors' free-roaming, nonlinear design and added a far more compelling story in the process. Those improvements, coupled with amazing vehicle physics, a surprising amount of variety in the gameplay, and a great sense of style, made GTAIII a runaway hit and one of the rare games that is accepted by both hard-core and casual game players alike. But as good as Grand Theft Auto III is, the next game in the series, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, improves upon it. Vice City expands on the themes and concepts found in Grand Theft Auto III, fixes a few of the minor issues in the last game, and adds a lot of new abilities and items to play with. It all comes together to form one of the most stylish and most enjoyable games ever released.  Vice City contains a good variety of fine automobiles.  The new GTA game is set in a fictional take on Miami, Florida, known as Vice City. The year is 1986, and Tommy Vercetti has just been released from prison after doing a 15-year stretch for the mob. The mob--more specifically, the Forelli family--appreciates Tommy's refusal to squeal in exchange for a lesser sentence, so they send him down to Vice City to establish some new operations. Tommy's first order of business in Vice City is to score a large amount of cocaine to work with. But Tommy's first drug deal goes sour, leaving him with no money, no cocaine, and no idea who wronged him. The mob is, of course, angry over the whole situation, and now Tommy has to make up for the loss before the gangsters come down from Liberty City to clean up the mess. As Tommy, you'll start the investigation, figure out who ripped you off, take care of business, and set up shop in Vice City in a big, big way. Oh, and you'll also drive taxis, get involved in a turf war between the Cubans and the Haitians, befriend a Scottish rock group named Love Fist, become a pizza delivery boy, smash up the local mall, demolish a building to lower real estate prices, hook up with a biker gang, run an adult film studio, take down a bank, and much, much more.  Here's Tommy Vercetti, modeling his fresh Miami Vice suit and matching M60 machine gun.  While Grand Theft Auto has always been a violent, mature-themed series, it has always balanced the violent crime with an equal amount of tongue-in-cheek humor and style. Vice City is no exception, presenting an exaggerated view of the 1980s that makes use of a number of the kitschy pop-culture stereotypes found in film and television from the decade. The drug-laced tale recalls such films as Scarface and television shows like Miami Vice. The humor comes mostly from the radio, which really drives home the sort of form-over-function mentality that most people associate with the '80s. Some of the game's major characters are also a source of comic relief, from the Jim Bakker-like Pastor Richards to the Steven Spielberg-like porn director Steve Scott. The game's large cast of characters is colorful and memorable. For instance, local drug kingpin Ricardo Diaz is always hilariously breaking something and cursing wildly whenever you happen to see him. Ken Rosenberg is your fidgety coke-fiend lawyer pal, and he gets you started in town by getting you connected with the city's major players. Lance Vance, appropriately voiced by Miami Vice alum Philip Michael Thomas, becomes your sidekick of sorts, as both of you chase vengeance for your own reasons. Your Cuban gang contact, Umberto Robina, is constantly reminding you how much of a man he is, and most of the Cuban gang members you'll run into are similarly inclined.   Stylistically, the game presents an accurate depiction of your average '80s crime saga. Like in Miami Vice, many of the characters are dressed in pastel suits. The game's vehicles also fit the bill, with a lot of basic sedans mixed in with cars that look enough like Porsches, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris to pass for the real thing. None of the cars are licensed, of course, though in a nice touch, some of the cars are actually earlier models of cars that appeared in Grand Theft Auto III. Fans of the previous game will undoubtedly appreciate little things like this and the other occasional ties to the world of GTAIII, which really help this new Grand Theft Auto game feel like part of a cohesive universe. As great as the game's presentation and use of its source material are, without a collection of gameplay improvements, it would have been little more than a mission pack with a touch-up job. But Rockstar North has definitely been hard at work in this department. The most obvious addition is the inclusion of various types of motorcycles among all the vehicles on the road. There's a decent variety of two-wheelers in the game, including mopeds, street bikes, dirt bikes, and big hogs. As you'd expect, the bikes handle a lot differently from one another. Your basic street bike is a good mix of speed and maneuverability. The big choppers are harder to steer, but have ludicrous top speeds. You'll get tossed off a motorcycle in almost any collision, which costs you a little bit of health or armor. This makes them pretty much useless in any situation that involves dodging the police. But they're incredibly handy in any mission that requires speed, and since you can pull a lot of fancy tricks on them, they're also a lot of fun to drive around.  While there are a lot more weapons in Vice City, the available arsenal hasn't really changed that much overall.  You'll also do a bit of flying in Vice City. After moving through a few major plot points, you'll open up the west half of Vice City, which is locked away at the start due to hurricane warnings. After that, you'll encounter missions that let you fly a seaplane around the city. You'll also find a few different helicopters here and there. Flying around the city is pretty impressive, and it showcases the game's engine quite well--you can see for miles when you're up in the sky. While some of the city's skyscrapers are too high to get on top of, you can land the choppers on most of the game's buildings. Expect to find a few of the game's hidden items stashed away in these sorts of difficult-to-reach areas.   A few new player actions have been added to the game as well. Pressing L3 will lock Tommy in a crouched position. This lets you take cover behind objects and improves your shooting accuracy. You can also dive out of moving vehicles, which handy for ditching cars or bikes into the ocean, escaping a burning vehicle, or just ramming empty cars into other cars for kicks. Like wrecking a motorcycle, bailing out of a car causes a little bit of bodily harm. You can also enter certain buildings now. While the interior settings are few in number and mostly extraneous, they look great and are used to effectively create a city that's even more realistic than GTAIII's Liberty City. You'll be able to go into your hotel and run all the way upstairs to your room. You can also enter a nightclub, a strip club, the Vice City mall, and a handful of other buildings. There are load times associated with entering certain buildings, but they're pretty brief.   Many of the game's story missions are more involved than those of GTAIII. GTAIII had a lot of missions in which you needed to get something or take someone somewhere and then return for your reward. You will find those sorts of missions in Vice City, but most of the new game's missions are multiple-part affairs that involve more than just moving from point A to point B and then back to point A. Some of these parts are simple extensions, such as maybe having to visit a respray shop after pulling a job. However, other missions are more involved and require the use of more-advanced tactics. For instance, one mission requires you to plant a bomb inside a mall that is swarming with cops. To do so, you'll first have to get a little heat chasing after you. You'll then lead the cops into a garage, where you'll ambush them and take one of their uniforms so you can pose as a cop, which makes getting into the heavily guarded mall possible. Once you've taken care of business at the mall, you'll then have to escape and get all the way back to your hideout.  Tommy Vercetti's voice is provided by Ray Liotta, who does a great job of bringing the character to life.  The missions are well designed for the most part. The noticeably longer average mission length is great, though it can become a source of occasional frustration, since failure in a mission means having to replay every part until you get it right. Getting back to a mission area is easier than ever, though. In GTAIII, you'd restart at a hospital or police station and be forced to steal a car and hightail it back to a mission area, which could take a while. In Vice City, a taxi appears near your respawn point, and, for a small fee, it will drive you back to the last mission briefing area you visited. Unfortunately, since you're generally going to want to pick up some arms and some armor before going back into most missions, you'll still have to drive over to the local Ammu-Nation first. It would have been nice if you could have used the taxis to handle this step of the process as well. At any rate, while the game definitely has its share of difficult missions, the average mission difficulty seems a notch or two easier in Vice City than in GTAIII, so you shouldn't have to repeat too many missions too often. Though, overall, Vice City's degree of difficulty is similar to that of the previous game, thanks to increased tenacity on the part of the police in their efforts to thwart you. Besides the changes to the missions themselves, the game's mission structure is pretty different from that of the previous GTA games. In previous installments, you were given a pretty clear-cut path to follow--you may have had multiple mission options at any given time, but you consistently knew what to do next and for whom. In Vice City, you'll spend the first portion of the game undertaking missions for other people, much like in GTAIII. But once the town is yours, you'll be working for yourself, going out and keeping your protection racket in line and establishing yourself as the town's new boss.  Armed with an MP5, Tommy prepares to take on Vice City SWAT.  Eventually, you'll even be able to go out and purchase various properties, which opens up new missions. For instance, when you buy the taxi company, you'll open up a series of taxi-related missions that are separate from the side missions that you can take on by entering any taxi. Once you've completed a property's missions, that property will start earning money for you. This fact means that money eventually becomes a nonissue--as it should be for any self-respecting crime lord--since your various properties will always have some cash for you. All you need to do is drive around to all of them and collect from time to time. There are several other properties to purchase, including the film studio, the Malibu Club, and a car dealership. All the secondary-mission types from GTAIII have returned, such as vigilante missions, taxi missions, fire truck missions, and ambulance missions. New to Vice City is the ability to hop on a specific kind of scooter and deliver pizza. Pizza is delivered while in motion using the same mechanics you'd normally use for drive-by shootings, only in this case you hurl pizza pies at customers.   While the control in Vice City is largely the same as that of GTAIII, the handling of the game's various cars feels really different, as the game's frequent driving sequences seem even more exciting and dangerous. Perhaps in part due to the change of time period, a lot of the cars feel a lot looser on the road and seem to get knocked around quite a bit easier. This provides much of the game the sort of car-flipping, explosion-filled quality you'd expect from an episode of The A-Team. And when you factor in the new ability for you--or other in-game characters--to shoot out tires, handling becomes an even larger problem. Cars with blown tires are really hard to control, making car chases that much tougher when you have a flat (or several). And as if cars weren't dangerous enough, a motorcycle with a blown tire is practically useless, as it usually spins out and throws you over the handlebars every time you try to attain any serious speed. One of the tougher missions has you trying to get a bike with flat tires back to a biker bar while being chased by angry thugs.  The game has a lot of different pedestrian models.  Cars break apart in an even more spectacular fashion this time around. Along with taking out tires, you can smash up cars with your melee weapons now. Running up and caving in a car's hood with your baseball bat is usually a good way to get the occupants to vacate the vehicle in a hurry. You can also shoot out car windows and even hit the people inside the car with your shots. This makes a huge difference when it comes to taking out cars, as you can now target the tires to slow the vehicle down and then take out the driver with a well-placed rifle shot.   As mentioned, the police have become a much more formidable threat than they were in GTAIII, especially now that they have the ability to take out the tires on your getaway vehicle. Attempting to jump in a vehicle and leave the scene of a crime usually gives the cops enough time to take out one of your tires. At higher levels of response, the police will set up spike strips to take out all your tires. Of course, they'll also set up standard roadblocks and do all the things the GTAIII cops did, including ignore most standard traffic violations. However, in Vice City, stirring up a serious ruckus will get both the cops and the FBI on your case. Helicopters will also chase after you. This time around, SWAT teams will actually rappel out of the helicopters, making them even more dangerous. If you can manage to get a clean shot at a chopper's cockpit, though, you can take one down with one hit. At the highest level of law enforcement response, the army once again rolls tanks onto the street, making your chance of survival slim. All this means that, as in GTAIII, many encounters with the authorities in Vice City can be extremely exciting. However, one blemish on the police record is the fact that the cops still don't deal with elevation changes particularly well. If you run into a parking garage and leave the first or second floor, the cops aren't smart enough to find their way up to face you. They'll even keep firing in your general direction, even though there are several walls and ceilings between you and the officers. But you'll encounter this sort of thing very rarely amidst many, many memorable and intense chases and shoot-outs.While there are a lot more weapons in Vice City, the available arsenal hasn't really changed that much overall. The most obvious additions are in the melee weapon department--or, rather, the hardware department. You can head to a hardware store and pick up a screwdriver, a hatchet, a trusty baseball bat, or a machete. You'll also find additional melee weapons in different parts of the city. Hitting the golf course, for example, makes it easy to find a golf club. You can also get a chainsaw, which is great in theory, but surprisingly unsatisfying in action. Weapons are broken up into different classes. Your first assault rifle will be a Ruger, but later on you'll be able to get an M16. You can carry only one weapon in each class, so picking up an M16 will replace your Ruger, getting a golf club will replace your baseball bat, and so on. The selection of weapons closely mirrors GTAIII's set, only now with more types of pistols, submachine guns, rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and thrown explosives.  The draw distance is a lot farther out this time around, meaning you can see a greater distance down the road than you could in GTAIII.     You'll work your way up from basic weapons up to deadlier versions. For example, the Tec-9 is a decent submachine gun, but later on you'll be able to buy an MP5K, which has a much faster rate of fire. Later still, you'll be able to wield rocket launchers, a flamethrower, an M60 machine gun, or even a Gatling gun. Different weapons have different weights, and your movement speed may affected by the weapon you're holding. Wielding a pistol or a submachine gun lets you run at full speed. Busting out the shotgun or rifle prevents you from sprinting, but you can walk normally. And the heavy weapons cause you to lumber around sluggishly. The targeting system from GTAIII has been reworked a bit for Vice City, making it easier to target enemies and keeping the camera from getting too crazy when you're locked on to a target.   Vice City also improves on GTAIII graphically. The only problem with the graphics is the frame rate's tendency to bog down when you've got a mess of police swarming all around you, making escape that much harder. But considering that this problem is no worse in Vice City than it was in GTAIII, and that the game looks quite a bit better overall than GTAIII, it's not really a big deal. The entire look of the game is quite different from its predecessor overall, but technically, this new GTA game has a significantly cleaner appearance. The character models are better looking, and the animation--some of it reused from GTAIII--looks great. Some of the highlights include jacking a motorcycle from the front, which causes Tommy to execute a flying jump kick that knocks the rider clean off the bike. Jack a bike from the side, and he'll deliver an elbow to the face of the rider.   The draw distance is a lot farther out this time around as well, meaning you can see a greater distance down the road than you could in GTAIII. This is even more noticeable when you're flying high above the city and can see almost all the way across to the other side of it. But you'll still notice when simply driving up the street, especially when you abandon a moving car and watch it cruise off down the street on its own. Beyond that, the game's textures are bright and colorful, properly reflecting what '80s-era Miami should look like. Nearby buildings are laced with neon that glows nicely at night. You'll also notice lots of great little touches, such as the glint of sunshine off the windows of nearby cars.   GTAIII's sound played an important part in setting the tone for the entire game. The voice acting used throughout the story segments effectively conveyed the crime story, and the radio provided the soundtrack to go with the action. Vice City's sound is a dramatic improvement on GTAIII's already amazing sound. The game's cast is top-notch. The main difference in the voice work is that, unlike in GTAIII, the lead character in Vice City speaks. Tommy Vercetti's voice is provided by Ray Liotta (Blow, Muppets From Space), who does a great job of bringing the character to life. The rest of the voice talent--which includes Gary Busey, Dennis Hopper, David Paymer, Danny Trejo, Luis Guzman, Philip Michael Thomas, and retired adult film actress Jenna Jameson--also does an excellent job. The game's sound effects are top-notch. Everything from explosions to gunfire simply sounds outstanding.  Tommy can bust up car windows in a hurry with that billy club.     The radio stations in Vice City are amazingly well done. The '80s music found on the stations really helps set the tone for the entire game. You'll find tons of bands and artists, including Quiet Riot, Michael Jackson, David Lee Roth, Herbie Hancock, Judas Priest, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. There are hours and hours of music in the game, and once you get tired of one genre, flipping to the next is as easy as pushing the L1 button. You'll find a rock station, a pop station, an underground rap/electro station, a quiet-storm-style love song station, a new wave station, and more. The rock station, which is hosted by a younger, more idealistic version of Lazlow from GTAIII's talk radio station, is probably the funniest of the lot, mostly because Lazlow does such a great job of claiming to be a hard-rockin' rebel while coming across like a total wimp in the process. Vice City also has twice as many talk radio stations as GTAIII. K Chat is a fluff-filled celebrity interview show hosted by a complete airhead. Vice City Public Radio features a public debate show called Pressing Issues, which is broken up by frequent pledge breaks. Overall, the talk radio and the various radio station commercials are funny, though at times they seem a bit too self-aware. Of further note, the game defaults to stereo sound, but it also features DTS encoding. The game doesn't really go overboard with the surround effects, but the DTS mode definitely sounds cleaner and richer than the default stereo sound.   In the end, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City provides just about everything you'd want in a follow-up to an outstanding game. It's bigger, badder, and better in almost every imaginable way. The game tells a compelling story and adds enough gameplay content to the formula to engage players who've already played the previous game to death. And if by some small chance you somehow missed out on last year's GTAIII, Vice City will clue you in on what all the commotion was about. In short, if you're old enough to purchase Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, then you absolutely should, and fast.


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34,Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ,9.6," San Andreas definitely lives up to the Grand Theft Auto name. In fact, it's arguably the best game in the series.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/3/8/3/2212383-box_gtasa.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-review/1900-6111345/,pos,"
 How do you follow up a runaway success like 2001's Grand Theft Auto III? Rockstar North responded a year later with GTA: Vice City, a game that took the gameplay of its predecessor and expanded it considerably. At the same time, Vice City gave the series an extensive and amazing stylistic makeover, drenching the experience in the sights, sounds, and attitude of Miami, Florida from the mid '80s. So where do you go from there? You take it statewide. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas expands the series' concept to encompass three entire cities, as well as the countryside between them. The gameplay similarly expands, packing in some explosive set pieces and amazing action-movie-like thrills while maintaining that same remarkably fun, freefom GTA feel. In short, Rockstar has done it again. San Andreas definitely lives up to the Grand Theft Auto name. In fact, it's arguably the best game in the series.  Carl Johnson is going (going) back (back) to Cali (Cali).  This latest installment takes place in 1992 in the West Coast-themed state of San Andreas. San Andreas is an island containing three cities. You'll begin the game in the city of Los Santos, which is based roughly on Los Angeles and consists of a mixture of ritzy downtown areas and the gangland ghettos of South Central. San Fierro is based on San Francisco, reproducing the real city's hilly terrain and ever-present fog. The game's third city is Las Venturas, which is a great take on early-'90s Las Vegas, complete with a strip full of casinos and the surrounding desert. While one-to-one measurements against previous games in the series are difficult in practice, San Andreas definitely feels like a much, much larger place than Vice City ever did, but at the same time, the growth is handled intelligently. There are plenty of things to do both in and out of the cities, which makes all this real estate matter.  While Grand Theft Auto III was inspired by movies like The Godfather and Vice City took several pages from the Scarface playbook, San Andreas draws its inspiration from the ghetto and gangsta struggle films of the early '90s. Movies like Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood are the clear influences here. In San Andreas, you play the role of Carl ""CJ"" Johnson. The game opens with Carl returning to Los Santos after spending the last five years in GTA III's Liberty City. But his homecoming isn't a happy one--he's returning home because his mother has been killed. Carl isn't on the ground for more than an hour before he's picked up by a pair of crooked cops and thrown right back into the middle of the street life he left Los Santos to avoid.  Your first order of business in Los Santos is to put your set back on the map. Your gang, the Grove Street Families, has fallen into disarray over the last five years, and their influence is minimal at best. So you, along with the three other leaders of the gang--the long-winded Big Smoke, the dust-smoking Ryder, and your stubborn brother, Sweet--set out to take back the streets from your rivals, the Ballas, who have turned to dealing crack to earn money and gain influence in the hood. You set out on a series of missions to take back your territory, starting small with things like spray-painting over other gangs' tags (which is one of the many new types of actions that replace previous GTA games' more-generic hidden package collecting here), but quickly moving up to drive-bys and other acts of extreme gangsterism. But there's a whole lot more to San Andreas than just set tripping.  Just when you think you're getting used to gang warfare, everything goes sour. We're certainly not interested in spoiling the game's many interesting plot twists, so we'll leave out the details, but it should suffice to say that you'll eventually need to get the heck out of Los Santos. You wind up in the country outside the city, where you'll encounter many more great characters and officially embark on your quest to put right what's gone wrong. Once you get out of Los Santos, you won't really have to worry about gang warfare for a while, and the game settles down into a more GTA-like feel.  The San Andreas story is well written and packs in some really great surprises that tie this game to the previous GTA games.  Like the previous games in the series, San Andreas features a fairly linear story that takes you through the game's areas. You'll start off restricted to Los Santos--something the story justifies by claiming that an earthquake has taken out the bridges and roads that link Los Santos to the surrounding area--but it doesn't take long to unlock the other two areas. The game also throws in some pretty great surprises in the form of characters from previous entries in the series. These characters tie the GTA games together really nicely, so while San Andreas feels pretty different from the other games in the series, it still feels like you're playing in the same universe.  As in the previous games, most of your progress is accomplished by completing missions for a variety of individuals. These missions are oftentimes similar to missions you've seen in previous games in the series. You'll drive people around, take out specific individuals (an early mission gives you the straightforward objective of beating up a crack dealer, for example), do drive-bys on your enemies, and so on. But as you proceed through the game, the missions get crazier and crazier. Along the way you'll pull off a daring casino heist, steal some wicked military hardware, ""take care"" of plenty of Mafia bozos, and much, much more. The missions in the game are a lot more exciting, on average, than they have been in some previous GTA games. Additionally, the game is a lot better at spelling out what, exactly, needs to be done. It does this with onscreen text that color-codes each specific piece of a mission differently. Yet while the basics of the gameplay--taking on and completing missions--are similar to past GTA games, there are plenty of details to uncover, and plenty of new things to try.  The first addition to the game is the ability to ride a bicycle, which you encounter almost immediately upon starting the game. You'll ride it like any other vehicle, but you'll find that tapping the X button makes CJ go faster. This is true on foot, also, as holding X will make you sprint, but tapping it makes him super sprint. The melee combat is a bit deeper now, as you can block and execute combo moves with the square and triangle buttons, respectively. The targeting system has received a slight overhaul that makes it look more like the targeting in Manhunt, but it's functionally very similar to the system in Vice City. CJ is also a little more athletic than previous GTA protagonists. For one thing, he can swim, both on the surface and underwater, which causes a breath meter to appear near your newly redesigned health meter. And if CJ's in shape, he can jump up and climb over high walls.  There's much more to San Andreas than just running with a gang and dumping on your enemies.  Yes, that's right. CJ needs to stay in shape if he's to perform at his best, which is a new feature for the GTA series. The game keeps track of a lot of different statistics that increase and decrease as you play the game. Your physical fitness is the most overt statistic, as you're able to work out in gyms to work on your muscle and stamina ratings, and you'll have to occasionally eat to prevent your muscle stat from occasionally draining a bit. Eating, however, can increase your fat statistic. CJ's body shape will change, depending on what you do and for how long. While this might sound like a whole lot of busywork, it's actually a very small part of the game, and the best way to handle it is to spend a few minutes working out in the early parts of the game to build up your muscle (giving you a bonus to your melee attacks) and your stamina (which dictates how long you can sprint before getting tired), and then eating occasionally to maintain the ratings without gaining too much fat. You really don't have to spend too much time on it, and earning the ability to sprint for long periods of time makes getting around (and getting away) much easier.  The game also tracks a lot of other statistics. Respect is a big one, as it's what you'll be earning the most of as you complete missions. Not all missions earn you money, but almost all of them are good for a slight respect bonus. A higher respect rating lets you recruit more and more gang members to follow you around and shoot at rival gangs, which is another new addition and a nice perk, but not something that comes in handy very often. You're also rated in a lot of different vehicle categories, like driving, riding motorcycles, bicycling, and piloting aircraft. As you use a vehicle, your skill with it slowly increases, which seems to tighten up the controls a bit. In the case of motorcycles, it also makes it less likely that you'll fly off the bike in a wreck. Your bicycling skills translate into higher bunny hops. Similarly, you're given stats for every type of firearm in the game. You'll start with poor skills with all weapons, but don't let the tag of ""poor"" fool you--CJ's skills feel roughly the same as Tommy Vercetti's when you first squeeze the trigger. After getting in some time with a weapon, you'll upgrade it to ""gangster"" level, which extends your lock-on range with the weapon, speeds up reloading, and in some cases lets you walk around while locked on. Upgrading your skill with a weapon to the highest level, ""hitman,"" takes a relatively long time, but it extends the lock-on range and speeds up reloading even further, and it also opens up the ability to dual-wield some one-handed weapons. Unloading two full clips of submachine-gun ammo is extremely satisfying here.  Increasing your weapon skill makes mowing down foes pretty easy.  Probably the best part about the game's stat system is that it's all extremely subtle. It would be easy for something like exercise and eating to monopolize the game, but in practice you really don't have to think about it. All you really see is a quick pop-up in the upper left-hand corner of the screen whenever a stat changes, and if it's changed enough to make a big difference, the game offers a text description of what has changed and what that means for you. You will have to think about your stats a bit when you come across the first flight mission, as the story won't proceed until you've gone through flight training. The training program is frustrating, but once you pass it, the flight controls seem to tighten up a bit, and you'll have had enough practice to make it through most of the flight missions without too much trouble. The other time you'll think about stats is when you first take on a mission that requires swimming. If you haven't leveled your lung capacity up to a certain point, you simply won't be able to continue. Up until that point in the story, though, you haven't had to go underwater at all, so at the beginning of the mission you'll have to spend some time going underwater and resurfacing until you've developed the lungs required to swim out to a boat and silently kill everyone on board.  But enough about statistics. The important thing about GTA: San Andreas is that it's insanely fun to play, regardless of how you decide to play it. The missions are less frustrating this time around--there are still plenty of challenging objectives for you to meet, but the game does a better job of pacing the missions and keeping you informed about what you're supposed to do next. As a result, players who might not have been able to complete Vice City will have a better chance of finishing San Andreas' story, but at the same time the game never really feels like it's too easy. Experienced players should be able to make their way through the game's epic tale in 35 to 40 hours, though if you've been playing Vice City every day in anticipation of this game's release, that number could conceivably fall as low as 25 to 30--which is a pretty lengthy adventure, any way you slice it. On top of that, players who stick to the critical story path and ignore all the side stuff will finish the game with a completion percentage somewhere in the 50s, so obviously there's a lot more to San Andreas than just getting out of the hood and building a criminal empire. Even players who devote all their time in GTA to causing mass destruction will still have a great time here, though you may want to play through the story long enough to unlock the game's other areas. And this time, you'll be able to start trouble with a friend.  One of the many interesting wrinkles in GTA's gameplay is that the game now has a two-player cooperative mode. Now, before you get too excited about this, you should know that you can't actually play the entire game with a friend. Instead, you'll run into little two-player icons in certain spots in the gameworld. Walking over one with a second controller plugged in lets you start up a series of special objectives that work sort of like the rampage icons in previous GTA games. You and a friend will be able to wreak havoc in a car or on foot, though the game requires that both players remain on the same screen. While the concept of a multiplayer mode in GTA is pretty mind-blowing, the implementation here makes it more of a fun little addition that, along with all the other crazy things you'll come across as you play, contributes to the feel that the game has a million different things for you to uncover. OK, while there aren't quite a million side missions in the game, it seems to come pretty close, offering everything from a basketball minigame, to pool games played for money, to arcade machines that pay homage to classic games like Gyruss and Gradius.  There's a lot of variety to San Andreas' gameplay, and most of its features are very well constructed.  Some of the missions that have been with the series for years reappear here. When you enter a police vehicle, you can hit the R3 button and take on some vigilante missions. The same thing goes for fire trucks and ambulances. If you get into a moving van at night, you can embark on a home-invasion mission, which is a stealthy task that requires you to enter a home and make off with some goods without making noise. Walking when crouched is the order of the day here. You'll also find an assortment of races, ranging from the good old dirtring to well-hidden mountain-bike challenges. Another interesting facet of the game is that you'll get to hook up with a variety of women. The story requires you to dabble in the game's dating system, which sets you up with specific women at different points in the game, but there are plenty of other girls you can take out, if you have the look and style they're searching for. Dates are usually pretty simple: You pick up the girl, and usually she wants to eat. It's up to you to drive her someplace. If she's thinking lobster, but you're thinking Burger Shot, the date's not going to go particularly well, but there are a variety of nice places to go. You don't usually take any control during the date other than driving her to the location and back to her house, but if she wants to go dancing, the game launches into a simple Dance Dance Revolution-like timing minigame. In an awesome touch, this same type of minigame appears when you enter a lowrider-hopping contest, which is a good way to earn a little extra cash.  The Grand Theft Auto series has always been rather stylish, visually speaking. Vice City did an amazing job of capturing both the look of Miami and the feel of the mid '80s. San Andreas has to live up to that standard while creating four unique landscapes--one for each city, and one for the countryside between cities. Fortunately, the game does this very, very well. The parts of Los Santos that you call home have a very realistic ghetto look that fits perfectly. The other cities in the game also look a lot like the towns they're modeled after, but the most dramatic difference occurs when you leave town. The countryside is unlike anything you've seen in previous GTA games. The winding country roads, the small towns that pepper the landscape, plenty of off-road action, and lots of nice-looking foliage make these areas look pretty amazing. Outside of Las Venturas, the area is much more desertlike, which also looks really great. And there's no loading time separating up all the landmass.  The architecture looks outstanding, and the game has some new effects to match. The old trails effect from Vice City and GTAIII is history. Now, you'll see everything pretty clearly, but when you're in warm areas, the game has a nice heat-shimmer effect. When you're moving at or near top speed in a car, the screen blurs a bit, which does a fantastic job at conveying an extreme sense of speed. Also, the game takes on a grainy, filtered look when it rains, which also looks really good. The character models throughout San Andreas look very good as well, though some aspects, like the characters' blocky hands, look a little weird at times.  While the game's frame rate isn't stable, San Andreas still looks great.  It's not all fun and sun when it comes to San Andreas' graphics, though. As in previous GTA games, the frame rate in San Andreas is pretty unstable. It always runs at a playable rate, but depending on what you're doing, how fast you're doing it, and how many other objects are onscreen, the frame rate can vary wildly. Additionally, there are some occasional level-of-detail issues, where you'll be able to get pretty close to an object before its ""looks good up close"" texture can load in. This sort of problem will probably vary, depending on the condition of your hardware. If your PS2 is new and fresh, you probably won't see it too often. But if your system has seen better days, it might have trouble keeping up with you when it comes to streaming in the new textures and landscapes. The draw-in distance seems a lot further out than Vice City's, but you'll still see some structures pop into view, especially when flying overhead at high speed. But even when you take these issues into consideration, San Andreas delivers a really impressive-looking graphical package on the aging PlayStation 2 hardware.  The sounds of San Andreas are, as you'd expect, many and varied. The game does a really strong job with things like engine noises. Vehicles like jets (yes!), fast cars, and motorcycles all deliver deep, throaty tones that make them sound as fast and powerful as they really are. Gunfire sounds about like you'd expect, and the game's Pro Logic II support does a fine job of positioning the audio properly. San Andreas doesn't have DTS support, as Vice City did, but you probably won't notice any real difference. On the other hand, you'll surely notice how the quality of the voice work has improved since that game.  In a story-driven game like San Andreas, the voice cast has a profound effect on the story's impact. Rockstar has assembled a fantastic cast for the game that, down to a person, does a great job with the dialogue. While there are definitely some recognizable names on the cast list, the game doesn't go overboard in this respect, casting a relatively unknown rapper by the name of Young Maylay in the role of CJ--and he delivers an excellent performance. MC Eiht, an inspired inclusion to say the least, does a great job with the role of Ryder. Samuel L. Jackson does some fine work in the role of the dirty cop, Officer Tenpenny. Comedian David Cross is pretty funny in the role of the nerdy hobby store owner, Zero. Peter Fonda is very strong as a hippie/conspiracy theorist known only as ""The Truth."" Charlie Murphy, best known for his appearances on Chappelle's Show, does well in the role of a pimp named Jizzy B. Even Ice-T turns up as a rapper named Madd Dogg. But the best role in the game goes to James Woods, who is absolutely incredible in his role as Mike Toreno. To mention too much about his role in the story would give away a plot point or two, but your time spent with Toreno--both in the cutscenes and in the actual missions that surround this segment of the story--is some of the best and most uniquely rewarding that San Andreas (and, therefore, Grand Theft Auto) has to offer.  The cast in San Andreas does a really amazing job of delivering the game's great dialogue.  The in-car radio was one of the most effective tools that GTA: Vice City used to make the game feel like it took place in the '80s--having hours and hours of great music to choose from was among the game's most noteworthy features. San Andreas contains some pretty strong radio stations, but the overall selection is a little too scattered. The rap station, Radio Los Santos, is the most fitting, at least for the gang-related segments of the game. With songs from Dr. Dre, Compton's Most Wanted, and Tupac Shakur, this station does a good job of sounding like Los Angeles radio, circa 1992. The other stations, however, don't set the tone nearly as well. There's a classic-rock station, a classic-rap station (Did classic-rap radio even exist in 1992? Heck, does classic-rap radio exist today?), a country station, an alternative station, a funk station, a talk-radio station, and so on. While the rap station and the alternative station do passable jobs of delivering the music of the era, you'll probably be able to quickly rattle off 10 or 15 songs you would've liked to have heard instead. With the inclusion of things like a country station and a classic-rock station, it almost seems like the game's developers felt the need to offset the game's thuggish subject matter, and ended up with a soundtrack that isn't quite as cohesive as Vice City's.  One neat thing is that the radio sounds different depending on which vehicle you're in--so, for example, the radio will sound appropriately tinny on a dirt bike. You can even go purchase a bass boost for your car at the mod shop, but considering the disposable nature of vehicles in a Grand Theft Auto game, we recommend you save your money. Also, it's worth noting that the radio stations are the same, regardless of where in the gameworld you are. It would have been neat to have seen some of your station selections change as you drive from one city to the next.  You'll hear some familiar voices on the radio, including Chuck D as the Forth Right MC.  The DJs on the radio do a good job, and the radio commercials feature the same style of tongue-in-cheek humor that you've come to expect from the series. Some celebrities make appearances as DJs. Public Enemy's Chuck D plays the DJ of the classic-rap station, George Clinton mans the funk station, and Axl Rose turns in a low-key but appropriate performance as the DJ of the classic-rock station. The talk radio in the game is, for the most part, pretty good. The most impressive thing about the talk station is that the news breaks update as you play the game. So you'll hear updates about, for example, a ""mysterious"" ship full of dead bodies found floating out at sea shortly after that swimming mission of yours. Lazlow returns with some great ""celebrity"" interviews, but you'll also hear a sports show, a matchmaking program, and a gardening show whose host is played by the never subtle Andy Dick.  Usually, when a game tries to do a million different things, it's an overambitious hodge-podge that can't manage to get its different parts down cold. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has you doing many, many more things than any previous GTA game, and while some of them do work a little better than others, the strength of all these different gameplay elements--too many to count--makes for a powerful package that does not disappoint, despite the extremely high standards that Grand Theft Auto established and that San Andreas needed to live up to. With its strong story, well-written dialogue, terrific voice cast, impressive graphics, great in-game sound, and extremely entertaining and varied gameplay, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a stupendous thrill ride that shouldn't be missed.  


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35,The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ,9.6, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is simply one of the best role-playing games ever made.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/6/4/2218964-box_oblivion.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-review/1900-6146657/,pos,"
  This is a rare and remarkable achievement--a huge, open-ended, complex, detailed role-playing game that's fun to play and a pleasure to behold. Oblivion not only delivers everything that earned the Elder Scrolls series the devoted loyalty of a huge following of fans, but also significantly improves on the weaknesses of its 2002 predecessor, Morrowind. Morrowind earned recognition for being one of the best role-playing games in years, but the immersive and long-lasting experience it provided wasn't for everyone. Oblivion is hands-down better, so much so that even those who'd normally have no interest in a role-playing game should find it hard to resist getting swept up in this big, beautiful, meticulously crafted world.   Morrowind was a tough act to follow, but Oblivion isn't just better--it's a lot better.   The Elder Scrolls series is known for its sheer size and depth. These are games that you could lose yourself in, spending hours exploring a fantasy world, traveling for miles, or just looking for minutiae, such as rare plants or hidden treasure. Oblivion lives up to this pedigree, putting you into a massive, cohesive, highly immersive world. You get to create your own character--the possibilities for customization seem limitless--and then explore the world as you will. There's a compelling main quest for you to follow, which takes about 40 hours to finish the first time through, but the majority of the game's content is peripheral to that main quest. You can root out evil in hidden dungeons, join and climb the ranks in a number of different guilds, visit all the different towns and try to solve everybody's problems, compete in a long series of gladiatorial battles to the death, break into someone's home and rob them in their sleep, get caught and face the consequences, contract a disease that leads to vampirism and then try to find a cure, buy a house, steal a horse, invest in your favorite shop, and, if you can believe it, there's much more.    So the breadth of content is as remarkable as ever, but the most important thing is this: The many types of gameplay in Oblivion are well-designed and deeply satisfying, even when taken on their own. That's the main difference between this game and Morrowind. This may be a role-playing game, but you could play it like a pure action game, or like a stealth game, or like an adventure game, and it'd still be at least as good as, if not better than, games that are specialized in these regards.    Oblivion does a great job of quickly introducing you to all these different aspects of play, successfully engaging you rather than overwhelming you. You see the world through your character's eyes, but a behind-the-back perspective is also available. Initially you just pick a name, race, and gender for your character, and the game opens with you stuck in a dungeon cell, being taunted by a fellow inmate. Somehow, though, you get swept up in a desperate escape attempt by the emperor and his loyal retinue of protectors. The emperor, voiced unmistakably by Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation, X-Men), recognizes you from a portentous dream and entrusts you with the search for his illegitimate heir. But first, you'll need to escape from the Imperial City's sewers. As you make your way through this basic dungeon crawl, you happen upon ill-fated adventurers, their stuff, and some ornery goblins, so you immediately get to play around with close combat, ranged attacks, magic, sneaking, lock picking, equipment repairing, and more. How you survive is up to you--it's just as viable to kill your enemies with destructive magic, weapons, or bare hands as it is to sneak or run right past them. And even though the sewer setting might sound unimaginative, the quality of the game's visuals, the exceptionally good atmospheric sound effects, and the realistic physics all serve to quickly draw you in.   Not only is there a huge amount of great content in the game, but you can also experience it in all kinds of different ways depending on the type of character you create.   Toward the end of this sequence, the game does a clever job of recommending a character class to you based on how you've been playing. For example, if you've gone toe to toe with every goblin you've seen, hacking them up with an axe, you might make a good barbarian. But the game's numerous premade character classes aren't nearly as interesting as the ability to create your own custom class. The choices are numerous but clearly presented, and while you could go out of your way to create a fairly useless character, your intuition will easily guide you through what's a complex process. You choose an underlying specialization--combat, magic, or stealth--then you choose a couple of primary attributes, seven major skills, and even a birth sign. Basically, you're choosing your character's talents. Every character can use every skill; it's just a question of how well. Ultimately, this character-creation process is much like Morrowind's, and it shares the same ingenious design: You get stronger in this game by practicing and improving your primary skills, not by killing stuff and earning generic experience points.    That's not to say you can play Oblivion like a pacifist, since the main quest and many others are combat-intensive. But all the fighting in this game is probably one of the best parts. Visceral toe-to-toe melee battles have you carefully negotiating the distance between you and your opponent while switching between quick and powerful attacks, sometimes pausing to manually deflect your enemy's blows with your weapon or shield. Specifically, melee combat feels faster and smoother than it did in Morrowind, since in that game, it was possible to whiff blows against enemies while still appearing to hit--in Oblivion, close combat (as well as ranged combat) looks and feels much more solid. Your foes are generally quite smart, too. Humanoid enemies will taunt you when they're winning or turn tail and flee if they're near death. If you're faced with a number of foes, you can try to draw closer ones into the line of fire of the ones in the back--but be careful, because ranged attackers will lead their shots, forcing you to dodge and weave during battle, rather than simply keep moving.   The combat in Oblivion is surprisingly fun and exciting, whether you fight head-on or from the shadows.   A stealthy approach can be a tantalizing alternative, since sneaking up behind an opponent, pick-pocketing him, and then finishing him off with a single, deadly sneak attack can be at least as satisfying as slugging it out. And there are a wide range of magic schools to choose from, as well. Blast your foes with elemental spells, summon demonic aid or otherworldly weapons, charm your enemies into laying down their arms, debilitate the toughest monsters into simpering wimps that even a magic-user could beat up, make yourself invisible or really fast, and on and on. Whether you're playing on the Xbox 360 or PC, you can select a number of spells, items, and/or weapons for easy access in the heat of the moment.    Of course, there's much more to the game than combat against a wide variety of scary-looking bad guys. Simply exploring one of the game's towns and interacting with its populace can be a remarkable experience. Characters don't all stand around like they did in Morrowind; they're on a schedule, so they'll go to work in the morning and go to bed at night, and you can catch them going from place to place, talking to each other about recent rumors, and so on. They'll regard you differently depending on your personality and appearance, and you can compel them to like you better using everything from bribery to a fun little persuasion minigame in which you must guess at the other character's disposition and act accordingly. Every line of dialogue in the game is delivered in full speech, and the quality of the voice acting and the writing is generally excellent.    Almost every character in every town is unique, apart from the generic guards you'll find patrolling around (though every city's guards are different, clad in their respective armor and uniforms). There isn't always a ton to say to each character, but the fact that there are so many different lifelike characters in this game is staggering. It's exciting to stop and chat with each new person you meet, especially since a lot of them might send you on a quest of some sort or tell you where you can find one. Their faces are expressive, their eyes glint with life, and their lips move well with their speech. They could have used more body language, though, since they stand almost perfectly still when you're speaking to them. These aren't necessarily the most realistic-looking characters in any game to date, but they're up there.    Also, the way the quest system is structured in Oblivion is a huge improvement to the way quests were handled in Morrowind. In this game, anytime you're given a quest, you're prompted with a clear summary of what the quest is about and what you're supposed to do or where you're supposed to go. All your pending quests are clearly listed as part of the game's well-designed menu system, and you can set any of them to be your active quest, which automatically marks your objective on your map and gives you a compass waypoint to follow. This means there's next to no time wasted confusingly wandering around, looking for the right person to talk to or the next place to go.    In fact, you can instantly travel to all major metropolitan areas right from the start, or any other landmarks you've previously discovered. Through the ""fast travel"" feature on the world map, Oblivion simulates the amount of time it would have taken you to hoof it from point A to point B, so if you'd prefer to quickly teleport from one town to another instead of go by foot or on horseback, you're free to do that. This might be jarring at first, both to Morrowind fans and new players, but it turns out to be a great feature that helps keep the gameplay fast-paced...if that's how you like it. Certainly, the game rewards you for exploring on your own, since you'll find all kinds of uncharted places worth visiting. And in general, the way the quest system is structured is ideal for making you feel like you always have clear goals, yet without it feeling dumbed down or easy.   There's a lot to do in the game, but it's easy to keep track of your objectives thanks to a great quest system and map interface.   On that note, the game's level of challenge feels just right by default, though you can adjust a difficulty slider if you want to make it easier or harder. There's so much to do at any given point that even if you do get stuck on something, you can always come back to it later and go do something else that's fun and rewarding. The game's fine-tuned challenge is achieved in part because the enemies you'll encounter out in the world will get stronger as you do, though in practice, this doesn't come across nearly as contrived as it sounds. Growing more powerful in this game feels suitably rewarding, as it should in any role-playing game. As you find new and better equipment or spells, gain mastery over your skills, and increase your ability scores, you'll clearly get the impression that you're becoming much stronger. One of the great, new features in Oblivion is how all of the different skills in the game have different levels of mastery and corresponding perks--for example, when you reach journeyman level with blunt weapons, you gain a chance to disarm your foes with a power attack. Or, a journeyman in marksmanship can zoom in to snipe at foes with his or her bow. The strongest spells are limited to masters of their respective magic schools, and so on. When you advance to a higher rank in a skill, you get an immediate and significant payoff that wasn't there in Morrowind, where your character grew stronger much more subtly.    All of that aside, the main quest in Oblivion features a solid good-versus-evil storyline that'll give you a reason to see a lot of the world and get wrapped up in a lot of other activities. Much of the main quest revolves around the good-natured illegitimate son of the emperor, voiced to perfection by Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings, Patriot Games), and how you become his trusted ally in a desperate attempt to rid the world of what's essentially an invasion from hell. The title of the game refers to a hellish realm from which demons are springing forth and besieging the land of Tamriel, and you get wrapped up in the middle of an effort to put a stop to it. While this main quest doesn't branch wildly depending on the disposition of your character, you can go about it while being as good or as evil or as chaotic-neutral as you please.   Stunning good looks and fantastic audio make spending lots of quality time with this game that much easier.   That is, you can opt to help the emperor's heir out of the goodness of your heart or for your own self-serving motives, or not at all if you'd prefer not to. You can actually role-play in this game, something that the vast majority of role-playing games have stopped offering in recent years. Unlike in a massively multiplayer role-playing game filled with people acting out of character, or a typically linear Japanese role-playing game in which you're more of a spectator than an active participant in the plot, in Oblivion the world will often respond to you as you'd expect. Characters will ask you if you're feeling well if you've been diseased. They'll hail you as a hero if you save their town from one of the looming oblivion gates that are threatening the world. They might be apprehensive toward you if you approach them with a weapon drawn, and they'll yell at you and summon the guards if they catch you stealing.    Yet, the more believable a game is, the more believable you want it to be, and it's true that the artificial intelligence in Oblivion doesn't always put on a good show. You can break into someone's home and wake them up for a chat, and they'll chat with you like nothing's happened. The guards still might suddenly show up, seemingly without notice, but probably because one of them saw you crack the lock on the front door. Sometimes you'll battle alongside computer-controlled allies, but while these guys may be likable, they really aren't good at self-preservation, and you'll probably catch yourself mourning their loss more than their comrades will. Also, you can't bash stuff open, and no bathrooms are to be found anywhere in a world that's otherwise so finely detailed that it genuinely seems lived in. And the things about it that aren't always realistic or believable can still be amusing and entertaining. You're free to do whatever you want. Why not find out what happens if you try to pickpocket the Count of Skingrad while he's looking straight at you in the middle of his heavily guarded court? You can always load your saved game if things go sour, and you can save quickly at any point.    Considering all that's in this game, it's surprisingly difficult to find much fault with any of it. The inventory system could have been a little more streamlined, and the encumbrance system will quickly disrupt your plans to pick up and carry as much stuff as you'll wish you could, but these things are hardly worth mentioning. However, some reference to the game's technical performance is necessary. On the Xbox 360, you can look forward to a usually fast and smooth frame rate and graphics that look especially dazzling on a high-definition display. On a high-end PC, you can get the game looking even better, though unless you have a fast graphics card and at least a gig of RAM, you might have a hard time getting the game to appear pretty while moving at an acceptable frame rate at a high resolution. The frame rate especially tends to bog down when a lot of characters are simultaneously onscreen, which might explain why there aren't as many people milling about in the cities as you might hope for. Controls are as good on the Xbox 360 as on the PC, though using the PC's number keys is a little easier than using the 360 controller's D pad for quickly switching between items and powers. On the other hand, a lot of the other interface elements seem like they were designed with the console version primarily in mind, which makes switching between character menu panels using the mouse feel a bit clunky on the PC. Both versions contain fairly frequent but fairly short loading times, a slight detriment to the game's sense of immersion, but nothing that you wouldn't expect from a game with this much detail.   Once you visit Tamriel, you might want to stay there.   Ultimately, which version you choose should depend on whether you have a high-powered PC and whether you have an Xbox 360 hooked up to a home theater. If you don't have the former, the Xbox 360 version is a relatively safer bet, and it gains a perk over its PC counterpart by offering some unlockable achievements, enticing you both to finish the main quest and to earn your keep in all the different guilds in the game. It packs a higher retail price, though. Meanwhile, there's a downloadable toolset available for the PC version, which will surely lead to untold volumes of user-created content that could extend the life of the game. Incidentally, the Xbox 360 version also contains hooks for future content downloads over Xbox Live.    What's overwhelming about Oblivion is how good it is and how much there is to it. Literally almost everything that's ever been done well before in past role-playing games is in here--done at least as well, if not better. From the quality of the story and character interaction to the pure thrill of the combat to all the pleasure to be found in the game's little details--the lock-picking minigame, the alchemy system, the way arrows stay stuck in their victims, the ability to eventually create your own spells, the informative full-color manual, all the different books you can stop to read in the game--these things combine to make Oblivion one of the single best, longest-lasting gaming experiences to be had in a long time. It's just too bad there's no multiplayer.    Just kidding.  

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36,Gears of War ,9.6," Gears of War is an outstanding technical achievement, but in addition to looking and sounding amazing, it's a seriously awesome action game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/0/0/5/2215005-box_gow.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gears-of-war-review/1900-6161188/,pos,"
  In Gears of War, a slab of concrete is your best friend. And if that slab of concrete isn't around, you can always make do with burned-out cars, piles of metal, huge columns, or even the ever-popular wall next to a doorway. Why are these inanimate objects so friendly? Because if you aren't hiding behind something in Gears of War, you might as well be dead. Microsoft and Epic have teamed up to create this wicked game of hide-and-seek with high-powered future guns, which delivers one of the most heart-pounding and graphically thrilling experiences of the year. If its exciting campaign doesn't rope you in, chances are the team-based multiplayer will--either way, Gears of War is downright amazing.   Marcus Fenix disobeyed orders and got locked up, but in tough times, even a traitorous soldier is better than nothing.  The game's campaign tells the tale of a man named Marcus Fenix. He, like the other soldiers around him, is an extremely thick dude that very clearly doesn't have time to bleed. The game immediately sets an action movie-like tone, complete with an interesting post-apocalyptic world that's been overrun by a mysterious force called the Locust. Marcus is a former soldier for the Coalition of Organized Governments, or COG. Their soldiers wear ridiculously huge, bulky armor, but can't be bothered to wear helmets. They're just that tough. Or stupid. Either way, Fenix is a former soldier that's been branded a traitor and locked away, but he's busted out of prison at the opening of the game, to help in the fight against the Locust. After a brief tutorial level where you and Dom, the soldier that busted you out, make your way out of the Locust-infested prison and, yes, get to the chopper, you're connected with the other members of Delta Squad and sent out to find Alpha Squad, which is both missing and supposedly in possession of a device that could turn the tide of the war. The game's story isn't very deep, and aside from a very brief mention in the front of the manual, it doesn't really bother to fill you in on the details behind the conflict or the main character's incarceration. The lack of exposition feels like a missed opportunity to make the characters and the setting even more compelling, and there are parts of the game that seem like they were built specifically to make room for some kind of flashback sequence, but the gameplay is so sharp that you probably won't care.     You'll fight a decent variety of enemies in Gears of War. Most of the Locust are humanoids, with minor visual distinctions between the standard troops, ones with shotguns, and so on. Later on, you'll fight some different-looking humanoid-style enemies that are armed with explosive torque bows, and there are plenty of other critters to face--some small, some screen-filling. They all use slightly different tactics, but the same basic rule applies: Wait for them to pop their heads (or other weak points) out and attempt to shoot it off. The enemy response to your actions has its great moments, but it also has its problems. Enemies hiding behind cover tend to not react when they get hit. From time to time, you might catch the back of an enemy peeking just over a piece of cover, and if you start shooting it, he'll usually just sit there and let you drill him to death. But in spite of its few problems, the action is tense and extremely enjoyable.    Gears of War consists of a large series of pitched battles between your squad and the enemy forces. If you leave your fool head popped up for too long, it'll get shot off every single time, so the proper place for you is tucked behind a wall or some other piece of cover. The cover mechanics work very naturally, making it easy to stick to a wall, pop up or around to take shots at the enemy, and get back down safely. Moving between nearby pieces of cover is also very easy to manage.    This isn't the first time that taking cover has been a focus of gameplay--the mechanics work very similarly to a fairly obscure PlayStation 2 game from Namco called kill.switch. But no game has made this sort of gameplay quite so exciting. One of the greatest feelings in this game is that when you pop out to take a shot, you immediately feel like you're taking your life into your own hands, because the enemy is very good at opening fire the second they see you and you'll see those bullets heading your way. This formula remains thrilling from start to finish, though boss fights and a pretty neat vehicle section help to break up the action.    Thankfully, one shot won't kill you, in most cases. The health meter takes the form of a skull and gear icon that appears onscreen in pieces as you take damage. If it's completed, that means you took one hit too many and you're history. But if you can avoid getting shot for a few seconds, the gear fades away and you're restored to full health. It's a much quicker recharge than something like Halo's energy shields, and this helps keep the action moving while reinforcing that you really need to play cautiously.    You'll usually have three other guys in your squad, but they usually aren't much help. They're good for distracting enemies, and they'll take down a few here and there, but they also tend to get dropped a lot. You can revive them, if you can get over to them and hit the X button, but usually it's easier to just finish the fight yourself, which brings them all back without exposing you to the same enemy fire that took them down in the first place.   Gears of War is all about ducking, covering, and blasting your enemies whenever they give you an opening.  Gears of War offers two difficulty settings right off the bat, and a third unlocks when you beat the game. The game defaults to the easiest setting, called casual. On this setting, taking cover only becomes important when you're up against heavy odds or later in the game, when the enemies get tougher. The middle setting, hardcore, feels just right at first--you need to take cover, but you can usually pop up and take shots without immediate punishment. But near the tail end of the game, both difficulties ramp up quite a bit. Hardcore starts to get a little unmanageable. Casual gets to be about as hard as the hardcore setting is near the beginning of the game. And once you unlock insane, you'll find that it's aptly named, though not impossible. Overall, the difficulty feels like it could have used a bit more tuning, or another setting that finds the sweet spot between casual and hardcore. But since you can select your difficulty each time you load up your game, it's easy to set it down to casual if you get stuck at a certain checkpoint, then raise it back up once you've made progress. Making your way through the campaign should take most players somewhere from about 10 to 12 hours, depending on the difficulty.    The game has achievements for finishing each of the five acts on each of the three difficulties, and they stack, so if you beat an act on hardcore, you get the casual points, as well. It only seems to keep track of what difficulty setting you're on when you finish the act, so all this switching around won't cause any trouble on that front, either. The game's achievements are pretty good, with a smart mix of points you'll get for simply playing through the game and some more esoteric ones, like points for playing as Dom in co-op, points for perfectly reloading your weapon many times in a row, doing well online, and so on. None of the points seem that far fetched, but you also won't have the full thousand during your first couple of days with the game, either.    While the campaign is fine and good alone, it's even better when you're playing with another player. You can do so via a split-screen or over Xbox Live, and the good news is that you can continue the campaign from where you've played in the single-player, so you can use any mix of single or cooperative play to get through without having to replay missions. The second player takes on the role of Dom, and the game is both more entertaining and significantly easier when playing with a partner. That's because when players die in co-op, they can be revived, provided they haven't been blown to bits or their deaths don't take place during one of the few times when the team splits up, separating the two human players. Online, the co-op behaves quite smoothly, and the graphics in split-screen mode appear to be just as good as they are when you're playing alone. About the only negative aspect of co-op play is that if a player drops out of an online game, the other player is forced to quit back to the main menu. A more seamless drop-in/drop-out setup would have been cool.   The game's online options make for some really exciting team-based gameplay.  A big part of making any shooter memorable is the design of its weapons. Gears of War has some very satisfying weaponry that really make the game stand out. The machine gun you're going to use for most of the game is the Lancer, and in addition to it being a fast-firing death dealer, it also has a unique melee attack in the chainsaw bayonet. Yes, a machine gun with a chainsaw mounted to the bottom of it is just as awesome as it sounds, though since most of the enemies are content to hide behind cover and mow you down if you attempt to get close, you don't get to use it as often as you might like. But when you do, it's a terrific display of great, splashy blood effects. The other weapons in the game aren't quite as flashy, as you'll get a standard sniper rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, some grenades, and so on. But you'll also get to use something called the Hammer of Dawn, which is an orbital satellite that beams down hot, fiery death from above when you paint a target. But the catch is that the satellites have to be lined up above your position and you have to be outside for it to work, so it's only available in a few very specific situations during the campaign. You can carry four different weapons, but you'll always have slots reserved for a pistol and for grenades, so you have to make choices about which two main weapons you'll carry around with you.    Another really cool facet of the gameplay is that there's a trick to reloading your weapon. By default, reloads take a set amount of time and aren't anything flashy. But if you look just below the gun indicator on the screen, you'll see a line sweeping across a bar with a couple of different colors on it. That's the trick. A button press stops the meter. If you stop it in the gray area, the weapon reloads faster. If you stop it in the tiny white zone, you'll reload and all the bullets you just fed into your weapon will do more damage. But if you miss and hit it in the black, the gun jams and takes even longer to reload. It's a fascinating risk-versus-reward scenario that isn't difficult to master, but when you're under fire in a tense situation, you're still likely to screw it up now and then.    In addition to the single-player and co-op play, Gears of War has a team-based multiplayer mode for up to eight players. The four-on-four action is also round-based with no respawns, though like in the co-op game, you can revive other players when they go down. On the other side, though, that means you need to pump a lot more rounds into your enemies after they go down, just to make sure they stay down. Or, alternately, you can run up on their downed body and hit the X button, which delivers a very satisfying life-ending boot to your foe's head. For as much fun as the weapons are in single-player, they're actually more exciting here. The Hammer of Dawn becomes a pretty hilarious addition to the game, and you'll get to use that chainsaw more frequently against unsuspecting players thanks to the way the maps offer multiple ways to get to the same location. The key to multiplayer is to never work alone so that you can always have someone around to revive you and vice versa. Two players rolling up on one player usually (though certainly not always) results in the single player getting decimated. One of the other players may go down, but that's nothing a revival won't fix. The game's 10 maps offer a good variety, and you can mix the action up a bit by changing out the weapons that appear in the map. You can play in three different modes. Warzone is a standard team deathmatch. Assassination puts one player in the leader role and the other three players must fight as protectors. Execution forces you to kill opposing players yourself--if you let them sit there and bleed, they can hammer the A button to revive themselves. With a good number of maps and exciting action, this game appears to have some longevity to it online. If you like, you can also play over a LAN via system link, or locally--though local multiplayer is limited to two players, which isn't too exciting.   A shooter is only as good as its weapons, and Gears of War has a couple of really outstanding guns in it.  Consider Gears of War to be the game that raised the bar for how console games should look from here on out. The character models are thick and look outstanding. The gray, war-torn environments are nicely varied throughout the game, and the game is full of amazing standout visual moments, such as a train sequence where you see that the sky is full of ink left behind by flying Locust enemies, blocking your view of the stars just enough to prevent you from busting out the Hammer of Dawn. Or, when you get to an underground mine and see a lot of molten, glowing lava all around you. Or, anytime you get to use the chainsaw on anything, ever. Or, the way the camera gets down low and starts shaking like a wartime documentary whenever you start running. It all looks absolutely amazing, from the animation to the game's over-the-top blood effects.    The game also runs at a very steady frame rate during gameplay. The cutscenes, however, are rendered in real time, and when the action really gets heated in some of the sequences, the visuals chop up. The music in Gears of War is appropriately cinematic and really helps carry the action-movie style that the game is shooting for. The dialogue also gives off an action-movie vibe, mainly because most of it is totally meatheaded. The COG soldiers aren't scientists--they're dumb, strong soldier boys that are at home when they're behind the trigger. As a result, almost all of the dialogue is appropriately gruff and filled with the sort of ""let's rock!"" enthusiasm that you'd expect from a team of hardcore shooters. The weapons are also enhanced by great sound effects. The squish of flesh being ripped apart by the chainsaw, in particular, is outstanding.    Gears of War is a game that capitalizes on all of the promises made by the next generation of gaming. It looks more than a few steps beyond what consoles have been doing to this point, and the gameplay is supremely fulfilling from start to finish in all of its various modes. While there have certainly been plenty of similar shooters before it, the game's great weapons, amazing graphics, and absolutely thrilling action make it stand out from the pack in a big, big way.  


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37,Final Fantasy VII ,9.5," Never before have technology, playability, and narrative combined as well as in Final Fantasy VII.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/4/0/9/2215409-box_ff7.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/final-fantasy-vii-review/1900-2547583/,pos,"
Never before have technology, playability, and narrative combined as well as in Final Fantasy VII. The culmination of Square Soft's monumental effort is a game that will enrich just as it will entertain. Yet, for all the boundless praise it so rightfully deserves, Final Fantasy VII is not without its shortcomings and occasional design problems. These are enough to make some gamers (who are unfamiliar with RPGs, to be sure) wonder just why anyone would bother playing through it in the first place. This is the most dazzling visual experience to date on any console. Film-quality computer-generated cinematics blend seamlessly with pre-rendered background artwork to create the strikingly realistic world of Final Fantasy VII, both beautiful in its grandeur and terrifying in its detail. The overworld and battle sequences are presented in full polygonal splendor with just a touch of texture mapping for good measure. But you haven't seen anything until you witness some of the more powerful magic spells in the game. Massive dragons heed your bidding, dwarfing your gigantic enemies tenfold; an earth titan tears the ground up from beneath your enemies' feet, flinging them aside like toy blocks. Some of these summoning spells cut to over half a dozen different camera angles as the catastrophe unfolds. Meanwhile, a masterfully orchestrated soundtrack - courtesy of veteran composer Nobuo Uematsu - is a major force behind the intense emotion of Final Fantasy VII. The synthesized musical score hearkens Final Fantasy's golden age on the Super Nintendo, consciously staying true to its roots. Yet for all its top-notch graphics and sound, truly the best aspect of Final Fantasy VII is the plot that these peerless aesthetics help weave. Join the enigmatic mercenary Cloud Strife in a journey that will take him to the very source of his being in an incredible quest where the fate of the world hangs by a precious thread, threatening at any instant to be torn by the charismatic, tormented villain of the story. Final Fantasy VII's moving plot is influenced by some of the greatest works of science fiction film and literature, including Frank Herbert's Dune, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and even Godzilla. If you were to strip away the story, scenery, and musical score, Final Fantasy VII would otherwise be very much like any other Japanese RPG you've ever played. You still must face countless random monster encounters while keeping a close eye on your hit points and magic points, and you will witness your characters grow stronger with every experience level they attain. Battles are fought in typical Japanese RPG fashion (albeit with fully polygonal graphics), with your team on one side and any number of opponents on the other. You exchange blows until you or the enemy is defeated. Fights are made interesting with the introduction of Limit Breaks (devastating desperation attacks) and Materia, the curious colored crystals that let your party use magic and other special abilities. Materia can be found or purchased and mixed and matched to create all sorts of interesting effects. Best of all, there are more than enough hidden Materia, weapons, and optional plot sequences in the game to merit playing it through at least twice. Some have gone as far as to call Final Fantasy VII the hands-down best game ever made. And if you enjoy a good Japanese-style RPG, chances are you will agree. However, Final Fantasy VII, for all its astonishing features, is not a game with the sort of mass appeal that its massive marketing blitz may lead you to believe. For one thing, you can't finish it in a sitting, as Final Fantasy VII will be a solid 40 to 50-hour commitment for the average role-playing gamer. Otherwise, you might be taken aback by the extensive, text-heavy dialogue; there is no speech at all in Final Fantasy VII, in the interest of letting your imagination do a little work. Though you will make many small-scale decisions over the course of the game, on the whole, the story follows a very linear path. This linearity is a by-product of the plot's complexity, however - certainly a respectable sacrifice. Sony's translation of the original Japanese dialogue is direct and first-rate, much to the relief of Final Fantasy purists everywhere. Nitpickers may identify a very occasional spelling or grammar error (""Off course!"" agrees Cloud at the Golden Saucer battle arena), but otherwise this text-heavy game reads just right, flawlessly conveying each character's distinct personality. Even the foul-mouthed costars of the game retain their affronting attitudes, as Sony went as far as to translate certain four-letter words in the interest of staying true to the Japanese script. Final Fantasy VII boasts several features not found in the original Japanese release in February 1997. Some changes are designed to improve gameplay: For instance, now your party members can quickly and easily exchange their Materia, where swapping the invaluable crystals between characters was a real pain in the Japanese version. Also, at the touch of a button, all exit points on a particular screen become highlighted with conspicuous red arrows - these turn out to be a real boon in those areas where the exits aren't immediately obvious. Further, random monster encounters are thankfully much less frequent in many areas of the game, particularly on the overworld map. At the same time, Final Fantasy VII is considerably more challenging than its original release. You actually must plan ahead and devise some sort of strategy to beat some of the boss monsters that were likely pushovers before. Other changes include the addition of spectacular all-new cinematics and a handful of intriguing, new plot sequences at key points toward the end of the game. These moments help clarify several important issues in the story. Square Soft wasn't just resting on its laurels these past six months. The question you must ask yourself is, are you prepared to dedicate a good portion of the next month to take part in a powerful story unlike anything you have ever witnessed before? If your answer is yes, and you can approach Final Fantasy VII content knowing that it bears its genre's inherently problematic traits, you will find it be among the most incredible games you have ever played - or ever will. 
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38,Unreal Tournament ,9.5, Unreal Tournament is the most complete first-person shooter available.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/7/3/2217573-ut_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unreal-tournament-review/1900-2531737/,pos,"
When Unreal was released back in May of 1998, it turned a lot of heads. But while the game delivered the most immersive and interesting single-player shooter for its time, the multiplayer game was very weak in comparison. The weapons never really seemed to pack a punch. The deathmatch maps were hit and miss. The performance of Internet games took months of patching before it was acceptable, but by the time that happened, most people had already moved on to bigger and better games. In contrast, Unreal Tournament goes in a new direction for the first-person shooter genre by stripping away anything that resembles a single-player adventure mode, and instead, it strictly focuses on the more popular multiplayer aspects of the genre. Rather than spend development time working on a cohesive single-player scenario that most players will only play through once or twice, Epic Games used that same time to refine the multiplayer game. Consequently, the only single-player mode available serves as training for multiplayer matches by pitting you against computer-controlled bots. The bots have good, adjustable artificial-intelligence settings, which let you tailor the game's difficulty to your own personal skill level. On the lowest setting, anyone should be able to defeat the bots with little or no hassle, but once you bump up the difficulty, you'll have an actual challenge on your hands. The single-player mode will also teach you the basics about each different type of game contained in Unreal Tournament. Of course, deathmatch is the old standard free-for-all battle. Capture the flag, the quintessential first-person-shooter team game, is also included. Domination is a different type of team game. Each Domination level has three control points; when you touch a control point, you claim it for your team. The longer you hold a control point, the more points your team scores. So you duke it out to see who can hold the control points the longest. Assault is yet another new team game in which one team plays offense, and the other defends a base. Each map has a different set of offensive objectives (push the button at the front of the train, destroy four computers, and so forth). If the offensive team completes its mission, the two teams switch sides, and the new offensive team must complete the same objectives in the same amount of time it took the first team to succeed.The selection of weapons in Unreal Tournament is mostly taken from Unreal, but the weapons have all been redesigned to look and sound much better. The new weapons include the impact hammer, which is more or less a portable pneumatic piston that you can use as a last resort when the rest of your weapons are empty. The pulse gun fires small energy shots in its primary mode, but the secondary fire spits out a rail of energy that you can sweep around, like Quake's lightning gun. The redeemer is essentially a portable nuclear missile; the primary fire mode shoots it in a straight line, but the secondary mode switches to a really great-looking guided-missile view that lets you target foes from across the level. The nice thing about the game's weapons is that they seem really well balanced. There isn't a single weapon that causes you to run away in fear when you see it in your opponent's hands. The weapons may seem a little alien to players used to other first-person shooters, but once you get a feel for how each weapon operates, using them becomes second nature. As good as the original Unreal looked, Unreal Tournament looks even better. The character models and skins look excellent, and there are quite a few choices to make when designing your character. First, you'll choose a model, then a skin, and then you'll have a choice of which face to put on the model. The textures throughout the game look great, and the levels that have backgrounds look especially amazing. HyperBlast, the final level in the single-player game, is a good example: It takes place on a speeding starship. Stop to look out a window and you'll see stars zooming by. Hop out of the ship and run around on its roof and you'll be able to see other nearby ships keeping pace with you as you fly through space. Unreal Tournament has consistently ambitious level design throughout, and the entire game benefits from it. The levels feel less like simple first-person shooter maps and more like actual locations, such as starships, old mining facilities, and temples. The game's music lends some atmosphere to the proceedings, but it never overshadows the crucial sound effects you'll need to hear to keep tabs on what items your opponents are picking up. The first-person shooter genre is fiercely competitive. But Unreal Tournament rises above the rest with its solid multiplayer performance, from its good weapon balance to its great level design. The numerous game types and mini-mods that ship with the game give you plenty of options right out of the box, and the large variety of great maps ensure a fast-paced and exciting game, no matter how many players you've got. Even considering its lack of a solid single-player adventure, Unreal Tournament is the most complete first-person shooter available.
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39,Banjo-Kazooie ,9.5," It doesn't stray too far from the formula, but it makes the logical progressions you would expect Nintendo to make.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/3/4/2/2214342-box_bkazooie.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/banjo-kazooie-review/1900-2544109/,pos,"
A lot of people are writing off Banjo-Kazooie as a Super Mario 64 clone. Now let's think about this for a bit. Mario 64 was a revolutionary game. It redefined what people expected from a platform game. Banjo-Kazooie follows in the footsteps of Mario 64. It doesn't stray too far from the formula, but it makes the logical progressions you would expect Nintendo to make. The storyline is fairly typical. Banjo's sister, Tooty, has been kidnapped by the evil witch, Gruntilda. Gruntilda is hoping to use some wacky contraption to steal Tooty's youth. It's up to Banjo and Kazooie, the grumpy bird that lives in his backpack, to venture into Gruntilda's lair and stop the witch before it's too late. Once inside, you'll find an insanely huge overworld and nine levels to contend with. Mario's stars have been replaced by jigsaw puzzle pieces. These ""jiggys"" are used to open each level. Coins have been replaced by notes. You'll need to have a certain number of notes to proceed throughout the overworld. The red coins have been replaced by birds. Collecting all the birds in a level will give you a jiggy. Each level contains ten jiggys, 100 notes, and five birds. The first thing you'll notice about B-K is its size. The game is much, much bigger than Mario 64. The overworld is huge, and the levels are spread pretty far apart. Usually, the puzzle that opens up a level isn't even near the level's entrance. The gameplay in Banjo-Kazooie follows Mario, but Banjo and his bird have a lot more moves than Mario ever had. Luckily, there are some great tutorials in the beginning that teach you the basic punching, jumping, and swimming maneuvers. You'll learn the rest (flying, how to use certain items, etc.) as you need them. While Banjo has several different attack moves, I found that his basic roll is usually more than enough to take out all the run-of-the-mill enemies. Graphically, Banjo-Kazooie takes it to another level. The game maintains the look and feel of Mario 64, but instead of flat, shaded polygons, BK uses a lot of textures. You would think that the amount of texturing and the size of the levels would slow the game down a lot, but it runs nice and smoothly. The camera control has remained the same, but due to BK's many tight, enclosed areas, the camera sometimes fails to show the action from a playable perspective. Expect to miss some things that would normally be incredibly obvious, due to a bad angle. Also, you'll have to control the camera a bit more than you should have to, as it doesn't track perfectly. The sound and music are really well done. The soundtrack is infectious, and the character voices are very cool. All the ""speech"" is done in a Charlie Brown's teacher sort of way. If you were a fan of Mario 64, then it's pretty apparent that you're going to like Banjo-Kazooie as well. BK may be a Mario clone, but that isn't exactly a bad thing. In fact, it's a pretty good thing. In a world filled with mediocre N64 games, it's nice to see another truly great game on the system.
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40,Stormrise ,2," This frustrating, broken mess is one of the worst strategy games in years.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/4/7/2219547-box_srise.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/stormrise-review/1900-6207076/,neg,"
  Stormrise is one of those games that makes you wonder, ""What were they thinking?"" This real-time strategy game is, from top to bottom, misconceived, frustrating, frequently broken, and rarely fun. Developer Creative Assembly has built an entire product around a fundamentally flawed control scheme and neglected almost every important facet of the RTS genre. Embarrassingly busted pathfinding, infuriating interface problems, abysmal mission design, substandard visuals--these unpleasant elements and many others make the whole thing an unseemly mess. Furthermore, the game's console roots lead to an even more awkward experience on the PC than on other platforms.       The control scheme in question is called whip select, and its Stormrise's most interesting idea--and greatest liability. The game eschews the standard top-down perspective, forcing you to view the battlefield and issue orders from the viewpoint of an individual squad. This isn't a brand-new innovation; a similar perspective worked to great cinematic effect in Tom Clancy's EndWar. To switch to another unit, you rotate a line that emanates from the center of the screen by holding the right mouse button, hovering the line over your target unit's icon, and releasing. This is whip select, a control scheme that valiantly attempts to get around console gamepad restrictions but has no place on the PC. While at first it may seem like an odd but semifunctional alternative to traditional RTS controls, any initial fascination deteriorates rapidly into abhorrence, when the control scheme collides with the game's delinquent interface and often nonfunctional pathing.     Your initial struggles will come when you start to spread units across the map. When a squad isn't onscreen, it is represented by an icon displayed either in your field of view (when there are obstacles between your current selection and your target) or along the edge of the screen, in the manner of a space combat sim. When units amass in the distance, making an exact selection, especially in the midst of combat, can be a nightmare. You'll waste precious seconds fiddling to make sure you highlight the correct tiny icon before releasing the mouse button, or worse yet, choose the wrong unit, possibly flinging your view you to an unrelated squad that happens to be positioned in the same general direction--but underground. Or you may land on the wrong unit simply because you can't tell what the unit type is from the simple icon that represents it, wasting even more time while you fumble your way to the squad you need most. Rather than enhancing the enjoyment, whip select taints every action and hobbles the few moments where the game's burgeoning potential peeks from underneath this specter. It's like driving through a thick fog, or running with a broken leg. You can issue indirect orders, though this function is only mildly helpful, and like most aspects of Stormrise, was not implemented well. You can issue such a command when controlling a unit, but not when managing the power nodes that you must capture and upgrade, where the feature would have been far more helpful. In fact, when your view is centered on a power node, you can't even turn the camera, an inexplicable design flaw specific to the PC version.     From here, the problems begin to pile up, and the resulting tower of insanity crashes to the ground in an astounding mass of broken and half-implemented features. The pathfinding in particular is possibly the worst an RTS has seen to date. Units get hung up on everything: the environments, each other, and sometimes nothing at all. You might watch some individual members of a squad move forward while the lagging ones get stuck in the level geometry, and then teleport forward a few moments later. Large units like the spiderlike matriarchs may walk directly into beams and just keep walking rather than go around, and get stuck in jittery animation loops when they can't figure out what to do or where to go. Squads won't get out of the way of oncoming units, often leading to traffic jams that can only be fixed by manually leading away units one at a time until you can bring order to the chaos. Interpretive dance routines are common in the ranks of your infantry, and your warriors often choose to run about like buffoons rather than engage the enemy or find a place to still their hyperactive feet.    Here, the camera offers its usual brilliant view of important events...   The campaign's level design seems created almost to aggravate these issues. In the level that introduces the anti-infantry vehicles called prowlers, these units must navigate through tight roadways, a task they are clearly incapable of performing. In later missions, you must lead units down spiraling set of walkways to take a series of control points, and navigate through incredibly confined underground tunnels. The choke points in these areas create long, frustrating stalemates due to the resulting stew of practically uncontrollable units. At least in wider environments, unit behavior inspires fewer headaches, but these missions are simply abysmal, because bad pathfinding and unnecessary micromanagement lead to losses that could have been avoided if your units would have simply done what you commanded them to do. At least on the PC you can assign hotkeys to units, which lets you get around the map a bit more quickly than in the console versions. However, you can group only three (yes, three) units together, and doing so compounds the pathfinding absurdities.    Even should you overcome these roadblocks, you'll find that units are extremely slow to respond to orders, taking their time to move out of the way as if they need to give it some thought first. Want your hero unit to get out of the way when his health is quickly diminishing? Don't count on it: he'd rather perform a series of useless animations, and then die--which ends the mission--rather than actually follow your command. Not that it is always clear why your hero (or any other unit) is losing health in the first place. All too frequently, you will watch a health bar slowly diminish, yet the absence of bullets, lasers, or nearby units will make you wonder where the damage is even coming from. This is because animations and effects often go missing. Enemy rangers might collapse in a bloody heap, apparently from the fire of your hovering hunters--but because these airborne units are stuck in a jittery loop, you won't see any laser fire. In fact, Stormrise goes out of its way to not give you important visual information. Once units are grouped, you cannot see their remaining health, which is an enormous problem should you include a commander in the group. Should you want a better look at the battlefield, you might try pulling up the overhead view, though in doing so you will find the most useless piece of garbage that's ever been passed off as a map.    This smorgasbord of horrific design is all the more heartbreaking when you consider the game's potential. Yes, Stormrise is brimming with terrible ideas poorly executed, but the grim, futuristic setting and cool-looking units like the soaring rift worm show elements of real promise. Two factions, the Echelon and the Sai, clash over the future of the planet after a cataclysmic environmental disaster, and both sides' moral ambiguities give way for a few different twists and turns to the tale. The story isn't always easy to follow, but emphatic voice acting and a few atmospheric touches keep the narrative interesting, even if you aren't always sure what's going on. Sadly, poor production values cast a shadow on these few bright spots. When masses of units collide, Stormrise can offer a mild visual spectacle. Otherwise, low-resolution textures, poor lighting, and muddy, uninspired art make the game look homely, even when you crank every visual option up to its highest setting. It's hard to imagine why such an unattractive game requires DirectX 10 (and therefore Windows Vista) to play.     The basic gameplay also showcases some decent core ideas. You must capture and link power nodes to accumulate resources, and can upgrade them with shields and surprisingly effective turrets. This concept isn't that new, but it's a solid one that keeps you pressing forward. And while utilizing the terrain has been an important aspect of other strategy games, few offer Stormrise's sheer verticality. You can place snipers (called infiltrators here) on ledges and move infantry behind cover, and once you become familiar with each unit's attack range, careful positioning can open up some intriguing strategic options. Sadly, knowing each unit's range is even more important than you would expect, given that if you give an attack order, the unit will likely move right up to its target, rather than attack from the most distant possible range, as in every other RTS. This leads to more micromanagement, lest your rangers wander directly into their targets as if they just want a hug.   ...but if it doesn't show you what you need, you can always pull up this helpful tactical overview.   Stormrise's multiplayer component gives rise to its greatest ideas. Before you head into battle, you can customize your powerful commander unit with different weapons and abilities, which is a nice touch that gives you the element of surprise. Up to eight players can battle it out, and like World in Conflict, Stormrise offers drop-in, drop-out online play. At least here you can leave behind the single-player campaign's oft-frustrating mission objectives and concentrate on capturing power nodes while crushing the opposition. Multiplayer skirmishes offer the most hints at what the game could have and should have been, and a few micromanagement lovers may enjoy exploring their units' alternate attack modes (the matriarch's acid storm is fun to play with). However, you're still dealing with all the control and pathfinding issues, only now, you might get stuck on friendly units that you don't get any direct control over. If you really want to showcase your skills on the leaderboards, you can participate in ranked matches, but maddeningly, the game allows uneven teams, which is just out-and-out absurd in a ranked contest. Not that tacticians on the PC are likely to find many fellow players: at the time of this review, Stormrise's online community is so tiny that you may have trouble finding so much as a single competitor.     There are more nightmarish issues, of course. Such as how the terrible enemy AI ignores your attacks, or rushes past your powerful stalkers in endless, scripted waves. And how the broken checkpoints (don't let the ""saving progress"" indicator fool you) and single save slot mean potentially saving at an inopportune time, forcing you to restart a mission from the beginning. And the automated rally-point function, which may send your units off in the most unhelpful direction possible. Suffice it to say, Stormrise is a broken debacle that is in no way deserving of either your time or your money.     


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41,NBA Unrivaled ,2, NBA Unrivaled is one of the worst basketball games ever made.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/7/5/2222775-nbaunr_box.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-unrivaled-review/1900-6241577/,neg,"
  Well, at least they got the title right. NBA Unrivaled truly may be without rival…as the worst basketball game ever made. Bizarre animations. Idiotic player AI. Ugly visuals. Unresponsive controls. Annoying sound effects. Developer ACRONYM Games has run the table here, screwing up so much of this Xbox Live Arcade game that it is virtually unplayable.   Take lots of point shots because when the action gets down low, the terrible graphics turn even seven-foot giants into confusing mashes of color.   At first glance, the game does seem appealingly retro (well, aside from the price, which at 1,200 Microsoft points would be too much even if it were good). You can either team up with or take on a buddy either from the comfort of your couch or over the Net, though the online community is paltry at this point, which makes sense given how awful this game is. All 30 NBA clubs with their current rosters are included. Rudimentary controls handle passing, shooting, jumping, and reaching in, so you can sit down to start playing immediately despite the animations being so awful that it's difficult to get a handle on your movement.. There are even some minor frills. You can't set up a league, but you can take more control in games as a coach and do things like set up specific defenses. Momentum matters, too. Go on a run and you pump up the momentum meter, which boosts player attributes for a short while.    Not that any of this really matters. What looks like a reasonable design doc and feature list on paper has been executed abysmally. Controls are mushy and unresponsive. Occasionally players even take a couple of extra steps in one direction well after you've started pressing the left stick in another direction. Players are also maddeningly slow even on a full-out rush. The pace becomes even more tortoiselike when a defender is nearby and your player starts automatically guarding the ball. Such sluggishness is across the board, too. Speedy shooting guards play a lot like lumbering centers. Save for their scoring accuracy, you can't tell the stars from the schlubs, which erases the differences between teams so much that you could almost mistake the Raptors for the Lakers. Artificial intelligence is barely there. Your own players just shuffle back and forth on offense, while on defense, they sit back to play a soft man to man. Opponents don't seem to know what they're doing at all. They take odd shots, including occasionally ridiculous ones falling out of bounds behind the backboard, and they don't have a clue about what to do near the end of a game. You can just run the clock out with a two-point lead without worrying about being fouled, for instance.   NBA Unrivaled only looks acceptable in monster-jam moments, which are loaded with cheesy graphics and sound effects.   Graphics problems exacerbate all of the above. Animations are so jerky it seems like somebody went into the game and pulled out every other frame. Players twitch and stagger around the court like some kind of sci-fi special effect gone horribly wrong. Visuals are dark, murky, and devoid of detail, except for the odd jarring moment when somebody pulls off a monster jam and the game turns into a 1970's game show for a few seconds. It is tough to keep track of who has the ball, whether or not you should go for a steal, or even when to leap up to try to block a shot and score a rebound. Making matters worse is the low camera that gives you a view of the action from the best seats in the house, a la Jack Nicholson's traditional perch at a Lakers games. This angle, which cannot be changed, puts players on the same level around the key, so whenever you get into heavy action, you can't tell who's who. Everything turns into a confusing mash of multicolored blobs. You're basically in the dark, listening to the annoying squeak of sneakers and irritating faux funk music that are the game's primary sound effects while watching the clock like a fifth grader waiting for recess.    What's most surprising about NBA Unrivaled is that it made it out to the public. Regardless of how you feel about basketball and retro basketball arcade games, you should avoid this game at all costs.  
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42,Thor: God of Thunder ,2, Thor: God of Thunder hammers out an experience that is absolutely awful in every way.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/1/2/2223812-box_thorgot.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/thor-god-of-thunder-review/1900-6312790/,neg,"
  The curse of the blockbuster movie adaptation has plagued the games industry for more than three decades, but even a history of futility will not prepare you for the digital misery that is Thor: God of Thunder. Every aspect of this slapdash action game is forged in the flames of failure. Amateurish voice acting and woefully outdated visuals serve as flashing red warning lights urging you to avoid this abomination, but it's the disastrous combat that ultimately punishes anyone unlucky enough to spend time with this awful game. Shallow combat marred by unresponsive controls and a stubborn camera is a recipe for pain, and when you combine those pieces with an unnaturally high difficulty level, it turns the entire endeavor into an agonizing ordeal. Even the biggest fans of Norse mythology and Marvel comics should stay far away. Thor: God of Thunder is a terrible game that has almost no redeeming qualities.       The poorly constructed story contains neither interesting plot developments nor likable characters, though it does have a moral we should all keep in mind: Don't start the apocalypse. Thor, stubborn god-child that he is, doesn't heed this simple advice, which makes it difficult to care about the fate of this waste of divine flesh. Thor is joined by his trickster brother Loki and all-mighty father Odin, and you can tell they're related by how poorly voiced all three characters are. This insipid presentation extends to the visuals as well. Everything is coated in a blurry smear that makes the bland textures look even worse. Sadly, the lackluster environments are one of the high points of this package. Stilted animations give every character the range of a rusty robot, and a terrorizing camera always leaves something important out of the frame. The worst part of the visuals is the stuttering frame rate. Even with the low-rent technology on display, the frame rate still moves in fits and starts that can be downright nauseating before long.     God of Thunder is a linear action game that focuses almost entirely on combat. The lack of variety wouldn't be a bad thing, expect that fighting never comes close to being fun. As Thor, you wield a magical hammer that serves as a powerful bludgeoning device for anyone stupid enough to wander nearby. You can also conduct lightning, generate earthquakes, and summon wind, so at least you have the godlike powers you would expect from this mythical being. The wide assortment of moves you unlock during the course of the game might lead you to believe this brawler has plenty of depth, but that's just an illusion. The core mechanics are implemented in such a crude manner that fights are little more than tiring button-mashing contests. Sluggish controls are the biggest issue in a game overflowing with worthy candidates. There is a noticeable pause between attacks that gives fights a jerky flow. Thor stands stock-still for a beat after swinging his hammer or dashing to safety, and it's maddening trying to coax him to move out of the way while an enemy closes in. There are times when Thor doesn't respond to your button presses at all. He may walk happily into a pit while you're tapping away at the jump button, with no regard for your dwindling sanity.     Poor visual feedback adds another layer of frustration to a game already overflowing with issues. There are times when you swing at enemies and nothing happens. It's unclear if you're too far away, they're momentarily invincible, or they just didn't show damage. This problem turns something as basic as blocking into a crapshoot. You may tap the block button well before a fireball scorches your hair, but because it's so difficult to judge distance in this game, you're just as likely to be singed as you are to repel it back at the attacker. To make matters worse, the collision detection is completely off, so don't even think about playing defensively. You may dash out of the way long before an enemy swings its sword and still get hit. It doesn't make any sense, and it leads to dying in ways that are definitely not your fault. Of course, you're never the benefactor of these inconsistencies. If you're slightly off with your aim, the enemy won't feel a thing, so the odds are heavily stacked against you. And to top it all off, the restless camera ensures you can't even focus on the action. Combat is a complete mess in God of Thunder.   You don't become a boss by being small and cute.   Boss fights serve to break up the drudgery of standard brawls, but they're actually the worst part of this exasperating experience. All of the problems that persist in normal battles rear their ugly head here, and there's one new element that makes them even more aggravating: quick-time events. The bosses are all much larger than Thor, so you have to climb on top of them to bring them down. Stun them with ground attacks, grapple on to their massive frames, and then leap across their bodies to sniff out their weak points. Unfortunately, seeing the QTE indicators is tricky in the heat of battle. The dim yellow light commanding you to press a specific button gets lost amid all the chaos, and you have only a small window to perform this action. When you fail, you get slammed unceremoniously to the ground and have to repeat the process all over again. Some bosses initiate their own QTEs, and these are even harder to nail the first time around. The time frame for success is still maddeningly small, but that's not even the worst part. You sometimes have to frantically wiggle the stick, and even if you move as fast as you can, you're still likely to fail in crushing fashion.     Every aspect of the combat is awful in God of Thunder, and it's made even worse by the excessive difficulty. On the default setting, this game will beat down even hardened action veterans because it's ridiculously cheap. The myriad problems hounding every aspect of this game ensure that you die early and often, which can make this aggravating experience stretch out for dozens of hours. Bosses are the main source of frustration, but you can die just as easily during normal battle. And when you do fail, you have to replay large sections because the checkpoints are situated in such inopportune places. Most of the game plays out in this grueling manner, beating you down relentlessly until you finally squeak by, but things are taken to another level of punishment in the final stage. Here, not only do you have to worry about killing enemies, but there's a clock to fight against as well. It's nearly impossible to take down a horde of ice giants when you have only 10 seconds to spare, which leads to a rage-inducing finish to an already arduous journey.     Aside from combat, there are brief platforming sections that aren't any more fun than the hammer-bashing brawls that surround them. A lack of clear direction means you often wander around looking for where to go next, and the usual problems, such as sluggish controls and a troublesome camera, persist. But that's to be expected in a game rife with problems. There is not one moment in this entire game that is genuinely fun, which makes the whole experience feel like empty padding. Modern video games don't get much worse than Thor: God of Thunder.  


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43,Thor: God of Thunder ,2, Thor: God of Thunder hammers out an experience that is absolutely awful in every way.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/1/2/2223812-box_thorgot.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/thor-god-of-thunder-review/1900-6312947/,neg,"
  The curse of the blockbuster movie adaptation has plagued the games industry for more than three decades, but even a history of futility will not prepare you for the digital misery that is Thor: God of Thunder. Every aspect of this slapdash action game is forged in the flames of failure. Amateurish voice acting and woefully outdated visuals serve as flashing red warning lights urging you to avoid this abomination, but it's the disastrous combat that ultimately punishes anyone unlucky enough to spend time with this awful game. Shallow combat marred by unresponsive controls and a stubborn camera is a recipe for pain, and when you combine those pieces with an unnaturally high difficulty level, it turns the entire endeavor into an agonizing ordeal. Even the biggest fans of Norse mythology and Marvel comics should stay far away. Thor: God of Thunder is a terrible game that has almost no redeeming qualities.      The poorly constructed story contains neither interesting plot developments nor likable characters, though it does have a moral we should all keep in mind: Don't start the apocalypse. Thor, stubborn god-child that he is, doesn't heed this simple advice, which makes it difficult to care about the fate of this waste of divine flesh. Thor is joined by his trickster brother Loki and all-mighty father Odin, and you can tell they're related by how poorly voiced all three characters are. This insipid presentation extends to the visuals as well. Everything is coated in a blurry smear that makes the bland textures look even worse. Sadly, the lackluster environments are one of the high points of this package. Stilted animations give every character the range of a rusty robot, and a terrorizing camera always leaves something important out of the frame. The worst part of the visuals is the stuttering frame rate. Even with the low-rent technology on display, the frame rate still moves in fits and starts that can be downright nauseating before long.    God of Thunder is a linear action game that focuses almost entirely on combat. The lack of variety wouldn't be a bad thing, expect that fighting never comes close to being fun. As Thor, you wield a magical hammer that serves as a powerful bludgeoning device for anyone stupid enough to wander nearby. You can also conduct lightning, generate earthquakes, and summon wind, so at least you have the godlike powers you would expect from this mythical being. The wide assortment of moves you unlock during the course of the game might lead you to believe this brawler has plenty of depth, but that's just an illusion. The core mechanics are implemented in such a crude manner that fights are little more than tiring button-mashing contests. Sluggish controls are the biggest issue in a game overflowing with worthy candidates. There is a noticeable pause between attacks that gives fights a jerky flow. Thor stands stock-still for a beat after swinging his hammer or dashing to safety, and it's maddening trying to coax him to move out of the way while an enemy closes in. There are times when Thor doesn't respond to your button presses at all. He may walk happily into a pit while you're tapping away at the jump button, with no regard for your dwindling sanity.    Poor visual feedback adds another layer of frustration to a game already overflowing with issues. There are times when you swing at enemies and nothing happens. It's unclear if you're too far away, they're momentarily invincible, or they just didn't show damage. This problem turns something as basic as blocking into a crapshoot. You may tap the block button well before a fireball scorches your hair, but because it's so difficult to judge distance in this game, you're just as likely to be singed as you are to repel it back at the attacker. To make matters worse, the collision detection is completely off, so don't even think about playing defensively. You may dash out of the way long before an enemy swings its sword and still get hit. It doesn't make any sense, and it leads to dying in ways that are definitely not your fault. Of course, you're never the benefactor of these inconsistencies. If you're slightly off with your aim, the enemy won't feel a thing, so the odds are heavily stacked against you. And to top it all off, the restless camera ensures you can't even focus on the action. Combat is a complete mess in God of Thunder.    Ice giant dance party!   Boss fights serve to break up the drudgery of standard brawls, but they're actually the worst part of this exasperating experience. All of the problems that persist in normal battles rear their ugly head here, and there's one new element that makes them even more aggravating: quick-time events. The bosses are all much larger than Thor, so you have to climb on top of them to bring them down. Stun them with ground attacks, grapple on to their massive frames, and then leap across their bodies to sniff out their weak points. Unfortunately, seeing the QTE indicators is tricky in the heat of battle. The dim yellow light commanding you to press a specific button gets lost amid all the chaos, and you have only a small window to perform this action. When you fail, you get slammed unceremoniously to the ground and have to repeat the process all over again. Some bosses initiate their own QTEs, and these are even harder to nail the first time around. The time frame for success is still maddeningly small, but that's not even the worst part. You sometimes have to frantically wiggle the stick, and even if you move as fast as you can, you're still likely to fail in crushing fashion.    Every aspect of the combat is awful in God of Thunder, and it's made even worse by the excessive difficulty. On the default setting, this game will beat down even hardened action veterans because it's ridiculously cheap. The myriad problems hounding every aspect of this game ensure that you die early and often, which can make this aggravating experience stretch out for dozens of hours. Bosses are the main source of frustration, but you can die just as easily during normal battle. And when you do fail, you have to replay large sections because the checkpoints are situated in such inopportune places. Most of the game plays out in this grueling manner, beating you down relentlessly until you finally squeak by, but things are taken to another level of punishment in the final stage. Here, not only do you have to worry about killing enemies, but there's a clock to fight against as well. It's nearly impossible to take down a horde of ice giants when you have only 10 seconds to spare, which leads to a rage-inducing finish to an already arduous journey.    Aside from combat, there are brief platforming sections that aren't any more fun than the hammer-bashing brawls that surround them. A lack of clear direction means you often wander around looking for where to go next, and the usual problems, such as sluggish controls and a troublesome camera, persist. But that's to be expected in a game rife with problems. There is not one moment in this entire game that is genuinely fun, which makes the whole experience feel like empty padding. Modern video games don't get much worse than Thor: God of Thunder.   


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44,Fighters Uncaged ,2, Poor motion controls and unrewarding gameplay prevent you from having any fun at all with this terrible fighting game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/9/0/2225390-box_fu.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fighters-uncaged-review/1900-6283925/,neg,"
  If you're craving a less kid-friendly experience on the Kinect at launch, then your options are limited to just one game--Ubisoft's Fighters Uncaged. Sadly, not only does it fail on nearly every level to offer a compelling fighting experience, but its broken motion controls also make it immensely frustrating. Lifeless animation, generic visuals, and a baffling scoring system all serve to sap the fun out of playing. And, in a crazy omission, there isn't even a two-player option. Uncaged isn't so much a game as it is a way to make you want to bang your head against a brick wall in despair.      The premise behind Fighters Uncaged is as short and generic as they come. You play as an up-and-coming street brawler named Simon, who must battle his way through other brawlers in underground leagues to save his father from a kingpin. Aside from a mention in the manual and a short cinematic intro, you hear nothing about the story once you start playing, which makes this setup completely unnecessary. The game offers up just one mode, called Fight. But, before you can get down to fighting, you must endure an excruciatingly dull tutorial that teaches you the basics in a drawn-out fashion.    You view your character from behind in an over-the-shoulder perspective, with your opponent directly opposite. To fight, you mimic the moves you want your character to perform. For example, punching out directly in front of you launches a jab, while arcing your swing launches a hook. An onscreen animation demonstrates the movement, after which you must perform it three times against an instructor before you can progress to the next move. The game handles lateral movement of your character, so all you have to worry about is performing one of the kicks, punches, and dodges on offer.     The tutorial stretches on for what seems like an eternity because you not only have to perform each move three times, but you also have to repeat the process for both limbs--it's like attending a fighting school for toddlers. Furthermore, once you've completed basic training, you then have to fight against the instructor three times in best two-out-of-three matches before you can actually jump into the leagues. There is a skip option, but using it means the game thinks you haven't completed the training, so you can't progress anyway.   Getting dropped to the floor is a regular occurrence as the game fails to recognize your motions.   While most of the basic moves are easy to learn, there is a noticeable lag between performing them and having your actions reflected onscreen. This means you often throw a punch, only to think it wasn't recognized and throw another one, causing the game to suddenly launch two in quick succession. Thus, fights quickly degenerate into the Kinect equivalent of button mashing as you swing your arms and legs in the air, trying to get the game to pick up your movements. This only gets worse if you subject yourself to the advanced training, where you're taught moves like roundhouse kicks and combos. They require much more subtle movements, such as sliding your foot along the floor for a sweep, and are rarely recognized at all.    If you somehow manage to drag your way through the tutorial, then you can take part in the leagues. You start off in league three, where you face off against six other fighters with names as cliche as Rider, Ratface, and Mover. The aim is to progress to higher leagues, where you battle against increasingly tough though no more interesting or entertaining opponents. Fights themselves are an exercise in frustration as the game struggles to recognize your moments. This removes any sort of depth because you can't plan your attacks or launch advanced moves.    One of the most confusing aspects of a fight is the scoring system, which fails to reward you for your hard work. To reach league two, you have to gain a certain number of crowns, which are awarded if you score above 6000 points against an opponent. However, how you score points is never clearly explained, so even if you beat an opponent, you might not get any crowns at all. This means you have to go back and fight opponents repeatedly until you score points to progress, without ever really knowing how you did so.    Whether you win or lose, you'll be happy that the terrible fight is finally over.   To make matters worse, there aren't even any decent visuals to look at while you're fighting. The character models are lifeless, with stilted animation and a poor design that plays off of generic street stereotypes, such as leather-clad bikers and tattooed thugs. The 2D prerendered environments just add to the misery, with little detail and no animations. Even the music is poor, with a grating 10-second hip-hop-style loop repeated ad nauseam in every menu.    Fighters Uncaged is a prime example of how not to make a fighting game for the Kinect. The presentation is poor, the scoring system doesn't reward your hard work, and worst of all, the motion controls are simply broken. There's not even a multiplayer mode to, at the very least, let you eke some enjoyment out of fighting a friend. The only thing you'll get out of this game is a sweat, as you manically punch at the air in frustration. No matter how eager you might be for a Kinect-powered brawl, Fighters Uncaged is one game that's worth leaving locked up.  
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45,X Rebirth ,2, X Rebirth's endless deficiencies make it an inferior husk of the X games that came before it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/9/1/2226591-xrebirth1.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-rebirth-review/1900-6415614/,neg,"
Einstein taught us that space is both homogeneous and isotropic--that is, on a large scale, the universe is smooth and uniform in all directions. It's empty out there. Like many space games before it, X Rebirth depicts an unrealistically vibrant universe bursting with color and texture, and that's as it should be. A near-vacuum makes a dreary backdrop for a video game, at least for a human observer.It isn't X Rebirth's inauthentic view of space that should anger you; it's that this sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed. Just as the observable universe has no center, neither does space exploration game X Rebirth find a foundation from which to grow outward, and I am unsure how to begin describing its failures. I can only begin at the quantum level, pulling out each particle and analyzing its deficiencies. And so I start in the cockpit, where most galactic adventures begin.The Albion Skunk is the aptly named vessel that carries you on this journey. Unless you're peering out of a space port's window or piloting one of the game's different drones, you always see space through the Skunk's front window, and overlooking the aesthetically dull control panel that tells you the ship's condition. In fact, you look at most of X Rebirth's menus in the cockpit, each list pulling up on a digital display viewable by both you the player and protagonist pilot Ren Otani.This menu integration might have been a sensible way to draw you further into this universe, but no amount of immersion would have been enough to veil the system's grave deficiencies. Pulling up so much as a simple galactic map requires a ridiculous number of keystrokes, with each submenu buffered by just enough input lag and unnecessary animation to cause impatience. Furthermore, the menu doesn't always take up a sensible portion of the screen, making it hard to read intricate mission objectives--and even harder to read them when a particularly garish spacescape shines from behind the Skunk's menu screen.For a near-vacuum, it sure is busy in space!Garish spacescapes are common in X Rebirth, though there are sights of real beauty. Ships feature a remarkable amount of detail, and space stations and capital ships catch the eye with their intricate industrial designs. Rushing between systems via the game's space highways can be a visual delight, particularly as you watch ships and structures approach and then race by. When the color scheme embraces tranquil blues and developer Egosoft exercises visual restraint, the hazy background nebulae and tumbling asteroids are a treat. All too often, however, the view erupts with harsh orange and turquoise hues, making you wonder if you shouldn't stock the Albion Skunk with sunscreen. A vibrant vision of space is typically pleasing enough, but X Rebirth's depiction occasionally surpasses ""meticulous"" and surges straight into ""gaudy.""Buy low and sell high. It's a solid economic policy, and it forms the backbone of X Rebirth's explore-fight-collect-build gameplay loop. It's an inviting loop, and I found myself pushing onward to collect enough funds, hiring enough ships to join my squad, and building enough structures in the hope of calling the result a true empire.Sometimes, doing so means shooting spacecraft piloted by members of the slave-trading Plutarch Mining Corporation. Combat is functional, but ship controls are loose, though I never felt as though I wasn't properly directing the action. Regardless, the Skunk is your only ride for the duration, so get used to the way it looks and feels, though you can improve its performance with enhanced weaponry, shields, and so forth. Fortunately, you will build up an entire squad of vessels that perform various vital actions on your behalf, assisting you in combat, erecting structures, and ferrying goods about the sector. Massive battles are visually explosive, momentarily interrupting the slow-paced trading with fiery combat.This sequel is a galactic collision of unparalleled scale, an interstellar parade of bad ideas badly executed.Oh God. Just... Oh God. And boy is trading slow-paced. Buying and selling goods isn't an immediate process, or even an efficient one. Instead, you must wait for many minutes on end as your sluggish trading ship edges ever closer to the trade port, giving you an opportunity to poke around the sector, or more likely, to go grab a glass of wine and peruse the latest issue of Science Magazine from cover to cover. You also must maintain fuel reserves, which can come as a shock the first time a hired pilot informs you of his fuel shortage over the comm and has you scrambling to figure out how to rectify the situation, given how ordering your ship to fuel up is not an option you can find in the game's menus.Building up a fleet takes time and money, and you don't find capable crew members free-floating in space, but rather within space stations, which you explore on foot after docking. First-person exploration could have been a grand addition, taking the X series that much closer to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink games developer Derek Smart wanted his Battlecruiser series to be, but never was. It soon becomes obvious, however, that traversing cookie-cutter stations sucks the mystery out of space travel, leaving behind horrifying human visages that spout absolute drivel in the most excruciating tone of voice imaginable. You see the same grotesquely scarred faces over and over again, and engaging one of these unblinking ghouls results in absolute nonsense. Any given conversation is utterly devoid of logic. Characters are routinely rude when you approach them, then become delighted, and then lapse into obnoxiousness again. In the meanwhile, female characters frequently whine ""Ew! Slimy green lizard things are everywhere!"" in the shrillest possible manner, as if they are 1950s housewives from classic cartoons, crying atop the kitchen table and swatting at pesky mice.Colorful is one thing, but X Rebirth's artists really should have turned things down a notch.That line is shrieked in regard to the reptilian Teladi race, whose existence in the X universe is well established. Perhaps Egosoft wanted to use first-person exploration to further develop the game's tone and deepen its lore. Sadly, a universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.Instead, having to dock at a station and walk around looking for the right merchants becomes a chore. My first foray into a station delighted me; I could loot lockers and crates for marketable items, leading me to believe that X Rebirth might spill into role-playing territory. Alas, clicking on lockers becomes monotonous busywork, as does roaming the cut-and-paste hallways looking for vendors and crew members for hire. These places are as lifeless as a white dwarf, even in their underpopulated lounges, each living statue stiffly waiting for you to click on it. Characters speak of their own accord only when prompting you to take part in a ridiculous-beyond-measure minigame in which you engage in surreal small talk to earn a few discounts. It wasn't long before I avoided this minigame altogether, however: no matter how deep the discount, I couldn't stomach the stupid dialogue, which made me question how such imbeciles could have devised any form of space travel.It isn't just in the space stations where you go hunting for discounts. Out in the black beyond, you glimpse icons that urge you to investigate the objects they identify; examine enough of them, and you unlock discounts and side missions. Little lowercase i's are splattered all over the place, but you have to be close enough to see them, and you must have line of sight. And thus your adventure turns into a vapid Easter egg hunt in which you float around satellite arrays seeking icons, and then soar close enough to them to interact with them. It isn't uncommon to briefly see an icon identifying a side mission only to have it flicker away in a flash, forcing you to maneuver carefully around the starbase hoping to catch another glimpse.According to the theory of special relativity, X Rebirth stinks. Don't expect those missions to work properly once you graciously accept them from your sneering contacts, however. Each X game has suffered from a certain number of rough edges at launch, and you could be forgiven for assuming that like those games, X Rebirth would be superficially glitchy but eminently playable. Yet no matter how low your expectations might be for the newest X's stability, the game still manages to sink lower. Only a few hours in, and a mission proved impossible to complete, leading me to commiserate with other players suffering from the same game-ending bug in Internet forums. After downloading a saved game file from a helpful comrade, I continued my journey, only to have a side mission task me with destroying a story-critical capital ship, leaving me to wander for hours wondering why I couldn't find my mission objective.A universe full of rude, moronic space travelers barely capable of communicating normal thoughts in a logical order is not a compelling place to be.Listing all of the bugs I encountered would take up inordinate amounts of space, and so I offer here a random array. Crashes too numerous to count. Poor frame rates that had me wondering why I'd spent so much money on modern computer hardware. Suddenly unresponsive dialogue that left me stuck mid-conversation. Enemy ships flying around in the middle of space station geometry, keeping me from completing missions. Trading ships that simply wouldn't conduct the assigned transaction. That last one was particularly aggravating, considering how much time you must wait for functional transactions to complete. All too often, X Rebirth had me asking the age-old question: ""Is it a bug or a feature?""The fact that it's too difficult to tell the difference tells you all you must know about X Rebirth. You might assume a bright future for the game, given Egosoft's solid history of supporting its games after release--and given the community's dedication to crafting fixes and modifications that further improve these starry treks. X Rebirth's failings are rooted too deeply to simply be patched away, however. No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.
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46,Iron Front: Liberation 1944 ,2," In its attempts to be realistic, Iron Front: Liberation 1944 bites off far more than it can chew.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/2/2/0/105292-191220.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/iron-front-liberation-1944-review/1900-6382138/,neg,"
  Realism in shooters is something the computer game industry has both striven for and struggled with for some time. It's good to feel that what you're doing has some connection to the real thing, especially when historical settings are involved, but it isn't fun to spend half your game time field-stripping rifles and doing KP. A veneer of authenticity can make for a more emotionally charged experience, but to pull this off, a game needs to hide the inevitable lack of realism that's at the core of first-person shooter gameplay. It's a delicate balance, and one that Iron Front: Liberation 1944 utterly fails at. As fate would have it, Iron Front also fails at not crashing constantly, not looking like its graphics were drawn by a teenager, and at being any fun at all.   If standing around listening to random Nazis speak German draws you in, Iron Front has you covered. Also, get help.   Iron Front starts with a solid historical basis, at least: you play either as a German or a Soviet soldier in the middle of a campaign to win the Eastern Front in World War II. It's an enticing premise for those who have imagined the life of a foot soldier in the ranks of two of the world’s most ruthless dictatorships. Gameplay lands somewhere between ARMA and Battlefield 1942. There's a thick coating of realism, alongside a kitchen sink full of possibilities. You start off as a simple soldier, but ultimately you can do everything from manning heavy weapons to commanding tanks to flying fighter aircraft. Sniping, stealth, huge frontal assaults: everything’s included. Iron Front: Liberation 1944 is highly ambitious in scope, but ends up trying to do way too much. The ground portions do feel somewhat realistic (at least in the sense that you can die and kill instantly), but the opaque control system makes flying a plane cumbersome and inorganic.    To its credit, the game offers dialogue in both German and Russian (subtitled) or in horribly dubbed English, if reading isn't your bag. The thing is, regardless of the language you choose, you won't care what anyone is saying. Apart from the occasional stultifying cutscene in which you listen to a narrator read text that's already visible onscreen, most dialogue in the game is AI-generated radio babble that comes so fast and furious, and is so poorly tracked on your heads-up display, that it may as well be a TV left on in the background. Iron Front tries hard to give you a feeling of being one part of a much larger battle, but because the briefings interface is totally obtuse, and because the way information comes at you in missions is so confusing, the interface overwhelms both you and itself.   Before missions you'll get a tactical briefing, but it's not much use since the AI never does what it's supposed to.   In fact, the entire game overwhelms itself. During the review process, Iron Front received a large patch that fixed some (but by no means all) of its stability issues. Yet in spite of the patch, the game still crashes, just not as often. Other bugs have revealed themselves since: loading screens frequently hang, necessitating forced quits; controls stop responding mid-mission for no apparent reason; AI entities stand around doing absolutely nothing while receiving effective incoming fire; and sound suddenly cuts out or goes extremely quiet in the middle of critical briefings. AI pathfinding is also a huge issue, with non-player characters frequently getting lost or trapped on geometry, and enemies patrolling in endless circles, doing nothing of importance.      As if the technical issues weren't enough, it becomes immediately clear when you begin a real mission that Iron Front is completely overwhelmed with feature creep. All sorts of small arms are, ostensibly, realistically modeled, along with vehicles, heavy weapons, airplanes, you name it. But the game tries to cram realistic performance for all of these things into its limited controls, creating a morass of impenetrable key bindings that are impossible to memorize and even harder to implement when someone is shooting at you. Why, for example, is there a separate key for ""stand up""? Why can't you simply hit the ""crouch"" or ""prone"" button again? Conversely, double-tapping the forward button to sprint is extremely clumsy, especially since your sprinting speed is so similar to your normal movement speed that it's hard to tell at times if you've even started sprinting successfully.    You've just started a scenario mission. What are you supposed to do? Who knows!     Let's say you manage to look past all this and struggle through Iron Front's interminable tutorial levels to get to actual missions; you only have complete chaos to look forward to, because enemy AI is completely moronic, allies are useless, and death will randomly hit you with no warning whatsoever. You might be walking along a friendly runway in your HQ during the first 10 seconds of a mission, about to climb into the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190, only to be summarily laid out by God knows what in the middle of your own base. Was it an enemy bomber? A piece of shrapnel? Friendly fire? A sniper? It doesn't really matter--have fun looking at another loading screen while the entire mission resets.     Multiplayer offers little respite, although at least you don't have to deal with much in the way of AI idiocy. Still, almost all players of Iron Front appear to be located in Europe, so pings from the US, particularly the Western US, are absolutely awful. If you do get into a decent game, you better know how to speak German, because the guys you're playing with most likely do. But don't worry, you won't have to listen to them for too long--games crash, lag out, or unceremoniously kick you out on a regular basis. On the rare occasion you do get to play through a match, you spend most of your time sneaking about, encountering nary an enemy, and getting totally owned by someone you never see.    Floating tooltips try to offer guidance, but the key bindings make no sense, and it's hard to read them in the middle of getting shot at.   Alternatively, you're on the other side of this: you creep up on some poor soul who has no idea what's going on because Iron Front hates clarity, and you equip your Mosin-Nagant rifle, hunt for that one button that makes you look through the scope rather than the iron sights, press it, line up your target in the period-appropriate crosshairs, and then restart Windows because you've been kicked to the desktop, and your mouse cursor has disappeared.    Iron Front is unfinished. Playing through a game, even with some of the bugs squashed, gives you a sense of confusion more than anything else. More patches may be on the way to shore up what there is of Iron Front, but as it stands now, you're better off avoiding these perilous battlefields.    
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47,NCIS ,2, Childish minigames and saw-it-coming plots make NCIS a mockery of its TV inspiration.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/7/8/2227378-box_ncis.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ncis-review/1900-6346297/,neg,"
  Popular TV show begets awful video game again in Ubisoft Shanghai's NCIS. This point-and-click adventure is a mockery of the hit CBS TV series on which the game is based, with childish gameplay based on a handful of repetitive minigames, laughably saw-it-coming plots, and none of the show's leading cast members in. This game exists solely to try to con series fans out of their money.   You can look at Mark Harmon in this video game version of NCIS, but you can't hear him.   Ties with the hit CBS TV series about a team of investigators solving various murders and other nasty crimes on behalf of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in Washington, DC, are front and center, of course. The marketing here revolves around you supposedly working with the well-known team of sleuths led by Mark Harmon's Jethro Gibbs, Michael Weatherly's Tony DiNozzo, and Cote de Pablo's Ziva David. You take part in four different cases structured like episodes of the TV show, complete with opening credits, B plots that let the characters indulge in some very non-witty repartee (you will want to kill DiNozzo in mere moments), and closing unfunny moments geared to inject a bit of lighthearted fun into all the murder and mayhem. The reality sees you slogging through tedious pixel hunts at crime scenes and enduring simplistic minigames geared for children. The content and the gameplay contrast so much that the game can be quite jarring; You investigate bloody murders and conduct autopsies via minigames that could have been taken out of a game aimed at 6-year-olds.    Each episode plays out in the same fashion that the procedural TV show does each week. You watch an opening sequence showing the crime to be investigated, and then you plunge into work at crime scenes and with forensics back in the lab. All of the searching, sampling, and bagging have been distilled to simply searching rooms and taking photos of evidence, such as bullet holes and explosive residue (that magically translate into actual physical evidence like slugs and powder that can be analyzed back in the lab). The most obnoxious part of this sleuthing is navigating the crime scenes themselves, because the camera angle is locked so tight to your character that you can't move more than a few feet per button press.    When investigating, you aim and focus the camera and occasionally must access oddly placed evidence by moving furniture or standing on some handy object. These mechanics just make everything annoying, though, given how the finicky controls force you to manually do things like climb and shove tables and couches by dragging a cursor with the left stick. It all feels forced and unnecessary.   Pulling fingerprints off of evidence with tape is every bit as thrilling here as it must be in a real crime lab.   Once all of the requisite photographs have been collected at the crime scene, you switch to forensics back at the NCIS offices. Everything is based on minigames. Need to lift prints off a gun? Snap the left stick around to apply and remove tape. Need to conduct an autopsy? Scroll around the body taking photos. Need to analyze tire treads? Match up samples by scrolling through a short list of options. Need to figure out who did what to whom? Hit the ""deduction board"" to drag and drop clues before answering a multiple-choice quiz to solve crimes. Need to interrogate a suspect? Watch the dialogue and hit the A button every so often to ask a follow-up question. All of the games are spectacularly easy. It is just about impossible to fail any of them at any time, but even if you mess up by, say, falling asleep, you get do-overs courtesy of the Caf-Pow drinks favored by forensic Goth goddess Abby Sciuto both here and on the TV show. And even if you run out of this magical beverage, failure just means that you get to try again.    Solutions to the four cases are blindingly obvious. Each can be wrapped up in under an hour. Suspects pretty much present themselves front and center in the opening moments of each episode. They're not difficult to spot, largely because they tend to be the only characters to have spoken lines aside from the core NCIS gang. Still, you need to go through the motions to get to the laughable aha moments, made even funnier when Harmon's Gibbs yells ""Deduction board!"" at times when the bad guy has already done everything but confess and provide video evidence of himself actually committing the crime.    The look and sound are abysmal. The entirety of the game has been built around a half-dozen or so generic crime scenes that could have been swiped from the plots of thousands of procedural TV shows. Even worse, these settings come with all of the visual artistry and depth of the average first-gen Xbox game. Textures are flat, fine details like furniture are largely missing in action, and character models have been stricken by oddly bulbous faces and palsied gaits. Action scenes haven't even been fully animated. Instead, you get freeze-framed clips whenever the game needs to show something possibly exciting, like a police chase or an explosion going off in a bank. You get to see a lot of Harmon's steely visage in these scenes, which is kind of cool if you're into the actor who was once named People's Sexiest Man Alive. But mostly you just wonder how much Ubisoft saved by not bothering to properly animate these sequences.    If only it could be as easy to solve crimes in the real world as it is here in these minigames.   Aspects of the art seem to have been assembled from older games, too. How else to explain the appearance of massive CRT monitors on desks in the otherwise high-tech NCIS offices? There is virtually no music to speak of during gameplay, and character dialogue is recited in a reading-the-phonebook manner by a cast that includes only a pair of secondary characters from the TV show. Oddly, those characters are two of the biggest names to appear on the series: Robert Wagner and David McCallum. They say next to nothing, however, and Wagner shows up for little more than a cup of coffee before exiting stage left. The roster of cheap soundalikes that fill out the rest of the cast is unimpressive at best, especially the one-note wonder taking the place of star Harmon.    The only possible plus in NCIS is that the simplistic, repetitive gameplay likely depicts the drudgery of real police investigations far more accurately than procedural TV shows loaded with lasers and sci-fi gadgets. Of course, you have to think that the developers probably weren't going for that sort of authenticity here. Stick to the TV show. Or knitting. Knitting's good.    Full disclosure: NCIS, the television show on which this game is based, airs on CBS, GameSpot's parent company.
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48,Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 ,9.5, Anyone with even a remote interest in either the genre or the real-life sport should purchase this game as soon as possible.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/6/6/2209766-box_thps4.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-pro-skater-4-review/1900-2895577/,pos,"
It's hard to believe that it's been only three years since the release of the first game in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. The original 1999 game launched an entire genre, and now several publishers are on the action sports bandwagon in a big way, eating off the table that Tony Hawk built. Activision has turned the success of the series into an entire line of similar products, but of course, the Tony Hawk series has always been the jewel in the crown. The yearly installments in the series have all featured pretty dramatic improvements on all fronts, while retaining some of the core gameplay mechanics that emphasize timing, skill, and creativity. On the surface, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 appears to make only minor changes to the formula, taking the career mode in a new direction and adding some seemingly minor gameplay elements. But as you play the game more and more, the value of the small tweaks and changes becomes pretty obvious, adding up to what's certainly another outstanding installment in the series.  Tony Hawk 4 is another excellent installment in Activision's flagship series.  Like Acclaim's great inline skating game from earlier this year, Aggressive Inline, Tony Hawk 4 does away with the two-minute time limit so commonly associated with the genre. While this takes away the exciting challenge of trying to accomplish all of a level's objectives in one run, the game's larger levels would make such an effort impossible anyway. Instead, goals in Tony Hawk 4 are spread throughout the level in the form of various bystanders with big arrows floating above their heads. Skating up to them and hitting the grab-trick button will make them talk and will start the goal, which then starts a timer. Many of the goals are the same sort that the series has featured all along. You'll still have to reach certain score plateaus by pulling off long strings of tricks, you'll still have to collect or break various goal-specific items, and you'll still collect the letters that spell skate. New types of objectives include some combo-based goals, which ask you to beat a specific score with one combo. You'll also have to collect letters that spell the word combo--all without landing your combo until the word is complete. The size of each area lets the game pack a lot more goals into each of the game's nine levels, and some goals are only available once other goals have been met. Completing a goal also earns you upgrades for your skater, such as cash, new slots for special tricks, or stat points.  A newly redone career mode and improved online play are some of the highlights.  All this goal completing leads up to unlocking the pro challenges, which become available when you've collected 90 of the game's 190 total goals. Goals can be completed with any of the game's skaters, so you won't have to play through the game multiple times to see all there is to see. But the pro challenges ensure that you'll still play the game with every skater. These challenges are larger in scope than your average goal, and many of them attempt to tie in to a skater's actual career. For example, Tony Hawk's pro challenge has you gapping from one rooftop ramp to another, doing specific tricks as you go. Bam Margera's pro challenge takes after his popular CKY series of videos, putting the Jackass star in a shopping cart and challenging you to race, hurdle, and slalom your way from the top of Alcatraz down to the bottom. Bob Burnquist, who is one of the two Tony Hawk 4 pro skaters who weren't in last year's game, has a pro challenge that is styled after his event-winning performance at the Op King of Skate competition, which aired on Pay-Per-View earlier this year. In that competition, Bob opened up the top section of a full loop and rode all the way around it. In the game, you'll take this one step further, doing specific tricks while gapping the ever-widening break in the loop. The pro challenges are unique, more difficult than your average goal, and quite a lot of fun. Completing a pro challenge unlocks that skater's ending video and also opens up a new collection of more difficult goals in every level.   Many of the level goals in Tony Hawk 4 will be pretty difficult even for series veterans, so accomplishing them will be really satisfying. The game throws some strict time limits at you in some of the goals, and some of the later combo goals are tough to pull off. In previous games, failing a goal or missing a jump meant that you had to spend time skating around to get back in position. Here, when you fail a goal, you can use the pause menu to jump right back to the start of that goal, instantly. This gives the game a real trial-and-error feel, letting you reattempt the same combo line over and over again until you finally get it, though being able to restart a goal at any point keeps this from getting frustrating. You can also jump to any goal that you previously tried, which is a handy way to skip around from place to place in a level. Aside from earning cash when completing goals, cash is also floating around each of the levels, just like it was in Tony Hawk 2. You'll use cash in the skate shop to unlock decks for your skaters and to purchase various items. Cash is used to purchase new parts for created skaters, a set of presentation-oriented cheat modes (such as bloodier wrecks, fiery grinds, and slow-motion specials), four hidden skaters, and two of the game's levels, one of which is the Chicago level from Activision's recent BMX release, Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2. Depending on how into Iron Maiden you are, you may or may not be excited by the game's hidden skaters. One of them, however, is a nice spot of fan service for all the people who have been requesting the addition of some more pro skaters. Three of the four hidden skaters up for sale are available immediately. The fourth, however, can only be purchased once you've collected at least $100,000 in cash, essentially forcing you to find every piece of cash and complete every goal, which will take a while.  The game plays even faster than before.  Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 plays even faster than its predecessors, but the main gameplay change is the addition of spine transfers. This lets you reorient your skater in midair so that you can go up one side of a quarterpipe and down the other. It also works for getting out of pools and halfpipes, getting up onto high ledges, and, much like the bail button in Aggressive Inline, saving yourself from wrecking when you accidentally fly off the side of a ramp. But the spine transfer isn't the only thing cooking. The concept of double- and triple-kick tricks has been expanded to cover grabs as well, with a second press of the grab button giving you tweaked versions of existing grabs or, in some cases, a completely different move. For example, a double-tapped stalefish becomes a tweaked stalefish. A double-tapped benihana becomes the sacktap. Flatland tricks were introduced as special moves in Tony Hawk 3. Tony 4 still has special manuals, but most of the main tricks--caspers, truckstands, pogos, half cabs, and the like--are available to every skater without even having to fill your special meter.  New moves like the spine transfer become more meaningful as you play.  Flatland tricks, grind transitions, and lip trick transitions are all done differently. They're now done by tapping out moves with the grind, flip, and grab buttons. Flatland tricks were easily abused in multiplayer contests back in Tony Hawk 3 because you could do casper flips almost as quickly as you could hit the button, driving your score up quickly and easily. Casper flips and other similar flatland tricks are still scored the same way, but you now have to wait for the trick animation to completely finish before executing another flip, meaning that it's slightly more difficult to toss in a ton of cheap flatland flips at the end of every combo. This balances the game a bit better, though it's still possible to abuse the system to some extent, once you get good at maintaining your balance. Furthermore, you can execute a quick 180-degree turn, which comes in handy if you accidentally miss an item and need to go back for it. Finally, you can grab onto the backs of vehicles and skitch around the roads.   Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 contains just about every real skating trick you'd want to see in a game and, as usual, contains a huge array of insanely exaggerated tricks as well. Most of Tony Hawk 4's new specials take after Chad Muska's ghetto blaster grind or Bam Margera's jackass move in that they try to convey a little personality. Now there are special grinds like ferret fight, where a small rodent crawls around your body as you grind. Another has your skater dribbling a basketball. Others include a manual that involves fireworks and grinds with guitars, samplers, an American flag, and even a laser blaster. These new grinds are in direct opposition to the game's level design, which strives for more realism than the series has ever seen in its levels. The design succeeds nicely, and the levels look really great. The Kona skate park, based on a real park in Florida, looks almost identical to the pictures of the park shown on Kona's Web site. Other areas, such as some of San Francisco's classic skate spots, are also rendered with a nice amount of realism. The game still does have a few more fantastical levels, such as Alcatraz and a carnival level, which comes complete with a good number of intoxicated hicks. Graphically, Tony Hawk 4 is an improvement on Tony Hawk 3, which was the first version designed with the current generation of consoles in mind. The texture quality really serves to drive the realistic look of the level design home, and the animation--most of it reused from Tony Hawk 3--still looks fantastic. The levels are large but have a decent draw distance, and the game runs at a solid frame rate throughout the career mode. You'll find a little frame stuttering when playing online or in a created park, but it's rare and doesn't really get in the way. There are a few ugly bits to the graphics--the pedestrian models that are shown up close whenever you finish a goal look really, really bad, and most of them share the same looping congratulatory animation. Also, the animation used in the minigames is incredibly poor. Thankfully, these moments are very few and far between, and most of the time, the game looks outstanding.  The game sports nine big, realistic-looking levels.  Many of the game's sound effects are identical to the ones used in Tony Hawk 3. A few have been added here and there, and the sounds of skating are still really solid. With the expanded career mode, a whole lot of voice work has been recorded to go with every goal. Since you'll get a lot of your goals from the skaters themselves, each pro skater has been recorded for the game. Skaters also have skater-specific screams when you wreck. Most of the voice work is pretty solid, though there are a few bits in there that probably could have been done a little cleaner if some more time had been taken in the vocal booth.   The soundtracks of the Tony Hawk series have always been an eclectic mix that is as varied as skateboarding style itself. Tony Hawk 4 is no exception, from the AC/DC title track to the inclusion of NWA's classic radio hit ""Express Yourself."" Most of the soundtrack is pretty good, and there are more than 30 tracks featured, but there are a few songs that could have probably stood to be left out. Specifically, four tracks came from two of the game's skaters. They aren't awful, but they come across as perhaps a bit too self-indulgent. Still, the playlist can be edited on a track-by-track basis, so you can turn off, say, ""System of a Down"" or ""Delinquent Habits"" if they don't fit your idea of skate-friendly music.   Like the PlayStation 2 version of Tony Hawk 3, Tony Hawk 4 also contains online support for multiplayer matches. The player limit has been raised from four to eight, which is handy considering that it would be easy to lose three other players in such large levels. All the modes from Tony Hawk 3 return, including capture the flag, which was only in the PC version of Tony Hawk 3. There are some new modes, such as score attack, which ends when a player reaches a certain score; combo mambo, which keeps track of which player has done the largest combo within a certain time limit; and goal attack, which lets you enable any of the career mode goals, with victory going to the player who can complete all the goals first. The game is also set up for teamplay. You can set up multiple teams in all of the game's online modes, which lets you set up some pretty cool variations. Sure, you can win a combo mambo game by yourself, but what if you're playing against the best combos of three other players? The options are a nice touch. The game has also implemented a player login, which lets you keep lists of friends.  It's not a dramatic departure from the series, but why mess with success?  The game's skatepark editor is roughly the same as it was in Tony Hawk 3, but the option has been made infinitely more interesting by the inclusion of upload and download support for created levels. You can play in created parks online and even upload your parks to the game's server to share with other players. The game also features decent two-player split-screen support for players not ready or able to play online.   While fans of the previous games will find the redesigned career mode a little foreign at first, it definitely makes for a longer game with a lot less repetition than you saw in previous installments, which asked you to play the game over and over again with each skater to unlock their secrets. The deeper single-player and improved multiplayer modes make Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 the most tightly packed installment in the series to date, and the slightly refined gameplay is still unmatched in the action sports arena. In short, anyone with even a remote interest in either the genre or the real-life sport should purchase this game as soon as possible.   



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49,Super Mario Galaxy ,9.5, The stellar presentation and fantastic level designs combine to make Super Mario Galaxy the Wii's game to beat and one of Mario's greatest adventures yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/9/2/5/2216925-super_mario_galaxy.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-mario-galaxy-review/1900-6182474/,pos,"
  Here is the game that Wii owners have been pining for, a game that has tons of appeal for both the less experienced player and the longtime gamer. A game that deftly combines accessibility and challenge, all wrapped up in a package that's both deep and addictive. Super Mario Galaxy is all of this and more. It is simultaneously one of Mario's best adventures and a game that doesn't require fandom of the portly plumber's previous engagements to appreciate. The sheer quality of Mario Galaxy's wonderful level designs, tight controls, and brilliant presentation is the sort of thing that just about anyone who loves gaming should be able to appreciate, and that many will fall head-over-heels for.   Mario takes to the stars in Super Mario Galaxy.   The premise for Mario Galaxy begins in fairly well-worn territory. Mario receives a note from his beloved Peach to come to the castle, for she has a special ""gift"" for him. He arrives, only to walk straight into chaos as Bowser and son arrive in a fleet of airships and use a giant UFO to pluck the Princess' castle right out of the ground. Mario gives chase, but is unable to rescue her before the fearsome twosome jet off into space. This all certainly sounds par for the course, but it's where Mario ends up that gives Mario Galaxy its own flavor. Mario eventually hooks up with a creature called a luma, from a race that looks like some kind of cross between an invincibility star and a headless chicken. The lumas are led by an enigmatic woman named Rosalina, who lives with them on a crazy spaceship called the comet observatory. Mario learns that Bowser has made off with a gaggle of power stars used to power the observatory. To reach Bowser's hideout, Mario has to travel to all the various galaxies in the universe to collect as many power stars as he can in order to power the ship back up, fly to the center of the universe, rescue the princess, and set everything right again.    Mario 64, anyone? If you played that seminal game, Mario Galaxy's star hunt progression probably sounds familiar to you. But apart from that basic structuring, you can hardly call Mario Galaxy a Mario 64 rehash. If anything, Mario Galaxy simply takes the basics of what made Mario 64 such a dynamite game, and turns them completely crazy.     The definition of crazy here has a lot to do with gravity and physics. Each galaxy contains a series of little worlds that can't even really be called planets so much as they are floating puzzles. In many of these worlds, Mario can walk just about anywhere. When he lands on a sphere, he can walk all over it, going sideways and upside down in the process. Sometimes you'll simply jump in one area and end up gravitating toward the ceiling or walls or even another nearby planetoid without even realizing it. Often Mario will need to track down launch stars, which, when you shake the Wii Remote while standing near or inside one, will send you flying to a whole new, previously inaccessible area. There are even sections where you'll be floating through space, using specialized pull stars to hop from area to area, all while floating through the spatial void.     Practically every galaxy you explore is an absolute joy to experience. The level designs here are top flight in every regard, with tons of clever and sometimes dastardly traps and puzzles for Mario to navigate. The difficulty doesn't start off terribly high, but as time goes on, the game ramps up nicely, building the challenge steadily until the final areas, which, though perhaps a bit frustrating to inexperienced players, provides the exact sort of tough workout you've come to expect from a Mario adventure. But even aside from the challenge level, simply exploring all these various galaxies is half the fun. Whether you're floating from land mass to land mass on a giant spinning flower, running frantically around a giant series of platforms that shrink to nothing the first time you touch them, or taking on one of several terrific 2D side-scrolling areas reminiscent of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, you won't be wanting for variety while playing through Galaxy's dozens of levels.    In a sort of nod to the suit-happy gameplay of Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario can don a number of different costumes that give him new abilities. For instance, in several levels, Mario can take on the abilities of a bee, buzzing around through the air via his new pair of wings, and wall-climbing specific honeycombed areas of the environment. With others, Mario can freeze water to walk over it, launch fireballs (natch), fly, wrap himself in a Mario-sized spring and jump to great heights, turn invincible (natch, again) and even turn into one of those pesky boos, allowing him to float around and pass through some solid walls. In most cases, the game takes great advantage of these abilities in the context of each level. A few involving the bee suit are a bit frustrating (given that you lose the suit when you touch water) and the spring suit is kind of a pain to control given Mario's perpetual bounciness, but otherwise, these abilities add a great dimension to the already excellent gameplay.   All the crazy gravitational pulling and perspective shifting is undeniably cool, and also potentially a little queasy.   Apart from the screwiness of the spring suit, there's very little issue to be taken with Mario Galaxy's controls. At its core, it controls much as Mario 64 did, but with a couple of Wii-centric twists. For one, Mario's primary attack is a basic spin move (the same spin move you use to activate launch stars). Simply shaking the Wii Remote engages the spin, and it's an extremely responsive mechanic. The one trick to it is that you have to wait a second before spinning again, so you want to make sure you're able to get away from whatever bad guy is nearby if you happen to miss.     The other key change is the addition of the Wii Remote as a pointer. Simply by pointing at them on the screen you'll collect star bits, which can be found just about everywhere and serve as both Super Mario Galaxy's currency and as a weapon. Firing star bits is as simple as aiming the Wii Remote at an enemy and pressing B to launch. But you don't want to fire off too many of those, as they come in handy for unlocking new stages later on. Only in a few specific cases does the game really dabble in true motion control, such as sections where you're surfing on a manta ray or walking on a boulder. But even these few divergences from the standard gameplay formula are largely successful and quite fun.    Mario Galaxy's journey is scattered and epic all at once. There isn't much of a thread tying together all these disparate worlds, apart from the fact that they have power stars hidden within them somewhere. And yet, at the same time, the lack of cohesion in what you're doing never really gets in the way of your enjoyment of it. Because each level is so much an island unto itself, it actually makes each one stand out all the more.     It helps that practically every stage in the game has a great deal of replayability purely on its own merits. These levels are just inherently fun to go back to again and again, and that the game gives you plenty of reason to is even better. Once you complete an area, you can go back and engage in a specialized version of it in certain cases. Essentially, comets will enter orbit in some of these galaxies, and thus change the way you play in some bizarre way. Whether it's speeding up all the enemies in an area, putting you on a timed run, or having you race against a doppelganger Mario, there's a nice variety of change-ups to experience. The adventure probably won't take you more than 12 to 15 hours if you just collect the minimum number of stars necessary to get to the end level, but you can certainly tack on a great deal more to that if you're into going back and collecting all the stars. And if you want to unlock the game's neat end surprise, you'll need to get all of them.     There is even a multiplayer component to the game, albeit a limited one. Another player can point their Wii Remote at the screen and take part in some of the basic fun, like collecting star bits, shooting star bits, and the like. You can even directly assist Mario by pointing at him and pressing A at the same time as your friend to make him do a super jump, and stop certain enemies from attacking by highlighting them with the pointer. It's not the most involved co-op mode you'll ever experience, but it can be fun if you've got someone enthusiastic alongside you.    As wonderful as Mario Galaxy's gameplay is, its graphics are even better. There simply isn't a better-looking Wii game available. A great deal of credit is due to the art design, which is simply phenomenal. The character designs, level details, animations, all of it is incredibly colorful and vibrant, and just a joy to look at. The technical engine does its part as well, keeping the frame rate drops to minor, infrequent bouts. One area especially worth noting is the game's camera, which takes a largely cinematic perspective, albeit with a limited amount of player control. You can adjust it right or left in certain areas, and go to a first-person view if you just want to look around. There are a few areas where the camera prevents you from seeing things perfectly, but mostly it does an excellent job of framing the action, especially considering all the kooky perspective shifting the game does as you run around these oddball environments. The only thing that's kind of a bummer is that you'll undoubtedly wish at some point while playing that the Wii could support resolutions higher than 480p; but even with the limited resolution, the game just looks beautiful.   Some of the new suits are seriously awesome.   Audio is also excellent, thanks largely to the top-notch soundtrack. Much of the music is made up of classic Mario tunes from a wide variety of different games, and it's all modernized and orchestrated. These are some of the best renditions of these tracks since the originals, and you're sure to be humming along as you play. There's little voice work in the game, but the few voice samples that are there are used to nice effect. It's probably better to just hear Bowser snarling than it is to hear him being a chatty Cathy, anyway. The sound effects are a touch on the shrill side at times, but the bulk of them fit the vibe of each stage nicely.    When all is said and done, the thing that really makes Super Mario Galaxy such a standout game isn't the fact that it's another Mario game, but the fact that it doesn't even need to be a Mario game to be successful. Sure, it's got all the nostalgic flavor Mario fans would want, with the updated soundtrack, familiar foes, and various other Mario-related bric-a-brac scattered throughout the adventure, but the game never leans on these nostalgic aspects as a crutch. It instead puts the whole of its focus on its gameplay design, and with good reason. You could probably swap in just about any other characters from practically any other franchise, and this would still be a phenomenally fun game. That it layers all these memorable characters and components on top of that phenomenal design just makes it all the sweeter. If ever there were a must-own Wii game, Super Mario Galaxy is it.    


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50,Burnout 3: Takedown ,9.5, Burnout 3: Takedown is an amazing achievement that anyone with a pulse will probably love.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/8/4/6/2208846-box_bout3t.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/burnout-3-takedown-review/1900-6106835/,pos,"
 As driving games continue to flood the market, the genre seems to be splintering apart further and further. It used to be easy. Driving games were either attempting to simulate actual driving, or they were eschewing realism in favor of a more accessible, more instantly gratifying game. But now there are even more subsets to choose from. You've got the hardcore simulations that attempt to model cars and driving as accurately as possible. There are the open-road, ""choose your own route""-style of racing games, which usually give you an entire city to race in. And, more recently, there are games that focus on the import tuning scene. With all these vastly different styles of driving games to choose from, it might be hard to figure out which type is the right one for you. With the release of Burnout 3: Takedown, developer Criterion Games makes the choice surprisingly easy. Put it this way: Even if driving games aren't normally your thing, Burnout 3 is still right for you. It's that good. It ranks among the best racing games ever made.  Still pictures can't do Burnout 3 justice.  The original Burnout, released back in 2001, was a great arcade-style racing game. It delivered a sense of speed that most games lacked, and it also showcased some pretty spectacular crashes. In fact, the crashes were so cool that they were spun off into their own mode of play in Burnout 2. The crash mode in Burnout 2 was totally separate from the main racing game, but the puzzle-like challenge of wrecking your car in the right spot and at the right time caused the most spectacular, most damaging multicar pileups, which represented an amazing addition to the game. Burnout 3 expertly combines the two main elements of the series while also adding some great, new gameplay modes, a career mode that ties all of these different modes together, good split-screen support, and online play that supports up to six players on the same racetrack. These changes and added features drastically improve a series that was already very impressive.  Burnout 3, like the previous games in the series, is mainly a racing game that rewards you for living dangerously. The game features simple, extremely responsive controls, so you can accelerate, steer, brake (around corners), and boost for a burst of speed. The courses in the game are open-road tracks on winding freeways and city streets, and, naturally, the streets are populated with a good amount of traffic. Driving dangerously comes in the form of driving in the wrong lane, getting close to (but not hitting) other cars, catching air, drifting around turns, and so on. When you pull such risky maneuvers, you're rewarded with boost. But the quickest way to fill your boost meter in a regular race is to make your opponents crash. Takedowns, as you might imagine from the game's subtitle, are a major part of Burnout 3. When you knock another car out, not only is your boost meter filled, but also it's extended up to a maximum of four times its original size. The downside is that you'll expose yourself to some pretty dangerous situations to earn all this boost, and crashing will eliminate much of your boost, chop off one of your bonus meter segments if you have any, and, more than likely, cause you to fall back one or two spots in a race. For an easy-to-play racing game, Burnout 3 actually gives you a lot to consider.  The other big gameplay mechanic in Burnout 3 makes the crashes much more exciting and interactive. When you crash, you can drop the game into a slow-motion mode called impact time, which makes for a very interesting and even innovative dynamic where the pacing of the game can drastically shift for a few moments if you crash. While this slow-motion look at cars getting mangled is beautiful in and of itself, you can actually make light adjustments to your car's trajectory using the left analog stick or d-pad, which is something the game calls ""aftertouch."" By applying aftertouch when you crash, not only can you stack your car into trucks, tankers, and other cars--just for the heck of it--but also you can attempt to knock into your opponents during a race. If you're successful, you'll earn an aftertouch takedown, which refills your boost meter and prevents you from losing any bonus meter segments. Basically, it functions as a recovery move. The fact that Burnout 3 makes crashing--which is usually the most undesirable part of competition in a racing game--a completely enjoyable part of the game is remarkable. Burnout 3's crash mode has also been completely redesigned to take advantage of aftertouch, so you'll have to do more than just wreck into the right spot this time around. Instead you'll need to maneuver your vehicle's carcass around for best results. It's a strange and surprisingly well-thought-out addition to the game.  There are several different types of events in Burnout 3 that build on the basic concepts of driving dangerously and making the most of your wrecks. Many of them can be played on their own or in an offline or online multiplayer setting, but a few of them only really come up during the game's world tour mode. The most standard mode of them all is the single race. A single race puts you and five opponents on the track, and, as the name suggests, you race. Some tracks feature multiple laps, while others are long enough to be one-lap affairs. The game has a good variety of environments, and multiple tracks are set up in each one by using the old Ridge Racer-style system of opening up certain paths while closing others to make the most of each section of road. The career mode occasionally strings three races together into a grand prix event, where you'll earn points at the end of each race based on your finishing position. There's definitely a good amount of variety here.  Burnout 3 delivers a sense of speed that other driving games can't even touch.  Crash mode returns to Burnout 3 with the same goal as in Burnout 2--to create the largest, most expensive pileup possible. The crash junctions still have a puzzle-like quality to them in that you'll have to figure out the most efficient crash spot in each level. However, with the addition of aftertouch and a series of on-track power-ups, the mode feels totally different from how it did in Burnout 2. Controlling your crash brings a lot of depth to the mode. Some power-ups are merely cash bonuses, whereas others are score multipliers, which are very important. Also, you won't have infinite boost right out of the gate here. You'll have to pick up a boost icon, at which point you'll boost whether you like it or not.  Crash mode also benefits from a new function called the ""crashbreaker."" This basically lets you make your car spectacularly explode on command. However, you can only trigger it after a certain number of cars have become involved in the wreck. There are also instant crashbreaker power-ups on the track that, as you might expect, cause an instant crashbreaker, effectively letting you blow up twice in the same level. This makes the basic progression much deeper than simply wrecking you car and watching the fun unfold. Now, a common crash junction has you getting the boost icon, maneuvering to wreck into something big, then aftertouching over to a score multiplier or other bonus. Once you reach the crashbreaker threshold, pop that sucker, and use your second wind to aftertouch over to both some cars you may have missed and another power-up. And if you're really looking to break stuff, there's an instant crashbreaker power-up. The junctions get pretty elaborate, and you really have to think on your feet to cause the biggest wrecks. The results tend to be immensely satisfying in ways that are unique to Burnout 3 in particular, since its crash mode is so bizarre and yet so good.  There are also a few different multiplayer crash options to choose from. You can play two-player games online or offline, and you can either cooperate to cause an even bigger crash, or you can work against each other to see who can cause the biggest pileup. The party crash mode--which is the game's only online mode that goes all the way up to eight players--is a simple score competition where each player crashes in the same junction, and then scores are compared. At the end of each round, the most damaging crash is replayed for all to see. This is an interesting mode, online, but since you aren't exactly interacting with the other players beyond voice chatting during your wrecks, it's not the most impressive mode the game has to offer.  The game's six-player online support works very well.  The other modes in the game are standard variants on the basic format. You'll face off against one other car in a race that, if won, unlocks the opposing vehicle for your own use. The burning lap is a solo race against the clock that gives you the maximum boost meter length and essentially challenges you to boost your way around the entire track to meet or beat some pretty challenging lap times. Road rage gives you a time limit and a never-ending stream of opponent cars. The gold medal is won by achieving a specific number of takedowns before time--or before your banged-up car--expires. Online, you can play road rage in teams, where the blue team tries to escape while the red team, often with infinite boost, tries to catch up to take the drivers out before a certain number of miles have been logged. Eliminator races are five lap races that disqualify the last-place car at the end of every lap, making the final lap a one-on-one showdown.  Tying all of the single-player modes together is the world tour mode, which is essentially a large map full of different events. This career-type mode is good at letting you do what you want to do, since you'll usually have a great deal of races available at any given time. Single races eventually lead to grand prix events, burning laps, road rage, crash junctions, eliminator races, face-offs, and so on. The goal in each event is to earn a medal. You can earn bronze medals and still progress through the game, but to unlock the most cars and events, you'll want to take the time to go for the gold. The world tour mode is very good at throwing a lot of unlockable content at you right off the bat, though as you progress, the new cars start to dry up a bit.  The world tour mode is fantastic at ramping up the difficulty at a manageable pace. The first set of cars you get--the compact series--already feels like its cars go incredibly fast. But at this speed, beginners will still feel like they have just enough time to react to little things like, say, an oncoming semi truck. Then you'll move up to the muscle series, which is a little faster and looser but is still manageable--once you get used to the upgrade. These performance boosts keep coming until you hit the super series, which is faster still--and is significantly harder than the early portions of the game. But since you've been working your way up through the ranks little by little, the difficulty never feels too hard.  Your computer-controlled opponents add to the mayhem quite well. Usually, at the start of a race, they'll drive in a fairly passive manner. But they don't take kindly to aggressive drivers such as you. If you knock one of them around, the icon above his or her car will change color, eventually becoming a deep red, at which point the driver will be out for blood--yours. Angered artificial intelligence will knock you around, attempt to force you into walls or oncoming traffic, and generally make your life more difficult (just as a human player would). But it's also to your advantage to fight with your foes, because the boost bonuses are significant. Additionally, the races are kept challenging by AI that is designed to keep races close. While most games use this ""rubber band"" effect in a noticeably negative way, here it works very well. In fact, Burnout 3 wouldn't be as intense if you could sustain a comfortable lead. You'll occasionally pull ahead of the pack and get into a situation where you can crash once or twice without losing the lead, but for the most part, you need to stay on your toes and race well to win. This works in reverse too, so it's possible for you to come back from worst to first, provided you're driving in a risky enough fashion to earn sufficient boost to catch up to the pack.  While the crashes are flashy and spectacular, the most impressive part of Burnout 3 is its pure sense of speed. This is something that most other racing games simply can't seem to get right--at least not compared with this one. In Burnout 3, racing at 150mph feels about as dangerous as it should. Boosting in a super series car will get you up around the 200mph mark, which feels ridiculously fast, especially when you factor in the relative speeds of oncoming drivers. The sense of speed combines with things like oncoming traffic to make Burnout 3 a truly white-knuckle experience. If all games could maintain this level of intensity from start to finish, avid game players would be going gray well before their times.  With a large collection of unlockable cars and events, Burnout 3 will keep players busy for some time.  Burnout 3 has online support for up to eight players on both the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox, though when it comes to actually putting all the players into one race, your maximum limit is six contestants. Most of the game's modes--from single race, to a variety of crash modes, to team road rage--are available for play online. The game has an extensive set of leaderboards that will rank you in a variety of categories, and you're able to restrict races to specific ranks or series of cars when creating a game just to keep things fair. The best thing that can be said about the online support in Burnout 3 is that it works very, very well. If one player has a particularly laggy connection, you might see that car skip around the course a bit, but for the most part, the game handles all six drivers--as well as a full complement of traffic to dodge--amazingly. Notably, the slow-motion portion of crash aftertouch is removed when you're playing online, which gives online play a slightly different feel.  Both the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game support voice chat and have ""quickmatch"" options to get you into a race quickly. Xbox Live owners might be puzzled by some of the EA-specific modifications that the publisher has made to the standard Xbox Live feature set, but what really matters is that you can find a game and get into a game with very little trouble. The game is playable with players from around the world, though those with NTSC copies of the game won't be able to play against PAL users due to the speed and timing changes inherent in making a game for both standards. Just like in the world tour mode, you'll earn points for your online performance, and these go toward unlockable cars.  You'll earn cars in different ways throughout Burnout 3, but perhaps the most satisfying way to earn them is by reaching specific score plateaus. The game keeps track of how many takedowns you've pulled against your opponents and how much monetary damage you've caused in crash mode--and it also tracks a global Burnout score that you get for driving skillfully, crashing stylishly, and so on. Each of these different counters will get you a car from time to time, and the points can come in whether you're online or off. Some of the higher-ticket crash vehicles--like the fire truck--cost a lot of money, so you won't see these during your first weekend of play. These unlockables, combined with the lengthy world tour mode, give Burnout 3 a fantastic amount of replay value. When you add in the online support and how well it's all tied together, you have a driving game that you won't be putting down anytime soon--and not just because of its outstanding gameplay.  The sounds of driving are incredible, though the lame DJ gets in the way.  When it comes to graphics, Burnout 3's main focus is on its sense of speed, which is achieved by an extremely fast frame rate and some impressive special effects, such as those for motion blur. But the game also has an astonishing particle-effects system that makes the crashes look better than ever. You'll see sparks flying off of your car when you grind it against something, large chunks of metal fly off of the car when you crash, and the game really looks superb from top to bottom. The car models look really great. Even though they aren't the most detailed car models in the business and they aren't real cars, considering how fast most of them fly by, you'll hardly notice. The game's frame rate stays surprisingly solid in both versions of the game, which really helps sell the sense of speed. Burnout 3 has a pretty incredible physics model working behind the scenes that makes the darkly humorous crashes worth watching every single time. Both games have support for progressive scan and 16:9 displays. Both versions look awesome on their respective platforms, but when you compare the two, the Xbox version wins the fight easily.  It's worth noting that with the Burnout series moving from the now-defunct Acclaim over to Electronic Arts, some of EA's standard touches have made it into the game in the form of product placement. You'll definitely notice ads for EA's upcoming games on the sides of almost every course, along with an occasional cologne ad. The ads stick out a bit too much and become annoying almost immediately. Considering how great the backdrops in each track look, it's a bit disappointing to see them marred by advertising. You might also be frustrated that when you play the game's main modes for the first time, you'll have to sit through a few minutes of unskippable training video. It's nicely produced, but the game itself is easy to get into, so the tutorial should have been skippable. The audio has a few similar touches to it that aren't entirely welcomed.  Make no mistake. Burnout 3's audio is great. Actually, the sounds of driving, from the roar of your engine, to the rush of wind as you pass oncoming traffic, to the loud thunks of your car shifting gears, to the bass-heavy whoosh that kicks in when you hit your boost, are incredible. However, these sounds are counterbalanced by a few negatives. The game is missing a few key noises that would have added to the sense of realism. For instance, you really don't hear much when you scrape your car against a guard rail. It would seem that the obvious shower of sparks would be accompanied by some sort of grinding noise. But the real culprits are the game's announcer and soundtrack. Burnout 3's soundtrack is treated like a radio station called Crash FM. The DJ, a knucklehead alt-rock jock called Stryker, is merely annoying to begin with, but when you hear him repeat the same handful of phrases time and time again, you'll do the right thing and turn him off in the game's options menu.  The soundtrack is full of a bunch of populist indie rock and pop-punk that might be doing well on the radio these days, but the tempo and style of the music doesn't necessarily mesh with very-high-speed driving. On the Xbox, you'll fortunately be able to use the custom soundtrack feature to fix this to your liking. On the PS2, you're out of luck unless you want to just turn the music down entirely. Considering how awesome the sounds of driving are in the game, this actually isn't a bad choice. Finally, the Xbox version supports Dolby Digital 5.1, while the PlayStation 2 only supports Pro Logic II. The end result is that bass effects--such as the sound of boosting--are much clearer and deeper on the Xbox.  Anyone with a pulse and a penchant for thrills will love Burnout 3.  It's also worth mentioning that the loading times in Burnout 3 are a little longer than you'd probably like them to be. The Xbox is much faster than the noticeably poky PlayStation 2 version, but you'll still be waiting a bit longer than you'd like, regardless of which version you're playing. That's mostly because you won't want to be waiting at all before your next race or crash.  Unless your only idea of driving-game enjoyment involves playing the strictest of simulations, Burnout 3: Takedown is the driving game for you. It's instantly accessible, yet it has more than enough challenge to it to keep you busy for a very long time, even if you don't intend to play the game online. Furthermore, it's simply one of the most exciting, action-packed games to come along in a long time, regardless of genre. So even if driving games aren't normally your thing, if you're a thrill-seeker (at least in game terms), this offering has them in spades. Burnout 3: Takedown is an amazing achievement that anyone with a pulse will probably love.   Editor's note 09/09/04: The review originally stated that the PlayStation 2 version of Burnout 3 did not support progressive scan displays, which is incorrect. GameSpot regrets the error. 


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51,Dragon Age: Origins ,9.5," Incredible storytelling, great characters, and exciting battles are just a few of the things that make this fantasy role-playing game so extraordinary.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426736-2219291-box_da1.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragon-age-origins-review/1900-6238632/,pos,"
  When was the last time you felt totally lost in a fantasy gameworld? When was the last time you played a game with such a well-crafted and enjoyable story that you knew you’d remember it for a long, long time? Dragon Age: Origins is that kind of game, so rich and involving that you are powerless to resist its wiles and whims, so touching and triumphant that your mind and heart will be moved. In the fictional land of Ferelden, you meet memorable characters and fight for a cause you believe in, and it's this backdrop that makes developer BioWare's newest role-playing game so extraordinary. Dragon Age is more than a well-crafted story, however: It's a lengthy, intricate, and thoroughly entertaining adventure that's easy to fall in love with.       Dragon Age's plot, which deals with the impending invasion of a horde of demonic creatures called the darkspawn, isn't where the story's biggest surprises lie. The shocks, the joys, and the disappointments spring from the repartee among a number of remarkable characters; they lurk within books of lore and stories of martyrs; and they burst forth during spine-tingling moments when you must choose from a selection of difficult choices that affect the tale's direction--and the way your associates interact with you. Ferelden is a colorful and fascinating kingdom that takes enough cues from well-known fantasy tropes to be familiar, but bends enough conventions to feel original. Dragon Age features dwarves, but their caste-based society and the social paragons that rise above it twist the norms enough to keep you intrigued. Mages remain under the constant watch of templars, a restriction that doesn't sit well with those who view such policing as virtual slavery. The role of religion in human circles is of particular note. Chantries provide refuge to those worshiping the all-powerful Maker, and chanters recite the holy word near their houses of prayer. But lest this world sound too serious, don't despair: One such disciple slides food references into her chant, and a few dwarves warn you not to fall into the sky. Small, humorous touches like this are plentiful. Even if you aren't the literary sort, Dragon Age may inspire you to read every note, every character bio, and every creature description, thanks to the richness of the world and the consistency with which it's presented.     You'll learn even more from the companions who join you, and you'll grow to care about them on your quest for glory. There's Morrigan, the cynical apostate mage bound to your cause for reasons that become clear only late in the journey; Sten, the strong, silent type who isn't so quick to reveal his innermost thoughts; and Zevran, a darkly mischievous would-be assassin with a wild streak and a playful disregard for the law. There are others too, including Alistair, a wisecracking, vaguely insecure member of the Grey Wardens, an elite group of champions that recruits you early on. Great dialogue and fantastic voice acting make these characters leap off the screen as if they were real friends, and the way they interact with one another feels authentic. Morrigan and Alistair banter about the role of templars in the lives of mages, and the sweetly devout Leliana tries to communicate with your trusty canine cohort in some amusing exchanges. You may even develop a romance (or two) before all is said and done. The course of love isn't always a smooth one, though it can be a bit steamy, in a PG-13 sort of way.    Uh oh--this can't be healthy.   Relationships must be nurtured; in the world of Dragon Age, love doesn't develop at first sight. Rather, you must improve your standings with available party members by giving them gifts and fulfilling quests in ways that please them. Doing so opens more dialogue options and may even reward you with unexpected gifts beyond the private pleasures of your tent. Your personal relationships aren't all you need to worry about when facing a difficult decision, however. On significant quests, you'll encounter complex choices that force you to weigh the risks against the rewards, even as you try to stay true to your own vision of your character. Are werewolves heartless killers, or is there a method to their madness? Should you wholeheartedly embrace a political candidate, or will some unexpected information have you playing double agent--or just killing the opposition? Such open-ended quests have become staples in many similar RPGs, but few make these decisions feel so momentous. The anxiety that results when you encounter important choices is a result of superb writing and character development: When you care about your destiny, decisions have more weight.     Even Dragon Age's initial moments present important decisions that affect how your adventure plays out. You'll customize your own avatar's look from a variety of presets, but more importantly, you'll choose a race and class. The choices may seem initially limited, but your options eventually expand. Later, you can choose up to two subclasses once you reach the necessary level requirements, and there are a few different means of unlocking additional skill trees. Your initial race and class choices don't just determine the kinds of skills and spells you will have access to, however; they influence how the first few hours of the game progress. You will experience one of six different ""origin stories"" that follow the events that lead you to the elite Grey Wardens. Every origin story leads to the same place, but that doesn't mean you leave these events behind for good. Characters you met early on will cross your path again, and crucial moments of your origin story will continue to haunt you. The varied origin stories not only provide plenty of replay value, but allow you to see familiar characters from a different angle. A prisoner you meet within a dank dungeon may not have much impact on you if you are playing as a Dalish elf, but if you play as a human mage, this encounter is a bittersweet reunion.    Meet Morrigan. Sharp tongue not pictured.   You aren't a lone adventurer, however. You can take up to three companions along with you, and eventually you will meet more willing (or unwilling, as the case may be) darkspawn slayers. You can switch out party members back at your camp or in other friendly areas. Party members you don't use will remain at camp, though they thankfully level up even when you don't take them along. Your comrades aren't just AI-controlled henchmen; you can take full control of any party member at any time, though how you do so depends on the platform. PC owners get the most versatile and rewarding experience in this regard. You can zoom the camera in to a close third-person view when exploring and conversing with non-player characters, or pull the camera back to a tactical view, which makes it a breeze to quickly and easily micromanage every spell and attack, in true Baldur's Gate tradition. On consoles, you always view the action from behind a single character, and you use a shoulder button to switch among them. It's a great way of experiencing the buzz of battle, though occasional pathfinding quirks are more apparent in the console versions, simply because you experience the action from a single perspective at a time, rather than while managing four characters simultaneously.    If you've played a BioWare fantasy RPG in the past, you'll feel right at home with the combat system. By clicking on your target or pressing the attack button, you don't just swing a sword, but you approach your target and queue up your attack. Once your party has gained access to a good number of spells, stances, and skills, battlefields explode with bright colors and raucous sound effects, and it's a lot of fun to switch back and forth between party members, managing your abilities and taking advantage of various spell combos to wreak havoc. There are dozens of different types of enemies to slice up, from giant spiders and darkspawn, to ghosts and walking trees, to demons and, of course, dragons. Allies will join you in the biggest battles, and the best of these, particularly those toward the end of the game, are thrilling. On the PC, they're particularly challenging, and many battles benefit from frequent pausing and tactical thinking, so that you can queue up attacks across your entire party. The same battles on consoles are noticeably easier.      Nevertheless, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions have their challenges, and no matter which platform you choose, you can customize your cohorts' AI behavior to be more effective in battle. Using the tactics menu, you can set characters up to drink potions when their health gets low; have Morrigan cast helpful crowd-control spells when enemies are clustered together; and program sturdier characters to draw enemies' ire when more vulnerable party members are under attack. As you level up, you will earn additional tactics slots, allowing you to implement even more intricate actions. You can also apply basic behaviors to your team members, making them more aggressive or defensive, and you can switch them around on the fly if an experimental custom tactic isn't working as you intended. When things come together as you plan--such as when Morrigan freezes a hurlock in place and Alistair smashes it to smithereens--battles are even more rewarding.       All of these elements coalesce wonderfully, making for a memorable and exciting adventure that keeps you on the move. The flow of loot and pace of leveling are both highly satisfying, and because you have four active characters to consider (in addition to others back at the camp), you spend a lot of time poring over armor and weapon choices. The tempo is even quicker than the Dungeons & Dragons games that preceded Dragon Age, thanks to important tweaks that minimize downtime. For example, you do not need to rest between encounters to replenish your health and recharge your spells. Instead, health and stamina are replenished quickly once the skirmish ends, allowing you to string encounters together without unwanted breaks in between. Should a party member fall during battle, he or she will be resuscitated once the battle has ended, albeit with a stat penalty applied (though it can be cured with an injury kit). These factors, and more, give Dragon Age an excellent sense of forward direction.    All the spells, tactics, and skills sound like a lot to organize, but the interface does a great job of helping you keep track of things. The PC interface is brilliant, letting you browse through your inventory and tweak your quickbars quickly and easily. The console versions do a surprisingly great job as well, making it simple to sort through your quests, and to queue up actions while battle is paused. One particularly useful feature is the ability to identify inventory items as trash and sell them all with a single button press once you're back in town. There are some console-specific interface irritations that could have been cleaner, however. For example, identifying new codex (that is, lore) entries can be troublesome, because the list doesn't scroll down until your highlight cursor reaches the bottom of the window. As a result, you can't always distinguish new entries from old ones, which is an issue that doesn't plague the fantastic PC interface. The consoles' radial menu, on the other hand, is an excellent way of letting you access every battle skill, and it works somewhat like the similar interface in Mass Effect--albeit with a few more layers.     The differences between versions aren't limited to the interface. Dragon Age doesn't look amazing on the PC, but it's an attractive game nonetheless. Zooming from an isometric view to a third-person perspective is slick, and while environments don't hold up quite as well when viewed up close, they're consistently lovely when viewed from above. On the flip side, the Xbox 360 version looks positively disappointing. Textures are highly compressed and colors are washed out, though the upside is that this version maintains a smoother frame rate than on the PlayStation 3, where things might get jittery when swiveling the camera around. The PlayStation 3 version features higher-quality textures than those on the Xbox 360, better color saturation, smoother facial animations, and shorter load times. Minor visual hiccups, like corpses that disappear and reappear, are a bit more common on the PS3, however. The PC version is the superior experience, but if you're choosing between the two console releases, the PlayStation 3 has the upper hand. Some minor glitches are shared between the console versions, however, such as rare occasions when the soundtrack or voice-overs disappear. We also ran into a few quest malfunctions that could be replicated on all three platforms, though they were relatively minor and did not interfere with the progress of the main quest.   This particular origin story is not a peaceful one.   No matter which version you choose, however, there are plenty of audiovisual details to note. In many ways, Dragon Age looks and sounds like other high-fantasy games, but while the towers, forest paths, and underground caverns are what you've seen before, the art style is attractive, and a few sights, such as an underground dwarven city, are particularly eye-catching. Character models don't exhibit Mass Effect-level expressiveness, but they look good and animate smoothly enough. Also of note are the splatters of blood that appear on your party members after battle. It's a nice idea, but the splotches look like they've been splashed across you with a paintbrush. The crimson stains are a cool thematic touch, however, because blood plays an important role in Dragon Age. The sound effects are excellent, console glitches notwithstanding, and the soundtrack, while typical for a fantasy game, swells and murmurs at all the right moments.     Few games are this ambitious, and even fewer can mold these ambitions into such a complete and entertaining experience. You might spend 50 or more hours on your first play-though, but there are so many paths to follow, so many details to uncover, and so many ways to customize your party that you'll want to play again as soon as you finish the first time. PC owners even get an extra dash of depth via the downloadable toolset, which lets you create new levels, spells, skills, and even cutscenes. But any way you slice it, here's the fantasy RPG you've been waiting for, the one that will keep you up late at night, bleary-eyed, because you have to see what happens next. Like the best fiction, Dragon Age will sweep you up in its world, so much so that when you're done, you'll want to experience it all over again.     


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52,The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ,9.5, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an amazing role-playing game that should not be missed.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/6/4/2218964-box_oblivion.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-review/1900-6168010/,pos,"
  The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an unequivocal role-playing masterpiece of epic proportions. After strong showings on the PC and Xbox 360, Oblivion is now available for the PlayStation 3, and it's still every bit a fantastic game. That said, if you've already played Oblivion, you won't find much of anything new in this version. The graphics are slightly better, the load times are shorter, and there is a bit of new content in the form of the Knights of the Nine add-on, which is available as a separate purchase on other platforms. However, if you own a PlayStation 3 but haven't played Oblivion yet, this is one game you won't want to miss.   It seems like you're always stumbling across a new dungeon to explore in the world of Tamriel.   Oblivion takes place in the massive fantasy world of Tamriel. It's an immersive world full of adventure and intrigue that you can easily get lost in for hours at a time. You begin the game by selecting a race and gender to create a character. After a short introductory sequence, you can choose a class and birth sign to further customize your hero. The classes are typical role-playing standards, such as warriors, wizards, and thieves. There are also several hybrid classes, so you're sure to find a perfect class for your style of play. As flexible as the character-creation system is, you can take it a step further by assigning skills and attributes as you see fit to create your own class. You aren't limited by the class you choose though, because all of the skills and abilities in the game are open to anyone. Designing your character is simply a matter of assigning proficiencies. There are seemingly endless options for creating your character, which gives an early indication of just how deep and customizable this game is.     Once you create a character, the world is yours to explore. The main quest involves closing a series of gates to the hellish alternate dimension of Oblivion, which is spawning hordes of evil creatures that are attacking the cities of Tamriel. You can stick closely to the main story quest, which will take about 40 hours to complete, but the majority of the content in Oblivion is entirely ancillary. This is one role-playing game that does a fantastic job of nailing that feeling of truly being in control of your own destiny. Something as simple as picking herbs or hunting deer in a forest can suddenly turn into a dashing adventure as you're attacked by bandits or stumble upon a secret cavern that's just begging to be explored.     The world is full of hundreds of characters, each with unique names, personalities, and problems. It pays to talk to these characters because you never know when one of them might send you on a lengthy and rewarding side quest. You might have to spy on a suspicious person, assassinate someone, collect rare plants to create a potion, expose a crooked merchant, and much more. There are also guilds for each of the basic classes, and each guild has its own elaborate quest for you to complete. If there's a problem with Oblivion, it's that there's so much to do in the world of Tamriel that the scope of it all can feel daunting at times. Rather than trying to experience everything the game has to offer, you might find yourself simply walking about the countryside taking in the beautiful sights, which can be every bit as enjoyable as fighting for your life on the fiery planes of Oblivion.    Fighting is one of the more exciting aspects of Oblivion because the combat is fast and frantic. The tension is also heightened by the game's default first-person perspective. Fighting is as simple as pressing a button to swing a sword, shoot an arrow, or cast a spell, but the adaptability of the combat and the solid artificial intelligence of the enemies ensure that no two battles will ever feel quite the same. You can approach combat head-on, go for a stealth approach and stab an enemy in the back, stay back in the shadows and fire arrows, cast spells to inflict damage or status effects on your enemy, or even conjure up other monsters to do the dirty work for you. If you're averse to confrontation, you can simply make yourself invisible and sneak past enemies, avoiding combat altogether. No matter what strategy you choose, the combat is satisfying because it's quick, dynamic, and challenging enough to make you feel as if you're really fighting for your life rather than slogging through an endless stream of obligatory battles. You're rewarded for your efforts with piles and piles of glorious loot.     As you play the game, you'll get stronger. You don't earn experience points as in a traditional role-playing game. Instead, your skills become stronger as you use them. This means that if you stick to using a sword, you'll get better with blade weapons. If you primarily use magic, you'll become a stronger caster. It's an intuitive system that eliminates the need to go out of your way to train and strengthen your character, which lets you focus on the more enjoyable aspects of the game. No matter how strong you become, you'll never feel invincible because all of the enemies that you fight in the game also level up with you. This does deflate the ego a bit because even after putting hours into the game, on the default difficulty you'll often find a respectable challenge fighting even the most common enemies. But there is a difficulty slider that you can adjust at any time, just in case you find yourself having a hard time staying alive.     Not only is the world of Tamriel massive, but it's also a gorgeous, organic place full of spectacular sights and experiences. There's plenty of variety to the landscape as well, and you can do everything from scaling a snowy peak, to taking a horseback ride up a rugged mountain path, to going for a swim in a crystal-clear lake, to searching an ancient tomb. The draw distance in the PlayStation 3 version of the game is a bit further than in the Xbox 360 version, which means that when you're looking out across the world, you'll see huge castles, lakes, and mountains perfectly clearly in the distance. When you're exploring the world, you will notice some objects and textures pop into view a bit late, which looks a bit awkward but is certainly forgivable because the rest of the game is so pretty. The cities are also thoughtfully designed and arranged as if each place you visit is entirely unique. The claustrophobic dungeons are vast and deep, full of fearsome enemies and abundant treasures. When you enter these cities or dungeons, you do have to look at a loading screen, but on the PlayStation 3, the load times are thankfully brief and usually last only a few seconds.    There are plenty of opportunities to create a little mayhem, but if you step out of line you can expect to suffer the consequences.   The fantastic presentation also extends to the audio in Oblivion. The rousing orchestrated soundtrack sounds great and enhances the grand feeling of adventure in the game. When you encounter an enemy, the music will suddenly change to a more upbeat track that keeps you on your toes and often serves as your only alert to nearby danger. There's a ton of voice work to listen to here as well. Every single line of dialogue in the game is fully voiced. Some notable actors lend their voices, including Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation, X-Men) and Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, National Treasure). But for the most part, all of the residents of Tamriel share the same few voices. The delivery is very good, but it's a bit off-putting to hear almost every character in the game speak with exactly the same voice. The sheer amount of spoken dialogue in the game is impressive nonetheless.      The PlayStation 3 version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is every bit as impressive as the Xbox 360 and PC versions. However, this isn't necessarily the best version of the game. This version does come with the Knights of the Nine add-on, which will add about 10 hours of gameplay to the already lengthy game, but it doesn't come with any of the other downloadable additions made available on the Xbox 360. In terms of extras, the PC trumps both other versions because of a wealth of free player-created content. Even with a  relatively modest amount of added content, the PlayStation 3 version of Oblvion packs well over 100 hours of adventuring to keep you entertained for months to come. Ultimately, the version you decide to purchase comes down to a matter of preference, but one way or another, you should definitely play this game.   


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53,Halo 3 ,9.5," Halo 3 builds upon the concepts of Halo 2 in ways that you'd expect, but there are also new modes and options that send the series in exciting new directions.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/8/6/2213886-box_halo3.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/halo-3-review/1900-6179646/,pos,"
  Regardless of how you felt about its cliffhanger ending, there's no denying that Halo 2 was a gigantic success that raised the bar for what we, as a game-playing society, expect out of a good console-based first-person shooter. In the years that followed, plenty of games attempted to duplicate the Halo formula, with varying degrees of success. But there's still nothing quite like the genuine item. Luckily for all involved, Halo 3 is a positively amazing package that offers extreme satisfaction across all of its different parts. Maybe now you can finally retire your Halo 2 disc and really move into the next generation of games.   Halo 3 manages to feel familiar while also packing in a good amount of new material.   Halo 3 is an interesting mix of established protocol and intriguing new stuff. For example, the gameplay doesn't stray too far from Halo 2, which, in turn, didn't exactly reinvent the original Halo. Don't take that as a negative, because it means that Halo 3 plays extremely well, with the same types of light tactical considerations that have made the series stand apart from other, faster-paced shooters. The balance between your guns, your grenades, and your melee attack has always given Halo a unique feel in the genre, and those same considerations apply today, both in the campaign mode and in multiplayer. You'll also have new weapons and items to consider, such as a host of Brute weapons. One example is the spiker, which is an exciting automatic pistol that fires quickly and decimates opponents, especially if you're holding a pair of them. Another is the mauler, which is a one-handed shotgun that can level enemies up close. You'll even find weapons so huge that your movement speed slows when you carry them. When you use these weapons, the camera pulls out to a third-person perspective so you can see your missile pod, plasma cannon, or flamethrower as it fires. And then there's the gravity hammer. Originally shown in Halo 2 (where it wasn't usable by the player), the gravity hammer is a large melee weapon that will wipe out most regular enemies in one swipe. Needless to say, it can be especially fun in multiplayer settings. The end result is gameplay that feels wholly familiar without retreading the same ground too heavily.    The campaign is structured in much the same way as past Halo games, with multiple chapters and effective streaming that ensures you'll see load times only between chapters. There are also lengthy vehicle sequences to break up the on-foot action. You'll pilot the classic Halo vehicles, such as the Ghost, a hovering one-person craft that's fast and deadly, and the Warthog, a dune buggy with a turret mounted in the back. You'll also see new vehicles, such as the Brute Prowler, which is a two-person vehicle with turrets. Like in previous games, the vehicles are fun to use. Also similar to previous games, the artificial intelligence can't drive very well, so if you're playing alone, you'll usually want to grab the steering wheel rather than the weapons.    The concept of ""equipment"" is new to the series. These deployable special items have a variety of effects. The most obvious example is the bubble shield: You (and your enemies) can walk through it, but bullets and explosions bounce right off. It's especially entertaining when your enemies use it, given that you can just walk through and bash them with the butt of your gun. You'll also find items that make your shields regenerate more quickly, and others that drain enemy shields and stop their vehicles dead in their tracks. These items also show up in multiplayer, where they're a little more interesting.    Halo 2's ending was widely criticized for being too much of a cliffhanger and leaving you with no sense of progress or resolution whatsoever. It's good news, then, that Halo 3's story doesn't suffer from that problem at all. It opens immediately following the events of Halo 2: The Covenant is on its way to Earth, continuing its religious zealotry and attempting to activate the floating space weapons known as Halos, which could destroy civilization as we know it. The Master Chief and the other Earth forces of the UNSC are in hot pursuit to stop them, with newfound allies such as the Arbiter coming along for the ride. We'll spare you the specifics because they're quite compelling and should be seen firsthand. All you really need to know if you're on the fence about Halo 3's campaign is that it's a delicate balancing act that manages to provide satisfying closure for the trilogy, make perfect sense of all the cryptic events in Halo 2, and leave you filled with anticipation for more adventures set in the Halo universe. Not bad for a game that will take most players between 10 and 15 hours to finish on one of four difficulty settings.    But you'll probably go through the campaign more than once, thanks to the inclusion of a strong co-op mode. Previous Halo games have let two players go through the campaign; Halo 3 ups that number to four players and lets you do the whole thing over Xbox Live, if you so choose. This is a really fun way to experience the campaign's nine chapters, and you can choose to go through them in any order, provided you've already played through it alone. Furthermore, this method of play (which you can also do alone) lets you turn on scoring in campaign mode, in which you earn points for kills and lose them for dying. This adds a sense of competition to the co-op, and there are also achievements associated with finishing chapters with high point totals. You can also customize the experience a bit by turning on a series of unlockable modifiers that open up as you collect hidden skulls. The skulls are stashed around the game, and some of them do things such as increase the amount of damage you'll need to deal to take an enemy down, remove the heads-up display and make your weapon invisible, and so on. This gives the story-driven section of the game some more replay value, although it doesn't get significantly more difficult as you scale up the number of players. Consequently, finishing the game on legendary difficulty is a breeze if you're rolling through with three experienced fellow triggermen.   You can earn the campaign achievements in co-op mode, which makes the legendary difficulty a lot easier to manage.   In addition to the four-player co-op action, you can also play competitive solo and team-based multiplayer matches with up to 16 players on 11 different maps. There's a lot of depth to the multiplayer modes, ranging from simple stuff such as deathmatch and team deathmatch (still referred to as slayer and team slayer here), to more objective-based gameplay such as capture the flag. Another similar mode is called territories, in which the two teams fight to defend or attack various control points around the map. You'll also find a mode called infection, where a percentage of the players start as sword-wielding zombies and must convert the members of the other team by killing them, until only one non-zombie remains. Each of the maps can handle any of these game modes.    Like in Halo 2, you can customize these game types, and there's more to customize this time around. You can change things like starting weapons, the weapons that appear on the map, whether the motion sensor is active, the force of gravity, the game speed, whether the players all have active camouflage or not, and much, much more. The multiplayer is as strong as it has ever been thanks to the addition of new weapons and tweaks to old ones. Swords have been made much more interesting this time around: If two players run at one another with energy swords and attack at the same time, the swords clash and the players bounce off one another. This makes all-swords matches totally wild. The gravity hammer is also big fun in multiplayer matches, both because it crushes enemies that are foolish enough to get too close, and because you can smack incoming rockets to bat them away, which makes for an interesting game of baseball.    The weird thing about this last concept is that, with the addition of the Forge, you'll actually be able to build some sort of crude baseball variant if you want. Forge mode is a map editor, but not in the 3D modeling sense that you're used to seeing in PC shooters. You can't edit level geometry with Forge, but you can spawn, remove, and move objects and items around the level. All of the editing is done in real time, and you can pop in and out of edit mode by pushing up on the D pad. You can also play this mode with other players, letting everyone run around in edit mode to spawn Warthogs, rocket launchers, and whatever else is already on the map. On the surface, that doesn't sound so exciting. But in practice, it's a weird and potential-rich addition to the game because there are a ton of little secrets and tricks you can use to manipulate the objects in ways the developers may not have intended.   The Forge might not sound like much at first, but when you figure out how to play with it, it becomes one of the game's most impressive features.   For example, take the fusion core. It's Halo's version of the exploding barrel, and by default, it blows up when you shoot it or drop it from a significant height. It also takes 30 seconds to respawn. You can modify it to respawn every 10 seconds and, with help from another player's rifle fire, you can coax it into respawning in midair, where it tumbles to the ground and explodes every 10 seconds. Naturally, if you surround that spot with more stuff that explodes, you'll have a fun little physics-based bomb that respawns and explodes every 10 seconds. If you've ever messed around with Garry's Mod, a similar physics-based toolbox for Half-Life 2, then you'll recognize this as a simplified take on that idea when you start using it for more than simply adding a few weapons to a map or moving spawn points around. Though many players probably won't get hooked on Forge tinkering, it's an extremely powerful addition that may just take over your life.    You'll be able to easily share your Forge creations with other players via a handy file-sharing system that lets you quickly send map configurations and gameplay types to your friends. You can also set a certain number of items as publicly shared, and users can go to Bungie's Web site to browse and rate the shared items. Additionally, you can flag items for download on that Web page, and the next time you fire up Halo 3, it'll download the items you've marked. It's a very slick interface that makes moving stuff around very easy.    You can also use the file-sharing options to send screenshots and saved films. Saved films are replays of action from any of the modes in the game, from campaign to multiplayer to Forge sessions. The game automatically stores the last 25 or so sessions, and you can choose to save them more permanently from there. Once you've got them, you can edit them down to key kills, weird single-player behavior, or the strangest Forge stuff you can come up with, and then save them for sharing, just as you would with a map or game mode. Much like Forge, the saved-films feature doesn't really sound like much, but Halo 3 is a very replay-worthy game, and you'll probably run into plenty of little moments that you'll want to save for posterity. Another nice touch is that the films aren't locked to one perspective. You can detach the camera from your player and fly anywhere on the map, or change it to any other player's view, as well. The only real issue is that rewinding and fast-forwarding are a little clunky. So if you've got something you want to save that's at the end of a 45-minute session, you'll have to hold down the fast-forward button for a long time to get to that moment, and if you miss it, rewinding can be a real pain, too. Once you've figured out the little idiosyncrasies of footage manipulation, it's not so bad.    Halo has always had a very strong artistic vision, and the graphics have always been just good enough to convey the necessary imagery without becoming huge technical powerhouses. That's not to say that the game isn't technically impressive, because it maintains a smooth frame rate throughout, and looks very sharp overall with plenty of great lighting and other nice effects. But the visual design overpowers its technical side and really stands out. Given that the game takes place in a wider range of locales than the previous two games, you'll see a lot of different, colorful environments, including deserts, snow, jungle settings, great-looking building interiors, and more. The enemies, many of which are returning from past games, also look great.   The audiovisual portion of Halo 3 is definitely impressive, with great art, sharp effects, and terrific music.   The sound in Halo 3 is a good mix of old and new, much like the rest of the game. You'll hear the familiar Halo theme music and variants thereof. You'll also hear plenty of great new music, including one suspenseful track with a heartbeat-like sound that manages to get your heart pounding as well. Most of the voice cast from Halo 2 returns to voice their respective characters, and they again turn in terrific and believable performances. You'll also hear a ton of combat dialogue, both from the marines that fight by your side as well as the enemies you're fighting, who don't seem to appreciate it when you kill one of their comrades. Our favorite line from the Covenant was probably ""You've killed my brother for the last time,"" which is pretty hilarious.    As games start to consider user-generated content, it's becoming clear that more and more games will be ready to give you back just as much as you're willing to put into them. On the surface, Halo 3 is every bit the sequel you would expect it to be, in that it delivers meaningful upgrades to both the story-driven and competitive sides of the package. However, it's the addition of the Forge level editor and the saved films that give the game an even longer set of legs, legs that will probably keep you running at full speed until Bungie figures out where, exactly, to go from here.    


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54,Super Smash Bros. Brawl ,9.5," With a bigger roster than ever, online multiplayer, and the ability to share screenshots, custom levels, and game replays with friends, Super Smash Bros. has never been better.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2343599-2219171-box_ssbb.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-smash-bros-brawl-review/1900-6187411/,pos,"
  It's hard to believe, but it's been nine years since the original Super Smash Bros. brought some of the most iconic Nintendo characters together for frantic battles, and roughly seven years since its sequel Super Smash Bros. Melee was released. Perhaps even harder still to believe--and a testament to the series' popularity and longevity--is that these games are still being played religiously to this day. But no matter whether you're a diehard Smash Bros. fanatic or a neophyte brawler, you'll be pleased to know that Super Smash Bros. Brawl includes a plethora of impressive characters, features, and game modes, and is more accessible and fun than ever before.    For the uninitiated, Smash Bros. is a multiplayer-centric series of fast-paced 2D fighting games that features a cast of characters from all over the Nintendo universe. If you've ever found yourself arguing with a friend about whether or not Mario could beat Link in a one-on-one match, Brawl is the game that will let you settle the issue once and for all (the answer of course is that Kirby would eat them both). Characters such as Ike from Fire Emblem, Meta Knight from Kirby, Fox McCloud from Star Fox, Lucas from the unreleased-in-the-US Mother 3 (Earthbound 2), Pikachu from Pokémon, and many more are all on the roster in Brawl, boosting its size up to an impressive 35 total characters--14 of which are hidden and must be unlocked. For the first time, the list of guests includes third-party, non-Nintendo characters such as Solid Snake and Sonic the Hedgehog, and all of them bring their own signature fighting styles and moves to the game.   The roster is bigger than ever before and includes some surprising new additions.   Smash Bros. has always been one of the most accessible fighting games on the market because of the simplicity of its controls, and Brawl is no different. There are essentially only two attack buttons (one for normal attacks and one for special moves), and depending on which way you tilt your control stick when you hit them, they can produce a variety of effects that include the titular ""smash"" attacks. In the interests of user friendliness, Brawl offers four possible control schemes, which ensures that everyone can play whichever way they like; Wii Remote and Nunchuck, Wii Remote alone, Classic Controller, and GameCube Controller are all equally represented. Each of these methods are equally viable, and fans of Brawl's predecessor will be happy to know that the GameCube controls remain unchanged.    Combat includes up to four players brawling on video game-themed stages. The goal is to knock your enemies out of the arena with one of the aforementioned smash attacks. The amount of damage each character has sustained is measured in a percentage, and the higher this percentage is, the farther he or she flies when hit. Battles are fast-paced, frenetic, fun, and often outrageous orgies of chaos, which makes Brawl a perfect party game. But just because the game's mechanics are so simplified compared to traditional fighters doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of depth to be found for those willing to invest the time.    All of the characters have their own strengths and weaknesses, and learning how to protect yourself while taking advantage of your opponents' flaws goes a long way toward securing a victory. There can be a surprising amount of strategy involved, from knowing when and how to attack to ensuring that the terrain of the sometimes over-the-top levels works for you rather than against you. But all that said, Brawl is an incredibly well-balanced game in which even a brand-new player can come away the victor against a hardened veteran.    Throughout combat, various types of items will spawn on the battlefield for use by the first player to reach them. Some, such as the beam sword, are offensive in nature and augment your attack capabilities, whereas others are restorative and will lower your damage meter. Many of these items are from the various games the characters originate from, such as the fire flower and the super mushroom from Super Mario Bros. Although a lot of them have been featured in the previous Smash Bros. games, many new ones appear in Brawl, including the superspicy curry, which makes your character breathe fire for a time. Also worthy of a mention are the various assist trophies, which summon non-playable characters such as Tingle from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker or the 8-bit racers from Excitebike to help or hinder you. Some things--especially the hammer, bob-omb, and warp star--could be considered game-breaking due to their abilities to inflict fatal wounds nearly all of the time, but these items and any others can be toggled off in the options menu before a match begins.   Metal Gear?! It can't be!   In fact, customizable is the name of the game, given that a wide variety of parameters can be adjusted when participating in the special brawl mode. Gravity, fighter size, and game speed are just a few of the options, with some of the more outlandish possibilities being whether or not your characters are made of metal (which makes them much heavier and thus harder to KO) or are virtually invisible. Both special brawl matches and regular battles let you customize which items are allowed and how often items will spawn, what kinds of handicaps--if any--are in place, how stages are selected, and more.    Teams can be created if you so desire, and the types of brawls that can be started include timed matches in which the one who scores the most kills and the least deaths wins, stock matches in which the last player standing wins, and coin-collecting matches in which the number of coins everyone has when time is up determines the winner. Tournaments are a snap to set up due to a built-in mode that facilitates up to 32 players on a single Wii, and there's even a rotation mode to help up to 16 players figure out how to take turns. In short, there are literally dozens of ways that you can battle in your living room.    However, that's not to say that all your matches have to be held in your home with your friends at hand. For the first time in the series, Brawl lets you play matches online. If you're interested only in a quick match, you can join a standard or team-based game with anyone and the game will attempt to find you three competitors. Each person will select his or her character and stage of preference, and while you're waiting you'll be tossed into a practice room alone to warm up. Once everyone's settled, one of the requested stages will be chosen at random and the brawl will get underway.    For more control over your matches, you'll have to connect to friends via the dreaded friend codes. Despite their annoyance, friend codes unlock a lot of otherwise unavailable options. Friend matches let you customize an online match the same way you would a local one, and they even open up a couple more game types. As an added bonus, you'll be able to add in extra local players, which isn't the case when playing with strangers. Lag has always been an issue with online games--and especially fighters--but of all the battles we participated in, only one of them suffered from any major lag, and most of them ran so smoothly that we wouldn't be able to tell that it was an online match if we didn't already know.   In the Subspace Emissary, characters like Diddy Kong can show off their moves in glorious cutscenes like this.   Competitive battles and cooperative missions aren't the only things to do with your friends in Brawl. Whenever you finish a multiplayer match that lasted less than three minutes, you can save a full replay of the battle for playback later, and at almost any time in the game or during these replays, you can pause and position your camera to take the perfect screenshot. Then, using the WiiConnect24 service, you can send these replays and screenshots to anyone on your friends list to show off.    Even though Brawl includes a multitude of fun and unique battlefields in which your matches can take place, in the event that you find yourself wanting more, it also offers a custom stage-editor tool so you can make your own from scratch. Using a simple interface, you can specify a size, background picture, and theme song to go along with your masterpiece. Then it's just a matter of selecting which of the premade terrain parts and platforms you want to lay out, and afterward you save the level. This tool works surprisingly well, and though your creations unfortunately can't be used in online matches, you can share them with your friends via WiiConnect24 just as you would a screenshot.    Though Brawl is primarily a multiplayer game, that doesn't mean it isn't without single-player challenges. Classic mode runs your character of choice through a variety of sequential battles as well as two bonus stages before pitting you against the sinister Master Hand, the mysterious disembodied hand that has appeared in every previous game in the series. Each time you play through classic mode, the rounds will change subtly, so you'll never go through the same version twice. Event mode is a series of individual challenges that force you to complete specific objectives to win. Training mode lets you hone your smash skills against opponents whose behaviors you can customize. In stadium mode, you can race against the clock to destroy targets in an obstacle course, try to score a distance record in a home-run contest, or face off against an army of enemies in the multiman brawl.    However, the main attraction in single-player is the adventure mode known as the subspace emissary. This is a retooled version of the adventure mode from Super Smash Bros. Melee that features a single story in which all of the characters in the game join together in an epic battle against a mysterious enemy. Subspace emissary follows the exploits of the various characters as they interact with each other, and is typically divided up into a number of loose story threads that eventually weave together; in one level, you may play as Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong, and in the next you may be Lucas and the Pokémon Trainer. Between each level, you're treated with very high-quality and frequently hilarious cutscenes that further advance the story (and in typical Nintendo style, they are entirely dialogue-free).    The subspace emissary consists almost entirely of side-scrolling platforming levels that are filled with the usual bottomless pits, moving platforms, and enemies, and each one is designed to resemble some of the games that the characters are from. For instance, Donkey Kong's early levels are reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country, launcher barrels and all. These platforming levels are for the most part well designed and fun to play, but there are some--in particular the automatically scrolling ones--that the game could have done without, and there are some characters that just don't seem to handle platforming as well as others. Overall, though, the Subspace Emissary is an entertaining new experience for Smash Bros. and a full game in its own right, given that it will last you between eight and 10 hours. To sweeten the deal even more, Subspace Emissary, and in fact all of the single-player game types with the exception of the training and classic modes, can also be played with a friend cooperatively.   Four-player brawls are as fun and chaotic as ever.   Super Smash Bros. Brawl is easily one of the most impressive-looking games on the Nintendo Wii, and even when four players are battling each other onscreen at once in the largest levels, the frame rate never drops once. All of the characters look stunning in their new designs, and their every action, from their taunts to the expressions they make when on the receiving end of a blow, is exceptionally well animated. Equally impressive is the game's soundtrack, which boasts more than 100 songs from all over the Nintendo universe and beyond. Each of these tracks is arranged specifically for Brawl by a star-studded lineup of composers that includes notables Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros.), Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger), Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts), and more.    Every now and then, a game comes along that is entirely must-have for every owner of the platforms it is released on. Last holiday season, Nintendo struck that kind of chord with Super Mario Galaxy, and now, less than six months later, that feat has been repeated with Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Its simple controls and gameplay make it remarkably accessible to beginners yet still appealing to Smash Bros. veterans. With the inclusion of mostly lag-free online play and the ability to share screenshots, custom levels, and game replays with friends, it offers an unparalleled multiplayer experience previously unseen on the Wii. Mix in all of the unlockable characters and stages, the lengthy single-player adventure, and the exorbitant number of collectible trophies and stickers to find, and you've got yourself the recipe for a game that, if its predecessors are any indication, people will be playing for years to come.  


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55,Crysis ,9.5," Crysis is visually stunning, packed with intelligent, thrilling gameplay, and easily one of the greatest shooters ever made.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/7/5/9/2214759-crysis_01_artwork.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crysis-review/1900-6182739/,pos,"
  It was hard not to be completely impressed when the first images and videos of Crysis appeared about 18 months ago. Scenes of lush jungles and towering alien war machines looked light-years beyond what seemed possible. Of course, the two questions that revolved around Crysis since its announcement were whether it would deliver on those visuals and whether it would deliver a game worthy of those fancy graphics. It turns out that the answer to both those questions is a resounding yes, as Germany's Crytek has proven that its 2004 hit Far Cry was no fluke. In fact, it was just the beginning from this studio. With its sophomore effort, Crytek has managed to deliver an incredibly advanced and exciting first-person shooter that practically rewrites the rules for the entire genre.   Welcome to the prettiest jungle that you have ever seen in a game. Notice that it's starting to snow?   Crysis is an alien invasion game set in the year 2020. An archeological team on a remote Pacific island is captured by an invasion force of North Koreans, and your US Special Forces team is dispatched to investigate and rescue the scientists. Clad in high-tech nanosuits capable of boosting your strength, speed, and armor, as well as cloaking you temporarily to the enemy, you're parachuted into a tropical paradise that's crawling with intelligent enemies and something else that's tearing both the North Koreans and US forces to shreds.    Like Far Cry, the first half of Crysis is essentially a ""sandbox"" game where you're put in the middle of incredibly large levels and tasked with an objective. How you get the job done is pretty much entirely up to you, which is part of the brilliance of the game's design. For instance, the environments are big enough to give you a wide range of latitude. Do you have to get to a certain point on the map? You can take a meandering route that avoids patrols and go stealthy, or try the up-front approach and try to blast your way through, with the danger of enemy reinforcements showing up. Need to infiltrate a North Korean-held village? You can try the front gate, or maybe explore and find a quieter way in.    Couple these huge environments with the powers of the nanosuit, and you have a ton more options. You can play like the eponymous character from the movie Predator and use your cloaking abilities to stalk North Korean patrols, picking them off one by one and watching the survivors react in confusion. That could be via a silenced rifle, or simply coming up from behind a guard and grabbing him by the throat and hurling him off a cliff, or through the roof of a building, or against a tree, or whatever catches your fancy. Enhanced speed and strength give you an amazing amount of mobility, so you can vault atop buildings and come down behind someone, or run up against a North Korean vehicle next to a cliff and push it over the side. In a heartbeat you can switch between different roles, from stealthy assassin to seemingly unstoppable death dealer. It's a game that makes you feel like a superhero, though not an invincible one, because you simply can't run roughshod over the enemy. Crysis rewards smart, fast thinking.   The firefights are stunning, as well as challenging, whether you're tackling North Korean soldiers or alien war machines.   It helps that the game features a high degree of advanced physics and destructibility in a highly dynamic world. Getting caught in a firefight in the jungle is a cinematic treat, thanks to the way the bullets will chop down trees, while branches sway from impacts. This isn't just a visual effect, either, as falling timber can kill if it lands on someone. There's all sorts of emergent behavior like that throughout the game, events that spring up completely unintended or unforeseen. In one instance, the flaming wreckage of a chopper landed on a hut, crushing it and killing all those inside.    Meanwhile, the gunplay and ballistics modeling make this shooter feel as if you're handling real weapons. Trying to hit a target at long engagement ranges is challenging thanks to weapon recoil and other factors. The North Koreans are encased in body armor, so they take some time to gun down, unless you aim for the head, which usually puts them on the ground. At your disposal is a variety of firearms, like shotguns and assault rifles. One of the neat aspects of the game is that you can fix up your weapons on the fly, adding scopes, silencers, and grenade launchers, provided you've found them. There are trade-offs for each add-on. Silencers let you take down guys quietly, though they reduce bullet damage, meaning you've got to make every shot count. Or flashlights mounted on your weapons might help you out in dark levels, but will give you away.   It's not just infantry combat, as you can hop into almost every vehicle in the game, as well as take part in an incredible tank battle.   Crysis gives you all of these toys and ratchets the action higher and higher the deeper you get into it. The first level of the game introduces you to the sandbox combat and the nanosuit. From then on, the battles become larger and more intense as the action escalates. You'll storm North Korean-held villages and bases; encounter their counter to your nanosuit; take part in a chaotic assault on a North Korean harbor; and from there the game accelerates. Next is a wild tank battle in a tropical mountain valley, with helicopters and jet fighters roaring overhead. There's a sheer rush as your tank plows through vegetation and knocks down trees as missiles and tank fire erupt all around you. Meanwhile, the vehicle explosions are convincing, right down to the way ammunition cooks off and sends spirals of smoke outward. It's visual poetry of destruction. You're not confined to your tank the entire time, either. You can jump out at any time and use your suit powers and rifle to take on enemy infantry. When they're dead, pick up their dropped rocket launchers and engage vehicles in a cat-and-mouse-style game.     As events in the game continue to ramp up, you'll find yourself inside the alien ship, the zero-gravity environment delivers a visually strange and yet wondrous setting. As you navigate through the environment and engage the aliens you have to figure out your way through the level. Escape the alien ship and you're tossed into a frozen environment against the alien foe. After the alien vessel, the game becomes less free form and more linear, but it also amps up the action along the way, reflecting the way that the stakes are being raised. Now you're trying to fight your way out of the alien sphere, which means dodging war machines that look like something from The Matrix.  There are a few more surprises in store from that point before you get to the ultimate showdown.   The alien environment feels appropriately otherworldly, and it feels like you're under the sea.   The one criticism that can be leveled on the story is that it leaves you screaming for more. While there's an adrenaline-packed finale, you still don't want the game to end on the note that it does. The single-player campaign is around eight to 10 hours long, which is a healthy amount for a shooter. There's a lot of replay here, too, as you can experiment with a multitude of different approaches. Plus, it's fun to go back and try out the large, set-piece battles again and again, since they can unfold in different ways thanks to the dynamic nature of the combat and the artificial intelligence.    Speaking of which, the AI is generally excellent in a fight, as enemy soldiers use cover and concealment effectively. They also know how to lay down suppressing fire and are great at tossing grenades to flush you out of hiding. Getting in a firefight in the jungle with these guys is always fun, because they'll make you work for it at the default normal difficulty setting. (However, the AI can suffer from the same problem all shooters seem to have; mainly that bad guys sometimes don't know what's going on down the road from them.) When you take damage, find cover and your armor and health will regenerate. If you die, you reload to the last checkpoint or quick save. Meanwhile, Crysis includes a special hard mode called delta, which is a lot of fun, because rather than making the game tougher by cheating and giving the bad guys more powerful weapons, delta takes away some of the gameplay crutches that help you at lower difficulty levels. For instance, incoming grenades are no longer highlighted, so you've got to pay attention now, and your health regeneration is slower. And the best part about delta is that all enemy soldiers speak fully in Korean, so unless you understand Korean, you're going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what they're planning to do.    The single-player game is a considerable accomplishment by itself, but Crytek has also included a full-featured multiplayer mode called power struggle that combines the best of the Battlefield games and Counter-Strike. The goal in power struggle is that each 16-man team (for 32 players total) must destroy the opposing team's base, but to do so they have to construct alien weaponry at a central prototype facility. To power the prototype facility, though, both teams need to seize and hold power stations throughout the map. In addition, there are bunkers and factories that can be captured; capturing a bunker allows your team to spawn in forward positions, while capturing a factory allows you to purchase vehicles that can help your side. Whenever you help your team by killing the enemy or seizing an objective, you gain points that can be used to purchase more advanced weapons, vehicles, and gear. It's an excellent multiplayer mode, and it comes with five large maps to support it. Keep in mind that everyone has their suit powers as well, so in addition to all the running and gunning and vehicle driving, there's plenty of leaping and speed running and cloaking going on.     Power struggle is Battlefield meets Counter-Strike meets the powers of the nanosuit.     Then there's instant action, which is essentially deathmatch with nanosuit powers. This is a chaotic mode set in some stunning levels, including what feels like a fully modeled Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. You can run around the flight deck, a good chunk of the hanger deck, and many of the corridors. Weapons are strewn about everywhere in instant action, so it's just a crazy melee of shotguns, snipers, rocket launchers, or nanosuit-enhanced fists. However, a team deathmatch mode is missing, which seems odd. Team deathmatch would have been a welcome addition, since it would have instilled some kind of teamwork into an otherwise free-for-all frenzy. Finally, Crysis multiplayer features built-in voice support, which means that all you need is a microphone to talk to your fellow players and teammates in power struggle.     Graphically, Crysis looks photorealistic at times--it's that amazing. Crytek has managed to achieve a visual fidelity that blows away anything seen to date, and there are countless moments when you'll just stop and gape at what you're seeing. Sometimes it's just the ordinary, like the setting sun casting all sorts of shadows and rays through the jungle canopy. Other times, it's something epic, like watching a huge alien war machine stomping toward you. The impressive aspect of the graphics is just how it manages to render huge, open, dynamic, interactive levels. Everything looks amazing up close or far away. Interacting with your squadmates lets you gaze upon the mechanical sinews of their nanosuit, or the incredible facial animation that brings them to life. They're capable of the subtlest of facial gestures to help convey emotion. Then you can sit on a ridge and peer down using binoculars to a village a kilometer away, scouting the location of the patrolling guards and machine gun posts. The sheer fact that many of the trees and buildings are destructible just adds a level of realism that's staggering.    You'll need a fairly high-end system to make the game look its best. In that regard, Crysis really does embody everything that's both exciting and daunting about PC gaming. A dual-core CPU and the latest generation of video card can run the game at maximum detail settings capably, though you have to lower the resolution a bit to do so. It's doubtful that a system has been built yet that can run the game at ultra-high resolutions with all the graphical sliders maxed out. Dial down the detail settings to high, which is the next-lower setting, and Crysis still blows contemporary games out of the water. Results are a bit mixed at medium and low settings, though. At the lowest detail settings, objects pop in and out with a fair degree of consistency. It's annoying at best and frustrating at worst, as it can impact gameplay. Crysis does support both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, though the latter requires you run the game using Windows Vista. The visuals in DX9 are impressive, but they really come to life in DX10, provided you have the hardware.   This is a backwoods redneck's worst nightmare: North Koreans, aliens, and a tornado.   The game also sounds fantastic, from the primordial ""moans"" that the island periodically releases, the soft crunch of dirt and branches under your feet, and all the background sounds that you'd expect in the middle of the jungle. Turn on your suit's cloak, and everything sounds muffled. The music, by composer Inon Zur, feels inspired by the scores from epic Hollywood action movies, while the voice acting is also excellent, helping to deliver some distinct characters and even a little humor.     If you put it all together, Crysis is just remarkable. This is a game that pushes the envelope in terms of both technology and gameplay and does so with aplomb. Crysis raises the expectations for every shooter to follow when it comes to graphics, interactivity, environments, immersiveness, AI, and gameplay. Quite simply, Crysis represents the first-person shooter at its finest, most evolved form.    


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56,DIRT - Origin of the Species ,2," When Origin of the Species isn't breaking your mind with its insane storyline and terrible gameplay, it's probably breaking itself with one of its many, many bugs.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/7/8/0/20860-60780.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dirt-origin-of-the-species-review/1900-6165861/,neg,"
  You don't even have to open the box of DIRT: Origin of the Species to know that you're not exactly dealing with an A-list game. While some might not be apt to complain about the thong prominently displayed by the gun-toting girl on the cover, a couple of ""Hey, wait a sec"" moments are provided by the apparently random quotation attributed to President James ""Maison"" on the inside flap and a list of ""intriguing"" levels that places New York alongside ET hangouts Area 51, Groom Lake, and ""Hanger"" 18. So you don't need to have access to technology from crashed flying saucers to realize that the chances are pretty good that quality control isn't going to be a highlight of this third-person shooter from NuGeneration Games.   Some of Dirt's psychic maneuvers sure look cool, but they're not all that useful during gameplay.   And surprise, it isn't. Ugly, virtually unplayable in spots, and with a plot guaranteed to make your head spin when you're not laughing at the ridiculous dialogue, Origin of the Species is quite simply one of the worst games to hit hard drives in the past year.    The bizarro storyline is as good an example of the game's ineptitude as any. You wake up in a New York City jail cell watching what looks like a giant cockroach eating a guy. Sure, we've all been there. Well, in games, anyways. But none of this weirdness is readily explained or even touched on later, so you can't develop any interest in finding out what's going on. You're a candy raving riot grrrl wearing the ""hot if it were 1999"" outfit of thong panties peeking above hip-hugging pants, but you have amnesia and can recall only that your nickname is Dirt, you've got some psychic powers, and your friends may have abandoned you at a beach or something. A reporter who looks and talks like a hooker gives you some clues about a chemical spill ""in some backwater craphole,"" and then you're off blasting giant bugs and what appear to be some kind of Special Forces commandos. Just in case that last sentence makes this storyline sound a little too generic, let's now add that you do all this with the aid of a sentient teddy bear backpack named Mr. Boo that tosses out the occasional tip.    As is usual with these hackneyed man-or-woman-of-mystery plots, the tale here is gradually revealed through little hints and cutscenes. Most of them make little sense, though. You might round a corner and trigger some inexplicable clip of police cars being tossed through the air, or get a comic book-style dialogue scene with an apparently anonymous civilian you just saved from a Kafkaesque death. Level structure makes zero sense. One moment you're on a torn-up NYC street, the next you walk through a doorway and you're in what looks to be some kind of Victorian mansion complete with heraldic arms on the wall. Vital plot points aren't hooked into the game properly. One key plot device at the start of the game, about a stranger coming to your assistance, is set up to trigger in an out-of-the-way room that you don't have to enter. But the mystery man's voice-over plays as you run by the room in question, so the game keeps going even if you soon wind up having to backtrack to figure out what the hell this voice is talking about.    Sadly, in some ways the weird plot may be the game's only strength. Everything else is even worse. Even though the game is dog-ugly and loaded with lots of plain, straight corridors, and character models are so lacking in detail that they lack most discernible facial features, the engine is such a system hog that it chugs on a lot of levels every time you turn around, and character animations stutter. All these hitches make it impossible to accurately aim your weapons. You're best off to resist the desire to shoot until you're close enough to see the whites of your enemies' eyes, but that can be a bit of a problem when you're facing a half-dozen commandos with submachine guns. Other problems make gun battles even more frustrating. You can be shot through walls. Unseen grenades on the other side of a wall or door often kill you instantly. Enemies can take a crazy amount of damage before expiring, unless you hit them with a shotgun blast that typically knocks them all the way across rooms, or with a headshot.    As you've got an arsenal of psychic powers, you don't have to rely solely on armaments. But you don't really have any incentive to use your mental abilities, either. While some of them are pretty nifty, especially the razor disk that locks on to and decapitates up to eight bad guys, most of the controls for these powers are awkward or too finicky to be of much use in combat. You typically wind up freezing in place while using a power like the razor disk, or pausing after a power expires like with the shield, which leaves you open to enemy gunfire. It's always easiest to just blaze ahead and shoot everything that moves. Using your powers to bypass puzzles is a little more intriguing, though twitchy controls don't help matters here, and most of the puzzles involve basic things like manually directing a bullet to hit an out-of-the-way target and drop a laser barrier.   It's hard to argue with lots of senseless splatter, although you might want to give it a shot in this case.   Other issues further wreck any chance of wringing the slightest bit of entertainment out of this game. Drops to the desktop and hard crashes that reboot your machine happen on a regular basis. Sometimes Dirt herself seems to just spontaneously drop dead. Vaguely innovative gameplay options, such as being able to choose play styles like stealth or long-distance shooting, which earns you skill points for buying weapons and ammo, simply don't work. For example, you can get bonus points for stealth when blowing away a bug with a shotgun. The save system appears to work on demand, in that you can apparently save anytime, anywhere, but all the function really does is save your progress at the start of each level. Some of the levels are long, too, so you can find yourself doing a fair bit of backtracking. Finally, the game is protected by StarForce, which can cause serious problems with certain system configurations.     All in all, Origin of the Species is one of those games that make you want to ditch your PC and take up a less aggravating hobby, like detecting land mines.    
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57,Seven Kingdoms: Conquest ,2, Bugs and bottom-drawer RTS gameplay tarnish this latter-day addition to the Seven Kingdoms series.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/2/4/2221524-seven_kingdoms.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/seven-kingdoms-conquest-review/1900-6188681/,neg,"
  The resurrection of an old game franchise is never without pitfalls, and Seven Kingdoms: Conquest seems to plummet into just about every one of them. Enlight Software's latest has nothing to do with the historical-strategy epic that turned a lot of heads back in 1997, and has moved from a complex empire builder to a simplistic, fantasy-oriented real-time strategy game that pits humans against demons. Beyond that, the game is clearly unfinished and has a tremendous number of serious bugs, few strategic choices during gameplay, and campaign missions that amount to nothing more than skirmishes by different names.    Building farms, building mines. We're guessing that you've probably done this before.   Instability is the biggest problem. Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is, to use the technical term, buggy as hell. Just getting the game to start is a challenge, and glitches can bring everything to a halt at any time. Not only did every one of these frequent lockups require an Ctrl-Alt-Del escape to the Windows desktop, but they also seemed to cause some sort of lasting graphical corruption that prevented a successful restart of the game. The game would load, but with a black background screen in the main menu and lots of visual artifacts and stuttering music. Only a full uninstall and reinstall got the game working again...at least until the next big crash.    Other serious problems plague the game even if you get it running properly for a few minutes. The human tutorial mission is so messed up that it's unplayable due to scripting errors, such as a gate that refuses to open. Some campaign and skirmish missions with annihilation as the objective can't be won even if you wipe out all of your enemies. Pathfinding is awful for the most part, which means that units easily get stuck behind buildings. And any sort of adjustment to the visual settings seems to cause the game to crash even sooner than it usually would. This actually serves as a kind of trap, given that you're bound to go into the video-options screen eventually in search of a way to improve the gloomy, horrifically pixelicious visuals, or at least to change the default resolution to something supporting widescreen monitors. (Don't bother, the game's limited to 1024x768 and 1280x1024.) To make a long story short, wait for the patch.    Or not. There isn't much here worth hanging around for, actually. Although the original two games in this franchise were hardcore strategy epics that blended real-time battles with intricate empire management and economics, Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is a generic RTS that pits humans against demons, and it features generic resource gathering and base building. You don't even get to play with the seven kingdoms that gave the franchise its name. Instead of the partially realistic, diverse ancient powers that gave the first game its depth, such as the Chinese and the Persians, you're stuck with a handful of nearly identical human factions given historical names such as Hittites and Saxons. The only appreciable difference between these nations is the visual appearance of units in the interface. (As an example, Egyptian troops wear those famous desert headpieces.) Troop and building options change as you move forward from the starting Early Bronze Age through the closing Middle Age, but even then it's not as if you're thrown any curveballs. Bowmen turn into crossbowmen, and catapults become trebuchets--that sort of thing. At any rate, the human factions play the same no matter what age you're currently undergoing.    Stereotypical characteristics such as flame, ice, plague, and shadow make the seven demon-realm factions more interesting, but there isn't much to choose from no matter what faction you're commanding. Admittedly, some of the monsters are pretty cool in an old-school D&D fashion, given that you have the ability to summon troops like yeti, plague demons, and naga. Nevertheless, each realm uses the same two basic units, larvae and succubi, and you get only a handful of unique options to choose from when building the unit-summoning hellgates. Resource gathering has a more intriguing, darker vibe, although collecting the blood needed to summon monsters is about as creepy as pumping oil, and the facilities that gather stone are just mines under the spookier name of ""stone shrines."" Monotony grows fast.    Game options do nothing to alleviate this sense of boredom. The human and demon campaigns consist of skirmish missions given opening screens and voice-over intros that recount soldiers' diaries. The voice acting is surprisingly good considering the low-budget nature of the game, although the gritty effect is ruined when these first-person accounts wrap up with mention of dates like ""756 BC."" Uh-huh. At any rate, the ""campaign"" missions all task with you building up a base, cranking out troops, and killing everything in sight. The actual skirmish missions do the same, but they're a little better than the campaigns because you at least have the option to pick a faction to play, along with your opponents, a map, and the starting age. You just can't take skirmishes online, at least not without knowing an opponent's IP in advance, because there is no matchmaking service.   Demon hordes on the attack. Look really closely and you can see some horns.   Gameplay in both modes rarely varies from the RTS formula, with the only real difference being the need to deal with neutral villages and cities. Maps are dotted with these settlements, which can be attacked or brought over to your side with human ambassador or demon succubi units. Not that you ever really need to resort to diplomacy. The AI is so incompetent that it never mounts anything resembling a reasonable attack or defense, particularly in larger maps. Enemy cities will crank out troops, but they're sent on what seem to be mindless raids against you and the odd neutral village, more like they're pillaging marauders than a coherent army in the field. Computer-controlled foes also never seem to bother with the monster-guarded treasure hordes and demonstones (mana-providing resources) scattered around the maps.    Essentially, Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is a disaster in just about every imaginable fashion. A few patches may yet round it into some kind of playable shape, but right now this is simply another cookie-cutter RTS loaded with serious bugs and unfulfilled potential.    
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58,World War II Combat: Road to Berlin ,2," If America's participation in World War II was as frustratingly terrible as this game, all of Europe would be speaking German today.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/7/5/2209675-box_l.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-war-ii-combat-road-to-berlin-review/1900-6143664/,neg,"
  Every once in a while we run into a game that is almost completely devoid of redeeming qualities. When that game happens to be in a crowded genre like a first-person shooter set in World War II, it casts an even darker pall on an already horrible product. World War II Combat: Road to Berlin is just such a game. Road to Berlin is an utter failure from top to bottom, offering ugly, drab graphics, and terrible sound that matches the low quality of the gameplay and game design.    It's hard to find anything to like in Road to Berlin.   There are 10 missions in Road to Berlin's very brief campaign. In each of the missions, you're given a primary weapon like a submachine gun or sniper rifle, a pistol, and an explosive weapon such as a grenade. You'll explore various locales in the European theater such as a German air base, a submarine pen, and hardened bunkers as you kill dozens of Wehrmacht on your way from point A to point B. Sounds like any other WWII shooter, right? Well on the surface it does, but somehow the game designers couldn't even manage to get a game theme, which has been cloned dozens of times, to work well. First of all, there are absolutely no health packs that you can pick up--the only thing you can loot is extra ammunition for your weapons. This makes the game a lot harder than it needs to be, as you need to be able to get from the start of a mission to the end without dying. The missions aren't particularly long, and you can absorb a decent number of shots. But, any mistake you make means you have to start over at the last checkpoint, which promotes a trial-and-error approach to the missions where you try to memorize the locations of all the enemies.     And speaking of checkpoints, the save system in the game is flawed, as well. Each level is broken up by a few checkpoints that you can start from if you die. But if you happen to reach a late checkpoint with only a smidgen of health left, you may find it impossible to finish the level at that point. The game only saves your last checkpoint, and there's no manual saving, so that means you could find yourself forced to start the entire level over again if you accidentally trigger the last checkpoint with too little health. Further adding to the frustration is the inability to pick up or change weapons. You'll start some levels with a sniper rifle, which is so poorly implemented that it takes you out of zoomed view each time you fire, and it takes far too long to load in the next bullet. When you get into close-quarters situations on these levels, there's no way to pick up a different weapon, and so you're stuck with trying to shoot at close range with the sniper rifle or just using a pistol.     If the core gameplay were any good, some of those inherent design flaws might be forgivable, but this isn't the case. The mechanics of moving and shooting in Road to Berlin are downright terrible. Aiming with the weapons feels chunky and imprecise no matter how you adjust the sensitivity. The movement of your character just doesn't feel right, nor does the movement of enemies, who sometimes appear to be sliding across the ground like carnival shooting-gallery targets on rails. Level design is boring and uninspired, and whether you're outdoors or indoors, everything has a drab, gray and brown look. Plus, the guns don't handle very well. For example, the automatic weapons spray too wildly, and aiming down the iron sight of your weapon doesn't seem to improve your accuracy much, if at all. The worst part is that it's often hard to see anything. Enemies will begin shooting at you from the very limits of your visual range, so that they're just specks in the distance. The threat reticule around your crosshair that's supposed to tell you where you're getting shot from is broken, so no matter what direction the shots are coming from, the reticule reports that you're being shot from behind and to the left. And, in some missions, it might just be a ""friendly"" soldier shooting at you. In one encounter that involved computer-controlled teammates, the artificial intelligence scripting broke and soldiers who should have been on our side chased our character around and shot at him instead of the enemy.    Not even the most enthusiastic WWII game nuts should subject themselves to a game like this.   Road to Berlin looks and sounds about as awful as it plays. Environments and characters are laughably blocky-looking, and the level design is boxy and uninspired. You'll see vehicles like trucks, tanks, and half-tracks, but these don't even have articulated wheels or treads. Details like these are instead crudely drawn into the textures. The sound does little to inspire, too. All the guns sound the same, like sharp firecrackers instead of real weapons. There's a bit of voice narration before each mission, done by a bored voice actor who phoned in the effort, and there's no real music to speak of. The game includes offline and online multiplayer action for four players on split-screen or 16 players over Xbox Live. We didn't find anyone to play online, so we tried a little offline multiplayer action against AI-controlled bots, which are included in the game. But just like the single-player aspect, multiplayer action in Road to Berlin is horribly dull. The bots don't exhibit much strategy, making beelines to the enemy flag in capture the flag or just running around randomly in deathmatch mode.    Calling World War II: Road to Berlin just another in a long line of uninspired World War II games would give it far too much credit. In a way, Road to Berlin isn't a WWII game at all, as you'll spend more of your time fighting with the poor game design than you will fighting against Germans. And, when you're done with that, you'll probably find yourself fighting the urge to snap the disc in two and throw it out the window. Avoid this game.  
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59,World War II Combat: Road to Berlin ,2," If America's participation in World War II was as frustratingly terrible as this game, all of Europe would be speaking German today.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/7/5/2209675-box_l.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-war-ii-combat-road-to-berlin-review/1900-6148235/,neg,"
  Every once in a while we run into a game that is almost completely devoid of redeeming qualities. When that game happens to be in a crowded genre like a first-person shooter set in World War II, it casts an even darker pall on an already horrible product. World War II Combat: Road to Berlin is just such a game. Road to Berlin is an utter failure from top to bottom, offering ugly, drab graphics and terrible sound that match the low quality of the gameplay and game design.   It's hard to find anything to like in Road to Berlin.   There are 10 missions in Road to Berlin's very brief campaign. In each of the missions, you're given a primary weapon like a submachine gun or sniper rifle, a pistol, and an explosive weapon such as a grenade. You'll explore various locales in the European theater, such as a German air base, a submarine pen, and hardened bunkers, as you kill dozens of Wehrmacht on your way from point A to point B. It sounds like any other WWII shooter, right? Well, on the surface it does, but somehow the game designers couldn't even manage to get a game theme that has been cloned dozens of times to work well. First of all, there are absolutely no health packs that you can pick up--the only thing you can loot is extra ammunition for your weapons. This makes the game harder than it needs to be, as you need to be able to get from the start of a mission to the end without dying. The missions aren't particularly long, and you can absorb a decent number of shots. But any mistake you make means you have to start over at the last checkpoint, which promotes a trial-and-error approach to the missions where you try to memorize the locations of all the enemies.     And speaking of checkpoints, the save system in the game is flawed, as well. Each level is broken up by a few checkpoints that you can start from if you die. But if you happen to reach a late checkpoint with only a smidgen of health left, you may find it impossible to finish the level at that point. The game saves only your last checkpoint, and there's no manual saving, so that means you could find yourself forced to start the entire level over again if you accidentally trigger the last checkpoint with too little health. Further adding to the frustration is the inability to pick up or change weapons. You'll start some levels with a sniper rifle, which is so poorly implemented that it takes you out of zoomed view each time you fire, and it takes far too long to load in the next bullet. When you get into close-quarters situations on these levels, there's no way to pick up a different weapon, and so you're stuck with trying to shoot at close range with the sniper rifle or just using a pistol.     If the core gameplay were any good, some of those inherent design flaws might be forgivable, but this isn't the case. The mechanics of moving and shooting in Road to Berlin are downright terrible. The movement of your character just doesn't feel right, nor does the movement of enemies, who sometimes appear to be sliding across the ground like carnival shooting-gallery targets on rails. Level design is boring and uninspired, and whether you're outdoors or indoors, everything has a drab, gray and brown look. Plus, the guns don't handle very well. For example, the automatic weapons spray too wildly, and aiming down the iron sight of your weapon doesn't seem to improve your accuracy much, if at all. The worst part is that it's often hard to see anything. Enemies will begin shooting at you from the very limits of your visual range so that they're just specks in the distance. The threat reticle that was broken in the Xbox version of the game seems to be working properly in this version, but that's cold comfort for a game that would have been considered primitive even five or six years ago.   Not even the most enthusiastic WWII game nuts should subject themselves to a game like this.   Road to Berlin looks and sounds about as awful as it plays. Environments and characters are laughably blocky-looking, and the level design is boxy and uninspired. You'll see vehicles like trucks, tanks, and half-tracks, but these don't even have articulated wheels or treads. Details like these are instead crudely drawn into the textures. The sound also does little to inspire. All the guns sound the same, like sharp firecrackers instead of real weapons. There's a bit of voice narration before each mission, done by a bored voice actor who phoned in the effort, and there's no real music to speak of. Road to Berlin includes online multiplayer action for 16 players, in modes ranging from deathmatch and last man standing, to capture the flag, king of the hill, and VIP. The server browser, if you can call it that, simply finds a server for you to play on, without giving you a full menu of servers to choose from. It's as though the developers lazily tried to emulate the Xbox Live style of quickmatching, as opposed to the PC style, where you can browse from a list of available servers. It doesn't make much difference, though, as any online game you find is liable to be full of bots, with maybe one or two other human players. The netcode is so awful that you'll find yourself teleporting back and forth, with hit detection that's frustratingly poor even at modest latencies. There's offline multiplayer action against computer-controlled bots, but just like the single-player aspect, multiplayer action in Road to Berlin is horribly dull. The bots don't exhibit much strategy, making beelines to the enemy flag in capture the flag or just running around randomly in deathmatch mode, and you can't play against the bots in king of the hill or VIP modes.    Calling World War II: Road to Berlin just another in a long line of uninspired World War II games would give it far too much credit. In a way, Road to Berlin isn't a WWII game at all, as you'll spend more of your time fighting with the poor game design than you will fighting against Germans. And, when you're done with that, you'll probably find yourself fighting the urge to snap the disc in two and throw it out the window. Avoid this game.  
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60,World War II Combat: Iwo Jima ,2, From top to bottom World War II Combat: Iwo Jima is a terrible game with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/6/7/2213467-box_ww2cij.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-war-ii-combat-iwo-jima-review/1900-6155611/,neg,"
  As if to prove a point about just how awful video games can be, publisher Groove Games has released World War II Combat: Iwo Jima, the second game in a series that debuted earlier this year with the terrible Road to Berlin. Don't let the generic title fool you--this game is anything but innocuous. Iwo Jima is so dreadfully awful that when playing it, you'll feel more than just the sting of regret from throwing your $20 away. You'll feel frustration, anger, confusion, and amazement at the overwhelming dearth of quality, inspiration, and general effort in this title. Every single aspect of World War II Combat: Iwo Jima, from the punishing checkpoint system and generic mission design to the hideous graphics and bug-ridden gameplay make for a game that is completely without merit. If Iwo Jima proves anything, it's that if ever there were a series that doesn't deserve to be a series, it's the World War II Combat games.   It's not even bad in a funny way; this game is really about as terrible as it gets.   As the name so plainly states, World War II Combat: Iwo Jima takes you through several missions set on the heavily contested island of Iwo Jima during World War II. You start out storming a beach and move on from there, single-handedly fighting through foggy jungles and crumbling villages to capture the island for the Allies. It's certainly a fine setting for a World War II shooter, with plenty of important battles and heroic missions to draw inspiration from. But the game mostly ignores this material; instead, it uses the name and some brief video clips to set the stage. This is far from effective, though, and you're left with an ugly, unsalvageable mess of a game.     As a first-person shooter, Iwo Jima has high standards to live up to on both the PC and the Xbox. But even if this game had come out five, or even 10, years ago, it would have still felt behind the times. It's a first-person shooter, so you start each mission with a few different types of weapons. You have a primary weapon, which is usually a rifle or machine gun; an explosive weapon, such as grenades or a rocket launcher; and two secondary weapons, these being a pistol and a knife. You're given no choice of which weapons to take with you into combat, and you can almost never pick up new weapons during the mission. You can find some grenades, and at one point you do get a completely useless flamethrower, but other than that, you're stuck with what you have.     Using these limited weapons, you have to work your way through each level while completing mission objectives. You might have to destroy three radios, take out a couple pillboxes, or sabotage some enemy airplanes. The objectives are all laid out right in front of you, so at least you don't have to go searching all over a level to find what you're looking for. In fact, the game actively discourages you from wandering off the beaten path by placing invisible mines all along the pathway, so if you try to go exploring, you'll get blown sky high. All of the enemies you fight look identical, and they all act like idiots. Some enemies will run right up to you and start firing wildly, sometimes expending full clips from point-blank range without hitting you once. Sometimes the enemies will just stand there and fire their rifles straight up into the air, which is rather bizarre. What's more bizarre is that they'll often  hit you even though their guns aren't aimed in your direction. Even more annoying is that the same random fire works both ways. Sometimes when you have a dead aim on an enemy's head, you can blast away and get no response. Other times you can use the sniper rifle for a one-hit kill with a well-placed footshot.      To their credit, the enemies in the game are all accomplished dancers. Sometimes you'll see enemies do the jitterbug as they try to move around by rapidly vibrating like windup toys, or you'll see them do a modified version of the moonwalk as they float along the ground backward without moving their legs. They also appear to be experts at doing the robot, as they twitch wildly and spasm about in a way that couldn't possibly be human. But while an enemy will appear to be busting a move, in actuality they're all just busted.    Despite that the enemies are entirely devoid of intelligence, they'll still end up killing you many, many times,  because they'll usually have a numbers and positional advantage over you. This wouldn't be so difficult to manage if there was any way to replenish your health, but there isn't. There are no medikits, and it only takes a few shots to kill you. There is a checkpoint system in the game, so you don't have to start over at the beginning of a level when you die. But if you pass a checkpoint with low health, you can find yourself in an impossible situation because you can't backtrack but you might not have enough health to survive to the next checkpoint. The only way out is to either start the entire level over again or keep playing and dying until you've memorized the exact placement and behavior of each enemy--and hope the game's random hit detection works out in your favor. It's an extremely aggravating design, because the game becomes an extended and exasperating exercise in trial and error, and your success depends more on dumb luck than on any measure of skill.    If you're sick of dealing with the sloppy gameplay in the single-player campaign, you can play a multiplayer game online with up to 16 players. However, unless you can convince some poor sap to purchase another copy of the game, you're going to have a hard time finding anyone online to play against. We were unable to find anyone to play against with the Xbox version, and although there a handful of people playing the PC version there aren't nearly enough to have a full 16-player game. It's safe to assume that if there aren't any players online a few weeks after the game was released, there won't be a sudden explosion of interest in the game later on. You can play against bots, but the multiplayer gameplay is just as watered down and unpleasant as the single-player campaign. There are the standard deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, as well as king-of-the-hill, capture-the-flag, and last-man-standing modes. None of them are the least bit interesting and certainly don't bring any worth to this game.   The checkpoint system can really screw you over if you're not careful, but there's a simple solution: Don't play this game.   Visually, World War II Combat: Iwo Jima is a horrid mess of ugly textures, blocky character models, chunky animation, and severe clipping issues. The levels look so drab and full of unsightly hard edges that the short draw distance almost seems merciful. Every area is shrouded in thick fog that blocks out your view of anything more than a hundred yards away. Despite the very jagged, unnatural geometry of the terrain, nothing in the game is truly solid, since enemies often clip through doors and walls and will often clip through the ground or one another. There's very little detail to be found anywhere on Iwo Jima, to the extent that its inhabitants barely even have faces. On the PC, you can crank up the resolution, and on the Xbox you can play the game in 480p if you have a capable TV, but those options don't do anything to improve the look of the game. The sound is no more detailed and is mostly composed of repetitious, tinny gunfire and hollow explosions. There's an occasional, almost inaudible, mumbling from enemies, and the narration that sets up each level is so flat that it sounds synthesized. The music is generic and repetitive, as well, but it's easily the least offensive element of this game.     No matter how broke, desperate, or crazy about World War II you are, there's no reason to play this game. If you're looking for a cheap shooter, go to the store and grab any game off the shelf and you're practically guaranteed to have a better game than this one. Whatever you do, don't play World War II Combat: Iwo Jima.     
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61,World War II Combat: Iwo Jima ,2, From top to bottom World War II Combat: Iwo Jima is a terrible game with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/6/7/2213467-box_ww2cij.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-war-ii-combat-iwo-jima-review/1900-6155612/,neg,"
  As if to prove a point about just how awful video games can be, publisher Groove Games has released World War II Combat: Iwo Jima, the second game in a series that debuted earlier this year with the terrible Road to Berlin. Don't let the generic title fool you--this game is anything but innocuous. Iwo Jima is so dreadfully awful that when playing it, you'll feel more than just the sting of regret from throwing your $20 away. You'll feel frustration, anger, confusion, and amazement at the overwhelming dearth of quality, inspiration, and general effort in this title. Every single aspect of World War II Combat: Iwo Jima, from the punishing checkpoint system and generic mission design to the hideous graphics and bug-ridden gameplay make for a game that is completely without merit. If Iwo Jima proves anything, it's that if ever there were a series that doesn't deserve to be a series, it's the World War II Combat games.   It's not even bad in a funny way; this game is really about as terrible as it gets.   As the name so plainly states, World War II Combat: Iwo Jima takes you through several missions set on the heavily contested island of Iwo Jima during World War II. You start out storming a beach and move on from there, single-handedly fighting through foggy jungles and crumbling villages to capture the island for the Allies. It's certainly a fine setting for a World War II shooter, with plenty of important battles and heroic missions to draw inspiration from. But the game mostly ignores this material; instead, it uses the name and some brief video clips to set the stage. This is far from effective, though, and you're left with an ugly, unsalvageable mess of a game.     As a first-person shooter, Iwo Jima has high standards to live up to on both the PC and the Xbox. But even if this game had come out five, or even 10, years ago, it would have still felt behind the times. It's a first-person shooter, so you start each mission with a few different types of weapons. You have a primary weapon, which is usually a rifle or machine gun; an explosive weapon, such as grenades or a rocket launcher; and two secondary weapons, these being a pistol and a knife. You're given no choice of which weapons to take with you into combat, and you can almost never pick up new weapons during the mission. You can find some grenades, and at one point you do get a completely useless flamethrower, but other than that, you're stuck with what you have.     Using these limited weapons, you have to work your way through each level while completing mission objectives. You might have to destroy three radios, take out a couple pillboxes, or sabotage some enemy airplanes. The objectives are all laid out right in front of you, so at least you don't have to go searching all over a level to find what you're looking for. In fact, the game actively discourages you from wandering off the beaten path by placing invisible mines all along the pathway, so if you try to go exploring, you'll get blown sky high. All of the enemies you fight look identical, and they all act like idiots. Some enemies will run right up to you and start firing wildly, sometimes expending full clips from point-blank range without hitting you once. Sometimes the enemies will just stand there and fire their rifles straight up into the air, which is rather bizarre. What's more bizarre is that they'll often  hit you even though their guns aren't aimed in your direction. Even more annoying is that the same random fire works both ways. Sometimes when you have a dead aim on an enemy's head, you can blast away and get no response. Other times you can use the sniper rifle for a one-hit kill with a well-placed footshot.      To their credit, the enemies in the game are all accomplished dancers. Sometimes you'll see enemies do the jitterbug as they try to move around by rapidly vibrating like windup toys, or you'll see them do a modified version of the moonwalk as they float along the ground backward without moving their legs. They also appear to be experts at doing the robot, as they twitch wildly and spasm about in a way that couldn't possibly be human. But while an enemy will appear to be busting a move, in actuality they're all just busted.    Despite that the enemies are entirely devoid of intelligence, they'll still end up killing you many, many times,  because they'll usually have a numbers and positional advantage over you. This wouldn't be so difficult to manage if there was any way to replenish your health, but there isn't. There are no medikits, and it only takes a few shots to kill you. There is a checkpoint system in the game, so you don't have to start over at the beginning of a level when you die. But if you pass a checkpoint with low health, you can find yourself in an impossible situation because you can't backtrack but you might not have enough health to survive to the next checkpoint. The only way out is to either start the entire level over again or keep playing and dying until you've memorized the exact placement and behavior of each enemy--and hope the game's random hit detection works out in your favor. It's an extremely aggravating design, because the game becomes an extended and exasperating exercise in trial and error, and your success depends more on dumb luck than on any measure of skill.    If you're sick of dealing with the sloppy gameplay in the single-player campaign, you can play a multiplayer game online with up to 16 players. However, unless you can convince some poor sap to purchase another copy of the game, you're going to have a hard time finding anyone online to play against. We were unable to find anyone to play against with the Xbox version, and although there a handful of people playing the PC version there aren't nearly enough to have a full 16-player game. It's safe to assume that if there aren't any players online a few weeks after the game was released, there won't be a sudden explosion of interest in the game later on. You can play against bots, but the multiplayer gameplay is just as watered down and unpleasant as the single-player campaign. There are the standard deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, as well as king-of-the-hill, capture-the-flag, and last-man-standing modes. None of them are the least bit interesting and certainly don't bring any worth to this game.   The checkpoint system can really screw you over if you're not careful, but there's a simple solution: Don't play this game.   Visually, World War II Combat: Iwo Jima is a horrid mess of ugly textures, blocky character models, chunky animation, and severe clipping issues. The levels look so drab and full of unsightly hard edges that the short draw distance almost seems merciful. Every area is shrouded in thick fog that blocks out your view of anything more than a hundred yards away. Despite the very jagged, unnatural geometry of the terrain, nothing in the game is truly solid, since enemies often clip through doors and walls and will often clip through the ground or one another. There's very little detail to be found anywhere on Iwo Jima, to the extent that its inhabitants barely even have faces. On the PC, you can crank up the resolution, and on the Xbox you can play the game in 480p if you have a capable TV, but those options don't do anything to improve the look of the game. The sound is no more detailed and is mostly composed of repetitious, tinny gunfire and hollow explosions. There's an occasional, almost inaudible, mumbling from enemies, and the narration that sets up each level is so flat that it sounds synthesized. The music is generic and repetitive, as well, but it's easily the least offensive element of this game.     No matter how broke, desperate, or crazy about World War II you are, there's no reason to play this game. If you're looking for a cheap shooter, go to the store and grab any game off the shelf and you're practically guaranteed to have a better game than this one. Whatever you do, don't play World War II Combat: Iwo Jima.     
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62,Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars ,2, Call for Heroes is yet another poorly made Diablo clone crawling its way onto the budget shelf.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/5/5/6/27660-78556.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/call-for-heroes-pompolic-wars-review/1900-6175202/,neg,"
  As the back of the Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars box proclaims, ""It is the darkest of times."" Well, that's certainly true enough for anyone who installs and plays the game within. This action RPG from Quotix Software hits new lows in mind-numbing combat and ridiculously confusing level design.    Judging by the credits at the back of the manual, just two people made this one, and boy does it ever show. The twosome worked off a simple template of making a 3D copy of Diablo, but didn't include any of the depth or catchiness of that classic dungeon crawl. The single-player story (there is no multiplayer) about battling the monstrous hordes of a demon named Pompolic is told solely on the first page of the manual. There are no cutscenes, dialogue sequences, or anything else to tell a tale in the game itself. RPG elements are also MIA. Instead of rolling up characters, you make a one-or-the-other choice between a male warrior and a female amazon, and then bestow a name and a special ability (from a whopping list of three choices per class) upon the hero that you select. And with that, it's off to explore a succession of 15 generic fantasy castles and dungeons.   Combat is fast and frenzied but incredibly repetitive, and the frame rate can't keep up with the action.   And you really do have to do some exploring. Unlike in most hack-and-slash dungeoneering games, levels in Call for Heroes aren't strictly linear. Instead of just cutting down skeletons and goblins from Point A to Point B, you instead must delve into every nook and cranny of each level to discover all of the dark soul artifacts and open up a portal to the next level before a timer ticks down to zero. Initially, this is refreshing. Far too many action RPG dungeon crawls are so slavishly devoted to linear level design that they play themselves, so finally getting an alternative could have been a very good thing.    Unfortunately, though, the alternative here is an absolute mess. There is no rhyme or reason to the level design at all, and there is no mini-map tracking your expedition, so you feel like a rat running around in a maze. Levels are also totally isolated from one another, giving you the impression that you're fighting through disconnected battle arenas, not making your way through any sort of story or campaign. Each level seems to have only a half-dozen or so noteworthy architectural elements, too, which leaves you adrift with no distinctive landmarks to indicate where you are at any given moment. Monsters also typically spawn in when you grab a power-up like a health potion or a dark soul, too, leaving you without a sense of place when it comes to specific fights. Welcome to a hack-and-slash treadmill.    Making matters even worse is the incessant, stupidly difficult combat. Packs of monsters constantly swarm you, forcing a lot of scrambly fighting and fleeing that further screws up your sense of direction. From the second level on, the number of creatures on your tail is so insane that you mostly just scurry away from them and hope that you happen to pass the dark souls before you get killed. All of this fighting does at least lend the game a certain white-knuckle intensity. It seems like you're forever stuck with your hit points in single digits, leaving you constantly afraid that a random swipe from some goon is going to send you on a dirt nap. Also, you have to restart levels from scratch when killed, which adds even more pressure to the hacking and slashing unless you've lucked out and found one of the rare respawn icons.    Still, everything goes on too long and is far too repetitive to be the least bit enjoyable. Each Call for Heroes level takes a good half-hour to finish, and you spend every second of that time either fleeing without any idea where you're going or click-click-clicking on the bad guys. There isn't any excitement in this monster mash, as you're whaling away on just a handful of types of beastie in each level. Creatures in the game nicely blend ""kill-myself-if-I-have-to-kill-another"" fantasy archetypes like skeletons and zombies with bizarro beasts like fireball-spewing floating orbs (the spitting image of Doom's cacodemon) and spindly-armed ET look-alikes, but there just aren't enough different monsters to prevent your brain from locking up with tedium. You'll wallop forty or fifty spiders in one level, then a few dozen one-armed zombies in the next, then a veritable Shriners convention of Doom balls in the next, and so on.    Variety isn't a part of your arsenal, either. Although you accumulate different weapons and armor along the way, there isn't that much of it. You generally pick up one good new weapon per level, for instance. Battles can be livened up by activating special class abilities that are picked when you level up, or by collecting coins that let you activate god mode for a limited period of time, but you don't need any of that fancy stuff; most of the time you'll be happy (well, ""happy"" is a relative term) to just click-kill your way through monsters.   Smashing skeletons on a snowy evening.   ""Happy"" is also not a word you would use when describing likely reactions to the sound and video. The most memorable characteristic of the audio is the buggy musical score that occasionally flips out and spawns a choppy tune about as melodic as a fat guy belly flopping on a xylophone. This is a shame, actually, as the proper main theme is a great classical piece loaded with moody strings. Sound effects are subdued and nonsensical. Hitting a skeleton with a club results in a wimpy ""whump"" sound like you just hit a sack of wheat with a drumstick. The graphics up the awful ante even further. No collision detection means that you can run right through monsters. Clipping is a frequent problem, and objects flash in and out, especially around water. The camera gets jammed into the back of your head when you venture close to walls. Fonts go overboard when it comes to a gothic feel, making the ""N"" look like an ""R,"" and the ""G"" look like something vaguely Klingon. Animations are herky-jerky, and the frame rate turns into a slide show whenever you get more than a half-dozen monsters on screen at once (which is pretty much all the time from the second level onward).    Call for Heroes is about as slapdash a PC game as you'll find in recent memory. There's just no excuse for taking something so half-baked and generic and shoving it into a box on the cheap. Call for Heroes ought to be recalled.  
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63,Instinct ,2, Terrible AI and indecipherable dialogue are just two of the many problems afflicting this zombie shooter.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/2/0/2211120-wp_05_1024_768.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/instinct-review/1900-6178489/,neg,"
  Instinct is a Resident Evil rip-off with a first-person perspective that's a good 10 years too late for the party. This creation of the aptly named Russian developer Digital Spray Studios has more problems than just copying the story and bad guys from a game with a best-before date that expired in the 1990s. Everything here is ineptly made and annoying, from the dumb zombie foes to the terrible level design. Throw in big performance problems that regularly turn battles into slideshows and you've got yet another atrocity good for a trifecta of crap.    The storyline appears to be a garden-variety zombie caper, with you guiding three Russian commandos on a search-and-destroy mission to a secret facility in North Korea. You start off facing run-of-the-mill soldiers, but immediately run into what looks to be the undead as soon as you enter the base. Or so it seems. The plot continually bounces back and forth in time, with cutscenes filling in the backstory only after you've completed missions. While this style of storytelling might work well in the hands of a competent storyteller, it's just confusing here. You start off watching a clip of a drunken Russian soldier taking out a TV a la Elvis and then plunge right into the invasion of some kind of military base. If not for the blurbs on the box cover and in the manual, you wouldn't have a clue what's going on until wrapping up at least three levels.   Meet one of the least scary zombies in gaming history. Tracksuits might be pretty frightening to fashionistas, but not to anybody else.   Another big problem is the developer's decision to leave all of the dialogue in the original Russian. While it's sweet of Digital Spray to save us from what would no doubt have been mangled English dubbed by family and friends of the development team, not being able to understand anything said by your comrades in the middle of firefights isn't a great alternative. Bringing up a separate journal screen with subtitled dialogue is the only way to figure out what your pals are saying, and this is tantamount to suicide since the action continues in the background while you're trying to read. By the time you've gotten an idea of what you're supposed to be doing, the zombies on your heels will usually have caught up to you and started busily pounding on your skull. Not fun.    But this handicap is one of the few things that makes combat in Instinct remotely challenging. Enemy soldiers are total morons who frequently take cover behind explosive barrels. These barrels can typically be found adjacent to all soldiers, so it's a lot easier to just target them whenever spotted and then rely on the ensuing ka-boom to take out any bad guys in the neighborhood. Shooting soldiers directly isn't nearly as effective or as satisfying, as they absorb a ridiculous number of rounds before eating the pavement and show absolutely no signs of being shot even while you're riddling them with bullets. Not surprisingly, the zombies are pretty stupid, too, although at least they have the excuse of being the victims of a mind-destroying experiment gone horribly wrong. Regardless, they pretty much line up to be gunned down. They pose a threat only when they attack in large numbers, and even then you can still blast them to bits without much of a hassle as long as you've got a little room to fall back whenever you need to reload a weapon.    More difficulty is provided by the level design, although that's largely because of the typically terrible layout. Most of the rooms and corridors all look the same, making it easy to get turned around. Getting lost is an impossibility due to the small size of the levels, at least, although you'll sure get bored looking at the same grey metal walls, gas tanks, and explosive barrels over and over again. It's also hard to figure out what you're supposed to do in spots. Levers are never highlighted, so you can readily miss a switch that needs to be pulled to open a door. Sometimes zombie attacks are only triggered by entering a certain part of a level. You can wander around for ages looking for a door that doesn't exist only to eventually get attacked out of nowhere by finally walking into the right place.    Visuals are noteworthy solely for what have to be the least scary zombies in gaming history. Many of them are clad in tracksuits, so at times it seems like you're being attacked by packs of old-school rappers. Few details have been incorporated in the zombie models, either. Their bodies are blurry and their faces are pale blobs distinguished by rolled-up eyes and bulging veins only visible in extreme close-ups. Digital Spray has tried to give the game something of a unique look through a comic-book display mode, although all this does is outline everything with thin white lines that obscure much of the scenery. Both the regular and comic-book graphics have serious performance issues, as well. The frame rate tends to plummet when a fair number of enemies are onscreen, particularly in wide-open settings. And little hitches and flat-out long freezes are common when simply turning around during battles.   It's awfully polite of those enemy soldiers to position themselves so close to explosive barrels.   But at least bits of the audio can be effective, particularly the music. Even though the score lapses into dreary, driving techno typical of yesterday's shooters when in the middle of firefights, the atmospheric music played when creeping around in the dark on zombie levels is truly spine-tingling. Toss in some squelching footfalls when you walk through gore, the satisfying boom of your shotgun, and the efficient rat-a-tat-tat of your automatic weapons and you've got a pretty decent-sounding shooter.    Still, the many flaws in Instinct outweigh a few creepy tunes and shotgun blasts. All of the above details should be more than enough to scare you off, but if you need further evidence, please take note that saves take really long to load, there are no multiplayer modes, and that the game is copy-protected by Starforce.  
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64,Red Dead Redemption ,9.5," This stunning Wild West epic raises the bar for open world action games, and stakes its claim as one of the most engaging games this year.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426726-2221817-reddeadredemptionboxartfinallargegb.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/red-dead-redemption-review/1900-6262940/,pos,"
  As you ride the train west from the northern city of Blackwater, you have no idea what's waiting for you in the frontier town of Armadillo at the end of Red Dead Redemption's intro sequence. Conversations between other passengers clue you in to the state of the nation, and a quick look out of the window tells you that the territories are as untamed as they are beautiful. But it's not until you step off the train in the well-worn boots of protagonist John Marston and have to sidestep a drunk staggering out of the saloon that you realize how alive the world feels, and how much fun you're going to have exploring it. Similarities with recent Grand Theft Auto games are immediately apparent in the controls and the HUD, though both have been improved in subtle but important ways. Those basics, in conjunction with excellent gameplay, a great story, and a sizable multiplayer suite make Red Dead Redemption something very special.      When you arrive in Armadillo for the first time, you're a small fish in an extremely large pond. None of the townsfolk have ever heard of John Marston, and they're too busy believably going about their business to pay you much attention unless you bump into them. The gameworld stretches for miles in every direction beyond the confines of the modest town, and if it weren't for a number of mandatory missions that deftly familiarize you with the controls and gameplay mechanics early on, the prospect of venturing out into the wilderness could be daunting. Marston is a deeply flawed but very likable protagonist, and therefore it doesn't take long for him to start making friends in the New Austin territory. One of them, a ranch owner whom you meet early in the game, gives you both a place to stay (which doubles as a place to save your progress) and a horse to call your own, and it's at this point that you're more or less free to do as you please. Marston's lengthy and occasionally surprising story is linear for the most part, but it's told through missions that don't always need to be completed in a specific order, and you're free to ignore them for a time if you'd rather just explore the giant Wild West sandbox you're playing in.     Whether you're galloping between locations where there are missions available or just trotting around aimlessly, Red Dead Redemption's world is a far easier one to get sidetracked in than most. That's because in addition to the dozens of excellent and varied story missions, there are countless optional undertakings to enjoy--most of which offer some tangible reward in the form of money, weapons, or reputation. While you're in town, you might choose to gamble at card and dice tables or tear a wanted poster from the wall and do some bounty hunting, for example. And when you're in the middle of nowhere, opportunities for gunfights and the like have a habit of presenting themselves or even forcing themselves upon you. Random strangers in need of help can show up at any time, and while it's a little jarring to find two or three strangers in the same predicament back-to-back, most of their requests are varied and fun for the short time that they take to complete. You might be called upon to retrieve a stolen wagon, to collect herbs, or even to rescue someone being hanged from a tree. There's no penalty for ignoring strangers, but when you help them you collect a small reward and become a little more famous in the process.   When accompanying other characters, you can easily match your speed to theirs.   Fame is interesting in Red Dead Redemption, because it's measured alongside but independently of your honor. Regardless of whether you're doing good deeds or bad, becoming increasingly famous is inevitable as you progress through the game. How people react when they recognize you is determined by your honor, though, which can be positive or negative. If you spend your time acting dishonorably, townsfolk might be terrified of you, but if you're considered a hero, they'll go out of their way to greet you and might even applaud as you ride into town. Either way, there are pros and cons to becoming something of a public figure. People won't bother to report you when you steal a horse if you're famous, and any bounty hunters or posses that come after you when there's a price on your head will take twice as long to try again after failing the first time, for example. On the flip side, as you make a name for yourself you become a target for gunslingers who are looking to make names for themselves, and so you're challenged to duels that play out entirely using the game's slow-motion ""dead eye"" mechanic.    In duels, even though speed is a factor, dead eye affords you an opportunity to place your shots precisely. The head is the most obvious target, but occasionally you might be required to (or wish to) win a duel without actually killing your opponent. With practice, you can shoot a gun out of an enemy's hand as he makes his move, which is especially satisfying and makes you more famous than killing someone outright. Dead eye can be used in much the same way during regular play, but a slowly replenishing meter limits how often you can trigger it, and given how effective the lock-on targeting system is, you're unlikely to need it much. With the exception of sniper rifles, you can lock on to enemies from a great distance with any weapon. Then, once you're locked on, you can tweak your aim to target a specific part of your enemy. Nudge your aim up just a touch, and there's a good chance you'll get a one-hit-kill headshot. (You do that so often that it's likely to become a reflex every time you raise your weapon). However, you don't always want to kill your enemies, because, for example, once you learn to use a lasso, you have the option to bring bounties in alive. It's more challenging, but it also doubles your reward, and it's extremely satisfying to shoot a criminal in the leg so that he falls to ground and can only try to crawl away, hog-tie and slump him over the back of your horse, and then deliver him to the local sheriff.   Breaking a wild horse isn't nearly as hard as it looks, even in the middle of the night.   You can also use your lasso to rope wild horses, which is a fun way to upgrade or just replace the mount that you spend so much time with. After catching a wild horse, you wait for just the right moment to mount it and then, via a simple minigame in which you maintain your balance as the horse tries to buck you, you break it. Initially, you might want to change your horse just to get a color that you like (there are lots to choose from), but it's also fun to keep a lookout for rare breeds, because they not only look a little more impressive but are also noticeably quicker. Regardless of what kind of horse you ride (including those that are pulling carts and wagons), the responsive controls work in the same way and make it easy to adjust your speed from a walk to a trot, canter, or gallop. You also have the option to match your speed with that of any character you're riding alongside, which is incredibly useful.    As you spend more time with the same horse, it rewards your loyalty by increasing the length of its energy bar, which determines how long it can sprint at full speed. You shouldn't become too attached to your mounts, though, because Red Dead Redemption's world is both a dangerous place and one in which horses occasionally behave unpredictably. There's nothing wrong with a horse walking around a little when you climb off it, but if you leave it close to a deep river, you run the risk of losing it if--as we witnessed on one occasion--it stupidly steps in, because, like you, horses can't swim. Horses also have a habit of not staying put when you tie them to a hitching post, so you then need to whistle for them to come to you from wherever they've ended up or run the risk of inadvertently stealing someone else's identical mount. Other, more avoidable ways to lose a horse include its getting shot by enemies or attacked by wild animals, though the controls for shooting from the saddle are good enough that you really have only yourself to blame if that happens.       Red Dead Redemption's varied wildlife adds a great deal to the world and also makes it a dangerous place to let your guard down. Crows, hawks, eagles, and vultures fly overhead; armadillos, raccoons, deer, and skunks try to stay out of your way; and cougars, coyotes, wolves, and even snakes can be dangerous if they see you before you see them. All of these species and lots more inevitably cross your path, and whether they're solitary creatures or hunting as a pack, their behavior is always believable. Furthermore, all of these animals can be hunted and then--via an animation that sees blood spattering on the screen--harvested for their skins, meat, and other valuable body parts. Beavers, boars, bobcats, bears, buffalo, bighorn--all have something to offer, and all pose a slightly different challenge.    Other than the fun of the hunt, the main reason to kill most of these animals is so that you can sell the aforementioned body parts to a store owner the next time you're in town. Sometimes, though, there are additional incentives in the form of ambient challenges that, as the name suggests, reward you for objectives that you might complete in the course of regular gameplay. For example, sharpshooter challenges include shooting people's hats off and shooting birds out of the sky from a moving train. Hunter challenges, on the other hand, include one-shotting grizzly bears and taking down a pack of wolves using only a knife. For a change of pace, treasure hunter challenges present you with a treasure map that often amounts to little more than sketches of a landmark, and challenge you to locate the treasure hidden nearby. You become a little more famous every time you complete one of these challenges, and beating a significant number of them is a requirement for unlocking at least one of the different outfits that Marston can change into.      Marston is an impressively detailed character whose scarred face and default outfit play big parts in making him wholly believable as a 30-something gunslinger. Other than donning a bandana that covers much of your face (and hides your identity so that you don't affect your fame or honor while performing certain actions), there's nothing you can do about the scars, but by putting on a different outfit you can change how certain people react to you. There are more than a dozen different outfits to discover and unlock. Some of them, like the duster jacket and the poncho, are easy to unlock and offer no real benefit other than making you look even more dangerous. Others, though, such as military and gang uniforms, can be obtained only after completing multiple challenges, and wearing them makes certain factions more accepting of you. There are even a couple of outfits that can make gambling more fun: one gives you the option to cheat anytime you deal in a game of poker, and another--acquired by signing up for the Rockstar Social Club--grants you access to a high-stakes game.    Believe it or not, even while cheating at cards and gunning down hundreds of enemies, it's possible--with only one exception during a plot-critical mission--to make it through Red Dead Redemption's entire story without ever getting on the wrong side of the law. It's fun to play as a heroic bounty hunter, but it's also fun to be chased by one, or several. Much like the system in GTA, being spotted committing a crime alerts local law enforcement, and until you outrun them, they pursue you relentlessly. Your crimes aren't completely forgotten the moment you escape in Red Dead Redemption, though, because every crime that you commit raises the bounty on your head, and the only way to clear that is to visit a telegraph operator and either pay the amount of your bounty yourself as a fine or present him with a letter of pardon--which isn't easy to come by. It's a great system, because in conjunction with fame and honor it really makes you feel like your actions have lasting consequences.   Whether you're claiming one or have one on your head, bounties are a lot of fun.   Depending on how much time you spend completing optional challenges, Red Dead Redemption's single-player mode can take you anywhere from 20 to 40 hours to play through. If you're in a rush to get through the game for some reason, you can use stagecoaches and quick travel options to move between key locations on the gigantic map instantly, but there's so much fun to be had out in the wilderness that bypassing those areas isn't recommended. You should also know that while bugs and glitches are few and far between, there's at least one stagecoach driver who apparently isn't great at math and might inexplicably charge you $100 (not an insignificant sum of money, given that it's enough to buy property) on top of the quoted price for a journey. Other problems worthy of note during our 30-plus hours in single-player included a conversation between Marston and another character in which only Marston's lines could be heard, an attempt to crouch behind a decrepit overturned wagon that resulted in Marston being thrown high up into the air, and a cutscene in which two versions of the same character--one injured and animated, one neither--appeared alongside each other. You might also notice characters having some pathfinding problems when confronted by hitching posts, stacks of crates, and the like, but beyond these extremely rare issues, the world of Red Dead Redemption is very difficult to find fault with. It looks incredible, it sounds superb (though the excellent soundtrack occasionally swells up without reason), and it's just a fun place to spend time regardless of what you're doing or whom you're doing it with.    In addition to its lengthy single-player offering, Red Dead Redemption boasts a good number of multiplayer modes that support both competitive and cooperative play. No matter which mode you want to play, all multiplayer sessions start out in Free Roam. Here, you and up to 15 other players are free to do whatever you please with the entire gameworld at your disposal. You can shoot each other, you can cause trouble with townsfolk, you can form posses to complete gang hideout missions, or you can become the session's most wanted outlaw and then kill or steer clear of any other players who come looking to collect the bounty on your head. Your character in Free Roam mode is persistent, and as you earn experience points you gain access to additional character models, better weapons, and superior mounts. It's unfortunate that you don't get to design a character from scratch, and it can be frustrating to enter Free Roam as a level-one player riding a burro and armed only with a pistol, but it doesn't take long to level up, and even high-level players can be killed with just a few bullets if you can get close to them.    In multiplayer, the entire map is your playground.   When you enter competitive online modes, you don't get to use your persistent character, and everyone is on a level playing field. The five modes on offer are free-for-all and team-based versions of Shootout and three versions of Capture the Bag. Clearly, these modes are variations on the traditional deathmatch and capture-the-flag themes, but they do more than just apply a Wild West lick of paint to them. For starters, all multiplayer games kick off with an awesome standoff in which all players stand around in a circle (or in two opposing lines if it's a team game) and wait for all hell to break loose when the word ""Draw"" appears on the screen. And in Capture the Bag modes, the bags of gold that you carry weigh you down so that you move more slowly, making you an easy target in the free-for-all Gold Rush and making escorts or cover fire vital in the team-based Hold Your Own.    Between the Free Roam and competitive modes, there's enough great multiplayer content to keep you playing Red Dead Redemption long after you've watched the credits roll at the end of the superb single-player mode and gone back in to finish up any optional challenges and missions that you missed. This is an outstanding game that tells a great story with memorable and occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny characters. Think about great moments that you remember from spaghetti Western movies, put them all into one 20- to 40-hour epic feature, and picture yourself in the starring role. Now you have some idea of what's waiting for you in Red Dead Redemption.  


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65,Real Racing ,9.5," One of the most complete racing games on iDevices today, Real Racing drives like a champ and is packed with features.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/9/9/6/2223996-img_0895.png,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/real-racing-review/1900-6231983/,pos,"
  As ambitious as anything in the App Store, Real Racing kicks the powersliding trend to the curb and substitutes it for intelligent application of the gas and brakes. It's breathtakingly realistic in all aspects of its design and is easily one of the best games on the iPhone to date.     This game wouldn't work without good controls, and Real Racing handles better than most iPhone racers, especially when driving in the immersive cockpit view. It can still be a little difficult to navigate corners, mostly because the margin of error here is so low, and a botched turn can send you into the dirt and out of contention. But it's called ""Real Racing"" for a reason, and those looking for realistic driving physics won't find any better on the iPhone.   Real Racing's cockpit view is realistic and immersive.   By default the game will brake and accelerate for you, and a slider bar allows you to wean yourself off of this help until you're in full control of the car. Your perspective will shift slightly as you tilt to steer, making it feel like you really are inside the car as you bounce and swing around corners.    It's great fun to blaze around the track on your own, shaving seconds off of your best lap time. Unfortunately, the Time Trial mode lets you race only one lap at a time, forcing you to restart the event for each successive lap.     Uploading lap times online is simple with Cloudcell integration (Firemint's online login system), which tracks your stats and makes them accessible in-game or via a Web browser. It will also automatically upload videos of your best lap times to YouTube, and dozens of leaderboards are available to see how you stack up worldwide.    Plus, online racing leagues are offered, and you'll have a set amount of time to race three tracks and post your best lap times for each. You'll be ranked against others who have raced the same tracks, and although it's not a real substitute for live online races, it's a nice feature.    In Career mode, you'll race against computer opponents, and this is where things might become a little frustrating. In the initial release, the opponents in Real Racing didn't like to play nice. In fact, they behaved nothing like real drivers, violently smashing you off the road every chance they got. However, the game has now been updated to include three levels of AI aggression.    Real Racing looks great and offers plenty of racecourses.   Despite the slight limitations of Career mode, racing fans will absolutely love Real Racing. The graphics are stupendous for an iPhone game, and the sense of immersion in the cockpit view is incredible. The cars purr, rumble, and roar in thrilling coordination with your speed. Twelve different tracks will give you plenty of courses to master, and they make up for the fact that there's a limited number of cars to race in. In fact, Real Racing is comparable to some of the best high-end games available on the Sony PSP and puts racing games on the Nintendo DS to shame.    Even high-profile iPhone racers such as Need for Speed: Undercover can't compete with what Real Racing brings to the table. Local Wi-Fi multiplayer, the track variety, and the online feature set give you far more to do in Real Racing than Need for Speed does. Wi-Fi racing supports six players, and while it dropped the connection multiple times during our initial testing, it has been improved.    Casual racers might be put off by Real Racing, because it isn't an easy ""tilt the handset to win"" type of racing game that is so common to the platform. It's difficult, and it will take dedication to succeed. But those looking for a simulation-style racing experience are going to be very, very impressed.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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66,Super Meat Boy ,9.5," This sublime platformer provides tons of challenge, precise controls, and incredible level design that will keep you glued to the screen.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/4/5/2221745-box_supermeatboy.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-meat-boy-review/1900-6282520/,pos,"
  Failure is an unavoidable fact of life. Its devilish claws knock you down when you least expect it, but it's how you react to disappointment that's important. Super Meat Boy is the digital embodiment of the idea that pleasure can spring from pain, but although death is pervasive in this 2D platformer, it does not define the experience. There is an incredible sense of satisfaction when you clear a particularly nasty level that makes the setbacks you endured to reach that lofty goal well worth it. It's the feeling you get when you miraculously squeeze through two slicing blades unscathed or leap in the air to snatch a dangling bandage that seemed impossible to reach only moments earlier that continually pushes you forward to tackle the next challenge. Super Meat Boy is an extraordinary game that makes you work for every inch you gain, which makes success taste so much sweeter when you finally get there.      Everything in Super Meat Boy begins with the controls. Within seconds of diving into the first few levels of this daunting adventure, it's clear that your onscreen movement is amazingly responsive. The titular hero jumps with such precision that you're always in complete command of your actions. Wall jumping is particularly impressive. The extreme nimbleness of your character makes it a cinch to quickly leap straight up one wall, bounce smoothly between two adjacent ones, and even contort your trajectory in midair to avoid an obstacle while you make your ascent. Super Meat Boy can sprint with the best of them, and though it might seem crazy to hurl yourself at breakneck speeds through these deadly traps, it's not a problem here. Because he responds to your every command immediately, you can tear through levels as fast as Meat can run without worrying about the controls slowing you down.    And you need ultraprecise controls to get through the deadly dangers that await you. Super Meat Boy is one of the most difficult games around, but it starts out innocently enough. You learn your basic moves in punishment-free levels to get accustomed to how your movement feels before the real trouble begins. The difficulty curve is incredibly smooth, giving you a taste of upcoming dangers early on but making sure you can pass these stages without much trouble. The execution is brilliant because it introduces you to everything you need to know while giving you the confidence to overcome any obstacle that stands in your path. If Super Meat Boy started out harder, or if the difficulty spiked rapidly, it would serve as a slap in the face to all but the most determined players. But because the game holds your hand early on, you build up the skills you need to tackle anything the tricky later levels throw at you.   The bosses are equipped with their own deadly weapons.   The level design in Super Meat Boy is absolutely stunning. The usual tricks you would expect in a 2D platformer are here--such as spinning saws, lava pits, and shooting blades--but they are positioned in such intelligent ways that the game is extremely challenging without ever feeling cheap. There is a delicate balance on display that ensures you're pushed to the limits of your skill without becoming frustrated. One of the most impressive aspects of Super Meat Boy is how you learn and adapt while you play. The first time you enter a level, you may be presented with a jump that seems impossible. You may try and fail a few times, maybe even a few dozen times, without any idea what you're supposed to do. But once you figure out the timing to succeed, you can pull off even the toughest moves with a good degree of consistency. Being able to conquer levels that previously seemed impossible is an exhilarating feeling, and the ease with which you become proficient is a testament to how precise the controls are and how meticulously designed the levels are.    Death is commonplace in Super Meat Boy. When you reach the harder levels, you may end up dying a dozen times before you pass the first pit, and more than a hundred before you reach the end. With failure such an expected occurrence, you might think this game is frustrating. It rarely is. Although you will inevitably be frustrated at times, Super Meat Boy goes a long way toward lessening your irritation. The precise controls and imaginative level design go a long way toward alleviating any throw-your-controller reactions, but the reason frustration is avoided goes even deeper than that. The upbeat soundtrack does a great job of keeping your energy at a high level without ever distracting you from the carnage that lies ahead. Each song also changes slightly, so even if you're stuck at a particularly wicked stage for an hour or more, the catchy riff never gets repetitive. The lack of extreme punishment also helps a lot. Although you die if any obstacle hits you, you do have infinite lives. Also, because levels usually last less than 30 seconds, even though you have to start from the beginning each time, you never have to retrace much ground. Finally, the extreme focus needed to pass these difficult stages ensures that your energy is zeroed in on completing your task rather than beating yourself up for falling short. This is an amazingly well designed game that avoids the frustration of failure by insulating you from your own aggravation.     The core mechanics and level design are absolutely superb in Super Meat Boy, and the wealth of content ensures you'll be playing this excellent platformer for quite a long time. There are more than 300 levels in all, most of them optional, and many of them are hidden. To reach the end you need to play through all of the light world levels, which include traditional platforming challenges along with a few clever boss fights. You have as much time as you need to pass each level, but if you reach the end under a specific mark, you unlock a dark version of that same level. This is when things get really difficult. The dark world puts a cruel twist on the light levels, and it can take all of your determination to rise above these daunting tests. It's a good thing the dark world is optional, so you can play through the slightly easier light world before you dive into the furnace. But the bonus content doesn't stop there. There are warp zones hidden in certain levels that whisk you to a three-level obstacle course that's a bit easier than standard levels but gives you a finite number of lives to make it through alive. On top of that are glitch world levels, which are as hard to unlock as they are to finish, and the goofily named Teh Internets, which is updated periodically with new levels. It takes lots of hours to plow through all this content, and you'll be glued to the edge of your seat the whole time.       On top of the optional levels are unlockable characters, which feel much different from the speedy Meat Boy, and each has a unique move as well. These extra heroes have been pulled from other indie platformers, so you may find Commander Video from Bit.Trip.Runner. He's pretty slow, but he can glide horizontally, which can be handy in a pinch. You have the option to switch to any of these characters at the beginning of most levels, and they provide a different strategy to reach the end. Alien Hominid can slow his descent by firing his gun straight down, which allows you to fit into crevices that Meat Boy could never reach. Although every level can be completed just by playing as Meat Boy, you may have to dip into your roster to nab the hidden collectibles. There are bandages strewn about certain levels, and you need to grab these to unlock some characters. But Meat Boy doesn't have the ability to get them all, which forces you to try out each character to see how they can help you succeed. These special characters add even more replay to a game that's already bursting with it, and they're a great shout-out to the independent gaming scene.     Time is a factor if you want to unlock the dark levels, but it goes even deeper than that. The leaderboard ranks your best score on each level, and it's an addictive challenge to try to figure out how someone posted a better score than your near-perfect run. It's just unfortunate that you aren't able to view those replays. Other downloadable games, such as Trials HD and Hydro Thunder Hurricane, let you check out the top runs on the leaderboard, and it's entertaining and educational to view what the best in the world can do. This would have worked really well in Super Meat Boy, a game in which skill is pushed to the forefront, so it's a shame that it's not an option. There is still a replay system in place, though. Your deaths are recorded in each level, so when you finally reach the end, you can see all of your failed attempts play out simultaneously. It's not only empowering to see the progress you made, but it's a great reward for persevering. It's brutally exhilarating to see dozens of Meat Boys burst into bloody balls of death all at once.   Some levels have a striking monotone color scheme.   Super Meat Boy is an extremely difficult game, but that doesn't mean it lacks a sense of humor. The setup is just as preposterous as the traps you have to overcome, setting the stage for a daunting adventure that always has a smile on its lips. Meat Boy's girlfriend, Bandage Girl, has been kidnapped by Dr. Fetus. You may wonder how an unborn baby could possibly have a medical degree, but the bigger question is: What is he wearing? He struts around in a mechanical suit clad in a spiffy tuxedo with a top hat on his dome. Certainly the sign of an evil individual. At the completion of each boss fight, a cartoony cinematic rolls, and these are a great reward for your hard work. The cutscenes are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, but always entertaining. It's amazing how many emotions play out without any dialogue, but that's part of the beauty of this incredible game. It never lets its simplicity hold it back from greatness.    It's impossible to point to just one element that makes Super Meat Boy such an extraordinary game. From the intense-though-always-fair difficulty and the inspired level design, to the pinpoint controls and catchy soundtrack, all of the different aspects converge into something that is truly outstanding. When you hear stories of the unrepentant dangers that stand in your path, it's easy to get intimidated by such a daunting prospect. But don't be. The beauty of Super Meat Boy is that it always plays within the rules, and the smooth difficulty curve gives you plenty of time to become acquainted with everything before the true tests are unleashed. Death is always just one misstep away in Super Meat Boy, but the rush of winning is so supremely rewarding that you won't be able to tear yourself away.  


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67,Super Meat Boy ,9.5," This sublime platformer provides tons of challenge, precise controls, and incredible level design that will keep you glued to the screen.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/4/5/2221745-box_supermeatboy.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-meat-boy-review/1900-6285270/,pos,"
  Failure is an unavoidable fact of life. Its devilish claws knock you down when you least expect it, but it's how you react to disappointment that's important. Super Meat Boy is the digital embodiment of the idea that pleasure can spring from pain, but although death is pervasive in this 2D platformer, it does not define the experience. There is an incredible sense of satisfaction when you clear a particularly nasty level that makes the setbacks you endured to reach that lofty goal well worth it. It's the feeling you get when you miraculously squeeze through two slicing blades unscathed or leap in the air to snatch a dangling bandage that seemed impossible to reach only moments earlier that continually pushes you forward to tackle the next challenge. Super Meat Boy is an extraordinary game that makes you work for every inch you gain, which makes success taste so much sweeter when you finally get there.      Everything in Super Meat Boy begins with the controls. Within seconds of diving into the first few levels of this daunting adventure, it's clear that your onscreen movement is amazingly responsive. The titular hero jumps with such precision that you're always in complete command of your actions. Wall jumping is particularly impressive. The extreme nimbleness of your character makes it a cinch to quickly leap straight up one wall, bounce smoothly between two adjacent ones, and even contort your trajectory in midair to avoid an obstacle while you make your ascent. Super Meat Boy can sprint with the best of them, and though it might seem crazy to hurl yourself at breakneck speeds through these deadly traps, it's not a problem here. Because he responds to your every command immediately, you can tear through levels as fast as Meat can run without worrying about the controls slowing you down. Just be warned: Using the keyboard will throw a hurdle in your path to victory. A controller is the preferred option here because the keyboard does not offer the exactness needed to overcome these daunting obstacles.    And you need ultraprecise controls to get through the deadly dangers that await you. Super Meat Boy is one of the most difficult games around, but it starts out innocently enough. You learn your basic moves in punishment-free levels to get accustomed to how your movement feels before the real trouble begins. The difficulty curve is incredibly smooth, giving you a taste of upcoming dangers early on but making sure you can pass these stages without much trouble. The execution is brilliant because it introduces you to everything you need to know while giving you the confidence to overcome any obstacle that stands in your path. If Super Meat Boy started out harder, or if the difficulty spiked rapidly, it would serve as a slap in the face to all but the most determined players. But because the game holds your hand early on, you build up the skills you need to tackle anything the tricky later levels throw at you. And for those who want to get smacked down to reality from the get go, there are optional bandages to collect, warp zones to enter, and dark world twists to attempt if you don't want to follow the easy learning curve the standard levels follow.   Who let Dr. Fetus drive a walking chainsaw?   The level design in Super Meat Boy is absolutely stunning. The usual tricks you would expect in a 2D platformer are here--such as spinning saws, lava pits, and shooting blades--but they are positioned in such intelligent ways that the game is extremely challenging without ever feeling cheap. There is a delicate balance on display that ensures you're pushed to the limits of your skill without becoming frustrated. One of the most impressive aspects of Super Meat Boy is how you learn and adapt while you play. The first time you enter a level, you may be presented with a jump that seems impossible. You may try and fail a few times, maybe even a few dozen times, without any idea what you're supposed to do. But once you figure out the timing to succeed, you can pull off even the toughest moves with a good degree of consistency. Being able to conquer levels that previously seemed impossible is an exhilarating feeling, and the ease with which you become proficient is a testament to how precise the controls are and how meticulously designed the levels are.    Death is commonplace in Super Meat Boy. When you reach the harder levels, you may end up dying a dozen times before you pass the first pit, and more than a hundred before you reach the end. With failure such an expected occurrence, you might think this game is frustrating. It rarely is. Although you will inevitably be frustrated at times, Super Meat Boy goes a long way toward lessening your irritation. The precise controls and imaginative level design go a long way toward alleviating any throw-your-controller reactions, but the reason frustration is avoided goes even deeper than that. The upbeat soundtrack does a great job of keeping your energy at a high level without ever distracting you from the carnage that lies ahead. Each song also changes slightly, so even if you're stuck at a particularly wicked stage for an hour or more, the catchy riff never gets repetitive. The lack of extreme punishment also helps a lot. Although you die if any obstacle hits you, you do have infinite lives. Also, because levels usually last less than 30 seconds, even though you have to start from the beginning each time, you never have to retrace much ground. Finally, the extreme focus needed to pass these difficult stages ensures that you're zeroed in on completing your task rather than beating yourself up for falling short. This is an amazingly well designed game that avoids the frustration of failure by insulating you from your own aggravation.     The core mechanics and level design are absolutely superb in Super Meat Boy, and the wealth of content ensures you'll be playing this excellent platformer for quite a long time. There are more than 300 levels in all, most of them optional, and many of them are hidden. To reach the end you need to play through all of the light world levels, which include traditional platforming challenges along with a few clever boss fights. You have as much time as you need to pass each level, but if you reach the end under a specific mark, you unlock a dark version of that same level. This is when things get really difficult. The dark world puts a cruel twist on the light levels, and it can take all of your determination to rise above these daunting tests. It's a good thing the dark world is optional, so you can play through the slightly easier light world before you dive into the furnace. But the bonus content doesn't stop there. There are warp zones hidden in certain levels that whisk you to a three-level obstacle course that's a bit easier than standard levels but gives you a finite number of lives to make it through alive. On top of that are glitch world levels, which are as hard to unlock as they are to finish, and the goofily named Teh Internets, which is updated periodically with new levels. It takes lots of hours to plow through all this content, and you'll be glued to the edge of your seat the whole time.     On top of the optional levels are unlockable characters, which feel much different from the speedy Meat Boy, and each has a unique move as well. These extra heroes have been pulled from other indie platformers, so you may find Commander Video from Bit.Trip.Runner. He's pretty slow, but he can glide horizontally, which can be handy in a pinch. You have the option to switch to any of these characters at the beginning of most levels, and they provide a different strategy to reach the end. Headcrab, one of the new additions in the PC release, can hang on to walls and climb along ceilings. Although every level can be completed just by playing as Meat Boy, you may have to dip into your roster to nab the hidden collectibles. There are bandages strewn about certain levels, and you need to grab these to unlock some characters. But Meat Boy doesn't have the ability to get them all, which forces you to try out each character to see how they can help you succeed. These special characters add even more replay to a game that's already bursting with it, and they're a great shout-out to the independent gaming scene.  Time is a factor if you want to unlock the dark levels, but it goes even deeper than that. The leaderboard ranks your best score on each level, and it's an addictive challenge to try to figure out how someone posted a better score than your near-perfect run. It's just unfortunate that you aren't able to view those replays. Other games, such as Trials 2: Second Edition, let you check out the top runs on the leaderboard, and it's entertaining and educational to view what the best in the world can do. This would have worked really well in Super Meat Boy, a game in which skill is pushed to the forefront, so it's a shame that it's not an option. There is still a replay system in place, though. Your deaths are recorded in each level, so when you finally reach the end, you can see all of your failed attempts play out simultaneously. It's not only empowering to see the progress you made, but it's a great reward for persevering. It's brutally exhilarating to see dozens of Meat Boys burst into bloody balls of death all at once.   Headcrab is just hanging around hospital.  Super Meat Boy is an extremely difficult game, but that doesn't mean it lacks a sense of humor. The setup is just as preposterous as the traps you have to overcome, setting the stage for a daunting adventure that always has a smile on its lips. Meat Boy's girlfriend, Bandage Girl, has been kidnapped by Dr. Fetus. You may wonder how an unborn baby could possibly have a medical degree, but the bigger question is: What is he wearing? He struts around in a mechanical suit clad in a spiffy tuxedo with a top hat on his dome. Certainly the sign of an evil individual. At the completion of each boss fight, a cartoony cinematic rolls, and these are a great reward for your hard work. The cutscenes are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, but always entertaining. It's amazing how many emotions play out without any dialogue, but that's part of the beauty of this incredible game. It never lets its simplicity hold it back from greatness.  It's impossible to point to just one element that makes Super Meat Boy such an extraordinary game. From the intense-though-always-fair difficulty and the inspired level design, to the pinpoint controls and catchy soundtrack, all of the different aspects converge into something that is truly outstanding. When you hear stories of the unrepentant dangers that stand in your path, it's easy to get intimidated by such a daunting prospect. But don't be. The beauty of Super Meat Boy is that it always plays within the rules, and the smooth difficulty curve gives you plenty of time to become acquainted with everything before the true tests are unleashed. Death is always just one misstep away in Super Meat Boy, but the rush of winning is so supremely rewarding that you won't be able to tear yourself away.  
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68,Halo: Reach ,9.5," Halo: Reach is the culmination of the superlative combat, sensational multiplayer, and seamless online integration that are the hallmarks of this superb series.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/9/9/2222699-reach.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/halo-reach-review/1900-6275772/,pos,"
  Before the discovery and destruction of an ancient alien ringworld, before a teeming parasitic enemy threatened Earth, before a soldier called John-117 made a new name for himself, humanity fought to defend the planet Reach. And though Halo: Reach is a prequel to all the Halo games that have come before, it represents the evolutionary pinnacle of the series. From the expertly tuned combat to the expansive level design and from the innovative online integration to the robust creation tools, all the pillars of Halo's success are in top form here, tied together seamlessly by an elegant and intuitive menu system. While the core mechanics remain very familiar, invigorating new elements and extensive customization options make it so there are more ways to enjoy yourself than ever. Halo: Reach is one of the most fully featured games on consoles today, and it's also one of the best.      One of the first things you notice about Halo: Reach is the refined menu system. In addition to presenting the main gameplay modes, the main menu displays the status of your friends who are playing Reach and allows you to peruse their service records and invite them to your party with ease. Entering a mode, tweaking options, and starting up a match is an effortless process, and your party members can come with you almost everywhere you go. The interface allows you to easily explore game types, customization tools, and user-created content without getting swamped or overwhelmed. It's remarkable that everything is this easily accessible, because Halo: Reach is absolutely packed with great content.    Halo campaigns have traditionally had epic aspirations, and Halo: Reach is no different. Whether you play solo or cooperatively with up to four players, you play as the newest member of Noble team. Your first mission is to investigate a distress signal in a rural mountainous area, and it's no surprise when the source of the distress turns out to be the Covenant. Small skirmishes and reconnaissance missions soon escalate to all-out war as humanity tries to repel the alien invaders. Anyone familiar with the Halo canon knows how that one ends, but it's thrilling to be a part of Noble team's efforts. You undertake missions of increasingly crucial strategic importance, and this urgency is conveyed without any reliance on previous Halo knowledge. Instead, the characters you interact with help set the tone, and your squadmates have unique personalities that go a long way toward keeping you emotionally invested in the action. There are some cliches and a few cheap moments, but the story successfully channels the forthright heroism of soldiers who are committed to their cause. This earnest appeal makes Halo: Reach's campaign one of the most satisfying in the series.    The campaign also benefits from great pacing and a cohesive sense of place. The slow burn of the early levels explodes into frenetic large-scale conflict, and some good dramatic turns and an engrossing musical score keep the pace from fizzling out as the game builds toward a climactic ending. Your missions take you through a rich array of environments, from rural farming communities to high-country military outposts and from dry, rocky steppes to battered city streets. Throughout these diverse locations, the mountainous geography of Reach remains a constant presence that helps you connect with the land you are fighting to defend. Levels are often expansive, offering stunning views and allowing for some nice gameplay diversity. In addition to a number of classic vehicles that still handle marvelously, there are a few new rides that provide some kicks of their own. There's also a space-faring first for the series, and though this sequence is a bit shallow, it doesn't overstay its welcome and features some gorgeous orbital vistas.   The battle of energy sword versus shotgun rages on.   The campaign provides excitement aplenty, and adding some friends to the mix makes it even more enjoyable. Picking your own routes through the battlefield is more exciting when you know your buddies are doing it too, and it leads to some great moments of teamwork, both planned and unexpected. Though the friendly AI is generally harmless, it has trouble when it comes to driving, so you're better off driving yourself or trusting a friend behind the wheel. If you want to spice things up a bit, you can keep score individually or as a team, using skulls (now found in an options screen rather than hidden in levels) to modify battlefield conditions and boost your scoring potential. And if you don't have any friends available to join you, the online campaign matchmaking can easily set you up with squadmates. These options, along with the stellar core action, the excellent level design, and the well-balanced difficulty levels, make this great campaign supremely replayable.    Back after a very successful debut in Halo 3: ODST, the Firefight mode once again offers up to four players an arena to take on increasingly difficult waves of Covenant enemies. This is largely the same addictively entertaining experience, though it now boasts full online matchmaking support. Frantically fighting off hordes of enemies is as exciting and satisfying as ever, and the new maps and gameplay variants offer many different ways to enjoy this mode. You can take on a tougher challenge by choosing to defend generators in addition to killing Covenant or add a bit of levity by fighting hordes of grunts that fling confetti into the air when you shoot them in the head. You can even have some players play as Elites and try to thwart the remaining Spartans. If you want to tweak one of the built-in variants or create something entirely different, the extensive game options let you customize the makeup and toughness of each enemy wave, the weapons and shields available to you, the strength of gravity, and a lot more. It's a lot of fun to mess around with these options and see what you can come up with, and if you're not the tailoring type, you can easily download user-created variants by browsing popular variants or searching for keywords.      Extensive customization options are also available in competitive multiplayer. In the Custom Game mode, you can tweak the conditions of any game type beyond recognition or use subtle changes to spice things up. As in previous Halo games, the possibilities here are vast, and the intuitive interface makes them all easily accessible. Competitive matchmaking is once again a standout in Halo: Reach. Before you jump in, you can tweak a few variables in your psych profile to indicate that you prefer team players to lone wolves or want to avoid chatty teammates. It was hard to gauge the effectiveness of this system at the time of review, but just having such a system in a prominent location bodes well for being able to find an agreeable crowd with which to play.     Though there are just six competitive multiplayer lobbies, a revamped voting system lets you choose from a few different maps or variants, potentially turning your Team Slayer game into Team SWAT.  This built-in variation may irk some purists who don't want their Slayer game to turn into a Mongoose race, but it's a great way to build in some variety without spreading the player base between too many lobbies. There's also a ranked arena that functions as a competitive league, assigning players a ranking based on their performance while cycling through discrete blocks of time called seasons. And, there's a new objective-based mode called Invasion that pits Spartans against Elites, challenging one team to capture a series of positions and abscond with a valuable item. The progressive structure is a nice change of pace, though ultimately, it's just another way to enjoy the best part of the game: combat.      Halo: Reach continues the series' tradition of superlative combat and movement mechanics. This consistency isn't likely to excite those who have disliked Halo in the past, but those who have enjoyed it before have a new twist to contend with in the form of armor abilities. These special abilities operate on a cooldown timer and grant players a specific power that can give them an edge in combat. Whether it's a quick burst of speed to close the distance between you and an enemy or a jetpack that grants you the power of limited flight, these abilities add an intriguing new tactical element. Active camouflage aids in stealthy maneuvers, while armor lock can help you survive a grenade explosion that is too close to evade. And while the advantages of being able to create a running decoy of yourself may seem obvious, deploying the decoy effectively is another matter.     When these abilities are in play, they change the every-soldier-is-equal dynamic that has long defined Halo multiplayer, but they do it in a very specific and knowable way. Once you see your opponent tumble laterally in an evade maneuver, you know exactly what kind of ability you are dealing with (at least, you do until he respawns). Rather than creating an imbalance in the battlefield, these armor abilities enrich combat and offer even seasoned Halo veterans new ways to flex their strategic muscle. They also go hand in hand with the concept of loadouts. Rather than always spawning every player with identical equipment, Halo: Reach often lets players choose which guns and armor ability they want to equip, sometimes offering new loadouts as the match progresses. The ability to change loadouts can cause strategic shifts in the battlefield, forcing players to reevaluate their combat options, and figuring out the many tactical possibilities of each armor ability is an engaging challenge. These invigorating new elements inject a new energy into one of the traditional strengths of the series, making Halo: Reach's competitive multiplayer better than ever.    Doing well in online multiplayer, the offline campaign, and most other gameplay modes earns you credits that can be used to buy new, strictly cosmetic armor pieces for your Spartan. It can also earn you progress toward commendations and daily or weekly challenges, which in turn earn you more credits, a higher ranking, and of course bragging rights. Your service record displays your Halo stats and accomplishments to anyone who cares to look, and the Theater lets you capture a screenshot or video clip of any moment that you care to show off. Halo: Reach automatically saves your recent matches regardless of what mode you play, and watching replays is a lot of fun even if you don't care to preserve them for posterity. Recording clips, taking screens, recommending them to your friends, and uploading them to your file share is as easy as ever, and the only real drawback to the Theater is that you can't bring any party members along with you.    The new concussion rifle is a great way to destroy your enemy's shields.   You can, however, bring friends with you into Forge, the amazing editing sandbox that gives you astonishing creation powers. There are nine Forge-able maps, including the massive Forge World, and they are all at your mercy. From building a brand new level structure to tailoring an existing one to fit your unique game variants and from stacking absurd quantities of objects on top of each other to engaging in all-out vehicular mayhem, Forge ranks among the most impressive and versatile creation studios available on consoles today. And even if your interest in Forge is limited to spelling your name in the sky with traffic cones, you can't help but be excited by the possibilities. Since its introduction in Halo 3, the Forge community has generated a lot of clever, exciting, and downright fun content, and Halo: Reach promises to continue this trend into the foreseeable future.    Halo: Reach is not only brimming with excellent content, but it's also bursting with possibilities. The exciting campaign, addictive Firefight mode, and dynamic competitive multiplayer make it one of the best shooters around. The extensive customization options, powerful Theater tools, and staggering Forge capabilities make it one of the most malleable and socially engaging games on consoles. And the slick menu system brings it all together with remarkable simplicity. Though its deep roots may not win over those who haven't enjoyed previous games in the series, Halo: Reach is a towering achievement that delivers an enormous amount of engaging content that players will no doubt be enjoying for years to come.       Editor's Note: Though they are clearly present in the matchmaking menu, campaign and arena matchmaking were not playable at the time of this review. 


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69,Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid ,9.5, Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid Review is the accelerometer-based sequel to the original Rolando. And it's nothing short of phenomenal.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/2/4/2222024-rolando2.jpg,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rolando-2-quest-for-the-golden-orchid-review/1900-6231985/,pos,"
  The original Rolando was a tilt-sensitive game that challenged you to guide your rolling ""Rolandos"" through various levels using your iPhone's accelerometer and by cleverly manipulating both environmental objects and your own Rolandos--or stacks of them--to seek the exit to each level. It was an outstanding iPhone game that seemed like a very tough act to follow. By that logic, the task of surpassing Rolando 2 will be next to impossible. This sequel trumps the original game in every conceivable way: story, gameplay, graphics, sound, online, everything. It shows what a talented development team can do on this platform when given the right resources, and it might even leave the likes of Nintendo and Sony sweating.   Rolando 2 is bright and colorful, and it improves on an already-great game.   Rolando 2 is to Rolando as Super Mario Bros. 3 was to the original Super Mario Bros. Many sequels just concentrate on giving fans of the series more of the same--a difficult enough task by itself--but this one set out from the beginning to grow and improve in all directions at once. Given how competitive the App Store environment is, and how quickly things grow and change there, it's clear that to top their own game, Hand Circus and Ngmoco had to get extremely ambitious. And they've delivered.    The sequel's story is still simple--a crew of roly-poly Rolando adventurers must make their way to a far-off island to search for a cure for their diseased sages' infection. But once things start rolling, you'll see that the writing has been kicked up several notches.    Much more attention has been devoted to giving the Rolandos individual personalities and playing them off one another to comic effect. The Rolandos make comments and crack jokes in the middle of the action, adding to their characterization. For instance, a fancy-pants Rolando sporting a monocle winds up with a vulgar ex-pirate, resulting in a hilarious odd couple. They start the game by insulting one another, but their banter gradually turns to camaraderie as the game continues. There are two child Rolandos in the crew, a couple of big dumb lugs, two royal spiky commandos who stick to walls, and the intrepid explorer at the helm of the expedition. They all have different personalities, as well as varying attributes that are exploited to switch up the gameplay.    Smaller Rolandos float on water, while big ones sink, making for some interesting puzzles in Rolando 2's new water environments. A friendly savage Rolando encountered early in the game swells up and floats when he eats peppers, allowing him to navigate vertical levels.   Rolando 2 offers up new environments as well, such as water environments that make use of new abilities.   And the explorer often winds up by himself, confronting levels full of crazy, Indiana Jones-style death traps--including the infamous rolling boulder.    These gameplay switch-ups are one of Rolando 2's best attributes. There are puzzle-like levels where you have a whole crew of Rolandos to work with, and you must systematically use teamwork to navigate through a maze. There are also fast-paced levels that put your platforming skills to the test and ""spirit quest"" levels that play like traditional ball-rolling mazes, where you control gravity by tilting the phone.     These changes keep things fresh and show off different aspects of the game to great effect. Many new machines mix up the gameplay even further, like bows and arrows, ""boomfinger"" stations, bomb trees, and vehicles. And if you don't like a level, you can skip it entirely using collectible golden idol items that are hidden throughout the game.    The easy touch-and-tilt controls work just as well as they did in the first game. However, there are a few odd camera and physics glitches--for example, if you're manipulating a machine at one end of a level, and your Rolando rolls away, the camera will confusingly zoom all the way out--but they're fairly minor.   This sequel's new 3D graphics add even more to the visual presentation.  Rolando 2's graphics have received a major makeover. The new 3D engine adds layered backgrounds and subtle camera movement to the visual equation, and it looks fantastic. Championship-level DJ Mr. Scruff returns with a bunch of awesomely funky new tunes that you can buy right off of iTunes. A few of the vocal pieces seem out of place, but they're hauntingly beautiful nonetheless.    From the new script, to the new gameplay elements, to the many new achievements, to the inclusion of Ngmoco's Plus+ online challenge system, Rolando 2 is a revelation. This is a platformer that puts the competition on the App Store to shame and that, frankly, can roll with what video game consoles have to offer.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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70,F.A.S.T. ,9.5, F.A.S.T. is one of the best action games around right now for iDevices.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/6/5/1/2224651-f.a.s.t..jpg,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fast-review/1900-6231962/,pos,"
  Social Gaming Network--known mostly for its social massively multiplayer online games and free sports games up to this point--pulled a tight 180 and hit the afterburners with F.A.S.T., an action-packed, technically accomplished dogfighting game that matches wannabe fighter jocks up for Internet duels. F.A.S.T.'s state-of-the-art presentation, tight controls, and great online play make it one of the best action games around right now.   In F.A.S.T., you need to blast your opponents out of the sky while watching your six.   F.A.S.T. drops you into the cockpit of one of 13 different fighter jets (three of which are unlockable only via in-app purchase), equipped with radar, missiles, cannons, afterburners, and defensive countermeasures. You're up against one or several rival aircraft, either computer-controlled or controlled by other iDevice users across the Internet (or across the room, if you're playing over Bluetooth). Once you've started a game, the objective is simple: You have to blast your opponents out of the sky before they do the same to you.    Your primary weapons are missiles, which can lock on to your targets and deal death with a hit or two. But getting to that point isn't easy--you have to keep the enemy in your sights long enough for your targeting computer to nail him down.    At that point, you ""get tone"" and fire off your missiles, two at a time. There are long-range and short-range rockets; the first can take baddies out at distance but requires a sustained radar lock, while the second has limited range but is more of a fire-and-forget option. The need to switch adeptly between the two adds a lot of depth to combat.    Of course, the enemy is trying to do exactly the same thing to you, so you'll be playing offense and defense at the same time. It takes real skill to successfully evade attacks while positioning yourself to strike. It's a matter of combining all the controls at your disposal--throttle, rudder, afterburner, defensive chaff, and tilt steering--into seamless maneuvers to outwit your opponent. The controls require some practice, but they fit together naturally, so it's never frustrating.    A near miss means you live to fight again another day.   Nevertheless, this game delivers the sense of being at the controls of an advanced war-fighting machine. The heads-up display looks authentic, and it gives you the info you need without being confusing. The sound effects are excellent, from the lock-on tone to the afterburner's sonic boom.    And the graphics hold their own against the App Store's best. F.A.S.T. renders everything from cloud cover and contrails to the mountainous terrain below with silky smoothness. You can choose from multiple camera angles, and there's even a ""missile cam"" that lets you follow your payload all the way to the bogey.    The game comes with 30 single-player exercises to work through. This is how you unlock new planes, all of which have different attributes, such as the stealth fighter, which has enormous targeting range.    It's easy to jump into online play. The system matches you up automatically with players of your skill level, and you can also make your own private games--one on one, two on two, or up to a four-way free-for-all. We experienced no lag over a Wi-Fi connection.    F.A.S.T. is an extremely impressive game. Would-be fighter pilots looking for fierce, challenging action are going to have a field day with this one.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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71,Gears of War 3 ,9.5," Gears of War 3 concludes an excellent trilogy with engrossing cooperative play, taut competitive action, and a masterful campaign.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/5/5/6/2224556-gow3cover_insert.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gears-of-war-3-review/1900-6334586/,pos,"
  It's hard to believe that almost five years have passed since Emergence Day. The bane of the humans on Sera was a boon for the gamers on Earth, as we plunged headlong into a grim new world of brutal, cover-based combat and gorgeous visuals. Now the third-person shooter trilogy comes to a superb climax in Gears of War 3. Building on the savage shoot-outs and merciless melees of its predecessors, Gears of War 3 hones the series' signature action to a wickedly sharp edge. Cooperative and competitive opportunities are broader and better than ever, but the most stunning achievement is the campaign. It's an exhilarating, emotional, and thoroughly satisfying finale for the series, and it makes Gears of War 3 one of the best shooters of the year.      Things haven't been good for the Gears since the first cutscene of the series, and this time around, the human race is really on the ropes. Having sacrificed their last civilized holdout in a desperate bid to destroy the Locust, they now cling to survival in isolated forts and on ships, teetering on the verge of annihilation. The included ""Previously On…"" video gives you a disappointingly meager refresher, but the first act of the campaign sets the tone beautifully. It starts with a surreal surprise that undermines your expectations right from the get-go, and then it reacquaints you with Delta Squad. Marcus grumbles about taking orders while Dom cultivates plants, and this brief moment of quiet offers a nice contrast to the chaos moments later when Marcus is barking out orders and Dom is threatening to kill the enemies that mess up his garden.    Gears of War has always done brash well, and this game is no exception. A salty new female squad member named Sam gives Baird a run for his sarcastic money, and the Cole Train barrels along, full steam ahead. Some of his lines are groan-worthy, while some are genuinely amusing, and the same holds true for many characters in the game. Regardless of whether you cringe or chuckle, the dialogue does a great job of creating a sense of camaraderie that bonds both new and old members of Delta Squad into a cohesive unit. Their fraternal connection makes you feel like you know the characters well, and sets the stage for the outstanding campaign to come.    An early revelation shocks Marcus Fenix, but you get only a glimpse of internal turmoil as he overrides his emotions to be the leader his squad needs. It isn't until halfway through the first act that the game really flexes its storytelling muscle. Stepping out of Marcus Fenix's boots, you play as Cole Train on a foraging mission to the town where he earned his reputation as a star athlete. Your first encounter with his past includes a simple line that foreshadows the journey you are about to take: ""You ever feel like you're dead, but nobody told you?"" As you catch more and more snippets of the life that used to be, the horrifying reality of the life that is begins to sink in deeper than it ever did before. By the time you see this chapter through its hallucinatory climax, you don't just have a whole new understanding of Augustus Cole; you have a richer understanding of what it must be like for everyone still alive on this war-ravaged planet. As the campaign progresses, different characters, environments, and situations intertwine to further flesh out your emotional investment in this world. Gears of War 3 delivers some truly poignant moments and boasts some of the best storytelling ever seen in a shooter, complemented by great facial animation, an expressive soundtrack, and excellent pacing.       As you journey from ship to shore and beyond, you visit a variety of beautifully designed locations. Improvised settlements of human and Locust alike convey the desperate state of Seran surface dwellers and contrast starkly with the areas humans have forsaken. These places all have meaningful connections to the story, so every narrative detour feels natural. The same goes for the gameplay detours. Logical on-rails vehicle sequences link major locations, providing exciting interludes that last just long enough to add some welcome diversity. The only vehicles you actually pilot are squat exoskeletons that move like a bulkier, robotic version of you. They are used sparingly and handle well, offering a heady feeling of destructive power. Gears of War 3 doles out cutscenes, combat, and changes of pace in skillful measure, and maintains this delicate balance within the on-foot firefights.    Conflict zones vary widely in size and shape. Claustrophobic rooms channel you straight into your enemies, while larger areas give you plenty of room to flank your foes. Such spacious locations often play host to a new type of enemy spawn point, the Lambent stalk. Like the emergence holes before it, the stalk must be damaged to stanch the flow of enemies, and this can require some active maneuvering on your part. You need to use cover to stay alive, but you also must venture out into the field of fire to stop these spawn points and locate powerful weapons to wield against your foes. Returning favorites like the Mortar and Mulcher are joined by the One Shot (guess how it got that name) and the massive Vulcan, a devastating minigun that can only be moved by two people. Most of your arsenal is made up of guns that will be familiar to series veterans, providing a gruesome and satisfying array of ways to deal death at all ranges. Bullets still hit their marks with gratifying squish noises, and roaring chainsaws proclaim that the tried-and-true combat mechanics are once again in top form.      The pace and intensity of combat change drastically depending on your difficulty level and how many cooperative teammates you have along for the ride. The Gears of War 3 campaign supports four-player online co-op throughout (and two-player splitscreen), and it is an absolute blast to play with friends. Having actual humans on your team increases the campaign's natural sense of camaraderie, though the friendly AI still creates very capable companions. Still, having more folks along for the ride makes the battlefield feel more lively and encourages you to vary your play style to support and complement your teammates. Cooperative campaign play is one of the most exciting and rewarding modes that Gears of War 3 offers, and it's easy to drop in and out of a friend's game. It's a little trickier to join a public game, because you have to limit your search by act and difficulty level, but once you've found a match, you quickly take control of a Gear and start shooting. You can also play the campaign in Arcade mode and earn points for every enemy you kill. Racking up a big multiplier and notching a high score is gratifying, just as getting downed and watching your multiplier slip away is frustrating. Teamwork is crucial to high scores because you share a score multiplier, so a downed ally translates to points lost. A variety of Mutators let you mess with battlefield conditions to make things easier (every melee hit causes an explosion), harder (friendly fire is enabled), or just flat-out goofy (dialogue is complemented by a laugh track).       If you're looking to test your skills against other people in a more direct way, the Versus mode provides a bunch of great maps upon which to do battle. Up to 10 players can clash in a variety of game types, including staples like Team Deathmatch and King of the Hill. Other types make good use of specific gameplay mechanics, like Capture the Leader (hold an enemy hostage) and Execution (only executions will kill players). You can now resurrect yourself if you are downed, provided you have enough time, which adds extra incentive to close in for the kill. Furthermore, a number of these Versus game types have limited respawn counts, creating the possibility for some incredibly tense final showdowns.   Death can come quickly on these battlefields, especially if you get close enough to put the new sawed-off shotgun to work. Fortunately, newcomers can play in a kiddie pool of sorts before swimming with the sharks. A beginners-only multiplayer lobby ensures that you have a chance to compete against other novices and learn the ropes without getting mercilessly slaughtered at every turn. Once you join the murderous multiplayer hordes, you find that skillful movement is almost as crucial as skillful shooting. The difference between slow players and nimble players is more drastic here than in other shooters, meaning that with some practice, you can navigate these maps significantly faster than your opponents. This makes for a special breed of competition that deftly serves up the thrill of a great kill as well as the heartbreak of seeing your own intestines paint the floor.    Two distinct cooperative modes offer even more great Gears gameplay. The Horde mode introduced in Gears of War 2 makes a return here, once again pitting up to five human players against wave after wave of bloodthirsty Locust. This time around, however, you can use money earned by killing Locust to build fortifications and bolster your defenses. From a simple row of spikes to a makeshift turret to an apparently very convincing cardboard decoy, each element helps you deal with the enemy in a different way. The more you build, the better your improvements get and the better your chances of survival. You can only build between waves, however, and your resources are limited. Deciding what to build, what to repair, and when to save your money can make the difference between a long, successful run and a short, brutal run. This engaging strategic element livens up the already-frantic moments between waves when you are scrambling around to replenish your weapon stores from the guns your enemies dropped. Once the next wave begins, these assets disappear and it's just you, your teammates, and your defenses. Struggling to survive is an exciting challenge, and the extra tactical depth makes it that much more enjoyable.      Beast mode offers you a taste of how the other half lives. This is essentially an inverse Horde mode in which you (and up to four teammates) spawn as the Locust and try to slaughter increasingly strong groups of human survivors. Playing as the bad guy is every bit as sinister and satisfying as you want it to be, and like in Horde mode, you earn currency for all your gleeful murders. You then spend this resource to spawn as the type of Locust of your choosing, from the humble Ticker to the hulking Berserker. Time limits can be pretty tough in the early going, which forces you to aggressively seek out your prey. It can definitely take some trial and error to get the hang of each type of creature, and you may find yourself trying to execute a familiar maneuver but failing to do so. Not all Locust can use cover, for example, and sometimes your healing screams seem to stick in your throat. Fortunately, once you've worked it all out, Beast mode makes for some gory and challenging fun, with a range of difficulty levels that make it accessible to anyone.    In fact, accessibility is one of the strengths of Gears of War 3. Though it is an undeniably intense shooter, it scales very well to accommodate a range of skill levels. This is just one facet of the pervasive attention to detail that suffuses the whole game and gives you the sense that you are experiencing the pinnacle of the series. From the taut Versus competition to the two great cooperative modes, Gears of War 3 delivers immensely entertaining experiences on both sides of The Locust War. But the real triumph is the campaign, a masterpiece of exciting gameplay and emotional storytelling that stands head and shoulders above its predecessors. Even if you don't remember where you were on Emergence Day, this is one adventure you won't soon forget.  


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72,Tetris Worlds ,2.1, Tetris Worlds does what countless iterations of the game haven't managed to do in the past--it actually breaks Tetris.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/9/5/9/2215959-box_tetriswld.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tetris-worlds-review/1900-2831450/,neg,"
One of the key draws of Tetris has always been its elegant simplicity--a simplicity that allows for open interpretation, which is attested to by the countless forms it has taken on consoles, the PC, cell phones, calculators, and various Web-based platforms. Now, Blue Planet Software has brought six different variations on the Tetris formula together for Tetris Worlds on the GBA. With its wealth of gameplay modes, passable presentation, and its classic, nostalgia-triggering music, Tetris Worlds probably would have been one of the best iterations of Tetris yet. Unfortunately, Tetris Worlds also introduces one particular change to the gameplay that renders the classic game all but unplayable. Graphics and sound have never been make-or-break categories for Tetris games, but Tetris Worlds handles both of them capably. The music is made up of all the old classic Tetris tunes and a few completely forgettable new songs. The Tetris field itself looks like, well, Tetris. Each mode has its own screensaver-style backdrop, where you'll see polar bears tromping across a tundra or a jellyfish cruising through the deep sea. It's all decent-looking window dressing, if not slightly distracting from the game at hand. As previously mentioned, Tetris Worlds is composed of six different flavors of Tetris. In Cascade Tetris, individual blocks that make up the different shapes will slide down independently once they land. Square Tetris gives you extra points for creating a four-by-four square of blocks. In HotLine, the only way to make a line clear count is by clearing lines at certain levels in the playfield. In Fusion Tetris, you'll occasionally be given an atom block, which must be attached to the fusion block buried at the bottom of the playfield to advance to the next level. In Sticky Tetris, shapes are made of multiple colors that will fuse with similarly colored blocks to form gigantic immoveable slab. Then there's plain old white-bread Tetris, which works just like it did in 1985. Each version can be played in marathon mode, where the game goes on for as long as you can; ultra mode, where you're charged with completing specific objectives within a limited amount of time; or head-to-head versus mode. Tetris Worlds institutes two gameplay conventions that may prove helpful for the novice and the expert alike. The hold function lets you remove a piece that is in play and save it for later, making it easier to plan out and execute a full four-line Tetris. The ghost piece gives you a better idea of where your piece will end up once you drop it by projecting an outline of the current shape in play on the bottom of the screen. These additions can make playing Tetris a lot less frustrating, and in the case of the hold function, slightly more strategic, though both of these functions can be turned off for those who detest any form of handholding. There is one aspect of the gameplay that unfortunately cannot be turned off. Once the piece in play reaches the bottom, you can continue to spin the piece infinitely, which will keep it from setting and keep the next piece from dropping. While your Tetris piece is in this limbo state, you can also move it side to side, giving you ample time to decide where it should go. This change effectively castrates the game, removing any challenge it might have presented. We were able to tear through the game's 15 levels of difficulty without breaking a sweat, thanks to this infinite spinning bug. The point of Tetris has always been to push the player to think and move as quickly as possible; with Tetris Worlds, there is no point. Which begs the question, did THQ and Blue Planet make this gameplay alteration for the benefit of novice players, or was this simply an oversight? Either way, Tetris Worlds does what countless iterations of the game haven't managed to do in the past--it actually breaks Tetris.
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73,New World Order ,2.1, New World Order tries to emulate other tactical shooters but fails in every imaginable way.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/9/5/3/3560-13953.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/new-world-order-review/1900-6024326/,neg,"
 At first glance, New World Order gives the impression that it's an unoriginal game, rushed out the door to cash in on the latest trend. Unfortunately, this first impression is pretty much accurate. The back of the box states that New World Order is a ""super realistic, tactical team-based first-person shooter."" The problem is that the game isn't realistic, it contains only shallow tactical features, and it's played without help from AI teammates. New World Order tries to emulate other tactical shooters such as Counter-Strike and Tom Clancy's Raven Shield but fails in every imaginable way.  Is my name Dobbs or is it Parker?  According to the story, your name is John Dobbs, and you're the latest member of the elite Global Assault Team, a top-secret, worldwide organization created to fight terrorism. Even if you can ignore the fact that this setup is a direct rip-off of Ubi Soft's Rainbow Six series, you'll probably notice that at no time during the game do you meet any other member of this so-called team. All the missions in the game are solo missions, with no help whatsoever from any other operatives. Aside from the commanding officer, who gives canned orders at the beginning of each mission, you appear to be the only field operative in the GAT. Even the opening level, set at GAT headquarters, is entirely bereft of other GAT employees, despite the fact that it's a multistory office building with dozens of desks. To make things even more bizarre, a text prompt at the beginning of each mission addresses you as Agent Parker. Is your name Dobbs or is it Parker? Maybe Parker is your supersecret code name, for use only out in the field? The world may never know.  It would be an understatement to label New World Order's graphics mediocre. The game's textures are flat and drab, and this is exacerbated by the fact that most missions take place at night or during overcast days. The game's vertex lighting looks downright primitive by today's standards, while models contain few polygons and are animated in a stiff manner. New World Order's death animations result in corpses lying in bizarrely contorted positions, which is odd because these animations are pre-set and not the result of rag-doll physics as in Raven Shield and some other shooters. The game features some blood, which probably contributed to its M rating, but for some strange reason, blood on the ground evaporates almost immediately.  Given how little New World Order offers in terms of graphics, the game's steep system requirements seem puzzling. Even on a fairly high-end system with a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 and an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, New World Order's frame rate is terrible. With more than two or three enemies firing onscreen, the frame rate drops into the low teens. If more than 10 enemies in a level are activated, the visuals become a literal slideshow, and the game becomes completely unplayable.   Yes, this is how the game looks with graphical settings almost maxed.  Unfortunately, the game's sound doesn't really have any redeeming qualities either. New World Order's tinny sound effects make each of its real-world weapons sound like a toy gun. Even the multibarreled minigun sounds underwhelming. The voice acting is terrible. Your travels take you around the world from Sweden to Chechnya to the Middle East, but apparently terrorists all around the world speak three phrases of English: ""Kill Him!"" ""Take him down!"" or ""Not a chance!""  And as it turns out, New World Order's gameplay is awful. On normal and hard difficulty levels, you can sustain about two to four shots before dying. That may sound bad already, but the fact that AI opponents can see through walls and are often already firing at you as they turn the corner to engage you makes it worse. Most missions contain anywhere from 12 to 20 enemies, so it's nearly impossible to make it through an entire mission. Yet for some bizarre reason, there's no way to save the game during a mission? If you die, you must start over from the beginning. Turning the difficulty level to easy is the only reasonable option, which will let you sustain a lot more damage before dying, but since the frame rate drops precipitously during big firefights, you'll probably die a good number of times in the later levels anyway.   There are only 12 missions in New World Order, and each consists of just a tiny map, sprinkled with some enemies. Although some missions ask you to gather intelligence or rescue a hostage, in almost all cases, none of these side quests need to be accomplished; it's simpler to just kill every enemy in the level. Even taking into account a liberal amount of restarting, it will take you only about an afternoon to get through New World Order's campaign. Don't expect to beat the last mission though--with more than 20 enemies on the map at once, the frame rate plummets, and it becomes impossible to finish the game.  The manner in which you equip weapons in New World Order is ill-conceived. At the start of each mission you can equip various weapons based on what rank you've attained. This rank and experience system plays little role in the game because after the second mission, you'll always have acquired enough experience to buy any weapon you like. You're also given a weight limit of what you can carry--each gun, grenade, and clip you equip yourself with has a certain weight, and according to the game's documentation, the more you carry, the slower you move, although we never found weight to affect movement speed significantly. While that may seem insignificant, for some bizarre reason, there's no way for you to tell how much weight you are carrying. Based on the stats given for each item, you're forced to calculate in your head how close you are to the 10-kilogram limit. Even more frustrating is that you cannot pick up a dropped weapon if you're already carrying one of that type. For instance, if you're carrying an AK-47, and an enemy drops one after dying--you can't even take the bullets from the dropped weapon to add to your stash. If you run out of bullets, you're forced to memorize the gun's location and go back to it later.  Don't mess with the one-man GAT.  Actually firing New World Order's weapons is an exercise in frustration. Despite the game's claims of realism, all of the rifles and submachine guns fire in full automatic mode. There's no selector switch to change to single shot or burst fire, and since the firing rate is so fast, it's difficult to manually fire weapons in short bursts. Even kneeling, bullets tend to stray well away from your crosshairs, which, unlike the crosshairs in more-realistic games like Counter-Strike and the Rainbow Six series, do not expand to show the increasing inaccuracy of the weapon as it's being fired. Did you run out of bullets and want to quickly switch to a pistol instead of reloading your primary weapon? Too bad you can't--once a reloading animation has begun, it has to run until completion before you can switch weapons. All too often you'll die while reloading because the game won't let you switch to a secondary weapon.  Keeping the swimming pool empty means they don't have to render any water!  Multiplayer in New World Order is directly copied from Counter-Strike. Aside from standard team deathmatch modes, there are also bomb planting missions and hostage rescue missions. You'll seldom find anyone online playing retail New World Order, and even the game's many demo servers are utterly empty.   Even at its $30 suggested retail price, New World Order is a poor value. It's a game that simply attempts to cash in on the success of Counter-Strike and the Rainbow Six series by copying their themes, but it ends up falling well short of the mark because of its terrible graphics engine, its ill-conceived design, and a campaign that takes only a few hours to (nearly) complete. If you're looking for a modestly-priced tactical shooter, you'd be much better served by picking up Line of Sight: Vietnam, Deadly Dozen: Pacific Theater, or gold editions of Ghost Recon or Operation Flashpoint. 
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74,The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring ,2.1, The entire game is so unpolished and full of bugs that it's unfathomable how it ever passed quality assurance in the first place.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/3/5/2210835-box_tlotrtfotr.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-r/1900-2895714/,neg,"
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the Game Boy Advance is based on the first book in J.R.R. Tolkien's immensely popular fantasy series. For fans of the novels, as well as for those who enjoyed the recent motion picture, this game offers the chance to wander around a digital replica of Middle-earth. But that's about all it offers. The range of interactivity is so low and the action is so infrequent that Frodo's quest to Mount Doom is reduced to nothing more than a trivial errand. What's more, the entire game is so unpolished and full of bugs that it's unfathomable how it ever passed quality assurance in the first place.  Frodo's house. Middle-earth on the GBA doesn't look like much. In the game, you play the role of Frodo, a young hobbit given the task of protecting the One Ring from Sauron, who himself originally forged it atop Mount Doom centuries prior. A prophecy foretells that nine kindred souls will form an alliance--a fellowship--to accompany Frodo on this long journey. The game begins where the book begins, in Hobbiton, and ends where the book ends, along the banks of the Anduin. The design of Fellowship of the Ring is similar to that of most role-playing games. There are people to talk to in every village who can offer advice or give you items that will prove invaluable throughout your quest. To get some of these items, you'll have to perform favors, such as retrieving a feather for Tom Bombadil before he'll help you rescue your friends from Old Man Willow in the old forest. Over the course of your travels, you'll also encounter a wide variety of trolls, orcs, wild dogs, and other dangerous creatures. Contact with these monsters inevitably leads to battle, during which each character takes turns attacking single or multiple enemies.     Although the description sounds nice on paper, Fellowship of the Ring really isn't any fun to play. The favors you'll perform are remarkably simple but often sidetrack the game to the extent that you'd just as soon avoid them. The game's battles are even worse. They're turn-based, which isn't a bad thing, but they're incredibly slow. You actually have to wait while each character slowly walks toward his target, makes an attack, and steps back into line. At the same time, the enemy always has the privilege of first attack, which means that it can be anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute before you even have a chance to retaliate. As it is, combat is pretty basic. The only available options are to attack with a sword, throw fireworks, defend, heal, or flee.  A battle like this could last 10 minutes. Ironically, although each battle takes forever to finish, you don't gain experience from any of them. Instead, you acquire health and skill upgrades automatically at various points throughout the story. While this is an innovative aspect, it just makes all of the time you'll spend in battle that much more frustrating.    The game's plot exposition is terribly light as well. You'll encounter all of the major characters, as well as a few peripheral ones, but none of them possess even half of the personality and dignity that they showed in the book. Barliman Butterbur, the barkeep in Bree, is reduced to nothing more than an innkeeper, rather than the knowledgeable informant who helps Frodo flee the rampaging Nazgul. The Nazgul themselves also play a somewhat diminished role. Instead of tracking the group to Bree and forcing a tense confrontation at Bruinen, they just block the road in various spots and later spring an ambush. Not once is it ever explained that these nine evil servants bear rings similar to Frodo's. You can't expect a video game to include every event and conversation from a 430-page novel, but Fellowship of the Ring doesn't even try. Despite its minimal dialogue, the game does at least follow the progression of the book. Just as in the text, you'll start in Hobbiton, make your way through the old forest to Bree, and pass through Weathertop and Rivendell en route to Lothlorien and the final scene at Anduin. Unfortunately, this faithful pacing will prove a drawback for some players, as it limits your ability to explore and forces you from one location to the next. Once you've made your way to the next landmark, you can't go back. This creates the potential to leave important items behind, such that you may have to start over.  Frodo uses the ring to call forth the river spirits. Worse yet, Fellowship of the Ring was shipped to retail with a number of software bugs present. Once in a while, you'll encounter enemies who won't attack you--you can just walk right through them. You can repeatedly enter and leave some areas to find duplicated items. A good example of this occurs after you meet Gildor. Off to the left, you'll find a house that constantly spawns gold pieces. While these glitches are unfortunate, they are at least helpful. As you continue playing, however, you'll encounter even more bugs, some of which are outright disastrous. There are two different areas where you'll experience a fatal crash that simply halts the game. One of these is avoidable, since it occurs during an optional side quest, but the other is not. About 80 percent into the game, deep in the mines of Moria, your game will just stop responding altogether, and you won't be able to play any further. Black Label Games has a workaround that involves pausing and saving your game right before you enter the problematic area, but it's not foolproof.  You'll still have to read some of the story. For the few brief hours that you can actually play the game, you're treated to a no-frills rendition of Middle-earth. Locations are brought to life accurately and with the necessary landmarks, but the overall color depth is minimal, and there's absolutely no animation present for minutiae like rivers, torches, or fog. Similarly, characters are faithful to their descriptions in the book, but they don't really move except to walk around or lunge during battle. The game's audio is equally plain. There are a few sound effects and a couple of digitized voices, but other than that, you won't hear very much at all. For whatever reason, the wonderful orchestral background music kicks in only at infrequent intervals.     Do yourself a favor and save the $30 you'd spend on this game. Despite whatever half-decent qualities this game might have, it ultimately butchers the story it's based on into a remarkably dull role-playing game--a game that you possibly won't even be able to finish.  
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75,Black Stone: Magic and Steel ,2.1, Everything's working as intended--the game just looks and plays really poorly.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/6/6/6/2214666-box_blackstone.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/black-stone-magic-and-steel-review/1900-6024585/,neg,"
 Black Stone: Magic and Steel is like a botched cloning experiment from a B movie, with developer Xpec Entertainment playing the mad scientist's role and Gauntlet playing the test subject. The beast that's emerged from the cloning chamber is just what you'd expect: a shambling, ugly, and dumb version of the source material. Black Stone shamelessly wants to be Gauntlet, but it somehow fails to accurately copy that franchise's simple gameplay and controls, while simultaneously underperforming in all other areas.  Black Stone shamelessly wants to be Gauntlet. Black Stone was originally released under the title Ex-Chaser a little over a year ago, as a launch title for the Xbox in Japan. Part of a long-running series that started with the PlayStation game Spectral Force, it's the first title in the series to be brought to the West. While other games in the series have been RPG-strategy hybrids, Black Stone is a departure into the action genre. The game drops you into the middle of a story arc, but the plot is rife with impenetrable and unnecessary details. Suffice it to say that the kingdom of Zedan will be much better off if you collect all the black stones and kill all the monsters.  One to four players (no Xbox Live support is provided) undertake the task by playing as characters from one of five classes: warrior, thief, warlock, archer, or pirate. Just like in Gauntlet, you run around multiple levels, attacking monsters and destroying the monster generators that produce them. Smashable barrels are scattered throughout the level, and they contain power-ups, gold to buy power-ups between levels, one-shot magic items, food to replenish health, or keys to open chests that contain more of the same. Sometimes a chest or barrel will contain bad things, like spoiled food that decreases health, an insect that will follow you around and drain your health, or a curse that will change your head into a pig's head and render you unable to attack. Sound familiar?  While it's bad enough that the high-level design is nearly identical to Gauntlet's, Black Stone's implementation is overly generic and slow-paced in comparison. Any given level contains only three or four different monsters, and even then, just two of those will make up the bulk of what you face. Furthermore, each class plays nearly the same, with very minor differences. Run speeds vary from abysmally slow to rather slow, and ranged attacks pierce through enemies, ricochet off them, or fire a bit more quickly. Melee attacks seem to have no differences at all between classes. Firing off magic looks the same for all classes. The only attacks that are truly differentiated between classes are each character's special attack, which you can only pull off when you've filled your power gauge, and each character's ""bump"" attack, which is an initial attack performed when you run (or rather, when you move almost imperceptibly faster while switching to a jogging animation) at a monster.  Apart from often being the slowest-moving thing on the screen, there are also some incredibly bad control issues. Chief among them is an auto-aiming system for ranged attacks that has a predilection for aiming at things off to the side of and further away than the monster you're currently facing. It also can't aim down a flight of stairs that you're currently on. For some classes, it can even cause a special attack to miss. Needlessly, instead of a single, situation-dependent attack button, there are separate buttons for ranged and melee attacks. Button mashing is also not tolerated, as you cannot adjust your direction while attacking, and pushing an attack button while you're already attacking will cause you to attack again in the same direction. The end result is that in an already sluggish game, combat is a push-wait-wait-push affair. Combined with monsters that can knock you down, stun you, or freeze you, there are stretches where you'll spend less time controlling the game than watching it.  As is to be expected in a game with such major flaws, there are plenty of little ones as well. Some levels will pull you out as soon as you complete the level's objectives, even if you're not ready to leave yet, while others provide a teleport pad. The manual offers no information on how the different classes play, shows a different screen for the power-up store than is actually in the game, and includes this as the command for ""Bump Attack 2"": ""Left Thumbstick:backward?forward + A button"" [sic]. The manual is ultimately better suited as entertainment for fans of badly translated English and a reference list for commands, but the game is simple enough to figure out without help. The interface is also inelegant. An information window at the bottom of the screen provides your character's information, but you have to push the black button to page through four different screens of info. Some information that you'd like to have together is on separate pages, like your current health and the number of shots of magic you have left, and one of the pages really doesn't serve any useful purpose at all while you're in a level, because the information (your character's strength, defense, and intelligence stats) might change once or twice during the level. Finally, the game's anime cover art doesn't represent the game's actual art design at all, which aims for a realistic look, and the screenshots on the back are too small to show this.  Run speeds vary from abysmally slow to rather slow.  Once you do see Black Stone in action, though, you'll see that the game's graphics are just as far south of mediocre as its other aspects. There's the aforementioned lack of different monsters, as well as the running animation, which makes the characters look like they're running on an ice rink. The ground consists of surprisingly low-resolution textures, and there are lots of visible seams. The monster design, character design, and spell effects are all lackluster. Everything's working as intended--the game just looks and plays really poorly.  Ultimately, there's nothing about Black Stone: Magic and Steel that makes it good enough to recommend, even to someone whose favorite games are from the Gauntlet series. The game is extremely unoriginal in concept and poorly executed, and it's hard to understand why it ever crossed the ocean.
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76,Delta Ops: Army Special Forces ,2.1," Delta Ops: Army Special Forces is an awful game that isn't worth your time or money, and that simply shouldn't exist.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/1/6/2220216-deltaops.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/delta-ops-army-special-forces-review/1900-6086454/,neg,"
 Remember the 2002 budget game Shadow Force: Razor Unit? Probably not. As forgettable as budget PC games get, Shadow Force was a shabby, uninteresting first-person shooter that put you in the soldier role as a member of the Air Force Special Operations Unit. The levels were ugly, the AI was a mess, and the game was simply not worth the time or effort it took to play. Nearly two years after Shadow Force, Activision Value released a ""new"" game called Delta Ops: Army Special Forces. And by ""new,"" we mean ""Shadow Force with a new name.""  Delta Ops: Army Special Forces is really just Shadow Force: Razor Unit with a new name slapped on the box.  The only indicator that an otherwise-unsuspecting customer would get that this is actually a 2002 release is found on the back of the box, where the package admits, in fine print, that Delta Ops was ""previously released as Shadow Force."" However, if you look a little deeper, you'll see a few other signs that this game isn't a recent development. For instance, the game tries to install DirectX 8.1 as part of its install process, even if you already have a later version installed.  After an entirely needless training session, the game drops you into the desert for 10 levels of bad enemy AI, ugly graphics, and, above all, very boring gameplay. While the game gives you objectives to complete, none of them are interesting enough to cut through the game's problems. Even when you compare it to the fairly low standards of most budget games, Delta Ops comes up short. The weapons are bland, the controls for picking up or manipulating items are clunky, and there really just isn't enough to do.  Interestingly enough, some changes have been made to the game, but they don't really improve matters very much. Finding multiplayer games--if there were any--in Shadow Force was nearly impossible, since the game didn't have an in-game server browser, and it didn't offer support for third-party browser tools. Delta Ops has a server browser and a lobby option, which is nice because it takes the guesswork out of the process and lets you know right off the bat that there aren't any multiplayer servers running. In the strange event that you were to actually find a server running, or if you wanted to mess around with the game's dodgy, well-hidden bot support, you'd be able to play deathmatch, team deathmatch, or capture the flag in 16-player matches.  Graphically, Delta Ops wasn't a looker when it was released in 2002. So, as you can imagine, it certainly doesn't look any better today. The movement feels jerky, the textures are a total mess, and the environments are completely bland. In addition to that, on some machines, the game runs at a stuttery, unplayable pace. This isn't a system requirements issue, since the systems we tested it on outpace the game's measly Pentium II requirements by a long shot, but it affects everything--from the gameplay to the video intro to the menu screens.  Shadow Force was a pretty bad game, and rereleasing it well over a year later certainly doesn't improve its chances.  The game's sound certainly doesn't save it either. Delta Ops has some voice work that pops up throughout the missions--usually to point you in the right direction--but it sounds incredibly unprofessional, both in content and in recording. It's almost as if the developer just had the programmers step up to a broken stick microphone so that they could record some random dialogue.  There's really no need for this game to exist. For Activision Value to have essentially repackaged a bad old game as a bad new game is an obvious and despicable attempt to cash in on the recent military operations going on in the Middle East. Despite this, Delta Ops: Army Special Forces is an awful game that isn't worth your time or money. Avoid it at all costs.  
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77,Crime Life: Gang Wars ,2.1, Crime Life: Gang Wars is just plain awful. Do yourself a favor and stay away from it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/8/8/2209388-box_clgw.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crime-life-gang-wars-review/1900-6140957/,neg,"
  The only word is ""wow."" Crime Life: Gang Wars is one of those rare games that is so mind-blowingly terrible that seeing it action is enough to make you crazy. With Crime Life, several questions immediately come rushing to the front of your mind. How did this game get approved for release? Didn't anyone realize that it looks like a slightly filtered PlayStation game? Does Konami actually expect to turn a profit on something so terrible? But while the questions come easily, the answers are hard to come by. There's more detail to be found in this review, but really, the only thing you need to know about Crime Life: Gang Wars is that you shouldn't play it.   Crime Life: Gang Wars puts players in the role of Tre.   Crime Life: Gang Wars tells the story of a dude named Tre. Tre's a new member of the Outlawz, a once-powerful street gang that seems to have fallen on hard times, while its main rival, the Headhunterz, is flourishing. You can tell they're ""from tha streetz"" by the way they use a ""z"" instead of an ""s"" in their names. You'll take on the role of Tre and work on earning some rep in the neighborhood by getting in organized street fights, sticking up jewelry stores, shoplifting, and all types of ill business. While the list of options might sound appealing, one is barely different from the next, and the core of the game is a very awful beat-'em-up with a few practically meaningless squad commands that you can use to order your followers around. Sometimes rival gangs will pile up into a mess of swinging limbs and weapons that showcase the game's bad artificial intelligence and ugly animation. Sometimes you'll get to go one-on-one with a guy and witness firsthand the horror of the game's busted fighting system. Regardless of the situation, the gameplay is uniformly bad. You're given two attack buttons, a block, and a modifier button that lets you use a portion of an easy-to-fill adrenaline meter to bust out special attacks that do more damage. You can press two buttons together to execute a throw, which is funny-looking because the enemies fly away from you as though you were tossing an empty cardboard box. When you've beaten an enemy down to a sufficiently low level, the Y button appears over his head. Pressing the Y button kills that enemy with a special fatality animation. Some of these are neck breaks, or if you're holding a machete, you pick the guy up over your head and poke the blade into him. Some of them are wrestling moves, like arm bars, that probably wouldn't kill a guy no matter how hard you yanked his arm back. The combo system is uninteresting, and the moves don't look good.    This is a mission-based game, and as you complete missions, you'll see cutscenes, both prerendered and in-engine, that attempt to move the story along. But you're never given any solid motivation to proceed. The ugly character models look even worse up close, and the prerendered cutscenes don't look much better. The leaders of the rival gang are played by five of the six members of D-12 (Eminem must have been busy recording voice-over for 50 Cent: Bulletproof that afternoon), but you'd be hard-pressed to identify most of them, because there isn't much voice from them in the game, and the awful character models don't look anything like the real-life D-12.    This game looks like a PlayStation game running on some sort of emulator that bumps up the resolution and attempts to antialias the whole screen by making everything ridiculously blurry. The quality of the textures is very low, the animation is bad, and the character models are downright ridiculous. You'll even see some textures ""swimming"" back and forth in a couple of spots, just like in all those classic PS games you remember from 1995 and 1996. On top of that, the camera isn't so hot, so even if you can look past the game's visuals, you might not get a clean view of the action.   The fighting in Crime Life is practically broken.   The soundtrack in Crime Life: Gang Wars reveals its European heritage. While you'll hear a track from D-12 on the title screen, the rest of the soundtrack is composed of a lot of bad foreign hip-hop. But you'll have to go looking for it, as the game doesn't play music most of the time, leaving you to bust out deadly arm bars in near silence. The speech is weak, and the rest of the sound effects aren't so hot, either.    From top to bottom, there's absolutely nothing to like about Crime Life: Gang Wars. It isn't even bad in an interesting or funny way. It's just garbage. We may never know how a game this bad made its way onto store shelves, but one thing is crystal clear: Don't play this game.    
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78,Crime Life: Gang Wars ,2.1, Crime Life is just plain awful. Do yourself a favor and stay away from it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/8/8/2209388-box_clgw.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crime-life-gang-wars-review/1900-6142146/,neg,"
  The only word is ""wow."" Crime Life: Gang Wars is one of those rare games that is so mind-blowingly terrible that seeing it in action is enough to make you crazy. With Crime Life, several questions immediately come rushing to the front of your mind. How did this game get approved for release? Didn't anyone realize that it looks like a slightly filtered PlayStation game? Does Konami actually expect to turn a profit on something so terrible? But while the questions come easily, the answers are hard to come by. There's more detail to be found in this review, but really, the only thing you need to know about Crime Life: Gang Wars is that you shouldn't play it.   Crime Life: Gang Wars puts players in the role of Tre.   Crime Life: Gang Wars tells the story of a dude named Tre. Tre's a new member of the Outlawz, a once-powerful street gang that seems to have fallen on hard times, while its main rival, the Headhunterz, is flourishing. You can tell they're ""from tha streetz"" by the way they use a ""z"" instead of an ""s"" in their names. You'll take on the role of Tre and work on earning some rep in the neighborhood by getting in organized street fights, sticking up jewelry stores, shoplifting, and all types of ill business. While the list of options might sound appealing, one is barely different from the next, and the core of the game is a very awful beat-'em-up with a few practically meaningless squad commands that you can use to order your followers around. Sometimes rival gangs will pile up into a mess of swinging limbs and weapons that showcase the game's bad artificial intelligence and ugly animation. Sometimes you'll get to go one-on-one with a guy and witness firsthand the horror of the game's busted fighting system. Regardless of the situation, the gameplay is uniformly bad. You're given two attacks, a block, and a modifier button that lets you use a portion of an easy-to-fill adrenaline meter to bust out special attacks that do more damage. You can press two buttons together to execute a throw, which is funny-looking because the enemies fly away from you as though you were tossing an empty cardboard box. When you've beaten an enemy down to a sufficiently low level, a skull appears over his head. Pressing the space bar kills that enemy with a special fatality animation. Some of these are neck breaks, or if you're holding a machete, you pick the guy up over your head and poke the blade into him. Some of them are wrestling moves, like arm bars, which probably wouldn't kill a guy no matter how hard you yanked his arm back. The combo system is uninteresting, and the moves don't look good.    This is a mission-based game, and as you complete missions, you'll see cutscenes, both prerendered and in-engine, that attempt to move the story along. But you're never given any solid motivation to proceed. The ugly character models look even worse up close, and the prerendered cutscenes don't look much better. The leaders of the rival gang are played by five of the six members of D-12 (Eminem must have been busy recording voice-over for 50 Cent: Bulletproof that afternoon), but you'd be hard pressed to identify most of them, because there isn't much voice from them in the game, and the awful character models don't look anything like the real-life D-12.    The control in Crime Life was passable on the Xbox, but on the PC it's another part of the mess. The manual claims that you can just plug in a ""Microsoft Common Controller,"" which is really just a fancy name for the Xbox 360 controller, and the game will automatically reconfigure itself to work with the pad and change all the in-game control references to show the buttons on your controller. That's not the case, though. While configuring the controller, we were unable to map functions to the analog triggers, even though the screen was showing a diagram of the Xbox 360 controller and showing us exactly which analog trigger to press. Even after mapping half the controller functions to the gamepad, the in-game controller messages still only referred to the mouse and keyboard controls. Speaking of mouse and keyboard, the game is playable with those controls, but just barely.    Crime Life looks like a PlayStation game running on some sort of emulator that bumps up the resolution and attempts to antialias the whole screen by making everything ridiculously blurry. The quality of the textures is very low, the animation is bad, and the character models are downright ridiculous. You'll even see some textures ""swimming"" back and forth in a couple of spots, just like in all those classic PS games you remember from 1995 and 1996. On top of that, the camera isn't so hot, so even if you can look past the game's visuals, you might not get a clean view of the action.   The fighting in Crime Life is practically broken.   The soundtrack in Crime Life: Gang Wars reveals its European heritage. While you'll hear a track from D-12 on the title screen, the rest of the soundtrack is composed of a lot of bad foreign hip-hop. But you'll have to go looking for it, as the game doesn't play music most of the time, leaving you to bust out deadly arm bars in near silence. The speech is weak, and the rest of the sound effects aren't so hot, either.    From top to bottom, there's absolutely nothing to like about Crime Life: Gang Wars. It isn't even bad in an interesting or funny way. It's just garbage. We may never know how a game this bad made its way onto store shelves, but one thing is crystal clear: Don't play this game.    
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79,Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green ,2.1," This game fails to deliver even the most garden-variety zombie-killing thrills, due to its inept combat, bad visuals, and cripplingly stupid artificial intelligence.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/5/5/2218055-land_of_the_dead.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/land-of-the-dead-road-to-fiddlers-green-review/1900-6144105/,neg,"
  There is an almost pseudo-brilliance to the sheer awfulness of Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green. Loosely based within the same universe as zombie pioneer George Romero's Land of the Dead film from earlier this year, Road to Fiddler's Green isn't content on being another completely unplayable movie-to-game translation. It's almost as though the developers wanted to capture the essence of the zombie through each and every aspect of the game. In many ways, it feels like it was once a regular, workaday, full-featured first-person shooter that was horribly murdered by zombies and then resurrected into a shambled, decrepit, undead version of its former self. Every component of this game is slow to react, dumb as a doornail, and irreparably broken. It shuffles along at a sluggish, depressing pace while pieces of it literally fall apart at the seams. And the only thing going through its figurative mind is the unquenchable instinct to attack and feed on your free time and money. This game is either one of the most avant-garde pieces of gaming artistry to ever find its way to the retail market, or one of the worst PC games you'll ever play--though, it's probably the latter.    The ethos of zombie culture dictates that zombies should roll deep and violently attack and eat living people with reckless abandon...   The protagonist of this hapless zombie tale is Jack, a regular country bumpkin thrust into the role of zombie vanquisher extraordinaire when a slightly ripe-looking stranger happens upon his doorstep. When this stranger turns out to be a brain-hungry zombie, Jack is sent fleeing around his property, looking for guns, ammunition, and, of all things, his keys. Clearly panic-stricken, Jack finds himself neck-deep in zombie action, with mildly threatening corpses flocking onto his meager farm. He takes off to a neighbor's property, by way of a completely insane haystack maze and a badly textured cornfield, only to find--yes, you guessed it--more zombies! Perhaps you can see where all this is going. Wondering where the film tie-in comes into play? Well, you do eventually find yourself in the guarded city of the scant few living humans remaining on the planet, which is featured prominently in the movie. But before you can get there, you'll have to travel through a slew of horrendous-looking environments, navigate terrible level designs, and shoot a never-ending army of the stupidest zombies you will ever encounter.    Stupid zombies? How is that even possible? Zombies are, after all, lumbering dimwits by nature, driven purely by the instinct to feed and with no real form of intelligence. However, the whole point of the Land of the Dead movie is that the zombies are slowly evolving into a more organized society of the undead. They're supposed to be smart zombies. But let's forget that fact for the moment and try to understand that there are rules that govern zombie fiction at large. In about every form of zombie anything you'll ever see, the creatures are largely aggressive toward any creature with living flesh, and they tend to travel in overwhelming packs. Save for very rare instances, you will see no such behavior in this game. Oh sure, they'll attack, but it's an absolute rarity to find yourself in a situation where you're overmatched. The zombies have one or two really lame attacks, which can be easily avoided if you're not completely surrounded. And even when you are, all you need to do is run and find a piece of the scenery that the zombies aren't smart enough to circumvent--you know, like an open doorway or a pile of garbage that sits maybe two or three feet high. And this is all assuming the zombies even come after you in the first place. Half the time, they're content to stand completely still, dumbfounded as you pick them off from silly distances.    To make matters worse, the game completely destroys any measure of satisfaction you might get from offing these bloodthirsty creatures by making the combat a complete and utter bore. The game tries to create some measure of tension by severely limiting the amount of ammunition you can pick up, leaving you to fight off the zombies with shovels, golf clubs, baseball bats, and fire axes. Yet somehow, the action of slamming a blunt object into a zombie's brittle body is screwed up. There are both weak and strong melee attacks, but the weak attacks are completely useless. You can sit there whacking away at a zombie and half the time it won't even react to the shots it has taken, leaving you completely vulnerable.   Apparently someone forgot to clue in the developer of Land of the Dead to these key facts.   So, you're stuck using strong attacks at all times. The trouble is, these strong attacks look completely stupid. When you're using a shovel, you look like you're giving the zombie a firm poke--a fact made even more hilarious by the overexaggerated animation of a zombie flying backward from the attack. Every time you use a hammer, you see Jack flip it around to the claw side to make his strong swipe. For the love of god, why can't he just leave the hammer on its claw side? And somehow, someway, the act of chopping hard at a zombie with an axe is done so flatly, so devoid of satisfaction, that it's barely even worth using the weapon, given how long it takes to wind up for the hit.    The game's gunplay is even worse. There's a decent variety of weapons, but there is no predictability to their effectiveness. The game purports to use some manner of location-specific damage model, but it's also completely broken. Shoot a zombie in the chest, and his head will magically explode. Shoot another one in the chest, and it will react like it just took a shot to the shin. Shoot another's arm off, and it won't even flinch. Sometimes you have to shoot a zombie seven times in the head to bring it down. Other times, two shots to the legs will kill it. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it.      Adding further insult to injury, Land of the Dead constantly sabotages itself with predictable and insipid level designs. The game constantly tries to force a reaction out of you by having zombies appear out of nowhere. But that's the problem...they literally appear out of nowhere. They'll either blink in and out of thin air, or they'll drop in from some magical point in the ceiling. And even when you don't see them appear from some magically distant dimension, the game waves a big, bright flag to let you know zombies are coming around the corner by hitching up the frame rate for up to a full second every single time enemies are being loaded into the level. Talk about defeating the tension...   It's just not scary. It's not scary like it should be, Jack.   Believe it or not, Land of the Dead offers a full multiplayer mode for online play. But what's even harder to believe is that it's as awful as the single-player experience. You have deathmatch and co-op modes available, and both are lousy for different reasons. The deathmatches take place in zombie-infested levels, so you're fighting your opponents and zombies at the same time. OK, that sounds all well and good, except that the maps all completely suck, and lag frequently gets in the way of your ability to properly shoot anybody or anything. On servers that seemed to have entirely decent ping times, it would sometimes take up to five full seconds for a shotgun blast to kill a zombie or an opponent. The co-op missions we played seemed to suffer from this the most. Zombies would dart around the level in indecipherable patterns and sometimes even spawn right on top of us, making it impossible to even get a shot off before we were eaten alive. Fun? Hardly.    On the Xbox, Land of the Dead was one of the worst-looking games in that system's history. On the PC, the bump in resolution does improve matters, if not by a wide margin. Specifically, the zombies tend to look better up close than they did on consoles--though still not good, exactly. The main difference is that they look gorier, because the blood-and-guts effects and decrepit skin textures look a bit more proper. Lighting is also a bit better in this version, with some soft glow effects that you could almost call pretty to look at. Most everything else in the game, however, looks about as awful as it did on the Xbox. The environments are still bland and overly angular, the textures are blurry, and the severely damaged rag-doll physics that turned the Xbox version into a practical work of comedy are as broken here. Zombies will flop to the ground in an ultraexaggerated fashion once they die and then start gyrating and twitching as if they're being electrocuted for up to an entire minute before they simply vanish from sight. Save for the moments when the game completely freezes, every time a zombie loads up, the frame rate does mostly hold up, but it would be really difficult for it not to with graphics that look this ancient.   Rag-doll physics are really at their best when they're completely broken.   Even mentioning Land of the Dead's abysmal audio almost seems like it would be giving it too much credit. Zombies have about two or three distinct grunts and gurgling sounds, all of which seem forced or overwrought. Jack talks like a man reading a script--very, very poorly. The weapon effects are generic and flat, and the music, if you even want to call it that, consists of a four-measure loop of grating unpleasantness that changes to a different four-measure loop of grating unpleasantness as you jump to each new level. If ever there were a game that demanded a mute button, this is the one.    The most insane thing about Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green is that it doesn't feel like the kind of rushed, hack-job piece of work that often comes from movie licenses. Considering the fairly lengthy single-player game and that there's a complete multiplayer mode that's online-enabled, it's very clear that a group of people put time and effort into this unadulterated train wreck of a game. And that's depressing on so many levels. Regardless of whatever effort was sunk into this fool's errand, Land of the Dead is far and away one of the most atrocious gaming experiences to be found on the PC. And like the zombies contained within, it should be shot, burned, stabbed, or otherwise slaughtered until there's no possible way for it to harm anyone again. Seriously, don't play this game.    
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80,Die Hard Trilogy ,9.4, The key to this collection is that each game soars to the top of its respective genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/5/2/4/2218524-box_dhtril.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/die-hard-trilogy-review/1900-2547309/,pos,"
Die Hard Trilogy delivers more than most would ever dream of even asking from a regularly-priced Playstation game. Not only are all three games hands-down good, but they're all also very big and replayable. Die Hard takes you through more than 15 brutally intense levels of the Nakatomi Plaza. But what separates Die Hard from a run-of-the-mill shooter is the need for strategy over firepower. Players must learn to hide John McClane behind walls, and out-think and ultimately ambush the enemy. This first installment of the trilogy is extremely challenging, and brute force just won't get McClane through it alive. Think of this game as a Resident Evil, only with more action and strategic elements. Action games simply don't get better. Die Hard 2 scrolls through every nook and cranny of Dulles International Airport. The mission is to blow away a horde of enemies en route to the final snowmobile chase. Die Hard 2 has the personality and punch most light-gun games lack, thanks in large part to the legacy of the films and the wise-cracking McClane himself. But it's the fantastic set design that really transports you to Dulles. Think of this as Operation: Wolf and Virtua Cop, only better.  Die Hard with a Vengeance puts virtually all of New York up for grabs: downtown, Central Park, and even the subway. The player's vehicle can do 90 degree swerves at the touch of a button. In other words, players are free to race at the highest speeds and make those impossible turns only seen in movies. The Bruce Willis sound-alike adds that special touch of Hollywood when he shouts, ""I don't like to lose,"" ""Somebody get me some aspirin,"" and that Die Hard classic, ""Yippe-kai-ay!"" The game's high-tension, ticking clock is extremely effective, and it's on-the-edge-of-your-seat action from start to finish while McClane mows down pedestrians to get to those bombs in time. The key to this collection is that each game soars to the top of its respective genre with sharp control, some of the best polygon graphics we've seen yet, and superior gameplay. One word of warning, however: All three games are fairly hard, and there's no adjusting the difficulty. That, combined with the outrageous violence (smashing into pedestrians and using your wipers to get the blood off your windshield), makes Die Hard Trilogy inappropriate for young children. For older gamers, though, this is the cream of the crop of console action games, and easily one of the best ever. Yippe-kai-ay!!!
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81,Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec ,9.4," Its endless tuning options and many racing events will keep you engrossed in the game for many months, and it's accessible enough to be enjoyed by anyone who's the least ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/0/2/4/1056-4024.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gran-turismo-3-a-spec-review/1900-2783813/,pos,"
Some would argue that Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec isn't the most accurate racing or driving simulator currently available, and those people would be correct. There are and have been many specialized games that more realistically depict a single aspect of motor sports--games like Grand Prix II, Mobil 1 Rally Championship, NASCAR Racing 3, F355 Challenge, Le Mans 24 Hours, and Grand Prix Legends. However, no one game has ever captured the broad essence of driving cars that hail from all walks of auto-racing life like Gran Turismo 3 does, and certainly no one game has ever offered the depth contained within this ambitious game. And while many ambitious games seem to miss their mark, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec achieves its goal of re-creating a believable racing experience in a package that's both easily accessible and difficult to master.    At its core, Gran Turismo 3 remains essentially unchanged from its two PlayStation predecessors. The game lets you drive over 150 real-world cars on racetracks and road courses, some of which are modeled after existing locations and others of which are simply loosely based on a number of cities like Tokyo, Seattle, and Rome. In fact, anyone who's played either of the two previous games will be instantly familiar with Gran Turismo 3's layout, interface, and control scheme, all of which mimic the same formula that the series established back in 1998. Certainly, the fact that the gameplay remains the same shouldn't be viewed as a lack of innovation on the developer's part--fans of the series will undoubtedly welcome the return of the intuitive layout, as well as the rally mode. As an added bonus, Gran Turismo 3 also includes the ability to drive Formula 1 cars from the mid-1980s, an era when these cars were generating upwards of 1000hp. It should also be noted that while the game includes only 25 percent of the total number of cars that were available in Gran Turismo 2, gone are the ""econobox"" vehicles that you were forced to slave through before being able to drive the high-end cars. Instead, Gran Turismo 3 focuses strictly on the truly exotic cars and only includes a handful or so of the low-end models.    The game is composed of two core components: the arcade mode, which is fairly straightforward, and the simulation mode. Here you'll get to choose from a wide variety of cars that include exotic convertibles, rugged rally cars, and powerful touring racecars, and you'll race on one of six racetracks. Placing first on each of these six tracks will unlock another group of courses, and placing first in this batch of tracks will unlock yet another group until a total of 34 tracks become available to you. These 34, however, are variations of 19 individual tracks that include ovals, city streets, professional racetracks, and dirt roads, most of which are relics from the first two games. There are some new tracks, however, and all the courses in the game--new and old--have been completely remodeled. While the arcade mode will let you race on all of Gran Turismo 3's tracks, it'll only present you with a fraction of the 140 cars present in the game.    It's the game's simulation mode that's easily Gran Turismo 3's most considerable aspect, because it's here that you'll actually have the opportunity to drive and own some of the most coveted cars in the world. In the simulation mode, you'll create a persistent persona and start out with a small sum of money with which to buy your first, relatively humble, car. You'll then participate in a number of racing leagues, accumulate more money, upgrade your existing car or buy a faster one altogether, compete in more-advanced races, and repeat that process until eventually you've completed all the racing events in this mode. Naturally, this is no easy feat, and it will require you to complete hours and hours of racing before any notable progression through the simulation mode even becomes evident. There are five different racing leagues--beginner, amateur, professional, rally, and endurance--and each is made up of anywhere from 20 to 25 racing events. These events have specific requirements that will dictate what kind of cars are allowed to participate, and they include the Type R Meet, which requires that you own a Honda or Acura Type R-model car; FR races, in which only front-engine, rear-wheel-drive cars are allowed to enter; and MR races, which require that you own a mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive car. Within these events, you'll find a number of individual races. This number will vary from three to ten individual races, and each will reward you with a certain sum of money, depending on how you place. You can participate in these events in any order you feel comfortable with, so long as you meet the car-type and license requirement of that race. Once you complete an entire event by successfully placing first in each of that event's races, you'll be awarded with a free car, which you can either sell for more money or upgrade for additional performance.If the sheer number of races in this mode doesn't impress you, then the depth with which you can upgrade your car will. The game offers a complete suite of performance parts from licensed companies that specialize in a specific manufacturer. That is, if you upgrade your Toyota Supra, you'll be choosing from a list of parts from TRD. Nizmo parts will be available for Nissan cars; Hondas will be upgraded with Mugen parts; Mopar parts will be available for Dodge cars; and so on. Performance parts come in several stages and include stiffer shocks and springs, larger turbos, more-efficient exhausts, and lighter chassis. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the game's simulation mode, but the rewards of earning enough money to buy a car (or winning a car) like the Nissan Skyline or Honda NSX and customizing it to your liking are worth the time and effort you'll undoubtedly put into it. Also, once you do upgrade your car, your original parts will still be available to you in case you ever feel compelled to return your car to its original setting or to fiddle around with a combination of stock and aftermarket products. Additionally, you can tweak a number of settings on your car whether or not you've actually upgraded it--settings like toe and camber angles, brake balance, spring rate, ride height, shock rebound, and a myriad of other options.   Despite all its depth, Gran Turismo 3 is very easy to grasp. Its control scheme follows basic car mechanics, with buttons for accelerating, braking, shifting, and using the emergency brake. And yet, while the simple act of driving a car is fairly intuitive for anyone, the game models enough real-world physics to keep ardent racing fans happy--powerslides, oversteering, brake lock, understeering, and wheel spin all play a determining role in how you'll perform in each race, and even though keeping an average car on the road while driving conservatively is a breeze, maintaining control of a 400hp machine while driving at speeds that approach 250mph isn't. It'll take casual gamers a while before they become comfortable with the cars within the higher echelon in Gran Turismo 3 but not long enough to make the game frustrating. So that you can constantly improve your racing skills, the game also includes an extremely robust analyzer that will dissect your performance using turn-by-turn slow-motion replays, racing-line indicators, and a line graph that displays your engine's output at any given time during the race.   Additionally, the arcade mode has three difficulty settings that will determine how aggressively the computer-controlled cars will behave, and the simulation mode has a dynamic AI setting that, at times, seems a little suspect. During some of the longer racing events in the game's simulation mode, you'll have to take into account the rate of your car's tire wear. Fortunately, so do your opponents. However, your opponents will often pit and change their tires at the most inopportune times, like during  the second to last lap of a race, which gives you ample opportunity to pass them and take the checkered flag. At other times, when they pit during the middle of a race, your opponents' speed out of the pit lane will be so exaggerated that they'll catch up to you within half a lap, and then they'll automatically slow down to match your speed. While it's understandable that the game might not be fun if you're allowed to beat your opponents outright, it's also a little discouraging to know that, except in a few cases, you'll never have the satisfaction of completely annihilating the competition. For what it's worth, Gran Turismo 3's ""rubber band AI"" does manage to keep the races close, which maintains the game's intensity.    The game also suffers from the lack of licenses like Ferrari and Porsche, two pillars of racing's heritage. While there are certainly a huge number of desirable cars in the game, Gran Turismo 3 feels almost incomplete without those two powerhouses. Aside from these shortcomings, however, it's hard to find fault with this game. The graphics are gorgeous, and the car models are simply the best re-creations of real-world cars ever included in a game. Don't be surprised if you fool onlookers into thinking you're watching a televised race. Gran Turismo 3 has some impressive visual effects like shimmering heat waves, shaky cameras, a cool MTV-style replay mode that changes perspectives with the beat of the background music, real-time reflections off cars and wet pavement, and a spectacular effect that causes the sun to glare off the asphalt at the right angle. The only aspect of the game's graphics that needs to be improved upon are the peripheral items that surround each track, because it's not too difficult to spot sprite-based spectators and trees throughout most of the levels. The sound is equally as praiseworthy as the graphics. The US soundtrack includes artists like Papa Roach, Motley Crue, Jimi Hendrix, Judas Priest, Lenny Kravitz, Raekwon, and Snoop Dogg (who composed a brand-new track specifically for this game called ""Dogg's Turismo 3""), and all deliver songs with upbeat rhythms that are perfectly suited for driving fast. Gran Turismo's sound effects are also an aural treat--wind noise increases the faster you drive, the cars emit different engine and exhaust noises through all the powerband from the front and rear, and the game even mimics the individual texture noises that the cars' tires make when driving in a straight line and the different noises that tires make when driving over gravel of varying composition.     Ultimately, there's little more that racing fans can ask for that Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec doesn't have. Its endless tuning options and many racing events will keep you engrossed in the game for many months, and it's accessible enough to be enjoyed by anyone who's the least bit interested in driving an exotic car, and quite frankly, who isn't? Your PlayStation 2 library would be incomplete without this game.


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82,Magical Tetris Challenge ,9.4, Magical Tetris Challenge is a winner of a game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/5/2/2214152-box_mtc.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/magical-tetris-challenge-review/1900-2537181/,pos,"
On a platform deluged with puzzle games, Capcom adds one more to the fray with the release of Magical Tetris Challenge. What began on the N64 as a decent combination of Tetris variants has been shrunk down, enhanced, and greatly improved for Nintendo's pint-sized handheld. At first glance, Magical Tetris Challenge (MTC for short) may look like Tetris with a Disney license slapped on. However, the reality is that MTC combines seven of the best Tetris variants with an entertaining Disney-esque storyline. The names have been changed to protect the guilty, but it's a fair description to call MTC a combination of Tetris, Tetris Attack, Tetris Plus, The Next Tetris, and The New Tetris. When you first turn on the cartridge, you can play four of the seven Tetris types: normal, upside down, magical, and harmony. The final three types can be unlocked later via MTC's quest mode. Normal Tetris is standard Tetris. The player must align quad-cubed shapes left and right across the screen to form lines, which in turn disappear. Upside-down Tetris is similar to normal Tetris, but the lines you clear end up increasing the height of your opponent's pile. Magical Tetris removes this penalty-lines aspect, opting instead to send across bizarre Tetris shapes. Imagine getting a Tetris piece in the shape of a letter U, or maybe a Z, and you have the idea. Harmony Tetris is a two-player game in which each player must clear lines in tandem with the other. If one player fills too many more lines than the other, the game ends. Three more Tetris variations: signal Tetris, towering Tetris, and target Tetris can be unlocked by defeating the game's Pokemon-style quest mode. In quest mode, you take control of Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, or Donald, in an effort to accrue Tetris challenge coins. Obtain the required pattern of coins, and you can become mayor for a day and unlock another Tetris variant. Not only has Capcom driven home a gameplay treat with MTC, but the visuals and audio have also come along for the ride. Graphically, the Tetris pieces are easy to see, background graphics are nondistracting, and the Disney characters are all nicely drawn and animated. Imagine Tetris DX with cute Disney artwork, and you have a pretty fair idea of this game's visuals. Supporting this graphical deluge, the music and sound effects further add to MTC's delightfulness. In-game tunes are catchy and upbeat, while the sound effects do their job without distracting the player.  Overall, Magical Tetris Challenge is a winner of a game. Solid gameplay, excellent graphics, quality sound, support for two players, and the quest mode all combine for replay value that's out of this world.
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83,Metal Gear Solid GBC ,9.4," Despite minor gripes, Metal Gear Solid is, without equal, the best tactical-espionage title on the Game Boy Color.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/9/4/2/2216942-mgs_ntsc.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metal-gear-solid-gbc-review/1900-2579037/,pos,"
Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation is a venerable classic. Seeking to build on this success, Konami brings a similarly titled side story to Game Boy Color. While dubbed Metal Gear Solid, the game actually takes place many years before and in lieu of the universe portrayed in the PlayStation release. It seems a secret government project, codenamed Babel, intends to revive the Metal Gear program, but members of the Gindran Liberation Front have hijacked the new prototype instead. Returning to the jungle base Outer Heaven, site of Snake's previous battle with Big Boss in the original NES classic, it's up to you to stop them.   Metal Gear Solid for the Game Boy Color offers 13 single-player levels, 180 VR missions, and a two-player duel mode. Even though the action is displayed in 8-bit color, Snake can still sneak, crawl, hide, and use a wide array of weapons and tools, just as in the PlayStation game. From the R5 rifle and Nikita missile launcher to infrared goggles and cardboard boxes, there is a total of 19 items to collect. Defeat every level and VR mission, and you'll unlock further goodies, such as a sound select option and a time attack mode. Rounding out the list of features, a battery save ensures progress will not be lost once the power is off.   From a gameplay standpoint, Metal Gear Solid lives up to its name - solid. Each level requires a fair amount of sneaking and planning, and unlike the pasted-in tactics of Red Storm's Rainbow Six, MGS pulls you into the mind of a special-forces soldier. Should you hide behind a crate or crawl past the guard? Maybe you should create a diversion and run away. Whatever the situation calls for, MGS puts the decision into your hands. If you make it through the game, you'll have hiked through flooded sewers, crawled through miles of ducts, traversed tricky conveyor belts, survived poison gas, found your way via night-vision goggles, dealt with vicious attack dogs, and improvised a variety of solutions to other similarly harrowing situations. Should you tire of the single-player levels, the game's 180 VR missions offer up an experience just as addicting as that in last year's PlayStation VR Missions title. The game's two-player mode, while mostly a variant of capture the flag, isn't too shabby either.   Unlike the PlayStation MGS, the handheld release does not allow backtracking to previous areas. While this raises the possibility of overlooking useful tools, the game's level design precludes bypassing important items. Linearity is also a concern, but the length and variety within each level somewhat offsets this fear. Ultimately, the most glaring gameplay fault stems from enemy AI, or lack thereof. It's one thing to be hiding silently out of view, but it's quite another to pop a guard who is mere inches from another, only to watch the survivor walk past as if nothing had happened. While this is faithful to the PS MGS, it's still disappointing to know that enemy troops are bussed into Outer Heaven on the short bus.   Visually, Metal Gear Solid exudes refinement. Each level, though not overly colorful, is drawn in a way that emphasizes utility and clarity over extravagance. The game bears a passing resemblance to the NES Metal Gear titles, but the sleek lines and high animation level lift the game much higher. Snake's shimmy when walking, his recoil when punching, and the enemy's shrug of boredom are just a few of the game's many visual details. If there is one drawback to the game's graphical style though, it is the onscreen radar system. While a 27-inch television can display solitary moving pixels distinctly, the GBC screen cannot, and discerning enemies via the radar is difficult. This qualm is academic though, as the amount of graphical detail along with a surplus of lush cutscenes pushes the game to new heights of quality.   Many would argue that the PlayStation Metal Gear Solid's soundtrack is what keeps passion for the game burning long after every VR mission and both endings are but a faded memory. The same rings true for the Game Boy MGS. Musically, the game is haunting. Every track - whether it's the slightly uptempo stage-one jungle music, the depressingly suspenseful cello backbeat of stage six, or the frantic crescendos of stage 11 - echoes with a pleasing balance of drama and reservation. The same cannot be said, though, about the sound effects. Though the game uses a variety of sounds for movement and environmental ambience, nothing stands out as particularly innovative or impressive. There's no digitized speech, there's no distinction between weapons, and the same explosion effect is reused countless times. It would be unfair to call the sound effects bad, but they're not varied either.   Despite minor gripes, Metal Gear Solid is, without equal, the best tactical-espionage title on the Game Boy Color. The plot further explores the mythos of the Metal Gear project, reveals the truth behind Colonel Campbell's retirement, and divulges a secret or two about the origins of Snake's ""legend"" status. The gameplay is engaging, the visuals enjoyable, and the soundtrack phenomenal. From the initial meeting with Delta Force member Chris Jenner to the final battle with Black Art Viper, MGS pulls you into a handheld gaming thrill ride you won't forget.
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84,Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus ,9.4," If you hated the first one, it's likely because of the lack of save points, so you should definitely consider giving this series another try.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/4/9/1/2218491-oddworld.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/oddworld-abes-exoddus-review/1900-2545915/,pos,"
If you haven't played a lot of Oddworld Inhabitant's first game, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, the transition from the original title to the next game in the line, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus, may at first appear subtler than it actually is. Yet even though the Exoddus gameplay is essentially more of the same, it's more of a good thing, and the modifications are excellent. We've gone through the whole ""Exoddus is not a sequel but rather an offshoot of the first game"" rigmarole about 50 times by now. So, just know that Abe, the absinthe-skinned main character known as a Mudokon in the first game, is back in this title and is still trying to foil the plans of The Man, or the Glukkons for the sake of Oddworld Inhabitant's well-spun fiction. The storyline is layers deep, but perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the Oddworld games is the gamespeak function. While some people may have a tough time conceptualizing how to get through an entire game without a weapon, those who've played Oddysee know that you bank on your ability to communicate, rather than terminate. And the old ""shoot first; ask questions later"" doesn't get you anywhere in Exoddus either. In addition to the reappearance of the somewhat simple roster of commands you had in the first gam - Hello, Follow Me, Work, etc. - your duty is now more complicated, as the Mudokons (that's your race) get angry, crazy, blitzed on Soulstorm Brew (a wicked but addictive concoction of Mudokon tears and bones), and so forth, and you've got to talk them down frequently and systematically with the use of a whole handful of new commands. Naturally, as a friendly fart can't always solve more advanced communications conundrums, the developers have now given you the ability to apologize, slap unruly Mudokons into submission, and lead the blind.  Along the same premise as the first game, the Mudokons you're trying to rescue in Exoddus are much more complex than the original assembly. Besides the occasional drunk, blind, or just generally resistant creature, they all emote like mood rings, showing red skin when angry and an off-color greenish yellow and pale tone when sick. You have to find healing rings from Shaman Mudokons and apologize and shoulder-pat to make angry ones happy again so they'll follow you to safety. And blind Mudokons have a tendency to walk into drills and off of ledges if you don't guide them properly with verbal cues. On a positive note, you can use their blindness to your benefit. For example, if a blind Mudokon is on the level below you, notably the one with the lever you need to pull but can't get to, you can stand on the side of the screen you want the blind guy to walk toward, prompt him to follow you, and then tell him to ""work"" in order to turn the crank or pull the lever that allows you access to another level. Another excellent function is being able to guide more than one Mudokon at a time. In the first game, you had to rescue one Mudokon, then come back and get the other one. In Exoddus, you have an ""All o' ya"" command that captures the attention of anyone present. At points, you'll have a gaggle trailing behind you - sneaking, running, or jumping into the bird teleporters.  But perhaps even better than the hammed-up gamespeak is the fact that the developers fixed what could easily be called the number one problem with the first game: the inability to save the game wherever you wanted. Not only was Abe's Oddysee a tough game, you spent a lot of time redoing what you'd done because of the need to learn the hard way. Many of the puzzles in the original required some testing before you made it through, and when you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the path each time you fail, it's hard to stay inspired to push forward. In Exoddus, you have an incredibly welcomed quick-save option that allows you to quickly save your progress, anywhere in the game as many times as you want. And when you're ready to quit playing, you simply save to the memory card instead of a quick save, and you're set. This introduces an interesting dilemma, as the quick save certainly makes Exoddus seem easier, in a sense, but the game itself is actually even more difficult than the first one - it's just that now you finally have hope. And just when you think hope's lost, something wonderful like an invisibility power-up appears when you free Mudokon spirits. Graphically, Abe's Exoddus is the same 2D visual wonder, much like the original or, moreover, Interplay's Heart of Darkness. Yet the graphics seem much more brilliant, as there are more environments with greater diversity in design. And the cutscenes are not only gorgeous, they're entertaining and (can I say it?) funny. No, really. Besides that, the game is quite large, and the environments are expansive. You'll have to rescue the spirits of Mudokons past; battle the typical, yet enhanced cast of Sligs, Scrabs, and the excruciatingly annoying Fleeches (long live the quick save), among others; as well as roll through the mines in mine carts and such. And sound-wise, you really can't get much better without being downright distracting. The voices of all the characters are incredible, and the effects, from getting blown up by a mine to the echoey sound of falling to your death, really can't be beat.  Abe's Exoddus also has a two-player mode. While the Exoddus mainstay is clearly the single-player game, the two-player co-op mode does have charm, as you and another player take turns working your way through. When you die, your partner picks up where you left off and so forth. A bit of advice? Pick a crummy partner, and you might have some fun with this. Otherwise, the waiting game just doesn't parallel the egocentric fun of keeping this title to yourself. In all, Abe's Exoddus is a great example of how a game can stay true to its conceptual pursuit while still improving upon the original, all while keeping its soul intact. If you loved the first one, you'll like this game more. If you didn't play the first one, you can start here. If you hated the first one, it's likely because of the lack of save points, so you should definitely consider giving this series another try.
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85,Rayman 2: The Great Escape ,9.4, Rayman 2 is one of the best platforming experiences available today.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/7/3/2208973-box_rayman2.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rayman-2-the-great-escape-review/1900-2540494/,pos,"
After patiently waiting more than a year between the announcement of the release date of Rayman 2 for the N64 and the actual release last November, fans eager for another serving of Ubi Soft's jointless platform hero were rewarded with an amazing platforming experience that truly showcased the N64. But what really surprised the gaming populace was the announcement that Rayman 2 was also in development for the Dreamcast and the PlayStation. And while the PlayStation version has yet to be released, the Dreamcast version is currently the best Rayman 2 available.  Rayman has finally made the transition into a fully 3D realm, and although not as well known as Sonic or Mario, Rayman 2 proves that you don't have to have a hugely popular character to make a great 3D platform game. Evil mechanical pirates led by the maniacal Razorbeard are enslaving the population of Rayman's world. It's up to our jointless hero to collect four magical masks that, once united, will awaken a sleeping god who will help Rayman defeat the pirates. Along his quest he'll pick up lums, which are magical fragments of the world's energy core. He'll also free creatures enslaved by the evil pirates and run into a host of friends who will help him achieve his goal.  Rayman 2 really immerses you in Rayman's world. The game offers stunning graphics, incredible sound, and tons of opportunity to interact with other characters. Almost immediately you'll run into Globox, an old friend who helps you escape from the pirate ship. From there, you'll encounter a cute fairy, a collective of tiny magical beings, a muscle-headed giant, an imprisoned whale, a polite water snake, and a few other surprising characters. They'll help you along the way by opening new routes, pulling you across chasms, giving you new powers, or even volunteering information. The graphics are simply astonishing. People taken aback by the N64 or PC versions of Rayman should really see him on the Dreamcast. The environments are lush, the colors are vivid, and the graphics are extremely crisp. There's absolutely no pop-up anywhere in the huge levels, and the game flows smoothly from one part to the next. You won't be truly impressed until you stand atop a ledge and switch to a first-person view, in which you'll be able to look down on the entire level without any hint of fog. Rayman himself looks great, and the character design is wonderful. The robo-pirates have just the right combination of menacing and doltish, Ly, your fairy friend, looks positively elfish, and Jano, the Keeper of the Cave of Bad Dreams, looks like he belongs in a nightmare. Rayman 2 is one of the most creative games to come along in a great while. Most platform games give you tons of ledge jumping and room exploring, with little deviation. Rayman 2, however, is packed full of different modes and minigames. From waterskiing, to swimming alongside a whale, to riding a rocket-powered horse, to flying a flaming powder keg, Rayman 2 is full of gameplay surprises. Indeed, there's plenty of platforming in Rayman 2, but the frequent use of different gameplay elements keeps the game fresh and exciting. Also, the game is very good at surprising you. While there are not a lot of objects in the game, there are several ways to use each. A powder keg can be tossed at bad guys, thrown at doors, used to break open cages, and even lit to create a rocket. This system always keeps you wondering what, exactly, you're going to do with an item you run in to.Rayman 2 is not only a treat to the eyes, but also to the ears. All the characters in Rayman 2 speak in their native language - a sort of quasi-French that comes out sounding more like gibberish than anything positively discernable. While each level has its own distinctive tune running in the background, certain scenarios will cause the music to change tempo, or even switch to a different track altogether, giving the game a truly interactive sound system. And if that weren't good enough, the music is actually really good. But that's not all the sound department has to offer. The sound effects in this game are great too. Detailed down to your footsteps, you'll hear every snoring pirate, every plink of your shoes hitting hollow metal pipes, every swinging cage, and everything else you'd expect if you were actually Rayman. Playing Rayman 2 without any sound is a difficult task indeed, as it's absolutely essential to the game. The control is so intuitive you'll wonder why other games even bother with bogging down the player with complex control schemes. You can jump, use your helicopter move to glide, shoot purple rings to swing, hold the left trigger to lock onto a target a la Zelda, and stand next to an object to pick it up. That's all you must do to get you through every level of Rayman. You won't need a complex item inventory screen, a lives count, or even much of a life bar, for that matter. With the wonderfully simple control and nothing more, Rayman 2 still manages to be a challenge without frustrating you with complex button presses or making you figure out what item to use where. Ubi Soft wasn't satisfied with simply porting the code over to the Dreamcast. Not only does it look better than the PC version, but it's also obvious the developers took their time making Rayman really take advantage of what the Dreamcast has to offer. There are new extra features, and Rayman 2 is now a multiplayer game. And if you explore the game's web site through the Dreamcast's browser, you'll find clues that lead you to a hidden Gloobox village, where you'll be able to play the Gloobox Disk - a multiplayer maze game. Rayman 2 is one of the best platforming experiences available today. By including a wonderfully humorous story, excellent game mechanics, and perfection in almost all other categories, Ubi Soft has created a game that appeals to all types of gamers. There are many versions of Rayman to choose from, but the extra features crammed into this version plus the Dreamcast's superior graphics and sound make this the Rayman game of choice for choosy gamers.
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86,SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium ,9.4," The two giants of the 2D fighting-game industry joining forces to create, perhaps, the most highly anticipated fighter ever.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/0/5/2/2215052-snkvsc.jpg,NGPC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/snk-vs-capcom-match-of-the-millennium-review/1900-2545702/,pos,"
Here's something we thought would never happen. The two giants of the 2D fighting-game industry joining forces to create, perhaps, the most highly anticipated fighter ever. SNK (of King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown fame) and Capcom (of Street Fighter and Darkstalkers) have combined resources to create a mini-glimpse of the upcoming, Naomi-based SNK vs. Capcom. The game, appropriately, is titled SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium. MotM is undoubtedly the greatest handheld fighting game to date. There is a large selection of the greatest fighters from each company. Combined with the fact that you'll finally be able to pit Ken Masters against Terry Bogard is absolutely incredible. The opening animation resembles Capcom's Alpha series, except with a smattering of SNK characters, but the actual in-game fighting looks and plays practically identically to King of Fighters R-2. Featuring a tourney mode, which breaks down into single, tag, or team battle, allowing one-on-one battles, tag-team matches like Marvel vs. Capcom, and team battles a la the KOF series. Even after a selection is made, style choices are possible that govern the way your super combos work. You can choose from a Street Fighter Alpha style, or venture into SNK-land with two modes that, for the most part, act like the advanced and extra modes in King of Fighters '98.  Beyond the traditional tourney, training, and versus modes, there is also an Olympic mode, which offers a slew of minigames. Depending on how well you do in the minigames, you'll unlock extra super combos for the various characters. The game also allows data to be exchanged between the SNK vs. Capcom Card Fighters Clash game, King of Fighters: Dream Match 1999 for the Dreamcast, and the upcoming Dreamcast version of SNK vs. Capcom.  Control is excellent, despite the two-button scheme, and the response time is right on the money. The Neo-Geo Pocket's D-pad is easily the best handheld D-pad yet and this game makes good use of it. The graphics in SNK vs. Capcom are the best in any of SNK's handheld fighting games to date, with extremely detailed character portraits, fluid and precise animation, and beautifully rendered backgrounds loaded with little animations (check out the flock of doves in the church level). Mai Shiranai even features her patented bounce. Sound is less than inspiring, with whitenoise punch and kick sounds being the effect of choice, but if you can get past the typical sound-clash, and the world's most hilarious win quotations, then this is the must-own game for the NGPC.
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87,SSX ,9.4," SSX is one of the PlayStation 2 launch titles that truly excels in every single category a game can be rated on, to the point that even video game fans ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/2/9/1/1892-7291.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ssx-review/1900-2637652/,pos,"
SSX is one of the PlayStation 2 launch titles that truly excels in every single category a game can be rated on, to the point that even video game fans who aren't into snowboarding games have to sit up and take notice. For those of you who are fans of games like Cool Boarders 2 and X-Games Pro Boarder, SSX is reason enough on its own to pick up a PlayStation 2 this October.    SSX is a snowboard racing game in which you compete against other boarders from around the world. One of the major differences between SSX and previous snowboarding games is how well SSX balances racing for position and performing tricks. The game awards points and an adrenaline boost for the tricks you do. The adrenaline boost is used as a turbo of sorts, which helps you race down the courses faster then you could on your own. This allows the game to be heavy on tricks while still keeping a fast-paced racing game edge. From the game's outset, you can select from four different characters, each of which has a different persona and boarding style. Progressing through the game by finishing in the top three of every course in the preliminary, semifinal, and final events unlocks more tracks, boarders, special boards, and character outfits. In all, the game features eight courses and eight characters. Each boarder has multiple boards and outfits to unlock, and those boards and outfits enhance your boarder's attributes and drastically change the way he or she performs on the snow throughout the game.    One of the best things about SSX is how unbelievably large and diverse the eight courses are. The first two tracks are fairly standard, which gives you a chance to get a feel for the game in a familiar setting. After those two tracks, though, the designers let their imaginations run wild, creating tracks that range from a run though a snow-covered city at night, to a desert, to an indoor course styled after a giant pinball machine, to a course that runs down an iceberg sitting in a Hawaiian harbor. While some of these tracks may sound completely absurd, they are in fact some of the most exciting, innovative, and unbelievably fun courses ever created for a snowboarding game. Plus they are incredibly expansive - on some tracks you can literally spend close to ten minutes boarding down one run at top speed. What's even more impressive is the freedom the game gives you to explore the vast levels, which is impressive since the rule of thumb is anywhere there's snow, you can go. Even if it's past the course boundaries, or even behind the grandstands, if you can see a way to get there, you usually can. You may occasionally run into an invisible boundary or two, but it happens so rarely that you forget they're even there. This freedom to explore is much more than just an impressive technological feature, as exploring the levels is how you find the hidden shortcuts that are almost necessary in order to finish in first place.The responsiveness of the controls in SSX is the single most enjoyable aspect of the game. You never feel as though you're just watching an animation complete or that something is happening too slowly or incorrectly. You might complain when your character doesn't land a jump, but you'll definitely know that it was all your fault, because the game's controller responsiveness is dead on. The one complaint some may have about the controls is that once you've started to charge for a jump, it's not possible to change the direction of your boarder as he or she approaches the jump. This, however, is only true for the basic control scheme, where the left analog stick controls the direction of your boarder and the direction of your spin once you've depressed the jump button. The advanced control setting separates these functions by letting you stay in control of your boarder's direction at all times with the left analog stick while giving you control of your boarder's rotation for his or her aerial stunt using the D-pad. The rest of the controls remain the same in both control schemes. The shoulder buttons allow you to perform various grabs and tricks, which can be linked together for combos and big points. The more points you score, the more boost you earn, which in turn allows you to go faster, which makes landing big tricks actually important. The X button is your jump button, and you hold it when approaching a jump and then release it at the top of the jump. The right analog stick allows you to shove your competitors, which is an effective means of knocking opponents down for some of the larger boarders. On the whole, turning and cutting across the snow in SSX is the closest any game has come to representing what it's actually like in real life. Even though SSX is more of an arcade-style game that allows you to get crazy amounts of air and pull off crazy aerial stunts, you always feel like you're going to catch an edge and take a nosedive into the powder.    Graphically, SSX is by far the most visually stunning snowboarding game we've ever seen, and it's also one of the most visually dynamic PlayStation 2 titles we've seen so far. The characters in the game look like anime characters. Their mouths move, they blink, and it's really quite remarkable just how lifelike they are. The polygonal models used for the characters are so smooth that you really have to look to see any hard angles. Even more impressive is that the animation of the boarders never pops or looks awkward in any way when in transition from one trick to another. If you start to execute a front grab then change your mind in mid-animation and go for a heal grab, the animations smoothly flow from one into the other with no delay. The textures used for the character's clothes and some portions of the environments are incredibly rich and detailed. All of this graphical polish - including effects like the snow spray that comes off the board when you make a hard turn and the depression carved into the snow by the boards - really helps make the game look convincing, as do the impressive lighting effects, which are really shown off when fireworks shoot into the sky and cast appropriately colored reflections of light on the snow. The sense of speed that the game delivers is amazing - when you're not playing the game it's actually hard to watch since it zooms by so amazingly fast. As a whole the game is visually stunning, thanks in great part to its almost constant 60fps frame rate, which only dips every once in a great while - usually when nearly every boarder is on the screen at once and the fireworks go off.In the audio department, no one does it like the Beastie Boys' DJ MixMaster Mike and the incredible team at Electronic Arts, who've really pushed the envelope of video game music with SSX by actually making it a game element that ties into your performance. When you're in first place and landing big jumps and pulling off great tricks, you'll hear the full range of the particular track - vocals, bass line, guitar, scratching, and so on. But when you crash or fall behind a couple of positions, the music mixes on the fly and discretely loses its intensity by dropping out elements of the song. The effect is amazing - you hardly ever hear any abrupt changes that disrupt the song, and even when you're in last place you still get to hear the bass line and a few other key elements, so you can still enjoy the music. However, the lack of elements really pushes you to catch up to the pack and get the full version of the song back on. It's really quite an extraordinary effect, not to mention that the music in the game is really good hard-hitting hip-hop. In all, the game has over 15 tracks performed by various artists including MixMaster Mike, Rahzel, Rasmus, Politika, Aphrodite, and Mickey Finn. To go along with the top-notch soundtrack, the game has fantastic character voices and supercrisp sound effects. The game has different announcers for every track, and each character has various little phrases that he or she says at the beginning of and during the races.       In the end, SSX is a terrific snowboarding game that has all the right stuff. Every element comes together and makes for a game that is extremely fun and rewarding to play. The graphics will make you shake your head in disbelief even after a month of playing it, the sound effects can actually convey a sense of texture, and the music will have you figuring out the best way to hook your PS2 up to your computer to record the soundtrack. It's also a very challenging game that at times crosses the line of frustration, a line that you're sure to be more than happy to cross time and time again since the game is extremely rewarding when you do well. You'll want to complete every trick and course with every single character just because the game is so fun to play. So to make a long story even longer, SSX is a must-have PlayStation 2 game that certainly sets a new standard for snowboarding video games.
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88,MTV Skateboarding ,2.3," MTV Skateboarding is a perfect example of cashing in on a recently established genre, yet unlike games like Street Sk8er 2 or Grind Session, it doesn't bring anything worthwhile to ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/7/6/4/2788-10764.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mtv-skateboarding-review/1900-2628202/,neg,"
MTV Skateboarding is THQ's attempt to cash in on the now-rampant craze of skateboarding games. On paper, the game looks pretty good, with several levels, real skaters, and modes that haven't been in any other skateboarding game to date. In practice, however, the game's ugly textures, poor frame rate, and clunky gameplay combine to make MTV Skateboarding one of the worst PlayStation games released this year. The game has all the bases covered when it comes to modes. There's a freeplay mode, for when you just want to skate; a lifestyle mode, which serves as the game's main career mode; a high score contest; an icon collection mode, which requires you to grab a set number of MTV icons before time runs out; a survival mode; and a stunt mode, which lets you do things like fly down giant ramps and jump over cars. Mutliplayer modes include a simple trick-battle mode, a time-bomb mode, a two-player MTV icon hunt, and a ""knock the other guy off his board"" deathmatch. The licensing in this game runs rampant. There's, of course, the MTV license. Plus, the game has several professional skaters, including Andy Macdonald, Keith Hufnagel, Stevie Williams, and Colin McKay. Lots of company logos are found throughout the game, such as Swatch, Airwalk, DC, Sobe, Porn Star, and Adio. Additionally, licensed music from bands like Cypress Hill, the Deftones, System of a Down, Goldfinger, and Pennywise is played throughout the game. At first glance, the controls are similar to those of games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Grind Session. But some adjustments have been made. For starters, you can't spin with the D-pad. The L1 and R1 buttons are used for midair spinning, as well as maintaining your balance on rails. The game has a large collection of tricks, but each skater has the same set of tricks, making the difference between skaters little more than slightly better rail balance, faster acceleration, or better turning abilities. The game does have a nice collection of flatland tricks, though, including manuals, powerslides, handstands, and kickbacks. The game also features a lot of levels, but most of them are uninspired ramp-fests, without the nice, flowing lines contained in other recent skate games. Graphically, the game is downright hideous. The game's textures are blurry, and they warp and tear at their polygonal seams so much that the ground constantly jiggles like Jell-O. When combined with the game's jerky, annoying camera angle and the seemingly random yet never acceptable frame rate, it's enough to give you a case of motion sickness. Some of the moves look decent, but the transitions between moves are nonexistent, making the skater look as jerky as the camera. Some of the wrecks are downright laughable, as the game will sometimes skip from the start of a wreck to your skater laying flat on the ground, skipping what should be at least three or four frames of crashing. The sluggish frame rate infringes on the gameplay as well, since it prevents you from ever really achieving a real sense of timing. As if that weren't bad enough, the control is evilly unresponsive, making accurate jumping a nightmare. It's as if your button presses don't register for half a second or so after you hit them. MTV Skateboarding is a perfect example of cashing in on a recently established genre, yet unlike games like Street Sk8er 2 or Grind Session, it doesn't bring anything worthwhile to the table. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 hits shelves in about a week - do yourself a favor and wait for that one, instead.
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89,Bowling ,2.3, It comes as no surprise that the $10 you would spend on purchasing this game would be better spent on several games at a real bowling alley.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/1/5/2221715-584595_37560_front.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bowling-review/1900-2770877/,neg,"
Recently, the Sony PlayStation has been the host of a growing library of titles that fall into the ""budget"" category, or games that retail for $9.99 new. For the most part, these have been simple games, lackluster in their execution and delivery. A1 Games' Bowling is no exception to this rule. As you might expect, the standard features of a bowling game are present and accounted for: 10 pins, a freshly oiled lane, and a selection of balls of various weight. The only glaring exception is the well-worn shoes. After you've chosen your ball, it's time to get bowling. If you choose, you can also team up with up to three friends to fill up the lanes. The main mechanic of the game is fairly simple to get a grasp on: You simply align an arrow pointing down the lane, adjust the level of power with which you'd like to throw the ball, and finally, heave the ball down the lane after putting some spin on the ball. The latter of the three steps is the toughest to get the hang of, as there is a small target in the center of the screen that you have to aim for to make the ball roll straight. As you'll soon find after a few frames of gutter balls, a little bit of spin can go a long way. So much so in fact that the end result is completely and totally unrealistic. After all is said and done, this game strips bowling down to a bare minimum of options and lets you go from there.  Graphically, this game is about as plain as they come. The lanes, pins, and balls are all very simply rendered and are generally unattractive. To make matters worse, the only view that you see during the game is a bowler's eye view of the lane with a camera that follows the ball as it heads toward the pins. In short, you practically look at the same screen during the whole game. The in-game sound, for the most part, is also an annoyance. The sounds of the ball rolling down the lane and the resulting crash into the pins are similar in quality to a canned laughter track on a sitcom. As you can imagine, hearing the same repetitive audio for several games can get old rather quickly. On top of the standard bowling game, there are two additional modes of play to add a small amount of fuel to the fire. The first of which is the special mode, which takes a standard game, increases the number of pins in the lane to 45, and shortens the number of frames to seven. The end result is basically the same as the standard game, just slightly different. The last of the additional modes is the quest mode. In the case of this variant, the lane has only three pins standing, and you are given several chances to knock the pins down. After doing so, you are given an additional ball, and you move on to another frame of three pins. As you can see, these additional games are really only slightly different from the main game and don't really offer that much to the player. Bowling is a simple game with unimpressive visuals and monotonous gameplay. It comes as no surprise that the $10 you would spend on purchasing this game would be better spent on several games at a real bowling alley.
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90,Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis ,2.3," Even the most hard-core Aquaman devotees will likely find little use for this short, shallow, problematic ramshackle game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/0/2/2217502-box_aquaman.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aquaman-battle-for-atlantis-review/1900-6073165/,neg,"
 Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis is the kind of game that happens when a developer has a license and not much else. The game itself has only the bare minimum requirements necessary to technically be called a game, and even these components are an ugly mess. Even the most hard-core Aquaman devotees will likely find little use for this short, shallow, problematic ramshackle game.  The gameplay is so achingly repetitive that any kind of narrative seems like a moot point.  Though the majority of the non-comic-book-reading populace probably recalls Aquaman as the clean-cut, orange-shirt-wearing Super Friend who could talk to fish, times have changed. In the early '90s, a quick and brutal series of events left Aquaman short one hand, which he replaced with a crazy trident/hook hand. He's also since grown out a majestic mane of hair and a full beard and rarely wears a shirt at all. The story of Battle for Atlantis pits Aquaman against the usual Aquaman-exclusive nemeses, including Black Manta and Lava Lord. The game uses comic-book-style panels in between levels to move the story along, but these story sequences are too boring on their own to draw in your attention, and the gameplay is so achingly repetitive and on the verge of being broken, that any kind of narrative seems like a moot point.  The action in Aquaman goes something like this. Using the onscreen radar, you guide Aquaman through the waters of Atlantis, looking for small, isolated clusters of bad guys. Upon locating and beating up said bad guys, you begin looking for another small, isolated cluster of bad guys, who are also in need of some corporal discipline. That's about it. Sometimes you'll have to locate some kind of item, and sometimes the number of bad guys in the cluster will vary, but the action and the surroundings remain largely unchanged through the length of the game. Perhaps if Aquaman had some really sweet, Devil May Cry-style fighting system, this repetition might be a shade less offensive, but this is not the case. Upon approaching one of the bad-guy clusters, Aquaman will automatically lock on to one of the enemies--sometimes the one closest to you, sometimes not. Aquaman has basic punch, kick, and grab attacks, a half dozen or so combo attacks, and a couple of special moves, including the ability to call in the help of some nearby sea life, but simply mashing on the A button for the duration of the game works sufficiently.   At first, the fighting just seems easy and stupid, but eventually the gameplay reveals itself to be stupid and frustrating, for two key reasons. First, there's the camera, which operates on its own free will during combat and will often position itself in a way that gives you virtually no perspective on the action, and it has a tendency to move violently and randomly. The erratic camera makes the combat even more unbearable by virtue of the control scheme being relative to the position of the camera, which means that whenever the camera moves, the directional control changes, giving you the challenge of constantly rediscovering the control scheme, most often right in the middle of a fight. And it isn't limited to Bizarro-style 'down is up and up is down' kind of crazy--it can also cause down to move left and right to move up. Secondly, while you're engaging a single opponent, his buddies will take the opportunity to shoot at you or sneak up from behind and hold you down while someone else pummels you. You can cycle your focus from one enemy to another using the directional pad, but with no way to expediently target a specific enemy, and without any multitarget attacks, Aquaman just has to tough it out. Out of the 21 levels that make up Battle for Atlantis, there are four where you'll pilot a small attack submarine, usually using it to shoot at other submarines. It's a change of pace and a slightly less agonizing experience than the rest of the game, but it's still rather basic, and ultimately, it's just not enough.  Simply mashing on the A button for the duration of the game works sufficiently.  The city of Atlantis, and the few other locations you'll travel to in Battle for Atlantis, is understandably dark and murky, what with it being at the bottom of the sea. But apparently there aren't actually any people living in the towering, futuristic-looking seascrapers that make up the sunken city, as Aquaman and his foes are the only people you'll see around. You'll see some fish, and in the Xbox version there are some sleek-looking underwater craft that cruise along thoroughfares, but that's it. Yet, despite these relatively simple rendering duties, Battle for Atlantis is rife with graphical hitches. The draw distance, which the game tries to mask with blurry underwater effects, is still noticeably short, especially in the GameCube version. The environments are light on polygonal complexity and feature bland, fuzzy textures, though to its credit, the Xbox version sports slightly cleaner textures, and a little bit more visual flair. Aquaman himself is the best-conceived graphical element of the game and looks and moves reasonably well, but the enemies are brutally repetitive, alternating between robot-crab guy and hot-lava guy, and all of them share the exact same animation routines. Most of the time the game moves at a reasonable frame rate, though there's some truly showstopping choppiness during the submarine sequences. The sound is even more amazingly bad and consists solely of an adventure-toned score and some banal punch-and-kick sounds. Aquaman isn't even given any glib one-liners to spout off, though considering how poorly the rest of the game is executed, this is probably a blessing in disguise.  Despite the fact that Aquaman has always sort of been a B-team DC superhero, the character still feels incredibly short-changed by Battle for Atlantis. TDK is peddling Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis at bargain-basement prices right out of the gate, but with the only redeeming quality of the game being its relative brevity, any price is really too much.  
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91,Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis ,2.3," Even the most hard-core Aquaman devotees will likely find little use for this short, shallow, problematic ramshackle game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/0/2/2217502-box_aquaman.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aquaman-battle-for-atlantis-review/1900-6073168/,neg,"
 Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis is the kind of game that happens when a developer has a license and not much else. The game itself has only the bare minimum requirements necessary to technically be called a game, and even these components are an ugly mess. Even the most hard-core Aquaman devotees will likely find little use for this short, shallow, problematic ramshackle game.  The gameplay is so achingly repetitive that any kind of narrative seems like a moot point.  Though the majority of the non-comic-book-reading populace probably recalls Aquaman as the clean-cut, orange-shirt-wearing Super Friend who could talk to fish, times have changed. In the early '90s, a quick and brutal series of events left Aquaman short one hand, which he replaced with a crazy trident/hook hand. He's also since grown out a majestic mane of hair and a full beard and rarely wears a shirt at all. The story of Battle for Atlantis pits Aquaman against the usual Aquaman-exclusive nemeses, including Black Manta and Lava Lord. The game uses comic-book-style panels in between levels to move the story along, but these story sequences are too boring on their own to draw in your attention, and the gameplay is so achingly repetitive and on the verge of being broken, that any kind of narrative seems like a moot point.  The action in Aquaman goes something like this. Using the onscreen radar, you guide Aquaman through the waters of Atlantis, looking for small, isolated clusters of bad guys. Upon locating and beating up said bad guys, you begin looking for another small, isolated cluster of bad guys, who are also in need of some corporal discipline. That's about it. Sometimes you'll have to locate some kind of item, and sometimes the number of bad guys in the cluster will vary, but the action and the surroundings remain largely unchanged through the length of the game. Perhaps if Aquaman had some really sweet, Devil May Cry-style fighting system, this repetition might be a shade less offensive, but this is not the case. Upon approaching one of the bad-guy clusters, Aquaman will automatically lock on to one of the enemies--sometimes the one closest to you, sometimes not. Aquaman has basic punch, kick, and grab attacks, a half dozen or so combo attacks, and a couple of special moves, including the ability to call in the help of some nearby sea life, but simply mashing on the A button for the duration of the game works sufficiently.   At first, the fighting just seems easy and stupid, but eventually the gameplay reveals itself to be stupid and frustrating, for two key reasons. First, there's the camera, which operates on its own free will during combat and will often position itself in a way that gives you virtually no perspective on the action, and it has a tendency to move violently and randomly. The erratic camera makes the combat even more unbearable by virtue of the control scheme being relative to the position of the camera, which means that whenever the camera moves, the directional control changes, giving you the challenge of constantly rediscovering the control scheme, most often right in the middle of a fight. And it isn't limited to Bizarro-style ""down is up and up is down"" kind of crazy--it can also cause down to move left and right to move up. Secondly, while you're engaging a single opponent, his buddies will take the opportunity to shoot at you or sneak up from behind and hold you down while someone else pummels you. You can cycle your focus from one enemy to another using the directional pad, but with no way to expediently target a specific enemy, and without any multitarget attacks, Aquaman just has to tough it out. Out of the 21 levels that make up Battle for Atlantis, there are four where you'll pilot a small attack submarine, usually using it to shoot at other submarines. It's a change of pace and a slightly less agonizing experience than the rest of the game, but it's still rather basic, and ultimately, it's just not enough.  Simply mashing on the A button for the duration of the game works sufficiently.  The city of Atlantis, and the few other locations you'll travel to in Battle for Atlantis, is understandably dark and murky, what with it being at the bottom of the sea. But apparently there aren't actually any people living in the towering, futuristic-looking seascrapers that make up the sunken city, as Aquaman and his foes are the only people you'll see around. You'll see some fish, and in the Xbox version there are some sleek-looking underwater craft that cruise along thoroughfares, but that's it. Yet, despite these relatively simple rendering duties, Battle for Atlantis is rife with graphical hitches. The draw distance, which the game tries to mask with blurry underwater effects, is still noticeably short, especially in the GameCube version. The environments are light on polygonal complexity and feature bland, fuzzy textures, though to its credit, the Xbox version sports slightly cleaner textures, and a little bit more visual flair. Aquaman himself is the best-conceived graphical element of the game and looks and moves reasonably well, but the enemies are brutally repetitive, alternating between robot-crab guy and hot-lava guy, and all of them share the exact same animation routines. Most of the time the game moves at a reasonable frame rate, though there's some truly showstopping choppiness during the submarine sequences. The sound is even more amazingly bad and consists solely of an adventure-toned score and some banal punch-and-kick sounds. Aquaman isn't even given any glib one-liners to spout off, though considering how poorly the rest of the game is executed, this is probably a blessing in disguise.  Despite the fact that Aquaman has always sort of been a B-team DC superhero, the character still feels incredibly short-changed by Battle for Atlantis. TDK is peddling Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis at bargain-basement prices right out of the gate, but with the only redeeming quality of the game being its relative brevity, any price is really too much.  
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'Aquaman', ""n't"", 'even', 'given', 'glib', 'one-liners', 'spout', ',', 'though', 'considering', 'poorly', 'rest', 'game', 'executed', ',', 'probably', 'blessing', 'disguise', '.', 'Despite', 'fact', 'Aquaman', 'always', 'sort', 'B-team', 'DC', 'superhero', ',', 'character', 'still', 'feels', 'incredibly', 'short-changed', 'Battle', 'Atlantis', '.', 'TDK', 'peddling', 'Aquaman', ':', 'Battle', 'Atlantis', 'bargain-basement', 'prices', 'right', 'gate', ',', 'redeeming', 'quality', 'game', 'relative', 'brevity', ',', 'price', 'really', 'much', '.']",-0.052453898225957085,0.4762225723622783
92,Drive to Survive ,2.3, Drive to Survive will make you want to do neither.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/3/4/9/23241-65349.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/drive-to-survive-review/1900-6164477/,neg,"
  Sometimes with budget-priced games, there's the urge to cut them a little slack for minor performance or design flaws. If the music's kind of lame or the textures look crummy, hey, it's no biggie. It was only like $10. Two hundred nickels just so happens to be the magic number for a fresh copy of Drive to Survive, yet despite its out-of-the-gate, deep-discount price, there will be no slack cut for this aggressively wretched, mostly broken car combat game. No, for Drive to Survive, 10 bucks is 20 bucks too much.   Fun fact: DTS developer Supersonic was also responsible for the nearly unplayable Circuit Breakers for the original PlayStation.   Drive to Survive is a combat racing game similar to last year's Full Auto games, though what it most reminds us of is Atari's 1989 arcade racer Badlands, which was essentially Championship Sprint with guns. You'll do laps around short racetracks while picking up predictable power-ups like machine guns, oil slicks, and landmines, with the usual goal of running your opponents off the road or simply blowing them up. While Full Auto went with super-shiny concept cars and Badlands was all Mad Max, Drive to Survive goes for a toy-car look and feel. It's actually not a bad way to go, and the tiny, primary-colored cars and the flat, simple environments are probably the best things the game have going for it. Actually playing the game, unfortunately, produces such a blinding sheet of white-hot rage that it's difficult to have much appreciation for the game's appearance.    Aside from the shooting-and-driving commonality, what makes Drive to Survive particularly reminiscent of Badlands is the game's poorly conceived camera, which follows your position on the track, but not the direction that you're facing. It feels weird and mechanical, and it's totally counterintuitive for the camera to begin rotating around a corner before you're supposed to actually start turning your car. This, on its own, would take some getting used to--but wait, there's more! The game's most common race type, the battle race, has no set number of laps, and instead requires you to either blow up your opponents or pull far enough ahead of them; and in this mode the game insists on fitting every car onscreen at once, which causes the camera to pull up and away as the distance between the cars increases. Not such a big deal if you're in the back or middle of the pack, but if you're actually winning, your car will be at the very top of the screen, giving you absolutely no way of knowing what lies ahead. It could be a power-up, an explosive barrel, a straightaway, a hairpin turn...who knows? There are other, more traditional lap-based and checkpoint races that don't suffer from the crazy camera-zoom thing, but even then the camera still follows the track instead of your car. Either way, it's as if the game actively hates players who are winning.    Keeping with the whole toy-car motif, the cars you'll drive are all really squirrelly and unpredictable, though not in a zippy, fun way. You'll slide uncontrollably around corners, and slight nudges can cause unreasonable changes in speed and direction. Even though you'll always be driving the exact same car as your opponents, it's not uncommon for any car, including your own, to speed up and slow down at random, as though they've all got serious fuel-valve problems. The computer-controlled opponents have been tuned roughly to ""bag of hammers,"" and have been seen repeatedly launching themselves off the exact same section of track, race after race. Also, the other racers are a real bunch of Chatty Cathys, and an unending barrage of tinny sounding insults is used to mask an otherwise nonexistent sound design. It gets annoying and repetitive right quick, but there's something oddly nonsensical about their attacks on your character, which include ""myopic lemur,"" ""slime puppet,"" ""stump head,"" ""spray-on vomit,"" and our personal favorite, ""Democrat.""   With 15 tracks, eight weapons, and 13 types of cars, DTS offers hours of play for self-loathing masochists.   You can also punish your ""friends"" for their various slights and wrongdoings with Drive to Survive's four-player support. If you're short on controllers or you've really got a grudge, you can try to force them to play using the ""shared controls,"" which has two players using one controller at the same time. It's already weird and uncomfortable to have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with your buddy as you each hold half of a DualShock2, but the real kicker is that the controls still require two hands to use, which means that you'll have a total of four hands fumbling around with the controller at once. That the developer spent time implementing this stupid, stupid feature instead of working on an actually functional camera system almost makes a sick kind of sense.    Drive to Survive seems to have received blissfully limited distribution here in the US, so your chances of accidentally running into it in the wild are fairly slim. Still, should you have a chance encounter with this terrifically bad game, take the safest course of action and simply go the opposite direction.  
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93,Superman Returns: The Videogame ,2.3, Superman Returns for the DS is a terrible game for numerous reasons.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/0/9/2214409-box_smr.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/superman-returns-the-videogame-review/1900-6162928/,neg,"
  As you'd expect, Superman Returns for the Nintendo DS takes the story from the recent film and expands on it by incorporating tangents involving other villains from the DC Comics canon. Sadly, the story is the only aspect that the game comes close to getting right. There's nothing to the board game-style presentation except that it provides another means for you to fail and have to start over, and the action levels that populate the board are badly designed and full of problems that hamper your ability to complete them. To make matters worse, the graphics and audio throughout range from mediocre to downright ugly.   Superman Returns for the DS continues a long legacy of truly atrocious Superman games.   The single-player mode presents Metropolis as the squares on a game board and the various super beings, including Superman, as the pieces on the board. The majority of squares are neutral, but some of them turn into disaster areas when a villain appears. During each turn, you, as Superman, and the bad guys can each move a certain number of squares. The general idea is to clean up the disaster squares and land on the squares occupied by Braniac, Bizarro, and the three other evildoers in order to challenge them to epic battles. Landing on a disaster square or initiating an epic battle will bring up an action stage in a 3D environment where you can put Superman's powers to good use. In the disaster stages, you have to do things like rescue a certain number of civilians, uncover a certain number of explosive trucks with your X-ray vision, or put the freeze on a certain number of henchmen before time runs out. Epic battles, meanwhile, are fistfights between Superman and a super villain, where you have to land punches and kicks by pressing the buttons shown at the proper time. All the while, Metropolis has a health indicator of sorts that ticks down each turn and gets a boost or a jolt depending on whether you succeeded in cleaning up the disaster or winning the battle you were just in.     The board game-style layout is an interesting idea, but there isn't much meat to it. You won't uncover any bonus squares or rewards that you'd look forward to while playing a traditional board game, and, although you can choose where to go, you'll eventually end up tackling all five villains and their 15 related disasters regardless of how you reach them. Clearly, the sole purpose of the game board was to come up with a way to give players a negative outcome. That makes sense in the regard that Superman is invincible in the game, so, since he can't die, his overall success or failure depends on whether or not Metropolis survives. Sensible or not, they could have done something to make traveling the game board more exciting.    Running out of turns and seeing Metropolis perish at the hands of Superman's enemies is actually a common outcome. It isn't that the disasters or epic battles are particularly complicated or difficult. In theory, they ought to be easy. In practice, however, the controls are clunky and slow to respond, and the levels themselves are full of glitches, graphical issues, and bad design decisions that make it tough to complete missions in the limited time provided. Often, it's just that Superman will get stuck up against a building for a couple seconds or a target won't appear until you back up and move forward again. The time limits are nail-biters though, so these sorts of unpredictable time wasters are usually catastrophic. In some instances, the culprit is a bad design choice on the part of the development team. Take the missions in which you have to locate trucks filled with explosives and hurl them into space, for example. You get a time bonus when you find a truck loaded with explosives, but that time bonus is eaten up by the nonskippable cutscene that shows Superman throwing the truck into space. There's also the matter of Bizarro's missions, which are displayed upside down. That's cute, but the disorientation only adds to the frustration brought on by the other problems. About the only positive thing that can be said about gameplay is that Superman's invincibility, strength, and various super abilities are faithfully represented.    Fans of the movie won't get much payoff for suffering through the game. Aside from the missions revolving around Braniac, Bizarro, Metallo, Mongul, and Parasite, there are a few extra missions interspersed at preset intervals that are based on scenes from the film. They're all in-flight missions in which you have to dodge obstacles and reach a goal before time runs out. The cutscenes that are displayed between missions explain in a believable way when these other villains appeared in relation to the events that transpired in the movie, and they incorporate movie imagery and dialogue without skipping a beat, but the amount of movie imagery that's used is miniscule. As it is, the images are all still frames, and the dialogue is purely text. Even though the Nintendo DS is capable of full-motion video and recorded audio, this game features neither.    Overall audiovisual payoff is practically nonexistent, anyway. On the audio end, the music is generic and loops constantly, while a good portion of the limited selection of sound effects are so shrill that they'll probably make you flinch when you hear them. There's no reason why sound effects should sound this painful coming from a Nintendo DS game, especially when the hardware is capable of much better music and recorded speech. Visually, the game board portion is nothing more than some colored squares and character icons, while the third-person stages are characterized by cookie-cutter buildings, streets that look like pudding, and blocky characters that make the earliest PS and Nintendo 64 games seem cutting-edge by comparison. Bizarro has a blocky face and features by nature, but every character, object, and vehicle in this game looks as if it was built out of rectangular blocks bought at a toy store in Bizarro World. Although the stages are small, it's striking just how empty they seem to be. There aren't any cars or people apart from those relevant to the mission, and the only decorations are light poles and trash cans placed sparingly. Incredibly, even though the stages are tiny and the graphics don't push many polygons, the frame rate has a habit of stuttering, which can make it hard to stay focused on what's happening. All in all, this game is an affront to the eyes and ears.    Despite how tough it is to get through the single-player mode, most people will load their save data a few times and eventually reach the story's conclusion in an hour or two. Twenty-five or so missions may seem like a lot, but it really isn't when you consider that most missions take about a minute to complete. The only reason the single-player mode takes as long as it does to finish is that you're forced to play through some missions multiple times thanks to all of the glitches and design gaffes. Besides the main single-player mode, the game also features two multiplayer modes. One is a multiplayer variation of the single-player mode, where as many as four players can compete to see who can control the most territory in Metropolis. When a player lands on a square occupied by another player, the two compete in a disaster showdown or an epic battle to decide control of the square. Mr. Mxyzptlk also appears periodically to pass out trick items that you can use to slow down your opponents. Each player needs his or her own copy of the game to play in this mode. The other multiplayer mode requires only one player to have a cartridge, but it's also fairly limited in that it doesn't feature the board game aspect and offers just a small selection of one-off disaster showdowns. In either case, you probably won't feel compelled to try the multiplayer modes since they're made up of the same cruddy levels from the single-player mode.    Whatever you do, stay away from the Nintendo DS version of Superman Returns. It hurts to play, it hurts to see, and it hurts to listen to. Games based on movies usually aren't very good, but this one is especially crummy.  
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94,Alliance: Future Combat ,2.3, Alliance: Future Combat is less a look at the future and more a history lesson on what not to do when making a real-time strategy game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/4/8/5/26125-73485.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alliance-future-combat-review/1900-6159676/,neg,"
  Settle into a real-time strategy game called Alliance: Future Combat and you naturally expect a little sci-fi. The name of Serbian developer Gameyus Interactive's wannabe epic evokes thoughts of cataclysmic battles taking place many years from now, a feeling emphasized by a box emblazoned with space-age soldiers and jets that look like Vipers, as well as a plot about genetic engineering. But not so fast. All of this ""future combat"" actually takes place in the distant year of 2008. All of the fighting is done by contemporary-looking soldiers and tanks. And the gameplay takes you back in time to the days when RTS programmers had yet to figure out such intricacies as pathfinding, level design, and visual presentation.   DRND terrorists attack under cover of darkness so black that they can't even see each other.   The absurdity of the plot is the least of this game's flaws. And that's saying a lot when you consider that the storyline deals with the United States setting up a secret military base to make genetically enhanced supersoldiers in a new Middle Eastern nation called the Democratic Republic of North Dzombystan (DRND). Granted, there have been goofier stories in other RTS games, and the two campaigns that follow the saga from the perspectives of the US and the DRND are a proven staple of the genre. But no other games have ever tried to present such an outlandish saga taking place a mere 14 months from the present. Gameyus might as well have set the game next Tuesday, robot tanks and all. This absurd saga is all you get, too, as there is no skirmish option (unless you count the ability to replay finished campaign missions) and no multiplayer modes.    At any rate, the ridiculous story doesn't matter much once the game begins, as the plot isn't developed at all. You're given the barest of details when it comes to motivations, and you're typically plopped down in a generic RTS map in each mission and told to go from point A to point B, killing everybody you meet along the way. There is neither resource gathering nor much else to manage, aside from the regular appearance of reinforcements. Instructions are spectacularly vague, though, so it's probably good that the gameplay is so simplistic. Mission commanders appear in little pop-ups at the top of the screen and issue orders that are always either complete nonsense due to the game's translation problems (""Learn few things!""), or so terse that it's better to ignore them entirely and suss objectives out on your own.    But doing so isn't all that easy. Almost all of the maps in Alliance are composed of pixelated, muddy terrain (that, incidentally, looks more like Western Europe than anything in the Middle East) and grimy towns that make it very tough to spot enemy units. Soldiers are so tiny and dark that they vanish into the landscape like camouflage-wearing Waldos. Vehicles like personnel carriers, tanks, and mortar trucks are a bit easier to eyeball but still blend into the background, as they are clothed in slate gray and brown. Many missions take place at night, as well (particularly in the DRND campaign), which doesn't exactly improve the situation.    Making matters even worse, the fog of war has been cranked up so high that it is actually more of a thick pea soup of war. This visibility issue is a one-way street, because it only affects the Americans. Even though the DRND troops remain invisible to you until you're practically falling over them (which makes a bit of sense, as they're supposed to be terrorists), they have no problems spotting you from long range and opening fire. So when playing the Yanks, you're constantly hammered by rockets and machine-gun fire from enemies that you can't see and can't target.   Now there's an armor column that would have given Patton nightmares.   Missions are constructed around these blind ambushes. Levels are typically artificial constructs where you need to follow a winding, narrow path from the start to the finish and deal with lots of enemy units set up to bushwhack you around every turn. Cutting across country is often flat-out impossible, due to impassable terrain (although a lot of these verboten sections sure look like gentle, rolling hills) and atrocious pathfinding. Go off-roading and units instantly start playing demolition derby. They slam into each other, backtrack and stop for no apparent reason, and even ignore commands in tight spots. Coordinating an attack across fields or hills is pretty much hopeless, as is even moving across the map in an orderly fashion. Even if the controls cooperated, there are no formations and no way to make speedy units keep pace with slower ones. So confusion is difficult to avoid unless you micromanage every step of the way. And most missions feature such a staggering number of well-armed enemies (you'll quickly grow to despise the rocket-propelled-grenade-armed rocketeers) that victory is extremely hard to achieve.    Finally, just to rub it in a little bit more, Alliance crashes and/or locks up Windows on every exit and features the most annoying death ""Arggghhhh!"" ever included in an RTS. You don't need to look back from the far-flung future of 2008 to know that this game is going to be remembered as one of the worst of the year.    
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95,DMZ: North Korea ,2.3, A date with Kim Jong II would be more enjoyable than this shooter.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/4/2/2222842-dmz.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dmz-north-korea-review/1900-6164974/,neg,"
  Of all the weird and wacky crimes committed by North Korean despot Kim Jong Il, some of the weirdest and wackiest were the kidnappings of Japanese civilians for such disparate duties as training spies and making movies. Still, that was a pretty good scheme, at least for an evil dictator, because nobody would willingly sign up for a tour of duty in Pyongyang. It's also a tactic that developer Jarhead Games (known for such straight-to-Wal-Mart classics as World War II Sniper: Call to Victory) might want to adopt for DMZ: North Korea, because nobody would willingly play this horrible third-person shooter.   You would think that a covert mission beyond the Korean DMZ might be a bit more, um, covert?   There are so many awful things to discuss here that it's hard to decide where to start. But let's begin with the plot, which is B-movie absurdity at its finest. Whoever came up with this saga about an American commando waging a one-man war against North Korea hasn't opened a newspaper in a few years, as the story deals with discovering whether or not the nation has an ""under the radar"" nuclear-weapons program under way. Yeah, you really need to send in the troops to find that out.    Want more chuckles from the writing? Your code name is ""Loveless."" Every line of dialogue sounds like it was snapped off while chomping a stogie. The opening spiel from your boss back at HQ is all about getting ""intel"" and sneaking around, but by mission three you're calling in air strikes to blow up whole North Korean military bases. Mission information is transmitted to you on a laptop while en route to assignments. In the opening mission, you actually get the particulars while piloting a rubber dinghy to the North Korean coast in the dead of the night. Nothing like putting less time into planning these covert ops needed to save the free world than the average housewife spends on writing up a grocery list. Also, you have to take photos of many major objectives, which doesn't always make sense. It's understandable to snap pictures of a missile, but when you're also grabbing shots of assassinations, either you're a ghoul or somebody back in Washington doesn't trust you.    Of course, even the stupidest story can mask a pretty good game. Alas, DMZ: North Korea's gameplay matches its lame premise and script. While the look has been patterned on Splinter Cell based on the way that Loveless wears a Sam Fisher-style frogman suit and night-vision goggles, the game is a kill-'em-all Rambo affair patterned on the shooter design template circa 1997. So ignore the box-cover images; there is no stealth meter, hence no need to determine if you're invisible in the shadows or as obvious as a sheik in suburbia--as silent as death or as loud as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here you just stomp from point A to point B, throw a few switches, gun down everything that moves, try to act surprised when enemy reinforcements arrive on the way out of Dodge--you know the drill, move along, nothing to see here.    But DMZ doesn't even do a good job of sticking to the basics. There are only a handful of weapons, all of which are dull shooter standards like submachine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, and all come with a rat-a-tat whine that most developers jettisoned with their Ad Lib soundcards. Most are nearly impossible to aim, too. Automatic weapons have such a kick that you can't accurately target enemies unless you're on top of them, and even then you're best off aiming at the ground and letting the recoil do the work for you. You can take a break from the shooting and do some driving, but clunky vehicle controls make it as hard to drive a jeep as it is to hit the broadside of a barn with a combat shotgun.    Artificial intelligence is awful. Enemies run around like idiots whenever a firefight begins. This is a step above other awful shooters where the bad guys act deaf, blind, and paralyzed while you plug them from 10 paces away (although you can shoot the hat off of the odd enemy here without him even flinching), yet still annoying in that they sprint so fast that they outrun bullets. It feels more like you're playing paintball with a bunch of third-rate Flashes than engaging in deadly combat with villainous enemies. At least your foes die superdramatic deaths when the lead finally catches up to them, thanks to an over-the-top use of rag-doll physics.    Visuals add to the problems. Everything in the game is indistinct. Character and vehicle models seem half finished and even oddly surreal, as dying enemies often briefly morph into Mr. Fantastic and flail arms long enough to drag on the ground when dying. Buildings are completely barren. And the satellite-styled overhead map is tough to read, because it consists of mashes of green terrain and colored blobs representing enemy soldiers and objectives.     Maps are often overly long and convoluted, with a lot of dead ends and odd twists and turns making it fairly easy to get lost. Nighttime missions are so pitch black that cranking up the in-game gamma setting does little to lighten the gloom. In the daytime, when you can sort of figure out where you should be going, bloom effects are so extreme that it sometimes looks like everything has already been nuked. A bigger obstacle to getting around properly is the lack of an on-demand save option. Here, there are just console-style automatic saves at checkpoints, and these are often very far apart. Sometimes you have to pass two or three mission objectives just to get a checkpoint.   Loveless was never one to waste time, so he spent a few spare moments on the chopper to North Korea updating his MySpace page.   Last and least, even though it's ridiculous to complain about a terrible game not being long enough, it should still be noted that DMZ: North Korea has an abbreviated solo campaign and no multiplayer. Even if you can manage to struggle through the entire game (Magic 8 Ball says: ""Very doubtful""), you're still going to wrap up your violations of North Korea's sovereignty in no more than six or seven hours. The only thing that will keep you in the glorious republic any longer than that are the bugs that occasionally lock up the game and force a retreat to the desktop and a manual shutdown.    Here's the point in bad-game reviews where a few more putdowns are usually stuffed in. But if you've taken the time to read this far, you've already given DMZ: North Korea more of your life than it warrants, so let's cut this short and just wrap things up. Oh, OK. Here's one more--you can't skip any of the cutscenes, and there are a lot of them.  
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96,Quake ,9.3," If you're into action games, or even if you're not, you should be playing Quake right now - it's as good as PC gaming gets.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/6/2/2212862-dfvgbhnm.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/quake-review/1900-2532549/,pos,"
After generating more hype than any unreleased game in history, Quake is finally here. And it makes good on its promise, big time. With no compromises, no excuses, and no bull, Quake delivers an edge-of-the-seat adrenaline rush that begins the moment you set foot in its darkened halls.  If it sounds like I'm gushing about this game, I am. Quake is a masterpiece on every level, with its ominous atmosphere, silky-smooth animation, incredibly well-balanced gameplay and level design, and unparalleled soundtrack. Once again, the team at id Software has created a no-apologies, ultra-violent gorefest sure to be the new battleground of choice for single and multi-player combatants worldwide. New Gameplay, New Controls The most important distinction between Quake and the drove of first-person action games currently available is that it's set in a true 3-D world. Compared to other titles, Quake's enemies and objects have an entirely new level of depth to them - you can view any game element from any angle with consistently smooth and realistic results. The architecture of the levels is much more sophisticated than it is in competing titles; so are the real-time animations, which include such effects as explosion particles flying in every direction and enormous, spike-like objects shooting out from hidden compartments. The true 3-D environment also allows totally new attack strategies, like bouncing a grenade off a wall in order to blast an opponent skulking around the corner. In Quake, you can attack (or be attacked) from almost any angle or altitude. But gone are the days of merely pointing your gun in the general direction of your enemies and blazing away; if you want to hit something, you're going to have to aim your weapon carefully. That's not as easy as it sounds, because the Quake interface breaks rank with the standard control set of previous id software titles. The new system takes some getting used to, but once learned, provides an unmatched level of control.  A three-button mouse is almost a must, since it allows you to simultaneously move, turn, and fire in any direction. Although it's possible to play with the keyboard or a game pad, most players will find that in underwater and Deathmatch situations, only the mouse will ensure mastery over both the environment and unruly opponents. Killer Weapons, Killer Effects And speaking of unruly opponents, there's only one way to deal with them: violently. Quake sports a wicked complement of weapons--grenade and rocket launchers, shotguns, lightning guns, and a nailgun that's so fun to fire I ran out of ammo just shooting it at the walls. (Note to beginning players: Don't shoot at the walls and run out of ammo until ALL of the monsters are dead.) A host of power-ups are also hidden throughout the game, and collecting them can instantly shift the balance of power both in single and multiplayer battles. These items include the Circle of Protection, which gives you 666 hit points, enough to go toe-to-toe with just about anyone; the Ring of Shadows, which makes you invisible (except for the two glowing eyeballs your enemies can spot floating in space); and Quake Power, a true humdinger that dramatically increases the damage levels of all your weaponry (you can open up a family-size can of whoop-ass on anyone once you've collected this icon). All this is backed by graphics that are awesome in their own right. The creatures that fill the game's four worlds and 28 levels are, as you might expect, sick, twisted, and perverse. The visceral effect of the bloody grimaces and entropic bioforms is intensified by animation that's unusually smooth and utterly convincing. The first time I was attacked by a hook-wielding enemy, I actually dropped the mouse and backed away from the computer. (Second note for beginning players: Don't drop the mouse and back away from the computer until ALL of the monsters are dead...)  The graphics are perfectly complemented by sound effects and ambient tunes from the darker regions of Trent Reznor's musical mind. Simply put, this is the best soundtrack ever created for a computer game. Reznor's eerie sounds and unsettling background music push Quake's already dark and creepy atmosphere into the realm of pure evil. Deathmatch Deluxe Yes,  ""kill, and keep on killing"" is clearly the message here, and with Quake's 28 artfully balanced multiplayer maps, it's a hard message to resist. I spent two days playing against Quake's design team in Deathmatch mode (third note for beginning players: Don't EVER play Quake's designers in Deathmatch mode), and the experience was truly unforgettable. Quake's designers have created Deathmatch environments that reward skill rather than luck, and are filled with nooks and crannies and other lovely places to hide while you wait for the unwitting opponent to stroll by. And if merely killing your opponents isn't enough (and for the guys at id, it apparently isn't), Quake includes a set of extremely debasing death messages - ""Player 1 sucks down Player 2's rocket,"" for example - along with an easy-to-use chat system that enables you to add a few custom pokes of your own. Much more could be said of Quake, but I'll leave the rest for you to discover. The hype surounding this game has been almost unbearable, but in the end, Quake deserves every bit of advance - and until now, unverifiable - praise it has received. If you're into action games, and even if you're not, you should be playing Quake right now - it's as good as PC gaming gets.
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97,Total Annihilation ,9.3, Cavedog has done a commendable job of taking the basic mechanics of real-time strategy and using them to create something new.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/3/5/2210535-ta_box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/total-annihilation-review/1900-2535174/,pos,"
The gaming industry is gearing up to bury consumers under an avalanche of real-time strategy games. Every developer is touting the one or two features that will help its game to ""redefine the genre"" - but the majority of these features do nothing but take away from the precarious balance which made the big two - Warcraft II and Command & Conquer - such runaway hits. At first glance, Total Annihilation, with its much ballyhooed 3D terrain and more than ten dozen units, appears to be nothing more than another in a long line of real-time games with a few minor innovations. But in this case, the innovations work. Cavedog has done a commendable job of taking the basic mechanics of real-time strategy and using them to create something new: A game that relies less on constant mouse-clicking than careful planning and strategic thinking. Initial impressions of Total Annihilation may be misleading. Fire up a campaign and the first few missions will seem like nothing more than another Command & Conquer clone, albeit one with strikingly realistic terrain and a great symphonic score. But as you play deeper into the game, or play a few multiplayer battles or skirmish missions where your opponent is less forgiving, the complexities of the game begin to become apparent. Total Annihilation is a game about balance, from the tightly interwoven resource management scheme to the very diverse units.  It's hard to talk about one without the other, and resource management provides a great tightrope you must walk to keep the army strong, both in numbers and brute force. You need the two resources in the game (metal and energy) to power and build your units. Unfortunately, metal is usually rather scarce in the early parts of a mission (later you can salvage wreckage from destroyed units), but you can build generators to convert energy to metal. This solution to the metal shortage poses another problem entirely: Your units need energy to fire their weapons, and these generators use a great deal of power to produce a small amount of metal. Building a massive army of units is fine, but won't help you much if you don't have enough energy to keep them firing. The units themselves - robotic mechs, vehicles, aircraft, and naval vessels - provide more to the balancing challenge. The stronger units are devastating but require a great deal of power and move very slowly. Large tanks and ships take a great deal of time to simply turn and fire at a target, and large bombers often must traverse the entire length of a map to turn around and make a second run. As a result, you must create balanced forces, small units to hold the enemy while the big guns ready themselves. There's no ""ultimate weapon"" like Red Alert's Mammoth Tank or Warcraft II's Ogre Magi - there are only more powerful weapons that have equally powerful disadvantages. And then there's the Commander, your strongest unit, your fastest builder and possessor of the devastating D-Gun that destroys units with a single shot. The Commander provides another great strategic conundrum - he's your best warrior, but it's risky to send him into battle because once the Commander's gone, the mission is over.  Total Annihilation is full of great features. The 3D terrain - pre-rendered maps with tall mountains and deep valleys - plays an important part in strategy, as units situated at higher elevations have a much wider firing range. Units can take cover behind trees, but these trees - and whole forests - can go up in flames with a single stray shot. When units are destroyed, complete with bass-heavy explosions and a slight shaking of the map, shrapnel flies everywhere, and structures and troops unlucky enough to be hit by the flying debris take damage, adding to the need for strategic placement - just standing and firing at the enemy will cause your units to get destroyed very quickly. Your units gain experience, and with five kills they become veterans with much more accurate firing ability. You can also give units numerous commands at once (simply by holding down the shift key), so that minor tasks can be queued while you go off to worry about more important matters. These types of details make Total Annihilation great, and every time you play you'll discover some subtle little feature that makes you want to change your tactics and try something new.  There are a few small details that could have been improved. The opening missions of the Core campaign are set on a metallic backdrop that is somewhat confusing, making the area in your line of sight and grayed-out; invisible areas look very similar. The manual is a little on the skimpy side, and the lack of any tutorial to demonstrate the game's mechanics seems like an oversight, especially in a game where many players will bring tried-and-true real-time tactics, only to find they're almost completely useless. There's also the lack of a dedicated server for Internet play and the noticeable lack of a scenario editor. Finally, there's the Commander AI bug, which makes the enemy AI send his Commander into battle early on in skirmish missions, causing most to only last a few minutes (Cavedog has promised that a patch for this problem will be released shortly). But in the face of all that is right about Total Annihilation, these minor details are fairly easily overlooked. If you're looking for a real-time strategy game that adds some new features without breaking from the standard formula, Total Annihilation may be too foreign to satisfy your needs. But if you're looking for a game that is challenging and rewarding on entirely new levels, Total Annihilation is highly recommended.
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98,Grim Fandango ,9.3," In addition to being a very good adventure game, it features great writing and beautiful art direction.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/4/9/9/2215499-grim_fandango_artwork.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grim-fandango-review/1900-2537300/,pos,"
Adventure game designers face a difficult task. The genre is by its very nature linear and serves primarily to tell stories, but without puzzles, there's no game. Combining these two elements is the challenge. The story must be intricate and engaging enough to make the inclusion of puzzles seem plausible, and the puzzles must be clever enough to not jump out as an artificial roadblock for the story. It's the rare game that meets one of these goals, let alone both. But Grim Fandango, the latest from Tim Schafer of Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle fame, achieves this delicate combination and more. In addition to being a very good adventure game, it features great writing and beautiful art direction.  Grim Fandango is based upon Mexican folklore, set in the land of the dead. You play Manny Calavera, employee of the Department of Death and travel agent to newly dead souls who are just setting out on the treacherous four-year journey to the ninth underworld. Employees of the DOD, as it is called, are souls who must work off debts from their previous lives in order to earn their own passage to the final resting place. To pay off the debts, agents must accrue a certain number of premium souls, those of the virtuous who have earned more pleasant means of passage, the ultimate of which is the Number Nine, a bullet-train that makes the journey in a more desirable four days. But Manny is down on his luck. His clients never qualify for the premium packages. And even when he meets one that does, the saintly Mercedes Colomar, he can't seem to find a suitably saintly mode of transportation, reluctantly setting her off on foot into the dangerous world beyond. But Colomar's case will lead Manny to the discovery that all is not as it seems in the DOD, and he will set out on his own journey to set things right. The game follows four years of Manny's afterlife as he travels through a variety of fantastic locales, searching for Mercedes and the real source of corruption. You will lead Manny through the city of El Marrow, the port town Rubacava, a mining colony at the edge of the world, and the gates of the ninth underworld itself. Each location is distinct, with its own atmosphere and interesting characters. The visual design is consistently great, drawing upon various Latin American sources, such as angular Aztec stonework and the stylized Day of the Dead skeletons, and using them to create modern buildings and vehicles such as cruise ships and casinos. The sound is equally impressive, with great voice acting, distinct sound effects, and a diverse and subtle score by Peter McConnell which ranges from mariachi to jazz. But the writing is where Grim Fandango earns the most praise. Parodying film noir cliches has become a cliche unto itself, and Grim Fandango thankfully avoids the obvious. This isn't just a faux Sam Spade mystery. Instead, the game draws upon darker and more complex sources, with Chinatown, Casablanca, and even David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross lurking in its shadows. And there are very few jokes in the game, but it is funny. It derives its humor from its situations and characters (such as Manny's oversized sidekick, Glottis) without making fun of itself, helping to create a believable world. The puzzles help to maintain this believability. While traditional in nature, they are worked into the storyline well. And they are varied, both in style and difficulty. For the most part, you'll have a series of known objectives to complete before moving on to the next locale. These objectives are complex, though, and often the solutions will have multiple parts. You'll undoubtedly be stumped more than once, but the solutions are logical and subtle clues are plentiful.  Grim Fandango is not a typical LucasArts adventure. It's the first from the company to dispense with traditional 2D animation and move to the more cinematic 3D style made popular with Infogrames' Alone in the Dark games, and also utilized in Origin Systems' underrated Bioforge. It uses a keyboard-driven interface instead of the traditional point-and-click, and Manny signals significant objects by turning his head and looking as he passes by. Grim Fandango overcomes the major problems with this style, so only rarely will you be frustrated by disorienting camera-angle switching or feel lost because of an obscure exit. It would be remiss to avoid mention of Grim Fandango's minor technical faults (such as the strange behavior exhibited by almost every elevator in the game). But these are unfortunate drawbacks to an otherwise great game. The one real problem with Grim Fandango is that the end comes too soon. This isn't because it's too short (it should take most a good two- to three-dozen hours), but because the designers have created a rich world that you won't want to leave, filled with memorable characters that are hard to say goodbye to. Don't be surprised if you're sad when it's over.
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99,Myth II: Soulblighter ,9.3, Myth II is about as good as a computer game can possibly be.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/6/6/2218966-myth_ii_box__large_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/myth-ii-soulblighter-review/1900-2542747/,pos,"
It would have been easy for Bungie to just leave things alone after Myth: The Fallen Lords. The game was a huge hit, met with critical acclaim at nearly every turn, and continues to be one of the most popular multiplayer games on the Internet. But thankfully for gamers, Bungie went back to the drawing board to craft a bigger, better Myth. Thus was born Myth II: Soulblighter, a game with the untainted heart and soul of its predecessor, along with slicker graphics, better gameplay, enhanced multiplayer options, a vastly improved interface, and a pair of powerful editing tools. Basically, Bungie left no stone unturned in its quest to improve an already solid product. As a result, Myth II is about as good as a computer game can possibly be. The game takes players to a time 60 years after the events of the original Myth, when peace reigns and the once busy Legion has very little to worry about. But this pleasant state of affairs is about to change. Responding to reports of brigands terrorizing a small village, a small group of warriors stumbles across a much bigger problem: Undead creatures are popping up all over and, even worse, the Fallen Lord named Soulblighter is behind it all. The single-player campaign comprises 25 missions, each of which is remarkably well designed and - on the harder difficulty levels especially - enormously challenging. Scenarios range from simple skirmishes and NPC escorts to the infiltration of a massive keep and even some indoor missions. Fans of the original game's Shadow of the Mountain level will love Myth II's The Great Library and Redemption levels, along with a number of other great defensive missions. The coolest (and creepiest) level in the game is one in which you must make your way through a haunted dungeon, where friendly and hostile ghosts appear and disappear without warning. One of the other memorable missions sees you wading ashore to silence the cannons of a nearby keep, all while hordes of Soulless rain their spears down on you. Another has you and your troops racing for the last bridge to safety, which you must then destroy to keep your pursuing enemy at bay. Bridge? Keep? Yes, Myth II makes extensive use of large buildings and interactive terrain to liven up the 3D battlefield. During the game, you'll run across massive fortifications, destructible bridges, a working drawbridge, a ship, a windmill, and a slew of other eye-popping items. The enhanced 3D engine also supports a number of other new features, colored lighting and shadows, and an underlying terrain mesh that's four times finer than the one used by Myth. The result is a smoother-looking game with more realistic settings. Other, more subtle features like the increased ambient life also help to create a more realistic environment. Chickens peck around in the villages, deer bound through the forest, and various birds soar overhead on most maps. Of course, you're not limited to looking at these creatures, you can interact with them as well (meaning that you can blow up most of them). The ambient sounds are also enhanced in Myth II. Between the sounds of wildlife in the background and Dwarven bottles exploding, there was never a moment of silence in the game. If you listen carefully, you'll even hear some really funny chatter among your human enemies (the whole bit about the world's biggest turnip had me cracking up). The music that plays during the great narrative premission screens is outstanding, but I never noticed any music at all during the missions. This was a little disappointing, but I can't say that it really detracted much from the gameplay. Although the animated cutscenes in Myth looked good, they were too brief and cryptic to convey much of a story. The Bungie developers must have agreed, because they went out and hired a new animation studio to do the Myth II cinematics. The results are astounding. The cutscenes are still brief, but they look fantastic, and you can always tell what the heck is happening - or at least what is being implied. As with most sequels, Myth II is chock full of new units on both sides of the battlefield. Dwarven mortars, Samurai-like Heron Guards, and friendly Trow will all chip in for your cause. There are no forest giants this time around, but believe me, the Trow more than make up for that loss. The rest of your forces comprises the familiar warriors, berserkers, and dwarves. The archers are still there also, but they now have the added (and extremely cool) ability to shoot fire arrows that ignite the countryside where they land. Soulblighter's forces include familiar foes like the Thrall, Soulless, Ghol, and Fetch. A few new and dangerous enemies have joined the ranks as well, including the werewolf-like Myrkridia, the fireball-hurling warlock, the pig-like Maul, and the black-armored Stygian Knights. The AI and pathfinding for all units has been improved, so your troops don't mill about endlessly when they can't reach their initial destinations. There are some glitches with Myth II's pathfinding, such as the ludicrous conga line your warriors form while chasing down an enemy unit, but for the most part, units move and behave much more intelligently than in Myth. Myth II's interface and controls are also more intelligent than those we saw in the original Myth. Players who found the keyboard camera controls confusing in Myth can now move and rotate the camera angle simply by moving the mouse. I personally found this more confusing than the old method (which you can still use), but there are undoubtedly some gamers who will welcome the mouse option. A handy control bar now runs alongside the bottom of the screen, providing easy access to commonly used commands and unit formations. Also, you can tell a unit's health status simply by passing the mouse over it. Formation facing is much, much simpler than that clunky ""gesture click"" system - you can either turn your troops with the left and right arrow keys, or hold the mouse button to turn your troops at will (an arrow appears on the screen to help you line up the troops properly). Perhaps the biggest interface improvement, however, is the addition of well-written, easily understood mission objectives at the beginning of each and every mission. No more stumbling around the woods looking for the mystery goal - all your objectives are clearly spelled out, plus you can even look over a few mission-specific tips to help get you through each level. For those who found some of the levels in the original game far too difficult, Myth II features a vastly improved set of difficulty levels. These are well stepped and let gamers of any talent and interest level jump in and enjoy the world of Myth II. Kudos to Bungie for making the game so approachable for novice players without sacrificing the challenge hard-core gamers crave (and those higher difficulty settings can be pretty damn hard). Hard-core Myth fans will also appreciate the improved multiplayer support in Myth II. The game offers a ton of new multiplayer features (such as player alliances) and scenarios (several of which involve the aforementioned ambient life in strange and unusual roles). Bungie.net has also been updated, and the performance of games over Bungie's free service seems faster and more reliable in general. Rounding out this epic game are two of the tools Bungie used to create the game. Fear and Loathing are powerful editors that players can use to craft their own missions and maps. Though you'll need some practice to master these complex utilities, they can be used to create and modify Myth II levels in just about any way imaginable. These tools should certainly prove popular to the thousands of devoted Bungie.net users, as the service lets players easily exchange custom maps. Myth II does have a few minor problems, but nothing that detracts seriously from the overall gameplay. An automatic save between missions would be a welcome addition. This is a common enough option in most strategy games and would eliminate the need to save your game at the beginning (or end) of every mission. Also, though a fairly thorough briefing prefaces each mission, it would be nice to get at least a hint of which direction you should move on some missions. The Deceiver was a particularly confusing level, with bad guys on all sides, and the proper path was difficult to spot. Lastly, the game did crash a few times while loading up a new level, but infrequently. Bungie basically improved all the good features in Myth; added a number of gameplay, multiplayer, and graphical enhancements; and then threw in some slick and powerful editing tools to boot. The end result is one of the best games to be released this year, and one that should easily find a home in any serious gamer's library.
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'life', 'strange', 'unusual', 'roles', ')', '.', 'Bungie.net', 'also', 'updated', ',', 'performance', 'games', 'Bungie', ""'s"", 'free', 'service', 'seems', 'faster', 'reliable', 'general', '.', 'Rounding', 'epic', 'game', 'two', 'tools', 'Bungie', 'used', 'create', 'game', '.', 'Fear', 'Loathing', 'powerful', 'editors', 'players', 'use', 'craft', 'missions', 'maps', '.', 'Though', ""'ll"", 'need', 'practice', 'master', 'complex', 'utilities', ',', 'used', 'create', 'modify', 'Myth', 'II', 'levels', 'way', 'imaginable', '.', 'These', 'tools', 'certainly', 'prove', 'popular', 'thousands', 'devoted', 'Bungie.net', 'users', ',', 'service', 'lets', 'players', 'easily', 'exchange', 'custom', 'maps', '.', 'Myth', 'II', 'minor', 'problems', ',', 'nothing', 'detracts', 'seriously', 'overall', 'gameplay', '.', 'An', 'automatic', 'save', 'missions', 'would', 'welcome', 'addition', '.', 'This', 'common', 'enough', 'option', 'strategy', 'games', 'would', 'eliminate', 'need', 'save', 'game', 'beginning', '(', 'end', ')', 'every', 'mission', '.', 'Also', ',', 'though', 'fairly', 'thorough', 'briefing', 'prefaces', 'mission', ',', 'would', 'nice', 'get', 'least', 'hint', 'direction', 'move', 'missions', '.', 'The', 'Deceiver', 'particularly', 'confusing', 'level', ',', 'bad', 'guys', 'sides', ',', 'proper', 'path', 'difficult', 'spot', '.', 'Lastly', ',', 'game', 'crash', 'times', 'loading', 'new', 'level', ',', 'infrequently', '.', 'Bungie', 'basically', 'improved', 'good', 'features', 'Myth', ';', 'added', 'number', 'gameplay', ',', 'multiplayer', ',', 'graphical', 'enhancements', ';', 'threw', 'slick', 'powerful', 'editing', 'tools', 'boot', '.', 'The', 'end', 'result', 'one', 'best', 'games', 'released', 'year', ',', 'one', 'easily', 'find', 'home', 'serious', 'gamer', ""'s"", 'library', '.']",0.1097651236118088,0.52148278363748
100,Madden NFL 2000 ,9.3, Fans of the series will undoubtedly call Madden NFL 2000 the best incarnation of the series thus far.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/0/8/6/2215086-box_madd2000.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2000-review/1900-2548187/,pos,"
Madden football is back once again, and it has more features and options than ever before. With the new play editor, Madden Challenge feature, and faster gameplay, fans of the series will undoubtedly call Madden NFL 2000 the best incarnation of the series thus far.  The game is by far the best version of Madden football on the PlayStation yet. Madden NFL 2000 features the usual array of game modes, like exhibition, season, franchise, create-a-player, and so on, and it includes the full NFL license with all the teams and players. EA beefed up the franchise mode by allowing you to play up to thirty consecutive seasons with statistical tracking for your dynasty. Along with statistics this year are fluctuating player attributes that allow players to have hot and cold streaks. A player in a slump will fumble the ball more often than someone who's in the zone and catching everything you throw at him. This little feature really makes you pay close attention - if one of your guys is going through a rough time, you'll know to avoid giving him the ball. In addition to these extras Madden NFL 2000 has three really big new features - a play editor, arcade mode, and the Madden Challenge. The play editor is rather nifty; it lets you create your own plays by assigning each player his own route and/ or command. The editor doesn't really let you make any crazy plays, but it does let you do just about anything within reason. While the play editor is an enjoyable extra that is sure to keep football fanatics busy for quite awhile I'd like to see it become a little easier to use next year. The arcade mode really isn't anything special - the only noticeable differences are superficial things like a weird glow that surrounds a player when you press the turbo button. Plus, just about every hit results in a dramatic animation of a player flying through the air as though he had been hit by a car.   The Madden Challenge feature is by far the best new thing about the series. The Madden Challenge is just that - a bunch of specific objectives that are outlined for you. For instance, you must complete a pass for thirty or more yards, complete three passes to three different receivers, and hold a team in a game at seven or fewer points. Once you complete one of these goals in a game a little icon comes up on the screen to let you know. At the end of the game it tells you which ones you completed and what secrets you may have unlocked for completing them. The secrets include hidden teams, bonus stadiums, and modes like more injuries. This new feature really adds fun to the game. Sure, for the average football fan Madden football is fun enough, but with these little extra objectives you'll really want to keep playing to see what you can unlock.  In terms of gameplay, M2K feels pretty much the way a Madden football game should, although with a distinctly tighter feel this year. The controls are extremely responsive and match up with the game's onscreen visuals quite well. The analog stick really lets you put your player right where you want him, when you want him there.The AI of the computer is actually quite easy on the regular setting, although for us Madden veterans, if you crank the difficulty up, the AI kicks in and plays a bit more aggressively. The receivers and cornerbacks play the ball well and really make you battle to get a hand on the ball, whether you're playing defense or offense. The running game of the computer is strong, although every once in a great while the running back will get stuck behind one of his own guys. While this is annoying it is literally one of the only flaws in the game, and it happens very rarely. Visually, the players look a little blocky and basic, but the frame rate of the game and the animations of the players running, catching, and tackling more than make up for it. The game moves at a brisk pace and captures the feeling of fast, furious, hard-hitting football action like never before. The player models are scaled differently, so that the linemen are bigger than the receivers and quarterbacks, giving the game a more authentic look than before. Madden 2000 also delivers authenticity in the audio department as well. Pat Summerall once again calls all the play-by-play action along with John Madden, who, of course, provides his unique color commentary. The calls and commentary are usually right-on, although every once in a while you'll here something from John that doesn't fit the situation at all. In addition to the chatter during gameplay, Madden, Summerall, and sports announcer James Brown do a quick little TV-styled pregame show. It should be noted that when you play the game in the new arcade mode, a different announcer takes the mike. It should be noted that when you play the game in the new arcade mode, a different announcer takes the mike, and it's actually the guy who belts out the ""EA Sports! It's in the game!"" slogan at the beginning of every EA sports title. His dialog isn't so good, but the full-motion video opening sequence features a surprisingly good rap ditty that will have you chanting the song's chorus: ""Whatcha want? The rock in the palm of my hand? Whatcha got? I got John Madden!""  Overall, Madden 2000 is the most fun I've had playing a Madden game in a long time. The control and new Madden Challenge mode alone are reasons to pick this game over the competition. I still prefer the total-control passing of NFL Gameday 2000, but I must admit that in the end I had more fun playing Madden. Madden 2000 just has a great feel to it. I've been a Gameday fan for awhile, but this year I have to pick Madden over Gameday.
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101,Conker's Bad Fur Day ,9.3," The premise of the game is gimmicky, but after its sordid skin is peeled away, a true gem of a 3D platformer is revealed.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/6/4/2214164-box_conkerbfd.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/conkers-bad-fur-day-review/1900-2691677/,pos,"
Nintendo has come a long way since it refused to allow blood in the SNES version of Mortal Kombat. For better or worse, this sort of content decision has earned Nintendo the reputation as the Disney of the video game industry. While parents know they can trust Nintendo to provide good clean fun for their children, the spend-happy over-18 market has instead found solace in the PlayStation's wide selection of games intended for adults. Hoping that it's not too late to change public perception, the Nintendo 64 now features the most boundary-pushing piece of software ever to hit a video game console: Conker's Bad Fur Day. Conker is a squirrel that looks just like any other character from previous Nintendo games. But underneath his cordial exterior lies a trash-mouthed rodent with a penchant for booze, wild women, and lewd conduct. Conker's twisted tale begins at his local bar, where he tosses back a few too many drinks with his war-bound friends before stumbling out into the rainy night. Drunken, confused, and vomiting profusely, Conker becomes lost and eventually blacks out. When he comes to his senses, he finds himself in a world unlike he, or anyone else for that matter, has ever seen before--a world full of gutter-mouthed cogs, LSD-dropping demons, bosses with giant testicles, and a panther king that rules minions of seemingly inept weasels. It's a demented world, and Conker's only desire is to somehow escape and catch up with his girlfriend, Berri. While little more than just a setup for the game's content, the story makes no sense until the end of the game, when several plot twists help to explain things a bit. In the early going, Conker's BFD indulges heavily in lurid situations that provide some genuine belly laughs. Throughout the course of the game, you'll see an opera-singing boss made entirely out of crap, graphic depictions of morose scenarios (like a firing squad), and furry creatures being ripped in half or blown to bits. At first, it all seems surreal. After the initial shock wears off, the humor becomes contrived at times. Nonetheless, Conker's BFD is like a good book. You can't wait to turn the page and find out what happens next. Blood, guts, feces, and swearing dominate the subject matter, and the game's design is targeted squarely at adults as well as children. Instead of having to collect exorbitant amounts of items and figure out where to use them, context-sensitive pads give them to you when you need them. Standing on the pads and pressing the B-button awards Conker with one-use items, special costumes, and extra abilities. Although you may meander virtually anywhere you choose, the game progresses in a linear fashion. Another one of the game's aspects, which will appeal to the older crowd, is the dead-on movie spoofs that pop up with alarming regularity. One portion mimics the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan right down to the soldier-looking-for-his-arm bit. Scenes from The Terminator, The Godfather, The Matrix, and many more also get the Conker treatment. While it's really nothing new for the genre, the gameplay variety in Conker's BFD is excellent. In addition to the traditional jump, climb, swim, fly, and attack staples of 3D platformers, there are first-person shooting levels, racing levels, some simple puzzle elements, and plenty of minigames. The game reveals its heritage through some of the objectives, like carrying objects through gauntlets, which would be right at home in Banjo-Tooie. The platforming elements can be difficult at times thanks to a stubborn camera, but the majority of problems come from figuring out what to do instead of actually doing it. When compared with games like Banjo-Tooie, the linearity of Conker's BFD cuts its length considerably.After the one-player mode is completed, there are seven multiplayer modes to explore for up to four players. Along with several forms of third-person deathmatch with a healthy arsenal, the tanks mode lets players blow each other to bits while they attempt to capture and detonate a bomb. The stereotypical race mode provides two variations of the same course for kart racing mayhem while the cool but dull raptor mode splits players into two teams. One team must try to steal dinosaur eggs from the raptors while the raptors attempt to stop them. In the frenetic heist mode, all four players play as armed weasels attempting to obtain a lone sack of money. The beach mode is the most fun of all the multiplayer modes. One team must storm the beach while the other team defends the beach with gun towers. While the extra modes do add some longevity to Conker's BFD, the majority of them fail to stand the test of time. Rare pulls every graphical trick out of its book for Conker's BFD. It makes other Nintendo 64 games look like 16-bit software. From the incredible multicolored real-time lighting that illuminates each area to the real-time shadow that mocks Conker's every step, Rare's final Nintendo 64 game is the console's most visually impressive. The game contains almost two hours of real-time cinemas, with fully animated character faces that mimic streaming dialogue with precise detail. Conker's limitless facial expressions accurately convey the rodent's feelings on the fly whether he's determined, sad, or angry. The levels are enormous and never suffer from draw-in--no matter how far away the horizon may be. While the texture work is mediocre in the early areas, it gradually improves as you keep playing. Conker's BFD pushes the N64 to its graphical limit. This becomes painfully obvious when the frame rates bog down while you enter outdoor areas. If you were able to tolerate it in Perfect Dark and Banjo-Tooie, Conker's BFD's dodgy frame rates won't be a problem. Another issue is a stubborn camera, which sometimes gets caught on objects or refuses to obey commands. The audio in Conker's BFD matches the high standards set by its graphics. The Dolby Surround Sound provides rumbling bass and ear-piercing highs. There are literally dozens of sounds just for Conker's footsteps. Whether he's running on carpet, wood, concrete, metal grating, or dung, the sounds emitted make the surface immediately recognizable without the need for visual clues. The profanity-riddled voice acting brings the entire game together. Some of the more ambitious phrases are bleeped out, but it's never too difficult to decipher what's really being said. The writing can be extremely clever at times, but the voice acting develops the characters more than anything else. As with all its previous Nintendo 64 games, Rare has included an interactive soundtrack that gradually mutates as you move from one area to the next. The songs are catchy, and some feature farting noises played at different octaves for that BFD touch. In all, the sound doesn't get any better than this on the Nintendo 64.   While it's far too late in the game to revitalize interest in the Nintendo 64 among adults, Conker's Bad Fur Day gives third-party publishers the green light to do whatever they like on the GameCube. The premise of the game is gimmicky, but after its sordid skin is peeled away, a true gem of a 3D platformer is revealed. The pacing is perfect, the gameplay is varied and predominantly tight, and technically, it has no match on the Nintendo 64. The main drawback is the game's relatively short length. It comes to an end rather quickly, and most will be able to finish it during a solid weekend of playing. While it lasts, Conker's Bad Fur Day is a wild ride well worth taking.


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102,Final Fantasy X ,9.3," If you've been waiting for the definitive role-playing game for the PlayStation 2, here it is.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/9/8/2214498-box_ff10.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/final-fantasy-x-review/1900-2832771/,pos,"
Square's Final Fantasy series is one of the longest running, most prolific, most critically acclaimed lines of games ever. That means each new installment in the series needs to be exceedingly good--since the company has outdone itself on so many occasions, millions of fans expect each new Final Fantasy to be even better than all its predecessors. Whether they truly end up better is the subject of never-ending debate among Final Fantasy fans, but one thing is certain: Each new Final Fantasy game is a momentous occasion.  Final Fantasy X features a brand-new cast of characters... It's been crystal clear for months that Final Fantasy X would be no exception. Countless screenshots, movie files, and bits of information have propagated all over the Internet, revealing the game's stunning good looks and much of its back story. Of course, it isn't enough for Final Fantasy X to look good--since it's Square's first role-playing game for the PlayStation 2, it's reasonable to expect Final Fantasy X to improve upon every aspect of the series beyond just the graphics. The good news is that, by and large, that's exactly what it does. Overall, Final Fantasy X is a remarkably well done role-playing game that offers plenty of just about everything that's ever been good about the series. At the same time, it takes the series in interesting new directions and refines many of the series' most important elements, such as the turn-based combat and the character-advancement system. Perhaps even more importantly, Final Fantasy X weaves an engrossing, memorable story filled with a number of great characters. Beyond that, it's a very challenging game that's even longer than most any of its predecessors and is certainly longer than most other PlayStation 2 games. If you've been waiting for the definitive role-playing game for the PlayStation 2, here it is.   Recent games in the Final Fantasy series have followed a tried-and-true formula, and for the most part, Final Fantasy X follows it too. That is, like its predecessors, this isn't a game you can play for a few minutes at a time. Much of the game revolves around epic, drawn-out battles between your party of characters and Final Fantasy X's gigantic, villainous monsters. Much of the game consists of your having to watch lengthy noninteractive story sequences, in which the game's plot gradually unravels in the conversations between Final Fantasy X's protagonists. Much of Final Fantasy X is purely optional--though the game will take you no fewer than 40 hours to complete the first time through, you could easily spend twice as long exploring some of its late-game side quests and searching for suitably rewarding secrets. Not every player will be willing or even prepared to spend this much time with the game, and it's more than likely that not everyone will even be able to finish the game, either. So if you're a hard-core fan of the series and are wondering whether Square is loosening the reigns, dumbing Final Fantasy down to make it accessible to an even broader audience, then rest assured that's definitely not the case.  ...and a refined version of the series' signature turn-based combat. On the other hand, if you haven't played much Final Fantasy before, then don't feel too intimidated by Final Fantasy X. It's easy to get into and includes plenty of good tutorial information built right into the game. As long as you're ready to commit some time and energy to it, then Final Fantasy X is a perfectly good place for new players to get acquainted with the series. Like all Final Fantasy games, this one's plot is completely unrelated to any of its predecessors, although series fans will appreciate all the subtle references to the previous games.   The visual style of Final Fantasy X most closely resembles that of Final Fantasy VIII for the PlayStation, which was the first game in the series to give its characters a more lifelike appearance instead of a cartoonlike one. The hero of Final Fantasy X is Tidus, a teenager all decked out in decidedly garish clothes and sporting bleached, feathered hair. Unlike many Final Fantasy protagonists, Tidus apparently isn't a shy, stoic youth, but rather an outgoing, cheerful person. You might not take a liking to him right off the bat--he's a jock and can be a bit arrogant--but in time, you'll find him to be suitably endearing and to have the same kind of surprising depth that's characterized past Final Fantasy heroes.Soon into the game, you'll meet Tidus' companions, who will generally remain by his side throughout the duration of Final Fantasy X. These include Auron, a veteran swordsman whose stolid demeanor doesn't quite disguise that he clearly knows much more than he lets on; Wakka, a big guy with a big heart, who quickly befriends Tidus; Lulu, a sultry yet emotionless magic user; Rikku, an upbeat girl with a mysterious heritage; Yuna, a beautiful and determined young summoner; and Kimahri, a silent creature that's like a cross between a man and a lion--only bluer. You'll learn much about all these characters over the course of Final Fantasy X, though some are developed better than others. Still, Final Fantasy X is a long game and takes plenty of time to flesh out its diverse cast of characters.  Final Fantasy X is one of the longest games in the series. Character advancement is one of the defining aspects of any role-playing game, and Final Fantasy X uses an interesting system for it that's rather different from that of most such games. Instead of gaining experience levels as you win battles, you gain points that you then use on what's called the sphere grid. The sphere grid is like a large board-game map, though it looks more like a maze. At almost every step of the grid, you'll find points that raise attributes such as strength, hit points, magic power, agility, and more and other points that teach new spells and new special abilities. Characters start out at different points on the grid, and the surrounding area on the grid will roughly correspond to their inherent talents. For instance, Auron will often reach points that increase his strength and defense ratings, accentuating his skills as a swordsman. Lulu will start closest to where all the powerful, damaging black-magic spells reside. Yuna will be your primary healer. There are points where the sphere grid branches off, and you can look for these and plan ahead to develop your characters in a particular fashion. Also, some points of the sphere grid are initially locked, and you won't be able to access them until you gain certain items later in the game. This keeps your party balanced commensurately with the game's challenges. Throughout most of the game, the sphere grid will ensure that each character's role within the group is well defined. Also, since you gain sphere grid points after almost every battle, you'll find that Final Fantasy X's character-advancement system is constantly rewarding--you'll just keep getting stronger.  The sphere grid is where you'll improve your characters' stats. The sphere grid isn't the only way to build up your characters. You'll eventually gain the ability to add special properties to your weapons and armor, though most equipment you'll find will have particular properties already ascribed. For instance, one weapon might let you automatically counterattack the foe each time you're hit. Another stands a chance of inflicting a deadly poison on the enemy or causing it to fall asleep. Certain types of armor can make you immune to debilitating effects such as blindness, petrifaction, or confusion. Others can make you resistant to elemental effects such as fire and ice. There's an immense amount of variety here, though most of these properties will be familiar to those who have played previous Final Fantasy games. Beyond their special properties, weapons and armor unfortunately have little purpose in Final Fantasy X, as your characters' equipment doesn't really affect their attack and defense ratings as you might expect. Still, there's a lot of strategy to be found in using different equipment--you can even switch weapons or armor in the middle of battle if you have to.   Combat in Final Fantasy X looks similar to that of other games in the series but features a few key innovations that make it more involved. You can have up to three characters active at a time--down from Final Fantasy IX's four-character teams. However, any time it's your turn, you can swap your active party member for one of his or her friends who's not currently fighting--so essentially, you have seven characters in battle and not just three. The game is still balanced for three-character teams, since you can only swap in a new party member during one of your character's turns, and you can't replace someone who's been knocked out or incapacitated unless you revive him or her first. Likewise, if all three of your active characters should be defeated, it's game over.This system may not make logical sense--why don't the characters on the sidelines just do something as their friends are getting beaten down?--but it helps make the combat very tactical. Two factors contribute to this: The first is that many weapons have an innate ability to detect how many hit points your enemies have remaining, thus preventing you from having to fight blindly, with no indication of how close you are to victory. The second is that Final Fantasy X gives you the prescience to see the order in which all the combatants are going to act in subsequent turns. This ability, together with the ability to switch characters on the fly--this doesn't even cost you your character's turn--means you can try to anticipate your enemy's move and swap each of your uniquely different characters into and out of battle as necessary.  Extremely detailed 3D character models bring the game to life. You'll probably notice that some of your characters seem more powerful than others. The game suitably justifies this in context--Auron is supposed to be the best fighter in the group, and he is. Every character does have his or her own useful abilities, though it's still too bad that you'll probably have to rely on certain characters much more than others. In any event, a character won't gain experience from battle unless he or she actually does something during the fight, so it's in your best interest to make sure everyone sees some action. Besides, you won't have access to all seven characters in every single situation.   As mentioned, the battles in Final Fantasy X are quite drawn out, in part because--much like in the last few games in the series--you'll often depend on powerful summoned creatures to assist you in battle. They are known in Final Fantasy X as aeons. Only Yuna is capable of calling forth these creatures, and she will learn to summon more of them (including old Final Fantasy standbys such as Ifrit, Shiva, and Bahamut) over the course of the game. Each time she summons an aeon, it makes an extremely dramatic entrance--after you've seen these animations several times, you may wish to toggle the option to cut them short. Unlike summoned creatures in previous Final Fantasy games, aeons aren't just overblown magic spells, but instead act just like characters in your party--you have complete control over them, and they have their own skills, special abilities, and statistics. Later on, you'll even gain the power to boost your aeons' statistics and teach them new abilities, though doing so is costly and not really necessary.  Your summoned ally Bahamut is back and is as impressive as ever. Aeons are extremely important in battle, not just because they're powerful, but because they take the place of (and thus take damage in place of) your characters whenever you summon them. Late in the game, when you're dealing with incredibly powerful foes, you'll often have to summon one of your aeons just so it can ""take one for the team."" After all, if your characters get wiped out, it's game over, but if your aeon is defeated, your characters jump back in. As for the aeon, you just can't use it again until you automatically restore it to health at one of Final Fantasy X's countless save points, conveniently located throughout the game. Overall, there aren't quite as many aeons in Final Fantasy X as there have been summoned creatures in the last few Final Fantasy games. But since aeons are much more fully developed here, it's a good trade-off.   Clearly, there's a lot to be said for the combat of Final Fantasy X. And though combat is a major part of the game, it's by no means the focus. In fact, long stretches of Final Fantasy X involve little or no combat at all. The context of Final Fantasy X revolves around Tidus and the others traveling with Yuna on a fateful pilgrimage to various temples. It's at these temples where Yuna gains new aeons, but before she does, you'll need to complete a series of puzzles. You'll use different colored gemstones to open different portions of the temple in an effort to get to the antechamber within. The puzzles aren't particularly difficult--there's no time pressure and no possibility of failure--and they're a decent enough diversion from the rest of the game.Final Fantasy fans will appreciate the references to previous games. The temples aren't optional, and at first, neither is blitzball, which is the world's most popular sport in the world of Final Fantasy X. Blitzball is essentially like soccer but played entirely underwater (the entire game is surreal enough that blitzball players' ability to hold their breath indefinitely doesn't seem like a stretch). There's a built-in 12-step tutorial that tries to teach you to play, though some trial and error will likely be necessary beyond that. Blitzball is a hybrid turn-based/real-time game whose fundamental mechanics are rather similar to a collectible card game--basically, the statistics of a player on the attack are compared with those of up to three defending players in the vicinity. If the attacker is stronger, he can shoot the ball past the defenders, past the goalie, and score a point for his team. If you get into blitzball--there's only one point where you have to play, but later you can keep at it--you'll be able to recruit new players, compete in tournaments, gain levels for your teammates and acquire new special abilities, and so on. It's easily the most robust minigame to date in a Final Fantasy installment, and though it's not amazing, it can be fun--and it provides a few good rewards for your continued efforts.   Besides blitzball, Final Fantasy X features optional chocobo racing sequences, where you'll guide your giant chickenlike steed to greater glory; and a monster scavenger hunt, where you'll earn great prizes for capturing various beasts out in the field. There are also several hidden aeons to be discovered as well as ancient weapons, which may later be imbued with extremely powerful properties. There are even a few extremely tough monsters you can go out of your way to fight and a mysterious language you can eventually decipher letter by letter--you'll speak with a number of characters throughout the game that you won't understand otherwise.  Minigames such as blitzball can keep you busy for hours. Knowing that it has so much peripheral content, you might be surprised to learn that Final Fantasy X is almost entirely linear. In virtually every scene, you'll have an onscreen minimap that literally shows a big red arrow pointing in exactly the direction you need to move in. If you're a hard-core fan of role-playing games, this fact may alarm you, and the knowledge that you never get to guide your characters across an overworld map, but only from one relatively small area to the next, may alarm you even more. After all, the word ""linear"" is almost like an expletive to some role-playing game fans, who love the genre--and the Final Fantasy series--for its open-ended nature. At any rate, though there may have been some trade-off in choosing to make the game linear, the designers made a sound choice in making Final Fantasy X this way. In Final Fantasy X, you never get lost--you always know where you're supposed to go next. In the context of the game, this makes perfect sense, because your characters have a map of the world and are on a specific mission. As a gameplay element, it's a relief, because Final Fantasy X is a great big game, and the last thing you need to be doing in it is wandering around, wondering where you're supposed to go. Besides, as mentioned, there are plenty of hidden secrets waiting to be found by the more pioneering players. As for everyone else, they won't get frustrated trying to figure out how to proceed.   People often criticize linear games, not because they're linear, but because they're either too short or they require you to do a lot of backtracking through areas you've visited before. Final Fantasy X does not fall into either of these categories. Though the game opens up near the end, giving you the option to return to areas you've already visited, you never have to double back to finish the game.You'll travel to a number of beautiful, memorable locations. Besides eliminating the possibility of pointless wandering or tedious backtracking, another advantage of the linear nature of Final Fantasy X is that it's able to weave a cohesive narrative. Though the story can branch slightly at a few points, by and large, it's one long ride. The story isn't perfectly coherent, especially at first, but by the end, you'll probably be stunned by just how complex it turns out to be. At first, all you know is that Tidus seems to be stranded in a strange, new world and that this world is prey to an enormous, nefarious being known only as Sin. Yuna, being a summoner, is apparently capable of stopping this thing. How, you'll eventually find out. What Sin really is, you'll eventually find out. The plot sets itself up to use typical role-playing game clichés but in most cases cleverly avoids whatever expectations you may have for it. The ending of the game--which you'll reach after a long, difficult journey--is emotionally charged and satisfying.   Along with its linear design, the other controversial aspect of Final Fantasy X is that it's the first game in the series to use speech. Though all the dialogue in the game is subtitled, almost all of it is spoken aloud (the only exceptions are for some of the bit characters). Previously, the Final Fantasy series left characters' voices to your imagination. In Final Fantasy X, most every character speaks in just the sort of voice you'd probably imagine for him or for her. That is to say, the speech is surprisingly well done. It's not perfect--some of the dialogue, especially when it tries to be funny, sounds forced and falls flat. But for the most part, the characters sound just right. Likewise, Final Fantasy X's musical score fits the game well. Esteemed composer Nobuo Uematsu arguably hasn't yet surpassed his compositions from the days of Final Fantasy for the Super Nintendo system, but the music in Final Fantasy X is diverse and well suited to the various scenes in the game. The only piece that grows old, and fast, is the one that's used for combat--not because it's bad, but because you'll hear it, from the beginning, each time you face another random encounter in the game.  Final Fantasy X will more than satisfy fans and new players alike. Final Fantasy X looks as incredible as the screenshots make it out to be, or even better since some of the animations look really good too. It's worth pointing out, though, that you can tell a huge team of artists worked on the game because not all of the graphics look consistent. For instance, the game occasionally uses prerendered, gorgeous-looking cinematic cutscenes during key moments of the game. Though the quality of these rivals that of the imagery in this summer's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, you'll notice that your characters look completely different here--much more Japanese--than they do in the actual game. Furthermore, you'll notice that sometimes the game uses extremely detailed 3D character models during dialogue, but in other instances (such as in battle), the characters don't look quite as remarkable. Finally, the lip-synching of the characters' mouths with the speech is pretty spotty. Nevertheless, these are decidedly minor points in the grand scheme of things, because Final Fantasy X is certainly one of the best-looking games of this year or any other. Its diverse, colorful 3D scenery is consistently beautiful to look at and often evokes a real sense of wonder.   All told, Final Fantasy X is an outstanding new installment in the series and is an excellent role-playing game in its own right. Like other Final Fantasy games, it isn't beyond reproach--not everyone will take to its deliberate pacing, its drawn-out and sometimes punishing combat, or its metaphysical story. Similarly, the actual gameplay of Final Fantasy X isn't much of a departure from its predecessors or countless other role-playing games. Instead, the difference between Final Fantasy X and other games is in the sheer scope and undeniably impressive production values. The ambitious design of Final Fantasy X ultimately pervades in every aspect of the game. And so, like many of its predecessors, Final Fantasy X stands as a testament to just how affecting a game can be.


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103,Grandia (Import) ,9.3, Grandia beats out FF7 in all of the ways that matter.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/6/7/3/2217673-box_grandia.png,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grandia-import-review/1900-2533932/,pos,"
Easily the most hyped and delayed 32-bit RPG, Grandia is a role-playing masterpiece that delivers in all of the ways that really matter. Grandia makes up for its comparative technological inferiority with innovation and a strong character-driven story. Long before humans could claim world superiority, a benevolent race ruled the world in peace. After dividing the world in half with a great wall, they used their vast knowledge to transcend the bonds of flesh and become beings of pure light and thought. Following their departure, humanity and a horned, feral race developed independently on opposite sides of the world. While humanity embraced technology, the other embraced religion and magic. Humanity developed a strong government, and out of that government grew the Garyle army. Under the corrupt leadership of General Baal, the Garyle army has been scouring the world for bits of magic and technology that will lead it to the ancient capital of Arento and its secrets. Destined to come into conflict with the army's plans, a precocious 15-year-old, Justin, and his friends, Sue and Fina, stumble upon the Garyle army's plans and begin a globe-spanning race to discover what happened to the ancients and stop General Baal and his lackeys from awakening a deadly secret. All story similarities aside, Grandia is an entirely different, and ultimately more satisfying experience, than Final Fantasy VII. As in GameArts' flagship Lunar series, characters play a vital role in the game. You will immediately get a sense of the characters' personalities and the feel of the world. For example, while most of the game's conversation takes place in standard text form, important segments feature lively voice acting, adding another level of character familiarity. Up to four story-chosen characters can occupy your party. While some will say this limits your customization of your experience, it forces you to get to know the characters and their abilities, something Final Fantasy VII's materia system ignored, while adding a personal touch to the story. Unlike FF7, Grandia's world is warm and inviting. Brightly colored throughout, each town has an architectural style all its own, giving you an incentive to explore, which Final Fantasy's static cookie-cutter towns lacked. Enhanced by an amazing attention to detail, you will spend plenty of time wandering around the game's locales, mostly without regret. Grandia is an enormous game, yet these seemingly small items help keep the game interesting throughout the 60+ hours it will take an experienced, somewhat Japanese-capable role-player to complete. Technologically, Grandia is one of the Saturn's more impressive titles. However, the technology is not just for technology's sake. Each environment is presented in real-time 3D from an overhead perspective and painstakingly textured. Using the L and R buttons you can rotate the viewpoint any way you desire, with a few exceptions. A useful feature for exploring and finding hidden items, overuse can result in the loss of one's bearings, even with the compass that points towards the dungeons' exits. Various enemies roam the environments, collision with which will result in battle. This gives you the chance to escape from battles before they even begin, a nice feature when the party is in desperate condition or you just aren't feeling belligerent. Grandia's combat engine merges bits of Square's Active Battle system with pieces of Lunar's system, all presented from an overhead 2D view. In battle, time constantly passes, only pausing for your commands. When planning attacks, you must also factor distance into the usual equation. This usually results in shorter-lived battles, as all four of your characters can attack simultaneously. While Grandia's spells lack the jaw-drop quotient of FF7's, they still remain impressive and take less time to execute. Because Grandia's story forces you to spend an extended period of time with a handful of characters, the game's magic and character development system become especially important. You start with no magic but will quickly find Mana Eggs, items exchanged in stores for magic in one of the four elements. Casting spells within a particular element will gain you experience, eventually resulting in new spells and, later in the game, multi-element spells. In addition to magic, each character is proficient with a variety of weapons. Like the magic system, you receive new attack techniques from weapon experience, eventually merging with elemental levels to produce even more powerful attacks. Once equipped with all of the elements, each character's library of spells fits his personality - Justin's spells tend to only be offensive while Sue's tend to be more defensive, for example. As a result of this distinction, you will ultimately have over 80 spells and attack techniques at your fingertips. Overall, Grandia is top-notch graphically, save a few exceptions. While the imaginative town designs look fantastic, a number of the dungeons are fairly bland looking. In a number of areas the Saturn is visibly strained when rotating the 3D terrain, resulting in many dropped frames. Grandia's transparency effects are surprisingly good for the Saturn, however, and these are often used in both the overworld and in spell effects. Finally, the game's few uses of full motion video suffer from a choppy compression codec (much like most other Saturn FMV), greatly reducing the effect of the movies' content. With a sound system implemented by Skywalker sound, Grandia is an aural feast. Grandia's music is typical GameArts RPG fare, featuring upbeat and engaging tunes and more battle themes than any other RPG. The oft-used voices and sound effects are clearly sampled and unique for each purpose, be it spells or the closing remarks after a battle. Grandia beats out FF7 in all of the ways that matter. Grandia is not only longer, with a more engaging cast of characters, but it lacks the lulls that so many RPGs have because of these merits. It's a shame that US Saturn owners will be denied what this reviewer believes to be the best RPG in a long time. Grandia is relatively easily played without knowledge of Japanese, making it an extremely worthwhile import for RPG fans.
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104,"Fifth Element, The ",2.4, No need to waste time clamoring about lousy feature film to video game metamorphoses; let's just say that Activision's The Fifth Element PlayStation game is a textbook example of the ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/2/7/2213427-box_tfe.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifth-element-the-review/1900-2546460/,neg,"
No need to waste time clamoring about lousy feature film to video game metamorphoses; let's just say that Activision's The Fifth Element PlayStation game is a textbook example of the conversion conundrum - and quite possibly the worst game I've ever played.  The game loosely follows the broader themes of the Luc Besson uberfilm of the same title - which starred Bruce Willis as Korben and Milla Jovanovich as Leeloo, two characters on a course to save the world - and sticks all of this drama on the Nightmare Creatures game engine Kalisto unleashed on us exactly one year ago. Within the single-player action-adventure game, you play as both Leeloo and Korben, or each character's cut-rate-designed likeness anyway, not one or the other. Meaning as you progress through the game, you'll switch between Korben and Leeloo, depending on the level. The difference between the two is basically defined by Leeloo's acrobatics and hand-to-hand combat style and Korben's firearms. Your goal is simple enough: follow extremely basic and elementary missions that play out more like a treasure hunt than an adventure game, and do this over and over until you've completed over 20 levels of sheer agony and boredom.  But it's not the painfully rudimentary missions that make this game a washout; it's the ugly graphics and the incredibly foul gameplay mechanics that make The Fifth Element such an embarrassingly bad game. As Korben, you shoot your enemies (the cops, the cops' floating surveillance units, whatever) with a stockpile of unlimited ammo to get them out of your way; however, where you aim, as long as you're in the vicinity, doesn't really seem to matter. In fact, on a couple of occasions, the lack of precision shooting was so obvious, the subject I was aiming at seemed to arbitrarily fall to the ground and promptly disappear. My bullets traveled beyond him and off to his left. But alas, he died anyway. Maybe it was fear. And naturally, a good part of shooting straight is being able to sight. Can you aim, or tighten up your angle? Nope. Since there isn't a look feature, you just have to turn the clunky characters in the general direction you want to shoot, and hope for the best.  Also, large rings of graphical fire form around your characters when you're shot at, so as to mask the lack of target precision as well. And because it's impossible to move on without mentioning this, if someone is shooting at Korben, and you can hear the enemy's shots, you won't be able to hear your own until your enemy's shots cease. So you won't even really know if you're cappin' or nappin' - not that it matters because your enemies die so quickly and easily anyhow.While playing as Leeloo, you trade in your guns for a charming little worthless cartwheel/flip-type event that lends you some variety, but with very little usefulness. Leeloo mostly uses her fists and her kicks as weapons, with various scattered grenades and such she picks up along the way. The 3D fighting engine, however, is worse than Nightmare Creatures. Either it's magic, or Leeloo can manage to punch the cop who's not even within arm's reach, but yet she won't be able to turn and punch the guy who's punching her. On a semi-positive note, the characters can, on occasion and sometimes with no purpose at all, hang from the ceiling and monkey-bar their way across a room or hall, crawl under sensor beams, and roll away from enemy fire as needed. In spite of the game's many levels, the missions are terribly simplistic, often making a task that may have completed the previous mission, a new mission entirely (would you actually free someone from prison and not escape yourself within the same mission?). The real challenge in The Fifth Element, notably, is managing the lousy controls, as the puzzles are insultingly easy, and the course of action is inanely dull.  The graphics are grainy, loaded with seams, awkward perspectives (no, you don't have any control over the camera at all, which makes it pretty dated at this late point in time), blind platform jumps, and pop-up from the get-go, and they don't improve. The intro and the cutscenes are better, naturally, as they're excerpts from the film itself - often in the form of non sequiturs that have been wrapped around the game's anemic plot.  The enemy AI is laughable, as well. When in the same room with several enemies, if you're attacking one, the others seem to linger behind a bit, then move up when the first guy's down. Or if they are up close to you, they seem to be dancing, rather than attacking you, until you turn your attention toward them, respectively.  The Fifth Element has an OK soundtrack. It's not good, but it's not intrusive. And coming from a game that should receive a quality citation, one mediocre feature is perhaps its only saving grace. Kalisto should have spent more time on this engine. Period. The game is not fun, not pretty, and not challenging. And the sad part is, Activision can't even cash in on the movie license, because the characters look nothing like those in the movie. Don't waste your money on this game, and if you're walking around the rental store, get the movie, not the game.
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105,Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga ,2.4, This game is seriously bad right across the board.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/0/7/1/2217071-box_tihtps.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/incredible-hulk-the-pantheon-saga-review/1900-2547907/,neg,"
Since the maxim ""If you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"" has no place in video game journalism, let me begin by stating that The Incredible Hulk - The Pantheon Saga is the worst game I've played in a long while. It's not a flawed title because calling it flawed insinuates that some aspects of the game are good. This game is seriously bad right across the board. The graphics and sound in The Pantheon Saga are below average. The once proud Hulk looks terrible - his head is too small for his body and his movements are choppy in the extreme (it's a lot like playing a better video game in a strobe light). Backgrounds are even shallower, using one-swatch textures for some of the flattest 3-D environments ever seen. And the between-stage cutscenes? They look no better than the rest of the game - but they at least give you much-needed breaks from the horror of actually having to play. Rounding out this delightful package is a pedestrian soundtrack that can best be described as an irritating blend of dance music and wanna-be goth-rock. The Incredible Hulk features a confusing storyline worsened by boring gameplay. You're the Hulk (big, green, and angry), and you're transported against your will to a secret laboratory for rehabilitation. The ship that's transporting you crashes and you're set free in the lab. From there you must escape, defeat a few super-villains, and eventually face a meaner version of yourself from an alternate future. Adapted from the comic book, the storyline does not translate well - even after completing the game you'll wonder how the events tie together. What you DO get is a series of three-quarter view levels that will have you punching, kicking, and smashing everything in your sight. And although this may sound like fun, it loses its appeal somewhere near the beginning of level one - about the same time you realize how limiting the play control is. It feels wrong to attack a game for being straightforward, but The Incredible Hulk is just stupid easy. There are no complex problems to solve or secrets to unlock - you just smash your way through each stage until you destroy your main target or flip some switches (which you don't even switch - you punch). Even if you can deal with the game's shortcomings, playing the title from start to finish doesn't feel worth the effort. Ironically, Eidos (publisher of The Incredible Hulk) also released Tomb Raider, which helped redefine platform and adventure titles to such a lofty point that games like this are now unacceptable. Even before Tomb Raider, however, games with similar shortcomings have had at least one redeeming quality. Sadly though, there is no salvation for The Incredible Hulk - its dreadful mix of low-quality graphics, sound, and gameplay will leave players green with disgust.
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106,NFL Quarterback Club 2000 ,2.4," Quarterback Club 2000 is a buggy, problem-ridden football game that should be avoided by all football video game fans.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/3/3/2212833-box_nflqbc00.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nfl-quarterback-club-2000-review/1900-2540492/,neg,"
Acclaim's N64 version of NFL Quarterback Club 2000 suffered from a terribly low frame rate that often left you unable to figure out what was happening on the screen. While the Dreamcast version fixes the choppy frame rate, it is plagued by a ton of other problems that make playing the game just as frustrating and unenjoyable, if not more so. Sure, the game has lots of defensive and offensive plays, real teams, players, team-management options, high-resolution graphics, and the rest of the usual features and game modes. But none of it matters if you can't get through a game, much less a five-minute quarter, without some weird, quirky problem interfering. Most of the items on the laundry list of problems that ruin QBC 2000 stem from the most important aspects of a sports game: artificial intelligence, gameplay, and control. First off is the largest problem: When passing, your computer opponent will often stop its cornerbacks dead in their tracks moments after the play begins. This is a problem for several reasons, the biggest being that your receivers aren't smart enough to run around the motionless defender. Instead they just keep running in place while pressed up against the defender. If you decide to throw the ball to one of these dimwitted receivers, most of the time the ball will go sailing past both players, and pass interference won't be called. This happens quite frequently, and while you can call a quick out pass to prevent this silly scenario from happening, it's still totally inexcusable and makes the game completely unplayable. The control is another dramatic issue with QBC 2000. Let's say you want to just ease up to the line with a linebacker, but you get a little too close and turn him around to back away from the line. If you aren't careful, he'll just bolt through the line and get called for encroachment. Overall the control feels very sticky, and the difference between having a player turn around and run facing in the direction you wish him to and having him simply backpedal seems arbitrary and even completely backward at times. If you run a safety down the field and want him to turn around to face the rest of the players, you literally have to do a wide circle with the analog stick; otherwise he'll just run backward. While at first it may seem like a quirky control scheme that you'll eventually get used to, within a week the control alone will make you want to break the controller in half. Visually Quarterback Club 2000 isn't all that impressive. Sure the players look very detailed with eye blacking, nasal strips, and even actual faces mapped onto their polygonal heads, but the only time you can really appreciate it is during the replays and post-play close-ups. The camera angle during the actual game, while extensively adjustable, is too far away to see any of the detail. Instead, all you see are motion- captured animations with terrible, terrible transitions. On top of that, many of the same animations appear quite frequently. When players break from a huddle, all of them clap their hands at the same time, at exactly the same speed, because it's exactly the same animation. Even in the audio department QBC 2000 fails. The PA announcer sounds like he's announcing inside a tin can, and the color commentary and play- by-play calls by Mike Patrick and Randy Cross are repetitive and dull.  Overall, Quarterback Club 2000 is a buggy, problem-ridden football game that should be avoided by all football video game fans, even if you, like me, liked previous installments in the QBC series. The game isn't even close to the level of quality that Sega's own NFL 2K achieves.
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107,Urban Chaos (DC) ,2.4," Somewhere inside the Dreamcast version of Urban Chaos is a decent game, struggling to escape. But the layers and layers of flaws completely negate any strong points the game could ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2341054-2216400-box_uc.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/urban-chaos-dc-review/1900-2657842/,neg,"
Like your everyday action movie, Urban Chaos shoots for the ""short on plot, long on action"" formula. The Dreamcast release, with its sickeningly sluggish frame rates and equally sinister control schemes, takes what was a charming PC beat-'em-up with a twist of Tomb Raider for good measure and vandalizes it beyond recognition. The year 2000 is coming, and Union City is heating up. Gang warfare is at an all-time high, and the local gang, called the Wildcats, seems to have ties to some sort of apocalyptic cult. You, as D'arci Stern, rookie cop, must first work through a few training missions, which detail things like how to fight and how to control a vehicle. The training missions are an illustration of exactly what is wrong with Urban Chaos, teaching you useful things like how the vehicle driving controls constantly stutter or why pushing up on the analog to move forward and up on the digital pad at the same time to force your character to walk isn't feasible when you're trying to navigate tight ledges. Once you've gone through the three different types of training, it's on to the streets of Union City. In each level, you're given a few main objectives to accomplish. In one, you must arrest at least one mugger and return an abandoned vehicle to the station. In another, you have to find a way to get a suicidal man down from a building. Optional secondary objectives occasionally pop up as well, asking you to locate a stolen police car or find a murderer. Eventually, you'll run into the mysterious Roper, and you'll begin to piece together the apocalyptic nature of the game's overall plot. The game features two different control schemes, and they're both fairly difficult to use. In the default scheme, you use the analog stick to move in a Tomb Raider-style configuration, where left and right make you turn. The other scheme takes the now-standard 3D platformer approach, where pushing in a certain direction simply moves you in that direction. With the exception of the occasional camera angle change, this scheme works a bit better. You can jump, punch, and kick, and there's also an all-purpose action button for flipping switches, picking up items, and so on. When you encounter an enemy, you're thrown into a lock-on targeting mode, where you're constantly facing one foe. Pressing the action button cycles through your targets. The hand-to-hand fighting allows for some combos, but the timing on these combos is needlessly difficult and not at all in line with the rest of the game's beat-'em-up nature. There's an unwritten rule in console gaming: If you're going to port a PC game over to a console, at least have the decency to strike a balance between graphical effects and acceptable frame rates. Due to a lack of either interest or time, no one even bothered to balance Urban Chaos. Instead, the job is left to you in the form of a screen full of configuration options, which allows you to tinker with the shadows and other graphical effects. With all the effects on, the frame rate occasionally drops down to the 10 frames per second range. With everything turned off, well, the frame rate isn't much better. On the PC, when you're dealing with a nearly infinite number of hardware combinations, it makes sense to allow the user to tweak the game to work optimally on his or her machine. In a Dreamcast game, such an option comes across as sheer laziness. The sound in Urban Chaos is very low-key. During normal play, all you hear is the sound of the streets - passing cars and the like. Break into a sprint, and you're treated to a short loop of ""D'arci is sprinting"" music. Beyond that, you're left with some poorly performed and occasionally obscenity-filled (hey, being a cop is a gritty business) voice acting. Each line of dialogue is preceded by fairly noticeable popping noise as the engine kicks into ""playing speech clips"" mode, and the time between clips is long enough to make the conversations you have seem completely alien in nature, with no natural flow whatsoever. Somewhere inside the Dreamcast version of Urban Chaos is a decent game, struggling to escape. But the layers and layers of flaws completely negate any strong points the game could have had. If you absolutely must play Urban Chaos, do yourself a favor and play the PC version, which actually manages to look and play well, something neither of the console versions of the game have been able to accomplish.
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108,X-Men: Mutant Academy ,2.4," While the ""big brother"" console release of X-Men: Mutant Academy may be at least tolerable, the Game Boy Color release falls flat.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/4/0/8/2216408-box_xmma.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-men-mutant-academy-review/1900-2603650/,neg,"
Just as Activision has kept the PlayStation covered with X-Men games this summer, it has also kept the Game Boy Color in mind. The GBC release of X-Men: Mutant Academy is a one-on-one fighting game, just like its console counterparts. Take the idea of Street Fighter, paint over it with Marvel characters and spruce things up with a movie-inspired plot, and you've got the gist of X-Men. It isn't a new formula, but it's not immediately disastrous either.   At the outset, X-Men: Mutant Academy seems promising. There are five game modes: story, battle, versus, survival, and training. While the story, battle, survival, and training are modes familiar to most fighting game vets, this game marks only the second GBC fighting title to feature link-cable support. Kudos to Crawfish for that. There are nine selectable characters and two hidden characters: Storm, Magneto, Cyclops, Wolverine, Sabretooth, Toad, Mystique, Gambit, Pyro, Phoenix, and Apocalypse. Since there's no battery save, the game rewards you with the unlock codes to the latter two characters once you've beaten the story mode. Other than that, that's it. An abrupt end to what was the beginning of a decent feature list. No hidden artwork, no sneaky secrets, and no superboss to unlock.   While X-Men's features are nothing to write home about, its gameplay might just warrant a restraining order. Once you begin a match, you quickly realize the game's shortcomings. First, the control is sluggish and unresponsive. While the GBC hardware is partly to blame, games such as Street Fighter Alpha and Power Quest prove that adaptation is possible. The game's fight system itself is a throwback to pre-Mortal Kombat days, with one button for punch and another for kick, and with the duration of button press controlling the strength of the attack. Unfortunately, each character has exactly the same punches and kicks, with zero variation in range or damage. Special moves are done via quarter circle, half circle, and tapping motions coupled with button presses, but since each character has only three special moves, you won't need to worry about them too much. The game also lacks reversals, counters, and combos above your basic three-hit chain. A rage meter at the bottom of the screen lets you perform devastating supermoves, but thanks to the unresponsive control, you won't use them much, either. Serving as the game's final dosage of cyanide, the single player AI is the sheer definition of detritus. Walk to the middle of the screen, crouch, and tap the punch button repeatedly. You'll win every match, regardless of the difficulty level. The link-cable mode offers a chance for redemption, but with uninspired moves, sluggish control, and a lack of variety, does this game sound like something you'd want to challenge a friend to?   Contrary to the above, X-Men: Mutant Academy does have a single redeeming trait - its visuals. Inasmuch as Street Fighter Alpha came at you with large sprites and fluidly animated characters, X-Men improves upon the idea. Whether you choose Wolverine, Magneto, or the ever-luscious Storm, the character sprites are large, colorful, and expressive. Framing these sprites are the best background visuals ever rendered on a GBC screen. While Street Fighter Alpha had more background animation, X-Men: Mutant Academy leaps out with colorful, stylish backdrops. Despite the game's visual performance, though, the audio devolves back into disappointment with overly dramatic theme music and painfully scratchy sound effects. The Game Boy Color may not be an audio powerhouse, but it's capable of better.   While the ""big brother"" console release of X-Men: Mutant Academy may be at least tolerable, the Game Boy Color release falls flat. This disappointment is doubly painful when you consider that the same development company responsible for Street Fighter Alpha for the GBC is responsible for this game's failure. Once you pry away the enjoyable visuals, you end up with a title that barely warrants any gameplay or value scores at all. Professor X would not be pleased.
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109,Caesar's Palace 2000 ,2.4," While the selection of gambling titles on the Dreamcast is slim in comparison to the PlayStation or the PC, the best bet for all involved would be to take your ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/6/3/3/2747-10633.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/caesars-palace-2000-review/1900-2633665/,neg,"
Much like mah-jongg games, gambling games are produced by the truckload. They tend to be adequate because they simply reproduce the mechanics of their real-world counterparts, and developers tend to add very little to their depth, which makes it difficult to differentiate one gambling title from the other. Caesar's Palace 2000 tries to enhance the experience by adding bells and whistles to the gambling experience, but ultimately it comes up short in every department.   The game is laid out with four different gaming sections and a virtual ATM. Each gaming area contains several different games: You can play craps or roulette in table games; blackjack, pai gow poker, and casino war in card games; a handful of one-armed bandits under slot machines; and several video poker variants under video games. Each game has several different betting limits, and, in an attempt to add a role-playing element to the game, you can only access the higher-limit games by playing the low-limit games for extended periods of time. In addition, you are given a bankroll of $2,000 with which to start - though, unlike in the real world, if your bankroll runs out, you can just go to the virtual ATM and take out another virtual $2,000. This not only removes all incentive to play conservatively and build your bankroll, but it also allows for game after game of high-risk gambling with no consequences. After all, even virtual money holds a certain amount of value if the supply is limited.   The weight of a card- or a table-game simulator rests heavily on the quality and accuracy of the simulation, and while Caesar's Palace 2000 does a capable job of simulating the games in question, the lackluster presentation and unintuitive interface detract from the games greatly. The card and table games consist of a table surrounded by a black void, and a shoddy-looking pair of FMV dealer hands, accompanied by disconnected dealer voices, handle the action. There is no casino atmosphere - no fellow gamblers, no cocktail waitresses. The cards at the card games are too small to see their value as they're dealt, and it is also difficult to see the value of the dice on the craps table. The slots and video games are equally uninspired and simply fill the screen with the machine interface. Also, anyone who's spent any time in a casino lately can tell you that the slot machines have become an incredibly involved venture, with unusual themes, multiple betting options, and a variety of minigames. The slot machines in Caesar's Palace 2000 fail to represent this and instead look like slot machines that were made 15 years ago. The interface doesn't add much to the game's case, as it requires an excessive amount of controller action simply to place your bet or change your ante. This sloppy interface slows the usually fast-paced action of games like craps or blackjack to a crawl and takes away a good deal of the fun.    The game also includes a handful of in-game tips in a halfhearted attempt to make a better gambler out of you. If you are unfamiliar with the complex workings of games such as craps, these tips don't provide enough depth and explanation to be of any help but, instead, add confusing jargon to an already intimidating game. If you already know how to play the games, these tips alternate between useless and condescending.   In the end, Caesar's Palace 2000 is a shoddy casino game and only rides the franchise name without making virtual use of it in the game. While the selection of gambling titles on the Dreamcast is slim in comparison to the PlayStation or the PC, the best bet for all involved would be to take your chips elsewhere.
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110,Jeremy McGrath Supercross World ,2.4," Gamers are advised to avoid this game, period.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/3/3/2225333-box_jmgsw.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jeremy-mcgrath-supercross-world-review/1900-2828756/,neg,"
Jeremy McGrath Supercross World is the most recent in a line of MX games developed by and for Acclaim. The franchise last reared its head on the PlayStation in the form of McGrath vs. Pastrana, which was different from its predecessors in that it was developed by Z-Axis, the team responsible for all things Dave Mirra. Supercross World, on the other hand, was developed by one of Acclaim's in-house teams, and the result can't be called anything but a miserable failure. The heart of the game is its single-player mode, which is divided up into two main parts--the single event mode, which allows you to pick a rider and race immediately, and the career mode, which requires you to select a character and enter him in a series of races. There are a number of different characters and bikes to choose from in both modes. The different bikes are sorted according to four ratings: top speed, suspension, traction, and powerband, which measures the acceleration of the bike. In what appears to be a complete lack of effort on Acclaim's part, though each bike is of a different make and model, all of them look exactly the same, with the exception of different-colored gas tanks and fenders. The game also seems to be doomed from the time you first select your character. Much like their motorcycles, each character is defined by his individual stats, which are rated from one to five. They are all ranked according to their jumping, cornering, stability, and stunt abilities. McGrath is the safest character to start off with in the single event mode, due to his high numbers (four in all four categories), while other riders have higher numbers in some areas and lower in others. In the game's career mode, no matter what rider you choose, all these stats will begin at one, which puts your character at a rather extreme disadvantage from the get-go. All the competing riders already have their numbers beefed up to the single event levels. This becomes immediately apparent as soon as the first race begins and you're left in a cloud of bad particle effects, wondering if you've done something wrong. Graphically, McGrath Supercross World is a sight to make sore eyes. If it weren't for the slightly higher polygon count in the character and motorcycle models and more rounded hills, you'd swear you were playing a PlayStation game. In keeping with what is becoming tradition for the series, there is a poor draw-in distance, and hills, mounds, trees, and whatever else lies ahead can come popping up at a moment's notice. Some hills even pop up partially naked of textures, looking like twitching gray masses as the texture panels load belatedly. The textures themselves are of the lowest denominator as well. In the distance, they appear to be of the quality you'd expect from an early N64 game, all washed out and muddled. As you drive closer, they sharpen--slightly--but not enough to make up for the overall poor presentation. The control of the game adds even more to the frustration. Driving and steering while on level ground works fairly well, but once you start catching air, things fall apart rather quickly. Landing is the most difficult part to deal with. Some landings will happen almost supernaturally--you'll come down on the front tire and magically be racing away, having lost a negligible amount of speed, while at other times, you'll land on one or both of your tires and crash.  The sound is probably the strongest point in the game, mostly due to the soundtrack. While it's not on the same level as the soundtrack in the Tony Hawk or Mat Hoffman games, there are a few good songs by some alternative and punk bands. The contributions of Millencolin, Mudhoney, and the Supersuckers are quite good in particular. While the music is good, the sound effects don't fare as well. There is a standard set of engine noises that are reused liberally, and while there are sounds to accompany your landings and such, overall, sound effects are used sparingly. On top of all this, the game's AI is sorely lacking. Calling to mind the AI of Midway's CART Fury Championship Racing, the computer-driven opponents are given scripted laps that they diligently drive, whether you're in their way or not. If in fact you are in their way, they won't hesitate to plow into you or even land on you after a jump. This isn't intentional on their part--they just aren't made to understand if something is in their way. Every once in a while, after being knocked off their bike, they'll get back on only to drive in circles like madmen until they are knocked off again or the race ends. The bottom line is that the Jeremy McGrath games have been building up--or down--to this point for a long time. While they debuted firmly in the mediocre, they've steadily descended into what can only rightly be called terrible. One can hope that Jeremy McGrath Supercross World is that final blow, the nail in the proverbial coffin. Gamers are advised to avoid this game, period.
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111,Jeremy McGrath Supercross World ,2.4, The game is a thoroughly bland cross between the simulation and arcade styles of MX games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/3/3/2225333-box_jmgsw.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jeremy-mcgrath-supercross-world-review/1900-2851266/,neg,"
Jeremy McGrath Supercross World for the GameCube is a port of the PlayStation 2 game that was released a few months back. There have been a few minor additions this time around, the most noticeable being a new intro video, new images of the selectable riders, and a few gameplay tweaks that are so minimal that they don't affect the overall game, which, unfortunately for supercross fans, was already rather terrible, garnering the original PS2 release a runner-up mention in our 2001 ""award"" for worst game of the year. Essentially, the game is a thoroughly bland cross between the simulation and arcade styles of MX games. Those familiar with Acclaim's series have come to recognize the McGrath branding as something to avoid, since it has never been anything north of mediocre, even in its prime. The series debuted in 1998 on the PlayStation, and even then, it was a game that didn't strive to deliver anything that couldn't be found in other, better games. The core of Jeremy McGrath Supercross World is the single-player mode, which is divided up into two main parts--the single event mode, which lets you pick a rider and race immediately, and the career mode, which requires you to select a character and enter him in a series of races. While there are a number of different bikes to choose from, one of the first things you'll notice is that all of the models are identical visually--the only variance is in the color of the fiberglass body on each. The different bikes are sorted according to four ratings: top speed, suspension, traction, and powerband, which measures the acceleration of the bike. These stats can be further enhanced by the riders, which are defined by their individual stats, rated from one to five points in each category. They are all ranked according to their jumping, cornering, stability, and stunt abilities. McGrath is the safest character to start off with in the single event mode, due to his high numbers (four in all four categories, which also makes him far superior to the other riders initially). Other characters have a more drastic distribution of their respective points. In the game's career mode, no matter what rider you choose, you will begin with one point in each category, which puts your character at a rather extreme disadvantage from the get-go. All the competing riders already have their numbers beefed up to the single event levels. This becomes immediately apparent as soon as the first race begins and you're left in a cloud of bad particle effects, wondering if you've done something wrong. On the PlayStation 2, Jeremy McGrath Supercross World was quite poor in the graphics department, and that hasn't changed at all in the GameCube version. The colors are drab, the character and vehicle models are poor, and the environments suffer as well. The draw-in distance is roughly the same as in the PlayStation 2 version, which is to say that the horizon is hardly distant. Hills and other parts of the terrain will arrive far too late, and even the baja levels, which are quite low in detail, suffer from pop-up. The textures themselves are of exceptionally low quality as well. As you drive closer, they sharpen--slightly--but not enough to make up for the overall poor presentation. The control of the game adds even more to the frustration. Driving and steering while on level ground work fairly well, but once you start catching air, things fall apart rather quickly. Landing is the most difficult part to deal with. Some landings will happen almost supernaturally--you'll come down on the front tire and magically be racing away, having lost a negligible amount of speed. At other times, you'll land on one or both of your tires and crash. The game moves along a little faster on the GameCube and holds a steady frame rate, but aside from those two points, the game is essentially unchanged.The sound is probably the strongest point in the game, mostly due to the soundtrack. While it's not on the same level as the soundtracks in the Tony Hawk or Mat Hoffman games, there are a few good songs by some alternative and punk bands. The contributions of Millencolin, Mudhoney, and the Supersuckers are quite good in particular. While the music is good, the sound effects don't fare as well. There is a standard set of engine noises that are reused liberally, and while there are sounds to accompany your landings and such, overall, sound effects are used sparingly. On top of all this, the game's AI is sorely lacking. Calling to mind the AI of Midway's CART Fury Championship Racing, the computer-driven opponents are given scripted laps that they diligently drive, whether you're in their way or not. If in fact you are in their way, they won't hesitate to plow into you or even land on you after a jump. This isn't intentional on their part--they just aren't made to understand if something is in their way. Every once in a while, after being knocked off their bike, they'll get back on only to drive in circles like madmen until they are knocked off again or the race ends. Some might have hoped that McGrath Supercross World would improve as it made the transition from the PlayStation 2 to the GameCube. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The game looks downright terrible on both systems and plays little better on either. The new improvements for the GameCube release are so minimal that Acclaim might as well have left the game entirely unchanged. The new intro is slapped together from gameplay footage, with a few effects thrown in to spice things up. Even then, it's nothing that couldn't be put together by an efficient video editor in less than a day. The new images of the riders are better, but one must suspect that these, along with the intro, were only included so that the publisher could claim that changes have been made to the game. Unfortunately, there aren't any other MX games due for release on the GameCube anytime soon, so there are those who might pick this game up as a rental, or even worse, pay full price for it. Even taking the lack of MX games into consideration, this game is bad for everybody, and it's our sincerest hope that potential players will take our advice and stay very, very far away from this game.
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112,Virtua Fighter 4 ,9.3," You can't tell right off the bat, but Virtua Fighter 4 is the best fighting game in years.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/2/7/2210927-box_vf4.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/virtua-fighter-4-review/1900-2855178/,pos,"
The blocky, flat-shaded 3D fighters first seen in 1993's Virtua Fighter have sure come a long way. Nearly 10 years after the original arcade game was released, Sega's Virtua Fighter series now spans four games, not to mention a number of weird spin-offs like Virtua Fighter Kids and the outrageous Fighters Megamix. Virtua Fighter games have appeared on virtually every Sega system ever made. Last year, Sega bowed out of the hardware business, so the latest installment of Virtua Fighter is the first that isn't exclusive to Sega's own hardware. And PlayStation 2 owners couldn't be luckier, because Virtua Fighter 4 is the best fighting game to debut since Namco's superlative Dreamcast version of Soul Calibur back in 1999. Virtua Fighter 4 is also the best game in the series to date: It offers even more of the depth that fans of the series have enjoyed for years, yet it also quickens the pacing, streamlines the controls, and fixes the problems found in previous installments. Furthermore, the PS2 version of Virtua Fighter 4 packs some interesting bonus features and the best artificial intelligence hands down of any fighting game. Superficially, Virtua Fighter 4 may resemble any number of other graphically impressive 3D fighters. But the real beauty of it is definitely in the gameplay.  Virtua Fighter 4 is the best fighting game to come around in years. Virtua Fighter 4 has 13 characters you can choose from, two of which are new to the series. Only Virtua Fighter 3's conspicuous sumo wrestler Taka-Arashi didn't make the cut--all the other fighters from the series are back with new moves and new looks, including such favorites as the Japanese martial arts expert Akira, the massive Canadian pro wrestler Wolf, and the blonde-haired high-kicking siblings Jacky and Sarah Bryant. As in all previous Virtua Fighter games, the last bout in Virtua Fighter 4's arcade mode is against Dural, basically a very mean female mannequin made of metal (there's a way to unlock her as a playable character for use in the versus mode). The first of the game's new fighters is Lei Fei, a shaolin monk whose dizzying kung fu skills are as effective as they are spectacular. The second is Vanessa Lewis, who looks like X-Men's Storm and specializes in both defensive counterthrows and in kickboxing. Lei Fei looks better in action than Vanessa, though both of the new characters have dozens of interesting moves. Actually, the same can be said for all the characters, not just the new ones. Each returning fighter boasts a number of new abilities, many of which become important additions to their repertoires. Many of the new moves aren't just punches or kicks--they're complex techniques like deflections, reversals, and alternate fighting stances.  Lei Fei (left) is one of the new characters. He knows kung fu. Virtua Fighter 4 isn't just for hard-core fighting-game fans--the game is only as complex as you want it to be. While it will definitely appeal to you if you enjoy poring over long-winded character FAQs or spending an evening just practicing the same tough move or combo over and over, you'll also enjoy it if you just want to play for fun. The majority of the game's playable characters are very easy to pick up--by the manual's own admission, more than half of them are well suited for beginners, even for those who've never played a fighting game before. All of the fighters are competitive, yet all of them are substantially different. There's much more differentiation now between some of the characters who seemed similar to each other in previous installments.   What all the characters do have in common is that they respond equally well to the game's flat-out perfect controls. Virtua Fighter 4 reverts back to the deceptively simple control scheme found in the first two games in the series: There's a punch button, a kick button, and a guard button. The evade button introduced in Virtua Fighter 3 is gone, yet lateral movement and evading attacks are still easily accomplished just by tapping up or down on the directional pad, to shift your character away from or toward the screen. You don't necessarily need to know that--using some of the characters, you can have a good time just mashing on buttons, watching as they perform various great-looking strings of attacks. But sooner or later you'll notice that Virtua Fighter 4 rewards skill and precision. The pacing of a typical match is just right--very fast and intense, but not frantic. Most of the moves in the game are easy to execute, but there's still a lot to remember if you want to get good. And some of the more advanced techniques and combos are as challenging, and rewarding, as fighting game moves get.The gameplay in Virtua Fighter 4 will be familiar to those who've played other games in the series. Characters can no longer jump 10 feet in the air (they hardly jump at all anymore), but they can now use a quick recovery move to instantly get back on their feet as they're knocked down. Recovery times on a lot of moves have been trimmed down by fractions of a second, a subtle change that makes Virtua Fighter 4 seem faster paced than the previous games, because it is. The battles themselves are fought with wits as well as fists and feet. You need keen reflexes and an active mind to mix up high, middle, and low strikes to keep your opponent guessing, and you can move in 3D to set up attacks from the sides and sometimes even from behind. Throws are essential against overly defensive types, while some characters have reversals that can be the undoing of an overzealous attacker. In general, each character has dozens of moves, and most all of them can be useful. You may find yourself relying on certain moves a lot, but you aren't limited to them.  Notice the snow kicking up from the ground. One of the best things about the game is that even if you're not a veteran fighting-game player going into it, it gives you all the tools you need to become one. For starters, Virtua Fighter 4 has no fewer than three different types of training modes: One lets you practice every last move for any of the characters. At the touch of a button, you can watch a demonstration of what the move looks like, and then you can try it for yourself against Jacky, who's a suitable stand-in for a training dummy. There's also a training mode that walks you through all the game's elements--from basics like blocking, to intermediate skills like evading, on up to learning how to deal the greatest amount of damage in the shortest possible time. You can go through this comprehensive step-by-step tutorial piecemeal, and these concise lessons will explain Virtua Fighter 4's complex underlying mechanics and reveal much of its incredible depth. In addition to this tutorial, there's also a free-sparring mode that lets you customize the computer opponent's behavior and basically lets you try out whatever you've learned. Virtua Fighter 4 is easy to pick up and play, but there's so much to it that you'll probably find yourself spending hours in its training modes, focusing on trying to learn just one or two characters at a time.  Vanessa is the other new character. Her kicks and reversals are brutal. Regardless of your skill level, the game's AI does an incredible job of scaling to your abilities and providing a great challenge. Most fighting games neglect putting in a good AI, a design compromise that's perhaps understandable. After all, it's a given that fighting games are at their best when they're being played competitively with other people. But just as fighting games aren't as popular in arcades as they used to be, so is it the case that most players won't always have a willing human opponent on hand whenever they want to play at home. Fortunately, with Virtua Fighter 4, even when you don't have someone else around to play against, you'll find that the computer opponent provides an excellent alternative.   The computer opponent noticeably catches on to some of your tricks. At higher levels, you'll see it pulling off the toughest moves at the best opportunities. Yet even at higher levels, the computer still fights fair--it doesn't flaunt superhuman reaction times, and it doesn't block or reverse absolutely everything you throw at it. You need skill rather than patterns or dirty tricks to beat it. All this is not to suggest that the AI in Virtua Fighter 4 is as good as a skilled human opponent--after you've played against the AI several hundred times, you'll probably pick up on how a few types of techniques do seem to work better than others. But the fact that the AI always puts up a serious fight is a distinguishing feature that's unique to Virtua Fighter 4 among all fighting games.Virtua Fighter 4 sports an arcade mode where you'll square off against every character, including your own, before facing Dural. Your opponents become progressively more difficult, but before you get started, you can tweak the game's settings in the options screen, adjusting the overall difficulty and defining a number of other gameplay parameters. But the best way to play against the computer isn't in the arcade mode, but instead in what's called the kumite (which can be translated from Japanese as ""tournament"") mode. It's like a survival mode--you'll face a continuous sequence of opponents in best-out-of-five-round bouts. The great part is that the game can track your win/loss record, as well as a truly staggering array of statistics about your fights (things like ""low throw escape rate"" and ""percent of damage taken from reversals""). There's even an advice screen you can refer to that uses these stats to give you practical suggestions on how to improve your skills.  Except for one, all the old fighters are back and better than ever. As you win kumite matches, you'll gain higher ranks and find yourself facing more-challenging opponents. Sometimes you'll unlock custom goodies for your character including hats, necklaces, tattoos, sunglasses, and more. You can equip these and also change the color of your character's outfit to give him or her a distinct appearance. You even get to name your fighter, and you'll find that computer opponents will often have very funny names of their own. The kumite mode does a great job of rewarding you simply for playing a lot. But you'll also feel compelled to keep ranking up--especially since, if you start doing poorly, you can be demoted. Ultimately, the kumite mode manages to bring forth a lot of the excitement of playing fighting games competitively at the arcades. The home version of Virtua Fighter 4 captures the thrill of not knowing exactly how good the next opponent will be, along with the sense that there's something at stake in every battle. Naturally, the character you've built up in kumite mode can be pitted against human opponents as well. After all, the best part about customizing your character is being able to show him or her off to your friends.  Characters are all highly detailed, down to their complexions. Every game in the Virtua Fighter series has looked terrific, and Virtua Fighter 4 keeps the trend going. The PS2 version looks nearly as good as the arcade version. The fighters appear much more lifelike than in previous installments--and tougher too. The characters' individual physiques and even their complexions are well defined, and the detail in their facial expressions is impressive. Their new moves look great, though if you've played previous Virtua Fighter games, you'll notice that the animations for old moves have been recycled (though the old moves look great too).    The backdrops for the bouts in Virtua Fighter 4 generally aren't quite as interesting to look at as the various locales from the previous game, though they're better to fight in. Virtua Fighter 3's rolling scenery sure looked pretty, but it caused some problems with collision detection and generally just didn't feel right. In Virtua Fighter 4, as in the first two games, every battle takes place in a flat square arena--in this case, the arenas are amid detailed scenery, including a beach resort, a traditional Japanese dojo, a subterranean river, and that classic fighting-game setting, the Great Wall of China. Some arenas are open, allowing you to knock your opponent out of the ring for a quick but well-deserved victory. Others are closed off--if you force your opponent to the edge, you'll have the perfect setup to inflict major damage. Still others are closed off but can be broken through if you pound your opponent hard enough against a wall. Ring-out victories are a lot more satisfying when there's a broken wall involved.The stages in Virtua Fighter 4 may all be square, but there's a good amount of visual variety to them, and some of them sport some really great effects--one is covered in about a foot of snow, which deforms realistically as the characters move through it. Another stage takes place in ankle-deep water that splashes and undulates like the real thing. Yet another has a surface made of ceramic tiles that shatter whenever your opponent falls on them. Virtua Fighter 4 does suffer from some aliasing problems that can be very apparent in the jagged-looking background scenery, though depending on your television set, you might not really notice. Virtua Fighter 4 may not be the most visually stunning game--its appearance is more realistic than over the top--but it's still easily one of the best-looking 3D fighting games ever made.  You can break through those walls and score a ring-out victory. The least remarkable quality of Virtua Fighter 4 is its audio. The game still uses many of the same exact sound effects from the original Virtua Fighter, and a lot of the character voices are recycled too. On its own terms, the game sounds fine, but not particularly special--at least some of the English dialogue doesn't sound as awkward as it did in the previous games. The soundtrack, light on percussion and heavy on synthetic instruments and electric guitar licks, is upbeat and similar to the scores of the previous games in the series, but it is generally forgettable.   The humdrum sound is indicative of how, despite all the great features, Virtua Fighter 4 does have somewhat of a no-frills sensibility. For better or worse, though, that's always been the case with the series. What little story there is in the printed manual is nowhere to be found in the game itself--don't expect to be treated to an ending sequence when you beat the arcade mode. The game's menu system is awkward. You need to go out of your way to create a data file for each character and then load it up before you begin a match. In the versus mode, there isn't a quick way to change the background stage you're fighting on. The game's loading times, while certainly not slow, are noticeable. You can imagine a world where these sorts of things could have been better, but in the end they have nothing to do with the core gameplay of Virtua Fighter 4, which is fantastic.   Virtua Fighter 4 should keep you busy for a very long time. The game does have one really interesting extra feature: an AI training mode, where you must teach a computer-controlled fighter all its moves and when to use them, first by demonstrating the moves yourself and then by providing positive or negative reinforcement when the computer experiments with them. Another way to train the AI is to show it replays of some of your battles--you can optionally save a replay at the end of any match. Once you've taught your trainee fighter a thing or two, you can then put it through the kumite mode, pit it against your friends, or even pit it against their own AI-controlled fighters. It's certainly a novel idea, though it's poorly explained in the manual and certainly not as much fun as actually playing the game yourself.   You can't tell right off the bat, but Virtua Fighter 4 is the best fighting game in years. Even if you've never liked the Virtua Fighter series before--and there's a reasonable chance that's the case, considering the series has never taken off in the US like it has in Japan--you should still give Virtua Fighter 4 a try. The quicker pacing, the perfected controls, and the great-looking character designs, along with the outstanding AI and the unparalleled gameplay depth, make this a fighting game that just about everyone will agree on.


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113,NBA Street ,9.3, Anyone looking for a fast-action basketball game that isn't afraid to tinker with Midway's stock formula will definitely find a lot to like in NBA Street.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/4/3/2212843-box_nbastr.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-street-review/1900-2778756/,pos,"
For years, Midway has been breaking the arcade-sports formula down to a science. The company takes a sport, breaks it down to a four-player match, adds a turbo button, creates some way to set your player on fire by accomplishing a task three times in a row, and includes a code to give your player a huge head. While the company's basketball offerings have always been fairly solid, there's definitely room for improvement. Electronic Arts' latest PS2 offering, NBA Street, capitalizes on this fact, delivering a very NBA Jam-like game of street basketball that features enough well-designed differences to breathe life into Midway's stock formula.   NBA Street is three-on-three street basketball. Games go to 21 points, though the winning team must win by two points. Shots from inside the three-point line count for one point, while shots outside it count for two. Outside of the shot clock violation, there are no fouls, and there are no quarters or other time limits. The game also keeps track of your trick points, which are accumulated on defense by stealing balls and blocking shots and on offense by faking out defenders and scoring on various dunks and other shots. Executing tricks also builds your gamebreaker meter. Once the meter is full, you have a limited time to shoot one special shot that is almost guaranteed to land if your player is in range. The shot, if it drops, subtracts points from your opponents' score while adding to yours. For instance, landing a gamebreaker from outside the three-point line will give you two points and take two points away from the opposing team. As games are typically pretty close, the gamebreaker shots can really make the difference between winning and losing.   At first, NBA Street's control scheme seems needlessly complex, especially if you're used to playing simpler games, such as NBA Jam or NBA Hoopz. But once you spend some time with the game, the control becomes second nature. Aside from the standard pass and shoot buttons, you have a steal/trick button, a shot-blocking/rebounding jump, and four turbo buttons. Much like EA's snowboarding game, SSX, the different turbo buttons are used to execute different tricks. While driving to the hoop, you can execute lots of different side steps and other tricky footwork in an attempt to shake the defenders. Different turbo-button combinations also translate into different dunks. While any player can attempt any trick or dunk, players with low handle ratings will lose control of the ball if they attempt a more complex trick and players with low dunk ratings will frequently miss difficult dunks.NBA Street has two main modes of play. The circuit mode features a fighting game-like ladder that pits you against each of the NBA teams. After defeating each region of pro teams, you're put up against a boss team led by one of EA's street-ball players. After each win, you're given the chance to add one of the players you defeated to your roster, or you can instead take skill points that can be used to pump up a created player. Your roster starts out pretty strong, as you can put Michael Jordan on your team right off the bat. The game's other mode asks you to achieve certain goals on each of the game's courts. Each court has win-streak and trick-total records. Breaking each record unlocks new items to use for your created players, such as new heads, bodies, and shoes. It also unlocks new cheat codes, which are entered in true NBA Jam fashion at the pregame matchup screen. You can also unlock new teams, including the EA Sports Big team, which features snowboarders from SSX, and 3LW, the urban/pop group responsible for the song ""No More (Baby I'ma Do Right)."" The 3LW team is pretty funny on the court, as they're all around the five-foot mark and around 90-100 pounds each.   The players in NBA Street look a little choppy when they're running around the court. While the game moves at a nice fast pace, the lack of really solid transition animations hurts the game's otherwise excellent appearance. The outdoor courts all look great. Some have different lighting effects, which create nice-looking shadows on the court. NBA Street also features some solid facial textures, though a little facial animation would have been a nice touch, and it would have brought quite a bit of life to the game's post-dunk close-ups. The game features quite a bit of voice work, some by the actual players themselves. You'll hear quite a bit of trash talking throughout the game, as well as quite a bit of other background speech. The music in NBA Street is really quite amazing. Provided by Ninja Tune, the game's music plays like one continuous mix that fades into and out of various songs. ""Dark Lady"" by DJ Food is used quite a bit in various forms, as tons of different hip-hop loops are laid under the ""Dark Lady"" bass line as you progress from game to game. The song also comes on in full force whenever your gamebreaker meter is charged. If it weren't for the game's announcer, the sound would have scored a perfect 10. The announcer, represented by a bald guy with a megaphone who appears before each game in an attempt to hype up the crowd, talks in played-out rap slang, up to and including ""bling bling!"" Funny at first, the commentary wears out its welcome after a few games, and, luckily, it can be easily silenced--even though the fact that the commentator eventually starts berating you before and after each game if you play on the easy difficulty setting too long is pretty clever.   NBA Street has enough unlockable items and options to make it worthwhile as a single-player game. While two-player games eventually boil down to a frustrating battle of who can shake defenders long enough to unleash a gamebreaker, the two-player mode still manages to be a lot of fun as well. Anyone looking for a fast-action basketball game that isn't afraid to tinker with Midway's stock formula will definitely find a lot to like in NBA Street.
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114,The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker ,9.3," The Wind Waker is a strong achievement in every way, from its stunning graphical presentation to its tight control and interesting story line.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2581374-518yox4uf7l.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-review/1900-6023591/,pos,"
 While Nintendo has a wide array of classic characters in its repertoire, The Legend of Zelda has become the company's flagship series. The last big Zelda game, The Ocarina of Time, basically reinvented the series for the polygonal generation, retaining the basic elements that have made the series great while unveiling new standards, such as the Z-trigger-based lock-on targeting system that made combat easier to manage and more exciting. The newest installment in the series is finally upon us in the form of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which sticks quite close to the blueprint drawn up by 1998's The Ocarina of Time. But what truly makes The Wind Waker a landmark event and sets it apart from most other games on the market today is its high level of polish.  The game's characters are extremely expressive in their motion and appearance.  At the start, The Wind Waker's story feels really separate from any of the previous Zelda games, though it ends up tying into the rest of the series pretty well. The game opens on the appropriately named Outset Island, where you live with your sister and grandmother. It's your character's birthday, and he's reached the age when it's customary for boys to wear green clothing that honors The Ocarina of Time version of Link, who is now known as the ""hero of time"" in the legends that speak of his Ocarina exploits. Shortly after you wake up and don your classical Legend of Zelda garb, all hell breaks loose in the form of a giant bird carrying a small girl toward the island, with a pirate ship giving chase and firing cannonballs. Eventually, the bird makes off with your sister, and you team up with the pirates to follow the bird and get your sister back. As luck would have it, this series of events grows into something much larger as you proceed, and as you'd expect, the very fate of the world hangs in the balance by the time you reach the game's final confrontation.   While The Wind Waker does have its own twists and turns--much of the gameplay involves you sailing around the world in a talking boat known as the King of Red Lions, for example--the gameplay is very similar to that of The Ocarina of Time. The control scheme is nearly identical, using the GameCube controller's L trigger for lock-on targeting and the Z, X, and Y buttons for any inventory items you choose to assign there. The combat is also very similar, though there is a new counter move that lets you easily sidestep or leap over incoming attacks and strike at a foe's back. The combat in The Ocarina of Time worked really well, so it's no surprise that the combat in The Wind Waker also works very well.   Like in other Zelda games, progressing in The Wind Waker is tied to having the right items in your inventory. More often than not, you'll earn your new items in the game's dungeons and then go on to face a boss battle that requires you to use your new item properly to emerge victorious. The classic items that we've seen introduced over the course of the series return here, including power bracelets, bombs, the hookshot, the boomerang, multiple types of arrows, empty bottles, and, of course, the master sword. The returning items behave in a pretty standard fashion, though the boomerang has been upgraded this time around to target up to five enemies or objects at once. One or two puzzles in the game require you to use this new functionality. New this time around are items like the grappling hook, which can be used to steal items from enemies or swing from place to place using specially marked targets. The deku leaf can be used like a hang glider or parachute of sorts, and it comes in handy when you need to cross large gaps. You can also use the leaf to blow gusts of wind at objects and enemies. The wind waker itself is a conductor's baton that has the power to control the wind. Much like with Link's ocarina, you'll learn songs throughout the game that have various magic effects. One warps you from place to place, another turns night into day, and yet another lets you control the direction of the wind, which, as it turns out, is very important indeed.   The Wind Waker makes fantastic use of the GameCube's ability to link up to the Game Boy Advance.  The world of The Wind Waker consists of a large collection of islands. Once you've completed the first few portions of the game, you're given access to the King of Red Lions and the watery overworld. Your talking boat will basically guide you through the game, and you'll use a sail, a sea chart, and the wind waker's ability to change the direction of the wind to move from island to island. While the world is quite large and full of all sorts of little side quests, the game is also very good about marking sectors and islands on your chart when they become important to your progression, so getting lost or stuck in the game's large overworld is actually pretty difficult. The sailing can be a bit much at times, but once you've learned a warp song for your wind waker, you can skip around to the more important locations with ease. Once you set foot on land, you'll find a variety of locales, including towns, fortresses, fairy caves, a ghost ship, and dungeons.   While The Wind Waker has a lot more overworld and town work than some of the previous games in the series, you'll definitely be spending a fair amount of time in the game's dungeons. None of them ever get as devious as The Ocarina of Time's water temple, but these portions of the game definitely have their own sets of challenges. The game's different dungeons have different themes, such as fire, ice, plants, and wind. Two of the game's later dungeons throw in an extra, Ico-like twist by forcing you to bring another character along with you. These helper characters have abilities of their own, which come into play when solving puzzles in those dungeons.  While The Legend of Zelda games have never been overly difficult, The Wind Waker seems to be easier than previous entries in the series. Most of the game's in-dungeon puzzles are really straightforward, and the game's bosses rarely put up a terribly threatening fight. Even the game's multistage final boss battle is only marginally difficult. Players already familiar with The Ocarina of Time combat and control system should be able to breeze through the game without having to go out of their way to acquire extra bottles for fairies or medicine or find the game's numerous hidden heart pieces. Eager Zelda fans who pre-ordered the game should have already been brushing up on this fighting system, thanks to Nintendo's Zelda preorder disc offer, which includes both the original Ocarina of Time and a more-challenging ""master quest"" version of Ocarina. Both of these hold up well, considering how much time has passed since their original release, but the Wind Waker is good enough to justify the entire purchase on its own.   The combat in Ocarina of Time worked really well, so it's no surprise that the combat in The Wind Waker also works very well.  The Wind Waker makes fantastic use of the GameCube's ability to link up to the Game Boy Advance. In the game, you'll acquire an item called the Tingle tuner, which essentially looks like a Game Boy Advance with an antenna sticking out of it. With it, you can call upon the fairy wannabe Tingle, who appears on the GBA screen along with a map of your surroundings. As you move around, Tingle will occasionally give you hints about dungeon puzzles, and his map of the sea is helpful for finding islands before you've properly charted a quadrant. Tingle can also heal you, restore your magic, drop a bomb anywhere you put his cursor, and give you the ability to fly for short periods of time. All this extra item- and power-up-based help comes at the cost of a handful of rupees, and it's never actually required. The entire Tingle tuner portion of the game seems to have been designed to allow parents to help young children through the game, as his hints and items can be used to make the game even easier than it already is. However, Tingle's bonuses are disabled during boss fights and other important encounters, limiting his effectiveness.   All told, the game can be completed in 15 to 20 hours, though considering all the extra heart pieces, treasure maps, and other little optional endeavors in the game, that number can increase fairly dramatically. The game's quest starts out in a very brisk manner, quickly moving you from dungeon to dungeon without delay. The game's final third, however, requires you to collect a series of items before you can gain entry to the game's final sequence. Collecting these items isn't difficult, but the focus on sailing, rupee collecting, and dredging up items from the bottom of the sea is pretty tedious. While this portion of the game has actually been shortened up a bit since the Japanese release, it still feels like it was put in the game merely to pad it out to an acceptable length. Thankfully, the game gets back on track after this portion is completed, and the game's final confrontation puts a nice new twist on the classic Zelda boss fight.   Much has been said about The Wind Waker's cartoonlike, cel-shaded look, which was initially met with quite a bit of skepticism when it debuted some time ago. That skepticism is completely unfounded, though, as this new entry in the series looks absolutely amazing. What seems like a relatively simple look on the surface is revealed to be quite complex pretty early on, as the game begins to show off some of its facial animation techniques. The game's characters are extremely expressive in their motion and appearance, and this adds emotional weight to the game's text-based story line. There are lots of great little touches to the game's look. The game's focus on wind translates into grass that blows naturally, sails that fill with wind when you've pointed them in the right direction, and swirling gusts of wind that clue you in to the wind's direction and force--something that actually factors into the gameplay on more than one occasion. Artistically, The Wind Waker is nearly unmatched, on the GameCube or on any other platform.    But the game is no technical slouch, either. It runs at a pretty consistent frame rate, allows you to clearly see far-off objects and islands with ease, and makes great use of various lighting effects for things like torches and other underground light sources. About the only noticeable bit of weirdness in the game's visuals is some occasional dithering or color banding when you're out on the open sea at night, but even that is relatively rare and stands out only if you're specifically looking for it. It's also worth noting that the game features progressive scan support for those with higher-end displays.   The game's final confrontation puts a nice new twist on the classic Zelda boss fight.  The Wind Waker's music is a collection of fantastic tunes. Some of it is completely new, some of it qualifies as a remix of older (usually The Ocarina of Time) music, and some of it is music that sounds reminiscent enough of older Zelda music to remind you of specific passages in previous compositions. Regardless of the source, the music all comes together very, very nicely. There isn't any real speech in the game, though most major characters make a series of noises when you speak to them. Link himself has the same style of yelps, shouts, and screams that you've heard in previous Zelda games. While the noises do work fairly well, hearing the same handful of voice clips again and again in combat does tend to wear on you a little bit. The game's sound effects and other audio elements are nicely done, and, depending on your surroundings, they occasionally pick up a little echo. For players with above-average audio configurations, the game makes pretty good use of its Dolby Pro Logic II support.   While some may be a little put off by the late-game item fetching and the game's easy puzzles and boss battles, The Wind Waker is nonetheless a strong achievement in every way, from its stunning graphical presentation to its tight control and interesting story line. It may not have fallen too far from the tree Nintendo planted back in 1998, but the way it refines one of the polygonal generation's most important games makes The Wind Waker every bit as much of a must-own game as The Ocarina of Time was before it. 


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115,Flight Simulator 2002 ,9.3," Whether you're a nervous tenderfoot or hardened devotee of desktop flying, this is the Flight Simulator you've been waiting for.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/9/4/3369-13194.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/flight-simulator-2002-review/1900-2823426/,pos,"
Merging newfound accessibility with revolutionary graphics and stupefying depth, Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002 is a program of monolithic proportions. Like its immediate predecessor, 1999's daunting Flight Simulator 2000, FS 2002 invites its guests to experience virtually every conceivable parameter of civilian piloting while exploring virtually every conceivable corner of this planet. Yet any further comparison between the two is not unlike comparing a typical fastball with a Randy Johnson fastball. Microsoft has simply blown the top off the civilian flight simulation genre with its latest iteration and, in so doing, proven that dearly departed competitors like Flight Unlimited III never really stood a chance. Whether you're a nervous tenderfoot or hardened devotee of desktop flying, this is the Flight Simulator you've been waiting for.  Flight Simulator 2002 is a major improvement on its predecessors.  The statistics alone are staggering. For FS 2002, Microsoft has added more than 1,000 operative airports to FS 2000's already astounding 20,000--for a mind-numbing grand total of more than 21,000. It has upped the number of flyable aircraft from 10 to 12, including series newcomers such as the humungous Boeing 747-400, the Cessna 172S Skyhawk SP, and the largest single-engine floatplane currently available, Cessna's $1.5 million amphibious Caravan. Returning from past editions are the Boeing 777-300 and 737-400, Cessna 182S Skylane and Skylane RG, Bell 206B JetRanger III chopper, Learjet 45 business jet, Extra 300S stunt plane, Schweizer 2-32 glider, and the ancient Sopwith Camel. Users may also import aircraft from previous and current versions of Flight Simulator and Combat Flight Simulator, although substantial tweaking is required before said aircraft are fully recognized and operational. Even the game's system requirements are colossal, ranging from a 650MB minimum to a full install of 1.5GB.   But it's unquestionably FS 2002's surprisingly glorious and massively modified visual presentation that makes this the finest civilian flight simulation ever to appear. Critics and customers alike have long heaped scorn upon the Microsoft franchise--and rightly so--for its painfully sluggish frame rate and often bland incidental scenery, particularly when judging it against the smaller yet markedly more attractive and smoother world of competitors like the aforementioned Flight Unlimited. Suffice it to say that such disapproval is no longer warranted.   Not only does FS 2002 paint as pretty a picture as did Flight Unlimited III, but it also does so on a quasi-global scale. Of its 21,000-plus airstrips, more than 60 are paired with partially and fully realized cityscapes that put to shame the detailed cities of prior editions. In fact, the structural scenery in prime centers such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong is so dense, so authentic, and so smartly blended into the landscape that you'll swear you're flying over the real thing. Less-populous locations like Las Vegas are no longer a sparse assemblage of area-specific buildings plopped in the midst of a vast wasteland. Now, a quick tour over the strip reveals more than a dozen finely crafted casinos and such detail as the Luxor skylight, the Mirage volcano, numerous legible billboards, and a Bellagio fountain that actually gushes water as you approach. That the entire gambling district is surrounded by what looks like a real city is indicative of what's in store throughout the game.   Depending on their location and importance, even small urban zones bear resemblance to their real-world counterparts. Midsize towns such as Bullhead City, Arizona, and Redding, California, have been upgraded from generic blotches and one or two haphazardly positioned structures to the thriving communities they really are. Bullhead City is noticeably larger and bordered on the west by the Colorado River, which bends and curves almost precisely where it should. The downtown Redding core is a bit underdeveloped, yet its buildings are faithfully low-level and the surrounding countryside authentically treed. Interstate 5 bisects the town, and alternate byways sprawl in all directions to nearby Whiskeytown and Shasta Lakes and further northward to majestic, snow-capped Mount Shasta.  The amphibious Cessna 208 Caravan is one of FS2002's newest aircraft.  The visual disparity between this product and its predecessor is just as evident in unsettled areas, where the developers have clearly taken great pains to ensure the environment isn't just an endless sea of featureless land. In most locations, the game automatically generates terrain, vegetation, shading, and textures to match that of the real world. Water features are particularly convincing, moving and reflecting and often forming waves that break against the shoreline. Major geographical elements like the Swiss Alps or Grand Canyon and landmarks like Mount Rushmore are nothing less than awesome. Some elements, like the Great Pyramids of Egypt, are far less memorable than one might think, and certain isolated locations like Tanquary Fiord in Canada's arctic display strange anomalies like floating trees, but the overall impression is stunning.   Spectacular weather visuals, such as multishaded translucent clouds and bleeding rain droplets, only add to the dynamics, as do incidental special effects, such as touchdown wheel smoke and jet contrails. Some aircraft provide smooth-scrolling virtual 3D cockpits--a feature sadly absent in FS 2000--complete with operational gauges and zoom/unzoom capability. Pilots are offered a generous allotment of environmental variables, including cloud elevation and type, precipitation strength and form, and a wonderfully authentic portrayal of real-time weather as provided through Jeppesen flight information services. Parameters such as aircraft type, time of day, and weather may be adjusted on the fly from within the cockpit, although the latter doesn't always turn out as expected.Environmental conditions aside, series veterans will absolutely love what Microsoft has done with the Flight Simulator frame rate. This time around, the game flows effortlessly on mid- to high-end systems and thus renders obsolete the crawling slide show of prior editions. With most graphic options cranked wide open, screen resolution set to 1024x768x32, and visibility toggled to 150 miles, the test machine's 1000MHz Athlon processor and GeForce 2 video card seemed at ease throughout. Even traditional system killers, like snap cockpit side views, were fluid and uninterrupted. There are, however, several minor caveats. The graphics engine does tend to jump momentarily when initially drawing an approaching urban area or high-density chunk of scenery. Flight load-up times are substantially longer than ever before, and computers barely meeting the minimum 300MHz processor and 8MB video card requirements will in all likelihood continue to experience slowdowns and delayed rendering. Yet these are small trade-offs considering the game's otherwise high level of performance.  Cities are densely populated and weather effects are strikingly real.  As has always been the case for this series, the act of operating a Flight Simulator aircraft may be as ridiculously easy or as challenging as you wish. Fans of quick action will undoubtedly reduce some or all of the realism options to their minimums and skip any groundwork altogether by slewing their plane from the outset to 5,000 feet. They may conduct a flight entirely of their own creation or avail themselves of the game's 50-plus prearranged flights, half of which require advanced skills. Alternately, they can log onto Microsoft's Gaming Zone for airborne antics that can theoretically support up to 300 of their best friends.   Ultra-hard-core enthusiasts can just as easily file and follow complex flight plans, introduce the potential of equipment failures, fly at night or with low visibility via their instruments, and, for the very first time in the history of the game, interact with Flight Simulator's optional air traffic control (ATC) system. ATC communication adds a whole new dimension to the Flight Simulator environment, filling the previously quiet skies with chatter and forcing you to adhere to the rules of the aerial road. Fortunately, Microsoft's translation of ATC seems to behave intelligently, recognizing your presence, position, and behavior and attempting to deal with it in a reasonable manner. Be prepared to join the back of the queue before you take off or land and otherwise tackle many of the stresses and delays facing real pilots as they hop to and from busy airports. Certainly the quality of the game's ATC justifies the many hours you'll spend learning all about its functions and unique lingo.   FS 2002 is also the first installment to offer truly enjoyable tutorials. Granted, Microsoft has traditionally furnished each version of the game with oodles of reading material, but it has never offered this level of user-friendliness. New pilots will want to begin with the ""getting started"" videos, wherein licensed pilots and obvious John Boy Walton fans John and Martha King take their pupils on a golly-gee preparatory tour of the absolute basics. Once indoctrinated, players will then turn to any of the massive online guidebooks, gain hands-on experience through a series of 27 beautifully composed and fully narrated interactive training sessions, or jump back and forth from one to another. Experienced pros will want to continue the interactive sessions as they make their way from private pilot to instrument-rated veteran through to commercial and airline transport captain. Flight instructor/motivational speaker Ron Machado returns to once again lead the instructional segments, and his breezy style tends to take some of the sting from what is clearly a ton of information.   In keeping with the game's new ATC verbiage, FS 2002's in-flight audio is dang near perfect. Each aircraft packs distinctive engine, electronic, and mechanical sounds, all of which vary in accordance to the current camera and viewing perspective. The wind howls around smaller craft, severe rainstorms pound on the fuselage, and ominous thunder growls in the distance. The whir and clunk of landing gear and flaps sound far different in a 747 than they do in a Skylane, and most equipment failures are accompanied by their own unique effect.  Even looking out from a virtual cockpit, frame rates tend to stay smooth.  Potential players with an extra $20 burning a hole in their pockets may want to opt for the additional goodies found in the Flight Simulator 2002 Professional Edition. Here, they may fly four additional aircraft, including two that are completely new to the franchise (the Cessna 208 Grand Caravan and Raytheon BE58) and a pair of veteran performers (the Raytheon/Beech King 350 and Mooney Bravo). They're also permitted to take on the role of teacher or student in the multiplayer ""instructor's station,"" wherein they'll partner with another player to either issue or attempt a sequence of fully customizable assignment parameters. The Pro Edition includes several other perks that only a true fanatic could love, including the high-end, highly detailed 3D modeling tool gMax, through which aspiring world builders can design, construct, and assign dynamic attributes to virtually any Flight Simulator-supported object. And certainly anyone who wishes to import Combat Flight Sim and earlier Flight Sim airplanes should give the Pro Edition some deliberation, as it seriously simplifies what is otherwise a difficult process. We had an A6M5 Zero imported and flying over Paris within five minutes.   With Flight Simulator 2002, Microsoft has not opted for the easy road. Instead of taking advantage of a suddenly inactive genre by rehashing old programming, it has delivered the most complete civilian flying experience that the PC world has yet to see. Considering its immense scale and wholesale upgrades, it is a bargain at $54.95.
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116,Madden NFL 2002 ,9.3," While Madden 2002 isn't reinventing football on the PlayStation, it is really the best you're going to get on the system.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/9/8/2214298-box_madden02.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2002-review/1900-2807809/,pos,"
While fans of last year's PlayStation Madden game may initially have a hard time noticing the differences between that game and the new Madden 2002, this latest installment deserves credit for being the best football game to date on the PlayStation. Featuring great additions like the Madden classic mode, which lets you play the game in a 16-bit style, you'll find that even if you own last year's version, there's still good reason to get what could be the last version of Madden football we see on the PlayStation.   One of the coolest extra features that has ever been included in a Madden game is in Madden 2002, which is the Madden classic mode. This mode lets you play Madden 2002 as though it were running on the16-bit Sega Genesis. The mode has all the current teams and rosters--but it plays and looks like the classic Madden '92. It's an incredible extra that makes you feel almost as if you're getting a whole other game for free. Another new addition in Madden 2002 is a mulligan feature that lets you take another shot at any play you'd like. For instance, say the game is tied, and you're only 10 yards away from the end zone, with 15 seconds left on the clock. You go for the touchdown but realize that it was a mistake as your receiver drops the pass. Now, you can simply take a mulligan and try it again.   Madden 2002 of course comes with all the features and options you've come to expect from the series, including all the current NFL teams, players, and stadiums. The game also once again features the Madden cards, which now even feature cheerleaders. These digital trading cards are unlocked by completing Madden challenges during a game. These Madden challenges are specific objectives that you can try to complete--tasks like throwing five consecutive passes in a game or running for more than 200 yards with one player. These challenges add a bit of extra fun and depth to what is already a very deep game.   Controlling Madden 2002 is very enjoyable, since the game strikes a good balance between delivering true-to-life physics and just being responsive. You can pretty much get a quick running back to go wherever you want him to, when you want him to. The game's controls are extremely responsive, even in comparison with its PS2 counterpart. Otherwise, the artificial intelligence of the defensive backs and line has been tweaked a bit since last year. Defenders can simply get beat and linemen are now more accurate, both of which help add a better sense of realism to the game. You'll have to identify mismatches in the game and substitute people in and out accordingly.   Visually, Madden 2002 is as good as football is going to look on the PlayStation. However, the graphics really aren't that different from last year's game. The player models are a bit blocky, but smooth and realistic animations make up for the lack of polygons. The various tackling animations are once again the most notable, as they include everything from shoestrings to one-man drag-downs. The animation of the players executing their various moves, such as catching, throwing, and running, are all very realistic as well. The game's broadcast-style camera angles and commentary from Pat Summerall and John Madden round out what is a very-well-done presentation.   So while Madden 2002 isn't reinventing football on the PlayStation, it is really the best you're going to get on the system. Arguably, it can even provide a more enjoyable experience than its big brother on the PlayStation 2. In any event, Madden 2002 for the PlayStation is a wonderful re-creation of a sport that controls well and has almost just as many bells and whistles as its PlayStation 2 counterpart. But most importantly, the game is just superfun to play.
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117,NFL 2K2 ,9.3," NFL 2K2 for the Xbox is marginally better looking than its PlayStation 2 counterpart, but it doesn't really take advantage of the Xbox's hardware.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/9/0/1/2215901-box_nfl2k2.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nfl-2k2-review/1900-2837303/,pos,"
NFL 2K2 for the Xbox is marginally better looking than its PlayStation 2 counterpart, but it doesn't really take advantage of the Xbox's hardware. Aside from this slightly enhanced visual presentation, the differences between the two versions aren't that noticeable and really only lie in the AI department. The question for Xbox owners of course is whether it's better than NFL Fever 2002--which really comes down to personal taste, since both games are very good.   NFL 2K2 features all of the standard gameplay modes, including exhibition, practice, tournament, season, playoffs, and franchise. It carries the full NFL license, which means the game has all the real players, teams, and stadiums from the NFL 2001 season. The NFL 2K series originated on the Dreamcast, where one of its major selling points was its online functionality. Unfortunately, this feature hasn't been implemented into this year's PS2 or Xbox releases. You can, however, play the game with up to four players.    The single greatest thing about playing NFL 2K2 is that the game's incredibly responsive control really puts you in the game. The mechanics of a football game are simple: You pick plays, run the ball, throw the ball, and catch the ball. The mechanics in NFL 2K2 are no different except that the game actually puts you in control of some of these seemingly mundane tasks. For instance, you can run the ball faster by tapping the A button as fast as you can, you can really throw the ball to your receivers by using the analog stick to aim your pass, and you can catch the ball by pressing the Y button. These little control nuances, mixed with controls that translate into onscreen action, almost instantly pull you into the mechanics of playing football.    Whether you're playing defense or offense, NFL 2K2 is incredibly exciting, thanks to the freedom that the controls give you. For instance, if you're controlling a cornerback just as the pass comes your way, in an instant you have to decide whether you're in position to go for the interception or for the tackle. If you're not in the best position to try to make a play for the ball, are you in a good position to try to really lay into a receiver by charging up your move meter before pushing the tackle button so you might make him drop the pass? You'll find yourself asking these questions subconsciously and will only realize it after the fate of the play has been decided. On offense, for example, when controlling the quarterback, you can have maximum passing turned on, which gives you complete control of the placement of the pass, meaning you can literally aim your passes using the analog stick. This lets you lead or underthrow to your receivers just like a real quarterback would. The maximum-passing mechanic makes passing the ball extremely intense since the slightest lapse in concentration can and usually does result in an interception. Running the ball in NFL 2K2 is also quite an experience since the game features a couple of unique mechanics that make the running game extremely exciting. The first is an intelligent animation that automatically happens when your running back has to squeeze through the line or has to bounce off an offensive lineman. For instance, say you're running the ball with Tiki Barber, and the line just isn't really giving him much of a hole to get through. You'll see Tiki simply turn sideways just enough to squeeze in between his teammates. This intelligent animation not only looks very natural, but also makes the running game a whole lot of fun. This intelligent stumbling/tripping animation was in the Dreamcast version of NFL 2K2; however, it wasn't quite as balanced as it is in the Xbox version. You'll still be hitting some high running numbers but nothing unrealistic or unstoppable by any means.    In the AI department, NFL 2K2 gets some high marks, but the game does have one small problem. The computer plays very well on the medium difficulty setting and actually seems to get better throughout the season. The computer plays the ball well on defense both at the line and in the backfield. It knows how to position its line and how to use its defensive backs well. On offense, the computer is very efficient, especially on the ground with an A-list running back. It sometimes seems that the computer just really wants to win, and it's busting tackles left and right, but most of the time if you hunker down and give it everything you've got, you can at least keep it competitive. The computer is really good on the hardest difficulty setting but not as impossible as in the PS2 version. The one area where the computer isn't so smart is clock management. It can be late in the fourth quarter with only a few yards to go, and the computer will spike the ball instead of using one of the three timeouts at first. In the PS2 version the computer never called a timeout; in the Xbox version it does, but still not before it spikes the ball.Visually, NFL 2K2 for the Xbox is really good. People are sure to debate over whether NFL Fever 2002 looks better, but the truth is that they both look great and simply have different graphical styles. The opening movie of NFL 2K2 illustrates the realistic look of the game by showing an FMV sequence that fades seamlessly into polygon models from the game in the exact positions. The texture-mapped, animated faces of the players look more like their real-life counterparts than in any other football game before. While you can really see this only during the tight close-ups after the play or in replays, the detail is there nonetheless. Some faces look better than others, but for the most part they all look really good. The player models themselves are very complex and are quite different from one another. The animation, however, is where the game earns most of its points, as the players move and react to one another very realistically. The players in NFL 2K2 really look as though they are making contact with one another, especially in the tackles, of which there are many. Another very nice touch to the look of the players is the real-time field lighting and shadowing. The most pronounced use of this is when clouds pass over the stadium when you're playing during the day. You'll see the clouds pass over not only the field, but the players as well. While it might sound trivial, the first time you see the big dark shadow coming, you'll realize that you've never seen it before. The stadiums all look very real, plus they've got all kinds of detail in the stands and along the sidelines with full 3D models of the teams, camera crews, cheerleaders, and even the chain gang. Visually, the main difference between the Xbox and PS2 versions is that the Xbox version doesn't slow down at all, which does make the game look a bit better in comparison to the PS2 version. You can also see some of the small technical differences between NFL 2K2 and NFL Fever 2002, especially in regard to the game's reflections.   In the audio department, NFL 2K2 is one of the most entertaining games to listen to. The play-by-play and color commentary are not only accurate and right on the mark but also funny, informative, and even refreshing. You'll hear some of the same comments after playing a few games as the same team, but as a whole, NFL 2K2 really does have a lot of diversity to its dialogue, and it has wonderful hard-hitting sound effects, crowd chants, and fantastic trash-talking player chatter.    In the end, NFL 2K2 is a great football game that you'll either love or hate, depending on your personal tastes. Deciding whether it's the game for you simply depends on what type of football game you like. NFL 2K2 is an action-packed football game that plays more like the 16-bit football games of old than the latest generation of momentum-based simulations. In NFL 2K2, when you make the catch you know you made it, because you threw the ball accurately and you got the receiver in the right place at the right time, and he actually caught the ball because you hit the catch button just as the ball reached him. No other game truly delivers the feeling of literally catching a football, running through the line, or making that perfect throw better than NFL 2K2 does. For fans of the series, NFL 2K2 for the Xbox is a must-own game that you'll love to play. For anyone who likes Madden or NFL Fever 2002 but wishes the control were a bit more responsive, NFL 2K2 is a game you'd probably like. Hard-core Madden fans might not be too thrilled with the game, but even they should probably give NFL 2K2 a try.
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118,FIFA 2002 ,9.3, Fans of real-life soccer will find this the most enjoyable soccer experience on the PC to date.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/0/1/8/3798-15018.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-2002-review/1900-2825778/,pos,"
Those who hammer the buttons on their gamepads as though they were synthetic rodents in a whack-a-mole game had best prepare for their day of reckoning. The foremost proponent of willy-nilly button-beating, EA Sports, has used the latest edition of its vaunted FIFA Soccer series as a springboard to a more thoughtful and more challenging control method that genuinely alters the way the game is played. Penalizing adrenaline-fueled thumb jockeys and rewarding those who initiate actions only after quick consideration, FIFA Soccer is quite simply a more grown-up affair than its predecessors. That it also offers improved passing and player movement and a generally more credible feel are just two more reasons fans of real-life soccer will find this the most enjoyable soccer experience on the PC to date.  The gameplay of FIFA 2002 has a remarkably true-to-life pacing.  Since its debut in the mid-1990s, the FIFA series has continually ranked as one of the strongest PC sports games on the market. If the series had a low point, it was in the highly stylized FIFA 2000, which focused on graphical prowess and high-speed button pushing over believable gameplay. In doing so, it seemed to herald a trend toward even more arcadelike gameplay in the future. Fortunately, things got back on track with last year's FIFA 2001, a game that showcased a renewed commitment to authenticity and now can be viewed as an obvious stepping-stone to this year's model.   In FIFA 2002, the gameplay is noticeably slower and more deliberate. Players behave even more like human beings than they have in the past--taking a few moments to gather in passes, accelerating slowly, gaining momentum in their first few steps, and ultimately losing steam toward the end. Rapid and repetitive button presses only hinder subsequent maneuvers, and manually controlled speed bursts do not generate the temporary supermen seen in prior editions. Passes must be delivered with an emphasis on trajectory rather than raw speed, and shots on the goal should be measured and carefully targeted if you don't want to miss the net completely.   The art of tackling has undergone a particularly satisfying revision. No longer do slide tackles carry a player 20 or 30 feet across the field, razing opponents without fear of punishment. Now, you had best measure your chances of contacting the ball first, or you'll risk drawing a yellow or red card. As such, an aggressive tackle is recommended over a conservative approach only in the most dire circumstances.  Neither rain nor night prevent games from being played through.  Artificially intelligent players without control of the ball display newfound canniness in some situations, though they may just as likely infuriate you in others. It all depends on whether the program has been coded to recognize the play you want to set up. Normally, teammates smartly predict strategies and move skillfully to open areas, setting up for quick one-twos or running at double speed to await perfectly timed lobs that drift just over the heads of defenders. EA has added new visual cues such as trailing red streaks to help identify which of your players is currently making a break for open ground. Sadly, teammate reaction is less convincing when the human coach leads his or her ballcarrier on an abnormal crossing pattern or otherwise atypical maneuver. In such situations, nearby players tend to stop or shuffle about listlessly rather than adjusting and moving where you want them to go.   The ebb and flow of the team is especially believable. Offensive forays are stifled not just with well-timed interceptions or tackles, but also with appropriate positioning. Watching a computer-controlled side move toward midfield, only to play the ball back and regroup when faced with a threatening but as yet uncommitted wall of defenders is something FIFA veterans have rarely seen before. Shot and goal totals are still a bit too high, and defenses continue to possess uncanny skill within the box--often dispossessing ball carriers and picking up loose balls faster than they do anywhere else--but EA Sports has generally done a fine job determining the final tally according to quality of opportunity and ball possession, total number of shots, and overall dominance. In short, FIFA 2002 beckons you to play again if just to more effectively implement your strategy and more astutely man the controls.FIFA Soccer 2002 is not completely void of the series' past problems, some of which now seem more conspicuous simply because the rest of the game is so darned good. The most prominent problem is its continuing inability to properly generate the final scores of simulated contests in league or tournament play. Whether you've been dominating prior games by scores of 10-1 or losing them by the same margin, the programming consistently spits out tight, low scoring results that might just as easily be a draw as a victory one way or another. On the pitch, players will be mystified when the referee blows his halftime or fulltime whistle right in the midst of a breakaway, and they'll be annoyed when their controllers just don't seem to respond as quickly as they should.  Diving saves are just part of the job for FIFA 2002 goaltenders.  It won't take returning players long to discover that EA Sports has paired FIFA's new physics and modeling authenticity with several measurable graphic innovations. The prior edition, FIFA 2001, was already one of the prettiest sports games on the market, and FIFA 2002 offers enough new wrinkles to warrant a close inspection even by those who purchased last year's model. The pitch itself is brighter, sharper, and far more representative of real grass. Players raise their arms to call for passes and jostle about even more realistically. The crowd is more colorful and alive than ever before, flying flags of the participating nations and waving their arms when they see something they like. User perspectives are doubled from last year's four to eight with an extra manual ""free cam"" available during replays, yet EA Sports has curiously continued to confine the number of playable stadiums to five, each of which is now generic. Fortunately, all five are impressive.   As is typical for the series, FIFA 2002 sports three variations of playing conditions--day, night, and rain--the latter of which combines visible droplets, overcast skies, an appropriately faded color palette, and the roar of distant thunder and the pitter-patter of precipitation. In addition, the FIFA audio scheme is a surround-sound delight. Players grunt when they kick the ball, shout when they want the ball, and howl painfully when hit with it. Returning BBC commentators John Motsen and Andy Gray once again prove infinitely preferable to FIFA 2000's ESPN pairing of Phil Schoen and Julie Foudy, generally exhibiting awareness of the play and a typically dry UK wit. Britain's popular techno and dance purveyor Ministry of Sound provides the music, much of which is majestically electronic and seriously funkified.  FIFA 2002 is simply the best soccer simulation on the PC to date.  Off the pitch, FIFA 2002 is a managerial funhouse. Now, you can generate, edit, and otherwise customize any number of new teams, then take one of those teams into a league or tournament involving up to 32 of the game's 500-plus sides or multiplayer contests via network, direct modem connection, or EA's own Internet player-matching service. You can construct new players from scratch, define skill levels in each of eight categories, then assign such personal characteristics as age, nationality, clothing style, height, weight, and facial features. Controller assignments are now fully adjustable, as are virtually all other parameters.   Like most EA Sports series, the FIFA series receives an annual upgrade that addresses some concerns and leaves others for the next installment. In this way, FIFA Soccer 2002 is no different from its predecessors. However, EA Sports decided to key on gameplay this time around, and in the process it has successfully propelled the game dangerously close to reality. This should sit well with anyone who truly appreciates the nuances, subtlety, and pace of the real-world sport.
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119,No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy In H.A.R.M.'s Way ,9.3, No One Lives Forever 2 is a rousing success on every level.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/6/0/2214860-nolf2_front_smaller.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/no-one-lives-forever-2-a-spy-in-harms-way/1900-2881851/,pos,"
No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way--the sequel to GameSpot's 2000 Action Game of the Year, The Operative: No One Lives Forever--continues the surprising success Monolith has experienced in the last couple of years. It improves on almost everything that worked well in the first game, and it also fixes that game's problems. Thanks to this sequel, an already amazing year for action games just got even better.  Skill points can be used to raise eight different character stats. Though the details have changed, the new game's story and setting are similar to those of the first game. It's still the swinging '60s, you're still UNITY agent Cate Archer, and you're still fighting the worldwide crime syndicate H.A.R.M. and its quirky henchmen. This time, you'll not only travel to predictable locations such as a remote military base, an undersea laboratory, and Japan, but you'll also visit the never-before-simulated world of Akron, Ohio, an environment that in video game terms qualifies as truly exotic.    If the story hasn't changed dramatically, the means of telling it certainly have. The expository cutscenes--which were sometimes interminable in the original game--have been seriously streamlined for the sequel. Nearly all of them make their points quickly and effectively and then move on. This skillful trimming results in scenes that are funnier and generally more entertaining than those in the original game. And from the unexpected visual gags, to the strange gadgets, to the overheard conversations of H.A.R.M.'s neurotic, chatty minions, all the other elements of the series' steadfast good humor remain intact as well.    The series' stealth elements, arguably the weakest aspect of the original's gameplay, have undergone a complete overhaul. Thankfully, a lean function has been added to Cate's repertoire of actions. Most of the game's 40 levels (spread across 15 long chapters) can be completed using stealth, brute force, or a combination of the two. And unlike in many games with a stealth element, guard alarms are usually localized--if you trigger an alert in one section of a level and manage to escape, enemies in another area won't necessarily be alerted to your presence. The designers have also done away with all the aggravating missions in which you automatically lose if you're spotted. Though triggering an alarm (especially on higher difficulty settings, where enemies pack a real wallop) will often result in a tough situation, you always have the option of fighting your way through, fleeing, or hiding until things cool down. In fact, several new gadgets, such as the bear trap and the banana peel, are specifically designed to help you escape from pursuers.    Excellent level design complements the game's improved sneaking element. Most of the environments include side passages that can be used to avoid guards. These side-passages, however, also give enemies a way to circle around you in a fight. The AI of your enemies, which was already excellent in the original, has been somewhat improved. Often, one henchman will hold his position while another one tries to work his way behind you. Meanwhile, the AI of characters who aren't actually engaged in combat has been improved dramatically. Guards will become alerted by sounds, footprints in the snow, cries from other guards, and the bodies of their fallen comrades (which you can pick up and carry out of sight). Once alerted, they won't immediately pinpoint your location. They'll first check the area of the disturbance (taking a moment to investigate dead bodies). They'll then start poking around, turning on lights and peeking into closets, in an attempt to find you. All these actions are accompanied by auditory feedback in the form of either the guard talking to his compatriots or muttering to himself. The stealth system is both intuitive enough and lenient enough to avoid the frustrating half-baked feel of similar systems implemented in other shooters, which often seem to be nothing more than an afterthought. With the possible exception of the Thief series, No One Lives Forever 2 features the most seamless and satisfying integration of first-person stealth to date.    As in the original, there are lots of bonus objects to find and extra tasks to undertake. But this time, there's an actual incentive for tackling these challenges. Skill points are awarded for completing objectives, and these points can be used to improve eight different character stats through five different levels. The effects of raised stats are noticeable without being unbalancing. For instance, improving your weapons skill will reduce the amount of time it takes to load a new clip. It's nice to have improved skills, but it's not necessary to complete a level.    The graphics are rendered using LithTech's next-generation Jupiter engine, and while they're somewhat trumped by the next-generation Unreal engine on display in the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo, they still look terrific. The Jupiter engine is capable of rendering large environments with a lot of detail, and it seems particularly suited to creating some striking water effects. But the characters in No One Lives Forever 2 are an especially notable triumph of imaginative design combined with excellent technology. Fluid animations and eyes that actually track objects permit the game's characters to truly act--a rare feat in gaming. The soundtrack is once again an endearing mix of an orchestral score and Ray Conniff-style space age pop. Also, those who played the original may notice that a new actress has provided Cate's voice work for the sequel. It's a little jarring at first, but you'll quickly adjust to it.  The Jupiter engine does a good job with large outdoor environments. Facing stiff competition from games whose sole purpose is multiplayer action, the developers have concentrated on the game's great single-player experience and (possibly wisely) decided to not include any competitive online modes in No One Lives Forever 2. Instead, they've created a supplemental four-chapter campaign that can be tackled cooperatively by up to four players. The campaign is composed of reworked environments from the single-player game, and it's designed to be a true campaign experience in that you can actually save and resume online sessions. The levels do a good job of tailoring the action to a team of players. For instance, at one point you have to carry Cate's unconscious body to a safe zone, an act that requires one person to bear the load while the others to protect him or her, since you can't carry a readied weapon and a body simultaneously.    Since it's not a review until someone starts complaining, here you go: The multiplayer doesn't have a lot of replay value. Also, there might be a few too many tasks that require you to scour a level for a key object. Those criticisms might seem half-hearted--in truth, there isn't really a lot to complain about. No One Lives Forever 2 is a rousing success on every level. In an era when grim, humorless realism appears to be the sensibility of choice among shooters, a game as genuinely funny and good-natured as No One Lives Forever 2 is a welcome relief. That it's also a genuinely excellent game makes it almost too good to be true. 


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120,Anacapri - The Dream ,2.5," Anacapri has more in common with the ancient gameplay of early '90s adventures than anything modern, but even as a pseudo-nostalgia piece, it's no fun at all.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/6/7/5/30552-85675.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/anacapri-the-dream-review/1900-6178487/,neg,"
  Someone needs to tell S&G Software that it's no longer 1993. Creating games with photographs and video clips in place of digitally created images is about as culturally relevant today as a new Coolio CD, so it's hard to see what the developer was thinking when it made Anacapri: The Dream. This throwback to the era of The 7th Guest may include thousands of photographs of one of the most gorgeous vacation spots on the planet, but it plays more like something you found at a yard sale than a game you pulled down from the new releases shelf.    The line between games and movies is sort of blurred in the structure of the game. While the play style holds tight to the point-and-click adventure template, the game is constructed solely with still photos that give your jaunt the vibe of an indie film. So even though you play a stereotypical sleuth looking to solve the mystery of the ancient Obsidian Disk on the island of Capri, the atmosphere is quite different from the sorts of adventures you might be accustomed to. Thousands of photos depicting everything from seaside vistas to cobblestone roads, to the many quaint shops lining the narrow streets of the titular town of Anacapri, give you the impression that you've embarked on a real trip to the exotic Mediterranean locale. The gameworld is absolutely massive, so it frequently feels as if you're really exploring all of the crooks and crannies of the island.   Gorgeous pictures? Sure. But didn't this style of game design go out of vogue about fifteen years ago?   However, there are prices to pay for this type of presentation and the sheer size of everything. Many of the most potentially picturesque outdoor shots are blurry or strewn with artifacts, presumably to keep picture size reasonable. Oddly, the most sharply detailed pics are the dull ones that show a shopkeeper behind his counter or an old man sitting on a bench. Regardless of quality, there is an air of absurdity to the whole affair because of the use of multiple shots of people during conversations to give the illusion of movement. Done more subtly, this might have been a good idea, and might have nicely added the illusion of movement to what is otherwise a breathless game. But all of the changed poses and expressions given to Anacapri residents are wildly exaggerated, so encounters with them come off like some sort of bizarre mime show. Finally, there are some technological issues in the install process due to the high number of photographs. There are so many photos included as single, high-resolution files that the installation takes almost as long as a flight to Capri itself. You might want to brew a pot of coffee for this one, as it takes a good two hours for all seven gigs of picture files to be transferred from the DVD to your hard drive.    Unfortunately, this time isn't well spent. The game amounts to little more than a great selection of somebody else's vacation snaps. Gameplay lacks structure, due largely to the sheer size of the island. The game itself is such an afterthought that it feels like something hacked together at the last minute to justify writing off a vacation to Capri. Although you're assisted by a hotspot system that highlights key locations on each photograph, it's ridiculously easy to get lost because the entire island is open at the start of the game. Make a wrong turn, or simply get befuddled over the game's many vague clues, and you're soon off on an unintentional sightseeing tour. Although it's relatively easy to work your way through most in-game situations by doing some careful pixel hunting, closely following all of your instructions, and continually checking the city and island maps to see where you are, you still need a walkthrough to figure out how to get where you need to go.    Adding to the confusion of Anacapri is a plot that values nonsense about the nature of reality over the virtues of an easy-to-follow narrative. As if the real-world island wasn't hard enough to figure out, you regularly have to chug dream syrup that sends you off to explore surreal lands populated by ghosts and mythological monsters. Set-piece puzzles that bypass the absurdities of the plot are the only strength here, and there aren't nearly enough of them to compensate for the awfulness of everything else. Most don't even show up until near the end of the game, such as the nifty series of sphinx riddles, and the tile puzzle that is one of the final barriers to the Obsidian Disk.   Although you may not want to finish Anacapri the game, at least the snapshots will give you some ideas for your next vacation.   Horrific voice acting and scripting, along with some truly weird musical choices, sprinkle extra strangeness into everything. Strangers stop to talk as if they were long-lost friends, and the topics of conversation often seem nonsensical until you start looking back on things and putting together the big picture. All of the characters in the game are voiced by a handful of terrible actors making lame attempts to change their voices with bad accents, which makes even real-world interactions with people shimmer like hallucinations. The dialogue is universally overwrought, characterized by lines such as ""That disk will remain a dark stain on our past and humanity forever,"" spoken with all of the passion of a fast-food counter jockey asking if you want to supersize your value meal. Music is frequently jarring, and bounces all over the place between poppy lounge music and driving guitar. It's like you're being stalked by somebody with a xylophone on wheels and Yngwie Malmsteen, respectively. Thankfully, there are frequent, long stretches of silence.    If it were a relic from the early 90s, Anacapri: The Dream might be worth a play for the nostalgia factor alone. A ""so bad it's good"" vibe also creeps into the adventure through the voice acting, almost giving you the feeling that you're reliving some fond memory that hasn't aged particularly well. But you're not, and considering that the longing for a bygone day is the only possible reason for playing this backward game, you'll soon get tired of flipping through photographs and move on to something more modern and more competently designed.  
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121,Cruis'n ,2.5," Unless you fancy the idea of paying $30 for a hacked-together port of an old arcade game that wasn't any good to begin with, you can safely ignore Cruis'n.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/6/7/2220267-cruis_n_coverart.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/cruisn-review/1900-6183953/,neg,"
  Many a quick and dirty cash-in has trudged its way onto the Wii in the time since publishers began to exclaim, ""Holy smokes! People are buying this thing! Get games on system make go money now!"" Cruis'n ranks highly amongst the most egregious of these games. Cruis'n is essentially Midway's attempt to unearth the consistently mediocre arcade driving franchise the company used to port to consoles regularly back in the N64 days. A fitting notion, given that Cruis'n actually looks a little bit like an N64 game that's been cranked to a resolution it never should have and plays like something that would have felt like an ancient relic years ago, let alone now.    It's well known fact that the novelty of having two-dimensional cutouts of real life people in games was already played out by 1997. In case anyone was keeping track, this is 2007.   Again, fitting, considering that this is just a fairly straightforward port of The Fast and the Furious arcade game that came out back in 2004. Midway doesn't have the FATF license, so instead, it slapped the Cruis'n name on this puppy and churned it out for Wii owners. It's an OK fit in that regard because FATF had a number of hallmarks of the Cruis'n series already, including the creepy 2D cutouts of real people standing around at the starting line, the variety of wacky-themed US locales to drive around in, and the driving model that gives you a good idea of what it would be like if you were to cut all the good parts out of Burnout.     You can choose from one of several different licensed street racing rides, from the Mitsubishi Eclipse to the Nissan Skyline, though which car you choose doesn't really make a ton of difference because every car still feels like a squirrely mess. You steer your car by holding the Wii Remote sideways and tilting it, à la Excite Truck. The steering mechanics are, at the very least, consistent, but also incredibly touchy. Extremely minor movements are required to steer properly, and if you go even a smidge over, your car will spin like crazy then end up wrecking into a wall, or a tree, or whatever other bric-a-brac litters a given stage. You can buy upgrades for your car that help alleviate some of the loose feel, but not so much that it ever quite fixes the problem.    The intense grip you have to keep on the Wii Remote is about the only intense thing Cruis'n has going for it. Races are a bore, no matter how many crazy jumps and tight turns you might be taking. The game's sense of speed is OK, but the racing simply feels devoid of skill. You could wreck into a billion objects on the track, hit your nitrous on one decent straightaway, and somehow come out on top. Or you could race a perfect race the whole way through, hit one bump, and somehow come in last. Part of that is likely attributable to the sort of catch-up artificial intelligence prevalent in arcade racers like these, and it's definitely here in spades.    It doesn't help that Cruis'n looks like a fetid corpse of a driving game. It wasn't even particularly impressive-looking back in 2004, but seeing it released now in this state is borderline offensive. The environments look dime-store cheap, with painfully ugly textures, blocky set pieces, and destructible elements that don't so much destruct as fly off into a few random pieces (incidentally, they only destruct if you drive through them--many objects will remain intact while opponent cars just clip right through them). Car models are similarly blocky and goofy-looking, but giving them upgrades just makes them look even more absurd. There's nothing like putting a gigantic turbo engine on a Skyline! And did we mention that, despite the fact that this thing looks like it should be running off an N64 cartridge, the load times are insanely long? Like, 40 seconds per track. And any time you restart a race, it takes that same amount of time again. Or how about the frame rate that inexplicably can't stay above 15 frames a second any time anyone wrecks into anything? Yikes.   Textures!   Audio is more comically awful than anything else. Sound effects infrequently exist. You get all the basic tire screeches and bangs of cars hitting one another, but environmental objects are much spottier. Most times, you'll wreck through a whole series of objects and hear no sound at all, which is a bit surreal. The soundtrack consists of precisely the sort of trite arcade driving game jams you'd expect while the announcer sounds a little bit like a soft-core porn actress on her fifth gimlet making a feeble attempt to sound alluring as she gasps through track titles like ""L.A. Ghetto"" and ""Race Wars.""     Ultimately, Cruis'n offers nothing of any value. It's short on modes, cars, visual fidelity, workable driving mechanics, and most of all, fun. Skip it.    
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122,Showtime Championship Boxing ,2.5," Hmm, a punch to the groin or one more round of this DS boxing game? Hang on, we're still thinking...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/0/1/2211501-12250.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/showtime-championship-boxing-review/1900-6182730/,neg,"
  Boxing games typically come in two flavors: the cartoon punchfests à la Ready to Rumble and the more realistic Fight Night-esque simulation games. With the release of Showtime Championship Boxing, you can add a new flavor to that list: an ugly mixture of both approaches that results in a fetid stew, heavy on the clunky animations and shoddy gameplay, and light on longevity and fun.   The Thrilla in Manilla this ain't.   The list of things Championship Boxing gets wrong is a long one, so let's start with the good news. That would be the game's control scheme, specifically the moves that use the directional pad as well as the face and shoulder buttons. Yes, you can punch and block by drawing on the touch screen with your stylus, but the implementation is so imprecise that, as soon as you figure out that you can punch with the shoulder buttons, you'll set aside the stylus once and for all. With the button controls, you can sway left or right with the Y and A buttons, respectively, and block high and low with the X and B buttons. Your punches are regulated by a stamina bar that drains with each punch.    Okay, so the mechanics aren't that bad. However, once you put those controls to use in the ring, it's clear that Championship Boxing falls far short of the mark. You fight from a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective, and the vast majority of the boxing in this game is just you standing in the center of the ring and slugging it out with your opponent, while occasionally swaying left or right just to mix things up. Only in the final fights of a tournament do you need to really move at all, given that the game's artificial intelligence in the early and middle fights is simply brain-dead. The game's manual boasts of a sort of rock-paper-scissors approach to punches, body positioning, and blocking, but for the vast majority of the game, all you really need to do is punch. And punch. And punch.    Here's a fight sequence from a typical round: You and your opponent trade punches in the center of the ring, until one of you eventually backs off and the AI continues its vigorous punching routine, delivering a sound drubbing to whatever air molecules get in the way of his gloves. While your opponent continues to beat empty space senseless, you rear back with a hook (holding down the punch button will give it more impact). Eventually the AI decides to give up its vicious assault on nothing and ambles within your reach, which gives you the perfect opportunity to let loose with your fully loaded hook shot. If you back up a few steps, you can repeat this over and over until your opponent goes down for good.    Though the AI's chin is seemingly magnetically attracted to your boxing gloves, there are few knockouts. In fact, throughout the entirety of the game's miniscule single-player mode, we won every single fight by a TKO. We never cleanly knocked out an opponent, and we also never won (or lost) in a decision. On the other hand, you are not immune from getting laid out occasionally, especially when facing the later opponents in the game. These fellows can seemingly knock you out with a couple of well-placed punches, even if you've already put them on the canvas a few times. To make matters worse, should you lose in the later fights of a tournament, there's no rematch option. Instead, you have to start the entire tournament over again, which is a frustrating design choice to say the least.    None of this feels like boxing, and it certainly doesn't look like boxing, either. The characters themselves aren't so bad when they stand perfectly still; there's some variety to the character design (the Mohawked Psycho Sarge, the glass-jawed Lazy Lorenzo, and so on). However, once the boxers go into motion, things go to pot. Apart from a dreadfully slow pace, each punch, whether delivered to the body or the face, causes your opponent's head to shake as if he were a bobblehead doll. Furthermore, many of the punches you throw aren't even animated; instead, you'll watch as your opponent's head vigorously shakes from the impact of your phantom strike. When a player goes down, it's as if he were hit by an 18-wheeler, even if you sent him to the mat with a jab. Likewise, Championship Boxing doesn't sound like boxing. Even during the King of the Ring mode--the final tournament found in the game--the tame, listless audience makes it sound as if you're punching it out in a moderately crowded Applebee's.   His parents never wanted him to be a boxer--hence the name--but Punchbag Pat always felt that the best conversations involved punching. And he was quite well-spoken.   There's no career mode in Championship Boxing. Instead, you make your way through a handful of single-player tournaments with one of the premade boxers in the game. You can't create a boxer from scratch, and there are no training options to improve your boxer as he moves up the ranks. In all, the single-player game--which has both heavyweight and welterweight divisions--won't take you more than around two hours to zip through. There's also wireless multiplayer for two players, both of whom must have a cart of the game to play. Honestly, though, why would you want to subject a friend to this kind of thing?    A fun and frantic boxing game for the Nintendo DS certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility; it just isn't to be found in Showtime Championship Boxing. There are very few things in this game that are worth more than a casual glance, and only then for a chuckle. It just might be the worst boxing game ever made.    
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123,Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust ,2.5," Mindless, repetitive gameplay and a truly atrocious sense of humor help Leisure Suit Larry live up to its name--it's a total bust.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/5/5/2219455-box_lslbob.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/leisure-suit-larry-box-office-bust-review/1900-6207461/,neg,"
  When the Leisure Suit Larry series was revived a few years back in Magna Cum Laude, its bawdy, over-the-top humor and minigame-heavy action seemed geared to capture a new generation of gutter-minded gamers. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust seems geared to offend, bore, or frustrate anyone who makes the mistake of playing it. The game's shocking sense of humor has all but forsaken wit and cleverness, choosing instead to inundate you with a constant stream of ham-fisted innuendo and spray-and-pray vulgarity (if we say enough foul things, some of it's gotta be funny, right?). Box Office Bust is an intensely adult game, yet the depressingly simple gameplay features more repetition than a children's television show. Despite their simplicity, some of these tasks are actually difficult, thanks to poor platforming and fighting controls. When aggravatingly dull action combines with a desperately perverse sense of humor as they have in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, they form an entirely new compound: soul-crushing, mind-poisoning shame.      The star of Box Office Bust is Larry Lovage, the protagonist from Magna Cum Laude and nephew of legendary lounge lizard Larry Laffer. Summoned to his uncle's movie studio to help sniff out a saboteur, the young Larry arrives in a flurry of disgusting and lewd comments. This storm does not abate throughout the whole game, and you are subjected to a wide spectrum of vulgarity, including (but not limited to) scatological jokes, bestiality gags, and esoteric sexual slang. Most of the humor tries to be shocking, but it just ends up feeling like someone spent a few days on the Internet tracking down the nastiest stuff he could, and then transformed it into a script. This isn't to say you won't be shocked; Box Office Bust contains some of the foulest dialogue you'll hear in a game. But most of it is far from entertaining, let alone funny.    This is fitting, however, because most of the game isn't fun. A lot of your time is spent running around movie lots ad nauseam, and hijacking the herky-jerky golf carts doesn't make it more fun, just faster. The detailed environments have a brightly colored cartoony aesthetic befitting a Looney Tunes game, which at least makes the endless running hither and thither a bit more bearable. Unfortunately, any relief the scenery might offer is quickly swept away by one of the many aggravating platforming sections. Larry can jump, double-jump, and wall-jump, and is forced to do so quite often. The controls are floaty, so you'll have to be careful when setting up your jumps lest you send Larry over a ledge to his doom. He also loves to grip onto walls, preparing for a wall jump. More often than not, however, this gecko imitation will mess up your intended jump, and you'll have to try again. The ability to move the camera or switch into first-person view makes jumping puzzles more manageable, but whether or not the camera will respond in a given situation is a crapshoot.    You'll do a lot of driving around. Why not run over some folks to spice things up?   When you're not struggling with this awkward platforming, you may be forced to grapple with the awkward combat. Larry can punch, kick, and block and can perform a magical-pirouette-knockdown attack, but again, the controls aren't responsive. You may easily pirouette your enemies to the ground, or they might gang up on you and make it difficult for you to move. Standing your ground and duking it out is an exercise in frustration, making the best strategy a combination of running around, pirouetting, and kicking your enemies while they're down. There are also some shooting and horse-riding sequences that aspire to mediocrity, and they round out a suite of action elements that are boring at best and infuriating at worst.    There are some mildly entertaining minigames, but they are relatively scarce and come with their own set of problems. After you complete one of the dream sequences in which Larry actually lives the movie he's acting in, you get to direct the final scene. You do this by choosing which of the three cameras to focus on as the scene is acted out. Switching cameras in time with the action and dialogue cues is a neat challenge, and the cameras will often reveal funny happenings just off the set. The problem is, to do really well you have to listen to the dialogue, which is a trial in and of itself. The other notable minigame happens when Larry is trying to seduce one of the many women around the lot. The dialogue here is some of the best (morbidly amusing) and worst (absolutely atrocious) that the game has to offer. Though you can get some good laughs out of these conversations, you'll have to endure some pretty bad stuff. When you are successful (you literally cannot fail), Larry takes the woman back to his skeezy trailer. Congrats?    Not really. Though Box Office Bust wears out the bottom of the dialogue barrel by scraping it so vigorously, it barely scratches the surface of sexual content. All you see during the much-ballyhooed act is the suggestive rocking of Larry's trailer. Not that you'd really want to see what is going on. All the women in the game are downright ugly, even by cartoon sexy-lady standards. Weird eyeballs, disproportionate features, and wonky shading effects wreak havoc on their faces, and many seem to be smuggling overinflated rugby balls beneath their skin, which makes them more freak show than pinup girl. This is bizarrely fitting, though, because the idea of any woman bedding Larry after hearing his obscene come-ons is truly frightening.    The only other option is to turn off your system. Let's go with that one.   Perhaps the greatest peril you'll face when playing Box Office Bust is that, after being so heavily bombarded with such repulsive dialogue, you might find yourself tempted to repeat some of the things Larry says to your friends or family. Don't. Keep your mouth shut and get rid of the game ASAP. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is a cesspool of foul language and ugly personalities. The terrible gameplay is stretched thin over hours and hours of redundant, repetitive quests, and it's a bad purchase even at its discount price. The one good thing you could say about Leisure Suit Larry is that it aims high: by relentlessly degrading men and women alike it transcends mere misogyny and insults us all equally and without prejudice.  
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124,Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust ,2.5," Mindless, repetitive gameplay and a truly atrocious sense of humor help Leisure Suit Larry live up to its name--it's a total bust.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/5/5/2219455-box_lslbob.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/leisure-suit-larry-box-office-bust-review/1900-6207462/,neg,"
  When the Leisure Suit Larry series was revived a few years back in Magna Cum Laude, its bawdy, over-the-top humor and minigame-heavy action seemed geared to capture a new generation of gutter-minded gamers. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust seems geared to offend, bore, or frustrate anyone who makes the mistake of playing it. The game's shocking sense of humor has all but forsaken wit and cleverness, choosing instead to inundate you with a constant stream of ham-fisted innuendo and spray-and-pray vulgarity (if we say enough foul things, some of it's gotta be funny, right?). Box Office Bust is an intensely adult game, yet the depressingly simple gameplay features more repetition than a children's television show. Despite their simplicity, some of these tasks are actually difficult, thanks to poor platforming and fighting controls. When aggravatingly dull action combines with a desperately perverse sense of humor as they have in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, they form an entirely new compound: soul-crushing, mind-poisoning shame.      The star of Box Office Bust is Larry Lovage, the protagonist from Magna Cum Laude and nephew of legendary lounge lizard Larry Laffer. Summoned to his uncle's movie studio to help sniff out a saboteur, the young Larry arrives in a flurry of disgusting and lewd comments. This storm does not abate throughout the whole game, and you are subjected to a wide spectrum of vulgarity, including (but not limited to) scatological jokes, bestiality gags, and esoteric sexual slang. Most of the humor tries to be shocking, but it just ends up feeling like someone spent a few days on the Internet tracking down the nastiest stuff he could, and then transformed it into a script. This isn't to say you won't be shocked; Box Office Bust contains some of the foulest dialogue you'll hear in a game. But most of it is far from entertaining, let alone funny.    This is fitting, however, because most of the game isn't fun. A lot of your time is spent running around movie lots ad nauseam, and hijacking the herky-jerky golf carts doesn't make it more fun, just faster. The detailed environments have a brightly colored cartoony aesthetic befitting a Looney Tunes game, which at least makes the endless running hither and thither a bit more bearable. Unfortunately, any relief the scenery might offer is quickly swept away by one of the many aggravating platforming sections. Larry can jump, double-jump, and wall-jump, and is forced to do so quite often. The controls are floaty, so you'll have to be careful when setting up your jumps lest you send Larry over a ledge to his doom. He also loves to grip onto walls, preparing for a wall jump. More often than not, however, this gecko imitation will mess up your intended jump, and you'll have to try again. The ability to move the camera or switch into first-person view makes jumping puzzles more manageable, but whether or not the camera will respond in a given situation is a crapshoot.    No one will know if you fall off the wire on purpose. Just do it. End your misery.   When you're not struggling with this awkward platforming, you may be forced to grapple with the awkward combat. Larry can punch, kick, and block and can perform a magical-pirouette-knockdown attack, but again, the controls aren't responsive. You may easily pirouette your enemies to the ground, or they might gang up on you and make it difficult for you to move. Standing your ground and duking it out is an exercise in frustration, making the best strategy a combination of running around, pirouetting, and kicking your enemies while they're down. There are also some shooting and horse-riding sequences that aspire to mediocrity, and they round out a suite of action elements that are boring at best and infuriating at worst. PC players get a extra layer of frustration to top it all off: any button prompt is delivered as ""B1,"" ""B2,"" etcetera, forcing you to remember exactly how your keys are mapped. Delightful.     There are some mildly entertaining minigames, but they are relatively scarce and come with their own set of problems. After you complete one of the dream sequences in which Larry actually lives the movie he's acting in, you get to direct the final scene. You do this by choosing which of the three cameras to focus on as the scene is acted out. Switching cameras in time with the action and dialogue cues is a neat challenge, and the cameras will often reveal funny happenings just off the set. The problem is, to do really well you have to listen to the dialogue, which is a trial in and of itself. The other notable minigame happens when Larry is trying to seduce one of the many women around the lot. The dialogue here is some of the best (morbidly amusing) and worst (absolutely atrocious) that the game has to offer. Though you can get some good laughs out of these conversations, you'll have to endure some pretty bad stuff. When you are successful (you literally cannot fail), Larry takes the woman back to his skeezy trailer. Congrats?    Not really. Though Box Office Bust wears out the bottom of the dialogue barrel by scraping it so vigorously, it barely scratches the surface of sexual content. All you see during the much-ballyhooed act is the suggestive rocking of Larry's trailer. Not that you'd really want to see what is going on. All the women in the game are downright ugly, even by cartoon sexy-lady standards. Weird eyeballs, disproportionate features, and wonky shading effects wreak havoc on their faces, and many seem to be smuggling overinflated rugby balls beneath their skin, which makes them more freak show than pinup girl. This is bizarrely fitting, though, because the idea of any woman bedding Larry after hearing his obscene come-ons is truly frightening.    And she's one of the sexy ones.   Perhaps the greatest peril you'll face when playing Box Office Bust is that, after being so heavily bombarded with such repulsive dialogue, you might find yourself tempted to repeat some of the things Larry says to your friends or family. Don't. Keep your mouth shut and get rid of the game ASAP. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is a cesspool of foul language and ugly personalities. The terrible gameplay is stretched thin over hours and hours of redundant, repetitive quests, and it's a bad purchase even at its discount price. The one good thing you could say about Leisure Suit Larry is that it aims high: by relentlessly degrading men and women alike it transcends mere misogyny and insults us all equally and without prejudice.    
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125,Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops ,2.5, Stupid AI and sluggish performance are just two of the many problems that plague Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/6/9/2220969-box_shpo.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shadow-harvest-phantom-ops-review/1900-6307852/,neg,"
  Searching through the collected speeches of Jimmy Carter probably isn't the best way to scrounge up an inspirational quote to use on the splash screen of a shooter. So seeing a line from the former President kicking off third-person shoot-'em-up Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops is rather disconcerting. This terrible game is every bit as odd and inappropriate as the quotation in question, which criticizes the US for dealing arms while claiming to be a nation of peace right before you start indiscriminately killing foreigners. Virtually nothing is handled right. Levels are stuffed with idiotic enemies. Controls are sluggish, visuals are murky and blurry, load times are long, and crashes are frequent. There is no save-on-demand, and auto-save points are spread ridiculously far apart. And both the sound effects and the voice acting are so grating that you could use them on a block of cheese.   Blurry and ugly is no way to go through life, son.   The only mode of play is a solo campaign set in the year 2025, in a smelly dystopian future where the world has gone to heck in a handbasket and the US of A is policing the globe via a grammatically challenged group called the Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA. You alternate playing as two of these world cops: the gruff but lovable Aron Alvarez and the sneaky sniper babe Myra Lee. Bad stuff is going down in a bad part of the world because of bad people, and you need to set things right by killing folks. Your main goal is the assassination of a Somali warlord named Kimosein, although things go off track and you wind up trying to find out who's supplying the tyrant with high-tech weaponry outlawed by the UN.    Being able to swap between two different types of soldiers gives Shadow Harvest a solo co-op vibe. Alvarez is the standard kill-'em-all tank with heavy weapons good for frontal assaults against enemy grunts, snipers, and even mechs, while Lee is a stealthy sort who slinks around and dispatches baddies up close and personal with retractable claws. But even though this duo offers different ways to play the game, levels are paint-by-numbers simple because of poor AI and linear level design. Neon signs might as well tell you when you need to switch soldiers, since it's obvious when Alvarez is needed to go on killing sprees and when Lee is required to break high-tech locks or some necks. Some of Lee's stealth sequences are somewhat nifty, however. The mechanics are simplistic, in that you crouch down, creep up behind dim-witted guards, put them in headlocks, and turn out their lights, but Lee's gadgets are undeniably cool. She gets to don a cloaking-device suit, shoot nano crossbow bolts that instantly kill baddies and conceal their bodies, and kill with those Wolverine-like claws that both slash enemy throats and inject them with nanites that hide their corpses.    Glaring design flaws present more challenge than the Somali troops you're called on to kill. Poor damage feedback makes it hard to tell when you've been shot without checking the depleting health stat in the lower left of the screen. The beyond-frustrating auto-save system forces you to replay huge areas because the checkpoints are spread way too far apart. This save setup is so awful that parts of the game are nearly unplayable. One section in level six requires you to trudge past sniper emplacements, take out a good 20 or so goons in a huge firefight, destroy a machine-gun nest, and sneak around to deal with more sentries plus a helicopter--all before getting the chance to finally save your progress. And taking cover has been automated to the point of extreme awkwardness. You latch onto cover-providing terrain far too readily. This causes big trouble when you try to get away from hiding spots, because you then have to expose yourself to enemy fire by backing away from the terrain feature before moving forward or sideways again.   Some of the sneaker sections of Shadow Harvest are mildly diverting.   Environments have a strange, smeared quality last seen the morning after you had one too many margaritas. Somali street rubble has a blurry filter over it, as though the city has been overexposed with too much bloom and then smeared with mud. You can shut bloom off, but then the brown gets so dark that sections of the game are pitch black. The inability to adjust the gamma in-game makes it impossible to deal with these issues manually. Performance is far from ideal as well, with frame rates frequently dipping into the teens on a machine that more than matches the system requirements. As a result, it often feels like you're dragging an anchor around when you move the mouse.    Audio quality is so bad that you'll want to emulate Van Gogh, and perhaps even go all-in and lop off the right ear, too. All of the spoken dialogue is from the Fun With Phonics School of Voice Acting. Your commandos complain to HQ about being left to die in Somali slums with all the heartfelt passion of ordering lunch at a drive-through window. Real human beings sound more upset when they break a shoelace. The sound effects are equally grating. Weapons go off with little pops so tinny that the resulting lack of impact is almost surreal, given that the noise heard is so far removed from the tracers flying all around in firefights. Popping bubble wrap offers more auditory excitement. Only the soundtrack is something of a highlight. While a fair number of the tunes are generic, bombastic shooter fare, some parts of a few levels boast fantastic African tribal chanting and beats that sound like lost Peter Gabriel cuts.    Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops is a terrible shooter in every way save the occasionally diverting stealth sequences. Oh, and just in case you needed some more nails in the coffin before dismissing the chance of ever playing this one, you can't skip cutscenes, crashes to the desktop for runtime errors are depressingly frequent, and there is at least one spot where you can fall through a floor and drop right out of the entire level. Consider that a lucky escape.  
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126,Mr. Driller Online ,2.5," With a shallow single-player campaign and a broken online mode, Mr. Driller Online leaves little to recommend.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/0/1/2219201-box_mdo.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mr-driller-online-review/1900-6188759/,neg,"
  Namco Bandai's Xbox Live Arcade games are lauded for two things: classic arcade gameplay and easy achievements. Mr. Driller Online departs from both of these traditions by breaking the storied gameplay and making the achievements more difficult to unlock. The single-player experience is shallow and the online is unplayable. It all begs the question: ""How can you call it Mr. Driller Online without the online?""     Mr. Driller originated as an arcade game in 1999 and arrived on the Game Boy Color, PlayStation, and Dreamcast in 2000. In every instance, the gameplay has been the same. You control Susumu, or one of a handful of other characters, and dive into the multicolored layers of the Earth's crust. As you dig down, the blocks fall around you. Blocks of the same color stick together, so drilling one of them will take out an entire like-colored mass. You can drill in four directions and move from left to right if you've opened up a path. Most of the danger lies in the possibility of being crushed by falling blocks, but you also need to collect the air capsules that show up from time to time or you'll run out of air and lose a life.    Mr. Driller may dig deep, but his gameplay is still shallow.     The single-player experience is very shallow with only two modes of play: Standard Driller and Quest Driller. Each mode has five maps, with the only variation to the gameplay coming in the depths to which you are tasked with diving. While the starting locations are supposed to represent different and exotic locations around the world, the levels all look the same. Sure, the strata of earth change from tier to tier as you dive, but the appearance is identical to previous installments' level designs. Quest mode is only differentiated from Standard mode because each tier of earth you dig through has a condition for completion. You may be limited to only picking up a certain number of air canisters or you are tasked with finishing in a certain time limit. The conditions for each tier are easy, but the Standard mode, by comparison, is made all the more mundane in comparison to the Quest mode. Though the gameplay is simple, a limited number of lives ensures that only the most excellent of excavators will survive the repetition and complete the deeper levels to unlock all of the achievements. After you've explored the depths of the single-player experience, the gameplay only has one direction to go: down.    Online play is broken. Match hosts can play against up to three opponents in Solo Battle mode. Hosts can dig without many problems, but any challengers would be very fortunate to make it past the first four levels of soil due to the glitch-filled, lag-filled mess. Sometimes, players will die for no reason. Challengers can mash on that drill button until their fingers develop blisters, but the same animation and the same grating sound effect will play dozens of times before an obstruction will clear. If you want to win, your only choice is to host. Throughout scores of matches--between opponents of all types, connections, locations, and vocabularies--the outcome was the same. Unfortunately, the game's other multiplayer mode, Tag Battle, is even worse. In the event that four players are able to move, the two-person teams can do little to help one another or make any noticeable progress. Theoretically, teammates should be able to rescue one another from peril or unleash special moves, but death and drilling on the same blocks seem to be inescapable. Given the general lack of playability, few challenges lasted the full three minutes before one or all of the would-be players quit the match.   If you think single-player is repetitious, then the one-block gameplay of online play will do little to change your opinion.     There are better (and cheaper) puzzle games on the Xbox 360, and the 2004 release of Mr. Driller: Drill Spirits on the DS offers pretty much the same gameplay in a better package. In its current broken state, Mr. Driller is one franchise that Namco Bandai should have waited to exhume.      
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127,Emergency Heroes ,2.5, Emergency Heroes is a lazy and repetitive open-world driving game that will bore even the younger audience that it's aimed at.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/9/0/2219390-emergency_herso.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/emergency-heroes-review/1900-6193248/,neg,"
  Emergency Heroes is Ubisoft's attempt at an open-world game for young gamers. But with an incredibly sterile city, repetitive missions, and an inconsequential plot, the game manages to make playing as a police officer, a firefighter, and a medic no fun whatsoever. The single-player game is a five-hour slog through dull missions, and the introduction of friends in multiplayer does little to alleviate the boredom. In the end, it's a game that's so generic and devoid of fun that it actively sucks the life out of you as you play it.    Emergency Heroes offers up a shocking vision of the future, in which humankind makes cities entirely of highways. And tunnels.     You play as Zach Harper, an emergency hero in the city of San Alto. At the beginning of the game, Zach is recovering from being forced out of the city's combined services after a training accident killed one of his colleagues. Predictably, though, he's called back into action when a gang, led by a mysterious figure, starts terrorising the city. You can probably guess the twist from that description alone, but the story is so inconsequential that any spoilers are unlikely to impact your enjoyment. Emergency Heroes features some of the most cliched plotting, one-dimensional characterisation, and laughable dialogue ever to feature in a video game.       The gameplay itself is based entirely around driving, with no on-foot sections at all. You control vehicles either by holding the Wii Remote on its side or by using one of the many Wii Wheel-style peripherals, such as the one bundled with Mario Kart. The control method is functional, but the vehicles suffer from poor turning circles, and it's a shame that there's no option to use a Nunchuk. Even worse, all 12 vehicles handle the same, and even the smallest police car can smash a civilian truck right off of the road. There's also no punishment for crashing into an endless amount of innocent vehicles, which makes the game incredibly easy to play.       The story progresses through 40 preset missions, or ""perils,"" as they're called in the game. However, there are only a few different mission types, such as putting out fires, saving civilians, or inflicting enough damage on an enemy car to knock it off of the road. This lack of variety quickly becomes tiresome, and the city itself doesn't present any of the opportunities usually associated with sandbox games. You might not earn a gold medal for every mission on your first try, but it's unlikely that you'll actually fail one.       Given that this is an open-world game, you can spend some time driving around and taking in the sights. The problem is that San Alto lacks the landmarks, pedestrians, and other points of interest that might make you want to do so. All you have to look at is highway after tunnel after roundabout, resulting in a city that's boring and sterile. Emergency Heroes is perhaps a more shocking dystopian vision of the future than has been created by any number of science-fiction writers in the past. There are also bugs and design issues in abundance. Your car bounces over other vehicles, the GPS often points you in completely the wrong direction, and characters' heads pop up in the middle of the screen and block your view of the road, for no other reason than to offer up another line of meaningless dialogue.   Emergency Heroes is entirely devoid of artistic merit.     Although the game itself is merely dull and repetitive, the overall presentation is on a whole different level of bad. The futuristic comic-book style is reminiscent of Crackdown on the Xbox 360, but it doesn't have that game's style or level of detail. The buildings all look the same, there are only a few different vehicle types, and the character designs look cheaper and more generic than the lowest-budget children's cartoon series. The music maintains a relentlessly fast tempo, but it fails to add drama to the monotonous pace of the game. Furthermore, the voice work teeters on the so-bad-it's-good level of amateurism. If you thought the House of the Dead series was laughably bad when it came to acting in video games, then Emergency Heroes makes that series look like a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet in comparison.      Though multiplayer modes help extend the longevity of the five-hour single-player game, they use the same mission types and are unsurprisingly as repetitive with friends as they are alone. The game supports two players via split-screen mode, and has seven multiplayer game modes in total once you've unlocked them by playing through the single-player game. These games aren't improved in any way by having another person involved, and there's no way to share your best times or play with other people online.       Emergency Heroes is a bad game. It's lazy, boring, and repetitive, and won't even appeal to the younger market that it's aimed at. The missions are dull, the driving is pedestrian, and the city is restrictive. Although it's not fundamentally broken, Emergency Heroes is devoid of any artistic merit and should be avoided at all costs.     
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128,Battlefield 2 ,9.3," Despite the fact that it's a sequel, Battlefield 2 is a thrilling action game that immerses you in the chaos of combat like never before.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/2/7/8/2217278-box_bf2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battlefield-2-review/1900-6127831/,pos,"
  There will be doubters and naysayers who will claim that Battlefield 2 is just an incremental upgrade from its famous predecessors, or that it only offers a marginal improvement over the popular Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942. Ignore them, because they couldn't be more wrong. EA and Digital Illusions' cutting-edge and highly awaited sequel is everything that it's supposed to be and more. Battlefield 2 is a thrilling testament to how great PC gaming can be. It packs unmatched gameplay, impressive visuals, and endless replayability in one exquisite package. And it's, by far, the most fun that we've had with a PC game this year.   Battlefield 2 elevates the excitement and action from its illustrious predecessors by making you feel like part of an actual elite military squad in battle.   Contrary to its name, Battlefield 2 is actually the third game in the Battlefield series, and, on the surface, it sticks closely to the formula established in the previous two games. In it, two teams of up to 32 players each battle it out for supremacy on huge virtual battlefields, taking the fight to one another on foot, in a vehicle, on sea, and in the air. This time around, though, you'll have the opportunity to take modern weapons and equipment into the fray, as the game is based in a near-future, hypothetical conflict that pits the forces of the United States, China, and the fictional Middle Eastern Coalition in mortal combat with one another.    Strangely enough, Battlefield 2 ships with just one gameplay mode, but the conquest mode is what made Battlefield what is today. Conquest is essentially a sprawling, king-of-the-hill-style game with multiple control points (doubling as spawn points) scattered on the map. Each team gets a limited number of tickets, or spawns, to draw upon in the battle for control of these points. The winner is the side that can either capture all the control points and eliminate the opposing team entirely, or whittle down the opposing team's tickets to zero. It's a fairly simple formula, but it sets the stage for the wild and memorable virtual battles that take place.    The beauty of Battlefield 2 is the fact that, like its predecessors, it has a totally unpredictable nature to it. It's completely unscripted and chaotic, but in an awesome way. There are simply so many insane, over-the-top moments that can happen in a single game that you quickly lose track. In any given match, you can have a dozen desperate firefights, countless moments when a rocket or bullet whizzes by your head, and the proud sense of accomplishment when you and your squad overcome the odds and achieve your objective. You'll see feats of audacious daring as someone flies a helicopter through a city's streets or runs up to plant explosives on an enemy tank that's mowing down your colleagues. You'll experience the hellish shelling of artillery, see the desperate revival of wounded colleagues, and be killed a dozen grisly ways. And yet, through it all, you'll find yourself coming back for more.     What makes Battlefield 2 better than its predecessors, though, is that there's much more of an attempt to instill some method to this madness. Battlefield 2 is full of excellent new features designed to make coordinating your efforts a lot easier. First up is the new voice-over IP system, which means that real-time voice capability is built into every single copy of the game. There simply is no excuse not to get a headset and start talking with your buddies, because even though Battlefield 2 does offer an improved keyboard-based communications system, nothing beats the power of being able to instantly and effortlessly communicate with your teammates. The voice system in Battlefield 2 is simple to set up and use, and you no longer have to fiddle around with conflicting third-party solutions.    More critically, it's the voice-chat system in Battlefield 2 that's important. Rather than have 64 players swamp a single channel with nonstop chatter and taunts, the voice system is instead integrated heavily into the concept of a commander and squads, which are both new features in the game. In earlier Battlefield games, you simply ran around as part of an unorganized mob, with little coordination between players. Battlefield 2 solves this by letting you organize into squads that come under the leadership of a single commander. In other words, a team of 32 players could split up to potentially form five or six squads consisting of five to six players each, with one player coordinating all the efforts as a commander. This fundamentally changes the nature of the game from having a bunch of lone wolves running around to having coordinated combat teams working together to get the job done.    Here's how it works. Armed with a real-time, top-down view of the battlefield, along with a number of powerful abilities, the commander can keep an eye on the big picture. The commander can scan the battlefield for enemy forces, deploy spy drones on the map that transmit data to all the members of the team, air-drop supply crates that rearm and heal adjacent units, and drop powerful artillery barrages onto enemy positions. The commander also issues orders to squad leaders, who have the job of carrying the orders out. The squad is much more than a handful of players, thanks to the potent squad abilities. Since you can spawn on your squad leader (so long as he is alive), the ability to create a sort of roving, self-supporting combat team is possible, especially if a team has a medic or two to keep the squad on its feet. The voice-chat system automatically filters all communication, so if you're in a squad, you can only talk with your fellow squad members. Squad leaders can talk to their squad on one channel and use another channel to communicate with the commander. And the commander can only talk to squad leaders. Thus, orders have a way of trickling down the chain of command, while requests go up the chain from the squad leader to the commander (like they do in real-life militaries).   One of the great new features is the ability to keep a permanent character who gains rank and medals over time. Rank gives you priority to be commander, while medals are simply cool to collect.   When this system is clicking, it makes Battlefield 2 simply a transcendent experience unlike anything we've experienced before. While other games have incorporated concepts such as squads and commanders, none have combined them in such a brilliantly designed and executed way. The ability to only chat with your squadmates can create a sort of instant personal camaraderie, even when the sound of bullets, explosions, and artillery surrounds you. At times, you'll find yourself yelling for a medic, telling a buddy to cover you while you sprint across an open patch, or quickly organizing an impromptu assault on an enemy. It's so easy and tempting to fall into role-playing mode when playing this game. We found moments when, as squad leader, we requested permission from the commander to go after an enemy target. Or, when we were attacking an enemy control point, we screamed, ""Go, go, go,"" and the squad rushed in just moments after an artillery barrage softened the objective, the dust from the explosions still thick in the air. The sensation that you're actually fighting as a unit is simply immersive and gripping. In fact, the only thing missing is the ability to keep some kind of friends or buddies list. This is something that you'll desperately want once you've played with a great squad and want to play alongside them in future battles.     It's fair to note, however, that your online experience with Battlefield 2 is completely dependent on the nature of your fellow players. And yes, it can be frustrating if you find yourself on a team that doesn't organize into squads or doesn't work together. This frustration is doubled if you find yourself facing a team that is organized and coordinated. With the powerful team tools in the game, it's quite easy for a completely outnumbered but coordinated team to defeat a far larger and unorganized force. The game does come with tools designed to get you familiar with the controls, but you still rely on the willingness of your teammates to work together. If anything, we wish for some kind of option that requires you to join a squad when you enter a game, and if you fail to do this you'll be kicked off, since players who play outside the command and squad system remain outside the loop. (The game could use a better auto-balancing system, as well, as far too many matches become lopsided affairs because one team has twice as many players as the other.)  Though you don't get to run around a lot as the commander, you can still inflict a lot of damage upon the enemy by reporting enemy movements and raining artillery down on their heads.  Of course, all it takes are a handful of anarchic team killers to throw a wrench into your experience, as well. In that case, you can try to vote someone off a server if he or she proves annoying enough, or the server can boot players who team-kill too often. In addition, Battlefield 2 introduces the concept of persistent identity. When you log onto Battlefield 2 for the first time, you'll create a unique account that will follow you throughout your online adventures, keeping track of your rank, your statistics, and much more. The better you play, the higher in rank you will rise, and you can eventually unlock alternate weapons. A higher rank also means that you will be given higher priority to assume the commander role in a match, so hopefully this will let the serious players gain control of such a potent position.   We should note that Battlefield 2 keeps track of an astonishing number of statistics, such as the number of kills you make with each weapon, your favorite kit, the map you play the most on, and more. You can also collect dozens of different types of medals by doing certain tasks. Medics are rewarded for reviving fallen soldiers, engineers are rewarded for repairing vehicles, and so on. Collecting these medals proves to be a reward in and of itself. However, as much as we like this system, we must admit that the game's main menu/server browser, where you access your personal statistics, feels needlessly confusing at times. The server browser itself is slow and clunky, which makes it annoying at times when you're trying to find a game. Since this is the third Battlefield game, you'd expect that the designers would have figured out how to create a decent server browser by now. Meanwhile, trying to rebind the many different keyboard settings can be like pulling teeth at times, as you have to sort through different pages to unbind a key before you can bind it to another command.  If you're not feeling like playing with fellow humans, the good news is that the much-maligned bots from Battlefields 1942 and Vietnam are history. In those games, the computer-controlled bots were just a hair better than brain-dead, but not by much (they literally ran in circles most of the time). The new bots in Battlefield 2 are relative Einsteins compared to the old ones, and while they still make a few stupid errors every now and then, they can be downright ruthless and cunning. We've seen bots do things that we wish human players would do. In one case, a bot in a tank actually waited for infantry support before entering the crowded confines of an enemy village. In another, the bots threw grenades onto the rooftop we were sniping from to flush us out. These bots will also go after objectives with a vengeance. It's ironic that DICE nixed the cooperative gameplay mode featured in earlier Battlefield games just when it finally developed decent bots. To be fair, the bots can get confused, and we suspect that some maps may be too complex for their pathfinding, as they tend to do better on maps with fewer natural choke points, such as bridges and rivers.  Battlefield 2 ships with 12 levels, and while that seems like a small number, the fact that each level comes in three different sizes adds some variety. The nature of the game can change dramatically depending on the size of the map and the number of players involved. Small, 16-player games on the smallest map offer a Counter-Strike-like atmosphere, with a limited number of control points and a few vehicles. The 32- and 64-player maps are downright huge in comparison, and they offer plenty of room to maneuver around. The level design itself has evolved quite a bit from earlier games, as the designers have eliminated the huge distances that separated control points. These new levels are an interesting mix of different settings, including cities, mountains, valleys, and swamps. They're also packed with all sorts of specific, distinct areas, such as villages, hotels, construction areas, oil refineries, and more.   Yes, attack helicopters can ruin your day, but instead of whining about it, you should find antiaircraft defenses, or jump in a helicopter or fighter, and shoot them down.  There are seven different kits, or basically character class types, to play as in Battlefield 2, and these kits are essentially identical across all three nations. There aren't the weird variations that occurred in Battlefield Vietnam, where the US engineer kit would get completely different weapon types from the North Vietnamese engineer kit. And for the most part, the kits are fairly well balanced. There's no superkit (like the M-60/LAW combination in Vietnam) this time around. And while there will be advocates for and against certain kits, the balance on a whole is excellent right out of the gate for Battlefield 2. For example, the support kit seems a bit overpowering at first, since it gets a light machine gun capable of firing long bursts from huge magazines, but it is tempered by the fact that it's only suitable at short and medium ranges. Try to engage anyone from a long distance, and they'll simply drop down and snipe you with carefully aimed shots. The sniper kit, usually the most overpowering weapon in these kinds of games, no longer features a one-shot, one-kill capability. However, this relegates snipers to their proper (and accurate) role of supporting the infantry and reporting the location of enemy units and vehicles.  There's a definite rock-paper-scissors nature to the different kits. The special forces kit is ideal for planting plastic explosive charges and destroying enemy infrastructure, from bridge crossings to radar stations that allow enemy commanders to conduct satellite scans of the battlefield. In fact, for balancing purposes, it's the only kit able to really do so effectively. Blow up enemy artillery, and the enemy commander can't drop artillery barrages on your team's head until the guns are repaired. The engineer kit can repair such damage and patch up vehicles, and so engineers are worth their weight in gold. Meanwhile, the engineer and medic kits are even more powerful than ever by being able to project an area-of-affect radius around them if they're riding in a vehicle, which is a big incentive for players to take up support roles in a game.    That same sort of rock-paper-scissors balancing is also evident in the vehicles. The general rule in Battlefield 2 is that every weapon has a counter weapon, and the balance, once again, feels about right. However, it can be argued that some vehicles may be more powerful than others, so therefore much is dependent on the skill of the players involved. Sure, a skilled player in an attack helicopter can take over a game, but there are answers for that situation if you know how to take advantage of them. For example, as potent as tanks and other vehicles are, they can be slaughtered by other vehicles, helicopters, planes, and infantry antitank missiles. Helicopters can fall prey to jets or antiaircraft weapons, while jets themselves can fall prey to other jets or missiles.  Medics help keep pressure on the enemy by reviving fallen comrades. Plus, it's unbelievably cool when you register your first kill with the defibrillator.  Many of the vehicles are modern-day versions of those found in Battlefields 1942 and Vietnam, so they will undoubtedly feel familiar to veterans of those games. There are a few neat features to play with, though. Tanks can now pop smoke grenades, which can throw off the aim of an incoming missile. Helicopters and jets can fire guided missiles, allowing them to kill multiple targets on a single pass. Once again, you'll probably want to get a joystick for optimal control of aircraft, but it's definitely worth it. Helicopters are a bit easier to fly than those in Vietnam, it seems, but it's always interesting to note that for all the arcadelike action in the game, the helicopter controls are still fairly realistic. Once you get the hang of the controls, there's no rush quite like the one you experience when you fly a chopper through trees, or pop up over a ridge and unleash a fiery barrage on a passing convoy.  Battlefield 2 is a step up from its predecessors graphically, as well. The new graphics engine is a wonder to behold, and it plays a lot smoother than earlier versions, especially when it comes to infantry combat, which was always jerky and awkward in the first two games. This is just a beautiful game overall, especially when everything around you is in motion. Tanks and vehicles are rendered with astonishing detail, such as swaying antennas, while the environments themselves--save for the somewhat crudely rendered grass--are simply beautiful. There are so many tiny details at work, from the concussive effects of nearby blasts blurring your vision to the clouds of dust that appear when tank cannons fire to the tiny fountains of dirt that kick up when rounds land next to you. It's so pretty that it almost becomes counterproductive, in a way. For example, except for a few road signs that you can knock over and bridges that you can destroy, the environment itself is barely destructible, and you feel that buildings should collapse into heaps of rubble after artillery smashes into them. Also, the instantaneous teleporting in and out of vehicles, a staple from the first game, feels more and more out of place as the series becomes more graphically immersive. You almost wish for some kind of transition animation to show your character climbing in and out of the driver's seat (it would also be more realistic, as well). Though our biggest concern with the graphics comes with the close draw in that occurs when you're flying a fast-moving jet, as it only gives you a second or two to identify and line up your target before you overshoot it.  Battlefield 2 is an excellent audio experience also, as there's nothing quite like hearing the scream of artillery overhead, the crack of various rifles, the squeal of tank treads and the sound of their engines roaring in the distance, the thump of whirling helicopter blades, and more. The only thing missing really is the memorable music of the first two games, especially the iconic soundtrack that shipped with Battlefield Vietnam. To be fair, it's asking a bit much of EA to identify the signature songs of the near future, but even then, the only music in the game is the bland Asian and Middle Eastern themes that you listen to during the very long load times. And yes, the load times are one of the biggest gripes that we have, as you'll spend quite a bit of time waiting for a game to start up, even on high-end machines. Battlefield 2 is also a bit demanding in the hardware department, since you'll need a modern 3D card to run it (anything older than two years is iffy), as well as a fair bit of memory and a somewhat powerful CPU. The good news is that the game scales well within that hardware, and it can play at high detail on even relatively midrange machines. But this is definitely a game worth upgrading for, because it easily holds countless hours of gameplay, especially once players get over the learning curve and start to work together. It shouldn't be long before the quality of Battlefield matches is raised to a whole new level. It will also help that you evaluate your performance using Battlefield TV, a built-in recording system that keeps track of all the events during a match. With Battlefield TV, you can go back and see what tactics the best players used, where the best sniping positions are, and more.  Whether you're running around on the battlefield, flying around in a helicopter, or doing a dozen other things, this is simply one of the best games of the year.  The best thing that we can say about Battlefield 2 is that even when it's at its worst, it can still be as much fun as its illustrious predecessors. However, when you experience Battlefield 2 like it's meant to be played, with everyone working together and using real-time voice chat, the game quickly becomes unlike anything else that you've played before. When it's at its best, Battlefield 2 elevates online gaming to whole new heights. Put simply, this is a thrilling and revolutionary game that just has to be played to be believed. 


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129,World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International ,9.3," World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International is KCET's best soccer game to date, which basically makes it the best soccer game ever made.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/0/7/0/20995-61070.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-soccer-winning-eleven-8-international-review/1900-6118013/,pos,"
  Konami's Winning Eleven games have never been able to boast the official licenses and superb presentation that are such integral parts of many other sports games, and as result the series has earned its great reputation solely on the strength of its realistic gameplay. World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International not only marks the first time that (an unfortunately limited number of) licensed club teams have appeared in a Winning Eleven game, but also the first time that the series has appeared on the Xbox. Released in Europe as Pro Evolution Soccer 4 toward the end of last year, World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International is undoubtedly Konami's best soccer game to date, thanks to a number of quite dramatic improvements made both on and off the field.   The training mode offers plenty of ways to hone your skills.   Regardless of whether or not you're familiar with previous Winning Eleven games, the first thing you'll want to check out in Winning Eleven 8 is its surprisingly deep training mode, which, like everything else, can be reached via menu screens that are both far easier on the eyes and far easier to navigate than those found in previous entries in the series. The training options in Winning Eleven 8 are divided into four subcategories: beginner training, free training, situation training, and challenge training. Beginner training not only teaches you how to perform all the basic moves, but also does a great job of explaining the sport itself, the roles of the different players on the pitch, and even the offside rule (via a series of texts, diagrams, and demonstrations). Free training lets you take control of a team on a field where the only opponent is a goalkeeper. Situation training teaches you how to use some of the more advanced controls to make you more effective at dribbling, passing, shooting, attacking, and defending. Challenge training is basically an opportunity for you to put what you've learned to the test in a series of increasingly difficult trials. It's so rewarding that you'll want to successfully play through everything it has to offer at least once.    The challenge training mode comprises no fewer than 40 different trials for you to complete, and it will test your skills in eight different disciplines: attacking, defending, dribbling, short passing, manual passing, free kick long passing, free kick shooting, and ball possession. All the challenges on offer are played using exactly the same controls and camera angles as the rest of the game, but they require you to perform very specific tasks. The dribbling challenges, for example, require you to navigate your way through mazes of cones within a time limit, while the free kick challenges have you aiming at increasingly smaller targets. Every time you beat a challenge, you'll gain access to a more difficult one, in addition to being awarded a number of ""WEN points"" to spend in the WE-Shop. WEN points are one of the many new features in Winning Eleven 8. Specifically, they can be spent to unlock additional content, such as stadiums, classic teams and players, ball types, player-edit options, camera angles, and a sixth difficulty setting. Completing the challenge training is the easiest way to amass a large number of WEN points early on, but you'll also be awarded a small number every time you play a match, regardless of the outcome.   The master league career mode boasts a number of innovative features.   When you're not playing Winning Eleven 8 with friends (up to seven can simultaneously play on the PlayStation 2, while three can play on the Xbox) you'll most likely be managing a team in the ""master league"" career mode, which this year introduces a host of great new features to what was already a winning formula in previous Winning Eleven games. The first thing you'll notice about the master league, before you've even chosen a team to take control of, is that you're no longer forced to manage the exact same squad of fictional no-hopers, regardless of which team you opt for. That option is still available, of course, but you can also choose to start your career in charge of a team that comprises the players you'd expect it to in real life, thus making winning games a lot easier. However, raising enough money to pay wages becomes a bit harder. Once your career gets under way, you'll find this year's master league to be an incredibly deep and engaging gameplay option in which every player on your team is in a constant state of change.   The behavior of every player in Winning Eleven 8 is determined by a rating of 1-100 in no fewer than 31 different attributes, as well as by any of 23 specialized skills that each might possess. The attributes system isn't radically different from that found in previous Winning Eleven games, but what is new is the role-playing-game-style character development that every player goes through as your career progresses. At the end of every match, you'll automatically be taken to a development-sheet screen where you can see which of your players has been awarded experience points and how those points have affected any of his attributes. Every time a player accrues 100 experience points for a particular attribute, his rating for that attribute (which might be top speed, shooting accuracy, or team work, for example) will be increased by one point. Only players who actually participated in the match will be eligible for experience bonuses, and the number of points that can be received is more dependent on age than anything else.  The players on your master league squad are in a constant state of change.  Very young players in Winning Eleven 8 are generally less skilled than those in their primes, but they're quick to learn and can improve noticeably over the course of just one 14-game season. Older players, on the other hand, will actually start to lose skills as they near retirement age, by which time you'll hopefully have managed to sell them to other clubs. The new age and experience system works incredibly well, because whereas previous Winning Eleven games let you both build your dream team and stick with it indefinitely, Winning Eleven 8 forces you to constantly evaluate and change your squad, since retiring players are removed from the database and promising youngsters invariably replace them. Signing big-name players for your team is still very satisfying, of course, but in addition to the huge transfer fees and wages they'll invariably demand, you'll now also have to take their ages into account.   As you've probably guessed, you'll be spending a fair bit of your time wheeling and dealing on the transfer market in this year's master league, which is, no doubt, why Konami went to the trouble of including player search options that put even those in some soccer management games to shame. You'll find a quick search option that automatically selects a number of players that are ready and willing to play for your team, as well as a talent search option that lets you search for 14 different ""types"" of players (such as dribblers, ace strikers, or defensive leaders). Additionally, you'll find an advanced search option that lets you narrow down your short list by fine-tuning just about every parameter imaginable. As in previous Winning Eleven games, you also have the option to look for new players to sign simply by checking out other teams' lineups, though this really isn't a very efficient use of your time. In short, finding the player that you're looking to sign really couldn't be any easier (assuming that he exists), although convincing him to play for your team is occasionally much more challenging than you'd imagine.  At other times in your master league career, you'll have to make the tough decision of not playing key members of your team, either because their ""condition"" ratings are low or because they've not been rested for a number of matches and have accordingly accumulated fatigue. The condition rating in Winning Eleven 8 works the same way it did in previous games, with different-colored directional arrows used to indicate five varying player states. A player in poor condition (indicated by a blue arrow pointing down) will definitely not perform as well as he would if he was at his peak (red arrow pointing up). So, again, you're forced to constantly evaluate your players so you can alter your starting lineups accordingly. One of the more unusual options in the master league lets you ""regulate"" your entire team's condition by kicking a ball around with it for 20 seconds or so before going to a match. This results in the overall improvement of most of your less-well-conditioned players, while your better-conditioned players often drop slightly in overall gameplay performance. The master league mode can be played indefinitely, and you can, of course, pit your team against one that belongs to a friend at any time via the miracle of Memory Card.  The referee's presence on the field adds very little to the game.  And how would that game against your friend play out? Well, like every other match in Winning Eleven 8, it would be incredibly realistic. It's highly unlikely that you'd ever score the same goal twice, and while one of you sings the praises of the new on-the-pitch referee, the other would almost certainly be cursing him for making some poor decision or another. In truth, the referee on the field doesn't add anything significant to the game other than representing a focal point for your frustrations after a dubious offside decision or after a questionable judgment that awards a penalty or playing advantage to the opposition. Like the CPU-controlled players in Winning Eleven 8, the referee exhibits great artificial intelligence (if you can use ""referee,"" ""great,"" and ""intelligence"" in the same sentence), but since he's only human, it's not uncommon for him to make mistakes from time to time. Dubious refereeing decisions are a big part of soccer in real life, of course, so this isn't a criticism so much as an observation...and a warning.  Perhaps the best thing about Winning Eleven 8 is that it's not a difficult game to pick up and play, particularly if your pride doesn't prevent you from playing at one of the easier difficulty settings. However, it should also offer a lasting challenge for even the most experienced players among you. Some of the advanced controls listed in the instruction manual, for example, will undoubtedly come as news even to many of you who spent a lot of time with Winning Eleven 7. We should also point out that Winning Eleven 8 is the first game in the series to feature licensed teams. Although the teams from the Dutch, Italian, and Spanish leagues collectively look great and certainly represent a collective step in the right direction for the series, they also serve to highlight just how generic the remaining 80 club sides and 50 international teams look. With that said, Winning Eleven 8 does boast some adequate editing tools with which you can quite easily add more-realistic uniforms, badges, player likenesses, and more...if you're so inclined.   Most of the players in the game are instantly recognizable.  Most of the default player likenesses in Winning Eleven 8 are very good, in  fact, as are the re-creations of famous stadiums from around the world. These stadiums, despite presenting false names, are instantly recognizable and can be given their real-life names just as easily as players like Wales' Ryan Gils, who, strangely, also appears under the correct name of Giggs for Manchester United. (sorry, Man Red) It's unfortunate licensing issues have manifested themselves in such messy, evident manners in team and player rosters for Winning Eleven 8, but these issues are nothing that those of you who are familiar with the series aren't used to, and it's certainly not reason enough for any of you to ignore the best soccer game available for any current-generation console.   More impressive than the stadium re-creations and player likenesses in Winning Eleven 8 are the way they come to life when a match gets under way. The player animations are superb, the ball physics are as believable as always, and even the crowds look good, so long as the cameras keep their distances from them. The visual differences between the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions aren't significant, although the Xbox game's player models are a little more detailed. We also noticed that the PS2 game suffered from drops in frame rate occasionally, though these were extremely rare and were limited to those occasions when practically every player on the field was in the active shot.  The only other noticeable difference between the PS2 and Xbox versions of Winning Eleven 8 (besides the aforementioned numbers of players supported on a single screen) is that the loading times in the Xbox game are a lot quicker, which is particularly apparent when matches between CPU-controlled teams are being played out in the master league mode or during custom cup and league competitions. Despite the fact that most of the differences between the two games favor the Xbox version, we'd definitely choose to play the PS2 version for its controls. It's not that the PS2 controller is inherently better than its Xbox counterpart, it's just that Winning Eleven 8 puts all four shoulder buttons to good use when you want to sidestep other players or when you want to alter your team's playing style on the fly. Accomplishing either of those things on the Xbox means using the poorly positioned (regardless of which official controller model you're using) black and white buttons.  If there's one area in which Winning Eleven 8 definitely comes second to FIFA Soccer 2005, it's audio. The game's soundtrack comprises just two or three instantly forgettable and mind-numbingly repetitive variations of the same tune, and the crowd noise, while varied, doesn't always seem to relate to the action on the field. BBC soccer pundits Peter Brackley and Trevor Brooking do a good job reprising their roles in the commentary box, and although they're prone to repeating themselves, their observations are generally accurate.  Eat my goal!  So there you have it. World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International is KCET's best soccer game to date, which basically makes it the best soccer game ever made...even taking the seminal Sensible World of Soccer games on the Amiga into account. The competition between KCET and EA Sports is now closer than ever, and which of this season's games you choose to play will ultimately be determined by what you're looking for from a soccer offering. If online play and official licenses are high on your wish list, then FIFA Soccer 2005 is the only way to go. If you can manage to play without those features and are looking for the most realistic soccer game available, in addition to an all-consuming career mode that you can play when your friends aren't around, then Winning Eleven 8 is definitely the game for you. 


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130,World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International ,9.3," World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International is KCET's best soccer game to date, which basically makes it the best soccer game ever made.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/0/7/0/20995-61070.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-soccer-winning-eleven-8-international-review/1900-6118018/,pos,"
  Konami's Winning Eleven games have never been able to boast the official licenses and superb presentation that are such integral parts of many other sports games, and as result the series has earned its great reputation solely on the strength of its realistic gameplay. World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International not only marks the first time that (an unfortunately limited number of) licensed club teams have appeared in a Winning Eleven game, but also the first time that the series has appeared on the Xbox. Released in Europe as Pro Evolution Soccer 4 toward the end of last year, World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International is undoubtedly Konami's best soccer game to date, thanks to a number of quite dramatic improvements made both on and off the field.   The training mode offers plenty of ways to hone your skills.   Regardless of whether or not you're familiar with previous Winning Eleven games, the first thing you'll want to check out in Winning Eleven 8 is its surprisingly deep training mode, which, like everything else, can be reached via menu screens that are both far easier on the eyes and far easier to navigate than those found in previous entries in the series. The training options in Winning Eleven 8 are divided into four subcategories: beginner training, free training, situation training, and challenge training. Beginner training not only teaches you how to perform all the basic moves, but also does a great job of explaining the sport itself, the roles of the different players on the pitch, and even the offside rule (via a series of texts, diagrams, and demonstrations). Free training lets you take control of a team on a field where the only opponent is a goalkeeper. Situation training teaches you how to use some of the more advanced controls to make you more effective at dribbling, passing, shooting, attacking, and defending. Challenge training is basically an opportunity for you to put what you've learned to the test in a series of increasingly difficult trials. It's so rewarding that you'll want to successfully play through everything it has to offer at least once.    The challenge training mode comprises no fewer than 40 different trials for you to complete, and it will test your skills in eight different disciplines: attacking, defending, dribbling, short passing, manual passing, free kick long passing, free kick shooting, and ball possession. All the challenges on offer are played using exactly the same controls and camera angles as the rest of the game, but they require you to perform very specific tasks. The dribbling challenges, for example, require you to navigate your way through mazes of cones within a time limit, while the free kick challenges have you aiming at increasingly smaller targets. Every time you beat a challenge, you'll gain access to a more difficult one, in addition to being awarded a number of ""WEN points"" to spend in the WE-Shop. WEN points are one of the many new features in Winning Eleven 8. Specifically, they can be spent to unlock additional content, such as stadiums, classic teams and players, ball types, player-edit options, camera angles, and a sixth difficulty setting. Completing the challenge training is the easiest way to amass a large number of WEN points early on, but you'll also be awarded a small number every time you play a match, regardless of the outcome.   The master league career mode boasts a number of innovative features.   When you're not playing Winning Eleven 8 with friends (up to seven can simultaneously play on the PlayStation 2, while three can play on the Xbox) you'll most likely be managing a team in the ""master league"" career mode, which this year introduces a host of great new features to what was already a winning formula in previous Winning Eleven games. The first thing you'll notice about the master league, before you've even chosen a team to take control of, is that you're no longer forced to manage the exact same squad of fictional no-hopers, regardless of which team you opt for. That option is still available, of course, but you can also choose to start your career in charge of a team that comprises the players you'd expect it to in real life, thus making winning games a lot easier. However, raising enough money to pay wages becomes a bit harder. Once your career gets under way, you'll find this year's master league to be an incredibly deep and engaging gameplay option in which every player on your team is in a constant state of change.   The behavior of every player in Winning Eleven 8 is determined by a rating of 1-100 in no fewer than 31 different attributes, as well as by any of 23 specialized skills that each might possess. The attributes system isn't radically different from that found in previous Winning Eleven games, but what is new is the role-playing-game-style character development that every player goes through as your career progresses. At the end of every match, you'll automatically be taken to a development-sheet screen where you can see which of your players has been awarded experience points and how those points have affected any of his attributes. Every time a player accrues 100 experience points for a particular attribute, his rating for that attribute (which might be top speed, shooting accuracy, or team work, for example) will be increased by one point. Only players who actually participated in the match will be eligible for experience bonuses, and the number of points that can be received is more dependent on age than anything else.  The players on your master league squad are in a constant state of change.  Very young players in Winning Eleven 8 are generally less skilled than those in their primes, but they're quick to learn and can improve noticeably over the course of just one 14-game season. Older players, on the other hand, will actually start to lose skills as they near retirement age, by which time you'll hopefully have managed to sell them to other clubs. The new age and experience system works incredibly well, because whereas previous Winning Eleven games let you both build your dream team and stick with it indefinitely, Winning Eleven 8 forces you to constantly evaluate and change your squad, since retiring players are removed from the database and promising youngsters invariably replace them. Signing big-name players for your team is still very satisfying, of course, but in addition to the huge transfer fees and wages they'll invariably demand, you'll now also have to take their ages into account.   As you've probably guessed, you'll be spending a fair bit of your time wheeling and dealing on the transfer market in this year's master league, which is, no doubt, why Konami went to the trouble of including player search options that put even those in some soccer management games to shame. You'll find a quick search option that automatically selects a number of players that are ready and willing to play for your team, as well as a talent search option that lets you search for 14 different ""types"" of players (such as dribblers, ace strikers, or defensive leaders). Additionally, you'll find an advanced search option that lets you narrow down your short list by fine-tuning just about every parameter imaginable. As in previous Winning Eleven games, you also have the option to look for new players to sign simply by checking out other teams' lineups, though this really isn't a very efficient use of your time. In short, finding the player that you're looking to sign really couldn't be any easier (assuming that he exists), although convincing him to play for your team is occasionally much more challenging than you'd imagine.  At other times in your master league career, you'll have to make the tough decision of not playing key members of your team, either because their ""condition"" ratings are low or because they've not been rested for a number of matches and have accordingly accumulated fatigue. The condition rating in Winning Eleven 8 works the same way it did in previous games, with different-colored directional arrows used to indicate five varying player states. A player in poor condition (indicated by a blue arrow pointing down) will definitely not perform as well as he would if he was at his peak (red arrow pointing up). So, again, you're forced to constantly evaluate your players so you can alter your starting lineups accordingly. One of the more unusual options in the master league lets you ""regulate"" your entire team's condition by kicking a ball around with it for 20 seconds or so before going to a match. This results in the overall improvement of most of your less-well-conditioned players, while your better-conditioned players often drop slightly in overall gameplay performance. The master league mode can be played indefinitely, and you can, of course, pit your team against one that belongs to a friend at any time via the miracle of Memory Card.  The referee's presence on the field adds very little to the game.  And how would that game against your friend play out? Well, like every other match in Winning Eleven 8, it would be incredibly realistic. It's highly unlikely that you'd ever score the same goal twice, and while one of you sings the praises of the new on-the-pitch referee, the other would almost certainly be cursing him for making some poor decision or another. In truth, the referee on the field doesn't add anything significant to the game other than representing a focal point for your frustrations after a dubious offside decision or after a questionable judgment that awards a penalty or playing advantage to the opposition. Like the CPU-controlled players in Winning Eleven 8, the referee exhibits great artificial intelligence (if you can use ""referee,"" ""great,"" and ""intelligence"" in the same sentence), but since he's only human, it's not uncommon for him to make mistakes from time to time. Dubious refereeing decisions are a big part of soccer in real life, of course, so this isn't a criticism so much as an observation...and a warning.  Perhaps the best thing about Winning Eleven 8 is that it's not a difficult game to pick up and play, particularly if your pride doesn't prevent you from playing at one of the easier difficulty settings. However, it should also offer a lasting challenge for even the most experienced players among you. Some of the advanced controls listed in the instruction manual, for example, will undoubtedly come as news even to many of you who spent a lot of time with Winning Eleven 7. We should also point out that Winning Eleven 8 is the first game in the series to feature licensed teams. Although the teams from the Dutch, Italian, and Spanish leagues collectively look great and certainly represent a collective step in the right direction for the series, they also serve to highlight just how generic the remaining 80 club sides and 50 international teams look. With that said, Winning Eleven 8 does boast some adequate editing tools with which you can quite easily add more-realistic uniforms, badges, player likenesses, and more...if you're so inclined.   Most of the players in the game are instantly recognizable.  Most of the default player likenesses in Winning Eleven 8 are very good, in  fact, as are the re-creations of famous stadiums from around the world. These stadiums, despite presenting false names, are instantly recognizable and can be given their real-life names just as easily as players like Wales' Ryan Gils, who, strangely, also appears under the correct name of Giggs for Manchester United. (sorry, Man Red) It's unfortunate licensing issues have manifested themselves in such messy, evident manners in team and player rosters for Winning Eleven 8, but these issues are nothing that those of you who are familiar with the series aren't used to, and it's certainly not reason enough for any of you to ignore the best soccer game available for any current-generation console.   More impressive than the stadium re-creations and player likenesses in Winning Eleven 8 are the way they come to life when a match gets under way. The player animations are superb, the ball physics are as believable as always, and even the crowds look good, so long as the cameras keep their distances from them. The visual differences between the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions aren't significant, although the Xbox game's player models are a little more detailed. We also noticed that the PS2 game suffered from drops in frame rate occasionally, though these were extremely rare and were limited to those occasions when practically every player on the field was in the active shot.  The only other noticeable difference between the PS2 and Xbox versions of Winning Eleven 8 (besides the aforementioned numbers of players supported on a single screen) is that the loading times in the Xbox game are a lot quicker, which is particularly apparent when matches between CPU-controlled teams are being played out in the master league mode or during custom cup and league competitions. Despite the fact that most of the differences between the two games favor the Xbox version, we'd definitely choose to play the PS2 version for its controls. It's not that the PS2 controller is inherently better than its Xbox counterpart, it's just that Winning Eleven 8 puts all four shoulder buttons to good use when you want to sidestep other players or when you want to alter your team's playing style on the fly. Accomplishing either of those things on the Xbox means using the poorly positioned (regardless of which official controller model you're using) black and white buttons.  If there's one area in which Winning Eleven 8 definitely comes second to FIFA Soccer 2005, it's audio. The game's soundtrack comprises just two or three instantly forgettable and mind-numbingly repetitive variations of the same tune, and the crowd noise, while varied, doesn't always seem to relate to the action on the field. BBC soccer pundits Peter Brackley and Trevor Brooking do a good job reprising their roles in the commentary box, and although they're prone to repeating themselves, their observations are generally accurate.  Eat my goal!  So there you have it. World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 International is KCET's best soccer game to date, which basically makes it the best soccer game ever made...even taking the seminal Sensible World of Soccer games on the Amiga into account. The competition between KCET and EA Sports is now closer than ever, and which of this season's games you choose to play will ultimately be determined by what you're looking for from a soccer offering. If online play and official licenses are high on your wish list, then FIFA Soccer 2005 is the only way to go. If you can manage to play without those features and are looking for the most realistic soccer game available, in addition to an all-consuming career mode that you can play when your friends aren't around, then Winning Eleven 8 is definitely the game for you. 


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131,The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ,9.3, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is simply one of the best role-playing games ever made.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/6/4/2218964-box_oblivion.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion-review/1900-6146661/,pos,"
  This is a rare and remarkable achievement--a huge, open-ended, complex, detailed role-playing game that's fun to play and a pleasure to behold. Oblivion not only delivers everything that earned the Elder Scrolls series the devoted loyalty of a huge following of fans, but also significantly improves on the weaknesses of its 2002 predecessor, Morrowind. Morrowind earned recognition for being one of the best role-playing games in years, but the immersive and long-lasting experience it provided wasn't for everyone. Oblivion is hands-down better, so much so that even those who'd normally have no interest in a role-playing game should find it hard to resist getting swept up in this big, beautiful, meticulously crafted world.   Morrowind was a tough act to follow, but Oblivion isn't just better--it's a lot better.   The Elder Scrolls series is known for its sheer size and depth. These are games that you could lose yourself in, spending hours exploring a fantasy world, traveling for miles, or just looking for minutiae, such as rare plants or hidden treasure. Oblivion lives up to this pedigree, putting you into a massive, cohesive, highly immersive world. You get to create your own character--the possibilities for customization seem limitless--and then explore the world as you will. There's a compelling main quest for you to follow, which takes about 40 hours to finish the first time through, but the majority of the game's content is peripheral to that main quest. You can root out evil in hidden dungeons, join and climb the ranks in a number of different guilds, visit all the different towns and try to solve everybody's problems, compete in a long series of gladiatorial battles to the death, break into someone's home and rob them in their sleep, get caught and face the consequences, contract a disease that leads to vampirism and then try to find a cure, buy a house, steal a horse, invest in your favorite shop, and, if you can believe it, there's much more.    So the breadth of content is as remarkable as ever, but the most important thing is this: The many types of gameplay in Oblivion are well-designed and deeply satisfying, even when taken on their own. That's the main difference between this game and Morrowind. This may be a role-playing game, but you could play it like a pure action game, or like a stealth game, or like an adventure game, and it'd still be at least as good as, if not better than, games that are specialized in these regards.    Oblivion does a great job of quickly introducing you to all these different aspects of play, successfully engaging you rather than overwhelming you. You see the world through your character's eyes, but a behind-the-back perspective is also available. Initially you just pick a name, race, and gender for your character, and the game opens with you stuck in a dungeon cell, being taunted by a fellow inmate. Somehow, though, you get swept up in a desperate escape attempt by the emperor and his loyal retinue of protectors. The emperor, voiced unmistakably by Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation, X-Men), recognizes you from a portentous dream and entrusts you with the search for his illegitimate heir. But first, you'll need to escape from the Imperial City's sewers. As you make your way through this basic dungeon crawl, you happen upon ill-fated adventurers, their stuff, and some ornery goblins, so you immediately get to play around with close combat, ranged attacks, magic, sneaking, lock picking, equipment repairing, and more. How you survive is up to you--it's just as viable to kill your enemies with destructive magic, weapons, or bare hands as it is to sneak or run right past them. And even though the sewer setting might sound unimaginative, the quality of the game's visuals, the exceptionally good atmospheric sound effects, and the realistic physics all serve to quickly draw you in.   Not only is there a huge amount of great content in the game, but you can also experience it in all kinds of different ways depending on the type of character you create.   Toward the end of this sequence, the game does a clever job of recommending a character class to you based on how you've been playing. For example, if you've gone toe to toe with every goblin you've seen, hacking them up with an axe, you might make a good barbarian. But the game's numerous premade character classes aren't nearly as interesting as the ability to create your own custom class. The choices are numerous but clearly presented, and while you could go out of your way to create a fairly useless character, your intuition will easily guide you through what's a complex process. You choose an underlying specialization--combat, magic, or stealth--then you choose a couple of primary attributes, seven major skills, and even a birth sign. Basically, you're choosing your character's talents. Every character can use every skill; it's just a question of how well. Ultimately, this character-creation process is much like Morrowind's, and it shares the same ingenious design: You get stronger in this game by practicing and improving your primary skills, not by killing stuff and earning generic experience points.    That's not to say you can play Oblivion like a pacifist, since the main quest and many others are combat-intensive. But all the fighting in this game is probably one of the best parts. Visceral toe-to-toe melee battles have you carefully negotiating the distance between you and your opponent while switching between quick and powerful attacks, sometimes pausing to manually deflect your enemy's blows with your weapon or shield. Specifically, melee combat feels faster and smoother than it did in Morrowind, since in that game, it was possible to whiff blows against enemies while still appearing to hit--in Oblivion, close combat (as well as ranged combat) looks and feels much more solid. Your foes are generally quite smart, too. Humanoid enemies will taunt you when they're winning or turn tail and flee if they're near death. If you're faced with a number of foes, you can try to draw closer ones into the line of fire of the ones in the back--but be careful, because ranged attackers will lead their shots, forcing you to dodge and weave during battle, rather than simply keep moving.   The combat in Oblivion is surprisingly fun and exciting, whether you fight head-on or from the shadows.   A stealthy approach can be a tantalizing alternative, since sneaking up behind an opponent, pick-pocketing him, and then finishing him off with a single, deadly sneak attack can be at least as satisfying as slugging it out. And there are a wide range of magic schools to choose from, as well. Blast your foes with elemental spells, summon demonic aid or otherworldly weapons, charm your enemies into laying down their arms, debilitate the toughest monsters into simpering wimps that even a magic-user could beat up, make yourself invisible or really fast, and on and on. Whether you're playing on the Xbox 360 or PC, you can select a number of spells, items, and/or weapons for easy access in the heat of the moment.    Of course, there's much more to the game than combat against a wide variety of scary-looking bad guys. Simply exploring one of the game's towns and interacting with its populace can be a remarkable experience. Characters don't all stand around like they did in Morrowind; they're on a schedule, so they'll go to work in the morning and go to bed at night, and you can catch them going from place to place, talking to each other about recent rumors, and so on. They'll regard you differently depending on your personality and appearance, and you can compel them to like you better using everything from bribery to a fun little persuasion minigame in which you must guess at the other character's disposition and act accordingly. Every line of dialogue in the game is delivered in full speech, and the quality of the voice acting and the writing is generally excellent.    Almost every character in every town is unique, apart from the generic guards you'll find patrolling around (though every city's guards are different, clad in their respective armor and uniforms). There isn't always a ton to say to each character, but the fact that there are so many different lifelike characters in this game is staggering. It's exciting to stop and chat with each new person you meet, especially since a lot of them might send you on a quest of some sort or tell you where you can find one. Their faces are expressive, their eyes glint with life, and their lips move well with their speech. They could have used more body language, though, since they stand almost perfectly still when you're speaking to them. These aren't necessarily the most realistic-looking characters in any game to date, but they're up there.    Also, the way the quest system is structured in Oblivion is a huge improvement to the way quests were handled in Morrowind. In this game, anytime you're given a quest, you're prompted with a clear summary of what the quest is about and what you're supposed to do or where you're supposed to go. All your pending quests are clearly listed as part of the game's well-designed menu system, and you can set any of them to be your active quest, which automatically marks your objective on your map and gives you a compass waypoint to follow. This means there's next to no time wasted confusingly wandering around, looking for the right person to talk to or the next place to go.    In fact, you can instantly travel to all major metropolitan areas right from the start, or any other landmarks you've previously discovered. Through the ""fast travel"" feature on the world map, Oblivion simulates the amount of time it would have taken you to hoof it from point A to point B, so if you'd prefer to quickly teleport from one town to another instead of go by foot or on horseback, you're free to do that. This might be jarring at first, both to Morrowind fans and new players, but it turns out to be a great feature that helps keep the gameplay fast-paced...if that's how you like it. Certainly, the game rewards you for exploring on your own, since you'll find all kinds of uncharted places worth visiting. And in general, the way the quest system is structured is ideal for making you feel like you always have clear goals, yet without it feeling dumbed down or easy.   There's a lot to do in the game, but it's easy to keep track of your objectives thanks to a great quest system and map interface.   On that note, the game's level of challenge feels just right by default, though you can adjust a difficulty slider if you want to make it easier or harder. There's so much to do at any given point that even if you do get stuck on something, you can always come back to it later and go do something else that's fun and rewarding. The game's fine-tuned challenge is achieved in part because the enemies you'll encounter out in the world will get stronger as you do, though in practice, this doesn't come across nearly as contrived as it sounds. Growing more powerful in this game feels suitably rewarding, as it should in any role-playing game. As you find new and better equipment or spells, gain mastery over your skills, and increase your ability scores, you'll clearly get the impression that you're becoming much stronger. One of the great, new features in Oblivion is how all of the different skills in the game have different levels of mastery and corresponding perks--for example, when you reach journeyman level with blunt weapons, you gain a chance to disarm your foes with a power attack. Or, a journeyman in marksmanship can zoom in to snipe at foes with his or her bow. The strongest spells are limited to masters of their respective magic schools, and so on. When you advance to a higher rank in a skill, you get an immediate and significant payoff that wasn't there in Morrowind, where your character grew stronger much more subtly.    All of that aside, the main quest in Oblivion features a solid good-versus-evil storyline that'll give you a reason to see a lot of the world and get wrapped up in a lot of other activities. Much of the main quest revolves around the good-natured illegitimate son of the emperor, voiced to perfection by Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings, Patriot Games), and how you become his trusted ally in a desperate attempt to rid the world of what's essentially an invasion from hell. The title of the game refers to a hellish realm from which demons are springing forth and besieging the land of Tamriel, and you get wrapped up in the middle of an effort to put a stop to it. While this main quest doesn't branch wildly depending on the disposition of your character, you can go about it while being as good or as evil or as chaotic-neutral as you please.   Stunning good looks and fantastic audio make spending lots of quality time with this game that much easier.   That is, you can opt to help the emperor's heir out of the goodness of your heart or for your own self-serving motives, or not at all if you'd prefer not to. You can actually role-play in this game, something that the vast majority of role-playing games have stopped offering in recent years. Unlike in a massively multiplayer role-playing game filled with people acting out of character, or a typically linear Japanese role-playing game in which you're more of a spectator than an active participant in the plot, in Oblivion the world will often respond to you as you'd expect. Characters will ask you if you're feeling well if you've been diseased. They'll hail you as a hero if you save their town from one of the looming oblivion gates that are threatening the world. They might be apprehensive toward you if you approach them with a weapon drawn, and they'll yell at you and summon the guards if they catch you stealing.    Yet, the more believable a game is, the more believable you want it to be, and it's true that the artificial intelligence in Oblivion doesn't always put on a good show. You can break into someone's home and wake them up for a chat, and they'll chat with you like nothing's happened. The guards still might suddenly show up, seemingly without notice, but probably because one of them saw you crack the lock on the front door. Sometimes you'll battle alongside computer-controlled allies, but while these guys may be likable, they really aren't good at self-preservation, and you'll probably catch yourself mourning their loss more than their comrades will. Also, you can't bash stuff open, and no bathrooms are to be found anywhere in a world that's otherwise so finely detailed that it genuinely seems lived in. And the things about it that aren't always realistic or believable can still be amusing and entertaining. You're free to do whatever you want. Why not find out what happens if you try to pickpocket the Count of Skingrad while he's looking straight at you in the middle of his heavily guarded court? You can always load your saved game if things go sour, and you can save quickly at any point.    Considering all that's in this game, it's surprisingly difficult to find much fault with any of it. The inventory system could have been a little more streamlined, and the encumbrance system will quickly disrupt your plans to pick up and carry as much stuff as you'll wish you could, but these things are hardly worth mentioning. However, some reference to the game's technical performance is necessary. On the Xbox 360, you can look forward to a usually fast and smooth frame rate and graphics that look especially dazzling on a high-definition display. On a high-end PC, you can get the game looking even better, though unless you have a fast graphics card and at least a gig of RAM, you might have a hard time getting the game to appear pretty while moving at an acceptable frame rate at a high resolution. The frame rate especially tends to bog down when a lot of characters are simultaneously onscreen, which might explain why there aren't as many people milling about in the cities as you might hope for. Controls are as good on the Xbox 360 as on the PC, though using the PC's number keys is a little easier than using the 360 controller's D pad for quickly switching between items and powers. On the other hand, a lot of the other interface elements seem like they were designed with the console version primarily in mind, which makes switching between character menu panels using the mouse feel a bit clunky on the PC. Both versions contain fairly frequent but fairly short loading times, a slight detriment to the game's sense of immersion, but nothing that you wouldn't expect from a game with this much detail.   Once you visit Tamriel, you might want to stay there.   Ultimately, which version you choose should depend on whether you have a high-powered PC and whether you have an Xbox 360 hooked up to a home theater. If you don't have the former, the Xbox 360 version is a relatively safer bet, and it gains a perk over its PC counterpart by offering some unlockable achievements, enticing you both to finish the main quest and to earn your keep in all the different guilds in the game. It packs a higher retail price, though. Meanwhile, there's a downloadable toolset available for the PC version, which will surely lead to untold volumes of user-created content that could extend the life of the game. Incidentally, the Xbox 360 version also contains hooks for future content downloads over Xbox Live.    What's overwhelming about Oblivion is how good it is and how much there is to it. Literally almost everything that's ever been done well before in past role-playing games is in here--done at least as well, if not better. From the quality of the story and character interaction to the pure thrill of the combat to all the pleasure to be found in the game's little details--the lock-picking minigame, the alchemy system, the way arrows stay stuck in their victims, the ability to eventually create your own spells, the informative full-color manual, all the different books you can stop to read in the game--these things combine to make Oblivion one of the single best, longest-lasting gaming experiences to be had in a long time. It's just too bad there's no multiplayer.    Just kidding.  


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132,Command & Conquer ,9.2," Command & Conquer is an incredible game on any platform, and it translates incredibly well to the Saturn.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/6/2/2210962-cncbox.jpg,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/command-and-conquer-review/1900-2533851/,pos,"
Ever since I can remember, strategy games have bored me. I've never cared about reliving historic navy battles on my television, or cultivating spices while infiltrating futuristic dynasties. After all, console games are about kicking ass with fast-paced action and state of the art graphics. And then came Command & Conquer. My world has changed. Command & Conquer for the Saturn (a conversion of the popular PC game), is a title that has earned a higher score than any console game we've reviewed to date. In other words this Saturn game has bested Nintendo 64 and Playstation superstars like Super Mario 64, Tekken 2, Die Hard Trilogy, and Tomb Raider. Hard to believe? Let me put it this way: Not only am I amazed that a strategic war simulation could be so captivating, but also that its score is so justified - Command & Conquer for the Saturn is an amazing title, one that I believe will be hard to beat in 1997 in terms of gameplay, value, and challenge on any platform. Command & Conquer takes place in a futuristic world where two forces battle for global supremacy. Welcome to the realm of the peacekeeping Global Defense Initiative and the world terrorist organization, Brotherhood of Nod. It's common to pop in the first disc and start playing as GDI. The typical mission involves setting up a base, raising funds (by harvesting Tiberium), and building up enough manpower (in the form of commandos, tanks, engineers, etc.) to accomplish your objective, whether it's destroying a key weapon, taking out defense posts, or leveling the enemy's base. Your skills are tested throughout each mission as you try to force the offensive while developing your base and defenses. It's not uncommon to play the later missions ten to twenty times before accomplishing your objectives, and don't be surprised if you spend the better part of a day on some levels as you hone your strategy. Multiply this by fifteen GDI missions and you have a long way to go before you can claim ultimate victory. Sound exciting? Wait, there's more…this is only the first disc. In a move that almost justifies a value score of ""10"" (almost), the second disc contains thirteen separate NOD missions. You can play as either immediately from the get go, but combined they make for the most value a Saturn game has yet to offer. (It's worth noting that the Playstation version contains a few bonus missions this version doesn't, thus robbing the Saturn of unequivocal victory in this category.) The graphics in Command & Conquer are better than what you'd expect from a strategy game, and the storyline unfolds in between missions with full motion video and 3-D rendered cutscenes. Believe it or not, this enhances the game dramatically, giving players added insight into their missions while advancing the game's plot. It's also quite interesting to play the game through as one side then go back and play as the other. From either perspective the Brotherhood of Nod are clearly ""the bad guys,"" but seeing it from their point of view is entertaining, to say the least. The soundtrack is a stunning Red Book audio combination of industrial techno and rock that makes for the best video game music ever heard (with styles sounding like everything from Filter, to Consolidated, to early 90s pop-dance sensation The Party). The interface has been converted nicely from the PC. The sidebar for constructing the weapons of war is called up at the click of a button; and your forces are controlled with a simple point and click. This makes for smooth gameplay, which also works well when the missions erupt into a heated battle. The battlefields are large enough to make navigating the landscape a challenge, though it's easy to get a feel for them after awhile. Command & Conquer is an incredible game on any platform, and it translates incredibly well to the Saturn. Some would argue that it should have multiplayer support, but unfortunately the console system itself is not equipped to handle such a feature (which makes it hard to hold this shortcoming against such a rich and lengthy title). With its mix of in-depth strategy, tactical action, and slick storytelling, Command & Conquer brings console strategy games out of the shadow they've lived in for so long. It's interesting to note that this conversion (not a port - it was fully re-created for the Saturn) is better than any first party title Sega has yet to produce. Saturn owners should savor this title as an example of the games they deserve to play on their system.
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133,NASCAR Racing 2 ,9.2, Allow me to make one crucial point: NASCAR 2 is not a toy.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/6/5/2209965-nascar2_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nascar-racing-2-review/1900-2543742/,pos,"
Before I begin reviewing Sierra's NASCAR 2, allow me to make one crucial point: NASCAR 2 is not a toy. I thought I was fairly adept at your average brake-accelerate PC racer, but NASCAR draws a thin line between exhilarating action-racing and strategic planning. This is a game where every track must be considered individually when tweaking the design of your car, where you need to know where and when to pit, all while staying aware of your competition's position on the road. After a few hours of roaring around the oval, taking cues from your spotter through a headset (let's assume you're wearing headphones during your game) it becomes startlingly clear: NASCAR 2 is so realistic, it's scary. First of all, NASCAR 2's graphics are top-notch. Sierra has improved on the frame rate of the first game, making for fluid car animation, and realistic body damage. Simply put, this is as close as most of us are going to come to participating in an actual televised race. As an added bonus, Sierra has included a paintshop-style program where you're given the opportunity to customize the artwork of any car on the track. Slap your dog's name on the hood, a smiley face on the bumper. The association doesn't care: In NASCAR 2 the car is your canvas. I don't mean this wholly in an artistic sense. Half the fun of NASCAR 2 is making the ever-so-slight adjustments to your vehicle's tire pressure, foil height, camber, and gear ratios to achieve optimal performance for a particular track. Experienced racers - whether they're the real McCoy or just veteran desktop competitors - will know what all these arcane terms mean from the start. However, before hitting the first NASCAR track, most of us are going to need an quick learner's course. An easy to understand which-element-on-your-car-affects-what diagram made it all clear, and in no time at all I began to experiment until I felt I had a firm grasp on exactly what I could tweak to make my V-8 the finest machine on the track. The AI in the game is pretty incredible. When you accidentally blindside another vehicle (or even on purpose, if you don't believe in good sportsmanship), the other cars realistically slow down or cautiously slide out to avoid a collision. It's funny, but although NASCAR 2 doesn't purport itself as being the kind of body-casualty ride that Psygnosis' Destruction Derby 2 is (with its incredibly realistic incremental car damage - fenders mashing in, hoods flying off, wheels tearing from their axles, bouncing down the track, requiring a tow into the pit-stop), it certainly rivals that game damage-wise. . If you collide with another vehicle because you performed an action contradictory to your spotter's directions, he'll remind you of your ineptitude with a reprimanding ""What kind of bone-headed move was that!"" And at that point, you're probably so absorbed in the race that you'll want to go back and apologize to him personally. That's the kind of complete immersion NASCAR 2 offers. It's a completely professional game, both in its execution and in its dedication to the NASCAR tradition. In fact, it's so that Sierra and NASCAR have teamed up to bring the game to TEN (the online Total Entertainment Network) to allow players to compete and achieve ""official"" NASCAR standings in an Internet roster. Now how cool is that? People who played and worshipped the original NASCAR already own this game. I'm writing this review largely for gamers out there who are intimidated by realistic sims. Games like Grand Prix 2 and now NASCAR 2 have converted me: I can now rest my rocket-launcher temporarily to carry on some in-depth racing.
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134,Dark Reign ,9.2, One of the most impressive games released this year in any genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/0/1/2216501-dark_reign.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-reign-review/1900-2538542/,pos,"
Real-time strategy game designers face a difficult task: If their game stays too closely within the path laid down by Red Alert and Warcraft II, it is sure to be criticized for being derivative. On the other hand, if they tinker with the formulas of those classic games, they may find themselves outside the familiar and comfortable bounds of the genre, and thus, without an audience. The only solution - one which is very rarely achieved - is to create a game that is instantly accessible to real-time strategy gamers, but which at the same time offers new and significant innovations that take the experience beyond its previous limits and into the realm of the new and unexpected. Dark Reign is such a game. At first glance (and at first play) Dark Reign appears to be little more than a Red Alert clone - experienced players will certainly have a sense of deja vu at their first encounter with the game's visual presentation, sound effects, and single-player missions. However, two or three hours of play (or completion of the advanced online tutorials) reveal a real-time strategy game that is, in many respects, altogether different from its predecessors.  The reason that Dark Reign is such a success is twofold: First, it fixes almost everything that was wrong with its most obvious influence, Red Alert. Take unit production, for example. Where Red Alert required you to manually select each unit to be produced, Dark Reign lets you create a production queue for as many units as you wish. Not only that, it also allows you to set an exit point for units produced by a particular building. The result is that you can create and group entire divisions of troops anywhere on the map with just a few clicks of the mouse - freeing your mind to concentrate on more important matters. Another example: One of the most frustrating aspects of Red Alert was the tendency of units to be drawn away from their selected position by enemy attacks. In Dark Reign, you can instruct your units to attack without moving. This greatly enhances the effectiveness of defensive unit placement, as well as the offensive deployment of artillery units. These types of subtle improvements, which are the obvious result of long and careful thought about what did and didn't work in earlier real-time strategy games, permeate Dark Reign, and make it a true pleasure to play.  But Dark Reign does more than overcome the shortcomings of earlier titles. It also introduces major new strategic options that greatly enhance the depth of the gaming experience. The two most important innovations are the inclusion of a very sophisticated waypoint system, which lets you easily dictate the paths which your troops will follow, and an AI control panel, which allows you to set general parameters for troop behavior and responses to specific situations.  The waypoint system is easy to use and remarkably flexible, with application to a wide variety of offensive, defensive, and reconnaissance initiatives. You can specify an attack path to maximize stealth and efficiency, create elaborate patrol schemes to protect key areas and root out intruders, or send scouts to search just those areas of the map that are still uncovered. You can even save paths to allow quick and easy assignment of new troops to an existing set of orders. After a short while using the waypoint system, you will wonder how real-time strategy games ever got along without it. The AI control panel is equally impressive. It allows you to tell your troops to guard a specific location, harass enemy troops using gun-and-run tactics, scout out hidden areas of the map, or to seek ""kill or be killed"" encounters with the enemy. Even better, you can dictate to your troops how aggressively to pursue enemy units they encounter and how much damage to take before returning to a repair facility.  Both the waypoint system and AI panel are powerful when used alone, but when used in conjunction with one another, they allow you to execute extremely complex strategic maneuvers. For example, you could send a unit group along a path into the enemy base, then give them orders to search and destroy and to retreat to a repair facility after taking minimal damage. They will reach the base, spread out, and then quickly retreat, drawing out the enemy troops in the process. By careful placement of the repair facility to which they are returning (buildings can be placed anywhere on the map), the pursuing enemies could be drawn directly into an ambush, carried out by a second group located in a highly favorable position, with orders not to move from it. Meanwhile, a third formation could be sent along a set path into the heart of the weakly defended enemy base, with their end point near a critical installation (such as a power plant), which they can then attack, crippling the base.   This level of strategic depth would be enough in and of itself to recommend Dark Reign. But there is much more to consider. The unit design in particular is worth noting, as it offers exceptional variety and balance while at the same time maintaining a clear (and consistent) distinction between the two sides. The computer AI is quite good, attacking in swarms, retreating when outnumbered or outgunned, and brutally impervious to basic tank-rush tactics. Dark Reign's dual resource management (one earns money, the other speeds production) adds yet another degree of depth to the game.  The only components that are somewhat disappointing are Dark Reign's line-of-sight and 3D terrain features. While both work to a degree, neither has quite the impact on gameplay that one would expect. While the slope (as well as the composition) of the terrain does clearly affect unit movement speed, it rarely matters that one takes the ""high"" ground - range and accuracy of weapons are negligibly affected (if at all), and the increase in visual range is minor. And while the line-of-sight feature does offer a new twist on enemy encounters, it's more of an annoyance than anything else. All this may sound like a lot to take in, and it is. Fortunately, Dark Reign includes an excellent series of tutorials that gently introduce you to the game's many unique facets. It's also comforting to know that it is not necessary to understand all, or even most, of Dark Reign's more subtle features in the early missions - experienced gamers will be able to start playing without even reading the manual. The game presents the player with a smooth and steady learning curve, and by the later missions, you will be well equipped to take full advantage of all of the strategic options at your disposal.  Even once you've mastered the solo missions, you'll still get plenty more out of the game. The multiplayer version, which supports up to eight players on a LAN, four players over the Internet, and two players using a direct modem connection, is extremely easy to use. Just click on multiplayer, and within moments you'll be logged onto the Dark Reign Server, where matches are continually launched. Another of Dark Reign's special features is its bundled construction kit. With it, you can (relatively) easily construct your own levels and maps, complete with any terrain, buildings, or features you want, as well as set unit distribution, behavior, and stats. While most players will find the bundled multiplayer maps (there are some 20 in all, including maps designed specifically for various numbers of players) to be more than enough, the construction kit ensures that new maps will be continually available on the Web. There is much more that could be said about Dark Reign, but potential buyers of the game have surely heard enough already. This is one of the best real-time strategy games ever (Total Annihilation and the upcoming Starcraft are the two potential contemporary competitors) and one of the most impressive games released this year in any genre. We'll be playing it for many months to come.
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135,FIFA 99 ,9.2," FIFA 99 is a good choice for the neophyte, and an almost-essential upgrade for the die-hard soccer enthusiast.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/4/1/2216841-box_fifa99.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-99-review/1900-2536008/,pos,"
EA Sports has produced some of the finest soccer games on any platform. Last year's two versions of the FIFA franchise came replete with more options, stunning graphics, and hours of gameplay than ever before. With terrific animations, dozens of special moves and in-game strategies, it begs the question: Is there room for improvement, aside from just keeping up with new hardware and processing speeds? Little, but there is some. EA tweaked the graphics, added commentary and celebrations, beefed up teammate AI, and ""smartened"" sideline control - making FIFA 99 a better choice for the neophyte, and an almost-essential upgrade for the die-hard soccer enthusiast. All the moves you expect from an EA Sports FIFA title are here: flick passes, diving headers, slide tackles, and rainbow kicks. FIFA 99 adds new moves like directional chest-trapping to bring the ball down away from enemy players. You can fake the receipt of a pass. And draw fouls. And push the goalie down with the touch of a single button. It's now possible to volley an airborne ball directly to a teammate's head or feet. Shots on goal now include a chip shot and a poke shot to disarm the unsuspecting keeper. These aren't the same static goalies of last year's editions either. Instead of automatically grabbing and holding the ball every time, sometimes they kick the ball away, other times they fail to gain control and leave it in play, dangerously close to the goal. Plus, you can now have a hand in their control, and though this primarily means deciding when to pick up or drop the ball, it's now possible to charge enemy strikers. The threat of charging goalies makes offensive timing more of a critical issue. Tactically, there's nothing new here. Still, EA deserves credit for showing that soccer is in fact a game of strategy. It was the first to implement a strategic component in the electronic soccer world - something that has existed in video (American) football gaming since the Atari 2600 days. The four plays from World Cup 98 return here: For the defense, an offside trap moves the defensive line forward to draw the enemy offsides. Offensive plays include an attack press to team up on defending ball carriers to force a mistake near the enemy goal and two breakaway plays. And as in previous versions of the game, three separate customizable formations are available on the fly. If you're willing to tire your team out fast, you can effectively have the bulk of your squad in your territory and enemy territory, by switching formation whenever the ball switches sides of the field.  All this strategy is further customizable with the various setup options. Control each formation's orientation, from defensive to attacking, as well as each individual player's attitude, from ""calm"" to ""nutter."" In addition, all the usual stat and cosmetic tweaks recur in this version, so you can still create strange races of bald, neck-beard-sporting, super-strikers that are all speed and no endurance. Nothing new over last year's edition, but filled with possibility nonetheless.  EA Sports has opted for a more realistic use of color this time around. Gone are last year's candy-coated primary and secondary colors and saturated look, in favor of lighter yet more subdued and browner hues. In general, the frame rate is better, and the overall visual effect is a smoother one, although (very rarely) a frame rate glitch occurs, and the game hiccups during a wide camera pan. Last year's angry goalie assault of the ""cameraman"" must have been a big hit with the kids, because dozens of new grandstanding and pouting animations have been added. Dancing wingbacks, obnoxious taunts, and goalie retaliations are great, but it's the mellow and abject goalie hanging his head after blowing the tying save that gets me every time. Speaking of color, commentary is tighter and more varied this time around with a larger script and, more importantly, improved response time. You don't have the old problem of commentators declaring ""He's just given the ball away,"" two seconds late, when you've already recovered and scored. The most significant improvement in this year's version is in the AI. On the enemy side, defenders mark tighter than ever before. For you Americans, that means they play man-to-man faster, rougher, and closer to the forwards. You might actually have to learn a few of those special moves this time around (at least half of them are fancy dribbles suited perfectly for this purpose). Teammate AI is also superior to previous attempts. Through-pass runs are easier to pull off, making for supersonic breakaways, but even basic strategy is more effective now: Send a wing back up the sideline and fire it into the box. Nine times out of ten, your man is there. Used to be you could get away with passing blindly, not because teammate AI was good, but because enemy marking wasn't so hot. There'd be time to chase the ball without losing your momentum. These improvements make FIFA 99 more of a game of skill that emphasizes passing and control over hotdogging.  One thing no previous soccer title has ever pulled off with any realism is sideline recoveries. In most games, whenever a player first arrives at a loose ball, the ball travels a few feet along the same vector as that of the player's approach. As a result, it's almost impossible to recover a loose ball at the sideline, since the CPU doesn't know that the ball is dangerously close to being out of bounds and that no real-life player would dumbly kick the ball forward and forfeit possession to a throw-in. This flaw is the reason why you always see electronic soccer players sprint up to the ball only to tap it out of bounds - it's not some desperate and ingenious defensive ploy; it's a weakness in the code. At first I was skeptical of EA Sports' claim to have built new ""bounding logic"" to remedy the problem, but the surprising and subtle results make for greater realism at the all-important periphery of play. Last year's double dose of FIFA titles was a little confusing for soccer fans. Releasing FIFA 99 so soon after is also confusing. Who would buy three games with nearly identical engines in just over a year (first-person shooters notwithstanding)? FIFA Road to World Cup 98 had more than one hundred more teams than the later World Cup 98, which in turn had a wider array of in-game tactics and plays, and FIFA 99 has more of each than either of its predecessors. EA Sports has made terrific, if sometimes subtle, improvements to AI and control, making it the obvious choice of the three.
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136,South Park Rally ,2.5," Even though the Dreamcast may possess considerably more processing power under the hood than the Nintendo 64 or PlayStation, nothing seems to be able to hide the fact that South ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/5/8/2214058-box_spr.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/south-park-rally-review/1900-2600320/,neg,"
Even though the Dreamcast may possess considerably more processing power under the hood than the Nintendo 64 or PlayStation, nothing seems to be able to hide the fact that South Park Rally is simply not a good game.    The idea behind this South Park-licensed kart-racing game is that the fine citizens of South Park commemorate every holiday by holding a go-cart racing event. These events range from straightforward races to events in which the goal is to hold on to an item for a certain length of time. For example, on Valentine's Day, everyone assembles at Big Gay Al's place to shoot one another with Cupid's arrows. The catch is that there's only one bow that the racers must fight for control of by bumping the driver who has it, all the while trying not to get shot. Once you get the bow, you must get enough distance between yourself and the other drivers so you can get off a few shots without losing it. These non-race events have a similar setup, which makes the gameplay extremely fast paced and even frantic at times. To help you fend off or prevent the other racers from passing you or taking away a key object, the levels are filled with an arsenal of offensive and defensive weapons and items. Items like dogs, cats, and alien lasers can stall your opposition for a brief period of time. There are also objects like the Terrance and Phillip boxes that are filled with gas, giving you a momentary speed boost. You can even pick up Mr. Hanky, who patrols around your vehicle, keeping you free from harm for a limited time. So while the game's kart-styled items setup may sound like that of previous games in the genre, it's really South Park Rally's overall gameplay and control that keeps it from measuring up.   While fairly fun for a couple of minutes, the gameplay is quickly debilitated by poor control and physics, which make the game hard to play. The biggest problem with the control is the vehicles' turning speed. If you get yourself in a tight situation where competitors are coming right at you, you might as well just take it head-on, since turning around takes forever. You do have a braking feature that allows you to take tighter turns at higher speeds - however, this doesn't help you at all when you're stopped or going slow. Another problem is getting your vehicle back on its wheels after it flips, which happens a lot since the car physics are way too floaty, resulting in vehicles that bounce all over the place.    Graphically, South Park Rally on the Dreamcast obviously looks better than its N64 and PlayStation counterparts, and it certainly captures the flat, unrefined visuals of the show. However, compared to other Dreamcast games, the level of detail, 3D models, and the general quality of the graphics are noticeably below par. The one exception is that all the characters and their vehicles look fairly true to the show. As are the raunchy quips from the characters, which, while funny at first, become quickly tiresome as the variety of phrases is extremely limited.   Overall, South Park Rally's poor control and limited charm prove to be a detrimental combination that makes the game unbearable to play, even for the biggest South Park fan. South Park fans may want to rent this game, but its poor control and limited gameplay make it one that even the most die-hard fan will want to stay away from.
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137,TVDJ (Import) ,2.5," IMPORT: TVDJ is a minigame posing as a complete game, as it has neither the gameplay depth nor the length to qualify it as a game in and of itself.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/6/6/5/2224665-tvdj.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tvdj-import-review/1900-2630662/,neg,"
Import: The rhythm/dancing game genre unparalleled popularity in Japan, which is made apparent by the glut of Bemani and similarly themed titles currently on the market. While they all tend to have the commonality of a heaping helping of style combined with some simple, addictive gameplay, everyone has a gimmick. Sony has decided to veer wildly from the standard musical them of rhythm games with TVDJ, a rhythm game based not on dancing, playing a musical instrument or rapping, but splicing together TV shows on the fly. While a wholly unique concept, TVDJ quite simply doesn't add up.   TVDJ throws you into the role of the new video editor at the fledgling BBB television station. The station is in trouble, and it's up to your masterful video editing skills to get ratings up and save the station. You then edit your way through four shows, none of which, unfortunately, are quite bizarre enough to capture the attention of those seeking that weird Japanese flavor. To edit the show, a row of cells scrolls across the bottom of the screen, divided into cell segments. Each face button on your controller spits out a short video clip, filling between one and four cells. You then fill up the segments with exactly 8 cells, and variety counts. To be blunt, TVDJ substitutes a test of basic arithmetic skills for actual gameplay. If you can count to 8, you can play TVDJ. While interesting in concept, this gameplay doesn't offer enough depth to base an entire game around.   Not that there is much of a game in TVDJ in the first place. With a total of four levels in the game, each level lasting no more than 5 five minutes, TVDJ can be beat in 20 minutes or less, guaranteed. After beating the game once, you're treated to the same exact game, with slightly higher difficulty. The shallow gameplay, shortage of levels, and lack of options make TVDJ's replay value all but nonexistent. The rest of TVDJ is equally unimpressive. The sound is quickly forgotten, as it offers nothing terribly engaging or irritating. Utilizing the soon-to-be reviled cell-shading technique, TVDJ's graphics suffice, though it's probably the least impressive use of the effect to date.    TVDJ is a minigame posing as a complete game, as it has neither the gameplay depth nor the length to qualify it as a game in and of itself. TVDJ will never see the light of day here in the States, which is no real loss, as its short-lived novelty isn't worth the time and money of even the most fanatical rhythm fan.
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138,History of the World ,2.5, One of the most lifeless board game conversions going.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/1/8/1118-4218.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/history-of-the-world-review/1900-2537706/,neg,"
If you want to see how to turn a board game into a computer game, look no further than Hasbro's Risk, Scrabble, or Monopoly. If you want to see how not to turn a board game into a computer game, try History of the World. History of the World is a popular and entertaining board game for two to seven people. It's best when played with a large, mostly drunk group and involves carving out an empire for oneself over seven historical epochs. Think of it as Risk for the anal-retentive.  Avalon Hill, however, has had notoriously poor results with conversions of its classic board games. Most recently, Third Reich limped to the shelves, three years out of date. Now History of the World is bunged into our hard drives with little more to recommend it. Avalon Hill is not alone in perpetrating this one. Colorado Computer Creations (of High Command fame) did the programming. Avalon Hill should have shown more care with one of its major game assets.  You begin an epoch by drawing a card. This card represents your kingdom and any special benefits you get from it (strength points, navigation technology, and so on). You also draw event cards that can be played at any point in the turn. These trigger specials events such as earthquakes that knock down an enemy capitol or rebels that try to overthrow a territory. Gameplay itself unfolds on a squished map of the world, highlighting the area from Japan to Western Europe as a series of lands grouped into regions. You're given an empire, you deploy army units into neighboring regions, play any special events, and then wait for your opponents to do the same. If an opponent decides to take over one of your regions, a simplified die-roll combat decides the victor. The key is to control enough landmasses to have the most victory points at the end of seven epochs. On the dining room table, with plenty of beer and chips at hand, this is all rather fun in a Risk sorta way. On the computer screen, however, it dies a thousand deaths. It is just about one of the most lifeless board game conversions going, with any attempt to lighten the mood or add some color merely adding to the gloom. (Try the hackneyed tutorial or look at any of the AVIs if you don't believe me.)  The problems are many. First, it is programmed very badly, with a cumbersome, sluggish interface that is right out of Windows 3.1. The toolbar is a mystery, and the various windows are all separate rather than being integrated into a single, fluid gameplay environment. It runs like a dog despite being pretty short on chrome. None of the commands has hot text, so it's back to the manual each time you need to puzzle one out. There are two zoom modes for the game map, but the large zoom is half size and not all that useful. Not that this matters, since the map is only slightly better than the one found in Third Reich, which was only slightly better than playing lines-and-dots on notebook paper. In a word, it is a visual and technical turkey. Well, okay, at least those low-bandwidth visuals can be put to good use, right? Fast Internet play! Live chat! A good place for this game to come alive. Maybe so, but we'll never know, since the only multiplayer element is the dreaded e-mail game, which only five guys in the applied physics department of Kalamazoo U. still bother with.  The implementation of Internet support may have saved HOTW. The gameplay itself, however, does not even remotely translate into a solo game. The abstract conquering of countries on the basis of drawing cards and placing chits on an ugly map does not exactly give us Civilization II or Imperialism. Military units have no special properties or skills: They are merely attackers and defenders, all with the same ratings. The tactical element is not only minor (die rolls), but badly handled, since an enemy just attacks and if he wins, your chit just disappears. No fanfare, no combat results. At least, none I could find on the oh-so-confusing screen. Gameplay unfolds in a routine, predictable way no matter how many times you play. All of the joy of expansion and conquest has been sucked out of this game like the final drops out of a Slurpee cup. It is a shame that Avalon Hill, which happens to own the rights to some of the greatest board games in history, has never been able to bring those games to the computer with any degree of success (aside from the efforts of Atomic Games). History of the World is simply the latest in a long line of disappointments.
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'.']",0.052647757335257346,0.4697205687830688
139,Iron And Blood ,2.5," If one word had to be used to sum up Iron and Blood, ""laughable"" would fit just fine.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/4/1/7/1186-4417.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/iron-and-blood-review/1900-2547924/,neg,"
One would think a game bearing the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons license would at least be mildly entertaining. Instead, gamers get just a fighting game - and a bad one at that. If one word had to be used to sum up Iron and Blood, ""laughable"" would fit just fine. Playing Iron and Blood is as painful as being hit over the head repeatedly with a blunt object. Character control is slow and unresponsive: Think of the type of game where it's hard to tell if the move you made was a special move or not (occasionally the announcer shouts ""Combination!"" to let you know you probably did something right). Campaign mode adds a team aspect, where you pick a series of characters and do battle with opposing forces. This is where artifacts come into play, which can enhance a character by making him stronger or faster, or bringing fallen compatriots back to life. Onscreen, Iron and Blood looks like a real clunker. While still photos make it out to be a pretty sharp-dressed game, the motion is jerky and the camera angles are horrible. The game seems to be very fond of the behind-the-back view, which makes accurate player control a far-off dream. The back of the box boasts ""Death strikes at 225,000 polygons per second,"" but fails to mention that the ""death"" is the player dying of sheer frustration. The only point in favor of this game is character variety. You can pick from several different characters, including a headsman, complete with his head-chopper, an elf with his bow, a goblin with two short swords, or even Torgo, the one-armed dwarf who beats his opponents into submission with his giant hammer. Too bad they look better on the select screen menu than they do in the actual game. This game could have been good. With some gameplay tweaks, a better sense of camera angling, and smoother motion, it would have been a hell of a fighter. Instead it is a bleak reminder that all polygon games aren't as smooth as Tekken 2. If someone attempts to pawn this game off on you, do yourself a favor and just say no.
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140,Judge Dredd ,2.5, It's pretty hard to believe that someone at Activision saw this game and felt that it was worth bringing out in the States.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/5/2/3/1218-4523.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/judge-dredd-review/1900-2547976/,neg,"
To all but a few comic book aficionados, the Judge Dredd name stands for a bad movie, a few bad video games, and a pretty decent pinball machine. And even though this latest offering from Activision is based on the Judge Dredd comic series rather than the Stallone magnum opus, it fits right in as just another bad video game. Even though most avid light-gun fans are probably starving for another game, this is one they'd be better off without. The game plays just about how you would expect it to play. The camera perspective travels around without your help and stops every time a bad guy pops up. You pop a few caps into said bad guy, and the game continues. Occasionally you'll find a power-up or two, allowing you to have rapid fire or more powerful shots. In a definite nod to Area 51, much of the surrounding background can be damaged with your shots, scoring you more points in the process. The main difference is that most of the enemies take several shots to kill, which gives them plenty of time to return fire while you reload. This makes getting through a level unscathed pretty hard. Judge Dredd moves at a decent frame rate, but the graphics look pretty bad. Everything is fairly pixelated, and it's somewhat hard to discern where the background stops and an enemy starts. The FMV is pretty hilarious. It looks like the Judge's outfits were made by spraying some gold paint onto cardboard, and the acting is laughably pathetic. The Dredd character, portrayed by some goon who apparently forgot to shave on the day of the shoot, utters phrases like ""I am the law"" with little or no conviction, and instead comes off as a complete weakling instead of the badass judge/executioner that you would expect. The soundtrack is filled with typical gunfire and explosion effects. It's pretty hard to believe that someone at Activision saw this game and felt that it was worth bringing out in the States. It just doesn't have anything to offer at all. No matter how strong your craving for a gun game may be, just wait this one out.
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141,Ultimate Fighting Championship ,2.5, Ultimate Fighting Championship for the PlayStation doesn't have anything to offer beyond the good name of its Dreamcast counterpart.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/8/2/6/2215826-box_ufc.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ultimate-fighting-championship-review/1900-2660266/,neg,"
The no-holds-barred martial arts tournament known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship has finally spawned a PlayStation interpretation of the sport, which comes with real fighters, tons of moves, and 32 different styles of fighting. The game, however, fails to deliver responsive controls or decent graphics, and this makes the UFC a disappointing game to play for even the most dedicated fan of the sport.   On the surface, Ultimate Fighting Championship looks as though it may be a not-so-pretty version of its Dreamcast counterpart. The game has more than 22 different fighters, 32 different styles, and various modes of play such as exhibition and tournament. The game's main mode of play is a career mode of sorts that's called championship road. In this mode you face opponent after opponent, increasing your fighter's ability along the way. The game even has a fairly in-depth create-a-fighter mode that lets you mix and match moves and skills as well as different appearances to make a custom fighter. But once you get past the menus, options, and basic premise of knocking out your opponent or making him or her submit, the similarities between the two versions of the game end.    The most debilitating problem the game has is its gameplay and control. Controlling your fighter is a hard and frustrating task due to unresponsive and sloppy controls that result in delayed and undesired onscreen action. The game gives you tons of moves to perform, ranging from standard strikes to complicated chokeholds and joint locks. Many of the moves require precise timing and multiple button presses to execute correctly, which is something that's hard to accomplish due to the game's controls. The AI of the computer opponents in the game are extremely single minded in their attack, if you're facing a grappler he or she is always going to try to take you down and make you submit. If you face a striker he's almost always going for a knockout. Knowing this makes fighting your opponents less difficult than fighting the game's poor control.   Visually, the game suffers from an array of problems including a low frame rate, sloppy character models, and poor animations. The fighters in the game just look plain bad, the punches they throw and the way they interact with one another is way too stiff, making them look and move more like rock-'em-sock-'em robots. The textures used for their faces and clothes are very blocky and pixilated looking. Even the game's menus and character portraits look terribly blocky and pixelated. In the audio department, ""Big"" John McCarthy's voice adds a bit of authenticity to the game. The game's sound effects and music are fairly decent as well.   In the end, Ultimate Fighting Championship for the PlayStation doesn't have anything to offer beyond the good name of its Dreamcast counterpart. No matter how big of a fan of the UFC you may be, the game's poor control and graphics just simply ruin the game and make it totally unenjoyable.
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142,Destroyer Command ,2.5, This is a blatant and insulting instance of a game released too early to the detriment of the people who buy it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/4/7/9/2216479-command.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/destroyer-command-review/1900-2852075/,neg,"
Sometimes software is released in such a wretched state that the developers may as well just come to your house and kick your dog for $40. This is the case with Destroyer Command, a painful instance of just how shameless and insulting a computer game company can be with its customers.  Near miss by a kamikaze.  Destroyer Command is the spiritual heir to all those Great Naval Battle games SSI used to publish. You command a ship (or ships, in some cases) from either an overhead map view or by jumping around the various stations, where you flip switches, twiddle dials, and look at gauges. But whereas the Great Naval Battles series put you on the bridges of the century's grandest battleships, Destroyer Command relegates you to their little cousins, the destroyer escorts in World War II who kept enemy subs at bay. While this might seem like a less glamorous command, it does open the game to antisubmarine warfare, a topic that hasn't been covered in a sim since Novalogic's 1990 game Wolfpack. It also means you'll get to use torpedo launchers, which were the real teeth of destroyers in that era. Since you usually have to get in close to fire torpedoes, using them requires more finesse than simply plugging away with your 5-inch guns.   The developers at Ultimation created this sim as a companion to last year's Silent Hunter II, a submarine sim that was supposed to be ""interoperational"" with Destroyer Command. What this means is that you can link them together and play multiplayer games in which some players drive subs and some players drive destroyers. At least that's how the theory goes. As of two weeks after the game's release, there's no support for ""interoperation"" and no official word on when a patch will be available. Considering how long the deeply flawed Silent Hunter II has remained unpatched (five months and counting), this doesn't bode well. Note that this didn't stop Ubi Soft from advertising this feature on its Web site, on the game box, and in the manual. ""One of the most exciting features of Destroyer Command is the ability to play cooperatively or head-to-head against other Destroy Command or Silent Hunter II owners,"" the manual states optimistically. There isn't even a correction for this in the readme file.   There is multiplayer support for destroyer-only games. Since real engagements can last hours, the time compression works by selecting the slowest speed chosen by all the players, which lets the boring stretches speed past at whatever pace players choose. You can play deathmatches, cooperative missions against computer-controlled vessels, and even base-capture games. While these work well enough over a LAN, Destroyer Command repeatedly drops out of sync and crashes when played over Ubi Soft's online matching service, ubi.com.  The game is almost entirely playable from this screen.  The single-player game consists mainly of two campaigns, each a linear set of about 20 canned missions. Because Hitler's surface navy was quickly defeated, the Atlantic campaign should have been mainly sub hunting, but Destroyer Command goes out of its way to put you in the middle of surface battles against German raiders and even Italian ships in the Mediterranean. The far more interesting campaign is set in the Pacific, where you get to participate in historical highlights like ""running the slot"" to Guadalcanal, covering MacArthur's triumphant return to the Philippines, and even a late-war drive on Japan itself. At one point, you help kick the Japanese off an island at the tip of Alaska, a completely inconsequential exchange of land notable as the only time foreign troops have seized American territory. There are a couple of attempts at carrier battles, arguably the deciding factors in the war against Japan, but Destroyer Command presents these epic struggles with all the accuracy and grandeur of a third-grade Thanksgiving pageant. You can set up epic naval encounters by using the custom mission generator, which lets you throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Unfortunately, there's no random generator, so you always know exactly what you're facing before you ever see it on the map.   Because the challenge of submarine warfare is the uncertainty of being hidden underwater, Ultimation's submarine sim Silent Hunter II suffered greatly from its canned missions. During the inevitable replays, knowing exactly what you would be facing and where it would be located killed the thrill of the hunt. But this isn't so much a problem with surface warfare, where the challenge is maneuvering into position once you've made contact. In a way, Destroyer Command plays like a wargame, and the scenarios are like set-piece battles in which you have to figure out the best tactics. There are still plenty of aggravating situations when you have to repeatedly replay a mission to accomplish some objective, but it doesn't drag the game down as much as it did in Silent Hunter II.What does drag the game down, and what's been preserved intact since Silent Hunter II, is the horrible AI. Ships plow into other ships in their convoy. Ships plow into their targets. Ships plow into sinking hulks. Ships plow into submarines, which don't have the presence of mind to dive below periscope depth when a destroyer is bearing down on them. Ships plow into islands and entire continents. When they're not plowing into obstacles, ships behave as if their captains skipped class the day maneuvers were being taught at the Naval Academy. They won't dodge torpedoes, and they won't split into separate groups to draw fire. In a game where the challenge is one of maneuvering, it's as if your opponent isn't even bothering to play. They won't stay in formation properly, and they're more than happy to let loose a spread of torpedoes into the hull of a friendly ship 200 yards away. It's one of the most egregious instances of friendly fire you'll ever see in a game when a single destroyer sinks all three ships in its squadron with one volley of torpedoes. Destroyer Command is like Disney's Boatniks, but with guns and torpedoes.  This is what you get to drive.  Aside from the fact that the AI seems incapable of simulating anything like real naval actions, there are some historical peccadilloes. The ""waves"" of planes coming in four at a time are more like Galaga than actual antishipping attacks. A valuable function performed by destroyers was laying smoke screens to protect the bigger ships, but there's no provision for this here. Any self-respecting naval sim should have a damage model that takes into account hitting ammo magazines, the rare and catastrophic equivalent of a critical hit that decided several encounters by instantly destroying crucial ships. Submarines were rarely as aggressive against destroyers as they are in Destroyer Command, where they'll squander valuable torpedoes taking hopeless shots at an approaching destroyer instead of diving. In reality, those torpedoes were usually reserved for important targets like merchants and capital ships.   The graphics engine doesn't hold up very well at all. The ship models are serviceable, but everything else is perfunctory at best. Damage effects are canned fire animations, blooming predictably from ship models like orange flowers. When ships sink, they invariably list to one side and then drop straight down as if they were melting into the ocean. The weather effects are almost nonexistent, there's a conspicuous absence of men on the decks of ships, and the water doesn't do anything but undulate and sparkle. Carriers don't even have planes on their decks. The smoke effects look good, particularly in the aftermath of a battle, but they kill frame rates on even the fastest computers. There's no gamma adjustment, and even daytime missions in clear weather can be dark and muddled.   With computers as powerful as they are, and with CPU cycles to spare because the AI is obviously not using them, Destroyer Command should have looked much better than it does. By way of example, there are some later missions that have you attacking gun emplacements on the shore to cover ground troops. Although there's potential here to create a memorable visual experience, all you get are vaguely boxy shapes set on featureless island terrain. Nighttime missions with star shells illuminating their targets are a great opportunity for eerie dynamic lighting, but there's nothing of the sort in Destroyer Command.   Finally, there are the inconsistent interface and the broken features. The manual seems to have been based on a different build of the game than what actually shipped. There are scattered hotkeys for some features, but you can't reconfigure them. You can't invert the mouse for the gunnery stations, and there's no way to adjust its sluggish sensitivity. There's a row of pop-up buttons to jump to different stations, but they're hidden by default, and they don't pop up until after a short delay; it's as if screen real estate was suddenly so valuable that those 30 pixels along the bottom of the screen couldn't be spared. One problem the developers haven't even attempted to solve is that there's no reason to visit most of the stations. You can do almost everything from the efficient and informative overhead map. Ultimation went to all the trouble of creating stations that let you take direct control of the finer points of the game--torpedo settings, gunnery, depth-charge runs, engine management, sonar, and radar--but because there's absolutely no incentive to do so, the developers effectively rendered their hard work superfluous.  This is what you see when you use the vessel-identification utility.  It doesn't help that some of these stations are useless at best and broken at worst. For instance, the hydrophone at the sonar station doesn't work, so you can't take control of it to listen for subs and enemy ships. There's no way to set your heading from the helm short of manually moving the rudder. The depth-charge screen is useless as anything other than a place you have to visit to press the space bar if you want to drop depth charges manually. There's never any time in the game you'd need to visit the engine room, which allows for absolutely useless things like linking individual boilers to turbines.   Most of these problems are as obvious as a pig on a sofa, so how could they have slipped through the QA process? Ubi Soft apparently didn't skip the QA because there are 25 testers listed in the credits, including a reputable naval simulation Web site (www.navalwarfare.org). It's inconceivable that none of these testers noticed problems with the AI, the interface, and the broken features. Part of why Destroyer Command is so painful is that it comes from companies that should know better. The publisher, Ubi Soft, gave us one of the latest greatest sims to date in IL-2 Sturmovik. Producer Carl Norman has overseen classic sims like the aforementioned Great Naval Battles series, IL-2, Su-27 Flanker, and the Harpoon naval strategy games. The developers at Ultimation have been making sims for five years, some of which aren't bad. The state of Destroyer Command cannot be attributed to oversight or inexperience. This is a blatant and insulting instance of a game released too early to the detriment of the people who buy it. If you're thinking of being one of those people, at least wait to see if Ultimation and Ubi Soft get around to finishing it. Otherwise, you might as well just find your dog, kick her, and throw $40 in the trash.
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143,Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis ,2.5, Jumpy graphics transform this classic side-scroller into a crushing disappointment.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/6/9/2209969-sonic_the_hedgehog_boxart__genesis_.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sonic-the-hedgehog-genesis-review/1900-6162113/,neg,"
  In 1991, Sega made everyone rethink their concept of a side-scrolling platform game. That's the year the company published Sonic the Hedgehog for its Sega Genesis console. Nintendo's Mario games typically focused on gradual progress through a level and cautious jumping, but Sonic emphasized blazing speed. While Mario was relatively slow, Sonic could run like the wind. Mario was impish and stale, Sonic was skinny and cool. Back then, Sega's blue hedgehog simultaneously revolutionized the platform genre and gave people a legitimate alternative to Nintendo's fat plumber. To celebrate that landmark moment in video game history, Sega, in a flash of delicious irony, has brought Sonic's original adventure to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance handheld. As the title suggests, Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis strives to be a pixel-for-pixel replica of the original Sega Genesis game. All of the grassy hills, speedy loops, and bouncy pinball bumpers look exactly as they did on the Genny, only now they're coming to you on the GBA. Further sweetening the pot, it also implements some welcome improvements, such as a save feature, a level select, and a mode that incorporates Sonic's spin-dash move from later games. Unfortunately, there's just one very big problem: The GBA doesn't seem to be able to keep up with Sonic's speed, and that completely breaks the game.   It may look like the original Sonic the Hedgehog, but it sure doesn't play like the beloved classic.   If you get your hands on a copy of the original game and pop it into an actual Sega Genesis, you'll find that everything moves fast and fluidly. The GBA port, by contrast, seems to have an insane amount of trouble keeping up with the swift blue hero. The screen stutters when Sonic leans into a run or bounces off a springboard, and the action absolutely slows to a crawl when you grab an invincibility power-up. That's a ruinous problem for a game that's oriented so much around fast movements and quick reflexes. On top of that, enemies and floating platforms that used to gradually move into view as the screen scrolled now often just materialize right in front of Sonic. Many times, you'll lose rings or lives because you ran into something dangerous that wasn't visible until you were barely a few pixels away from it. Taken together, these problems kill any sense of speed the game once had and frequently lead to mishaps that are totally out of the player's hands.    It's a crying shame that the dodgy graphics have ruined the game, because the game gets a lot of other things right. Immediately after popping in the cartridge, players are greeted with the classic ""Say-guh"" chant that accompanied the Sega logo in the original game. A large portrait of Sonic waving his finger leads into the main menu, which reveals the game's two play modes. The original mode is the classic Genesis game, with seven zones, 21 main levels, and five bonus levels. There's also a new anniversary mode. It's roughly identical to the original mode, except that Sonic can perform the spin-dash ability that was added in Sonic 2. Regardless of which mode you pick, the game will save your progress so that you can quit at any time and pick up right where you left off. They've also implemented a zone select, which lets you start a new game and skip ahead to any zone that you've already completed. Both of these features are welcome upgrades compared to the original Genesis game, which didn't have a backup feature and required players to enter a cheat code in order to skip levels.    After all these years, the underlying graphics, audio, and gameplay still hold up. The side-scrolling levels are lush and vibrant, especially the Green Hill Zone and Star Light Zone, which make use of nifty waterfall and laser-show effects. Sonic looked sleek on the Genesis with his spiky blue hair, big white eyes, and red tennis shoes, and he looks just as sharp on the GBA. The characters, in general, are expressive and good-sized, although some of that is admittedly due to way the graphics have been cropped to account for the GBA's smaller screen dimensions. This cropping cuts away some of the view up ahead, but not so much that you don't have time to react to things--when the system can manage to draw them, of course. Fans that played the original game and have keen ears will notice that the music has been remixed and that the sound effects are higher in pitch. Some of the tunes sound really close to the original compositions and some are vastly different. They're all generally upbeat and pleasing to the ear though. Keen eyes will also notice that Sonic doesn't always recoil from hits or bounce off of springboards exactly as he did in the original game. For whatever reason, sometimes Sonic just bounces the wrong way or comes to a dead stop. These differences in physics aren't pervasive and they rarely affect gameplay in a negative way, but they do give fans something else to dislike besides the broken frame rate.    In theory, gameplay is satisfying and easy to get into, except for the fact that the graphical issues basically break it. Sonic can run, jump, and pop enemies or item containers by bouncing on top of them. If you're playing the anniversary mode, you can press the A button to charge and release a spin-dash, which launches Sonic forward at breakneck speed and obliterates most enemies in his path. The game wasn't really designed with the spin-dash in mind, but its inclusion doesn't break anything, either. It's mainly just a good way to build up speed in a pinch. Levels aren't necessarily tough to get through, but getting through them with a decent stash of gold rings is often quite a challenge. As long as you've picked up at least one ring, you won't lose a life if Sonic runs into an enemy or hazard. Such a run-in, however, will cause Sonic to drop all of the rings he's carrying. Since you need lots of rings to get high scores and access the chaos emerald bonus levels, you'll find yourself trying hard to avoid enemies so that you can hold on to those golden goodies.    The graphics can't keep up. Once you pick up speed, the game turns into a jittery, jumpy mess.   Thanks to the busted frame rate, however, every single one of those high points is irrelevant. It's downright impossible to enjoy the timeless design, the bright visuals, and the peppy music when you're losing lives all the time because the screen can't keep up. Putting in all these extra features into the game and then forgetting to fix the one thing that would actually make it playable is simply ridiculous.    Around the same time that the original Sonic the Hedgehog came out, Sega was running an advertising campaign with the slogan ""Genesis does what Nintendon't."" It's almost as if this game was some sort of mean-spirited attempt to prove that old slogan, as Nintendo's Game Boy Advance sure doesn't seem to be able to handle a straight port of a game that came out on the Genesis a full decade before the GBA even hit store shelves. Or maybe Sega just didn't give the development team enough time and resources to work the kinks out. Whatever the case may be, Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis for the Game Boy Advance is a crushing disappointment.  
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144,MiG Alley ,9.2, Dogfighting in MiG Alley is one of the best experiences a virtual pilot can hope for.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/6/5/2210065-ma1.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mig-alley-review/1900-2542556/,pos,"
Flight simulations set in the Korean War are few and far between. Not only is it the ""forgotten war"" in the history books, but the Korean conflict is rather neglected as a setting for flight simulations, at least compared with games focusing on World War II or the latest hi-tech jet fighters. The last Korean War game was Virgin Interactive's Sabre Ace, and the sooner it's forgotten, the better. So perhaps it was to developer Rowan Software's advantage that the scarcity of Korean War sims and the failure of Sabre Ace lowered gamers' expectations for MiG Alley. But as it turned out, Rowan didn't need any such advantages, because MiG Alley is good enough to stand up to the best flight simulations available simply on its own merits. MiG Alley is very promising right from the start, as it provides flyable models of several different planes including the F-80 Shooting Star, F-84 Thunderjet, and F-86 Sabre, as well as the F-51D (also known as the P-51 Mustang). In addition, the game even lets you jump in the cockpit of the MiG-15 and MiG-15bis. Planes like the A-1 Skyraider and Yak-9 are also present although not flyable. (Flyable -A, -E, and -F variants of the F-86 are included as well.) What makes MiG Alley's range of aircraft so effective is the diversity of the flight models. Not only are the flight models accurate, but they really bring out the differences between the various aircraft. The jets in MiG Alley are all idiosyncratic, as each presents a different set of handling considerations, and MiG Alley has done a brilliant job capturing these differences in performance. You'll learn to fly and fight very differently in the F-86 Sabre than in the MiG-15, and savvy pilots will use their aircraft's unique characteristics to their advantage. A corollary to the accuracy of the flight models is the fact that the planes are quite difficult to fly. Fortunately, Rowan provided enough options to make the learning curve less steep, and all manner of in-flight effects, such as realistic flameouts and extra thrust, can be toggled on and off for pilots just getting the feel of the jet. Novice pilots will spend a good deal of time flying with ""training wheels"" before graduating to the real thing. When you are flying with all the realism effects in force, MiG Alley is a challenging flight simulation by any standards. And that's even without having to deal with people trying to shoot you down. The graphics and sound in MiG Alley are mostly as good as the physics models. While the terrain textures might tend toward brown, it's to be expected from a game that depicts Korea in the middle of a war. The only problem with the graphics is at low altitudes, where terrain features become rather indistinct and even interfere a little with ground targeting. Although the terrain in MiG Alley isn't that great, the aircraft models look excellent and can even be customized with various nose art to add to the already excellent atmosphere. The atmosphere is further heightened by the game's great sound effects, which combine to provide a sense of immersion uncommon in most flight simulations. The jet engine sounds are realistic and create the sense of being in an early jet as opposed to some more modern machine with a hermetically sealed cockpit. The cockpits themselves, while sparse, look beautiful and show off the relative antiquity of the planes. In-flight radio chatter is plentiful, and the sound of gunfire is enough to rattle your teeth.MiG Alley includes a 116-page manual that does an adequate job of explaining the game and providing most relevant information in a legible manner. To complete the package, there is not only a keyboard card but also a 46-page booklet detailing the differences between the MiG-15 and the F-86, which is actually a reproduction of a 1952 RAF briefing paper. While it's of limited practical value, it makes for interesting reading and underscores the fact that Rowan has imbued the entire simulation with a surprisingly strong attention to time period, such that the game feels like a historical document almost as much as a flight sim. MiG Alley provides five great dynamic campaigns that let you fly the various US aircraft during six months of war. Missions are preplanned in the first four campaigns, so that you can practice for the Spring Offensive 1951 campaign. In the Spring Offensive, you have control of 112 aircraft, 96 of which can fly at any one time. You can either plot each mission yourself as the frontline air commander or simply sketch out general objectives and let your command staff worry about the details. The results of missions can have specific consequences: Knock out a bridge and the Communist advance is slowed, but neglect the enemy airfields, and you'll find a swarm of MiGs on hand to greet you on your way to bridge-busting duty. The dynamic nature of the campaigns makes MiG Alley even more immersive and adds to the appeal of ground-attack ""mud-mover"" missions that flight sim fans often find less interesting than dogfighting. In any event, in the Spring Offensive campaign you can not only assign all the missions, but also choose which ones you want to fly. You can stick with one particular aircraft or hop in any one you choose. Such flexibility is welcome for those who want to stick to fighter jets but nevertheless want to sample the breadth the campaign has to offer. All of its features make MiG Alley a technically excellent simulation, and the campaigns give it longevity. But the actual gameplay experience surpasses the game's technical accomplishments. Dogfighting in MiG Alley is one of the best experiences a virtual pilot can hope for. While the speed of the early jets featured in MiG Alley was incredible compared with their propeller-driven predecessors, both generations of planes were limited to guns as their main weapon. A Sabre or MiG-15 pilot won't be clicking through different radar modes; he'll be struggling to get on the enemy's six without stalling, spinning, or flaming out, all the while knowing that one or two bursts from his opponent will mean defeat. The artificial intelligence of MiG Alley's computer-controlled pilots is good enough to invoke such fear and thus accomplishes something that is often missing in military flight simulations. Even veteran pilots will be surprised at how intense the game's dogfights are. You might wish MiG Alley had even more features. The F4U Corsair is missing, even though the aircraft was ubiquitous in Korea. There are no aircraft carrier operations. However, MiG Alley does just about everything you could possibly expect from a simulation that comes in a box instead of in a multimillion-dollar professional trainer. Once in a while, a simulation comes along that you can tell will be fondly remembered by dedicated flight sim fans years later. Only a select group of games earns such a place in the hearts of fans as demanding as those who use their computers to simulate air combat, and MiG Alley is now a part of that group. It's certainly the best military flight sim of 1999, and you'll continue to hear about it for years to come.
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145,NHL 98 ,9.2," EA's NHL series once again ups the bar, not only for hockey games but for all sports games.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/6/8/2218268-box_nhl98.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nhl-98-review/1900-2543885/,pos,"
The level of realism in this year's crop of sports games is both frightening and exciting. Even without taking the unbelievable graphics you get with a 3D card into consideration, 1997 is shaping up to be a breakout year for the genre. Computer-controlled players are smarter, physics are better, and gameplay is more exciting than ever. Throw in awesome graphics and audio, and sports games are finally coming into their own. NHL 98 is one of the front-runners in this bumper crop of sports games. Each year, this game gets so good, it's hard to fathom how it could get better; not that past versions of the game were perfect, but compared to other sports games, this hockey series has consistently been one of the best. The major improvement in the '98 edition comes in the area of control. It's about time EA Sports got around to supporting more than a two-button control scheme. You can do a lot more with a couple more buttons, and all EA needed to do was take a look at console sports games. With just this one simple addition, as well as a few other improvements, EA's NHL series once again ups the bar, not only for hockey games but for all sports games. The four-button control scheme makes doing some moves easier than before. The designers removed the need for double clicking on the gamepad, and some of the moves that previously relied on double clicks, like speed burst, are now assigned to a single button. Maybe someday EA will decide to include full eight-button support for the aging Gravis GrIP or the Gravis GamePad Pro. Finally, the game includes some strategic elements, although not many. You can choose among four different offensive and defensive strategies - and you can select these from the ice instead of always having to exit to the menu. The game is still a bit shallow on the coaching side, but the inclusion of any options at all is a welcome improvement. The physics have improved so you get a greater sense of a player's size and momentum, making it important to know how big your player is before you decide to go for a hard body check. Plus, the puck doesn't seem to pass through players as much as it did in the past. You can even choose to deflect a pass into the net instead of always using the less-subtle ""one-timer."" For those who want to keep track of your season's statistics, EA has included the NHL 98 This Week area, accessible while a season is in progress. It's a great way to keep up to date on injuries and trades going on in your personal league. This is particularly helpful if you have several players participating in a single league, which is made possible via the Internet or a local-area network. Although AI is better, it still needs a little work. The goalie will now leave the net to stop the unnecessary icing call, and players are smarter about going offsides or receiving a two-line pass, but the game still has a few hitches. Still, play isn't stopped nearly as much as in years past. There are also moments where computer-controlled players will not go after a loose puck - it's like they don't see it or are not paying attention. Apart from these improvements, everything else is pretty much standard fare for the series - which is by no means a criticism. With only one or two potential threats on the horizon, NHL 98 is a strong contender for the best sports game of the year.
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146,Panzer Dragoon Saga ,9.2," It's almost fitting, in the twilight of the Saturn's years, that it should end as it began.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/8/7/2210587-box_pds.png,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/panzer-dragoon-saga-review/1900-2534034/,pos,"
It's almost fitting, in the twilight of the Saturn's years, that it should end as it began. Sure, there was the original Virtua Fighter and the lackluster Daytona USA, but the game that first revealed the true potential of the Sega Saturn was Panzer Dragoon. It was a fairly straightforward shooter, but a shooter that enveloped you in a world you'd never seen before. Taking its inspiration from the classic concept of a boy and his dog, Panzer Dragoon took the shooter genre to the next level with its unique design and captivating gameplay. With characters and monsters originally taken from designs by French artist Moebius, Panzer was chock-full of exotic locales, truly unusual enemies, bio-organic warships, and boss encounters so epic (as in Star Wars epic) it practically shut the door on the 16-bit shooter. Panzer Dragoon Zwei took it a step further by offering improved graphics, alternate paths, and a growth system that influenced the type of dragon you rode based on the difficulty of the course as well as your skill in combat. Possibly the most striking feature of the Panzer Dragoon series was the CG sequences that slowly revealed the storyline to the gamer, while drawing him into the Panzer world. In a progression that is at once surprising, logical, and welcome, Team Andromeda has taken its heralded series of shooters and turned it into a full-blown RPG - a progression that only seemed natural, considering the increasing complexity of the storyline and the questions that had been left unanswered. Panzer Dragoon Saga picks up where the first game left off, many years into the future (Panzer Dragoon Zwei was a prequel). The main character, Edge, is a guard at one of the Empire's excavation sites. While on watch, an emergency arises that unearths a most unique artifact: a girl encased in stone. It is at this point that Edge finds himself caught in the middle of a rebellion. After witnessing the death of the people he was hired to protect, Edge confronts his attackers only to be hurled down a chasm to his death. At the bottom of the ravine Edge awakens in a pool of water, somehow unhurt by his descent. As he comes to his senses, he finds himself surrounded by a herd of creatures with 20-foot-long scythes for arms. Just as Edge finds himself with nowhere to turn, a sharp piercing cry echoes through the darkness. Suddenly, dozens of glowing beams of light find their way down to their targets causing instant destruction all around. A lone figure swoops down through the smoke and debris, only to settle gently amidst the ruins. It was a dragon that saved Edge, and this is where the Saga begins. After the lengthy intro that sets the tone for the game, you'll find yourself in a situation never before experienced in the Panzer series: on foot. There's a lot of running to be done in Panzer Saga, as it becomes necessary to interact with the villagers and other characters for your success. Certain characters assist you in your journeys, while others merely offer light conversation. Almost everyone in the game has prerecorded dialogue, while subtitles play underneath. Additionally, if you talk to someone twice, even three times, he has something different to say each time. Interaction doesn't stop there, as the usual RPG suspects all make an appearance: merchants who sell anything and everything from health potions to weapon upgrades, campsites that serve as rest areas and save points, and a fully 3D world-map that changes as the game progresses. The graphics in this game are a landmark. Panzer Dragoon Saga does things that people didn't think were possible on the Saturn. While the textures can be rough and the frame rate can stutter at times, there is a slew of graphical features that more than compensate. Amazing water effects that surpass those found in Panzer Zwei, Gouraud shading, light sourcing, and full transparencies all combine to stunning effect. Coupled with the incredible designs of the towns and locations, which range from underwater labyrinths to spiraling towers, Panzer Dragoon has reached a graphic level of excellence on a par with anything available on a home console. Watch as Edge and his dragon take flight, engage the enemy, and unleash a furious barrage of attacks. You can practically feel the heat from the blast. The battle-system in Panzer Saga is a revelation. Instead of the traditional turn-based menus found in most RPGs, Saga utilizes a real-time engine that offers more strategic opportunity and raises the challenge as well. While in battle (which is almost exclusively done on the dragon), you have three power meters. How many are filled determines what actions you will be able to take. Once a meter is filled, you may take as much time as you need to decide which action is necessary. At least one must be filled in order to use either the dragon's homing lasers, your pistol, or the item menu. When two or more are filled you are able to take advantage of other options such as a berserk meter. There are differing types of berserk attacks: attack, spiritual, defense, agility, or a full-gauge menu). Different berserk attacks achieve different things. One berserk attack may launch a gigantic ball of fire, while another will surround your dragon with a protective network of spheres. Berserk attacks are obtained depending on the development of your dragon, and it is here where Panzer Dragoon Saga separates itself from every other RPG available. After your dragon has gained enough levels to obtain a first-class ranking, he will then be able to morph into, virtually, an endless number of dragons. Your dragon has four classes in which he can mature: attack, spiritual, defense, and agility. At any time after achieving a first-class rank, you can choose to augment your dragon in any of the four categories; however, there are considerations to make when morphing. If you decide to have a dragon with extremely high attack power, he will suffer in the spiritual ratings, meaning it will take more berserk points (BP) to utilize any berserk attacks. Likewise, if you have a dragon with a high agility rating, he will not have a very good defense rating, meaning that while his meters will fill faster, any damage he takes will be greater than normal. Great care must be taken to ensure that your dragon is balanced, or else the game will be more difficult to complete. The gameplay is smooth and efficient, with battle menus becoming more and more intuitive with each and every encounter. Exploring towns and interacting with townsfolk becomes second nature as the storyline becomes more engrossing. The menus and graphic design permeate the game with a fluid easy grace usually reserved for museum collections. Unlike Shining the Holy Ark or Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon, no two areas look the same. Every exotic location retains a place in your memory as you progress. Another feature that the Panzer series has always been famous for has been its sound and musical score. While not as grandiose as the first Panzer Dragoon, Saga still maintains a level of quality usually associated with Hollywood productions. Enter into battle, and a pulsating techno sequence begins, heightening anticipation. Defeat your enemy, and an orchestra full of strings punctuates the moment. Sound effects, while unspectacular, are sufficient. You'll wince as your dragon shrieks in pain as he suffers damage during battles. Like all Panzer Dragoon games, the story unfolds through thoughtfully directed CG sequences; however, a great deal of storytelling is done in real time using the game engine. It's during these moments that the story seamlessly flows from plot to warfare. As with the previous Panzer games, there is a number of secrets to be found once the game is completed, and that is probably Saga's only true fault. It's just too short. While it spans four CDs, the majority of that space is used to store the copious amounts of full motion video and voice acting. Sure, it clocks in at a reasonable 20-25 hours, whereas the first two were finished in about 1-2 hours each, but it still leaves you longing for more. As it stands, this does little to detract from the game itself. Panzer Dragoon Saga has been called Sega's answer to Final Fantasy VII, but that is an unfair comparison. Panzer Saga, in its own way, is so much more than Squares' ultimate RPG. It is a worthy successor to a series that with each installment has grown in stature and scope. It is flawlessly executed, limited only by the hardware (and barely that at all) and medium. Unlike other recent RPGs, such as Parasite Eve and Grandia, Panzer Dragoon Saga is truly a ""cinematic RPG."" Wide-screen in vision and Technicolor at heart, you can only imagine where the next one will take us. It's almost fitting, in the twilight of the Saturn's years, that it should end as it began. Panzer was always the brightest example of what the Saturn had to offer, and this third and final chapter reveals what Team Andromeda was up to all along - to fulfill the legacy of Panzer Dragoon and deliver Panzer Dragoon Saga, possibly the finest RPG of 1998.
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147,Sonic Adventure ,9.2," With the Chao-breeding simulation and the minigames, Sonic offers much more beyond the completion of its story.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/6/9/2212769-sonica_box.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sonic-adventure-review/1900-2540626/,pos,"
Every once in a while, a game comes along that redefines a genre and sends the gaming scene in a new direction for years to come. Sonic Adventure simultaneously is and is not one of these games. It keeps the linearity and structure of a 2D game and brings, for the first time, real speed to a 3D platformer. Yes - Sonic is back in classic form after an all-too-long hiatus. Having been failed time and time again by technology, Dr. Robotnik began to look elsewhere for world-conquering gear. In his journeys he stumbled on Chaos, the water-based God of Destruction. To reach his full destructive potential, Chaos must absorb the seven Chaos Emeralds. Robotnik begins scouring the world for the elusive gems, sparking the interest of Sonic. Five additional characters also become caught up in the fight against Robotnik and Chaos, and each character has his own agenda. Tails seeks to become more than Sonic's sidekick; Knuckles searches for shards of the shattered Master Emerald; Amy protects a small bird; Big chases his amphibious friend;  and Robotnik's E-102 Gamma sets out to relieve the world of his robotic kindred. Several flashbacks are interspersed throughout each of the characters' adventures to explain the back story, but the whole picture is not revealed to the player until the game has been completed with all six characters. Sonic Adventure's levels come in two flavors - action stages and adventure fields. The action stages are, as the name implies, action oriented. Each action stage is entirely self-contained, with play mechanics varying from character to character. Sonic's levels play exactly as they did in the 2D Sonic games, but a 3D element has been added. Knuckles' levels, on the other hand, center around Knuckles' search through various levels for shards of the Master Emerald. The large adventure fields are more exploratory in nature and tie together the action stages. The field areas are inhabited by various people to talk to, and they contain no enemies other than the game's bosses. Finally, hidden throughout the field areas are items that enhance the characters' abilities, allowing them to access new areas. While Sonic's game is roughly twice as long and a far more thrilling ride, each character's game is fun in its own way. Even with the characters' respective play differences, Sonic Adventure's design is very straightforward and linear, so the game is always fast and fun. Yes, fast - Sonic is easily the fastest 3D platformer to date, setting the game apart from the largely collection- and exploration-based games that fill the market. The game's few bosses are well done and inventive, but they only seem to whet the player's appetite for more - or at least more difficult ones.As is fashionable these days, Sonic Adventure is also chock-full of minigames. From the game's impressive snowboarding sequence in the Icecap Zone to the bumper car race in Twinkle Park, Sonic Adventure is constantly putting new spins on its speed fixation. However, the most interesting minigames center on the slow process of raising Chao. Taking a cue from the NiGHTS's Nightopian A-Life simulation, the game lets players hatch these adorable, tear-headed creatures from eggs in three breeding areas scattered throughout the game. The Chao learn from Sonic and his friends, grow, lay new eggs, and genetically diversify. Each Chao is rated in swimming, flying, running, and strength - numbers that come into play in the Chao racing game in the Station Square breeding area. You can work on your Chao's stats by downloading them into a VMU and helping them though a mini-adventure of their own. You can even mate them by linking two VMUs together. While really just a diversion, the Chao simulation is surprisingly interesting and fun to play around with, especially if you trade and compete with friends. New to the US version of Sonic Adventure is an Internet-based Chao trading system, which lets people trade Chao over the phone lines. While its level design almost never ceases to amuse, Sonic does have a few signs of rushed production that directly affect gameplay. The game's camera is the most notable issue, but collision problems occasionally show up, as well. Most of the time, the camera doesn't get in the way of play, but it's annoyingly spastic in tight areas, and it can get caught under floors and behind walls, sometimes resulting in unnecessary deaths. Collision problems can also result in Sonic's untimely demise, sometimes causing Sonic to careen straight through a normally solid wall. Some of the worst instances of bad camerawork have been fixed for the US release, but some problems still remain. Either way, these problems don't ruin the game - they only add an occasional element of unwelcome frustration. Sometimes, Sonic will get stuck on an incline, and while this is usually remedied with just a jump, it can sap valuable seconds away from a winning run for that final emblem. But these problems are minor irritations at most. Sonic Adventure's graphics are easily the best in a 3D platformer, surpassed only by Soul Calibur's graphics. Under the high-resolution, mip-mapping, and other graphical buzzwords lies a genuinely attractive game. The game's huge, detailed environments exude the visual style that made the Sonic games some of the best-looking on the Genesis. The textures are crisp and varied, and the midlevel load times are short and sweet. Most of the game runs at a nice frame rate, but slowdown does show up in some areas, and it is usually concentrated in a few of the game's levels. Pop-up is noticeable in many areas, as well, but usually it's far away from the player, so it doesn't affect gameplay in the least. A vast majority of the game's cinemas are done with the game engine itself, and they are nicely choreographed. The FMV-based scenes are excellent, as well, but sometimes one has to wonder why they had to be prerendered. The game's music is top-notch Sonic-style rock, sporting crystal-clear playback and nicely understated vocals. Most of the sound effects are the standard Sonic sound effects, which still work well. The game's voices, overall, are surprisingly well done, with only a few lines delving into the depths of translation mediocrity that players have come to expect from ports of this nature. While the voices are good, Sega completely ignored the lip-syncing - it looked weird enough in the Japanese version and it looks much weirder now.  Sonic Adventure is a must-have game for the Dreamcast, and it's a blast for the entire twenty-odd hours of gameplay. With the Chao-breeding simulation and the minigames, Sonic offers much more beyond the completion of its story. Fans of the Sonic series will definitely be pleased with Sonic Adventure - it truly carries and builds on the style of the original games. Even with its flaws, Sonic Team has produced a 3D experience unlike any to date.
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148,Tekken 2 ,9.2," The undeniable king of fighting games is here, and it's time to break bones and necks.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/9/2/2214092-box_t2.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tekken-2-review/1900-2549644/,pos,"
Wickedly sick action, amazingly fast gameplay, mother of all.... What more is there to say? Tekken 2 rules! The undeniable king of fighting games is here, and it's time to break bones and necks - not to mention the controller after Angel Kazuya toasts you alive with her eye laser.  This sequel features a variety of new moves, characters, backgrounds, and other improvements. Characters are more detailed, and Namco has imbued them with new features, like head movement. In addition to having twice as many moves, combos, and throws, most characters also now have at least three different ten-string combos. In addition to the original selection of moves, ""counter throws"" have been added, allowing a few of the characters to grab an inbound punch or kick and perform a defensive throw. The most noticeable enhancement however, is the light sourcing - the Playstation can seemingly make light appear from anywhere during the battle. The game has 25 playable fighters who ALL have endings (when you first begin the game only ten playable fighters are available, but for every time you beat the game you receive a new playable character).  If you like fighting games at all, you will love Tekken 2. The graphics and fluid character movement will astound and amaze. The simple control format allows inexperienced players to begin play immediately with minimal effort, and will keep the interest of expert players for months - thanks to the game's complex system of moves and combos. Tekken 2 gives you more than your money's worth.
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149,Terra Nova ,9.2," A breakthrough in outdoor 3-D action sims, Terra Nova gives mech games and flight sims something to aspire to.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/4/9/2209849-250px_terranovastrikeforcecentauribox.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/terra-nova-review/1900-2533378/,pos,"
Most outdoor 3-D action games have a problem with their horizons. Traditionally, terrain is rendered with polygons, and the farther you can see, the more polygons your woefully under-powered Pentium will have to render.  Some games, like Magic Carpet, get around this by hazing—after a certain distance, terrain is obscured by a thick fog effect.  Other games, like MechWarrior 2, just refuse to render things beyond a certain distance, which leads to noticeable effects that destroy your suspension of disbelief, like huge mountains that appear polygon by polygon when you get within a click-and-a-half or so. Leave it to Looking Glass Technologies to change the 3-D rules.  LGT produced the first true 3-D, first-person perspective game in Ultima Underworld, in addition to creating a cyberpunk masterpiece in System Shock and using fluid dynamics, physics, and photo-realistic terrain in Flight Unlimited. Terra Nova, LGT's entry into the world of outdoor sci-fi combat sims, puts you in the shoes of a squad leader in command of up to three other specialists, and missions range from recon and repair to all-out assault. The game plays like a first person, 3-D real-time version of Syndicate. Encased in powered battle armor, you and your squad stomp across distant planetscapes while fighting a covert war with a fascist imperialist government. The terrain is simply spectacular—snowy peaks, distant mountain ranges and reflecting lakes as far as you can see provide a convincing backdrop to the mayhem and warfare—that you won't even notice the absence of an SVGA mode (you can choose between 320x200 or 320x400 video resolution modes). A breakthrough in outdoor 3-D action sims, Terra Nova gives mech games and flight sims something to aspire to. Advanced technology supplies beautiful graphics and excellent play dynamics, and great mission-building provides challenging and entertaining situations.
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150,Ultimate Fighting Championship ,9.2," Overall, UFC successfully merges the ease of play you'd expect from a fighting game with the simulation aspects of a sports game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/8/2/6/2215826-box_ufc.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ultimate-fighting-championship-review/1900-2620398/,pos,"
Ultimate Fighting Championship is a long-running fighting competition that occasionally flirts with mainstream success, but its recent disappearance from most pay-per-view lineups keeps the highly skilled fighters of the UFC from getting the respect they so richly deserve. So - as a result - you may not be aware of the UFC at all. In short, it's a bare-knuckle competition that attracts fighters of wildly varying styles. So you might see wrestlers facing off against kickboxers, or judo experts against raw, unpolished muscle. With all the different styles represented in the UFC's ranks, you might think that any attempt at a video game would be watered down or too much like a standard wrestling or fighting game. But while the video game versions of the UFC's fighters share more moves on the Dreamcast than they do in real life, the game does an admirable job of making the fighters look, act, and fight differently. The game has an easy-to-learn control scheme that, at first, seems extremely Tekken-like. But while you use back on the D-pad to block and each of your limbs has a button assigned to it, UFC is no fighting game. The game is chock-full of counters, reversals, submission holds, and lots of different situations. You may find your fighter's back on the mat, with the opposing fighter mounted on top of him, delivering blows to the face until your fighter loses consciousness. Or, if you're fast, you might catch one of those fists and roll your opponent over and try for an arm or leg lock. The submission holds in the game are extremely simple - either you counter them or you tap out and lose the fight. Luckily, the submissions aren't too hard to counter once you're familiar with game's controls. Like boxing, the matches are broken up into rounds. At first, almost all of your matches will be one-rounders, but as you and your human opponents get better and better at the game, it becomes a chess-like battle of wits, full of counters and countering counters. The computer is no slouch, either. With varying difficulty settings and modes, the computer is always available and usually challenging. The game's modes are roughly what you'd expect from a fighting game. It has an exhibition mode, a training mode, a tournament mode, and two single-player modes. The UFC mode puts you through a typical night of UFC tournament fighting. Eight fighters start out, and the bracket is eventually pared down to a final championship fight. Winning this fight earns you the silver belt. Silver-belt holders can enter the championship road mode. In championship road, you must successfully defend your belt against 12 opponents. As your health doesn't fully recover between fights, it's a bit like a fighting game's survival mode. Winning this mode gives your fighter a gold belt. Aside from playing as the actual UFC fighters, there is also a career mode, where you can create and name a fighter, then take him through several levels of sparring. By sparring, you earn points that are used to beef up your character and purchase new moves. The character can then be loaded into the game's other modes. The game really comes together as a two-player game. The matches are reasonably short, and the game has a superaddictive appeal to it that rivals that of the best fighting games. The strategy involved in the gameplay really helps this along. If you're better at striking, there are characters like Gary Goodridge and Andre Roberts. If you're really good at timing counters and anticipating your opponent's actions, you can choose the stronger ground fighters, like Frank Shamrock. The character models and textures in the game are top-notch. All of the movement is extremely lifelike, and it's only slightly marred by some occasional clipping issues and one or two awkward transition animations. Also, there are times when the referee gets in the way of the action. It doesn't happen very often, but it's the most annoying thing in the world when it does. Also, the game has a few blood splatters here and there, but they look a little blocky up close. The sound is well done. The game doesn't feature much in the way of music, but what is there is almost regal, and it's very well suited to the gladiatorial nature of the competition. Overall, UFC successfully merges the ease of play you'd expect from a fighting game with the simulation aspects of a sports game. UFC purists may find a few nagging aspects that aren't true to the sport (for instance, in real life, fighters that wear shoes aren't allowed to kick, but that rule is ignored in the game), but the sacrifices that were made improve the gameplay by a great deal. Fans of wrestling or fighting games should definitely enjoy the game.
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151,Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal ,9.2, Even the most jaded Orc or Human will be challenged by the new scenarios.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/8/9/2/2218892-519dtc.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warcraft-ii-beyond-the-dark-portal-review/1900-2531844/,pos,"
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the wasteland, along comes Beyond the Dark Portal. Set in the Orcish homeland, this expansion pack for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness adds 24 new single-player scenarios and nearly 50 multi-player scenarios, all for a bargain-basement price.  Be prepared: The new solo scenarios are hard with a capital H-A-R-D. Even the most jaded orc or human will be challenged by the new levels, which thankfully dispense with the tutorial nature which made the early portion of Tides of Darkness somewhat tedious. In Beyond the Dark Portal, you start off with almost all of the technologies at your disposal, and you'd best be prepared to use them (strangely--and this is my only complaint about the expansion pack--you don't get everything right away, and some vital units are inexplicably unavailable in the early scenarios).  Apart from a new environment to represent the Orcish world, nothing has been added to the game. But there are some minor changes which affect gameplay, and require some new strategies to ensure success. The most notable change is the newfound emphasis on “heroes”special units whose survival is necessary. Many of these heroes appear in the “circle of power” missions found in Tides of Darkness, but others just fight alongside your troops with superior strength and endurance. They can be an excellent aid, but their death means failure. The new custom maps are a diverse lot. For the most part, there is less emphasis on resource gathering than in the multi-player maps included with Tides of Darkness. This change has the benefit of making games less of a race-for-the-resources duel, allowing players more breathing room and time to plan strategies, as well as lessening the effectiveness of a “brute-force” attack at the onset of a game. Also included are a couple of “strange” maps for quick games: one with a football theme and one with a chess theme. Fans of Warcraft II are split along two fronts: there are the single-players and then there are the multi-players. But whichever side of the fence you lean toward, this is a must-have. More challenging and more diverse than its namesake, Beyond the Dark Portal proves once and for all that you can never have too much of a good thing.
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152,Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ,2.7," Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the Nintendo Entertainment System is sadistically difficult, unpolished, and generally just isn't fun.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2345237-587689_39815_front.jpg,NES,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-review/1900-6168657/,neg,"
  Conceptually speaking, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the Nintendo Entertainment System isn't all that different from Contra, Castlevania, or any of Konami's other 8-bit action games. In fact, a good portion of the sound effects and music in TMNT were lifted directly from Contra. For each of the game's five chapters, you wander around a top-view map, figuring out which doors and manholes connect to the areas you need to clear. Then you jump and hack your way through the enemies in those side-scrolling areas using the turtles at your disposal. You only control one turtle at a time, but you can swap them from the pause menu, which effectively gives you four lives to get through each chapter. Unfortunately, unlike Contra or Castlevania, the team that put TMNT together did a sloppy job. The stages aren't so much challenging as they are unfair, the action feels unpolished, and the game as a whole doesn't make good use of the TMNT license.   If you miss a jump or fall off a ledge, you'll have to fight through all of the same enemies again.   Half of the game's stages lead to dead ends or turn out to be optional paths that make you fight your way through dozens of respawning enemies for nothing more than a slice of pizza. Some stages seem like they were designed purely to suck away lives. The dam section at the end of the first chapter is so thick with electric seaweed that it's almost impossible to finish the area without losing at least two turtles. Enemies reappear if you make the screen scroll too far, which means if you fall down from a platform and have to make your way through a room again, you'll also have to fight through all of the same enemies again. Because jumps are airy and difficult to control, this happens frequently. Without a doubt, the game's most frustrating aspect is how enemies always appear right in front of you when you're jumping between platforms. More often than not, you won't hit the attack button fast enough and will end up knocked backward into the pit you just jumped over. Additionally, only one of the four turtles is any good. Mike and Leo can't get past enemies situated atop ladders without taking damage. Raphael's sai have such dinky range that he can barely reach enemies right next to him. Donatello is the turtle to use because his bo staff can pass through floors and nail enemies almost three lengths away. Of course, considering how impossible some stages are, you won't be controlling Donatello very long before you're stuck with one of the other three turtles.    On top of everything else, the game doesn't provide a strong tie-in to the TMNT franchise. While the music is upbeat, none of it bears any resemblance to the themes you may remember from the original cartoon series, which had already been airing for a year prior to the game's initial release. All of the dialogue that appears in speech bubbles and text displays is generic and fails to reflect the attitudes of the characters. April's comments are just as deadpan as Splinter's are, for example. The turtles look fine and the bosses at the end of each chapter are such familiar characters as Bebop, Rocksteady, a giant Mouser, the Technodrome, and Shredder. However, the majority of regular enemies are robots and bizarre creatures that look nothing like the Foot ninja, Krang's robots, or Baxter Stockman's creations. The mutant frogs, fire monsters, and big-eyed spiders you constantly encounter look out of place and would be more appropriate for a game like Castlevania. If you actually manage to get through all five chapters and beat the game, you'll also witness a plot twist that contradicts the TMNT story to such an extent that it'll make your head spin.    Considering how bad the game is, it's insane that Konami is charging 600 Wii points ($6) instead of the 500 points that NES games typically cost on the Virtual Console. It's even more of a mystery as to why Konami chose to make this stinker available for the Wii's Virtual Console rather than either of the later TMNT beat-'em-ups that most people have fond memories of playing.    
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153,Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu ,2.7, Atari and Webfoot have combined to deliver a game that not even the series' hardcore fans can enjoy.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/4/1/2222041-box_dbzt.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragon-ball-z-taiketsu-review/1900-6085911/,neg,"
 Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu is a 2D fighting game based on Akira Toriyama's manga-turned-anime series, and it is downright awful. Atari showed how willing it was to turn a quick buck off the Dragon Ball Z name earlier this year when it released the 8-year-old Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 for the PlayStation, and Taiketsu is as offensively bad. Perhaps even more so, since the age of Ultimate Battle 22 could be blamed for its terrible quality, while Taiketsu is a brand-new title.   Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu plays as bad as it looks. And it looks terrible.  The selection of fighters in Taiketsu is a predictable mix of heroes and villains from across the Dragon Ball Z timeline, with the only real surprise being the inclusion of Broly. The combat in Taiketsu is on the verge of being totally broken. For starters, the hit boxes are wildly inconsistent, causing some erratic behavior--characters will slide across the screen seemingly at random, and they'll regularly pop over to the other side of one another when in close-quarters combat. The actual fighting itself is sloppy and simplistic, with every character only having a few combos and a special move or two of its own, outside of the catalog of punches and kicks that all of the characters share. The only component of Taiketsu that's even moderately original is the sky battle mode, where both characters will jump into the air and exchange a quick volley of punches and kicks, but all you need to do to come out on top here is mash buttons. Actually, the gameplay is so sloppy and the artificial intelligence so simplistic that all you need to do at any point in Taiketsu is mash buttons. The game also contains link cable support, so you can play this mess with a friend, if you're so inclined. While playing with a friend takes the sloppy AI out of the way, it really isn't any more fun.  The game's presentation mirrors the dearth of depth and finesse in the gameplay, featuring large, pixilated versions of what appear to be prerendered 3D sprites with really choppy animations. Even when standing still, the sprites look uniformly bad, most of them only resembling their hand-drawn counterparts when you really squint your eyes. Some of the backdrops are reminiscent of familiar Dragon Ball Z locations, like Kame's tower, but a lot of them just sort of look like bad abstract prerendered 3D art projects. The game's music could have easily been stolen from one of a dozen generic 16-bit 2D fighters, and the sound effects are unwaveringly tinny and indistinct.  You'll be hard pressed to find a GBA fighting game as lousy as this.  Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu is a very bad game. The GBA might not seem like the ideal home for fighting games, but there is a small library of fighting games that are worlds better than this one. There's virtually nothing to the game that suggests that any real effort or care went into Taiketsu's creation, and every facet of its execution--the sound, the graphics, the combat--feels unfinished. All in all, Atari and Webfoot have combined to deliver a game that not even the series' hardcore fans can enjoy.   
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154,Chicago Enforcer ,2.7," Chicago Enforcer accurately re-creates what it must be like to be on the wrong end of a mob shakedown, because by the end of it, you'll feel like you've had ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/6/0/6/2220606-chicago_enforcer_coverart.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/chicago-enforcer-review/1900-6118485/,neg,"
  If you were one of the lucky many who missed out on a little budget-priced PC first-person shooter from last year titled Mob Enforcer, then congratulations, you did yourself a spectacular favor. Now do yourself another favor and skip Chicago Enforcer for the Xbox too. You see, despite a clever attempt to fool you into thinking the two games are actually different products via a half-baked name change, lo and behold, Mob Enforcer and Chicago Enforcer are one and the same, brought to you by the same developer, Touchdown Entertainment. The only difference is that the original game's largely terrible single-player campaign has been joined by a similarly bad multiplayer mode. In fact, the only thing you can say in Chicago Enforcer's defense is that it truly manages to re-create what it must be like to be on the wrong end of a mob shakedown, because by the end of the experience, you'll pretty much feel like you've had your head caved in with a lead pipe.   If the real Al Capone were alive today, he'd have whoever was involved with this game whacked for crimes against the family.   The setup for Chicago Enforcer is simple: You're a lowly thug looking to come up through the ranks of Al Capone's Chi Town criminal racket in the 1930s. To do this, you'll have to murder a lot of gangsters, murder a lot of crooked cops, avoid killing civilians for some reason, and occasionally perform a few mundane tasks that have little relevance to any of what is supposedly going on in the game.     The premise itself isn't terrible, but the game never does a thing with it. It's just one dull, repetitive mission after another. You're charged with killing a mob informant in the first mission, but before you can, you have to wander aimlessly through the streets (which apparently are populated only with enemy gangsters, cops, and one or two civilians whom, again, you can't kill, or the game is over for some reason), mowing down enemies, and then you eventually get to the hotel, mow through some more gangsters, climb a few flights of stairs, realize you need a key to unlock the door to the last floor, run back down the stairs, mowing down even more enemies in the process, and run back up--well, you can see where this is going. Now envision this kind of drudgery spread across 10 chapters, each with multiple sections, peppered only with a few other objectives, like lousy locked-door puzzles and occasional bomb-planting assignments, and you've got the gist of what this game offers.    You might be able to forgive the dreadful missions if the shooting in the game were any fun. Then again, if the shooting were any fun, we wouldn't be calling this game terrible. The AI is either overpowered or underpowered to the point of screaming frustration (including cops that you couldn't bring down with a Sherman tank), with no gray area in between. The list of unsatisfying weapons includes, among other things, a shotgun that works wonders at picking off enemies from hundreds of feet away despite the fact that even the game's manual tells you it's supposed to work well only at close range, a sniper rifle that's almost useless because of the two-second delay between when you press the shoot button and when the gun fires, and a makeshift rocket launcher that's actually a novelty-sized bottle rocket, complete with multicolored sparks. Even the weapons that aren't ridiculous or broken aren't any fun, thanks to the obnoxious AI and the awful, clunky shooting mechanics.    This all carries over into the game's multiplayer mode in spades. You've got deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, as well as a couple of gangster-themed variations on king of the hill and capture the flag games. Sounds dandy, right? Not so much. The maps the game provides you with are pathetically bad versions of levels from the game. Some are open street areas with sprinklings of indoor areas you can occasionally hide in, and others are narrow, ugly, thoroughly unpleasant indoor maps with no real room to move around. All your weapon upgrades and health pickups come in the form of big blue circles floating around each environment, which look more than a little out of place. But the most fundamental flaw is, again, that the shooting just isn't fun, and shoving more players into the mix doesn't fix that. All that will accomplish is getting up to eight people to hate the game with you.   Ahhh Chicago, such a rich, robust city, full of life and... Wait, where the heck is everybody?   Chicago Enforcer also fails to present itself in any positive fashion. The game uses a graphics engine that looks like it has been trapped in a time capsule for the last five years. It features horribly bland textures, blocky character models that animate about as well as animatronic robots with broken limbs, and environments so sparsely populated with proper scenery or the aforementioned terrible character models that you would think you had entered some kind of postnuclear wasteland, where venturing outside was equal to certain doom. And yet despite the horribly archaic graphics, the game takes forever to load up a mission. It takes 30 seconds to a minute for any mission to load, and any time you die, you have to sit through another horrendous load time. The audio is equally minimalist, with practically no music whatsoever, badly generic sound effects that you've heard in about a thousand other games, and very little in the way of voice acting. What little voice acting is included is the only high point of the presentation. It's mostly made up of the sort of cheeseball gangsterisms you might hear in a made-for-TV biopic about Chicago organized-crime lords, but it's delivered well enough. It's a shame there isn't very much of it.    It really ought to be clear as crystal at this point what you should do in the case of Chicago Enforcer. Real-life mobsters have been given cement shoes and a one-way ticket off a pier for less than what Chicago Enforcer tries to get away with, so to actually go out and pay money for this pile of junk would be an absolute mistake. Please, just stay away.     
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155,ArchLord ,2.7, You probably shouldn't play ArchLord.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/8/6/2211786-15.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/archlord-review/1900-6162258/,neg,"
  ArchLord can be summed up with two words: ""dull"" and ""repetitive."" Unfortunately, this game doesn't have anything to offer massively multiplayer veterans, and if you've been playing these games for a while, there's a good chance you've already found something better than this.    Congratulations. You are now level 2. You can wear armor.   Like other games of this sort, ArchLord lets you create a single character to adventure in a persistent world, fighting monsters and performing quests to gain experience levels and in-game wealth to upgrade your character's items and abilities by purchasing new weapons and armor or new magic spells to cast. Yes, ArchLord is a fantasy-themed game, but it looks and sounds generic. The environments are bland, the character models look rough and blurry and offer hardly any customization options, and the game doesn't sound that great.    You can play as a character from one of three races--orcs, elves, or humans--and play as such professions as hunter or sorcerer. No matter what choice you make, you'll always end up wandering off into the world to find monsters, pounding on them until they die or your character dies. And you keep doing this until you gain an experience level. Then, you go back and do the same thing again, eventually against stronger enemies, but hopefully you're high enough in level to purchase a slightly bigger stick to beat enemies with. If you were making sweeping generalizations, you could arguably make this kind of criticism about most massively multiplayer games to date, but in ArchLord, this boring hack-and-slash combat really is the focus of the game, and it's so bad, you'll notice. Your character's individual power doesn't scale well against monsters, so you'll need to either sit and rest or run back to town for more healing and magic potions more frequently over time, unless you ""farm"" lower-level monsters that pose little challenge. Considering how many recent games have introduced much more lenient combat systems with minimal downtime, the grind seems outdated as well as tiresome.    So the good news is that every few levels or so, you might qualify for slightly better armor or a slightly stronger magic spell. The bad news is that it's boring to repeatedly kill or be killed by monsters, especially since the monsters, your character, and your weapons tend to make only one sound sample apiece--and they all sound like cheap, public-domain audio files you'd hear on a bad TV cartoon. Considering that your character and the monsters also repeat the same animation over and over again in battle, this might be the best way to describe what a battle in ArchLord looks like--not an epic struggle with a human warrior fighting for his life against a vicious monster, but two cartoon characters repeatedly whacking each other on the head for hours on end. The game's subdued, faux-opera soundtrack doesn't help either; listening to a generic-sounding song with a trilling female vocalist doesn't add much to the experience most of the time, and when it's laid down behind the same two looped sound samples of your character playing whack-a-mole with a giant spider, it's kind of embarrassing.     Unfortunately, this is most of what the game will ever offer for many players. ArchLord was originally billed as a competitive player-versus-player game with the unique twist that one extremely high-level player could ascend to the rank of ""ArchLord,"" the ruler of the in-game world, possessing awesome abilities. Unfortunately, to get anywhere near that level, you absolutely need to belong to a high-ranking guild--a permanent association of players who fight monsters and perform quests together and, in this case, stand in lines for the next shot at the epic quests that lead to the crown. Without that kind of support, you'll take much longer to gain your experience levels and will have to constantly run back to town to purchase healing and magic potions to replenish yourself. You also won't be competitive in player-versus-player combat--unless you have a good group of high-level players to back you up, your character will pretty much be a sitting duck when you wander out into the wild.    You're able to type in a command to make your character smile, but ArchLord probably won't be able to make you smile.   Unfortunately, most players may not even see that part of the game because to get to the lofty character level of 50, you'll need to endure hours and hours and hours of grinding away at killing increasingly tough monsters, selling loot, buying potions, and then going out and finding even tougher monsters. It's possible that players who have very little experience with this sort of game might find the treadmill-like game of killing, looting, and buying better stuff to be somewhat addictive, but there are more-compelling, more-enjoyable games out there by now that offer more. Yes, the game has halfhearted quest and crafting systems, but the quest system just gives you some bland missions that boil down to killing monsters or delivering items as one-off tasks that don't seem connected to each other with any kind of context or story, and the crafting system is simplistic and not all that interesting.     What you're left with when playing ArchLord is a whole lot of grinding away, repeatedly fighting off both monsters and the urge to stop playing ArchLord. There are already plenty of other decent massively multiplayer games out there that offer a better experience, and you'd probably be better off playing one of those right now.   
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156,South Park Rally ,2.6, South Park Rally is a poor racing game that tries to capture the look and feel of the show with a few cute quips and phrases that become annoying after ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/5/8/2214058-box_spr.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/south-park-rally-review/1900-2545248/,neg,"
South Park Rally for the N64 tries to capture the feel of the South Park television series with a few phrases and familiar faces. Unfortunately, the game is not only unsuccessful in that, it also fails to deliver a fun or even competent racing-game experience. Even the most dedicated South Park fan would be hard pressed not to agree that the game's colorful charm quickly wears thin. The idea behind South Park Rally is that the local townspeople commemorate every holiday by dragging out their go-carts and having a race, although some of the races aren't exactly races. Some are mission-based events that call for you to pick up a specific item - such as a trophy - and take it to different locations on the track. For instance, on Valentine's Day everyone assembles at Big Gay Al's place for a Valentine's Day shoot-out. The objective in this mission is to find Cupid's bow and arrow and then shoot all of the other racers with it. The catch is that all your opponents have to do to take it from you is to ram your vehicle. Many of the events are set up like this, where you're either being chased by a mob of racers or you're one of the members of the mob chasing down someone else. In any event, the game's poor control, sloppy physics, and poor track design keep it from ever being truly fun, not to mention hard to play.  The game starts out with a limited number of characters to choose from and only one track to race on. Although with every race that you complete, more and more characters and tracks open up for selection in the multiplayer mode. You can save these unlocked tracks to a memory pack, though unfortunately you can't save your progress. Instead, every time you start the game you have to go through all of the levels you've already played. The control of the vehicles is very loose. Even when you use the hand brake to try to make a tighter turn, the results are often unpredictable. This has a lot to do with the floaty physics of the game, which let the cars flip over way more than they should.  Visually, South Park Rally does a fairly decent job of re-creating the look of the various characters and locations from the South Park universe. The game's frame rate stays fairly consistent, even when you're playing with four friends in the split-screen multiplayer mode. In the audio department, the game will certainly get a few laughs with a few trademarked phrases and one-liners from the show. Unfortunately, the number of quotes is extremely limited. By your fourth race in the game you'll be looking for an option to turn the audio off.  In the end, South Park Rally is a poor racing game that tries to capture the look and feel of the show with a few cute quips and phrases that become annoying after just a couple of races. Even for the most die-hard South Park fan, the game's references to the television series won't be enough to hide the fact that the game is a dirt-poor Mario Kart 64-styled racing game that should be avoided.
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157,AYSO Soccer '97 ,2.6," The charming, uniform graphics also invoke the warm nostalgia of a bygone era.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/6/6/9/464-1669.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ayso-soccer-97-review/1900-2538096/,neg,"
The American Youth Soccer Organization, or AYSO, is a youth soccer league whose goal is to build character through such tenets as balanced team play, positive coaching, and good sportsmanship. While these are admirable traits, the organization should also be warned about the peddling of poor quality merchandise to unsuspecting youths. The spirit of good sportsmanship, however, has inspired a positive spin on this review. Like a walk down memory lane, AYSO Soccer's opening DOS installation reminds us of how much fun it is to edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat files and struggle with sound card compatibility issues. The charming, uniform graphics also invoke the warm nostalgia of a bygone era - namely the age of the 8-bit Nintendo system - with 22 pixelated boys, who are entirely uniform except for a slight variety in skin color, kicking and chasing a soccer ball around a bright green field. Showing off is not encouraged, so the sound quality is kind enough to lower itself to the level of the graphics, producing a grand total of three muffled sound effects: the slide, the kick, and the ball hitting the post. Not wanting to single anyone out, the play-by-play man reserves comments like ""That's not much of a tackle"" for completely inappropriate times, either well later than or completely unrelated to the action actually happening on the field. It's good to remember that it really doesn't matter if you win or lose, particularly because every member of every computer team is faster than every member of any team you control, and they have the ability to stop their kicks before they go out of bounds, slide tackle two or three of your players at the same time, and curve shots at impossible angles into your goal. Good sportsmanship is practiced as well as encouraged, as evidenced by your goalie's willingness to let a soft shot rebound right to an opposing player in front of the net and by your defender's  pounding the occasional loose ball directly into your own goal. While there's not much good here, there are several tournament and season modes if you're so inclined. Also, real AYSO player names and teams were included in the making of AYSO '97, so young soccer heroes around the country will be able to look through the rosters and find their names; a player editor lets them change their name or appearance if they're embarrassed.
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158,Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. ,2.6," It will go down in legend as the most bug-ridden, unstable, unplayable pieces of software ever released.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/1/2/500-1812.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battlecruiser-3000-ad-review/1900-2538148/,neg,"
When Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. is dead and gone (and within a week of release it was on a fast track to oblivion), one question will linger: Could it have been a good game?   Was its creator's dreams and promises of a realistic, dynamic game universe where you could roam at will in a large ship, finding adventure, managing a complex crew, conducting ground warfare, and engaging in space combat, ever for real? Or were they just wishes sculpted in Jell-o? We will probably never know. Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. is now out, and as one of the games with the longest development periods in computer history (seven years), it will go down in legend as the most bug-ridden, unstable, unplayable pieces of software ever released. (And, yes, I'm counting Falcon 3.0 and Patriot.) Who exactly is to blame is a subject for another time and place, but it is sufficient to point out that Dr. Derek Smart said a year ago that the game was ""done except for the manual"" and turned in his code to Take 2, who were supposed to test and refine this code graphically and then publish it. Neither of them is immune from culpability in this farce. Maybe they deserve each other. Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. was planned as a universe simulator, without any real gameplay in the conventional sense, just a world to explore in a large starship that carried several smaller, faster fighter craft. Realizing that this was an unfulfilling structure for a game, the developers added a mission-based campaign, so that you actually have objectives and some sort of narrative. In the end, BC3K shipped with three modes of play: ""Xtreme Carnage"" is a jump-in action mode, Advanced Campaign Mode is a series of linked missions, and Free Flight is the free-range storyless mode in which you wander the galaxy looking for trouble. According to the hype, BC3K offers an exciting array of new features. With a set of systems - including a bridge view, a tacops screen, a navigation mode, and various screens which process and provide information - you can travel to different star systems, scan planet surfaces, send out shuttles and fighter craft, interact with aliens and distant empires, and conduct landing missions and ground combat with jet-pack-equipped space marines. Well, that was the plan. Little of it actually works, however. First, the game crashes constantly, more than any game I have ever played. Almost any action you perform will cause the program to go south. I didn't know what half the functions were or how to use them. Most of them don't work: going into orbit around a planet, using jump points, navigating to distant star systems, docking, and so on; the list is long. Objects pass through other objects. Ships don't do what they're told. Equipment won't work. I won't even go into the alleged ground combat mode because I couldn't make heads or tails of it, never got it to work, and haven't been able to find anyone who can even tell me if it's even in the game or not. Best of all, the campaign can't be played past the second mission, which is structured in such a way that it cannot possibly ever end. All of this is made a thousand times worse by a manual that is more like an un-manual. If I fed my dog a set of Scrabble tiles he could have crapped a better manual. Online information only clouds the issue, with a long, rambling set of designer notes from Derek Smart that make him look like a charter member of the Jodie Foster Fan Club (John Hinkley Chapter). Take 2 is promising a replacement manual (as well as extensive bug fixes) for all registered users some time soon, but by then it will be too late. Right out of the box BC3K is the single most impenetrable game since Patriot. The whole debacle is only aggravated by a core design that, even if properly documented and tested, was flawed from the outset. There is too much going on in too many places, and none of it is well-crafted. A messy network of screens, pop-up boxes, and function keys make managing even the most rudimentary functions a chore. Nothing is smoothly integrated or intuitive. Tacops - in which you manage space combat in a map-like top-down view - is a brain-scrambling mass of confusing commands and jargon.   Some other points can be handled quickly. The graphics are nice (the work of Take 2) but not extraordinary, and though the ""living universe"" elements are there in some places (day turns to night, people come and go), who really cares if there's nothing interesting to do? Privateer is fundamentally similar in play, and though it doesn't have the vaunted ""depth"" of BC3K, were such elements missed in the former? Not by me. I played Privateer from start to finish and loved it. BC3K had me reaching for the Alt-Q button after an hour. And finally let's touch on the widely hyped ""neural net"" technology that supposedly gives BC3K its ""terrific"" AI (damned if I could find it) and real-world feel.  There is no functional neural net in BC3K.  Applying true neural net technology to a game of this size and getting it to run without causing havoc is improbable. Even if, by some unlikely stroke of programming genius, he has pulled this off, we will likely never know unless he opens his code to scrutiny, something he is loathe to do.  (Even Take 2 was kept from seeing his secret code, which means they had to make their contributions and do their testing on half a product.) Derek Smart and Take 2 were co-conspirators: Smart made the snake oil and Take 2 sold it. Even if this weren't the buggiest and worst documented game in history (which it is), chances are it wouldn't have delivered on all its many promises. Smart promised too much, and went about fulfilling that promise in all the wrong ways. In the process, he forgot that the most important object of creating a game is making it fun.
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159,Stephen King's F13 ,2.6, Even rabid King fans and completists will be disappointed with F13.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/1/6/2218116-stephenkingsf13.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/stephen-kings-f13-review/1900-2535886/,neg,"
The only thing scary about this paper-thin collection of screen savers, desktop wallpaper, and minigames is the price: $29.95. Even with the Stephen King novella Everything's Eventual packed in, F13 is an overpriced and unimaginative squandering of the King license. Two out of the three features in F13 that can actually pass for games are whack-a-mole variants. In Bug Splat you squash ascending rounds of cockroaches with a fly swatter, a rolled newspaper, and finally a hammer. Likewise, in Whack-a-Zombie you suppress an uprising of the undead from a screen of gravesites. And that's it - no network play for goofing off at the office, no interesting twists on the formula. No Swimming is a tad more enticing, for about two minutes: It's a fun turn on the old fish-tank screensaver in which you use a decapitated hand to feed a tank of piranha with live rhinos, dogs, cows, and horses. Ignore your adorable pets and they start smashing the screen. The ghoulish premise, detailed graphics, and good animal sounds (rhinos don't like being picked up) make No Swimming the only piece in the package that actually approaches Stephen King's own dark humor. F13's collection of 20 sound files and ten wallpaper images are both stingy and remarkably bland. A screen of eyeballs, King logos, assorted screams, etc. seem to have strained the limits of the design team's imagination, and few of the images are even remotely clever or creepy. It seems the designers made little attempt to think through how the sounds and wallpaper might actually replace standard desktop effects. Background images of roaches and a hearse as well as noises such as screams and axe chops are nice enough, but how much creative energy does it really take to assemble witty, horrific effects that beg to be used for the most common computer operation? Moreover, why not take some of these creepy themes and convert them into standard desktop fare, like a calculator that screams or a daybook with eerie alarms? F13's seven screen savers are more like mini-movies, all of which have good graphic design but underwhelming premises. In Murder and Mayhem, we see the silhouettes of a killer and his unsuspecting female victim through different windows in an old house. In It's Just Lightning, we see a demonic clown illuminated by lightning flashes creeping up on a homeowner as he tries to replace a fuse. While the screen savers are fairly clever, you need to sit through the five-minute cycle of each to get all the sight gags, which obviously begs for some sort of startling denouement. To be fair, just about all desktop gadgets, wallpapers, and screen savers grow stale quickly. But more considerate designers make up for this by providing a wide variety of add-ons and variations that users can swap in and out frequently. Not so with F13, which can't even muster up more than a dozen wallpapers. The King story, Everything's Eventual, is pretty standard fare that's reminiscent of The X-Files. A dullard of a young man signs up with a secret corporation, Trans, to wreak a kind of cosmic justice on the world's bad guys. The novella is presented in an onscreen book. It's entertaining to read, but just as underpowered as everything else in F13, thanks to its sparse sound accompaniment and uninteresting illustrations. You can't print the story out, and the multimedia add-ons are so weak that you'll wonder why. Even rabid King fans and completists will be disappointed with F13. It's unclear whether the designers even read much of the author's work, as so little of it informs these gadgets aside from a trivia screen saver. Given King's library of familiar plots and icons like Salem's Lot, Carrie, Cujo, and Christine, it's surprising that Presto Studios missed the opportunity. Just imagine the ways in which a vindictive Carrie, rabid Cujo, or pissed off Firestarter could have torn apart your screen. How about blood-filled vampire meters for indicating system resources or battery life? In fact, every gadget in F13 will probably only leave you thinking about all the ways it could have been done better. The only one who might be frightened by F13 is Stephen King himself, who risks tainting a fine pop entertainment legacy by attaching his name to this sort of thing.
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160,The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages ,9.2," Ages is a wonderful game in its own right, and as a set with Seasons, it comes as highly recommended as a game can be.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/5/4/2212854-236106-zelda_ooa.jpg,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-legend-of-zelda-oracle-of-ages-review/1900-2768469/,pos,"
Ah, The Legend of Zelda, the most hallowed of game franchises. Nothing beats the feeling of sitting down with a new Zelda game and all the impeccable hours of gameplay that it entails. Our friends at Nintendo have found a way to one-up that excitement, however, by releasing two Zelda games simultaneously for the Game Boy Color. The two newest games in the series, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, deliver on every essential element of the classic Zelda formula--dungeons, puzzles, and items galore are all here. Though the games were actually created by Flagship, a Capcom developer, they fit so well with previous Zelda titles that they might as well be Nintendo games. In graphics, sound, and gameplay terms, the Oracle games are almost identical. Of course, they differ in settings, characters, and storylines, but the two games are in many ways a continuation of the previous Game Boy Zelda game, Link's Awakening. Veterans of that game will feel completely at home in either Oracle game, because the controls and interface are virtually identical, as are many of the graphics and sounds. If you haven't played any of the Game Boy Zelda games, don't worry, because they're very similar to the overhead Zelda games of yore. Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons find further distinction in their emphasis on different aspects of Zelda gameplay. Seasons is billed as an action game, while Ages focuses on more difficult puzzles. Make no mistake, though; each has a healthy dose of both action and puzzles. The difference is definitely noticeable, however; even the first dungeon of Ages contains a couple of puzzles that may leave you scratching your head, and it gets more difficult from there. You'll still get an appropriate amount of hack and slash, though. Oracle of Ages sets itself up much like Oracle of Seasons--Link encounters the Triforce and is informed that there's a new quest he needs to complete. Never one to shirk his duties as the hero of Hyrule, Link silently accepts and is whisked away to the land of Labrynna, where he meets a songstress named Nayru. She's not just a singer, though; she also controls the flow of time as the Oracle of Ages. Veran, the Sorcerer of Shadows, wastes no time in kidnapping Nayru, unfortunately, and then uses her power to wreak havoc across past and present. Link must team up with Nayru's allies to travel back and forth in time and stop Veran from rewriting history. Longtime Zelda fans can probably already guess how Link will go about saving Labrynna--yes, there are eight dungeons to solve and eight mystical items, called the essences of time, that Link has to collect before he can set everything right. In keeping with Ages' puzzle theme, these dungeons can be devilishly challenging, if not outright frustrating, at times. As in all Zelda games, however, there's a tremendous sense of accomplishment when you finally work through the switches, trapdoors, and interconnected rooms of the maze and kill the boss at the end. Every Zelda has a central item that corrals your progress through the game--in A Link to the Past, it was the magic mirror that teleported you to the Dark World, while Ocarina of Time gave you a trusty ocarina with which to work all kinds of magic. In Oracle of Ages, the Harp of Ages is your ticket to getting around. It lets you open up portals to go back and forth through time so that you can work events in one period to affect the other. As you get further into the game, your harp will receive new songs that enhance your ability to skip through the ages. The time travel is handled very well--a decrepit old cave whose entrance collapses in the present is still nice and sturdy in the past, allowing you entry. In another example, a sapling planted a long time ago is a fully grown, seed-bearing tree in the present. Oracle of Ages makes superb use of the time-travel aspect in the flow of the game. A few other new gameplay touches join the tried and true Zelda block-pushing and boomerang-throwing. Ages and Seasons both introduce us to three animals that can aid Link in getting around the overworld; Ricky the kangaroo, Dimitri the dodongo, and Moosh the flying bear can all help you out in their own way. Another addition shared by Ages and Seasons is the seed satchel, which lets you collect all sorts of different seeds. For instance, ember seeds create fire, while pegasus seeds make you run faster for a few seconds. As usual, you also get old favorites, such as bombs and the feather. Ages and Seasons also share a ring system that involves finding rings in all sorts of places, having them appraised by the town jeweler, and then wearing them to receive benefits, like extra damage or increased chances of random events. There are more than 60 rings, so collection hounds will have plenty to do just tracking down all the rings. Once you've built up your game by collecting rings, upgrading weapons, and that sort of thing, you can finish the game and then receive a password that you can input when you start Oracle of Seasons. This will let many of the attributes of your Ages game carry over to Seasons at the outset. The same thing also works by playing Seasons first and then starting Ages. You'll be able to keep some of your stats and equipment, and certain people and places in the world will be affected by things you did in the previous game. This is definitely an interesting incentive for playing both games. Oracle of Ages is the more cerebral of the two Oracle games--Seasons has you slashing more enemies and solving fewer logic puzzles. If you really want to play only one of them, your decision should be based on the part of Zelda you enjoy most--the action or the puzzles. Ages is a wonderful game in its own right, and as a set with Seasons, it comes as highly recommended as a game can be.
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161,The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons ,9.2," Although Capcom's Flagship team actually handled development on the two games, both of them pack in everything one expects from a good Zelda adventure.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/5/4/2212854-236106-zelda_ooa.jpg,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-legend-of-zelda-oracle-of-seasons-review/1900-2768475/,pos,"
Let's say you're Nintendo, and it's late spring 2001. The Game Boy Color is still selling like hotcakes, but you've got your new portable unit, the Game Boy Advance, looming close on the horizon. How do you bridge the gap between new and old and unite a legion of devoted handheld gamers? The answer is an easy one: Zelda. Nintendo is sending the Game Boy Color out with a bang by releasing not just one but two new Game Boy Zelda titles--Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, both of which run just fine on the Game Boy Color, though playing the games on the upcoming Game Boy Advance will unlock a few new surprises, such as a new ring shop. Although Capcom's Flagship team actually handled development on the two games, both of them pack in everything one expects from a good Zelda adventure.  The biggest difference between Seasons and Ages is that each focuses on a different aspect of the classic Zelda formula: Ages is puzzle-heavy while Seasons is action-oriented. That's not to say that Ages skimps on the monster slaying or that Seasons won't give you any puzzles to solve, but each game knows what it's going for. Of course, true Zelda fans will want to play both games for reasons that will be detailed shortly, but it's worth mentioning that Seasons and Ages are fully self-contained games that can be played and completed without each other. Like the previous Game Boy Zelda game, Link's Awakening, Oracle of Seasons strays outside the standard Ganon-Zelda-Triforce canon of the Zelda series to find its plot. The initial setup is simple enough: The Triforce tells Link that it has a quest for him and transports him to the land of Holodrum. Onox, the self-appointed ""General of Darkness,"" has kidnapped Din, the Oracle of Seasons, and made the hallowed Temple of Seasons disappear. Holodrum's seasons are going haywire as a result, and it's up to Link to fix everything. He'll do this by--surprise, surprise--solving eight dungeons and retrieving the eight Essences of Season. But hey, we don't play Zelda games for total originality in design, we play them for incredibly well-developed gameplay. In fact, the gameplay department is where Oracle of Seasons really pays off. If you've played Link's Awakening, then you know exactly how Seasons plays. The new game uses the same controls, interface, and many of the graphics and sounds as its predecessor. If you haven't played Link's Awakening, think Zelda: A Link to the Past crammed into a Game Boy. Oracle of Seasons is classic overhead Zelda all the way. The biggest addition here is an item called the Rod of Seasons, which will eventually let you control the seasons at will. This is necessary for reaching new areas of the overworld because the landscape is altered depending on the current season. In winter, for instance, some trees wither and let you pass by, while in summer, climbable vines grow up certain cliffs. The Rod of Seasons is joined by a few other new items such as a seed satchel, which lets you keep up with a bevy of different seeds, and some old standbys like the boomerang and power bracelet. Oracle of Seasons departs from the typical Zelda formula a bit by giving you three animal assistants. Ricky is a kangaroo that can jump tall obstacles and punch with his strong arms. Dimitri the dodongo can swim through deep water and munch on enemies. Finally, Moosh the flying bear can, pardoning the pun, bear you across large holes in the ground. These are minor additions to the gameplay, but they add some variety. The Zelda universe is also fleshed out a bit by the addition of Subrosia, the subterranean world into which the Temple of Seasons has been cast. Link will have to deal with the quirky, hooded Subrosians to fully complete his quest. It's nice to see a few new faces mixed in with the classic Zelda milieu. Both of the Oracle games also feature a new system involving rings that give the game an extra element of RPG-style customization. Link can discover rings on the overworld and in dungeons, and he can then get them appraised by Vasu, the town jeweler. Once he discovers the function of each ring, Link can equip it to reap its benefit. Some rings modify damage, others increase or decrease the frequency of certain events; one ring lets you hold bombs indefinitely. As you progress through the game, you'll gain the ability to wear more rings and thus utilize more special powers at once. There's actually a sort of Pokemon-like collectible feel about the rings. That leads us to perhaps the most interesting feature of the two Oracle games, the link mode. After finishing either Seasons or Ages, you'll receive a password that you can input upon beginning the second game. This will carry over a number of attributes from your previous game, such as certain items, rings, and tasks that you've completed. Nintendo has come up with a surefire way to make Zelda fans want to play through both Oracle games in sequence.  Oracle of Seasons is as worthy a Zelda game as any in the series. This is the action-minded half of the Oracle duo, and your thumbs will get a noticeable workout along with your brain. However, button jockeys shouldn't expect to breeze through the game quickly; the dungeons especially contain some pretty devious puzzles. Seasons gives you hours of engrossing, enjoyable gameplay and, should you opt for it (and you should), an entirely new quest when you're done. What more could a handheld gamer want?
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162,Age of Mythology ,9.2," Featuring lots of interesting, inventive design decisions, plenty of fun-to-use units, and tons of variety, Age of Mythology is the last real-time strategy game you'll need for a long time.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/4/2/2/2215422-256px_age_of_mythology_liner.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/age-of-mythology-review/1900-2896451/,pos,"
Ensemble Studios has long since made a name for itself with its extremely popular Age of Empires series of real-time strategy games, so the company's latest game, Age of Mythology, seems risky. Not only is this the first Ensemble product to feature a fully 3D graphics engine, but it's also the first to stray from the purely historical context of Age of Empires and delve into fiction. In the game, you'll still find the sort of realistic armies of cavalry, spearmen, and archers you'd find in Age of Empires, but they'll be fighting alongside the likes of medusas, minotaurs, sphinxes, mummies, frost giants, trolls, and more. So don't expect Age of Mythology to help you ace any history tests. And yet, much like with the Age of Empires games, you still could easily end up learning a thing or two while playing Age of Mythology. While the game may not be a simulation of any battles that ever actually took place, it offers great insight into three core historical civilizations and their beliefs, which collectively helped shape much of the world as we know it. More importantly, Age of Mythology executes its concept extremely well, in a manner that should please fans of Ensemble's previous real-time strategy games as well as many of those who might have found the history-themed Age of Empires games a bit dry.  The developers of Age of Empires have outdone themselves once again with Age of Mythology.  Age of Mythology doesn't make any huge departures from the conventions of real-time strategy gaming, but rather represents arguably the most refined example of the genre to date. If you've played any other real-time strategy game lately, especially Age of Empires II, then you'll feel very comfortable getting started with Age of Mythology, a highly complex game that will seem remarkably intuitive. If you've played a lot of Age of Empires II, then you'll get the impression from Age of Mythology that the designers spent their time further adjusting the gameplay conventions that they themselves have already helped pioneer and coming up with lots and lots of clever twists to give the game plenty of appeal, depth, and lasting value. You'll also note that Age of Mythology immediately comes across as a highly polished product--fully featured and carefully documented, Age of Mythology is also elegantly designed and surprisingly easy to explain despite its unusual concept.   Most real-time strategy games let you play as a certain number of different factions. In the case of games like this year's Warcraft III, the relatively small number of playable factions still makes for outstanding gameplay due to the very substantial differences from one faction to the next. Yet in the Age of Empires games, which featured numerous different playable civilizations, the differences between these were much less obvious--many of the factions shared units, strategies, and graphics. Age of Mythology essentially combines these two philosophies by offering you the chance to control one of three radically different civilizations--the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Norse--as well as three different subsets of each one, based on these respective cultures' major deities. There's variation even within each subfaction--during the course of a match, you'll get to ally yourself with a number of different minor deities, each of which confers its own unique benefits on your civilization. And not only does allegiance with any of the game's deities give you special bonuses, but you also get a one-time-use miracle, a unique mythological unit of some sort, special technology, and more. The option to choose from three civilizations, nine major gods, and 27 minor gods adds up to a huge amount of variety.  Three distinctly different civilizations are vie for power in the game: the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Norse.  At its core, Age of Mythology does play a lot like Age of Empires II, as well as other real-time strategy games. A typical match will still require you to spend considerable amounts of time and attention on gathering various resources and building up your civilization, then on producing vast armies, researching numerous technologies and upgrades, and commanding your forces in large battles. The game's resource model is very similar to that of Age of Empires II, with one exception. You once again need ample supplies of food to build new units and advance from one stage of civilization to the next, and food is once again obtained from hunting, gathering, farming, or fishing. You once again need gold to research new technologies and construct military units and structures, and gold is mined from clearly visible deposits you'll find scattered about each map. You'll also need to chop plenty of lumber. Stone, the fourth resource of the Age of Empires games, is not a factor in Age of Mythology, though there is a fourth resource: favor. Favor represents the powers of your civilizations' gods and is used for summoning your civilization's powerful mythological units, as well as gaining some divine technological bonuses.   One thing that each of the game's three civilizations have in common is that their temple is one of their most important buildings. It is there that mythological units are summoned and other divine enhancements are granted. However, civilizations each gain favor differently. Greek villagers can be ordered to pray at a temple, which gradually increases favor. Egyptian workers can construct monuments to their gods--four different, successively larger ones--that generate favor. And the Norse earn favor by waging war. Civilizations also each have different types of hero units available, which specialize in defeating mythological units. The Greeks have a handful of legendary heroes such as Odysseus, Jason, and Heracles. The Egyptians have priests and a pharaoh, a powerful leader that can be used to speed construction of buildings, increase production, or serve as guardian of his people. The Norse can produce innumerable helsirs, mighty warriors that are most favored by the gods.The way that the different civilizations generate favor and the way they must incorporate their heroes into battle make for a lot of interesting gameplay right off the bat. For instance, the Greeks can generate favor pretty easily, but cannot have as many heroes in the field as the Norse. Meanwhile, the Norse can have plenty of heroes in the field, perfect for dealing with the Greeks' large mythological armies, but cannot earn favor as readily as the Greeks or Egyptians can. Furthermore, the different civilizations gather and use resources differently. The Egyptians don't build structures as quickly, but do not use wood for making them. The Norse use their burly infantry for construction, while their worker units are used only for gathering resources. The Norse also use oxcarts as mobile drop-off points for resources, rather than the stationary structures of the other civilizations.  Nine major gods and 27 minor gods are represented in the game, each with their own unique powers and bonuses.  Of further note, hero characters are the only ones that can retrieve relics that can randomly be found on most maps. In Age of Empires, retrieved relics generated a small but steady surplus of gold. However, Age of Mythology has a number of unique relics that confer dramatic bonuses. It's therefore more important than ever to actively scout the environment, if only to discover relics early on and keep them out of your opponents' hands. You also need to search for new settlements, since, unlike in Age of Empires II, you can't just plunk down a new town hall anywhere. You need additional settlements in order to grow your population limit, and in Age of Mythology, settlements are deliberately spread out so as to discourage overly defensive play.   It may be clear by now that Age of Mythology has a multifaceted balance system that's far, far more intriguing and complex than the relatively simplistic rock-paper-scissors balance systems seen in most real-time strategy games. Besides having different resources to manage, and myth units and hero units to summon, you also have a wide variety of conventional forces at your disposal, including various foot soldiers, cavalry, archers, siege engines, ships, and more. Some of these are specialized to be exclusively well suited against certain other types of units, and all can be upgraded. While myth units can often make short work of conventional forces--units like the cyclops and the minotaur can slay most human soldiers in a single blow--you absolutely need to balance your myth units with your standard armies. For one thing, myth units can't be produced as readily as conventional forces can. For another, conventional soldiers are well suited for overwhelming enemy hero characters, which, as mentioned, are the biggest threat to your myth units.   To make things even more interesting, as you advance through up to four different ages over the course of a single battle, you'll choose between two different minor deities at each of these points. While progressing through the ages was a purely linear affair in the Age of Empires games, having these options in Age of Mythology lets you play a little more reactively and puts a certain strategic consequence on being the first to advance in age. An expert player that learns of his opponent's allegiance with, for example, Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, may then proceed to focus his efforts on training units that are effective against archers, since Artemis' powers bolster the Greeks' archer units. Of course, the player that advanced sooner should have a technological advantage to offset this.   Generally speaking, battles in Age of Mythology have a similar feel to those of Age of Empires II, meaning they're often big, brutal, and quick. Defensive structures and buildings aren't quite as resistant to damage here as in Age of Empires II, and that game's ubiquitous trebuchet is nowhere to be found. However, using long-range but vulnerable siege engines to crack enemy defenses remains a key aspect of gameplay in Age of Mythology.  Myth units are extremely powerful in battle, and can defeat small armies on their own. You'll need hero characters to stop them.  The game uses a highly intuitive interface that's very similar to that of Age of Empires II and offers many of the same enhancements. Float your mouse pointer over virtually any object in the game, and you'll get concise yet thorough descriptions of what it is, what it does, and what it's good for. You can also access a technology tree that includes hypertext links to considerable amounts of historical information on all the game's units, gods, and monsters. During gameplay, automatic unit formations, good pathfinding, production and research queues, and generally intelligent autonomous behavior on the part of your units all help to minimize the amount of micromanaging you'll have to do. In another nice touch, units with special abilities use those abilities automatically--however, this can actually be used to the advantage of the player taking on those units, since he can force them to waste their special abilities on inconsequential targets. At any rate, despite all the automation, you'll absolutely need to make every moment of every match count if you plan to play competitively, and you'll have to balance overseeing your civilization with scouting and managing your battles. But at least you won't have to spend any time micromanaging any of your individual units.   Actually, one issue with Age of Mythology is that most of the units in the game appear very small, and hero units in particular--though they're distinguished with a slight glow--can be tough to pick out of the fray. Hotkeys are available for quickly cycling through all hero units, though, as well as for locating any idle villagers. For that matter, hotkeys are available for pretty much all the game's actions and can be redefined as you see fit. You can't simultaneously select as many units in Age of Mythology as you could in Age of Empires II, so you'll have to be prepared to use multiple groups of units simultaneously. But in another great touch, Age of Mythology visually represents your unit groupings with onscreen banners that indicate the makeup of that group--you'll be able to quickly distinguish your cavalry group from your siege engine group, for example.Age of Mythology includes a linear, story-driven single-player campaign spanning three dozen missions, which let you control Greek, Egyptian, and Norse forces as you progress. Some decent-looking cutscenes using the game's 3D engine are used to drive the story along, which concerns an Atlantean hero and his legendary journeys on land, sea, and beyond. The mission variety in the campaign is good, and four different difficulty settings ensure that just about anyone should find a suitable challenge from the computer opponent. The campaign also does a fine job of introducing you to most all of the game's units and concepts contextually, or it'll at least give you some opportunity to play around with most of the units, technologies, and structures to get a sense of how everything works. While some of the campaign missions do feature some unusual circumstances or objectives that change, the game's story isn't incredibly engaging, not that Age of Empires II fans would expect it to be. These players will probably make a beeline for the game's random map mode, anyway.  Age of Mythology offers tremendous lasting value in either its single-player or multiplayer mode.  The random map mode is much like that of Age of Empires II, except that it lets you choose from a significantly wider variety of settings, from the deserts of Egypt, to the frigid plains of Scandinavia, to the mythological Greek underworld. You can play with or against as many as 11 other computer-controlled players, and their behavior can be adjusted independently of each other. Different gameplay variations like those of Age of Empires II are available and include deathmatch (which starts you off with plenty of resources) and conquest (where only a military victory is allowed), while the default setting grants victory to whoever wins through conquest, through building a wonder, or through capturing all settlements. The robust, highly replayable random map mode will be the core of the game for many players.   For many others, online play will be the option of choice. Age of Mythology incorporates a much more streamlined, integrated multiplayer mode than that of Age of Empires II, and it's functionally similar to what's been found in Blizzard's and Westwood's recent real-time strategy games. Most notably, there's a feature that lets you automatically find a willing opponent looking for a similar type of match. We were able to quickly find online opponents at all hours, and Age of Mythology seems to run smoothly and stably in multiplayer over a decent Internet connection. Ensemble and Microsoft's service even tracks numerous statistics for each player and ranks them relative to the competition. Due to the complexity of this game and its broad range of options--and due to the inclusion of a complete scenario editor that lets anyone so inclined attempt to build a custom map or mission--Age of Mythology seems certain to enjoy the same sort of long life online as its predecessors.   Age of Mythology is a great-looking game, filled with bright colors and carefully detailed animations. You'll see Egyptian slingers whirl their weapons menacingly as they charge into battle. You'll see minotaurs gore their victims, sending their unfortunate foes flying. You'll see some impressive divine powers; Egyptian god Thoth's meteor and Horus' tornado are among the most spectacular. As mentioned, the game's units, and to some extent the buildings, can look a bit too homogeneous on first impression, but with time you'll learn to differentiate everything at a quick glance. And you'll consistently be entertained by the entire look of the game, which uses lots of ambient animations to make the world seem alive. Fans of classic films such as The Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts will note that Age of Mythology attempts to re-create the same sort of dynamic as the battles in those films. When you see a small band of human forces come across even a single myth unit in Age of Mythology, you'll just wince as the myth unit invariably deals grievous damage to its mundane foes.  The combination of historical and fantastical units on the battlefield gives Age of Mythology a style all its own.  Age of Mythology also sounds terrific. It has a stirring musical score that's distinctly different for each of the civilizations, and unit voices are done in the three cultures' native languages. The campaign's cutscenes are in English, but its voice-over is still very good, giving you a strong sense of the different characters' personalities even when the rapid-fire missions don't leave much room for development. Plenty of memorable audible cues are used to signify various in-game events deserving of your attention, and the sounds of battle are convincingly done, though a bit subdued much like in Age of Empires II. Those stepping into Age of Mythology after having played Warcraft III might miss hearing many different responses from each unit, but overall, Age of Mythology is as much a pleasure to listen to as it is to watch.   Of course, what's most important is that Age of Mythology plays remarkably well. Featuring lots of interesting, inventive design decisions, plenty of fun-to-use units, and tons of variety, Age of Mythology is the last real-time strategy game you'll need for a long time. It's a necessary addition to any real-time strategy fan's collection, and the game is accessible enough so that even those without much experience with the genre should be able to pick up and enjoy the game without getting overwhelmed. Novices and die-hard RTS players alike will all note the remarkable amount of care and quality that clearly went into every aspect of Age of Mythology--the sorts of things that have already established Ensemble Studios as one of the leading developers of real-time strategy games and that now reinforce the company's position as a leader and innovator in one of PC gaming's most competitive and most popular genres.


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163,Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 ,9.2, The GBA version of Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 makes no compromises in re-creating the experience of its console cousins.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/9/9/4/2213994-box_dmfsbmx2.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dave-mirra-freestyle-bmx-2-review/1900-2833605/,pos,"
Full-Fat, the developer of Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 for the Game Boy Advance, swears up and down that its game was created independently of the work done by Vicarious Visions for Activision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. It is by eerie coincidence then, that Mirra 2 on the GBA looks a lot like Tony Hawk, plays a lot like Tony Hawk, and rocks just as hard as Tony Hawk. No one is complaining, though, as it is these coincidences, along with a few necessary tweaks, that make Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 the best handheld stunt-bike game ever made. A fully licensed product, Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 includes riders, sponsors, and bikes taken straight from the world of professional BMX competition. There are 12 pro riders, including such notables as 10-time X Games gold medallist Dave Mirra; 2001 Bike Stunt Series Park champion Ryan Nyquist; and spectator favorite Todd ""The Wildman"" Lyons. Each rider has his own different speed, airtime, hang time, and balance characteristics, as well as a stable of five name-brand bikes that augment these traits. For your pleasure, the game offers four gameplay modes: proquest, session, free ride, and two-player.  Proquest mode is the heart of the Mirra experience. It contains six different stages to prove your prowess in. The stages range from standard vert, dirt, and street configurations to wild conglomerations that include multiple tiers and segments. Within each stage, there are 10 goals to achieve, the completion of which will increase your experience, let you upgrade your rider's skill attributes, and ultimately unlock the next area. The goals range from score challenges and grind requests to more complex tasks such as sequential gap leaping or the performance of a specific trick on a certain object--a semi truck, for example. Just like Activision's Tony Hawk game, Mirra 2 has a number of collecting goals, such as gathering the letters to spell ""Mirra"" or snagging paint cans. In all, there are 120 different goals to achieve in three classes--amateur, pro, and hardcore--eventually resulting in a rider with maxed-out skills and the unlocking of the big air challenge. Of the other modes, session and free ride let you play without goals or a timer, while the deceiving two-player mode lets you and a friend collect stars or vie for a top score using a single non-linked system. What Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 lacks in modes, it more than makes up for in style and fun. The game plays wonderfully. On the ground or while landing, the directional pad controls acceleration, steering, and the performance of manuals (single-wheeled trick interludes); the A button boosts speed and triggers jumps; and the B button activates grinds and stalls. In midair, the D-pad adjusts the spin and pitch of your bike; the B and R buttons enable you to perform more than 40 individual grab, kick, and spin tricks; and the L button executes dangerous maneuvers, such as forward and backward flips. There's also a rush meter that builds with every successful trick or combo completion, boosting your speed and enabling signature moves when full and emptying when you crash. Overall, tricks and chains are easy to perform, as triple, quadruple, and even quintuple sequences are possible with rapid D-pad and button combinations. Combined with the number of possible surfaces and obstacles, there are more than 200 possible tricks to discover. The real challenge lies in completing the goals on time, which gives experts something to busy themselves with and also allows beginners to enjoy the feeling of BMX without feeling burdened by complexity.The only significant hurdle is the game's viewpoint, an overhead isometric point of view that gives depth to the surroundings, but at the cost of a slanted perspective. While Full-Fat has gone to great lengths to ensure that significant goal items and course sections aren't obscured or distorted by the tilted view, there are still times when precision timing is made difficult by the uncertainty about your proximity to surfaces below. Just like in Activision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, the environments and riders in Mirra 2 are crisp and detailed, consisting of a colorful mixture of 2D sprites and 3D polygons. Unlike Activision's Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, which is somewhat flat in appearance, Mirra 2 doesn't cut any corners when it comes to visual variety. Each of the game's six main levels is large and full of ramps, rails, cars, trucks, sheds, and other sundry trick spots. Sponsor logos are prevalent and clearly visible, and some stages have entrance points into underground or indoor areas, such as a parking lot or a drained swimming pool. They say seeing is believing, and you really must see Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 in motion to appreciate it--it's that fast, that fluid, and that realistic. In comparison, the game's soundtrack isn't nearly as spectacular as its gameplay or visuals. This isn't to say that you won't enjoy the 11 different techno and industrial music selections, or that you won't be impressed by the wildly diverse assortment of bike and rider sound samples. The overall audio experience just happens to be more realistic than over-the-top. Considering how well rounded the overall product is, it's actually somewhat refreshing that Full-Fat didn't try to get crazy in terms of music or unrealistic sound effects. People hunting for an excellent portable BMX game aren't going to split hairs over repetitious music anyway, especially those wishing for a game that's just as remarkable as Tony Hawk--albeit on two inflated wheels. Unlike Activision's competitor, Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, the GBA version of Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 makes no compromises in re-creating the experience of its console cousins. In all areas--gameplay, graphics, sound, and overall longevity--Full-Fat and Acclaim have literally created a handheld miracle.
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164,Madden NFL 2002 ,9.2, The game manages to one-up last year's Madden in most categories.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/9/8/2214298-box_madden02.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2002-review/1900-2806003/,pos,"
While it shouldn't come as a surprise that Madden 2002 is simply a beefed-up, slightly refined version of the first PlayStation 2 Madden title, it is a bit disappointing. Even still, the game manages to one-up last year's Madden in most categories. Madden 2002 includes a good list of new features and options, as well as some slight but noticeable visual improvements.   Madden 2002 features two basic modes, easy play and normal. The primary difference between the modes is that easy play starts you off with almost every bit of computer assistance turned on, including features designed to help bring new players up to speed. One such feature is a receiver indicator that lets you know exactly when it's safe to pass the ball. In either mode, you can choose from seven different game options: exhibition, season, franchise, tourney, custom league, practice, and situation. While most of Madden 2002's modes of play are pretty much par for the course, the franchise mode, which allows you to play up to 30 consecutive seasons, is really quite extraordinary. The situation mode is also an impressive addition, allowing you to put your players into just about any foreseeable scenario--be it 10 seconds on the clock, third down, and 30 yards to go or whatever other situation you can dream up, the options are near limitless.    With the game's extensive general manager options, you can do everything from creating a player to creating an entire team. The create-a-player feature in Madden 2002 is easily one of the most robust create-a-player modes ever. The height and weight stats are customizable, and there are more than 65 faces and 20 different face shapes to choose from. The create-a-player mode also includes seven other adjustable areas of a player's body such as thighs, arms, and waistlines. Each one of these areas can be customized to have a certain amount of fat and muscle. While visually impressive, these physical traits also directly tie into the player's ability on the field. For instance, a 6-foot-6-inch 300-pound behemoth would obviously make a lousy quarterback, and a 6-foot-6-inch 250-pound player wouldn't be much of a lineman. You can also customize your player's equipment, including shoe size, visor type, and face mask configuration, among other things. The create-a-team option is just as impressive, allowing you to pick the team's logo, customize the uniforms, and even create your own stadium. If you enjoy customizing your own team and players, Madden 2002 certainly has you covered.   In the gameplay department, Madden 2002 plays almost identically to last year's title. The game still features a momentum-based physics system that accounts for the weight and speed of the player when determining how fast he can change direction when running. This system makes Madden 2002 feel a little unresponsive at first, but it quickly becomes second nature. The AI is very solid, and the inclusion of an AI adjustment scale--which allows you to adjust the AI of certain aspects of the computer's game, such as receiving, running, run blocking, and so on--just makes it that much better.    At first sight, Madden 2002 looks largely unchanged from last year. But on closer inspection, you'll see that EA has been cleaning house. One of the most noticeable improvements on last season's visuals is the players' faces. Their eyes move and track much better than last year, and their facial animations and textures look more diverse and realistic. Little extras like seeing the coaches and cheerleaders on the sidelines with ice chests and other players sitting on the bench really help give Madden 2002 a polished feel. The crowds are still made up of 2D bitmaps, but with the focus constantly on the on-field action, they're rarely even noticeable. The game's animation is also top-notch--seeing a player jumping through the air and making a one-handed catch is a very special treat. And the thrill of the moment doesn't stop there, as Madden 2002 has an extensive replay option that you can use to watch replays from virtually any angle.    The sound, music, and announcing in this year's title are all quite good. The little rap and hip-hop cuts that play briefly in between play selections and during the menus fit perfectly. The commentary and play-by-play banter of John Madden and Pat Summerall is a lot more interesting than last year. They have more things to say this time around, and their style is much more conversational, giving the commentary a more natural feel. The sound effects are largely unchanged, although sticking somebody with a good tackle will produce an extraordinary punch.   Once everything is accounted for, Madden 2002 is fundamentally the same game as last year's title. There are a handful of compelling new features and graphical upgrades, but when you compare the experience of being out on the field that both games offer, the core technical differences between them are nominal. Even still, what Madden 2002 has to offer is rock-solid, and will not disappoint fans of the series.



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165,NHL 2002 ,9.2, There are quite a few excellent enhancements to the gameplay and the computer's artificial intelligence hidden beneath NHL 2002's dizzying array of flashy new features.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/0/9/2218109-box_nhl02.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nhl-2002-review/1900-2813489/,pos,"
Last year's NHL 2001 was about the best computer ice hockey game most fans of the sport could have hoped for, even if it wasn't a perfectly realistic simulation of the sport. Using that outstanding edition of the long-running hockey series as a foundation, EA Sports could just as well have added on a bunch of superficial extras and called the new product NHL 2002. And to some extent that's exactly what happened. But fortunately for fans of the series, let alone anyone who likes hockey, there are quite a few excellent enhancements to the gameplay and the computer's artificial intelligence hidden beneath NHL 2002's dizzying array of flashy new features.  NHL 2002 plays much like--but even better than--last year's game.  NHL 2002 is essentially similar to NHL 2001, so fans of the previous version will likely be very happy with this year's installment, too. The AI sliders that made NHL 2001 so approachable and customizable are still available in NHL 2002, and they once again let you custom-tailor the computer into just the sort of opponent you'd like to play against. Other returning features include the rookie draft, the ability to trade draft picks, the ""big hit"" and deke buttons, and the options to import your own music and photos for custom players. The new features in NHL 2002 are hit and miss. Longtime fans of the series will likely find a few of the new features disagreeable, but to its credit, EA Sports has included the option to easily toggle just about every one of the game's new features on or off.   And the first thing many players will want to do is toggle off the new color commentary provided by Don Taylor. For some reason, despite years of trying to assure gamers that the NHL series is a serious sports franchise, EA Sports just gave up trying to be serious when it brought this guy on board. His comments, while occasionally quite funny, rarely ever have anything at all to do with hockey. They are merely one-liners that are included for humor's sake, and they give the game a rather unwelcome comic air. As if trying to keep this flavor consistent across the board, the developers also gave the PA announcer nothing but comic lines, such as, ""Tonight's 50-50 number is...not yours."" Oddly enough, the PA announcer's comments are often much funnier than Taylor's, but they're still out of place. You can turn the commentary off, but even when you select that option, you'll still hear several of Taylor's lines in each game. Aside from the commentary, the rest of the game sounds excellent and more or less exactly like the real thing.   NHL 2002 adds a lot to the core game, including an in-game NHL ""trading cards"" book, similar to the ones found in some of EA Sports' PlayStation 2 games (NCAA Football 2002 for example). You can accumulate points by completing various specific objectives, such as scoring a hat trick or reaching the 20-goal plateau in a season. These points can then be spent on trading cards, which in turn unlock other special features. The most common of these is the ability to turn the player on the card into a hero for varying periods of time. Others include unlockable goal celebrations and arcadelike power-up items, such as superfast shots. As with the commentary, most hard-core fans of the series will likely prefer to ignore a lot of this stuff, aside from the fun of trying to collect all the available player cards.  A 3D crowd responds to the action in the rink.  NHL 2002 also adds special camera views for dramatic moments in the game. The best of these is the breakaway camera, which zooms in on your offensive player as the game fades out all sounds except for that player's heartbeat. The idea is excellent and can truly add a sense of drama to a breakaway. However, if you're skating toward the goal at the bottom of the screen, the breakaway camera will maintain that perspective instead of shifting around to follow the attacker in from behind. As a result, the goal and the goalie often block most of your view. Again, you can turn off the breakaway camera if you find it disruptive, but it'll probably impress you at least a few times.   A similar, but far more frustrating, new graphical effect occurs whenever there is a dramatic body check or goaltender save. The gameplay freezes for a moment and you get treated to a Hong Kong-action-movie-style montage of three different views of the hit or save. Occasionally, this can be pretty spectacular--but unless you set the frequency slider for this effect pretty low, you will quickly tire of the seemingly random and repetitive interruptions caused by this replay.   On the other hand, a more original and very well done new replay option is found in the new ""game story,"" which basically tracks the flow of the game and flashes back to key moments, either much earlier in the action or just a few seconds ago. These replays pop up during stoppages and can be skipped simply by pressing an action button on your controller, but they are often worth watching just for fun. Some of the themes you'll see during a game story update include a hot goalie, a hat trick, one team dominating the play, or a dramatic comeback by one side or the other.The addition of a hero line is also welcome, as it lets you create a fifth line made up of your most dangerous players. When you edit the lines for your team, you can assign your best players to your hero line and then put that group on the ice in the waning moments of a close game. This saves hard-core players the effort of halting games in order to shuffle their lines for the best scoring punch.  The new breakaway cam offers a dramatic new perspective.  Lest you think that all the new features in NHL 2002 are gimmicky, you'll be happy to know that the AI has been enhanced--a lot. Computer-controlled goalies are much quicker and smarter now, and thanks to what EA Sports calls adaptive goalie AI, they seem to learn your moves over time. So basically you can't just do the same play over and over again and hope to have much success. You will still score a lot of goals with one-time shots on the ""crash the net"" offense, but you won't score quite as many as you were able to in NHL 2001.   Some of the other welcome AI tweaks include the players' ability to receive passes more realistically. Now when a pass goes slightly awry, the receiving player will turn and/or extend his reach as much as he can in order to get the puck. The game also now supports saucer passes, which are accomplished by holding down the pass button a bit longer than usual. In effect, this is similar to the ""through pass"" in soccer. The passer simply lifts the puck a little bit to get it past opposing players--a very solid addition to the game.   To make matters even more interesting, puck possession is not a cut-and-dried concept any more. Instead, each player's ability to control--and do anything with--the puck is directly determined by his ""puck control"" attribute. As you skate, the colored circle under your player will darken to indicate how much control you have (the darker the better). So a player who is highly susceptible to giveaways will have a faintly colored circle, while puck-handling wizards like Jagr, Lemieux, and Sakic will have darker circles. Also, your control of the puck increases the longer you have it. The only downside to this feature is that the faintly colored ""some control"" circle is awfully similar in appearance to the empty circle indicating no control at all. As a result, you may continue skating down the ice thinking you have the puck, when actually the computer player has stolen it from you and is moving quickly in the other direction.   Another minor problem is that, more often than is good or right, computer-controlled players on your team will stand stock-still when the puck is right in front of them. Even worse, your goalie will stay steadfastly in between the pipes when the puck is loose and sitting up against the side of the net--even when no opposing players are around. This simply would never, ever happen in real hockey. Also, the game actually seems to put defensive players at a severe disadvantage when they successfully poke-check the puck away from an attacking player. The defender goes into an odd crouching position when he pokes the puck away from the attacker. He then stays in this pose for some unknown reason, while the attacker can easily circle back, pick up the puck, and skate right past the now out-of-position defender. Presumably, this was done to prevent easy steals leading to unlikely breakaways, but it could have used more tuning.   Of course, you don't just have to play against the computer. NHL 2002 supports up to four players in a match over the Internet, and it also provides options for playing over a modem, IPX LAN, and direct Internet connection, as well as the EA.com matchmaking service.  New features, like the NHL trading cards, are plentiful in NHL 2002.  No review of NHL 2002 would be complete without some mention of the game's impressive graphics--rest assured, the visuals are stunning. Not only do the players look even more lifelike than in previous versions, but they also seem to move from one animation to the next with far more fluidity. This is especially true of the goalies, who often look incredibly realistic and now have a much wider variety of animations, enabling them to look the part in nearly any kind of save situation. As an added bonus, EA Sports even added some 3D fans to the game, and they lean over the rails to reach players entering the rink and cheer or jeer depending on how the home team happens to be doing. It's a really nice touch.   When you consider NHL 2002 as a whole, you have a game that is everything last year's outstanding version was and more. Each of the many new features adds something to the game, and if that something isn't quite to your liking, you can just fine-tune the options to suit your tastes. The gameplay and the graphics are still phenomenal, and the problems with the game are minor and relatively scarce. It simply is the best hockey game ever produced--again.
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166,World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade ,9.2, The Burning Crusade is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game should be.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1593/15930215/3534316-box01.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-of-warcraft-the-burning-crusade-review/1900-6165433/,pos,"
  When it was released in November 2004, World of Warcraft raised the bar for the massively multiplayer genre, and more than two years later, none of its would-be competitors have even come close to matching it. Even at launch there was very little to find fault with in Blizzard's first MMOG offering, and thanks to regular free updates and no shortage of feedback from a community that now numbers more than 8 million players, it has continued to grow and evolve into an even bigger and better game. With the recent release of The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft has never been better, and while you don't need the expansion pack to continue playing, it's hard not to feel like you're missing out in Azeroth without it.   In the draenei the Alliance finally has a race that measures up to the Horde's tauren.   Like any great expansion pack, The Burning Crusade doesn't just offer more of the same, and it doesn't cater exclusively to experienced players. It offers a lot more of the same, and it also adds a number of new features that can be enjoyed by newcomers and level 60 veterans alike. Perhaps the most significant additions introduced in The Burning Crusade are the blood elves and the draenei--two new playable races that have made the paladin class available to the Horde faction and the shaman class available to the Alliance faction for the first time. Both of these races have quite fascinating backstories that are revealed both through their respective intro movies and via in-game quests and conversations with non-player characters. Like the eight previously existing playable races in Azeroth, the blood elves and the draenei begin their adventures in specially designed starter areas where you can play without having to worry about bothersome high-level opposing players for the first 15 to 20 levels of your character's existence. Thereafter, the new races join the rest on one of Azeroth's two continents, where there are more than enough quest-filled environments and dungeons to keep you busy to level 60 and beyond.    It's only possible to advance beyond the original game's level 60 cap if you own The Burning Crusade, which unlocks new player skills and talents for characters through to level 70. It's conceivable that you could advance through many of the levels post-60 without ever visiting the new Outland realm, but it'd be a far more time-consuming and less profitable process because quests in Outland offer significantly more experience points and gold. Furthermore, Outland is the only place where you can advance your chosen professions beyond the previous skill cap of 300 to gather all-new resources and craft powerful new items. All of the existing professions such as leatherworking, alchemy, cooking, and enchanting can now be pursued to a maximum skill level of 375, which is also true of the new jewelcrafting profession.     Along with engineering, jewelcrafting is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and useful professions to pursue in World of Warcraft right now. Every profession in the game serves a purpose, but many of the items that can be made by weaponsmiths and tailors, for example, are no better than those that regularly drop from enemies and subsequently appear in major cities' auction houses. As a jewelcrafter, you'll initially spend your time and resources making simple rings and necklaces that afford their wearers small attribute bonuses. As your skills improve (and the materials you need become less common and more expensive), you'll learn to make powerful trinkets, rings and necklaces that can be used to buff the attributes of other party members as well as your own, a handful of weapons, and gems that can be socketed into new pieces of armor and jewelry to make them even more powerful.    Skilled crafters can make items that have empty sockets for gems, and you'll occasionally be offered them as a reward for completing a quest. For the most part, these items are quite hard to come by, though, since they rarely drop from anything but dungeon bosses and the like. Choosing gems for your socketed items gives you an opportunity to tailor your gear to your character's chosen talent spec and play style, and many classes even have multiple endgame armor sets to choose from now for the same reason. Bonuses to basic attributes such as strength, stamina, agility, and intellect are now augmented by bonuses to far more specific skills, such as attack power, dodge rating, and hit rating. Before The Burning Crusade, it was generally quite obvious whether or not one item was better than another, but there are so many different factors to consider now that choosing which equipment to use often has as much to do with personal taste as anything.   If you're not already wearing epic gear, expect to replace everything you own within hours of going through the Dark Portal.   Even the relatively common gear that's available in Outland is better than much of the rare and epic equipment that has been dropping in Azeroth for the past two years. Those of you with complete sets of epic armor will find that it's good enough to get you through most of the new continent's quests and dungeons, but everyone else's equipment becomes obsolete within hours of them stepping through the Dark Portal. The new gear serves to lessen the gap between hardcore dungeon raiders and more casual players, and as a result, the Outland quests are neither too challenging for relatively inexperienced players nor too easy for those in the minority who can truly claim to have ""beaten"" the original game. The fact that the playing field has been leveled somewhat also makes player-versus-player encounters more enjoyable now than they've been for some time, which is just as well given that almost all of the new Outland environments have PVP objectives and rewards.    You're free to ignore these world-PVP objectives if you wish, but they offer a welcome distraction from the occasionally repetitive nature of questing, and you don't need to devote an awful lot of time to them to enjoy the benefits. In Hellfire Peninsula, for example, capturing three strategic locations will earn you PVP reward tokens that can be put toward a new ring, weapon, or gemstone. And in the Bone Wastes of Terokkar Forest, the first faction to simultaneously control all five of the PVP towers is rewarded with six hours of damage and experience bonuses anytime they do battle in the area. Perhaps the most interesting world-PVP objective can be found in picturesque Nagrand, where the Horde and the Alliance are constantly battling for control of the small town of Halaa in the center of the map. The faction that controls Halaa can purchase special items and turn in quests there, and they will be protected by up to 15 high-level guards anytime they visit. The rival faction, on the other hand, can climb aboard wyverns and fly overhead on bombing runs in an attempt to kill the guards before storming the town, although the takeoff and landing points for the wyverns can be temporarily taken out of commission by players on defense.      Flying mounts that can be used exclusively in Outland are another significant feature of The Burning Crusade, although it's not possible to drop bombs or to perform any other kind of attack while you're riding them. Level 70 players flying on these mounts still have a significant impact on all PVP, though, because they're able to move between objectives and battles much more quickly, and they can leap down to the ground to join a fight in an instant. While they're very expensive to buy, flying mounts are worth every piece of copper, silver, and gold that they set you back, not only because they offer a distinct advantage in world PVP, but also because there's no better way to take in Outland's occasionally breathtaking scenery.   The new environments are undoubtedly among the most breathtaking that World of Warcraft has to offer.   Although still quite beautiful, the original World of Warcraft's visuals are certainly starting to show their age after more than two years. Masterful texture work and lighting belie some quite rudimentary geometry in places, and The Burning Crusade is no different. With that said, the expansion pack's environments are undoubtedly among the most impressive that the game has to offer, and when you're not busy trying to complete a quest or doing battle with rival players, there's plenty of fun to be had just exploring them and keeping an eye out for previously unseen creatures, rare enemies, and such.      Regardless of whether you're questing or taking part in PVP, The Burning Crusade caters well to solo and grouped players alike, although a number of the harder quests are impossible to beat alone. This is also true of the game's dungeons, which are specifically designed for groups of between 5 and 25 players and are instanced so that every group gets an identical challenge. The Burning Crusade adds more than 20 new dungeons to World of Warcraft (not all of them are in Outland), ranging from those that can easily be completed inside an hour through to truly epic undertakings that will take even the most skilled groups around 10 hours or so (across multiple sessions in the same week, if necessary) to get through. Many of the new dungeons can be played on a more difficult ""heroic"" mode once you earn the right to do so, pitting you against much stronger enemies that drop superior items if you manage to defeat them.    In the past, only the largest and most challenging dungeons in Azeroth have pitted you against enemies that were really interesting and that required groups to think very carefully about their tactics, but in The Burning Crusade, these qualities have found their way into smaller dungeons and, to a lesser extent, into the world as a whole. Many of the enemies that you'll be killing for quests early on are able to use skills similar to what players have, for example, so beasts will stomp to stun you, hunters will trap you so they can attack from range, some species will play dead when their health gets low, and others are able to vanish and reappear behind you in much the same way that a rogue player might. When it comes to boss encounters, the majority of enemies that you face in The Burning Crusade require groups to do something a little cleverer than just have a warrior or feral druid ""tank"" them while every other player either does damage or heals. Defeating the most challenging bosses invariably requires every player in the group to know their role and to be on form, and it certainly doesn't hurt if they're wearing good armor and carrying powerful weapons either.    The fact that the group sizes required for most new dungeons is smaller than in the original game is a double-edged sword--getting 10 players together is obviously a lot easier than getting 20 or 40, but in a smaller group, you have to be much more selective about who comes along, so depending on which class you play, it won't necessarily be easier to find a good group to play with. As is the case in all massively multiplayer games, your experience in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will be shaped largely by the other players that you interact with. Playing alongside a good group or guild can enrich your time in the game to no end, while having your corpse camped and getting killed repeatedly by an opposing player will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. In our experience, players who delight in making others' lives a misery are certainly in a small minority, but they're out there, and it's unfortunate that they're often the most vocal in general chat channels.   Many of the new dungeons are designed for groups of five players.   Third-party voice-over-IP programs remain the most effective way to communicate with players who you're actually interested in interacting with, particularly if you're playing through a challenging dungeon where there isn't always time to type messages to each other. And when you're not listening for warnings or instructions from players that you're grouped with, you could do far worse than to have the game's excellent orchestral soundtrack provide a constantly changing backdrop for the animal sounds, enemy grunts, ambient sounds, and weapon noises that accompany the action onscreen at all times. The sound design in The Burning Crusade never fails to impress, and while the Russian accents of the draenei can take a little getting used to, the game's voice acting is generally very good.     If you've already spent any serious amount of time with World of Warcraft then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from its first expansion pack. It's true that some of the new quests can feel like a grind, and it's also true that The Burning Crusade's arrival has rendered much of the old endgame content all but obsolete. This is a superb example of exactly what an expansion pack for any game should be, though, and the gulf between World of Warcraft and the pretenders to its throne is now wider than ever.  


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167,Madden NFL 2003 ,9.2, Madden 2003 is a must for anyone with even a passing interest in football.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/6/4/2216864-box_madden03.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2003-review/1900-2877841/,pos,"
Just a few throws downfield are all that you need to be convinced that Madden NFL 2003 is better than its predecessor. Unlike last year's game--which is best remembered for holes in the secondary that permitted the likes of Ryan Leaf to pass for more than 400 yards on any given virtual Sunday--the new game is smart defensively. Call nothing but deep routes here and your quarterback will be rewarded with lots of turnovers and a mouthful of sod. Driving the length of the field is now as tough as it should be, and as satisfying as computer sports gaming gets.  Madden 2003 looks great whether you're up close...  All of this means that Madden 2003 is a must for anyone with even a passing interest in football. It might very well be the finest game in the venerable history of the EA Sports series, thanks to enhancements to the artificial intelligence, spectacular production values, and a number of new game types and bonus features for both hard-core and casual pigskin fans. If not for a console-inspired interface that doesn't lend itself well to the PC and a shortsighted (not to mention tightfisted) approach to online play, the game would be inches from perfection.   But Madden 2003 is nearly flawless where it really counts. When you get down in the trenches, the game provides a remarkably authentic re-creation of the sport of football. This is particularly evident in regard to the defense put up by the artificial intelligence. Computer coaches are almost preternaturally adept at anticipating what play you're about to run, although this varies somewhat depending on which of the four difficulty settings you prefer. Run the textbook play for the situation at hand and you'll likely get stuffed. Fall into a play-calling pattern and you'll almost certainly run into a wall.   ...or back in the pocket on a rainy day.  This is particularly evident when passing. Last year's game featured defensive coverage that was apparently based on zone schemes. No matter what was actually taking place on the field, the linebackers, defensive backs, and safeties would remain in loosely defined areas. The result was an inflexible style that was easy to exploit, particularly when throwing deep, because receivers could run right past defenders. That isn't the case any longer. Defensive players now demonstrate a level of situational awareness that wouldn't be out of place in the defensive backfields of the NFL elite. They react to what you do with all the smarts and speed of their real-life counterparts. Just getting open is a challenge, let alone breaking big plays on a consistent basis. Slow down a replay and you can even see backs reacting to balls in the air, moving into position for a knockdown or an interception, or to make sure that the receiver doesn't go very far.Minicamp games let you hone your skills.  Lifelike physics come into play no matter how you choose to move the ball. On passing plays, the intended receiver has to be in a position to make the reception. If he's not in precisely the right position and facing the right way, the pass will be incomplete. Tackles work in the same fashion. Unless the player is in the right place at the right time, he'll end up grabbing a lot of air. Hitting from an awkward angle can knock the ballcarrier down, but only if a lot of momentum has been built up. This allows you to develop a good ground game, as defenders have to get a good grip to pull down the league's top running backs. Accurately modeling physics in this way makes every play more realistic, both for the obvious reasons and because it forces players to adopt the gang tackle mentality needed when dealing with speedsters like Marshall Faulk and Marvin Harrison. It further accentuates the arcade element of Madden 2003, as you pretty much have to master juking, spinning, stiff-arming, and swimming to handle the best that the NFL has to offer.   These arcade-friendly aspects are made easier to handle this year with the addition of an entertaining minicamp mode. Essentially a series of minigames that help you hone your skills at all positions, this mode is really a computer game version of the old punt, pass, and kick competitions for kids. In this case, however, you get to visit each NFL city in the Madden cruiser and drill with the pros. You'll travel to Kansas City and attempt to make completions through hoops, head down to Dallas for some running with moving tackling dummies, shuffle off to Buffalo to swat balls with defensive backs, and more. Accumulate a high enough score in each city's drill and you will unlock a game situation. When you beat the passing drill in Kansas City, for example, you'll be put at the helm of the Chiefs offense with just two minutes left in a 14-12 game and charged with the task of moving the ball 50 yards in the air for the winning touchdown or field goal. Minicamp cities are organized into rookie, pro, all-pro, and Madden levels of difficulty. As is usual with these sorts of things, you have to beat all the drills and situations in one level before moving on to the next.   You can customize your favorite teams.  If you're a traditionalist interested only in the core football game modes, you won't be disappointed with Madden 2003. Dozens of clubs are included, ranging from classic teams to those in today's NFL and NFL Europe. Most come with team-specific stadiums, and even a range of old-time and alternate uniforms and helmets. You can take part in exhibition games, try career play with the franchise mode, practice plays, work on a two-minute drill, set up specific in-game situations, and go online to take on human opponents. Of these modes of play, franchise has been beefed up the most. All the included teams can be selected here, even the all-time clubs if you're interested in a Hall of Fame-style league. Fictional teams can also be used in franchise play now. Added detail in almost every area makes it seem like you're truly running a pro football club. Dealing with free agents and draft picks now includes lots of negotiation and the requisite obnoxious comments from agents, and you have to prepare for the future by scouting college players before the draft. Player progress can be tracked, so you can tell how those rookies are faring over time.   Many of Madden 2003's gameplay tweaks help long-term play. The game mode options now include a player selection that allows you to have plays called in by a computer coach. This is perfect when you want to abandon management duties for a game or two and see what it's like in today's NFL, where almost everything is signaled in from the sidelines. The accelerated clock feature ticks time off between plays so you get realistic numbers when playing with quarters of 10 minutes or more. Artificial intelligence sliders again allow you to adjust nearly every aspect of the gridiron game, from quarterback accuracy to the likelihood of a pass being knocked down.Online play is more of a focus in this year's edition of the Madden series. Quick games, tournaments, and ranked matchups are available with just a couple of clicks on the login box on the main menu screen. Buddy lists are also maintained, so you know when your favorite opponents are also online and looking for a game. Unfortunately, the EA Sports Online player matching service is free for just the first 60 days. After that, a subscription fee of $4.95 a month is applied. Tokens for added time can be earned by playing games against ranked opponents, although this isn't much of an olive branch when official matching services of this kind are typically offered without charge. Furthermore, a notice on the back of the box points out that ""EA reserves the right to retire the EA Sports Online support for this product after 90 days notice, or 30 days after the last game of the 2002-2003 NFL season."" Which of course means that you're going to have to upgrade to Madden 2004 to continue to play online, whether you like it or not. And you might not even be able to play Madden 2003 online after the lights are turned out on Super Bowl XXXVII next January.  Madden 2003 just looks great.  Otherwise, Madden 2003 has been enhanced in terms of look and sound, for the most part. This is largely due to the way that this year's PC and console versions were developed simultaneously--unlike last time around, when the PC game was a port of the previous year's PlayStation 2 release. Graphically, there is no comparison between this game and any other in the sports genre. Stadiums are livened up with operating scoreboards, animated crowds that often seem like they're made up of real individuals, lighting effects that dramatize the sun during daytime games and stadium floodlights at night, and field textures so realistic that you could almost get a grass stain on your monitor. The player models move smoothly, although there are a few animation hitches in the replay mode, where frames are skipped when the quarterback releases a pass. Mapped faces and uniforms that get dirty as you progress through a game complete the Sunday-afternoon look.   The only crack in this perfect facade is in the interface, which remains too console-centric to be anything but awkward on the PC. There are no pull-down menus, there's no double-click support, and you have to call up new menu screens to do just about anything. A series of linked icons in the revolver menu at the bottom right of every screen helps with basic navigation, though it's still too easy to get lost or confused in the early hours of play. It's a shame that Madden 2003 isn't following in the footsteps of EA's NHL 2003, which will ship in mid-September with an interface designed specifically for the PC.  Menu screens betray Madden's console roots.  Madden 2003's audio keeps pace with current tunes from Bon Jovi, Andrew WK, and others, along with good on-the-field audio effects. The broadcast-booth work from the new Monday Night Football team of John Madden, Al Michaels, and Melissa Stark is merely passable, with lots of variety in the commentary but little information being provided. Big John seems to have phoned in his lines again this year, as they never go beyond the generic. They even lapse into the monosyllabic. When you ask his advice on calling a play, the usual comment is something like, ""Hey, why not try this play?"" A grunt would have been just as helpful.   The awkward interface and EA Sports' questionable online policies aside, Madden NFL 2003 is a great football game. It's a great way to get warmed up for the real NFL season, which is now just a few short weeks away. The challenging difficulty, numerous modes of play, and availability of Internet opposition means that it should also be a welcome companion as that season plays out over the coming months.
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168,Celebrity Deathmatch ,2.8, MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch is a mess from top to bottom.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/0/4/8/4560-18048.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/celebrity-deathmatch-review/1900-6077399/,neg,"
 Celebrity Deathmatch, MTV's clay-animated comedy series, featuring random celebrities killing one another off in an exaggerated, gladiatorlike fashion, was a surprise hit back in 1998 when it debuted as a part of MTV's own Super Bowl halftime show. Since its initial matchup between shock-rocker Marilyn Manson and convicted mass murderer Charles Manson, hundreds of different celebrity matchups have been featured on the show, ranging from the marginally relevant (Bob Barker vs. Weakest Link host Anne Robinson) to the utterly insane (psychic John Edwards vs. Nostradamus). While the show is still technically on the air, Celebrity Deathmatch isn't quite at the level of popularity it once was, which makes the timing of Gotham Games' console and PC representation of the show, MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, a bit peculiar. However, Celebrity Deathmatch's biggest problem isn't its timing, but, rather, it's the absolutely horrid gameplay and complete lack of any worthwhile features.  MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch brings home the mayhem of the hit clay-animated TV series.  Celebrity Deathmatch contains a decent number of real-life celebrities, available for your personal amusement, including the aforementioned Marilyn Manson, Carmen Electra, Dennis Rodman, Anna Nicole Smith, Mr. T, Carrot Top, Jerry Springer, Ron Jeremy, Miss Cleo, Cindy Margolis, Busta Rhymes, Shannen Doherty, Tommy Lee, and all five members of N'Sync. Each celebrity has his or her own unique--albeit narrow--range of attacks set to reflect his or her personality. Anna Nicole Smith, for instance, can hit you with a large drumstick of meat, send her yappy little dog after you, or smash you with a pair of melons (the fruit variety, thankfully). Every character also has a special kill attack that can be performed once your opponent's life meter has dropped to nil. Mr. T drops the A-Team van on you; Tommy Lee plays your intestines like an electric guitar; and Ron Jeremy drops a pair of oversized balls on you--disco balls, that is. It doesn't get much more gimmicky than Celebrity Deathmatch's premise; but whereas the TV show manages to stay reasonably fresh from week to week, by providing at least timely and semi-relevant comedy, the game's version of the gimmick is so utterly limited that you'll be done with it almost immediately.  The most limiting thing about Celebrity Deathmatch isn't actually even its gimmick, but, rather, its gameplay system. Every fighter has an extremely short list of attacks available to them, and only about half of these are actually useful. Some attacks are so insanely gimmicky that they actually buck any sort of functionality or usefulness for the sake of a joke. Additionally, the attack system is about as rudimentary as you'll ever find, involving so little skill that all you'll ever need to do to win a match is just hammer on the attack buttons until your opponent is dead. Sure, they'll occasionally block, but not often enough to ever require any form of strategy or plan of attack on your part.  The word ""limited"" is highly useful when describing the roster of modes in the game as well. The only two gameplay modes featured in the game are deathmatch and episode. Deathmatch is just a stand-alone match between any of the fighters in the game. Episode lets you choose from six available ""episodes"" of the show, each one with three predetermined fights on the card. Once you've beaten an episode, you'll unlock a hidden character (like Frankenstein or a generic alien) and a new fight arena as well. It should only take you about 90 minutes--tops--to blaze through the episode mode, and once you've unlocked everything, that's all she wrote. The game also has a create-a-celebrity mode, which, theoretically, is supposed to let you create your own roster of famous people to bludgeon to death. Once again, however, the word ""limited"" comes into play, as there just aren't many options to choose from in this mode, leaving you with only a scant few options and no real ability to create anyone recognizable.  The game's few gags get old very fast, and the incredibly dull and simplistic gameplay doesn't help much.  Celebrity Deathmatch's graphics and sound are also decisively lacking in pretty much every way. The game doesn't really try to emulate the show's clay-animated art style, and, instead, goes for a straight cartoon-styled polygonal translation of each celebrity. The models for the characters look decent enough, but each of them lacks much in the way of animation. There's a few different deathmatch arenas to try out, but none of them look particularly good. The game's audio is a bit better, thanks to the infrequently amusing commentary of Johnny Gomez and Nick Diamond. It's functional commentary, though a lot of the humor is a little on the crude and offensive side. (In fact, there's far more offensive humor in the game--more than the TV show ever allowed.) Cheesy voice actors play the parts of the various celebrities, and they're no worse than the actors employed on the show. The rest of the audio might as well not even exist, as it consists largely of poorly mixed sound effects and the show's looping theme song, which only plays in menu screens.  MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch is a mess from top to bottom. The jokes are rarely ever funny, the gameplay is a veritable smorgasbord of repetitive and boring action, and the underwhelming graphics and sound don't help matters. If you're a fan of the TV program, you may find Celebrity Deathmatch amusing for the 20 minutes it takes to see every single gag in the game once, and even that might be a bit of a stretch. As for anyone else, stay as far away from Celebrity Deathmatch as is humanly possible.  
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169,Celebrity Deathmatch ,2.8, MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch is a mess from top to bottom.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/0/4/8/4560-18048.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/celebrity-deathmatch-review/1900-6077400/,neg,"
 Celebrity Deathmatch, MTV's clay-animated comedy series, featuring random celebrities killing one another off in an exaggerated, gladiatorlike fashion, was a surprise hit back in 1998 when it debuted as a part of MTV's own Super Bowl halftime show. Since its initial matchup between shock-rocker Marilyn Manson and convicted mass murderer Charles Manson, hundreds of different celebrity matchups have been featured on the show, ranging from the marginally relevant (Bob Barker vs. Weakest Link host Anne Robinson) to the utterly insane (psychic John Edwards vs. Nostradamus). While the show is still technically on the air, Celebrity Deathmatch isn't quite at the level of popularity it once was, which makes the timing of Gotham Games' console and PC representation of the show, MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, a bit peculiar. However, Celebrity Deathmatch's biggest problem isn't its timing, but, rather, it's the absolutely horrid gameplay and complete lack of any worthwhile features.  MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch brings home the mayhem of the hit clay-animated TV series.  Celebrity Deathmatch contains a decent number of real-life celebrities, available for your personal amusement, including the aforementioned Marilyn Manson, Carmen Electra, Dennis Rodman, Anna Nicole Smith, Mr. T, Carrot Top, Jerry Springer, Ron Jeremy, Miss Cleo, Cindy Margolis, Busta Rhymes, Shannen Doherty, Tommy Lee, and all five members of N'Sync. Each celebrity has his or her own unique--albeit narrow--range of attacks set to reflect his or her personality. Anna Nicole Smith, for instance, can hit you with a large drumstick of meat, send her yappy little dog after you, or smash you with a pair of melons (the fruit variety, thankfully). Every character also has a special kill attack that can be performed once your opponent's life meter has dropped to nil. Mr. T drops the A-Team van on you; Tommy Lee plays your intestines like an electric guitar; and Ron Jeremy drops a pair of oversized balls on you--disco balls, that is. It doesn't get much more gimmicky than Celebrity Deathmatch's premise; but whereas the TV show manages to stay reasonably fresh from week to week, by providing at least timely and semi-relevant comedy, the game's version of the gimmick is so utterly limited that you'll be done with it almost immediately.  The most limiting thing about Celebrity Deathmatch isn't actually even its gimmick, but, rather, its gameplay system. Every fighter has an extremely short list of attacks available to them, and only about half of these are actually useful. Some attacks are so insanely gimmicky that they actually buck any sort of functionality or usefulness for the sake of a joke. Additionally, the attack system is about as rudimentary as you'll ever find, involving so little skill that all you'll ever need to do to win a match is just hammer on the attack buttons until your opponent is dead. Sure, they'll occasionally block, but not often enough to ever require any form of strategy or plan of attack on your part.  The word ""limited"" is highly useful when describing the roster of modes in the game as well. The only two gameplay modes featured in the game are deathmatch and episode. Deathmatch is just a stand-alone match between any of the fighters in the game. Episode lets you choose from six available ""episodes"" of the show, each one with three predetermined fights on the card. Once you've beaten an episode, you'll unlock a hidden character (like Frankenstein or a generic alien) and a new fight arena as well. It should only take you about 90 minutes--tops--to blaze through the episode mode, and once you've unlocked everything, that's all she wrote. The game also has a create-a-celebrity mode, which, theoretically, is supposed to let you create your own roster of famous people to bludgeon to death. Once again, however, the word ""limited"" comes into play, as there just aren't many options to choose from in this mode, leaving you with only a scant few options and no real ability to create anyone recognizable.  The game's few gags get old very fast, and the incredibly dull and simplistic gameplay doesn't help much.  Celebrity Deathmatch's graphics and sound are also decisively lacking in pretty much every way. The game doesn't really try to emulate the show's clay-animated art style, and, instead, goes for a straight cartoon-styled polygonal translation of each celebrity. The models for the characters look decent enough, but each of them lacks much in the way of animation. There's a few different deathmatch arenas to try out, but none of them look particularly good. The game's audio is a bit better, thanks to the infrequently amusing commentary of Johnny Gomez and Nick Diamond. It's functional commentary, though a lot of the humor is a little on the crude and offensive side. (In fact, there's far more offensive humor in the game--more than the TV show ever allowed.) Cheesy voice actors play the parts of the various celebrities, and they're no worse than the actors employed on the show. The rest of the audio might as well not even exist, as it consists largely of poorly mixed sound effects and the show's looping theme song, which only plays in menu screens.  MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch is a mess from top to bottom. The jokes are rarely ever funny, the gameplay is a veritable smorgasbord of repetitive and boring action, and the underwhelming graphics and sound don't help matters. If you're a fan of the TV program, you may find Celebrity Deathmatch amusing for the 20 minutes it takes to see every single gag in the game once, and even that might be a bit of a stretch. As for anyone else, stay as far away from Celebrity Deathmatch as is humanly possible.  
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170,The History Channel's Crusades: Quest for Power ,2.8," Crusades: Quest for Power may bear the logo of The History Channel, but the only thing this half-baked RTS teaches us is a lesson in terrible game design.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/5/8/1/19970-57581.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-history-channels-crusades-quest-for-power-revi/1900-6083695/,neg,"
 Crusades: Quest for Power may bear the logo of The History Channel, but the only thing this half-baked RTS teaches us is a lesson in terrible game design. Any notion that this budget title is somewhat educational is dashed by a simplistic focus on tank rush-style combat and killing enemies for gold. It is also something of a buggy mess that has nothing to do with the actual Crusades and even less to do with fulfilling, engaging gameplay.  At least some of the pyrotechnics are entertaining. These Saracen bowmen serve up great crusader flambé.  Actually, it's pretty difficult to even tell what sort of gameplay the developers are trying to present here. Crusades is ostensibly a traditional real-time strategy game, in that you build bases, collect resources, and crank out units. But it is so stripped-down that at times it feels like a blend of Age of Empires and Diablo. Scenarios are fast-paced and jammed with right-click combat, so they often have the atmosphere of an isometric hack-and-slash RPG. You even have to pick up sacks of gold that are dropped by slain enemies, and you must also open treasure chests containing holy relics.  The RTS elements are as flimsy as the scenery in a grade-school play. Building your armies involves nothing more than erecting infantry, bowman, and crusader/holy warrior tents and issuing build orders for the respective units. Gold is the only resource. Combat is so fast-paced that there is no need for tactical thinking. Abysmal pathfinding would negate such strategizing even if it were an option. Every scenario is a tank rush where you band-select groups of soldiers and their supporting holy men healers and then have at it. There isn't much of a challenge in any of this, either. The developer seems to be aiming for the casual gamer, and, as a result, anyone with the tiniest amount of RTS experience will be able to breeze through the missions featured in the Eastern and Western campaigns. Since there aren't any multiplayer modes, and there's just a cheap ""instant action"" skirmish option that features a pair of maps, you can see all there is to see in just three or four hours.  History is also barely there. Units are generic medieval soldiers who wield generic swords and bows. Crusaders look like the popular conception of the medieval knight, complete with heavy silver armor, jug-shaped helmets, and bloodred crosses on their tunics. Saracen holy warriors look like the Western conception of a medieval Arab, meaning that they wield scimitars and look like something out of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Stereotypes are something of a hallmark of the game design.  The scenarios don't make reference to historical events, and they often don't even make sense. Much of the Eastern campaign, for instance, has the Saracens defending the capital of their Byzantine archenemies. The very Christian city of Constantinople (in the time period of the Crusades, that is) is decked out with mosques, and the Muslim Saracens bizarrely fight to save the Church of the Holy Wisdom from ""sacrilege"" in one mission. In a further oddity, Christian artifacts are stocked in the mystery treasure chests in both campaigns. This presents you with the strange spectacle of seeing Muslim holy men being blessed with monk's robes and flasks of holy water. It's hard to believe that this game has the seal of approval from The History Channel.  Presentation values are somewhat higher than expected for a budget game. Graphically, Crusades looks pretty good. The fully 3D engine does a nice job with soldiers and backdrops, though the lack of variety in unit types takes a toll after just a couple of scenarios in each campaign. Zono has done a great job with the camera. You can zoom right in on the action and pan out to see a tactical view of what's developing in the distance, though the latter isn't useful because enemies just pop into view from out of thin air. There are also some nice flourishes, like Christian soldiers who run around cartoonishly and scream whenever they're set alight by a Saracen flaming arrow.  The audio doesn't fare as well. The musical score consists of a flute-heavy tune that sounds vaguely Middle Eastern but is hampered by being about 10 seconds long. It constantly loops and gets so irritating so fast that you'll be hard-pressed to keep away from that mute button for more than a couple of minutes. Voice acting is handled with all the ethnic sensitivity of a 1940s Bugs Bunny cartoon. The developers don't even get this right, as they give the Arab Saracens overblown Indian accents more befitting of Apu from The Simpsons than Saladin.  Graphics are the game's lone high point, especially when you zoom in for a close look at the bloody action.  Bugs are another major problem. It's pretty obvious that Zono made this game on the cheap, but was it really necessary to skimp on quality control? The game was initially unplayable because of a problem that locked the mouse cursor into the top right corner of the opening menu screen. Switching from a cordless mouse to one of the corded variety solved the problem, though only momentarily. While the game could then be started, the cursor often went astray, would momentarily get stuck, or would wind up becoming immovable in that top right corner again. Occasionally, the cursor refused to budge when the game was loaded, forcing a Ctrl-Alt-Del restart. Then the game wouldn't come back until Windows was rebooted. Incidentally, reducing video acceleration (which often helps when facing cursor troubles) did nothing to correct this problem.  About the only unabashedly good thing you can say about Crusades: Quest for Power is that it retails for just $20 as part of the Activision Value Publishing line. Even this isn't a deal, as you can find much better and far more stable RTS games in the bargain bin for the same price or less.  
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171,Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie ,2.8," Kong's DS adventure is unambitious, boring, ugly, and buggy.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/5/9/7/2213597-box_kingkong.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/peter-jacksons-king-kong-the-official-game-of-the-/1900-6140814/,neg,"
  Talk around the watercooler suggests that the console versions of Peter Jackson's King Kong are thrilling and entertaining, albeit brief in length. If you're interested in playing a video game based upon the big ape's recent silver screen adventure, by all means, pick up the console game and enjoy yourself. Whatever you do, don't give the Nintendo DS game a passing thought, or, heaven forbid, waste money on it. This poor excuse of a first-person shooter is so bad that other developers should study it and use it as a guide for what to avoid when putting together similar games in the future.   King Kong on the DS has very little in common with its console counterpart.   Like its console counterparts, the DS game is set up primarily as a first-person shooter and only loosely follows the events from the movie. Everything takes place on Skull Island, which is home to a tribe of superstitious natives, some prehistoric beasts, and a giant ape known as King Kong. Players spend the majority of the 17 levels directly controlling the swashbuckling hero, Jack Driscoll, in first-person-viewpoint environments that are mainly oriented around shooting enemies and unlocking doors. In the movie, key events are set in motion by three of Jack's companions, namely Carl Denham, the pushy filmmaker; Hayes, the expedition guide; and Ann Darrow, the actress that Carl has hired to star in his latest film. In the game, most of the mischief caused by these characters is shown in still-frame cutaways, although they do tag along behind Jack during certain levels and help out as necessary. Approximately every five levels or so, the game shifts gears and puts players in control of the mighty Kong. These levels employ a third-person perspective and mostly involve climbing, jumping, and swinging across the island with some hand-to-hand combat thrown in along the way.    Without question, the idea of being able to play as a human one moment and Kong the next is brilliant. Unfortunately, the action-packed combat and beastly cathartic moments that were realized so frequently in the console game aren't present in the DS game. Progression through the first-person levels is entirely too straightforward. Despite the jungle setting, each level is basically just a long hallway with a few offshoots, turns, and doors incorporated in order to obscure the nagging feeling that, indeed, you really are just walking down one hallway after another. Ironically, even though this is a first-person shooter, players rarely get the opportunity to shoot at things. Enemies are sparsely distributed, to the point that most combat situations involve a lone crab skittering toward you with its claws extended. What's more, every enemy is a crab, a bee, a bat, or a Velociraptor-like dinosaur. Velociraptors are worthy foes, but crabs and bees?     The control mechanics in the first-person levels are fine, but, there too, the developer didn't make an effort to do anything interesting with them. You can move Jack around using the directional pad, change his eyeline by dragging the stylus across the touch screen, and fire weapons or activate switches by pressing one of the shoulder buttons. When you come across a switch that Jack can't reach, you can also double-tap the touch screen to command Carl, Hayes, or Ann to pull it. That's everything players have control over. Aiming is mostly automatic, Jack can't jump or perform any melee attacks, and there isn't any inventory management because Jack can only carry one weapon at a time. As it is, Jack's weapon options are pitiful and extremely limited. He can throw spears and pick up and use four different guns. For whatever reason, though, someone on the development team decided that the spear and pistol should be more effective than the shotgun or machine gun.     The Kong levels aren't much better. They give off a larger-than-life vibe because of Kong's size and the third-person perspective, but all of the tree-swinging falls flat because the majority of Kong's actions are pre-scripted. He can't fall off a ledge, miss a jump, or lose his grip. All players need to do is press the B button over and over again to make Kong progress from one handhold to the next. Combat requires slightly more input. Smaller lizards have to be knocked away by pressing the punch or slam buttons, while larger T-Rexes must first be worn down with basic attacks before initiating the killing blow, which is a neck snap that's performed by rapidly pressing the Y button. Even though the Kong levels aren't that good, they're easily the best aspect of the game. It's a pity that among the 17 levels, only four of them involve playing as Kong.    Clearly, the game was doomed from conception because the design and development staff wasn't ambitious enough with their ideas. On the whole, there isn't much for players to do. The first-person levels are overly linear and don't contain anywhere near what would be considered a satisfactory number of enemies. There certainly aren't enough Kong levels. The control mechanics are fine, but so many actions are automatic or pre-scripted so that it takes away hands-on opportunities that might have helped the layouts and combat seem less boring.    Not surprisingly, the graphics, audio, and pretty much everything else associated with the game's entire presentation are underwhelming. The woefully inadequate 3D graphics engine is about on par with the early Turok games that were on the Nintendo 64. The environments look vaguely like the caves and forests you might find on a jungle island, except that the layouts are numbingly linear, and graphical flaws, such as blocky textures and excessive fog, are ever present. Polygon seams are visible all over the place, too. A fair amount of polygons went into Jack's visible appendages and his weapons, and also into Kong, so those character aspects look sharp. However, the other characters and enemies are downright ugly. The crabs and bees are put together with so few polygons that they look like two-dimensional sprites, and they barely animate. The rendition of Ann Darrow, played in the film by Naomi Watts, looks sickly, as if she were recently bitten by a zombie and decided to trade in her designer duds for a burlap sack. Although the accompanying audio isn't bad, there really isn't much to the soundtrack aside from a dramatic music loop that repeats constantly and a few rudimentary weapon and creature sound effects.     Above all, the entire presentation is just anticlimactic from the get-go. Every single one of the movie's greatest and most action-packed moments is depicted in the game as a series of still-frame images. Kong's climb up the Empire State Building, easily the most recognizable scene from the film, is rendered using the game engine, but it too is a waste of time, since players can't actually control any aspect of the sequence.    Adding injury to insult, the game is full of programming bugs. Bullets and spears will pass right through enemies if they're at point-blank range. Sometimes, Jack can walk through walls, which may cause you to fall to your death in a vague polygonal abyss. The game also has a nasty habit of resetting itself, particularly in the ninth level when Jack and Hayes encounter a set of crabs. A less-annoying glitch, but one that's amusing to witness, is when an enemy slides sideways across the ground, like on a sheet of ice, and eventually just disappears right into a wall. Whether due to bad planning, rushed programming, or poor quality control, there's simply no excuse for a retail packaged video game to exhibit bugs like this.   The DS version of King Kong is full of bugs.   Mercifully, it only takes about two hours to play through the entire game, although mentally the experience feels like an eternity thanks to the mind-numbing gameplay and presentation. Once you finish a level, you can't replay it without starting a new save file. There is no unlockable content. The reward awaiting any player stubborn enough to finish the game is a brief, non-interactive Kong sequence that's honestly the only part of the game players might actually want to have control over, since it involves the Empire State Building and a few pesky airplanes. No such luck, though. You'll just have to watch Kong do his dirty work and enjoy the credits that roll right after.    The DS hardware is more than capable of handling a competent, well-designed first-person shooter. Even the Metroid Prime: First Hunt demo that came packaged with the first batch of systems is proof enough of that. The DS version of Peter Jackson's King Kong is a wreck, not because of the hardware's weaknesses, but because the developers just didn't put any effort or inspiration into their game.    
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172,Made Man ,2.8," After a few hours with Made Man, you'll be begging for someone to put two in the back of your head.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/0/9/2213809-mademan_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/made-man-review/1900-6170735/,neg,"
  Rarely has an action game squandered such a solid concept as Aspyr and Silverback Studios' Made Man has. Gangland shooters should be a pretty easy thing to put together at this point, yet Made Man is proof positive that with the right amount of indifference and general disdain for the game-buying public, you can still make complete dreck out of a seemingly foolproof concept. The weirdest thing is that by all accounts, Made Man shouldn't have ever come out. This is one of the last few games now-defunct publisher Acclaim had in the pipes when it went under a few years back. Now Aspyr has resurrected its unfinished corpse, yet apparently it didn't bother to have anyone fix it up beyond what was necessary to make the game install and load up. From its buggy, intensely frustrating gameplay to its near-absent production values, Made Man is a flat-out mess across every category.   Shooting brain-dead mafia thugs while listening to an inordinate amount of heavily accented cursing--yep, that's Made Man in a nutshell.   Made Man tells the story of Joey Verola, a longtime Mafia crony who's on the verge of being ""made."" Most of the story is a series of flashbacks that Joey recants to a friend while they drive through New York. What, exactly, the whole plot is actually about is never terribly clear. The game jumps around a lot, and the cutscenes aren't scripted well enough to properly extrapolate on what's going down. One minute you're hijacking a truck in North Carolina; the next you're in the middle of the Vietnam War. The in-between bits of narration try to set all this up into an overarching tale of gold buried in a coffin and rival families in cahoots with federal agents to take you down, but it's all very disjointed and, after a while, insufferable. The lone positive is that Joey is voiced by a solid actor who seems to be channeling Goodfellas-era Ray Liotta at times, and he sells the character as best he can. But every other actor hams it up so badly, and the plot itself is so scattered and unintelligible, that the whole thing is downgraded to somewhere between Godfather III and Corky Romano in the lexicon of mob fiction.    Even if the plot were better, odds are you wouldn't be able to put up with Made Man's awful gameplay long enough to really invest yourself in it. It all begins with the shooting controls, which were sluggish-to-the-point-of-broken in the earlier-released PlayStation 2 version of the game. In the PC version, controlling the aiming reticle with the mouse doesn't drag as much as it did when using the PS2 controller's analog stick (conversely, there's no controller support at all in this version), so it is a good bit easier to hit targets while moving. Still, it's entirely too easy to get shot to pieces while fiddling with the zoom toggle to get a proper aim on anything.    To counteract this, you'll want to use cover as often as you can--though the fact that the cover mechanics border on broken kind of negates the usefulness of this feature. All you need to do is walk up to a spot that looks as if you could duck behind it, like a wall or a box, and press the designated button. Problem is, sometimes that just doesn't register, and you stand there like an idiot while bullets riddle your dopey-looking self. When it does register, there are some cover areas that you can still get shot behind, even though it looks like your whole body is covered. Even more obnoxious, you have to peer out from cover to get any kind of target on your enemies, and the second you do so, they pounce and start firing away at your peeking-out head. And for the game's final trick, sometimes you can't get the targeting reticle out far enough to even hit anything. It's as if it just gets stuck in one spot, and won't move far enough out to shoot anything other than the box you're sitting behind.    The really hilarious thing about all this is that enemies aren't even that smart. They're all crackerjack shots, but they also tend to stand in plain sight. The ones who do use cover tend not to shoot that much, meaning you can just take as long as you like to pick them off when they peer out from time to time. And then there are the enemies who just stand idly behind walls, doing nothing as you blast at them from two feet away.    Of course, when enemies travel in the kind of numbers that they do in Made Man, and have the innate ability to hone in on the teensiest part of your exposed body and shoot it to death very, very quickly, it really doesn't make much difference if you're a dunce or a Rhodes scholar. Most of the game's missions just revolve around getting from point A to point B while killing everyone in between, and often there's quite a bit to kill. So many bullets and such clunky aiming and shooting mechanics conspire to make the gameplay little more than a constant frustration. The game tries to throw a few curveballs in with a ""kill rush"" feature that slows down time temporarily and leads to you getting shot slightly less frequently, and a ""retort kill,"" where some not-quite-dead enemy says something insulting to you, and then you stand over them and execute them while uttering some painful quip back to them (doing this refills your health gauge, for some reason). Not only do the execution moves look lame (and sometimes broken, as Joey won't even be facing the guy he's killing), but they don't pop up often enough to be all that useful.    Couple the infuriating shooting sequences with some abysmal stealth bits, and you pretty much get a game that's no fun to play at all. That the game isn't longer than six or seven hours is almost merciful, though in real time, it'll take you a lot longer than that to get through it, as you'll find yourself replaying dozens of sequences again and again and again. Perhaps if the game had a better checkpoint system or any sort of autosave functionality, that might not be such an issue, but that's not the case. You'll also want to be diligent about saving on your own, as the game does occasionally lock up and force you to reboot. Or, you know, you could just not play it. That'd probably be better for all involved.   Wait, five minutes ago I was smuggling cigarettes out of North Carolina, and now I'm in Vietnam? What in the blue blazes is going on with this game?   Even more horrific than the gameplay is the presentation. At times, Made Man looks like a game made for the original PlayStation, and even when it manages to claw its way up to something that looks marginally close to modern, it still lines the bottom of the barrel with its hideous-looking textures, atrocious animations, and zombielike character models. At least the PC version looks crisper than the PS2 version did, and the frame rate is far less erratic, but it's still a poor looking game all around. The audio is even worse than the graphics, mostly because of the editing. Joey's voice acting, in-game sound effects, and the licensed soundtrack (yes, they actually went and got licensed songs for this pile of junk, including stuff from artists like UNKLE, Bachman Turner Overdrive, and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas) are all pretty solid, but the audio mix is so wildly inconsistent and periodically busted that it's impossible to enjoy any of it. Sometimes dialogue starts skipping loudly, characters start talking over one another for long stretches, and any time voice over narration pops up in-game, the music just cuts out altogether.    If you painstakingly dig through Made Man's seemingly endless onslaught of poor design decisions and ugly problems, you might be able to spot a few things that come across as legitimately interesting or entertaining. But it's just not worth sifting through so much garbage to get to a few fleeting moments of fun, especially when dozens upon dozens of games do this formula loads better than Made Man does. Made Man was all set to be canceled once, and it should have stayed that way. Don't play this game.  
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173,Harlem Globetrotters: World Tour ,2.8, Harlem Globetrotters: World Tour is a sloppy two-on-two basketball game that includes Globetrotters players but none of their signature shots or antics.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/6/3/2217463-harlem_globetrotters_world_tour.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/harlem-globetrotters-world-tour-review/1900-6160361/,neg,"
  Whether you're a fan of the Harlem Globetrotters or just looking for a basketball game to play on your Game Boy Advance, you're bound to be disappointed by Harlem Globetrotters: World Tour. This pathetic NBA Jam rip-off contains none of the Globetrotters' trademark shtick, and, worse than that, it serves up a flimsy rendition of basketball that's as broken as it is dull.   You can pick from 26 actual Globetrotters, but you won't see any of their signature dunks or antics in this game.   Long before the And 1 Streetballers, there were the Harlem Globetrotters. Since 1927, different incarnations of the Globetrotters have been thrilling audiences worldwide with their tongue-in-cheek brand of acrobatic basketball. If you've ever watched a streetballer dribble through an opponent's legs, bounce the ball off an opponent's chest, juggle multiple basketballs, or perform a somersaulting dunk, then you have some idea of what you'd see at a Globetrotters exhibition, because they were the first ones to do all those tricks. It's ironic, then, not to mention sad, that Harlem Globetrotters: World Tour neglects to incorporate any of the team's signature antics, aside from some high-flying dunks that look suspiciously like they were copied from Midway's NBA Jam games.    In fact, the whole game feels like a gimped knockoff of NBA Jam. Play is two-on-two, quarters last two minutes, and players take different canned shots depending on where they're standing when you push the shot button. Press it from the top of the key, for example, and you'll do a Michael Jordan-style hang-time dunk. That's nice and all, but there are only a handful of unique shots in the game, and the animations range from choppy to nonexistent. Half the time, the ball will disappear from your player's hand and appear in the basket. Passing animations are similarly jumpy, to the extent that you or the CPU can dish the ball down the court without actually seeing the receiving player grab the ball. The ref won't call you for fouls, so it's OK to mash the steal button with abandon. Unfortunately, doing so doesn't conjure up any antics worthy of the Globetrotters name. Just tap the button a couple of times and you'll end up with the ball. As if that weren't boring enough, the CPU rarely bothers to pass or steal, which means you'll be up by at least 10 points by the end of the first quarter.    It's shameful to see just how little care went into putting the game together. There are only two play modes, world tour and quick play, and progress is tracked with passwords instead of by an automatic cartridge backup. The gameplay isn't simply dull; it's also broken. Frequently, when you press the shoot or pass buttons, the ball will sail toward the wrong basket or an empty corner of the court. As for the CPU, it attempts full-court shots after every other rebound and will completely ignore you if you stand on the lower edge of the court and let the clock run out. The game doesn't support link play, so you have no recourse against the brain-dead CPU.    Shots sail in the wrong direction. The animations are disorienting. This game is broken.   You won't find much solace in the presentation, either. The player graphics are large and the courts look stunning, but the animation is so choppy and bizarre that it's impossible to follow what's going on. Jump shots and layups seem to teleport, dunks go in after the fact, and shot takers somehow materialize under the hoop to catch their own three-point attempts. Audio consists of a few generic sports anthems, some chirpy sneakers, and short recorded clips of children cheering. When you're not taking shots, all you'll hear is silence broken up by the intermittent chirp of those squeaky shoes. Incredibly, the Globetrotters' own theme music, ""Sweet Georgia Brown,"" is nowhere to be heard!     Hardly any effort was made to incorporate the Globetrotters license into the game. There aren't any wacky plays or halftime sideshows. You'll never see a Globetrotters player hurl a bucket of confetti at the crowd. The titular team does include 26 actual players from the past few years, which is nice, but the roster doesn't include legends like Meadowlark Lemon, Fred ""Curly"" Neal, or ""Sweet"" Lou Dunbar. Those guys appeared in the 1970's cartoon series and in multiple Scooby-Doo! episodes! It's also disappointing that all of the 15 other opposing teams are fake squads populated by fictional players. They didn't even bother to include the Globetrotters' current or classic rivals, the New York Nationals or the Washington Generals. Harlem Globetrotters: World Tour for the Game Boy Advance is a complete letdown in every way. It's a crummy basketball game and an insult to the Globetrotters' legacy.  
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174,Extreme Winter Sports ,2.7, About the only thing Extreme Winter Sports really succeeds at is to remind you of how much better other snowing and skiing games are than this lifeless sim.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/3/7/173-637.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/extreme-winter-sports-review/1900-2532009/,neg,"
That relentless summer heat getting you down? Dreaming of those brisk winter days where the powder was perfect and you could do no wrong? Then dream no more, because Head Games' Extreme Wintersports lets you vicariously relive all those moments and many other adrenaline-packed adventures - all with a price tag that'll help you afford those new ski boots you've been eyeing for the last three months. No, wait a minute - I just can't do it. You see, that's the way a lot of reviews were written in the bad old days, when some PC game magazines kowtowed to publishers for fear they'd pull their advertising dollars (or not advertise in the first place). So here's the truth about Extreme Wintersports, or at least my decidedly biased version of it: This game exists only because Head Games managed to talk Arctic Cat (snowmobile manufacturer) and K2 (ski manufacturer) into sticking their names on the box and allowing their products to be featured in the ""game."" At first glance, Extreme Wintersports would seem to be several notches above such Head Games oddities as Top Shot (a target-range simulation) or the nauseating Extreme Paintbrawl. At least it's based on sports that have been made into fun games in the past. But about the only thing Extreme Wintersports really succeeds at is to remind you of how much better other snowing and skiing games are than this lifeless sim. Like Extreme Tennis, Extreme Wintersports opens each session by sending you to a Pro Shop where you're supposed to pick out equipment and accessories - but none of your choices have any impact on how you perform when you hit the slopes or trails. You just look at the stuff and pretend to buy it, then choose skis, a snowboard, or snowmobile all over again when you finally play. Head Games could have added 15 or 20 minutes to this game's play life by giving you a budget to work with while in the Pro Shop, but that idea probably got nixed because it would show how boring the rest of the game is. Once you finish with the advertising fluff, you leave the shop and try your hand at one of three sports: skiing, snowboarding, or snowmobiling. How ""extreme"" is the skiing? Well, don't be expecting any freestyle acrobatics; all you do is head down a slope in hopes of racking up the fastest time. Snowmobiling? Except for some ridiculous power-ups you can grab to cut your time or give you a speed burst, the only thing ""extreme"" about this event is the railroad ties someone's thoughtfully scattered in your path on the cross-country courses. That leaves snowboarding, which clocks in slightly higher on the fun level by giving you the chance to perform some acrobatics - but there's no half pipe for pulling off really outrageous maneuvers, and things get old pretty quickly here also. Miss a flag while practicing skiing - yes, practicing - and you've got to start all over again after some ""cool"" guy calls you a loser. Snowboarding practice sessions end with the same jerk's voice if time expires before you reach the bottom of the run (or at least I think that's why the session ends - it might have something to do with a mysterious meter on the left side of the screen that's not mentioned in the two-page ""manual""). Those fancy snowmobiles are almost impossible to control no matter what input method you choose (you can't reconfigure keyboard or joystick commands, by the way), and after a few runs you'll be ready to pack it in for good. Topping off this boring mess are the earsplitting sound effects preceding each race that you'd swear were ported directly from an Atari 2600 game - a suspicion that grows stronger when you hear the pathetic Atari whine used for the snowmobile or the grating hiss that's supposed to be the sound of someone skiing. The best you can say about Extreme Wintersports is that HeadGames, K2, and Arctic Cat apparently got what they wanted: HeadGames was able to crank out yet another budget title, and K2 and Arctic Cat got either licensing dollars or free advertising, or both. Too bad no one ever thought to include gamers in the equation.
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175,VR Sports Powerboat Racing ,2.7," If you're a fan of powerboat racing and think it's neat that it has been turned into a video game, don't get your hopes up.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/8/0/2211980-vr_sports_powerboat_racing.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/vr-sports-powerboat-racing-review/1900-2548887/,neg,"
If you're a fan of powerboat racing and think it's neat that it has been turned into a video game, don't get your hopes up. Powerboat Racing is by far one of the worst racing games I've played since VMX Racing. The fact that it's boat racing doesn't hide the fact that it's a terrible racing game. There are five modes of play in Powerboat Racing: arcade, shootout, time trial, challenge, and practice mode. The different modes of play have different parameters and rules. You have eight monohull boats to race with at first, but after completion of the game or use of a code you can select from eight catamarans as well. There are three levels of difficulty to choose from, cutely named minnow, pike, and barracuda. The nine tracks to race on are all incredibly narrow, making the game feel as though you are on rails. Visually, Powerboat Racing is a mess. The water spray that comes off the boat when turning looks like it consists of two frames of animation. The pop-up is horrendous - half of the time a wall appears out of nowhere when you round a corner. The biggest problem with the graphics is that you can hardly see what's in front of you because of the incredibly bad camera view. Most of the screen is simply blue sky. There is a second cockpit view to play from, but since the pop-up is so bad it isn't any good either. And to top it all off, the frame rate is pretty sluggish. Sluggish is also a good word to describe the gameplay. You have to control the trim of the boat as well as step on the gas. It's extremely basic. So basic, in fact, that after a lap or two you will be reaching for the power switch. Even the sound in Powerboat Racing is annoying. The constant buzzing of boat engines that sound more like leaf blowers accompanied by the annoying commentary will prompt you to go into the audio options menu and turn it off. Powerboat Racing has too many problems. It looks bad, sounds bad, and plays bad. There simply isn't a good side to this title. It seems like it was designed as an afterthought. PlayStation owners, racing game fans, and everyone else should just skip Powerboat Racing.
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176,Sid Meier's Pirates! ,9.2," This is a triumphant remake of a classic strategy game, featuring an intoxicating blend of action, strategy, role-playing, and pure fun.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/0/6/2209406-pirates.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sid-meiers-pirates-review/1900-6114066/,pos,"
 The original Sid Meier's Pirates! is one of the famed designer's most beloved games, which is saying a lot. After all, Meier is responsible for some of the greatest games ever made, most notably Civilization. Sid Meier's Pirates!, first published in 1987, is renowned to this day for its addictive blend of action, strategy, and role-playing. And the good news is, with this newly released remake, it's clear that Sid hasn't lost the magic touch. This new Sid Meier's Pirates! is an amazing, wonderfully lighthearted game that boasts an intoxicating blend of strategy and action, and as such it's a dire threat to your professional and personal productivity.  The Caribbean is brought to life vividly, thanks to the beautiful and colorful graphics.  In Sid Meier's Pirates!, you play as a pirate out for revenge against the evil Spanish nobleman who wronged your family. At least, that's your initial reason for going to sea. The beauty of Sid Meier's Pirates! is that this open-ended strategy game lets you live the glorious life of a swashbuckler your own way. You can pursue the career of a privateer, a treasure hunter, an explorer, or a trader. More often than not, you'll dabble in all those fields at the same time. You'll sail the Spanish main, trade broadsides with other ships, engage in dashing swordfights, search for buried treasure, sneak into hostile towns, and dance with many a governor's daughter along the way. Your character will age over time, so your ultimate goal is to amass as much fame and fortune as possible before you retire, at which point your pirate will go into the hall of fame and you can start all over again.  The game's prologue explains how your wealthy merchant family was imprisoned and how you escaped as a young boy. Now, years later, it's up to you to save your family, vanquish the evildoers, and get rich along the way. The first thing you'll do is choose a name for yourself, as well as a specialty, such as sword fighting (which is useful in duels), navigation (which makes you sail a bit faster), or wit and charm (which help your dancing skills). You also select a nation to align yourself with, which determines which ports are friendly to you, as well as a time period, which affects the starting balance of power in the Caribbean. After that, you'll begin in your tiny ship in a great big sea that's alive with commerce and activity.  Sid Meier's Pirates! is remarkably easy to pick up and play (in fact, you can practically play the entire game without lifting your right hand from the numeric keypad on your keyboard), yet that simplicity belies a considerable amount of strategic depth. Your first stop will be in port, where you can pick up a letter of marquee from the local governor, which basically gives you the right to sink any ship not flying that nation's flag. You can also swing by the tavern to get the latest gossip (which can reveal useful info, such as the sailing of a treasure ship), purchase a useful item from the mysterious guy in the corner, or hire a bunch of scurvy knaves for your crew. After you check in with the shipwright, who patches up any damage and can upgrade various components of your ship, you'll visit the local merchant, where you can provision your ship and purchase or sell trade goods.  When sailing around the Caribbean, you can go anywhere, though you're limited by two constraints. The first is food. You can carry only so much food, and the bigger your crew, the faster your food will disappear. While this doesn't sound much of a problem, in an age when sailing voyages took weeks and even months, it becomes an issue quickly. Thankfully, you can always pull into a friendly port, or hijack a nearby vessel and commandeer its food. The other constraint is the morale of your men. Your salty crew members expect a fair share of the plunder when the voyage is over, and you'll have to keep them happy by bringing in the income--otherwise they'll start to desert you in droves.  What makes Sid Meier's Pirates! so compelling, though, is its exquisite pace. There's just so much for you to do when you're sailing about the Caribbean, and you're never too far from accomplishing some kind of goal, whether it's finding the final part of an important treasure map or chasing down some dastardly nobleman who wronged your family. This pacing makes it easy to get drawn into the game and even harder to stop playing--you may well discover yourself looking up from the game and realizing that you've spent the entire night playing. At the heart of the game is the sense that it's essentially a series of enjoyable, fast-paced minigames stitched together. In the span of half an hour, you can easily wage several ship battles, dance with numerous governors' daughters, sneak into an enemy port, and dig up a stash of buried treasure.  Battles involve using the wind to maneuver yourself into position and then unleashing a powerful broadside.  When your ship engages in battle, the game zooms in on the immediate patch of ocean (including any nearby landmasses, rocks, and shoals) and you have to maneuver into position and then fire broadsides at the enemy. These battles last only a couple of minutes at the most, but there's a great deal of tactical depth to them, particularly at the harder difficulty levels. Not only is the enemy more cunning at harder levels, but you must also factor in the constantly shifting wind, which affects your ship's maneuverability. Ideally, if you're upwind of an opponent (which is called ""having the weather gauge"") you can control the battle. And to capture a ship, you must use different ammunition, including medium-range chain shot to destroy sails and rigging and short-range grape shot to whittle down the opposing ship's crew. That last one is the most important, because if you try to board a ship, there's a chance you'll have to fight its captain in a duel, triggering the sword-fighting minigame. Defeat the captain and you can capture the ship and sail it into the nearest port, where you can sell it and its cargo for a profit and then pay a visit to the governor for your reward. You may also have the opportunity to dance with his daughter, and if you charm her, she may reward you with a valuable piece of information. You'll then go out to sea to repeat the cycle all over again.  Perhaps the most difficult minigames involve sword fighting and dancing, due to the fact that they rely on fast reflexes. (This can be tough, especially since some strategy fans aren't used to twitch-based games.) To keep things simple, sword fights are highly scripted in the sense that they all unfold the same way. During a bar fight, for instance, if you're winning, you'll always knock your opponent off the balcony, and if you're losing, he'll always chase you back up the stairs. Push him back far enough and the barmaid will break a bottle over his head, knocking him out. The only thing you have to worry about is timing the right swing at the right moment, and parrying or dodging his swings. Meanwhile, during a dance, you have to quickly respond to the dance cues that your partner gives you, or else you'll stumble and mess up. While both sword fighting and dancing can be difficult at first, they get much easier once you learn to recognize the patterns. Plus, you can purchase or acquire special items to make both minigames easier, such as a superbly balanced sword that lets you swing faster or dancing slippers that give you more time to react to a cue.  Charm a lovely governor's daughter by dancing well and she'll reward you with something valuable.  When you need to infiltrate a hostile port, you'll encounter the sneaking minigame, which is sort of Pac-Man in reverse. Your goal is to skulk around the mazelike streets of a town, avoiding the town watch. If captured, you'll be thrown into jail, where you'll rot for a few months before they let you go. At the easier difficultly levels, dodging the guards is incredibly easy, but at the harder levels, it's a lot tougher. Thankfully, you have a few moves at your disposal, such as the ability to scale walls, knock out guards from behind, and duck behind bales of hay to hide. The suspense can be high at times, especially when you narrowly weave between several guards.  Then there are the turn-based land battles that occur when you try to raid an enemy port or face off against the main bad guy at the end of the rescue-your-family storyline. In these, you have three kinds of units at your command: officers, sailors, and buccaneers. Officers and sailors are melee units, while buccaneers are armed with muskets. In battles, you have to maneuver your units to take advantage of the terrain and try to destroy or demoralize the enemy. You can flank enemies or use the jungle as cover. Win the battle, and you will not only plunder the town, but you'll also have the ability to switch its allegiance, thus earning you points with a particular faction.   The Caribbean of Sid Meier's Pirates! is a colorful place, and the game approaches the subject matter with a light touch. The pirates are charming rogues who like to sing drinking songs, the stuffy army officers are bombastic buffoons, and the ladies are all lovely. In other words, these are sorts of characters who would feel at home in an Errol Flynn movie or Pirates of the Caribbean. The game has a beautiful art style that's simple, clean, and packed with all sorts of graphical frills. The cotton sails on your ship softly glow in the warm sun, and beneath the glittery ocean water you can see dolphins and porpoises swimming in your ship's wake. The game's audio effects are also lighthearted and soothing, from the sound of water lapping against wooden hulls to the distant crack of cannons firing. Above it all is the game's wonderful soundtrack, which mixes historical tunes with memorable original themes. It also helps that the characters in Sid Meier's Pirates! speak in a sort of The Sims-like gibberish, which adds to the game's overall charm.  The map keeps track of all your accomplishments and failures, as well as the lovely ladies who have crossed your path.  Sadly, Sid Meier's Pirates! didn't make it out of the shipyard without a few flaws. The game suffers from some minor stability issues, which caused it to crash on one of our test systems every few hours. Thankfully, the game autosaves every time you enter port or battle, so you never lose much progress when it crashes. You can save the game manually as well, though you're not allowed to name saved games, which can cause a little confusion, especially when you have multiple characters. There's also no multiplayer, which is a noticeable omission, since it would have been fun if you'd been able to go head-to-head against another player in the naval battles. Finally, the game is incredibly easy on the beginning difficulty levels, so you'll need to ramp up the difficulty level to find the appropriate level of challenge.  Nevertheless, this is still a completely engrossing strategy game that will easily consume countless hours. While the average pirate career might last only about 5 to 10 hours, there's tons of replay value here, as you can play on harder difficulty levels, try out different approaches, and check out different sailing eras. With its engrossing gameplay, impeccable pacing, and charming presentation, Sid Meier's Pirates! is quite simply one of the most enjoyable games to come out in years.  


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177,Astro Boy: Omega Factor ,9.2," Everyone, regardless of age, simply must own and play Astro Boy: Omega Factor--because it is one of the best action games on the GBA.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/4/4/2209844-box_abof.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/astro-boy-omega-factor-review/1900-6104819/,pos,"
 Everyone, regardless of age, simply must own and play Astro Boy: Omega Factor--because it is one of the best action games on the Game Boy Advance. Sega has teamed up with Treasure, the same development house responsible for past cult hits such as Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, and Ikaruga to create what is essentially a celebration not just of Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka's life's work, but also of everything that makes the side-scrolling action genre so timeless and great.  Astro's arm cannon is visually impressive and punishing.  The Treasure-inspired influences are unmistakable. Astro can beat up enemies using his fists, but the many individual waves of enemies within each level encourage the frequent and gratuitous use of his pyrotechnically gorgeous finger laser, arm cannon, and machine gun special attacks. The arm cannon, for instance, is as tall as Astro Boy and spans the entire screen. Best of all, you only need to perform a couple of kung fu combos to recharge Astro's stock of special attacks. Roughly half of the game's 43 levels have a boss battle, another Treasure trademark. Some bosses are behemoths that stand multiple screens high and attack with a variety of different weapons. Others are smaller, but have multiple transformations and attack patterns. Just to shake things up a little, there are also flying stages scattered here and there. These stages play out like a traditional shoot-'em-up, with Astro dodging lasers and taking on wave after wave of flying robots using his finger laser and special attacks.  Astro has only a handful of attacks, but they're all extremely useful in the right situation. The A and B buttons perform basic jump and punch functions, and you can press the A button multiple times in midair to use Astro's rocket boots. Pressing the up and B buttons at the same time activates the finger laser, which can shoot through multiple enemies. When you tap twice quickly in the same direction on the directional pad, Astro will perform a dash move that lets him pass safely through bullets and enemies. This is a handy move to use when you're knee deep in angry robots. The L and R buttons activate Astro's special attacks--the arm cannon, machine gun, and EX dash. The arm cannon fires a powerful blast that can deal out 30 times the damage of the finger laser. The machine gun stops enemies in their tracks for a couple of seconds, which is nice when you're in a cramped room and want to squeak behind a boss. The third and last special attack is the EX dash, which adds a powerful multihit punch onto the standard dash move.  Nowadays, plain old action games are ubiquitous. They're old hat. Heck, they're obsolete. Someone on the development team must have realized that, because Omega Factor incorporates character interaction into its level navigation and power-up procedures. It works like this: Most levels have a character either sitting in plain sight or hidden behind something. When you talk to that character, he or she will offer up another part of the story and let you upgrade one of Astro's weapons. At the same time, some characters provide clues about how to find other characters or simply reveal a formerly secret level. In order to unlock all of the game's levels and see the best ending, you'll need to revisit previously played levels and figure out the proper order in which to speak with certain characters. That type of setup gives this side-scroller a rather engrossing quest aspect that most action games don't have.  The quest aspect also goes a long way toward helping players follow the story and learn the personalities of each of the characters. Sega has been faithful to Osamu Tezuka's original vision and has concocted a story that's both a whodunit and an allegory for society's racial schisms. The story has numerous twists and turns, and longtime Tezuka fans will be glad to see cameo appearances from a number of characters from his other works, most notably Jetter Mars, Ambassador Magma, and Dr. Black Jack. All of the game's many dialogue scenes are drawn in the same expressive, colorful manga style that Tezuka used when he drew the original comics.  Omega Factor is a delight for the senses. The levels show a great amount of depth and detail, partly because there's a lot going on in the cities in the background and also because the multiple layers of parallax and line scrolling make it seem like there's a whole environment out there besides just what's in the foreground. Astro and the various enemies are lavishly animated. When you activate Astro's arm cannon, the screen pauses and Astro's arm transforms to allow the massive burst to be fired. Enemies' faces react with looks of pain when you attack them, and they'll perform little actions, like pumping their fists or loading their weapons, before making their own attacks. Bosses are huge, often take up multiple screens, and tend to have multiple attack patterns. The artificial sun boss in level 2-2 continues to grow as you attack it, and it eventually sprouts poisonous tentacles. Epsilon, one of the final five, can send a massive blue whale across the screen. Along with the giant bosses, Treasure has employed the GBA's entire bag of graphical tricks to keep the screen busy. That includes day-to-night color changes, breakable foreground objects, the use of transparencies for flame and laser effects, and scaling effects that allow you to encounter giant or miniaturized versions of normal enemies. Surprisingly, there's only a little slowdown here and there.  The music and sound effects show an equal degree of variety and quality. There are digitized voice effects and dozens of different weapon noises, and each level has its own unique musical theme. Fans of Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier, two Sega Genesis games that Treasure developed, will recognize music from those games during a couple of later boss encounters.  Between the massive bosses and flurries of missiles, the screen gets busy in a hurry.  Omega Factor was originally released six months ago in Japan, but the developers have used that time to make numerous improvements to the English-language version. Many stages have a different assortment of enemies, and formerly ""empty"" levels now have more enemies in them. Some enemies gained additional attacks, including most of the bosses. Graphically speaking, the number of instances of slowdown has been significantly reduced, the color schemes of some enemies have been changed to make them easier to see, and a boss health meter has been added so that players know exactly how much health a boss has left. Lastly, a third difficulty setting has been added and the old difficulty settings have been made tougher to make the English version much less of a cakewalk than the comparatively easy Japanese game. These tweaks and improvements cause Omega Factor to be that much closer to perfection.  All game systems have two or three games that ultimately define the particular genre they represent on that platform. Thus far, the GBA's must-have action games have included titles from the Super Mario, Metroid, and Castlevania series. Now you can add Astro Boy: Omega Factor to that short list. You'll need to go through most of the game's 43 levels twice in order to find all the characters and unlock the best ending, but even after you accomplish that feat, this is the kind of game that you'll pick up regularly just to play a level and kill some time. 


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178,ESPN NFL 2K5 ,9.2, ESPN NFL 2K5 is yet another excellent football game in a long line of excellent football games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/4/1/1/2215411-box_nfl2k5.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/espn-nfl-2k5-review/1900-6103135/,pos,"
 Amid the usual prerelease hoopla for this year's installment in Sega's football franchise, ESPN NFL 2K5, announcements of both a massive drop in price to a more budget-minded point of $19.99, and a sudden release date shift that puts the game in stores over a month earlier than it shipped last year both caught a lot of people off guard. This led to a lot of wild speculation about the fate of this year's title and whether the overall quality of it would suffer. Yes, it certainly has been an interesting past couple of months for fans of Visual Concepts' brand of football, but, thankfully, the end result of all this drama is a game that seems no worse for the wear. ESPN NFL 2K5 is yet another excellent football game in a long line of excellent football games, bringing to the table a host of feature improvements, amazing visuals, and the same brand of exciting and highly playable football gameplay that Visual Concepts is so well known for. Add to all of that a ridiculously cheap price, and you've got a game you simply can't afford to pass up.  We're still a good month away from the start of the NFL season, but that hasn't stopped Sega and Visual Concepts from bringing out the latest in their NFL franchise.  If you played and enjoyed last year's ESPN NFL Football, you will find yourself quite at ease when playing ESPN NFL 2K5. The basic gameplay has remained largely untouched, save for a few improvements that aren't necessarily immediately noticeable but become readily apparent when compared to last year's title. The biggest complaint about rushing the ball last year was how incredibly easy it was. This was largely due to the runner's ability to simply turn on a dime without any notable time needed to shift direction. This year, a bit of momentum has been added to the running game, thus making it impossible for you to simply shift directions at will without slowing down a bit first. You can still use your juke and spin moves to turn and move past defenders, but if you just shift from left to right, you'll see a momentary step where the runner has to readjust himself. This is a fairly subtle effect, but it definitely makes for a more realistic running game.  The biggest upgrade to the passing game is fewer dropped passes. At times in last year's game, good receivers would manage to somehow just drop easy passes while wide open. This year, things have changed. If you've got a great receiver that you can manage to get open, he'll catch the ball almost every time. You'll still see occasional drops here and there, but, hey, even the best receivers in the game drop occasional easy ones. Just ask ESPN's cover boy, Terrell Owens. While all of this is well and good, the increase in caught passes actually manages to make the game significantly easier than ever before on the default difficulty. Certain in and out routes, with good receivers, pretty much turn into money plays where, if you time the pass right, you can get a completion around 80 percent of the time. Cranking the difficulty up to all-pro (from the default pro difficulty) remedies this a bit, because coverage gets tighter, and it's easier to throw interceptions when being careless.  Speaking of coverage--and all things generally defensive--the defensive game has also gotten tweaked a bit. For starters, you can redesign defensive back and linebacker schemes now using a combination of the right and left triggers (on the Xbox) or the R1 and L1 buttons (on the PlayStation 2) with the right control stick. By holding down one button or the other and then pressing the right stick in a direction, you can shift your DBs or LBs to the right or left, you can pull them back, or you can push them in to press receivers. It isn't quite as dynamic as the single-player defensive hot routes that Madden has this year, but it does give you more control over how your defense is laid out. Another tweak that's been made involves sacks. Seemingly, it is actually easier now to work your way past an offensive line to get to the QB than it used to be. The flip side to this is that now, QBs have specific dodge moves (that you yourself can make use of by tapping the right control stick when controlling your QB) that allow them to shake would-be sackers off. While these moves are more effective for athletic QBs like, say, Michael Vick and Daunte Culpepper, it still is just a little too easy to sack someone. And then when you find yourself against a largely stationary quarterback like Drew Bledsoe or Tom Brady, you can imagine what happens. This, in the grand scheme of things, isn't really all that bad. It just means that the sack numbers tend to be a little higher than your average NFL sack numbers.  The running game this year features a bit more of a momentum-based physics system. It's subtle, but it makes rushing more realistic.  The final, notable gameplay adjustment made for this year's title is an added emphasis on control over tackling. Aside from the ability to dive tackle by specifically pressing a button, tackling, up to this point, had basically simply been a matter of running one player at another player. While you can still simply run your defensive player at an opponent until you make contact, you also have some control over what kind of hit you deliver. By pressing the X button on the Xbox or the square button on the PS2, you can either deliver a massive hit by holding the button down, or you can simply give the ball carrier a shove by tapping the button lightly. On the whole, tackling just feels better in this year's game, and it's more under your control. It feels quite good to really lay a big hit using a strong safety like Rodney Harrison.  On either side of the ball, the artificial intelligence this year is quite top-notch--or, at least, when you opt to turn the difficulty up. As mentioned previously, on the default setting, ESPN NFL 2K5 is immensely easy if you've ever played a Visual Concepts football game before. Once you get to all-pro--and, eventually, legend--the AI really kicks up. Aside from a couple of odd coverage lineups here and there, the defensive AI is superb, and when you're going up against a high-ranked defense, look out. An AI-controlled offense can still be tamed on higher difficulty levels with some practice, but, at least for a while after first picking the game up, you're likely to give up a lot of big plays. The AI coaching has also been completely revamped to better assess and emulate the styles of real-life coaches. Each coach has his own profile that tracks everything from how often he runs the ball to how often he calls shotgun plays and right down to how often he typically goes into a hurry-up offense. It's a great system that brings a lot more variety and strategy to the game.   However, aside from the coaching profiles, each of the other fixes and additions to the ESPN gameplay system, while certainly most welcome, aren't always immediately noticeable. The feel of the game is a bit different thanks to these tweaks, but really, no particularly revolutionary gameplay upgrades have made their ways into this year's game--at least nothing that would leap out at anyone who wasn't a devout fan of last year's game. After a while, you kind of can't help but feel like you're just playing last year's recycled engine, which has been given an extra coat of polish to make it look shiny and new. Of course, last year's gameplay engine was phenomenal, so, really, however light the game may be on significant changes to the overall play style, it is still exceptionally fun to play.  While the game still plays wonderfully, you can't help but feel like you're still playing the same basic game as last year.  For what the game may be lacking in major gameplay upgrades, however, ESPN NFL 2K5 more than makes up for by being feature-rich across the board. Going back to the coach profile aspect of the game for a moment, one of the game's biggest innovations pertains to a user version of this exact same profile. Essentially, when you create your profile, the game immediately starts tracking how you play. Most of the same ratings and stats from the coach profiles are tracked as you play, as well as a host of other statistics that are far deeper than the coach profiles themselves. This ""VIP"" profile system, as Visual Concepts has labeled it, is amazing. If you were to play through a few games and then play a game against a team that was coached using the attributes found in your own profile, it would almost be like looking in a mirror. The team would play so much like yours, it would be almost scary. On top of all of that, your profile can be uploaded to your friends' memory cards or online, allowing future opponents to effectively ""scout"" you. Not only does this add a whole new dimension to the game's multiplayer component but also it's very, very cool.  The VIP profile system is really the only effectively new feature in the game, but many of the preexisting ESPN modes have been given huge upgrades. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the franchise mode. Comparing this year's to last year's franchise mode is like night and day. For starters, the contract system finally gives you the ability to include signing bonuses, as well as design salary structures out over a number of years. So, if you're signing an older free agent whose skills might diminish after a couple of seasons, backload the contract and keep the signing bonus minimal so that you can possibly trade or cut that player a couple of years down the road with minimal penalty. This kind of signing logic has made its way into the franchise AI as well, because the remaining 31 teams you don't control will sign and release players during the offseason just like in real life. Rather than just occasionally signing big free agents and filling holes where needed, players will get cut, signed by other teams, cut again, and so on. You can also now place players on injured reserve, which allows you to sign a fill-in player if that player is going to be out for the season. All in all, it seems like the signing, cutting, and trading logic is absolutely realistic (for the most part), though teams do still have odd tendencies to stock up on positions that are already filled out by high-ranked players, thus making for slightly weird roster balances once you get five or six years into a franchise.  The new VIP profile system tracks every aspect of how you play the game and makes it so that others can use your profile to practice against your style of play.  Perhaps the biggest addition to the franchise mode this year is the new team-preparation feature. This feature essentially gives you the ability to design exactly how each and every player and position on your team prepares for a game. If you think your quarterbacks need to watch some game film of the opposing defense, then you'll schedule it. If you've got an injured cornerback that you want for next week, schedule some specific rehab. You're given an allotted number of hours per day with which to design your training regiments, and the allotted number allows for quite a number of workouts. You can design most all types of training and coaching in varying degrees of intensity, and you can also design them to be weekly bouts or single sessions. To put it bluntly, it is utterly insane how much stuff you can do, and if you do it well, the results really show in your players' ratings (as it does when you coach and train poorly). The only problem with this addition is that it requires some intense micromanagement to really be effective. Your average football fan probably isn't going to want to put up with this sort of thinking man's work, but, fortunately, you have the option to just skip the preparation altogether so that you can go into a game with your team as is. It's certainly a nice feature to have, though.  And then there are the figurative second-year players in first-person football and the crib. Last year's rookie season for these two features yielded both positive and negative responses, so many were curious to see how the two would improve. Well, they really haven't. First-person football remains, largely, a gimmick mode. You can now cycle through viewed receivers when playing as the quarterback, and you can also toggle out of first-person at any time during a game as well. But aside from these tweaks, it's basically still last year's first-person football. If you liked it last year, you'll certainly like it this year. If you hated it last year, well...perhaps you'll just want to skip it this time around.   As for the crib, it's deeper, there's more stuff to unlock (ranging from furniture to free agents), and it's got one all-new feature to speak of. That feature? The inclusion of a bunch of B-list celebrities. These celebrities consist of Ready to Rumble and 3,000 Miles to Graceland star David Arquette, Dave Navarro groupie numero uno Carmen Electra, mildly funny comic actor Jamie Kennedy, the loudest hip-hop personality on earth in Funkmasta Flex, and the grotesque human curiosity-turned-occasional reality TV star Steve-O. Each of these celebrities has his or her own ""team,"" which basically consists of a roster most pro bowl teams can't even compete with, and through the crib, they'll challenge you to matches. The only interaction you have with the celebrities is through a little box with a talking head that appears from time to time during a game. The celebrity taunts you when his or her team makes a big play, while he or she laments when you pull a big play. For the sake of brevity, we'll just sum it up nicely and quickly for you: This feature is dumb. None of these celebrities makes any manner of contextual sense in the game, their dialogue is painful to listen to, and, really, the last thing we ever want to see is Steve-O's grinning, desperate face when we give up a touchdown. The good news is that you can, if so inclined, completely ignore these celebrity interactions, even if you happen to visit the crib regularly. And you'll want to ignore it.  First-person football and the crib are back. Whether you loved them or hated them last year, you'll likely have much the same reaction to them this time around.  The last couple of additions to ESPN NFL 2K5's feature list are celebrations and, on the Xbox, editable stadium music. The celebration mode actually lets you assign specific celebration animations to various control buttons, letting you bust out with your favorite celebrations after a big score. The list of available celebrations isn't huge, but there's a decent variety to choose from. The stadium music mode is Xbox-exclusive since it ties into the game's custom soundtrack feature. Basically, you can take any song from the Xbox hard drive and edit it to fit into the game as background ambience. Score a big touchdown and set it to play the most celebratory song you've got. Get ready for a kickoff and set up ""Welcome to the Jungle"" to play (just like a New England home game). It's a very cool feature, to say the least.  Aside from these modes, most of the remaining game is much the same as before. The requisite quick match, situation, practice, tournament, player create, and team create modes are all there, front and center. One notable omission is the season mode, which, for some reason, just doesn't exist this year. While you can just play a single season in the franchise mode, and the franchise mode does support multiplayer, it is a little odd that season was just dumped.  Online play is also back once again for ESPN NFL 2K5, and, this year, both the PS2 and Xbox are basically on an even keel when it comes to online features. Both have your basic head-to-head play, and both feature tournament- and season-based league play. Leagues existed on the PS2 last year, but they weren't all that spectacular. This year, leagues are set to offer up a multitude of options that weren't previously available, including live rosters. Essentially, the system will host your league's rosters on a server, allowing you to perform trades, conduct free agent signings, and track injuries across your league. It's basically the closest thing to that Holy Grail of online football--called an online franchise mode--that fans have been pining for since the advent of online play. That all sounds very cool, but leagues are currently unavailable as of this writing, so it's hard to say one way or the other if this feature will work out as intended.  The online mode on both the PS2 and Xbox features league play, complete with live roster storage for trades, injury tracking, and free agent signings.  One change that's been made to the online gameplay is a new EQ balance that essentially balances out the two teams in competition to make their statistics more comparable, which means that if you want to play with a team that's lower-ranked, you'll still be able to compete with the juggernaut teams. It seems as though this works pretty well, though we did find that pitting, for example, the Giants against the Patriots was still a fairly one-sided affair. Another nice addition is the effective requirement of updated rosters for online play. Once a new roster update comes up, the game prompts you to install it once you log on. For those who demand roster purity, this is exactly what you've been hoping for. Finally, in regard to online performance, for the most part we came across no lag, no drops, and no issues to speak of. We had one connection drop on the PS2, and the PS2 version also seemed to experience a bit of slowdown online, but otherwise, it seems as though online play should be pretty much copacetic across the board.  For all of its excellent modes and gameplay, however, ESPN NFL 2K5's greatest asset comes in the form of its graphics. Hands down, flat out, undeniably, inarguably, this is the best-looking football game ever made. All you need to do is take a nice, up-close look at any given player model, and this fact will become readily apparent to you. The jerseys, helmets, body builds, and faces all look amazing. Sure, a few players' faces don't look quite perfect, but the ones that do are phenomenal. And then there's the animation. Never has a football game looked as parallel to the real game as ESPN NFL 2K5. The tackles, the catches, the throws, the blocks, the interceptions... Every single aspect of the on-the-field action--all of it--looks completely awesome. Watch a safety jump up for an interception, or check out linemen on opposite sides of the ball grappling with one another, or catch a glimpse of a running back as he spins past a would-be tackler. Try to recall a game that captured these visual aesthetics better. You might as well just give up, because you won't be able to.   Of course, all of this is to say nothing of the game's usage of the ESPN license for every aspect of its presentation, which is equally incredible. Last year's game feels like just the tip of the iceberg compared to what Visual Concepts has done with it this year. Along with all the awesome replays, menus, stat overlays, crowd cutscenes, and otherwise cool-looking ESPN bric-a-brac, real-life ESPN personalities Chris ""Boomer"" Berman and Suzie Kolber are polygonally represented in the game. Boomer provides pregame, halftime, and postgame commentary, whereas Suzie interjects the game with injury reports and appears at the end of the game to interview the top player of the contest. Aside from some rather poor lip-synching dialogue, these representations of the two actually look a whole bunch like their real-life counterparts. Additionally, ESPN anchor Trey Wingo and draft guru Mel Kiper Jr. also make appearances--albeit only audibly--to discuss specific aspects of a season during episodes of SportsCenter, which can be played during the franchise mode. Wingo talks up injury reports, retirements, and contract signings, whereas Kiper discusses promising rookies and lends his name to the mock draft feature. Not all of the dialogue is brilliant, but it works just fine.  The crib mode lets you assemble a large collection of random items, including bobbleheads.  However, while the dialogue from the ESPN folks is certainly great, the in-game commentary isn't quite up to snuff. Longtime Sega Sports no-name commentators Dan Stevens and Peter O'Keefe are back yet again, and if, when playing the game, their commentary seems just a tad too familiar, don't worry. You're not crazy. It seems as though the developers didn't really record much new commentary this year, and much of it is directly lifted from last year's game. Additionally, we encountered some weird spots where specific lines of dialogue kept showing up over and over again throughout a game. We actually heard the same line about ""a huge punt"" seven times in the same game. Aside from the repetition and lack of vicissitude, however, the commentary is still largely good, and it manages to stay accurate in most every situation.  Faring far better in the audio department are the in-game sound effects. Though, again, not a ton has changed here. However, what has changed makes a huge difference. The sounds of hits and tackles are excellent and so is the roar of the crowd, especially if you happen to have some surround speakers, because the game makes solid use of Dolby surround support on both systems. The on-the-field dialogue is about the same as always, consisting of some junky insults thrown from opposing players, which is fine for what it is. Less fine, however, is the dialogue during the Suzie Kolber interview with the player of the game. Suzie herself is appropriately obtuse for her usual on-camera interview style, but the player dialogue actually manages to be less interesting than your usual player interview. You get nothing from it, and half of the time the player speaking has the completely wrong voice. Tom Brady talking like he was raised in Brooklyn? Not good. Funny, perhaps, but not good.  As creepy as the idea of a polygonal Chris Berman is, the implementation of him, Suzie Kolber, and the other ESPN personalities is a great touch.  When comparing the two versions of ESPN NFL 2K5, the Xbox version wins in most every respect. Graphically, the PS2 version is pretty clearly just a dumbed-down take on the Xbox version, with some occasional frame rate problems to boot. Also, the PS2 version has a notable difference when it comes to highlight reels. While the Xbox version features full video highlight clips, the PS2 just uses static images presented in succession. That's not to say the PS2 version doesn't look excellent when compared to other PS2 games, because it does. However, the Xbox version holds a much clearer-cut advantage over other games on its respective system. On the flip side... Over the years, some have claimed that the PS2 versions of the ESPN games have controlled better, due to slightly more responsive button timing and analog control. An extremely minute difference can be noted between the two versions of ESPN NFL 2K5, but it's so slight that it practically doesn't matter. The Xbox version still plays wonderfully, and nobody should have any problems with it.  So, when all is said and done, and after all the price drop and release date hullabaloo, does ESPN NFL 2K5 manage to come together to make a compelling, quality football game? The answer is an unflinching and resounding ""Yes."" Don't think of ESPN NFL 2K5 as a budget game, because it's about the farthest thing from the average budget title that you can imagine. If anything, this game should be called the ""Steal of the Century,"" because you're getting all the benefits of one of the best football franchises of all time for an incredibly measly 20 bucks. If this price isn't enough of an excuse to get you to give ESPN NFL 2K5--arguably the best football game on the market right now--a fair shot, then you are out of your mind. As for the rest of you who are not suffering from bouts of insanity, go pick up ESPN NFL 2K5, and do so with the peace of mind that you're getting no less than the deal of a lifetime. 


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179,Prince of Persia: Warrior Within ,9.2, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is a highly advanced and technically ambitious mobile platformer that has been executed almost flawlessly.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/2/7/2217527-box_popww.png,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/prince-of-persia-warrior-within-review/1900-6114187/,pos,"
 Ubisoft's Prince of Persia is one seriously bad dude. He has been through a myriad of adventures over the years--ranging from his early PC quests through the dungeons of ancient Iran to last year's smash console hit, where he added the ability to control time to his already imposing repertoire of tricks. The prince has also appeared in a few mobile games courtesy of Ubi's mobile counterpart Gameloft, which has experienced great critical and commercial success. By all indications, both the prince and the developer geared up considerably for Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, which will be simultaneously released for console and mobile. This game expands upon Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time's excellent framework in almost every conceivable dimension; it adds more moves, more levels, more puzzles, better graphics and sound, and more replay value to a product that had already been buffed to a high sheen. Unsurprisingly, this level of effort has resulted in one of the finest platform games ever created for mobile phones.  Fight your way through four hazard-filled episodes.  It's rather difficult to discern exactly what your goal is in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Using a series of short cutscenes between levels, the game tries to elucidate the prince's epic battle against an evil empress, but the setting jumps between past and present like a fractured fever dream. Suffice it to say that the prince will have to pick his way through about a dozen trap-filled environments, slay numerous haunts composed of enchanted time sand, and resist the advances of several winsome, scantily clad maidens, before all is said and done. Luckily, the prince has cowboyed up considerably since his last outing: He now sports dual scimitars, new combat skills, and a swarthy, antiheroic image.  Prince of Persia: Warrior Within's gameplay is fundamentally very similar to that of its antecessor. After you complete a quick tutorial level to master the prince's maneuvers, you must dash through a series of large environments, searching each area for the time warp that will deliver you to the next. In a nice concession to the learning curve, the first couple of levels provide you with small navigation arrows that indicate which direction you should take at each intersection. The game will also frequently give you written hints to keep you moving through some of the puzzles--most of which involve finding switches to remove barriers. There are a few tougher obstacles that you'll need to figure out on your own, but the challenge level remains quite manageable throughout the adventure.   The prince returns with all of his basic platforming tricks intact. He can run, sneak, jump, crouch, roll, hang off of and climb ledges, and cross larger gaps by running across walls. Advanced tricks like wall-running deplete your blue stamina meter, which will recharge slowly when you're at rest. There are also a few new moves to spice things up. For instance, you can now attack enemies while swinging on chains, and you gain a new combat technique after you complete each level. The game provides you with a button-press recorder in the upper left-hand corner of the screen to help you execute these maneuvers, which uncork a short animation and then deliver a razor-sharp surprise to your foes. These moves are easy to access with simple button combinations. Some combinations are definitely more useful than others, but they all help to keep your frequent battles with sand beasts and other enemies interesting. You will find yourself making frequent recourse to such moves as the blade dervish, which chops enemies on either side of you, and the heart render, a brutal stabbing attack that will dispose of almost every enemy in the game. Toward the middle of the game, the prince also gains the ability to stop time for short periods. However, this power seems underutilized, as there are only a handful of situations in the game where it's necessary.   There isn't a huge variety of enemies in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but there are enough to keep things interesting. The game's clever level designs also help to spice things up. There are a couple of different types of sand monsters, like foot soldiers and axe-throwers, as well as invisible swordsmen, bats, and a few boss baddies. These enemies usually take only a few attacks to kill, especially if you knock them off of their feet and deliver a stabbing deathblow. Strangely, this seems to hold true for most of the handful of enemies that are supposed to be impervious to your bladesmanship. In any case, combat feels very intuitive. Once you draw your swords, the game switches up the controls a bit to provide you with combat moves like blocking and agile backflips. Most of the damage you'll sustain, however, will be chalked up to the game's insidious traps, which include blades, spikes, hammers, pits, and moving ledges of every variety. Many of these devices will kill you on contact, forcing you to restart from the nearest checkpoint. You have an unlimited number of lives to complete the game, but each time you die, you'll lose some points from your final level score.  Warrior Within also has an additional arena mode, which is a straightforward slog through 15 concurrent levels of pure combat. This mode is actually very challenging, and gives you an additional combo attack if you make it to the end. The rating system at the end of each level also boosts replay by scoring you on a number of criteria and assigning you a rank.   The prince has some new moves he'd like to show you.  The graphics and sound are both marvelous on Series 60 Java handsets. The environments are sharply rendered in a range of fairy-tale bright colors, and there are numerous instances of extra visual detail--like the mice that crawl in and out of the holes for spike traps--that really add a lot to the overall presentation. Furthermore, all of the game's complex, highly varied animation runs comparatively smoothly through the entire experience. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within also has first-rate music and sound effects. It's rare to find a Series 60 game that uses both elements effectively, but this game does, juxtaposing snippets of music against the groans and clanks of hand-to-hand combat. The game also includes a vibrant opening theme to prime you for your journey to the Middle East.   All in all, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is a highly advanced and technically ambitious mobile platformer that has been executed almost flawlessly. In the past, the weak spot of similar Gameloft platformers has been their relative brevity. By contrast, this game feels only slightly on the short side, and even though there's no adjustable difficulty, the adventure is large enough to keep most players occupied for several hours. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is a dominant game on its own merits, but it's identical to the first game in one respect: Anyone who is remotely interested in playing an action game on their handset should download it. 
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180,Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door ,9.2," It's practically overflowing with wonderful, funny characters, memorable subplots, inventive gameplay, and beautiful visuals, and it's lengthy and quite challenging to boot.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/7/2/2212572-box_pmttyd.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/paper-mario-the-thousand-year-door-review/1900-6110235/,pos,"
 Nintendo's unassuming little mustachioed mascot stars in one of his greatest adventures yet in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, which follows in the footsteps of last year's Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga for the Game Boy Advance, as well as the original Paper Mario title for the Nintendo 64. This new role-playing game from Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems is truly inspired. It's practically overflowing with wonderful, funny characters, memorable subplots, inventive gameplay, and beautiful visuals, and it's lengthy and quite challenging to boot.  Say hello to one of the best games for the GameCube.  The adventure begins conventionally enough: Princess Peach has gone missing again, and it's up to Mario to find her. She was last seen in Rogueport, a seedy and mysterious coastal town far from the familiar reaches of the Mushroom Kingdom, and this place serves as the game's central location. Mario will gradually uncover Rogueport's secrets as he attempts to decipher a treasure map that Princess Peach left in his care. Soon enough, the quest develops a clear episodic structure involving the search for seven crystal stars, each one a powerful artifact. The stars are all tucked away in different parts of the world. So, in turn, the process of finding each one is like a unique and self-contained storyline in which Mario will meet some colorful new friends and foes and solve various puzzles using his ever-growing number of special abilities. That means Paper Mario is structured much like classic Mario games, in which each main level has a distinctively different tone and style to it.  While the overarching storyline is typical of a Mario game, the smaller subplots are what give Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door so much of its own charm and personality. It would be spoiling some of the fun to even briefly describe these various episodes, since each one provides a thrill of discovery, and the stark contrast from one episode to the next makes for a great experience. On the whole, the world of the game is brilliantly imagined and fully realized: It's filled with just about all the weird characters you may have seen in past Mario games, and yet here they're mostly just going about their day-to-day business, trying to make ends meet. The effect is reminiscent of Pixar's computer-animated movies (such as A Bug's Life or Finding Nemo), whose fantastic storybook worlds are believable partly because, in a lot of ways, they're mundane--not so different from real life. That's exactly the effect that Paper Mario goes for, and it's hugely successful at achieving it.  The game has a terrific sense of humor, thanks partly to a first-rate English translation. Much of the absurd humor comes from how Mario is one of the only human characters in the game, and yet his constantly bright-eyed, cheerful, but nearly silent demeanor makes him the most enigmatic character of them all. There's also a great deal of comedy to be found in between the game's chapters, as Bowser, Mario's nemesis, haplessly follows in the footsteps of his foe...yet is always several steps behind him. Also, Mario's brother Luigi makes an excellent appearance. In each chapter, he'll fill you in on the latest of his own eerily familiar-sounding misadventures. The game's sense of humor has truly broad appeal--younger audiences will love the funny-looking, over-the-top characters, while older players will appreciate some of the subtler wordplay and absurdity. You'd never know this game originated in Japan, since the always-amusing, often-funny dialogue just feels so contemporary and reads so naturally. There's no speech in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but that's actually a good thing--the onscreen text unfolds dynamically, based on the intended tempo of the conversation, and it's generally so well written that it's just better off in its original written form. Indeed, most every character has a distinctive ""voice"" here, despite the absence of speech. If you've enjoyed the excellent localizations in other Nintendo games, such as Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, then you can expect similarly outstanding results from Paper Mario.  The surprises keep on coming throughout Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The theme of the game? Don't judge a book by its cover.  Paper Mario really isn't directly comparable to too many other games, though it's basically designed like other console RPGs. Gameplay is spent exploring various environments, encountering and battling foes in a turn-based combat system, and gaining experience levels and new skills. Exploration occasionally involves Mario-style conventions of having to jump from platform to platform, find hidden switches or passageways, or navigate around certain hazards. These action-type sequences are handled well in the context of the game, and--much like the action-oriented aspects of the combat system--they help make the experience of playing the game engaging (not to mention similar to classic Mario titles), rather than too slow and passive as in some other RPGs.  The game's storybook look also paves the way for some unique play mechanics, in how Mario actually has paperlike properties in the game. It's a level of abstraction that works beautifully in this surreal setting. Basically, Mario will learn how to slip through narrow gaps and gratings, glide like a paper airplane, roll up into a tube, and more. These unique abilities--which he learns in some of the game's funnier moments--allow you to gradually gain access to new areas. You'll also upgrade your hammer and your shoes during the course of the game, opening up even more venues to explore in the process. The gradual ""unlocking"" of the world is done quite subtly, actually. You'll gain some surprising new ability and then start to notice parts of the world in which the ability could come in handy. Of course, some of these abilities aren't just for exploration--they're also good for beating the tar out of Paper Mario's dozens of different bad guys.   Combat is frequent during some portions of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, though, fortunately, there are no random battles like in other RPGs. You'll see your foes out in the field, and if they spot you, they'll try to close in to initiate combat. If you manage to hit them with your hammer or jump on them when they're close (a question of proper timing), you'll get a free hit as the fight begins. Fights are turn-based, and involve Mario and his companions--you can have just one ally with you in battle at a time--taking turns dishing out damage with one or more bad guys. Over the course of the game, Mario will gradually learn a wide variety of jumping and hammer attacks, as well as some other special moves. Attacking is not just a matter of selecting options from a menu, either. Each technique has some sort of control input that's required for you to pull off the technique. Most of these are easy, timing-based affairs that you'll master after just one or two attempts.  Audience participation in Paper Mario's battles is just one of the game's numerous clever twists.  On the other hand, the timing for the game's defensive moves can be quite tricky. You can either press the A button just after getting hit to reduce the amount of damage you sustain, or, with perfect timing, you can press the B button as you get hit to nullify any damage and then counterattack. All enemy attacks can be countered, so you'll always be trying to get the split-second timing down, and it's satisfying to succeed at this. Having to constantly time button presses helps make combat an active and entertaining aspect of the game. For the most part, there's a good, fast feel to the combat, and like other aspects of the game, if nothing else, it's just fun to watch.  This is partly because the combat is literally conducted onstage, before an audience. In another of the game's inspired ideas, the entirety of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is staged like a theatrical performance, and this is apparent when you enter and exit buildings (you'll literally see the set pieces fold away--the fourth wall breaks down so you can see inside) and especially in battle. Appealing to the audience lets you use certain special moves more frequently at the expense of one of your combat rounds, and, sometimes, a surly member of the audience will throw something at you or your opponent. The audience participation in Paper Mario's battles ultimately doesn't have a huge impact on the gameplay, but it's a really neat touch, especially in the way the audience--which consists of all the different types of characters you'll meet in the game, both friend and foe--grows in size the further you get into the game.  Paper Mario has some real depth to it, which makes it a great-playing game and not just a great story with some battles thrown in to slow you down. Whenever Mario levels up after defeating a certain number of opponents, you may choose to boost one of his main attributes. One of these is called ""badge points,"" which determine how many special badges Mario can have equipped. There are dozens of different badges to be found in the game, and they do everything from granting new fighting moves, to bolstering your strength and defense, to increasing the likelihood of finding items after a foe is defeated, to changing the sounds Mario makes when he attacks, and so on. More-powerful badges require a greater number of badge points to equip, and you're free to mix and match and experiment as much as you like. Mario himself may not look like much, but make no mistake: This game offers as much of the sort of addictive, open-ended character building as any first-rate RPG. In fact, the benefits of leveling up tend to be much more gratifying in Paper Mario than in other RPGs.  Some surprisingly deep character-building elements are in here to appease hard-core fans of RPGs.  Furthermore, figuring out which of your allies will be best suited to a given situation is another interesting aspect of play. Each of Mario's friends has his or her own unique abilities both in and out of battle, and, in a contrivance that's great for the gameplay, you can freely switch between your companions almost instantly. These colorful characters are all quite valuable. For example, Goombella, a well-to-do goomba girl and Mario's first comrade, happens to know the local gossip on just about every character in the game. So, before striking up a conversation with somebody, you can always check with Goombella for the inside scoop--she'll tell you about the character in his or her own words. Likewise, she can look up valuable information on all the different foes you'll face, cluing you into their strengths and weaknesses. And she's just one of several interesting characters who'll join you.   Again, it's just not worth ruining the surprises to say much more about this aspect of the game. You'll also notice that Mario's partner--whether it's Goombella or someone else--tends to do a lot of talking, and will speak for Mario during conversations. However, since you can have only one partner with you at a given time, this means you'll inevitably miss a bunch of the potential exchanges of dialogue in the game if you play through only once. The fact that the dialogue changes depending on your traveling companion doesn't necessarily give a clear incentive to play through the Paper Mario a half dozen times, but it is another indicator of the game's unusually high quality.   Excellent dialogue--and tons of it--is one of the game's best traits.  Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is quite a long game, weighing in at 30 to 40 hours from start to finish. It's chock-full of optional side quests and secret areas, and also invites you to continue your adventures in and around Rogueport even after the main storyline reaches its satisfying conclusion. The game does have a few issues worth noting. Some combat-intensive sequences can get to be a little too repetitious at times, especially since there just isn't a ton of variety to the combat within a given area once you've figured out the best way to defeat a given type of foe. Furthermore, the game often requires you to go back and forth (and back and forth again) through areas you've already visited. This ultimately helps make the gameworld feel as big as it does, but within the moment, it can feel a bit like busywork. Considering how interesting most of Mario's adventures are here, the prospect of backtracking through the same areas several times isn't always so attractive. But the occasional hassle is, of course, well worth it. Finally--and this certainly isn't a flaw, but it should be noted for what it's worth--in case you haven't deduced this already, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a surprisingly story-rich game. You might expect a Mario game to be focused mainly on action, but there's actually tons of character and plot development here. Save points are liberally interspersed throughout the game, so it's not like you're forced to play for long stretches at a time, but you'll naturally feel inclined to.  Paper Mario's outstanding presentation has a lot to do with how terrific of a game it is overall. It exhibits a level of visual artistry and technical prowess matched or exceeded by few other GameCube games, and, much like in last year's The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the unique graphical style on display throughout the game is constantly a joy to behold. The smoothly animated, hand-drawn characters who populate the game's world look far more like something you'd expect to see in a cartoon than something you'd expect to see in a video game. Also, the game's juxtaposition of flat 2D characters and certain other flat 2D elements amid pop-up-book-style 3D backgrounds not only adds to the visual flair, but it also sets up some interesting gameplay, as previously mentioned. At times, it even leads to some mind-bogglingly surreal moments, as when part of the screen literally peels away or tears open to reveal a secret area. The game also moves along at a consistently smooth clip, and there are no discernible loading times anywhere, except for maybe a couple of pauses here and there between major areas. At any rate, while Paper Mario's visuals may not seem like a technical tour de force, this is still one of the best-looking games of the year, and it's proof positive that high polygon counts and fancy graphical effects clearly aren't the only way to put together a superb-looking game.   Bravo! Encore!  The audio in Paper Mario fits the theme and tone of each sequence of the game very well. Certain characters have their own musical themes that become as recognizable as their appearances, and in general the music throughout the game is catchy and upbeat, much like the classic Mario music you may have heard. It's not all lighthearted stuff, either. Some of the game's spookier, creepier, or more emotional (yes, it's true) sequences also use sound and music to achieve their intended effect. Meanwhile, the sound effects in Paper Mario include some of the classics from the Mario series, along with plenty of other funny, appropriate-sounding audio bits.  If you've enjoyed any of Mario's past appearances, you really ought to give Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door a try. For that matter, you should try it even if you haven't. The game is clearly a labor of love, but it's a lot more than that--this is the product of some incredible talent in game design. It's difficult to imagine how someone could not be quickly pulled into Paper Mario's whimsical world if they give the game so much as half a chance to do its thing.  


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181,Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 ,9.2," By bringing together the best aspects of squad-based shooters with the freedom of a more action-oriented shooter, Brothers in Arms offers a unique gameplay experience in the unlikeliest of genres.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/2/9/2213429-box_biarth30.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/brothers-in-arms-road-to-hill-30-review/1900-6119853/,pos,"
  We'll admit it. When we first heard about Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, a small voice inside our heads said cynically, ""Just what the world needs...another World War II-based first-person shooter."" Sure, it has some squad command mechanics, but it wasn't lost on us that those design aspects were rather similar to another military game, Full Spectrum Warrior. The big difference with Brothers in Arms is that it puts a gun in your hands and actually allows you to pull the trigger. And, oh, what a difference it makes! Brothers in Arms is paced more deliberately than other popular WWII shooters, such as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. But the game more than makes up for any apparent absence of run-and-gun action with the raw intensity and realism of its battles combined with the added tactical considerations required in the challenging campaign. The online aspect is equally compelling, making for a complete and thoroughly impressive game experience.   Brothers in Arms offers a satisfying mix of tactical strategy and action thrills.   Brothers in Arms puts you in the role of Sgt. Matt Baker, a real-life member of the 101st Airborne Division. The game's 17-chapter campaign stretches over a week's time. You'll start out the night before D-Day, when you and the rest of the division parachute behind enemy lines into France, fighting your way into and capturing the town of Carentan. Each chapter and all the settings are based closely on actual missions carried out by Baker's platoon. As you beat each mission, you'll unlock extras, such as photographs and reconnaissance photos, which show you how closely the game's levels match what Baker's platoon fought through in the critical first days of the invasion.    The game's presentation is extremely cinematic, borrowing cues from popular World War II fare such as Band of Brothers. Every chapter begins with a simple screen and title in stark black letters, narrated somberly by Baker's character. You'll also watch some in-engine cutscenes before and after missions that not only summarize the previous mission in the context of the war, but also get you personally acquainted with the rest of your squadmates. These presentational aspects set the mood of the game well, but unfortunately can't be skipped. There is one thing that breaks the mood of the game, and that's when squadmates who die in the course of your gameplay all of a sudden appear fully healthy in the next mission. This is a minor gripe, though, and the game would be unduly difficult if you weren't allowed to lose any squadmates over the course of a mission.    The quiet, introspective thoughts that Baker and his squadmates share between missions is a stark contrast to the intense, chaotic battles you'll fight. The game's campaign offers an interesting mix of mission types. Some will have you assaulting small towns crawling with German infantry, machine gun nests, and snipers. You'll also explore hedgerows filled with hidden mortar teams and German 88mm guns, which are a menace to your tanks. Another chapter has you clearing obstacles off of heavily defended farms in order to make a path for gliders to land. You'll need to deal with enemy tanks on a couple of missions, and while you will often have access to a bazooka or your own armor under your command in these cases, it's much more thrilling and satisfying to sneak up behind the enemy tank, climb onto it, and drop a grenade into the hatch to take it out. You'll also be treated to shooting gallery-style missions later on, where you're defending a position while armed with a sniper rifle. The campaign should last most players about 10 to 12 hours on their first play-through. There's plenty of incentive to play on the higher difficulty settings, though, as this forces you to perform in a more disciplined fashion with sharper command decisions.    Depending on the mission, you'll command either one or two squad elements, each of which can consist of a few infantrymen or a tank. Infantry are either designated as an assault team or a fireteam. The former is usually armed with submachine guns and is better at charging and eliminating enemies, while the latter carry rifles and are better at establishing a base of fire on an enemy position for suppression. Like in Full Spectrum Warrior, you'll see icons over enemy positions to signify their condition. Fully suppressed enemies will not move or fire much, and when they do shoot, their accuracy is poor. Unsuppressed enemies are much more accurate with their shots and may actually move, either to get a better attack position, or to find more useful cover.   Tanks play a large role in the game, both as your allies and your enemies.   This design conceit gives you incentive to actually use established army doctrine to find, fix, flank, and finish the enemy. One or two of your elements hold an enemy down with a base of fire, while you can move yourself or use another element to flank around the side to take that enemy out. Players who are more hands-on will obviously want to take the finishing aspect into their own hands, while more strategic-minded players still have the option of sending in a squad element to do the dirty work. Either way is satisfying, and throughout the course of the campaign you'll find cause to use both methods. It's also worth noting that, unlike in Full Spectrum Warrior, enemies behind cover are not invincible to direct fire. If you're a good shot with a rifle, you can still pick off an enemy who pokes his head a little too far out from behind cover. That said, the game still offers you a big advantage to try to find an unobstructed line of fire.    To help you with the job of maneuvering, Brothers in Arms includes a mode called ""situational awareness."" It's basically a pause state that zooms out and gives you an overhead view of the map with limited rotation and zoom ability. From here you can examine your own position and the position of your squad elements relative to that of known enemy positions. This mode is extremely helpful, as it allows you to make more intelligent decisions about maneuvering and positioning. You can only see enemy contacts that you've already made, so you can't cheat to see what else might be lying in wait up ahead. However, it's still possible to use the situational awareness mode to confirm the number of enemies behind cover, so there is some advantage to always peeking at this screen every time you find a new contact.   The command interface in Brothers in Arms is fairly streamlined. By holding down the left trigger, you'll get a command ring, which you can then move around the landscape to command your selected squad element to move. The squad artificial intelligence is fairly clever. If they know they're moving into the line of fire, they'll fire at the enemy position while proceeding in a low and fast manner. They'll also stack up behind any nearby cover and automatically fire at any enemy that comes into sight. You can order them to intensify their fire on a position for suppression or call for an all-out charge. Your squad is smart enough, however, to refuse orders to directly charge a machine gun nest or enemy tank. While the streamlined command interface keeps things simple, it can be frustrating at times in the uncommon cases when your soldiers don't get behind cover properly or take a strange path to their target. You also don't have the ability to specifically call for a grenade toss, although they will throw grenades on their own from time to time.  The suppression indicators help point out enemy positions, but they are not available at the highest difficulty setting.  As far as controlling your own character, Brothers in Arms offers a couple of twists from your standard shooter. You can move about (albeit a bit more slowly than in most shooters) and toggle between standing and kneeling positions, which expectantly affects your accuracy. You'll notice this most with the Springfield sniper rifle, as the scope drift is dramatically lessened while kneeling. What's different about Brothers in Arms is that the default setting does not give you a crosshair with which to aim. If you choose to fire from the hip, you're pretty much guessing where your shots will land. In effect, you are forced to toggle the zoom, which lets you aim your gun along the iron sight in order to shoot with any degree of accuracy. Your movement speed is also cut down to a fraction while aiming, so if you want to fire while on the move, you need to make a choice between movement speed and shot accuracy. This adds to the game's realism and feels less contrived compared to other games that simply expand your crosshair reticle as you run.   You'll use an array of different weapons, including M1 Garands, Thompson submachine guns, BARs, and fixed machine guns. You'll also pick up antitank weapons, such as bazookas, and you can loot weapons off of dead enemies. In general, you're probably better off sticking with the guns you start each mission with until you start running into the elite German Fallschirmjager, who carry the Sturmgewehr automatic assault rifle. Grenades are very limited in the game. You don't get them in every mission, and you can't seem to loot any off of corpses. It's also fairly tricky to toss them; learning how to arc them just right will take some practice. Just be careful to pay attention to your tosses. If you don't suppress an enemy position before throwing a grenade, you're liable to get that pineapple tossed right back in your face.  Unlike many other games of this type, multiplayer Brothers in Arms isn't just an afterthought. The multiplayer aspect retains the squad command aspects from the single-player campaign, resulting in a game that plays unlike anything else on Xbox Live. Matches can be set up for two to four players online on any of 10 objective-based maps. Most of these maps will involve demolitions of some sort, with one side attempting to plant a bomb on a strategic target, such as a bomb or antiaircraft gun, while the other side tries to prevent the bomb from exploding over a fixed period of time. Each player in the game controls one or two squad elements, and you can also hop out to situational awareness mode to check your surroundings, although the game does not pause in this mode during multiplayer matches. If the soldier you're controlling goes down, you can press a button to immediately take control of another member of that squad element. Get your whole element wiped out, and you'll need to respawn at your original spawn point with a fresh element.   The overall feel of multiplayer Brothers in Arms is much more strategic than a typical shooter. There's a lot of depth involved with coordinating attacks with your teammates, such as trying to confuse the enemy with feints or linking up on one side of the map for an all-out charge. Raw skill at first-person shooters certainly helps, but aiming skill alone doesn't quite compensate for a player who utilizes his squad commands to the fullest. That aspect gives Brothers in Arms a unique style, and one which should give the game lasting appeal for multiplayer. For those stuck offline, a split-screen mode for two players is available. But being able to see your opponent's movements takes a lot of the mystery out of a match, making it much less compelling than playing online. In our testing, the online play worked pretty well, with only a few problems in latency.  The graphics and sound in Brothers in Arms add to the game's overall excellence. Character models are good overall, offering up some nice detail in motion with the way they carry their weapons and take position behind cover. Squadmates who have taken a lot of hits will also limp noticeably and won't run as quickly. The models do appear a bit blocky at times, however, and the character faces have a somewhat lifeless, mannequin-like quality to them, particularly in the eyes. Vehicles and weapons are realistically modeled in both the way they look and the way they sound, as are all the settings in the game, including the position of foliage, roads, and buildings. Bullets kick up debris and dust depending on their impact point. In fact, if you're being fired upon, you'll see bits of dirt kick up and ""stick"" to the screen as the bullets plink and whiz by your head. Your squadmates will also yell for you to get down. These are useful visual and audio cues that alert you to when you should duck your head back behind cover.   Dirt kicks up on the screen when you're under fire.  You'll see noticeable blood spray as you fire at and hit enemies up close, but this isn't done gratuitously. Certain cutscenes, however, can get rather gory and graphic. Add that to the cussing you'll hear, and you'll have a game that captures the grim reality of war (which is also found in any movie or miniseries). What's also interesting is that there's no music at all during gameplay. An orchestral score is limited to the menus and loading screens. Again, this seems like a conscious design decision, adding to the cold overall feeling that the game offers.  By bringing together the best aspects of squad-based shooters with the freedom of a more action-oriented game, Brothers in Arms offers a unique gameplay experience in the unlikeliest of genres: a World War II shooter. The campaign is varied and lengthy enough to keep players thrilled from beginning to end. There's even good incentive to play through again at higher difficulties. Combined with a well-designed and thought-out multiplayer aspect, Brothers in Arms offers one of the best World War II gaming experiences to date. 


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182,Prince of Persia: Sands of Time ,9.2," While the fighting is fun, the game requires more brains than brawn.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/5/2/0/20560-59520.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/prince-of-persia-sands-of-time-review/1900-6094667/,pos,"
 It's tough to find a more consistent mobile games publisher than Gameloft, and right now it would be very tough indeed to find a better wireless action/adventure game than Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. From controls to graphics, the game plays like it belongs on the top shelf in the GameBoy Advance section.  Like the previous Prince of Persias, The Sands of Time features a prince who has to climb, fence, and think his way out of a booby-trapped castle. The prince can find items that give him new techniques, like short-term flight and forward rolls. The controls are crisp, despite the game utilizing nearly every button for an action. And while the fighting is fun, the game requires more brains than brawn. Thankfully, there are in-game hints that can be turned off while you play.  The PoP graphics are cartoonish yet detailed, and the animation is among the best that cell phones have to offer. The difficulty meter is pegged just right-- always challenging but never frustrating. Extra details (like a code in the BREW version that unlocks a big-head version of the PC game) make Sands of Time a mobile masterpiece.  My only complaint is that, like most Gameloft titles, the game feels too short. However, hidden items and level rankings will probably encourage you to play through many times over. Another triumph for the Gameloft team.  
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183,Need for Speed Underground 2 ,9.2, Need for Speed Underground 2 isn't just the best racing game ever made for a mobile phone; it's also a much-needed showcase for V Cast technology.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/6/9/9/2213699-box_nfsug2.png,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/need-for-speed-underground-2-review/1900-6129297/,pos,"
  Of all the technical restrictions put on mobile developers, draconic file-size limitations are the most crippling. If a dev team's goal is to make a 120k game, and the splash screen alone uses 15k, that group is going to have to write some pretty tight code. Fortunately, Verizon's V Cast service allows for much larger, more complex games and makes streaming additional content off the network relatively seamless. EA's Need for Speed Underground 2 is the first game to fully take advantage of this technology, and the result is the longest, most engaging racing title ever made for wireless phones. The realmusic audio content alone is worth the $9.99 download price.   The only thing hotter than fitness model Brooke Burke is an animated comic book representation of fitness model Brooke Burke.   If you've played the console version of NFSU2, you know exactly what to expect from the mobile version. You are a washed-up street racer who, under the tutelage of the seductive Rachel--played by aging supermodel Brooke Burke, whose name and body still bear a satisfying symmetry--may once again find sponsorship, fame, and ready cash to pour into your ride. The story unfolds through comic book-style cinematics, which, while less than impressive on consoles, are mind-blowing on mobile.     Exposition is hardly Need for Speed's focus, nor really its forte. The racing is a showcase in itself, and it looks as good as software rendering possibly can. The game's streaming capabilities have allowed EA to include an unprecedented number of tracks across multiple racing districts, and each looks like a distinct part of the city. You can view these either on a world map screen or by free-roaming through the streets of your chosen district, where you may even find hidden cash bonuses. Each race is initiated via a pager challenge, and you are told how long you can expect to spend on the course. As a result, while NFSU2 is a full-fledged video game, and not really intended for casual players, it can nonetheless be enjoyed in short sessions.     Dedicated players will be rewarded, though, as NFSU2 plays just like its console counterpart. Using your emergency brake to execute perfect drifts and then nitro blasting away takes some getting used to on the mobile keypad, but racing at a high level is satisfying enough to justify perseverance. Every command available in the console game is present here, and they can all be remapped to whichever keys you prefer.    Fancy driving refills your nitro meter, so the Burnout formula (risk equals reward) applies here. As you narrowly escape crashes, a bonus multiplier builds, such that each successive near miss adds several orders of fuel to the fire. Drafting behind opposing vehicles and performing powerslides also charges up your turbo. The rival racer AI is excellent, and your adversaries will perform all these maneuvers in hopes of getting an edge on you. You may pull ahead of a souped-up Audi TT, only to have its driver draft behind you, then rocket ahead while rounding a corner. Bystander vehicles aren't stupid either and will sometimes swerve to avoid a crash.    Paris Hilton owns five of these cars, and she thinks they're hot.   When you do collide with a car, it will fly ridiculously over your head in a manner not unlike rag-dolling. While crashes don't seem to damage the vehicles involved, they'll cost you precious seconds and will potentially necessitate the use of nitro fuel to regain your top speed. Hitting street signs or the like will stop you cold, however. Apparently, several tons of steel is no real impediment, so long as it's on wheels. Then again, when compared to its competition, NFSU2's physics modeling is exemplary.     Although they don't crunch on impact, Need for Speed's cars look absolutely beautiful, whether in the garage or on the street. Considering the LG VX8000's lack of hardware acceleration, the highlights and reflection effects on each car's painted surfaces are incredible. Holiday lights hung over telephone wires will imbue your vehicle's exterior with shades of red, green, and blue. You will notice quite a bit of the draw-in, but the detailed architectural modeling work that's gone into this game helps to make up for it. In any case, NFSU2 manages to consistently run around 20 frames per second, which is quite a triumph for a V Cast game.     We've seen graphics approaching this caliber before, in titles such as Gameloft's Asphalt: Urban GT. As a result of its revolutionary approach to content delivery, however, EA has been able to provide much more visual variety. Almost everything you do in the game requires a download, but the trade-off is that you'll always have fresh content heading to your handset. Every time you head to a shop to upgrade your car, for example, you'll download new car models to account for your opponents' upgrades. The stock Peugeot-driving loser you smoke today may show you up with a souped-up ride tomorrow. When you reach the second Phoenix, Arizona, district, everyone will have some noticeable upgrades, including big rear spoilers and checkerboard paint jobs. You should put your earnings to use as well, lest you, in the words of Rachel, ""look like you're driving your daddy's ride."" Need for Speed is consistently difficult, and you'll need to get tricked out (to employ the game's parlance) if you hope to compete.   Crashing your car will cost you precious seconds, and your safe driver insurance discount.   NFSU2's audio, too, benefits from this dynamic content-delivery system. If you've got the space on your phone, you can download eight realmusic samples of the tunes included in the console version of the game. Each of these lasts about a minute and can be enabled or disabled via the game's EA Trax menu. Of course you'll want to hear Riders on the Storm, the postmortem collaboration between longtime pals Jim Morrison and Snoop Dogg. While the compositional quality of this music is debatable, the audio fidelity isn't. It's simply the best in a mobile game, ever.     Although we'd like to see EA make some better licensing choices, the amount of audio content offered here would cost more than the price of the entire game, were it purchased on Verizon's Tunes and Tones service. You're getting high-bit-rate samples of popular music--essentially for free. Add spoken cutscene dialogue to the package, and you're looking at an unbelievable audio bundle that really adds to the game's value. The only caveat is that you must choose between sound effects and music as your racing accompaniment. Many games now offer this choice, which is mandated by handset hardware shortcomings.     Even more impressive than Need for Speed's wealth of ear candy is the sheer number of race challenges and locales you'll encounter. It's usually much more economical to buy a subscription to a game, which costs half as much as an outright purchase. In the case of NFSU2, however, we're not convinced that average players will complete the game within two months of periodic play, especially since EA is able to provide server-side content refreshes at any time.    Here's hoping EA's testing the waters for other games in its pantheon.   Need for Speed starts relatively small but soon swells with downloaded features. The game will delete unused content, though, so you won't have an ever-expanding client, à la Guild Wars. When you wish to revisit previously viewed content, such as old cinematics, the game will simply prompt you to redownload the content, making room by excising other, more recent content. This shuffling sounds like an annoyance, but it's relatively painless in practice.    Need for Speed Underground 2 isn't just the best racing game ever made for a mobile phone; it's also a much-needed showcase for V Cast technology. This game boasts game length and replay value so many orders beyond the mobile norm that it calls for a total paradigm shift. Simply put, mobile gaming just got a much-needed kick up the evolutionary ladder.   


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184,Mortal Kombat Advance ,2.9, MKA plays little to nothing like the game it's based on and should be avoided.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/2/7/2213027-mkadvance.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mortal-kombat-advance-review/1900-2840612/,neg,"
Nintendo's Game Boy Advance has been an extremely fertile breeding ground for remakes of popular games from the past. As the remakes begin to pile up, more and more companies are getting on the rerelease train, hoping to cash in on their back catalog of products. Midway has already released a collection of old arcade games for the system, and now the company has released a version of Mortal Kombat for the GBA. The resulting product looks and sounds OK, but the gameplay is so astoundingly awful that even the most die-hard MK fan should stay far, far away.   Mortal Kombat Advance is based on Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. It also features some of the palette-swap characters from the console-only update, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, but it doesn't have the aggressor meters introduced in MKT. The arcade game's six-button configuration is scaled back to a respectable four-button setup, using the face buttons for punch and kick, R for block, and L for run. The controls are responsive, and unlike in previous handheld MK games, pulling off special moves isn't too frustrating. The game features different levels of difficulty and multiple two-player modes, including two-on-two and tournament modes. Each character has a fatality and a friendship finishing move.   Unfortunately, the gameplay itself only barely resembles that of Mortal Kombat. The timing is way off, the game doesn't have turnaround kicks, and, perhaps worst of all, uppercuts take too long to come out, making it more difficult to uppercut people out of the sky than it should be. In addition, the AI in the single-player mode is incredibly merciless, attacking you nonstop until you lose without giving you a chance to respond--regardless of the difficulty setting. The only effective way to win against the computer on any difficulty is to rely on cheap tactics, such as repeated jump kicks and the like. This is a nonissue when you're playing two-player games, but the horrible AI makes the game unplayable by yourself.   The graphics in MKA are pretty good. The characters look good and are suitably animated, though they look a little skinny. The backgrounds also look nice. The game's soundtrack is a little odd at times, though for the most part, the music and sound effects are decent.   Mortal Kombat Advance simply has nothing to offer when compared with other great portable fighting games, such as Street Fighter II Turbo Revival and Tekken Advance. MKA plays little to nothing like the game it's based on and should be avoided. Let's hope Midway takes its upcoming Mortal Kombat sequel a little more seriously than this half-baked remake.
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185,Space Raiders ,2.9," Fans of modern shooters will have no use for this trite, monotonous junk, and fans of the original Space Invaders will simply be appalled at how Taito has butchered its ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/6/6/9/2211669-box_sraiders.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/space-raiders-review/1900-6094582/,neg,"
 No one is going to argue that Taito's classic shooter, Space Invaders, wasn't a seminal release in its heyday. To this day, it still remains as one of the true classics of gaming's early era. As is often the case with a serious classic, the game spawned numerous sequels and reiterations over the years, though few were anywhere near as successful (or playable) as the original. Now, over a quarter century after Space Invaders first hit arcades, the original creator of Space Invaders, the Taito Corporation, has developed what is being referred to as the first true 3D sequel to Space Invaders, titled Space Raiders. While this is a grand idea in theory, the simplistic side-to-side shooting mechanics that were great so many years ago would need a serious upgrade to be interesting to a modern gaming audience. Space Raiders doesn't provide this upgrade and ultimately proves to be both a laughable attempt at re-creating Space Invaders and a terrible experience from beginning to end.  Though one could say that the Space Invaders name has been broken for quite some time, the fact that Taito, the name behind the original Space Invaders, broke it this time around is all the more upsetting.  As the story of Space Raiders opens, we are treated to an exceptionally lengthy cutscene depicting the invasion of Earth by a less-than-friendly alien race, which upon attacking obliterates any human life in its path. During this scene, we are introduced to the game's three main characters: Justin, a tough kid seeking revenge for the death of his friends; Naji, a streetwise cop in a future suit looking to avenge his fallen partner; and Ashley, a woman on the search for her missing boyfriend (who looks just a bit too much like Tom Cruise for comfort). You can choose any of the three characters at the beginning of the game, but it really doesn't matter whom you choose. Though the characters have slightly different weapons and marginally different storylines, you pretty much end up playing the exact same game regardless of whom you choose.  So, remember how Space Invaders played: You'd have a little ship at the bottom of the screen, and alien invaders in several lines would progressively drop down on you, and you'd have to dodge their bullets while blasting them away. OK, replace your ship with a person holding a gun, replace the top-to-bottom view with a 3D environment (where you still can only run from side to side), and give the evil aliens a little more generic personality, and basically, you've got Space Raiders. Sure, there are a few little differences here and there--like the fact that you can occasionally chuck grenades at the hordes of approaching aliens, gain a few weird and generally unnecessary power-ups here and there, and do a nifty little dodge move to avoid bullets--but otherwise, this is basically just a rehashing of the same 1978 premise. Although it's that same premise, there isn't any of the challenge that made the original so addictive.   Essentially, the team behind Space Raiders apparently decided that challenge would be somehow detrimental to the game, and they removed everything that made the original Space Invaders enjoyable. Specifically, the whole point of Space Invaders was that you wanted to prevent the approaching aliens from getting to you, because if they did, you'd die. In Space Raiders, aliens can get to you, but when they do, they only do a little bit of damage. Once they do reach you, you can do your little dodge move in their direction, and that will actually damage them and drive them back. Because of this, if you're even marginally adept at the whole concept of dodging enemy fire, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to just mindlessly button-mash your way through all of the game's six levels in about an hour and a half, dying only a scant few times. Of course, you'd only have to worry about dying at all if you had limited continues, which, incidentally, you don't. Die all you want, because the only consequence of doing so is that your high score resets. When you're playing a game that's challenging and fun, like Ikaruga for example, your score might mean something. When you're playing a game as prosaic and lifeless as Space Raiders, it's hard to care about your score.  Even when simply looking at or listening to Space Raiders, you're going to have an unpleasant experience. Graphically, the game features absolutely nothing worthwhile. The in-game graphics are drab and muddy and generally look hastily thrown together, and the CG opening and few in-game cutscenes look just as pathetic. The character designs for the heroes are derivative of every dumb stereotype you can think of, and the creature designs for the aliens are even worse. Everything animates as stiff as a board too, and overall, the game just looks ugly.   Unless you're a big fan of hammering on the GameCube controller's A button for an hour and a half at a time, Space Raiders really doesn't have much to offer.  For as ugly as Space Raiders looks, however, the sound is even worse. The few, repetitive in-game sound effects you'll encounter aren't exactly offensive, but they're pretty bad, and the soundtrack is barely noticeable. However, nothing can trump Space Raiders' inconceivably atrocious voice acting. Without any measure of exaggeration, Space Raiders is right up there in the running for the worst voice acting of all time. The dialogue itself is written horribly enough, but the ""actors"" who deliver these pathetic lines simply have to be heard to be believed. Bad voice acting may be a regular occurrence in gaming, but voice acting this bad is a once-in-a-lifetime atrocity.  If at this point you're still even entertaining the thought of picking up Space Raiders, stop, right now. To sum it all up quickly and concisely, its gameplay is a pathetic, 90-minute button-mashing marathon, and the two-player co-op mode is more of the same, just with another person to experience the pain along with you. Its graphics are an underwhelming experience to say the least, and the game's incomparably horrendous voice acting will drive you to the brink of madness. Fans of modern shooters will have absolutely no use for this trite, monotonous junk, and fans of the original Space Invaders will simply be appalled at how Taito has butchered its classic gameplay into this one-dimensional mess. Regardless of what category you fall into, you don't want to play Space Raiders. 
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186,Bravoman ,2.9, The only good thing about Bravoman is that its poorly translated dialogue is sometimes amusing.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/2/4/3/2217243-bravoman_usa_boxart.png,TG16,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bravoman-review/1900-6169471/,neg,"
  Most games available for the Wii's Virtual Console are noteworthy for some reason or another. Some are standouts in their genres. Others lack mainstream appeal but have developed loyal followings throughout the years. Bravoman for the TurboGrafx-16 is a thoroughly lousy 2D action game that's notable for its strange characters and batty broken-English dialogue. The main character is a bionic superhero that attacks by extending his arms and legs, and the story revolves around a madman named Dr. Bomb that has unleashed an army of robots, weird beasts, and Power Ranger wannabes on the world. The game was most likely meant to be taken as a parody of the action genre. Unfortunately, the humor is impossible to appreciate since the action and graphics are so lame.    Bravoman is a lame 2D action game peppered with badly translated dialogue scenes.   Bravoman is a blueprint of how to make a bad action game. The design is as basic as it gets. In the majority of the game's side-scrolling levels, you run to the right, jump over hazards, and use Bravoman's limbs to attack and destroy enemies. By pressing up or down on the controller, you can direct Bravoman's attacks high or low. You can also control how far his limbs extend by pressing the attack button longer. Enemy attack patterns and level layouts are simple, so the game gets old quickly. It doesn't help that the same five backdrops are recycled four times each to give the game 20 main levels. To make matters worse, Bravoman's attacks don't come out immediately, which is a big no-no for an action game. The collision detection also tends to be unfair, in that you need to be right on the money for your attacks to hit an enemy, while their missiles and bodies will often suck away some of your health even though it looks like they've missed you by dozens of pixels. On top of everything else, it's tough to keep your eyes and ears focused on the action, because the shrill music, ugly character designs, choppy animations, and dull backdrops are a constant affront to the senses. Enemy characters usually resemble toasters and giant magnets. The backgrounds consist of a bland day or night backdrop peppered with brown crates and the occasional brick building.    The game's only entertainment value comes from the weird characters and the badly translated dialogue sequences that occasionally appear. Frequently, the enemies you destroy will leave behind bonus items. If you collect enough of them, a yellow robot riding a unicycle will drop down from the sky and give you a random power-up. At the end of some levels, the yellow robot will ask you if you're hungry and then give you pieces of sushi that will refill some of your health meter. That's pretty crazy. Crazier still is that you can attack buildings and phone booths to elicit such grammatically butchered comments as, ""Hello I'm Japanese telephone box."" Also, at the beginning of some levels, another spandex-clad hero will appear in the sky and give you a useless hint in the form of a badly worded riddle. If you want, you can jump up and kick him, which will make him say a variety of complaints and insults. Seeing those comments is good for an isolated laugh here and there. That sort of zany humor would have been much easier to enjoy were the game not utterly atrocious.   
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187,MLB Slugfest 2004 ,2.9," It lacks the unpredictability and mayhem of the console versions, as well as most of the features that you'd expect to find in a traditional baseball game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/6/8/2211968-box_mlbsf04.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-slugfest-2004-review/1900-6024678/,neg,"
 Anyone who's familiar with Midway's sports franchises--NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, and NHL Hitz--knows what to expect from a game titled MLB Slugfest. On the current-generation consoles, MLB Slugfest 2004 is an exciting combination of baseball and boxing. Players can punch the ball out of a fielder's glove and use the turbo meter to improve various aspects of their game. The pitcher can even bean batters to diminish the batter's stats. MLB Slugfest 2004 on the Game Boy Advance has only a few of these features, and they're all poorly implemented to boot.   Fenway looks nice from the batter's box. This portable version of MLB Slugfest 2004 is so bad that it's hardly worth describing the baseball aspects of the game. At the plate, you can select a contact, power, or bunt swing and then take a hack at the ball once the pitcher releases it. On the mound, you have four pitches to choose from, and you can use the directional pad to veer the pitch left and right while it's on its way to the plate. If the ball is anywhere near home plate when the batter swings, it will fly somewhere into the field. The computer goes after the ball for you. All you need to do is input the command to throw to a base. Unfortunately, the CPU rarely takes the most efficient path, so contact at the plate usually results in a hit. Computer-controlled batters also have a habit of swinging at pitches long before they're released, giving you the advantage of a few unearned strikes.  To be fair, Midway never claimed Slugfest was a simulation. In the console versions, much of the action occurs on the base paths. You can activate a turbo boost to run faster and pummel a fielder to knock the ball loose from his glove. On defense, the pitchers in the console versions can bean batters in an attempt to decrease the batter's stats, although there's always the risk that the batter will turn hot and improve instead. None of these things are implemented properly in the GBA game. Base runners can't attack fielders and bean balls always set the batter on fire. You can have fielders punch base runners, but this is the only remnant of the console versions' fisticuffs--and it has no effect, anyway.  The number of available play options is also somewhat limited. You can play exhibition games, participate in a playoff series, or take on all 30 teams in an abbreviated season. Unlike in other baseball games on the GBA, you can't play a full season, trade players, fool around in a home run derby, or play against your friends using a link cable.   Even though MLB Slugfest 2004 is terrible in most respects, the graphics are at least decent. The game includes six different ballparks: Wrigley Field, Pacific Bell Park, Fenway Park, Safeco Field, Yankee Stadium, and Coors Field. In the batting viewpoint, the stands and scoreboards look exactly like they would in the actual venue. The tiny fielders twitch from side to side in anticipation of a hit. Once the ball is in play, the field is shown from an overhead viewpoint. The dimensions for each park, including the looks of the lines and walls, are accurate. You can't make out the faces or numbers of specific players, but the animations when they run and throw the ball are fairly smooth.  You're stuck with CPU-controlled fielders who couldn't reach a ball if their lives depended on it. The audio is simply OK. You'll hear sound effects to represent the crack of the bat and the audience cheering, as well as speech samples for when the umpire calls balls and strikes. A couple of musical tunes play throughout.   Overall, MLB Slugfest 2004 on the GBA is a major disappointment. It lacks the unpredictability and mayhem of the console versions, as well as most of the features that you'd expect to find in a traditional baseball game. 
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188,Dragon Booster ,2.9, Dragon Booster is a halfhearted and practically unplayable racing game with no redeeming qualities.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/9/6/2222096-dragon.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragon-booster-review/1900-6142104/,neg,"
  Dragon Booster is an animated ABC Kids show about a futuristic civilization where humans and dragons coexist…and race for some reason. Regardless of how improbable it might seem, racing dragons sounds like it could be a decent premise for a video game. Apparently Konami thought so, at least, because it has published a racing game for the Nintendo DS based on the show. However, Dragon Booster the game is only a racing game in the most basic sense. There is a starting line and a finishing line, and the objective is to make it to the end of the course before your opponents do. Other than that there isn't much actual racing involved. You have no direct control over the speed of your dragon, and steering is automatic. The result is a hollow and utterly joyless rail shooter with some ancillary racing tenets tacked on, and it's one that should be avoided by even the most devout fans of the show.    You've heard it a million times: The world is on the brink of a massive war and the only way to stop it is by racing magical dragons.   The story behind Dragon Booster is a poor attempt at imitating some of the anime-inspired kids' shows that have been successful in the past. The world in Dragon Booster is inhabited by dragons and humans, who live in symbiosis thanks to some cosmic energy transfer between the two species. Eventually the humans began to exploit the dragons and they started breeding specialized dragons to be used to build cities and create all kinds of powerful weapons. As the humans developed their power, they fought and nearly destroyed the world in what is known as the Dragon-Human War. A heroic dragon and rider emerged and became the first of the so-called Dragon Boosters, and they saved the world by showing everyone that dragons and humans could coexist peacefully. The game takes place 3,000 years after the war, and the humans are making the same mistakes again. So, as you might expect, you have to become a Dragon Booster and save the world from destruction by… racing dragons? What? OK, so it doesn't make a lot of sense, and the game does a terrible job of conveying the story, but those are the least of the problems with Dragon Booster.    There are five modes to choose from when you start, including training, free run, grudge match, mini-challenge, and all-city races. The majority of the action takes place in the all-city races mode, which is basically a career mode where you choose a rider and dragon, and then participate in a series of races to move up the ranks and eventually save the world. You start out as a class C racer, and after you finish first in each of the six races you'll unlock a new dragon and rider and move up to the B class, where you can do it all again at a slightly higher difficulty level.     You control a dragon and rider and you have to battle your way past five opponents to be the first to cross the finish line. The races take place on long, winding courses set in dismal futuristic settings like a desolate slum, a lava-filled cavern, sky-high cityscapes, and so on. You don't have to worry about accelerating, braking, cornering, or any of the other stuff that makes racing games fun and challenging. Here you can only jump, move left and right across the track, attack, and use speed boost. The boost doesn't seem to have much of an effect on your speed though, and if not for the white speed lines that appear at the edge of the screen, you would never know when boost is activated. The dragons supposedly have different stats for speed, jumping, and power, but they all have the same sluggish handling on the track, and none of them are fun to race. You might think that a dragon would fly at least occasionally, but instead these dragons just plod along on the ground, clumsily tripping over hurdles that are placed in their path, running into walls, and falling off the edge of the course where sections of roadway are missing.     As soon as a race begins all of your opponents will just take off and disappear down the track, so you always start out in last place. This is intentional because it forces you to battle your way through the pack, taking out all the other racers until you're left in the lead. You only ever encounter one other racer at a time, and you actually seem to encounter them in predetermined intervals. Once you catch up to enemies, they will stick with you until the end if you let them. You can't outrun your opponents, and even if they fall off the track or get tripped up by a hurdle they'll instantly respawn right on top of you. Since you can't outrace them, you have to take your opponents out of commission by attacking them. You can purchase special gear, including weapons that can be used to take out your enemies, but mostly you'll just be using the basic attack, which involves launching your human rider (tethered to the dragon by an elastic electric field) at opponents and objects on the course. Do this enough and you will knock the other racer out of commission, and you can keep racing for a little while before encountering the next rider in line. It never feels like you're actually racing in Dragon Booster, it just feels like you're stuck in a lame shooting gallery that requires you to hit the right targets at the right time over and over again on the same few dull, repetitive courses.     By winning races you'll earn money, which you can spend on gear for your dragon. You can purchase weapons and upgrades to increase speed and defense. There aren't very many items to choose from though, and most of them are exceedingly expensive. Since you get no money for second place, it takes awhile to save up enough credits to actually get any worthwhile items.    Dragon Booster has its share of control problems as well. Most of the time you'll control the dragon with the touch screen and the directional pad. You tap the dragon to jump, touch objects or opponents to attack, and slide an icon to initiate a speed boost. This method of control is clumsy and annoying, because the touch screen isn't always responsive, which results in a lot of missed jumps or attacks. FFor example, when you're trying to attack an enemy in close quarters the screen will sometimes register your touch as a jump instead of an attack, since the two targets are too close together. There's a minigame that plays like a side-scrolling shooting gallery where you have to hit colored targets to earn points, but it isn't fun and it just serves to highlight the imprecision of the touch screen controls.     The graphics in Dragon Booster look jagged and ugly. The scenery is repetitive and seems to scroll endlessly without really going anywhere. Most of the time you don't really have much of a sense of the race track either--it just sort of appears in front of you as you run along, and there are rarely points when you can actually see very far ahead. The animation is limited as well. Aside from a clumsy gait, each racer has a single attack animation and that's it. There's nothing interesting to look at here, but even if Dragon Booster had great graphics, the gameplay would still disappoint.    The racing consists of moving side to side and jumping once in awhile, which isn't exciting at all.   The music in Dragon Booster is actually pretty good, but the sound effects are merely average. The soundtrack consists of some nice, dramatic orchestrated themes that actually do a fair job of conveying a sense of urgency. The sound effects, on the other hand, sound distorted, and while they fill the noise void just fine, you could turn them off and enjoy the game just as little as you would if they were on.     Dragon Booster is an exceedingly lousy attempt at making a licensed game out of a license that isn't all that great to begin with. The single-player game is shallow and uninteresting, and multiplayer is worthless. There's a two-player mode with single-card play, but the only thing you can do in that mode is play a couple mini games against a friend, including the aforementioned side-scrolling target shooting gallery game, and the other is just a truncated version of a regular race that only has two racers total. Add it all up and you get a terribly clumsy game that should be avoided regardless of age or affinity for the show.    
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189,MC Groovz Dance Craze ,2.9," MC Groovz may feature The Fresh Prince's ""Parents Just Don't Understand,"" but dancing to its poorly stepped, overly lengthy tracks just makes us feel like Carlton Banks.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/8/4/2220084-something.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mc-groovz-dance-craze-review/1900-6116469/,neg,"
 Rhythm action games used to be fairly obscure, Japanese affairs. Suddenly, largely due to the popularity of Konami's Dance Dance Revolution games and Sony's PaRappa the Rapper titles, the genre generated mainstream US interest. Yet, while Donkey Konga and Taiko Drum Master have given GameCube owners a taste of the action, few GameCube games have involved fancy footwork. Enter MC Groovz Dance Craze, which the game's unlikely developer, Mad Catz, is packaging with a dance mat of the sort that it has been making for the PS2 and the Xbox for quite a while. Unfortunately, the mat isn't particularly good and the DDR-style game is just terrible. MC Groovz may feature The Fresh Prince's ""Parents Just Don't Understand,"" but dancing to its poorly stepped, overly lengthy tracks just makes us feel like Carlton Banks.  This just may be the worst rhythm action game available.  MC Groovz's first and most serious problem is its paltry song selection. The game features a dozen or so tracks, only a handful of which are recognizable. Its most heavily promoted song is a remix of Jessica Simpson's ""Irresistible"" that lasts about seven minutes, which is actually MC Groovz's average track length. This is much, much longer than rhythm action fans have come to expect, and it seems like an effort to add more dancing content without licensing additional songs. Party games should involve frequent breaks in the action, so a large group of people can take turns. Watching someone waddle to Jewel for an extended period of time is no one's idea of fun.  By default, MC Groovz displays its dance steps in a circular format. While this layout is more analogous to that of the actual mat, those accustomed to DDR's vertically oriented step arrows will want to switch the game to scrolling mode.   From here, Groovz gives up on originality, and attempts to approximate the standard virtual Terpsichore experience as closely as possible. Unfortunately, it fails in this endeavor, as its steps land woefully offbeat and almost don't appear to have been written to match the music. After you finish a song, you'll usually have about 15 to 20 seconds of steps left to perform, which is totally ridiculous and simply feels broken. The upswing is that you'll have just as easy a time playing the game with the sound off as with it on. As the mat's Z button is dedicated to toggling sound, it's easy to test this theory...even when you're not actually trying to.  Even the game's ""expert"" difficulty won't at all challenge anyone who has played any rhythm action game before, be it DDR or Samba de Amigo. This would have been fine, had this game been conceived as a sort of dancing game for kids, but its song list would never appeal to such an audience. Most tykes don't remember KC & the Sunshine Band or DJ Jazzy Jeff.  Dance Craze is about as barebones as a rhythm game can get.  Like DDR, MC Groovz lets you play against a friend or engage in a workout mode. In this case, workout mode doesn't differ at all from the standard game type, except that it counts your expended calories. If you ask us, there are better ways to burn 23 calories than dancing to an obscure, overproduced song, like those of Rupee or Rithma, for seven minutes.  MC Groovz Dance Craze fails to accomplish the few things asked of a dance game. The song selection is terrible, and each track's dance moves seem incidental and completely unrelated to the music. You won't even see anything onscreen to distract you from the ugly, arrhythmic arrows you're supposed to follow. As there's really no other application for this GameCube-only dance mat, Mad Catz's seemingly reasonably priced package turns out not to be such a great value after all. 
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190,Top Spin 2 ,2.9," Top Spin 2 for the DS offers a good player roster and a deep shot system, but the choppy graphics render the game unplayable.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/0/7/2217407-box_ts2.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/top-spin-2-review/1900-6147573/,neg,"
  Top Spin 2 for the Nintendo DS would keep most tennis fans satisfied for weeks, if only the herky-jerky graphics didn't render the game completely unplayable. The game's better aspects, such as its diverse player roster and deep shot system, aren't enough to compensate for a jumpy frame rate that makes it impossible to see and follow the ball.   Top Spin 2 puts real tennis pros, like Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova, under your control.   Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova headline a roster that includes 16 actual male and female tennis pros. Ten different court locations are available, including a few real-world venues from tournaments such as Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open. Exhibition play can be waged against the CPU or you can compete against a friend wirelessly using two DS systems and two game cards. The other single-player modes are tournament and career. Career mode is set up like the similar modes found in other tennis games, where players create their own custom tennis phenom and gradually upgrade their skills by playing minigames and participating in tournaments.    Similar to the game's console counterparts, the controls and shot system in the DS version are easy to learn and layered with depth. The directional pad is used to control player movement, while the system buttons are used to input the various shot types. The touch screen is used only to navigate menus and rotate the world map in the career mode. Each of six different shot types is keyed to its own button on the unit. At the touch of a button, you can compel your onscreen persona to serve or return a flat, topspin, slice, lob, smash, or drop shot. In most cases, during the split-second that your player is winding up for his or her shot, you can hold the button longer to make a more powerful shot and use the D pad to target the shot toward a specific spot on the court. Whether a swing is a forehand or a backhand depends on which hand your player holds the racket in and which direction his or her body is facing relative to the ball. Righties, for example, will perform a forehand shot when the ball is to their right and a backhand shot when the ball is to their left. Control response is generally very quick, although you do have to make sure to let up on the button when you actually want your player to swing the racket. All in all, the shot system is easy to get the hang of and provides a great deal of control over the speed, arc, and placement of shots.    Four minigames in the career mode let you master the nuances of the shot system while upgrading your custom player's skills. Serve Sniper challenges you to hit targets on the opposite side of the net. Inflatable Carnage tests your ability to pop inflated targets with power shots. Shot Sequence is a Simon-style game where you have to hit sections on the other side of the net in the order shown. The last minigame, Tic Tac Toe, is a tennis-themed variation of the classic pen-and-paper game. Although other tennis video games typically offer a larger selection of minigames, the relative lack of selection here isn't a major shortfall because each game is conceptualized so well.    Sadly, all of the game's good aspects are made moot by the choppy graphical frame rate. The players don't return shots gracefully. Instead, they move in jerks, like some club kid performing the robot. The ball doesn't sail smoothly over the net. Instead, it literally disappears from one side of the net and reappears on the other side about halfway to the service line. Since the ball can't be seen until the last moment, it's impossible to track the ball's trajectory, which means you won't have time to move your player into position to make a return shot, let alone adjust the power and aim of the swing. Thus, the game is completely unplayable.    The choppy frame rate makes it impossible to track the ball, which pretty much means the game is unplayable.   It's a shame that the frame rate is so bogus, because the remainder of the presentation is at least somewhat up to the task of portraying the sights and sounds that people expect from a tennis video game. The audio won't win any awards for artistry or variety, but the combination of realistic sound effects, recorded player grunts, and cheesy elevator music does back up the action relatively well. Visually, the graphics are somewhere between the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation in terms of quality, which is in line with what we've come to expect from the DS hardware. Player bodies are large and sufficiently detailed, and they look very much like actual people thanks to a relatively high polygon count and a believable implementation of shadow effects. The courts are necessarily plain, but the crisp graphics and behind-the-back camera perspective provide an ample sense of depth and place. In addition to the various court surfaces, prematch fly-bys help establish the setting by showing a 360-degree view of the venue and the spectators within. Even though spectators are immobile low-poly blobs, the overall appearance of the crowd suffices because they're only visible off in the distance during matches. Replays and reaction shots are infrequent, but they're nice to see when they occur.    In the end, unfortunately, the most important thing to keep in mind about Top Spin 2 for the Nintendo DS is that the jumpy frame rate makes it impossible to play the game for more than 30 seconds without inspiring the urge to smash the system into bits and pieces.   
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191,Pocket Aquarium ,2.9," Pocket Aquarium probably shouldn't be in Verizon's games section, but it is. Even as a screensaver, though, this would be a poor offering.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/2/5/0/24606-69250.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pocket-aquarium-review/1900-6127445/,neg,"
  It makes sense for an aquarium-maintenance simulation to walk the line between screensaver and interactive game. Unfortunately, Pocket Aquarium hardly features any gameplay at all, so it therefore falls directly into the former category. The game lets you place fish of four types into your tank, alone with chests or sea anemones. At this point, your job is to watch your pets swim around...very slowly. Unless you're planning to let your phone sit open on your desk as you work--so you can periodically gaze adoringly at it, as one would a sleeping lover--you're not going to get too much hands-on enjoyment out of Pocket Aquarium.    Once you add four fish and three items, there's literally nothing to do.   You start the game with an empty tank and a song in your heart. It's not tough to get going. You just throw some fish in there, and maybe an undersea cave or two. There's a very limited amount of space, and the objects and fish are enormous. Consequently, adding three items and four fish effectively exhausts your options.     At this point, there's really nothing to do, apart from feeding fish. That said, there's no feeding animation and no way to tell how much the little critters are eating. Also, choosing not to feed the fish seems to be acceptable as well. They don't seem to be very high-maintenance. Your fish also won't do anything interesting, like breed or eat one another. In a game that offers so little control, that would at least be interesting to watch.    Pocket Aquarium is a poor screensaver and an even worse game .   Pocket Aquarium's sprite-based visuals look fairly realistic, but they don't move very well. Each fish has about four frames of animation in its repertoire. This quickly grows tiresome to watch. The sound is similarly repetitive, as a single system of harp music plays incessantly. This is simultaneously soothing and annoying--not a winning combination.    Pocket Aquarium probably shouldn't be in Verizon's games section, but it is. Even as a screensaver, though, this would be a poor offering. If you're looking for a fish-care simulation, try Centerscore's Aquarium Pets, which is a superior product in every conceivable way.   
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192,Starcraft ,9.1," It doesn't stray far from the blueprint created by its predecessors, but it is, without a doubt, the best game to ever adhere to that formula.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/4/1/6/2215416-starcraft_box_art.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/starcraft-review/1900-2533189/,pos,"
Passing judgment on the most eagerly anticipated game of the last few years is no easy task; it's difficult to set aside prejudices that would sway one's opinion either way. Let's face it: Starcraft comes with a great deal of anticipatory baggage, and it would be easy to say that it's either a huge disappointment or the greatest thing since real-time strategy became a household phrase. Truth is, it's neither. Weighed on its own merits, Starcraft is an extremely well-crafted game, albeit one with a few notable problems. It doesn't stray far from the blueprint created by its predecessors (namely the Warcrafts and Command & Conquers), but it is, without a doubt, the best game to ever adhere to that formula.  Starcraft offers a lengthy single-player campaign featuring ten missions for its three diverse races, totaling 30 single-player missions in all (there's also an unsupported veteran campaign included as part of the campaign editor). The story is compelling enough to make playing through all three worthwhile, and the campaign difficulty is tiered so that each is more challenging than the last. While this may seem like an uninteresting point, it helps Starcraft to avoid the problem that has plagued every other game in the genre: Each side is not the same. You don't have to go through a set of training missions once you've already mastered one side. The missions themselves mainly stick to the ""gather, build, and conquer"" philosophy, but there are a few innovative missions thrown in, and Blizzard has added some narrative elements to the missions themselves that help to keep things interesting. With the exception of the installation missions (in which you are given a handful of units to raid an enemy base, an attempt to break from the mold that is only occasionally successful), the missions are well designed. The solo player also has the option of skirmish missions, though the computer opponents have the annoying ability to see everything you are doing and defend accordingly, making the dreaded ""rush"" tactic one of the only viable means of emerging victorious.   Starcraft offers an equally nice suite of options on the multiplayer side: There's head-to-head and up to eight-player battles over LAN or Internet (though Internet play is only available over Blizzard's Battle.net server, which includes a ranking list and seems to be as lag-free as it gets nowadays). There is a good variety of multiplayer game types, and you can easily download new maps. Multiplayer has its own set of negatives, the major one being the predominance of rushing. Like it or not, creating a horde of the most basic units and attacking the enemy immediately is an effective tactic. Only a heavily defended base will survive an early rush of Terran Marines or Protoss Zealots. Starcraft has a built-in safeguard to discourage rushing, but it's one of the game's most problematic areas.  This safeguard is in the interface, which only allows you to select 12 units at a time. This isn't especially effective, considering six Zealots will smoke a base early in the game. The selectable unit cap does make rushing more difficult, but it also becomes frustrating at times, especially for those used to the ability to select unlimited units at once. Often, selecting the chosen units from a large group becomes a time-consuming effort. During battle, it can be an exercise in frustration. You can assign groups to hotkeys quite easily, however, lessening the frustration of the selectable unit cap - but this system isn't nearly as good as in Total Annihilation or Dark Reign, and units aren't marked by their group number like in said games. Multiplayer battles can often be decided by who has the best manual dexterity and can overcome the built-in limitations of the interface the most quickly.  Recent real-time innovations regarding unit control are included, with mixed results. Each production facility can have up to five units queued at once. There's a waypoint system, patrolling, and the like - but many of these options aren't particularly well implemented, and some of the options seem tacked on. On the other hand, pathing is great, with only occasional glitches (where a unit will run around in cute little circles). Starcraft most notably lacks the ability to define unit behavior (as in Dark Reign or Total Annihilation), leading to much micromanagement. What Starcraft does have, though, is personality. Playing any of the three races is a notably different experience. You have the Terrans, ""space trailer trash"" with moving buildings; the frightening, insect-like Zerg who can burrow underground; and the hi-tech Protoss who can easily construct many buildings at a time. Each race features totally different units, often with no equivalents on the other side, differing construction and repair principles, and even different (though equally effective) interface art. Blizzard has managed to keep it well balanced despite the great diversity. One of the greatest things about Starcraft is that no unit is ever rendered obsolete during the course of a game. Each unit is key in certain situations, and you'll still be relying on your most basic ground units in the endgame.  Aesthetically, Starcraft is impressive. Graphically, it stands alongside Age of Empires as the best-looking 2D strategy game around. What it lacks in visual innovation it makes up for in style; the unit and building animations are highly detailed and imaginative. There are some nice translucency effects, such as the flickering shields on Protoss units. The tilesets and maps are varied and interesting, and the unit portraits are expressive and realistic. And the cinematics, of which there are many, are outstanding. The only real complaints about the visuals are that the viewing area is a little small (the bottom quarter of the screen is occupied by the interface), and the minimap presents only rudimentary information. The music, apart from some new-agey Terran tunes, is appropriately melodic and dark, the sound effects are believable and distinct, and the voice acting is great, bringing the characters to life.  Starcraft's personality goes a long way towards rendering its minor shortcomings obsolete. The game has so much life in it - whether in the great, narrative-driven single-player campaign or the multitude of multiplayer options - you won't grow tired of it anytime soon. And even if you blow through it all, there's an incredibly versatile editor that allows you to create your own full-featured campaigns, right down to spoken introductions and triggered events within missions. It all comes down to this: Starcraft may not do anything particularly new, but it does the real-time thing as well or better than any game before it. If you're willing to give the formula another go, Starcraft is highly recommended.
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193,Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven ,9.1, Might and Magic VI is a classically designed role-playing game that features both a huge gaming world and lots of attention to detail.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/7/7/9/2217779-mm6_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/might-and-magic-vi-the-mandate-of-heaven-review/1900-2542598/,pos,"
New World Computing's classic Might and Magic games helped to define the subgenre that grizzled old RPG grognards now affectionately refer to as ""traditional style"" role-playing games. All of the previous Might and Magic role-playing games were set in expansive gaming worlds, filled with exotic locations, tomes of spells, armies of enemy types, and hoards of magic items. But during the past couple of years, such traditional role-playing games have been rarer than orcs in Denver. While other gaming companies have shied away from such classic game design, New World Computing has rebelled against this recent trend by creating a truly addictive role-playing game that is both faithful to the spirit of the venerable series and innovative in its own right. The game takes place in the world of Enroth, a setting that will be familiar to veterans of the Heroes of Might and Magic spin-off strategy games. Good King Roland was apparently victorious in his battles with evil old Archibald, only to have his united lands fall prey to the ravages of an invasion of devils. When the King disappears after encountering the devilish horde, the ineffectual child prince Nicolai assumes control of the Kingdom. Your humble party of four adventurers has the onerous task of gaining the gratitude of the Kingdom's regional leaders, parlaying with a cryptic, omniscient Oracle in order to unravel the mystery behind Roland's disappearance and, along the way, carving a destructive path through a hellish legion of enemies. Welcome to the medieval jungle. As with previous games in the series, Might and Magic VI is a first-person-perspective party-based game. In a minor break from Might and Magic tradition, all of your characters are human (elves need not apply), and there are only six available character classes. There are knights, sorcerers, and clerics, which are fairly standard fantasy role-playing game fare, and paladins (knight/cleric), archers (knight/sorcerer), and druids (sorcerer/cleric), which are essentially multi-classed derivatives of the initial three classes. While you can choose from a variety of digitized portraits to represent your characters and tinker with their initial attributes and skills, all of the character classes are preset. In another break from recent gaming trends, you won't be able to develop characters that are capable of mastering all trades, as there is a limited number of skills available to each character class. In other words, don't expect to be parading around with a party of plate armor-clad, halberd-swinging Arch-Mages. Far more interesting is the game's character development system. Stomping monsters and completing quests will net your characters experience points. Gain enough experience points, and you'll be able to raise the levels of your characters, provided that you hook up with a capable trainer and have a few spare coins. With each increase in level, a character will gain a handful of points that can be used to increase that character's skills. Gain enough expertise in a particular skill, and you can train to become an expert and then a master in that skill, acquiring additional abilities in the process. Since there are dozens of quests in the game (most of which have relatively basic objectives such as, ""clear out the evil critter nest/get my shiny bauble back from the evil critter nest"") and even more monster types to squish (I lost track around 150), you'll be getting a lot of experience points in this game, which means you'll have plenty of opportunities to allocate skill points to improve your characters. Complete a few special quests for the ornery Regional Lords, and your characters can be elevated within their respective classes, from clerics to priests and then high priests, etc. It's an extremely rewarding system, as you constantly get the opportunity to strengthen your characters, and even late in the game, level advancement is rapid. Unlike prior Might and Magic games, The Mandate of Heaven features freely scrolling, and often rolling, terrain. Gameplay generally occurs in real time, but you can make it turn-based at any point. It's a hybrid system that really offers the best of both worlds, allowing you to either hurl arrows or spells at enemies from a distance while dodging counterattacks or resolve the affair in more tactical, turn-based combat. While both options are always available, turn-based combat is often the only practicable manner to fight battles, which frequently involve dozens of enemies. Like many role-playing games (actually, like most games of all genres, other than those ""Mysty"" pseudo-interactive screen savers) Might and Magic VI is quite combat intensive. What sets Might and Magic VI apart from other games, however, is the sheer size of some of the battles. It's not uncommon to have a mini-army of monsters charging at you, flinging arrows and lightning bolts at you. Might and Magic VI's turn-based interface is more than up to the challenge of handling these engagements, and there's nothing quite as satisfying as casting a Meteor Shower from a hilltop, watching fireballs come from the sky to smite a pack of enemies. Some of the explosions from the more destructive spells will toss your targets back or up in the air, reminiscent of a pack of Doom imps being smacked by a rocket-launched blast. But make no mistake, Might and Magic VI is at its heart very much a turn-based tactical role-playing game and not an action game. Still, it's enjoyable to watch those Death Knights go boom.... The graphics in Might and Magic VI are the best yet seen in a 3D first-person-perspective role-playing game. At one point in the game's development, hardware support for 3D graphics cards was contemplated, which certainly would have been welcome. But even without 3D acceleration, the graphics are generally crisp and clear, with a minimum of pixelation. Like prior games in the series, the graphics are also very colorful, which takes a while to get used to for those of us accustomed to somewhat more realistic, but considerably more dreary, depictions of our fantasy gaming worlds. Although Might and Magic VI uses two separate graphics engines, one for dungeons and one for outdoor locations, they integrate seamlessly. All of the nonplayer characters, enemies, and items are represented by flat 2D ""sprites,"" as opposed to the 3D polygonal representations seen in action games like Tomb Raider and Quake. The sprites in Might and Magic VI are often very detailed, and monsters that you would intuitively think should tower above your characters, like titans and dragons, are suitably huge. The sprites in Might and Magic VI actually have substance as well - you can't just saunter right through NPCs and trees as you could in Bethesda Softworks' Daggerfall. But it's somewhat disappointing that there is only a couple of different nonplayer character icons, degenerating cities and towns into a swarm of largely identical faceless figures. Might and Magic goes Manhattan. My initial opinion of the graphics was lukewarm, and although I was ultimately genuinely surprised by how much I grew to like the graphics, they are still the one aspect of Might and Magic VI that is most likely to disappoint gamers. In an age when action games continue to push the envelope by providing increasingly more impressive graphics, Might and Magic VI's 3D graphics look understandably outdated. Not to say that there isn't some graphical eye candy: Dynamic lighting is used to good effect (especially when casting spells); the interiors of buildings are displayed on separate noninteractive screens that universally look good (and also include lighting effects); there's an excellent ""resting"" screen that vividly displays the timely rising and setting of the sun and moon; and there are some well-done weather effects. Once your characters acquire the ability to fly, you'll really begin to appreciate the artistic lay of the land, as you travel over mountain ranges, lakes, frozen wastes, and other varied terrain. One of the best things about Might and Magic VI is that Enroth was clearly crafted with a lot of care and attention to detail. Although the game is huge, taking well over 100 hours to complete, each of the towns and dungeons was individually designed. For perhaps the first time ever in a role-playing game, dungeon layouts are consistently logical and yet varied in appearance. I also like the fact that no matter how powerful you become, you'll still occasionally run into very weak creatures when the setting is appropriate - wander into some sewers, and you'll see some rats, not just dozens of Supreme Titans because ""you're powerful enough to fight them now."" Enemies are also grouped together logically - no more running into a goblin in one room, next to a Medusa Enchantress, next to a specter, next to a Grand Druid, etc., ruining the immersiveness of the setting. There are tons of other little details that make Might and Magic VI special. You can fly like a Spitfire through the air and fire arrows at packs of monsters - miss them as they run by a stream, and your arrows will splash into the water. Go into a few too many shops without purchasing or selling anything, and you'll start to be rebuked by their keepers: ""See ya, tightwad!"" Walk into the right thieves' guild, and you'll be confronted with a Monty Python-esque ""nudge, nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean...."" knowing glance from the trainer. A big metallic-looking guy loaded with vicious-looking swords who looks like a walking Ginsu knife is appropriately labeled a Cuisinart. There are some excellent sound effects as well - shoot a harpy out of the sky, and you'll be treated to the sound of it falling like a crumpled bird. Gargoyles shatter into pebbles. The sound of your footsteps reflects the nature of the ground you're walking on, whether it's hardened rock, fresh snow, or a damp beach. Music isn't used a great deal in the game, but it works well when it appears. Might and Magic VI has both an automatic note taker and an automap function, largely allowing you to focus on playing the game instead of being relegated to a woeful ""scribe character,"" manually taking pages and pages of notes, as in other role-playing games. Neither function works perfectly - the automap doesn't work well in complex dungeons with a lot of different levels, and it gets very blocky when ""zoomed in,"" and the note taker doesn't keep track of some key information like the location of trainers. Still, both are welcome tools. There are a few other minor disappointments. The interface is non-customizable, so you're stuck using the default key settings even if you find them inconvenient. Although it is basically a keyboard-controlled game, you still have to occasionally use the mouse, which is a bit cumbersome. The different geographical regions in the game don't quite integrate fully, meaning you'll occasionally be unable to loot the bodies of enemies that wandered outside of your current region. The main window for depicting the 3D gaming world is quite small, and even though there are hotkeys for all of the functions you need, there is surprisingly no ""full screen"" mode. The cutscene introduction is well done, but it feels somewhat disconnected from the rest of the game, and the introductory dialogue seems like it was scripted after the cutscene was already completed. Your interaction with the nonplayer characters wandering around town is quite limited, although you can get such NPCs to tag along to grant your party additional abilities, but such NPCs won't otherwise directly participate in the game. You might also be disappointed with the digitized character portraits, which sometimes don't seem to fit in with the other animated graphics. The voice acting of your characters is also of mixed quality, although I generally enjoyed it. Each of the characters has his own distinct expressions (""Chalk up another for the big guy!""), which is another nice touch. There are also a few bugs and graphical quirks. There are occasional clipping errors, which allow you to see, or even interact with, objects through walls. Certain spells, like Meteor Shower will occasionally not complete their animations if they are cast on an enemy who is on sloped terrain, causing the game to hang. Switch the game from real-time mode to turn-based while your characters are on inclined terrain, and you'll gradually trickle down the incline (as will monsters similarly placed). Some spells don't seem to work as intended - I was never able to even momentarily ""Stun"" the most ineffectual of enemies. Enemy AI is generally quite challenging - a pack of critters won't hesitate to try to surround your party - but it is still too easy to get your opponents trapped behind objects. Often a conveniently placed chair or chest becomes your characters' best friend, as it can render an otherwise challenging foe quite impotent, as you delicately fling arrow after arrow into your paralyzed enemy's head. But such quirks and bugs are really quite trivial. Overall, Might and Magic VI is a remarkably stable game - one of the most bug-free role-playing games in years. Even more importantly, it's tremendously addictive. There always seems to be one more quest you just have to complete, one more skill you have to elevate to mastery, one more region to explore... one more night to forget to sleep before dragging yourself to work. It's been a long time since a Might and Magic role-playing game was released, and many gamers questioned whether or not New World Computing could recapture the magic of past games in the series. We shouldn't have worried. Might and Magic VI is a classically designed role-playing game that features both a huge gaming world and lots of attention to detail. It's a standout game in what should be a great year for role-playing game fans. Might and Magic is back, and it's better than ever.
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194,Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far ,9.1, Atomic Games has managed to create the ideal sequel: It expands and adds many features while keeping everything that made the first game a joy to play.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/4/0/2216540-cc2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/close-combat-a-bridge-too-far-review/1900-2538434/,pos,"
""The first time we came under fire, the sergeant had to move around and personally tell each man that he was supposed to be firing back."" That quote is from an unnamed Marine during the Korean War. Combat in real life is far different from the John Wayne movies of yesteryear. Studies have shown that only 20-30 percent of soldiers in combat actually do something effective. But one would never guess this by most computer wargames or real-time strategy games - especially when you're watching minigunners happily walking under the treads of Soviet tanks in Red Alert. Enter Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far, a tactical real-time World War II wargame with an emphasis on realism. With this follow-up to Close Combat, Atomic Games has managed to create the ideal sequel: It expands and adds many features while keeping everything that made the first game a joy to play.  With A Bridge Too Far, the scope of the game has been greatly expanded. While the first game focused on American and German forces fighting in France, the sequel concentrates on the failed Operation Market Garden. Forces now include British and Polish units in addition to the Americans and Germans. There are now more than 30 individual scenarios, along with several operation games (linked scenarios with a specific objective) and campaigns. The operations and campaigns are especially challenging because you must fight at the tactical level while keeping the strategic picture in mind (including supplies and replacements). You can also create your own scenarios, but you must make do with the prerendered maps for the battlefields. Gameplay is simple but challenging. Ordering a unit to perform a task is as easy as right-clicking on it and choosing from the pop-up menu. Orders include different modes of movement as well as combat options. Unlike most real-time games there is no need to ""baby-sit"" the units, units will perform the order to the best of their ability. That's where the game really struts its stuff. What sets the Close Combat series apart from all other wargames is that the game models stress and fatigue in each individual soldier. This means that if you order a sniper to charge a tank it's very doubtful that order will be followed. This also means that you must use common sense and real-world tactics if you want to win. While there were some complaints about the morale system in the first Close Combat, units behave as they should. It can be frustrating at times, but there's something to be said for watching the enemy run away when you bring up a flamethrower. If the morale factor is too difficult there are settings so that units always follow your orders, but that takes a great deal away from the game.  Graphics are astounding. Watching the game unfold is like hovering a hundred feet over a real battlefield. The maps are gorgeous to the point of almost being photo-realistic. The only detraction is the large yellow numbers on buildings identifying how many stories they are. The inclusion of multistoried buildings - which were lacking in the first Close Combat - adds some new strategic elements: Roofs block visibility into buildings until units actually enter, creating plenty of ambush chances. Unit animation is top-notch: Soldiers crawl, crouch, sprint, and ready their weapons. Zoom in close enough and you can make out individual hatches on tanks. Sound effects are also first-class. Battles begin with an eerie silence punctuated by a bird chirping or a cow mooing and then quickly break into a cacophony of screaming and gunfire, and each weapon has its own sound effect. In addition, voices are accented properly for the countries and there's a range of different voices within each group. The online help even includes all the sound files so you can learn to aurally identify what is going on. ABTF is a highly polished game of near perfection. There are a few quibbles. The maps, while nice looking, aren't dynamic, which means damage to structures tends to look rather unrealistic. Prisoners follow units around like lost puppy dogs, often getting in the middle of a firefight (though they don't take damage). The only gameplay gripe is that some scenarios are extremely tough for one side. Of course this does breed the ""One more time and I know I'll win"" attitude that keeps the gamer glued to the computer.  One thing that must be emphasized is that ABTF is not a real-time game with historical elements (like Age of Empires) but a historical wargame with real-time gameplay. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but anyone the least bit interested in a game that stresses realism and real-world tactics, while retaining the fun factor, will find great pleasure in A Bridge Too Far.
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195,NFL Blitz ,9.1, NFL Blitz is the best football game ever made.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/6/4/2213064-box_nflblitz.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nfl-blitz-review/1900-2544917/,pos,"
The team that brought you NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime has returned to glory with the amazing action-based football game, NFL Blitz. The N64 translation of the game may not look or sound as pretty, but the gameplay is basically the same, and the addition of a play editor can breathe new life into the game on a daily basis. NFL Blitz takes a few liberties with the rules of football. First of all, there are no penalties. You can dive into receivers long before the ball heads their way with no fear of getting called for pass interference. Secondly, it now takes 30 yards to get a first down. Given the scope and speed of this game, getting a first down every ten yards would have been far too easy. Also, the number of players on the field has been reduced to seven. There are 18 offensive plays and nine defensive plays, although the excellent play editor allows you to construct nine new plays from the ground up. Not only can you use these plays at home, but you can take your controller pack to the arcade and plug it into the new game, NFL Blitz '99, and use them there as well. The gameplay moves along very quickly once you've gotten a basic feel for things. The plays are pretty straightforward at first, though there are tons of different things you can do on each play, so as you play the game more and more, you'll figure out more and more little tricks. There are specialty moves like spins, dives, and stiff-arms, all of which will help you to gain more yardage when used appropriately. Pitting two players of the same skill level against each other turns the game into a strategic, nearly chess-like battle, while mismatched players can use the game's CPU assist, which helps people come from behind, keeping games close. Once you get reasonably good at the game, however, you'll want to disable the assistance and be judged purely on your own skill rather than rely on the cheap comebacks that the CPU assist provides.Graphically, the N64 does a good job of rendering Blitz. The game was dropped to 30 frames a second from the arcade's 60, and the field and players are a bit more blocky. The game still runs just about as fast, though, so the gameplay isn't hampered. Also, some of the zoomed-in scenes are plagued by slowdown, which also happened from time to time in the arcade, but here it is a bit more pronounced. The arcade's rampant speech has been cut way back to fit on a cartridge, although the music has remained mostly intact. Also, a lot of the grunts and screams have been cut from the game, so you hear the same scream over and over again. Most people won't notice it, but if you played the arcade version a lot, the repeated scream quickly becomes annoying. While the gameplay is mostly accurate when compared with the arcade versions, there are a few minor differences. Receivers are covered slightly differently, which sometimes results in your defender not being in the right position to break up a play. The computer plays you a bit tougher now, and the CPU assist kicks in much earlier and much harder. If it is down by a couple touchdowns, it will merely march upfield and score, leaving you little or nothing to do about it. Also, it will onside kick the ball to you if it is down late in the game. There are more dropped passes, and a few more fumbles, as well. The play editor allows you to do some pretty cool things, but the computer is easily fooled by the custom plays, and playing them against the computer isn't really an accurate way to test their effectiveness. NFL Blitz is the best football game ever made. Unless you're one of those freaks that requires hyperrealism in every facet of your football games, there's no need to buy any other football game. Even if you're only playing against the CPU, the game is still extremely engrossing and more addictive than biting your nails. Even those of us that despise traditional sports games aren't immune to Blitz's incredible performance.
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196,Independence War ,9.1," Independence War not only provides the most detailed flight and systems modeling yet seen in a space sim, it also provides a complex, rewarding plot and a fully fleshed-out gaming ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/6/1/128-461.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/independence-war-review/1900-2535523/,pos,"
The crafty captain who deftly commands the crew of a starship to outwit a seemingly overwhelming force is a well-known fixture in many science fiction tales. To date, no computer game developer has successfully created a game that convincingly allows players to assume the role of that captain. Interplay's recently released Starfleet Academy opted to give capital ships flight models and weaponry that made the behemoths behave as if they were wanna-be X-wing fighters. But Independence War is the real deal. Independence War not only provides the most detailed flight and systems modeling yet seen in a space sim, it also provides a complex, rewarding plot and a fully fleshed-out gaming world.  In Independence War you play the captain of a small capital ship, a Corvette burdened with a far-too-impressive name, the ""Dreadnought."" As the game starts, Earth is in the midst of a decades-old guerrilla war with the colorful Indies, a haphazard collection of former colonists who have rejected Earth rule and formed their own political organization. Your character is a neophyte captain in Earth's Commonwealth Navy, and you're given an introduction to the Indie/Commonwealth conflict through an impressive 14-minute-long opening animated cutscene. The game's developers put so much effort into the introduction that upon viewing it I was immediately concerned that there wouldn't be enough other cutscenes of comparable quality within the actual game. I couldn't have been more wrong. The game is literally riddled with quality animated cutscenes and other scripted events within missions, which expand upon the game's introduction and advance the game's plot. Each of the other members of your bridge crew has a well-developed personality and contributes appropriate advice or comments during missions. A number of other space sims have had well-developed storylines, but Independence War has so many scripted events and plot developments within missions that the game almost feels like it is as much an adventure game as a space sim. The storyline is always compelling, and occasionally interactive, as your character's mission choices and decisions made within missions can dramatically alter game events. George Lucas admits that clips from World War II airplane dogfights were the inspiration behind his Star Wars fighter battles, and it's not surprising that most space sims have also largely chosen to emulate flight-sim gameplay, notwithstanding their gravity-less settings. While flight models vary somewhat in each space sim, for the most part similar combat tactics will work equally well in any game of the genre, and experienced Wing Commander or X-Wing fighter jockeys will do well in either game or in any number of similar games. But gamers who boot up Independence War and expect to be able to whiz through space, pulling gravity-based moves such as Immelmanns, and turning directions on a dime are going to run smack into Independence War's steep learning curve.  In Independence War, objects in space have inertia, don't have arbitrary speed restrictions, and otherwise respond in accordance with most laws of physics. In addition to having to learn these scientific limitations, you'll also have to get used to commanding a small capital ship, which doesn't maneuver like a nimble fighter even under the best of conditions. All of the ship's systems, from weapons and shields to waste heat disposal and propulsion thrusters, are logically explained and physically represented on the ship's hull, making them susceptible to damage. Some scientific compromises were clearly made in the interest of ensuring that the game was still fun to play, so you'll still hear some thunderous explosions even though sound doesn't travel in space, for example, and planets and other celestial bodies don't exert gravity. But it's equally apparent that Particle Systems wanted to emphasize the ""science"" aspect of the game's science fiction setting. The development team's plausible handling of extraordinary technology and events gives Independence War a very original, refreshing edge over other games in the genre. There are four bridge stations in the game: command, navigation, weapons, and engineering. At the command station you'll access mission briefings and be able to assume remote control over other vessels, and at the engineering station you can give orders to four repair crews and adjust power settings within the ship. You'll spend the bulk of your time, however, at the navigation and weapons stations. The navigation station provides you with a convenient screen to guide the ship, pick waypoints, and assign targets. The weapons station gives you the opportunity to see a third-person-perspective wire-frame view of your ship, allowing you to keep your current target always in view and to effectively fight enemies who are attacking you from a variety of angles. Your ship can trek through space using basic thrusters, using an exponentially faster Linear Displacement Drive system, which is convenient for intrasystem travel, or by using handy LaGrange points to warp to other star systems using a Capsule ""faster than light"" Drive system. While the ship's misleading name may invoke images of a mighty space behemoth, the Dreadnought is instead a modestly durable vessel with an outstanding ""team o' Scotties"" repair crew and some fairly basic weaponry. You have both a forward-firing particle cannon and missile bank and rear counterparts to the two weapons. The forward-firing cannon is on the right-hand side of your ship and initially feels a bit unbalanced and awkward to veteran gamers who are more accustomed to a fighter's duel gunned approach. Cannons will automatically track opponents within a certain range, although you can override that tracking by opting for a more rapid-fire, but unguided, attack. Missiles are either remotely or self-guided, and you can quickly send missiles at a number of opponents simultaneously using the weapons station's ""rippling"" fire mode. The weapons station's padlocked view also allows you to track and fire upon enemies that would otherwise be out of range of your weapons.  Shields aren't all-encompassing energy fields, as in other space sims. In Independence War your ship has two shield projectors, one protecting each of its upper and lower hemispheres, and each projector is only capable of shielding you from one attacking ship at a time. Using your weapons and shields effectively is difficult, but until you learn how to do so you won't have much of a chance against multiple opponents. Even once you're experienced, you'll have to choose your fights wisely. This is definitely not a game where you can be successful by charging in and trying to blast every enemy in sight. Time to retire your ""Iceman"" instincts. The graphics in Independence War are excellent, although strangely enough that might not be immediately apparent once you boot up the game. Since the game's physics system frequently results in you travelling in a direction other than the one your ship is facing, the Dreadnought's Heads Up Display (HUD) displays a series of directional lines at all times to help keep you oriented. Similarly, other ships leave a ""ladder-like"" trail behind them on your HUD, allowing you to quickly visually judge their speeds and headings. While you can turn off the HUD, you likely won't want to lose all of the information it provides, and as a result, the game's impressive 3D graphics are somewhat obscured. Perhaps to alleviate this effect somewhat, the game will switch automatically to a full-screen third-person perspective in certain circumstances, such as when your ship docks with another vessel or travels through a capsule-drive warp point. The game's software-rendering mode is good, but to fully appreciate the graphics you'll, as usual, require a 3D graphics-accelerator board. Only native Glide support is included, so you'll need a Voodoo Graphics or Voodoo 2 card (even a Voodoo Rush card won't necessarily work properly) to see all of the pretty pictures.  Not every ship system or game feature that the development team included works well. The engineering and command stations are infrequently used, and I suspect that Particle Systems had more ambitious plans for the engineering station and the detailed, and celestially accurate, star chart that is accessible from the command station. Wingman commands are also fairly perfunctory. You're prevented from dividing up your forces to achieve a series of objectives, as you can only issue one order to your wingmen at a time, and all available wingmen will scramble to obey that order even if you would tactically be better off keeping some wingmen in their current positions. Force-feedback support is included, but it's only modestly utilized, especially when compared with the prolific feedback effects in Descent: Freespace. Considering the fact that Independence War was released several months ago in the U.K. under the name ""I-War,"" it's surprising that the manual still contains erroneous or misleading information. The ship's power management (TRI) system is never explained in the game's manual, although there is a reference to the system in the manual that directs you to a further, nonexistent section of the manual. You'll need to learn a lot of keyboard commands in this game or have a capable programmable joystick, and you can't change the configuration of the keys without manually editing the game's keybind.ini file. The game's impressive introduction doesn't play automatically, and to get it to run in full-screen mode you'll inconveniently have to specifically change its playback mode by right-clicking on the movie once it commences. Unfortunately, these little inconveniences are among the first elements of the game that players are exposed to, and coupled with Independence War's already intimidating steep learning curve and initially disorienting graphics, they may cause gamers to prematurely give up on the game. Hang in there, Captain. Finally, the game's biggest strength is also one of its weaknesses. The game's missions contain original objectives and are generally far more detailed and involving than those of any other game in the genre. Unfortunately they sometimes suffer from overscripting, where the only way to advance the mission is to take a specific, occasionally unintuitive or finicky, triggering action. Allowing your ship to get pounded by your enemies just to advance the mission just feels wrong, and yet that's exactly what you have to do in one mission. The scripting also very much gives the missions a ""puzzle-like"" feel, where you have to figure out the trick to a mission before you have a reasonable opportunity of success. Since no space sim yet has allowed gamers to effectively save the game within a mission, it's not surprising that Independence War similarly excludes this feature, but its omission was even more noticeable than normal because of the length of some of the missions in the game. In the end, I found that the strength of the mission design in Independence War was the main reason that the game stands out above other games in the genre, but I was still occasionally frustrated by mission overscripting.  Independence War is easily the best simulation of a large spacecraft yet, and its originality is extremely refreshing in a genre that is quickly becoming crowded. If you're willing to cope with Independence War's steep learning curve and invest some time in learning the nuances of the game, you'll ultimately have a very rewarding and unique experience.
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197,Links LS 1999 Edition ,9.1, Three years of improving this engine has made Links one of the most well-rounded and finely crafted software products on the market.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/7/0/131-470.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/links-ls-1999-edition-review/1900-2535709/,pos,"
Even with all the new companies vying for a piece of the computer golf pie, and even with all the old lines putting out new and improved editions, Links is still the benchmark. It is the state of the art, and it continues to push the envelope. The LS series has been reviewed so many times that it would be pointless to reiterate all its many qualities. For some background, check out our reviews of Links LS and Links LS 1998 Edition. Basically, it is the best looking and playing golf sim on the market. The visuals are gorgeous, the control and ball dynamics are excellent, and the features and extras are plentiful. Links LS 1999 simply builds on these key areas and adds about two dozen new features to improve it even further. The improvements in Links LS 99 touch every area. Let's start with the basics. Once again, Access has improved the visuals, making them sharper, more colorful, and more detailed. New objects, ranging from trees and plants to full-3D buildings, bridges, and other landmarks add depth and realism to courses. The 3D objects are more than just scenery: They come into play as balls bounce off buildings or come to rest on small footbridges. All these features really help make the three new courses come alive. In addition to Latrobe, the package now includes Bay Hill, Entrada at Snow Canyon, and St. Andrews. All four courses are challenging and wonderfully re-created, but St. Andrews in particular will appeal to hard-core golfers, since it is rarely modeled. Though Access has done an impressive re-creation, the St. Andrews course will strike many as flat and lifeless. That's partly because it is fairly flat and lifeless, but also because the Links system is more effective with the rich colors and closed fairways of ""Augusta-style"" golf, rather than classic Scottish links golf, which is rather cold and windswept.  Another major addition is in the area of swing control. Following the recent trend toward dynamic mouse swings, Links has implemented a PowerStroke control feature. By sliding the mouse right and left, you control the power and accuracy of the swing. The powerbar used to gauge this new swing is quite effective, with markings to assist in distance assessment and a tempo gauge that displays mouse speed at impact relative to optimal speed as a red, yellow, and green bar. They've also added a three-click swing to the classic Links two-click swing. Most golf sims offer a dozen or so styles of play, such as skins, stroke, and so on. Links LS 99 ups the ante by including not only 30 modes of play, but also a complete mode-of-play editor. Some of the included play types are already pretty arcane (the Australian Hogan?), so it's hard to see what you can do differently with the MOP editor. It does enable you to create custom rules and scoring for stroke, match/Nassau, and skins-style games, complete with dollar values, points, club restrictions, and even weather conditions. Another editor that's new to Links LS 99 enables you to customize sound scripts, adding your own comments, effects, and other WAVs. The final major area of improvement is in tournament and multiplayer features. Tournaments are more lifelike with the addition of galleries full of spectators and enhanced crowd sound effects. Online tournament play has been significantly expanded with the creation of the LS Tour: an Internet matching site that not only allows head-to-head competition, but also Internet spectators and live voice chat. Internet play is smooth so far, but I have not been able to test the live voice chat to see if it slows down play or not. Other, less prominent changes and additions have also been made, such as two new golfers, a very sharp caddie book that shows the yardage and best approaches for each hole, more multimedia tours of each course, and refined physics. If this review sounds like one long paean to Links LS 99, that's merely because ten years of developing golf games and three years of improving this engine has made Links one of the most well-rounded and finely crafted software products on the market. Links LS 99 is the best golf game made, period.
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198,Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings ,9.1," If you've ever liked any other real-time strategy game in this classical style, then you'll clearly see why this one deserves so much credit.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/1/6/8/2210168-napc.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/age-of-empires-ii-the-age-of-kings-review/1900-2537995/,pos,"
It would be incorrect, but not entirely unreasonable, to claim that Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings and its isometric 2D playing field seem just like every other first-generation real-time strategy game ever made. Take away the historical context depicting a millennium of military progress since the Dark Ages, and you'd have a game in which you'd stockpile resources, grow your population, and augment your technology, all to amass an army with which to defeat your enemies as quickly as possible. But even as this model has remained historically relevant for as long as history has been documented, so too is it not liable to stop being the premise for computer games anytime soon. And if Age of Kings is any indication of how such real-time strategy games will continue to improve, then we couldn't be more fortunate. Although Age of Kings runs at higher resolutions and looks cleaner and sharper than many of its similar predecessors, you'll find that there's nothing foreign about its appearance. Villagers, buildings, trees, the black fog of war, and everything else on the map will be immediately recognizable if you've played a real-time strategy game before. But even if you've played them all, you'll note several differences in Age of Kings' presentation that make it stand out against comparable games. For instance, all the buildings and units in Age of Kings are shown more or less to scale - town halls and castles nearly fill the screen and loom high above your people. There are four different styles of architecture in the game - Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Eastern and Western European - and although they appear identical in the Dark Ages, by the Imperial Age all four look entirely different and authentically beautiful. Unlike the architecture, your villagers and military units look the same no matter what civilization you choose. Fortunately, almost every one of them looks good, and there are plenty to choose from, such as swordsmen and archers on up to mounted knights and terrific war machines. Age of Kings can look a little bland and washed out before you fill the screen with buildings and military units, but this same sparseness makes its interface clean and effective. The clearly depicted controls at the bottom of the screen and the familiar mouse functionality make this game very easy to pick up and play. Best of all are the descriptive floating help messages that thoroughly describe every unit and technology available, which you can toggle off once you begin to remember them. Your units move quickly and easily from point to point, and selecting a mixed group will automatically assign them to a logical formation, with tougher units in front and more vulnerable units in pursuit. Grouped units will also travel at the rate of the slowest member of the brigade, a feature that ultimately lets you coordinate attacks far more effectively than in most any other real-time strategy game. And as your soldiers fight and win, they quickly seek out the closest and most appropriate target, thus eliminating any tedious micromanagement and affording you the time to oversee something more complicated and tactically viable than a head-on assault. With floating help turned on and all your little units running around at once, Age of Kings can start to look a little cluttered. But it also looks its best at times like this, when the screen is so full of buildings and people you can begin to imagine how their historical equivalents once prospered. Even so, you'd think with only four styles of architecture and one generic set of units, the 13 civilizations in Age of Kings would seem identical. And while some of them seem similar, it's to the designers' great credit that most of the civilizations manage to feel very different from one another in spite of any visual likeness. For one thing, each civilization's units speak in their native language, and while they don't say too many different things, it's great to listen to them anyway. Each civilization also has its own unique unit that emphasizes or augments that civilization's strengths, and this also helps distinguish each one from the other 12. Every civilization also has its unique advantages that refer to the historical culture's strengths. For instance, to emphasize the Byzantines' defensive power, their units for countering infantry, archers, and cavalry are cheaper to produce; and to suggest the Turks' scientific achievements, they can research gunpowder technologies at a lower cost than any other civilization. Such cultural distinctions are often subtle but become more noticeable later in the game, when the skillful player who takes greater advantage of his culture's offensive or defensive inclinations will soon find himself in the lead. Then again, to build up your civilization to its strongest potential is by no means a simple feat, despite whatever luxuries the game's elegant interface provides. The original Age of Empires was criticized for combining the pretensions of a complicated turn-based strategy game like Civilization with real-time gameplay mechanics that were borrowed from Warcraft II. But Age of Kings makes good on the original's promises by providing a huge, branching technology tree and a correspondingly profound depth of gameplay that rivals virtually all similarly themed turn-based games. You must constantly reevaluate your priorities when gathering the game's four resources, since those priorities change as new technologies become available; and you must constantly make key tactical decisions based on the order in which you research particular technologies. You need to keep moving forward without spreading yourself too thin, although you're afforded some breathing time to get started early on since you can garrison your villagers within your town hall to defend against a preemptive attack. And yet throughout the game, Age of Kings' pacing is so fast and so exciting as to rival Blizzard's real-time strategy hits. Consequently, under no circumstances should you be prepared to win a war in Age of Kings without a fast hand on the mouse. But similarly, you're not going to win unless you think. Even Blizzard's Starcraft confines you to a basic set of strategies, whose subtle variations separate the experts from the rest. However, in Age of Kings, your options tend to be more flexible. If your opponent is too focused on particular tactics, you can easily allocate your resources into countering whatever it is he's sending your way. Swarms of infantry can be stopped cold by a simple wall; a contingent of archers may kill a line of cavalry but would be hard pressed to damage even a single war machine. Swordsmen can deal with pikemen easily, but the pikemen's reach make them much more effective against units on horseback. At one time, games aspired to such principles with the rock-scissors-paper game as a model. But Age of Kings has so many variants on this theme that to even suggest a similarity between Ensemble's sequel and the old betting game would be to grossly undermine Age of Kings' intricacy. It doesn't take long to realize that Age of Kings is complicated, but your appreciation for its detail will only grow with time as you begin to understand that, unlike in most real-time strategy games, you really do have several distinctly different but equally viable routes toward victory. There are also several different ways to play the game. You can use the random map generator to quickly create a custom-tailored, finely crafted map for up to eight players, or build your own map from scratch. You'll find a consistent challenge in taking on one or several computer opponents set to the default difficulty or above, although you'll soon learn of the computer's propensity to use guerilla tactics and fall prey to particular tricks. You can start with a ton of resources and just have at it in the deathmatch mode; you can set out to kill the enemy king in a regicide match; and you can play one of Age of Kings' five historical campaigns. These campaigns focus on such legendary leaders as Joan of Arc, Frederick Barbarossa, and Genghis Khan in a series of linked missions interjected with voice-over narration describing these figures' tribulations and victories. All five of these, including the William Wallace tutorial campaign, are fairly short and only begin to approach the sense of style and cohesion pioneered by Blizzard's real-time strategy campaigns. But you'll enjoy playing a part in these characters' historical accomplishments anyway, even if the narrators' accents are a little heavy and the artwork depicting the outcome of each mission looks rushed. At any rate, unlike in Starcraft, the campaigns seem more peripheral in Age of Kings, because its historical context and 13 civilizations will keep you interested with or without a plot to back it all up. Of course, you can also play Age of Kings over the Internet, although Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone can't compare to Blizzard's refined Battle.net. No matter how you play it, chances are good that you'll enjoy Age of Kings if not for its careful historical detail then because its context never takes precedence over the game's playability. And if you've ever liked any other real-time strategy game in this classical style, then you'll clearly see why this one deserves so much credit, even in direct comparison to the finest examples in its category.
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199,Heroes of Might and Magic III ,9.1, Spending even a short time with the game quells any doubt that it's anything but an excellent sequel and a first-rate strategy game in its own right.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/0/8/139-508.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/heroes-of-might-and-magic-iii-review/1900-2537588/,pos,"
Your typical game developer specializes at a particular genre, leaving New World Computing as an uncommon exception that excels on not one but two fronts. Best known for its long running Might and Magic role-playing series, New World has since created the offshoot Heroes of Might and Magic turn-based strategy series, which has nearly eclipsed its role-playing progenitor with the sheer amount of critical and popular acclaim it's earned. It's no coincidence - the Heroes formula is one of the most brilliant strategy game designs ever conceived, with its careful blend of micro- and macromanagement within a distinctive fantasy setting. And so, the big question with Heroes of Might and Magic III is whether the formula is good enough to hold up three games in a row. After all, while Heroes III overhauls the appearance and otherwise expands upon its predecessors, its gameplay remains fundamentally similar. Nevertheless, spending even a short time with the game quells any doubt that it's anything but an excellent sequel and a first-rate strategy game in its own right. But you'll notice its new look before everything else. The first two games were especially notable for their colorful storybook-style graphics, which lent either one a quirky sense of humor in spite of the epic subject. You'd witness hundreds of peasants being slaughtered by, for instance, a pack of minotaurs. But because both the peasants and the minotaurs looked silly, and because their numbers were graphically abstracted onscreen with just a single unit representing the army, it was difficult to take the combat too seriously. Even though it plays about the same, a veteran of the first two Heroes games will initially suspect that Heroes of Might and Magic III is a departure from the series because of its face-lift. Specifically, it tries to look a little more serious. Many of the units seem more dangerous than before, and at first, the look can put you off. The 3D-rendered units seem to lack some of the charm and character of the previous games, in part because the higher resolution graphics mean all the creatures appear smaller onscreen than before. Still, further inspection reveals that the old flame still burns - just take a look at the new units like the devils (complete with scythes, ram horns, and sideburns) or the behemoths (lots of hair, teeth, and claws) and you'll see that the series still retains its trademark sense of humor. While not all of the monsters in Heroes III look interesting, most of its graphics are beautiful, especially for a genre that typically neglects its appearance for the sake of gameplay. Heroes of Might and Magic III sounds even more impressive, with incredible and well-suited orchestral themes for each castle, although the operatic vocals from Heroes II are conspicuously absent. The turn-based gameplay has you recruiting mercenary heroes, whom you then guide about an overhead map jam-packed with resources, treasure, magical artifacts, mysterious landmarks, monsters, and more. Using the resources your heroes acquire, you augment your towns so that they can produce more powerful units, or still more resources. Meanwhile your heroes gain experience, skills, and spells, and you put them in command of the largest armies that you can afford in an ultimate effort to defeat the enemy mercenaries looking to conquer you first. As your heroes earn experience through combat and exploration, you'll want to utilize some for castle sieges, while others will make far better scouts or magic users. All the while, you need to balance resources between recruiting new troops and heroes, and building new facilities in your castles. Half the game is spent exploring and building, and the other half is spent in battle. The overhead map switches to a side view when you engage in combat, at which point you must command your various creatures against their enemies, taking turns moving unit stacks one by one depending on their speed. You can have up to seven types of creatures serving under a hero (as opposed to five in the previous games), with seven unique creatures available in each of the eight castles. Every creature can also be upgraded, making it more powerful yet more expensive to recruit. Each castle is meticulously balanced, and although the units roughly correlate between castles, most of them are unique. In fact, many of the creatures (both old and new) now have special abilities; archangels can resurrect their fallen comrades, unicorns create a defensive anti-magic aura, and cavaliers deal more damage if they charge their target. Combat plays out simply, but a great deal of complexity lies beneath the surface, as your hero's attributes and spells tend to sway the course of a battle. The single player game spans six campaigns detailing the war to claim the kingdom of Erathia from the perspective of good, evil, and mercenary leaders alike. The story isn't played up too much, but the campaign missions themselves are well designed and appear deceptively small. In fact, many contain subterranean caverns as well as the usual overworld territory, often demanding hundreds of turns across many hours of play. And if you can finish the campaigns, you still have dozens of single player maps to try, with the promise of many more to come thanks to the map editor included with the game. Meanwhile, Heroes III is a much better multiplayer game than its predecessors, as you can scroll around the map and review your forces when it's not your turn. Heroes of Might and Magic III doesn't alter the formula set forth by its ancestors, but represents a refinement and improvement on caliber with the finest sequels ever released. The promise of much more of everything - heroes, castles, creatures, artifacts, skills, spells - is gracefully accomplished so as to accentuate the game's complexity, style, and strategy without making it feel excessive. Much like its predecessors, Heroes of Might and Magic III successfully combines a number of elements that are enjoyable and accessible on their own, but when combined and weighed as a whole, they add up to a game that's both entertaining and rewarding.
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200,Magnetic: Cage Closed ,3, Magnetic: Cage Closed's reliance on imprecise platforming and nondescript storytelling makes the game's prison setting an unintended and accurate metaphor.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/6/5/388511-514265.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/magnetic-cage-closed-review/1900-6416155/,neg,"
Magnetic: Cage Closed is a game where every second is a battle against loose jumping and even looser primary gimmick powers as you solve mindless puzzles. Unwieldy imprecision is at the core of Magnetic, and it makes for a terribly frustrating experience.Originally created as a student project for developer Guru Games, Magnetic: Cage Closed is a puzzle-platformer with magnetic force as the primary gimmick. Stuck in some dystopian prison (for reasons that are never properly explained) and sentenced to death row, your character is given a chance at freedom if she can escape the twisted, sadistic warden’s experimental weapons laboratory by becoming the latest guinea pig for a new supertool: a magnet gun.This is as subtle as Magnetic's storytelling gets.If that sounds like an intriguing premise, it is. The game was originally designed as Portal meets The Cube, and solving physics-based puzzles in a totalitarian prison environment sounds like an idea with legs. However, it's clear that Magnetic: Cage Closed doesn't have the personality or fresh perspective to pull this sort of material off. The primary villain, the warden, is GlaDos without any of that homicidal AI's charm or humor. And while the game has every right to tell a more serious story, it doesn't, despite many attempts. There's no nuance or subtlety to the villains, your environment, or your actions. Thus, the story is an ""evil prison"" with no context or heart pushing you forward.The game's primary gimmick is magnetic attraction/repulsion. You're given a magnet gun--with three different power settings--that you can use to attract surfaces or repel them. You can use your gun to pick up boxes and then shoot them across the room. You can levitate across specialized magnetic pads and use those pads to fling yourself across rooms. But at every turn, it never felt like I was in true control of my movements and actions.If I never see another lever again, it will be too soon.It's the little things that add up in Magnetic: Cage Closed's avalanche of missteps. Mid-puzzle checkpoints are a rarity, almost to the point of being non-existent. For many of the more-involved, late-game puzzles, you will play long sections of puzzles over and over again as you reach the spot where one botched jump or poorly executed magnetic repulsion flight means instant death through impalement or a slow death through chlorine gas poison.At the beginning of the game, it's not an issue. Magnetic is simply dull. But the back half of the game featured multiple puzzles that I spent over half an hour on (and two that took over an hour) not because the puzzles were difficult to solve--puzzles are never more involved than ""get boxes here""--but because the platforming refused to cooperate. Various ""puzzles"" rely on trial-and-error guessing instead of logic. You're required to shoot boxes at certain buttons surrounded by magnetic attraction/repulsion pads, which create magnetic fields around the button keeping you from shooting the box directly at the button. And that's cool...in theory. But what it ultimately comes to is figuring out early where exactly you need to shoot the box and then spending 10 minutes nailing the sweet spot.Rarely has a tool felt so useless.The game also features ""moral choices,"" but they're extremely simple. The first choice (arguably the most clever) involves simply pressing a button or not pressing a button within one minute. The rest are stale: sentence someone to certain death or don't (without ever putting a face to the person you're making a decision about); seek revenge or take a more selfless action. The choices could have been interesting, but you’re never given any context to make you care about why you're doing anything.Magnetic: Cage Closed is not a puzzle platformer that will tickle your brain and push your problem-solving capabilities. Extreme repetition, poor controls, and a barely there story makes this game a dull proposition from start to finish.
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201,Color Guardians ,3, Color Guardians offers relentless difficulty and beautiful visuals but not much else.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/7/9/9/396609-544799.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/color-guardians-review/1900-6416136/,neg,"
Color Guardians is a beautiful headache. The idea is simple enough: you're a colorful mascot, running mostly from left to right and dodging back and forth along three lanes to avoid upcoming hazards while you collect glowing orbs to boost your score. The experience could have been delightful, but instead wavers between monotonous and infuriating.As the game begins, most of the color is sucked out of a magical world and replaced with darkness. You, a red guardian, and your two friends--blue and yellow--are the only ones who possess the ability to restore the vibrant hues that otherwise will be gone forever. The setup is reminiscent of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse or de Blob, only this game is populated by generic characters you've never seen before and probably won't care much about now.And for every failure, a two-star flag to remind you.If making everything right only required you to gather the orbs strewn about the three lanes, Color Guardians wouldn't offer much to challenge you, even with the addition of the environmental hazards. However, as a guardian you possess the ability to change between the three primary tones, and must utilize that gift in order to make real headway. If you pass over orbs while appropriately colored, you gain rewards. You do better still if you press one of three buttons as you find yourself in position. This is a neat idea on paper but tedious in practice. Imagine if your score in an old Sonic or Mario game were dependent on your willingness to press a button each time you passed over a ring or coin.Earning the best possible ranking in a stage is difficult, since you must manage a nearly perfect run to do it. A two-star rank is essentially the default. If you mess up badly enough that you're in line for a lesser accolade, you seldom survive the effort, at least during the first half of the game. After that, it sometimes seems the only way you ever reach a goal is by the skin of your teeth. Fortunately, you can resume as often as you like from a checkpoint, once you pass one. The downside is that these are in rather short supply as the game wears on, and thus you have to retread a lot of hostile ground.Early on, the challenge isn't severe, but that changes with the introduction of new mechanics. You eventually find oversized parasols that you collect automatically as you pass over them, and these carry you into the air for a while, after which you can either descend slowly or discard them to initiate a quick dive. Elsewhere, your path is blocked by color-coded barriers that recede only when you approach them with the proper hue applied. There are mushrooms and giant fans that allow you to quickly gain elevation, but your color must match theirs, or they're useless.Bringing the color back, one kingdom at a time.None of that may sound especially taxing, but it comes together in some truly exasperating ways. The developer did a commendable job of taking full advantage of each new gameplay wrinkle. Less admirably, it produced a lot of seemingly simple scenarios where you must do the opposite of what feels natural or face the consequences. Because of the particular button layout, it's easy to associate each color with a particular lane, but any color can require your interaction at any time, often in a rapid-fire sequence and with all manner of distractions. This dynamic is of course exploited frequently. Likewise, the game eventually trains you to switch hues so that you can gather trinkets and spring triumphantly from color-coded mushrooms. You then tackle a level that forces you to do precisely the opposite, lest you launch into inky spirits flying overhead. In the third world and elsewhere thereafter, you ride in mine carts that only switch lanes if you press a button corresponding to the desired lane. Such areas force your brain to adjust yet again, especially when segments of track are interrupted by ledges for a brief time. The net effect of the game's design is that you spend your time racing through one level after another, failing frequently until you memorize every danger that lies between one checkpoint and the next. Each stumble is punishment for your lack of a crystal ball that might allow you to divine what obstacle comes next. Successes don't feel like proof of skill; they merely attest to your ability to memorize another sequence.The irksome platforming is exacerbated by a number of related issues. You frequently find yourself floating over wide gaps, forced to land briefly on small islands and launch from pads. Sometimes, you must drop your parasol and quickly switch colors and spring into the air again before changing to another lane. Then, as you tumble into an abyss, you realize that you actually needed to switch two lanes at once, which wasn't immediately apparent. An on-screen indicator lets you know where you will land, but it's mostly only useful to explain your mysterious death so that you can do things differently the next time around. Another problem is that sometimes the game hangs for a split-second without warning, which murders your timing, or indicators pop up as you pass score thresholds and ruin your concentration.Whatever its other issues are, Color Guardians at least nails its presentation. Its visual design in particular is quite appealing. Regions start out draped in shadow, but everything comes to vibrant life as paint washes over it. There's lots of activity most of the time, as well, from floating spirits to mischievous goblins and dancing light and shadows. The music and sound effects set the stage nicely, being both mystical and energetic in just the right proportion.Expect to see a lot of this guy. If you find yourself enjoying the game despite its excessively punishing design, or perhaps even because of it, there's good news: the five worlds possess around ten stages apiece, along with boss encounters (though each of these offers increasingly challenging variations on a theme, rather than wholly distinct confrontations). When you defeat the recurring baddie at the end of an area, you can backtrack and search for hidden sprites and unlock additional stages, or just revisit your familiar stomping grounds in search of better scores. Leaderboards let you know how you rank compared to other players, which should be a nice incentive once the game has been in the wild long enough.Color Guardians features a concept that's still new enough to feel fresh, and makes the most of it. All too often, though, the stages are designed in such a way that you're tricked into failing, and any technical issues stand out more than they might elsewhere because precise timing and concentration are so vital to success. You can always rebound after failure, but sometimes it's difficult to muster the energy to do so when part of you knows there's bound to be another trick of some sort waiting just a few screens away. It's all very pretty, sure. It's just not worth it.
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202,Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 ,3, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is riddled with glitches and offers almost nothing new to longtime fans of the series.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2912051-image-2.jpg,XONE,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-pro-skater-5-review/1900-6416265/,neg,"
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 momentarily recalls the greatness of earlier games in the series. Skating around and looking for opportunities to test your creativity and reflexes is sometimes as enjoyable today as it was 10, 15 years ago. However, these moments of excitement are fleeting. THPS5 a full-priced game that feels like an alpha release. The core mechanics are there, but the supporting systems are half-baked and rickety.For anyone who's played Tony Hawk games in the past, skating, pulling off tricks and forming combos in THPS5 will come naturally, and it's accessible for newcomers, too. Grinding has been made slightly more difficult, however, because the same button that's used to grind is also tied to the new slam action, which forces your skater and their board downward. You can use it to your advantage if you've mistimed the distance between takeoff and landing during a combo, but you can no longer buffer a grind while in mid-air because you instantly plummet to the ground.This is my Tony. There are many like him, but this one is mine.Of course, skating sessions are only as good as the locations they take place in, and the eight maps in THPS5 are too small, lacking in interesting opportunities. They're also ugly, with poorly drawn textures and constant texture pop-in. After a few minutes with each map, you've seen pretty much everything there is to see. Pulling off combos often requires identifying a series of loosely connected objects that you can grind on between air-based tricks, and there are a few cleverly hidden ones to be found, but nowhere near as many as in past games, which were proudly stuffed with hard-to-find secrets and combo opportunities.Some maps will frustrate you in other ways beyond their lack of interesting elements. It's all too easy hit a ramp or jump off of other objects, only to find that you've gone out of bounds. This feels unfair, because these areas are fully-rendered and look accessible. THPS5's camera jitters when you ride over rough terrain--or whenever the game feels like it. There were times that the camera was so shaky and disorienting that I had to stop playing in order to curb my discomfort. Frame rates are also an issue, which is surprising given the game's simple and outdated graphics. It's not uncommon that you fall through geometry, clip through it and ruin a combo, or fall victim to anomalous physics quirks, either.When all else fails, go off the deep end.Progressing from map to map requires that you collect stars by performing various feats and completing challenges. These challenges can include reaching a high-score, collecting items, or pushing balls out of a pool, among a few others. These tasks vary little from map to map, and they are indeed tasks, because they never deliver an enjoyable or challenging experience. You're only motivation to play them are the stars to unlock maps and skill points that can be used to increase your abilities, though they never make a tangible difference. Your skater feels the same on day one as it does on day five.THPS5 is built as an online game, but it does little to entice you to playing with others. I was never paired with more than one other person outside of freeskate, and there were times when a multiplayer challenge would start with me as the sole participant. Online connectivity gets in the way during single player sessions, too. If you're connected to the internet when you try to play single player, THPS5 still tries to connect to a server. If it has any problems during this process, you have to wait for it to timeout, disconnect your console from the internet, and try again. At times like this, you can't help but feel like you're wasting your time with a game that isn't finished.Try to start a private session when your console is connected, and you may get stuck on this screen.Beyond the boring levels and challenges, THPS5 has another big problem with organization and presentation. When scrolling through the main menu, you're presented with a few options: THPS5 Levels, My Levels, and Player Created Levels. The game teases you with more to do by placing arrows on the top and the bottom of the list, as though you can scroll to see more, and it does the same thing on the map selection screen, creating the illusion that there's more to the game than there actually is. Once you're playing a challenge, there's no way to exit it besides returning to the game's main menu, and even if you stick with it and wait for the timer to tick away, you have to endure a series of loading screens before you're back to skating. I tried my hardest to engage with the activities in THPS5 to eek out enjoyment, but problems with menus, loading screens, and glitches made it all too easy to put the controller down and walk away.Within THPS5 lies a basic skating game that's difficult to enjoy, because you have to jump over numerous hoops and ignore a plethora of obvious issues to find the smallest amount of fun. Previous THPS games were able to capture your imagination, and motivate you through character progression, gear, interesting levels, and even a great soundtrack. The soundtrack in THPS5 is good enough, but the game is riddled with technical glitches and design missteps, making it a huge step back for the series


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203,Umbrella Corps ,3, Umbrella Corps is a sloppy competitive shooter with a score of issues that overshadow its redeeming qualities.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3077362-umbrella_corps_cover_art.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/umbrella-corps-review/1900-6416460/,neg,"
As a competitive shooter set in the Resident Evil universe, Umbrella Corps faces an uphill battle. Fans of Resident Evil are most likely thinking about the upcoming, horror-focused Resident Evil 7, and competitive shooter fans have a wealth of proven games with thriving communities to choose from. With so much background noise, Umbrella Corps has to do something special to stand out. And it does offer a few promising concepts, but they sit under a flickering spotlight--Umbrella Corps is a forgettable game dominated by bland action and half-baked mechanics.This is a competitive shooter, first and foremost, where teams of three face off in single death elimination matches, or in a series of varying match types, including domination, bounties, and item collection races. Call them what you will, Umbrella Corps' modes are standard concepts that have been around for decades, and players are so fragile that rounds tend to devolve into deathmatch battles regardless of the overarching objective.Single player levels tend to be similarly basic--kill zombies and collect their DNA. Shooting them is an option, but why expend round after round when you can instantly kill targets with a melee attack? It's baffling that a single whack from the butt of your gun will kill zombies faster than a stream of bullets, but it does.The small selection of maps in the game is directly inspired by the last few numbered Resident Evil games, and apart from the presence of zombies and unlockable character skins, are the strongest ties to the series at large. Despite their familiar appearance, the maps' inner-workings have some fresh appeal. While in Umbrella's labs, you can snake through ducts to get the jump on an unsuspecting enemy, or, in the game's outdoor locations, you can scurry up walls to gain a height advantage. In a game where most people constantly sprint and fire, it feels good to be able to disappear into the environment and wait for prey to cross your path; it's also an easy way to bide your time during single-death matches.Umbrella Corps is at its best when it allows you to utilize your surroundings, but this isn't always possible. Most games with a cover system allow you to snap to any structure of a certain size, such as a wall or a crate, but not here--only some objects are eligible, highlighted with a neon outline. Sure, you can hide behind any wall in the face of incoming fire, but only some walls--ordained without discernible rhyme or reason--allow you to enter a proper cover state and fire from safety. Because of this, you quickly learn that relying on cover is a fool's errand. Ultimately, characters move so fast, and kill each other so quickly, that you become accustomed to looking for enemies rather than hunting for cover opportunities.Despite being fired upon by two armed combatants, the melee attacker will probably come out on top thanks to Umbrella Corps' technical bugs.You can kill opponents in three ways in Umbrella Corps: you can shoot them, kill them instantly with a melee attack, or disable their Zombie Jammer and rely on zombies that litter every map to get the job done. Every player has a jamming device on their back, which allows players to move around the map without rousing suspicion from the undead. When it's disabled--triggered by a well-placed shot to a player's back--zombies rush towards their newfound target. This is a great option in theory, but in practice, it's very difficult to execute. Whether you're standing, crouching, or prone--where you slither around like an awkward greased seal--you can cover a lot of ground with minimal effort, which results in a lot of twitchy and chaotic face offs where opponents frantically attack anything that moves.While you can melee enemies with your gun, you might as well equip the Brainer if you prefer close quarters combat. Your Brainer is an overpowered, hybrid scythe-hammer that kills opponents in one hit, so long as they fall in the weapon's generous kill zone, indicated by a HUD projection. Using it comes with a risk--the Brainer's attack animation is notably long--but it's the fastest way to take out an enemy. Should you and a Brainer-wielding enemy attack each other at the same time, you both stagger for a moment before you can issue a follow-up attack. Typically, this results in a flurry of button presses as you try to attack again as soon as the game allows--but with both competitors mashing away, it becomes a game of luck rather than skill. Relent and try to switch weapons, and you'll probably die. Spend too much time trying to issue a counterattack, and you're likely to get killed by an enemy who's passing by. The Brainer is both the most effective tool in your arsenal, and the most likely to get you killed.You can try to adjust your strategy to account for the Brainer's peculiarities, but there's nothing that can be done to combat Umbrella Corps' broken death animations. In some instances, it takes a full second or two for a death to properly register in the game, and in that window of time, the doomed player can attack and kill others before they are disabled. There's probably a joke to made in there about how the dead don't stay dead in the world of Resident Evil, but this is a bug--not a feature--and the final nail in the coffin for a game pitched as a competitive shooter.Determined players can earn cosmetic items and new weapons as they earn XP and level up, but a new gun or patch for your helmet doesn't wash away the bad taste of Umbrella Corps' gameplay. Its systems are either unreliable or illogical, and as a result, it feels almost impossible to get a foothold. The first time an enemy kills you when they should have been dead, you may shrug it off. When it happens the dozenth time, you'll probably wonder why you're playing Umbrella Corps at all. There's ultimately no good excuse. 
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'.', 'Spend', 'much', 'time', 'trying', 'issue', 'counterattack', ',', ""'re"", 'likely', 'get', 'killed', 'enemy', ""'s"", 'passing', '.', 'The', 'Brainer', 'effective', 'tool', 'arsenal', ',', 'likely', 'get', 'killed.You', 'try', 'adjust', 'strategy', 'account', 'Brainer', ""'s"", 'peculiarities', ',', ""'s"", 'nothing', 'done', 'combat', 'Umbrella', 'Corps', ""'"", 'broken', 'death', 'animations', '.', 'In', 'instances', ',', 'takes', 'full', 'second', 'two', 'death', 'properly', 'register', 'game', ',', 'window', 'time', ',', 'doomed', 'player', 'attack', 'kill', 'others', 'disabled', '.', 'There', ""'s"", 'probably', 'joke', 'made', 'dead', ""n't"", 'stay', 'dead', 'world', 'Resident', 'Evil', ',', 'bug', '--', 'feature', '--', 'final', 'nail', 'coffin', 'game', 'pitched', 'competitive', 'shooter.Determined', 'players', 'earn', 'cosmetic', 'items', 'new', 'weapons', 'earn', 'XP', 'level', ',', 'new', 'gun', 'patch', 'helmet', ""n't"", 'wash', 'away', 'bad', 'taste', 'Umbrella', 'Corps', ""'"", 'gameplay', '.', 'Its', 'systems', 'either', 'unreliable', 'illogical', ',', 'result', ',', 'feels', 'almost', 'impossible', 'get', 'foothold', '.', 'The', 'first', 'time', 'enemy', 'kills', 'dead', ',', 'may', 'shrug', '.', 'When', 'happens', 'dozenth', 'time', ',', ""'ll"", 'probably', 'wonder', ""'re"", 'playing', 'Umbrella', 'Corps', '.', 'There', ""'s"", 'ultimately', 'good', 'excuse', '.']",-0.031151742993848264,0.49769803296119075
204,Conan Exiles : Dull And Dense,3, This hardcore survival sim is too dense for its own good.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2997738-12573215_164716707233538_4070234360792013548_n.jpg,XONE,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/conan-exiles-review-dull-and-dense/1900-6416916/,neg,"
For a game that’s based on the world of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, Conan Exiles has remarkably little to do with any part of that universe. It’s a big, open-world survival sim that sticks true to its initial hardcore vision to a fault. When you combine the steep learning curve of a deep but confusing crafting system with largely monotonous gameplay and a spectacularly awful UI, Conan Exiles feels like it does everything it can to push back on those curious enough to step into its admittedly intriguing but highly flawed world.The game opens as you regain consciousness in the scorching desert, completely naked and vulnerable. As an exile, you are trapped in a doomed and cursed land with nothing but the faint memory of being cut down from your crucifix by Conan, the giant hunk of man-meat himself. From there, you’re free to wander off into the wild yonder. The exiled lands are massive, made up of different environmental biomes that can be explored freely from the outset. Spectacular-looking sandstorms can roll in out of nowhere, forcing you to seek shelter lest they consume you. You can climb anything from mountains and trees to walls and buildings, provided you have the stamina. This adds an extra dimension to exploration, with the added payoff of some lovely views of Conan's varied world.You start out small, picking up rocks and sticks and crafting simple tools. Almost everything you find can be broken down one way or another, and while it's neat to watch rocks chip apart and trees topple over as you hack into them, the humdrum motion of harvesting never feels rewarding. Eventually you’ll need to build shelter and a bed, which becomes your new spawn point. Given the game’s brutal loss of items and resources after death, doing this sooner rather than later can save you some real heartache.Shelter can mean anything from a small stone shack all the way to a giant castle, complete with reinforced walls, towers, and even a trebuchet. Building is block-based and relatively free form, allowing for hugely elaborate base designs that can be some fun to build, provided you take the time to gather the raw materials to build everything you need. That's all well and good, except for the part where you aren’t shown how to do any of it. It’s all up to you to simply figure out or dive head first into a wiki to have anything explained in detail.If you aren’t motivated by curiosity, Conan Exiles' single-player mode will feel empty and largely aimless. It's more like a practice mode, with only a handful of NPC outposts and structures to find. When you do, most of them are hostile, and the few that aren’t only offer minimal interaction. Multiplayer changes this up for the better in a few ways, mainly through the addition of other human players.More importantly, though, multiplayer gives you more purpose and clearer goals to achieve. This includes defending your base from other players as well as The Purge, an army of NPCs that might attack and destroy your base as you gain XP--there's also an option to activate The Purge within the single-player mode. You can also join Clans, which will allow you to build collectively, either on or near clanmates' already-laid foundations. For times when you do have to leave home behind, you can create Thralls--human NPCs with specialised abilities you can knockout, bind, and drag back to base to enslave--to help protect it, and they do a decent enough job.Character progression in both single and multiplayer takes place in the Journey, a series of tasks grouped into chapters that, when completed, grant you attribute points to spend on any one of seven main ability slots. You also gain knowledge points to unlock new crafting recipes, of which there are a lot. The number of things you can craft is staggering; weapons, armor, survival items, and even religious altars to help to deify the gods of the world and earn their favour.Once you start crafting more complex items, you get better acquainted with one of the game's worst aspects: its UI. There’s nothing intuitive about it, and like the rest of the game, there’s very little explanation given as to how it works. On top of that, it's overly complicated, requiring you to place the resources along with any fuel required into the crafting bench first, select what you want to build from the menu, and then hit the play button to actually craft it. There’s also almost no difference between the console and PC UI, so it's an absolute nightmare to do any kind of inventory management with a controller. And like in most survival sims, it’s what you inevitably spend a significant amount time doing, making it a constant source of frustration.When you get tired of chipping away at trees and rocks, which you will, you can chip away at creatures or other humans instead. There are all manner of things in the exiled lands for you to kill or be killed by, from animals and beasts to monstrous boss creatures like a giant black spider and a huge, spiked Dragon. But despite the sizeable enemy variety and the large array of weapons you can smith--from daggers to axes and giant mallets--combat is just plain bad. Both light and heavy attacks feel unwieldy thanks to sluggish animations, and weapon strikes lack any impact, resulting in dull and monotonous fights.Conan Exiles is one of the most unsatisfying games I’ve ever played.To top it off, Conan Exiles just feels really unpolished. The bodies of harvested enemies simply disappear into thin air, and large areas of the world can pop in and out of view at any time, clipping your character through the ground then respawning you somewhere else on the map. When the night starts to come, the moon’s light casts upwards from the ground, creating an bottomlit effect that looks atrocious. It’s also not in the most stable condition, with a number of crashes affecting gameplay randomly on both PC and Xbox.Ultimately, Conan Exiles is one of the most unsatisfying games I’ve ever played. Its crafting and resource systems may be dense enough that the ultra-patient could find something to enjoy here, but anyone else would likely walk away with their hands thrown up in defeat. The mind-numbing tedium of harvesting resources, woefully boring combat, and a slew of bugs left me feeling completely underwhelmed and unimpressed when it was all said and done.
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205,Ghostbusters ,3, Ghostbusters fulfills your worst expectations of licensed games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3093559-untitled-2.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ghostbusters-review/1900-6416480/,neg,"
It’s not surprising that Activision has chosen to release a Ghostbusters game right in time for the movie reboot or that it’s a four-player cooperative twin-stick shooter. Really, the only thing truly surprising about the game is how clueless it seems to be about its own genre and license. Ghostbusters is a nearly full-priced release that feels more like a budget bomb.To put that in context, I actually like the last-gen Ghostbusters games, including the similarly themed four-way, very arcade-like, Sanctum of Slime. It's slight and disposable, but it nailed the old-school multiplayer groove. It wasn’t a particularly good game, but it was far and away better than this one.This new Ghostbusters has none of the redeeming qualities of its predecessor. This romp takes place after the events of the new movie. You don’t play any of the that film's Ghostbusters though, instead taking the role of a squad of rookies (just as in the previous game). They’re a bit more diverse than usual, at least--two women and two men fill the team--but they’re standard archetypes for a multiplayer twin-stick shooter: the big guy is a mini-gun carrying tank, while his buddy is the assault rifle-carrying smart guy. The two ladies offer up proton pack versions of a shotgun and dual pistols.With a full compliment of human players at the controls, they make a fairly well-rounded team, even if their personalities fail to make a meaningful impression. The game takes you all over New York City and, eventually, beyond. There are treks through a graveyard, cruise ship, hotel, and other haunted locales across 10 stages. Each level plays out the same way: you fight a bunch of the same, smaller ghost baddies, then some larger ones who require switching to the traditional proton beam to weaken them further so you can trap them, and eventually a pattern-based boss ghost. This formula is serviceable at first, but it doesn't take long before you start to feel like you're merely going through the motions, completing uninspiring chores.You can also switch to the P.K.E. meter during non-combative moments to find secret goodies hidden throughout the level. This dual set-up is the standard boilerplate twin-stick shooter template, which isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. The problem here is that Ghostbusters somehow manages to suck the life out of both its own license and gameplay.To be more specific, Ghostbusters is mind-numbingly boring. Levels are huge--too large for this kind of game--and filled mostly with empty space and confusing, seemingly random designs. Some levels can take over an hour, devoid of interesting environments or fun challenges--it's enough to put you to sleep.There are half-baked elements that might have improved things with better execution. The upgrade system lets you increase weapons and stats of each character, but the characters start out so ponderously slow that increasing their speed becomes a priority. Even after these upgrades, though, the controls are unresponsive, and shooting ghosts remains cloying.While each level tends to introduce a couple new enemies, there’s very little variety overall. You encounter the same larger mid-boss opponents ad nauseam as the drawn-out levels progress. Even with that sense of repetition, you spend most of your time aimlessly walking around more than actually battling spirits. There are huge arena-sized areas with virtually nothing in them. The P.K.E. meter may initially inspire you to search every corner of a level, but there’s little payoff when you do.And although Ghostbusters uses the Unreal 4 engine, its aesthetics don't redeem its poor accompanying factors. It’s trying hard to summon the cel-shaded animated look of Borderlands, but isn’t up to the task. The mundane looking ghosts are uninspired and landscapes are basic. The soundtrack, however, evokes the proper nostalgia, making it one of the only standout qualities in an otherwise substandard game. The overall score is surprisingly dramatic, making it much better than any other aspect of the game.In the end, Ghostbusters has rare moments when it doesn't feel like an utter waste of time. But it's mostly a bizarre slog through mostly empty, overly cumbersome levels full of extreme repetition. Even for devoted fans of the films and four-player co-op shooters, Ghostbusters is a disappointment. 
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206,Breached ,3, Breached wants to evoke the sci-fi survivalism of The Martian but fails to get off the ground.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/1/4/6/454165-599146.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/breached-review/1900-6416473/,neg,"
Cranes and excavators tower over a deserted alien landscape like skyscrapers. Mysterious obelisks and arches dot the horizon. Metallic colossi sprout out of the earth, decaying remnants of a dead world. Sentinels of pure electromagnetic energy roam the desert.Breached is a hybrid science fiction adventure game grounded in the legacy of Russian existentialist literature, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker. You wake up in a damaged pod, suffering disorientation after a stint in long term hibernation. All you know for certain: your shelter is falling apart, your oxygen tank is low, and you've got eight days to come up with a survival strategy. Across the game's three large maps, your mission is to guide a drone to locate materials for repairing your ship and synthesizing fuel.As with all the game's controls, you pilot your drone using mouse clicks. Unfortunately, you're either flying at unnecessarily high speeds or standing still. That's helpful when you're zooming across an expansive desert and you only need to maneuver around the alien obelisks and construction equipment that dot the landscape. It's frustrating when, for the third time in 20 minutes as you are forced to navigate tiny cliffsides to reach caches, you fly off a cliff that houses the capsule you need to win the game. It's even worse when you need to carefully avoid the game's electromagnetic anomalies. If the drone touches an anomaly, your turn is over. Your turns are very limited over an in-game week, so if you lose more than one drone, it's essentially guaranteed that you'll lose the game.Exploring Breached's large maps for resources can be equally agonizing. There's a radar system that lets you know how close you are to the nearest resource, but there's no way to tune that radar to any of the specific materials you need to collect. Without that guidance, you spend a lot of time wandering aimlessly, praying to find what you need. Given that you need a lot of fuel and many parts to repair your ship, this becomes yet another tiresome act that weighs Breached down.The story is presented via text logs that your character reads from their computer inside of their pod. Like the game's evocative alien landscapes, these logs hold a hint of promise. Sadly, they ultimately devolve into a banal technobabble. The game is a very basic text adventure during these portions. You click on a handful of hyperlinks in the text logs, and based on which hyperlinks you click, the details you're given into Breached's lore change. You can also do a little detective work by clicking on hashtags at the end of the text logs that give you more logs to read and more pieces of the story to put together.On the surface, the story has some interesting pieces. Is everything really what it appears? Are you actually stranded and about to die, or is the game some bizarre virtual reality experiment gone wrong? There are hints of cataclysms and factions at work and even teases that you've done this before as your memories return. But these are just breadcrumbs that whet your appetite for something more substantive that never arrives. There's a case to be made (see: Journey, Limbo or The Witness) for games that tease lore and worldbuilding without giving concrete answers, but Breached lacks the imagination and stylistic flair needed to fully draw you into its ambiguous tale.But it's the game's resource management that ends up being the biggest source of frustration. You have eight days to gather the resources you need, and the larger macro-actions you take use up a certain percentage of your energy for that day. If you go exploring, you immediately lose 40% of your energy, which makes any failed expedition practically fatal for the long-term run of a game. If you want to open one of the capsules you find--whose contents are randomized each playthrough--that's 30% of your energy. There are four different components the capsules can give you, and the game changes how much you need of each to repair your ship each time you restart the game. So, even if after multiple playthroughs you manage to memorize the location of enough capsules to repair your shelter, it won't matter because their contents are liable to change. But all of that pales in comparison to the madness of synthesizing fuel.There are three main sources of fuel in the game: alpha, beta, and gamma material. The game's conceit is that your material analyzer is broken so you have to manually synthesize those materials into fuel. In order to synthesize fuel, you need to combine specific proportions of all three materials, and those portions are different each time. The game gives you no clue what the solution is, and there are enough potential solutions that it's perfectly feasible you never solve the problem. In three complete playthroughs (and a handful of half-playthroughs that I quit in rage), I managed to guess the correct solution once.If you want any hope of succeeding, you'll need to play through Breached multiple times. But the exploration and text-driven portions of the game are totally static, and resource management is so maddeningly random that victory becomes a far from certain affair. Considering how poorly it controls, how shallow its mystery proves to be, and how little Breached cares if you succeed, it's pretty easy to mark it as a sci-fi adventure worth skipping. Breached has a spark, but it ultimately fades before catching fire. 
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207,Agony : A Captivating Disappointment,3," Despite some glorious and gruesome horror imagery, Agony doesn't have much else to offer.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3357314-agony.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/agony-review-a-captivating-disappointment/1900-6416919/,neg,"
Hell, by its very nature, shouldn't be enjoyed, but there's still something enthralling and entertaining in seeing creators imagine it in various ways. Agony, on the other hand, is less about Hell as a vehicle for entertainment or even fear. Agony's version of Hell is simply a place of unimaginable horror. It is depraved beyond reckoning, a place whose very brick and mortar is composed of atrocities. It is a place that never opens its sick, emaciated maw except to blaspheme and torment. Hell is terrifying in Agony, which goes hand in hand with the fact that the game is also torturous to play.In Agony, you are a freshly fallen wretch who wakes up at the gates of Hell with his memories--including his true name--burned away during the trip down. Under normal circumstances, it'd be torture time for the rest of eternity, but somehow, the new meat walks through the gates with most of his wits about him, and only one piece of knowledge: that Hell has a guardian angel, the Red Goddess. Only she can help him regain his lost memories, and help him escape perdition. So begins a long, arduous journey of survival horror--closer in function to Clock Tower or Alien Isolation than Resident Evil--to meet the Goddess, and beg for her dark blessing.Agony's single most breathtaking achievement is Hell itself. It is an enormous, heretical province of terror, the ungodly conceptual Venn diagram between Hieronymous Bosch, H.R. Giger, and Clive Barker. The very ground you wake up on in the game's first level is made of rotting pink flesh, the mortar made from the crushed bodies and blood of the hideous unborn, a process a later cutscene even shows you in great detail. The architecture all around you is a pulsating gothic nightmare, cathedrals of wide-eyed corpses and skeletons, some of whom are still alive, trapped twitching inside for eternity.It's because the world itself is so impressive that the enemy design then comes across so disappointing and predictable. While beautiful in detail, demons look mostly like the typical Doom interpretation of demons, and female variants tend to veer closer to being strippers-with-sharp-teeth as opposed to something legitimately imaginative. The Red Goddess herself is a near constant source of eyerolls, mostly coming off as a bloodied burlesque performer, with an inappropriately over-the-top voice performance that wouldn't be out of place in a commercial for a sex hotline. There are design elements that push the envelope--mostly centered around some truly unsettling perversions of genitalia--but the game's ham-handed attempts to be sexy, even in a sinister manner, is incongruous with the skin-crawling nature of the rest of the game.All the wretched humans shambling around Hell--you included--are little more than desiccated revenants. You can walk--or, more accurately, shuffle along at a snail's pace--perform a limited sprint, and jump. There are no weapons to be had, though you can pick up torches, which provide light, but little else. When you come across an enemy, you have only three options: run, sneak, or hide. You can technically sneak around, and there’s even a power-up to be gained later that supposedly lessens the noise you make. It is still very, very easy to be heard and seen, hiding spots aren't always close by, and aside from a rising musical sting, there’s no indicator of where exactly an enemy is in relation to you.There's only a few different classes of enemy you see throughout your play time, ranging from swarms of insects to Lovecraftian behemoths that can snatch up your soul. With only a couple of exceptions, getting caught by an enemy is typically a one- or two-hit death. As such, an hour's work can be flushed down the toilet just by hitting the wrong enemy in a group. Later on, you can actually possess a few classes of demon, but this is never as empowering or thrilling as you might expect. Agony doesn't seem to know how to capitalize on its most promising aspects.You do, however, have one big trick up your shriveled sleeve: if you should die another death in Hell, your soul can actually fly out of your current body, and forcibly possess another. That's only if you can find a vulnerable victim, though, and pull off the black shroud preventing them from being possessed. Otherwise, after about 10-15 seconds of being dead again, your soul dies a true death. The trick of it is not just finding the last person you unshrouded, but typically finding them in a maze, with an extremely limited and obscured field of vision while disembodied. If/when you die, the Goddess keeps you in Hell, though, and sends you back to the last checkpoint. Even then, checkpoints are a whole other problem. They're represented by a special mirror, where a soul must be sacrificed, but the mirrors are hidden deep in each level. Agony treats basic progressional milestones the way most games treat obscure collectibles.The checkpoint issue is one tiny facet of the game's overarching issue: Hell is too big for its own good. Your one navigational tool, the Destiny Lines, sends out a little neon cluster of lights that can point you in the right direction, but often the cluster gets just as confused as you are, leading you through walls or ceilings, instead of along a proper route, which can be difficult to discern in the chaotic and painfully dim environments. In addition, on the game's default difficulty, the Lines are a limited resource. The idea here is sound, if the idea was, in fact, to make surviving in Hell feel like a Sisyphean struggle, wandering a realm that mortal men have no mastery over. It doesn't make for an enjoyable experience.When you're not losing chunks of progress, the rest of the game pits you up against two types of glorified scavenger hunts: collecting a small number of important objects and arranging them in a very specific way to open a door, or finding the correct sigil among dozens written in the environment that will unlock the next area. The first kind is usually easy enough, though oddly, the most difficult one in the game is right at the beginning, where you're thrown into an expansive labyrinth full of enemies, and no way to save your progress when you've grabbed any of the resources you need to continue. Others are easier, but still more of a trudging annoyance than anything. The second kind involves exploring around to find the sigil, often involving backtracks into dangerous areas, only to get back to the door and discover the sigil you picked up doesn't unlock your door. This kind of slow and infuriating repetition typifies Agony from start to finish.These are issues ironically exacerbated by the fact that it's all taking place in one of the most abominable, depressing, and fundamentally disgusting environments imaginable. Worst of all, you grow numb to Agony's uniquely repulsive flair over time. You start thinking about the environment in practical nonplussed terms, instead of the grim wonder that strikes you in the beginning. Distress turns to disinterest, then--even as the bigger revelations about the protagonist and the nature of his torture come to light--turn to total apathy. I entered Agony’s Gates of Hell with a slack-jawed gasp. It is such a disappointment to have to have left it with a shrug. 
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208,Flash Point Korea: AH-64D Longbow ,9.1," There is no doubt that this is the finest helicopter sim ever made, and one ofthe best sims of any type.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/7/3/9/975-3739.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/flash-point-korea-ah-64d-longbow-review/1900-2536048/,pos,"
The first add-on disk for the outstanding Longbow sim is not just a new set of missions - though it is that, too. It's a substantial revision of the entire game system that elevates numerous aspects of play to new levels. It's required flying for anybody who owns the original. The core of Flash Point Korea is the 140 new missions: 100 single scenarios and 40 in a new Korea-based campaign. Set around a Second Korean War, with news clips and new animations, the new missions take place in the wonderfully rendered Korean landscape, with plenty of terrain changes and hills for masking. While the campaign is still a branching tree rather than a dynamic campaign, missions are much more complex, with a new structure that can make things very tricky. You may go out on one mission, only to be called away on a more pressing one. The enemy in the field can call in fire support, and redirect forces to deal with you. Sometimes your primary target isn't even given to you until you've gone out, and then it's radioed in. This all comes together to make Longbow missions more like those of Apaches in the real world. The result is a dangerous, challenging, constantly shifting battlefield that will keep you on your toes. These new features, as well as improved enemy AI, also carry over to the stand-alone missions, resulting in a huge set of scenarios with a whole new game dynamic. New enemies are also included, and new sounds have been added to many of the weapons already in Longbow. Beneath the new gameplay is a massive overhaul of the flight model and the game engine itself. The biggest changes are to avionics, which is even more complex and realistic. Performance characteristics for both TADS and FLIR are now more closely in line with the real thing. Azimuth controls have been added to both the TADS and the fire-control radar, allowing for panning left or right. You can set both FCR and TADS to either radar or laser modes to better control emissions, and narrow the scan zone for faster updates. FCR can be set to either single-sweep or continuous scan. The radar range has been reduced to eight nautical miles from 50. FLIR now has ""white/hot"" and ""black/hot"" modes to help with armor spotting. Beyond avionics, there are other changes, such as recoil effects when firing guns, more detailed handling of system damage, choice of seeker head type (laser or radar) on Hellfires, more realistic rotor performance, modeling of obstacles when laser designating, varying enemy armor values, new weapon launch sound effects, and other tweaks that show the attention to detail that makes for a great sim. To handle fires in the chopper, there's now a fire extinguisher. A whole new screen has been added to emulate the second seat for the co-pilot/gunner. You can lock and track targets from this view, and while there's no real new functionality, it is a new cockpit with two MFDs that are configured to make threat assessment easier. The 140 new missions and some new threats would have been plenty for most Longbow fans, but Andy Hollis and his team have gone ahead and honed this puppy down to a killing edge. The initial version of Longbow was realistic, playable, and finely crafted. Flash Point Korea raises it to a new level, though. There is no doubt that this is the finest helicopter sim ever made, and one of the best sims of any type.
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209,Grind Session ,9.1," The game has great sound effects and an absolutely amazing soundtrack, featuring songs from artists such as Jurassic 5, GZA, Dr. Octagon, X-Ecutioners, NOFX, and Black Flag.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/3/2/2211532-grindsession.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grind-session-review/1900-2577967/,pos,"
It's official: The skateboarding game boom is in full swing. EA created a monster in Street Sk8er because - although it was a terrifyingly horrible game - it showed that skateboarding was a viable genre. Soon after, we got Thrasher: Skate and Destroy, and the reigning king of skate, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Grind Session is essentially Sony's answer to Activision's super-successful Tony Hawk game, featuring similar control and gameplay goals, thereby making it easy for Hawk fans to dive right in. But the game manages to differentiate itself from Hawk by offering a much more varied list of skateboarding tricks, as well as interesting new gameplay goals in the form of technical lines.   Grind Session features six real-life skaters: Willy Santos, Daewon Song, Cara-beth Burnside, Ed Templeton, Pigpen, and John Cardiel. You can also create your own skater by using four preset models, and one hidden skater is also contained in the game. Aside from the training level and dream-house bonus rooms, there are eight stages in the game, and some are modeled after real-world locales. The Burnside level from Tony Hawk also appears in Grind Session. Remember how hard you tried to jump over the fence and skate next to those trucks in Tony Hawk only to discover an invisible wall that prevented you from doing so? Grind Session lets you live out your Burnside fantasy and hop right over a fence into a parking lot.   In Grind Session, respect is the name of the game. Each level has the potential to earn you 40 respect points. You get ten points for reaching a certain score, ten more for reaching a higher ""pro"" score, ten for knocking over certain objects that have been placed around a level, and ten for skating each of the level's ten technical lines. Tech lines, which become visible for a few seconds after a button press, are numbered lines. To skate a technical line, you must execute a trick combo that spans every point on the tech line. Easy lines are things like straight rail slides and ramp-to-ramp jumps, but the more devious tech lines force you to really use your head. The harder tech lines are the reason Grind Session has so much replay value. Figuring out exactly how you're supposed to accomplish the tough lines can be a real challenge. As you earn respect, you unlock the higher levels, including two competition levels. The competitions are broken into a street section, a vert section, and a best-trick challenge. The skater with the most points at the end wins, and you'll earn respect according to how well you do. If you get all 40 respect points in a level, you're given access to a room in the dream house. The dream house consists of a lot of cool, skateable objects, such as a large fountain or a shark tank. Spread throughout the dream house are several coins. Collecting all these coins unlocks the game's hidden skater. There are also several different multiplayer modes, such as a variant on Horse, a teamplay mode, and endurance matches. Unfortunately, all of the multiplayer modes are turn-based.   Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. The frame rate is nice and smooth, and the animation is great, especially on the various vert tricks. The environments are absolutely huge, and each level is designed extremely well, with lots of great little secret areas. The game has great sound effects and an absolutely amazing soundtrack, featuring songs from artists such as Jurassic 5, GZA, Dr. Octagon, X-Ecutioners, NOFX, and Black Flag.   Just because Grind Session is in many ways a Tony Hawk clone doesn't make it a bad game. In fact, it's easily as good as the original Tony Hawk in most areas and surpasses Hawk in a few areas, such as the number of available tricks and the character-building option. Grind Session has enough going for it on its own to make it one of the best PlayStation games released so far this year.
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210,Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour ,9.1," Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour provides the fastest and smoothest golf action on the Internet, along with a wonderful community of friendly players.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/4/4/1/1195-4441.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jack-nicklaus-online-golf-tour-review/1900-2535564/,pos,"
Just a few years ago, playing a golf sim head-to-head over the Internet was little more than a fantasy. Now there are more ways to do it than there are types of oversized drivers: Microsoft Golf, Links LS 1998, and Jack Nicklaus 4 and 5 can all be played for free over the Net. So if you can play those games for free, why should you pony up $9.95 a month to play Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour on GameStorm? There are a couple of good reasons that immediately spring to mind - the software is free, and the $9.95 monthly fee gives you unlimited gameplay in a slew of other games. But the most compelling reason is that Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour provides the fastest and smoothest golf action on the Internet, along with a wonderful community of friendly players. The game uses the Jack Nicklaus 4 engine (which I personally prefer to the JN5 engine), but it's been enhanced specifically for online play. The initial download can be a monster - if you're starting from scratch it's something along the lines of a 38MB file - but the advantages it brings to online play are well worth the time. Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour has been designed so that you don't have to play in ""serial"" fashion, with each golfer waiting in a cyberline to take his shot; instead, you take your shot at the same time everyone else is taking theirs, and the front-end software arranges the shots in proper sequence.  That might not sound all that impressive, but it makes for some pretty exciting action. The moment your shot has landed you immediately see how your partner or opponents fared, and in less than a minute or two you're addressing the ball again. It also means that a foursome can finish 18 holes in an amazingly short period of time. And speed is a very good thing if you're in the mood to sample all the courses you can play here. Jack Nicklaus 4 enthusiasts have used that game's excellent course designer to pump out scores of courses (most authentic, but a few fictional), and they're all available for download and play on Online Golf Tour. Grabbing all these would take a long time for players connecting via modem, and naturally there's an issue of disk space as well (I only have five courses on my hard drive and they still take up 37MB of disk space). But you'll figure out which courses get the most play once you've hung out at the clubhouse for a while, and then just keep four or five of the most popular ones if you're pressed for storage. It's great that all the Jack Nicklaus 4 courses can be played on Online Golf Tour, but it does mean that Jack Nicklaus 4 owners have a distinct advantage: They can practice off-line on all 18 holes of every course, while Online Golf Tour members who don't have the retail version of the game are only able to play the first three holes of each course off-line. (Online Golf Tour is also limited to stroke play, while Jack Nicklaus 4 features standard variations like best ball, scramble, and bingo bango bongo.) It's true you can use the gallery feature to watch someone else playing holes you couldn't online, but that's not much help when you step up to the tee box yourself on a hole you've never played. The limitation is understandable: If GameStorm allowed non-JN4 owners to play all 18 holes off-line, they'd basically be giving the retail game away free. Still, it does mean that newcomers to the tour can wind up with poor stats because their practice rounds will go into the big Online Golf Tour data bank, which lists the 50 players with the lowest average score (minimum of ten rounds played). You can sort those top 50 players by a slew of stat categories: rounds played; handicap; averages for putts, birdies, and pars per round; total number of aces, eagles, and double eagles; and length of drives. Unfortunately, there's no way to see which courses these guys played the most. It's a lot more impressive to shoot 10 under at Country Club of the South, for instance, than on the relatively tame English Turn Country Club. GameStorm places an emphasis on creating a sense of community for all its online games, and Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour is no exception. In its first month or so of competition, all the tournaments have been organized by members, and while there currently aren't any types of prizes, you can at least count on almost always finding some type of tourney going on. And all the members I've chatted with and played against have been friendly and ready to help if I had any questions. All in all, it's a great PC golfing experience. Aside from minor issues such as download times, disk space, and off-line practice, about the only shortcomings of Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour are the absence of a manual in WordPad or Acrobat format (it's all online in HTML format, which makes it hard to find specific info quickly) and a lack of actual prizes (Mplayer's Links LS 1998 challenge features $5000 in cash and prizes, but it costs between $9.95 and $14.95 to compete, and the Internet Gaming Zone's Golf '98 Tournament of Champions awards two winners with a free trip to San Francisco). As good as Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour is, it would still be nice to see GameStorm step up and offer some types of prizes, even if they're just a putter or tickets to a PGA event. The good news, of course, is that Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour is an online game, which means it will evolve over time - and with golf action this compelling, it's definitely worth the wait. Editor's Note: GameSpot content is licensed for republication by GameStorm and appears on the GameStorm web site. This relationship is traffic based, and GameSpot does not derive direct financial benefit from it
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211,Links LS 1998 Edition ,9.1, This is a first-rate product.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/6/4/1/2215641-51qygrgwofl.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/links-ls-1998-edition-review/1900-2535708/,pos,"
If you don't own Links LS 1997 Edition, the decision to buy Links LS 1998 Edition is a no-brainer: This is the finest golf simulation on the market, and should be considered the cornerstone of any golf fan's software library. But what if you're one of the tens of thousands of PC duffers who do own Links LS 1997 Edition? Buy it anyway. The 1998 Edition has enough new features to easily justify spending the thirty or thirty-five dollars. There will doubtless be 1997 Edition owners who will complain that at least some of the 1998 Edition's enhancements should have been offered as a patch, but when you look at the breadth and depth of the changes that argument loses its validity. This is a major upgrade to the best golf engine on the market - adding features that give the game more replay value than it has ever had before. Probably the biggest of the game's many enhancements is Access' decision to make the 1998 Edition a native Windows 95 (or NT) application. Gone is the 1997 Edition's annoying video test, along with nearly all compatibility problems involving video and sound cards. DirectPlay drivers mean that you can host a game on the Internet (with up to seven opponents) without having to use Kali. To help players find each other, Access will host a matching service on GolfWeb's Links LS web site. And the 1998 Edition will be supported on both Mplayer's Free Zone and Mplayer Plus: the Free Zone. The first will be for casual games, while the Mplayer Plus area will feature tournaments, prizes, and rankings. Remember the long redraw times of the 1997 Edition on lower-end machines? That too is a thing of the past, thanks to what Access calls ""look ahead rendering,"" which calculates your ball's final resting position and begins to load the correct scenery into memory as the ball is in flight. I'd estimate screen redraws are four or five times faster, and if you knock down a few details, the improvement is even more noticeable. New graphic flourishes include airborne objects such as balloons, jets, and blimps; incredibly realistic water reflections and clouds; new textures and colors; and waving flags on the green (which you can actually see from the tee on some shorter par-3 holes). One of the 1997 Edition's few flaws is its lack of a tournament mode. That shortcoming is obviously addressed to some degree by the online tourneys mentioned above, but that's not the only way the 1998 Edition lets you compete in a tournament: An off-line tourney mode allows you to design your own tours and compete in a field of 64 players. While playing against the fictional players found here is obviously not as titillating as going up against the pros in EA's PGA Tour Golf Pro, a name edit feature lets you at least assign your favorite players' names to the computer players. And the off-line tourneys are a great way to practice for the pressure of the online events. What else do you get for your money? Plenty - there are two new golfer animations (one male, one female), four new camera angles (you can have all eight camera views open at one time), two new play modes (scramble and alternate shot), the ability to see your playing partners onscreen, and a feature that lets you print your score on a digitized version of each course's actual scorecard. Links LS 1998 Edition ships with four courses - three at Kapalua (Plantation, Village, Bay) and, of course, Latrobe Country Club - and includes a conversion feature for 17 Links SVGA courses. There are also multimedia tours of Kapalua Resort and Latrobe, ""virtual reality"" tours of the Plantation Clubhouse and Arnold Palmer's office and workshop, and video flybys for all four courses. These little extras are fine, but an extra course or two would be far more welcome.  Apart from a single crash during play (which occurred when a when I tried to close a camera view, but as soon as it happened the program detected the problem and saved my position: in less than ten seconds I was back where I had been and ready to resume play),  the limited number of courses is the only flaw of the 1998 Edition.  If simplified and free Internet play, off-line tourneys, significantly faster gameplay, new camera angles, new golfer animations, a $15 rebate, and a host of other enhancements don't convince you should upgrade from the 1997 to the 1998 Edition, then nothing will. This is a first-rate product: a sports sim upgrade that's truly worth the asking price.
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'This', 'first-rate', 'product', ':', 'sports', 'sim', 'upgrade', ""'s"", 'truly', 'worth', 'asking', 'price', '.']",0.09027022152022153,0.4654715592215593
212,Madden NFL 2001 ,9.1, Madden NFL 2001 for the N64 is the most complete and refined version of the game thus far.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/6/4/2213264-box_madden01.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2001-review/1900-2628756/,pos,"
Madden NFL 2001 for the N64 is the most complete and refined version of the game thus far. While not a great deal has been added or changed when compared to last year's game, fans of the series will undoubtedly appreciate the new Madden challenges, the tweaked AI, and the new two-minute drill mode.   EA has placed everything that you've come to expect from the Madden series and more into this year's game. All of the teams, players, and stadiums come packed in as usual, along with eight modes of play such as exhibition, season, franchise, custom league, tournament, practice, situation, and a new two-minute drill mode. The two-minute drill mode allows you and ten other alternating players to compete in a two-minute exercise in which players are awarded points for completing passes, gaining yards on the run, and even managing the clock effectively. The player at the end of the competition with the most points wins bragging rights. The mode, while a minor addition, is fun and fast, making it a sort of Madden-style party game. The already incredibly in-depth GM modes have been made even deeper than before. This year you can pick offensive playbooks that are coach specific, which means that if you think Mike Holmgren is the best offensive coach in the business, you can select his playbook as your own. You can also create a new coach from scratch, which allows you to set his offensive and defensive tendencies, anywhere from very conservative to very aggressive, in addition to make other selections. In addition, Madden NFL 2001 once again features the wonderful Madden challenges that were introduced to the series last year. The Madden challenges are specific tests that motivate players to learn new skills by setting goals in all areas of play that can only be reached by experimentation. Some challenges run along the lines of simple tasks such as completing five passes in a row or making a run of 60 yards or more, while others are more complicated. Completing these challenges will unlock secret players, special All-Madden teams, secret stadiums, and cheats.   While the options and features in Madden NFL 2001 have obviously been reworked, the actual gameplay and control options on the field haven't changed a bit. On the field, the game is basically a carbon copy of last year's game in terms of presentation and control.    The controls are responsive and match up with the game's visuals well. You can control the players on the field with the analog stick or the D-pad. The AI of the computer is a little tougher across the board this year, even on the regular setting. Turning up the difficulty in Madden NFL 2001 is just about asking for a loss, even for experienced Madden players. The cornerbacks play as if their lives depend on it, and only a perfectly placed pass can ensure your receiver will even have a chance of catching the ball. Running the ball is another one of Madden NFL 2001's strong points. Maneuvering your back between the tackles as your offensive line clears a path is extremely fun and easy to do if you catch the defense unprepared.    Visually, the game looks almost identical to last year's, which was a great-looking game even by today's standards. If you own an Expansion Pak for your N64, Madden NFL 2001 really does look nice. The player models are detailed and smooth, and the game's frame rate is almost always constant and speedy. The animation of the players performing their various moves and post-TD celebrations look better than any other N64 football game. In the sound department, the game does a fairly decent job of re-creating the sounds on the field and those of the broadcast booth. Pat Summerall, James Brown, and John Madden provide play-by-play calls during games and also add their unique insight. John is still the master of summing up a play with a ""boom"" or a ""pop,"" while Summerall is still good at letting you know what down it is. The sound effects and the voices that bust out taunts after a big play really add to the experience and make the game feel complete.   Overall, Madden NFL 2001 - while not dramatically different when compared with last year's game - is a slightly more advanced version of the game. Everyone who's a fan of video game football, whether a fan of the Madden series or not, will surely enjoy the game's solid control and presentation. The tweaks to the AI and the small additions like the two-minute drill and coach-specific playbooks are more than enough reason for fans of the series to pick this year's iteration up.
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213,Madden NFL 2001 ,9.1, Madden 2001 is the most realistic and complete video game interpretation of the sport of football ever.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/6/4/2213264-box_madden01.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2001-review/1900-2640511/,pos,"
Madden 2001 for the PlayStation 2 is the best iteration of the game we've ever seen. EA Sports has delivered just about everything a fan of the series could hope for, and while it focuses on technical and simulation elements a bit more than the other games on the market, the game stays true to the Madden name.    The game has more features and options than any other Madden game before. It includes all of the fundamental options, like exhibition and season modes, and all of the in-depth options, like franchise, create-a-player, and Madden challenges. The Madden challenges have a bit more to them this year, since the completion of each one earns you tokens, which you can use like money in the game. You can purchase special items like cheats, secret players, and teams. You can even use the tokens, with the help of a couple of memory cards, as currency to wager with when challenging another player. The Madden challenge cards, which are displayed when you buy items, were made in conjunction with Upper Deck and look like really cool digital trading cards. They add a whole new incentive for playing the game and completing the Madden challenges.    The control in Madden 2001 is pretty much just like any that of any other Madden game, although some will find the overall feel of the game a bit too slow and unresponsive. The game uses a momentum-based physics engine, which is supposed to make the gameplay all the more real. The only problem is that it plays a bit too real - players have to literally stop their momentum when making a change in the direction they're running, just like in real life. This, while physically correct, just doesn't translate into fast-paced, hard-hitting football action. Instead, it causes the reaction time of a controller command to be a tad too slow, leaving the game feeling a bit sluggish. In time, you do learn to accommodate for this, and the effect isn't nearly so bad. The AI of the game will surely to seem familiar to fans of the series, particularly those who've played this year's PlayStation version. The AI's easiest setting will let you get away with a lot and teaches you early on that the game is all about knowing your team's plays and your players' abilities. Knowing which players to go to will help you blow the doors off the computer on the lower skill settings, but once you start to move up, you'd better have more than just a few tricks up your sleeve.    Visually, Madden 2001 on the PlayStation 2 is unsurpassed in its detail and polish. The game is almost perfect in its visual replication of the fields and players of the NFL. The textures used for the fields, jerseys, and skin of the players is incredible. Grass fields look just like real grass, which can actually get lodged in the corner of a player's facemask after he sinks his head into the soil after a missed dive tackle. During the game's replays, you can actually see the individual bumps of the pigskin on the football. All of these little visual details really make the game look and feel real. For instance, line judges will hastily drop the line markers and move out of the way when players run out of bounds in their direction. The animations of the players themselves are extremely fluid and realistic. The players move and perform stiff arms, catches, and tackles quite authentically. The multiple point collision detection system of the game allows the tackles in the game to look more realistic and be based more on individual situations than ever before. When you blindside a quarterback, he really goes down in a real ""lights out"" type of collapse. Speaking of lights, the lighting effects in Madden 2001 are fantastic. When you play a game at a field that has an open dome during the day, you can actually see the difference between the shadow of the partial dome and the direct sunlight shining down from above. Even when you're playing a night game, the shadows cast on the field by the players from the stadium lights look real. To aid this realistic looking lighting, the helmets of the player's are extremely shiny and reflect the player's surroundings. While the reflection off the helmets is a convincing effect at first, it loses something after you see it in every post-play close-up. This is also the case for the faces of the players as well. When you first see the player's faces, they appear extremely articulated since they come complete with intelligent expressions that react to plays and situations with appropriate responses such as a smile or a scowl. After a few games, though, you realize they are a bit over the top and actually appear a little too plastic looking. There are, of course, a few other minor visual flaws that you could nitpick about, like the way the ball magically switches from one hand to another or the minor clipping that occurs when multiple players tackle the ball carrier. But most of these things are only noticeable during replays and not during play.In the audio department, Madden 2001 isn't nearly as impressive. This is largely due to the lack of excitement in John Madden and Pat Summerall's typical commentary, which consists of the dry play-by-play provided by Summerall punctuated by the occasional Maddenism like ""boom"" or ""pop."" The rest of the sound effects are all very authentic and sound fantastic with a surround-sound system. The crowd actually sounds quite real, as their cheering is tied into the action - you'll even hear them chant the name of a home team favorite when he makes a big play.    In the end, Madden 2001 is the most realistic and complete video game interpretation of the sport of football ever. The level of detail in the game's presentation and feel is so dramatically superior to previous football games, it's unbelievable. If you enjoy football in the least, the game is a must-have PlayStation 2 game, and even if you don't like football, you may want to pick the game up just to see how amazing it looks. In any event, the game is easily the best iteration of the Madden series. Though it may be a little heavier on the simulation side than the previous games, it's still a Madden game at heart. 
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214,Ogre Battle 3 (Import) ,9.1," Ogre Battle 64 offers a detailed branching story and great depth of customization, both executed brilliantly within the limitations of a 35-meg cartridge.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/8/5/3/1569-5853.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ogre-battle-3-import-review/1900-2543697/,pos,"
Unfortunately for Nintendo owners, the Nintendo 64's decision to stick with the cartridge drove away almost all would-be RPG developers for the system. But all is not lost, as well-known Japanese developer Quest took on the burden of working within the restraints of the cartridge format to bring the latest incarnation of its strategy RPG series to the N64. Don't lose hope yet RPG fans, redemption will soon be at hand. Ogre Battle 64 offers a detailed branching story and great depth of customization, both executed brilliantly within the limitations of a 35-meg cartridge. The premise of the story centers on a kingdom that has been sold out by its king so that his throne and the social elite of the country will remain safe. After witnessing the plight of the downtrodden lower citizens, the hero Magnus finds himself leading a revolt against the powerful Lodis Church Kingdom to gain true independence. Building on this somewhat archetypal premise, Ogre Battle 64 spins a complex and involving tale of political intrigue, personal relationships, and battlefield drama using numerous cutscenes and in-game dialogue. The story's use of foreshadowing and ample character development, along with your ability to affect the outcome of the story, do a lot to keep the game interesting over its lengthy (about 60 hours) duration. To help you keep track of everything, you can view a diagram illustrating character relationships; you can read profiles of people, groups, and countries; and you can replay past events. While Ogre Battle 64 includes an intricate story and many RPG elements, it's a strategy game at its core. As the leader of the Palatinue army, you'll form combat units of up to five characters and deploy up to ten units at a time in each of more than 40 scenarios.  Before moving to a stage, you will be given a briefing that outlines the area and your objective, and you'll possibly witness a cutscene. Units are represented as sprites moving across a 3D battlefield, which incorporates adjustable views and features scaling effects for the sprites. While controlling your army, you can set waypoints for your units, predetermine how to react to enemy units encountered along the way, and camp to recover from fatigue. Icon-based menus and handy controller functions allow you easy access to the game's functions and let you issue complex orders to your units. Units do move in ""real time,"" but you can pause the action to issue commands whenever necessary.  When two units meet, a skirmish ensues, and the game switches to an isometric view of the prerendered battlefield. Characters make their attacks in semi-real time, meaning multiple characters act at once, which is a bit more exciting than turn-based battles. A high frequency of parries, misses, and critical hits make the battles more interesting and less predictable, and the animation and spell effects are very well done. A nice touch is that a magic user can combine spells to create a variety of impressive hybrid spells with unique effects. As in the original Ogre Battle, you don't have direct control during combat; instead, you direct the battle by deciding on your unit's formation and issuing commands. A unit's strength, number, and method of attack are determined by its placement on a three-by-three grid, and you can issue different commands to the attacking team at any time. As the battle wears on, the option to retreat becomes available, and finally the option to call for the help of one of the four elemental goddesses is provided.This is just the beginning of Ogre Battle 64's staggering attention to detail. Each character has its own individual stats, equipment, alignment, and gender. All of these factors affect various nuances of combat and determine the unit's class-change options. There are around 50 classes for human characters, including paladins, wizards, and valkyries, as well as special and secret classes. In addition, a variety of monsters can join your army, many of which can also change class. There are 13 types of dragons alone, as well as hawkmen, griffins, and deadly gorgons. Most of these characters can be outfitted from the huge selection of equipment and weaponry you purchase from shops and win from defeated enemies. Because you can rename and equip the characters in your army as you see fit, you'll soon develop attachments to certain characters and find yourself cheering when they parry a potentially fatal blow or screaming when they fall unexpectedly. While gameplay is by far the most important aspect of a strategy game, the presentation does count for something. Quest has made a great effort here, but some shortcomings can't be helped when squeezing a game this large onto cartridge format. Generally speaking, the prerendered backgrounds used for battles and conversations in various town locales are beautiful. Every possible type of terrain has been modeled along with bars, town squares, and modest mountain dwellings. Small details, like dust blowing down a street and plants gently swaying in the wind, make up for the slightly blurry look that results from heavy data compression. The units themselves are also slightly blurry but still have personality. Characters have nicely done portraits for speech and status screens, and most main characters carry their own signature sword, which is sure to have slain countless enemies. The 3D maps can be a bit bland and get somewhat repetitive by the end of the game, but several stages that involve breaching the outer walls of an enemy castle and making your way through the enclosed town to the inner gate look rather impressive from the multiple viewpoints. The game's soundtrack is composed by Sakimoto and Iwata, the duo widely known for scoring Final Fantasy Tactics and the previous Ogre games, and is full of dramatic intensity and power. The slight downside to the soundtrack is that the game reuses a good deal of music from the series and seems to have fewer tracks than its predecessors, the latter likely stemming from limited space on the cart. Perhaps Ogre Battle 64's greatest strength lies in its replay value. Because of divergences on the world map and decisions you are forced to make, there is no way to get every major character and see every event by playing the game through once. Additionally, how you play will affect your reputation. Some characters simply won't join your cause if you haven't gained enough support from other characters and earned the trust of the masses. The huge amount of customization possible and the ability to shape the involving story unfolding before you make the game a very enjoyable experience for any RPG gamer willing to venture into the realm of challenging strategy and micromanagement. Let's hope Nintendo leaves the game's content as it is and has a North American release date solidified soon.
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215,Ogre Battle 64 ,9.1," Ogre Battle 64 offers a detailed branching story and great depth of customization, both executed brilliantly within the limitations of a 35-meg cartridge.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/8/5/3/1569-5853.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ogre-battle-64-review/1900-2638901/,pos,"
Unfortunately for Nintendo owners, the Big N's decision to stick with the cartridge drove away almost all would-be RPG developers for the system. But all is not lost, as well-known Japanese developer Quest took on the burden of working within the restraints of the cartridge format to bring the latest incarnation of its strategy RPG series to the N64. Don't lose hope yet, RPG fans, redemption will soon be at hand. Ogre Battle 64 offers a detailed branching story and great depth of customization, both executed brilliantly within the limitations of a 35-meg cartridge.   The story centers on a kingdom that has been betrayed by its king so that his throne and the social elite of the country will remain safe. After witnessing the plight of the downtrodden lower citizens, the hero Magnus finds himself leading a revolt against the powerful Lodis kingdom to gain true independence. Although based on a somewhat archetypal premise, Ogre Battle 64 spins a complex and involving tale of political intrigue, personal relationships, and battlefield drama by using numerous cutscenes and in-game dialogue. The story's use of foreshadowing and ample character development keeps the game interesting over its lengthy (about 60 hours) duration. Plus, you can affect the outcome of the story. You can view a diagram that illustrates character relationships to help keep track of everything; you can read profiles of people, groups, and countries; and you can replay past events. While Ogre Battle 64 includes an intricate story and many RPG elements, it's a strategy game at its core. As the leader of the Palatinue army, you'll form combat units of up to five characters and deploy up to ten units at a time in each of more than 40 scenarios. Before moving to a stage, you will be given a briefing that outlines the area and your objective, and you'll possibly witness a cutscene. Units are represented as sprites that move across a 3D battlefield, which incorporates adjustable views and features scaling effects for the sprites. While controlling your army, you can set waypoints for your units, predetermine how to react to enemy units encountered along the way, and camp to recover from fatigue. Icon-based menus and handy controller functions allow you easy access to the game's functions and let you issue complex orders to your units. Units do move in ""real time,"" but you can pause the action to issue commands whenever necessary. This unique gameplay system will be an interesting variation for many gamers and a welcome return for vets of the series.   When two units meet, a skirmish ensues, and the game switches to an isometric view of the prerendered battlefield. Characters make their attacks in semireal time, meaning that multiple characters act at once, which is a bit more exciting than turn-based battles. A high frequency of parries, misses, and critical hits make the battles more interesting and less predictable, and the animation and spell effects are well done. There are other touches, like two magic users combining spells to create impressive hybrid spells with unique effects. As in the original Ogre Battle, you don't have direct control during combat; instead, you direct the battle by deciding on your unit's formation and issuing commands. A unit's strength, number, and method of attack are determined by its placement on a three-by-three grid, and you can interrupt battle to issue different commands to the attacking team. As the battle wears on, the option to retreat becomes available, and eventually the option to call for the help of one of the four elemental goddesses is provided. This is just the beginning of Ogre Battle 64's attention to detail. Each character has its own individual stats, equipment, alignment, and gender. All these factors affect various nuances of combat and determine the unit's class-change options. There are around 50 classes for human characters, including paladins, wizards, and valkyries, as well as special and secret classes. In addition, a variety of monsters can join your army, many of which can also change class. There are 13 types of dragons alone, as well as hawkmen, griffins, and deadly gorgons. Most of these characters can be outfitted from the huge selection of equipment and weaponry you purchase from shops and win from defeated enemies. Because you can rename and equip the characters in your army as you see fit, you'll soon develop attachments to certain characters and find yourself cheering when they parry a potentially fatal blow or scream in anguish when they fall unexpectedly.While gameplay is by far the most important aspect of a strategy game, presentation always counts for something. Quest has made a great effort here, but some shortcomings can't be helped when squeezing a game this large onto cartridge format. Generally speaking, the prerendered backgrounds used for battles and conversations in various town locales are well done. Every possible type of terrain has been modeled along with bars, town squares, and modest mountain dwellings. Small details, like dust blowing down a street and plants gently swaying in the wind, make up for the slightly blurry look that results from heavy data compression. The units themselves are also slightly blurry but still have personality. Characters have nicely done portraits for speech and status screens, and most main characters carry their own signature sword, which is sure to have slain countless enemies. The 3D maps can be a bit bland and get somewhat repetitive by the end of the game, but several stages that involve breaching the outer walls of an enemy castle and making your way through the enclosed town to the inner gate look rather impressive from the multiple viewpoints. Much of the game's soundtrack consists of music by Sakimoto and Iwata, whose credits include Final Fantasy Tactics and the two previous games in Ogre Battle Saga. Unfortunately, much of the music is lifted from previous Ogre titles, but new composer Hayoto Masuo adds some original music to the game. Overall, the soundtrack is full of dramatic intensity and power.   Perhaps Ogre Battle 64's greatest strength lies in its replay value. Because of divergences on the world map and decisions you are forced to make, there is no way to get every major character and see every event by playing the game through only once. Additionally, how you play will affect your reputation. Some characters simply won't join your cause if you haven't gained enough support from other characters and earned the trust of the masses.    North American gamers should be grateful to Atlus for taking special pains to bring this epic across the ocean. Aside from securing rights to the game from Nintendo (who lost the rights to publish the title), Atlus undertook a dauntingly huge translation project. Being a little on the complex side, the game is accompanied by a very thorough and competent manual. Game text and dialogue might lack a bit of polish in places, but they are very strong in most cases and do well to move the story forward and reveal the emotions of the characters.   The huge amount of customization possible and the ability to shape the involving story unfolding before you make the game a very enjoyable experience for any RPG gamer willing to venture into the realm of challenging strategy and micromanagement. Although Ogre Battle 64 will be limited at first, regular distribution will commence in the week following the initial date.
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216,Windward ,3, Windward is less of a high seas adventure and more of a soporific cruise for the geriatric crowd.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/9/9/9/165919-263999.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/windward-review/1900-6416142/,neg,"
At the beginning of Windward, you're presented with four factions to choose from. In Tasharen Entertainment's maritime action/exploration game, these factions represent the four styles of play Windward nominally offers: exploration, combat, trading, and diplomacy (read: questing). In the game's yawn-inducing first hour, that may seem like an apt description for the potential in the procedurally generated world set in front of you. But as you sink more time into Windward, its similarities to Sid Meier's Pirates! reveal themselves to be a masquerade--yet it still finds more time for the yawns, for good measure.Windward presents itself as a ""chart your own adventure"" high-seas simulator promising great ocean expanses, complex economic trading, diplomatic engagement, and high-octane sea battles for whoever wishes to find their inner Magellan or Admiral Horatio Nelson. You sail your ship (and the small fleet you gather at the beginning of the game) around procedurally generated seas trading goods, hunting pirates, laying siege to cities, and building diplomatic relationships with towns and opposing alliances. But every mode features the depth of a freshman-level philosophy course, and if you want to engage in any of the non-combat options the game offers, you must deal with rote, padding-fueled combat for extended stretches.The see is deep; Windward is not.For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out. The best way (honestly, it's the only reliable way) to gain money in Windward is through trading. You enter a town (through a bland menu) and either buy goods the residents have too much of or sell them goods they are short on. That's it. It never becomes more complicated than that. The aggravating, time-consuming portion of the system is that for the first few hours of the game, you’re stuck with ships with a two-slot cargo hold, which means you can only sell two trade goods at a time. So you're forced to waste time sailing around these large-ish maps unloading your cargo rather than taking care of a significant amount of business at once.To further that aggravation, the questing/diplomacy systems--which feed into experience you get to make your ship better (read: survivable)--also take up space in your cargo hold. So, if you're ferrying passengers for a quest, you can only carry one trade good. That creates an interesting incentive to make sure you're maximizing your time, but it mostly creates an incentive to never quest (and therefore rarely engage in direct relationship-building services) because it never pays half as well as the more rote side of trading.For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out.But, wait! Exploration! I love exploration! I will spend hours just walking around The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and not fighting anyone (if I can help it), or questing, or doing anything because I just want to take in the gorgeously realized environments. I will happily get lost in a part of Brooklyn I have never visited before because I will be overcome by the stunning Victorian houses, the trees that seem to be more than just streetside window dressing, and the innumerable churches that are genuine architectural wonders. Exploration in Windward never achieves a fraction of that pleasure, because exploration is fun and intoxicating only when you're presented with a space worth exploring. Gone Home is literally a walk through your house, but every nook and cranny of the Greenbriar abode offers a glimpse into the lives of that family. Eidolon drops you into a massive forest and invites you to get lost and engage in exceptionally subtle environmental storytelling. Windward gives you bland chains of islets and an ocean, and you're never without a handy course direction effect telling you where to go. An entire faction of the game has no reason to exist because it represents a meaningless portion of the Windward experience.Combat exists to break up the monotony of the other three core mechanical loops in the game, but it gets stuck in its own rote monotony. It takes a couple of hours for your ship to get any combat capabilities beyond circling around your enemy, auto-firing, and waiting for the cooldown on your volley shot to refresh. That's dull but fair for the singular ships you encounter at the beginning of the game, but once you encounter more ships in the game's second area--Windward's admittedly massive world maps are broken down into significantly smaller chunks--success in ship combat becomes an arbitrary question of ""will the game send more ships at me than I can possibly handle"" until you get more upgrades. Conquering towns involves dropping anchor in a circle outside a port for a nominal period of time.Menus: Windward's most exciting facet. That feeds into Windward's most perfidious sin. Even if you decide you're really into Windward's exploration, trading, or questing, you can't properly engage in them without sinking a lot of time into combat once you reach the second area. Trading is totally blocked off until you've kicked all the pirates out of any given region. And pirates spawn rapidly in Windward, and they’ll take over towns if you lose your vigilance for even a second. Windward doesn’t give you the necessary tools to properly defend regions you've secured from pirates, leading to a constant hit and run. Even if you don’t engage in the game's combat, it still becomes the only element of the game you can interact with.The opening portions of Winward have you falling asleep at your computer; later areas have you cursing angrily as every small victory you win is erased by the overzealous enemy AI (aided by utterly complacent allies content to watch town after town fall to pirates). The promise of exploring Windward's world as you see fit is a false one, and Windward never earns its sea legs.
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217,Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows ,3, Game-breaking glitches and a poor camera make TMNT: Out of the Shadows a bruised and battered shell of what it could have been.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/8/8/2229988-box_tmntoots.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-out-of-the-shadows-re/1900-6414058/,neg,"
Mikey won't stop talking about pizza. Between bouts of combat, he brings up stuffed crust, ponders the philosophy of ordering extra cheese, and complains about pizza toppings. It's all a silly monologue drawn out for comedic effect, but it's true to the spirit of Michelangelo, the goofiest of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Then the game freezes--if not here, then in plenty of other instances--and so you reload the latest checkpoint and fight the same enemies and hear the same banter over and over again. Eventually, you want to just drop TMNT: Out of the Shadows down the garbage chute like an old, grease-stained pizza box.The classically named turtles didn't learn martial arts just to improve their cardio. They were born to fight, and that's what you're going to spend most of your time doing. The beat-'em-up combat mechanics are heavily influenced by the Batman: Arkham Asylum system. Attacking multiple enemies with energetic combos is quick and simple, and incoming attacks are highlighted for easy dodging and countering. As you level up, you can put points into powerful and satisfying team attacks, complete with cheesy one-liners. There's also a contextual jump button that lets you swing around lamp posts, roll over a fellow turtle's back, leap over a fence, and do a number of other acrobatic moves that look cool and help with positioning. There's even a taunt system that, when upgraded, buffs your team with useful effects. But for every success Out of the Shadows brings to the table, there's a ridiculous technical issue keeping your experience from ever becoming what it could be.While Raphael fights thugs, you'll be fighting with the camera.There are situations in which the turtles seem to ignore your commands. Tap frantically on the buttons without any response, and then, seconds later, that queue of blocks and attacks is spat out in a tardy and useless manner. You might not get into combat at all, however, because enemies are often stuck in the walls, floors, or pretty much anything else they touch. If you don't cross the invisible line that spawns enemies in the first place, you're left to roam an empty environment wondering what went wrong until all you can do is sigh, open the menu, and choose to restart from the last checkpoint. Of course, even if you do cross that line, an enemy might fail to enter the fray. Prepare to search every nook and cranny for that one guy who decided not to fight, therefore keeping you from making progress.Even with four turtles, you're still going to be outnumbered in most battles. This is potentially exciting because the extra bodies let you attain high combo numbers and pull off more-powerful moves. In practice, however, the camera often jerks around too wildly for you to see what's happening. Special moves yank the camera too close to the action. Depending on what sort of acrobatics you're performing, the camera might spin or zoom on its own, disorienting you in the middle of a longer attack. And though it may not affect you, there is no option to invert the camera, making an already unpredictable game even more frustrating for those who prefer to play that way.The poor lighting thrusts Out of the Shadows right back into them.The plain and inconsistent level design makes it difficult to know where you're supposed to go. When all the streets and hallways look the same, there's little indication of how to move forward. Sometimes the ledges of buildings glow yellow, indicating you can leap across them. Sometimes that glow isn't there when it should be, leaving you to just run against surfaces and mash the jump button until something happens. In the worst cases, your turtles inexplicably have all of their combat animations replaced with the ledge leap animation. This leaves you totally unable to fight, since your swings and kicks are now little more than an awkward mime performance.Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows could have been a fun, short romp with exciting combat, a silly story, and familiar green faces. A few broken battles in, however, you'll forget all about that potential. This is a sad, unfortunate showing for the heroes in a half shell.
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218,Daylight ,3, Don't be afraid of the dark in the shallow and cliched horror adventure Daylight.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2318011-2229905-daylightwhitetrns1jpg_9f1140.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/daylight-review/1900-6415746/,neg,"
When Daylight's ridiculous final image appeared on my screen and the credits then rolled, I stared into my screen, mouth agape. What. Was. That?My incredulity wasn't a result of how scary this first-person survival horror game is, but how poor it is, how it makes no effort to escape rusty cliches, and how nonsensical its writing is. Granted, I jumped at a few scares, but you can see only so many drawers fly out of bureaus, and so many toppled wooden chairs right themselves, before you know when and where the ""surprises"" will occur. Daylight is procedurally generated, but it's no less predictable than a typical linear adventure. In fact, a carefully crafted game might have provided more unique opportunities to create stupefying shocks. Daylight instead recycles the same basic fright props in different places, turning the initial scares into tepid shrugs.You could think of Daylight as a combination of Slender: The Arrival and Outlast. The Slender comparison comes from how you must escape each area without coming too close to ghostly stalkers, in this case spirits in blood-soaked dresses, their eyes and mouths glowing with bright light. The Outlast connection is the setting, which focuses on a now-defunct asylum where terrible events once occurred. You grasp a cell phone that functions as a light source as well as a GPS, mapping out new areas as you enter them. As you move through each major region--the hospital, the sewers, the dark adjacent forest--you come across memos, personal diaries, and other written remnants of the past. Collect enough of these remnants, and you may proceed to the next stage of your journey. There's a story to piece together here, a story partially driven by the insidious disembodied voice that accompanies you. But after a single playthrough, it's a jumble of random notes and vague dialogue that point nowhere in particular.It takes several playthroughs for the game's story to come into better focus, though the payoff is hardly worth the tedium of getting there. The hazy opening, which has player-character Sarah waking in the middle of an abandoned mental hospital, is almost quaint in how it embraces age-old horror cliches. It's tempting to presume that Daylight is aiming for B-movie appeal, but the writing lacks the overt melodrama, and the presentation is too prosaic, for the the game to earn a ""so bad, it's good"" recommendation. The rapid flutter you hear when a witch approaches is an effective touch, and the discordant string noodlings that puncture the silence when you set your eyes on her are chilling. But the audio often communicates no more true horror than a discount sounds-of-Halloween CD. Random creaks and screams don't contribute much to the atmosphere because there doesn't seem to be any evidence of a force that should create them. They're just eerie noises collected from the eerie-noise repository.Our hearts go out to all the jack-o-lanterns that will go glow-stickless this Halloween. Some of the screams do have an obvious origin: Sarah herself often reacts to events as they occur. In fact, she often reacts to things that don't occur. ""Oh God--I can't see anything,"" she complains, even though the phone and glow stick you carry do a fine job of illuminating her surroundings. ""I know there's somebody here,"" she says, even when there's no obvious sign of another presence. She'll respond to silence with ""What was that?"" as if there's some paranormal phenomenon to analyze. Sarah displays no real character, so she comes across as though she's been possessed by an actress practicing her lines for an upcoming horror film.Well, maybe Sarah is frightened by the silly writing, which piles on desultory truisms that have no apparent relevance to the muddled backstory. ""Life is but a butterfly's dream,"" remarks your unseen guide, doing his best to make an arbitrary Chuang Tzu reference sound like a Deep Thought. Armchair philosopher Sarah opines out of the blue that you can't escape fate, proving that she's watched plenty of movies but adding nothing to the tale she's actually a part of. By the time a newspaper clipping raised the possibility that a construction project was occurring atop a Native American burial ground, I could only laugh. When it comes to appropriating horror ideas someone else used in superior ways, Daylight leaves no stone unturned.The game's odd moments of inspiration provide proof that it didn't have to be this way. When a pursuer draws close, you can burn away her presence with a flare, and I reached for the flare button in a panic several times when a spirit closed in. The game's few puzzle elements were welcome, too, as was an inspired moment when a music box came to life and spun terrifyingly beautiful shadows across the walls and ceiling. Such beauty is uncommon in Daylight, a dated-looking horror game with the distinction of being the first game made with the Unreal 4 engine to be released. A cutting-edge engine deserved a more fitting introduction.The writers of Daylight heard that infections were scary, so figured they should be included. Also scary, according to Daylight: lights that turn on and off, crows, asylum patients with evil powers, the number 13, notes that have words left out for some reason, biological experiments, boiler rooms, rain, archaeological relics, construction workers being pushed into cement, ferry accidents, the year 1666, and other elements yanked from the grab bag of scary things. Daylight's most interesting facet is the way it allows you to connect the game to your Twitch.tv channel, where viewers can type keywords into the chat window and trigger in the game a few scares of their own. There's no official list of effective words: viewers simply try out commands and wait to see what happens. Hearing a panicked cry because someone in your channel typed ""scream"" is a curiosity, but only a curiosity. In fact, viewer-generated events simply confirm how disconnected the sound design and jump scares are from the setting and its themes. Who is it that's screaming, and what exactly is she afraid of? Daylight doesn't care. Screams are scary, and that's all that matters.When it comes to appropriating horror ideas someone else used in superior ways, Daylight leaves no stone unturned.Take Daylight's claims to procedural generation with a grain of salt; while the corridor mazes change somewhat from one playthrough to the next, layouts remain consistent enough that you can easily rush through them when making return visits. In fact, given the lukewarm nature of the game's scares, I took to rushing through the game at full speed on my second playthrough; you can sprint indefinitely, which isn't conducive to terror, but handy if you want to finish in 25 minutes or so. Daylight makes for an interesting experiment in audience participation, but no crowd of online viewers can make the poor writing any better or the themes any less hackneyed. In creating a game designed for return visits, Zombie Studios ironically forgot to make a game worth playing in the first place.


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219,Deadfall Adventures ,3," Deadfall Adventures is a boring, glitchy, and repetitive shooter with too few moments of clarity.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/8/3/2229983-deadfall%20adventures.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deadfall-adventures-review/1900-6415563/,neg,"
In many games, you unlock ancient discoveries and acquire grand treasures as a reward. But not all tombs offer something grandiose, and a long trek down a musty corridor may sometimes yield disappointment.Deadfall Adventures is one such trek. The game draws its history from H.R. Haggard's Allan Quatermain series of adventure novels written in the late 1800s, but the plot of Deadfall Adventures bears a closer resemblance to the Indiana Jones movie--which were in part inspired by Haggard's books--than to Haggard's books themselves. Set in 1938, Deadfall Adventures stars Allan's great-grandson, James Quatermain, a hard-drinking, hard-fighting adventurer who must keep an all-powerful ancient artifact from Nazis who will use its power to gain an edge in the upcoming world war. Similarities to the Indiana Jones movies don't end there, as familiar traps and even a minecart ride that barrels through caverns and over bubbling pools of lava make an appearance. But Deadfall Adventures' biggest problem isn't familiarity: it's tedium. Quatermain's notebook helps you solve puzzles.Deadfall Adventures feels like a game out of its time. It relies on tired, two-dimensional characters to tell its all-too-familiar story. The rugged Quatermain is paired with Jennifer Goodwin, a tough and flirtatious love interest, and the two are pitted against melodramatic comic book villains. Wooden voice acting and emotionless facial animations put a damper on the presentation, and Quatermain himself is lost as to what period of time he's in. He occasionally spouts references to Indiana Jones, which merit little more than an eye roll, but sometimes he says or quotes phrases that are completely out of place. Despite living many decades before, Quatermain seems to have no qualms shouting lines from The Terminator and, believe it or not, Darkwing Duck.Deadfall Adventures becomes hopelessly predictable, breaking down into a tiresome formula of kill rooms and effortless puzzles.Unlike The Farm 51's previous game, Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, Deadfall is slow paced, and your inventory is limited to three weapons at once, split into three categories: pistol, rifle, and special weapon. Combat revolves around shooting from cover with a variety of weapons, many of which are World War II-era firearms. Guns and ammunition are always plentiful, so Quatermain is rarely at a disadvantage. He absorbs massive amounts of damage before needing to drop behind cover to recharge his health. Enemies repeat the same animation to get out of cover, so it's entirely possible to sprint into the field of battle and take each one out like a game of Nazi Whac-a-Mole while taking little damage in the process.James Quatermain: like Indiana, except without all the fun.Enemies exercise little caution in fights, only occasionally taking cover, and leaving their vulnerable bodies exposed in the process. They never seem to have any clue what they're shooting at and have a habit of shooting in your direction, even if you're in another room. It's one thing to watch a Nazi soldier fire his gun into the crate he's hiding behind, but it's a rare treat to hear the sound of rifles popping in the next room as enemies desperately try to kill you through layers of dirt and rock.Deadfall Adventures delves into the supernatural by introducing mummies who spur to life to protect the homes of their ancient masters. The mummies are invulnerable at first, but you damage them by focusing your flashlight beam, which sets them on fire after a short period. I found myself enjoying fighting these undead guardians, because they at least provide some sense of danger, and they back away or shield themselves against the harmful rays of the flashlight. In the final act, mummies charge in large numbers at a breathless rate. With every encounter, you are forced into a game of finding a corner and blasting away with a shotgun, ruining one of the few things going for Deadfall Adventures.Glitches plague Deadfall. You can pass through some fences or rocks, while other times, enemies are stuck running along an invisible floor. Cover in combat is often untrustworthy; one boss in the game proved that if you have a big enough gun, any form of cover is penetrable, from wooden boxes to stone pillars. You might sprint off a ledge and keep charging forward in midair, and during combat, enemies may shrug off explosions from grenades or red barrels, even if they detonate mere inches away.Not only do the invisible walls impede exploration, but their often bizarre placement creates some frustrating moments during combat.Every so often the game prompts you to pull out a notebook owned by great-grandfather Quatermain to solve one of its many puzzle rooms--a method that should sound familiar to fans of Uncharted. Don't expect to stress your brain solving these ancient enigmas. More often than not, the book demonstrates the steps you need to take--which lever to pull, which buttons to press in what order--to solve each mystery, turning what could have been a welcome break in the pace into a brief pause in the action while the game holds your hand through every step. If you are still having issues with a puzzle, no worries; your companions sometimes shout the solution for you, and continuously repeat it until you follow the command. There are several puzzles, however, for which the book offers no clear solution.Solving these puzzles in particular requires an arbitrary solution. One has you placing a bundle of dynamite in a hook attached to a platform, which you then use to blow up a hanging engine block, which, amazingly, leaves the platform intact. Another has you deciphering a puzzle with your flashlight, which I solved by randomly waving my light around until it granted me access. These puzzles are thankfully rare, but they provide some of the more frustrating moments in the game.Deadfall Adventures features some impressive-looking locations.At the very least, the puzzles allow you to take in Deadfall Adventures' attractive environments. Underground areas, from ancient catacombs to twisting mines, and the wild jungles of South America look astonishing. In the arctic tombs, for example, the orange of blazing pit fires complements the blue luminescent frozen walls and stalactites. Vine-choked, Mayan-inspired temples in Guatemala look appropriately aged. The style and design of these environments are an impressive foil to the blemishes and stand as the game's champion feature.Mummies can be lured into one of the many instant-kill traps, further enhancing the importance of strategizing your moves.Though Deadfall Adventures includes open terrain and large underground passages, it feels claustrophobic because it's plagued by invisible walls. For a game taking the guise of an adventure, it's sadly ironic that any sense of exploration is stagnated by these nagging restrictions. In Deadfall, you are funneled down linear paths where you can only proceed forward if you follow the developer's exact design. Short walls, stone formations, crates, and even some plants are little more than fancy dressing to hide irritating blockades. Not only do the invisible walls impede exploration, but their often bizarre placement creates some frustrating moments during combat. I remember fondly a time when I walked into a firefight and tried to quickly duck behind a box directly to my left. But no matter how hard I pushed the left key, I stayed in place, catching a few bullets in the process, all due to an invisible wall blocking me from taking cover.Hunting for treasure? Take out the compass and follow the needle.If you're looking for more game time with Deadfall Adventures, it does include two different multiplayer modes. Standard multiplayer offers five different classes to play as, which allows you to jump in and play with your method of choice. You can build your own classes, and you don't need to hit a certain level to do so. Custom classes are available right from the start, but certain weapons will not come into your employ until you reach a necessary level.More interesting is Survivor mode, which mimics the ever-popular Horde style of cooperative multiplayer. Here, you are rushed by the game's undead mummies, and since defeating them requires a flashlight, it takes more thought than simply lining up your iron sights and blasting away. This mode requires more tactics, and with a partner, you can find rhythm in the mayhem. In my play time, I used my flashlight to set the mummies alight, while my partner fired as soon as they were vulnerable. The game is set in rounds, and at the end of every rush, you get to replenish ammunition or grab a new weapon. Mummies can be lured into one of the many instant-kill traps, further enhancing the importance of strategizing your moves. Unfortunately, my time in the game's multiplayer was limited. As of this writing, I spent more time in the lobbies than in combat. The game's multiplayer is a ghost town, and the few players I met disappeared shortly after a round was finished.Glitches, stereotypical characters, and dull combat betray any chance of Deadfall Adventures providing any real incentive for your troubles. Digging into this game yields not a rough-cut gem, but rather a lump of coal that should have stayed buried.
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'players', 'I', 'met', 'disappeared', 'shortly', 'round', 'finished.Glitches', ',', 'stereotypical', 'characters', ',', 'dull', 'combat', 'betray', 'chance', 'Deadfall', 'Adventures', 'providing', 'real', 'incentive', 'troubles', '.', 'Digging', 'game', 'yields', 'rough-cut', 'gem', ',', 'rather', 'lump', 'coal', 'stayed', 'buried', '.']",0.010284188564443334,0.4898591005597376
220,Dragons and Titans ,3, Dragons and Titans is a halfhearted and frustrating online arena that doesn't deserve your time.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/6/7/2230467-dragons%20and%20titans.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragons-and-titans-review/1900-6415706/,neg,"
When you play a game with a title like Dragons and Titans, you seek fire, brimstone, and battles of epic proportions that rattle the very foundations of the Earth. The reality of the latest addition to the ever-expanding MOBA genre, however, is a bland and clumsy game that relies on its theme as a crutch to make up for its gameplay having no longevity of its own. Dragons and Titans may feature the juggernauts of fantasy lore, but the game itself is too frail to make so much as a whimper.Dragons and Titans is yet another free-to-play game following in the footsteps of the likes of Dota 2 and League of Legends. You select a dragon and a legendary weapon, and then join a team with the focus of annihilating the equally voracious opposing team. As has become a staple of the genre, you may do so in any of three game variants, the central of which has you focusing on freeing your team's titan by destroying the enemy's titan cage in the center of the base. The titan cage is shielded, however, and destroying the various structures surrounding the enemy base serves to take a chunk out of the enemy's shield or speed up the shield's natural decay. The other options are a domination variant, which requires your team to destroy the enemy titan cage, and the familiar all-random, all-mid offering for a more relaxed experience. Matches are much shorter than in most similar games, clocking in at around 20 minutes for a long game, compared to the daunting hour-long matches that often appear in League of Legends.Dragons and a titan.The dragons in Dragons and Titans rely on special cone-based skills focused in the direction the dragon is facing. Such skills pertain to the element the dragon represents, whether it be poison, fire, light, sand, mist, or so forth. That the basic attack is tied to the direction you face is the cause of untold frustration. Once you use up your other spells and abilities or run out of mana, you and your opponents have nothing but basic attacks left, and battles play out in one of three equally exasperating ways: you chasing down someone who's too low to stay and fight and just flies in a zigzag pattern to reduce your damage; you chasing an enemy fighter who is waiting on cooldowns and simply flies backward; or you and an enemy dragon rider attempting to fly directly at one another, only to end up chasing each other's tail in a circle. The resulting chaos is never fun.The ARAM map crumbles beneath you as you conquer your foes.Basic attack complaints aside, dragons are inherently equipped with one other ability to give them their unique identities. The paper dragon has a bonus health shield to bolster its literally paper-thin defenses, the bone dragon gains some close-range combat ability, and the magma dragon sends chunks of flaming rock flying at foes. These abilities, and a dragon's appearance and base stats, are the only aspects of the game lending identity to the different selectable characters, apart from the game's legendary weapon system.While teams are limited to one of each type of dragon per team, they are also limited to one of each type of legendary weapon. Legendary weapons grant you two additional abilities, and any weapon can be attached to any dragon, so you can customize half of a dragon's skill set on a game-to-game basis. This offers some interesting customization options, such as the ability to turn a back-line poker into an equally devastating threat in melee range, or to simply increase your firepower from afar, but it also drains the identity of each class of dragon and makes them all bleed into one.That the basic attack is tied to the direction you face is the cause of untold frustration.The game offers a single-player campaign for those who aren't interested in, or who want a break from, playing against other players. The campaign consists of three acts, two of which you must pay for to unlock, and is merely a gauntlet of ""kill this, kill those, collect these, and kill that,"" with forgettable bits of dialogue to link each bit together. There are three difficulty levels, and the game offers an additional ""star"" for beating the level with additional parameters, such as within a certain time or with a certain dragon.It should be a sin to mix incompatible fonts.Much like League of Legends, Dragons and Titans features a rune system for customizing your stats for a battle by collecting and purchasing runes to power up your dragon. Unlike in League of Legends, the runes can be purchased with real money, leading to a red flag for those opposed to ""pay for power"" mechanics in games. Further in this insidious vein is the ability to forge your legendary weapons to reduce mana costs or cooldowns or to increase their damage. To forge, you expend forge materials and wait four hours, or use an ingot to finish the forging instantly. Once again, ingots can be purchased with real money, so players who pay can power up their characters more quickly than those who simply attempt to acquire them by grinding. You can make pretty substantial progress on a weapon's forging for as little as $4, with those 1 percent boosts all adding up to a noticeable decrease in mana consumption. And again, I stress that mana goes away fast in this game. You want mana. You want things to not cost a lot of mana. You want to forge that weapon you're using. One of the few areas where Dragons and Titans succeeds and others have failed is in its method of mitigating champion select arguments over who gets to play which champion, because prior to queuing, you can preselect your dragon or legendary weapon. It comes with a warning that it will increase queue times, since running into anyone else preselecting your dragon or titan prevents you from being matched, but in my experience, the queue time didn't noticeably increase. I was guaranteed to get the weapon I wanted every game, which meant more to me than what dragon I selected. The mechanic is a brave one, especially given the meager player base, but it succeeds in its purpose.Or let them peck your eyes out and pretend you are Odin.It's a shame that a game featuring colossal lizards would look and sound so drab. Dragon fire-breath sounds are nigh indistinguishable from the sound of static when your TV's cable has gone out. The only graphics options available to adjust are resolution, full-screen mode, vertical sync, and a single slider allowing you to choose between fast or pretty graphics; the best I could reckon the slider did was adjust the brightness from ""morning-drive road glare"" to ""moderate corneal incineration."" You may wish to wear sunglasses when playing the game, or turn down your monitor's brightness and contrast settings to comfortable levels.Dragons and Titans is a mere shadow of other, richer MOBAs, and while its significantly shorter average game time may give it some initial appeal, that appeal comes at the cost of almost any enjoyment of the time invested. Dragons and Titans could have been a gateway game to the genre, but weighed against the game's counterparts, neither dragon nor titan can tip the scales in its favor.
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221,Lords of the Fallen - Ancient Labyrinth ,3, Lords of the Fallen's long-awaited add-on is an unimaginative rip-off.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2828828-2825030-91dbgif-yql._sx425_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lords-of-the-fallen-ancient-labyrinth-review/1900-6416047/,neg,"
Lords of the Fallen cannot escape Dark Souls' shadow, but its weighty combat and impossibly chunky art style still give it an identity of its own. Yet the shadow still looms, and in the case of Lords of the Fallen's newest add-on, Ancient Labyrinth, it wholly swallows its imitator. That Ancient Labyrinth is so short is not, in itself, a fundamental flaw. That it is devoid of imagination and betrays the exploratory wonder of the main game, however, is unforgivable. This tiny, throwaway slice of action is a rude return to a world with far better stories to tell.The eight-dollar asking price may sound reasonable, but it is important to understand what you are getting: a skimpy maze that amounts to three hallways, a few levers to pull, some skeletal archers, and a few other cronies to defeat. A difficult boss battle puts the cap on this miniature adventure, which includes about 30 minutes of content and a finale that stretches that half-hour into a masochistic stretch of trial-and-error bashing and blocking that could substantially extend your play time, depending on how quickly you learn The Keeper's tricks, and how flawlessly you execute your attacks. The skimpy gameplay leading to that battle is so forgettable as to be barely worth detailing: A secretive stranger--that Lords of the Fallen storytelling staple--sends you into the maze of monsters, hoping that you might defeat The Keeper hidden within and thus free him of his torment. Calling the three, tight, same-ish corridors you traipse through a ""labyrinth"" is laughable, sadly, as would calling the ensuing lever-pulling ""puzzles."" Your greatest challenge within the gothic stone halls is the collection of creatures that patrol them: Ghostly warriors, translucent wizards, and those pesky undead archers pester you on your lever quest, and you apply the same blocking-rolling-swinging-spellcasting techniques to off them as you do elsewhere in Lords of the Fallen.The DLC knows how to make an entrance. But it's all downhill from here. You might have expected a grander journey, not simply because Lords of the Fallen itself provided one, but because the first glimpse of the labyrinth from the staircase leading there is so dramatic. Slabs of rock hover over the menacing maze, and ribbons of flame and lightning warn you of the danger waiting within. Pulling a lever causes the maze's circular walls to rotate and reveal entrances, which produces a satisfying sound of grinding and a conclusive thud. There's little fault to find in the presentation, presuming you take to this particularly exaggerated art style, in which every surface and every piece of armor is covered with sharp edges and intricate carving. Draw too near, and some part of your anatomy would surely be punctured.Alas, the first boss is the only boss, and a troublesome one at that. Like The Worshiper from the main game, The Keeper employs an instakill area-of-effect attack that requires speed and care to avoid. Determining how to survive the explosion is your first task; actually performing the required tactics is the other. If you have built player-character Harkyn for bulk and not for speed, you may have a tough time of it, though there is a magical trick you can pull off to ease your troubles. The boss has four stages, the third of which breaks the rules the battle previously established regarding how and when the explosive attack occurs--a deviation likely to result in a torrent of profane language. The fourth stage, on the other hand, is easily exploited with particular types of magic, like Ram. It's an unrewarding gameplay arc for a boss fight, ending with the easiest form, rather than building the challenge to a proper climax.And so you reach the center of three hallways called a labyrinth. And then your task is complete. A shield of your choice is the reward, along with a few other odds and ends, and you may then return to the monastery, or wherever else you might have been exploring. ""Is that it?"" you may ask , though not just because the add-on is so short. No--that reaction is born of what a droplet of nothing this long-awaited return to Lords of the Fallen is. It is a miniscule stroll, made to feel longer by gating its ending behind tedious lever-pulling and a trial-and-error boss battle. With Ancient Labyrinth, Lords of the Fallen doesn't just fail to take a step forward: It takes a momentous leap backwards.
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222,Basement Crawl ,3," Basement Crawl tries to emulate Bomberman with a horror setting, but fails to ignite on all accounts.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2355281-basementcrawl%20boxart.png,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/basement-crawl-review/1900-6415683/,neg,"
Basement Crawl opens with a cutscene that promises horror and perhaps a bit of mystery. A grandmother sternly tells her granddaughter of the dangers that lurk outside their home, though the grandmother's warning is itself tinged with a sinister tone. What has happened to the outside world? How have these two people survived? Is the grandmother evil? What are these horrific creatures that we're getting glimpses of?Then you start the game and find a lackluster, multiplayer-only Bomberman clone bereft of features and personality. Any promise the premise had is immediately lost, and disappointment--not terror--lurks around every corner.Basement Crawl is a grid-based game for multiple players in which you bomb things. As one of four different characters, each with slightly different starting stats (one is a bit faster, one has a bit more health, and so on), you lay down bombs--sorry, ""traps""--which explode in straight lines in four directions: up, down, left, and right. You can collect power-ups for longer explosions, kick traps away from you, and hide behind a predictable pattern of unbreakable blocks, all in an effort to kill the opposing players over and over again.Wait, am I the crash test dummy in the center or on the left? They both look the same!If this sounds familiar, then you've probably played a Bomberman game before. Basement Crawl may call its bombs traps, but even the game's dark visuals can't hide the fact that this is just Bomberman with a shoddy horror theme.Basement Crawl's biggest problem isn't that it's derivative, however; it's that it gives you no options. Never mind that there is no single-player mode whatsoever, not even an option to play against bots for practice. There simply aren't any settings to toggle for what kinds of rules you want to play by. Even when you create your own custom game (which is likely, since there's no matchmaking), you can't set options like match time, the number of kills needed to win, whether or not certain power-ups are disabled, or even a player limit. Your only options are Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch. That's it.Want to limit your online match to four players, because you think having eight players in a match is too hectic and not very fun? Too bad. Want to disable the ability to kick traps, because that's all some players ever use? No dice. For having been inspired by a classic party game, Basement Crawl sure doesn't want you to have any chance at forming house rules. But hey, you can take your room full of four local players and join online matches with them, so that's something, right?Ooooh, look at all that blood outside the arena. So scary!One thing you do get to choose is the arena, though differences between arenas are negligible and almost entirely cosmetic. They come in three flavors, with a few different grid shapes for each: Restaurant Dungeon, Abandoned Circus, and Forgotten Factory. Notably, none of these environments is a basement.One thing all these environments have in common is that they are dark and cramped. So dark and cramped, in fact, that it's easy to lose track of the action. A pillar of light highlights your location when you spawn, but if you lose track of your character after that first moment, good luck finding it again. It's bad enough that there are only four characters to go around for eight players, but they're not visually distinct enough from each other to quickly pick them out in the dark environments anyway. There is often so much happening onscreen--much of which looks too similar to its surroundings already--that you lose track of the action constantly. As you play, you hear people screaming and a creepy child laughing, but none of it is the least bit effective at delivering on the premise of horror.It's hard to tell in the dark. How many players are here, again?The only sense of progression is the ability to play online against strangers in an effort to increase your online rank. But since there's no form of matchmaking, your rank means very little. And if you want to increase it at all, you have to actually win matches--as in, win first place in Deathmatch (or as a team in Team Deathmatch). Otherwise, you get nothing. Reaching the maximum rank of 30 could take a very long time.To top it all off, Basement Crawl is buggy at worst and unfinished at best. For example, when you pause an offline game, the action pauses, but the match timer keeps ticking down. How do you get the act of pausing wrong? It has been a while since a good Bomberman game was released, and nobody else seems to be interested in mimicking that classic gameplay. If you can get a solid group of four local Bomberman fans, and you have no desire to change any of the game's standard settings, you can have some simple fun blowing each other up. But if you're really desperate for this kind of experience, you're better off hunting down just about any Bomberman game from years past, rather than getting dirty crawling through the muck in this basement.
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223,Dead Rising 3: Apocalypse Edition ,3, Dead Rising 3 combines bland gameplay and colorful stereotypes into one unfortunate adventure.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2381878-dead-rising-3-box-art.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dead-rising-3-apocalypse-edition-review/1900-6415861/,neg,"
In the world of Harry Potter, where the laws of natural selection seem to favor whichever genes carry the most whimsy, there exists a species called a Boggart which takes on the appearance of your greatest fear, and is defeated by laughter. Unfortunately for the poor Boggart, there's also a spell that's laser-targeted on its ironic weakness, as Harry & co. discover in class. With the wave of a wand and the incantation ""riddikulus,"" a Boggart in the assumed form of a giant spider gets shod with eight roller skates. A snake Boggart gets magically transmogrified into a Jack-in-the-box, which is actually kinda creepier, really. Alan Rickman ends up in a dress for some reason. I haven't read the novels, so the movies are a bit confusing for me. But the lesson of the Boggart is a familiar one all the same--you can master the object of your fear by rendering it absurd.Our Boggarts are all zombies these days. ""Walkers"" in The Walking Dead, ""infected"" in Resident Evil, ""vampires"" in The Strain...all scary in their own right, certainly, but a zombie outbreak also tends to reflect back to us our fears about modern society. We watch our umpteenth cubicle-dweller swallowed up by the horde and think--have we become too sedentary? We stare, as fragile alliances of survivors fracture over who should make the run for the flare gun in the pickup's glove compartment--would we sacrifice ourselves for our loved ones? Could the government be *that* corrupt? Has the selfie generation become too self-absorbed to survive the apocalypse? It's all getting a little heavy and a bit overwhelming and then--""Riddikulus!""--suddenly there's Dead Rising, running zombies over with a lawnmower, hitting them with a gumball machine, jamming a shower head into their scalp that causes them to emit cranial fluids through the nozzle. Since the start of the last console generation, Capcom's brawler series has been one big clown nose on face of the undead, now three entries deep. The latest release--last year's Dead Rising 3--has been newly minted on PC, putting keyboard & mouse users in the jumpsuit of one Nick Ramos, Los Perdidos mechanic and nascent zombie-slayer. While the Apocalypse Edition is not the most lovingly crafted PC port around (locked at 30 frames per second and a tad jittery), the quality is agreeable enough, it supports controller or keyboard well, and the game's four downloadable content missions come bundled in.The city of Los Perdidos is in a bad way. It's been all but given over to reanimated corpses, and as we join Ramos and his small band of leftovers, they're attempting to jury-rig a mode of transportation that'll get them out of Dodge. They're up against a fairly tight clock, but unless you're playing on the included ""Nightmare Mode,"" it's not so tight as to prevent Ramos from indulging in a copious amount of assorted clowning and speciously relevant errands for the city's other survivors. Collect three spray cans, find that lost briefcase, and could you stop by the pharmacy on the way back? Games with this sort of laissez-faire attitude on direction tend towards morally inconsistent, strangely acquiescent protagonists, and Dead Rising 3 is no exception. Take Ramos' innocent, almost puppy-love sort of affection for a fellow member of his group, named Annie. When Annie flies the coop, he volunteers to capture and deliver her to a shadowy figure who wants her for some unknown end. A few scenes later, when it's revealed that Annie's part of a rebel band of ""Illegals"" (a real-world analogy that's invoked, then summarily ignored), Ramos is back by her side, and never a question is raised.The game is saddled with deeply sexist and mean-spirited overtones.Ramos may only be marginally more perceptive than the shambling remains of the rest of the populace. But fortunately for him, the horde is less a threat than it is a slowly shifting, listless object to be acted upon--electrocuted en masse, perhaps, or paved over with a steamroller. As far as raisons d'être go, that's not much, even if Dead Rising 3's zombies get second billing to its unusual arsenal. The thrill of squishing them wears thin when you realize the extent of their haplessness--stand at the top of a ramp, and one after another will trip over the incline, forming a pile of dead undead without you so much as revving your chainsaw. Even a resurrected corpse deserves a little more agency than this, if only to make besting it a bit satisfying. Dead Rising 3 feels over-tuned to accommodate the player’s activity. Firing a weapon into the space between two zombies seems to consistently result in one of them getting hit. Player button presses feel prioritized in a way that makes the zombies appear almost deferential when you wade into their midst, brandished swordfish a-swingin'. It’s also quickly revealed that Ramos is immune to “the bite,” and you could say that this old chestnut represents a final breakage of the “there but for the grace of God” connection between survivor and shambler. Dead Rising 3’s zombies, thusly neutered and fully divorced from their status as once-humans, can more comfortably sit in the crosshairs of say, a leaf-blower that fires ""personal massager"" missiles.Not your cup of tea? Perhaps the sledgehammer with grenades duct taped to its head, then? How about the vehicle that shoots fireworks that pierce zombies and launch them into the sky? At one point I stumbled across a dictionary that can be weaponized. Well played there, Dead Rising 3: you know everyone's got that one item they'd like to hit people with. There's a wonderfully diverse arsenal lying about, begging to be picked up and brandished by a curious player, and ad hoc weapons and vehicles can be thrown together with a few clicks of the mouse. It's a shame that these imaginative combinations can only be made once unlocked via collectible blueprints marked on your map, however. The tidy, rationed flow of blueprints kills the potential for creative discovery in favor of more prescriptive rewards. ""Here's a traffic cone"" Dead Rising 3 says, like a tween's exasperated parent, ""Go do something with the traffic cone.""Remember to change your oil every 3 months or 5,000 zombies, whichever comes first.There's something of an evocation of Los Angeles' sprawl--four clusters of low-rise urban landscape connect via knotted highway ramps. But it feels too staged, too self-contained, and it quickly begins to feel like you're a lab rat, cycling around the same track, turning in the same colored blocks for the same pieces of cheese. Take a ride on one of the long-spanning causeways, and you can see the dead-zones to either side: empty plots of land at the corners of the intersections, cordoned off by barricades. There's a wearying amount of roadblocks in the playable space too, and they rarely divert you into interesting areas. Mostly they break up the flow of driving, which becomes immediately obnoxious when some errand inevitably forces you to commute back and forth between multiple districts. There is some clever staging, like an open-air fireworks store you just might blow through while driving a low-rider full of loose fuel tanks. But these exceptions make the larger blandness all the more conspicuous.But hey, there sure are a lot of zombies. Many of Dead Rising 3's most enduring images come when you stand atop some burned-out car, surveying the field of hundreds of on-screen undead with their arms outstretched. You're a post-apocalyptic rock star, sometimes, and maybe you're even wielding a proper axe. Yet Dead Rising 3 reiterates the common lesson of zombie fiction: that in a world where the majority of the population eats brains, the salient dangers are still posed by your fellow man. In the long view, that danger comes from the power-mad general who'll be nuking Los Perdidos in six days. But in the here-and-now, the biggest threats come from the game's various human bosses. ""Psychopath battles,"" as the game dubs them.These fights are demonstrably harder than any zombified creature Ramos runs up against. There's even a cutscene where a new, frankly terrifying zombie type is revealed, and, lo and behold, when control is handed back to you it's mysteriously gone, later revealed to be a new enemy type that simply populates the streets--marginally tougher than the normal fodder, but equally susceptible to a flame-throwing steamrollercycle, as it turns out. The humans you fight, by contrast, are veritable bullet-sponges, and just intelligent enough to employ frustrating stun-locks that bounce Nick around the battleground, or charge moves that home in with a will. They all seem to pack multiple health meters. Scary stuff.As far as items and weapon combinations go, there's something for everyone.They're uniformly miserable encounters, and it isn't just because they're chock full of clumsy, tired mechanics that overtax Dead Rising 3's loose, brawler controls. One psychopath is a Chinese man, bearded and dressed as a monk, fought in a temple garden, who attacks you with a medieval polearm and kung fu. The game stops just short of playing ""Chopsticks"" as an accompaniment (but it does ring a gong). One is a sexualized policewoman wearing a Halloween-costume version of the uniform. One is a female bodybuilder that the developers, through Ramos, gleefully misgender. Another is a chap-wearing bisexual man in a pink cowboy hat. He has a phallic flamethrower.Is there a Harry Potter fan in the audience? Maybe one with a good command of the series' bestiary? Because I think what we have here is a Boggart, reflecting back someone's subconscious fears about minorities. And to conquer those fears, they've cast a mean-spirited spell to turn the things that frighten them into ridiculous caricatures. It's a cruel portrayal, and superfluous besides: in a game that's ostensibly about zombies, shouldn't the zombies be scary enough on their own?
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224,Devil May Cry ,9.1," Devil May Cry has successfully captured the twitch-based, relentlessly free-flowing gameplay style of so many classic 2D action games.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/4/1/8/2215418-dmc.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/devil-may-cry-review/1900-2818325/,pos,"
Capcom's notion of what's cool--a concept on which its PlayStation 2 action game Devil May Cry was built--may not find complete synergy with today's gaming audience. In fact, much of Devil May Cry's aesthetic presentation is rooted in stereotypical gothic and cheesy '80s metal imagery. But beneath that overstated surface is one of the most interesting and generally entertaining 3D action games in recent years. Perhaps for the first time in the 3D action genre, Devil May Cry has successfully captured the twitch-based, relentlessly free-flowing gameplay style of so many classic 2D action games. In Devil May Cry, you assume the persona of Dante, the half-human, half-devil son of a legendary dark knight known as Sparda. A powerful and malevolent ruler of the underworld, whom Sparda vanquished 2,000 years ago, has awakened and, although Dante doesn't quite know it at the game's onset, he--like his father--has been chosen to defeat this evil being. At his aid, at least for portions of the game, is a beautiful woman named Trish, who invites Dante to Mallet Island, a gateway to the netherworld. The game's story, and much of its script for that matter, draws heavily from tired clichés and presents generic plot points. But as Dante descends into the grimy underworld--a great place for blasting a wide variety of demons--it becomes clear that you must accept the game's formulaic story to fully appreciate the fine-tuned gameplay that it veils. Perhaps Devil May Cry's greatest gift, in gameplay terms, is its highly intuitive control scheme. It is one of those rare games in which simply moving the character around the screen and performing various attacks is innately entertaining. Blasting Dante's dual handguns, which are amusingly named Ebony and Ivory, in rapid succession or double-jumping through some of the game's open areas is simply a lot of fun. Throw in a variety of opponents, including everything from hovering marionettes to ruthlessly persistent, lava-spewing demon spiders, and Devil May Cry becomes one of the most entertaining action games in gameplay terms alone. In practice, the responsive controls mean that the more adept you are with the game's control scheme, the quicker you're able to dispose of the demonic enemies. Once again, like classic 2D action games, Devil May Cry rewards the skillful game player. Devil May Cry has been cleverly designed, in harmony with the fast-paced gamplay and control scheme, to challenge the player with a steadily increasing learning curve. The gradual unlocking of a variety of weapons and moves, which are secured by bartering mystical red orbs that are collected by disposing of evil souls, means that in general, your strength increases in precise concert with the game's overall difficulty level. Dante is superquick and is able to perform a myriad of attacks, but his enemies are powerful and are generally highly skilled at disposing aspirant demon hunters like our hero. This is another essential success of Devil May Cry, as it keeps you involved in the flow of the game and is constantly challenging without becoming frustratingly so. Devil May Cry will challenge even the most capable game player, while its easy automatic mode, which is unlocked after you finish the first mission, makes the game accessible to players of varying skill levels. In either case, both the intensity and the difficulty build gradually, as the game culminates almost predictably in an epic and multitiered final battle. The final stages, although still quite entertaining, also produce the game's few failings. Without giving away the ending, it's safe to say that the game loses its direction, branching into a variety of different genres, some quite unnecessary. The game's final sequence almost feels forced and artificial, as it strays from the game's general course. Also, despite the drawn-out conclusion, Devil May Cry's difficulty level reaches a plateau near the end and isn't nearly as challenging as it could have been.  Another issue that some may have with Devil May Cry is its fixed camera angles. As surprising as it sounds, Devil May Cry began its life as a Resident Evil game, and although it has grown out of the confined conventions of the survival-horror genre, it has retained the static cameras of Capcom's zombie-infested series. Like in Resident Evil, you'll sometimes find yourself blasting away at unseen enemies who are outside the camera's view. Also, at times--although this is relatively infrequent--you will find yourself battling the analog stick and reorienting your sense of direction after a quick camera switch.Still, the camera issues are not overbearing on you and are generally dealt with quite ingeniously. Usually, the camera is positioned farther from the action than in the Resident Evil games, for example, so that you are given a greater field of view. Also, Dante is quite adept at auto-aiming, which means that even if enemies are not visible onscreen for a few seconds, they're still being battered by the rapid fire from Dante's dual handguns. Besides, the fixed camera angles let you appreciate Dante's fluid and ultracool movements and are useful in showing panoramic views of the game's gorgeous environments. Devil May Cry is no one-trick pony, and its outstanding gameplay is complemented adeptly by some of the most stunning visuals yet seen on the PlayStation 2. In terms of the game's environments, once again, the Resident Evil influence is vaguely visible. The castle in particular, with its spiral staircases, open courtyards, and stone columns, is reminiscent of the mansion in Resident Evil. Still, in Devil May Cry, the environments have received a healthy dose of texture detail, as the stone walls of the aged castle show cracks and subtle hints of wear and stained glass windows are adorned with elaborate designs. In fact, some of the locations in the game are almost awe-inspiring. Much like in Sony's ICO, there are some areas in Devil May Cry, like the deck of an intricately detailed submerged pirate ship or the black-and-white décor inside a church setting, that you will want to revisit just to gawk at the magnificent scenery. Environmental visuals aside, the characters, although a bit ragged around the limb joints, are generally nicely modeled. Plus, they all move with a graceful fluidity. In fact, the animation is perhaps the glue that coagulates the convincing synergy between the gameplay and graphics in Devil May Cry. Dante's transitions from one animation to another are done convincingly and with the utmost of ease. The game's signature move, which involves Dante slashing his opponents up in the air with his sword and keeping them suspended with the rapid fire of his handguns, is a perfect example of the game's ultrasmooth animation. But Dante isn't the only character gifted with effortless animation. The variety of demons also moves at a fluid pace. For example, the shadowy feline--which appears near the beginning of the game--twists, turns, and contorts its body into a variety of shapes, all the while moving freely and naturally through the battle area. Much like the animation, the game's music is quite adaptive to your actions. While engaged in battle, the music transitions to a faster, guitar-heavy vibe, but as Dante swiftly explores the game's environments, the music becomes understated, as the sound of Dante's footsteps and demonic wails fill the air. Still, although the game's soundtrack matches the in-game action and its general visual theme, the guitar-heavy riffs may not be to the liking of some. Devil May Cry isn't the type of game that will provide countless hours of gameplay--in general, it will take a little less than 10 hours to complete on the harder difficulty levels. And other than the challenge of the increasing levels of difficulty, there really isn't much replay value to speak of. Still, for those hours that you will play Devil May Cry, you will enjoy every second of it. Those able to look past the overly dramatic voice acting and superficial story will find themselves being utterly enveloped by the stunning visuals and, in particular, the engrossing and satisfying gameplay. Devil May Cry generally lives up to its considerable hype and is one of the PlayStation 2 must-haves for fans of the action genre.
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225,Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis ,9.1," The gameplay of Tactics Ogre truly shines, and the Game Boy Advance is a capable platform for it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/3/5/2215335-box_totkol.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tactics-ogre-the-knight-of-lodis-review/1900-2864409/,pos,"
Descended from a noble lineage, The Knight of Lodis follows in the grand tradition of the original Tactics Ogre for the SNES, as well as the now-classic Final Fantasy Tactics for the PlayStation. Like those other games, this handheld version of Tactics Ogre is very easy to recommend--its depth is comparable to that of its predecessors, making it almost unequalled for a handheld game. The action focuses on the turn-based management and strategic command of a small group of soldiers. This is a complex idea, but the gameplay of Tactics Ogre truly shines, and the Game Boy Advance is a capable platform for it.  Tactics Ogre has a rich, interesting story...  Rather than act like a completely original game, Tactics Ogre for the Game Boy Advance is more of a side story in the Ogre Battle saga. As a young knight and member of the Order of the Sacred Flame, you are part of a small detachment of troops sent to the island nation of Ovis on behalf of the Holy Lodis Empire. You begin with a straightforward objective, but the path that lies before you isn't simple. Your decisions throughout will determine your path and lead you to one of several different endings--but you'll never get that far without proving yourself in the heat of battle.   Tactical combat is the focus of Tactics Ogre. Battles take place on an isometric 2D playing field that does a great job of simulating three-dimensional terrain, with the exception of the fixed perspective. The little details are great--the trajectory of archer's arrows is clearly depicted, and characters will strike upward or downward at foes if they're not on equal footing. The color palette seems to be specifically tailored to the Game Boy Advance, lending the environments a clean and detailed look. This serves to highlight the diverse topography of the maps, which feature diverse terrain types and varying elevation. A height advantage will increase the range of bows and make your attacks more powerful, while the varying terrain types affect everything from movement range to the effectiveness of magic. Weather effects, like rain that can cause water levels to rise unexpectedly, change the look of the battlefield and have a direct bearing on the gameplay. The influence of terrain on combat is often subtle, but it's very important--the type of ground your cleric is standing on could mean the difference between being able to cast a life-saving healing spell or being felled on the spot by a ruthless enemy.   While you'll have direct control over only the main character for the first couple of battles, you'll soon be able to deploy up to eight troops on the field and exercise full control over all their actions. Each character has an alignment, an affinity for one of six elements, and a class. A character's alignment (as well as his or her gender) has subtle effects on his or her abilities. Elemental affinity determines how he or she fares against characters of other elements, the effectiveness of different spells, and terrain bonuses and penalties. And a character's class, his or her most distinguishing characteristic, essentially determines what role he or she plays on the battlefield. The most basic class is the soldier, but more focused and useful classes will become available as individuals gain experience.  ...but the fun, sophisticated turn-based combat is the best thing about it.  Class change has always been a focal point of the Ogre Battle series, and it is equally important in Tactics Ogre for the GBA. The classes have varying minimum requirements, and some of them are restricted to a specific gender or alignment. But overall the rules have been relaxed a bit when compared with previous installments in the saga. Many classes formerly exclusive to one gender are now open to both males and females, and most advanced classes are open to at least two different alignments.   There is a slight new twist to the system, however. Ascending to an advanced class may require a character to perform a specific deed on the battlefield. As you play, you'll find that performing feats of valor or luck (or even disgrace) can earn your character one of dozens of different emblems. Some of these combat decorations are necessary to change class--for instance, the book of initiation is required for becoming a swordmaster. You can earn it by dodging or blocking four consecutive attacks. Other medals will lend power to those they adorn by boosting their stats, such as the centurion emblem, which is awarded to a character who single-handedly defeats every enemy on the battlefield. You'll have a lot of fun trying to meet the requirements for some of these.Winning in the field any way you can is the game's most basic objective, and the sheer amount of control you have over each soldier's growth and actions is what makes playing the game so satisfying. Also, the enemy artificial intelligence is quite good--your foes will play the odds well and use terrain and elemental relationships to their advantage. On the other hand, the opposition will seldom resort to mercilessly attacking one of your own. The computer's avoidance of this brutally effective strategy keeps battles interesting and minimizes frustration, but it can take something out of the game's challenge in certain instances.  There's plenty of depth and variety to the gameplay.  That isn't to say that the game is easy. There is a gradual increase in difficulty that will keep you thinking, and much of the challenge comes from managing the growth of your characters, equipping the right items, and using the right soldiers for the right situation. Enemies will typically be on the same level as your highest-level character, but if one recruit falls more than a couple of levels behind, there is a training option that's also useful for obtaining emblems and buried treasure. The need to train won't arise too often, though, and making sure everyone has a part in the action will do a lot to minimize the time you spend sparring with your troops or seeking random encounters on the world map.   The single-player game is quite lengthy, and its multiple paths and deep combat system mean it should also provide you with plenty of replay value. But in addition to the meaty campaign, there's also the quest mode, which presents several other gameplay options. Ancient texts discovered in the main game can be used in the quest mode to unlock bonus stages, and you can gain treasure in the bonus stages that you can then use in any other mode. You can also exchange items or characters with a friend using the link cable, or pit your armies against each other for prizes and prestige. Some valuable emblems are only obtainable by fighting it out with a friend in a ""versus"" battle, so it's definitely worth checking out if you have the means to do so.   The quality and quantity of the gameplay are evenly complemented by the smooth presentation of Tactics Ogre. As mentioned, the colors and contrast in the game make it easy to see in normal lighting conditions and also give it a vibrant look. The animations for the stylized characters look great as well. Each class has a preferred weapon that produces a more impressive animation (and more damage) than it would in the hands of another character, and the animated spell effects are quite detailed despite the relative limitations of the GBA hardware. The musical score is varied and in keeping with the Ogre Battle tradition, though it can sound a bit tinny through a pair of headphones, much like other GBA soundtracks.  The campaign is worth replaying, and there are plenty of extras to boot.  While it's true that the gameplay of Tactics Ogre for the GBA has been simplified slightly when compared with the gameplay of its predecessors, the addition of emblems and other new facets provide the game with the same overall level of depth associated with the series. That depth can occasionally seem imposing--navigating menus can take a while to get used to, but the controls used for the game are completely competent, despite being limited to four main buttons. One substantial omission is a world encyclopedia and history index, something found in similar games like Final Fantasy Tactics. When a game tosses around as many names of countries, regions, and people as Ogre Battle does, having some reference material is invaluable. If you don't pay close attention, or you're just quick to scroll through text, you may find yourself confused as to exactly what's happening in the story.   That's a minor issue--overall, Tactics Ogre is one of the best games to hit the GBA since Advance Wars. Even the English translation of the game is solid, and the extras available in quest mode add more life to a design that's already blessed with longevity. Considering all that, Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is a worthy addition to the Ogre Battle series, and it rivals similar games on any system. It's perfect for either those who like strategy games or those who like RPGs, and especially for those who've enjoyed other tactical RPGs of this sort.
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226,Advance Wars ,9.1, Advance Wars is both impressive and addictive.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/2/6/0/2215260-box_awars.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/advance-wars-review/1900-2811574/,pos,"
Turn-based military strategy sims aren't a well-represented genre in the handheld market. In fact, other than Sacnoth's totally cool UK release of Faselei! for the NeoGeo Pocket Color, Nintendo's Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance is the only strategy sim to make its way to a handheld in English within the last four years. It's been an excruciating wait, but the news is good: Advance Wars is both impressive and addictive. Developed by Intelligent Systems, Advance Wars thrusts you into the role of a military advisor in the Orange Star army. The game opens with a diverse 14-mission field training exercise, which delves into all aspects of the game, including deployment, unit development, movement range, and fog-of-war navigation. Until you complete this mode, only the versus mode and link mode options are available from the main menu. The versus mode allows four-player competition with only a single cartridge on the same system, while the link mode enables both single-cartridge and multi-cartridge multiplayer options. Due to system-memory limitations, the single-cartridge link-cable option is merely a watered-down version of the overall game, with a randomly generated map and each player possessing only seven units. To experience a full-featured multiplayer game, all four players must purchase their own copy of the game, or they must all play on a single system using the versus mode. After you get your feet wet in field training, five additional menu choices become available: campaign, war room, stats, battle maps, and design maps. The single-player campaign offers a nonlinear quest through all four nations of Alara, a war-torn continent. In all, there are 30 potential missions to play and eight commanding officers (COs) to control. After you complete a mission, you can replay it in the game's war room, or you can track statistics, such as wins, losses, and rank, in the stats area. As you advance in the single-player campaign, your progress is graded and you're rewarded with AW coins, which you can later spend in the battle-maps store to purchase additional maps and COs for the game's versus, war room, and multi-cartridge link modes.  As if the 150 different maps in the game's multiplayer and single-player modes weren't enough, you can also create, save, and trade your own maps using the design-maps option. The editor is chock-full of terrain, unit, and battle-condition choices and ensures that even the most stalwart map designer will have free reign over his or her imagination. The cartridge has room to save only three maps, however--an unfortunate, albeit tolerable, shortcoming. Just as Advance Wars has an overwhelming plenitude of options and features, the game's overall design is one of easygoing complexity. Anyone can play this game, provided you start with the basics and work your way into more advanced situations. As a CO, you start with a number of units under your control. During your turn, you can move them to locations within their movement range, attack enemy units, merge two units together, command troops to capture cities, or purchase new units from your land, sea, and airport bases. At the end of each turn, units resting atop allied cities and bases are repaired, while money is accrued for each city under your control. In all, there are 18 different units, separated into four distinct categories: troops, land vehicles, aircraft, and sea vessels. Although every unit comes standard with 10 stamina points, each has its own specific limitations on armor, movement, attack range, and sight. For example, infantry and mechanized troops can move only short distances and must attack adjacent enemies, but they are also the only units that can capture cities or bases; APCs have thick armor and can transport troop units a great distance, but they have no attack capabilities of their own; and bombers have excellent range and insanely killer firepower, but they have very little armor and are especially vulnerable to antiaircraft guns and missiles.  Mixed in with the unit strategy, terrain type and morale level also affect your units' movement, sight, and attack capabilities. Mountains, forests, and reefs offer a defensive boost and an increased sight range, but it takes longer to traverse them, while highways offer a speed advantage to land vehicles, but only at a cost of higher vulnerability and narrowed sight. If you're playing with fog of war enabled, you can also hide units within forests and reefs for an added element of surprise. Morale is a factor to consider, as it gives attacking units a slight strength advantage over those on the receiving end. This alone can turn the tide of many battles, because it can help you gang up on enemy tanks with cost-efficient antiaircraft guns and jeeps.Overall, Advance Wars is a highly balanced game that is easy to learn but full of strategy. Whether you excel with land, sea, or air units, you can usually find a way to exploit your own inherent strengths in battle. To make the game more interesting, however, the commanding officer you choose will also bring his own distinct strengths, weaknesses, and CO power into the equation. Andy, the first CO you'll play with, is average in all respects, but his CO power, hyper repair, is a formidable ability that can repair all allied units by two stamina points. Eagle, another CO, is known for his superior air units, but he earns most of his reputation from his CO power, lightning strike, a skill that lets all of his units attack twice in the same turn. Thankfully, CO powers are difficult to abuse, as they often take between three and eight turns to recharge, depending on how many cities you capture or how many enemy units you destroy in the meantime. In general, the goal of each mission is to defeat the opposing COs--either by wiping them out or by capturing their headquarters. The grade for each mission is broken down into three categories: speed, power, and technique. Speed is a measure of how quickly you complete each conquest, while power and technique are interrelated indicators that gauge how many units you amassed and how many were ultimately destroyed. As you can see, only a balance of the three skills will earn you an 'S' rating at the end of each level. Good grades, such as S, A, and B, are important, because they influence how many AW coins you earn after each battle, which in turn affects how many maps or COs you can purchase in the battle-maps store. Considering all the modes, maps, COs, and strategy packed into Advance Wars, it's rather remarkable that the game looks as gorgeous as it does. Before each mission, manga-style character artwork sets the scene, eventually giving way to a soft-colored top-view map that is populated with hundreds of crisp, highly animated units--all with nary an instance of slowdown or flicker. Incidentals such as flashing tower lights and crashing waves on shorelines also give the game an aura of realism, but the true elegance of each battle is only realized during unit-to-unit confrontations, when animated cutscenes show the explosive nature of war. In terms of audio, Advance Wars isn't as thrilling to listen to as Castlevania: Circle of the Moon or Mario Kart Super Circuit, but it's nevertheless pleasant. The same bass-laden background music accompanies each battle, while there are separate themes between each single-player mission and for the menus. In general, the music is catchy and solid, though a bit heavy on the dramatic backbeat. In-game sound effects are the standard array of tread, missile, and machine-gun samples that you've no doubt heard from a plethora of other games in similar genres. Boil it all down and the one word that comes to mind is ""great."" Advance Wars is deep and easy to learn, and it contains a level of replay rarely witnessed in handheld gaming. Whether intentional or not, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have created the consummate handheld strategy sim by which all others will now be measured.
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227,Madden NFL 2002 ,9.1, Fans will find more than enough reason to get the latest and best version of Madden football we've seen on the N64 yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/9/8/2214298-box_madden02.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2002-review/1900-2819752/,pos,"
While fans of the Madden series may initially have a hard time noticing the differences between Madden 2001 and this year's game, a closer examination not only reveals a bevy of new features and options, but some tuned-up AI as well. The biggest addition you'll find is the Madden classic mode, which is basically the 16-bit classic game with updated rosters. With everything that's included in Madden 2002, fans will find more than enough reason to get the latest and best version of Madden football we've seen on the N64 yet.   The Madden classic mode is one of the coolest extra features that has ever been included in a Madden game. This mode lets you play Madden 2002 as though it were running on a 16-bit Sega Genesis. The mode has all the current teams and rosters, but it plays and looks like the classic Madden '92. It's an incredible extra that makes you feel almost as if you're getting a whole other game for free. Another new addition in Madden 2002 is a mulligan feature that lets you take another shot at any play you'd like to. For instance, say the game is tied, and you're only 10 yards away from the end zone, with 15 seconds left on the clock. You go for the touchdown but realize that it was a mistake as your receiver drops the pass. Now, you can simply take a mulligan and try it again.   Madden 2002 comes with all the features and options you've come to expect from the series, including all the current NFL teams, players, and stadiums. The game also once again includes the Madden cards, which now feature cheerleaders. These digital trading cards are unlocked by completing Madden challenges during a game. These Madden challenges are specific objectives that you can try to complete--tasks like throwing five consecutive passes in a game or running for more than 200 yards with one player. These challenges add a bit of extra fun and depth to what is already a very deep game.    Controlling Madden 2002 is very enjoyable, since the game strikes a good balance between delivering true-to-life physics and just being responsive. You can pretty much get a quick running back to go wherever you want him to, when you want him to. The artificial intelligence of the defensive backs and line has been tweaked a bit since last year. Defenders can simply get beat, and linemen are now more accurate, both of which help add a better sense of realism to the game. You'll have to identify mismatches in the game and substitute people in and out accordingly.    Visually, Madden 2002 doesn't look much different from last year's game, which looked really good. The player models are a bit blocky, but smooth and realistic animations make up for the lack of polygons. The various tackling animations are once again the most notable, and they include everything from shoestrings to one-man drag-downs. The animations of the players executing their various moves, such as catching, throwing, and running, are all very realistic as well. The game's broadcast-style camera angles and commentary from Pat Summerall and John Madden round out what is a very well-done presentation.    So while Madden 2002 isn't dramatically different from last year's offering, EA has really tried to put in everything it could. The game's got the Madden classic mode, which is almost like a completely different game, and you can play two players in the two-minute drill. EA's also added more Madden telestrator action in with the coach's corner. In any event, Madden 2002 for the N64 is a wonderful re-creation of the sport of football that controls well, looks good, and has enough packed in to keep you busy for a while. But most importantly, the game is just superfun.
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228,Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic ,9.1," You don't need to be a fan of Star Wars or of RPGs to appreciate all the impressive qualities of this game--but if you are, all the better.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/1/1/2218211-kotor_cover.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic-review/1900-6071718/,pos,"
 Canadian developer BioWare is well known for producing high-quality role-playing games, thanks to its successful Baldur's Gate series, and offers up what is in many ways its finest such game to date in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. LucasArts wisely delegated the task of producing a deep and involving Star Wars-themed RPG to BioWare, which has done a remarkable job of making Knights live up to the Star Wars name. In fact, Knights arguably lives up to the Star Wars name better than any other Star Wars property in years, including the last two theatrical films. The game's greatest accomplishment is its focused yet open-ended plot progression, which gives you the freedom to play as either a morally good or evil character, or shades in between. The struggle between good and evil is of course central to Star Wars and manifests itself extremely well throughout this outstanding game. For good measure, Knights features hours and hours of top-notch voice-over (all the dialogue is spoken), so you'll certainly be impressed by how different characters respond differently to you but also by the sheer size of the game.  Knights takes place thousands of years before the Star Wars films, but you'll recognize a lot of the technology.  The Xbox needed another great RPG--one that was more accessible than last year's great but sometimes-bewildering Morrowind--and it's finally here. Those who've played BioWare's computer RPGs--either the Baldur's Gate series or last year's Neverwinter Nights--will recognize the influence of those games on Knights of the Old Republic. In fact, the main difference between the gameplay of Knights and BioWare's previous games is superficial. This one is played from a third-person perspective and thus resembles a 3D action adventure game rather than one of BioWare's older isometric RPGs.   Other than that, gameplay is similar. You create a main character and then explore many different areas, interact with many different characters, settle many different disputes, solve many different puzzles, and engage in plenty of combat. Combat appears to be real-time but actually uses a turn-based system ""under the hood"" just like Neverwinter Nights, which means your character's statistics and attributes (and your strategy) make all the difference, and your personal reflexes and hand-eye coordination have no bearing on the outcome. Most importantly, Knights is very different from the typical console RPG in that you'll always be an active participant in the storyline, rather than a passive observer. You don't just read, watch, and listen to a lot of text, cutscenes, and dialogue--your character is constantly invited and required to make difficult decisions, and that's ultimately the most entertaining, impressive, and rewarding aspect of the game.  You'll meet a wide variety of interesting characters in the game, a number of whom will join you in your journey.  Knights of the Old Republic actually takes place thousands of years before Star Wars Episode I, though you'll still see many of the same sorts of alien creatures and technology in the game that you probably associate with Star Wars. The story begins in the midst of a power struggle between the Republic and the Sith, an evil imperial power that's encroaching on Republic space. Your character seems to be just another Republic trooper, and at the beginning of the game, you manage to avoid certain death as your spaceship is attacked and destroyed. Your escape pod lands on a world that's been put under quarantine by the Sith, so your first order of business is to find a means of escape, and also to find out what happened to Bastila, a gifted young Jedi who is key to the Republic's war efforts and who also managed to flee your doomed ship. Later, you'll be charged with uncovering the secrets of an ancient relic called the star forge, apparently the key to the Sith's seemingly limitless supply of weaponry.  You'll end up visiting a number of key Star Wars locations, including the wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk and the desert planet Tatooine, in what's by all means an adventure of epic proportions. The game's main storyline isn't remarkable and eventually boils down to squaring off against your standard bad guy, and the main plot twists along the way don't really seem plausible. But you'll encounter so many great little subplots and characters along the way that this really won't matter. You'll investigate murders, become a bounty hunter, resolve cultural disputes, find a cure for a deadly disease, take sides or play both sides against each other in various ambiguous conflicts, and find out how life really treats both citizens of the Republic and followers of the Sith. There's just a lot to see and do in this game, and it'll last you a good 40 hours or so from start to finish, yet you'll never see all that the game has to offer if you finish it only once.  It may seem strange, but Knights of the Old Republic actually uses a slightly simplified version of 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules both for combat and for character generation. So despite the obviously different setting, fans of BioWare's D&D-themed games will be in relatively familiar territory here. Your main character starts off as a male or female soldier, scout, or scoundrel. These three basic classes roughly correspond to D&D's fighter, ranger, and rogue. The soldier is straightforward but very strong and begins with proficiency with various types of weapons and armor and gains the most vitality points per experience level. The scout is slightly less tough than the soldier but gains more skill points per level, allowing him or her to do such things as repair droids, pick locks, and disarm land mines. The scoundrel is physically the weakest class but can disappear from sight using special cloaking devices and can then inflict great damage if he or she catches a foe unaware. The scoundrel is also best suited to talking his or her way out of situations where the other character classes might have to resort to violence. Your choice of gender also has a bearing on some of the situations.  Will you choose the light or the dark side?  It's not spoiling anything to point out that you eventually gain access to Jedi powers. In turn, there are three different Jedi classes available, which emphasize either the Jedi's prowess with a lightsaber or his or her Force powers--or a balance of the two. Force powers are basically like magic spells, allowing you to do such things as stun opponents, knock them down, and choke them, as well as heal yourself and use the Force to persuade characters to see things your way. Some powers are inherently light-inclined, while others are dark-inclined, and though Jedi characters may gain access to any Force power as they gain experience levels, powers that match a Jedi's moral alignment can be used at a lower cost in Force points (which steadily recharge, allowing you to use your powers continuously).  The game does a fine job of letting you customize your character and his or her companions. Nine different characters will join you over the course of the adventure, and you'll be able to travel with up to two of them at a time. Most every character has an interesting story to tell that unfolds as you converse with him, her, or it over the course of the game, though some are developed better than others. The most entertaining of the bunch is probably HK-47, who's like a homicidal and slightly insubordinate C-3PO. As you and the others gain levels, you develop your abilities by choosing from a wide variety of skills (repair, stealth, persuasion, and so on) and combat feats (critical strike, two-weapon fighting, toughness, and so on).  Ultimately, the 3rd Edition rule system works quite well for the game and makes for an experience that seems consistent with the Star Wars mythos, namely that Jedi are extremely powerful, and conventional weapons are practically useless against their lightsabers and their Force powers. However, a few things don't quite make sense, such as how your strength statistic (as opposed to your dexterity) is tied to your proficiency with a lightsaber, and how ranged weapons generally seem too weak, offering practically no advantages over melee weapons since it's easy to close the distance with a gun-toting opponent. Also, much like in 3rd Edition D&D, fighter-type characters in Knights of the Old Republic can become overpowered to the point where they're virtually unstoppable. If you focus on building up such a character, you'll find that most of the combat in the game will be rather easy at the default difficulty setting, though you can crank it up to make your enemies stronger.  Blasters, grenades, and melee weapons are available--but nothing beats a good old double-bladed lightsaber.  Combat looks dynamic, and at a glance, you could mistake Knights of the Old Republic for an action game. You'll see characters firing away with their blasters, while those armed with melee weapons such as lightsabers will perform a variety of close-combat moves. Characters dueling with such weapons will block and feint, looking for openings in their opponents' defenses. It's all clearly inspired by the dramatic lightsaber battle at the end of Episode I and also resembles the outstanding lightsaber battles in last year's shooter, Jedi Knight II.  Despite appearances, though, the combat is really just a series of statistical checks, just like D&D. Your character's ""to hit"" rating, determined by his or her class, level, and weapon, is added to a random 1-20 dice roll and compared against the opponent's defense rating. If the to-hit roll is greater, you connect and deal damage. Your characters will automatically attack any foes nearby until either you or they are all dead, so in some cases, you end up simply watching the fight unfold. You'll only need to intervene to use healing kits or stimulants that boost your combat abilities, as well as Force powers and such, or maybe to prioritize targets. You can pause the action at any time and easily queue up specific orders for all your characters, but you can usually get away with just looking after your main character and will rarely need to micromanage things (your party members will lag behind once in a while as you're running around, but it's not a big deal). Generally, the combat is exciting to watch and paced nice and fast. You needn't worry if one of your characters falls in battle--he or she will simply get up once the fighting is over, though you're tossed back to the title screen if your entire party goes down.   The combat and the dialogue are the two main elements of Knights of the Old Republic. Other than those activities, you'll find yourself running from place to place, but you'll have little interaction with the environment other than being able to open footlockers and other objects containing goodies. You can sometimes hack into certain computer systems, but this is all done in text and isn't very interesting. Loading times between areas can feel a little long, especially when you have to backtrack--fortunately there's an option to instantly return to your hideout or ship if you're not in a dangerous area. Some of the environments are pretty big, but most aren't, and a mapping system clearly shows where you can and can't go and what the points of interest are in each area. There's also a very clear record of all the quests you have pending (and all the quests you've completed). As such, you'll probably never get lost in the game, though at the same time, you might feel a bit confined by where you can and can't go. Fortunately, the game opens up later on, allowing you to freely travel between planets and accomplish numerous tasks in whichever order you please.  Hours of expertly done voice-over help make character interaction incredibly engaging throughout Knights of the Old Republic.  Knights of the Old Republic also contains several minigames: You can gamble by playing a fairly entertaining card game that's similar to poker, you can compete in simple drag races on swoop bikes, and you can man the turrets of a spaceship to shoot down enemy fighters from a first-person perspective. These are all simple diversions, however.  As mentioned, character interaction really is the best thing about Knights of the Old Republic. There's a lot of dialogue in the game, all in full speech, and if you listen to all of it rather than read it (you can turn subtitles off), the game will probably last hours longer than it could otherwise. The dialogue is well done, and many of the game's characters are well defined. Most all of the numerous subquests in the game are suitably justified and present you with more than one viable solution. You'll constantly be able to choose between good and not-so-good solutions--early on, for instance, you can rescue a man who's being hassled by bounty hunters. Do you then offer to pay the dues he owes so that the poor man may live without fear, or do you threaten to mug him for his last remaining credits?   Knights lets you play as a really nasty character if you so choose, and that's certainly part of the fun. It's also an interesting aspect of gameplay, considering a big part of the theme is how Jedi constantly run the risk of falling to the dark side--indeed, you'll probably often be tempted to see what happens if you pick the evil dialogue options rather than the good ones, if only because most RPGs simply don't let you make these types of decisions. Certain key points in the game will play out very differently depending on the decisions you make, creating lots of replay value. LucasArts also promises that downloadable content in the form of new weapons and other items will be made available via Xbox Live later this year.  The graphics in Knights of the Old Republic aren't the game's strong suit. Some important aspects of the visuals are handled very well--specifically, the lightsaber combat looks dead-on, though you won't see any forearms getting chopped off or anything. Effective use of bump mapping and environment mapping can be seen on some of the aliens and their shiny armor or slick, oily skins. Many of the environments also look quite good, though some of the others are plain and lacking in detail. Character models are relatively simple, and their lip-synching and facial expressions don't always look quite right. You'll also notice that some character models will repeat often throughout the game--you'll encounter a number of different characters who all share the same face. The frame rate of Knights of the Old Republic also doesn't hold up, and it can frequently bog down in combat or whenever a lot of characters are around. Furthermore, the occasional cutscenes using the game's 3D engine tend to look downright crude, which is disappointing considering how impressive some of the game's production values are. Knights is a good-looking game overall, but it's easy to find fault in its visuals when the other aspects of the game are so well done.  Knights is both an outstanding RPG in its own right and an excellent tribute to the Star Wars source material.  Some of the audio is what you'd expect from a Star Wars game, though Knights deserves credit for featuring a mostly original (yet very subdued) soundtrack, which is a nice change of pace from the ubiquitous John Williams score. But the high quality and sheer quantity of the voice acting are exceptional. Alien characters even speak in convincing alien languages, though you'll pick up on the fact that the alien voice-over actually repeats often. Overall, though, the professional voice cast does an excellent job with the material, delivering believable performances, and this really enriches the gameplay experience. Not only does Knights of the Old Republic have some of the most voice-over of any game to date, but it also has some of the best.  It's apparent from playing Knights of the Old Republic that a remarkable amount of effort, work, and talent went into this game. It's one of the only Star Wars games to truly make you feel at times as though you're a key player in and a part of this unique and beloved sci-fi setting. You'll get to do all the sorts of stuff that you've seen and enjoyed in the Star Wars movies, and you'll get to emulate any of your favorite characters' personalities and actions over the course of the game. You'll also experience a much more morally complex version of Star Wars than what you get from the movies. Along the way, you'll find a few aspects of the game that you'll wish were better, but that's mostly because the vast majority of Knights of the Old Republic is so exceptionally good. You don't need to be a fan of Star Wars or of RPGs to appreciate all the impressive qualities of this game--but if you are, all the better.  


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229,NBA 2K2 ,9.1, Virtually every aspect of the real NBA game is accurately represented and well implemented to provide a roundball experience that is second to none.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/5/2/2209052-box_nba2k2.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-2k2-review/1900-2839238/,pos,"
If there's one sport that Electronic Arts has yet to perfect, it's NBA basketball. In the past, EA has had little to no competition for its NBA Live franchise, but with Sega's new multiplatform stance, the tables have suddenly turned. The NBA 2K franchise has long been considered the best the genre had to offer, but up until now it was only available on Sega's faltering Dreamcast console. NBA 2K2 is the series' first outing on a non-Sega console, and it proves just how complacent EA Sports has become with its basketball series.  Like any good sports simulation, NBA 2K2 has plenty of gameplay modes to keep players happy, whether they're squaring off against the computer or against friends. In addition to a rudimentary multiplayer mode for up to four players, NBA 2K2 also includes a franchise mode that carries statistics and rosters over from one year to the next. There's also a single season option for those who like to build a dynasty from scratch each year, a playoffs mode for the impatient, and a fantasy option for those who enjoy redrafting teams for each season. Trades, free-agent signings, and the ability to scout college players are all at your disposal and are simplified just enough to make such transactions appeal to the average player. As in past installments of the franchise, there's a street mode included that allows you to play on nine of the most popular playgrounds in America and show your street-ball skills. Practice and tournament modes round out the package--leaving virtually no stone unturned.  NBA 2K2 has earned a reputation for being the most in-depth basketball simulation on the market, and the PlayStation 2 iteration does nothing to change that. Zone defenses are new to the NBA this season, and NBA 2K2 will let you call a 3-2 on the fly to clog up the lane. Virtually any offensive or defensive play can be called with a flick of the right analog stick, and calling the right offensive set can immediately open the lane for a drive. Each team has its own specific playbook, so it's entirely possible to run the triangle offense with the Lakers or run isolation plays to get Allen Iverson the ball while playing as the 76ers. If you're unhappy with controlling your team's strategy on the fly, you can simply adjust the game's menu-driven coaching strategies. The inside post game is excellent. You can back a defender down into the paint, only to spin off and perform one of the many dynamic post moves included in the game. Defending against post moves is also possible thanks to a plethora of countermoves, but the advantage still seems to be with the offensive player most of the time.  Special dribbles are included in the game, but which move is performed is determined by the computer depending on the location and speed of your player. It works well the majority of the time, but other times special dribbles will cause your player to run out of bounds or directly into the chest of a defender. Stealing the ball is almost impossible unless the opposition is performing a special dribble, and making or missing shots is often arbitrary. It can be frustrating to watch a forward or center make a three-point shot with two players in his face while your shooting guard misses a wide-open jump shot the next time down the court. The computer AI has undergone some adjustments that keep players from being fooled as easily by pump fakes as they were in last year's game, and the fast break has been fixed so that players no longer stop when receiving the ball on the run. The computer can be difficult to beat on anything but the rookie setting, and a more gradual increase in difficulty would have been nice. In the early going, you'll either kick the computer's butt on the rookie setting or get yours handed to you in the pro and all-star difficulties.There are still some annoying bugs in NBA 2K2 that Visual Concepts has yet to squash. Teammates will stand out of bounds while you're inbounding the ball, goaltending is usually called only when the shot is blocked just before it hits the rim, and you can often push opposing players off the court. Passing with the analog stick can also be an adventure, so it's advised to master the game's icon passing. Despite these issues, NBA 2K2 is still the best-playing basketball simulation on the market. There are enough gameplay modes to keep most anyone happy, the controls are tight and intuitive, and the degree of team management the player possesses on the court is staggering.  NBA 2K2 for the PlayStation 2 may be a port of the Dreamcast version of the game, but it's still the best-looking game of roundball on the console. The players are generously modeled with enough polygons to create flowing curves, and the facial textures make it easy to tell Steve Francis apart from Sam Cassell. Players' faces will animate when they talk trash and their eyes will follow other players on the court, but the flatly shaded textures used to cover their bodies can make them almost look like cartoon characters. The arenas are accurately modeled, right down to every last luxury box and seating section, but the monochromatic crowd can be ugly when viewed up close. But where NBA 2K2 separates itself from the competition is in its animation. Visual Concepts motion-captured more than 2,200 animations for NBA 2K2, and they bring the game to life. Beyond the excellent shooting, dunking, and blocking animations, there are a wealth of transition routines that will make players continue to run after a failed steal attempt or react realistically to being jostled by another player. Another slight issue is the way players receive passes. The game seems fine at full speed, but during replays the ball will strike a player virtually anywhere on his body and will then be magically transferred to his hands. These slight issues aside, NBA 2K2 is the most visually impressive basketball game for the PlayStation 2. The player models are accurate, the animations are second to none, and the speed of the game is nearly perfect.  One aspect of the NBA 2K franchise that has yet to live up to the standards of Visual Concepts' other sports games is the play-by-play announcing. The two-man team does an adequate job of keeping up with the action, but their statements tend to repeat too often and their analysis rarely goes beyond the current play. The ambient sounds effects are excellent, however. Players will talk to each other while running down the court and call for a pass, and after especially impressive plays, you can hear players talking trash to each other or celebrating aloud. Team-specific chants are included in the game, and you'll often hear single fans making comments about the game. While the play-by-play can grate on the nerves, the rest of the auditory experience offered by NBA 2K2 is at the top of its class. NBA 2K2 for the PlayStation 2 has some slight issues, but they're not nearly enough to undermine the package as a whole. Virtually every aspect of the real NBA game is accurately represented and well implemented to provide a roundball experience that is second to none. If you have a PlayStation 2 and are looking for a simulation-style basketball game, NBA 2K2 is by far the best option.



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230,Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin ,9.1," Barbarossa to Berlin raises the wargaming bar even higher with its pitch-perfect, ultra-polished improvements to an already great game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/7/1/7/3722-14717.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/combat-mission-barbarossa-to-berlin-review/1900-2896002/,pos,"
Big Time Software's Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin is an entirely new type of wargame that successfully combines many seemingly incompatible elements. It combines traditional wargame mechanics with 3D graphics, real-time action with turn-based planning, strategy with excitement, and minute details with an accessible interface. Barbarossa to Berlin is the follow-up to the first title in the series, Beyond Overlord. If ever there were a showstopper of a wargame, this is it. Barbarossa to Berlin raises the wargaming bar even higher with its pitch-perfect, ultra-polished improvements to an already great game.  The tank models are much more detailed than in the previous game.  The most immediate change that Barbarossa to Berlin makes to the original game is in the scenery. The graphics are much improved since the first game's quaint in-house-artist look, which was more concerned with fidelity than flair. They were the kind of graphics only a crotchety old wargame veteran could love. But this time around, the foliage is more complex, the textures are sharper, the special effects like fire and smoke don't look so homegrown, and the vehicle models feature more detail and animation. You'll spend more time getting in close to study the replays just because they look so good. With the possible exception of its stiff little infantry models, Combat Mission now looks like a big-budget game. The audio is as rich and full as ever, with careful attention paid to the sounds used for different weapons and the nationality of the men yelling at each other. You may not be able to tell a Finnish call for a medic from a Romanian one, but you'll hear them both here.  New rules make city campaigns like this much easier to deal with.  The scenery has also changed with the new location. Barbarossa to Berlin moves the action from World War II's western front to the huge swath of territory on the eastern front. There are four distinct zones, each with unique terrain, weather conditions, nationalities, and equipment, ranging from Finland all the way south to the Crimean peninsula. While the first Combat Mission seemed almost pastoral with its villages and hedgerows, this time the maps include denser urban locations. Although buildings are still fairly abstract (they're essentially a terrain type laid out in blocks), city fighting is more vivid, with new rules for damage to structures and sneaking through sewers.    More detailed infantry commands make house-to-house fighting less dependent on the AI by giving you more control over your men. For instance, a new command to advance under fire and use cover along the way is invaluable in the city maps. It's also easier to specify that an infantry unit should get in close to a tank to assault it (in the first game, they tended to think you were telling them to fire at a tank with their rifles, the World War II equivalent of shooting spitballs at a charging rhino). With new rules for infantry fitness and fatigue, Combat Mission can now model the difference between fresh inexperienced recruits and burned-out, war-weary veterans. There are other new commands available for all types of units. You can set cover arcs to restrict where a unit will attack, making it much easier to set up the kind of close-quarters ambushes that made city fighting so deadly. The command ""advance to contact"" lets you specifically order a unit to stop as soon as it sees an enemy. This command makes early planning much more effective than simply hoping that the AI will act the way you want it to when the shooting starts.  An example of the harsh weather on the eastern front.  The eastern front's steppes were the site of some of the war's most dramatic tank battles. Barbarossa to Berlin has some larger, more wide-open maps that really show off the armor combat model. New rules for gunnery optics, which were an important factor that wasn't figured into the first Combat Mission, give the Germans an edge, particularly in low-light situations and cold weather. You can now order tanks to ""shoot and scoot"" (move forward to take a shot and then retreat into cover) or go ""hull down"" (take up a defensive position behind a hill that leaves their turrets peeking over the hilltop). Most importantly, the AI for armor combat has been cleaned up a lot since the last game. Tanks don't have the targeting problems they had in the first game, where they'd develop an inordinate fixation on relatively harmless targets. As in Atomic's Close Combat series, tanks could be a little unreliable in Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord. Barbarossa to Berlin tidies this up nicely and allows for some epic heavy metal clashes without the headaches of the first game.  Barbarossa to Berlin features improved special effects.  Barbarossa to Berlin also has some new interface elements that make playing the game much smoother. You can tell at a glance what weapons a unit is carrying. A color-coded box gives you quick details about the effectiveness of a unit's armor coverage. On the whole, Barbarossa to Berlin requires much less peeking into information screens to play. However, Big Time Software still doesn't support a mouse wheel, and there's no sensitivity setting for scrolling the map, which is a laborious process that takes longer than it should. And although the manual is as detailed and comprehensive as ever, the developer has mysteriously placed the table of contents at the back and called it an index.   Now that World War II is such a popular setting in first-person shooters, Combat Mission is a perfect venue for action-oriented gamers to have a more in-depth but no less exciting look at the subject matter. While it might not have the kind of glamorous, Hollywood-style appeal of Battlefield 1942, it's a refreshing alternative to the two previous approaches to wargaming: burying it under numbers and hexes or dumbing it down with Panzer General-style levels of abstraction and simplicity. Combat Mission navigates beautifully between these two extremes. Furthermore, as is the case with any good follow-up, it would be hard to go back to playing the original Combat Mission after getting a taste of all the innovations and improvements in Barbarossa to Berlin, which takes a great game and makes it even greater.
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231,Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition ,9.1," This is the definitive version of a modern classic and a must-play, even if you've already experienced the unique thrill of Resident Evil 4 on another platform.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3208280-untitled-1.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/resident-evil-4-wii-edition-review/1900-6172762/,pos,"
  There's a very good chance that you've already played Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube or PlayStation 2 (or, heaven forbid, the PC). Yet the best games are worth playing through all over again. Not only does RE4 itself remain a heart-pounding thrill ride and a modern classic, but the Wii Remote and Nunchuk controls breathe new life into a game that is still a treat to play, two years after release.    Un forastero!   If by some miracle of chance you haven't played Resident Evil 4 yet, you've got some catching up to do. You play as Leon S. Kennedy, a secret agent in charge of recovering the president's kidnapped daughter. His search leads to a creepy Spanish village whose residents are, well, not quite lucid. The story drops the occasional cliché, but for the most part, it avoids the usual horror pratfalls to deliver an interesting, intense narrative with a number of fascinating characters. It's also genuinely creepy, leading you through abandoned farmhouses, dank churches, and dripping caves, all the while throwing progressively weirder and stronger enemies at you. Like the PS2 version, it also includes a side story called Separate Ways, where you take control of spy Ada Wong and explore some of the same storyline from her perspective. Unfortunately, the Wii version doesn't include any new, exclusive content.     At its core, this is the same Resident Evil 4 that multitudes of players have grown to appreciate. It's a carefully paced, often breathtaking action game that keeps you on the edge of your seat with lumbering almost-zombies, chanting cultists, and challenging fights against gargantuan bosses. You view the action from a third-person view, and when you ready a weapon, the camera zooms in close. Once you've drawn your weapon, you can't walk, but you can aim. It all feels very deliberate, but it's perfectly countered by the measured speed at which your enemies approach you. However, you shouldn't take this to mean that the action is any less exciting than in a traditional shooter. These are dangerous foes, and you've got to pump them full of lead before they fall.     The fundamental combat is where the game shines most. Your arsenal consists of pistols, shotguns, rifles, and more, with every weapon producing credible results. Popping pitchfork-wielding villagers will cause them to drop their weapons. Or you can shoot them in the knees to make them momentarily fall to the ground. Because ammunition isn't plentiful, being able to handle a crowd of shambling psychopaths with as few shots as possible is a main priority. You've always got a knife as a last resort, but unless you want to take a chunk of damage, it's better to keep your distance.     But what makes this release so special are the subtle differences wrought by the version's definitive controls. Movement and turning are controlled using the Nunchuk's analog stick, and you enter aiming mode by using the remote's B button. But the most noticeable improvement is in aiming your weapon. The laser sight has been replaced with an actual reticle that you fully control with the remote, which gives you more mastery over where your shots land. It's absolutely intuitive, more so than the original scheme, but you shouldn't take this to mean that Resident Evil 4 on the Wii is a cakewalk. You will notice an increase in your hit percentage, but hordes of Spanish not-zombies and gigantic boss battles are as nerve-wracking as ever. Granted, there is a subtle softening of the difficulty level due to the greater degree of control. Yet the newfound fluidness in the gunplay is a welcome adjustment, and the controls still contribute to the deliberate pace.     Other changes are just as welcome. Getting your knife to find its mark is a lot easier thanks to an auto-aim function that makes melee attacks land on the nearest available target. You can still use a more familiar control scheme by holding C and pressing A to slash, but even better, you can waggle the remote to do it. The same is true of reloading: You can enter aiming mode and push down on the D pad to do it, or wave the remote. The famous context-sensitive actions are still a hallmark of the experience, and the addition of the motion sensing makes them feel fresh again. The end result of all these improvements, both subtle and obvious, is a logical and comfortable control scheme that makes perfect sense and heightens your immersion.     Resident Evil 4 sounds as fantastic as ever. It's a sonic spookfest, from the creepy minimalist soundtrack to the outstanding weapon effects. In fact, the most memorable aspects of the game are accompanied by equally thrilling audio, such as the roar of the humongous bosses or the disturbing murmurs of villagers as they infiltrate your personal space. But even here, the Wii version sneaks in a small but notable enhancement, thanks to the remote speaker. Hearing the swoosh of the knife and the clatter of reloading your shotgun emanate from your own hand sweetens an audio design that was already practically perfect.    El Gigante is an appropriate name for this towering monstrosity.   On the other hand, RE4 on the Wii doesn't bring anything new to the visual table, though like the PS2 version, it supports progressive scan and widescreen displays. Yet it still looks superb, featuring beautifully designed character models and environments that were obviously created with deliberate care and detail. Of particular note are the boss characters, which get more vulgar and imposing as you progress. But even the minor details are impressive, such as flocks of crows that flutter away as you approach or the way flames flicker realistically. And unlike the PS2 and PC versions, which used prerendered cutscenes, the engine renders them in real time here, making the scenes look more natural.     Resident Evil 4 isn't quite as groundbreaking now as it was two years ago when it was first released on the GameCube, but that doesn't make the Wii version any less dazzling. It is undoubtedly the preferred version for anyone who has yet to experience the thrill of climbing up El Gigante's back, and even if you already have had such an experience in the past, this iteration is still most certainly worth playing. The exquisite controls make this the defining Wii action title and a must-play for anyone who enjoys the act of shooting things.  
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232,Gettysburg: Armored Warfare ,3, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare is a busted online real-time strategy/third-person shooter hybrid that falters despite its cool premise.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/1/6/1/2226161-box_gaw.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gettysburg-armored-warfare-review/1900-6371581/,neg,"
  Imagine how the Civil War might have played out if the battle of Gettysburg had been fought with armored tanks and flying zeppelins instead of cannons and cavalry. Radioactive Software's inventive pairing of futuristic weaponry and historical 1860s-era warfare is enough to make Gettysburg: Armored Warfare's what-if combat scenarios an exciting prospect to explore. But the promising premise of this multiplayer-focused real-time strategy/third-person shooter hybrid falls apart almost immediately once you suit up and hit the battlefield. With its broken gameplay, graphical glitches, and missing design elements, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare feels painfully unfinished. While there's a shadow of a good game lurking beneath the myriad problems, the reality is that it's a disappointing mess in its current state.   The RTS elements are messy and broken.   A few head-scratchers pop up right from the get-go, like the fact that the cool plot setup is never explained or even directly referenced in the game. It's the year 2065, and history is poised to repeat itself when deteriorating relations among several states in the Union spark civil unrest and threaten to destroy the government. Around the same time, a freak Hadron Collider accident creates a temporal rift, allowing a general with ancestral ties to the Confederacy to return to the 1860s with modern-day technology in tow. This leads to an arms race as rival states ferry high-tech guns to the past in an attempt to win the war and rewrite history.     It seems absurd that you have to hunt around online to download and read the instruction manual to get any inkling of why Union and Confederate troops are duking it out with machine guns. It's an unfortunate oversight and a missed opportunity, considering the main appeal of the game hinges on its unique futuristic twist on American Civil War history. Figuring out controls and how to play without searching online is equally confusing, since there's no tutorial to speak of. You just have to dive in and experiment.   This doomed zeppelin is about to phase through the ground.   The online Army Skirmish matches have you building a custom army and hopping onto the battlefield as either the Union or Confederate forces. You're free to conduct your troops by issuing traditional RTS commands with the mouse, or you can drop down at any time to take direct control over a single unit in third-person view to blast away at foes at ground level while the AI takes over the rest of your soldiers. You don't lose your troops permanently when they die; fallen units respawn automatically at your starting camp. Matches continue until one side runs out of ticket points, which are lost every time units are killed and also slowly leak away over time as your opponents capture more territory.     Deathmatch mode, the more enjoyable and functional of the two available play options, changes this up slightly by ditching the RTS controls and focusing on the third-person aspect in bigger matches for up to 64 players. Either mode can also be played offline against the computer AI, but whether you're fighting bots or fellow humans, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare's numerous issues manifest quickly.    Managing your troops from afar via RTS commands is ugly business in more ways than one. At a distance, battlefields are a muddled sea of dark, drab colors, and the touchy camera angles and hypersensitive zoom make getting a good angle on the action a constantly jarring, frustrating struggle. Selecting groups of units and issuing commands also brings up a ghastly network of neon-green lines that zigzag everywhere to obscure your view, but that's not even as offensive as the hamstrung RTS combat. Mousing over enemies brings up a ""right click to attack"" prompt, yet doing so does absolutely nothing. Your soldiers stand there twiddling their thumbs as they get mowed down, and the only way around this is to maneuver your group near enemies to trigger the AI's auto attack or drop into direct third-person control of a nearby unit. It's a broken system that saps all of the effectiveness and potential fun from the real-time elements.   This soldier's gun seems to be working just fine. Unlike this game.   Things fare slightly better when you take direct control of individual units on the ground. The third-person perspective is actually fun to dig into at first. It's the only portion of the game that feels like it works somewhat the way it's meant to. Slogging across the massive battlefields without the ability to run or engage a speed boost is a slow, tedious process, but enemy encounters do spark fleeting moments of excitement as guns start blazing. However, getting up-close and personal soon reveals other issues. While there's a satisfying mix of troop types to choose from--ranging from tanks, artillery, airships, and steamships to mounted cavalry, snipers, gunners, and specialists--they're wildly unbalanced and rather one-dimensional.     It's awesome that you can have 1860s-era forces fighting next to modern troops. The problem is that the older historical combatants are no match for their futuristic counterparts. For example, tanks can steamroll most opponents with ease, making quick work of cavalry and foot soldiers. The weapon system is half-baked too. Infantry carry different gear, like grenades, guns, and sabers. These armaments appear at random, and though it looks like there are multiple slots on the HUD for carrying more than one weapon at a time, the ability to pick them up and switch between them hasn't been implemented. It just isn't rewarding to play weaker units, and the impreciseness of many attacks means shots don't always line up or connect well even when you're rolling with the big guns.   If Robert E. Lee had had the ability to draw green lines all over the battlefield, the Civil War might have ended differently.   The difference between playing as the North or the South is purely a cosmetic one, though units are visually appealing. A few of the four available battlefields also look sharp at times, at least when you don't run into graphical blips and bugs. At the ground level, AI-controlled foot soldiers phase right through stone walls and other obstacles like ghosts, while you get caught up on them and have to press a button to awkwardly volley over. Taking down zeppelins should be a dramatic affair, except that when they come plummeting out of the sky in a ball of flame, they actually phase through the ground and disappear rather than crash and explode. These quirks deaden the impact of third-person combat to an extent.      Gettysburg: Armored Warfare's biggest letdown is that it has some interesting ideas at play to match its neat premise, but doesn't come close to delivering on its potential. With more time to squash the bugs, flesh out the missing features, and tighten up the loose screws, this could be an enjoyable game. Since development and fine-tuning are ongoing postrelease, it might be worth checking this one out in a few months, but right now there are just too many problems and not enough online players to make it worth your time.    
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233,Grotesque Tactics 2: Dungeons & Donuts ,3," Not only is Grotesque Tactics 2: Dungeons & Donuts light in the strategy department, but its misogynist humor is awful and insulting.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/9/3/8/97203-180938.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grotesque-tactics-2-dungeons-and-donuts-review/1900-6348143/,neg,"
  Strategy role-playing games typically come in two flavors: games in which you either amass large armies of units (such as King's Bounty) or those in which the focus is to gather a group of heroes (such as the Disciples series). Grotesque Tactics 2: Dungeons & Donuts takes the Disciples route, so the basic setup should be familiar to anyone who has invested time in the genre. Unfortunately, the game is let down by a plethora of problems, including a shallow combat system, incomplete translations, and a slanderous sense of humor that makes this an uncomfortable and tiresome experience.   Yes, those are bras hanging off the wall. It's your job to steal one for a goblin for 'sniffinz.'   In Grotesque Tactics 2, the emo star of the first game, Drake, must form his own adventuring guild and assemble a group of misfit adventurers. The guildmates you acquire are an assortment of characters that are little more than stereotypes, such as the jive-talkin' black man, the ditzy blonde, and a holier-than-thou angel that loves nothing more than to bicker with a dark undead adventuress. If you thought cookie-cutter characters was the only unoriginal aspect of the story, there's some bad news. Drake suffers from the most well-worn plot trope: amnesia. As he regains his memory, you learn more about his past with some of his companions and the deadly fog that's plaguing the world, which has driven you underground to The Sanctuary (not only is it a safe place, but it's also your quest hub).     The story isn't interesting, and the same goes for the quests that you pursue in this tale. Within The Sanctuary are several factions--the mercenaries, the elves, and the humans--and you spend a great deal of time running among their bases and multiple dungeons as you accomplish tasks to curry favor. Your reputation with the various factions is important; as you gain more rep, you earn more quests and advance the plot (for what it's worth).     Early on, many of these quests are tedious, such as those that involve cooking meals for people. What's worse, you may receive a quest that sends you into a sealed-off area that can only be unlocked by completing a different quest. Grotesque Tactics 2 doesn't make the natural order of quests clear, and this, combined with quests that require you to interact with multiple character, makes for a lot of running back and forth around the Sanctuary. Such quests serve as mindless padding between the combat missions and makes you pine for the moments when you can use your sword rather than fry up some vittles.   You'd think something as evil as a killing fog would be bigger.   Unfortunately, you face a different set of problems during combat. While exploring on the map, your companions march with you. But you can't set their marching order; the AI takes care of it. So when combat starts, they're all in a jumble, and when combat ends, they sometimes spread out. This can be problematic if they initiate another battle while spreading out, especially if you're not ready for a battle. When combat occurs, it's pretty standard turn-based fighting. You control your team against the AI foes, who are about as smart as a colony of sea sponges. They generally rush into the fray, targeting your guild members willy-nilly. And they never focus on healers; they just attack whoever is in range first.     The options available in combat are limited. As you level up, you can acquire and boost abilities on your character's skill tree. The sad thing is that a number of skills on these trees duplicate skills of other characters, so combat suffers from the lack of variety. And the skills on these trees are bland. Combat never feels truly tactical--fighting is all about simply whacking a foe, using a limited area-of-effect spell (that's centered on you, so you can't even fling a decent spell at your opponent), or shooting an arrow at the enemy. The only real tactical option comes with back attacks, which grant more damage.     The execution of combat is spotty, and the localization of this German game is a real issue. You receive the ""Translation is missing"" option in some conversation menus. This message also appears on some doors and gates in the dungeons; while the information isn't essential, it's nice for things in your game to have names. Sometimes, these names are still in German. The game also has some crash bugs, including one annoying crash that happens whenever you try to put more than three points into one of a character's skills, limiting his progression on that portion of the skill tree. These flaws point to one thing: The game isn't finished.    When one of your conversation options is 'Translation is missing,' the game is not ready.   But what really sucks the joy out of Grotesque Tactics 2 is its humor. Sometimes, it seems to be poking fun at genre conventions, but the humor isn't sly--it's downright disrespectful. Nearly every female non-player character has a ditzy or sultry voice and is dressed in a skimpy getup. A number of these characters also make come-ons to you, and the dialogue is frequently laced with innuendo. The gear for your female guildmates is either a dress or a leather outfit, all of which seems more appropriate at a strip club than in an adventuring company. Holy Avatar, the demigod character, is a blond Adonis that keeps a harem of adoring maidens. You even have to steal one of their bras in a quest for a goblin that wants women's underwear for ""sniffinz."" (Gross!) And though women bear most of the brunt of the game's offensive characterizations, that's not always the case. For example, Deacon, the black character, talks in jive and keeps hitting on one of the female characters. Without wit or charm, Grostesque 2 ends up merely serving up more of the same stereotypical shlock that it intends to satire.    Grotesque Tactics 2 seems intended as a light take on a serious genre. Instead, it's a sexist disaster that is offensive when it means to be funny and flat when it means to be fun. Rather than deep combat, you get mindless tactics. Instead of interesting character progression, you face bland skill trees. The game isn't stable and is unfinished in parts, and the story leaves little impact on you. This all adds up to make Grotesque Tactics 2 one of the worst strategy RPGs in recent memory.  
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234,Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Stealth Force Edition ,3, Dark of the Moon: Stealth Force Edition starts out as a bad vehicle combat game and never transforms into anything else.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2358159-2226283-box_tfdotm.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/transformers-dark-of-the-moon-stealth-force-editio/1900-6321364/,neg,"
  What makes a Transformer a Transformer? You don't need to know the difference between Soundwave and Shockwave to know that it's their ability to change from robots into vehicles, weapons, boom boxes, and other things that defines the Transformers. How strange it is, then, that Transformers: Dark of the Moon: Stealth Force Edition strips the robots in disguise of this quintessential characteristic. Here, you're limited to the Transformers' vehicle forms and their ""stealth force"" forms, which are slower, more maneuverable versions of their vehicle forms with weapons attached to them. Yes, this is a Transformers game in which you never play in robot form, and this bizarre limitation prevents it from feeling like an authentic Transformers experience. This might have been forgivable if Stealth Force Edition managed to be a fun vehicle combat game, but it isn't; it's a shallow, short, and dull game that has nothing to offer Transformers fans or anyone else.      Stealth Force Edition is broken up into 18 missions, across which you play as eight Transformers, including the speedy Camaro Bumblebee and the lumbering tank Megatron. None of the missions takes more than a few minutes to complete, so there's only roughly two hours' worth of content here. But nonetheless, you won't be sorry when it comes to an end. Although there are 18 individual missions, they only come in a few different flavors, and by the time the credits roll, you'll have had more than your fill of each one. In some missions, you must destroy a certain number of enemy Transformers. It's such a tedious task that, by the time you've fulfilled your first objective of destroying 12 Autobots or whatever the mission might call for, you're ready for it to be over, and being presented with a new objective--""Defeat 12 more Autobots,"" for instance--only prolongs your suffering. Other missions are checkpoint races against the clock in which you must scurry quickly from one spot to another while enemy Transformers try to kill you. There are missions in which you must either destroy a few structures or protect a few structures from enemy attacks. And, finally, there are a few boss battles, which all play out the same way.    None of these mission types are exciting because the underlying gameplay is so shallow. In vehicle mode, you move quickly, with all of your movement handled by the thumbstick; there are no accelerate or brake buttons, although there is a button to immediately perform a 180-degree turn. When you shift into stealth force mode, weapons sprout from your shell, and although you move much slower, you can strafe from side to side. And you'd better get used to doing so, because strafing and shooting are all there is to the combat in Stealth Force Edition.    Each Transformer you control has two types of weapons: a machine-gun-like weapon with unlimited ammo, and a special weapon--a missile launcher, shotgun, or the like--with ammo you must collect from around the small environments. Combat boils down to getting close to enemies and strafing and shooting until they explode. There's no depth, no room to develop different tactics; you strafe and you shoot. If you're fighting a boss, you frequently switch back into vehicle mode, speed away to track down some energon to restore your health, and then head back to the boss to chip away at his health some more. And that's all there is to it. The action starts off tediously and doesn't evolve at all from there. Two hours is absurdly short for a game, but Stealth Force Edition overstays its welcome within the first few minutes.   Stealth Force Edition proves that objectives that update during missions aren't always a good thing.   There's a bare-bones story in Stealth Force Edition, but it offers nothing more than a flimsy setup for each mission. It's too bad, because the visual style of the animated cutscenes that precede certain missions is the only good thing about the game, striking an interesting balance between the character designs of the Michael Bay films and the vibrant colors of the classic Transformers cartoons. Aside from these brief interludes, the graphics are as dull as the gameplay. The drab urban and desert environments are sparse, textures are simple, and there's not a single moment of inspired design or visual surprise. The sound design is similarly poor; generic enemy grunts repeat generic phrases so frequently that you'll wish the Transformers had never crash-landed on Earth.     On the Wii, Stealth Force Edition also has six co-op missions that can be played split-screen by two players, but the gameplay is so excruciatingly dull that sharing it with another person doesn't make it any better. The fact that this sad excuse for a vehicle combat game features Transformers characters only makes it more dissatisfying because it utterly fails to capture the essence of the license. If it's a Transformers experience you're after, you're much better off buying some Transformers toys and making up your own adventures, as they're sure to be more fun, and to involve more transforming, than this game does. Regardless of what you're looking for in a game, you won't find it here. Steer clear of Stealth Force Edition at all costs.  
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235,Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Stealth Force Edition ,3, Dark of the Moon: Stealth Force Edition starts out as a bad vehicle combat game and never transforms into anything else.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2358159-2226283-box_tfdotm.png,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/transformers-dark-of-the-moon-stealth-force-editio/1900-6321433/,neg,"
  What makes a Transformer a Transformer? You don't need to know the difference between Soundwave and Shockwave to know that it's their ability to change from robots into vehicles, weapons, boom boxes, and other things that defines the Transformers. How strange it is, then, that Transformers: Dark of the Moon: Stealth Force Edition strips the robots in disguise of this quintessential characteristic. Here, you're limited to the Transformers' vehicle forms and their ""stealth force"" forms, which are slower, more maneuverable versions of their vehicle forms with weapons attached to them. Yes, this is a Transformers game in which you never play in robot form, and this bizarre limitation prevents it from feeling like an authentic Transformers experience. This might have been forgivable if Stealth Force Edition managed to be a fun vehicle combat game, but it isn't; it's a shallow, short, and dull game that has nothing to offer Transformers fans or anyone else.   The Transformers have agreed to stop transforming and to settle their differences by strafing and shooting at each other.   Stealth Force Edition is broken up into 18 missions, across which you play as eight Transformers, including the speedy Camaro Bumblebee and the lumbering tank Megatron. None of the missions takes more than a few minutes to complete, so there's only roughly two hours' worth of content here. But nonetheless, you won't be sorry when it comes to an end. Although there are 18 individual missions, they only come in a few different flavors, and by the time the credits roll, you'll have had more than your fill of each one. In some missions, you must destroy a certain number of enemy Transformers. It's such a tedious task that, by the time you've fulfilled your first objective of destroying 12 Autobots or whatever the mission might call for, you're ready for it to be over, and being presented with a new objective--""Defeat 12 more Autobots,"" for instance--only prolongs your suffering. Other missions are checkpoint races against the clock in which you must scurry quickly from one spot to another while enemy Transformers try to kill you. There are missions in which you must either destroy a few structures or protect a few structures from enemy attacks. And, finally, there are a few boss battles, which all play out the same way.    None of these mission types are exciting because the underlying gameplay is so shallow. In vehicle mode, you move quickly, with all of your movement handled by the circle pad; there are no accelerate or brake buttons, although there is a button to immediately perform a 180-degree turn. When you shift into stealth force mode, weapons sprout from your shell, and although you move much slower, you can strafe from side to side. And you'd better get used to doing so, because strafing and shooting are all there is to the combat in Stealth Force Edition.    Each Transformer you control has two types of weapons: a machine-gun-like weapon with unlimited ammo, and a special weapon--a missile launcher, shotgun, or the like--with ammo you must collect from around the small environments. Combat boils down to getting close to enemies and strafing and shooting until they explode. There's no depth, no room to develop different tactics; you strafe and you shoot. If you're fighting a boss, you frequently switch back into vehicle mode, speed away to track down some energon to restore your health, and then head back to the boss to chip away at his health some more. And that's all there is to it. The action starts off tediously and doesn't evolve at all from there. Two hours is absurdly short for a game, but Stealth Force Edition overstays its welcome within the first few minutes.   The Autobots' plan to overwhelm the Decepticons with weak, mass-produced red cars with guns on them isn't going so well.   There's a bare-bones story in Stealth Force Edition, but it offers nothing more than a flimsy setup for each mission. It's too bad, because the visual style of the animated cutscenes that precede certain missions is the only good thing about the game, striking an interesting balance between the character designs of the Michael Bay films and the vibrant colors of the classic Transformers cartoons. Aside from these brief interludes, the graphics are as dull as the gameplay. The drab urban and desert environments are sparse, textures are simple, and there's not a single moment of inspired design or visual surprise. The sound design is similarly poor; generic enemy grunts repeat generic phrases so frequently that you'll wish the Transformers had never crash-landed on Earth.     The fact that this sad excuse for a vehicle combat game features Transformers characters only makes it more dissatisfying because it utterly fails to capture the essence of the license. If it's a Transformers experience you're after, you're much better off buying some Transformers toys and making up your own adventures, as they're sure to be more fun, and to involve more transforming, than this game does. Regardless of what you're looking for in a game, you won't find it here. Steer clear of Stealth Force Edition at all costs.  
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236,Post Apocalyptic Mayhem ,3," The empty and amateurish Post Apocalyptic Mayhem belongs in the junkyard, not on your PC.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/3/1/6/2226316-header_292x136.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/post-apocalyptic-mayhem-review/1900-6306078/,neg,"
  The future is boring. At least, it's boring if you trust Post Apocalyptic Mayhem's vision of it. In this vision, you drive about in a buggy or truck decked out with weapons, avoiding your opponents' pathetic attempts to destroy you on courses in which the laws of physics as we know them don't consistently apply. This highly flawed car combat game is short on thrills and even shorter on content: you race AI drivers or online opponents on one of only three tracks, in one of only six vehicles. ""Racing"" isn't really an appropriate description of what you're doing out there, however. You might be doing laps around a course, but matches end when the timer runs out, and you aren't rewarded for finishing ahead of the pack--only for how many opponents you kill. P.A.M., as it's known, is easy and boring on every difficulty level, and at $9.99, it's an absolute rip-off.      It is, at least, attractive enough. You couldn't call Post Apocalyptic Mayhem a stunner, but its courses look as though they were carved out of a postwar borderland. On Concrete Jungle, leaning skyscrapers stand in relief against a blood-red sky. Derelict airplanes and an ominous (nuclear?) cloud make for an eerie sight on Cold War Beach. Wasteland is the most boring of them, winding through brown, rocky canyons with little to break up the view. Unfortunately, these are the only three courses, and while they offer a few alternate routes in the way of MotorStorm, they aren't intricate enough to keep them from becoming boring and predictable after a few races. Offline, there are only two modes. In Arcade mode, you race against five AI competitors; in Apocalyptic Challenge mode, you do the same thing three times in a row, once on each track. So really, there is only one kind of race, on one of three tracks. Even for a downloadable budget title, this is a laughable value.     Perhaps the limited amount of content could have been mitigated by rip-roaring explosions and close calls at high speed, but instead, the ""mayhem"" part of Post Apocalyptic Mayhem is decidedly lacking. At the beginning of each race, you choose one of six vehicles of various sizes, from the buggy known as the Skorch to the recreational vehicle called the Meth Alchemist. Again, P.A.M. seems to look to MotorStorm for its inspiration in this regard, but none of these vehicles are naturally limited to one course route over another. Sure, the Logger moves more slowly and feels more top-heavy than the Space Cowboy, but all of these vehicles are capable of getting good air off ramps and turn without any possibility of drifting. They all right themselves in midair in unnatural ways, and may let you drive up a few feet of cliff if you miss the track after a jump. The physics are neither realistic, nor unrealistically fun.    This only looks fun.   And so you are usually best off going with one of the big clunkers, at least on easy and medium difficulties. This is because you needn't concern yourself with the finish line, only with crashing your opponents, so speed isn't a major asset. You cause crashes by collecting power-ups as you race and then unleashing one of three different attacks. (A fourth kind of power-up fills your boost meter.) There is some initial fun here, if only because activating a missile barrage and crashing two or three enemies at once is intrinsically enjoyable. One of the Meth Alchemist's weapons unleashes exploding pink flamingos, which is a silly touch that might put a brief smile on your face. Ditto for the Childhood Dreams' frontal assault, in which you lift the driver in front of you with this school bus's scoop and fling him backward.    But Post Apocalyptic Mayhem quickly wipes those smiles away when you discover that each ""race"" has the same awkward, stilted pace: you pull ahead of the pack, unleash your rear attack when your challengers get close, and then slow down or stop until they catch up. Then you do it again until you win with many more kills than any other driver. On hard difficulty, AI drivers pass you more often, giving you a chance to use your frontal assault more frequently. But generally, you can use the same strategy over and over again without feeling pressured by the computer-controlled foes. Because you are never actually ""racing,"" the only reason to rush ahead is to bombard laggers in the rear, so don't expect any high-speed thrills. And because so much destruction occurs behind you, you don't see much explosive action, either. A picture-in-picture window shows you what's happening behind you when you perform a rear attack, but it's no substitute for full-screen, metal-melting blowouts.   Not in the lead? Don't worry--you'll still win. Almost every time.   You'd think racing others online would alleviate these concerns, but in fact, multiplayer racing is even more stilted than competing against the AI. Where the AI rushes toward the spikes of ice you've laid behind you, human players know better. Thus, competitors simply stop until the spikes disappear before again moving forward--and you're all but forced to stop too so that they can catch up. If you're in a slower vehicle, it isn't uncommon for competitors to get to power-ups before you ever can, even in the race's initial two-second stretch, giving you no chance to retaliate. It's tough but not impossible to find online games and climb up the leaderboards, but it's not worth searching too enthusiastically: multiplayer competition is even clumsier than the offline racing. If the game were called Post Apocalyptic Monotony, P.A.M. could at least be praised for truth in advertising. But this is Post Apocalyptic Mayhem, so you may have expected a bit of pandemonium. Instead, you get massive yawns, and the regret that comes with knowing you just wasted a tenner.  
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'scoop', 'fling', 'backward', '.', 'But', 'Post', 'Apocalyptic', 'Mayhem', 'quickly', 'wipes', 'smiles', 'away', 'discover', '``', 'race', ""''"", 'awkward', ',', 'stilted', 'pace', ':', 'pull', 'ahead', 'pack', ',', 'unleash', 'rear', 'attack', 'challengers', 'get', 'close', ',', 'slow', 'stop', 'catch', '.', 'Then', 'win', 'many', 'kills', 'driver', '.', 'On', 'hard', 'difficulty', ',', 'AI', 'drivers', 'pass', 'often', ',', 'giving', 'chance', 'use', 'frontal', 'assault', 'frequently', '.', 'But', 'generally', ',', 'use', 'strategy', 'without', 'feeling', 'pressured', 'computer-controlled', 'foes', '.', 'Because', 'never', 'actually', '``', 'racing', ',', ""''"", 'reason', 'rush', 'ahead', 'bombard', 'laggers', 'rear', ',', ""n't"", 'expect', 'high-speed', 'thrills', '.', 'And', 'much', 'destruction', 'occurs', 'behind', ',', ""n't"", 'see', 'much', 'explosive', 'action', ',', 'either', '.', 'A', 'picture-in-picture', 'window', 'shows', ""'s"", 'happening', 'behind', 'perform', 'rear', 'attack', ',', ""'s"", 'substitute', 'full-screen', ',', 'metal-melting', 'blowouts', '.', 'Not', 'lead', '?', 'Do', ""n't"", 'worry', '--', ""'ll"", 'still', 'win', '.', 'Almost', 'every', 'time', '.', 'You', ""'d"", 'think', 'racing', 'others', 'online', 'would', 'alleviate', 'concerns', ',', 'fact', ',', 'multiplayer', 'racing', 'even', 'stilted', 'competing', 'AI', '.', 'Where', 'AI', 'rushes', 'toward', 'spikes', 'ice', ""'ve"", 'laid', 'behind', ',', 'human', 'players', 'know', 'better', '.', 'Thus', ',', 'competitors', 'simply', 'stop', 'spikes', 'disappear', 'moving', 'forward', '--', ""'re"", 'forced', 'stop', 'catch', '.', 'If', ""'re"", 'slower', 'vehicle', ',', ""n't"", 'uncommon', 'competitors', 'get', 'power-ups', 'ever', ',', 'even', 'race', ""'s"", 'initial', 'two-second', 'stretch', ',', 'giving', 'chance', 'retaliate', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'tough', 'impossible', 'find', 'online', 'games', 'climb', 'leaderboards', ',', ""'s"", 'worth', 'searching', 'enthusiastically', ':', 'multiplayer', 'competition', 'even', 'clumsier', 'offline', 'racing', '.', 'If', 'game', 'called', 'Post', 'Apocalyptic', 'Monotony', ',', 'P.A.M.', 'could', 'least', 'praised', 'truth', 'advertising', '.', 'But', 'Post', 'Apocalyptic', 'Mayhem', ',', 'may', 'expected', 'bit', 'pandemonium', '.', 'Instead', ',', 'get', 'massive', 'yawns', ',', 'regret', 'comes', 'knowing', 'wasted', 'tenner', '.']",0.009357421331105545,0.5189007240323031
237,Amy ,3, Decent ideas can't rescue this shoddy survival horror game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/2/4/2226524-box_amy.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/amy-review/1900-6348733/,neg,"
  Amy's eponymous infant is psychic, mute, and immune to the mysterious plague that has turned the people of Silver City into zombies. She is also a tiny fool who dashes from a safe hiding spot through a patch of zombies if you leave her alone for a few moments. If you think a frightened little girl deserves your unending patience, you haven't played this game. Amy (little girl) isn't nearly the biggest problem with Amy (downloadable survival horror adventure), however. The game stacks frustration on frustration such that you resent its rudimentary puzzles, shoddy stealth sections, and awkward combat far more than the kid you've led through it all. It's not without decent ideas, but any goodwill they earn the game burns through early and fully; tension and horror quickly give way to exasperation, punctuated by the occasional fake-out jump scare.       You play as Lana, who has busted Amy out of a shady research centre and is escorting her to a hospital when their train crashes into zombie central. Luckily, Amy can't be infected by these ghouls, and radiates an improbable immunizing field; when you hold hands with her, you can't be infected either. In addition to her decontaminating aura, Amy has psychic powers, harnessed by sketching glowing glyphs dotted around the levels. One glyph enables a shock wave that knocks down enemies and barriers; the other creates a dome of silence, used for masking sounds from enemies within earshot. The intriguing premises of the infection system and psychic powers, however, are wasted in the execution.     When you leave Amy's side, the omnipresent infection gradually zombifies Lana. As the contamination sensor on her back goes from green to yellow to red, her skin turns pale and veiny, and her vision becomes red and hazy. When Lana is contaminated enough, zombies mistake her for one of their own, as long as she moves slowly and leaves Amy behind, maybe stuffed in a cupboard somewhere. Despite all the supposed visual cues, it's unclear when Lana is infected enough to pass as a zombie (somewhere between veiny and very veiny). For maximum annoyance, couple that with a city street stealth section with an instant game-over on being detected by an enemy.    The kid has the psychic powers, but when it comes to shimmying, Lana can't be beat.   In addition, Amy can be on her own for only short spells; if you spend too long sneaking around alone, she comes looking for you, trailing nearby zombies like an undead conga line. The added time pressure generates frustration, not tension, especially because when Amy blows her cover it's tantamount to another game-over. There are frequently no weapons to grab, and there is no unarmed combat; Lana can swing a stick or a crowbar, but nothing else. Amy's commitment to de-emphasising combat also means the sticks and crowbars shatter after a few thwacks. Sometimes mid-fight. And you can't carry more than one. Amy, we get it: you're not about fighting. But this punitive, enforced pacifism isn't fun or scary; it's irritating. When that's layered on top of flaky controls for moving and bashing stuff, plus an aggravatingly heavy camera, Amy does a grand job of discouraging combat by encouraging you to set down the controller and walk away.    The imprecise controls extend to the kid's magic brain powers. You can't control Amy directly--though you can command her to stay still and occasionally send her to a designated spot--but you can clumsily aim and steer her two psychic spells. The most creative sequence based on these powers has Amy positioned high on a walkway, psychic-blasting enemies onto motion-sensitive electric mines, clearing the way for Lana, who is unarmed, as usual. But this, like all of Amy's sound ideas, is undermined in the wobbly execution. Amy can't climb ladders but can crawl through small gaps and press elevator buttons, giving rise to the preponderance of basic elevator puzzles (stand on elevator, make Amy push remote button). Old-school coloured key cards for locked doors are another puzzle staple. The most novel puzzle-like element comes via DNA-based locks; Lana has a hacking device that leads her to possible DNA samples (read: corpses) that might unlock the way forward.     Locations are plain and predictably gloomy. A busy screen with high-speed movement invariably nets you a juddering frame rate. There are a handful of pleasing visual touches; Lana's and Amy's character designs are believable and detailed, and Lana's gradual zombie transformation is reasonably creepy. The latter is accompanied by a red fog that dims the screen and a garbled, sinister murmuring. Elsewhere there are similarly eerie flourishes of sound, but the game's occasional spot of music is nothing special.    Everything is red and grainy; must be a survival horror game.   Amy isn't a short game, but its length will vary hugely according to your talent and tenacity for mastering Amy's lethal foibles, since checkpoints are infrequent, and there's no way to save mid-chapter. You could clear it in six hours, but you'll more likely take 10, and if you don't finish a chapter in one sitting, you can't even restart at a checkpoint--you are whisked back to the beginning of that chapter.     The sixth chapter ends with only a minor plot payoff and sets up the story for Amy II with a baffling optimism you won't share for Amy's future. Amy has some interesting ideas, not least the pairing of a fight-averse female lead with a fragile but powerful little girl. It's a pity these aren't enough to sustain it through hours of substandard survival horror.   
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""'s"", 'tantamount', 'another', 'game-over', '.', 'There', 'frequently', 'weapons', 'grab', ',', 'unarmed', 'combat', ';', 'Lana', 'swing', 'stick', 'crowbar', ',', 'nothing', 'else', '.', 'Amy', ""'s"", 'commitment', 'de-emphasising', 'combat', 'also', 'means', 'sticks', 'crowbars', 'shatter', 'thwacks', '.', 'Sometimes', 'mid-fight', '.', 'And', 'ca', ""n't"", 'carry', 'one', '.', 'Amy', ',', 'get', ':', ""'re"", 'fighting', '.', 'But', 'punitive', ',', 'enforced', 'pacifism', ""n't"", 'fun', 'scary', ';', ""'s"", 'irritating', '.', 'When', ""'s"", 'layered', 'top', 'flaky', 'controls', 'moving', 'bashing', 'stuff', ',', 'plus', 'aggravatingly', 'heavy', 'camera', ',', 'Amy', 'grand', 'job', 'discouraging', 'combat', 'encouraging', 'set', 'controller', 'walk', 'away', '.', 'The', 'imprecise', 'controls', 'extend', 'kid', ""'s"", 'magic', 'brain', 'powers', '.', 'You', 'ca', ""n't"", 'control', 'Amy', 'directly', '--', 'though', 'command', 'stay', 'still', 'occasionally', 'send', 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'forward', '.', 'Locations', 'plain', 'predictably', 'gloomy', '.', 'A', 'busy', 'screen', 'high-speed', 'movement', 'invariably', 'nets', 'juddering', 'frame', 'rate', '.', 'There', 'handful', 'pleasing', 'visual', 'touches', ';', 'Lana', ""'s"", 'Amy', ""'s"", 'character', 'designs', 'believable', 'detailed', ',', 'Lana', ""'s"", 'gradual', 'zombie', 'transformation', 'reasonably', 'creepy', '.', 'The', 'latter', 'accompanied', 'red', 'fog', 'dims', 'screen', 'garbled', ',', 'sinister', 'murmuring', '.', 'Elsewhere', 'similarly', 'eerie', 'flourishes', 'sound', ',', 'game', ""'s"", 'occasional', 'spot', 'music', 'nothing', 'special', '.', 'Everything', 'red', 'grainy', ';', 'must', 'survival', 'horror', 'game', '.', 'Amy', ""n't"", 'short', 'game', ',', 'length', 'vary', 'hugely', 'according', 'talent', 'tenacity', 'mastering', 'Amy', ""'s"", 'lethal', 'foibles', ',', 'since', 'checkpoints', 'infrequent', ',', ""'s"", 'way', 'save', 'mid-chapter', '.', 'You', 'could', 'clear', 'six', 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238,Amy ,3, Decent ideas can't rescue this shoddy survival horror game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/2/4/2226524-box_amy.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/amy-review/1900-6348824/,neg,"
                                  '  Amy's eponymous infant is psychic, mute, and immune to the mysterious plague that has turned the people of Silver City into zombies. She is also a tiny fool who dashes from a safe hiding spot through a patch of zombies if you leave her alone for a few moments. If you think a frightened little girl deserves your unending patience, you haven't played this game. Amy (little girl) isn't nearly the biggest problem with Amy (downloadable survival horror adventure), however. The game stacks frustration on frustration such that you resent its rudimentary puzzles, shoddy stealth sections, and awkward combat far more than the kid you've led through it all. It's not without decent ideas, but any goodwill they earn the game burns through early and fully; tension and horror quickly give way to exasperation, punctuated by the occasional fake-out jump scare.       You play as Lana, who has busted Amy out of a shady research centre and is escorting her to a hospital when their train crashes into zombie central. Luckily, Amy can't be infected by these ghouls, and radiates an improbable immunizing field; when you hold hands with her, you can't be infected either. In addition to her decontaminating aura, Amy has psychic powers, harnessed by sketching glowing glyphs dotted around the levels. One glyph enables a shock wave that knocks down enemies and barriers; the other creates a dome of silence, used for masking sounds from enemies within earshot. The intriguing premises of the infection system and psychic powers, however, are wasted in the execution.     When you leave Amy's side, the omnipresent infection gradually zombifies Lana. As the contamination sensor on her back goes from green to yellow to red, her skin turns pale and veiny, and her vision becomes red and hazy. When Lana is contaminated enough, zombies mistake her for one of their own, as long as she moves slowly and leaves Amy behind, maybe stuffed in a cupboard somewhere. Despite all the supposed visual cues, it's unclear when Lana is infected enough to pass as a zombie (somewhere between veiny and very veiny). For maximum annoyance, couple that with a city street stealth section with an instant game-over on being detected by an enemy.       In addition, Amy can be on her own for only short spells; if you spend too long sneaking around alone, she comes looking for you, trailing nearby zombies like an undead conga line. The added time pressure generates frustration, not tension, especially because when Amy blows her cover it's tantamount to another game-over. There are frequently no weapons to grab, and there is no unarmed combat; Lana can swing a stick or a crowbar, but nothing else. Amy's commitment to de-emphasising combat also means the sticks and crowbars shatter after a few thwacks. Sometimes mid-fight. And you can't carry more than one. Amy, we get it: you're not about fighting. But this punitive, enforced pacifism isn't fun or scary; it's irritating. When that's layered on top of flaky controls for moving and bashing stuff, plus an aggravatingly heavy camera, Amy does a grand job of discouraging combat by encouraging you to set down the controller and walk away.    The imprecise controls extend to the kid's magic brain powers. You can't control Amy directly--though you can command her to stay still and occasionally send her to a designated spot--but you can clumsily aim and steer her two psychic spells. The most creative sequence based on these powers has Amy positioned high on a walkway, psychic-blasting enemies onto motion-sensitive electric mines, clearing the way for Lana, who is unarmed, as usual. But this, like all of Amy's sound ideas, is undermined in the wobbly execution. Amy can't climb ladders but can crawl through small gaps and press elevator buttons, giving rise to the preponderance of basic elevator puzzles (stand on elevator, make Amy push remote button). Old-school coloured key cards for locked doors are another puzzle staple. The most novel puzzle-like element comes via DNA-based locks; Lana has a hacking device that leads her to possible DNA samples (read: corpses) that might unlock the way forward.     Locations are plain and predictably gloomy. A busy screen with high-speed movement invariably nets you a juddering frame rate. There are a handful of pleasing visual touches; Lana's and Amy's character designs are believable and detailed, and Lana's gradual zombie transformation is reasonably creepy. The latter is accompanied by a red fog that dims the screen and a garbled, sinister murmuring. Elsewhere there are similarly eerie flourishes of sound, but the game's occasional spot of music is nothing special.       Amy isn't a short game, but its length will vary hugely according to your talent and tenacity for mastering Amy's lethal foibles, since checkpoints are infrequent, and there's no way to save mid-chapter. You could clear it in six hours, but you'll more likely take 10, and if you don't finish a chapter in one sitting, you can't even restart at a checkpoint--you are whisked back to the beginning of that chapter.     The sixth chapter ends with only a minor plot payoff and sets up the story for Amy II with a baffling optimism you won't share for Amy's future. Amy has some interesting ideas, not least the pairing of a fight-averse female lead with a fragile but powerful little girl. It's a pity these aren't enough to sustain it through hours of substandard survival horror.   '
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239,Battle: Los Angeles ,3," Short, unremarkable, and overpriced, Battle: Los Angeles is a shooter to be avoided.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/3/4/9/2226349-box_bla.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battle-los-angeles-review/1900-6305135/,neg,"
  Battle: Los Angeles is just 45 minutes long. This shooter-flavored advertisement for the alien-invasion movie that landed in theaters earlier this month is one of the slightest games to ever hit Xbox Live Arcade. For 800 points, you get a simplistic, easy single-player campaign that even a shooter rookie can blast through in under an hour. And that's it. There are no multiplayer modes, no challenge levels, and no extra frills of any sort to hold your interest a moment longer than it takes to finish the campaign and reach a ""Thanks for Playing"" message that comes off more like an ""LOL Thanks for Giving Us Your Money"" parting shot.      Even if the gameplay in Battle: Los Angeles were great, it would be difficult to throw out any laurels for a $10 game that lasts less than half as long as the movie on which it is based. But you don't even have to contemplate that value proposition, because this is a bland shooter with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. In the rather grandiosely named ""campaign,"" which isn't much longer than the tutorial missions in other shooters, you take on the role of a marine fighting the alien hordes that have swamped the City of Angels. Levels are set in LA rubble, with you running around on the wrecked city streets with a small squad of buddies. All you do is move from one choke point to another, hunkering down behind cars and chunks of concrete whenever the beanpole extraterrestrials show up and start taking potshots at you.    The whole campaign plays out like the first level of a game that was never completed. You face just one kind of alien enemy along with a couple of walking gun contraptions that serve as mobile turrets. Alien foes never vary their approach or battle tactics. They're just there every so often when you round a corner, either hiding behind wreckage or standing atop nearby buildings or buses. Aliens mostly present themselves as targets, because even though they demonstrate some awareness of a need to take cover when marines show up with big guns, the invaders are too tall to fully hide behind the junk littering the streets. Hello, headshots. Just four types of weapons are available for your hot little hands: a standard M16-style assault rifle, frag grenades, a sniper rifle with scope, and a rocket launcher. Most of the time you use the assault rifle, because the sniper rifle and rocket launcher are typically saved for the few moments when you shoot aliens to cover a buddy or blast big alien ships out of the sky.     Even when you're running and gunning, gameplay is plodding and methodical. It takes almost a full clip to kill an alien, which really slows things down. Making the pace even more excruciating, you spend almost all of your fighting time peeking around cover waiting for an opportune moment to stand up and shoot. Little challenge is offered by any of the combat. Your marine can take a lot of punishment, and he can totally heal up by hiding out for a few moments. Ammo crates are plentiful, which means that you never have to worry about running out of anything. As a result, you can get through the campaign with ease, dying no more than once or twice no matter which of the three difficulty settings you select. So you reach the game's finale in under 45 minutes of play. And that's without rushing. Some players are making it to the finish line a lot faster judging by the leaderboard, which shows quite a few clocked times well under 20 minutes.   Gee, the 101 looks a little backed up today.   All Battle: Los Angeles has going for it is a pretty appearance. The graphics are great, with a lot of detail on both the soldier models and the ruined LA streets. Explosions are extremely well done, and it only takes a single grenade to spark a massive fireball if you throw it at a car in one of the mostly destructible environments. The aliens themselves are a bit disappointing, being nothing more than stretched-out pale ETs with guns almost identical to those the marines are toting around. What little story there is appears in distinctive comic-book cutscenes, which adds personality even though you have to wonder why the game didn't make use of clips from the movie in these spots. (Movie-related videos and other goodies are unlocked whenever you finish the game on the three difficulty settings). The audio is rather annoying. All your squadmates ever do is yell the same two or three orders about taking cover when the aliens show up. And the music consists of generic martial Hollywood tunes that you forget the moment you get off the couch.    Most demos offer lengthier, more-involving gameplay than that in the full version of Battle: Los Angeles. As a free promo for a movie, this would be a worthwhile download to fool around with for an hour or so. As a game costing $10, though, this XBLA title is a flat-out rip-off.  
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240,Metroid Prime 2: Echoes ,9.1," Echoes stands shoulder to shoulder with its predecessor, delivering absolutely everything you'd want from a new 3D Metroid adventure.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/9/7/2209497-m2_b_pkg_main_usa.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metroid-prime-2-echoes-review/1900-6112996/,pos,"
 It was only two years ago that an upstart Texas developer named Retro Studios allayed an industry's worth of skepticism by delivering Metroid Prime, a sublimely rendered 3D take on Nintendo's beloved sci-fi adventure series. That game defied many gamers' expectations--it more accurately re-created, from a first-person perspective, the moody, exploration-based shooting action of past Metroid games than many doubting nostalgists thought possible. Prime was, in essence, an unexpected and unadulterated success. In the last two years, Retro has perfected and evolved the form of its previous game to bring us Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, a sequel that takes the established framework and builds on it with diverse new locales, innovative abilities, and inventive gameplay. Despite the addition of a middling and somewhat unnecessary multiplayer component, Echoes stands shoulder to shoulder with its predecessor, delivering absolutely everything you'd want from a new 3D Metroid adventure.  Samus Aran makes a stunning return to the GameCube in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.  The game begins simply enough, placing you once again in the hefty cybernetic boots of noble interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran. Following a simple Galactic Federation directive to investigate a missing squad of troops, Samus tracks a signal to the remote planet Aether and descends to the surface to find the missing detachment. From here things become anything but simple. Within minutes, you'll find yourself being drawn into a bizarre civil war between the luminoth, a benevolent, mothlike race that inhabits Aether, and the ing, a vile host of dark creatures who reside in an alternate-reality version of the planet referred to as Dark Aether. The ing have a nasty habit of popping into the light version of Aether at will to possess other beings, which you'll discover early on. And wouldn't you know it--your old friends the space pirates are also on Aether, working to further their nefarious ends. Soon, the mission to discover the missing soldiers is replaced by a battle to defeat the ing and destroy Dark Aether, restoring the once-tranquil planet back to the beleaguered luminoth. To top everything else off, there's a dark and seemingly malevolent version of Samus running around, causing havoc for everyone. Our favorite bounty hunter certainly has her hands full here.  Retro has done an outstanding job of bringing Aether's opposing halves to life. The light side is full of organically designed, varied environments ranging from arid wastelands to rain-soaked marshes to a stunning futuristic fortress located high up in the mountains. Dark Aether, on the other hand, is a hellish, twisted mirror image of the light world, with a generally identical layout and much of the same actual topography. The relationship is actually quite similar to the one in another Nintendo game, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the Super NES. Like in that game, you'll travel back and forth between worlds using portals scattered around the map, and many of your actions in one dimension will have specific effects in the other. Dark Aether engenders a truly ominous sense of mood, with its predominantly dark-purple color palette and grotesque denizens. The atmosphere itself is caustic to Samus early on and rapidly bleeds your energy away, forcing you to seek refuge in small protective bubbles of light energy, which really helps establish palpable tension while you're forging ahead in the dark world.  For a Metroid game, Echoes goes to pretty impressive lengths to develop its storyline, though like its predecessor, most of the plot development comes through the discovery of textual logs and ancient lore. You'll find the relics--and the corpses--of the luminoth and ing war scattered liberally throughout the world, and these provide both interesting backstory and valuable information to help move you along. Despite the presence of so many factions--the Galactic Federation marines, the space pirates, the luminoth, and the ing--you'll rarely interact with friendly characters throughout the game, so Echoes effectively re-creates the feeling of solitude in an alien world that's so integral to the Metroid experience.  A host of new tools will allow you to ply Samus' bounty-hunting trade with deadly precision.  If you've played Metroid Prime, you've essentially played Metroid Prime 2. Retro hasn't mucked with the original, winning formula, so veterans of the first game will feel quite at home resuming their position behind Samus' computer-enhanced visor. The heads-up display, in fact, really hasn't changed at all--you're literally seeing through the eyes of Samus, viewing readouts on the curved inside of her helmet. Nor have the controls, for that matter. You can still lock on to enemies and relevant background elements, which makes aiming a nonissue and frees you up to concentrate on exploring the enormous, complex environments. Samus' trusty scan visor once again comes in handy--you'll automatically scan every new room you enter to gather valuable clues about your surroundings and also discover new elements of the intriguing story.  Echoes dispenses with some of the standard Metroid equipment that fans have come to know and love, most noticeably the ice and wave beams and the X-ray and thermal visors from the original Prime. It's hard to miss that stuff, though, when you get a load of all the new toys that the sequel offers. In addition to the trusty charge cannon, you'll soon receive the light beam and the dark beam, two weapons that naturally tie into the light-and-dark theme of Aether's opposing dimensions. Many of the game's enemies are light- or dark-aligned, so you'll be able to use the weapon with opposite properties to deal extra damage. Furthermore, there are a lot of puzzle-oriented scenarios in both dimensions in which the ability to wield light and dark energy comes in handy. Later in the game, you'll obtain the annihilator beam, a weapon that combines both light and dark energies and has its own specific uses. If you've played previous Metroid games, you may be a little surprised that the three secondary beams have limited ammo, which requires you to use them judiciously and rely on your standard charge beam fairly often. Of course, Samus' impressive array of equipment doesn't consist of just guns, and Echoes delivers a host of useful secondary equipment as well.   The visor system was an innovative addition in Metroid Prime, allowing you to see in a number of different spectrums and consequently facilitating plenty of new puzzle opportunities. In addition to the standard combat and scan visors, Echoes gives you the dark visor and the echo visor, each accompanied by nifty visual filters and unique properties. The dark visor lets you see more clearly in Dark Aether and also makes interdimensional items and enemies show up in bright red. The echo visor literally lets you see in terms of sound, acting as a sort of sonar overlaid on the environment and allowing you to interface with sonic locking mechanisms. Again, these new visors allow for some ingeniously tricky puzzles.   There are some truly unique and fun new gameplay sequences here, thanks to more-inventive use of Metroid Prime's basic mechanics.  Of course, it wouldn't be Metroid if Samus didn't have missiles, bombs, super missiles, power bombs, and the ever-present morph ball, and those are all included as well. There's even a new seeker-missile ability that lets you paint up to five targets and then launch missiles to strike them all simultaneously. Lots of new and old Metroid equipment is here as well. The grapple beam returns, allowing you to swing over wide chasms. The spider ball again comes in handy for rolling up walls in ball form, and the newly revived screw attack lets you perform multiple flips in midair to damage enemies and traverse large distances. In true Metroid form, you'll come under attack right at the beginning of the game and be forced to recover all this equipment as you trudge onward toward your confrontation with the despicable ing leadership.  Recovering that equipment, discovering new areas, and battling vicious enemies are as devilishly challenging and as rewarding in Echoes as they have been in every other Metroid game. With the host of new equipment and the two dimensions of Aether at their disposal, Retro's designers had an absolute field day dreaming up complex environments and puzzles for you to discover and solve. You'll hop through portals between worlds more times than you can count, scanning with every visor, bombing in every corner, and generally turning the world upside down to find the next available path--and even when you're banging your head against a wall, you'll have a great time just traversing the lush environments, looking for clues.   With the exception of a strange sort of scavenger hunt in the endgame, the objectives in Echoes proceed with the series' trademark fluidity. The acquisition of one item will instantly open up half a dozen new areas for you to explore, leading you to even more discoveries--just like Metroid has always worked. That one questionable sequence at the end of the game may serve as a sort of brick wall for less-stalwart players, unfortunately--it requires you to cross-reference luminoth logs and lore with map locations in both dimensions and with previously acquired items. This section is certainly manageable with a bit of diehard sleuthing, but it's also a little too obscure for its own good. At least there's an automatic hint system, similar to the one in the first game, that kicks in and guides you to the next hidden objective if you flounder around for too long. Purists will be glad to know that this feature can be disabled, so you can go at it without any help whatsoever if you want.  When developing the first Metroid Prime, Retro must have expended considerable energy simply nailing the Metroid experience in full 3D. Now that the framework is set, the designers have been able to craft some really impressive new gameplay around the basic model. For instance, you'll fight one boss entirely in morph-ball mode from the standard cutaway side view, which requires you to execute precision-bombing tactics to defeat the boss without sustaining damage yourself. Other boss encounters make interesting use of your standard equipment, such as the spider ball, providing a lot of truly impressive moments when you finally realize the proper method for defeating the enemy. All the way up to the very last boss, you're constantly being challenged to consider the immense amount of equipment at your disposal and determine the proper method for surmounting a given challenge.  Echoes looks better than Metroid Prime, but you might have to compare them side by side before that's apparent. The differences are subtle and perhaps made even less obvious by the fact that several elements of the two games' presentations--everything from the HUD to the pop-up info windows and many of the accompanying sound effects--are basically identical. But the environments and even Samus herself are more-detailed this time around, boasting greater geometric detail, more-dynamic designs, and impressive new lighting and other special effects. The world of Aether is brought to life with exceptional artistry--no two areas look even remotely the same, and they all feature inventive architecture and unique set pieces. The designs for the ing are especially ghastly, putting a repulsive face on your new enemy. And just like its predecessor, the game runs at a perfectly smooth frame rate, which is all the more impressive considering how good it looks. The sound design is excellent (though much of it is the same as in the original game), with the many weapons and enemies underscored by appropriate aural accompaniment. Prime 2's soundtrack also does a great job of establishing mood without being obtrusive, though it's not the kind of thing you'll be humming in the shower.  It's too bad the multiplayer doesn't add a whole lot to Echoes, but the game would still be superb with no multiplayer at all.  Strangely, Echoes has a multiplayer component with a handful of maps for up to four players, but it's unfortunately not up to the single-player game's quality and seems a little incongruous with the solitary, adventure-driven spirit of the Metroid series. Two basic modes are on offer: the self-explanatory deathmatch mode, and the bounty mode, which makes wounded players bleed coins (and slain ones bleed more), with the objective being to hit the coin limit before your competitors. The multiplayer mode grafts the beams and some of the equipment from the single-player game onto a rudimentary power-up model, and the lock-on system works reasonably well in a competitive format--you can switch to morph ball and hit your boost to break a lock--but overall the feel of the multiplayer isn't nearly as solid as in shooters with an actual multiplayer focus. It's not hard to imagine that this competitive mode was shoehorned into the game due to the widely held expectation that all first-person games--and most GameCube games, for that matter--should have some kind of multiplayer, as it feels a little half-baked and out of place here. The good news is that Echoes doesn't suffer at all for having this mode (nobody's making you play it, after all), and it would be just as great an overall package if the multiplayer hadn't been included.  If you finished Metroid Prime and were left wanting more, Echoes gives it to you in spades. Anyone who was turned off by the slowly paced and meticulous exploration elements of the original game won't find anything new to win them over here--a run-and-gun shooter this ain't. The game is quite long and involved--you'll spend a bare minimum of 20 hours just getting to the end, and finding all the hidden items and scanning everything will take much longer (and will open up bonuses such as a harder difficulty mode and production-artwork galleries). As an adventure game with heavy action elements and an emphasis on complex puzzle-solving, Metroid Prime 2 is about as good as it gets, on the GameCube or on any platform. 

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'Metroid', 'Prime', '2', 'good', 'gets', ',', 'GameCube', 'platform', '.']",0.1160568628515338,0.47660326959700033
241,WarioWare Inc.: Mega MicroGame$ ,9.1, Anyone looking for an exciting change of pace will have a fantastic time with WarioWare.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/0/9/0/2216090-box_wware.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warioware-inc-mega-microgame-review/1900-6029025/,pos,"
 It doesn't happen terribly often these days, but you still occasionally see a game that tries its hardest to defy classification. The latest such game is Nintendo's WarioWare Inc.: Mega MicroGame$ for the Game Boy Advance. At first, it may seem like a minigame collection or some sort of party game. But the way the game tosses its huge slew of often hilarious minigames at you gives it the frenetic, unstoppable pace of a Tetris-like puzzle game, and in the end, it all comes together in a nearly magical fashion.  WarioWare just might make you crazy. In a good way!  WarioWare has a bit of a plot to it, but like most puzzle games, it's fast and very, very loose. While lounging around on the couch one day, Wario sees a television report about an extremely popular video game. Sensing the opportunity to make a lot of cash, Wario enlists a ragtag bunch of misfits and gets into the game business. This translates into gameplay by a level with its own set of minigames being assigned to each one of Wario's pals.  The games in WarioWare are as simple--and as weird--as they can possibly get. They all revolve around one basic action of some sort. One asks you to shoot a golf ball into a hole. Another asks you to stop a sliding finger just below a waiting nostril so the nose is successfully picked. You'll have to match shapes, answer simple IQ-test-like questions, jump rope, ride a skateboard, keep a spotlight shining on an escaping Wario, and lots, lots more. The startling gems of the collection come in the form of minigames based on old Nintendo classics. Inside you'll find simplified games based on The Legend of Zelda, Wild Gunman, Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Urban Champion, Metroid, Sheriff, Balloon Fight, Mario Paint, F-Zero, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., Dr. Mario, and more. On their own, the games aren't the most exciting thing in the world. For example, the Metroid game simply places Samus directly in front of Mother Brain at the end of the original NES game. All you must do is hammer on the A button to fire enough missiles to destroy Mother Brain. But there's another factor involved: time.  Each game lasts about five seconds, tops. Either you hit A enough times to destroy Mother Brain and succeed, or you don't, and you fail. What's more, the game gets faster and faster as you play, much like the blocks in a Tetris game start falling more quickly as you progress. That, combined with the way the game tosses its minigames at you in a random, rapid-fire manner makes WarioWare one of the most hectic games ever released. Not only do you need to perform a variety of tasks at increasingly breakneck speeds, but the game also doesn't tell you which minigames it's going to give you. So you must recognize which game it is and then quickly execute before time runs out. You're given four lives initially, though each stage has a boss fight that rewards victory with an extra life. The first time you complete a boss stage, it opens up the next stage, but you can go back and compete for pure score and, more importantly, to see how much speed and variety you can withstand before losing your edge and failing.  With its wide variety and Tetris-like replayability, WarioWare is well worth its purchase price.   The graphics in WarioWare keep up with the insane pace of the minigames. One minute you'll be looking at a crude yet effective shot of toast popping out of a toaster so you can grab it with a disembodied hand. The next you'll be looking at a fast-moving rendition of F-Zero for the Super Nintendo. In the end, it all comes down to pure style. WarioWare's graphics, whether attempting to render the fine art of nose picking or a picture of R.O.B. the Robot, look fantastic. The game's music and sound perfectly fit the action as well. The music, some of which has digitized lyrics, heightens in both speed and pitch as you proceed, doing a good job of making the game feel a little more manic. The sound effects are also pretty satisfying.  While it can be said that the game isn't quite as exciting once you've seen every minigame it has to offer, the method that it brings the games to you stays fresh, and a bevy of unlockables--including full versions of Dr. Mario (renamed Dr. Wario here) and Nintendo's classic arcade game Sheriff--keep things moving along quite nicely. In the end, the game does have a lot of that Tetris-like appeal, making it something that you can play in short bursts and return to again and again, which is one of the most admirable qualities a portable game can have. Anyone looking for an exciting change of pace will have a fantastic time with WarioWare.  


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242,Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 ,9.1," Even if EA Sports had left every other aspect of the game identical to Tiger Woods 2003, the staggering number of new, playable courses alone makes 2004 worthwhile.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/2/6/2214926-box_twpgat04.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tiger-woods-pga-tour-2004-review/1900-6075746/,pos,"
 EA Sports has spent the past four years slowly improving the quality of its Tiger Woods PGA Tour series of golf games, and it arguably hit its stride last year with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003. That game all but perfected the series' dramatic visual style and tactile analog swing mechanic, while piling on loads and loads of courses and gameplay options. In fact, the 2003 edition was so well made, it could have made a halfhearted Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 irrelevant. Fortunately, EA Sports clearly hasn't been resting on its laurels and has poured enough great new features and courses into Tiger Woods 2004 to make it a worthwhile purchase for any and all golf fans.  Tiger Woods 2004 outclasses its predecessor in several important ways.  Functionally, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is not that much different from last year's Tiger. The analog swing is unchanged, letting you control the power and direction of your shot with a back-and-forward motion on the analog stick. The game also offers all kinds of assistance to sloppy duffers, letting you alter the spin of the ball in the air, providing slope grids, and offering shot advice while you're putting. All of this assistance helps keep the game from becoming exceedingly frustrating, and all of it is optional for those who take the game more seriously.  There are nearly 30 different golfers from which to choose, pretty evenly split between real-life pros and EA's homegrown characters. (There's even a guest appearance from Cedric the Entertainer.) One of the big new additions to Tiger Woods 2004 is the ""game face"" feature that allows you to create your own pro golfer with a rather painstaking level of detail. This player creation mode lets you define virtually every aspect of your player's appearance. For some idea as to how extensive it is, there are 18 different attributes that can be modified in terms of facial structure alone, not including facial hair, eye color, skin tone, and what your golfer's teeth might look like. Truly, the level of character customization offered by the game face feature is unparalleled.  The 'game face' player creation feature really helps put you in the game.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 contains all of the gameplay modes found in last year's version, plus a few extra. You can still take part in the esteemed PGA Tour, as well as one-off rounds of stroke, match, and skins games. You can also take part in team-based games, like best ball and fourball. For more fast-and-loose golf, there's speed golf, battle golf (where two players can go head-to-head to try to win each other's clubs), and the long drive shootout. The skillzone returns and still stands as a great set of drills to help you hone the different abilities you need on the fairway. The scenarios are a great way to test your skills, throwing you into a series of bad situations and leaving it up to you to work your way out. Most of the modes in the game can be played with up to four players, and the variety of play offered makes it a great multiplayer game.  If your friends aren't big fans of video golf, the PlayStation 2 version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 lets you play online. You can play match or stroke games against another real-life opponent, or you can compete in online tournaments. You're given a great amount of control over the game parameters when playing match or stroke games, allowing you to decide whether you play the front nine, the back nine, or the whole 18-hole course. You also get to choose the length of the rough and the speed of the fairway. You can even introduce a shot clock, which limits the time a player can take for his swing, and, ultimately, it lets you control the pace of the game. This helps to keep a quick nine holes from turning into a long, grueling ordeal.   As golf is a sport that doesn't require competitors to have lightning-fast reflexes, Tiger Woods works predictably well online, and lag doesn't even factor into the quality of the online play. The online tournaments, which are orchestrated by EA Sports, don't have you competing against another player in real-time, but rather, they post your scores on specific courses on an online leaderboard. Theoretically, players who place high in the online tournaments will be asked to play in invitation-only tournaments against other highly ranked players. Some of the interface in the online mode is a little clunky, as you have to directly challenge another player rather than just sending an open invitation. It works well enough and is surprisingly robust for being the first console version of Tiger Woods to include online play. Though the console versions of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 are all roughly identical, the online play in the PlayStation 2 version tips the scales in its favor, making it the most recommendable of the three.  With a great overall presentation, it's arguably the best-looking golf game out there.  New this year are the real-time events that synchronize with the console's system clock to offer special competitions on specific days of the year. Winning these competitions nets you exclusive gear and apparel that you can't get any other way. It's not a make-or-break feature, but adding it to Tiger Woods 2004's already impressive stable of gameplay modes only makes the game that much stronger.  And then there are the courses... While last year there were 12 18-hole courses--many of which were inaccessible when you first started--Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 offers a whopping 19 different courses to play, and 14 of them are playable right off the bat. That's so many courses that the GameCube version of Tiger Woods 2004 had to be spread across two discs! Even if EA Sports had simply left every other aspect of the game identical to Tiger Woods 2003, the staggering number of new, playable courses alone makes 2004 a worthwhile purchase.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 looks fundamentally identical to Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003, which is to say, it's a really good-looking golf game. The courses faithfully represent their real-life counterparts, featuring consistently clean, realistic-looking textures. The scope of what the camera sees has been increased a bit, occasionally giving you a glimpse of the next hole. This gives you a better sense of actually playing a course rather than presenting a series of disconnected holes. The player models appear slightly cleaner, with better facial detail and small touches, like the way breezes cause a player's clothes to flutter. Most of the player animations are recycled from Tiger Woods 2003, but they still look really smooth and natural, adding extra emotional weight to both great and horrible shots. The striking visual effects that really helped Tiger Woods 2003 stand out return this year, with a handful of new shots to help make really strong tee-offs and achingly close shots that much more intense. All told, it's not a significantly better looking game, but it's still arguably the best-looking golf game out there.  Just like last year's game, Tiger Woods 2004 sets the standard for future golf games.  The only nagging issue with the Tiger Woods games that EA has yet to address seriously is the game's soundtrack. For the past two years, EA has been assembling seemingly random collections of contemporary licensed songs and calling them soundtracks. Again, the soundtrack in Tiger Woods 2004 tries to be all things to all people, oscillating between indie rock and hip-hop beats. The way the soundtrack goes immediately from Rooney to DMX is just jarring. You have the option of selecting your own playlist as well as which gameplay modes the music will actually come up in, though. Much like last year, the ambient environmental effects are done well enough so that turning off the music entirely is a perfectly viable option. These effects, combined with the casual, contextual tone of the commentary, really help make you feel like you're out there on the course.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 offers such a complete package, it almost seems like EA is painting itself into a corner. With the sheer number of courses available, the variety of gameplay modes offered, and the overall polish of the presentation, there just doesn't seem like a lot of room for improvement for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005.  
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243,Madden NFL 2004 ,9.1," Madden NFL 2004 covers nearly every facet of professional football, but what makes this year's entry in the series so special is the fact that it ties all its components ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/4/4/2214844-box_madden04.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2004-review/1900-6073205/,pos,"
 It's not an easy task for a development team to make enough improvements to a yearly sports game series to warrant a purchase every year. However, EA Sports has not only managed to add enough features and gameplay tweaks to make Madden NFL 2004 a more than worthy purchase for those who bought last year's game, but it has also created one of best football games to date. Madden NFL 2004 covers nearly every facet of professional football, but what makes this year's entry in the series so special is the fact that it ties all its components together seamlessly. Even the new gameplay features have been integrated incredibly well, and the result is a game that models the sport of professional football much more intricately than any other game before it.   Madden NFL 2004 boasts a number of new features.  A perfect example of this is the playmaker control feature. While it initially seems like nothing more than a quick audible option, playmaker control is actually much more than that. Before the snap of the ball, if you don't like what you're seeing on defensive side of the ball, you can adjust the offensive play to compensate without calling an audible. For example, if a linebacker appears to be blitzing on the side you're about to run a halfback toss to, you can change the direction of the run on the fly by simply pressing the right analog stick in the opposite direction.   Similarly, after the ball's been snapped, you can direct teammates on the field to block opposing players in front of the ballcarrier by pressing the right analog stick in the appropriate direction. There's a little bit of risk involved in doing this, since its effectiveness depends on the speed of the teammate running over to block. In fact, when calling for a block in this fashion, you may be tempted to head for the teammate once you've told him to throw a block in an attempt to put him in between you and the defensive player more quickly. But you'll quickly discover this rarely ever works and almost always results in an appreciable loss of yards. In any case, the playmaker controls for directing your blockers prove to be quite valuable when used in the correct situation.   Running isn't the only facet of the gameplay in which playmaker control can be used. When using it on a passing play before the snap, playmaker control can quickly change the route of a receiver if there appears to be a gap in the secondary. When the ball is snapped, playmaker control can then be used to have a designated receiver break off his route and go in a variety of directions--even back toward the line of scrimmage. Again, there's a fair amount of risk involved, since the defensive line and linebackers are constantly gunning for the quarterback, but if it looks like you have enough time and it appears that you can get a receiver open by having him change direction, you can use this technique to pick up a few extra yards.   Defensively, the playmaker mechanic isn't quite as prominent. Essentially, if you see a key receiver lining up one-on-one with a cornerback that you don't have too much confidence in, then playmaker can be used to shift your coverage over to that side, making it a little more difficult for the receiver to get open. If the ball has already been snapped, then playmaker control can be used to shift your overall coverage to run or pass. It's these subtle nuances created by the playmaker control scheme that make Madden NFL 2004 that much more strategic and fun to play than its predecessors.  Of course, there are plenty of other ways to modify plays on the defensive and offensive sides of the ball. On defense, you can shift the defensive line and the linebackers to compensate for any possible gaps that may appear in the line or to cover the outside better in the event of a toss. Offensively, audibles are still incredibly useful, and you can modify them in the coach's area in the menu.   The playmaker controls are an integral part of the gameplay.  The fundamental gameplay mechanics in Madden NFL 2004 have also been slightly tweaked. Like in NCAA Football 2004, play-action passing plays are much more effective against opponents, especially those controlled by human players, since the camera briefly follows the running back--making it seem as though it's actually a running play--before panning back to the quarterback. The running game in general feels much better, especially when you're running the ball up the middle, since the offensive lines tend to be a little more adept at opening holes when linebackers and safeties aren't shooting the gaps--in other words, getting stuck behind the ample posterior of an offensive lineman is much less of a problem than it was in the previous game. Running to the outside is also executed quite well and requires you to determine the best angle to take after your fullback has blocked a linebacker or a lineman has pulled from the opposite side of the line to make a block downfield.   Having a successful passing game in Madden NFL 2004 requires much more thought than you might initially suspect, especially since the defensive backs are much more adept at stepping into zones and going after balls, just like in NCAA Football 2004. Setting aside the playmaker controls for a moment, if you see a receiver in relatively tight zone coverage, then the chances for a successful completion are relatively low--even when running a quick out route, something that would usually guarantee a few yards. Conversely, if you see a receiver in tight man-to-man coverage running a streak, then you can try to lob the pass and hope for the best. But for the most part, a successful passing game requires you to identify the defensive coverage in the secondary, as well as that split second in the receiver's route when he'll be open.  With all these slight refinements and changes, even blitzing seems to have much greater risks and rewards. Audibles and the playmaker control can negate the effects of a blitz, but the playmaker control also requires the offensive player to think just a little bit more than he or she normally would, giving the defense one or two more precious seconds to hit the ballcarrier behind the line of scrimmage. This is especially true for human opponents, though the AI for computer-controlled opponents is pretty good about not cheating when it comes to reading a blitz.   You have to be able to read defenses to be successful in the passing game.  All these changes are great, but perhaps one of the biggest single reasons to buy Madden NFL 2004 is the owner mode, which is directly tied to the game's franchise mode. The owner mode gives you an entirely new perspective on the sport by portraying it as a business where you have to do everything in your power to ensure not only that the fans are happy, but also that you're making enough money to support the team and the stadium. If your team is doing well, then it won't be necessary to constantly adjust the prices of tickets (which are broken down according to the different sections in the stadium), merchandise (programs, hats, jerseys, bobble heads, and foam fingers), snacks (such as beer, soda, and popcorn), and parking. You can also decide how much money you want to spend on promoting the team through advertising, but that depletes your overall budget, which may make it difficult to go for a high-profile free agent in the off-season. If your team is performing poorly, compiling a losing record or missing the playoffs a number of years in a row, then fan support will wane, forcing you to constantly adjust prices in an effort to get the fans to come back.  Fortunately, you'll have plenty of information and advice at your fingertips to figure out what's wrong with your team from a business perspective. Not only will you have advisors who give you basic information on what you can do to quickly improve fan support, but you'll also have access to graphs and charts that will show you how the team has done over the course of the season financially. In addition, at any time during the season, you can access a balance sheet to see how much income you have and what your major expenses are. You can use this information to determine if you want to hire a new, higher-profile coach (though it's also possible to promote offensive and defensive coordinators if you don't particularly care for your current head coach), go after a talented free agent, trade for an additional draft pick, or save your money and lower prices for the next season. The owner mode offers a surprising amount of freedom to do what you want--you can even rebuild your stadium or move the team to a completely different city--but if you're careless with your money or in your decisions, your team's chances of being successful will be quite low.   If you don't feel like dealing with the business side of the NFL, you can simply turn the owner mode off and the game will automatically change to a more standard franchise mode. However, there are some slight differences from last year's franchise mode. The training camp mode has been integrated into the franchise mode, and it now has a direct effect on players. For example, in the passing drills, you can select any quarterback on your roster, and if that quarterback happens to perform well in the drills, then you'll receive a certain number of points to upgrade that player's attributes.   All the other modes in Madden NFL 2004 are pretty much the same as in last year's game. You can create players, teams, and playbooks. There are tournament, minicamp, two-minute drill, practice, and situation options, as well as a football 101 mode where John Madden will take you through the basics of the sport. The Madden cards, which are used to unlock cheats and hidden teams, are also back.   The graphics haven't been changed all that much either, but the game still looks great. Some minor enhancements were made to the player models, but they still have the somewhat generic look that the series has been known for the past couple of years. The sideline detail has been improved slightly, and the stadiums are incredibly accurate. Some cool minor details from last year's game have also returned--if you're playing on a grass field, for example, the quality of the field will degrade over the course of the game. Likewise, players' jerseys will get progressively dirtier if they're constantly being slammed into the ground. The already great animation also looks like it's been improved with more tackling animations, as well as just general bumps and shoves.   As for sound, the commentary in Madden NFL 2004 has been slightly improved--at least for Al Michaels, who has plenty to say on just about every single type of play. Unfortunately, Madden continues to be a weak spot. John just repeats himself far too often, and his comments can often be a little too generic. However, the interaction between the two sounds much more natural and less like a bunch of lines that were simply pasted together. The soundtrack is bolstered by licensed music from a variety of artists. The soundtrack covers a handful of genres, and most will probably enjoy the wide range of music that's been selected for the game.  There's no online play in the Xbox and GameCube versions, but Madden NFL 2004 is still one of the best football games to date.  The other versions understandably do not, but the GameCube version of Madden NFL 2004 supports the Game Boy Advance link cable. When the GBA has been connected to the GameCube, you can view the scoreboard and even select a suggested play from the Game Boy Advance. However, the GameCube version lacks the ""what's new"" videos found in other versions of the game. These videos--hosted by Monday Night Football field reporter Melissa Stark--give a glimpse into what's been added into this year's game and how to use all of the new features, but they're hardly necessary given how intuitive the new features are.  Unfortunately, the Xbox and GameCube versions of Madden NFL 2004 don't have any sort of online play, but that really doesn't detract much from how great Madden NFL 2004 really is. All the new features have been integrated so well into the preexisting framework that it seems like they've always been there. Indeed, you might wonder how you even played previous games in the series without the playmaker controls. Moreover, the owner mode and this year's minor gameplay tweaks make Madden NFL 2004 a must-have football game, regardless of which platform you own. 



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244,Madden NFL 2004 ,9.1," Madden NFL 2004 covers nearly every facet of professional football, but what makes this year's entry in the series so special is the fact that it ties all its components ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/4/4/2214844-box_madden04.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2004-review/1900-6073206/,pos,"
 It's not an easy task for a development team to make enough improvements to a yearly sports game series to warrant a purchase every year. However, EA Sports has not only managed to add enough features and gameplay tweaks to make Madden NFL 2004 a more than worthy purchase for those who bought last year's game, but it has also created one of best football games to date. Madden NFL 2004 covers nearly every facet of professional football, but what makes this year's entry in the series so special is the fact that it ties all its components together seamlessly. Even the new gameplay features have been integrated incredibly well, and the result is a game that models the sport of professional football much more intricately than any other game before it.   Madden NFL 2004 boasts a number of new features.  A perfect example of this is the playmaker control feature. While it initially seems like nothing more than a quick audible option, playmaker control is actually much more than that. Before the snap of the ball, if you don't like what you're seeing on defensive side of the ball, you can adjust the offensive play to compensate without calling an audible. For example, if a linebacker appears to be blitzing on the side you're about to run a halfback toss to, you can change the direction of the run on the fly by simply pressing the right analog stick in the opposite direction.   Similarly, after the ball's been snapped, you can direct teammates on the field to block opposing players in front of the ballcarrier by pressing the right analog stick in the appropriate direction. There's a little bit of risk involved in doing this, since its effectiveness depends on the speed of the teammate running over to block. In fact, when calling for a block in this fashion, you may be tempted to head for the teammate once you've told him to throw a block in an attempt to put him in between you and the defensive player more quickly. But you'll quickly discover this rarely ever works and almost always results in an appreciable loss of yards. In any case, the playmaker controls for directing your blockers prove to be quite valuable when used in the correct situation.   Running isn't the only facet of the gameplay in which playmaker control can be used. When using it on a passing play before the snap, playmaker control can quickly change the route of a receiver if there appears to be a gap in the secondary. When the ball is snapped, playmaker control can then be used to have a designated receiver break off his route and go in a variety of directions--even back toward the line of scrimmage. Again, there's a fair amount of risk involved, since the defensive line and linebackers are constantly gunning for the quarterback, but if it looks like you have enough time and it appears that you can get a receiver open by having him change direction, you can use this technique to pick up a few extra yards.   Defensively, the playmaker mechanic isn't quite as prominent. Essentially, if you see a key receiver lining up one-on-one with a cornerback that you don't have too much confidence in, then playmaker can be used to shift your coverage over to that side, making it a little more difficult for the receiver to get open. If the ball has already been snapped, then playmaker control can be used to shift your overall coverage to run or pass. It's these subtle nuances created by the playmaker control scheme that make Madden NFL 2004 that much more strategic and fun to play than its predecessors.  Of course, there are plenty of other ways to modify plays on the defensive and offensive sides of the ball. On defense, you can shift the defensive line and the linebackers to compensate for any possible gaps that may appear in the line or to cover the outside better in the event of a toss. Offensively, audibles are still incredibly useful, and you can modify them in the coach's area in the menu.   The playmaker controls are an integral part of the gameplay.  The fundamental gameplay mechanics in Madden NFL 2004 have also been slightly tweaked. Like in NCAA Football 2004, play-action passing plays are much more effective against opponents, especially those controlled by human players, since the camera briefly follows the running back--making it seem as though it's actually a running play--before panning back to the quarterback. The running game in general feels much better, especially when you're running the ball up the middle, since the offensive lines tend to be a little more adept at opening holes when linebackers and safeties aren't shooting the gaps--in other words, getting stuck behind the ample posterior of an offensive lineman is much less of a problem than it was in the previous game. Running to the outside is also executed quite well and requires you to determine the best angle to take after your fullback has blocked a linebacker or a lineman has pulled from the opposite side of the line to make a block downfield.   Having a successful passing game in Madden NFL 2004 requires much more thought than you might initially suspect, especially since the defensive backs are much more adept at stepping into zones and going after balls, just like in NCAA Football 2004. Setting aside the playmaker controls for a moment, if you see a receiver in relatively tight zone coverage, then the chances for a successful completion are relatively low--even when running a quick out route, something that would usually guarantee a few yards. Conversely, if you see a receiver in tight man-to-man coverage running a streak, then you can try to lob the pass and hope for the best. But for the most part, a successful passing game requires you to identify the defensive coverage in the secondary, as well as that split second in the receiver's route when he'll be open.   With all these slight refinements and changes, even blitzing seems to have much greater risks and rewards. Audibles and the playmaker control can negate the effects of a blitz, but the playmaker control also requires the offensive player to think just a little bit more than he or she normally would, giving the defense one or two more precious seconds to hit the ballcarrier behind the line of scrimmage. This is especially true for human opponents, though the AI for computer-controlled opponents is pretty good about not cheating when it comes to reading a blitz.   You have to be able to read defenses to be successful in the passing game.  All these changes are great, but perhaps one of the biggest single reasons to buy Madden NFL 2004 is the owner mode, which is directly tied to the game's franchise mode. The owner mode gives you an entirely new perspective on the sport by portraying it as a business where you have to do everything in your power to ensure not only that the fans are happy, but also that you're making enough money to support the team and the stadium. If your team is doing well, then it won't be necessary to constantly adjust the prices of tickets (which are broken down according to the different sections in the stadium), merchandise (programs, hats, jerseys, bobble heads, and foam fingers), snacks (such as beer, soda, and popcorn), and parking. You can also decide how much money you want to spend on promoting the team through advertising, but that depletes your overall budget, which may make it difficult to go for a high-profile free agent in the off-season. If your team is performing poorly, compiling a losing record or missing the playoffs a number of years in a row, then fan support will wane, forcing you to constantly adjust prices in an effort to get the fans to come back.  Fortunately, you'll have plenty of information and advice at your fingertips to figure out what's wrong with your team from a business perspective. Not only will you have advisors who give you basic information on what you can do to quickly improve fan support, but you'll also have access to graphs and charts that will show you how the team has done over the course of the season financially. In addition, at any time during the season, you can access a balance sheet to see how much income you have and what your major expenses are. You can use this information to determine if you want to hire a new, higher-profile coach (though it's also possible to promote offensive and defensive coordinators if you don't particularly care for your current head coach), go after a talented free agent, trade for an additional draft pick, or save your money and lower prices for the next season. The owner mode offers a surprising amount of freedom to do what you want--you can even rebuild your stadium or move the team to a completely different city--but if you're careless with your money or in your decisions, your team's chances of being successful will be quite low.   If you don't feel like dealing with the business side of the NFL, you can simply turn the owner mode off and the game will automatically change to a more standard franchise mode. However, there are some slight differences from last year's franchise mode. The training camp mode has been integrated into the franchise mode, and it now has a direct effect on players. For example, in the passing drills, you can select any quarterback on your roster, and if that quarterback happens to perform well in the drills, then you'll receive a certain number of points to upgrade that player's attributes.   All the other modes in Madden NFL 2004 are pretty much the same as in last year's game. You can create players, teams, and playbooks. There are tournament, minicamp, two-minute drill, practice, and situation options, as well as a football 101 mode where John Madden will take you through the basics of the sport. The Madden cards, which are used to unlock cheats and hidden teams, are also back.   The graphics haven't been changed all that much either, but the game still looks great. Some minor enhancements were made to the player models, but they still have the somewhat generic look that the series has been known for the past couple of years. The sideline detail has been improved slightly, and the stadiums are incredibly accurate. Some cool minor details from last year's game have also returned--if you're playing on a grass field, for example, the quality of the field will degrade over the course of the game. Likewise, players' jerseys will get progressively dirtier if they're constantly being slammed into the ground. The already great animation also looks like it's been improved with more tackling animations, as well as just general bumps and shoves.   As for sound, the commentary in Madden NFL 2004 has been slightly improved--at least for Al Michaels, who has plenty to say on just about every single type of play. Unfortunately, Madden continues to be a weak spot. John just repeats himself far too often, and his comments can often be a little too generic. However, the interaction between the two sounds much more natural and less like a bunch of lines that were simply pasted together. The soundtrack is bolstered by licensed music from a variety of artists. The soundtrack covers a handful of genres, and most will probably enjoy the wide range of music that's been selected for the game.  There's no online play in the Xbox and GameCube versions, but Madden NFL 2004 is still one of the best football games to date.  The other versions understandably do not, but the GameCube version of Madden NFL 2004 supports the Game Boy Advance link cable. When the GBA has been connected to the GameCube, you can view the scoreboard and even select a suggested play from the Game Boy Advance. However, the GameCube version lacks the ""what's new"" videos found in other versions of the game. These videos--hosted by Monday Night Football field reporter Melissa Stark--give a glimpse into what's been added into this year's game and how to use all of the new features, but they're hardly necessary given how intuitive the new features are.  Unfortunately, the Xbox and GameCube versions of Madden NFL 2004 don't have any sort of online play, but that really doesn't detract much from how great Madden NFL 2004 really is. All the new features have been integrated so well into the preexisting framework that it seems like they've always been there. Indeed, you might wonder how you even played previous games in the series without the playmaker controls. Moreover, the owner mode and this year's minor gameplay tweaks make Madden NFL 2004 a must-have football game, regardless of which platform you own. 



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245,Jak II ,9.1," Everything in Jak II comes together to produce one of the best-looking, best-playing games on the PS2 so far.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/8/9/2214089-box_jak2.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jak-ii-review/1900-6076839/,pos,"
 Naughty Dog has always been one of the strongest cards in Sony's hand. The developer's games are consistently among the most technically and creatively impressive to appear on the PlayStation and, more recently, the PS2. In the days of the first PlayStation, Naughty Dog was known primarily for a raft of games based on the only-slightly-loveable Crash Bandicoot, a character that was seen as Sony's answer to Mario. But in 2001, the company switched both consoles and franchises with the creation of Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, a whimsical platforming romp through a multitude of brightly colored worlds. The game had all the trappings of your typical platformer. There was Jak, the mute action hero with an array of snazzy moves; Daxter, the furry and wisecracking sidekick; and tons and tons of items to collect. When Jak and Daxter hit the scene, it filled a pretty conspicuous gap in the PlayStation 2's cutesy platformer lineup. What's more, its cliffhanger-ending left players expecting a sequel that would give us more of what made the first game so endearing.  Jak II combines its platforming roots with elements found in other popular genres.  That was before Grand Theft Auto rewrote the gaming rules. Endearing is no longer in vogue. Instead, urban grit and grime now rule the day, and it looks like Naughty Dog has been paying attention. The developer's new game, titled Jak II, has taken a distinct turn for the darker in nearly every aspect. However, the series' storyline, visuals, and gameplay have all adapted surprisingly well to recent changes in gamers' tastes. Jak II is quite a different game from its predecessor, though they share some basic gameplay mechanics, and its incorporation of several genres' styles will likely increase its appeal to a wider audience than that of Jak and Daxter. Perhaps most importantly, the styles come together in a very powerful way, making for a pretty amazing game.  Jak II begins innocently enough when Jak, Daxter, and their old pals, Keira and Samos, get to tinkering with some ancient precursor machinery. One errant press of the wrong button, however, and they're confronted by a big rift in the sky, a ghastly, trash-talking monster, and an unrequested trip through a portal, where they're launched through a big, multicolored-light tunnel. When they land, Jak and Daxter find themselves in a grungy, dystopian city where they're confronted by a group of red-suited guards under the command of the evil Baron Praxis. Daxter escapes, but Jak is taken hostage and undergoes two grueling years of experimentation involving the mysterious energy source dark eco. After two years of this torture, Daxter finally rescues Jak, who makes a vow to kill Praxis (Jak speaks--bitterly--in this one). The pair then make their way into Haven City to exact revenge or to, at least, figure out where the hell they are. Without spoiling too much, the game's storyline is stronger and contains more unexpected twists than you'd expect--especially if you played the first game. The Baron isn't the only villain; you'll also have to contend with ""metal heads"" who are an army of creatures that are always on the verge of besieging Haven City. The battle between the three factions--Praxis' army, the underground rebellion, and the metal heads--is surprisingly intriguing.  Jak II is an enormous and ambitious game that succeeds on every level.  The flow of Jak II's gameplay is radically different from what fans of Jak and Daxter are used to. While the first game had you traversing its lavish environments in a sort of free-form, interconnected manner, Jak II operates with Haven City as its hub. The game's initial prison break sequence is straight out of the platforming handbook, but as soon as you enter the city proper, you'll see that Jak II's similarities to Grand Theft Auto are not limited to its more-adult tone. The streets of Haven City are populated by ambling townspeople, steady traffic from hovercars, and the Baron's jackbooted army, the krimzon guard, whom you can effectively think of as policemen. You can ""borrow"" a passing car by knocking off its driver, and this lets you cover ground through the city more quickly. But, of course, if you disturb the peace too much, you'll have the wrath of the krimzon guard to deal with. All of this may sound like what you're used to in Grand Theft Auto, which it is. It works surprisingly well, however, given the game's previously kid-friendly pedigree.  You can't wander around Haven City stealing hovercars and aggravating the cops all day, of course, and you won't. Jak and Daxter immediately become embroiled in an underground resistance movement against the Baron, and your involvement in this rebellion will have you running back and forth around the city completing missions with a wide variety of goals. Again, all of this plays out just like you'll remember from GTA. There are a number of story characters scattered around the city that you can find by using icons on your map, and when you visit them, they'll give you assignments that, when completed, advance both your access to the city and the game's storyline. Also like GTA, you'll find a number of optional missions that provide you with rewards but aren't required to move the plot along. The many missions are spaced out very nicely, and you'll often have several goals at one time. There is a bit of nonlinearity involved, so if you get frustrated with one of the required missions (and you will), you're usually free to complete something else and can try the difficult one later.     Jak II still retains its platforming roots in its missions, which mostly take place in unique levels outside of Haven City. These stages are where Jak II will feel most familiar to fans of its predecessor, as it plays almost exactly the same. Jak still has the same moves--the dash punch, spin attack, double-jump, and butt-stomp--that he had before, although he's also been given quite an arsenal of firearms to work with this time around. Though they go by different names, the guns in Jak II resemble what you'd expect to find in a more combat-oriented action game. There's a shotgun, a rifle, a machine gun, and a final weapon, called the peacemaker. Though the addition of guns to Jak and Daxter's sequel seems like a gaming non sequitur, it works surprisingly well, since you can switch between guns and snap off attacks so quickly. With a little practice, it's possible to create some pretty neat combos involving both your physical attacks and your guns. In addition to the guns, Jak's dark eco exposure has left him with the ability to become Dark Jak, a raging berserker who has increased speed and melee combat abilities. Finally, you'll pick up a hoverboard that can be used to zoom around more quickly through the levels--and it's actually required in some of them. The hoverboard also allows you to pull off Tony Hawk-style tricks in a skate park arena. Overall, Jak II has far more depth and variety in its mechanics than the previous game, and, thus, it's more entertaining throughout.  As soon as you enter the city proper, you'll see that Jak II's similarities to Grand Theft Auto are not limited to its more-adult tone.  Like too many platformers, Jak and Daxter was based on collecting items. It had you looking for power cells (its version of Super Mario 64's stars) that were hidden around each level. Though you had to accomplish a lot of different tasks to obtain the cells, your end objective was always the same. Thankfully, Jak II's mission goals are far more diverse. You'll do things like nab a sacred artifact from a mountain temple, protect an important member of the rebellion (who fights with AI) through a combat mission, wreck the Baron's mining operations, knock out a transport ship, race through the city to deliver important goods within a time limit, and the list goes on and on. In other words, you'll almost always have something new to do when you seek a new mission, which definitely compels you to keep playing. Be warned, though: Some of the missions can be maddeningly difficult. Many missions, especially those that are time-limited, will force you to replay them multiple times just to figure out the optimal (read: only) method of completing them. Of course, there's still the opportunity to collect items, if you want to, but it's entirely optional. The collectibles give you some ability upgrades and enable a few game mods, like turning Jak's goatee off or enabling a ""big head"" mode.  In graphical terms, Naughty Dog's games have always been at the top of the heap for the two PlayStations. The company's graphics engines consistently demand more from the hardware than just about anybody else's, and its artists fill these engines with lush, detailed scenery and characters. Jak and Daxter was as much a graphical showcase of the PlayStation 2's capabilities as it was a fun action game, and, in this sense, Jak II more than lives up to expectations. The game is absolutely beautiful. Its environments are enormous, well-colored, and incredibly detailed. The levels ooze excess geometry everywhere you look, and they're all built with an obvious degree of care and attention to detail. The game characters are also highly detailed and animate very nicely, especially in the cinematic sequences. In fact, Naughty Dog has taken its cutscenes to a new level in Jak II. The character animation is as lifelike, expressive, and effectively characterized as you'll find in any video game. The voice acting is, for the most part, Hollywood-quality, and even the shots are set up by someone with an obvious talent for using a camera.  Jak and Daxter was as much a graphical showcase of the PlayStation 2's capabilities as it was a fun action game, and, in this sense, Jak II more than lives up to expectations.  Aurally, the game comes across strongly, with nice meaty sound effects punctuating the action and, as mentioned, exceptional voice acting. The game's Dolby Pro Logic II support will obviously enhance the audio's impact, if you have capable hardware. The music is pretty good and never gets annoying, but it also isn't very memorable. Perhaps a GTA-style radio station function would've been nice to see in the city driving sequences, but this is hardly a glaring omission, and the game isn't worse off for it. In terms of overall production values, this game is a class act all the way.  Jak II is an enormous and ambitious game that succeeds on every level. Half an hour in, it's no secret that it draws very heavily from the Grand Theft Auto formula, but, then again, nobody damned the original Jak and Daxter for being a clone of Super Mario 64. If anything, Jak II's resemblance to GTA enables new opportunities for its gameplay and storyline that wouldn't otherwise be available had Jak II remained a simple platformer. The gameplay is rewarding, the story twists and turns more than you'd expect from a game like this, and everything comes together to produce one of the best-looking, best-playing games on the PS2 so far. 


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246,Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow ,9.1, The single-player and multiplayer portions of Pandora Tomorrow are both highly impressive and add up to an experience that will surely appeal to anyone remotely interested in a game of ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/1/0/5/18408-54105.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-splinter-cell-pandora-tomorrow-review/1900-6092205/,pos,"
 Sam Fisher is back, and this time, he's brought some friends. Well, that's not exactly true--Fisher, an ultrasecret agent in league with the US government, always works alone. But the point is, the sequel to Ubisoft's blockbuster hit, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, not only offers more of the same spectacular single-player stealth action, starring Sam, that was featured in the original game, but also boasts a genuinely innovative, new multiplayer mode for up to four players, in which small groups of spies must match wits with heavily armed mercenaries. The multiplayer mode ties in with the single-player storyline, though the two portions of the game are completely self-contained. In fact, both the single-player and multiplayer portions of Pandora Tomorrow are highly impressive in their own right and add up to an experience that will surely appeal to fans of the first Splinter Cell, let alone anyone remotely interested in a game about high-tech stealth, subterfuge, and sabotage.  Pandora Tomorrow features more of the same cinematic stealth action as its predecessor, plus a genuinely innovative, new multiplayer mode.  The title of Pandora Tomorrow refers to a code phrase used by the presumed villain of the game, a guerrilla leader threatening the free world with a biological contagion. In the single-player portion of the game, you'll reprise the role of Sam Fisher and track this culprit around the globe, in locations ranging from a speeding passenger train hurtling across Paris, to a military camp in Indonesia. The first Splinter Cell game took place predominantly in building interiors, which were richly detailed but naturally mundane. One of Pandora Tomorrow's obvious improvements on its predecessor is in how it takes place in more-exotic locales. In Indonesia, you'll creep through the heavy brush, perhaps using the dense foliage to hide the bodies of your victims out of sight. On the passenger train, you'll shimmy along the outside to avoid detection and will come dangerously close to being flung to your death from the fast-moving car. This train level comes pretty early on in the campaign and is the shortest and probably the most impressive of the game's missions. There are only eight in total, but most of them are quite long, so veteran Splinter Cell players should expect a good 10 hours' worth of action.  The core gameplay is basically the same, which, for the most part, is a very good thing. You'll sneak your way through the game's linear scenarios, avoiding or incapacitating any unsuspecting guards (or, sometimes, civilians) who might otherwise threaten your mission of secrecy. It's not difficult to alert passersby to your presence, either by moving too quickly (or otherwise making too much noise) or by blundering into a well-lit area. There are other nasty surprises in store for you. Hidden antipersonnel mines (visible only when you toggle your thermal vision), infrared trip wires (likewise), booby traps, motion detectors, security cameras, and other such devices make the going quite difficult.  You've got plenty of tricks up your sleeve, too. Fisher is typically armed with a silenced pistol as well as his trusty SC20K multipurpose experimental assault rifle, which he can use for some silent sniping when lethal force is permitted or which he can use to fire off a variety of different gadgets. Those who played Splinter Cell will recognize all of these, which range from diversionary cameras to smoke grenades to electrifying (but nonlethal) rounds. Fisher's other gadgets include lock picks, an optical fiber wire used for seeing what's on the other side of a closed door, and his combined night vision/thermal vision goggles. He's fully decked out to get the job done by any means necessary.  The multiplayer portion is like a completely separate game, though it ties in with the single-player storyline of Pandora Tomorrow.  Pandora Tomorrow's storyline is somewhat more cohesive than that of its predecessor, and some of the gameplay elements are thankfully a bit more transparent this time around. For example, the game inherits a somewhat contrived element from its predecessor: In Splinter Cell you needed to hide the bodies of your victims out of sight to avoid setting off an alarm, which would possibly result in the failure of your mission. You needed to hide all bodies even when there was no one left conscious to pay them much heed. Pandora Tomorrow at least makes it clear that this is always necessary, and a helpful blip on your stealth meter (which indicates how camouflaged you are in the darkness) lets you know where it's safe to dump a body so no one will notice. Also, in most missions, you don't automatically fail if an alarm is sounded; you'll be afforded up to three such mistakes, though at scripted points in each mission, the alarm stage will reset back to zero, and you'll be able to proceed somewhat less anxiously.  Yet, much like the original Splinter Cell, it must be said about Pandora Tomorrow that it occasionally devolves into pure trial-and-error gameplay. The missions are completely linear and tightly scripted, so if you're jumped by bad guys or you stumble over a trap of some sort and thus fail your mission, you'll just reload from the last check point (or quick save, if you're playing the PC version), and then try again from a previous point, this time knowing exactly what's coming up. That doesn't mean you'll always get through the tight spots on the second attempt, as in fact, Pandora Tomorrow is quite a difficult game. Some sequences demand you to silently make your way through environments while using both your night vision and your thermal vision to see all the dangers in your surroundings. Then you might need to silently take out a small squad of guards.  The action occasionally devolves into frustrating trial and error, but the missions are so dense with intrigue and detail that you'll always want to press on.  Enemy artificial intelligence is about the same as in the previous Splinter Cell, which means guards will basically patrol around in a set pattern, giving you the opportunity to sneak up on them or shoot them. If you make too much noise or otherwise reveal your position, though, they'll either come investigate if you weren't too blatant about it (usually setting themselves up for an easy kill or knockout), or they'll open fire and/or sound an alarm. Fisher can't sustain much damage, but it's still quite easy to outshoot your enemies as long as you don't alert too many of them at a time. The fact that the gameplay sequences in which you aren't permitted to use lethal force are so much harder than the ones in which you can shoot to kill says a lot about the AI.   While Pandora Tomorrow's missions, like those of Splinter Cell, could have benefited from feeling less rigid and scripted, on the plus side, they're incredibly slick. Each one features some very cool, memorable moments, and you'll find considerable variety and multiple objectives within each mission. And the missions do present you with some tactical options. For instance, there are many more breakable lights in Pandora Tomorrow than in its predecessor, so you can often create a shroud of darkness for yourself with some well-placed shots. You can snipe your foes, sneak up behind them and knock them out, or distract them by whistling (one of Fisher's few new tricks) and then sneak right by. The game unfortunately has no point system of any kind, so there's no built-in impetus to try to accomplish your missions as stealthily as possible, but it's worth noting that the gameplay here is ultimately skill-based, requiring a delicate touch and careful timing. But Splinter Cell fans knew that already.  The control is as responsive as ever. Using the Xbox controller, you'll need to gently apply the analog stick in order to move quietly, lest you make too much noise and alert anyone in the vicinity to your position, while the right analog stick lets you freely rotate the camera to get an ideal vantage point. On the PC, standard shooter-style mouse-and-keyboard controls let you easily maneuver around, and the mousewheel controls how quickly you move. This more-precise control scheme works well--arguably, better--but the analog control and the context-sensitive force feedback provided by the Xbox controller make that version of Pandora Tomorrow a much more tactile experience. The PC version of the game also features sharper, more colorful visuals (assuming you have a good-enough system for them) and gives you the ability to quick-save your progress at any time, whereas the Xbox version is limited to a checkpoint save system, which makes the game more challenging but potentially more frustrating. For what it's worth, the PC version of the game also retails for less than the Xbox version.  Multiplayer Pandora Tomorrow is based on a key plot point in the game, which is alluded to peripherally. Basically, a group called Shadownet--consisting of stealthy guys very much like Sam Fisher, only their faces are completely covered--is charged with sneaking into key areas to dispose of biological weapons in the vicinity. An opposing mercenary force, ARGUS Corp., is commissioned to prevent Shadownet from succeeding. The big twist is that mercenary players view the action from a first-person perspective--and control the action just like in a conventional first-person shooter.  The first Splinter Cell was renowned for its incredible graphics, and Pandora Tomorrow is just as easy on the eyes.  The ARGUS mercs aren't just thugs. Their multipurpose assault rifles are equipped with optional laser sights and torch lights for target identification, and their helmets feature two special vision modes, which allow them to detect spies lurking in the darkness, or traces of their special gadgets. Mercs also have access to anti-spy mines, various grenades, and spy traps, which can cause unsuspecting spies to give away their position. The spies, meanwhile, aren't just Sam Fisher clones, and you'll notice that they control quite differently in some ways. Plus, they have a bunch of unique gadgets of their own. Their electromagnetic rifles are nonlethal but can be used to disable security cameras, motion sensors, and laser trip wires or to temporarily stun enemy mercenaries. Spies also pack flashbang grenades for blinding those pesky mercs and chaff grenades for temporarily disrupting static defenses. They've even got spy bullets, which can mark enemy mercs, revealing their positions on the spies' radars, and allowing the spies to eavesdrop on that merc's voice communications. They can also creep up behind and put unsuspecting mercenaries in a vice grip, in true Sam Fisher style, and then knock them out or kill them.  As you might expect, multiplayer Pandora Tomorrow is a team-oriented affair, and it encourages verbal communication between teammates via communicator headsets--but in a cool touch, if a spy grabs hold of a mercenary, the spy can offer some parting words to the opponent before breaking his neck. It's not game over for the spies if they're caught on camera, but their positions will be revealed on the mercs' minimaps, and sometimes, the area they're in will be temporarily sealed off. Death isn't necessarily the end, either, as both sides have a limited number of lives with which to try to complete their objectives.  The multiplayer action is limited to just four players at a time, and the teams needn't be balanced, so you can have three-on-one matches if you like. There are actually three distinct multiplayer game types based on the aforementioned premise. In the neutralization mode, Shadownet needs to get to and disable several different viral containers, and ARGUS needs to stop them. Extraction mode is kind of like Counter-Strike's hostage rescue; Shadownet needs to find the viral containers and bring them to an extraction point, and ARGUS needs to prevent that from happening. Sabotage is similar to neutralization, but here Shadownet must dispose of the viral containers by hacking into them using modems. It takes a while for the modems to finish the job, so ARGUS has an opportunity to destroy them before the countdown is complete, while Shadownet must make sure the job isn't interrupted.  Shadownet spies square off against heavily armed ARGUS mercenaries in Pandora Tomorrow's unique multiplayer mode.  It seems like it's been a while since any game's multiplayer mode actually warranted a detailed explanation, and that says a lot for the creativity and innovation of this mode. It's executed quite well, too, and can be extremely entertaining if you're playing in good company. The first time you try multiplayer, you're given a quick interactive tutorial of both the Shadownet and ARGUS sides, though you'll need a lot more practice than that. There are just eight maps to choose from, which differ significantly from the single-player settings and include a hospital, a movie theater, a museum, a laboratory, and others. These maps are all shrouded in darkness and lined with air ducts, hidden passageways, multiple points of entry, and other such tactical complexities, so gameplay is still fundamentally all about stealth and tactics--and teamwork, since you'll probably be working with a partner. They're all complexly designed, and neither too small nor too big for four players, so they make for some good, tense action and would probably take a while to really master. Some of them are suitable for one-on-one showdowns, but four-player matches are ideal.  We experienced smooth online gameplay in both the Xbox and PC versions of Pandora Tomorrow's multiplayer mode--when we could get into a match, that is. Via the Xbox Live service, you have the standard quick match and optimatch modes, though a bug in the shipping version of the game unfortunately causes the optimatch menu to freeze up if you wait there for more than 10 seconds or so; you can still set up your own match or search for a random quick match. On the PC, you mostly have the same types of options via Ubisoft's proprietary Ubi.com online service, though this has its own quirks. We experienced crashes to the desktop or other errors trying to get in on numerous matches, which apparently stem from issues with how the game incorporates anti-cheating software. In theory, though, you can easily do a quick search for available matches, create your own, or browse for available matches. The PC version of the game supports voice chat just like the Xbox version does. You can also play the PC version over a LAN or the Xbox version using the system link feature.  Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow looks about as impressive as its predecessor, which means it looks outstanding. Beautiful lighting effects and excellent animation make this one of the better-looking games out there. Sam Fisher and his foes mostly recycle all the same animations from the original Splinter Cell, so the visuals won't necessarily be as breathtaking as when you saw them the first time (though Fisher has a few cool, new animations you'll notice). On the other hand, some of the new environments are extremely impressive. Also, some of the new graphical effects for the multiplayer mode are very nice, such as how the ARGUS mercs' vision gets distorted with static when they take a hit. This is an altogether visually stunning game, though it does have a few graphical shortcomings that mar the presentation a bit. The characters who aren't Sam Fisher (or his Shadownet look-alikes) look much less remarkable both in detail and in motion than he does. The game's frame rate is pretty smooth most of the time, but in certain areas it noticeably bogs down, which can be distracting. And the little light sources on Fisher's stealth suit for some reason generate some rather noticeable and unsightly artifacting, an effect similar to when you see ""chunks"" of color appear while watching a dark scene on some DVDs. On the PC, this isn't a problem, though the simple character models stick out at higher resolutions. But then, nit-picking about Pandora Tomorrow's graphics really is just that.  Splinter Cell was a tough act to follow, but Pandora Tomorrow delivers everything that was great about that game, and more.  Most of the audio in Pandora Tomorrow is also excellent, especially Sam Fisher's gravelly voice-over, again provided by career tough-guy actor Michael Ironside. There's some pretty great, dry banter between Fisher and his commanding officer during the course of the game, which helps flesh out these characters a bit more. However, a lot of the voice-over for the game's secondary characters is surprisingly bad--and not only is it amateurish, but it just doesn't fit. The illusion that you're in these various international hotspots is shaken by the fact that almost every voice you hear is speaking in fluent, unaccented English. Fortunately, the rest of the game's audio fares much better. An appropriately tense-sounding musical score again picks up and trails off depending on whether you're sneaking or fighting for your life (though, as in Splinter Cell, the musical transitions are overly abrupt), and ambient noises and various footstep sounds are all very well done.  Judged solely on its single-player offering, Pandora Tomorrow would still be a great follow-up to its predecessor. Its missions are even more densely packed with action, stealth, and intrigue, and its set pieces are even more impressive, though marginally so--Splinter Cell was quite impressive to begin with. But then there's the fascinatingly complex multiplayer mode, which truly is one of a kind and potentially gives Pandora Tomorrow much more lasting value than its predecessor. The sum total is more than deserving of the Splinter Cell namesake and can be highly recommended to most any avid gamer. 


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        Privacy Policyenter Now Playing: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow Video Review

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247,Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow ,9.1, The single-player and multiplayer portions of Pandora Tomorrow are both highly impressive and add up to an experience that will surely appeal to anyone remotely interested in a game of ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/1/0/5/18408-54105.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-splinter-cell-pandora-tomorrow-review/1900-6092206/,pos,"
 Sam Fisher is back, and this time, he's brought some friends. Well, that's not exactly true--Fisher, an ultrasecret agent in league with the US government, always works alone. But the point is, the sequel to Ubisoft's blockbuster hit, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, not only offers more of the same spectacular single-player stealth action, starring Sam, that was featured in the original game, but also boasts a genuinely innovative, new multiplayer mode for up to four players, in which small groups of spies must match wits with heavily armed mercenaries. The multiplayer mode ties in with the single-player storyline, though the two portions of the game are completely self-contained. In fact, both the single-player and multiplayer portions of Pandora Tomorrow are highly impressive in their own right and add up to an experience that will surely appeal to fans of the first Splinter Cell, let alone anyone remotely interested in a game about high-tech stealth, subterfuge, and sabotage.  Pandora Tomorrow features more of the same cinematic stealth action as its predecessor, plus a genuinely innovative, new multiplayer mode.  The title of Pandora Tomorrow refers to a code phrase used by the presumed villain of the game, a guerrilla leader threatening the free world with a biological contagion. In the single-player portion of the game, you'll reprise the role of Sam Fisher and track this culprit around the globe, in locations ranging from a speeding passenger train hurtling across Paris, to a military camp in Indonesia. The first Splinter Cell game took place predominantly in building interiors, which were richly detailed but naturally mundane. One of Pandora Tomorrow's obvious improvements on its predecessor is in how it takes place in more-exotic locales. In Indonesia, you'll creep through the heavy brush, perhaps using the dense foliage to hide the bodies of your victims out of sight. On the passenger train, you'll shimmy along the outside to avoid detection and will come dangerously close to being flung to your death from the fast-moving car. This train level comes pretty early on in the campaign and is the shortest and probably the most impressive of the game's missions. There are only eight in total, but most of them are quite long, so veteran Splinter Cell players should expect a good 10 hours' worth of action.  The core gameplay is basically the same, which, for the most part, is a very good thing. You'll sneak your way through the game's linear scenarios, avoiding or incapacitating any unsuspecting guards (or, sometimes, civilians) who might otherwise threaten your mission of secrecy. It's not difficult to alert passersby to your presence, either by moving too quickly (or otherwise making too much noise) or by blundering into a well-lit area. There are other nasty surprises in store for you. Hidden antipersonnel mines (visible only when you toggle your thermal vision), infrared trip wires (likewise), booby traps, motion detectors, security cameras, and other such devices make the going quite difficult.  You've got plenty of tricks up your sleeve, too. Fisher is typically armed with a silenced pistol as well as his trusty SC20K multipurpose experimental assault rifle, which he can use for some silent sniping when lethal force is permitted or which he can use to fire off a variety of different gadgets. Those who played Splinter Cell will recognize all of these, which range from diversionary cameras to smoke grenades to electrifying (but nonlethal) rounds. Fisher's other gadgets include lock picks, an optical fiber wire used for seeing what's on the other side of a closed door, and his combined night vision/thermal vision goggles. He's fully decked out to get the job done by any means necessary.  The multiplayer portion is like a completely separate game, though it ties in with the single-player storyline of Pandora Tomorrow.  Pandora Tomorrow's storyline is somewhat more cohesive than that of its predecessor, and some of the gameplay elements are thankfully a bit more transparent this time around. For example, the game inherits a somewhat contrived element from its predecessor: In Splinter Cell you needed to hide the bodies of your victims out of sight to avoid setting off an alarm, which would possibly result in the failure of your mission. You needed to hide all bodies even when there was no one left conscious to pay them much heed. Pandora Tomorrow at least makes it clear that this is always necessary, and a helpful blip on your stealth meter (which indicates how camouflaged you are in the darkness) lets you know where it's safe to dump a body so no one will notice. Also, in most missions, you don't automatically fail if an alarm is sounded; you'll be afforded up to three such mistakes, though at scripted points in each mission, the alarm stage will reset back to zero, and you'll be able to proceed somewhat less anxiously.  Yet, much like the original Splinter Cell, it must be said about Pandora Tomorrow that it occasionally devolves into pure trial-and-error gameplay. The missions are completely linear and tightly scripted, so if you're jumped by bad guys or you stumble over a trap of some sort and thus fail your mission, you'll just reload from the last check point (or quick save, if you're playing the PC version), and then try again from a previous point, this time knowing exactly what's coming up. That doesn't mean you'll always get through the tight spots on the second attempt, as in fact, Pandora Tomorrow is quite a difficult game. Some sequences demand you to silently make your way through environments while using both your night vision and your thermal vision to see all the dangers in your surroundings. Then you might need to silently take out a small squad of guards.  The action occasionally devolves into frustrating trial and error, but the missions are so dense with intrigue and detail that you'll always want to press on.  Enemy artificial intelligence is about the same as in the previous Splinter Cell, which means guards will basically patrol around in a set pattern, giving you the opportunity to sneak up on them or shoot them. If you make too much noise or otherwise reveal your position, though, they'll either come investigate if you weren't too blatant about it (usually setting themselves up for an easy kill or knockout), or they'll open fire and/or sound an alarm. Fisher can't sustain much damage, but it's still quite easy to outshoot your enemies as long as you don't alert too many of them at a time. The fact that the gameplay sequences in which you aren't permitted to use lethal force are so much harder than the ones in which you can shoot to kill says a lot about the AI.   While Pandora Tomorrow's missions, like those of Splinter Cell, could have benefited from feeling less rigid and scripted, on the plus side, they're incredibly slick. Each one features some very cool, memorable moments, and you'll find considerable variety and multiple objectives within each mission. And the missions do present you with some tactical options. For instance, there are many more breakable lights in Pandora Tomorrow than in its predecessor, so you can often create a shroud of darkness for yourself with some well-placed shots. You can snipe your foes, sneak up behind them and knock them out, or distract them by whistling (one of Fisher's few new tricks) and then sneak right by. The game unfortunately has no point system of any kind, so there's no built-in impetus to try to accomplish your missions as stealthily as possible, but it's worth noting that the gameplay here is ultimately skill-based, requiring a delicate touch and careful timing. But Splinter Cell fans knew that already.  The control is as responsive as ever. Using the Xbox controller, you'll need to gently apply the analog stick in order to move quietly, lest you make too much noise and alert anyone in the vicinity to your position, while the right analog stick lets you freely rotate the camera to get an ideal vantage point. On the PC, standard shooter-style mouse-and-keyboard controls let you easily maneuver around, and the mousewheel controls how quickly you move. This more-precise control scheme works well--arguably, better--but the analog control and the context-sensitive force feedback provided by the Xbox controller make that version of Pandora Tomorrow a much more tactile experience. The PC version of the game also features sharper, more colorful visuals (assuming you have a good-enough system for them) and gives you the ability to quick-save your progress at any time, whereas the Xbox version is limited to a checkpoint save system, which makes the game more challenging but potentially more frustrating. For what it's worth, the PC version of the game also retails for less than the Xbox version.  Multiplayer Pandora Tomorrow is based on a key plot point in the game, which is alluded to peripherally. Basically, a group called Shadownet--consisting of stealthy guys very much like Sam Fisher, only their faces are completely covered--is charged with sneaking into key areas to dispose of biological weapons in the vicinity. An opposing mercenary force, ARGUS Corp., is commissioned to prevent Shadownet from succeeding. The big twist is that mercenary players view the action from a first-person perspective--and control the action just like in a conventional first-person shooter.  The first Splinter Cell was renowned for its incredible graphics, and Pandora Tomorrow is just as easy on the eyes.  The ARGUS mercs aren't just thugs. Their multipurpose assault rifles are equipped with optional laser sights and torch lights for target identification, and their helmets feature two special vision modes, which allow them to detect spies lurking in the darkness, or traces of their special gadgets. Mercs also have access to anti-spy mines, various grenades, and spy traps, which can cause unsuspecting spies to give away their position. The spies, meanwhile, aren't just Sam Fisher clones, and you'll notice that they control quite differently in some ways. Plus, they have a bunch of unique gadgets of their own. Their electromagnetic rifles are nonlethal but can be used to disable security cameras, motion sensors, and laser trip wires or to temporarily stun enemy mercenaries. Spies also pack flashbang grenades for blinding those pesky mercs and chaff grenades for temporarily disrupting static defenses. They've even got spy bullets, which can mark enemy mercs, revealing their positions on the spies' radars, and allowing the spies to eavesdrop on that merc's voice communications. They can also creep up behind and put unsuspecting mercenaries in a vice grip, in true Sam Fisher style, and then knock them out or kill them.  As you might expect, multiplayer Pandora Tomorrow is a team-oriented affair, and it encourages verbal communication between teammates via communicator headsets--but in a cool touch, if a spy grabs hold of a mercenary, the spy can offer some parting words to the opponent before breaking his neck. It's not game over for the spies if they're caught on camera, but their positions will be revealed on the mercs' minimaps, and sometimes, the area they're in will be temporarily sealed off. Death isn't necessarily the end, either, as both sides have a limited number of lives with which to try to complete their objectives.  The multiplayer action is limited to just four players at a time, and the teams needn't be balanced, so you can have three-on-one matches if you like. There are actually three distinct multiplayer game types based on the aforementioned premise. In the neutralization mode, Shadownet needs to get to and disable several different viral containers, and ARGUS needs to stop them. Extraction mode is kind of like Counter-Strike's hostage rescue; Shadownet needs to find the viral containers and bring them to an extraction point, and ARGUS needs to prevent that from happening. Sabotage is similar to neutralization, but here Shadownet must dispose of the viral containers by hacking into them using modems. It takes a while for the modems to finish the job, so ARGUS has an opportunity to destroy them before the countdown is complete, while Shadownet must make sure the job isn't interrupted.  Shadownet spies square off against heavily armed ARGUS mercenaries in Pandora Tomorrow's unique multiplayer mode.  It seems like it's been a while since any game's multiplayer mode actually warranted a detailed explanation, and that says a lot for the creativity and innovation of this mode. It's executed quite well, too, and can be extremely entertaining if you're playing in good company. The first time you try multiplayer, you're given a quick interactive tutorial of both the Shadownet and ARGUS sides, though you'll need a lot more practice than that. There are just eight maps to choose from, which differ significantly from the single-player settings and include a hospital, a movie theater, a museum, a laboratory, and others. These maps are all shrouded in darkness and lined with air ducts, hidden passageways, multiple points of entry, and other such tactical complexities, so gameplay is still fundamentally all about stealth and tactics--and teamwork, since you'll probably be working with a partner. They're all complexly designed, and neither too small nor too big for four players, so they make for some good, tense action and would probably take a while to really master. Some of them are suitable for one-on-one showdowns, but four-player matches are ideal.  We experienced smooth online gameplay in both the Xbox and PC versions of Pandora Tomorrow's multiplayer mode--when we could get into a match, that is. Via the Xbox Live service, you have the standard quick match and optimatch modes, though a bug in the shipping version of the game unfortunately causes the optimatch menu to freeze up if you wait there for more than 10 seconds or so; you can still set up your own match or search for a random quick match. On the PC, you mostly have the same types of options via Ubisoft's proprietary Ubi.com online service, though this has its own quirks. We experienced crashes to the desktop or other errors trying to get in on numerous matches, which apparently stem from issues with how the game incorporates anti-cheating software. In theory, though, you can easily do a quick search for available matches, create your own, or browse for available matches. The PC version of the game supports voice chat just like the Xbox version does. You can also play the PC version over a LAN or the Xbox version using the system link feature.  Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow looks about as impressive as its predecessor, which means it looks outstanding. Beautiful lighting effects and excellent animation make this one of the better-looking games out there. Sam Fisher and his foes mostly recycle all the same animations from the original Splinter Cell, so the visuals won't necessarily be as breathtaking as when you saw them the first time (though Fisher has a few cool, new animations you'll notice). On the other hand, some of the new environments are extremely impressive. Also, some of the new graphical effects for the multiplayer mode are very nice, such as how the ARGUS mercs' vision gets distorted with static when they take a hit. This is an altogether visually stunning game, though it does have a few graphical shortcomings that mar the presentation a bit. The characters who aren't Sam Fisher (or his Shadownet look-alikes) look much less remarkable both in detail and in motion than he does. The game's frame rate is pretty smooth most of the time, but in certain areas it noticeably bogs down, which can be distracting. And the little light sources on Fisher's stealth suit for some reason generate some rather noticeable and unsightly artifacting, an effect similar to when you see ""chunks"" of color appear while watching a dark scene on some DVDs. On the PC, this isn't a problem, though the simple character models stick out at higher resolutions. But then, nit-picking about Pandora Tomorrow's graphics really is just that.  Splinter Cell was a tough act to follow, but Pandora Tomorrow delivers everything that was great about that game, and more.  Most of the audio in Pandora Tomorrow is also excellent, especially Sam Fisher's gravelly voice-over, again provided by career tough-guy actor Michael Ironside. There's some pretty great, dry banter between Fisher and his commanding officer during the course of the game, which helps flesh out these characters a bit more. However, a lot of the voice-over for the game's secondary characters is surprisingly bad--and not only is it amateurish, but it just doesn't fit. The illusion that you're in these various international hotspots is shaken by the fact that almost every voice you hear is speaking in fluent, unaccented English. Fortunately, the rest of the game's audio fares much better. An appropriately tense-sounding musical score again picks up and trails off depending on whether you're sneaking or fighting for your life (though, as in Splinter Cell, the musical transitions are overly abrupt), and ambient noises and various footstep sounds are all very well done.  Judged solely on its single-player offering, Pandora Tomorrow would still be a great follow-up to its predecessor. Its missions are even more densely packed with action, stealth, and intrigue, and its set pieces are even more impressive, though marginally so--Splinter Cell was quite impressive to begin with. But then there's the fascinatingly complex multiplayer mode, which truly is one of a kind and potentially gives Pandora Tomorrow much more lasting value than its predecessor. The sum total is more than deserving of the Splinter Cell namesake and can be highly recommended to most any avid gamer. 


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248,Raven Squad ,3," Raven Squad is 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/6/3/2220463-box_rsquad.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/raven-squad-review/1900-6216622/,neg,"
  Plenty of games feature mediocre voice acting, but few approximate the pain of driving a railroad spike into your ear canal. If you value sonic comfort, it's best to overlook Raven Squad when you see it in the bargain bin, which is where you'll find this embarrassing squad-based shooter in a few months' time. And yes, it's really just a shooter. Though Raven Squad has been touted as a hybrid of real-time strategy and first-person shooting, it's simply a bad FPS in which you can issue a few commands to your two squads from a top-down view. An overhead camera view isn't enough to claim that your game possesses strategic elements, and Raven Squad is so incredibly linear, and so easy, that you could never mistake your actions as ""strategic"" or ""tactical."" In addition, it is hard to look at and boring to play, so unless you're researching misleading advertising or offensive ethnic accents, you should stay far away from Raven Squad, lest it cause spontaneous aural bleeding.      The idea of an RTS/FPS fusion is intriguing, but the ""new and unique genre"" advertised on the game's box is a complete misnomer. In spite of an overhead camera view from which you can issue some basic commands to your two three-man teams, Raven Squad is a squad shooter--and boy, is it a bad one. You can take control of any of your six men, and each has a standard weapon (like a boring SMG) as well as a specialized weapon (like a boring sniper rifle) in his arsenal. You've seen these weapons before, and none of them are satisfying to shoot, mostly due to the nonreaction of your Amazonian enemies as you riddle them with bullets. Your thickheaded foes generally stand there absorbing gunfire, showing no signs that they are bothered in the slightest until they drop down dead. There is no bloodshed, and there are no animations indicating the impact of bullets, so you have no idea whether or not you're even doing damage. This issue further exacerbated by the fact that some weapons don't seem to hurt your adversaries if you're far enough away, though you'd think that the SMGs and rifles in question would more than cover the distance.     How thickheaded are these bad guys? They are so dumb that they don't try to take cover while getting shot, they run straight toward you while shooting, they ignore you as you walk right up to them, and they stay glued to the ground when you throw a grenade at their feet. Not that your squadmates will be receiving any diplomas, since they're equally dimwitted, wandering about aimlessly and trying to shoot enemies through walls. Yet as dense as your teammates are, you won't run into any challenges: Raven Squad, even on its highest difficulty settings, is remarkably easy. Your standard strategy works thusly: You rush directly at enemies and shoot them until they die. The mission design occasionally strays from this recipe, but you won't need to apply any thoughtful new tactics when this occurs. For example, you may need to defend civilians from enemy attacks for a period of time. To accomplish this objective, you can just park yourself at a turret and blast the small groups of enemies as they appear. In this circumstance, you spend more time waiting for enemies to emerge than you do shooting them.     The ""real-time strategy"" part of the game is wholly marginalized. You command just these two units and usually need to move into the top-down strategic view only to see where enemies are hiding or to quickly move your squads from one location to another. You can issue an attack order, pick up ammo and health packs, and throw grenades from this view, but an overhead view does not an RTS make. The jungle maps you traverse are exceptionally linear, so each level is paced in much the same way. You shoot up some enemies, move into the overhead view to move your two squads to the next location, and zoom back into first-person view and shoot some more. You can try to make things more strategic by flanking your foes, but Raven Squad is such a cakewalk that you'll never need to do so. At least the transition between modes has been implemented extremely well. Zooming into first-person view and back to the top-down view is slick and simple, and the frame rate holds steady during the shift.    In this cutscene, squad members turn their backs on you and shoot directly into that wall.   Sadly, that transition is the only glossy element in an otherwise rough-looking, rough-sounding game. There's no overlooking the appalling voice acting. What with the dreadful deadpan of the assault team leader and an archaeologist's odious accent, Raven Squad's voice-overs may be the worst you will hear all year, and you'll want to head to the option menu to turn it down a few minutes in. Don't worry that you'll be missing out on any storytelling or deep characterization. A game in which the bad guys are called ""bad guys"" is clearly not interested in telling a story. There is no reason to care about any of your squad members and only the barest thread of a plot to keep you pushing forward, and the dialogue (""It's quiet. Too quiet."") is the kind of tripe that was cliche decades ago. The ugly cutscenes don't veil these sins--they just shine a spotlight on the awful character models, atrocious facial animations, and ugly textures. Environments don't look as horrendous and the lighting is decent enough, but Raven Squad's visuals would have looked old four or five years ago.     You could finish Raven Squad in around four hours. If you want to share the pain, you can ask a friend to join you in missions online, in which case each player controls a single squad. Cooperative play doesn't improve the action, but it all but removes the shallow RTS elements, since you only need to worry about your own squad when playing with others. Misery loves company, as they say, but it's better just to avoid misery altogether. To this end, don't bother with Raven Squad.     
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249,Raven Squad ,3," Raven Squad is 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/6/3/2220463-box_rsquad.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/raven-squad-review/1900-6216687/,neg,"
  Plenty of games feature mediocre voice acting, but few approximate the pain of driving a railroad spike into your ear canal. If you value sonic comfort, it's best to overlook Raven Squad when you see it in the bargain bin, which is where you'll find this embarrassing squad-based shooter in a few months' time. And yes, it's really just a shooter. Though Raven Squad has been touted as a hybrid of real-time strategy and first-person shooting, it's simply a bad FPS in which you can issue a few commands to your two squads from a top-down view. An overhead camera view isn't enough to claim that your game possesses strategic elements, and Raven Squad is so incredibly linear, and so easy, that you could never mistake your actions as ""strategic"" or ""tactical."" In addition, it is hard to look at and boring to play, so unless you're researching misleading advertising or offensive ethnic accents, you should stay far away from Raven Squad, lest it cause spontaneous aural bleeding.      The idea of an RTS/FPS fusion is intriguing, but the ""new and unique genre"" advertised on the game's box is a complete misnomer. In spite of an overhead camera view from which you can issue some basic commands to your two three-man teams, Raven Squad is a squad shooter--and boy, is it a bad one. You can take control of any of your six men, and each has a standard weapon (like a boring SMG) as well as a specialized weapon (like a boring sniper rifle) in his arsenal. You've seen these weapons before, and none of them are satisfying to shoot, mostly due to the nonreaction of your Amazonian enemies as you riddle them with bullets. Your thickheaded foes generally stand there absorbing gunfire, showing no signs that they are bothered in the slightest until they drop down dead. There is no bloodshed, and there are no animations indicating the impact of bullets, so you have no idea whether or not you're even doing damage. This issue further exacerbated by the fact that some weapons don't seem to hurt your adversaries if you're far enough away, though you'd think that the SMGs and rifles in question would more than cover the distance.     How thickheaded are these bad guys? They are so dumb that they don't try to take cover while getting shot, they run straight toward you while shooting, they ignore you as you walk right up to them, and they stay glued to the ground when you throw a grenade at their feet. Not that your squadmates will be receiving any diplomas, since they're equally dimwitted, wandering about aimlessly and trying to shoot enemies through walls. Yet as dense as your teammates are, you won't run into any challenges: Raven Squad, even on its highest difficulty settings, is remarkably easy. Your standard strategy works thusly: You rush directly at enemies and shoot them until they die. The mission design occasionally strays from this recipe, but you won't need to apply any thoughtful new tactics when this occurs. For example, you may need to defend civilians from enemy attacks for a period of time. To accomplish this objective, you can just park yourself at a turret and blast the small groups of enemies as they appear. In this circumstance, you spend more time waiting for enemies to emerge than you do shooting them.     The ""real-time strategy"" part of the game is wholly marginalized. You command just these two units and usually need to move into the top-down strategic view only to see where enemies are hiding or to quickly move your squads from one location to another. You can issue an attack order, pick up ammo and health packs, and throw grenades from this view, but an overhead view does not an RTS make. The jungle maps you traverse are exceptionally linear, so each level is paced in much the same way. You shoot up some enemies, move into the overhead view to move your two squads to the next location, and zoom back into first-person view and shoot some more. You can try to make things more strategic by flanking your foes, but Raven Squad is such a cakewalk that you'll never need to do so. At least the transition between modes has been implemented extremely well. Zooming into first-person view and back to the top-down view is slick and simple, and the frame rate holds steady during the shift.    Your squadmates will protect you from attacking fruit carts.   Sadly, that transition is the only glossy element in an otherwise rough-looking, rough-sounding game. There's no overlooking the appalling voice acting. What with the dreadful deadpan of the assault team leader and an archaeologist's odious accent, Raven Squad's voice-overs may be the worst you will hear all year, and you'll want to head to the option menu to turn it down a few minutes in. Don't worry that you'll be missing out on any storytelling or deep characterization. A game in which the bad guys are called ""bad guys"" is clearly not interested in telling a story. There is no reason to care about any of your squad members and only the barest thread of a plot to keep you pushing forward, and the dialogue (""It's quiet. Too quiet."") is the kind of tripe that was cliche decades ago. The ugly cutscenes don't veil these sins--they just shine a spotlight on the awful character models, atrocious facial animations, and ugly textures. Environments don't look as horrendous and the lighting is decent enough, but Raven Squad's visuals would have looked old four or five years ago.     You could finish Raven Squad in around four hours. If you want to share the pain, you can ask a friend to join you in missions online, in which case each player controls a single squad. Cooperative play doesn't improve the action, but it all but removes the shallow RTS elements, since you only need to worry about your own squad when playing with others. It's also buggy. At one point, a squadmate clipped into a building and couldn't move; in another, the controls stopped responding and the mission objective pointer disappeared. Misery loves company, as they say, but it's better just to avoid misery altogether. To this end, don't bother with Raven Squad.     
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250,Castlevania Judgment ,3, Castlevania's switch from 2D side-scrolling to 3D fighting is an endless stream of missteps that will frustrate even series devotees.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/5/5/2219355-box_cvj.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/castlevania-judgment-review/1900-6202123/,neg,"
  To its credit, Castlevania Judgment has high ambitions. Rather than cloning a classic one-vs.one brawler and shoehorning Castlevania characters into it, Judgment fuses multiple fighting game philosophies in an effort to separate itself from its side-scrolling heritage. Unfortunately, it takes the borrowed ideas two steps back without pushing them forward. What you're left with is a mishmash of dull gameplay made up of disparate bits and pieces of various games, strung together with tragically applied motion-controlled attacks. The poor execution on such a high-potential premise will frustrate you from your very first fight until the moment you throw in the towel.   Awkward camera angles and clutter are not conducive to having fun.   Judgment's influences are obvious from the start. Uniting weapons-based combat and big-chested babes reaks of Soul Calibur, while the gameplay is reminiscent of Power Stone at times. Even the menus and prefight banter between armor-clad characters feel familiar. But because it ditches deep combos, strategic fighting, and a balanced cast of characters, Judgment isn't the solid fighter it could have been. Once you and your opponent put up your dukes, you're free to roam around the 3D arenas and scour for ranged weapon pickups stashed in breakable boxes. Using throwing knives, hungry bats, and other Castlevania-themed goodies isn't very useful, though. Simply flicking the analog stick lets you easily evade the ranged attacks, which don't deal significant damage to begin with. If you opt to avoid using them, however, the A button loses its functionality. This is particularly onerous when you consider that mapping an attack to the A button could have decreased the amount of spastic waggling you'll have to endure.     Your gestures don't really resemble the onscreen action, and the painfully unresponsive controls involve a lot of wildly waggling your Wii Remote. Regardless of which direction you swing your controller in or how quickly you swing it, your character's combo never changes from the standard set of sword swings and whip lashes, so there's very little in the way of dynamic combat. The tutorial even goes so far as to point out that there's only one set of attacks for each character, so fights are rarely exciting. Alternatively, you can plug in your Gamecube or Classic controller to alleviate the woes of the clunky gesture-based combat in exchange for equally awkward button mashing.Regardless of  which controller you use, you'll still be stuck with bland brawling. The only variety stems from tapping the A or B button to modify your standard combo, dealing more damage at the cost of vulnerability. This risk-vs.-reward choice is the sole technical aspect of the game. Fights otherwise boil down to one-round bouts wherein the better character--not player--wins the match. Judgment ditches the traditional concept of pitting balanced brawlers against each other in favor of overpowering fan favorites like Alucard, Maria Renard, and Simon Belmont. Meanwhile, third-rate characters like Eric Lecarde, Cornell, and the Golem are cripplingly weak and easily disposed of by the faster and stronger collective of famous faces.    New fighters are unlocked by completing each of the thinly laid-out storylines, but your efforts feel wasted since each awarded brawler feels weaker and slower than the last. If you decide to play through everyone's campaign, you'll find yourself struggling with these underpowered wimps who continually lose to superior enemies. This is annoying if you want to open up the entire roster, which takes more than 12 career completions. To make matters worse, the storytelling is downright maddening. Nothing hurts more than seeing your favorite characters reduced from menacing vampire hunters to a pack of blithering idiots. For example, an immature obsession with gigantic breasts sparks a number of Maria's jealousy-fueled fights. Each character has a quirk, but it's never interesting or suitable.    But even poor characters and story take a backseat to Judgment's insufferable camera. Instead of remaining stationary while the one-on-one fight plays out, it zooms out as you approach the front of the screen and tunnels inward as you retreat. Complicating things further are item caches and opponents that obscure the already problematic perspective, so it's nearly impossible to keep tabs on the action. As if things couldn't get any worse, each arena is riddled with bothersome traps that interrupt the flow of the fast-paced fights: poison pits, lava lakes, laser beams, springing spikes, kraken tentacles, and oscillating axes don't benefit the battleground in any capacity. More often they're the cause of reproducible glitches wherein AI fighters remain frozen in the trap until their health depletes to zero. The added clutter keeps you on your toes, but it takes away from the admirable detail of each arena. The breakable stained-glass windows of a church, rotting trees in a dying forest, and the lavish layout of Dracula's regal palace outshine the disappointing characters. The whole cast sports horrible costume redesigns featuring plenty of belts, chains and pointy armor that make characters like Simon, Sypha, Eric and Maria wholly unrecognizable. On top of that, the poorly rendered anime-influenced art suffers from jagged edges and crummy, single-color textures.  They look out of place among the pretty, more realistic environments.    The stages look cool, but the characters are less impressive.   If you're just looking to fight, Judgment is full of game modes. On top of the expected Story mode and local multiplayer, online fighting adds longevity for anyone determined enough to stick out the frustrations of finding an opponent. Sadly, the community is totally barren as of this writing. Survival mode proves to be too repetitive with its fight-until-you-die mentality, and Arcade mode is just a series of battles with a time ticker. So the Castle mode is left to carry the weight. Similar to Soul Calibur II's Conquest game variant, you'll fend off hordes of minor enemies like monsters and zombies (as well as the occasional giant boss character) in a series of challenges as you unlock new gear to equip. It's addictive to earn goofy items like top hats and sunglasses, since the approach is so dissimilar to that of the two-man bouts, and a tolerable new camera angle makes for fun God of War-like arena battles.    Unfortunately, one worthwhile mode and new equipment can't save Castlevania Judgment from its mountainous pile of problems. The unforgivable flaws drain nearly every ounce of enjoyment from the fighter, and whatever aspiration it had falls flat on its face. The abhorrent camera, dreadful art, and cumbersome controls are for masochistic applicants only; fans of the franchise, fighting, or fun will find nothing of value in this sloppy cash-in.   
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251,CrazyMouse ,3, CrazyMouse should have stayed in its hole.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/9/7/2221597-box_cmouse.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crazymouse-review/1900-6199866/,neg,"
  The title screen describes CrazyMouse as ""The epic journey of the mouse gastronomist."" For those who may not know, a gastronomist is somebody who really loves food. Unfortunately, this game lacks taste and never expands beyond guiding the titular character around a series of monotonous twisting mazes. If you've played any of the Pac-Man or Bomberman games, you'll be familiar with the top-down view and winding, grid-based levels. Instead of a yellow puck or a squat demolitions expert, you guide a poorly animated blue mouse with a milkshake strapped to its back through passages to collect pizza, ice cream, and other appealing edibles in search of the ultimate food. Unfortunately that undertaking isn't nearly as challenging as the search for fun.   Navigating mazes while ingesting edibles is so 1981.     CrazyMouse's single-player experience is divided into two options: story mode and battle mode. While the look of each maze and the objective of each level changes as you progress through the story mode, the whole experience feels very mundane. Due to the lack of a coherent tale and its generic design, the story mode is a tiresome, plodding run through 32 levels. No matter the surface, the controls make you feel as though you're traversing 8-bit ice. You will run through straightaways picking up trails of collectibles and hope that by pushing to the side long enough you will turn a corner to collect more objects. If you miscalculate the turn, your small blue avatar will crash into a wall and toss its collected cookies, chocolates, or cheese to the four winds. If you can successfully ingest all the foodstuffs, get more points, or otherwise fulfill the level's objectives, you pass and move to the next obstacle.    In some levels other mice compete to collect more items and points and to prevent you from achieving top grades. Battle mode, a race for a high score in a timed bout against up to three other AI-controlled mice, is a perfect example. Some of the later levels in story mode are populated by multiple adversaries that must be outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and sometimes targeted with special attacks. The attacks are nothing more than swapping places, hurling a boomerang, or tossing a bomb. None of the special moves are satisfying to execute, and they all depend on the random item you get from the gold power-up boxes scattered around the maze. By using the special attacks on AI opponents, simple levels are made even easier. To unlock hidden achievements or the best grades for completing the level, you will have to execute perfect maneuvers and sometimes forgo assaulting your opponents.    Who trains mice to use boomerangs?     Finding an online match is difficult, but not impossible. We played each of the online modes, ranging from tournaments with up to four players to one-on-one battles. Online maps drew from the same blase battle maps available in the single-player experience. In the matches we played, the connections were smooth and the game played out in much the same way as the single-player experience. Which is to say, they were derivative and dull, despite our smarter-than-the-average-AI opponents.    With limited appeal, handicapped controls, an annoying presentation, and a now-exterminated online community, 400 Microsoft points is too much for what little CrazyMouse has to offer. Most sane people will not see any need to revisit the story mode, even though it can be completed the first time within a couple of hours. Other, classic games provide more entertainment and richer gameplay experiences than this uninspired rehash.    
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252,Fairytale Fights ,3, There's no way to break the curse on this staggeringly bad action game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/5/5/2221355-box_ffights.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fairytale-fights-review/1900-6238939/,neg,"
  Fairytale Fights is an action game that puts an emphasis on slicing lumberjacks, gingerbread men, rabbits, wolves, mice, and other storybook characters into messy little pieces as gallons of blood spill on the ground. So perhaps, in a twisted way, it's appropriate that the gameplay feels sloppy and the experience of playing the game is nothing short of painful.       You start your terrible trek in Taleville, playing as one of four famous fairy-tale characters: Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, the naked emperor, or Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk fame). Now forgotten after being usurped from the leading role in each of their stories, they set off to make names for themselves again by undertaking a quest to recover a stolen magical kettle. It may take its inspiration from many classic stories, but if you go into this game expecting a tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm, you'll be deeply disappointed. The story is paper-thin and serves only as the flimsiest pretense to bring you face-to-face with Pinocchio, the Pied Piper, and other famous fairy-tale personages.    In each linear level, you run along a set path through forests, candy castles, quaint hamlets, and other storybook settings. You'll occasionally need to make tricky jumps over spinning blades or onto moving platforms, but the controls aren't tight enough to make this maneuvering enjoyable. The camera also maintains too great a distance from the action at times, making it difficult to tell just when you should leap to land on that drifting log or rotating waterwheel. But the platforming is a minor part of the experience. By far the majority of your time will be spent killing off the waves of enemies that hinder your progress. To attack, you move the right thumbstick in any direction. To chain attacks together, you just keep wobbling the thumbstick, and to charge attacks, you hold the thumbstick in one direction and then quickly push it in another. The gameplay isn't just shallow; it's also sloppy and imprecise, feeling largely disconnected from your actions, and as a result, it's thoroughly uninvolving. You can't effectively target specific enemies, and there's no meaningful variety to your attacks. All you can do is move the right thumbstick around wildly to pummel your attackers. The lack of control also leads to other frustrations. If you're unleashing attacks anywhere near an edge, it's very easy for your character's combo to carry you right off of it to your death.     Not that this matters at all. The only penalty for death is the loss of a portion of the money you've gathered from chests and defeated enemies on that level. But since the only thing money is good for is the completely unimportant funding of a statue of your character in Taleville, losing it is of no real consequence. That doesn't mean that dying can't get annoying, though. Particularly on the hard difficulty level, there may be times when the instant you respawn, you're mobbed by so many foes that you barely have time to get an attack in before you've been ripped to shreds and need to respawn again. There's nothing satisfying about this kind of difficulty, though. Since there's no depth to the gameplay, there's no skillful way to respond to these kinds of situations. It's just frustrating.   Hate blood and gore? This isn't the game for you! Love blood and gore? Still not the game for you!   Gore is the gimmick with which the game tries to distract you from its shallowness and repetition. Scattered throughout each level are blunt and sharp objects you can wield as weapons. These include axes, clubs, swordfish, swordfish skeletons, rulers, waffle irons, lollipops, rolling pins, pitchforks, and bratwurst. Each weapon has an effectiveness rating in stars or skulls, but for all that variety, there's no real difference in how one sharp weapon or one blunt weapon behaves compared to any other. Blunt weapons are particularly useful with charge attacks, while sharp weapons are particularly useful when you want to cut your enemies to pieces and spill blood everywhere. Once that blood has been spilled, you can slide around on it like a skater on ice, and if your glory bar is fully charged, you can perform a glory attack in which your character dismembers an enemy with movements that match your inputs with the thumbstick. All this gleeful grisliness may be good for a laugh in the first few minutes, but it's quickly overshadowed by the crushing boredom of the gameplay. There are also ranged weapons, such as blunderbusses and candy guns, that you can pick up, but the inability to aim with any precision limits both their effectiveness and the enjoyment you're likely to get from them.    Making matters worse, unlike most real fairy tales, this game doesn't have the sense to keep things brief. It's the equivalent of a heavy, bloated tome that desperately needed a merciless editor to look it over before publication. Many of the 22 levels feel as if they go on forever. Stop to slaughter a dozen gingerbread men, and 20 seconds later you'll have to slaughter a dozen more. By the time all is said and done, you may never want to see another gingerbread man as long as you live. Just forcing your way through each interminable level is an act of heroism worthy of being chronicled in legends. But there's no reason to soldier on in the face of such unwavering tedium, no pot o' gold waiting for you at the end of this nightmarish rainbow. Just more, more, and still more of the same. You experience the same shallow combat against the same brain-dead AI in the eighth hour as you do in the first. Sometimes less is more, and in the case of Fairytale Fights, more is definitely less.   A scene from the classic fairy tale The Game With the Really Bad Boss Fights.   The occasional boss battles do nothing to break the monotony. In fact, they often contribute to it. An early boss battle pits you against a giant beaver who telegraphs all of his attacks, making the battle pretty easy, but this encounter demonstrates the same lack of pacing that characterizes the entire game. After you've pounded or sliced him endlessly, an animation plays that leads you to think it's all over. But then the beaver gets a second wind, and you have to go through the whole dull process all over again. A later boss battle has you fighting the Pied Piper, who is at the keys of a deadly, fire-spewing pipe organ. Here, the timing necessary to avoid the constant jets of flame is so precise as to border on the absurd, making this battle an exercise not in boredom, but in frustration.    Fairytale Fights offers local or online multiplayer for up to four players, but while enduring the experience with friends makes it a mite less painful, it still doesn't make it fun. There's something to be said for the charms of simple, arcade-style multiplayer mayhem, but this game is so basic and repetitive, your eyes may glaze over. There's also a competitive free-for-all multiplayer mode in which you battle it out to slice each other to bits or beat each other to a bloody pulp, but it serves only to emphasize just how shallow and unenjoyable the combat system is. Unsurprisingly, very few people are playing the game online as of this writing, so don't expect a lively multiplayer scene. Alone or with friends, cooperating or competing, this game is beyond redemption.    The visuals and sound are on par with everything else about Fairytale Fights. It's true that there's a touch of maniacal inspiration to some of the character designs. For instance, you may not soon forget the sight of Hansel and Gretel, reimagined as candy-crazed conjoined twins. Unfortunately, this visual inspiration is rare, and most of the character models are unattractive. The environments show some basic charm, but the overall look is too simplified to be appealing. The sound is equally disappointing, with forgettable tunes and minimal sound effects. Your characters express themselves only through occasional grunts, screams, and laughs that sound oddly muted and don't have much personality.    Even if it were a downloadable game for a fraction of the price, Fairytale Fights would not be recommendable. The very idea of this shallow, repetitive, bloated, excruciating adventure as a full-priced retail offering is nothing short of ludicrous. If there's any moral to be gleaned from this demented fairy tale, it is this: Don't play this game.  
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253,Fairytale Fights ,3, There's no way to break the curse on this staggeringly bad action game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/5/5/2221355-box_ffights.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fairytale-fights-review/1900-6239070/,neg,"
  Fairytale Fights is an action game that puts an emphasis on slicing lumberjacks, gingerbread men, rabbits, wolves, mice, and other storybook characters into messy little pieces as gallons of blood spill on the ground. So perhaps, in a twisted way, it's appropriate that the gameplay feels sloppy and the experience of playing the game is nothing short of painful.       You start your terrible trek in Taleville, playing as one of four famous fairy-tale characters: Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, the naked emperor, or Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk fame). Now forgotten after being usurped from the leading role in each of their stories, they set off to make names for themselves again by undertaking a quest to recover a stolen magical kettle. It may take its inspiration from many classic stories, but if you go into this game expecting a tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm, you'll be deeply disappointed. The story is paper-thin and serves only as the flimsiest pretense to bring you face-to-face with Pinocchio, the Pied Piper, and other famous fairy-tale personages.    In each linear level, you run along a set path through forests, candy castles, quaint hamlets, and other storybook settings. You'll occasionally need to make tricky jumps over spinning blades or onto moving platforms, but the controls aren't tight enough to make this maneuvering enjoyable. The camera also maintains too great a distance from the action at times, making it difficult to tell just when you should leap to land on that drifting log or rotating waterwheel. But the platforming is a minor part of the experience. By far the majority of your time will be spent killing off the waves of enemies that hinder your progress. To attack, you move the right thumbstick in any direction. To chain attacks together, you just keep wobbling the thumbstick, and to charge attacks, you hold the thumbstick in one direction and then quickly push it in another. The gameplay isn't just shallow; it's also sloppy and imprecise, feeling largely disconnected from your actions, and as a result, it's thoroughly uninvolving. You can't effectively target specific enemies, and there's no meaningful variety to your attacks. All you can do is move the right thumbstick around wildly to pummel your attackers. The lack of control also leads to other frustrations. If you're unleashing attacks anywhere near an edge, it's very easy for your character's combo to carry you right off of it to your death.     Not that this matters at all. The only penalty for death is the loss of a portion of the money you've gathered from chests and defeated enemies on that level. But since the only thing money is good for is the completely unimportant funding of a statue of your character in Taleville, losing it is of no real consequence. That doesn't mean that dying can't get annoying, though. Particularly on the hard difficulty level, there may be times when the instant you respawn, you're mobbed by so many foes that you barely have time to get an attack in before you've been ripped to shreds and need to respawn again. There's nothing satisfying about this kind of difficulty, though. Since there's no depth to the gameplay, there's no skillful way to respond to these kinds of situations. It's just frustrating.   Hate blood and gore? This isn't the game for you! Love blood and gore? Still not the game for you!   Gore is the gimmick with which the game tries to distract you from its shallowness and repetition. Scattered throughout each level are blunt and sharp objects you can wield as weapons. These include axes, clubs, swordfish, swordfish skeletons, rulers, waffle irons, lollipops, rolling pins, pitchforks, and bratwurst. Each weapon has an effectiveness rating in stars or skulls, but for all that variety, there's no real difference in how one sharp weapon or one blunt weapon behaves compared to any other. Blunt weapons are particularly useful with charge attacks, while sharp weapons are particularly useful when you want to cut your enemies to pieces and spill blood everywhere. Once that blood has been spilled, you can slide around on it like a skater on ice, and if your glory bar is fully charged, you can perform a glory attack in which your character dismembers an enemy with movements that match your inputs with the thumbstick. All this gleeful grisliness may be good for a laugh in the first few minutes, but it's quickly overshadowed by the crushing boredom of the gameplay. There are also ranged weapons, such as blunderbusses and candy guns, that you can pick up, but the inability to aim with any precision limits both their effectiveness and the enjoyment you're likely to get from them.   Making matters worse, unlike most real fairy tales, this game doesn't have the sense to keep things brief. It's the equivalent of a heavy, bloated tome that desperately needed a merciless editor to look it over before publication. Many of the 22 levels feel as if they go on forever. Stop to slaughter a dozen gingerbread men, and 20 seconds later you'll have to slaughter a dozen more. By the time all is said and done, you may never want to see another gingerbread man as long as you live. Just forcing your way through each interminable level is an act of heroism worthy of being chronicled in legends. But there's no reason to soldier on in the face of such unwavering tedium, no pot o' gold waiting for you at the end of this nightmarish rainbow. Just more, more, and still more of the same. You experience the same shallow combat against the same brain-dead AI in the eighth hour as you do in the first. Sometimes less is more, and in the case of Fairytale Fights, more is definitely less.  A scene from the classic fairy tale The Game With the Really Bad Boss Fights.  The occasional boss battles do nothing to break the monotony. In fact, they often contribute to it. An early boss battle pits you against a giant beaver who telegraphs all of his attacks, making the battle pretty easy, but this encounter demonstrates the same lack of pacing that characterizes the entire game. After you've pounded or sliced him endlessly, an animation plays that leads you to think it's all over. But then the beaver gets a second wind, and you have to go through the whole dull process all over again. A later boss battle has you fighting the Pied Piper, who is at the keys of a deadly, fire-spewing pipe organ. Here, the timing necessary to avoid the constant jets of flame is so precise as to border on the absurd, making this battle an exercise not in boredom, but in frustration.  Fairytale Fights offers local or online multiplayer for up to four players, but while enduring the experience with friends makes it a mite less painful, it still doesn't make it fun. There's something to be said for the charms of simple, arcade-style multiplayer mayhem, but this game is so basic and repetitive, your eyes may glaze over. There's also a competitive free-for-all multiplayer mode in which you battle it out to slice each other to bits or beat each other to a bloody pulp, but it serves only to emphasize just how shallow and unenjoyable the combat system is. Unsurprisingly, very few people are playing the game online as of this writing, so don't expect a lively multiplayer scene. Alone or with friends, cooperating or competing, this game is beyond redemption.  The visuals and sound are on par with everything else about Fairytale Fights. It's true that there's a touch of maniacal inspiration to some of the character designs. For instance, you may not soon forget the sight of Hansel and Gretel, reimagined as candy-crazed conjoined twins. Unfortunately, this visual inspiration is rare, and most of the character models are unattractive. The environments show some basic charm, but the overall look is too simplified to be appealing. The sound is equally disappointing, with forgettable tunes and minimal sound effects. Your characters express themselves only through occasional grunts, screams, and laughs that sound oddly muted and don't have much personality.  Even if it were a downloadable game for a fraction of the price, Fairytale Fights would not be recommendable. The very idea of this shallow, repetitive, bloated, excruciating adventure as a full-priced retail offering is nothing short of ludicrous. If there's any moral to be gleaned from this demented fairy tale, it is this: Don't play this game. 
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254,Evasive Space ,3, This top-down shooter with no shooting in it might just break your wrist.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/0/5/2221405-large.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/evasive-space-review/1900-6205282/,neg,"
  When a game features a hero named Konki the Stellar Guardian and a bad guy called Dr. Dark Matter, the review sort of writes itself. It isn't the absurd childish character names that make Evasive Space an awful slog though; it's the controls. This WiiWare top-down shooter with a twist (there's no shooting) is based on an impressive premise of escaping every nasty situation that enemies throw at you, which gives the game an addictive puzzle vibe. Unfortunately, the game is also based on the not-so-impressive premise of using the Wii Remote to guide your every movement, which is just about as enjoyable and as painful as slamming a car door on your hand. Repeatedly.   Narrow corridors designed to break your wrist are par for the course in Evasive Space.   Only the concept here is sound. The idea behind Evasive Space is good enough that the game would probably have gulped down a lot of quarters if it had hit arcades around the same time that Foreigner hit the top 10. You take command of Konki the Stellar Guardian's 2D spaceship and maneuver it through a series of levels to gather up all of the Constellation Stones that have been swiped by the insidious Dr. Dark Matter and his gang of space thieves. Yes, this is a deeply dumb plot that you will ignore whether you're playing the 20 missions of the solo campaign or the local multiplayer where you take on up to three other players in one-off races and timed challenges.    Of much more importance is the game design, which veers away from top-down arcade fare, such as old classics like Asteroids and modern equivalents like Geometry Wars, and ditches shooting completely. Instead of blasting baddies to bits, you evade obstacles. The focus here is on staying away from the many level hazards and grabbing power-ups like time bonuses and diodes that power ship upgrades, such as on-demand shields. Primary level objectives include races through maze-like corridors to hit warp gates before they close and scavenger hunts where you scoop up set numbers of floating astronauts or energy power-ups. Everything is intense and frenzied even without any firepower, due to tight time limits. You often have less than a minute to get out of Dodge, so every mistake where you run into a wall or turn the wrong way can be very costly.   Ship controls are so awkward that it can be maddening to fly through even the more free-form levels.   What could also be costly is the strain that the Evasive Space controls put on your wrist. After a few hours of play you might have to sign yourself up for carpal tunnel surgery. You guide Konki's ship by moving a cursor with the remote and pressing the B button to engage engine thrust. All you need to do is aim the cursor where you want to fly and hit a button to get there. Simple and intuitive. And also extraordinarily frustrating and painful. Everything is unforgiving, and the ship controls are temperamental. It seems like the hunk of junk never wants to head directly for the cursor, so you wind up looping around power-ups and backtracking to pick up objects that you somehow sailed right past.    Evasive Space is a good-looking game, but it is far too busy. You can easily lose track of the cursor behind the interface or mistake it for space debris like asteroids or nebulas. Corridors are so narrow and levels so clogged with obstacles that you have to be just about perfect to get out of a level. A split second of confusion is enough to cause you to spin off the screen to your doom or plow into a wall, so expect to get stuck in some levels for more than an hour. Worst of all, the difficulty and control fussiness cause you to grip the remote so tightly that you can barely unclench your hand at the end of a level.    If Evasive Space were just another run-of-the-mill arcade game played with a gamepad, it would come close to being an enjoyable enough experience to justify the 1,000 Wii Points asking price. Unfortunately, the motion-sensing controls have turned this promising design into a wrist-cracking trip into hand cramp hell.    
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255,AFL Challenge ,3," Shallow  gameplay, technical flaws, and rubbish difficulty make this more of a benchwarmer than a goal.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/2/5/2222525-afl_challenge.jpg,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/afl-challenge-review/1900-6232601/,neg,"
  Australian rules football is a passionately supported, fast-paced, and frenetic sport. It's disappointing, then, that while AFL Challenge has attempted to capture the look and feel of one of our national pastimes in game form, it misses the mark (both literally and figuratively) and lands face down in the dirt with a whimper. The game's simplified arcade-style gameplay makes it easy to pick up and play without the need for prior knowledge of the ins and outs of the sport. But unfortunately while its inviting no-barrier entry will appeal to those not in the know, regardless of your familiarity, the experience is nothing more than shallow and unrewarding gameplay, technical issues, and horrible difficulty scaling.       AFL Challenge and its sibling, Rugby League Challenge, share many of the same damning qualities. The game is split into two halves: quick matches and full season play. In quick matches, you'll pick your team and head straight to the field to run the ball. You'll be forced to pick your side blind because there are no ratings to indicate how teams perform or if they have a particularly strong element to their game. Season mode is no better when it comes to identifying team quality, but it does give you the option to become slightly more involved with your players. Here, you'll spend in-game money earned after each game on training to raise the skills of the players on your team. Player stats are split into eight categories: strength, speed, accuracy, stamina, kick, tackle, handball, and mark. There's no explanation of player positions or which attributes are beneficial, so you'll inevitably stack stats in the speed and stamina categories to get to the ball faster and run away from the other team for longer. There are no carry-over penalties, match form, or injuries to manage in Season mode, and as a result, you can hammer the opposition players with heavy tackles all afternoon without consequence.     Win, lose, or draw, once the season is complete, you'll need to start over because there's no option to continue developing your players, relive close matches, or replay the finals. Stats and figures are also oddly handled in AFL Challenge. While you'll be given a running tally of basics, such as your win-to-loss ratio and points for or against, there's no way to track the performance of individual players. There's no custom player creation, no fantasy teams, and no multiplayer support to be found here. The latter in particular is a glaring ommission for a sports title and seems a clearly wasted opportunity to let you battle it out with friends using the PSP's Wi-Fi and ad-hoc connectivity.    The game offers a paltry two playable venues. First, there's a suburban field with half-empty stands and houses in the background. Then, there's an advertising-plastered stadium, which appears to be modelled on AFL's spiritual home, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. While the latter is convincing enough, the former is hardly befitting of the national teams. Player animations also appear jerky and wooden. It's all too common to see a group of clumped characters jump in unison only for one player to warp upward and the ball to magically appear in his hand as he falls to earth.    Yes, they play AFL on top of a giant Pokeball.   Regardless of which of the game's three difficulty settings you play on, you'll be subjected to incompetent AI and the horrible mark system. Even if you're well placed and time your jump to perfection, your ability to successfully pluck the ball out of the air is somewhat kismet. Once you realise that running the ball is a more viable option than punting the ball downfield and rolling the dice on a catch, you'll do so. On the chance you decide to play the kicking game and do take a mark, play on is supported, though you'll have to wait for the marking defender to reset, which negates the point of trying to move the ball quickly. Passive marking on defence gives the illusion of placing pressure on the kicker, though the inability to move or jump to force errors or deflect the ball does nothing to help turn over possession. The game's kicking mechanics are just as ridiculous, and with very few exceptions, you'll snap the ball through the goalposts at crazy angles, knock it through dead straight from huge distances, and kick accurately while sprinting without breaking pace. There's no kicking direction marker to use as a guide to line up your shot, but you don't need one because the game automatically aims the ball for the goals and seldom misses. At the easiest difficulty, it's a cakewalk to keep the scoreboard ticking over with straight sprints and kicks from the 50-meter line with pinpoint accuracy, but get ready to be embarrassed if you crank it up to hard. Perfectly timing the power meter button presses from the bounce still sees the ball go to your opposition almost all of the time, AI players will dart away to snatch the ball at blistering pace, and scoring points is nigh on impossible on the back of early tackles resulting in turnovers.     AFL Challenge features full licences for all 16 clubs in the 2009 competition, including the names and images of major players. It's disappointing, then, that once you hit the field, all players rely on a single generic character model. There are no player numbers on the back of jerseys, and while the team uniform colours are present, the game's muddy visuals make it tough to differentiate your own players from the opposition at long distances. Regardless of whether you're playing a friendly match or contesting the grand final, you'll only ever receive the less than enthusiastic ""Congratulations Match Won"" or loss equivalent splash image at the conclusion of play. Current team logos and uniforms are here, but there are no prerendered cutscenes, no video of real players in action, and no team songs after clinching victory.    You've got a better chance of being struck by lightning while winning the supermodel lottery than taking a mark.   Audio is a particularly low point for AFL Challenge. Menus are accompanied by a single rock track looped incessantly, while matches remain eerily silent with the exception of a few phoned-in tackle thuds, whistle blows, and the disinterested murmur of the crowd. There's no commentary or background music during the match, so the grounds have as much atmosphere as a byway cemetery when you attempt the winning goal.    Ultimately, AFL Challenge suffers from half-baked ideas and cutting corners on development. The poorly tuned difficulty and lousy gameplay make what should be fun an unrewarding bore. AFL fans are better off leaving this alone and spending the money on tickets to a live game.   
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256,NBA Street V3 ,9.1, NBA Street V3 is the new gold standard of arcade-style basketball games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/9/4/2208694-box_nbastr3.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-street-v3-review/1900-6118202/,pos,"
  It's been almost two years since the last iteration of the NBA Street franchise, Volume 2. While still a great game overall, NBA Street Vol. 2 wasn't quite the revelation its predecessor was. But now, with the release of NBA Street V3, it's clear that the developers at EA Sports Big clearly haven't been loafing in the off-season. The addition of online play (on the PS2 and Xbox) and a compelling single-player career mode, as well as improvements to the basic game mechanics, make NBA Street V3 the new gold standard of arcade-style basketball games.   NBA Street V3 is about the improvisation of blacktop basketball, not running set plays.   For those not as familiar with the series, the core game mode in NBA Street V3 is three-on-three, full-court, street basketball. Although every NBA team is represented by a partial roster of players, make no mistake--this is blacktop basketball. You won't be running any high pick 'n' rolls or making backdoor Princeton cuts for layups. Instead, you'll be using your slickest ball handlers to break ankles and drop dimes off to your finishers for rim-rattling dunks. You'll need to string together a combination of jukes and shakes, punctuated with a made basket or an alley-oop slam in order to rack up trick points and build up your gamebreaker meter. Once you've got that meter filled, you can execute a ""gamebreaker"" shot or dunk, which will add points to your score and also take away from the opposing team's score.     The developers have made some core changes to the basic gameplay. The most significant tweak is the introduction of the ""trick stick."" You can execute a different kind of juke move with the ball by tapping the right analog stick in any of eight directions. You'll have access to more-powerful jukes and shakes when you use the trick stick in combination with the turbo buttons on the controller. You have to be careful with your jukes though; if you try to do some of the fancier moves with a player who has a weak handle, you may end up tripping over yourself and turning over the ball. The trick stick is a vast improvement over past NBA Street games, wherein you were required to press one or two trick buttons in order to execute a juke. Using the right analog stick not only allows you quick access to a larger array of tricks, but also makes the game feel smoother and less robotic than the previous trick system. It's worth noting that the PS2 version of the game uses the four shoulder buttons for turbo, whereas the Xbox and GameCube versions of the game only use three, making these versions of the game slightly less complex. Their placement also makes playing the game on these platforms a bit more awkward than on the PS2.    There's a helpful display at the top of the screen that shows you how many special moves you've got strung together. Once you're satisfied that you've built a long enough string, you can wait for a teammate to pop high into the air for an alley-oop or you can take your own shot to finish off the combo. The combos that garner the most points are the ones that actually manage to fake out your opponents, as opposed to the maneuvers you do just for show.     There are other nifty tricks you can pull off that involve passes. By combining turbo buttons and the pass button, you can humiliate defenders by throwing the ball off the backboard and back to yourself or to a teammate. You can even toss the ball off an opponent's foot, chest, or face. These special passes can also be strung into your combos for maximum trick points and for building up your gamebreaker.    Three-man gamebreaker dunks are new to the NBA Street series.   Gamebreakers have also been changed, to make them a more skill-based affair. Instead of simply toggling the gamebreaker on once you've built up your meter, as in past NBA Street games, NBA Street V3 lets you head to the rim and attempt two- or three-man combination dunks. You can use turbo buttons and your trick stick to execute midair moves on the men as they pop up into the air, including switching the ball between your legs, covering your eyes, or tossing the ball over your shoulder. Just before the first player dunks the ball, you can pass it off to a teammate popping up behind you, who can then execute more moves before he passes it off to the last teammate for more tricks. If you can build up enough points with your airborne acrobatics, you can make the gamebreaker worth more points to your team. The standard gamebreaker is worth just two points to your team while it subtracts one point from your opponents. With practice, however, you'll be pulling off breathtaking three- and four-point gamebreaker dunks. Yet it's very possible to get too greedy with your gamebreaker and fail the dunk entirely, which means no points and usually a turnover.     Aside from the major changes with the trick stick and gamebreaker, everything else that made the NBA Street series so much fun remains intact in V3. You can still get up high in the air on defense to reject dunks and jump shots using shot blockers like Shaq and KG. The juke moves, while powerful, are not unbeatable, as a well-timed trick countermove will allow you to steal the ball away. The underlying strategic balance remains: you need to weigh the benefits of scoring quickly against trying to string together a long, difficult combination of tricks to build for a gamebreaker. There haven't been many tweaks with defense, although you can now attempt steals and blocks with the right analog stick. Those who prefer the old style can still press specific buttons to do those things also.      NBA Street V3 is rife with customizable content. You can create your own baller using the game's robust character-creation feature. Just about every aspect of your created character can be tweaked, including facial structure, skin tone, physique, and, of course, skills. What's interesting is that as you tweak your character's size, the cost of increasing your skills in various areas changes. For example, a shorter, lighter character will be able to upgrade quickness and handle for fewer points than it would cost to upgrade attributes such as blocks or rebounding. Conversely, a taller, heavier player will spend more points trying to upgrade shot-making ability as opposed to power and dunking ability. The NBA Street V3 store includes a wide array of clothes to outfit your created character, and the points you earn in various single-player modes can be used to unlock hats, jerseys, shoes, and even jewelry. There's also a create-a-court feature that is as chock-full of options as the character-creation feature. You can pick a setting for your fantasy court, choose from dozens of different floor types, and paint schemes, logos, and stanchion types to adorn your court.    The customize-a-character feature is very robust and flexible.   Both the player-creation and court-creation feature factor heavily into the game's primary single-player mode, which is the street challenge. Over the course of 10 weeks, you'll take your player on a tour of the game's 12 different courts, playing dozens of different types of challenges in order to build your street rep. Your rep will allow you to recruit better and better players onto your team. While at the outset you'll play against no-name streetballers, toward the end you'll be running with and alongside NBA stars that all have their own agendas and egos. Of course, along the way you'll be earning thousands of points, which can be used to upgrade your own character's skills and wardrobe or to add new adornments to your created court. The variety of different challenges available to you and the reward of playing alongside your favorite NBA stars make the street challenge mode a worthwhile and compelling single-player feature. As it takes dozens of matches to get through the full 10 weeks, doing one street challenge should keep you busy for quite some time as well.    NBA Street V3 also includes a slam-dunk contest mode. Thankfully, for those of us who found NBA Live 2005's dunk mode more frustrating than fun, this dunk contest proves to be a lot easier. You can set the contest up for two to eight dunkers, and like the gamebreaker dunks, you'll be jumping up high into the air to pull off a string of midair moves before finally throwing it down. You can spice up your dunks by doing different kinds of tosses, such as throwing the ball off the glass or bouncing the ball off the floor and catching it in midair. You can also make use of various props around the court to jump over, like tables, ball racks, or porta-potties. The dunk mode in NBA Street V3 is an amusing diversion, but ultimately not very deep, so it's not likely to hold your attention for as long as NBA Live 2005's dunk mode.     Rounding out the list of major features in NBA Street V3 is the introduction of online play for the Xbox and PS2 versions of the game. In both cases you'll be connected to EA's proprietary online service, so you'll be able to take advantage of its standard features, such as ladders, messaging, and news. For online play you have the option of using standard NBA teams or creating your own online baller and team. If you choose the latter, you'll not only earn points toward your ranking for winning games, but also you'll get points that you can use to upgrade your online character's skills and appearance. In our testing, online play was smooth and responsive on both PS2 online and Xbox Live. Unfortunately, online matches must always consist of one human player against another, so there are no cooperative or team-play modes available online. Offline play allows for up to six human players to play with and against each other on the PS2 with a multitap.    In lieu of online play, the Nintendo GameCube version of the game includes a trio of characters from the Mario games: Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach. Their presence in the game is a little awkward. The characters do appear 3D and cartoonish, but the contrast gives the game somewhat of a Space Jam-kind of feel. They're much shorter and stubbier than the NBA players in the game, so some of the juke moves they make look a bit strange. When they do dunk the ball or make a successful shake on a defender, you'll hear some Mario-esque power-up sounds to give the game even more of a Nintendo flavor. There's even a Nintendo-themed court that serves as the Mario All-Stars' home. The bottom line is that if you liked the idea in the first place, then the execution of this feature won't leave you feeling disappointed. The good news for those who can't get over the strange contrast is that the Mario characters are never forced on you--they're all on their own team--so if you don't want to use them or see them, you don't have to.   The game also includes a dunk contest mode.   The graphical presentation in NBA Street V3 is as slick as the gameplay. Player models and faces are drawn with an urban graffiti style. Combined with the various gritty light filters applied to different courts, the game's overall look comes off even more ""street"" than previous games in the series, and this look fits the game's themes well. The animations for the various tricks and dunks are also done very well, although you'll still experience some amount of popping as some animations transition to others.  It's noteworthy that NBA Street V3 maintains a sharp look across all three platforms; there doesn't seem to be a marked graphical difference between the Xbox and the other two platforms.    About the only disappointment as far as presentation goes is with the game's sound, and that's only a relative disappointment, as the actual court sounds of dribbling and dunking are sharp and impactful. DJ Bobbito Garcia is back as the play-by-play announcer, so if you didn't like him in Street Vol. 2, you're probably going to be just as irritated with his loud, abrasive style this time around. The music is somewhat better than the announcing, with a soundtrack highlighted by a new Beastie Boys track, and some old-school hip-hop beats like De La Soul's ""Me, Myself, and I,"" and a heavily sanitized remix of House of Pain's ""Jump Around."" Still, it seems like the game could have used a few more tracks, as the music seems to get repetitive after a while.    NBA Street V3 offers a fantastic amount of content, from tons of unlockables and customizable options in the single-player game to the addition of a smooth online mode. The developers have also managed to make significant meaningful tweaks to the gameplay without wrecking a proven formula for fun. If you're a fan of basketball, you owe it to yourself to check out NBA Street V3, which is the new king of the court as far as arcade basketball games go.  

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257,NBA Street V3 ,9.1, NBA Street V3 is the new gold standard of arcade-style basketball games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/9/4/2208694-box_nbastr3.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-street-v3-review/1900-6118203/,pos,"
  It's been almost two years since the last iteration of the NBA Street franchise, Volume 2. While still a great game overall, NBA Street Vol. 2 wasn't quite the revelation its predecessor was. But now, with the release of NBA Street V3, it's clear that the developers at EA Sports Big clearly haven't been loafing in the off-season. The addition of online play (on the PS2 and Xbox) and a compelling single-player career mode, as well as improvements to the basic game mechanics, make NBA Street V3 the new gold standard of arcade-style basketball games.   NBA Street V3 is about the improvisation of blacktop basketball, not running set plays.   For those not as familiar with the series, the core game mode in NBA Street V3 is three-on-three, full-court, street basketball. Although every NBA team is represented by a partial roster of players, make no mistake--this is blacktop basketball. You won't be running any high pick 'n' rolls or making backdoor Princeton cuts for layups. Instead, you'll be using your slickest ball handlers to break ankles and drop dimes off to your finishers for rim-rattling dunks. You'll need to string together a combination of jukes and shakes, punctuated with a made basket or an alley-oop slam in order to rack up trick points and build up your gamebreaker meter. Once you've got that meter filled, you can execute a ""gamebreaker"" shot or dunk, which will add points to your score and also take away from the opposing team's score.     The developers have made some core changes to the basic gameplay. The most significant tweak is the introduction of the ""trick stick."" You can execute a different kind of juke move with the ball by tapping the right analog stick in any of eight directions. You'll have access to more-powerful jukes and shakes when you use the trick stick in combination with the turbo buttons on the controller. You have to be careful with your jukes though; if you try to do some of the fancier moves with a player who has a weak handle, you may end up tripping over yourself and turning over the ball. The trick stick is a vast improvement over past NBA Street games, wherein you were required to press one or two trick buttons in order to execute a juke. Using the right analog stick not only allows you quick access to a larger array of tricks, but also makes the game feel smoother and less robotic than the previous trick system. It's worth noting that the PS2 version of the game uses the four shoulder buttons for turbo, whereas the Xbox and GameCube versions of the game only use three, making these versions of the game slightly less complex. Their placement also makes playing the game on these platforms a bit more awkward than on the PS2.    There's a helpful display at the top of the screen that shows you how many special moves you've got strung together. Once you're satisfied that you've built a long enough string, you can wait for a teammate to pop high into the air for an alley-oop or you can take your own shot to finish off the combo. The combos that garner the most points are the ones that actually manage to fake out your opponents, as opposed to the maneuvers you do just for show.     There are other nifty tricks you can pull off that involve passes. By combining turbo buttons and the pass button, you can humiliate defenders by throwing the ball off the backboard and back to yourself or to a teammate. You can even toss the ball off an opponent's foot, chest, or face. These special passes can also be strung into your combos for maximum trick points and for building up your gamebreaker.    Three-man gamebreaker dunks are new to the NBA Street series.   Gamebreakers have also been changed, to make them a more skill-based affair. Instead of simply toggling the gamebreaker on once you've built up your meter, as in past NBA Street games, NBA Street V3 lets you head to the rim and attempt two- or three-man combination dunks. You can use turbo buttons and your trick stick to execute midair moves on the men as they pop up into the air, including switching the ball between your legs, covering your eyes, or tossing the ball over your shoulder. Just before the first player dunks the ball, you can pass it off to a teammate popping up behind you, who can then execute more moves before he passes it off to the last teammate for more tricks. If you can build up enough points with your airborne acrobatics, you can make the gamebreaker worth more points to your team. The standard gamebreaker is worth just two points to your team while it subtracts one point from your opponents. With practice, however, you'll be pulling off breathtaking three- and four-point gamebreaker dunks. Yet it's very possible to get too greedy with your gamebreaker and fail the dunk entirely, which means no points and usually a turnover.     Aside from the major changes with the trick stick and gamebreaker, everything else that made the NBA Street series so much fun remains intact in V3. You can still get up high in the air on defense to reject dunks and jump shots using shot blockers like Shaq and KG. The juke moves, while powerful, are not unbeatable, as a well-timed trick countermove will allow you to steal the ball away. The underlying strategic balance remains: you need to weigh the benefits of scoring quickly against trying to string together a long, difficult combination of tricks to build for a gamebreaker. There haven't been many tweaks with defense, although you can now attempt steals and blocks with the right analog stick. Those who prefer the old style can still press specific buttons to do those things also.      NBA Street V3 is rife with customizable content. You can create your own baller using the game's robust character-creation feature. Just about every aspect of your created character can be tweaked, including facial structure, skin tone, physique, and, of course, skills. What's interesting is that as you tweak your character's size, the cost of increasing your skills in various areas changes. For example, a shorter, lighter character will be able to upgrade quickness and handle for fewer points than it would cost to upgrade attributes such as blocks or rebounding. Conversely, a taller, heavier player will spend more points trying to upgrade shot-making ability as opposed to power and dunking ability. The NBA Street V3 store includes a wide array of clothes to outfit your created character, and the points you earn in various single-player modes can be used to unlock hats, jerseys, shoes, and even jewelry. There's also a create-a-court feature that is as chock-full of options as the character-creation feature. You can pick a setting for your fantasy court, choose from dozens of different floor types, and paint schemes, logos, and stanchion types to adorn your court.    The customize-a-character feature is very robust and flexible.   Both the player-creation and court-creation feature factor heavily into the game's primary single-player mode, which is the street challenge. Over the course of 10 weeks, you'll take your player on a tour of the game's 12 different courts, playing dozens of different types of challenges in order to build your street rep. Your rep will allow you to recruit better and better players onto your team. While at the outset you'll play against no-name streetballers, toward the end you'll be running with and alongside NBA stars that all have their own agendas and egos. Of course, along the way you'll be earning thousands of points, which can be used to upgrade your own character's skills and wardrobe or to add new adornments to your created court. The variety of different challenges available to you and the reward of playing alongside your favorite NBA stars make the street challenge mode a worthwhile and compelling single-player feature. As it takes dozens of matches to get through the full 10 weeks, doing one street challenge should keep you busy for quite some time as well.    NBA Street V3 also includes a slam-dunk contest mode. Thankfully, for those of us who found NBA Live 2005's dunk mode more frustrating than fun, this dunk contest proves to be a lot easier. You can set the contest up for two to eight dunkers, and like the gamebreaker dunks, you'll be jumping up high into the air to pull off a string of midair moves before finally throwing it down. You can spice up your dunks by doing different kinds of tosses, such as throwing the ball off the glass or bouncing the ball off the floor and catching it in midair. You can also make use of various props around the court to jump over, like tables, ball racks, or porta-potties. The dunk mode in NBA Street V3 is an amusing diversion, but ultimately not very deep, so it's not likely to hold your attention for as long as NBA Live 2005's dunk mode.     Rounding out the list of major features in NBA Street V3 is the introduction of online play for the Xbox and PS2 versions of the game. In both cases you'll be connected to EA's proprietary online service, so you'll be able to take advantage of its standard features, such as ladders, messaging, and news. For online play you have the option of using standard NBA teams or creating your own online baller and team. If you choose the latter, you'll not only earn points toward your ranking for winning games, but also you'll get points that you can use to upgrade your online character's skills and appearance. In our testing, online play was smooth and responsive on both PS2 online and Xbox Live. Unfortunately, online matches must always consist of one human player against another, so there are no cooperative or team-play modes available online. Offline play allows for up to six human players to play with and against each other on the PS2 with a multitap.    In lieu of online play, the Nintendo GameCube version of the game includes a trio of characters from the Mario games: Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach. Their presence in the game is a little awkward. The characters do appear 3D and cartoonish, but the contrast gives the game somewhat of a Space Jam-kind of feel. They're much shorter and stubbier than the NBA players in the game, so some of the juke moves they make look a bit strange. When they do dunk the ball or make a successful shake on a defender, you'll hear some Mario-esque power-up sounds to give the game even more of a Nintendo flavor. There's even a Nintendo-themed court that serves as the Mario All-Stars' home. The bottom line is that if you liked the idea in the first place, then the execution of this feature won't leave you feeling disappointed. The good news for those who can't get over the strange contrast is that the Mario characters are never forced on you--they're all on their own team--so if you don't want to use them or see them, you don't have to.   The game also includes a dunk contest mode.   The graphical presentation in NBA Street V3 is as slick as the gameplay. Player models and faces are drawn with an urban graffiti style. Combined with the various gritty light filters applied to different courts, the game's overall look comes off even more ""street"" than previous games in the series, and this look fits the game's themes well. The animations for the various tricks and dunks are also done very well, although you'll still experience some amount of popping as some animations transition to others.  It's noteworthy that NBA Street V3 maintains a sharp look across all three platforms; there doesn't seem to be a marked graphical difference between the Xbox and the other two platforms.    About the only disappointment as far as presentation goes is with the game's sound, and that's only a relative disappointment, as the actual court sounds of dribbling and dunking are sharp and impactful. DJ Bobbito Garcia is back as the play-by-play announcer, so if you didn't like him in Street Vol. 2, you're probably going to be just as irritated with his loud, abrasive style this time around. The music is somewhat better than the announcing, with a soundtrack highlighted by a new Beastie Boys track, and some old-school hip-hop beats like De La Soul's ""Me, Myself, and I,"" and a heavily sanitized remix of House of Pain's ""Jump Around."" Still, it seems like the game could have used a few more tracks, as the music seems to get repetitive after a while.    NBA Street V3 offers a fantastic amount of content, from tons of unlockables and customizable options in the single-player game to the addition of a smooth online mode. The developers have also managed to make significant meaningful tweaks to the gameplay without wrecking a proven formula for fun. If you're a fan of basketball, you owe it to yourself to check out NBA Street V3, which is the new king of the court as far as arcade basketball games go.  

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258,NBA Street V3 ,9.1, NBA Street V3 is the new gold standard of arcade-style basketball games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/9/4/2208694-box_nbastr3.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-street-v3-review/1900-6118205/,pos,"
  It's been almost two years since the last iteration of the NBA Street franchise, Volume 2. While still a great game overall, NBA Street Vol. 2 wasn't quite the revelation its predecessor was. But now, with the release of NBA Street V3, it's clear that the developers at EA Sports Big clearly haven't been loafing in the off-season. The addition of online play (on the PS2 and Xbox) and a compelling single-player career mode, as well as improvements to the basic game mechanics, make NBA Street V3 the new gold standard of arcade-style basketball games.   NBA Street V3 is about the improvisation of blacktop basketball, not running set plays.   For those not as familiar with the series, the core game mode in NBA Street V3 is three-on-three, full-court, street basketball. Although every NBA team is represented by a partial roster of players, make no mistake--this is blacktop basketball. You won't be running any high pick 'n' rolls or making backdoor Princeton cuts for layups. Instead, you'll be using your slickest ball handlers to break ankles and drop dimes off to your finishers for rim-rattling dunks. You'll need to string together a combination of jukes and shakes, punctuated with a made basket or an alley-oop slam in order to rack up trick points and build up your gamebreaker meter. Once you've got that meter filled, you can execute a ""gamebreaker"" shot or dunk, which will add points to your score and also take away from the opposing team's score.     The developers have made some core changes to the basic gameplay. The most significant tweak is the introduction of the ""trick stick."" You can execute a different kind of juke move with the ball by tapping the right analog stick in any of eight directions. You'll have access to more-powerful jukes and shakes when you use the trick stick in combination with the turbo buttons on the controller. You have to be careful with your jukes though; if you try to do some of the fancier moves with a player who has a weak handle, you may end up tripping over yourself and turning over the ball. The trick stick is a vast improvement over past NBA Street games, wherein you were required to press one or two trick buttons in order to execute a juke. Using the right analog stick not only allows you quick access to a larger array of tricks, but also makes the game feel smoother and less robotic than the previous trick system. It's worth noting that the PS2 version of the game uses the four shoulder buttons for turbo, whereas the Xbox and GameCube versions of the game only use three, making these versions of the game slightly less complex. Their placement also makes playing the game on these platforms a bit more awkward than on the PS2.    There's a helpful display at the top of the screen that shows you how many special moves you've got strung together. Once you're satisfied that you've built a long enough string, you can wait for a teammate to pop high into the air for an alley-oop or you can take your own shot to finish off the combo. The combos that garner the most points are the ones that actually manage to fake out your opponents, as opposed to the maneuvers you do just for show.     There are other nifty tricks you can pull off that involve passes. By combining turbo buttons and the pass button, you can humiliate defenders by throwing the ball off the backboard and back to yourself or to a teammate. You can even toss the ball off an opponent's foot, chest, or face. These special passes can also be strung into your combos for maximum trick points and for building up your gamebreaker.    Three-man gamebreaker dunks are new to the NBA Street series.   Gamebreakers have also been changed, to make them a more skill-based affair. Instead of simply toggling the gamebreaker on once you've built up your meter, as in past NBA Street games, NBA Street V3 lets you head to the rim and attempt two- or three-man combination dunks. You can use turbo buttons and your trick stick to execute midair moves on the men as they pop up into the air, including switching the ball between your legs, covering your eyes, or tossing the ball over your shoulder. Just before the first player dunks the ball, you can pass it off to a teammate popping up behind you, who can then execute more moves before he passes it off to the last teammate for more tricks. If you can build up enough points with your airborne acrobatics, you can make the gamebreaker worth more points to your team. The standard gamebreaker is worth just two points to your team while it subtracts one point from your opponents. With practice, however, you'll be pulling off breathtaking three- and four-point gamebreaker dunks. Yet it's very possible to get too greedy with your gamebreaker and fail the dunk entirely, which means no points and usually a turnover.     Aside from the major changes with the trick stick and gamebreaker, everything else that made the NBA Street series so much fun remains intact in V3. You can still get up high in the air on defense to reject dunks and jump shots using shot blockers like Shaq and KG. The juke moves, while powerful, are not unbeatable, as a well-timed trick countermove will allow you to steal the ball away. The underlying strategic balance remains: you need to weigh the benefits of scoring quickly against trying to string together a long, difficult combination of tricks to build for a gamebreaker. There haven't been many tweaks with defense, although you can now attempt steals and blocks with the right analog stick. Those who prefer the old style can still press specific buttons to do those things also.      NBA Street V3 is rife with customizable content. You can create your own baller using the game's robust character-creation feature. Just about every aspect of your created character can be tweaked, including facial structure, skin tone, physique, and, of course, skills. What's interesting is that as you tweak your character's size, the cost of increasing your skills in various areas changes. For example, a shorter, lighter character will be able to upgrade quickness and handle for fewer points than it would cost to upgrade attributes such as blocks or rebounding. Conversely, a taller, heavier player will spend more points trying to upgrade shot-making ability as opposed to power and dunking ability. The NBA Street V3 store includes a wide array of clothes to outfit your created character, and the points you earn in various single-player modes can be used to unlock hats, jerseys, shoes, and even jewelry. There's also a create-a-court feature that is as chock-full of options as the character-creation feature. You can pick a setting for your fantasy court, choose from dozens of different floor types, and paint schemes, logos, and stanchion types to adorn your court.    The customize-a-character feature is very robust and flexible.   Both the player-creation and court-creation feature factor heavily into the game's primary single-player mode, which is the street challenge. Over the course of 10 weeks, you'll take your player on a tour of the game's 12 different courts, playing dozens of different types of challenges in order to build your street rep. Your rep will allow you to recruit better and better players onto your team. While at the outset you'll play against no-name streetballers, toward the end you'll be running with and alongside NBA stars that all have their own agendas and egos. Of course, along the way you'll be earning thousands of points, which can be used to upgrade your own character's skills and wardrobe or to add new adornments to your created court. The variety of different challenges available to you and the reward of playing alongside your favorite NBA stars make the street challenge mode a worthwhile and compelling single-player feature. As it takes dozens of matches to get through the full 10 weeks, doing one street challenge should keep you busy for quite some time as well.    NBA Street V3 also includes a slam-dunk contest mode. Thankfully, for those of us who found NBA Live 2005's dunk mode more frustrating than fun, this dunk contest proves to be a lot easier. You can set the contest up for two to eight dunkers, and like the gamebreaker dunks, you'll be jumping up high into the air to pull off a string of midair moves before finally throwing it down. You can spice up your dunks by doing different kinds of tosses, such as throwing the ball off the glass or bouncing the ball off the floor and catching it in midair. You can also make use of various props around the court to jump over, like tables, ball racks, or porta-potties. The dunk mode in NBA Street V3 is an amusing diversion, but ultimately not very deep, so it's not likely to hold your attention for as long as NBA Live 2005's dunk mode.     Rounding out the list of major features in NBA Street V3 is the introduction of online play for the Xbox and PS2 versions of the game. In both cases you'll be connected to EA's proprietary online service, so you'll be able to take advantage of its standard features, such as ladders, messaging, and news. For online play you have the option of using standard NBA teams or creating your own online baller and team. If you choose the latter, you'll not only earn points toward your ranking for winning games, but also you'll get points that you can use to upgrade your online character's skills and appearance. In our testing, online play was smooth and responsive on both PS2 online and Xbox Live. Unfortunately, online matches must always consist of one human player against another, so there are no cooperative or team-play modes available online. Offline play allows for up to six human players to play with and against each other on the PS2 with a multitap.    In lieu of online play, the Nintendo GameCube version of the game includes a trio of characters from the Mario games: Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach. Their presence in the game is a little awkward. The characters do appear 3D and cartoonish, but the contrast gives the game somewhat of a Space Jam-kind of feel. They're much shorter and stubbier than the NBA players in the game, so some of the juke moves they make look a bit strange. When they do dunk the ball or make a successful shake on a defender, you'll hear some Mario-esque power-up sounds to give the game even more of a Nintendo flavor. There's even a Nintendo-themed court that serves as the Mario All-Stars' home. The bottom line is that if you liked the idea in the first place, then the execution of this feature won't leave you feeling disappointed. The good news for those who can't get over the strange contrast is that the Mario characters are never forced on you--they're all on their own team--so if you don't want to use them or see them, you don't have to.   The game also includes a dunk contest mode.   The graphical presentation in NBA Street V3 is as slick as the gameplay. Player models and faces are drawn with an urban graffiti style. Combined with the various gritty light filters applied to different courts, the game's overall look comes off even more ""street"" than previous games in the series, and this look fits the game's themes well. The animations for the various tricks and dunks are also done very well, although you'll still experience some amount of popping as some animations transition to others.  It's noteworthy that NBA Street V3 maintains a sharp look across all three platforms; there doesn't seem to be a marked graphical difference between the Xbox and the other two platforms.    About the only disappointment as far as presentation goes is with the game's sound, and that's only a relative disappointment, as the actual court sounds of dribbling and dunking are sharp and impactful. DJ Bobbito Garcia is back as the play-by-play announcer, so if you didn't like him in Street Vol. 2, you're probably going to be just as irritated with his loud, abrasive style this time around. The music is somewhat better than the announcing, with a soundtrack highlighted by a new Beastie Boys track, and some old-school hip-hop beats like De La Soul's ""Me, Myself, and I,"" and a heavily sanitized remix of House of Pain's ""Jump Around."" Still, it seems like the game could have used a few more tracks, as the music seems to get repetitive after a while.    NBA Street V3 offers a fantastic amount of content, from tons of unlockables and customizable options in the single-player game to the addition of a smooth online mode. The developers have also managed to make significant meaningful tweaks to the gameplay without wrecking a proven formula for fun. If you're a fan of basketball, you owe it to yourself to check out NBA Street V3, which is the new king of the court as far as arcade basketball games go.  

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259,Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar ,9.1, The new features in Dark Avatar elevate the already superb Galactic Civilizations II to the title of undisputed best turn-based space strategy game on the PC.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/galactic-civilizations-ii-dark-avatar-review/1900-6166566/,pos,"
  Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords was on most strategy-game-of-the-year awards lists in 2006, garnering praise from many as the best space-based ""4X"" (exploring, expanding, exploiting, exterminating) game ever released for the PC. That's a tough act to follow, yet somehow Stardock has managed to produce an add-on package that elevates the game to an even higher level of strategy gaming excellence. Dark Avatar accomplishes this via subtle tweaks in a wide range of existing features combined with some totally new elements that significantly expand the depth and breadth of an already excellent game.   A Drengin fleet looking for trouble.   Many of the improvements can be termed ""minor,"" yet they have a significant impact. The graphics in Dread Lords were fine, but Dark Avatar improves the quality of the visuals in just about every aspect of the game. The ships in particular are noticeably more detailed, and a slew of new parts in the ship designer provide you with the ability to reproduce anything from the U.S.S. Enterprise to a flying milk truck. Users have already posted some incredible home-brew ships on the Internet. Weapon effects and resulting explosions have also been improved. The technology-tree interface has undergone a graphics face-lift that results in a much easier-to-use presentation of the branching technology pathways, although it can still take a little work to determine precisely what techs are required to build a certain type of ship.   These and many other tweaks and improvements on existing features are what you might expect in an add-on to an already superb game.     But Dark Avatar introduces some completely new features that create fresh challenges and options. One of the most profound changes is the nature of planets. In Dread Lords, all planets could be colonized by every civilization, which resulted in an early game rush to grab every planet possible, with an emphasis on the richest worlds. The best strategy was always to focus on being first to the planets. Dark Avatar's universe is more realistically hostile, with planets having a variety of environments, many of them uninhabitable to most civilizations unless they either natively possess the capability to prosper in that environment or spend the considerable time and resources to develop the technology to render the world livable. Planets exhibit a wide variety of environments; thus, your choice of what to research is critical: You may spend weeks developing the capability to tame a radioactive world, only to find that there is only one radioactive planet but three prime planets that require aquatic capabilities. If you're a civilization with the native ability to populate a certain type of hostile planet, you'll have to debate the value of trading that valuable capability against keeping it to yourself. Building a civilization of planets is a much more complex and challenging undertaking than in Dread Lords.   You can create and completely customize new races.   Espionage now requires you to develop agents, which takes time and money. Once you have an active agent, you can place it on an opponent's planet and foil your opponent's attempts to build planetary upgrades at the same time that your agent gathers intelligence. You will also need agents to engage in counterespionage to nullify enemy agents placed on your planets. This results in little cat-and-mouse games as you and your foes try to spy on each other as long as possible before your agents are caught and eliminated. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any negative consequence to having an agent caught spying; we never received any messages from an opposing civilization protesting our espionage on its planet.     Two more major additions are superabilities, which are native to specific races, and mega-events, which are unpredictable events that can have a galaxywide impact. Superabilities give each race a more distinct feel and require that you take each race's unique capabilities into account as you deal with them. For example, if you attack a race with the superorganizer ability, you'll find that every race of the same ethical alignment will come to its aid. If you play as the Drath, with their supermanipulator ability, you will be able to more easily get other races to go to war against each other. Superdiplomat races can cut much better deals with other civilizations than normal races. Mega-events typically change the overall balance of the galaxy, with such events as universal plagues, civil wars, outbreaks of pirates, and much more. Mega-events can completely change the course of the game, which can be a blessing or a curse, depending upon how well you're doing. Both superabilities and mega-events have a profound impact on the game; thus, in the ''have it your way'' philosophy of Galactic Civilizations II, both can be toggled on or off.     The customizability and respect that the game shows you by allowing every aspect to be toggled, tweaked, or, in some cases, completely modified, have been beefed up even more in Dark Avatar. Now you can play as any race (and two new races have been included), and you can design a completely new race. You can tailor every aspect of the new race, from how it thinks, what its priorities are, and its abilities, to its appearance and custom ship styles. Want to play against the Borg? Or would you rather play as Hitler's great-great-great-great grandson? You can design them into the game. An enterprising user has already designed a Shodan opponent (the evil entity from the classic System Shock). The possibilities are practically endless.     Speaking of new races, the new campaign is built around a very interesting premise. It's the bad guys against the really bad guys. The Drengin Empire has always represented evil in the Galactic Civilizations II universe, but now a clan within the Drengin, the Korath, has begun to break away and impose its own will on the galaxy. While the Drengin are content to merely enslave everyone that they can conquer, the Korath are happy with nothing less than complete extermination. In addition, there is something even more sinister occurring within the Korath race. Your role, as the commander of the Drengin, is to unravel the mystery of what is going on within this renegade race and prevent it from exterminating all of those potential slaves. The campaign is very well designed, as well as a good way for beginners to start and learn the mechanics of the game while being drawn into an engrossing drama.   Asteroid belts can now be mined to provide valuable resources.   The artificial intelligence has always been a highlight of Galactic Civilizations II, so it is downright scary that it has been further refined and improved in Dark Avatar. It was already intelligent enough to make you feel as if you were playing against human players rather than hard-coded AI. So the improvements are subtle, such as how well your opponents design their ships for particular situations and how they handle negotiations in technology trading. Speaking of race negotiations, you now have the option of establishing research and economic treaties. These can be unilateral or bilateral treaties. Diplomacy is still a bit simple when compared to Space Empires V, but it's extremely well designed.    Dark Avatar is technically a ""mere"" expansion to Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, but the added features are so profound that it feels like a new and even better game. The incredible range of options and now the ability to create completely new races ensure that you can create any type of game that you happen to be in the mood for, from a race between reasonable civilizations in a tiny galaxy to an epic space opera between good and evil in a massive universe, with a mythos made of stock races or customized to create Kirk's U.S.S. Enterprise versus Darth Vader. If you had any doubt about whether Galactic Civilizations II was the best 4X space game on the PC, Dark Avatar will crush those doubts like the Korath wiping the last vestiges of life from a helpless planet. This is a must-buy for any owner of Dread Lords and highly recommended for any strategy gaming fan.  
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260,Diner Dash ,9.1, Diner Dash is one of the best casual games we've played yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/5/3/2214053-588984_934243_77607_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/diner-dash/1900-6158741/,pos,"
  Everyone always says that the restaurant business is tough, but this action puzzle game proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt and provides a lot of entertainment in the bargain. You control Flo, a newcomer to the service industry, and you have to help her single-handedly wait on all the tables in her new restaurant. This means you have to seat customers, take their orders, serve them their food, get them their checks, and bus their tables for the next group. All of these activities are driven with a simple point-and-click interface that will send Flo scurrying from table to kitchen to dirty dish bin and back again--hopefully before the customers get mad and leave. As you play through the game, you'll learn how to chain actions together, seat customers according to the color of their clothes for extra multipliers, distract them with music and chitchat, and quell their anger with coffee and tiki drinks. Before too long, you'll also start encountering different types of customers, like college students and senior citizens, who have different levels of patience and generosity. This great-looking game will soon have you obsessed over increasing the efficiency of your restaurant. It's a great purchase all the way around.  
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261,Burnout Revenge ,9.1, Burnout Revenge is one of the most exciting racing games ever made.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/1/1/2/2217112-box_boutrev.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/burnout-revenge-review/1900-6132963/,pos,"
  It may have started out as just another post-Ridge Racer driving game with a unique focus on beautifully destructive car crashes, but over the years, the Burnout series has really carved out its own spot in the racing genre. Last year's Burnout 3: Takedown was when the series truly came into its own by achieving a near-perfect balance between high-speed racing and nefarious racing tactics designed to put the other racers out of commission. With a name like Burnout Revenge, you might expect the latest game in the series to be a little rougher, a little meaner. And you'd be right. While it isn't a total reinvention, Burnout Revenge makes significant alterations to the Burnout formula that essentially render every other game in the series obsolete.   Burnout Revenge's tracks have a lot of alternate paths hidden in them.   The biggest changes in Burnout Revenge come in its track design and in the ability to slam into some nonracing traffic and plow right through it. Wrecking into innocent bystanders in automobiles is known as traffic checking, and it's limited to small and medium-sized cars that are stopped or traveling in the same direction as your vehicle. These cars, once hit by a racer, essentially become weapons. If you slam them just right, you can send them flying into the other lane, ideally slamming into another racer and taking him down immediately. But checked traffic will also fly behind you after being rear-ended, letting you create tricky flying obstacles for other racers to avoid. Having to keep track of which traffic you can and can't hit adds an interesting layer of complexity to the game, though the sometimes comical physics displayed by checked traffic--which flies around like you're wrecking into an aluminum can--looks a little weird. The whole concept also ties in to the new traffic attack event, which gives you money for each car you smash and ties its medals to specific dollar amounts.    The design of Burnout Revenge's tracks make an even bigger impact on the way the game feels, and they give you a lot to think about. Each of the game's tracks is now packed full of alternate routes, some of which serve as shortcuts. Some of them really just serve as ramps, letting you set up for tough but supremely satisfying vertical takedowns. Crashing down from above onto an opponent is one of the more thrilling moments the game has to offer. The increased complexity of the game's tracks also has an impact on your boost meter. Most of the routes don't have any traffic on them and don't count as oncoming lanes, meaning the only two ways to earn boost while on an alternate route are to slam into other racers or to drift. Since neither are guarantees, it's easy for some alternate routes to turn into longer paths than the main track. But for events like online road rage, where you might be trying to avoid detection, these routes make it much easier to hide. In the end, all roads lead back to the main path one way or another, so you're never separated from the action for too long.    All the game's modes and events are rolled up into a single-player world tour mode. Unlike last year's game, Revenge's world tour doesn't really take place on a world map. Instead, events are broken into 11 different ranks. Earning gold medals is a major goal, but you'll also have to earn stars to rise through the ranks. Stars are earned in every different type of event, and outside of crash mode, you get them from driving as aggressively as possible. Drifting, hitting other cars, taking out your rivals, driving in the wrong lane, and catching air are just some of the things that impact your star meter. Your task in each race is to finish with an ""awesome"" rating, which translates to four stars. Winning the event with a gold medal adds a star to your rating, taking you up to ""perfect."" Conversely, finishing with bronze subtracts a star. These stars are tallied up after each event, and they go into your rank. When you hit a certain star count, you go up to the next rank, giving you access to another set of races.    The world tour front end is more complicated than it needs to be. It starts out with one section for each rank. Each rank has a list of locations, and each location has a list of races. Sounds straightforward, right? But sometimes you'll unlock races in previous ranks while working up in a higher one, especially if you're focusing on crash events over race events, or vice versa. So you won't consistently move up to the higher ranks, as you'll constantly have to dig through the other ranks in search of events you haven't completed yet. Additionally, the game seems to run out of new tracks and crash environments about halfway through. You'll race every single type of race on every possible track, both forward and backward. After awhile, it starts to get a little repetitive, but with each new rank, you do uncover a few new twists.   Different cars have different crashbreaker strengths, which is handy in crash mode.   Your choice of cars has also been made a little tougher. In Burnout 3, everything was spelled out for you right away. Each race fit into a class, and the most recent car you had in that class was usually the right one to use. Now, each car is rated in its top boost speed, its weight class (which tells you how likely it is to get pushed around the road by other cars, as well as how it handles around corners), and its crashbreaker force. When you unlock a new car, there's no guarantee it'll be your new best vehicle, so selecting a vehicle takes a little more thought than it probably needs to. More often than not, though, the right-most car on your list is the one you'll want to use for races. Speaking of cars, you can earn a couple of extra cars right off the bat by having saves for Burnout 3 and Madden NFL 06 on the same card or hard drive as your Burnout Revenge save. If you plan to get these cars, make sure you get the saves first, as adding the saves later won't give you the cars, and apparently they aren't unlockable by any other means.      World tour mode lets you work through 169 different events on your quest for 100 percent completion. Along the way, you'll see all the game's various race types. For starters, there's your basic race, which asks you to finish ahead of five other vehicles. Eliminator puts a 30-second timer on the screen. The last place racer is cut from the race every 30 seconds until only the winner remains. Road rage puts a never-ending series of opponent cars on the track and asks you to force as many of them to crash as possible. Medals are tied to specific numbers of crashes, and you'll also earn time bonuses after every few takedowns. Burning laps and preview races are solo races against the clock that often give you access to cars much faster than the ones you're currently racing with. When you get into the later races, you'll get into crashbreaker variations of some of these events. This means that whenever you crash, you can tap a button to cause your car to explode, often with enough force to take out any other racers that might be nearby. Catching other racers in a crashbreaker is a good way to refill or extend your boost bar, and the other cars tend to move away quickly enough after a takedown to prevent an instant crashbreaker from automatically getting revenge, which helps keep the system more balanced.   The game's AI-controlled racers are never impossible to beat, but they'll occasionally challenge you.   In all the single-player racers, you'll go up against artificially intelligent racers that are governed by a very rubber-banded system that's intended to keep races close. This is usually the part that forces racing game fans to turn away in disgust, but considering that the whole crux of Burnout Revenge is slamming into the other racers and fighting for position, the game absolutely needs this sort of AI system to work at all. As a result, you can expect to always have racers around you, creeping up on your back door when you're in the lead. In later races, the other cars get mean and really start trying to take you down. But on average, they're never too much to deal with, and overall, the game feels like it's quite a bit easier than Burnout 3 was. If you're the sort of person that broke through to 100 percent completion last time around, you might find the game to be a little too easy, in fact.    Aside from the races, the other major portion of Burnout is crash mode. While you're still driving a car in this segment of the game, crash mode is more of a puzzle game than a racing one. You're dropped into an environment filled with cars going about their artificially intelligent business. It's your job to find a way to cause the most dramatic car pileup that you can. How, when, and where you crash is the key. For example, it's always best to block as many lanes as possible to ensure a larger, multidirectional crash. The crash mode in Burnout 3 was filled with onscreen power-ups and bonuses that essentially served as big bull's-eyes for you to aim at. This made them pretty easy. The crash mode in Revenge has been changed quite a bit. All the power-ups are gone, but you can pull off multiple crashbreakers in one run if you drag enough cars into the fray. Also, explosions and rating increases serve as your score multipliers. Some of the game's crash junctions can be real head-scratchers, as the combination of where to wreck and which vehicle to drive can get a little tricky later in the game. The early events, however, aren't terribly tough, and overall, it doesn't get much more difficult than Burnout 3's crash mode was. On top of all that, retrying a crash event seems to load faster than it did in Burnout 3, especially on the Xbox.    Both versions of the game allow for split-screen racing, including crash battle, where two racers play crash mode at the same time on the same track. But really, if you're going to play Burnout Revenge with more than one person, you want to play it online. Here, up to six players can compete in most of the single-player race types. Road rage becomes a team event online, with one team trying to finish a race while the other tries to take down the racing team. Crash battle and other variants of crash are also available online, but without the overview of the junction before you race, you'll have to go out of your way to memorize each pattern from its name alone. The racing and road rage modes are quite exciting online, and the addition of traffic checking really makes a difference. However, one thing you'll notice about checked traffic is that it tends to vanish off the screen after a few seconds. That doesn't seem to happen offline.   The online ranking system gives you an ELO rating to calculate your overall skill.   Also, the game uses an entirely new rating and rank system online that gives you much more in-depth scoreboards. It also sort of locks away a lot of your car and track options right out of the gate. Online, you progress through the same ranking system that you do offline, but you do it much more quickly. At the start, you'll only be able to host games in your low rank (or in the unrestricted rank, if you really want to open yourself up to high-ranked players coming in with better cars), and you'll be limited to a handful of tracks. As you race, you earn points that go into your rank. With dedication, you can take your race rank from a lowly rank 1 up to 6 in five or six hours. The catch is that you're also sort of re-unlocking the cars that you already unlocked offline, which is weird and pretty unrewarding. Still, the ranks come pretty quickly online, so you aren't kept away from your favorite vehicles for very long.    The player-matching in Burnout Revenge takes a page from the Halo 2 playbook. You're given separate ratings for crash and races, and that rating increases as you play. That rating also dictates what sort of players you'll be matched up with when you go looking for a game. The party system introduced in Halo 2 is also used here, so you can form a party and then go out looking for challengers. These are cool additions that make much more sense than the nearly useless text-only lobbies in Burnout 3.      It's been said before, but it's worth repeating: One of the most important things a racing game can do is properly convey what it feels like to be driving at ridiculously breakneck speeds. On the graphical side, it's several parts frame rate combined with a dash of great blur effects, perhaps with a little camera shaking thrown in for good measure. As simple as the formula sounds, most racing games fail to get it right. Burnout Revenge is the new game to beat when it comes to delivering that feeling of flying around corners and through alleys at speeds north of 200 miles per hour. But this game isn't all speed with no substance. If you manage to stop for a second, take a look at the car models. They're not only incredibly smooth and shiny-looking, but also they're actually extremely cool car designs. Burnout might not be able to get licensed cars in the game, but with modern and occasionally flashy car designs like this, you almost wish someone would put them into actual production. Similarly, the environments look fantastic, with terrific textures and great effects. Crashes and collisions have, obviously, been given special attention. Cars blast apart in even more dynamic ways this year, and explosions are truly terrifying. Rounding out the package are some new camera angles that help make crashes look as dramatic as possible.   With more than 150 single-player events to play, you'll be at it for a while.   Both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions look fantastic, but if you're choosing between the two, the Xbox version is the one to get. Visually, the game's crisper on the Xbox. It's also a good reason to get a widescreen HDTV setup for either platform, as the increased clarity makes it easier to pick out traffic before it gets close. In our anecdotal testing, we wrecked a lot more frequently on a standard resolution 4:3 set. Outside of graphics, the Xbox version has a much cleaner online experience, free from the hassle of creating or maintaining an EA-specific login. Plus, the analog triggers on the Xbox controller give you better control over your vehicle. It's still an amazing PlayStation 2 game, of course, but given the choice, you're better off with the Xbox version.    The graphics are certainly a big part of what gives the game its feel, but you simply can't discount the importance of sound when it comes to that whole ""sense of speed"" thing. You'll especially notice it with a surround-sound configuration, but even with your TV speakers, Burnout Revenge has completely mind-blowing sound effects. As you race around the course, you're constantly hearing the scenery, traffic, and other objects whip right past you with a distinct whoosh of air. The sound of metal on metal whenever you collide with another object adds a lot of outstanding scrapes and bumps. And when you kick in your boost, it practically sounds like a jet taking off in your living room. Game sound effects really don't get much better than this.   Overall, Burnout Revenge has a slightly darker feel to it.   The music side of Burnout 3 was problematic. The overtly pop-punk soundtrack simply didn't mesh with the action at all, and the game contained a lame, upbeat radio DJ that would chime in with annoying chatter midrace. Burnout Revenge fixes all that. That's not to say the soundtrack is completely free from pop-punk, but overall, the soundtrack is much more aggressive and varied, which lends itself well to the game's darker theme. Additionally, there's no DJ during races. A female voice accompanies the game's training videos, which can be skipped this time around if you already know what you're doing. Car-collection sequences can also be skipped now, in case you're in a hurry to get back to the action. Also, the Xbox version supports custom soundtracks.    Burnout Revenge might not be the revolution that Burnout 3 was, but in the end, it changes more than enough to make it feel like a very different game. It's a technical marvel, but more importantly than that, it's one of the most exciting racing games ever made. Unless you don't have the reflexes to handle it, Burnout Revenge is a must-own game, especially for fans of online competition.  


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262,Burnout Revenge ,9.1, Burnout Revenge is one of the most exciting racing games ever made.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/1/1/2/2217112-box_boutrev.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/burnout-revenge-review/1900-6132965/,pos,"
  It may have started out as just another post-Ridge Racer driving game with a unique focus on beautifully destructive car crashes, but over the years, the Burnout series has really carved out its own spot in the racing genre. Last year's Burnout 3: Takedown was when the series truly came into its own by achieving a near-perfect balance between high-speed racing and nefarious racing tactics designed to put the other racers out of commission. With a name like Burnout Revenge, you might expect the latest game in the series to be a little rougher, a little meaner. And you'd be right. While it isn't a total reinvention, Burnout Revenge makes significant alterations to the Burnout formula that essentially render every other game in the series obsolete.   Burnout Revenge's tracks have a lot of alternate paths hidden in them.   The biggest changes in Burnout Revenge come in its track design and in the ability to slam into some nonracing traffic and plow right through it. Wrecking into innocent bystanders in automobiles is known as traffic checking, and it's limited to small and medium-sized cars that are stopped or traveling in the same direction as your vehicle. These cars, once hit by a racer, essentially become weapons. If you slam them just right, you can send them flying into the other lane, ideally slamming into another racer and taking him down immediately. But checked traffic will also fly behind you after being rear-ended, letting you create tricky flying obstacles for other racers to avoid. Having to keep track of which traffic you can and can't hit adds an interesting layer of complexity to the game, though the sometimes comical physics displayed by checked traffic--which flies around like you're wrecking into an aluminum can--looks a little weird. The whole concept also ties in to the new traffic attack event, which gives you money for each car you smash and ties its medals to specific dollar amounts.    The design of Burnout Revenge's tracks make an even bigger impact on the way the game feels, and they give you a lot to think about. Each of the game's tracks is now packed full of alternate routes, some of which serve as shortcuts. Some of them really just serve as ramps, letting you set up for tough but supremely satisfying vertical takedowns. Crashing down from above onto an opponent is one of the more thrilling moments the game has to offer. The increased complexity of the game's tracks also has an impact on your boost meter. Most of the routes don't have any traffic on them and don't count as oncoming lanes, meaning the only two ways to earn boost while on an alternate route are to slam into other racers or to drift. Since neither are guarantees, it's easy for some alternate routes to turn into longer paths than the main track. But for events like online road rage, where you might be trying to avoid detection, these routes make it much easier to hide. In the end, all roads lead back to the main path one way or another, so you're never separated from the action for too long.    All the game's modes and events are rolled up into a single-player world tour mode. Unlike last year's game, Revenge's world tour doesn't really take place on a world map. Instead, events are broken into 11 different ranks. Earning gold medals is a major goal, but you'll also have to earn stars to rise through the ranks. Stars are earned in every different type of event, and outside of crash mode, you get them from driving as aggressively as possible. Drifting, hitting other cars, taking out your rivals, driving in the wrong lane, and catching air are just some of the things that impact your star meter. Your task in each race is to finish with an ""awesome"" rating, which translates to four stars. Winning the event with a gold medal adds a star to your rating, taking you up to ""perfect."" Conversely, finishing with bronze subtracts a star. These stars are tallied up after each event, and they go into your rank. When you hit a certain star count, you go up to the next rank, giving you access to another set of races.    The world tour front end is more complicated than it needs to be. It starts out with one section for each rank. Each rank has a list of locations, and each location has a list of races. Sounds straightforward, right? But sometimes you'll unlock races in previous ranks while working up in a higher one, especially if you're focusing on crash events over race events, or vice versa. So you won't consistently move up to the higher ranks, as you'll constantly have to dig through the other ranks in search of events you haven't completed yet. Additionally, the game seems to run out of new tracks and crash environments about halfway through. You'll race every single type of race on every possible track, both forward and backward. After awhile, it starts to get a little repetitive, but with each new rank, you do uncover a few new twists.   Different cars have different crashbreaker strengths, which is handy in crash mode.   Your choice of cars has also been made a little tougher. In Burnout 3, everything was spelled out for you right away. Each race fit into a class, and the most recent car you had in that class was usually the right one to use. Now, each car is rated in its top boost speed, its weight class (which tells you how likely it is to get pushed around the road by other cars, as well as how it handles around corners), and its crashbreaker force. When you unlock a new car, there's no guarantee it'll be your new best vehicle, so selecting a vehicle takes a little more thought than it probably needs to. More often than not, though, the right-most car on your list is the one you'll want to use for races. Speaking of cars, you can earn a couple of extra cars right off the bat by having saves for Burnout 3 and Madden NFL 06 on the same card or hard drive as your Burnout Revenge save. If you plan to get these cars, make sure you get the saves first, as adding the saves later won't give you the cars, and apparently they aren't unlockable by any other means.    World tour mode lets you work through 169 different events on your quest for 100 percent completion. Along the way, you'll see all the game's various race types. For starters, there's your basic race, which asks you to finish ahead of five other vehicles. Eliminator puts a 30-second timer on the screen. The last place racer is cut from the race every 30 seconds until only the winner remains. Road rage puts a never-ending series of opponent cars on the track and asks you to force as many of them to crash as possible. Medals are tied to specific numbers of crashes, and you'll also earn time bonuses after every few takedowns. Burning laps and preview races are solo races against the clock that often give you access to cars much faster than the ones you're currently racing with. When you get into the later races, you'll get into crashbreaker variations of some of these events. This means that whenever you crash, you can tap a button to cause your car to explode, often with enough force to take out any other racers that might be nearby. Catching other racers in a crashbreaker is a good way to refill or extend your boost bar, and the other cars tend to move away quickly enough after a takedown to prevent an instant crashbreaker from automatically getting revenge, which helps keep the system more balanced.   The game's AI-controlled racers are never impossible to beat, but they'll occasionally challenge you.   In all the single-player racers, you'll go up against artificially intelligent racers that are governed by a very rubber-banded system that's intended to keep races close. This is usually the part that forces racing game fans to turn away in disgust, but considering that the whole crux of Burnout Revenge is slamming into the other racers and fighting for position, the game absolutely needs this sort of AI system to work at all. As a result, you can expect to always have racers around you, creeping up on your back door when you're in the lead. In later races, the other cars get mean and really start trying to take you down. But on average, they're never too much to deal with, and overall, the game feels like it's quite a bit easier than Burnout 3 was. If you're the sort of person that broke through to 100 percent completion last time around, you might find the game to be a little too easy, in fact.    Aside from the races, the other major portion of Burnout is crash mode. While you're still driving a car in this segment of the game, crash mode is more of a puzzle game than a racing one. You're dropped into an environment filled with cars going about their artificially intelligent business. It's your job to find a way to cause the most dramatic car pileup that you can. How, when, and where you crash is the key. For example, it's always best to block as many lanes as possible to ensure a larger, multidirectional crash. The crash mode in Burnout 3 was filled with onscreen power-ups and bonuses that essentially served as big bull's-eyes for you to aim at. This made them pretty easy. The crash mode in Revenge has been changed quite a bit. All the power-ups are gone, but you can pull off multiple crashbreakers in one run if you drag enough cars into the fray. Also, explosions and rating increases serve as your score multipliers. Some of the game's crash junctions can be real head-scratchers, as the combination of where to wreck and which vehicle to drive can get a little tricky later in the game. The early events, however, aren't terribly tough, and overall, it doesn't get much more difficult than Burnout 3's crash mode was. On top of all that, retrying a crash event seems to load faster than it did in Burnout 3, especially on the Xbox.    Both versions of the game allow for split-screen racing, including crash battle, where two racers play crash mode at the same time on the same track. But really, if you're going to play Burnout Revenge with more than one person, you want to play it online. Here, up to six players can compete in most of the single-player race types. Road rage becomes a team event online, with one team trying to finish a race while the other tries to take down the racing team. Crash battle and other variants of crash are also available online, but without the overview of the junction before you race, you'll have to go out of your way to memorize each pattern from its name alone. The racing and road rage modes are quite exciting online, and the addition of traffic checking really makes a difference. However, one thing you'll notice about checked traffic is that it tends to vanish off the screen after a few seconds. That doesn't seem to happen offline.   The online ranking system gives you an ELO rating to calculate your overall skill.   Also, the game uses an entirely new rating and rank system online that gives you much more in-depth scoreboards. It also sort of locks away a lot of your car and track options right out of the gate. Online, you progress through the same ranking system that you do offline, but you do it much more quickly. At the start, you'll only be able to host games in your low rank (or in the unrestricted rank, if you really want to open yourself up to high-ranked players coming in with better cars), and you'll be limited to a handful of tracks. As you race, you earn points that go into your rank. With dedication, you can take your race rank from a lowly rank 1 up to 6 in five or six hours. The catch is that you're also sort of re-unlocking the cars that you already unlocked offline, which is weird and pretty unrewarding. Still, the ranks come pretty quickly online, so you aren't kept away from your favorite vehicles for very long.    The player-matching in Burnout Revenge takes a page from the Halo 2 playbook. You're given separate ratings for crash and races, and that rating increases as you play. That rating also dictates what sort of players you'll be matched up with when you go looking for a game. The party system introduced in Halo 2 is also used here, so you can form a party and then go out looking for challengers. These are cool additions that make much more sense than the nearly useless text-only lobbies in Burnout 3.      It's been said before, but it's worth repeating: One of the most important things a racing game can do is properly convey what it feels like to be driving at ridiculously breakneck speeds. On the graphical side, it's several parts frame rate combined with a dash of great blur effects, perhaps with a little camera shaking thrown in for good measure. As simple as the formula sounds, most racing games fail to get it right. Burnout Revenge is the new game to beat when it comes to delivering that feeling of flying around corners and through alleys at speeds north of 200 miles per hour. But this game isn't all speed with no substance. If you manage to stop for a second, take a look at the car models. They're not only incredibly smooth and shiny-looking, but also they're actually extremely cool car designs. Burnout might not be able to get licensed cars in the game, but with modern and occasionally flashy car designs like this, you almost wish someone would put them into actual production. Similarly, the environments look fantastic, with terrific textures and great effects. Crashes and collisions have, obviously, been given special attention. Cars blast apart in even more dynamic ways this year, and explosions are truly terrifying. Rounding out the package are some new camera angles that help make crashes look as dramatic as possible.   With more than 150 single-player events to play, you'll be at it for a while.   Both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions look fantastic, but if you're choosing between the two, the Xbox version is the one to get. Visually, the game's crisper on the Xbox. It's also a good reason to get a widescreen HDTV setup for either platform, as the increased clarity makes it easier to pick out traffic before it gets close. In our anecdotal testing, we wrecked a lot more frequently on a standard resolution 4:3 set. Outside of graphics, the Xbox version has a much cleaner online experience, free from the hassle of creating or maintaining an EA-specific login. Plus, the analog triggers on the Xbox controller give you better control over your vehicle. It's still an amazing PlayStation 2 game, of course, but given the choice, you're better off with the Xbox version.    The graphics are certainly a big part of what gives the game its feel, but you simply can't discount the importance of sound when it comes to that whole ""sense of speed"" thing. You'll especially notice it with a surround-sound configuration, but even with your TV speakers, Burnout Revenge has completely mind-blowing sound effects. As you race around the course, you're constantly hearing the scenery, traffic, and other objects whip right past you with a distinct whoosh of air. The sound of metal on metal whenever you collide with another object adds a lot of outstanding scrapes and bumps. And when you kick in your boost, it practically sounds like a jet taking off in your living room. Game sound effects really don't get much better than this.   Overall, Burnout Revenge has a slightly darker feel to it.   The music side of Burnout 3 was problematic. The overtly pop-punk soundtrack simply didn't mesh with the action at all, and the game contained a lame, upbeat radio DJ that would chime in with annoying chatter midrace. Burnout Revenge fixes all that. That's not to say the soundtrack is completely free from pop-punk, but overall, the soundtrack is much more aggressive and varied, which lends itself well to the game's darker theme. Additionally, there's no DJ during races. A female voice accompanies the game's training videos, which can be skipped this time around if you already know what you're doing. Car-collection sequences can also be skipped now, in case you're in a hurry to get back to the action. Also, the Xbox version supports custom soundtracks.    Burnout Revenge might not be the revolution that Burnout 3 was, but in the end, it changes more than enough to make it feel like a very different game. It's a technical marvel, but more importantly than that, it's one of the most exciting racing games ever made. Unless you don't have the reflexes to handle it, Burnout Revenge is a must-own game, especially for fans of online competition.  


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263,Daxter ,9.1," The pint-sized Daxter is every bit as good as its console counterparts, bringing all the best elements of the action-platformer Jak games fluidly to the PSP.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/1/9/8/2216198-box_daxter.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/daxter-review/1900-6146038/,pos,"
  Daxter may be the fifth game in Sony's flagship Jak and Daxter franchise, but it's still responsible for many firsts. It's the first game in the series that doesn't star Jak, the once-mute-turned-brooding protagonist. It's the first game in the series to appear on a system other than the PlayStation 2. And it's the first time the PSP has ever looked so good. Simply put, fans of Jak and Daxter who were disappointed that the latest console release, Jak X: Combat Racing, strayed from the franchise's formula need not be disappointed any longer. Daxter is every bit as entertaining as its PS2 counterparts, looks absolutely stunning, and manages to pack the full console experience into a handheld without being dumbed down in the slightest. Frankly, the bar for PSP games, in terms of graphics and gameplay, has just been raised. Though Daxter is a little formulaic, especially for those familiar with previous Jak games, the formula works, and it works surprisingly well on the PSP.   Jak who?   Taking place directly before Jak II, Daxter follows the story of the so-named hero during the years that his buddy Jak was imprisoned, learning how to be an angst machine. Fortunately for you, it appears Daxter had plenty to do during that time: getting to star in an adventure all on his own to save Haven City from nefarious and dastardly...bugs. Yup, bugs. And to nail the point home, Daxter's primary weapon is a fierce...electric...flyswatter. From the game's entire premise to some of the more minute details, you'll experience a lot of the series' typical brand of irreverent humor, maybe even more so in this game because Daxter has always been the driving force behind it, and now you don't have to worry about sullen Jak bringing the mood down. It's in this way that the game is particularly endearing--not because it's unique or innovative, but because of how cohesively and effectively it takes an existing franchise and gives it a new spin.    If you've played either Jak II or Jak 3, you'll feel quite at home with Daxter, because the layout of Haven City and the mission-based structure of the gameplay are identical to those of the previous games. When the adventure begins, Daxter is...well, he's telling tall tales in a bar again, but shortly thereafter he begins employment at the Critter-Ridder Extermination Company. Since it's the only remaining exterminator shop that Haven City has left, and since there's suddenly a real infestation crisis (two problems which are not unrelated), Daxter has his hands full trying to pull his weight and prove his worth to the Critter-Ridder shop manager, Osmo.    In each level, you have several objectives to complete. There's the main objective that has been laid out for you, which might consist of killing enemies, destroying insect hives, or collecting objects. As you're playing through, you can also choose to do two optional secondary objectives, which are reminiscent of Jak games of old, collecting Metal Bug gems and precursor orbs. Though the mission is generally straightforward, completing the secondary objectives can sometimes prove to be a real challenge. Fortunately, you only need to clear the main objective to progress the story, so you can always return to collect all the items later. Playing cleanup is also easier later, since you'll often have better weapons and moves to get through the level more quickly. In fact, the way this works is done extraordinarily well, giving you quite an incentive to play through again to hunt for all the items.    The two tools at Daxter's disposal are his previously mentioned (very fierce) flyswatter, and an insecticide sprayer that gets some righteous upgrades in the later levels, to become a flamethrower and then a sonic blaster of sorts. Daxter is also able to do some light platforming, including double-jumping and scaling climbable-looking surfaces. The dynamic that is most interesting, however, is that his sprayer also serves as a propulsion device, allowing Daxter to hover or boost up in the air, giving him more distance and height than merely jumping would allow. Although this is mighty reminiscent of the water pump from Super Mario Sunshine, the mechanic works extremely well, if not better, in Daxter. You'll spend most of the game switching between the sprayer as a weapon and the sprayer as a platforming device, and it all works quite effortlessly.   There's a lot of stuff to pick up, and incentive to do it.   Most of the gameplay has you proceeding from one area to the next, fighting, and maneuvering around various enemies and obstacles, and fighting large bosses, but there are some alternate gameplay elements along the way. One is the zoomer, which Daxter uses in a couple of different missions to chase down enemies or objectives that would be out of reach if he were simply on foot. There are a few other great mechanics, like the level that requires you to jump across the tops of moving trains, or the level that is practically taken out of Metal Gear Solid. Though none of these mechanics are particularly original, they're varied enough to keep you on your toes for the duration of the game. Also, as you collect precursor orbs, you'll be able to unlock dream sequence minigames. Each dream sequence borrows heavily from well-known movies, a couple more than once, like The Matrix, Indiana Jones (why did it have to be snakes?) and The Lord of the Rings. Though all of the game's minigames consist of virtually identical gameplay, tasking you to properly time hitting the PSP's directional pad and face buttons, they're a nice break from the run-and-gun gameplay, and they offer you the ability to unlock additional moves, like an uppercut, or to increase Daxter's health meter.    One of the immediately obvious things about Daxter is the game's stellar presentation. The graphics are simply beautiful. The animation quality both inside and outside of the cutscenes is as rich as it ever has been before. And you'll wander through several different gorgeous environments, even if most of the game's later levels are repeats of the earlier ones. The game also manages to run pretty large environments with minimal loading times and almost no loss of frame rate whatsoever. Whatever formula was used to get Daxter working so efficiently on the PSP should be used as the model for PSP games from here on out. If a game like Lumines is the equivalent of peeking through the keyhole of the PSP's graphic capabilities, Daxter kicks the door in. The sound is equally impressive, not missing a beat (literally) when it comes to detail. When you jump on the scooter, you'll hear the engine rev up until it reaches a nice steady gurgle. Every aspect of both the sound and music is fine-tuned, so you'll notice how effective the combination of buzzers, moving doors, and music presents something even as simple as the ambiance in an elevator. The voice acting is also outstanding, and Daxter is once again voiced by Newsies-star Max Casella, who nails Daxter's humor and awkwardness perfectly.    The game's most noticeable flaw is that it might take awhile to get used to the control and camera. 3D platformers are notoriously tricky when it comes to both these elements, especially on handheld systems. Both the camera and the control scheme are implemented about as well as can be expected (but not flawlessly) so it might take you a little while to get accustomed to moving around. And though the game is quite linear, sending you directly from one mission to the next, some of the levels are so open that you might backtrack a little more than you'd like. In some respects, this gives the game depth, but in others, you might find the repetition tiresome. For the most part, though, the game is both easy to follow and open-ended, making the gameplay fairly long without being tedious.  Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.   The single-player is rich enough to make the game worthwhile, but there is also a multiplayer mode, bug combat, that makes for a nice diversion. Essentially, as you play through the game, you'll find additional hidden pickups for use in multiplayer. These pickups are caged bugs, spells that you can assign to them, and boosts that will bump up their stats for the fights. After you've collected the items, you can exit out and play the bug combat mode, which is a turn-based version of rock-paper-scissors in which you can fight either the computer or a multiplayer opponent. Aside from collecting the items to make your bug as powerful as possible, there's little purpose to the bug combat. Still, it's a nice addition to an already solid game. There are also a few extra unlockables that you'll get from perfecting the game and/or hooking your PSP up to a copy of Jak X: Combat Racing. The most elusive pickups are a bunch of masks that Daxter can wear. They're pretty difficult to find, but you'll probably bump into the Jak mask just in time to rescue him from prison. The addition of all these extras, cheats, and little goodies gives Daxter a richness that many other games in the genre lack.    Daxter follows the Jak formula closely, but in the absence of a Jak game in the end of last year, Daxter plugs the hole almost perfectly, by offering console-rich action-platforming gameplay that is almost better because it's on the PSP. Setting new standards for what the PSP is capable of, especially when it comes to graphics, Daxter is going to be enjoyable for almost anyone, even people who might not normally be interested in the gameplay. If you're a PSP owner, platformer enthusiast or not, you simply can't go wrong with Daxter.     The two tools at Daxter's disposal are his previously mentioned (very fierce) flyswatter, and an insecticide sprayer that gets some righteous upgrades in the later levels, to become a flamethrower and then a sonic blaster of sorts. Daxter is also able to do some light platforming, including double-jumping and scaling climbable-looking surfaces. The dynamic that is most interesting, however, is that his sprayer also serves as a propulsion device, allowing Daxter to hover or boost up in the air, giving him more distance and height than merely jumping would allow. Although this is mighty reminiscent of the water pump from Super Mario Sunshine, the mechanic works extremely well, if not better, in Daxter. You'll spend most of the game switching between the sprayer as a weapon and the sprayer as a platforming device, and it all works quite effortlessly.   There's a lot of stuff to pick up, and incentive to do it.   Most of the gameplay has you proceeding from one area to the next, fighting, and maneuvering around various enemies and obstacles, but there are some alternate gameplay elements along the way. One is the zoomer, which Daxter uses in a couple of different missions to chase down enemies or objectives that would be out of reach if he were simply on foot. There are a few other great mechanics, like the level that requires you to jump across the tops of moving trains, or the level that is practically taken out of Metal Gear Solid. Though none of these mechanics are particularly original, they're varied enough to keep you on your toes for the duration of the game. Also, as you collect precursor orbs, you'll be able to unlock dream sequence minigames. Each dream sequence borrows heavily from well-known movies, like The Matrix (twice), Indiana Jones (why did it have to be snakes?) and The Lord of the Rings (twice). Though all of the game's minigames consist of virtually identical gameplay, tasking you to properly time hitting the PSP's directional pad and face buttons, they're a nice break from the run-and-gun gameplay, and they offer you the ability to unlock additional moves, like an uppercut, or to increase Daxter's health meter.    One of the immediately obviously things about Daxter is the game's stellar presentation. From top to bottom, Daxter looks and sounds like a console game. The graphics are simply beautiful. The animation quality both inside and outside of the cutscenes is as rich as it ever has been before. And you'll wander through several different gorgeous environments, even if most of the game's later levels are repeats of the earlier ones. The game also manages to run pretty large environments with minimal loading times and almost no loss of frame rate whatsoever. Whatever formula was used to get Daxter working so efficiently on the PSP should be used as the model for PSP games from here on out. If a game like Lumines is the equivalent of peeking through the keyhole of the PSP's graphic capabilities, Daxter kicks the door in. The sound is equally impressive, not missing a beat (literally) when it comes to detail. When you jump on the scooter, you'll hear the engine rev up until it reaches a nice steady gurgle. Every aspect of both the sound and music is fine-tuned, so you'll notice how effective the combination of buzzers, moving doors, and music presents something even as simple as the ambiance in an elevator.   This game is gorgeous.   The game's most noticeable flaw is that it might take awhile to get used to the control and camera. 3D platformers are notoriously tricky when it comes to both these elements, especially on handheld systems. Both the camera and the control scheme are implemented about as well as can be expected (but not flawlessly) so it might take you a little while to get accustomed to moving around. And though the game is quite linear, sending you directly from one mission to the next, some of the levels are so open that you might backtrack a little more than you'd like. In some respects, this gives the game depth, but in others, you might find the repetition tiresome. For the most part, though, the game is both easy to follow and open-ended, making the gameplay fairly long without being too tedious.    The single-player is rich enough to make the game worthwhile, but there is also a multiplayer mode, bug combat, that makes for a nice diversion. Essentially, as you play through the game, you'll find additional hidden pickups for use in multiplayer. These pickups are caged bugs, spells that you can assign to them, and boosts that will bump up their stats for the fights. After you've collected the items, you can exit out and play the bug combat mode, which is a turn-based version of rock-paper-scissors in which you can fight either the computer or a multiplayer opponent. Aside from collecting the items to make your bug as powerful as possible, there's little purpose to the bug combat. Still, it's a nice addition to an already solid game. There are also a few extra unlockables that you'll get from perfecting the game and/or hooking your PSP up to a copy of Jak X: Combat Racing. The most elusive pickups are a bunch of masks that Daxter can wear. They're pretty difficult to find, but you'll probably bump into the Jak mask just in time to rescue him from prison. The addition of all these extras, cheats, and little goodies gives Daxter a richness that many other games in the genre lack.    Daxter follows the Jak formula closely, but in the absence of a Jak game in the end of last year, Daxter plugs the hole almost perfectly, by offering console-rich action-platforming gameplay that is almost better because it's on the PSP. Setting new standards for what the PSP is capable of, especially when it comes to graphics, Daxter is going to be enjoyable for almost anyone, even people who might not normally be interested in the gameplay. If you're a PSP owner, platformer enthusiast or not, you simply can't go wrong with Daxter.   


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264,Undercover: Operation Wintersun ,3, Spy-story noir meets ridiculous adventure-game puzzles in this misguided tale of Nazis and nukes.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/0/0/2215300-6956.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/undercover-operation-wintersun-review/1900-6180473/,neg,"
  As with far too many adventures, your enjoyment of Undercover: Operation Wintersun depends almost entirely on your tolerance for nonsensical puzzles. This Sproing Interactive game really knocks it out of the park when it comes to that sort of thing. It boasts a greatest-hits collection of maddening adventure-game absurdities, such as digging a potato out of the garbage to distract a crow in order to listen in on a conversation (in the very first scene, no less), as well as outlandish chem-lab solutions to mundane problems such as getting through locked doors. Anyone who can solve this spectacularly hard game without resorting to a walk-through deserves a ticker-tape parade like the kind they used to give generals and astronauts.    So, you've got what you might call a niche game here. However, the storyline sets forth a great spy thriller for the masses that plays out like a lost Hitchcock movie from his WWII period. You play British nuclear physicist Dr. John Russell, an everyman (who looks a lot like a young Eugene Levy with shorter hair) recruited by MI-6 in early 1943 to go undercover in search of the truth about Nazi efforts to detonate an atomic bomb. It's a quick rush from the initial debriefing to a scavenger hunt through various German research facilities, and then a scramble to Stalingrad for a 007-style disarming of a prototype nuke. Aside from the high-school Shakespeare overacting, this story plays out as a respectable, literate spy thriller that manages to build tension without leaning on clichés like sinister, trench-coated Nazis and ""Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS"" types. The only real annoyance is the accompaniment of a trio of supposed espionage experts who are as useless as red shirts in a Star Trek episode (if not quite so prone to untimely deaths).   Don't mess with the SS…which can be accomplished quite nicely by not playing this game.   Not that the plot matters. It's impossible to appreciate the noirish script when you're constantly wondering what the heck you're supposed to be doing. Undercover throws you into one ridiculous situation after another. If you're not collecting every little bit of junk that litters the scenery like some foppish Brit version of Fred Sanford, you're forced to deal with the most convoluted solutions to simple problems. The developers seem to have some sort of chemistry fetish, given the number of times that you need to whip up various solvents. At first, this is sort of nifty, even if it's rather strange that you go to the extreme of making hydrochloric acid to get through a locked door. But it soon gets flat-out stupid when you're doing things such as making some sort of mineral water to soften up window putty that, in the real world, could easily have been peeled off with nothing more than Russell's trusty pocketknife.    Even nonchemical solutions stick a pin in the great big balloon of common sense. Along with the potato puzzle noted at the top, you also use a flag and floor polish to knock out a guard, deploy a rat to scare off a barmaid, and rig up phone wires to electrocute a guard. Some of your stunts are positively MacGyver-ish. And just to make things a little bit more perplexing, you never find uses for a fair number of items that you pick up, and many are so small and tucked away in dark corners that the developers might as well be purposely hiding clues. Only a single, fixed camera is provided in most scenes; given that it's typically so far away from the action, you often need to engage in tedious pixel hunts.     Some of the half-dozen or so set-piece puzzles will also have you scratching your head raw. Granted, many of these are actually somewhat enjoyable, in that they provide a break from the randomness of the rest of the game. At least you know what you're supposed to be doing when they pop up on the screen. Some involve such boilerplate scenarios as turning code wheels and spinning gears to open secret doors, but others are more innovative, such as the nifty number where you guide a fellow spy past guards by switching off lights in a specified sequence. Unfortunately, none are particularly well-implemented. Even the stealth situation described above is partially wrecked by shadows so dark that you can rarely tell exactly where the enemy soldiers you're trying to dodge are patrolling.   Some of the logic puzzles are a welcome relief from the craziness of the rest of the game, although there aren't enough of them to counterbalance all the nonsense.   Last, but certainly not least, Undercover is also buggy. Very buggy. The game constantly crashes in the opening cutscene when set to 1280x1024 resolution with antialiasing turned on. The game started and remained somewhat stable only after we went with the default 1024x768 resolution and no antialiasing. However, even then crashes continued to occur every so often in all manner of in-game situations, and the audio would frequently get caught in loops in which the opening lines spoken by a character would repeat until you skipped past them or the game fainted to the desktop.    At any rate, if you can't get Undercover running properly, don't bother trying to fix the problem. You'd be wiser to consider this a sign and turn your talents toward something that makes more sense and is easier to solve, such as the political situation in the Middle East.  
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265,Dawn of Magic ,3," Buggy, broken, and entirely unoriginal, Dawn of Magic is one horrible action-oriented role-playing game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/5/7/2213157-486_dawn_of_magic.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dawn-of-magic-review/1900-6183644/,neg,"
  All of the extra hocus-pocus in Dawn of Magic should have made it a cut above the typical Diablo clone. While the standard action role-playing game contents itself with nonstop hacking and slashing, this one from developer Sky Fallen Entertainment gives you all of that twitchy-fingered goodness along with a dozen magical schools that let you raise the dead, launch fireballs, and even suck the blood out of enemies. But all of this Harry Potter stuff is worthless in the end because horrific bugs make the game virtually unplayable and the lackluster game design will have you groaning or yawning before you've cut down a dozen monsters.   At least you get the usual RPG light show, courtesy of some pretty nifty spell effects.   Getting right into the meat of the Dawn of Magic experience, the only real standout aspect of the game is its magic system, which features what appears to be a whopping 12 schools of magic. With that said, there are only eight spells in each school, so don't get too excited over the variety on offer here. Having 96 different ways to say abracadabra is nothing to sneeze at, though this number is fairly comparable to other RPGs. Also, the schools and their spells are wholly derivative of D&D spellcasting. If you've ever played as a magic user or cleric in another fantasy RPG game, chances are pretty good that you'll be familiar with the spells in schools, such as fire magic, blessing magic, light magic, and summoning magic. Spell names may be different here, but you're still casting the same old fireballs, lightning bolts, cones of cold, and blessings that have been lighting up the Forgotten Realms for what feels like forever.    Gameplay itself sticks close to the action RPG formula. Too close, actually. The worn-out story deals with a god named Modo that has decided to destroy the Earth to take revenge on his fellow immortals for sentencing him to spend a lifetime as a mortal man. Your goal is of course to halt these evil machinations, which you do by slashing and spellcasting your way through repetitive kill, kill, kill quests faced with thousands of creepy crawlies. But nothing is noteworthy about the monsters here save their numbers because you'll battle such stock RPG beasts as giant insects, wolves, various undead, big lizards, and goblins. Every level in the game is overrun by these creatures, however, so these generic goons pose a real threat. You should expect to die early and often, as well as face opposition so strong that the only way to deal with it involves running as fast as you can. In many sections of the game, stopping to fight is almost suicidal.    In addition to the crazy numbers of enemies here, bad guys are universally speedy and tend to jump around like frogs on hot plates. You have to keep moving constantly to keep up with them as they tear around in a seemingly random fashion and to avoid getting hammered by ranged attacks. Also, because you're a mage, you can't really stand up to heavy melee combat. This necessitates a lot of retreating from enemy mobs, only pausing briefly to launch a fireball or some similar form of magical artillery back at your pursuers. But you can't just run wild. Wandering too far afield can land you in hot water because you can readily race into a new pack of monsters while you're still busy ducking and diving through a fight with an old pack of monsters. All in all, combat is frustratingly rushed and pressured, giving you barely a moment to catch your breath amidst the chaos of it all.    Player character features are similarly irritating for their dearth of choices. You choose from four stock adventurers at the start of the game and can only customize them by typing in a name then selecting an alignment from the usual good, neutral, or evil. Even worse, these options are some of the worst ever featured in an RPG. You're stuck with a Harry Potter clone in the Awkward Student; a carnival mystic in the Weird Gypsy; a Friar Tuck rip-off in the Fat Friar; and a so-bad-we-can't-even-come-up-with-a-suitable-comparison in the Baker's Wife. Not that there's much separating the characters aside from the way that they look. The five core stats (strength, intellect, energy--you know the drill) for each vary only marginally, so it's not as if you're picking between hulking brawlers and wimpy bookworms. There's also just a handful of character skills--all utter blandness--such as weapon mastery and crafting.    Visuals add a layer of confusion to everything. Art design is poorly handled from a technical standpoint because of such clumsy elements as big text blurbs illustrating conversations. Towns filled with non-player characters get so muddled up with these word balloons that you can barely see the scenery, let alone make your way around. Maps are just as tough to read because of the same excess clutter. You might as well keep the minimap switched off entirely because the huge text denoting the location of NPCs and boss enemies gets all jumbled together into an alphabet soup. Only blowing up the map to full size clears the picture, but this full-screen view of course makes it impossible to see the action.    In-game graphics are just as bewildering because of a reliance on the surreal. Glowing rocks fill caverns, alien plants sprout up all over the terrain, and you even morph into strange shapes depending on what school of magic you favor. Spells are fired off to the accompaniment of some groovy pyrotechnics, but the strange glows actually make everything appear even more bizarre. At times, it almost seems like you're hacking and slashing your way through an Hieronymus Bosch painting. But don't get excited. As cool as this sounds, the weirdness isn't pulled off very well and the whole surreal idea doesn't mesh with core gameplay pulled straight from a traditional medieval fantasy game.    As usual in an RPG, every successful attack generates an explosion of numbers. But it sort of takes away from the immediacy of combat when you can practically see a 20-sided die being rolled on the screen.   Audio is equally bewildering. Dialogue darts around so much (probably because of poor translation from the original Russian) that you're always asking yourself what just happened. At least the quest log keeps track of things. You always know what you need to do, even if the logic behind your actions is missing in action.    Lastly, there are the bugs. Crashes to the desktop come so fast and furiously that the game can be all but unplayable. We tried all sorts of different video drivers and went so far as to pull out the installed audio card in the test system to go back to onboard sound to try stabilizing the game but had no luck with any approaches. Making the situation even worse, the save system only allows you to store your progress when exiting the game or at rare checkpoints. So you can't even try to compensate for the random crashes by hitting a quick-save button every couple of minutes. The only saving grace here is that not everybody seems to be having serious technical problems with the game. Judging by forum posts, it's hit and miss as to whether or not you'll encounter problems. But when you do, these issues seem to be severe enough to cause crashes or prevent you from loading the game at all. So, caveat emptor and all that.    Dawn of Magic also features a multiplayer mode that we haven't gotten into, but really, haven't you endured enough suffering already? If you happen to see this game on a store shelf, just back away slowly.  
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266,Big Oil: Build an Oil Empire ,3," Big Oil is poorly designed all around, with frustrating bugs, a practically unworkable interface, and tiresome gameplay.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/9/7/7/27472-77977.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/big-oil-build-an-oil-empire-review/1900-6157299/,neg,"
  Crude oil is some nasty stuff even in virtual form, as evidenced by the ugly mess that is Big Oil: Build an Oil Empire, the latest economic strategy game from Tri Synergy. You might hope that a game that puts you in the role of an oil baron would attempt to capture the excitement of striking oil and making it big or negotiating high-stakes business contracts for mind-boggling sums of money around the world. Instead, Big Oil lends the sensation of trying to coax a sluggish tanker with an inebriated captain at the helm through an endless gauntlet of piercing icebergs. This game is slow, ugly, and poorly designed, and it isn't entertaining in the least.    After playing this game, you might think it was programmed by Jed Clampett...   Big Oil lets you build an oil empire by drilling for oil, shipping it to refineries around the world, and eventually processing it into products that you can sell to the public. You can choose from more than 15 scenarios based on historical events such as the World Wars or the Great Depression. Some of the scenarios are somewhat interesting, and they each have unique conditions for success. However, they all play about the same, which is to say, they all play poorly. You can also choose a freeplay campaign, where you start from scratch and build oil wells and refineries; research new technology to improve transportation and create new products; and develop cities to provide you with workers.      There are two difficulty modes to choose from: easy and advanced. If you choose easy mode, you'll have an annoying helper who pops up every few moments to tell you what's going on and offer to help you with tasks such as chartering ships to transport oil or purchasing drilling rights from cities around the world. This assistant can be helpful because it lets you avoid the headache of slogging through the poorly designed interface to manage your assets manually. However, the assistant is also annoying because when it pops up on the screen, the game stops, and the only answers you can give to its queries are ""yes,"" ""no,"" and ""don't remind me again.""     If you answer ""yes,"" you'll be taken to the area in question, which is frustrating when you're in the middle of a task in a city on the other side of the world. If you answer ""no,"" you'll have just a moment to finish what you're doing before being asked about some completely unrelated item of business. It doesn't help that the game comes riddled with glitches, which will cause your assistant to, for example, repeatedly ask if you want to build a kindergarten in Algiers, even if that city already has 10 kindergartens to every block. The worst thing you can do is respond to one of the assistant's requests with ""don't remind me again."" If you do this, you'll never get any such notices again, which means that you'll be uninformed about what's going on, and if you do want to do anything, you'll have to figure it out manually. This can be next to impossible given the game's lack of a tutorial and a severely lacking manual. Even if you look past the apparent design flaws with the forced automation method, playing Big Oil on easy comes down to clicking ""yes"" over and over to the pop-ups from your assistant and occasionally throwing down a new building or stretch of pipeline.     If you choose to play in advanced mode, you don't have an assistant at all. Instead, you're left to manually manage everything. Also, in advance mode, everything is far more complicated. For instance, constructing an oil well on easy mode is as simple as purchasing and placing a single building on an open oil field. In advanced mode, you have to purchase the oil well, staff it with workers, hire a specialist to manage the workers, maintain the various physical components of the well itself, and so on.     This is needlessly complicated by the game's interface, which seems to be intended to challenge you every step of the way. You're given a few buttons to choose from, which mostly bring up graphs and charts that show you how your company is doing. For the most part, these are all useless and in no way required to play the game. If you want to build a structure, you have to click on a vacant patch of land near the town you want to build in, click a button to bring up the building menu, click on the building you want to construct, drag the building around until you find a suitable spot to place it, and then wait as it gets built. That's way too many clicks to do something as simple as build an oil-storage structure. It doesn't help that there are no keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys, and there's no way to select anything more than a single unit at a time, be it something as large as a refinery or as small as a length of pipeline.     There's also the matter of moving around the map. Since you'll often be managing oil fields and cities around the world, you'll need to move from one area to the next almost constantly. In easy mode, the game will automatically transport you from one city to the next as long as your assistant thinks that's where you need to go. However, if you ever want to explore the map of your own free will, you have to use the mouse wheel to scroll all the way out of the map until you get a view of the entire world, with icons representing each city, ship, refinery, and oil field on the map. You can then click on the city you want to go to, and you'll be instantly zoomed into that city...most of the time, at least. Many times, you can click until your blue in the face and you'll get no response. In that case, you have to zoom in and search for your properties by scrolling around the map. Since you can't see any structures until you're almost completely zoomed in, you'll spend a lot of time scrolling across massive, empty areas searching for your tiny oil well among some trees hundreds of miles outside of the nearest town.    The single-player experience is tedious and frustrating enough, but the multiplayer compounds the bad experience. You can play online or via a local network with up to six players as you go head-to-head to try to become the richest and most powerful oil company in the world. But that's not so easy because to play online, you have to know the IP address of the server you want to play on. As you can expect, the fan community isn't exactly lively for a game like Big Oil, so connecting with other players outside of the game just to get a match together is an exercise in futility. In fact, we never found anyone online to set up a game, or even any inkling that anyone in the world is interested in playing this game. Of course, that isn't much of a surprise.   ...or maybe even Jethro.   Big Oil looks ugly and moves like a slug. The units and buildings in the game all look blocky and undefined, and each and every city looks almost identical. The scenery isn't any better, with huge stretches of brown and green smears to represent various terrains and the occasional smattering of unnatural-looking foliage that does nothing to liven up the view. The draw distance is also way too short, and you can't see any structures until you zoom right in on them. The game moves slowly, too. When you mouse over a menu item, you have to wait several seconds for the text to appear explaining what that item is, and many times when you click on a patch of land to bring up a menu, it takes forever for the menu to appear onscreen. The game's presentation also suffers from a dearth of sound. When you click on a research facility you might hear the distorted gurgle of bubbling chemicals, and when you click on a government building you might hear some dull crowd noise, but more often than not, you won't hear anything.    Big Oil is a failure in almost every regard. Sure, it's a budget title, but that doesn't excuse the tedious gameplay, frustrating bugs, and shoddy presentation. There are dozens of better economic strategy games available for the PC, most of which will probably end up costing you less than Big Oil. No matter how much you thirst for a taste of the Texas tea, you'll want to avoid this game.    
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267,Kengo: Legend of the 9 ,3, Who knew that samurai swordfighting could ever be so dull and annoying?,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/1/1/2222511-box_kengo.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kengo-legend-of-the-9-review/1900-6179861/,neg,"
  It overstates the case a fair bit to call Kengo: Legend of the 9 a game. While this latest addition to the minigenre of Japanese swordfighting comes in a retail box and is priced right up there with other new releases for the Xbox 360, it feels more like a proof-of-concept demo than something that developer Genki actually expects people to buy. Mindless button mashing and missions that consist entirely of slaughtering mobs of mouth-breathing bad guys make you wonder if somebody shipped the wrong build to the mastering lab.    Regardless, what made it to store shelves is barely playable, much less engaging. The only interesting aspect of Legend of the 9 is its connection to Japanese history, as the nine protagonists are renowned samurai from the 17th century. Anyone interested in feudal Japan will certainly recognize such legendary swordsmen as Musashi Miyamoto, Jubei Yagyu, and Ito Ittosai. But none of these characters is given any sort of lifelike characterization, so it's not like you're getting a tour of the more colorful personalities of the samurai set. Each is really nothing more than a beefy muscled stereotype that struts around spouting dialogue that would embarrass the screenwriters who penned '70s kung-fu movies. At least the game's original Japanese voices are translated solely with captions, so we're spared the agony of listening to hacks delivering these cheesy lines in spoken Engrish. It's just too bad that somebody couldn't have similarly silenced the repetitive sword ringing and shouting during battles or the bloody squelching sound used to underscore menu selections.   Look exciting? Well, appearances are deceiving.    The nine main campaigns where you guide the heroes on various adventures are equally drab. Although each campaign is supposed to be entirely different to represent aspects of each character's life, they're actually nearly identical hack-and-slash expeditions. These consist of you mindlessly hacking down packs of thugs, ninjas, and the like until you reach level bosses. All that really separates one campaign from another is the identity of one of the mission bosses. These bosses represent the other eight playable samurai in the game, and you don't flash the blade against yourself. The only signs of life here come from the ability to customize your warrior at the end of each level by spending spirit spheres or experience points to buff stats, such as health and attack power, or to pick up new sword-slinging moves. Some of the mission architecture looks pretty good too. Levels generally aren't very big, but they typically feature one striking theme, such as a ninja fortress in the moonlight or the deck of a ship in front of a setting sun.    Other modes of play are more monotonous than the scenery. Mission mode collects 10 campaign maps and gives them separate objectives. Unfortunately, all of Genki's creativity was expended on naming these escapades. Cool-sounding titles, such as The Three Ronin Must Die! and Death at the Kira Household, cover up more mechanical slaughters where you simply cut a swath from point A to point B. Combat mode is a bit better, in that it features straightforward one-on-one dueling either against the artificial intelligence or a buddy over Xbox Live or on a second gamepad. At least here you can get the scraps over with in a just a couple of quick rounds and skip the tedious repetition of the other game choices.    In the end, however, none of these selections are worth your time. Legend of the 9 mixes bland modes of play with equally uninspired combat. Although the game purports to present an authentic re-creation of swordfighting, what we've got here is really just another button-mashing beat-em-up. All of the customizable fighting stances or fancy attack and defense terms, such as soku-giri, kumitachi, and kuzushi, are meaningless. All you need to do to win most fights is move in close, twirl the left stick a little then punch the Y and B buttons. Actually, it's tough to do much more. Although you're supposed to be portraying lithe killing machines, the samurais lumber about like they're wearing cement sandals, which makes it hard to react to enemy moves and leaves you open for devastating counter-attacks. Only environmental kills give you a sense of purpose. It's somewhat nifty to try to slay enemies by maneuvering them off docks or pinning them into walls with your sword after locking them up in a kumitachi sword clinch. They're not particularly easy to pull off and totally unnecessary because you can kill foes in much easier ways, although they do at least reward you with bloody close-ups.   One-on-one battles in combat mode may not be highlight-reel material, yet they at least let you skip all of the dreary carving up of thugs and ninjas in the campaign missions.   Missions are also packed with cannon fodder that you can hack through in moments. In true kung-fu-movie style, the deeply dumb grunts generally engage you in one-on-one battles even when they've got you totally surrounded. So you'll sail through gangs of goons paying little thought to swordsmanship, stringing together combos or pretty much anything else, only waking up when a tougher guy comes along (you'll know them by their coolie hats) or you stack up enough bodies to trigger the appearance of the level boss. The latter opponents provide just about the only tough battles in the entire game. But it's not like they outduel you or do anything skillful. They lay back and wait for your attack, preferring to counter only after you do something stupid, such as force an attack due to the tedium of waiting around for the other guy to move. This can often lead to instant death because even though enemies seem lazy at times, they have a knack for turning your attacks into kuzushi moves that leave you totally helpless in preventing a one-stroke kill.    A good sword-combat game is long overdue on the Xbox 360, but don't let your desperation cloud your judgment when it comes to Kengo: Legend of the 9. While it's usually fun to run around playing samurai, there isn't nearly enough quality slicing and dicing here to even warrant a rental. Wait until the next time, when maybe that unknown future developer will actually finish its chop-'em-up game before trying to sell it.    
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268,The Mark ,3, Do yourself a big favor and avoid The Mark.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/9/1/3/2212913-mark10.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-mark-review/1900-6168312/,neg,"
  It would be so easy and tempting to describe how bad The Mark is by making some cute remark like, ""The Mark is way off the mark,"" or ""The lame gameplay is a black mark against The Mark."" However, that takes more effort than this dreary, lackluster shooter from DreamCatcher and T7 Games deserves. Sure, it's a budget shooter, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it's a very bad game.   As far as shooters go, The Mark can head toward the bottom of the list.   The Mark wants to be like a Hollywood-style buddy movie--in this case, a US Marine and a British mercenary who must team up to stop London from being nuked by terrorists. It's a fairly generic but passable plot device, but the game manages to get everything else wrong. The plot itself is overly contrived and makes no sense. For example, before they nuke London, the terrorists need to kill the marine and his sister because they're the only people who can identify the missile they plan to use. But wouldn't the missile be vaporized by the nuclear explosion? There's also the fact that the bad guy's father, a gazillionaire, finds out about the plot and wants to stop it. But instead of picking up the phone and calling, say, the British government, he hires a mercenary to protect the marine. Because as long as he's alive, the terrorists won't launch their missile because he could identify it!    But wait, there's more. The characters are like badly drawn caricatures. There's Steve ""Fletch"" Fletcher and Austin Hawke, a couple of manly hero names if there ever were any. They like to spout inane dialogue that's terribly delivered. They also fly around in a small, one-man jet, which apparently defies the laws of physics because the jet already has a separate pilot. At one point, the two heroes, their pilot, and the sister are all on board. There must be a lot of sitting on laps in there; how cozy.    The plot--as silly as it is--could easily have been overlooked if The Mark delivered a decent shooting experience, but it doesn't. This is a game that makes the act of shooting a gun a chore. As you advance through each level, you'll battle an almost endless stream of bad guys. Oftentimes the game ""surprises"" you by having them pop out of corners and cut you down without warning, but after the 20th or 30th such encounter, this gets old. So you'll die a lot, memorize the location of bad guys, and then get past a choke point on the third or fourth try. Getting through the game requires the frequent application of quicksave and quickload, as well as having the willpower to continue.    The Mark tries to mix things up by letting you choose which hero to play as throughout the game. This lets you experience a slightly different route through each level, but the differences between the characters are negligible. You can also play the campaign cooperatively with another player, though trying to find someone to play with online is going to be very difficult--but more on that later.    If you're looking at the screenshots, you may think that the game looks decent. Sure, there's a glossy slickness to surfaces, and some of the environments look interesting. However, the game falls apart when it's in motion and can cause eye strain because of the badly selected color palette, the poor frame rate, the jerky animations, and the over-the-top blur effect that you need to tone down to the absolute minimum to avoid migraines. The Mark constantly recycles the same character models, so each level basically has only three or four different bad guys, and you see the same guys all the time. The level design also gets old fast, particularly in an aircraft carrier where you have to open the door to compartment after compartment and wage a firefight in each one. Things get particularly bad in the aircraft carrier because the frame rate drops to a stutter on a high-end PC. The sound effects are completely generic, but they're the best part of the audio, as the voice acting is third-rate, at best.   After seeing this screen for the 40th or 50th time, you won't care anymore that the evil ones win.   When it comes to multiplayer, The Mark serves up the standard deathmatch mode, in addition to the aforementioned cooperative mode, as well as a map-control mode. However, you'll need luck trying to find other players online. This isn't a popular game, and considering the fierce competition for multiplayer shooters, that probably isn't going to change in the near future.    The Mark isn't a humorous or fun game in any sense of the words. It's also a tedious game that taxes your patience and your endurance. When you get down to it, there are simply far too many other shooters that you can spend your money on, and most of those will offer a more enjoyable and fun gameplay experience than The Mark.    
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269,Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal ,3," Dull, repetitive, and carelessly programmed don't even begin to sum up how crummy this action game based on the Looney Tunes license is.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/8/0/2219680-box_ltaa.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/looney-tunes-acme-arsenal-review/1900-6182233/,neg,"
  Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal is a third-person action romp that blatantly borrows a number of concepts from Sony's Ratchet & Clank series. In a nutshell, you work your way through large 3D environments and lay waste to the enemies you encounter using the characters' comical kung fu attacks or the different Acme-inspired weapons that are available within each area. If you disregard the fact that gun violence is very out of character for the Looney Tunes gang, then the game's biggest problem is that it tries to copy Ratchet & Clank but doesn't actually come anywhere close to delivering the same amount of fun or variety that the typical Ratchet & Clank game does. The action is boring, and the presentation is half-hearted and almost devoid of humor. Furthermore, thanks to the sloppy programming, the simple act of playing the game often feels like an exercise in frustration.   In Acme Arsenal, the Looney Tunes gang has guns and knows how to use them.   According to the story, a mysterious mad scientist has invented a time machine and sent his robot goons back in time to eliminate the Looney Tunes characters' ancestors, which would erase Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and the rest of the Looney gang from existence. Luckily, Bugs Bunny catches wind of the plan and rallies the other toons, who decide to travel back in time to set things right. The main mode is mission-based. In it, you run and jump your way through 3D environments that are liberally populated with robotic adversaries. To dispatch these bad guys, you can get in close and smack them with your melee attacks, or you can blast them from a distance with the different weapons you've picked up. If you play alone, you can swap between the two characters involved in the mission simply by tapping a button. However, if you connect a second controller, you and a friend can control the characters individually and play through each mission cooperatively. There's also a stand-alone battle mode, which lets you and your friends fight it out in multiple arenas to see who is the top toon.    You'd think doling out violence with your favorite cartoon characters would be fun. Unfortunately, every level employs the same boring mix of gap jumping and switch hunting, and the combat mainly involves mindlessly mashing the buttons to perform the same melee combinations against the same half-dozen robots that are recycled thousands of times throughout the game. You can collect vials of a substance called illudium to make your character stronger, but that doesn't add any new attacks to your repertoire. Likewise, the weapons don't do much to alleviate the monotony brought on by all that sameness. They're effective at getting rid of enemies in a hurry, but, out of the 15 different guns you can pick up, the only ones that aren't generic blasters are the flamethrower, the freeze gun, and the extend-o-fist. You also don't get to run wild with them as often as you'd like. Few enemies carry them. Instead, you usually have to bide your time until you come across a vending machine, which will sell you one for an astronomical number of gold pieces. However, the joke's on you, because the 20 or 30 shots in that gun probably won't last beyond the next cluster of enemies.     The presentation feels similarly phoned-in. Sure, the characters look like they're supposed to, and the toon-shaded backgrounds look appropriate, but there's not much to see with regard to different animations or environmental details. Once you've seen Bugs Bunny slam his guitar down and have observed the embers being cast out of the fire pits, you've seen everything this game has to offer. During the missions, the only real hints of Looney Tunes attitude you'll notice are the repetitive one-liners that the characters utter when they're trading blows with the enemy. The prerecorded scenes that are shown between missions do show the characters interacting with one another, but the gags are nowhere near as funny as anything you'd see in an actual Looney Tunes or Merry Melodies cartoon. Even on a technical level, the presentation fails. The muddy textures and simplistic terrain features are at least four years behind the curve compared to other PlayStation 2 games. Except for an increase in sharpness, the Xbox 360 and Wii versions of the game don't look any better.     In fact, the only noteworthy enhancement the Xbox 360 version of the game offers over its PS2 and Wii counterparts is the ability to play through the story cooperatively with another person over Xbox Live. That's not much of a bonus, considering how lifeless the whole experience is. It's also rather silly that the battle mode in the Xbox 360 version is limited to local split-screen play only, considering that the Xbox Live service is perfectly capable of handling four players and the tiny arenas that the game dishes out.   It's like the developers quickly slapped together a crummy, generic action game, and then tacked on the Looney Tunes license.   On top of everything else, the developers did a poor job of nailing down the controls, hit detection, and camera. Shaking the Wii remote to deliver jabs and spin attacks takes a while to get used to, but, generally speaking, the controls in all three versions simply entail repeatedly tapping the buttons to jump, perform melee combos, and use weapons. If only playing the game really was just that simple. First of all, aiming weapons is a pain, because the lock-on function has a tendency to latch onto boxes just as often as an enemy. Secondly, the characters move like they have oil on their feet. They slide all over the place! Combine that with the exaggerated follow-throughs on most attacks and you'll frequently find yourself slipping off of ledges for no good reason. It also doesn't help that you'll occasionally take a swing at an enemy only to pass right through them, basically flinging yourself right off of the platform.     Above all, the most frustrating thing is how the camera tends to move at the worst possible moment. It's bad enough that it never seems to pick a good angle in the first place, but you'll frequently find yourself in the middle of a jump between two platforms when the camera decides to point at something other than the platform you're trying to land on. Health refills and checkpoints are plentiful, and you can continue as much as you like, so at least the shoddy programming doesn't mean the game can't be beaten. Nevertheless, you'll have to endure lots of cheap deaths during the roughly eight hours it takes to clear all of the missions contained within the game's 10 chapters.    Don't bother with Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal, not even for kids who you think won't know any better. It isn't fun, it certainly isn't funny, and the game's sketchier aspects are liable to fluster anyone who plays it.    
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'game', 'ca', ""n't"", 'beaten', '.', 'Nevertheless', ',', ""'ll"", 'endure', 'lots', 'cheap', 'deaths', 'roughly', 'eight', 'hours', 'takes', 'clear', 'missions', 'contained', 'within', 'game', ""'s"", '10', 'chapters', '.', 'Do', ""n't"", 'bother', 'Looney', 'Tunes', ':', 'Acme', 'Arsenal', ',', 'even', 'kids', 'think', 'wo', ""n't"", 'know', 'better', '.', 'It', ""n't"", 'fun', ',', 'certainly', ""n't"", 'funny', ',', 'game', ""'s"", 'sketchier', 'aspects', 'liable', 'fluster', 'anyone', 'plays', '.']",-0.0362866680503667,0.44274558204352726
270,Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal ,3," Dull, repetitive, and carelessly programmed don't even begin to sum up how crummy this action game based on the Looney Tunes license is.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/8/0/2219680-box_ltaa.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/looney-tunes-acme-arsenal-review/1900-6182234/,neg,"
  Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal is a third-person action romp that blatantly borrows a number of concepts from Sony's Ratchet & Clank series. In a nutshell, you work your way through large 3D environments and lay waste to the enemies you encounter using the characters' comical kung fu attacks or the different Acme-inspired weapons that are available within each area. If you disregard the fact that gun violence is very out of character for the Looney Tunes gang, then the game's biggest problem is that it tries to copy Ratchet & Clank but doesn't actually come anywhere close to delivering the same amount of fun or variety that the typical Ratchet & Clank game does. The action is boring, and the presentation is half-hearted and almost devoid of humor. Furthermore, thanks to the sloppy programming, the simple act of playing the game often feels like an exercise in frustration.   In Acme Arsenal, the Looney Tunes gang has guns and knows how to use them.     According to the story, a mysterious mad scientist has invented a time machine and sent his robot goons back in time to eliminate the Looney Tunes characters' ancestors, which would erase Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and the rest of the Looney gang from existence. Luckily, Bugs Bunny catches wind of the plan and rallies the other toons, who decide to travel back in time to set things right. The main mode is mission-based. In it, you run and jump your way through 3D environments that are liberally populated with robotic adversaries. To dispatch these bad guys, you can get in close and smack them with your melee attacks, or you can blast them from a distance with the different weapons you've picked up. If you play alone, you can swap between the two characters involved in the mission simply by tapping a button. However, if you connect a second controller, you and a friend can control the characters individually and play through each mission cooperatively. There's also a stand-alone battle mode, which lets you and your friends fight it out in multiple arenas to see who is the top toon.    You'd think doling out violence with your favorite cartoon characters would be fun. Unfortunately, every level employs the same boring mix of gap jumping and switch hunting, and the combat mainly involves mindlessly mashing the buttons to perform the same melee combinations against the same half-dozen robots that are recycled thousands of times throughout the game. You can collect vials of a substance called illudium to make your character stronger, but that doesn't add any new attacks to your repertoire. Likewise, the weapons don't do much to alleviate the monotony brought on by all that sameness. They're effective at getting rid of enemies in a hurry, but, out of the 15 different guns you can pick up, the only ones that aren't generic blasters are the flamethrower, the freeze gun, and the extend-o-fist. You also don't get to run wild with them as often as you'd like. Few enemies carry them. Instead, you usually have to bide your time until you come across a vending machine, which will sell you one for an astronomical number of gold pieces. However, the joke's on you, because the 20 or 30 shots in that gun probably won't last beyond the next cluster of enemies.     The presentation feels similarly phoned-in. Sure, the characters look like they're supposed to, and the toon-shaded backgrounds look appropriate, but there's not much to see with regard to different animations or environmental details. Once you've seen Bugs Bunny slam his guitar down and have observed the embers being cast out of the fire pits, you've seen everything this game has to offer. During the missions, the only real hints of Looney Tunes attitude you'll notice are the repetitive one-liners that the characters utter when they're trading blows with the enemy. The prerecorded scenes that are shown between missions do show the characters interacting with one another, but the gags are nowhere near as funny as anything you'd see in an actual Looney Tunes or Merry Melodies cartoon. Even on a technical level, the presentation fails. The muddy textures and simplistic terrain features are at least four years behind the curve compared to other PlayStation 2 games. Except for an increase in sharpness, the Xbox 360 and Wii versions of the game don't look any better.     In fact, the only noteworthy enhancement the Xbox 360 version of the game offers over its PS2 and Wii counterparts is the ability to play through the story cooperatively with another person over Xbox Live. That's not much of a bonus, considering how lifeless the whole experience is. It's also rather silly that the battle mode in the Xbox 360 version is limited to local split-screen play only, considering that the Xbox Live service is perfectly capable of handling four players and the tiny arenas that the game dishes out.   IIt's like the developers quickly slapped together a crummy, generic action game, and then tacked on the Looney Tunes license.     On top of everything else, the developers did a poor job of nailing down the controls, hit detection, and camera. Shaking the Wii remote to deliver jabs and spin attacks takes a while to get used to, but, generally speaking, the controls in all three versions simply entail repeatedly tapping the buttons to jump, perform melee combos, and use weapons. If only playing the game really was just that simple. First of all, aiming weapons is a pain, because the lock-on function has a tendency to latch onto boxes just as often as an enemy. Secondly, the characters move like they have oil on their feet. They slide all over the place! Combine that with the exaggerated follow-throughs on most attacks and you'll frequently find yourself slipping off of ledges for no good reason. It also doesn't help that you'll occasionally take a swing at an enemy only to pass right through them, basically flinging yourself right off of the platform.     Above all, the most frustrating thing is how the camera tends to move at the worst possible moment. It's bad enough that it never seems to pick a good angle in the first place, but you'll frequently find yourself in the middle of a jump between two platforms when the camera decides to point at something other than the platform you're trying to land on. Health refills and checkpoints are plentiful, and you can continue as much as you like, so at least the shoddy programming doesn't mean the game can't be beaten. Nevertheless, you'll have to endure lots of cheap deaths during the roughly eight hours it takes to clear all of the missions contained within the game's 10 chapters.    Don't bother with Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal, not even for kids who you think won't know any better. It isn't fun, it certainly isn't funny, and the game's sketchier aspects are liable to fluster anyone who plays it.    
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271,Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal ,3," Dull, repetitive, and carelessly programmed don't even begin to sum up how crummy this action game based on the Looney Tunes license is.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/8/0/2219680-box_ltaa.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/looney-tunes-acme-arsenal-review/1900-6182235/,neg,"
  Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal is a third-person action romp that blatantly borrows a number of concepts from Sony's Ratchet & Clank series. In a nutshell, you work your way through large 3D environments and lay waste to the enemies you encounter using the characters' comical kung fu attacks or the different Acme-inspired weapons that are available within each area. If you disregard the fact that gun violence is very out of character for the Looney Tunes gang, then the game's biggest problem is that it tries to copy Ratchet & Clank but doesn't actually come anywhere close to delivering the same amount of fun or variety that the typical Ratchet & Clank game does. The action is boring, and the presentation is half-hearted and almost devoid of humor. Furthermore, thanks to the sloppy programming, the simple act of playing the game often feels like an exercise in frustration.   In Acme Arsenal, the Looney Tunes gang has guns and knows how to use them.     According to the story, a mysterious mad scientist has invented a time machine and sent his robot goons back in time to eliminate the Looney Tunes characters' ancestors, which would erase Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and the rest of the Looney gang from existence. Luckily, Bugs Bunny catches wind of the plan and rallies the other toons, who decide to travel back in time to set things right. The main mode is mission-based. In it, you run and jump your way through 3D environments that are liberally populated with robotic adversaries. To dispatch these bad guys, you can get in close and smack them with your melee attacks, or you can blast them from a distance with the different weapons you've picked up. If you play alone, you can swap between the two characters involved in the mission simply by tapping a button. However, if you connect a second controller, you and a friend can control the characters individually and play through each mission cooperatively. There's also a stand-alone battle mode, which lets you and your friends fight it out in multiple arenas to see who is the top toon.    You'd think doling out violence with your favorite cartoon characters would be fun. Unfortunately, every level employs the same boring mix of gap jumping and switch hunting, and the combat mainly involves mindlessly mashing the buttons to perform the same melee combinations against the same half-dozen robots that are recycled thousands of times throughout the game. You can collect vials of a substance called illudium to make your character stronger, but that doesn't add any new attacks to your repertoire. Likewise, the weapons don't do much to alleviate the monotony brought on by all that sameness. They're effective at getting rid of enemies in a hurry, but, out of the 15 different guns you can pick up, the only ones that aren't generic blasters are the flamethrower, the freeze gun, and the extend-o-fist. You also don't get to run wild with them as often as you'd like. Few enemies carry them. Instead, you usually have to bide your time until you come across a vending machine, which will sell you one for an astronomical number of gold pieces. However, the joke's on you, because the 20 or 30 shots in that gun probably won't last beyond the next cluster of enemies.     The presentation feels similarly phoned-in. Sure, the characters look like they're supposed to, and the toon-shaded backgrounds look appropriate, but there's not much to see with regard to different animations or environmental details. Once you've seen Bugs Bunny slam his guitar down and have observed the embers being cast out of the fire pits, you've seen everything this game has to offer. During the missions, the only real hints of Looney Tunes attitude you'll notice are the repetitive one-liners that the characters utter when they're trading blows with the enemy. The prerecorded scenes that are shown between missions do show the characters interacting with one another, but the gags are nowhere near as funny as anything you'd see in an actual Looney Tunes or Merry Melodies cartoon. Even on a technical level, the presentation fails. The muddy textures and simplistic terrain features are at least four years behind the curve compared to other PlayStation 2 games. Except for an increase in sharpness, the Xbox 360 and Wii versions of the game don't look any better.     In fact, the only noteworthy enhancement the Xbox 360 version of the game offers over its PS2 and Wii counterparts is the ability to play through the story cooperatively with another person over Xbox Live. That's not much of a bonus, considering how lifeless the whole experience is. It's also rather silly that the battle mode in the Xbox 360 version is limited to local split-screen play only, considering that the Xbox Live service is perfectly capable of handling four players and the tiny arenas that the game dishes out.   It's like the developers quickly slapped together a crummy, generic action game, and then tacked on the Looney Tunes license.     On top of everything else, the developers did a poor job of nailing down the controls, hit detection, and camera. Shaking the Wii remote to deliver jabs and spin attacks takes a while to get used to, but, generally speaking, the controls in all three versions simply entail repeatedly tapping the buttons to jump, perform melee combos, and use weapons. If only playing the game really was just that simple. First of all, aiming weapons is a pain, because the lock-on function has a tendency to latch onto boxes just as often as an enemy. Secondly, the characters move like they have oil on their feet. They slide all over the place! Combine that with the exaggerated follow-throughs on most attacks and you'll frequently find yourself slipping off of ledges for no good reason. It also doesn't help that you'll occasionally take a swing at an enemy only to pass right through them, basically flinging yourself right off of the platform.     Above all, the most frustrating thing is how the camera tends to move at the worst possible moment. It's bad enough that it never seems to pick a good angle in the first place, but you'll frequently find yourself in the middle of a jump between two platforms when the camera decides to point at something other than the platform you're trying to land on. Health refills and checkpoints are plentiful, and you can continue as much as you like, so at least the shoddy programming doesn't mean the game can't be beaten. Nevertheless, you'll have to endure lots of cheap deaths during the roughly eight hours it takes to clear all of the missions contained within the game's 10 chapters.    Don't bother with Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal, not even for kids who you think won't know any better. It isn't fun, it certainly isn't funny, and the game's sketchier aspects are liable to fluster anyone who plays it.    
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272,Quake II ,9," Whatever else may be said about Quake II, one thing is certain: It is the only first-person shooter to render the original Quake entirely obsolete.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/3/5/7/2210357-q2box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/quake-ii-review/1900-2532651/,pos,"
Whatever else may be said about Quake II, one thing is certain: It is the only first-person shooter to render the original Quake entirely obsolete. Within moments of starting the game, it is safe to say that all but the most irrationally loyal players will acknowledge that Quake II is better than the original in every respect, and that no one who can afford to upgrade will have any reason to ever load Quake again. Considering the countless hours invested by countless players in the game, that's a remarkable achievement. It's also significant because since Quake shipped 18 months ago, we have seen a steady stream of challengers, games that have been trumpeted by press and players alike as the successors to the first-person throne. But none of these games has actually come through on that count - not Hexen II, not Jedi Knight, and certainly not any of the half-dozen ""Quake Killers"" that have yet to make it out of alphaland and onto store shelves. But Quake II does come through, delivering at least incremental and occasionally monumental improvements over its predecessor.  Many gamers describe playing Quake II in semireligious terms, and when immersed in the 3Dfx version of the game, it's easy to understand why. The visual effects are awesome, as in awe-inspiring. The masterful weaving of subtle graphic effects - colored hues that blend seamlessly into one another, intricate textures cast over complex and beautiful architectural features, and realistic transitions between light and shadow - creates a graphic environment that is without peer on the PC. Of course, Quake II supports many graphics modes and 3D cards (it utilizes OpenGL), and players will surely find a combination that works well on their system (even if it's a now-ancient Pentium 150). But none approaches the 3Dfx version, and it is the only way through which one can fully appreciate the technological achievement of the game. There are gameplay achievements, as well. Most notable, of course, is the inclusion of a well-crafted, mission-driven single-player game. As players of its previous titles know, id has never been much for storylines, and while Quake II won't win any interactive fiction awards, it does make a credible effort to pull you into the game emotionally as well as viscerally. As you advance through Quake II's multisection levels, an increasingly ominous sense of purpose takes hold. And by the time the prison doors are opened and the factory is breached, it is difficult not to experience a certain tinge of horror, and perhaps even fear - both of which spur you on in a way altogether different from the deathmatch adrenaline rush that made the original Quake so famous. Not to worry - the deathmatch rush is still there. And although the territory is now quite familiar to most players, Quake II offers a compelling multiplayer experience, due in large measure to a much-needed recasting of available weapons. No more does the player with the rocket launcher hold all the cards in deathmatch levels. Devastating alternatives now exist, especially in the form of a new electromagnetic rail gun and more versatile grenades, which may be picked up and thrown in addition to being used with a launcher. Realistic machine and chain guns also pack a powerful punch, with the latter capable of cutting an opponent to shreds within a second or two. The weapons have also been more acutely balanced, making more powerful weapons more difficult to use. For instance, the deadly rail gun takes nearly full second to power up and fire, and requires precise aim. The damage done by rockets has been lessened, and the rocket launcher takes a few moments to reload between shots.  The deathmatch experience also benefits from always interesting and occasionally ingenious level design. Not only are the levels tremendously varied in terms of architectural composition, style, and setting, they include boundless opportunities for ambush, sniping, and close-quarter encounters. The omission of a cooperative multiplayer mode is notable and puzzling (especially in light of the enhanced in-game communication capabilities). This issue will surely be addressed in the very near future, if not by id itself, then by any number of aspiring Quake II mod designers. Other aspects of the game are more subtlety improved and fall short of being state-of-the-art. The sound effects, especially when set to the high-quality mode, are superb - so good, in fact, so as to render the rather monotonous musical soundtrack irrelevant (if not downright annoying) by comparison. But the sound effects of the original Quake were also first-class, and one might have hoped for the employment of more advanced technology, such as surround or even positional sound in the sequel. Enemy animations are much better (taking a clear cue from the N64 shooter Turok: Dinosaur Hunter), but in general the base character designs are somewhat nondescript and certainly not a match for those of rivals such as Hexen II. And while the enemy AI often delivers what id promised, and creates opponents that are more tenacious and more cunning than before, there is still something very mechanistic about their movements, almost like if one could look closely enough, the strings connecting them to some cosmic puppeteer might be seen glinting in the light. But none of these are substantial criticisms. Given all of the strengths outlined above, one must conclude that Quake II is nothing less than a remarkable game, and we recommend it without hesitation. Compared with the original, everything in Quake II is better, nothing is worse. But still... there is a lingering sense - especially after spending dozens of hours with the game - that something is missing, that somehow things aren't quite right. What's missing, in fact what is altogether absent - the sense of true surprise, novelty, and even fun that once existed in the first-person shooter. Or to put it another way: Although it's never been done better, it's all been done before, and that casts a shadow on the experience that no amount of technology can hope to penetrate.
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273,Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver ,9, Soul Reaver is a deep game possessed of myriad impressive little touches.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/3/8/2211938-box_loksr.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legacy-of-kain-soul-reaver-review/1900-2540376/,pos,"
One of the best 3D PlayStation adventure games from last year has now arrived on the Dreamcast. In fact, it's an exact port, with graphics that are as impressive on this platform as they were on the original, and with control that's almost as tight. But to back up a bit, Crystal Dynamics' sequel to the first Kain game, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, is a far different animal from its predecessor. Instead of being a top-down RPG, Soul Reaver is a 3D adventure game similar to Eidos' Tomb Raider. And Kain? This time he's the main antagonist. The game begins hundreds of years after Blood Omen and works on the premise that when you, as Kain, were given the choice of sacrificing yourself to save the world of Nosgoth or ruling it, you chose the latter, plunging the world into darkness. Over the millennia, Kain and his vampiric lieutenants evolved new abilities, with Kain always developing them first and the others soon following. When Raziel, the ""hero"" of the new game, grew wings before his leader did, Kain saw it as blasphemy, tore them from Raziel's back, and cast him into a giant, swirling, watery grave. But the long-winded story doesn't end there. After his features have been almost completely eaten away by the water, Raziel is saved by a being known as the Elder God, who sets him on a quest to free the world from the parasitic influence of the vampire clans and to destroy Kain. Raziel finds himself transformed so that he no longer drinks blood but devours souls (luckily, since he no longer has a jaw). Also, he can no longer die; instead, he is transported to the Spirit Realm - a shadowy distorted version of the Material World - after sustaining heavy damage. And surprisingly, his wings still work after a fashion, at least letting him glide for short distances. These are the tools you start the game with. You can also move and stack large stone blocks and switch over to the Spirit Realm whenever you like. You can only transport yourself back to the Material World at select locations and only once you've filled up on souls. This ability comes in handy, since the netherworld often bends platforms and structures out of shape so that you can climb them more easily and then flip back to the Material World and continue on. Why not just stay in the Spirit Realm? Because you can't open doors or move objects there. You can now begin to see the shape of many of the game's inventive 3D puzzles. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your skills. Kain's other lieutenants have evolved in different ways throughout the last few hundred years, and each of them acts as a stage boss in the game. One has a spidery form, another has grown a tolerance for water, and so on. After destroying each one, you gain his special ability, which then opens up new areas in the environment for you to access. Beyond that, there are bonus areas (which you don't need to complete to beat Soul Reaver). In these areas, you can acquire elemental glyphs, which grant you new powers that work well against the game's standard stock of vampires. Speaking of which, there are many different ways to exterminate the vampires of Soul Reaver. You can set them on fire, throw them into water, impale them with stakes, and toss them onto spikes. Destroying vampires regularly is necessary early on in the game because you'll eventually revert to the Spirit Realm if you don't eat enough souls. That is, until the Soul Reaver itself comes into play. The Soul Reaver is a blade that appears as a thin blue energy trail that curls around your right arm from the shoulder and extends a few feet down past your hand. Swallowing enough souls summons it to the Material World, where it sustains you, keeping you from having to constantly hunt down vampires to feed on. Once you gain the Soul Reaver, you'll shatter enemies with an explosive punch that mixes Psylocke's psi-dagger (from Marvel Comics' X-Men) with a Jedi lightsaber. While poking vampires with stakes can get a bit tired after awhile, this never gets old. As this extensive description may suggest, Soul Reaver is a deep game possessed of myriad impressive little touches. The graphics are among the best we've seen on the Dreamcast, taking as much advantage of the power of the system as the original version did of the PlayStation. While it was stunning before, the environments and characters possess a level of clarity and definition far beyond what we saw on the PlayStation Soul Reaver. As before, the game has subtle lighting effects that color each scene just a little differently to the scale and the overall jaw-dropping look of its polygonal 3D world. The Drowned Abbey stage is an excellent example of both elements. Standing midlevel in a half-flooded church, you'll look down at water pulsing gently above a tiled floor. When you gaze upward, you'll see the reflection of the water shimmering across an ornate gothic ceiling. Meanwhile, Raziel himself is modeled so well that you'll find yourself turning the camera around to get a good view of him posing with the Soul Reaver or pulling down his scarf to expose the gaping maw where his mouth used to be. The storyline is presented through a gorgeous introductory CG cinema (which runs even smoother on the Dreamcast), which is then followed by well-crafted events using the in-game engine and superb voice work. It's all wonderful high drama, with much less of the overstated breathy gothness found in Blood Omen. An excellent, albeit looping, soundtrack only adds to this and picks up whenever things get intense. The camera controls for the PlayStation version of the game were admittedly a little better than those on the Dreamcast edition. They followed the route of Spyro the Dragon and Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (more the former than the latter), letting you pan the area you're viewing with a press of the R2 or L2 button. Since there are only two ""shoulder"" buttons on the Dreamcast controller, this functionality has been relegated to the DC d-pad, which is unfortunately placed under the analog control. In the end, though, while worth noting, it doesn't hold the game back. You quickly get used to holding both triggers (the look function) to quickly turn Raziel, which, while less elegant, works nearly as well.  As in the PlayStation version, the level of frustration resulting from dealing with the camera is about equal to that found in Rare's Banjo-Kazooie - which is to say, close to none. Also similar to Banjo-Kazooie is that Soul Reaver takes place in such a huge game world that it's sometimes hard to figure out where to go next. There are gates that teleport you from area to area, but the stations are represented by strange designs - rather than simple text - that are impossible to remember. While it feels as if Crystal Dynamics set out to make a game that was not as difficult as the Tomb Raider series but not as simple as Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver does come off a bit on the easy side. The platform-jumping sections aren't too tough, the puzzles not too complex, and the bosses fairly simple to beat. You can ignore the basic cadre of vampires once you have the Soul Reaver, and there are perhaps too many occasions where you're required to move blocks around. It is an extremely solid game, however, that's as much of an experience as it is an adventure, and its warts (the difficulty level and an ending that's abrupt to the point of making Silent Hill's finale seem complete) are few. After beating it, you'll want to go back and get all the glyphs (even though you'll find few instances to use the powers they provide), and you'll learn that having picked them all up doesn't alter the ending. You'll still just want to play it a little more. 
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274,Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver ,9, Crystal Dynamics' long-awaited sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is a far different animal from its predecessor.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/3/8/2211938-box_loksr.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legacy-of-kain-soul-reaver-review/1900-2548115/,pos,"
Crystal Dynamics' long-awaited sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is a far different animal from its predecessor. Instead of being a top-down RPG, Soul Reaver is a 3D adventure game similar to Eidos' Tomb Raider. And Kain? This time, he's the main antagonist. The game begins hundreds of years after Blood Omen and works from the premise that when you, as Kain, were given the choice of sacrificing yourself to save the world of Nosgoth or ruling it, you chose the latter, plunging the world into darkness. Over the millennia, Kain and his vampiric lieutenants evolved new abilities, with Kain always developing them first and the others soon following. When Raziel, the ""hero"" of the new game, grew wings before his leader did, Kain saw it as blasphemy, tore them from Raziel's back, and cast him into a giant swirling watery grave. But the long-winded story doesn't end there. After his features have been almost completely eaten away by the water, Raziel is saved by a being known as the Elder God, who sets him on a quest to free the world from the parasitic influence of the vampire clans and destroy Kain. Raziel finds himself transformed so that he no longer drinks blood, but devours souls (luckily, since he no longer has a jaw). Also, he can no longer die; instead, he is transported to the Spirit Realm - a shadowy distorted version of the Material World - after sustaining heavy damage. And surprisingly, his wings still work after a fashion, at least letting him glide over short distances. These are the tools you start the game with. You can also move and stack large stone blocks and switch over to the Spirit Realm whenever you like. You can only transport yourself back to the Material World at select locations and only once you've filled up on souls. This ability comes in handy, since the netherworld often bends platforms and structures out of shape so that you can climb them more easily and then flip back to the Material World and continue on. Why not just stay in the Spirit Realm? Because you can't open doors or move objects there. You can now begin to see the shape of many of the game's inventive 3D puzzles.  But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your skills. Kain's other lieutenants have evolved in different ways throughout the last few hundred year, and each of them acts as a stage boss in the game. One has a spidery form, another has grown a tolerance for water, and so on. After destroying each one, you gain his special ability, which then opens up new areas in the environment for you to access. Beyond that, there are bonus areas (which you don't need to complete to beat Soul Reaver). In these areas, you can acquire elemental glyphs, which grant you new powers that work well against the game's standard stock of vampires. Speaking of which, there are many different ways to exterminate the vampires of Soul Reaver. You can set them on fire, throw them into water, impale them with stakes, and toss them onto spikes. Destroying vampires regularly is necessary early on in the game because you'll eventually revert to the Spirit Realm if you don't eat enough souls. That is, until the Soul Reaver itself comes into play. The Soul Reaver is a blade that appears as a thin blue energy trail that curls around your right arm from the shoulder and extends a few feet down past your hand. Swallowing enough souls summons it to the Material World, where it sustains you, keeping you from having to constantly hunt down vampires to feed on. Once you gain the Soul Reaver, you'll shatter enemies with an explosive punch that mixes Psylocke's psi-dagger (from Marvel Comics' X-Men) with a Jedi lightsaber. While poking vampires with stakes can get a bit tired after awhile, this never gets old. As this extensive description may suggest, Soul Reaver is a deep game possessed of myriad impressive little touches. Crystal Dynamics seems to have spent all that extra development time wisely, and the game has obviously benefited from it. The graphics are among the best that have ever been on the PlayStation. The game has subtle lighting effects that color each scene just a little differently to the scale and overall jaw-dropping look of its polygonal 3D world. The Drowned Abbey stage is an excellent example of both elements. Standing mid-level in a half-flooded church, you'll look down at water pulsing gently above a tiled floor. When you gaze upward, you'll see the reflection of the water shimmering across an ornate gothic ceiling. (The downside to scenes like this? There's a little clipping and some infrequent slowdown.) Meanwhile, Raziel himself is modeled so well that you'll find yourself turning the camera around to get a good view of him posing with the Soul Reaver or pulling down his scarf to expose the gaping maw where his mouth used to be. The storyline is presented through a gorgeous introductory CG cinema, which is then followed by well-crafted events using the in-game engine and superb voice work. It's all wonderful high drama, with much less of the overstated breathy gothness found in Blood Omen. An excellent, albeit looping, soundtrack only adds to this and picks up whenever things get intense.  The camera controls follow the route of Spyro the Dragon and Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (more the former than the later), letting you pan the area you're viewing with a press of the R2 or L2 button. Holding both down lets you look around your environment, while R1 provides a ""Z-targetting"" style lock-on on enemies. The level of frustration resulting from dealing with the camera is about equal to that found in Rare's Banjo-Kazooie - which is to say, close to none. Also similar to Banjo-Kazooie is that Soul Reaver takes place in such a huge game world that it's sometimes hard to figure out where to go next. There are gates that teleport you from area to area, but the stations are represented by strange designs – rather than simple text - that are impossible to remember. While it feels as if Crystal Dynamics set out to make a game that was not as difficult as the Tomb Raider series but not as simple as Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver does come off a bit on the easy side. The platform-jumping sections aren't too tough, the puzzles not too complex, and the bosses fairly simple to beat. You can ignore the basic cadre of vampires once you have the Soul Reaver, and there are perhaps too many occasions where you're required to move blocks around. It is an extremely solid game, however, that's as much of an experience as it is an adventure, and its warts (the difficulty level and an ending that's abrupt to the point of making Silent Hill's finale seem complete) are few. After beating it, you'll want to go back and get all the glyphs (even though you'll find few instances to use the powers they provide), and you'll learn that having picked them all up doesn't alter the ending. You'll still just want to play it a little more. 
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275,Homeworld ,9, Homeworld is both an excellent game and one that may well reshape the entire real-time strategy genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/6/6/9/2214669-homeworld_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/homeworld-review/1900-2537718/,pos,"
Relic's Homeworld is the sort of game that can inspire unbridled hyperbole in game reviewers. With its stunning 3D engine, uniquely challenging gameplay in both single- and multiplayer modes, great audio, and terrific story, Homeworld is both an excellent game and one that may well reshape the entire real-time strategy genre. It begins with an epic discovery: An ancient starship, buried deep beneath the sands of your home planet Kharak, contains evidence indicating that your people descended from aliens who colonized the planet many centuries ago. Spurred on by this discovery, your people construct a massive mothership with hyperspace capabilities and undertake an expedition to find their true homeworld. However, you complete your first hyperspace jump only to run smack into a swarm of hostile aliens, which proceed to reduce Kharak to a burning wasteland. Now, with only the mothership to call home, you must lead the fleet onward to your fabled homeworld, exacting vengeance for Kharak along the way. Most of the plot unfolds by way of elaborate cutscenes created using the game's 3D engine. The game also makes use of some slick hand-drawn animation to convey other elements of the story. These black-and-white scenes have a simple but gritty look to them, and they work exceptionally well with the flashy 3D cinematics. Homeworld's gameplay is in fact fairly similar to any tried-and-true real-time strategy game. You have a fleet under your command and must guide it through a series of 16 missions by building more vessels, researching new technologies, and harvesting resources from asteroids and dust clouds. However, in spite of the basic formula, Homeworld manages to feel like a very different breed of game. Your ships and resources carry over from mission to mission. This can result in very different playing habits designed to preserve your precious fleet. After all, it's the only one you have. For example, you'll come to rely on vessels like the support frigate to repair your damaged ships so they are ready for the next mission. Similarly, you might find yourself sticking around after completing your mission goals to harvest every last ounce of space dust available. Thankfully, Homeworld lets you do this sort of thing, because you control when you exit each mission regardless of when and how the mission goals are accomplished. But the most obvious difference between this and other real-time strategy games is the true 3D nature of the gameworld. You're in deep space, after all, so there is no restriction on the direction in which your units may travel. As a result, you'll have to learn to think and move using three axes at all times. This can be extremely confusing if you jump right in, which is why you ought to go through Homeworld's excellent tutorial regardless of your experience with real-time strategy games. One thing the tutorial doesn't teach you is the best way to keep track of your units once a battle begins. Though you have numerous options for organizing your ships - including a variety of formations and three different attack styles - it can be quite easy to scatter them across the galactic map if you're not careful. The main culprit here is the convoluted 3D movement command. In order to move your ships along the Z-axis, you must first click on an X-Y destination, then hold the shift key and move the mouse to indicate the distance up or down that you wish your ships to travel. Be warned that this system can be incredibly difficult to master, especially if you don't take the time to line things up perfectly. Fortunately, you won't mind retrying some of Homeworld's missions a few times until you get them right, because you never get the sense that the computer is cheating you. These missions are challenging, especially towards the end of the campaign, but they are fair. Even so, you may be put off by the complete lack of a difficulty setting. You'll also enjoy playing Homeworld repeatedly because it has some of the most impressive graphics ever. This 3D engine is stunning, with an acute attention to detail that is staggering. Every ship, from the tiny scout fighter to the lumbering heavy cruiser, is amazingly detailed, right down to markings on the hull and individually animated gun turrets. One of the coolest features in the game is the ability to zoom right in on a single ship and follow it through a battle - every turn, maneuver, and shot fired is brought to life, and you get a front-row seat for all of it. The ship design itself is also pretty impressive. And though the two sides in the conflict have nearly identical arsenals (there are only two unique ship classes per side), each has a completely different stylistic approach that is consistent throughout the fleet. Weapons effects are suitably spectacular, and explosions are also very cool, especially when the doomed vessel is penetrated by a beam weapon as it blows up - an effect that recalls those great ship explosions from the old Star Blazers cartoons. The audio in Homeworld is just as impressive as the graphics engine. The new-age musical score may not appeal to everyone, but it does a great job of setting the whole ""space is really, really big"" mood. The unit acknowledgments and sound effects are equally good, though it can be difficult to determine which of your units is asking for more fuel when the call comes in during a heated battle. Homeworld's multiplayer support is excellent. The game lets up to eight players compete over the Internet via WON.net. LAN play is also provided, with both IPX and IP networks supported. In multiplayer matches, you can fully customize the game settings, including the presence, skill level, and hostile tendencies of any AI opponents. A skirmish mode is also included if you only wish to play against computer opponents. Resource availability can be modified, and harvesting can even be deactivated completely. The alternative is a periodic infusion of resources for all players. Regrettably, some players have experienced random drops and crashes during online play, and the game tends to really slow down or shut down completely if you throw too many ships into the mix. Homeworld does have a few other issues that deserve mention. There is no way to tell how much damage an enemy ship has sustained. Even though your own ships have clearly visible health bars, the status of enemy ships remains unknown until just before they explode, at which point they begin to smoke and burn. And while you can play the game as either of the two warring parties, the single-player campaign is exactly the same for each side. It seems like Relic really dropped the ball here, since even a perfectly parallel campaign would have been a welcome diversion - and a way to extend the life of the meager single-player game. In fact, an opposing story with an equally positive spin on the conflict would have been downright cool. Even so, any complaints about the basic design or mechanics of Homeworld are minor at best. This is one of the best games you'll see this year: The phenomenal 3D engine, the great story, and the stellar gameplay all combine seamlessly in what will surely become a longtime favorite for many gamers.
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276,NHL 2000 ,9, NHL 2000 is virtual hockey at its finest.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/1/3/8/2210138-box_nhl2000.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nhl-2000-review/1900-2543845/,pos,"
Most gamers wait with bated breath for the latest, greatest shooters and real-time strategy games every fall - but not me. Sure, I love a good deathmatch as much as the next guy, but when September rolls around, the one game I want to play more than any other is hockey. I've been devoted to EA Sports' NHL Hockey series since I played the original on my old Sega Genesis. Of course, as a hard-core hockey fan I'm also one of the series' harshest critics, eternally hoping that EA will make the game more realistic and challenging. Thankfully, this year EA Sports came closer than ever to achieving the perfect balance between realistic gameplay and graphic appeal. Sure, NHL 2000 has its flaws, but most of these are overshadowed by the game's many strengths. Simply put, NHL 2000 is virtual hockey at its finest. At first glance, NHL 2000 looks like the same game EA shipped last year, with a handful of visual enhancements. Rest assured that this is not the case: Among the many under-the-hood changes, EA Sports finally changed the way the game clock works. Now, instead of offering 5-, 10-, or 20-minute periods, the game always simulates a 20-minute period with an acceleration modifier that lets it last anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes of real time. This has two significant results: First, the game now computes goalies' statistics correctly. Second, the computer-simulated league games now generate realistic scores and statistics, instead of the low-scoring tallies of previous versions. This means that your league leader boards will now include player stats from computer-controlled teams, instead of just those from your own high-scoring team. More obvious changes to NHL 2000 include even more lifelike computer-controlled players and strategies, which are built upon NHL 99's marked AI improvements. While it may not be as true to life as Radical's PowerPlay series, the gameplay in NHL 2000 is by far the most realistic of any game in the series. This time, AI players forecheck more aggressively and get back into a good defensive position after a turnover. Additionally, players will get caught out of position when they go for an ill-timed body check or steal, opening up more breakaway and odd-man rush opportunities. The game also offers more coaching strategies, including a ""crash the net"" option. New training scenarios can help you figure out how to skate, shoot, and check as well as hit one-timer shots and give-and-go passes. Speaking of one-timers, they actually work in NHL 2000. Nothing was more frustrating in NHL 99 than setting up a perfect two-on-one play, dishing the puck to a wide-open winger, and seeing him smash a one-time slap shot into the goalie's chest. This year, if your guy really is in a good position and shoots the puck cleanly, you will score. You'll find that penalty shots (which are a little less common this year) and breakaways are easier to score with as well. You may even tally a goal or two on plain old shots from the point. In fact, the only scoring method that seems to be toned down is deflections, which were way too easy and automated in NHL 99. Deflections aside, however, ""super goalies"" appear to be a thing of the past, which means that your scoring totals should go way up with NHL 2000. But you won't be the only one scoring. The computer opponents in NHL 2000 are craftier, quicker, and more skilled than in previous versions. While NHL 99 and its predecessors use a basic ""body check/get the puck/shoot"" algorithm for AI-controlled teams, NHL 2000 uses more of a ""shoot/shoot/shoot"" method of challenging you. And though I occasionally got outshot by the computer in NHL 99, I found that I was almost always being outshot and out-checked by the AI in NHL 2000 - usually at a two-to-one ratio in both cases. This is the one area where NHL 2000 remains unrealistic. Shot totals are still ridiculously high, but at least now a more realistic number of those shots will actually go in the net. In fact, the computer scores a lot of goals now - occasionally in a frustrating ""that damn AI is cheating"" manner. Long-range blue-line shots tend to get past your goalie with alarming frequency, typically before you can even see your goalie on the screen. But this sort of thing happens all the time in real hockey, so it's actually good to see in NHL 2000. As a result, the game is more difficult than NHL 99 but less frustrating at the same time. True hard-core players will begin to wallop the computer with regularity after 20 to 30 games, even on the hardest difficulty setting, but very few sports games have ever been able to prevent this type of mastery. Also, if you choose to play the game with a bad team (my beloved Islanders, for example), you'll find yourself sorely ill-equipped against AI-controlled powerhouses like Colorado, Dallas, and Detroit. Of course, you can ditch the real teams altogether and use the game's new (and long overdue) fantasy draft feature. This lets you build a custom team from scratch by drafting against the computer. The draft is flawed - Adam Deadmarsh and Bryan Berard are almost always drafted before Jaromir Jagr, Paul Kariya, and Teemu Selanne - but it does let you customize the gameplay. Similarly, the career mode has been enhanced in NHL 2000 so that you can now draft rookies before each season, while aging players will retire and move on via free agency. Another significant new feature is the Internet multiplayer support, complete with an EA-maintained lobby system. It's not the slickest online gaming system, but it is convenient for finding opponents. The gameplay can be choppy, but it does work, and the game host can choose client-server or peer-to-peer connections. But no matter how you play it, NHL 2000 is simply beautiful. New animations for shots, checks, and goalie saves are augmented by the new face-mapping technique that makes every NHL player look exactly like his real-life counterpart. Better yet, you can even import a picture of yourself and have it mapped onto a custom player of your own creation. The audio effects in NHL 2000 are as good as ever, with excellent lifelike sounds for every body check, shot, and arena noise imaginable. The game even includes a library of prerecorded names so that your custom players can finally get their due during play-by-play and PA announcements. And even though the play-by-play still suffers from the same out-of-sync problems of previous versions, it is considerably more accurate than it was in NHL 99. Also, EA finally brought in decent color commentary talent in the form of ESPN's Bill Clement. If NHL 2000 deserves to be criticized for anything, it would have to be for the unusually high number of injuries that now take place during an average game. In a single period of my first season game, I lost four players for two to three weeks each, while two guys from the computer team went down. You can turn the injury feature off, but it would be better to use a slider bar for injury frequency, like the penalty and fighting frequency options already in place. The only good thing about the injuries is that they force you to manage your roster, by trading for new talent and juggling lines to bolster an injury-riddled squad. Also, the game's computer-arbitrated trading system has a flaw that lets you upgrade your team while seriously deteriorating the talent of other squads. Basically, you can trade any player for any other player whose overall skill value is one to three points higher. Using this loophole, I was able to turn the Islanders' Eric Cairns (rated a 56) into Jaromir Jagr (rated a 100) using a sequence of 15 trades. I even spent an hour doing this for the entire Atlanta Thrasher team and created a squad where no player was rated at less than 80. Fortunately, only complete hockey dorks would waste so much time exploiting this problem. Overall, NHL 2000 is the best hockey game EA Sports has ever produced. Despite the inflated shot totals and the not-quite-perfect draft, career, and trading features, this is as good as it gets in PC hockey games. It's definitely worth the upgrade for NHL 98 and NHL 99 users, and those new to the series will surely find it worth the investment. 
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277,Planescape: Torment ,9, It's clearly the best traditional computer role-playing game of the year and is bound to be an all-time favorite for many of its inevitable fans.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/3/2/2209832-planescape.jpeg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/planescape-torment-review/1900-2535119/,pos,"
Torment is a traditional role-playing game with an uncommonly detailed story and first-rate graphics and sound. It's set in the complex and interesting Advanced Dungeons & Dragons universe of Planescape, which is a patchwork of wildly different dimensions surrounding a sprawling city that connects them together. In Torment, you play as a nameless character who cannot die and cannot remember his past, and in uncovering his origin, you'll experience one of the year's most fascinating games. Torment uses the same graphics engine as Baldur's Gate and will consequently seem immediately familiar to fans of the best-selling 1998 role-playing game. However, Torment's top-down isometric perspective is much closer to the ground than in Baldur's Gate, which means all the characters in Torment appear quite large onscreen. Each character is highly detailed, carefully animated, and cleverly designed above all else. Torment abandons the high-fantasy styling of most RPGs and instead uses the Planescape license's unique interpretation of familiar fantasy archetypes, which lends the game a wholly original appearance that defies expectations for fantasy and science fiction artwork. Even Torment's protagonist, who is heavily scarred, entirely tattooed, and dressed in bones and animal hides, seems nothing like the usual role-playing game hero. Torment's scenery is more intricately detailed than the scenery in Baldur's Gate because of the close perspective, and much like its characters, the scenery looks good and looks different from what you're used to. The game has no pointless spans of wilderness; each area is carefully designed, and most areas are densely populated. The jutting blade-like architecture of the game's urban settings and the rough-hewn, almost alien tangle of its catacombs give Torment a well-defined, highly distinctive appearance, while the game's atmospheric soundtrack, good sound effects, and sparse but high-quality voice acting all help maintain Torment's style. The game has a consistently cold look that can even be unsettling and uncomfortable at times, but Torment's bleak environments seem to work intentionally to motivate the protagonist's desire to escape from the oppressive, claustrophobic confines of the city of Sigil. In spite of its harsh scenery, at times Torment is colorful and impressive looking, mainly because of its often-spectacular special effects. Powerful magic spells cause the screen to go dim and erupt in ghostly energy, which shakes and rattles the screen. Even the game's most minor incantations feature impressive effects and animations, although some of the more elaborate effects tend to make the game slow down. The Baldur's Gate engine has other limitations, some of which are exclusively aesthetic, and some of which have a slightly adverse effect on Torment's gameplay. However, as in Baldur's Gate, Torment players will likely be quick to dismiss or disregard any such problems, like the limited screen resolution, bad character pathfinding, and the unattractive real-time-strategy-style fog of war shroud that covers each new area you visit. To allow for Torment's bigger characters, most of the game's interface is invisible until you right-click to bring up a circular pop-up window that lets you use items, cast spells, use special abilities, and so forth. Unfortunately, while the hidden interface does free up most of the screen, it is neither compact nor intuitive - you'll spend a lot of time fumbling for its little unmarked buttons or otherwise dragging it aside so you can see what's happening once you bring it up. At least the game automatically pauses whenever the interface is active, so you can figure it out at your leisure. Even though most of Torment's interface isn't onscreen most of the time, you'll find that the game's close-up perspective nevertheless has particular problems. There are virtually no ranged weapons in the game, if only because there's so little relative distance from one end of the screen to the other. Similarly, several of the game's powerful spells have a bad tendency to be just as dangerous to the caster, because by the time the enemy is targeted and the spell is uttered, that enemy has already closed the distance with the caster, who invariably suffers from his own magical attack. Torment also suffers from the game's unrefined menu screens and the unavoidably slow scrolling speed of its extensive dialogue, which, much like the interface, you will train yourself to ignore. You will ignore Torment's technical problems because it's such a good game. Specifically, it's a long and involving game with an original plot, well-written, descriptive dialogue, and likable characters. It's fortunate that Torment's dialogue reads well, because there's a lot of it to read; although the game's graphics are evocative and often beautiful, the game's most vivid events are actually written out rather than portrayed onscreen. You might wish the game had a more frequent tendency to show-not-tell; however, its combination of great graphics and writing is generally very effective. As such, even though you'll be reading text half the time, you'll rarely feel as if the dialogue interferes with the game's surprisingly quick pacing. That's mainly because the dialogue is actually one of the best parts of Torment, since it's one of the few role-playing games to ever make good on the promise of letting you play your character however you prefer. Torment's dialogue often lets you choose to make promises, bluff, or play dumb; the game lets you perceive small details if your character is intelligent, understand philosophical implications if he's wise, and intimidate or charm if he's strong or charismatic. Your character's moral alignment and his affiliation with Sigil's different factions are openly flexible and have a noticeable impact on the course of the game. Similarly, your character can readily switch between fighter, thief, and magic-user classes and can rapidly advance to a high level of proficiency in any and all of these, which is justified within the game as not so much an acquiring of new skills as a remembrance of latent centuries-old talents. In addition, your character's perverse incapacity to permanently die also helps maintain Torment's pacing by discouraging you from frequently reloading your saved games, although the game never seems easy or trivial in spite of the hero's immortality. Yet it's easy to apologize for Torment's many programming flaws, which cause the game to become excruciatingly slow at times and some of its dozens of quests to become unsolvable on occasion. It's true that bugs in computer role-playing games seem almost as conventional as spells and hit points. Fortunately, Torment's aren't so drastic that they actually ruin any single part of the game. Nevertheless, you'll probably experience several glitches either in performance or in quest scripting that make portions of the game unnecessarily frustrating, especially in light of Torment's generally excellent quality. In fact, it's evidence of Torment's impressive achievement that its problems, which would be detrimental to most any other game, seem so negligible. It's clearly the best traditional computer role-playing game of the year and is bound to be an all-time favorite for many of its inevitable fans. That's because it's a great-looking game that's lengthy but never boring, and it begs to be played through more than once, just as its unique hero and his story promise not to be forgotten. 
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278,Donkey Kong 64 ,9, Those of you who remotely liked Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie will be excited to the point of numbness by this game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/3/8/6/2216386-box_dk64.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/donkey-kong-64-review/1900-2543651/,pos,"
If Mario is Nintendo's Luke Skywalker, then it's safe to say that Donkey Kong is Nintendo's Darth Vader. Originally cast as the primate villain in the Donkey Kong arcade game back in the early '80s, Kong and his many descendants have stepped away from the ""dark side"" and become forces for good. While it's genetically unlikely that Kong is Mario's father, it's been well documented that Kong and company have been enlisted to rescue Nintendo in times of trouble. Remember when the Super NES was ""threatened"" by Sega's 32-bit/CD add-on hype? A game called Donkey Kong Country came out, featuring prerendered graphics never before seen on a home console. Not only did it breathe new life into the Super NES' sales, it spawned a profitable series that kept Nintendo's 16-bit scene alive for years to come. Fast forward to 1999. Sega and Sony again threaten the Nintendo 64 with superior game consoles, and once again Nintendo calls on Kong's descendants to breathe new life into its 64-bit system with Donkey Kong 64. While this much-anticipated 3D adventure game has high-quality gameplay and plenty of variety to fuel Nintendo's sales this holiday season, it lacks enough ""wow factor"" to exert the revolutionary influence that Donkey Kong Country had. Donkey Kong 64 starts with a well-worn storyline: Donkey Kong's isle of paradise faces destruction by an invading K.Rool and his crocodile Kremlings. Donkey now has four friends to help him defeat K.Rool: Diddy Kong, his perennial sidekick; Lanky Kong, an ape with super-stretchy limbs; Tiny Kong, a teenybopper who can shrink to fit into small holes; and Chunky Kong, a muscle-bound lunkhead who can lift boulders and smash down doors. Veterans of the Donkey Kong series will also note the return of old-timers like Cranky, Funky, and Candy, all of whom upgrade the Kongs with new abilities, hints, shooting weapons, and musical instruments that help unlock hidden areas. For the most part, Donkey Kong 64 is an explore-and-collect adventure. Those who obtain perverse pleasure from collecting every last coin and item in this type of game will be titillated - and those who don't will be frustrated. The main thrust is to find 200 golden bananas in the main world and in the seemingly standard individual stages: an underwater level, a forest level, a jungle level, an industrial level, etc. As expected, almost none of these bananas are in plain view - multipart puzzles and obstacles impede the way to these treasures. However, there's plenty more to collect: regular bananas, fairies (which you must take pictures of with a camera), banana medals, super-secret Rareware coins, blueprint pieces (found by defeating certain enemies), crowns (to unlock multiplayer games) and boss keys (to unlock new areas on the island). Now, factor in that each of the five characters must find some of these items individually: Devoted gamers will see this as added replay value, while others will see it as a royal pain in the Donkey derriere. If that weren't enough, it seems the developers threw every gameplay style they could think of into the mix. This gameplay variety is perhaps this title's main strength, although the quality of the games varies. For starters, the game has a separate two-to four-player mode, with games such as a battle arena, where Kongs can beat up each other in a circular ring, or a GoldenEye-type shooting game. In the adventure mode, you earn golden bananas by completing mini-bonus games. Some are true games in their own right, such as a racing track, race-boat water course, or mine-cart roller coaster - all of which look impressive in 3D. Some of these games are less visually impressive but are entertaining nevertheless, such as a maze where the Kong must avoid enemy detection, or a bug splattering stage. The remaining games - such as a simple target-shooting session or a slot machine - are either run-of-the-mill or too easy to sustain long-term interest. Finally, a couple of bonus games are direct translations of old-school titles, including a partial version of the original Donkey Kong arcade game that'll bring back memories for some. Since the Kongs learn unique abilities as the game progresses, some Kongs have special stages, as well. Remember the barrel-blast levels in the 16-bit games? Donkey now plays them in 3D with a target sight. As the barrel moves, you can shoot Donkey out to other barrels. Diddy gets a jet pack that lets him complete some flying stages, while the other three characters learn other impressive skills, such as shrinking (Tiny), climbing up steep slopes (Lanky), and lifting or breaking heavy objects (Chunky). If that weren't enough, some characters can transform into animals, such as a rhino or a swordfish, to break into boxes or secret areas and kill bothersome enemies. Hands down, there's probably no other game currently on the market that's filled with as much gameplay variety as this title. But at its core, this game is a 3D adventure in the vein of Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie. Just like Mario, Donkey Kong translates well from 2D into 3D. The rendering of the huge levels and dimwitted enemies seems directly lifted from the 16-bit games - with the expected improvements resulting from technology upgrades. The most obvious upgrade? Donkey Kong 64 is the first title that must be played with the memory expansion pak, which is sold with the game. Graphically, the high-resolution detail is immediately apparent (there's even an optional widescreen mode), but the jump in quality isn't far above any recent well-made Nintendo 64 game. Even with the pak, the graphics have limits that hamper gameplay: For instance, when a Kong stands above a tree to look around, many faraway objects and icons fail to show up, making it difficult to survey where missing items might be located. In rare instances, there's even slowdown in the frame rate, such as when a large boat is added to a portion of the underwater level. Still, the well-crafted graphics look as good as anything else on the Nintendo 64, and Rare has to be applauded for special graphical details that add flavor to the game, such as special animations for getting bananas from an invention-minded weasel, and little references to earlier Donkey Kong games (for example, pictures of old enemies from the 16-bit games inside a sunken ship). As the Kongs learn more skills, the controls get necessarily complicated. While the control itself is intuitive, aspects of it do detract from the game. With the exceptions of Diddy and Tiny, the Kongs run slowly. This makes exploration a bit tiresome in levels where that Kongs search for the last golden banana. Fortunately, the game uses teleports to whisk characters from one area to another - but a slight speed boost for the big Kongs would've helped. Otherwise, the responsive control works just fine in most situations. What does fall short - and what is likely the game's biggest flaw - is the camera. This is a game where the enemies and bosses won't kill you, but the camera angles will. This is especially true in some swimming sequences, where the camera flakes out when you're close to walls, and in at least one boss battle, where the camera's fixed location prevents you from seeing the boss half the time - and wild camera swinging makes it a pain to jump accurately. In some cases, when a Kong's behind an object, the camera gets confused and flutters wildly. But 95 percent of the time the camera works decently enough - and since no 3D game has yet to offer a ""perfect"" camera, it's unfair to hammer this point home. Suffice it to say, the camera is the one aspect of the game that could use improvement, and you will just have to accept the frustrating five percent. The game suffers from other minor flaws. The GoldenEye-type multiplayer mode, while serving up extra gameplay styles such as tag and survival, loses its luster rather quickly. This is mainly because some Kongs move slowly, and there's a woeful lack of weaponry to spice up the destruction. The other multiplayer modes seem a bit too trivial to sustain long-term enjoyment as well. All flaws aside, strong gameplay reigns throughout Donkey Kong 64, mainly because Rare has preserved the Kongs' cooperative spirit from the 16-bit titles. Simply put, one Kong must complete several tasks (such as activating switches) so other Kongs can complete their quests in that stage. This process gets rather complex in later levels, and you must keep thinking creatively to solve the game's many puzzles. This truly adds to the ""cerebral"" gameplay aspects, in addition to the jump-and-shoot reflex testing already prevalent in the game's levels. For those with a high-quality sound system, this game will prove a delight, with the Dolby surround sound effects adding to gameplay - audio clues can help gamers find certain items such as fairies. The audio filters that kick in, such as when a Kong's underwater, are also impressive. Although there's plenty of audio for the intro, it would've been better to add some talking audio for animals or supporting characters within a level, rather than plain text and sound effects. To best summarize this game is to flip-flop a popular catch phrase of the day: ""Don't hate the game, hate the player."" Had this game been released with the Nintendo 64's launch, gamers would've gone bananas (sorry, I couldn't resist at least one monkey-related pun) and hailed this game as a gift from the video-game gods. Nowadays, 3D adventures seem to be a dime a dozen, and despite all the exhaustive gameplay Rare has thrown onto this game's plate, jaded players will probably aim ""been there, done that"" criticism at the title. That said, this reviewer feels Donkey Kong 64 offers too much solid gameplay to warrant such criticism, even though it's not the technological marvel that Donkey Kong Country had been in its heyday. Those of you who remotely liked Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie will be excited to the point of numbness by this game. However, for those of you averse to the ""collect everything"" gameplay mentality, this game might come off as a chore to complete. In any case, Donkey Kong 64 has high-quality adventure written all over it - despite its camera flaws - and it gives you many reasons to see the good-guy Kongs thrive in 3D. 
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279,Bad Mojo ,9," Strikingly original, Bad Mojo is a gritty, action-based exploration that sucks you in with great visuals, and keeps you playing with a poignant story.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/9/1/2211591-196680_41738_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bad-mojo-review/1900-2538115/,pos,"
If you think you have it tough, try switching places with entomologist Roger Samms who, as fate would have it, has been temporarily turned into a cockroach. A dead ringer for Jim Carrey, Dr. Samms is an embittered mad scientist who embezzles money from a research grant for roach-killing pesticide, and on the eve of his perfect getaway is faced with an untimely metamorphosis. Lucky for you, Roger's dingy apartment is just the kind of place where a cockroach could have a field day. Grimy sewer pipes are your private roads to several rooms in the dilapidated building, unveiling screen after glorious screen of the best computer art you've ever seen in a game. Strikingly original, Bad Mojo (meaning ""black magic"") is a gritty, action-based exploration that sucks you in with great visuals, and keeps you playing with a poignant story and clever obstacles that bar your progress from room to room. Magic and realism blend together in Mojo, where your exploration of Roger's place in a dark corner of San Francisco's techno-rejuvenated South of Market district presents an animal kingdom of friendly guides who supply clues and moral support during your quest. Still images, magically triggered by a little nudge from your roach, display well-produced video sequences that provide a bittersweet background story, and help to explain your current predicament. From time to time you'll see images of a magical matriarch who supplies witty, rhyming messages that help give you immediate goals. Bad Mojo conveys an intricate world but, like Myst, supplies simple, intuitive controls for your interaction with this world. Four directional keys are all you need, supplying you with enough liberty to get fully engrossed without requiring you to learn a new, complicated interface. Without a doubt, Bad Mojo is not for the faint-hearted. If filth, creepy spiders, and gasping fish out of water make your skin crawl, you'll want to avoid this game. But those who can stomach these treats will find a rewarding world of fun in Bad Mojo.
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280,Duke Nukem Forever ,3, The bland and ugly Duke Nukem Forever turns a famous gaming icon into an embarrassment.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/7/9/2219279-box_dnf.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/duke-nukem-forever-review/1900-6319249/,neg,"
  So this is what we've been waiting for, it seems: a tedious and unattractive sci-fi shooter that would quickly hit the bargain bin if it weren't called Duke Nukem Forever. Duke may be an icon, but he's just going through the motions in this stitched-together collection of poorly paced levels, which do the unimaginable: they make Duke boring. Some see the cigar-chomping alpha male as a misogynist pig; others see a clever and ironic take on macho cliches. Neither crowd is likely to get worked up over Duke's actions here. Sure, he spouts the occasional sexist quip. He receives a lap dance from a topless stripper, smacks monsters in the crotch to humiliate them, and has no problem using words beginning with the letter ""f."" But there's nothing sexy, provocative, or sly about his portrayal in this long-awaited sequel. In Duke Nukem Forever, there is little joy, little excitement, and little fun. That is, unless your idea of fun is to catch an occasional glimpse of digital nipples while you jump and drive around, and only occasionally shoot a few brain-dead aliens.       Duke Nukem Forever is a treatise on what happens when random ideas are slapped together without regard for how they fit with one another. You might spend only three or four minutes on one level, doing nothing but walking and jumping a bit, before reaching the inexcusably long loading screen that introduces the next. Other sections drag on interminably, and there are frequent stretches in which nothing is happening. The game slows to a crawl constantly. Take, for example, a series of levels in which you drive Duke's four-wheeler. In these sequences, you drive over aliens and use ramps to jump across chasms. You see a lot of the same brown canyons and cliffs in these sections, and on scripted occasions, the rover stalls and you have to get out and search for gas cans. It's nice that you get the chance to shoot some aliens amid all this bland driving. But this structure repeats itself three times in a row. The driving just goes on and on, and then on some more. And just when you think you're going to get the chance to do something different, you get in your monster truck and drive up more ramps.    That kind of pace-killing monotony is frequent in Duke Nukem Forever. You do a lot of platforming and some occasional puzzle-solving, but all of these portions are dull as dishwater. Several jumping sequences see you shrinking to action-figure height. Playing as pint-sized Duke is a neat idea, and he spews profane chatter as if he has inhaled a tank's worth of helium. (""Size only matters when you're full grown,"" Duke reminds us with his chipmunk voice.) But these sections drag on for ages, such as a prolonged excursion across burger patties and kitchen shelves. It's cute at first, but five minutes in, you wish it would just end. An excruciating platforming section across rotating gears is wholly un-fun. Puzzles that have you pushing orbs around on the ground turn a voyage through an alien hive into pure drudgery. Few first-person shooters are this focused on monotonous actions that don't involve shooting.     Duke Nukem Forever isn't just boring; sometimes, it's plain awful. The last 90 minutes of the game are putrid, featuring seemingly unending underwater excursions in which you swim over bubbles to catch your breath. There's only a bit of action here, and the need to constantly replenish your breath meter is frustrating--as is the ease with which you can get caught up in the environment while swimming through tunnel entrances. A level soon after has you running up a staircase as explosive barrels come rolling toward you, all while the rising water level forces you to push forward. Not fun; not even close. Furthermore, the ridiculously flippant ending that follows is an absolute insult. Duke himself says in his unenthusiastic monotone: ""What kind of s*** ending is that?"" So Duke knows the finale is abysmal, which means the development team(s) did too. But making a joke about it doesn't make it excusable. The game pulls the same trick earlier on, cracking wise about a boring valve-turning puzzle, but once again, Duke's claim that he hates valve puzzles doesn't make this boring and cliched task suddenly entertaining.   Either this guy's a little person, or that is one gigantic can of beer.   Every so often, you shoot some aliens. There are no surprises here: these are mostly the same foes and the same guns from Duke Nukem 3D. But the joy of that game's shooting has been flattened. Pig cops, octabrains, and so on occasionally threaten you, but they don't react much to getting shot, and they just sort of fall over when you kill them. The shooting has little sense of impact: you don't get gushers of blood or goo, only pixelated sprinkles, though there are a few decent moments when the action gels. A few shoot-outs in a ghost town require some fleet-footed movement and offer a bit of a challenge, as does a boss fight atop a dam. And it's always enjoyable to deflate an alien beast with the shrink ray and stomp on the puny thing. On the other hand, a rooftop sequence in which dropships deliver one wave of aliens after another just drags on and on. Here, and in a few other sections, it's also possible to find yourself without the right weapon for the job and have no way to replenish your ammo. It's as if the levels were designed for the old Duke, who could carry a full arsenal of guns at once. But the new Duke carries only two weapons at a time.     You might hope that Duke could at least pep up the proceedings with some trademark raunch--maybe a bit of nudity, some misogynistic humor, and the occasional wagging of a middle finger. You get all of these things, but Duke Nukem Forever's attempts to recapture that old filthy magic aren't funny--just sad. About halfway through, Duke makes a pit stop to visit his strip club. This is the least sexy strip club you could imagine, because there's no stripping, though you do receive a lewd proposal: a lady friend offers a lap dance if you find her three objects, including a battery-powered device designed for her pleasure. And so your visit to a strip club is characterized not by a rush of sexual energy or a ridiculous riff on Duke's sexism, but by a fetch quest. One that involves popping popcorn in a microwave oven. Really.   Nothing like a screen full of brown to energize a turret sequence.  The reward for your microwaving skills is to have a stunningly un-sexy woman gyrate without her top on. Like all of Duke Nukem Forever's character models, she moves with the grace of a dump truck; and like all of the game's women, she talks with the dulcet tones of a truck stop waitress. Every attempt the game makes to be ""adult"" comes across as pathetic. You find nudie magazines here and there, but the naked women you ogle are so pixelated, you might as well be looking at the latest issue of Lego Playboy. The idea of Duke urinating in a dying alien's eye socket sounds filthy. But the game doesn't stylize this or other such moments in any way. The generic, public-domain-quality soundtrack lulls you into passivity; the camera angles do what they need to, but no more. And so the sight of Duke peeing into a body cavity isn't shocking--it's shockingly banal. The game's funniest moment doesn't even involve smut: it's Duke's mimicking of the sound of an industrial fan. This isn't the Duke you knew. This is Duke reimagined as an aging gym bunny desperately trying to recapture his youth, and failing.  It isn't just the tedious pace and paltry puerility that make Duke Nukem Forever feel like a thrown-together budget game. (Take note that this downtrodden shooter sells at full price.) It's also ugly. There are hideous amounts of texture pop-in, yet the differences between the original blurred textures and those that replace them are minimal. Blocky characters stand around and unenthusiastically deliver their lines with minimal mouth movement. Buildings in the distance might be all off-white, with no details or textures at all to differentiate them. Yet every so often, you see a clear detail--text on a poster, for example--that sticks out like a sore thumb, considering the hazy surfaces and jagged edges that surround it. In spite of its poor visuals, the game suffers from frequent frame rate stutters, an inexcusable problem in a run-and-gun shooter. How does a game that looks this old not perform smoothly?   This is one time when you're tempted to just let the aliens win.  Its multiplayer options might have been Duke Nukem Forever's saving grace. The best idea here is Duke's digs, an apartment where you can purchase and admire various pieces of furniture and other objects. The more you play online and gain experience, the more goodies you get, including new shirts and hats to show off during matches. But your digs can't compensate for lag and shuddering frame rates, which turn many matches into a wreck. You might wait a few seconds just for the prompt to pick up a weapon to appear, all while competitors teleport around you, or you might glimpse a foe standing idly in the air above you as if supported by an invisible ledge. The modes are hardly groundbreaking: you get deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill, and capture the flag variants supporting up to eight players. Some old-fashioned deathmatch action is fine, though, provided it's done right. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the maps themselves, which give plenty of opportunity to bunny-hop around and seek out the cool weapons hiding in out-of-the-way places. But the technical hitches make almost every match uncomfortably jittery.  Given its storied development history, you might be inclined to grab a copy of this train wreck. Avoid the temptation. While much of Duke Nukem Forever is embarrassingly bad--the kind of game you point and laugh at--its biggest problem is that it's so tedious. Twisting valves, jumping on pipes and alien tentacles, driving through drab canyons, rolling alien spheres along the ground: this is what Duke Nukem Forever is about. It's not about shooting aliens, and it certainly isn't about fun. This game takes an icon and turns him into a laughingstock. Except, no one's laughing.   


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281,Duke Nukem Forever ,3, The bland and ugly Duke Nukem Forever turns a famous gaming icon into an embarrassment.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/7/9/2219279-box_dnf.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/duke-nukem-forever-review/1900-6319881/,neg,"
  So this is what we've been waiting for, it seems: a tedious and unattractive sci-fi shooter that would quickly hit the bargain bin if it weren't called Duke Nukem Forever. Duke may be an icon, but he's just going through the motions in this stitched-together collection of poorly paced levels, which do the unimaginable: they make Duke boring. Some see the cigar-chomping alpha male as a misogynist pig; others see a clever and ironic take on macho cliches. Neither crowd is likely to get worked up over Duke's actions here. Sure, he spouts the occasional sexist quip. He receives a lap dance from a topless stripper, smacks monsters in the crotch to humiliate them, and has no problem using words beginning with the letter ""f."" But there's nothing sexy, provocative, or sly about his portrayal in this long-awaited sequel. In Duke Nukem Forever, there is little joy, little excitement, and little fun. That is, unless your idea of fun is to catch an occasional glimpse of digital nipples while you jump and drive around, and only occasionally shoot a few brain-dead aliens.       Duke Nukem Forever is a treatise on what happens when random ideas are slapped together without regard for how they fit with one another. You might spend only three or four minutes on one level, doing nothing but walking and jumping a bit, before reaching the inexcusably long loading screen that introduces the next. Other sections drag on interminably, and there are frequent stretches in which nothing is happening. The game slows to a crawl constantly. Take, for example, a series of levels in which you drive Duke's four-wheeler. In these sequences, you drive over aliens and use ramps to jump across chasms. You see a lot of the same brown canyons and cliffs in these sections, and on scripted occasions, the rover stalls and you have to get out and search for gas cans. It's nice that you get the chance to shoot some aliens amid all this bland driving. But this structure repeats itself three times in a row. The driving just goes on and on, and then on some more. And just when you think you're going to get the chance to do something different, you get in your monster truck and drive up more ramps.    That kind of pace-killing monotony is frequent in Duke Nukem Forever. You do a lot of platforming and some occasional puzzle-solving, but all of these portions are dull as dishwater. Several jumping sequences see you shrinking to action-figure height. Playing as pint-sized Duke is a neat idea, and he spews profane chatter as if he has inhaled a tank's worth of helium. (""Size only matters when you're full grown,"" Duke reminds us with his chipmunk voice.) But these sections drag on for ages, such as a prolonged excursion across burger patties and kitchen shelves. It's cute at first, but five minutes in, you wish it would just end. An excruciating platforming section across rotating gears is wholly un-fun. Puzzles that have you pushing orbs around on the ground turn a voyage through an alien hive into pure drudgery. Few first-person shooters are this focused on monotonous actions that don't involve shooting.     Duke Nukem Forever isn't just boring; sometimes, it's plain awful. The last 90 minutes of the game are putrid, featuring seemingly unending underwater excursions in which you swim over bubbles to catch your breath. There's only a bit of action here, and the need to constantly replenish your breath meter is frustrating--as is the ease with which you can get caught up in the environment while swimming through tunnel entrances. A level soon after has you running up a staircase as explosive barrels come rolling toward you, all while the rising water level forces you to push forward. Not fun; not even close. Furthermore, the ridiculously flippant ending that follows is an absolute insult. Duke himself says in his unenthusiastic monotone: ""What kind of s*** ending is that?"" So Duke knows the finale is abysmal, which means the development team(s) did too. But making a joke about it doesn't make it excusable. The game pulls the same trick earlier on, cracking wise about a boring valve-turning puzzle, but once again, Duke's claim that he hates valve puzzles doesn't make this boring and cliched task suddenly entertaining.   Duke isn't fighting aliens to save Earth--he just needs to know where they took the chicks.   Every so often, you shoot some aliens. There are no surprises here: these are mostly the same foes and the same guns from Duke Nukem 3D. But the joy of that game's shooting has been flattened. Pig cops, octabrains, and so on occasionally threaten you, but they don't react much to getting shot, and they just sort of fall over when you kill them. The shooting has little sense of impact: you don't get gushers of blood or goo, only pixelated sprinkles, though there are a few decent moments when the action gels. A few shoot-outs in a ghost town require some fleet-footed movement and offer a bit of a challenge, as does a boss fight atop a dam. And it's always enjoyable to deflate an alien beast with the shrink ray and stomp on the puny thing. On the other hand, a rooftop sequence in which dropships deliver one wave of aliens after another just drags on and on. Here, and in a few other sections, it's also possible to find yourself without the right weapon for the job and have no way to replenish your ammo. It's as if the levels were designed for the old Duke, who could carry a full arsenal of guns at once. But the new Duke carries only two weapons at a time.      You might hope that Duke could at least pep up the proceedings with some trademark raunch--maybe a bit of nudity, some misogynistic humor, and the occasional wagging of a middle finger. You get all of these things, but Duke Nukem Forever's attempts to recapture that old filthy magic aren't funny--just sad. About halfway through, Duke makes a pit stop to visit his strip club. This is the least sexy strip club you could imagine, because there's no stripping, though you do receive a lewd proposal: a lady friend offers a lap dance if you find her three objects, including a battery-powered device designed for her pleasure. And so your visit to a strip club is characterized not by a rush of sexual energy or a ridiculous riff on Duke's sexism, but by a fetch quest. One that involves popping popcorn in a microwave oven. Really.    Just when you get tired of the color brown, Duke Nukem Forever mixes things up. With gray.   The reward for your microwaving skills is to have a stunningly un-sexy woman gyrate without her top on. Like all of Duke Nukem Forever's character models, she moves with the grace of a dump truck; and like all of the game's women, she talks with the dulcet tones of a truck stop waitress. Every attempt the game makes to be ""adult"" comes across as pathetic. You find nudie magazines here and there, but the naked women you ogle are so pixelated, you might as well be looking at the latest issue of Lego Playboy. The idea of Duke urinating in a dying alien's eye socket sounds filthy. But the game doesn't stylize this or other such moments in any way. The generic, public-domain-quality soundtrack lulls you into passivity; the camera angles do what they need to, but no more. And so the sight of Duke peeing into a body cavity isn't shocking--it's shockingly banal. The game's funniest moment doesn't even involve smut: it's Duke's mimicking of the sound of an industrial fan. This isn't the Duke you knew. This is Duke reimagined as an aging gym bunny desperately trying to recapture his youth, and failing.    It isn't just the tedious pace and paltry puerility that make Duke Nukem Forever feel like a thrown-together budget game. (Take note that this downtrodden shooter sells at full price.) It's also ugly. There are hideous amounts of texture pop-in, yet the differences between the original blurred textures and those that replace them are minimal. Blocky characters stand around and unenthusiastically deliver their lines with minimal mouth movement. Buildings in the distance might be all off-white, with no details or textures at all to differentiate them. Yet every so often, you see a clear detail--text on a poster, for example--that sticks out like a sore thumb, considering the hazy surfaces and jagged edges that surround it. In spite of its poor visuals, the game suffers from frequent frame rate stutters, an inexcusable problem in a run-and-gun shooter. How does a game that looks this old not perform smoothly?    For beings capable of interstellar travel, these aliens sure are dumb.   Its multiplayer options might have been Duke Nukem Forever's saving grace. The best idea here is Duke's digs, an apartment where you can purchase and admire various pieces of furniture and other objects. The more you play online and gain experience, the more goodies you get, including new shirts and hats to show off during matches. But your digs can't compensate for lag and shuddering frame rates, which turn many matches into a wreck. You might wait a few seconds just for the prompt to pick up a weapon to appear, all while competitors teleport around you, or you might glimpse a foe standing idly in the air above you as if supported by an invisible ledge. The modes are hardly groundbreaking: you get deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill, and capture the flag variants supporting up to eight players. Some old-fashioned deathmatch action is fine, though, provided it's done right. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the maps themselves, which give plenty of opportunity to bunny-hop around and seek out the cool weapons hiding in out-of-the-way places. But the technical hitches make almost every match uncomfortably jittery.    Given its storied development history, you might be inclined to grab a copy of this train wreck. Avoid the temptation. While much of Duke Nukem Forever is embarrassingly bad--the kind of game you point and laugh at--its biggest problem is that it's so tedious. Twisting valves, jumping on pipes and alien tentacles, driving through drab canyons, rolling alien spheres along the ground: this is what Duke Nukem Forever is about. It's not about shooting aliens, and it certainly isn't about fun. This game takes an icon and turns him into a laughingstock. Except, no one's laughing.    


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282,G.I. Combat: Episode 1: Battle of Normandy ,3," G.I. Combat might realistically model the chaos and confusion of a real-world skirmish, but it's hardly playable.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/6/3/6/3228-12636.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gi-combat-episode-1-battle-of-normandy-review/1900-2897501/,neg,"
Making a wargame these days is a difficult undertaking. On the one hand, you've got to satisfy hard-core wargame fans with solid gameplay and historical fidelity. On the other hand, you really should to try to rope in new players with something flashy or innovative. Most wargames veer toward one of those two approaches. Unfortunately, Freedom Games' G.I. Combat veers so far afield that it's practically AWOL.   An example of G.I. Combat's messy battles.  One of the few things you can say in G.I. Combat's favor is that it has a respectable pedigree. It was created by some of the developers of Atomic's Close Combat, one of the earliest attempts to bring the tension of real-time strategy to a traditional wargame. In its day, Close Combat was a breath of fresh air, a thrilling lesson in dealing with factors like suppressing fire and morale. It looked good and sounded great, although it dragged on through about two sequels too many.    But G.I. Combat has none of Close Combat's innovation or bold design. It bears a lot of similarities to that venerable series, as if the developers couldn't quite break away from the same game they've been working on for the last six years or so. For instance, you select unit orders exactly as you did in Close Combat, and you even use the bottom row of your keyboard for shortcut keys, just like in Close Combat. The individual debriefings between missions are right out of Close Combat. The setting--Normandy immediately after the D-Day landing--is a return to Close Combat's roots. The game's structure, which basically involves a short series of linked scenarios with your men carrying over between missions, is similar to that of Close Combat. All these elements will perhaps be familiar or even nostalgic for fans of Atomic's games, but they're nevertheless the product of a clunky 3D engine slapped on top of a game design from six years ago.    G.I. Combat's biggest shortcoming is that it has very little gameplay. Instead, it has a heap of confusion. Once you place your units for a battle and press the start button, you're on a confusing ride to the end of the time limit. You can give your squads and vehicles orders, but the game plays in relentless real time, and it doesn't give you enough information about what your men are doing, where they're going, or even what they are. The selection of orders you can give is limited, and they often get overridden by the tactical AI for reasons that aren't always clear. You can't always tell when a unit can see another unit. You can't easily tell when someone is under fire. Sometimes, you won't even be able to find a unit or squad. Once the firing starts, men start shouting and tracers dot the landscape. Sometimes something burns or gives off smoke. People die often. Tanks blow up. If you give enough movement orders, it's possible you might eventually grab a victory location. It might realistically model the chaos and confusion of a real-world skirmish, but it's hardly playable.   G.I. Combat's interface is partly to blame. You can select only one vehicle or squad at a time, and your orders consist of a few broad instructions. The awkward camera control conspires with the awkward unit interaction to make it even harder to tell what's going on. If pausing didn't completely lock you out of the game, you might have had a chance to consider your situation better and occasionally find your men among the pixelated foliage. Instead, you just hang on and wait for the scenario to end.   Hopefully the AI enjoys playing the game, because it controls most of G.I. Combat. The AI exhibits a bewildering range of behavior, from waltzing into enemy fire like a suicide squad to executing strange flanking maneuvers that might pass for smart tactics if they weren't so erratic. The friendly AI is mostly frustrating for not always seeking cover when it should. It's not uncommon for men under fire to decide to stand up and get shot for no reason. Since you can't place individual men, it's almost impossible to get soldiers to take cover in a house without having a few men dawdling around outside. At least tanks seem to err on the side of caution and thus extend their longevity.    G.I. Combat's graphics are dated, and its colors are drab and muddy. Although the tank models are decent, they're not as good as Combat Mission's latest 3D models. The infantry models feature passable artwork but very jerky animation. The terrain is murky, and special effects like smoke and fire are extremely bad. G.I. Combat's appearance represents one of the worst uses of a 3D graphics engine in a wargame since Panzer General clogged up your screen with inscrutable little polygonal models. Most of the sound effects are disappointingly tinny, and you get a lot of obvious repetition, particularly when your men scream after getting shot.  Confused German troops rally  around a Panzer tank.  G.I. Combat gives you a lot of options for setting up missions, which can be played singly or linked together as short campaigns. Most of the maps are small, so battles usually start out with units within firing range. Hedgerows tend to divide the small maps into even smaller killing zones. But without finer control over your units or a better AI, it's hard to carefully negotiate these obstacles. At least there's some degree of replay value in that most missions give you points to spend on different types of additional forces.   Unfortunately, there's not much reason to play the missions, much less replay them. Freedom Games may be able to address some of G.I. Combat's problems with diligent patching. But in the meantime, there's really no reason to be playing this instead of the far superior Combat Mission, which inspired it.
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283,Jekyll & Hyde ,3, It's so crippled by confusing camera angles and bad control that it seems less like a game and more like a parody of the action-adventure genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/4/5/3/3666-14453.jpg,N/A,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jekyll-and-hyde-review/1900-2820287/,neg,N/A,['N/A'],0.0,0.0
284,Sneakers ,3," The game's cutesy hook might be enough for the young ones, but anyone with a modicum of gaming experience will probably find Sneakers to be boring and tedious.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/2/8/3/2216283-sneakers__apple_ii_.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sneakers-review/1900-2896591/,neg,"
While Microsoft has clearly been gunning for a slightly older demographic since the release of the Xbox, this doesn't mean MS doesn't have room in its game plan for the kids. Originally released as Nezmix in Japan, Sneakers is a simple puzzle game featuring lots of cute, furry mice, and the fact that the game is targeted at the Sesame Street demographic is apparent in its breezy, almost saccharine-sweet presentation. The game's cutesy hook might be enough for the young ones, but anyone with a modicum of gaming experience will probably find Sneakers to be boring and tedious.  As a digital game of hide and seek, Sneakers might be a suitable diversion for the post-toddler age group... Sneakers quickly starts with a group of mice living in a human-sized house discovering that all their cheese has been stolen. Their prime suspects are the dozens of sharp-fanged, red-eyed rats that have been spotted around the house, and so the four mice gang up to search for the rats and chase them out of the house, which is more or less where you come in.     The gameplay is broken down into two distinct portions. Through most of the game, Sneakers plays like a lopsided game of hide and seek. You'll lead your group of mice around the house, looking for rats. When you spot one, you'll press the X button to bring up a targeting reticle and then press A once you have the rat in your sights. Now that the rat's been spotted, he'll disappear into a puff of stars, and you'll move on. Occasionally a rat will be hiding inside a basket or under a lamp shade, requiring you to perform some basic puzzle solving to flush them out, but for the most part, the rats can be found in plain sight. Adding to the game's simplicity is the limited amount of control you have over the mice. You'll directly control which direction the main mouse moves, and the other mice will follow accordingly, but you can only move the main mouse left and right along a predetermined path. You'll find crossroads throughout the game, at which point you can choose a different direction, but that's the extent of your control.     The second part of the gameplay will occasionally pit your group of mice against a group of rats and have the two factions duke it out. The fighting system features a total of six different moves, including a couple of punches and a defensive maneuver. The fighting portion of the game, while not particularly difficult, can be a frustrating endeavor due to the haphazard timing of throwing punches. Neither component of the gameplay is especially challenging or compelling, and though the game can be beaten in two hours or less, it's doubtful most players will want to slog through it to see the end.  ...but anyone more discerning will quickly tire of the game's half-hearted presentation and repetitive, simplistic gameplay. The rodents in Sneakers all sport the fur-shading technique we first saw in Rare's Star Fox Adventures, though it was executed to much more impressive effect in that title. The fur shading here looks cheap and inconsistent, and it draws attention to simplicity of the character models. The animation of the mice is limited to a walking/shuffling animation, a running animation, and a climbing animation, each of which appears to be made up of three or maybe four frames. The environments are modeled with a lean number of polygons, though the game does sport some occasionally sharp, realistic-looking textures. The sound design mirrors the game's sunny attitude with a couple of cheery tunes that play at full blast for the entirety of the game. These songs, which occasionally sound suspiciously like music from older Super Mario Bros. games, become seriously grating more quickly than you might suspect.    If the fact that Sneakers is being distributed in the US exclusively by Toys ""R"" Us tells us anything, it's that even Microsoft, the publisher of Sneakers, has little faith in this title reaching anyone outside the 9-and-under crowd. As a digital game of hide and seek, Sneakers might be a suitable diversion for the post-toddler age group, but anyone more discerning will quickly tire of the game's half-hearted presentation and repetitive, simplistic gameplay. 
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285,Toxic Grind ,3," With better BMX or action sports games already available on the Xbox, Toxic Grind is left out in the cold.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/8/6/2210886-box_toxgrind.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/toxic-grind-review/1900-2896990/,neg,"
You wouldn't think that the home console market would see two awful BMX games in the same year, but somehow the stars have aligned themselves to give us just that. Toxic Grind may put an interesting story-line spin on the basic alternative sports formula laid out by Tony Hawk, Mat Hoffman, and the rest of the gang, but the gameplay doesn't hold up its end of the bargain. The resulting game is a neat idea, but ultimately it's also a complete mess, ranking down there with the recently released Gravity Games: Street Vert Dirt.  Toxic Grind actually has an original premise.  According to Toxic Grind, in the future, skateboarding is a crime. So are BMX biking and inline skating--all that extreme sports stuff is strictly verboten. Violators are sentenced to appear on the world's number-one game show, Toxic Grind. And like on any good futuristic game show, failure on Toxic Grind results in death. Unfortunately, the game show is so unfair that all the contestants die almost immediately. Eventually, this lack of a struggle causes the show's ratings to tumble. In a stroke of genius, the show's host decides to reach into the past--or, from our perspective, the present--and steal one of the world's best freestyle BMX riders for his show. That rider is, of course, where you come in. As the show's latest contestant, you'll have to defeat its American Gladiators-like riders and race against the clock to complete objectives before the toxin in your bloodstream reaches a fatal level.   That's a pretty funny and inventive premise, but in general, Toxic Grind is a fairly conventional extreme sports game that theoretically plays much like the rest of its contemporaries. You'll be able to execute vert tricks, grinds, wallrides, and so on, and each trick will earn you points. If you string together a number of successful tricks, you'll be able to pull off special adrenaline tricks for even bigger points. Scoring points comes into play most heavily in the rider battles, which are decided purely on that basis, though you'll also see some score goals in the game's more conventional levels. The rest of the goals are pretty standard for the genre. You'll collect letters to spell words, perform specific tricks on specific level objects, and so on.   While the creative story is told pretty well using a series of static images and decent voice-over, the actual gameplay really breaks up the experience. The physics in Toxic Grind feel painfully unfinished. You'll often go racing up the side of a quarter-pipe, only to have all your momentum drained away before you even leave the ramp. There's a timing trick here, in that you have to release the jump button at the right spot on the ramp to catch any air, but even when you time it correctly, you never really feel like you're catching the right amount of air. The camera acts up from time to time, and it's really ill-equipped to handle nonstandard maneuvers like riding through full loops. Like in most second-tier action sports games, you can land vert tricks into stalls 99 percent of the time. So you're never challenged to actually finish your trick and line up your landing--you can simply hit the lip trick button on your way down and land in a stall without even having to think about it. Everything about the way the game moves has a very clunky look and feel to it, from the trick animations to the physics of your basic wallride.  Unfortunately, it also has some terrible gameplay.  Toxic Grind doesn't even look good. The environments are fairly large and some seem to be designed somewhat well. The textures look OK when the game isn't moving, and overall, the game looks promising at first. But the animation of the rider movement and the stunted physics make the game look more and more awful the more you play. The game's sound and soundtrack aren't particularly noteworthy, and the decent voice work doesn't save it.   While Toxic Grind has the standard complement of features you'd expect from an action sports game and mixes things up by including a clever back story, the actual gameplay ruins anything else the game has to offer. With better BMX or action sports games already available on the Xbox, Toxic Grind is left out in the cold, where it belongs. Stick with Dave Mirra or Mat Hoffman for your freestyle BMX needs.    
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286,Universal Combat: A World Apart ,3," This stand-alone expansion to 2004's Universal Combat adds a few new features, but it can't make up for dated production values and some dubious gameplay.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/2/8/2209428-561677_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/universal-combat-a-world-apart-review/1900-6142245/,neg,"
  While the once mighty space simulation genre has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo, developer Derek Smart has continued to persevere on his long-running Battlecruiser games. Smart has been working on the Battlecruiser games for a decade now, and the series itself got a name change in 2004. The latest game in the series, Universal Combat: A World Apart, is essentially a stand-alone expansion to 2004's Universal Combat, adding some extra content in the form of campaigns, vehicles, and character classes. It does very little, however, to address Universal Combat's dismal production values, incomprehensible interface, and other issues.   Take command of a mighty starship that flies and fights like a fighter.   Universal Combat takes its name partly from the fact that you can explore and fight in a huge galaxy, and because you can battle it out as a starship commander, a fighter pilot, and even as a grunt on the ground holding a rifle. However, this broad design is simply too ambitious for its own good, as Universal Combat doesn't really do any of the three particularly well, and it does some of the modes terribly.    At the heart of the game is the starship command simulation, where you take direct command of a gigantic starship. You can fly around the universe in an open-ended and free-form campaign mode or ""roam"" mode, or you can take your ship into battle in a handful of premade combat missions. However, even though your space carrier flies and fights like an oversized fighter, there's an incredibly steep learning curve that you have to surmount. And while A World Apart actually adds a tutorial to Universal Combat (something sorely missing in the 2004 release), it isn't as helpful as it sounds. The 97-page tutorial is dense, and it requires you to constantly refer to the separate 101-page manual in order to make sense of the alphabet soup of acronyms that it throws at you. In terms of complexity, Universal Combat is about as complex (if not more so) than some of the high-fidelity combat flight simulators out there. So if your idea of fun is sitting in a cockpit and tinkering with an endless amount of buttons, then you may feel a bit at home with Universal Combat. Anyone looking for a fast, simple, Wing Commander-style action game should certainly look elsewhere.    In theory, this is a game that should appeal to anyone who has ever wanted to be Jean-Luc Picard, sitting on a bridge and issuing orders to explore a huge galaxy. There's a huge galaxy in this game to explore, as you can travel from system to system, interact with countless vessels and stations, and explore strange new worlds. However, the execution just feels off, and you'll encounter plenty of frustration along the way. For example, it can take so long simply to get from point to point that you're left twiddling your thumbs while staring at the screen. The combat also can be a frustratingly short and brutal experience, as your huge warship can get taken out in just seconds.    It also doesn't help that the production values vary from poor to abysmal. The space graphics look ancient, especially in comparison to the handful of sleek, cutting-edge space sims that have been released in recent years. Models and textures look blocky and bland, and the game has trouble getting even the little details right. For instance, clouds whip around planets at about 500,000 miles per hour, and the star field in front of you suddenly changes if all you're doing is selecting an item from one of the menus. We also encountered a weird bug half the time that sent our ship into an uncontrollable clockwise spin. The only solution was to quit out, restart the game, and then repeat if the spin was still there.    The fighter pilot aspects of Universal Combat won't have you ditching your precious copies of Wing Commander and X-Wing, either. The space combat is just lackluster, and the only interesting feature is the ability to conduct strikes on planetary targets, but the planet-side missions end up feeling like a decade-old flight sim, only nowhere near as interesting. The flight modeling is also poor, and we couldn't even die when we purposely flew nosefirst into the ground. Instead, we simply leveled out and ""flew"" around like we were in a car. Again, don't feel a rush to toss out your favorite old flight sims.   Confused? Apparently, there is no gravity on alien planets.   However, it's the first-person sequences on the ground that make the rest of Universal Combat look stellar in comparison. Virtually every shooter made in the last decade looks and plays far better than Universal Combat. You'll discover horribly splotchy and bland textures, incredibly empty environments dotted with triangular ""hills,"" bitmapped foliage and trees that you can walk through, and absolutely no sense of physics whatsoever. One of the really dubious moments was when our small squad of three marines literally walked up a sheer cliff. Combat itself is ugly and unforgiving, as the graphics are so crummy that you often can't see the enemy soldiers shooting at you until it's too late. Collision boxes are so badly placed that you'll ""run"" into objects that are a meter away. Animations are also pretty crude, as the reloading sequence for the rifle has you putting it on your shoulder. The list just goes on and on, and it's a wonder why Smart simply doesn't just cut this feature altogether and focus on improving the other sections of Universal Combat, because this game is absolutely lousy as a shooter.    There is a multiplayer mode in Universal Combat, but good luck trying to find anyone in the handful of servers that are online (this doesn't bode well for Universal Combat Online, the next chapter in the series, either). Simply put, this is a series that needs to lose a few features so that its creator can concentrate on improving the stuff that does work. This is also a series that desperately needs an infusion of new technology. Yes, graphics aren't everything, but you've got to at least make the game pleasant and interesting to look at. However, there are some good ideas lurking somewhere in Universal Combat, but you need to have the patience of Job in order to appreciate them.     
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287,Star Raiders ,3," Star Raiders achieves the incredible, somehow taking all the fun out of being a hotshot space pilot.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/3/7/2209037-starraiders_400800box.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-raiders-review/1900-6314535/,neg,"
  The original 1979 Star Raiders was a complex and ambitious space combat game that involved navigating across the galaxy via hyperspace, scanning for hostiles, and managing damage to weapons, engines, and other ship components. It also had a sense of humor; at the end of a game, heroic players might earn the rank of Star Commander, while less successful pilots might be designated Galactic Cooks. Now, following in the footsteps of last month's Yar's Revenge, which also took the title of an Atari classic, is a new game called Star Raiders. But it possesses none of the ambition or fun of its namesake. On the contrary, Star Raiders is an awful space combat game, with nothing to offer to newcomers and only anguish in store for those with fond memories of the original.      As a crackerjack pilot in the Atar Academy, you're called upon to help defend humanity from the mysterious Zylons. (This isn't a reference to the Cylons of the recent Battlestar Galactica series. It's a reference to the original game's Zylons, who were themselves a reference to the Cylons of the original Battlestar Galactica series.) The story initially attempts to drum up a sense of camaraderie between your character, Ruiz, and his friends at the academy, but there's too little time spent on this for it to amount to anything, and the monotonous narrator imbues the tale with all the excitement of a legal document. The illustrations that tell the story look as if they were done quickly, and the attempts to bring a sense of movement to these drawings sometimes have unintentionally hilarious results. On the plus side, abbreviation enthusiasts will appreciate that the game has plenty of lines like, ""It is the only ship capable of delivering the Mass Ordinance Plasma Bomb, or MOPB, which can destroy the SMCD.""    Once you climb into the cockpit, the real problems begin. Star Raiders has a sorry excuse for a tutorial. Your ship can transform into three configurations: the slow but powerful turret mode, the balanced assault mode, and the speedy but vulnerable attack mode. The tutorial missions give you paragraphs of text to absorb about the best uses for each of these three modes, but this information isn't actively reinforced by the very basic tasks that follow. As a result, once you find yourself in real combat situations, it's tough to get a handle on when to switch from one form to the next, and on the different control schemes for different forms. (By default, the right stick controls pitch and yaw while in assault and turret modes, but in attack mode, the left stick controls pitch and roll.) The tutorials also offer no advice on how to evade locked-on enemy torpedoes or how to most effectively use the EMP and countermeasures your ship is equipped with. As for making sense of the gauges that surround your targeting reticle, you're shown a labeled diagram before tutorial missions, and that's it. Concepts like managing energy consumption would be far easier to grasp if the game took a moment to touch on these as you were playing, rather than expecting you to fully understand them just by reading about them once.   Getting hit with a giant cotton swab is far more fun than Star Raiders.   Sadly, putting in the time to get familiar with the game just isn't worth it. The Zylons may have fighters, frigates, and cruisers, but their most powerful weapon is boredom. Battling Zylon fighters has none of the cat-and-mouse thrills that good dogfighting should have; you can usually get them in your sights from a distance and take them out easily, making their feeble attempts to be elusive a frustrating postponement of the inevitable rather than a source of excitement. Far worse than dealing with these tiny fighters is the incredibly tedious process of taking down Zylon capital ships. Zylon cruisers and frigates have several small generators on their hulls that must be destroyed to take out the ships, and the most effective way to do that is to transform into assault mode and slowly move along the ship's surface from one generator to the next, pumping bullets into them until they explode.     It's an excruciatingly dull process, and after doing it for the umpteenth time, seeing that the next mission requires you to destroy still more frigates and cruisers may be enough to make you throw up your arms in surrender and let the Zylons win. Late in the game, when you finally get to take on one of the massive Zylon basestar vessels, it's almost comically disappointing that destroying one of these monstrosities boils down to flying inside it and taking out still more of those stupid little generators. And there's no sense of danger in any of this; when you die, you simply respawn a few seconds later, good as new.    If you choose to persevere through all of this crushing boredom and repetition, you're rewarded with a climactic mission in which you must fly through ventilation shafts into a Zylon structure deep beneath the surface of a planet. It's at least different from anything that comes before, but it culminates in a sequence in which you must escape from the structure before it gets blown to kingdom come. Infuriatingly, failing to do so sets you back to the start of the entire mission, forcing you to repeat a great deal of tedious gameplay before you can attempt the escape again.   Be thankful that you can't hear this screenshot.   The drab interstellar battlefields of Star Raiders are a fitting accompaniment to the dull gameplay, and the constant blaring of the alarm warning you of an enemy lock-on is a maddening incentive to turn the game off and do something else. It's a shame that there are now so few good games being made in the once-flourishing space combat genre, but no matter how desperate you are for some interstellar action, there's no reason to play Star Raiders. On the original game's rating scale, this game earns the particularly shameful rank of Garbage Scow Captain.  
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288,Metal Gear Solid Integral (Import) ,9," If there were any justice, Konami would just bite the bullet and release it as is for the American public.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/1/5/4/1363-5154.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metal-gear-solid-integral-import-review/1900-2548384/,pos,"
Metal Gear Solid. The revolutionary game that invented its own genre. A game that redefined the way we imagine games and how we play them. As it has been well documented, Metal Gear Solid is a game that focuses mainly on stealth. Stealth, as displayed by Solid Snake, is the greatest weapon you will have in the game. Haphazard gunfire and sloppy tactics will get you killed in this game. Period. If you want to make it out of this snowy hellhole in one piece, you'd better learn when to act and when to stay still, and you'd better learn quick. What, then, is the point of Metal Gear Solid Integral? The basic game is the same, with its incredible vision, inspired gameplay, graphic sophistication, and questionable AI (shoot a guard, but run away and he forgets about you). Well, insofar as the Japanese version is concerned (we'll get to the American release later), it adds an extra disc called the VR disc, which, among other things, adds 300 additional VR missions for stealthy gamers out there to occupy themselves with. That's right. At the risk of sounding like a used-car salesman, a staggering 300 VR missions awaits to test the gamer who thought he was all that the first time around. Those of you who can finish all these extra missions will be able to unlock special missions, such as mystery missions, where you must solve, um, mysteries, kind of like the Hardy Boys. You can also unlock bonus missions where you can play as the Ninja, which is particularly cool.  In addition to the extra VR missions is a photographic mode that, depending on your success and score in the regular game, will allow you increasingly closer access to the girls in the game. The higher your rating, the closer you can get to Mei Ling in a virtual photo shoot. Unfortunately the photos still take up a shocking two memory-card blocks each, making this a cost-prohibitive endeavor.Extra bonuses include the original promotional movies that were originally shown at previous E3s before the game was released. You can also select which language you'd rather hear and see in the game. Also, in the main game, there is also a first-person mode that you unlock when you beat the game through once. Not the first-person perspective, mind you, but a first-person mode where you can actually move around. Sadly, this mode isn't as awesome as you might hope, since Snake turns about as quickly as your grandma on a hot day. It also reverts back to the normal perspective after every transitional screen, making switching back to first-person view an annoyance. Not being able to see your weapon in this mode is a little bit of a bummer as well, since Snake has such a cool arsenal.  The tragic part is that MGS Integral will not be coming to the States as is. While the VR disc will be coming here, the normal game will not. Even if it's lackluster, it still would have been nice to have the original game (with first-person mode included) come packaged with the VR disc. Maybe Konami doesn't want to aggravate gamers who bought the original not too far back, but that's at least one feature the Japanese gamers will have that we won't.  International politics aside, Metal Gear Solid Integral is the game that should have come out in the first place. While the original game was groundbreaking and whetted the appetites of millions of gamers worldwide who wanted more stealth action, it was too short. With the addition of the VR missions, the replay value has gone through the roof, with tons of little secrets that make this the Metal Gear fan's dream.  If there were any justice, Konami would just bite the bullet and release it as is for the American public. The VR Missions released solo seems like more of an expansion pack than a bona fide new game. Disappointing as it may be, that's what we'll be getting, but for fans of the original (and who isn't?), the VR disc is practically essential.
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289,Mickey's Racing Adventure ,9," With more than 20 tracks and six characters to choose from, this title shows how Game Boy racers should be done.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/3/1/6/2210316-197916_42496_front.jpg,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mickeys-racing-adventure-review/1900-2537184/,pos,"
It would be very easy to dismiss this title as just another fluff Disney game, but the fact of the matter is that Mickey's Racing Adventure is a solid choice for racing fans. The game is viewed isometrically, and you control Mickey, Minnie, Daisy, Donald, or Goofy as they race around tracks filled with obstacles, ramps, power-ups, and Pete's evil cronies. Many of the races consist of both land and water tracks, and you'll instantly switch vehicles on reaching the shore. Each character has a special vehicle, as well as two others that can be purchased with Disney Dollars, which are earned for racing expertise. All of the cars can be upgraded - you can purchase a better accelerator, top speed, and turnbox for each car. These are necessary to complete the game, for as more difficult tracks are unlocked, opponents' vehicles are upgraded automatically. You can also purchase and cast magic spells to disable the competition on the track. In addition to the tight racing are scores of minigames, from a Pipes-style game with a locomotive to Pluto's eight Bone Hunt challenges, which he literally has to dig up to play. Maneuvering the characters around Mickey's world is a task in its own right, as Pete's goons are on the loose and they will steal your hard-earned Disney Dollars if you come into contact with them. The graphics of Mickey's world are nearly perfect: All of the characters are animated as well (if not better) as they are in a Disney cartoon. The musical score is dynamic and vibrant - a pleasant change from the usual three-note themes that are repeated endlessly in so many Game Boy titles. The visuals and the sound during the races themselves aren't up to par with the rest of the title, but they get the job done more than adequately. With more than 20 tracks and six characters to choose from, this title shows how Game Boy racers should be done.
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290,NASCAR Legends ,9, NASCAR Legends is the only game for nostalgic NASCAR fans to turn to.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/8/2/5/2218825-nascar_legends_box_art.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nascar-legends-review/1900-2543745/,pos,"
Over the last three decades, NASCAR racing has gone from being a Southern-fried specialty to the most popular motor sport in the United States. Three decades ago, fans had to tune in to their local radio station to hear live coverage of NASCAR events. Now, just about every single race is televised, and the big ones grab prestigious weekend spots on major broadcast networks. Today's NASCAR vehicles are engineering marvels that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Back then, racers like Petty, Yarborough, Isaac, Pearson, the Allisons, and others drove cars that were similar to the ones you could buy from a dealer. It's that simpler era that developer Papyrus sought to re-create in NASCAR Legends, and it's that very simplicity that makes the simulation both appealing and addictive - and downright fun to play. NASCAR Legends is an homage to the 1970 NASCAR season. It features 42 NASCAR drivers, some legendary and others familiar only to the most grizzled fans of the sport. Fortunately, Papyrus has not only included informative online bios of all the racers, but also a detailed history of the entire NASCAR season, complete with anecdotes and comments from some of the drivers. A total of 49 events were run that year on more than two dozen tracks, 16 of which are featured in the game. Many of the omissions are lesser-known venues, and licensing issues have once again kept Papyrus from including Daytona. It's a little disappointing that Hickory and the Smokey Mountain Speedway aren't in the game, but it still has excellent variety. If you felt like the short-track king after putting in top-notch performances at Bristol and Martinsville in NASCAR 3, then try your hand at Bowman Gray Stadium in Legends, which features a quarter-mile track that feels more like a circle than an oval. And then there's North Wilkesboro, whose distinct uphill-downhill design is just long enough (.625 miles) to let you get up to pretty serious speed. Aside from the chance to race against NASCAR luminaries, perhaps the best reason to consider NASCAR Legends is to tackle Riverside International Speedway, a nine-turn road course that's a change of pace from the land of left turns. Anyone familiar with Papyrus' earlier NASCAR games won't be surprised that the tracks in Legends are rendered very accurately, but the car graphics seem just a bit flat compared with what you'll find in NASCAR 3. Perhaps it's because the cars - Plymouth Superbird, Dodge Daytona, Ford Torino, and Mercury Cycle - are so much bigger than their modern-day counterparts, or that they aren't plastered with sponsor ads from bumper to bumper.NASCAR Legends' sound effects are also initially disappointing. It's true that the cars back then didn't have the whiny scream of today's equivalents, but you'd expect a lot more rumbling than you'll hear coming from your speakers and subwoofer. Luckily, you can actually adjust the pitch to re-create that familiar earth-shaking sound, and with only a couple of adjustments, you should be hearing the throaty roar that was the hallmark of the old V-8s. Papyrus used the NASCAR 3 physics engine for NASCAR Legends, which is a good thing because it provides enough realism to create a convincing experience but is just forgiving enough. Everything that made NASCAR 3 feel so authentic such as great smoke effects, persistent skid marks and crash effects, and superb force feedback support is in NASCAR Legends, only with much cooler cars. Winning races won't be easy, especially as you boost the skill level of the computer-controlled opponents. But something about driving a genuine stock car provides just enough of a mental comfort zone to make you feel that you can be a contender in every race - provided you're patient and pay close attention to how the huge beast you're driving behaves. Driving classic cars brings with it an additional challenge that might come as a surprise to players accustomed to modern-day NASCAR sims: having to change tires. The bias-ply tires used back then make it easier to recover from skids or spins, but they also wear out considerably faster than today's radials. For serious racing fans who want to tackle full-length races, finding the right tire pressure and monitoring your tires' temperatures to get the longest life from each set will play a crucial role in your attempt to grab the checkered flag. Car setup options were obviously less complex 30 years ago, but there's still a decent numbers of ways to modify your car's performance in NASCAR Legends: Tire pressure, gear ratios, camber, weight adjustment, wheel lock, and suspension can be quickly and easily adjusted from the familiar garage screen. And if you're unhappy with your car's appearance, you can use the paint-shop utility that ships with NASCAR Legends; it seems primitive compared with a standalone paint program, but it's got everything you need to make your ride look even better than it already is. NASCAR Legends' Internet multiplayer mode is allegedly smoother than in NASCAR 3, but I couldn't tell the difference because there were so few people online in the NASCAR Legends arenas. However, hosting and joining games over WON.NET servers is a snap, so once NASCAR Legends garners a larger user base it should become a lot easier to get some multiplayer races going. In spite of its great features, NASCAR Legends probably would have fared better as an add-on to NASCAR Racing 3. After all, most of the players who were hungry for a NASCAR game snatched up NASCAR 3 the second it hit shelves, and NASCAR 3 has a greater number of tracks anyway. Even so, NASCAR Legends is the only game for nostalgic NASCAR fans to turn to, and Sierra's decision to release NASCAR Legends and NASCAR Racing 3 so closely together is ultimately to the benefit of racing fans.
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291,Radiant Silvergun (Import) ,9," Simply put, this is the finest example of the genre you will find on any platform, home or arcade, to date.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/2/2/2217322-box_rs.png,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/radiant-silvergun-import-review/1900-2534056/,pos,"
Announced just this past winter, Radiant Silvergun makes a conspicuous debut, not only because of the speed of its arrival, but also for its platform of choice - the Sega Saturn. Radiant Silvergun was developed by Treasure (the legendary team of programmers responsible for old-school classics such as Castlevania 4, Contra-Hard Corps, and more recently Guardian Heroes, Silhouette Mirage, and Mischief Makers), surprising most people who assumed that Treasure would move on to full-time PlayStation development after the port of the now classic Saturn hit Silhouette Mirage. Instead, Treasure developed Radiant Silvergun using Sega's St-V board (basically an arcade-modified Saturn with extra RAM), with the intention of releasing it first in arcades. Released in Japanese arcades only a month before the home version, Radiant Silvergun arrives as a fitting testament to the true power of the Saturn. Simply put, this is the finest example of the genre you will find on any platform, home or arcade, to date. Usually known for their innovations in the platforming genre, Treasure, like  Square, decided it wanted to try its hands at a top-down shooter. A bold move for sure, as interest in vertically-scrolling shooters has dwindled since the halcyon days of 16-bit gaming. However, not only did the gamble pay off, it practically blows the lid off the Saturn. Like Square's own Einhander, Radiant Silvergun is an unqualified success of a shooter, but, to compare the two games really isn't fair - Radiant Silvergun completely destroys all competition. Some may scoff at this, but to see is to believe. Einhander, Raystorm, G Darius and Thunderforce V, all of these play second fiddle to Radiant Silvergun. In fact, the only shooter within a photon torpedo's reach is Soukyugurentai, and even that pales next to Radiant Silvergun's considerable merits. Here's why. You're the pilot of one of the galaxy's most lethal starfighters: the Radiant Silvergun. You're travelling through various time periods, along with your captain and crew, in search of the Origin, a being who's been disrupting the fabric of time and space. Following a well-done animated intro, you'll find that gameplay is, predictably, based on navigating the southern regions of the screen while swarms of enemies swoop down from above, lacing the screen with all sorts of gunfire.  Less mundane are your methods of attack. There are no shields or screen-clearing super bombs; instead, you're armed with an innovative control interface. Each of the three main buttons (A, B, and C) triggers a different weapon: A fires a straight shot, while B activates a homing laser, and pressing C will release a damaging spread shot. Pressing any combination of these (also conveniently configured on the X,Y, and Z buttons) -A+B, A+C, B+C, and A+B+C -  will result in all sorts of pyrotechnics.  Tracking lasers, a rear firing scatter-shot, lock-on lightning attacks, and a plasma sword all make appearances, courtesy of your little blue (or red) ship. For those of you concerned with the lack of a super-bomb, you should know that your plasma sword can be used to absorb certain types of enemy gunfire. Once your sword-meter is filled up, you can then unleash a Mega-Slasher, which looks like a huge polygonal pair of scissors that pretty much wipes out everything nearby.  While this may sound unnecessarily complex, it, in time, becomes second nature. As well it should, because using specific weapons at the appropriate times will be the key to your success in the game. For example, when you find yourself navigating steeply diagonal tunnels, you have little choice but to use your spread shot, as it is the only effective means of clearing out the battery of cannons blocking your way. In certain boss encounters, you will find yourself dodging what seem to be thousands of projectiles, leaving you unable to get a straight shot at your antagonist - but quick thinking and an accurate thumb will land you on the homing laser, increasing your chances of dispatching your foe to a fiery death. Other times, you will have to make with some fancy handiwork, switching from one attack to another to compensate for swarms of enemy fighters AND bosses all gunning for your demise.  As far as challenge is concerned, you'd be hard pressed to remember a game where you didn't blink for five minutes at a time. This is Visine country, folks. Prepare to watch in sheer amazement as you attempt to dodge gazillions of scatter-shots, missiles, flame-throwers, solar flares, lasers, you name it, all at once. Treasure throws the kitchen sink at you, and laughs. In the world of vertical shooters, there's nothing more satisfying than maneuvering your way through a screen full of gunfire, and in Radiant Silvergun, you have only the most minute of spaces with which to make your escape. Essentially, it's one false move and you're dead. Everything depends on your level of skill. The Saturn version of Radiant Silvergun provides you with a couple ways to play the game. The first would be arcade mode, which, as the name states, is a direct port of the version found in the arcade. The place where you'll find the real action is in Saturn mode, which adds in voice-acting, additional levels and bosses, and cutscenes featuring you and your Radiant Silvergun teammates in full polygonal detail. There's a full list of options at your disposal as well, i.e., the number of lives you start with, difficulty, etc. Once you've beaten the game, an 'options plus' menu opens up, with a number of secrets waiting to be unlocked. For stat freaks, there's a full documentation of how many times you've played arcade mode and Saturn mode, and it also keeps track of how long you've had the Saturn on while playing the game. Other statistics are featured in the ranking mode, but perhaps the most interesting thing is the presence of the Dog Master ranking. Strange, but true, Radiant Silvergun has hidden 30 'Merry-chans,' which are essentially dogs, throughout the entire game. You need to use the lock-on laser in order to find them all, and only in one-player mode. Presumably, something good unlocks once you've found them all. Which won't be easy, since you'd be hard-pressed just to finish the game your first couple of times through. Thankfully, Treasure has implemented an interesting way to compensate for the extreme difficulty of this game. Instead of offering power-ups, your weapons gain power like you gain experience points in an RPG. The more you play in Saturn mode, the stronger your weapons get. When you finish the game, it will prompt you to save your status. The next time you play, your weapons will be powered up at the same level as when you last played. For example, at level 1, your guns are only moderately effective against the larger bosses, but at level 32 your guns are knocking them out of the sky so fast it makes your head spin. This enhances the incentive to play the game after you've beaten it: There's nothing better than some serious firepower. Forget that, says you, how does RS stack up graphically? In a word, outstandingly. Radiant Silvergun does things you don't expect out of the Saturns aging gear-box. Gorgeous transparencies, tons of Mode-7 effects, fully polygonal bosses, tons and tons of sprites, and layers of stunning parallax are present. Textures and all the 3D effects are clean, highly detailed, and hi-res - all at the same time. Level designs are the best seen in a shooter - tricky, ingenious, and awe-inspiring. Take as an example the level that reduces everything onscreen to a vector-based outline that invokes memories of Asteroids, or the huge polygonal buildings (a la Raystorm, but better) that zoom by at 60fps, and you'll start to imagine the variety at hand.  The level bosses and their sub-bosses (some levels have three or more) are all unique and offer their own individual challenges; some are so huge they can fill three television screens. The first time you see the final boss (interestingly called the Origin), a three-mile-high polygon man who looks like a cross between Spider-Man and an Area 51 alien, start to run after you and karate kick you as the screen turns upside down, only then will you know the true meaning of panic. Set over six levels of sheer madness, each with tons of sub-sections, Radiant Silvergun isn't a game that's over too quickly. Finishing the game on Saturn mode, depending on difficulty level, can take anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours. As is the case with most of Treasure's work, the soundtrack is of extremely high quality. A full orchestral score accompanies this game, and majestic it is. Available as an import CD, the soundtrack is worthy of a stand-alone purchase. Sound effects are wonderfully punishing and show the attention to detail that Treasure has given this game. Explosions are ear drum crunching, and every weapon has its own particular sound. Sonically this game is as good as it gets. Conspicuously absent, however, is analog control. Anyone who's played Soukyugurentai with a Nights pad will attest to the sheer brilliance of its control. Considering that the ships in Radiant Silvergun don't move all that fast, your thumb gets a lot of exercise using the D-pad all the time. Though it's certainly not necessary to enjoy this game to the fullest, analog control would have been appreciated. Another small detail is that the Silverguns could have used a couple more animations themselves - maybe jet exhaust or something like that - but no one will miss it considering how much is going on at all times. Small gripes, really. To call Radiant Silvergun the best shooter out of all the next-generation consoles is to do it an injustice. It is simply one of the best games, period. That said, since the likelihood of SOA bringing this one to the States is absolutely nil, the next course of action would be to pick up the import. This game is an absolute must-buy. Never has a shooter combined relentless, thoughtfully-designed action with such stunning graphics and sound. Mix in a moving storyline with exceptionally well-done voice acting (in Japanese) and beautiful real-time cutscenes, and you've got a shooter experience unmatched by any that have come before. Few games stay with you after you've turned the system off, but Silvergun does, and it's more powerful for it. The game has a polish and finesse worthy of a Ferrari, complete with a trunkful of secrets that only the best will discover. The true beauty of the game only reveals itself after numerous repeated plays. With an addictive gameplay, and the necessary incentives to keep you coming back, Radiant Silvergun makes you feel as if you've never really played a shooter before. It's a whole new experience.
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292,Red Baron 3D ,9, Kudos to Sierra and Dynamix for taking a disappointing disaster and turning it into the best World War I simulation yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/5/7/6/1717-6576.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/red-baron-3d-review/1900-2532771/,pos,"
Few things are more disappointing than a sequel that doesn't live up to its predecessor. You're looking for another Jurassic Park and you end up with The Lost World (or Trespasser, for that matter). Such was the case with Red Baron II, last year's sequel to 1990's hit World War I sim. Its promising dynamic campaign environment was hobbled by poor graphics performance, nonfunctional multiplayer modes, crippled flight models, and more bugs than a North Carolina picnic. To its credit, Sierra's Dynamix division didn't take its money and run, promising to do better next time, but rather spent the last year working on a series of patches to bring the program up to speed and add 3D support. The result is Red Baron 3D, a program that's a worthy successor to the original. Best of all, Red Baron 3D is available at absolutely no cost to purchasers of Red Baron II. Other than the fixes, the addition of 3D support, and multiplayer enhancements, Red Baron 3D is essentially the same program as last year's release. That's not a criticism, however, as its feature set more than holds its own against more recent designs. The simulation features 22 different flyable World War I aircraft, along with 18 other types flown by AI pilots. These planes can be flown in a dynamic campaign, on a variety of scripted single missions, and in an instant-action mode. The campaign is especially well done, with more atmosphere and less repetition than the dynamic campaigns found in recent jet sims. You're likely to encounter other flights and targets of opportunity - friendly and enemy - en route to and from the target. The missions are better balanced than in the original release. For instance, waypoints don't take you over every enemy antiaircraft gun in the country anymore. Flight models have seen dramatic improvement in Red Baron 3D. The original simplified flight model is intact for beginners, but new intermediate and authentic settings will give more experienced sim players a more convincing experience, with features such as torque, spins, gyroscopic effects, and deadly spins. The overall model is very convincing, and it would take quite a bit of test-flying to find the few performance differences between the models and their real-life counterparts. Cockpits have been given an overhaul as well. The virtual cockpit is now as readable as the standard cockpit, making for improved situational awareness while tracking enemies with padlock views. One innovative feature in 3Dfx mode is a toggle to make the cockpit and wings transparent. While this is obviously not realistic (real flight sim fans know it didn't come around until Wonder Woman's invisible plane was built during World War II), it does make tracking enemies much easier, while still maintaining the ability to use your plane's fuselage to keep track of the direction you're looking. As you'd expect from the sim's name, Red Baron 3D has undergone a major graphics overhaul. Running on a 3Dfx card, you'll find that the formerly blocky terrain graphics have been smoothed out with bilinear filtering. At low altitudes, trees pop up to give you a better reference as to your height above the ground. Explosions and other effects have been tuned as well, and the sim now supports up to 1024x768 resolution. Unfortunately, those effects are available only on 3Dfx cards - there's no support for Direct3D, so cards with chipsets such as the Riva TNT or Matrox G200 will run the sim only in 2D DirectDraw mode. The 2D mode does support the higher resolutions, but even on a Pentium II/400 I needed to stick to 640x480 resolution to keep the frame rates completely smooth. The sim's sounds deserve special praise. From the various engine sounds to the creaking of wooden struts as you stress your plane's airframe to the screams of enemy pilots as they jump from burning planes sans parachutes, they do a wonderful job of immersing you into the sim. All these improvements serve to bring the program to the state at which it should have been released in the first place. But Dynamix didn't stop there. The formerly practically useless multiplayer mode has been tossed out and completely replaced with a server-based massively multiplayer version. You can now battle for free against up to 100 other human opponents via Sierra's free WON.NET matchmaking service, as well as on user-run servers (server software is included on the CD). Modes include melee (essentially deathmatch), team melee, and a capture-the-flag-style ""Get the Baron"" mode where only the last person to get a kill scores points. Unfortunately, there's no support for playing the sim's excellent missions cooperatively. If you were disappointed by the initial release of Red Baron II, you definitely should give the program another try. You can download a patch for the original disc that includes everything you'll find on the Red Baron 3D CD (except for the server software) from www.redbaron3d.com. Or if you prefer, you can purchase Red Baron 3D, send back a form, the receipt, and your original Red Baron II CD, and Sierra will refund you the entire purchase price of Red Baron 3D.  While Red Baron II owners obviously have every reason to upgrade, this sim merits consideration by any fan of historical flight sims. Only MicroProse's new European Air War comes close to Red Baron 3D in capturing the atmosphere of historical air combat. Kudos to Sierra and Dynamix for taking a disappointing disaster and turning it into the best World War I simulation yet. Editor's Note: The Red Baron 3D rebate offer mentioned in the review has ended. The patch to upgrade Red Baron II is still available.
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293,Samba De Amigo ,9," Samba De Amigo is one of the best music and rhythm games released thus far, and it's the first such game to hit the United States, making it an excellent ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/1/2/3/2217123-198539_50463_front.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/samba-de-amigo-review/1900-2589601/,pos,"
Samba De Amigo is Sega's attempt to cash in on the music game craze that Konami started back in 1998 with its DJ simulator, BeatMania. Though Konami has taken its sweet time about bringing any of its music and rhythm games - collectively called the Bemani series - to the United States (the company's dancing game, Dance Dance Revolution, is scheduled for a January 2001 release on the PlayStation), Sega has struck the first blow in the ""expensive and completely necessary controller"" department with the Dreamcast port of Samba De Amigo.   Samba De Amigo is a maracas simulator. The game tells you exactly how, where, and when to shake your maracas, and provided you shake on beat and in the right location, your score rises appropriately. While you can manipulate the onscreen action with a standard Dreamcast pad, the game truly comes into its own when combined with the appropriate maraca controller, which consists of two maracas and a floor sensor that detects when and where the maracas are shaken. You are told how to manipulate your maracas by a simple onscreen display, which consists of six circles - three on the left, three on the right. The circles are also broken up into low, medium, and high. Blue and red balls shoot out from the middle of your playfield, each destined for one of the six circles. When the ball reaches the circle, you shake one (or both, for extra points) of the maracas on the appropriate side and at the appropriate height. Red balls come out in long strings and command you to shake the maracas as fast as you can in the proper circle. Finally, the game also asks you to strike a pose from time to time by showing you a stick figure with the maracas in two specific locations. You're given a brief period to match the stick figure for extra points. Provided you keep your end of the song on beat, you continue through two songs, and, if you're really good, a special third song.   The music in the game is quite amazing. Most of it has a real Latin flair, though some other songs, like Tubthumping and Reel Big Fish's cover of Take On Me, give the game a multigenre touch. The Japanese version of the game was released before Sega could fully acquire the rights to the two Ricky Martin songs, but the US release has both songs (Cup of Life and Livin' La Vida Loca) intact. While they sound close enough to the real thing, it should be noted that neither song is actually performed by Martin. The graphics back up the audio perfectly, and the result is the best-looking music/rhythm game ever released. Behind your circles and balls lies a small world filled with tons of colorful characters, including Amigo, the maracas-shaking, pants-wearing monkey. The scenery changes depending on how well you're doing, and if you lose, the monkey cries. You don't want to make Amigo cry, do you?   The Dreamcast release contains a lot of modes that aren't found in the original arcade mode. Aside from the standard arcade and all music (original) modes, there's a challenge mode that gives you tasks that must be completed to unlock some of the more difficult songs. The tasks range from getting a perfect on a specific song to scoring a certain number of points and eventually get maddeningly difficult as you progress through the five different challenge tracks. Also, there's a party mode that contains a few different two-player modes, including a fairly dull battle mode and couples mode, which figures out how often you and your partner hit a note simultaneously and gives you relationship advice based on the number of simultaneous shakes. Finally, Internet mode provides you with online score rankings and downloadable music that adds lots of great old Sega songs (such as music from Afterburner, Outrun, and Nights) to the Samba roster. You don't actually store the music on your VMU - instead, a small (2K) file resides on your VMU and tells the game which extra songs to unlock.   Samba De Amigo is one of the best music and rhythm games released thus far, and it's the first such game to hit the United States, making it an excellent entry into the world of music peripherals. The only sticking point is the price. While the game is expected to retail for $39.99, it will not include the maracas so necessary to making the game worthwhile - those must be purchased separately for $79.99 a set. So, if you're serious about Samba (which, after playing it for any length of time, you probably will be), be prepared to drop $200 on your latest addiction.
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294,Seven Kingdoms ,9, It is one of the best strategy games of the year and deserves more attention than it is liable to get.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/0/8/0/1826-7080.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/seven-kingdoms-review/1900-2532953/,pos,"
Seven Kingdoms is quite a surprising find amid the rubble of real-time strategy games. It almost passed by unnoticed, thrown in the pile with a couple dozen similar games. Interactive Magic had already earned our indifference with War Inc., but the ""Designed by Trevor Chan"" line on the box made me curious. Chan is the programming wonk who brought us the dry - yet strangely compelling - Capitalism. Was he a one-shot wonder or the next design whiz? An hour with Seven Kingdoms answered the question. Designer Chan may be the next Sid Meier (Civilization, Gettysburg!) or Will Wright (SimCity), with ideas that make a nod to the past, yet have their own quirky individuality. Seven Kingdoms delivers on the promises made by Age of Empires by creating a real-time meld of Civilization-type empire building and WarCraft-style combat, with enough unique twists to make it more than a mere hybrid. It is one of the best strategy games of the year and deserves more attention than it is liable to get.  A glance at the box of Seven Kingdoms will show you why it's likely to be passed over in favor of more glitzy fare. The graphics are decent, but we've seen better this season. The images of little men running around fighting don't inspire us with the notion that there is something new and different here. But, in fact, it is new and different. Seven Kingdoms is not a game that is won by fighting. It can be, but not satisfactorily. It is won by planning, trade, deceit, intrigue, diplomacy, racial harmony (yes, really), solid leadership, exploration, prayer (yes, really), bribery, industry, and taxation. It is a complex world where the final goals (which are flexible) can be achieved in multiple ways. After the intricate tutorial introduces all the game concepts, there are several ways into Seven Kingdoms. Scenarios offer specific challenges, usually with set goals and start-up units or even with complete kingdoms already built. The way most people will probably play, however, is to generate a new world. A plethora of settings can be tweaked to make each game different. Number of players, random events, world size, wealth, race, victory conditions, and other factors contribute to SK's strong replayability. Seven-player TCP/IP, LAN, serial, and modem play are supported, with spawning for up to four players from a single CD. Seven races - Mayan, Norman, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Greek, and Viking - exist in each game. As leader of one of these races, your goal is to build a strong and profitable empire. To expand your empire, you need to build up your starting city and begin taking over unaligned cities, a la Warlords. Aggressive expansion isn't always the key to doing this. You can beat everyone into submission, but your reputation will suffer and your overall rating will decline. You can also take over cities through grants (basically buying them), the actions of spies, or by building a fort nearby to house a strong army. If the general in command of that fort is of the same race as most of the townspeople, they will be more likely to join your empire, as they will be if you provide them with jobs and goods. This complex modeling of races is at the heart of Seven Kingdoms. Each race has a different military skill. A Persian leader with an army full of Persian archers will soon be defeated. But with a mix of Persian archers and Viking axmen, he has a much better chance. Each race also has a magical scroll secreted somewhere in the world that enables the king to build a Seat of Power. These scrolls are usually hidden in the dwellings of Fryhtans: monstrous marauders who need to be destroyed. Theoretically, one king can capture all the scrolls and build a Seat of Power for each race. Once stocked with praying citizens, the Seats can produce Greater Beings who act as superunits, each with a different power. At the core of a balanced empire is a strong economy. Three raw materials can be mined - iron, copper, and clay - and made into finished goods, which can then be sold in the marketplace. Each stage of this process - mining, production, and sale - requires a building. Caravans can haul trade to distant markets, and ships can haul it to distant ports. The economic model is fairly complex and could use a bit of tweaking to make it easier to manage. With ten caravans running all over the map, it's hard to keep track of who needs which goods. Some more minerals and finished products would also be a good touch. Research buildings spend all their time producing better weapons. Catapults, balistas, cannons, spitfires, and porcupines can all be researched and then built in war factories. Eventually, you will have to fight, if only the Fryhtans. A complex diplomacy model is also available, allowing you to create trade treaties and alliances and even to buy another empire outright. Computer opponents seem pretty good, though they could use some further refinement to make them more unpredictable. Military units act intelligently and are aggressive when they need to be. Some of the latest real-time unit management features - saved paths, unit orders - are not in Seven Kingdoms, but since the combat element is not the focus of the game, they are not greatly missed. There's much more to Seven Kingdoms, which is a deep, satisfying strategy game. There hasn't been an empire-builder this good since Civilization II. A more detailed research tree and more complex methods of keeping people happy would be welcome in any sequel, but this is more of a wish list than criticism. Seven Kingdoms is an outstanding game in every way.
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295,Star Control 3 ,9," Star Control 3 is a vast oddity, integrating real-time strategy and actionelements with the exploratory playability of an adventure title into one game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/6/3/2209563-sc3box.gif,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-control-3-review/1900-2533188/,pos,"
Doogs, Ktangs, Spathis,… Daktaklakpaks? After playing Star Control 3 for a few hundred hours, these will be household names to you. In fact, the four interstellar races mentioned above are but a few of the motley cast of characters that you're either allying with or warring against in this epic space oddity. And Star Control 3 is a vast oddity, integrating real-time strategy and action elements with the exploratory playability of an adventure title into one game. It may take up eons of play time to finally solve, but one thing's for sure: you will become absorbed in the Star Control universe that unfurls before you. An adventure game is nothing without an engaging plot and the premise of Star Control 3 is infused with such a complexly woven history, you're bound to become engrossed in its narrative. Following the storyline established in Star Control 2, Star Control 3 casts you as the leader of the League of Sentient Races. Your mission takes place in the Kessari galaxy, where you are exploring strange inter-dimensional anomalies which you think may have something to do with the universal cessation of inter-space travel. Ostensibly, the only thing standing between you and resolving this mystery is an enemy alliance called the Hegemonic Crux. Your ship is a Precursor vessel (invented using the technology of the  proverbial Precursors, an ancient founding race) and is the only ship known to exist which can circumvent the current inter-space travel restrictions. On board is a sort of HAL 9000 computer called ICOM that helps you out with tips during your mission. Armed with this equipment, you start on a colony founded on an Earthlike planet. You explore the Kessari by pointing and clicking on a rotating star-map interface. During your travels, you will encounter other race colonies, friendly and otherwise, who are either members of the League or else potentially complicit with the Hegemonic Crux. These races can offer you ships and items to be used later in the game. You have the option of picking up friendly colonists to form new colonies on other planets. At the colony interface screen, you can adjust sliders that control the emphasis of your colony's production, skewing it toward ship, fuel, or resource production. There are seemingly a hundred different solar systems, all with colorfully rendered planets which can and, in many cases, must be explored. Many of these yield artifacts left behind by the Precursors, which can be researched to add exciting new resources to your space navy. To like any adventure game, you have to like its characters. So it's a good thing that the creepy critters and droids who inhabit Star Control 3 are its strongest point. There are 24 different races you can interact with, all of them animatronically controlled renderings, and each with its own distinct personality. From the slouch-shouldered, cowardly Spathi, to the brazenly bellicose Ur-Quan, to the haughtily omnipotent Arilou, each personality must be judged correctly, for some, if not all, of the races you encounter might betray you. Most of the characters have pretty delicate temperaments, and your replies, which can range from obsequious to rude, must be chosen wisely. All is not what it appears to be in the Kessari, and often you will find yourself going toe-to-toe with an erstwhile ally. Actually, the fun really starts in Star Control 3 when things come to blows. You continually generate ships and add them to your ever-expanding armada, employing them when need be. When one of the enemy wants to rumble, the game immediately goes into combat mode. Choose a ship from your fleet and off you go, into a real-time space battle. Each type of ship has its own weapons, maneuverability, and special abilities. After a while, you start to figure out which of your ships is strategically suited to take down a particular adversary. You'll need to keep a pretty formidable fleet because if your Precursor vessel is ever destroyed, the game's over. The fact is, Star Control 3 is basically two games in one. If you finally solve the game and no longer are challenged by the adventure aspect, you can still customize your own fleets and play in Hyper Melee mode (just combat) against the computer or a friend over the network. One could go far enough to say that this one of the best titles to come out this year. If you're one of those game fanatics who doesn't mind living a cloistered existence in your room, playing space commander into early hours of the morning (and carrying on excited conversations that make your friends worry), consider picking this one up.
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296,The Polar Express ,3.1," An ugly collection of poorly conceived minigames, The Polar Express is a failure by the standards of any medium.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/0/2/3/2211023-9215.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-polar-express-review/1900-6114522/,neg,"
 As a game based on a movie based on a book, The Polar Express is two degrees removed from the original vision of children's author Chris Van Allsburg, whose surrealist yuletide imagery won him a Caldecott Medal in 1986. One would assume that the video game purveyors of such a beloved property would feel pressure to be faithful to book and film, as they are both products of considerable talent. Instead, the end result of this game's development is a directionless hack job. An ugly collection of poorly conceived minigames, The Polar Express is a failure by the standards of any medium. It may be a blessing that this game is also extremely short, such that it can be completed by its target audience in about as much time as it takes to watch the film.  Unlike Van Allsburg's award-winning book, The Polar Express game is devoid of any artistic merit.  Most of The Polar Express takes place on a magical train destined for the elfin metropolis of the North Pole. As the bathrobe-clad, anonymous ""hero boy,"" you take it upon yourself to ensure that all the children on the train arrive safely. At first, you'll have to contend with Scrooge, a misanthropic puppet who frequently steals the children's tickets through some manner of prestidigitation. Each room on the train is a simple sort of minigame in which the object is usually to defeat some of Scrooge's mechanized underlings, thereby advancing toward one of your compatriots' lost tickets.   One relatively memorable minigame has you sneaking by an angry chef, whose head will project a Metal Gear-style exclamation point should a noise arouse his suspicion. Another game has you climb atop the train to chase the conductor to some unknown point where he plans to jettison your ponytailed romantic interest--unless, of course, you can supply her missing ticket. By far the strangest of these sequences, however, are Polar Express' several rhythm-action games, which require nothing of you, save the arrhythmic tapping of buttons in conjunction with the faintest touch of background music, probably culled from the film. These games are invariably facile and uninteresting.  At about the game's halfway point, you'll defeat Scrooge, using snowballs to hit him in his nose and exposed chest. Once the Polar Express' only villain is defeated, this already disjointed game loses all semblance of direction. The second 40 minutes of gameplay feels even more meaningless than the first. At this point, the game is frequently interrupted by cinematics taken from the movie.   Featuring much better voice talent than was used in the game, along with infinitely superior art and music direction, these movies feel like a total tease. They also expose The Polar Express for what it is--nothing more than a commercial extension of the film license. The game is over before it begins, and will leave even the youngest of tykes painfully aware that they've been cheated. Thirty dollars is rarely enough money to spend for an experience clocking in at under an hour and a half, especially if that experience is devoid of any enjoyment.  The PlayStation version's EyeToy minigames are just terrible.  In a halfhearted effort to provide some replay value, The Polar Express lets you unlock some of the minigames from the story mode for individual play. However, it's difficult to see why any child would want to endure these a second time. In the PlayStation 2 version of The Polar Express, two of these games involve the EyeToy. Incredibly, these are even worse than their controller-driven counterparts. One has you wipe the snow off the windshield of the Polar Express train before it accumulates to the point where your vision will be obscured. In line with the rest of the game's visuals, this snow looks like it was scribbled in Microsoft Paint. The other EyeToy game has you decorate a Christmas tree by waving your hand over the appropriate areas. Occasionally, one of Scrooge's puppets will attempt to ruin your work, so you'll have to swat him away. Obviously, the GameCube version doesn't include these two particular games. No loss there.  The Polar Express really feels like a soulless video game cash-in on the movie. Providing so little for the parental holiday dollar certainly isn't in the Christmas spirit the game purportedly teaches kids to cherish. No matter who you are, this is a train you'd be better off missing. 
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297,Felix Frenzy ,3.1, Avoid this game unless you are both a masochist and an obsessive Felix the Cat aficionado.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/4/2/8/20482-59428.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/felix-frenzy-review/1900-6094173/,neg,"
 Why oh why must developers, especially experienced ones like Jsmart, persist in making lousy games based on characters nobody cares about? Actually, let's carry this painful thought experiment a step further. When was the last time you saw any sort of product--except one of those obnoxious clocks--based on Felix the Cat? Felix was a cartoon character that never made it, folks. He was Mickey Mouse without good looks, Donald Duck minus the mellifluous voice, and Bugs Bunny sans street smarts. Nobody mourned his marginalization 50 years ago, and there's no discernable reason to bring him back now. I would sooner release games built around the Pillsbury Doughboy or Mike Tyson. Washed-up protagonist aside, suffice it to say that Felix Frenzy is a pretty mediocre title in its own right.  So it seems that Felix the Cat is hungry. To rectify this situation, you must move him laterally to make him catch falling fish. It's one point for blue fish, five points for green fish, a ton of points for these weird purple starfish things, and a lost life if you touch a nasty yellow shark. You can't do anything but move jerkily from left to right; Felix is barely animated (moving one space prompts him to switch feet and nothing more); the backgrounds are phenomenally ugly; and there's no sound. There's some kind of bonus stage, but it seems to be almost exactly the same as the rest of the game--except, now, only sharks are falling, and the objective is to stay alive as long as possible. It's still OK to truck out the ol' ""catch-the-falling-objects"" premise, but I can think of about 500 games that do it with more panache. Where are the falling power-ups that allow Felix to move faster or protect him from a shark hit? Seriously, fellas, you can do better than this.  Avoid this game unless you are both a masochist and an obsessive Felix the Cat aficionado. I haven't met anyone that answers this description yet, and I think I'd like to keep it that way. 
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298,Bet on Soldier ,3.1," It's buggy, it's ill-conceived, and it's even totally unplayable on some systems in its current state. If you think Bet on Soldier is a recipe for a game worth skipping, ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/3/6/2210836-bet_on_soldier___blood_sport_coverart.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bet-on-soldier-review/1900-6135590/,neg,"
  Bet on Soldier is a sci-fi-themed first-person shooter that takes place in a crazy war-torn world where the primary form of televised entertainment is one-on-one gladiatorial battles that break out in the middle of an otherwise normal battle. While that might sound like just the sort of gameplay and plot hook that might drag in all of you people waiting patiently for a game based on The Running Man, Bet on Soldier is a collection of half-baked ideas wrapped in a buggy mess of an engine, and the end result is a very bad game, overall.   Who loves you and who do you love?   Each mission begins with a soldier loadout screen where you can purchase weapons, various types of armor, and mercenaries to assist you along the way. You'll also choose which champions you'd like to face in each mission. This is where the whole Bet on Soldier concept comes into play. When you encounter these champions, the game breaks into a cutscene that plays the intro of a TV show called Bet on Soldier. These battles are treated like a televised sport, but they boil down to your trying to win as quickly as possible to earn more money. The solo battles are dull and fairly lifeless, plus they're jarring and intrude on the rest of the game.    The rest of the game is all about keeping your armor in good working order. You can do this by using conveniently placed reload and repair terminals, but this costs you money. Thankfully, you earn cash for every kill, and unless you're horrible at shooting people in the head--which is pretty easy here since the artificial intelligence doesn't seem to understand the concept of finding good cover--you'll always have plenty of money to work with. Alternately, you can hire an engineer to come with you. He can repair you at any time, but his light armor means you'll have to protect him. Since the mercenary AI is only marginally smarter than the enemy AI, this isn't always easy. We ran into several occasions when our backup got hung up on a wall and wouldn't proceed until we ran back through half the level to get him unstuck.    Armor is more than just a number near your health bar. Bet on Soldier also gives you a large metal riot shield, which you can put out in front of you when using a one-handed weapon. It slows you down a bit, but considering you can just as easily get headshots with a pistol as with a scoped rifle, the pistol is plenty powerful. Anyone with a steady hand should be able to nail headshots from great distances, since the enemies tend to stand still when you aren't directly in front of them.    In addition to its dreary, repetitive single-player game, Bet on Soldier has a multiplayer component that attempts to bring the betting in by letting you place ""bets"" on your ability to take out specific enemy soldiers. It's also a class-based mode that lets you upgrade through multiple levels by spending money. Unfortunately, the combat itself isn't exciting, so all of this is fairly moot. Also, finding more than one or two servers running at once is rare, so don't expect to find a great deal of online competition.    While it's not a particularly compelling game even when it's running properly, Bet on Soldier is also dragged down by a series of nasty technical issues that aren't fixed by the game's version 1.2 patch, including one that caused the game to crash to desktop every time we tried to start a game, change the resolution, or do just about anything else. On a different but similarly outfitted machine, the game ran without crashing, but it was prone to seizing up for seconds at a time. And the long load times' static or black screens had us wondering if maybe the game had crashed anyway, and then it would finally start up a minute or two later.   Killian!   Once it's up and running, Bet on Soldier does have some decent graphics. The player models are at least technically impressive and it makes good use of lighting and shadow effects, even if the design side of the game's visuals leave something to be desired. It's a proficient but bland-looking game that never seems to run at a stable frame rate, even on a machine that well exceeds the recommended system requirements. The speech in Bet on Soldier is a source of hilarious unintentional comedy. Imagine a native French speaker learning English from someone with a British accent and then attempting to sound like a hard-ass general from Texas. The constant accent shifts occur not only from sentence to sentence, but even word to word in some cases. It's completely insane, and it's one of the few compelling things about the game. Beyond that, the music is lackluster, and the basic sound effects are pretty bad. The scraping metal sound that plays when you walk is supposed to invoke the sound of a heavily armored trooper on the move. Instead it's just grating. You're also constantly panting and wheezing like an asthmatic. Considering you're supposed to be a trained soldier and the best of the best, carrying all that armor around shouldn't make you sound like you're constantly about to collapse.    It's buggy, it's ill-conceived, and it's even totally unplayable on some systems in its current state. If you think Bet on Soldier is a recipe for a game worth skipping, you're exactly right.  
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299,Dual Threat ,3.1," An enjoyably prototypical plot is the best thing that this short, repetitive, and poorly produced side-scrolling shooter has to offer.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dual-threat-review/1900-6104183/,neg,"
 Dual Threat, Airborne Entertainment's new mobile side-scroller, kicks off with a story straight out of an early-'80s Walter Hill movie--it's Philadelphia, 1982. The city is in the grips of an oppressive heat wave, and a crime syndicate called The Duce is running the city. It's up to a mismatched pair of cops, one of whom has recently been stripped of his badge, to bring down this criminal empire. This enjoyably prototypical plot, though, is by far the best thing that this short, repetitive, and poorly produced side-scrolling shooter has to offer.  Before the summer is over, The Duce will know the real meaning of heat.  The title refers to the fact that you'll play through the game as both of the buddy cops over the course of the game--there's Bobby Archer, described as ""a third-generation cop who goes by the rules,"" and Marcus ""Boom-Boom"" Brown, a loose cannon who plays by his own rules and is a danger to himself and those around him. Despite their divergent personalities, the two have nearly identical capabilities. Over the course of the game's two levels, you'll punch and shoot three different types of enemies, leap over gaps and land mines, and evade enemies by shimmying along elevated bars and creeping through ventilation shafts. At the beginning of each level, you're presented with a list of stats--strength, weapons, stamina, and stealth--which dictate how well you'll perform the different tasks at hand. You're given the option to invest some extra points into your stats as you see fit, though considering how much more effective guns are than stealth or hand-to-hand combat, and the seemingly random amount of health that can be lost to enemy fire, we found dumping all our points into weapons and stamina to be the most effective tactic.  Though you'll play through the two levels as both Archer and Boom-Boom, each with a different objective, the levels aren't particularly long, nor are they exceedingly difficult, thanks to an abundance of health pickups. The abrupt ending, which does little to wrap up the well-conceived story intro, gives the feeling that the developer initially intended to include many more levels. The gameplay concepts presented in Dual Threat are all totally legitimate, but the problem is that the game executes on those ideas terribly. General movement feels stifled, and jumping in particular is incredibly poor, making the tasks of jumping over land mines and leaping across gaps--activities that come up fairly often--rather cumbersome. The shooting mechanic literally seems hit and miss, and there was more than one occasion when we ran into an enemy that was, for all intents and purposes, invincible. Dual Threat is a game where the difficulty is derived from design flaws rather than a legitimate challenge, which always ends in frustration. We played through Dual Threat on both an LG VX6000 and a Nokia Series 60 phone, and though the Series 60 version ran at a much less lethargic pace, the actual gameplay was identical, and all of the functional issues remained intact.  The game's visuals don't compensate much for the dodgy gameplay, either. Character animation is extremely choppy, and the characters themselves look kind of awkward. The backgrounds, which include some rather bland warehouse and back-alley motifs, recycle different art elements quite liberally. Both the LG VX6000 and the Nokia Series 60 versions of Dual Threat are devoid of any sound whatsoever--no menu music, no in-game effects, nothing. Even a simple little funk ditty would have gone far to add some personality to the whole affair, but there is none to be found here.   Dual Threat is a poor implementation of a decent, if not well-worn, idea. The text-based story goes a long way toward cementing the game's feel, but shoddy, inconsistent controls, repetitive gameplay, and an underwhelming amount of playtime completely negate any charm Dual Threat might have had. 
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300,Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects ,3.1," The unfortunates who decide to rent or buy this game will be stuck with nothing more than a filthy, horribly buggy port of an already middling game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/5/7/2211457-box_mnroti.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/marvel-nemesis-rise-of-the-imperfects-review/1900-6135816/,neg,"
  Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects, Electronic Arts' new fighting game, has already appeared on the Xbox, PS2, GameCube, and PSP. Next up for the Nemesis treatment is the Nintendo DS, a portable system with very different capabilities from those other four platforms. The DS's touch screen and voice-recognition features present a lot of interesting gameplay opportunities, which, if used correctly, can more than make up for the portable's lack of graphical horsepower and analog control. Alas, that isn't at all the case here. Instead, Marvel Nemesis on the DS makes very poor use of the unique abilities of the hardware, and the unfortunates who decide to rent or buy this game will be stuck with nothing more than a filthy, horribly buggy version of an already middling game.   How many battle points does $35 buy?   On the DS, Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects' story goes from heavily garbled to completely incomprehensible. There are a few cartoon panels between each mission, but they never consist of more than two sentences of grammatically incorrect text. The basic facts are that The Imperfects, six superpowered thugs in the employ of evil genius Niles Van Roekel, are out to cause trouble in New York City so the boss can get his hands on a heavily guarded suit of alien armor...or something along those lines. In any case, there's ample excuse for Marvel's superheroes, led by crowd favorites Spider-Man, Iron Man, Elektra, and The Thing, to go up against the nasty ol' Imperfects in a series of one-on-one battles. The battles take place in fully destructible environments that are heavily seeded with objects you can turn into convenient missiles or bludgeons, all at the touch of a button.    It's a chore to wring any kind of entertainment out of Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. This is partly because you must play through the game's arcade mode endlessly to unlock content. You only start with two playable characters: Wolverine and The Human Torch. All other content--including characters, concept art, arenas, and alternate costumes--cost ""battle points,"" which you earn by trashing one CPU-controlled opponent after another as fast as you can. Occasionally the game will offer you a chance to wager battle points on an upcoming fight, but you never know when you'll get this opportunity, and you can only bet a maximum of 500 points on a battle, which is a fairly trivial amount. Unlocking Daredevil, for instance, costs 8,000 battle points. It's also possible to wager points during a multiplayer battle.    Marvel Nemesis' gameplay doesn't compare favorably to any of the other versions of the game, let alone any competing games on the Nintendo DS. The controls have gone from simplistic to cretinous. You can toggle auto-aim using the left shoulder button, but there's no reason to ever take it off, because there's no point to free-running around the level to pick up and throw objects. Furthermore, the game's environmental attacks have gone from somewhat overpowered to completely useless. Furthermore, your lock-on function reacts far too slowly to your opponent's movement. If you're in the middle of an attack and your enemy shifts to your left or right, your character won't adjust accordingly, as it takes a heavy fraction of a second for him or her to awkwardly pivot in place to face the right direction again.     The touch screen's primary use is to activate your character's motion and flight powers, which have no real use in this game, even on the multitiered levels. This is because you can fall any distance without suffering any damage, and your opponent will follow you wherever you go. Sometimes one of the characters will fall off a tall building, causing the game to pause for a few seconds before simply resetting the battle on the roof. Usually, all you need to do to win is maneuver the bad guy in to a corner so you can beat him to a pulp using your regular combo attack. You can also use the touch screen to perform your character's single finishing move by tapping in an elementary combo at the end of a match.    It's quite obvious that Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects didn't receive adequate play testing before its release. It's simply riddled with graphical, artificial-intelligence, and hit-detection glitches. Yes, most of the walls and floors are destructible, but they also have a nasty habit of disappearing at odd times so that your character appears to be standing on thin air. The CPU isn't much good at attacking you in any fashion, but every once in a while, CPU opponents will just start attacking a corner of the screen, even if you're standing in the middle of it. At a few points, we were even able to toss an enemy through a solid wall, or out of the screen entirely (the match went another 50 seconds before we won by default).   Stay away from this game.   Marvel Nemesis is not a good-looking game by the standards of the Nintendo DS. Most of the neat lighting tricks from the other versions have been dispensed with, as have a large portion of the character animations. What's left is a blurry hash of strange-looking combat, weak explosions, smoke and particle effects, and bland skeletal environments. Whatever visual élan and comic-book styling this game possessed on other platforms is gone. The sound is very mediocre for this type of game, and the effects are perhaps even a little understated. In any case, they're a pretty quotidian collection of beat-'em-up thumps, bashes, and breaking glass.      Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects shouldn't have been made for the Nintendo DS. The system doesn't have the capabilities to display the other versions' main strengths, which lie in their graphics and online multiplayer modes. Add this to the fact that this game is clearly an unfinished product (that still costs $35), and you've got a real lemon on your hands. Don't buy, rent, or otherwise play this game. You'll regret it.  
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301,Motocross Mania 3 ,3.1, There's not enough fun in Motocross Mania 3 to even justify its bargain bin price.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/3/7/2216537-box_mcm3.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/motocross-mania-3-review/1900-6124276/,neg,"
  Motocross Mania 3 attempts to inject a dose of adrenaline into the traditional motocross racing genre by putting an emphasis on bike-to-bike combat and including a variety of partially open-ended courses. Unfortunately, these attempts are marred by a shoddy controls, buggy gameplay, and some of the worst character design we've seen this year, resulting in a game that can't even justify its $15 price tag.   Playing Motocross Mania 3 makes us wonder how bad the first two must have been.   The list of gameplay options in MM3 is fairly standard: championship, single race, time trial, as well as a handful of minigames, multiplayer gameplay for up two players, and an unlockable freestyle mode. You'll spend most of your time in MM3 locked in the  championship mode, which comes in three difficulty levels (hardcore, which is the final level, can only be unlocked after completing the ""medium"" championship level). Typical of most championship modes, you will earn points in MM3 depending on your position in the race, with the ultimate goal of being the top point-earner in the series. An interesting twist lets you directly challenge other racers over the course of a season. If you best a racer in two out of three races, for example, you win his bike. Your home base in championship mode comes in the form of a little park where you can buy upgraded parts for your bike, new weapons, or better armor for your rider, or you can check out your game stats, switch bikes altogether, or head out to the next race. Being able to actually ride from spot to spot is a nice touch, and you'll have plenty of opportunities to upgrade your bike, provided you have the cash to do so.     So far, so good, right? Well, things don't start really getting ugly until tire meets dusty track. As a motocross game, MM3's unresponsive controls are further hampered by physics that would only make sense in Bizarro World. Take collisions, for example: In some sections of courses you'll feel as if you're scooting along in god mode, as you run directly through trees, rocket into impossibly high jumps, and carve through oncoming traffic as if the cars were made of marshmallows. You won't be allowed to get too comfortable with these little victories, however, because at any moment you're liable to crash for no apparent reason (even if you're riding in the middle of the road with no obstacles in sight). The same traffic you can blast through one moment will immediately become all too solid the next, meaning you'll never know just when it's safe to wind your way through cars or attempt to avoid them altogether. The atrociously annoying slow-motion rag-doll physics that accompany each crash look silly, drag on for too long, and become old virtually after the first time you see them.    The other half of the MM3 equation is rider combat. Not content with just creating a fast off-road racer, the developers tossed in the ability to whack your opponents with weapons ranging from baseball bats to cattle prods to (our personal favorite) severed bear claws attached to sticks, all of which do differing amounts of damage. Lashing out at your opponents is easy, as you can strike to the left or right by pressing the appropriate trigger. There are also special attacks on the ground and in the air that do a bit more damage to your opponents. Some of the air attacks--which are essentially stunts--have some cute animations, but we didn't find much use for them. The main problem with the combat system in MM3 is a complete lack of impact when using the weapons. The idea of taking a baseball bat to a fellow rider while traveling 90mph and watching him topple off his bike sounds like a great thing, and it probably could have been. In MM3, however, whipping a bat at a guy's head merely results in a slight decrease in his hit points and not much else. If you manage to take a guy completely out (by reducing his HP to zero), a nice little animation plays. Up until that point, though, you never feel the danger that's inherent in the combat.   The game looks best when there is virtually nothing happening on the screen at all, such as at the beginning of a race.     Though the combat isn't implemented that well in MM3, you will be forced to use it in order to win races. In straight-ahead circuit races, you can win not only by crossing the finish line first, but also by taking out all the other riders on the track. Battle royal races, also featured in championship mode, aren't races at all, but are two-minute free-for-alls where the rider with the most KOs wins the match. These matches aren't particularly fun, however, and the overly large battle areas mean the field can spread out way too thin for effective combat. The battle royal feature is also present in MM3 as one of three minigames.    In terms of looks, MM3 is one of the uglier games we've seen in a while. Each track has an extremely hazy, unfocused look to it, which, when combined with the bland pastel color scheme, looks as if mall art maven Thomas Kinkade had a direct hand in the artistic direction of the game. To be fair, some of the tracks do feature some interesting design choices. One track in particular has you speeding through the mountains during a military drill, dodging jeeps and tanks, and all the while doing your best to pick up the power-ups that dot the track. Unfortunately, MM3's character designs don't exhibit much in the way of imagination and, to make things worse, they are poorly executed at that.     The soundtrack is rockingly straightforward. While the game claims support for custom soundtracks, it seems that you can only choose which of the game's soundtrack tunes to play and which to turn off. We couldn't find any way to incorporate the music on our Xbox into the game. As for in-game audio, the bikes sound fine, but the repetitive yelps of pain from your competitors during combat becomes annoying after just a few minutes.    MM3 is Xbox Live aware, and your top scores on a particular track will be automatically posted. Judging by the fact that we placed in the top 10 on every race we entered, there doesn't appear to be too much competition at this point, even though the game has been out for a few weeks now. That's where the online support ends, however, because there's no online racing to speak of.    It doesn't get much more rag doll than this.   For what it's worth, MM3 features one of the largest manuals we've ever seen for a budget title, especially a budget title of this type of nominal quality. If a bit more of the development budget had gone into the game's features instead of the manual that describes them, perhaps we could at least recommend this one. As it stands, Motocross Mania 3 is an extremely poor execution of a concept that might have been fun in different hands. Even at a $15 price tag, this game should be avoided.    
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302,Army Men: Major Malfunction ,3.1, Major Malfunction is an all-too-apt subtitle for this horrible Army Men shooter.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/4/9/2219649-box_ammm.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/army-men-major-malfunction-review/1900-6151644/,neg,"
  Film buffs remember when the drill sergeant played by R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket encountered the mentally unstable Private Pyle holding a rifle in the bathroom and yelled, ""What is your major malfunction?!"" Pyle responded by firing a round right into the drill sergeant's chest. You'll feel about the same way if you make the mistake of buying Army Men: Major Malfunction. This poorly designed shooter, with awkward controls and particularly shoddy sound, comes off as an embarrassing attempt to cash in on a franchise name that wore out its welcome years ago.   Anyone who buys this game may, indeed, suffer from a major malfunction.   The game's plot centers on an enemy officer named, as you might have guessed, Major Malfunction, who has built up an evil empire around the house. Sarge has been sent to investigate but hasn't been heard from in a while. You take the role of a green plastic soldier named Private Anderson and are sent to find Sarge and stop Major Malfunction's nefarious plans. Along the way, you'll pick up a number of different weapons, ranging from rifles to shotguns to bazookas, and fight against other toy soldiers, robots, and emplaced guns.    There are 30 different missions in the game, which is an entirely single-player affair. That sounds like a lot more content than it is though, as you can cruise through most of those missions in about 10 minutes or less. Aside from the odd time-trial affairs (one of which has you sliding down a narrow pipe, like a snowboarder) or arena battles, the missions generally have you moving from point A to point B, blasting everything in your path. The environments, which include different areas of a house, such as the kitchen, basement, and backyard, give a somewhat varied look to the proceedings, but inside of the first hour, Major Malfunction gets very, very dull with its tiny levels and repetitive gameplay.     The game's awkward controls are probably the biggest problem with Major Malfunction. You can't aim your weapon effectively without using the game's auto-aiming function, which is clunky to use as it often doesn't lock on to enemies, even if they're in view. Then, there are the enemies that sometimes dive out of the way to break out of the target lock--reacquiring the same enemy to fire at can be a pain, as pressing the auto-aim button will often lock on to a different enemy. If it was possible to just aim manually with any effectiveness, relying on the auto-aim button wouldn't be a problem, but the even more awkward camera control means this isn't an option. You are afforded some measure of camera control with the right analog stick, but in practice, the camera doesn't stick where you want it to, or even move much of the time. If there are obstructions in the way-- which occurs often in the cramped confines of the levels--you simply can't move the camera around much, if it all. When you do move it, the camera has a tendency to float off slightly from where you want it, as if there are only certain fixed angles you can view your character from.     Despite all the issues with control, Major Malfunction is a fairly easy game. The enemy artificial intelligence is often quite dumb--it's usually possible to get them stuck on some portion of the level geometry as you pop out and shoot them periodically. About the only problems you may have with beating the level come with the level-scripting breaks or just trying to figure out the next objective, which isn't always as obvious as it could be.    The speech in the game is irritating enough to make you want to jam an ice pick into each of your ear canals.   There's no salvation to be had in the game's presentation, unfortunately. The graphics are fairly primitive, with lots of clipping issues, chunky-looking models, and very flat texturing, even in the environments. Sound is where Major Malfunction is particularly horrible, as the voice acting in the game is some atrocious mumbling mumbo jumbo. It's not cute or clever sounding like Simlish, either--the ""speaking"" in the game sounds more like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon but worse--it's annoying enough to just about drive you crazy by the end of the second or third mission when you get your briefing. The gun and explosion effects are pretty limp-sounding, too, but at least they don't make you want to play the game with the volume turned down like with the speech.    With its terrible controls and ugly, sometimes embarrassing, presentation, Army Men: Major Malfunction is a game that everyone should avoid. Don't be fooled by the budget price, either--there's little value to be had in playing this game.    
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303,Underground Pool ,3.1, Underground Pool is a squalid representation of the game of billiards.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/2/0/7/26588-75207.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/underground-pool-review/1900-6165308/,neg,"
  It's unlikely that anyone would go into a budget- priced handheld pool game and expect the moon from it, but it wouldn't be hard to expect more than what a ramshackle piece of junk like Underground Pool offers up. Shoddy ball physics, useless artificial intelligence, clumsy touch-screen controls, ugly graphics, shrill audio, and a severe lack of modes are just the highlights of what's wrong with this game.    Underground Pool: Because people were tired of all those sellout corporate pool games, right? Right...? Hello?   Underground Pool offers single game, challenge mode, and multiplayer options. The challenge mode is the closest the game gets to a career mode, but it's really just a scattered collection of tournaments that unlock, of all things, more tournaments. Winning tournaments nets you cash, but the cash doesn't do anything for you, except let you buy into more tournaments down the road. There are no bonus items or new pool gear to purchase--not even new games to unlock. In fact, Underground Pool offers only two variations of the game of pool: 8-ball and 9-ball. There isn't even an option to futz with the rules of each game.     Considering how utterly inept the two included pool variations are, maybe it's for the best that the developers didn't try to shoot for higher sky and add more. For one thing, you might as well just ignore most of the game's touch-screen functions. The game lets you rotate the pool cue around the table with the stylus, but it's generally easier and less flustering to do it with the D pad. Tapping on the cue when it's positioned at the top or bottom of the screen often results in no response whatsoever. The one thing the touch screen is useful for is setting power for your shot, but even this mechanic is flawed because the game doesn't use an intuitive power meter. It's just a stick that you move up and down to determine how far back the pool cue is from the cue ball. While that might seem easy enough, there are times in this game when seemingly small amounts of power send balls flying every which way, so any measure of predictability is absent here. It probably has at least something to do with the game's oddball physics. There's a bit of weightiness to the balls on the table, but they seem too light overall, bouncing much more wildly than real pool balls do.    Another huge flaw is that the camera system makes lining up proper shots nearly impossible. You can float between a few different camera angles, but only one of them lets you properly line up with a ball on the table, and even then, it's tough to gauge whether the angles you're taking are beneficial or not. Again, part of the issue is the weird physics model, but it's tough to make much headway with these awful camera angles, especially when the on-the-table angle can't deal with your cue ball being near the edge of the table and obscures your view of practically everything.    That the AI opponents are basically idiots does ease some of the challenge presented by the lame camera and broken controls. These invisible dolts repeatedly screw up seemingly easy shots. Even when all they have to do is hit the side of a slightly blocked ball to avoid a foul, they still can't pull it together. The Black Widow these players are not.   There are exactly a million different ways to play the game of pool that are better than this one. We know. We did the math.   On top of everything else, Underground Pool looks and sounds awful, which is sad considering that the graphics are probably the least offensive part of the game. The game does include several different tables and club backgrounds, but none of them are pleasant to look at. The tables look kind of grainy and blurry, and you can barely see the club backgrounds, save for quick looks now and again. The audio is probably the game's worst feature. The ball-clacking noises sound weirdly tinny and compressed, and the soundtrack consists of some of the most gratingly terrible MIDI you can imagine. It's not even music. It's a 5-year-old with hooks for hands slamming wildly on random keys on a MIDI keyboard. Horrific stuff.    Whether or not you're a pool enthusiast, Underground Pool is not the game for you. The single-player game is pointless and severely not fun to play, the multiplayer game isn't any better (and requires multiple carts--there's no download play), and the whole game is presented poorly. Go plop down $20 at a local pool hall, and leave this hunk of junk on the shelf.  
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304,Halo: Combat Evolved ,9," If you've been holding out for the PC version of the game all these years, then don't deny yourself this experience any longer, and see what you've been missing.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/4/0/2210040-box_halo.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/halo-combat-evolved-review/1900-6076140/,pos,"
 When Microsoft released its Xbox game console in late 2001, easily the best launch title for the system was Halo. Originally announced way back in 1999 and slated for release on the PC and Macintosh, this first-person shooter became an Xbox exclusive after Microsoft bought the developer, Bungie. Halo for the Xbox has gone on to sell more than 3 million copies worldwide--which isn't proof of the game's superior quality, but certainly is evidence of it. Yet, the game was never officially canceled for its originally intended platforms, and at long last, it's available for the PC. For the most part, this new version of Halo is a straight port of the 2-year-old Xbox game. You'd think a high-end PC could handle such a game easily, but this port, which was done by Gearbox Software, is surprisingly taxing even on very fast PCs with tons of RAM and the latest video cards. Halo for the PC also loses the original version's much-vaunted cooperative play mode. But in spite of all that, and in spite of the very high standards for first-person shooters on the PC, Halo is still an incredible action game. It's a true classic--a game that hasn't lost any of its impact and intensity over time.  The PC version of Halo is mostly identical to the original Xbox version, but it's still a truly impressive game.  Halo consists of an intense, story-driven single-player campaign and a multiplayer mode. The campaign is a good 12 hours long at the normal difficulty setting, and the dynamic nature of the battles, along with the multiple, well-balanced difficulty settings, gives it good replay value. The multiplayer component only supports up to 16 players and includes a bare-bones integrated server finder. The game tends to play smoothly online if you can find a server with a low enough ping, and it features an assortment of different modes, which are variations on the standard modes of play found in your typical multiplayer shooter: They include slayer (meaning, deathmatch), team slayer, capture the flag, king of the hill, and some others, though slayer and CTF are by far the most popular choices judging from the servers that are up and running.  Halo is famous for integrating powerful, fun-to-drive vehicles with the on-foot action, and this is what distinguishes its multiplayer component from that of other shooters, though some other PC shooters have also integrated vehicles more or less successfully since the original release of Halo. The PC version exclusively features a couple of multiplayer-only weapons not found in the Xbox version--the flamethrower and the fuel rod gun, sort of a plasma grenade launcher--though they're not as interesting as the game's core weapons. There are also six new multiplayer maps that were made for the PC version of the game. All in all, Halo's multiplayer component can make for some good, chaotic fun and seems to have a lot of potential for when the fan community gets hold of the editing tools that Gearbox has promised.  For the time being, it's Halo's single-player component that's the main attraction. If you've played it on the Xbox, then you already know why--and you may still wish to pick up the PC version of the game just to go through this outstanding campaign with higher-resolution graphics, virtually non-existent loading times, and more-responsive controls than what can be found on the Xbox. The standard first-person shooter controls work flawlessly with this game, so you'll be able to pick it up and start playing in no time if you've played any other shooter lately.   The Master Chief is very strong and can effectively take on groups of enemies alone, but he can't afford to be reckless.  Longtime fans of Bungie's games know that one of the company's greatest talents is to tell a great story in its games. Halo is no exception, and it easily features one of the best stories to date in a first-person shooter, though that's not necessarily saying much. In any case, this is some great science fiction. The game picks up as the Pillar of Autumn, a human warship, is under heavy attack by the alien race called the Covenant. As a last resort, the ship's captain issues the order to awaken an experimental soldier from his cryogenic sleep. Referred to only by rank, the Master Chief is a skilled solider equipped with a very durable environment suit. He's tasked with protecting the ship's AI, Cortana, and escapes with some human marines toward a mysterious ring-shaped planetoid called Halo. Halo has its own atmosphere and ecosystem, but clearly it's no natural construction. There, the Master Chief (along with the surviving human marines) will continue the brutal fight against the Covenant and, with Cortana's help, will uncover the secrets of Halo and hopefully find a means to escape.  As the Master Chief, you're highly skilled with all types of ranged weapons, which you can even use as deadly bludgeons when up close and personal with the enemy. You're also able to commandeer human and alien vehicles and hurl grenades accurately at a great distance. You have a motion tracker that detects any enemies in the vicinity, as well as recharging energy shields that allow you to survive against direct impact from energy or ballistic weapons. And your armor prevents you from being killed outright by such attacks should your shields be depleted.  The Master Chief is powerful, but he's far from invulnerable. He can only carry two weapons at once (plus a stash of human frag grenades and alien plasma grenades), and he's vulnerable to concentrated fire or heavy weapons. The way the Chief's energy shields work is one of the game's innovations. The shields will recharge in a few seconds when the Chief isn't taking any fire, a life-saving feature that forces you into strategic retreats and to fight from behind cover whenever possible during the course of Halo. Having those shields not only makes for some tense firefights, but also means you won't find yourself in situations where your health is too low for you to possibly survive the next fight. It's little wonder that other shooters have started copying this play mechanic, since it works very well.  You'll sometimes find yourself in the thick of pitched battles between the Covenant, friendly marines, and others, and these make for some incredible action sequences.  The most impressive aspects of Halo are its friendly and enemy artificial intelligence, its physics for vehicles and explosions, and its weapon design. These elements are what contribute to the outstanding quality of the action, and though they are technically the elements of a 2-year-old game, they remain unsurpassed by just about any other shooter. Halo isn't a squad-based shooter, but in those instances when you're fighting alongside fellow marines, these troopers will naturally look to you for guidance and provide you with covering fire.  Your enemies, meanwhile, offer a significant challenge. The Covenant's elites are imposing-looking, arrogant alien soldiers who have recharging energy shields of their own. They'll attempt to dodge your fire, use cover, and flush you out with explosives or flanking maneuvers if you try to stay hidden for too long. They're supported by grunts, which are weak little creatures that serve as Halo's comic relief. These cowardly foes will scatter, flailing their arms in terror, if an elite is killed in their vicinity. Yet grunts are not to be underestimated, for they can carry heavy weapons and grenades. They can also use stationary gun emplacements and will draw your fire away from their more-dangerous comrades. There are other Covenant foes, such as the jackals, which are skinny little creatures who defend themselves with energy shields, and the hunters, which are enormous and fearsome shock troopers. The Covenant aren't the only enemies you'll face in Halo, but they are the most prevalent and the most interesting to fight against. There aren't many varieties, but since they're armed with different types of weapons and are capable of effectively fighting both in close quarters and from long range, there's a great deal of variety to the types of battles in the game.  That's thanks in no small part to the vehicles. The best parts of Halo take place in sprawling, wide-open areas in which you're free to fight on foot or in any of the game's four drivable vehicles that you can find. The human's warthog is a sturdy 4x4 all-terrain vehicle--you can't shoot while driving it, but a marine can use the high-powered chaingun mounted on the back, and another can ride shotgun, providing support fire with his weapon. The warthog, like all of Halo's vehicles, automatically moves in the direction in which you're looking, and this works very well to allow you to pull off some great stunts. The humans also have the rhino, their main battle tank, which can lay waste to small armies of Covenant single-handedly.  Halo's vehicles are fun and easy to drive, and they're great in multiplayer.  The Covenant's vehicles aren't as durable but are still very useful. The Ghost is a hoverbike armed with twin plasma guns, and the Banshee is an assault aircraft that can devastate ground forces. Each of these handles uniquely from all the others, looks great, and has its own unique advantages. They're put to use in memorable moments in Halo's campaign, and are a lot of fun in multiplayer, but what makes them particularly impressive is how seamlessly they're integrated with the action. Your perspective smoothly transitions to a third-person view when you get into the driver's seat of one of these.  The arsenal of weapons available in Halo is also terrific. Rather than include a progressively more powerful lineup of guns as in most shooters, Halo's weapons are all well balanced and uniquely suitable to certain situations. Plus, the human and Covenant weapons are very distinct, thematically--the humans' ballistic weapons are well matched against the Covenant's plasma and energy-based firearms. You'll probably gravitate to a few types of weapons in particular. The standard marine assault rifle practically steals the show, as it offers a high rate of fire, looks and sounds great, and has a built-in compass and ammo readout. Better yet, it's perfectly suited for smashing an ugly Covenant's face in at close range. Indeed, the Master Chief has a unique way of using all of the game's different weapons as a bludgeon, and these powerful attacks are incredibly satisfying to use as finishing moves, especially in a tight spot when your ammo clip is running low and you need to finish the job, fast.   Grenades in Halo are also really great. The standard human frag grenade explodes almost on contact, causing any foes, weapons, or debris in the vicinity to go flying every which way. It just doesn't cease to be thrilling to watch a pack of Covenant get caught in an explosion. The Covenant's plasma grenades work great, too. They take a few seconds to explode, but they can also stick to a target, which will run around frantically in its final moments. Later in the game, when grenades are in heavy supply and when you're fighting mostly in close quarters, vast chain reactions of grenade explosions can lead to some very messy results.  A well-placed grenade can set off a chain reaction that blows away a whole pack of enemies.  Halo's single-player campaign does have one noticeable shortcoming in the actual level design. Though the wide-open areas are great, the game's numerous indoor levels aren't very interesting to look at and mostly consist of one same-looking room or corridor after another. The level design just isn't nearly as imaginative as every other aspect of the game, and it's the one aspect of Halo that really does seem dated. Nevertheless, the level design never stoops to slowing you down with tedious puzzles or jumping sequences, or overbearing dialogue or stealth elements, so the focus is always on the action. And since the enemy and friendly AI and the weapon design are so good, the layout of the levels really isn't so important, because the quality of the action is always top-notch. At any rate, Halo's single-player campaign lets you move seamlessly between outdoor and indoor environments, and the game's long-range vehicle battles and close-quarters, claustrophobic corridor crawls are all highly entertaining in their own right.  Surprisingly, Halo looks really great on the PC--if you can get it to run smoothly. The creature and vehicle design is top notch--there are clear thematic design differences between the steely, utilitarian human designs and the sleek, purple-hued, almost oily-looking alien constructions. The weapon effects, explosions, and vehicles are especially impressive, and the enemy animations are very well done, too. The textures are sharpened up for the PC and are effectively bump-mapped to make them look touchable and realistic rather than flat and fake, though Halo's outdoor areas look particularly good. The character models and level architecture aren't terribly complex, however. But the only real issue with Halo's visuals is that they won't necessarily run smoothly at a high resolution, even on a high-end PC. You can tone down various aspects of the visuals to up the frame rate, but still, you're unlikely to experience a better frame rate from Halo than you would from other popular shooters from the past year or so. That's too bad, since the frame rate was one aspect of Halo that the PC version could ideally have improved on over the original version, which moved no more smoothly than 30 frames per second.  Halo is one of the best shooters of all time, on any platform.  On the other hand, the audio in Halo has been translated completely intact and is still first-rate. A truly superb soundtrack swells up during key moments of the single-player campaign. Chock-full of militaristic percussion, choirlike vocals, and cello strings, this is one of the best soundtracks in a shooter, and it adds a lot of drama to the action. The sound of the various weapons is also well done--each sounds distinctly different, though the Covenant's plasma weapons sound a bit underpowered. The voice acting is also excellent, from the Master Chief's soft-spoken, reassuring one-liners to the marines' variety of elated battle cries. In a nice touch, the marines even have different ethnic accents, and they have a great deal of dialogue, in general, so you'll rarely hear them repeat their lines. Covenant forces sound pretty great, too, as do some of the other characters and foes you'll face.  Some aspects of Halo for the PC are disappointing, to be sure. Considering this is mostly just a straight port of the Xbox version, it's a shame that we had to wait two long years for the game to come out. It's also too bad that the Xbox version's option to play through the campaign cooperatively is nowhere to be found and that the graphics engine doesn't seem well optimized for the PC. And the multiplayer component, while entertaining, doesn't offer the sheer scale or unique modes of play offered by the most popular multiplayer PC shooters of today. But even with all that said, Halo is still a tremendously entertaining game on its own merits, and it can easily be placed in the same category as other all-time greatest shooters, like Doom and Half-Life. So if you've been holding out for the PC version of the game all these years, then don't deny yourself this experience any longer, and see what you've been missing. 


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305,Freedom Force ,9," Even with its minor problems, Freedom Force is very easy to recommend--it's a superhero game that gets everything right.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/5/6/2212056-freedom_force.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/freedom-force-review/1900-2859351/,pos,"
Freedom Force isn't the first eagerly awaited superhero game, but it is the first to actually be released. With the cancellation of Hero Games' Champions, Bullfrog's The Indestructibles, and MicroProse's Agents of Justice in previous years, it seemed as if there would never be a decent superhero game for the PC, or any superhero game for that matter. But Freedom Force saves the day. Irrational Games has combined the surface elements of a role-playing game with a tactical combat engine, creating a hybrid that isn't very deep but is totally satisfying in its breadth. And, perhaps more importantly, Freedom Force has a winning personality and a developed style that's as good as PC gaming has ever offered--it joins the ranks of games like Interstate '76 and Grim Fandango.   Freedom Force features a memorable cast of superheroes...  Immediately upon starting the campaign, it's apparent that Irrational Games took its inspiration from the silver age of comics. The game opens with the origin of Minuteman, the patriotic leader of Freedom Force. The first thing you see is an elderly man's face, all Jack Kirby-style black lines and wrinkles, surrounded by bright secondary colors. The narrator explains the game's events in a bombastic voice that owes more to Adam West's version of Batman than Tim Burton's. The heroes of Freedom Force don't have time to brood in dark corners; they're too busy returning stolen purses, fighting the communists, and protecting Patriot City from dinosaurs and aliens. It's a spot-on homage to the era that may seem like a parody only because it gets almost every detail, from the dialogue to the enemies, exactly right.    Freedom Force is primarily a squad-based tactical game. At the beginning of each mission, you choose a squad of up to four heroes from the available roster. You enter the map, fight some enemies, occasionally fight a boss, return to base, and repeat. The combat system is similar in some respects to that in Baldur's Gate, in that it seems like a turn-based system but it plays in real time. You can pause the game whenever you like to issue orders, and you can also slow things down and speed them up at your discretion. Your heroes have a wide variety of attacks and defenses, including melee, projectile attacks, and area-effect attacks. Attacks do different types of damage, such as fire, cold, crushing, mental, magic, and so forth. Defensive powers will generally help against only a particular type of damage, and certain heroes and enemies are particularly vulnerable or immune to certain types.   The best thing about the combat system is that the streets of Patriot City aren't just a backdrop. The environments play an important part in any battle. Strong heroes can pick up cars and throw them. You can wrench stoplights out of the ground and bat thugs around with them. You can jump, climb, or fly to the tops of buildings and rain energy beams down on your foes. The physics are great--you'll learn to use them to your advantage, knocking foes off of buildings and batting them into oncoming cars. You can turn whole buildings to rubble in a matter of moments. You'll want to be careful, because causing too much havoc can take away from your prestige--you gain prestige points at the end of each mission, which are used for recruiting new heroes. But in the best combat missions, you'll be out of the confines of the city and free to wreak destruction as needed. The combat system includes everything you'd want in a superhero game--some characters can fly, some can climb walls, and some can leap tall buildings. It's almost perfect.  ...and a great tactical combat system.  There are only two problems with the combat. The first is that the game doesn't allow for automatic pausing at regular intervals. Stopping to issue orders must be done manually, which is strange considering that it would be impossible to play Freedom Force as a real-time game. Missions often require you to split your squad, so keeping track of everything that's going on becomes impossible without stopping and surveying the situation. The system works as is, but an automatic pause would be more than welcome. What's more of an issue is the complete lack of a minimap. Except in rare cases, there's no indication of offscreen enemies, even if they are within the view of your squad. Enemies can also be hidden under trees and other objects, and when your squad is divided it's easy to overlook someone getting clobbered by a villain that's not visible for one reason or another.   In theory, the problem with superhero games is that superheroes are traditionally static characters: They have their powers and that's that. Irrational has broken with tradition here, and it was a wise decision. As you complete missions, your heroes gain experience. Every one of your heroes gains experience for every mission, though the four who directly participate get slightly more. When a hero gains a level, he or she gets points that can be used to buy new powers or to improve existing powers. Deciding when to improve and when to expand a particular hero's powers is one of the more interesting elements of the game, allowing you to create heroes that are relatively weak yet versatile or heroes with devastating yet very specific abilities. Should El Diablo specialize in his missile attacks, which do a good deal of damage but are hazardous in populated areas? Should the strong but slow Man-Bot work on his ranged attacks to make up for his speed deficiency?The experience system is Freedom Force's most significant tie to role-playing games, but there are a few other touches borrowed from RPGs as well. Missions occasionally have secondary objectives, small side quests you can find by talking to the citizens of Patriot City. These tend to break up the monotony of the missions, which often require you to just hunt down enemies on a map. The later missions lose the side quests but get much more interesting in structure. Missions are arranged into short storylines. A new supervillain appears in Patriot City, and Freedom Force must find out what he or she is up to, then put a stop to the nefarious plans.  Superheroes can fly, climb walls, burrow underground, and much more.  The villains in Freedom Force are creative and interesting, as are their minions. The Shadow lives underground with her deformed acolytes, Deja Vu takes to the streets with his cloned sidekicks, and Mr. Mechanical wreaks destruction with his robotic cohorts who swing their wrecking-ball arms at the city's landmarks. Though each villain's arc is a self-contained set of missions, there's an overarching story, one that explains why these heroes and villains acquired their powers to begin with, and who is behind the strange goings-on in Patriot City.   The heroes are at the heart of this story, and like all good comics, Freedom Force is essentially a soap opera. You've got a love story, and you've got interteam rivalries. You have all the archetypes, from the android that works purely on logic to the brooding loner trying to amend past wrongs. You even have new archetypes, such as a speedy Southern gent who spouts ridiculous slogans and sounds like Ross Perot and an ex-fisherman turned fish-man who sounds like Sean Connery. And though there are plenty of missions, and some good moments of character development, you'll wish the game were longer simply so the relationships could develop more. There are a lot of members of Freedom Force, and they each have a strong personality. It's a shame that some of them have to be relegated to supporting roles.   You can even make your own characters for the team, and the character editor is one of the game's highlights. Almost every possible power you could want is included, and the wide variety of user-created skins means that you can easily re-create your favorite superheroes and recruit them for your team. Add Wolverine, add Green Lantern, add the Silver Surfer. You can even create your own, if you're so inclined.   The characters look great. Freedom Force is bright and colorful, and the costumes all perfectly evoke the silver age. You even get quick sound-effect images onscreen during battles (""Thwack!"" and ""Foosh!"" and so on). It's hard not to wonder, at first, why the designers went with a typical 3D look for the characters and not the cel-shading effect that gave Jet Grind Radio for the Dreamcast its distinctive look. But the 3D graphics are great and well suited to the game. The origin movies are excellent, perfectly re-creating the art of the era, with slight animations to give the panels life. Even the loading screens are great, featuring fake comic book covers that are dead ringers for the real thing and that will most certainly bring to mind classic comic book hooks like ""In this issue: Everybody dies!"" In comparison to the origin movies and the loading screens, the in-engine cutscenes unfortunately aren't as comic book-like.   The audio in Freedom Force is even better than the graphics. The voices are perfectly overdramatic, delivering the earnest dialogue with a seriousness that borders on the zealous. ""All I need is a spaceship,"" says Mentor in his origin movie, ""...and courage!"" There are a few bad jokes, but for the most part the game plays it serious enough to be the right kind of funny. Some of the voices aren't as good as the majority--mostly bit parts that sound poorly recorded. The music is excellent and diverse, featuring different themes for different characters and managing, like the game itself, to be both lighthearted and serious at the same time.  There are plenty of characters to choose from, and you can also make your own.  The game's occasional problems are easily forgivable in light of all it has going for it, but they can sometimes be frustrating regardless. Some are small interface issues, like the fact that saved games are listed alphabetically instead of chronologically and that it's a bit of a hassle to figure out which heroes have gained a level after the initial mission wrap-up screen. You can't reconfigure your team when restarting a mission unless you fail the mission. The game is slightly unstable, and occasionally a mission will be impossible to finish for reasons beyond your control, such as when a plot-critical nonplayer character falls unconscious or gets knocked out of speaking range by a stray explosive. But without a doubt, the biggest shortcoming of Freedom Force is that the single-player game is really all there is. There's a deathmatch multiplayer mode, but there's no cooperative mode and no skirmish maps for extended single-player gaming (though Irrational has promised a skirmish mode in an upcoming patch).   Fortunately, the single-player game is highly replayable, if only because of the nearly limitless number of heroes and tactics available. And even with its minor problems, Freedom Force is very easy to recommend--it's a superhero game that gets everything right. It has the living, interactive city promised in The Indestructibles, the tactical combat promised in Agents of Justice, and the role-playing promised in Champions. It looks great and it sounds even better. You'll have a great time with Freedom Force if you like, or have ever liked, comic books, because it was made by people who obviously love them. And though Freedom Force could probably skate by on its premise and personality alone, it doesn't need to: Beneath the masks, capes, and heroic platitudes is a superb game.


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306,FIFA 2001 Major League Soccer ,9, This year's version represents a renewed commitment to realism and offers plenty of innovation to the hit soccer series.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/5/3/1/2943-11531.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-2001-major-league-soccer-review/1900-2647901/,pos,"
Last year's FIFA 2000 proved that even the finest PC sports game franchises are susceptible to some questionable design decisions. It emphasized fast action over simulation elements and also replaced the play-by-play commentary of the veteran British broadcasting team of John Motson and Mark Lawrenson with the unremarkable ESPN announcers Phil Schoen and Julie Foudy. Fortunately, this year's version represents a renewed commitment to realism and offers plenty of innovation to the hit soccer series.   However, when you first fire up the program, FIFA 2001 seems anything but improved. The introductory sequence is simplistic, grainy, and uninspired, despite the generous audible assistance of Moby's hypnotic Bodyrock. The menu interfaces are missing EA Sports' standard high-tech gloss, so they're uncharacteristically unsightly. Every menu selection is also accompanied by awful-sounding sound effects reminiscent of a loud coin-op arcade machine, but, fortunately, the game lets you turn these off.   FIFA 2001 really shows its stuff once you get to the pitch, where it exhibits the culmination of a complete visual and practical makeover that'll satisfy anyone who can appreciate the accuracy of a sports simulation. Now, the players move and groove with more realism than ever before, as they stop and plant before changing direction, take a reasonable amount of time to gather in passes, and move at a decidedly measured pace even during speed bursts. Though the players in FIFA 2001 are still a bit faster and more capable than their living counterparts, these players aren't swivel-hipped supermen - they generally move just as you'd expect them to.   Nevertheless, they're still capable of executing a stupefying variety of actions. FIFA once again takes full advantage of every aspect of your ten-button controller, so much so that you'll probably still be practicing new moves even days or weeks after you first play the game. You'll want to work on advanced moves such as 360-degree spins and double stopovers, and you'll get to control a full roster of in-game team management decisions and set piece decisions. Though the game won't let you reconfigure gamepad buttons, the default controls should prove to be highly accessible.   Unfortunately, the gameplay does have some minor problems. For instance, goalkeepers are capable of occasional gravity- and physics-defying saves. Virtually any player can execute implausibly long-distance sliding tackles. Lob goals are made possible only if you lob ""pass"" toward the opposition net when no teammate is positioned in front of you. And when you play on the more challenging difficulty levels, the computer-controlled rearguards become unnaturally effective. Even so, such problems are all but completely overshadowed by all the great features in the game.   In general, computer-controlled team and player actions in FIFA 2001 are much better than those in the previous version. Lesser defenses play for the offside. Talented offenses work the ""give and go"" and feed looping timed balls to bursting strikers. Defenders slyly monitor ball carriers and don't commit until the time is right. Even if you prefer to play FIFA 2001 as more of an action game by cranking up the gameplay speed and selecting the lenient officiating option, computer-controlled FIFA players are always smart players.   They're also noticeably smaller than in the previous installment, which better reflects their real-world size. That means you'll do a lot more running to get to where you want to go. It also means you'll be staring at very small players from most angles in the game's four available camera views, unless you decide to observe through the field-mounted ""action"" perspective and apply manual zooming. Yet, even then, none of the cameras get nearly as up close and personal as they did in FIFA 2000. They won't usually even get close enough during the game's replay mode, even with its free-floating, manually adjustable viewpoints.   But when you do happen to get a good close look at the players, whether it's during the game, the replay, or the wonderfully rendered cutscenes, you'll see their downsized stature hides how impressive they really look. The 3D players in FIFA 2001 are bereft of the straight lines and jagged edges of prior editions, and are quite capable of demonstrating various degrees of emotion and fervor. Their faces are particularly striking - they are individually rendered right on down to hair color and hair length and are articulated with moving lips and shifting expressions. When you watch your little computer version of Ronaldo or Zidane throwing a fit over a carding and then actually listen as he verbally chastises the referee, you'll know you've found your game.In addition to the realistic players, EA Sports has created a highly authentic environment for its latest FIFA. The grandstands come alive with undulating multicolored, humanlike shapes. Flags wave, songs are sung, and the crowd ebbs and flows in unison. In full sunshine, stadiums are lit with lens flare effects and later darkened by shadows that move across the pitch as the day wears on. When the weather grows inclement, thunder rolls in the distance as dark clouds travel across the skies, and thousands of individual rain droplets flash across the screen. That all these effects run so smoothly on the Pentium III 500 Voodoo3-powered test computer, even at 1024x768 resolution, really shows that EA Sports put a lot of work into optimizing the graphics.   Yet perhaps the most notable upgrade to the presentation of FIFA 2001 is not really an upgrade at all: It's instead the welcome return of veteran BBC and FIFA broadcaster John Motson as the commentator. Perhaps due to its real-world heritage, virtual soccer requires a knowledgeable British announcer, and certainly the poorly scripted banter of last year's Yankee team wasn't good enough. But the naturally witty Motson is, and he has more lines and better timing than ever.   The color commentary from Lawrenson is a bit less impressive - he's an Ed McMahon to Motson's Johnny Carson - but together they add the necessary spice to the game. Their phrases are delivered with just the right inflections and at precisely the right moments. When Motson proclaims, ""Only the goaltender to beat now"" followed by ""I'll have to eat my words"" if a defender slides in with an astonishing tackle, you'll realize just how impressive FIFA 2001 really is.   FIFA 2001 is also as deep as any good EA Sports game in terms of the sheer quantity of its features. The game offers no less than 17 national leagues from such divergent locales as Greece and Israel to more traditional soccer powers such as Germany and Brazil. 60 international sides are also along for the ride, for a grand total of hundreds of available teams and a player total that's more than a cool grand. These are mighty big figures indeed, especially when each side purportedly mirrors its real-life tactics, strategies, and player attributes. The old-time classic squads of last year's edition are unfortunately absent, as is the indoor game of distant FIFAs, yet there's more than enough in FIFA 2001 to keep you busy for a long time.   FIFA 2001's gameplay options are as seemingly limitless as the sheer quantity of teams and players available. You may want to conduct an almost-instantaneous quick game, a customizable exhibition, a full season, a knockout cup, or a custom league or tournament, in which you're offered just about any conceivable parameter for long-term competitions. Team managers may edit individual attributes, alter the color and appearance of team uniforms - many of which now carry actual team crests and sponsors - and buy and sell players with a bankroll based on real-life resource figures. Curiously, the game's practice mode won't let your team take the pitch without facing some form of computer-controlled opposition, thus somewhat limiting its effectiveness if all you want to do is figure out which button does what.   FIFA 2001 also promises to be a great multiplayer game. Apart from the usual allotment of modem, serial, and network modes, the game supports Internet play based on EA.com's new player-matching service. Various lobbies will be set up around the world, which will permit players to pick and choose the nationalities of their opponents, structure contests, and chat. This is fortunate, since FIFA fans have been waiting for just this type of service.   FIFA 2001 is much more than just an annual rehash - it repairs whatever damage was done by last year's version, heads in a more authentic direction, and offers numerous new features. It is the first serious revision of the series in a number of years, and it can be described only as the best FIFA to date.
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'numerous', 'new', 'features', '.', 'It', 'first', 'serious', 'revision', 'series', 'number', 'years', ',', 'described', 'best', 'FIFA', 'date', '.']",0.13811063136979368,0.4738464298935504
307,Alice In Wonderland ,9," In execution, Alice offers some of the best graphics and gameplay ever seen on a portable system.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/4/1/3011-11841.jpg,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alice-in-wonderland-review/1900-2640069/,pos,"
Almost fifty years ago, Walt Disney brought Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to life on the big screen. Featuring an outlandish story and visuals to match, it is no wonder that - even by today's standards - Alice remains one the most beautiful animated films of all time. Out of all the consoles on the market, one might think that a console such as the Game Boy Color would be the least technologically capable of re-creating the lush world of Wonderland. The developer Digital Eclipse is out to prove anyone who thinks that is the case wrong. In execution, Alice offers some of the best graphics and gameplay ever seen on a portable system.   In recent years, many Disney films have found their way to home consoles, single-handedly creating a genre of their own - the Disney platformer. Alice takes this formula a step further by not only offering simple side-scrolling action, but also an isometric view that kicks in once Alice reaches the main Wonderland area. In addition to single-player action, you can team up with a friend to take turns searching for the mysterious White Rabbit or use the optional Game Boy Printer to use Alice's Art Gallery, where you can arrange pictures of characters from the game and print them out.   Utilizing detailed cutscenes to carry the story along, this game follows the film's story to perfection. Beginning with Alice's descent down the rabbit hole, young and old alike will have no problem jumping right into the simple gameplay. While some sequences may prove to be frustrating at times, anyone with a small amount of patience should be able to enjoy the game all the way through.    During the course of the game, Alice will meet up with all of the major characters from the movie on the overhead-view Wonderland map. For the most part, these familiar faces have lost an item, and upon talking to them, Alice will volunteer her services to find what they are looking for. During these side-scrolling adventures, Alice is on the lookout for not only these hidden items, but the also the obligatory keys to open locked doors and, of course, magic mushrooms to shrink her down to tiny proportions so she can squeeze through small passageways.    Graphically, Alice is one of the most impressive Game Boy games of all time. Digital Eclipse has outdone itself in immersing the gamer in a world exactly like the movie, and it has pushed the hardware to its fullest, offering animated backgrounds and nearly every color in the handheld's palette. To add to the stunning visuals of the game, Alice and her Wonderland friends and enemies are also wonderfully animated, and they move almost exactly like they do in the film.   While Alice may be visually outstanding, the sound leaves a little to be desired. Most of the in-game music is kept simple and to the point. It gets the job done, but it's not nearly as impressive as the lush visuals of the game. It should be noted that this leaves only a small smudge on the game itself.   On the whole, Alice in Wonderland is an amazing Game Boy game. It offers some of the best graphics and animation ever for this system and should not be missed. Players running the gamut from novice to expert should thoroughly enjoy the game. In fact, it stands to leave a lasting impression, much like the film itself.
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308,Guitar Freaks 3rd Mix & DrumMania 2nd Mix Import ,9," IMPORT - Guitar Freaks 3rd Mix & DrumMania 2nd Mix is a value-packed collection perfectly suited for fans of either game, but one that really shines when you play in ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/9/0/9/3037-11909.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/guitar-freaks-3rd-mix-and-drummania-2nd-mix-import/1900-2668610/,pos,"
IMPORT: When it comes to music games, Konami has the genre locked down. While the US only gets Konami's Bemani games in bits and pieces, Japan gets everything. Japanese arcades are filled with huge deluxe-sized cabinets for games like BeatMania, DrumMania, Dance Dance Revolution, and Guitar Freaks. Later editions of DrumMania and Guitar Freaks can be linked together, allowing for three players to play the same song at the same time, as two guitar players and one drummer. The original DrumMania for the PS2 contains some of this three-player or session gameplay. So when it came time for Konami to release upgraded versions of Guitar Freaks and DrumMania, it must have seemed only natural to combine the two games onto one disc. The result is a value-packed collection perfectly suited for fans of either game, but one that really shines when you play in session mode.   As Konami's Bemani games progress from mix to mix, they tend to become more difficult. Sure, each version contains a few blindingly basic tracks, but on the whole, Guitar Freaks 3rd Mix is harder than 2nd Mix, which is harder than the original. DrumMania 2nd Mix progresses similarly, offering a much deeper challenge than the original game.   For those not already familiar with Konami's Bemani games, they challenge your rhythm, timing, and dexterity. Basically, you're told how to play your instrument via a scrolling collection of bars. The longer you go without missing a note, the higher your score. Miss too many, and your game ends. At the end of every song, you're given a report card that tallies up your mistakes and gives you a letter grade based on your performance. A typical game takes you through three songs, each of which is given a difficulty rating of one to eight stars.   Between guitar and drums, there are a ton of songs on this disc. While a great deal of them can be played on drums, guitar, or together in session mode, there are a few tracks - such as Virtual Insanity on the drum side - that are only suited for one instrument or the other. While many of the songs are original compositions, the game is also stocked with licensed music, such as Smoke on the Water, Highway Star, You Can't Hurry Love, and Virtual Insanity. While none of the tracks are performed by the original artists, it's still really cool to hear some familiar tracks. The original compositions are as catchy as ever, and you'll surely find yourself humming one of the game's songs at any given moment. The Guitar Freaks games have branched out further and further into different genres as it has progressed, and DrumMania is also packed with lots of different styles. Still, the game has its requisite surf tracks, ska, and funk tunes. The graphics have never really been a key point of either series, but it should be noted that the interface has been redesigned a bit, and the slide shows that accompany each song are as insane as ever. For example, one slide show contains, among other things, a pair of lips riding in the back of a smiley-faced van.   As with every Bemani game, the price of admission is rather high. Playing the game with just the standard PS2 controller is possible, but ultimately pointless. As such you'll need one, if not two guitars and a drum controller to truly enjoy the game as it was meant to be played. Also, you'll need a Multitap to enable three-player session mode. Given the cost of importing such hefty peripherals, the game definitely isn't for everyone. There currently aren't any plans to bring this game to the US, but if Konami's January release of Dance Dance Revolution does well, the company will no doubt take a second look at making the rest of its music games available domestically.
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309,Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ,9," Medal of Honor represents the absolute best that action-packed, event-driven shooters have to offer.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/5/1/0/3194-12510.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/medal-of-honor-allied-assault-review/1900-2841761/,pos,"
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, the first PC installment of Electronic Arts' WWII-themed shooter series, is superb. However, if the realistic setting has led you to expect a serious combat simulation along the lines of Ghost Recon or Operation Flashpoint, you're going to be surprised and perhaps disappointed. Medal of Honor is first and foremost a run-and-gun shooter--a really, really excellent run-and-gun shooter. A lot of clever scripting and precisely orchestrated mayhem lend it a sustained intensity that more open-ended tactical shooters often lack. Relatively short but very dense, it's like one-half game and one-half amusement park ride.   Medal of Honor is intense and exciting all the way through.   Medal of Honor isn't very heavy on story. Instead, the game is split into six more or less disconnected missions spread across more than 30 different levels. Rather than focus on creating memorable characters or surprising plot twists, the developers at 2015 have taken an arguably more effective route by constantly introducing memorable set pieces and surprising new gameplay elements. As in Half-Life, you witness everything from the fixed first-person viewpoint of your character. All the ""cutscenes"" are seamlessly integrated into the ongoing events of the level. Control is never taken away from you. Just as in Half-Life, this technique is incredibly effective for creating a sense of both urgency and of attachment to the game's environments. It's an ongoing mystery as to why developers don't use this uninterrupted viewpoint more often.     Over the last couple of years, 10 to 15 hours appears to have become the standard length for single-player shooters. Medal of Honor doesn't break this trend and should take you slightly longer than 10 hours to complete on the standard difficulty setting. However, it packs a lot of content into those hours. You won't ever have to force yourself through the game. This is mainly due to the wide variety of interesting things and unexpected events that happen on a regular basis. It seems as if the developers have tried to inject every level with some completely new challenge or new combination of elements from previous levels. It's a testament to this variety that to give many specific examples would be to ruin the surprise.   The Omaha Beach landing is just one of the game's memorable scenes.   Even so, at least one specific example is in order, just to give a sense of how involving Medal of Honor's missions can be. You begin the first level riding in the back of a truck with four members of your squad. The squad leader informs everyone that you're attempting to infiltrate a Nazi-occupied village. You can see another truck driving behind you. Both vehicles stop at a checkpoint, and a German guard approaches the rear truck and begins talking to the driver. As the conversation drags on, your squad becomes progressively more agitated. Finally, the driver of the rear truck pulls a gun and shoots the guard, at which point alarms sound, gunfire erupts all around you, and the rear truck explodes in a fireball. Your squad jumps out of its truck and you follow. With the leader barking orders, you all advance on the village gates, eventually making your way to a courtyard. There, you're ordered to check a door. As you do, German soldiers appear all across the rooftops and balconies surrounding the small courtyard. You're trapped and chaos ensues, as bullets and grenades rain down on your squad. Eventually, a door is blown open and you're ordered to enter a building, get to the second floor, and commandeer a mounted gun that's currently being used against you. Once you do that, and turn the gun against the Nazis, an ally joins you and tells you he'll cover you from a window while you head to the far end of the courtyard. By the time you make it, the entire rest of the squad is dead, and you're forced to continue to the next level alone.     This isn't the first mission, but rather just the first level. Things continue apace from there. While not all of the following levels are as eventful as the first, virtually every one breaks up the traditional straightforward run-and-gun action with some twist. One level that re-creates the Normandy beach storming scene from Saving Private Ryan is quite likely the most intense and well-executed set piece in shooter history. It's the perfect implementation of Medal of Honor's apparent design philosophy: the heavily scripted level that somehow feels alive and completely spontaneous.In what has become a disclaimer that, at this point, should probably just be left implied in every shooter review, the enemy artificial intelligence is not as good as Half-Life's. However, it's not bad either. The Nazis don't exhibit any real squad-based behavior, and they'll sometimes come running single file around a corner as you shoot each one in turn, but those that don't come sprinting after you tend to use cover well. They also know how to toss grenades and get out of the way of incoming grenades. If fact, you can provide cover for yourself by tossing grenades and then advancing while the Nazis are busy scampering out of the way.   The action takes place in a variety of distinct locations.   Two things contribute to making the fights especially intense. First, other than snipers who are sometimes frustratingly accurate, the rank-and-file soldiers you'll face aren't perfect shots. Gunfights usually involve bullets spraying all around you, instead of merely straight into you. Second, when you do get hit, you become incapacitated for a brief moment, and your viewpoint is knocked aside accordingly, leaving you open to more hits. This means you can't simply roll toward an enemy while absorbing hits like a tank. Moving from cover to cover becomes an indispensable tactic, which ends up making the fights feel more real, in spite of the fact that you can absorb an unrealistic amount of damage and can instantly replenish your health with med packs.     Medal of Honor uses the Quake III: Team Arena engine, and its graphics are generally excellent. It may not look quite as crisp as Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but it's no slouch. Character animations are especially good, as are more subtle effects such as lightning storms in the distance and trees swaying in the wind. It also features some of the most impressively destructible environments ever created. However, to ensure a teen rating--previous Medal of Honor games for the PlayStation were also rated T--the game is completely bloodless. If that turns you off, think of it this way: Maybe they took out the blood so it wouldn't obscure your view of the death animations, which are gruesome to say the least.     The graphics are very good, but the sound is phenomenal. Every level is thick with ambient sound effects. The voice acting is excellent, and there's plenty of it. Best of all, the Germans actually speak German. A lot. The music is fine and usually appropriate, but the game is smart enough to sometimes forgo music. The soundtrack for the Normandy beach level is nothing but gunfire, waves, screaming, and the overlapping conversations of groups of panicked soldiers, which ends up being much more effective than any score could have been.   Medal of Honor's single-player game is a blast.   Medal of Honor offers a few different multiplayer modes, including deathmatch and objective-based team matches. There's nothing really wrong with them, and the realistic World War II-era weapons are interesting, but there's nothing here that's overly compelling. Nothing like the marginal but significant advances to teamplay offered by Return to Castle Wolfenstein are present in Medal of Honor. Worse, there are some severe implementation issues. Rather than offer a built-in server browser, Medal of Honor relies on the GameSpy program for finding games. Quitting out to a third-party application every time you want to switch servers is a pain to begin with, but the developers have made it even more obtrusive by forcing you to sit through three uninterruptible logo animations every time the game loads. Three! Someone will probably come up with a workaround to this, but a workaround shouldn't be necessary. There's also already a rampant cheating problem. It's possible to enter god mode in multiplayer and become an invincible opponent or, worse yet, an invincible team killer. Complementing this problem is the fact that there's no clear menu-based voting system. Voting exists, but it's only available through console commands, and only then if you check the advanced console setting in the options menu.     So, if you're looking for the next great online game or a deep tactical shooter, Medal of Honor isn't for you. For anyone else, it's hard to recommend it strenuously enough. At a time when shooters seem to be evolving into two distinct kinds of games--either focused on realistic tactics or on arcade action--Medal of Honor represents the absolute best that action-packed, event-driven shooters have to offer.    Editor's note 01/25/02: Today a patch was released that addresses many of the multiplayer issues mentioned in this review.
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310,Final Fantasy XII ,9," This chapter in one of the world's most popular role-playing series features an inspired look, boldly redesigned strategic combat, and a long, engaging story.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/6/3/2/2214632-box_ff12.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/final-fantasy-xii-review/1900-6160816/,pos,"
  It's been a long time since the last proper installment in the standard-setting Final Fantasy series. While Square Enix did ship numerous games bearing the Final Fantasy brand after 2001's Final Fantasy X, it took all these years before another lengthy, ambitious, lavishly produced, traditional role-playing game would arrive. Final Fantasy XII arrives at the end of the PlayStation 2's lifecycle, whereas Final Fantasy X benefited from a presentation that was truly cutting edge. This latest installment in the series also introduces a new strategic combat system that makes gameplay more cohesive yet more hands-off than before. In spite of this trade-off, it's an evolutionary step for the series and a refreshing change. And underneath the overhauled combat and the distinctive visual style, this is still Final Fantasy. Outstanding art direction, a likable cast of characters, a lengthy quest, and plenty of challenging battles all await you in this next installment to live up to the Final Fantasy name.   Has Final Fantasy still got its magic touch after all these years? Judging by part XII, the answer is yes.   Unlike most previous Final Fantasy games, this latest game takes place in a particular fantasy setting that's already been established by some of its predecessors. Final Fantasy XII's world of Ivalice, first seen in 1998's great Final Fantasy Tactics and later again in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, is like a Japanese take on Star Wars' galaxy far, far away. Men and women walk the streets of Ivalice's impressive cities together with hulking, lizardlike creatures and other strange beings, and political unrest and war threaten their livelihoods as a resistance movement mounts to overthrow an empire that's taken over much of the land. Ivalice is more fantasy than science fiction, yet the air battles featured in the game's opening cutscene, and the decidedly high-tech airships that figure prominently throughout the rest of the game, give this Final Fantasy its token sci-fi flair. The story follows a cast of characters who set out to free the country of Dalmasca from the clutches of the Archadian Empire, which took it over by force. During the journey, you'll learn much more about the history of Ivalice, the strange forces at play behind the scenes, and, of course, about your characters.    The ragtag group of characters you'll be guiding throughout most of the game are as unlikely a lot as you've probably come to expect from a Final Fantasy game. Vaan is the token androgynous male lead, sort of an Aladdin-type with a good-natured personality and strong instincts. He might look a bit like a girl, but he's your typical good guy. His childhood friend, Penelo, somehow gets swept up into everything along with him, and soon enough Vaan also runs into a smooth-talking sky pirate named Balthier and his stern-but-stunning companion, a rabbit-eared woman named Fran. A strong-willed princess and a disgraced captain of Dalmasca's defeated military round out the main cast, though they'll be joined by other companions at various times throughout the game. Much like the cast, the story itself is similar to previous Final Fantasy games in a lot of ways, resulting in many implausible but exciting sequences and some dramatic, emotionally charged moments later on. It's a very good story overall, especially once the Empire's true intentions become clearer and the real villains are unmasked. The plot unfolds through lots of beautifully produced and expressive cinematic cutscenes and plenty of well-written dialogue. In between all this, expect a lot of combat, exploration, and character building--the hallmarks of Final Fantasy gameplay.   The suave, pragmatic sky pirate Balthier sticks out as the game's best character (or the Auron of the cast, if you will).   The biggest difference between this Final Fantasy game and its predecessors is in how the combat works. These changes fundamentally affect the overall flow of the game, not necessarily making it flat-out better or worse than past Final Fantasies, but certainly different. Combat occurs seamlessly in the context of the areas you'll be exploring, rather than in random battles that sporadically force you out of exploration mode and into combat mode. As a result, you'll almost always see your enemies on the battlefield (or on your map) before you engage them, and there's no longer a discrete difference between the exploration mode and the combat mode--they're now one and the same. The benefit of this is that the frustrations of constantly running into random enemy encounters, a feeling that's common to Japanese role-playing games, is simply not there in Final Fantasy XII. Combat is still frequent and unavoidable, but not having to constantly switch between fighting and exploration helps make the game flow more smoothly.    The downside of the new combat system is that it's often on a smaller scale than in past games. Final Fantasy games are known for pitting you against some impossibly big and imposing-looking enemies, but since combat in this game takes place within the same environments you'll be exploring, it doesn't have quite the same larger-than-life sense of scale as before. Don't worry, though--you'll still get to fight plenty of fearsome, powerful-looking opponents. But you'll be looking at the bigger ones' feet as you hack away. Yet it's the real-time nature of the combat that's bound to be the most controversial aspect of Final Fantasy XII. This game's combat system is about managing your characters' battle plan, rather than micromanaging their individual actions, though you can micromanage if you really want to. Interestingly enough, the combat system draws a lot of influence from online role-playing games, like Square Enix's own Final Fantasy XI. This means that while the combat will seem much different from what you might have played in past single-player Final Fantasy episodes, chances are it'll still feel pretty familiar.    The key to the combat is something called the gambit system, which is like a simple programming language for your characters. And if you think ""simple programming language"" is an oxymoron, chances are you'll find the system to be pretty complicated. Basically, you can give each character in your party his or her own set of conditional, prioritized orders. A simple example is a gambit that causes one of your characters to automatically attack the nearest enemy. But you might prioritize casting a healing spell on allies at less than 50 percent of their health ahead of that. Or, if any enemies are down to critical health, you can make sure they get finished off first and foremost. As you play through the game, you'll be able to create increasingly longer, more complex lists of gambits. Being limited to just some vary basic gambits at first helps keep this system from being overwhelming, even as you'll naturally think ahead to what you'll do as more options open up. But this system still comes down to you programming the artificial intelligence for each of your characters. If you use gambits properly, in many battles all you'll need to do is sit back and watch as your characters automatically attack their foes and use healing and support spells to keep each other in fighting shape.   A beautiful setting and a great cast of characters are to be expected from a Final Fantasy game, and this one's got them.   Of course, in any serious battle--and there are a lot of challenging fights in this game--you'll get wiped out if you just sit back and watch. During combat, you can step in to manually issue orders to any party member whenever you wish and may also swap in defeated party members with your alternates (only three of your main characters can fight at a time). In the end, the combat feels highly strategic, because poorly planned gambits will bring disaster. But you can easily change your gambits on the fly or toggle them off for any character if you'd prefer to. You can also adjust the speed at which battles unfold, though the default speed seems ideal. And even if you do find yourself at an impasse with a particular battle, it's usually possible to go off someplace else and come back to it later, after having replenished your supplies, grown stronger, and adjusted your strategy. In the first hours of play, the rather passive combat sequences are somewhat disappointing, since there's really not much to do. But once you've assembled the entire party and the gambit system starts opening up, the combat becomes quite interesting and involved. In short, rather than task you with controlling the specific actions of your different characters, Final Fantasy XII puts you in a more strategic, commanding role.    Ironically, the nature of the underlying combat is the same as ever, which means you'll constantly be trading hits with foes whose own attacks will frequently bring your characters to death's door, just in time for a healing spell to restore them. Many foes will also use status-changing effects in different combinations, like poison or sleep spells, and Final Fantasy players will need to contend with these in familiar ways. You'll also learn special abilities unique to each character and get to summon creatures called espers to temporarily fight for you, elements that will also be familiar to Final Fantasy players. What helps make all the fighting feel meaningful and interesting is Final Fantasy XII's licenses system, another fairly convoluted but ultimately good addition to the game. Your characters all earn license points with each enemy you defeat, and these points are then used to unlock new upgrades and innate abilities for your characters. Much like the combat, the license board gives an odd first impression, because you need a license for literally each and every equipment piece, magic spell, and special ability in the game before you can use them. So you can't equip that crossbow as soon as you find it, and you won't just magically learn the cure spell once you hit a certain level. You need to spend license points on the license.   The combat tasks you with thinking about the bigger picture--about which type of strategy will help you win.   The license board works kind of like Scrabble. You can only acquire licenses next to other licenses you've already acquired, and the licenses along the edges of the board (farthest from your starting points toward the middle) are often tied to the strongest items, spells, and upgrades. Each character starts off with some basic equipment and ability licenses, and the board is roughly split up so that weapon, armor, accessory, magic, combat, and special ability licenses are all grouped together. Licenses for more-valuable abilities tend to cost more points, and the license board also lets you unlock additional gambit slots for adapting your characters' behavior in combat toward increasingly complex battles.    Much like the combat, the license system introduces some trade-offs. The good news is that the intricacies of this system are far more interesting than annoying, and it gives you an incentive to fight just about everything you encounter, even the weakest creatures that are barely worth any experience points anymore. The bad news is you might find yourself getting hung up on trying to figure out the ""best"" way to unlock licenses for each character, and since the license board is the same for each character, that means each character is also the same, and it's entirely up to you to define their differences and specializations. This may come as no surprise to those who've been keeping up with Final Fantasy for a while, since recent installments in the series have all done this. But it still seems strange that Basch, the captain of the Dalmascan guard, is inherently no better in a sword fight than pig-tailed Penelo. In fact, you could turn Basch into a pure healer / magic user while developing Penelo as your single toughest fighter. This open-ended system adds sophistication and replay value to Final Fantasy XII, but some sort of ""autolevel"" system probably would have been a good option.    Final Fantasy XII caters to the series' dedicated fans with numerous references to past installments and with plenty of tough battles. Even once you're comfortable that your characters can all operate like a well-oiled machine thanks to the gambits system, you'll still need to spend a good amount of time going out of your way to level them up, earning enough license points to purchase some important upgrades for all of them. Earning money in the game is no simple matter, either. In a slight move toward greater realism, most of the foes you fight don't actually carry any money, but they'll drop trade goods that you can then sell in exchange. Stealing from foes can give you more of these precious items, and throughout the game, you'll be faced with a lot of tough decisions about which weapons, armor, and spells to buy and not to buy. This is to the game's credit, since having to choose which characters will get the best weapons or best armor is more interesting than simply snatching up all the best new gear in each new town you visit. And remember: You'll need to get the necessary licenses for these upgrades, too.   You don't need a license to kill in Final Fantasy XII, but you do need one before you can use some bronze armor and just about anything else.   Exploring, fighting, watching the story unfold, and managing your characters using the gambits and licenses systems are where you'll be spending most of your time with Final Fantasy XII, and there's a lot to it. Expect the quest to last you a good 40 or more hours the first time through, and on top of that, there are many hidden and optional areas to explore, bounty-hunter missions to undertake, special rewards to unlock, and more. The game even features a surprisingly well done bestiary, which provides some lively remarks about all the hundreds of different creatures and foes you'll encounter. Overall, the world of Ivalice feels quite big, especially since you'll traverse so much of it on foot. There's definitely a lot of straight-up running around in this game, but since the visuals are so impressive, all the sightseeing is part of the fun.    Final Fantasy XII's art style is different from that of previous games in the series, but longtime fans of Square's role-playing games will note that it bears a clear similarity to the memorable look of 2000's Vagrant Story. In fact, Final Fantasy XII borrows not only the visual style but also some of the sound design from that game, and the results are truly impressive. The game's characters portray genuinely lifelike emotions during the cutscenes, on down to some very subtle changes of expression and use of body language. And the imaginative characters and scenery of Ivalice make it exciting to enter each new area of the game. You'll see some objects just pop into the environments as you explore them, but there aren't a lot of other rough edges to the game's visuals. This isn't the technical marvel that Final Fantasy X was in its day, but it's by every means another gorgeous-looking game in the series, featuring probably the best art style of any Final Fantasy game to date.    A beautifully composed soundtrack is there to accompany every moment, and while it still uses synthesized instruments like the old Final Fantasy games, it sounds fantastic. Some of the familiar themes are in there, along with lots of original compositions that fit the mood and the setting very nicely. Indeed, one other advantage of how the game's combat all takes place seamlessly within the environments is that you don't get stuck listening to the same battle theme all throughout. Final Fantasy XII offers support for widescreen displays and surround-sound setups, and it generally looks and sounds remarkably good even by today's standards.   By taking some risks with the Final Fantasy formula, this new chapter succeeds at carrying on the series' standard-setting reputation.   The quality of the game's voice acting deserves special mention, as well. Not every performance is spectacular, but the main characters' voice actors are great fits, and they deliver their lines well. There aren't many recognizable actors in the lot (not unless you count Simon Templeman, who voices Kain from the Legacy of Kain series), but this cast does an excellent job of helping bring the in-game characters to life. Note that Final Fantasy XII isn't fully voiced, as most of the conversations you'll have with townspeople are done in text. If there are any minor issues with the presentation, it's that the characters' lip-synching doesn't quite match the English dialogue and the subtitles often don't exactly match the speech in the cutscenes, but these issues are easy to ignore.    Final Fantasy XII has been a long time coming, and it shows. Thankfully, all the time in development hasn't dampened the quality of the game's presentation, and in spite of however many hundreds of people must have worked on this game for all these years, the end result is a more cohesive game than its predecessors from the series' 3D-graphics era. There's still a disconnect between what happens during gameplay and what happens during cutscenes, but by integrating the combat and exploration, Final Fantasy has come one step closer to being more immersive than before. And while Final Fantasy XII takes some liberties with the series' conventions, it sticks closely to most of the good ones, delivering another memorable and highly recommended experience in the process.  


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311,Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age ,9, One of the best Final Fantasy games gets the remaster treatment it rightfully deserves.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/6/3/2/2214632-box_ff12.png,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/final-fantasy-12-the-zodiac-age-review/1900-6416714/,pos,"
The Final Fantasy series has always been about reinvention, and the twelfth incarnation embodies this to such an extreme, that you might catch yourself wondering if this is a really a game from the long-running RPG franchise at all. Not only is it deserving of the name, but it's an RPG through and through, where monster hunting and exploration of spacious locales effectively feed into its stat-based progression within an ensemble cast of colorful personalities. Like its predecessors, Final Fantasy 12 puts its own spin on how chocobos, summons, and characters named Cid play into its epic journey. With its long awaited remaster ready for release, Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age puts its best foot forward with a wealth of improvements and changes, delivering a fresh experience even if you've memorized the path from The Phon Coast to The Tomb of Raithwall.For those who thoroughly enjoyed the PS2 version of Final Fantasy 12, The Zodiac Age is not only a remaster, but also a remix. Keen eyes will notice subtle tweaks to enemy locations and even changes to the selection of merchant goods. Some of these modifications are in service to the character-enhancing License Board, which itself has been overhauled from the original game in order to give each party member more distinctive jobs and abilities. Along with the inclusion of a Japanese voice track and improved loading times, the option to toggle between the original and reorchestrated versions of Hitoshi Sakimoto’s exquisite soundtrack is a welcome feature. Lastly, the improved high definition visuals brings out a fetching painterly look to the characters' faces. As a PlayStation 4 exclusive, The Zodiac Age stands out as a feature-rich rerelease on a platform with a bountiful selection of lesser remasters.Even if it were an untouched port, Final Fantasy 12 would stand out for its distinct handling of familiar elements. For instance, there's a thriving society centered around hunting, a gig economy where skilled fighters of many races vanquish the game world's most hostile creatures. Being recognized and awarded for taking down bounties effectively weaves a part of FF12's story with any player motivation to complete the bestiary. Equally notable is the emphasis on thievery, which is also narratively tied to the resourceful nature of Vaan, one of the playable characters. You won't go far if you relied solely on money from defeated monsters and treasure chests. Riches instead come from the sales of loot you acquire from the creatures you take down. Much like Final Fantasy 9's Zidane, Vaan's stealing skills helps players develop an appreciation for the series' long line of talented but sometimes overlooked thieves.Further driving the distinctiveness of Final Fantasy 12 is its setting of Ivalice, an established universe with its origins outside of the core series. And like other games based in Ivalice, specifically Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics, 12's plot often feels like a middle chapter of a grander tale yet to be told. It's so rich in backstory that keeping track of names and places during the initial hours can feel overwhelming, though the further you play, the easier it is to get a handle of the intricacies of the lore. What you really need to know at the start is two small kingdoms, Dalmasca and Nabradia, are caught in the crossfire of two larger warring empires, Rozarria and Archadia. Of the countless individuals affected by this period of upheaval, six characters--all of whom come from vastly different backgrounds-- form your party, uniting for a common cause to de-escalate this continent-wide conflict.Perpetuating this middle episode vibe are the playable characters themselves, who have been appropriately compared to the cast of Star Wars: A New Hope. As examples, Ashe is the captured princess and Basch is the former general in hiding. Balthier is the self-serving pirate with a price on his head and his partner, Fran, has been described as Sexy Chewbacca. Their intertwined backstories and resulting encounters allow for chemistry and conflict as the often engaging narrative unfolds.Reinforcing Final Fantasy 12's timelessness, The Zodiac Age brings in an enhanced Gambit battle system, which itself felt ahead of its time upon its first release. By stringing together a prioritized series of if/then commands for each character, battles unfold with a semi-automated flow where you can vanquish beasts without pressing a button for minutes on end. The immensely user friendly interface fittingly looks and feels like a Fisher-Price styled introduction to programming, where each player-chosen behavior is simply assigned a specific target, whether it be an ally, themselves, or a single enemy.One would think that the hands-free aspects of The Gambit System would deprive you of agency and engagement but it in fact creates the opposite result. Since you're still responsible for every character's actions, the thrill of seeing your handiwork unfold and emerging victorious never gets old. It allows for experimentation and risk-taking but The Gambit System truly shines when you stick to sensible and tried-and-true RPG battle tactics. Remember all those times you died in battle because you ignored a status ailment and thought you could get one last attack in instead? This system removes all manner of impulsiveness and for many, offers a glimpse of the RPG combatant one aspires to be, free of impetuous behaviors.You don't get your hands on this system in earnest until three hours in, which is one hour too many. Yet this onboarding period is notably improved over the original game thanks to the option to double or even quadruple the speed of play. This is just one of the many new features that makes The Zodiac Age ever more engrossing. In a game that features respawning enemies, every hostile area becomes more inviting. You're motivated by growing your party's stats at an accelerated pace even after you've explored every corner and opened every treasure chest in a given region.While its enhancements do not translate into a brand new game for existing fans, The Zodiac Age is nonetheless invigorating. For an experience that can last over a hundred hours, the subtle tweaks therein go a long way in showcasing Final Fantasy 12's grand trek in a new light. Its epic, lore-abundant story and its time-tested Gambit System should also appeal to those who missed out on the mainline series' trip to Ivalice the first time around. And thanks in part to the new audio and speed options, The Zodiac Age is an ideal definitive edition: one that improves the game over its original version across the board. 


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312,Arthur and the Invisibles ,3.2, It's a shame that Arthur and the Invisibles on the GBA can't just take after its namesake and disappear.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/3/4/2219834-256px_arthur_and_the_invisibles.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/arthur-and-the-invisibles-review/1900-6165062/,neg,"
  With the PlayStation 2, PC, and Nintendo DS versions of the Arthur and the Invisibles video game tie-in defying the odds by not being half bad, it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped. And sure enough, along comes the Game Boy Advance version to set things right in the universe. This questionably coherent take on the movie equates to an abbreviated, chopped-up version of the not-so-shabby PlayStation 2 and PC versions, and its looping level designs and utter lack of challenge prevent it from being anywhere close to an enjoyable game in its own right.   This rhythm-game sequence could have been neat...if it actually had rhythm.   The GBA version of Arthur gives you even less of a plot outline than the Nintendo DS version of the game, which is actually kind of impressive considering how little of a movie tie-in was to be found in that version. Instead of playing out the entire adventure like in the PS2 and PC versions, or going in a completely opposite direction like the DS version, the game starts out by giving you some text that is supposed to provide a little context for your adventuring, and you're then launched into a series of short, disjointed, and extremely easy missions divvied up into three chapters that essentially follow the phases of the film--survive the initial henchmen attack on the Minimoy village, travel through your backyard to Necropolis, wreck Necropolis and flee in a toy car. It's a bit like watching the movie in fast-forward, hitting the play button occasionally just to see where you're at. All told, the 20 missions can be burned through in two to three hours.    As you jump from one scenario to the next, Betameche, being the irritating troll doll that he is, will explain to you each and every time how to jump, move, attack, and so on--not that any of the controls ever change. In fact, nothing here is even remotely challenging or interesting, as most enemies die in one hit and the ones that don't tend to seize up in indecision, trying to figure how to counter the devastating tactic of jumping over them and attacking from behind. Also, for the most part the game is a one-dimensional side-scroller, so there isn't much in the way of exploring, and puzzles are painfully straightforward.    If anything nice can be said about the GBA version of Arthur and the Invisibles, it's that the game tries to present a good amount of variety in the types of missions you'll go on. Nearly every mission has you tackling a different task, whether it be solving environmental puzzles with the standard team, flying on a mosquito as Arthur while you shoot ""tears of death"" at other mosquitoes, or hitting a scrolling series of button sequences. Unfortunately, even though there is variety to the types of missions, there isn't much variety within the actual missions themselves. In fact, levels seem to play out in a continuous loop; you'll come up against the same obstacles laid out in the exact same fashion and enemies waiting for you in the exact same places that you passed just minutes before. And while it's entirely possible that the developers are subliminally urging us to abandon our heathen ways lest we eternally live out a Sisyphean afterlife, it's probably more along the lines of lazy, uninspired level design--or the recognition that a GBA version of this game probably shouldn't have been made. Within these levels, you'll be able to free mul-muls and collect runes, which are used to unlock ""bonus"" content. However, collecting all the mul-muls in any given stage simply lets you play a level you already have access to. And even more worthless, collecting all of the runes decodes a secret message that may as well declare you the king of Zimbabwe, for all the sense it makes or value it imparts.   Betameche really just doesn't like you hitting on his sister all the time.   Arthur's presentation is equally underwhelming. Backgrounds aren't particularly varied or interesting to look at, and the color palette is pretty bland with its ubiquitous earthy tones. Likewise, the audio just loops two or three tunes, and the other sound effects are just good enough to get the job done. Considering that the presentation went a long way in improving the other versions of this game, it's a bit surprising to see the utterly unremarkable quality on display here.    If you enjoyed Arthur and the Invisibles and are looking for more, do yourself a favor and pick up any other version of the game than this one. You'll receive a lot more game for your investment, and perhaps more importantly, you might actually enjoy playing the game you get. Also, it's a rude disservice to fans to price this vastly inferior version at the same point as the other versions--except for the PC version, which is actually $10 cheaper. And if the GBA version is your only option, just go watch the movie three more times, or save your cash for when it comes out on DVD.  
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'versions', '--', 'except', 'PC', 'version', ',', 'actually', '$', '10', 'cheaper', '.', 'And', 'GBA', 'version', 'option', ',', 'go', 'watch', 'movie', 'three', 'times', ',', 'save', 'cash', 'comes', 'DVD', '.']",0.05590089522128357,0.5055093234704885
313,Carmageddon ,3.1, What one gets with Carmageddon is a game where every pro is met by an equally matched con.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/4/1/2218041-1281953641_00.jpg,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/carmageddon-review/1900-2536160/,neg,"
Historically speaking, handheld ports of PC games don't turn out well. Due to the memory and processor limitations of the Game Boy Color, as well as its lack of 3D hardware, many shortcuts are required to bring a game over from the PC. In Carmageddon's case, this translates to a 2D top-down view, a limited selection of vehicles, and diminished track variety. At first glance, 18 cars and 32 tracks may seem like a good handheld gaming experience. The conversion from 3D- to 2D-oriented gameplay is, for the most part, successful - with play control keeping up with the standards set by Codemasters' Micro Machines series. Quite rapidly though, the blatant repetition each level brings serves to derail what could have been an otherwise great game. With rare exception, your underlying goal in each of the game's 32 tracks is literally to drive in circles and plow over pedestrians. On the PC, this included a requisite amount of gore in addition to nicely detailed 3D courses. The Game Boy Color, however, is forced to present the gore within the confines of about ten pixels, and the lush courses of the PC version are nowhere to be seen, be it by design or homage. Unlike in the PC counterpart, no single course in GBC Carmageddon feels drastically different from any other. Finish a race with enough kills or property damage, and the next level unlocks. Repeat this procedure often, until bored. Once in awhile, you can purchase a new car, but the effect of this ability wears off quickly for two reasons. First, every car acts pretty much as any other, regardless of physical size or detailing. Secondly, and most problematic, the game's save feature is password based - meaning serious you will need to have a notebook to track your progress in the game. This same mixture of quality and disappointment continues in terms of graphics and sound as well. Sure, one has to accept that the GBC cannot top a $1,000 PC in terms of graphical quality. However, there has been a standard level set for this type of game's visuals, and Carmageddon only meets it halfway. Course graphics are sufficiently pleasing, with well-drawn boundaries and buildings, but cars and objects are unassuming and bland. One could describe the sound quality the same way. Sound effects are fitting but minimal, and the music is varied but far too repetitive. What one gets with Carmageddon is a game where every pro is met by an equally matched con. Micro Machines and Star Wars: Episode One Racer are both examples of better games in the genre, and with the lack of a two-player feature, there is little reason to pick up Carmageddon. Other than the ability to run over pedestrians, there is nothing to set this game apart from the rest of what's available.
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314,ClayFighter 63 1/3 ,3.1, ClayFighter 63 1/3 goes right back to boring players to tears.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/3/4/5/2210345-box_cf64.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/clayfighter-63-1-3-review/1900-2544260/,neg,"
ClayFighter was originally a Super Nintendo game. At the time, it was a welcome change from all the other fighters out there. It made use of Street Fighter-like gameplay, but replaced all the characters with clay figures such as Bad Mr. Frosty (a snowman with an attitude), Icky Bod Clay (a ghostly pumpkin-head), and the Blob (a mass of clay that formed into various shapes like a block or a buzz saw when necessary). ClayFighter 2 continued the tradition, stretching the already-hair-thin premise to the breaking point. ClayFighter 63 1/3 picks up where the series left off and goes right back to boring players to tears with its derivative gameplay, pathetic graphics, and annoying sound effects. The gameplay in ClayFighter isn't simply stolen from Street Fighter anymore. Now the game has the moves and super moves of Street Fighter, the already-ill-conceived combo system and dual life bar from Killer Instinct, and finishing moves a la Kombat. The characters can sidestep, but it doesn't prove to be a very useful technique, aside from dodging the occasional projectile. Unoriginality aside, the game is also pretty uninteresting to play. The CPU AI is sketchy at best - most of the time it simply can't fight, but from time to time it unloads a 13-hit combo on you without any warning. Then it simply goes back to fighting like a dolt. Graphically, ClayFighter falls somewhere between average and horrible. The backgrounds are polygonal, and look fairly nice, although there is a lot of pop-up and fogging at longer camera distances. The characters look pasted on top of the world. They may have several more frames of animation when compared to the old SNES games, but they still look very choppy. The game's sound is atrocious. The only thing it has going for it is the fact that it uses lots of speech. Unfortunately, it uses so much speech (and what they're saying is so stupid), that it becomes instantly annoying. The music is also quite bad. You really have to wonder what a company is thinking when it puts out a game like this. It simply can't compete with a real fighting game in any category. Even if the graphics and music were great, the game would still play terribly. If you're so starved for N64 games you're considering picking this game up, do yourself a favor and at least rent it first. You'll probably have a good laugh, but not in the way the developers originally intended.
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315,Doom ,3.1," The Saturn finally has its own version of Doom, and not only is it about two years too late, but it's also completely worthless.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/4/8/8/2212488-box_doom.png,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/doom-review/1900-2532876/,neg,"
The Saturn finally has its own version of Doom, and not only is it about two years too late, but it's also completely worthless. You know the story: Space Marine discovers his platoon has been wiped out, Space Marine gets pistol, Space Marine opens a can of whoop-ass on an almost infinite number of demons. Saturn Doom contains all the Ultimate Doom and Doom II levels for a grand total of sixty, which by now most of you should be able to complete on the hardest setting with one arm tied behind your back. Doom for the PlayStation and N64 hold their own against the original PC version. Doom on the Saturn, on the other hand, is very similar to playing on a 286; the frame rate is incredibly low, especially when entering a large room. The game's sound is also drab, and while the original music has been replaced, it will have you longing for the original MIDI in no time. If this is the best the Saturn can do, you might as well dismantle it with a sledgehammer, glue the remains together, and recoup your costs by selling it as modern sculpture. The control in this Doom for the Saturn is on par with the dismal 32X port. You can do everything you could in the PC version; the execution is just nowhere near as smooth (everything feels jerky). Also lacking is a save game option - the Saturn has a built-in memory, but the game relies on a password-based system. And while the back of the box claims that this version of Doom is ""Deathmatch-ready with two-player link capabilities,"" it's a flat-out lie. There is NO multiplayer option in this version. These drawbacks, combined with the game's poor look, make it a wonder that this game got past Sega and onto shelves. Doom for the Saturn is to be avoided at all costs. If you've never seen Doom before, check out the original on the PC. But if you're like me and have suffered through numerous versions, you've probably had enough already. If I see one more Doom game released on any platform, I'm going to hunt down the people responsible and kill them slowly.
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316,Doraemon (Import) ,3.1, By all accounts Doraemon can be compared to Mario...it just suffers by the comparison.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/0/7/2/818-3072.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/doraemon-import-review/1900-2544342/,neg,"
Many Nintendo 64 owners have complained that since the launch of the system, nothing has compared to Miyamoto's bright and shining star, Super Mario 64. Japanese developer Enoch must have been listening, because it has released Doraemon's Nobita and the Three Spirit Stones. By all accounts Doraemon can be compared to Mario...it just suffers by the comparison. Based on the beloved Japanese anime/manga character Doraemon, a blue, earless, robotic cat from the future, this is one of the most blatant clones that the industry has ever seen.  The story revolves around a trio of extremely powerful and sacred crystals that have been broken into pieces and scattered across the land. As Doraemon (or any one of his four friends), the player must gather up all the chunks and rid the world of a menacing demon. Each one of the player characters, who can be switched at any given time (the one original element of the game), has different attributes and abilities...although all are oddly around the same height. The characters are: Jaian, the overgrown bully, who sings into a karaoke microphone to quash enemies; Suneo, who gives bad guys the one-two punch with his boxing gloves; Shizuka, a big-eyed little girl who can jump higher than anyone else; and the nerdy Nobita, who sports a pea-shooter and a dead-eye. Meanwhile, Doraemon has a magic pocket in his middle where he can store tons of items, including the tools he'll need to enter new areas of the game. For example, Doraemon will get access to an underwater buggy that lets him drive on the bottom of the sea, a toy propeller that enables him to fly, oxygen nose capsules for underwater breathing, and even a winged kangaroo-like dragon to ride. Sound original? Nope! It's pretty much an elaboration on the “You need five stars to open this door” aspect of Super Mario 64.  Did you have a problem with the few occasional 3-D screw-ups in SM64? A few minutes with this title will give you a new appreciation for how few problems were present. Mario looked flat and plain? The graphics never looked nearly this basic. Even setting the considerable visual flaws aside, Doraemon's gameplay manages to be tedious and slow. In short, the game is atrocious. Although I found its more straightforward and annoying elements (such as its screaming title character) almost charming, there's no excuse for lack of solid gameplay. Doraemon is like Super Mario 64 put through a strainer until there's nearly no entertainment value left. While I'm admittedly not a lawyer, I understand all that's necessary for Nintendo to take Epoch to court over this title would be proving seven strong similarities between this game and Super Mario 64. Well, from the nearly identical trees, to the treasure chests, to the pirate ship, there's plenty for them to build a case. Obviously, Nintendo's not going to sue Epoch over this title, since it had to be approved by them in the first place...but perhaps Miyamoto should.  Sometimes an import game comes along that make me wish some publisher would have the wherewithall to release it in the States (such as PaRappa the Rapper or Assault Suit Leynos 2). This isn't one of them.
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317,Dragon Lore II ,3.1, Dragon Lore II is about as frustrating a gaming experience as I have encountered in recent years.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/3/4/826-3134.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragon-lore-ii-review/1900-2539992/,neg,"
Here is the sequel that no one asked for. Indeed, we gamers clamored for second chapters of Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and Lands of Lore, to name a few, but when was the last time that anyone asked, ""Gee, when is that next Dragon Lore title going to be ready?"" The original was a tepid adventure/RPG, interesting only because of its nicely rendered 3-D environments, but otherwise hampered by weak combat and gameplay. Someone at Cryo apparently felt that this bland recipe was a winning formula, however, because here is the regrettable sequel. From movement to combat, interface to disc swapping, Dragon Lore II is about as frustrating a gaming experience as I have encountered in recent years. Superficially, DL2 seems to have promising elements - a better plot, improved characterization, and a better visual setting than many recent RPG/adventures. The storyline: Draconia is a medieval land of magic and monsters that is besieged by orcish armies. A new leader who might be able to see Draconia through this ordeal must emerge from the ranks. You are Werner von Wallenrod, one of a handful of legendary Dragon Knights - warriors who are allied with specific ""protecting dragons."" Your dragon, Maraach, is missing so your status as a true Dragon Knight is being publicly questioned by an ambitious nobleman. Retrieving Maraach and gaining the respect of your fellow knights is among your chief tasks in a game that does begin with a compelling storyline and even believable characters. All of the Dragon Knights have distinct personae - kind, cool, or bombastic - yet all share an arrogance and self-confidence that one would expect from members of a martial elite. The local princess is brooding over some mysterious disappointment, and the town's all-seeing clairvoyant speaks in obscure parables. The voice acting is overdone (now the norm in gaming), but the script itself is refreshing, as the dialogue conveys not only useful information but a fine sense of the characters and a deeper involvement in the game's setting.  Much of the action takes place within the buildings and the underground labyrinths of the capital city. Hours pass and day turns to night as you make your way around town, solve minor quests, locate necessary objects, and speak with a cast of well-drawn townsfolk or fellow knights. The graphics for these settings are grainier than one would expect from 640X480 mode (under Win95 DirectX), but the underlying artwork is quite convincing nevertheless. The cutscenes, too, have a nice polish to them, with dramatic edits and a fine use of pre-rendered animations. All in all, then, DL2 succeeds in creating a strong sense of presence, of being in a world in which time passes, people live their lives, and pressing events depend upon your actions. This is no mean feat in the otherwise cardboard world of computer gaming.  But the devil is in the details, and Dragon Lore II disintegrates quickly into a mush of user-hostile interfaces, incomplete instructions, and just downright thoughtless design. The playing interface resembles the mediocre one in Stonekeep. The first-person gaming screen employs a cursor that can cycle through speaking, moving, and taking icons. Weapons and items for left/right hands are visible in the menu bar below, as are buttons for access to spells and inventory. Life, strength, and magic bars are over the play screen and increase in capacity with experience. How and why these attributes increase or get depleted remains unclear due to the mute documentation. Eating restores some strength. Sleeping helps, but apparently only in some places, as you can die in your sleep, at times without any explanation. While character attributes are present and do grow over time, DL2 is more of a 3-D adventure in which gathering items to solve puzzles and satisfy assignments is punctuated only occasionally by combat or other action sequences. The puzzle difficulty is moderate, generally a matter of giving the correct object to the right person. The inventory screen gives you the time, limited item capacity, and the ability to combine found objects in order to solve some puzzles. But just try and find some of these items! Many of them are not even visible on screen and are detectable only if your cursor happens upon just the right pixel. Worse still, overlooking a necessary object from the early parts of the game will lock you out of any progress later, forcing a restart.  Movement is first-person and point-to-point, much like Zork Nemesis or the recent Space Bar. An on-screen compass rose indicates which routes are available, but clicking in a direction could take you anywhere, from turning in place to halfway across the city and even into a battle sequence. In other cases, like at the inn, it can take four or five mouse clicks to twist and turn your way across two feet in order to talk to the owner. The inconsistency is maddening and unnecessary.  But wait, there's more. The combat interface is even worse. There are purported to be three types of fighting blows under the control of your right mouse button: thrust, cut, and reverse cut. But where you should move the real-time battle cursor to achieve each blow is left to experimentation. Both the weapon and the video image of the enemy are so unresponsive in combat that it's difficult to know when and how your blows might be connecting or missing. With so little feedback from the program itself, and entirely useless documentation, you can die often and learn nothing to hone your skills. The same is true for the other action element of the game - jousting - for which there are two lengthy tournaments for our hero by game's end. Yet nothing about the jousting interface is to be found in the flimsy documentation. Switching to a third-person behind-the-horse POV, you move the mouse to balance and point the weapon at the approaching knight, though both lance and enemy are so broken up under the low resolutions here that aiming is moot. Magic casting is equally poor. Icons for the handful of spells (reading runes, adding to your defense in combat, or making friendly conversation, for instance) are pressed from the gameplay screen but offer no signs of their success or effectiveness.  Apparently the designers of Dragon Lore II got it into their heads that inconvenience and user frustration should be salient features of a game, so it wasn't enough to make movement and combat inane. The 3-CD set requires frequent disc swapping - at night/day changes and whenever entering certain frequently-visited locations. No matter where your last save may be in the course of the adventure, reloading requires the first CD, especially annoying when the battle interface tends to kill off the hero so often. Many of the objects that need collecting are nearly invisible to the naked eye and require very tedious, slow panning of the on-screen cursor in order to be detected. The movement scheme desperately needs shortcuts. Prior to each jousting sequence, for instance, you have to repeat a tedious circuit of preparations and movements (up to six times!) just to retool for the next round.  The manifest design flaws of the game might be pardonable by some gamers if the promising narrative elements came to anything. But, alas, the characters and storyline turn out to be window dressing rather than points of genuine interest. As the game winds towards its predictable conclusion - a final battle with your main rival to Draconia's leadership - the game relies even more on its weakest elements, combat and pixel-hunting.  One of the many inconsiderate design features in Dragon Lore II turns out to be a blessing in disguise. An unlabelled button in the corner of the play screen, easily mistaken for a decorative rivet, actually dumps you from the game and into the credits: no warning, no confirmation screen, no save opportunity - just a scroll of the people who are responsible for this travesty. Game Hint No. 1: Use this feature frequently.
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318,K-1 Grand Prix ,3.1, K-1 Grand Prix is for the most part the same as the original.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/7/9/2224479-14_2.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/k-1-grand-prix-review/1900-2547988/,neg,"
Ostensibly, K-1 Grand Prix is the third title from Xing, but really it's the same game all over again. The beefed-up graphics and additional options in K-1 Revenge, the second game in the series, were enough to appease K-1 fans like this one once, but two times in a row just doesn't cut it. The cleaner character models and all of the new modes added to K-1 Grand Prix simply can't hide the fact that the game is just the same. You still can choose from several modes of play, including single player, tournament, and training. There is also a new career mode, which lets you create your own kickboxer; unfortunately, the creation system employed is terribly simple, and it doesn't offer much variety at all. The career mode lets you fight your way up from the bottom of the ranks in the hopes of being named champion. Along the way, you must pay your dues by going through tedious exercises so you can earn enough points to purchase moves, which you can use during a match. Of course you can still choose from 16 of the top kickboxers in the world, like Andy Hug, Musashi, and Ernesto Hoost. This game controls the same as the first two games: The D-pad moves your fighter toward and away from your opponent; the shoulder buttons sidestep, while the buttons on the face of the controller execute punches, kicks, and special attacks. If you press up or down on the D-pad while pressing an attack button you'll vary the height and/or type of attack. However, the actual speed that the game runs at is a great deal slower than that of the other K-1 titles, and this makes playing K-1 Grand Prix totally boring.Visually, K-1 Grand Prix is definitely an improvement over its predecessors. The game's frame rate is fast and runs quite smoothly. The character models have improved dramatically: No longer are the fighters blocky polygons strung together but instead are quite rounded, and they represent their real-life counterparts quite well. However, improved models can't hide the same old animations used for punches and kicks. The animations of the fighters performing various moves look very stiff and unrealistic. In the audio department, the sound effects are decent but not very authentic. The music in the game is good enough to get the job done but not much past that. Unfortunately, there's no cool quasi-rendition of Van Halen's Running With the Devil, as there was in the last K-1.  In the end, K-1 Grand Prix is for the most part the same as the original. Sure, the graphics are cleaner and the game has more options, but for anyone who has played the first two K-1 titles, the third isn't worth playing. If you haven't played any of the K-1 games, and you are curious about K-1 Grand Prix, you shouldn't be - the game's outdated engine and control scheme are inferior to just about any other fighting or boxing game released in the past year. If you just have to know for yourself, take my advice and play K-1 Revenge -  it was a bit faster and therefore more fun.
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319,Machine Hunter ,3.1, A mediocre shooter with repetitive and boring action.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/6/0/2216660-256px_machunt.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/machine-hunter-review/1900-2542426/,neg,"
Machine Hunter fits squarely into that has-been category of top-down, low-res, action scrollers with chunky, 2D sprites. If anything, this game's lengthy production cycle and numerous name changes should have been MGM's first clues that Machine Hunter was a lost cause. It was originally called H.O.S.T (with no explanation of the acronym) and was set for release a year ago, then the name was changed to HOST (no periods), then Droid Hunter (LucasArts probably would not have approved), then Suicide Run (are we kamikaze pilots now?), and finally Machine Hunter. What it ended up with was a mediocre shooter with repetitive and boring action, lame visual effects, and weak sound. The gimmick to Machine Hunter is that as you kill off droids, you become them and gain whatever firepower they had. Of course, if you're able to kill these guys with your inferior firepower, why do you need to ""step-up"" to theirs?  The game plays out in what MGM's marketing geniuses describe as a ""multilayered 3D hell"" but things look mighty 2D to me. Even using the four different camera angles, it's darn hard figuring out where walkways end and drop-offs begin. You walk under bridges but have no idea if you'll come out the other side. You can bump into bad guys in those unviewable locations and get blown to smithereens or they can shoot you from off-screen. While the enemy can leap wildly around and blast you from multiple angles, your movement is very limited and you can aim only in 45-degree increments. And, at any one time, you can have only two weapons at your disposal. You have only two control options - keyboard or joypad - and the controls are very confusing. The cursor arrows control movement, but their actions change depending on the camera angle: left and right movement keys suddenly become left-turn and right-turn keys. Bizarre. Gameplay takes place in (would you believe) a tiny 320x240 screen (that's quarter-screen, folks). Expanding to full screen simply enlarges the pixels. This is the only game I've played where the manual states: ""Preferably play the game on a small monitor."" The graphics are proportionately poor. Dying soldiers leave little circular pools of red paint and explosions are tiny translucent yellow/blue balls. One animation of an about-to-be-rescued hostage, jumping enthusiastically up and down, was reminiscent of my Apple II version of Choplifter. Pretty cool 15 years ago, pretty weak now. Besides human-looking soldiers and nine droids, you'll encounter numerous other animated objects, including floating whelks and blue clouds. But you don't know whether to shoot, pick up, or ignore them. There is no explanation anywhere as to their purpose. With all the hype this game has encountered, you'd expect something worth critiquing. But as it stands, Machine Hunter isn't even worth picking up from the discount rack.
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320,MechAssault ,9," If you're going to buy one game with your Xbox Live starter kit, MechAssault is the one to get.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/6/8/2217568-box_mecha.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mechassault-review/1900-2897126/,pos,"
BattleTech and its offshoot, the MechWarrior series, form a deep, long-running science-fiction universe that has extended from tabletop games played with miniature figures into the realm of computer games and video games. The MechWarrior series represented the giant-robot-filled universe on the PC, while BattleTech centers around the country offered an even more immersive experience, allowing players to truly feel as though they were piloting gigantic, futuristic walking tanks. Translating the complex mechanics of BattleTech into manageable gaming experiences has met with mixed results over the years, as developers have struggled to find just the right balance of simulation, shooting, and strategic elements for these games. And while there have been previous attempts to simplify the game's inherently slow pacing for a more mainstream audience, none have fared better than Microsoft's new Xbox game, MechAssault. This new game delivers the best of what BattleTech's brand of giant robot combat has to offer in a highly accessible game that's especially fun when played against others online.  MechAssault is an action-packed shooter set in the BattleTech universe.  While the game's main draw is its online play, MechAssault does feature a single-player campaign. The story puts you in the role of a marooned dropship's last remaining mechwarrior, and you'll have to stomp through just under 20 levels while waging war against the fanatical followers of the oppressive Word of Blake. You'll launch raids on enemy emplacements, defend your dropship from attackers, and destroy just about everything you come across. The campaign levels are tied together by premission briefings and in-mission updates. The game's radar screen will always point you toward your next objective, so paying attention to the premission briefings isn't really necessary. You're given missions by your commanding officer and a lieutenant who is usually referred to as ""briefing boy."" The missions are generally well structured and entertaining, packing in a lot of explosive action.   However, the campaign simply pales in comparison with MechAssault's online component. The game has functional support for system link and split-screen play, but the game is at its best on Microsoft's new Xbox Live service. Your gamertag and Xbox Live account info will be seamlessly integrated into the game, so you'll simply have to choose a control scheme, select your account, and log in. MechAssault has the standard configuration for Xbox Live games, so you'll be able to search for specific games using quickstart or the optimatch feature. The game features a lot of different voice masks for vocal communication during play, although some are almost completely unintelligible.  The campaign can be engaging, but online is where MechAssault truly shines.  Multiplayer MechAssault can be played by up to eight players at a time in a collection of different game types. The self-explanatory deathmatch and team deathmatch let you choose which arena you wish to fight in and configure winning conditions. Last man standing is available as is or in a team variant, and it serves as an elimination mode that goes until one mech or team remains. ""Not it"" classifies one player as ""it."" The player who is ""it"" is charged with the task of killing the other players for points. Other players are trying to kill the player who is ""it"" in order to become ""it."" The player with the most points at the end is the victor. The game runs very smoothly online and features a good selection of maps. MechAssault also has a built-in option to download new content, which will theoretically allow the developers to add new mechs, levels, or multiplayer game types to the mix at a later date. The selection of multiplayer options is already robust, so this feature may really add scads of replay value to the game.   The actual gameplay involves a simple control scheme that should be immediately familiar to Xbox owners, as it's very similar to the schemes used in first-person shooters like Halo. The left analog stick is used to move your mech around, while the right is used to aim. Each mech has three different weapons, and you can either cycle through them with one of the triggers or jump specifically to one of them using the appropriate face button. Some mechs are also able to fly short distances using jump jets, turn invisible, or dodge missile locks by dropping chaff. Naturally, lighter mechs move faster, but they lack the punch of the game's heavier units, which are armed to the teeth and have the thick armor to match. The different weapon loadouts include weapons found throughout the MechWarrior universe, including machine guns, lasers, various types of missile packs, the powerful but comparatively difficult to aim Gauss rifle, and the ever-popular particle projection cannon. True to the roots of the series, overheating your mech in MechAssault is always a constant concern. Previous games to tackle the MechWarrior license have all tried to deal with heat distribution in different ways. The theory, however, is always the same: Firing weapons and using your jump jets generates heat, which you must allow to dissipate. Sure, you have unlimited ammo for all your basic weapons, but if you lay into the fire button and never let go, you'll generate so much heat that you'll eventually overheat your mech, which prevents you from firing until your mech's temperature drops back below a certain level. This adds some strategy to the gameplay without bogging it down, and it keeps confrontations from constantly boiling down into an exercise in circle-strafing.  Spectacular visuals and great sound help maintain the game's intensity for as long as you play.  Forty-foot-tall robots aren't exactly the fastest things in the world, so dodging fire is a bit more difficult than it is in your average multiplayer shooter. Ducking behind cover--which is plentiful thanks to the game's many city-based environments--is the number-one way to avoid damage, but skillfully timed jump-jet boosts and direction changes can also be used to dodge incoming homing-rocket and PPC attacks.   MechAssault definitely has the outstanding look that you'd expect from an Xbox-exclusive title. The environments look fantastic, the mechs all look and move extremely well, and the game sports some really great textures. The levels are filled with buildings that break apart in a spectacular fashion when you pump rockets into them, and the explosions are second to none. Even the small humanoids in power armor suits turn into satisfying puffs of fire when destroyed. Windowed buildings explode into a shower of glass when hit, and the game's light vehicles also explode spectacularly. But the best explosions come from the mechs themselves. When defeated, mechs go critical, falling over and detonating in a white-hot blast followed by a shockwave and a messy, smoke-filled fire cloud.   The game also has a lot of great little touches. You'll see the different mechs noticeably deteriorate in combat, emitting smoke after taking a few hits, sparking at moderate damage, and practically bursting apart at the seams when near defeat. The only weird graphical thing the game has going on is the fact that its sense of scale doesn't seem quite right, as the mechs seem to move a bit too nimbly. While you're supposed to be cruising around the levels in a 40-foot-tall walking tank, the mechs look more like miniature models walking around a world filled with tiny buildings. The buildings general lack of definition also lends to the game's odd sense of scale.  MechAssault is one of the most accessible MechWarrior games ever, and it's also one of the best.  MechAssault has loud, bass-heavy sound effects to match its wartime graphics. All the weapon fire sounds fantastic, and the amazing explosions are synched up to some really great-sounding audio. Like the rest of the Xbox lineup, MechAssault has Dolby Digital support, and the game uses this support better than most Xbox games. The game's interactive soundtrack is a helpful in-game tool. The music is fairly subtle throughout most of the game, but whenever there's another enemy mech in the area, the soundtrack picks up and starts to rock. The heightened rock soundtrack really adds to the game's intensity, and it lets you know when to expect contact with the game's tougher campaign-mode foes.   MechAssault isn't an overly complicated game, and this makes it a perfect choice for the Xbox Live launch. Once you get used to the game's pacing, it's easy to get good at controlling your mech, which is, of course, invaluable when you're playing online against other experienced players. The well-done campaign mode, the terrific presentation, and the variety of online modes all combine to make a truly superb final product. If you're going to buy one game with your Xbox Live starter kit, MechAssault is the one to get.


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321,Ratchet & Clank ,9," Ratchet & Clank skillfully avoids most of the traps that hold back the majority of modern platform games and presents a fantastic, well-balanced, story-driven adventure.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/0/2/2218002-box_rac.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ratchet-and-clank-review/1900-2896475/,pos,"
The platform genre is well-worn territory. The 2D platformer was driven completely into the ground back in the 16-bit era, and we're starting to see an awful lot of repetition in the 3D platformer arena, as well. Most 3D platformers are full of backtracking, poor camera work, and countless little doodads to collect. However, Ratchet & Clank skillfully avoids most of the traps that hold back the majority of modern platform games. Developed by Insomniac Games, the company behind the first three games in the popular Spyro the Dragon series, Ratchet & Clank presents a fantastic, well-balanced, story-driven adventure that can easily be recommended to anyone.   Ratchet & Clank is an outstanding game in every way.   Ratchet is an alien creature that looks a bit like a cross between a cat and a rabbit. He's handy with his tools and is busy working on his spaceship when a small robot named Clank falls out of the sky. Clank relays a tale of a world in peril, hops onto Ratchet's back, and the duo set off to save the world from Drek, an evil corporate suit who, like President Skroob in the Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs, is the leader of a dead, polluted world. Drek and his minions are remedying their situation by ripping apart other, cleaner planets and using their resources to build a new home. Ratchet and Clank are an odd couple of sorts, so many of the game's cutscenes show the duo trying to pull their quest in two different directions. The game maintains a nice, lighthearted feel from start to finish, complete with a colorful cast of very well animated characters and a well-written script.     Each level in Ratchet & Clank is actually a different planet. You'll start out not knowing where to go next. New planets are revealed to you by ""infobots,"" small robot storage devices that contain a brief video clip. The cutscenes shown when accessing an infobot are sometimes intercepted communiqués between Drek and his army, others are newscasts that talk about the havoc Drek has unleashed, and still others are commercials that advertise various spots in the universe. The cutscenes also provide an initial reason for visiting a planet, though you'll usually receive other objectives as you explore each world.     While Ratchet & Clank is structured a lot like most other platformers, it's much more focused on skillful combat than on making difficult jumps. Your standard weapon is a large wrench, which you can swing around or toss like a boomerang. You'll also start with one of the game's many weapons, the bomb glove. As you might expect, equipping the bomb glove lets you toss bombs at enemies. All your enemies are robotic, and when they're destroyed, they explode in a shower of nuts and bolts. As you move through the game, you'll be collecting these nuts and bolts at a near-constant rate. These serve as the game's currency, and you can use them to purchase items and ammo for your weapons at various shops.   Ratchet's the one with the big ears, and Clank is the robot on his back.   As you make your way from level to level, you'll find or purchase a lot of other weapons, including a cannon that lets you suck up small foes and spit them out, a flamethrower, a machine gun, a minelayer, homing and guided rockets, and several more. The weapons provide a really nice variety of ways to deal with the game's enemies, and players with different playing styles will find certain weapons more effective than others. The game gives you the standard complement of attacks and jumping options. You can steer Ratchet around with the left stick, but it's actually easier to steer with the right stick, which swings the camera around. Other platformers have given you camera control, but most of the cameras like to swing back around to the default viewpoint as soon as you stop adjusting them. With the exception of a few tight spots, Ratchet & Clank's camera stays where you put it. You'll run into a few occasions where you're surrounded by enemies and can't see them all, but once you get the hang of things, this isn't really a problem.     Aside from the game's large supply of weapons, you'll also earn a collection of upgrades and gadgets that are mainly used for puzzle solving. The swing shot is probably the coolest of the lot. It gives you a Bionic Commando-like hook shot that grapples onto special targets, letting you swing back and forth or quickly move from one spot to another. You'll eventually earn hover upgrades, masks, a door opener, a water displacement device, and a cool little gadget that lets you disguise yourself as a robot, which you'll use to infiltrate a robot factory. Some sections of the game break from the standard course of action. You'll ride a hoverboard in a couple of races, and you'll fly a starfighter, man a couple of turrets, and even directly control Clank in areas that Ratchet can't reach. These brief bits of gameplay aren't terribly difficult, but they break up the action effectively and really lend a lot of variety to the game.  As most of the game's levels have multiple objectives, you'll usually have two or three paths branching off of your starting position. Each one will eventually lead to some sort of payoff. At that point, most games would ask you to backtrack through the section you just completed to get back to the beginning of the level and try a different path. But the levels are designed in such a way that you'll almost never have to backtrack through a section you've already played. Many paths loop all the way around to the starting point, while others do this artificially by placing a teleporter or other form of instant transport at the end of the track. The lack of backtracking really keeps the game moving by almost completely eliminating downtime. The levels seem extremely large and really look great.  All kinds of zany weapons will be at your disposal.  Ratchet & Clank is a fantastic-looking PlayStation 2 game. The sheer size of the levels is really impressive, and you'll often find yourself fighting a screen full of small enemies amid these huge environments, but the game's incredibly smooth frame rate never slows down. The frame rate doesn't come at the cost of texture quality or animation quality, either, and these aspects of Ratchet & Clank also look terrific. The game's environments are colorful, and the game features some really great animated sequences, too. Convincingly done facial animations convey a wide range of emotions for both Ratchet and Clank during the game's amusing cutscenes. And while you'll see quite a bit of repetition of enemies within a given level, there is a good range of different enemies to be found in the game, overall. The game's bosses look especially good.   The graphics are backed up by a fantastic soundtrack. Each level is given its own feel, thanks in part to music that can convey tension, creepiness, and more, but without giving up the game's generally upbeat, lighthearted tone. The sound effects are also generally outstanding, though the perpetual sound of bolts being collected can get pretty grating over time. The game's voice actors had a strong script to work with, and the game's dialogue is all well done. Ratchet & Clank has support for Dolby Pro Logic II, so players with surround sound systems will be able to hear things happening behind Ratchet in their rear speakers.  The game's levels are enormous and full of humorous detail.  Ratchet & Clank isn't a difficult game, at first. It starts out pretty easy, so you'll cover a lot of ground quickly. Later on, the game's difficulty really picks up, though it never becomes needlessly difficult or unfair. When you run out of health, you'll quickly respawn at the last checkpoint you crossed. Checkpoints aren't actually visible, but there are enough of them that you'll rarely have to spend a lot of time working your way through previously seen territory. The game is also a lot longer than you might have come to expect from games of this type. Ratchet & Clank spends a lot of time leading up to its final confrontation, and it tosses in a few extra levels and quests while you're hot on the trail of the game's lead antagonists. Overall, it's longer than many similar platformers, yet the game doesn't feel artificially lengthened by late-game fetch quests. There are optional items to be found in the game, such as gold bolts and skill points, and finishing the game will allow you to play through again and unlock special items.   The team at Insomniac did a fantastic job of balancing the game between various types of combat and standard platforming action, and the overall design sidesteps most of the common platformer failings really, really well. Anyone looking for a lengthy platformer will find a lot to like here, and fans of third-person shooters will also have a lot of fun with the game due to its heavy focus on various outrageous projectile weapons. Ratchet & Clank is certainly a fantastic platformer in every way and qualifies as one of the best games the genre has seen since consoles went polygonal.


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322,Super Monkey Ball 2 ,9," It's almost amazing how Super Monkey Ball 2 makes fun and addictive multiplayer gaming seem so simple, and it manages to include a compelling single-player game to boot.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/3/9/2211339-box_smb2.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-monkey-ball-2-review/1900-2878389/,pos,"
Something that started off as an obscure arcade game, AmusementVision's Monkey Ball series probably would have slipped under most people's radars had Super Monkey Ball not been one of the launch titles for the GameCube. Though it may not have made as big of a splash with gamers as games like Luigi's Mansion or Rogue Leader, the original Super Monkey Ball quickly garnered a strong following, and the game's unique style and wealth of addictive gameplay modes kept people playing long after interest had waned in many of the higher-profile GameCube launch games. Super Monkey Ball 2 simply cranks up the volume on the Monkey Ball formula, offering up fully twice the number of playable four-player party games as the original and wrapping the single-player experience in an appropriately cute and slightly deranged story.  Super Monkey Ball 2 is a bigger, better version of the outstanding original.  The game's story mode begins with the sinister Dr. Bad-Boon rolling up on Monkey Island and using a giant vacuum to steal all the bananas on the island. Our heroic quartet of Ai Ai, Mee Mee, Gon Gon, and Baby perform a breathtakingly weird dance to summon their supersized hamster balls and quickly give chase to Dr. Bad-Boon, who has, of course, lined their path with a series of puzzles. That's where you come in.   The easiest way to describe Super Monkey Ball is to call it a fully three-dimensional version of the classic Marble Madness, but even this compliment would not do justice to the game's constantly inventive and challenging course design. The objective of each level is as simple as it gets--using nothing but the rolling power of your monkey ball, you must get from one end of a course to the other before time runs out. Actually doing so, however, is where the simplicity ends, as the levels themselves are fraught with moving platforms, big drops, and an assortment of other dangerous obstacles whose sole purpose is to knock you off the platform. The level design has unquestionably become much bolder since the original Super Monkey Ball. While sheer steady-handedness is still a very necessary skill, Super Monkey Ball 2 puts a slightly greater emphasis on puzzle-solving, forcing you to extrapolate the best course of action rather than just trying to power through. Make no mistake, Super Monkey Ball 2 is every bit as challenging as its predecessor, and fans of the original will surely appreciate the 100 new levels the game has to offer.   As you play through both the story mode and the challenge mode, which is essentially the story mode with a limited number of lives and without the story, you'll be rewarded with play points along the way that can be used to unlock the game's six new party games. All the party games from the original Super Monkey Ball--monkey race, monkey fight, monkey target, monkey billiards, monkey bowling, and monkey golf--have returned for the sequel in an enhanced form, and all are playable right from the get-go. The enhancements that have been made to these games are generally minor and seem designed specifically to make the proceedings more enjoyable for novice players, though they shouldn't really keep monkey ball veterans from continuing to enjoy them.   The six new unlockable party games are all worth unlocking, though some have greater lasting appeal than others. Monkey boat is a race mode where the monkeys have converted their balls into tiny plastic kayaks. This mode can prove to be physically draining, as forward motion and directional control are determined by the left and right strokes of your paddle, which are handled by the left and right trigger buttons, respectively, and you'll have to pump like mad to keep ahead of the pack. In monkey dogfight the simians are given weapons and the ability of flight, and they do battle in an aerial arena. Monkey shoot is essentially a cutesy version of Virtua Cop, or any other rail-based shooter where you use a targeting reticle to shoot down moving targets. The other three party games, monkey baseball, monkey soccer, and monkey tennis, pretty much play as simplified versions of those sports. They will not give the likes of High Heat Baseball or FIFA Soccer a run for their money, but the easy-to-learn mechanics and fast pacing make them perfectly fit for quality multiplayer action.   The presentation of Super Monkey Ball 2 is head and shoulders above the original, with every single aspect of the game's visuals receiving at least a slight upgrade. The ethereal nothingness that surrounded the original Super Monkey Ball is a distant memory, and the single-player game is divided into 10 different themed areas ranging from the banal Jungle Island levels to the more outrageous Inside a Whale and Bubbly Washing Machine levels. The platforms themselves are constructed of the same distinct checkerboard material, but the background teems with action as volcanoes, space stations, and the machinations of a clock tower go about their business. The monkeys themselves have been given a greater level of detail and more animation. Lighting and particle effects are used more liberally, and to especially good effect in the Volcanic Magma levels, where you'll see the hot embers from the burning pit below flying up and around the track. Aside from the very rare occasion of slowdown, it's hard to complain about the graphics here.  You'll have a blast with this game playing either alone or with others.  The aural presentation hasn't changed as radically since the original Super Monkey Ball, using the same throbbing, impossibly upbeat techno soundtrack accompanied by the same announcer with the same unsure speech patterns. During the story mode, you'll hear the characters speak in their own gibberish dialects, which consist mostly of lots of eeks and other generic monkey sounds, except for Dr. Bad-Boon, who sounds as if he's talking backward--whether this was intended to make him seem even more sinister or if AmusementVision is using subliminal marketing to sell more copies of Super Monkey Ball 2 remains to be seen.   With so many so-called party games out there trying so hard to create a frenetic multiplayer experience, it's almost amazing how Super Monkey Ball 2 makes it all seem so effortless and manages to include a compelling single-player game to boot. Fans of the series will find more to love here than in the original Super Monkey Ball, and beginners will find this to be a much easier game to get into.
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323,Dark Cloud 2 ,9," Dark Cloud 2 could very well be the PlayStation 2's Zelda, and it will appeal to fans of the action RPG genre for a long time to come.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/9/5/2213895-box_dcloud2.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-cloud-2-review/1900-2911113/,pos,"
Every so often a game comes along that's so well crafted, unassuming, and downright enjoyable that you just can't help but like it. Dark Cloud 2, the charming sequel to 2001's PS2 action RPG Dark Cloud, is such a game. The latest in the series improves on its predecessor in nearly every way, as it tightly integrates the combat, world building, and weapons management of the first game into a more cohesive whole. Add together these elements, astounding visuals, superb music and voice acting, and high production values and you have Dark Cloud 2, one of the finest games released for the PlayStation 2 so far.  Dark Cloud 2 brings back and enhances the georama system, and this time it's a pivotal part of the gameplay, since you'll need it to literally rebuild the world. In Dark Cloud 2, you play as Maximilian (Max, for short), a tech-minded whiz kid with a knack for creating strange inventions. Max fills the requisite role in Dark Cloud 2 of the ""plucky good-hearted youth with a mysterious amulet or jewel,"" and of course it's because of this jewel that he becomes embroiled in a massive quest to restore his dying world to its former splendor. As it turns out, Max's inherited pendant is a time-travel device, and after defending it from the attacks of a very demented clown, he meets Monica. Monica is a princess from the future on a grave mission: She's come to enlist Max's aid in thwarting an evil tyrant from the past who's erasing the future by meddling with the present. In fact, this great villain has already wiped out pretty much the entire world, save Max's village. Max and Monica are determined to stop this madness by visiting key points around the world and restoring the land, buildings, and people at those points to make the future what it should be.    The first Dark Cloud introduced the georama system, a world-building gameplay component that let you build and populate villages from the ground up. Dark Cloud 2 brings back and enhances the georama system, and this time it's a pivotal part of the gameplay, since you'll need it to literally rebuild the world. A huge assortment of buildings, small objects, plants, and landscape features are available so you can construct and mold a town to your liking. Georama gives you get a simple overhead interface for doing this, allowing you to move and rotate a piece before dropping it onto the terrain. You can even paint your buildings and add household effects like chimneys and fences. After you've built up a town, you can recruit the residents of Palm Brinks, the game's one existing town, to move into the houses you've created. Each new town you build has a set of requirements that, once fulfilled, will lead to the restoration of that area in the future. You can zip back and forth at will between the present and the future to see if the changes you've made have affected the timeline in a meaningful way. Generally, once you've fulfilled enough of the requirements, the people you've restored in the future will grant you assistance that will help further your quest. The georama system is pretty easy to get the hang of, especially with the game's comprehensive, elegant tutorial system, and you'll be building busy little burgs in no time.    You can't build a town without knowledge and raw materials, of course, and to obtain these you'll have to plunge into Dark Cloud 2's expansive dungeons. As you forge onward through the dungeon in a given area, you'll obtain geostones, mystical rocks that contain the wisdom and building expertise of the ancients. Each geostone you find adds new items for that area's georama mode and establishes a few more guidelines to point your building efforts in the right direction. You'll also have to collect materials in the dungeons, although these can also be bought from merchants. The dungeon layouts are randomized, so you'll never be able to memorize the right paths, but they're straightforward enough that you won't have much problem getting around.  While the first game looked merely decent for its time, the visual improvements made by the new game are staggering. Of course, the dungeons of any good action RPG are filled with all manner of monsters, and Dark Cloud 2 is no slouch in this area. Thankfully, Max and Monica are both adept at using their weapons of choice--he fights with a heavy wrench and a pistol, while she favors swords and a magical-energy-shooting armband. The combat is highly reminiscent of the action featured in the N64 Zelda games (not to mention most other modern action RPGs) in that it utilizes a lock-on system that lets you rotate around your enemies, backflip away from them, and perform other standard combat maneuvers. The dungeons in Dark Cloud 2, while fun, are probably the game's weakest link. The randomized layout does add some variety, but it also limits your activities to hacking and slashing and opening treasure chests until you find the key for that floor and can progress to the next. The combat is also a little bit clunky and not nearly as gracefully executed as the combat in the Zelda games, but after you pound away at enough enemies, you'll get the hang of it.     Any good RPG lets you obtain new weapons to use against harder monsters, and Dark Cloud 2 is no exception, but the way you do so here is fairly unique. As you kill monsters, the experience you gain doesn't go straight to your characters; you level Max and Monica up with items you find in the future. Rather, the experience goes into your weapons, which have a full range of stats and attributes to manage. Each time a weapon's level increases, its stats go up slightly, and it gains a few more synthesis points. With these you can ""spectrumize"" any item you're carrying and apply it to the weapon. Spectrumized items increase a particular stat of the weapon you apply it to, and when that weapon reaches the required levels in certain categories, you can rebuild it into an entirely new weapon. You'll also occasionally find better weapons for sale, but generally, building your existing weapons up is the most straightforward and effective way to enhance your attack power. Like the georama system, this upgrade system is easy to get a handle on with the provided tutorials, and it provides you with a wider range of customizing options than most other games of this type. Max and Monica are the main fighters in Dark Cloud 2, but there are also a wide array of secondary characters to use in battle as well. Max's alternate incarnation comes in the form of Steve the ridepod, a big rattletrap of a robot cobbled together from household items. Steve can be upgraded in all sorts of ways as he gains experience, ranging from replacing his legs with tank treads to swapping out his massive arms for side-mounted cannons. Monica has the ability to transform into certain monsters and use their attacks in combat. To do this, she has to obtain special medallions, each of which provides her with a new monster form. Finally, any one of the many people you meet can be recruited as a support character to follow you into the dungeons. Although you won't see that person running around with you, he or she will provide a variety of passive abilities that will help you out. The game's combat portion would have been pretty good with just its two main characters, but these extra additions add a lot of versatility as you plow through the hordes of enemies.  The dungeons of any good action RPG are filled with all manner of monsters, and Dark Cloud 2 is no slouch in this area. In addition to the main quest, which involves plumbing the depths of each dungeon for geostones and then building up the surrounding area in the georama, Dark Cloud 2 features a staggering amount of peripheral material for you to plow through. As you build your towns up, you need to move people into them, and these people can be found only in Palm Brinks. Each potential new resident has a task for you to complete, however, before they'll come with you, and these tasks are like little side quests in themselves. Some are more involved than others, but whenever you've had your fill of dungeon combat and world building, you can head back to the main town and try to convince people to come with you. This can be as easy as running a requested errand or as involved as seeking a rare item hidden somewhere in the world. These side quests are a great diversion and add a lot to the gameplay.    Another thing you can do in your off time is take advantage of Max's skill in inventing things. The invention system works like this: All inventions require three component objects to make a full idea, and when Max has the beginnings of an idea, the game will tell you which three things you need to invent the object. You'll have to go out with Max's camera and snap pictures of these three things and then feed the images into his brain so he can mull over the possibilities and finally come up with something new. For instance, the idea involving a window, a wooden box, and a river yields an aquarium. Some inventions are more useful than others, and occasionally the search for components can degenerate into a fetch quest, but the invention process is almost always optional, and it's rewarding to come up with new things to assist your journey. Fully featured fishing and golf-like minigames round out the plentiful list of extra gameplay elements in the game. There's so much to do that it's almost overwhelming, and you'll never be starved for an enjoyable activity.  Dark Cloud 2 is simply a class act all the way. Dark Cloud 2 is an aesthetic masterpiece. While the first game looked merely decent for its time, the visual improvements made by the new game are staggering. Dark Cloud 2 features some of the best use of cel shading yet, on the PlayStation 2 or anywhere else. All the game's characters and enemies make full use of the effect, but its application is subtle enough that it never blatantly leaps out at you--rather, it produces the intended effect, which is simply to make the game's people and monsters look like characters in a cartoon. The game's environments are also lovingly crafted and quite varied, with the exception of the dungeons, whose random nature tends to make them look a little repetitive. Dark Cloud 2's music ranges from good to excellent, and generally there are enough tunes that you won't get too bored of hearing any particular one. Dark Cloud 2's translation and voice acting deserve special mention because they show how far the localization of Japanese games has come in the last decade or so. The dialogue's phrasing is imaginative and the voices are of the caliber you'll find in any animated television show. The effect of this is a greater involvement on the part of the player with the characters in the game, and this of course is the goal of any story. Sony clearly put some real effort into localizing Dark Cloud 2, and the work pays off big.    Dark Cloud 2 is simply a class act all the way. Every element of the game, from the georama system to the weapon upgrading to the interaction with a large cast of characters, displays a polish and attention to quality that you find only in real classics. Level-5 and Sony should both be commended for turning a fair-to-middling old game into what will now be a series to watch with great interest. Dark Cloud 2 could very well be the PlayStation 2's Zelda, and it will appeal to fans of the action RPG genre for a long time to come. 


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324,Ninja Gaiden Sigma ,9," If you haven't attempted to do so before, this is the best way to play one of the best, most brutal action games ever made.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/2/4/3/4598-18243.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ninja-gaiden-sigma-review/1900-6173475/,pos,"
  Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was a true modern classic. It featured smooth, challenging gameplay and amazing production values. It was, in short, one of the finest games of its generation. In 2005, its gameplay was reworked and expanded for a second release, Ninja Gaiden Black. And incredibly enough, the third time's the charm. No, Ninja Gaiden Sigma isn't a true next-gen sequel, nor is it a simple port of the Xbox release. But it does add a good deal of new content, both subtle and obvious. If you're a Ninja Gaiden enthusiast, you'll want to see the new chapters, reworked levels, and slicker graphics. And if for some reason you missed it before, this is a must-play game. The action is intense, focused, and certainly not for the faint of heart. It's also among the most satisfying in all of gaming and remains as awe-inspiring as ever, three years after its original release.     So what's changed? The biggest addition is that Rachel the fiend hunter is a new playable character. She's a badass buxom babe who gets three chapters of her own, and a few levels in mission mode, too. She may be top-heavy, but she still manages a good number of terrific moves. Her minicampaign isn't as expansive as Ryu's: She's limited to using the warhammer and has only a single magic attack (called sorcery, rather than ninpo). The chapters are remarkably refreshing though, particularly because Rachel isn't as agile as Ryu--though a swing of her hammer does a huge amount of damage. Playing her requires you to adjust because her levels are interspersed among the others, so as the game's groove shifts, so must yours. Along with her chapters come new cutscenes, new bosses, and even a few feminine touches that humanize a story that was (and still is) more summer blockbuster than art house drama.   Rachel appreciates her unique talents. And so should you.   Her chapters aren't just disconnected additions, however. Ryu's chapters are shifted and reworked to give greater context to Rachel's. In fact, every level offers unexpected surprises, both big and small. In some cases, it's as simple as different items found in treasure chests. In others, the significance of the adjustments will catch you off guard, but pleasantly so. For example, one of the central chapters of the original Ninja Gaiden featured a straightforward puzzle to end the sequence. Now, a replica of an earlier boss returns, complete with a few new attacks to round out the surprise. Throughout the game, you'll find new enemies to uncover, such as glowing spirits and soldiers on motorcycles. You'll even get to play with a new set of weapons: Dual swords called Dragon's Claw and Tiger's Fang.     The changes are great, and they do more than throw in stuff for the sake of stuff. In some cases, they refine the pace and address frustrations of the original to make for an even tighter, more centered experience. One such change is the addition of a shop near the final save point before a major, difficult boss fight. It sounds insignificant, but it soothes a large frustration from the original and keeps the difficulty level steady without removing any real challenge from the boss encounter itself. Needless to say, there are countless additions, subtractions, and modifications, and they run the gamut from superficial to substantial. For the most part, all of them are for the better. The only questionable one is the ability to shake the Sixaxis controller to give more power to your ninpo skills. It feels needlessly tacked on, and shaking the controller doesn't really jibe with the general slickness of the other controls. Thankfully, it's the only element that stands out as unneeded among legions of improvements.     And if you haven't played Ninja Gaiden? Well, there's no better time than the present, and you won't need any previous experience with the series to understand what makes it excellent. Ninja extraordinaire Ryu Hyabusa is on a quest to recover the legendary Dark Dragon Blade and avenge the destruction of his peaceful village. Along the way, he meets Rachel, who is on a vision quest of her own. Their two stories mesh nicely in a single-player campaign that may take you 25 or more hours the first time through, depending on your skill level and prior experience with Ninja Gaiden Xbox.    The story never takes center stage, though it has the proper over-the-top sensibilities to frame what the game is really about: kick-ass action in the form of throws, slashes, wall-running, and acrobatic tumbling. If you think a ninja should be able to do it, you can do it in Ninja Gaiden Sigma. The controls for doing so are smooth and seamless, and aside from a few camera angle issues, at no point will you feel you have to struggle with the controller to pull any of these moves off. They result in astounding sequences of somersaulting, swordplay, offensive magic (called ninpo), and countermoves that are as gratifying as anything found in gaming. And as you progress through the game, you can upgrade your weapons, add new attacks, and earn other enhancements.     As you may have heard, Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox was a difficult game, and it's no different here. That isn't to say it's as tough as Ninja Gaiden Black, nor does it ever reach punishing levels. But it is no walk in the park, and newcomers may find it initially intimidating. If you've already cut your teeth on the series, you may be inclined to think that Sigma is a little easier, though that is due more to certain level design tweaks than it is to a reduction in challenge. In particular, Rachel's first chapter may strike fans as a little too easy thanks to a nice smattering of health potions, but the impression won't last once you reach her later appearances. As it is, you'll encounter armies of strong, agile opponents of all sorts, both human and, well, not so human--and you'll fight them in a variety of environments, from winding city streets to subterranean caverns.    The boss fights are as challenging and invigorating as ever.   Some of the most touted improvements in Ninja Gaiden Sigma over the original release are in the visual department. That isn't to say that it looks exactly next-gen, because there are signs of porting in the form of some bland textures and a few other blemishes. But it looks great, and a side-by-side comparison reveals a lot of nice enhancements in elements like shadows and color saturation. Animations are particularly spectacular, and Rachel's movements are as sleek as any of Ryu's. The sound effects and soundtrack remain the same as before. Still, as with the visuals, the audio additions are beautifully woven into the rest of the design, so nothing seems out of place or glued on.     And once you're done with the tour de force the first time around, you've got new difficulty levels to try out, stand-alone combat missions to play, and in-game leaderboards to peruse. There's simply a lot of game here, and the fact that this is a retooling of a three-year-old title for a new audience shouldn't dissuade you from playing it. Whether you're a series veteran or a newcomer, the in-your-face action of Ninja Gaiden Sigma is as exhilarating now as it ever was, and the new, slickly embedded content is surprisingly meaty. Play this game.   


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325,Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne ,9," Max Payne 2 is just a remarkable production, and what it lacks in length or volume it more than makes up for in quality and density.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/1/2/2210512-box_mpayne2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/1900-6076950/,pos,"
 ""Short but sweet"" is a good way to describe 2001's Max Payne, as well as its newly released sequel. Actually, the main difference between Max Payne 2 and its predecessor involves more of the circumstances under which the games arrived than anything existing in the games themselves. The original was victim to multiple development delays and spent years in the making, but, despite being a relatively brief experience, it was a thrilling, stylish, violent action game that was ultimately worth the wait. The sequel, on the other hand, was announced just months ago and hit store shelves on exactly the day it was supposed to. This new Max Payne, billed as ""a film noir love story,"" was certainly worth the wait too, though this time, the wait was brief. As long as you go into it without expecting a dramatically different--or longer--gameplay experience than the original, Max Payne 2 won't disappoint. On its own merits, it's a stunning shooter that's got a bit too much plot and is over too soon, though it's still incredibly intense and, by all means, worth experiencing.  Max Payne 2 doesn't last long, but the outstanding story and gameplay it provides are still well worthwhile.  Max Payne 2 is a direct sequel to the original and picks up after the events of that game. Max, now a detective and wearier than ever of the world, once again has his hands full as he finds himself hopelessly attached to the lovely Mona Sax, a murder suspect and part of a bigger plot that ties in to Max's own dark past. There are tons of references and parallels to the original story. Fans will undoubtedly be pleased by some of the nudging and winking, though someone starting off with Max Payne 2 would probably feel rather left out, despite the presence of an optional cutscene that summarizes what happened leading up to Max Payne 2. Still, this is a surprisingly complex narrative for a game, irrespective of the genre.  The storyline unfolds in much the same fashion as the original. It uses some very slick, graphic novel-style storyboards--complete with melodramatic dialogue straight out of a pulp detective novel--and good voice-over to go with it. These graphic novel sequences are unmistakably similar to those of the first game, though they are, in some cases, even more artistic this time around. Max Payne 2 certainly isn't lacking in its presentation. Even the game's special edition DVD-style packaging is slick, and all of the game's between-level loading screens and graphic novel sequences are impressive-looking and often very cool. The plot itself features a number of twists but is rather convoluted the first go-round. Play through the game a second time (perhaps on the higher difficulty setting that's unlocked after you finish it the first time) and you'll likely get a much clearer sense of what's happening.  Mona Sax is Max Payne's love interest, and the two seem destined for each other.  There's no confusion when the bullets start flying: Max can point and shoot, and, were it not for his unique ability to slow down time, he'd be a pretty boring character to play. In the first game, Max's bullet time ability was used primarily while executing shootdodges. Max would launch himself forward, sideways, or backward while blazing away at his enemies. Bullet time slowed Max down--same as the bad guys--but he'd retain the ability to aim in real time, thus allowing him to draw a bead on multiple enemies while in midjump. Bullet time is different now and, for better or worse, the shootdodge has been de-emphasized as the technique of choice. It's still an option--and a good one. In fact, Max can now optionally stay prone, after landing from a shootdodge, for as long as he continues to fire his selected weapon (till its clip runs out of ammo, anyway). Recovery from shootdodging is a little slower than before, but the main reason it's less essential than it used to be is because now Max is so much more effective on his feet during bullet time.  Unlike the first game, Max does not slow to a crawl during bullet time. Now, as he kills his enemies, his bullet time meter not only regenerates, but it turns from white to yellow. As this happens, time moves even slower while Max moves even faster. After you've killed several enemies in succession, and your meter is yellow, you'll be moving pretty much at full speed while in bullet time. Your foes will be practically helpless to stop you. Bullet time was never intended to be a realistic feature, though it was loosely justified as Max's heightened state of awareness, brought on by the intensity of a life-and-death situation. This new bullet time can't be explained away quite as easily, and it's much more akin to a superhero power. Or maybe it's the power of love? In any case, this new bullet time makes Max Payne 2, to some extent, easier and less tactical than the first game. Whereas the old Max Payne needed to shootdodge from cover to cover, playing it safe, the new Max Payne's best tactic is to run straight at his enemies with bullet time toggled on. This may seem like a counterintuitive approach for a man who's heavily outgunned, but it lends itself to some pretty incredible close-quarters shootouts and gives Max Payne 2 a different feel than its predecessor.  The souped-up bullet time of Max Payne 2 enables you to take on much larger groups of foes than you could in the first game. The body count here is very high, particularly in some of the later sequences which have Max taking on small armies by himself or, sometimes, with a helping hand or two. One of the touted new features of Max Payne 2 is that Max can sometimes fight alongside other characters. This works as expected. The supporting characters follow Max's lead and lend a helping hand, though their assistance isn't all that valuable. Your options in working with these characters are limited to telling them to stay put or to follow you, which is fine, since having to issue complex orders to a squad would just slow things down in a game like Max Payne 2.  He may look like a man who's lost his fighting spirit, but Max Payne is actually stronger in his new game than he was in the first.  Along with the changes to bullet time and the presence of the occasional friendly character, the third main difference in the gameplay of Max Payne 2 versus its predecessor is in the new game's use of physics. The Havok physics engine was put to noticeable, extensive use in this game, as objects from human bodies to cardboard boxes to tires to paint cans all have fairly realistic mass and can be flung and bounced around forcefully--even when struck by a double-barreled shotgun blast. Thanks to rag doll physics (which have been used in other action games, like the Hitman series and Rainbow Six 3), bad guys in Max Payne 2 routinely get sent flying--like the lifeless heaps that they are--when shot by any high-caliber weapon or caught in an explosion.  Sometimes the results of this look awkward, but much more often, the results are dynamic and impressive--especially when seen in slow motion. Many of Max Payne 2's shootouts take place in seemingly mundane locations, like warehouses, but when you consider that most every object lining the shelves--and even the shelves themselves--can be blown around or apart during a firefight, you'll begin to realize that these settings are actually ideal for a game that's all about shooting. Just as with the rag doll physics for the characters, the physics for the game's objects aren't quite perfect. You can bump a box around by running into it, or you can shoot it and send it flying. However, the box itself won't break apart or anything. Some other aspects of Max Payne 2, such as its relatively frequent cutscenes that use the game's 3D engine, can also seem a bit awkward. That's mainly because most of the game's visuals are so incredibly convincing, the few unconvincing portions tend to stick out.  The graphic novel-style cutscenes look better than ever in Max Payne 2.  Max's arsenal of weapons hasn't changed much from the first game. He largely uses the same types of pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, and shotguns that he used extensively in the past. The main addition here is the MP5 submachine gun, a mainstay in any shooter with real-world weapons. An AK-47 and a Dragunov sniper rifle are also available, but, by and large, the weapons in Max Payne 2 are just what you'd expect if you played the first game. Max now has the ability to use any of his weapons as a bludgeon, though this is a throwaway feature that's useless and lousy-looking. This is too bad, since Max seems like a guy who'd be more than willing to use the butt of his gun if some scumbag wasn't worth the lead. He's still got access to grenades and Molotov cocktails, and one nice change from the first Max Payne is that he can have these equipped at the same time as his primary weapon. Much like in Halo, a secondary fire key lets you chuck a bomb at the bad guys even when you're firing away. The flame and explosion effects are truly spectacular as well.  As in the first Max Payne, the sequel features a self-adjusting difficulty level, which tweaks the enemy AI as well as the quantity of life-restoring painkillers you'll find in a level. Enemies are pretty smart, in general. They use cover and mostly behave in a plausible manner, for guys who are trying to shoot you to death. In a nice touch, some of them call you a coward if you run for cover, and they'll toss a grenade your way to keep you moving. If you die a lot, you'll run across more pills to keep you alive, and your enemies might be a little slower on the draw. This works well, insofar as no part of Max Payne 2 is liable to have you stuck for very long. As in the first game, the sequel features a few sequences that take place in Max's mind, as well as in some other surprising locations. Many of these sequences, however, are analogous to those found in the original. For instance, there are a few parts that require some careful maneuvering, lest you plummet to your death. While these tightrope acts really aren't the best parts of Max Payne 2, they do break up the pacing a little and aren't very hard.  The storyline breaks up the pacing, too. There's a lot of story throughout the game, and, though it may be slick, it's time you spend passively rather than shooting thugs in slow motion. All the game's cutscenes may be skipped, though there's a brief loading time when you skip them. In any case, it's not like the game is about wall-to-wall action, unless that's what you want it to be. You'll probably find yourself pausing to watch some of the goofy television shows playing in the background or paying attention to some other peripheral details, of which there are many. One of the game's mock TV shows is particularly good. Dick Justice is a '70s-style cop drama that happens to be a rather scathing parody of the original Max Payne storyline. These and some other bits add a refreshing bit of absurd levity to the proceedings, proving that being clever is working out great for the developers at Remedy Entertainment. In fact, it bears mentioning that Max Payne 2 is indeed a very cinematic game: Don't let someone spoil the plot for you if you can help it! The story and some of the gameplay sequences are that much more effective if you experience them on your own terms and at your own pace.  The body count is off the charts. The newly enhanced bullet time effect lets Max Payne deal death faster than ever.  Even if you stop and smell all the roses, Max Payne 2 is short. It's shorter than the first game, which lasted about 10 hours from beginning to end. That may sound weak, but the core action is dynamic and enjoyable enough, and the story is twisted enough to where it's definitely worth playing through the game more than once. Two higher difficulty settings are available, which become unlocked after you finish the game at the previous difficulty setting. The highest setting limits the number of times you can save in a level, as an added challenge. Also, once you've finished the game, you can go back and replay any of the individual levels that compose the storyline. The first game's ""New York minute"" mode is back, but now it's just a simple time trial. You no longer lose if you aren't fast enough in a level, though, implicitly, you're trying to get through as quickly as possible.  A new mode, called ""dead man walking,"" has been added, and, in it, you're trapped in any number of the game's more spread-out environments as enemies start spawning in. It's a question of how long you can last until they finally gun you down, and it can be quite fun. Since Max Payne 2 is, nevertheless, a short, single-player-only game, perhaps it's little wonder that the developers have been very encouraging of the game's mod community. The original Max Payne spawned some great user-created mods, and it seems likely that user-created content will help prolong the life of the sequel too.  Like its predecessor, Max Payne 2 looks extremely impressive, for the most part. Max's character model--his face, anyway--looks completely different than it did in the first game, though the character models aren't really the strong point of the game's presentation. Rather, it's the razor-sharp, photorealistic texture maps, the excellent special effects and animation, and the incredibly detailed environments that are the stars. The bullet time effects look great too. Bullet time now causes the game world to go into a sepia tone, and you can still make out individual bullets or shotgun pellets whizzing through the air when time's slowed down. There's plenty of blood during the firefights (though still no visible damage on the character models) and plenty of debris from background objects that are struck. All in all, Max Payne 2 looks simply outstanding. The rare clipping issue or other small blemish in the look of the game is easily outweighed by the overall style and artistry of the game's visuals. And, despite some of the predictably mundane settings of a game set in the real world, you can expect to see some very unusual and interesting places and characters during the game.  The first Max Payne is a tough act to follow, but the sequel delivers an experience that doesn't disappoint.  Max Payne 2 sounds a lot like its predecessor. The sound of bullet time, which was so remarkable in the first game, is largely the same here. The rush of air and the sound of Max's heart pounding in his chest are the telltale signs of the effect. Then all the gunfire becomes muted and distant. The weapon effects are very loud and clear. The game's soundtrack is limited but outstanding. The title theme for the game, a beautiful and melancholy cello solo, is downright moving. You won't be hearing much music during most of the action scenes, though. What you will hear plenty of is Max Payne's internal monologue. He may look different, but thanks to the voice of James McCaffrey and a script by Sam Lake--both of whom reprise their roles from the original project--Max sounds very much the same: He's as brooding and monotone as ever. Some criticized Max Payne for its ham-fisted storyline and performances, but, by now, these elements seem perfectly intentional. The game's attempts at being melodramatic are, by all means, successful, and the over-the-top dialogue is the perfect counterpart to the over-the-top action.  That's a style of action that no game since Max Payne has managed to deliver with nearly the same level of greatness--though a number of games have tried. As such, the fact that Max Payne 2 essentially provides more of what made the first game so outstanding--but with a fresh, new coat of paint and an intriguing, new storyline--makes it a must for anyone who liked the original. Like its predecessor, and in some ways even more so, Max Payne 2 is just a remarkable production, and what it lacks in length or volume it more than makes up for in quality and density. 


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326,Winning Eleven 6 International ,9," Winning Eleven 6 International is, without a doubt, the finest soccer game available for any game platform right now.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/4/1/0/4913-19410.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/winning-eleven-6-international-review/1900-2912303/,pos,"
In Europe, where soccer games are plentiful, Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer series is widely regarded as the very best the genre has to offer. EA Sports' FIFA series has always boasted superior visuals, better match commentary, and a slicker presentation, but over time more and more European gamers have come to realize that when it comes to gameplay, the soccer games developed by KCET really are in a league of their own. The latest KCET-developed soccer game, Pro Evolution Soccer 2, was released in Europe on the same day as FIFA 2003 last year, and, much to everyone's surprise, it topped the sales chart and went on to sell more than a million units across Europe in just 40 days. Winning Eleven 6 International is the North American name for Pro Evolution Soccer 2, and you've probably already guessed that the game is better than FIFA 2003--all we need to do now is explain why.   The best way to play Winning Eleven 6--particularly when you're on your own--is in the master league mode.   Playing Winning Eleven 6 International for the first time can be an intimidating experience. Not only are the in-game menus poorly presented, but once you find your way into a match, there's a very good chance that you won't manage to score a single goal. This isn't because scoring goals in the game is unnecessarily difficult, or because the controls are particularly tricky to get a handle on--it's simply because the kinds of attacks you might be used to scoring with in other soccer games simply won't work in Winning Eleven. The reason? Because they normally wouldn't work in real life.   Realism has always been key in the Winning Eleven series, and despite the fact that Konami's license doesn't allow it to feature real team and player names, the game re-creates the sport of soccer so well that it's easy to see past this failing. For anyone uncomfortable with the idea of pitting soundalike teams against each other, Winning Eleven 6 International also features a fairly powerful editing tool that can be used to customize not only the names, appearances, and attributes of teams and their players, but also the flags that will be waved by the teams' supporters during matches. The process of entering all the correct information is time-consuming, but the option to do so is an important inclusion for soccer fans keen to take control of their favorite team. Before taking to the pitch, you also have the option to fully customize your team's formation, playing style, and player lineup. It's also possible to select up to four different tactics for your team, which can then be easily activated mid-game using the shoulder buttons.   Once you get your team out onto the pitch, it's hard not to be impressed by the game's near-FIFA-quality visuals.   Once you get your team out onto the pitch, it's hard not to be impressed by the game's near-FIFA-quality visuals, and when the game kicks off, it quickly becomes apparent that Winning Eleven 6 International is by far the most realistic soccer game for any platform to date. The ball physics in the game are completely believable, and the animations as the players interact with it are not only great to look at, but they also seem infinitely varied, so no matter where the ball is in relation to a player, his actions never look out of place. The range of moves available to a player in possession of the ball is also impressive, and it is accessed via a control scheme that both intelligent and intuitive. Straightforward passes, through balls, long balls, and shots are all accessed via a single button, but depressing the L1 button when in possession of the ball opens up a whole new set of moves, including one-two passes, lofted through balls, early crosses, and lob shots. When in possession of the ball, there are also three different running speeds with varying levels of ball control, a few occasionally effective trick moves, and some really intelligent control assists, such as the way that the shoot button performs an almighty clearance if you're in your own half, or the way that pressing the long ball button when you're out wide alongside your opponent's penalty area will automatically send a probing cross ball in. The gameplay is equally sublime when you're not in possession of the ball, and rather than forcing you to chase the ball manually, Winning Eleven 6 allows you to automatically send your nearest player after it simply by pressing the X button, send him after it more quickly by also depressing the R1 button, and if necessary add a second player to the pursuit with the square button. It all sounds terribly complicated at first, but it soon becomes second nature, and it undoubtedly offers a greater degree of control over multiple players than any other soccer game. The thinking behind this particular feature is, of course, not to make retrieving the ball from opponents easy, but to free your own player for performing other duties such as looking to intercept passes or manually marking a dangerous member of the opposition.   KCET has managed to develop a game that achieves a near-perfect balance between realism and gameplay.   When on the defensive in any soccer game, the player who comes under the most scrutiny is undoubtedly the goalkeeper. Thankfully, the keepers in Winning Eleven 6 are very realistic, and although you'll occasionally curse them for failing to make what looks like an easy save, the believable match scores in the game speak volumes for their abilities, and since you have the option to bring your keeper out for the ball manually at any point, you'll often be just as much to blame for conceded goals as your keeper.    Once you've mastered the basic game controls, checked out the game's excellent training mode, and perhaps unlocked a few of the classic international squads by winning leagues and cup tournaments, the best way to play Winning Eleven 6--particularly when you're on your own--is in the master league mode. Starting out with a relatively unskilled team in the third division, you'll take your team all the way to the top by spending points earned during every match on signing valuable players for your squad. This, in turn, makes winning subsequent matches a little easier, which is a good thing, because the wage demands of the top players can put a real strain on your finances if you lose too many matches. Perhaps the coolest feature of the master league mode is the ability to pit your team against those of your friends. And because of the way the transfer market works, it's highly unlikely that you'll have many of the same players on your squad--even if you both believe your personal selection has very little room for improvement.   The process of entering all the correct information is time-consuming, but the option to do so is an important inclusion for soccer fans keen to take control of their favorite team.   Like most sports games nowadays, Winning Eleven 6 features multiplayer support for more than two players--eight in fact, though filling two Multitaps can become a little confusing, and playing two-on-two is perhaps as good as it gets. The great thing about teaming up with a friend is that while one of you has the ball, the other can make runs to draw away defenders or get into space--playing a great ball that allows your teammate to score is every bit as rewarding as scoring one yourself, and since the game rarely allows you to move the ball from one end of the pitch to the other without passing it around, there's very little chance of one player hogging the ball.   Winning Eleven 6 International is, without a doubt, the finest soccer game available for any game platform right now. KCET has managed to develop a game that achieves a near-perfect balance between realism and gameplay, and the drastic changes that have been made to the FIFA games in recent years are undoubtedly EA's attempt to catch up in light of the Konami series' increasing popularity. If you're a fan of the sport, or of sports games in general, you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't take a look at Winning Eleven 6 International--friends who see you playing it might not be overly impressed by the presentation or the commentary, but if you can persuade them to play a few matches against you, you'll be guaranteed a playing partner for life. 
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327,Super Street Fighter II: Turbo Revival ,9," Unquestionably, Turbo Revival is a perfect choice for any Game Boy Advance owner looking for some great fighting action on the go.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/2/5/2209325-box_ssf2t.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-street-fighter-ii-turbo-revival-review/1900-2822105/,pos,"
Street Fighter II needs no introduction, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival for the Game Boy Advance literally represents the ultimate version of the classic one-on-one fighting game. After years of balance tweaks, gameplay adjustments, and more, 1994's Super Street Fighter II Turbo became perhaps the best, most well balanced revision of the game ever made. After that, Capcom went on to do the Street Fighter Alpha series, and purists felt that Street Fighter never reached the same pinnacle of quality as it did with Super Street Fighter II Turbo. It's this incredible game that has been faithfully ported to the Game Boy Advance. Hard-core fans of the original will take note of a few loose screws in the translation. But these players and everyone else alike will find in Turbo Revival an excellent, timeless fighting game--one that plays great even with the Game Boy Advance's limiting controls.   For the most part, Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival is identical to the arcade version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo--an impressive achievement. Previous home versions of Street Fighter II, for systems such as the SNES, Genesis, and TurboGrafx-16, and later the 3DO and the PlayStation, all managed to successfully reproduce the extraordinarily tight gameplay and fluid action of the arcade game. However, all of these versions had varying deficiencies, such as missing frames of animation, truncated sound effects, simplified background graphics, or bad loading times. Yet these were a small price to pay for having Street Fighter II at home. Turbo Revival for the Game Boy Advance also has its share of minor problems, but likewise, that shouldn't dissuade you from appreciating such a great version of Street Fighter II not just at home, but on the go, anywhere. Besides, Turbo Revival's few flaws are offset by a slew of extra play options, which aren't terribly interesting but still serve to add some extra variety to the game.   Like the arcade version, Turbo Revival features the entire eight-member cast of the original Street Fighter II, plus the four additional fighters introduced in Super Street Fighter II. Super Street Fighter II Turbo also introduced Akuma, Ryu and Ken's evil counterpart, as a hidden character, so expect to find him lurking about in Turbo Revival as well. Street Fighter II and its predecessor made famous the six-button control configuration used for many other fighting games after. The big issue with this translation is of course the fact that the Game Boy Advance has only two face buttons, plus two shoulder buttons. Turbo Revival makes do with this limitation by letting some attacks be pressure-sensitive. For instance, you can set the controls so that a quick tap of the B button makes your character throw a weak punch, while pressing the B button a bit longer throws a strong punch. Basically, this system lets you have the effects of six buttons using just four, and it does a fairly good job of it. However, you'll soon notice that the window for quick taps is vary narrow--you'll need to practice for a while before you can make the button controls respond precisely to your command. Since the arcade version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo was quite famous for how it made virtually every attack of virtually every character useful, it's not really preferable to simply ignore some of the attack buttons in Turbo Revival, though you do have this option.   Besides the buttons, the actual control of Turbo Revival works just great. Most special moves, even the tougher ones like Zangief's spinning pile driver, can be executed precisely using the Game Boy Advance's small digital pad. Still, some moves, like the super combos that require two controller motions in quick succession, will take practice even if you've mastered them in other games. Actually, Turbo Revival offers an interesting ""easy special moves"" option, which you can toggle on with the select button. This lets you perform most any move with a simplified motion--for instance, you can make Ryu and Ken throw a fireball just by pressing forward on the digital pad and pressing a punch button at the same time. This should be helpful for players who can't get a good grip on the system's smaller controls or who otherwise don't want to wear out the digital pad by performing countless dragon punches and spinning pile drivers on it.Turbo Revival lets you choose from four different speed settings and handles even the fastest ones capably. Still, at times you'll see the game slow down, unlike the arcade version. Super combo moves, as well as fancier moves like Ken's fiery dragon punch, can make the action bog down. This can throw your timing off, but it isn't a serious problem. You'll also notice that the game's music suffers in translation. Though all the characters' memorable themes are retained intact, they sound tinny and flat on the Game Boy Advance. On the other hand, the character speech is authentic and sounds pretty much just like the speech in the arcade version--a mixed blessing, since Capcom replaced all the original speech beginning with Super Street Fighter II, and many of the new voices sound terrible. Tough guys like Ken, Guile, and Sagat just don't sound right with those nasally, high-pitched voices.   Visually, Turbo Revival doesn't look quite as good as the arcade game, but it looks pretty darn close. The arcade's bright colors are fully intact. Most of the game's character animations are there too and still look good all these years later. However, some frames of animation have been cut. For instance, in the arcade, most every character had a different animation for walking backward rather than walking forward, but these have been taken out of Turbo Revival, much like they were cut for the SNES versions of Street Fighter II. Many players won't be able to tell the difference--by all accounts, Turbo Revival's characters are big and detailed, especially for a portable game.   It's also worth noting that for some reason some of the original backgrounds have been modified in Turbo Revival. Some, like Dhalsim's Indian palace, are arcade-perfect--you'll count all six elephants trumpeting away. Others, like Guile's and Chun-Li's stages, borrow elements from the Street Fighter Alpha games. Still others, like Ryu's and Zangief's stages, are tweaked versions of their original backgrounds. Similarly, Capcom replaced all the still images from the original, such as from the intro movie and the character select screen, with all-new hand-drawn art. These big, colorful portraits, as well as the full-screen graphics of the winner of each match, are a nice addition to Turbo Revival. Even so, die-hard fans will miss the original graphics both here and in the backgrounds. You might also notice that Street Fighter II's minimal blood effects have been omitted from this version. Finally, fans of the series will undoubtedly get a chuckle out of an apparent miscommunication in the translation from Japanese to English. The vain bullfighter Vega, the boxer Balrog, and the evil mastermind M.Bison all had their victory quotations switched about, presumably because their names don't correspond to the same characters in the Japanese version. Seeing M.Bison declare, ""Handsome fighters never lose battles,"" is almost surreal.   Turbo Revival does feature all the bonus stages from Street Fighter II, including the beat-up-the-car stage. The game also introduces several additional game modes, such as training, survival, and time attack. These give you specific scenarios--such as survival mode's highest challenge of beating 100 foes with one life bar--and let you keep fighting as new foes keep popping up. You'll unlock these modes as you play and win and will appreciate them as a diversion from the game's arcade mode. In the arcade mode, the computer actually provides a vicious challenge, even at low difficulty settings--like in the original game, each computer-controlled character fights differently and brutally, even if they're sometimes susceptible to repeated attack patterns. But the computer is definitely fun to fight, though of course you can also play Turbo Revival against a human opponent. You'll need a link cable and an extra copy of the game along with a second Game Boy Advance to do so.   The arcade version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo is still an excellent game--it's aged elegantly, and it's still one of the most well designed fighting games ever made. Therefore, having a 95 percent perfect version of that game in the palm of your hand is by all means a startling concept. Unquestionably, Turbo Revival is a perfect choice for any Game Boy Advance owner looking for some great fighting action on the go. And for longtime fighting game fans who may not have a Game Boy Advance yet, this is the perfect reason to get one.
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'designed', 'fighting', 'games', 'ever', 'made', '.', 'Therefore', ',', '95', 'percent', 'perfect', 'version', 'game', 'palm', 'hand', 'means', 'startling', 'concept', '.', 'Unquestionably', ',', 'Turbo', 'Revival', 'perfect', 'choice', 'Game', 'Boy', 'Advance', 'owner', 'looking', 'great', 'fighting', 'action', 'go', '.', 'And', 'longtime', 'fighting', 'game', 'fans', 'may', 'Game', 'Boy', 'Advance', 'yet', ',', 'perfect', 'reason', 'get', 'one', '.']",0.1083362216015278,0.48929861238534716
328,Major League Baseball 2K7 ,3.3," Major League Baseball 2K7 for the Game Boy Advance is light on features, but it's the sloppy fielding that ultimately ruins it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/3/9/2219639-box_mlb2k7.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/major-league-baseball-2k7-review/1900-6172195/,neg,"
  Game Boy Advance owners who have been waiting a few years to play a new MLB licensed baseball game on the handheld won't find their hunger satiated by Major League Baseball 2K7. Not only is the game missing features that other baseball games produced five years ago for the GBA had, it's also broken in ways that suck all of the fun and fairness out of the sport.   The catcher's view sure looks nice. Too bad there's only one player model.   Threadbare is the only way to describe the available play options and the game's overall presentation. You can play a quick game, participate in a home run derby, or set up the all-star game and playoffs. That's it. There's no season mode, no trade function, and no link option for playing against your friends. When you're setting up a game, you can pick a team and juggle players from the active roster or bench, but you can't adjust the number of innings or pick a park in which to play. In fact, even though all 30 MLB teams and hundreds of players are represented, there's only one ballpark. Judging from the outfield wall, it appears to be Yankee Stadium. All of the action on the field is depicted from two perspectives. The large players in the ""catcher's eye"" view look quite realistic, while the pitcher's wind up and delivery are silky smooth. Whenever the ball is put into play, the game switches to a functional top-down viewpoint that shows a crude rendition of the field populated with tiny players that also move fluidly. It's just a shame that the players all look the same. Every player is the same tall guy with a cap covering his bald head, and the uniforms lack anything in the way of team names, logos, or pinstripes. The audio is equally minimalist, although the random pep tunes and spoken umpire calls do at least get the job done.    Out on the field, the controls are fine, and the physics are generally believable. To throw a pitch, you simply have to position the ball-shaped target and select a pitch from the menu. Once you press the button, the pitcher will begin his delivery. To hit, all you need to do is pick a section of the strike zone to focus on and press the button to swing. If the ball is put into play, you can use the D pad to move the highlighted fielder and direct the base to which he'll throw. Low pitches tend to induce grounders and early swings usually result in foul balls, which is about right. There doesn't seem to be any bias one way or the other for pop flies or ground balls. Occasional one-hoppers and dribblers will keep you on your toes.    Fielders move like they're swimming in glue.   Unfortunately, putting the ball into play has dire consequences. Fielders move like they're swimming in glue and take too long to get rid of the ball. For example, after you press the button, runners that should've been out by 10 feet will reach base safely. On top of that, trying to keep runners off the bases is nearly impossible because the catcher will allow a passed ball or drop a caught strike at least two or three times per inning. Between the sluggish pace caused by the slow fielders and all of the bases given up from late throws or passed balls, you probably won't get through a single inning before you turn the system off in disgust.    It doesn't matter whether you consider yourself a casual fan of the sport or if you eat, sleep, and drink the major leagues. Either way, you won't get much enjoyment out of this sorry excuse for a baseball game.  
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329,Earthworm Jim 3D ,3.2, Earthworm Jim 3D has something to discourage all types of people from playing it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/8/6/2210986-197200_42067_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/earthworm-jim-3d-review/1900-2601110/,neg,"
If you're a fan of the first two Earthworm Jim games, you'll be excited to learn that the spacesuit-powered annelid is back for a third installment. Unfortunately, the excitement will end the moment you actually play the tedious game.   Earthworm Jim 3D attempts to rethink the side-scrolling platform action of the two earlier games. Whereas the original games boasted funny and truly inspired hand-drawn artwork and animation, everything in Earthworm Jim 3D is rendered using low polygon models. Both the characters and the environments are stiff, simple, and lifeless, especially when compared with the exuberant cartoon quality displayed in the game's precursors. To the left of your health indicator is a hand-drawn sketch of Jim that changes as he takes damage; it's one of the only images in the game that captures the visual spirit of the first two games, and it acts as a constant reminder of Earthworm Jim 3D's better heritage.   Earthworm Jim 3D is like every generic 3D platform game made in the last five years. The story is, Jim has gone insane. You must guide him through the different areas of his own mind and help him regain his sanity by collecting his lost marbles and some cow udders. The structure of the game will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Croc, or Rayman 2 - all much better games than Earthworm Jim 3D.   All of Jim's standard equipment has made the transition to 3D. He can use his body as a whip, as a hook for climbing across ropes, and as a propeller for limited gliding. Jim still has his standard blaster, but he can now acquire new weapons from vending machines that are scattered around the levels. One of these new weapons launches a happy, gibbering gnome, which explodes on impact. It's funny, and it's one of the few original ideas in the game. For the most part, the developers seemed content to rehash old favorites such as Professor Monkey-For-A-Head and Bob the Goldfish without creating any memorable new characters or situations.   Even though it's not nearly as inspired as its predecessors, Earthworm Jim 3D might have coasted by on the fact that it's just another mediocre yet painless platform game. But it's virtually unplayable on account of what's possibly the worst camera system ever implemented in this type of game. The camera tries to stay behind Jim, but it moves much, much slower than he turns. In the heat of battle, you'll spin to face an enemy, and it will take several long moments for the pokey cameraman to inch his way behind you so that you can finally see what you're now facing. This behavior is totally unsuited to a fast action game such as Earthworm Jim. In addition, the camera never overrides the default angle to fit the situation. For instance, at one point you're crawling across a rope as enemies fire at you from your right side. The camera should be pointed toward the action happening on your flank. Instead, it's still pointed at your back. Since you can only face forward or backward on the rope, you can't get a clear view of the important part of the scene. You can stop and manually adjust the camera to face the correct way, but you're an easy target as you do so, and as soon as you move again, the camera slowly returns to its original orientation, meaning you have to readjust it. A lock-on feature like the one in Rayman 2 would have eased some of the frustration generated by the camera system, but there's no such feature in Earthworm Jim 3D.   Instead, Earthworm Jim 3D has something to discourage all types of people from playing it. Fans of the series will be disappointed by the lackluster translation of the characters into three dimensions. Everyone else will be frustrated by the horrible camera. The game's few pleasures are not worth the laborious task of unearthing them.
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330,Free Enterprise ,3.2, Free Enterprise is a SimCity wannabe that doesn't come close to achieving itslofty goal.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/7/9/9/997-3799.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/free-enterprise-review/1900-2536117/,neg,"
Free Enterprise is a SimCity wannabe that doesn't come close to achieving its lofty goal. The object is to start and successfully operate a business in an economic climate that reflects real-world issues. With my perspective as a former publishing company marketing director and operations manager, I can tell you Free Enterprise is so far off the mark it's more like a lesson in how not to run a business. First, the game lets you select a city in which to establish your company, then you find a building to rent; only then do you decide what you're going to manufacture. You determine how much money you'll start your company with, from $400,000 to a million. (The larger the sum, the more strings attached.) Finally, you equip your building with production machinery, offices, and people. Once set up, you start the clock and watch what happens. You'll receive memos letting you know if the employees are disgruntled over low pay, whether you're forecasting a positive cash flow, and if some areas of the business are overworked and need additional staffing. The problems come in the details. The city selection is a joke; what you want to find is a location with minimal competition, plenty of raw material suppliers, a strong but not too expensive labor force, and accumulated demand for your product. So why not use the power of the computer to analyze all the cities? Instead you have to click on each city, one at a time, and go through a laborious process to gather less-than-informative data. You'll need to go through a similarly tedious and unrewarding process to select your product line, which is always a very narrow niche like bowling balls or weed whackers. You must pay employees what they demand or the whole company shuts down. And gathering information on why sales have suddenly slumped or which employees are doing well and which are goofing off is nearly impossible. Occasionally your daily activities are interrupted by televised reports on changing business conditions. These video snippets look horrendous. Tsunami uses ancient black and white generic business clips or pathetic color videos that have virtually nothing to do with the stories. For instance, an electrical storm has fried most of the area's home electronic appliances creating a huge demand - but the video shows looters ripping off Huggies disposable diapers. Free Enterprise gives minutely detailed information on its employees' capabilities, from mathematical aptitude to typing skills. But this micro-management knowledge has no value in light of the game's other minimal controls and information. Not only that, but according to Tsunami, a worker who smokes creates many more problems than a drug abuser. And here's a new flash from the game manual: Did you know accounting skills are ""good for an accounting type to have""? With all of Free Enterprise's drawbacks, it has some potential. But to reach any level of effectiveness this product needs a thorough tutorial and several step-by-step scenarios. With the right supplemental material it could work well as a grade school or high school business education tool, but as a game it falls flat.
 ","['Free', 'Enterprise', 'SimCity', 'wannabe', ""n't"", 'come', 'close', 'achieving', 'lofty', 'goal', '.', 'The', 'object', 'start', 'successfully', 'operate', 'business', 'economic', 'climate', 'reflects', 'real-world', 'issues', '.', 'With', 'perspective', 'former', 'publishing', 'company', 'marketing', 'director', 'operations', 'manager', ',', 'I', 'tell', 'Free', 'Enterprise', 'far', 'mark', ""'s"", 'like', 'lesson', 'run', 'business', '.', 'First', ',', 'game', 'lets', 'select', 'city', 'establish', 'company', ',', 'find', 'building', 'rent', ';', 'decide', ""'re"", 'going', 'manufacture', '.', 'You', 'determine', 'much', 'money', ""'ll"", 'start', 'company', ',', '$', '400,000', 'million', '.', '(', 'The', 'larger', 'sum', ',', 'strings', 'attached', '.', ')', 'Finally', ',', 'equip', 'building', 'production', 'machinery', ',', 'offices', ',', 'people', '.', 'Once', 'set', ',', 'start', 'clock', 'watch', 'happens', '.', 'You', ""'ll"", 'receive', 'memos', 'letting', 'know', 'employees', 'disgruntled', 'low', 'pay', ',', 'whether', ""'re"", 'forecasting', 'positive', 'cash', 'flow', ',', 'areas', 'business', 'overworked', 'need', 'additional', 'staffing', '.', 'The', 'problems', 'come', 'details', '.', 'The', 'city', 'selection', 'joke', ';', 'want', 'find', 'location', 'minimal', 'competition', ',', 'plenty', 'raw', 'material', 'suppliers', ',', 'strong', 'expensive', 'labor', 'force', ',', 'accumulated', 'demand', 'product', '.', 'So', 'use', 'power', 'computer', 'analyze', 'cities', '?', 'Instead', 'click', 'city', ',', 'one', 'time', ',', 'go', 'laborious', 'process', 'gather', 'less-than-informative', 'data', '.', 'You', ""'ll"", 'need', 'go', 'similarly', 'tedious', 'unrewarding', 'process', 'select', 'product', 'line', ',', 'always', 'narrow', 'niche', 'like', 'bowling', 'balls', 'weed', 'whackers', '.', 'You', 'must', 'pay', 'employees', 'demand', 'whole', 'company', 'shuts', '.', 'And', 'gathering', 'information', 'sales', 'suddenly', 'slumped', 'employees', 'well', 'goofing', 'nearly', 'impossible', '.', 'Occasionally', 'daily', 'activities', 'interrupted', 'televised', 'reports', 'changing', 'business', 'conditions', '.', 'These', 'video', 'snippets', 'look', 'horrendous', '.', 'Tsunami', 'uses', 'ancient', 'black', 'white', 'generic', 'business', 'clips', 'pathetic', 'color', 'videos', 'virtually', 'nothing', 'stories', '.', 'For', 'instance', ',', 'electrical', 'storm', 'fried', 'area', ""'s"", 'home', 'electronic', 'appliances', 'creating', 'huge', 'demand', '-', 'video', 'shows', 'looters', 'ripping', 'Huggies', 'disposable', 'diapers', '.', 'Free', 'Enterprise', 'gives', 'minutely', 'detailed', 'information', 'employees', ""'"", 'capabilities', ',', 'mathematical', 'aptitude', 'typing', 'skills', '.', 'But', 'micro-management', 'knowledge', 'value', 'light', 'game', ""'s"", 'minimal', 'controls', 'information', '.', 'Not', ',', 'according', 'Tsunami', ',', 'worker', 'smokes', 'creates', 'many', 'problems', 'drug', 'abuser', '.', 'And', ""'s"", 'new', 'flash', 'game', 'manual', ':', 'Did', 'know', 'accounting', 'skills', '``', 'good', 'accounting', 'type', ""''"", '?', 'With', 'Free', 'Enterprise', ""'s"", 'drawbacks', ',', 'potential', '.', 'But', 'reach', 'level', 'effectiveness', 'product', 'needs', 'thorough', 'tutorial', 'several', 'step-by-step', 'scenarios', '.', 'With', 'right', 'supplemental', 'material', 'could', 'work', 'well', 'grade', 'school', 'high', 'school', 'business', 'education', 'tool', ',', 'game', 'falls', 'flat', '.']",0.06505603450047893,0.5309470673359561
331,Godzilla Generations (Import) ,3.2," It's not as if the Godzilla license has ever really turned out a good game, but that doesn't excuse Godzilla Generations from being as terrible as it is.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/3/7/2220537-godzilla_generations.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/godzilla-generations-import-review/1900-2540320/,neg,"
With a mere four launch titles, one would've thought Sega would have had the foresight to make them good games. Unfortunately, it didn't. A product of poor launch planning and the need for a token license, Godzilla Generations tears right through the bottom of the barrel and easily earns for itself the dubious distinction of being one of the worst games of 1998. The sadistic fun that lies in the act of stomping a city flat lies within all of us to some degree, and virtually every digital execution of this dark desire has been done better than this one. Like Rampage, Crush, Crumble and Chomp and many games before it, the premise of Godzilla Generations is simple - you trash a city while fending off the hordes of humans that would end your fun. You can select from five of the Godzilla franchise's most popular characters: Godzilla, First Generation Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, USA Godzilla, and Minira. At first, only Godzilla and Mechagodzilla are available, with the other two appearing after further progress through the game. Once selected, you are dropped into the city of Fukuoka to begin your rampage through Japan. Each of the game's five cities has two stages, with the exception of the last one, which has three. The goal in each stage is to simply destroy everything within the set time limit. To do this, each nuclear-spawned monstrosity has a handful of projectile attacks, a block, and a healing move. And that's where the good stuff ends. Godzilla Generations' control is infuriatingly unresponsive, and the camera is almost the worst anyone could inflict upon the polygon. When attacking with Godzilla's fire, aiming at anything, mobile or stationary, is a laughable proposition. At the same time, the monsters turn so slowly that any attempt to block enemy attacks is almost impossible, as well. As a result, you will cause most of your destruction by... walking into it at Godzilla's maddeningly slow, lumbering pace. Seeing that there's almost no way to avoid damage, GE gave each monster a healing move so that they might live forever. As a result, you are given a game where simple ramble through Japanese cities without fear of dying. There's no strategy, no technique. Just the extreme tedium of tromping through cities. Most players will opt not to get a 100-percent destruction rating, as even the tiniest tree counts. If you miss one tree, you'll have to scour the rubble of the cities for that one tree, a less-than-worthwhile pastime. The Dreamcast sports some powerful graphics hardware to be sure, but Godzilla takes advantage of it in almost no way. The high-resolution graphics move smoothly without a trace of slowdown, but the monsters are chunkily constructed, the buildings uninteresting to look at, and the effects annoyingly lackluster. For example, smoke and fires in the rubble are poorly animated textures that flatly sit atop the terrain. The game's sound is equally bad. The music consists of infinitely looping segments of the Godzilla movies' orchestral soundtrack, while the sound effects are poorly recorded and generic. With its monotonous graphics, poor animated textures, and limited sound, one can't help but wonder where all of the Dreamcast's 16 megs of RAM went. Somehow, the extra features of Godzilla Generations became the best part, but they still don't make up for the main game. The first feature is accessible only to those who bought the Godzilla VMS units. In the Atsumete Coliseum mode, you can battle the monsters you raised on the VMS against the computer or battle up to three friends. The multiplayer mode is the most fun but will become tiresome quickly - you select the monsters you wish to fight with and secretly select who you will attack on the controller's VMS screen. Once again, there's almost no strategy, and probably the most fun is seeing who will turn on the other first. The other interesting feature is the large compilation of Godzilla movie trailers. However, only those who subject themselves to extensive playing of the main game will be able to unlock them all, making this largely wasted space on the disc. It's not as if the Godzilla license has ever really turned out a good game, but that doesn't excuse Godzilla Generations from being as terrible as it is. If found in an import bargain bin, this game might be worth it to dyed-in-the-wool Godzilla fans and no one else.
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332,Lego Rock Raiders ,3.2," Somewhere in the transition from drawing board to television screen, something has gone awry.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/7/4/2213874-box_legorr.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lego-rock-raiders-review/1900-2619903/,neg,"
Go into any young boy's toy chest and you're likely to find some Lego pieces in there somewhere. Like the Erector Set and Lincoln Logs, Legos have stood the test of time as a toy that generation after generation of young bucks can enjoy. This would usually provide an easy way for a company producing video games to make some loot, but with Lego Rock Raiders, this might not be the case. Somewhere in the transition from drawing board to television screen, something has gone awry.   In Lego Rock Raiders, you play as one of several Lego characters instructed to mine an alien planet for precious energy crystals and ore. As you might expect, the indigenous creatures aren't too keen on the idea of giving up their planet's goods to plastic men with black dots for eyes. As one of the several Rock Raiders, it's your job to mine the rock on the planet for the energy crystals and ore or, in some cases, to rescue the other Raiders who may have pitifully found themselves in trouble. There is a two-player mode available for up to six levels, but as the instruction manual puts it, they are designed ""just for fun.""    The first few minutes playing Rock Raiders makes the game seem like it's going to be an endless search to find the few places where your imbecile drill can work. Once you begin to use the radar, the loose rock appears a brighter green than the rest of the level, and any difficulty the game may have had quickly jumps on the next train to Easyville. The level design isn't exactly mystifying. As each of the 18 linear levels begins, you start with a simple drill that will destroy the loose rock. As you progress through the level, you find more-powerful tools that allow you to turn the medium and hard rock into rubble. When dealing with solid rock, you can use dynamite to blast open the way through. As you finish each level, you are awarded a medal based on your performance, and you may go back to replay previous levels in attempts at a golden glory. Take note, this is not recommended.   While using a hand drill falls just shy of buffoonery, the vehicles are by far the shining stars in the Lego Rock Raiders sky. If you collect enough ore, the usually tucked-away LMS Explorer located in every level can be used to construct anything from an armored tanker that ejects menacing laser blasts, to a massive double-bladed carrier chopper. While every vehicle controls identically whether land-based or airborne, each one is able to either traverse an area that was previously inaccessible or destroy once-thought-immovable rock masses. Vehicle control is so erratic in one particular vehicle that you become dizzy from the spinning. Controlling the jumping of your Rock Raider while on foot is stupefying though not required all that often. There aren't exactly swarms of enemies dashing on; the biggest obstacle to overcome is maintaining control around dangerous areas. This is about the only way you will ever die. The oft-repeated enemies will rush at you and bump you, but there's so much health lying around that it never becomes an issue.   Lego Rock Raiders' visuals also fail to impress; we're talking first-generation PlayStation graphics. Every level looks almost identical to the one before, and if it weren't for the rock radar, playing this game would be akin to reconstructive knee surgery. The explosions are popular with the people for a little while, but by the eighth or ninth level, their allure quickly fades. This too can be said of the monotonous gameplay. Some of the vehicles are fairly impressive but are not worth taking the time to experience the rest of the game. Not helping matters, the loading time for each level clocked in at a hefty half-minute. Considering how little texture swapping is taking place, this isn't a good thing. The sound is adequate minus the two tracks that are obnoxiously repeated as the sounds of the explosions get the woofers shaking.   When it's all said and done, the small things that are done right are far outweighed by the multitude of those done wrong. The only motivation to continue playing Lego Rock Raiders is to see the next portion of a decent FMV sequence that only serves as a reminder of how much better the game could have been.
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333,Manic Karts ,3.2," Touting many new features and improved graphics, the box would have us believe the game offers a state-of-the-art gaming experience, however, this is not the case.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/9/4/9/1324-4949.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/manic-karts-review/1900-2542428/,neg,"
Virgin Interactive's Manic Karts is yet another entry into the already crowded go-cart racing genre. A sequel to the moderately successful Super Karts, released by GT Interactive, Manic Karts attempts to breathe new life into a tired concept. Touting many new features and improved graphics, the box would have us believe the game offers a state-of-the-art gaming experience - sadly, however, this is not the case. Even in 1994, when Super Karts was originally released, the game engine did not represent the pinnacle of software engineering. Limited to a perfectly flat driving surface and 90-degree corners, the tracks in Super Karts more closely resembled rooms in Wolfenstein 3D than outdoor rally courses. Back then, this could be easily dismissed given that the typical computer was a 33 MHz 486, and the selection of quality racing titles was sparse at best. While the world of PC gaming has matured greatly in the intervening years, Super Karts has not. More specifically, the underlying game engine remains fundamentally unchanged in this sequel. Manic Karts is limited to the same planar floor surfaces and simple rectagonal track structures as its predecessor. In a genre populated by complex polygon worlds (such as those found in Screamer and Formula 1 Grand Prix 2), it is inconceivable for a company to release a title with such an outdated rendering system as anything other than shareware. On a more positive note, the simple rendering engine does provide for lightning-fast redraw rates on Pentiums, and even owners of slow 486 machines can play the low-resolution mode. As far as the gameplay itself, Manic Karts is neither exciting nor inspired. It is an average arcade-style racer that rarely strays from the tried and true formula found in countless other games of this type. Would-be karters can choose to race any of the 16 tracks individually, or compete in a championship season. If you choose the latter, how you finish doesn't only determine championship points, but also earns cash that can be used to upgrade your kart for the next race. Perhaps the game's most original feature is the option of bribing officials to add points to players' tally. Unfortunately, even this form of regulated cheating won't hold racers' interest for long.   In conclusion,  Manic Karts is best described as ""been there, done that."" While some may enjoy its simple and straightforward gameplay, most people demand more for their gaming dollar. Those looking for a quality arcade racer should try Virgin's own Screamer or EA's Need for Speed instead.
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334,NHL Blades of Steel 2000 ,3.2, Blades of Steel 2000 for the PlayStation fails to deliver a hockey experience that could be considered better than any one of its competitors.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/3/8/2223138-box_nhlbos00.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nhl-blades-of-steel-2000-review/1900-2546070/,neg,"
Fans of video-game hockey usually have a few things in common. They love hockey, they think NHL 94 for the Sega Genesis was the greatest hockey game ever created, and they believe buying any hockey game other than the best that's currently available is a waste. Blades of Steel 2000 unfortunately doesn't deliver anything that games like NHL 2000 and NHL Face Off 2000 hasn't already, so, if you're keeping up, this places Blades of Steel 2000 squarely in the waste bin. Blades of Steel 2000 is an officially licensed product of the NHL and NHLPA, which means that it has all of the real players, teams, rinks, and even jerseys. The game has three different modes of play: exhibition, season, and playoffs. Within each mode you can change the parameters of the game, such as the rules you would like to have on or off, length of the periods, and even the general amount of fouls that you'd like to see the ref call. The control, while tolerable, isn't nearly as responsive as it should be. Whether you're playing with a Dual Shock controller or without one, the game feels sluggish, and players just don't respond as quickly as they should. This is unfortunate, since the game certainly has all of the moves you'd want, like one-timers, shot fakes, wrist shots, flip passes, formation changes, and even the almighty give and go. Even the fighting system in Blades of Steel 2000 is surprisingly in-depth. You have the ability to throw numerous types of punches such as jabs, hooks, and uppercuts. You can even land body shots and tackle your opponent. It's really a shame that the game has all the options and features you'd want but fails to deliver solid gameplay.  Graphically, Blades of Steel 2000 is far below the standards set by any one of the other hockey games that have surfaced this year. The polygon count of the player models is really low, giving the players a blocky, unrealistic look. The designers were apparently shooting for a high frame rate, which the game totally has, giving it a fast crisp look. But such a good frame rate makes it easy to see that the animations and the player models look terrible. In the audio department, Blades of Steel 2000 is just plain weak. The sound effects are nearly laughable: When players pass the puck, a strange whooshing sound accompanies it; when players collide, bump, or check at any velocity, you hear an odd clunking sound. The only thing the audio in the game has going for it is the play-by-play announcing by Randy Hahn. But even his dialogue gets a little stale after a few games.  In the end, Blades of Steel 2000 for the PlayStation fails to deliver a hockey experience that could be considered better than any one of its competitors. Titles like NHL 2000, NHL Face Off 2000, and Fox's NHL Championship 2000 for the PlayStation are simply much better hockey games.
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335,Treasure Quest ,3.2," For a game to be fun, there needs be a reasonable mix of challenge and reward -- and aside from the minute chance of winning a million bucks, Treasure Quest ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/4/1/5/2193-8415.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/treasure-quest-review/1900-2559967/,neg,"
Does the chance to win a million dollars by solving an adventure game get you excited? Sure it does. Does that mean Treasure Quest -- the game whose solution could you earn you that bread -- is fun to play? Definitely not. The design of Treasure Quest is uninspired, borrowing liberally from earlier adventures such as Myst, The 7th Guest, and Shivers. You play as a student of the late Professor Johnathon William Faulkner, whose inheritance of a cool million will be awarded to the first student who's able to piece together ten quotations based on a mountain of insanely obscure clues scattered through the prof's mansion. (Oh yeah, there's an audio CD that ships with the game that might yield some clues if you listen carefully.) It sounds okay, but the truth is that Treasure Quest looks and plays as if it were cobbled together merely as a rack on which to hang that million dollar prize. Except for short video clips of ""Deep Space Nine"" star Terry Farrell, the game screens are graphically drab and almost totally lacking in atmosphere.  Enter a room in the mansion, and the ""clues"" -- graphics, text, video, and audio -- come barreling at you with about as much subtlety as hippies in the Haight asking for spare change. Unfortunately, the astounding number of clues doesn't mean the game will be easy to win or fun to play: my best guess is that you'd need to be in a disassociative trance state to decipher the mumbo jumbo assaulting your senses. Aside from the jumbled mish-mash of images that serve as a visual backdrop for certain parts of rooms, there's no attempt to create a game world in which you can immerse yourself. And even if the game world was the most fascinating ever designed, you'll be so busy scrambling to keep track of every single thing you see and hear that you wouldn't have time to enjoy it. For a game to be fun, there needs be a reasonable mix of challenge and reward -- and aside from the minute chance of winning a million bucks, Treasure Quest doesn't offer enough of the latter. It might appeal to the most hardcore puzzle fans, but everyone else will be rewarded only with confusion and frustration.
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336,Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ,9, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a stupendous thrill ride that shouldn't be missed.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/3/8/3/2212383-box_gtasa.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-review/1900-6127078/,pos,"
  By now, you probably know how this works. The new Grand Theft Auto game comes out in October, but only on the PlayStation 2. Xbox and PC owners have to wait a half a year or so for their versions of the game, and each always has the potential to be better than the original release. That's saying something, because we're already talking about one of the best games of 2004 and the best game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Once again, the wait is over, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is now available on the PC and Xbox. While both versions have aspects that are better than the outstanding PS2 game, visual weirdness on the Xbox and a handful of technical issues on the PC prevent either version from being the clear-cut best of the bunch.   Representing the hood never felt so good.   For those of you already familiar with the game, let's quickly discuss the differences between all three versions. The Xbox one has 480p support, but when enabled, the aliasing is out of control. Portions of the environment look so unbelievably jaggy that you'll wonder if your eyesight is failing you. At times it looks like you're playing a 3D game without putting on the glasses. But if you can get past that (it isn't quite as noticeable in standard resolution), the game generally looks great. Loading times on the Xbox don't seem to be much faster than the PlayStation 2 release, and for some weird reason, a loading message occasionally appears onscreen, even in situations where the load times are supposed to be hidden, like when changing your hairstyle. Control in the Xbox version is sharp, and just like the GTA Double Pack, your vehicle gas and brake controls have been moved to the triggers and made analog. This works well, but the flight controls, which have also been remapped to fit on the Xbox controller, are a little weird.    The PC version comes on DVD only and is packaged with a fully bound book that serves as the manual. It's definitely some of the coolest PC game packaging around. This version also has the potential to be the best-looking version of the game by a long shot. Support for higher resolutions makes the textures and characters look sharper and much better than either of the console versions. There's a draw distance slider that, when turned all the way up, almost totally eliminates the draw-in and fogging that's become synonymous with the series. Your Grove Street home looks much more like a run-down South Central neighborhood when you can see more of its surroundings. But all this graphical quality is offset by some serious problems with the sound. Testing on three different machines that exceed the recommended system specs got us three results. On one machine, we didn't experience any audio glitches. On another, the audio simply cut out a lot, leaving you to drive around with only music to keep you company. It's tough to play when you can't hear your mission descriptions. On the third machine, loading up a save game caused a loud grating noise--which sounded like the bike-riding audio mixed with a helicopter--to scream out from the middle of the Grove. We had to hop in a car and drive away from the area to make the noises stop. Also, the cutscenes occasionally desynched from the audio, making the lip movement appear to be way off.    Control in the PC version is full of options. You can decide to hook up a dual analog gamepad so that you can play it just like the console versions, or you can instead opt for mouse-and-keyboard control. Either method works, though we had several cases where the game would simply stop responding to any mouse input until we alt-tabbed out of the game, moved the mouse, and then jumped back in. This isn't exactly the sort of thing you want to have happen in the middle of a shoot-out. Mouse control also removes the lock-on aspect of the targeting, giving you easy access to manual targeting. The refined control the mouse gives you seems like an unfair advantage at times, because it's very easy to rack up one-shot kills by aiming for the head. If you have a smooth mouse hand, even the roughest firefights are really basic...provided the mouse doesn't die on you.   The Xbox and PC versions have some aspects that are better than the PS2 version, but they also have some that are worse.   Both versions have custom soundtrack support, though using it robs you of the great DJs that populate the game's radio stations. You'll still hear a lot of the funnier ads on the custom station, though.    Overall, each version of the game has its share of differences and minor issues, but the core game is fantastic, regardless of the platform you play it on. While the list of games that can list GTA as an influence grows longer and longer, there's still nothing quite like the real thing, and the ""bigger, better"" approach to sequel design definitely works in San Andreas' favor.    OK, all that information is fine and good if you've already played San Andreas. But if you're new to the loc'ed-out streets of San Andreas, there's much more you need to know.      This latest installment takes place in 1992 in the West Coast-themed state of San Andreas. San Andreas is an island containing three cities. You'll begin the game in the city of Los Santos, which is based roughly on Los Angeles and consists of a mixture of ritzy downtown areas and the gangland ghettos of South Central. San Fierro is based on San Francisco, reproducing the real city's hilly terrain and ever-present fog. The game's third city is Las Venturas, which is a great take on early '90s Las Vegas, complete with a strip full of casinos and the surrounding desert. While one-to-one measurements against previous games in the series are difficult in practice, San Andreas definitely feels like a much, much larger place than Vice City ever did. But at the same time, the growth is handled intelligently. There are plenty of things to do both in and out of the cities, which makes all this real estate matter.    Carl Johnson is going (going) back (back) to Cali (Cali).   While Grand Theft Auto III was inspired by movies like The Godfather and Vice City took several pages from the Scarface playbook, San Andreas draws its inspiration from the ghetto and gangsta struggle films of the early '90s. Movies like Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood are the clear influences here. In San Andreas, you play the role of Carl ""CJ"" Johnson. The game opens with Carl returning to Los Santos after spending the last five years in GTA III's Liberty City. But his homecoming isn't a happy one: He's returning home because his mother has been killed. Carl isn't on the ground for more than an hour before he's picked up by a pair of crooked cops and thrown right back into the middle of the street life he left Los Santos to avoid.    Your first order of business in Los Santos is to put your set back on the map. Your gang, the Grove Street Families, has fallen into disarray over the last five years, and its influence is minimal at best. So you, along with the three other leaders of the gang--the long-winded Big Smoke, the dust-smoking Ryder, and your stubborn brother, Sweet--set out to take back the streets from your rivals, the Ballas, who have turned to dealing crack to earn money and gain influence in the hood. You set out on a series of missions to take back your territory by starting with such small things as spray-painting over other gangs' tags (which is one of the many new types of actions that replace previous GTA games' more generic hidden-package collecting) to quickly moving up to drive-bys and other acts of extreme gangsterism. But there's a whole lot more to San Andreas than just set tripping.    Just when you think you're getting used to gang warfare, everything goes sour. We're certainly not interested in spoiling the game's many interesting plot twists, so we'll leave out the details. But suffice it to say you'll eventually need to get the heck out of Los Santos. You wind up in the country outside the city, where you'll encounter many more great characters and officially embark on your quest to put right what's gone wrong. Once you get out of Los Santos, you won't really have to worry about gang warfare for a while, and here the game settles down to present a more GTA-like feel.    Like the previous entries in the series, San Andreas features a fairly linear story that takes you through the game's areas. You'll start off restricted to Los Santos--something the story justifies by claiming that an earthquake has taken out the bridges and roads that link Los Santos to the surrounding areas--but it doesn't take long to unlock the other two areas. The game also throws in some pretty great surprises in the form of characters from earlier GTAs. These characters tie the GTA games together really nicely, so while San Andreas feels pretty different from the other offerings in the series, it still feels like you're playing in the same universe.   The San Andreas story is well written and packs in some really great surprises that tie the game to the previous entries in the series.   As in the preceding games, most of your progress is accomplished by completing missions for a variety of individuals. These undertakings are oftentimes similar to those you've seen in previous GTAs. You'll drive people around, take out specific individuals (an early mission gives you the straightforward objective of beating up a crack dealer, for example), perform drive-bys on your enemies, and so on. But as you proceed through the game, the missions get crazier and crazier. Along the way, you'll pull off a daring casino heist, steal some wicked military hardware, ""take care"" of plenty of Mafia bozos, and much, much more. The missions are a lot more exciting, on average, than they've been in some previous GTAs. Additionally, the game is a lot better at spelling out exactly what needs to be done. It does this with onscreen text that color-codes each specific piece of a mission differently. Yet while the basics of the gameplay--taking on and completing missions--are similar to past offerings, there are plenty of details to uncover, and there are plenty of new things to try.      The first addition to the game is the ability to ride a bicycle, which you encounter almost immediately after starting up. You'll ride it like any other vehicle, but you'll find that you can tap a button to make CJ go faster. This is true on foot also, as holding a button will make you sprint, and tapping it makes CJ super-sprint. The melee combat is a bit deeper now, because you can block and execute combo moves. The lock-on targeting system found in the previous games has received a slight overhaul that makes it look more like the targeting in Manhunt. However, its functionally is very similar to the system in Vice City. CJ is also a little more athletic than previous GTA protagonists. For one thing, he can swim, both on the surface and underwater, which causes a breath meter to appear near your newly redesigned health meter. And if CJ's in shape, he can jump up and climb over high walls.   There's much more to San Andreas than just running with a gang and dumping on your enemies.   Yes, that's right. CJ needs to stay in shape if he's to perform at his best, which is a new feature for the GTA series. The game keeps track of a lot of different statistics that increase and decrease as you play. Your physical fitness is the most overt statistic, as you're able to work out in gyms to improve your muscle and stamina ratings, and you'll have to occasionally eat to prevent your muscle stat from occasionally draining a bit. Eating, however, can increase your fat statistic. CJ's body shape will change depending on what you do and for how long. While this might sound like a whole lot of busywork, it's actually a very small part of the game. And the best way to handle it is to spend a few minutes working out in the early parts of the game to build up your muscle (giving you a bonus to your melee attacks) and your stamina (which dictates how long you can sprint before getting tired). Then you should eat occasionally to maintain your ratings without gaining too much fat. You really don't have to spend too much time on it, and earning the ability to sprint for long periods of time makes getting around (and getting away) much easier.    The game also tracks a lot of other statistics. Respect is a big one, as it's what you'll be earning the most of as you complete missions. Not all missions earn you money, but almost all of them are good for a slight respect bonus. A higher respect rating lets you recruit more and more gang members, which is another new addition and a nice perk, but it isn't something that comes in handy very often. You're also rated in a lot of different vehicle categories, like driving, riding motorcycles, bicycling, and piloting aircraft. As you use a vehicle, your skill with it slowly increases, which seems to tighten up the controls a bit. In the case of motorcycles, it also makes it less likely that you'll fly off the bike in a wreck. Meanwhile, your improved bicycling skills translate into higher bunny hops. Similarly, you're given stats for every type of firearm in the game. You'll start with poor skills with all weapons, but don't let the tag of ""poor"" fool you, because CJ's skills feel roughly the same as Tommy Vercetti's when you first squeeze the trigger. After getting in some time with a weapon, you'll upgrade it to ""gangster"" level, which extends your lock-on range with it, speeds up reloading, and, in some cases, lets you walk around while aiming. Upgrading your skill with a weapon to the highest level, ""hitman,"" takes a relatively long time, but it extends the lock-on range and speeds up reloading even further. Additionally, it also opens up the ability to dual-wield some one-handed weapons. Unloading two full clips of submachine-gun ammo is extremely satisfying here.   Increasing your weapon skill makes mowing down foes pretty easy.   Probably the best part about the game's stat system is that it's all extremely subtle. It would be easy for something like exercise and eating to monopolize the game, but in practice you really don't have to think about it. All you really see is a quick pop-up in the upper left-hand corner of the screen whenever a stat changes, and if it's changed enough to make a big difference, the game offers a text description of what has changed and what that means for you. You will have to think about your stats a bit when you come across the first flight mission, as the story won't proceed until you've gone through flight training. The training program is frustrating, but once you pass it, the flight controls seem to tighten up a bit, and you'll have had enough practice to make it through most of the flight missions without too much trouble. The other time you'll think about stats is when you first take on a mission that requires swimming. If you haven't leveled your lung capacity up to a certain point, you simply won't be able to continue. Up until that point in the story, though, you won't have needed to go underwater at all. So before you can take on the mission, you'll have to spend some time going underwater and resurfacing until you've developed the lungs required to swim out to a boat so you can silently kill everyone on board.    But enough about statistics. The important thing about GTA: San Andreas is that it's insanely fun to play, regardless of how you decide to play it. The missions are less frustrating this time around. There are still plenty of challenging objectives for you to meet, but the game does a better job of pacing the missions and keeping you informed about what you're supposed to do next. As a result, players who might not have been able to complete Vice City will have a better chance of finishing San Andreas' story. But at the same time, the game never really feels like it's too easy. Experienced players should be able to make their ways through the epic tale in 35 to 40 hours, though if you've been playing Vice City every day in anticipation of this game's release, that number could conceivably fall as low as 25 to 30, which is a pretty lengthy adventure any way you slice it. On top of that, players who stick to the critical story path and ignore all the side stuff will finish the game with a completion percentage somewhere in the 50s. So, obviously, there's a lot more to San Andreas than just getting out of the hood and building a criminal empire. Even players who devote all their time in GTA to causing mass destruction will still have a great time here, though they may want to play through the story long enough to unlock the game's other areas. And this time, at least in the console versions, you'll be able to start trouble with a friend.      One of the many interesting wrinkles in GTA's gameplay is that it now offers a two-player cooperative mode on the Xbox and PlayStation 2. Now, before you get too excited about this, you should know that you can't actually play the entire thing with a friend. Instead, you'll run into little two-player icons in certain spots in the gameworld. Walking over one with a second controller plugged in lets you start up a series of special objectives that work sort of like the rampage icons in previous GTA entries. You and a friend will be able to wreak havoc in a car or on foot, though the game requires that both players remain on the same screen. While the concept of a multiplayer mode in GTA is pretty mind-blowing, the implementation here makes it more of a fun little addition that, along with all the other crazy things you'll come across as you play, contributes to the feel that the game has a million different things for you to uncover. However, PC owners aren't really missing out on much here, as the two-player stuff is a very small part of the overall game. OK, while there aren't quite a million side missions in the game, it seems to come pretty close, offering everything from a basketball minigame, to pool games played for money, to arcade machines that pay homage to classic games like Gyruss and Gradius.   There's a lot of variety to San Andreas' gameplay, and most of its features are very well constructed.   Some of the missions that have been with the series for years reappear here. When you enter a police vehicle, you can hit a button and take on some vigilante missions. The same thing goes for fire trucks and ambulances. If you get into a moving van at night, you can embark on a home-invasion mission, which is a stealth undertaking that requires you to enter a home and then make off with some goods...without making noise. Walking when crouched is the order of the day here. You'll also find an assortment of races, ranging from the good old dirtring to well-hidden mountain-bike challenges. Another interesting facet of the game is that you'll get to hook up with a variety of women. The story requires you to dabble in the dating system, which sets you up with specific women at different points in the game, but there are plenty of other girls you can take out, if you have the look and style they're searching for. Dates are usually pretty simple: You pick up the girl, and usually she wants to eat. It's up to you to drive her someplace. If she's thinking lobster, but you're thinking Burger Shot, the date's not going to go particularly well. However, there are a variety of nice places to go. You don't usually take any control during the date other than driving her to the location and back to her house. But if she wants to go dancing, the game launches into a simple Dance Dance Revolution-like timing minigame. In an awesome touch, this same type of minigame appears when you enter a lowrider-hopping contest, which is a good way to earn a little extra cash.    The Grand Theft Auto series has always been rather stylish, visually speaking. Vice City did an amazing job of capturing both the look of Miami and the feel of the mid '80s. San Andreas has to live up to that standard while creating four unique landscapes: one for each city and one for the countryside between cities. Fortunately, the game does this very, very well. The parts of Los Santos that you call home have a very realistic ghetto look that fits perfectly. The other cities also look a lot like the towns they're modeled after, but the most dramatic difference occurs when you leave town. The countryside is unlike anything you've seen in previous GTA games. The winding country roads, the small towns that pepper the landscape, the plethora of off-road action, and the abundance of nice-looking foliage make these areas look pretty amazing. Outside of Las Venturas, the area is much more desertlike, which also looks really great.     The architecture looks great, and the game has some new effects to match. The old ""trails effect"" from Vice City and GTAIII is history. Now, you'll see everything pretty clearly, and when you're in warm areas, the game even has a nice heat-shimmer effect. When you're moving at or near top speed in a car, the screen blurs a bit, which does a fantastic job of conveying an extreme sense of speed. Also, the game takes on a grainy, filtered look when it rains, which also looks really good. The character models throughout San Andreas look great as well, though some aspects, like the characters' blocky hands, look a little weird at times.   A widescreen display really helps you see more of the action, which is handy in a shoot-out.   The sounds of San Andreas are, as you'd expect, many and varied. The game does a really strong job with things like engine noises. Vehicles like jets, fast cars, and motorcycles all deliver deep, throaty tones that make them sound as fast and powerful as they really are. Gunfire sounds about like you'd expect, and the surround support does a fine job of positioning the audio properly. Additionally, you'll surely notice how the quality of the voice work has improved since Vice City.      In a story-driven game like San Andreas, the voice cast has a profound effect on the story's impact. Rockstar has assembled a fantastic cast that, down to a person, does a great job with the dialogue. While there are definitely some recognizable names on the talent list, the game doesn't go overboard in this respect, casting a relatively unknown rapper by the name of Young Maylay in the role of CJ...who delivers an excellent performance. MC Eiht, an inspired inclusion to say the least, does a great job with the role of Ryder. Samuel L. Jackson does some fine work in the role of the dirty cop, Officer Tenpenny. Comedian David Cross is pretty funny in the role of the nerdy hobby store owner, Zero. Peter Fonda is very strong as a hippie/conspiracy theorist known only as ""The Truth."" Charlie Murphy, best known for his appearances on Chappelle's Show, does well in the role of a pimp named Jizzy B. Even Ice-T turns up as a rapper named Madd Dogg. But the best role in the game goes to James Woods, who is absolutely incredible in his role as Mike Toreno. To mention too much about his role in the story would give away a plot point or two, but your time spent with Toreno--both in the cutscenes and in the actual missions that surround his segment of the story--is some of the best and most uniquely rewarding that San Andreas (and, therefore, Grand Theft Auto) has to offer.   The cast in San Andreas does a really amazing job of delivering the game's great dialogue.   The in-car radio was one of the most effective tools that GTA: Vice City used to make the game feel like it took place in the '80s, as having hours and hours of great music to choose from was among the game's most noteworthy features. San Andreas contains some pretty strong radio stations, but the overall selection is a little too scattered. The rap station, Radio Los Santos, is the most fitting, at least for the gang-related segments of the game. With songs from Dr. Dre, Compton's Most Wanted, and Tupac Shakur, this station does a good job of sounding like Los Angeles radio circa 1992. The other stations, however, don't set the tone nearly as well. There's a classic rock station, a classic rap station (Did classic rap radio even exist in 1992? Heck, does classic rap radio exist today?), a country station, an alternative station, a funk station, a talk radio station, and so on. While the rap and alternative stations do passable jobs of delivering the music of the era, you'll probably be able to quickly rattle off 10 or 15 songs you would have liked to have heard instead, which is where the custom soundtrack option comes in handy. With the inclusion of things like a country station and a classic rock station, it almost seems like the game's developer felt the need to offset the thuggish subject matter. The end result is a soundtrack that isn't quite as cohesive as Vice City's.    One neat thing is that the radio sounds differently depending on which vehicle you're in. So, for example, the radio will sound appropriately tinny on a dirt bike. You can even go purchase a bass boost for your car at the mod shop, but considering the disposable nature of vehicles in the Grand Theft Auto games, we recommend you save your money. Also, it's worth noting that the radio stations are the same, regardless of where in the gameworld you are. It would have been neat to have seen some of your station selections change as you drive from one city to the next.   You'll hear some familiar voices on the radio, including Chuck D as the Forth Right MC.   The DJs on the radio do a good job, and the radio commercials feature the same style of tongue-in-cheek humor you've come to expect from the series. Some celebrities even make appearances as DJs. For instance, Public Enemy's Chuck D plays the DJ of the classic rap station, George Clinton mans the funk station, and Axl Rose turns in a low-key but appropriate performance as the DJ of the classic rock station. The talk radio is, for the most part, pretty good. The most impressive thing about the talk station is that the news breaks update as you play the game. So you'll hear updates about, for example, a ""mysterious"" ship full of dead bodies found floating out at sea shortly after that swimming mission of yours. Lazlow returns with some great ""celebrity"" interviews, but you'll also hear a sports show, a matchmaking program, and a gardening show, whose host is played by the never subtle Andy Dick.    Usually, when a game tries to do a million different things, it's an overambitious hodgepodge that can't manage to get its different parts down cold. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has you doing many, many more things than any previous GTA game, and while some of them do work a little better than others, the strength of all these different elements--too many to count--makes for a powerful package that doesn't disappoint, despite the extremely high standards that Grand Theft Auto established and that San Andreas needed to live up to. With its strong story, well-written dialogue, terrific voice cast, impressive graphics, and extremely entertaining and varied gameplay, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a stupendous thrill ride that shouldn't be missed.  


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337,Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow ,9, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is one of the most compelling mobile games around.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/1/0/5/18408-54105.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-splinter-cell-pandora-tomorrow-review/1900-6098812/,pos,"
 Every gamer with two controllers to his or her name has been raving like a complete maniac about the console version of Pandora Tomorrow, and with good reason. With features like mercs vs. spies, nonlinear gameplay paths, and a whole lot more, the game was a standout hit when it was released on the Xbox and PC earlier in the year. But the real news has snuck past the launch frenzy and infiltrated your cell phone. Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow is a perilous download indeed, because once it's on your handset, your formerly productive, multifarious existence will collapse to a single, all-engrossing question: What's the best way to get past that next set of guards? One would assume that protecting the Four Freedoms would be a full-time job, but Gameloft turned it into a waking obsession. In all, the French developer has eclipsed its own almost-peerless standard with this one; SCPT is a perfectly balanced stealth masterpiece for mobile.   There aren't many companies that can port console titles to mobile effectively. The two platforms are so technologically disparate that developers must often remake the game entirely--and, in many cases, a big chunk of a title's integral design evaporates along the way. But Gameloft has already proven its capability with numerous excellent console ports, including plenty of other Ubisoft properties, like the first Splinter Cell, XIII, Rayman 3, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time; in each case, the developer has captured the heart and soul of the console version in less than 200K.   SCPT builds on its mobile predecessor's core gameplay by adding a number of twists to the 2D sneak-and-spy mix. For example, Pandora Tomorrow makes much more extensive use of lighting and shadow to boost stealth possibilities; if you're in a dark area, you can move surreptitiously past guards without recourse to judo choke hold or pistol. Fisher's pistol mechanism has been retooled to allow for much more accurate up-and-down aiming--a must for mine disposal. The grizzled superoperative has learned to swim (or at least walk around in liquid) and is tricked out with a brand-new oxygen meter to measure submersion time. He can also drag his victims into darkened areas or borrow their eyes to pass through retinal-scan doors.  You'll have to use all of these skills and more to make it through eight levels of espionage and stop the deadly conspiracy (the details of which remain murky--and entirely irrelevant--through the course of the game). The early missions take place in rural locations like East Timor and Indonesia, which are protected only by guards and mines, but the later levels involve breaking into fortified buildings stacked to the ceiling with surveillance equipment. The game's levels are fairly linear in terms of where you can go, but each screen is solvable in several different ways. You can dash or roll past guards when they aren't looking, taking care not to boost the alarm meter into the red zone; you can take hostages; or you can go in with pistol blazing, if you're feeling especially belligerent. Three guard bullets is all it takes to put an end to Sam's life, so both common sense and the scoring system call for secrecy. Gameloft put a great deal of thought into design and layout, lending an almost puzzlelike quality to many of the later levels: You may have to grab one guard, throw him off a ledge onto a mine, duck into a doorway until the hue and cry fades, and then make your escape by grabbing another guard and using him as a shield against an auto-machine gun, all in the correct order.   SCPT's audiovisual prowess is much more than a complement to its avidly entertaining gameplay. The graphics are crisp and detailed, featuring flowing character animation (including a fantastic blood jet from ballistically perforated guards), voluminous mine explosions, and dark, clammy backgrounds. It's unbelievably cool to watch Fisher's trademark glowing tripoint stalk in the darkness behind an unsuspecting goon. The sound is also excellent, with a number of short, pulsating tunes for the start of each level and clean effects for explosions and gunfire. The only real problem with SCPT is a fairly minor case of control lag, which will probably account for several frustrating botched goon-grabs before you learn to compensate.  Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow is one of the most compelling mobile games around. It combines bleeding-edge production with fantastic gameplay mechanics and churns out several hours of pure infiltration bliss--or more, if you take into account a time-attack mode and the eternally burning urge to better your top score. This game's so good it practically could have been a mobile-to-console port. 
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338,Fallout 3 ,9," Fallout 3 is a profoundly engrossing role-playing game just waiting to reveal its deep, dark mysteries.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/0/8/2219108-box_fallout3.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fallout-3-review/1900-6200089/,pos,"
  A lot of games make a big deal out of player choice, but few in recent memory offer so many intricate, meaningful ways of approaching any given situation. You fulfill or dash the spiritual hopes of an idyllic society, side with slavers or their slaves, and decide the fate of more than one city over the course of your postapocalyptic journey through the Washington, DC wasteland. Your actions have far-reaching consequences that affect not just the world around you but also the way you play, and it's this freedom that makes Fallout 3 worth playing--and replaying. It's deep and mesmerizing, and though not as staggeringly broad as the developer's previous games, it's more focused and vividly realized.   Welcome to the wasteland.   This focus is obvious from the first hour of the game, in which character creation and story exposition are beautifully woven together. It's an introduction best experienced on your own rather than described in detail here, but it does set up Fallout 3's framework: It's the year 2277, and you and your father are residents of Vault 101, one of many such constructs that shelter the earth's population from the dangers of postnuclear destruction. When dad escapes the vault without so much as a goodbye, you go off in search of him, only to find yourself snagged in a political and scientific tug of war that lets you change the course of the future. As you make your way through the decaying remnants of the District and its surrounding areas (you'll visit Arlington, Chevy Chase, and other suburban locales), you encounter passive-aggressive ghouls, a bumbling scientist, and an old Fallout friend named Harold who has, well, a lot on his mind. Another highlight is a diminutive collective of Lord of the Flies-esque refugees who reluctantly welcome you into their society, assuming that you play your cards right.     The city is also one of Fallout 3's stars. It's a somber world out there, in which a crumbling Washington Monument stands watch over murky green puddles and lurching beasts called mirelurks. You'll discover new quests and characters while exploring, of course, but traversing the city is rewarding on its own, whether you decide to explore the back rooms of a cola factory or approach the heavily guarded steps of the Capitol building. In fact, though occasional silly asides and amusing dialogue provide some humorous respite, it's more serious than previous Fallout games. It even occasionally feels a bit stiff and sterile, thus diminishing the sense of emotional connection that would give some late-game decisions more poignancy. Additionally, the franchise's black humor is present but not nearly as prevalent, though Fallout 3 is still keenly aware of its roots. The haughty pseudogovernment called the Enclave and the freedom fighters known as the Brotherhood of Steel are still powerful forces, and the main story centers around concepts and objectives that Fallout purists will be familiar with.     Although some of that trademark Bethesda brittleness hangs in the air, the mature dialogue (it's a bit unnerving but wholly authentic the first time you hear 8-year-olds muttering expletives) and pockets of backstory make for a compelling trek. There are more tidbits than you could possibly discover on a single play-through. For example, a skill perk (more on these later) will enable you to extract information from a lady of the evening, information that in turn sheds new light on a few characters--and lets you complete a story quest in an unexpected way. A mission to find a self-realized android may initiate a fascinating look at a futuristic Underground Railroad, but a little side gossiping might let you lie your way to quest completion. There aren't as many quests as you may expect, but their complexity can be astonishing. Just be sure to explore them fully before pushing the story forward: Once it ends, the game is over, which means that you'll need to revert to an earlier saved game if you intend to explore once you finish the main quest.     Thus choices are ruled only by your own sense of propriety and the impending results. For every ""bad"" decision you make (break into someone's room, sacrifice a soldier to save your own hide), your karma goes down; if you do something ""good"" (find a home for an orphan, give water to a beggar), your karma goes up. These situations trigger more consequences: Dialogue choices open up, others close off, and your reputation will delight some while antagonizing others. For example, a mutant with a heart of gold will join you as a party member, but only if your karma is high enough, whereas a brigand requires you to be on the heartless side. Even in the last moments of the game, you are making important choices that will be recounted to you during the ending scene, similar to the endings in the previous Fallout games. There are loads of different ending sequences depending on how you completed various quests, and the way they are patched together into a cohesive epilogue is pretty clever.     Fallout 3 remains true to the series’ character development system, using a similar system of attributes, skills, and perks, including the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system from previous games for your attributes, such as strength, perception, and endurance. From there, you can specialize in a number of skills, from heavy weapons and lock-picking to item repairing and terminal hacking. You will further invest in these skills each time you level, and you'll also choose an additional perk. Perks offer a number of varied enhancements that can be both incredibly helpful and a bit creepy. You could go for the ladykiller perk, which opens up dialogue options with some women and makes others easier to slay. Or the cannibal perk, which lets you feed off of fallen enemies to regain health at the risk of grossing out anyone who glimpses this particularly nasty habit. Not all of them are so dramatic, but they're important aspects of character development that can create fascinating new options.    The VATS system makes for some awesome-looking battles.   Although you can play from an odd-looking third-person perspective (your avatar looks like he or she is skating over the terrain), Fallout 3 is best played from a first-person view. Where combat is concerned, you will play much of the game as if it is a first-person shooter, though awkwardly slow movement and camera speeds mean that you'll never confuse it for a true FPS. Armed with any number of ranged and melee weapons, you can bash and shoot attacking dogs and random raiders in a traditional manner. Yet even with its slight clunkiness, combat is satisfying. Shotguns (including the awesome sawed-off variant) have a lot of oomph, plasma rifles leave behind a nice pile of goo, and hammering a mutant's head with the giant and cumbersome supersledge feels momentously brutal. Just be prepared to maintain these implements of death: Weapons and armor will gradually lose effectiveness and need repairing. You can take them to a specialist for fixing, but you can also repair them yourself, as long as you have another of the same item. It's heartbreaking to break a favored weapon while fending off supermutants, but it reinforces the notion that everything you do in Fallout 3, even shooting your laser pistol, has consequences.    These aspects keep Fallout 3 from being a run-and-gun affair, and you shouldn't expect to play it as one. This is because the most satisfying and gory moments of battle are products of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or VATS. This system is a throwback to the action-point system of previous Fallout games, in that it lets you pause the action, spend action points by targeting a specific limb on your enemy, and watch the bloody results unfold in slow motion. You aren't guaranteed a hit, though you can see how likely you are to strike any given limb and how much damage your attack might do. But landing a hit in VATS is immensely gratifying: The camera swoops in for a dramatic view, your bullet will zoom toward its target, and your foe's head might burst in a shocking explosion of blood and brains. Or perhaps you will blow his limb completely off, sending an arm flying into the distance--or launch his entire body into oblivion.     This anatomically based damage is implemented well. Shooting an Enclave soldier's arm may cause him to drop his weapon, shooting his leg will cause him to limp, and a headshot will disorient him. But you aren't immune to these effects, either. If your head takes enough damage, you'll need to deal with disorienting aftereffects; crippled arms mean reduced aiming ability. Fortunately, you can apply healing stimpacks locally to heal the injury; likewise, a little sleep will help ease your troubles. You can also temporarily adjust your stats using any number of aids and healing items. Yet these, too, come with consequences. A little scotch or wine sounds delicious and offers temporary stat boosts, but you can become addicted if you drink them enough, which results in its own disorienting visual effects. And, of course, you will need to deal with the occasional effects of radiation, which is a problem when you drink from dirty water sources or eat irradiated food. Radiation poisoning can be cured, but you'll still need to weigh the healing benefits of certain items versus the resultant increase in radiation levels.   Quests are often more than meets the eye.   This all makes for a remarkably complex game that's further deepened by other elements that add some gameplay variety and help the world feel more lived-in. Lock-picking initiates a decent, if odd, minigame that simulates applying torque to the lock with a screwdriver while twisting a bobby pin. The hacking minigame is an interesting word puzzle that requires a little bit of brainpower. Or if you fancy yourself more of a blacksmith than a wordsmith, you can earn and purchase schematics to help you create weapons using the various components scattered around the land. More of an interior decorator? No matter: Should you acquire the deed to an apartment, you can decorate it and even outfit it with a few helpful appliances. The jokester robot comes free.     Although you'll be spending much of your time wandering alone out in the wastes, or perhaps with a companion or two, there are some memorable cinematic sequences. You will join soldiers as they take on a giant boss mutant, spearhead an assault on a famous DC landmark, and escape from a doomed citadel while robots and soldiers fill the air with laser fire. It's a good mix, paying off the atmospheric tension with an occasional explosive release. Your enemies put up a good fight--often too good, considering that enemies that were a challenge early on can still be tough cookies 5 or 10 levels later. This scaling difficulty makes your sense of progression feel a bit more limited than in other role-playing games, but it feels somewhat appropriate, considering the game's open-ended nature and inhospitable world. After all, if skulking mutants weren't a constant threat, you wouldn't be afraid to peek into the dark corners of the Fallout world. It should be noted that unlike previous games in the series, you can’t take a completely peaceful approach to solving your quest. In order to complete the game, you will have to get into combat and kill off some enemies, but since the combat system is generally pretty satisfying, this shouldn’t be a serious problem for most players.    Fallout 3 takes place in a bombed-out, futuristic version of Washington DC, and in the game, the area is bleak but oddly serene. Crumbling overpasses loom overhead and optimistic 1950's-style billboards advertise their products with sunny catchphrases. It looks impressive, and you move around the wide-open wasteland with nary a loading time, though you will encounter loads when entering and exiting buildings or quick-jumping to areas you've already visited. Numerous set-piece landmarks are particularly ominous, such as a giant aircraft carrier that serves as a self-contained city, or the decrepit interiors of the National Air and Space Museum. But the small touches are just as terrific, such as explosions that produce mushroom-like clouds of flame and smoke, evoking the nuclear tragedy at the heart of Fallout 3's concept. Character models are more lifelike than in the developer's prior efforts but still move somewhat stiffly, lacking the expressiveness of the models in games such as Mass Effect.     It's a shame, in light of these impressive design elements, that the PlayStation 3 version is shockingly inferior to the others from a technical perspective. Although the Xbox 360 and PC versions display the occasional visual oddity and bland texture, these nitpicks are easy to overlook. Sadly, the jagged edges, washed-out lighting, and slightly diminished draw distance of the PS3 release aren't so easy to dismiss. We also experienced a number of visual bugs on the PS3. Character faces disappeared several times, leaving only eyeballs and hair; limbs on robots went missing; some character models had an odd outline around them as if they were cel-shaded; and the day-to-night transition may cause odd streaks on the screen as you move the camera around. This version doesn't even offer trophies, whereas the Xbox 360 and PC versions offer Xbox Live/Windows Live achievements.    While there is plenty of somber exploration, you'll still find lots of action.   Aside from a few PS3-specific sound quirks, the audio in every version is marvelous. Most of the voice acting is great, some sleepy-sounding performances notwithstanding. Any game's atmosphere can live or die by its ambient audio, and Fallout 3 rises to the challenge. The whistling of the wind and the far-off sound of a gunshot are likely to give you a chill, and the slow-motion groans and crunch of a baseball bat meeting a ghoul's face sound wonderfully painful. If you get lonely and want some company, you can listen to a couple of radio stations, though the frequent repetition of the songs and announcements grates after a while. The soundtrack is fine, though it's a bit overwrought considering the desolate setting. Luckily, its default volume is very low, so it doesn't get in the way.     No matter what platform you own, you should play Fallout 3, which overcomes its issues by offering a deep and involving journey through a world that's hard to forget. It has more in common with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series than with previous Fallout games, but that is by no means a bad thing. In fact, Fallout 3 is leaner and meaner than Bethesda's previous efforts, less expansive but more intense, while still offering immense replay value and quite a few thrills along the way. Whether you're a newcomer to the universe or a Fallout devotee, untold hours of mutated secrets are lurking in the darkest corners of Washington.    


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339,Fallout 3 ,9," Fallout 3 is a profoundly engrossing role-playing game just waiting to reveal its deep, dark mysteries.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/0/8/2219108-box_fallout3.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fallout-3-review/1900-6200093/,pos,"
  A lot of games make a big deal out of player choice, but few in recent memory offer so many intricate, meaningful ways of approaching any given situation. You fulfill or dash the spiritual hopes of an idyllic society, side with slavers or their slaves, and decide the fate of more than one city over the course of your postapocalyptic journey through the Washington, DC wasteland. Your actions have far-reaching consequences that affect not just the world around you but also the way you play, and it's this freedom that makes Fallout 3 worth playing--and replaying. It's deep and mesmerizing, and though not as staggeringly broad as the developer's previous games, it's more focused and vividly realized.   Welcome to the wasteland.   This focus is obvious from the first hour of the game, in which character creation and story exposition are beautifully woven together. It's an introduction best experienced on your own rather than described in detail here, but it does set up Fallout 3's framework: It's the year 2277, and you and your father are residents of Vault 101, one of many such constructs that shelter the earth's population from the dangers of postnuclear destruction. When dad escapes the vault without so much as a goodbye, you go off in search of him, only to find yourself snagged in a political and scientific tug of war that lets you change the course of the future. As you make your way through the decaying remnants of the District and its surrounding areas (you'll visit Arlington, Chevy Chase, and other suburban locales), you encounter passive-aggressive ghouls, a bumbling scientist, and an old Fallout friend named Harold who has, well, a lot on his mind. Another highlight is a diminutive collective of Lord of the Flies-esque refugees who reluctantly welcome you into their society, assuming that you play your cards right.     The city is also one of Fallout 3's stars. It's a somber world out there, in which a crumbling Washington Monument stands watch over murky green puddles and lurching beasts called mirelurks. You'll discover new quests and characters while exploring, of course, but traversing the city is rewarding on its own, whether you decide to explore the back rooms of a cola factory or approach the heavily guarded steps of the Capitol building. In fact, though occasional silly asides and amusing dialogue provide some humorous respite, it's more serious than previous Fallout games. It even occasionally feels a bit stiff and sterile, thus diminishing the sense of emotional connection that would give some late-game decisions more poignancy. Additionally, the franchise's black humor is present but not nearly as prevalent, though Fallout 3 is still keenly aware of its roots. The haughty pseudogovernment called the Enclave and the freedom fighters known as the Brotherhood of Steel are still powerful forces, and the main story centers around concepts and objectives that Fallout purists will be familiar with.     Although some of that trademark Bethesda brittleness hangs in the air, the mature dialogue (it's a bit unnerving but wholly authentic the first time you hear 8-year-olds muttering expletives) and pockets of backstory make for a compelling trek. There are more tidbits than you could possibly discover on a single play-through. For example, a skill perk (more on these later) will enable you to extract information from a lady of the evening, information that in turn sheds new light on a few characters--and lets you complete a story quest in an unexpected way. A mission to find a self-realized android may initiate a fascinating look at a futuristic Underground Railroad, but a little side gossiping might let you lie your way to quest completion. There aren't as many quests as you may expect, but their complexity can be astonishing. Just be sure to explore them fully before pushing the story forward: Once it ends, the game is over, which means that you'll need to revert to an earlier saved game if you intend to explore once you finishe the main quest.     Thus choices are ruled only by your own sense of propriety and the impending results. For every ""bad"" decision you make (break into someone's room, sacrifice a soldier to save your own hide), your karma goes down; if you do something ""good"" (find a home for an orphan, give water to a beggar), your karma goes up. These situations trigger more consequences: Dialogue choices open up, others close off, and your reputation will delight some while antagonizing others. For example, a mutant with a heart of gold will join you as a party member, but only if your karma is high enough, whereas a brigand requires you to be on the heartless side. Even in the last moments of the game, you are making important choices that will be recounted to you during the ending scene, similar to the endings in the previous Fallout games. There are loads of different ending sequences depending on how you completed various quests, and the way they are patched together into a cohesive epilogue is pretty clever.     Fallout 3 remains true to the series’ character development system, using a similar system of attributes, skills, and perks, including the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system from previous games for your attributes, such as strength, perception, and endurance. From there, you can specialize in a number of skills, from heavy weapons and lock-picking to item repairing and terminal hacking. You will further invest in these skills each time you level, and you'll also choose an additional perk. Perks offer a number of varied enhancements that can be both incredibly helpful and a bit creepy. You could go for the ladykiller perk, which opens up dialogue options with some women and makes others easier to slay. Or the cannibal perk, which lets you feed off of fallen enemies to regain health at the risk of grossing out anyone who glimpses this particularly nasty habit. Not all of them are so dramatic, but they're important aspects of character development that can create fascinating new options.    The VATS system makes for some awesome-looking battles.   Although you can play from an odd-looking third-person perspective (your avatar looks like he or she is skating over the terrain), Fallout 3 is best played from a first-person view. Where combat is concerned, you will play much of the game as if it is a first-person shooter, though awkwardly slow movement and camera speeds mean that you'll never confuse it for a true FPS. Armed with any number of ranged and melee weapons, you can bash and shoot attacking dogs and random raiders in a traditional manner. Yet even with its slight clunkiness, combat is satisfying. Shotguns (including the awesome sawed-off variant) have a lot of oomph, plasma rifles leave behind a nice pile of goo, and hammering a mutant's head with the giant and cumbersome supersledge feels momentously brutal. Just be prepared to maintain these implements of death: Weapons and armor will gradually lose effectiveness and need repairing. You can take them to a specialist for fixing, but you can also repair them yourself, as long as you have another of the same item. It's heartbreaking to break a favored weapon while fending off supermutants, but it reinforces the notion that everything you do in Fallout 3, even shooting your laser pistol, has consequences.    These aspects keep Fallout 3 from being a run-and-gun affair, and you shouldn't expect to play it as one. This is because the most satisfying and gory moments of battle are products of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or VATS. This system is a throwback to the action-point system of previous Fallout games, in that it lets you pause the action, spend action points by targeting a specific limb on your enemy, and watch the bloody results unfold in slow motion. You aren't guaranteed a hit, though you can see how likely you are to strike any given limb and how much damage your attack might do. But landing a hit in VATS is immensely gratifying: The camera swoops in for a dramatic view, your bullet will zoom toward its target, and your foe's head might burst in a shocking explosion of blood and brains. Or perhaps you will blow his limb completely off, sending an arm flying into the distance--or launch his entire body into oblivion.     This anatomically based damage is implemented well. Shooting an Enclave soldier's arm may cause him to drop his weapon, shooting his leg will cause him to limp, and a headshot will disorient him. But you aren't immune to these effects, either. If your head takes enough damage, you'll need to deal with disorienting aftereffects; crippled arms mean reduced aiming ability. Fortunately, you can apply healing stimpacks locally to heal the injury; likewise, a little sleep will help ease your troubles. You can also temporarily adjust your stats using any number of aids and healing items. Yet these, too, come with consequences. A little scotch or wine sounds delicious and offers temporary stat boosts, but you can become addicted if you drink them enough, which results in its own disorienting visual effects. And, of course, you will need to deal with the occasional effects of radiation, which is a problem when you drink from dirty water sources or eat irradiated food. Radiation poisoning can be cured, but you'll still need to weigh the healing benefits of certain items versus the resultant increase in radiation levels.   Quests are often more than meets the eye.   This all makes for a remarkably complex game that's further deepened by other elements that add some gameplay variety and help the world feel more lived-in. Lock-picking initiates a decent, if odd, minigame that simulates applying torque to the lock with a screwdriver while twisting a bobby pin. The hacking minigame is an interesting word puzzle that requires a little bit of brainpower. Or if you fancy yourself more of a blacksmith than a wordsmith, you can earn and purchase schematics to help you create weapons using the various components scattered around the land. More of an interior decorator? No matter: Should you acquire the deed to an apartment, you can decorate it and even outfit it with a few helpful appliances. The jokester robot comes free.     Although you'll be spending much of your time wandering alone out in the wastes, or perhaps with a companion or two, there are some memorable cinematic sequences. You will join soldiers as they take on a giant boss mutant, spearhead an assault on a famous DC landmark, and escape from a doomed citadel while robots and soldiers fill the air with laser fire. It's a good mix, paying off the atmospheric tension with an occasional explosive release. Your enemies put up a good fight--often too good, considering that enemies that were a challenge early on can still be tough cookies 5 or 10 levels later. This scaling difficulty makes your sense of progression feel a bit more limited than in other role-playing games, but it feels somewhat appropriate, considering the game's open-ended nature and inhospitable world. After all, if skulking mutants weren't a constant threat, you wouldn't be afraid to peek into the dark corners of the Fallout world. It should be noted that unlike previous games in the series, you can’t take a completely peaceful approach to solving your quest. In order to complete the game, you will have to get into combat and kill off some enemies, but since the combat system is generally pretty satisfying, this shouldn’t be a serious problem for most players.    Fallout 3 takes place in a bombed-out, futuristic version of Washington DC, and in the game, the area is bleak but oddly serene. Crumbling overpasses loom overhead and optimistic 1950's-style billboards advertise their products with sunny catchphrases. It looks impressive, and you move around the wide-open wasteland with nary a loading time, though you will encounter loads when entering and exiting buildings or quick-jumping to areas you've already visited. Numerous set-piece landmarks are particularly ominous, such as a giant aircraft carrier that serves as a self-contained city, or the decrepit interiors of the National Air and Space Museum. But the small touches are just as terrific, such as explosions that produce mushroom-like clouds of flame and smoke, evoking the nuclear tragedy at the heart of Fallout 3's concept. Character models are more lifelike than in the developer's prior efforts but still move somewhat stiffly, lacking the expressiveness of the models in games such as Mass Effect.     It's a shame, in light of these impressive design elements, that the PlayStation 3 version is shockingly inferior to the others from a technical perspective. Although the Xbox 360 and PC versions display the occasional visual oddity and bland texture, these nitpicks are easy to overlook. Sadly, the jagged edges, washed-out lighting, and slightly diminished draw distance of the PS3 release aren't so easy to dismiss. We also experienced a number of visual bugs on the PS3. Character faces disappeared several times, leaving only eyeballs and hair; limbs on robots went missing; some character models had an odd outline around them as if they were cel-shaded; and the day-to-night transition may cause odd streaks on the screen as you move the camera around. This version doesn't even offer trophies, whereas the Xbox 360 and PC versions offer Xbox Live/Windows Live achievements.    While there is plenty of somber exploration, you'll still find lots of action.   Aside from a few PS3-specific sound quirks, the audio in every version is marvelous. Most of the voice acting is great, some sleepy-sounding performances notwithstanding. Any game's atmosphere can live or die by its ambient audio, and Fallout 3 rises to the challenge. The whistling of the wind and the far-off sound of a gunshot are likely to give you a chill, and the slow-motion groans and crunch of a baseball bat meeting a ghoul's face sound wonderfully painful. If you get lonely and want some company, you can listen to a couple of radio stations, though the frequent repetition of the songs and announcements grates after a while. The soundtrack is fine, though it's a bit overwrought considering the desolate setting. Luckily, its default volume is very low, so it doesn't get in the way.     No matter what platform you own, you should play Fallout 3, which overcomes its issues by offering a deep and involving journey through a world that's hard to forget. It has more in common with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series than with previous Fallout games, but that is by no means a bad thing. In fact, Fallout 3 is leaner and meaner than Bethesda's previous efforts, less expansive but more intense, while still offering immense replay value and quite a few thrills along the way. Whether you're a newcomer to the universe or a Fallout devotee, untold hours of mutated secrets are lurking in the darkest corners of Washington.    


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'Review']",0.09466026023784645,0.5210512638702295
340,MVP Baseball 2004 ,9," The core fundamentals are spot-on, the variety of options and control choices is spectacular, and the presentation totally draws you into the experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/3/2/2211432-box_mvpb04.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mvp-baseball-2004-review/1900-6091359/,pos,"
 Last year's MVP Baseball 2003 was praised for its complex simulation-style controls, but it was also criticized for failing to include many of the simple things that most video baseball fans take for granted. Pitcher warm-ups and intentional walks were absent, and the franchise mode didn't allow you to draft teams or trade players. At the same time, the limited variety of player animations displayed on the field didn't jive with the massive amount of noise and activity going on in the stands. MVP Baseball 2004 fixes these problems and expands upon every other aspect that made the previous installment such a joy to play.  MVP Baseball 2004 represents a significant improvement on its predecessor, and it's a fantastic baseball game overall.  There are a slew of new features this year. AAA and AA farm teams and rosters have been included for all 30 official MLB teams, and legendary players and retro jerseys can be unlocked by earning points during games. If you have an EA Sports Bio file from another EA Sports game on your system, some of these goodies will unlock the first time you load the disc. The dynasty mode is a full-fledged franchise mode that lets you draft teams from scratch and lets you make trades during the season. You can even send players down or call players up from a team's farm club. While the franchise mode in MVP 2003 kept track of team chemistry and rivalries, the dynasty mode in MVP 2004 also tracks the moods of individual players. If you don't give a player enough playing time or if his contract doesn't reflect his performance on the field, his mood will sour, which will have a negative effect on all aspects of his play. The batting, fielding, and baserunning interfaces have all been expanded this year to give you more control over aiming your swing, making diving catches, and performing around-the-bag slides.  Every baseball game includes the same basic assortment of exhibition, franchise, home run derby, and pitchers' duel modes. MVP Baseball 2004 is no different in this regard, but it does have a couple of unique modes of its own. Fans of text-based baseball management simulations, which are popular on the PC platform, will appreciate the manager mode, where each at bat is simulated based upon the choices you make before the opening pitch. You don't actually see the players swing or make plays. Instead, the outcome of each play is printed onscreen in a running box score, of sorts. The list of managerial decisions is pretty large. On defense, you can choose to pitch to the batter, pitch around him, throw an intentional walk, call for a bean ball, realign your fielders, and make substitutions. On offense, you can tell your batter to swing away, try for a bunt, put on the hit-and-run, call for a steal, or sub in pinch hitters and pinch runners. The other interesting play mode is called the scenario editor. Here, you can adjust 20 different variables and set up every possible baseball scenario that has ever occurred in the history of the sport. The game lets you set the inning, the number of outs, the score, the count, who's at bat, who's on base, and even the fatigue level of the pitchers. This is a much better alternative to the canned scenarios typically included in other baseball games.  There's a lot of depth to the core gameplay on the field, and there's a lot of detail in the presentation.  Where MVP Baseball 2004 distinguishes itself from other baseball games is in the amount of control it gives you over every aspect of each play. You can control how accurate your pitches are, how hard your fielders throw, where your hitters aim the bat, and even what kind of slide your base runners use when sliding into a bag. The controls make use of every single button and stick on the controller, but the steep learning curve pays off by making you feel like you're a part of the game.  Intentional walks, bean balls, pitcher warm-ups, and mound visits weren't included in MVP 2003, but they're here this year. One particularly cool feature is that mound visits actually have an effect on a pitcher's stamina. If you send the manager to the mound in late innings or right after the pitcher surrenders a towering home run, the visit may increase the pitcher's stamina by five or 10 percentage points. However, if you go up too early in the game or for no apparent reason, you run the risk of angering the pitcher and having his stamina drop by five or 10 points.   The process of pitching is rather unique thanks to the swing meter that's used to set the effectiveness and accuracy of each individual pitch. After you press a button to select a pitch, a meter appears above your pitcher's arm and starts to fill up. You want to let go of the button when the indicator inside of the meter gets near the red zone at the top. This sets the effectiveness of the pitch. Once you let go of the button, the indicator changes directions and falls back through the meter. You need to tap the button one more time when the indicator is in the green zone to set the accuracy of the pitch. Effective and accurate pitches are more likely to land for strikes and don't consume as much stamina as flat or wild pitches.  MVP 2004 simulates a lot of fine details, such as how fielders have a tougher time of accurately throwing the ball after it's caught while off-balance.  Throws from the field employ a meter similar to the one used for pitching, except that there's only a single adjustment to make. When you hold down one of the buttons, the meter above your fielder starts to fill. This meter represents a trade-off between strength and accuracy. Optimally, you want to let go of the button once you've put enough power into the throw but before the indicator drifts into the red zone. Let go too soon or too late and the ball may take a hop or sail past its intended target. Just like in real life, accurate throws are tougher to make after your player makes an off-balanced or diving catch. MVP 2004 simulates these situations by adjusting the size of the red area depending on how your player caught the ball.  If you've played other baseball games before, the fielding and baserunning interfaces in MVP Baseball 2004 should seem pretty straightforward to you. The diamond-shaped layout of the buttons on the controller allows you to throw to specific bases or to control individual runners. EA Sports has added an innovative twist to fielding and running with what the company calls ""Big Play Control."" The right analog stick lets you command your fielders to dive after the ball or make a run up the outfield wall. When you're on the bases, the right stick lets you both adjust the length of leadoffs and select the type of slides your runners perform as they slide into bases. Press right or left on the stick, and you'll perform a hooking slide. Press up on the stick, and you'll dive in headfirst.  The batting interface was clearly patterned after the one used in 3DO's former High Heat Baseball series, and this isn't a bad thing. There aren't any batting cursors to deal with. Instead, hitting involves timing your swing so that you lay wood on the ball when it's in the strike zone. If you swing too early or too late or if the ball is outside of the zone, there's a good chance you'll miss altogether or induce a weak grounder or pop-up. Hitters are generally pretty good about making accurate swings, but if you want to adjust the swing angle on your own, you can do so using the left thumbstick. This allows you to put more of the head of the bat on the ball and gives you the ability to get over or under the ball to intentionally produce grounders or pop flies.  Other positive aspects of the gameplay include hot and cold zones for hitters, the ability to queue up stolen base attempts before the pitcher makes his delivery, and the opportunity to instigate bench-clearing brawls whenever an opposing pitcher beans one of your players. It's also sweet how injuries are more prone to occur when you make inexperienced fielders perform diving catches or you drive out-of-shape players toward collisions at the plate.  As authentic as the visuals are in MVP 2004, the audio is even more impressive.  In addition to including all of the plays and options that are required of a good baseball simulator, MVP Baseball 2004 also does a spectacular job of depicting the atmosphere that you'd find in an actual major league ballpark.  The sound systems at each ballpark blast player introductions and belt out music clips for each member of the home team. In the stands, the spectators respond accurately to what's occurring on the field. They'll cheer loudly when the home team scores a run or when the home team's pitcher notches a strikeout, and they'll boo when a player on the home team makes a bonehead play or if the visiting team scores a run. When an inspirational interlude comes over the PA system--such as the stomp beat from Queen's ""We Will Rock You""--the crowd will respond to it like a real crowd would. The team-specific chants and player-specific catcalls are also a charming touch. Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow provide the play-by-play commentary, and they do an excellent job of mixing together their playcalling with historical information and player anecdotes.   As for the graphics, EA Sports has made great strides to iron out the problems that were apparent in last year's game. Even though the bulk of spectators in the stands are still cardboard cutouts, the fans in the lower-level infield seats are actually fully modeled now, which means that they don't look as flat-as-pancakes when the camera shoots them from the side. The number of different animations for infield and outfield plays has been increased significantly, so that now, not only do star players have their own unique plays, but you can actually go a half-dozen games without seeing the same catch twice. The players' bodies are better proportioned, and the majority of faces match their player portraits. Fan favorites, like Hideki Matsui, Bret Boone, and Randy Johnson, look identical to their real-life counterparts. Throughout the game, uniforms accumulate dirt and grass stains based upon the actions that the players in these uniforms make on the field. The miniature baserunning cameras that appear in the base diagram are back this year. EA has added a new a picture-in-picture camera that shows an overhead view close up whenever you swing and miss at the plate.  The PS2 version of the game uniquely features online play, though all three versions are about the same otherwise.  If you're a fan of a particular stadium, you'll be satisfied with the amount of detail that has gone into each ballpark. Some stadiums are missing a walkway or a pillar here and there, but you really need to be a stickler to notice. The JumboTron displays in each stadium do a good job of mingling generic field views and replays in with the standard home plate-view that you see during each at bat. Most stadiums also have outfield scoreboards that update throughout the game, although there are a few ballparks--such as Bank One Ballpark in Arizona--that only have preset static displays.  So what's wrong with MVP Baseball 2004? This is a short list. The absence of traditional season and playoff modes means you're stuck playing seasons and playoff games in the dynasty mode. Anyone that wants to leap right into a playoff atmosphere will have to quick-sim through 162 other games first. If you just want to keep track of a single MLB team without being bothered by extraneous menus and farm club results, you're out of luck. The biggest drawback to the way the dynasty mode is set up is that you can't import a new roster once the season has started. This makes it impossible to update the rosters to reflect the current makeup of your favorite team without starting the season over from scratch. The rest of the game's problems are mainly nitpicks. Statistics-tracking is woefully limited. Basic categories, such as batting average, fielding percentage, and WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched), are covered, but you won't find night versus day or domed versus outdoor comparisons here. Ball physics are much better this year--to the point that liners and bloopers bounce the way they're supposed to. Unfortunately, EA neglected to increase the speed at which human-controlled outfielders run, which means the CPU still has an unfair propensity toward earning doubles and triples. To be fair, you can adjust the speed of your players manually, along with 19 other variables, in the game's tuning menu.  Those of you who are thinking about picking up the GameCube version of the game may also be chagrined to learn that you can't put both a custom roster file and a dynasty file onto a single Nintendo-brand memory card. Nintendo's cards can only hold up to 251 blocks. A roster update takes 134 blocks, and a dynasty file takes 160. If you want to make sure you have enough room, you'll need to pick up a third-party memory card of the 4X or 16X variety.  Baseball fans owe it to themselves to try this game.  Since MVP Baseball 2004 is available for all three major consoles, the big question is, ""Which version is the best?"" The PlayStation 2 game includes network adaptor support so that you can both play against other players online and download roster updates throughout the season. The Xbox and GameCube versions don't have any online features. This difference alone should be enough to make the choice obvious for many players. Other than this, the three games are generally identical to one another. The textures in the GameCube game are a little blurrier than those in the PS2 and Xbox versions, but you don't really notice unless the camera focuses in on the sky or onto a wall. The graphics in the PS2 game stutter during instant replays but never during actual gameplay. Owners of HDTV-compatible monitors or televisions will be pleased to note that the Xbox version supports 720p scan widescreen displays. All three versions have support for 480p scan displays and Dolby Pro Logic II audio. Also, each version essentially controls equally as well with the respective system's stock gamepad.  Assuming you do decide to take the plunge and pick up a copy of MVP Baseball 2004, you'll likely be satisfied no matter which version you get. The core fundamentals are spot-on, the variety of options and control choices is spectacular, and the presentation totally draws you into the experience of being front and center at an actual ballpark that's filled with screaming fans. 

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341,MVP Baseball 2004 ,9," The core fundamentals are spot-on, the variety of options and control choices is spectacular, and the presentation totally draws you into the experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/3/2/2211432-box_mvpb04.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mvp-baseball-2004-review/1900-6091364/,pos,"
 Last year's MVP Baseball 2003 was praised for its complex simulation-style controls, but it was also criticized for failing to include many of the simple things that most video baseball fans take for granted. Pitcher warm-ups and intentional walks were absent, and the franchise mode didn't allow you to draft teams or trade players. At the same time, the limited variety of player animations displayed on the field didn't jive with the massive amount of noise and activity going on in the stands. MVP Baseball 2004 fixes these problems and expands upon every other aspect that made the previous installment such a joy to play.  MVP Baseball 2004 represents a significant improvement on its predecessor, and it's a fantastic baseball game overall.  There are a slew of new features this year. AAA and AA farm teams and rosters have been included for all 30 official MLB teams, and legendary players and retro jerseys can be unlocked by earning points during games. If you have an EA Sports Bio file from another EA Sports game on your system, some of these goodies will unlock the first time you load the disc. The dynasty mode is a full-fledged franchise mode that lets you draft teams from scratch and lets you make trades during the season. You can even send players down or call players up from a team's farm club. While the franchise mode in MVP 2003 kept track of team chemistry and rivalries, the dynasty mode in MVP 2004 also tracks the moods of individual players. If you don't give a player enough playing time or if his contract doesn't reflect his performance on the field, his mood will sour, which will have a negative effect on all aspects of his play. The batting, fielding, and baserunning interfaces have all been expanded this year to give you more control over aiming your swing, making diving catches, and performing around-the-bag slides.  Every baseball game includes the same basic assortment of exhibition, franchise, home run derby, and pitchers' duel modes. MVP Baseball 2004 is no different in this regard, but it does have a couple of unique modes of its own. Fans of text-based baseball management simulations, which are popular on the PC platform, will appreciate the manager mode, where each at bat is simulated based upon the choices you make before the opening pitch. You don't actually see the players swing or make plays. Instead, the outcome of each play is printed onscreen in a running box score, of sorts. The list of managerial decisions is pretty large. On defense, you can choose to pitch to the batter, pitch around him, throw an intentional walk, call for a bean ball, realign your fielders, and make substitutions. On offense, you can tell your batter to swing away, try for a bunt, put on the hit-and-run, call for a steal, or sub in pinch hitters and pinch runners. The other interesting play mode is called the scenario editor. Here, you can adjust 20 different variables and set up every possible baseball scenario that has ever occurred in the history of the sport. The game lets you set the inning, the number of outs, the score, the count, who's at bat, who's on base, and even the fatigue level of the pitchers. This is a much better alternative to the canned scenarios typically included in other baseball games.  There's a lot of depth to the core gameplay on the field, and there's a lot of detail in the presentation.  Where MVP Baseball 2004 distinguishes itself from other baseball games is in the amount of control it gives you over every aspect of each play. You can control how accurate your pitches are, how hard your fielders throw, where your hitters aim the bat, and even what kind of slide your base runners use when sliding into a bag. The controls make use of every single button and stick on the controller, but the steep learning curve pays off by making you feel like you're a part of the game.  Intentional walks, bean balls, pitcher warm-ups, and mound visits weren't included in MVP 2003, but they're here this year. One particularly cool feature is that mound visits actually have an effect on a pitcher's stamina. If you send the manager to the mound in late innings or right after the pitcher surrenders a towering home run, the visit may increase the pitcher's stamina by five or 10 percentage points. However, if you go up too early in the game or for no apparent reason, you run the risk of angering the pitcher and having his stamina drop by five or 10 points.   The process of pitching is rather unique thanks to the swing meter that's used to set the effectiveness and accuracy of each individual pitch. After you press a button to select a pitch, a meter appears above your pitcher's arm and starts to fill up. You want to let go of the button when the indicator inside of the meter gets near the red zone at the top. This sets the effectiveness of the pitch. Once you let go of the button, the indicator changes directions and falls back through the meter. You need to tap the button one more time when the indicator is in the green zone to set the accuracy of the pitch. Effective and accurate pitches are more likely to land for strikes and don't consume as much stamina as flat or wild pitches.  MVP 2004 simulates a lot of fine details, such as how fielders have a tougher time of accurately throwing the ball after it's caught while off-balance.  Throws from the field employ a meter similar to the one used for pitching, except that there's only a single adjustment to make. When you hold down one of the buttons, the meter above your fielder starts to fill. This meter represents a trade-off between strength and accuracy. Optimally, you want to let go of the button once you've put enough power into the throw but before the indicator drifts into the red zone. Let go too soon or too late and the ball may take a hop or sail past its intended target. Just like in real life, accurate throws are tougher to make after your player makes an off-balanced or diving catch. MVP 2004 simulates these situations by adjusting the size of the red area depending on how your player caught the ball.  If you've played other baseball games before, the fielding and baserunning interfaces in MVP Baseball 2004 should seem pretty straightforward to you. The diamond-shaped layout of the buttons on the controller allows you to throw to specific bases or to control individual runners. EA Sports has added an innovative twist to fielding and running with what the company calls ""Big Play Control."" The right analog stick lets you command your fielders to dive after the ball or make a run up the outfield wall. When you're on the bases, the right stick lets you both adjust the length of leadoffs and select the type of slides your runners perform as they slide into bases. Press right or left on the stick, and you'll perform a hooking slide. Press up on the stick, and you'll dive in headfirst.  The batting interface was clearly patterned after the one used in 3DO's former High Heat Baseball series, and this isn't a bad thing. There aren't any batting cursors to deal with. Instead, hitting involves timing your swing so that you lay wood on the ball when it's in the strike zone. If you swing too early or too late or if the ball is outside of the zone, there's a good chance you'll miss altogether or induce a weak grounder or pop-up. Hitters are generally pretty good about making accurate swings, but if you want to adjust the swing angle on your own, you can do so using the left thumbstick. This allows you to put more of the head of the bat on the ball and gives you the ability to get over or under the ball to intentionally produce grounders or pop flies.  Other positive aspects of the gameplay include hot and cold zones for hitters, the ability to queue up stolen base attempts before the pitcher makes his delivery, and the opportunity to instigate bench-clearing brawls whenever an opposing pitcher beans one of your players. It's also sweet how injuries are more prone to occur when you make inexperienced fielders perform diving catches or you drive out-of-shape players toward collisions at the plate.  As authentic as the visuals are in MVP 2004, the audio is even more impressive.  In addition to including all of the plays and options that are required of a good baseball simulator, MVP Baseball 2004 also does a spectacular job of depicting the atmosphere that you'd find in an actual major league ballpark.  The sound systems at each ballpark blast player introductions and belt out music clips for each member of the home team. In the stands, the spectators respond accurately to what's occurring on the field. They'll cheer loudly when the home team scores a run or when the home team's pitcher notches a strikeout, and they'll boo when a player on the home team makes a bonehead play or if the visiting team scores a run. When an inspirational interlude comes over the PA system--such as the stomp beat from Queen's ""We Will Rock You""--the crowd will respond to it like a real crowd would. The team-specific chants and player-specific catcalls are also a charming touch. Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow provide the play-by-play commentary, and they do an excellent job of mixing together their playcalling with historical information and player anecdotes.   As for the graphics, EA Sports has made great strides to iron out the problems that were apparent in last year's game. Even though the bulk of spectators in the stands are still cardboard cutouts, the fans in the lower-level infield seats are actually fully modeled now, which means that they don't look as flat-as-pancakes when the camera shoots them from the side. The number of different animations for infield and outfield plays has been increased significantly, so that now, not only do star players have their own unique plays, but you can actually go a half-dozen games without seeing the same catch twice. The players' bodies are better proportioned, and the majority of faces match their player portraits. Fan favorites, like Hideki Matsui, Bret Boone, and Randy Johnson, look identical to their real-life counterparts. Throughout the game, uniforms accumulate dirt and grass stains based upon the actions that the players in these uniforms make on the field. The miniature baserunning cameras that appear in the base diagram are back this year. EA has added a new a picture-in-picture camera that shows an overhead view close up whenever you swing and miss at the plate.  The PS2 version of the game uniquely features online play, though all three versions are about the same otherwise.  If you're a fan of a particular stadium, you'll be satisfied with the amount of detail that has gone into each ballpark. Some stadiums are missing a walkway or a pillar here and there, but you really need to be a stickler to notice. The JumboTron displays in each stadium do a good job of mingling generic field views and replays in with the standard home plate-view that you see during each at bat. Most stadiums also have outfield scoreboards that update throughout the game, although there are a few ballparks--such as Bank One Ballpark in Arizona--that only have preset static displays.  So what's wrong with MVP Baseball 2004? This is a short list. The absence of traditional season and playoff modes means you're stuck playing seasons and playoff games in the dynasty mode. Anyone that wants to leap right into a playoff atmosphere will have to quick-sim through 162 other games first. If you just want to keep track of a single MLB team without being bothered by extraneous menus and farm club results, you're out of luck. The biggest drawback to the way the dynasty mode is set up is that you can't import a new roster once the season has started. This makes it impossible to update the rosters to reflect the current makeup of your favorite team without starting the season over from scratch. The rest of the game's problems are mainly nitpicks. Statistics-tracking is woefully limited. Basic categories, such as batting average, fielding percentage, and WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched), are covered, but you won't find night versus day or domed versus outdoor comparisons here. Ball physics are much better this year--to the point that liners and bloopers bounce the way they're supposed to. Unfortunately, EA neglected to increase the speed at which human-controlled outfielders run, which means the CPU still has an unfair propensity toward earning doubles and triples. To be fair, you can adjust the speed of your players manually, along with 19 other variables, in the game's tuning menu.  Baseball fans owe it to themselves to try this game.  Since MVP Baseball 2004 is available for all three major consoles, the big question is, ""Which version is the best?"" The PlayStation 2 game includes network adaptor support so that you can both play against other players online and download roster updates throughout the season. The Xbox and GameCube versions don't have any online features. This difference alone should be enough to make the choice obvious for many players. Other than this, the three games are generally identical to one another. The textures in the GameCube game are a little blurrier than those in the PS2 and Xbox versions, but you don't really notice unless the camera focuses in on the sky or onto a wall. The graphics in the PS2 game stutter during instant replays but never during actual gameplay. Owners of HDTV-compatible monitors or televisions will be pleased to note that the Xbox version supports 720p scan widescreen displays. All three versions have support for 480p scan displays and Dolby Pro Logic II audio. Also, each version essentially controls equally as well with the respective system's stock gamepad.  Assuming you do decide to take the plunge and pick up a copy of MVP Baseball 2004, you'll likely be satisfied no matter which version you get. The core fundamentals are spot-on, the variety of options and control choices is spectacular, and the presentation totally draws you into the experience of being front and center at an actual ballpark that's filled with screaming fans. 

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342,Burnout 3: Takedown ,9, Burnout 3: Takedown is an amazing achievement that anyone with a pulse will probably love.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/8/4/6/2208846-box_bout3t.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/burnout-3-takedown-review/1900-6106827/,pos,"
  As driving games continue to flood the market, the genre seems to be splintering apart further and further. It used to be easy. Driving games were either attempting to simulate actual driving, or they were eschewing realism in favor of a more accessible, more instantly gratifying game. But now there are even more subsets to choose from. You've got the hardcore simulations that attempt to model cars and driving as accurately as possible. There are the open-road, ""choose your own route""-style of racing games, which usually give you an entire city to race in. And, more recently, there are games that focus on the import tuning scene. With all these vastly different styles of driving games to choose from, it might be hard to figure out which type is the right one for you. With the release of Burnout 3: Takedown, developer Criterion Games makes the choice surprisingly easy. Put it this way: Even if driving games aren't normally your thing, Burnout 3 is still right for you. It's that good. It ranks among the best racing games ever made.   Still pictures can't do Burnout 3 justice.  The original Burnout, released back in 2001, was a great arcade-style racing game. It delivered a sense of speed that most games lacked, and it also showcased some pretty spectacular crashes. In fact, the crashes were so cool that they were spun off into their own mode of play in Burnout 2. The crash mode in Burnout 2 was totally separate from the main racing game, but the puzzle-like challenge of wrecking your car in the right spot and at the right time caused the most spectacular, most damaging multicar pileups, which represented an amazing addition to the game. Burnout 3 expertly combines the two main elements of the series while also adding some great, new gameplay modes, a career mode that ties all of these different modes together, good split-screen support, and online play that supports up to six players on the same racetrack. These changes and added features drastically improve a series that was already very impressive.    Burnout 3, like the previous games in the series, is mainly a racing game that rewards you for living dangerously. The game features simple, extremely responsive controls, so you can accelerate, steer, brake (around corners), and boost for a burst of speed. The courses in the game are open-road tracks on winding freeways and city streets, and, naturally, the streets are populated with a good amount of traffic. Driving dangerously comes in the form of driving in the wrong lane, getting close to (but not hitting) other cars, catching air, drifting around turns, and so on. When you pull such risky maneuvers, you're rewarded with boost. But the quickest way to fill your boost meter in a regular race is to make your opponents crash. Takedowns, as you might imagine from the game's subtitle, are a major part of Burnout 3. When you knock another car out, not only is your boost meter filled, but also it's extended up to a maximum of four times its original size. The downside is that you'll expose yourself to some pretty dangerous situations to earn all this boost, and crashing will eliminate much of your boost, chop off one of your bonus meter segments if you have any, and, more than likely, cause you to fall back one or two spots in a race. For an easy-to-play racing game, Burnout 3 actually gives you a lot to consider.    The other big gameplay mechanic in Burnout 3 makes the crashes much more exciting and interactive. When you crash, you can drop the game into a slow-motion mode called impact time, which makes for a very interesting and even innovative dynamic where the pacing of the game can drastically shift for a few moments if you crash. While this slow-motion look at cars getting mangled is beautiful in and of itself, you can actually make light adjustments to your car's trajectory using the left analog stick or d-pad, which is something the game calls ""aftertouch."" By applying aftertouch when you crash, not only can you stack your car into trucks, tankers, and other cars--just for the heck of it--but also you can attempt to knock into your opponents during a race. If you're successful, you'll earn an aftertouch takedown, which refills your boost meter and prevents you from losing any bonus meter segments. Basically, it functions as a recovery move. The fact that Burnout 3 makes crashing--which is usually the most undesirable part of competition in a racing game--a completely enjoyable part of the game is remarkable. Burnout 3's crash mode has also been completely redesigned to take advantage of aftertouch, so you'll have to do more than just wreck into the right spot this time around. Instead you'll need to maneuver your vehicle's carcass around for best results. It's a strange and surprisingly well-thought-out addition to the game.    There are several different types of events in Burnout 3 that build on the basic concepts of driving dangerously and making the most of your wrecks. Many of them can be played on their own or in an offline or online multiplayer setting, but a few of them only really come up during the game's world tour mode. The most standard mode of them all is the single race. A single race puts you and five opponents on the track, and, as the name suggests, you race. Some tracks feature multiple laps, while others are long enough to be one-lap affairs. The game has a good variety of environments, and multiple tracks are set up in each one by using the old Ridge Racer-style system of opening up certain paths while closing others to make the most of each section of road. The career mode occasionally strings three races together into a grand prix event, where you'll earn points at the end of each race based on your finishing position. There's definitely a good amount of variety here.   Burnout 3 delivers a sense of speed that other driving games can't even touch.  Crash mode returns to Burnout 3 with the same goal as in Burnout 2--to create the largest, most expensive pileup possible. The crash junctions still have a puzzle-like quality to them in that you'll have to figure out the most efficient crash spot in each level. However, with the addition of aftertouch and a series of on-track power-ups, the mode feels totally different from how it did in Burnout 2. Controlling your crash brings a lot of depth to the mode. Some power-ups are merely cash bonuses, whereas others are score multipliers, which are very important. Also, you won't have infinite boost right out of the gate here. You'll have to pick up a boost icon, at which point you'll boost whether you like it or not.    Crash mode also benefits from a new function called the ""crashbreaker."" This basically lets you make your car spectacularly explode on command. However, you can only trigger it after a certain number of cars have become involved in the wreck. There are also instant crashbreaker power-ups on the track that, as you might expect, cause an instant crashbreaker, effectively letting you blow up twice in the same level. This makes the basic progression much deeper than simply wrecking you car and watching the fun unfold. Now, a common crash junction has you getting the boost icon, maneuvering to wreck into something big, then aftertouching over to a score multiplier or other bonus. Once you reach the crashbreaker threshold, pop that sucker, and use your second wind to aftertouch over to both some cars you may have missed and another power-up. And if you're really looking to break stuff, there's an instant crashbreaker power-up. The junctions get pretty elaborate, and you really have to think on your feet to cause the biggest wrecks. The results tend to be immensely satisfying in ways that are unique to Burnout 3 in particular, since its crash mode is so bizarre and yet so good.   There are also a few different multiplayer crash options to choose from. You can play two-player games online or offline, and you can either cooperate to cause an even bigger crash, or you can work against each other to see who can cause the biggest pileup. The party crash mode--which is the game's only online mode that goes all the way up to eight players--is a simple score competition where each player crashes in the same junction, and then scores are compared. At the end of each round, the most damaging crash is replayed for all to see. This is an interesting mode, online, but since you aren't exactly interacting with the other players beyond voice chatting during your wrecks, it's not the most impressive mode the game has to offer.  The game's six-player online support works very well. The other modes in the game are standard variants on the basic format. You'll face off against one other car in a race that, if won, unlocks the opposing vehicle for your own use. The burning lap is a solo race against the clock that gives you the maximum boost meter length and essentially challenges you to boost your way around the entire track to meet or beat some pretty challenging lap times. Road rage gives you a time limit and a never-ending stream of opponent cars. The gold medal is won by achieving a specific number of takedowns before time--or before your banged-up car--expires. Online, you can play road rage in teams, where the blue team tries to escape while the red team, often with infinite boost, tries to catch up to take the drivers out before a certain number of miles have been logged. Eliminator races are five lap races that disqualify the last-place car at the end of every lap, making the final lap a one-on-one showdown.  Tying all of the single-player modes together is the world tour mode, which is essentially a large map full of different events. This career-type mode is good at letting you do what you want to do, since you'll usually have a great deal of races available at any given time. Single races eventually lead to grand prix events, burning laps, road rage, crash junctions, eliminator races, face-offs, and so on. The goal in each event is to earn a medal. You can earn bronze medals and still progress through the game, but to unlock the most cars and events, you'll want to take the time to go for the gold. The world tour mode is very good at throwing a lot of unlockable content at you right off the bat, though as you progress, the new cars start to dry up a bit.  The world tour mode is fantastic at ramping up the difficulty at a manageable pace. The first set of cars you get--the compact series--already feels like its cars go incredibly fast. But at this speed, beginners will still feel like they have just enough time to react to little things like, say, an oncoming semi truck. Then you'll move up to the muscle series, which is a little faster and looser but is still manageable--once you get used to the upgrade. These performance boosts keep coming until you hit the super series, which is faster still--and is significantly harder than the early portions of the game. But since you've been working your way up through the ranks little by little, the difficulty never feels too hard.  Your computer-controlled opponents add to the mayhem quite well. Usually, at the start of a race, they'll drive in a fairly passive manner. But they don't take kindly to aggressive drivers such as you. If you knock one of them around, the icon above his or her car will change color, eventually becoming a deep red, at which point the driver will be out for blood--yours. Angered artificial intelligence will knock you around, attempt to force you into walls or oncoming traffic, and generally make your life more difficult (just as a human player would). But it's also to your advantage to fight with your foes, because the boost bonuses are significant. Additionally, the races are kept challenging by AI that is designed to keep races close. While most games use this ""rubber band"" effect in a noticeably negative way, here it works very well. In fact, Burnout 3 wouldn't be as intense if you could sustain a comfortable lead. You'll occasionally pull ahead of the pack and get into a situation where you can crash once or twice without losing the lead, but for the most part, you need to stay on your toes and race well to win. This works in reverse too, so it's possible for you to come back from worst to first, provided you're driving in a risky enough fashion to earn sufficient boost to catch up to the pack.  While the crashes are flashy and spectacular, the most impressive part of Burnout 3 is its pure sense of speed. This is something that most other racing games simply can't seem to get right--at least not compared with this one. In Burnout 3, racing at 150mph feels about as dangerous as it should. Boosting in a super series car will get you up around the 200mph mark, which feels ridiculously fast, especially when you factor in the relative speeds of oncoming drivers. The sense of speed combines with things like oncoming traffic to make Burnout 3 a truly white-knuckle experience. If all games could maintain this level of intensity from start to finish, avid game players would be going gray well before their times.  With a large collection of unlockable cars and events, Burnout 3 will keep players busy for some time. Burnout 3 has online support for up to eight players on both the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox, though when it comes to actually putting all the players into one race, your maximum limit is six contestants. Most of the game's modes--from single race, to a variety of crash modes, to team road rage--are available for play online. The game has an extensive set of leaderboards that will rank you in a variety of categories, and you're able to restrict races to specific ranks or series of cars when creating a game just to keep things fair. The best thing that can be said about the online support in Burnout 3 is that it works very, very well. If one player has a particularly laggy connection, you might see that car skip around the course a bit, but for the most part, the game handles all six drivers--as well as a full complement of traffic to dodge--amazingly. Notably, the slow-motion portion of crash aftertouch is removed when you're playing online, which gives online play a slightly different feel.  Both the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game support voice chat and have ""quickmatch"" options to get you into a race quickly. Xbox Live owners might be puzzled by some of the EA-specific modifications that the publisher has made to the standard Xbox Live feature set, but what really matters is that you can find a game and get into a game with very little trouble. The game is playable with players from around the world, though those with NTSC copies of the game won't be able to play against PAL users due to the speed and timing changes inherent in making a game for both standards. Just like in the world tour mode, you'll earn points for your online performance, and these go toward unlockable cars.  You'll earn cars in different ways throughout Burnout 3, but perhaps the most satisfying way to earn them is by reaching specific score plateaus. The game keeps track of how many takedowns you've pulled against your opponents and how much monetary damage you've caused in crash mode--and it also tracks a global Burnout score that you get for driving skillfully, crashing stylishly, and so on. Each of these different counters will get you a car from time to time, and the points can come in whether you're online or off. Some of the higher-ticket crash vehicles--like the fire truck--cost a lot of money, so you won't see these during your first weekend of play. These unlockables, combined with the lengthy world tour mode, give Burnout 3 a fantastic amount of replay value. When you add in the online support and how well it's all tied together, you have a driving game that you won't be putting down anytime soon--and not just because of its outstanding gameplay.  The sounds of driving are incredible, though the lame DJ gets in the way. When it comes to graphics, Burnout 3's main focus is on its sense of speed, which is achieved by an extremely fast frame rate and some impressive special effects, such as those for motion blur. But the game also has an astonishing particle-effects system that makes the crashes look better than ever. You'll see sparks flying off of your car when you grind it against something, large chunks of metal fly off of the car when you crash, and the game really looks superb from top to bottom. The car models look really great. Even though they aren't the most detailed car models in the business and they aren't real cars, considering how fast most of them fly by, you'll hardly notice. The game's frame rate stays surprisingly solid in both versions of the game, which really helps sell the sense of speed. Burnout 3 has a pretty incredible physics model working behind the scenes that makes the darkly humorous crashes worth watching every single time. Both games have support for progressive scan and 16:9 displays. Both versions look awesome on their respective platforms, but when you compare the two, the Xbox version wins the fight easily.  It's worth noting that with the Burnout series moving from the now-defunct Acclaim over to Electronic Arts, some of EA's standard touches have made it into the game in the form of product placement. You'll definitely notice ads for EA's upcoming games on the sides of almost every course, along with an occasional cologne ad. The ads stick out a bit too much and become annoying almost immediately. Considering how great the backdrops in each track look, it's a bit disappointing to see them marred by advertising. You might also be frustrated that when you play the game's main modes for the first time, you'll have to sit through a few minutes of unskippable training video. It's nicely produced, but the game itself is easy to get into, so the tutorial should have been skippable. The audio has a few similar touches to it that aren't entirely welcomed.  Make no mistake. Burnout 3's audio is great. Actually, the sounds of driving, from the roar of your engine, to the rush of wind as you pass oncoming traffic, to the loud thunks of your car shifting gears, to the bass-heavy whoosh that kicks in when you hit your boost, are incredible. However, these sounds are counterbalanced by a few negatives. The game is missing a few key noises that would have added to the sense of realism. For instance, you really don't hear much when you scrape your car against a guard rail. It would seem that the obvious shower of sparks would be accompanied by some sort of grinding noise. But the real culprits are the game's announcer and soundtrack. Burnout 3's soundtrack is treated like a radio station called Crash FM. The DJ, a knucklehead alt-rock jock called Striker, is merely annoying to begin with, but when you hear him repeat the same handful of phrases time and time again, you'll do the right thing and turn him off in the game's options menu.  The soundtrack is full of a bunch of populist indie rock and pop-punk that might be doing well on the radio these days, but the tempo and style of the music doesn't necessarily mesh with very-high-speed driving. On the Xbox, you'll fortunately be able to use the custom soundtrack feature to fix this to your liking. On the PS2, you're out of luck unless you want to just turn the music down entirely. Considering how awesome the sounds of driving are in the game, this actually isn't a bad choice. Finally, the Xbox version supports Dolby Digital 5.1, while the PlayStation 2 only supports Pro Logic II. The end result is that bass effects--such as the sound of boosting--are much clearer and deeper on the Xbox.  Anyone with a pulse and a penchant for thrills will love Burnout 3. It's also worth mentioning that the loading times in Burnout 3 are a little longer than you'd probably like them to be. The Xbox is much faster than the noticeably poky PlayStation 2 version, but you'll still be waiting a bit longer than you'd like, regardless of which version you're playing. That's mostly because you won't want to be waiting at all before your next race or crash.  Unless your only idea of driving-game enjoyment involves playing the strictest of simulations, Burnout 3: Takedown is the driving game for you. It's instantly accessible, yet it has more than enough challenge to it to keep you busy for a very long time, even if you don't intend to play the game online. Furthermore, it's simply one of the most exciting, action-packed games to come along in a long time, regardless of genre. So even if driving games aren't normally your thing, if you're a thrill-seeker (at least in game terms), this offering has them in spades. Burnout 3: Takedown is an amazing achievement that anyone with a pulse will probably love.   Editor's note 09/09/04: The review originally stated that the PlayStation 2 version of Burnout 3 did not support progressive scan displays, which is incorrect. GameSpot regrets the error. 
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343,Madden NFL 2005 ,9," Madden NFL 2005 is still Madden. That is to say, it's another superb game of football that continues Madden's long legacy as one of the best in the business.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/7/5/2210875-box_madden05.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2005-review/1900-6104310/,pos,"
 As the best-selling football franchise on the market for an umpteen number of years, Madden NFL is a name that is known by the masses as representative of some of the best football you can get on a video game console. Last year's Madden NFL 2004, in particular, is revered as one of the best installments EA has ever brought out--which ultimately makes it a tough act to follow. For this year's edition, Madden NFL 2005, defense is the name of the game. Nearly all of the additions and tweaks made to this year's game fall squarely into the realm of defensive football, and they're all great new features. The downside to this high emphasis on one particular area of the game seems to be that the remaining aspects of the game (of which there are many) are generally only slightly improved or altered, if at all. In many ways, Madden 2005 is just a bit too much like last year's Madden for comfort--but it's still a truly excellent game of football all around.  Madden NFL 2005 is finally here, and it absolutely does the Madden name proud.  If you've ever felt that Madden was simply a one-sided piece of pigskin in favor of offensive play, Madden 2005 changes all of that. The additions made to the defensive side of the ball are plentiful and all superb. The first and most entertaining addition is the new ""hit stick."" Essentially, when on defense, tapping the right control stick in the direction of your opponent will lay a nasty hit on him. What the hit stick translates into is context-sensitive tackling that you can control. If you're just running alongside your opponent and tap it without getting much of a head of steam, then you'll just kind of shove him. Get up a good bout of speed, and you will absolutely waylay the poor ball carrier. Using the hit stick properly will also result in more fumbles and dropped passes for the offense. However, you have to be careful, because missing with the stick leads to a supremely missed tackle, which consequently gives your opponent an easy way to dodge past you. While this sounds like it could be a little over-complicated if not done right, in this case it is done right. As a result, using the stick becomes an immensely fun way to play the defensive side of the ball.  Another big-time addition is the new defensive hot route system. Similar to the offensive hot routes, you can now redesign a defensive player's assignment at the touch of a button. Want to push a linebacker into deeper zone coverage or bring a safety in for the blitz? Simply highlight the player, and tap the right analog stick in the desired direction. You can also give better pre-snap assignments to your defensive backs now. Individual presses and pullbacks on receivers can be performed, and you can also lock a corner on to a specific receiver, thus preventing mismatches. Finally, you can now also adjust how a defensive lineman attacks the offensive line without actually having to shift your whole line. What all of this amounts to is a far more user-configurable defense that actually makes playing defense much more enjoyable and strategic. The strategy works beautifully, since the defensive artificial intelligence is generally very, very good, and it performs your changes perfectly. If you're adept at defensive playcalling and are able to make good reads, you should be able to dominate on defense--at least against the CPU.  On the flip side of things, Madden NFL 2005's offensive game isn't really all that different from Madden NFL 2004, save for a few, small changes. For one, you can now make formation shifts on the line. Formation shifts are essentially audibles that don't change the play. You can move your running back out of the backfield and into a better position for the reception, or you can overload one side of the field with receivers. You'll also notice some new option routes for receivers in this year's game. Option routes are typically highlighted on the playcalling screen and feature dotted lines coming off of a curl route, for example. These lines indicate possible directions that a receiver may run, depending on that receiver's assessment of the current coverage scheme. The intelligence of the receivers who are running these routes seems to vary depending on the quality of the player, but, as a whole, the feature seemed to work well.  However, aside from these few offensive changes, which ultimately don't amount to a whole lot more than nice, little touches, the offensive game feels almost exactly the same as last year's Madden. This isn't a bad thing, by any means, but what it does mean is that anyone who played last year's version of the game shouldn't have a lick of trouble simply blowing up the game offensively on the default difficulty. All-pro and All-Madden difficulties are something of another story, but in actuality, experienced Madden fans still shouldn't have a ton of trouble with either of them. Some of the old Madden money plays are still just as effective as ever, and there really isn't a whole lot of new ""stuff"" to get used to this time around. Granted, the AI defense has more tricks up its sleeve now, what with all the new defensive hot routes and shifts and such, so there is that to be taken into consideration.  The changes made to defense, which include the defensive hot routes and the new hit stick, are absolutely phenomenal.  On the features side of things, Madden NFL 2005 is as robust as it has ever been, though not all of the preexisting modes have seen too much in the way of changes. We'll start with the franchise mode, which has easily seen the most work. The big, new presentational change to the mode is the addition of sports radio host Tony Bruno. Billed as EA Sports Radio, the Bruno-hosted show actually plays at the start of each week, and by listening to the show, you'll hear interviews with players and coaches, hear Tony take calls from irate and occasionally idiotic fans, and hear little tidbits about things happening in the NFL. For example, we encountered one scenario where quarterback Mark Brunell was benched early on in the season in favor of Patrick Ramsey. Of course, Brunell was not pleased with the decision, which Tony was quick to report. The dialogue is occasionally a little jittery when Bruno discusses specific stuff related to your league scenarios, but the more generalized bits, like the phone calls, are pretty entertaining.   The Tony Bruno stuff is actually tied in to a larger franchise feature called storyline central. Storyline central is essentially your way of keeping track of media coverage of the NFL and the morale-based grumblings of your players. There's a newspaper feature where you can look at both the national and local papers to see what the big stories are. The local papers are actually licensed after real, big city papers. So, for example, if you're the New England Patriots, you'll be reading the Boston Globe. There is also a new e-mail system that lets you read e-mails from your staff, players, and agents. Players will usually thank you for opportunities or complain when things aren't going their ways. Agents will basically do the same.  Sports radio host Tony Bruno makes an appearance in this year's franchise mode.  Your players' morale is centered primarily around playing time versus rating, it seems. If you've got a good player who is riding the bench, he'll quickly become despondent. Doing things like shifting player positions around can also adversely affect morale if a player doesn't want to be moved from his current position. Furthermore, losses of big-star players will pretty much bring your entire team into a funk if you aren't able to find a suitable replacement. Some players also just seem to have a natural tendency to become problem children, such as the always entertaining Terrell Owens and the periodically whiny Ty Law. Player personalities also play into contract negotiations, because sometimes teams will have certain intangibles that simply appeal more to a certain player, like preferable weather or a level of prestige that is just that much more attractive. All told, the storyline features seem to fairly accurately represent the sort of media hoopla and personality-driven drama that surrounds the NFL year after year, and though not everything it has to offer is super-useful, it's very cool nonetheless.  The draft is another area that has been overhauled. You'll get offers for trades during the draft itself, and you'll be able to scout up to 15 different prospects during the combine, with varying degrees of scouting report quality depending on how much time you spend with each prospect. The one nice thing about the draft is that your players' morale will actually be affected based on who you draft. So if you've got a quarterback who isn't performing wonderfully as a starter, and you draft a top rated QB, his morale will go to the dumps.  Aside from these changes and the addition of a basic practice mode, there really isn't much else new in the franchise mode. Owner mode is back, and, aside from a few, little tweaks--like more graphs and adjustable options--it is largely the same feature it was last year. Trade and free-agent-signing logic throughout the CPU-controlled league is a little better, and player development seems to be about as accurate as it's ever been. All told, this year's franchise mode isn't a gigantic step forward, but it is excellent enough to provide you with hours of team management bliss.  Another mode addition to Madden NFL 2005 is actually sort of an offshoot of the minicamp mode. Essentially, EA Tiburon has added a pair of minigames, one of which is actually a score-based version of the running back minicamp game. This is a competition for one to two players where you will each have a turn at playing offense and defense. The goal on offense is to score as many rushing touchdowns as possible within a certain amount of time, while on defense, you must prevent touchdowns and try to lay down some big hits that force fumbles for bonus points. The team at the end with the most points wins. The other minigame is called two-minute drill. Here, you have two minutes on offense to score as many points as you can. Once that's done, the other team will conversely have two minutes of its own, and it's up to you to stop them on defense. You earn points offensively through big completions, runs, and scores, while on defense, you earn points by dishing out some big hits and by breaking up passes. While these games don't amount to much more than a simple distraction, they're pretty fun.  Player morale is something you'll have to monitor in your franchise, because too many troublemakers can lead to a team-wide plunge in motivation.  The last mode addition made to Madden NFL 2005 is an equally unnecessary, but still cool, little inclusion. This new feature is the create-a-fan mode, where you can create and design fans that will show up during in-game cutscenes. There is a fairly wide variety of options to choose from, so you can create fans that range from the mildly obsessive to the out and out crazy--like those lunatics who don Viking helmets and big, old Legion of Doom spiked shoulder pads. The one downside to the mode is that, aside from the cool design stuff, you can't really do anything else with your fans. They always pretty much just run through the same scant few cutscene animations each time, and you can't do anything to make them particularly stand out beyond their visual appearances. Still, if you're one of those people with a special place in the heart for the truly insane football fans who paint their bare chests the colors of a team and stand out in 20-below-zero weather to support it, this is a nice feature.  In terms of online features, Madden NFL 2005 marks the debut of Madden on Xbox Live. For anyone who has immediate concerns about the online issues found in last month's NCAA Football 2005, we're pleased to report that we ran into none of the same problems while playing Madden. In fact, both the PS2 and Xbox versions performed just fine under normal playing conditions, and we barely even ran into any lag. All stats and records seemed to track perfectly. As far as features go, most of the same stuff you'd expect from online football is front and center here. You can join EA's setup lobbies on both systems (or just do the quick match, optimatch thing on Xbox Live), and you can create and join various matches and tournaments. New to the online mode is the rushing attack minigame, which works just as it does offline, so your point scores make up the leaderboard statistics. You'll also be able to track your online career in your EA profile, which is a little like ESPN NFL 2K5's VIP profile system, except that you can't download other people's profiles.   The other addition to Madden's online component is one that came, quite literally, at the 11th hour. Madden NFL 2005 will support league play. These leagues are tied in to a new Premium Pass service EA is touting, of which members of said service can also take part in specialized tournaments, exclusive leaderboards, and message boards. Additionally, members can actually gain special medals. While Madden's leagues won't have the live rosters that are present in ESPN's football offering for this year, you'll still be able to use up to 32 teams in a league, and you can design your own teams and playoff schedules. Of course, none of this is up and running yet, but if all goes according to plan, it should make an already enjoyable online system a whole lot better.  Madden NFL 2005 is online for both the PS2 and Xbox, and league play will be included on both.  While that's pretty much it for the Xbox and GameCube versions of Madden--as far as features go--the PlayStation 2 version does have a little something extra; that is, it does if you happen to pick up the special Collector's Edition of the game. The PS2-exclusive Collector's Edition of Madden 2005 boasts a number of additional features, including three classic Madden games, a trivia challenge mode, and a few bonus video features. The three classic games consist of a pair of PlayStation-era titles (from different ends of the console's life span) and one 16-bit-era game. We don't identify these games specifically, because the game itself doesn't identify them by name. Rather, they're opaquely titled Madden Vintage, Madden Retro, and Madden Classic, respectively. Each of the games has up-to-date rosters, and the PlayStation games even include the modern commentary.  While the addition of the classic games and the trivia mode are nice and all, they aren't so remarkable that you'll simply have to run out to get the Collector's Edition or anything. The classic games are the sort of thing that you're likely to pick up and play once or twice, enjoy for exactly that amount of time, and then never touch again. The same goes for the trivia, because, while there are more than plenty of different questions, it is, after all, just trivia. None of the video stuff is especially engaging, and unless you're an absolutely diehard Madden enthusiast, you really won't want to watch it. In fact, that last statement really sums up the whole Collector's Edition: If you're a diehard Madden fan, you'll like it. If you aren't, you don't need it.  Graphically, Madden NFL 2005 looks pretty much like, well, Madden. The Madden series hasn't really made any significant leaps forward in visual design in recent years, and 2005 isn't much different. Yes, things are improved. Some of the new tackling animations are especially awesome and give you a pretty incredible sensation of how hard the hit is actually being delivered. Other animations, however, don't really look all that different from last year's game. In fact, a few animation glitches do rear their ugly heads from time to time, such as when some rather nasty clipping presents itself during between-play cutscenes and when runners occasionally get hung up on offensive linemen when trying to hit holes, thus causing themselves to vibrate a bit. The player models have basically the same sort of generic look that they've always had. Little details, like player jerseys and body builds, have been improved quite a bit, but the faces all sort of have the same glassy-eyed look. Some of the more marquee players definitely look like their real-life counterparts, facially, but a lot of other players could have stood for a bit more detail in this area. On a more positive note, the different arenas, playing fields, and such all look fantastic. Each arena is spectacularly detailed, from the many ads and banners that line the walls, right down to the turf or grass.  Madden NFL 2005 also delivers a presentational improvement over last year's game. Everything, in terms of menus and stat screens and so on, all looks great and is extremely easy to navigate. The in-game stuff isn't quite as impressive, because the replays aren't typically all that exciting. Furthermore, there isn't much to the various cutscenes that present themselves from time to time, save for a bit of cheering and gallivanting here and there. The commentary is still a weak spot for the series, because neither John Madden nor Al Michaels is especially enjoyable to listen to. All around, their dialogue is pretty wooden and repetitive. As mentioned before, the Tony Bruno stuff is quite cool, though it isn't quite up to the level of ESPN NFL 2K5's TV-styled presentation. It still holds its own, though.  The remaining portions of Madden NFL 2005's audio are similarly unspectacular. Most of the in-game sound effects are quite solid, though if you were to listen to Madden NFL 2004 and Madden NFL 2005 side by side, it's unlikely you'd take note of any major differences between the two. Once again, EA has trotted out a number of licensed artists as part of its EA Trax service, which includes the likes of Green Day, Franz Ferdinand, Midtown, The Hives, and Faith No More. While the songs themselves are all perfectly fine, they don't always feel quite right within the scope of a football game.  The graphical differences between this year's Madden and last year's are pretty subtle--and there aren't a whole lot of them.  Between the three console versions of Madden NFL 2005, this year's iteration manages to bridge the gap a bit more between the PS2 and Xbox versions, and, subsequently, it also manages to leave the GameCube version a little more out in the cold. Control-wise, the PS2 and Xbox versions are probably the most natural feeling. While the GameCube controller might feel a little strange to anyone who doesn't typically play sports games on the Cube, if you are used to playing sports games on the Cube, you shouldn't have any problem with it. Graphically, the three versions are pretty predictable in that the GameCube version looks a tad better than the PS2 version, and the Xbox version looks a bit better than the GameCube version. With the addition of online play in the Xbox version of the game--coupled with the slightly better graphics than its console counterparts--the Xbox offering is definitely the one to get, unless you're really jonesing for the features included in the PS2 Collector's Edition, in which case you'll need to go with the PS2 version of the game.  When all is said and done, Madden NFL 2005 is still Madden. That is to say, it's another superb game of football that continues Madden's long legacy as one of the best in the business. The defensive changes made to the gameplay are likely going to set the standard for football games in the years to come, and the additions to the franchise mode easily make the mode the best of its kind. It's unfortunate that the other portions of Madden NFL 2005 aren't quite as improved over last year's installment in the series as these key areas are, but that small quibble shouldn't stop any Madden fan from running out to purchase yet another highly accomplished game of football in Madden NFL 2005. 



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'additions', 'franchise', 'mode', 'easily', 'make', 'mode', 'best', 'kind', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'unfortunate', 'portions', 'Madden', 'NFL', '2005', ""n't"", 'quite', 'improved', 'last', 'year', ""'s"", 'installment', 'series', 'key', 'areas', ',', 'small', 'quibble', ""n't"", 'stop', 'Madden', 'fan', 'running', 'purchase', 'yet', 'another', 'highly', 'accomplished', 'game', 'football', 'Madden', 'NFL', '2005', '.']",0.14086734314007038,0.4756548727003271
344,Sammy Sosa's Softball Slam  ,3.3, The sheer lack of quality throughout the game keeps Sammy Sosa's Softball Slam from being anything interesting.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/4/9/0/2212490-bxo_ssss.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sammy-sosas-softball-slam-review/1900-2549377/,neg,"
In the copycat world of sports video games, it's unusual to find a game concept that's never been done before. So it's something of a wonder that the preferred sport of the bearded, pot-bellied, blue-collar American is just now making an entry into the video-game market. But even though the game may deserve some credit for originality, the sheer lack of quality throughout the game keeps Sammy Sosa's Softball Slam from being anything interesting. Sammy Sosa's Softball Slam makes an over-the-top arcade-style approach to softball, portraying it as the silly, somewhat outrageous ""sport"" it is. There are no professional players here - just beer-guzzling guys and well-endowed women out in the park for a little fun. The game does a good job of staying with this theme, as fielders will often flub catches, basemen will overthrow their bases, and runners will occasionally plow over the ball carriers. The gameplay is just about as simple as you could possibly get - when you're pitching you can choose from one of four pitches, and when you're batting you can choose from one of three swings. There are none of the complex ball-angling or pitch-prediction techniques found in most other baseball games on the market - just a simple single-button hit-the-ball-when-it's-over-the-plate technique that gets boring pretty quick. Once the ball is hit, the computer switches you to the nearest fielder and shows you exactly where the ball is going to land with a huge circular icon - stand anywhere underneath it, and you've got a great chance of catching it. Tossing the ball to the bases is pretty intuitive, as Softball Slam uses the diamond button-for-a-base scheme so common in other baseball games. Still, playing the game really isn't that fun, as the overly simplistic nature gives you almost no control over your players. The addition of flaming homeruns and power throws - throws that light on fire and are faster but less accurate - really do nothing to help the gameplay. The first thing you'll notice about this game is just how ugly it is. Simply put, the graphics are way below par - not only is the animation of all the characters extremely choppy, but the textures and backgrounds are pathetic. There are almost no shading and lighting effects, and the characters look extremely polygonal. The backgrounds are both blurry and pixilated, and making out exactly what's going on while you're fielding is sometimes difficult. On top of that, your batters will often go into a practice animation or taunt in the middle of the pitch, only to suddenly jump into the swing animation when you press the button. This effect not only looks ridiculous, but it also makes it that much harder to judge the pitch. The sound is really bad too. Not only does the game feature an overobnoxious announcer who unsuccessfully tries to get you into the game by screaming things like ""It's wild! It's crazy!"" when you get a base hit, but the taunts from the stands are enough to make you go insane. You're guaranteed to hear ""Hey, your shoe's untied"" at least twice for every batter, making this game infinitely better without the soundtrack. There's no in-game music, and the ambient sound effects really make you wish they had put some sort of music in the game.While the game offers you the option of creating your own team, the options are extremely limited. When playing a coed league, you'll have to have an equal number of guys and gals on your team, and you won't be able to change their order. The options that it does give you are pretty ridiculous - you'll be able to change your players' name, size, weight, and a few of their stats, but you won't be able to change their actual faces or hair color. The edit-player mode also features a ""transform to Sammy Sosa"" button, which, when pressed, transforms the character into Sosa as if he were some sort of fleshy Optimus Prime. Unfortunately, once you press the button you can't change back, meaning Sammy's now stuck on your team. Also, while the mode uses a point system to measure stats on each of the different players, it doesn't regulate your spending, meaning you can simply pump all the stats up to their max without giving it a second thought. All in all, the edit-team options are so limited and tedious that it's not really worth spending the time to use them. While it's nice that more arcade-styled takes on regular sports are showing up on consoles, Sammy Sosa's Softball Slam is a poor example of how games like this should be done. This game simply screams mediocrity, as almost every aspect of this game is substandard. While casual gamers might want to give this game a rental, those looking to experience a little softball action should simply go outside and do it the old-fashioned way.
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345,Slamscape ,3.3, It's theoretically possible that Slamscape is someone's idea of fun.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/2/2/2/2216222-eric_kelso.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/slamscape-review/1900-2549310/,neg,"
Be suspicious of a game that hypes its soundtrack more than its gameplay (or even its graphics for that matter). Let's face it, if cool tunes are the most noteworthy feature of a game, why bother? What's even worse is when the hyped soundtrack is full of wretched MIDI-esque tunes as bad as the game - like in Viacom New Media's Slamscape. The result: Slamscape is like some bizarre cross between a cyber-pinball game and Twisted Metal, but nowhere near as cool as the latter. Slamscape's graphics are sharp and look good, though the polygon objects seem a bit crude, and the impressive frame rate does make the game move quickly and smoothly. Explosions are particularly impressive. However, even these nice graphics can't hide the game's overriding problem: control. Players pilot a hovercraft/bulldozer hybrid, and have to plow their way through four big, utterly flat levels (filled with goofy-looking polygon baddies) in search of glowing balls of energy. The vehicle features all the precision handling of a superball - bouncing chaotically off anything it hits and slavishly following every whim of inertia. In addition to the awkward movement, it's not possible to strafe (which players will yearn to do after just a few minutes). This makes the vehicle's weapons nearly useless, and players will be reduced to bouncing off of the tops of obstacles for their main play tactic. The result? A game that gets very annoying, very quickly. The game has a strange shield power-up system, wherein players collect energy spikes (of varying levels of strength) which attach themselves to the rear of the craft. When fully powered, players slam around the cyber-world with a bunch of nested spikes shoved up their, uh, afterburners. Other power-ups include better weapons, a clamping jaw landmine, and a turboboost. Once the novelty wears off, however, players won't find much here to hold their interest. It's theoretically possible that Slamscape is someone's idea of fun. But with competition so stiff in the action category, this game doesn't even come close to being notable or even particularly entertaining. And even though the CD contains a couple rocking music videos by God Lives Underwater, they aren't enough to make the game worth the purchase.
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346,Space Invaders ,3.3," Space Invaders is a game different enough to cancel any feelings of nostalgia, yet it isn't good enough to stand on its own.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/2/6/2211326-a2600_spaceinvaders_au.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/space-invaders-review/1900-2545241/,neg,"
The year was 1978. A simple, black-and-white game came out that would set the standard for shooters for years to come. That game was Space Invaders. Not only did it spawn a few sequels of its own (including a pinball machine), but other game makers quickly cloned it and made improvements to its gameplay. Activision is continuing its big retro kick with an updated version of Taito's classic. But can a game as simple as this succeed in today's market? (Hint: The answer isn't yes.) This new version of Space Invaders follows the basic concept of the old versions: Rows of small alien ships move from side to side across the screen. The ships drop down a row every time they reach either edge of the screen. If they land, you die. If they shoot you, you die. While the original Space Invaders stuck to this one type of level, later games - like the arcade game Super Space Invaders '91 - added weapon power-ups, shields, different types of alien ships, bonus stages, and bosses into the mix. Activision's game follows SSI '91's lead very closely. It also tries to inject a bit more plot into the game via opening and closing cutscenes. Also, the game takes you from the outer outposts of Pluto all the way back to Earth. Each planet has ten levels, the last of which is a boss level. A new alien ship is introduced in each world. Some of them shoot diagonally, some of them you must hit twice to kill, and some dive at you after they've been hit. The power-up system works off these different aliens. To earn a special shot, you must hit four of the same aliens in a row. Each alien type delivers a different special shot. This gives the game an almost puzzle-game-type feel at times, since you'll want to earn a special shot, then use it to kill four more aliens, which will give you another special shot, and so on. The game's biggest problem is its lack of difficulty. Anyone with a bit of shooter skill should be able to whip through the entire game in less than 90 minutes. The bosses are occasionally difficult, but you'll have built up so many extra lives by that point that it won't really matter. The original Space Invaders is also hidden in the game. The graphics are quite boring, and they don't really give the game a retro feel at all. Other than one of the end-level bosses, which was taken from the original Space Invaders cabinet art, none of the design in the game bears any resemblance to the original game. Also, the music and sound don't have any ties to the original thumping noise of the 1978 classic.  Space Invaders is a game different enough to cancel any feelings of nostalgia, yet it isn't good enough to stand on its own. If classic games are what you're after, get a pack of classic games, or better yet, find a big arcade that still cares about the old stuff. This pretender is no substitute for the original.
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347,Space Invaders ,3.3," If classic games are what you're after, get a pack of classic games, or better yet, find a big arcade that still cares about the old stuff.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/2/6/2211326-a2600_spaceinvaders_au.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/space-invaders-review/1900-2549412/,neg,"
The year was 1978. A simple, black-and-white game came out that would set the standard for shooters for years to come. That game was Space Invaders. Not only did it spawn a few sequels of its own (including a pinball machine), but other game makers quickly cloned it and made improvements to its gameplay. Activision is continuing its big retro kick with an updated version of Taito's classic. But can a game as simple as this succeed in today's market? (Hint: The answer isn't yes.) This new version of Space Invaders follows the basic concept of the old versions: Rows of small alien ships move from side to side across the screen. The ships drop down a row every time they reach either edge of the screen. If they land, you die. If they shoot you, you die. While the original Space Invaders stuck to this one type of level, later games - like the arcade game Super Space Invaders '91 - added weapon power-ups, shields, different types of alien ships, bonus stages, and bosses into the mix. Activision's game follows SSI '91's lead very closely. It also tries to inject a bit more plot into the game via opening and closing cutscenes. Also, the game takes you from the outer outposts of Pluto all the way back to Earth. Each planet has ten levels, the last of which is a boss level. A new alien ship is introduced in each world. Some of them shoot diagonally, some of them you must hit twice to kill, and some dive at you after they've been hit. The power-up system works off these different aliens. To earn a special shot, you must hit four of the same aliens in a row. Each alien type delivers a different special shot. This gives the game an almost puzzle-game-type feel at times, since you'll want to earn a special shot, then use it to kill four more aliens, which will give you another special shot, and so on. The game's biggest problem is its lack of difficulty. Anyone with a bit of shooter skill should be able to whip through the entire game in less than 90 minutes. The bosses are occasionally difficult, but you'll have built up so many extra lives by that point that it won't really matter. Beating all of the game's 80 levels will, just as you'd expect, unlock the original Space Invaders. The graphics are quite boring, and they don't really give the game a retro feel at all. Other than one of the end-level bosses, which was taken from the original Space Invaders cabinet art, none of the design in the game bears any resemblance to the original game. Also, the music and sound don't have any ties to the original thumping noise of the 1978 classic.  Space Invaders is a game different enough to cancel any feelings of nostalgia, yet it isn't good enough to stand on its own. If classic games are what you're after, get a pack of classic games, or better yet, find a big arcade that still cares about the old stuff. This pretender is no substitute for the original.
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348,Virtua Tennis ,3.3," Virtua Tennis for the N-Gage, which is essentially a stripped-down version of Virtua Tennis for the GBA, doesn't do the franchise any justice.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/3/0/2214230-vtendc0f.jpg,NGE,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/virtua-tennis-review/1900-6085349/,neg,"
 Though it started in the arcades, Sega's Virtua Tennis series has been met with success--perhaps not always financial--on every platform it's been brought to. From the Dreamcast to the GBA, all iterations of Virtua Tennis were tight, inherently enjoyable versions of the game. Unfortunately, Sega's luck has just run out, as the new Virtua Tennis for the N-Gage, which is essentially a stripped-down version of Virtua Tennis for the GBA, just doesn't do the franchise any justice.  This is the worst version of Virtua Tennis ever released.  The beauty of Virtua Tennis has always been its accessibility, which remains intact here. There are just two buttons used for swinging at the ball: one for a regular groundstroke and one for a lob (the latter of which is good for pushing back an opponent who's standing a little too close to the net). You start holding your swing button just as the ball passes over the net. If you hold a direction on the D pad at the same time you swing, it will dramatically affect the flight path of the ball. This is, essentially, how Virtua Tennis has worked in all its other incarnations. Unfortunately, the problem with Virtua Tennis on the N-Gage is that the game runs much, much slower than it does on the Game Boy Advance. In fact, it's slower than any other version available. What were once quick, blink-and-it's-over volleys have become slow and tedious affairs.  The game offers little to distract from the lethargic action. You can get a basic single-player game in the arcade and exhibition modes, or you can play with up to three other players over a Bluetooth connection in the exhibition mode. The world tour mode puts you through a series of big tournaments, but unlike other takes on Virtua Tennis, there's no training, no stat-building, or any other peripheral gameplay elements to make up for the otherwise slow, monotonous action on the court.  If the action were sped up a bit, this would be a much more tolerable game of tennis.  The visual elements aren't that bad and look about the same as they do on the Game Boy Advance. The N-Gage's vertical screen orientation is actually more fitting for the three-quarters perspective of the court you're given. The graphical problems in Virtua Tennis start rearing their ugly head once you start moving around, as the players and the ball both seem to be missing lots of frames of animation, thus making the game look slow and jerky. For some reason, the game sees fit to put you on the backcourt even when you're playing solo, which gives you a slightly awkward perspective on the action and just seems unnecessary. There's also the issue of load times, which are lengthy and come up often, even when there aren't any new graphical elements being introduced, such as when you're simply changing sides on the court. The sound, which consists of Virtua Tennis' trademark cheesy guitar rock and the sound of the racquet making contact with the ball, is occasionally punctuated by a little cheer from the crowd. All of these effects sound grainy and poorly compressed, and the crowd effect sounds like white noise.  During the process of being ported to the N-Gage, Virtua Tennis was crippled pretty severely. The lack of gameplay options is unfortunate but forgivable. The slow pacing and choppy animation, however, irreparably damage the gameplay experience, thus turning something that was intended to be fast-paced and fun into something that is now leaden. 
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349,Mike Tyson Boxing ,3.3," Mike Tyson Boxing is a boring, repetitive exercise in countering your opponent.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/4/2/2223142-box_mtb.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mike-tyson-boxing-review/1900-2859024/,neg,"
Mike Tyson Boxing for the Game Boy Advance may look like the Nintendo classic Ring King on the back of the box, but make no mistake--this is not a classic, and it's not anything like Ring King. Mike Tyson Boxing is a boring, repetitive exercise in countering your opponent.   The only thing that's particularly impressive about Mike Tyson boxing for the Game Boy Advance is the amount of depth in the game's career mode. The game contains four game modes in all, versus, world, practice, and showcase. The game's world mode serves as the game's single-player career mode, allowing you to train your fighter and build him up from scratch. This mode features Mike Tyson as your trainer, and he tells you what type of training regimen you should be adhering to and what you have to work on. Training simply consists of selecting one of eight different types of exercises. You don't actually get to take part in the training exercise, but rather just see the change to your stats. If you like, you can even switch on the manager-only mode, which allows you to simply call the shots during training and then send your boxer into battle.   The biggest problem with Mike Tyson Boxing is that the gameplay is incredibly limited and totally unexciting. It consists of moving your fighter within range to fire off a punch and then moving him away when your opponent throws a punch. While that may sound like boxing, the limited types of punches and way you throw them keeps this game from being anything more than an approximation of the real-life sport. You can throw a left and right jabs, left and right hooks, left and right uppercuts, and left and right super punches. Simply tapping a button throws a jab, but holding down a button for a second or two charges your punch and delivers a more powerful hook. The actual gameplay frequently degrades to you simply punching your opponent with a regular jab or hook when he is charging his punch, which is indicated by a series of yellow rings around his glove and a sound effect, and landing charged punches of your own when he misses or leaves himself open. The controls aren't all that responsive, and punches sometimes don't get thrown when you want them to.    Visually, Mike Tyson Boxing is boring. The camera angle stays locked on the back of your fighter, following him around the ring. The boxer models are rather small, and they don't have a whole lot of animation or detail. What animation there is isn't very smooth, and the only visual differences between the venues are simply different colors and logos on the canvas.    In the audio department, the sound effects are mediocre at best, and the sound effect when charging a punch quickly becomes quite annoying.    In the end, Mike Tyson Boxing is simply not much fun to play. The gameplay is laborious, repetitive, and limited to throwing a charged punch when you can land it and countering your opponent's attack with a regular punch when you can't. The bottom line is that the game doesn't look, sound, or play particularly well. If you're looking for a boxing game for the Game Boy Advance, you'd be better served by checking out Ready 2 Rumble or Boxing Fever.
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350,Industrial Spy ,3.3," Unless you're extremely into the spy game genre, you should avoid this game at all costs.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/8/7/2213187-isoe.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/industrial-spy/1900-2586710/,neg,"
Industrial Spy is a tactical simulation game in which you become the head of a spy agency called Blitzstrahl. The game was developed by Atyical Alchemists Association, was published by NEC Home Electronics, and character art design was done by artist Kazuo Miyamura. The story goes something like this: It's the year 2000, and large corporations have gained more power than the government. During the information age in the late 20th century, corporations began hiring spy agencies to perform operations such as industrial espionage. Among all the spy agencies, the Blitzstrahl is ranked number one. Behind the success of the Blitzstrahl is a group of industrial spies, which is composed of agents with special skills and abilities.    Remember the Mission Impossible TV series? You play in the role of Jim, the commander of the espionage team. You select four out of seven agents to fulfill a mission in each stage and take command of them all in an RPG combat format. Windows pop up with commands such as walk, attack, search, and unlock doors. Each agent has special abilities, such as hacking, fighting, and stealth movement. Seven agents may seem like a lot of choice to you, but, frankly, only half of them are capable of doing the job right. So you're pretty much forced to pick the same agents most of the time.    The game is similar to the PC game Rainbow Six, but, unfortunately, after you give commands, you don't physically get to control the agents. Yes, you just stare at the screen and watch the agents do their act. The AI isn't too smart, either, so your agents pull off pretty silly moves like ignoring enemies when they are walking right by you. This doesn't only happen with enemy encounters, either. Sometimes, control terminals may have traps, and agents fall for the traps unless they're smart enough to detect them. If not, your agent screws up, and you could be in big trouble. Your agents aren't good with directions, either. If they need to get to a certain area, they will take the nearest route, but that route isn't always accessible. A door may be locked, for instance. Agents will just stand in front of a locked door rather than figure out an alternate path if it means going a longer distance. You can reassign the AI's algorithm so you can avoid some of these screwups, but it's a shame it couldn't just be smarter.    There are ten stages total, and you'll probably have to go through each stage more than once just to get everything right. It seems practice makes perfect in this game. The game runs in real time, but most of the time you will be forced to use the menu screen to stop time and make decisions. There are time limits in each stage, so decisions should definitely be made from the menu screen rather than in real time.  The game's visuals are quite a disappointment for the Dreamcast. While the character artwork is absolutely fantastic, the game's 3D polygonal counterpart isn't nearly as appealing. In fact, the Nintendo 64 could generate this level of graphics with the help of the RAM pack. You'd think it'd look much better, considering how sparsely populated the environment is. In the game, you sneak into museums and buildings where people are suppose to be walking around, but all you see are guards. Once you eliminate them, you don't encounter anyone else. You'll enter a secretary's office, meeting room, or even a bathroom - and find that nobody's home. Also, the sound effects and the music of aren't too intriguing. There are a few voice-over segments but not enough. The soundtrack isn't inspiring, either. With a game like this, a soundtrack like the one in Mission: Impossible would have been perfect, but none of the tracks here are thrilling at all.    It's easy to say that Industrial Spy falls far short of expectations. Unless you're extremely into the spy game genre, you should avoid this game at all costs. You'd be much better served looking up the Dreamcast version of Rainbow Six.
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351,Frank Herbert's Dune ,3.3, It's a poorly designed 3D action-adventure game that actually has precious little to do with the source material and equally little to recommend it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/3/7/2216637-fhsdpc0f.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/frank-herberts-dune-review/1900-2834202/,neg,"
Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the towering monuments of imaginative fiction. This massive novel brings feudalism to the far future, creating an unforgettable story of a messianic hero, political intrigue and betrayal, mysticism, and more. Not surprisingly, Dune has spawned a number of games and films. On the gaming side, Westwood's Dune II helped create the real-time strategy genre on the PC back in 1992, and it was followed by a number of sequels, like the recent Emperor: Battle for Dune. With movies, Dune fans were first treated (or subjected as the case may be) to David Lynch's controversial 1984 adaptation, which was visually unforgettable but infamously incoherent. More recently, SCI FI Channel ran a six-hour miniseries called Frank Herbert's Dune. Directed by John Harrison, this Emmy-winning adaptation unquestionably stuck closer to the spirit, if not the letter, of the source material than Lynch's version did. It also featured some fine acting and high production values. Now Dune films and games meet in Frank Herbert's Dune, a tie-in for the miniseries. Unfortunately, it's a poorly designed 3D action-adventure game that actually has precious little to do with the miniseries and equally little to recommend it.  Dune is specifically based on the Sci-Fi channel's miniseries.  In the game, you'll assume the role of young Paul Atreides, scion of a noble house that's been sent to administer the desert planet, Arrakis, also known as Dune. Dune is the source of the invaluable spice that lies at the core of civilization, commerce, and space travel. With the aid of the Emperor, the evil House Harkonnen plots against the Atreides family, resulting in the death of Paul's father the Duke, as well as most of the royal house. Paul and his mother, Jessica, survive by escaping to the desert. The game plays out during the time that Paul and Jessica spend among the fierce desert warriors known as the Fremen, as they bide their time for revenge against the Harkonnen. You'll lead Paul from a third-person viewpoint as he carries out raids on Harkonnen and spice smuggler bases.   You'll quickly learn that just trying to move Paul during these missions can be a real chore. Throughout the game, he constantly gets caught on objects and other characters, even when he's only in their general vicinity, and the camera is often blocked by walls, rocks, and other objects. In the horribly ill-conceived second mission, you're forced to avoid a giant sandworm by actually running toward the camera, into its blind spot. That wouldn't necessarily be so bad--as awkward as it is--if it weren't for the fact the ground is littered with hard-to-spot patches of quicksand.  The missions can be frustrating and awkward to play.  That sort of poor design carries over to the majority of the game. To view detailed information about your inventory items, you need to cycle through a slow-moving, clumsily animated menu system. Just trying to start a new game can be a hassle because of the awkward interface for naming your game session. You have to scroll through letters like you do in a console game interface instead of just typing them in. The game is also beset with lengthy load times, a lack of difficulty levels, and the inability to save the game during the overly lengthy missions.   The structure of the actual missions isn't handled well either. These story-based tasks contain a mixture of stealth, action, and light puzzle solving, and the tension from sneaking around can be genuinely enjoyable in brief spurts. However, instead of mainly having to use your head or your reflexes, you'll often need to resort to blind trial and error. You'll also find that the missions play almost identically every time: The utterly moronic guards will be standing in the same places and will appear out of thin air every time you activate a hidden trigger. The missions would play a lot better if the guards you needed to kill patrolled more, letting you gauge their movements so that you could sneak past them or eliminate them from behind. Many just stand there, though, forcing head-on confrontations.Once a guard starts firing at you, you inexplicably can't attack with your knife anymore, even if you're literally right next to him. When you're then forced to use a gun instead, get ready for one of the game's many letdowns. Ranged combat is so simplistic and unrealistic as to be comical, with two characters basically standing in place and repeatedly shooting at each other until one falls. The game also offers precious few opportunities to restock your ammo.  Dune's graphics bear little likeness to the source material.  During your missions, you'll need to watch Paul's life level, refilling it with a stock of water from his stillsuit, which is inexplicably called a ""distiller."" (New names and spellings for Dune terms are common in the game.) By sneaking up on a guard and eliminating him with one quick knife blow, Paul can reclaim the guard's water. It's a clever twist on the usual med kit or health pack cliché, and one that nicely ties into the Dune mythology, where water is the second most-precious thing on Dune after the spice.   Between and during the missions, you'll watch lengthy, poorly directed, in-engine cutscenes that do a hit-and-miss job of explaining the situation and your goals. The dialogue is utterly boring or just plain silly, and the game takes major liberties with both the miniseries and novel. When you restart a mission, as you'll likely have to, you'll be subjected to all the cutscenes again with no way to skip them.   Between missions, you're also forced to saunter around the Fremen hideouts, seeking new inventory items from other characters. The fact that you don't know what these characters look like or where to find them initially means you'll have to waste your time wandering in circles for no reason at all. You can also talk--using the term very loosely--to just about any Fremen, yet most of them will offer inane or even incoherent non sequiturs. Some of the characters' statements are so bizarre that they at least provide unintentional comedic relief. Characters will also mention events not shown or properly explained in the game. If you haven't read the novel, you'll likely have no clue what's being referred to part of the time. This all feels like some perverse way of stretching out a short game.   As shown in both its film adaptations, Dune has enormous visual potential, though the game's graphics are merely average, often looking rather dull and dated. On the one hand, you'll see a few nice details like extremely realistic smoke effects, yet other effects, like weapons fire, look very bland. The environments don't adhere to the miniseries and are mostly forgettable both in look and layout, though they feature a few nicely painted textures, particularly the striated desert rocks.   Dune's character designs and animations suffer from a bunch of problems. Characters move extremely stiffly and slowly. Paul runs as if he were utterly exhausted from a week of trudging across the desert, and dead guards casually crumble to the ground in slow motion. Up close, the characters' faces often look downright ugly, and lip-synching animations are poorly done too. You'll also notice right off that the characters bear no resemblance to those in the miniseries. With his black, jagged locks, the Paul of the game looks a lot more like a generic anime character than he does actor Alec Newman from the miniseries.  It's a short, disappointing game.  Like its visuals, Dune's sparse sound effects have little going for them. Weapons, for instance, sound underpowered and tinny. The voice-overs aren't handled by the actors from the miniseries, nor are they handled particularly well at all, for that matter. They're competent at best. For its music, the game wisely sticks with portions of Graeme Revell's evocative, elegiac orchestral score from the miniseries. It's sad that the music should be the high point of the game, though.   Despite a couple of moderately nice touches, Frank Herbert's Dune is a dud of a game. Any strengths are marred by a long string of poor design decisions and equally poor execution. The game utterly fails to capture the majesty and mystery of the Dune universe, turning it into an interactive Saturday morning cartoon--and a bad one at that. Toss this one to the worms.
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352,New Super Mario Bros. ,9, New Super Mario Bros. is a terrific 2D side-scroller that makes you think of the old games but never feels like it's just cashing in on past success.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/9/7/4/2212974-box_nsmb.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/new-super-mario-bros-review/1900-6151365/,pos,"
  Despite the sort of weird title, New Super Mario Bros. is exactly what it sounds like. It's a new Super Mario Bros. game that pulls off the series' classic 2D, side-scrolling gameplay without feeling contrived or like a needless nostalgia trip. While there's plenty of old memories referenced in this game, it is most definitely new. You rarely see 2D platformers at all these days, and it's even rarer when it's done right. While experienced players might blow through the game quickly, New Super Mario Bros. is still completely awesome and absolutely necessary.   Mario's got more than enough moves to deal with his enemies.   The story is simple, provides just enough to get you going, then gets out of the way. Bowser Jr. kidnaps the princess, and Mario needs to save her by running to the right and jumping on the heads of his enemies. You'll cruise through up to eight worlds in the game, though the occasional use of Super Mario World-like secret exits and a few alternate paths mean that you'll only really have to play through six of those worlds. Of course, the quality of the levels means that you'll probably want to go back and see everything there is to see, but if you're bent on blazing through the game, you could burn up the minimum number of levels in a day or two.    You'll get a full SMB-like variety in the game's levels and worlds, including underground and undersea levels, as well as an ice world, a desert, a few forced-scrolling levels that may make you lose it, and so on. The visuals are fantastic, simultaneously reminding you of the older games while using polygonal graphics and effects very well, making the levels and characters all look really, really impressive.    The level design in the game is great, taking advantage of Mario's moves in a few key spots. Mario's move list isn't terribly deep, but he's got more than enough to get by. The game reverts all the way back to the NES games' two-button control scheme. One button jumps, while the other runs when you hold it down and shoots fireballs when you're equipped with that ability. The game includes some of Mario's 3D platforming acrobatics from Super Mario 64, too. You can cling to walls and slide down them or use them for wall jumps, which really comes in handy. Many of the game's secrets seem to be built on knowing exactly when and where to wall jump up to some otherwise-unreachable spot. You can push down on the D pad to execute a butt stomp, too, which is handy for busting through columns of blocks. The game's power-ups are roughly the same, too, though there are a few new options. The mega mushroom makes Mario grow to fill the screen, making him invincible for a short time and letting you just run right through obstacles. The mini mushroom makes you really small, letting you fit in a few tiny pipes. And the blue turtle shell lets you crouch and slide along like an empty shell, taking out enemies as you move. The new power-ups are interesting, but they don't really pop up very often, so you're usually just rolling with fireball power. Overall, the level of control you're given and the moves and power-ups at your disposal are put together very well and help make the game fun.    Fun, definitely, but not especially challenging. There are a few levels here and there that can get frustrating because they demand that you take your time, but for the most part, the individual levels feel a bit short, though there are plenty of them to go around. You'll get into several boss fights along the way, but some well-placed fireballs make quick work of your foe--and you keep facing the same foe over and over again in boss fights that feel like they were lifted directly from Super Mario Bros. 3, with some occasional twists that attempt to make the battles feel different. But you're really just trying to beat Bowser Jr. over and over again, usually by jumping on him unless you have fire power, making the boss fights pretty underwhelming. Though they're so short that they don't have much impact on the game one way or the other.    The initial single-player quest is the main chunk of the game, and it's the best part of the game, as well. But there are additional modes. There's a two-player Mario versus Luigi mode that puts you up against another player in a short level that wraps around. Big stars appear in the world, and you attempt to collect more than the other guy. If you can hit your opponent with fireballs, jump on his head, and so on, he'll drop stars. It's a fun little diversion. Also, the game has a mess of touch-screen minigames, just like the ones found in the DS remake of Super Mario 64. Some of these games are OK, but for the most part, they're a little tired.   Mario's main adventure is the real action here. The other stuff isn't quite as exciting.   The game really rides the nostalgia line very well. There's just enough old or remixed Mario music and sound effects in there to remind you of the older games, and there's just enough newer-sounding stuff to prevent the whole thing from feeling shameless. In short, the audio is another one of the game's many high points, containing plenty of great sound effects (both old and new) and the standard array of speech you've come to expect from Mario.    With its ability to recall the older games without leaning too heavily on its famous name, New Super Mario Bros. is an essential new classic that lives up to the legacy of the series quite well. If you're looking for a quality DS game, look no further.  


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353,Might and Magic ,9," With Might and Magic, Gameloft has created one of the best cell phone action adventure games ever.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/9/0/9/20912-60909.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/might-and-magic-review/1900-6109143/,pos,"
 Might and Magic has a long legacy on the PC as a role-playing game series that, along with Ultima and a few others, set the standard for quality adventure games--and then helped maintain those standards for years. However, the new mobile version of Might and Magic isn't a role-playing game; it's an action adventure game. But more importantly, it features all the depth and high quality for which the Might and Magic series used to be known. Gameloft has essentially created its own Legend of Zelda with this game, which represents an excellent action adventure offering with role-playing overtones.  Might and Magic isn't an RPG like its PC namesake, but it's still quite an adventure.  Might and Magic centers around Ewan, an earnest fighter who is out to save his kidnapped king. He meets the elfin archer Lorean and the changeling Kayu early on, and from there, the plot twists and turns like a medieval soap opera. The story is told via sequences that are presented between levels filled with inspired dialogue and Braveheart-style war scenes.  The game is spent juggling between the three characters, solving puzzles, and battling enemies, like bats, zombies, and ogres. The story is linear, but the levels are vast. Even the first level is significant in size, and each subsequent one only grows more complex from there.  The most striking aspect from Might and Magic's collection of many strong qualities is its graphics. You view the action from an isometric perspective, like in Diablo or other action RPGs. As you explore, you'll see a lot of great detail, such as lava bubbles that appear beneath your feet; rocks that seem to show years of erosion; and ogres that take up most of the screen with their attacks. The bright, crisp colors add to the game's beauty. The animation is top-notch, even when there are several things happening at once. The sound is surprisingly minimal, but it's effective just the same. There is no music. Sound effects, however, are strong and appropriate--like when finding a new magic item or defeating a foe, for instance.  The actual screen layout is ergonomically perfect. All major information is regulated to the top of the screen, thereby taking up very little of the game area but still remaining detailed and clear. The left corner shows a sharp profile of your current character, followed by hearts that represent health. Next is a power-up meter, followed by an icon showing the currently readied item or magic power.  The graphics, sound, and overall presentation are all top-notch.  Might and Magic's controls take a bit to adjust to because of the isometric view. Key 1 makes Ewan jump, while 3 uses the current character's item or special power. Items and powers are selected by pressing 7 or 9. Key 5 executes an attack, whether it's by sword (for Ewan and Kayu) or by arrow (for Lorean), and it can be held down for charged attacks. Key 0 switches between characters when more than one is present. Complication enters the picture whenever movement in the game is involved, because the cardinal directions are at angles. You basically have a choice between two control setups: A, which assigns the diagonally-up-right direction to key 2, or B, which assigns the diagonally-up-right direction to key 6. The other keys are changed accordingly. Movement becomes fairly intuitive after a few games, but it would have helped if Gameloft let players assign their own keys as opposed to having them choose one from only two set options. For instance, some may prefer having the corner keys (1, 3, 7, 9) as the diagonal buttons.  Gameloft seemed to have predicted any possible challenges, though, because Might and Magic makes a serious, quite remarkable effort to make you feel right at home throughout the game. When a new item is acquired, a brief interlude gives you the information on how it is used. Often when confronting a unique obstacle, a small icon will highlight where you should be located to resolve the situation, in addition to revealing what key to press. Then, as the game progresses, the hints trail off, eventually allowing you to fend for yourself.  The puzzles themselves are interesting and challenging, rivaling comparable titles on consoles. The game begins with traditional Zelda-inspired challenges, like having to move the correct blocks to open passageways, as well as having to either hit switches or destroy all enemies to get a specific key. Later areas require some considerable thought and, in some cases, switching between different characters. For instance, one area is blocked by iron gates, and, despite the numerous floor switches, the doors can't be opened. To get through, you must move Kayu to the first gate and then have her transform into her fog form. However, since she can't move in that form, you must use Ewan's wind power to blow her through the crevices of the gate. This is surprisingly interesting stuff.  The adventure is hearty for the cell phone, and it lasts a good several hours.  Attacking enemies requires creativity as well. The electricity-shooting zombies only fire in the cardinal directions, so hitting them at an angle is the key to survival. The huge ogres are more difficult to contend with, because they spin their maces whenever you get close. Initially, you must toss a torch at them to knock them down, and then you can attack them while they're dizzy. Later, magic like Ewan's wind tornadoes can disable them. The ability to make little decisions like these gives the game a sense of freedom of choice, even though the adventure itself is linear.  The items are a hearty laundry list of RPG staples, like medicinal herbs for healing and hearts for a longer health bar. Ewan, in particular, finds useful weapons along the way, like iron boots that allow him to walk on spikes. The grappling hook is the item that is the most fun to use, because it can be used Indiana Jones-style to reach higher places and traverse bottomless pits.  Might and Magic is an addictive game that has that difficult-to-achieve balance between tough situations and appropriate reward. We didn't find a moment of unfair gameplay, and the more difficult areas--at least early on--were supplemented by excellent instruction. Basically, the game flows incredibly smoothly.  Gameloft has created one of the best cell phone adventure games ever--and it's one that's rivaled, ironically, only by its own Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Both are great games, but while Prince of Persia was an ode to its own heritage, Might and Magic is an ode to the action adventure genre itself. 
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354,Burnout Legends ,9," Burnout Legends is the best racer the PSP has to offer, and any PSP owner should definitely check it out.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/2/5/9/2211259-box_boutleg.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/burnout-legends-review/1900-6132926/,pos,"
  Driving games happen to be the genre the PSP is wealthiest in, but that didn't stop EA and developer Criterion's Burnout Legends from coming in and smoking the competition. Burnout Legends is almost like something of a greatest hits collection, combining gameplay elements with cars and tracks from the first three console Burnout games to form a package that actually feels pretty original and unique on its own merits. Apart from that, though, Legends simply makes fantastic use of the PSP technology, providing a profoundly impressive audiovisual experience and fast, frantic racing, both of which easily rank with the best the platform has to offer.    The debut of the Burnout franchise on the PSP is a resounding success.   Racing in Burnout is a high-speed, crash-filled affair. Your main controls are gas, brake, and boost. Boost is integral to your racing, as the opponent-racer artificial intelligence keeps it tight pretty much at all times. You earn boost by basically driving like a maniac, steering into oncoming traffic, nearly missing random cars, and, of course, knocking your opponents around like you own the place, ultimately hoping to take them out entirely. Burnout is all about the act of breaking cars in the most spectacular ways possible, especially those of your opponents. And Legends gets this aspect down pat with extremely satisfying crashes across the board. You won't see quite the level of crash detail on the PSP that you would in the console games (most notably, particle effects and explosions have been toned down), but even still, the wrecks are pretty fantastic. Cars deform, sparks fly, and given the right circumstances, broken husks of vehicles will fly through the air in incredibly satisfying ways.     Not to mention that the game gives you ways to control your wreck so you can ultimately cause even greater carnage. Once your car is wrecked, you have the ability to slow time by holding down a button. Once that's done, you can use the game's aftertouch mechanic to literally steer your charred husk of a car into any other traffic you see fit, sometimes even taking out opposing cars in the process. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the game's crash mode, where the whole point is simply to cause the most havoc possible by steering your car into a carefully crafted traffic scenario. Here you're graded by the monetary value of the damage you inflict on the available cars, and along the way, you can pick up cash bonuses. And if you cause enough wrecks, you can pick up a crashbreaker. Crashbreakers blow your car to smithereens, as well as any surrounding traffic, and they also give you the chance to steer your car around to cause even more damage--so you can pick up even more bonuses.     The incredible sense of speed made famous on consoles is retained extremely well in Legends.   Any Burnout fan is likely to already be quite familiar with the crash mode, and he or she will be intimately familiar with pretty much all the other modes, too. Apart from normal races, you'll also engage in: road rage races, where the whole point is to gain as many takedowns of opponents as possible in a set amount of time; burning laps, which are just basic time-trial races; faceoffs, in which you go against a single opponent to try to win his car; and pursuit mode, which was absent in Burnout 3 but will fondly be remembered by long-time Burnout fans. In this Chase HQ-like mode, you play as a cop car, and the whole goal is to chase down a target opponent and wreck his car silly until he's finally taken down. Though none of these modes are new in any way for the franchise, the familiarity of the gameplay actually works to Legends' benefit, as any fan should be able to pick it up and jump right into the action. And even those who have never played a Burnout game ought not to have much trouble, given the relative simplicity and overall addictiveness of the racing.    All these races are tied together into one main single-player mode called world tour. You start the game with only one car class unlocked (the compacts), as well as just a couple of map locations available. As you race through assorted events, you'll eventually unlock more races, and then GP events, which (once beaten) will unlock more car classes. Crash events are kept separate from races, but you'll still need to play them to unlock certain cars. Between all the races and crash events, there are 175 to play through in total, and getting gold medals in all events is no quick exercise. It can be somewhat taxing trying to bust through the world tour mode in long stretches, as many of the race types and tracks repeat fairly regularly. But played in shorter, regular bursts, Burnout Legends can be a highly addictive single-player game. Plus, you've also got the multiplayer to jump into when the single-player becomes too much to deal with.    The multiplayer races are for up to six players via ad hoc wireless play (no online, unfortunately), and you can engage in races, road rage races, pursuit races, party crashes, and double impact mode, which is basically a two-player single-crash event. Game hosts can create single games or tournaments with up to five rounds. The multiplayer action is definitely best played with more than a couple of players, as the game is at its best with lots of cars competing with and frequently taking down one another. But certain modes, like pursuit or double impact, work just fine if you've only got a single friend around.   With 175 single-player races, it's unlikely you'll run out of stuff to do anytime soon.   Legends also looks and sounds amazing. Part of what makes Burnout...well, Burnout, is its incredible sense of speed. And Legends doesn't disappoint on that front. The first few cars go fast, but not fast, so you might initially think that the PSP game got the short shrift. That notion will quickly traipse its way out of your head once you start unlocking the faster cars, as some of the higher-end vehicles go some kind of ridiculous fast. Sometimes this presents a problem, as due to the PSP's smaller screen, it can occasionally be hard to see oncoming traffic coming up on the horizon until it's too late. Thankfully, over time you'll start to get accustomed to the brief but noticeable signals the game gives when traffic is coming, like the glare of headlights or taillights, and that problem will essentially correct itself.     It also bears mentioning that Legends maintains a brilliant frame rate pretty much all throughout, with noticeable drops only coming during extreme crashes with lots of smoke effects. There's one really annoying frame hitch that seems to occur when the soundtrack is switching songs, as the game will lock up for about a half-second. Fortunately, this momentary hitch never caused us to wreck or do anything stupid, but we certainly could have done without it.   This is easily one of the best-looking games on the PSP.   Soundwise, the audio effects in Burnout Legends are top-notch. Cars whiz by with big whooshes of air, engines rev to peak pitches, and every wreck sounds absolutely brutal. The soundtrack is made up of the typical EA Trax fare, with plenty of hipster-type indie punk and rock bands like Finch, Goldfinger, OK Go, Junkie XL, The Dead 60s, and Yellowcard. There are 21 tracks in all, and though some are repeats from other recent EA games, pretty much every track fits with the vibe of the game at least reasonably well. Perhaps the best part of Burnout Legends' audio is actually an omission--namely, the obnoxious radio DJ, whose chatter was merely a detriment to Burnout 3's in-game experience.    All in all, Burnout Legends is pretty much exactly what you would want from a handheld Burnout game. The marriage of all the best aspects of the first three Burnouts into a single package makes for a deep, lasting game that also manages to be a consistently challenging and exciting endeavor pretty much the entire way through. While the PSP isn't exactly suffering from a dearth of quality racers, make no mistake about it: Burnout Legends is the best racer the PSP has to offer, and any PSP owner should definitely check it out.  


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355,Shadow Of The Colossus : A Timeless Classic,9," Shadow of the Colossus is a beautiful reconstruction of an extraordinary title, a modern classic that everyone must experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/7/7/2212077-box_sotc.png,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shadow-of-the-colossus-review-a-timeless-classic/1900-6416845/,pos,"
2005's Shadow of the Colossus was a revelation, a game whose gorgeous aesthetic and reserved tone were, at the time, undeniably distinct. Together with its unique take on boss encounters and a stirring soundtrack, those aspects made the game a defining title of the PlayStation 2 era. But it was also a game infamous for its technical issues: most notably, the ambitious design of the titular colossi meant the game would often suffer from a choppy, aggravating framerate.A 2011 HD remaster for the PlayStation 3 alleviated these problems, but now, with 2018's Shadow of the Colossus for PlayStation 4, Bluepoint Games has completely rebuilt every aspect of the game's world while leaving the underlying structure and mechanics intact, a move which not only rejuvenates the game visually but uncategorically intensifies the utter majesty of this extraordinary experience.Shadow of the Colossus takes place in an ancient world, where young warrior Wander and his horse Agro transport a deceased loved one to a forbidden, sealed land. With a mythical sword and an ordinary bow, Wander hopes to take advantage of a fable that suggests something in this isolated province has the means to bring back the dead. There, he encounters an omnipresent entity who compels him to destroy sixteen colossi scattered throughout the territory in order to enable his wish.If you've already played a previous version of Shadow of the Colossus, you'll find that Bluepoint's rendition feels much the same, barring some minor differences in controller mapping, some subtle quality-of-life tweaks, and a new Easter egg. The locations of each colossus and the methods of defeating them remain the same, as do the locations of every white-tailed lizard and fruit collectible. The weight and movement physics of Wander and Agro feel unchanged, and New Game+ rewards are identical.But the impact of the completely rebuilt world is transcendent. This is a world that is geographically as you remember, but one that still astounds you as if seeing it for the first time. Highly detailed environment modeling in tandem with impressive light and shadow simulation bring amazing life to the game's breathtaking biomes. Forests are densely packed with majestic tall trees and twisting foliage, dappled beautifully with soft rays of sunlight. Vast, arid deserts feel hauntingly desolate as you try and sight somber ruins through a wispy sandstorm. Even the simple sight of mountainous crags and cliff faces is impressive, with shadows acutely defining their rocky surfaces, making them pop ominously. Every time you crest a hill, emerge from a crevice, or change your perspective, the landscape will be a sight worthy of pause.The increased fidelity of the reconstructed colossi is just as spectacular, and the mere sight of one in this version of the game is even more awe-inspiring than it is in your memory. Each foe--some small and nimble, the rest impossibly titanic and overbearing--is a terrifying beast of stone, fur, and leather. That fur is now noticeably more dense and luscious, and hanging onto it for dear life as your enemy tries to violently shake you off feels even more intense. These moments are enhanced by the detail of the distant environment that lies far beneath you when on top of a colossus, combined with motion effects that amplify the sense of danger at these dizzying heights. The first time I mounted a flying colossus in this version of the game, I could feel my chest wrench as I squeezed my controller to hold onto its wing for dear life while it soared, flapping wildly through the air. It was exhilarating.Playing on a PS4 Pro offers you the ability to further enhance visual fidelity via high dynamic range color, as well as the choice between two different graphical options with different priorities. Cinematic mode enables 4K resolutions, as well as allowing for impressive downsampling (that is, scaling down a higher-resolution image) for 1080p displays at a targeted 30fps. Performance mode provides less impressive graphical quality but maintains a smoother frame rate targeting 60fps. In my experience, I preferred the crisper image offered in Cinematic mode--once you realise you can recognise the definition between each individual blade of grass, it's hard to let that go. However, the visual quality offered by both modes still enhances the experience of the game in ways previously mentioned, especially for those whose last memory of it was suffering through sub-30fps framerate issues on the original PS2 release.The visual reconstruction doesn't detract from what makes Shadow of the Colossus great, and the game's holistic and understated direction still comes through strongly: its muted colors, cinematic camera angles, and stark absence of music while exploring the world still evoke a poignant tone of desolation and solitude. The world's large forsaken landscape doesn't feel bereft of things to do, because simply riding through it and enjoying at the majesty of the land, accompanied only by the sound of Agro's hooves scraping against the earth, is a meditative experience.Fighting a colossus is still a grand, solemn, and tense challenge that is exhilarating to overcome. The impassioned orchestral soundtrack heightens the pressure of every maneuver: Deciphering a method of mounting your impossibly enormous enemy, clambering to reach their vulnerabilities as they try to fling you off, and driving your sword into their flesh. Every moment of a colossus battle is thrilling to execute and witness, whether you're doing it for the first time, or the fifteenth time in a post-game time trial.While the passing of twelve years hasn't affected the overall quality of Shadow of the Colossus, there are two technical annoyances that persist and remind you of a bygone era. The third-person camera system does not clip through world objects, so it becomes erratic and troublesome to adjust when moving Wander through enclosed spaces, or near a solid object. Additionally, the game's unforgiving climbing system, which asks you to jump with the X button and grasp onto a ledge or surface with the R2 trigger, is occasionally temperamental in certain situations; there may be times when contact with a ledge may not correctly register even though you may have been holding R2 well in advance and correctly estimated the distance needed for your jump. However, both of these issues affect only a small amount of your time with the game and should not be considered a significant strike against the whole. In the case of the climbing system, it's a quirk that's easy to come to peace with because of how absolutely essential the mechanic is to creating the rousing pressure and suspense of colossus encounters.Shadow of the Colossus is a tremendous journey, and one well worth taking and retaking. The visual overhaul is stunning, thoroughly enhancing every facet of Wander and Agro's excellent adventure. Galloping through the tranquil world is always breathtaking; felling a monumental colossus is always humbling. Shadow of the Colossus is a beautiful reconstruction of an already exceptional title. It continues to be a modern classic and is an extraordinary game that everyone must experience.


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356,Lumines ,9," Between the beautiful presentation, the innovative gameplay, and the excellent single-player and multiplayer modes, Lumines may very well be the greatest Tetris-style puzzle game since Tetris itself.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/4/3/7/22342-63437.jpg,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lumines-review/1900-6119726/,pos,"
  In a perfect world, Lumines wouldn't have been sold separately from Sony's slick, new portable gaming system. But the world is still better off now that Lumines is in it. This ingeniously designed, addictive, mesmerizing puzzle game from the creator of cult classics like Rez and Space Channel 5 may not seem as out-and-out impressive as some other PSP launch titles, but it's liable to be the one you keep coming back to. In fact, between the beautiful presentation, the innovative gameplay, and the excellent single-player and multiplayer modes, Lumines may very well be the greatest Tetris-style puzzle game since Tetris itself.   Lumines is pretty abstract, but its depth and quality couldn't be more concrete.   Lumines resembles Tetris on first impression, and it's similarly intuitive to pick up and play--though, the simple design belies tremendous depth. Squares comprising four smaller blocks, which can be one of two colors, fall from the top of the screen. The object is to form solid-colored rectangles of at least two-by-two blocks by rotating and arranging the falling squares properly. Solid rectangles instantly light up and get cleared away as a line (called the ""timeline"") intermittently passes from left to right across the screen, kind of like a windshield wiper and just like a timeline in a music sequencer program. Clearing blocks in this fashion is how you earn points and also how you prevent blocks from stacking all the way up to the top of the screen; your game ends if the blocks stack too high. Meanwhile, any blocks above the blocks you just cleared automatically drop down until they hit other blocks or the bottom of the screen, and this creates the potential for some big combos. Controls are tight and responsive. Despite having so much horizontal space to work with thanks to the PSP's landscape-style screen, you can just as easily fling a square all the way from one side of the playing field to the other as you can nudge it just a hair's breadth into the perfect spot.    This is all quite simple and basically fun like most Tetris-style puzzle games are fun--especially since Lumines looks and sounds wonderful. Its colorful, swirling backgrounds are clear and clutter-free, the audio cues are noticeable and appealing, and the soundtrack, featuring tracks by Japanese club music pioneer Mondo Grosso, is fun and vibrant. You'll surely notice a great little touch early on, which is that the music dynamically adjusts to fit how you're playing, so the more squares you're clearing in rapid succession, the more the music will swell. The visuals glow and respond to your actions, too. Still images certainly don't do this game's pulsating, dynamic presentation justice. For that matter, the PSP's stereo speakers don't do full justice to the audio, either. Listen to this game with headphones on for an audio experience that, in a way, rivals the surround-sound explosions and screams you might be enjoying with your video game consoles and your fancy home-theater system.    The game's depth doesn't take long to emerge. The main twist is that you'll occasionally get special blocks, which, when formed into a solid rectangle, cause any and all consecutive matching blocks to light up. This means you can sometimes clear a whole bunch of blocks at once, and since you're always given a preview of the next three squares that are going to fall, you'll learn to plan for these important occasions. With enough practice, not to mention a lot of forethought, a steady hand, and a little bit of luck, it's essentially possible to clear the entire screen in one fell swoop--something that's incredibly satisfying and drives your score through the roof.    It's not often anymore that high scores are something you care about in gaming, but this is one of those cases in which you probably will. Lumines has a well-designed scoring system that rewards risk-taking and tenacity, so you'll use your score as a measure of just how good you are at the game's single-player challenge mode. One minor issue with scoring is that you get a big bonus for completely clearing the board of any blocks, yet you'll sometimes get a single-colored square as your very first piece in challenge mode, which then gets wiped out right away, resulting in a freebie boost to your score. Still, unpredictable circumstances like this only add to the game's addictive charm.   The timeline washes away your handiwork while everything else falls into place.   Lumines' depth also comes from how its challenge escalates. In most Tetris-style puzzle games, increased challenge is directly proportional to increased speed. Sure enough, in Lumines, squares start falling faster and faster the longer you play, giving you less time to move them around and rotate them into proper position. However, a much more interesting and inventive layer to the challenge has to do with the variable rate at which the timeline washes across the screen. Even as the speed of falling squares increases from level to level, the timeline will often noticeably slow down. On the one hand, this enables you to rack up points faster and faster, because the more blocks you can clean out in a single wipe, the more points you'll get. On the other hand, this means you'll need to be able to hold out for longer and longer as the blocks start to stack perilously high...only to then get cleared out in bigger and bigger chunks. Then again, some levels have the timeline moving very rapidly, which brings about its own set of challenging considerations, since this forces you to act that much more quickly yourself.    Other puzzle games tend to just go faster and faster the longer you play. In short, what's so unique about the gameplay of Lumines is that it often takes on a noticeably and significantly different tone from level to level.    This is partly because Lumines' levels--which, in challenge mode, seamlessly transition from one to the next as you score higher and higher and last longer and longer--tend to take on a radically different look and feel from one to the next. Each level, or ""skin,"" has the same basic elements to it. But the colors, shapes, effects, sounds, and music tend to shift radically. You've got everything from dance club-inspired motifs, featuring silhouettes of dancers cascading across the screen, to much stranger themes like one resembling an old Nintendo Entertainment System-era fantasy role-playing game. Yet, despite the thematic variety, there's clearly an overarching cohesion to the game's style, helping make long sessions of Lumines a relaxing, almost Zen-like experience rather than a dizzying, mind-melting one like you get from playing too much WarioWare at a time. Some skins are thematically similar to others, but in all, there's actually an almost shocking amount of variety to the presentation. And this turns out to be a real treat, especially for those who've grown too accustomed to the conventionally static-looking puzzle genre.   For a game without any story to it, Lumines sure has a lot of personality.   The thing about Lumines' challenge mode is that you go through the levels in the same sequence each time, so you'll get very used to seeing the game's first few skins. This isn't really problematic in and of itself, but some kind of a ""shuffle"" mode would have been nice, as well as consistent with the music-inspired design. Still, you get plenty of other options, such as time trials that challenge you to earn high scores in small amounts of time and the ability to choose to play in any of the skins you've previously unlocked. There's also a pretty entertaining puzzle mode, in which you don't need to worry about forming rectangles, for a change, but must instead make various shapes out of the falling two-toned squares. The puzzle shapes get progressively more complicated, and this mode is a good diversion overall.    Then there's Lumines' versus mode, which you can play against a computer opponent or against a friend (who's also got a PSP and a copy of the game) using the PSP's built-in Wi-Fi support. Versus mode adds a very interesting tug-of-war element to the core game by dividing the playing field down the middle into two parts and then forcing the two competing players to try to push the barrier toward their opponent, reducing the amount of room the adversary has to work with, while freeing up more room for themselves. Versus mode is somewhat more passive than competitive modes in some other puzzle games, since you'll invariably focus on your own playing field rather than on what your opponent is up to. However, that's mostly because the fast pace of versus mode doesn't give you time to stress over what your opponent's next move will be, and overall, it makes for an exciting and distinctly different variation on Lumines' primary single-player game.   If you plan to get a PSP, then you can't go wrong with making Lumines one of the first games in your collection. And if you don't plan to get a PSP, then Lumines should cause you to reconsider.   When playing against the computer in versus mode, you'll notice that you always take on the same opponents in the same order, kind of like how challenge mode is also a linear sequence of levels. The thing is, versus mode ramps up in difficulty quickly--have fun trying to get past your fourth or fifth challenger. Actually, you probably will, and you'll also probably appreciate that Lumines tracks your win/loss record against any human opponents you take on. You and your opponents are more than just names on each other's lists, by the way. You get to choose a persona from among many amusingly animated icons, including some tough-to-find unlockable ones.    You wouldn't think a game about arranging colored blocks into rectangles could be this interesting and this engrossing. At the heart of Lumines is an ingenious design, which someone theoretically could have dreamed up years ago, but no one did until now. And at the soul of Lumines is something that you might call completely pure. You wouldn't expect a game like this to incorporate most all of what's good about gaming--the sights, the sounds, the trancelike experience, the option of competition--but Lumines does all that.  


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357,BioShock ,9, BioShock creates an amazing world that you'll want to explore from top to bottom and a compelling mystery that slowly comes together as you play.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/8/1/2217481-bioshock_cover_edited.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bioshock-review/1900-6176947/,pos,"
  While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you're constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won't let go until you've figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture.   Rapture is an amazing city that sits at the bottom of the ocean, but something's gone horribly wrong down there.   BioShock opens with a bang, but the overall plot focuses more on making an emotional impact than an explosive one. The year is 1960, and you're flying over the Atlantic Ocean. One mysterious plane crash later, you're floating in the water, apparently the lone survivor, surrounded by the flaming wreckage of the aircraft. But there's a lighthouse on a tiny island just at the edge of your view. Who in their right mind would put a lighthouse this far out? You swim closer and discover a small submersible called a bathysphere waiting to take you underwater. After catching a breathtaking view of what's below, you're sent into the secret underwater city of Rapture. Masterminded by a somewhat megalomaniacal businessman named Andrew Ryan, this city is driven by its own idea of total freedom, with capitalism completely unhindered by governmental meddling and science unhinged from the pesky morals of organized religion. Sounds like the perfect society, right? Well, even before you step out of your bathysphere and into the city, it becomes obvious that everything has gone horribly wrong down here. The city is trashed, and genetic freaks called splicers roam around, attacking anything that gets in front of them. At the heart of the matter is a powerful, corrupting substance called ADAM, which makes all this genetic tinkering possible and allows you to get your first plasmid power, the ability to shoot lightning out of your fingertips.    Character customization is a key trait in BioShock. You have a limited but increasable number of spaces in various customization categories, and you can totally reconfigure all of your different plasmids and tonics at will, at no charge, at specific locations in-game. Plasmids are the active, weaponlike genetic enhancement. Many of these are very straightforward. Incinerate lets you burn things and melt ice. Telekinesis lets you use your left hand as if it were Half-Life 2's gravity gun. But others are a little more subversive. Security bullseye is a little ball you can toss at enemies, causing any nearby security cameras, turrets, or sentry bots to point in his direction. Enrage can cause enemies to fight one another. Insect swarm causes your arm to shoot bees at your enemies, which unfortunately is far less cool-looking than it sounds. You can also place decoys, plant swirling wind traps for enemies, and so on. While it's fun to mess around with a lot of the indirect attacks, facing your enemies head-on with the more direct plasmids feels a bit more effective.    Tonics are skills that are slotted just like plasmids, but they have passive effects, like sportboost, which increases your movement and melee attack speed, or natural camouflage, which makes you turn invisible if you stand still for a few seconds. So if you want to make your swinging wrench attacks more powerful, you can slot up things like wrench jockey and wrench lurker, which increase your wrench damage on all attacks and when catching opponents off-guard, respectively. Add bloodlust, which gives you some health back every time you club someone with your wrench, and you're a melee master with health and plasmid energy (called EVE) to spare. You can also slot some defensive stuff, like static field, which zaps anyone who touches you with a electric radius effect, and armored shell, which reduces the damage you take from physical attacks. There are more than 50 tonics to collect, giving you plenty of options to play around with.   ADAM and EVE combine to let you shoot fire, lightning, ice, wind, bees, and more out of your fingertips.   Most of those plasmids and tonics will have to be purchased using the raw ADAM that you collect from harvesting vessels called little sisters. They're little girls with a big needle that they use to collect the sought-after stuff from dead bodies, and they're protected by the baddest enemies in the entire game, hulking armored monsters called big daddies. This is where the game makes you decide to be selfless or selfish. If you harvest the girls, they die, but you get 160 ADAM from them. If you free them and return them to normal, you get only 80 ADAM. There are a limited number of girls to deal with in the entire game, making it very possible that you won't be able to collect every single purchasable plasmid and tonic, so choose wisely. Either route has benefits and consequences, and there are story considerations as well.    Before you start thinking this is some kind of role-playing game or something, let's stop right here and say that in addition to all the toys that plasmids and tonics for you to play around with, you're also going to be carrying around some more conventional firepower. Your melee weapon is a wrench, and you quickly collect a pistol and machine gun. Being that this is 1960 filtered through the isolation of an undersea world that has the art deco style of the first half of the century, the weapons aren't nearly as high-tech as the genetic code in your body. The machine gun is your basic tommy gun, and the grenade launcher appears to have been cobbled together from coffee cans and other spare parts. You'll also get a shotgun, a crossbow, and so on. You can also collect different types of ammunition, such as exploding buckshot for your shotgun or missiles for your grenade launcher, and upgrades that increase damage, speed up reloads, and so on. The weapons are functional and the upgrades are pretty good, but the firing action isn't nearly as exciting as a combat-focused first-person shooter would be. The weapons are loud but don't feel especially right, and seeing shotgun blasts not even do 50 percent damage to an unarmored human target (on the default difficulty setting) just feels wrong. But that might also say something about the general lack of enemy variety.    There are five types of splicers to deal with, and these are your primary enemies. The splicers are humans who have messed around with ADAM too much and have essentially lost their minds. Now they wander around the city like junkies in need of a fix. The only real difference among them is what they're carrying. Leadheads have guns, thugs have blunt objects, nitros toss explosives, Houdini splicers can teleport and shoot fireballs, and spider splicers can crawl on ceilings and toss hooks at you. As you go through the game, they get tougher to kill, but there's no real visual indicator as to why that's so, leading to some of the weapons feeling a bit weak. Headshots simply shift from killing enemies immediately to not killing enemies immediately. This makes smart use of a combination of plasmids and conventional weapons the best tactic, though even those tactics don't involve much. The same one-two punch of shocking enemies to stun them and following up with a whack with the wrench is a perfectly viable tactic throughout the entire game, depending on how you've placed your tonics.   Though the story is full of heavy-handed homage to Ayn Rand, you don't need a head full of freshman philosophy to enjoy BioShock.   You'll find more important human characters at certain points in the story, and though these are set up like boss fights, these guys are just more powerful and resilient versions of existing splicers. You'll also have to deal with security robots, turrets, and cameras, though these can all be hacked via a neat little hacking minigame to bring them over to your side, allowing for more indirect combat options.    Then there's the big daddy, which comes in two configurations. The bouncer has a huge drill arm that is used to, you know, drill into people. The rosie likes to launch explosives in your general direction. Both of them are fairly nasty, because they move quickly and dish out a lot of damage while not taking very much from most of your attacks. They protect the little sisters, who are invulnerable to your attacks and can only be dealt with once their protecting big daddy is dead. The big daddy is hardly unbeatable, though you may die a few times while facing your first few. Death in BioShock is barely even a setback. When you die, you're reconstituted at the nearest vita-chamber and sent on your way with your inventory intact and most of your health.    This isn't a reload, so everything is as you left it, even the damage that you've already done to any surviving enemies. So you can wear down a big daddy by just running at it again and again with little or no care for your health. That, of course, can get tedious, but having that possibility is a blessing--and a curse. On one hand, you're free to try out new things, like plasmid and tonic combinations, with no penalty if you equip some bum techniques. On the other, there aren't any real gameplay consequences, so playing with skill isn't rewarded. You could fumble your way through the 15 or 20 hours it'll probably take to properly explore Rapture and still see everything there is to see. This, along with three selectable difficulty settings, leaves you with the impression that the game was made to cater to a wide audience, but the hard difficulty setting doesn't actually impact things like artificial intelligence or force you to play any more skillfully to succeed. The enemies still mostly run at you mindlessly while attacking, occasionally getting into scraps with one another or breaking off to find a healing machine, but they take longer to kill and hurt you more when they hit.    While the world of Rapture is rich and filled with interesting little tidbits, the game does a tight job of keeping you on track. Aside from two cases where you must collect a certain amount of specific items in order to proceed, you always know exactly what to do and where to go to do it, thanks to a handy map screen and an onscreen arrow that points you directly at the next objective. These helping hands feel almost a little too helpful, but in the event that you get really stuck, you'll appreciate the additional hint system that very plainly explains what you need to do and where you need to go to move forward.    You won't miss a ton of locations by sticking to exactly where the arrow points you, but the story fills out a lot more when you find and listen to as many audio diaries as possible. Hearing various characters talk about the problems leading up to Rapture's current disheveled state really fills in the blanks nicely and should be considered mandatory if you intend to play the game. Hearing the voices of these wide-eyed idealists as their world falls apart makes the whole game feel more human. Playing through without listening to any of these optional audio clips would make the game quiet and, actually, fairly confusing, as you'd be proceeding with no sense of backstory about Andrew Ryan, fish magnate Frank Fontaine, and the bit characters who comment on their increasingly hostile struggle.    It certainly helps that the environments you find throughout the game look amazing and practically beg to be explored. For something as potentially dingy as an underwater city, you sure do get a lot of different looks as you move along, from the boiler rooms and workshops of the city's core to the forest that helps keep the entire thing oxygenated. You'll also get a lot of great views of the sea through windows. In addition to a terrific artistic design that ties the visuals together, the game has a very strong technical side. Unreal Engine 3 is under the hood, and all the requisite bells and whistles are along for the ride. If there's one thing you need to know about BioShock's graphics, it's that the water looks perfect. As an underwater city that's slowly falling apart, it's no surprise that you'll find plenty of leaks. Whether it's standing water on the floor or sea water rushing in after an explosion, it'll blow you away every time you see it.    But the visuals aren't without flaw--the game has an annoying seizure problem that almost looks like a correctable bug. On some consoles, the game hitches up and totally freezes for anywhere from one to five seconds at a time, then proceeds as if nothing happened. It doesn't seem to be tied to any particularly noteworthy parts of the game, and it happened only after playing the game for hours; but once it started, it didn't stop happening--even after we began an all-new game--and it can freeze up two or three times a minute. It's not the end of the world, but it's extremely frustrating and one of the few knocks this game has against it.   Electric buck in your shotgun makes the big daddies shimmy and shake.   In addition to some nice period music that plays from jukeboxes or record players, you'll get some terrific music that helps set the creepy, uncertain mood. The weapons sound good and loud, and everything else just sounds right. The voice acting, which you'll hear plenty of throughout the game from both living characters and their posthumous audio recordings, really brings the story together and helps give it all an emotional impact that most games lack. You'll also hear splicers mumbling, humming, and singing to themselves as they scavenge the environment, which helps give the game a creepy vibe. The quality and depth of things like this are what set BioShock apart from other games and make it something really special overall.    If you're the kind of player who just wants yet another action-packed shooter, BioShock probably isn't for you. Its weak link is its unsatisfying no-skill-required combat, which might aim this one just over the head of the average Halo fan. But if you want to get a little fancy, there's a lot of fun to be had with some of the game's more indirect fighting methods. It builds an amazing atmosphere by using terrific graphics and sound to set a creepy mood. But BioShock's real strengths are as a compelling work of interactive fiction, and as a unique ride through a warped world with some great payoff built into its mysterious plot. If that description has you even the least bit interested, you won't be disappointed one bit.  

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358,BioShock ,9," In spite of some technical issues, BioShock creates an amazing world that you'll want to explore and a compelling mystery that slowly comes together as you play.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/8/1/2217481-bioshock_cover_edited.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bioshock-review/1900-6177215/,pos,"
  While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you're constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won't let go until you've figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture.    Rapture is an amazing city that sits at the bottom of the ocean, but something's gone horribly wrong down there.   BioShock opens with a bang, but the overall plot focuses more on making an emotional impact than an explosive one. The year is 1960, and you're flying over the Atlantic Ocean. One mysterious plane crash later, you're floating in the water, apparently the lone survivor, surrounded by the flaming wreckage of the aircraft. But there's a lighthouse on a tiny island just at the edge of your view. Who in their right mind would put a lighthouse this far out? You swim closer and discover a small submersible called a bathysphere waiting to take you underwater. After catching a breathtaking view of what's below, you're sent into the secret underwater city of Rapture. Masterminded by a somewhat megalomaniacal businessman named Andrew Ryan, this city is driven by its own idea of total freedom, with capitalism completely unhindered by governmental meddling and science unhinged from the pesky morals of organized religion. Sounds like the perfect society, right? Well, even before you step out of your bathysphere and into the city, it becomes obvious that everything has gone horribly wrong down here. The city is trashed, and genetic freaks called splicers roam around, attacking anything that gets in front of them. At the heart of the matter is a powerful, corrupting substance called ADAM, which makes all this genetic tinkering possible and allows you to get your first plasmid power, the ability to shoot lightning out of your fingertips.     Character customization is a key trait in BioShock. You have a limited but increasable number of spaces in various customization categories, and you can totally reconfigure all of your different plasmids and tonics at will, at no charge, at specific locations in-game. Plasmids are the active, weaponlike genetic enhancement. Many of these are very straightforward. Incinerate lets you burn things and melt ice. Telekinesis lets you use your left hand as if it were Half-Life 2's gravity gun. But others are a little more subversive. Security bullseye is a little ball you can toss at enemies, causing any nearby security cameras, turrets, or sentry bots to point in his direction. Enrage can cause enemies to fight one another. Insect swarm causes your arm to shoot bees at your enemies, which unfortunately is far less cool-looking than it sounds. You can also place decoys, plant swirling wind traps for enemies, and so on. While it's fun to mess around with a lot of the indirect attacks, facing your enemies head-on with the more direct plasmids feels a bit more effective.     Tonics are skills that are slotted just like plasmids, but they have passive effects, like sportboost, which increases your movement and melee attack speed, or natural camouflage, which makes you turn invisible if you stand still for a few seconds. So if you want to make your swinging wrench attacks more powerful, you can slot up things like wrench jockey and wrench lurker, which increase your wrench damage on all attacks and when catching opponents off-guard, respectively. Add bloodlust, which gives you some health back every time you club someone with your wrench, and you're a melee master with health and plasmid energy (called EVE) to spare. You can also slot some defensive stuff, like static field, which zaps anyone who touches you with a electric radius effect, and armored shell, which reduces the damage you take from physical attacks. There are more than 50 tonics to collect, giving you plenty of options to play around with.    ADAM and EVE combine to let you shoot fire, lightning, ice, wind, bees, and more out of your fingertips.   Most of those plasmids and tonics will have to be purchased using the raw ADAM that you collect from harvesting vessels called little sisters. They're little girls with a big needle that they use to collect the sought-after stuff from dead bodies, and they're protected by the baddest enemies in the entire game, hulking armored monsters called big daddies. This is where the game makes you decide to be selfless or selfish. If you harvest the girls, they die, but you get 160 ADAM from them. If you free them and return them to normal, you get only 80 ADAM. There are a limited number of girls to deal with in the entire game, making it very possible that you won't be able to collect every single purchasable plasmid and tonic, so choose wisely. Either route has benefits and consequences, and there are story considerations as well.     Before you start thinking this is some kind of role-playing game or something, let's stop right here and say that in addition to all the toys that plasmids and tonics for you to play around with, you're also going to be carrying around some more conventional firepower. Your melee weapon is a wrench, and you quickly collect a pistol and machine gun. Being that this is 1960 filtered through the isolation of an undersea world that has the art deco style of the first half of the century, the weapons aren't nearly as high-tech as the genetic code in your body. The machine gun is your basic tommy gun, and the grenade launcher appears to have been cobbled together from coffee cans and other spare parts. You'll also get a shotgun, a crossbow, and so on. You can also collect different types of ammunition, such as exploding buckshot for your shotgun or missiles for your grenade launcher, and upgrades that increase damage, speed up reloads, and so on. The weapons are functional and the upgrades are pretty good, but the firing action isn't nearly as exciting as a combat-focused first-person shooter would be. The weapons are loud but don't feel especially right, and seeing shotgun blasts not even do 50 percent damage to an unarmored human target (on the default difficulty setting) just feels wrong. But that might also say something about the general lack of enemy variety.    There are five types of splicers to deal with, and these are your primary enemies. The splicers are humans who have messed around with ADAM too much and have essentially lost their minds. Now they wander around the city like junkies in need of a fix. The only real difference among them is what they're carrying. Leadheads have guns, thugs have blunt objects, nitros toss explosives, Houdini splicers can teleport and shoot fireballs, and spider splicers can crawl on ceilings and toss hooks at you. As you go through the game, they get tougher to kill, but there's no real visual indicator as to why that's so, leading to some of the weapons feeling a bit weak. Headshots simply shift from killing enemies immediately to not killing enemies immediately. This makes smart use of a combination of plasmids and conventional weapons the best tactic, though even those tactics don't involve much. The same one-two punch of shocking enemies to stun them and following up with a whack with the wrench is a perfectly viable tactic throughout the entire game, depending on how you've placed your tonics.    Though the story is full of heavy-handed homage to Ayn Rand, you don't need a head full of freshman philosophy to enjoy BioShock.   You'll find more important human characters at certain points in the story, and though these are set up like boss fights, these guys are just more powerful and resilient versions of existing splicers. You'll also have to deal with security robots, turrets, and cameras, though these can all be hacked via a neat little hacking minigame to bring them over to your side, allowing for more indirect combat options.     Then there's the big daddy, which comes in two configurations. The bouncer has a huge drill arm that is used to, you know, drill into people. The rosie likes to launch explosives in your general direction. Both of them are fairly nasty, because they move quickly and dish out a lot of damage while not taking very much from most of your attacks. They protect the little sisters, who are invulnerable to your attacks and can only be dealt with once their protecting big daddy is dead. The big daddy is hardly unbeatable, though you may die a few times while facing your first few. Death in BioShock is barely even a setback. When you die, you're reconstituted at the nearest vita-chamber and sent on your way with your inventory intact and most of your health.     This isn't a reload, so everything is as you left it, even the damage that you've already done to any surviving enemies. So you can wear down a big daddy by just running at it again and again with little or no care for your health. That can get tedious, of course, but having that possibility is a blessing--and a curse. On one hand, you're free to try out new things, like plasmid and tonic combinations, with no penalty if you equip some bum techniques. On the other, there aren't any real gameplay consequences, so playing with skill isn't rewarded. You could fumble your way through the 15 or 20 hours it'll probably take to properly explore Rapture and still see everything there is to see. This, along with three selectable difficulty settings, leaves you with the impression that the game was made to cater to a wide audience, but the hard difficulty setting doesn't actually impact things like artificial intelligence or force you to play any more skillfully to succeed. The enemies still mostly run at you mindlessly while attacking, occasionally getting into scraps with one another or breaking off to find a healing machine, but they take longer to kill and hurt you more when they hit.     While the world of Rapture is rich and filled with interesting little tidbits, the game does a tight job of keeping you on track. Aside from two cases where you must collect a certain amount of specific items in order to proceed, you always know exactly what to do and where to go to do it, thanks to a handy map screen and an onscreen arrow that points you directly at the next objective. These helping hands feel almost a little too helpful, but in the event that you get really stuck, you'll appreciate the additional hint system that very plainly explains what you need to do and where you need to go to move forward.     You won't miss a ton of locations by sticking to exactly where the arrow points you, but the story fills out a lot more when you find and listen to as many audio diaries as possible. Hearing various characters talk about the problems leading up to Rapture's current disheveled state really fills in the blanks nicely and should be considered mandatory if you intend to play the game. Hearing the voices of these wide-eyed idealists as their world falls apart makes the whole game feel more human. Playing through without listening to any of these optional audio clips would make the game quiet and, actually, fairly confusing, as you'd be proceeding with no sense of backstory about Andrew Ryan, fish magnate Frank Fontaine, and the bit characters who comment on their increasingly hostile struggle.     It certainly helps that the environments you find throughout the game look amazing and practically beg to be explored. For something as potentially dingy as an underwater city, you sure do get a lot of different looks as you move along, from the boiler rooms and workshops of the city's core to the forest that helps keep the entire thing oxygenated. You'll also get a lot of great views of the sea through windows. In addition to a terrific artistic design that ties the visuals together, the game has a very strong technical side, provided you have a machine that's built enough to handle it. Unreal Engine 3 is under the hood, and all the requisite bells and whistles are along for the ride. If there's one thing you need to know about BioShock's graphics, it's that the water looks perfect. As an underwater city that's slowly falling apart, it's no surprise that you'll find plenty of leaks. Whether it's standing water on the floor or sea water rushing in after an explosion, it'll blow you away every time you see it.     But BioShock isn't without flaw. The game has been released with a host of technical issues, ranging from a total lack of audio on some machines to issues with the SecuROM online activation, which under normal circumstances is designed to prevent you from activating a retail copy on more than two machines. The game is also available through Steam, though all of the same audio stuttering and other issues that some players are experiencing in the disc-based version carry over to the digital version as well. While it's a sad truth that no game is ever released in a completely bug-free state for 100 percent of its users, these issues appear to be pretty widespread, and if you're at all skittish about waiting for a patch after you've purchased something, you might want to wait until at least one patch is released before buying BioShock. In our experience, we got the game running with some minor audio stuttering on a Windows XP PC, and can't get any audio at all on our Vista test machine. All of this makes the Xbox 360 version's stuttering issues (which seem to only happen on some consoles) pale in comparison.    Aside from having different technical problems, the differences between the Xbox 360 and PC versions of BioShock are fairly minor. The mouse and keyboard support works exactly as you'd expect, and using a mouse makes the combat a touch easier, since aiming for the head is usually easier with a mouse than with a gamepad. But if you're after that console-style gamepad experience, BioShock has full support for the wired Xbox 360 controller. If you're at a loss for which version to purchase, it comes down to the quality of your PC. If you're running a high-end DirectX 10 machine, the game looks better on the PC. It also has DirectX 9 support, and even running this way, it's possible for some facets of BioShock, like texture quality, to look sharper than the 360 version if your machine can handle it. But when you factor in the current bug list for each version, or if your PC isn't especially recent, the Xbox 360 version is a safer bet.   Electric buck in your shotgun makes the big daddies shimmy and shake.   In addition to some nice period music that plays from jukeboxes or record players, you'll get some terrific music that helps set the creepy, uncertain mood. The weapons sound good and loud, and everything else just sounds right. The voice acting, which you'll hear plenty of throughout the game from both living characters and their posthumous audio recordings, really brings the story together and helps give it all an emotional impact that most games lack. You'll also hear splicers mumbling, humming, and singing to themselves as they scavenge the environment, which helps give the game a creepy vibe. The quality and depth of things like this are what set BioShock apart from other games and make it something really special overall.     If you're the kind of player who just wants yet another action-packed shooter, BioShock probably isn't for you. Its weak link is its unsatisfying no-skill-required combat, which might aim this one just over the head of the average Halo fan. But if you want to get a little fancy, there's a lot of fun to be had with some of the game's more indirect fighting methods. It builds an amazing atmosphere by using terrific graphics and sound to set a creepy mood. But BioShock's real strengths are as a compelling work of interactive fiction, and as a unique ride through a warped world with some great payoff built into its mysterious plot. If that description has you even the least bit interested, you'll definitely find BioShock worth playing--but you still might want to hold off for a patch or two, just in case.  
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359,BioShock ,9," Intriguing moral choices and a chilling story make BioShock a must-play adventure, even a year later.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/8/1/2217481-bioshock_cover_edited.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bioshock-review/1900-6200177/,pos,"
  When BioShock was released for the Xbox 360 and PC last year, it redefined what people could expect from a console first-person shooter. The intricately designed Rapture--a utopian city that had fallen on hard times--was the star of the show. This startlingly real metropolis located far below the ocean's surface was a planned community for people desperate to escape the imminent war on land, though a much worse fate caught up with those who made the move. One year later, PlayStation 3 owners finally get a chance to lay waste to the genetic freaks populating this dilapidated world. If you've already played through the original release, this version is nearly identical; the inclusion of a harder difficulty mode is not enough to lure BioShock veterans back to Rapture. However, if you missed BioShock the first time, you won't want to pass up this undersea adventure again.   The deadly inhabitants of Rapture can be brought down with a good gun.   The impressive graphics and gorgeous water effects make the transition to the PlayStation 3 intact. Rapture feels alive even in its decaying state. There are a number of unique environments located in this underwater city. The medical bay has pools of blood still drying on the floor and posters along the walls depicting surgical procedures; the clubs and bars have ads for various beers and places for people meeting for a drink to sit and relax; there are even forests in Rapture, with trees to provide the necessary oxygen for underwater living. The frame rate stays high no matter how many enemies and explosions are onscreen at one time. After a brief install when you first start the game, load times are kept to a minimum. The only loading screens you'll encounter are when you travel from one section to another using a bathysphere, but this is rare enough that it never breaks up the pace of the action.     As technically sound and artistically impressive as BioShock is, the reason to play the game is to experience the dark story of Rapture's downfall. The story is primarily told through audio recorders you'll find throughout the environment. These snippets document the growing madness taking place. When you come to the medical bay, you'll be introduced to a plastic surgeon who was obsessed with beauty. The recordings--both from him and those who observed him--tell of his haunting practices, how the freedom to run his facility without moral responsibility allowed him to create the human masterpieces he always envisioned. The people you'll come across are clearly mad with power, as you quickly discover, because nearly all of them have tampered with genetic modifications to their own bodies. Yet their motivations feel terrifyingly real.    Things get even more interesting when you're able to inject your own morality into the experience. During the course of your journey, you'll come across Little Sisters. These small girls control Adam, the life source that allows you to change your own genetics, giving you superhuman powers. You are able to see how power has corrupted the citizens of Rapture, but how will you react when presented with power for yourself? The Little Sisters are protected by Big Daddies, huge beings with limitless ammunition and an aggressive attitude. Once you dispose of these terrifying bodyguards, you'll be face to face with a defenseless Little Sister. They cry because they are scared, because their protector has been slain in front of their eyes, but they won't try to run away or attack you. You have to decide if you want to harvest them, sucking the Adam from their tiny bodies, killing them in the process. Of you can free them from their genetic prison, taking away just enough Adam to allow them to live normal lives. Seeing them try to break free from your grip is a heart-wrenching experience, and you'll have to decide for yourself if the extra Adam is worth it.    The medical ward is the last place you'll want to go if you're hurt.   Even though BioShock is a slow-paced shooter, the action is just as satisfying as it was on the Xbox 360 and PC. You'll spend as much time listening to recordings and marveling at the environment as you will shooting enemies. But the gunplay is rather intense when enemies are swarming. You have a few standard weapons in your arsenal--a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, and a wrench for close combat, yet these can be upgraded with parts you scavenge along the way. However, the game’s defining feature is its plasmids. These are the genetic modifications you unlock with precious Adam. You can shoot fire or bees from your hands, discharge an electric blast when attacked, or give yourself super healing abilities, and that's just the beginning. The action is able to stay intense throughout because you're constantly upgrading and changing your attacks. One of the big criticisms of the first release was that it was too easy. The PS3 version addresses this complaint by adding a punishing new difficulty setting and lets you choose not to use vita-chambers, life vaults that let you continue close to where you died.     The PlayStation 3 version of BioShock is every bit as engaging as the Xbox 360 and PC versions released last year. The graphics and gameplay are nearly identical across the platforms, so there is little reason to choose this latest release over the other versions. However, this game should be experienced no matter which system is your favorite. The story in BioShock is dark and satisfying, something that will make you contemplate it long after you've put the game down. And though combat takes a back seat to the enthralling atmosphere, it's still extremely satisfying to combine your plasmid powers with traditional weapons. The lack of any meaningful new content is disappointing, but this is still one of the finest first-person shooters around and a game that simply should not be missed.  
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360,Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood ,3.4, Backyard Wrestling 2 is just flat-out bad in most every way you can think of.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/1/5/2218015-box_bwrestl2.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/backyard-wrestling-2-there-goes-the-neighborhood-r/1900-6113776/,neg,"
 The original Backyard Wrestling game was released last year, and despite the fact that it was an all-around poor effort, it still showed the slightest glimmers of hope that maybe, just maybe the franchise could eventually become the entertaining, hardcore alternative to standard wrestling games that it aspired to be. With Backyard Wrestling 2, it's now apparent that those hopes and dreams have been almost completely dashed. The sequel suffers from basically being the exact same game that came out last year...but with a couple of half-baked gameplay changes thrown in that just make the game even easier than it was before. Furthermore, there's an arduously long and dull career mode that could only be less entertaining if it were capable of giving you a painful rash of some sort. This game is just flat-out bad in most every way you can think of, and for a franchise with such promise and potential, that's a truly disheartening thing.  Remember everything you hated about the original Backyard Wrestling? Terrible news! It's all back!  Let's start with what actually has been improved in this year's game, since there's not very much of it. The game's roster of wrestlers features more than 20 combatants, including several notable hardcore grapplers, like Mad Man Pondo, Vic Grimes, Vampiro, New Jack, Sick Nick Mondo, Ruckus, Sandman, and, of course, the Backyard Wrestling cover boys Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J, the Insane Clown Posse. But, of course, this wouldn't be Backyard Wrestling without a couple of other random celebrity personalities thrown in for good measure, and in There Goes the Neighborhood, these personalities come in the forms of adult film actresses Tera Patrick and Sunrise Adams and the always mind-blowing metal head Andrew W.K. The overall lineup is much more recognizable than the one found in last year's game, but it's still mostly geared toward those who actually follow and understand underground wrestling.  The gameplay engine features a couple of added mechanics, though they don't end up making a lot of difference in the game. The basic additions to the highly rudimentary wrestling engine include submission holds and a block button, both of which were absent before. There's also a new type of environmental attack, appropriately titled an ""enviro-mental"" attack. These contextual attacks occur during grapples, when you're positioned in just the right area. With the simple press of a button, you'll be whisked into a cutscene that will have your wrestler doing something crazy, like powerbombing your opponent through a picnic table or repeatedly slamming his or her head into the trunk of a car. While no one will argue that these aren't laudable bonuses to the gameplay, the simple, glaring fact remains that the wrestling engine is still terribly underdeveloped.  Everything about the wrestling in Backyard Wrestling 2 just feels incredibly sloppy. The striking mechanics and the grapples... Both are so basic and repetitive that after about two matches, you'll have mastered the entire game. Then again, the whole point of Backyard Wrestling is that the wrestling is almost totally secondary to hitting your opponent with whatever trash is littered throughout the environment. Chain saws, weed whackers, bricks, and pieces of broken tables... These are just some of the things you can use to beat your opponent senseless and bloody. But, just like last year's game, these weapons simply can't salvage the gameplay. All the weapon hits just seem so halfhearted and underwhelming. You rarely ever get that sensation that just makes you want to cringe in pain, because none of the weapon hits are cringe-worthy. They are just too quick, and the sounds of blows or cuts barely register. A mere chair shot in a typical WWE game, or even a simple body slam in Def Jam: Fight for NY, sounds about a hundred times more brutal than a fluorescent light tube crashing over someone's skull or a brick thrown across a fight zone and into someone's face in Backyard Wrestling 2. Considering that this game is supposed to be all about total brutality, this comes across as pretty pathetic.  There are also a lot of glitchy, generally dumb things that hinder the gameplay even further. For starters, the hit detection is just awful. Weapon tosses that miss a wrestler, seemingly by several feet, will still register hits. Characters will sometimes just somehow magically fall out of grapple positions and transport themselves back to standing positions elsewhere. Anytime you're in a multileveled environment (like in the game's swimming pool area, for instance), and you're standing on the upper level--while your opponent is on the lower level--you can just stand while facing your opponent with a weapon in your hand. Then you can swing the weapon. The strike will inflict damage on him or her, even though you're several feet above your opponent. The enemy artificial intelligence is also quite bad. Enemies will just run around a level, periodically swinging at you or trying to grapple you. But thanks to the game's incredibly easy countering system, you can almost always get out of a grapple. And even if you have trouble countering, it doesn't matter, because all you have to do is either take advantage of any of the game's collision exploits or just keep punching and grappling over and over again to never lose a match. The AI just can't keep up with an aggressive pace, so it's just entirely too easy to roll over it constantly. As a result, no match should ever take you more than a couple of minutes, tops. You can also play two-player matches. However, even without the lame AI in the mix, the game still isn't any fun.  Andrew, buddy. If you needed the money, all you had to do was ask. Seriously.  Another big problem with Backyard Wrestling 2 is that the whole thing just gets extremely old, extremely quickly. This is mostly because there's hardly a thing to do in the game, thanks to its paltry selection of play modes. Apart from the obligatory exhibition match, the only other mode in the game is the career mode, which is an effective replacement for the terribly lousy talk show mode in last year's game. The career mode features a simple premise. Backyard Wrestling has come to your town to offer up a $1 million prize to any backyard grappler who can plow his way through the competition and win all the regional championships in your previously peaceful burg. Sounds like a neat enough idea, but that's ultimately about all it amounts to.  First, you begin by creating a new wrestler via the game's limited create-a-wrestler mode. Granted, there's far more to customize here than there was in last year's incredibly sparse create-a-wrestler mode, but all the different costume customizations you can make are just patently ridiculous. Ever wanted to make a spiky-haired, morbidly obese wrestler with a tutu, night-vision goggles, and a pair of flippers? Then you're in luck, friend! Otherwise, though, there aren't too many options that come outside of the goofy side of things. So if you just want to make a tough-guy wrestler, your options are limited.  Once that's out of the way, you'll find yourself with three areas on a map of the town unlocked. In each of these three battle areas, you'll find yourself presented with a number of missions that you'll have to complete to unlock that region's title tournament. These objectives run the gamut from performing a specific number of counters in a match to performing a specific number of special moves. That's it. You don't even have to go on to win the match. Once you perform the objective required, you can just quit the match and go on to the next objective. Eventually, the game does run out of ways to make you perform specific numbers of moves specific numbers of times, so then it starts throwing some curveballs. Even then, it's still mostly very simple and boring stuff. Basically, you'll have to keep doing this stuff over and over again in each area to keep unlocking title tournaments to participate in so you can win belts and so on.  What this all boils down to is the plain and simple fact that the career mode just has little to no entertainment value whatsoever. The missions are all terribly lame, and apart from some side matches you can take on to earn extra cash for the game's shop area--where you can unlock additional silly outfits for your created wrestlers, as well as some crazy real-life wrestling footage--there's just nothing else to it. Computer-generated cutscenes periodically rear their ugly heads between regions and totally fall flat. Whether it's the Insane Clown Posse jawing at you because...well, just because...or whether it's New Jack taking a second to stab a reporter in the face with a fork for no particular reason, there's just no coherency to any of these sequences. So they're completely skip-worthy every single time. Actually, skip-worthy pretty much sums up the whole game.  Graphically, Backyard Wrestling 2 represents a marginal graphical improvement over its predecessor. The models are a little less blocky-looking, but considering how ugly the models looked in the last game, these models are a pretty weak step up. The animation is just as bad, if not worse, here than it was in the previous entry in the series. Nasty environmental clipping, glitchy moves, and otherwise unpleasant-looking problems plague each and every match. The wrestling environments are probably the best aspect of the game, visually, but that doesn't mean they're all that good. Just like in the last game, they're all thematically designed after one trashy location or another, ranging from a simple backyard, to a trailer park, to a brewery. Each has interactive elements, as well as plenty of weaponry scattered about, and aesthetically, each looks as well as it should, though there's nothing markedly impressive about any one of them, either. Neither the Xbox nor the PlayStation 2 version has a leg up on the other, and the game looks roughly the same on both platforms. So, basically, neither looks good.  Go watch just about any ECW, CZW, XPW or Japanese hardcore wrestling tapes or DVDs. You'll have a billion times more fun than you will playing this game.  The audio is another big point of contention in the game. Though, once again, Eidos has gone out and licensed a collection of name bands for the soundtrack, including Andrew W.K., Kool Keith, the ICP, Bad Brains, Body Count, and Hoobastank, this offering's soundtrack isn't as consistent as the last one. It lacks the decisive theme that the last game's soundtrack had, and some of the music actually feels a little out of place. Of course, a slightly out-of-place soundtrack is like pure gold compared to the game's consistently terrible sound effects. Even when they work properly, the effects here are so underproduced and cheap-sounding that they completely wreck any impact they should have on the overall action. But then again, that's only when they actually work. There are plenty of sound effects that actually seem to be completely missing altogether, which leads to big dead spots where some sort of punch or slam sound should be heard. There's also some exceptionally bad voice acting from the wrestlers and celebs, but, unfortunately, it actually works...unlike the sound effects.  In short, you don't want to play Backyard Wrestling 2. This game is everything you hated about the last one, but it's been spray painted over with a few cheap gimmicks to try to gussy up what ultimately amounts to a pretty pitiful package. If you like hardcore wrestling, go buy some videos or DVDs, because most all the brief snippets of video found in this game can be found just about anywhere else in extended form...and in better-quality format. And when you factor in that these snippets of video are about a billion times more entertaining than this game, you're really left with no reason at all to entertain the notion of picking up Backyard Wrestling 2.  
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361,Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood ,3.4, Backyard Wrestling 2 is just flat-out bad in most every way you can think of.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/1/5/2218015-box_bwrestl2.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/backyard-wrestling-2-there-goes-the-neighborhood-r/1900-6113784/,neg,"
 The original Backyard Wrestling game was released last year, and despite the fact that it was an all-around poor effort, it still showed the slightest glimmers of hope that maybe, just maybe the franchise could eventually become the entertaining, hardcore alternative to standard wrestling games that it aspired to be. With Backyard Wrestling 2, it's now apparent that those hopes and dreams have been almost completely dashed. The sequel suffers from basically being the exact same game that came out last year...but with a couple of half-baked gameplay changes thrown in that just make the game even easier than it was before. Furthermore, there's an arduously long and dull career mode that could only be less entertaining if it were capable of giving you a painful rash of some sort. This game is just flat-out bad in most every way you can think of, and for a franchise with such promise and potential, that's a truly disheartening thing.  Remember everything you hated about the original Backyard Wrestling? Terrible news! It's all back!  Let's start with what actually has been improved in this year's game, since there's not very much of it. The game's roster of wrestlers features more than 20 combatants, including several notable hardcore grapplers, like Mad Man Pondo, Vic Grimes, Vampiro, New Jack, Sick Nick Mondo, Ruckus, Sandman, and, of course, the Backyard Wrestling cover boys Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J, the Insane Clown Posse. But, of course, this wouldn't be Backyard Wrestling without a couple of other random celebrity personalities thrown in for good measure, and in There Goes the Neighborhood, these personalities come in the forms of adult film actresses Tera Patrick and Sunrise Adams and the always mind-blowing metal head Andrew W.K. The overall lineup is much more recognizable than the one found in last year's game, but it's still mostly geared toward those who actually follow and understand underground wrestling.  The gameplay engine features a couple of added mechanics, though they don't end up making a lot of difference in the game. The basic additions to the highly rudimentary wrestling engine include submission holds and a block button, both of which were absent before. There's also a new type of environmental attack, appropriately titled an ""enviro-mental"" attack. These contextual attacks occur during grapples, when you're positioned in just the right area. With the simple press of a button, you'll be whisked into a cutscene that will have your wrestler doing something crazy, like powerbombing your opponent through a picnic table or repeatedly slamming his or her head into the trunk of a car. While no one will argue that these aren't laudable bonuses to the gameplay, the simple, glaring fact remains that the wrestling engine is still terribly underdeveloped.  Everything about the wrestling in Backyard Wrestling 2 just feels incredibly sloppy. The striking mechanics and the grapples... Both are so basic and repetitive that after about two matches, you'll have mastered the entire game. Then again, the whole point of Backyard Wrestling is that the wrestling is almost totally secondary to hitting your opponent with whatever trash is littered throughout the environment. Chain saws, weed whackers, bricks, and pieces of broken tables... These are just some of the things you can use to beat your opponent senseless and bloody. But, just like last year's game, these weapons simply can't salvage the gameplay. All the weapon hits just seem so halfhearted and underwhelming. You rarely ever get that sensation that just makes you want to cringe in pain, because none of the weapon hits are cringe-worthy. They are just too quick, and the sounds of blows or cuts barely register. A mere chair shot in a typical WWE game, or even a simple body slam in Def Jam: Fight for NY, sounds about a hundred times more brutal than a fluorescent light tube crashing over someone's skull or a brick thrown across a fight zone and into someone's face in Backyard Wrestling 2. Considering that this game is supposed to be all about total brutality, this comes across as pretty pathetic.  There are also a lot of glitchy, generally dumb things that hinder the gameplay even further. For starters, the hit detection is just awful. Weapon tosses that miss a wrestler, seemingly by several feet, will still register hits. Characters will sometimes just somehow magically fall out of grapple positions and transport themselves back to standing positions elsewhere. Anytime you're in a multileveled environment (like in the game's swimming pool area, for instance), and you're standing on the upper level--while your opponent is on the lower level--you can just stand while facing your opponent with a weapon in your hand. Then you can swing the weapon. The strike will inflict damage on him or her, even though you're several feet above your opponent. The enemy artificial intelligence is also quite bad. Enemies will just run around a level, periodically swinging at you or trying to grapple you. But thanks to the game's incredibly easy countering system, you can almost always get out of a grapple. And even if you have trouble countering, it doesn't matter, because all you have to do is either take advantage of any of the game's collision exploits or just keep punching and grappling over and over again to never lose a match. The AI just can't keep up with an aggressive pace, so it's just entirely too easy to roll over it constantly. As a result, no match should ever take you more than a couple of minutes, tops. You can also play two-player matches. However, even without the lame AI in the mix, the game still isn't any fun.  Andrew, buddy. If you needed the money, all you had to do was ask. Seriously.  Another big problem with Backyard Wrestling 2 is that the whole thing just gets extremely old, extremely quickly. This is mostly because there's hardly a thing to do in the game, thanks to its paltry selection of play modes. Apart from the obligatory exhibition match, the only other mode in the game is the career mode, which is an effective replacement for the terribly lousy talk show mode in last year's game. The career mode features a simple premise. Backyard Wrestling has come to your town to offer up a $1 million prize to any backyard grappler who can plow his way through the competition and win all the regional championships in your previously peaceful burg. Sounds like a neat enough idea, but that's ultimately about all it amounts to.  First, you begin by creating a new wrestler via the game's limited create-a-wrestler mode. Granted, there's far more to customize here than there was in last year's incredibly sparse create-a-wrestler mode, but all the different costume customizations you can make are just patently ridiculous. Ever wanted to make a spiky-haired, morbidly obese wrestler with a tutu, night-vision goggles, and a pair of flippers? Then you're in luck, friend! Otherwise, though, there aren't too many options that come outside of the goofy side of things. So if you just want to make a tough-guy wrestler, your options are limited.  Once that's out of the way, you'll find yourself with three areas on a map of the town unlocked. In each of these three battle areas, you'll find yourself presented with a number of missions that you'll have to complete to unlock that region's title tournament. These objectives run the gamut from performing a specific number of counters in a match to performing a specific number of special moves. That's it. You don't even have to go on to win the match. Once you perform the objective required, you can just quit the match and go on to the next objective. Eventually, the game does run out of ways to make you perform specific numbers of moves specific numbers of times, so then it starts throwing some curveballs. Even then, it's still mostly very simple and boring stuff. Basically, you'll have to keep doing this stuff over and over again in each area to keep unlocking title tournaments to participate in so you can win belts and so on.  What this all boils down to is the plain and simple fact that the career mode just has little to no entertainment value whatsoever. The missions are all terribly lame, and apart from some side matches you can take on to earn extra cash for the game's shop area--where you can unlock additional silly outfits for your created wrestlers, as well as some crazy real-life wrestling footage--there's just nothing else to it. Computer-generated cutscenes periodically rear their ugly heads between regions and totally fall flat. Whether it's the Insane Clown Posse jawing at you because...well, just because...or whether it's New Jack taking a second to stab a reporter in the face with a fork for no particular reason, there's just no coherency to any of these sequences. So they're completely skip-worthy every single time. Actually, skip-worthy pretty much sums up the whole game.  Graphically, Backyard Wrestling 2 represents a marginal graphical improvement over its predecessor. The models are a little less blocky-looking, but considering how ugly the models looked in the last game, these models are a pretty weak step up. The animation is just as bad, if not worse, here than it was in the previous entry in the series. Nasty environmental clipping, glitchy moves, and otherwise unpleasant-looking problems plague each and every match. The wrestling environments are probably the best aspect of the game, visually, but that doesn't mean they're all that good. Just like in the last game, they're all thematically designed after one trashy location or another, ranging from a simple backyard, to a trailer park, to a brewery. Each has interactive elements, as well as plenty of weaponry scattered about, and aesthetically, each looks as well as it should, though there's nothing markedly impressive about any one of them, either. Neither the Xbox nor the PlayStation 2 version has a leg up on the other, and the game looks roughly the same on both platforms. So, basically, neither looks good.  Go watch just about any ECW, CZW, XPW or Japanese hardcore wrestling tapes or DVDs. You'll have a billion times more fun than you will playing this game.  The audio is another big point of contention in the game. Though, once again, Eidos has gone out and licensed a collection of name bands for the soundtrack, including Andrew W.K., Kool Keith, the ICP, Bad Brains, Body Count, and Hoobastank, this offering's soundtrack isn't as consistent as the last one. It lacks the decisive theme that the last game's soundtrack had, and some of the music actually feels a little out of place. Of course, a slightly out-of-place soundtrack is like pure gold compared to the game's consistently terrible sound effects. Even when they work properly, the effects here are so underproduced and cheap-sounding that they completely wreck any impact they should have on the overall action. But then again, that's only when they actually work. There are plenty of sound effects that actually seem to be completely missing altogether, which leads to big dead spots where some sort of punch or slam sound should be heard. There's also some exceptionally bad voice acting from the wrestlers and celebs, but, unfortunately, it actually works...unlike the sound effects.  In short, you don't want to play Backyard Wrestling 2. This game is everything you hated about the last one, but it's been spray painted over with a few cheap gimmicks to try to gussy up what ultimately amounts to a pretty pitiful package. If you like hardcore wrestling, go buy some videos or DVDs, because most all the brief snippets of video found in this game can be found just about anywhere else in extended form...and in better-quality format. And when you factor in that these snippets of video are about a billion times more entertaining than this game, you're really left with no reason at all to entertain the notion of picking up Backyard Wrestling 2.  
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362,Pac-Man Pinball Advance ,3.4," Rushed, broken, and ugly are appropriate words to use when describing Pac-Man Pinball Advance.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/4/6/9/22787-64469.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pac-man-pinball-advance-review/1900-6126597/,neg,"
  Pac-Man Pinball Advance does a clever job of incorporating the characters and themes from Namco's Pac-Man franchise into a traditional pinball video game. Unfortunately, that's about the only thing this game does right. Between the broken physics and dark graphics--not to mention the egregious lack of a high-score list--Pac-Man Pinball Advance suffers from a litany of problems.   Pac-Man, the ghosts, the dots, and power pellets are just some of the familiar Pac-nuances you'll recognize in Pac-Man Pinball Advance.   The overall concept is a good one. The game takes the characters from the Pac-Man franchise and integrates them into a pinball game that involves two different tables, multiple power-up items, and a small assortment of minigames. There are dots to collect on each table and power pellets to eat, which, just like the power pellets in the original Pac-Man arcade game did, give our round yellow hero the ability to chase after and devour the four ghosts wandering around the table. By entering the Pac Prof's house on each table, you'll be able to exchange the dots you've collected for power-up items, such as ball savers, multiballs, and bonus multipliers. These items have a Pac-Man theme as well. For instance, the multiball looks like Ms. Pac-Man. Every so often, you'll enter the Pac Prof's house and find yourself participating in a minigame, which could take the form of a standard dot-collecting bonus room, a vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up, or even a classic Pac-Man maze.    Sadly, Pac-Man Pinball Advance is broken in a myriad of ways. The physics, the collision detection, and even the graphics actually get in the way of making headway. The controls are easy enough. You use the left D pad and the A button to control the left and right flippers, respectively, while the other buttons let you bump the table. When you use one of the flippers, however, it's anyone's guess as to where the ball is going to end up. Sometimes, the ball will speed down the lower ramp and you'll activate a flipper, only to watch it gently roll into one of the gutters. Other times, the ball will trickle down the lower ramp and go absolutely flying when you bump it off of the fat side of the flipper, where there shouldn't be any leverage. Momentum and angle also don't seem to have any bearing on how the ball bounces off of walls and bumpers. Basically, the physics are random. To make matters worse, the collision detection isn't always reliable. At times, the ball will pass right through a pin or fail to bounce off one of the bumpers.    Even the graphics make the game harder to play. Each of the two tables--four if you count the classic color schemes--is roughly the height of two screens and based on a particular theme, such as the Wild West or the Pac people's forest village. Pac-Man's four ghostly foes--Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde--sit below the flippers and subsequently scurry around the table whenever you pick up a power pellet. Just to make the license even more obvious, the ball is yellow and painted to look like Pac-Man. These details are nice, but unfortunately, the graphics are so dark and grainy that it's impossible to enjoy them. The ball is easy to lose track of, especially on the two classic tables where the backgrounds are dark blue with yellow or brown accents.    The audio won't win any awards either, but at least it doesn't get in the way of a person's ability to actually play the game. Most of the sound effects for actions such as collecting dots, activating power pellets, and eating ghosts were lifted straight out of the Pac-Man arcade game. Throughout it all, a single piece of dramatic music loops constantly. It's a bit scary and out of place, but not particularly bad.   When viewed on a GBA or GBA SP, the graphics are so dark that the ball is often impossible to see.   When you think about it, it almost seems like the development team that made Pac-Man Pinball Advance didn't have much hands-on experience with real pinball tables. If they had, they'd easily have noticed how inappropriate the physics were and perhaps would've realized that the graphics needed to be better defined. Also, you don't have to be a pinball wizard to understand that pinball is all about setting high scores and establishing bragging rights. The fact that Pac-Man Pinball Advance doesn't record high scores is inexcusable. This one oversight pretty much eliminates what little replay value the game had left.    Just like all of the other budget-priced GBA games that Namco has published lately, Pac-Man Pinball Advance is rife with problems that any decent quality-control process would have made right. The game was rushed out the door to make a quick buck and it clearly shows.  
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363,IHRA Drag Racing Sportsman Edition ,3.4," This game sucks all the fun out of drag racing, presenting the sport as slow and tedious instead of fast and furious.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/1/7/2223217-box_ihrase.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ihra-drag-racing-sportsman-edition-review/1900-6153843/,neg,"
  Drag racing is exciting because it distills auto racing into a very short, very intense event that emphasizes the core strengths of American-made cars--they go really fast, really quickly, and in a really straight line. Even just watching these land-bound rockets is a viscerally thrilling blend of noise, speed, and fumes. IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition, on the other hand, captures none of the excitement of drag racing, instead presenting the sport as simplistic, ugly, and tedious.   Driving in a straight line has rarely been such a bore.     Every race in IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition goes something like this. First you enter your dial-in time, which is your own rough projection of how long it's going to take your car to run the quarter mile. It's extremely important that your dial-in time be as accurate as possible without being over your actual race time, as it's used to handicap the delay between the two lanes on the light tree. Set it too low and your opponent gets a head start on the light tree; set it too high and you'll basically be disqualified from the race. If your car is equipped with a delay box, you then set the delay time, which can be useful for getting off the starting line quicker but is difficult to fine-tune. You go through the burnout phase in order to heat up your tires for optimal grip, which simply requires you to lean on the accelerator button until the onscreen meter tells you that your tires are suitably hot.     Then comes the staging mode, where you roll as far up on the starting line as you can without going over; once you're staged, you're ready to race. If there's any challenge, it's in timing your acceleration so that you're off the starting line within thousandths of a second of the light turning green. There's rarely much challenge in keeping your car in its lane, and by default, the game handles shifting gears automatically, though for a more realistic experience you can choose to shift manually. From a strictly nuts-and-bolts perspective, it's technically fairly accurate, and gearheads will probably appreciate realistic touches like the dial-in time; but in practice, the whole experience is just mind-numbing. All the prerace preparations are basically mechanical, but the game still requires you to go through them yourself every single time, and once you're actually off the starting line you get no sense of power, speed, or danger, all of which are key to the experience of real drag racing.    IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition packages its dull racing experience in two different ways, neither of which is compelling enough to excuse how lackluster the core of the game is. An arcade mode lets you jump right into a race against an artificial intelligence opponent or a friend using prebuilt, tricked-out dragsters, while the season mode offers something a little more in-depth. You start off with a beater, though by winning races you'll earn cash that you can spend on part upgrades like new front and rear tires, engine blocks, cylinder heads, carburetors, blowers, nitrous kits, camshafts, valves, transmissions, and delay boxes, as well as new cars.     The game has zero licenses beyond the IHRA name, which means that all of the parts you'll buy have fake aftermarket names, and the cars you can buy look like knockoff versions of Challengers, Chargers, Camaros, Monte Carlos, and so on. There's also some light tuning you can do, such as suspension stiffness and your fuel ratio, and you can also choose from a handful of paint designs and colors. The season mode focuses on a series of 12 bracketed events where you can earn not just cash, but points that go toward your overall position for the season, though if you go straight into one of the 12 season events with your stock car, you won't make it past the first qualifier. Instead, you'll have to go and engage in single races, over and over again, in order to build up enough of a bankroll to get your car into serious competition shape. The fact that you have to go through a bunch of monotonous races for cash before you can think about going through the monotonous season races speaks to how poorly the season mode was laid out.   The lackluster graphics and sound do little to improve what's already an underwhelming experience.     Making IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition even harder to sit through is its muddy, underwhelming presentation. The cars themselves actually look like decent approximations of real hot rods, but everything else is just flat, barren, and ugly, which makes it kind of appalling that the game has trouble keeping a stable frame rate when all it's showing is two cars and maybe a dozen cardboard-cutout spectators. The game uses some filtering effects to augment the frankly pathetic sensation of speed, though they kick in at specific intervals so bluntly that it almost feels like the graphics engine is shifting gears. Both the PS2 and Xbox versions are pretty unpleasant, though in their own special way--the PS2 version is grainier, while the Xbox version feels smoother, but more washed out. Regardless, both versions are saddled with lots of ridiculous load times. The game can't even muster some decent noise for the cars, which are inappropriately subdued and often overwhelmed by the game's antiseptic heavy metal-inspired soundtrack, and you can forget about bells and whistles like track announcers.    It can be tempting to forgive certain production value shortcomings when you're looking at a budget-priced game like IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition, but the whole of this game is so shallow and so unengaging, it doesn't warrant any such charity. This is a dreary approximation that makes the genuinely exciting world of nitro-burnin' dragsters just look like a drag.    
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'game', 'handles', 'shifting', 'gears', 'automatically', ',', 'though', 'realistic', 'experience', 'choose', 'shift', 'manually', '.', 'From', 'strictly', 'nuts-and-bolts', 'perspective', ',', ""'s"", 'technically', 'fairly', 'accurate', ',', 'gearheads', 'probably', 'appreciate', 'realistic', 'touches', 'like', 'dial-in', 'time', ';', 'practice', ',', 'whole', 'experience', 'mind-numbing', '.', 'All', 'prerace', 'preparations', 'basically', 'mechanical', ',', 'game', 'still', 'requires', 'go', 'every', 'single', 'time', ',', ""'re"", 'actually', 'starting', 'line', 'get', 'sense', 'power', ',', 'speed', ',', 'danger', ',', 'key', 'experience', 'real', 'drag', 'racing', '.', 'IHRA', 'Drag', 'Racing', ':', 'Sportsman', 'Edition', 'packages', 'dull', 'racing', 'experience', 'two', 'different', 'ways', ',', 'neither', 'compelling', 'enough', 'excuse', 'lackluster', 'core', 'game', '.', 'An', 'arcade', 'mode', 'lets', 'jump', 'right', 'race', 'artificial', 'intelligence', 'opponent', 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',', 'makes', 'kind', 'appalling', 'game', 'trouble', 'keeping', 'stable', 'frame', 'rate', ""'s"", 'showing', 'two', 'cars', 'maybe', 'dozen', 'cardboard-cutout', 'spectators', '.', 'The', 'game', 'uses', 'filtering', 'effects', 'augment', 'frankly', 'pathetic', 'sensation', 'speed', ',', 'though', 'kick', 'specific', 'intervals', 'bluntly', 'almost', 'feels', 'like', 'graphics', 'engine', 'shifting', 'gears', '.', 'Both', 'PS2', 'Xbox', 'versions', 'pretty', 'unpleasant', ',', 'though', 'special', 'way', '--', 'PS2', 'version', 'grainier', ',', 'Xbox', 'version', 'feels', 'smoother', ',', 'washed', '.', 'Regardless', ',', 'versions', 'saddled', 'lots', 'ridiculous', 'load', 'times', '.', 'The', 'game', 'ca', ""n't"", 'even', 'muster', 'decent', 'noise', 'cars', ',', 'inappropriately', 'subdued', 'often', 'overwhelmed', 'game', ""'s"", 'antiseptic', 'heavy', 'metal-inspired', 'soundtrack', ',', 'forget', 'bells', 'whistles', 'like', 'track', 'announcers', '.', 'It', 'tempting', 'forgive', 'certain', 'production', 'value', 'shortcomings', ""'re"", 'looking', 'budget-priced', 'game', 'like', 'IHRA', 'Drag', 'Racing', ':', 'Sportsman', 'Edition', ',', 'whole', 'game', 'shallow', 'unengaging', ',', ""n't"", 'warrant', 'charity', '.', 'This', 'dreary', 'approximation', 'makes', 'genuinely', 'exciting', 'world', 'nitro-burnin', ""'"", 'dragsters', 'look', 'like', 'drag', '.']",-0.0015648616919803422,0.48857028211901077
364,IHRA Drag Racing Sportsman Edition ,3.4," This game sucks all the fun out of drag racing, presenting the sport as slow and tedious instead of fast and furious.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/1/7/2223217-box_ihrase.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ihra-drag-racing-sportsman-edition-review/1900-6153844/,neg,"
  Drag racing is exciting because it distills auto racing into a very short, very intense event that emphasizes the core strengths of American-made cars--they go really fast, really quickly, and in a really straight line. Even just watching these land-bound rockets is a viscerally thrilling blend of noise, speed, and fumes. IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition, on the other hand, captures none of the excitement of drag racing, instead presenting the sport as simplistic, ugly, and tedious.   Driving in a straight line has rarely been such a bore.     Every race in IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition goes something like this. First you enter your dial-in time, which is your own rough projection of how long it's going to take your car to run the quarter mile. It's extremely important that your dial-in time be as accurate as possible without being over your actual race time, as it's used to handicap the delay between the two lanes on the light tree. Set it too low and your opponent gets a head start on the light tree; set it too high and you'll basically be disqualified from the race. If your car is equipped with a delay box, you then set the delay time, which can be useful for getting off the starting line quicker but is difficult to fine-tune. You go through the burnout phase in order to heat up your tires for optimal grip, which simply requires you to lean on the accelerator button until the onscreen meter tells you that your tires are suitably hot.     Then comes the staging mode, where you roll as far up on the starting line as you can without going over; once you're staged, you're ready to race. If there's any challenge, it's in timing your acceleration so that you're off the starting line within thousandths of a second of the light turning green. There's rarely much challenge in keeping your car in its lane, and by default, the game handles shifting gears automatically, though for a more realistic experience you can choose to shift manually. From a strictly nuts-and-bolts perspective, it's technically fairly accurate, and gearheads will probably appreciate realistic touches like the dial-in time; but in practice, the whole experience is just mind-numbing. All the prerace preparations are basically mechanical, but the game still requires you to go through them yourself every single time, and once you're actually off the starting line you get no sense of power, speed, or danger, all of which are key to the experience of real drag racing.    IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition packages its dull racing experience in two different ways, neither of which is compelling enough to excuse how lackluster the core of the game is. An arcade mode lets you jump right into a race against an artificial intelligence opponent or a friend using prebuilt, tricked-out dragsters, while the season mode offers something a little more in-depth. You start off with a beater, though by winning races you'll earn cash that you can spend on part upgrades like new front and rear tires, engine blocks, cylinder heads, carburetors, blowers, nitrous kits, camshafts, valves, transmissions, and delay boxes, as well as new cars.     The game has zero licenses beyond the IHRA name, which means that all of the parts you'll buy have fake aftermarket names, and the cars you can buy look like knockoff versions of Challengers, Chargers, Camaros, Monte Carlos, and so on. There's also some light tuning you can do, such as suspension stiffness and your fuel ratio, and you can also choose from a handful of paint designs and colors. The season mode focuses on a series of 12 bracketed events where you can earn not just cash, but points that go toward your overall position for the season, though if you go straight into one of the 12 season events with your stock car, you won't make it past the first qualifier. Instead, you'll have to go and engage in single races, over and over again, in order to build up enough of a bankroll to get your car into serious competition shape. The fact that you have to go through a bunch of monotonous races for cash before you can think about going through the monotonous season races speaks to how poorly the season mode was laid out.   The lackluster graphics and sound do little to improve what's already an underwhelming experience.     Making IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition even harder to sit through is its muddy, underwhelming presentation. The cars themselves actually look like decent approximations of real hot rods, but everything else is just flat, barren, and ugly, which makes it kind of appalling that the game has trouble keeping a stable frame rate when all it's showing is two cars and maybe a dozen cardboard-cutout spectators. The game uses some filtering effects to augment the frankly pathetic sensation of speed, though they kick in at specific intervals so bluntly that it almost feels like the graphics engine is shifting gears. Both the PS2 and Xbox versions are pretty unpleasant, though in their own special way--the PS2 version is grainier, while the Xbox version feels smoother, but more washed out. Regardless, both versions are saddled with lots of ridiculous load times. The game can't even muster some decent noise for the cars, which are inappropriately subdued and often overwhelmed by the game's antiseptic heavy metal-inspired soundtrack, and you can forget about bells and whistles like track announcers.    It can be tempting to forgive certain production value shortcomings when you're looking at a budget-priced game like IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition, but the whole of this game is so shallow and so unengaging, it doesn't warrant any such charity. This is a dreary approximation that makes the genuinely exciting world of nitro-burnin' dragsters just look like a drag.    
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'time', ',', ""'s"", 'used', 'handicap', 'delay', 'two', 'lanes', 'light', 'tree', '.', 'Set', 'low', 'opponent', 'gets', 'head', 'start', 'light', 'tree', ';', 'set', 'high', ""'ll"", 'basically', 'disqualified', 'race', '.', 'If', 'car', 'equipped', 'delay', 'box', ',', 'set', 'delay', 'time', ',', 'useful', 'getting', 'starting', 'line', 'quicker', 'difficult', 'fine-tune', '.', 'You', 'go', 'burnout', 'phase', 'order', 'heat', 'tires', 'optimal', 'grip', ',', 'simply', 'requires', 'lean', 'accelerator', 'button', 'onscreen', 'meter', 'tells', 'tires', 'suitably', 'hot', '.', 'Then', 'comes', 'staging', 'mode', ',', 'roll', 'far', 'starting', 'line', 'without', 'going', ';', ""'re"", 'staged', ',', ""'re"", 'ready', 'race', '.', 'If', ""'s"", 'challenge', ',', ""'s"", 'timing', 'acceleration', ""'re"", 'starting', 'line', 'within', 'thousandths', 'second', 'light', 'turning', 'green', '.', 'There', ""'s"", 'rarely', 'much', 'challenge', 'keeping', 'car', 'lane', ',', 'default', ',', 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'friend', 'using', 'prebuilt', ',', 'tricked-out', 'dragsters', ',', 'season', 'mode', 'offers', 'something', 'little', 'in-depth', '.', 'You', 'start', 'beater', ',', 'though', 'winning', 'races', ""'ll"", 'earn', 'cash', 'spend', 'part', 'upgrades', 'like', 'new', 'front', 'rear', 'tires', ',', 'engine', 'blocks', ',', 'cylinder', 'heads', ',', 'carburetors', ',', 'blowers', ',', 'nitrous', 'kits', ',', 'camshafts', ',', 'valves', ',', 'transmissions', ',', 'delay', 'boxes', ',', 'well', 'new', 'cars', '.', 'The', 'game', 'zero', 'licenses', 'beyond', 'IHRA', 'name', ',', 'means', 'parts', ""'ll"", 'buy', 'fake', 'aftermarket', 'names', ',', 'cars', 'buy', 'look', 'like', 'knockoff', 'versions', 'Challengers', ',', 'Chargers', ',', 'Camaros', ',', 'Monte', 'Carlos', ',', '.', 'There', ""'s"", 'also', 'light', 'tuning', ',', 'suspension', 'stiffness', 'fuel', 'ratio', ',', 'also', 'choose', 'handful', 'paint', 'designs', 'colors', '.', 'The', 'season', 'mode', 'focuses', 'series', 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',', 'makes', 'kind', 'appalling', 'game', 'trouble', 'keeping', 'stable', 'frame', 'rate', ""'s"", 'showing', 'two', 'cars', 'maybe', 'dozen', 'cardboard-cutout', 'spectators', '.', 'The', 'game', 'uses', 'filtering', 'effects', 'augment', 'frankly', 'pathetic', 'sensation', 'speed', ',', 'though', 'kick', 'specific', 'intervals', 'bluntly', 'almost', 'feels', 'like', 'graphics', 'engine', 'shifting', 'gears', '.', 'Both', 'PS2', 'Xbox', 'versions', 'pretty', 'unpleasant', ',', 'though', 'special', 'way', '--', 'PS2', 'version', 'grainier', ',', 'Xbox', 'version', 'feels', 'smoother', ',', 'washed', '.', 'Regardless', ',', 'versions', 'saddled', 'lots', 'ridiculous', 'load', 'times', '.', 'The', 'game', 'ca', ""n't"", 'even', 'muster', 'decent', 'noise', 'cars', ',', 'inappropriately', 'subdued', 'often', 'overwhelmed', 'game', ""'s"", 'antiseptic', 'heavy', 'metal-inspired', 'soundtrack', ',', 'forget', 'bells', 'whistles', 'like', 'track', 'announcers', '.', 'It', 'tempting', 'forgive', 'certain', 'production', 'value', 'shortcomings', ""'re"", 'looking', 'budget-priced', 'game', 'like', 'IHRA', 'Drag', 'Racing', ':', 'Sportsman', 'Edition', ',', 'whole', 'game', 'shallow', 'unengaging', ',', ""n't"", 'warrant', 'charity', '.', 'This', 'dreary', 'approximation', 'makes', 'genuinely', 'exciting', 'world', 'nitro-burnin', ""'"", 'dragsters', 'look', 'like', 'drag', '.']",-0.0015648616919803422,0.48857028211901077
365,IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition ,3.4," This game sucks all the fun out of drag racing, presenting the sport as slow and tedious instead of fast and furious.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/1/7/2223217-box_ihrase.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ihra-drag-racing-sportsman-edition-review/1900-6154320/,neg,"
  Drag racing is exciting because it distills auto racing into a very short, very intense event that emphasizes the core strengths of American-made cars--they go really fast, really quickly, and in a really straight line. Even just watching these land-bound rockets is a viscerally thrilling blend of noise, speed, and fumes. IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition, on the other hand, captures none of the excitement of drag racing, instead presenting the sport as simplistic, ugly, and tedious.    Driving in a straight line has rarely been such a bore.   Every race in IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition goes something like this. First you enter your dial-in time, which is your own rough projection of how long it's going to take your car to run the quarter mile. It's extremely important that your dial-in time be as accurate as possible without being over your actual race time, as it's used to handicap the delay between the two lanes on the light tree. Set it too low and your opponent gets a head start on the light tree; set it too high and you'll basically be disqualified from the race. If your car is equipped with a delay box, you then set the delay time, which can be useful for getting off the starting line quicker but is difficult to fine-tune. You go through the burnout phase in order to heat up your tires for optimal grip, which simply requires you to lean on the accelerator button until the onscreen meter tells you that your tires are suitably hot.     Then comes the staging mode, where you roll as far up on the starting line as you can without going over; once you're staged, you're ready to race. If there's any challenge, it's in timing your acceleration so that you're off the starting line within thousandths of a second of the light turning green. There's rarely much challenge in keeping your car in its lane, and by default, the game handles shifting gears automatically, though for a more realistic experience you can choose to shift manually. From a strictly nuts-and-bolts perspective, it's technically fairly accurate, and gearheads will probably appreciate realistic touches like the dial-in time; but in practice, the whole experience is just mind-numbing. All the prerace preparations are basically mechanical, but the game still requires you to go through them yourself every single time, and once you're actually off the starting line you get no sense of power, speed, or danger, all of which are key to the experience of real drag racing.     IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition packages its dull racing experience in two different ways, neither of which is compelling enough to excuse how lackluster the core of the game is. An arcade mode lets you jump right into a race against an artificial intelligence opponent or a friend using prebuilt, tricked-out dragsters, while the season mode offers something a little more in-depth. You start off with a beater, though by winning races you'll earn cash that you can spend on part upgrades like new front and rear tires, engine blocks, cylinder heads, carburetors, blowers, nitrous kits, camshafts, valves, transmissions, and delay boxes, as well as new cars.     The game has zero licenses beyond the IHRA name, which means that all of the parts you'll buy have fake aftermarket names, and the cars you can buy look like knockoff versions of Challengers, Chargers, Camaros, Monte Carlos, and so on. There's also some light tuning you can do, such as suspension stiffness and your fuel ratio, and you can also choose from a handful of paint designs and colors. The season mode focuses on a series of 12 bracketed events where you can earn not just cash, but points that go toward your overall position for the season, though if you go straight into one of the 12 season events with your stock car, you won't make it past the first qualifier. Instead, you'll have to go and engage in single races, over and over again, in order to build up enough of a bankroll to get your car into serious competition shape. The fact that you have to go through a bunch of monotonous races for cash before you can think about going through the monotonous season races speaks to how poorly the season mode was laid out.    The lackluster graphics and sound do little to improve what's already an underwhelming experience.   Making IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition even harder to sit through is its muddy, underwhelming presentation. The cars themselves actually look like decent approximations of real hot rods, but everything else is just flat, barren, and ugly. The PC version of the game naturally looks clearer than its console counterparts, but the improved resolution just makes it that much easier to see the low-res environmental textures and pixelated cardboard-cutout crowds. The game can't even muster some decent noise for the cars, which are inappropriately subdued, as if they're not even getting out of idle as they race down the track, and are often overwhelmed by the game's antiseptic heavy metal-inspired soundtrack. And you can forget about bells and whistles like track announcers.     It can be tempting to forgive certain production-value shortcomings when you're looking at a budget-priced game like IHRA Drag Racing: Sportsman Edition, but the whole of this game is so shallow and so unengaging, it doesn't warrant any such charity. This is a dreary approximation that makes the genuinely exciting world of nitro-burnin' dragsters just look like a drag.     
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366,Marshal Wyatt Earp ,3.4," Power-ups, new weapons, different sorts of enemies, time limits, and boss fights are all missing from the equation, and so is the fun.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/5/9/1/24720-69591.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/marshal-wyatt-earp-review/1900-6128870/,neg,"
  A lot of mobile games retail at prices that most gamers would consider cheap: usually anywhere from a buck or two a month, to $10 for an outright purchase of a 3D game. At $2.50 a month, Marshal Wyatt Earp is well within the normal range.  Unfortunately, this game doesn't provide enough content to be worth even worth that much.      Where are these guys coming from?   From its boring, static presentation to its utter lack of creative gameplay, this halfhearted shooting-gallery game looks like it's been yanked out of 2003 and deposited on your phone. All you're doing in Marshal Wyatt Earp is blasting Wild West banditos as they pop up in various areas of the screen, just as in any whack-a-mole game. To shoot an offending gunman, you must hit the number key assigned to the correct quadrant of the screen, periodically hitting the reload key in between shots. If for some reason you should fail to shoot an enemy before he shoots you, you'll be wounded and lose half a star from your stock of three. You needn't worry much, though, because the game is extremely easy, even on the hardest of the three difficulty levels; if three simultaneous enemies and an empty revolver can't tax your reflexes, nothing will. You also have to watch out for an occasional civilian, who will be attired very conspicuously. Power-ups, new weapons, different sorts of enemies, time limits, and boss fights are all missing from the equation, and so is the fun.    Marshal Wyatt Earp's graphics are decent, if very repetitive. Although the background graphics look OK on the LG VX6000, there are only four different environments to fight in, and the bad guys always shoot at you from the same four locations. The game isn't entirely bereft of detail or humor. For instance, firing your pistol produces a nice gun-smoke effect. Also, a pair of stretcher-bearers will periodically jog onto the killing field to remove the piles of corpses littering the street. Alas, the game is completely silent, lacking even elementary gunshot effects. This would be far more believable if Earp were bringing law and order to an airless moon colony, instead of Dodge City.    The idea that you're expected to actively seek out and pay for Marshal Wyatt Earp is laughable. In fact, you shouldn't download this game under any circumstances. Wyatt Earp probably wasn't an elected official, but you should vote with your dollars and kick him out of office anyway.  
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367,Left Behind: Eternal Forces ,3.4," Another good thing about the Rapture is that it will take you away from disastrous, buggy games like Left Behind: Eternal Forces.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/7/5/4/2217754-left_behind_eternal_forces_pc.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/left-behind-eternal-forces-review/1900-6162370/,neg,"
  Don't mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it's a Christian game. Mock it because it's a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs.   Not even the Antichrist can stand in the way of our mighty faith in the Lord and snazzy sweater-vests!   Of course, a lot of people won't make it far enough to find out. Because Left Behind is based on the evangelical notion that you have to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior or spend an eternity at Satan's weenie roast, most gamers won't get past the ""apocalypse right now"" premise. Still, games are typically based on outlandish ideas, so it's unfair to dismiss this one based on religious grounds. Yet this is an awfully tough game to take seriously because the absurd story only works as a self-parody.    How goofy is this tale? Well, the battleground between the true believers' Tribulation Force and the Antichrist's Global Community Peacekeepers is a heathenish New York City. Your units include gospel-singing musicians, missionaries, healers, and medics. Enemy units feature college-trained secularists, devils, and foul-mouthed rock stars with their electric twangers. Stereotypes are everywhere. New Yawkers speak with such cheesy accents that they should be driving Brooklyn cabs in 1954 while chewing on unlit stogies. Similarly, the game has a 1950s-style attitude about men and women. Only males can become priestlike disciples and handyman builders, whereas only women can become nurses. Female units are actually designated as such and given ridiculous titles like ""Friend Woman"" and ""Medic Woman,"" a sexual distinction that unsurprisingly isn't extended to their male counterparts. Finally, the game isn't politically correct when it comes to race, either, because a fair number of the bad guys bear Arab and African names.    Given the game's Christian devotion, your goal is not to wipe out the enemy as in a typical RTS game but to convert as many neutrals and baddies as possible by raising their spirit level. You seek out these people and directly target the ones you want to save with the recruit ability. If all goes well, he or she will soon be turned into a friend in either a Ned Flanders-like sweater ensemble or a sensible skirt and pumps. These drones can then be sent to training centers for instruction in their new Christ-inspired careers. Soon you've got builders turning abandoned buildings into resource-producing venues, such as food-making cafés and money-making banks, as well as soldiers patrolling the streets. You also have special forces, such as recruiters, influencers, and healers, doing their bit for the cause.      Even though all of the above is worth more than a few chuckles, you could still make a good game based on these foundations (if you could get over the creepy brainwashing vibe you get from all the converting). However, Left Behind is not that game. All of the missions are plagued with interface problems. It often takes two or three clicks to select a neutral unit to convert. Units can be set on an auto-proselytizing mode where they can be ordered to recruit on demand, but the artificial intelligence isn't as committed to Christ as you might expect. If you set units on autopilot, they respond by just standing around, which forces you to do a lot of hands-on conversions to keep up with the Antichrist. Even if this function did work, you would still have to take over units on occasion because they regularly get stuck behind lampposts and parked cars.    You get stuck behind objects too. The tall buildings of NYC constantly interfere with camera angles. While you can see friendly unit silhouettes through structures, camera rotation is often blocked. You can scroll back and up to look over buildings, but then you're at penthouse level, and the people down below look like ants. Buildings are also quite ugly, presented mainly as featureless blobs of concrete-gray. It's tough to tell at a glance which buildings are producing which resources--or quickly determine which can be bought and remodeled for your purposes--and which are scenery.    Street design is a little prettier than that of the individual units and buildings because at least you get a few attractive elements, such as billboard ads (EB is apparently the official sponsor of Armageddon) and steamy sewer grates. People in the game share only a handful of faces and outfits and recite just a few canned lines of dialogue. You'll hear outrageous accents and corny lines like ""Praise the Lord!"" This sort of thing normally wouldn't be a big deal because such issues are common with standard RTS games. But here, they stand out because you're supposed to be converting individuals (a feeling boosted with detailed life stories for each and every unit), not building cookie-cutter armies of disposable grunts.    If you get past all of the engine problems, you'll quickly find that scenario design in Left Behind leaves a lot to be desired. Goals focus on tedious strolls through the mazelike city streets, searching for other true believers and constructing the same half-dozen or so types of buildings over and over again. Arbitrary yellow lines block off whole sections of the city solely to make you take the long way to objectives. Converting heathens and dodging foes, like evil rockers, is really all that you do in every scenario right through the end of the game. The only difference between the first and later missions is the toughness of your enemies and the pace at which you have to churn out the faithful.      One major annoyance with all of this is that units steadily lose spirit unless they're bolstered with regular prayer. So in addition to ripping around and recruiting every Joe Sixpack who walks by, you have to keep tabs on spirit levels. If you fail to do this, you risk a power chord from one of those evil rockers that will take you out of the game. If a regular unit drops below 60, he or she loses all training and reverts to a neutral civilian; if a hero unit suffers the same decline, you immediately fail the mission. Who knew that leading people to the Lord would involve so much micromanagement?      Multiplayer raises a few questions. This is a Christian game, where you can only play the forces of good in the campaign, so it's more than a little bizarre that you can sign on with the Antichrist in multiplayer battles. You would think that this alone would be more than enough to turn off religious folk. The two sides feature a lot of nearly identical units, though. Each faction has the same healers, the same soldiers, the same tanks and helicopters, and the same proselytizers (albeit with different names). The only significant way to tell the two apart is by looking at the evil spirits that occasionally get summoned when Global Community Peacekeeper units let their spirits get too low. Even so, these creatures wreak havoc on everyone around them no matter what their affiliation, so it's hard to consider them as evil units. At any rate, the multiplayer option is moot because the game has trouble connecting with the matching servers, and even when it does, nobody seems to be playing the game online as either good or evil.   I like your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.   Last but not least, you need to do some praying yourself to make this buggy mess run. Crashes are such a frequent occurrence that it seems like you've got maybe 50/50 odds between a level or a save loading properly and the game freezing up with a sound loop. Sometimes it also hard locks Windows in these circumstances, forcing a system reboot. This was even a problem for us during automatic restarts after changing the in-game resolution. The only way we could change any of the default visual settings was to manually shut down and restart the game, because letting it restart on its own always locked up our system and necessitated a reboot.    When it comes right down to it, Left Behind isn't appropriate for anyone--religious or not. It's hard to imagine RTS gamers sticking with it for long because of its many serious flaws and bugs. It's equally hard to imagine Christians appreciating a game where you can join the forces of Satan, even if only in multiplayer. On a purely basic level, you do have to at least appreciate the interesting twist on the RTS genre the game takes. But beyond that twist, there's nothing remarkable about it--other than the fact that it is a remarkably bad game. Let's hope it inspires designers to experiment with the genre, if nothing else.    
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368,Assassin's Creed ,9, Assassin's Creed is a beautiful and exciting experience that you'll remember for years to come.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/2/1/0/25343-71210.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/assassins-creed-review/1900-6182793/,pos,"
  Assassin's Creed will stay with you long after you finish it. Here is one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it's more than just a world--it's a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with silky-smooth controls and a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. Make no mistake: Assassin's Creed is one of the best efforts of the year and a must-own game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners.    The citizens of Damascus have a lot of secrets to hide.   Not enough can be said about the living, breathing world that you'll inhabit in Assassin's Creed. As assassin extraordinaire Altaïr, you'll explore three major cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. Each city is beautifully rendered from top to bottom and features meticulously crafted towers that reach for the sky, bustling market squares, and quiet corners where citizens converse and drunks lie in wait to accost you. As you wander the streets (and rooftops), you'll push your way through crowds of women carrying jars on their heads, hear orators shout political and religious wisdom, and watch town guards harass innocent victims. Altaïr has a profound effect on this world, but the cities are entities all their own, with their own flows and personalities.     The visual design has a lot to do with how believably organic everything feels. The cities are absolutely huge, and though you don't get full exploration privileges in the first few chapters, they eventually open up to let you travel seamlessly from one side to another. Everything is beautifully lit with just the right amount of bloom effect, and almost everything casts a shadow, from tall pillars to Altaïr's cloak. In fact, sometimes the shadows get to be a bit much and may make you think for a moment that there is artifacting on your screen, when in fact it's a character's head casting a shadow on his or her own neck. Every object, from scaffolds to pottery, is textured so finely you feel as if you could reach out and touch it. Animations are almost as equally well done. Altaïr scales walls, leaps majestically from towers, and engages in swashbuckling swordfights that would make Errol Flynn proud. And he does it all with fluid ease, generally moving from one pose to another without a hitch. Minor characters move gracefully as well, though one of the game's few visual drawbacks is the occasional jerky animation on the part of a citizen. However, it's easy to forgive, considering that the cities are populated with thousands and thousands of individuals. In fact, these tiny blemishes are noticeable only because everything else looks so incredible.     What you hear is even more impressive than what you see. At the top of a temple, you hear little but the rush of wind, the twittering of birds, and the barking of a far-off dog. In the most populated areas, your ears will fill with the din of street vendors, the pleas of beggars, and the occasional humming. It's never too much, though, and the game does a good job of making sure you hear what you need to hear (for example, the cries of citizens who need your help), without filling your ears with pointless noise. All these effects, along with the clangs of swords and groans of assassinated foes, are outstanding. The voice acting of the supporting cast is similarly remarkable. Conversations are completely believable and delivered with the perfect amount of solemn dignity. Oddly, the weakest link is Altaïr himself. Actor Philip Shahbaz does an all right job, but he isn't up to par with the first-rate acting of his fellow troupe. Rounding it all out is a beautiful orchestral score that is most notable for its subtlety. Many of the game's most impressive moments are accompanied by lovely musical themes that add even more threads to the game's rich living tapestry.   Climb to the pinnacle of a tower for a bird's-eye view.   Fortunately, the story that binds it all together rises to the occasion. Actually, there are two related stories in play. The unfolding drama of Crusades-era Palestine is a mere memory, forcibly pulled from a modern-day bartender named Desmond by a resolute researcher using a machine called an animus. The memories aren't Desmond's own--they are Altaïr's, stored safely in the hapless subject's genetic code. We follow Altaïr as he assassinates nine public figures at the command of his master, and as the common thread that ties these men comes into focus, so does the true identity of Desmond's captors. There are no cutscenes in the traditional sense; every bit of story exposition and dialogue flows smoothly from the gameplay and takes place entirely within the game engine. The ending is confusing, and it blatantly leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but it's a small blemish on an otherwise stirring tale. Altaïr's world is not one of absolutes. His assassination targets aren't always evil, and Altaïr isn't always likable. As he is fond of reminding us, ""Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.""    Of course, such an authentic world would be meaningless without a lot of fun things to do in it. Thankfully, Assassin's Creed is endlessly entertaining in that it features a fine mix of stealthy exploration, tight platforming, and exciting combat. To discover the whereabouts of your assassination targets, you must first follow up on possible leads. There are several different mission types in this regard. In some cases, you sit on a bench and listen in on secret conversations. At other times, you will closely follow someone carrying an important letter that you'll pickpocket. Alternately, you can beat the information out of your target. Most missions are relatively easy to pull off in the early stages of the game. But once the guards and townspeople start recognizing you (or you alert them to your presence too close to the scene of one of your crimes), they get a little tougher.       There are also some optional tasks, such as rescuing innocent townspeople from the clutches of guards. The reward for doing so is a group of vigilantes who will hang out in the area afterward and hinder any foes chasing you. It's also a good way to try out Assassin's Creed's combat, which is surprisingly satisfying, considering the game's focus on sneaking around. You can pounce on enemies using your hidden blade (an incredibly rewarding one-stab kill), or use throwing daggers to take enemies down from a distance. However, your sword is your melee mainstay, and though the hack-and-slash combat may seem simple at first, it gets more challenging once you unlock the various countermoves. Often, you'll have a dozen or more attackers to fend off at once, but though these fights can be a little tricky, you'll never feel as if you're in over your head. In fact, the few circumstances in which you are forced into combat--such as a late-game boss fight against a seemingly endless crowd of attackers and their leering leader--are challenging and require some pitch-perfect timing to counter every strike and lunge.    Combat is a whole lot of bloody fun.   Nevertheless, brute force is rarely the best way to handle a situation. You want to slink unnoticed through the crowds, but you can draw attention to yourself in a number of ways--whether it be galloping past a guard station on a horse, knocking pottery off of someone's head, or getting so frustrated by the various beggars that you fling them away from you. (And trust us--these are the most aggressive panhandlers you'll ever meet.) If you antagonize the guards, they'll give chase. Yes, you can stick around and fight, and though it's never the easiest option, breaking stealth does not damn you to death like it does in other sneaking games. But why not lure them to a rooftop? Once up there, you can grab them and fling them to the street below. Or if there are too many of them, you can jump across the rooftops gracefully until you find a hiding place, such as a nice bale of hay or a curtained garden. Once you're hidden, they'll break chase and you'll be free to roam about.     You can also seek refuge in small groups of scholars who serve as mobile hiding places. It's a bit contrived to walk into a stationary cluster of scholars and have them suddenly start moving simply because you're there, but it gets the job done. Actually, if there's any drawback to the usually excellent gameplay, it's how synthetic certain elements feel. Vigilantes are always in the same spot, missions reset if you don't get them right the first time, and those same guards will be harrassing that citizen, an hour after you pass by. It's easy to forgive these quirks though, given the easygoing flow of the world surrounding these pockets of gameplay.     Climbing up buildings and jumping around the rooftops is fun and breezy, thanks to effortless controls that strike a great balance between ease of use and player input. You can leap across alleys and scale walls with the pull of a trigger and the press of a button, and though it's possible to launch yourself from a wall or hurtle through a vendor's booth by accident, these moments aren't very common. You'd think that a city specifically designed to let you climb structures and caper about the roofs would look overly artificial, yet there's never a moment when you will think to yourself, ""Wow, that looks like a place where I'm supposed to jump."" The architecture looks completely natural, which makes Altaïr's abilities all the more exciting to pull off. The environments don't look as if they were created for him to climb around on; he just uses the hand he's been dealt, as any good assassin should.    Eavesdropping will reveal a wealth of information.   In Assassin's Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there's a quiet moment that cuts to the game's heart and soul. Climbing towers to uncover portions of the map is a simple mechanic but forever satisfying, thanks to the beautiful vistas and soft musical themes that accompany the view. Even the drunks that pester you are amusing and fun, though their constant shoving is more than annoying, especially if you are trying to pickpocket a pedestrian or eliminate a target without a fuss. It all makes your missions that much more compelling, and you'll be inclined to explore every nook and cranny and take on every optional task, just for the fun of it. There's a ton of stuff to do, and even when you've exhausted your official tasks, you can search for the collectible flags and crosses strewn around the cities and countryside. You could probably plow through the main quest in 20 hours if you're lucky, but completists might spend close to 50 hours finishing every quest and gathering every collectible.     There are few differences between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. PS3 owners are blessed with a slightly more solid frame rate, although the 360 version features a little more contrast in the lighting, so it's pretty much a wash. But regardless of which platform you go with, you'll have an amazing and unforgettable game. Assassin's Creed is the kind of game you tell your friends about, and one that should be in your collection.  


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369,Assassin's Creed ,9, Assassin's Creed is a beautiful and exciting experience that you'll remember for years to come.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/2/1/0/25343-71210.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/assassins-creed-review/1900-6182795/,pos,"
  Assassin's Creed will stay with you long after you finish it. Here is one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it's more than just a world--it's a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with silky-smooth controls and a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. Make no mistake: Assassin's Creed is one of the best efforts of the year and a must-own game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners.    The citizens of Damascus have a lot of secrets to hide.   Not enough can be said about the living, breathing world that you'll inhabit in Assassin's Creed. As assassin extraordinaire Altaïr, you'll explore three major cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. Each city is beautifully rendered from top to bottom and features meticulously crafted towers that reach for the sky, bustling market squares, and quiet corners where citizens converse and drunks lie in wait to accost you. As you wander the streets (and rooftops), you'll push your way through crowds of women carrying jars on their heads, hear orators shout political and religious wisdom, and watch town guards harass innocent victims. Altaïr has a profound effect on this world, but the cities are entities all their own, with their own flows and personalities.     The visual design has a lot to do with how believably organic everything feels. The cities are absolutely huge, and though you don't get full exploration privileges in the first few chapters, they eventually open up to let you travel seamlessly from one side to another. Everything is beautifully lit with just the right amount of bloom effect, and almost everything casts a shadow, from tall pillars to Altaïr's cloak. In fact, sometimes the shadows get to be a bit much and may make you think for a moment that there is artifacting on your screen, when in fact it's a character's head casting a shadow on his or her own neck. Every object, from scaffolds to pottery, is textured so finely you feel as if you could reach out and touch it. Animations are almost as equally well done. Altaïr scales walls, leaps majestically from towers, and engages in swashbuckling swordfights that would make Errol Flynn proud. And he does it all with fluid ease, generally moving from one pose to another without a hitch. Minor characters move gracefully as well, though one of the game's few visual drawbacks is the occasional jerky animation on the part of a citizen. However, it's easy to forgive, considering that the cities are populated with thousands and thousands of individuals. In fact, these tiny blemishes are noticeable only because everything else looks so incredible.     What you hear is even more impressive than what you see. At the top of a temple, you hear little but the rush of wind, the twittering of birds, and the barking of a far-off dog. In the most populated areas, your ears will fill with the din of street vendors, the pleas of beggars, and the occasional humming. It's never too much, though, and the game does a good job of making sure you hear what you need to hear (for example, the cries of citizens who need your help), without filling your ears with pointless noise. All these effects, along with the clangs of swords and groans of assassinated foes, are outstanding. The voice acting of the supporting cast is similarly remarkable. Conversations are completely believable and delivered with the perfect amount of solemn dignity. Oddly, the weakest link is Altaïr himself. Actor Philip Shahbaz does an all right job, but he isn't up to par with the first-rate acting of his fellow troupe. Rounding it all out is a beautiful orchestral score that is most notable for its subtlety. Many of the game's most impressive moments are accompanied by lovely musical themes that add even more threads to the game's rich living tapestry.   Climb to the pinnacle of a tower for a bird's-eye view.   Fortunately, the story that binds it all together rises to the occasion. Actually, there are two related stories in play. The unfolding drama of Crusades-era Palestine is a mere memory, forcibly pulled from a modern-day bartender named Desmond by a resolute researcher using a machine called an animus. The memories aren't Desmond's own--they are Altaïr's, stored safely in the hapless subject's genetic code. We follow Altaïr as he assassinates nine public figures at the command of his master, and as the common thread that ties these men comes into focus, so does the true identity of Desmond's captors. There are no cutscenes in the traditional sense; every bit of story exposition and dialogue flows smoothly from the gameplay and takes place entirely within the game engine. The ending is confusing, and it blatantly leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but it's a small blemish on an otherwise stirring tale. Altaïr's world is not one of absolutes. His assassination targets aren't always evil, and Altaïr isn't always likable. As he is fond of reminding us, ""Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.""    Of course, such an authentic world would be meaningless without a lot of fun things to do in it. Thankfully, Assassin's Creed is endlessly entertaining in that it features a fine mix of stealthy exploration, tight platforming, and exciting combat. To discover the whereabouts of your assassination targets, you must first follow up on possible leads. There are several different mission types in this regard. In some cases, you sit on a bench and listen in on secret conversations. At other times, you will closely follow someone carrying an important letter that you'll pickpocket. Alternately, you can beat the information out of your target. Most missions are relatively easy to pull off in the early stages of the game. But once the guards and townspeople start recognizing you (or you alert them to your presence too close to the scene of one of your crimes), they get a little tougher.       There are also some optional tasks, such as rescuing innocent townspeople from the clutches of guards. The reward for doing so is a group of vigilantes who will hang out in the area afterward and hinder any foes chasing you. It's also a good way to try out Assassin's Creed's combat, which is surprisingly satisfying, considering the game's focus on sneaking around. You can pounce on enemies using your hidden blade (an incredibly rewarding one-stab kill), or use throwing daggers to take enemies down from a distance. However, your sword is your melee mainstay, and though the hack-and-slash combat may seem simple at first, it gets more challenging once you unlock the various countermoves. Often, you'll have a dozen or more attackers to fend off at once, but though these fights can be a little tricky, you'll never feel as if you're in over your head. In fact, the few circumstances in which you are forced into combat--such as a late-game boss fight against a seemingly endless crowd of attackers and their leering leader--are challenging and require some pitch-perfect timing to counter every strike and lunge.    Combat is a whole lot of bloody fun.   Nevertheless, brute force is rarely the best way to handle a situation. You want to slink unnoticed through the crowds, but you can draw attention to yourself in a number of ways--whether it be galloping past a guard station on a horse, knocking pottery off of someone's head, or getting so frustrated by the various beggars that you fling them away from you. (And trust us--these are the most aggressive panhandlers you'll ever meet.) If you antagonize the guards, they'll give chase. Yes, you can stick around and fight, and though it's never the easiest option, breaking stealth does not damn you to death like it does in other sneaking games. But why not lure them to a rooftop? Once up there, you can grab them and fling them to the street below. Or if there are too many of them, you can jump across the rooftops gracefully until you find a hiding place, such as a nice bale of hay or a curtained garden. Once you're hidden, they'll break chase and you'll be free to roam about.     You can also seek refuge in small groups of scholars who serve as mobile hiding places. It's a bit contrived to walk into a stationary cluster of scholars and have them suddenly start moving simply because you're there, but it gets the job done. Actually, if there's any drawback to the usually excellent gameplay, it's how synthetic certain elements feel. Vigilantes are always in the same spot, missions reset if you don't get them right the first time, and those same guards will be harrassing that citizen, an hour after you pass by. It's easy to forgive these quirks though, given the easygoing flow of the world surrounding these pockets of gameplay.     Climbing up buildings and jumping around the rooftops is fun and breezy, thanks to effortless controls that strike a great balance between ease of use and player input. You can leap across alleys and scale walls with the pull of a trigger and the press of a button, and though it's possible to launch yourself from a wall or hurtle through a vendor's booth by accident, these moments aren't very common. You'd think that a city specifically designed to let you climb structures and caper about the roofs would look overly artificial, yet there's never a moment when you will think to yourself, ""Wow, that looks like a place where I'm supposed to jump."" The architecture looks completely natural, which makes Altaïr's abilities all the more exciting to pull off. The environments don't look as if they were created for him to climb around on; he just uses the hand he's been dealt, as any good assassin should.    Eavesdropping will reveal a wealth of information.   In Assassin's Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there's a quiet moment that cuts to the game's heart and soul. Climbing towers to uncover portions of the map is a simple mechanic but forever satisfying, thanks to the beautiful vistas and soft musical themes that accompany the view. Even the drunks that pester you are amusing and fun, though their constant shoving is more than annoying, especially if you are trying to pickpocket a pedestrian or eliminate a target without a fuss. It all makes your missions that much more compelling, and you'll be inclined to explore every nook and cranny and take on every optional task, just for the fun of it. There's a ton of stuff to do, and even when you've exhausted your official tasks, you can search for the collectible flags and crosses strewn around the cities and countryside. You could probably plow through the main quest in 20 hours if you're lucky, but completists might spend close to 50 hours finishing every quest and gathering every collectible.     There are few differences between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. PS3 owners are blessed with a slightly more solid frame rate, although the 360 version features a little more contrast in the lighting, so it's pretty much a wash. But regardless of which platform you go with, you'll have an amazing and unforgettable game. Assassin's Creed is the kind of game you tell your friends about, and one that should be in your collection.  


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370,Mass Effect ,9, Streamlined combat and numerous minor improvements make this great game even better.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2448234-2217301-mass_effect.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mass-effect-review/1900-6191875/,pos,"
  When Mass Effect was originally released last November on the Xbox 360, it unveiled a vast, beautiful galaxy populated by diverse, fascinating alien races. Players stepped onto this stage as Commander Shepard, a hero at the vanguard of humanity's ascension in the arena of galactic politics, and thus began an epic story bolstered by engaging characters and rich, branching dialogue. Exciting combat and robust skill management completed the package, but it was not without flaws. Many small issues have been addressed in the PC release, and the result is a more streamlined, more playable version of one of the best role-playing games in recent memory.     The bulk of Mass Effect remains the same, so for our thoughts on the story, character customization, dialogue, quest structure, and combat abilities, please read our review of the 360 version. This review will focus on the PC experience and how it differs from console play.    Biotic powers are still rockin' awesome.   None of the changes are drastic overhauls, but they do have an appreciable effect on the gameplay. One of the biggest tweaks is to the combat system. In the 360 version, you have to temporarily pause the action to use any weapons or biotic/tech powers beyond the one you currently have equipped. On the PC, this pause is still available, but weapons and powers have been consolidated onto one screen, along with squad commands which you can now issue individually. Pressing the space bar will bring up a heads-up display where you can change weapons or powers and issue commands to your squad. Odds are you'll use this pause very rarely, because your weapons are mapped to the function keys and your biotic/tech powers can be assigned to the number keys.    Without frequent pauses, Mass Effect further distances itself from the ponderous, tactical feel of combat in previous BioWare role-playing games. Instead, it feels like a bona fide third-person action title. Gunning down small groups of enemies while barely breaking a stride is still immensely satisfying, as is blasting your way out of larger pitched battles--only now you can unleash multiple tech or biotic attacks on the fly. You can dart out from cover, take down enemies' shields, and explode their weapons--all while shooting them--and be back behind cover in a matter of seconds. The real reward of this faster, more fluid action is the sense of power it imbues. Wielding your formidable abilities with ease really makes you feel like the badass warrior you were meant to be, and it makes combat more exciting and fun.    Unfortunately, all those tech and biotic power animations flying around can cause the frame rate to suffer on less than godly computers. This will really only happen during battles with numerous foes, and though it isn't much more than a brief stumble, it's distracting. Slightly more distracting are the frequent in-game load screens. Masked by long elevator rides on the 360, load times have actually decreased in length but increased in frequency for the PC version. Elevator rides are shorter, but you'll often be ambushed by a two- to four-second pause (the screen dims and a small ""loading"" icon appears) when you're coming up on a battle or entering a new area. Again, these pauses are brief enough that they don't bring things to a screeching halt, but they are a bit of a nuisance.    A few other tweaks have positive effects on the game. The inventory system is much easier to manage with a mouse and keyboard, and long lists of items won't reset to the top every time you sell something near the bottom. The Mako vehicle sequences are easier to manage thanks to the implementation of dedicated forward and reverse buttons in place of the 360 version's viewpoint-dependent controls. A new hacking and decrypting minigame, in place of the old button-matching one, is both more interesting and more suited to the game: You must move a small arrow through concentric circles to reach the core while avoiding stationary and rotating barriers. It's generally easy to accomplish once you get the hang of it, but the time limit and tricky perspective shifting help keep it entertaining. Keyboard hotkeys allow quick access to the map and squad upgrade screens, and the quicksave button is a great way to ensure you won't have to do too much backtracking. They aren't big changes, but the aggregate benefit is definitely noticeable.    Krogans. Why'd it have to be Krogans?   All the things that made Mass Effect great on the 360--the story, the conversations, the galaxy, the combat, the soundtrack, and the characters--are still great on the PC. The changes that have been implemented don't radically alter the game in any way, but they have enough of a positive impact to make it easy to recommend the PC version over the 360 version. On top of that, BioWare is offering the downloadable expansion ""Bring Down the Sky"" free to PC players, though at the time of this review that content was not yet available. Whether you're a seasoned Spectre looking to suit up again, or a newcomer who has never set foot on the Normandy, the refined PC version is your best choice for experiencing this excellent game.   
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371,Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition ,9, Console owners reap the benefits of two years worth of changes and updates in this conclusive version of Diablo III.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2372510-2219335-box_d3.png,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/diablo-3-ultimate-evil-edition-review/1900-6415842/,pos,"
When it comes to Diablo, one should expect a sense of finality when an upgraded version features the word ""Ultimate"". After all, where do you go after defeating The Devil? Developer Blizzard's answer--in the Reaper of Souls expansion--was a villain that was the closest thing to Death. Unless the studio can come up with an expansion to vanquish a tax collector, it's safe to say that Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition is as final as it gets. Thanks to two years worth of PC version fixes, wise console-friendly UI adjustments, and a number of exclusive social features, this also happens to be the definitive version of Diablo III.Diablo III's bleakness is so comprehensive, one can't help but admire Blizzard's dedication. If you're not engaging in conversation with downtrodden and pessimistic townsfolk, you're fending off a seemingly limitless stream of demons. It feels all the more poignant when you walk on floors fully covered in corpses in Reaper of Souls. Given that the apocalyptic tone and art direction is so pervasive and focused, it's remarkable that the darkness doesn't feel overbearing or monotonous.The feeling of item ownership in Diablo III is an awfully fickle one, much thanks to the game's swift pacing. When new loot appears so often and in such great numbers, your ensemble of optimized gear can completely change over the course of 30 minutes of adventuring. Yet Blizzard has ensured there's no waste: outdated items can be salvaged by the blacksmith or sold to the merchant in order to play for the blacksmith's training. Memorable items can be stored and you can endear yourself to friends by mailing them useful gear. For Blizzard, giving items a life beyond the battle itself is an art form.Mailing gear is just one of a suite of exclusive social features for this edition, and I have no reservations in proclaiming that Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition is a candidate for the most accessible multiplayer game of 2014. Cooperative sessions allow low-level players to join experienced friends and reap the benefits of fast level progression and early access to better items. If you don't mind playing the story out of sequence, co-op let's you play later chapters based on the host's progress, and let's you continue your solo progress from that point without even needing to play through the middle acts. It's an uncommon practice that would normally cheapen the experience, but this method of fast-tracking makes it easier for newcomers to appreciate the series' appeal. Diablo III is immensely replayable, with some credit due to the post-campaign Adventure Mode and the staggering selection of 10 difficulty levels. The risk factors in these difficulties are superbly balanced; Normal is the path of least resistance, while each subsequent level above offers enticing and fitting rewards of experience and gold.Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition is a reminder that you can never underestimate the effectiveness of a killstreak counter. While the PC version did provide a final death count after you pulled off consecutive kills in a short span of time, this update offers a rush akin to the hot-dog-eating contest at Coney Island. After 10 kills, a pop-up keeps a running count until the streak expires, and the more demons you kill, the greater your experience multiplier. When there are enough monsters to push you to 50, 75, or even 100 kills, you and your friends will transform from heroic explorers into bloodthirsty murderers. Diablo is many things to many players, and if you've come to the series because it gives you a rush similar to that of the Gauntlet franchise, Ultimate Evil Edition is bound to quench that thirst.The killstreaks are part of a larger scheme of improvements meant to enhance momentum. Between the steady stream of demons and treasure goblins that lure you into unexplored areas, the building blocks of momentum have long since been laid down in the PC version. With the d-pad, you can now sort through new loot without having to open the menus, making it easier to drop gear more suited for your friends. For those sharing the screen on a single couch, loot has been earmarked for specific players and classes, creating one less reason to go into your menus. Beyond the killstreak onuses, there are other temporary atrribute improvements that result from destroying objects or killing specific enemies. Ultimate Evil Edition's message to you is, ""Keep killing, you can color in the map and sort through your loot later."" And it helps that there aren't any loading times during individual quests, and there is nary a frame rate issue, even when the screen is packed with scarabs, ghosts, and demons. Not even dropping from the heavens and killing 25 beasts simultaneously with a holy hammer slam will reveal any performance issues.Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition is a reminder that you can never underestimate the effectiveness of a killstreak counter.When you do take the time to color in a map, it never feels like a waste of time, even if you're not the obsessive compulsive type. More areas means more monsters, and more monsters means more loot. This is the basis for the top-down view of the standard action role-playing game; how Diablo III stands out is in its pacing and how it manages to stave off boredom. Maps are labyrinthine but are never yawn-inducingly large. You never stay in one experience level for long and the rewards for leveling up are worthwhile and practical enough that you become that much more motivated to reach the next level.Beyond the menacing hooded reapers and new quest content that can stretch into dozens of hours, one of the key draws of Reaper of Souls is the blessed crusader class. Conveniently accessible at the start of Diablo III, this holy warrior is perhaps the most well-rounded class, and as such, is a user-friendly choice for newcomers. The crusader's abilities in melee and ranged attacks, along with the support of high defense, underscore the challenges and tradeoffs of the other classes. The demon hunter, for example, is proficient at ranged attacks and is a superb contributor to any party, yet this class proves difficult to use during a solo playthrough.Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition feels like the happy conclusion of a two-year public beta, with the initial purchasers on PC bearing much of the grief with the auction house and the slow pace to reach level 60. Those who have held off up to this point will benefit the most, while those who got a head start on the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 versions will be able to transfer their saves to their new gen console of choice. It's just a shame that some newcomers won't appreciate what the early adopters went through to make the fantastic game it is today.
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372,Diablo 3: Eternal Collection Switch  - Better With Age,9," Diablo 3 remains a clever, rewarding, and oftentimes brilliant action-RPG that has made a near seamless transition to Nintendo Switch, six years after its original release.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2372510-2219335-box_d3.png,NS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/diablo-3-eternal-collection-switch-review-better-w/1900-6417022/,pos,"
More than anything, Diablo 3: Eternal Collection proves just how well Blizzard's action-RPG has aged. Six years after its original release, the dungeon crawler remains as rewarding as ever, and despite a few technical concessions, it has found yet another welcoming home on Nintendo's portable console.For those unfamiliar with Blizzard's 2012 loot fest, Diablo 3 places you in the shoes of a superpowered demon-slayer in a hellish, gothic world. You explore five disparate regions from a top-down view, upgrading your character and earning new loot as you battle the lords of the underworld and their monstrous swarms.With the Eternal Collection, Diablo 3 includes every expansion, every character, every quality-of-life improvement the RPG has ever added. One of the more notable options is the ability to play Adventure Mode right from the start, eliminating the need to slog through the slower-paced story out of necessity.Of course, in coming to Nintendo Switch, Diablo 3 has also become a portable game. And it works. It works incredibly well.In fact, I can think of few games better suited for a handheld port. So much of Diablo 3 plays best in short bursts, from the 10-minute chase for that next legendary item, to the satisfying flow of a challenge rift. I completed bounties on my way to work and organized my inventory on the way back. Of the 50 hours I spent with Diablo 3 on Switch, about half of them played out in handheld mode. It's another testament to the novelty of Nintendo's console, yes, but also the elegance of Diablo 3's design.Movement still feels natural on the analog sticks--whether you're playing with the Joy-Cons or Pro controller--and custom controls make it easy to maximize your character build at any time. As was the case with Diablo 3's previous jump to PS4 and Xbox One, the mechanical leap to Switch is painless and fluid. It's just as easy to rely on muscle memory while you focus on the kaleidoscopic display of magic and fire. To paraphrase the designer Don Norman: good design is invisible.When it comes to visual fidelity, Blizzard ensured that Diablo 3 on Switch runs at 60 frames across the board--aside from rare occasions when elemental effects didn't animate, the Eternal Collection is remarkably clean. Even during high-level challenge rifts, with hundreds of demons covering the screen, the dungeon crawler maintained a smooth and steady pace. The framerate is equally stable in handheld mode, and crunching those mobs is just as satisfying as it's ever been.The Eternal Collection's resolution, on the other hand, is a bit more muddled. In the Switch's docked mode, Diablo 3 looks aggressively fine, or at least, as good as any other isometric game released in 2012. In handheld mode's 720p resolution, however, things get cloudier. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. In Diablo 3's darker areas--of which there are many--I have to crank my console's brightness all the way in order to really see what is going on. Even then, there's a slight haze over everything, making character models look more like mirages than actual figures. Handheld mode's jagged edges and foggy panoramas aren't massive flaws by any means, but after playing for long periods in docked mode, they tend to stand out.What they don't do, however, is detract from Diablo's thrilling combat. And of course, in true series tradition, that combat is often more thrilling with a friend or two.Few cooperative experiences compare to a Monk, Demon Hunter, Barbarian, and Wizard working in concert to whittle down mobs down little by little, one demon at a time. It's a special thrill to see my character build factor into a larger group, and an even better one to see how that group dynamic changes how I play. I'm still mainly focused on killing every enemy possible, but I'm also thinking about tanking with my Crusader, or healing with my Monk, or littering the screen with corpses to give my Necromancer ally more ammunition.As with previous console iterations of Diablo 3, The Eternal Collection allows for up to four players on one console at a time. Item management is less satisfying in this scenario, as you're either quick-equipping new loot without appreciating its subtleties, or pausing the game for the entire party just so you can boost your damage by 100 points. The radial menus are also still as imprecise as ever, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a better solution without a mouse and keyboard.I came into the Eternal Edition expecting a eulogy for one of my favorite games. Instead, I stumbled upon a celebration.And although Diablo 3 on Switch gives you the option to use Joy-Cons as individual controllers, be warned: It's counterintuitive and cumbersome, with poor button-mapping and an overreliance on motion controls. Blizzard did the best it could with what the Joy-Con offers, but when in doubt, stick to the Pro controller or the dual Joy-Con rig.The Eternal Collection brings the additional ease of playing via LAN connection on each player's respective Switch. It's helpful to have the camera focused solely on your character, especially in Diablo 3's more hectic moments. But I still couldn't help preferring local co-op. There's something novel--even nostalgic--about playing on the same screen, watching the same chaos unfold as the person next to you. Diablo 3 on Switch allows for several methods of playing with friends, and whatever your preference, the experience still holds up.Like the best games, Diablo 3 has gotten better with time. And despite a few setbacks, the Switch is now my preferred home for the extraordinary RPG. It includes every major improvement Blizzard made to the formula, with the added handheld versatility every Switch port offers.Diablo 3 is a game about long term goals accomplished in short, thrilling bursts. It's rewarding and subtle. It's flashy and boisterous. I have spent six years enjoying it, and will likely spend six years more. As far as video games go, that's a long time--I came into the Eternal Collection expecting a eulogy for one of my favorite games. Instead, I stumbled upon a celebration.


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'course', ',', 'true', 'series', 'tradition', ',', 'combat', 'often', 'thrilling', 'friend', 'two.Few', 'cooperative', 'experiences', 'compare', 'Monk', ',', 'Demon', 'Hunter', ',', 'Barbarian', ',', 'Wizard', 'working', 'concert', 'whittle', 'mobs', 'little', 'little', ',', 'one', 'demon', 'time', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'special', 'thrill', 'see', 'character', 'build', 'factor', 'larger', 'group', ',', 'even', 'better', 'one', 'see', 'group', 'dynamic', 'changes', 'I', 'play', '.', 'I', ""'m"", 'still', 'mainly', 'focused', 'killing', 'every', 'enemy', 'possible', ',', 'I', ""'m"", 'also', 'thinking', 'tanking', 'Crusader', ',', 'healing', 'Monk', ',', 'littering', 'screen', 'corpses', 'give', 'Necromancer', 'ally', 'ammunition.As', 'previous', 'console', 'iterations', 'Diablo', '3', ',', 'The', 'Eternal', 'Collection', 'allows', 'four', 'players', 'one', 'console', 'time', '.', 'Item', 'management', 'less', 'satisfying', 'scenario', ',', ""'re"", 'either', 'quick-equipping', 'new', 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373,Wik & the Fable of Souls ,9," Wik & the Fable of Souls is a mix of challenging, intelligent gameplay and an intriguing, fairy-tale presentation that will appeal to just about anyone.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/4/9/7/25751-72497.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wik-and-the-fable-of-souls-review/1900-6152113/,pos,"
  Wik & the Fable of Souls is a static platformer starring Wik, a bug-eyed creature with an extraordinarily dexterous tongue. Whether you're playing story or challenge mode, you progress through a series of screens that are filled with coins, gems, enemies, and little green grubs. You have to collect grubs with your tongue and spit them at your pack animal, Slotham, who slowly moves from left to right at the bottom of the screen. If Slotham reaches the end of the screen before you collect the required number of grubs, you lose. Luckily you can slow Slotham down by spitting puddles of honey in his path. To collect grubs, you'll have to jump, swing from your tongue, and fend off enemies that try to carry the grubs away. As if that weren't enough, some enemies can actually kill Wik, so there's the matter of self-preservation to keep in mind as well. With its charming presentation and challenging gameplay, Wik is an enchanting little game that's definitely worth checking out.  
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374,MLB '06: The Show ,9," All of the little improvements, and there are tons of them, make MLB '06: The Show a masterful follow-up to last year's game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426884-2211641-box_mlb06ts.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-06-the-show-review/1900-6145408/,pos,"
  Sony really turned its MLB franchise around last year by scrapping its old code and starting from scratch to create a wonderfully crafted baseball sim that many considered superior to the competing products put out by EA Sports and 2K Games. Wisely, it didn't try to reinvent the wheel again with MLB '06: The Show. Instead, it took what was already a great game and made it better. The developers have fleshed out various play modes, added a few new features, fixed a couple of nagging bugs, and spit-shined the presentation, thus producing a masterful follow-up that should appeal to newcomers and should also entice owners of last year's game to upgrade.   Career mode lets you create your own player and embark on an MLB career.   The list of play modes is exhaustive, in a good way. Offline, you can play full games in the exhibition, rivalry, career, season, and franchise modes or distill it all down to the batter-versus-pitcher matchup in the home run derby and king-of-the-diamond modes. Online, you can use your PlayStation 2's network adapter and broadband Internet connection to play head-to-head, participate in tournaments, follow leaderboards, and download roster updates. Buddy lists and instant messaging are also available, as is an MLB news feed. On top of all that, you can create your own players and shuffle the rosters any way you like using the various editing tools. The game even supports Sony's EyeToy camera so you can insert your own face onto custom players.    Of course, the game includes all 30 Major League Baseball teams and stadiums, thousands of actual players, and a decent assortment of alternate jerseys and spring-training ballparks. Two all-star teams are available, as are two legends teams, although those need to be unlocked by winning games in the various play modes. Triple-A and double-A clubs are also available in the career and franchise modes, but the only real players included in them are those who have already had previous major league experience.     Fans who want to follow their team for multiple seasons have a number of options with which to do so. The season mode is perfect if you just want to shuffle lineups, make trades, and play some ballgames. One step beyond the season mode is the career mode, which lets you create a rookie player and guide him through an entire career, beginning in the minors and hopefully hashing out numerous seasons in the bigs. You'll earn training points to upgrade your player's abilities, based on his day-to-day performance, and you can access interaction and contract menus to get playing time and negotiate better deals. At the end of the spectrum is the franchise mode, which lets you micromanage literally every aspect of a ballclub. In all modes, the game tracks statistics in more than 75 individual categories and doles out all of the necessary year-end awards.    The franchise mode in MLB '06 is pretty much identical to how it was in the previous game, which is to say ridiculously comprehensive. Besides handling lineups, drafting players, making trades, and playing ballgames, you have to manage the development, facilities, and marketing aspects of the ballclub. On the development side of things, you can hire scouts, coaches, and medical staff, and then you can assign them to specific research areas or have them hunt for talent in various regions of the country. Facilities management is split into various subcategories, including stadium updates, vendors, training facilities, rehab facilities, and transportation. For example, the vendors menu lets you install different food and gear stalls and set the prices for the items they sell. On the marketing side of things, you can set up promotional giveaways, buy advertising in various forms of media, and sell ad space on the billboards and scoreboards inside the stadium. Variables such as budget, fan support, and player morale are also tracked on a daily basis, and you can access detailed reports to keep tabs on each of them. The goal is to build a successful ballclub and satisfy the contract goals that the owner has set forth so that you'll be hired back year after year.   You have to tend to player complaints and needs in the season and franchise modes.   New to the season and franchise modes this year is a feature called ""game time decisions."" In a nutshell, the players and coaches will voice their complaints and concerns to you prior to the start of each game, and you have to decide whether to solve their problems or ignore them. Perhaps Ichiro is in a slump and the hitting coach thinks he needs a day off, or maybe a hotshot rookie is tired of sitting on the bench and wants to be put into the lineup. Granting their requests will make them happy and bolster their stamina and confidence, but doing so may negatively affect your lineup for a game or two. On the other hand, not granting a request could lead to injury or discontentedness, which will negatively affect that player's play out on the field. Day in and day out, you have to weigh the pros and cons and make those game time decisions.    Thankfully, MLB '06 generally lets you adjust your level of involvement to suit your tastes. While playing through the season, career, and franchise modes, you can have the CPU automatically handle any aspect you don't want to bother with. That includes everything from lineups and injuries to business tasks and facilities upkeep. In all modes, you have the option to play games from the field, manage from the dugout, or have the CPU simulate all or a portion of a game. For instance, if you want to jump ahead a couple of innings, you can do that by selecting the fast-forward option from the in-game pause menu. Two different manage-only interfaces are available. One uses the standard 3D perspective, while the other resembles a fantasy baseball board game. In either, the CPU controls both teams while you watch from the dugout. Whenever you need to, though, you can interrupt the game and issue specific commands to your hitters, pitchers, and base runners.     In addition to being a very flexible single-player game, MLB '06: The Show is well suited to competitive multiplayer play, both offline and online. Offline, the majority of play modes support head-to-head competition. What that means is that in addition to being able to battle it out in single games, two different players can each have their own teams while playing through the season or franchise modes. Realizing that people often develop rivalries with their friends and relatives, the folks at Sony's San Diego studio built a rivalry tracker into this year's game. The rivalry menu keeps track of win-loss records and other various statistics for anyone who inputs a username into the system. Those stats are then saved to a memory card and loaded up each time the game is started. From the rivalry menu, it's easy to see who among your friends is the best hitter, the best pitcher, or the best overall. It's kind of like the offline equivalent of online leaderboards.   Online play is more stable in this year's game.   Just like its predecessor, MLB '06: The Show boasts a number of online features you can take advantage of using a PS2 network adapter and a broadband Internet connection. Last year's game set the bar high with head-to-head play, user-created tournaments, roster downloads, buddy lists, leaderboards, and discussion forums. This year's game adds instant messaging and an MLB news feed to the mix. The system automatically keeps track of records, various statistics, and disconnects. A new rating system has also been implemented, which lets you rate your opponents based on their sportsmanship. If they used bad language or disconnected before the game was finished, you can assign them a low rating. If they were a relatively decent competitor, you can assign them a high mark. From the game lobby, it's easy to see at a glance how many times players have disconnected and whether they have a positive or negative overall rating. Most importantly, however, the lag issues and system crashes that users experienced and complained about last year seem to have been fixed in this latest game. When the connection between two players is solid, play is generally smooth with only a few hiccups here and there. Not having the game lock up after showing the final line score is also a big plus.    As for the nitty-gritty of actually playing the game, the basic aspects of its various control interfaces are rather straightforward, but each interface also has a number of optional and advanced features that, when put to use, provide pinpoint control over every facet of play. Many of these features have been with the MLB franchise since its inception. Some, like the release-point pitching meter, have been outright lifted from competitors' products. Chances are, if you enjoyed some aspect of a particular baseball game's control setup in the past, it's here in MLB '06, either by default or as an alternative to one of the default interface setups.    Hitting is mainly based on timing. Press the button when the ball crosses the plate and you'll probably make contact. Like any good baseball sim, MLB '06 includes a number of advanced features that you can employ to improve the quality of contact and increase the odds of reaching base. By holding the R2 button, you can attempt to guess the specific pitch and its intended location. Guess correctly and the game will outright show you the pitch's location before the pitcher releases the ball. Guess wrong and your swing won't be as solid. Following in the footsteps of other highly respected baseball sims, this year's game uses different buttons to specify whether to swing for power or for contact, and it also lets you influence the angle of the swing by inputting directions with the left analog stick. For instance, if you want to lift the ball to left field, you'd hold up-left on the stick.   The default hitting and pitching viewpoints and interfaces are fairly standard.   Should you reach base, you can let the CPU control your base runners or input commands at various points to advance and retreat your runners. Picture-in-picture cameras at the top of the screen enable you to see how much of a lead your runners are taking and where the opposing defenders are in relation to your runners. Base runners can be controlled as a group, or you can take control of an individual runner by pressing the button that corresponds to the icon. Before the pitch, you can preload stolen-base commands. Once the ball is in play, you can issue different commands to have your runners advance, hold position, or retreat. A couple of years ago, EA Sports implemented the ability to control runners' slides into its MVP Baseball game. Sony has implemented a similar feature in MLB '06. By pushing up or down on the left analog stick, you can have your runners make headfirst or feetfirst slides. Feetfirst slides become take-out slides at second base if the double play is a possibility, while issuing the headfirst slide command to a runner nearing home plate will result in a collision with the catcher.    Pitching is probably the game's strongest interface and also the most involved. Pitchers generally have anywhere from three to five pitches in their repertoire. To select a pitch and set the pitcher's aim, you first have to pick a pitch by pressing the corresponding button, and then you set the aim by positioning a ball-shaped cursor with the left analog stick. When you tap the X button to lock in the target, the release-point meter appears. This curved meter sets the effectiveness and accuracy of the pitch. After you press the X button, the meter starts to fill. Letting up on the button sets the effectiveness of the pitch, and a quick follow-up tap sets the accuracy and causes the pitcher to release the pitch. Timing your button presses is the key to making effective, accurate pitches. If you hit the ""sweet spots"" on the meter, your fastballs will be speedy, and your breaking pitches will break sharply. If you goof up on either input, your pitch won't have good movement, or it'll miss its intended mark. In addition to all of the pitch-specific controls, you can issue commands for pitchouts, pickoffs, and intentional walks.     One thing that may bother some people is that the onscreen target doesn't take into account how sharply the pitch will break. For instance, you may target a curve ball at a spot in the bottom of the strike zone, but it will actually bounce across the plate much lower because that type of pitch tends to drop just before it reaches the box. This discrepancy isn't something to cry over, since it's easy enough to compensate for once you learn what all of the pitches do. So long as you position the cursor higher on curveballs, sinkers, and split-finger fastballs and off to the side on sliders, you'll know exactly where your pitches will end up. Somewhat related to this, it may seem at first that passed balls and wild pitches happen too frequently. This isn't a bug. Rather, it's another of the game's more realistic aspects. In reality, catchers have a devil of a time laying the mitt on pitches that sail too far out of the zone. MLB '06 simulates this. If a slider veers too far sideways or a sinker lands in the dirt, there's a chance that it'll get away from the catcher and flop into the backstop. If you throw your pitches to reasonable locations, you won't experience too many passed balls or wild pitches.   Preload throws in the field by pressing the button before the fielder catches the ball.   Fielding, by contrast, is the game's least intricate interface. You can have the CPU handle fielding automatically, set it to provide an initial assist, or handle it yourself. Controlling the active fielder is fairly straightforward. All you need to do is use the left analog stick to move the fielder and press one of the main buttons to throw the ball to the corresponding base. If need be, you can have him make a leaping catch or dive for the ball by pressing the R1 or R2 buttons. You can also preload throws by pressing the base button before the fielder catches the ball. The advantage to this is that the fielder will make a smoother transition and get rid of the ball more quickly.    It can't be stressed enough, however, that every single one of those complicated interfaces can be scaled back to reflect your own personal comfort zone and skill level. If you want to make use of the full toolbox of optional features and advanced controls, you can do so. If you want to focus on hitting and pitching, but not fielding or baserunning, you can set the CPU to handle those aspects for you. If you want to go back to the days when all people did in baseball video games was push single buttons to swing the bat, toss pitches, and get to the ball, you can shut off every advanced feature and play the game with only the basic controls. In that regard, MLB '06: The Show really can be enjoyed by players of all skill and interest levels.    Various managerial functions are also easily accessed. Before the game starts, you can check player charts, scout the disabled list, and adjust your lineup and pitching rotation accordingly. During the game, a quick press of the L2 button brings up a menu that lets you warm up relief pitchers, substitute players, and make visits to the mound. When you're playing defense, a similar menu, brought up by pressing the L1 button, lets you shift the position of your infielders and outfielders. You can also press and hold the select button to bring up a scouting report that shows the pitcher's pitch count, stamina, and confidence, as well as the batter's confidence rating and personal hitting chart.     Once you get in a game or two, you'll quickly realize that MLB '06: The Show also simulates the intangible aspects that make the game of baseball so interesting on a human level. Pitchers tire out and lose their stuff as the innings go by. A well-timed mound visit can give your pitcher the added confidence and energy he needs to get another couple of batters out. Hitters will admire home runs, pitchers will pump their fists when they strike a batter out, and fielders will preen when they make a flashy play. By the same token, hitters and pitchers will sometimes argue questionable strike calls, and base runners will give the ump a tongue-lashing if they're called out on a close play. You can't specifically command players to argue their case or charge the mound, but their tempers may compel them to do so anyway without your input, which, as sometimes happens on the actual field of play, may result in an ejection.    MLB 06 simulates the intangibles, such as fatigue and confidence.   Again this year, every player has his own confidence measure. A player's confidence increases with timely hitting, good plays, and strike pitches and decreases when strikeouts and errors happen or hits are given up. The effects of confidence are fairly evident, in that hitters will make better contact and pitchers will throw harder stuff when the meter is full. Unlike in last year's game, confidence in MLB '06 is easier to build up and tear down, which ultimately makes every at-bat more interesting, since a few pitches or a single swing can really change the course of a ballgame.    In general, MLB '06: The Show puts forth a remarkably authentic portrayal of what actually happens during live baseball games. On the mound, the CPU does a good job of mixing up pitches and changing speeds, and it will intentionally throw junk pitches outside the strike zone just to trip you up. At the plate, the CPU won't swing at pitches too far outside the zone, and contact made on pitches thrown to such extreme locations will usually result in a weak dribbler or pop-up, which is what's supposed to happen. The frequency of pop flies, ground balls, errors, putouts, and double plays seems to be in line with reality. As was the case in last year's game, the ball interacts with objects such as bases, gloves, the dirt, and players' body parts in a realistic fashion, so surprises such as bobbled balls, one-hoppers, and bizarre bounces happen about as often as they ought to. Once in a while, a play will happen as if it were preordained to do so, but on the whole, where the ball ends up appears to be believably dynamic. One subtle improvement made to this year's game is that fielders are now more likely to reach and lean back for balls when they're not quite in position for a clean catch. These animations are fun to watch, because they contribute to the game's overall naturalistic feel, but they're also meaningful from a gameplay perspective, because errors and late throws are more likely to result when you make a goofy catch.      Words like natural, authentic, and atmospheric are also good ways to describe the game's overall presentation. Batter walk-ups, instant-replay views, and postplay camera shots give the game a lively feel. Compared to the previous game, this year's game incorporates more instant replays and flashy transitions, but it doesn't go unnecessarily overboard with them.    Player faces look like the actual players' faces.   The graphics are exceptionally clean, the stadiums and players look just like the real thing, and there's a healthy amount of miscellaneous eye candy. On the field, dirt is kicked up by players' cleats, and players' uniforms gather dirt and grass stains as a result of sliding into bases and making acrobatic plays. Around the stadium, the crowd will stand up in their seats in response to plays. You'll also notice that many of the advertising billboards are animated and that scoreboards update to reflect the current game's score as well as scores from around the league. Sony's face-scanning technology is impressive, because the player faces are accurate and don't look plastic or contorted like the faces in other games do. Meanwhile, player animations are fluid, and the transitions that they make from one motion to the next are seamless, for the most part. On a double play, for example, the second baseman will scoop up the ball and dive gracefully over the base runner while making a bullet throw to first. Similarly, when there's a runner on second and a hitter sends a grounder to the third baseman, he'll give a look to hold the runner on second before throwing out the runner heading to first. The variety of cute, miscellaneous animations is fairly decent too. After a player legs it out to first, for instance, the first-base coach will give him a pat on the back. If the batter's bat shatters on a foul ball, the broadcast camera will show him receiving a new one from the dugout. From the tiniest nuance to the biggest, MLB '06: The Show sure seems to sweat the details.    Honestly, other than putting in more play animations, there isn't much else that could be done to improve the game graphically. The hitting and fielding viewpoints are necessarily plain, with all of the indicators and button commands clearly laid out. EA's MVP series is still the king when it comes to animation variety, but Sony's team has really beefed up the player dynamics in this year's game, so the gap isn't nearly as wide as it once was. All of the flaws evident in the game's graphics are minor (at worst) and might not be fixable anyway due to the limits of the PlayStation 2 hardware. For instance, the textures used for larger outfield signs and stadium structures look sharp and legible when seen from the plate, but they look blocky when viewed from the outfield, especially on 480p sets and monitors. It's not that the signs become distorted when viewed up close; it's that the lettering and details on them scale smoothly only up to a point. Past that point, the edges start to look a bit rough. Considering how crisp the graphics are overall, and how the game typically runs at a steady 60 frames per second, it's quite reasonable to assume that the development team also did the best it could with regard to the PS2's texture memory. This is certainly the best-looking baseball sim on the console to date.    The accompanying audio is equally rich and atmospheric. All of the basic noise, for things like the crack of the bat and the sound of the ball bouncing on the infield, is spot on. Crowd noise, stadium music, and public-address announcements do a good job of duplicating the authentic ballpark atmosphere. The crowd will sometimes yell out player-specific catcalls or launch into an impromptu chant. It's funny to hear what Boston fans think of Johnny Damon now that he's with the Yankees, and it's always nice to hear the crowd at Safeco Field in Seattle cheer Ichiro on with a thumping chant of ""I-chi-ro, I-chi-ro."" Generally speaking, this year's game has a slightly better variety of batter walk-up music and incidental PA announcements than last year's game did.   The audio commentary is natural, like an actual radio or TV broadcast.   Again this year, the highlight of the audio is the running commentary, which is voiced by a three-man booth consisting of Padres TV announcer Matt Vasgersian, longtime Fox and ESPN analyst Dave Campbell, and Angels TV color man Rex Hudler. Vasgersian is the more talkative of the trio, since he has the general play-calling duties, although Campbell and Hudler do chime in frequently to offer critique and guru-level insight on specific plays and individual player performances. Vasgersian's rich vocabulary and conversational delivery really help make the commentary seem more like something you'd hear on radio or TV, as opposed to canned in a video game. He keeps pace with the action fairly well and has no problem changing his own train of thought or gently interrupting the other two when a bang-bang play happens. Also helping the commentary seem less canned are the stadium-specific comments that the three broadcasters make when a feature of the stadium influences a play on the field. For instance, Campbell will mention balls bouncing off the Green Monster at Fenway or talk about how Safeco Field is a pitcher's ballpark. From a linguistic standpoint, the sheer variety of different comments and transitional phrases recorded to lend Vasgersian's voice to the game is astonishing. Campbell and Hudler tend to repeat themselves from time to time, but Vasgersian provides an ongoing stream of natural, dynamic conversation. Related to that, owners of last year's game will be happy to discover that Vasgersian's delivery is more energetic this time around. It's particularly amusing to hear him chuckle whenever a pitcher throws a knuckleball across the plate.    Through and through, MLB '06: The Show for the PlayStation 2 is a top-quality baseball sim. If you even remotely like baseball, there's no way you'll be disappointed with it.  
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375,GTR 2 ,9," Despite a slightly gentler learning curve, GTR 2 still demands the most out of your inner race driver.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/6/8/26018-73168.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gtr-2-review/1900-6159524/,pos,"
  The PC racing simulation category isn't what it once was. While the PC used to be home to a big variety of classic, in-depth racing sim series, the ever-increasing power of game consoles and the promise of more sales have led many would-be racing developers to abandon the PC altogether. Consider SimBin's GTR 2, the sequel to 2005's GTR FIA Racing, a hearkening back to the good old days of sim racing. It's an expansive and challenging sequel to one of the best racing games of last year and, at its price, it remains one of the best bargains of the year for the PC.   Wave the green flag because it's time to go racing in GTR 2.   From a content standpoint, GTR 2 isn't that much different from the original. The game still revolves around GT racing--a compelling mixture of multiclass sports cars from makers such as Ferrari, Porsche, TVR, Saleen, and many more, all competing on a cosmopolitan lineup of real-life tracks from all over the world. Additionally, the driving model, which so authentically captured the thrilling yet often twitchy experience of driving a highly tuned sports car in the original GTR, is even more finely tuned in the sequel. The lion's share of the game's improvements, then, can be seen in the slight planing down of the original game's often steep learning curve.    The first and most obvious way the GTR developers have done this is through the driving school, an expansive tutorial that has seemingly been designed to take you from the ground up--from your first moments in the car to competing tightly with the game's demanding artificially intelligent drivers (or with up to 27 other players via the game's excellent online multiplayer racing). Categories covered in driving school include the basics, such as acceleration and braking, up through cornering and overtaking, and finally, into section-by-section breakdowns of many of the tracks featured in the game. Each category includes a text breakdown that covers the theory behind each racing concept, as well as the specific goal you need to accomplish in order to pass that particular challenge. You can also practice the challenge before an ""official"" attempt against the ghost car or watch the ghost car's lap to view proper braking or turn-in points, which is essential for some of the trickier challenges.   By beating challenges, you unlock a host of restricted-class championships that are graded in difficulty levels; some of the first championships you open are quite easy and serve as an excellent introduction to the kind of intense on-track action that forms the heart of the game. Those new to the series are well served by simply going through the basic tutorials in driving school, unlocking a few championships and competing in a few of these early series. In all, if you go so far as to compete in all 142 challenges found in GTR 2, you'll be well on your way to mastering the fundamentals of driving quickly and have a good idea of how the many tracks found in the game operate.    Once you're done with the tutorials and have built up a heap of early-game confidence, you'll find a number of game modes and options in GTR 2 just waiting to beat you down and bring you back to earth. Open practice and time trial are two good ways to improve your lap time. The inclusion of a color-coded racing line feature similar to that found in Forza Motorsport is a nice touch--though the one found in GTR 2 isn't as dynamic as the feature in Forza. As a result, you'll often find points where you can ""fudge"" the race line in order to gain a few extra tenths. The same can be said for the turn indicator signs that pop up when turning laps, which also suggest the gear you should be in to attack a particular corner. Many times you can safely ignore the recommended gear in favor of what you know works better in a particular car.   With multiple car classes available, you'll easily find a ride to suit your speed.   GTR 2's three main racing modes are race weekend, championships, and 24-hour race. A race weekend is a single event, complete with multiple practice and qualifying rounds, as well as the actual race itself. Championship mode includes both the 2003 and 2004 official FIA GT seasons, as well as the custom championships you open up by completing challenges in the driving school. New for GTR 2 are the 24-hour races on tracks such as Spa-Franchorchamps, Monza, and China's Zuhai circuit. You can scale down these grueling endurance races to a more manageable size (say one or three hours) and still experience the same gradual day-to-night transition you would in a 24-hour race.    There are three difficulty levels to choose from--novice, semi-pro, and simulation. And, as you may expect, the difference in handling between novice and simulation is dramatic. At the novice level, every option from antilock braking to various aids, such as stability and braking assists, are available to be toggled on and off at your discretion. The semi-pro level turns off most of these aids but leaves traction control and your ABS system intact. The simulation level of difficulty grays out all options and leaves you on the asphalt with only your skill behind the wheel (and whatever deity you pray to) to count on.     And it's there--on the asphalt--that you feel the full brunt of the GTR 2 experience. As in the last game, with all aids disengaged, this is one of the more thrilling and challenging racing experiences you can have. The cockpit view, which features impressively detailed and authentic interiors for every car in the game, puts you in the driver's seat, and lap after lap, you are jostled and thrown around tracks at ludicrous speeds. Every shake and wobble of your car is felt and demands your full attention. Whether playing the game with a joystick or with a wheel and pedal combination (or, heaven forbid, with a keyboard), you find yourself consistently balanced on a knife's edge, trying to pull out the last remaining ounce of speed from your car while fighting against your rapidly degrading tires. A hair too much tire on the curb or just slightly too steep an angle into a corner can spell disaster, such as a spin into the grass or, worse, a full-on collision with the wall--where you'll experience the game's sophisticated damage modeling.    Think you're man enough to tackle Eau Rouge at top speed?   In fact, the biggest credit to GTR 2's refined driving model is that, as a race goes on, you can feel the nature of the car's handling change. Just before you're due for a pit stop, for example, you'll find yourself sliding to the outside of corners you normally could attack at full clip at the beginning of the race, as your worn-out tires begin to work against you. Also, watch your rearview mirrors because the game's smart AI will be apt to pounce on you after the slightest mistake. In fact, if there is a criticism of GTR 2's otherwise sterling approach to driving sims, it's that, even with its concessions toward making the series more approachable for rookies, it's still a tough slog to get on the podium. Even the easier custom championships require a good deal of skill and concentration to win, which isn't necessarily a bad thing--as long as you've set your expectations as such.    Part and parcel with a driving sim game comes a wealth of tuning options for your ride, and GTR 2 absolutely does not skimp here. Everything from fuel strategy to tire pressure, and from springs and camber to toe-in and the anti-roll bar, is adjustable in the game. If you're an experienced virtual gearhead, the wealth of options here will certainly be a boon. For the novice, it will likely seem overwhelming. Thank goodness, then, that the game's online options will let you download user-created sample setups that are organized by track. With a little digging, you can likely find a speedy setup for whatever car you are currently driving; the ability to rate these configurations is also a handy filter for separating the setup wheat from the chaff. Despite this option, however, qualifying still seems inordinately difficult in the game. Even with a tight setup and a good deal of practice on the track, you'll find it tough to place in the upper echelon of cars when the time comes to drop the green flag.     The cars and tracks found in the game are expertly modeled, and on a mid- to high-end computer, you'll enjoy seeing the wealth of detail on display on the tracks. The game's track models are wonderful, capturing the high notes of each--Eau Rouge at Spa, the Parabolica at Monza, and the downhill slide into the never-ending front straight at Barcelona. They also provide enough small details, such as flag-waving race officials and a long train of spectators that line the long straight at Spa, to keep you engaged. The trade-off for all of this quality is that, just as with the last GTR, you'll need a hefty setup to get the game running at a respectable clip. Even with the 3.20GHz/2GB RAM machine we played the game on, we encountered enough frame-rate issues at the default setting to give us concern--it's difficult to imagine the game being very playable at the minimum system requirements of 1.8GHz/512MB RAM. It's also worth pointing out that the series is due for a presentation makeover because the menu system seems largely unchanged from the previous GTR, which is to say it's a bit ugly and confusing.   Wheel-to-wheel action doesn't get much better than this.   While you don't necessarily expect a wealth of variety in a racing game's sound presentation, GTR 2 has some audio treats for the attentive listener. First, the sound of the car engines is wonderful, from the gentle, slurring purr of a G3-class Porsche, to the furious, and frankly a bit scary, wail of a TVR T400R. But the fun doesn't stop there. When tearing down the long straight at high speeds, you'll hear the sounds of dust and debris minutely clanking against the bottom of the car; in the turns, you'll notice the protesting squeal of tires as they strain against your steering input; and if you run wide in a turn, your teeth will chatter as your car loudly bumps over the curbing. Whether listening in on headphones or with your PC speakers cranked nice and loud, the game's audio presentation simply transports you that much further into the car. Even the musical soundtrack isn't that bad, depending on your tolerance for the kind of European techno-pop featured in the previous GTR game.    The ability to skip directly past the first GTR game and start with GTR 2 is a testament to this game's quality and its slightly gentler learning curve. Once on the track, though, GTR 2 unapologetically demands your full attention as a participant, which is exactly what a highly tuned and deep racing sim should do. Provided you've got the PC horsepower to run it, this game's level of quality and discount price point practically scream for your attention.      
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376,007 Legends ,3.5," A cast of five famous Bond villains conspire against you in 007 Legends, but the uninspired gameplay is your true nemesis.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/3/4/2228234-box_007l.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/007-legends-review/1900-6398765/,neg,"
  Eurocom's 007 Legends is a game about falling. We see it in the way the opening minutes feature Daniel Craig's James Bond plummeting into a river after a friendly sniper accidentally shoots him off a speeding train, and we experience it in the way this latest installment in the long-running franchise reveals a fall from the innovations of 1997's GoldenEye 007 to Legends' tired mimicry of Call of Duty's core gunplay. This is a game that gets to run with Bond's legacy from half a century of cinema and yet stumbles on its face everywhere it should have broken into a sprint. It trips over shoddy AI and laughable stealth mechanics, it slips on boring boss fights and near-absent exposition, and while it benefits from decent multiplayer and challenge modes, these diversions never allow Legends to pick itself back up.    Know the context? If not, Legends never really tells you.   It's a shame, since 007 Legends has some rich source material to work with. Legends' patchwork story draws from iconic films such as Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill, Die Another Day, and Moonraker, but with Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, and other famous agents swapped out for the dour mug of Daniel Craig, pitifully voiced by Timothy Watson. Some iconic moments lurk about the carnage (including Goldfinger's famed ""I expect you to die"" speech while a laser threatens Bond's privates), but they feel forcibly stuffed into the humdrum, repetitive levels and their mediocre gunplay. True, there are flashes of fun, such as a firefight outside the gates of Fort Knox, but it doesn't take long to realize that every level invariably involves sending Bond into a famous enemy's lair with guns blazing, using his often anachronistic smartphone to hack or capture data with tedious minigames, and then capping off the level with a quick-time fistfight against the likes of Oddjob or Franz Sanchez.    That's not to say that Eurocom doesn't make a few attempts to add some variety to the gameplay, but they're halfhearted at best, and taken together, they easily constitute the game's worst moments. It's most apparent in Legends' simple stealth mechanics, which consist of little more than crouching and walking quietly, and the failure of the concept becomes all too apparent as soon as you off a thug and realize that you can't do anything with his body. Therefore, the stealth sequences play as though on a timer, with Bond picking off as many enemies as he can with a silenced weapon or his one-hit melee punches before a patrolling guard stumbles across one of the bodies.     In most cases, in other words, you're probably better off just going in with guns blazing anyway. The only complication is that 007 Legends includes mandatory stealth sequences that strip Bond of usable weapons and end in instant failure if he's seen by any guard. That might not be such a bad idea, were it not for the fact that Bond has no way to peek around corners (although he can peek over ledges, provided you can get the prompt to work).   Even infiltrating the amazing lairs of Bond villains is boring in 007 Legends.   Yet at least with the stealth mechanics, there's still a dash of skill involved. That's why it's so disappointing that the aforementioned fisticuffs are so bland; you can likely go through every one the campaign throws at you without ever seeing an enemy get a hit in. In theory, at least, the ability to use your controller's trigger to avoid incoming blows renders these fights a bit more complex than the average quick-time event, but the prompts to pummel your opponent with the analog sticks last long enough that you're not likely to miss in the first place. Even the most challenging sequences last less than half a minute.    Repeat this scenario for five hours, and you've experienced 007 Legends' campaign. It's an unfulfilling slog, particularly since levels spend little to no time on exposition out of an apparent conviction that Legends' players have seen all the movies anyway, and it's made all the worse by the way the action comes to a dead halt after the Moonraker level. It won't always be thus--the idea is to release the Skyfall episode as downloadable content around the time of the film's theatrical release in early November--but Legends gives you little reason to look forward to capping off this hodgepodge saga. The visuals look as dated as some of the early Bond movies, the enemy AI sometimes runs into walls or fires directly into obstacles, and the frame rate occasionally dives into what feels like the single digits.     If 007 Legends has any redeeming quality, it's in its multiplayer mode. Gone is the tiresome stealthy gameplay of the campaign; instead, this mode has 12 arenas for 8 to 12 players that focus on such Bond-themed objectives as killing enemy players with Goldfinger's golden gun or retrieving data from a downed spy plane, all while capering around as iconic Bond personalities. It's a pity, then, that there's no one around. Only a week after Legends' release, the servers are consistently empty, which makes the return of the beloved four-player split-screen mode from GoldenEye 007: Reloaded all the more worthwhile. Decent, too, is Legends' Challenge mode with its specific objectives, which adds some meaning and urgency to campaign levels that were too dull in their own right.    International espionage? There's an app for that.   To say that 007 Legends is a disappointment is to be kind, especially after Eurocom's commendable efforts with last year's GoldenEye 007: Reloaded. Legends could have been a memorable release that reminds us why we've loved Ian Fleming's famous spy for more than 50 years, but somehow it manages to earn its place as what may be the most lackluster Bond game to date. Missed opportunities cower in every corner, ranging from an irreverence toward the subject matter in the disjointed story to the absence of familiar voices, and the gameplay feels like it started life as an amateur Bond-themed Call of Duty mod. The options offered by the multiplayer and challenge modes might entice some of the most devoted Bond fans, but for the majority of players, this seemingly rushed world won't be enough.  
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377,007 Legends ,3.5," A cast of five famous Bond villains conspire against you in 007 Legends, but the uninspired gameplay is your true nemesis.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/3/4/2228234-box_007l.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/007-legends-review/1900-6398807/,neg,"
  Eurocom's 007 Legends is a game about falling. We see it in the way the opening minutes feature Daniel Craig's James Bond plummeting into a river after a friendly sniper accidentally shoots him off a speeding train, and we experience it in the way this latest installment in the long-running franchise reveals a fall from the innovations of 1997's GoldenEye 007 to Legends' tired mimicry of Call of Duty's core gunplay. This is a game that gets to run with Bond's legacy from half a century of cinema and yet stumbles on its face everywhere it should have broken into a sprint. It trips over shoddy AI and laughable stealth mechanics, it slips on boring boss fights and near-absent exposition, and while it benefits from decent multiplayer and challenge modes, these diversions never allow Legends to pick itself back up.    Know the context? If not, Legends never really tells you.   It's a shame, since 007 Legends has some rich source material to work with. Legends' patchwork story draws from iconic films such as Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill, Die Another Day, and Moonraker, but with Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, and other famous agents swapped out for the dour mug of Daniel Craig, pitifully voiced by Timothy Watson. Some iconic moments lurk about the carnage (including Goldfinger's famed ""I expect you to die"" speech while a laser threatens Bond's privates), but they feel forcibly stuffed into the humdrum, repetitive levels and their mediocre gunplay. True, there are flashes of fun, such as a firefight outside the gates of Fort Knox, but it doesn't take long to realize that every level invariably involves sending Bond into a famous enemy's lair with guns blazing, using his often anachronistic smartphone to hack or capture data with tedious minigames, and then capping off the level with a quick-time fistfight against the likes of Oddjob or Franz Sanchez.    That's not to say that Eurocom doesn't make a few attempts to add some variety to the gameplay, but they're halfhearted at best, and taken together, they easily constitute the game's worst moments. It's most apparent in Legends' simple stealth mechanics, which consist of little more than crouching and walking quietly, and the failure of the concept becomes all too apparent as soon as you off a thug and realize that you can't do anything with his body. Therefore, the stealth sequences play as though on a timer, with Bond picking off as many enemies as he can with a silenced weapon or his one-hit melee punches before a patrolling guard stumbles across one of the bodies.     In most cases, in other words, you're probably better off just going in with guns blazing anyway. The only complication is that 007 Legends includes mandatory stealth sequences that strip Bond of usable weapons and end in instant failure if he's seen by any guard. That might not be such a bad idea, were it not for the fact that Bond has no way to peek around corners (although he can peek over ledges, provided you can get the prompt to work).   Even infiltrating the amazing lairs of Bond villains is boring in 007 Legends.   Yet at least with the stealth mechanics, there's still a dash of skill involved. That's why it's so disappointing that the aforementioned fisticuffs are so bland; you can likely go through every one the campaign throws at you without ever seeing an enemy get a hit in. In theory, at least, the ability to use your controller's trigger to avoid incoming blows renders these fights a bit more complex than the average quick-time event, but the prompts to pummel your opponent with the analog sticks last long enough that you're not likely to miss in the first place. Even the most challenging sequences last less than half a minute.    Repeat this scenario for five hours, and you've experienced 007 Legends' campaign. It's an unfulfilling slog, particularly since levels spend little to no time on exposition out of an apparent conviction that Legends' players have seen all the movies anyway, and it's made all the worse by the way the action comes to a dead halt after the Moonraker level. It won't always be thus--the idea is to release the Skyfall episode as downloadable content around the time of the film's theatrical release in early November--but Legends gives you little reason to look forward to capping off this hodgepodge saga. The visuals look as dated as some of the early Bond movies, the enemy AI sometimes runs into walls or fires directly into obstacles, and the frame rate occasionally dives into what feels like the single digits.     If 007 Legends has any redeeming quality, it's in its multiplayer mode. Gone is the tiresome stealthy gameplay of the campaign; instead, this mode has 12 arenas for 8 to 12 players that focus on such Bond-themed objectives as killing enemy players with Goldfinger's golden gun or retrieving data from a downed spy plane, all while capering around as iconic Bond personalities. It's a pity, then, that there's no one around. Only a week after Legends' release, the servers are consistently empty, which makes the return of the beloved four-player split-screen mode from GoldenEye 007: Reloaded all the more worthwhile. Decent, too, is Legends' Challenge mode with its specific objectives, which adds some meaning and urgency to campaign levels that were too dull in their own right.    International espionage? There's an app for that.   To say that 007 Legends is a disappointment is to be kind, especially after Eurocom's commendable efforts with last year's GoldenEye 007: Reloaded. Legends could have been a memorable release that reminds us why we've loved Ian Fleming's famous spy for more than 50 years, but somehow it manages to earn its place as what may be the most lackluster Bond game to date. Missed opportunities cower in every corner, ranging from an irreverence toward the subject matter in the disjointed story to the absence of familiar voices, and the gameplay feels like it started life as an amateur Bond-themed Call of Duty mod. The options offered by the multiplayer and challenge modes might entice some of the most devoted Bond fans, but for the majority of players, this seemingly rushed world won't be enough.  
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378,DARK ,3.5," Like the guards you must sneak past in this vampire stealth game, it's best to avoid Dark entirely.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2330776-81i4dcb07ql._sl1500_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-review/1900-6412133/,neg,"
  Can you imagine how deliciously powerful it would feel to be a vampire? Sustaining yourself on the blood of your victims, you could turn to mist and rush through the air, preying on the weak and hunting down the forces that would see the end of you and your kind. Dark hints at such an existence, but this vampire stealth game fails to make such bloodsucking dreams and nightmares come to life. Rather than pull you into the supernatural drama it tries to author, Dark devolves into unintentional comedy, the ridiculously bad dialogue and hilarious artificial intelligence inspiring fits of laughter. This game is both insane and inane, but at least its overall stupidity gives you something to cackle at.       The laughs start with the story, which casts you as Eric Bane, a half-vampire looking to suck the blood out of more powerful vampires before you turn into a mindless ghoul. You spend a lot of time in a nightclub called Sanctuary, where you might at first enjoy the colorful cel-shaded visuals and awkwardly dancing patrons before you start giggling at the bad dialogue. Says a vampire DJ about another powerful bloodsucker: ""The women that work there for him are really f***ed up. I think he put some vampire s*** on them."" Says another: ""The guy more or less owns the city. He's like the vampire dictator, man."" A Mass Effect-like dialogue wheel offers dialogue options, but not any actual choices, though you can string together different parts of conversation in ways that make the insipid dialogue even more nonsensical.    So off you go into the night to exercise your sneaking skills and do vampiric things, like knocking out dunderheaded rent-a-cops from behind when you aren't plunging your teeth into their necks. It's clear right away that something's amiss in Dark, however. Guards engage in conversation before beginning their patrol patterns, which is a typical atmospheric touch in stealth games, but some chats go on forever without unveiling any important truths or infusing Dark with any personality. When alerted, guards deliver canned lines that don't always make sense in context, the same snippets of recorded dialogue overlapping with each other and lone enemies calling out to nonexistent comrades. Bad animations, mediocre voice acting, jittery cutscenes, and disappearing sound effects round out the first impressions, though some nice audiovisual touches, such as the satisfying whoosh of your shadow leap ability, give you hope for the coming hours.     Unfortunately, Dark never capitalizes on its few strengths. The basic gameplay is bone-dry stealth--you crouch and hug walls, at least when the cover mechanic decides to work, while trying to avoid the none-too-watchful eyes of guards and attacking them when you need to. You may also drag corpses away if you have the opportunity, and need to avoid litter lest you call attention to yourself, though it isn't always clear whether or not nearby watchmen notice or care. There are a few visual references to Thief in the early levels, but you never need to keep to the shadows, in spite of the allusions (and in spite of this game's own name).    The repetitive catcalls and music in this weird strip club will probably have you turning down the audio.   You also have some passive and active vampire powers that let you, for example, confuse enemies in the area for a short period of time, or rush across a good distance and assassinate a guard. You need to kill guards and read scattered personal digital assistants and emails to earn points to unlock and improve these abilities, and you drain blood from your enemies to power them. At first it's fun to fool around with these skills, since they're the only way of mixing up the generic sneaking. Flying through the air and felling the cookie-cutter character models can give you a sense of accomplishment, as can successfully sneaking through a heavily defended warehouse without alarming the sentries. But about halfway through the game, you realize that you can use your shadow leap ability to exploit your way through levels, propelling yourself onto ledges and other platforms and avoiding or eliminating entire swaths of patrols in the process.    The rotten enemy AI doesn't always hinder you; in fact, it often seems intent on assisting your efforts. For instance, you might hide in a bush, one guard after another approaching you, perhaps after seeing you lurk in the area. You can knock them out one at a time, the guards acting as if they can't figure out where that corpse came from, even after staring right at you as you performed the kill. To make matters worse, Dark draws out levels during such circumstances, spawning new guards when the AI is alerted until the supply runs out, which makes levels tedious. You even see some of these guards appear right in front of you out of nowhere, which completely corrupts the core design of a stealth game.     Elsewhere, enemies jitter in place or against each other before teleporting somewhere else--again undermining the very idea of a stealth game. Sometimes, guards get stuck standing and looking in one spot in a way that keeps you from reaching your destination. And what's really hysterical is when guards shoot at you so that you can see bullets landing on you, yet the shots don't register. The lack of continuity between checkpoints also annihilates Dark's design consistency. In certain locations, triggering a checkpoint causes all the enemies in the area you just left to disappear, only to have new enemies and characters materialize there without any explanation.    Truer words were never spoken.   There are some good ideas in here, like machines that produce a field of UV rays that injure you and dull your vampire powers. And every so often, a level comes together, with enemy routines created in a way that allows you to satisfyingly slink by. But those bright spots are exceptions in Dark's poorly crafted areas. Some levels at first look open-ended, inviting you to experiment with different approaches, but actually push you down a single linear path, because it's the only path the AI and its rigid patterns can reasonably handle. Other levels feature a mishmash of enemies, alarms, and behaviors that seem thoughtlessly put together, inspiring you to exploit your way through rather than devise a clever plan of action.    Instead of ramping up the challenge and excitement, Dark actually gets much easier as it progresses, and the final boss fight (which involves walking around as its main mechanic) and subsequent moral choice (in which you have no emotional investment) aren't gut punches, but rather are gut-bustingly bad. In its favor, Dark mixes up its pace in the final levels, dropping some narrative surprises on you and depositing you into a few unexpected locales. But by then, you've endured too much banality for a few bewildering plot twists to suck any interest out of you, or for the stand-alone challenge levels to hold any appeal. In the dark is where this clumsy vampire game should remain.  


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379,Pacific Rim ,3.5, Big robots and big monsters are no match for boring gameplay in Pacific Rim.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2330853-ff64d78d.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pacific-rim-review/1900-6411616/,neg,"
  Movie tie-ins may be the laughing stock of the gaming world, but Pacific Rim seemed uniquely poised to succeed where so many dozens of others had failed. At heart, the film is little more than an excuse to see massive robots clobbering monsters in the style of Voltron, and therefore the game had no need to bog itself down in convoluted plots or even, thanks to Guillermo del Toro, bother itself with memorable character design. All it needed to do was get the clobbering right. Unfortunately, the gameplay always feels as though it's sitting on the rim of something better, although in the multiplayer matches, it's sometimes possible to catch a glimpse of what might have been.      Pacific Rim wisely avoids any attempt to follow the film's storyline to the letter, but the repetition of  playing as the same three Jaegers (or robots) and two Kaiju (or monsters) throughout its mere 12 stages sours the experience. Without explanation, it soon pits you against other Jaegers instead of the monsters threatening human existence as we know it, and to make matters worse, each of the five combatants in the core release cling to patterns so predictable that it's not too much of a challenge to score a gold ranking after but one failed attempt. That's less true of the harder Survival mode, but even mastering its additional challenges amounts to little more than making smarter blocks and throwing well-timed punches.    That's partly because the combo-free combat's so simple, to the point that its monotony outweighs its accessibility in the campaign. Jaeger or Kaiju, you're limited to blocks and strong and light attacks that amount to little more than swiping or stomping whatever's in front of you, which occasionally has no effect thanks to Pacific Rim's poor collision detection. Power attacks for each fighter spice up the action a bit, if almost to a fault--let your energy meter build up all the way, and you can unleash a devastating attack that downs most of your Chrysler Building-size opponents within seconds. In a surprise twist, it's actually more fun to fight Jaegers than monsters, because there's at least an extra element of strategy in depleting the two health bars that represent the machine's two pilots. With the Kaiju, it's just a case of whittling down one bar.   Flame-broiled kaiju, anyone?   Even so, facing an opponent with two health bars certainly isn't enough to counter the drudgery the campaign presents, although the multiplayer options for local play or on Xbox Live at least benefit from the challenge of fighting opponents whose attacks aren't as predictable as watching a clock. Fighting other players is also a good way to earn more experience to buy gear for your fighters, although doing so involves a long and tedious process that easily extends far past Pacific Rim's meager threshold for fun. Instead, considering Pacific Rim's limited appeal and sparsely populated multiplayer arenas, you're probably better off spending your experience on one-use boosts and a handful of barely noticeable stat upgrades.    On the bright side, Pacific Rim lets you customize your preferred Jaeger or Kaiju using the parts you've earned from playing; on the downside, it keeps many of the cosmetic options (such as the ability to change colors) locked behind a roughly $2.00 downloadable add-on. And so it goes with the three extra Kaiju available for purchase, including the flying monster Otachi that you encounter early on in the lightweight campaign. Not that downloadable content is necessarily bad; it's just that Pacific Rim makes the unwise decision to lean so heavily on it that the core game ends up feeling like an extended demo.   Why play the game to become more experienced when you can just spend money to do it?  That's a shame, since the concept behind Pacific Rim brims with untapped potential. Unfortunately, this release comes off as a sluggish imitation of 2011's Real Steel, complete with environments on the Xbox 360 that look as though they were lifted from Pacific Rim's similarly disappointing iOS incarnation. With more time and potentially more resources, this could have been an exciting and enjoyable experience with the power to stand on its own, independent of the film. As it is, its pleasures rust away long before it finally gets moving.  


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380,Tribal Rage ,3.4," Set on yet another postapocalyptic Earth, Tribal Rage lets you battle as one of six allegedly wacky tribes for domination of the scorched planet.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/9/121-429.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tribal-rage-review/1900-2535293/,neg,"
Looking for some real-time strategy with a comic flavor? Try playing Starcraft while listening to an old George Carlin record. Despite its billing, Tribal Rage doesn't deliver any comedy, strategy, or really much of anything except a delicately balanced blend of tedium and frustration, topped off with a painful hum in the back of your skull. Set on yet another postapocalyptic Earth, Tribal Rage lets you battle as one of six allegedly wacky tribes for domination of the scorched planet. Among your choices are the neo-fascist Enforcers, the Grim Reaper-hugging Death Cultists, or the, um, extraordinarily large-lunged Amazons, women whose endowments make Lara Croft seem prepubescent in comparison. Tribal Rage's humor is pretty much limited to a Trailer Trash unit that looks like Elvis and shoots a guitar gun.  Stopped laughing yet? Then let's discuss the gameplay. In a striking show of originality, you'll get to mine ore to create units to defend your bases and to attack others. For all its boasting of uniqueness, Tribal Rage coughs up a big greasy hair ball of some of the most hackneyed gameplay to be found in any game, any genre. The game comes with a number of stand-alone, unconnected scenarios that are totally lacking in depth and character. While each of the scenarios does have specific mission goals, you can fail to meet the goals and still win just by killing enough of the enemy.  Tribal Rage does offer a nice little twist in terms of a campaign game, but fails to fulfill any of its promise. Instead of asking gamers to play through a series of increasingly challenging, pre-scripted scenarios, Tribal Rage generates a grid of uncontrolled territories, each representing a different battle zone controlled by different factions. Starting from one territory, you must take over the entire map, moving units and credits to support your war effort. Unfortunately, you can pretty much breeze through the map once you generate a heap of killer units and a hefty bankroll to overwhelm any resistance. A potentially more challenging, large-scale strategic game is kneecapped by this most basic approach.  That strategy is money in the bank except when one of Tribal Rage's endearing bugs arbitrarily decides to erase those units and resources. As aggravating as that is, Tribal Rage features an even more egregious game-crashing glitch that affects those gamers who have those terribly rare and unpopular Sound Blaster audio cards. There's a patch on the Talon Soft web site, but the game still crashed on me after I installed it.  Not that I minded the crashes that much. Even if you're willing to forgive the pedestrian graphics, average sound, interchangeable units, and crappy gameplay, Tribal Rage's bottom of the barrel AI is sure to cripple whatever fun you might be able to squeeze out of the game. This game has the absolute worst pathfinding routines in the universe. Grouped units will separate widely, get stuck on the edge of any object in the zip code, just stop moving, or simply refuse to move, staying behind while the rest of the troop marches on. It makes you wonder if anyone played this game before it was shoved in the box. But wait - there's more! Units must be clicked on exactly right to get control of them. Buildings and defense structures frequently refuse to deploy despite receiving orders about a dozen times. Units need to appear on the screen all at once to be linked to hot keys. There's no command to center the display on hot-keyed units. The ability to design your own super-units sounds good but throws any concept of play balancing right out the window. Starting to get the idea?  Sure, Tribal Rage features multiplayer, but so what? Russian roulette is a multiplayer game, and I don't want to play it either. Tribal Rage does have its place in the gaming world - on a store shelf, gathering dust.
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381,Deadly Arts ,3.4, Don't waste your time or money on this one.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/9/7/6/2217976-da.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deadly-arts-review/1900-2544305/,neg,"
Deadly Arts is a bandwagon-hopping 3D fighting game from Konami. While it has one or two interesting modes, the gameplay is incredibly generic, and the character design is completely drab. Where Deadly Arts differs from other 3D fighters is in its create-a-fighter option. The option is surprisingly full-featured when compared with the rest of the game. You can pick from various hairstyles, body shapes, heights, and faces when dealing with your fighter's appearance. Once finished, you pick one of the stock characters to fight against. As you win, you'll be able to learn moves from the other fighters, eventually piecing together the best moves from each of the other characters. The other interesting mode is the tag mode, where you form a three-person team. You can switch characters at any time, but just like baseball, once you take a guy out, he's out for the rest of the match. The game plays similarly to Virtua Fighter, in that you have punch, kick, block, and evade buttons. The combo system is fairly simplistic, allowing people to pound on one button and get two or three hits. You can also strike opponents when they're down. If time runs out, various scores are tabulated, and the score leader, rather than the energy leader, wins. The characters in Deadly Arts lack life. They all reek of the cookie-cutter character design common in second- and third-tier fighters. Also, the character animation is really lackluster. The game's graphics are very plain, and the stages can cause quite a bit of slowdown, especially when they have to use foreground transparencies to keep the characters visible. Deadly Arts is just too basic. It doesn't have any truly distinguishing characteristics, and the gameplay just isn't interesting in any way. Don't waste your time or money on this one.
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382,DragonHeart: Fire and Steel ,3.4, This represents Acclaim's latest attempt to capitalize on the publicity surrounding a major motion picture.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/3/7/2209537-dragonheart_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragonheart-fire-and-steel-review/1900-2558623/,neg,"
The past six months have not been kind to mega-publisher Acclaim Entertainment. Record losses and large stockpiles of unsold games have placed the future of the once mighty publisher in serious doubt. Although the company blames its misfortunes on the market's transition to 32-bit consoles, I suspect that the true reason for the company's woes lies in its practice of flooding the market with poorly programmed platform games based on motion picture property rights. Even though Acclaim's president promises to stress quality over quantity in the future, the gaming community must contend with the likes of DragonHeart today. Loosely based on the film that wowed moviegoers last summer, DragonHeart follows the adventures of a medieval dragonslayer named Sir Bowen in his attempt to rid the world of an evil King. Along the way, he befriends Draco, the very last of the mythical creatures. (Never mind the fact that Sir Bowen has just finished off Draco's entire ""Friends and Family"" calling circle). Together, man and beast join forces to destroy the king's army and rescue the obligatory damsel in distress. With a plot this rich in gaming potential, you would think that Acclaim would choose to produce a quality RPG,  adventure title, or even a nice ""Panzer Dragoon"" style shooter. Alas, all we get for our $40 is yet another hastily designed platform game. On the subject of gameplay, fans of the popular ""Shinobi"" series will feel right at home here. Using only your wits and a little fancy swordplay, you must single-handedly defeat countless soldiers, skeletons, and other minions before confronting one of nine ""boss"" dragon waiting at level's end. Lather, rinse, repeat.  Unfortunately, even this tried and true concept is marred by a poorly implemented control scheme. Not only is there a slight delay between the pressing of a button and the corresponding action, but your character possesses all the athletic dexterity of a sofa. In fact, Sir Bowen's slow speed and lead-bottomed leaping make even the easiest of obstacles almost impossible to navigate. To make matters worse, not only does Sir Bowen posses the leaping ability of a schoolgirl, but he has the fighting abilities of one too. Swinging your sword more than four or five times will cause Sir Bowen to drop his weapon and heave like a chain-smoker in a marathon. This ""feature"" is just about the most frustrating thing I have ever seen in an ""action"" title, and I suspect it was added at the last minute to increase the overall difficulty of the game.   In conclusion, DragonHeart represents Acclaim's latest attempt to capitalize on the publicity surrounding a major motion picture by releasing a mediocre platform game with the same name. Fortunately, however, most gamers are savvy enough to know that it takes more than a license to make a good game - and Acclaim's balance sheet is beginning to reflect that harsh reality.
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383,Evil Dead: Hail to the King ,3.4," Evil Dead: Hail to the King unfortunately offers little of the appeal of its source material, as everything about the game is derivative, boring, or just plain bad.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/0/7/8/2216078-box_edhotk.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/evil-dead-hail-to-the-king-review/1900-2714027/,neg,"
Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, and Army of Darkness are some of the finest B movies ever made. Particularly in the latter films, Director Sam Raimi's reworking of the splatterfest horror genre is a hilarious thrill ride, thanks to the irreverent scripts and Bruce Campbell's winning performance as the fall guy/hero of the series. Anyone who's seen the films will never be able to forget Ash, the smart-assed protagonist, who's either serving as a whipping boy for the undead in uproarious pratfall scenes or cutting the undead to shreds with the chain saw he wears in place of his lopped-off right hand. Inspired by the trilogy of movies, Evil Dead: Hail to the King unfortunately offers little of the appeal of its source material, as everything about the game is derivative, boring, or just plain bad. The entire game seems to have been developed around the misguided notion that any game with a cool lead character like Ash (whose one-liners in the movies were so good that 3D Realms used a number of them verbatim in Duke Nukem 3D) has to be a good one. The designers were apparently so caught up in re-using trademark Ash-isms that they failed to notice that the gameplay was a jumble of dated elements that were handled much better in Capcom's original Resident Evil back in 1996.  Evil Dead follows the same formula as countless Resident Evil rip-offs.  Visual flaws practically slap you in the face as soon as Ash appears onscreen, reminiscing about his struggles with the undead that began way back in 1982. For a few moments, you'll think that he's taken your computer back 19 years with him. In fairness, that's a bit of an exaggeration--but it's no stretch to say that the graphics throughout the game are more than a few years past their prime. The maximum resolution is a blocky 640x480, and even with Direct3D support, that's unacceptable for a PC game today. Of all the characters and monsters present in the game, only Ash himself is even remotely presentable. The rest are either drawn or animated poorly. It's hard to be impressed or scared by ghouls and ghosts that lumber about like they'd just blown disks in their lower backs.   Poor background visuals reveal Evil Dead's roots as a console game. These prerendered 2D backdrops possess all the depth of a painted sheet of plywood and, as such, have no power to draw you into what's supposed to be a spooky setting. Muddy colors and blurry textures further remove Ash and his decomposing adversaries from the environment. Blood glows and jiggles on the ground like radioactive Jell-O. The lone saving grace is a suitably ominous treatment of light sources and shadow. While they're few and far between, a few scenes can actually send a shiver down your spine because of these qualities. But most screens are so dark and nondescript that you'll need to engage in tedious pixel hunts to find objects and resources needed to progress. Complicating these searches--and just about everything else--are the game's consistently awkward camera angles. The third-person view is rarely where you'd like it to be. Combat is often difficult because you're either too far away from Ash or you're looking down on a battle from such a weird vantage point that you can't tell where your enemy is really located.  The environments in the game leave a lot to be desired.  The audio is just as unimpressive. The musical score is tinny and repetitive, and the ambient noises don't convey any sense of the midnight world surrounding Ash. Nor do the sound effects punch up the action and give that necessary oomph to shotgun blasts punching through zombies or to the chain saw cutting into them. Even Bruce Campbell's voice talent proves disappointing. The actor's staccato delivery has been dialed down so far that it sounds like some comments were recorded while he wasn't really paying attention to what was going on. It's as if he recorded his lines over the telephone while flipping through the morning paper. If Ash's lines had sounded this weak in the movies, Duke Nukem wouldn't have bothered ripping them off.Combat in Evil Dead is repetitive and bland.  The gameplay in Evil Dead is typical of any number of games that have borrowed from Resident Evil in the last five years. Along with his new wife, Ash has returned to the lonely cottage, where it all began, to work out a little problem he's been having with nightmares. However, confronting his fears just gets his lovely bride kidnapped by the forces of evil in the opening cutscene, and he spends the remainder of the game trying to find the missing pages of a black magic book (the necronomicon ex mortis from the films makes yet another appearance) needed to rescue her. That's a little different from the ""just get out alive"" theme prevalent in Capcom's horror-themed games, but that doesn't make it any different to play. You still search for clues and keys, slaughter bad guys, and collect weapons, ammo, items, and various power-ups with the aid of an awkward inventory system, just as though you were in Resident Evil's Raccoon City. Aside from the way that Ash saves his progress with an audiotape reel instead of a typewriter ribbon (you can't save on demand), the games are actually quite similar.   Still, there are some key differences. The primary one is a dreary pacing of Evil Dead. Ash's weapons are weak, and even the chain saw requires seven or eight clean swipes to send a foe to the afterlife. Creatures also respawn, so the game's interminable, repetitive combat can be found on virtually every screen. This design does successfully manage to lengthen the game, albeit at a cost of putting you to sleep. You don't even get the satisfaction of carving up a ghoul or two with the chain saw when you do score the required number of hits. Although Ash will occasionally go into a frenzy with the weapon--cutting into a monster with a real blood-spewing relish--it's not nearly as over-the-top as fans of the movies would expect. And much of this limited gore is obscured by the substandard camera angles. The game seems sedate--at times, you'll have to remind yourself that it's supposed to be an Evil Dead game.  Even Ash can't save this game.  Unfortunately, a control scheme that's limited to mouse and keyboard support makes progressing through the game even more exhausting. While the ""read me"" file mentions gamepad support, ""keyboard"" is the only option to choose on the options screen. Repeated attempts to get Evil Dead to recognize a Microsoft Sidewinder and a Logitech Wingman Rumble Pad met with failure. It's exceedingly odd that the designers didn't make a gamepad as the default control option, especially since the game was first developed for consoles.   Evil Dead: Hail to the King raises a lot of questions, not the least of which is an enduring fascination with why THQ is publishing it. Irresistible source material aside, it's a little late to be jumping on the survival-horror bandwagon--especially with such a lackluster rip-off as Evil Dead: Hail to the King. If you're a fan of the movies, you'd be better off spending the same amount of money on the collector's edition of Army of Darkness on DVD instead. You'll enjoy it a lot more than playing Evil Dead: Hail to the King, which will wear out its welcome in a much shorter span than the 96-minute running time of the film.
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384,Sins of a Solar Empire ,9, This isn't just the first great strategy game of 2008. It's also an absolute must-have if you love space strategy.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/1/8/2213418-box_soase.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sins-of-a-solar-empire-review/1900-6185991/,pos,"
  There's a blissful nirvana strategy gamers yearn for, even though experiencing it usually involves a considerable loss of sleep along with a steep drop in productivity for days on end. Sins of a Solar Empire is one of those rare games that can deliver an incredibly addictive experience that devours a healthy chunk of your life, and you won't mind a bit. Not bad for a debut game from a relatively small developer. Ironclad and publisher Stardock should be proud, because they've delivered one of the most original, compelling strategy games in recent years.    Let's get this clear: Sins isn't anything like a typical turn-based space strategy game such as Galactic Civilizations or the granddaddy of the genre, Master of Orion. Instead, this is a real-time game--but don't let that make you think that it's Command & Conquer in space. Though it's in real time, Sins unfolds at such a leisurely pace and can happen on such a gigantic scale that you'll easily manage five or six gigantic fleets at a time as you battle across multiple star systems that contain dozens of worlds.   This medium-sized map comprises only a single star system. Larger maps in the game contain up to five, linked together by wormholes.   The game is set in a distant future where the Trader Emergency Coalition--an alliance of various human worlds--bands together in the face of two threats. The first is the Advent, an offshoot of humanity that has embraced an alien philosophy and has come looking to spread the word by force. Even direr is the Vasari, a mysterious alien race that seeks the annihilation of both factions. Sins lets you play from the perspective of any of the three factions, which are approximate mirrors of one another.    Like many space strategy games, the action begins with you in control of a single planet, and from there you must explore the rest of the system worlds, locating planets to colonize, as well as resources that you can exploit to fuel your research and ship-building needs. Sins isn't as ambitious as other space strategy games that task you with taking over a galaxy; instead, the action is limited to a maximum of five local stars, each with a network of planets around it. Travel among planets is limited via strict space lanes, so some planets are natural choke points. Planets themselves come in four varieties. Terran and desert planets can be colonized easily, but to settle ice and volcano planets you must research the appropriate technology first. Asteroids can also be colonized, but they're so small that they can support only tiny populations, making them ideal for outposts.    To support your expansion, you'll have to build a plethora of vessels. Scouts explore the planetary systems, locating ideal worlds to colonize with colony ships, as well as providing advance warning on incoming enemy fleets. Warships come in three classes. The smallest are frigates, and they include frontline combatants, siege vessels that can pummel planets with nuclear weapons, and missile platforms. Then there are larger cruiser-class vessels, such as escort carriers that can deploy squadrons of fighters and bombers to heavier warships. The crème de la crème, though, are the capital ships, which you can build only a handful of. Capital ships are huge, expensive, and powerful, but they're also like the characters in a role-playing game in that they can level up as they gain experience, making them more powerful and unlocking unique and potent abilities. The ability to gain experience creates a powerful dynamic, as you want to get your capital ships into fights so they can level up, but you also want to protect them from danger, because the loss of them can be devastating. However, if you get a task force of high-level capital ships and smaller vessels together, you'll have a force to be reckoned with.   Like characters in a role-playing game, capital ships become more powerful as they level up.   Good strategy games force you to constantly make decisions about where to allocate your resources, and Sins does an exceptional job of this, mainly because you'll usually find yourself having to juggle where to invest your precious resources. There are three resources in the game: money, metal, and crystal. Money is generated by having large planetary populations or by building trade stations. Metal and crystal can only be harvested on small asteroids. Building warships or structures, making planetary improvements, and conducting research consumes large amounts of these resources, and usually you'll have a shortage of at least one of them, which forces you to make some difficult decisions.    It's also possible to engage in a bit of diplomacy, though Sins takes a different tack than a lot of other strategy games. You can do the standard diplomatic maneuvers like declaring a nonaggression pact or forming an alliance with someone, but to do so, you've got to prove your worth to that faction by pursuing missions it puts toward you. For example, one faction might task you with destroying a certain number of defensive structures of another faction. Successfully completing the mission will earn you favor, though not completing the mission will earn disfavor. In order to form an alliance with any faction, you'll have to complete several missions for it.     Then there's the pirate system, which is a brilliant way of waging war by proxy. The pirates are third-party raiders who launch attacks periodically. You can influence whom they attack by raising the bounty on one of your opponent's heads. However, this creates an eBay-like bidding war, where factions are trying to either get the bounties off of their heads or put them on opponents they really need attacked. The danger is that when you bid, you actually put money into the pot that you can't withdraw, even if you lose. That means that if you get into an astronomical bidding war and win, the bad news is that in the next round, the opponent already has a mountain of money in the auction that you have to overcome. The other danger is that the more money there is in the bidding, the bigger the pirate attack will be. It's a pretty slick system, though its one flaw is that it requires you to babysit each auction when it happens, a process that takes a minute or two. Given that attacks happen every 10 or 15 minutes, this is an activity that takes away from the overall pace of the game.   The tech tree will demand your attention, as you can research better weapons, armor, new ship classes, and much more.   All of this sounds like it might be a handful to handle in real time, but Sins unfolds at a stately, almost leisurely, pace. The action is fast enough that you're constantly busy making decisions, but it's rarely frenetic to the point where you're overwhelmed. To help you manage a huge empire, there's an innovative empire tree on the side of the screen that gives you an outline of all of your planets, fleets, and factories. Let's say you have a fleet battling in a distant system and taking losses. Without zooming away from the battle, you can select a nearby shipyard and start ordering up replacement ships that can automatically join the fleet. With the empire tree, it's relatively easy to manage multiple fleets consisting of dozens of warships each.    If Sins has a downside, it's that larger-scale games will easily take hours upon hours to resolve. Medium-size maps will chew up six to eight hours, often to the point where you will be looking at the clock and wondering just how effective you're going to be the next day on about three or four hours of sleep. Larger games can take even longer at the default speed settings. Things would end a lot faster if there were alternate victory conditions or if the artificial intelligence would surrender after it clearly has no chance of winning. Instead, you have to pulverize each enemy position before the game ends, a process that can take a while. One thing that you can do while you're finishing someone off, though, is to work on accomplishing achievements. The game has its own achievement system that rewards you for remarkable performance, such as wiping out a certain number of enemy capital ships or settling a pirate base. One dastardly achievement challenges you to win without researching a single military technology.    The game features random maps and scenarios, but one thing that's missing is a campaign. Still, Sins of a Solar Empire is an excellent single-player game and one that translates well into the multiplayer realm, especially since it's a lot harder to beat a human opponent than it is a machine. The built-in server browser connects to Ironclad Online, where it's easy to create a multiplayer game or join up with others. The one thing to keep in mind is that, for the sake of brevity, it's usually best to go with small maps in order for the game to resolve in one sitting. Though it's possible to save a multiplayer game, it will take a considerable amount of dedication and scheduling by all parties involved to tackle a huge game.   Did someone say achievements? If you want to go for 100 percent, you can try pursuing some of these challenging tasks.   Finally, the game's visual presentation is excellent. It's not a graphically flashy game, but it works on many levels. The ship designs look cool up close, and watching fleets slug it out is always fun. Pull the camera back, and ships and squadrons are replaced by distinctive icons, giving you the big picture even when you've zoomed out and are looking at a solar system as a whole. The interface is also quite elegant, and it scales nicely to a wide variety of display sizes. The audio and sound effects aren't quite as distinctive, and the music provides some decent sonic wallpaper.    In sum, Sins of a Solar Empire is an absolute must-have if you enjoy strategy games. It's an addictive, deep game that elevates space strategy to new levels. At the same time, it provides a fresh, original take on one of the oldest and most revered subgenres in all of strategy gaming.   
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'strategy', 'new', 'levels', '.', 'At', 'time', ',', 'provides', 'fresh', ',', 'original', 'take', 'one', 'oldest', 'revered', 'subgenres', 'strategy', 'gaming', '.']",0.08782207097715118,0.5182940944973035
385,Professor Layton and the Curious Village ,9," Professor Layton and the Curious Village mixes an interesting story, challenging logic puzzles, and exploration into an extremely entertaining package that you won't want to put down.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/2/1/2214821-box_platcv.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/professor-layton-and-the-curious-village-review/1900-6186070/,pos,"
  There's no shortage of brain training and minigame collections on the Nintendo DS, many of which are mediocre. That's why Professor Layton and the Curious Village is such a pleasant surprise. Its marriage of story and gameplay does for brain training and minigames what Puzzle Quest did for puzzle games.    There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.   The game's story, which is told via a mix of beautiful full-motion video, as well as attractive still-scenes, follows that of Professor Layton, a man renowned for his puzzle-solving abilities. Along with his young assistant Luke, Professor Layton travels to the village of St. Mystere. Although they were initially called to the town to deal with a curiously written will and search for something known as ""The Golden Apple,"" the duo will be faced with many other unknowns on the journey. Both the quality of the story, as well as its presentation, go a long way toward making this an adventure you'll want to see through to its satisfying conclusion--a rarity when compared to other puzzle games and minigames collections.    To solve the many mysteries in St. Mystere, you must travel around the village and speak to its inhabitants. In this aspect, Professor Layton plays similarly to a 2D point-and-click adventure. You move from one area to the next by tapping the screen. You can also tap random nooks and crannies to find hint coins, secret areas, or hidden puzzles. When you come across townspeople, you interact with them by tapping them as well. They're more than happy to help you...eventually. You see, each person has a logic puzzle that he or she needs you to solve before offering his or her assistance. Yes, this is a bit strange, but you'll learn the reason for it before all is said and done.    The story mode's 120 or so puzzles cover a wide variety of types; you'll need to move matchsticks, answer riddles, draw objects, solve math problems, place chess pieces, and much, much more. You might have to find out which suspects in a police lineup are lying, come up with a route to work for four people who don't like each other and don't want to see one other along the way, or even tackle a few puzzles where you must get a ball from one end to the other by sliding blocks around. The puzzles range from easy to difficult. While the game can get downright challenging, it rarely gets frustrating. There are no time limits, so you're free to mull things over, which often reveals an astonishingly simple solution. In fact, the way the game forces you to alternate between thinking outside the box and then hitting you with a simple puzzle that you overthink is one of the many clever ways in which the game will challenge you. But fear not, if you've pondered things from every angle and are still stuck, you can get up to three hints on each puzzle by spending hint coins that are sprinkled about the village.     Professor Layton is one of those addictive games that's incredibly hard to put down once you get into it. Thankfully, it's pretty lengthy. It should take you anywhere from 13 to 17 hours to finish the fantastic story mode, but once you're done, there's still more to do. You only need to solve about 80 or 85 puzzles to finish the game, so you'll probably want to locate and finish the remaining puzzles because they're so much fun. There are also a number of items to collect during your adventure: gizmos for a contraption, scraps of a painting, or furniture for Luke and Layton's hotel rooms. You're not likely to find all of these on your first play-through, but collecting all the items for each category unlocks bonus content, so it's likely that you'll want to go back to find them. Once you've done all that, there's a large amount of bonus content to keep you busy. For an additional challenge, you can tackle some ultradifficult puzzles not found in the story mode. But what will keep you coming back again and again are free weekly downloadable puzzles. That's right: free.   Professor Layton's puzzles range from easy to difficult, but they're always entertaining.   Impressive presentation is another aspect in which Professor Layton differentiates itself from other games in its genre. There's quite a bit of high-quality full-motion video, complete with voice acting--something not often seen on the DS. Environments and characters have a hand-drawn look to them and look like they came straight from an illustrated children's book. This unique style gives the game, as well as its characters, warmth and personality. The only blemish on the otherwise outstanding presentation is the audio, which consists of accordion music that is so repetitive and irritating you'll have to turn it down so you can concentrate on solving puzzles.    Professor Layton and the Curious Village combines exploration, story, and logic puzzles to make for a truly unique, entertaining, and even educational experience. Don't be fooled by the game's box art into thinking this is just some silly game for kids; it's a must-own game for any puzzle fan.  

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386,The Sims 3 ,9," The latest Sims game is also the greatest, striking a terrific balance between the fresh and the familiar.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/6/6/2219166-936498_81672_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-sims-3-review/1900-6210540/,pos,"
  If you're reading this, there's a very good chance that you've heard about The Sims. It's been difficult to escape the popular franchise's web, what with two full games and a seemingly endless stream of expansions. The first thing you may be asking, then, is whether The Sims 3 is worth playing, or if it's just more of the same. Well, it most certainly is worth it, and yes, in some ways it is more of the same. But in this case, that's a very good thing. For anyone who's played The Sims or its first sequel, this familiarity will let them ease into it, feeling like a welcomed guest rather than an outsider. But this doesn't make The Sims 3 a simple rehash of what's come before. Instead, returning elements have been energized and extended by a number of terrific improvements, such as expanded customization tools, additional tools for interaction with other sims (and other players), and more tangible goals and rewards. Most importantly, the free-to-explore town makes you feel like part of an entire virtual society--a feature approximated but never fully realized in the previous games. By blending together the old and the new, developer Maxis has created the best, most charming game yet in the series.       If you're new to the series, here's a quick primer. The Sims 3 is a virtual life simulator. In it, you take control of a character called a sim, or an entire household of them. Sims have needs; they need to empty their bladders, to eat, to sleep, to bathe, to have fun, to socialize. It's real life boiled down to simple mechanics, but within these mechanics lies an entire universe of possibilities. Your sims can have babies who will cry in the middle of the night, needing their diapers changed. You can manage their personal development by sending them to the gym to work out, or by telling them to fix a broken television, or by having them play chess, or by sending them to the park to play the guitar. Sims go to work to earn simoleans (money, of course) so they can buy better things for their homes and redecorate--or just buy a brand-new home. They make friends and enemies, they go swimming, and they clog up the toilet. In other words, they act a whole lot like real people, except that they yammer in a delightful gibberish called simlish and communicate via speech bubbles that appear over their heads. It all sounds terribly mundane, but balancing the needs of your sims and tending to your digital playmates can keep you happily glued to your monitor for hours at a time.     For experienced Sims players, the laundry list of new features in The Sims 3 is extensive, but the one overhaul that has the biggest impact on the game is how seamlessly you can now move around your virtual town. In previous games, the presence of various neighborhoods led to a disjointed experience, so you rarely felt like you were in a living world. Now, your burb is freely explorable, so traveling to the gym, the art gallery, or your place of work means walking, biking, driving, or taxiing to the location in question without any loading times to break things up. Want your sim to head to the library and read up on the latest mystery? Just zoom out to the city map and select your destination, and your sim will travel there automatically, using the most efficient means of transportation. You might even get the option to invite someone along with you, so you won't have to head to the diner alone if you've got a friend or acquaintance nearby who's available to tag along.     The effect of the open town has a profound influence on the community aspects of The Sims 3. You can call other sims and invite them over using your handy cell phone, but if you're feeling adventurous, just head directly to another sim's house and introduce yourself. Or travel to one of the many public venues: the beach, the park, even the graveyard. In these places, you will have a chance to interact with other sims, and there may even be surprises in store if you happen to be in the right place at the right time. For example, you might be able to join a picnic in progress, or a midnight visit to the cemetery may introduce you to some new see-through pals. The game also provides spontaneous opportunities for your sims to socialize. Other sims will call you on the phone; if you're growing a garden, they may ask you to bring some veggies over in exchange for a few simoleans; or perhaps they'll ask you to repair a broken appliance for them. Either way, these tasks send you out on the town where you'll run into other sims, which gives you a sense of being part of a society that exists outside of your realm of influence.     Those social opportunities often result from the traits that you assign your sims during creation. These social traits are another new feature, and they influence how your sims will behave in certain situations, the careers that they will most likely excel in, the conversation options available, and many other aspects of daily sim life. You can select up to five traits for your sim, and there are a lot to choose from. So if you'd like to re-create your insane, neurotic, kleptomaniac aunt within the game, then you can do that, and those traits in turn will influence various aspects of her virtual life. For example, a sim with the neurotic trait can increase his or her happiness level by compulsively checking the sink and stove, but will also be prone to random freak-outs during moments of stress. Not only will a sim with the neat trait automatically clean almost everything, but his or her fun levels will actually rise in the process.    For the first time, your town feels like a living society.   Of course, when you create a sim, you're choosing more than just personality traits. The physical customization options are far more extensive than before. Sliders let you determine skin color and tweak various facial features, color wheels let you settle on exact clothing hues, and there are a number of accessories, hair styles, and so on to choose from. Although it would be nice to have had even more options in some cases (for example, men's available hair styles seem limited), there's a good chance that you can still create a sim that resembles your kleptomaniac aunt. There's also a good chance that you can outfit her in that crazy polka-dot dress she wears, thanks to the Create a Style feature, which lets you choose from a huge number of patterns (even those used for nonclothing items such as masonry and linoleum) and tweak their colors as you see fit. If you want to put your klepto sim in a beautiful, subtle ball gown, then by all means, go for it. On the other hand, if she prefers swimsuits made of bricks, well, no one's going to judge (except maybe the aunt she's based on).     Getting sims together is usually a guaranteed laugh. As before, you can just sit back and let things happen if you prefer, and the AI does a good job with automated behavior; sims will act in ways remarkably true to the personality that you've established for them. But directing social encounters often yields even more hysterical results, and your sims' traits allow you to direct conversations more easily than before. There's a wider array of conversation topics when meeting up with others, and you'll want to play around with all of them just to see how your friends react. Try jumping into a romantic interest's arms--he may not catch you! Take your weakling sim to the gym and watch what happens on the treadmill; kiss another sim in front of your husband and watch the slaps ensue. Or generate your own masochistic amusement by denying your sims the use of a toilet, or putting them in a room without doors. Watching the expressive animations and listening to the dramatic vocal inflections is always a delight, whether it's your toddler sim chewing on her xylophone mallets or the man of the house throwing a tantrum because there are rotting leftovers in the fridge.      If you're not inclined toward such cruelty, you're better off making your sims happy by being aware of their needs and desires. You'll set a long-term goal as the final step when creating your sim, choosing from five that are generated based on the traits that you assigned. You may want to be surrounded by family, or be a famous musician, or become an international superspy, or be superpopular. Consequently, you'll need to make choices to bring these aspirations to fruition. If your sim wants to be a famous chef, take the right career track when browsing the paper; go to the bookstore and buy cookbooks to increase your cooking skills; and, of course, cook as often as you can to keep the skill bar moving ever upward. You can even take cooking classes to speed up the process, though it will cost you simoleans. But not every goal must be for the long haul; you can elevate a sim's mood and earn happiness points by accomplishing smaller tasks that pop up. Some of these are relatively simple: make the bed! Others are a little more time-consuming: upgrade five appliances! With the points you earn, you can then purchase permanent goodies such as a steel bladder (never need to pee again!), or always throwing the perfect party, or discovering the traits of other sims much more quickly. The system is more rewarding than The Sims 2's aspirations/fears system because it focuses on rewards and eliminates the sometimes-frustrating business of therapists and insanity. Actually, you can turn aging off entirely if you wish, or adjust the length of a sim's lifetime directly in the game options. In any case, the new aspiration mechanics are more about positive reinforcement than avoiding negative consequences, and the game is better for it.    A trip to the bookstore is interrupted by some chatty neighbors.   The Sims 3 balances its rewards well, not just within aspirations, but within career and financial progression as well. Like real people, your sims will always want better stuff, a nicer house, and a prettier yard. You'll start with meager means, but as you progress down your chosen career track, you'll earn more money and work less, giving you more time for the fun stuff. Like before, you won't actually guide your sim through the workday, but you will be able to select something to focus on during the day, such as getting to know your coworkers or pursuing independent research. Doing so earns extra benefits; for example, studying music theory will increase your logic skill, letting you kill two birds (a paycheck and an improved skill) with one stone. You'll also be presented with all sorts of choices along the way. Read a particular book or deliver some documents to city hall to improve your standing with the boss, and you might earn a raise. You might even get an opportunity to change career tracks completely (perhaps the military has had an eye on your scientist). As it happens, these kinds of possibilities aren't just related to your job. Perhaps the local school is having a bake sale; you might be invited to whip up some cookies. Thankfully, managing your basic needs--hunger, bladder, and so on--takes less effort than before, giving you more chances to take advantage of these occasions.     Your coffers will grow, at which point you'll be spending time in Buy and Build modes. The Create a Style concept is at work here too, so you'll be able to customize furniture, appliances, and even window panes if you so desire. For example, you can go so far as to paint almost every brick in the wall pattern if you want to get that in-depth. Better stuff makes for a more automated and happier life, and it also lets aspiring architects and landscapers showcase their creativity. The tools work much the same as before, though the terrain and terrain-painting tools are easier to use than ever, and the most enthusiastic designers can still use cheat codes to manipulate things further (some of which are handily included in the game's readme file). And if you really take pride in your handiwork, The Sims 3's online features are much better integrated than before, though there is still room for growth in this area. From the game launcher, you can upload and download shared content such as sims, outfits, household objects, and so on. This kind of social exchange has always been an important aspect of The Sims, though in light of the tight online integration seen in games such as Spore, there are some missed opportunities here. For example, placing the browser directly in the game client would have made for a more seamless experience. And though the ability to upload movies to The Sims 3 Web site and edit them is a great new feature, you still have to access this feature through your Web browser. The good news is that there are some great items ready to download the moment you register an account online, including an entire town (which is, thankfully, free). However, most official content requires you to spend SimPoints, which cost real money.     That nickel-and-diming points to what is probably The Sims 3's main drawback: Although the game includes a whole lot of content, it still has noticeable holes that the expansions to previous Sims games have already filled. Previous add-ons offered pets to play with, seasonal weather, magical items, and other fun content. None of that is featured in The Sims 3, and certain aspects of the series, such as the events of the standard workday, have gone curiously unexplored. The established pattern of Sims expansion packs make these areas of opportunity all the more apparent, especially when you'd expect a sequel to include most of the popular features of the games that led up to it.    Tired of marshmallows? You could always try roasting grapes!   One of the reasons for the franchise's success is how easy the games are to run on a variety of computers, and The Sims 3 is no exception; it's very scalable, so chances are that if you have a relatively modern PC, you'll probably be able to run the game. The visuals are colorful and crisp, and a noticeable step up from The Sims 2. Sim movements continue to be the highlight of the presentation, and zooming in close is always a fun treat, especially when your sims are engaging in a particularly animated exchange, such as telling a joke. Buildings like the theater and city hall look attractive, and the soft sway of trees and bushes makes the town look pleasantly suburban. Nevertheless, the game's performance does continue some unfortunate trends of Sims games past. Performance is a bit sluggish when you scroll across the town or follow your sim as he or she travels. And though the pathfinding has improved, sims sometimes still have difficulties getting from point A to point B without going through some odd animations or complaining that there's someone in the way. Unsurprisingly, the game sounds absolutely charming. The jaunty tunes that accompany the Build and Buy modes and the tunes that play when you turn on the radio are terrific, perhaps the best in the series. Some sound effects are recycled, but The Sims 3 doesn't feel cheapened as a result; it strikes a chord of familiarity that works to the game's benefit.    So what is it that makes The Sims 3 even more addictive than its predecessors? It's partially due to the deft handling of rewards; it doles out new social options, new aspirations, and the possibility of better furniture and wood flooring at a slow but even pace, which keeps you tied to your computer for hours at a time. It offers the element of surprise, showing off its abundant charms through funny social interactions that make you want to be part of the improved virtual community. Although it could have offered even more right out of the box, there's still an awful lot of content here, and it's bound to put a smile on almost anyone's face.    


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387,Sid Meier's Civilization V ,9, Excellent tactical battles and a slick interface make the latest Civilization another wonderful addition to a classic franchise.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2360541-civ5.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sid-meiers-civilization-v-review/1900-6276683/,pos,"
  Strategy fanatics have lost hundreds of hours of their lives to Sid Meier's beguiling creations over the years, and they should prepare to lose hundreds more. Civilization V is yet another glistening example of turn-based bliss that will keep you up long past your bedtime. It exercises its power over your mind using many of the tricks the series has long been known for: varied ways of accomplishing your goal of world domination, the thrill of expanding a paltry city into a bustling empire, and the suspense of venturing into unknown territory. The latest Civilization game takes those basics and layers onto them new features that make moment-to-moment gameplay feel more dynamic than in the past. Most noticeably, the square grids of previous Civilization games have been jettisoned in favor of hexagons that nicely accommodate the other most consequential transformations: Military units can no longer be stacked, and ranged units can fire from multiple tiles away. The tactical combat that rises from these modifications is a lot of fun and makes warfare a lot more exciting than in Civ games of yore. AI quirks and a few other minor issues become apparent the more you play, but these are wholly forgivable foibles in an attractive and sophisticated game that constantly begs you to remain at your keyboard for just one more turn.       First, here is a quick primer for newcomers. Civilization V, like previous games in the series, is about leading a nation through the eras of history, starting with a single city and expanding across the map. At the outset of any given game, you select a leader (in this case, one of 18, or 19 if you purchased the special edition from Steam), each of whom possesses a particular benefit that disposes his or her civilization to a particular style of play. Americans get a range of sight bonus; the Siamese get diplomatic bonuses with miniature nations new to the series called city-states; the English get naval perks; and so forth. From here, you collect resources; make deals with other civilizations; manage your economy; and go to war and attack the cities of your enemies when the time is right. There are four main ways to win a typically lengthy game of Civilization V. You could dominate through military means and defeat every civilization's capital city. You could be the first to gun through the technology tree and build the parts necessary for a spaceship that whisks you away to Alpha Centauri. You could ally with nations and city-states across the globe and win a diplomatic victory via a vote at the United Nations. Or you might become the cultural envy of the world by developing a large number of government policies and researching a mysterious undertaking known as the Utopia Project. There is also a fifth victory condition: possess the highest score when the turn limit has been reached.     Whether Civ is new to you or not, it's easy to appreciate the newest game's user-friendly interface, which makes figuring out what to do next a breeze, meaning more of your time is spent strategizing and less of it is spent fumbling around. The organized nested menus are intuitive and easy to get used to, and Civ V does a good job of only displaying vital information on the screen while making other information easily available with just a few clicks. A single action button leads you through every aspect of your turn. If a unit is waiting for orders, the button says so, and clicking it takes you to the unit in question. If it's time to research a new technology, you click the button and it opens the research menu. There are a few aspects of the interface that could have been cleaned up. Switching between a city's production menu and the production queue is needlessly clunky, and the diplomatic overview doesn't label the tiny icons indicating what luxury resources other civilizations are producing. But most of the time, you always have the information you need when you need it, and neophytes should never feel in the dark.    It looks like a lot to keep track of, but the terrific interface makes all of this easy to manage.  A few of Civilization IV's features have been eliminated--most notably, religion and espionage--though many players aren't likely to miss them. However, longtime aspects of the series have returned. Your advisors are there if you need a bit of direction, though unit automation and little icons representing each advisor's suggestion in the production menus mean you won't often need to pay them a visit. The exhaustive Civilopedia is only a click away and offers a wealth of information on every aspect of every feature. You still build wonders like the Egyptian pyramids, the hanging gardens, and the Great Wall, which generate the culture resource and provide other tangible benefits, without coming with the turn-by-turn maintenance cost of standard structures. The culture you gain is spent on social policies, which have replaced the governments of Civilization IV. Each time you reach the cultural resource benchmark, you select from the policy list, which is split into multiple policy types, each of which has its own sub-tree. The benefits you reap are cumulative, and while there are certain balancing restrictions in place, you still get a lot of freedom in how you want to progress. The mid- and late-game flexibility make it an excellent addition to the franchise. The first change you'll notice, however, has even more impact on Civilization V: The map is divided into hexagons rather than squares.     The move to hexagons sets the stage for Civilization V's tactical combat. In the past, you could stack units into one army of doom (or a few armies) that rolled across the map. Now, with the exception of special units (the great general, for example) and workers, units cannot occupy the same space. As a result, you must be extremely conscious of each unit's weaknesses and strengths; a unit's position in regards to both its enemies and other friendly units; and whether or not any terrain bonuses apply. There is a rock-paper-scissors relationship among units that further deepens as units level up and you progress through the eras. When units level up, you choose one of several upgrades for them, such as an attack bonus when attacking from flat terrain. As they level up further, the possibilities expand, which means healing bonuses for the unit, as well as neighboring units, or greater degrees of the same enhancements. Helpfully, you can also choose to fully heal the unit when it levels at the expense of choosing another bonus, which is a mighty handy ability that can save a veteran unit from the jaws of defeat. This excellent new system layers tactical combat onto the strategic map, making battles much tenser--and much less abstract. It also encourages you to keep your veteran units alive. And while it costs you a bit of gold, you can also upgrade units into more powerful iterations (a trebuchet into a cannon, for example) when your research path allows it.   Montezuma knows drama.  That sounds complex, but it's extremely simple to keep track of battles in Civilization V. When you hover over your intended victim, you get a quick preview of the likely outcome of battle, though a preview won't tell you of other potential consequences. You might win the battle but move into range of a city's defenses or next to a squad of riflemen prepared to defeat you. In fact, similar points could be made about most of Civilization V: It's complex enough to support all of your schemes, but it's easy to interact with it. Veterans who are into micromanagement and like to plan at a snail's pace can manage every worker's actions, select an automated focus for each city's citizens (gold, culture, and so forth), and control each scout's moves hex by hex. But if you'd rather concentrate on the broader aspects of your strategy, you can leave a lot of these actions to the AI, which does a mostly creditable job of doing the right things at the right time.     Nevertheless, you do need to keep an eye on automated processes. Minor civilizations called city-states are one of Civilization V's newer additions. While you need an open-border agreement to pass freely through the territories of other civilizations, you may pass through a neutral city-state's borders without such a treaty, though city-states that aren't friendly to you will take offense at trespassing. Units set to automatically explore will think nothing of passing through neutral territory. The damage to the relationship is small, but it's still an annoyance to get a notification that you've irritated a city-state because your scouts weren't conscious of the borders. A toggle to allow or disallow exploring units to pass through city-state borders would have been a helpful addition.      City-states may be partners to that particular pathfinding inconvenience, but they are overall a positive addition to the franchise, if not a dramatic one. You can interact with them, but only in limited ways. By offering them gold or units, you gain favor with them, becoming friends and perhaps allies with them. When friendly, you can move through city-states without consequence; when allies, they will join you in war, where they don't have a lot of impact but can still ease some pressure. Money isn't the only way to increase your standing with city-states. They will make various requests of you--build a road to them from your capital, defeat some barbarians, or take up arms against an enemy city-state, among others. Doing their bidding earns you favor, but it can have other outcomes as well. Genoa may want you to defeat Venice on its behalf, but should another civilization be protecting Venice, you might draw unintended ire. And if you get particularly aggressive, city-states may band together to try to defeat you.      Another purpose city-states serve is that they get a vote in the United Nations, making them helpful in winning a diplomatic victory if you work especially hard (and spend huge amounts of coin) to cultivate lasting relationships. If you are seeking this method to victory, you might be tempted early in the game to bring a city-state into your fold, but it's a temptation you should avoid. Your relationships with city-states crumble if you don't maintain them, and gold is too precious early in the game to waste your first 250 coins on a friendship that will dissolve within a few turns. In fact, diplomacy can occasionally feel a bit haphazard because of infrequent but noticeable AI oddities. You might request open borders in one turn and be flatly refused--only to have the same civilization propose the same agreement in the next. A weak nation might attack you and refuse your attempts to call for peace, only to sue for peace and gift you with a nice sum of gold and luxury resources a few turns later. As a rule, competing civilizations seem to favor war over harmony, which makes diplomacy feel a bit hollow. Furthermore, the descriptions of other leaders' moods seen in Civ III and Civ IV have been dropped, so you're not always sure of your standing with another civilization.     That isn't to say, however, that diplomacy isn't viable. Focusing on nonmilitary means can still inspire a well-deserved victory. Pushing through eras to win a scientific victory is particularly enjoyable; this is in part due to the well-balanced technology tree, which prevents you from gunning forward willy-nilly from one era to the next. Focusing on technology also has entertainment value, unlocking the game's most powerful future-era unit--the giant death robot. (Nukes are fun; robots are even more fun.) But even if you want cultural or diplomatic victory, you can't ignore the science resource. Structures you need or at the very least should have for other types of victories--the U.N. or the Sydney Opera House, for example--require planning and smart use of the tech tree. But this is the tightly balanced way of the Civilization series: Every action, unit, technology, and structure is tied to everything else. And it's this balancing act, as well as the tweaks and on-the-fly adjustments you need to make, that keeps players so captivated.    Rock beats paper; elephants beat cannons.  You will also be captivated by Civilization V's great looks and serene soundtrack. You may or may not miss Civilization IV's glossy global view, but it's hard not to be drawn in by the newer game's sunny visuals. The great leaders of the world are particularly noteworthy. Montezuma announces his arrival from behind a bright flame while wearing an elaborate green headdress. Wu Zetian's porcelain skin, silky garments, and icy glare are just as memorable. Each leader speaks in his or her native language, which is a wonderful touch. Elsewhere, waves lapping against the shores and exaggerated battle animations give flair to the strategic map; even the fluffy clouds indicating unexplored areas have a certain amount of class to them. The soundtrack is equally classy, made up of a wonderful array of understated orchestral tunes. Musical repetition is all too common in slow-paced strategy games. While tunes certainly repeat in Civilization V, the gorgeous and diverse classical mix here, featuring such composers as Dvorak, Mahler, and Grieg, as well as original music utilizing familiar themes, is unlikely to wear out its welcome.     In fact, Civilization V is not likely to wear out its welcome in general. Random maps, numerous civilizations, and many other options keep the game fresh time after time. If predictable behavior patterns start to bother you (the aggressiveness of the Aztecs, for example), then you can randomize civilization attitudes. If you tire of the early game, then you can start in a later era. Remove barbarians from the map or set a maximum number of turns, if you prefer. And as in Civilization IV, you can adjust the game speed to accommodate marathon sessions or quicker matches. (Though any given game is measured in hours, not minutes.) User-created mods are also likely to be a big part of Civilization V's future, and it's easy to download mods in the game menus. There are already a few available, including a great one that allows you to play on an array of real-world maps.    Social policies are a new, and great, addition to the Civ franchise.  Multiplayer games are also a possibility for the most patient players. You can set a turn timer to limit how long players get to consider their next move, but even so, the pace is at the whim of those involved, so matches can get bogged down in the early hours. Luckily, most of the customization options available to you in single-player games are available in multiplayer games as well, so you can keep things moving with the right options activated. Gone are hotseat and e-mail play options, with online and local network play as the only ways to play with others. By nature, Civilization V is a game you enjoy most with friends instead of random strangers, though the simple interface makes it easy to find and join available Internet games. Should you want to limit your game to friends, you must invite them through the Steam overlay. (It's too bad there is no button built into the in-game interface for friend invitations, as it would have been a nice user-friendly touch.) Nonetheless, games tend to move smoothly without any notable lag, though we did run into glitches while playing online. At several points, the action button refused to progress to an end turn prompt, forcing us to open a random menu for the match to continue. At other times, switching from the production menu to the production queue caused certain buttons to become unresponsive. (The random-menu fix was effective here as well.)    But those are tiny irritations in a fun and complex game bursting with joy and constant rewards. Sid Meier's Civilization V sucks hour after hour of your day away, giving rise to plans of global conquest and thoughtful tactics. Of course, you could say the same of Civ games of the past, but what makes Civilization V a praiseworthy successor is how it changes up key elements of the franchise. The game's core values--expansion, exploitation, exploration, extermination--are as strong as ever. But the newer tactical combat and addition of city-states give strategy veterans new ways of tackling their goals, while a friendly interface and expansive Civilopedia help newcomers get up to speed relatively quickly. There are a few aspects of Civilization V that could have used a bit more attention, but even as is, this is yet another classic edition to a series that consistently rewards and renovates. If you have even the remotest interest in worldwide domination, you owe it to yourself to get lost in one of the most rewarding turn-based games in years.      


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388,Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings ,9, Civilization V: Gods and Kings is an eminently worthwhile collection of big and small changes that enhance an already amazing game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2360541-civ5.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sid-meiers-civilization-v-gods-and-kings-review/1900-6383629/,pos,"
  Just in case you finally managed to drag yourself away from your PC and go live a productive life, the good folks at Firaxis have released a new expansion to their superb 2010 strategy game Sid Meier's Civilization V. Titled Gods and Kings, it represents the first ""full"" expansion to the nearly two-year-old, turn-based giant. Though previous expansions have featured new cultures, scenarios, and gameplay tweaks, they haven't brought new game elements into the mix. Gods and Kings does so, and it rekindles that ""just one more turn!"" addictiveness that has become the hallmark of the Civilization series.   Oh yeah? Well, we're gonna tell the world that you wear too much makeup, lady! How does that grab ya?   As its title suggests, the foremost new inclusion in Gods and Kings is religion as a cultural and political force. A new cumulative resource, faith, is now part of the game, riding alongside culture, gold, and happiness. Faith can be gathered initially by building shrines and temples, or by stumbling across a random quantity as a prize for searching through ancient ruins. Get enough, and you can start your own polytheistic pantheon, which provides you with a choice of many potential enhancements for your civilization. Some of these help you generate more faith (for example, by giving you some faith for each gold and silver mine you have), and some give other benefits (such as enhancing the amount of food each of your hunting camps generates), but all are helpful in one way or another.    Eventually, you garner enough faith to move from your basic pantheon to a full-on religion. At this point, a great prophet, whom you use to start your religion, spawns near your capital. From here, you choose the symbol and name of any of the dozen major world religions, or create your own, and then you decide what benefits you want from that religion. You need to be careful here, because your choices have a massive effect on how you guide your civilization toward victory, especially in the early to mid game, and you almost always want to synergize your religious benefits with the strengths of whichever civilization you're playing. For example, the French, who are both expansionistic and culture-focused, might want to choose religious benefits that fortify their culture and reduce their level of unhappiness (a by-product of large empires). Conversely, more warlike civilizations, like the Aztecs or Japanese,  might want religious benefits that focus on quicker production of military units or more efficient logistics.    City defense has been enhanced in Gods and Kings, and you need serious firepower to take one over.   Of course, even if you don't ever get to found your own religion, you can still take on one that was founded by another player. And if you have founded a religion, it's in your interest to convert rival civilizations and city-states to your way of viewing things. This provides both you and them with benefits, but the advantage is yours, since you ultimately control the direction of the religion (which you can alter once during the course of a game). Furthermore, civilizations that follow the same religion tend to be friendlier and more willing to help one another (although this is far from a given), and conversely, those that follow different faiths tend to form coalitions against each other. It's an aspect that greatly enhances Civ V's gameplay.     Eventually, the influence of religion begins to dwindle (depending on which benefits you've chosen), and you derive most of your income and power from other sources. At this point, Gods and Kings' other major enhancement comes into play: espionage. While spying isn't as fundamental or as critical to success as religion, it is vastly more robust and important than it has ever been in a Civilization game. Spies aren't trained, but are instead awarded at particular intervals throughout gameplay and can be assigned to do everything from stealing technological secrets from rival factions to fomenting a coup d'etat in a city-state and installing a government that's loyal to you.     Spies' missions require a roll of the dice to succeed, but the more successful they are, the more they level up, and the more they level up, the more successful they are. On the other hand, it's also possible for spies to fail, even to the point of causing an international incident and starting a war. Indeed, if caught and interrogated, spies have the potential to reveal secrets about their owners' civilizations, so the espionage game can be risky. Late-game buildings and social policies can affect a civilization's susceptibility to being spied on, but most players will need to take advantage of spies at one point or another to catch up to their rivals.    Ha ha! Take that, 'unmet player!' Later, we found out it was Attila the Hun. Yipes!     Besides religion and espionage, Gods and Kings adds a bevy of new units, buildings, wonders, and civilizations to play. The newly added civilizations bump up the number of female world leaders, and include the semi-mythological Dido, queen of Carthage, and Theodora, empress of the Byzantine Empire. Also included are a bunch of new city-states, including two completely new types: religious ones that boost your faith when you ally with them, and scientific ones that boost your research. On the downside, Gods and Kings doesn't include any of the civilizations or scenarios from previous Civ V expansions, with the exception of the Spanish and the Mongols, the latter of which was free downloadable content anyway.    But that's just about the only thing you can say in the negative about Gods and Kings. Along with all the nifty additions to gameplay and content, AI has been noticeably improved across the board. It no longer puts artillery on the front lines, builds cities right in the middle of someone else's empire, or behaves as if it were schizophrenic in diplomatic negotiations. It's still not perfect, but it's a lot closer than it was before and remains a challenge much further into the late game now. And, depending on how long it has been since you last played Civ V, you'll also notice a slew of gameplay and rule tweaks that help close exploits and loopholes in the rules.     In the end, the best thing you can say about Gods and Kings is that it makes Civ V noticeably more fun--something that anyone who's already familiar with the game would likely say is an impressive achievement indeed.  


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389,Little Big Planet ,9," Little Big Planet is a novel, imaginative, and highly customisable platform game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/8/1/2219181-box_lbp.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/little-big-planet-review/1900-6199348/,pos,"
  Although Little Big Planet could be described as a platforming game, its dedication to creativity in every area takes it far beyond the confines of the genre. Everything from your character to the environment is geared towards user creation and adaptation, via stickers and costumes right up to a full-blown level creator. Each level of the story mode is an unforgettable trip through the wild imagination of the designers, and it would be difficult to find a game that's as much fun to play with friends co-operatively. It's a little disheartening that the Story mode is over so quickly, and although there's some longevity to be had from finding all the hidden extras, you can still see everything the story has to offer in six hours. Then there's the level creator--an astoundingly powerful toolset that theoretically allows you to recreate anything you see in the included levels and much more. However, it still requires a great deal of time and skill to develop something that people will actually want to play, and despite the best intentions of the developer, it's a feature that not everyone will be able to take full advantage of. The overall result is a game that's incredibly fun while it lasts, and one that has the potential to be taken further by its community.   This is the pod, your window on the world of Little Big Planet. Like everything else in the game, it's customisable.   The titular Little Big Planet is the place where all human imagination collects--the planet above the cosmos where our untapped creativity escapes when we're asleep or daydreaming. That's the background, anyway, and though characters occasionally refer to each other in the game, this fantastical journey has little in the way of exposition or backstory. There are eight themed worlds in total, and they vary in style from places such as the African savannah to the Mexican desert and ninja-obsessed Japan. Each world has either three or four individual levels, most of which can be completed in less than 10 minutes, and each level also has a bonus challenge or race if you can find the key hidden within. These bonus levels offer some of the most fun and imaginative experiences in the game, with an homage to Line Rider, skipping contests, and even drag racing competitions.    Little Big Planet's emphasis on creativity is completely embodied by its mascot, Sackboy. This endearingly cute rag doll acts as a blank slate for your creativity, and as you collect new materials and clothing in the story mode, you can constantly try out new looks. You can dress him up in costumes, add accessories such as hats and glasses, and even change his covering from that familiar brown to a particularly gaudy pink. Sackboy is also highly expressive, and you can use the controller's triggers and analog stick to move his arms and even smack unruly players. The D pad controls his facial expressions: up for happy, down for sad, left for scared, and right for angry, and repeatedly tapping in that direction further emphasises these emotions. You can also use the motion sensor to move Sackboy's head and hips, nodding knowingly if you win a level, at least until someone inevitably smacks you in the face for being so smug. With so much control over your character, you often end up spending a good deal of time just changing clothes, pulling faces, and maybe even sticking a ""LOLZ"" sticker on your buddy's forehead.   Sackboy is PlayStation's new icon in the making--customisable, emotional, and irresistibly cute.   Although the character customisation may be in-depth, the platforming itself is not. There are only two action buttons: X to jump, and R1 to grab hold of swings and move objects. Sackboy doesn't use any special powers, and he doesn't become any faster or stronger throughout the course of the game. This is platforming in its purest form: jumping from platform to platform, dodging obstacles such as fire and electricity, and collecting blue orbs to score points along the way. What makes Little Big Planet unique is that it frequently goes way beyond platforming into something else entirely, seemingly for no other reason than to satisfy the designer's rampant imagination. With scenarios such as hot-air balloon riding, animal prison breaks, and ninja henchmen battles, every level of Little Big Planet demonstrates incredible imagination.    The main story mode follows a sequential progression, so you open up new levels by completing them in order. However, even when you've finished a level, you'll want to return to collect the hidden items, keys, and point bubbles that you likely missed the first time around. Collecting items allows you more creative freedom in the form of stickers and costumes, whereas music and materials can be used in the creation mode afterward. You can also collect loot drops by putting stickers down in certain places, and there are puzzles that you can only solve by playing in the two- to four-player mode. These include gates that can only be opened remotely, objects that require multiple characters to pull, and in one brilliant scene, a car driven by one character while another dangles on a trapeze underneath.    Little Big Planet poses a bit of a dilemma; it's miles more fun in multiplayer, but also more flawed. Figuring out the puzzles and experiencing the set pieces for the first time with others is one of the most memorable experiences we've had this year, and chances are that you'll find yourself recounting the best moments with your friends afterwards. Unfortunately, there's a downside to playing in multiplayer, and it's something that often afflicts platforming games: the camera. It frequently struggles to frame the action, and considering many precision jumps are required, certain sections become nigh-on impossible. The generous spacing of respawn points lets you retry most of the tricky sections, but if you fail after using up your lives, you have to restart the entire level. There were many occasions in multiplayer in which we intentionally killed ourselves, just so that one player could try a section without the camera jerking around all of the time.     Sadly, with no scalable difficulty level and relatively few truly testing challenges, stalwarts of the genre will be able to reach the last boss in less than six hours. This isn't counting the time it takes to go back and collect everything, but the fact remains, you can see all the main levels in one prolonged sitting. Clearly, if the community jumps on the creation tools then this longevity will be extended, but it will take time and great skill from home designers to match the creativity and professionalism of Media Molecule's work.    Once you've finished the story and built up a stock of items, stickers, and other creation tools, you'll want to head to the My Moon that orbits Little Big Planet to start building your own levels. The creation tools are comprehensive, which is why you have to go through plenty of tutorials to learn the basics. You begin by moving items around, but things become a lot trickier when you start creating characters and moving objects. For example, enemies and allies have to be given an AI routine so they know whether to follow or run away from a player when they're approached. The physics system is easy to understand, so making things is common sense, but it can still be very time-consuming to construct even the most simple moving objects. You can create structures and glue everything together with ease, but it takes a lot more work to use motors, pistons and springs. These help to set traps, make puzzles and add vehicles, which makes for more interesting levels, but creating and testing everything is a lot of work for the creator. Given the work required to build even simple systems, it's a pretty momentous task to re-create something on the scale of the levels made by the developers.   The creation tools are both accessible and comprehensive, but it takes some work to produce something that people will actually want to play.   Thankfully, the task has been made easier by the inclusion of premade objects and level templates from the main game. This makes it a lot easier to start dropping in characters, structures, and vehicles, although you'll still want to adapt them to create your own look. The other problem for budding designers is that the game has three separate planes to work on, which lets players move between fore, middle, and background when playing. This means that unless you think on all three levels when making obstacles, players can simply pop into the foreground and avoid them completely. Once you have all of your main content in place, you can add finishing touches such as respawn points, dynamic music that changes according to player proximity, and characters that offer instructions on what to do. You can also throw in point bubbles and prizes to encourage players to play your level, and of course it's a good idea to play through repeatedly to make sure that others won't get stuck.    With all of this in mind, it's no small feat to create a Little Big Planet level that people will actually want to play. The reality, at least according to what we've seen happen in the game thus far, is that home designers will use the tools to make much smaller-scale creations than the levels in story mode. We've seen some great creations based on a nightclub and even TV show The Crystal Maze, in addition to video game homages such as Space Invaders and Breakout. They're simple ideas that incorporate systems already built by the developers, and they're probably a good indication of where the community is going to go with the game.    Going online with Little Big Planet is a breeze as you can see which of your friends are online and jump straight into their pod. The multiplayer online mode works well, even if it's not as smooth as the local multiplayer. You also can’t play the create mode online, though a future update will purportedly enable this feature. Sharing is also well implemented, and you can choose to move levels from your My Moon to the online Little Big Planet. When people play a level here, they can choose from preset tags to help describe the level for other players. This helps Little Big Planet to group similar levels together, so if you like what you're playing, you can search for creations that players have awarded similar tags. You can also add a heart to your favourite designers and search through all of their levels, and the system streams content live from the network so you don't have to save anything. There's even an option to play 'Cool Levels' from the main menu if you want something at random. If you really like a level or fancy adapting what you've seen, you can take levels submitted by other people and copy them to your own moon for later. All in all, it's a system that looks like it can cope with the content that's set to come out after the game's release.   If you find a level you like, you can play more from that user or search similar tags to find other levels like it.   This is a beautifully assembled game, with a patchwork visual style that covers the technical achievements underneath. There are smaller details such as reflections in the collectable balls to look out for, as well as some really nice fire, smoke, and electricity effects. It may be cruel to watch Sackboy die, but he can be electrocuted, burned, and disintegrated in a variety of ways, each resulting in highly detailed effects. Special mention should go to the physics system, which is pitched just a fraction beyond realistic to allow for some amazing stunts, jumps, and races. Then there's the soundtrack, a mix of genres from indie artists such as The Go Team and Jim Noir that all suit the game to a tee. Finally, a nod has to go to the pitch-perfect narration from British comedian Stephen Fry, and apart from his insistence that you don't post anything rude online, his voice is just as charming as the rest of the game.    Little Big Planet is a startlingly imaginative take on the platforming genre, and its story mode, while short, is truly outstanding. It's down to the community to elongate the life of the game, and while only the most ardent fans will be up to the task of making compelling content, the tools here certainly have some potential. If you've not got a creative bent then you might feel like you're getting half a game, but that doesn't stop Little Big Planet being a star that burns twice as bright, half as long.  


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390,Gears of War 2 ,9," Gears of War 2's new environments, weapons, and multiplayer features round out an all-around superior action package.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/3/4/2219234-box_gow2.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gears-of-war-2-review/1900-6200486/,pos,"
  The original Gears of War became an action genre classic thanks to its incredible graphics, cinematic presentation, and solid cover system. The sequel repeats this formula, and though it introduces new weapons, enemies, and environments, it remains an incredible yet familiar experience. The 10-hour campaign is rambunctiously entertaining, with clever set pieces and epic confrontations that punctuate the exhilarating stop-and-pop gunplay. The multiplayer offers more significant upgrades, with four new modes, 10 new maps, and support for up to 10 players instead of eight. These things make for a package with significant longevity, and though Gears of War 2 ultimately refines more than it innovates, it still deserves a place in any action fan's collection.   Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago return in Gears of War 2, heading underground to bring the fight to the Locust.   Gears of War 2 picks up the story six months after the end of the first game. The Locust are so powerful that they can sink entire cities from below, whereas the humans are becoming even more desperate thanks to the spread of a disease called rust lung. With fears that the last city of Jacinto might fall, it's down to Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago to take the fight to the Locust in a desperate last stand against their alien foes. Survival is at the centre of Gears 2, but there's also personal drama, with themes such as family, death, and even love interwoven into the grand plot. This sheds some light on the characters and the universe, and though it ultimately uncovers more questions than it answers, the game has a much grander premise than its predecessor.    In terms of gameplay, Gears 2 is fundamentally the same as the original game, but fans of the series should be able to spot some key refinements. The cover system has been honed so that you cling more accurately to surfaces, and the weapons have received subtle alterations to make them even more balanced than before. The revival system has also been tweaked considerably. Not only can your AI teammates heal you if you're injured, but now you can also tap A to crawl toward them more quickly when you're injured. This makes the game a lot fairer in terms of difficulty and allows for some heart-pounding moments as you race to your teammates to avoid a fatal curb-stomping from the opposition.   Gears of War 2 introduces more backstory to the characters and the universe, but it ultimately throws up more questions than answers.   Although the assault rifle is still the go-to firearm for the duration of the campaign, there are plenty of other weapons to play with. New to the Gears universe is the flamethrower, which doesn't have a great range but is excellent for dealing with groups of enemies that get a little too close for comfort. Then there are the heavy weapons, which stop you from being able to roadie run but make up for this with their immense power. The mulcher is a high-calibre chain gun that can cut through even the biggest enemies in a single burst, whereas the mortar rains down a shower of explosives from afar. Grenades have also seen improvements; you can stick them to surfaces so they become proximity mines, there's a new model that gives off noxious gas, and the smoke grenade delivers a concussive blast that knocks surrounding players off of their feet. All of these new weapons are great fun to use, and crucially, they're well balanced for use in multiplayer.    The first Gears of War was brutally over-the-top in its violence, and the sequel manages to take this even further. You now have four ways of executing your enemies, all of which are mapped onto the face buttons of the joypad. X performs the standard curb-stomp, B delivers a quicker blow to the back of the head, and Y flips your foe over for repeated punches to the face. Finally, the A button lets you grab the wounded enemy to use as a meat shield, affording you some protection until you decide to finish it off with a neck-break. The signature chainsaw move has been adapted so you cut upward from the crotch if you approach from the rear, and if two players ready their saws, they enter a duel that's won by whoever taps the B button the fastest. These new additions improve on the already gritty and satisfying melee combat of the original Gears of War and make close-quarters combat even more gruesomely rewarding.      Gears of War 2 has a considerably different look from its predecessor. Whereas the first game was characterised by derelict cities and crumbling monuments, a good portion of the sequel takes place in huge outdoor spaces and underground caverns. You'll see fluorescent lights, snow-capped mountains, and enemies so big you'll actually need to get inside them to destroy them. There are also more vehicle sections, and though they can be a bit fiddly to use, these segments are thankfully short and infrequent. The traditional stop-and-pop gunplay still makes up the majority of the campaign, and it's a raucously enjoyable ride that you'll want to play again and again.   The new game modes add more variety and longevity to the Gears multiplayer.   Gears of War 2 is best when played with friends, and the entire campaign now features drop-in support and independent difficulty levels for two players. The competitive multiplayer has also been substantially improved and now offers more players, maps, and game modes to select. Warzone, Execution, Assassination, and Annex modes all make a return, along with King of the Hill, which was introduced in the PC version of the game. There are also three new standard multiplayer modes called Submission, Guardian, and Wingman. Submission is a variation on Capture the Flag, but here the flag is a civilian who you carry to the checkpoint using the meat-shield technique. The hostage also carries a gun and is hostile to anyone who comes close, making for a really great twist on the traditional CTF game mode. Guardian is a team-based game with a designated leader; keep the leader alive and everyone else can respawn, but if the leader dies then that privilege is over. Finally, Wingman splits players into teams of two, with the emphasis on working together to kill and revive. You've probably seen these game modes before in other games, but they fit perfectly into Gears of War 2 and add even more variety and longevity to online play. Thankfully, the benefits of being the host online have also been lessened, making the online experience much fairer across the board.    The final multiplayer mode is called Horde, and it's the most addictive and challenging take on Gears yet. It could be described as a cross between single- and multiplayer, in which a team of five COGs take on wave after wave of Locust enemies. As long as one player stays alive at the end of each round, the entire team respawns and the game keeps going, with progressively bigger and more difficult enemies. It's an incredibly tense and exciting game mode, and despite the steep difficulty curve, it's highly rewarding to play with friends. Gears 2 is also accommodating to new players and those without Internet connections, with five training missions and bot support for every multiplayer mode except Horde. The bots are surprisingly good at replicating human players, and they make great practice for people who have never played the game online.    Gears of War 2 includes a total of 10 new multiplayer maps, plus a code to download five remastered maps from the original game. The new maps take inspiration from the locations in the campaign, whereas new environmental effects change some of the maps as you're playing. For example, Hail features razor-sharp rain that gradually kills anyone out in the open. Furthermore, Day One has a huge emergence hole in which a beast can take swipes at any surrounding players. Finally, Avalanche is completely transformed when a snowstorm hits, turning it from a multitiered level into one flat plane. These environmental effects don't feature in every map and game mode, but they definitely liven up standard deathmatch-style multiplayer game types such as Warzone.   The sequel introduces training missions and bots that you can play in nearly all of the multiplayer game modes.   The original Gears of War was a spectacular-looking game, and the sequel maintains this high technical and artistic quality. Instead of pushing for increased visual fidelity, the graphics engine adds a couple of other dimensions to the presentation, with walls that crumble under gunfire and dozens of enemies onscreen at once. These new features don't necessarily affect the gameplay, but they look good and help add to the dramatic scale that the designers have chosen. The new organic capabilities of the Unreal Engine make for one particularly memorable level in which you literally have to kill a giant enemy from the inside. Gears of War 2 also has impeccable sound design, with terrific voice acting, meatier weapon effects, and another beautiful cinematic score.    Gears of War 2 has a lot in common with its predecessor, but the new environments, darker storyline, and epic scale certainly have a lot to offer fans. The new weapons, melee attacks, and co-op options make for a campaign that you'll want to complete a number of times, and the new multiplayer modes give the game variety and longevity. Simply put, Gears of War 2 is a superior shooter that no action fan will want to miss out on.  


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391,Guild Wars 2 ,9," Guild Wars 2 is a paradise for explorers and thrill-seekers alike, and the best online role-playing game in years.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2350899-2219618-box_gw2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-review/1900-6396275/,pos,"
  The world of Tyria, as imagined in the massively multiplayer Guild Wars 2, is an endlessly intriguing place, stuffed with mystery and adventure, gifting you with gorgeous sights and personal stories that etch themselves into your memory. These are the kinds of stories you tell for months to come--and they arise from your own spontaneous experiences. There's the one about how you and your guildmates emerged from chilly waters into an ominous thunderstorm, captured a tower from the enemy, and escaped from a roaring crowd of necromancers and rangers before they could deliver you to the devil. Then there's the one where a giant lightning-breathing dragon landed in a dark-misted field, and you joined a legion of soldiers to cleanse the land of its blight. Guild Wars 2 strips away the traditional game of ""follow the waypoint,"" allowing you to feel like part of a vast living landscape rather than the tool of a thousand and one taskmasters.       How does Guild Wars 2 make Tyria so inviting and inventive? It starts with the loss of the traditional quest log. That isn't to say that Guild Wars 2 doesn't provide you with side quests and other activities outside your main storyline--it's that they are structured in a way that makes them organic to the world around you. In a sense, your map serves as a journal. Here, you see points of interest to discover; waypoints that you can unlock and that serve as nodes for quickly traveling from one area to the other; and non-player characters designated with hearts that have optional activities for you to do.     Your map is more than a sketch of the surrounding lands: it's a personal guide to your adventure, beckoning you to uncover unexplored territory. It isn't just the marked activities that have you peeking into every nook, however, but the surprises lurking on mountaintops and within hidden caves. Suddenly, you're stumbling upon a secretive entrance or emerging from a deep lake to discover a hidden oasis. Further inspection reveals hidden treasure, tricky labyrinths, and giant ogres needing a smackdown.     As for the more structured activities, those NPCs labeled with hearts are more than just quest givers--they're vendors, too. By fulfilling these characters' requests, you get access to whatever gear they sell, which you buy not with gold, but with a currency called karma, earned by participating in world events (more on those soon) and by just doing things. This system of hearts is more or less like the traditional ""take quest, earn reward"" structure of most role-playing games, but the reward is access to a merchant's entire inventory, rather than a piece of equipment you may not want or need. You don't have to speak to that character to take on the task--you just get prompted when you come near, and the prompt disappears if you leave the area before completing the goal. (Of course, it then reappears when you again enter the area.)   The calm before the storm.    These might seem like small adjustments to a familiar formula, but Guild Wars 2 rethinks old standards in new ways so that you can go have an adventure of your own, rather than be guided through one someone else created for you. For instance, like in other massively multiplayer online games, you can visit low-level areas as a high-level character--perhaps the starting regions of other races--for a change of scenery. But in other games, there's no real reason to be there: the quests don't provide pertinent rewards, and local wildlife goes down in a single hit. In Guild Wars 2, your level scales downward in such places so that your foes are a greater threat. Furthermore, while your experience rewards aren't notable in lower-level regions, the loot you earn is scaled to match your level, as opposed to the region's. And by rethinking a single trope, developer ArenaNet makes each glade, swamp, and valley a tantalizing destination for every player.      Those ""heart"" missions generally have you performing any number of tasks: repairing fences, killing enemies, delivering ale to thirsty inn patrons, and more. Not every task is all that engaging; some activities are just busywork (collecting tools), while others involve elements (such as stealth) that don't feel natural given Guild Wars 2's basic mechanics. But you're always free to move on to something more interesting, perhaps to discover another grand vista. Vista points are scattered about Tyria and seen as glowing bits of parchment, usually hovering in spots just out of reach.    This is just one of many lovely vistas to behold.   Getting to those vistas can be a joy or a chore (usually the former), depending on the quality of the jumping puzzles that lead to them. Leaping about in Guild Wars 2 isn't a slog--the game has perhaps the most fluid movement in the genre--but the camera has a tendency to get caught up on walls and ceilings. When you're afforded the opportunity to see all around you, scaling icy cliffs and rickety planks is a pleasure. In cramped environments, the camera might freak out, and you can't see well enough to make an educated leap. But even when you wrestle with the camera, the effort is worthwhile: you activate the vista, and the camera spins about, showing off the spectacular panorama surrounding you. A gentle tune accompanies the moment, and you revel in the pastoral uplift it creates.     While you do get experience for unlocking these vistas, the greater reward is getting the chance to admire Tyria without hindrance. Guild Wars 2 is a beautiful game that makes an impression in big ways and small. In Lion's Arch, a bridge takes the form of a giant sloop now retired from its days sailing the seas. In Blazeridge Steppes, a dragon's electric attacks have burned the foliage to a crisp; swirling claw marks and a shimmering veil of darkness tell tales of the devastation that occurred there. From snowy mountains to humid swamps, Tyria encompasses a diverse number of climates and landscapes, yet it still looks remarkably cohesive.         The cohesion comes from painterly techniques employed in textures, special effects, and even the interface. Look at the edges of spell effects and the trails of projectiles, and you see swirls that recall a painter's brushstrokes. The sides of the screen are embellished with subtle inky streaks, as if your entire view were being drawn in real time. Such techniques are most effective in lush meadows and forests: strips of green, gold, and mahogany make tree trunks seem as though they belong on a canvas, and forest canopies look like layers of acrylic due to subtle gradations of light and color. These touches aren't heavy-handed, but make Tyria more than just another fantasy world.      The 3D-as-2D approach is most obvious during cutscenes in which one or two 3D characters are superimposed upon a moving 2D background. These cinematics are attractive, if not particularly dramatic; the minimal staging doesn't effectively demonstrate emotion, nor does much of the acting from the Norn and human races. (The female Norn player character is excruciatingly inexpressive.) Atmospheric dialogue is more impressive, and some of it will tickle your funny bone. While the voice acting varies from poor to great, you can always count on the symphonic musical score to set an exact tone for every region and event. In a tranquil grove, a flute and oboe weave melodic threads in and out of each other--simple music for simple surroundings. Heavy drums and pungent trombone licks immediately evoke the ferocity of the Charr. It's a terrific soundtrack that stands on its own, but more importantly, it suits the world at large, its people, and its individual places.      Just as the visuals and music contrast the peaceful with the powerful, so too does your adventure. You might be leisurely crossing a lovely meadow, only to be alerted to a nearby world event. The event might then lead to another, ultimately culminating in a giant boss encounter or furious area-wide struggle for dominance. The fight may start small: a crowd of centaurs, easily defeated by the group of players the event has brought together. Soon, champion warbeasts have arrived, their sharp scales forcing you to work harder for victory. And then, a giant hand reaches from under the earth, as if a trapped golem is escaping from its underground prison. This ravaging battle isn't one you are expected to fight, but one you stumble upon as you roam the land. And that's the Guild Wars 2 experience: going about your business, only to be drawn into another battle, another hidden secret, or another bit of Tyrian lore.    When a world event beckons, heed its call, lest you miss out on the excitement.   Guild Wars 2's reimagining of so many role-playing standards has a downside: the game does a mediocre job of introducing you to its new way of thinking. Generic tips appear in your hints menu, but these aren't adequate teaching tools; playing Guild Wars 2 successfully means shedding preconceived notions and learning a new approach. But there's a lot to take in, and even after you switch gears, you still stumble upon information by accident, or are educated by other players. How do I unlock more traits? Which merchants sell gathering supplies? What crafting professions best complement my class? Simple information like this isn't as quick to come by as you might think, and visual cues and map markers either don't give a lot of information or aren't obvious about it.      This touch of obtuseness is notable in part because most aspects of Guild Wars 2 are designed to keep you playing instead of wasting time on typical MMOG padding. Need to free up some inventory and deposit crafting supplies in the bank? Do it right from your inventory screen. Want to travel across the entire continent? Forget mounts: just click on an unlocked waypoint and teleport there--for a nominal fee, of course. Want to access the trading post (that is, the player auction house)? Bring it up with the press of a key. (You need to visit a trade broker to pick up your supplies, however.)     Another great convenience: all races can be any class, so you needn't choose between an appealing character and an appealing set of skills. You'll come to appreciate that Guild Wars 2 values your time, and wonder why more games haven't implemented such features. Of course, you may also appreciate the lack of a monthly fee. You can buy certain conveniences from a real-money store--more inventory space, armor dyes, and whatnot--but you couldn't reasonably call Guild Wars 2 ""pay to win.""    The Hylek aren't an attractive race, but they sure live well.   Guild Wars 2's exploration value and creative restructuring of old concepts deserve praise--but so, too, does the moment-to-moment gameplay. Combat and movement feel exceptionally fluid and responsive, and much of this has to do with the way skills are implemented. Superficially, Guild Wars 2's combat system resembles that of other MMOGs, in the sense that you have a bar of skill icons at the bottom of the screen, and you perform attacks by pressing the hotkeys associated with them. But there's a deeper and more malleable system here than initially meets the eye, and once it's fully in play, you are consistently engaged with the action; you rarely just hit the auto-attack key and let the game do the work.       Notably, you have only 10 main skill slots--five to the left of your health orb, and five to the right. The ones on the left are associated with your equipped weapon. In the case of a two-handed weapon, all five slots are associated with that weapon; otherwise, they might be split between a primary weapon and a supplementary one. But you also have two sets of weapons at any given time, and can switch between them--and in doing so, access a completely different set of attacks. You even have different sets of weapons and skills when delving underwater, and automatically switch to them when submerged. Skill cooldown rates are quick, and being a successful player means frequently changing sets in combat. And that, in turn, means staying consistently busy during the battle.          Class skills are another consideration, both outside combat and within it. You can have only five class skills active at a time, but while that might sound limiting, there's a good deal of flexibility here. You earn skill points fast enough (and you can earn more by completing skill challenges found on the map) that you soon unlock more abilities than you can ever equip at once. You can stick to a play style that works for you--bringing along a legion of pets to do some of your dirty work, for instance--but your favorite combination won't be ideal in all situations, so you might be pressed to try something new. And even with just those five skills in play, you can exercise more control than the number ""five"" would communicate. Rangers and necromancers have special pet skills to use once their minions are summoned, elementalists can attune themselves to different elements, and engineers have various healing and utility skills to manage.   Follow the golden road toward great riches…and great danger.    With this flexible class system, Guild Wars 2 jettisons typical MMOG roles (healer, tank, and so on). This works out better in the game's enjoyable five-man dungeons than you would think, for a few reasons. First of all, every class has some kind of healing skill, so while no one player is dedicated to keeping teammates alive, everyone can contribute to the party's general health. You can revive a fallen player, too--and should you fall, you can even make a last-ditch effort to rejoin the fight. Furthermore, Guild Wars 2 allows you to use environmental objects and weapons, from rocks to ballistae, so if you need to knock down a pesky spellcaster and no one has a helpful skill, just grab a stone and throw it.      Not having obvious combat roles doesn't mean that some battles don't require strategy. In one dungeon, for example, a particularly nasty boss spawns swarms of spiders, and your team needs a battle plan lest they succumb to a mess of skittering legs and clouds of poison. In the main world, on the other hand, many battles are just a vast crowd slashing away at a big bad meanie, spells flying everywhere to the point where you can't see what's going on, and you're not even sure if you're contributing to the chaos. Yet even in such instances, excitement levels are through the roof, particularly when that big bad meanie is a fearsome purple dragon with a wingspan of an entire valley.   There's great pleasure in ripping the opposing team to shreds.   Other players make for more stubborn enemies than even big dragons, and Guild Wars 2's player-versus-player battlefields are great, particularly the world-versus-world realm. In these persistent warzones, players from three servers vie for dominance by capturing keeps, purchasing and employing siege equipment, and overcoming the enemy with brute force and smart tactics. You might join a roving band of heroes and encounter a seemingly unstoppable wall of other players, none of them identified by name--only by guild tag. Such moments are beautiful, terrifying madness, players trying to gain high ground and manage a battlefield swarming with dozens if not hundreds of combatants. But there's also room to lead a surgical strike team, avoiding the keen eye of your foes and yanking away control of a tower left unguarded.    Such battles instill a sense of triumph when you succeed, and heartbreak when you fail. Defending a keep from the walls above, only to abandon it when it's overrun--or to die trying to save it--is deflating. It takes a special game to make you feel disappointment like that deep in your gut, and Guild Wars 2 generates the right sort of emotional investment. There in the world-versus-world, it does so in some of the same ways it does in Tyria proper: with vistas to discover and world events that call you to action.     There's also a unique interplay between the WVW and the core adventuring that drives you to battle. While you are bumped up to the maximum level of 80 when facing other servers, you still take only the skills you've earned up to that point, which drives you to explore the player-versus-environment content and learn skills. Meanwhile, story quests and world events sometimes mirror the mechanics of WVW battles, making these aspects of the game feel like two sides of the same coin rather than wholly disparate features.   Onward, honorable soldiers!   You can also face other players in one-off battles, in which case not only are you bumped up to level 80, but you gain access to all available class skills as well. Such battles don't contribute to your overall experience; instead, there is a ranking system specific to player-versus-player, and weapons and rewards are separate from the rest of the game. Even without persistence, however, these battles are exciting tests of skill and are fun playgrounds for various character builds. Stories are made here, just as they are elsewhere. You'll tell others of the time you fought for control of a capture point and triumphed, pushing the team over the hump to a sliver-thin 500-499 victory. Or maybe you'll tell the tale of how a school of sharks mauled an overly aggressive Mesmer as you swam back and flung dark magic toward his tiny Asuran torso.      One concern you might have is whether the game is stable, and while the answer is a solid ""yes,"" there have been some issues during the launch phase, such as trading post problems, glitched world events, scripted moments that can get you stuck in a monster's geometry, and a few other oddities. But these aren't defining moments, and many have been cleaned up hastily, allowing the incredible exploration and thrilling player-versus-player combat to command attention. There's so much more that could be said about Guild Wars 2--the branching story paths, the keg brawl minigame, crafting at the mystic forge--and that says a lot about the breadth and depth of this online world. Tyria isn't just a place you should visit; it's the place you should call your new online home.    


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392,Calling ,3.5, Ripping off every Japanese horror trick in the book doesn't make this poor attempt at survival horror any scarier.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/9/7/9/2222979-51f7uhhjhil.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/calling-review/1900-6253687/,neg,"
  True unadulterated terror is something most folks never hope to encounter in their lives, but the adrenaline rush that comes from being scared in short, controlled bursts can be absolutely thrilling. To that end, blending technology with the supernatural in a survival horror game setting has the potential to get the blood pumping and dish out spine-tingling chills when done properly. With a creepy plot involving a murderous Web site, the advent of cell phone teleportation, and more than a few dead Japanese girls, Calling might have had a shot at succeeding if it didn't blow its entire bag of horror tricks in the first 30 minutes of the game. Plus, there are only so many times you can tolerate mindlessly shaking the controller around like a lunatic to fend off touchy-feely spooks before you'd rather beat yourself senseless with the thing to make it all stop.   Boo!   Though it's not directly associated with any movies, Calling's story and gameplay draws pretty heavily on elements from various Japanese horror films like The Grudge and The Ring. The game opens as widespread rumors of a strange Web site called ""The Black Page"" attract the attention of many curious Web surfers. Most are puzzled when they load it up to find a blank page and a visitor counter. However, a select few that stumble upon the site find a chat room where the page once existed. While chatting away, these poor souls suddenly receive a phone call that transports them to an alternate plane of existence called the Mnemonic Abyss. The story follows the intertwining paths of four very different victims doomed to roam aimlessly between life and death. Their only hope is to try to escape the hellish realm they've been thrust into, and you'll play as each of them at different times throughout the game.    The early stretches of Calling are the eeriest and most enjoyable. Until you eventually grab a flashlight, fumbling around the oppressive, pitch-black hallways of an empty high school in a first-person perspective is a tense experience. And the first few times ghostly entities with dark hollow eyes and stringy black hair leap out of the darkness to claw at your face will definitely be freaky and unsettling. However, the initial shocking moments grow less chilling as you proceed. Only a few hours in, the survival horror vibe melts away into a dull and predictable exploratory grind through many of the same empty environments. Sure, you'll hunt down diary notes or clues left by other characters, pick up a few select items needed to overcome specific obstacles, and solve a handful of clever puzzles. But mostly, you just roam around in the dark and shake off pesky ghosts while trying to figure out where you're meant to go next. The Mnemonic Abyss consists of several self-contained locations, including a hospital, a high school, a hair salon, an Internet cafe, some geeky guy's bedroom, and a few other spectral hot spots. Oddly, the only way to travel between them is by making a cell phone call to another phone located in the desired destination. It seems you can't shake a stick in the abyss without hitting a cell phone (even the ghosts have them).    Cell phones are such an integral aspect of the game that it even uses the Wii Remote and its internal speaker to mimic one. You can flick open your current phone at any time (with a tap of the minus button) to manually input and dial numbers you've pieced together on your travels, as well as receive calls from the dead who talk to you through the speaker. The Wii Remote can even be held to your ear like a phone, if you're so inclined. It's admittedly a pretty cool idea that does make interesting use of the controller hardware. Additional cell phone features get some play too, like recording and translating ghostly whisperings, answering text messages, or taking pictures of your surroundings. Exploring and navigating the abyss is generally smooth. The nunchuk handles all directional walking and running movement, while the Wii Remote allows you to point your flashlight, as well as turn around. Grabbing doors, desk drawers, and cabinets lets you pull them open. The controls are very responsive, allowing you to turn quickly and run easily. This makes the awful wagglefest that ensues during every single ghostly encounter a big disappointment.    The presence of ghosts triggers a scare meter that gradually increases as your character grows more frightened. Ghostly entities in Calling have a knack for popping up in your face, grabbing at your legs from the floor, or hanging down from the ceiling to grab at you at the most irritating of times. When they do appear, you have to shake them off by waving the Wii Remote around. In most cases, you have a single evasive opportunity per encounter by hitting the A button with precise timing. This lets you quickly evade them without having to deal with all the shaky fussing, though it's hard to nail when you're flailing around at the same time. Early encounters are indeed startling, but they happen so frequently further along that they just lose their already-meager scariness and become a huge nuisance. Some bosslike encounters force you to fend off multiple attacks from tenacious spirits for a minute or two. This is even more irksome when you're being chased through an unavoidable gauntlet of attacks down a lengthy hallway. There's even one point where you have to try to dial a memorized number at breakneck speed while fending off three ghosts at once.   Is that fear in your eyes or boredom?   Most areas in the Mnemonic Abyss are eerily designed and make great use of spooky lighting, as well as well-timed sound effects to lay out a grim atmosphere. While there are a few unique spots that offer a stark contrast to the doom-and-gloom scenery, meandering through larger locations like the hospital or high school gets visually monotonous. The main characters look and act convincing during cutscenes. On the other hand, ghosts you encounter deeper in the game look absurdly hokey while the garbled voice acting that spews through the Wii Remote speaker and from the TV itself is equally atrocious.    A sluggish pace and an unexciting, convoluted plot further compound the fact that Calling loses its ability to spook you far too soon, which is the kiss of death for a horror game. Here's another head-scratcher: The poorly structured adventure only takes you through a partially complete run of the game before showing you the end credits. Then you have to go back and replay the whole thing if you want to see the added chapters that will fill in the blanks left on the first go-around. You can skip the sections you've already played but will miss out on some secrets. This forced redundance is an abysmal move on the developer's part that really makes you feel cheated and used. Forget the adrenaline rush. Calling will give you a headache and a bad case of boredom for your efforts instead.  
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393,Naruto Shippuden: Dragon Blade Chronicles ,3.5," Shallow combat, frustrating exploration, and crippling technical issues make Dragon Blade Chronicles a Naruto adventure to avoid.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/7/0/6/2225706-box_narutodbc.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/naruto-shippuden-dragon-blade-chronicles-review/1900-6284634/,neg,"
  Naruto is a fascinating character. He can be obnoxious at times, but he just puts so much effort into everything that it's hard not to end up rooting for him. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the new Wii action adventure he stars in, Naruto Shippuden: Dragon Blade Chronicles. It tries to win you over with its vivid, detailed characters and an original Naruto story, and at first glance it seems as if these elements might serve to make its shallow combat and bland exploration tolerable. But although the character of Naruto is as likable as ever here, a laundry list of unending frustrations and some crippling technical issues try your patience in ways that make this a game even Naruto's winning attitude can't save.      While many games featuring Naruto recycle storylines from the anime, Dragon Blade Chronicles tells a new tale. Hidden Leaf Village is devastated by the attack of a dragon, and a mysterious girl named Akari presents Naruto with a weapon called the dragon blade, which he uses to defeat the fearsome beast. Akari tells Naruto that her brother is planning to awaken the light dragon and use its power to destroy the world, and soon Naruto and a few comrades set off for Mount Koryu to confront this threat. Meanwhile, Naruto's longtime rival Sasuke journeys to Mount Koryu for reasons of his own. It's nice to experience an original Naruto story for a change, and the familiar and reliable voice actors give solid performances, but at times the cutscenes drag on for frustratingly long stretches, and you don't have the option to just click through the text at your own pace. You need to either listen to each line being said aloud or skip the story sequence entirely.    The action jumps back and forth between Naruto and Sasuke, both of whom control identically. The story establishes that Mount Koryu interferes with a ninja's chakra, providing a convenient excuse as to why neither playable character can perform the tremendously powerful attacks they can usually pull off without breaking a sweat. Instead, they must resort to mostly just slicing away at enemies, which is pretty dull. All attacks, including longer combos, are performed with the same button. Naruto and Sasuke do have some meager ninjutsu attacks available, despite the chakra interference, and as you progress, you find scrolls in treasure chests that give you new abilities. But these don't do much to enliven the combat. Your enemies are dumb as posts, so whether you defeat them with quick swings of a blade or with one ninjutsu attack or another, there's no satisfaction to be gained from victory.     That's not to say that the battles are always a piece of cake, though. At times, the sheer number of enemies that swarm you can make things challenging. A single swipe from an enemy might send you flying through the air and off a cliff to your doom. Because your own swings move you forward, you also have to worry about attacking your way right off the edge of a platform. Since there's no way to lock on to enemies, many of your swings will probably just pierce the empty air. And if enemies manage to crowd around you, their hits can juggle you for a while, doing significant damage, while you have no means of escape. There's not even anything remotely interesting about these enemies, called mugonhei, whom you encounter every step of the way. Some of them look like featureless figures hastily crafted out of clay, while others look like evil flying potatoes.    Seeing the same very few utterly bland enemy designs over and over adds to the tedium of the combat. And when bow-wielding mugonhei show up, the addition of a new enemy type only sprinkles additional frustration into the monotonous mix. The camera often doesn't show you incoming arrows until it's too late to react, and each impact from these projectiles knocks you down momentarily. When these arrows start coming at you in rapid succession, getting knocked off your feet again and again can become infuriating. The combat is so bad that it's best avoided whenever possible. Since you don't earn experience or any other meaningful reward for fighting enemies, there's no reason to not just run past groups of them when you're free to do so, though you often need to defeat a few waves of mugonhei to open blocked doors.   Sasuke spends much time practicing the ancient ninja art of standing on switches.   Unfortunately, there's no joy to be found in exploring the environments to make up for the frustrations of the combat. One passageway of Mount Koryu looks so much like the next that it's very easy at times to run in circles, trying to figure out which way you haven't been and where to go next. (It doesn't help that the in-game map is completely useless.) And although the environmental puzzles you encounter on occasion sometimes provide a welcome alternative to the repetitive monster-hacking, they bring with them their own frustrations. These puzzles often require you to use a specific power on something in the environment; however, at times you might use the correct power, but because you're not standing in precisely the right spot when you do it, it doesn't work.    Making all of these individually irritating elements far more maddening is that the game is frequently plagued with crippling slowdown issues. This is not merely an occasional nuisance. This is slowdown of insufferable proportions. Entire long stretches of the game chug along at what feels like half speed. The thrill of running down a hallway that's collapsing behind you is wiped out when you have to make the entire long run in slow motion, and when other characters advise Naruto or Sasuke to take a break at least once an hour, it's hard not to reflect that some hours you spend playing contain only about half an hour's worth of actual play.    Dragon Blade Chronicles does have the occasional moment when it rises above the dreariness of its many issues. Avoiding torrential waves that flood a passage as you make your way toward a water dragon is dramatic and memorable, for instance. But these moments are far too rare to be worth the struggle to reach them. And while the characters from the anime are richly detailed and make a strong first impression for the game's visuals, waves of featureless mugonhei and long stretches of drab environments soon become the order of the day and only compound the tedium of the gameplay. The music at least manages to drum up a mood of excitement at times, which is more than the action deserves.   Visual flourishes like steam rising from pools of lava would be cooler if they didn't slow the game way down.   There's a meager Versus mode in which you and a friend can duke it out as Naruto and Sasuke using the same simple attacks as in the Story mode, but with only two characters and no compelling combat techniques, it's not the least bit interesting. Depending on how much time you spend wandering around in circles, it may take you six or ten hours to complete the adventure, and when you consider that a significant amount of that time is spent in slow motion, it becomes clear that there isn't much game here. But that actually doesn't matter, since any time spent with Dragon Blade Chronicles is too much. Even the most diehard Naruto fans are better off pretending that this particular side story to the Naruto lore never happened.  
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394,Alter Ego ,3.5," A boring story, a dreadful ending, and easy puzzles bury this dull point-and-click adventure.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/9/6/9/2215969-cover_alterego_crane.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alter-ego-review/1900-6272422/,neg,"
  As any fan of a good murder mystery will tell you, there's nothing more satisfying than a surprising reveal and a shocking payoff. Unfortunately, there's a disastrous corollary to this tenet: A bad ending insults the reader and renders the plot that came before it hollow and insincere. Though point-and-click adventure game Alter Ego tries to involve you in its story with a few gruesome crimes, the crime that will strike you as most hideous is its own storytelling offenses. After an excruciatingly slow start, the tale seems like it might finally come together, only to pull the rug from underneath you with an ending so abrupt and incomplete you feel as if you just read a novel with the final two chapters ripped out of it. The end result is a story that makes the average episode of Scooby-Doo look like a sophisticated whodunit and will have you throwing your hands up in the air in disgust. Alter Ego's easy and unremarkable puzzles, which can be solved with a bunch of random clicking, offer no relief and make for a soggy and unfinished adventure that even genre fans should avoid.    Briscol is not happy with the wallpaper in his new office.   You play as two different characters throughout the course of this ""mystery."" Timothy Moor is an Irish thief joining a fellow crook on a heist that will pay their way to the United States. Detective Briscol is a by-the-book investigator new to the town of Plymouth, England, where the funeral of a suspected murderer hasn't ended the chain of murders terrorizing the populace. Alternating between the two, you slog through cemeteries, laundries, and sewers, combining inventory items and clicking on environmental objects to progress the story. And it is quite a sluggish story. As Moor, you spend most of the game totally unaware that a mystery even exists, sneaking into mansions and inspecting crossbows. As Briscol, you talk to a few suspects and investigate the crime scene, which is boring, but at least it tantalizes you with a few choice tangents. What secrets does a reclusive grandmother harbor? What goodies might be hidden in the trunk in Briscol's office? Who really was this man known by locals as the White Beast?    Alter Ego regrettably does nothing to resolve such lingering questions. The paths of the two characters don't even cross until two-thirds of the way through the game, thus failing to capitalize on the potential of a story told from two angles. The events just prior to the crossing of these paths, including a sequence that plunges you into total darkness, seem to hint that something exciting is finally about to happen after hours of busywork. Instead, the simple puzzles get even simpler, you only control a single character, and important facets of the mystery get either completely cast aside or explained away in a bit of hasty dialogue. Where there should have been a climax, there is a 15-second speech that clarifies precious little; where there should have been a conclusion, there is instead a final cutscene that might be trying to set up a sequel but instead makes the entire game feel like a pointless endeavor in which you learned and accomplished absolutely nothing. This is storytelling at its most putrid, and it is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who sticks with this murder mystery hoping for closure.     Furthermore, Alter Ego fails to communicate much suspense, but at least there are sparks of personality. Briscol's temper occasionally erupts, and his anger is used to good effect in a few scenes within a church. Moor's brogue lends him some charm, even though the actor playing the thief is too laid-back during times he should be communicating terror or annoyance. But the environments, while attractive, aren't atmospheric enough to encourage tension. The cemetery looks nice, but there are precious few animations within the environments, the lighting is often flat, and character models tend to get swallowed up by the shadows. More of the failure to provoke suspense comes from the meager sound design. Silence can be suspenseful, of course, but Alter Ego isn't creepily quiet--it's just plain quiet. Moody music and sound effects might have helped draw the player in where the story fails, but the stillness isn't scary. Rather, it's just another thin element that makes this adventure seem unfinished.    Moor is simply stretching here, not belting out a tune from the musical Oklahoma.   Where the story is rancid, the puzzles are merely boring. None of them require brainpower. There are no environmental tests of logic, no clever solutions to multitiered problems, and no need to pay close attention to subtle clues. If you aren't sure of what you need to do, just click on everything until something happens. This is especially disappointing considering you fill the shoes of a detective. Numerous adventure games, from Still Life to the recent string of Sherlock Holmes games, have implemented smart mechanics that simulate crime scene inspection and evidence examination. In Alter Ego, playing as Detective Briscol is just like playing as Moor. Sure, you get a pair of tweezers, a brush, and a magnifying glass, but they are used sparingly and only in very obvious ways. Briscol's journal is nothing but a repository of images to click on; not a gameplay addition as it is in other mystery adventures. Furthermore, several objects or elements you can interact with foreshadow future solutions that never come. You click on an exit that implies you might be able to explore a rich dowager's manor--but it never happens. You click on a safe that holds a pistol, but you never retrieve and use the pistol. And, again, you come away with the sense that Alter Ego was envisioned as a longer game but, sadly, was never completed.      There are countless old point-and-click games that surpass Alter Ego in almost every manner, from puzzles to characters. This is not just a testament to the quality of those games but to the failure of Alter Ego to deliver an adventure worth taking. Even if the meandering mystery draws you in, the game's appalling attempt to wrap up the story in a manner of seconds, as well as its total failure to bring any sense of closure, may very well drive you to drink. And if you play these kinds of games hoping for some brain-twisting puzzles to test your wits, you'll be sorely disappointed by the cliched click-everywhere tasks that never require so much as a single brain cell. So whether you come for the story or for the conundrums, Alter Ego is certain to let you down.    
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395,HAWX 2 ,3.5," Poor controls and dumb enemies ground this arcade air combat game, making it more chicken than bird of prey.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/8/1/76044-153181.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hawx-2-review/1900-6284635/,neg,"
  Aerial dogfights are supposed to be evocative of soaring birds of prey effortlessly diving and weaving through the sky, but Tom Clancy's HAWX 2 for the Wii flies more like a chicken than a majestic falcon. Like a chicken, HAWX 2 is ungainly in the air, and sluggish controls make it difficult to manoeuvre with the precision and speed you'd expect from the world's most advanced flying vehicles. Your opponents, too, don't act with the aggression or grace of raptors, flying around in mostly smooth, easy-to-track arcs that make most dogfights a dawdle to blast through. The best air combat games can elicit high-altitude thrills and white-knuckle tension, but HAWX 2's boring dogfights and poor controls mean it barely makes it off the ground.      It's not just the gameplay that has feet of lead; HAWX 2's story has all the finesse and subtlety of a cluster bomb but without any of the impact. You take the role of Cole ""Arrow"" Bowman, a young, hotshot pilot (is there any other kind?) working for a private mercenary air force with some decidedly murky motivations. Needless to say, Cole eventually finds himself flying for the eponymous HAWX squad and soon gets embroiled in a globe-threatening plot filled with double crosses, triple crosses, unresolved familial disputes, space lasers, and more. All of this, however, is conveyed in an extremely poor fashion: nearly all missions start with absolutely no explanation as to your objectives or how they fit into the overall narrative, and most of the cutscenes (which are presented through a series of watercolor-like stills) are laden with wooden, cliched dialogue. Even for a game with the aforementioned space lasers, HAWX 2's plot is hard to take seriously, and it's even more difficult to become invested in any of its cardboard cutout characters.    Things don't fare better when you're in the air. A Wii Remote and Nunchuk are required to play HAWX 2 (no other control variations, such as a Classic Controller, are supported). You use the nunchuk's thumbstick to fly your vehicle, and you directly target your foes onscreen with the remote. While you get to fly a variety of planes in HAWX 2--such as F-15s, Harriers, Mirages, various attack helicopters, and even a space shuttle--they're all uniformly unresponsive, making you feel like you're driving a cement truck rather than a nimble jet. The planes don't respond well when you need to make precise, tight manoeuvres, so even simple actions like following a friendly unit's gently curving flight path are difficult to achieve. This lack of finesse makes trench-run-like missions, where you have to guide your plane through tight confines, quite frustrating. While there's only one default view per vehicle, HAWX 2 does try to break things up by changing the viewing perspective you fly your plane from. The most common is a close view from behind the plane, but there are other perspectives, such as one where your plane is fixed on top of the screen (usually when you're flying a bomber), a cockpit view for helicopters, and even a zoomed-out, top-down view akin to a 2D shooter. This last view is particularly bad to fly in, because it's extremely tough to tell what height you're flying at, making crashes into mountain peaks a common occurrence.    It seems like your opponents in HAWX 2 suffer from the same movement malaise that you do, with most of them being little challenge to gun down. You won't see any tricky moves or tail-to-tail dogfighting--your opponents mainly fly in long, straight lines, only occasionally exhibiting complex or hard-to-track manoeuvres. Having your aiming tied to the remote makes the already easy combat even easier, because you don't even need to be facing your enemies to spray heavy machine gun fire at them. It looks even stranger onscreen--machine gun fire doesn't emanate from your plane's wings, but rather from behind as if an unseen wingman tracking your vehicle is doing the shooting for you.    The view's not great from up here.   There's only about six hours of gameplay in HAWX 2's single-player campaign, and there's little reason to play through the campaign more than once. The game does have a basic co-op multiplayer component, where a friend can join in with another remote and help out with shooting duties. This may be a neat feature for those wanting to share the experience with children, but because there's no difficulty spike when playing with a partner, there's no challenge at all. Playing a few single-player missions unlocks a top-down shoot-'em-up minigame, but since the plane controls here are even more sluggish than in the main game, it's not at all fun to play.    Rounding off this game's list of woes is its presentation. The game's world--from its skies and seas to its plains and mountains--are ill-defined and bland, so much so that it's sometimes tough to tell the difference between them. While the planes have a decent amount of detail, none of them sound realistic. The guns and various missiles you have at your disposal all sound like they'd be unable to blow a hole in paper, much less a heavily armed tank. The planes don't sound at all menacing, which is apt in its own way because HAWX 2 for the Wii certainly doesn't live up to the birds of prey its crack team of aerial aces are meant to invoke. HAWX 2 flops rather than soars and is a disappointing entry into this young franchise.  
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396,The Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos ,3.5, The Bering Sea has never seemed more boring than in this dull spin-off of the popular Discovery Channel reality show.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/0/6/2223806-a1c0_iir0tl._aa1500_.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-deadliest-catch-sea-of-chaos-review/1900-6285759/,neg,"
  The Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos delivers what may be the most boring take on its subject imaginable. Casting you as a captain of a crab ship on Alaska's Bering Sea, the game drops anchor on absurdly simplified versions of mundane harvesting duties without a scrap of the excitement and drama found in the award winning Discovery Channel series on which it is based. Worse yet, the visuals feel more than a decade old, the motion controls for the Wii and PlayStation 3 fall well short of their potential, and the endless repetition of four minigames quickly sinks any chance of excitement.       It's hardly the fault of the source material. Now nearing its seventh season, The Deadliest Catch is an intensely human reality show chronicling the hazardous lives of crabbers stationed on Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands. Viewers tune in by the millions to see fortunes and friendships made and lost, and they see the treacherous Bering Sea erupt into life-threatening chaos. This game, however, gives you none of that chaos. Instead, it abandons the salty flavor of the series in favor of a dull and persistent narrator. That decision alone sucks the soul out of the game, and it's regrettable that one of the crusty captains from the TV series wasn't hired for the job.    The graphics are dreadfully outdated and, if anything, a step backward from those in the previous Deadliest Catch game. The only time you ever see your crew members face-to-face is when you're hiring them or checking their fatigue in Cabin mode, and even then, they're just publicity stills with stat sheets. Only while casting or retrieving your pots do you see a crew member on the ship at all, and then it's only the back of the same slicker-sporting nobody who looks out at the ocean with all the vigor of a barnacle. Crew members thus resemble mere statistics with familiar names from the series slapped on them for good measure. As captain, you can hire up to five of them based on their varying skills at setting or retrieving pots or sorting, patching, and offloading, but every task is simple enough that their strengths and weaknesses never really become an issue. If you allow them a bit of rest after a series of jobs, your boat will usually perform at top capacity. More experienced crew members demand a greater share of the season's profits and are generally worth their cost in stamina alone, but you can also improve your weaker crew members by using them to perform tasks in their weak areas. It's a good system in theory, but the game never becomes difficult enough to definitively demand one crew member over another.     The eight campaigns in Sea of Chaos rely on mind-numbing repetition with only occasional stabs at variety. In one of the more exciting endeavors, you face off against the famed Captain Sig Hansen in a race to see who can bring in the biggest haul. Another campaign weakly follows the events of the show's fourth season by comparing your hauls to the real numbers achieved by the boats in the series. The longest mission spans an entire career across six seasons, during which you rise from obscurity and earn your fortune. These campaigns all start with selecting a crew and a customizable boat based on those found on the show. You then use the map to sail to one of several untapped fishing locations, although you usually won't know how many crabs are available without fishing there yourself. Some strategy thus springs from casting only a few pots at first to test the waters and avoiding spots on the maps where competitors are congregating. Also, in one of the few nods to the drama of the series, you can radio familiar captains from the show to ask about successful hauls at other locations and report your own findings for better results and allegiances.      Beyond these minor map-based strategies, success is based on mastering four simple minigames that lose their fragile charm not long after the lengthy tutorial. In the first, you set pots by steering your ship across gold or silver rings on the water, each marked with the number of pots that can be placed there. Time matters here (as it does for all the minigames), as do bonuses for successfully performing several actions in a row. As befits a largish seafaring vessel, steering is difficult with a gamepad, although the comparatively intuitive Wii and PlayStation Move motion controls improve the experience significantly. The same is true for the next minigame, which requires you to pull your pots from the water by casting lines off the side of the boat (preferably after waiting for 48 in-game hours) and catching buoys as they rush past. Because other ships have buoys in the water as well, you need to time your catches so you don't pick up the wrong pots. While there's nothing wrong with using the analog sticks to cast the line on the gamepads, the experience of physically flicking out the line with the Wii or Move and tugging it back is much more satisfying. Occasionally, you have to deal with heavy winds, but even at their worst, you can easily see the buoys float by you.    Curiously, though, the gamepads far outshine the motion controllers once you start sorting your catch. In this minigame, crabs are piled onto a sorting table (which may rock with the boat in bad weather) where you toss the rejects to the left and the crabs bound for Red Lobster to the right. A simple click of an action button and a flick of the analog sticks suffices for tossing the crabs on the gamepads, but poor controls on the Wii or the Move render these sequences almost unplayable. Picking up the proper crab is slightly more difficult with the optional motion controls, and properly flicking a crab from one side to the other seems based more on luck than skill. Once you return to port, you off-load your crabs by tossing them across a room and into a moving wire bucket while avoiding a pointlessly swinging hook. This would have been a chance for the motion controls to shine; instead, the task merely requires you to move your arms back and forth in sync with the target and release your crab when appropriate.    These four games form the core of every mission, but occasionally two other games will surface without warning. In one, you rescue drowning crewmembers in a reskinned version of the pot-retrieval game; in another, you patch broken equipment through a rewiring minigame reminiscent of BioShock's hacking sequences. These should provide a welcome respite from the endless cycle of pot setting and retrieval, but the rescue mission is too familiar and the patching game moves too slowly to leave much of an impact.      Sea of Chaos features a decent local multiplayer mode for up to eight players in which you try to amass the largest haul of crab using six different options, such as a rickety old ship, overly stormy seas, and uncharted crabbing maps. Unlike the main campaign modes, which can stretch on for six seasons, these customizable tournaments are limited to a comparatively short span of up to eight in-game days. There's no online or split-screen modes (which means you have to watch your opponent play each lengthy turn), but the gameplay structure in Sea of Chaos is better suited to the tournament mode's save-and-play mechanic than real-time matches against other players. All the same, even diehard fans may find their money better spent on boxed sets of the television series instead of this second missed opportunity. Though it sells for slightly less than full price, Sea of Chaos is simply far too expensive for the bland and tedious experience it offers.  
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'opportunity', '.', 'Though', 'sells', 'slightly', 'less', 'full', 'price', ',', 'Sea', 'Chaos', 'simply', 'far', 'expensive', 'bland', 'tedious', 'experience', 'offers', '.']",0.01438289601554908,0.4733074182053773
397,The Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos ,3.5, The Bering Sea has never seemed more boring than in this dull spin-off of the popular Discovery Channel reality show.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/0/6/2223806-a1c0_iir0tl._aa1500_.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-deadliest-catch-sea-of-chaos-review/1900-6285762/,neg,"
  The Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos delivers what may be the most boring take on its subject imaginable. Casting you as a captain of a crab ship on Alaska's Bering Sea, the game drops anchor on absurdly simplified versions of mundane harvesting duties without a scrap of the excitement and drama found in the award winning Discovery Channel series on which it is based. Worse yet, the visuals feel more than a decade old, the motion controls for the Wii and PlayStation 3 fall well short of their potential, and the endless repetition of four minigames quickly sinks any chance of excitement.       It's hardly the fault of the source material. Now nearing its seventh season, The Deadliest Catch is an intensely human reality show chronicling the hazardous lives of crabbers stationed on Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands. Viewers tune in by the millions to see fortunes and friendships made and lost, and they see the treacherous Bering Sea erupt into life-threatening chaos. This game, however, gives you none of that chaos. Instead, it abandons the salty flavor of the series in favor of a dull and persistent narrator. That decision alone sucks the soul out of the game, and it's regrettable that one of the crusty captains from the TV series wasn't hired for the job.    The graphics are dreadfully outdated and, if anything, a step backward from those in the previous Deadliest Catch game. The only time you ever see your crew members face-to-face is when you're hiring them or checking their fatigue in Cabin mode, and even then, they're just publicity stills with stat sheets. Only while casting or retrieving your pots do you see a crew member on the ship at all, and then it's only the back of the same slicker-sporting nobody who looks out at the ocean with all the vigor of a barnacle. Crew members thus resemble mere statistics with familiar names from the series slapped on them for good measure. As captain, you can hire up to five of them based on their varying skills at setting or retrieving pots or sorting, patching, and offloading, but every task is simple enough that their strengths and weaknesses never really become an issue. If you allow them a bit of rest after a series of jobs, your boat will usually perform at top capacity. More experienced crew members demand a greater share of the season's profits and are generally worth their cost in stamina alone, but you can also improve your weaker crew members by using them to perform tasks in their weak areas. It's a good system in theory, but the game never becomes difficult enough to definitively demand one crew member over another.     The eight campaigns in Sea of Chaos rely on mind-numbing repetition with only occasional stabs at variety. In one of the more exciting endeavors, you face off against the famed Captain Sig Hansen in a race to see who can bring in the biggest haul. Another campaign weakly follows the events of the show's fourth season by comparing your hauls to the real numbers achieved by the boats in the series. The longest mission spans an entire career across six seasons, during which you rise from obscurity and earn your fortune. These campaigns all start with selecting a crew and a customizable boat based on those found on the show. You then use the map to sail to one of several untapped fishing locations, although you usually won't know how many crabs are available without fishing there yourself. Some strategy thus springs from casting only a few pots at first to test the waters and avoiding spots on the maps where competitors are congregating. Also, in one of the few nods to the drama of the series, you can radio familiar captains from the show to ask about successful hauls at other locations and report your own findings for better results and allegiances.      Beyond these minor map-based strategies, success is based on mastering four simple minigames that lose their fragile charm not long after the lengthy tutorial. In the first, you set pots by steering your ship across gold or silver rings on the water, each marked with the number of pots that can be placed there. Time matters here (as it does for all the minigames), as do bonuses for successfully performing several actions in a row. As befits a largish seafaring vessel, steering is difficult with a gamepad, although the comparatively intuitive Wii and PlayStation Move motion controls improve the experience significantly. The same is true for the next minigame, which requires you to pull your pots from the water by casting lines off the side of the boat (preferably after waiting for 48 in-game hours) and catching buoys as they rush past. Because other ships have buoys in the water as well, you need to time your catches so you don't pick up the wrong pots. While there's nothing wrong with using the analog sticks to cast the line on the gamepads, the experience of physically flicking out the line with the Wii or Move and tugging it back is much more satisfying. Occasionally, you have to deal with heavy winds, but even at their worst, you can easily see the buoys float by you.    Curiously, though, the gamepads far outshine the motion controllers once you start sorting your catch. In this minigame, crabs are piled onto a sorting table (which may rock with the boat in bad weather) where you toss the rejects to the left and the crabs bound for Red Lobster to the right. A simple click of an action button and a flick of the analog sticks suffices for tossing the crabs on the gamepads, but poor controls on the Wii or the Move render these sequences almost unplayable. Picking up the proper crab is slightly more difficult with the optional motion controls, and properly flicking a crab from one side to the other seems based more on luck than skill. Once you return to port, you off-load your crabs by tossing them across a room and into a moving wire bucket while avoiding a pointlessly swinging hook. This would have been a chance for the motion controls to shine; instead, the task merely requires you to move your arms back and forth in sync with the target and release your crab when appropriate.    These four games form the core of every mission, but occasionally two other games will surface without warning. In one, you rescue drowning crewmembers in a reskinned version of the pot-retrieval game; in another, you patch broken equipment through a rewiring minigame reminiscent of BioShock's hacking sequences. These should provide a welcome respite from the endless cycle of pot setting and retrieval, but the rescue mission is too familiar and the patching game moves too slowly to leave much of an impact.       Sea of Chaos features a decent local multiplayer mode for up to eight players in which you try to amass the largest haul of crab using six different options, such as a rickety old ship, overly stormy seas, and uncharted crabbing maps. Unlike the main campaign modes, which can stretch on for six seasons, these customizable tournaments are limited to a comparatively short span of up to eight in-game days. There's no online or split-screen modes (which means you have to watch your opponent play each lengthy turn), but the gameplay structure in Sea of Chaos is better suited to the tournament mode's save-and-play mechanic than real-time matches against other players. All the same, even diehard fans may find their money better spent on boxed sets of the television series instead of this second missed opportunity. Though it sells for slightly less than full price, Sea of Chaos is simply far too expensive for the bland and tedious experience it offers.  
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398,The Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos ,3.5, The Bering Sea has never seemed more boring than in this dull spin-off of the popular Discovery Channel reality show.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/0/6/2223806-a1c0_iir0tl._aa1500_.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-deadliest-catch-sea-of-chaos-review/1900-6285763/,neg,"
  The Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos delivers what may be the most boring take on its subject imaginable. Casting you as a captain of a crab ship on Alaska's Bering Sea, the game drops anchor on absurdly simplified versions of mundane harvesting duties without a scrap of the excitement and drama found in the award winning Discovery Channel series on which it is based. Worse yet, the visuals feel more than a decade old, the motion controls for the Wii and PlayStation 3 fall well short of their potential, and the endless repetition of four minigames quickly sinks any chance of excitement.       It's hardly the fault of the source material. Now nearing its seventh season, The Deadliest Catch is an intensely human reality show chronicling the hazardous lives of crabbers stationed on Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands. Viewers tune in by the millions to see fortunes and friendships made and lost, and they see the treacherous Bering Sea erupt into life-threatening chaos. This game, however, gives you none of that chaos. Instead, it abandons the salty flavor of the series in favor of a dull and persistent narrator. That decision alone sucks the soul out of the game, and it's regrettable that one of the crusty captains from the TV series wasn't hired for the job.    The graphics are dreadfully outdated and, if anything, a step backward from those in the previous Deadliest Catch game. The only time you ever see your crew members face-to-face is when you're hiring them or checking their fatigue in Cabin mode, and even then, they're just publicity stills with stat sheets. Only while casting or retrieving your pots do you see a crew member on the ship at all, and then it's only the back of the same slicker-sporting nobody who looks out at the ocean with all the vigor of a barnacle. Crew members thus resemble mere statistics with familiar names from the series slapped on them for good measure. As captain, you can hire up to five of them based on their varying skills at setting or retrieving pots or sorting, patching, and offloading, but every task is simple enough that their strengths and weaknesses never really become an issue. If you allow them a bit of rest after a series of jobs, your boat will usually perform at top capacity. More experienced crew members demand a greater share of the season's profits and are generally worth their cost in stamina alone, but you can also improve your weaker crew members by using them to perform tasks in their weak areas. It's a good system in theory, but the game never becomes difficult enough to definitively demand one crew member over another.     The eight campaigns in Sea of Chaos rely on mind-numbing repetition with only occasional stabs at variety. In one of the more exciting endeavors, you face off against the famed Captain Sig Hansen in a race to see who can bring in the biggest haul. Another campaign weakly follows the events of the show's fourth season by comparing your hauls to the real numbers achieved by the boats in the series. The longest mission spans an entire career across six seasons, during which you rise from obscurity and earn your fortune. These campaigns all start with selecting a crew and a customizable boat based on those found on the show. You then use the map to sail to one of several untapped fishing locations, although you usually won't know how many crabs are available without fishing there yourself. Some strategy thus springs from casting only a few pots at first to test the waters and avoiding spots on the maps where competitors are congregating. Also, in one of the few nods to the drama of the series, you can radio familiar captains from the show to ask about successful hauls at other locations and report your own findings for better results and allegiances.      Beyond these minor map-based strategies, success is based on mastering four simple minigames that lose their fragile charm not long after the lengthy tutorial. In the first, you set pots by steering your ship across gold or silver rings on the water, each marked with the number of pots that can be placed there. Time matters here (as it does for all the minigames), as do bonuses for successfully performing several actions in a row. As befits a largish seafaring vessel, steering is difficult with a gamepad, although the comparatively intuitive Wii and PlayStation Move motion controls improve the experience significantly. The same is true for the next minigame, which requires you to pull your pots from the water by casting lines off the side of the boat (preferably after waiting for 48 in-game hours) and catching buoys as they rush past. Because other ships have buoys in the water as well, you need to time your catches so you don't pick up the wrong pots. While there's nothing wrong with using the analog sticks to cast the line on the gamepads, the experience of physically flicking out the line with the Wii or Move and tugging it back is much more satisfying. Occasionally, you have to deal with heavy winds, but even at their worst, you can easily see the buoys float by you.    Curiously, though, the gamepads far outshine the motion controllers once you start sorting your catch. In this minigame, crabs are piled onto a sorting table (which may rock with the boat in bad weather) where you toss the rejects to the left and the crabs bound for Red Lobster to the right. A simple click of an action button and a flick of the analog sticks suffices for tossing the crabs on the gamepads, but poor controls on the Wii or the Move render these sequences almost unplayable. Picking up the proper crab is slightly more difficult with the optional motion controls, and properly flicking a crab from one side to the other seems based more on luck than skill. Once you return to port, you off-load your crabs by tossing them across a room and into a moving wire bucket while avoiding a pointlessly swinging hook. This would have been a chance for the motion controls to shine; instead, the task merely requires you to move your arms back and forth in sync with the target and release your crab when appropriate.    These four games form the core of every mission, but occasionally two other games will surface without warning. In one, you rescue drowning crewmembers in a reskinned version of the pot-retrieval game; in another, you patch broken equipment through a rewiring minigame reminiscent of BioShock's hacking sequences. These should provide a welcome respite from the endless cycle of pot setting and retrieval, but the rescue mission is too familiar and the patching game moves too slowly to leave much of an impact.       Sea of Chaos features a decent local multiplayer mode for up to eight players in which you try to amass the largest haul of crab using six different options, such as a rickety old ship, overly stormy seas, and uncharted crabbing maps. Unlike the main campaign modes, which can stretch on for six seasons, these customizable tournaments are limited to a comparatively short span of up to eight in-game days. There's no online or split-screen modes (which means you have to watch your opponent play each lengthy turn), but the gameplay structure in Sea of Chaos is better suited to the tournament mode's save-and-play mechanic than real-time matches against other players. All the same, even diehard fans may find their money better spent on boxed sets of the television series instead of this second missed opportunity. Though it sells for slightly less than full price, Sea of Chaos is simply far too expensive for the bland and tedious experience it offers.  
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399,MotionSports ,3.5," With deeply flawed motion controls and a number of other issues, MotionSports fumbles all its potential.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/5/6/7/78289-156567.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/motionsports-review/1900-6284211/,neg,"
  Kinect owners looking for a sports-themed assortment of minigames will find that there's more than one game in town. MotionSports' more realistic visuals may suggest that it offers a more realistic and rewarding sports experience than Kinect Sports, but this isn't the case at all. On the contrary, infuriating controls, unreasonable difficulty, and a lack of clear instruction and feedback make going for the gold in most of these events only slightly more enjoyable than taking a jab to the face from a heavyweight champ.     Your goal in MotionSports is to take the world by storm by rising from local athlete to international superstar as you compete in minigames based on six sports. Throughout your career, the same commentator stalks you everywhere, covering your every event. His comments range from wildly enthusiastic (""That is just some freakin' fabulous stuff right there!"") to just plain strange (""The kind of girl you can take out with your friends and she'll actually enjoy it""), but he does liven up the audio presentation a bit. Between your competitions, you see a city scene with photos of you plastered on billboards, but any sense you may get of being a superstar is sapped by the often hilarious placement of your image. One billboard might show just your torso; another may show part of your head but get cut off just above your chin. Clearly, your MotionSports athlete needs to hire a new agent.    The best sport among MotionSports' six offerings is hang gliding. It's set apart from the other five events by very simple, responsive controls that leave no room for ambiguity--you know exactly what you're supposed to do and how to do it. You hold out your arms as if grasping the glider bar, lowering your left arm to turn left and your right arm to turn right. Soaring through either a natural landscape with majestic rock formations or the concrete canyons of a quiet city, you must pass through rings on your way to the target landing zone, descending to maintain speed and using columns of rising air to lift you up. Finding the right balance between speed and altitude feels good, and it's rewarding to hit that sweet spot where you're gliding quickly and you approach the landing zone at an ideal trajectory to score a bull's-eye. The way the glider reacts to the subtle movements of your arms makes it feel like an extension of yourself, and the beautiful and peaceful locations make gliding a serene little escape.    But that's where the good news ends. Football is represented, but don't expect to play full games on the gridiron. Instead, you participate in a series of isolated training exercises. You start with vertical and lateral runs, where you're responsible for ducking, jumping, and sidestepping obstacles as the onscreen athlete runs up the field at a steady pace. Then, in a running back challenge, you use these same skills to evade attackers as you charge for the end zone. Succeed as a running back, and you may get a shot at being a quarterback. In these simple challenges, you look for a receiver--there's just one, and he's designated with an icon--and you make a throwing motion in his direction. That's all there is to being a star quarterback in MotionSports.    Dancing like a butterfly and stinging like a bee is not an option.   The movements you need to make in boxing are clear enough, but they often don't work like they should. You fight in first person, with your punches represented as colorful whooshes in the air. You can throw jabs, hooks, and uppercuts, but these don't happen in real-time response to your movements (there's no point in throwing a rapid flurry of jabs, for instance, because your fighter just isn't capable of doing so), and often they don't happen at all, either because your movements aren't recognized or because your opponent's canned animations don't allow him to be interrupted by a punch at such an inconvenient moment. In addition, boxing is unreasonably difficult. Even your second opponent is extremely tough to defeat, and with no suggestions on how to improve your performance in the squared circle, you'll quickly want to throw in the towel. You can box head-to-head with a friend, but the split-screen presentation makes what's happening during the bout unclear. It's difficult to tell who's hitting whom, and when punched, your boxer's head often flies back so that you can't see anything.    In soccer challenges, you play as either a penalty taker or a goalie. As a goalie, you move your arms in the direction you think the ball is going to go. The goalie's movement is delayed until the final instant, making these shots look dramatic but creating a sense of detachment between you and the action. Making matters worse, your movements are often misinterpreted. For instance, anticipating a low kick, you might move your arms down and to the left, only to see your goalie leap clean over the ball. This imprecision and the lack of anything resembling one-to-one responsiveness really take the fun out of goalkeeping. Kicking from close range works reasonably well when the only thing between you and victory is a goalie, but some challenges introduce special conditions. For example, a challenge in which you need to kick the ball into small moving targets demands remarkable accuracy if you're going to earn high marks, but the lack of clear communication from the game about how to kick high or low makes being that accurate more difficult than it should be.    According to MotionSports, being a running back is all about jumping over and ducking under chargers who telegraph their movements.   Horseback riding and skiing round out this collection. Horseback riding is somewhat broken. You shake the reins to make your horse gallop, but sometimes when the starting gate opens, your jockey is rapidly shaking the reins as you make the indicated movement, yet your horse just stands there, ignoring your commands. Even when your horse is responsive, moving your arms up and down quickly in a rein-shaking motion is tiresome. Skiing works better. You push with your ski poles to gain momentum, lean your weight from side to side to turn, and crouch to gain speed, but staying on course and maintaining a competitive speed is too difficult to make hitting the slopes enjoyable for all but the most dedicated players.    Most events can be played by up to four players, each taking turns, but this does nothing to improve the experience. In addition to all its other problems, MotionSports is hampered by frequent, sometimes staggeringly long load times, so you need to be patient as you wait for your next opportunity to get frustrated by control woes and difficulty issues. The subtle precision and soothing quiet of hang gliding offer some serene pleasure, but the other events are plagued with far too many flaws to make MotionSports tolerable. This isn't the sports-themed collection for the Kinect that you should be playing.  
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400,Street Fighter IV ,9," Robust and challenging single-player modes, strong online multiplayer, and gorgeous visuals make this a must-have for any fighter fan.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426905-2219071-box_sf4.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/street-fighter-iv-review/1900-6204783/,pos,"
  It's obvious that each iteration of the long-running Street Fighter series has been carefully tuned and tweaked to the finest degree, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Street Fighter IV. The lessons learned in the franchise's 20-plus years have been used to prune back the core fighting experience to create something truly special. Street Fighter IV isn't a success simply because it's one of the most technically complex 2D fighters ever made, it's a success because it's also wrapped inside a layer of absolute accessibility. Never has the old ""A minute to learn, a lifetime to master"" adage been truer than it is here.   Six new characters join the Street Fighter IV roster, all with their own unique backstories and abilities.   The Street Fighter fundamentals have remained consistent over the years; your job is to knock out the other guy or gal. All 12 of the classic world warriors--Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, E. Honda, Zangief, Guile, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison--are back and playable from the outset, and they're joined by six brand-new and diverse characters. Abel, a mixed martial arts grapple-style character; Crimson Viper a female fighter with sweeping, airborne fire attacks; Rufus, a rotund fighter whose body makes him a bit of a sight gag despite his deceptive speed; and El Fuerte, a pro wrestler whose rushes and air throws make him a slippery foe. Ryu and Ken's sensei, Gouken, also makes his playable-character debut in Street Fighter IV. Naturally, he didn't teach the boys everything he knows, so when they meet again he has a few tricks up his sleeves, including a horizontal and vertical fireball EX move. The game's new end boss, Seth, fills the last spot and joins the list once you've unlocked everyone else. Character balance is absolutely spot-on across the entire roster, and as a result, you should never feel that you can't compete simply because you've chosen one character over another.    You'll need to finish the game multiple times and in special ways to unlock the complete character list. Doing so will make fan favourites Cammy, Sakura, Akuma, Fei Long, Rose, Gen, and Dan playable. Like previous games in the series, Street Fighter IV lets you perform powerful super combos, but it has removed air blocking and parrying completely. Developers Capcom and Dimps have added a completely new gameplay system: focus attacks, a new multipurpose offensive and defensive ability that can be charged to one of three levels by pressing and holding the medium punch and kick buttons simultaneously. There's no onscreen bar to show how charged your attack is, so you'll need to rely on the progressively darkening ink splashes surrounding your character model. Each character features a unique focus animation, so you shouldn't have any trouble working it out after a few rounds with each. Focus attacks make you vulnerable to damage because you need to be standing still to charge them (though you can dash forward or backward to cancel them), but the trade-off is that you'll absorb the first hit without the penalty of an animation reset, allowing for an instant counterattack if you land it. They can also act as armour-breaking moves, shutting down more-powerful attacks. Successfully landing a fully charged focus attack will deal damage and crumple your opponent to the ground, giving you the chance to follow up with an unblockable hit as he or she falls.     The new mechanic also lets you use part of your EX power-meter charge to exit animations early and chain bigger combos together. They take a little getting used to and some serious thumb dexterity, but once they're mastered, you can perform moves such as dragon-punch stalls directly into super moves or use them to juggle players in midair with multiple hits. Your revenge meter builds as you take damage, whereas the EX meter fills as you dish it out. EX power rolls over to the next round, but revenge must be built from scratch each time. This becomes a crucial risk-versus-reward mechanic. Do you take hits to build revenge and power up an ultra attack, or do you deal damage to burn your EX on improved moves, cancels, or save it for a super finisher? The flexibility of this system means that you're free to play according to your strengths and style. But just like reversals, EX power-ups, and ultra combo attacks, focus attacks serve to mix up the experience only for veteran players; such is the game's balance that they have never been required to win a match, and they act more as an additional weapon in the arsenal of a skilled player. They're waiting for you when you want to take a step up and learn how they work, but well-timed basic punches and kicks are just as effective.    Classic world warriors make a return with gorgeous new character models.   The single-player mode is robust and has a lot to offer across several components. Arcade mode pits you against a set number of fights from your unlocked-character roster and culminates in a showdown with Seth. Along the way to your goal, you'll always encounter a rival fight. These are regular fights accompanied by an in-engine exchange with your opponent. They're a welcome mix-up but often add nothing to the character's storyline because some fighters clearly don't even know why they hate one another. Each character's adventure is bookended by an anime-style cinematic movies that explain his or her motivations for attending the tournament. They're quite short and keep story to an absolute minimum, but they get the message across and do a reasonable-enough job of filling in the gaps. Given the amount of additional content shoehorned into this game, we were slightly disappointed to find that no bonus levels have been included, especially since we had high hopes of reliving our car and barrel smashing from Street Fighter II.     Regardless of whether you're down with busting out a tatsumaki senpukyaku at will or think it's some kind of egg-noodle dish, there's a difficulty mode here for you. Eight levels ranging from very easy to hardest are available, so you're sure to find one appropriate for your skill level. That said, even at the gentler difficulties, Street Fighter IV is no cakewalk because your opponents will occasionally mix things up with surprise super and ultra combos. First-timers will have no trouble picking up, playing, and learning as they go. Playing on the medium or above difficulty will also enable score tracking, letting you submit and compare to other players on the game's online leaderboards.      Street Fighter IV's training mode will challenge even experienced brawlers to improve. Given that SFIV straddles the line between classic SFII and SFIII gameplay, there's bound to be some confusion about which of your old mainstay combos work and the timing that you'll need to pull them off. The training mode is an excellent resource and is one of the biggest jewels in the SFIV crown. Once you've chosen your character and your sparring partner, you'll be able to pose them in either a standing, crouching, or jumping position, toggle CPU control (and adjust its intensity), or give player two control of the action. There's even the ability to switch to your opponent's character, record up to 10 seconds of custom moves, and loop their replay. It's a great way to practice your evasion, attack timing, and counters without requiring another player or needing to search for online games. As you'd expect, there are plenty of switches to fiddle with here, including changing your target's block mode, stun frequency, ultra and super power-bar start, and regeneration levels. Live attack data can be enabled to show how much damage your moves are dealing, whereas input display can show you which way you're pushing the sticks and mashing the buttons.     A built-in move list is available through the menu and details all of your characters' skills, saving you the hassle of fumbling around for the manual when you can't remember if it's a double-quarter-forward fireball with a kick or a punch, or finding out which moves have EX variants or armour-breaking properties. Though training modes aren't new, the amount of control here will have a genuine impact on your game, and can be used to pinpoint, and subsequently correct, your play shortcomings.   Super and ultra combo finishing moves really rub it in your opponent's face with drawn-out, flashy animations.   Training mode aside, one of the single best features of Street Fighter IV is the Challenge mode, which is made up of several sub-modes. Old faithfuls such as Time Attack and Survival mode make an appearance and see you completing fight after fight to best your rival before the timer runs out or you empty your vitality bar. The new addition to Challenge mode is Trial mode, a multitiered training tool that will teach you not only how to perform moves, but also how to string them together to best deal damage. Although the Training mode gives you the full arsenal and space to try it out, in Trial mode you'll need to perform a specific manoeuvre or combo to continue. The five normal difficulty levels cover basic character-specific moves such as dragon punches, charge moves, and throws, but they get significantly tougher as you progress to cover specials, canceling attacks with focus, and stringing multipart combinations together. If you can get through these and feel up to the challenge, there are an extra five levels of bone-crushing general-purpose moves designed to help you improve your competitive play.     Street Fighter IV supports both online and offline multiplayer modes. In offline you'll be able to go head-to-head with a second player using your unlocked characters. Online you'll be given the choice of either friendly Player matches or Ranked games. Winning a ranked match awards you with battle points, which are used to both show off your prowess and help with the matchmaking process, though you can search for games beyond your skill level. Stat tracking will let you see your competitor's win-to-loss ratio for the session. And if you're after the true arcade experience, you can toggle online competitive challenge mode on and off to work with single-player. Just as you would expect in an arcade, if you're battling the CPU and someone issues a challenge, your game will pause and you'll automatically accept the invitation. Once the game has finished and you leave the multiplayer lobby, you'll restart your offline game from where you were. You can set it to either player or ranked matches as per your preference. We'd recommend leaving it off if you're keen to just play through arcade matches, given that we received back-to-back invites while reviewing. We played online against opponents with both strong and weak connections, and even at slightly less than full connection strength, you'll receive an offline-like, seamless fighting experience. Poorer connections are more akin to a slide show, although we did manage to find games with supposedly poor connections that played quite well. There's also no online tournament mode to be found here, a surprising omission given its inclusion in the downloadable game Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.     Though it was unavailable for us to test at time of review, Capcom has confirmed that at some time postlaunch a free download dubbed the Championship Mode Expansion Pack will be released and will let you record, upload, and download player match videos. The patch will also add three more point systems--Championship, Tournament, and Grade points--and improve matchmaking for beginner and mid-level players. We're hoping that the patch also addresses players who leave games early to avoid point loss, considering that currently there's no penalty for bailing if it looks like you're going to lose. Collectors also have plenty of work ahead of them, with coloured outfit variations, taunts, medals, icons, and text tags being rewarded for completing online and offline challenges. These can be assigned to your online profile and are unlocked by finishing games with certain percentages of your vitality bar remaining, dishing out perfect victories, or successfully performing reversals.     Street Fighter IV's visual presentation is outstanding. The art style appears a lot more adult this time around, swapping the bright Saturday-morning kids' cartoon looks of previous games for large, menacing characters with bulging muscles and environments with more muted colour palettes. The game's pseudo-cel-shaded character-art style uses thick black borders and splattered ink to great effect, while fast, fluid animation sees your favourite fighters dance across the screen with grace. Long hair flows and trails, facial expressions contort and grimace as you deal blows, and eyes bulge as opponents see an ultra attack successfully executed. We observed a few minor character-model clipping errors during play, such as legs passing through each other and the odd missed sweep when we were sure that we should have landed a hit, but these are small quibbles because they appeared few and far between. Battle environments are a mix of old and new, reinventing favourites such as Guile's airbase tarmac (complete with destructible plane wings), Blanka's jungle walkways, and Chun-Li's marketplace alleyway. New environments include a secret science laboratory, a highway underpass, a classic martial-arts dojo, and the rim of an active volcano.     Audio is a particular high point in SFIV, and though the J-pop soundtrack and cheesy intro theme will be driven into your head within minutes, it's also worth mentioning the subtle environmental effects that go otherwise unheard in the heat of battle. The cheers of crowds, the rattle of old trains, and the barking of dogs in alleys all help create a genuine sense of immersion. Purists are even given the option to choose between Japanese and English voice-overs during cutscenes and as characters enter the ring.    Blotchy ink splashes and thick character outlines are used to give the game an incredibly stylish look.   From our extensive play on both platforms, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game appear identical both in terms of visuals and performance. Even during the most frenetic battles, the frame rate remained solid. Both versions of SFIV offer an optional hard-drive installation, and though it lowered load times from about 30 seconds per game to the 10-second mark on the PlayStation 3, on the Xbox 360 it had no tangible effect, presumably because those loads are already around 10 seconds per match. Xbox 360 analog sticks seemed slightly easier to perform ultra moves with, though the Microsoft controller's D pad left plenty to be desired. By contrast, the DualShock 3 analogs felt slightly sluggish, but the D pad made double fireballs and ultra combos easy. Your best bet, of course, is to invest in a good arcade stick or one of the controllers designed specifically for this game.    Street Fighter IV will welcome you with open arms, whether you're a lapsed fan concerned that you've been out of the loop for too long or you're dipping your toes for the first time. Amazing presentation, intricate and enjoyable fighting gameplay, and long-term appeal with online play make this a must-have. Street Fighter IV is undoubtedly one of the finest examples of the fighting genre in this generation.   


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401,Street Fighter IV ,9," Robust and challenging single-player modes, strong online multiplayer, and gorgeous visuals make this a must-have for any fighter fan.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426905-2219071-box_sf4.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/street-fighter-iv-review/1900-6213576/,pos,"
  It's obvious that each iteration of the long-running Street Fighter series has been carefully tuned and tweaked to the finest degree, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Street Fighter IV. The lessons learned in the franchise's 20-plus years have been used to prune back the core fighting experience to create something truly special.Street Fighter IV is a resounding success not only because it's one of the most technically complex 2D fighters ever made, but also because it's also wrapped inside a layer of absolute accessibility. Never has the old ""A minute to learn, a lifetime to master"" adage been truer than it is here.   Three new shader effects give the game a fresh new look, though they're only minor improvements on the already-gorgeous graphics.   The Street Fighter fundamentals have remained consistent over the years; your job is to knock out the other guy or gal. All 12 of the classic world warriors--Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, E. Honda, Zangief, Guile, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison--are back and playable from the outset, and they're joined by six brand-new and diverse characters. Abel, a mixed martial arts grapple-style character; Crimson Viper a female fighter with sweeping, airborne fire attacks; Rufus, a rotund fighter whose body makes him a bit of a sight gag despite his deceptive speed; and El Fuerte, a pro wrestler whose rushes and air throws make him a slippery foe. Ryu and Ken's sensei, Gouken, also makes his playable-character debut in Street Fighter IV. Naturally, he didn't teach the boys everything he knows, so when they meet again he has a few tricks up his sleeves, including a horizontal and vertical fireball EX move. The game's new end boss, Seth, fills the last spot and joins the list once you've unlocked everyone else. Character balance is spot-on across the roster, and as a result, you should never feel that you can't compete simply because you've chosen one character over another.     You'll need to finish the game multiple times and in special ways to unlock the complete character list. Doing so will make fan favourites Cammy, Sakura, Akuma, Fei Long, Rose, Gen, and Dan playable. Like previous games in the series, Street Fighter IV lets you perform powerful super combos, but it has removed air blocking and parrying completely. Developers Capcom and Dimps have added a completely new gameplay system: focus attacks, a new multipurpose offensive and defensive ability that can be charged to one of three levels by pressing and holding the medium punch and kick buttons simultaneously. There's no onscreen bar to show how charged your attack is, so you'll need to rely on the progressively darkening ink splashes surrounding your character model. Each character features a unique focus animation, so you shouldn't have any trouble working it out after a few rounds with each. Focus attacks make you vulnerable to damage because you need to be standing still to charge them (though you can dash forward or backward to cancel them), but the trade-off is that you'll absorb the first hit without the penalty of an animation reset, allowing for an instant counterattack if you land it. They can also act as armour-breaking moves, shutting down more-powerful attacks. Successfully landing a fully charged focus attack will deal damage and crumple your opponent to the ground, giving you the chance to follow up with an unblockable hit as he or she falls.     The new mechanic also lets you use part of your EX power-meter charge to exit animations early and chain bigger combos together. They take a little getting used to and some serious thumb dexterity, but once they're mastered, you can perform moves such as dragon-punch stalls directly into super moves or use them to juggle players in midair with multiple hits. Your revenge meter builds as you take damage, whereas the EX meter fills as you dish it out. EX power rolls over to the next round, but revenge must be built from scratch each time. This becomes a crucial risk-versus-reward mechanic. Do you take hits to build revenge and power up an ultra attack, or do you deal damage to burn your EX on improved moves, cancels, or save it for a super finisher? The flexibility of this system means that you're free to play according to your strengths and style. But just like reversals, EX power-ups, and ultra combo attacks, focus attacks serve to mix up the experience only for veteran players; such is the game's balance that they have never been required to win a match, and they act more as an additional weapon in the arsenal of a skilled player. They're waiting for you when you want to take a step up and learn how they work, but well-timed basic punches and kicks are just as effective.    Championship mode pits you against similar skill-level online fighters in a pseudo tournament setting.   The single-player mode is robust and has a lot to offer across several components. Arcade mode pits you against a set number of fighters from your unlocked-character roster and culminates in a showdown with Seth. Along the way to your goal, you'll always encounter a rival fight. These are regular fights accompanied by an in-engine exchange with your opponent. They're a welcome mix-up but often add nothing to the character's storyline because some fighters clearly don't even know why they hate one another. Each character's adventure is bookended by an anime-style cinematic movie that explains his or her motivations for attending the tournament. They're quite short and keep story to an absolute minimum, but they get the message across and do a reasonable-enough job of filling in the gaps. Given the amount of additional content shoehorned into this game, we were slightly disappointed to find that no bonus levels have been included, especially since we had high hopes of reliving our car and barrel smashing from Street Fighter II.    Regardless of whether you're down with busting out a tatsumaki senpukyaku at will or think it's some kind of egg-noodle dish, there's a difficulty mode here for you. Eight levels ranging from very easy to hardest are available, so you're sure to find one appropriate for your skill level. That said, even at the gentler difficulties, Street Fighter IV is no cakewalk because your opponents will occasionally mix things up with surprise super and ultra combos. First-timers will have no trouble picking up, playing, and learning as they go. Playing on the medium or above difficulty will also enable score tracking, letting you submit and compare to other players on the game's online leaderboards.      Street Fighter IV's training mode will challenge even experienced brawlers to improve. Given that SFIV straddles the line between classic SFII and SFIII gameplay, there's bound to be some confusion about which of your old mainstay combos work and the timing that you'll need to pull them off. The training mode is an excellent resource and is one of the biggest jewels in the SFIV crown. Once you've chosen your character and your sparring partner, you'll be able to pose them in various positions, toggle CPU control (and adjust its intensity), or give player two control of the action. There's even the ability to switch to your opponent's character, record up to 10 seconds of custom moves, and loop their replay. It's a great way to practice your evasion, attack timing, and counters without requiring another player or needing to search for online games. There are plenty of switches to fiddle with here, including changing your target's block mode, stun frequency, ultra and super power-bar start, and regeneration levels. Live attack data can be enabled to show how much damage your moves are dealing, whereas input display can show you which way you're pushing the sticks and mashing the buttons.   You gonna pay for eating Rufus' danish!   Training mode aside, one of the single best features of Street Fighter IV is the Challenge mode, which is made up of several sub-modes. Old faithfuls such as Time Attack and Survival mode make an appearance and see you completing fight after fight to best your rival before the timer runs out or you empty your vitality bar. The new addition to Challenge mode is Trial mode, a multitiered training tool that will teach you not only how to perform moves, but also how to string them together to best deal damage. Although the Training mode gives you the full arsenal and space to try it out, in Trial mode you'll need to perform a specific manoeuvre or combo to continue. The five normal difficulty levels cover basic character-specific moves such as dragon punches, charge moves, and throws, but they get significantly tougher as you progress to cover specials, cancelling attacks with focus, and stringing multipart combinations together. If you can get through these and feel up to the challenge, there are an extra five levels of bone-crushing general-purpose moves designed to help you improve your competitive play.    Street Fighter IV supports both online and offline multiplayer modes, though cross-platform play with consoles is not available. In offline play, you'll be able to go head-to-head with a second player using your unlocked characters. Online is handled through the Games For Windows LIVE service and registers and runs without a hitch. For matches you'll be given the choice between friendly player matches, ranked games, or Championship mode. Winning ranked matches awards you battle points, which are used to both show off your prowess and help with the matchmaking process. Patched in after the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Street Fighter IV shipped (and also available on those platforms), Championship mode adds online play with a tournament-style knockout system. The ranking system means you'll only fight against players of roughly the same skill level as you accrue points and progress through a mock round system on the way to a final showdown.    If you're after the true arcade experience, you can toggle online competitive challenge mode on and off to work with single-player. Just as you would expect in an arcade, if you're battling the CPU and someone issues a challenge, your game will pause and you'll automatically accept the invitation. Once the game has finished and you leave the multiplayer lobby, you'll restart your offline game where you were. You can set it to Player, Ranked or Championship matches as per your preference. We played online against opponents with both strong and weak connections, and even at slightly less than full connection strength, you'll receive an offline-like, seamless fighting experience. Poorer connections are more akin to a slide show, although we did manage to find games with supposedly poor connections that played quite well.    Street Fighter IV's visual presentation is outstanding. The art style appears a lot more adult this time around, swapping the bright Saturday-morning kids' cartoon looks of previous games for large, menacing characters with bulging muscles and environments with more muted colour palettes. The game's pseudo-cel-shaded character-art style uses thick black borders and splattered ink to great effect, while fast, fluid animation sees your favourite fighters dance across the screen with grace. Long hair flows and trails, facial expressions contort and grimace as you deal blows, and eyes bulge as opponents see an ultra attack successfully executed. We observed a few minor character-model clipping errors during play, such as legs passing through each other and the odd missed sweep when we were sure that we should have landed a hit, but these are small quibbles because they appeared few and far between. Battle environments are a mix of old and new, reinventing favourites such as Guile's airbase tarmac (complete with destructible plane wings), Blanka's jungle walkways, and Chun-Li's marketplace alleyway. New environments include a secret science laboratory, a highway underpass, a classic martial-arts dojo, and the rim of an active volcano.    Dhalsim's flames aren't nearly as frightening when you're fighting alongside a lava flow.   The PC version of SFIV manages to ratchet up the already-gorgeous visuals a couple of notches over its console counterparts by offering resolutions up to 1920x1200, as well as selectable shader and antialiasing options to suit your PC's capabilities. Three new ""extra touch"" visuals--ink, watercolour, and posterization--add visual effects to your character and the environment. This includes the ability to add thicker borders, though it's purely cosmetic and doesn't alter gameplay. These settings aside, the visuals are almost indistinguishable from those on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, and the frame rate is solid even during the most frenetic battles.    Audio is a particular high point in SFIV, and though the J-pop soundtrack and cheesy intro theme will be driven into your head within minutes, it's also worth mentioning the subtle environmental effects that go otherwise unheard in the heat of battle. The cheers of crowds, the rattle of old trains, and the barking of dogs in alleys all help create a genuine sense of immersion. Purists are even given the option to choose between Japanese and English voice-overs during cutscenes and as characters enter the ring.     Unsurprisingly, the PC game includes support for Microsoft's Xbox 360 controllers and handles identically to its console brethren. The analog sticks are easy to use for performing ultra moves, though the Microsoft controller's D pad leaves plenty to be desired. Keyboard play or a mixture of keyboard and pad are supported, and while serviceable in a pinch, it's certainly not our preference for serious play. Button layouts for pad and keyboard can both be mapped to your tastes. Your best bet, of course, is to invest in a good arcade stick or one of the controllers designed specifically for this game. While not available in all territories, bundles with gamepads and a copy of the game are available from many retailers.    Street Fighter IV will welcome you with open arms, whether you're a lapsed fan concerned that you've been out of the loop for too long or you're dipping your toes for the first time. Amazing presentation, intricate and enjoyable fighting gameplay, and long-term appeal with online play make this a must-have. Street Fighter IV is undoubtedly one of the finest examples of the fighting genre in this generation.  
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402,God of War III ,9, Exhilarating combat and an imposing sense of scale provide a fitting end to Kratos' saga.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2911873-image%20%281%29.jpeg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/god-of-war-iii-review/1900-6253019/,pos,"
  After slicing a rampaging Minotaur repeatedly with your trusty Blades of Exile, you finally knock the exhausted beast down, leaving it dazed and disoriented from your virtuosic display of hatred-fueled combat. As the Minotaur writhes on the ground, badly wounded  but still not ready to succumb to death’s waiting embrace, you sprint over and take hold of its piercing horns. With muscle-tearing effort, you grapple with the monster, twisting its neck as it desperately tries to break free of your hold. A horrific snap echoes across the room: You have won the fight. His limp body falls pitifully to the ground, forgotten as you run off to your next conquest. God of War III relishes death like few other games, glorifying the downfall of mythical beasts, rock-solid Titans, and not-quite-immortal gods in grotesque and satisfying fashion. The visceral combat and overwhelming sense of scale that have become the hallmarks of this brutal franchise have been pushed further than ever before in God of War III, creating an experience so focused and explosively fun that it's hard to put down, and even harder to forget.   A Titan can't look away from a good fight, either.   Kratos has serious daddy issues. After being momentarily killed by his father, Zeus, at the beginning of God of War II, Kratos has spent every waking hour trying to return the favor. His quest for vengeance is unwavering. The majority of the cutscenes are centered on angry exchanges between Kratos and someone who dares oppose him, and end with an irreversible resolution. The motivation that pushes Kratos forward is easy to understand, but the repetition of his uncanny fury dulls the impact after a while. It's hard to relate to his actions after he gruesomely disposes of yet another mythical opponent with the same wicked scowl plastered on his face. For much of the game, the story hits just this one note. But things open up late in the quest, giving the game the heart it so desperately needs. When Kratos reveals a side beyond violent retribution, it makes his character more empathetic and gives the story much more weight. Freed from its overreliance on cold-blooded vengeance, Kratos' story becomes powerful and moving in unexpected ways, peaking in a thrilling conclusion that successfully touches on many different emotions and provides closure for this epic tale.     God of War III begins immediately after the events that conclude its predecessor. Kratos stands on the shoulder of Gaia, urging her and her fellow Titans to climb Mount Olympus and strike down the gods once and for all. This incredible scene follows the trend set by the previous games in the series, kicking off your journey with a jaw-dropping experience that will immediately suck you into this epic adventure. The defining characteristic of your plight as you climb this sacred mountain is a breathtaking sense of scale. The Titans you are traveling with are gigantic. Kratos is but a mere speck on their colossal bodies, and the camera zooms and pans so you can fully appreciate the size disparity of these reluctant allies. The ground you run across is part of a living creature, flexing and swaying as you dispatch the enemies who dare stand in your way. The game seamlessly shifts from a bird's-eye view of this epic climb to an extreme close-up of Kratos in combat, and it's simply stunning that there are no dropped frames or other graphical oddities to lessen this effect. The feeling that you're riding a towering giant is conveyed brilliantly, and the game only gets better from there.    The culmination of this fantastic sequence is one of the most violent deaths ever seen in the series. Kratos is no stranger to blood, but the stunning visuals in God of War III make his penchant for beheadings and disembowelments so much more gruesome. By initiating a quick-time event on a wounded foe, you can rip out the entrails of a centaur, de-wing a harpy, and tear the eyeball from a Cyclops, complete with optic-nerve snapping. Some of these death animations have been recycled from previous games in the series, but seeing them re-created here in meticulous detail will elicit equal doses of nausea and sadistic joy. The only downside to these horrific death sequences is that there is only one way to mutilate each type of enemy, even though you have four weapons in your arsenal. So while it is amazing to slit a gorgon's neck the first time, it loses its impact after a dozen or so identical viewings. Even with the repetition, the brutality of combat is one of the most satisfying aspects of God of War III.    Meanwhile, the God of Peace climbs up her other shoulder.   Of course, you can’t finish your enemies off in style until you whittle down their health first. The combat in God of War III hasn't changed significantly from its predecessors, but new moves and a few control tweaks make it even more fun to slice up your enemies. It's no longer a problem when cowardly adversaries keep their distance from Kratos' whirring blades. The bow you acquire early on isn't tied to your magic meter anymore, making it a handy option when a lumbering Cyclops is using his deadly reach to his advantage. If you charge your shot first, you ignite the arrow, and keeping a few enemies alight while you whale away on closer foes is a sadistic distraction during large-scale battles. You can also latch on to enemies and propel yourself toward them with a shoulder charge, and this painful technique is instrumental in stringing together long combos. Planting yourself in the middle of a swarming mass of undead may seem like a bad idea, but you can just grab on to any grunt and carry him around the battlefield like a battering ram, smashing into other enemies until his mushy body loses its usefulness.     The most noticeable improvement to the combat is that your secondary weapons are now viable alternatives to the Blades of Exile. You unlock four unique tools of death by the end of the game, and though their basic move sets don't differ significantly, they feel so distinct that it's a blast to use them all. You can now switch between every weapon at the touch of a button, and it's incredibly satisfying to swap out your long-reaching Blades of Exile for bludgeoning cestuses and pound your enemies into a bloody pulp. The pain your enemies are feeling is communicated beautifully. Every hit you dole out feels as though an angry man-god is behind the action, and the bone-cracking impact makes it a joy just to hack and slash your way around the arena with malicious intent. Defense is also more fun this time around because countering not only provides a devastating retaliatory blow, but is far more consistent as well. The timing needed to deflect an attack is more forgiving now, so luring your enemies into attempting the first swing and then slamming them back in the face is always fun. Ultraprecise controls provide the perfect backbone for your actions. Whether you're peppering a harpy with arrows, deftly rolling away from a fire-breathing Cerberus, or countering a sword strike from an undead skeleton, every one of your actions is responsive and entertaining.     The combat comes to a head in a series of intense boss battles. Neither gods nor Titans are safe from Kratos' wrath, and plunging your sword into divine flesh is a savage delight. Every boss you encounter requires a different tactic, forcing you to learn their patterns on the fly to strike them down before they get the better of you. The more craven of your colossal foes will call forth additional support to help even the odds a bit, but others are content to fight you one-on-one, and these prove to be the most difficult duels. Matching blows with a Greek god is no easy task, and your life will likely be stripped away once or twice before you figure out how to take them down. During turning points in battle, a quick-time prompt will command you to attack your oversized foe in a dazzling way, breaking up the battle with some well-earned brutality. These interludes do a great job of keeping fights diverse and interesting, urging you forward to see what heinous crime you'll commit next. At the conclusion of each of these battles, you are given a chance to finish your foes off in style, and these bloody moments are incredibly rewarding.   Helios better hope his neck is stronger than Kratos' hands.   God of War III isn't just about meting out barbaric vengeance, though. There are clever puzzles sprinkled among the dramatic battles for supremacy, and they do a good job of forcing your brain to shift thought patterns. Although you have to partake in a few requisite box-pushing puzzles, the majority thankfully do not rely on this tired game mechanic. One of the more interesting puzzles takes place in Hera's maze garden. Reaching the next section by normal means is impossible, but by using a magic stone, your perspective is skewed, causing pathways that were previously unconnected to momentarily attach. Wrapping your brain around how to create paths from this warped perspective takes a fair bit of thought, and finally making your way through this area is as satisfying as crushing the life from a siren. Puzzles in God of War III are neither as prevalent nor as difficult as those found in its predecessor. Because of this, the experience is much more streamlined now, placing the focus squarely on the explosive combat. The result is a slightly more predictable adventure, but the fights are full of enough raucous moments to almost make up for the lack of diversity.    God of War III embraces violence like few other games, but the brutal combat never feels overwhelming. There is a delicate balance between the grotesque combat and the more cerebral, slower-paced sections. This restraint adds a lot to the experience, making the brutality more affecting and the quiet stretches a welcome respite from the bloodshed. The ease with which the game shifts between these moods is impressive, seamlessly flowing from deicide to puzzle solving to peaceful exploration without stumbling. The epic scale is also used sparingly, but to great effect. You always have a sense that you are part of something larger even when the environment doesn't necessarily reveal the majesty all around you. Kratos finds himself in tight, cramped corridors, using every trick in his combat arsenal to survive. And when you finally break free from your confined state into the open air and see miles of freedom beyond you, and a towering Titan leering down from thousands of feet above you, the overwhelming scale carries more weight.   Two heads are better than one. The same can be said of blades.   Whether you're in a cramped cave or riding on the back of a furious Titan, the visuals in God of War III are stunning. The ease with which the camera zooms in and out during epic battles is jaw dropping, but it's the attention to detail that puts this game over the top. Kratos is animated with such painstaking care that it is striking at times. While riding atop a lassoed Cerberus, you can see Kratos' legs and arms flex with each step as he desperately tries to corral the wild beast, hanging on for dear life. The same care is given when you're swimming underwater, taking flight with Icarus wings, or ascending a flight of stairs, and it's a marvel to see how lifelike Kratos' movements are. This care is transferred to the creatures and gods you fight as well, making the battles feel more personal and the impact more painful. The lighting effects are equally stunning. Torches flicker realistically on surfaces and characters, creating an eerie effect. And these technical wonders are further enhanced by an artistic touch that gives every section of this game a unique look that is a joy to stare at. God of War III is simply gorgeous.     God of War III sticks to the strengths already established by its predecessors, but what it lacks in innovation it more than makes up for in execution. The combat is simple to pick up, but the added moves and weapons give it more depth than before, and the spectacular visuals make fights even more brutal. But God of War III is so much more than its satisfying combat. The imaginative visual design and moody classical score balance your quest for vengeance with artistic pleasures, and the well-crafted puzzles further tap into your cerebral vein. God of War III is a brilliantly paced, meticulously detailed adventure that thrills and satisfies until the very end.  


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403,Resistance 2 ,9," Resistance 2 is bigger, better, and broader--everything a stellar sequel should be.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/6/7/2219267-box_resist2.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/resistance-2-review/1900-6200653/,pos,"
  Almost two years after Resistance: Fall of Man gave PlayStation 3 owners their first great exclusive shooter, Resistance 2 has arrived bearing more great news. No, humanity hasn't gained an edge in its desperate fight against the alien Chimera (quite the opposite, in fact). The news is that Resistance 2 takes the grand apocalyptic setting and tight, fast-paced action of its predecessor and improves upon it in almost every way. Bigger battles, richer environments, and an outstanding new eight-player cooperative mode elevate Resistance 2 above almost every other shooter on the PS3.   Welcome to the bigs.   From the first moments of the single-player campaign, Resistance 2 proclaims its dedication to grandeur. As you crawl from the wreckage of your transport helicopter, you look up to see a sinister, towering machine laying waste to your surroundings, its shiny black bulk standing in stark relief to the smoky blue sky and green Nordic scrub. Environments (and enemies) like these, vividly colored and remarkably big, are prevalent throughout the campaign. Your journey will take you across North America, where you'll visit a fantastic variety of rural, suburban, urban, and alien landscapes. You'll see attention to detail in the plants under your feet, in the towering skyscrapers above your head, and everywhere in between. The scars of the Chimeran invasion clash dramatically against the technicolor mid-century American backdrop, setting a superb stage for exciting action.    And make no mistake, the action is the real star here. The protagonist, Nathan Hale, and his fellow soldiers are run-of-the-mill characters, and the functional story is a bit too vague to be interesting. Intel documents scattered about each level provide intriguing background and foreshadowing, but most of them are hidden away and require too much errant exploration to find. The only time you'll feel any emotional connection to the proceedings is when you stop to listen to the radio. The scattered monologues from radioman Henry Stillman provide a wrenching window into the despair of a nation overrun, and they're the lone narrative highlight.     Despite the lackluster story, Resistance 2's excellent single-player campaign is a thrilling roller coaster ride across dozens of varied locales, each infested with Chimera. Your horrible alien foes run the gamut from tiny chittering scorpions to fanged foot soldiers, from shielded two-story titans to lumbering forty-story leviathans. They come at you in waves of increasing size and intensity; they are quick, aggressive, and accurate, and dispatching them will take skill and persistence. Resistance 2 isn't an easy game, but that just makes your hard-fought victories sweeter.     To achieve these victories, you'll need to stay alive. You can fully recover your health by ducking out of the line of fire for a few seconds, a tactic you'll need to use often. While you usually aren't too far from a checkpoint, you're often far enough to make death very unappealing. This is particularly true during the massive boss battles and the large-scale conflicts that pit you against legions of increasingly nasty Chimera. These are the most exciting encounters in the game, and though the former are less challenging than the latter, there's nothing quite like squaring off against a beast the size of the Chrysler Building.    Hello! Can I interest you in our new eyeball replicating ointment? Side effects may include dizziness, disfiguration, and spontaneous dental trauma.   The 12 guns you wield throughout the campaign are also quite satisfying. Some old favorites have returned, like the workhorse M5A2 Carbine, and there are a few great additions, like the .44 Magnum that shoots bullets that double as remote-detonated explosives. Secondary attacks like this one are a feature on every gun, and they effectively double the destructive options at your disposal. Though the weapons don't feel particularly realistic, they are so uniquely deadly and fun to use that you'll hardly notice. You can only carry two guns at a time, but the game does a good job of making sure you have a chance to use them all. There are also a few different types of powerful grenades at your disposal (notably the fiery air-fuel and spiky hedgehog), and they round out your very effective and very gratifying arsenal.    While the campaign is a lengthy (about 10 hours) and satisfying endeavor, the online cooperative mode is what really sets Resistance 2 apart. In this mode, up to eight players fight their way through hordes of Chimera to accomplish a set of objectives. Each player must choose one of three specific classes, each with its own guns and special abilities. The Medic drains enemy health and passes it on to teammates, an essential function because no one can regenerate health. The Special Ops uses a battle rifle of sorts and is the only source of ammunition refills. The Soldier carries a gatling gun that can generate a protective shield, defending his teammates and shredding the Chimera simultaneously. This interdependency binds players together and creates a frantic, engaging team dynamic.     As a further incentive, each player earns experience and currency throughout the mission that can be used to unlock more weapons, special abilities, and stat-enhancing gear. These powerful bonuses aren't easy to attain, which makes earning them all the more satisfying. The action plays out on a variety of sizable multiplayer maps inspired by the campaign levels. These maps each have a bevy of objectives, and every mission takes a few objectives at random and strings them together, so subsequent playthroughs of the same map feel different. This is a good thing, because you'll have to run a number of successful missions on the first map before you unlock the next, and so on. Each map is designed so that enemies can (and will) come at you from a number of directions. Missions are hard and demand teamwork and skill, so each time you vanquish a wave of enemies it feels like a small victory. Add this sense of accomplishment to the addictive and rewarding experience system, and you've got a game mode that's truly excellent.   With enemies like this, you'll need all the friends you can get.   If you're not feeling cooperative, Resistance 2 boasts a robust competitive mode as well. Maps accommodate as few as two and as many as 60 players, and do so with virtually no lag. The usual Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag (""Core Control"") modes are available, but the best of the bunch is Skirmish. In this mode, teams are divided up into squads, and each squad receives on-the-fly objectives to complete. Objectives are updated often and can change the flow of battle drastically, so each match has a unique, frantic feel. Unlike in the cooperative mode, you have all the abilities and weapons in the single-player campaign readily available to you, so everyone is more or less evenly matched. You can also play ranked matches to earn experience and upgrades, and even though it's not quite as engaging as the cooperative mode, the competitive multiplayer is still a blast.     All in all, Resistance 2 is an excellent game. The stirring scale of the single-player levels is impressive and the pervasive details make them truly awesome. Despite the squandered story, blasting your way through the campaign is electrifying, thanks largely to the deadly weapons in your arsenal. The cooperative multiplayer is a resounding success, and the competitive modes are terrific in their own right. Anyone looking for a superb shooter experience need look no further than Resistance 2.  


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404,Mass Effect 2 ,9," Once this intense and action-packed role-playing game pulls you into its orbit, you won't want to escape.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2448235-2219836-box_me2.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mass-effect-2-review/1900-6246923/,pos,"
  Mass Effect 2 takes the bleak vacuum of space and flushes it with color--the light of stars and galaxies, the red and violet swirls of far-off nebulas, and the glimpses of comets as they burn through the void. You’ll catch your first glimpse of this in the game’s intense and much-improved art design, but that dance of light and shadows is also an apt metaphor for bleak undercurrents in the story, as well as the moral quandaries and past indiscretions that haunt the main characters. More so than its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 possesses an identity, and most of the obvious changes and improvements over the original are beholden to the shift in tone. The shooting is more immediate and satisfying, which keeps the pace moving and intensifies the violence of each encounter. Rich characterizations invite you to look more closely at each crew member's personal stake in the sprawling galactic backdrop. Even the relatively predictable space opera that is the main plot has sinister moments, and you sense the characters struggling with that heavy burden. Mass Effect 2 is incredibly enjoyable, but it's more than just fun: It's a stellar package with a fierce spirit that makes it engrossing and unforgettable.       Mass Effect 2 begins with dire events that foreshadow the game's darker tone--an attack that leaves the SSV Normandy in pieces and the fate of series protagonist Shepard temporarily unclear. Never fear: Shepard returns thanks to the efforts of the controversial pro-human organization called Cerberus and under the watchful eye of its chain-smoking overseer, The Illusive Man. Entire human colonies are disappearing without a trace, and Cerberus needs you--as Shepard--to investigate and confront the vicious forces behind the mystery. Whether you make your contempt for Cerberus' questionable methods clear or espouse the organization's manipulations, you owe The Illusive Man your life. Like it or loathe it, he casts his shadow on every action you take.     A race of locustlike beings known as the Collectors cast an even larger shadow, and the threat they pose is greater than may first appear. Cerberus wants you to assemble a formidable team to assist and provides you with two human officers of its own. First, there is the sexy Miranda. Then, there is Jacob, who seems initially reticent but allows his emotional fire to burn more brightly as the journey progresses. One by one, you build up your crew of specialists to complement them. Among them are a stoic but powerful Asari named Samara, whose ethical code is as unforgiving as it is inflexible, and Thane, a brooding assassin that belongs to the reptilian Drell race. These are great characters, as are other members of your team, though the Salarian scientist Mordin Solus is possibly the finest character in Mass Effect 2 and arguably the most interesting one seen in an RPG in some time. His ultracaffeinated, ultralogical delivery is often hysterical and always entertaining (his romantic advice will have you in stitches), but his moral misgivings and humaneness make him more than just comic relief. This diverse team joins you aboard a newly built vessel named, appropriately enough, The Normandy SR-2, with the ever-reliable and ever-feisty Joker at the helm. He's not the only blast from the past to cross your path in Mass Effect 2, but it's best to discover for yourself which characters from its predecessor (and what role they play in this trek across the Milky Way) you'll meet again.    Your new boss needs to speak with you. Quick, look busy.   The main plot is conventional science fiction that draws to a predictable close, so the narrative wonders don't exist within the sturdy-but-safe central story; rather, they gild its periphery. Each recruit offers a quest of his or her own to undertake, and these missions give you a lot of insight into your crew members--even those, like Jacob, that seem rather boring initially. Not all of these missions involve combat, which doesn't always work in the game's favor; one in which you follow your target from a walkway overhead is one of Mass Effect 2's weaker moments. But even the rare missions that are light on thrills are still heavy on character development. Writing and dialogue are top notch, keeping each teammate from being a simple sci-fi cliche. The game may come with an M rating, but it doesn't flaunt its adult motifs. Profanity and sexual themes are handled maturely, and their use has purpose and poignancy. There's nary a weak link in the tremendous voice cast, so each line sounds heartfelt, and great facial animations (especially among the nonhuman members of your crew) and physical gestures make it easy to connect with your cohorts.     Conversations commonly present you with a number of responses that affect the meters representing two sides of the ethical spectrum: paragon and renegade. These meters are handled separately rather than represent sides of a single gauge. This structure makes a simple but important point: Morality isn't an either/or, good/bad attribute, but it allows for shades of gray in which to maneuver. As these meters fill, new conversation options open, giving you additional ways to solve dilemmas. These choices don't lead to the complexity and flexibility you see in RPGs like Fallout 3 or Dragon Age, but they result in some electric moments, particularly during the final hours. If you import your character from the original Mass Effect, the decisions you made in that game will be manifested here in extraordinary ways--though it might take a second play-through for you to really understand exactly how extraordinary. A more immediately noticeable adjustment to the conversations is the addition of interrupt triggers. In certain cases, you may get a prompt allowing you to interrupt the scene. This may involve pulling a gun on an unsavory mercenary (a renegade action) or snatching an impressionable youngster from the clutches of a gang when he tries to enroll (a paragon action). These instances have a nice feeling of immediacy and prove that actions really are louder than words.    Purging the galaxy of evil, one Collector at a time.   Mass Effect 2's third-person shooting action is greatly enhanced over the original, making battles exciting and violent, which befits the overall shift in tone. Battles play out as they do in a typical cover-based shooter like Gears of War, with a few caveats (you can't tumble, for example). Sliding into cover is slick and easy, as is popping in and out to take potshots at the wide variety of foes that assault you. Action sequences still present a few rare hangups; you may suddenly rise a few feet into the air for no reason and be unable to move. Or you may get stuck on an invisible obstacle and jitter back and forth. Uncommon bugs aside, Mass Effect 2 works well as a shooter, and other changes to the combat reinforce the improvements. For example, your shields and health automatically regenerate as they commonly do in straightforward shooters, and you now pick up ammo from the battlefield. You can still pause the action to let loose biotic-powered fury, but combat remains fluid and stimulating. It helps that the two teammates accompanying you on your missions are much less of a burden than before--not quite brilliant, but certainly smart enough to stay out of your way and stay alive.      The repetitive nature of Mass Effect's cookie-cutter levels is gone, as are the vehicle sequences featuring the oft-maligned rover called the Mako. Mass Effect 2's missions take place across a wonderful variety of locales, from the creepy interior of a derelict vessel to a deep-space prison. Some of them trip up the pace by throwing in additional challenges, such as one in which you must avoid direct sunlight lest it burn you to a crisp. Most levels are thoughtfully constructed, letting you charge from one cover spot to the next in order to unleash destruction. You certainly get an impressive array of devastating tools to that end, including a blinding nuclear weapon that's always a delight to fire. Standard weapons (as opposed to heavy weapons) also support additional ammo types--such as cryo ammo--which provide additional benefits. Besides, it's always fun to watch a Krogan merc's final sliver of health burn away when you equip incendiary rounds. And if that doesn't bring a wicked smile to your face, throwing a horde of advancing security bots into the air with the shockwave skill certainly will.       It's hard to miss Mass Effect 2's focus on action, not just because you can reasonably play it as a third-person shooter, but also because certain features associated with RPGs have been restructured and streamlined. At first, you might see Mass Effect 2 as somewhat stripped; you don't have a traditional inventory management screen, for example, where you would choose a weapon to equip or convert an item into omni-gel. Instead, you select the weapons you want when you embark on a mission or from a weapons locker. You purchase or find universal weapon and armor upgrades, which are then transferred to the Normandy's science station, where you can apply them, provided you have enough mineral resources. If you want to change armor, you go to your personal quarters, where you can don the armor items you've obtained and personalize them with different colors and textures. Even character development feels lighter. You have fewer skills to develop for each team member (though you have a much larger team to choose from), and you could complete a thorough, 40-hour play-through without reaching level 30.     Yet in most cases, the role-playing elements haven't been pared down as much as they've been cleaned up, forcing you to spend less time staring at menus and more time gunning down Geth and earning the loyalty of your comrades. After all, when you can equip alternate ammo without opening up a cluttered inventory screen, you stay connected to the moment, whether that consists of a heartfelt one-on-one encounter with a tormented Thane or an electrifying encounter with a thresher maw. However, don't assume that you won't get time to shop for goodies or check out the sights and sounds at important space stations. You can still load up on upgrades and weapons on hub worlds or even grab souvenirs like model ships to show off in your quarters. (And be sure to pick up a space hamster, which is exactly what it sounds like.) Nevertheless, the balance between shooting and role playing is different in Mass Effect 2 than in the first game--but the focus on action works to the game's benefit, given the intensity of the characters and visuals.     Not every decision is any easy one.   When you aren't shooting the heads off of clamoring husks or eavesdropping on a bizarre bachelor party, you'll be flying the Normandy about the galaxy from a top-down view, scanning planets for side missions and for the resources used to purchase upgrades. To do so, you move a scanning reticle about the planet and drop a probe when your scanner indicates the presence of a resource. At first, this is a comfortable change of tempo, but eventually, scanning wears a bit thin--though it is a necessary task if you want to get the most out of your weapons and armor. You can purchase an upgrade to speed up spanning speeds, but the reticle moves slowly regardless (albeit faster on the PC than on the Xbox 360), which makes the entire process feel sluggish if you spend too much time exploring each system at once. Luckily, other noncombat activities make a better impression. Hacking computers and wall safes initiates one of two minigames--one in which you match blocks of code to a scrolling sequence underneath and another in which you must match like symbols as you would in the card game concentration. These little hacking games are brief and last just long enough to provide a pleasant distraction.     If you played the original Mass Effect, you may remember the jarring texture pop-in and frequent frame rate stutters as much as you remember the excellent character design and atmospheric planetside vistas. You'll notice few if any instances of those drawbacks in this installment, which means there's less to distract you from the impressive visuals. Just as an interior designer works from a collection of complementary and contrasting colors and textures, so too does Mass Effect 2 draw from a consistent set of hues and architectural touches. Deep reds and glowing indigos saturate certain scenes, making them richer and more sinister; eerie fog limits your vision in one side mission, while rain pours down upon you in another. Subtle, moody lighting gives certain interactions great impact, such as one scene in which your troubled, tattooed teammate appears as a black silhouette. The visuals are a superb melding of art and technology, with only a few animation hitches that stand out because most aspects are consistently excellent. The fantastic musical score and sound effects do more than their share to enhance the production, working the deeper end of the sonic spectrum and communicating tension and weight without getting heavy handed or manipulative.   These security forces must be new hires.    Mass Effect 2's improved shooting mechanics are no-brainers; they're the expected advancements that clean up the flaws of its predecessor. But what makes this sequel so rich isn't mechanics, but vision. A nightclub lit with flames, deadly family reunions, a friend accused of the inconceivable--these are the sights and events that cast shadows in your mind and heart. A few blemishes prove that this planned trilogy still has potential for growth, but they barely diminish the game's overall impact. This is a galaxy you want to explore that is populated with characters you are glad to know. Mass Effect 2 is the kind of game that you return to, not just because it's fun to play multiple times, but also because its universe is a place you wish you could call home.    


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405,Mass Effect 2 ,9," Once this intense and action-packed role-playing game pulls you into its orbit, you won't want to escape.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2448235-2219836-box_me2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mass-effect-2-review/1900-6246931/,pos,"
  Mass Effect 2 takes the bleak vacuum of space and flushes it with color--the light of stars and galaxies, the red and violet swirls of far-off nebulas, and the glimpses of comets as they burn through the void. You’ll catch your first glimpse of this in the game’s intense and much-improved art design, but that dance of light and shadows is also an apt metaphor for bleak undercurrents in the story, as well as the moral quandaries and past indiscretions that haunt the main characters. More so than its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 possesses an identity, and most of the obvious changes and improvements over the original are beholden to the shift in tone. The shooting is more immediate and satisfying, which keeps the pace moving and intensifies the violence of each encounter. Rich characterizations invite you to look more closely at each crew member's personal stake in the sprawling galactic backdrop. Even the relatively predictable space opera that is the main plot has sinister moments, and you sense the characters struggling with that heavy burden. Mass Effect 2 is incredibly enjoyable, but it's more than just fun: It's a stellar package with a fierce spirit that makes it engrossing and unforgettable.       Mass Effect 2 begins with dire events that foreshadow the game's darker tone--an attack that leaves the SSV Normandy in pieces and the fate of series protagonist Shepard temporarily unclear. Never fear: Shepard returns thanks to the efforts of the controversial pro-human organization called Cerberus and under the watchful eye of its chain-smoking overseer, The Illusive Man. Entire human colonies are disappearing without a trace, and Cerberus needs you--as Shepard--to investigate and confront the vicious forces behind the mystery. Whether you make your contempt for Cerberus' questionable methods clear or espouse the organization's manipulations, you owe The Illusive Man your life. Like it or loathe it, he casts his shadow on every action you take.     A race of locustlike beings known as the Collectors cast an even larger shadow, and the threat they pose is greater than may first appear. Cerberus wants you to assemble a formidable team to assist and provides you with two human officers of its own. First, there is the sexy Miranda. Then, there is Jacob, who seems initially reticent but allows his emotional fire to burn more brightly as the journey progresses. One by one, you build up your crew of specialists to complement them. Among them are a stoic but powerful Asari named Samara, whose ethical code is as unforgiving as it is inflexible, and Thane, a brooding assassin that belongs to the reptilian Drell race. These are great characters, as are other members of your team, though the Salarian scientist Mordin Solus is possibly the finest character in Mass Effect 2 and arguably the most interesting one seen in an RPG in some time. His ultracaffeinated, ultralogical delivery is often hysterical and always entertaining (his romantic advice will have you in stitches), but his moral misgivings and humaneness make him more than just comic relief. This diverse team joins you aboard a newly built vessel named, appropriately enough, The Normandy SR-2, with the ever-reliable and ever-feisty Joker at the helm. He's not the only blast from the past to cross your path in Mass Effect 2, but it's best to discover for yourself which characters from its predecessor (and what role they play in this trek across the Milky Way) you'll meet again.    I've got a headache this big…   The main plot is conventional science fiction that draws to a predictable close, so the narrative wonders don't exist within the sturdy-but-safe central story; rather, they gild its periphery. Each recruit offers a quest of his or her own to undertake, and these missions give you a lot of insight into your crew members--even those, like Jacob, that seem rather boring initially. Not all of these missions involve combat, which doesn't always work in the game's favor; one in which you follow your target from a walkway overhead is one of Mass Effect 2's weaker moments. But even the rare missions that are light on thrills are still heavy on character development. Writing and dialogue are top notch, keeping each teammate from being a simple sci-fi cliche. The game may come with an M rating, but it doesn't flaunt its adult motifs. Profanity and sexual themes are handled maturely, and their use has purpose and poignancy. There's nary a weak link in the tremendous voice cast, so each line sounds heartfelt, and great facial animations (especially among the nonhuman members of your crew) and physical gestures make it easy to connect with your cohorts.     Conversations commonly present you with a number of responses that affect the meters representing two sides of the ethical spectrum: paragon and renegade. These meters are handled separately rather than represent sides of a single gauge. This structure makes a simple but important point: Morality isn't an either/or, good/bad attribute, but it allows for shades of gray in which to maneuver. As these meters fill, new conversation options open, giving you additional ways to solve dilemmas. These choices don't lead to the complexity and flexibility you see in RPGs like Fallout 3 or Dragon Age, but they result in some electric moments, particularly during the final hours. If you import your character from the original Mass Effect, the decisions you made in that game will be manifested here in extraordinary ways--though it might take a second play-through for you to really understand exactly how extraordinary. A more immediately noticeable adjustment to the conversations is the addition of interrupt triggers. In certain cases, you may get a prompt allowing you to interrupt the scene. This may involve pulling a gun on an unsavory mercenary (a renegade action) or snatching an impressionable youngster from the clutches of a gang when he tries to enroll (a paragon action). These instances have a nice feeling of immediacy and prove that actions really are louder than words.    Hmm… could the blood-red lighting be a metaphor?   Mass Effect 2's third-person shooting action is greatly enhanced over the original, making battles exciting and violent, which befits the overall shift in tone. Battles play out as they do in a typical cover-based shooter like Gears of War, with a few caveats (you can't tumble, for example). Sliding into cover is slick and easy, as is popping in and out to take potshots at the wide variety of foes that assault you. Action sequences still present a few rare hangups; you may suddenly rise a few feet into the air for no reason and be unable to move. Or you may get stuck on an invisible obstacle and jitter back and forth. Uncommon bugs aside, Mass Effect 2 works well as a shooter, and other changes to the combat reinforce the improvements. For example, your shields and health automatically regenerate as they commonly do in straightforward shooters, and you now pick up ammo from the battlefield. You can still pause the action to let loose biotic-powered fury, but combat remains fluid and stimulating. It helps that the two teammates accompanying you on your missions are much less of a burden than before--not quite brilliant, but certainly smart enough to stay out of your way and stay alive.      The repetitive nature of Mass Effect's cookie-cutter levels is gone, as are the vehicle sequences featuring the oft-maligned rover called the Mako. Mass Effect 2's missions take place across a wonderful variety of locales, from the creepy interior of a derelict vessel to a deep-space prison. Some of them trip up the pace by throwing in additional challenges, such as one in which you must avoid direct sunlight lest it burn you to a crisp. Most levels are thoughtfully constructed, letting you charge from one cover spot to the next in order to unleash destruction. You certainly get an impressive array of devastating tools to that end, including a blinding nuclear weapon that's always a delight to fire. Standard weapons (as opposed to heavy weapons) also support additional ammo types--such as cryo ammo--which provide additional benefits. Besides, it's always fun to watch a Krogan merc's final sliver of health burn away when you equip incendiary rounds. And if that doesn't bring a wicked smile to your face, throwing a horde of advancing security bots into the air with the shockwave skill certainly will.       It's hard to miss Mass Effect 2's focus on action, not just because you can reasonably play it as a third-person shooter, but also because certain features associated with RPGs have been restructured and streamlined. At first, you might see Mass Effect 2 as somewhat stripped; you don't have a traditional inventory management screen, for example, where you would choose a weapon to equip or convert an item into omni-gel. Instead, you select the weapons you want when you embark on a mission or from a weapons locker. You purchase or find universal weapon and armor upgrades, which are then transferred to the Normandy's science station, where you can apply them, provided you have enough mineral resources. If you want to change armor, you go to your personal quarters, where you can don the armor items you've obtained and personalize them with different colors and textures. Even character development feels lighter. You have fewer skills to develop for each team member (though you have a much larger team to choose from), and you could complete a thorough, 40-hour play-through without reaching level 30.     Yet in most cases, the role-playing elements haven't been pared down as much as they've been cleaned up, forcing you to spend less time staring at menus and more time gunning down Geth and earning the loyalty of your comrades. After all, when you can equip alternate ammo without opening up a cluttered inventory screen, you stay connected to the moment, whether that consists of a heartfelt one-on-one encounter with a tormented Thane or an electrifying encounter with a thresher maw. However, don't assume that you won't get time to shop for goodies or check out the sights and sounds at important space stations. You can still load up on upgrades and weapons on hub worlds or even grab souvenirs like model ships to show off in your quarters. (And be sure to pick up a space hamster, which is exactly what it sounds like.) Nevertheless, the balance between shooting and role playing is different in Mass Effect 2 than in the first game--but the focus on action works to the game's benefit, given the intensity of the characters and visuals.     Even the quiet moments are filled with tension and dread.   When you aren't shooting the heads off of clamoring husks or eavesdropping on a bizarre bachelor party, you'll be flying the Normandy about the galaxy from a top-down view, scanning planets for side missions and for the resources used to purchase upgrades. To do so, you move a scanning reticle about the planet and drop a probe when your scanner indicates the presence of a resource. At first, this is a comfortable change of tempo, but eventually, scanning wears a bit thin--though it is a necessary task if you want to get the most out of your weapons and armor. You can purchase an upgrade to speed up spanning speeds, but the reticle moves slowly regardless (albeit faster on the PC than on the Xbox 360), which makes the entire process feel sluggish if you spend too much time exploring each system at once. Luckily, other noncombat activities make a better impression. Hacking computers and wall safes initiates one of two minigames--one in which you match blocks of code to a scrolling sequence underneath and another in which you must match like symbols as you would in the card game concentration. These little hacking games are brief and last just long enough to provide a pleasant distraction.     If you played the original Mass Effect, you may remember the jarring texture pop-in and frequent frame rate stutters as much as you remember the excellent character design and atmospheric planetside vistas. You'll notice few if any instances of those drawbacks in this installment, which means there's less to distract you from the impressive visuals. Just as an interior designer works from a collection of complementary and contrasting colors and textures, so too does Mass Effect 2 draw from a consistent set of hues and architectural touches. Deep reds and glowing indigos saturate certain scenes, making them richer and more sinister; eerie fog limits your vision in one side mission, while rain pours down upon you in another. Subtle, moody lighting gives certain interactions great impact, such as one scene in which your troubled, tattooed teammate appears as a black silhouette. The visuals are a superb melding of art and technology, with only a few animation hitches that stand out because most aspects are consistently excellent. The fantastic musical score and sound effects do more than their share to enhance the production, working the deeper end of the sonic spectrum and communicating tension and weight without getting heavy handed or manipulative.   This gunship battle is just one of many exciting encounters in store for you.    Mass Effect 2's improved shooting mechanics are no-brainers; they're the expected advancements that clean up the flaws of its predecessor. But what makes this sequel so rich isn't mechanics, but vision. A nightclub lit with flames, deadly family reunions, a friend accused of the inconceivable--these are the sights and events that cast shadows in your mind and heart. A few blemishes prove that this planned trilogy still has potential for growth, but they barely diminish the game's overall impact. This is a galaxy you want to explore that is populated with characters you are glad to know. Mass Effect 2 is the kind of game that you return to, not just because it's fun to play multiple times, but also because its universe is a place you wish you could call home.    


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406,Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 ,9," This stylish role-playing social-simulation game packs a great story, realistic characters, and dozens of hours of enjoyment.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/0/7/2219707-box_smtp4.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shin-megami-tensei-persona-4-review/1900-6202201/,pos,"
  Late last year, Atlus completely reinvented its Persona series, a spin-off from the relatively niche Shin Megami Tensei franchise, and brought its third entry to the US after seven years of retirement. With its unconventional yet addictive blend of dungeon-crawling action and social simulation, it quickly garnered accolades from all directions. A year later, Persona has returned with a sequel that not only builds upon but greatly improves the quirky formula that made its predecessor so successful, and with its unique take on the murder mystery and its realistic characters, it proves once again that the PlayStation 2 isn't quite as dead as you may think.    Persona 4 begins when your main character--a silent protagonist whom you name--is sent to live with his uncle in the sleepy village of Inaba. After experiencing some difficulty adjusting to your new school life thanks to a nightmarish homeroom teacher, you make fast friends with Yosuke, another big-city transplant like yourself; Yukiko, the daughter of a family famous for running a traditional local inn; and Chie, a hyperactive girl obsessed with martial arts movies. Things seem to be going well, until one morning shortly after your arrival an unnaturally thick fog sets in and leaves behind a body hung upside down from a power line. With the local police seemingly unable to even determine a cause of death, and faith in them waning thanks to a second, eerily similar case, you discover that you may be the only person who can put an end to the killings. For some reason, you possess the ability to travel into the Midnight Channel--a rumored show said to appear and reveal your soul mate if you stare into a TV on a rainy night--where victims are trapped before they meet their fatal end, and provided you make it in time, you can set them free and thwart the killer.   What is that? It's just a ball with a tongue.   It is there, inside the Midnight Channel, that you discover your second power, the ability to summon forth personae--reflections of your true self aligned with one of the major arcana of the tarot deck. With this innate talent, you can defeat the monstrous shadows that roam the TV world and help your friends to confront their own inner shadows, allowing them to unleash their own personae. Together, you investigate a series of dungeons crafted around the victims' insecurities or darkest fears, which range from the mundane (a castle for a princess waiting for a prince to take her away) to the retro (an 8-bit game complete with pixelated fire) to the twisted (a men's bathhouse for a young teenage punk unsure of his sexuality). Each dungeon is randomly generated, but unlike the 200+ floor Tartarus from Persona 3, they tend to be only about a dozen floors deep, keeping them fresher and more interesting. You no longer have to worry about your party becoming fatigued, and you can explore to your heart's content, though you will often find that the rarity of spirit (magic) point restoring items will limit the amount of progress you can make in a single trip.     Like its predecessor, Persona 4 takes place over the course of a complete year that you work your way though one day at a time, but unlike in previous Shin Megami Tensei games, major events are not tied to the moon phases. Instead, your investigations into the Midnight Channel are ruled by the weather--occasionally someone will be trapped inside, and if you don't rescue that person by the time the fog returns after a heavy rainfall, he or she will die, forcing you to restart. It's not all about dungeon crawling though, because you must balance your secret life as a supernatural detective with your everyday existence as a student. Friendships and relationships need to be forged and maintained because your ability to create new personae is limited by the strength of these bonds, called social links. By spending time with a friend or love interest in often hilarious or touching events, you can strengthen your social links--which are tied to an arcana as personae are--and you can unlock new powers in allies such as the ability to defend you from a mortal attack in combat. On top of that, you also need to worry about your own personal growth--your character has five attributes that can affect everything from how well you do in your tests to whether you have the guts to ask that cute girl for her phone number. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to raise these skills, such as studying in the library, reading a book, attending school clubs, or even working part-time jobs for extra cash and social links. Just be sure to keep an eye on the weather reports, because your time is limited.   Please push RESET, hold it in, then turn off the POWER.   Fans of Persona 3's battle system will be pleased to know that it is almost entirely intact with several tweaks and improvements. Shadows still appear as amorphous blobs when you're running around a dungeon, and combat is initiated by either making physical contact or attacking them with your weapon. Attacks are divided into seven types, which both you and your enemies are weak against to some degree, and striking a shadow's weak spot will knock it down and award you with another turn. Downed enemies can be struck again to beat them dizzy and cost them a turn, and if they're all knocked down, your party can bum-rush them in an all-out attack for massive damage. Enemy weaknesses can be discovered only by trial and error, and though you've always got an ally on support to keep track of the ones you've already found for later reference, you still have to deal with their annoyingly obvious narration of your fights. Two other notable changes are the absence of the controversial pistol-like evokers used to summon personae via mock suicide (your inner self is evoked by shattering a tarot card this time) and your ability to directly control party member actions rather than being forced to rely on their AI behaviors. While the former is purely aesthetic, the latter is perhaps the best change to occur in the game because your teammates will sometimes perform inexplicable (and inappropriate) deeds in the middle of a heated fight if left to their own devices.    Visually, Persona 4 shares a number of similarities with its predecessor, including a realistic modern-day setting, an outrageously stylish presentation, and, unfortunately, a lot of reused art assets and a poor camera system that makes navigating the twists and turns of dungeons difficult. The music is heavily inspired by J-pop and J-rock and is extremely catchy, so despite the number of times you may hear the battle theme throughout your entire journey, it never gets old. The majority of the game is voice-acted by a mostly stellar cast, though there are some awkward stretches of text in social-link events and side quests that for whatever reason do not have spoken dialogue, even though some of it does.    Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 is an excellent sequel that builds upon an already successful formula by improving it in nearly every way. With a down-to-earth cast of likable characters, an intriguing story further realizes its cast by highlighting their psychological complexities and making them seem that much more real, and an engaging and fun combat system, it's sure to keep your attention for the duration. Whether you're a fan of the dark and bizarre Shin Megami Tensei series or a first time shadow fighter, Persona 4 is a superb role-playing adventure with something to offer to everyone.  
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407,Big Bang Mini ,9," Beautiful visuals, great music, exciting gameplay, and an innovative control scheme make Big Bang Mini one of the best DS games out there.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/4/3/2221343-big_bang.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/big-bang-mini-review/1900-6204287/,pos,"
  At first glance, Big Bang Mini doesn't seem like a traditional shoot-'em-up. Given that the genre is best known for tiny spaceships blasting their way through thick fields of alien fire, you'd be forgiven for wondering where fish skeletons, pirate snowmen, and fireworks fit in. But don't let the charmingly oddball presentation fool you: Big Bang Mini is an evolutionary step forward for the genre. Ship movement and shooting are completely independent of each other. You can launch shots from anywhere on the touch screen, regardless of where your ship is positioned, and this innovation breathes new life into the frantic action. The smooth learning curve makes the game very accessible, but later levels and extra modes provide a tough test of your stylus mastery. Bound together with wonderfully vibrant visuals and an infectious soundtrack, Big Bang Mini earns its shoot-'em-up stripes and a place among the top games on the Nintendo DS.   Parachuting chef turtles are just one of your wacky targets.   The unique controls are at the core of Big Bang Mini's appeal. Unlike traditional shoot-'em-ups in which projectiles are fired from your ship, Big Bang Mini lets you launch fireworks from anywhere on the touch screen. Simply flick the stylus as if you were lighting a match, and a shot will light out along that trajectory. As your foes appear on the top screen, you are free to bombard them from any and all angles with fireworks galore. Shots that destroy enemies will explode in a colorful spectacle; however, shots that don't hit anything will explode when they hit the edge of the screen, raining down dangerous debris on your vulnerable ship. This danger pushes you to make more accurate shots, a goal easily accomplished thanks to the responsive and accurate stylus controls.     In fact, the controls are so responsive that errant strokes can get you into trouble. In addition to launching fireworks, you control the position of your ship with the stylus: just touch it and drag the stylus to move it wherever you like. If you try to launch a shot too close to your ship, you may end up moving it inadvertently. Likewise, a desperate swipe to move your ship out of danger can result in a badly aimed shot and a dangerous explosion. Big Bang Mini demands precision in both firing and maneuvering, two separate but equally important tasks. And you won't just be moving your ship to avoid danger: each destroyed enemy releases a falling star. If you collect enough stars to fill up the meter, you pass the stage. Balancing the necessary firing, dodging, and collecting is engaging and exciting. It can also be tricky, but fortunately the first few levels provide a smooth ramp-up in difficulty, ensuring that Big Bang Mini doesn't have the difficult point of entry that many of its genremates boast.    As you progress through the nine levels of the Arcade mode (each with nine stages and a boss), you'll encounter new power-ups and hazards. In one level, you can create a vortex that will absorb enemy shots by swirling the stylus around, but stiff winds will affect the trajectory of your fireworks. In another, you can lay down a reflective mirror shield with a horizontal swipe of the stylus, but certain clouds (which normally absorb your shots) will reflect your own projectiles right back at you. The beauty of these power-ups and hazards is that they are complementary, so as you become more powerful, the level becomes more dangerous. Big Bang Mini gives more as it demands more, and this makes each new level freshly challenging.    The nefarious alliance of laser sharks and preserved brains has gone unchecked for too long!   In addition to new challenges, each level brings a new, wildly different presentation. From the neon techno pixel landscape of the Egyptian-themed Luxor, to the bawdy colors and trippy musicians of Rio de Janeiro, each level in Big Bang Mini is a treat for the eyes. Attractive backgrounds scroll by smoothly, and the unique (often bizarre) enemies and explosions are a pleasure to look at when you can spare a moment. Underscoring these impressive visuals are some excellent musical tracks that range from snappy electric beats to mellow atmospheric melodies. The level of artistic quality and variety in Big Bang Mini is truly impressive, and the presentation alone is reason enough to recommend the game.    As if stellar presentation and exciting core gameplay weren't enough, Big Bang Mini offers a number of extras to keep you interested. At the completion of each stage (bosses excluded) you'll get the chance to complete a bonus stage. These are connect-the-dots minigames that will light up the top screen with a firework constellation should you succeed. Each level features a different twist (some quite clever), making these bonuses a pleasant palate cleanser between stages. Completing the Arcade mode is no easy feat, but doing so will earn you access to the Mission mode. This mode imposes tough challenges on stages you've already played, so you might be charged with clearing a certain stage within a time limit, using a certain number of shots, or never missing a shot. These conditions force you to adapt your well-honed strategy, so even skilled players will find a challenge here.   As if dodging projectiles wasn't enough to handle, now you've got to worry about breathing.   For those players who prefer to match their skills against human opponents, Big Bang Mini offers two ways to do so. The Challenge mode harks back to Big Bang Mini's shoot-'em-up roots and is the only mode in which you'll earn points. The core gameplay mechanics are the same, but the enemies, visuals, and music are completely new. Once you perish, you can post your high scores to online leaderboards and see how you stack up. If you prefer a more immediate competition, the Versus mode lets you challenge another DS owner to a shoot-out with only one game card. In Versus, you hold the DS sideways and shoot volleys of fireworks at your opponent on the other screen. Various power-ups and environmental hazards spice things up, and battles can get very heated, especially given that players can tap each other's projectiles to send them rocketing back where they came from. These extra modes provide great opportunities to flex your competitive muscle, while the unlockable Relax mode (watch and control fireworks displays) and Alarm Clock (actually cool, thanks to the stellar music) offer fun rewards for dedicated single-player play.    Big Bang Mini is an excellent shooter with an innovative control scheme that will please newcomers and veterans alike. To fully experience each level's uniquely awesome aesthetic and face the delightfully clever end boss, you simply must play the game all the way through. Once you've done so, there is plenty more to do whether you thrive on competition or just want to live it all again. Add it all up, and you've got one of the most accessible, most entertaining, and most attractive DS games in recent memory. Then consider the $19.99 price tag, and it's a no-brainer: Big Bang Mini is a must-buy.  
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408,The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor ,3.5," The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has all the right elements, yet it still manages to do everything wrong.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/2/1/2219421-box_tmtotde.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-mummy-tomb-of-the-dragon-emperor-review/1900-6197214/,neg,"
  The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor for the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 2 has all the ingredients of a successful third-person adventure game. And at first glance, it seems to get the recipe right, but the devil is in the details. As you venture further into this game, small and large issues continue arising until ultimately, it becomes clear that this mummy has served up one truly rotten dish.   Lock on. Fire. Kill. Lock on. Fire. Kill. Lock on. Fire. Kill.     The game faithfully follows the story of the third Mummy film, telling its tale with attractive hand-drawn artwork and narration from the dignified voice of Michelle Yeoh. You'll play as Rick O'Connell, as well as his son Alex, who must stop the evil Emperor Han from raising his Terracotta Army and conquering the world. The adventure takes you from ancient tombs to the snowy Himalayas and the Great Wall of China. Sadly, whatever joy may have been found in exploring these exotic environments is hampered by the invisible walls you'll frequently run up against.     Rick and Alex are constantly being assailed by enemies--human and ceramic. The O'Connells are brawlers, so they have a host of quick and dirty melee attacks at their disposal to deal with their foes. The variety of moves initially seems pretty cool. It's actually pointless, however, as the combat in the game is so simple that it hardly matters what tactic you use. Your enemies will just stand there and take it regardless. The O'Connells also have pistols, tommy guns, and shotguns, which add another level of silliness to the action. Many of your assailants will come at you with swords in hand, but they pose little threat. It's always a piece of cake to kill them from a safe distance with one of your guns, and, after all, it's what Indiana Jones would do.      Like any adventurer worth his or her salt, you'll also spend some time shimmying along ledges and making death-defying leaps, though these leaps place a little too much emphasis on death for their own good. It's often hard to distinguish a usable ledge from the background. What's worse, the camera, which you have no control over, doesn't give you a good view of what's ahead; thus, these sequences are exercises in trial and error. You'll often blindly jump to a ledge only to find that there's a spinning blade there with your name on it.    If the reason everyone really wanted to be an adventurer was for the thrill of pulling levers and opening doors, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor might have been onto something. Each time you encounter a door, lever, or other mechanism, you take control of your character's hands and input a series of gestures. On the Wii, this is done by moving the Nunchuk and Wii Remote, while on the PS2, you use the thumbsticks. Both methods work equally well. But these sequences are just tedious exercises and happen so frequently that they really break up the flow of the action, making the game feel more like a crank-turning simulator at times than a thrilling adventure.    The game also features a boss battle that is so unspeakably horrible that it alone would be reason to stay away from this game. At the end of the game's fifth level, the shape-shifting emperor takes on the form of a lionlike creature that frequently tries to pounce on you and emits shock waves that must be leapt over. The problem with the battle is that you'll spend most of your time wrestling with the game's controls, which are fine for taking on the soldiers the game throws at you but are wholly inadequate for this kind of action. You need to lock on to the boss to fire at him effectively, but then, you need to release the lock in order to jump over the shock waves, and if he chooses that moment to leap behind you, you won't see the shock waves approaching. Furthermore, if you happen to be reloading your gun when the shock waves approach, you won't be able to jump at all.    The Wii version is a bit sharper than its PS2 counterpart, but aside from that, the game looks pretty much identical on both consoles. The environments are varied and nicely detailed, though frequent collision-detection issues can be distracting. The music and sound effects are decent, while the voice acting is actually pretty good, with Brendan Fraser delivering his lines with particular enthusiasm. Unfortunately, though they may be good for a chuckle or two at first, these one-liners repeat so frequently that they end up being more annoying than humorous.   The game captures the excitement of pulling levers pretty well.     Tomb of the Dragon Emperor's six levels will take most players somewhere around five hours to complete. There are a bunch of unlockables in the form of concept art and the like that you get for finding hidden artifacts scattered throughout the levels, but it's hard to imagine anyone being compelled to go after that stuff. There's something especially disappointing about failures like this. All the elements are here. But every last one of them is handled so poorly that the end result is a game even the bravest of adventurers should run from...screaming.   
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409,The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor ,3.5," The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has all the right elements, yet it still manages to do everything wrong.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/2/1/2219421-box_tmtotde.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-mummy-tomb-of-the-dragon-emperor-review/1900-6197215/,neg,"
  The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor for the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 2 has all the ingredients of a successful third-person adventure game. And at first glance, it seems to get the recipe right, but the devil is in the details. As you venture further into this game, small and large issues continue arising until ultimately, it becomes clear that this mummy has served up one truly rotten dish.   Lock on. Fire. Kill. Lock on. Fire. Kill. Lock on. Fire. Kill.     The game faithfully follows the story of the third Mummy film, telling its tale with attractive hand-drawn artwork and narration from the dignified voice of Michelle Yeoh. You'll play as Rick O'Connell, as well as his son Alex, who must stop the evil Emperor Han from raising his Terracotta Army and conquering the world. The adventure takes you from ancient tombs to the snowy Himalayas and the Great Wall of China. Sadly, whatever joy may have been found in exploring these exotic environments is hampered by the invisible walls you'll frequently run up against.     Rick and Alex are constantly being assailed by enemies--human and ceramic. The O'Connells are brawlers, so they have a host of quick and dirty melee attacks at their disposal to deal with their foes. The variety of moves initially seems pretty cool. It's actually pointless, however, as the combat in the game is so simple that it hardly matters what tactic you use. Your enemies will just stand there and take it regardless. The O'Connells also have pistols, tommy guns, and shotguns, which add another level of silliness to the action. Many of your assailants will come at you with swords in hand, but they pose little threat. It's always a piece of cake to kill them from a safe distance with one of your guns, and, after all, it's what Indiana Jones would do.      Like any adventurer worth his or her salt, you'll also spend some time shimmying along ledges and making death-defying leaps, though these leaps place a little too much emphasis on death for their own good. It's often hard to distinguish a usable ledge from the background. What's worse, the camera, which you have no control over, doesn't give you a good view of what's ahead; thus, these sequences are exercises in trial and error. You'll often blindly jump to a ledge only to find that there's a spinning blade there with your name on it.    If the reason everyone really wanted to be an adventurer was for the thrill of pulling levers and opening doors, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor might have been onto something. Each time you encounter a door, lever, or other mechanism, you take control of your character's hands and input a series of gestures. On the Wii, this is done by moving the Nunchuk and Wii Remote, while on the PS2, you use the thumbsticks. Both methods work equally well. But these sequences are just tedious exercises and happen so frequently that they really break up the flow of the action, making the game feel more like a crank-turning simulator at times than a thrilling adventure.    The game also features a boss battle that is so unspeakably horrible that it alone would be reason to stay away from this game. At the end of the game's fifth level, the shape-shifting emperor takes on the form of a lionlike creature that frequently tries to pounce on you and emits shock waves that must be leapt over. The problem with the battle is that you'll spend most of your time wrestling with the game's controls, which are fine for taking on the soldiers the game throws at you but are wholly inadequate for this kind of action. You need to lock on to the boss to fire at him effectively, but then, you need to release the lock in order to jump over the shock waves, and if he chooses that moment to leap behind you, you won't see the shock waves approaching. Furthermore, if you happen to be reloading your gun when the shock waves approach, you won't be able to jump at all.    The Wii version is a bit sharper than its PS2 counterpart, but aside from that, the game looks pretty much identical on both consoles. The environments are varied and nicely detailed, though frequent collision-detection issues can be distracting. The music and sound effects are decent, while the voice acting is actually pretty good, with Brendan Fraser delivering his lines with particular enthusiasm. Unfortunately, though they may be good for a chuckle or two at first, these one-liners repeat so frequently that they end up being more annoying than humorous.   Puzzle sequences really break up the flow of the action.     Tomb of the Dragon Emperor's six levels will take most players somewhere around five hours to complete. There are a bunch of unlockables in the form of concept art and the like that you get for finding hidden artifacts scattered throughout the levels, but it's hard to imagine anyone being compelled to go after that stuff. There's something especially disappointing about failures like this. All the elements are here. But every last one of them is handled so poorly that the end result is a game even the bravest of adventurers should run from...screaming.   
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410,Rock Revolution ,3.5, You say you want a revolution? Be careful what you ask for.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/1/1/2219211-revolution.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rock-revolution-review/1900-6200929/,neg,"
  Thanks to its Bemani series of games, Konami was the name in rhythm and music games for many years, especially in Japan. These games include: Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Freaks, Drummania, and Beatmania. But times have changed; the genre is now dominated by SingStar, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band. Not content to sit on the sidelines and watch, Konami's response is Rock Revolution. It's too bad that the game, which lets you play guitar, bass, or drums (but not sing), doesn't rock and certainly isn't a revolution.    There's a singer onstage, but the game doesn't let you sing.   Rock Revolution can be purchased with a drum kit or as a stand-alone game--there are no game-specific guitars available. Fortunately, it's compatible with both Guitar Hero and Rock Band hardware. This is good because not only are you able to use peripherals you probably already own, but also because the included drum kit, which has six pads and a foot pedal, is lousy. The pads are small and loud, plus the ones in the back are only slightly angled and raised so they're difficult to hit. And, really, having seven inputs is too much for people without bona fide drumming skills. It seems that Konami realized this because you'll go entire songs using just four pads (and sometimes not even touching the pedal for songs at a time) until you get to the hard difficulty setting.    Questionable drums are the least of Rock Revolutions problems, though. The soundtrack includes just over 30 songs--a paltry number when compared to the 80 or so songs in both Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2. There are tunes from Metallica, Foo Fighters, Ratt, The Ramones, Fall Out Boy, Twisted Sister, Avril Lavigne, and more. This wouldn't be a bad list if not for the fact that all of the songs are covers. Some of them are decent, but the competition uses nothing but master tracks these days, so this ends up being just another way in which Rock Revolution fails to measure up.     Substandard gameplay and an underwhelming Career mode compound Rock Revolution's issues. The Career mode is nothing more than playing a list of songs; there's no way to embark on a career as anything other than a solo act, no character customization, and nobody is playing the paltry online modes. The game can't even get the genre's established gameplay down right. The note highway that displays upcoming notes is vertical and displayed on a 2D plane. As a result, it only shows a few notes at a time, which makes fast sections very difficult because you can't anticipate what's coming next. This problem is further exacerbated by an unusually small window in which to play the correct note, questionable note recognition, note patterns that don't match the music, and stringent requirements for passing songs. Not only is it easy to fail the average song, but frequent additional requirements, such as not playing ""poison"" notes, achieving a certain score, or passing a song despite the difficulty increasing midtune, also conspire to block your rock.   The music studio is kind of fun, but it's not enough to warrant buying the game.   Rock Revolution's one redeeming mode lets you create your own music by first choosing a style or sound for your instrument and then mapping chords, riffs, or beats to the frets or drum pads. It's highly unlikely you're going to make any sort of masterpiece with the limited tools available; you can't add your created works to the game's set list or share them online, but it is mildly amusing to see what you and a few friends can come up with by mashing fret buttons and banging on the drums.     If Rock Revolution came out two or three years ago, it might have been revolutionary, but in 2008, it's not even relevant. Uninspired presentation, a tiny tracklist that includes no master tracks, a complete lack of vocal support, uninteresting gameplay, and a barebones Career mode are just a few of the many ways in with Rock Revolution fails. In fact, it fails to live up to its name, Konami's past, and, most importantly, the competition.  
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411,Rock Revolution ,3.5, You say you want a revolution? Be careful what you ask for.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/1/1/2219211-revolution.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rock-revolution-review/1900-6200935/,neg,"
  Thanks to its Bemani series of games, Konami was the name in rhythm and music games for many years, especially in Japan. These games include: Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Freaks, Drummania, and Beatmania. But times have changed; the genre is now dominated by SingStar, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band. Not content to sit on the sidelines and watch, Konami's response is Rock Revolution. It's too bad that the game, which lets you play guitar, bass, or drums (but not sing), doesn't rock and certainly isn't a revolution.    There's a singer onstage, but the game doesn't let you sing.   Rock Revolution can be purchased with a drum kit or as a stand-alone game--there are no game-specific guitars available. Fortunately, it's compatible with both Guitar Hero and Rock Band hardware. This is good because not only are you able to use peripherals you probably already own, but also because the included drum kit, which has six pads and a foot pedal, is lousy. The pads are small and loud, plus the ones in the back are only slightly angled and raised so they're difficult to hit. And, really, having seven inputs is too much for people without bona fide drumming skills. It seems that Konami realized this because you'll go entire songs using just four pads (and sometimes not even touching the pedal for songs at a time) until you get to the hard difficulty setting.    Questionable drums are the least of Rock Revolutions problems, though. The soundtrack includes just over 30 songs--a paltry number when compared to the 80 or so songs in both Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2. There are tunes from Metallica, Foo Fighters, Ratt, The Ramones, Fall Out Boy, Twisted Sister, Avril Lavigne, and more. This wouldn't be a bad list if not for the fact that all of the songs are covers. Some of them are decent, but the competition uses nothing but master tracks these days, so this ends up being just another way in which Rock Revolution fails to measure up.     Substandard gameplay and an underwhelming Career mode compound Rock Revolution's issues. The Career mode is nothing more than playing a list of songs; there's no way to embark on a career as anything other than a solo act, no character customization, and nobody is playing the paltry online modes. The game can't even get the genre's established gameplay down right. The note highway that displays upcoming notes is vertical and displayed on a 2D plane. As a result, it only shows a few notes at a time, which makes fast sections very difficult because you can't anticipate what's coming next. This problem is further exacerbated by an unusually small window in which to play the correct note, questionable note recognition, note patterns that don't match the music, and stringent requirements for passing songs. Not only is it easy to fail the average song, but frequent additional requirements, such as not playing ""poison"" notes, achieving a certain score, or passing a song despite the difficulty increasing midtune, also conspire to block your rock.   The music studio is kind of fun, but it's not enough to warrant buying the game.   Rock Revolution's one redeeming mode lets you create your own music by first choosing a style or sound for your instrument and then mapping chords, riffs, or beats to the frets or drum pads. It's highly unlikely you're going to make any sort of masterpiece with the limited tools available; you can't add your created works to the game's set list or share them online, but it is mildly amusing to see what you and a few friends can come up with by mashing fret buttons and banging on the drums.     If Rock Revolution came out two or three years ago, it might have been revolutionary, but in 2008, it's not even relevant. Uninspired presentation, a tiny tracklist that includes no master tracks, a complete lack of vocal support, uninteresting gameplay, and a barebones Career mode are just a few of the many ways in with Rock Revolution fails. In fact, it fails to live up to its name, Konami's past, and, most importantly, the competition.  
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412,Game Party 2 ,3.5, Game Party 2 is a completely unoriginal minigame collection just waiting to take advantage of uninformed casual gamers.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/2/7/6/2221276-front_cover.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/game-party-2/1900-6200025/,neg,"
  Let's just get this out of the way now: Game Party 2 is not a fun game. From its generic title to its recycled collection of minigames, everything about it screams cash-in. Its poorly Photoshopped box sits on shelves waiting for unsuspecting grandparents and casual game players. Do not be fooled: There is nothing that sets this game apart from the dozens of other minigame collections on the Wii. There are better games out there that are more deserving of your money.   Play beanbag toss by making an underhand-throwing gesture; you know, just like lawn darts,  horseshoes, or skill ball.   As the title implies, Game Party 2 is the follow-up to the original, which was released less than a year ago. Of the 11 minigames present in the sequel, only five of them are new; the rest are recycled from the first game. These minigames include such things as darts, shuffleboard, trivia, skill ball, ping cup, beanbag toss, quarterback challenge, and more. Most of the games are slowly paced, with only one person playing at a time. A customizable Tournament mode allows up to 16 players to compete, so if you've got 15 friends and would like to ruin their night, invite them over for a round of uninteresting games. Playing through with a created profile will unlock new modes, playing surfaces, and other extras, but investing that much time in this game is a lot to ask.    When you first turn on Game Party 2, it might seem like there is a wide variety of moderately exciting minigames, but lazy controls make most of them blur together. During a play-through of all 11 games, you'll make a total of three different gestures. Skill ball, beanbag toss, horseshoes, and lawn darts all require the same underhand-throwing gesture, making them feel more like skin swaps than different games. The trivia game features a wide variety of questions in a bunch of different categories, but the question difficulty is too erratic, ranging from extremely obscure to ridiculously easy. Some of the minigames, such as darts and hoops shoot, offer a few minutes of fun, but none of them are worth playing more than a couple of times.    Though they've been improved since the original Game Party, the controls don't do much to make you feel like you're really playing the games. Most of them don't recognize slight variations, such as twisting the remote. Many of them also have problems registering and interpreting your gestures accurately. The few games that do work well, such as darts or shuffleboard, have been done before in better packages.     Like everything else in the game, the presentation is completely generic. You can set up a profile and create a player, but the options are limited. The character design is uninspired, with stiffly animated Mii look-alikes. Games take place in backyards and funky '70s-style basements. The environments and game pieces do an adequate job of re-creating the real games, but they lack any kind of appealing flash or effects. The menus are the best part of the visuals. They're easy to navigate and feature large buttons, as well as a nice polished shine. The music consists of forgettable waiting-room music that does a good job of tying off the whole generic package.    Ping cup, the nonalcoholic beer pong.   The last Game Party was released at a budget price, which kind of made up for the low quality. Game Party 2 costs $10 more than the first game, but it includes only a handful of new minigames and middling improvements. It's very hard to justify purchasing this game when the minigame collection packed in with the system is more fun. Don't let this game take advantage of your casual-game-playing friends.   
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413,Goosebumps: HorrorLand ,3.5, The controls in this horror-themed minigame collection are possessed by an evil spirit whose only goal is to drive you mad.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/9/5/2220995-hl1.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/goosebumps-horrorland-review/1900-6201317/,neg,"
  The HorrorLand theme park has been a fixture of writer R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books since its first appearance in 1994's One Day at HorrorLand. Since then, ""the scariest place on Earth"" has been featured in numerous Goosebumps books, as well as a board game and a 1996 PC game, but Goosebumps HorrorLand on the Wii almost certainly represents the most bone-chilling, hair-raising, terrifying depiction of the park to date. The controls in this horror-themed minigame collection are so bad, it's scary!   The bumper cars of Shock N Roll are one of the few enjoyable attractions at HorrorLand.     HorrorLand starts by having you choose a young boy or girl as your character, and then kicks things off with you and a friend mysteriously finding tickets to the park. Upon your arrival, your tickets are torn into pieces by the green-skinned horror at the entrance, and you and your friend are quickly separated. It soon becomes clear that the only way you'll escape from HorrorLand is by finding all the pieces of your ticket, which are scattered across the park's five areas. And to do that, you've unfortunately got to ride the rides and play the parlor games that make up HorrorLand's attractions.    Each of the park's five themed areas has six attractions, for a total of 30 minigames, though most of them are just slight variations on each other. To the game's credit, a few of them can be fun for a little while. For instance, there are some bumper-car games in which your goal is to destroy the other cars by ramming into them. You use the Wii Remote to steer, as well as to trigger bursts of speed, and these control well and are entertaining for a few minutes. But you've got to take the bad with the good in HorrorLand, and the bad is very, very bad.    It's not possible to get through the game playing only the more passable attractions, because getting into each successive area requires you to have a certain number of frights. You earn frights based on your performance in each game: a bronze-level performance nets you one, a silver two, and a gold three. Getting into the last area of the park requires you to have 50 frights, so you'll need to have earned at least a silver on most of the attractions to reach that point. It's surprisingly difficult to earn silver in a fair number of the attractions, and by the time you do, you'll likely have played even the more enjoyable minigames enough times that you'll be tired of them. But that's far from the worst that HorrorLand has to offer.    The worst games of all are those that require any kind of back-and-forth swinging motion, such as the minigolf games and the Skee-Ball-like parlor games in which you must roll balls into slots using just the right amount of momentum. The problem is that controlling that momentum seems just about impossible. You might swing the remote back and forth with tremendous speed, only to see your character tap the golf ball ever so slightly or roll the ball gently up the incline. Likewise, you might make the slightest movement with the remote and see the golf ball go flying forward or speeding up the slope. The controls for these attractions feel completely broken. And, like some kind of sick joke, the one game at which you absolutely must earn gold if you want to escape from HorrorLand is Pharaoh's Fairways, one of the minigolf attractions. Even the most patient of players will likely get frustrated with the controls while attempting to pull this off. It's almost as if the game itself, like the horrors who run HorrorLand, want you to be stuck in the park forever.    In addition to the aforementioned game types, there are roller coasters that have you scanning for targets to shoot, flume rides in which you must row left and right to avoid obstacles, shooting galleries, and the like. Some of the rides have an elaborate design that makes them look like they'd be fun to ride, but this doesn't translate into fun gameplay, and riding them a few times or more to try to earn more frights quickly becomes tedious. Speaking of tedious, many of your ticket pieces are found by aimlessly wandering all over various sections of the park with a young girl in tow, waiting for her to tell you that a piece of your ticket is nearby. It's not fun.   Perhaps the controls for Putt Cemetery are the diabolical experiment of a mad scientist.     It's too bad that the game fails so tremendously in a few very important areas, given that it does make HorrorLand seem like an interesting place, full of the kind of goofy, good-natured scares that young Goosebumps fans would love. The graphics certainly aren't technically impressive, but the five themed areas do have a certain style to them, from the B-movie sci-fi aesthetic of Mad Labs to the mummy-infested Egyptian horror of Terror Tombs. The music is suitably spooky, and the voice acting is decent throughout, with especially spirited introductions for each event and great delivery of the pun-filled humor that you'll find at every corner of HorrorLand. (What's a vampire's favorite holiday? Fangsgiving! Mwa-ha-ha!)    In addition to the single-player story mode, you can play any minigame you've previously played in the game's Arcade mode. Furthermore, a dozen of the games can be played by two players, allowing you to compete with a friend for a high score, which does make the shooting galleries a bit more interesting. There are also 25 monster cards to collect by meeting various conditions, though it's difficult to imagine anyone enjoying this game enough to find lasting value in this opportunity. Even the most devoted of Goosebumps fans will find a frightful amount of frustration waiting for them in HorrorLand.     
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414,Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 ,3.5, This clumsy and unsatisfying sequel is a major step backward.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/3/7/38212-101837.jpg,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/marvel-ultimate-alliance-2-review/1900-6228800/,neg,"
  Marvel Alliance 2, an action/role-playing sequel set in the Marvel comics universe, starts with a good foundation: the excellent Civil War storyline. This storyline provides a fitting backdrop for what could have been an all-star, superpowered frolic, but the unfortunate reality is an unfinished and poorly designed button masher. The action is awkward, the level design is messy and uninspired, and the minimal dialogue and major technical problems denigrate the source material. Furthermore, the PSP version of the game has jettisoned all cooperative multiplayer options, forcing you to team up with the awful artificial intelligence in lieu of your friends. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 represents a step backward in every conceivable way and is unworthy of its illustrious license.       Nevertheless, there are some points of light twinkling in the murk that mainly come from the source material bringing the fabled heroes together. The story is based on two well-known Marvel storylines: Secret War and Civil War. A number of excellent prerendered cutscenes bring the imaginative plot to life and, more importantly, force you to make an important choice a short ways into the game. You see, our bastions of justice are split into two camps over a newly established law coercing superheroes into officially registering with the US government. Your decision impacts how the middle portion plays and which heroes from the sizeable roster you can include in your team of four before the two branching paths meet again for the final act. The divergent story is a great idea and, in theory, should provide a good reason to return for a second round to see what you missed if you were to have chosen differently. However, this bifurcated story is diminished by simplistic storytelling that fails to involve you with its characters. The thoughtful plot is thinned out by shockingly few (and sparsely written) character conversations in between missions--none of which involve multiple dialogue options, let alone divergent ones.     The first half hour of the game introduces you to all you'll need to know to get you through the missions. From an isometric camera view, you lead a team of four Marvel stars through hordes of expendable henchmen, occasionally taking detours to perform simple tasks or solve puzzles. You lead one character at a time while the other three are controlled by the AI, though you can easily switch to other characters on your team in an instant. By hammering on buttons, you string standard attacks into combos that might trip or stun your foes. Each hero can eventually perform four different superpowers, and depending on your hero, you can jump, double jump, fly, or even teleport. Unfortunately, the AI-controlled heroes are a real drag on the proceedings. They often stand around doing nothing in the midst of big fights and boss battles, so you may find yourself screaming at the Incredible Hulk to stop talking about smashing and actually do it. In a boss fight in which you must destroy a particular object within a time limit, the AI's refusal to help out is even more infuriating. The AI characters also have a habit of huddling close to you and fencing you into corners while you traverse the tight, cluttered hallways as if villain-stomping were an excuse for team bonding. At least in other versions of the game, you can ease the frustration by inviting friends to join you. The PSP version, which is essentially the same game released for the Wii, does not support cooperative play of any kind. The original game featured both ad-hoc and infrastructure multiplayer progression; the sequel forces you to deal with weak digital substitutes. There's absolutely no excuse for such a major loss.    Perhaps awkward clumps of heroes without regard for personal boundaries would be easier to handle if the levels were accommodating, but alas, you spend a good amount of time walking down narrow, flavorless corridors and encountering poorly placed clusters of enemies prepared to take advantage of your team's greatest weakness: a bad camera. It's bad enough that it will nauseatingly swoop around to give you a completely different view of the action than you need, but it has an even worse habit of positioning itself just above doorways where a cluster of collaborators will be waiting to deliver a beatdown. As if to give you a fancy cinematic view, there are a few sequences in which you watch the action from the side, but most of these occasions don't work out. In one case, you view through a series of windows broken up by slats, so you can't even see the action that well. Furthermore, the game's low frame rate drops even further during these sections, which breaks up the flow and destroys any visual appeal that may have been gleaned. It seems that the camera was created to handle large, open-air environments--but Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 doesn't feature any. Even the city-street levels--the largest in the game--suffer from these issues.   Fusions: The Captain American way.   The action isn't all bad, but it isn't good either. At its simplest, the button mashing, superpower-infused mayhem has a basic appeal. Yet Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 seems to go out of its way to diminish the sense of flow and might that its combat should instill. The frame rate is consistently low and the animations are choppy, which in turn translates to lag in the controls. When pressing an attack button, your character may not respond immediately, and this delay sucks the immediacy out of the combat. The more action that occurs on the screen, the less in control you feel. It's like playing an online RPG with lag: Everything becomes herky-jerky and characters look like they are teleporting around. When camera issues are thrown into the mix, the awkwardness of it all is overwhelming. These frustrations culminate in the game's bonus missions. If you want to expand your roster and add unlockable characters to your team, you have to take on these scenarios. It's too bad you don't unlock characters as you play the campaign (as in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game) because these missions are a hassle and therefore not worth the trouble. For example, to unlock Jean Grey, you have to perform a solo mission in which you must destroy a bunch of vehicles by telekinetically flinging self-destructing enemies at them. But this mission is the opposite of fun. The suicidal foes get stuck on objects and spawn in too few locations; when these issues are combined with the ungainly camera, your annoyance levels rise.     This sequel introduces a new type of skill: fusions. These two-character attacks do an extra amount of damage, and some of them light up the screen with vibrant special effects. But they aren't much fun to perform, they suffer from the same clumsy animations as the main action, and they are hampered by clumsy features. You must build up a fusion energy meter, indicated on the screen by stars. Once you reach four stars, you can unleash a fusion by holding the L button and using the D pad to choose the hero you want fused with your active character. Oddly, the revival of fallen characters is also tied to the fusion stars. Unless an enemy drops a fusion token, which immediately grants you four stars, your meter is slow to build. Reviving a downed character uses up a star, which prolongs the wait. And, those tokens have a bad habit of appearing where they're hardest to get to--in the middle of multicharacter melees. It's odd, too, that the bright visual eruptions caused by fusions aren't accompanied by energetic audio effects. They sound feeble, which makes performing them less than exciting.    Not even an eye patch can keep Nick Fury from looking pensive.   When you aren't beating up minor criminals and Marvel villains, you will be leveling your characters and equipping teamwide upgrade medals that drop on the battlefield. These elements are sadly shallow. You begin with only one upgrade slot and unlock a few more as you play; this methodology is just a way of presenting a stripped-down progression system as a series of ""rewards."" You can spend skill points as you see fit, and if you choose to allow characters to auto-advance, it's nice that you can assign priority levels to various powers so that they may evolve more quickly. However, the fact that you must lock yourself into a leveling method (auto-level the entire party, manually advance party, or auto-advance party but manually level the player-controlled character) at the outset of the game is mind-boggling. Also mind-boggling: every attempt to provide variety by taking the player out of the fracas. An early turret sequence controls poorly, which makes mowing down enemies enormously unsatisfying. An end-level puzzle in which you must activate a sequence of computer terminals stops the game dead in its tracks, and the way your AI-controlled party crowds near you as you move about the room makes it even more exasperating.     Some licensed games are a labor of love, exhibiting profound respect for the source material. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, on the other hand, doesn't exhibit the kind of care and reverence a beloved brand merits. It's inelegant and underdeveloped, and while the original featured both ad-hoc and online co-op play, you're stuck on your own this time around. Halfhearted dialogue, bad AI, unimaginative level design, stripped RPG elements, and all sorts of other factors make the game feel as if it were pieced together on an assembly line and quickly tossed onto store shelves. The Marvel License--and PSP owners--deserve better.    
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415,Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings ,3.5, Too much motion-sensing and some dumb design decisions make Indiana Jones' latest adventure a chore.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/2/3/8/2221238-box_ijatsok.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/indiana-jones-and-the-staff-of-kings-review/1900-6212356/,neg,"
  Will the disappointments never end for Indiana Jones fans? After last year's disappointing Kingdom of the Crystal Skull movie, along comes the same heartbreak in video game form. Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings for the Nintendo Wii is every bit as big of a letdown as what Spielberg and Lucas foisted onto the silver screen last summer. Awful motion controls, simplistic action, a host of dumb design decisions, and graphics so old that they could have been dug out of an ancient tomb by the whip-cracking archaeologist himself make this third-person action-adventure one of the most dissatisfying games of the year.      Story is about the only area where Staff of Kings doesn't disappoint, and that's because it rips off Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. The year is 1939, and Indy is globetrotting in search of yet another Biblical McGuffin in the fabled Staff of Moses. His big enemies are--wait for it--Nazis and yet another rival archaeologist with no scruples. About the only Indy stereotype missing is a love interest, since Dr. Jones flies solo here. Even without the presence of a Marion Ravenwood-type, the plot is a far sight better than that in Crystal Skull. However, it unfolds in a very routine connect-the-dots fashion that holds absolutely no surprises for anyone who has ever seen the original tomb raider do his thing in a movie, and it doesn't have any sense of humor even in the goofiest moments. The absence of any chuckles is kind of a drag, too, since the Harrison Ford stand-in does a great job with Indy's dialogue, and a few wisecracks would have been welcome. The only innovative plot twist here comes in the cooperative multiplayer mode, where Indy teams up with his dad, Henry, in a series of 3D platforming challenges unrelated to the quest for Moses' great big stick. Because Henry was dropped from the Crystal Skull script due to Sean Connery's refusal to reprise the role, this cameo nicely steps in to serve as an alternate farewell to a memorable character in the Indy universe.    Once you get beyond the movie homage, however, the wheels fall off. The biggest problem is an overreliance on the Wii's motion-sensing control capabilities. The control stick handles basic movement, but beyond that, every one of Indy's signature whip cracks and roundhouse punches is choreographed with wiggles and waggles of the remote and the nunchuk. Whenever you need to do something more involved than running around or climbing onto a crate, an icon pops up on the lower right of the screen indicating what sort of wrist aerobics you have to pull off. And this gets old quickly.   No Indiana Jones adventure would be complete without lots of creeping around through ancient temples and tombs.   At first, it's kind of neat to flick the controller to punch out thugs, snap the remote forward to pull baddies into finishing moves with Indy's whip, target enemies with a pistol in carnival-style shooting sequences, pick up bats and other objects to use as weapons, and even fly a biplane. But such relentless use of motion controls for all of the action sequences in a nonstop action game wears you out, even in relatively short play sessions. The six-level jaunt through Sudan, San Francisco's Chinatown, Istanbul, and other stock pulp settings can be wrapped up in little more than six hours of play, though that limited amount of time seems awfully long and hard on the wrists when you're even pumping the remote up and down in a pretty intense manner to reload Indy's revolver. More judicious use of the motion controls for boss fights and puzzles would have been a lot easier to take than this kitchen-sink approach.    A lack of sensitivity adds to the frustration. Indy can throw a good variety of jabs, hooks, and uppercut punches, but it's a toss-up which one the controls will register, if any. So since precision doesn't work, it's best to flail about with the remote and nunchuk, paying attention only to the tougher thugs that have to be dodged before you can counterpunch. This is just as annoying as it sounds, although it sure provides lots of entertainment to spectators. Most battles are also pretty gimmicky. Indy typically creeps into a room packed with goons, then pulls off some movie-magic attacks to whittle them down to more reasonable numbers before wading into the fisticuffs. If you keep a close eye on the backgrounds, you'll find loads of places to dump exploding barrels onto enemies and pull down roofs with your trusty whip. Some of these trick sequences are awfully demanding, though. The icon telling you what to do or which button to press can flash on and off the screen very fast and can often be confusing, so Indy can quickly wind up dead when you're caught by surprise.    Combine these needless deaths with a poor checkpoint save system and say hello to a lot of unnecessary frustration. Even though the levels are strictly linear, of the sort that should lend themselves well to checkpoint save spots at regular intervals, developer A2M Games has placed them in weird spots. Many times you'll have to repeat a bunch of basic movements, like scaling walls, before you can even get back to the big showdown that has been killing you over and over again. You also can't skip cutscenes or tutorials. So if you get killed early on, you might have to sit through a lengthy tutorial sequence again. Later on, you're frequently stuck repeating the entirety of lengthy, multipart battles due to some nasty little surprise at the end. One shootout in Chinatown, for instance, drags on through a good half-dozen gun battles where you chase the bad guy by shooting various objects over his head. As if that scrap weren't tedious and repetitive enough, when you finally reach the end you have to suddenly save a kidnapping victim from being electrocuted...and of course you have to do so with some finicky remote wrangling. The surprise and the lack of good instructions on what you're supposed to be doing to save the damsel and yourself from being grilled like a hotdog on Independence Day make for an irritating coda to an already annoying action sequence.    Punching out and even whipping bad guys gets old very fast thanks to far too much use of the Wii's motion controls.   Staff of Kings isn't a game that's able to mask any of its shortcomings with pleasing visuals. All of the background scenery is fuzzy, blurry, or some optometrist's nightmare combo of both. Animations are so clunky that Indy lumbers around like a tank and can easily get stuck in alleyways. The only frills of note here are the co-op mode already mentioned and the presence of the fantastic 1992 PC adventure Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on the game disc as an unlockable bonus.    It has been a rough couple of years for Indiana Jones. The Staff of Kings arrived with a lot of promise, but in the end it's just another crime against this once-great movie and game icon.  
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416,Batman: Arkham Asylum ,9, You don't need to be a fan of Batman to enjoy this excellent third-person action game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426844-2220764-box_batmanaa.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/batman-arkham-asylum-review/1900-6217199/,pos,"
  You've heard of Batman no doubt, but if you don't read comics, it's conceivable that you might be unfamiliar with Arkham Asylum. The iconic psychiatric hospital is essentially Gotham City's Alcatraz, and it has housed just about every villain Batman has ever tangled with at one time or another. Now, thanks to Eidos and developer Rocksteady, Arkham is also the setting for a great third-person action game in which the lunatics take over the asylum and only you can stop them. As Batman, you not only get to go toe-to-toe with thugs in fast-paced punch-ups, but you also employ satisfying stealth tactics, play with great gadgets, solve some remarkable riddles, and do a decent amount of detective work. In short, you get to do all of the things that you want to when you don a Batman costume in a game, provided you weren't hoping to get behind the wheel of the batmobile.   The close-ups you're afforded every time a combat sequence comes to an end are always a treat.   Because just about everything else needs to be unlocked, the first time you boot up Batman: Arkham Asylum, your first port of call (after creating or logging into a Games for Windows Live account so that you can save your game) will inevitably be the Story mode. Here, you learn that Batman has captured Joker, and as the lengthy intro sequence plays out, you see him being returned to the asylum under Batman's watchful eye. Joker doesn't seem at all perturbed by his predicament, and it quickly becomes apparent that he has deliberately allowed himself to be captured as part of a grand plan that involves taking control of Arkham Island and throwing a party there with Batman as the guest of honor. Clearly it's a trap, but as Batman (and as someone who demands more than two minutes of gameplay before the credits roll), you just can't walk away from it.    As you take the controls, Arkham Asylum wastes no time throwing you into the thick of the action. Almost immediately, you're rushed by a few of Joker's goons and encouraged to knock them out using both basic attacks and counters. Both the Xbox 360 controller and mouse-and-keyboard control schemes work very well, though the latter occasionally demands a bit more dexterity to perform certain actions. You're free to move between the two options on the fly though, and the onscreen prompts for context-sensitive controls change accordingly. Using just two buttons on your mouse or controller, you can perform a huge number of moves from Batman's superbly animated repertoire, and it isn't at all difficult to string together combos worthy of Hollywood's finest fight coordinators. That's because for the most part, at least early in the game, combat requires you to do little more than mash the attack button and then hit the counter button anytime you notice an enemy with an ""I'm about to attack you"" icon above his head. None of the thugs that you encounter pose much of a threat individually, but you rarely encounter fewer than three or four of them at once, and often, you'll be up against six or more. Furthermore, the vanilla thugs are joined by enemies with knives, cattle prods, and guns later on, who force you to raise your game and incorporate stun attacks and evasive rolls into your deadly dance routine. Boss battles against supervillains like Scarecrow and Harley Quinn are definitely among the game's highlights, though it's a little disappointing that there aren't more of them. One supervillain in particular makes a number of appearances, but you never actually get to fight him.   Hit Y or the right mouse button, and the attacker with lines above his head will be countered with style.   The combat in Arkham Asylum never gets overly complicated, though the number of moves and attacks at your disposal increases quite dramatically as you progress through the Story mode, earn experience points, and subsequently spend those points on acquiring new combo moves and gadgets. Throws, takedowns, and even batarang attacks can be incorporated into your combos this way, but you never need to press more than two buttons simultaneously, and the timing of your moves doesn't have to be particularly precise. Fighting against mobs of up to a dozen enemies or so is a blast, and while they're not smart enough to all just jump on you at once, they're not stupid either. Given half a chance, thugs will pull pipes from walls to attack you with, pick up boxes to throw at you, and recover weapons from fallen colleagues. Fortunately, there's one weapon that your foes seem blissfully unaware of but which Batman is incredibly comfortable with: the environment.     Your surroundings don't always have a role to play in combat, but during large set piece encounters (many of which can be replayed against the clock in Challenge mode), using them to your advantage is practically a requirement. Picture this: You walk into a large room where eight gun-carrying enemies have been instructed by Joker to keep an eye out for you. You can't leave the room until every single one of them is unconscious, and going toe-to-toe with them isn't an option because--at least as far as this game is concerned--bullets are Batman's kryptonite. What do you do? Job one is to stay out of sight, which can often be accomplished by crouching atop gargoyles mounted high on the walls that, while an unusual interior design choice, make near-perfect hiding spots from which to survey the scene using your X-ray-like detective vision. From a vantage point like that, you can perform glide kicks to swoop down and floor enemies passing nearby, perform awesome ""inverted takedowns"" to grab guys as they pass directly beneath you and leave them hanging on ropes for their comrades to see, and throw batarangs that serve a number of useful purposes. Or, if you need to move, you can use your grapnel gun to zip to another location. Just be sure to suspend your disbelief as you do so because you're invisible to the enemy when you're in transit.   If this guy had looked up he might have seen the inverted takedown coming.   Once you've thinned your number of enemies a bit, it's safer for you to move around on the ground, and that's when you can really start to use the environment to your advantage. You can rig explosives to bring walls and ceilings down on top of enemies, crash through windows and ceilings, hide in floor grates and emerge directly behind unsuspecting enemies, and, well, you get the idea. All of these actions can be performed quickly and easily, but that doesn't make them any less satisfying when they work.    The reactions of enemies who know that their colleagues are being picked off one by one adds massively to the feeling that you're playing as a bona fide superhero. As their numbers diminish, enemies become visibly more scared--they start to move around in pairs rather than individually, press up against walls and lean around corners, and ultimately get so panicked that they fire a shot anytime they turn a corner. Listening to their superbly voiced conversations clues you into their state of mind as well. Initially, your enemies will be quite bold, loudly making threats and musing on how famous they're going to be for killing you. But as the odds gradually shift in your favor and Joker taunts them, they exude less and less confidence--ultimately sounding like they're resigned to their fates and might start crying at any moment.      The quality of the voice acting never falters for a second in Arkham Asylum, and while Mark Hamill's Joker is unsurprisingly a standout, there are great performances from other characters too. Listing them here would be to risk spoiling elements of the story for you, particularly where the other villains are concerned. You just need to know that every character in the game is well written, well voiced, and often well worth listening to--whether it's a supervillain, a thug, an ally, or a lowly security guard.   Over 50 characters from Batman's universe are detailed in unlockable bios.  One character that you definitely want to listen to carefully is Edward Nigma, also known as Riddler. That's because there are no fewer than 240 ""riddles"" for you to solve on Arkham Island, and doing so not only earns you a good number of experience points but is also the only way to unlock character bios, character trophies (detailed character models that you can examine and admire at your leisure), and Challenge mode maps. The riddles come in a number of different flavors, many of which don't involve riddles at all, and the one thing that they all have in common is that they're rewarding to solve. For example, finding hidden patient interview tapes or chronicles of Arkham affords you additional insight into the asylum's history and inmates, while cracking a cryptic clue to locate an item that you need to take a photo of might make you feel smart and, if you're lucky, earn you enough experience points to purchase your next upgrade. The best of the proper riddles are those that lead you to photograph question marks painted around the island, which doesn't sound very interesting until you realize that these question marks can only be seen using detective vision from very specific locations. That's because these elusive punctuation marks are painted in two parts at different locations that are often quite far apart, so the solution requires you to find both parts and then figure out where to take the photo from so that they line up perfectly. It's clever and compelling stuff, though it does encourage you to spend more time than you'd probably like in detective vision mode.  In fact, it's likely that you'll spend a good portion of your time with Arkham Asylum in detective vision mode even if you're not looking for hidden question marks. In regular vision mode, you just get to see that this is a great-looking game with superb animation, excellent lighting, and impressive attention to detail. But when you switch to detective vision, you can immediately spot destructible surfaces, more easily locate hidden items, and spot enemies through walls. You can even tell at a glance which of those enemies have guns and which don't because they're colored differently. It's unfortunate that the predominantly blue-with-white outlines vision mode is so invaluable because, while it's an interesting look, it's akin to reading a black-and-white photocopy of a beautifully colored comic book.   Detective vision mode makes it easy to spot nearby threats, among other things.  If you're a fan of Batman comic books, you should feel very at home in Arkham Asylum. There are plenty of nods and winks to inmates who don't actually appear in the game, and even some of the minor characters have neat backstories that are faithful to their previous, infrequent appearances in comics. You shouldn't feel intimidated if you're not that familiar with Batman, though, because the game does a great job of giving you all of the information you need, as well as plenty that you don't. For example, taking the time to read prominent character Harley Quinn's bio and listen to her patient interviews offers valuable insight into her motivations that might add to your enjoyment of the game, while unlockable information on such characters as Prometheus, Calendar Man, and Humpty Dumpty just adds a little flavor.  More significant unlockable content comes in the form of eight challenge maps, which come in regular and extreme difficulties for a total of 16. The maps are based on areas that you visit in the Story mode, and the challenges are split 50/50 between purely combat-oriented sequences and stealth-based ""Predator"" gameplay. In the former, you're pitted against four increasingly tough waves of enemies and score points for performing combos, avoiding taking damage, executing ring outs, and using a variety of different moves. In the latter, you're dropped into a level where every enemy has a gun and your goal is to take them all down as quickly as possible. The twist is that to earn a respectable position on the online leaderboards (which you need a Games for Windows Live account to access) in the Challenge mode, you also have to earn medals, and in order to do that, you have to deal with some of your enemies in very specific ways. During a stealth challenge, for example, earning the maximum possible three medals might require you to perform a silent takedown from behind and an inverted takedown, as well as pull an enemy down from a walkway while hanging from a ledge.  Joker is ever-present, taunting you via TV screens and PA systems.  The medals get even more demanding in extreme challenges, where you need to knock guys out while crashing through windows, pull floors out from underneath multiple enemies, and even cause three different walls to fall on three different thugs simultaneously. In regular stealth challenges, the wall-mounted gargoyles are your best friends, but on extreme maps, all of the gargoyles are booby-trapped to blow up shortly after you land on them. Robbed of these safe vantage points, you have to spend a lot more time moving around on the ground, which--because you have detective vision--you can do without needing to stop and peek around every corner. Stealth gameplay is almost never this fast-paced or action-packed, and it's rarely this fun.  Regardless of whether you're getting sucked into the Story mode or competing for high scores in the Challenge mode, Batman: Arkham Asylum does an outstanding job of letting you be Batman. Everything about this game--the impressive visuals, stirring soundtrack, superb voice acting, fiendish puzzles, hard-hitting combat--feels like it has been lovingly crafted by a development team that's both knowledgeable and passionate about the source material. Miss out on this one and the joke's on you. 
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417,The Last Guardian ,9, The Last Guardian's peerless animation and character development bring a fascinating relationship between boy and beast to life.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3080295-59672.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-last-guardian-review/1900-6416583/,pos,"
True to Fumito Ueda's work on Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian is a fascinating game that portrays a heartfelt relationship between two unlikely cohorts--a nameless boy and a giant creature named Trico--who develop mutual trust, communication, and compassion against seemingly impossible odds.Their tale is a shining example of storytelling through subtle cues and shared experiences; the occasional annoyances that come from trying to force members of two different species to cooperate are part and parcel of their partnership, for better and for worse. But touching moments throughout and an unshakable final act melt these grievances away. The culmination of your incredible journey crystallizes a bond with Trico and makes you immediately long for another adventure with your newfound best friend.It all begins when you awake from a dream to find yourself imprisoned in a mysterious cave. Trico is nearby, subdued by a metal collar, armor, and a pair of spears lodged in its back. Though the cause remains a mystery until the end, you immediately understand the need to remove the weapons and forge an escape. Trico knocks you unconscious after you extract the first spear, but your continued efforts after you wake payoff. In short order, the creature is free from the heavy shackles, and the two of you begin your tricky escape.You and Trico are instrumental to each other's progress; it's easy for you to slip through small passageways and precisely manipulate objects to activate doors, but only Trico can leap dozens of feet into the air and reach high, out-of-the-way places. Your massive companion needs to be coaxed into giving you a hand at first, and food in the form of glowing barrels works as a motivator at times, but you otherwise need to provide directions through physical positioning and vocal commands. Because you move with palpable inertia, running around in search of the next step and managing Trico at the same time can feel taxing, but its a small price to pay for the organic, lifelike animations on display.Success typically comes down to identifying the one object or passage in an environment that allows you to move ahead, and working with Trico to access it. You will climb on the beast's back to reach high ledges, use its tail to descend into pits, and lure it to jump into pools of water so you can ride the resulting wave. But you must accept its slow reaction times and patiently decipher its body language, and it's a process that can test your patience when you've lost your path, dense as the world is with red herrings like intrusive outcrops and heavily ornamented architecture.Yet even at its most disobedient, Trico is an impressive animal to behold, with the mannerisms of a house cat as it rests and slinks through environments, and the temperament of a lion during run-ins with possessed sentinels. Trico will swat and sniff curiosities--sometimes as a hint, other times because it's simply distracted, and the only way to calm your companion after a fight or a scare is through the solace of petting and coos. When you look into Trico's curious eyes as you run out of reach to pull a lever, or when it senses something frightening, you don't see the artifice that defines most video game characters; you see an honest portrayal.Much like a real pet, Trico doesn't automatically learn because you want it to, but its progress yields confidence in your cooperation as it eventually learns to take commands on the first try. This is gratifying from a gameplay perspective, since you feel less like you're wasting time investigating the world and more like you're working in concert with a reliable partner. As an emotionally invested player, your patience is handsomely rewarded by the formation of an unwavering bond.The Last Guardian is, for the most part, a totally convincing experience that draws you into the mindset of Trico and the boy. However, there are times when you're reminded of the game they live in. From beginning to end, without an option to disable it, a button prompt appears when you’re in front of an interactive object. Contrasted with environments that force you to consider every option, it's confusing that the game never trusts you to handle basic tasks and instead opts to interrupt the otherwise complex experience.And despite handling numerous impressive scenes without a hitch, there are a few scenes with obvious frame-rate issues. These occurrences by no means dominate the game--far from it--but they make you consider the technological lattice holding the world together when they appear. It also makes you consider the impossible task Ueda and company likely faced when The Last Guardian was in development for PlayStation 3.The resulting shift to PlayStation 4 has obviously paid off--troubled moments aside, your journey is dominated by awe-inspiring architecture and natural wonder. As you weave in and out of caves and ruins, you're treated to wide views of towers and bridges in the distance that you may never visit, but they live on in your imagination as you piece together the story and world around you.It isn't clear whether or not The Last Guardian means to be frustrating at times--if it's a concerted effort to test your patience for a lovable-yet-stubborn creature. Your affection for Trico and sympathy for both characters blossom nonetheless, culminating in an enrapturing series of revelations that cements your attachment to their personalities. Trico is the undeniable star of the show, exhibiting believable physicality and emotional range, but the boy is a valuable lesson in how to be patient and resilient when faced with unforeseen challenges.When the book closes on their story, it's hard not to open it up again and begin anew. The trials you overcome endear you to both characters, but the emotions Trico elicits make you want to give it another chance--to be the patient, effective partner it truly deserves.


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418,Halo 3: ODST ,9, An awesome campaign and addictive new Firefight mode make ODST a thrilling new entry in the Halo franchise.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/5/1/2221151-box_haloodst.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/halo-3-odst-review/1900-6228780/,pos,"
  You wake up all alone in a hostile city. Pockets of enemies are hiding in the nearly pitch-black environment and your allies are nowhere to be found. In the opening moments of Halo 3: ODST, you are vulnerable and aimless--two elements that have never been explored in a Halo game before. These quiet, moody scenes flow into the spirited, high-energy battles the franchise is known for, but this feeling of desolation never fully dissolves. ODST is an awesome entry in the franchise because it not only showcases the elements that have made previous games in the series so explosively fun, but it also introduces a handful of new ideas that add a unique spin on the classic formula. The most exhilarating of the new features is the Firefight mode, a cooperative battle against a never-ending swarm of covenant soldiers that is as intense and rewarding as anything that has appeared in the series. Whether you love the solitude of the single-player campaign, the camaraderie of cooperative encounters, or the blood lust of multiplayer competition, Halo 3: ODST is a fantastic package.      ODST takes place before Halo 3, but you do not get to play as Master Chief this time. Rather, you take on the role of an orbital drop shock trooper dubbed ""The Rookie,"" and your job is to extract important data located far below the ruined city of New Mombasa before the Covenant gets its hands on the prize. As you can imagine, things do not go as planned, and you wake up from a horrible crash landing six hours after your allies hit ground. The city is bathed in darkness, with burned-out cars littering the streets and sharpshooting enemies hiding in deadly gangs waiting to ambush anyone who wanders near them. The story itself is nothing special, but the manner in which it is told is quite engaging. As you wander around this hostile environment, you will find pieces of equipment that your fellow soldiers left behind. When you pick up these items, you are transported to the past and get to play through the events that took place while you were knocked out.     Your time spent as The Rookie is far different from what you might expect in a Halo game. It is slow-paced and largely silent. Your only companion as you methodically wind your way through these streets is a symphonic musical score that adds to the atmosphere and builds upon the loneliness of your situation. Your goal in these sections is to locate glowing beacons that will whisk you to the next chapter, but these areas are more than just a hub to take you from level to level. Even though these sections take place on Earth, the areas are as hostile and sterile as an alien planet, and exploring them has their own rewards. There are audio logs scattered all over the place, and piecing together events from the perspective of an innocent bystander during the invasion adds emotional depth to the situation. There are still enemies waiting to pounce, and you'll have to don your night-vision goggles so you aren't caught unaware. This view is rather jarring at first and casts the city in high-contrast light that is off-putting. This required overdependance on night-vision goggles dampens the moody ambience a bit, but these sessions are still an overwhelming success because of the strong feelings they evoke and the sharp contrast they provide to the main combat.    The majority of the game plays out in the memories of your allies, and these levels strongly resemble the classic Halo action. The whole campaign can also be played with up to three friends. The explosive weaponry and industrious vehicles make their return from Halo games of the past, and they are doled out in tantalizing increments so that you always have a new toy to play with just before you tire of the last. Your abilities have been scaled back, which makes the action feels closer to Halo: Combat Evolved. You don’t run as fast or jump as high, you cannot dual-wield weapons, and you can get hurt when you fall from too high. The health system has gone through the most impactful change. When you are attacked, your shield starts to dissipate, and when that is completely gone, your health begins to fade. Your shield can be recharged just by standing outside of combat for a few moments, but restoring your health requires medical packs. Because you can die much more easily in ODST than in Halo 3, you will have to approach combat in a more tactical way by skirting around the outside of the fray instead of rushing in guns blazing. Having to be constantly mindful of your own vulnerability in a Halo game is a welcome change of pace, and is a key element in some of the most thrilling situations in the game.   The silenced submachine gun is one of the new weapons, though being quiet is rarely necessary.   The early levels of ODST take place along the city streets of New Mombasa, and the buildings towering overhead give deadly hiding places for your many attackers. Every so often, a squad of enemies will ambush you, and you will have to fend off every last one of those Covenant assassins to progress through the level. These situations are intense and satisfying, placing enemies in optimal positions to make your life miserable. Snipers perching on balconies, sharpshooters dotting sky bridges, and kamikaze grunts flooding out of doors will constantly torment you. Trying to find cover when you're completely surrounded is a challenge in itself, so you'll need to make quick decisions and hope your aim is true.     From the city streets, you make your way to wide-open plains, and this affords you a chance to test out the excellent vehicles once more. There are only a few levels that let you go on a joyride for a prolonged period of time, and the rarity of these occasions, coupled with the many ambushes and blockades you encounter, make these some of the best sections in the game. During one early stage, you hop on board a Ghost and tear through the Covenant alongside the ocean. This is an exhilarating sequence and gives you plenty of room to turbo down straightaways, crashing into anyone stupid enough to stand in your way, and there's just enough challenge sprinkled in to keep you on your toes. The most intense of the vehicle sequences occurs a little later in the game onboard a fleet of Banshees. The maneuverability of these agile flyers is on full display here, forcing you to wind around obstacles and strafe deadly attackers if you want to survive. What makes this section extra special is that it takes place at night, and your limited visibility adds a bit of fear to the excitement.      The biggest downside in this campaign is the repetition of scenery in a few levels that creates an unwelcoming feeling of monotony. One of the last levels is especially guilty of this, laying out an endless line of similar-looking corridors and making the visuals far too repetitive. The fast-paced combat saves these sections from becoming boring, but they offer a sharp contrast to the excellence offered in the rest of the adventure. There is also one annoying visor quirk that you cannot escape. Whenever you are shot, your screen turns red and stays in this ugly hue until you fully recharge your shield. It doesn't matter if you are mortally wounded or just suffering from a flesh wound; the screen distorts your view, obscuring your vision for far too long. This is paired with an unnecessary beeping noise that will bore into your brain before long. Like the sometimes-repetitive level design, this certainly doesn't kill the thrilling action, but it's far from a pleasing effect.      The campaign is shorter than those in previous games, but there is still plenty to do when you finish your quest. Firefight is the biggest addition to ODST, and it is a fantastic experience for anyone who enjoys shooting grunts and brutes. The rules are simple: You and up to three friends shoot down wave after wave of enemy attackers until your shared pool of lives has been exhausted. Each round presents more formidable foes than the last, so while you start out picking on hapless grunts, you quickly move on to heavily shielded jackals, screaming brutes, and hammer-wielding chieftains. Dynamic gameplay settings represented by skulls add to the difficulty and either hamper your own abilities, give your enemies new powers or, most likely, offer a combination of the two. For instance, during some rounds, your enemies will toss an endless stream of grenades your way; while in another round, you may have to land a melee attack to replenish your shields.     The 10 Firefight levels force you to change your tactics, keeping the experience fresh and exciting. The lights have been knocked out in a large section of one level, so you must not only fight the enemies who are mercilessly trying to kill you, but you also have to be on guard from assaults in the darkness. Another level takes place on narrow pathways, and your enemies fly in from above, giving you no place to hide. A massive outdoor level stretches far off in the distance; here, a nondescript shanty provides the only reprieve from the open air, and your only other source of cover comes from some rock dotting the landscape. You can grab a warthog and gun down your foes in style, and if you can steal a Chopper from an incompetent brute, you can give yourself even more firepower. Every level forces players to work together. Because the ammunition is limited and your precious lives are shared, you have to defend each other at all costs, which makes for an intoxicating experience that continually sucks you back in to top your previous best score.     The competitive multiplayer hasn't been forgotten, though it can't match the heights offered by the other elements of the game. The biggest strength and weakness of this mode is that it has been transported wholesale from Halo 3. If you would like to read how this works, please refer to our review of Halo 3. The only difference between this mode in ODST and Halo 3 has to do with the number of maps you can access. Halo 3 shipped with 11 maps and added 10 more with downloadable content. Those 21 are all included with ODST, along with three new ones, one of which is a remake of Halo 2's Midship. The multiplayer is as exciting as ever, but for those who have tired of the action, there aren't any new gameplay features to tempt you. For those who hunger for more, the new maps are well constructed, and the various play types--along with forge, film sharing, and all the other elements--are just as amazing as ever.    The vehicle sequences are awesome even with the overused red effect.   Halo is starting to show its age visually, but it can still wow at times because of the excellent artistic design. In open-air environments, ODST continually brings your focus to the background with stunning effects taking place far off in the distance. In one sequence, you can see a building crumble to dust as you tear down a road. In another, you are greeted by a haunting blood-red sky when you step outside. These impressive moments won't let you forget the awkward character animation during cutscenes, though, and the inconsistent lip syncing will make you pine for the days when your hero's face was hidden. The music, however, is without fault. This is the best score in a Halo game so far and perfectly complements the mood with a variety of well-constructed beats. The eerie musical score during the city levels is the most impressive, but it is often the absence of music that creates the biggest impact. The ambient noises outside of fights slowly build a nervous energy, and the music explodes when bullets start flying, which adds to the intensity.     Halo 3: ODST is an excellent package. The delicate construction of the story adds a new wrinkle to the typical Halo plot, and the action-packed campaign levels are full of intense battles and surprising encounters. Firefight mode is a standout addition, crafting highly addictive cooperative battles for players to experience. It's disappointing that the competitive multiplayer hasn't received any updates or innovations from its Halo 3 incarnation, but it's as fun as it ever was, and well worth sinking more hours into if you haven't yet seen the many downloadable maps. ODST is a superb addition to the franchise and a must-play for anyone who craves top-notch action.  


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419,Demon's Souls ,9," Brutally challenging and utterly engrossing, this innovative role-playing game is one of the year's best.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426825-2221163-box_dsouls.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/demons-souls-review/1900-6231961/,pos,"
  The Kingdom of Boletaria is an unforgiving place. Entering it means embracing a seemingly endless cycle of death and resurrection as you slowly tread through sullen swamps, scavenge dark caverns, and sneak between looming castle walls. It's dark and dreary, as if the residents of hell have plunged a dagger into the very idea of happiness and left its lifeless form to wither away. Developer From Software's action role-playing game Demon's Souls houses this kingdom, and you should not expect the game to welcome you as an old friend and willingly share its deepest secrets. This is an uncompromising RPG of the highest order--and a brilliant, atmospheric, and visionary one. It is at once old-fashioned and innovative, a stubbornly difficult dungeon crawler loaded with wholly unique mechanics. Perhaps the game's greatest triumph, however, is that it takes qualities normally associated with frustration and discomfort--constant trial and error, slow progression, harsh enemies--and makes them virtues. It may have an unusual and unforgiving set of rules, but it stays true to them and, in the process, draws you in like few RPGs can. Demon's Souls is a stark and sulky beauty and is one of the finest games of 2009.       Demon's Souls' uncanny ability to ensnare you in its web starts with its five gloomy, meticulously crafted worlds. It takes some of the usual elements of dark medieval fantasy--roaring dragons, demon knights clad in well-worn armor, crumbling stone castles--and then molds them into a cohesive and enthralling universe. Every element is in exactly the right place, from soaring demons that look like manta rays to rows of fiends using their pickaxes to unearth unspecified valuables. Each world feels and looks authentic, as does the hub world (called the Nexus) from which you access them. There isn't much narrative to speak of, just some basic but intriguing backstory regarding the giant beast called the Old One and the demons infesting the kingdom. But you'll barely notice how thin the story strands are, for the kingdom itself weaves a story of its own as you slowly investigate its nooks and crannies, and the characters you encounter seem totally within their element. When you kneel before the Maiden in Black and she prays in her halting, affected speech, you believe in her conviction. When Blacksmith Boldwin sneers at you that he needs your business, you hear the contempt in his voice. Their lips don't move when they speak, but it hardly matters: these world-weary people, and the frightening realm they inhabit, are immediately believable.    The game doesn't just look and feel unforgiving--it plays that way too. You may tackle any of its five main regions at any time, but that doesn't mean you will easily slice your way through each one. If the first few minutes of the tutorial don't betray the challenges in store for you, the same level's gargantuan end boss certainly will. You are meant to die, and you are meant to die often. When you do, you return to the archstone at the beginning of the area and do it all again. When you are resurrected, you get to keep most of what you had on your person--your weapons, your armor, your healing grasses, and so on. However, you lose the most precious commodity you possess: collected souls. Souls are the game's currency, and the primary way of accumulating them is to kill demons. You can't sell looted weapons that you don't need, nor can you put souls in the bank for use later. You can hold onto them, spend them on important items like spice (which replenishes your magical energy), or use them to improve your core attributes (such as endurance, strength, and so on).    If you're afraid of the dark, the Tower of Latria may not be the best choice of vacation spots.   Should you die on your travels, the souls you've amassed aren't necessarily gone for good, however. You can return to the location of your death and touch the bloodstain you left behind, which returns the lost souls to you. Be careful, though: if you die on your way to your bloodstain, it will disappate and be gone forever, along with all your hard-won souls. The whole thing may sound incredibly harsh, and on the surface, it is. You'll cautiously traverse the same hallways and stairwells to find your bloodstain, only to have a lamp-carrying demon shock you with electricity, lift you into the air with the tentacles growing from its face, and take half of your health away with one fateful stab. The constant specter of death means you should plan how you want to spend your souls in advance. Once you get enough, you'll want to hightail it back to the Nexus and improve an attribute, upgrade your weapon, or repair your armor. Eventually, you'll make a breakthrough, and enemies that seemed so dastardly the last time will be mere speedbumps the next. Yet even when you accumulate thousands upon thousands of valuable souls, and you know that the sensible thing to do is to return to the closest archstone and teleport back to the Nexus, your curiosity may push you onward. There always seems to be a terrific surprise lurking around the bend, in the way of awesome new enemies (a giant blob made up of flailing corpses), amazing environments (the thin suspended walkways hanging over Latria's murky swamp), and precious loot (stones used to upgrade your crossbow).     The monsters may be tough, but the game grants you the flexibility you need to take them on as you see fit. You'll create your character using Demon's Souls' robust customization options and select a class when you first begin, but you aren't stuck with one particular play style. As long as you meet the necessary statistical requirements and own the requisite item (a talisman for casting miracles, for example), you can use any weapon, any armor, and any magic you please. It's a good thing, too, for certain circumstances may dictate that you follow an unplanned path. Perhaps you had no intention of using magic, but a simple soul arrow spell can come in mighty handy when you're dealing with flaming bugs fluttering about in the sky. You may plan to pour all your souls into your strength attribute, only to realize that leveling up endurance is the better idea, because you'll be able to absorb more damage with your shield before losing health.    These soaring demons don't just look dangerous--they'll pummel you with spears if you aren't careful.   What makes extreme difficulty and incessant trial and error such wonderful qualities in Demon's Souls, when they are so loathsome in other games? It starts with the deliberate and wonderful combat, which doesn't seem complex at first, but reveals its subtleties in time. Rarely will mindlessly hacking and slashing get you anywhere, unless death is your ultimate goal. You need to contemplate every move, swing only when you are sure you won't be countered, and switch weapons or use items only when you are sure your window of opportunity is wide enough. You'll encounter all sorts of awesome and unnatural beasts, from tumbling skeletal fiends to frightful three-faced larvae, and while they have a set number of attacks, they still behave unpredictably. You will undoubtedly take a lot of damage until you learn the subtleties of fighting each enemy, but combat feels just right. You move with the right amount of weight, combos take time to pull off, and animations are silky smooth. Everything moves and interacts in the way you'd expect. If your sword hits the wall instead of the enemy, it will glance off. If a demon knight rears back just before you do the same, his sword will make contact at the part of your body that you left unprotected. These touches may seem small and unimportant, but when every second counts, and when life and death are separated by a millimeter or two, you rely on such consistency.     The challenging combat is enhanced by a number of innovative online features that invite players to interact with each other. To survive, you not only need to pay careful attention to your environs, but you must be mindful of the clues other players have left for you, both purposeful and accidental. The game's online integration is nothing like you've ever seen, and it's a core component of the Demon's Souls experience. The signs and indications of other players are everywhere. You'll see translucent white ghosts roaming your world, moving about and swinging their weapons, though you can't directly interact with them. These spirits are actually other players. They are fighting the same enemies and sprinting across the same bridges, but they inhabit their own worlds, not yours. You see only their apparitions, but those apparitions may be enough to clue you in to a surprise ambush up ahead or a bit of hidden loot around the corner.      These ghosts are only one of several ways other players will be assisting you on your journey. You'll notice plenty of bloodstains coating the ground; by activating them, you'll witness an instant replay of another player's final few seconds before the unfortunate victim succumbed to death. These bloodstains may warn you of an upcoming drop into nothingness, a particularly difficult enemy encounter, or a deadly trap waiting to be sprung. If you wish to assist a player more directly (after all, self-sacrifice might drop a helpful bloodstain for your fellow players, but it doesn't do you much good), you can leave a note. You must choose from a preselected list, but there are dozens of messages to choose from, and you'll likely find a sentiment that communicates exactly what you need to share. If there's a deadly drop ahead, leave a note (which appears as a rune on the ground) warning your fellow players. Not only will it help them out, but if they find it useful, they can rate it. When a note is rated, it replenishes some of the note-givers health. Low-rated notes fade away quickly, while high-rated ones stick around longer. It's a superb system of give and take in which the writer and the reader can both benefit. Those who offer and receive true help are rewarded, and those who provide incorrect, pointless, or misleading information are simply wasting their own time.    The mines of Stonefang Tunnel have really gone to the dogs.   The most direct way of helping other players, however, is to join them on their quest. Demon's Souls' ingenious implementation of co-op play is hardly straightforward, though it is incredibly imaginative. Players exist in one of two forms: body form and soul form. If you are in body form, you have full hit points, while in soul form, your hit points are generally halved (though a terrific ring you can find early on will give you a boost). You start your adventure in body form, and when you die, you are resurrected in soul form. Because you are only restored to body form when you defeat a boss or use a relatively rare stone, you'll spend most of your time as a soul. When in soul form, you can drop a soul marker; a player in body form can then activate that marker to summon you to his or her world. At that point, you join the player in his or her realm and tackle the challenges at hand together. If you are in body form, you can summon either one or two players, for a maximum party of three. There is no way to invite a friend, and no voice chat to communicate strategies or warnings. Yet while that sounds limiting, this imaginative system works in the context of Demon's Souls' harsh world and backstory. You feel as if you occupy a single node on a vast web of interconnected realms that mesh and overlap in mysterious ways.     The result of this unique and amazing set of online features is a curious sense of camaraderie. On one occasion, we joined two other players in the host's instance, and using Demon's Souls' built-in emotes, all three players bowed to one another at the same time. That friendly moment was a microcosm of the sense of community that the game's tightly balanced cooperative features create. By dropping your soul mark, you are not only offering your service to a player in need, but also reaping rewards in the way of souls, as well as learning new combat strategies in your own realm. This is particularly helpful when it comes to Demon's Souls' exceptionally difficult--and exceptionally rewarding--boss fights. The first main boss you fight may give you an idea of the awesome character designs you'll see elsewhere, but its relatively low level of challenge won't prepare you for the dual monstrosities known as maneaters or the nail-biting and exciting storm king battle. Not all of these boss battles are as hard as the gameplay that leads to them, but they are tough nonetheless, and the boss designs are deliciously grotesque.     Nevertheless, other players aren't always your best pals; sometimes, they may be your worst enemies. Once you've progressed far enough (and procured the necessary item), you can invade another player's realm as a black phantom--and other players can invade yours. Don't worry that you'll suddenly be attacked by another player many, many levels above you: your invader must be around the same level as you, so you should be on more or less equal footing. Even so, the presence of an enemy player changes the very nature of your exploration. Not only must you cope with the array of demons seeking to slaughter you, but you must also be on the lookout for the telltale blood-red shimmer of your intruder. As a result, you'll move ahead much more cautiously--and when you do finally meet, the ensuing encounter is tense and exciting. Don't be surprised if you let out an audible gasp when you receive the notification on your screen that another player has penetrated your realm; no matter how often they happen, invasions never lose their potency. If you're the one being invaded, the intrusion is exciting and a little bit scary; you'll look around, wondering if you're being followed, and listen for signs of your foe. When you're the invader, you'll feel vaguely evil scouting about, trying to stay out of your victim's sight, and looking for the best opportunity to attack. And there may be surprising moments in which these various systems coalesce. For example, you may join another player in his or her realm, only to have a black phantom appear. The unspoken (there is no voice chat) partnership between you and your collaborator makes banishing a black phantom from his realm almost as satisfying as banishing one from your own. Of course, the souls you earn sweeten the deal.    Yes, you can kill him. But chances are, he'll kill you multiple times first.   Amid all of its elegance, Demon's Souls has a few small but noticeable flaws that bear mentioning. The game's targeting system is picky, so you may find it a chore to lock on to certain enemies when you need to most. The camera is occasionally hard to control when you're targeting demons, like when you need to deal with multiple flying gargoyles as you simultaneously climb a narrow, suspended staircase (there's no death in Demon's Souls more heartbreaking than a falling one). And there are a few areas where the frame rate tends to stutter, though these occurrences aren't frequent and are never overwhelming. Of course, the game's greatest potential drawback is its level of difficulty. If you are easily frustrated, or looking to unwind for the night, Demon's Souls isn't going to fit the bill, though that doesn't mean it's generally cheap: it always abides by its own laws. When you die, it's because the section is legitimately hard--but when you die, you learn. And you can minimize death by paying close attention to the tools you're given: player spirits, notes on the ground, bloodstains, and the cackles and groans emanating from around the corner. You know that walkway that crumbled underneath you and dropped you in the middle of some menacing fiends? Chances are you simply didn't read the note another friendly player left urging you to sprint across.     Demon's Souls harbors many more intricacies as well--nooks and crannies loaded with extra loot, a mechanic known as world tendency that changes the difficulty level depending on certain actions you take, and additional benefits (and risks) should you rescue (or kill) certain non-player characters you encounter on your travels. There's a lot to discover, and the game wants you to figure it all out on your own. But while Demon's Souls doesn't serve the answers to you on a gilded platter, it gives you a number of refined and inspired tools to help you succeed, and its astounding, oppressive world will cast its spell on you. If you crave true innovation, a fair but relentless challenge, and gripping exploration in which every step has consequences, then you crave Demon's Souls.    


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'another', 'time', '.', 'That', 'friendly', 'moment', 'microcosm', 'sense', 'community', 'game', ""'s"", 'tightly', 'balanced', 'cooperative', 'features', 'create', '.', 'By', 'dropping', 'soul', 'mark', ',', 'offering', 'service', 'player', 'need', ',', 'also', 'reaping', 'rewards', 'way', 'souls', ',', 'well', 'learning', 'new', 'combat', 'strategies', 'realm', '.', 'This', 'particularly', 'helpful', 'comes', 'Demon', ""'s"", 'Souls', ""'"", 'exceptionally', 'difficult', '--', 'exceptionally', 'rewarding', '--', 'boss', 'fights', '.', 'The', 'first', 'main', 'boss', 'fight', 'may', 'give', 'idea', 'awesome', 'character', 'designs', ""'ll"", 'see', 'elsewhere', ',', 'relatively', 'low', 'level', 'challenge', 'wo', ""n't"", 'prepare', 'dual', 'monstrosities', 'known', 'maneaters', 'nail-biting', 'exciting', 'storm', 'king', 'battle', '.', 'Not', 'boss', 'battles', 'hard', 'gameplay', 'leads', ',', 'tough', 'nonetheless', ',', 'boss', 'designs', 'deliciously', 'grotesque', '.', 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420,Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story ,9, Mario and Luigi's latest portable role-playing adventure is their best yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/1/8/2221118-mlbis.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mario-and-luigi-bowsers-inside-story/1900-6226786/,pos,"
  The story in most Mario games boils down to three things: Princess Peach is ransom fodder, the Mushroom Kingdom residents are hopeless at damage control, and Luigi treads that fine line between hero and zero. But though these elements have been in one combination or another in just about every Mario game for more than two decades, Nintendo has almost always managed to put some new spin on the classic Mario formula to keep the games fun and interesting. Case in point: the recently released Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, a fun and funny action role-playing game for the Nintendo DS that tosses Mario's longtime nemesis, Bowser, into the action as a playable character. The odd coupling of hero and surly shelled villain--who you just know is chomping at the bit to smash the mustachioed plumber--makes for not only comedy gold, but also a complete gold-star experience that's definitely deserving of your time and money.   The brothers prepare to do battle with Bowser's lunch.   The game finds the Mushroom Kingdom weathering its latest calamity: a mysterious ailment known as the blorbs, which causes the locals to balloon out to the point where they can't move. Mario and Luigi are called in to help, but when Bowser crashes the party, a series of sitcom-like shenanigans ensue that leave Peach, the brothers, a star sprite, some toads, and some magic pipes inside Bowser's belly. The villain behind it all is Lord Fawful, whom you might remember from Superstar Saga on the Game Boy Advance. He's a resident of the neighboring Bean Bean Kingdom and has designs on a powerful artifact buried beneath Toad Town. Fawful's evil intentions for the Mushroom Kingdom see him hijack Bowser's castle and brainwash the koopa king's minions. This leads Bowser to end up playing the role of unlikely hero in the adventure. His real motive is that he wants to be the only Peach kidnapper and mayhem bringer in town, but given the circumstances, no one's really complaining.    There's plenty of Nintendo's patented good-natured humor, which deftly walks the line between genuinely funny and cheesy as you progress through the story. The storytelling is kept fresh thanks to the inclusion of some new, eccentric faces that allowed the writers to have some fun. Fawful is a chatty, ungrammatical nightmare; Starlow the star sprite is helpful but surprisingly punchy; Bowser is a self-absorbed, impatient but likable jerk; and the two French block people, one of whom is looking for the perfect massage, are as funny as they are bizarre.    As you make your way through the story, your time is divided between controlling Bowser on the top screen and directing the brothers on the bottom screen. You'll usually be able to switch active control of Bowser and the brothers by simply hitting the buttons that correspond to them. The X and Y buttons are used for anything related to Bowser's attacks, while the A and B buttons are tied to the brothers. The control system is smooth and easy to use. This ease of use is a key component to many sequences where you'll have to make Bowser engage in activities to move things around in his guts to let the brothers get by. For example, sometimes you have to direct Bowser to chug water to shift some obstacles in his innards so the brothers can slip by, or position him in front of an X-ray machine to cause certain walls to disappear.    At the start of the adventure, Mario and Luigi are confined to Bowser's insides, which are miniature worlds unto themselves. The koopa king's roomy interior is broken up into areas that correspond to the different parts of his body. Initially, the brothers will spend the bulk of their time inside Bowser acting as his support staff and helping him deal with random physical problems as they arise. For example, you'll have to guide the pair to Bowser's throat and do some work to restore his flame breath. Later in the game, the brothers serve as a medical team and get some resuscitation going when heavy things, such as castles, fall on Bowser, which happens a lot more than you'd think. One of the side benefits of the internal work the brothers do is opening up more powers and abilities for Bowser to use. However, as you get further into the game, circumstances change and the boys are able to move in and out of Bowser's guts courtesy of the magic pipes he swallowed.    The action sticks closely to the basic template that has been set in the Mario & Luigi series since the first game appeared on the Game Boy Advance, albeit with some cool DS updates. Bowser and the brothers each have a number of different unique abilities that you can unlock over the course of the adventure. The brothers' abilities are mostly team-based actions, such as standing on each other's shoulders, using an air-filled Mario, burrowing underground, or smashing Mario into miniature size, to name a few. As always, new abilities let you access different areas and find the many secrets peppered throughout the land. When in combat, you can access a different set of combo moves that make up the brothers' chuckle-worthy special attacks. One noteworthy example sees you stuffing Luigi full of pastries so that he balloons out, and then tossing him in the air so he can slam down to the ground and damage your enemies. As with normal attacks, if you time your button presses right, you can do bonus damage to your targets, which is both satisfying and key during boss fights.   Subtlety has never been Bowser's strong suit.   When you're playing as Bowser, the action works in more or less the same way, but with a very cool twist. When you're exploring, the irritable monarch has fewer moves at his disposal than the brothers, and he's not big on subtlety. For example, when faced with an obstacle, Bowser can often stomp, slam, roll, or burn his way past it. When using Bowser in combat, you have a basic punch and flame attack, as well as a powerful breath attack that lets you inhale items or small enemies. The breath attack is handy for finding hidden block kittens spread throughout the world as well as for passing the buck in battles. When enemies are inhaled, they'll end up in Bowser's stomach, where Mario and Luigi can take them on, which makes for some interesting multipart battles. Bowser's special attacks differ from the brothers', thanks to his many minions. Each special attack uses a set of minions, such as goombas, koopas, and bob-ombs, and requires you to use the touch screen to perform the attack. Finally, Bowser has several unique combat sections in which he grows to Godzilla-like proportions. These require you to turn your DS on its side and use the touch screen and microphone to attack and to collect items. Bowser's size boost doesn't offer him too big an advantage over his enemies, though, since they're as big as he is and just about as mean. These sections offer a cool change of pace that adds to the game's already impressive amount of variety.    While the main story sends you through various locations in the Mushroom Kingdom to explore, battle, solve puzzles, and drive off Fawful, that isn't everything there is to do. One of the best aspects of the game is the variety of activities to take on. Over the course of the adventure, you have the option to solve puzzles, give massages, look for hidden items, and engage in minigames. The game's role-playing elements keep things simple and accessible. Bowser and the boys earn experience and level up as they progress. New to the leveling system is a ranking system that determines which gear you can equip on the characters and which shops you can buy gear from. Another new twist is the way that badges are implemented in battle. Badges are items you can purchase and equip on each brother, separately from gear, and they will offer a variety of effects depending on the badge combination. The only minor ding on the game's offerings is that, outside of going back to earn a secret rank, there isn't much reason to go back and replay the game once you've finished it.    On top of all this superb and varied gameplay, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story boasts a colorful and crisp art style, impressive character animation, and some whimsical audio design that's perfectly in keeping with other aspects of the game. It's a fun, accessible role-playing game for the DS that anyone with even a passing interest in the subject matter shouldn't miss.  


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421,League of Legends ,9, League of Legends is a free-to-play multiplayer phenomenon that has cemented itself as the cornerstone of its genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3064592-square%20league%20of%20legends%20box%20art.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/league-of-legends-review/1900-6415183/,pos,"
League of Legends is not just a game: it's a cutthroat competitive digital sport where the winners roar in victory and the losers whimper in defeat. You don't need to play on the same level as the pros to experience the thrills of these online battlegrounds, however. Blending elements of action role-playing, real-time strategy, and tower defense games into an engrossing amalgam of awesome, League of Legends is a free-to-play game that ensures each play session yields a unique and explosive experience.Each player in a match controls a single champion. In the default game mode, Summoner's Rift, two teams of five champions are pitted against each another with the ultimate goal of destroying the opposing team's nexus, which is guarded by three lanes of towers. The catch is that at the start of a match, your champion is only level 1 with no items to back up his or her quest for victory. To power up to a level sufficient enough to take on the enemy's base, a champion must first focus on killing AI-controlled minions for gold and experience.Bots offer great training for new players.The gold can be spent at the shop at each team's respective base in order to purchase items like the appropriately named B. F. Sword (a big freakin' sword), or its mage-friendly counterpart, the Needlessly Large Rod. Once you're appropriately equipped, your goal shifts from slaughtering the endless waves of minions to pushing your army down the lanes by destroying the towers. Of course, your enemies won't stand idly by and watch you destroy them. League of Legends erupts in beautiful savagery once the teams of five group and fight as a unified force. As the two teams engage one another in a semi-chaotic brawl, players dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge skill-shots and target abilities in order to survive and kill the opposition. Team fights can make or break a match, as victory in a single battle means there will be no resistance to the siege of towers for some time. Trailing teams may attempt to turtle around a tower in order to use its power to make up for their weakness, and then mount a defense that turns the tides of battle into an epic comeback.Team fights don't always erupt around towers, however. An elder lizard and an ancient golem both spawn in each team's jungle, and slaying one grants special sigil buffs. In the early stages of a game, some of the tensest moments occur when a team tries to steal away a buff from the opposing team. These skirmishes may not even result in a kill, but denying an enemy champion the mana regeneration of their ancient golem's blue sigil can grant a power play during which you may assert your dominance over the middle lane. Along the river, there are far more powerful neutral monsters which grant global gold to the team that bravely battles them. The dragon is a powder keg of early game team fights; combatants wage a war of vision-granting wards in order to ensure both, or neither, have vision over the dragon's pit so they may exterminate the beast out of sight of their foes.Failing the Baron fight or having the enemy steal the kill quickly turns the tide into a tsunami of aggression against you and your teammates.Late in the game, the powerful Baron Nashor serves as a cold war catalyst. You seek to kill him for the enormous stat boost he grants, but you also fear being nuked by a lurking enemy team, and so you wisely wait to fight him until you know your foes cannot contest. The stalemates over Baron are some of the most intense moments League of Legends has to offer, making the catharsis of overcoming a mighty challenge even greater. Beware, though, as failing the Baron fight or having the enemy steal the kill quickly turns the tide into a tsunami of aggression against you and your teammates.Every match is a challenge, and with over 100 champions to choose from, there are countless ways for a team to overcome it. Whether your style involves dropping a flaming bear on the opposition to stun them all, flying in as a frozen phoenix to summon a wall of ice and cut off a path of retreat, or slashing through minions in a fit of undying barbaric rage, League of Legends has you covered. Champion designs draw influence from regional legends and mythology, though others are Riot's own unique creations. Although most can be categorized as a role-playing archetype (mage, marksman, assassin, tank, fighter, or support), some champions blend two or more archetypes and allow you flexibility in how to play.Slaying Baron Nashor can buff up your team, but bring a friend!Riot has worked to ensure that new players don't immediately mix with veterans. League of Legends requires new players to reach level 3 by playing tutorial matches and cooperative matches versus the AI before being allowed to queue for matchmaking. If you're a complete novice, however, it's best to avoid facing other humans until you are certain you understand the basics of the game. Some veteran players may lurk on lower-level accounts, while others have slipped past bans issued by Riot's automated tribunal system, and their familiarity with the game will give them an unfair advantage. In spite of the tribunal system, which removes particularly unsavory players from the player pool, plenty of combatants use the chat window to vent their frustration toward others. Underperforming, arrogant, and impolite players are still unfortunate hurdles you must occasionally overcome.Dedicated theorycrafters will relish the ability to make a seemingly weak champion smash perceptions and succeed.To keep you invested in the game, Riot allows you to unlock champions permanently using influence points (earned by playing matches in the game) or Riot points (purchased with real money). Riot points can also be spent on boosts to increase IP gain, but the most common reason you may end up purchasing RP is to unlock skins. The pricier skin options also tweak champions' animations, spell effects, and even voice-overs in the case of legendary and ultimate skins. Skins have no actual effect on a champion's combat ability, so spending money on the game doesn't offer any actual gameplay advantage. Don't be fooled by the free-to-play moniker, though: you might eventually find a skin that finally convinces you to pay to support the game, and soon find yourself staring at a vast library of looks.However, the influence points earned through participating in matches can offer distinct gameplay advantages by adjusting the stats of a champion. Runes, which can only be purchased with influence points, can offer a flat bonus to a stat, or a bonus that gets more powerful over the course of a game as a champion levels up. All in all, you may assign up to 30 runes to your individual rune pages, with a new rune slot becoming available every time you gain in summoner level until you reach the cap at 30. Rune and mastery setups allow you to customize your champions' stats as you see fit, and dedicated theorycrafters will relish the ability to make a seemingly weak champion smash perceptions and succeed.In the ARAM mode, all players face off in a very confined wintry laneAlso unlocking at summoner level 30 is the true focus of the more hardcore players: ranked solo/duo matchmaking queues. You may queue alone or drag a friend along for the ride as you play games with slightly higher stakes than the normal games. Winning or losing in a ranked game grants or deducts league points from the summoner account. League points help to sort players into tiers ranging from bronze to challenger, with the challenger tier being available only to the cream of the crop among League of Legends players. If you're a player with an insatiable competitive appetite, ranked queues are where you'll find your home.If you don't find the initial Summoner's Rift map appealing, you'll be glad for the other vibrant battlefields on offer. Crystal Scar, Twisted Treeline, and Howling Abyss maps each stamp League of Legends with their own unique marks. Crystal Scar is a five-versus-five map with a focus on capturing territories in order to damage the opponent's nexus. Twisted Treeline plays mostly like Summoner's Rift, but with a limit of three players per team. And Howling Abyss, affectionately dubbed ""Murderbridge"" by the community, pits teams against one another in a single lane, with the queue for that map randomly selecting an available character to assign to each player in the game mode referred to as ""ARAM"" (short for ""all random, all mid"").It's difficult to resist the constant thrill of the game's diverse battles.Differences between League of Legends and Dota highlight LoL's focus on a cleaner learning curve for new players as well as the (normally) healthy competitive environment. The unintuitive mechanic of denying, in which you kill a minion or tower on your own team so that the opposition may not earn gold, does not exist. Although this slightly reduces the control you have over the lane and where minions meet, it also frees you up to focus more on interacting with the opposing champions, rather than with the minions. Additionally, randomized elements, such as a chance to do anything (critical hits excepted) have been removed from League of Legends, ensuring you have a greater ability to predict the outcome of a given situation.Riot displays its eSports support with pride during major tournaments.The game is still expanding, with a new playable champion being introduced roughly every month. Riot is highly proactive in keeping the game as balanced as possible as new gameplay trends are discovered and rise in popularity. For instance, a robust spectator tool and multiple game modes have appeared over the game's four-year history. The only missing feature that could be labeled a staple for competitive games is a replay feature, but even that is currently in development, with an iteration available for testing on the test realm.League of Legends is a fantastic game with something for players of all skill ranges to enjoy. Although it's better to play with friends, you are not left to your own devices if you tend to keep to yourself. The early hours can be frustrating as you learn the ropes, but once you are swept away by the ebb and flow, it's difficult to resist the constant thrill of the game's diverse battles. Once League of Legends has its hooks in you, don't be shocked to find you've spent a few hundred hours seeking digital fame in one of video gaming's finest battlegrounds.


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422,Peggle ,9," When it comes to puzzle games, there's Peggle, and then there's everything else.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/4/8/2220048-peggle_box.png,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/peggle-review/1900-6231982/,pos,"
  You may know Peggle as the dangerously addictive PC puzzle game. Now, it's the dangerously addictive iDevice game that will devour every last bit of your spare time. And it's a brilliant fit for the iDevice, too.    Peggle is an awesome puzzle game.   Peggle is a seemingly simple game that's loosely based on the Japanese pastime of Pachinko. A directional nozzle at the top of the screen launches a ball through a board full of colored pegs and bricks. The goal is to hit all the orange objects on the board before you run out of balls.    Touching the screen points the nozzle, with an aiming line to show where the ball is headed. A virtual dial allows for fine adjustments. As the ball bounces around the board, the pegs and bricks it hits light up and then disappear a few seconds later. Most balls fall through the bottom of the screen and are lost, but some are caught and recycled by a bonus bin that travels from side to side.    At first blush, Peggle looks like a game of chance. You point the nozzle and shoot, and the ball bounces around a bunch according to the whims of the pegs. But, in fact, this game asks a lot of the player--it just does it in such a subtle way that you'll hardly realize you're adapting.    For instance, you will very quickly learn that it's best to let the balls start high and take their own course down the board. With more experience, you will see how balls ricochet across the screen off pegs and bricks and start to aim accordingly. You will find yourself timing the movement of the bonus bin, attacking clusters of pegs systematically to conserve ammo and routinely making shots that once seemed impossible.    Meanwhile, Peggle keeps sprinkling in new tricks to keep you off balance and force you to adapt. There are purple pegs that crank up your score during a shot, improving your chance at a free ball; there are bonuses for long shots and stylish moves; and, finally, there are the all-important green pegs, which activate your special abilities.    These special powers are the highlight of the game. The game's Adventure mode is split into 11 chapters of five stages each, and the first 10 chapters are staffed by a wacky ""Peggle master"" character who has a new power to teach you. Every time you hit a green peg, you get to use that master's technique.    The powers are as inventive as the Peggle master's powers are bizarre. For example, the francophone lobster grants you pinball flippers on either side of the screen, useful for punching the ball back into the air and hitting more pegs. The jack-o-lantern offers up the ""spooky ball,"" which pops right back up to the top of the screen after falling through the bottom. And the fast-talking magical rabbit--who sounds like he's trying to sell you something--spins a wheel to see what kind of bonus you get.    These powers may be weird, but they are essential for earning your Peggle diploma and making it to the final stage. Here, you get your choice of all 10 powers. This is a good thing because these last five levels are next to impossible.    If you manage to make it past these, 40 additional challenges await. And then there's Duel mode, where you race against a friend or a computer opponent for the high score on a single level. Let's just say you won't be running out of Peggle anytime soon.   Peggle's special powers are great. The Peggle master's powers are bizarre.   Peggle looks great on the iPhone. The scaled-down graphics are sharp, and you can zoom in on shots to perfect your aim--although the ball path tracer doesn't always stretch into the zoomed-in screen. The ""Ode to Joy"" theme that plays at the end of the level is funny the first few times; 40 times in, not so much. iPod soundtrack is enabled.    Basically, Peggle is everything you'd want in an iPhone puzzle game. It's got a wry sense of humor, a solid presentation, hours upon hours of content, perfectly balanced and nuanced gameplay, a great learning curve, excellent controls…and anyone can play it.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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423,Little Big Planet 2 ,9," An enjoyable Story mode, powerful creation tools, and great online features make Sackboy's sequel a giant leap forward for LittleBigPlanet.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/5/7/2224857-box_lbp2.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/little-big-planet-2-review/1900-6286391/,pos,"
  More than two years after the release of LittleBigPlanet, the creativity of the game's community continues to impress. Tools that were designed to let users craft their own levels for the popular platformer have been masterfully manipulated to make all manner of weird and wonderful gameplay experiences, 3-million-plus of which live on in LittleBigPlanet 2. The superior creation tools that you're afforded access to in Sackboy's second outing are sure to send that number skyward soon, and even if you have no desire to make your own masterpieces, you're sure to enjoy the incredibly varied fruits of developer Media Molecule's labors, as well as those of other players. For creators, LBP2 is an easy-to-use tools package that lets you turn your ideas into games that can span multiple levels and genres, and even include cutscenes. For players, LBP2 is a game that lets you play all of these creations in addition to its own charming and impressively varied Story mode. Everyone's a winner.      Regardless of what you ultimately hope to get out of LBP2, the Story mode is a great place to start. The world of LittleBigPlanet has come under attack from the evil Negativitron, and only you (and up to three of your friends) can save the day. The 30-plus Story mode levels are incredibly varied both in terms of gameplay and visual design. One moment you're jumping between moving wooden platforms and swinging from sponges; the next you're riding a bee through a blocky-looking side-scrolling shooter and knocking enemies out of the sky with honey projectiles. Then, after using sticky cake projectiles to solve simple puzzles, you might find yourself cruising through another character's body and using white blood cells to combat a meanie infection. Each and every one of these levels serves as an enjoyable showpiece for what LBP2's new creation tools are capable of, and playing through the Story mode is even more fun than in the original game because you never know what the next level is going to have in store for you. Furthermore, Story mode levels have plenty of replay value if you're interested in finding all of the collectible materials, stickers, Sackboy outfits, and other goodies that have been expertly hidden away.    A number of the Story mode's collectibles can only be reached if you're playing cooperatively in a group of up to four players. Sequences that require multiple players are rarely complex, but even relatively simple objectives can be tricky to complete if you have to enlist the help of someone who isn't familiar with LBP's floaty physics or comfortable with how Sackboy moves between the foreground and background. Furthermore, playing cooperatively (especially locally) can get pretty confusing because, unless all of you are moving in sync, the camera becomes problematic. First, it zooms out in an attempt to keep all of you in shot, which can make distinguishing one Sackboy from another difficult. Then, if that fails, it leaves the player or players who are lagging behind for dead and they rejoin the action at the next checkpoint. Some levels fare a lot better than others in multiplayer, but often, the most enjoyable way to get items from multiplayer areas is to have friends hop into your game only when they're necessary, which is unfortunate and not much fun for them. For a fun multiplayer experience, your best bet is to check out some of the new versus games which, once you unlock them in Story mode, include enjoyable takes on basketball, air hockey, and pool, to name but a few.   It's easier than ever to stray from LBP's traditional handmade crafts aesthetic.   Armed with the items that you've collected in Story mode, as well as any that you've imported from your original LittleBigPlanet profile, you might be eager to jump into Create mode, but you'd do well to check out some of the new creation tutorials beforehand. The adequate though not entirely comprehensive tutorials are again wonderfully narrated by Stephen Fry, and even if you consider yourself something of an expert with the first game's tools, there's a lot of new ground to cover. Sure, you can safely skip the tutorials on gluing, corner editing, bolts, and basic sensors, but what about Sackbots, power-ups, microchips, and the gameplay sequencer? These are just a few of the new creation tools at your disposal in LittleBigPlanet 2, and they are quite literally game-changing additions. For example, Sackbots are non-player characters that can be customized with different appearances and behaviors; you can use them as actors in cutscenes, as enemies that are intelligent enough to avoid hazards and use power-ups, or--as they appear in the Story mode--as friendly little guys that you must either lead or herd through levels. Microchips, on the other hand, are a strictly behind-the-scenes innovation that give you a big flat space upon which to arrange multiple logic pieces (timers, randomizers, and the like) that might otherwise be confusing and difficult to arrange when applied to an object.     Power-ups are another excellent addition because, much like the paintinator gun that was introduced in the LBP Metal Gear Solid expansion pack (and which, like all of the original LBP's downloadable content, works with LBP2), they open up many new possibilities when designing levels. The grappling hook lets you swing from any object that it can grab onto, the grabinator gloves give you the strength to pick up and throw heavy and dangerous objects, and scuba gear lets you swim underwater without having to seek out oxygen-filled bubbles or come up for air. The most exciting power-up, though, is the creatinator; a helmet that can be used to fire any projectile that game designers choose and that includes user-created objects. Want to create a level in which Sackboy puts out fires? Give him a creatinator that fires a steady stream of water. Or how about a versus game in which two of you compete for high scores while shooting at enemies whose faces are photos of your friends taken with the PlayStation Eye? Easy, just load up the creatinator with missiles, fireballs, impact explosives, or some projectile of your own invention. You can even have the creatinator launch objects that then fire projectiles of their own. The possibilities are endless.      Perhaps the most significant game changer introduced in LBP2 is the controlinator; a small and unassuming device that, amongst other things, serves as a seat for Sackboy in vehicular gameplay sequences. More importantly, the controlinator can be used to give the players of your games and levels direct control of any object--effectively taking Sackboy out of the equation. Used in conjunction with the new antigravity object tweaker, the controlinator makes it painless to create side-scrolling and dual-stick shooters, tower defense games, top-down racers, and games in which you control nothing but a crosshair and a trigger, to name but a few. As a creator, you even get to map all of the controls of your games yourself, simply by using invisible wires to connect the buttons and analog sticks on a picture of a Dual Shock controller to the movers, rotators, emitters, and other devices that you want them to trigger.    Working with audio in LittleBigPlanet 2 is only as complicated as you want it to be. Different material types all have default sounds associated with them so, for example, when an item made of wood crashes into an item made of metal, what you hear is believable. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. There are dozens of great licensed songs and original music tracks included, along with loads of sound effects and even a selection of gibberish voices that you can assign to your characters. As with other aspects of creation in LBP2, you're given more than enough professional quality items to work with, but you're also afforded access to the tools and raw materials that you need to make your own. For starters, there are dozens of instrument samples that you can use to create your own tunes using the built-in sequencer, and if you want your characters to be voiced or your game to be narrated in some way, you can record your own samples using a headset or the PlayStation Eye mic.     If you're a creative type willing to put in some serious hours testing and improving upon your designs, there's no reason you can't share games with the LBP2 community that are good enough for players to come back to again and again. You might even receive requests to make sequels. Of course, not all of the creations that find their way into LBP2's community area will be very good or even worth playing. Already, numerous levels are appearing--just as they did for the first game--that serve no purpose other than to unlock trophies for anyone who plays them, while others simply aren't finished. Thankfully, there are some solid systems in place to help you sort the good from the bad. The option to rate levels after playing them with between one and five stars from LBP has been replaced with a simple smiley- or sad-face option that allows you to see, at a glance, how many players enjoyed it versus how many didn't. When browsing levels, you can also see how many players have completed them and how many liked them so much that they took the time to bookmark them with a heart. After playing a game, you have the option to write a full review for it and select tags relating to the experience (""short,"" ""intricate,"" ""funny""); the game type (""puzzler,"" ""sports,"" ""racer""); and specific content (""collectables,"" ""water,"" ""grappling hook"") that you think apply.   Competitive multiplayer levels like this rodent race are a fun addition.   When searching for new games to play, it's possible to filter using these tags in conjunction with those relating to the popularity or newness of levels, so it's pretty easy to avoid games that you have absolutely no interest in playing. Impressively, you can search for levels using these same filters on the new LBP.me community site, and even queue them up for next time you play. Also, as in the original game, it's possible to bookmark your favorite creators so that you can more easily find new offerings from them.    Like the most prolific creators in the series' community, LittleBigPlanet 2 is a game that just keeps on giving. That's also true of the first game, but what separates LBP2 from its predecessor is the sheer variety of games that are being created and will no doubt continue to be created for many months to come. This isn't just a superbly presented game that incorporates multiple genres and comes packaged with a powerful creation suite, it's your doorway into a wonderfully charming, vibrant, and ever-changing universe where almost anything is possible. Even if you're not interested in designing and creating games yourself, LittleBigPlanet 2 is not to be missed.  


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424,Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball ,3.5, Pirates and ninjas clash with other fantasy archetypes in dodgeball matches handicapped by a legion of drawbacks.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/5/7/8/32766-90578.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pirates-vs-ninjas-dodgeball-review/1900-6197279/,neg,"
  Regardless of when, how, or why the debate over whether pirates or ninjas are better began, Gamecock brings Blazing Lizard's deciding game to the Xbox 360. Whatever your level of interest in pirates, ninjas, or dodgeball, Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball unfortunately fails to deliver much in the way of satisfying action.    If for some reason you are expecting a dedicated simulation of the schoolyard pastime, check your anticipation upon download. Instead of a contemporary blacktop and a host of prepubescent players, Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball populates the matches with the titular characters. It also adds additional unlockable groups, including both robots and zombies. The Story mode gets underway with a series of two-versus-two matches in which you have to whittle down the health of the opposing team's players. As you complete the easier matches, you unlock additional three-versus-three and four-versus-four match types. You only control a single character, but can switch between team members at any time. As a player you can run, jump, throw, catch, deflect, and attack. Throwing with the X button can be varied between strong and light attacks depending on how long you hold the button. By pressing B, you can call in a pass to then unleash a powered-up attack to either deal additional damage or land a near-unavoidable throw.   Finally, a fully 3D dodgeball game.     Even though the character models look good enough to support the zany trappings of the game's concept, they borrow too heavily from other pop culture touchstones to be considered unique. The character close-ups in the story-light cutscenes are passable. For those who can get that far, the zombie storyline offers a surprising amount of adolescent humanity. It is the only payoff in an otherwise drab collection of narratives. Only one story is told in the game, but the cutscenes exist to reveal the characters' backstories, motivations, and oddities through flawed dialogue. In many instances, the characters are so annoying you wish you were on the opposite team just to beat them in the face with the red ball. Fortunately, there isn't much voice acting, otherwise, players might have another reason to play with the sound off in addition to the nauseating, continually looping, repetitive music.    Zombies are hard to distinguish from robots, and many times, the indicator used to identify which character you are controlling is so insufficient that you'll often lose your character in the crowd. Discerning your team from the opponents is further complicated by a problematic camera. The view is so pulled back and low to the ground that the similarly silhouetted characters are nearly identical on standard definition screens or small displays. Other problems that plague players are the result of the aforementioned camera being coupled with poor level design. Balls frequently hide behind objects, enemies hide behind obstacles, and some level trappings easily impair a critical dodge. Oddly enough, the camera in online matches will pitch helpfully to show your ninja in the low areas or pan to the side to reveal action in a properly framed view. It's a shame that didn't carry over into the single-player.   Was there ever any doubt?     While it's easy enough to progress through the early two-versus-two encounters, the cheapness of the AI is revealed in later matches and larger team showdowns. Frequently, enemies will paralyze you with special attacks while their compatriots pummel you with ball strikes. Enemies can deviously avoid your advances, catch your throws, or nimbly deflect your attacks back at you. This frustrating cheapness is matched only by the AI's baffling inconsistency. When playing in Story mode, your teammates are nowhere nearly as able or effective as your adversaries. This becomes even more evident in online matches. If it weren't for the faulty hit detection, players would only have the poor AI to blame for losing lag-saturated, one-versus-one matches. Ultimately, you can play in up to three-versus-three ranked matches or four-versus-four player matches, but playing without a full room of friends is not fun.    At a price of 800 Microsoft points, Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball delivers a short offline experience and a problematic online offering. Even if you enjoy dodgeball, you'll be hard pressed to find value in the absurd delivery, sluggish gameplay, cheap adversaries, and the monotonous single-player campaigns. Though there's some fun to be had with a roomful of friends, you're better off heading outside to start a real dodgeball game of your own.    
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425,Deca Sports ,3.5, This collection of short-lived minigames marks an unfortunate victory for quantity over quality.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/0/8/2219208-box_decasp.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deca-sports-review/1900-6191008/,neg,"
  Like Wii Sports, Deca Sports is a collection of sports games with simple controls and equally straightforward presentation. Unlike Wii Sports, it's not free, some of the games control poorly, and only a few of them are really any fun when played with a group, much less alone. There's soccer, basketball, badminton, beach volleyball, motocross, archery, curling, snowboarding, figure skating, and kart racing. By trying to please everyone with variety, Hudson has come up with an eclectic mix of activities that don't fit well together and aren't much fun.    Looking at this screenshot of badminton is as much fun as playing badminton in the game.   Deca Sports is extremely shallow. If you can move the remote up and down, you'll be able to perform most actions in the game. In sports like badminton and beach volleyball you don't move your player, you just flick the remote once in a while to swing your racket or hit the ball. You'll need the Nunchuk to move your players when playing soccer and you'll have to press the A button to change players, but passing, shooting, and even slide-tackling are all done by waving the remote. This means you'll occasionally pass when you mean to shoot and vice versa. Sometimes, controller inputs simply aren't recognized quickly, or at all. This makes snowboarding and motocross particularly frustrating because crashing into a barrier often brings you to a screeching halt. The controls for curling are imprecise--particularly with regards to determining power. To be fair, a few sports control fairly well. To drive a kart you hold the remote sideways, hit one button for gas, and tilt left or right to steer. Basketball also controls fine; it's the fact that your players constantly pepper the bottom of the backboard and rim with their layups that makes it awful.    Another problem with Deca is that each sport is broken down into its simplest form. Kart racing has just three tracks with six total participants; badminton is one-on-one; and archery is just you shooting at the same target repeatedly with only slight variations in wind and distance to mix things up. Figure skating has only three programs, which never change; all you do is follow a path and flip the remote upward when you come across a red, blue, green, or gray circle. Simple? Yes. Fun? Maybe for a couple of minutes.    You'll have to overcome one last obstacle before you find any enjoyment with any of the sports: the game's terrible AI, which is poor on all three available difficulties. CPU-controlled soccer players pass the ball back toward the midfield on breakaways; figure-skating judges award higher scores to the skater who falls the most; supercross riders and snowboarders will make no effort to avoid you; and the only time points seem to end in badminton and volleyball is when the AI just gives up and doesn't try to return a shot.     Playing with up to three friends alleviates the shoddy opponent AI (unless your friends are really stupid), but you'd be hard-pressed to play each game more than a couple of times before you and everyone else has had their fill. Eventually your friends will ditch you, and because there's no online support you'll have to suffer on your own through the handful of single-player modes. You can play a single round of any sport, participate in a tournament, or take part in a league where you go from one sport to another in an effort to earn more points than the CPU-controlled teams. Each sport also has a challenge that you can tackle. For example, in badminton you need to try to hit the shuttlecock toward specific areas of the floor, while in kart racing you have to beat a specific lap time. The challenges mix things up a bit, but you'll be lucky to squeeze an hour of entertainment out of them.    Snowboarding might have been OK if tricks mattered and there weren't only three courses.   Deca Sports' visuals are more interesting than its gameplay, but only slightly. There's no Mii support, nor is there any character customization. This shouldn't come as a surprise given how sparse the rest of the game's options are, but the characters are so simple it doesn't seem like it would have taken much extra time to let you create your own athletes. Arenas are basic in their appearance and the blurry backgrounds in kart racing and snowboarding could very well have been rendered on the Nintendo 64. But other than it being hard to see the center of the target in archery because of aliasing, the graphics don't hamper the gameplay nearly as much as the game's other problems, and the ice in the skating rink looks nice.    As tempting as a game with both badminton and curling may be, there's no reason to recommend Deca Sports. The roster of events is baffling, the controls for many of the events are poor, the AI is pitiful, and the gameplay is so shallow that you're unlikely to get your money's worth before this one starts gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.       
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426,Valhalla Knights 2 ,3.5," You'll find monsters, loot, and frustrations galore lurking in the shadows of this tedious dungeon crawler.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/8/2/2219582-box_vk2.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/valhalla-knights-2-review/1900-6199870/,neg,"
  Creating your own band of characters, taking them on dangerous quests, then watching them slowly become richer, more powerful, and equipped with much cooler gear can be a powerfully engrossing experience. Valhalla Knights 2 proves that it can also be extremely tedious and frustrating. This rote dungeon crawler for the PSP is not worth even a few minutes of the countless hours it will try to take from you.   Despite all the available options, combat often boils down to running up to the enemy and pounding on the attack button.     The story here is standard and uninteresting. In ages past, a battle raged in the kingdom between the destructive Goddess of Judgment and the noble Witch of the Crystal. Now the conflict between their acolytes stirs anew, and your character joins an anti-Goddess order of knights and sets off for war. The story advances in fits and starts, moving at a snail's pace. The overwhelming majority of your time will also be spent engaged in action that has no real connection to it. This isn't a story-driven game by any stretch. The plot is more of an afterthought than an integral part of the experience. It's just a flimsy structure on which to hang all of the dungeon-crawling you'll be doing.       That would be fine if the dungeon-crawling were more compelling. Unfortunately, the gameplay is marred by a number of frustrations that make the whole experience a real chore. You start by creating a character, which is a simple process that involves choosing from one of five races and one of five jobs. Then you select from a handful of different face and hairstyle options. The job you choose at the start--be it fighter, mage, priest, thief, or monk--doesn't limit your experience later. You can switch between jobs at any time, and you'll end up creating playable ally characters for your party as well, so you'll experience each of the available jobs during your time with the game.     As you navigate your way through the numerous monster-infested dungeons, battling bees, bunnies, dragons, mushrooms, pixies, insects, robots, and all manner of other creatures, there are no random encounters. You see all the foul beasts moving about on the world map, and coming into contact with any of them sends you into battle. You're tossed into the thick of battle without any kind of tutorial, although you can read up on all the details in the manual. If the game took a moment to familiarize you with the options during combat, however, it would have been helpful because there are lots of them. On the other hand, the game's real-time battles tend to go by so fast--in such a quick flurry of blows--that you probably won't end up using many of the available options much anyway. To access magic spells, for instance, you need to call up a menu, indicate the spell you wish to cast, and then select the target for the spell. That may not sound like much, but considering how fast things are happening, it's actually a significant amount of time. Because there's no option to pause the action to issue commands, having spells and items buried in a few layers of menus limits their effectiveness during battle. You may be better off setting your AI-controlled allies to handle such things as casting healing spells while you do the grunt work of running up to enemies and hitting the attack button. You can have up to six members in your party, and your companions tend to stick to the behaviors you designate for them, which makes them effective support. In any case, the combat is simple and shallow, lacking both the strategic depth found in many role-playing games, as well as the visceral fun found in good hack-and-slash action RPGs. That's a shame because you'll need to do an awful lot of it in Valhalla Knights 2.    To earn a little extra scratch for your monster-slaying efforts, you can undertake quests at a guild that involve heading to a certain area and killing a predetermined number of a certain monster. Oddly, there's no indication of how much progress you've made toward completing a quest, so it's up to you to keep track of how many more creatures you need to slay before you can head back to town, collect your reward, and start the process all over again. What's more, you can only undertake one quest at a time, which is tremendously inconvenient and results in a whole lot of unnecessary back-and-forth travel. And while you can find items or learn spells that let you warp back to town from a dungeon, you can't warp back to where you came from. As a result, a very significant portion of your time is spent just passing through the same areas over and over again. And you can only save your progress at inns, so should you make your way deep into a dungeon, only to fall in battle, you'll once again have to hike all the way back from town. You might also get lost trying to find your way back because the dungeons are full of forking paths and the map only shows your immediate surroundings. Each of these frustrations could have been alleviated with basic features found in other RPGs, which makes their absence here baffling.    There's an option for two players to take up to three characters each on some missions that are as mundane as those found in the single-player game. Experience and items earned here carry over with your characters back to the single-player game, but if you're playing with someone whose characters are significantly more powerful than yours, you're liable to get slaughtered because the strength of the monsters appears to be on par with the more powerful characters in the group. You can also pit your party against your friend's characters in an arena battle in which the victor wins a wagered item or set amount of gold from the defeated player. It's more interesting than fighting the monsters you find throughout the dungeons, but not by much.   The minimap is fine when you're hanging out in town, but it's useless for finding your way around dungeons.     Valhalla Knights 2's visuals are unremarkable. The limited options for customizing the appearance of your characters are disappointing, and while towns have a quaint, charming design to the buildings with interiors that have some attractive touches, such as windows with light streaming in, the monster-infested areas in which you spend most of your time are bland, and lacking in detail. The action plays out smoothly, though, even with several party members and monsters battling it out at once. The sound is thoroughly lackluster, with repetitive music that may put you to sleep and muted sounds of battle that lack any sense of character or urgency.      Even if you're just looking for the satisfaction of killing monsters, leveling up your characters, and scoring some nifty loot, there are so many better options than Valhalla Knights 2 available out there. Thus, there's really no reason to bother with this tedious, frustrating, and generic dungeon crawler.    
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427,Lux-Pain ,3.5," With nonsensical dialogue muddling the complex plot, Lux-Pain shows how an entire experience can be ruined by poor localization.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/6/7/2221767-box_luxpain.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lux-pain-review/1900-6207950/,neg,"
  Video games have come a long way since simply urging you to save the princess, and these days they increasingly present stories with complex, mature themes and social commentary. Lux-Pain, from publisher Ignition Entertainment, is a novel-style adventure game in the vein of the Phoenix Wright series, and it attempts to deliver a poignant experience to Nintendo DS owners. Instead, it is quickly tripped up by a plethora of embarrassing localization miscues, and what little exciting gameplay there is cannot break its fall.     The general concept is easy enough to grasp. An infection known as ""Silent"" has been spreading around the city of Kisaragi, causing citizens to organize group suicides, commit delinquent and criminal acts, and basically just go nuts in one way or another. As Atsuki Saijo, a member of an anti-Silent group called ""FORT,"" you're charged with going undercover as a high-school student to ultimately uncover patient zero: the original Silent victim. Bestowed with telepathic powers, you'll spend the next few weeks reading the thoughts of your classmates, teachers, and neighbors to deduce who Silent has infected and, hopefully, remove the infection.    Scrape at the screen to uncover her emotional worms.   Powerful emotions within people as well as residual emotions lingering in the environment--both referred to as ""shinen"" and represented as parasitic worms in the game--are the keys to uncovering the thoughts throughout the game. Atsuki automatically senses these, and when he does, a probing minigame is activated. In it, you simply tap at the touch screen to determine where a hidden shinen lies, scratch away at that area to reveal the shinen, and then hold your stylus on the worm to remove it.     The results of a successful probe are nothing short of baffling: The worm manifests itself into a ""term,"" which is just a short phrase consisting of no more than a few words (such as ""dumb kids,"" ""kill them,"" or ""nice guy""), which you must then ""imprint"" back into the characters' minds to discover what they're thinking. These thoughts range wildly from homicidal, self-loathing, and even flirtatious. Armed with the knowledge that you're supposed to gain from reading these thoughts, as well as information that you pick up through normal dialogue in school and on the street, you can track down Silent victims, have FORT examine the extracted infections, and find the original infection.     Sadly, this interesting idea never really pans out. A large portion of the dialogue is poorly and inconsistently localized, giving off the impression that multiple translators used different criteria in determining how to express given lines in English. It also seems as if the source material was scattershot. What you're left with are lines of dialogue that seem slightly out of sequence in relation to each other. You're also exposed to long chats that simply drag out the time between important plot points, such as the 30-plus lines about hunger and homemade cookies before finding out that a friend just landed herself in the hospital. This all makes the story harder to follow than it should be, and detracts from your ability to think about where to go and who to contact to achieve your goal.     Even worse, at the most basic level, you're showered with grammatically incorrect and confusing sentences such as, ""Seeing such joy is what is to some people,"" or those that were simply translated too literally such as, ""I ate his mind."" Colloquialisms such as ""wanna"" and ""gotta"" are followed inexplicably by single apostrophes. Finally, it's almost guaranteed that you'll encounter an egregious spelling mistake nearly every hour. Taking the most basic plot points into account, it's pretty clear that Lux-Pain's story was inspired by serious social issues (parental negligence, serious depression, and suicide). It's a shame that the botched localization results in too much unintentional humor to take any of Lux-Pain's commentary seriously.    I wanna erase your MIND.   Despite the localization's best efforts to thwart your progress, proceeding through the game is never really a problem because Lux-Pain is a very guided experience--so much so that it ends up a bore. You simply tap on active points on the map to visit an area and talk to anyone standing there, but half of the time, the game dictates specifically where you can go. In addition, you rarely get to choose what to ask of whoever you encounter. More often than not, the person will show up, spit out reams of irrelevant dialogue, and leave. Thus there's little need to try to sift through the (largely useless) information that you've accumulated, given that progress is reduced mostly to visiting every possible place until you find a Silent victim.    When you do encounter someone who is infected by Silent, Atsuki detects this (without any effort from you, naturally) and the game launches into Silent-Removal mode. This is the most mechanically involving portion of Lux-Pain's gameplay; one of several minigames make you poke, slash, and chisel away at white blobs on the touch screen to successfully remove the Silent. These sections are only occasionally challenging and don't make up at all for the game's other deficiencies. To add insult to injury, one Silent encounter resulted in a Game Over screen without any explanation--even after the Silent was defeated.    With neither thrilling gameplay nor an immersive story, the presentation in Lux-Pain simply goes to waste. The anime-inspired character art is colorful, if not all that well animated. The English voice actors recognize how awkward the translation is and paraphrase much of their dialogue such that you're actually able to understand and appreciate small pockets of the story. Your in-game cell phone can receive optional news broadcasts, e-mail, and ringtones, and the local Internet cafe has a message board that's updated with information every day (though you can't post on it yourself). There are even multiple endings based on whose Silent infections you've removed. Sadly, the game fails to deliver on the most basic element of a novel-style adventure so any added features are wasted, much like any time you'd spend with Lux-Pain.  
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428,Spaceforce: Captains ,3.5, This dreary and derivative turn-based strategy game is about as entertaining as working an assembly line.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/6/1/4/2210614-5.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/spaceforce-captains-review/1900-6187655/,neg,"
  Because so many turn-based strategy games deal with high fantasy, it's initially refreshing to get to play with the aliens and starships of Spaceforce: Captains. Unfortunately, the sci-fi setting is all that this low-budget DreaMatrix Games effort has going for it. Although this space-opera wannabe aspires to take traditional turn-based fantasy to the final frontier, it pulls the genre down to earth, courtesy of sloppy design and third-world production values.    The background is taken from 2006's space sim Spaceforce: Rogue Universe, which in this turn-based form resembles the Star Trek-styled setting of strategic epics going all the way back to Star Control. There are three solo campaigns depicting a stereotypical galactic war told from the points of view of the three main Spaceforce races: the human EMD, the orclike Ord, and the vaguely reptilian Alreani. But it's not as if the setting is developed enough for these factions to make much of a difference to the game itself. DreaMatrix seems more concerned with moving Heroes of Might and Magic to space than with creating a unique identity. Gameplay is a straight-up rip-off of the Heroes formula, with the stereotypical studly knights, pointy-eared elves, and gallant steeds. These are in turn swapped out for studly star-faring rogues, bug-eyed aliens, and warp-driving spaceships.    Line them up and then shoot them down.   Most of your time is spent on an isometric 3D star map (on a 2D plane) where you direct fleets as you would parties of adventurers in fantasy-oriented turn-based games. Instead of picking hero knights and mages to lead parties, you hire human and alien captains. These captains represent classes, such as explorer, pirate, scientist, and doctor. And, instead of exploring a medieval land to plunder caches of goodies guarded by monsters, you explore star systems to plunder goodies guarded by ET spaceships. Space stations are developed instead of cities, with you constructing fighter bays, gun turrets, and research labs rather than fantasy barracks, ballistae, and mage schools. Sci-fi techs replace magic weapons and spells, with lasers, cloaking devices, or teleporters doing the same jobs as old-fashioned +1 swords or lightning bolts. Such futuristic resources as credits and nano-bots also stand in for gold pieces and mana.    If copying such an old formula were pulled off successfully, Spaceforce: Captains would be an interesting take on a traditionally fantasy-centric genre. But just about everything here is broken. Level design is an absolute mess. Maps are dark and convoluted, and feature mazes wouldn't look out of place in Pac-Man. Alien ships are positioned at junctions leading to the best goodies, so you're presented with a strictly A-to-B path through each level. Space rubble, asteroids, and other objects blend in so perfectly with the star-system backdrops that it's hard to tell if you can move in certain directions or not. The minimap is of no help here, either, because it is so black and devoid of features to be all but totally useless.    Empire management is even more annoying. Enemy fleets are so huge that you have to spend a great deal of time building your space station and creating huge fleets. This isn't particularly difficult because your floating HQs make big money automatically with a couple of basic upgrades, and ship-building resources can generally be readily found just floating around in space. But, man, is the empire-building process ever tedious. You start levels off making a space station from scratch, which involves doing nothing but hammering on the end-turn button for five or 10 minutes to accumulate enough credits for construction jobs. Then you repeat this same mindless process to earn the cash required to crank out the hundreds upon hundreds of ships needed to defeat the massive enemy fleets lurking in the mazes of the maps. Sheer numbers are key, so forget about tactics. It's more like you're working on an assembly line than playing a game.    Actual combat is just as dreary. All the shooting takes place on chessboard-style maps where you move ships around by turns and simply blast away. There isn't any strategy here, though, because the ships all rely on basic beam weapons and missiles. Tactics are about as evolved as infantry combat in the 18th century--meaning that you just line everybody up and start shooting until one side or the other goes boom. Yet the game doesn't even get this romper-room stuff right. There isn't any graphical representation of firing ranges, so you're left guessing how far you can shoot. Chessboard squares are often unresponsive to move orders, making every maneuver a frustrating multiclick affair where you repeatedly zoom in and out looking for the magic spot where the game will recognize your command.     Cash on demand makes it awfully easy to build the space station of your dreams. Awfully boring, too.   The no-frills presentation also casts its shadow on the oppressive mood. There are just a handful of ship classes for each of the main races and some of the alien species you encounter. All of these vessels are hideous too, with jagged lines and few details. Research options liven matters up a little bit with some interesting weapons and gadgets. Still, as with the station and ship building, all you have to do is click ""end turn"" repeatedly to automatically earn the big bucks needed to buy all the tech on offer. Audio is excruciating because of lame order acknowledgements that don't make any sense (""law and order"" is a favorite) and the shred-happy canned-rock soundtrack. And multiplayer might as well not even be present because there are never any servers available that are actually hosting the game.    Spaceforce: Captains belongs in the brig, not on your hard drive. A sci-fi take on Heroes of Might and Magic is a great idea, but you're better off sticking with warriors and elves until somebody greatly refines this concept.    
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'repeatedly', 'automatically', 'earn', 'big', 'bucks', 'needed', 'buy', 'tech', 'offer', '.', 'Audio', 'excruciating', 'lame', 'order', 'acknowledgements', ""n't"", 'make', 'sense', '(', '``', 'law', 'order', ""''"", 'favorite', ')', 'shred-happy', 'canned-rock', 'soundtrack', '.', 'And', 'multiplayer', 'might', 'well', 'even', 'present', 'never', 'servers', 'available', 'actually', 'hosting', 'game', '.', 'Spaceforce', ':', 'Captains', 'belongs', 'brig', ',', 'hard', 'drive', '.', 'A', 'sci-fi', 'take', 'Heroes', 'Might', 'Magic', 'great', 'idea', ',', ""'re"", 'better', 'sticking', 'warriors', 'elves', 'somebody', 'greatly', 'refines', 'concept', '.']",0.043739106753812644,0.5433699035169622
429,Imperium Romanum ,3.5, Old-fashioned city building and bugs turn Imperium Romanum into an ancient ruin.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/1/3/2216513-boxcover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/imperium-romanum-review/1900-6187983/,neg,"
  Even with a cool new Latinized name, Imperium Romanum is pretty much the exact same game as Glory of the Roman Empire, which came, saw, and inspired a thousand yawns back in 2006. This carbon copy also has tougher problems to deal with than simply ripping off a two-year-old snoozer that nobody much cared for, since a legion of bugs leave the game stuck somewhere between ""unstable"" and ""God help you.""    And that last sentence isn't hyperbole. In its launch state, Imperium Romanum is virtually unplayable. Crashes are so commonplace that it's almost impossible to get through a scenario without the game hard-locking your system and forcing a reboot. Any sort of monkeying around with the default graphical settings tends to make matters much worse. Turn on antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, for example, or dial up shadows and grass detail, and chances are pretty good that the game will freeze before you even make it to a scenario loading screen. You're really going to want to crank up the graphics, too, because it will seem like you're viewing the game through a screen door at the default 1024x768 resolution and lowball detail settings. It doesn't take much fiddling for the game to go boom, either. Sometimes it crashes on interface menu screens that are just displays of text and a few static pictures. These bugs are depressingly common, if the posts at the developer's official forum are any indication. Haemimont is promising to release a patch in the near future, but really, this game never should have been shipped in such an rickety condition in the first place.   City building like grandma used to make.   Even if you can keep Imperium Romanum up and running, you're not going to experience anything that you haven't encountered many times before. As noted off the top, this is really just a refined take on Glory of the Roman Empire, with an improved 3D engine and more Rome-specific civilizational touches. But the overall design still feels phoned in. There is no formal campaign, for instance, just an historical timeline mode where you gradually proceed through scenarios from key moments in Roman history. You start off with just Rome in 509 BC, Rome in 146 BC, and Pompeii in 70 BC (although this should actually be AD 70, as that's when Mount Vesuvius blew its top and buried the provincial town in ash), with success in each mission unlocking around a dozen further stops along a timeline that ranges all the way from the birth of Rome to the second century AD. The actual history represented in these scenarios is awfully skimpy, however, so you'll really only get anything out of them if you're already familiar with ancient Rome and know what events the dates represent. The only other mode of play is a sandbox mode that takes you to rough approximations of famous Roman cities like Thessalonica and Caesarea. It's equally light on history, with terrain being the only real links between these simulated cities and their ancient inspirations.    Gameplay doesn't provide much in the way of an ancient history lesson, either. It doesn't appear as though Haemimont is very concerned with history--or spell-checking, for that matter, given how you're called a ""Preator"" all through the tutorial. You're really playing a stereotypical city builder with some Roman-inspired visuals, not a Roman city builder. So you build the standard-issue town with the expected town center, the de rigeur houses, the usual barracks and stables, and the rather familiar flax and pig farms. None of these buildings look particularly Roman, just vaguely ancient in a generic style. All share so many similar characteristics that it's hard to tell a villa from a tavern at any distance. Resources are standard for this sort of game, too, with you gathering timber, stone, meat, wine, and so forth. Combat is just as basic, in that you occasionally have to raise armies of soldiers, archers, and cavalry to beat down pesky barbarians.     There isn't anything particularly wrong with any of this, of course. During stable moments, the game plays quite smoothly, with a reasonable level of challenge and an easy-to-use interface that places all of the controls at your fingertips. The only real hitch is the absence of a proper time-compression option, as the game runs on only two speeds--""really slow"" and plain old regular ""slow."" But it all feels so dreary and uninspired. Too much here is patterned after the city-building template first laid out in games like Caesar over a decade ago. Scenario objectives sure don't break any new ground, so don't expect any big thrills here unless you're still having a blast building a town up to 60 citizens, or reaching a certain number of villas, or constructing a monument like a triumphal arch. The only mildly intriguing modern touch is automatic tracking of high scores over the Net, which gives you a target to shoot for each and every time you load up a scenario. Of course, this is still a pretty poor excuse for going head-to-head with another wannabe city planner in a real multiplayer mode.   Raising armies and sending them into combat is a brainless exercise.   Even if you appreciate this sort of mundane city building, many aspects of the design seem broken. It's sometimes impossible to satisfy citizens' demands for basic amenities like water and sausages. Residents often won't stop whining even when you drop wells and butcher shops right on their doorsteps. Many times you have to micromanage your plebs by manually clicking on them and ordering them to satisfy their needs by buying sausage or whatever it is that they're griping about. Riots will sometimes start up when you've got just a couple of angry citizens in your whole town. Fires will sometimes begin for no reason, even if you've got the town fully covered by prefectures, apparently just to set you back and drag out scenario length. Needless to say, this isn't a great deal of fun. Having half-wits torching villas when they can't find the butcher shop across the street is a real pain, as is enduring the random, fiery wrath of Vulcan on your farms. Employment is another problem. Jobs are slotted for men and women, with men getting the grunt farm work and women taking care of taverns. This is fine and dandy when it comes to providing a realistic look at the sexist times way back when, but it's a pain when most of the jobs are reserved for men. Unless you have the room and denarii to build a pile of woman-hiring taverns, your unemployment rate is guaranteed to be eternally high due to all the women who can't find jobs.    Army management is such a total waste of time that it shouldn't have been included in the game at all. Buildings such as barracks and stables create and maintain only a single complement of troops. If you want more than one company of soldiers, you have to build multiple buildings, which is well-nigh impossible in many scenarios due to lack of space and money. This makes combat excruciatingly drawn out. If your single company of, say, hastati is beaten to a hasty retreat by a pack of marauding barbarians (all your enemies are marauding barbarians, by the way), you have to wait for your boys to retreat to their barracks and then slowly rebuild their numbers. Lose a couple of scraps and you spend more time waiting for troop strength to get back up to snuff than you do actually playing general. Not that you can do much ordering around even if you get onto a Trajanlike roll. Aside from basic moving and a couple of formations, the only battle commands are attack, retreat, and stop. So all you can really do is point your troops at the nearest enemy town and hope they wind up burning it to the ground.    Buggy, boring, and pointless, Imperium Romanum is about as hard on gamers as Nero was on Christians. It may get some of the basics right, but the many technical flaws and the simplistic regurgitation of game mechanics almost as old as Hadrian's Wall leave very little here to be enjoyed, no matter how much you like playing Caesar.    
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430,WALL-E ,3.5, WALL-E's finicky camera and repetitive gameplay make this one lousy robot adventure.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/2/9/2219329-box_walle.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wall-e-review/1900-6194998/,neg,"
  As a robot designed specifically to make trash cubes, Wall-E's finely honed talent makes up a large part of his existence, but it takes up only a small portion of the movie. There are only so many unique ways Wall-E can interact with waste material before it gets tiring. Sadly, the Nintendo DS version of WALL-E chronicles the robot's twisted relationship with cubes for the entirety of the journey. A puzzle game designed around the joys of slinging garbage may seem like a promising idea, but the tedium of constantly wrestling with a camera that seems to exist solely to hide valuable objects while you dutifully hurl another block at another switch makes for a tedious experience.     The story of WALL-E vaguely follows the events of the movie, but the drama is so separate from the gameplay, it's easy to forget about the narrative thread entirely. Important events are showcased through cartoony cutscenes that, though they bear no artistic relationship to the big screen flick, are well animated and cheery-looking. It's just hard to take Wall-E's plight seriously when you see dramatic encounters play out in cinemas only to go through the same block-throwing puzzles when the action starts up again. The fact that you're a lonely robot trying to save the humans from their own greed and laziness doesn't seem important at all here. The segregated nature of this quest makes everything seem slight and unimportant.    Wall-E squares off against a much more interesting robot.   Levels are full of conveyor belts, laser-guarded doors, and wall-mounted switches that must be properly tweaked to allow your safe progress. The key to every puzzle is throwing a cube at a switch. The Earth levels have garbage stations where you can collect and compress ordinary trash cubes to toss at enemies or buttons. The later levels, which take place on a spaceship, mix in cubes with different properties. You'll have to manage cubes that explode, implode, and disable electronics (including you) to safely make your way through the next cube-filled room.     There are plenty of head-scratching puzzles along the way, but a number of flaws make this experience more frustrating than rewarding. The camera is awful. You view the action from a top-down, slightly angled perspective. Because switches and obstacles line every wall of the area, you have to constantly rotate your view to see what's going on around you. Methodically tweaking your position is fine when you aren't in any immediate danger, but the later levels are full of enemies that make patience impossible.    Furthermore, the punishment system is far too strict. You can only be hit five times per level before you perish. Each level has about five rooms that you need to successfully traverse before you can save your progress. Every time you are struck by a laser or accidentally fall down a pit, you lose precious energy. Because of your limited view of the play area, it is far too common to slip down a hole you didn't realize you were standing so close to or be hit by a laser you would have sworn was going to miss you. And though Wall-E will flail his metal arms when he gets close to a pit, you can't actually guide him away from death before he plummets. If you get too close to a pit, you fall in and lose some health. If you do this too often, you'll be replaying the same areas over and over again.   At least the cutscenes look pretty good.   There are some sections where you control Eve, but these only detract from the overall package. As Eve, you fly down a narrow path, avoiding propellers and dropping blocks along the way. There is too much pop-in here to fly quickly though, so this turns into a jerky, stop/start affair. It's a clunky detour from the main puzzle solving adventure that serves to frustrate rather than exhilarate. The visuals apart from the charming cutscenes are also more of a hindrance than a help. It's difficult to ascertain which environmental pieces can be safely interacted with and which will damage you. Thus, each new graphical variation leads to trial and error before you figure out the role of every blurry object. The two-cart multiplayer has players race in the Eve levels, but they're just as uninteresting with a friend.     WALL-E may have a few interesting puzzles, but the frustrating elements serve to make this adventure far too tedious in the long run. Even fans of the movie just looking for a portable robot pal will be disappointed here--the eye-straining visuals and poorly integrated storytelling make this a drastic departure from the theatrical hit.  
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431,WWII Aces ,3.5," WWII Aces is a frustrating, ugly, flight combat game with antiquated design elements and unresponsive motion controls.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/7/2/5/33847-93725.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwii-aces-review/1900-6190461/,neg,"
  One of the benefits of the Wii's unique design is the potential for innovative control schemes to introduce new ways of playing games that belong to traditional genres. Unfortunately, for every inventive Wii game, there are a number of shoddy, halfhearted efforts to shoehorn motion controls into a game that doesn’t benefit from them. WWII Aces is a flight combat game that loses any appeal it may otherwise have had by forcing unresponsive motion controls onto an already maddeningly difficult game.   Dogfights like this one would be a lot more fun if the controls weren't so bad.     In WWII Aces, you can choose to fly for the RAF, Soviet Air Force, or the Luftwaffe in three distinct campaigns totaling more than 70 missions. Each campaign offers a significant variety of objectives, ranging from simple checkpoint searches and dogfights to paratrooper drops and bombing runs. You'll have your choice of 12 planes that each handle a bit differently and utilize different sets of armaments. However, you won't know which plane is the best choice until you try a mission with the wrong plane and fail. Although the game presents you with your objectives before the start of each level, it's often unclear how to complete those objectives once you enter the mission. For example, you may be tasked with destroying a fleet of ships before the enemy can fire its arsenal of torpedoes, but these ships do not appear on your map until halfway through the mission. When missions last upward of 10 minutes each, sitting through the first half of the level only to fail shortly thereafter is frustrating. Each level can be tackled by yourself or cooperatively using split-screen multiplayer. Playing with a friend makes completing the objectives a bit easier, if only because your incredibly accurate enemies have one more target at which to fire. Dogfight mode allows you to set up a quick air battle against several AI opponents, but these fights are only fun when you can mess around with a second player.    The default control scheme uses only the Wii Remote. Holding the controller sideways, you move the aiming reticle by tilting the remote. Quickly jerking the controller to the side performs a barrel roll, while flicking it up performs a flip to evade pursuing enemies. Unfortunately, you'll often oversteer during intense dogfights and miss your target, while your enemies do not seem to have the same trouble. Adding to the frustration, barrel rolls and flips are rarely recognized properly. This causes you to perform the wrong maneuver and get back into the line of fire quicker than you anticipated. The second and third control schemes offer some reprieve by letting you use the motion sensitivity of the Nunchuk to control your plane's movement. They also relegate such actions as barrel rolls or firing weapons to the D pad and A button, respectively. None of the control schemes feel entirely intuitive, and it's unfortunate that a more traditional arrangement using the analog stick isn't available.   Playing with a friend makes WWII Aces easier, but only slightly more enjoyable.     WWII Aces also suffers from long load times, often making you wait more than 30 seconds to enter a mission. These load times are curious because the game's graphics and presentation are downright ugly. Its pixelated, barren landscapes could have been adequately rendered on the Nintendo 64 or PlayStation. Distant enemy planes or tanks appear as nondescript red triangles that are impossible to distinguish until you're dangerously within reach of their weapons. Oceans and forests are depicted as static blue and green textures, while your plane is only slightly more colorful, full of jagged edges. The game's soundtrack, which is appropriately dramatic, is the only commendable aspect of the game's presentation. Sound effects for weapons fire and voice acting for mission introductions are adequate, but they're not at all impressive.    Although WWII Aces offers sufficient content and variety, its frustrating difficulty, shoddy control schemes, and terrible presentation do nothing to justify its full retail price. This game does not meet the visual standards of its platform, and would have fared better with traditional controls. If you're interested in a Wii game because the system offers the chance for a novel control method, there are plenty of other games for you to try. Avoid this frustrating, halfhearted attempt.    
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432,Battlefield: Bad Company 2 ,9," Battlefield: Bad Company 2 boasts a fast-paced and thrilling campaign, as well as some of the most immersive and exciting multiplayer action around.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426730-2221815-box_bfbc2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battlefield-bad-company-2-review/1900-6252970/,pos,"
  There is no shortage of online destinations for those who enjoy first-person gun-wielding combat, but no matter how many opportunities you get to shoot another player in the face, there is always room for one more. Especially when that one more is as exciting and intense as Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The online multiplayer in this modern military shooter is a standout, featuring huge maps, incredible destructibility, powerful vehicles, and excellent sound design. These elements combine to foster the sense that you are fighting on an actual battlefield, making many other online shooters seem more like combat arenas than believable war zones. Multiplayer battles are invigorating and addictive, but they aren't all that Bad Company 2 has to offer. The sizable campaign takes you to beautiful and exotic locations where you'll be sorely tempted to take a break from shooting bad guys and blowing things up to admire the scenery. Your hilarious and endearing squadmates are great companions, giving the campaign a rich sense of character not often found in the genre. The result is a very entertaining adventure that, coupled with the excellent multiplayer and top-notch technical presentation, makes Battlefield: Bad Company 2 something special in the world of shooters.       The beginning of Bad Company's second tour finds Sarge, Marlowe, Sweetwater, and Haggard stationed in a wintery valley, supposedly serving out Sarge's last tour of duty. Lofty mountains loom high against the bright blue sky as you sneak your way between snow-laden trees and out across a frozen river. As you infiltrate a small village, the snow muffles the sound of your footfalls, and when a firefight breaks out, your ears ring from the concussion of nearby explosives. One daring escape later, you're dropped into the Bolivian jungle, where mosquitoes whine in your ear as you walk in the dappled light of the jungle floor. Gunfire doesn't echo very far in the forest, but beneath the corrugated tin roof of a logging outpost, each bullet is a cacophony unto itself. This vivid, engaging world is a testament to Bad Company 2's remarkable technical presentation. The stunning landscapes are matched by the diverse, intriguing terrain in both rural and urban environments. The excellent sound design further enriches your sense of place, and each gunshot, footstep, and exclamation fuels your battlefield awareness and informs your tactical decisions. Though there are some blurry textures, occasional screen tearing, and awkward moments caused by the pervasive environmental destructibility, these are mere blemishes on the ambitious look and immersive sound of Bad Company 2.    Of course, just because the scenery is great doesn't stop you from wanting to blow it up. Trees, barricades, vehicles, buildings, and bridges all splinter and break apart when exposed to gunfire or explosives. Not only is it immensely fun to destroy things, but it's crucial to your survival and success. Say there's a sniper perched in a tower covering your approach. You can try to pick him off without exposing yourself, or you can bust out your underbarrel grenade launcher and blow the platform to smithereens. The explosion showers debris in a realistic and satisfying way, and the sniper is taken care of. Destruction is a double-edged sword, however, as you'll learn the first time that the window you are shooting out of explodes and becomes a gaping hole through which your enemies are more than happy to shoot you. Most buildings can be completely leveled this time around, provided you have enough firepower, though metal structures like shipping containers are nigh impervious. Occasionally the rampant destructibility will get a bit too ambitious, leaving objects stuck in strange positions. Yet the scale of destruction you can wreak is impressive, and the best part about it is how your destructive power becomes a seamless part of your battlefield strategy. It makes you feel powerful in a logical, invigorating way and makes Bad Company 2 unique among its peers.    Strolling down a corpse-ridden street in a half-destroyed Bolivian jungle village is business as usual for Bad Company.  Humor is another way that Bad Company 2 distinguishes itself. Your squadmates each have great personalities, and their banter is witty and entertaining. You may have to wait for a quiet moment to hear some of their best conversations, but it is well worth it. Haggard's love for the Dallas Cowboys and command of the Spanish language are two amusing subjects, while a conversation about respecting the dead adds enough emotional depth to elevate these characters above one-dimensional stereotypes. They are competent and helpful on the battlefield, and though the squad-based action seems a natural fit for cooperative play, you won't lament playing solo because the men of Bad Company are such delightful companions.    The campaign is a focused, largely linear adventure that takes you to a variety of gorgeous locations. The aforementioned arctic and jungle landscapes are standouts, but other places live up to the high standard. Driving a tank through a countryside in the full bloom of autumn provides eye candy and cannon fodder aplenty, while speeding around a dry seabed in an ATV brings strange sights, not to mention a particularly fierce firefight in the courtyard of an old fortress. You have to be sharp to defeat the smart, aggressive enemies who use destructibility to their advantage and avoid your line of fire. The action is challenging but not overly so, ensuring you have plenty of time to revel in the havoc you are causing. Despite one oddly forced situation, the campaign moves through exotic locales at a great clip, providing ample opportunity to flex your firearms and enjoy some intense vehicle sequences. This is a very entertaining, very exciting adventure.       But the most exciting thing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has to offer is online multiplayer competition. Up to 32 players compete in squads in a few different match types. In Rush, the attacking team assaults an enemy position in an effort to destroy two targets of opportunity. If the attackers succeed, two more targets open up, as well as an entire new section of battlefield. These progressive contests are fierce and engaging, and each new area offers new challenges to which both teams must adapt. (There is also shorter, equally intense version of this mode called Squad Rush.) In Conquest, two teams strive to hold three control points while fending each other off. The natural ebb and flow of combat is unpredictable here, as points can be captured by a lone soldier or by a heavy armored assault. These battlefields are more fluid, and because the action doesn't move on like it does in Rush, they tend to be more thoroughly ravaged by destruction by the end of the match. The last mode, Squad Deathmatch, pits four squads of four against each other in a more traditional, yet still very fun competition. Jumping into a random game doesn't always work properly, and you won't always find a good match, or any match at all for that matter. Fortunately, you can easily call up a list of active servers and consistently hop into whatever game type you like. Each mode offers a different take on the core combat, providing a great variety of ways to do battle.     Bad Company 2's technical excellence is on full display here as well, and the spacious, well-designed maps make superb stages for combat. There are dense snowy forests, debris-laden deserts, coastal industrial complexes, swampy jungle villages, and riverside settlements that play host to the intense action. These maps are impressively varied, offering diverse terrain and more buildings than you would ever need to go in. Each weathers the destructive forces of battle differently each time, making the combat incredibly dynamic and demanding constant adaptability. These maps are excellent, as is the spot-on sound design, which is perhaps even more crucial in multiplayer than in the campaign. A distant crack indicates that an enemy sniper has a bead on you, footsteps inside a building can clue you in on where to aim your grenade, and friendly soldiers shout calls for ammunition or warnings that a building is about to collapse. In addition to the rich audio clues, you can use the unique spotting mechanic to increase your team's battlefield awareness. By getting an enemy in your sights and tapping a key, you put a temporary marker over his head that your whole team can see. It's a simple yet potent move that is immensely helpful to your team, and if it leads to his death, you'll get a nice little point bonus for your troubles.  Earning points enables you to unlock new weapons, gadgets, and attribute-boosting specializations. Some of these are class-specific, while others can be applied to any soldier and create some flexibility between classes. The four classes in Bad Company 2 fall into familiar archetypes: soldiers who wield assault rifles, grenade launchers, and ammo kits; engineers who stealthily kill enemies while sabotaging or repairing vehicles; medics who lay down machine-gun fire and revive downed allies; and snipers who sneak around making long-range kills and setting up close-range demolitions. You get points for killing enemies, supporting teammates, and earning medals for your battlefield prowess. Unlocking new gear not only makes you more powerful, but it gives you more ways to be effective in combat. Enemies won't expect the ghillie-suited sniper to be packing a shotgun, for example, and increasing the radius and healing speed of your health kits can extend your teammates' life spans significantly.   Playing peek-a-boo with a tank is risky proposition. There are plenty of tactical decisions to be made beyond the loadout screen, including where you spawn, which buildings you destroy, and which vehicles you pilot. ATVs, gunboats, Humvees, tanks, and helicopters all spawn on the battlefield full of deadly potential. Exactly who dies depends on your driving skills and the enemy's demolition prowess, but there's no question that vehicles can change the flow of battle very quickly. A quick flanking run with a Jet Ski can catch the enemy off guard, while an unmanned UAV can end a helicopter's reign of terror before it has a chance to begin. With all the different classes, vehicles, and stationary weapons (like heavy machine guns and mounted rocket launchers) at play, there is a dazzling array of ways to wage war. These tools, coupled with the threat and promise of destructibility, make Bad Company 2's battlefields uniquely chaotic and electrifyingly fun. The action is top-notch in both campaign and multiplayer alike. Whether or not you're looking for a new shooter in your life, you owe it to yourself to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2.   


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433,Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 ,9, Tiger Woods 10 for the Wii is as close as you can get to a golf course without paying green fees.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/2/3/2221923-box_twpgat10.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tiger-woods-pga-tour-10-review/1900-6212524/,pos,"
  Last year, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 All-Play for the Nintendo Wii just missed the green. Despite its mostly stellar re-creation of a real golf swing with the Wii Remote, annoying issues with putting sensitivity cost it a couple of strokes. That isn't a problem anymore. The 2010 edition of Tiger is as close to perfect as any golf game ever made, with dead-on swing mechanics thanks to fine-tuned controls and the use of the new Wii MotionPlus add-on. This is a brilliant re-creation of real golf, loaded with little touches and tweaks that make it an addictive pastime whether you're a low handicapper, a weekend hacker, or a first-timer who doesn't know one end of a putter from the other. In short, videogame golf doesn't get any better than this.   Thanks to Wii MotionPlus and Precision Putting, greens are no longer a source of unnecessary frustration.   With that said, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 is more of an intensive refinement of last year's game than an overhaul. You can't slam the game for suffering from sequelitis, though, because the many changes improve the quality of play across the board. The most noteworthy upgrade is of course the controls. As in the 09 game, gripping and ripping are still handled with the Wii Remote, although you can attach a nunchuk and swing in a more traditional videogame fashion if you prefer. To take a shot, you simply stand up, take the remote in both hands like a real golf club, and then go through a lifelike swing motion to blast little dimpled balls into the great blue yonder. It's all very realistic and addictive, and the challenge is almost on a par with real golf. The lack of a ball on your floor is the only thing spoiling the illusion, because in real golf you need to keep your head down when swinging, while here you find yourself torn between keeping your head tucked away properly and watching the screen to see if your movements are being accurately tracked by your avatar.    And they almost always are. The addition of Wii MotionPlus support has made swing sensitivity more authentic than it was last year. Simply plug the MotionPlus hardware (available both separately and in a special cut-price combo pack with Tiger 10) into the base of the remote, and every little wiggle and waggle of the controller is perfectly mimicked onscreen. This is particularly vital when it comes to approach shots and putting. Last year, Tiger 09 came up a little short in these areas. Lack of remote sensitivity occasionally made playing around holes an exercise in frustration. Approach shots from under 100 yards were tough to finesse, and putting required an absurd amount of effort to get even routine flat-lie 15-footers to the cup. At times, it didn't seem possible to even hit the ball hard enough to get it to the hole. This put you in bizarre situations where you had to swing the remote like you were wielding a driver, and it required adopting a lag-putting philosophy from distances as close in as 30 feet.    Neither are problems anymore. Greater control sensitivity allows you to put a more accurate touch on the ball on approach shots, letting you better handle in-close situations where you need to take a little off your swing to get close to the pin. Turning the remote even slightly is now all that you need to do to perform a fade or draw shot, which is often necessary when you're shooting for the green. Putting is completely different this year. The new Precision Putting mechanic causes the onscreen putter to move with every little twitch of the remote, allowing you to apply the same amount of oomph here that you would use on a real golf course. If you have any experience with putting in the real world, you don't even need to look up at the screen to putt; just check the distance and lie, and then lock your head to the ground just like you would on a real green and shoot. Tap-ins are tap-ins. Ten-footers are ten-footers. Sixty-footers are sixty-footers. These improvements are even noticeable without the MotionPlus gadget installed, although club responsiveness is noticeably better with it in place. The bottom line is that you no longer need to worry about clunky controls, just the greens. They are a real handful, too, with a lot of sculpted features and the kind of incredible speed that gives nightmares to even the finest PGA Tour pros.   Multiplayer tournaments give Tiger 10 a much beefier online presence than it had last year.   Tiburon also took care of some feature oversights and made Tiger 10 a more comprehensive package. Basic golf-game accoutrements have been rounded out. There are three difficulty settings, which run from kid-friendly to a grueling advanced level that's nitpicky about swing movements and removes such crutches as the putting meter (which, oddly enough, doesn't make much of a difference to gameplay due to the outstanding controller sensitivity when putting). The game now includes 27 courses, among them seven newcomers, including Bethpage Black and Banff Springs. Career mode has been beefed up with a more comprehensive player creator and the ability to play in the previously absent US Open.    Online support has been greatly enhanced. You can take on fellow golfers over the Net in solo matches, as you could last year, as well as take part in daily and weekly tournaments in which your rounds are recorded and then posted to a leaderboard. You even get a chance to rehit rounds from the first tee if you get to the end of the back nine and aren't happy with your score. Tournies are categorized for rookie and advanced players, which does a good job of keeping the scrubs apart from the sharps. Don't go anywhere near the advanced tournaments if you lack the chops to shoot rounds in the 60s and 70s. Either way, you need to put in a lot of time building up a character's skills before you can really be competitive online, or even offline against a more experienced buddy.    Another nifty online treat is real-time course weather courtesy of The Weather Channel. If you turn this option on, you play with the actual weather conditions noted at the time of your round. So if it's overcast and blustery at Torrey Pines in the real world, it's overcast and blustery at Torrey Pines in your living room. You can also play along with PGA tournaments as they take place in the real world, comparing scores with the likes of Tiger himself. Golf Party minigames are back again this year, along with the Wii-exclusive Disc Golf. The latter game is goofy and addictive, although perhaps a bit out of place. It's hard to imagine casual gamers buying Tiger 10 just for this novelty, but it adds to the package and is at least a good game for the family. The motion controls are also so accurate that you might as well be throwing a real Frisbee in the park.   Some courses are beautiful to behold in spots, although there are enough jaggies that you might not want to look too close.   This is one of the better-looking Wii sports games out there, with some holes that look pretty when viewed from the right angles. But there are loads of visual jaggies on golfer models and trees, and spectators look like performance-art pyramidal sculptures. The sound quality is much better, at least. There is a ton of commentary here and a tremendous number of atmospheric effects. The lack of Dolby Digital 5.1 support is barely noticeable during tournaments, because the crowd noise swells up all around you in the aftermath of a great shot. About the only quibble would be with the unnecessarily punitive commentary. A double bogey is punishment enough without the incessant wisecracks.    Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 has turned last year's great near-miss into an all-time classic. Improved motion-control support, more game features, and expanded online modes make it incredibly immersive and authentic. Golf games just don't get any better than this.  
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434,Comet Crash ,9, Cunning defensive strategies and the ability to build up attacking armies make this one amazing tower-defense game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426857-image.jpeg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/comet-crash-review/1900-6208391/,pos,"
  Comet Crash is a drastic departure from typical tower-defense games. Although you must still defend your base against an unrelenting onslaught of enemy attackers, you are not just a helpless commander trying desperately to hold off opposing forces. Rather, the power of destruction is in your hands as well. To achieve victory, you must not only craft an intricate defensive strategy, but also devise an offensive plan to take down your merciless opponent. This carefully woven dynamic between offensive might and defensive prowess creates a diabolical energy that keeps you constantly strategizing and maneuvering. Throw in gleefully chaotic competitive multiplayer and frantically engaging cooperative action, and you've got something special. Comet Crash soars above other tower-defense games and earns a prestigous spot on the strategy game skyline.      Laying waste to your unnamed assailants is always exciting, but before you even think about how you're going to bring the pain to them, you're going to need to plan out your defensive strategy. The beginning moments of each of the game's 28 campaign missions pit you against initially daunting odds. Your opponent has been handed an array of defensive structures and offensive forces, so you must quickly build up your own defenses or else you'll find yourself decimated within the first few minutes. Comet Crash ignores typical tower-defense conventions in which your enemy releases scripted waves of attackers followed by moments of respite during which you can refine your strategy. There is no such luxury here. You can be attacked at any time, so you must constantly shore up your defenses to ensure that you are equipped to handle anything that comes your way. This unpredictability will keep you on your toes.    The strategy of setting down defensive structures goes beyond merely placing lasers to attack airborne foes or pulsars to electrocute those poorly shielded scouts. Enemy attackers will always follow the shortest path from their base to yours, and you can herd them into circuitous routes by constructing an elaborate network between the two bases. You are allowed to build walls of turrets wherever you like, as long as you don't completely block off the path between bases, which allows you to constantly pepper your enemy as they push forward. Dishing out optimal punishment makes meticulously crafting the most elaborate route possible an addictive endeavor. The levels quickly ramp up in difficulty, so you must master the art of maze creation to have any chance of holding off your relentless foes long enough to build up your own offensive troops. You can also set up nodes that you can pass through but your opponent cannot, letting you circumvent your devious constructions and take a shortcut to your enemy's headquarters.    Once you have your defensive towers all laid out, it's time to shift your focus to destroying your enemy. Two of the eight structures that you can build in Comet Crash are devoted to churning out troops to vanquish the evil threat opposing you. The basic ops structures are where your offensive units are created. These vehicles are not equipped with guns that will let them shoot down turrets or enemies in their path. Rather, they are kamikaze riders, steamrolling directly into your enemy's base if they can successfully wind their way through the dangerous defenses. Basic ops can build four different units. The scout is fast but weak, the tank is more durable but slower, drones fly over obstacles and head straight for the enemy base, and torpedoes are extremely fast but have trouble navigating tight paths. You can have up to 1,000 troops at one time, and once you are ready to strike, you tap the right stick to highlight your desired troop and unleash the hounds.    The odds are often stacked against you.   You also have access to a special ops structure that can build more-interesting troops. Hammers intermittently stun enemies, further exposing them to your defensive barrages; thieves convert bad guys to your side, instantly sending them back at their makers; switches can short-circuit pulsars, clearing the way for your advancing troops; and carriers can shuttle your land vehicles clear across the sky, bypassing terrain obstacles and enemy defenses. Mixing these specialized allies with your regular troops can make your attacks unpredictable and much more dangerous. Your enemy has these tools as well, so you will have to be adaptive and quick-witted to clear levels. You will constantly have to evolve and refine your strategy to ensure that you can dispose of every threat.    With the constant string of decisions you’ll need to make, Comet Crash moves at a blistering pace. There is always a new defensive structure needed, a way to make your elaborate maze even longer, or a different offensive unit to counter your enemy's evolving defensive operation. The action is intense and satisfying, constantly pushing your brain and thumbs to make sure everything moves at peak efficiency. In addition to deciding which structure needs to be built, you will need to collect currency to fund your warfare. Meteors drift through the map, and you need to drag them to your lasers and turrets in order to destroy them and gather the little yellow coins they release. There is a constant tug of war for your resources, which forces you to decide if you want to upgrade your defensive structures or put a little more cash into your offensive reserves. The frantic pace is immensely satisfying and ensures that  there is never a dull moment.    As if the single-player mode didn't offer enough excitement, there is an offline-only multiplayer mode that is even more intense than the campaign. This mode is built on pure chaos. Four players can fight it out for galactic supremacy, and you can lay down your defensive structures anywhere on the map. The twelve maps have plenty of open spaces, and because you can choose where to place your bases and defensive structures, the battles are different every time. The lack of concrete rules makes it impossible to anticipate your opponents' actions, giving way to ridiculous battles in which truces are quickly made and then broken, and gleeful yells are as prevalent as aggravated outbursts. The sheer madness that ensues can be difficult to comprehend at times, but the initial anarchy gives way to a more measured, strategic phase. These battles can feature formidable escalation as both players shore up their defenses, scramble for resources, and maneuver their forces for the killing blow. The addition of a three-player co-op mode lets you bring friends along to help you fight the dastardly AI foes. You play through the same levels as the single-player campaign, but having another set of eyes or two to plan out the strategy is a huge help, making it even more fun to take down your enemy.   Overwhelming your enemy with a ton of troops is always one strategy.   The sometimes indistinct visuals are the one dark spot in this otherwise brilliant strategy game. For the most part, the sterile style of the graphics does its job, letting you quickly design and employ your strategy. However, in the later levels, when the camera is zoomed out and units and structures are more plentiful and varied, it can be difficult to quickly differentiate between the many onscreen structures. Figuring out how many times a specific turret has been upgraded or what troops your opponent is building can be awfully difficult. It doesn't destroy the fun or your ability to progress, but it can be a slight hindrance, especially on standard-definition television sets. The soundtrack neither adds nor detracts from the mood, supplying a steady stream of generic science-fiction music that never quite matches the energy of the onscreen action.     Fortunately, Comet Crash is just too good to be hampered by these shortcomings. The clever twists to the tower-defense genre add an intensity that is lacking in many of the game's forebears. There is a delicate balance between offense and defense that is just superb, constantly forcing you to bounce between the two in order to smite your enemy. The hectic multiplayer mode can border on sheer chaos, but the cunning strategies needed to defeat human opponents are immensely rewarding. Comet Crash is intense, strategic, and super fun, and it's a tremendous step forward for tower-defense games.   
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435,Zen Bound ,9," Zen Bound is a masterpiece, and it couldn't have worked on any other platform.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/4/6/2221946-zen_iphone.jpg,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/zen-bound-review/1900-6231992/,pos,"
  iPhone owners have been eagerly awaiting Secret Exit's Zen Bound for months. As it turns out, the hype was entirely justified. Zen Bound is a fascinating game and a bold statement in favor of the creative singularity that is the App Store.    The object of the game is to wrap wooden statuettes in string as thoroughly and efficiently as possible, twisting and twirling it using multitouch controls. Wrapped surfaces are ""painted"" with a striking color, and your job is to try to paint as much of the object as you can.    You must wrap objects from three different categories in Zen Bound.   There are 76 objects to wrap in total that are separated into three groups: the Tree of Reflection, the Tree of Challenge, and the Tree of Nostalgia. Each tree is decorated with tags representing the statues, which are either carved in the form of animals or abstract shapes.    After wrapping an object, you are graded on how much of its surface area you managed to cover. Seventy percent coverage earns you one flower, 85 percent gets you two, and 99 percent is good for all three. Your progress up the tree is regulated by how many flowers you cause to bloom. You will often have to revisit previously completed levels and perfect them to move up to the next batch of tags.    Zen Bound has many impressive attributes, but its touch controls stand out on top of everything else. They are flawless. Pinching the screen lets you rotate an object around any axis you choose, while swiping rolls it up in string. It requires no real thought or effort at all to position the object however you like.    Threading the string into tight crevasses and crannies does take some skill, but anyone will be able to do it with a bit of practice. The game feeds you as much string as you need to do the job, and it keeps the string nice and taut, so you can easily control its path to see what you're doing. The string also behaves exactly the way you'd expect it to behave. You can wrap it around a corner, and friction will keep it in place while you reorient the object and start turning it in a different direction. Zen Bound is built around a universally accessible activity--who hasn't rotated and wrapped objects before? As a result, the game feels like a primal experience, and with no time limit, you can choose your own pace.    After a while, you will naturally settle into the subtle rhythms of the game's ambient soundtrack, which meld with the striking textures on the carvings and the shimmering backgrounds in a way that seems intentionally pacifying. The ""Zen"" in Zen Bound is apt. This is a game that will generate contemplative, relaxed feelings if you let yourself sink into the experience.   Zen Bound's excellent gameplay is complemented by an unusual art style.   And yet, Zen Bound is not necessarily an easy game. It's a game that's certainly very easy to play, but it's still challenging enough to hold your attention for very long periods of time (until your battery runs out). Hitting that 99 percent on certain shapes can be a real bear.     You could say that Zen Bound joins such console and handheld games as Flower and PixelJunk Eden as a prime exponent of a rapidly growing movement toward universality in game design. That is, like those games, Zen Bound is neither restrictive nor unappealing because it has a steep learning curve or lots of violent content, but rather, because it focuses on gameplay and activities that can be quickly grasped and appreciated by just about anyone, regardless of age, background, or skill level. In any case, Zen Bound is something special, indeed.    This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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436,Call of Duty: Black Ops ,9," Call of Duty: Black Ops bears the series' standard superbly, delivering an engrossing campaign and exciting competitive multiplayer.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426696-2222507-box_codbo.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/call-of-duty-black-ops-review/1900-6283815/,pos,"
  When a franchise consistently delivers massively popular, high-quality games, each new entry in the series comes laden with expectation. Call of Duty: Black Ops has some big shoes to fill, but it does so admirably. The engrossing campaign is chock-full of exciting, varied gameplay and drips with intrigue and intensity. The excellent multiplayer boasts some invigorating new features, and the new combat training mode finally gives novices a way to enjoy the competitive action without suffering the slings and arrows of outrageously skilled veterans. Cooperative zombie killing and video editing tools help make Black Ops the most robustly featured game in the franchise, and though you may have expected it to be the case, this is undoubtedly one of the best shooters of the year.      The single-player campaign is set largely during the 1960s and takes you to Cold War hot spots like Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam. You are an elite covert operative, and your globe-trotting adventures form pieces of a puzzle--a puzzle that your mysterious captors are trying to put together by interrogating you. Each excursion into the field is a memory, and these missions slowly come together to build momentum as each interrogation cutscene puts another piece of the puzzle in place. It's not a very original mechanic, but it gives a coherent context to the action, and a few strong characters and dramatic moments give the story some genuine intrigue. The blurry edges of your consciousness conceal information that must come to light, and the erratic visual effects and eerie audio echoes that accompany your interrogations sometimes bleed into your mission memories, which creates a great tone of uncertainty that plays out in surprising and satisfying ways.    Your interrogation-fueled flashbacks are not beholden to the linear flow of time, allowing your missions cover a wide variety of geography and gameplay. A dramatic breakout from a brutal Soviet prison is one early highlight, and later missions feature frontline conflicts, urban firefights, and mountainous incursions. The environments are richly detailed, and though the campaign is not without a few technical hiccups (like occasionally problematic checkpoint markers and the odd teleporting ally), these moments aren't likely to hinder your enjoyment. In addition to the on-foot action, you use a number of vehicles to achieve your objectives. Some put you in the gunner's seat while others put you behind the wheel, and though the vehicle handling is unremarkable, the thrill of blowing stuff up and speeding through hostile terrain is undeniable. The core running-and-gunning mechanics remain as exciting as ever, and the gameplay variety throughout the campaign keeps the action moving at a great clip.   You're gonna need a bigger knife.   Though the campaign is a rip-roaring good time, it clocks in at a mere six hours long. The mode that will likely keep you coming back to Black Ops for months to come is, unsurprisingly, the competitive multiplayer. At its core, this is the familiar top-notch Call of Duty action that players have been enjoying for years. You earn experience for doing well in battle, and as you level up, you gain access to new and powerful ways to customize your loadouts. New weapons and maps freshen things up, and one of the new killstreak rewards--an explosive-laden remote-control car--is a delightfully deadly device that embodies the frantic, slightly goofy side of virtual online combat. The key new element, however, is currency. In addition to earning experience for your battlefield performance, you earn Call of Duty points, which you can then spend in a variety of ways. Most perks, weapon attachments, killstreaks, and equipment items are available early on, providing you shell out the points to equip them. Guns are still unlocked as you level up, but again, you have to pony up the points to put one in your loadout. Customization options like face paint, player card backgrounds, and the new create-your-own-icon tool are all accessed by spending points. Having to pay your way gives you more loadout options at lower required levels than in previous Call of Duty games, and the fact that points are so crucial to improving your arsenal makes them as just as sublimely satisfying to earn as experience points.      Call of Duty points also enable two cool new mechanics, the first of which is contracts. These are like the many multiplayer challenges that reward you with experience points for completing combat goals, only you have to pay to complete them. If you do so within the allotted time period, you receive a tidy payout. For example, if you pay 50 points for the stab-a-guy-in-the-back contract and make good, you'll earn 100 points for your troubles. If time expires before you get stabby, you're out 50 points. Tougher contracts cost more, but they also have bigger payouts (get five headshots without dying, cost: 250 points; payout: 3,500 points and 3,500 experience). You can have up to three contracts active at a time across three different categories, and the available contracts change regularly, potentially ensuring a good amount of variety as the weeks pass. Contracts offer a nicely incentivized version of challenges and can give you something fun to strive for if you get in a rut, but don't expect these small gambles to make you rich.       If contracts are gambling against the house, then wager matches are gambling against other players. In these matches, you pay an entrance fee of 10, 1,000, or 10,000 points, depending on how deep your pockets are, and then you get to play the most unique game modes that Black Ops has to offer. One mode gives you progressively better weapons for each kill you tally, while another gives you a pistol with one bullet and only three lives to live. At the end of the match, the pot is split proportionally among the top three finishers, and everyone else comes away empty handed. Wager matches are as exotic as Call of Duty multiplayer gets, and they offer a great change of pace to the familiar frantic firefights.     And for those who hanker for something completely different, the popular four-player cooperative zombie-killing mode that debuted in Call of Duty: World at War has returned. The fight to stay alive against wave after wave of shambling undead is still a tense and bizarre endeavor, and new maps and playable characters take the oddball humor of the situation to a whole new level. Nevertheless, at its core, this is the same frenzied action as found in its predecessor, and each play-through quickly begins to feel much like the last. This is the only proper cooperative mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops, supporting four players online.     There are two new modes that help make Black Ops the most fully featured Call of Duty game yet. Combat Training simulates a competitive multiplayer environment with AI opponents and allows you to set the enemy difficulty to match your skill level. You gain experience and unlock gear in the same way, and though this progress only applies within Combat Training, it's a great way to get the excitement and challenge of competitive multiplayer without submitting to the vicious predations of actual humans. The other new mode is the Theater, which lets you view replays of your games, take screenshots, and edit clips to share with the community. You can string together a number of different segements from a given game, and even render a video lasting up to 30 seconds for upload to the web, though the rendering feature is not fully functional at launch. Reliving moments--both glorious and shameful--is a lot of fun, and the community has already started cranking out content for your viewing pleasure. And though it may only apply to a small percentage of the population at this point, you can also play Call of Duty: Black Ops in stereoscopic 3D, providing you have the proper cables, required glasses, and a compatible monitor. The effect is novel and fairly intriguing, though it takes a significant mental adjustment and may not be comfortable for many players.    Causing mayhem with a minigun is marvelous.   While it may not take the signature Call of Duty action to dizzying new heights, Black Ops is a thoroughly excellent game. New modes and mechanics give a jolt of energy to the lively competitive multiplayer, and the engrossing new campaign develops into one of the best in the series. Combat training allows anyone to enjoy the thrills of arena combat and the satisfaction of leveling up, and the opportunities for cooperative play, local competition, and community video creation provide even more outlets for entertainment. Call of Duty: Black Ops lives up to the top-notch pedigree that the series has earned, giving players an awesome new shooter to enjoy just in time for the holidays.     


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437,Call of Duty: Black Ops ,9," Call of Duty: Black Ops bears the series' standard superbly, delivering an engrossing campaign and exciting competitive multiplayer.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426696-2222507-box_codbo.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/call-of-duty-black-ops-review/1900-6283817/,pos,"
  When a franchise consistently delivers massively popular, high-quality games, each new entry in the series comes laden with expectation. Call of Duty: Black Ops has some big shoes to fill, but it does so admirably. The engrossing campaign is chock-full of exciting, varied gameplay and drips with intrigue and intensity. The excellent multiplayer boasts some invigorating new features, and the new combat training mode finally gives novices a way to enjoy the competitive action without suffering the slings and arrows of outrageously skilled veterans. Cooperative zombie killing and video editing tools help make Black Ops the most robustly featured game in the franchise, and though you may have expected it to be the case, this is undoubtedly one of the best shooters of the year.      The single-player campaign is set largely during the 1960s and takes you to Cold War hot spots like Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam. You are an elite covert operative, and your globe-trotting adventures form pieces of a puzzle--a puzzle that your mysterious captors are trying to put together by interrogating you. Each excursion into the field is a memory, and these missions slowly come together to build momentum as each interrogation cutscene puts another piece of the puzzle in place. It's not a very original mechanic, but it gives a coherent context to the action, and a few strong characters and dramatic moments give the story some genuine intrigue. The blurry edges of your consciousness conceal information that must come to light, and the erratic visual effects and eerie audio echoes that accompany your interrogations sometimes bleed into your mission memories, which creates a great tone of uncertainty that plays out in surprising and satisfying ways.    Your interrogation-fueled flashbacks are not beholden to the linear flow of time, allowing your missions cover a wide variety of geography and gameplay. A dramatic breakout from a brutal Soviet prison is one early highlight, and later missions feature frontline conflicts, urban firefights, and mountainous incursions. The environments are richly detailed, and though the campaign is not without a few technical hiccups (like occasionally problematic checkpoint markers and the odd teleporting ally), these moments aren't likely to hinder your enjoyment. In addition to the on-foot action, you use a number of vehicles to achieve your objectives. Some put you in the gunner's seat while others put you behind the wheel, and though the vehicle handling is unremarkable, the thrill of blowing stuff up and speeding through hostile terrain is undeniable. The core running-and-gunning mechanics remain as exciting as ever, and the gameplay variety throughout the campaign keeps the action moving at a great clip.   Uncle Sam considers it impolite to use the door during a hostage rescue.   Though the campaign is a rip-roaring good time, it clocks in at a mere six hours long. The mode that will likely keep you coming back to Black Ops for months to come is, unsurprisingly, the competitive multiplayer. At its core, this is the familiar top-notch Call of Duty action that players have been enjoying for years. You earn experience for doing well in battle, and as you level up, you gain access to new and powerful ways to customize your loadouts. New weapons and maps freshen things up, and one of the new killstreak rewards--an explosive-laden remote-control car--is a delightfully deadly device that embodies the frantic, slightly goofy side of virtual online combat. The key new element, however, is currency. In addition to earning experience for your battlefield performance, you earn Call of Duty points, which you can then spend in a variety of ways. Most perks, weapon attachments, killstreaks, and equipment items are available early on, providing you shell out the points to equip them. Guns are still unlocked as you level up, but again, you have to pony up the points to put one in your loadout. Customization options like face paint, player card backgrounds, and the new create-your-own-icon tool are all accessed by spending points. Having to pay your way gives you more loadout options at lower required levels than in previous Call of Duty games, and the fact that points are so crucial to improving your arsenal makes them as just as sublimely satisfying to earn as experience points.      Call of Duty points also enable two cool new mechanics, the first of which is contracts. These are like the many multiplayer challenges that reward you with experience points for completing combat goals, only you have to pay to complete them. If you do so within the allotted time period, you receive a tidy payout. For example, if you pay 50 points for the stab-a-guy-in-the-back contract and make good, you'll earn 100 points for your troubles. If time expires before you get stabby, you're out 50 points. Tougher contracts cost more, but they also have bigger payouts (get five headshots without dying, cost: 250 points; payout: 3,500 points and 3,500 experience). You can have up to three contracts active at a time across three different categories, and the available contracts change regularly, potentially ensuring a good amount of variety as the weeks pass. Contracts offer a nicely incentivized version of challenges and can give you something fun to strive for if you get in a rut, but don't expect these small gambles to make you rich.      If contracts are gambling against the house, then wager matches are gambling against other players. In these matches, you pay an entrance fee of 10, 1,000, or 10,000 points, depending on how deep your pockets are, and then you get to play the most unique game modes that Black Ops has to offer. One mode gives you progressively better weapons for each kill you tally, while another gives you a pistol with one bullet and only three lives to live. At the end of the match, the pot is split proportionally among the top three finishers, and everyone else comes away empty handed. Wager matches are as exotic as Call of Duty multiplayer gets, and they offer a great change of pace to the familiar frantic firefights.    And for those who hanker for something completely different, the popular four-player cooperative zombie-killing mode that debuted in Call of Duty: World at War has returned. The fight to stay alive against wave after wave of shambling undead is still a tense and bizarre endeavor, and new maps and playable characters take the oddball humor of the situation to a whole new level. Nevertheless, at its core, this is the same frenzied action as found in its predecessor, and each play-through quickly begins to feel much like the last. This is the only proper cooperative mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops, supporting four players online or two locally. Two local players can also play split-screen competitive multiplayer online, while four can divide the screen equally among them and set up competitive local matches.     There are two new modes that help make Black Ops the most fully featured Call of Duty game yet. Combat Training simulates a competitive multiplayer environment with AI opponents and allows you to set the enemy difficulty to match your skill level. You gain experience and unlock gear in the same way, and though this progress only applies within Combat Training, it's a great way to get the excitement and challenge of competitive multiplayer without submitting to the vicious predations of actual humans. The other new mode is the Theater, which lets you view replays of your games, take screenshots, and edit clips to share with the community. You can string together a number of different segements from a given game, and even render a video lasting up to 30 seconds for upload to the web, though the rendering feature is not fully functional at launch. Reliving moments--both glorious and shameful--is a lot of fun, and the community has already started cranking out content for your viewing pleasure. And though it may only apply to a small percentage of the population at this point, you can also play Call of Duty: Black Ops in stereoscopic 3D, providing you have the proper cables, required glasses, and a compatible television. The effect is novel and fairly intriguing, though it takes a significant mental adjustment and may not be comfortable for many players.     STAB.   While it may not take the signature Call of Duty action to dizzying new heights, Black Ops is a thoroughly excellent game. New modes and mechanics give a jolt of energy to the lively competitive multiplayer, and the engrossing new campaign develops into one of the best in the series. Combat training allows anyone to enjoy the thrills of arena combat and the satisfaction of leveling up, and the opportunities for cooperative play, local competition, and community video creation provide even more outlets for entertainment. Call of Duty: Black Ops lives up to the top-notch pedigree that the series has earned, giving players an awesome new shooter to enjoy just in time for the holidays.     


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438,Call of Duty: Black Ops ,9," Call of Duty: Black Ops bears the series' standard superbly, delivering an engrossing campaign and exciting competitive multiplayer.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426696-2222507-box_codbo.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/call-of-duty-black-ops-review/1900-6283818/,pos,"
  When a franchise consistently delivers massively popular, high-quality games, each new entry in the series comes laden with expectation. Call of Duty: Black Ops has some big shoes to fill, but it does so admirably. The engrossing campaign is chock-full of exciting, varied gameplay and drips with intrigue and intensity. The excellent multiplayer boasts some invigorating new features, and the new combat training mode finally gives novices a way to enjoy the competitive action without suffering the slings and arrows of outrageously skilled veterans. Cooperative zombie killing and video editing tools help make Black Ops the most robustly featured game in the franchise, and though you may have expected it to be the case, this is undoubtedly one of the best shooters of the year.      The single-player campaign is set largely during the 1960s and takes you to Cold War hot spots like Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam. You are an elite covert operative, and your globe-trotting adventures form pieces of a puzzle--a puzzle that your mysterious captors are trying to put together by interrogating you. Each excursion into the field is a memory, and these missions slowly come together to build momentum as each interrogation cutscene puts another piece of the puzzle in place. It's not a very original mechanic, but it gives a coherent context to the action, and a few strong characters and dramatic moments give the story some genuine intrigue. The blurry edges of your consciousness conceal information that must come to light, and the erratic visual effects and eerie audio echoes that accompany your interrogations sometimes bleed into your mission memories, which creates a great tone of uncertainty that plays out in surprising and satisfying ways.    Your interrogation-fueled flashbacks are not beholden to the linear flow of time, allowing your missions cover a wide variety of geography and gameplay. A dramatic breakout from a brutal Soviet prison is one early highlight, and later missions feature frontline conflicts, urban firefights, and mountainous incursions. The environments are richly detailed, and though the campaign is not without a few technical hiccups (like occasionally problematic checkpoint markers and the odd teleporting ally), these moments aren't likely to hinder your enjoyment. In addition to the on-foot action, you use a number of vehicles to achieve your objectives. Some put you in the gunner's seat while others put you behind the wheel, and though the vehicle handling is unremarkable, the thrill of blowing stuff up and speeding through hostile terrain is undeniable. The core running-and-gunning mechanics remain as exciting as ever, and the gameplay variety throughout the campaign keeps the action moving at a great clip.   Nothing like a remote control car strapped with C4 to ruin your enemy's care package party.   Though the campaign is a rip-roaring good time, it clocks in at a mere six hours long. The mode that will likely keep you coming back to Black Ops for months to come is, unsurprisingly, the competitive multiplayer. At its core, this is the familiar top-notch Call of Duty action that players have been enjoying for years. You earn experience for doing well in battle, and as you level up, you gain access to new and powerful ways to customize your loadouts. New weapons and maps freshen things up, and one of the new killstreak rewards--an explosive-laden remote-control car--is a delightfully deadly device that embodies the frantic, slightly goofy side of virtual online combat. The key new element, however, is currency. In addition to earning experience for your battlefield performance, you earn Call of Duty points, which you can then spend in a variety of ways. Most perks, weapon attachments, killstreaks, and equipment items are available early on, providing you shell out the points to equip them. Guns are still unlocked as you level up, but again, you have to pony up the points to put one in your loadout. Customization options like face paint, player card backgrounds, and the new create-your-own-icon tool are all accessed by spending points. Having to pay your way gives you more loadout options at lower required levels than in previous Call of Duty games, and the fact that points are so crucial to improving your arsenal makes them as just as sublimely satisfying to earn as experience points.      Call of Duty points also enable two cool new mechanics, the first of which is contracts. These are like the many multiplayer challenges that reward you with experience points for completing combat goals, only you have to pay to complete them. If you do so within the allotted time period, you receive a tidy payout. For example, if you pay 50 points for the stab-a-guy-in-the-back contract and make good, you'll earn 100 points for your troubles. If time expires before you get stabby, you're out 50 points. Tougher contracts cost more, but they also have bigger payouts (get five headshots without dying, cost: 250 points; payout: 3,500 points and 3,500 experience). You can have up to three contracts active at a time across three different categories, and the available contracts change regularly, potentially ensuring a good amount of variety as the weeks pass. Contracts offer a nicely incentivized version of challenges and can give you something fun to strive for if you get in a rut, but don't expect these small gambles to make you rich.      If contracts are gambling against the house, then wager matches are gambling against other players. In these matches, you pay an entrance fee of 10, 1,000, or 10,000 points, depending on how deep your pockets are, and then you get to play the most unique game modes that Black Ops has to offer. One mode gives you progressively better weapons for each kill you tally, while another gives you a pistol with one bullet and only three lives to live. At the end of the match, the pot is split proportionally among the top three finishers, and everyone else comes away empty handed. Wager matches are as exotic as Call of Duty multiplayer gets, and they offer a great change of pace to the familiar frantic firefights.    And for those who hanker for something completely different, the popular four-player cooperative zombie-killing mode that debuted in Call of Duty: World at War has returned. The fight to stay alive against wave after wave of shambling undead is still a tense and bizarre endeavor, and new maps and playable characters take the oddball humor of the situation to a whole new level. Nevertheless, at its core, this is the same frenzied action as found in its predecessor, and each play-through quickly begins to feel much like the last. This is the only proper cooperative mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops, supporting four players online or two locally. Two local players can also play split-screen competitive multiplayer online, while four can divide the screen equally among them and set up competitive local matches.     There are two new modes that help make Black Ops the most fully featured Call of Duty game yet. Combat Training simulates a competitive multiplayer environment with AI opponents and allows you to set the enemy difficulty to match your skill level. You gain experience and unlock gear in the same way, and though this progress only applies within Combat Training, it's a great way to get the excitement and challenge of competitive multiplayer without submitting to the vicious predations of actual humans. The other new mode is the Theater, which lets you view replays of your games, take screenshots, and edit clips to share with the community. You can string together a number of different segements from a given game, and even render a video lasting up to 30 seconds for upload to the web, though the rendering feature is not fully functional at launch. Reliving moments--both glorious and shameful--is a lot of fun, and the community has already started cranking out content for your viewing pleasure. And though it may only apply to a small percentage of the population at this point, you can also play Call of Duty: Black Ops in stereoscopic 3D, providing you have the proper cables, required glasses, and a compatible television. The effect is novel and fairly intriguing, though it takes a significant mental adjustment and may not be comfortable for many players.     BURN.   While it may not take the signature Call of Duty action to dizzying new heights, Black Ops is a thoroughly excellent game. New modes and mechanics give a jolt of energy to the lively competitive multiplayer, and the engrossing new campaign develops into one of the best in the series. Combat training allows anyone to enjoy the thrills of arena combat and the satisfaction of leveling up, and the opportunities for cooperative play, local competition, and community video creation provide even more outlets for entertainment. Call of Duty: Black Ops lives up to the top-notch pedigree that the series has earned, giving players an awesome new shooter to enjoy just in time for the holidays.     


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439,Call of Duty: Black Ops ,9, Call of Duty: Black Ops offers an engrossing campaign and the most feature-rich competitive multiplayer on the Wii.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426696-2222507-box_codbo.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/call-of-duty-black-ops-review/1900-6283948/,pos,"
  In recent years, the Call of Duty series has produced some of the best shooters on the Wii, establishing a high standard for competitors to match. The latest entry, Black Ops, clears that bar with room to spare, thanks in no small part to the Classic Controller support that the series has long been without. Yet regardless of whether you embrace the new control scheme or stick with your trusty Wii Remote and Nunchuk, the engrossing campaign is sure to entertain you with exciting, varied gameplay and grim narrative intrigue. The excellent multiplayer boasts some invigorating new features, and the new combat training mode gives novices a way to ease into the intense competitive action. Cooperative zombie killing and new online communication architecture help make Black Ops the most robustly featured game in the franchise, and though you may lament the lack of split-screen play, this is one of the best shooters of the year.      The single-player campaign is set largely during the 1960s and takes you to Cold War hot spots like Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam. You are an elite covert operative, and your globe-trotting adventures form pieces of a puzzle--a puzzle that your mysterious captors are trying to put together by interrogating you. Each excursion into the field is a memory, and these missions slowly come together to build momentum as each interrogation cutscene puts another piece of the puzzle in place. It's not a very original mechanic, but it gives a coherent context to the action, and a few strong characters and dramatic moments give the story some genuine intrigue. The blurry edges of your consciousness conceal information that must come to light, and the erratic visual effects and eerie audio echoes that accompany your interrogations sometimes bleed into your mission memories, which creates a great tone of uncertainty that plays out in surprising and satisfying ways.     Your interrogation-fueled flashbacks are not beholden to the linear flow of time, allowing your missions cover a wide variety of geography and gameplay. A dramatic breakout from a brutal Soviet prison is one early highlight, and later missions feature frontline conflicts, urban firefights, and mountainous incursions. The environments are richly detailed, and though the campaign sometimes seems too visually ambitious for its own good, the occasionally lackluster textures aren't likely to hinder your enjoyment. In addition to the on-foot action, you use a number of vehicles to achieve your objectives. Some put you in the gunner's seat while others put you behind the wheel, and though the vehicle handling is unremarkable, the thrill of blowing stuff up and speeding through hostile terrain is undeniable. The core running-and-gunning mechanics remain as exciting as ever, and the gameplay variety throughout the campaign keeps the action moving at a great clip.     Though the campaign is a rip-roaring good time, it clocks in at a mere six hours long. The mode that will likely keep you coming back to Black Ops for months to come is, unsurprisingly, the competitive multiplayer. At its core, this is the familiar top-notch Call of Duty action that players have been enjoying for years. You earn experience for doing well in battle, and as you level up, you gain access to new and powerful ways to customize your loadouts. New weapons and maps freshen things up, and one of the new killstreak rewards--an explosive-laden remote-control car--is a delightfully deadly device that embodies the frantic, slightly goofy side of virtual online combat. The Wii Remote and Nunchuk controls still work very well and are extensively customizable, but the addition of Classic Controller support opens up a whole new kind of precision. Instead of pointing your arm and wrist, a small flick of the thumb is all that you need to acquire a target. This option makes Black Ops more accessible to players who have experience with shooters on other consoles, and skilled players can still be very effective with their console-specific control scheme.   Not exactly a vacation destination, but at least the sunsets are pretty.   In addition to the expanded control options, another key new element is currency. In addition to earning experience for your battlefield performance, you earn Call of Duty points, which you can then spend in a variety of ways. Most perks, weapon attachments, killstreaks, and equipment items are available early on, providing you shell out the points to equip them. Guns are still unlocked as you level up, but again, you have to pony up the points to put one in your loadout. Having to pay your way gives you more loadout options at lower required levels than in previous Call of Duty games, and the fact that points are so crucial to improving your arsenal makes them as just as sublimely satisfying to earn as experience points.     Call of Duty points also enable two cool new mechanics, the first of which is contracts. These are like the many multiplayer challenges that reward you with experience points for completing combat goals, only you have to pay to complete them. If you do so within the allotted time period, you receive a tidy payout. For example, if you pay 50 points for the stab-a-guy-in-the-back contract and make good, you'll earn 100 points for your troubles. If time expires before you get stabby, you're out 50 points. Tougher contracts cost more, but they also have bigger payouts (get three headshots without dying, cost: 150 points; payout: 1,300 points and 1,300 experience). You can have up to three contracts active at a time across three different categories, and the available contracts change regularly, potentially ensuring a good amount of variety as the weeks pass. Contracts offer a nicely incentivized version of challenges and can give you something fun to strive for if you get in a rut, but don't expect these small gambles to make you rich.    If contracts are gambling against the house, then wager matches are gambling against other players. In these matches, you pay an entrance fee of 10, 1,000, or 10,000 points, depending on how deep your pockets are, and then you get to play the most unique game modes that Black Ops has to offer. One mode gives you progressively better weapons for each kill you tally, while another gives you a pistol with one bullet and only three lives to live. At the end of the match, the pot is split proportionally among the top three finishers, and everyone else comes away empty handed. Wager matches are as exotic as Call of Duty multiplayer gets, and they offer a great change of pace to the familiar frantic firefights.   And for those who hanker for something completely different, Black Ops also features a four-player cooperative zombie-killing mode. You and up to three other online players start off in a small room armed with a pistol. Zombies tear down barricades and attack you in waves, and you must kill them to survive. Repairing barriers and killing zombies earns you points, which you can use to buy new guns, refill ammo, or open up new rooms that hide new goodies (and more zombies). The fight to stay alive against wave after wave of shambling undead is a tense and bizarre endeavor, and though the frenzied action can be a whole lot of fun, each play-through quickly begins to feel much like the last. This is the only proper cooperative mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops, as the two-player campaign mode from previous entries in the series has been scrapped.   One final new mode helps make Black Ops the most fully featured Call of Duty game yet. Combat Training mode simulates a competitive multiplayer environment with AI opponents and allows you to set the enemy difficulty to match your skill level. You gain experience and unlock gear in the same way, and though this progress only applies within Combat Training, it's a great way to get the excitement and challenge of competitive multiplayer without submitting to the vicious predations of actual humans. Competitive multiplayer, Zombies, and Combat Training modes all require you to connect to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, but many people are currently having trouble doing so. Wireless connections generally seem to work fine, but wired connections through LAN adapters are sometimes problematic. Changing your profile name may smooth things over, and the developers are working on remedying the issue, but these nagging issues are still causing problems.  A shotgun is considered standard equipment for a motorcyclist in Soviet Russia..  Black Ops also features robust online communication architecture, allowing you to see recent players and send them ally requests. Allies can join each other's matches and exchange text messages, and all players can communicate via voice chat if they have the compatible Headbanger headset. These features make it much easier to play with friends and to meet new potential squadmates. Though it has no split-screen play and some of the online elements are slightly scaled back, Call of Duty: Black Ops on the Wii is almost every bit as excellent as its HD console counterparts. New modes and mechanics give a jolt of energy to the lively competitive multiplayer; the engrossing new campaign is one of the best in the series; Combat Training mode allows anyone to enjoy the thrills of arena combat; and Zombies mode provides a goofy, gory diversion. Call of Duty: Black Ops lives up to the top-notch pedigree that the series has earned, giving players an awesome new shooter to enjoy just in time for the holidays.   
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440,Escape from Bug Island ,3.5, Escape from Bug Island is a dismal reminder of the low points of survival horror's past.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/1/3/2219113-cover.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/escape-from-bug-island-review/1900-6176881/,neg,"
  Escape from Bug Island is a game out of time, a cheap Resident Evil knockoff of the kind we haven't seen in years, and with good reason. When you strip away the looming dread of facing overpowered, flesh-eating monstrosities and replace it with A-to-B objectives and lots of fog, as Escape from Bug Island does, the end result is boring and awkward. Amongst other things, the consistently blocky and washed-out visuals, cut-rate animation, and voice work that's not quite bad enough to be funny all drive home the sense that this game missed its window of relevance by a good five years. That Escape from Bug Island uses the Wii Remote comes off as anachronistic, and it ultimately only exacerbates the clumsy controls.   The Bug Island tourist pamphlet must be awfully convincing.   A question that might spring to mind early on while playing Escape from Bug Island is, ""Why are people going to Bug Island in the first place?"" This is a genuinely awful location. Rocky terrain and an unrelenting sheet of fog that limits your view to about 20 yards ahead keep it from being much of a vacation spot, and, oh yeah, it's totally infested with gigantic, terrifying bugs that want nothing more than to flay the flesh from your bones and lay a clutch of eggs in your chest cavity! It seems like some government body or scientific group should have this place under military lock and key, and yet you, and other characters you encounter, head to Bug Island like it's a casual thing to do.     You play as Ray, a timid tagalong whose sports-sandals, cut-off jeans, and multi-colored parka vest make him look like he lost his way home from a Phish concert. An infatuation with the dainty Michelle, a girl with a hobbyist-level interest in entomology, brings you to this waking hell. Meanwhile, your swaggering, shotgun-cocking buddy Mike's only purpose for being there is to arbitrarily make a move on Michelle before you can, all of this within the first five minutes of the game. Michelle runs off after this awkward episode, and you spend much of the rest of the game trying to catch up with her and fending off the island's inhabitants. From here, the game's interest in telling a story is scattered. Characters are introduced and killed off at weird, anticlimactic intervals, and everything is so disjointed and poorly explained that it ceases early on being worth the effort to care.    Contrary to its title, a good portion of Escape from Bug Island involves working your way deeper into the island as you search for Michelle, the object of your affection. This means you'll mostly trek across some largely linear levels, fighting bugs and fetching keys to open shack doors, safes, and pieces of luggage. The stiflingly soupy layers of fog make it hard to see where you're going, though the game makes up for it with a minimap that will almost always tell you exactly where you need to go next. Though you'll fight plenty of oversized bugs, it seems ironic that some of your nastiest foes aren't bugs at all: these include flying fish, giant gorillas, Amazonian lizard-women, and dogs with human heads. When it comes to combat, you've got ranged and melee options, both of which require some lame motion controls to use.    General movement is controlled with the analog stick on the Nunchuk, and melee attacks require you to first line yourself up with your enemy, press and hold the B button, and then repeatedly swing the Wii Remote down...and that's pretty much it. You can't move once you've started swinging, and lining up with your enemies is difficult, especially when dealing with smaller, faster enemies. A half-dozen football-sized crickets can prove far deadlier than a couple of 10-foot-tall praying mantises. Ranged attacks don't work much better. First you have to hold down the A button to enter a first-person view, then once you've lined up your shot, you have to hold the B button down as well, and finally swing the Wii Remote downward to throw your projectile. Again, lining up your shots is difficult due to the inaccuracy of your aiming reticle and the inconsistency of your throws.    Having trouble with a boss battle? Try walking past them.   You start off with a pointy stick and some rocks, although you can also find a knife, a baseball bat, a machete, a giant ceremonial lance, sandbags, hand grenades, and bug spray, among other weapons on Bug Island. Though better weapons can help you fell enemies, you'll quickly find that the path of least resistance often involves avoiding the enemies altogether. While certain critters will chase you relentlessly, most of the time you can just run right past your enemies with little to no consequence. Furthermore, the game isn't shy about providing you with plenty of health-replenishing foodstuffs from level to level, which makes your weak little side-roll and back-step evasive maneuvers seem exceptionally pointless. If you ever take damage, you've always got plenty of fruit, mushrooms, and canned goods to cure what ails you.    Escape from Bug Island is an ugly game, and the persistent fogginess almost makes it seem ashamed of itself, a feeling that's actually pretty well earned. What you can see looks gray and muddy, with a general fuzziness that almost makes it look like it was ported up from the Nintendo 64. The only memorable aspect of the sound design is a spooky piano piece, though it's only really memorable because it consists of two bars, and seems to loop constantly.    The technical deficiencies of Escape from Bug Island simply highlight the fact that games have evolved since survival horror first turned fashionable. There's really no place for something this clunky. Rather than Escape from Bug Island, why not avoid it altogether?    
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441,Hellboy: Science of Evil ,3.5," The combat in Hellboy gets repetitive before the first level ends and never presents a challenge. This is a boring, bland game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/0/9/2219209-hb2_cover.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hellboy-science-of-evil-review/1900-6195403/,neg,"
  There is a moment in Hellboy: Science of Evil when you have to face off against a hideous gorilla/octopus hybrid. It roars with anger as its slimy tentacles writhe like sloppy worms. At this point, your adrenaline should gush as you raise your stone-encrusted fist to do battle with this horrific abomination. In practice, you'll slurp up a rogue strand of drool as you halfheartedly pound your well-worn square button for the umpteenth time. In a game where even swinging half-formed frog men around by their prehensile tongues can elicit a hearty yawn, it's not surprising that facing off against a monster that should reside exclusively in nightmares feels downright boring. The only thing Hellboy does really well is make you appreciate how far the beat-'em-up genre has evolved since games that play like this were commonplace.    Hellboy and Abe Sapien look desperate to leave this game.   Hellboy has a beef with a witch who refers to herself in the third-person. You'll spend the first half of your quest trying to shut her up for good before you suddenly decide your real enemy is a horde of cyborg gorillas. The story is a convoluted mess of inadequate motivations and long soliloquies given by every skeleton you meet along the way. Instead of simple explanations that keep you abreast of why your missions are taking seemingly random turns, you are given such contemporary one-liners as ""We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."" Despite the cursory effort given to constructing this nonsensical tale, the cutscenes are all too frequent and far from concise; plus, you can't even skip them. Ron Perlman lends his voice talents, but while it's fitting how often he mutters ""That was easy,"" his usual smarmy punch is nowhere to be found.    The main draw in a game involving an endless stream of enemies should be an entertaining combat system. There is no such draw here. You'll spend the majority of your time rapidly slamming the square button to punch with the occasional gunshot thrown in for diversity. This game is so easy you don't even have defensive maneuvers in your repertoire. Why would you need to block when your foes barely even attack? Enemies will meander up to you then simply stand still, waiting for you to turn around and smack them in the face. It's not uncommon to find yourself surrounded by a gang of ugly ghoulies only to walk away with your life bar still at the optimal level. You can pick up unwieldy swords and spears to give your aching fists a rest, but these serve as only graphically different versions of the same tired battle mechanic. Later enemies have bloated health bars, which force you to use discarded weapons to dispose of them in a timely manner. This serves to only frustrate because even the heartiest sword will shatter after three blows. Though these enemies take longer to kill, they never pose a serious threat to your own life.     The only time you'll find yourself challenged is when obstinate puzzles and directionless level design lead you down the path of frustration. In one level, you are told to light torches to continue on your way. After using flaming spears to pass the first few sections like this, you come to a point where that tactic inexplicably doesn't work anymore. Instead, you have to reach your hand into an already lit torch and extract flammable bullets--a technique never explained prior to that moment. In another level, late in the game, you have to find tiny switches hidden along walls. Again, this maneuver was never exhibited before, which leads to a frantic search trying to figure out how to progress. The game is full of moments where it appears to be broken, at least until you realize that you just need to stumble upon some random solution.   Despite his impressive size, the werewolf is a big pushover.   Science of Evil is as likely to win awards for its technical prowess as Hellboy is for being a dapper duke. It makes sense that the game keeps a relatively steady frame rate because it never tries to do anything that will actually push the hardware. Character models lack detail and diversity--you'll see only two or three different types per level--while textures are muddy. Fortunately, the game runs without any noticeable hiccups even when a second player jumps in locally or online. Though cooperative play often makes a game more fun than slogging through alone, an extra player here merely makes this already easy adventure even less challenging.     There is no reason to waste your time with Hellboy: Science of Evil. Even fans of the comic won't find much to dig here. The story is handled so inexpertly, it will only anger those who have invested hours reading the paper exploits of Hellboy. Weak combat and ugly visuals should deter those just looking for a solid beat-'em-up. With expectations for licensed products already so low, it's a testament to how poorly designed this game is that it can't even live up to the mediocre games around it.     
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442,Hellboy: Science of Evil ,3.5," The combat in Hellboy gets repetitive before the first level ends and never presents a challenge. This is a boring, bland game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/0/9/2219209-hb2_cover.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hellboy-science-of-evil-review/1900-6196853/,neg,"
  There is a moment in Hellboy: Science of Evil when you have to face off against a hideous gorilla/octopus hybrid. It roars with anger as its slimy tentacles writhe like sloppy worms. At this point, your adrenaline should gush as you raise your stone-encrusted fist to do battle with this horrific abomination. In practice, you'll slurp up a rogue strand of drool as you halfheartedly pound your well-worn square button for the umpteenth time. In a game where even swinging half-formed frog men around by their prehensile tongues can elicit a hearty yawn, it's not surprising that facing off against a monster that should reside exclusively in nightmares feels downright boring. The only thing Hellboy does really well is make you appreciate how far the beat-'em-up genre has evolved since games that play like this were commonplace.   Undead Nazis hate getting punched in the face.     Hellboy has a beef with a witch who refers to herself in the third-person. You'll spend the first half of your quest trying to shut her up for good before you suddenly decide your real enemy is a horde of cyborg gorillas. The story is a convoluted mess of inadequate motivations and long soliloquies given by every skeleton you meet along the way. Instead of simple explanations that keep you abreast of why your missions are taking seemingly random turns, you are given such contemporary one-liners as ""We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."" Despite the cursory effort given to constructing this nonsensical tale, the cutscenes are all too frequent and far from concise; plus, you can't even skip them. Ron Perlman lends his voice talents, but while it's fitting how often he mutters ""That was easy,"" his usual smarmy punch is nowhere to be found.       The main draw in a game involving an endless stream of enemies should be an entertaining combat system. There is no such draw here. You'll spend the majority of your time rapidly slamming the square button to punch with the occasional gunshot thrown in for diversity. This game is so easy you don't even have defensive maneuvers in your repertoire. Why would you need to block when your foes barely even attack? Enemies will meander up to you then simply stand still, waiting for you to turn around and smack them in the face. It's not uncommon to find yourself surrounded by a gang of ugly ghoulies only to walk away with your life bar still at the optimal level. You can pick up unwieldy swords and spears to give your aching fists a rest, but these serve as only graphically different versions of the same tired battle mechanic. Later enemies have bloated health bars, which force you to use discarded weapons to dispose of them in a timely manner. This serves to only frustrate because even the heartiest sword will shatter after three blows. Though these enemies take longer to kill, they never pose a serious threat to your own life.       The only time you'll find yourself challenged is when obstinate puzzles and directionless level design lead you down the path of frustration. In one level, you are told to light torches to continue on your way. After using flaming spears to pass the first few sections like this, you come to a point where that tactic inexplicably doesn't work anymore. Instead, you have to reach your hand into an already lit torch and extract flammable bullets--a technique never explained prior to that moment. In another level, late in the game, you have to find tiny switches hidden along walls. Again, this maneuver was never exhibited before, which leads to a frantic search trying to figure out how to progress. The game is full of moments where it appears to be broken; at least until you realize that you just need to stumble upon some random solution.    Crystals shatter way too easily.   Science of Evil is as likely to win awards for its technical prowess as Hellboy is for being a dapper duke. It makes sense that the game keeps a relatively steady frame rate because it never tries to do anything that will actually push the hardware. Character models lack detail and diversity--you'll see only two or three different types per level--while textures are muddy. Fortunately, the game runs without any noticeable hiccups even when a second player jumps in locally or online. Though cooperative play often makes a game more fun than slogging through alone, an extra player here merely makes this already easy adventure even less challenging.       There is no reason to waste your time with Hellboy: Science of Evil. Even fans of the comic won't find much to dig here. The story is handled so inexpertly, it will only anger those who have invested hours reading the paper exploits of Hellboy. Weak combat and ugly visuals should deter those just looking for a solid beat-'em-up. With expectations for licensed products already so low, it's a testament to how poorly designed this game is that it can't even live up to the mediocre games around it.     
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443,Warriors of the Lost Empire ,3.5," An uninspired dungeon-crawler mired by boring, repetitive gameplay, and more design flaws than you can shake a gladius at.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/1/1/6/2220116-warriors_s.jpg,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warriors-of-the-lost-empire-review/1900-6185041/,neg,"
  Warriors of the Lost Empire is about as straightforward of a mindless dungeon-crawling hack-and-slash action role-playing game as you can get. In fact, it's so derivative that you can almost picture the developers as they sat around a table with a pile of similar games and compiled a list of the bare necessities of the genre on their college-ruled notepads. Dungeons? Check. Dragons? Check. Item crafting, vaguely historical setting, bizarre traps? Check, check, and check. Unfortunately, they somehow managed to forget to add fun and variety into the mix; thus, the end result is a boring grindfest where the most satisfying moment is the one in which you turn it off.    In the year 165 of the Roman Imperial calendar, Hadrianus, the so-called ""Good Emperor,"" grows weary of his lofty position and retires in seclusion with his lover Antinous. Over time, Hadrianus' resting place, the city of Antinopolis, becomes embroiled in stories of monsters and the undead. The Imperial army then moves in with mercenaries to investigate the disappearance of the former emperor. While this is all a good start to an adventure, that's about the most story development you're going to get out of this game--once the intro is over, it devolves into a series of vague quests as delivered by a floating, toga-wearing ghost with a seriously wicked mustache. There are also some generic bits about souls and evil wizards as told in conveniently placed, incriminating journal entries.   Don't accidentally walk into that spiked column or anything.   Each of the missions will send you to various dungeons hidden throughout the city for one reason or another, and with the exception of the monsters you'll find within, each dungeon is virtually identical in appearance. The first half of the game's dungeons are brown and cryptlike, while the dungeons in the second half are white-blue and templelike. To make things worse, the dungeon-crawling experience itself is as insipid and absurdly straightforward as you can possibly imagine. Dungeons are divided up into between five and 10 randomly generated floors, each of which contains a single exit door that can be found by traveling in pretty much any direction. Although doors will transform into magical elevators at about the halfway point and some rooms will require you to defeat all the monsters within to continue, the bulk of the gameplay will never change. The boss battles that each spelunking trip culminates in are as equally clear-cut and rarely ever require actual strategy to complete.    There are four characters for you to play as; each is a mercenary coming to Antinopolis for his or her own reasons and each represents a class pulled directly out of Diablo. The hulking Highlander is slow but powerful, the fallen Gladiator wields two swords, the enigmatic Dark Seeker combines lithe movements with magic, and the Amazon is great at a range but helpless up close. Thanks to their inherent differences, each class will play slightly differently, but for the most part, every class but the Amazon will be going toe-to-toe with enemies in melee combat, making character selection little more than a visual change. As if that wasn't bad enough, your character has a bizarre relationship with his or her magical item box, a chest that resides at the Roman army's campsite. This is the only location in the game where equipment can be swapped out, special attacks changed, your character's stats increased, and the game saved. Any time you want to do any of this, you have to return to camp, even if you want to try out that shield you just picked up.    By far, the key element in any hack-and-slash is the actual hacking and/or slashing, but unfortunately, Warriors doesn't fare all too well in this area either. Combat essentially amounts to mashing the square or triangle buttons to attack swarms of monsters and, occasionally, letting loose a character-specific special move or using an item. At its very best, this resembles a poor man's God of War sans context-sensitive attacks, and combat quickly becomes a chore that must be performed dozens of times in each dungeon as monsters literally spawn on top of you. Luckily, the pathetic enemy artificial intelligence and bizarre traps can be combined to make it more enjoyable, but even the novelty of watching a soldier repeatedly impale himself on a spiked pillar in an effort to somehow run through it so he can stab you grows stale over time.    As bad as it seems, though, the list of flaws doesn't end here. All three cameras you have to choose from are virtually useless because you will invariably end up attacking enemies that are either offscreen or barely visible with little-to-no time to adjust, thanks to the awkward controls. Collision detection is buggy because not only can projectiles and spiked walls you avoid visually still hit you, but if you get knocked back by a pack of enemies, you may find yourself helplessly juggled by their attacks for half your health bar or longer before you can even move. Finally, the risk-versus-reward system that helps to make dungeon crawlers so enjoyable is completely skewed by a complete lack of any form of punishment for death. You can charge fearlessly into wave after wave of enemies and die, which sends you back to camp. Then, you can return to do it all over again to gain levels, items, and equipment.   You can also play this with a friend. Why would you do that to a friend?   Visually speaking, Warriors is a mixed bag. On the one hand, each of the four characters you can select from is very fluidly animated and looks fantastic in combat. This ranges from the Amazon who weaves and twirls as she fires to the Dark Seeker who leaps and kicks as she closes in on an enemy. On the other hand, the drab dungeons you encounter are suffocating, simpleminded, and uniformly ugly--no matter how you look at them. Audio-wise, the game is also consistently dull. Be prepared to repeatedly hear the same three combat sound effects so many times that they may invade your dreams and haunt you through your waking moments. Even the musical styling of Yuzo Koshiro, famed composer of Act Raiser, Ys, and more, feels forced and is ultimately forgettable.    In the end, Warriors of the Lost Empire is a mindless, repetitive, and painfully generic dungeon crawler. Provided it doesn't drive you mad, the story mode will provide you with 10 to 15 hours of gameplay that can then be repeated on two harder difficulty settings or with any of the other classes. It even offers co-op ad hoc Wi-Fi play to tag team the dungeons with a friend, but ultimately, this is a game we wouldn't recommend to one person, let alone two.  
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444,Bleach: Shattered Blade ,3.5, This Wii fighter will make you want to dye.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/9/1/2219091-box_bsb.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bleach-shattered-blade-review/1900-6182905/,neg,"
  Bleach whitens, so it's a good title for a manga about ethereal ninjas who cleanse evil spirits. It's also toxic, making it an apt name for a game you should avoid at all costs, which, in this case, is Bleach: Shattered Blade. Based on the anime adaptation of the aforementioned manga, Shattered Blade is a dim-witted 3D fighting game that squanders its source with idiot controls, chintzy production values, long loading times, and a lame plot. This is not even a good game for rabid fans, as they are the ones most likely to be offended by Polygon Magic's horrible whitewashing of their favorite fantasy.     If you aren't familiar with the series, Bleach tells the story of a young man who can see dead people and one day inadvertently absorbs all the powers of a young-looking spirit ninja dispatched by heaven to hunt hollows. The hollows are corrupted souls that live in a stark desert and prey on lost spirits they find on Earth. If you can't already tell, Bleach's three worlds are insanely intricate and detailed. They have all sorts of rules, symbols, and random exceptions, but you wouldn't know any of that from Shattered Blade. There are many stories at work in this game, but most follow this formula: Hero X is told by character Y that they need to collect shards to meet pressing objective Z. Upon collecting the shards by beating up a handful of opponents, character Y turns out to be Arturo Plateado, an evil hollow you then defeat. After that, everyone makes fun of your character for being fooled so easily and the credits roll.    Rochambeau no!   Pardon the algebra above, but when you first begin Shattered Blade, you can play through what's called the episode mode with one of three different characters, and the story for each follows the formula above. There is an exception, but for the most part, it's the rule. As you complete episodes with each character, new ones are unlocked for play in episode mode. This might be cool if it weren't for four major factors: the cutscenes, the dialogue, the gameplay, and the loading. Some cutscenes are actually just single, unanimated frames with voice-over. They're cut-pictures. Others have the in-game character models posing while dialogue is read. Here is a pretty good example of the kinds of things people say in Shattered Blade: ""I can feel power coming from my body. It's not a bad feeling."" And I think every character at some point says ""You're after the Sokyoku shards too?!"" even though it quickly becomes clear that everyone in the Bleach universe is after the shards.      Despite this minimalist approach to storytelling, every cutscene is preceded and followed by a loading screen. These are cute the first couple of times you see them, drawn as they are in Rukia's erratic style. But they're soul crushing to see the 500th time, especially when you consider the fact that the loading screens take longer than most of the matches. This is especially true in episode mode, where matches are one round long. Wherever you play, the controls are simple: You move with the Nunchuk and execute three types of basic attacks by waving or poking with the Wii Remote. If you hold the B button and wave, you execute your character's special attacks (Orihime, for instance, heals herself). By holding A and waving, you execute the dreaded critical attack.    The critical attack is amazing. It cannot be blocked, it's as fast as a regular attack, and it actually blocks incoming strikes. All you have to do is hold A, swing the Wii Remote, and constantly push the analog stick toward your opponent (to keep him or her in range); then, you are effectively a master of Shattered Blade. This tactic has only two counters: another critical strike and bankai mode. If you and your opponent perform a critical strike at the same time, you'll enter a best of five game of rochambeau, where a vertical slice beats a horizontal one, which in turn beats a poke, which in turn beats a vertical slice. In this mode, a white bar travels down a line, and when it enters a certain window, you must enter your choice. If you end up winning the most rounds out of five, you can hit your opponent for a decent amount of health. As you climb into higher difficulty levels or face human opponents, this becomes the whole game. At least, it is until one of you fills up your power gauge, at which point bankai mode becomes an option. In bankai mode, your character becomes much more powerful and can execute devastating attacks that sometimes fill the entire screen. Nothing in the world is more frustrating than losing three rounds of rochambeau to the computer, only to have it bankai and obliterate you in three cut-sequenced superattacks.    Bleach is not as fun as it looks.   As you critical strike and bankai your way through episodes, you'll gain points that can be spent on various unlockables, such as the single frames associated with a character's episode mode campaign. If you thought they were lame the first time you saw them, wait until the game tries to sell them to you. You can also play through arcade mode (a sequence of eight matches) or versus mode with a friend. Then again, you could just skip the video game and jump right into an old-fashioned game of rock-paper-scissors for the same effect.     Perhaps one of the worst things about Shattered Blade is its graphical quality. This is not because it's bad, but rather, because it's pretty good. The characters are reasonable approximations of their counterparts, and some of the bankai stuff looks pretty intense. If you saw this game at a Wal-Mart and were a fan of the series, you might think it looked pretty cool. You'd be horribly wrong, but it wouldn't be your fault. The voice acting isn't that bad either, although Arturo sounds a lot like Antonio Banderas' Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies, making him even harder to take seriously.    The last issue with Bleach: Shattered Blade is the fact that it costs $50 but isn't worth $1. Its fighting model is rochambeau at best, broken at worst. The story is irrelevant, the cutscenes aren't even scenes, and the dialogue is garbage. There is no reason to play this game, other than to marvel with your friends at how bad it is, until one of you bankais and slaughters the other. This might be fun for small children, but everyone else--especially fans of the anime--should leave Bleach in its bottle.  
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445,The Settlers ,3.5, The solid roots of a charming series are buried under an avalanche of bugs and other issues.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/6/1/2215361-settds0f.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-settlers-review/1900-6178488/,neg,"
  The Settlers for the Nintendo DS is actually a port of 1996's The Settlers II for the PC, rather than the original Commodore Amiga game. However, this is a blessing because the sequel let players speed up the course of time, rather than suffer through the slogging tempo of the first game. Yet there are few other things to be happy with in The Settlers on the DS. In fact, it's a buggy mess of a port that will send most newcomers to the series screaming all the way back to their local retailer. This is slipshod lip service to series fans who are willing to overlook multiple crazy issues in favor of a nostalgic trip down memory lane. But even if you're one of those folks, you're better off with your memories, rather than soiling them with this lazy port of a solid game.    Little boxes, on the hillside...   The Settlers is an economy-focused strategy game. Your goal is to expand your nation by taking advantage of resource nodes and building a logical system of structures and transportation. To do so, you plant flags and build roads between them, setting up a tag-team system in which residents carry resources from one flag to the next. It can get remarkably complex, considering that keeping your populace happy and healthy requires a web of roads and buildings to process all of the raw goods into something useful. You also need to carefully prioritize what types of goods get transport priority. There are military aspects, but they are secondary, and generally involve tapping on a few buildings and letting things work themselves out.     If you're new to the series, the unusual web of flags and roads will be confusing at first. There is no in-game tutorial, and the manual is simply abysmal. Consequently, if you don't know how to play The Settlers going in, you'll need to rely on trial and error until you get things figured out. Even once you get the basics down pat, you'll have to fiddle around with resource-distribution priorities, structure placement, and more in order to avoid traffic jams and other issues.     If you aren't so new to the series, the DS port isn't going to do you any favors, either. The DS menu interface is fine; it lets you flip the top and bottom screens at will to access distribution graphs and system messages. But the touch-screen icons are amazingly imprecise, often not registering taps, and the scrolling speed is sluggish. However, the worst part is the barrage of bugs you will have to endure. If you zoom in or out, you risk crashing the game and losing progress. One mission was impossible to complete until we turned off the sound effects, and we were never able to complete a later one, which left us stranded in the middle of the Roman campaign.   ...little boxes made of ticky tacky.   These awful moments are commonplace, so it's hard to say how the game made it past the testing phase. It's too bad, because when things are moving at the proper gear, The Settlers is a charming and addictive experience. Watching your workers go about their chores can be a delight, and a variety of cute animations makes it fun to watch them at rest, too. This isn't a technical powerhouse, but the visuals and little midi tunes are identical to the original Settlers II, and they get the job done just fine.     If you haven't played a Settlers game, steer clear of the DS release. It's far too frustrating to deliver much enjoyment. If you're a fan, there are enough Settlers games that you don't need to worry yourself with this one. It just seems as if things were slapped together with as little work as possible. When it functions, The Settlers can be laid-back fun. But given that you never know how far you're going to get before the next crash, why bother with such a pricey gamble?  
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446,F24: Stealth Fighter ,3.5, Weak graphics and dodgy controls hamstring an already mediocre air combat game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/6/9/4/27732-78694.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/f24-stealth-fighter-review/1900-6167182/,neg,"
  F24 Stealth Fighter was clearly inspired by such classic air combat games as F-15 Strike Eagle and Turn and Burn: No Fly Zone. In the game, you climb into the cockpit of the fictional F24 fighter jet and fly missions from a first-person viewpoint in the skies over Iran. Unfortunately, the main thing F24 Stealth Fighter has in common with the air combat games of days gone by is that it looks and sounds like it was developed decades ago. Along with that, the dogfighting in the game is boring and is further stymied by the touchy controls and the disorienting visuals.   F24 Stealth Fighter is a first-person air combat game similar to those produced for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis.   From the controls to what happens in the sky, F24 Stealth Fighter takes a laid-back approach to air combat. The D pad is used to steer the aircraft, while the buttons control throttle and weapons. You'll remain in the air just as long as you don't intentionally smash into the ground, run out of fuel, or get shot down. Your flight view is presented from a first-person perspective, but instead of employing 3D graphics, the game juxtaposes scaling cloud and aircraft sprites on top of 2D backdrops to fake a 3D look. All of the missions in the game follow the same format. Your first task is to get rid of any enemy MiGs patrolling the skies over the target area. Once you've taken out the planes, your next task is to fly to the designated waypoints and attack the enemy's ground targets, which can involve launching Tomahawk missiles at them or attacking them directly during a strafing run. There's really nothing to dogfighting or destroying ground targets. If an enemy MiG or surface-to-air missile gets behind you, all you need to do is turn around or drop some chaff to deal with the threat. Otherwise, shooting down a target simply involves sighting it and pressing the missile button when you hear the lock-on tone. To take out tanks, carriers, and structures on land, you'll occasionally have to use your guns to hit flashing target markers. Your own aircraft can absorb five hits before exploding, but you can return to the carrier's waypoint once per mission to automatically land for repairs and reloading. The developers clearly made a conscious effort to make blowing stuff up simple and easy.    Destroying the same enemy planes and tanks in the same repetitive fashion does get old pretty fast, but what really sucks the fun out of the game are the jumpy steering controls and disorienting visuals. When you tap the D pad, the targeting reticle goes flying. This makes it difficult to keep targets in view and makes it impossible to use the F24's machine guns in normal dogfight situations. Missiles lock on automatically and can turn on a dime to follow targets, so there's no compelling reason to ever use the guns, except when they're required for a strafing run. Disorientation is another common problem because the flat 2D backdrops don't provide anything in the way of terrain details or landmarks. All you ever see are generic clouds flying past. To locate targets and see which way you're going, you'll find yourself switching to the radar view (and interrupting the flow of combat) every few seconds.    The overall presentation is bland and lacks punch. The cockpit instrument panel occupies half of the screen in the Game Boy Advance version and one-third of the upper screen in the DS version. Enemy planes and vehicles are tiny unless you're right on top of them, and when you are on top of them, they turn into giant pixelated blobs. The sky and ground are merely two contrasting shades of color. If not for the plane's tendency to right itself and the fact that clouds are in the sky, you'd have no way of knowing which end is up. The only noteworthy graphical touches are the goofy cutscenes that show takeoffs and landings, as well as the missile-cam video clips that play on a small display in the cockpit when you destroy an enemy target. Also, there's not much to say about the audio. All of the requisite gun and missile sounds are present, while a guitar riff that's eerily similar to Kenny Loggins' music from Top Gun loops constantly. On the whole, F24 Stealth Fighter looks and feels similar to the air combat games that were produced for the Sega Genesis and SNES in the early 1990s. Now that it's 2007, both the GBA and Nintendo DS are capable of better.   Why is the game called F24 Stealth Fighter when enemy planes and missile systems have no trouble locking on to your airplane?   For the most part, the GBA and DS versions of the game are identical. In both games, the main draw is the campaign mode, which spans 20 missions and takes approximately three hours to finish. The DS version includes a few minor enhancements that don't do anything to improve the overall experience. Some of the cockpit instrumentation was moved to the lower screen, and you can use the touch screen to perform a number of commands. However, you'll rarely find yourself doing so because it's easier and faster to press a button when you want to switch weapons or adjust speed. There's also a multiplayer mode in the DS version that lets as many as four players compete in deathmatch scenarios, but it suffers from the same problems as the main campaign mode, and every player must have his or her own cartridge to participate. Ultimately, the only worthwhile enhancement that the developers made to the DS version was replacing the GBA's password-based save system with an on-cartridge save function.    Even if you're totally desperate to acquire an air combat game for your GBA or DS, you're better off staying away from F24 Stealth Fighter. It's boring, it's ugly, and it's somewhat broken.    
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447,Flyboys ,3.5," This movie-licensed World War I dogfighter takes off, stalls, and nosedives straight into the ground.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/flyboys-review/1900-6163291/,neg,"
  For a purported war epic, Flyboys didn't have much of a tour of duty in multiplexes last summer. This thriller about air aces in World War I lasted about as long as the average flier did in one of those canvas crates that saw action over France back in the day. Still, the movie stuck around in theaters probably for a lot longer than its officially licensed game will hang around on your hard drive. Flyboys Squadron is an all-around disappointment, with a practically nonexistent single-player mode, awkward controls, dubious multiplayer value, and visuals and sound so old that they belong in a museum alongside Snoopy's Sopwith Camel.   Gunner missions aren't exactly thrilling, but at least they get you out of the cockpit.   Taking that old British plane up for a spin couldn't be much more frustrating than flying the virtual equivalent of it here. For starters, even though you might think that you're getting the usual arcade-friendly movie tie-in game, you're actually getting a hardcore flight sim based on Interactive Magic's Dawn of Aces series. This isn't exactly bad, of course, as the game provides a fulfilling depiction of what it was like to fly rickety contraptions over Flanders Field during the Great War. But the flight model is still a lot more rigorous than the packaging indicates. Casual gamers and moviegoers expecting to soar into the wild blue yonder and start blasting Fokkers just like in the flick will be surprised at how tough it is to point planes in the right direction, let alone shoot anybody down. There are autopilot options to take off, land, and fly and fight during missions (the game will even shoot for you), though it's hard to see why anyone would bother with them because they reduce you to the role of spectator.    Of course, demanding flight models are OK if you've got the right audience and an acceptable number of tutorials and missions that let people get the hang of what they're supposed to be doing. Flyboys drops the ball on both accounts, though. Although a fair number of the 12 solo missions are dedicated to training, the first basic flight is conducted with the autopilot on, and the next two, which cover takeoffs, landings, and basic dogfighting with blanks, offer little interactivity. You end up hashing everything out for yourself, so you might as well skip these training flights and go straight into real combat with the German enemies.    Or maybe not. Most of the combat missions aren't all that engaging, either. Once you take out the three training flights, there are just nine actual combat assignments in the solo campaign. They're only vaguely connected with the plot of the movie through character names and the odd photograph, and they tend to either be over in mere moments or drag on far too long. The two gun-turret missions where you man the rear-gunner position on a plane and take over an ack-ack gun defending Paris from German boats and planes wrap up in a few minutes apiece. And the climactic battle with an enemy zeppelin on the way to bomb Paris kicks off with a good 5 to 10 minutes of just following your buddies to the airship and its escorts. You can kick in the autopilot during these slow periods, but you still have to sit through entire flights in real time since there is no fast-forward button to speed things up. All in all, you can rip through the solo campaign in an hour or two.    There is more to the game than just the single-player campaign, though. One of the big selling points is being able to go online and take part in massively multiplayer dogfights on the iEntertainment Network's Total Sims site against an almost unlimited number of players. You get a dozen or so aircraft to pilot, including famous models like the Fokker D.VII, the Nieuport 17, and the already mentioned Sopwith Camel. But it's pretty tough going, especially if you come in as a Flyboys movie fan looking for more arcade-oriented combat flying. There aren't too many people playing the game online right now, either. You can often pop into scraps with six or seven players, but the arena maps are so huge that it can be tough to really get into battle with enemies. So the game often feels deserted.    Also, buying Flyboys to play it online doesn't make a lot of financial sense. Dawn of Aces III is essentially the same game as Flyboys, and right now you get it as a free download along with four other games when you sign up with Total Sims for $13.95 per month. Flyboys and Dawn of Aces III players even compete against one another in the same online arena. So, basically, you're paying $30 here for the solo missions and the movie tie-in content. You do get one free online month with your Flyboys purchase, but still, the numbers don't exactly add up in the customer's favor here.   Timeless graphics.   Visual and sound quality is pretty bottom of the barrel. When viewed from above, the ground looks fantastic, as it is apparently based on maps of the actual French countryside over which WWI air aces fought, and the sky provides a pretty backdrop. However, planes are mostly lacking in detail beyond basic wing markings. You have to be right on top of an enemy to see much aside from a black, jaggy silhouette, although there are brief moments of beauty when the sun hits a plane just right. The game is hideous when you're on the ground. Character models and buildings have no textures or detail. The mission where you man gun turrets to defend ""Paris"" is hilarious, based solely on what the developers are passing off as the Eiffel Tower. At least the frame rate flies no matter how many planes are onscreen. Audio effects are so annoying that it's hard to play the game with the sound on. Enemy bullets hit your plane with a tinny, repetitive plink and plane motors whir in what's probably a realistic, but still aggravating, drone.    If you dug it out of a box of cereal, or got it free with your movie ticket last summer, you might not think too harshly of Flyboys Squadron. However, as a retail game, it's a dubious value and is misleading for movie fans looking for a game that lets them hop into a biplane and immediately start shooting down zeppelins.    
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448,Gangstar: West Coast Hustle ,9," Unless you're one of the few out there who don't enjoy the Grand Theft Auto series, Gangstar: West Coast Hustle is definitely worth playing.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/9/7/6/2222976-504x_splash_gangstar_320.png,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gangstar-west-coast-hustle-review/1900-6231965/,pos,"
  If you want to get in on the hustle, particularly a West Coast hustle, you'll want to head to the App Store and pick up Gameloft's latest crime epic, Gangstar. If you've ever enjoyed the Grand Theft Auto series, you'll probably enjoy Gangstar, which is one of the most technically impressive games on iDevices.     It doesn't matter which device you have, from the first-generation iPod Touch to the iPhone 3GS, Gangstar runs smoothly and never loads aside from a lengthy initial boot-up--not unlike the Grand Theft Auto games.   In Gangstar: West Coast Hustle, you can commit grand theft auto.   In fact, if you've ever played those games, you'll know exactly what to expect from Gangstar. It does a stellar job of imitating the GTA games, from the mission structure to the type of humor--though it perhaps isn't quite as funny as the original GTA games.    The game's primary gameplay is in its story missions, and it has a lot of them. The missions are along the lines of what you might expect from GTA and games like it--following targets without getting too close, killing thugs who messed with the wrong people, and dropping off ""working girls.""    Over the course of the story you'll meet lots of different characters, starting with Mexican gangbangers and gradually expanding to include mafiosi, yakuza, and politicians. The story is nicely done, but it isn't anything groundbreaking. Most of the time you'll have only one option for the next mission, though at one point you'll be able to work concurrently for warring gangs, making the progression a bit less linear.    Most of the missions can be completed in five to 10 minutes, making them well suited to short bursts of play. The menu screen is especially convenient, because it lets you launch any mission without having to drive all the way to the marker, saving you lots of tedious driving time. You can also buy health, guns, and police bribes right from the in-game menu. This makes an already easy game even easier but keeps it from being frustrating.    The story missions will give you at least five or six solid hours of play, and after that, it's fun to just drive off of jumps and over pedestrians around town. Aside from that, there are a few race missions to complete, and you can drop off food and passengers in the taxi, ambulance, and delivery-vehicle missions. There are also achievements to unlock.   This scenic carnival is the perfect spot for some illicit activity.   Unfortunately, messing with the police isn't as fun as it is in the GTA games. Like in those games, committing various infractions will increase your ""wanted"" status from level one on up to level five, but the police don't change their tactics at all. You won't be running into SWAT teams, FBI, or the Army. A higher wanted level just takes longer to go down, and the cops are pretty easily defeated with any decent weaponry.    The game takes place in Los Angeles, and while we couldn't identify any landmarks, the city itself is big enough, and the layout is conducive to driving at high speeds. It helps that small obstacles like trees and light posts can be passed through freely without slowing you down or stopping you. Driving controls default to the accelerometer, but virtual steering wheel and joystick options are present, and virtual joystick seems like the best control option.    You'll use a virtual joystick for moving on foot as well, and swiping a finger across the screen will pan the camera. To target an enemy or vehicle, you just need to tap it to lock on. Overall, successfully gunning down your targets is remarkably easy, and most enemies go down before they can do much damage to you. There are no sprint or jump buttons, but the game controls well, and stealing cars is easy.    Gangstar's presentation is a definite strong point. The game has very little voice acting, but the character illustrations are well done, as are the menus. There are also about six radio stations for your listening pleasure, complete with radio banter and ridiculous commercials. The humor is a bit hit-and-miss, but if you don't find a station you like, you can make your own with a custom playlist, which is an especially nice touch.    Graphically, the character models look pretty standard for a modern iPhone game, but the cityscape textures are surprisingly detailed up close. Unfortunately, anything more than 75 feet away devolves into a blurry mess, but at least you can see where you're going, and the frame rate remains rock solid throughout.   The game also has on-foot missions.   Overall, Gangstar is an amazing accomplishment on iDevices. It's a blast to play, taking all the best parts of the GTA games and condensing them into a completely workable portable experience.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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449,Alive 4-ever ,9, Alive-4-Ever is one of the finest two-stick shooters on iDevices.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/7/7/0/2223770-alive_4_ever_menu.jpg,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alive-4-ever-review/1900-6231314/,pos,"
  Few end-of-the-world scenarios seem as exhilarating as the zombie apocalypse. With just a few trusted companions by your side and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ammunition, you have to survive in a world overrun with shambling horrors. Alive-4-Ever takes the timeless scenario of an undead invasion to the next level, with 30 increasingly complex missions and an equal number of intense side challenges.     Choosing one of four stylishly designed characters, you gain experience points and cash by simply surviving scenarios, such as killing 50 zombies or rescuing two survivors. In addition, bonus objectives, such as bringing home a suitcase full of gold bullion or vaccine, earn you extra items that grant bonuses to your weapons, health, or experience. It's an elegant system that rewards your progress at every step; whether it's unlocking more-effective guns or spending your experience points to increase the likelihood of making a critical hit.   Mowing down zombies is a blast in Alive-4-Ever.   There's a good variety of enemies in these 30 missions, and they work very well for this type of game. Fast zombies, fat zombies, and wild zombie dogs join exploding and tongue-lashing zombies. These last two are not unlike those found in the similarly titled Left 4 Dead PC and console games. The game also has three boss battles; one for every 10 levels.    The gritty, grimy environments in Alive-4-Ever are appropriately spooky--especially the Forest level, where treetops can obscure hidden pickup items or zombie attackers. While the graphics aren't the most vibrant you'll see in a twin-stick shooter on an iDevice, the gameplay has more depth than most.    Another fantastic feature is the Bluetooth multiplayer. The missions used in multiplayer matches, which can also be attempted solo, offer much tougher missions where you must fight more zombies and recover more survivors, vaccines, or gold. Alive-4-Ever also has score leaderboards.    While the gameplay of gunning down hordes of zombies is a blast, rescuing survivors is a pain because they can't fire guns themselves. Some of them can't even walk, which means you have to pick them up yourself. Still, a cash penalty will make you think twice about abandoning these helpless victims.   Expect to leave plenty of carnage in your wake.   Cash is an important commodity because it lets you unlock the best guns. However, you can earn cash quickly by replaying the first few easy levels over and over again. Once you unlock the best assault rifle and handgun, the last third of the game ends up being a lot easier.    Still, in Alive-4-Ever, you're otherwise constantly gaining experience levels that make your character more powerful and always unlocking new, more-destructive means of wiping out zombies. The game has pretty much everything you'd want in an iDevice action game where you're fighting off an army of zombies.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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450,Wolfenstein RPG ,9, This funny and exciting turn-based role-playing game will definitely get its hooks in you.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/3/2/0/2223320-wolfrpg.png,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wolfenstein-rpg-review/1900-6231991/,pos,"
  The Fodor's Travel Guide to Castle Wolfenstein contains many useful phrases in German, so you can better understand your Axis oppressors as you fill them with lead or strap dynamite to their bodies. While the original Wolfenstein 3D was a tour of Nazi castles full of swastikas and dour-looking Hitler portraits, Wolfenstein RPG is decidedly lighter in tone, with mutant chickens, romance novels, and a playful giant named Gunther.     In fact, the only thing recognizable about this version of Wolfenstein is the arsenal and the main character, BJ Blazkowicz. Everything else, from the tone to the gameplay, has been altered drastically.   Wolfenstein RPG still has Nazi hunting, but with a lighter, more-humorous tone.   Instead of freely running through levels, you'll advance step by step using a turn-based battle system. When there are no enemies around, you might mistake this game--at a glance--for any other first-person shooter. But once enemy soldiers appear (or zombies, female assassins, or mutant chickens), you'll have to take turns maneuvering around the room and lining up your opponents to exchange gunfire with them. A wide range of weapons, including flamethrowers, Gatling guns, and the occasional thrown toilet, make every combat situation a great deal of fun, especially the game's challenging boss fights.    Additional elements, like mixing syringes and reading books for attribute boosts, are surprisingly interesting. Others, like booting each and every breakable object in the game for an achievement, are less satisfying. And while the game is highly linear, you can replay it on tougher difficulty levels with fewer health packs and tougher enemies. There are even two minor minigames and an on-rails shooter sequence to mix things up from the main storyline.    There are a lot of enjoyable moments in the Wolfenstein RPG story, but to say much about them would be to risk spoiling some of its surprises for you. Suffice it to say, there are numerous references to other games from developer id Software here, as well as plenty of surprising twists and ambushes. Humorous background details, such as portraits of Hitler with a soul patch instead of his famous mustache (originally meant to get around European telecom censors for the mobile version of the game), help make the Wolfenstein RPG experience a memorable one.   There are burning skeletons in Castle Wolfenstein.   On the downside, Wolfenstein RPG was originally designed for legacy mobile phones, and it shows. The graphics have been scaled up so that the sprites are presented in a higher resolution and the 3D animation runs more smoothly, but the quality is still a step below other games that have been designed from the ground up for the iPhone. Otherwise, the weird and silly Wolfenstein RPG is a welcome counterpart to the angry and serious Wolfenstein 3D.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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451,Word Ace ,9," Word Ace is an extremely well-designed game and a real treat for fans of Scrabble, poker, or gambling in general.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/7/7/1/54698-126771.jpg,WOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/word-ace-review/1900-6262869/,pos,"
  Word Ace combines two game ideas that are so compatible, it's a wonder someone didn't come up with it sooner. Specifically, Word Ace combines Scrabble and Texas hold 'em, and the result is an astonishingly fun game. The core gameplay focuses on forming words out of letters--the primary appeal for Scrabble fans--but the betting portion of the game will make hopless junkies of gamblers as well.    In Word Ace, you play a combination of poker and Scrabble against real-life opponents.   If you're familiar with the rules of Texas hold 'em, then you'll feel immediately at home with Word Ace. Each player starts with two cards and participates in several rounds of betting, while trying to make a winning hand out of the five additional ""community cards"" that the dealer places in the middle of the table. But instead of using playing cards, Word Ace uses letter cards. Like in Scrabble, each letter has a score assigned to it, and the goal is to form a high-scoring word by combining your letters with the ""community letters."" You can play single-player games against bots to practice, but the best part of the game is its online multiplayer.     Hopping online is a seamless experience, and because there's a large, active community of players, you won't have to wait around for other players to join. In fact, unlike in some online poker games, there's no excessive waiting at all, because each match is limited to five players, and everyone has a reasonable time limit to make bets or play words.     While other players are calling, raising, or folding, you can tinker with the letters. You can mix them up, handpick a few to toy around with, or lock in a word anytime you want. A locked-in word will count as your final word at the end of the turn, but you can always change your word before the round ends.     A well-implemented chat feature makes the game feel remarkably like sitting around a table with opponents in real life. A tiny line at the top of the screen displays chat messages in real time as other players enter them. Tap an icon, and the chat line expands into a translucent chat box you can use to enter text.    All players have a brief profile that shows their level, their highest-scoring word to date, and how much money they have. You can customize your profile with any picture you'd like. You can even put in three pictures--one as a standard poker face, one for happy, and one for angry--and you can switch between them in real time during games.    You share five community letters and are given two of your own at the start of each round.   It's clear that an exceptional amount of attention to detail, and some very smart design decisions, went into developing Word Ace. You can create a friends list and easily invite your buddies into a game when they're online. You get experience points that let you level up, and you can unlock achievements for things like making everyone at your table fold. The phone vibrates when it's your turn, which is very helpful when playing while doing something else. And, in a feat of technological wizardry, the multiplayer is cross-platform, meaning that your opponents might be using an iPhone or iPod Touch.     You get a thousand chips a day for free, which is more than any non-addict (even one with a tiny vocabulary) is likely to blow through. The supremely dedicated can buy more chips using real-life money. About the worst problem you'll run into is less-than-friendly players who have less-than-polite things to say in chat, but you can report them for moderation and leave the table anytime you want. Word Ace is a must-own for fans of word games, poker, or gambling in general.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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452,Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective ,9," Ghost Trick’s unusual premise, unique gameplay, satisfying puzzles, and wonderful characters make it an adventure game you don’t want to miss.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/3/8/3/2223383-box_gtpd.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ghost-trick-phantom-detective-review/1900-6286220/,pos,"
  Dead men, the saying goes, tell no tales. Luckily, this old adage doesn't apply to the recently deceased central character of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. In Ghost Trick, you take control of a soul who has no memory of his prior life and is desperate to uncover the truth behind his mysterious death. This investigation takes the form of a unique adventure game filled with terrific characters, compelling puzzles, and a labyrinthine mystery that keeps you guessing and that pays off in a big way. Don't let the fact that the main character is dead mislead you: this lively adventure is a breath of fresh air. You've never played a game quite like Ghost Trick.      Disoriented, you come to in a junkyard on the outskirts of a city. You don't remember much, but one fact is abundantly clear: you've just been killed. Presumably the crumpled body of the pointy-haired blond gentleman lying amid the garbage was yours--and if you don't do something quickly, the young woman being held at gunpoint over your body will soon be dead, too. This intriguing opening sets the stage for Ghost Trick, all of which takes place during the course of one long night. You soon learn that your name was Sissel, but everything else about your past remains a mystery you are determined to solve. Your quest for the truth about who you were, who killed you, and why brings you into the lives of a host of wonderful characters--feisty young detectives, shortsighted assassins, bushy-eyebrowed military commanders, roller-skating chicken restaurant waitresses, dancing prison guards, valiant puppies, and many, many more.     Spending time with these characters is a joy; their snappy dialogue is consistently entertaining, and their stunningly smooth and expressive animations make their movements mesmerizing to behold and speak volumes about the characters themselves. Some characters move with a stiffness that mirrors their rigid outlooks, while other characters exhibit a spring in their step that reflects their more spirited personalities. The environments these characters inhabit are presented in a striking style whose clean lines and sharp angles make details pop off the screen.     The unique way in which you interact with the world of Ghost Trick is as fantastic as the game's visuals. You view the characters and environments from a two-dimensional side view. As a disembodied soul, you can move between the ghost world and the real world. While in the ghost world, you can move around the environments, hopping from object to object. Not everything can be possessed; in the ghost world, your soul appears as a flame, and any objects you can possess have glowing cores. You have a very limited range and can only move to nearby objects; you move from one to another either by dragging your soul from place to place with the stylus or by using the D pad. When you possess an object, it appears on the top screen, along with a description of the trick (if any) that you can perform with that object. Haunt a refrigerator, for instance, and the top screen may indicate that you can open it with your ghostly powers, extending your reach and giving you access to new places. Possess a guitar, and you might see that you can strum it, which may startle a hit man and prevent him from killing his target. The controls for all this couldn't be simpler; you press buttons on the touch screen to switch between the ghost world and the real world, and to do a trick with whatever object you're possessing. Figuring out how to use these powers to your advantage is a big part of the fun of Ghost Trick.   Even the inanimate objects in Ghost Trick have vibrant personalities.   There are two general kinds of situations you find yourself in. Sometimes, you are in the present and need to manipulate objects to move to a specific location, help a character sneak past prowling guards, or accomplish some other objective. You also spend much of your time in the past. Many people end up dying over the course of the night, and when you come into contact with one of these fresh corpses, your powers let you hop back to four minutes before the victim's death. You watch the circumstances that led up to the victim's demise play out, and then you repeat them as an active participant, trying to find a way to change the past and prevent the victim's death. In an early scenario that serves as a tutorial, for instance, you change the past by bringing a wrecking ball down on an assassin's head.    These situations start out quite simple, with a small number of objects you can possess and rather obvious solutions, which gives you an opportunity to get comfortable with the unusual gameplay mechanics and the logic behind Ghost Trick's puzzles. Gradually, situations become more elaborate and challenging. Time doesn't pass while you are in the ghost world, moving from object to object, but you must return to the real world, where time does pass, to manipulate any object, and often you must be observant and wait for just the right moment to act. You may need to possess a crumpled piece of paper as it's being hurled across a room, for instance, or hitch a ride on a rapidly passing bike. If you miss your chance, though, you can hop back to a checkpoint and take another shot at changing fate.   In the ghost world, you can hop from object to object, as long as those objects have glowing cores.   As situations become more complex, it sometimes turns out that during the last four minutes of a victim's life, there's nothing you can do in the environment to prevent the murder. In some such cases, you need to travel to other locations (which you do using telephone lines) and change the course of events there to stop the death from happening. In other situations, during your examination of the last four minutes of one person's life, sometimes you encounter another corpse, letting you go back even further in time in pursuit of a way to alter the victims' fates. These more intricate scenarios are fun to investigate and explore, with each new environment you visit often giving you amusing new conversations to eavesdrop on, and working out how to save victims' lives becomes more satisfying as the scenarios become more challenging.     A significant amount of trial and error is often required to solve these puzzles, but it's an enjoyable sort of trial and error, because your experiments with different objects and the effects your tricks have on the world help you figure out what might work and rule out what definitely won't. As you interact with objects, characters make comments that nudge you in the right direction without giving away the solution entirely. If someone comments about the weight of an urn, for instance, you can bet dollars to donuts that the urn's weight will be important to your solution. Even with the absence of any penalty for failure, there's a feeling of suspense created as you work to save someone's life, knowing exactly how and when he or she will die if you fail. This is especially true of some scenarios late in the game, such as one where you work to save people who are trapped in a chamber that's flooding with water, creating a tense feeling of racing against the clock as you see the water level rising.    Original as the game is, the novelty of Ghost Trick's gameplay starts to wear off a bit, because for the majority of the game, it doesn't evolve in any way. Until very late in the game, you're limited to possessing and doing tricks with objects. Eventually, Sissel collaborates with another soul, whose power is to swap two objects of the same shape, giving the puzzles a new dimension, but changes like this earlier on would have brought a welcome degree of added complexity. Still, although your powers remain unchanged throughout most of the game, the scenarios you're faced with are varied enough to make each new puzzle engaging.    Each new chapter of your investigation sheds some light on your identity or the facts surrounding your death, but as in any good mystery, these revelations often only lead to bigger, more puzzling questions. There's a grimness to some of the game's subject matter--there are murders aplenty, as well as characters who are haunted by past events, and Sissel's investigation requires him to confront some painful truths--but the tone of the game smartly turns its sometimes heavy subject matter into a source of some of its funnier moments. It's initially rather sad, for instance, the way one character you repeatedly save from death goes on to be killed again and again, but the way the frequently killed young woman responds to each of her murders with more moxie and determination than the last makes her misfortune more amusing than melancholy. There’s a comic absurdity to the plot, too, that prevents it from becoming too dark and serious. (The conspiracy at the heart of the game involves, among other things, a man who goes on a rampage because of some overly spicy curry.) And when the final revelations are made and the truth falls into place, the fragments that make up the game's story come together in a surprising and very gratifying way.   Life is better when you love what you do.   Ghost Trick is one of the most original and compelling puzzle-oriented adventure games to come along in recent years. Nearly every facet of the game is outstanding: the unique gameplay concept and the puzzles you solve, the great characters and dialogue, the terrific animation and visual design, and the strange mystery, full of surprising twists and shocking revelations, whose threads all come together in a memorable and rewarding conclusion. The length of the game can vary significantly depending on how long it takes you to work out the puzzles, but you can expect to spend a good 10-15 hours piecing together this mystery, and its novelty and quality ensure that the experience will remain fondly in your memory well after that. If you have any interest in games of this kind, you need to play Ghost Trick.  
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453,Super Street Fighter IV ,9," Character rebalancing, strong online multiplayer modes, and an updated roster help Super Street Fighter IV expand on its predecessor in every way.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426728-2223568-box_ssf4.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-street-fighter-iv-review/1900-6260477/,pos,"
  In a world where downloadable content keeps games fresh long after their shine has started to fade, fighter fans may perceive the retail release of Super Street Fighter IV as a way of double-dipping into the pockets of series devotees twice in consecutive years. But that's not the case here. While the game expands on the solid base established by its precursor, Street Fighter IV, brawlers who dismiss this as merely a lick of paint and a roster update will do themselves a major disservice by passing on its excellent features and gameplay.      Some of the changes, such as the introduction of a second user-selectable ultra combo per character, new online battle modes, and fresh animated cinematics that bookend each storyline, are obvious, but plenty of work has also been done under the hood, away from prying eyes. Each character has been rebalanced to maintain a level playing field; for example, Sagat's Tiger Shot damage has received a minor reduction, while Ryu's fierce Shoryuken now lands two hits instead of one. For a game as ferociously contested online and offline as Street Fighter IV, these fine adjustments are just as important as introducing new fighters to the already well-populated roster.     Super Street Fighter IV adds 10 new playable characters: eight from previous Super Street Fighter, Alpha, and Street Fighter III games, and two brand-new ones. This brings the total roster up to 35 playable characters. The game's complete character roster--which is now available in its entirety from the outset and no longer requires multiple completions of Arcade mode in order to be unlocked--includes the 12 classic world warriors: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, E. Honda, Zangief, Guile, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison. All of the Street Fighter IV characters return: Cammy, Fei Long, Sakura, Dan, Rose, Gen, Abel, Crimson Viper, El Fuerte, Rufus, Gouken, Akuma, and Seth. New additions to the lineup are ninja schoolgirl Ibuki; young martial arts entrepreneur Makoto; Muay Thai kickboxer Adon; heavy-hitting Native American T. Hawk; Final Fight characters Guy and Cody; beat-crazed dancer Dee Jay; and gentlemanly pugilist Dudley.     Turkish oil wrestler Hakan and taekwondo Shadaloo agent Juri also make their debut. These two handle very differently from each other. While the comical appearance of the bright red Hakan and his body-oil-bathing routine are a bit strange, it does give him a competitive advantage; he uses heavy hits and slides in tandem with his grapple abilities to send opponents crashing into walls or looping in orbit around him like a hula hoop. By contrast, Juri's speed makes her nimble and deadly, perfectly suited to chaining together midair combo kicks, while her twirling EX Senpusha provides wide-reaching antiair defence.    Whether this is your first foray into the series or you're a seasoned vet, there is plenty of help available to get you up to speed with the characters and their abilities in Training and Challenge modes. Training is a free spar area to practice your moves with an AI-controlled opponent, while Challenge walks you through 24 must-know attacks and combos per character. While last year's game forced you to complete a challenge before being allowed to move on, accomplished and impatient players can now work their way through sequentially or skip the basics to tackle more difficult tests. The Survival and Time Attack modes have unfortunately been removed, but they've been replaced by the fun and nostalgic car and barrel destruction bonus stages, which can be played in isolation or woven into Arcade mode.    The game's story loosely holds your hand as it guides you through the fighting tournament the characters are taking part in. The attractive anime-style cutscenes in SFIV have been refreshed and give you another glimpse behind the gloves at the usually ridiculous motivations of the combatants. In true Street Fighter style, cutscenes ask as many questions as they answer, and though the characters' relationships with one another carry on from previous games in the series, first-timers and returning fans should have no trouble following along as the shallow story unfolds and steers you through the short Arcade mode.    You would be this angry too if you had such a gnarly sunburn.   All of the gameplay mechanics introduced in SFIV (such as focus attacks and rival matches) make return appearances, and you can now choose one of two ultra combos per fighter. This grants the choice between a ranged attack or close quarters combo to suit your play style. The ultras are listed only by name, and while they're easy to distinguish for all of the returning characters who were in SFIV (since all the new combos are marked in purple as Ultra II), expect some experimentation to work out which one you want to use for less frequently played characters.     A handful of new environments have been added to the mix and give you the chance to exchange your flurry of punches and kicks in a busy marketplace, atop a Metro City skyscraper construction site, and beside a river in an African landscape during a solar eclipse. They're varied and vibrant, and subtle touches, such as approaching hippopotamuses, cheering crowds, and clay vases that topple and smash as you pummel your opponent, give each locale a lively feel.    Online play has received the biggest improvement in Super Street Fighter IV. The game supports ranked match play, team battles (two vs. two, three vs. three, and four vs. four), and Endless Battle mode. Team battles are one-on-one round-robin matches, with the loser eliminated until a team is crowned victorious. Endless Battle supports a lobby of up to eight players and sees the winner staying on, with the next person in the queue taking on the defending champ. Voice chat during matches gives players on the bench the chance to yell encouragement or talk smack as they watch two players go head-to-head onscreen. It's the online equivalent of crowding around an arcade machine and is exceptional fun with strangers or a bunch of friends.   Anyone fancy a game of cops and robbers?   As it stands, the game doesn't support a dedicated tournament mode for online competitive play, but Capcom has confirmed the release of a free patch due in mid June this year which will add the feature. It's a disappointing omission given the comprehensive revamp of the online play in Super Street Fighter IV, but there's more than enough friendly and ranked content here to keep you throwing fireballs for a long time.    The video replay system has also received an overhaul in SSFIV and now automatically records all of your online matches. A dedicated video replay channel lets you view, rename, and rate your clips, save the keepers, and broadcast them instantly to a lobby of friends. Like in Training mode, players who are watching can toggle a display of player button input for one or both fighters, as well as enable a stats box overlay which shows how much damage each character is doing onscreen. Unfortunately, while the feature is undoubtedly a step up from the replay rating system in SFIV, which let accomplished players share their highlight reels, the tool is limited. You can skip between rounds and go into slow-mo mode (which simply halves the frame rate), but there's no way to pause or incrementally rewind the action. As a result, if you're trying to study a better player's replay, you need to rewatch an entire round and can't view just a snippet.    Options disappear further when you're sharing saved replay with friends, because you have to replay the video from the start of the match. Online is segmented into playing and watching, which makes sharing a little clunky. Want to relive an epic comeback or laugh at something amusing that happened in a game you just played? To do this, you need to drop your group, head to the Replay Channel, select your file, save it, rate it, and then invite the group back to a viewing lobby to screen the replay. A save option at the end of a match to move the replay from your capture to your keep pile would have made this process much simpler. Likewise, while the online leaderboard is easy to use and allows for comprehensive stat tracking of both your own and your friends' stats across the network, there's very little video replay integration. There's no way to specifically select replays uploaded by the top players on the charts; instead, you need to view the stat card of each newly uploaded match to determine if the points are high enough to warrant watching it.   Guy tries out some hot ninja-on-ninja action.   As was the case with Street Fighter IV (and indeed online games in general), your Internet connection will determine the quality of your match. The signal strength icon usually gives a good indication of your online performance, and over a smooth connection the game plays like a local Versus match. Profile icons, titles, taunts, and new costume unlocks are rewarded at a steady pace and give you a chance to personalise your online fighter persona. Fans who have saved-game data from SFIV will also receive two bonus unlockable character shader effects available as costumes. It's a nice touch to reward players who upgrade from last year's game, but neither effect is particularly attractive, and they're purely cosmetic.    Super Street Fighter IV stands tall on the broad shoulders of its predecessor. Its large and diverse character roster, balance tweaks, and comprehensive online play reaffirm its place as one of the best fighters this generation, and it's a worthy upgrade even if you own last year's version. The results are improvements in every aspect of the game, making this a must-have for series fans and Internet brawlers.   


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454,Super Street Fighter IV ,9," Character rebalancing, strong online multiplayer modes, and an updated roster help Super Street Fighter IV expand on its predecessor in every way.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426728-2223568-box_ssf4.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-street-fighter-iv-review/1900-6260480/,pos,"
  In a world where downloadable content keeps games fresh long after their shine has started to fade, fighter fans may perceive the retail release of Super Street Fighter IV as a way of double-dipping into the pockets of series devotees twice in consecutive years. But that's not the case here. While the game expands on the solid base established by its precursor, Street Fighter IV, brawlers who dismiss this as merely a lick of paint and a roster update will do themselves a major disservice by passing on its excellent features and gameplay.       Some of the changes, such as the introduction of a second user-selectable ultra combo per character, new online battle modes, and fresh animated cinematics that bookend each storyline, are obvious, but plenty of work has also been done under the hood, away from prying eyes. Each character has been rebalanced to maintain a level playing field; for example, Sagat's Tiger Shot damage has received a minor reduction, while Ryu's fierce Shoryuken now lands two hits instead of one. For a game as ferociously contested online and offline as Street Fighter IV, these fine adjustments are just as important as introducing new fighters to the already well-populated roster.     Super Street Fighter IV adds 10 new playable characters: eight from previous Super Street Fighter, Alpha, and Street Fighter III games, and two brand-new ones. This brings the total roster up to 35 playable characters. The game's complete character roster--which is now available in its entirety from the outset and no longer requires multiple completions of Arcade mode in order to be unlocked--includes the 12 classic world warriors: Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, E. Honda, Zangief, Guile, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison. All of the Street Fighter IV characters return: Cammy, Fei Long, Sakura, Dan, Rose, Gen, Abel, Crimson Viper, El Fuerte, Rufus, Gouken, Akuma, and Seth. New additions to the lineup are ninja schoolgirl Ibuki; young martial arts entrepreneur Makoto; Muay Thai kickboxer Adon; heavy-hitting Native American T. Hawk; Final Fight characters Guy and Cody; beat-crazed dancer Dee Jay; and gentlemanly pugilist Dudley.    Turkish oil wrestler Hakan and taekwondo Shadaloo agent Juri also make their debut. These two handle very differently from each other. While the comical appearance of the bright red Hakan and his body-oil-bathing routine are a bit strange, it does give him a competitive advantage; he uses heavy hits and slides in tandem with his grapple abilities to send opponents crashing into walls or looping in orbit around him like a hula hoop. By contrast, Juri's speed makes her nimble and deadly, perfectly suited to chaining together midair combo kicks, while her twirling EX Senpusha provides wide-reaching antiair defence.    Whether this is your first foray into the series or you're a seasoned vet, there is plenty of help available to get you up to speed with the characters and their abilities in Training and Challenge modes. Training is a free spar area to practice your moves with an AI-controlled opponent, while Challenge walks you through 24 must-know attacks and combos per character. While last year's game forced you to complete a challenge before being allowed to move on, accomplished and impatient players can now work their way through sequentially or skip the basics to tackle more difficult tests. The Survival and Time Attack modes have unfortunately been removed, but they've been replaced by the fun and nostalgic car and barrel destruction bonus stages, which can be played in isolation or woven into Arcade mode.    The game's story loosely holds your hand as it guides you through the fighting tournament the characters are taking part in. The attractive anime-style cutscenes in SFIV have been refreshed and give you another glimpse behind the gloves at the usually ridiculous motivations of the combatants. In true Street Fighter style, cutscenes ask as many questions as they answer, and though the characters' relationships with one another carry on from previous games in the series, first-timers and returning fans should have no trouble following along as the shallow story unfolds and steers you through the short Arcade mode.    You would be this angry too if you had such a gnarly sunburn.   All of the gameplay mechanics introduced in SFIV (such as focus attacks and rival matches) make return appearances, and you can now choose one of two ultra combos per fighter. This grants the choice between a ranged attack or close quarters combo to suit your play style. The ultras are listed only by name, and while they're easy to distinguish for all of the returning characters who were in SFIV (since all the new combos are marked in purple as Ultra II), expect some experimentation to work out which one you want to use for less frequently played characters.     A handful of new environments have been added to the mix and give you the chance to exchange your flurry of punches and kicks in a busy marketplace, atop a Metro City skyscraper construction site, and beside a river in an African landscape during a solar eclipse. They're varied and vibrant, and subtle touches, such as approaching hippopotamuses, cheering crowds, and clay vases that topple and smash as you pummel your opponent, give each locale a lively feel.     Online play has received the biggest improvement in Super Street Fighter IV. The game supports ranked match play, team battles (two vs. two, three vs. three, and four vs. four), and Endless Battle mode. Team battles are one-on-one round-robin matches, with the loser eliminated until a team is crowned victorious. Endless Battle supports a lobby of up to eight players and sees the winner staying on, with the next person in the queue taking on the defending champ. Voice chat during matches gives players on the bench the chance to yell encouragement or talk smack as they watch two players go head-to-head onscreen. It's the online equivalent of crowding around an arcade machine and is exceptional fun with strangers or a bunch of friends.   Anyone fancy a game of cops and robbers?   As it stands, the game doesn't support a dedicated tournament mode for online competitive play, but Capcom has confirmed the release of a free patch due in mid June this year which will add the feature. It's a disappointing omission given the comprehensive revamp of the online play in Super Street Fighter IV, but there's more than enough friendly and ranked content here to keep you throwing fireballs for a long time.    The video replay system has also received an overhaul in SSFIV and now automatically records all of your online matches. A dedicated video replay channel lets you view, rename, and rate your clips, save the keepers, and broadcast them instantly to a lobby of friends. Like in Training mode, players who are watching can toggle a display of player button input for one or both fighters, as well as enable a stats box overlay which shows how much damage each character is doing onscreen. Unfortunately, while the feature is undoubtedly a step up from the replay rating system in SFIV, which let accomplished players share their highlight reels, the tool is limited. You can skip between rounds and go into slow-mo mode (which simply halves the frame rate), but there's no way to pause or incrementally rewind the action. As a result, if you're trying to study a better player's replay, you need to rewatch an entire round and can't view just a snippet.    Options disappear further when you're sharing saved replay with friends, because you have to replay the video from the start of the match. Online is segmented into playing and watching, which makes sharing a little clunky. Want to relive an epic comeback or laugh at something amusing that happened in a game you just played? To do this, you need to drop your group, head to the Replay Channel, select your file, save it, rate it, and then invite the group back to a viewing lobby to screen the replay. A save option at the end of a match to move the replay from your capture to your keep pile would have made this process much simpler. Likewise, while the online leaderboard is easy to use and allows for comprehensive stat tracking of both your own and your friends' stats across the network, there's very little video replay integration. There's no way to specifically select replays uploaded by the top players on the charts; instead, you need to view the stat card of each newly uploaded match to determine if the points are high enough to warrant watching it.    Guy tries out some hot ninja-on-ninja action.   As was the case with Street Fighter IV (and indeed online games in general), your Internet connection will determine the quality of your match. The signal strength icon usually gives a good indication of your online performance, and over a smooth connection the game plays like a local Versus match. Profile icons, titles, taunts, and new costume unlocks are rewarded at a steady pace and give you a chance to personalise your online fighter persona. Fans who have saved-game data from SFIV will also receive two bonus unlockable character shader effects available as costumes. It's a nice touch to reward players who upgrade from last year's game, but neither effect is particularly attractive, and they're purely cosmetic.    Super Street Fighter IV stands tall on the broad shoulders of its predecessor. Its large and diverse character roster, balance tweaks, and comprehensive online play reaffirm its place as one of the best fighters this generation, and it's a worthy upgrade even if you own last year's version. The results are improvements in every aspect of the game, making this a must-have for series fans and Internet brawlers.   


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455,Dead Space 2 ,9," Dead Space 2's thrilling campaign, intense multiplayer, and great bonus material make it an outstanding game and a worthy follow-up to its superb predecessor.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/2/5/2221925-cleands2.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dead-space-2-review/1900-6286943/,pos,"
  Isaac Clarke, the unluckiest space engineer of the 26th century, is more unfortunate than ever in Dead Space 2. 2008's superb Dead Space took the style of survival horror shooter action exemplified by games like Resident Evil 4 and meshed it with an atmospheric deep-space setting and some terrific, distinctly sci-fi gameplay elements, creating something that felt simultaneously familiar and unique. Dead Space 2, on the other hand, will feel thoroughly familiar to those who have played the original; its few improvements over Dead Space are minor tweaks rather than game changers. But blasting the limbs off of hideous necromorphs remains tremendously satisfying, and although the pacing lags a bit during the game's middle portions, this second outing packs more than enough scares and surprises to make stepping back into Isaac Clarke's suit extremely worthwhile. In addition, a new multiplayer component successfully translates Dead Space's particular breed of dismemberment-focused combat into a pulse-pounding team-based experience that casts you as both humans and as the foul necromorphs. And, at least at the time of release, the PlayStation 3 version includes a hefty bonus: the great on-rails shooter Dead Space Extraction (previously a Wii exclusive), at no additional cost. As long as you've got the stomach for it, Dead Space 2 is one sci-fi horror thrill ride you definitely want to take.       The first few moments of Dead Space 2 smartly accomplish a good deal in a very short amount of time. We get a glimpse into Isaac's psychological state, his psyche still tormented by the painful loss he experienced on the Ishimura during the events of the first game. We also learn that the three years since then have been little more than a blur to Isaac--he's in some kind of hospital facility, but has only the vaguest memories of his time there. And almost before you can say ""necromorph outbreak,"" you take control of Isaac as he runs for his life from the hideous creatures who, for reasons that aren't immediately clear, have suddenly appeared and started slaughtering the human population here in the Sprawl, a vast urban area on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Isaac, who said not a word in the original game, has a voice here, and although he's a bit bland as a character, the intensity of the action that surrounds him makes you feel invested in his desperate struggle for survival. Revealing glimpses into the world of Dead Space--such as a trek through a Unitology center that sheds light on the inner workings of the church whose activity is inextricably linked to the necromorph outbreaks--keep the momentum rolling during the early chapters. The game later falls into predictable rhythms for a while, but it picks up steam again toward the end, as the story goes to some unexpected and exciting places and puts almost as much emphasis on Isaac's struggle against his own demons of guilt and regret as on his battles against the necromorphs.    But those battles against the hideous undead mutations remain front and center, where they belong. The key to dropping necromorphs is still blasting off their often frighteningly pointy limbs, which you do with a number of repurposed mining tools and a few actual guns, all of which feel powerful and are immensely fun to use. All of the weapons from Dead Space return in this sequel, including the plasma cutter and the line gun, which fire beams of energy capable of slicing necromorph limbs clean off. Another returning weapon is the ripper, a terrific tool whose spinning blade can result in a noisy, grisly end to necromorphs who make the mistake of getting too close to you. And there are a few new weapons as well: the detonator lets you place laser-triggered trip mines to set explosive traps for approaching necromorphs, and the javelin gun fires spikes at such a tremendous velocity that any necromorph unfortunate enough to be in their path is likely to find itself impaled to a wall.    Show no mercy to necromorphs who have boarded the subway without a ticket.   As you progress, you can upgrade your weapons with nodes that you collect, making them noticeably more effective at limb-ripping and laying waste to necromorphs, resulting in a satisfying sense of progression. What's more, it seems kinesis technology has seen remarkable advances in the three years since Isaac's fateful trip to the Ishimura, and it's now a much more effective offensive tool. Using this ability to pick up severed necromorph limbs or any of the sharp rods conveniently scattered across the Sprawl and hurl them at necromorphs is no substitute for a trusty plasma rifle by your side, but it works well in a pinch. There's a delicious feeling of dishing out poetic justice in turning the necromorphs' own limbs against them, and making use of this tactic is an effective way to conserve your often very limited ammo supply.    The Sprawl's pressurized environment also occasionally offers a spectacularly reckless and dramatic way to eliminate some necromorphs. Certain rooms have windows that you can easily shatter with a shot of your weapon or a hurled object. The instant you do so, everything in the room--furniture, necromorphs, and you--is rapidly pulled toward the window as the air rushes out into the vacuum of space. To save yourself, as you are being pulled toward the opening, you must quickly shoot a sensor that brings a metallic emergency door down over it. It's a risky and thrilling maneuver that brings some action-movie-style craziness to what is often a more grim and atmospheric adventure. These Hollywood set-piece moments and others that involve speeding trains, pursuits by massive necromorphs, and other surprises are great, but they're not entirely enough to keep things from falling into a predictable rhythm for much of the second half. Still, things start revving up again as you approach the conclusion, and the outrageous final moments make for an intense and truly memorable climax.    Despite your powerful and satisfying arsenal, you still feel as if you're in constant danger, and that's never more the case than when you're faced with a few of the terrifying new types of necromorphs that make their debuts here. One new variety, called the pack, resembles a twisted version of a human toddler. Individually very weak, these terrors run at you in groups, emitting bloodcurdling shrieks all the while, and if one manages to leap up onto you, it can cause tremendous damage. The other new standout necromorph type is called a stalker. These hunters display an intelligence previously unseen in necromorphs, making use of cover to try to stay hidden from you until they decide to strike, charging at you with incredible speed. It's particularly satisfying to hit one of these charging beasts with your very useful stasis ability, stopping it in its tracks before blasting it to bits. On the other hand, these creatures are so speedy and so prone to charge at you when your back is turned that Isaac's slow turning ability can at times become less a source of tension than a source of frustration.   The pack are one of the deadly and terrifying new types of necromorph that you encounter.   Stasis remains an invaluable part of your arsenal, but turnabout is fair play, and the bile of another new necromorph type, the puker, slows you down almost as much as your stasis ability slows the necromorphs down, leaving you extremely vulnerable for a short period of time. All of these new necromorph threats fit in perfectly with all the returning varieties from the first game, creating a diverse and deadly assortment of both short- and long-range attackers to keep you constantly on edge as you make your way across the Sprawl. Unfortunately, as in the first game, the camera sometimes contributes to the challenge. When you're backed up against a wall and a necromorph gets too close to you, the camera often won't show you your assailant, and targeting the creature can require you to move around to get a decent angle, which is frustrating when your health is rapidly being slashed away.    You might think that with no mission captain issuing orders to Isaac, this time your objectives might be more diverse and engaging than the go-here, fix-this tasks Isaac was saddled with in Dead Space. Alas, that's not the case. Isaac must still play galactic repairman; you need to fix elevators, deactivate AIs, align solar arrays, repair drills, and so on, none of which is terribly exciting. The occasional simple puzzles you encounter and a basic hacking minigame you must frequently complete provide nice little breaks from all the dismembering, though. Solving those puzzles sometimes involves moving through zero-G environments, and the way you do this has changed, for better and for worse. Whereas before, you looked around for a suitable surface to land on and then automatically jumped across the zero-G space, you can now hover in place and move freely in all directions. This added freedom allows for some fun moments in which you must soar around large open spaces to interact with objects. But you can always orient yourself to the ground with the push of a button, so these changes come at the expense of the delightfully disorienting sensation that went with seeing the Ishimura from dizzying new perspectives as you stood on the wall or ceiling of a chamber.       In addition to playing a lot like its predecessor, Dead Space 2 looks a great deal like the visually impressive original. Dead Space cleverly incorporated your health meter and stasis meter into the back of Isaac's suit, and that's still the case; there's no distracting HUD, which lets you feel all the more immersed in the atmospheric environments. But the size and diversity of the Sprawl give Dead Space 2 a very different atmosphere from the original game. Your journey takes you through hospitals, shopping districts, residential quarters, schools, and other locales, all of which are positively packed with details that create a haunting sense that this is a place with history, a place where, up until very recently, people lived normal lives. This variety also means that the Sprawl is not as consistently oppressive a location as was the Ishimura, and at times you may miss all that time spent in the claustrophobic industrial corridors of the planet-cracker. But Dead Space 2's bigger, more sprawling and action-oriented campaign gives the game its own identity; this is the equivalent of the blockbuster movie sequel Aliens to the first game's more moody and intimate Alien. The sound design is an absolutely essential part of the immersive spell the game casts. Recorded announcements echo eerily through the empty corridors; each blast of your weapons rings with the convincing pound of a powerful industrial tool; and the terrifying shrieks, screams, and wails of the necromorphs send shivers up your spine and adrenaline coursing through your veins.     The single-player campaign clocks in at around 12 hours and offers some solid replay value because you can start new games and carry over all your purchased, upgraded equipment, or even try tackling the ""hard core"" mode, which restarts you from your last save each time you die and permits you to save only three times over the course of the entire campaign. But the real draw to returning to Dead Space 2 time and again is its terrific team-based competitive multiplayer. Divided into humans and necromorphs with up to four players on each side, the multiplayer gives the human team a series of objectives they need to complete within a time limit--interacting with consoles, carrying items, destroying objects, and so on--while the necromorphs' only goal is to stop the humans. The humans all play exactly like Isaac in the single-player, and the opposing players get to choose one of four necromorph types each time they spawn: the elusive pack; the long-range, wall-crawling lurker; the resilient puker; and the hard-hitting spitter.    Of course, the humans have some cool abilities too, like the ability to pull the trigger on a plasma rifle.   The setup will feel immediately familiar to those who have played Left 4 Dead 2's competitive multiplayer, but the Dead Space trappings make it a wholly different experience, and an exhilarating one at that. While the mood of the single-player campaign is one of sustained tension and dread, broken frequently by necromorph attacks, multiplayer games create the frantic sense of a constant, desperate fight for survival against an unending onslaught. Humans are individually tougher than the necromorphs, and they have the advantage of spawning with a health pack in their inventories. But unlike the humans, necromorphs can choose where to spawn, making it possible for them to split the humans up and overpower them. Teams alternate once on each map so all players play both sides, and regardless of which side you're playing on, the mode strongly encourages coordinating with team members; taking down humans as part of an organized necromorph assault is immensely rewarding, as is completing an objective as a human player in the final few seconds of a hard-fought match. You earn experience points and level up as you play, gaining access to new weapons, more stasis power, and other benefits as a human and more powerful attacks as a necromorph, which, while nothing new, makes this multiplayer even more addictive.   Dead Space Extraction brings even more thrills and chills to this package.   The first printing of the PS3 version, marked as the Limited Edition, also includes Dead Space Extraction at no extra cost. This is the same great, story-driven on-rails shooter that debuted on the Wii in 2009, presented here in high-definition and looking much better than ever. Extraction's story introduces some strong characters and reveals fascinating details about the Church of Unitology and those trouble-causing markers they're so obsessed with. And the action is as intense and terrifying as you'd expect from a Dead Space game, with tons of satisfying limb-blasting and an assortment of powerful weapons. The Wii version's excellent controls have been transferred seamlessly to the PlayStation Move, and that's the way this game should be played, though if you don't have one of those handy, you can fumble through it with a DualShock, too. Extraction can also be purchased separately on PlayStation Network for $15; its inclusion here for free is a terrific bonus.    Dead Space 2 doesn't bring with it the same sense of experiencing something utterly new and innovative that its predecessor did. But it's nonetheless an outstanding game, with a campaign that simultaneously leaves you satisfied and eager for more, and intense multiplayer that gives you a great reason to keep coming back to this terrifying universe. Toss in Dead Space Extraction, and Dead Space 2 becomes a great value, bursting with all the gory, scary sci-fi action you can handle. Unless you're just plain chicken, this is a sci-fi horror adventure you definitely want to suit up for.  


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456,Syberia ,3.5, This DS port of the classic PC adventure game is a pale shadow of its original self.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/2/9/2217329-syberiaboxart.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/syberia-review/1900-6203023/,neg,"
  If you had to make a list of all the adventure games you could pick to be ported to the Nintendo DS, Syberia would probably land at the very bottom. The 2002 PC point-and-clicker from Microids and Belgian graphic novelist Benoit Sokal was a superb game in its day, but it was also loaded with the kind of extravagant graphical detail that just can't be adapted to a handheld system very well without a complete overhaul. Unfortunately, developer Tetraedge Games has moved the game to its new platform with few changes, which results in a clunky pixel hunt featuring none of the surreal magic of the original game.   Kate Walker, at least, has survived the transition to the DS intact.   Even Syberia's compellingly bizarre story has taken some lumps here. Although you still play as Kate Walker, a New York attorney trying to unravel the many mysteries around a French toy company and its automaton-creating heir, presentation issues interfere with the tale-telling so much that it can be very hard to figure out what exactly is going on. All of the voice samples from the original game have been stripped away, and the music has been dropped to a single fraction of the original score that annoyingly plays over and over again. This gives the game a silent-movie vibe in which Kate never gives any tips or makes any observations about her surroundings. She speaks up only through brief blurbs of text when you are blocked from proceeding into a new area because you haven't wrapped up everything in your present location. So you get the odd ""Hey, I can't do that yet!"" comment and pretty much nothing else.    This is a real drawback because more direction is desperately needed to make heads or tails out of Syberia. The graphics of the PC version of the game have simply been shrunk down and pixelated to fit onto the DS screens, which makes it very tough to solve puzzles. Some of the objects that you need to pick up are incredibly tiny in their new handheld format, no more than a couple of pixels wide. Visuals are quite blurry as well, making everything so indistinct that you can rarely tell what it is that you're supposed to be looking at, let alone what you might be able to do with it. No effort has been made to ensure that such Lilliputian objects stand out from the backgrounds, either. If you aren't looking for a specific item such as a key on a desk, for instance, chances are awfully good that you won't spot it.   The diminutive DS screen struggles to do Syberia's visuals justice.   The stylus-dependent interface fails to compensate for these visual issues. The stylus stands in for a mouse cursor and lets you move Kate around on the lower touch screen and open the inventory that is also displayed on the upper screen. You can also select an eye icon that can be scrolled around to see which areas light up with gears, a pick-up hand, or lips indicating that a conversation can be initiated. The control scheme works rather poorly, though, because it is inaccurate. For example, you’ll find yourself accidentally entering a doorway on the top of the screen when you tap a roadway down at the bottom. Movement mistakes are costly, too, given that Kate ambles across every screen at a slow walk and there are no shortcuts when trying to exit an area. Dragging the stylus over every square millimeter of the screen to find objects that you can barely see with the naked eye also isn't a great deal of fun. Using the stylus in this way seems like a cheap dodge to get around the graphical problems inherent in porting a game directly from the PC to a tiny handheld. This choice let the developer avoid the total redesign that would have properly scaled down the visuals for the new platform, but at the cost of turning the entire game into a spectacularly tedious pixel hunt.    The bottom line is that there are much better adventure choices available on the DS than Syberia. This once-impressive PC game has been awkwardly crammed into a tiny cartridge with little attention to how the transition would affect playability, and the results are exactly as bad as you might expect.  
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457,Blue's Journey ,3.5, Blue's Journey gives you a heaping helping of wasted potential with a generous side of crummy graphics.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/1/4/7/2212147-582029_88790_front.jpg,NEO,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/blues-journey-review/1900-6183999/,neg,"
  One glance at Blue's Journey may suggest cute side-scrolling fun. Don't be fooled. If you're unlucky enough to play it for yourself, you'll discover that Blue's Journey is just a repetitive run-and-jump action game that frequently resembles the sort of home brew that was prolific on the PC in the early 1990's.    There's nothing wrong with the basic design. As Blue--or two Blues, if you convince another player to join you--you have to save the Raguy kingdom from the invading Daruma Empire in typical 2D-action fashion. You jump between platforms, slap enemies with your leaf weapon, and battle a boss every couple of levels. Pouncing on enemies or hitting them with your leaf stuns them. A second whack will send most enemies flying off the screen, or you can pick them up and throw them into other enemies. Different weapon pickups increase the range of your leaf or let you use projectiles, such as boomerangs and honeypot bombs. There are dozens of levels, which are filled with optional paths and hidden shops that will sell you health items or warp you ahead.   One day, Blue went on a journey into a dull, repetitive world.   You can also shrink Blue to miniscule size at the touch of a button. He loses his attack capability, but he can fit into tiny passages and jump twice as high. This comes in handy for finding flower stashes, which gives you more flower bucks to spend in shops. It's also handy for grabbing the top-of-the-bell-plant thing that waits at the end of some levels and rewards you with bonus points for your leaping efforts.    This stuff sounds solid in theory, but the pieces aren't fashioned into a decent game. You're constantly fighting the same enemies and the weapons don't really vary all that much. The levels also employ the same lengthy expanses of land interspersed with predictable pitfalls and crushers. Blue's shrink ability is neat, but it's only required in a couple of spots. Depending on the paths you take, you may never have to use it at all. Worst of all, the bosses, though they look different, all feel the same. You jump over their projectiles, stun smaller enemies, and throw those smaller enemies into the boss until it's defeated.    Blue's world doesn't look too good, either. Bear in mind, Blue's Journey was originally made to run on the Neo Geo, a 16-bit arcade system known for multilayered backdrops and screens filled with dozens of massive character sprites. Blue and his enemies are barely more than two inches tall on an average-sized television while the backgrounds are put together with carbon-copied tiles that are heavily recycled. Some of the jungle backdrops are lush, but climbing up hills made of the same brown tiles and running across platforms made up entirely of gray bricks is a complete buzz kill. The animation is choppy and repetitive too. Overall, the graphics give the impression that amateur programmers put the game together using a limited pre-fab construction set in their spare time.    Just about the only good things that can be said about Blue's Journey are that the cartoon-style vocal sound effects are nice. The music is also an excellent collection of tunes that are highly reminiscent of the soundtrack Sega concocted for its Sonic the Hedgehog games. Of course, you'd be crazy to shell out 900 Wii points ($9) to bring home this stinker just because the music is good. And don't try to foist it on the children in the house. Despite the kid-friendly looks and unlimited continues, the game's repetitive nature plus shoddy presentation will have them pressing the home button then searching for something else to play within minutes.    
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458,Star Soldier ,3.5, Star Soldier is an intensely difficult shooter made almost impossible by shoddy programming.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/8/5/2209185-nes_starsoldier.jpg,NES,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-soldier-review/1900-6177921/,neg,"
  When Star Soldier came out for the NES back in 1988, it was held by many to be a cutting-edge, challenging entry in the vertical space-shooter genre. However, now that it's available for the Wii's Virtual Console, it's hard to fathom how anyone could enjoy this game. The visuals and audio are good compared to other NES games, but the action and design really aren't all that special. Furthermore, the intense difficulty stems just as much from poor programming as it does from intentionally coded challenges.    You know the drill. You have to pilot a spacecraft through 16 vertically scrolling levels, dodge and shoot the tiny enemies that appear, and destroy the boss at the end of each level. Every power-up you collect adds another laser to your ship, which is the long and the short of the weapon upgrades that are available to you. There's nothing amazing about the graphics or audio, but they were considered cutting-edge in the NES days. The black star fields and modestly detailed space station structures look nice, the screen is often loaded with alien ships without any hint of flicker or slowdown, and the single, looping music track has a motivating beat.   It's impossible to tell if scenery is above or below your ship, which often leads to a loss of firepower at the worst possible time.   The one interesting wrinkle is that you can avoid enemy fire by passing under certain structures, at the cost of not being able to shoot back while obscured. Unfortunately, that ability isn't as useful as you'd think it would be, because it's impossible to tell whether or not a structure is actually above or below your ship. The top-down view doesn't show depth and there's no shading whatsoever. They didn't even attempt to color higher altitude structures differently than lower ones. The only way to know if you can hide under something is to fly towards it and hope for the best. More often than not, you'll find yourself avoiding the foreground scenery entirely, in order to avoid the frustrating situation of having your firepower interrupted while you're dealing with a flurry of enemy ships.    As it is, Star Soldier is sadistically difficult. Alien ships are constantly swarming into view, deaths knock you back to a point much earlier in the level, and the bosses actually make you start the entire level over again if you don't destroy them in a short period of time. Besides the scenery constantly getting in your way, other programming flaws contribute to transform this already challenging game into an unfair one. Your own ship's hitbox is too large, the collision detection is unreliable, and enemies turn invisible when they're near the edges of the screen. All told, you never know if your bullets are going to hit anything or when the scenery is going to render you impotent.    Unless you're a masochist who gets off on frustration, don't waste 500 Wii points on Star Soldier. If you're looking for a vertical shoot-'em-up to play, spend an additional 100 points and purchase the TurboGrafx-16 renditions of Blazing Lasers or Soldier Blade instead.    
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459,Ninja Jajamaru-kun ,3.5," Ninjas are awesome, but this 2D action game featuring a tiny ninja is tedious, ugly, and downright uncomfortable to play.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/5/8/1/12906-40581.jpg,NES,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ninja-jajamaru-kun-review/1900-6181904/,neg,"
  Getting the chance to download and play games that weren't originally released in the West is one of the better perks of the Wii's Virtual Console service. However, not all of the imports that companies put up for sale on the service are worth your time or money. Case in point: Ninja Jajamaru-kun, a simplistic 2D action game for the Nintendo Entertainment System that's downright shoddy even when evaluated by 1985's standards.    In the game, you play a young ninja named Jajamaru who's trying to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend. The quest involves a looping sequence of 24 separate stages, each containing four floors and spanning roughly two screens wide by one screen tall. Within each stage, there are eight enemies running around, which you need to eliminate in order to move on to the next stage. To that end, Jajamaru can run, jump, and throw shurikens straight ahead. The whole idea is to bash ceilings with Jajamaru's head and move from floor to floor shooting enemies without getting shot in the process. Occasionally, the bricks you knock out of the ceiling will leave behind power-up items, which you can grab for bonus points or to make Jajamaru invincible.   The joke's on Jajamaru. No matter how many stages he clears, he never gets the girl.   The game's biggest problem is that there's basically nothing to it. The background decorations change and the enemies absorb more shots as you go deeper into the game, but the actual stage layouts and artificial intelligence behavior remain the same. On top of that, the enemies don't do much apart from run back and forth and throw knives at you when you approach. Every stage feels the same. That's bad, considering the game's whole dynamic involves playing through as many stages as you can in order to rack up a high score.    As you'd expect for an NES game produced in 1985, the graphics and audio are rather crude. Jaleco did manage to squeeze some atmosphere out of the music, at least, by organizing the beeps-and-pops output by the NES into a couple of genuinely interesting pieces of Japanese classical music. The sound effects are just a collection of ticking noises, though. Regarding the graphics, the tiny character sprites barely animate, and every background consists of a single splash of color, some bricks, and some ugly-looking trees. Not that you'll be able to pay attention to any of those details, because the scrolling and character movements are so jerky that your eyes will begin to blink, water, and exhibit other signs of physical discomfort after barely a minute of playtime.    Ninja Jajamaru-kun is tedious and ugly, and it actually induces physical discomfort. You'd have to be crazy to dole out six dollars to subject yourself to this kind of pain.    
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460,Super Thunder Blade ,3.5," Super Thunder Blade is a short-lived, choppy mess that isn't worth 800 Wii points.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/9/0/2208790-super_thunder_blade.jpg,GEN,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-thunder-blade-review/1900-6179400/,neg,"
  Back in the late 1980s, Sega was all about using 2D graphics to make three-dimensional shoot-'em-up games. Two of those games, Space Harrier and After Burner, were very well received, so much so that the Sega Genesis versions have been repackaged multiple times in various classics collections. Another game, Super Thunder Blade, wasn't as fortunate. It wasn't all that hot in the arcades, and it became a choppy, nearly unplayable mess when it was later ported to the Sega Genesis. Now, that cruddy Genesis port has appeared for sale on the Wii's Virtual Console service.   Super Thunder Blade was inspired by the 1983 feature film, Blue Thunder.   Thematically, Super Thunder Blade isn't much different from Space Harrier. As your helicopter moves forward in the pseudo-3D environment, you have to dodge the scenery, avoid enemy rockets, and blow up as many enemy tanks and aircraft as possible. You can press the fire button to unleash a constant spray of machine-gun fire, but you'll find that most of your targets meet their fate at the hands of the seeker missiles that automatically launch every couple of seconds while you're holding the button down. The other button lets you hover, which comes in handy when you're about to ram into a building or need an extra moment to move out of the way of a bullet barrage.    The two main sections of each stage, as well as the mid-boss battle, employ a behind-the-chopper viewpoint that fakes a 3D perspective by scaling the two-dimensional graphics so that objects grow larger as you move closer to them. Even today, the juxtaposition of perspectives and the way 2D graphics are used to depict a 3D world is quite refreshing. The rock-inspired music and constant explosions aren't bad, either. Mid-boss battles are satisfying because the targets tend to be large tank vehicles that you need to wail on until they explode. On the other hand, end-level bosses are actually kind of boring. The game switches to a more traditional top-down viewpoint for these skirmishes, which are merely survival runs in which you need to dodge rockets and blow up gun turrets until you reach an imaginary finish line.    Worst of all is the choppy frame rate. Instead of gradually moving toward you, objects appear to be teleporting. In the second stage, you'll move to the left or right to avoid a stone pillar that looks as if it's moving up the middle of the course, only to watch it suddenly appear directly in front of the spot you just moved to. Wham! You also run the risk of developing a headache as a result of the eyestrain brought on by trying to keep track of so many flickering, teleporting objects.    Other little annoyances add insult to injury. The hit detection is unreliable, the boss battles are all very similar, and most levels seem downright impossible until you discover the one repetitive flight pattern that makes them a total breeze. If you play the game long enough, you'll be able to get through the levels without paying much attention to the choppy graphics, but that's no fun. Furthermore, the game lasts only four levels, so it's also short-lived. Super Thunder Blade wasn't worth the 50 dollars it cost when it was originally released, and it's not worth the 800 Wii points ($8) that Sega is asking now.   
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461,J.J. and Jeff ,3.5, Slippery characters and sketchy collision detection ruin this scatological take on the run-and-jump genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/1/0/2219010-jj_and_jeff.jpg,TG16,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jj-and-jeff-review/1900-6172194/,neg,"
  Nobody liked J.J. and Jeff when it was originally published for the TurboGrafx-16 roughly 17 years ago, so it's a bit of a surprise to see that Hudson has gone through the effort of making it available for the Wii's Virtual Console. The game's bathroom-inspired humor is occasionally amusing, but the slippery characters and sketchy collision detection render this Super Mario Bros. wannabe practically unplayable.   Getting hit on the head by a giant bird crap will cost you some health--just like real life!   J.J. and Jeff are two geeky detectives who have set out to rescue a kidnapped businessman in a land full of wild dogs and snapping crabs. It doesn't matter which character you pick. Jeff wears sunglasses and J.J. doesn't, but they both run at the same speed and jump to the same height, and they both can perform the same high kick and low spray-paint attacks. Getting through all 24 levels contained within the game's six areas primarily involves jumping between platforms and bouncing atop enemies. At the end of each area, you won't encounter an angry dinosaur named Bowser. You will, however, have to kick the bejeezus out of a muscular goon who doffs a new wig every time you meet him. Touching enemies will take away some of your vitality meter, while falling into a pit or landing in fire will outright cost you one of your lives. Conversely, you regain vitality by collecting fruit items or by gambling coins in the slot machines that are frequently hidden in the roadside bathrooms you come across.    Toilet humor is the game's defining aspect. The level layouts aren't especially memorable, the squeaky sounds and repetitive beats are forgettable, and the large characters and colorful backgrounds are merely passable. In 1990, J.J. and Jeff etched itself into the minds of stubborn TurboGrafx owners with frequent references to excrement. Birds will often drop a pile your way as they fly overhead, and other animals will sometimes target you with their dung as they recoil from one of your attacks. About once per level, you'll encounter the character you didn't pick standing idly in the background or hurling soda cans at you from a garbage bin. However, on rare occasions, you'll notice that he's standing there with his back to you with his knees bent slightly, as if he is urinating.   In the Japanese version of the game, there is a telltale stream of urine between this man's legs.   Considering that the Mortal Kombat controversy and the ESRB rating system arose a couple of years after J.J. and Jeff was originally published, you might think it's insane that parents and politicians never made a stink over the game's scat jokes. Part of that is because the TurboGrafx didn't quite have the popularity of other consoles from the era. The other reason is that a good number of people who actually played J.J. and Jeff shut the system off out of frustration within a couple minutes and, as a consequence, didn't realize the extent of the game's toilet humor. Momentum causes the characters to keep sliding when you try to stop or change direction, which makes it almost impossible to survive the brutal jump sequences that are commonplace throughout the game. On top of that, the collision detection varies so much that you'll frequently fall through the edge of a platform or take damage from an enemy that you clearly weren't touching. Fighting with the controls and losing lives for no good reason sure takes the piss out of the game's bathroom humor.    J.J. and Jeff is probably the only console-based video game to incorporate dodging animal droppings as a gameplay feature. While that's neat from an antiestablishment perspective, the presence of poo doesn't make up for the game's sloppy programming.  
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462,Silent Debuggers ,3.5," Choppy graphics and simplistic, repetitive design ruin this early attempt at a first-person shooter.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/4/3/2219443-tg16_silentdebuggers.jpg,TG16,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/silent-debuggers-review/1900-6179854/,neg,"
  At first glance, Silent Debuggers for the TurboGrafx-16 looks like a sci-fi rendition of Eye of the Beholder. At second glance, you'll realize it's just a clunky, choppy, repetitive grind that's just about no fun to play.    In the game, you play the role of a bounty hunter that has to eliminate the aliens occupying the six floors of a space station before the security system blows the station to bits. While a funky, beat-filled soundtrack plays in the background, you'll need to pay attention to the onscreen radar and the text clues provided by your partner in the control room to find the rooms where the ugly beasts are holed up. At that point, you'll mash the attack button and trade blows until, hopefully, your alien opponent explodes in a flourish of pixilated guts. From start to finish, 100 minutes is all the time you have to wander the halls, blast aliens, and make frequent trips back to designated recharge rooms to replenish your shields and weapons.   These debuggers are silent but deadly.   Your movements and those of your enemies are very limited. Pushing up or down on the control pad will cause you to move forward or step back one whole room, and tapping left or right will rotate your view in 90-degree increments. If you encounter an enemy, it'll either stay put in the middle of the screen to hack away at you, or move straight back to avoid you. You have the same two options: shoot or back up. There's no strafing or ducking. As you'd expect, mindlessly mashing the attack button gets boring real fast, especially because the rooms on each floor of the station all look alike, apart from the color of the walls and the occasional sign marker.    Simplicity aside, the worst thing about the game is that it's literally a pain to watch. The beautifully drawn anime-style opening scenes give way to a flickering, choppy mess that will make your eyes and head hurt if you play for too long. When you walk or turn, the view doesn't change smoothly. Instead, one static 3D scene is quickly replaced by another, with only one or two intermediate frames in-between. A typical enemy attack consists of two alternating frames that show the creature's claws or mouth ""moving."" If you can imagine walking down the street while rapidly opening and closing your eyes, that's what playing Silent Debuggers feels like. It's not a comfortable feeling. It's certainly not worth the 600 Wii points.  
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463,Ozzy & Drix ,3.5," Ozzy & Drix has nice 3D visuals, but the game comes up short in every other aspect.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/6/9/1/18329-53691.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ozzy-and-drix-review/1900-6090575/,neg,"
 Games that look three-dimensional but play in two dimensions can turn out wonderfully. Klonoa and Viewtiful Joe are prime examples. The overall design just has to be diverse enough to keep players interested long after the glitz and glamour of the 3D visuals wears off. The environments and characters in Ozzy & Drix on the GBA are vibrant and lively, and the varying camera angles do a great job of conveying a solid 3D world. Past these cutting-edge visuals, however, there's nothing left but a simple run-and-jump platformer--and it's a bad one at that.  Despite the nice 3D look, Ozzy & Drix is just a low-rent side-scroller.  The concept behind Ozzy & Drix is pretty cool. Ozzy is a white blood cell, and Drix is a flu tablet. They're two tiny cops living inside a full-size human being. All of the blood vessels and organs contained within the city of Hector are represented as freeways and skyscrapers, and the citizens that live there are the cells, amino acids, and chemical compounds that keep Hector alive. In the game, Ozzy and Drix get called to action when an evil virus named Strepfinger kidnaps the mayor and brings together a group of menacing germs to attack the city. Your job is to hop and jump through Hector's body and battle these germs at the end of each level.  Developer Raylight Studios has come up with an impressive 3D engine here. Ozzy, Drix, and the dozen or so enemies are heavily animated, and the scenery (for the most part) is large, easy to see, and full of perspective. There are a few situations where the game flexes its 3D muscle to rotate a large structure, such as a gland or a tooth, which really helps to give the player an idea of what it's like to exist inside a human body. After every boss encounter, you'll also get to watch as story scenes that use the game's 3D graphics play out.  Sadly, the 3D graphics don't hide the fact that this is easily one of the plainest platform-style games ever produced for the Game Boy Advance. There are long stretches in the side-scrolling levels where you're doing nothing but running to the right--without any enemies or gaps to deal with. When you do encounter an enemy, chances are good that you'll need to hop over an incoming spit-wad before making an attack of your own, since the CPU can see you coming long before you see an enemy appear onscreen. Besides the standard side-view stages, roughly half the game's levels are first-person driving stages that are set on the blood vessel and nervous system pathways found inside Hector's body. To reach your destination in one piece, you need to dodge passing traffic and avoid the parasitic mines that Strepfinger has laid out for you. These driving stages are more of an afterthought than anything else, though. Your side-to-side movement is pretty limited, and the same hindering objects just repeat over and over again. The boss battles at the end of each stage are similarly underwhelming. You can beat most of them just by rapidly tapping buttons or keeping the accelerator pressed.  The cutscenes are rendered with 3D graphics too.  At times, the game's 3D graphics can hinder your ability to play. It's often impossible to land a clear shot on an enemy because there's no way to know if the barrel of your pistol is lined up with the enemy. Frequently, the perspective will change midway through a jump, so you'll soon discover that the ledge you're aiming for is a little farther out than you had originally thought. The sluggish controls don't help, either. There's a brief delay between the instances when you push the jump button and when your character actually makes his move, so it's easy to just slip right off of an edge or to bounce off of a trampoline and into the void below.  Ozzy & Drix is an example of putting too many eggs in one basket. The 3D visuals are great, but every other aspect of the game comes up short. The level designs are boring; the controls are terrible; you can beat it in an hour; and there's no compelling reason to play through a second time except to view a piddly gallery of 3D character models. 
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464,World Series of Poker Hold'em Legend ,9," If poker is your card game, then make World Series of Poker Hold'em Legend your video game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/2/1/9/68334-143219.jpg,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-series-of-poker-holdem-legend-review/1900-6268143/,pos,"
  It seems as though there are two kinds of poker video games: stripped-down, lazy efforts that were apparently developed in the hope that having ""poker"" in the title would bring in sales, and games created by hardworking developers looking to create the next addiction for virtual gamblers. Poker fans, listen up: the developers of World Series of Poker Hold'em Legend have made the good kind of poker game, just for you. In fact, this game runs circles around the vast majority of its competition on the App Store.    Play high-stakes, no-limit Texas hold 'em in fancy licensed casinos.   While the only version of poker you get with Hold'em Legend is Texas hold 'em, you do get several variations on the classic card game. The core game mode is called Legend Career, and in it you play through seven increasingly upscale venues with increasingly pricey buy-ins. Different venues offer different variations on Texas hold 'em, too. Video introductions of each venue play the first time you unlock a new area. Nine opponents greet you in each match, and some of them even have video intros, which gives them more of a personality.    If you're not already a card shark, fear not. This game is friendly to beginners and pros alike. Each variation of hold 'em is explained the first time you click on it, and none of them are hard to grasp. During play, a bar next to your cards gives you an idea of how strong your hand is based on the information available. Some AI opponents have ""tells,"" which are presented as a question mark for a weak hand and an exclamation point for a killer hand, though unfortunately there's no quick-reference chart for beginners that explains which hands beat which.    Unlike many other mobile poker games, Hold'em Legend also supports multiplayer, which comes in two flavors: online multiplayer and local heads-up Bluetooth. Online multiplayer adds a lot to the game, since it allows for up to nine players to gather at a single table, using their limited time each turn to check, raise, or fold. This mode moves reasonably fast but still gives you enough time to make your decisions, and the active user base is big enough that you probably won't have to wait long for a game to fill up. There's no way to communicate to other players during the game, but considering the limited real estate on your iDevice's screen, that's not a big problem. In the heads-up Bluetooth mode, you face off against one other player locally. It works just fine, though it supports only two players, rather than the full table of nine. You can work around this issue by having your eight buddies click into an online multiplayer match at the same time, which will often make everyone join the same match.   Some of your opponents have video introductions and colorful personalities.   If that weren't enough, Hold'em Legend has a ton of extras. The game offers seamlessly integrated online leaderboards, detailed personal stats, and a healthy number of achievements to unlock. You can even listen to your own music while you play. The graphics are clean, and the interface is simple and user-friendly. Whether or not you're a diehard poker fan, you'll find that this is a well-designed game that's worth the price.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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465,FIFA 11 ,9," FIFA 11 is more playable, refined, and feature-packed than any FIFA game before it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426697-711mancwnsl._sl1000_.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-11-review/1900-6280042/,pos,"
  After a steady rise in quality over the last few years, FIFA 10 added yet more welcome new features and game modes while refining the core gameplay. It's a tough act to follow for FIFA 11, but thanks to more realistic gameplay, new game modes, and more features, this is the best and most comprehensive FIFA game yet. The main improvements are refinements to the gameplay, rather than revolutionary new game modes as we've seen in previous years, but they're significant enough to make EA Sports' latest offering well worth the upgrade.       The changes to this year's game aren't all immediately apparent, but they are welcome and make the game deeper and more realistic. The biggest change is the physicality between players--whether it's a winger holding off a defender, or two players tussling in the box, FIFA 11's players are constantly fighting each other for the ball. This increased tactility has an impact on the gameplay, adding an emphasis on player strength and speed, making player interaction more brutal, and producing some nice touches that add to the realism. For example, if you perform a crunching tackle, the tackler will sportingly tap the downed player on the back as he runs by to collect the ball. There's also much more variation to the passes and shots; you won't see the same shots being taken repeatedly, while positioning, footedness, and environmental factors such as rain all have a real and notable impact. Scoring is also more difficult than before; improved goalies are harder to beat than in FIFA 10, and shots, particularly those lobbed over the keeper, are harder to get in the net.    Much more emphasis has also been put on individual players and how they operate within the team, thanks to the new Personality Plus feature. This is a system of attributes that affect players' skills, from how accurately they pass the ball to how quickly they can control it from the air. Topflight teams boast players with skills across the board, and to get the most from players you need to know how to play to their individual strengths. For example, a player like Wayne Rooney has an inherent ability to score from short range, whereas Steven Gerrard is a much better long-distance shooter. The system works well, and you can feel the difference between players as you control them on the pitch. This personality system also extends to celebrations--you can now hold down the A button to do trademark post-goal dances from famous players, and if you're online, you can also interact with the goal scorer with new team-based celebrations.    The only new game mode in FIFA 11 is Career, which combines the Be a Pro and Manager modes from previous games and gives them a slicker visual presentation. You start out your 15-year career as a player, a manager, or a combination of the two, with responsibility for different activities depending on your role. As a player, you can choose to take control of an individual team member, such as your Virtual Pro player, or play as the entire team. Since you can choose from both options on a match-by-match basis, you can mix things up during your career to keep it interesting. As a manager, you have considerations such as bringing new talent to the club and making sure all your players get experience on the pitch. There are slight tweaks to the management side this year, such as a two-stage negotiation process that also involves wage discussions with the player. It's an improvement and adds depth to proceedings, while coach feedback allows you to keep better tabs on your squad than before. The career mode has definitely improved the existing modes by rolling them into one structure--the presentation is great, you have more flexibility to play games in different roles, and you can compare your career accomplishments with friends' accomplishments on online leaderboards.    FIFA 11's gameplay is more realistic than ever, rewarding players who choose strategy over relentless attack.   The headline feature this year is the new option to play as a goalkeeper in offline and online game modes. The prospect of being the keeper may not sound that exciting, but the controls are intuitive and it can be fun to play as him in short doses. The camera shifts to a behind-the-player perspective, and you control movement with the left stick and diving with the right, with the aim of maintaining a good position while diving at the right moment. The process is made easier by visible lines that predict the path of the ball, as well as a marker that shows the optimal position to be in, and you can even snap to this spot by holding the left bumper. While it's inevitable that much of your time is spent waiting around, you can shout instructions to your team in offline modes by pressing buttons to indicate when they should cross, pass, and shoot, allowing you some tactical control over the game. Ultimately, it's a welcome addition to finally control the keeper, but it's unlikely that you'll want to play through an entire career as one unless you're eager to unlock achievements for doing so. The main benefit comes online, where it's fun to play as the keeper on an occasional basis.    Online, FIFA 11 is as robust and fun as ever, and it boasts 11 versus 11 online play for the first time. This is the first FIFA game to include EA's online pass system, so you need to input a code included in the box in order to play online. The Live Season feature continues, updating real-world player data throughout the football season for 400 MS points per league, or 800 MS points for all five. The hospitality settings option, which was introduced in 2010 FIFA World Cup and saves your FIFA settings to EA's servers, also makes an appearance, allowing you to import your preferences from the earlier game. The online game modes are all familiar--head-to-head ranked and unranked matches are still a lot of fun online and mostly lag-free, while the 10-versus-10 team play mode has been expanded to 11-versus-11 for the first time. You can also play the game with up to four players locally on one machine.   The new career mode combines the best of Be A Pro and Manager mode and combines them into one well presented game mode.   It only takes a couple of button presses to jump into any of the online match types, but there are also lobbies for those who wish to tweak their match options or chat with other players before a game. You can also set up friend leagues for others to join, with multiple matches played between each player in the league in order to decide the victor. You can also play ranked matches with your Virtual Pro player, and set up your own club with your Virtual Pro and recruit other players to join your team. In all, there are an abundance of online game types for you to get involved in. That said, there are still areas where the game could be improved; being able to download your Game Face for your Virtual Pro is neat, but it still needs to be done through a fiddly process involving a computer and a camera or webcam, rather than an Xbox Live Vision camera.    FIFA 11 preserves the series' tradition of slick presentation, with excellent commentary, easy-to-navigate menus, and a great soundtrack. The commentary is insightful and is naturally delivered, with anecdotes about the history behind the major clubs and recognition of derby matches, although the commentators will frequently start to make a point only to cut themselves off when something else happens. This year's soundtrack is also particularly noteworthy, with 33 tracks from the likes of Gorillaz, LCD Soundsystem, and Mark Ronson, and the ability to play weekly podcasts in the game is a nice feature. The commentary, presentation, and music have always been good, though; the only standout addition is a leaderboard on the main menu that compares your accomplishments to those of your friends.    Off the pitch, there are a couple of new additions that add to an already robust set of features. The creation centre allows you to create players and teams through a Web browser and then share them with other people to download in the game. The customisation options are impressive, letting you tailor the look, stats, and even mental approach (such as ""argues with referees"") of your player. A replay theatre has also been added--highlights are automatically compiled at the end of each match, and you can save them in video form locally or online. If you save them locally, the video format avoids the need to load the game up to watch them back in-engine, although the videos are saved in a low-resolution format. The music and chants feature is also a good addition, allowing you to import songs and audio clips into the game, with an impressive level of customisation. For instance, you can choose a specific song to play when your favourite team scores a goal, and your chosen recording will sound as if it's coming through the stadium speakers.   The option to play as a goalkeeper is welcome, and you can shout commands to the rest of your team when you're off the ball.   Thanks to key improvements to the core gameplay this year, FIFA 11 is the best and most addictive version of the game yet. The improved player characteristics and animations result in a deep and rewarding experience that feels as exciting and unpredictable as the real thing. It also boasts key online and offline improvements, with full 11 versus 11 online play for the first time in the genre, and a new career mode that brings together the single-player game in a much more enjoyable way than before. There may not be any new revolutionary new game modes this year, but with matches, leagues, tournaments, multiple career options, and 11 versus 11 online, it's as feature-packed a football game as you could want.


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466,FIFA 11 ,9," FIFA 11 is more playable, refined, and feature-packed than any FIFA game before it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426697-711mancwnsl._sl1000_.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-11-review/1900-6280381/,pos,"
  After a steady rise in quality over the last few years, FIFA 10 added yet more welcome new features and game modes while refining the core gameplay. It's a tough act to follow for FIFA 11, but thanks to more realistic gameplay, new game modes, and more features, this is the best and most comprehensive FIFA game yet. The main improvements are refinements to the gameplay, rather than revolutionary new game modes as we've seen in previous years, but they're significant enough to make EA Sports' latest offering well worth the upgrade.       The changes to this year's game aren't all immediately apparent, but they are welcome and make the game deeper and more realistic. The biggest change is the physicality between players--whether it's a winger holding off a defender, or two players tussling in the box, FIFA 11's players are constantly fighting each other for the ball. This increased tactility has an impact on the gameplay, adding an emphasis on player strength and speed, making player interaction more brutal, and producing some nice touches that add to the realism. For example, if you perform a crunching tackle, the tackler will sportingly tap the downed player on the back as he runs by to collect the ball. There's also much more variation to the passes and shots; you won't see the same shots being taken repeatedly, while positioning, footedness, and environmental factors such as rain all have a real and notable impact. Scoring is also more difficult than before; improved goalies are harder to beat than in FIFA 10, and shots, particularly those lobbed over the keeper, are harder to get in the net.    Much more emphasis has also been put on individual players and how they operate within the team, thanks to the new Personality Plus feature. This is a system of attributes that affect players' skills, from how accurately they pass the ball to how quickly they can control it from the air. Topflight teams boast players with skills across the board, and to get the most from players you need to know how to play to their individual strengths. For example, a player like Wayne Rooney has an inherent ability to score from short range, whereas Steven Gerrard is a much better long-distance shooter. The system works well, and you can feel the difference between players as you control them on the pitch. This personality system also extends to celebrations--you can now hold down the A button to do trademark post-goal dances from famous players, and if you're online, you can also interact with the goal scorer with new team-based celebrations.    The only new game mode in FIFA 11 is Career, which combines the Be a Pro and Manager modes from previous games and gives them a slicker visual presentation. You start out your 15-year career as a player, a manager, or a combination of the two, with responsibility for different activities depending on your role. As a player, you can choose to take control of an individual team member, such as your Virtual Pro player, or play as the entire team. Since you can choose from both options on a match-by-match basis, you can mix things up during your career to keep it interesting. As a manager, you have considerations such as bringing new talent to the club and making sure all your players get experience on the pitch. There are slight tweaks to the management side this year, such as a two-stage negotiation process that also involves wage discussions with the player. It's an improvement and adds depth to proceedings, while coach feedback allows you to keep better tabs on your squad than before. The career mode has definitely improved the existing modes by rolling them into one structure--the presentation is great, you have more flexibility to play games in different roles, and you can compare your career accomplishments with friends' accomplishments on online leaderboards.    FIFA 11's gameplay is more realistic than ever, rewarding players who choose strategy over relentless attack.   The headline feature this year is the new option to play as a goalkeeper in offline and online game modes. The prospect of being the keeper may not sound that exciting, but the controls are intuitive and it can be fun to play as him in short doses. The camera shifts to a behind-the-player perspective, and you control movement with the left stick and diving with the right, with the aim of maintaining a good position while diving at the right moment. The process is made easier by visible lines that predict the path of the ball, as well as a marker that shows the optimal position to be in, and you can even snap to this spot by holding L1. While it's inevitable that much of your time is spent waiting around, you can shout instructions to your team in offline modes by pressing buttons to indicate when they should cross, pass, and shoot, allowing you some tactical control over the game. Ultimately, it's a welcome addition to finally control the keeper, but it's unlikely that you'll want to play through an entire career as one unless you're eager to unlock trophies for doing so. The main benefit comes online, where it's fun to play as the keeper on an occasional basis.    Online, FIFA 11 is as robust and fun as ever, and it boasts 11 versus 11 online play for the first time. This is the first FIFA game to include EA's online pass system, so you need to input a code included in the box in order to play online. The Live Season feature continues, updating real-world player data throughout the football season for £3.99 per league, or £7.99 for all five. The hospitality settings option, which was introduced in 2010 FIFA World Cup and saves your FIFA settings to EA's servers, also makes an appearance, allowing you to import your preferences from the earlier game. The online game modes are all familiar--head-to-head ranked and unranked matches are still a lot of fun online and mostly lag-free, while the 10-versus-10 team play mode has been expanded to 11-versus-11 for the first time. You can also play the game with up to seven players locally on one machine.   Multi-user goal celebrations are now possible in online games of FIFA 11.   It only takes a couple of button presses to jump into any of the online match types, but there are also lobbies for those who wish to tweak their match options or chat with other players before a game. You can also set up friend leagues for others to join, with multiple matches played between each player in the league in order to decide the victor. You can also play ranked matches with your Virtual Pro player, and set up your own club with your Virtual Pro and recruit other players to join your team. In all, there are an abundance of online game types for you to get involved in. That said, there are still areas where the game could be improved; being able to download your Game Face for your Virtual Pro is neat, but it still needs to be done through a fiddly process involving a computer and a camera or webcam, rather than a PlayStation Eye camera.    FIFA 11 preserves the series' tradition of slick presentation, with excellent commentary, easy-to-navigate menus, and a great soundtrack. The commentary is insightful and is naturally delivered, with anecdotes about the history behind the major clubs and recognition of derby matches, although the commentators will frequently start to make a point only to cut themselves off when something else happens. This year's soundtrack is also particularly noteworthy, with 33 tracks from the likes of Gorillaz, LCD Soundsystem, and Mark Ronson, and the ability to play weekly podcasts in the game is a nice feature. The commentary, presentation, and music have always been good, though; the only standout addition is a leaderboard on the main menu that compares your accomplishments to those of your friends.    Off the pitch, there are a couple of new additions that add to an already robust set of features. The creation centre allows you to create players and teams through a Web browser and then share them with other people to download in the game. The customisation options are impressive, letting you tailor the look, stats, and even mental approach (such as ""argues with referees"") of your player. A replay theatre has also been added--highlights are automatically compiled at the end of each match, and you can save them in video form locally or online. If you save them locally, the video format avoids the need to load the game up to watch them back in-engine, although the videos are saved in a low-resolution format. The music and chants feature is also a good addition, allowing you to import songs and audio clips into the game, with an impressive level of customisation. For instance, you can choose a specific song to play when your favourite team scores a goal, and your chosen recording will sound as if it's coming through the stadium speakers.   The option to play as a goalkeeper is welcome, and you can shout commands to the rest of your team when you're off the ball.   Thanks to key improvements to the core gameplay this year, FIFA 11 is the best and most addictive version of the game yet. The improved player characteristics and animations result in a deep and rewarding experience that feels as exciting and unpredictable as the real thing. It also boasts key online and offline improvements, with full 11 versus 11 online play for the first time in the genre, and a new career mode that brings together the single-player game in a much more enjoyable way than before. There may not be any new revolutionary new game modes this year, but with matches, leagues, tournaments, multiple career options, and 11 versus 11 online, it's as feature-packed a football game as you could want.  


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467,The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile ,9," Grimly gorgeous and violently entertaining, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is one of the finest games released so far this year.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/3/2/6/2224326-box_tdvs.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-dishwasher-vampire-smile-review/1900-6307231/,pos,"
 The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai was a fun action game, but it didn't possess the spark and vision that could have made it special. Enter its sequel, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, a beautiful and bleak thrill ride that capitalizes on the original's potential to fantastic effect. Smooth controls and animations make the combat feel better than before, and online and offline cooperative play makes it even easier to enjoy this brutal 2D action game with another player. Even more than its predecessor, Vampire Smile possesses a strong identity, settling into a murky mood that befits the ghastly decapitations you perform. So it might be the game's grim tone that first draws you in, but it's the exciting action will keep you coming back.       That grim tone is initially set by Vampire Smile's outstanding visuals. Saturated reds and greens stand out against black and white backdrops, the cragged hand-drawn mountains in the distance imbuing the scene with a sense of depth. Splats of blood stain the ground, where masses of deformed skulls speak to the horrors that have occurred on this lunar landscape. Eerie silhouettes of menacing marine creatures give the gruesome battle playing out in front of an aquarium an even deeper sense of danger. Each level is given context by handsome comic panels that often show either of the two playable characters in close-up, bathed in blood and driven by revenge. But story isn't limited to pre-level comics; in certain moments, the level transforms and you slowly crawl toward a chair or run from a pursuing fiend. These sudden flashes communicate dread and confusion in a way that a static panel can't convey. The actual plot is fine, but it's secondary to the excellent manner with which Vampire Smile directly communicates the emotions of its two leads.     You begin the campaign by choosing one of these two characters: The Prisoner or The Dishwasher. You play through the same levels and fight the same enemies as either character, but you see two different sides of the violent melodrama, which is a good reason on its own to play the campaign twice. But it's the action that will have you returning to Vampire Smile, even after you've twice beaten the campaign and moved on to its other entertaining modes. Regardless of which gore-sodden hero you choose, the 2D side-scrolling action is fast and frantic. Using the right analog stick, you zoom through the air and tumble along the ground. As you do so, you avoid lurching zombies, charging behemoths, and blue-eyed teleporting freaks and then zip into an opening to do damage. Effortless controls make it simple to dive in with your chainsaw from above, slash away with a standard attack, or juggle pumpkin-headed demons in the air before finishing them off with a vivid chomp on the neck. These finishers are grisly displays of spurting blood and decapitated limbs that are sometimes accompanied by the contrasting sight of pretty pink hearts, which float from their cleaved corpses to replenish your health.    Adding a buddy to the mix doubles the blood and doubles the fun.   Along the way, you pick up new blades and upgrade those you have, which adds variety should you grow weary of a single weapon. These include the cloud sword, which can be charged up before inflicting electrical damage on the dome-topped robot pressuring you with homing rockets. The painkiller is a giant syringe, while the guillotine is a humongous pair of scissors. Each comes with its own combos, though it takes some time to get used to the heavier weapons. If you are used to your dual cleavers or your light katana, the slower attacks and changes to your movement speed might cramp your agile style. But once accustomed to the more cumbersome blades, you find good uses for them. You can easily switch between weapons, thus combining light attacks with heavy ones. For example, the violence hammer doesn't allow you to swoosh high into the air, but should you switch to it once you're hovering above, you can lay down the law when smashing to the ground. When you throw in a machine gun and a shotgun, you have all you need to dish out damage on a screen full of baddies.      The action feels even better in Vampire Smile than in Dead Samurai, in part due to the air dashing, more fluid animations, and consistent collision detection. For example, when you juggle an enemy in the air, should your blade slice far enough beyond him, you might also damage the enemy behind him or catch him up in the juggle. The campaign comes to a head in a memorable final level in which the art style takes on a new twist and includes a clever visual representation of one of the game's main themes: manipulation and control. If you play on medium difficulty, the concluding boss fights aren't too difficult--just challenging enough to win on your first try with a smidgen of leftover health. Such down-to-the-wire battles are typical of The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, which is not as brutally difficult as the original game. Vampire Smile's difficulty curve is excellent, balancing the level of challenge with your increasing skill. But if you need a greater challenge--or a lesser one--one of the five available difficulty levels should suit you just fine.   Wait--is that a horrific mass of shambling flesh that walks on heads?!   If you want to show off your slashing skills, you can load up arcade mode and shoot for high leaderboard scores. This series of challenges trips you up by giving you specific weapons and adding additional rules to the level. For instance, you might only be able to do damage with air combos, or you might only be able to replenish constantly draining health by killing masked heavies and ninjas with grappling hooks. Levels get trickier as they progress, so if you think the early ones are a cakewalk, you'll soon find the test of skill you crave. Or you can hit the dish challenge, which is a never-ending gauntlet of adversaries that continues until you succumb to their onslaught. You don't necessarily have to fight these foes alone, however: another can join you locally or via Xbox Live, not only in arcade mode, but in the campaign as well. The frame rate remains smooth either way you play, and the blood and sparks erupting onscreen is even more intense to watch than when on your own, the lack of close-up fatalities notwithstanding. Two-player battles can get chaotic, but the simple color scheme of most backgrounds ensures that you get a dazzling display of blood and guts without ever losing track of the action. And the camera does an admirable job of keeping both players in view at all times.     The flaws are few and carry over from Dead Samurai. You can initiate a rhythm game in which your character grooves to a metal beat while you punch on the appropriate series of buttons. Considering the grinding guitars that accompany your journey, these moments fit well with the game's overall ambience, but they break up the pace too much. At least this is an optional diversion. Unfortunately, you can't escape the occasional sense of aimlessness that sometimes intrudes on the level design in spite of the scattered arrows that help point the way. But these are negligible issues in a sequel that takes the foundation laid by its forebear and infuses it with gloomy shadows. At 800 Microsoft points ($10), The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is a wonderful value for anyone who enjoys exploring the darker regions of the soul.     


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468,Limbo ,9, Thoughtful puzzles and striking aesthetics make Limbo a cerebral adventure you must experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426704-2224461-box_limbo.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/limbo-review/1900-6269983/,pos,"
  Somewhere between life and death lies limbo, a nightmarish place where the feeble rays of light that flicker from above are swallowed whole by ink-black shadows. A young boy, courageous though ill-equipped to survive in such a hostile place, is trapped in this dreamworld, locked away from the safety of reality. Dangerous creatures, hostile natives, and deadly traps populate this eerie plane of existence, making survival the only tangible goal to strive for. Limbo dresses the cerebral lure of thoughtful puzzles with a bleak visual design and sparse, moody audio to suck you in as completely as the protagonist child who is mercilessly trapped here. This artistic, somber adventure so expertly combines all of its elements that it's nigh impossible to shake free from its grip once it grabs hold of you.      The opening scene thrusts you into this world without any explanation for your predicament. You play as a young child who finds himself lying on his back in a foreign land that is far from welcoming. He is virtually featureless, appearing as a black silhouette that frequently blends in with the dark surroundings you must travel through. His lone distinctive characteristic is his shining, white eyes. These flashes of light are always visible, making it the one part of his body you can recognize even when the rest of the screen is completely black. There is no story pushing you through this quest, no signs to give you hints nor characters to clue you in on an overarching plot. Rather, this is a game about survival, where merely making it from one area to the next, surviving one obstacle after another, is what pushes you on.     The subdued aesthetics more than make up for the lack of an elaborate tale, using subtle audio hooks and restrained visuals to guide you further along your destined path. Limbo is fully realized in shades of black and white. You walk through dense forests, decrepit towns, and abandoned factories, all of which feel confining and desolate, creating an ominous sense of entrapment. There is a hazy flicker at all times, a film-grain grit that makes the world of Limbo feel tarnished and unclean. For the majority of your adventure, there is no music to accompany you along the way. Instead, there are quiet ambient noises that slowly fade into and out of existence. A patter of raindrops or rustle of wind is sometimes cued up, or a quiet chirping from crickets. But there are moments when music does kick in. A heavy bass note will crash down or a light melody will briefly start up, and these tie in beautifully with your onscreen actions.     You have a small repertoire of moves to help you stay alive in this 2D puzzle/platformer hybrid. A modest jump allows you to clear small gaps; certain objects can be pushed or pulled; and you can climb up or swing from ropes. Submerging yourself too deep in water, falling from a high ledge, or making contact with any of the numerous traps will kill you instantly, sending you back to the previous checkpoint. Your lack of heroic moves does not mean that the puzzles you must overcome are equally limited, though. There’s plenty of variety in Limbo’s puzzles, and even those that appear similar initially are invariably quite different. The early puzzles are single-step affairs that require you to move a bear trap out of the way or cross a river. But later puzzles are much more complex, forcing you to use objects, flip switches, and perform perfect jumps in order to come out on top.    The world of Limbo is black and uninviting.  The puzzles in Limbo are rarely difficult, but they do take a bit of thought to complete, and it's eminently satisfying to figure them out and continue on your way. Trial and error is a strong component because death often springs from unexpected places. A boulder may tumble down a hill with no warning or a floor may become electrified while you're still standing on it. Oftentimes, unavoidable death in games can lead to frustration, but Limbo avoids this pitfall for a number of reasons. First of all, the checkpoint system is very forgiving. You usually reappear no more than a few paces away from where you died, so there is little unnecessary backtracking to reach the puzzle that thwarted you earlier. Furthermore, obstacles are laid out in a logical manner, so once you have an idea of what to expect, you can move on with little problem. For instance, a bear trap swinging from a rope may have ended your life the first time, but once you know what to expect, you can jump out of the way the next time you see it. Finally, there are subtle clues to help you complete most of the puzzles. A clatter offscreen indicates that an important object was knocked from a tree, or a swinging spotlight may guide you in the right direction so you know when to time your jumps. Because Limbo rewards patience and avoids frustration, the puzzles are always enjoyable to solve, and the variety will keep pushing your brain the whole way through.    Limbo is laid out in a linear way, with one obstacle placed after another as you dutifully march from left to right. There aren't any level breaks or partitions to separate one section from another, either. Without any load times or story segments to distract you from the gameplay, you're continually submerged in this bleak world. This unremitting focus draws you fully into this dark place, keeping your eyes locked on the gloomy visuals and your mind keyed on the clever puzzles without any other stimuli demanding your attention. This single-mindedness makes it easy to lose track of the time and play through the entire adventure in one sitting. It should take less than five hours your first time through, and though it's disappointing that the ending comes so abruptly, it is worth revisiting Limbo when you're done. There are collectibles to be found when you stray from the most obvious path, and locating them is every bit as satisfying as solving the game’s many puzzles.   You have to leave the comfort of the light sometime.  Even though there aren't developed characters or a story to care about, Limbo elicits a strong emotional connection. The striking visuals and low-key audio are instrumental in pulling you in, but it's the harsh manner in which death is depicted that conjures the most powerful pangs. This is a violent game. The boy can die in a wide variety of ways, and every death is incredibly painful to behold. Bear traps cut you into pieces, spikes impale you, and electrical currents shoot through your body. The elaborate death sequences do not feature excessive amounts of blood, but they are affecting nonetheless because of their shocking depictions. Death is handled in such a cold manner that it continually shocks, even after you've seen it dozens of times. This creates an emotional immediacy that is difficult to forget.    Limbo poses the questions of death versus life and reality versus dream, but it doesn't answer them. It's the questions that are important here, and you're left to contemplate the meaning of this world for yourself. Although this is a game without clear-cut answers, the lack of concrete explanations doesn't detract one bit from the overall experience. This is a delicately crafted adventure whose elements tie seamlessly together. The fact that you can finish the entire game in just a few hours is disappointing only because it's so difficult to pull yourself away once you've been sucked in. Limbo is a superb adventure from beginning to end.   


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469,Limbo ,9, Thoughtful puzzles and striking aesthetics make Limbo a cerebral adventure you must experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426704-2224461-box_limbo.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/limbo-review/1900-6324738/,pos,"
  Somewhere between life and death lies limbo, a nightmarish place where the feeble rays of light that flicker from above are swallowed whole by ink-black shadows. A young boy, courageous though ill-equipped to survive in such a hostile place, is trapped in this dreamworld, locked away from the safety of reality. Dangerous creatures, hostile natives, and deadly traps populate this eerie plane of existence, making survival the only tangible goal to strive for. Limbo dresses the cerebral lure of thoughtful puzzles with a bleak visual design and sparse, moody audio to suck you in as completely as the protagonist child who is mercilessly trapped here. This artistic, somber adventure so expertly combines all of its elements that it's nigh impossible to shake free from its grip once it grabs hold of you.       The opening scene thrusts you into this world without any explanation for your predicament. You play as a young child who finds himself lying on his back in a foreign land that is far from welcoming. He is virtually featureless, appearing as a black silhouette that frequently blends in with the dark surroundings you must travel through. His lone distinctive characteristic is his shining, white eyes. These flashes of light are always visible, making it the one part of his body you can recognize even when the rest of the screen is completely black. There is no story pushing you through this quest, no signs to give you hints nor characters to clue you in on an overarching plot. Rather, this is a game about survival, where merely making it from one area to the next, surviving one obstacle after another, is what pushes you on.    The subdued aesthetics more than make up for the lack of an elaborate tale, using subtle audio hooks and restrained visuals to guide you further along your destined path. Limbo is fully realized in shades of black and white. You walk through dense forests, decrepit towns, and abandoned factories, all of which feel confining and desolate, creating an ominous sense of entrapment. There is a hazy flicker at all times, a film-grain grit that makes the world of Limbo feel tarnished and unclean. For the majority of your adventure, there is no music to accompany you along the way. Instead, there are quiet ambient noises that slowly fade into and out of existence. A patter of raindrops or rustle of wind is sometimes cued up, or a quiet chirping from crickets. But there are moments when music does kick in. A heavy bass note will crash down or a light melody will briefly start up, and these tie in beautifully with your onscreen actions.    You have a small repertoire of moves to help you stay alive in this 2D puzzle/platformer hybrid. A modest jump allows you to clear small gaps; certain objects can be pushed or pulled; and you can climb up or swing from ropes. Submerging yourself too deep in water, falling from a high ledge, or making contact with any of the numerous traps will kill you instantly, sending you back to the previous checkpoint. Your lack of heroic moves does not mean that the puzzles you must overcome are equally limited, though. There’s plenty of variety in Limbo’s puzzles, and even those that appear similar initially are invariably quite different. The early puzzles are single-step affairs that require you to move a bear trap out of the way or cross a river. But later puzzles are much more complex, forcing you to use objects, flip switches, and perform perfect jumps in order to come out on top.    Just like a young George Washington.   The puzzles in Limbo are rarely difficult, but they do take a bit of thought to complete, and it's eminently satisfying to figure them out and continue on your way. Trial and error is a strong component because death often springs from unexpected places. A boulder may tumble down a hill with no warning or a floor may become electrified while you're still standing on it. Oftentimes, unavoidable death in games can lead to frustration, but Limbo avoids this pitfall for a number of reasons. First of all, the checkpoint system is very forgiving. You usually reappear no more than a few paces away from where you died, so there is little unnecessary backtracking to reach the puzzle that thwarted you earlier. Furthermore, obstacles are laid out in a logical manner, so once you have an idea of what to expect, you can move on with little problem. For instance, a bear trap swinging from a rope may have ended your life the first time, but once you know what to expect, you can jump out of the way the next time you see it. Finally, there are subtle clues to help you complete most of the puzzles. A clatter offscreen indicates that an important object was knocked from a tree, or a swinging spotlight may guide you in the right direction so you know when to time your jumps. Because Limbo rewards patience and avoids frustration, the puzzles are always enjoyable to solve, and the variety will keep pushing your brain the whole way through.    Limbo is laid out in a linear way, with one obstacle placed after another as you dutifully march from left to right. There aren't any level breaks or partitions to separate one section from another, either. Without any load times or story segments to distract you from the gameplay, you're continually submerged in this bleak world. This unremitting focus draws you fully into this dark place, keeping your eyes locked on the gloomy visuals and your mind keyed on the clever puzzles without any other stimuli demanding your attention. This single-mindedness makes it easy to lose track of the time and play through the entire adventure in one sitting. It should take less than five hours your first time through, and though it's disappointing that the ending comes so abruptly, it is worth revisiting Limbo when you're done. There are collectibles to be found when you stray from the most obvious path, and locating them is every bit as satisfying as solving the game’s many puzzles.    Who would put a bear trap up there?   Even though there aren't developed characters or a story to care about, Limbo elicits a strong emotional connection. The striking visuals and low-key audio are instrumental in pulling you in, but it's the harsh manner in which death is depicted that conjures the most powerful pangs. This is a violent game. The boy can die in a wide variety of ways, and every death is incredibly painful to behold. Bear traps cut you into pieces, spikes impale you, and electrical currents shoot through your body. The elaborate death sequences do not feature excessive amounts of blood, but they are affecting nonetheless because of their shocking depictions. Death is handled in such a cold manner that it continually shocks, even after you've seen it dozens of times. This creates an emotional immediacy that is difficult to forget.    Limbo poses the questions of death versus life and reality versus dream, but it doesn't answer them. It's the questions that are important here, and you're left to contemplate the meaning of this world for yourself. Although this is a game without clear-cut answers, the lack of concrete explanations doesn't detract one bit from the overall experience. This is a delicately crafted adventure whose elements tie seamlessly together. The fact that you can finish the entire game in just a few hours is disappointing only because it's so difficult to pull yourself away once you've been sucked in. Limbo is a superb adventure from beginning to end.   
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470,LIMBO ,9, Thoughtful puzzles and striking aesthetics make Limbo a cerebral adventure you must experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426704-2224461-box_limbo.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/limbo-review/1900-6326696/,pos,"
  Somewhere between life and death lies limbo, a nightmarish place where the feeble rays of light that flicker from above are swallowed whole by ink-black shadows. A young boy, courageous though ill-equipped to survive in such a hostile place, is trapped in this dreamworld, locked away from the safety of reality. Dangerous creatures, hostile natives, and deadly traps populate this eerie plane of existence, making survival the only tangible goal to strive for. Limbo dresses the cerebral lure of thoughtful puzzles with a bleak visual design and sparse, moody audio to suck you in as completely as the protagonist child who is mercilessly trapped here. This artistic, somber adventure so expertly combines all of its elements that it's nigh impossible to shake free from its grip once it grabs hold of you.       The opening scene thrusts you into this world without any explanation for your predicament. You play as a young child who finds himself lying on his back in a foreign land that is far from welcoming. He is virtually featureless, appearing as a black silhouette that frequently blends in with the dark surroundings you must travel through. His lone distinctive characteristic is his shining, white eyes. These flashes of light are always visible, making it the one part of his body you can recognize even when the rest of the screen is completely black. There is no story pushing you through this quest, no signs to give you hints nor characters to clue you in on an overarching plot. Rather, this is a game about survival, where merely making it from one area to the next, surviving one obstacle after another, is what pushes you on.    The subdued aesthetics more than make up for the lack of an elaborate tale, using subtle audio hooks and restrained visuals to guide you further along your destined path. Limbo is fully realized in shades of black and white. You walk through dense forests, decrepit towns, and abandoned factories, all of which feel confining and desolate, creating an ominous sense of entrapment. There is a hazy flicker at all times, a film-grain grit that makes the world of Limbo feel tarnished and unclean. For the majority of your adventure, there is no music to accompany you along the way. Instead, there are quiet ambient noises that slowly fade into and out of existence. A patter of raindrops or rustle of wind is sometimes cued up, or a quiet chirping from crickets. But there are moments when music does kick in. A heavy bass note will crash down or a light melody will briefly start up, and these tie in beautifully with your onscreen actions.    You have a small repertoire of moves to help you stay alive in this 2D puzzle/platformer hybrid. A modest jump allows you to clear small gaps; certain objects can be pushed or pulled; and you can climb up or swing from ropes. Submerging yourself too deep in water, falling from a high ledge, or making contact with any of the numerous traps will kill you instantly, sending you back to the previous checkpoint. Your lack of heroic moves does not mean that the puzzles you must overcome are equally limited, though. There’s plenty of variety in Limbo’s puzzles, and even those that appear similar initially are invariably quite different. The early puzzles are single-step affairs that require you to move a bear trap out of the way or cross a river. But later puzzles are much more complex, forcing you to use objects, flip switches, and perform perfect jumps in order to come out on top.    Just like a young George Washington.   The puzzles in Limbo are rarely difficult, but they do take a bit of thought to complete, and it's eminently satisfying to figure them out and continue on your way. Trial and error is a strong component because death often springs from unexpected places. A boulder may tumble down a hill with no warning or a floor may become electrified while you're still standing on it. Oftentimes, unavoidable death in games can lead to frustration, but Limbo avoids this pitfall for a number of reasons. First of all, the checkpoint system is very forgiving. You usually reappear no more than a few paces away from where you died, so there is little unnecessary backtracking to reach the puzzle that thwarted you earlier. Furthermore, obstacles are laid out in a logical manner, so once you have an idea of what to expect, you can move on with little problem. For instance, a bear trap swinging from a rope may have ended your life the first time, but once you know what to expect, you can jump out of the way the next time you see it. Finally, there are subtle clues to help you complete most of the puzzles. A clatter offscreen indicates that an important object was knocked from a tree, or a swinging spotlight may guide you in the right direction so you know when to time your jumps. Because Limbo rewards patience and avoids frustration, the puzzles are always enjoyable to solve, and the variety will keep pushing your brain the whole way through.    Limbo is laid out in a linear way, with one obstacle placed after another as you dutifully march from left to right. There aren't any level breaks or partitions to separate one section from another, either. Without any load times or story segments to distract you from the gameplay, you're continually submerged in this bleak world. This unremitting focus draws you fully into this dark place, keeping your eyes locked on the gloomy visuals and your mind keyed on the clever puzzles without any other stimuli demanding your attention. This single-mindedness makes it easy to lose track of the time and play through the entire adventure in one sitting. It should take less than five hours your first time through, and though it's disappointing that the ending comes so abruptly, it is worth revisiting Limbo when you're done. There are collectibles to be found when you stray from the most obvious path, and locating them is every bit as satisfying as solving the game’s many puzzles.    The other children call him Worm Head. Kids can be so cruel.   Even though there aren't developed characters or a story to care about, Limbo elicits a strong emotional connection. The striking visuals and low-key audio are instrumental in pulling you in, but it's the harsh manner in which death is depicted that conjures the most powerful pangs. This is a violent game. The boy can die in a wide variety of ways, and every death is incredibly painful to behold. Bear traps cut you into pieces, spikes impale you, and electrical currents shoot through your body. The elaborate death sequences do not feature excessive amounts of blood, but they are affecting nonetheless because of their shocking depictions. Death is handled in such a cold manner that it continually shocks, even after you've seen it dozens of times. This creates an emotional immediacy that is difficult to forget.    Limbo poses the questions of death versus life and reality versus dream, but it doesn't answer them. It's the questions that are important here, and you're left to contemplate the meaning of this world for yourself. Although this is a game without clear-cut answers, the lack of concrete explanations doesn't detract one bit from the overall experience. This is a delicately crafted adventure whose elements tie seamlessly together. The fact that you can finish the entire game in just a few hours is disappointing only because it's so difficult to pull yourself away once you've been sucked in. Limbo is a superb adventure from beginning to end.   
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471,Portal 2 ,9," Portal 2 is an accessible, clever, and downright hilarious adventure into the eccentric world of Aperture Science.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426687-2219887-box_portal2.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/portal-2-review/1900-6309133/,pos,"
  After the outlandish setting, ingenious gameplay, and hilarious dialogue had all run their course, Portal left you with some pretty big unknowns. Chief among them were, ""What happens now?"" and ""How did that whole weird situation come to pass?"" Portal 2 sets out to answer these questions, and in doing so travels both forward and backward from the conclusion of Portal. The result is a sequel that doesn't try to replicate the successful formula of its predecessor. Rather, it expands upon that original experience, creating something that feels initially familiar. Yet as you progress through the enthralling single-player journey and tangle with the clever cooperative campaign, any worries that things might be too familiar are swept away by the scope of your adventure and the characters you meet along the way. Once again, you are caught up in the fantastic world of Aperture Science, where hilarious and endearing dialogue is delivered by disembodied voices and artificial intelligences, and where inventive gameplay mechanics and a smooth difficulty curve make the sublime satisfaction of puzzle solving accessible to all.       The single-player campaign starts by addressing the issue of what happens now that you've destroyed the malevolent AI who tried to incinerate you. ""Now"" may be a relative term in the bowels of Aperture Science, but the facility you enter is still reeling from your actions at the end of Portal. Almost immediately, you meet a very helpful and attentive AI who wants to team up with you so that you both can escape dire peril. Despite looking like a metal basketball with handles and a camera lens, this AI is physically expressive and immensely entertaining. His well-meaning yet slightly inept persona is an immediate source of laughter that consistently delights throughout the game. Like that of its predecessor, Portal 2's writing is a standout. Not only is it packed with splendidly witty writing and excellent voice acting, but it also manages to create robust characters out of metal parts and thin air.     It's not long before you find an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (colloquially known as a ""portal gun"") and start slinging portals like it was 2007. Those unfamiliar with this technology need not fear: Portal 2 has a nice learning curve that quickly brings you up to speed. The basics are these: Using this gun, you can create two distinct portals on certain walls, ceilings, and floors. Go into one hole, and you come out the other. You start off learning basic navigation and then move on to transporting objects and experimenting with more complex moves, like jumping off a ledge into a portal below in order to fling yourself across the room. Getting the hang of this requires you to flex your spatial awareness, but the introduction is so smooth and intuitive that, before you know it, you're thinking in portals.    This may sound like a slow start to Portal veterans, and from an action standpoint, it is. It's a while before you encounter challenging puzzles, but the scenery is so different that you won't mind getting your bearings once again. Aperture Science has seen better days, and the broken test chambers, malfunctioning robotics, and encroaching plant life are an early sign that Portal 2's environments are much more varied and ambitious than its predecessor's. Later levels reveal the true scope of the Aperture facilities to great effect, piquing your curiosity and spurring you onward. As you work your way in and out of the damaged test chambers, you catch some intriguing glimpses behind the scenes. You also see a fair number of empty areas where the scenery fades into nondescript gloom, and these dull areas are a bit disappointing, given the busy industrial vibe of the place. You also encounter a lot of load times throughout the game, and though they rarely feel excessively long, they are often long enough to make you take notice and wish they were shorter.   Jump right in, the blue gel's fine!   While you are getting reacquainted with the basics of portals and trying to escape with your new friend, you run into your old test-administrator-slash-nemesis, GLaDOS. Though she isn't exactly happy to see you, she is glad to have a subject to run through test chambers and pester with sarcastic barbs. Her signature malevolence is alive and well, but those who have spent time testing with her before may find that her shtick has become familiar. She still has some wonderfully sinister lines, but her acerbic comments don't have the quite same shock value. Yet as you spend some time being shuffled through test chambers at her mercy, it becomes clear that her lack of bite is due to her injured self-confidence. After all, she fancied herself an omnipotent puppet master, and you tore her to pieces and threw every piece into a fire. She may be bent on your destruction, but GLaDOS is a complex character who evolves throughout these early levels. Before all is said and done, you'll once again come to cherish your relationship with that cruel AI.      A few hours into the campaign, the narrative focus expands beyond ""What happens now?"" to include ""How did that whole weird situation come to pass?"" In your explorations, you encounter new characters who provide some of the best lines in the game, and your AI companions evolve in surprising and gratifying ways. You also encounter a variety of new testing materials, from catapults to bridges made of light to gelatinous goos that splatter on surfaces and directly affect the way you move through the world. Portal 2 does a great job of introducing you to new tools and then challenging you to use them in clever ways. Successful navigation requires careful study of your environment and experimentation with the materials and surfaces available to you. There are some very tricky situations that you must puzzle your way out of, and figuring them out is always immensely satisfying.      The single-player campaign will likely last at least twice as long as your first Portal playthrough, clocking in at somewhere around seven to nine hours. Replaying it isn't very satisfying from a gameplay perspective, but with a ton of clever writing, some interesting developer commentary, and a bevy of achievements, a second playthrough is still appealing. Unfortunately, there are no stand-alone test chambers or leaderboards to really stump you or scratch that competitive itch, but even so, Portal 2 is not light on content. The cooperative campaign is an entirely separate, two-player experience that provides hours of exciting new puzzles and environments. You and your partner (split-screen or online) play as two robots that GLaDOS guides through a serious of test chambers. She's a bit disappointed that, as robots, you can't die horribly in the name of science, but that doesn't stop her from putting her perverse sense of humor to work. The robots provide a bit of physical humor themselves; their animations are a treat to watch, and seeing your partner bash into a ceiling is good for a chuckle.    There are some trips off the beaten path, but the action here is more akin to that of the original Portal--lots of clever test chambers that present an increasingly difficult challenge. Each player can deploy two portals of his or her own, and having twice as many portals allows a new degree of complexity. Again, the difficulty curve is fairly gentle, teaching you the basics before getting down to the tricky stuff. Teamwork is the name of the game, and some puzzles require some coordinated feats of timing. To help you communicate, you have a few simple visual indicators that you can place in the environment to direct your partner's attention or set a countdown timer for a simultaneous action. Verbal communication is very helpful as well, but if you aren't able or inclined to chat, these indicators are a surprisingly effective way to get your point across. Cooperative mode also includes the Aperture Science versions of emoticons--little dances or gestures that you can perform for fun. Solving puzzles with a friend is definitely satisfying, but it's also a lot of fun to goof around. Shooting a portal under your partner's feet and transporting him in front of a moving spike plate may not be nice, but it's a great way to get him back for the time he disappeared the bridge from under your feet and dropped you into a pit of deadly goo. While the cooperative campaign is shorter than the single-player one, together they provide 12 to 15 hours of very enjoyable, very accessible content.   This clear, easy-to-use icon is a much nicer way to point something out to your partner than yelling at them over a headset.   As you journey through the massive Aperture facility, it becomes clear that Portal 2 does not merely come after Portal. Instead, it radiates outward from its predecessor, simultaneously illuminating the world that gave rise to Portal and continuing the adventure that began there. The sense of novelty is diminished, but the thrill of exploration and puzzle-solving is still intoxicating, and it's amazing how Portal 2 manages to tell a better story with disembodied voices and spherical robots than most games can with full-on humans. Your return to Aperture Science is a joyful one in this immensely appealing, laugh-out-loud funny, and thoroughly satisfying sequel.   If you're already playing Portal 2, be sure to check out our game guide which includes both a Story mode walkthrough and tips for cooperative play. 


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472,Brain Dead 13 ,3.5, Brain Dead 13 is a skillfully animated cartoon that is almost entirely unplayable and fails completely as an interactive experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/4/0/2209040-3do_braindead.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/brain-dead-13-review/1900-2538221/,neg,"
It's immediately obvious that Readysoft, the game's designers, were involved in the translation of the PC versions of the 1980's coin-op favorites, Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. In these games, and in Brain Dead 13, an animated sequence is played and you have a fraction of a second to press one of the arrow keys or the spacebar. If you guess correctly which key to press, the video sequence continues to play until you're given the next unforgiving chance to ""interact."" If you don't, it's certain death and you start all over again. In the end, this means that the game must be played systematically as a process of elimination; in any given situation, you must press each key until you find the correct one. We're not talking real-time interaction here.  Just point Mr. One-finger at an arrow key, then sit back and watch the results.  The game has other flaws besides its grossly outdated gameplay. For instance, a number of rooms in the castle (see company line for plot overview) are mirror images of places you've been before. You can avoid the Red Witch, say, by pressing up, right, space bar, right, and so on. But to avoid the Green Witch, you'll press up, left, space bar, left, and so on. Even worse, it's never quite clear what the results of your actions will be. In one room you can escape through a door in the upper-left corner by pressing up, but another room with an exit in the same place will require you to press left to get out. This inconsistency and thoughtlessness in design highlights the problems inherent in imposing an interactive interface on a traditionally linear media. Brain Dead 13 does have one positive aspect: the animated cartoon that provides the framework for your limited interaction. Full of colorful characters (both literally and figuratively), the clips feature incredibly smooth animation all neatly packed onto one CD-ROM. Although this level of production quality is no minor technical feat, it's not enough to save this game from being inducted into my own personal computer game Hall of Shame. Unless you're a fan of the Dragon's Lair series of games, I strongly suggest that you avoid this exercise in absolute frustration.
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473,Deus ,3.5," If I have to play Deus in order to save the universe, I'll give up now without a fight.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/3/6/7/2210367-untitled.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deus-review/1900-2538511/,neg,"
The year is 2165. The entire universe is ruled by a benevolent military organization called the Alien World Exploration, and things are calm except for one nagging problem: Small but dangerous groups of terrorists are wreaking havoc across the galaxies. The most dangerous of these groups, the ""New Crusaders,"" have taken refuge on the planet Alcibiade. In Deus, you play the role of Trepliev 1, a bounty hunter charged with eliminating the threat of terrorism. As the game begins, you find yourself parachuting to Alcibiade, where a misty, beautifully detailed world unfolds in front of you. Great premise; auspicious beginning. Expectations rise... ...Only to be dashed. The first challenge you face is fighting one of the planet's natives, a stereotypical low-tech tribal thug who runs around in circles and takes an occasional jab at you with his knife. You move in to fight him and discover an absurdly weak fighting engine: movements are sluggish, and it's nearly impossible to tell when you've scored a hit, or even where to aim for that matter. If you manage to kill the native before slamming your fist through your monitor in frustration, you move on to another character and do it again. And again. And again. The rest of the game is riddled with the same problems. This is a fighting/shooting game in which it's hard to fight or shoot with any accuracy. There's simply no sense of engagement. To make matters worse, the insane control layout makes this game slightly harder to master than Microsoft Flight Simulator; more than 25 keys are used to control your actions.  The strangest feature of Deus is the option to play in ""simulation mode,"" a bizarre variation in which you must monitor all your bodily functions. For instance, you must tend to your wounds, get enough sleep, and fight colds with vitamins and antibiotics. Things take a turn for the sublimely grotesque when it comes time to inject yourself with plasma using a huge needle or (gulp!) amputate your own leg. Deus throws in a few more extras in a failed effort to spice things up: You must kill creatures in a specific order to advance in the game, and you have to find and use objects like anti-venom serum and key cards. But these features add only more frustration to an already frustrating game. There's a variety of weapons to collect, but nothing you haven't seen a hundred times before. The only positive note is Deus's richly detailed graphics, but they can't rescue this title from failure. Terrorism may be a threat to the future of all humankind, but if I have to play Deus in order to save the universe, I'll give up now without a fight.
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474,Fighting Force 2 ,3.5, There's really nothing exciting about Fighting Force 2.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/9/8/2218198-slus_00934_f_all.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fighting-force-2-review/1900-2540051/,neg,"
If you're lucky, you don't remember the original Fighting Force. The game tried to resurrect the Final Fight-style game on the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation by providing scads of bad guys you could beat by simply pounding on the punch button until everyone was dead. To put it bluntly, the first Fighting Force was not a good game. Fighting Force 2 takes the same basic beat-'em-up ethic and melds it with a pinch of Lara Croftian camera work and a smidgen of Metal Gear-esque espionage. The resulting game is better than the original, but it still comes off as an incredibly dull piece of software. The game sends you on several different missions, but your objective never really matters. You just plod through level after level, beating up anyone in your path and breaking all sorts of enemy equipment along the way. Just about anything you see can be destroyed if you hit it enough times. That's right, your character has the ability to make soda machines explode using only his bare fists. Heck, even an office chair will explode if you kick it hard enough. This is incredibly silly, especially when guns and health pickups start flying out of the copy machine you just stabbed with your knife. This is also just about the only cool element in the entire game. The enemies are painfully easy to defeat, especially given the copious amount of weapons you'll find along the way. Anything you can make explode could potentially contain another weapon for your inventory. Weapons include pistols (which our hero holds sideways like the true gangsta he is), a shotgun, knives, grenades, sledgehammers, pipes, and axes. The inventory is controlled by holding down a button and scrolling through your items until you find one you like - it's not a perfect scheme, but it works well enough. OK, the gameplay is weak and generic. The sound is occasionally sketchy and poorly mixed. The controls are a little too touchy. But at least the game is fairly pleasing to the eye. Though there are occasionally some clipping problems and some bad seams here and there, the game generally looks pretty good. The textures are crisp, and the animation is fluid. The behind-the-back camera works well, though it has lots of problems in small rooms. There's really nothing exciting about Fighting Force 2. The ease of gameplay makes it feel less like a game and more like an exercise. So you'll just wander around kicking everything in sight until sheer boredom forces you to turn the game off - which, depending on your tolerance level, will be anywhere from ten minutes to three hours. Yes, this game is better than the original Fighting Force - but that's really not saying much. Fighting Force 2 would make a decent rental, and it does fill a niche that until now hasn't been available on the Dreamcast, but it's mostly only good for a quick laugh at the exploding office chairs.
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475,Hired Team: Trial Gold ,3.5, Hired Team: Trial Gold has arrived at about the worst possible time.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hired-team-trial-gold/1900-2868241/,neg,"
Better late than never? Not where Hired Team: Trial Gold is concerned. This game, which despite its ambiguous title isn't a demo or time-limited shareware program, was originally released in Russia back in 2000 and has now finally seen the light of day in the US. If you're a shooter fan, you'll want to shove Hired Team back into a dark hole and forget about it. Hired Team is a shameless mishmash of Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament, two great games that helped redefine the shooter genre in 1999 with their focus on pure multiplayer carnage over single-player action. Even if Hired Team had been released back then, it would have been crushed by those illustrious, hugely popular competitors. It would have been too far behind the times in terms of both gameplay and technology back then, and it's doubly so today.  It's Quake II all over again, with bland textures and lots of lava. Like Quake III and Unreal Tournament, Hired Team technically has a story--a truly disposable one. It's the year 2064 and crime is out of control, so a new team of supersoldiers needs to be trained in virtual reality combat arenas. The ""Trial"" portion of Hired Team: Trial Gold is the equivalent of a single-player campaign, in which you work your way through progressively tougher levels, fighting with and against computer-controlled bots. Game modes include old standbys like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture-the-flag, and domination. You also get infiltration mode, a watered-down version of Unreal Tournament's assault mode, with just one simple objective: capture or defend a single flag. Playing these modes online against humans, bots, or a mix of the two is no easy task. The game's server browser either doesn't work, or there simply weren't any servers out there (the latter is a distinct possibility). Even when you're hosting a server, you should be ready for some lag.    Hired Team plays out in a motley assortment of arenas, including factories with industrial hazards, castles, and the now-obligatory neo-gothic cathedrals with cheesy heavy metal names like ""Halls of Suffering."" All told, you'll get 28 maps, which would be all well and good if only you could remember any of them five minutes after playing. For the most part, they're uninspired, unoriginal forays through terrain that every shooter fan has seen countless times before. Imagine third-rate, fan-created Quake II maps, and you'll get the idea. A few bounce pads, elevators, and vats of deadly goo are about all that the levels offer in the way of interactivity.    Hired Team's arsenal similarly works hard to prove that there's nothing new under the sun. You get a predictable assortment of boring weapons, like a pistol, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher that works and sounds remarkably like that of Quake III, and so on. None of these have the alternate firing modes that make the weapons of Unreal Tournament so much fun, nor do they have the visceral power and colorful visuals of Quake III's weapons. They're also horribly unbalanced. The default pistol, for instance, is so wimpy as to be essentially worthless. Most all of the other weapons are grossly overpowered and can kill opponents almost instantly.    You'll find extra ammo scattered liberally and arbitrarily throughout the levels. The same goes for armor and health items. It's a shame there aren't more inventive items or even just the equivalent of something like Quake III's quad damage or Unreal Tournament's antigrav boots. Hired Team is so dull that it seems to desperately need that kind of variety.    When a shooter jettisons storytelling, scripted events, and the other trappings of single-player games to focus on pure combat, it needs to sweat the small stuff all the more. As in most departments, Hired Team falls far short where finer points like physics are concerned. Character movement speed is spot-on for a game of this type, neither too slow nor too frantically fast. On the other hand, the ""feel"" of the weapons, their apparent heft and strength, leaves lots to be desired, since you never get any sense of your weapons' power. You don't get any decent feedback on damage taken or doled out, either. You'll have to settle for a few generic groans when someone gets blasted. The fact that characters simply vanish when killed (in deference to the game's virtual reality back story) sure doesn't help matters.  Now it's cut-rate Quake III: Arena, with a lame gothic cathedral. Hired Team doesn't do nearly enough with its computer-controlled bot opponents, either. You'll fight a few boring-looking humanoid robots and a few humans with evocative names like Ron. You can select from four bot skill levels that affect their basic combat abilities but sure don't make up for their lack of smarts where coordinated games like capture-the-flag are concerned. You can issue commands to bots through a branching menu, but they seem to ignore your orders. Adding bots to an online game is a tedious chore, requiring you to select each one individually and assign its team manually.    As far as its presentation goes, Hired Team offers loads of fancy graphics configuration options. However, they don't matter, because the game's graphics engine can't compete with today's shooters built around the Quake III, Unreal, or Serious Sam engine. A lack of technical polish could have been overcome with artistic imagination and skill, but Hired Team adamantly refuses to offer that. Instead, the game has ugly weapon and character models and boxy maps gratuitously filled with garish lights and mirrored textures like some futuristic disco. The game's sparse, amateurish sound effects similarly fall well short of the mark.    Hired Team: Trial Gold has arrived at about the worst possible time. It's a budget-priced game, retailing for around $20, but these days you can buy Quake III or Unreal Tournament for about that price. With either of those, you'll get a vastly better game served by a huge mod community. What's more, Unreal Tournament 2003 is just around the corner, which is sure to make Hired Team: Trial Gold look that much more like the uninspired, antiquated, and poorly designed copycat it is.
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476,Hresvelgr Import ,3.5, IMPORT - Not since the Japanese version of Sega Rally 2 has there been such random animation in a game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/8/3/1135-4283.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hresvelgr-import-review/1900-2603910/,neg,"
IMPORT REVIEW: It's about time someone other than Psygnosis released a decent Wipeout clone. Gamers have waited too long for the day when a quality futuristic racing title meets or exceeds the standards set forth in Wipeout XL. Unfortunately, this is not that day, and Gust's Hresvelgr is not that game. In fact, other than a passing resemblance to the ideas in Wipeout, Hresvelgr for the PS2 better represents the bastard child of Star Wars: Episode I: Racer more than anything else.   At the outset, you have one choice: gran prix mode. Choose one of seven ships and race against the computer on four winding courses. You then choose between one of ten offensive or defensive weapons, although a few are exclusive to particular ships. For defense freaks, there are turbo boosts, EM shields, and chaff to cover your tail. For the adrenaline junkie in all of us, there are missiles, rockets, lasers, and mines on offense. Complete the gran prix mode in fourth place or better, and you'll unlock two more modes: expert and master. Expert is a faster, more frantic version of the standard gran prix, whereas master mode twists the courses around with tighter turns and new routes. There you go: seven ships, four courses, and three modes. There's no two-player feature, no arena, and no prospect for hidden Easter eggs. Estimated time to unlock everything: three hours.    As far as the actual game goes, your goal is to complete three laps around a corridor-based course. To prevent deviation, there's a power field running down the middle of the course. Veer too far, and you'll lose engine power. Do you like shortcuts or alternate paths? Aside from occasionally cutting across corners, they don't exist here. The brunt of the game's challenge is composed of the eight opponents racing against you. Their AI is pitifully stagnant, though, amounting to ""fire weapons"" and ""stick to the middle."" Since their weapons don't do much damage or dangerously alter your course, all you really need to do is zigzag a bit and use a turbo boost. End result: You've won. On certain courses, there are yellow brake or boost panels, but these have little bearing on the outcome of a race. Drive straight, watch the course unfold, and win - that's Hresvelgr. Adding insult to injury, you can sometimes fall through solid flooring. Ouch.   Whereas gameplay may not change from generation to generation, the PlayStation 2 is renowned for its graphical and audio capabilities. Unfortunately, Hresvelgr never makes use of them. Musically, the game's soundtrack is soothing but uninspired. The sound effects do the job of conveying thrust, explosions, and collisions, but seem downright stolen from other games in the genre. Visually, the game's backgrounds are fluid and dripping with polygons, but actual course delineators - such as the power field and force field containment system - are barely above Sega CD in quality. To put it another way, Hresvelgr covers its juicy backgrounds with huge, ugly, flat-shaded polygons and the occasional lens flare. The ship models themselves are decent, with undulating engine exhaust, smoke trails, and reflective lighting, but nothing we haven't seen before on the N64 or PlayStation. Hresvelgr's greatest affront, though, lies not in its shortcomings, but in its frame rate. Not since the Japanese version of Sega Rally 2 has there been such random animation in a game. Would someone please choose between 15, 30, or 60fps? The PS2's talents are wasted on this game, even more so than they are in Sky Surfer.   When you get right down to it, if Hresvelgr were a food item, it wouldn't even pass the tasting and judgment criteria of Iron Chef's lower house member. This isn't to say that the ideas in the game are poor, because they're not. Futuristic racing ships, alien worlds, and high explosives are the everyman's idea of a good time. Unfortunately, Hresvelgr fails the meet this recipe's full potential, resulting in a stale, crusty lump as opposed to a succulent pastry. As Sky Surfer will attest, there are worse PS2 games, but seeing the sheer potential in a title like Hresvelgr makes its shortcomings all the more disappointing. Let's hope when Crave releases it stateside as Fusion GT, some of the more pressing issues are addressed.
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477,Mortal Kombat 4 ,3.5," People looking for portable fighting-game action would do well to wait for Street Fighter Alpha, a much more responsive fighting game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/3/3/2212033-mk4_box.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mortal-kombat-4-review/1900-2536195/,neg,"
While all four of the Mortal Kombat games have been released on Nintendo's portable platform, none of them have been terribly faithful re-creations of the arcade games on which they are based. I mean, let's face it: It's hard to take all those digitized graphics and toss them onto the Game Boy. Tossing the 3D environment of the fourth game would be nearly impossible. So MK4 on the GB is a strictly 2D affair.  Many of the original game's characters have been stripped out, and the move count has been greatly reduced. Much like the other MK games on the Game Boy, the controls aren't very responsive. Special moves are a chore to pull off.  The game's fatalities are done a bit differently than the fatalities in the previous games. When you perform the move, the game cuts away to a short, grainy animation, presumably digitized from the arcade version. It's a nice, quirky touch that brings a little charm to an otherwise uneventful game. People looking for portable fighting-game action would do well to wait for Street Fighter Alpha, a much more responsive fighting game.
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478,Nagano Winter Olympics '98 ,3.5, Nagano '98 isn't entirely bleak.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/9/4/8/2215948-nwo9864.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nagano-winter-olympics-98-review/1900-2544856/,neg,"
Nagano Winter Olympics '98 attempts to provide the definitive winter games sampler. The problem here, as might be expected from any 12-games-in-one package, is that the individual competitions just aren't any good. The gameplay is thin, the control options minimal, and the number of courses... well, there's usually one per event. You just don't feel involved in what you're doing. In eleven games out of 12, the control is so over-simplified - in several you only use two buttons and don't use the control stick at all - you never really feel like part of the action. Take aerial freestyle skiing, a trick competition where you're expected to perform various stunt combinations. Rather than learning the various moves and the timing required to tie them together in some creative fashion, you just push a power button and watch the CPU do all that for you, with no control over the individual tricks. Here's how it works: Before you make your run, select which set of tricks you want to perform from a list of ten, each with cryptic names like ""FTT"" and ""DFD"" (and no decoder offered in the manual or elsewhere). Wait and watch as your skier glides down the slope. Before and while he's in the air, push the A button as fast as you can (to increase his ""power""). Watch him perform the tricks you've selected and keep furiously pushing the A button until he's about to land. Push the B button to land him safely. It's difficult to imagine a less involving interface. The whole time he's up there doing double gainers or whatever, you're stuck on the ground hammering away at the A button.  Snowboarding fares slightly better. Again, a roster of tricks is selected in advance of each run. You make eight jumps per run. As you approach the lip of the half-pipe, each subsequent combination appears in your onscreen trick-o-meter. Before you catch any air, you must enter the correct combination of buttons, which is especially easy since you're reading them right off the screen and the key presses flash as you enter them, so there's no guesswork in knowing when you've completed a half-circle or tap. This takes the sense of timing usually required by combo-driven gaming right out of the loop. The oddest part of this whole thing is that each combo must be entered in its entirety before your rider even starts the move. This interface cripples one of the big keys to video game immersion: seeing onscreen results immediately as you, the player, perform actions. Turn-based sports? You might as well be playing Simon Says. The real dogs are the downhill races, which comprise five of the 12 competitions. The problem is twofold. Game controls are minimal, and courses are scarce. In skiing and snowboarding, you have controls for left and right turning and a brake (edging). There's no acceleration, no leaning forward or back, no tucking for tighter moves, and no real jumps. It's worse with the bobsled and luge. Since they're on rails, you don't even control steering so much as just weight distribution to avoid flipping over in the turns. Either way, each race comes down to just recognizing when you need to slow down or hug the curves. This is compounded by the lack of varied courses. There's one course for each competition. That's it. Win and you go to the awards ceremony. Coupled with the uninvolving level of control, this means that the sum total of each event is memorizing the two moments when you should hit the brakes. The gameplay is about as tough as answering a phone when it rings. This oversimplified gameplay reigns throughout. Speed skating is performed solely with the L and R buttons controlling each of the skater's legs. The CPU takes care of the curves and the lane changes for you. There is some room for tactics, since timing determines the power of each push off the ice. The faster you go, the more stamina you lose, which can result in an inadvertent slo-mo finish to your race. The most striking divergence from the inanity of most of these games occurs with the fairly occult game of curling, a bizarre form of ice-shuffleboard, which features fairly in-depth control and game logic. Go figure. Nagano '98 isn't entirely bleak. Though graphically average, some events fare better than others. The luge has a scary first-person perspective, but a crummy frame rate. Skiing is appropriately loud and has realistic edging sound effects. Ski jumping makes interesting use of separate skier angle and wind direction/speed meters, requiring occasional nudging to maintain proper balance and land safely. But it's really a case of too little, too late. Ultimately, this is an unmixed bag of terrible, underdeveloped games whose feeble, undernourished gameplay comes down to timing one or two button taps, not just per race, but per event.
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479,NFL Xtreme ,3.5, NFL Xtreme is no NFL Blitz.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/2/9/8/2217298-box_nflx.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nfl-xtreme-review/1900-2548735/,neg,"
Let's make one thing clear at the outset: NFL Xtreme is no NFL Blitz. Despite appearances to the contrary, it doesn't look, sound, or play even remotely like the original (and still the best) arcade-style football game. This isn't really surprising - an NFL Blitz machine utilizes state-of-the-art hardware and costs thousands of dollars, while the PlayStation is some three years old and lists for around a hundred bucks. Even so, there has been a handful of arcade-quality games released on the PlayStation (Tekken 3 and Rage Racer, to name two) - we just want to make it clear that NFL Xtreme isn't among them. So, if NFL Xtreme isn't a legitimate NFL Blitz competitor, what exactly is it? As far as we can tell, NFL Extreme appears to be a five-on-five version of Sony's excellent but now aging GameDay '98. (For its part, Sony maintains that NFL Xtreme does not use the GameDay engine, but whether it does or doesn't is beside the point, because the differences between the ""two"" engines, if indeed there are two, are very few and very far between.) Because of its close similarity to GameDay, which was designed for standard play, NFL Xtreme largely fails to take advantage of the unique gameplay opportunities presented by a five-on-five football format. The best example of this is in the playbook, the core of any football sim. The idea of a five-on-five game is that the field is wide open, and as a result, the gameplay should be free-flowing and creative. But in NFL Xtreme, it simply isn't. You're straightjacketed into run-of-the-mill plays - sweeps, outs, posts, etc. - that we've all seen, run, and defended against many times before. Furthermore, you have absolutely no latitude to customize the plays or to make them more interesting while running them. With one exception (the halfback pass), multi-pass plays are not possible. Downfield laterals are a no-no. And you can't send your men into motion.  Another major issue is the control, which is sluggish and generally ""off"" just enough to become a major impediment to enjoying the game. Catching a pass is an adventure each and every time - you can hit the same player in the same spot two plays in a row and get completely different results. Dropped passes, players inexplicably pulling up during their route, passes bouncing off the receiver's helmet - if you want ways to go crazy playing offense, this game has got 'em in spades. And success on defense seems even more random than on offense - it's basically pick a play and hope for the best. So, we've established that the playbook is lame and the control is suspect. What about NFL Xtreme's highly touted graphics engine? Well, it does have its moments - there are some absolutely vicious hits, the players are highly detailed, and the frame rate is impressive (at times). But overall, as with the control, something isn't quite right. The collision detection is less than perfect, so players routinely run right through each other, destroying any sense of realism. And the graphics are often extremely murky in the middle of the screen, especially during running plays (which, incidentally, must almost exclusively be run to the outside in order to gain positive yardage, a trademark of second-tier football games).  But the real flaw with NFL Xtreme's graphics is the camera perspective, which has the players way too big up close and darn near indistinguishable as they move down the field. In fact, the perspective is so skewed that once a player is more than 20 yards away, it's a total guessing game as to which team he's on - and you can imagine how much fun it is to play ""who's who"" at a critical point in the game. The perspective also leaves too much of the right and left of the field outside your view, making it extremely difficult to pass cross-field if you're rolling towards a sideline. This reduces your offensive options, which in turn reduces the fun of the game. So, that leaves us with the taunting, one of NFL Xtreme's most heavily promoted features. The designers obviously wanted to show that they can trash talk with the best of 'em, and in NFL Xtreme you'll spend almost as much time taunting or being taunted as you will actually playing the game. Not that you'll enjoy it. The biggest faux pas is that the taunts are issued by the players themselves, rather than the announcer (as in NFL Blitz). This makes them completely nonsensical, since different players on opposing sides will issue the same taunts in the exact same voice. Even worse, the selection of taunts is very limited - after one game, you've basically heard them all. What's more, the taunts have little if anything to do with the onscreen gameplay (how else to explain a defensive back strutting around crowing ""This is my house"" after giving up a 50-yard completion?).  But the biggest problem is that the taunts themselves are just really lame - they don't sound in the least bit tough, and they're moronically mean-spirited. In short, it's as much fun to watch the taunting here as it is in real life, which is to say, no fun at all. (Editor's note: If the NFL is trying to give its league a better image, it's a mystery why it approved this license.)  Is there anything left to cover? Oh yes, NFL Xtreme gives you plenty of options to ""extend"" the gaming experience. You can select from exhibition, regular season, and play-off modes. There are variable difficulty and game-speed levels. You can trade and draft players and even track their statistics in a seemingly endless range of categories. But the bottom line is, with gameplay this bad, why on earth would you want to?
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480,Pac-Man Championship Edition DX ,9, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX introduces a number of terrific new elements that make it a superb update of the arcade classic.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/5/1/9/2225519-pacmancedx_box.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pac-man-championship-edition-dx/1900-6284336/,pos,"
  Three years ago, Pac-Man Championship Edition took the classic Pac-Man formula and reinvigorated it with a new look, changing mazes, a ticking clock and a new emphasis on skillfully eating lots of ghosts in sequence to rack up huge points. But where Championship Edition felt like an evolution of Pac-Man, the new Championship Edition DX feels more like a reinvention. It introduces a number of elements that fundamentally change how Pac-Man is played, without losing any of the timeless appeal of speeding around mazes, gobbling up dots, and chomping ghosts. On the contrary, DX only makes the entire Pac-Man experience more thrilling and addictive than ever.      When Pac-Man made his arcade debut 30 years ago, his life was a game of cat and mouse in which you spent most of your time trying to avoid the ghosts and survive. In DX, survival is not so tricky. What's tricky is scoring as many points as possible within a five- or 10-minute time limit. As in Championship Edition, clearing all the dots from one side of the maze makes a piece of fruit, a cup of coffee, or some other object appear on the other side of the maze. Gobbling up these items changes the cleared portion of the maze and gives you more dots that need to be cleared. What's completely new here is that ghosts are sleeping in set positions throughout these mazes. If you've played Pac-Man before, your instincts may tell you to stay as far away from these ghosts as possible, but that's actually the opposite of what you want to do.     Zooming past a ghost wakes it up, and it immediately starts giving chase to Pac-Man, following every move you make through the maze. As you continue to pass sleeping ghosts, each one will join your ghostly trail. You actually want this to happen, because when you finally gobble up a power pellet, you can turn around and eat your entire ethereal entourage for massive points. Luring dozens of ghosts into following you and then eating all of them at once is immensely satisfying, and this goal completely changes how you approach playing Pac-Man. The challenge is to figure out the most efficient routes through the maze and how to get as many ghosts to follow you as quickly as possible. This new focus makes DX feel a bit like a fast-paced and absorbing puzzle game.    But it also feels like a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants action game that requires lightning-fast reflexes. It's still dangerous out there for Pac-Man, and not all of the ghosts are asleep. His longtime adversaries--Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde--still emerge from the ghost house at the maze's center and roam its passageways, and their movements may sometimes interfere with your best-laid plans. But Pac-Man has a few new tricks up his sleeve that give him an edge over his old foes. As you play, the game's speed gradually increases, which means you can score more points in less time, but it also means that avoiding dangerous situations becomes much more difficult. But when you get extremely close to a ghost, the action slows way down, giving you ample opportunity to react. You want to avoid these situations whenever possible because the clock continues to tick in real time even as the action moves in slow motion, but it's a great addition to the formula that eliminates the potential frustration of dying in situations that spring up too quickly to give you a reasonable chance to respond.   Pac-Man’s new career as a pied piper is really working out for him.   Even with the help of this slow motion, though, you may still find yourself on collision courses with ghosts that offer no chance for escape. That's when your bombs come in handy. You have a limited number of bombs that, when used, bounce all the ghosts on your trail back to the ghost house. Like the slow motion, the option to use a bomb is better than dying, but it comes at a cost. The downside of using one is that it cuts any point multiplier you've built up from eating dots in half, and it prevents you from waking up any additional sleeping ghosts for a short time. (Dying eliminates your multiplier and slows down the game's speed.) Both of these tools are integrated into the action in a way that makes them very useful, without taking the challenge and excitement out of the game.     Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is the very definition of a game that's easy to learn and tough to master, but getting better doesn't feel like an uphill struggle. Gobbling pellets and chomping down ghosts is a great pleasure, thanks to the inherent appeal of the Pac-Man formula and to the very tight and responsive controls. So you find yourself absorbed and wanting to play again and again. And as you do, you naturally start playing smarter and earning higher scores as the patterns become clearer and you get into a groove. The imposed time limit means that, quite literally, every second counts, encouraging you to strive for perfection and avoid mistakes that cost you even a moment. In this endeavor, it's very easy to lose track of the hours as you play, whether you're aiming to knock friends down a peg on the leaderboards or just striving for a new personal best. And getting better and setting new high scores carries with it a feeling of accomplishment that then spurs you on to play still more and continue improving your performance.    Unfortunately, while numerous games like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 and Pinball FX 2 have integrated friends' leaderboards in ways that fan the flames of competition, the leaderboards in DX are one step removed from the game itself. If you want to see just how you're doing compared to other players, you need to back out of the mode-select menu and enter a separate leaderboard menu where you have to select the specific mode and maze for the scores you want to view. And if you select the filter to view your friends' scores, your own score isn't listed among them. The leaderboards do have one great feature: viewable replays for all of the highest scoring players. If you want to know how the best of the best are getting those amazing scores, you can see how they did it. But it's surprising that a game that's all about high scores makes you go through a few unnecessary steps just to see how your score measures up.   New look. Same great Pac-Man Championship Edition DX.   The hottest competition is in the game's first and best mode, called Score Attack (five minutes). But DX offers plenty of opportunities for a change of pace. As you play, you unlock a 10-minute Score Attack mode, as well as a number of time trials that score you not on how many dots and ghosts you eat but on how rapidly you clear the mazes. In addition, you unlock a total of 10 mazes, so you won't soon get bored of retreading the same patterns over and over again. DX also gives you a number of ways to change the look of Pac-Man, with some options carrying on the attractive neonlike appearance of the original Championship Edition, and others that cast Pac-Man and the ghosts as three-dimensional characters in mazes made of building blocks, in a nod to the look of 1987's Pac-Mania. You're also given a number of musical selections, and thankfully, the original CE's excellent ambient track that subtly builds up as time runs out is among them.    Three difficulty levels mean that players of any skill level can start at a speed they're comfortable with, offering a terrific experience to both those driven by a competitive desire to dominate on the leaderboards and those just looking for a fun and accessible game with a retro arcade feel. The new elements fuse so seamlessly with the familiar ones that DX immediately feels like a thrilling new game and a timeless classic at once. Thirty years after Pac-Man first became an arcade sensation, it's exhilarating to see new concepts introduced that make the whole experience of playing completely fresh and compulsively playable all over again. The original arcade superstar is back, and this is one of his best performances yet.  


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481,Pac-Man Championship Edition DX ,9, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX introduces a number of terrific new elements that make it a superb update of the arcade classic.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/5/1/9/2225519-pacmancedx_box.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pac-man-championship-edition-dx-review/1900-6284565/,pos,"
  Three years ago, Pac-Man Championship Edition took the classic Pac-Man formula and reinvigorated it with a new look, changing mazes, a ticking clock and a new emphasis on skillfully eating lots of ghosts in sequence to rack up huge points. But where Championship Edition felt like an evolution of Pac-Man, the new Championship Edition DX feels more like a reinvention. It introduces a number of elements that fundamentally change how Pac-Man is played, without losing any of the timeless appeal of speeding around mazes, gobbling up dots, and chomping ghosts. On the contrary, DX only makes the entire Pac-Man experience more thrilling and addictive than ever.      When Pac-Man made his arcade debut 30 years ago, his life was a game of cat and mouse in which you spent most of your time trying to avoid the ghosts and survive. In DX, survival is not so tricky. What's tricky is scoring as many points as possible within a five- or 10-minute time limit. As in Championship Edition, clearing all the dots from one side of the maze makes a piece of fruit, a cup of coffee, or some other object appear on the other side of the maze. Gobbling up these items changes the cleared portion of the maze and gives you more dots that need to be cleared. What's completely new here is that ghosts are sleeping in set positions throughout these mazes. If you've played Pac-Man before, your instincts may tell you to stay as far away from these ghosts as possible, but that's actually the opposite of what you want to do.     Zooming past a ghost wakes it up, and it immediately starts giving chase to Pac-Man, following every move you make through the maze. As you continue to pass sleeping ghosts, each one will join your ghostly trail. You actually want this to happen, because when you finally gobble up a power pellet, you can turn around and eat your entire ethereal entourage for massive points. Luring dozens of ghosts into following you and then eating all of them at once is immensely satisfying, and this goal completely changes how you approach playing Pac-Man. The challenge is to figure out the most efficient routes through the maze and how to get as many ghosts to follow you as quickly as possible. This new focus makes DX feel a bit like a fast-paced and absorbing puzzle game.    But it also feels like a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants action game that requires lightning-fast reflexes. It's still dangerous out there for Pac-Man, and not all of the ghosts are asleep. His longtime adversaries--Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde--still emerge from the ghost house at the maze's center and roam its passageways, and their movements may sometimes interfere with your best-laid plans. But Pac-Man has a few new tricks up his sleeve that give him an edge over his old foes. As you play, the game's speed gradually increases, which means you can score more points in less time, but it also means that avoiding dangerous situations becomes much more difficult. But when you get extremely close to a ghost, the action slows way down, giving you ample opportunity to react. You want to avoid these situations whenever possible because the clock continues to tick in real time even as the action moves in slow motion, but it's a great addition to the formula that eliminates the potential frustration of dying in situations that spring up too quickly to give you a reasonable chance to respond.   Pac-Man’s new career as a pied piper is really working out for him.   Even with the help of this slow motion, though, you may still find yourself on collision courses with ghosts that offer no chance for escape. That's when your bombs come in handy. You have a limited number of bombs that, when used, bounce all the ghosts on your trail back to the ghost house. Like the slow motion, the option to use a bomb is better than dying, but it comes at a cost. The downside of using one is that it cuts any point multiplier you've built up from eating dots in half, and it prevents you from waking up any additional sleeping ghosts for a short time. (Dying eliminates your multiplier and slows down the game's speed.) Both of these tools are integrated into the action in a way that makes them very useful, without taking the challenge and excitement out of the game.     Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is the very definition of a game that's easy to learn and tough to master, but getting better doesn't feel like an uphill struggle. Gobbling pellets and chomping down ghosts is a great pleasure, thanks to the inherent appeal of the Pac-Man formula and to the very tight and responsive controls. So you find yourself absorbed and wanting to play again and again. And as you do, you naturally start playing smarter and earning higher scores as the patterns become clearer and you get into a groove. The imposed time limit means that, quite literally, every second counts, encouraging you to strive for perfection and avoid mistakes that cost you even a moment. In this endeavor, it's very easy to lose track of the hours as you play, whether you're aiming to knock friends down a peg on the leaderboards or just striving for a new personal best. And getting better and setting new high scores carries with it a feeling of accomplishment that then spurs you on to play still more and continue improving your performance.    Unfortunately, while games like Joe Danger have integrated friends' leaderboards in ways that fan the flames of competition, the leaderboards in DX are one step removed from the game itself. If you want to see just how you're doing compared to other players, you need to back out of the mode-select menu and enter a separate leaderboard menu where you have to select the specific mode and maze for the scores you want to view. And if you select the filter to view your friends' scores, your own score isn't listed among them. The leaderboards do have one great feature: viewable replays for all of the highest scoring players. If you want to know how the best of the best are getting those amazing scores, you can see how they did it. But it's surprising that a game that's all about high scores makes you go through a few unnecessary steps just to see how your score measures up.   Consult your doctor. There's a highly contagious new strain of Pac-Man fever out there.   The hottest competition is in the game's first and best mode, called Score Attack (five minutes). But DX offers plenty of opportunities for a change of pace. As you play, you unlock a 10-minute Score Attack mode, as well as a number of time trials that score you not on how many dots and ghosts you eat but on how rapidly you clear the mazes. In addition, you unlock a total of 10 mazes, so you won't soon get bored of retreading the same patterns over and over again. DX also gives you a number of ways to change the look of Pac-Man, with some options carrying on the attractive neonlike appearance of the original Championship Edition, and others that cast Pac-Man and the ghosts as three-dimensional characters in mazes made of building blocks, in a nod to the look of 1987's Pac-Mania. You're also given a number of musical selections, and thankfully, the original CE's excellent ambient track that subtly builds up as time runs out is among them.    Three difficulty levels mean that players of any skill level can start at a speed they're comfortable with, offering a terrific experience to both those driven by a competitive desire to dominate on the leaderboards and those just looking for a fun and accessible game with a retro arcade feel. The new elements fuse so seamlessly with the familiar ones that DX immediately feels like a thrilling new game and a timeless classic at once. Thirty years after Pac-Man first became an arcade sensation, it's exhilarating to see new concepts introduced that make the whole experience of playing completely fresh and compulsively playable all over again. The original arcade superstar is back, and this is one of his best performances yet.  


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482,Journey ,9, Mysterious desert adventure Journey is an uncommonly enthralling experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426675-journey-collectors-edition-game-screenshot-1-b.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/journey-review/1900-6363693/,pos,"
  In simplest terms, Journey is a third-person, sporadically two-player adventure in which you travel through a desert towards a mountain. By the alchemy of developer thatgamecompany's skill and vision, it is also unique, exciting, mysterious, and utterly lovely, with mesmerising landscapes and stirring music. It deploys more 'gamey' elements than any of the developer's works before it, and does so successfully, while maintaining the feel of an evocative, interactive art piece. Three hours long at most, it's concise but not overly short, its cycle of emotional highs and lows best experienced in a single sitting.       You begin without context, a red-robed figure in a desert, and set out hiking towards the mountain on the horizon. Why? Initially, at least, just because it's there; instinctively you seek an objective and the mountain, topped with an unexplained bright light, is your only option. It's a straightforward but elegant kind of signposting, making the mountain a near-constant, towering waypoint. Elsewhere, Journey's signposting is lighter-touch but similarly deft, suggesting objectives so subtly as to feel like you're always exploring on instinct--as though while being drawn onwards to that distant peak, every reveal is your own discovery.     You hike up dunes and slide down the other side, sand-surfing with either the Sixaxis tilt sensor or the left thumbstick. Both controls feel nimble and light, and the pleasing rhythm of steady uphill climbs and exhilarating downhill slides make trekking along a joy in itself. Then you encounter dusty ruins and mysterious stone markers, and among these you discover your first cloth fragment: a scrap of the luminous scarf that lets you fly.     Holding the X button boosts you off the ground, and as you explore and collect more cloth fragments, your scarf grows. This lets you boost for longer, enabling longer spells of gliding, across wider gaps and up to higher crests. Like the surfing, gliding is blissful fun, and it makes for graceful platforming around colossal towers. Once the power in your scarf is depleted, you'll often yearn to be back in flight, and to that end there are recharging fonts which themselves loft you skyward. Progress is made by walking, sliding, and flying onwards, and sometimes by opening the way to the next big area by triggering new fonts or reactivating old bridges.    Escape to which mountain?  Journey's gorgeous desolation and overwhelming scale bring to mind Shadow of the Colossus, while its dreamy colour and quirky, elegant designs recall a Studio Ghibli movie. It's relentlessly beautiful, and there's much more visual diversity than you might expect of a desert-set game, not to mention some charming desert denizens, airborne creatures made of the same magic fabric as your scarf. Even in the appearance of sand there's striking variety, from smoothly matte to glittery to full-on gleaming, through shades of red, white, and gold. It reacts convincingly, too, rippling in the wind or shifting under your feet as you climb.     The camera alternately draws in close to show the runes glowing on your undulating scarf and pulls far back to make you a little red speck in a sandy wilderness, where huge, half-crumbled structures hint at an empire long since vanished. It's all backed by moving, dynamic music, closely matched to in-game happenings, with exuberant orchestral bursts for action and mournful strings for quieter, poignant moments.     There are hints at the backstory in hieroglyph-like murals and visions (wordless cutscenes) brought on by statues, which allude to a terrible cataclysm. Mostly, though, Journey opts for atmosphere and mystery over exposition. The implication, at least, is you might be all that's left, and reaching the distant mountain is an important thing to do. It's a lonely prospect, however pretty the post-apocalypse.     That loneliness makes Journey's intriguing take on multiplayer all the more evocative. Multiplayer is anonymous and automatic, spontaneously bringing together two players at the same stage in their game. When you come across a fellow wanderer, he or she is stripped of PSN ID, and you have no means to communicate except a one-button musical tone, with which you can chirp at one other. In the absence of identifying details, you can only wonder who your nameless companion is.    Ain't no desert wide enough (to keep me away from you).  By withholding his or her identity, Journey makes your only friend a perfect stranger, simultaneously more anonymous and more immediately companionable than anyone you've met in an online multiplayer match-up. Huddling together keeps your scarves charged up and, in the absence of chat, your musical piping is surprisingly expressive. Though he or she is far from vital to making progress, the company is invariably welcome; it's a powerful contrast to the solitude of voyaging alone through a mostly empty desert, and when you drift apart forever, it's curiously sad.     In the light platforming, the challenge is slight; like Flower, thatgamecompany's previous title, Journey favours affecting experiences over systems of reward and punishment. That said, this is a more conventionally game-like affair, not least by way of your precious, flight-powering scarf--essentially an in-world representation of a boost gauge--for which you gather collectables (cloth fragments) and which can be cut short as well as grown, leading to some genuinely tense and scary moments.     It's a real accomplishment that Journey draws together so many conventional game elements, and so well, and still feels like the art piece we expect from the makers of Flow and Flower: intriguing, ambiguous, and experimental. The game's length, two or three hours on the outside, is exactly right, letting you take in the whole experience in one session.  Once you've completed it, you can dip back into favourite chapters, and even without the impact of unexpected reveals, it's uncommonly enthralling. Its deliberate ambiguity brings on the urge to speculate on deeper meanings, but meaning here is bound to be personal, and best discovered for yourself. Discover it you should.   


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483,Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch ,9," The witty, beautiful, and endlessly creative Ni no Kuni is a treasure not to be missed.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2396893-ninokuni.jpeg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ni-no-kuni-wrath-of-the-white-witch-review/1900-6402702/,pos,"
  What a delight Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is! It's charming but never cloying, complementing its vibrant cel-shaded art and good-natured child star with plentiful doses of wit and joy. The clever dialogue dips into a bottomless well of puns, keeping you grinning wide, if not laughing out loud at the constant goofiness. More importantly, this Japanese role-playing game possesses great soul, exploring a son's love for his mother, and the vast expanses he's prepared to cross in the hopes of a reunion. Hearts are broken and restored, hidden motives are revealed, and lost relationships again blossom, even after great evil has torn them asunder. This is a wonderful world that you will be eager to lose countless hours in as you adventure through its enticing realms.      Oliver is the cherry-cheeked center of Ni no Kuni--the boy who would save the world, as so many youngsters do in RPGs. But the world he saves isn't his own. Oliver lives in Motorville, an Anytown, U.S.A. sort of place--the kind you might see depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting. Children laugh and play, cars drive slowly along the shrubbery-lined streets, and mothers shop for bottles of milk and sacks of foodstuffs. On the occasions you visit Motorville throughout the game, your travels are accompanied by slurring violins and trilling flutes and oboes. The music tells you all you must know in just a few notes: Oliver's world is idyllic, and his childhood untroubled by cares of the adult world.    This all changes drastically when Oliver's mother dies, saving his life after his reckless motorcar antics. But there is a whisper of hope amid the grief: mom has a soul twin--a great sage living in a fantasy world, currently trapped by a villainous fiend called Shadar. For Oliver, Shadar's defeat means the possible liberation of his mother from death itself. For the denizens of the parallel world, it means liberation from his magical tyranny--or so their story goes.     Thus begins your journey alongside a heartbroken young boy desperate to restore order to his life and his world. Oliver is the soul of the adventure--and his companion Drippy is the wit. Drippy is hardly mere comic relief, but his enthusiasm is infectious. He frequently refers to himself as High Lord of the Fairies in a delightful Welsh accent, egging Oliver on during moments of uncertainty. It's in Ni no Kuni's most surreal scenarios that Drippy's dialogue tickles the most--places where lines like ""These littlies are nowhere near as fragile as they are egg-looking!"" make a silly sort of sense. His follow-up line: ""When I was their age, I ate squid for breakfast! Proper hard I was!"" Drippy's a wonderful sidekick (though Drippy sees you as his sidekick, to be fair), and remains a joy, even 60 or more hours in.    Darling, it's better down where it's wetter, take it from me.   As you traverse the overworld and its various cities and dungeons, the squat Drippy skips merrily along, a lantern pierced through his nose. His boundless energy occasionally causes him to stumble, but he bounces right back into gear without ever losing his goofy smile. He's an instant classic of a character, brought to life by fantastic voice acting, a trait the character shares with the entire cast. Oliver's young actor hits just the right balance: endearing and gung-ho, but rarely sickeningly sweet. Fantastical characters like Ding Dong Dell's King Tom--a feline ruler referred to as His Meowjesty--are uplifted by fun, sincere line readings that never cross over into self-parody.     The result is a world you love to be in, which is just as well: even as the game seems to wrap up its story with an emotionally satisfying conclusion, it presses forward, refusing to let plot threads dangle, and uprooting any sense of complacency. The whimsy of the writing is matched by the whimsy of the world and the situations you encounter. This is a game in which you explore the pastel-colored innards of a giant wobbling mother before she fancifully erupts and you experience a second birth of sorts. Unusual? Yes--but also utterly enchanting. Even the smallest moments deliver glee. A llama with a gourmet appetite wants yummies. A traveler keeps misplacing his diary. A wannabe diva of a molten monster warbles a few notes that could break a champagne glass. This is a world of wild imagination, and so you pursue every side quest and peek into every nook, knowing that a surprise lies in wait.     All of those nooks burst with beauty, and become even more varied as you explore further. When you first arrive in the overworld near Ding Dong Dell, you'll be enthralled by the sun-drenched meadows and glistening waterways. But later, you roam golden deserts, icy plateaus, and misty swamps, where the eyes of crooked trees look upon you in displeasure. Cel-shaded games often sacrifice detail in lieu of bold outlines and primary colors, but Ni no Kuni doesn't use its style as a crutch. Rather, the cartoonish visuals are heightened by extraordinary visual details. In a Motorville shop, each storefront and hanging flower planter is given careful attention, making it the hometown you wish you had grown up in. As you make your way towards a village, your party visibly shivers from the cold. These excellent small touches are crucial in creating a sense of wonder.   Shadar does not speak for the rest of us.   The impact of the fantastic soundtrack cannot be overstated. A fairy village in Ni no Kuni isn't like a fairy village in any other game, and the music reflects as much. When you enter, the oom-pa-pas of tubas lend this place the exact right kind of circus atmosphere. Explore a dungeon and you hear a rising scale motif, which in turn raises the tension. And then there comes a moment when Oliver's friend Esther raises a musical instrument in song, warmly intoning the game's main theme without additional accompaniment. And it's here you recognize how much meaning this one tune possesses--and how amazing it is that it never grows tiresome, but rather, gains emotional power over time.     Much of the success of a role-playing game hinges on its world, its people, and its story, and Ni no Kuni is thankfully rich in all of those areas. But generally, interacting with the game is as joyous as watching and hearing it. Structurally, the game is much like many RPGs to come before it. Towns and dungeons are linked together by a massive overworld that you first navigate on foot, then by boat. Even later, you navigate by dragon, soaring through the skies with ease from one locale to the next. You also unlock the ability to quick travel to and from places you've already been, but in this world, such conveniences must be earned by dedicating a couple dozen hours first.    Not every area you visit is bright and cheery.   You spend a lot of time in combat. Connecting with enemies initiates battle, and Oliver is joined by two other party members on the field. But Oliver and his buddies don't have to do the fighting on their own, though they certainly can if you wish them to. Instead, they usually deploy creatures to do it for them, Pokemon-style. Each party member can equip up to three familiars, which means you have as many as 12 combatants at your disposal during battle, though only three at any given time. You gather creatures by fighting them: every so often, Esther gets the random chance to lull one into submission. You can then name the creature and add it to your stable    The action is typically a lot of fun. During combat, you control only one character/familiar at a time; the AI handles the other two participants. The action isn't exactly real-time, but you still maintain direct control, maneuvering into effective position to attack, defend, or unleash magic or other special skills. In the most challenging skirmishes, you must pay close attention to visual indicators to take a defensive position at just the right time, or to interrupt a creature's attack with a well-timed strike.     Later hours can have you flipping back and forth between characters madly, trying to maintain a proper balance of healing, offense, and defense, all the while being aware of your opponent's weaknesses, and trying to nab the healing and mana orbs they occasionally drop. Such battles are highly entertaining, and once all the systems are in place, you can rarely afford to be complacent.    There's no finer way to get around in all the land.   Familiars level separately from their handlers, so the majority of battles end with a pronouncement that at least one pet or another has gained a level. (Fortunately, your 9 active pets gain experience even if you don't order them into combat.) The constant notifications give you a great sense of progress, which is important given the amount of grinding needed to keep a decent number of creatures ready for battle. Newly-captured familiars are weaklings, and it takes time to get them in tip-top shape. And even after spending significant time with them, some familiars just aren't that effective, rarely (if ever) getting used because there are battle-ready creatures that you've already leveled up.  As a result, you'll probably have a number of reliable pets you keep with you at all times, and will switch out a few other slots here and there to take advantage of particular magical skills--or just for the thrill of seeing a new pet in action.    You can set basic behaviors for the AI party members during combat, but you don't have as many options as you do in the Tales game series, whose combat system bears a passing resemblance to Ni no Kuni's. It would have been nice if the game allowed you to set these behaviors outside of combat, but at least you have the option to do so during a fight. Given how quick the AI is to waste its magical energy when given the chance, nudging them in the right direction is crucial to success. Combat exhibits other quirks too: familiars getting stuck against each other or monsters, for instance, or party members whacking on baddies with their puny weapons when a familiar would be the better choice.     The possibility of bringing along an ineffective familiar might lead to frustration if you aren't careful (and sometimes, even if you are). There are some notable difficulty spikes which are compounded by potentially imbalanced parties. Yet even at its most challenging, it's hard not to appreciate the grotesqueries you face, and the possibility of getting to nab one for yourself. You won't add boss creatures to your pen, but that hardly makes the boss battles less rewarding. Bosses require the most party micromanagement, and are often a wonder to look at to boot. Among them are a slithering snake in Egyptian garb, hissing at you with its menacing purple tongue; a horned demon, its obese figure belted by gnarled branches; and a rubbery invertebrate with blinking lights rimming its bell and tentacles, giving it the look of a carnival ride.    This might be the worst comedy routine ever--and you won't stop laughing.   Outside of the story quests are seemingly infinite side tasks to pursue, many of them focused on Oliver's ability to siphon excess amounts of emotions like love and ambition from passersby and offer them to brokenhearted citizens needing a pick-me-up. It's a cute and pervasive activity that makes perfect thematic sense within the narrative, though you aren't limited to such simple tasks. You can take down monsters to earn rewards, help a street vendor assemble the most delicious curry you ever did taste, and collect a sun-shaped creature in order to help a plant grow. Throw in a battle arena, an alchemy system, and hidden caves to explore, and you have more than enough to keep you busy for a while to come.     Ni no Kuni is a stupendous game because there's so much to do in it, and because all of it is just so good. The hallmark of the greatest RPGs is that you don't want to stop playing them, and Ni no Kuni proudly joins that elite group of games providing such an enticing world that you can't imagine never having visited it. The only problem, of course, is that you may never want to leave.   


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","['What', 'delight', 'Ni', 'Kuni', ':', 'Wrath', 'White', 'Witch', '!', 'It', ""'s"", 'charming', 'never', 'cloying', ',', 'complementing', 'vibrant', 'cel-shaded', 'art', 'good-natured', 'child', 'star', 'plentiful', 'doses', 'wit', 'joy', '.', 'The', 'clever', 'dialogue', 'dips', 'bottomless', 'well', 'puns', ',', 'keeping', 'grinning', 'wide', ',', 'laughing', 'loud', 'constant', 'goofiness', '.', 'More', 'importantly', ',', 'Japanese', 'role-playing', 'game', 'possesses', 'great', 'soul', ',', 'exploring', 'son', ""'s"", 'love', 'mother', ',', 'vast', 'expanses', ""'s"", 'prepared', 'cross', 'hopes', 'reunion', '.', 'Hearts', 'broken', 'restored', ',', 'hidden', 'motives', 'revealed', ',', 'lost', 'relationships', 'blossom', ',', 'even', 'great', 'evil', 'torn', 'asunder', '.', 'This', 'wonderful', 'world', 'eager', 'lose', 'countless', 'hours', 'adventure', 'enticing', 'realms', '.', 'Oliver', 'cherry-cheeked', 'center', 'Ni', 'Kuni', '--', 'boy', 'would', 'save', 'world', ',', 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484,DiRT 3 ,9, Dirt 3 is a superb off-road racer that adds some great new features and improves upon its predecessor at just about every opportunity.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/6/3/2224463-box_dirt3.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dirt-3-review/1900-6315203/,pos,"
  When Dirt 2 was released in 2009 it boasted a lengthy and varied career mode, numerous multiplayer options, and uniformly excellent presentation. Its sequel loses none of those things and also makes some great additions to the formula. Split-screen multiplayer is now an option, there are more vehicle classes to choose from, gymkhana events and snowy conditions pose fresh challenges, and new multiplayer modes put interesting automotive spins on some first-person shooter favorites. Dirt 3 brings a lot of superb content to the table, and because it offers a plethora of customizable difficulty settings and assists, newcomers and veterans alike can enjoy its excellent off-road action.       Regardless of which difficulty level you play at and whether or not you take advantage of stability and braking assists, Dirt 3 handles like a dream. There are dozens of great-looking modern and vintage vehicles in the garage, and you race them on all manner of surfaces and in changing weather conditions, but getting behind the wheel of one that you haven't driven before is never a problem. The controls are responsive, and while it's certainly possible to mess up so spectacularly that your ride loses panels and becomes deformed to the point that it's unrecognizable, there are gameplay mechanics in place that ensure you don't feel the need to hold anything back. Even as you hurtle along narrow dirt trails and around icy hairpins, Dirt 3's cars, trucks, and buggies encourage you to push them harder by using excellent audio and rumble feedback to let you know that you're not quite on the edge yet.    Demanding new gymkhana events in which you're challenged to perform tricks in specially designed arenas reinforce how excellent Dirt 3's controls are. In these exciting sessions you score points for crashing through carefully positioned destructible blocks, and for performing donuts, spins, slides, and jumps. String different tricks together to get the crowd pumped, and you build up a score multiplier; display anything other than masterful control by colliding with something, and your multiplier goes down. It's not entirely dissimilar to performing combos in a skateboarding game, except that the tricks are significantly less complex. Stringing successful tricks together against the clock is still plenty challenging, though, and as a result, gymkhanas are great practice for other events. Once you can make a car dance around a cone and slide at speed through a gate or underneath a truck, getting it around a corner in a race doesn't seem like such a big deal.    Tutorials do a good job of teaching you the tricks you need for gymkhana events.   Every event in Dirt 3, whether it be a point-to-point rally through a Kenyan desert, a head-to-head race in the Aspen snow, or a circuit-based rallycross event that weaves in and out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, demands precise driving. You can get away with a few collisions here and there, particularly if you take advantage of the five flashbacks at your disposal to correct your mistakes, and it's entirely possible that you might find finishing in first place too easy if you're an experienced player. Turn off some of the assists, crank up the difficulty, and switch from cosmetic damage to realistic damage, though, and you'll find that Dirt 3 is exactly as challenging as you want it to be. At the other end of the scale, if you're new to off-road racing and looking for a way into the genre, Dirt 3 has you covered. In addition to the aforementioned assists and other options, it's the first game in the series to offer a dynamic racing line like those seen in both the Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo series.     That racing line can be invaluable as you learn your way around Dirt 3's 100-plus circuits and stages; position yourself poorly as you take a turn or jump over a crest, and you might make a subsequent corner unnecessarily difficult. Also invaluable in the events where she's available is real-life co-driver Jen Horsey, who always delivers the information you need in a clear, concise, and timely fashion. (A male alternative is also available, as is an option to have either co-driver use more complex and detailed language.) If you listen to her carefully, rally stages that wind through the forests of Finland or around the lakes of Michigan don't seem nearly as daunting. You still won't have much time to admire the impressive scenery or to contemplate the foolhardy fans that occasionally run across the track ahead of you, but you're far less likely to wrap your car around a tree or crash through a barrier and into the crowd.   Replays afford you an opportunity to admire both the scenery and your skills behind the wheel.   Many of the events in Dirt 3's lengthy Dirt Tour career mode span multiple back-to-back races at the same location, but the game does an excellent job of keeping the action from feeling stale. After finishing the first of three rallycross events in dry conditions, for example, you might race the next during a grip-changing downpour and then the final in wet conditions after the rain clouds have passed and your visibility is improved. And in point-to-point rallies, racing the same stages in different directions can make for a very different experience, especially if you're under a desert sun one stage and having to use your headlights to cut through the black of night the next. Also lending variety to your career is that you invariably have several different events to choose from. The dozens of events that compose the Dirt Tour are organized into four seasons that must be completed in order, but your progress through each season is anything but linear, and you always have the option to return to events that you want to replay in an attempt to improve upon your position or best score/time.    Your progress as a driver is measured in reputation points, which are earned after every event. You score points for podium finishes, for not using your flashbacks, and for completing any team-specific goals. Teams aren't a big deal in Dirt 3; where in some games you're expected to commit to them for entire seasons, here you can drive for a different one every time you get behind the wheel, if you wish. Early in your career only a couple of teams have any interest in you, but as you earn reputation points and level up, more teams (and by extension, more cars) become available to you. Your choice of team before any event is likely to be motivated by its car first and foremost, but the number of reputation points that the team is offering for completing its bonus objectives is also a consideration. Sadly, you don't get to see what the actual objective is when choosing, so your decisions aren't nearly as well informed as they could be. Regardless, none of the challenges are so difficult that you're filled with regret for choosing a particular team; most involve simply reaching a certain speed, finishing with no damage, or making it through an entire event without ever spinning or rolling your vehicle.      On top of the events that form the four seasons, Dirt Tour mode boasts a number of unlockable extras that add to its longevity considerably. For starters, there are world tours specific to each discipline; choose to race and subsequently do well in point-to-point rallies, and you unlock a rally world tour with dozens of those events. Furthermore, you can unlock a playground of sorts in the form of London's Battersea power station and its surrounding area. Here, not only are you free to practice gymkhana techniques, but you can also complete a number of varied challenges to earn extra reputation. These challenges include everything from completing jumps and performing tricks in specific spots, to crashing through fences that divide the different unlockable areas and locating hidden Dirt 3 logos. Visiting Battersea makes for a welcome change of pace, and it's also a great way to prepare for some of Dirt 3's more unusual multiplayer offerings.    In addition to online versions of all of the conventional races, rallies, and gymkhana events, Dirt 3 features some unique vehicular versions of modes that you might already be familiar with. Transporter, for example, is a capture-the-flag game, while Outbreak is an Infection-style game of tag in which your car turns bright green when you're hit by an infected player. Another highlight of Dirt 3's sizable multiplayer suite is Invasion, a game in which you score points for crashing through cutouts of alien robots but lose points for causing collateral damage when you crash through cutouts of buildings. This mode, perhaps more than any other, puts the skills that you pick up in gymkhana events to great use, because you have to be both fast and precise to beat other players to your targets. Some of these multiplayer modes can get a little too chaotic at times (when everyone descends on the flag at the same time in a relatively confined space, for example), but it's still a lot of fun and hugely satisfying to win or even score a single point in a closely contested session.   Split-screen support for two players is a welcome addition.   Split-screen multiplayer for two is also supported, and like the online play, it's practically indistinguishable from playing solo where the game's performance is concerned. The only noteworthy difference is that you don't get the option to drive using the cockpit camera. With the exception of gymkhana events and joyrides around Battersea, split-screen races with a friend in any of the available disciplines (rally, rallycross trailblazer, head 2 head, landrush) can support up to six AI drivers competing alongside you. Advanced options, which are also available when you host unranked Jam Session games online, include allowing custom vehicle setups, forcing manual gears, and choosing between visual and full damage. Basically, whether multiplayer or solo, you can play Dirt 3 however you like; it can feel like a forgiving arcade game, a challenging simulation, or just about anything in between.    Regardless of how you play Dirt 3, there's no denying that, like its predecessor, it looks and sounds fantastic. Despite the fact that you rarely get to stop and admire the environments, the level of detail in them is great, and the cars--while not quite up to the standards set by the best that Forza Motorsport 3 and Gran Turismo 5 have to offer--are even better. Seeing these brightly colored vehicles get caked in mud and snow and take believable damage from impacts is a treat, and the incredible noises that their engines make never leave you in any doubt about the amount of power you have at your disposal. Audio is impressive across the board: you get plenty of feedback from whichever road surface you're driving on to let you know how well your tires are gripping, and the licensed soundtrack with tunes from the likes of Chromeo, Drive A, Hudson Mohawke, RJD2, and We Are Scientists is appropriately eclectic and energetic.   The racing can be a little too close for comfort in rallycross events.   Dirt 3 improves and builds upon its superb predecessor at just about every opportunity. The new multiplayer modes and gymkhana events are great additions, and if you're interested primarily in traditional racing disciplines, it has more than twice as many routes to race in more varied weather conditions and in an even greater selection of vehicles. The option to upload replays to YouTube isn't as exciting as it could be, given that you're limited to 30 seconds and there's no other way to save them, but this is a small blemish in an otherwise superb game. Whether you're a veteran of the Dirt series and the long-running Colin McRae Rally series that preceded it, or someone looking for a way into off-road racing, Dirt 3 is the game you should be playing.  


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485,DiRT 3 ,9, Dirt 3 is a superb off-road racer that adds some great new features and improves upon its predecessor at just about every opportunity.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/6/3/2224463-box_dirt3.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dirt-3-review/1900-6316260/,pos,"
  When DiRT 2 was released in 2009 it boasted a lengthy and varied career mode, numerous multiplayer options, and uniformly excellent presentation. Its sequel loses none of those things and also makes some great additions to the formula. Split-screen multiplayer with support for two controllers is now an option, there are more vehicle classes to choose from, gymkhana events and snowy conditions pose fresh challenges, and new multiplayer modes put interesting automotive spins on some first-person shooter favorites. Dirt 3 brings a lot of superb content to the table, and because it offers a plethora of customizable difficulty settings and assists, newcomers and veterans alike can enjoy its excellent off-road action.       Regardless of which difficulty level you play at and whether or not you take advantage of stability and braking assists, Dirt 3 handles like a dream. There are dozens of great-looking modern and vintage vehicles in the garage, and you race them on all manner of surfaces and in changing weather conditions, but getting behind the wheel of one that you haven't driven before is never a problem. The controls are responsive, and while it's certainly possible to mess up so spectacularly that your ride loses panels and becomes deformed to the point that it's unrecognizable, there are gameplay mechanics in place that ensure you don't feel the need to hold anything back. Even as you hurtle along narrow dirt trails and around icy hairpins, Dirt 3's cars, trucks, and buggies encourage you to push them harder by using excellent audio and rumble feedback to let you know that you're not quite on the edge yet.    Demanding new gymkhana events in which you're challenged to perform tricks in specially designed arenas reinforce how excellent Dirt 3's controls are. In these exciting sessions you score points for crashing through carefully positioned destructible blocks, and for performing donuts, spins, slides, and jumps. String different tricks together to get the crowd pumped, and you build up a score multiplier; display anything other than masterful control by colliding with something, and your multiplier goes down. It's not entirely dissimilar to performing combos in a skateboarding game, except that the tricks are significantly less complex. Stringing successful tricks together against the clock is still plenty challenging, though, and as a result, gymkhanas are great practice for other events. Once you can make a car dance around a cone and slide at speed through a gate or underneath a truck, getting it around a corner in a race doesn't seem like such a big deal.    Changing weather conditions prevent otherwise very similar races from feeling repetitive.   Every event in Dirt 3, whether it be a point-to-point rally through a Kenyan desert, a head-to-head race in the Aspen snow, or a circuit-based rallycross event that weaves in and out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, demands precise driving. You can get away with a few collisions here and there, particularly if you take advantage of the five flashbacks at your disposal to correct your mistakes, and it's entirely possible that you might find finishing in first place too easy if you're an experienced player. Turn off some of the assists, crank up the difficulty, and switch from cosmetic damage to realistic damage, though, and you'll find that Dirt 3 is exactly as challenging as you want it to be. At the other end of the scale, if you're new to off-road racing and looking for a way into the genre, Dirt 3 has you covered. In addition to the aforementioned assists and other options, it's the first game in the series to offer a dynamic racing line like those seen in both the Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo series on consoles.     That racing line can be invaluable as you learn your way around Dirt 3's 100-plus circuits and stages; position yourself poorly as you take a turn or jump over a crest, and you might make a subsequent corner unnecessarily difficult. Also invaluable in the events where she's available is real-life co-driver Jen Horsey, who always delivers the information you need in a clear, concise, and timely fashion. (A male alternative is also available, as is an option to have either co-driver use more complex and detailed language.) If you listen to her carefully, rally stages that wind through the forests of Finland or around the lakes of Michigan don't seem nearly as daunting. You still won't have much time to admire the impressive scenery or to contemplate the foolhardy fans that occasionally run across the track ahead of you, but you're far less likely to wrap your car around a tree or crash through a barrier and into the crowd.   Replays afford you an opportunity to admire both the scenery and your skills behind the wheel.   Many of the events in Dirt 3's lengthy Dirt Tour career mode span multiple back-to-back races at the same location, but the game does an excellent job of keeping the action from feeling stale. After finishing the first of three rallycross events in dry conditions, for example, you might race the next during a grip-changing downpour and then the final in wet conditions after the rain clouds have passed and your visibility is improved. And in point-to-point rallies, racing the same stages in different directions can make for a very different experience, especially if you're under a desert sun one stage and having to use your headlights to cut through the black of night the next. Also lending variety to your career is that you invariably have several different events to choose from. The dozens of events that compose the Dirt Tour are organized into four seasons that must be completed in order, but your progress through each season is anything but linear, and you always have the option to return to events that you want to replay in an attempt to improve upon your position or best score/time.    Your progress as a driver is measured in reputation points, which are earned after every event. You score points for podium finishes, for not using your flashbacks, and for completing any team-specific goals. Teams aren't a big deal in Dirt 3; where in some games you're expected to commit to them for entire seasons, here you can drive for a different one every time you get behind the wheel, if you wish. Early in your career only a couple of teams have any interest in you, but as you earn reputation points and level up, more teams (and by extension, more cars) become available to you. Your choice of team before any event is likely to be motivated by its car first and foremost, but the number of reputation points that the team is offering for completing its bonus objectives is also a consideration. Sadly, you don't get to see what the actual objective is when choosing, so your decisions aren't nearly as well informed as they could be. Regardless, none of the challenges are so difficult that you're filled with regret for choosing a particular team; most involve simply reaching a certain speed, finishing with no damage, or making it through an entire event without ever spinning or rolling your vehicle.      On top of the events that form the four seasons, Dirt Tour mode boasts a number of unlockable extras that add to its longevity considerably. For starters, there are world tours specific to each discipline; choose to race and subsequently do well in point-to-point rallies, and you unlock a rally world tour with dozens of those events. Furthermore, you can unlock a playground of sorts in the form of London's Battersea power station and its surrounding area. Here, not only are you free to practice gymkhana techniques, but you can also complete a number of varied challenges to earn extra reputation. These challenges include everything from completing jumps and performing tricks in specific spots, to crashing through fences that divide the different unlockable areas and locating hidden Dirt 3 logos. Visiting Battersea makes for a welcome change of pace, and it's also a great way to prepare for some of Dirt 3's more unusual multiplayer offerings.    In addition to online versions of all of the conventional races, rallies, and gymkhana events, Dirt 3 features some unique vehicular versions of modes that you might already be familiar with. Transporter, for example, is a capture-the-flag game, while Outbreak is an Infection-style game of tag in which your car turns bright green when you're hit by an infected player. Another highlight of Dirt 3's sizable multiplayer suite is Invasion, a game in which you score points for crashing through cutouts of alien robots but lose points for causing collateral damage when you crash through cutouts of buildings. This mode, perhaps more than any other, puts the skills that you pick up in gymkhana events to great use, because you have to be both fast and precise to beat other players to your targets. Some of these multiplayer modes can get a little too chaotic at times (when everyone descends on the flag at the same time in a relatively confined space, for example), but it's still a lot of fun and hugely satisfying to win or even score a single point in a closely contested session.   Rally events are in plentiful supply and are contested in a number of varied locales.   Split-screen multiplayer for two is also supported, and like the online play, it's practically indistinguishable from playing solo where the game's performance is concerned. The only noteworthy difference is that you don't get the option to drive using the cockpit camera. With the exception of gymkhana events and joyrides around Battersea, split-screen races with a friend in any of the available disciplines (rally, rallycross trailblazer, head 2 head, landrush) can support up to six AI drivers competing alongside you. Advanced options, which are also available when you host unranked Jam Session games online, include allowing custom vehicle setups, forcing manual gears, and choosing between visual and full damage. Basically, whether multiplayer or solo, you can play Dirt 3 however you like; it can feel like a forgiving arcade game, a challenging simulation, or just about anything in between.    Regardless of how you play Dirt 3, there's no denying that, like its predecessor, it looks and sounds fantastic. Despite the fact that you rarely get to stop and admire the environments, the level of detail in them is great, and the cars--while not quite up to the standards set by the best that Forza Motorsport 3 and Gran Turismo 5 have to offer--are even better. Seeing these brightly colored vehicles get caked in mud and snow and take believable damage from impacts is a treat, and the incredible noises that their engines make never leave you in any doubt about the amount of power you have at your disposal. Audio is impressive across the board: you get plenty of feedback from whichever road surface you're driving on to let you know how well your tires are gripping, and the licensed soundtrack with tunes from the likes of Chromeo, Drive A, Hudson Mohawke, RJD2, and We Are Scientists is appropriately eclectic and energetic.   The racing can be a little too close for comfort in rallycross and land rush events.   Dirt 3 improves and builds upon its superb predecessor at just about every opportunity. The new multiplayer modes and gymkhana events are great additions, and if you're interested primarily in traditional racing disciplines, it has more than twice as many routes to race in more varied weather conditions and in an even greater selection of vehicles. The option to upload replays to YouTube isn't as exciting as it could be, given that you're limited to 30 seconds and there's no other way to save them, but this is a small blemish in an otherwise superb game. Whether you're a veteran of the Dirt series and the long-running Colin McRae Rally series that preceded it, or someone looking for a way into off-road racing, Dirt 3 is the game you should be playing.  


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486,Dirt 3 ,9, Dirt 3 is a superb off-road racer that adds some great new features and improves upon its predecessor at just about every opportunity.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/6/3/2224463-box_dirt3.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dirt-3-review/1900-6316956/,pos,"
  When DiRT 2 was released in 2009 it boasted a lengthy and varied career mode, numerous multiplayer options, and uniformly excellent presentation. Its sequel loses none of those things and also makes some great additions to the formula. Split-screen multiplayer is now an option, there are more vehicle classes to choose from, gymkhana events and snowy conditions pose fresh challenges, and new multiplayer modes put interesting automotive spins on some first-person shooter favorites. Dirt 3 brings a lot of superb content to the table, and because it offers a plethora of customizable difficulty settings and assists, newcomers and veterans alike can enjoy its excellent off-road action.      Regardless of which difficulty level you play at and whether or not you take advantage of stability and braking assists, Dirt 3 handles like a dream. There are dozens of great-looking modern and vintage vehicles in the garage, and you race them on all manner of surfaces and in changing weather conditions, but getting behind the wheel of one that you haven't driven before is never a problem. The controls are responsive, and while it's certainly possible to mess up so spectacularly that your ride loses panels and becomes deformed to the point that it's unrecognizable, there are gameplay mechanics in place that ensure you don't feel the need to hold anything back. Even as you hurtle along narrow dirt trails and around icy hairpins, Dirt 3's cars, trucks, and buggies encourage you to push them harder by using excellent audio and rumble feedback to let you know that you're not quite on the edge yet.    Demanding new gymkhana events in which you're challenged to perform tricks in specially designed arenas reinforce how excellent Dirt 3's controls are. In these exciting sessions you score points for crashing through carefully positioned destructible blocks, and for performing donuts, spins, slides, and jumps. String different tricks together to get the crowd pumped, and you build up a score multiplier; display anything other than masterful control by colliding with something, and your multiplier goes down. It's not entirely dissimilar to performing combos in a skateboarding game, except that the tricks are significantly less complex. Stringing successful tricks together against the clock is still plenty challenging, though, and as a result, gymkhanas are great practice for other events. Once you can make a car dance around a cone and slide at speed through a gate or underneath a truck, getting it around a corner in a race doesn't seem like such a big deal.   Changing weather conditions prevent otherwise very similar races from feeling repetitive.   Every event in Dirt 3, whether it be a point-to-point rally through a Kenyan desert, a head-to-head race in the Aspen snow, or a circuit-based rallycross event that weaves in and out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, demands precise driving. You can get away with a few collisions here and there, particularly if you take advantage of the five flashbacks at your disposal to correct your mistakes, and it's entirely possible that you might find finishing in first place too easy if you're an experienced player. Turn off some of the assists, crank up the difficulty, and switch from cosmetic damage to realistic damage, though, and you'll find that Dirt 3 is exactly as challenging as you want it to be. At the other end of the scale, if you're new to off-road racing and looking for a way into the genre, Dirt 3 has you covered. In addition to the aforementioned assists and other options, it's the first game in the series to offer a dynamic racing line like those seen in both the Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo series.    That racing line can be invaluable as you learn your way around Dirt 3's 100-plus circuits and stages; position yourself poorly as you take a turn or jump over a crest, and you might make a subsequent corner unnecessarily difficult. Also invaluable in the events where she's available is real-life co-driver Jen Horsey, who always delivers the information you need in a clear, concise, and timely fashion. (A male alternative is also available, as is an option to have either co-driver use more complex and detailed language.) If you listen to her carefully, rally stages that wind through the forests of Finland or around the lakes of Michigan don't seem nearly as daunting. You still won't have much time to admire the impressive scenery or to contemplate the foolhardy fans that occasionally run across the track ahead of you, but you're far less likely to wrap your car around a tree or crash through a barrier and into the crowd.   Replays afford you an opportunity to admire both the scenery and your skills behind the wheel.   Many of the events in Dirt 3's lengthy Dirt Tour career mode span multiple back-to-back races at the same location, but the game does an excellent job of keeping the action from feeling stale. After finishing the first of three rallycross events in dry conditions, for example, you might race the next during a grip-changing downpour and then the final in wet conditions after the rain clouds have passed and your visibility is improved. And in point-to-point rallies, racing the same stages in different directions can make for a very different experience, especially if you're under a desert sun one stage and having to use your headlights to cut through the black of night the next. Also lending variety to your career is that you invariably have several different events to choose from. The dozens of events that compose the Dirt Tour are organized into four seasons that must be completed in order, but your progress through each season is anything but linear, and you always have the option to return to events that you want to replay in an attempt to improve upon your position or best score/time.     Your progress as a driver is measured in reputation points, which are earned after every event. You score points for podium finishes, for not using your flashbacks, and for completing any team-specific goals. Teams aren't a big deal in Dirt 3; where in some games you're expected to commit to them for entire seasons, here you can drive for a different one every time you get behind the wheel, if you wish. Early in your career only a couple of teams have any interest in you, but as you earn reputation points and level up, more teams (and by extension, more cars) become available to you. Your choice of team before any event is likely to be motivated by its car first and foremost, but the number of reputation points that the team is offering for completing its bonus objectives is also a consideration. Sadly, you don't get to see what the actual objective is when choosing, so your decisions aren't nearly as well informed as they could be. Regardless, none of the challenges are so difficult that you're filled with regret for choosing a particular team; most involve simply reaching a certain speed, finishing with no damage, or making it through an entire event without ever spinning or rolling your vehicle.    On top of the events that form the four seasons, Dirt Tour mode boasts a number of unlockable extras that add to its longevity considerably. For starters, there are world tours specific to each discipline; choose to race and subsequently do well in point-to-point rallies, and you unlock a rally world tour with dozens of those events. Furthermore, you can unlock a playground of sorts in the form of London's Battersea power station and its surrounding area. Here, not only are you free to practice gymkhana techniques, but you can also complete a number of varied challenges to earn extra reputation. These challenges include everything from completing jumps and performing tricks in specific spots, to crashing through fences that divide the different unlockable areas and locating hidden Dirt 3 logos. Visiting Battersea makes for a welcome change of pace, and it's also a great way to prepare for some of Dirt 3's more unusual multiplayer offerings.  In addition to online versions of all of the conventional races, rallies, and gymkhana events, Dirt 3 features some unique vehicular versions of modes that you might already be familiar with. Transporter, for example, is a capture-the-flag game, while Outbreak is an Infection-style game of tag in which your car turns bright green when you're hit by an infected player. Another highlight of Dirt 3's sizable multiplayer suite is Invasion, a game in which you score points for crashing through cutouts of alien robots but lose points for causing collateral damage when you crash through cutouts of buildings. This mode, perhaps more than any other, puts the skills that you pick up in gymkhana events to great use, because you have to be both fast and precise to beat other players to your targets. Some of these multiplayer modes can get a little too chaotic at times (when everyone descends on the flag at the same time in a relatively confined space, for example), but it's still a lot of fun and hugely satisfying to win or even score a single point in a closely contested session.  Split-screen support for two players is a welcome addition.  Split-screen multiplayer for two is also supported, but where online play is indistinguishable from playing solo where performance is concerned, here the visuals take a bit of a hit. The only other noteworthy difference is that you don't get the option to drive using the cockpit camera. With the exception of gymkhana events and joyrides around Battersea, split-screen races with a friend in any of the available disciplines (rally, rallycross trailblazer, head 2 head, landrush) can support up to six AI drivers competing alongside you. Advanced options, which are also available when you host unranked Jam Session games online, include allowing custom vehicle setups, forcing manual gears, and choosing between visual and full damage. Basically, whether multiplayer or solo, you can play Dirt 3 however you like; it can feel like a forgiving arcade game, a challenging simulation, or just about anything in between.  Regardless of how you play Dirt 3, there's no denying that, like its predecessor, it looks and sounds fantastic. Despite the fact that you rarely get to stop and admire the environments, the level of detail in them is great, and the cars--while not quite up to the standards set by the best that Forza Motorsport 3 and Gran Turismo 5 have to offer--are even better. Seeing these brightly colored vehicles get caked in mud and snow and take believable damage from impacts is a treat, and the incredible noises that their engines make never leave you in any doubt about the amount of power you have at your disposal. Audio is impressive across the board: you get plenty of feedback from whichever road surface you're driving on to let you know how well your tires are gripping, and the licensed soundtrack with tunes from the likes of Chromeo, Drive A, Hudson Mohawke, RJD2, and We Are Scientists is appropriately eclectic and energetic.  Grabbing the flag in an online game of Transporter is sure to get your heart racing.  Dirt 3 improves and builds upon its superb predecessor at just about every opportunity. The new multiplayer modes and gymkhana events are great additions, and if you're interested primarily in traditional racing disciplines, it has more than twice as many routes to race in more varied weather conditions and in an even greater selection of vehicles. The option to upload replays to YouTube isn't as exciting as it could be, given that you're limited to 30 seconds and there's no other way to save them, but this is a small blemish in an otherwise superb game. Whether you're a veteran of the Dirt series and the long-running Colin McRae Rally series that preceded it, or someone looking for a way into off-road racing, Dirt 3 is the game you should be playing. 


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487,BioShock Infinite ,9, Columbia the beautiful,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/469/4693985/2328054-8156688510-23226.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bioshock-infinite-review/1900-6405506/,pos,"
What drives a man of God to wash away the sins of his past, only to blacken his heart with a multitude more? How far can a freedom fighter be pushed before virtue and righteousness are replaced by a lust for vengeance? What does a privileged society do when the foundation of its prosperity is shaken? BioShock Infinite dares to explore these heady themes and many more, giving you glimpses at just how the seemingly smallest of decisions can forever alter our realities, and our hearts. As an agent provocateur in the fantastical floating city of Columbia, your actions bring turmoil and strife to an ostensibly idyllic landscape. It's immensely fun to stir up trouble, and even more engaging to see how boldly BioShock Infinite portrays a society torn asunder. You'll be haunted by this thematically devastating adventure, and indeed, its phenomenal final minutes, which are bound to be discussed and dissected for some time to come.It starts with a lighthouse. As former private investigator Booker DeWitt, you enter this lighthouse knowing that you have been hired to retrieve ""the girl""--but who this girl is, and who hired Booker, remain a mystery, if not to Booker, than at least to you. At the top of that lighthouse is a chair, and once strapped into it, Booker is fired into the stratosphere, toward the city in the sky called Columbia. And what a fitting name for this hyper-American domain of 1912, which incorporates the classical architecture of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The red, white, and blue Columbian flag flies from spires across the city, and statuaries and bas-relief panels immediately evoke the sense of old America.The buildings of that 1893 exposition were part of an area known as The White City, and here, too, Columbia lives up to the name of its inspiration--not just in the whiteness of its buildings, but in the whiteness of its racial structure. At a key early moment, you confront the festering illness corrupting this porcelain-white culture, where anyone whose skin is not the ideal color is ostracized and enslaved. You also confront one of BioShock Infinite's many core mysteries: What is the nature of the brand on Booker's hand? In Columbia, the brand is a mark of the false shepherd, this culture's version of the Christian Antichrist and the 666 that marks him. Identified as a prophesied fiend, Booker has no choice but to run.Then shall the lame man leap as a hart.Columbia is a tremendous place to be, the all-American dream-turned-nightmare crossed with steampunk sensibilities. Nationalist propaganda is mixed with airships and mechanical combatants, and the moving picture machines you occasionally use elaborate on the history of Columbia, which seceded from an America that just wasn't American enough. The leader of this city is Father Comstock, a self-proclaimed prophet and religious zealot whose likeness and influence pervade the game. What Andrew Ryan was to Rapture, Comstock is to Columbia; he is a frightfully well-meaning man who believes so strongly in his own damaged philosophies that you can only fear him. His worshipers are just as fearsome in their blind willingness to follow their leader, even when the costs are high. In BioShock Infinite, religious and political fervor intertwine, much as they do in real life, and these similarities could fill you with dread and unease.You eventually find ""the girl."" She is the supernaturally talented Elizabeth, locked in a floating tower and protected by a monstrous clockwork creature called Songbird. Your first confrontation with Songbird is one of many eye-opening scenes, and Elizabeth's relationship with her protector is a complicated one. So is her relationship with Booker, for that matter, though he is key to Elizabeth's escape from her solitary life, and to the city of her dreams: Paris.And so the two go on the run, alternately exploring Columbia's private nooks and allying with a resistance force called the Vox Populi, not out of politics, but out of necessity. Columbia isn't as hushed and mysterious as Rapture, but exploring it is no less tense. You are a witness to (and a participant in) an imploding social order, and as the story darkens, so too do the places you investigate. Sunny blue skies and perfect manmade beaches give way to burning streets and ghostly memorials. When the narrative has you questioning the nature of reality, the surreality of the environments reflects your confusion. So, too, does the soundscape metamorphose. The concordant harmonies of a hymn of praise take a sour and ominous turn as the more disturbing qualities of Columbia's unerring faith emerge.A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.Your confusion is appeased by audio recordings you discover called voxophones, which serve as personal diaries to past events. There are clues here to the nature of Elizabeth's gift: her ability to open tears in spacetime and peer into…the future? The past? Other dimensions? Voxophones also elaborate on Columbia's most important citizens, such as Comstock's troubled, martyred wife, whose story illuminates the desperate lengths to which her husband stooped to ensure that his message might be heard in perpetuum. They even provide a few touches of humor, as do other atmospheric audio audio details; alternate versions of well-known tunes could have you grinning once you pick your jaw up off the floor.BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter, but you aren't armed just with machine guns, pistols, shotguns, and the like; you also have vigors. Vigors, like the original BioShock's plasmids, are seemingly magical powers that you can fling at your enemies. Thus, you can weaken your enemies by zapping them with a bolt of electricity or by charging into them at impossible speed. Try distracting them with a murder of crows before gunning them down with your carbine, or flinging them over the edge of a walkway with a shock wave and watching them plummet to their deaths. You may even combine these powers, perhaps setting a foe on fire and then charging into him for an explosive finish. While many of your foes are of the gun-wielding human variety, the most notable of them have thematic ties to the world they inhabit. Plodding George Washington automatons threaten you with their chainguns, and the best way to bring them down is to aim at the gears that protrude from their backs. The way Columbian flags are draped behind these grotesqueries makes them look like dead-eyed angels of death, a perfect metaphor for the city's faith-driven nationalism. Surprisingly agile mechanical heavies may not be such obvious metaphors, but are more subtle reminders of the the men bound by these skeletons of metal and the factory owner unmoved by his slaves' pleas for a better life. You often face these enemies in outdoor arenas that have you on the move in ways the first two BioShock games never required.Such battlegrounds are given life by the Skyline railway system that winds through and around them. With the press of a button, you can latch onto a rail with an implement that functions as both a melee weapon and a Skyline hook. Enemies come at you from above and below, and sometimes even from airships that float into range, forcing you to grind the rails to get to higher ground, make a quick escape, or close the distance between you and a pesky sniper. You can leap from a rail and onto one of Comstock's faithful, skewering him before leaping back onto the Skyline and landing on the deck of an airship crowded with soldiers. It's rewarding to fling fire and blast enemies with shotguns as you zip about the hovering platforms, as if you are a vicious circus acrobat performing a murderous trapeze act.Elizabeth is usually at your side throughout such acrobatics, staying out of combat proper while offering you support. She occasionally tosses a health pack your way, or some salts, which power your vigors in the way EVE powered BioShock's plasmids. As far as AI companions go, she's a fine one, rarely getting in the way, running ahead to indicate the proper direction, and unlocking doors and safes with the lockpicks you find scattered about. Things can still go a bit awry: Elizabeth might not make it into an elevator with you, for instance, leaving you to have a scripted, one-sided conversation. But such discrepancies are rare, and little touches, such as how Elizabeth exhibits curiosity in the world around her, tend to overshadow them. Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword.Elizabeth has one other important role to play: by accessing tears in spacetime, she can pull helpful objects into the battlefield, such as hovering security turrets, boxes of health packs, ledges with hooks to leap onto, and so forth. Such objects appear in the environment as if covered with television static, and you bring them into being by holding a button. This system is a contrived handling of one of the game's important narrative conceits, an intriguing element awkwardly translated into gameplay. Yet these tears also give battles an extra sense of unpredictability, or provide important defensive elements when you most need them. That isn't to say that BioShock Infinite is punishing: when you die, Elizabeth revives you, remaining enemies gain a little health back, and you lose a little coin from your pocket.The combat does exhibit a wonderful sense of growth, however. You find various clothing items that grant you additional passive buffs, such as turning enemies you leap on into human torches. You spend the coins you pilfer from corpses and cash registers on vigor and weapon upgrades, though you ultimately must pick and choose the direction you prefer, since you can't afford every possibility. Should you run out of ammo and use a weapon you haven't upgraded, the difference is notable: suddenly you're facing a challenge you may not have expected. The final combat sequence gets frustrating should you be pushed into using weaker weaponry; it's the only battle in which BioShock Infinite's stellar gameplay doesn't come together. Fortunately, the astounding narrative payoff is more than a proper reward for triumphing over this visually remarkable assault. Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry.BioShock Infinite's combat is more freewheeling and fun than in the other games in the series, but its world is no less intriguing to explore. Secret codes yearn to be broken, and exquisitely crafted gardens and museums cry out for greater scrutiny. This is a game just as much about ""place"" as it is about ""play,"" and audiovisual touches invoke nostalgia for the original BioShock in effective ways. There's that telltale mechanical tinkling of the vending machines that sell ammo and upgrades. There's the lure of loot, inspiring you to plunder every trash can and every lifeless body. Then there are the old-timey videos introducing each vigor, the sound scratching as if played on an ancient phonograph. Each element draws you further into Columbia--this place so unlike any other you've seen in games that you can't tear yourself away. And a place that so horrifyingly mirrors parts of our own reality that you could never call BioShock Infinite escapist entertainment.BioShock Infinite could make you feel uncomfortable. If you adhere to religious faith, or celebrate American idealism, this game may invite introspection or even anger. BioShock Infinite isn't afraid to magnify the way religious and racial extremism inform our culture and change lives. It isn't afraid to depict a less-than-holy trinity diseased by power, deception, and manipulation. As the story circles back on itself, you're left wondering whether redemption cleanses us of our atrocities, or simply invites us to commit greater ones. Once the finale comes, you will want to play again, watching each event and image through the lens of information you can never un-know. BioShock Infinite is more than just a quality game: it's an important one.


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488,Pearl Harbor: Defend the Fleet ,3.6," What should be an adrenaline-pumping, action-packed experience grows outright dull in a hurry.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/2/9/2214829-ph.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pearl-harbor-defend-the-fleet/1900-2766754/,neg,"
 	In the 1980s, a string of gritty films and TV series like Platoon and Tour of Duty thrust the Vietnam War back into America's consciousness. For the past few years, the media spotlight has turned to World War II, producing films like Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and Enemy at the Gates. It's probably no coincidence that WizardWorks released Pearl Harbor: Defend the Fleet just in time for the premiere of Touchstone Pictures' Pearl Harbor, the heavily promoted movie about Japan's unprovoked 1941 sneak attack on the US Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The game lets you play out an arcade version of the ""date which will live in infamy,"" as President Roosevelt called the attack that left 21 ships damaged or sunk and more than 2,400 Americans dead. It's an old-school shoot-'em-up that would have been right at home in a 1980s arcade. Unfortunately, it would have been the dusty game in the corner that no one played.  Your missions are all pretty much the same.  Like in most arcade games, the gameplay in Pearl Harbor is simplicity itself. From a fixed deck gun aboard a ship in the harbor, you blast away at waves of Japanese attackers as you try to save the Pacific fleet. Each new stage brings more enemies, but you're armed more than well enough to handle them. You begin with a .50 caliber machine gun, and as the game progresses, more powerful weapons are added to your one-man arsenal. You'll get 20mm machine guns, 3-inch and 40mm antiaircraft guns, and ""experimental"" .50 caliber Gatling guns and rockets. You magically switch between these at will without changing gun positions.   Your .50 caliber and 20mm machine guns are automatically restocked after you exhaust their ammo, and the other guns are restocked from the occasional supply boat that miraculously manages to get its job done during a massive air raid. If you use up a supply of ammo, you'll lose points, though. Other than conserving ammo for the bigger, more powerful guns, your only other tactical consideration is leading your targets by trying to aim where the planes will be by the time the rounds reach them. You can zoom your view with the right mouse button, but it turns out to be a pretty superfluous feature since the planes all buzz by right near you. Other than that, there's really little to consider--just fire away.   Pearl Harbor, the game, features a brief history section about the attack on its namesake. Not surprisingly, though, the game takes liberties with history. You'll be fending off two versions each of the Aichi ""Val"" dive bomber, Mitsubishi ""Zero"" fighter, and Nakajima ""Kate"" torpedo bomber, as the Allies code-named them. While at least some variants of those planes attacked Pearl Harbor, you'll also try to shoot down the Ohka one-man suicide plane, which wasn't used until 1945. You'll fight midget subs too, though with deck guns instead of a destroyer's depth charges. Playing it fast and loose with history isn't really a bad thing for a game like this, since the speedy Ohka provides a tougher target than the fighters and bombers, and the relatively stealthy subs offer a little diversity.  There's little tension and little challenge to be found.  The differences in the game between the Val, Zero, and Kate are mainly cosmetic, though. The planes are rendered decently enough--their appearance is crisp, and you can make out the markings on them easily. Their animations are also fast and fluid, but that's not surprising since they repeatedly fly the same tight little patterns around the seemingly miniature harbor. The game doesn't just play like a glorified shooting gallery, but it actually looks like one. You'll feel more like you're in a violent Walt Disney ride than aboard an imposing naval vessel. The undersized ships in the harbor add to that unfortunate impression, and their muddy low-resolution textures make them look more like gray blobs floating in the water than massive majestic battleships. The combat effects are a big letdown too, as planes just disappear in a sputtering little explosion when you hit them.   The sounds of combat are on par with graphics--in other words, they're subpar. The guns sound weighty enough, and occasional plinks from rounds hitting your ship create at least a tiny sense of personal danger. The planes should deafen you as they fly directly overhead, but they're pathetically quiet. Bland background music and a little intercom chatter do too little to immerse you in the action.   That's probably the biggest problem with Pearl Harbor: Defend the Fleet. What should be an adrenaline-pumping, action-packed experience grows outright dull in a hurry. It might be fun to blast away with your heavy guns for a few levels, but you'll feel too little tension and challenge to want to play long after that. The game is a cakewalk, and there are no difficulty levels to rectify that. The fact that the game bears a startling resemblance to WizardWorks' widely panned WWII shooting game BeachHead 2000 doesn't help its cause either. It's true that Pearl Harbor: Defend the Fleet makes no pretences to being anything other than a simplistic arcade action game, but it barely meets that low goal. Games like Defender and Missile Command offered more challenging and exciting gameplay along the same lines 20 years ago. Toss this one in the harbor.      	  
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489,Jurassic Park III: The DNA Factor ,3.6," This game has nothing to do whatsoever with Univeral's megahit movie. What it has to do with dinosaurs, or even video games in general, is also unclear.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/8/9/2214989-box_jp3tdnaf.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jurassic-park-iii-the-dna-factor-review/1900-2803207/,neg,"
Are you ready to guide ace pilot Lori Torres and photographer Mark Hanson through the 12 dinosaur-filled levels of Konami's Jurassic Park III: The DNA Factor? Who are they, you ask? Despite taking place smack dab in the middle of the same Isla Sorna that's portrayed in the recent motion picture, this game has nothing to do whatsoever with Univeral's megahit movie. What it has to do with dinosaurs, or even video games in general, is also unclear. After a plane crash scatters a dozen DNA canisters all over the island, you, as either Lori or Mark, are given the unenviable task of retrieving both the errant canisters and the DNA particles they once contained. To the designers at Konami's Honolulu Studio, this translates into an ill-conceived mixture of side-scrolling platform levels and brief puzzle-based interludes.  Your sole task in the game's side-scrolling missions is to gather up enough DNA to reactivate the base-DNA canister resting at the end of the level. Since this is Jurassic Park's breeding area, a number of carnivorous dinosaur species litter the island and potentially stand in your way. To evade them, you have a few options: Kick or shoot your way out, or jump, roll, and run away from danger. If need be, you can also run into and out of the background, a confusing little gimmick that is mainly used to increase the amount of backtracking you'll have to do to collect the particles you need. Once in a while, giant boss dinosaurs lumber onto the scene, the majority of which require careful evasion skills to pass. Unfortunately, the slightest bit of contact will ""kill"" your character and force you to retry the entire level over again. Tedium notwithstanding, the problems observed in DNA Factor's side-scrolling areas are simply too numerous to list. Here are a few of the choice examples: Dinosaurs can't be killed and quickly react when you cross onscreen hot spots. The hit detection is unflinchingly precise, often requiring that you wander uncomfortably close to dinosaurs in order to stun them. The dinosaurs themselves are difficult to see, as they're tiny and often blend in perfectly with the similarly colored jungle backgrounds. A complete lack of shadows, scaling, or any other type of perspective-depiction doesn't help matters any. The sound effects and music are equally disappointing. Bland dinosaur roars, a few human screams, and some gunshots are all you'll hear scattered among the game's three or four cheesy action anthems. About the only real highlight in Jurassic Park III: The DNA Factor is its puzzle stages. While not spectacular, these areas feature crisp visuals, an efficient use of sound, and a semi-intelligent premise. Using the DNA you've collected in the game's side-scrolling areas, you have to maneuver and shoot particles upward into a swirling DNA strand. You have to avoid enemy particles that will attempt to intercept your efforts, and you also need to make sure your launcher doesn't smash into the strand itself. If you successfully complete the sequence before running out of particles or destroying the strand, you'll revive the dinosaur within the canister! What any of this has to do with dinosaurs or the movie itself is a mystery, but it's not terrible either. Still, a smidgen of intellect surrounded by garbage does not make for a good game. Jurassic Park III: The DNA Factor is not a good game. This is only the first of three Jurassic Park III titles that Konami intends to bring to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance system. Hopefully, it won't be the best of the bunch.
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490,Arctic Thunder ,3.6," The gameplay is repetitive, and the game is easily one of the worst-looking PlayStation 2 games we've seen to date.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/3/7/2211337-box_athunder.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/arctic-thunder-review/1900-2816959/,neg,"
In 1999, Midway struck gold with its arcade-style boat-racing game, Hydro Thunder. Though not the deepest of racing games, Hydro Thunder had its merits. The control was tight and responsive, and the graphics really made the then-new Dreamcast shine. Now, Midway has brought its snowmobile version of Hydro Thunder, Arctic Thunder, to the PlayStation 2. Unfortunately, none of the kind words said about Hydro Thunder can be applied to its chillier counterpart. At its core, Arctic Thunder is a simple racing game--get to the finish line first, and you are rewarded. To try and spice things up, the levels have multiple paths and the courses are littered with a variety of defensive and offensive power-ups, such as land mines, heat-seeking missiles, shields, and speed boosts, which you and your competitors will use to gain an advantage. Along with these standard power-ups, you'll find trick power-ups at the end of the ramps scattered throughout the levels that will trigger a trick animation for your rider and scatter more power-ups across the level. The power-ups aren't the most inventive, but they are entirely necessary, as the game would be powerfully dull if the gameplay were left to straight racing. Even as it stands, Arctic Thunder is not terribly engaging, as the races ultimately boil down to either focusing on defensive weapons and avoiding your competitors or staying in the thick of it and dealing out as much damage as you can, depending on which gameplay mode you're in. Though it sports four different gameplay modes, the differences between them are limited. The race mode will reward a gold medal with secret unlock codes, giving you the ability to modify attributes like the game's difficulty or which power-ups will be available in a race. The arcade mode is nearly identical to the race mode, minus the courses and riders that have been added exclusively for the console version of Arctic Thunder. The points mode rewards you with points for picking up power-ups, doing tricks, attacking competitors, and finishing in a higher position. These points can be used to unlock new riders, snowmobiles, and courses. The battle mode throws two competitors into an icy arena, where the goal is to simply knock the other rider off his or her sled. The race, point, and arcade modes can be played with either one or two players, though the battle mode is strictly a two-player affair. Arctic Thunder's biggest shortcoming is its graphics--the game looks simply awful. The frame rate fluctuates wildly, and it never quite reaches that optimal 60 frames per second, topping out at a little over 30fps. The low-resolution textures that make up the game are blurry, washed out, and generally ugly. The levels themselves, which range from the Swiss Alps to a nuclear power plant, do a fair job of representing their respective themes, but they're pretty stingy with the polygons and lack any level of finesse. Rider animation is clunky, though the rider and sled models are passable. On the whole, the game looks like it was ported from a PlayStation game, and not very well at that. When you get down to brass tacks, Arctic Thunder is not fun. The gameplay is repetitive, and the game is easily one of the worst-looking PlayStation 2 games we've seen to date. Unless you're a developer taking notes on how not to make a snowmobile racing game, there's simply no reason to play Arctic Thunder.
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491,ESPN NFL PrimeTime 2002 ,3.6," Feeble gameplay makes PrimeTime unappealing, and the number of serious bugs that have come along for the ride make it completely unacceptable.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/3/9/6/2216396-box_nflpt2k2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/espn-nfl-primetime-2002/1900-2858709/,neg,"
PC sports gamers have been largely ignored for a long time now. Aside from EA Sports, nearly every other major publisher of sports games has moved its efforts to the current generation of console systems. So while Xbox, PS2, and GameCube owners get to enjoy three or four different games representing each of the four big North American professional sports, computer owners have to make do with one baseball game, one football game, and so on. Such a lack of choice has caused a lot of die-hard computer-sports-game buffs to feel neglected. A cure for that feeling can be found in FarSight Studios and Konami of America's ESPN NFL PrimeTime 2002. Unfortunately, being stuck with only the Madden series depicting football on the PC doesn't seem so terrible after a bout with this game, which is every bit as awful as its release date more than a month after the Super Bowl might suggest. If having a choice means that you have to endure poorly designed, ugly, bug-ridden shovelware like this, better then to have no choice at all.  PrimeTime has some serious crash bugs and plays bad anyway.  Actually, NFL PrimeTime 2002 isn't a choice for many of its prospective victims. Bugs have been widely reported, and our test system--more than a match for the recommended system requirements and equipped with a GeForce3 Ti 500--experienced frequent crashes. Playing games in 32-bit color at video resolutions above the default 640x480 was impossible, as every attempt resulted in an immediate crash that not only shut the game down, but also rebooted our machine. Switching to 16-bit color enabled us to play above 640x480, though random drops to the desktop continued to be a problem. In all, the game probably crashed at least twice for every game that we successfully completed.   Even when you can get the game to run, playing just isn't worthwhile. While the list of available options is solid--with the inclusion of a thorough franchise play mode offsetting the absence of an Internet multiplayer option--the gameplay is a pastiche of everything that people complained about in computer football games a few years ago. The computer is far from astute as a coach, no matter which of the four difficulty settings you're using. Play-calling choices are often straight from the Bizarro World's Pop Warner league, complete with running the ball repeatedly in long-yardage situations and throwing repeatedly when stuck in a situation where running out the clock is advisable. Get the computer club back on its heels inside its own five-yard line, and it will do nothing but throw long, no matter how much time is left on the clock, no matter what the score. We've come back to win more than one game because the computer chose to go for an unnecessary first down instead of just letting the clock expire.   The game also does a subpar job of general clock management. Computer plays are called instantly, leaving a minimum of 25 seconds on the play clock, meaning that you'll be able to get off many more plays than would be possible in a real NFL game. This makes it hard to keep scores close to their real-world equivalents, even when you're playing with five-minute quarters. Playing with full 15-minute quarters is impossible, unless you want to see scores in arena football territory.   The play mechanics are equally disappointing. Compensating for the second-rate artificial intelligence is the computer's uncanny ability to pull off long bombs and make interceptions at opportune times. Because of this, scores typically remain close when they shouldn't, and you begin to feel like the game is cheating. Control issues also make you feel like some cheating is going on. Players glide across the turf as if they were skating, making it hard to make precise moves and cuts. Animations appear to skip frames. Tackles happen with all the suddenness of a bolt of lightning--one moment the defensive player is three yards away, the next he's got the ballcarrier on the ground. Additionally, there is no gray area with tackling. If an opposing player gets close, the ballcarrier is going down, no matter how well he uses the speed burst, juke, spin, stiff-arm, or other specialty moves. This works both ways, of course, though it still seems like the game is compensating for unsatisfactory AI with these magic tackles. After all, if players weren't taken down so easily, the game would be even more of a wide-open scorefest than it is already.   The visual quality is at the same low level as everything else here. The player models are rough, with blocky faces and knees and elbows so sharp that every tackle should result in a dozen stitches for everyone involved. The models also seem incomplete. Close-ups shown between plays often let you look through players' helmets to the sky above or peer through their shoulders at the sidelines. Players also frequently shudder during play, causing a strobe-light effect that makes it difficult to keep your eyes on the screen, and they sometimes flicker when standing on the sidelines. The weather effects exacerbate the latter problem, with snowflakes and players often flashing as much as a broken neon sign. But NFL PrimeTime 2002 isn't all bad visually. The stadium art is pretty good, particularly the animated crowds and textures used for the grass and turf. Team-specific banners are used to further customize each club's home field. Also, the player models get dirty as games go on. Mud and grass stains show up on their uniforms and helmets when playing on natural turf, a subtle touch that reinforces the ""down in the trenches"" feeling that football is all about.  The play-by-play commentary is pretty good, but that's about it.  The audio quality is also spotty, though it is better overall than the game's visual components. Much of this edge is due to the ESPN signature voices of Chris Berman and Tom Jackson, who provide all the play-by-play and color commentary. Berman's contributions are particularly welcome, as they do a good job of describing the on-field action with a minimum of hyperbole and a good sprinkling of players' names among accounts of what's happening. Jackson isn't quite so useful. Most of his lines consist of catchphrases like, ""The offensive coordinator didn't have that in mind when he drew up that play."" The only saving grace is the sheer number of these bland comments. In-game effects include the standard thumps and smacks, though a number of expected effects are missing. It's odd that penalties aren't announced and that audibles are called without a peep.   Which is in some ways fitting, because ""without a peep"" is exactly how ESPN NFL PrimeTime 2002 should disappear. Feeble gameplay makes the game unappealing, and the number of serious bugs that have come along for the ride make it completely unacceptable. The idea of having an alternative to EA Sports' award-winning Madden series is apparently superior to the reality, at least if this is the only choice available. 
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492,Mimesis Online ,3.6," Mimesis Online has a long way to go before it is worth your bandwidth, your time, or your money.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/1/1/6/3818-15116.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mimesis-online-review/1900-2848721/,neg,"
 Online role-playing games have a reputation for launching with significant problems. Last year's best online RPG, Dark Age of Camelot, was praised for being well designed and entertaining but earned equal praise for being playable from day one. Mimesis Online, from Polish developer Tannhauser Gate, has more in common with last year's messy Anarchy Online than with Dark Age of Camelot, and unfortunately, the comparisons don't stop at the science-fiction theme. Mimesis Online isn't so much a game as an engine, featuring very little variety, not much to do, and huge portions of the game missing from the current version.  The only thing to do in Mimesis is run around and fight things.  The manual features a lengthy expository story that attempts to explain the somewhat incomprehensible history of the world. This history manages to include almost every science-fiction trope imaginable: There was a great plague, some mysterious transporter things, and some sort of tentative alliance between humans and some alien races after several realities were somehow combined. The nameless world on which they all coexist is a mysterious, hostile place, and its origins are unknown. It's now the year 5692, and your job is to go out and explore that world. Tannhauser Gate has promised that the story will be a major part of Mimesis Online, but this is not at all evident in the game's current state. Mimesis Online includes only a few missions and no nonplayer characters, but it does include guides that explain the basic rules when you start out.   You have a choice of three character types: human male, human female, or the unisexual hirudon. The latter is an interesting-looking alien species, built like a skinny, hairless ape with the skin of a snake and John Merrick's head. Humans are your standard fighter types, with good strength and dexterity, while hirudons have high perception and intelligence, making them more adept at psionics.   Psionics powers are the equivalent of a magic system in Mimesis Online. Or at least they might be. The generally uninformative manual makes many references to psionics and specifically mentions a psionic power called ""paralyze."" None of this means much, because there are no psionics in the game. Playing a hirudon is akin to playing a camel with fins. They look neat, but they serve no purpose. Hirudons are inferior in combat, and that's all there is to the game.   The only thing that you can do in Mimesis Online is buy equipment, run around, and fight. The combat system is interesting. There are a good variety of melee weapons, and ranged weapons are slowly being introduced to the world. As you use a certain class of weapon, you gain experience with that class and gain access to new attacks. As a fledgling fighter, you'll have access only to rudimentary armor and crude weapons, like axes that look like TV antennas assembled from scrap metal. As you gain experience and cards, the currency of the world, your options will open considerably, allowing you to wield impressive-looking swords, shields, and axes.   Though the combat system is interesting, combat itself is not. To attack a creature, you target it and then right-click on the attack you want to perform. If you keep right-clicking on the attack, your character keeps chasing the monster around and whacking on it. There aren't many creature types in the world, and many of the ""different"" creatures, like the many variations of things called inim, are identical except for their strength and names. You'll likely grow tired of fighting the same creatures over and over before you even gain your first level.   And gaining your first level will take a long time. Actually, you'll be gaining your 11th level, as characters in Mimesis Online inexplicably begin at level 10. Leveling is remarkably slow and combat so repetitive that advancement in Mimesis Online isn't very interesting. There's no grace period for low-level characters, so you'll lose experience when you die, straight from the start. At least gaining a level makes some significant changes to your character. When creating a character, you choose what percentage of your experience will go toward advancing different statistics, which is an interesting means of making your character's progression somewhat unique.  Hirudons aren't good at fighting things.  While the combat system seems somewhat solid, most of Mimesis Online seems unfinished. The manual makes reference to stealing and other character skills, none of which are actually available. The interface seems like a placeholder, with unlabeled buttons and strange icons. Character control is sluggish, and turning while running feels like a fairly accurate representation of steering a Lincoln Continental underwater. Mimesis Online does have some interesting ideas, like the fame rating, which causes your reputation to decrease as you kill other players or increase when you kill players with bad reputations. Player killing is reportedly a problem, but it wasn't an issue during the course of this review.   Mimesis Online may be a good game someday. It looks good, and the alien architecture and monsters are both unique and well designed. But there's not much to do, and it takes a long time to do it. There are very few players, which is not surprising considering that the game would seem barren for a beta, let alone a game that is supposedly ready for the public. Even though downloading it is free and the monthly charge is relatively low, Mimesis Online has a long way to go before it is worth your bandwidth, your time, or your money.    	  
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493,Operation Blockade ,3.6," If you were to buy, install, and actually enjoy Operation Blockade, you'd need to be at least partially insane.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/3/3/0/2218330-block.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/operation-blockade-review/1900-2871394/,neg,"
Forget everything you know about budget-priced turret shooters, such as Beachhead 2002 and Beachhead 2000 before it. Of course, by ""budget-priced turret shooter,"" we're referring to $20 games in which you control a stationary gun turret and rotate 360 degrees to shoot at oncoming enemies. Forget that they look bad, sound terrible, and are mind-numbing wastes of time. Wait, remember that last part, because you'll want to consider it before you play Operation Blockade, Infogrames' budget-priced turret shooter--and also (unfortunately) the first of a new series of budget-priced turret shooters.  Operation Blockade has some surprisingly good graphics... For what it's worth, Operation Blockade actually looks quite good. The game takes place in a fictitious World War II-era conflict in which you play as a lone soldier in a gun turret who must shoot down enemy planes, ships, and infantry. You'll have to shoot down WWII biplane dogfighters, bombers, battleships, transport ships, and infantry soldiers who will dig in and launch mortars at you, and just about all of these enemies are modeled surprisingly well and look authentic in spite of the game's fictitious setting. You'll blow them up with the game's miserly four-weapon arsenal, but ships and planes actually blow up with some pretty spectacular 3D explosions, complete with debris and smoke effects. The game's environments also look nice--Operation Blockade's missions can take place at dawn, in the afternoon, dusk, and at night, and in each case, the sky will be lit by either sunlight or moonlight that reflects off the game's good-looking animated oceans and clouds.    Operation Blockade also has some very good sound effects and even makes use of 3D sound to produce a Doppler effect as enemy planes strafe past you, off into the distance. The game's explosions are loud and clear, and the enemy infantry you mow down with your weapons will each scream individually with a few different voice samples, so they don't all sound like the same guy dying repeatedly. Unfortunately, a few different voice samples are all your character has, and none are very good. Despite the fact that you're all alone sitting in a turret in the middle of nowhere, your nameless, faceless character will always gleefully yell out one of the same three or four lame taunts when he shoots down an enemy. He'll spew out expressions such as ""Like shootin' fish in a barrel,"" ""There's more where that came from,"" and the timeless World War II battle-cry of freedom, ""Booya!""--which will quickly begin to wear away at your sanity.    Then again, if you were to buy, install, and actually enjoy Operation Blockade, you'd need to be at least partially insane. That's because when you look past its good graphics and sound--and you will--Operation Blockade's arcade-style gameplay is relentlessly repetitive, often frustrating, and never really fun. The game gives you three regular weapons: a light machine gun for use against infantry, a medium machine gun for use against small boats and aircraft, and a cannon for use against larger boats. However, the medium gun is an all-purpose weapon that you'll rely on the most, especially since the cannon doesn't really have a useful gun sight that you can use to accurately target your enemies. You'll also sometimes have access to a fourth weapon, grenades, which you can toss a short distance toward your enemies, as well as a few different kinds of ""bomb"" attacks, like air strikes, but you'll generally end up using your three primary weapons.  ...But you'll get over them. Fast. Then you sit in your turret, rotate around, and shoot at whatever moves--there's little skill involved in the game other than basic point-and-shoot aiming, since you're in a stationary turret that can't dodge (and always gets hit). You can hit larger targets, such as cruisers and aircraft carriers, to ""salvage ammo and medical supplies,"" which instantly heals damage you've taken and replenishes your ammunition in true arcade-game fashion. And that's it. To make the game ""challenging,"" the later missions in the game throw even more enemies at you, and you can also scale up the difficulty settings to make enemies tougher (and to require more shots to destroy them). Both of these things end up making it easier to be in the preposterous position of completely running out of ammo--a problem that happens much more often than it should to a soldier whose sole purpose in life is to fire a turret. When this happens, you're a sitting duck, and you can either restart the game or sit there and watch your enemies gradually wear you down until you die. Operation Blockade actually has a lot of different missions to play through, but they're basically all just more of the same.    And anyway, you're better off not playing Operation Blockade at all. Though the game has some good-looking graphics and some pretty good sound, they were wasted on an unenjoyable, repetitive action game that should itself be blockaded from your hard drive.
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494,Stake: Fortune Fighters ,3.6," If you play Stake with three of your friends, you'll probably just end up with three fewer friends.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/5/1/2212551-box_stake.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/stake-fortune-fighters-review/1900-6028859/,neg,"
 Stake: Fortune Fighters, Metro3D's new arena-based fighting game, attempts to emulate games like Super Smash Bros. Melee, pitting four fighters against each other in an open arena full of power-ups and environmental hazards. But while the Super Smash Bros. games featured sharp visuals, a fighting system that was forgiving for beginners but had a surprising amount of depth, and a good amount of polish overall, Stake has none of these things. In many respects, Stake is the antithesis of Super Smash Bros. Melee and that game's best features.  Stake isn't much to look at.  The focus of Stake is squarely on the four-player action, a feature that's highlighted clearly on the front of the game's box. It does have a single-player mode that is virtually identical to the multiplayer game, except that you get to play against erratic AI opponents instead of your friends. Strangely, there are only two other fighters in the regular single-player game, though you can start up a multiplayer game and add three computer-controlled opponents to it. The fact that the game even bothers to differentiate between the single-player and the multiplayer is bizarre in itself. Even stranger is the game's watch mode, where you can just sit back and enjoy the game's four-player split-screen play without bothering to actually join in.  After choosing one of eight different characters, most of whom look like poor imitations of Capcom's fighting game characters, you're thrown into an arena where you duke it out with your opponents. The arenas you'll fight in are all rather large--too large, in fact. Though the game gives you a map in the corner of the screen to help you locate your opponents, you'll still spend more time in the game just trying to find someone to fight than doing any real fighting. However, this almost seems like a good thing, since the fighting itself isn't terribly compelling. You have two attacks, which are simply referred to as ""attack #1"" and ""attack #2"" in the manual, and you can also use special ranged attacks. The fighting system gets no deeper than pressing two buttons at once to trigger a special attack, and in the meantime, you'll simply pound one attack button, occasionally switching over to the other attack button when you get bored of watching the same attack animation over and over again.  To its credit, Stake displays a few hints of technical proficiency in its presentation--though, on the whole, it's not much to look at. The game uses a forced-focus look, which makes everything look blurrier the further away from the camera it is. The characters are self-shadowed, and they actually look pretty good standing still, though their animations are stilted and repetitive, which more or less negates the quality of the models. The environments are generally blocky and are rendered with decent-looking but uninteresting textures. Unfortunately, Stake's stubborn camera makes the otherwise straightforward game more frustrating than it should be, since you have no horizontal control over it, which causes you to occasionally lose track of your character behind pieces of the environment. The game generally moves pretty smoothly when you play it alone, though it stutters and slows down quite a bit in the four-player split-screen mode.  It's not clear why the game has separate single-player and multiplayer modes.  The sound in Stake is probably the single most offensive aspect of the game, since it almost seems unfinished. The game is pretty much dominated by the music, a shoddy fusion of Asian-themed music and rock and techno tunes. By default, you'll barely be able to hear the in-game sound effects over the music, though the annoying, repetitive attack sounds and death knells probably won't inspire you to mess with the audio levels.  Stake: Fortune Fighters has bad music and sound, unimpressive graphics, and camera problems. The only thing that it has going for it is its four-player mode, though even this is executed so poorly that if you play it with three of your friends, you'll probably just end up with three fewer friends. 
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495,Lion King ,3.6," Even given its target kiddie audience, The Lion King falls short.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/5/8/2/7658-28582.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lion-king-review/1900-6094032/,neg,"
 If The Lion King is truly an allegory for Hamlet, its mobile incarnation involves a lot more pointless jumping than one may remember there being in Shakespeare's classic. Now available on Verizon Wireless, The Lion King puts you in the role of Simba, the would-be ruler of the animal kingdom.   Obstacle-evasion makes up the majority of Lion King's unchallenging gameplay. You must guide the cute lion-prince past such pitfalls as swarms of bees, sleeping, leaf-pile-like hyenas, and slippery moss. The Lion King is a platformer in the simplest sense of the word.   Audio-visually, The Lion King is decidedly last-gen. The game seems to be rendered in stop motion, so it can only periodically be bothered to actually animate motion. Seriously, this game is jerkier than ""snapping into a Slim Jim."" As for its sound, The Lion King features only a scant few noises, included to remind you that your ears haven't fallen off. When you die, a five-note ditty loops incessantly to a backdrop of laughing hyenas--who are presumably the ones that look like leaf piles in the game.  Even given its target kiddie audience, The Lion King falls short. Mobile gamers are no longer content with such low production values. The Lion King is sooo 2K2. 
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496,Metro: Last Light ,9, Metro: Last Light is an astonishing and moving postapocalyptic journey.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/6/1/2226861-box_mll.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metro-last-light-review/1900-6408240/,pos,"
  The shadows of the past linger. They appear as silhouettes on crumbling walls each time lightning bolts slash across the sky. They haunt you as you journey across annihilated cityscapes once teeming with life and love. Metro: Last Light is an exceptionally well-crafted first-person adventure that fills your mind with the regrets of time gone by, and understands the fear and uncertainty that arise from silence and stillness. The game's predecessor, Metro 2033, established this series' penchant for mystery and supernatural drama,  but Last Light is in a class all its own. It's not just another frightening trek through the dark corridors of the metro, but a rhythmic symphony of surging dread and emerging hope.      Last Light returns you to a Moscow devastated by nuclear war. Humanity, hoping to avoid the dangerous radiation and hideous mutants plaguing the surface, has banded together in the underground metro system. Depending on how you played, Metro 2033 might have allowed you to make an important choice at the game's conclusion.Last Light assumes you chose to destroy the creatures known as The Dark Ones, scorching their home with missiles and scouring them from the face of the Earth. But a creature remains, and as returning protagonist Artyom, you must find this remnant of a race thought extinct, this remnant of a decimated species, though it's unclear whether the right decision is to destroy it or to try to communicate with it. Your Ranger allies certainly desire its annihilation, but Artyom's unique connection to the Dark Ones gives him pause and he is nagged by guilt about the devastation he has wrought.     Artyom's dilemma brings a sense of personal struggle to a game fraught with brooding emotion. Metro: Last Light punctuates your adventure with moments of dread and shock, as well as with occult visions that make the past come alive before your very eyes. Supernatural themes intertwine with conflicts between underground factions, the horrors of each element providing two equally macabre sides to a single coin. In the confines of the metro, betrayal is common and trust is a commodity. Here, your greatest enemies are your fellow humans, who are unafraid to cheat and steal if it means gaining favor from the right people. On the brutal surface, the beasts are your primary concern; at any moment, a wailing winged demon might snatch you with its talons, soar into the air, and drop you into the murky water, far from where your horrific flight began.     Yet fear isn't the only emotion Last Light stirs. The final moving hours raise the emotional stakes and test your allegiances by forcing you to confront the consequences of your own choices. Story sequences are absorbing, and typically occur within the game engine and in first-person view, keeping you strongly connected to the events unfolding before you. The most enthralling scenes, however, are those that occur within the context of gameplay. Many interactive sequences--a hypnagogic walk down a blood-red hallway, a survey of an airplane's nightmarish wreckage--relate vital events without removing you from the moment, which makes them hellishly palpable.    You shouldn’t trust The Fourth Reich. Then again, their frightening symbology makes that immediately obvious.   There is mirth amid the madness, however. Characters react to each other in authentic ways, responding to one Ranger's pedantic soliloquies with jokes and insults, likely mirroring your own thoughts on the matter. The inhabitants of the underground are colorful and individual. They move about with purpose, speaking at length to each other about war and family, about love and lust. Men gone stir crazy seek the company of prostitutes, and so might you, should you desire a lengthy lap dance. Nudity occurs multiple times, and though it's certainly explicit, it doesn't seem superfluous or exploitative. Rather, Last Light's erotic themes emerge naturally from the despair, and sex in the underground has an air of desperation and urgency. If you prefer tamer pleasures, you may take in a lengthy and detailed variety show, where can-can dancers and an accordion act bring some joy to the melancholy populace. This is life in the metro. And it's an amazing display of narrative craftsmanship.     Exquisite craftsmanship is also on display as you seek the remaining known Dark One on the irradiated surface, and as you avoid the wandering eye of your enemies in the depths beneath. Last Light is not a power shooter. You are not out to murder hundreds of nameless grunts without breaking a sweat, and in fact, the early hours are remarkably light on action. Instead, tension is carefully built in the conversations you have with your comrades, and in the cautious steps you take into the irradiated ruins above the tunnels. You feel the danger. Gnarled trees are twisted into vaguely humanoid shapes, and when you seek refuge from the rain, you hear the drops hammering on the flimsy tin roof above, mimicking the sounds of mutants' skittering claws. Your calling brings you here, but you know it's not a place anyone should be.     A number of creatures menace your journey across the surface. Amphibious freaks move from water to land, threatening you two or three at a time. As you manuever away from their clammy assaults, you must be ever mindful of the squalid pools that surround you, lest you fall in and get dragged to your death by a mutant lurking beneath. Fierce predators pounce towards you, keeping you on the move while you avoid the harsh siren calls of the creatures that cling to nearby walls. You use a number of weapons to fend them off, all of which look and sound appropriately powerful, but none of which turn your adventure into a cakewalk.    No one knows how the watchers came to be, but you needn’t know their origins to understand that they are best avoided.   Of these great firearms, it's easiest to become enamored with the shotgun. It fires with a loud report and allows you to discharge multiple shells at once, making it a great standby if you're willing to get close to these beasts. But the long reload time can be a killer if you miss a shot, given how creatures can descend upon you and take multiple swipes in a row. Ammo isn't plentiful in the wastes, though you can get your fill from vendors in the metro's safe havens. Yet the military-grade ammo used as currency is scarce, and you're often faced with a choice to grab more ammo, purchase more grenades, or upgrade that meaty revolver you favor. It's best to scavenge for supplies and ammo in every nook and cranny. Otherwise, you can't take for granted that you'll have everything you need to thrive, particularly on the harder difficulty levels, which are satisfyingly harsh.     Even a single breath is a valuable commodity outside of the metro. You must don a gas mask to stay alive, but masks require filters, which have limited life spans. You discover more filters by exploring your environs--but exploration takes time, which means watching your available supply of healthy air slowly diminish. If you don't value each minute, the pace of your mission could suddenly change from slowly methodical to terrifyingly urgent, as you sprint towards your destination, gasping with increased desperation and hoping against hope that you might cling to life. Unfortunately, you could encounter one of Last Light's uncommon but annoying invisible walls during such a circumstance, thinking that you might be able to leap over a small obstacle or follow a narrow path, only to discover how wrong you were.   In the dark… but not alone.   The air is healthier in the metro, but the dangers are no less real. You still confront misshapen mutants in the tunnels, but the darkness plays an important role. One type of creature recoils from the beam of your flashlight, eventually flipping onto its back and making itself vulnerable to your bullets. Battling several at once results in a rhythmic dance as you use your flashlight to keep your distance between you and the mutants' pincers, firing only when you do the most damage. You often find such critters in the blackest of passages--passages you aren't forced to investigate. Yet the lure of such places can be irresistible. The glow of mushrooms and the possibility of valuable ammo beckon you inwards, as does the chance of rescuing an innocent captive held hostage by the enemy factions that also lurk in the tunnels.     You aren't required to go toe to toe with human opposition. You can use darkness to your advantage, twisting light bulbs and flipping circuit breakers to keep yourself hidden, and then sneaking through bases to avoid combat altogether. You can be silently murderous, sidling up behind a guard and slicing his throat, and then quietly flinging a knife into another's back. Human enemies go about their actions in realistic ways; they follow patterns, of course, but they aren't always so regimented as to seem unnatural. As a result, the stealth is fun and tense, though you can always shoot your way out of a bind if you need to.    Take enough damage, and the cracks in your mask--and in your strategy--begin to show.   Firefights can be tough, depending on where and how you're caught sneaking around. You could find yourself cornered, wishing you had put a silencer on that sniper rifle rather than drawing everyone's attention with a single shot. Your enemies are uniformly aggressive when alerted, though hardly the sharpest tacks in the box. Several might get stuck in place, their weapons' barrels clipping through each other and the wall as they twirl about. Others might run about in nonsensical ways or fail to notice your presence as quickly as you'd expect. Yet given the close confines in which you normally face these soldiers, AI issues aren't great distractions, as you'll often be too busy staying alive to notice the oddities. It's when you get stealthy again that the discrepancies become most obvious.     Metro: Last Light's battles and sneaky sequences are tense delights, but what makes the adventure truly sing are how such scenes flow from one to the next--and how the detours between them make battles more impactful. Last Light frequently disrupts its own pace, going from terror to relief in a heartbeat, and putting you in one atmospheric location after another. At one point, you get a short look into a room before you drop into it from the vent above. The room is full of corpses, but it's the sight of one corpse in particular that fills you with unease: that of a little boy. Last Light doesn't linger here; there is no internal dialogue that tells you that Artyom is driven to anger in that moment. But the visual enrages you nonetheless, making the upcoming action and plot points more than just about warring men, but about the consequences that conflict has on the future of the metro.   It's best not to get caught, but if you do, you can shoot your way out of a jam.   The surface brings a tenuous visual warmth, even though though the sunlight is diffused through dreary gray clouds. Out here, one companion in particular brings the harsh exterior an unexpected humanity, while diverse sequences, like one that has you escaping the brash onslaught of the wind, keep the pace from ever becoming too predictable. And even in this wasteland, there's visual variety that keeps Last Light from becoming too overbearing. There's beauty in its indigo skies and battered cityscapes, and even in the sunken, asymmetrical angles of a watcher's face. Battling several such beasts at once without any noticeable frame rate drops requires a beast of a machine, however; owners of ATI video cards in particular will notice that Metro: Last Light, while beautiful, is not beautifully optimized. But even if you're forced to lower the resolution (possible) and turn off advanced physics (almost certain), this ruined world is too grotesquely gorgeous not to appreciate.     Metro: Last Light is not an endless barrage of bullets and beasts. It takes the time to let you breathe in the choking atmosphere and allow the chilling fog to seep into your bones. And when it finally comes time to aim your shotgun at mutated fiends, the payoff is grander for the eerie silence that came before. Last Light is notably superior to its predecessor, merging storytelling, shooting, and sneaking into a remarkable and cohesive whole. And through this harmony of game design comes the caustic dissonance of a world so torn asunder that a single possibility can bring with it endless hope.   


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497,Metro: Last Light ,9, Metro: Last Light is an astonishing and moving postapocalyptic journey.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/6/1/2226861-box_mll.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metro-last-light-review/1900-6408411/,pos,"
  The shadows of the past linger. They appear as silhouettes on crumbling walls each time lightning bolts slash across the sky. They haunt you as you journey across annihilated cityscapes once teeming with life and love. Metro: Last Light is an exceptionally well-crafted first-person adventure that fills your mind with the regrets of time gone by, and understands the fear and uncertainty that arise from silence and stillness. The game's predecessor, Metro 2033, established this series' penchant for mystery and supernatural drama,  but Last Light is in a class all its own. It's not just another frightening trek through the dark corridors of the metro, but a rhythmic symphony of surging dread and emerging hope.      Last Light returns you to a Moscow devastated by nuclear war. Humanity, hoping to avoid the dangerous radiation and hideous mutants plaguing the surface, has banded together in the underground metro system. Depending on how you played, Metro 2033 might have allowed you to make an important choice at the game's conclusion.Last Light assumes you chose to destroy the creatures known as The Dark Ones, scorching their home with missiles and scouring them from the face of the Earth. But a creature remains, and as returning protagonist Artyom, you must find this remnant of a race thought extinct, this remnant of a decimated species, though it's unclear whether the right decision is to destroy it or to try to communicate with it. Your Ranger allies certainly desire its annihilation, but Artyom's unique connection to the Dark Ones gives him pause and he is nagged by guilt about the devastation he has wrought.     Artyom's dilemma brings a sense of personal struggle to a game fraught with brooding emotion. Metro: Last Light punctuates your adventure with moments of dread and shock, as well as with occult visions that make the past come alive before your very eyes. Supernatural themes intertwine with conflicts between underground factions, the horrors of each element providing two equally macabre sides to a single coin. In the confines of the metro, betrayal is common and trust is a commodity. Here, your greatest enemies are your fellow humans, who are unafraid to cheat and steal if it means gaining favor from the right people. On the brutal surface, the beasts are your primary concern; at any moment, a wailing winged demon might snatch you with its talons, soar into the air, and drop you into the murky water, far from where your horrific flight began.     Yet fear isn't the only emotion Last Light stirs. The final moving hours raise the emotional stakes and test your allegiances by forcing you to confront the consequences of your own choices. Story sequences are absorbing, and typically occur within the game engine and in first-person view, keeping you strongly connected to the events unfolding before you. The most enthralling scenes, however, are those that occur within the context of gameplay. Many interactive sequences--a hypnagogic walk down a blood-red hallway, a survey of an airplane's nightmarish wreckage--relate vital events without removing you from the moment, which makes them hellishly palpable.    Your nightmares come to life in Metro: Last Light.   There is mirth amid the madness, however. Characters react to each other in authentic ways, responding to one Ranger's pedantic soliloquies with jokes and insults, likely mirroring your own thoughts on the matter. The inhabitants of the underground are colorful and individual. They move about with purpose, speaking at length to each other about war and family, about love and lust. Men gone stir crazy seek the company of prostitutes, and so might you, should you desire a lengthy lap dance. Nudity occurs multiple times, and though it's certainly explicit, it doesn't seem superfluous or exploitative. Rather, Last Light's erotic themes emerge naturally from the despair, and sex in the underground has an air of desperation and urgency. If you prefer tamer pleasures, you may take in a lengthy and detailed variety show, where can-can dancers and an accordion act bring some joy to the melancholy populace. This is life in the metro. And it's an amazing display of narrative craftsmanship.     Exquisite craftsmanship is also on display as you seek the remaining known Dark One on the irradiated surface, and as you avoid the wandering eye of your enemies in the depths beneath. Last Light is not a power shooter. You are not out to murder hundreds of nameless grunts without breaking a sweat, and in fact, the early hours are remarkably light on action. Instead, tension is carefully built in the conversations you have with your comrades, and in the cautious steps you take into the irradiated ruins above the tunnels. You feel the danger. Gnarled trees are twisted into vaguely humanoid shapes, and when you seek refuge from the rain, you hear the drops hammering on the flimsy tin roof above, mimicking the sounds of mutants' skittering claws. Your calling brings you here, but you know it's not a place anyone should be.     A number of creatures menace your journey across the surface. Amphibious freaks move from water to land, threatening you two or three at a time. As you manuever away from their clammy assaults, you must be ever mindful of the squalid pools that surround you, lest you fall in and get dragged to your death by a mutant lurking beneath. Fierce predators pounce towards you, keeping you on the move while you avoid the harsh siren calls of the creatures that cling to nearby walls. You use a number of weapons to fend them off, all of which look and sound appropriately powerful, but none of which turn your adventure into a cakewalk.    Let's drink to new friends. One for all, and all for one.   Of these great firearms, it's easiest to become enamored with the shotgun. It fires with a loud report and allows you to discharge multiple shells at once, making it a great standby if you're willing to get close to these beasts. But the long reload time can be a killer if you miss a shot, given how creatures can descend upon you and take multiple swipes in a row. Ammo isn't plentiful in the wastes, though you can get your fill from vendors in the metro's safe havens. Yet the military-grade ammo used as currency is scarce, and you're often faced with a choice to grab more ammo, purchase more grenades, or upgrade that meaty revolver you favor. It's best to scavenge for supplies and ammo in every nook and cranny. Otherwise, you can't take for granted that you'll have everything you need to thrive, particularly on the harder difficulty levels, which are satisfyingly harsh.     Even a single breath is a valuable commodity outside of the metro. You must don a gas mask to stay alive, but masks require filters, which have limited life spans. You discover more filters by exploring your environs--but exploration takes time, which means watching your available supply of healthy air slowly diminish. If you don't value each minute, the pace of your mission could suddenly change from slowly methodical to terrifyingly urgent, as you sprint towards your destination, gasping with increased desperation and hoping against hope that you might cling to life. Unfortunately, you could encounter one of Last Light's uncommon but annoying invisible walls during such a circumstance, thinking that you might be able to leap over a small obstacle or follow a narrow path, only to discover how wrong you were.   Sometimes, saving one life involves the taking of another.   The air is healthier in the metro, but the dangers are no less real. You still confront misshapen mutants in the tunnels, but the darkness plays an important role. One type of creature recoils from the beam of your flashlight, eventually flipping onto its back and making itself vulnerable to your bullets. Battling several at once results in a rhythmic dance as you use your flashlight to keep your distance between you and the mutants' pincers, firing only when you do the most damage. You often find such critters in the blackest of passages--passages you aren't forced to investigate. Yet the lure of such places can be irresistible. The glow of mushrooms and the possibility of valuable ammo beckon you inwards, as does the chance of rescuing an innocent captive held hostage by the enemy factions that also lurk in the tunnels.     You aren't required to go toe to toe with human opposition. You can use darkness to your advantage, twisting light bulbs and flipping circuit breakers to keep yourself hidden, and then sneaking through bases to avoid combat altogether. You can be silently murderous, sidling up behind a guard and slicing his throat, and then quietly flinging a knife into another's back. Human enemies go about their actions in realistic ways; they follow patterns, of course, but they aren't always so regimented as to seem unnatural. As a result, the stealth is fun and tense, though you can always shoot your way out of a bind if you need to.    Evil things descend from these swirling skies.   Firefights can be tough, depending on where and how you're caught sneaking around. You could find yourself cornered, wishing you had put a silencer on that sniper rifle rather than drawing everyone's attention with a single shot. Your enemies are uniformly aggressive when alerted, though hardly the sharpest tacks in the box. Several might get stuck in place, their weapons' barrels clipping through each other and the wall as they twirl about. Others might run about in nonsensical ways or fail to notice your presence as quickly as you'd expect. Yet given the close confines in which you normally face these soldiers, AI issues aren't great distractions, as you'll often be too busy staying alive to notice the oddities. It's when you get stealthy again that the discrepancies become most obvious.     Metro: Last Light's battles and sneaky sequences are tense delights, but what makes the adventure truly sing are how such scenes flow from one to the next--and how the detours between them make battles more impactful. Last Light frequently disrupts its own pace, going from terror to relief in a heartbeat, and putting you in one atmospheric location after another. At one point, you get a short look into a room before you drop into it from the vent above. The room is full of corpses, but it's the sight of one corpse in particular that fills you with unease: that of a little boy. Last Light doesn't linger here; there is no internal dialogue that tells you that Artyom is driven to anger in that moment. But the visual enrages you nonetheless, making the upcoming action and plot points more than just about warring men, but about the consequences that conflict has on the future of the metro.   The epitome of hiding in plain sight.   The surface brings a tenuous visual warmth, even though though the sunlight is diffused through dreary gray clouds. Out here, one companion in particular brings the harsh exterior an unexpected humanity, while diverse sequences, like one that has you escaping the brash onslaught of the wind, keep the pace from ever becoming too predictable. And even in this wasteland, there's visual variety that keeps Last Light from becoming too overbearing. There's beauty in its indigo skies and battered cityscapes, and even in the sunken, asymmetrical angles of a watcher's face. The console versions of the game look somewhat drab in the darkest of regions, the glimmers of light not quite piercing the blackness enough to make environments come alive. Additionally, the PlayStation 3 version doesn't always maintain a slick frame rate, though this version is still excellent, regardless.     Metro: Last Light is not an endless barrage of bullets and beasts. It takes the time to let you breathe in the choking atmosphere and allow the chilling fog to seep into your bones. And when it finally comes time to aim your shotgun at mutated fiends, the payoff is grander for the eerie silence that came before. Last Light is notably superior to its predecessor, merging storytelling, shooting, and sneaking into a remarkable and cohesive whole. And through this harmony of game design comes the caustic dissonance of a world so torn asunder that a single possibility can bring with it endless hope.   


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498,Metro: Last Light ,9, Metro: Last Light is an astonishing and moving postapocalyptic journey.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/6/1/2226861-box_mll.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metro-last-light-review/1900-6408419/,pos,"
  The shadows of the past linger. They appear as silhouettes on crumbling walls each time lightning bolts slash across the sky. They haunt you as you journey across annihilated cityscapes once teeming with life and love. Metro: Last Light is an exceptionally well-crafted first-person adventure that fills your mind with the regrets of time gone by, and understands the fear and uncertainty that arise from silence and stillness. The game's predecessor, Metro 2033, established this series' penchant for mystery and supernatural drama,  but Last Light is in a class all its own. It's not just another frightening trek through the dark corridors of the metro, but a rhythmic symphony of surging dread and emerging hope.      Last Light returns you to a Moscow devastated by nuclear war. Humanity, hoping to avoid the dangerous radiation and hideous mutants plaguing the surface, has banded together in the underground metro system. Depending on how you played, Metro 2033 might have allowed you to make an important choice at the game's conclusion.Last Light assumes you chose to destroy the creatures known as The Dark Ones, scorching their home with missiles and scouring them from the face of the Earth. But a creature remains, and as returning protagonist Artyom, you must find this remnant of a race thought extinct, this remnant of a decimated species, though it's unclear whether the right decision is to destroy it or to try to communicate with it. Your Ranger allies certainly desire its annihilation, but Artyom's unique connection to the Dark Ones gives him pause and he is nagged by guilt about the devastation he has wrought.     Artyom's dilemma brings a sense of personal struggle to a game fraught with brooding emotion. Metro: Last Light punctuates your adventure with moments of dread and shock, as well as with occult visions that make the past come alive before your very eyes. Supernatural themes intertwine with conflicts between underground factions, the horrors of each element providing two equally macabre sides to a single coin. In the confines of the metro, betrayal is common and trust is a commodity. Here, your greatest enemies are your fellow humans, who are unafraid to cheat and steal if it means gaining favor from the right people. On the brutal surface, the beasts are your primary concern; at any moment, a wailing winged demon might snatch you with its talons, soar into the air, and drop you into the murky water, far from where your horrific flight began.     Yet fear isn't the only emotion Last Light stirs. The final moving hours raise the emotional stakes and test your allegiances by forcing you to confront the consequences of your own choices. Story sequences are absorbing, and typically occur within the game engine and in first-person view, keeping you strongly connected to the events unfolding before you. The most enthralling scenes, however, are those that occur within the context of gameplay. Many interactive sequences--a hypnagogic walk down a blood-red hallway, a survey of an airplane's nightmarish wreckage--relate vital events without removing you from the moment, which makes them hellishly palpable.    Bullets aren't always the best solution, but when you've got a giant mutant after you, they're the most obvious.   There is mirth amid the madness, however. Characters react to each other in authentic ways, responding to one Ranger's pedantic soliloquies with jokes and insults, likely mirroring your own thoughts on the matter. The inhabitants of the underground are colorful and individual. They move about with purpose, speaking at length to each other about war and family, about love and lust. Men gone stir crazy seek the company of prostitutes, and so might you, should you desire a lengthy lap dance. Nudity occurs multiple times, and though it's certainly explicit, it doesn't seem superfluous or exploitative. Rather, Last Light's erotic themes emerge naturally from the despair, and sex in the underground has an air of desperation and urgency. If you prefer tamer pleasures, you may take in a lengthy and detailed variety show, where can-can dancers and an accordion act bring some joy to the melancholy populace. This is life in the metro. And it's an amazing display of narrative craftsmanship.     Exquisite craftsmanship is also on display as you seek the remaining known Dark One on the irradiated surface, and as you avoid the wandering eye of your enemies in the depths beneath. Last Light is not a power shooter. You are not out to murder hundreds of nameless grunts without breaking a sweat, and in fact, the early hours are remarkably light on action. Instead, tension is carefully built in the conversations you have with your comrades, and in the cautious steps you take into the irradiated ruins above the tunnels. You feel the danger. Gnarled trees are twisted into vaguely humanoid shapes, and when you seek refuge from the rain, you hear the drops hammering on the flimsy tin roof above, mimicking the sounds of mutants' skittering claws. Your calling brings you here, but you know it's not a place anyone should be.     A number of creatures menace your journey across the surface. Amphibious freaks move from water to land, threatening you two or three at a time. As you manuever away from their clammy assaults, you must be ever mindful of the squalid pools that surround you, lest you fall in and get dragged to your death by a mutant lurking beneath. Fierce predators pounce towards you, keeping you on the move while you avoid the harsh siren calls of the creatures that cling to nearby walls. You use a number of weapons to fend them off, all of which look and sound appropriately powerful, but none of which turn your adventure into a cakewalk.    Let us feast.   Of these great firearms, it's easiest to become enamored with the shotgun. It fires with a loud report and allows you to discharge multiple shells at once, making it a great standby if you're willing to get close to these beasts. But the long reload time can be a killer if you miss a shot, given how creatures can descend upon you and take multiple swipes in a row. Ammo isn't plentiful in the wastes, though you can get your fill from vendors in the metro's safe havens. Yet the military-grade ammo used as currency is scarce, and you're often faced with a choice to grab more ammo, purchase more grenades, or upgrade that meaty revolver you favor. It's best to scavenge for supplies and ammo in every nook and cranny. Otherwise, you can't take for granted that you'll have everything you need to thrive, particularly on the harder difficulty levels, which are satisfyingly harsh.     Even a single breath is a valuable commodity outside of the metro. You must don a gas mask to stay alive, but masks require filters, which have limited life spans. You discover more filters by exploring your environs--but exploration takes time, which means watching your available supply of healthy air slowly diminish. If you don't value each minute, the pace of your mission could suddenly change from slowly methodical to terrifyingly urgent, as you sprint towards your destination, gasping with increased desperation and hoping against hope that you might cling to life. Unfortunately, you could encounter one of Last Light's uncommon but annoying invisible walls during such a circumstance, thinking that you might be able to leap over a small obstacle or follow a narrow path, only to discover how wrong you were.   When the alarms go off, fight back!   The air is healthier in the metro, but the dangers are no less real. You still confront misshapen mutants in the tunnels, but the darkness plays an important role. One type of creature recoils from the beam of your flashlight, eventually flipping onto its back and making itself vulnerable to your bullets. Battling several at once results in a rhythmic dance as you use your flashlight to keep your distance between you and the mutants' pincers, firing only when you do the most damage. You often find such critters in the blackest of passages--passages you aren't forced to investigate. Yet the lure of such places can be irresistible. The glow of mushrooms and the possibility of valuable ammo beckon you inwards, as does the chance of rescuing an innocent captive held hostage by the enemy factions that also lurk in the tunnels.     You aren't required to go toe to toe with human opposition. You can use darkness to your advantage, twisting light bulbs and flipping circuit breakers to keep yourself hidden, and then sneaking through bases to avoid combat altogether. You can be silently murderous, sidling up behind a guard and slicing his throat, and then quietly flinging a knife into another's back. Human enemies go about their actions in realistic ways; they follow patterns, of course, but they aren't always so regimented as to seem unnatural. As a result, the stealth is fun and tense, though you can always shoot your way out of a bind if you need to.    Arachnophobes best brace themselves: Metro: Last Light is full of creepy-crawlies.   Firefights can be tough, depending on where and how you're caught sneaking around. You could find yourself cornered, wishing you had put a silencer on that sniper rifle rather than drawing everyone's attention with a single shot. Your enemies are uniformly aggressive when alerted, though hardly the sharpest tacks in the box. Several might get stuck in place, their weapons' barrels clipping through each other and the wall as they twirl about. Others might run about in nonsensical ways or fail to notice your presence as quickly as you'd expect. Yet given the close confines in which you normally face these soldiers, AI issues aren't great distractions, as you'll often be too busy staying alive to notice the oddities. It's when you get stealthy again that the discrepancies become most obvious.     Metro: Last Light's battles and sneaky sequences are tense delights, but what makes the adventure truly sing are how such scenes flow from one to the next--and how the detours between them make battles more impactful. Last Light frequently disrupts its own pace, going from terror to relief in a heartbeat, and putting you in one atmospheric location after another. At one point, you get a short look into a room before you drop into it from the vent above. The room is full of corpses, but it's the sight of one corpse in particular that fills you with unease: that of a little boy. Last Light doesn't linger here; there is no internal dialogue that tells you that Artyom is driven to anger in that moment. But the visual enrages you nonetheless, making the upcoming action and plot points more than just about warring men, but about the consequences that conflict has on the future of the metro.   Monsters got you down? Then take a breather and enjoy the show.   The surface brings a tenuous visual warmth, even though though the sunlight is diffused through dreary gray clouds. Out here, one companion in particular brings the harsh exterior an unexpected humanity, while diverse sequences, like one that has you escaping the brash onslaught of the wind, keep the pace from ever becoming too predictable. And even in this wasteland, there's visual variety that keeps Last Light from becoming too overbearing. There's beauty in its indigo skies and battered cityscapes, and even in the sunken, asymmetrical angles of a watcher's face. The console versions of the game look somewhat drab in the darkest of regions, the glimmers of light not quite piercing the blackness enough to make environments come alive. Additionally, the PlayStation 3 version doesn't always maintain a slick frame rate, though this version is still excellent, regardless.     Metro: Last Light is not an endless barrage of bullets and beasts. It takes the time to let you breathe in the choking atmosphere and allow the chilling fog to seep into your bones. And when it finally comes time to aim your shotgun at mutated fiends, the payoff is grander for the eerie silence that came before. Last Light is notably superior to its predecessor, merging storytelling, shooting, and sneaking into a remarkable and cohesive whole. And through this harmony of game design comes the caustic dissonance of a world so torn asunder that a single possibility can bring with it endless hope.   


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499,Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP ,9, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a beautiful and enthralling adventure that feels both archetypal and unique.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/7/9/1/2225791-image3.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/superbrothers-sword-and-sworcery-ep-review/1900-6373114/,pos,"
  Something in our minds and hearts has always yearned for heroes. From King Arthur to Luke Skywalker, humanity has created and celebrated characters who fulfill great destinies, albeit ones tinged with sorrow. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a game that simultaneously recalls the tradition of epic heroes that stretches back through time, and creates a new kind of heroic quest that could only exist in the modern era. It's a magical adventure with a cohesive sense of style that uses its visuals, music, and dialogue to create a wondrous experience that's unlike any game you've played before.      It involves you personally in a way that few games do. Sword & Sworcery doesn't so much break the fourth wall as never build it in the first place. Your guide is the archetype, a dapper fellow with a cigar and a cane and one hell of a chair. He addresses you, the player, directly. His welcoming words set an intriguingly offbeat tone for the adventure to come, as he thanks you for choosing ""to participate in this experimental treatment for acute soul-sickness."" Before long, you're thrust headlong into your quest.    You play as the Scythian, a warrior monk far from her homeland on a woeful errand whose details aren't immediately made clear. The game's early moments allow you to come to terms with its intuitive point-and-click controls, and to interact with the world. This pixelated land quickly reveals a liveliness that makes it beautiful. The green dots that make up bushes shift colors ever so slightly, suggesting the gentle rustling of the wind. Your reflection in a pristine lake catches your eye, and tapping the water causes splashes to occur. Rabbits and other woodland creatures scamper into the brush as you draw near. All these details and many more pull you into this world and make it feel alive.     Though your errand is woeful, your quest is filled with humor, which results from the consistently delightful fusion of typically lofty fantasy language with contemporary casual lingo. You quickly meet three residents of this realm; a girl known as Girl, a woodcutter known as Logfella, and their dog, known as Dogfella. Clicking on Logfella early in your adventure reveals, ""Logfella knew all about our woeful errand & he agreed to lead us up the old road. Still we definitely got the feeling that he wasn't super jazzed about this.""     The Scythian's use of a first-person plural suggests she is speaking not only for herself, but perhaps for both you and her, and along with the archetype's periodic interludes, this helps make the whole experience feel more personal, like a journey of discovery not just for the Scythian, but for you as well. The statements of other characters aren't always humorous; they can also be ominous or observational or melancholy. Their quotable nature makes them apt for sharing, and S&S facilitates this by making it easy for you to quickly tweet any line without leaving the game.   The archetype's interludes make you feel personally involved in the adventure.   Sword & Sworcery's gameplay is straightforward. Your errand involves acquiring the triangular triumvirate of magical objects known as trigons, a clear nod to the most iconic magical object in game history. To do so, you explore the world, looking for the telltale signs of the presence of slumbering sylvan sprites who must be awakened and sent skyward. The puzzles you must solve to awaken these sprites encourage careful observation of your surroundings, as you must usually tap objects that stand out for whatever reason. You might notice that a bush that appears to be reflected in a lake doesn't exist on the shore, or that a mother duck seems worried about her distant ducklings.    These puzzles are generally quite easy, and in most cases, if you choose, you can solve them just by clicking all over the place until you hit upon the environmental objects that respond. But the puzzles aren't designed to be brainteasers, so much as they're yet another way the game draws you into its captivating world. It's a world of wonder and miracles, and your actions when solving puzzles sometimes end up changing the landscape in dramatic and surprising ways. At times, real-world moon phases have an impact on the Scythian's quest, further cementing a feeling of connection between you and the hero.    Your adventure is punctuated by occasional battles. In combat, you can click a sword icon to swing and a shield icon to block. Despite their simplicity, these fights are involving and satisfying, thanks to their rhythmic quality and a sense, generated by the music and sounds, that these are epic battles of great heroism and importance.    In fact, the music is an essential component of the entire Sword & Sworcery experience. Musician Jim Guthrie's varied tunes perfectly support the sense of magic and wonder that the game's story and writing create. Awaken a sylvan sprite, and the ethereal tones it emits as you send it skyward may send shivers down your spine. Find yourself facing a monster in combat, and the primal beats that sound as it bashes its shield with its club will get your pulse racing.   Jim Guthrie's music has such a tremendous impact on the experience, it's only fitting that he appears in the game.   Some of the game's most memorable moments occur as you take time to just exist in the world without advancing the story forward. You might savor the sights and sounds of standing under a pristine night sky, for instance, or you might meet Jim Guthrie himself in a grove and share a dreamy jam session as you make the trees resonate while Jim lays down a beat. It's a magical moment in a game full of a kind of rare beauty that you seldom encounter in games, or anywhere, for that matter. You get Guthrie's score for the game free with your purchase, which is a fantastic bonus.    Sword & Sworcery is only a few hours long, though if you play it the way the game encourages you to play it, those few hours may be spread over a number of weeks. But despite its brevity, the game doesn't feel too short. It's a satisfying experience that leaves you feeling like you've seen an important and heroic task through to completion, and gives you memories to keep. Sword & Sworcery casts such a captivating spell, you may recall your time in this wondrous and mythical realm each time you see the moon shining in the night sky.  


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500,FIFA 12 ,9," FIFA 12 is the definitive football game: challenging, addictive, and with more excellent features than ever before.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426678-71moe0m7ecl._sl1001_.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-12-review/1900-6336847/,pos,"
  Distilling the world's most popular sport into a video game isn't an easy task. Aside from capturing the atmosphere of the game--the satisfying thump of boot on football, the on-pitch dramas created between player and referee, and the ferocious roar of the crowd as the ball sails into the back of the net--there are other considerations too. Some players want to manage their teams. Others want to live out their dreams of football stardom. Still others want to put their skills to the test against the best in the world, all the while clamouring for as realistic an experience as possible. FIFA 12 lets you do all of these things and more. A new tactical defending system, player impact engine, and head-to-head seasons are just some of the excellent new features it offers. But it's the new EA Sports Football Club that's the real draw, bringing with it an addictive levelling system that pits you against the world's players, keeping track of your own progress and that of your favourite team too. Not only is FIFA 12 the best game in the series, it's also one of the most exciting, accurate, and complete sports games around.       If you're a longtime FIFA player, then the changes to defending in this year's game might come as a bit of a shock. A new tactical defending system has been implemented that drastically changes the way you play. In previous versions of FIFA, a common tactic when defending was to hold down the two ""pressing"" buttons, which sent players in to close down attackers and win the ball, requiring little in the way of skill. That tactic no longer works. Instead of rushing in to take the ball, your player now just tracks the attacker and remains a few feet away, keeping him held back. This system of containing the opposition requires more thought than simply sticking a leg in and hoping for the best. You have to actively time when to tackle or decide if it's better to simply hold a player back, rather than rush in for the ball, miss the tackle, and have the opposition pass.    If the opposition does get past, you now have the option of jostling them--that is, pulling on their shirt or using your player's arm to hold them back. This is a neat feature that brings the game closer to how the real-life sport is played, with new player animations making it look more realistic. Be warned, though; pull too many shirts, and the referee won't hesitate to throw a yellow, or even a red, card your way. Other improvements to the animation lie in the new player impact engine. This adds a physics system that simulates the impact between two players during tackles or other forms of contact. If you go in for a particularly aggressive tackle and slam into the player, the resulting animation is rarely the same twice, depending on the build and strength of the two players in question. Both or just one of you may end up in a heap on the pitch, while passing players leap over fallen bodies to get past. On the whole, the system works well, adding another layer of realism to the game. It's not infallible, though, and there are times when you see some comical rag-doll-physics-like animations as players flop over the pitch.    Sending one to the back of the net is as satisfying as ever.   More tweaks to the controls come in the form of precision dribbling, which enable you to control the ball more accurately in close quarters. For example, when you get near the touchline, your player automatically knows he's there and retains tighter control of the ball to keep it in play. The system also affords you the ability to use small, quick touches to control the ball, letting you perform sharp turns and making it easier to beat the opposition's defence. You can shield yourself from other players while dribbling too, rather than being rooted to the spot like in previous games, giving you another way to get past defenders. These enhancements make FIFA 12 the most realistic representation of the sport yet. Scoring goals is trickier, with teams working together to implement strong lines of defence, but the game is all the better for it. You have to work harder, with a greater amount of skill required than ever before. These changes make those moments when you manage to score all the more satisfying.     You can break out your newfound dribbling and defending skills in a number of modes, many of which have carried over from last year. These include Career mode, which lets you compete as a single player working through a 15-year career; as a player manager, where you manage your team's lineup and compete on the pitch; or as a manager, where you take a backseat to the on-pitch action and instead focus on tactics and building up your squad. There's something for everyone, and if you tire of one mode, you can easily switch between them at any time to mix things up. There's also an array of tournaments to play through, from the F.A. Cup through to custom leagues and knockout tournaments.    A combination of new and returning online modes make FIFA 12 the most feature-packed version of the game yet. New this year are Head to Head Seasons and Online Friendlies. Head to Head Seasons is an online league, split into different divisions. You start in division 10, and at the end of each 10-game season your results determine whether you get promoted or, at the very least, avoid relegation to a lower division. You get three points for a win and one for a draw, with the number of points needed for promotion getting increasingly higher as you progress. Each division also has its own cup to win, starting with the EA Shield for lower divisions, through to the Premier Cup for the top tier. Tournaments for cups take place every few weeks, so you've always got another chance to compete for some silverware if you miss out the first time. Your performance is tracked too, so you can see how you compare to the rest of the online community, with a table showing you how many players are in each division.      Online Friendlies is an evolution of unranked matches from FIFA 11. While you still play friendly games against your friends, the results are tracked. Every friend you play against creates a new season, with the two of you having 10 matches in which to earn more points and beat each other. At the end of the season, the winner receives another trophy for the cabinet. This makes playing against your friends all the more exciting, particularly if you're competing in regular matches, giving you all the excitement of the ranked leagues without having to play with strangers. If you do delve into playing with random opponents, though, things have been tweaked so matches are fairer. Instead of searching for a match and then picking a club--which usually results in everyone playing as a five-star team--you now pick your team before searching for an opponent. The game automatically finds an opponent with a similar level team and takes into account your division, skill, location, controls, and Did Not Finish percentage (rage quitters beware!), ensuring that most matches are even.    Whichever mode you play in--online or offline--all your hard work is kept track of in FIFA 12's excellent EA Sports Football Club. At its simplest, the mode keeps track of your experience points, which are awarded to you in any game mode, giving you an overall level that you can compare to others worldwide. It's only when you delve deeper that the real fun begins. You can choose to support any real-life club from around the world, with your accomplishments and experience going toward them, regardless of what team you're playing as. This gives your favourite real-life team an overall position on global league tables, with the league resetting each week to allow for fresh competition. Fans of smaller clubs aren't at a disadvantage either, as scores for each team are based on averages, so even if you team's fan base is outnumbered when compared to the likes of Manchester United or Real Madrid, you're still in with a shot.   EA Sports Football Club keeps track of your FIFA career.   Competing to progress your favourite team up the table, even if it is a virtual one, is very compelling. Seeing your team slip down even one notch on the leaderboard is enough to spur you on to play more matches. There are also plans for EA Sports Football Club to incorporate real events from the world of football. These will include different challenges and storylines to play through. For example, if Liverpool beats Everton in the real world, that could be turned into a FIFA challenge where you could replay the match and try to avenge Liverpool. It's an interesting concept, and how well it works depends largely on any drama going on in the real world, and the ability for EA's dedicated writing staff to turn that into an interesting challenge. Integration with other FIFA games, such as on mobile devices and social networks, is also promised, letting you earn experience points regardless of which version of FIFA you're playing. And if that's not enough for you, the FIFA Ultimate Team mode that was released for previous games as DLC is now included for free too, letting you build a team of players by competing in matches and trading player cards.     Whichever mode you play in, you're treated to the slick presentation that the series is famed for. Menus are easy to navigate, the commentary is exciting and well delivered, and the visuals are as crisp as ever. It's easy to recognise your favourite players as they line up on the pitch, with official licences ensuring they sport the right kit too. And with the addition of the player impact engine, animations are more realistic than they've ever been. Excellent online modes and improved player handling further cement FIFA 12 as football at its best--gloriously deep, rewarding, addictive, and as close as you can get to the real thing without donning a pair of boots.  


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501,FIFA 12 ,9," FIFA 12 is the definitive football game: challenging, addictive, and with more excellent features than ever before.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426678-71moe0m7ecl._sl1001_.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-12-review/1900-6337114/,pos,"
  Distilling the world's most popular sport into a video game isn't an easy task. Aside from capturing the atmosphere of the game--the satisfying thump of boot on football, the on-pitch dramas created between player and referee, and the ferocious roar of the crowd as the ball sails into the back of the net--there are other considerations too. Some players want to manage their teams. Others want to live out their dreams of football stardom. Still others want to put their skills to the test against the best in the world, all the while clamouring for as realistic an experience as possible. FIFA 12 lets you do all of these things and more. A new tactical defending system, player impact engine, and head-to-head seasons are just some of the excellent new features it offers. But it's the new EA Sports Football Club that's the real draw, bringing with it an addictive levelling system that pits you against the world's players, keeping track of your own progress and that of your favourite team too. Not only is FIFA 12 the best game in the series, it's also one of the most exciting, accurate, and complete sports games around.       If you're a longtime FIFA player, then the changes to defending in this year's game might come as a bit of a shock. A new tactical defending system has been implemented that drastically changes the way you play. In previous versions of FIFA, a common tactic when defending was to hold down the two ""pressing"" buttons, which sent players in to close down attackers and win the ball, requiring little in the way of skill. That tactic no longer works. Instead of rushing in to take the ball, your player now just tracks the attacker and remains a few feet away, keeping him held back. This system of containing the opposition requires more thought than simply sticking a leg in and hoping for the best. You have to actively time when to tackle or decide if it's better to simply hold a player back, rather than rush in for the ball, miss the tackle, and have the opposition pass.    If the opposition does get past, you now have the option of jostling them--that is, pulling on their shirt or using your player's arm to hold them back. This is a neat feature that brings the game closer to how the real-life sport is played, with new player animations making it look more realistic. Be warned, though; pull too many shirts, and the referee won't hesitate to throw a yellow, or even a red, card your way. Other improvements to the animation lie in the new player impact engine. This adds a physics system that simulates the impact between two players during tackles or other forms of contact. If you go in for a particularly aggressive tackle and slam into the player, the resulting animation is rarely the same twice, depending on the build and strength of the two players in question. Both or just one of you may end up in a heap on the pitch, while passing players leap over fallen bodies to get past. On the whole, the system works well, adding another layer of realism to the game. It's not infallible, though, and there are times when you see some comical rag-doll-physics-like animations as players flop over the pitch.    Sending one to the back of the net is as satisfying as ever.   More tweaks to the controls come in the form of precision dribbling, which enable you to control the ball more accurately in close quarters. For example, when you get near the touchline, your player automatically knows he's there and retains tighter control of the ball to keep it in play. The system also affords you the ability to use small, quick touches to control the ball, letting you perform sharp turns and making it easier to beat the opposition's defence. You can shield yourself from other players while dribbling too, rather than being rooted to the spot like in previous games, giving you another way to get past defenders. These enhancements make FIFA 12 the most realistic representation of the sport yet. Scoring goals is trickier, with teams working together to implement strong lines of defence, but the game is all the better for it. You have to work harder, with a greater amount of skill required than ever before. These changes make those moments when you manage to score all the more satisfying.     You can break out your newfound dribbling and defending skills in a number of modes, many of which have carried over from last year. These include Career mode, which lets you compete as a single player working through a 15-year career; as a player manager, where you manage your team's lineup and compete on the pitch; or as a manager, where you take a backseat to the on-pitch action and instead focus on tactics and building up your squad. There's something for everyone, and if you tire of one mode, you can easily switch between them at any time to mix things up. There's also an array of tournaments to play through, from the F.A. Cup through to custom leagues and knockout tournaments.    A combination of new and returning online modes make FIFA 12 the most feature-packed version of the game yet. New this year are Head to Head Seasons and Online Friendlies. Head to Head Seasons is an online league, split into different divisions. You start in division 10, and at the end of each 10-game season your results determine whether you get promoted or, at the very least, avoid relegation to a lower division. You get three points for a win and one for a draw, with the number of points needed for promotion getting increasingly higher as you progress. Each division also has its own cup to win, starting with the EA Shield for lower divisions, through to the Premier Cup for the top tier. Tournaments for cups take place every few weeks, so you've always got another chance to compete for some silverware if you miss out the first time. Your performance is tracked too, so you can see how you compare to the rest of the online community, with a table showing you how many players are in each division.      Online Friendlies is an evolution of unranked matches from FIFA 11. While you still play friendly games against your friends, the results are tracked. Every friend you play against creates a new season, with the two of you having 10 matches in which to earn more points and beat each other. At the end of the season, the winner receives another trophy for the cabinet. This makes playing against your friends all the more exciting, particularly if you're competing in regular matches, giving you all the excitement of the ranked leagues without having to play with strangers. If you do delve into playing with random opponents, though, things have been tweaked so matches are fairer. Instead of searching for a match and then picking a club--which usually results in everyone playing as a five-star team--you now pick your team before searching for an opponent. The game automatically finds an opponent with a similar level team and takes into account your division, skill, location, controls, and Did Not Finish percentage (rage quitters beware!), ensuring that most matches are even.    Whichever mode you play in--online or offline--all your hard work is kept track of in FIFA 12's excellent EA Sports Football Club. At its simplest, the mode keeps track of your experience points, which are awarded to you in any game mode, giving you an overall level that you can compare to others worldwide. It's only when you delve deeper that the real fun begins. You can choose to support any real-life club from around the world, with your accomplishments and experience going toward them, regardless of what team you're playing as. This gives your favourite real-life team an overall position on global league tables, with the league resetting each week to allow for fresh competition. Fans of smaller clubs aren't at a disadvantage either, as scores for each team are based on averages, so even if you team's fan base is outnumbered when compared to the likes of Manchester United or Real Madrid, you're still in with a shot.   There's never a dull moment in FIFA.   Competing to progress your favourite team up the table, even if it is a virtual one, is very compelling. Seeing your team slip down even one notch on the leaderboard is enough to spur you on to play more matches. There are also plans for EA Sports Football Club to incorporate real events from the world of football. These will include different challenges and storylines to play through. For example, if Liverpool beats Everton in the real world, that could be turned into a FIFA challenge where you could replay the match and try to avenge Liverpool. It's an interesting concept, and how well it works depends largely on any drama going on in the real world, and the ability for EA's dedicated writing staff to turn that into an interesting challenge. Integration with other FIFA games, such as on mobile devices and social networks, is also promised, letting you earn experience points regardless of which version of FIFA you're playing. And if that's not enough for you, the FIFA Ultimate Team mode that was released for previous games as DLC is now included for free too, letting you build a team of players by competing in matches and trading player cards.     Whichever mode you play in, you're treated to the slick presentation that the series is famed for. Menus are easy to navigate, the commentary is exciting and well delivered, and the visuals are as crisp as ever. It's easy to recognise your favourite players as they line up on the pitch, with official licences ensuring they sport the right kit too. And with the addition of the player impact engine, animations are more realistic than they've ever been. Excellent online modes and improved player handling further cement FIFA 12 as football at its best--gloriously deep, rewarding, addictive, and as close as you can get to the real thing without donning a pair of boots.  


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502,FIFA 12 ,9," FIFA 12 is the definitive football game: challenging, addictive, and with more excellent features than ever before.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426678-71moe0m7ecl._sl1001_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-12-review/1900-6338993/,pos,"
  Distilling the world's most popular sport into a video game isn't an easy task. Aside from capturing the atmosphere of the game--the satisfying thump of boot on football, the on-pitch dramas created between player and referee, and the ferocious roar of the crowd as the ball sails into the back of the net--there are other considerations too. Some players want to manage their teams. Others want to live out their dreams of football stardom. Still others want to put their skills to the test against the best in the world, all the while clamouring for as realistic an experience as possible. FIFA 12 lets you do all of these things and more. For the first time, the PC version uses the same engine as its high-def console counterparts. As a result, it not only looks the part, but also gives you access to the same excellent new features, such as the tactical defending system, player impact engine, and head-to-head seasons. It's the new EA Sports Football Club that's the real draw, though, bringing with it an addictive levelling system that pits you against the world's players, keeping track of your own progress and that of your favourite team too. Not only is FIFA 12 the best game in the series, it's also one of the most exciting, accurate, and complete sports games around.       If you're a longtime FIFA player, then the changes to defending in this year's game might come as a bit of a shock. A new tactical defending system has been implemented that drastically changes the way you play. In previous versions of FIFA, a common tactic when defending was to hold down the two ""pressing"" buttons, which sent players in to close down attackers and win the ball, requiring little in the way of skill. That tactic no longer works. Instead of rushing in to take the ball, your player now just tracks the attacker and remains a few feet away, keeping him held back. This system of containing the opposition requires more thought than simply sticking a leg in and hoping for the best. You have to actively time when to tackle or decide if it's better to simply hold a player back, rather than rush in for the ball, miss the tackle, and have the opposition pass.    If the opposition does get past, you now have the option of jostling them--that is, pulling on their shirt or using your player's arm to hold them back. This is a neat feature that brings the game closer to how the real-life sport is played, with new player animations making it look more realistic. Be warned, though; pull too many shirts, and the referee won't hesitate to throw a yellow, or even a red, card your way. Other improvements to the animation lie in the new player impact engine. This adds a physics system that simulates the impact between two players during tackles or other forms of contact. If you go in for a particularly aggressive tackle and slam into the player, the resulting animation is rarely the same twice, depending on the build and strength of the two players in question. Both or just one of you may end up in a heap on the pitch, while passing players leap over fallen bodies to get past. On the whole, the system works well, adding another layer of realism to the game. It's not infallible, though, and there are times when you see some comical rag-doll-physics-like animations as players flop over the pitch.    Sending one to the back of the net is as satisfying as ever.   More tweaks to the controls come in the form of precision dribbling, which enable you to control the ball more accurately in close quarters. For example, when you get near the touchline, your player automatically knows he's there and retains tighter control of the ball to keep it in play. The system also affords you the ability to use small, quick touches to control the ball, letting you perform sharp turns and making it easier to beat the opposition's defence. You can shield yourself from other players while dribbling too, rather than being rooted to the spot like in previous games, giving you another way to get past defenders. These enhancements make FIFA 12 the most realistic representation of the sport yet. Scoring goals is trickier, with teams working together to implement strong lines of defence, but the game is all the better for it. You have to work harder, with a greater amount of skill required than ever before. These changes make those moments when you manage to score all the more satisfying.     You can break out your newfound dribbling and defending skills in a number of modes, many of which have carried over from last year. These include Career mode, which lets you compete as a single player working through a 15-year career; as a player manager, where you manage your team's lineup and compete on the pitch; or as a manager, where you take a backseat to the on-pitch action and instead focus on tactics and building up your squad. There's something for everyone, and if you tire of one mode, you can easily switch between them at any time to mix things up. There's also an array of tournaments to play through, from the F.A. Cup through to custom leagues and knockout tournaments.    A combination of new and returning online modes make FIFA 12 the most feature-packed version of the game yet. New this year are Head to Head Seasons and Online Friendlies. Head to Head Seasons is an online league, split into different divisions. You start in division 10, and at the end of each 10-game season your results determine whether you get promoted or, at the very least, avoid relegation to a lower division. You get three points for a win and one for a draw, with the number of points needed for promotion getting increasingly higher as you progress. Each division also has its own cup to win, starting with the EA Shield for lower divisions, through to the Premier Cup for the top tier. Tournaments for cups take place every few weeks, so you've always got another chance to compete for some silverware if you miss out the first time. Your performance is tracked too, so you can see how you compare to the rest of the online community, with a table showing you how many players are in each division.      Online Friendlies is an evolution of unranked matches from FIFA 11. While you still play friendly games against your friends, the results are tracked. Every friend you play against creates a new season, with the two of you having 10 matches in which to earn more points and beat each other. At the end of the season, the winner receives another trophy for the cabinet. This makes playing against your friends all the more exciting, particularly if you're competing in regular matches, giving you all the excitement of the ranked leagues without having to play with strangers. If you do delve into playing with random opponents, though, things have been tweaked so matches are fairer. Instead of searching for a match and then picking a club--which usually results in everyone playing as a five-star team--you now pick your team before searching for an opponent. The game automatically finds an opponent with a similar level team and takes into account your division, skill, location, controls, and Did Not Finish percentage (rage quitters beware!), ensuring that most matches are even.    Whichever mode you play in--online or offline--all your hard work is kept track of in FIFA 12's excellent EA Sports Football Club. At its simplest, the mode keeps track of your experience points, which are awarded to you in any game mode, giving you an overall level that you can compare to others worldwide. It's only when you delve deeper that the real fun begins. You can choose to support any real-life club from around the world, with your accomplishments and experience going toward them, regardless of what team you're playing as. This gives your favourite real-life team an overall position on global league tables, with the league resetting each week to allow for fresh competition. Fans of smaller clubs aren't at a disadvantage either, as scores for each team are based on averages, so even if you team's fan base is outnumbered when compared to the likes of Manchester United or Real Madrid, you're still in with a shot.   There's never a dull moment in FIFA.   Competing to progress your favourite team up the table, even if it is a virtual one, is very compelling. Seeing your team slip down even one notch on the leaderboard is enough to spur you on to play more matches. There are also plans for EA Sports Football Club to incorporate real events from the world of football. These will include different challenges and storylines to play through. For example, if Liverpool beats Everton in the real world, that could be turned into a FIFA challenge where you could replay the match and try to avenge Liverpool. It's an interesting concept, and how well it works depends largely on any drama going on in the real world, and the ability for EA's dedicated writing staff to turn that into an interesting challenge. Integration with other FIFA games, such as on mobile devices and social networks, is also promised, letting you earn experience points regardless of which version of FIFA you're playing. And if that's not enough for you, the FIFA Ultimate Team mode that was released for previous games as DLC is now included for free too, letting you build a team of players by competing in matches and trading player cards.     Whichever mode you play in, you're treated to the slick presentation that the series is famed for. Menus are easy to navigate, the commentary is exciting and well delivered, and the visuals are much crisper and more detailed than those in FIFA 11. If you've got the right hardware, FIFA 12 on PC looks even better than its console counterparts. It's easy to recognise your favourite players as they line up on the pitch, with official licences ensuring they sport the right kit too. And with the addition of the player impact engine, animations are more realistic than they've ever been. Excellent online modes and improved player handling further cement FIFA 12 as football at its best--gloriously deep, rewarding, addictive, and as close as you can get to the real thing without donning a pair of boots.  
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503,Terraria ,9, Terraria Vita is the best version of an already amazing game because you can take this enthralling adventure with you wherever you go.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/2/3/2226623-box_terraria.png,VITA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/terraria-review/1900-6415621/,pos,"
An old man awaits at the entrance of a dungeon. Stricken by a mysterious curse, he urges you to return after the sun has set, to free him of the madness that has infected his body. So you spend the day amid the grassy splendor of Terraria, surveying caves, slaying rabbits and slimes, as the hours tick by. Once night has set, you return to the old man, to free him of his curse and reap whatever rewards he wishes to give you. It turns out that the little curse transformed the old man into a demonic skeleton, a hovering monstrosity that unleashes holy hell upon your poorly equipped explorer. The battle rages for 10 seconds, maybe 20 if you run away at the onset, and then you're left staring at your corpse and wondering how you could ever defeat such a beast.But there's no reason to be deterred by such a thorough beating. Terraria uses an empowering sense of discovery to grab you, and that unrestrained freedom is a double-edged sword. Free to explore the untouched lands, you may happen upon a monster much more powerful than you, or you may find a chest filled with precious treasures. You're never sure where your travels will lead you, but your curiosity is always rewarded. You may gain knowledge, such as knowing not to talk to old men at night, or happen upon a cache of gold, which can be used to forge a powerful sword. It's a world bursting with possibilities. Terraria is an incredible adventure that continually excites your imagination with the endless secrets that await.An apartment complex reaching toward the sky gives your helpers plenty of room for themselves.Terraria debuted on the PC almost two years ago, and I was worried how such a mouse-heavy game could make the transition to a traditional control scheme. After a little practice, my worries were thankfully banished. Movement works remarkably well on the Vita, which makes sense given that Terraria feels like a 2D platformer. Performing precise jumps and grappling up walls feel even better using an analog stick instead of keyboard keys, so there's joy in traversing the world that didn't exist before. However, movement isn't nearly as important as excavation, and that's where patience matters. No longer can you dig precisely with a mouse; instead, you use a stick. The game has two options, manual and smart, which have different strengths and weaknesses. If you're clearing a deep hole, smart is blunt and effective. If you need to focus on individual blocks, manual works fine. Unfortunately, your cursor is controlled by both the right stick and the back touchpad, and there's no way to disable the second scheme, so you do have to hold the Vita carefully lest you dig haphazardly.Terraria is an incredible adventure that continually excites your imagination with the endless secrets that await.Discovery is the essence of Terraria, but thankfully that doesn't extend to basic play concepts. The PC version struggled to communicate exactly what you were supposed to do in this expansive world, and though the Vita version doesn't spell out every detail, it does a great job of pushing you in the right direction. Shelter is the most pressing matter for a lone explorer. Chop down trees to gain wood, and then use that wood to build a house. Once you lay out the frame, you need doors and a chair to complete the requirements, and that's where you get your first hint at what makes Terraria so appealing. You're told to make a crafting table, and by standing near it, you can make the rest of the pieces to finish your house. And there are a lot more items you can craft beyond that. With a bevy of weapons and armor, clothes and decorations, there are tons of tools you can make that help you become a better explorer.A little snow never hurt anyone.The items you can craft are clearly spelled out for you, so you're never unclear about what's possible. Once you acquire any of the plentiful materials strewn about the land, you learn how you can use them to craft something that could help you on the journey. Turn cobwebs into silk and then combine that with wood to make a bed. Melt silver nuggets into bars and then pound those into a shining suit at your anvil. By seeing exactly what items you can create, you're pushed to gather those materials as quickly as you can. You want that jungle hat, right? Well, you better find an underground jungle and gather spores if you want to sport that fine protective gear. An enticing cycle of hunting for materials followed by reaping a reward crops up in the early moments. Once you have golden armor and tools, you can venture further, which allows you to access even more powerful weapons.Much of your time in Terraria is spent digging elaborate tunnels beneath the surface. It's there that the most precious resources are buried, so you grab some torches and try to fend off the skeletons and bats as you dig ever deeper down. It's a slow process that stays compelling for two important reasons. First, with so many secrets hidden below, you continually stumble upon exciting new areas. Maybe you land at a place filled with bioluminescent mushrooms that can be brewed into a handy potion, or find a makeshift house hiding a treasure chest. You never know, so you keep digging. Second, there's a puzzle element to digging successfully. When you chip away at rock in the deep end of a lake, you have to figure out how to manage your dwindling supply of oxygen while going further down. Or you may have to divert water toward smoldering lava to create obsidian. You're always planning the best possible route, while fending off enemies, which keeps you engaged during those solitary hours carving out earth. It would be so much easier to mine this meteor if aliens weren't flying at your head.Once you harvest enough gold to drape yourself in it, you may wonder where you're supposed to go next. Well, thankfully, there's a guide who can point you in the right direction. Building houses attracts non-player characters, and each has his or her own way to help you. The guide tells you that it's finally time to fight a boss, and even details how to summon it, which is a godsend if you're lost. If you have an explosive in your inventory, a blast-happy dude moves in who happily sells you dynamite and bombs. There's no way to know exactly what will lure more NPCs to your commune, so just experiment with everything possible. None of them are necessary to complete your adventure, but they are a handy resource when you're stumped. Just make sure you fortify your walls. You wouldn't want a goblin army killing your only friends.Combat in Terraria is often simple. Killing slimes is more about positioning than deeper tactics, so most enemies serve as a distraction rather than a serious roadblock. Of course, you could play with permadeath if you want a real challenge, or lose all of your items upon every death, but such consequences were so severe for me that I didn't want to venture forth, which defeats the point of the game. The normal option is that you lose money when you die, which is a gentle scolding more than a serious setback.Digging a helevator is the quickest way to reach the bottom of the world.Be prepared to die a lot when bosses make an appearance. Every battle is against a massive beast that dwarfs your feeble adventurer, so you have to be smart and well prepared if you're going to come out on top. If you collect enough shooting stars beforehand, you can craft mana crystals that let you use magic. It's much safer to shoot magical strikes from a distance than to get up close with your warhammer. Still, there are many different tactics to take out the various bosses. And, who knows, maybe you won't have a chance to plan out a strategy at all. The Eye of Cthulhu randomly appears once you've become powerful enough, and it's crazy to fight this flying beast while in a subterranean jungle. Always be prepared for a fight; you wouldn't want to lose your hard-earned money because you forgot your bow at your home base.Terraria is a perfect fit on the Vita. Playing this adventure on a handheld is a huge bonus to a game that was already incredibly well made. Now you can mine for hellstone while sitting on the throne or on a bus, so you're always making up an excuse to play for five more minutes. But watch those minutes spiral into the thousands without you even realizing it. And once you go as far as you think you can, you unlock hard mode, and there are even more items to craft and bosses to defeat. Terraria includes the updates to the PC version, so there are lots more bosses, items, and even biomes than when the game was first released. It takes a special game to make you fully care about all the little activities you're taking part in while still keeping your eye on a faraway prize, and Terraria deftly balances those ideas.
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504,Tank Beat ,3.7, Don't bother playing Tank Beat.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/4/6/2221346-934649_86752_front.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tank-beat-review/1900-6171963/,neg,"
  Tank Beat isn't much fun. There's very little to it, and what is there is bland, and simplistic. If there's one feat developer MileStone managed to pull off, it's how dull it managed to make the act of blowing up tanks. That might be a fascinating accomplishment, but it makes for an utter bore of a game.    Playing Tank Beat is exactly as exciting as looking at this screenshot.   The main mode in Tank Beat is the story mode. Each battle is preceded by an introductory sequence featuring plain anime character drawings engaging in barely cohesive dialogue. The story is a mix of soap opera melodrama and freedom fighter hoo-ha, but it's all just an excuse to stick you in a tank and make you blow stuff to smithereens. To do that, you maneuver your blue dot around on the touch screen by drawing a line from the dot to a destination. You can sweep your viewing/firing arc around your dot by dragging the stylus around in a circle. When you see a red dot, you hold the L button and touch it. If you are a good shot, the red dot blows up. Most of the time, a friendly yellow dot or even a green dot will join you. You can set the companion dot to follow you, guard, seek and destroy, or move along a certain path. Usually you'll just have it follow you around, since micromanaging buddy dots is tedious and unnecessary.     As it turns out, the dots are tanks, judging by the action on the top screen. You will need to glance at the top screen from time to time to judge your line of fire, but even when you do pay attention to it your eyes aren't apt to be pleased. The boxy tanks roam around blurry environments with few topographical features. There may be some defensive walls or a few buildings and whatnot, but the visuals are mostly drab. The bright spot is when you successfully blow up an enemy tank and the camera zooms in to show you the hazy explosion of pixels. The accompanying soundtrack is grating and annoying, as are most of the sound effects.     There is one upside to the sound: Sometimes your combat companion will tell you an enemy is ahead, or off to the right or left. But to whose left is never clear. You might head off to your own left while sweeping your view only to find nothing at all, just in time to notice an enemy rolling in from the right. Another irritation is the simple act of drawing a path. If you draw one, it's indicated with a bright yellow line on the touch screen to let you know where the tank is headed. But occasionally there is a midmission cutscene, and when the scene is over and you are returned to gameplay, the path is gone. So even though your tank will still be following the now-invisible path, you'll need to either use your photographic memory to know where it's headed, or draw a new path. And while some tanks can fire while in motion, others must stop before they can fire. With these tanks, if you stop midpath to fire at an opponent, the path disappears and you need to redraw it. Was it too much to ask to have the tank continue its journey once it fires?    The little campaign takes about three hours to finish, and you can skirmish against the artificial intelligence or up to four other players using the maps and tanks you have unlocked. Tank Beat supports both DS download play and Nintendo Wi-Fi, but it's tough finding even one opponent online, let alone three. But it doesn't matter. Whether you think of Tank Beat as an action title or a strategy title, it's easiest just to call it a game you shouldn't play.     
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505,Super Rub a Dub ,3.7," More refined controls would have made Super Rub a Dub less frustrating, but that wouldn't be enough to make it worthwhile.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/7/0/4/29934-83704.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-rub-a-dub-review/1900-6170187/,neg,"
  Super Rub a Dub is a very basic puzzle game for the PlayStation 3's download service. The goal of each of the game's levels is quite simple. You want to move a rubber duck around a bathtub-like playfield to collect ducklings, and then lead the whole train of them to the exit in the fastest time possible. The catch is that you play the entire game by tilting the Sixaxis controller around, which tilts the tub and subsequently moves the duck. The end result might have made for a decent little tech demo to show off the ""tilty support"" made possible by the PlayStation 3's gamepad, but as a game, it's not so hot.   Pig Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck, and I'm about to put the hammer down.   The basic action in Super Rub a Dub is similar to an old Sega arcade game called Flicky. The ducklings are trapped in bubbles, and as you touch them with your duck, they pop out and start following you. The more ducks you collect, the longer the train of ducklings behind you gets. Ideally, your goal is to deliver every duckling in the level to the exit drain in one go, but you can stop off at the exit any time you want to send some of the ducklings to freedom. The danger of having a long string of duckies behind you is that there are enemies in many of the levels, like wind-up sharks. They can kill your ducks, which is decidedly uncool. But you'll get a bigger end-of-level bonus if you deliver all the ducks at once. So that's where the risk versus reward action comes into play. Your times for each level get uploaded to an online leaderboard, which is seriously lacking in features, as there's no way to go back to it and see your score. Not even the friends leaderboard shows your own score.    Later tubs add currents, which can make navigating a hassle, but a quick flip of the controller will make everything in the tub hop, letting you jump over extreme currents and, as an added bonus, disable some of your enemies. Unfortunately, the controller feels unresponsive in some areas and too touchy in others. Moving the duck around the tub always feels sluggish, like you don't have enough control over the tilt of the tub. Also, the sensors detect any sort of jerky movement as a jump, making you hop more than you want to.    Visually, the game's very plain. The surface of the water looks nice, and the rubber duckies are all very crisp. The game runs in 1080p, but even those HD bells and whistles can't make the game look interesting for any length of time. The audio is similarly half-cocked, with the same audio track playing underneath all of the action, whether you're looking at a menu or tilting some ducks.    There's a multiplayer mode in here, too, but rather than letting four players fight over ducks, it just lets players take turns playing the same level to see who can end up with the fastest time. Super Rub a Dub is stripped-down and plain at every turn, and it's a bad deal at $6.99.   
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506,C: The Contra Adventure ,3.6, It's hard to believe that Konami would release yet another sorry game with the Contra name on it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/5/7/2212557-box_ctca.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/c-the-contra-adventure-review/1900-2546981/,neg,"
After the last Contra game, which in case you've blocked it from your memory was a terrible failure, you'd think that Konami would have the sense to put together a decent follow-up in an attempt to right its past wrongs. But this is not the case. Appaloosa Interactive has managed to develop a game that, in some ways, is even worse than Legacy of War. The game is played from two perspectives. The first is an attempt to return to the side-scrolling ways of old-school Contra. The camera occasionally does some funny stuff to make it seem 3D, much like Pandemonium. The other mode is a top-down perspective similar to Legacy of War. The game's weaponry lacks any significant punch, partially due to the terrible sound effects, but the shots also don't look very impressive. The spread gun is still effective but doesn't look or sound as fearsome as it should. The graphics in the game are just plain bad. From the opening title screen, that looks like it came from a fourth-grade art class, to the blocky polygonal characters and ugly sprite-based explosions, nothing looks good. The music sounds like the guy that makes all the music for the Charlie Brown specials was told to write war tunes, and the shots, screams, and explosions that make up the effects are all very drab. Most of the game's levels are played from the top-down perspective, which, unfortunately, is the weaker of the two perspectives. Of course, the side-scrolling levels aren't exactly great, either. So what you're left with is a bad shooter that doesn't even resemble a Contra game most of the time. You can hold multiple weapons and take more than one hit before dying, and you also have smart bombs. It's hard to believe that Konami would release yet another sorry game with the Contra name on it. You would think it would have learned from Legacy of War and put more effort into the next game. If you want to play a good Contra game, pull out your NES or SNES. There's really nothing in this game worth checking out.
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507,Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX ,3.6," While the PlayStation version managed to be a fairly inoffensive game, the Dreamcast version's graphical flaws manage to wreck anything the game has going for it, leaving behind an ugly, ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/7/9/2213479-box_dmfsbmx.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dave-mirra-freestyle-bmx-review/1900-2659262/,neg,"
Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX started life on the PlayStation. Using a modified version of the engine that brought Thrasher: Skate and Destroy to life, Mirra was a decent, albeit easy, and somewhat dull PlayStation game. For better or worse, the Dreamcast version keeps all the same options, gameplay mechanics, and odd little glitches. However, the Dreamcast version adds a new mess of graphical problems to the mix, resulting in a game that is essentially unplayable.   Dave Mirra's main mode, the proquest, is a very goal-oriented mode. You start each level with four amateur challenges to complete. They are usually reasonably simple, such as score challenges, simple jumps, or knocking over items. Once those are completed, the pro challenges become available. The pro challenges are, as you might imagine, a little more difficult, and they'll ask you to do things like grind for 50 feet, make long transfers, or get a reasonably high score. After that come the hard-core challenges, which manage to be a bit more challenging than the rest of the level goals. While it's heavy on the ""grind X number of feet"" and score-based goals, the game's other challenges are fairly inventive and do a lot for the gameplay. The levels range from dirt tracks, to street settings, to full-on professional competition arenas, and most of them are fairly well designed. The game's other modes include the now standard free-ride and single-session modes as well as a two-player mode with lots of variants, such as best run, furthest jump, highest walltap, and so on.   The game controls are similar to those found in other games in the genre, such as Tony Hawk and MTV Sports: Skateboarding. It does, however, change things up a bit by having a move modifier button rather than a grab-style trick button. When used with the other trick buttons, you can combine different moves to actually create different tricks, such as superman seat grabs, no-look one footers, and the like. This trick system breathes a little life into the game and keeps it from being a simple clone of the various skateboarding games on the market. However, the game is way too lenient at times, as it lets you land sideways more often than it should. Also, pressing the grind button when you are within what seems like three or four feet of a grindable lip or edge causes your bike to automatically reorient itself and grind, regardless of how fast or how sideways you may be flying at the edge. It's almost as if pushing the Y button turns on a ""grind magnet"" of sorts, and anything in its reach sucks your bike to the ledge and starts the grind. It's even possible to combo vert tricks into grinds and stalls using your magnetic pegs. Thrasher had this problem, but it's much, much worse in this game.   Where the Dreamcast version of Dave Mirra falls apart is in its graphics. While still pictures of the game look tolerable, and the models and trick animations look pretty solid, the game's frame rate is extremely jumpy. Get close to a complex object or get yourself in a position where you can see a lot of the level, and you're looking at around ten frames per second. Considering the game is such a timing-based endeavor, the random frame rate makes the game almost completely unplayable. Adding to the laughable display is extreme amounts of pop-up, which goes completely unhidden by fog or any other standard pop-up masking trickery. Instead, you'll occasionally see half of a building in the distance, and the other half flickering in and out of sight as you approach it. The textures used throughout the game are a little plain, but they fit with the rest of the game's look. The game's sound is tolerable, and the soundtrack is filled with licensed music from bands like Cypress Hill, the Deftones, Sublime, Rancid, and lots more.   While the PlayStation version managed to be a fairly inoffensive game, the Dreamcast version's graphical flaws manage to wreck anything the game has going for it, leaving behind an ugly, unplayable mess. If you're a BMX junkie, the PlayStation version, while nothing spectacular, is far superior to the Dreamcast edition.
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508,Fighting Force 2 ,3.6, Fighting Force 2 takes the same basic beat-'em-up ethic and melds it with a pinch of Lara Croftian camera work and a smidgen of Metal Gear-esque espionage.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/9/8/2218198-slus_00934_f_all.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fighting-force-2-review/1900-2545956/,neg,"
If you're lucky, you don't remember the original Fighting Force. The game tried to resurrect the Final Fight-style game by providing scads of bad guys you could beat by simply pounding on the punch button until everyone was dead. To put it bluntly, the first Fighting Force was not a good game. Fighting Force 2 takes the same basic beat-'em-up ethic and melds it with a pinch of Lara Croftian camera work and a smidgen of Metal Gear-esque espionage. The resulting game is better than the original, but it still comes off as an incredibly dull piece of software. The game sends you on several different missions, but your objective never really matters. You just plod through level after level, beating up anyone in your path and breaking all sorts of enemy equipment along the way. Just about anything you see can be destroyed if you hit it enough times. That's right, your character has the ability to make soda machines explode using only his bare fists. Heck, even an office chair will explode if you kick it hard enough. This is incredibly silly, especially when guns and health pickups start flying out of the copy machine you just stabbed with your knife. This is also just about the only cool element in the entire game. The enemies are painfully easy to defeat, especially given the copious amount of weapons you'll find along the way. Anything you can make explode could potentially contain another weapon for your inventory. Weapons include pistols (which our hero holds sideways like the true gangsta he is), a shotgun, knives, grenades, sledgehammers, pipes, and axes. The inventory is controlled by holding down a button and scrolling through your items until you find one you like - it's not a perfect scheme, but it works well enough. OK, the gameplay is weak and generic. The sound is occasionally sketchy. The controls are a little too touchy. But at least the game is fairly pleasing to the eye. Though there are occasionally some clipping problems and some bad seams here and there, the game generally looks pretty good. The textures are nice and crisp, and the animation is fluid. The behind-the-back camera works well, though it has lots of problems in small rooms. There's really nothing exciting about Fighting Force 2. The ease of gameplay makes it feel less like a game and more like an exercise. So you'll just wander around kicking everything in sight until sheer boredom forces you to turn the game off - which, depending on your tolerance level, will be anywhere from ten minutes to three hours. Yes, this game is better than the original Fighting Force - but that's really not saying much. Fighting Force 2 would make a decent rental, if only to laugh at the exploding office chairs, but not much else.
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509,Magic: The Gathering - BattleMage ,3.6, This electronic version bears little resemblance to the original.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/5/4/2218254-magic_the_gathering_battlemage_ntsc_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/magic-the-gathering-battlemage-review/1900-2542419/,neg,"
The multimillion dollar card game that has swept the world finally makes its electronic debut with Acclaim's Magic: The Gathering - BattleMage. Fans of the original version have been waiting a long time to get their grubby mitts (well, card playing does make your hands mighty sweaty) on Acclaim's Magic: The Gathering. Prepare to wait a little longer because Acclaim's version lacks magic of any kind. If you've never played the card version of Magic, you will find it nearly impossible to understand what is happening Acclaim's adaptation, because the manual is a flimsy 30 pages (the rule book for the card game alone was over 60 pages) and this electronic version bears little resemblance to the original.  Imagine moving six creatures around a battlefield, defending yourself, and casting spells (which requires you to scroll through an assortment of cards, pick one, and then tap the appropriate color mana), while your computer-controlled opponent is rocking your world with speed, agility, and pinpoint accuracy. Anyone who has played the original version of Magic will have a hard time figuring out why Acclaim decided to make this a real-time strategy game. Real time destroys the beauty of the game - figuring out the perfect combination anticipating your opponent's next move - and destroys the Zen-like experience of the card game. Acclaim's adaptation allows two types of gameplay. Players can opt to go mano-a-mano against another planeswalker or attempt to conquer all of Corondor in campaign mode. For those of you who remember Defender of the Crown, the strategy portion of Magic is very similar. You start with one parcel of land and must conquer other tracts one by one until you've gained total control over Corondor. Unfortunately, the campaign mode is nothing more than a choose-your-own-adventure story where you read some text and, according to your response, either gain control of the land or not. New underwear on Christmas is more fun than this. Although the card artwork, cutscenes, and stills are beautiful, the dueling graphics are substandard. It is difficult to tell exactly where rival planeswalkers are or which creatures you are controlling while in combat. The score and sound effects are repetitive and minimal. Gameplay follows the ancient way of the three T's: torturous, taxing, and tedious. There is a patch available that corrects the performance of a few spells and improves the network capabilities of the game, but it doesn't change enough to significantly improve the gameplay. Even in its unfinished state, MicroProse's long-awaited Magic: The Gathering looks much more promising than Acclaim's finished product. But until that version is released, Magic fans will just have to break open a new deck and wait.
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510,Mega Man Legends ,3.6, Mega Man Legends is an unembellished port of a forgettable 3-year-old PlayStation game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/9/6/2212796-529738_44502_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mega-man-legends-review/1900-2799873/,neg,"
 Mega Man Legends is an unembellished port of a forgettable 3-year-old PlayStation game. If you're a big Mega Man fan, chances are you own a PlayStation and, therefore, have no compelling reason to buy Mega Man Legends for the PC. Those who aren't familiar with Capcom's Mega Man series can also skip this game, because it's very old and not especially fun for the 35 long hours it takes to finish. In closing, while there are still many issues that divide us, this is not one of them. Thank you and good night.  Legends is the first 3D installment of a classic series of side-scrollers.  To match the amount of effort Capcom put into the port, that's really where the review should end. Unfortunately, although there isn't too much more to say about Mega Man Legends, the review must continue. All the previous Mega Man games have been side-scrolling shooters. Legends, however, attempts to expand the series by being a 3D action/role-playing hybrid in the spirit of Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo 64. It tells the story of Mega Man, his sister Roll, his grandfather, and their pet monkey. They crash-land their airship on an island called Kattelox. While trying to repair the ship, they become embroiled in an effort to save the island from attackers. Ultimately, they end up learning a lot about the origins of Mega Man and a few valuable lessons about the power of friendship and getting bigger guns attached to your robot arm.   In the strict tradition of these types of games, you walk around sections of the environment and talk to everyone until somebody finally tells you what to do next. After you do it, a new area might open up, though you may have to talk to a few more people and complete a few more tasks first. In between, you can purchase new items for Mega Man at various shops. As in most console role-playing games, there is a dog that says ""woof"" when you try to talk to it, and many people have lost things.   The ""action"" part of ""action/role-playing hybrid"" refers to the combat system. Enemies attack in simple patterns, and you have to shoot them. Many of these battles take place in underground tunnel areas in which the control scheme makes aiming difficult. Instead of adjusting the controls to take advantage of the PC mouse, the game utilizes a cumbersome system whereby you use a gamepad's shoulder buttons to turn. In fact--even though you shouldn't bother anyway--if you don't have a gamepad, you really shouldn't bother with Mega Man Legends. Though there's a button that supposedly locks your aim on to enemies, it doesn't work very well, as the lock is lost as soon as an enemy scoots off the screen.   The environments are colorful, and, though geometrically simple, they display a surprisingly deep view distance. Unsurprisingly, though, the graphics that weren't noteworthy in 1998 haven't gotten better with age. Three years and the migration from your forgiving television five feet away to a high-resolution monitor eight inches from your face have not been kind to Mega Man Legends' visuals, and the developers made no attempt to improve them.  There's no real point to this lackluster PlayStation port.  The frequent cutscenes are integrated seamlessly into the game, since they're rendered using the engine. Unfortunately, either something went wrong with these scenes during the conversion to the PC, or they never worked right in the first place, because the dialogue is completely decoupled from the graphics. You'll see one character begin talking while the voice of another character is still playing on the soundtrack. At first it's confusing, but eventually it becomes sort of ineptly charming. So you can consider that something positive about the game.   Mega Man Legends is a product for people who want a little action with their adventure or a little adventure with their action, but not too much of both--or either one, for that matter. It also represents the worst type of publisher shovelware. No attempt has been made to improve it any way for the PC, and it shows. Many much, much better games exist in the same genre. In fact, Capcom has subsequently released both a prequel and a sequel for the PlayStation. And you can play all of them right now on your PC using Bleem.    	  
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511,Monkey Hero ,3.6," However it happened, Blam!'s pure intentions went chaotically awry, resulting in one of the worst PlayStation games in recent memory.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/6/7/2/2217672-monkey_hero_pal.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/monkey-hero-review/1900-2548444/,neg,"
Sometimes even the best intentions go to waste, and Monkey Hero is an unfortunate testament to this. Intended as a Japanese-style action/RPG in the old-school vein of Zelda, Monkey Hero is just about as ill conceived and poorly done as one can imagine, and it's only made more lamentable by its purported homage to the classics. Loosely based on Chinese lore, Monkey Hero follows the mythic exploits of one ""Monkey"" and his quest to return balance to the dream world, waking world and nightmare world and defeat the uniform-clad Nightmare King. To do so, Monkey must travel across the world to retrieve the eight chapters of a magic story book. Monkey Hero's gameplay is, unfortunately, below the generic level of the game's story. Inspired by the Zelda series and games of its ilk, Monkey Hero takes a broad stab at the action/adventure genre and provides Monkey with all the requisite tools, heart-container-equivalents and the like to complete his quest. Complete with a bird's-eye view of the ""action,"" Monkey hero is Blam!'s attempt to implement every classically tested variable of the action/adventure formula. However, that formula has yet to produce so painful a game. Monkey Hero's gameplay is often bad, occasionally mediocre, and thoroughly boring throughout. To start, one could make a case that the game's world is too big. This is a problem only because the game makes very little attempt to provide you with direction; often you are left to wander around, either looking for the next item or the next obstacle to remove. There has to be a better way than this to move away from the traditional linearity of the action/adventure genre. There's nothing like getting a new item and looking for one place to use it, only to find five, most of which are dead ends. Monkey Hero is a fairly long game, and it's full of these design inadequacies. Should you manage to progress, you'll find the game's dungeons to be lacking. Between the bland layout and the sparse, uninventive use of puzzles, Monkey Hero's dungeons are more exercises in tedium than actual gameplay. Some of the bosses are worthwhile, but they are short-lived, and seem like token reasons to use the game's myriad items instead of actual challenges. Additionally, control and collision issues seem to plague the game, adding additional frustration to the poor design. Alas, Monkey Hero's problems don't end there. Aesthetically, the game is a mess: It looks like a shareware throwback to the first generation of PlayStation games. The game's tile-heavy graphics are reminiscent of Interplay's abysmal Loaded, unfortunately borrowing that game's lighting extremes, as well. Areas are often inexplicably dark, but often have near-invisible enemies lurking in them, generally resulting in cheap hits. The game's terrain is flat and uninteresting, and all the art is decidedly blocky. Monkey Hero anachronistically relies on sprites for enemies, and they're not pretty, either. In addition to being small and of basic geometry, their animation is unforgivably poor, rarely more than a few frames. Despite the game's extremely basic 3D graphics, the frame rate is decidedly poor on the whole, slowing down at the most inopportune and inexplicable times. Coupled with the poor animation is an extremely poor use of sound. When you use the hammer item, there's no earth-shaking thud to accompany the animation. Additionally, most of the game's music is repetitive and used in far too many instances, not to mention that it doesn't really carry the game's professed Asian overtones. However it happened, Blam!'s pure intentions went chaotically awry, resulting in one of the worst PlayStation games in recent memory. Blam! knows the classics - here's hoping they can mimic them a lot better next time.
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512,Dishonored ,9, Dishonored's engrossing world and intoxicating interplay of supernatural powers make it a game you'll want to play more than once.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2309176-dishonored_box_art_bethesda.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dishonored-review/1900-6397794/,pos,"
  Dishonored is a game about many things. It's about revenge; armed with deadly weapons and supernatural powers, you seek vengeance upon all of those who orchestrated your downfall. It's about a city; the plague-ridden industrial port of Dunwall is lovely to behold, exciting to explore, and seething with secrets. It's about people; an array of vibrant characters await you, and as you get to know them, you are drawn further into their intrigues, hopes, and heartbreaks. But above all, it's about choice. The incredible variety of ways you can engage or evade your enemies makes Dishonored impressively flexible and utterly captivating.       You play as Corvo Attano, former bodyguard to the empress and current death row inmate. The prologue chronicling Corvo's crime not only inflames your desire for revenge, but also sparks your affection for a vulnerable character. These dual fires foreshadow the choice you have to make each time you encounter an enemy: do you walk the bloody path of brutal vengeance, or take the nonlethal high road and rise above the violence that suffuses the city? Your actions have small, yet tangible consequences throughout your quest, and it's up to you to decide what kind of retribution you want.     A cadre of conspirators helps you escape imprisonment, and you find out that they are plotting to bring down the very men who wronged you. These characters embody familiar archetypes--the dutiful admiral, the egotistical nobleman, the cheeky servant--but Dishonored is not content with one-dimensional portrayals. An excellent voice cast (which includes a number of notable actors) and stylish character design help bring these people to life. As you listen to them talk (you remain mute throughout), read their journals, eavesdrop on conversations, and learn whispered secrets from an arcane, psychic item you acquire, you come to know the characters and the world they live in. This kind of knowledge is engaging, so even when the main plot follows some well-trodden paths, you're always interested and eager to press on.     Exploring Dunwall is another one of Dishonored's great pleasures. The city prospered from the whaling trade in the recent past, but has fallen on hard times since the influx of a deadly plague. Brick walls and wooden beams loom over alleys crawling with rats, while granite facades and metal barricades block off the cobblestoned plazas of the wealthier neighborhoods. Dunwall evokes a British city in the grip of the industrial revolution, but painterly coloring and slightly exaggerated proportions give the place a unique feel. Though some texture details can be slow to load in the console versions, the lovely artistic design is undiminished, making Dunwall an immensely appealing place to inhabit.   Sure you want to be in league with ol' mutton chops here?   Of course, there are tangible benefits to exploration as well. Sewers, alleys, apartments, and estates all hide items that restore your health, reinforce your arsenal, teach you secrets, or allow you to gain new supernatural powers. The large areas you must traverse to get to your targets are riddled with out-of-the-way places to explore, and finding them reveals not only hidden goodies, but alternate routes as well.    Figuring out how to move through the environments is an enjoyable pursuit, and one of the first powers you get allows you to teleport a short distance. The quick pop and blurry whoosh of this power provides a nice audiovisual accompaniment to the thrill of defying natural law, and if you choose to supernaturally augment your jumping ability, your range of locomotion is drastically increased. Though you'll likely have some awkward moments as you try to go places that the game won't let you, Dishonored's level design is consistent enough to make such moments easy to avoid once you get the hang of things.       In addition to these superhuman movement abilities, you can choose the power of possession. Slipping into the skin of a rat or the scales of a fish allows you to navigate small tunnels and reach new areas, and when leveled up, you can even possess other humans for a short while. Acquiring and improving your supernatural powers requires runes, though, and there aren't enough for you to max out every power. There are no bad choices, thankfully, though some clearly favor lethal or nonlethal approaches. Pacifists will appreciate the ability to stop time, for example, while assassins might favor the power that instantly turns corpses to ash.       Powers are equipped in your left hand and are accessed with a radial menu. This menu also contains your pistol and your crossbow, each of which has a few different ammo types. Sleep darts are the only nonlethal munition in the bunch, and they are invaluable to players who try to play the entire game without killing anyone (yes, it's possible). The rest of your options are decidedly deadly, including grenades and razor-flinging proximity mines.     With such nasty weaponry and formidable powers at your disposal, you have a startling array of ways to deal with hostiles. Simply sneaking by them is often effective, as is creeping up from behind, applying a sleeper hold, and dragging the bodies to a dark corner. Killing can be quiet too. A deadly drop from above makes no noise, and a properly timed windblast can blow an enemy off a high ledge, never to be seen again. If you prefer to see the whites of their eyes, your sword is always in your right hand, ever ready to duel. You are a formidable swordsman, able to block and counterattack against most blows, but clanging swords bring more guards or thugs, and they won't wait until their allies are out of the way to take a shot at you.    Enemies are prone to fatal dips in intelligence from time to time, but they are generally tenacious and alert enough to put up a decent fight. Once you start experimenting with powers, weapons, and environmental elements, Dishonored's amazing flexibility shows its stuff. Summon a swarm of rats to devour an enemy, and then possess one of the rats to sneak up behind those foes who come running. Blow enemy projectiles back in their faces, killing them instantly. Freeze time, enter a room with hostiles, drop a live grenade, exit and close the door, and then watch the explosion through the keyhole.    Turning your enemies' tools against them can be mighty effective.   Sure, you didn't really have to watch, but taking a playful approach can result in even more supernatural fun. Blow bottles off a shelf from a hidden perch to terrify the maids. Snatch a painting while a guard is looking at it instead of waiting for him to walk away. Throw a corpse off a balcony onto a guard, but freeze time before it hits, so you can watch his reaction when you appear in front of him as he gets clobbered from above. Dishonored has multiple save slots available, and taking advantage of the ability to tear things up and then reload a fresh start encourages you to engage in some absolutely delightful mayhem.    Yet even though it allows you to wipe the recent slate clean, Dishonored still begs to be replayed from the beginning. Unlocking different powers, finishing missions in different ways, striving to be more or less murderous, and seeing a different endgame all offer appealing incentives to give it another go. It's a rare game that feels so compulsively replayable, but Dishonored is such a game. The compelling abilities, the bold artistic design, the colorful characters, and above all, the freedom of choice--these are the things that mark Dishonored as one of the truly remarkable games of this year.  


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513,Dishonored ,9, Dishonored's engrossing world and intoxicating interplay of supernatural powers make it a game you'll want to play more than once.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2309176-dishonored_box_art_bethesda.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dishonored-review/1900-6397798/,pos,"
  Dishonored is a game about many things. It's about revenge; armed with deadly weapons and supernatural powers, you seek vengeance upon all of those who orchestrated your downfall. It's about a city; the plague-ridden industrial port of Dunwall is lovely to behold, exciting to explore, and seething with secrets. It's about people; an array of vibrant characters await you, and as you get to know them, you are drawn further into their intrigues, hopes, and heartbreaks. But above all, it's about choice. The incredible variety of ways you can engage or evade your enemies makes Dishonored impressively flexible and utterly captivating.       You play as Corvo Attano, former bodyguard to the empress and current death row inmate. The prologue chronicling Corvo's crime not only inflames your desire for revenge, but also sparks your affection for a vulnerable character. These dual fires foreshadow the choice you have to make each time you encounter an enemy: do you walk the bloody path of brutal vengeance, or take the nonlethal high road and rise above the violence that suffuses the city? Your actions have small, yet tangible consequences throughout your quest, and it's up to you to decide what kind of retribution you want.     A cadre of conspirators helps you escape imprisonment, and you find out that they are plotting to bring down the very men who wronged you. These characters embody familiar archetypes--the dutiful admiral, the egotistical nobleman, the cheeky servant--but Dishonored is not content with one-dimensional portrayals. An excellent voice cast (which includes a number of notable actors) and stylish character design help bring these people to life. As you listen to them talk (you remain mute throughout), read their journals, eavesdrop on conversations, and learn whispered secrets from an arcane, psychic item you acquire, you come to know the characters and the world they live in. This kind of knowledge is engaging, so even when the main plot follows some well-trodden paths, you're always interested and eager to press on.     Exploring Dunwall is another one of Dishonored's great pleasures. The city prospered from the whaling trade in the recent past, but has fallen on hard times since the influx of a deadly plague. Brick walls and wooden beams loom over alleys crawling with rats, while granite facades and metal barricades block off the cobblestoned plazas of the wealthier neighborhoods. Dunwall evokes a British city in the grip of the industrial revolution, but painterly coloring and slightly exaggerated proportions give the place a unique feel. Though some texture details can be slow to load in the console versions, the lovely artistic design is undiminished, making Dunwall an immensely appealing place to inhabit.   This could be a decadent ball or a disastrous bloodbath, the choice is yours.   Of course, there are tangible benefits to exploration as well. Sewers, alleys, apartments, and estates all hide items that restore your health, reinforce your arsenal, teach you secrets, or allow you to gain new supernatural powers. The large areas you must traverse to get to your targets are riddled with out-of-the-way places to explore, and finding them reveals not only hidden goodies, but alternate routes as well.    Figuring out how to move through the environments is an enjoyable pursuit, and one of the first powers you get allows you to teleport a short distance. The quick pop and blurry whoosh of this power provides a nice audiovisual accompaniment to the thrill of defying natural law, and if you choose to supernaturally augment your jumping ability, your range of locomotion is drastically increased. Though you'll likely have some awkward moments as you try to go places that the game won't let you, Dishonored's level design is consistent enough to make such moments easy to avoid once you get the hang of things.       In addition to these superhuman movement abilities, you can choose the power of possession. Slipping into the skin of a rat or the scales of a fish allows you to navigate small tunnels and reach new areas, and when leveled up, you can even possess other humans for a short while. Acquiring and improving your supernatural powers requires runes, though, and there aren't enough for you to max out every power. There are no bad choices, thankfully, though some clearly favor lethal or nonlethal approaches. Pacifists will appreciate the ability to stop time, for example, while assassins might favor the power that instantly turns corpses to ash.       Powers are equipped in your left hand and are accessed with a radial menu. This menu also contains your pistol and your crossbow, each of which has a few different ammo types. Sleep darts are the only nonlethal munition in the bunch, and they are invaluable to players who try to play the entire game without killing anyone (yes, it's possible). The rest of your options are decidedly deadly, including grenades and razor-flinging proximity mines.     With such nasty weaponry and formidable powers at your disposal, you have a startling array of ways to deal with hostiles. Simply sneaking by them is often effective, as is creeping up from behind, applying a sleeper hold, and dragging the bodies to a dark corner. Killing can be quiet too. A deadly drop from above makes no noise, and a properly timed windblast can blow an enemy off a high ledge, never to be seen again. If you prefer to see the whites of their eyes, your sword is always in your right hand, ever ready to duel. You are a formidable swordsman, able to block and counterattack against most blows, but clanging swords bring more guards or thugs, and they won't wait until their allies are out of the way to take a shot at you.    Enemies are prone to fatal dips in intelligence from time to time, but they are generally tenacious and alert enough to put up a decent fight. Once you start experimenting with powers, weapons, and environmental elements, Dishonored's amazing flexibility shows its stuff. Summon a swarm of rats to devour an enemy, and then possess one of the rats to sneak up behind those foes who come running. Blow enemy projectiles back in their faces, killing them instantly. Freeze time, enter a room with hostiles, drop a live grenade, exit and close the door, and then watch the explosion through the keyhole.    Messy, but effective.   Sure, you didn't really have to watch, but taking a playful approach can result in even more supernatural fun. Blow bottles off a shelf from a hidden perch to terrify the maids. Snatch a painting while a guard is looking at it instead of waiting for him to walk away. Throw a corpse off a balcony onto a guard, but freeze time before it hits, so you can watch his reaction when you appear in front of him as he gets clobbered from above. Dishonored has multiple save slots available, and taking advantage of the ability to tear things up and then reload a fresh start encourages you to engage in some absolutely delightful mayhem.    Yet even though it allows you to wipe the recent slate clean, Dishonored still begs to be replayed from the beginning. Unlocking different powers, finishing missions in different ways, striving to be more or less murderous, and seeing a different endgame all offer appealing incentives to give it another go. It's a rare game that feels so compulsively replayable, but Dishonored is such a game. The compelling abilities, the bold artistic design, the colorful characters, and above all, the freedom of choice--these are the things that mark Dishonored as one of the truly remarkable games of this year.    


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514,Dishonored ,9, Dishonored's engrossing world and intoxicating interplay of supernatural powers make it a game you'll want to play more than once.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2309176-dishonored_box_art_bethesda.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dishonored-review/1900-6397799/,pos,"
  Dishonored is a game about many things. It's about revenge; armed with deadly weapons and supernatural powers, you seek vengeance upon all of those who orchestrated your downfall. It's about a city; the plague-ridden industrial port of Dunwall is lovely to behold, exciting to explore, and seething with secrets. It's about people; an array of vibrant characters await you, and as you get to know them, you are drawn further into their intrigues, hopes, and heartbreaks. But above all, it's about choice. The incredible variety of ways you can engage or evade your enemies makes Dishonored impressively flexible and utterly captivating.       You play as Corvo Attano, former bodyguard to the empress and current death row inmate. The prologue chronicling Corvo's crime not only inflames your desire for revenge, but also sparks your affection for a vulnerable character. These dual fires foreshadow the choice you have to make each time you encounter an enemy: do you walk the bloody path of brutal vengeance, or take the nonlethal high road and rise above the violence that suffuses the city? Your actions have small, yet tangible consequences throughout your quest, and it's up to you to decide what kind of retribution you want.     A cadre of conspirators helps you escape imprisonment, and you find out that they are plotting to bring down the very men who wronged you. These characters embody familiar archetypes--the dutiful admiral, the egotistical nobleman, the cheeky servant--but Dishonored is not content with one-dimensional portrayals. An excellent voice cast (which includes a number of notable actors) and stylish character design help bring these people to life. As you listen to them talk (you remain mute throughout), read their journals, eavesdrop on conversations, and learn whispered secrets from an arcane, psychic item you acquire, you come to know the characters and the world they live in. This kind of knowledge is engaging, so even when the main plot follows some well-trodden paths, you're always interested and eager to press on.     Exploring Dunwall is another one of Dishonored's great pleasures. The city prospered from the whaling trade in the recent past, but has fallen on hard times since the influx of a deadly plague. Brick walls and wooden beams loom over alleys crawling with rats, while granite facades and metal barricades block off the cobblestoned plazas of the wealthier neighborhoods. Dunwall evokes a British city in the grip of the industrial revolution, but painterly coloring and slightly exaggerated proportions give the place a unique feel. The lovely artistic design shines on the PC, bursting with detail and making Dunwall an immensely appealing place to inhabit.   A peaceful moment from before the fall.   Of course, there are tangible benefits to exploration as well. Sewers, alleys, apartments, and estates all hide items that restore your health, reinforce your arsenal, teach you secrets, or allow you to gain new supernatural powers. The large areas you must traverse to get to your targets are riddled with out-of-the-way places to explore, and finding them reveals not only hidden goodies, but alternate routes as well.    Figuring out how to move through the environments is an enjoyable pursuit, and one of the first powers you get allows you to teleport a short distance. The quick pop and blurry whoosh of this power provides a nice audiovisual accompaniment to the thrill of defying natural law, and if you choose to supernaturally augment your jumping ability, your range of locomotion is drastically increased. Though you'll likely have some awkward moments as you try to go places that the game won't let you, Dishonored's level design is consistent enough to make such moments easy to avoid once you get the hang of things.       In addition to these superhuman movement abilities, you can choose the power of possession. Slipping into the skin of a rat or the scales of a fish allows you to navigate small tunnels and reach new areas, and when leveled up, you can even possess other humans for a short while. Acquiring and improving your supernatural powers requires runes, though, and there aren't enough for you to max out every power. There are no bad choices, thankfully, though some clearly favor lethal or nonlethal approaches. Pacifists will appreciate the ability to stop time, for example, while assassins might favor the power that instantly turns corpses to ash.       Powers are equipped in your left hand and are accessed with a radial menu. This menu also contains your pistol and your crossbow, each of which has a few different ammo types. Sleep darts are the only nonlethal munition in the bunch, and they are invaluable to players who try to play the entire game without killing anyone (yes, it's possible). The rest of your options are decidedly deadly, including grenades and razor-flinging proximity mines.     With such nasty weaponry and formidable powers at your disposal, you have a startling array of ways to deal with hostiles. Simply sneaking by them is often effective, as is creeping up from behind, applying a sleeper hold, and dragging the bodies to a dark corner. Killing can be quiet too. A deadly drop from above makes no noise, and a properly timed windblast can blow an enemy off a high ledge, never to be seen again. If you prefer to see the whites of their eyes, your sword is always in your right hand, ever ready to duel. You are a formidable swordsman, able to block and counterattack against most blows, but clanging swords bring more guards or thugs, and they won't wait until their allies are out of the way to take a shot at you.    Enemies are prone to fatal dips in intelligence from time to time, but they are generally tenacious and alert enough to put up a decent fight. Once you start experimenting with powers, weapons, and environmental elements, Dishonored's amazing flexibility shows its stuff. Summon a swarm of rats to devour an enemy, and then possess one of the rats to sneak up behind those foes who come running. Blow enemy projectiles back in their faces, killing them instantly. Freeze time, enter a room with hostiles, drop a live grenade, exit and close the door, and then watch the explosion through the keyhole.    And that's the end of that.   Sure, you didn't really have to watch, but taking a playful approach can result in even more supernatural fun. Blow bottles off a shelf from a hidden perch to terrify the maids. Snatch a painting while a guard is looking at it instead of waiting for him to walk away. Throw a corpse off a balcony onto a guard, but freeze time before it hits, so you can watch his reaction when you appear in front of him as he gets clobbered from above. Dishonored has multiple save slots available, and taking advantage of the ability to tear things up and then reload a fresh start encourages you to engage in some absolutely delightful mayhem.    Yet even though it allows you to wipe the recent slate clean, Dishonored still begs to be replayed from the beginning. Unlocking different powers, finishing missions in different ways, striving to be more or less murderous, and seeing a different endgame all offer appealing incentives to give it another go. It's a rare game that feels so compulsively replayable, but Dishonored is such a game. The compelling abilities, the bold artistic design, the colorful characters, and above all, the freedom of choice--these are the things that mark Dishonored as one of the truly remarkable games of this year.    


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515,Owlboy : A Heartfelt Tale,9, Owlboy's touching story is brought to life through beautiful art and an unforgettable soundtrack.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3171178-owlboy.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/owlboy-review-a-heartfelt-tale/1900-6416567/,pos,"
By their very nature, retro-inspired games are fighting an uphill battle against the nostalgia they aim to invoke. How can they form their own identity when they're partly designed to make you remember other games? After finishing Owlboy, it seems D-Pad Studio might have the answer.For almost a decade, Owlboy has lurked behind the curtain of mainstream releases with a small-but-devout following. Looking at screenshots and videos over the years, it was always apparent that Owlboy would look and sound great, but there's so much more to love about the final product: the humor, the varied cast, the disasters that befall its otherwise bright and uplifting world, and the incredible action set-pieces that punctuate the calm found elsewhere. It's not until you break through the surface that you're blinded by Owlboy's artistic brilliance and swayed by its heartfelt story.It begins with Otus--our mute protagonist and the runt of his village--during a stressful dream where his professor and dark figments criticize his inadequacies and chastise his inability to speak. It's a powerful setup that endears our hero to you. Trouble brews shortly after he wakes up and concerns of pirate sightings explode into panic as a nearby metropolis comes under attack. Otus teams up with a military mechanic, Geddy, to put a stop to the pirates before their home is destroyed.Owlboy is old-school, not just in its presentation, but also in its storytelling--there’s no voice acting, and events are set in stone with nary a major decision-making opportunity in sight. The plot manages to avoid predictability, however, not only through a handful of twists, but by allowing characters to evolve throughout the course of the game. Sad moments aren't swept under the rug by unreasonable optimism--they stay with your squad and fundamentally alter their outlook on the mission and their own identity in surprising ways. There's great attention to detail in the cast's animations, which are often tailored for a specific scene, as opposed to falling back on routine reactions. Coupled with a script that's rife with emotion and nuance, Owlboy's characters feel real in your heart despite their cartoonish look.Owlboy tackles multiple artistic themes and subjects with consistently impressive execution.It may be a throwback of sorts, but Owlboy's visuals aren't tailored to specifically ape 8- or 16-bit graphics; it doesn't have a limited color palette, and its pixel resolution changes based on the scene at hand. When you enter wide-open spaces, the camera zooms out, chunky details shrink, and meticulously designed structures and environments take shape. In tight spaces, you're brought closer into the scene for more intimate inspection. From subterranean creatures to ancient structures, Owlboy tackles several artistic themes and subjects with consistently impressive execution. And if you have a soft spot for 2D games with multiple layers of parallax scrolling--where the background moves slower than the foreground to simulate depth--you're in for a treat.When you first take control of Otus, darting around floating islands and chatting with other creatures makes for a pleasant experience, and while the open air and bright colors deserve some credit, it's the orchestrated soundtrack that solidifies Owlboy's shifting atmosphere and tone. Violas and flutes instill merriment at first, but this innocence is short lived; when the pirates invade, oboes drone and cellos growl to the slow beat of a heavy drum. When the dust settles and the second half of your journey kicks off, sprightly piano compositions provide a much-needed respite from the stress of a society under attack.Your trek to the pirate's den takes you through expansive spaces and into the heart of sprawling cave systems where buccaneers and wildlife alike lie in wait. They typically bombard you with rocks and other projectiles, rarely engaging in close-quarters combat. On his own, Otus can only dash into enemies, stunning them at best. However, with the help of a handy teleportation device, he can summon one of three partners into his claws mid-flight to utilize their long-range blaster, shotgun, or webbing that can ensnare enemies and be used as a grappling hook to escape dangerous situations.Otus is unfortunately a tad slow by default, which causes you to spam his dash move repeatedly to keep things moving along outside of combat. There’s a modest upgrade system driven by collecting and turning in coins found in chests, but you're upgrading health reserves--in the form of soup canisters--and your team's weapons, not physical traits. Still, a keen eye and fast reflexes are more critical to success than any upgrades purchased during your adventure. Knowing that success comes from a show of skill rather than your ability to collect upgrades is gratifying, but you walk away from Owlboy with the sinking feeling that the equipment and upgrades in the game have unrealized potential.Owlboy is consistently charming and surprising, and when its final act doubles down on every front, it's bittersweet to see it end.Standard combat isn't anything special, but it never wears out its welcome thanks to deft pacing. Owlboy steadily mixes combat and exploration with measured stealth challenges, fast-paced escape sequences, and entertaining exchanges between characters. The chase/escape sequences in particular are some of the most impressive moments in the game, throwing you into a harrowing race against time in the face of tightly choreographed hazards. These scenes are challenging and filled with visual effects that add to the sense of danger, and they're overwhelming at first, but should you die, not to worry: Owlboy never truly punishes you for failure, allowing you to restart from the last room you entered.Owlboy is consistently charming and surprising, and when its final act doubles down on every front, it's bittersweet to see it end. As you relish the outcome of the final battle and watch the closing cutscene, you can't help but reflect on the beginning of your adventure and how far the world and its inhabitants have come. You'll never be able to play Owlboy for the first time again, but the memories of its magic moments stick with you. This is more than a treat for fans of old-school games; Owlboy is a heartfelt experience that will touch anyone with an affinity for great art and storytelling.Editor's note: After further testing, GameSpot has updated the score to reflect the Nintendo Switch version of Owlboy. - Feb. 13, 2018, 9:00 AM PT


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516,Persona 4 Golden ,9, A wealth of new content and gameplay additions make a modern role-playing classic better than ever in Persona 4 Golden.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2427400-2227298-box_persona4g.png,VITA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/persona-4-golden-review/1900-6400482/,pos,"
  A top-tier role-playing game is generally a finely crafted concoction of several ingredients: an interesting setting, an engaging story, enjoyable characters and interactions, and gameplay that makes your interaction with all of the aforementioned elements feel meaningful and worthwhile. When all of these individual factors are developed to high standards, the result is an RPG of exceptional quality--and that is exactly what Persona 4 Golden is.   New story scenes make the 90-some hours you're likely to spend in Persona 4's world all the more memorable.   This re-release of 2008's excellent PlayStation 2 game takes place in modern-day Japan. The protagonist is a high school student from a big city whose parents have been sent away on business. They send him to live for a year with his uncle--a police investigator--and his young cousin in a small countryside town. Almost immediately upon the hero's arrival, strange things begin to happen in this otherwise dull little hamlet: a string of people turn up dead, and rumor spreads of a supernatural television broadcast that shows bizarre programming. The hero and a crew of his newfound classmates soon discover a horrible secret: there's a separate world within the televisions that twists human desires and hidden feelings in potentially lethal ways, and it's somehow tied to the serial killings. It's up to the group of friends to harness the supernatural power of personas, put a stop to the sinister killing spree, and decipher the secrets behind the TV world.    The contemporary, real-world-inspired setting of Persona 4 is already an excellent conceit in the heavily fantasy- and sci-fi-driven world of RPGs. But it's far from the only element that sets the game apart from the crop. Unlike most RPGs, Persona 4 operates on something of a time limit. From the day you arrive in the country village of Inaba until the day the school year ends, you advance through the game on a calendar. Dates and deadlines are very important; not only do you have important events in school and in your personal life to deal with, but you also discover that the serial killings follow a specific time pattern. You need to explore and rescue potential victims from the TV world before they are killed--a task that usually takes several days to complete.   The all-new fully voiced quiz-show challenge is but a portion of Persona 4 Golden's bountiful extras.   It would be easy if you could just spend all your days fighting, but Persona 4 also puts heavy emphasis on interacting with other characters in the game. Every day presents many opportunities for various noncombative activities, be it school clubs, hobbies at home, working part-time jobs for extra spending money, or just hanging out with pals needing friendly support. Spending time on these activities benefits you in various ways: some boost your abilities, some earn you items and money, and still others increase your connections with other characters.     Some choices can even offer multiple benefits. By far the most lucrative are the connections with non-player characters, called ""social links."" By forming friendships and support networks with various characters, you create powerful personas to use during combat. (Some social links, such as those with your party members, also offer additional combat benefits and skills.) Thus, choosing how to spend your limited time each day becomes an additional challenge with its own risks and rewards. If you feel indecisive, an in-game feature lets you connect to an online database to see how other players chose to spend that day.    Though social links pose an engaging puzzle, they woudn't be nearly as interesting if the NPCs involved weren't engaging, memorable characters. This is one of the ways Persona 4 shines, since interacting with the game's cast is enjoyable and rewarding in itself. The characters you meet over the course of the game are relatable and believable, as are the struggles they go through. The bonds you wind up forming with characters make the various interludes scattered throughout the game (such as class trips and group vacations) even more enjoyable as breaks from a sometimes very heavy story. The quality of the game's writing and localization is an additional triumph, skillfully delivering both laugh-out-loud moments and heart-wrenching plot twists.   You can also equip new outfits for combat, ranging from the stylish to the ridiculous.   The story and socialization elements are only one portion of the game, however. You spend a lot of time exploring the TV world, as well. As the game progresses, the TV world expands to include numerous dungeons and monsters created from the dark, repressed thoughts of potential victims that have been cast inside. As the leader of your school friends' makeshift ""investigation team,"" you and your pals explore these randomly generated dungeons, scouring them for treasures and occasionally solving puzzles while searching for the abducted victims. Combat is traditional turn-based RPG fighting with a twist: both you and your foes can earn extra turns by exploiting each other's elemental weakness, a mechanic that fuels some devious strategies and devastating attacks. (It's worth noting that Persona 4 Golden is slightly easier than the original game, so veterans looking for a challenge may want to pick a harder difficulty setting when starting a new game.)      The concept of ""personas""--supernatural representations of one's projected self--comes into play during combat. Personas come with a set of strengths, weaknesses, and combat skills, which can change and evolve as the personas level up. While your party members each have a set persona throughout the game, your lead character has the unique ability to transform into many different personas during combat. This allows for additional combat strategy, giving you a way to select personas ideal for exploiting enemy weaknesses while also working to protect your own party. The main character's personas also gain experience and level up independently of his base level, usually being equal to or lower than his own.   When the enemies are knocked down, it's time to go to town.   Since eventually personas learn all of the skills they possibly can and taper off in stat growth, you need to explore the system of fusing personas to form new, more-powerful personas in combat. This allows skills from the personas used in the fusion to be passed along, and some well-planned skill inheritance combinations can result in a potent new combat persona. Social links also boost created personas with additional experience bonuses, allowing you to create much higher-level personas typically beyond your reach. Skillfully creating a persona array to use in battle can often mean the difference between victory and defeat.    These various elements improve an already-fantastic RPG experience. But what makes Persona 4 Golden an even more impressive package is how much extra content has been packed into the game over its original release. For starters, creating new personas via fusion is much easier, because the game lets you pick skills to transfer (rather than randomly transferring skills). You can also give personas specific abilities through the use of rare items called ""skill cards""--a callback to some of the earlier Persona games.     Your party members are also capable of performing additional abilities during combat: depending on how high your social links are with your teammates, they can randomly cure minor status ailments and perform support attacks--even if they aren't in the currently active party. Certain combinations of party members can also perform special follow-up skills after all-out attacks to deal extra damage to already weakened foes. The Shuffle Time card minigame after certain battles has been completely redone, allowing for less random chance and more worthwhile bonuses. A network feature in dungeons rounds out the combat enhancements, allowing you to request help from other P4G players connected to PSN to deliver aid in the form of health and skill point recovery.   Nothing is not normal about this scene.   The improvements go well beyond combat. Two new social links--including a brand-new female character named Marie--are available to foster, and additional locations and opportunities for building other links abound. You can buy seeds and tend to a garden at home, using the crops yielded as helpful items in the dungeons. You also earn a scooter during the game, which you can use to travel to the beach and a larger city for activities, shopping, and questing. More options are available to you during the evenings, including hanging out with friends and a new job opportunity working at a hostess bar. Finally, many activities from the previous game, such as reading or working at home in the evenings to improve various stats, have been streamlined to be easier to use and more beneficial.    But these aren't even the biggest additions to the game. In the original release of P4, there was a point where a significant time skip occurred, moving the game's calendar several months ahead. In Persona 4 Golden, much of this time period is made available to you to play through, allowing you to further build social links and engage with the characters and setting well beyond what you could before. Some new story events are available during this time, and a completely new dungeon also opens up (provided you've completed some prerequisites). The new story additions also allow for some vastly different endings.     On top of everything are separately accessible in-game TV channels that offer a variety of programming. Once you unlock them, you can freely access archives of the various animation sequences seen in the game, design artwork, and promotional materials and music. There's even a lesson on the Jungian psychology theories that form the basis of the game's story, along with an interactive quiz-show series that tests your knowledge of everything related to Persona 4.   Stay in school, kids.   As great as Persona 4 Golden is, there are a few minor issues. The game still takes a while to get going: expect to experience about two hours of plot setup and character introductions before you're turned loose to enjoy the game at your own pace. The visual upgrade also feels a little lacking: P4G's PlayStation 2 roots show in its fairly basic-looking character models and environments and sometimes-blurry textures. The game looks like an HD remaster rather than a full remake, leaving you feeling like it doesn't take advantage of the platform's graphical capabilities as well as it should.    When it comes down to it, however, any complaints that can be lobbied at Persona 4 Golden feel insignificant when weighed against the quality of the rest of the game. Persona 4 remains one of the most engaging, thoughtful, and enjoyable RPGs of recent years, having already earned its status as a genre classic upon its original release. Persona 4 Golden's well-thought-out and well-implemented augmentations serve to make an already fantastic game even better, resulting in a superlative game experience that belongs in any Vita game library.    
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517,Persona 5 ,9, Persona 5's compulsive gameplay and infectious energy make it a standout RPG.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3074971-untitled-1.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/persona-5-review/1900-6416640/,pos,"
Persona 5 is a game overflowing with style. From bold black and red menus that leap off the screen to the pop-and-lock of scene transitions that carry the player from one colorful corner of Tokyo to the next, it's a game about youthful exuberance and the power that lies within it. But its beauty isn't just skin deep. Persona 5's gameplay systems evolve and coalesce over its 80+ hours to deliver a confidently executed role-playing experience that is not only satisfying, but worth the almost decade-long wait since Persona 4.Like its predecessors, it's part social simulator, part dungeon crawler. By day, you're a high school student--busy taking classes, visiting cafes, watching movies, and hanging out with friends. But by night you are the leader of the Phantom Thieves, a ragtag troupe of idealistic teenagers that infiltrate a parallel reality called the Metaverse. Here, the corrupted hearts of adults have manifested as Palaces, and the Phantom Thieves must find and steal Treasures within them to reform their marks, and by extension, society. Think Lupin the Third, but with a socially conscious supernatural twist.Click images to view in full screenTogether with your friends, you infiltrate the Metaverse. Here lie physical representations of people's personalities, called Personas--angels, demons, and monsters of all shapes and sizes that you battle using elemental attacks. Physical moves can be used to chip away at health points incrementally, but exploiting an elemental weakness elevates battles from turn-based slapsies to a flurry of crushing combos. Hit an enemy weak to fire with Agi and it will crumple, giving you an additional turn to exploit another enemy's vulnerability, either by switching Persona to adopt a different elemental alignment or by passing the baton onto a teammate who can pick up where you left off. Once they've all keeled over, you can launch an All-Out Attack and watch as black silhouettes of your team dance across a striking red background, slicing and dicing enemies until they burst into a shower of blood. This triumphant animation calls to mind The Bride's iconic blue room battle against the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill, and even though you'll see it hundreds of times it never stops being cool.Improvements to the battle system mean that if you've already identified an enemy's weakness, instead of trawling through menus to locate the specific ability, tapping R1 takes you straight to the move you need. When combined with the baton passing, streamline the turn-based fights into pacy experiences that maintain forward momentum with ease. There's nothing more satisfying than firing off Persona spells, tagging in teammates, and wiping out waves of Shadows without them even getting a look in. Persona 5's combat pulls together some of the best elements from previous games--and it's borderline addictive as a result.Persona 5's combat pulls together some of the best elements from previous games--and it's borderline addictive as a result.Negotiations from early Shin Megami Tensei and Persona titles also make a return, but the system is much improved. If you knock down a Shadow, you'll surround it with guns drawn and can commence an All-Out Attack or simply talk to them. The conversation becomes a weird Q&A about your character or society a whole, and it often throws up some hilarious dialogue. There's nothing quite like winning over a succubus by playing hard to get or gaining the favour of a giant demon sitting on a toilet by telling him you, too, are a pretty easy going kinda guy.Whether you're successful or not, negotiating will get you something. You can demand items, money, or a monster's allegiance, but whether your request is granted depends on your gift of the gab. I found negotiation to be a much more useful reward system than the random pickings offered by Shuffle Time in Persona 3 and 4. When filling my Persona compendium or trying to fuse a specific Persona I'd ask them to join my cause. While grinding I'd use an All-Out Attack to earn more XP. In a pinch I'd demand an item. The new system let me reap the benefits I needed at that point in my playthrough.Palaces are areas given form by the distorted desires of powerful, corrupted individuals, while the process of infiltrating is akin to pulling off a heist. You need to identify your target by conducting investigations in the real world, then enter the Palace to explore it and secure an infiltration route. Once you've located the corrupted heart of the individual--represented as an ethereal Treasure--you send a calling card to the target in the real world. This act of showmanship not only alerts the world to the target's misdeeds but also gives physical form to the Treasure in the Palace so it can be stolen.And those Palaces are the best dungeons the series has ever had. No longer are you climbing through levels of procedurally generated corridors to reach a boss at the top. Instead, each Palace contains a myriad of puzzles to crack, traps to avoid, and of course, Shadows to defeat. They are intricate, striking locations that unravel as you explore them, each varying in size, scope, and gameplay opportunities. One is a rat maze filled with locked doors and looping hallways, another is a giant safe that you need to crack, and one is a crumbling pyramid filled with walking mummies. They feel almost like different worlds from a Mario game, each uniquely themed and cycling through gameplay ideas like cards in a rolodex.As Phantom Thieves, you sneak through halls, darting between cover and jumping over obstacles. As you slink into the shadows and ambush an unsuspecting enemy, getting in that crucial first shot, you realize that these Palaces are designed for you to be sneaky. And it feels really satisfying to bounce between coverpoints and ambush an enemy … when it works. Although you're encouraged to take enemies out sneakily, doing so is made difficult by the game's uncooperative camera, which often restricts your view. Similarly, clambering over obstacles doesn't quite feel as good as it should. There are specific spots that you can climb up to access more areas and I often missed these because I wasn't standing in the pixel perfect point to get the prompt needed to jump.But honestly, this is nitpicking. I loved my time in each of the Palaces, wandering around using my Third Eye Ability to uncover secrets and steal treasures, feeling like Batman on Opposite Day. Its puzzles never became too taxing, even in later dungeons that required backtracking to find a specific item, enemy, or switch using the Third Eye. In these areas the game mercifully opens up shortcuts for you, so you don't feel like you're wasting too much time.Persona 5 has a hefty run time and while the story remains engaging until its final moments, the gameplay has some pacing issues towards the end.Balance in such a huge game is tricky. I played on Normal difficulty, and for the vast majority of the game enemies felt well-matched to my level. Persona 5 has a hefty run time and while the story remains engaging until its final moments, the gameplay has some pacing issues towards the end. Instakill attacks, a short supply of elemental power-refuelling SP items, and going long stretches of miniboss after miniboss without a save point mean the latter stages can sometimes feel more frustrating than enjoyable. I've been wiped out half an hour into a fight on multiple occasions, and I'm still a bit bitter.But Palaces are just one part of the Metaverse. Once you take a Treasure, Palaces collapse, so they're not really the place to grind for levels. For those that enjoy the grind-heavy areas of P3's Tartarus and P4's randomly generated dungeons there's Mementos--society's joint Palace, which takes the form of the depths of Tokyo's subway system. This area is long, with many procedurally generated levels spiralling down towards a mysterious, seemingly unreachable core. It would feel like a monotonous job were it not for the Phansite. One of your Confidants believes so much in the plight of the Phantom Thieves that he sets up a website where members of the public can leave messages of support (or memes).More importantly, Phansite users can suggest people they think deserve a change of heart. These are figures that aren't quite evil enough to have their own Palace, but who are still misbehaving enough to spawn a demi-boss within Mementos. These side stories of abusive boyfriends, scammers, and thieves are mere tasters--bite size chunks of justice that you can dole out at your leisure while grinding for experience. Infiltrating Palaces can sometimes take hours, so quickly dealing with a few Phansite Requests in one go is a satisfying microcosm of the larger gameplay loop in Persona 5. Plus it made me feel like Judge Dredd, dishing out justice as I saw fit to clean up the city.Click images to view in full screenPersona 5 creates a rewarding synergy between its social simulator and dungeon crawling by making everyday activities in the former empower you in the latter. With limited time in each day and a constant deadline to steal Treasures by, it's up to the player to prioritize after-school and weekend activities. Attributes such as Knowledge, Charm, Proficiency, and Guts can be improved by studying, working in part-time jobs, crafting tools, or watching DVDs. In turn, these enable you to build deeper bonds with other characters to strengthen yourself and your cause.Persona games live and die on characterisation as much as they do on the RPG mechanics that underpin the gameplay, and in that respect the latest entry delivers a cast that is loveable, quirky, and nuanced in equal measure. Although the main group neatly fits into classic anime archetypes initially, over time everyone reveals the baggage they carry and, as you solidify your bonds, they start to show their complexities, creating emotional moments where you work through their pain together.Sometimes their goals will align with yours and sometimes they won't, so the group can be a little rowdier than previous Persona teams--but that only adds to the experience. I loved that you really had to invest time and effort into each character to crack their personality and unlock how they truly felt. Morgana the amnesic talking cat (it is a Japanese game, after all) is shrouded in mystery, determined to learn about his forgotten past. The quirky Futaba, despite suffering from extreme social anxiety, is the strategic genius behind the group's Metaverse adventures. Ryuji's boisterousness is both the energy the team needs to push forward and the powder keg that could be its undoing. And Ann deals with issues of self-doubt in the competitive field of modelling. These characters grow and change as you spend more time with them: They go from being mechanical tools that you engage with to strengthen their Personas, to real people you can identify and sympathize with. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I was leaving behind friends I had known for years.Building these relationships with teammates is key to success in the Metaverse. Increasing Confidant Ranks (a rebrand of the Social Link system from Persona 4) by spending time with each of your friends not only affords you deeper insight into their personalities, but also provides bonuses and special moves in battle. A teammate who initially was closed off and distant in the real world can end up literally taking a bullet for you in the Metaverse. Similarly, by improving your personal traits through daily activities you can meet a variety of side-characters that teach you new abilities or offer bonuses that feed back into the battle system.More than any entry in the series before it, Persona 5 manages to make the mundane not only fit into its gameplay loop but be essential to it. Atlus has perfected the back and forth investment and reward dynamic between the game's two parts to point where even doing laundry is gratifying--and how many games can you say that about?While there are moments of levity in Persona 5, the actions of the Phantom Thieves are important and often have much bigger implications than even they intended. Persona 5 deals with complex subject matter and really doesn't shy away from dark, even uncomfortable, story beats. A constant theme of the game is oppression and injustice, specifically how people can be suffering them in silence. It uses personal hardships and the pressures of modern day society to explore how the actions of the older generation affect the future of the youth. But there's also an optimism to it all. Its cast approaches complex issues and takes on overwhelming odds with a clarity and gusto that can only be born from teenage naivety, and there's a refreshing, cathartic quality to being part of that. But of course, just like in the real world, things aren't always black and white, and the game does an excellent job of showing how even well-meaning actions can have adverse consequences.Narratively and thematically, Persona 5 has the potential to overwhelm--particularly once it starts digging into Jungian theories of psychology. Thankfully, however, the writing does a fantastic job of eliminating unnecessary exposition, which ensures the important storylines are clear and everyone--especially series newcomers--is on the same page. It means the first ten hours are a little slow, and may make a lot of surface level observations, but not to the detriment of the story or its characters. Even with the heavy subject matter, it doesn't become overbearing and in fact is filled with little jokes and easter eggs to lighten the mood where appropriate. The localisation team has done a superb job of translating the comedy for a Western audience, too. I'm a big fan of the DVDs you can rent--spoofs of popular Western media like 'The X-Folders' or 'Bubbly Hills, 90210.'Within Persona 5 is a complex set of interconnected gameplay mechanics, and in almost every aspect Atlus has executed on its vision exceptionally, barring the pacing issues towards the end. At every turn, it presents something to marvel at, whether it's the fluid combat, vibrant world, or the many memorable characters. It's a game I could talk about for hours; I haven't mentioned the ability to connect to the Thieves Guild, which lets you see how other players spent their day or ask them for help answering questions at school. Or the thumping acid-jazz-infused soundtrack that I've not been able to get out of my head. Or even just the joy of seeing how it stylishly transitions between menus. But that encapsulates why Persona 5 is a game that shouldn't be missed. It's stuffed to bursting point with gameplay ideas and presentation flourishes--there's an overwhelming level of artistry in every part of Persona 5, making it a truly standout entry in the series. It's a refined, effortlessly stylish RPG that will be talked about for years to come.


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'self-doubt', 'competitive', 'field', 'modelling', '.', 'These', 'characters', 'grow', 'change', 'spend', 'time', ':', 'They', 'go', 'mechanical', 'tools', 'engage', 'strengthen', 'Personas', ',', 'real', 'people', 'identify', 'sympathize', '.', 'By', 'time', 'credits', 'rolled', ',', 'I', 'felt', 'like', 'I', 'leaving', 'behind', 'friends', 'I', 'known', 'years.Building', 'relationships', 'teammates', 'key', 'success', 'Metaverse', '.', 'Increasing', 'Confidant', 'Ranks', '(', 'rebrand', 'Social', 'Link', 'system', 'Persona', '4', ')', 'spending', 'time', 'friends', 'affords', 'deeper', 'insight', 'personalities', ',', 'also', 'provides', 'bonuses', 'special', 'moves', 'battle', '.', 'A', 'teammate', 'initially', 'closed', 'distant', 'real', 'world', 'end', 'literally', 'taking', 'bullet', 'Metaverse', '.', 'Similarly', ',', 'improving', 'personal', 'traits', 'daily', 'activities', 'meet', 'variety', 'side-characters', 'teach', 'new', 'abilities', 'offer', 'bonuses', 'feed', 'back', 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518,Infinity Blade II ,9," Deep, accessible, and visually stunning, Infinity Blade II sets the standard for iOS gaming.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/7/5/2227475-ib2.png,IOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/infinity-blade-ii-review/1900-6346878/,pos,"
  There's an old Klingon proverb that says, ""Revenge is a dish best served cold."" In the case of Infinity Blade II, it's not so much a dish as an all-you-can-eat buffet of revenge-fuelled sword combat, dressed with some of the most beautiful visuals to grace an iOS game. It's a game that plays to the platform's strengths; there's no battle so long that you can't finish it on a bus, and no unwieldy touch-screen analogue sticks to get in the way of the action. It takes just a few swipes of your finger to execute brutal slashes and stabs, all with a precision and intuitiveness rarely seen in games played with a traditional controller. Role-playing game elements and an imposing sense of scale combine with the excellent combat to create a beautiful, compelling experience that's a shining example of how to make a superb iOS game.   Siris is not a man to be messed with.   You play as Siris, a knight who's on a quest to find the mysterious Worker of Secrets and avenge his father's death. To do so, you must battle your way to the top of a tower known as The Vault of Tears, where you face off against various enemies and eventually battle the God King. Most of your time is spent in combat. You're armed with a sword and a shield, as well as a range of magic spells, all of which are controlled via the touch screen. This isn't your standard hack-and-slash fare, though--think Nintendo's Punch-Out!! rather than the likes of Diablo or Dark Souls. Your opponents have a very specific set of moves they perform, such as sword strikes, kicks and punches, or magic spells. Anticipating those moves to block, dodge, or parry them is the only way to succeed.    Thankfully, your opponents have a number of tells that aid you in identifying their next attack. Sword swipes might be preceded by a long swing, while long run-ups usher in punches and kicks. If you're faced with a sword attack, your best option is to parry it by swiping in the direction of your opponent's swing. Kicks and punches are best avoided with dodges by pushing to the left or right of the screen, while blocks work as a last resort when you have failed to anticipate a move and need to defend a follow-up combo. Successfully defend yourself, and you can unleash an attack of your own, swiping at the screen to perform different types of strikes. By swiping smoothly back and forth you perform combos, which deal more damage. Or, if you're on the ropes, you can perform a magic attack that can't be blocked by replicating a specific swipe pattern, depending on the spell.    It's an elegantly designed system that works extremely well, with the direction of your swipes accurately replicated by Siris. Each enemy has unique moves, ensuring there's variety to the combat. Plus, battles are just the right length for a quick fix while you're on the move, letting you chip away at the game in smaller chunks. For each opponent you defeat you're rewarded with experience points, with bonus XP on offer for performing different challenges such as executing 10 combos in a row, or dodging five attacks. That XP is used to level up Siris, so you allocate points to your attack, defence, shield, or health to increase his effectiveness in battle. You also earn money, which you can use to buy stronger weapons and armour.   Performing sweeping sword slashes is as easy as swiping at the touch screen.   Different weapon types affect your abilities, so if you buy a heavy weapon such as an axe, you lose your shield and dodging ability, replaced instead by buttons that let you block with your weapon. Choose to dual-wield, and you become much more nimble, but you lose the ability to block entirely. You can also place gems you earn from battles within your weapons for extra bonuses, such as increasing the amount of gold you earn or the number of gems that are dropped by enemies. These RPG elements give the game depth, making battles all the more compelling.    They also go hand in hand with the game's structure. While you might manage to make your way to the top of the tower to battle the God King early on, his high level ensures that you're unlikely to defeat him on your first encounter. Your experience points and items remain intact, however, so you can work through the tower again, gaining new items and levelling up until you're finally ready to take him down. Each time you do so, the enemies change, so you're never faced with the exact same adventure twice. Not only that, but reaching higher levels unlocks different paths to the God King, with all-new areas to explore. There are also keys to find scattered throughout the tower that let you unlock new paths, or chests that contain upgrades and money.     Even when you defeat the God King, the battle system is so fun that you're still compelled to jump in and take down the many enemies that litter the tower. There's also Game Centre support, so you can share your high scores with friends, as well as unlock achievements. Infinity Blade II doesn't just nail the gameplay either--it's a beautiful-looking game. Breathtaking environments such as a Japanese temple surrounded by pink blossoms and the huge monolithic tower set amid mountains are stunning. The characters themselves are also striking. The bulging muscles, evil eyes, and ornate armour of your opponents have a detailed steampunk style that's a treat for the eyes, along with the sparks and streaks of light that accompany your attacks.   The detailed environments are stunning to look at.   Infinity Blade II is a real showcase for iOS, bringing a full gaming experience to the platform that isn't simply a shoehorning of existing ideas onto a touch screen. It has an identity of its own, successfully straddling RPG depth with an experience that can be sampled in small chunks in a way that few other iOS games can match. Plus, like the first game, it should be heavily supported postrelease, with new bosses, environments, and rewards promised for future updates, all for free. Infinity Blade II sets the standard for big experiences on the go, and is an essential purchase for any iOS-toting gamer.  


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519,Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien ,9, Runner 2 artfully blends entrancing music and accessible gameplay to create a joyful experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2309132-bitrip.jpg,WIIU,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/runner-2-future-legend-of-rhythm-alien-review/1900-6404932/,pos,"
  The original Bit.Trip Runner was a simply named, retro-styled rhythm platforming game that deftly intertwined music and gameplay. The sequel, Bit.Trip Presents…Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, is more elaborately named and more visually lush, but its immense appeal is once again fueled by the elegant marriage of music and gameplay. As you leap and slide your way past obstacles as the perpetually sprinting protagonist, your actions trigger beats and chimes that enrich the burgeoning musical track. This creates a connection between you and the game that builds and builds, leading to an experience that is joyful, rewarding, and as challenging as you want it to be.       If you've played Runner 2's predecessor, Bit.Trip Runner, then you already know all the basics. Your character starts the level running, and doesn't stop until the end, providing you can avoid every single obstacle that appears in your way. Pits, robots, projectiles, walls, and more force you to jump, slide, block, and kick with judicious timing, lest one false move send you hurtling back to the beginning of the level.     These impediments and evasive maneuvers are introduced at a gentle, yet brisk, pace. By the end of the first of five worlds, you learn everything you could ever do in the first game, and then some. This structure keeps things lively for Runner veterans while remaining accessible for newcomers. If you find things are a bit too easy or too hard for your tastes, the adjustable difficulty level does a great job of helping you find a balance. Whether you're cruising past obstacles effortlessly, nimbly maneuvering through a tricky run, or trying time and time again to navigate a fiendish gauntlet, surmounting the challenges of Runner 2 is an enjoyable pursuit.    The whimsical environmental design adds to the appeal. Commander Video and his playable compatriots move with jaunty, fluid animations, while doofy robots, disgruntled hills, and even a jubilant Sasquatch watch from the background. There are a few elements that can be visually distracting at times, notably the kickable obstacles and the mid-level checkpoint attendees, but Runner 2 engenders the kind of focus that will likely allow you to navigate levels undeterred by occasional distractions. The Wii U version performs well on both big and small screen, though the controller screen does have the advantage of looking a bit smoother.    CommandGirl Video runs around one of the new score-boosting diamonds.   To encourage you to press onward and strive upward, the aforementioned checkpoints help mitigate the punishment for missteps. If you like your stakes high, however, you can always leap over a checkpoint and earn a nice point bonus for working without a net. Branching paths, unlockable treasures, and hidden retro bonus stages augment the generous difficulty spread and increase replay incentive, as do the online leaderboards. In Runner, you could achieve the perfect score on each level, but with the addition of point-garnering dance moves in Runner 2, every spare stretch of track is a chance to push your score a wee bit higher and edge out the competition.     There's a great sense of satisfaction that comes from acing levels and blasting yourself into the bonus bull's-eye at the end, but the real magic of Runner 2 lies in the music. Every obstacle you avoid and item you pick up sounds a chime or a beat that fits seamlessly into the musical track. This creates a powerful link between your actions and the music, enmeshing you in the rhythm of the stage and making you feel like part of the composition. It's an exhilarating feeling, one that not only makes you feel good, but also makes you play better. You may find yourself so in tune with the game that you feel like you're reacting instinctually with button presses before you consciously realize what you're doing. This is a rare sensation, one that compels you to start the next level even if you struggled mightily to complete the last one.    Every track gets richer the further you progress into a level thanks to certain power-ups that trigger a musical escalation. This progression sweeps you up in the action, propelling you along with increasing momentum (though, of course, your character's run speed remains steady). The final such power-up always elevates the melody to ethereal heights, creating a premature release of the tension that's been building all stage. You still have obstacles to overcome, but you coast past these with supreme confidence, buoyed by the euphoric melodies. You feel like you've already succeeded, and when you triumphantly ride this feeling across the finish line, it's just the glorious cherry on top. It's an ingenious stroke of mood management, one that makes your experience all the more pleasurable and engrossing.   Unkle Dill cheers on all checkpoint skippers.   Runner 2 ensnares your emotions with an artful cocktail of music and gameplay, sweeping you along in its rhythm and lighting up a smile on your face. It's a wonderful sensation to lose yourself in this game, whether you are facing down the formidable challenges of The Mounting Sadds or simply going for a breezy run in The Emerald Brine. Runner 2 doesn't just offer you an entertaining experience; it throws its arm around you companionably, ushers you into its whimsical world, and makes you feel like part of something special.    


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520,Wild Metal ,3.7," If it weren't for the terrible control scheme, horribly accurate AI, and confusing terrain, this game would still be overly simple.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/0/7/6/2221076-front_cover.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wild-metal-review/1900-2540781/,neg,"
There have been plenty of video games based on military combat, so why not a futuristic Dreamcast shooter that puts you behind the controls of a space-age tank on a search-and-destroy mission to save all mankind? While the concept might sound good on paper, Wild Metal fails to hit the mark and instead delivers an experience not worth repeating. While Wild Metal does have a storyline, the game doesn't bother to fill you in on it. There's no opening intro, no cutscenes, no mission briefings, and no real instructions on exactly why you're in a tank and on what you're supposed to do. This makes things confusing until you read the instruction manual, which tells you the backplot and informs you that your basic task is to pilot your tank through the levels, collect a bunch of multicolored power cores (one for each color of the rainbow, how nice!), and then bring them back to your ship. All the while you'll have to deal with a whole lot of terrain that tanks aren't exactly suited to, on top of destroying all the enemies contained within the level. Force fields, sentries, mines, and other tanks will all do their best to stop you from achieving this goal, but you'll find your main enemies are the terrain and the poor camera controls. Since Wild Metal features a wide range of elevations, it's often difficult to see exactly what you want to look at, and the camera controls aren't that much help since the camera only rotates on one elliptical axis. Why any  military force would choose a tank for this type of search-and-destroy mission is an obvious question. The terrain would be more suited to a drop ship or helicopter, as power cores are usually hidden in tiny crevices between mountains, and there's usually only one path you can take. And since there's no real map and only an amazingly oversimplified radar to tell you where to go, you'll find that you will be spending most of the time wandering around the level until you happen to bump into where you want to be going. On top of that, the terrain is so bland and repetitive that it's difficult to tell exactly where you've been, which makes it all that more difficult to complete your objective. Wild Metal does feature a fairly nice turret system that, in theory, lets you move and fire in a manner similar to that of a real-life tank. Unfortunately, in execution the turret is always too slow, and without an actual aiming icon it's extremely inaccurate. The analog trigger buttons rotate the turret to and fro, and holding down the fire button controls the elevation of the turret. When you rotate, the camera follows the gun, leaving you to simply guess where you are driving. And since there are all sorts of pitfalls and mountains scattered about the level, you're sure to accidentally drive off the side of a cliff or up the side of an unscalable mountain in the middle of combat, leaving you incredibly frustrated. The overly complex control scheme is done so poorly that it's much easier to simply stop your tank altogether every time you want to take out an enemy. And since there's no sort of accurate way to judge the elevation of your barrel and the arc of your shots, you'll be forced to fire a series of shots that get increasingly closer to your target as you correct yourself. This pretty much ruins any sort of stealth that you may have had, and it's such a tedious process that it ruins combat altogether, and you end up trying your best to simply avoid any sort of hostile situation. While the tank models themselves appear pretty sharp, the rest of the graphics look horrible. The terrain is a smattering of yellows and browns, making you wonder exactly what sort of planet you're actually on. With the exception of the occasional purple pipes or gray mesas, each level looks pretty much the same as the one before it  - incredibly bland. Since the levels carry the same overall appearance, they start to blur together, and after a while it seems as if you've been driving through the same few mountains for the last couple of hours. In fact, the only thing that seems to separate the levels is the occasional night mission, which gives the graphics a slightly different spin, but on closer inspection you'll notice that the textures are still the same. The sound is extremely average, aside from a nice crunching sound every time you run over the scraps of recently destroyed enemies. What really kills the whole audio experience is the absolute lack of any background music. Iinstead of suspenseful music edging you on, you get to listen to the drone of the helicopter's rotors while you play.  The game does feature a multiplayer mode but doesn't take advantage of all four of the Dreamcast's controller ports. Still, you and a friend can have at each other in one of four different multiplayer arenas. If you want to make things more interesting, you can even change the session from straight fragging to scrambling to collecting all the power cores. Still, the multiplayer mode suffers from the same problems that plague the single-player mode, and it keeps Wild Metal from being any sort of game you'd want to invite friends over to play. If it weren't for the terrible control scheme, horribly accurate AI, and confusing terrain, this game would still be overly simple. There are no difficult tasks set ahead of you - simply collect the cores and return to the starting point. It's unfortunate that the only difficulty found in the game is a direct result of the game's numerous flaws. With the Dreamcast's muscle, this game had plenty of potential, but it turned out to be a boring shooter so frustrating that it's hardly worth a rental.
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521,Cool Boarders 2001 ,3.7," From both a technical and aesthetic standpoint, Cool Boarders 2001 is like a winter without snow - a drag.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/3/8/8/2212388-480240_44313_front.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/cool-boarders-2001-review/1900-2650229/,neg,"
It wasn't that long ago that people were arguing that Cool Boarders was better than Nintendo's 1080 Snowboarding and vice versa. While the argument was a lot closer back then, Cool Boarders 2001 serves as a rather large ""I told you so"" for the side that always preferred 1080's more realistic feel. This is one PlayStation game that, like the Buffalo Bills of the early '90s, never quite makes it.   It's pointless to place the trimmings on a turkey that still isn't cooked on the inside, and this analogy fits Cool Boarders 2001 like a glove. There just aren't enough modes to explore. You may either play the career mode - where you pick a pro boarder or create your own and begin tearing up the pro circuit - or a quick race. That's it. As you play through the career mode, new boards, riders, and courses are opened up. You earn attribute points if you finish high in the standings, but they are automatically applied to your character in whichever way the computer deems appropriate. For a game that is already low in the options department, a simple thing like allocating your own hard-earned attribute points would have helped in making you actually care. But alas, it's done for you, so you don't.   Under the career mode, there are six different events to choose from. Gates requires that you finish first while negotiating a slalom course, board park places obstacles in a sequence down the hill that must be hit in order, CBX is a Road Rash-inspired bash-and-race affair, and big air gives you one massive hit to perform your most burly tricks. Pipe gives you three runs down a massive chute, complete with two feet of vert, while downhill points run is a simple race from the top of the mountain to the lodge. Earlier previewable versions of the game had a pro boarder challenge where you took on real-world pros in specific events, but this option has been changed so that you simply have certain objectives to accomplish. The most glaring omission is a free ride option. This goes against the very nature of the sport, and considering that a fighting interface has been included instead, this is one game where the developers simply don't understand the subject matter. There is enough variety to keep things fresh for a while, but the execution of the gameplay reduces all of these modes to the point of worthlessness.    The trick system is severely flawed. In order to perform a simple grab, you must first hit the X button and then any direction on the analog stick. If you press the direction first, or even at the same time, the desired trick is not performed. This becomes incredibly annoying when attempting to perform any sort of combo where you're not repeating a trick that was already landed. After a short period of time, it becomes akin to scraping your nails down a chalkboard, as the gameplay quickly turns into bouts of extreme button mashing.Every extreme sports game attempts to emulate Tony Hawk's Pro Skater these days, and CB 2001 is no exception. The button configuration is almost identical, though the terrible hit detection limits your ability to express the rider inside. Transferring from one obstacle to another is nearly impossible, as once your boarder releases from one obstacle, there is a dead spot where no commands may be entered. This results in your boarder bashing into rails or catching the tip of the board, causing him or her to awkwardly flop down the other side. Steering down the mountain presents its own set of issues. The boards are just far too unresponsive. Getting off course even once means that you might as well begin the race again, as the edges of the boards lack the proper tuning. Cranking hard on the analog stick makes the boarder turn slightly for a moment or two, and then he or she suddenly lurches into a full 90-degree turn. It's far too difficult to get a handle on this erratic steering mechanism, and choosing a different board provides no appreciable difference. Considering the computer riders seldom bail, even on the very first course, playing Cool Boarders 2001 quickly turns into an exercise in frustration.    The graphics in CB 2001 appear to be running on the same game engine the series debuted with back in 1996. All the usual suspects show their faces. Polygon seams are blatantly obvious, the backgrounds jitter, the riders are too small onscreen to make out any detail, and the textures are laughably pixelated. The course designs are CB 2001's graphical strong point. They are wider than in past installments of Cool Boarders, and the obstacles are intelligently placed, so if the control interface actually worked, you could conceivably pull off trick after trick. There are branching paths to each course, but attempting to cruise down a slim trail is nearly impossible thanks to the terrible hit detection, which makes obstacles like trees twice as wide as they appear. The trails the boards leave behind in the snow are well done, but you can forget any sort of particle effects for snow sprays. Spots of knee-deep powder pop up here and there, and they're at least somewhat believable.    The sound is by far the best aspect of Cool Boarders 2001, but it's still not great. The whooshing effect as you transfer from edge to edge is done well, and the sound of riders stomping tricks is absolutely perfect. But if you're looking for authentic music in CB 2001, you can forget it. Instead you get a number of wailing guitar tracks that are almost impossible to tell from one another, along with some Chemical Brothers rip-offs that are best left unheard.   The most obvious problem with Cool Boarders 2001 is that it fails to represent snowboarding in an accurate way on any front. The free flowing nature of the sport is stifled, and it all comes off as if the developers have never strapped a board to their feet and headed down the mountain, let alone hung out with a crew of real riders to find out where they're coming from. From both a technical and aesthetic standpoint, Cool Boarders 2001 is like a winter without snow - a drag. If you're looking to add a snowboarding game to your PlayStation collection, MTV's Pure Ride more accurately captures the spirit of the sport and is much more fun to play. Cool Boarders 2001 is an aggravating example of what not to do when developing a snowboarding game.
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522,McGrath vs. Pastrana Freestyle Motocross ,3.7," McGrath vs. Pastrana Freestyle Motocross is the primary candidate for an award no video game wants to win, the uninspired game of the year award.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/7/3/8/2991-11738.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mcgrath-vs-pastrana-freestyle-motocross-review/1900-2652159/,neg,"
Usually when a series has a bad rep, the game's publisher steps in, attempting to push the developers to add features or clean up the graphics for future releases. Acclaim's McGrath Motocross series, on the other hand, has gradually deteriorated over time, finally reaching a state of true dilapidation in this newly tweaked PlayStation installment. McGrath vs. Pastrana Freestyle Motocross is the primary candidate for an award no video game wants to win, the uninspired game of the year award.   McGrath vs. Pastrana features an adequate number of gameplay modes. The championship series lets you take control of either McGrath or Pastrana on your quest to conquer the 125cc, 250cc, and 250cc classes in both the racing and freestyle events. The freestyle events allow you to roam the courses at will, searching for steep hits to boost off and rack up stunt points. As you might expect, the races simply require you to cross the finish line in first place. The game boots up with an auto jump feature enabled, and while it's handy for the freestyle courses, it just slows you down in the races. After you defeat an engine class, you go onto the next one, and eventually the custom and open classes become available. In addition to the championship mode, you may play single races, which are handy for finding shortcuts, and the time attack mode, where you may race against one of your ghost laps. McGrath vs. Pastrana also features a card mode, where completing certain objectives opens up new bikes and tracks - similar to the challenge modes in EA Sports games. If you have a friend handy, there is a two-player mode available for head-to-head competition.   The majority of the 30 possible tricks are made up of the usual can-cans and supermans. There are also some tricks to pull that have yet to be landed by real-world riders such as the backflip and the barrel roll. Performing tricks is simple. A push of the analog stick and a press of the circle or triangle button are all it takes. As long as you release maneuvers before succumbing to gravity, they are always landed. It doesn't matter if you land at an awkward angle on a slope or smash into a building. Even while racing, it's nearly impossible to fall off your bike. If you take a turn too wide, it's possible to ride up on the track walls without dropping your speed. Not that a lot of time is spent off the road. The bikes control so heavily that the brake button is never used. It's possible to ride like a maniac and never be tossed off the bike. It's this lack of consequence for poor playing that prohibits any sense of tension from ever showing itself.   McGrath vs. Pastrana stutters along like Gomer Pyle on amphetamines. The frame rates are so poor that the entire game has a jerky feel to it, and the overall package comes off as erratic. This is in addition to the fact that the game engine has to bust its tail to draw 100 yards of terrain. Trees magically appear a mere 30 yards away, and the coastline gradually materializes while driving along the beach. The animations for tricks contain so few frames of animation that your mind is forced to draw in the missing parts. Everything from the riders to the terrain is pixelated, blocky, and grainy. There are nine tracks to exploit, including real-world locales such as Loch Ness and Yosemite, and each comes complete with shortcuts and branching trails. The texture sets vary for each course, giving them their own specific look, but the excessive length of each course results in a great deal of texture repetition. Z-Axis' patented skeletal dynamics system allows for some realistic reactions to crashes, but again, there aren't enough frames of animation for them to be believable.The music consists of driving guitar rock that fits properly with the subject matter, but it's impossible to hear it over the screaming bikes, which sound like Weedwackers on nitro. It doesn't matter whether the bike is airborne or its tires are digging into the soil, the same two-second engine sound loops over and over. Making matters worse, there are only two sliders to adjust the sound, so it's difficult to attain a desirable mix.    McGrath vs. Pastrana Freestyle Motocross continues the legacy of drab, dull gameplay and graphics established by previous versions of the Supercross series. While the gameplay offers a few new twists borrowed from other extreme sports video games, their implementation lacks proper execution, resulting in a game full of promising bits and disappointment. McGrath vs. Pastrana has good intentions, but the fact that there are only two riders to choose from pretty much says it all. There aren't many good motocross games for the PlayStation, and McGrath vs. Pastrana isn't going to change that anytime soon.
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523,Real War ,3.7, Real War is a throwback to the days of those horrible real-time strategy clones that followed the success of Westwood's Command & Conquer series.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/9/7/2210597-__real_war_pc__.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/real-war-review/1900-2817719/,neg,"
Real War is a throwback to the days of those horrible real-time strategy clones that followed the success of Westwood's Command & Conquer series. Like most of the games that tried to ride Westwood's coattails, this is an example of amateurish game design at its worst. And considering its subject matter--the US military going abroad to battle terrorists--it's also an example of colossally bad timing.   Dropping leaflets on enemies can actually make them flee.  Real War is entirely conventional in many ways. It's a typical real-time strategy game featuring modern weaponry rather than fictitious sci-fi or fantasy armaments. The two sides are the US military and the generically named terrorist organization, the Independent Liberation Army (which begs the question, ""If they're independent, from whom do they want to be liberated?""). You can choose the single-player campaign of 12 linear missions or a skirmish game. The campaign missions tend to have specific objectives, while the skirmish games are last-man-standing slugfests to the finish. You start with a headquarters and then build land, air, and sea command centers to unlock the basic units. You can upgrade your buildings to unlock new units. Power generators give you the energy your buildings need to function, and supply depots give you the resources you need to build units. Near the end of the build tree, you'll find weapons of nuclear, biological, and psychological warfare.   There are a few interesting angles Real War takes from the traditional real-time strategy conventions. There's a limit to the number of each type of unit and structure you can build. This puts a limit on the size of your army and how much you can expand across the map. It also forces you to use a combined-arms approach, since you can't focus solely on one type of unit. Instead of harvesting resources like gold or ore, your ""supply"" is automatically generated when you build supply depots. For each depot, a helicopter periodically flies in from the map edge and unloads ""supply"" into your reserves, which can then be used for building units and structures. Theoretically, you have to protect your helicopters from enemy attack, but they're invulnerable if you simply build your depots against the map edge. However, because the number of depots you can build is limited, Real War minimizes economic micromanagement and lets you focus on your military units.   And you'll definitely need to focus on your military units, because Real War's interface, artwork, and unit AI are an utter nightmare. Useful hotkeys are AWOL. There is no speed adjustment, and the game moves so quickly that your army can quickly scurry out of control. The basic idea behind the interface is admirable; at the bottom of the screen, there's a button for every unit and building. This means you won't have to scroll around the map to find something. But the buttons are tiny pictures about 25 pixels wide crammed into a small box. They're hard enough to make out because they're so small, but even the artwork is indistinguishable; there are vague drawings of trucks, buildings, lumpy colors, and other less-than-helpful stuff that doesn't look like anything on the map. Topware Interactive's 3D real-time strategy game Earth 2150 took a similar approach with more success because the buttons were bigger and they used the same 3D models from the game engine.  Even at the closest zoom level, infantry units seem tiny.  Many of Real War's units are virtually impossible to distinguish, especially when they're selected and a thick cloud of health bars and experience icons obscures them. Vehicles tend to be the boxy generic equivalents of plastic army-men toys. Even at the tightest zoom, infantry units are little more than dots. Many of the ship models look similar. Only aircraft fare well in this game because they're modeled after distinct real-world airframes. The engine is strictly 2D, but the animation allows units to move as if they were polygonal: They're not fixed to specific directions, and they can even turn over or fly through the air when they explode. But when traveling, they slide across the terrain as if they were skidding on ice, often moving at weird angles. It's odd to see an aircraft carrier moving sideways, but this is what happens in Real War when it's trying to scoot out of the way of another unit.   However, units more often shuffle over and through each other, clustering themselves into chaotic blobs. There are formations in the game, but they don't have any significant effect. Neither do the orders for units to launch simultaneous attacks. For some reason, Real War's putative formations aren't even included in multiplayer games. This certainly isn't because the CPU is working overtime on unit AI. These are some of the most helpless units you'll ever have the displeasure of herding. Real War features pathfinding that's incapable of going around a forest, much less navigating a gap in a defensive wall.The game's poor pathfinding makes battles a chore.  If Real War had worked better, the unit variety and build tree might have been interesting. Units like destroyers and subs can build a store of long-range cruise missiles. Carriers can build their own custom squadrons. Aircraft can be defended with flares and jamming equipment to shut down antiair weapons. Satellites can be positioned over parts of the map to keep a constant line of sight. Planes drop leaflets onto enemy units to demoralize them. The terrorists can use transport vehicles for suicide missions. There's the basis for a decent game here, but it seems the developers weren't quite up to the task.   However, Real War isn't just a bad game. It's also an exercise in horrible timing. It was released exactly two weeks after the September 11th attacks. It includes language in the terrorist campaign about causing the loss of American lives and hitting civilian targets. There are rendered cutscenes of burning cities. The US campaign ends with a view of the Pentagon, minus the dark gash cut into its west side. If ever there was a candidate for being retooled in light of recent events, it was Real War. And if there's any subject matter that's currently inappropriate for this sort of frivolous treatment, it's a war conducted against terrorists overseas. This isn't to accuse the game of poor taste so much as fortuitous timing. But if Westwood had the presence of mind to alter the artwork on Red Alert 2's boxes, Simon & Schuster looks insensitive in comparison when it lets Real War wend its way to retail shelves in its current state.  Tanks and other vehicles seem like nothing more than generic-looking toys.  The developer, Rival Interactive, created the game as a commercial version of Joint Force Employment, a ""multimedia CD-ROM"" it's been trying to sell to the military. Because Real War was based on a training tool that some poor slob in the military might have been duped into requisitioning, you'll find claims of ""realism"" and ""authenticity"" stuck all over Real War. ""Based On The Official Joint Chiefs Of Staff Training Game Developed For The U.S. Military,"" the front of the box reads. But this game's very name is patently absurd. There's minimal realism in the design, much less in the execution. Even if the tanks weren't stupidly driving around like drunken bumper cars, they wouldn't be engaging each other at these ranges. A tactical nuke will destroy more than a single building. Submarines don't launch cruise missiles a stone's throw from the shore. And it's not just the scale that's hopelessly fudged. Infantry don't stand out in the open and wait for vehicles to squash them. Propaganda leaflets dropped on an army don't cause them to run away. Helicopters and jet aircraft don't fly in formation with each other. Red Alert 2 has just as much claim to authenticity as Real War. By boasting that they've included authentic military units and realistic tactics, Rival Interactive and Simon & Schuster are insulting not only their audience, but their subject matter as well.   One of the saddest things about this Johnny-come-lately to the real-time scene is that actor R. Lee Ermey was hired to do the voice-over for the US campaign. By his voice, you'll instantly recognize Ermey as the ill-fated drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket or the commander of the plastic army men in the Toy Story movies. Ermey's voice is full of force and personality, but they have him narrate Real War's campaign with the steady insistent drumbeat of a drill sergeant. As each mission loads, he barks embarrassing slogans like, ""Semper fi, do or die, gung ho, gung ho, gung ho!"" Has he fallen so far that it's come to this? At least when you exit Real War, he barks, ""Oh boy, oh boy, isn't that sweet? You're givin' up!"" Thank you, R. Lee Ermey, for making it that much more enjoyable to exit Real War.
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524,B-17 Gunner: Air War Over Germany ,3.7, It's really just a shoot-'em-up game that gives you targets to shoot at but restricts your movement.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/8/1/0/3519-13810.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/b-17-gunner-air-war-over-germany-review/1900-2768543/,neg,"
 	B-17 Gunner: Air War Over Europe is essentially an arcade shooter in which you take the role of a gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber as it flies bombing missions over Europe in World War II. There is no flight simulation aspect to the game: You simply man the guns and shoot down enemy fighters. Each mission begins with your squadron already in the air, and the mission ends before you land. It's really just a shoot-'em-up game that gives you targets to shoot at but restricts your movement.  Bombing runs are a point-and-click affair.  Gameplay in B-17 Gunner is exceedingly straightforward. Six positions in the B-17 are modeled: nose gun, top turret, ball turret, right and left waist guns, and tail guns. You can jump between gunnery positions by hitting the number keys, and each gives you an appropriate view as you're looking out of the aircraft. Your job is to man these guns and protect your plane from enemy fighters. As your squadron loses escort planes, the enemy comes to focus increasingly on you. German fighters come in waves, and the deeper your mission into Germany, the more fighters you face per wave (although the length of the missions doesn't appear to measurably increase). At the beginning of the mission, you're shown a picture of your target. When you approach it, you are automatically shifted to the bombsight view and must center and release the bombs on the target you were shown in the mission briefing. At the end of each mission, you obtain a score based on successful bombing and defense of your aircraft. The goal is to live through 25 missions and be sent home. An indicator at the lower right of the screen shows your position in the plane. When gun positions get ""knocked out,"" they become inaccessible.   While you're in control of all your gun positions at the start of the mission, you won't find them all equally useful in practice. Some guns have very limited deflection (for example, at the nose and waist positions), and the persistent cloud layer really limits the effectiveness of the ball turret. Because the intercom sounds are mostly just oft repeated, canned phrases, it's often hard to determine where enemy attacks are coming from without constantly jumping from one control position to another. Instead of having other gunners call out locations (""Bandits at three o'clock low!""), they usually simply repeat a limited set of phrases, like ""Jeez, they're all over the place."" Consequently, it's usually better to simply sit in the top turret (which has the most freedom of fire) for the entire mission. Since enemy planes tend to attack from high positions, this is the most effective defensive strategy. Unfortunately, it gets fairly boring. Because guns reset their positions when you switch to a new station, flipping quickly between the waist and ball turret, for example, doesn't work because when you switch back into the ball turret, you'll find yourself facing aft (even if you were facing port when you left), and you'll have to waste time rotating the guns. Sticking to the top turret is the way to go.   The missions are essentially all the same, no matter what your target is or how deep it is inside Germany. Bombing is simply a case of squeezing the trigger while the crosshairs are over the target. While crewmembers will call out damage to the aircraft, this doesn't appear to affect its performance in any way. The aircraft is shot down only when all the gun positions have been eliminated.  None of the six gunner positions in the plane make for much fun.  As if this weren't enough, the game has fundamental technical problems that make it very frustrating to play. Despite the lack of detailed graphics and absence of any need for a flight model, B-17 Gunner stutters worse than some detailed flight sims that tax the computer far more than this simple arcade game. Even with a full installation, the game jerks, stalls, and stutters to such an extent that the graphics engine becomes a bigger obstacle to shooting down enemy planes than the planes' evasive actions. This stuttering persisted on two test systems that more than met the minimum hardware requirements, even after full hard-drive defragmentation and reinstallation. Considering the limited appeal of the gameplay in the first place, this is a crippling flaw.   Despite its simplicity, B-17 Gunner could have been an enjoyable, if mindless, arcade romp that you'd fire up for 20 minutes here and there to shoot down some planes and bomb some targets. Unfortunately, B-17 Gunner's numerous problems make it a product with little value, even at its reduced retail cost of $20.      	  
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525,Billiards ,3.7, The money spent on this game would be better spent playing a real game of pool.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/3/3/2211933-528431_50967_front.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/billiards-review/1900-2790760/,neg,"
Billiards is another of Agetec's value-priced software releases for the PlayStation. As evidenced by its no-nonsense title, Billiards is a 3D pool-hall simulation, and it features such varied modes of play as nine ball, eight ball, bowlliards, and rotation. All of the classic modes are true to the rules of their real-life counterparts and play relatively close to the real thing. You shouldn't expect a flashy presentation from Billiards, but sadly, you won't receive much enjoyment, either.  Billiards includes a number of different modes of play and other options that, while well intentioned, are unimpressive in execution. For example, you can select a CPU opponent represented by a cartoon caricature for the single-player games. This opponent's text window will utter a challenge in an introductory screen, but during the game, your foe is absolutely silent. You can unlock new opponents, but they all remain entirely lifeless, so there really isn't any reason to do so. There are three tables to choose from, each in a different locale, such as a bar where the backdrop includes paintings and a full liquor display. The environments are flat textures, however--the only polygons in this game are used to represent the cue and balls. The included trick-shot mode lets you master 18 different trick shots, including fancy bank shots and multipocket combinations. The ability to watch the computer's example of how to successfully complete the trick is nice, and after a certain amount of practice, making these shots can become second nature and rather satisfying. The background music is fairly entertaining in some areas, particularly the jazzy piano in the trick-shot game, but the tunes eventually become horribly repetitive. Getting a good view of the table is crucial in a billiards game, and despite the many camera controls in Billiards, the only way to get a passable look at the table is to use the game's full-screen overhead view, which is functional but unattractive. The inability to properly view the entire table will make playing complete games a thoroughly frustrating affair. The developers behind Billiards were clearly aware of the visibility problems, because they included a command for changing all the ball graphics to large numbers. This would have been a perfect remedy for the problem, if overlapping balls didn't keep it from working half the time. Another problem many players will have with Billiards is the nonintuitive, clunky control scheme. Billiards lets you use either the standard-line or a relatively well-done ghost-ball tracking system for lining up shots. The precise control over the cue ball and realistic physics ensure that if you miss a shot, it was because you lined it up poorly. Sorely lacking in the otherwise solid control, however, is analog support for the Dual Shock controller. Not being able to smoothly pan the camera in and out or position the cue ball when in hand is a major annoyance, to say the least.  Despite the game-design flaws in Billiards, it is an affordable title that may competently entertain the casual game player. The difficult camera takes getting used to, but all things considered, Billiards is a fairly accurate simulation of a game that has rarely translated well to video game consoles. For most billiards enthusiasts, however, the money spent on this game would be better spent playing a real game of pool.
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526,Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze ,3.7, It's a monotonous gaming experience that's difficult to recommend even to those looking for a little nostalgia.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/1/0/2210410-pac.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ms-pac-man-quest-for-the-golden-maze-review/1900-2823582/,neg,"
 Pac-Man: Adventures in Time, which was released about a year ago, brought the classic arcade game character into uncharted territory with its creative 3D level design and platforming elements. Now, Pac-Man's better half has her own new game too. But unlike in previous examples from the Pac-Man series, Ms. Pac-Man doesn't follow in Pac-Man's footsteps. In fact, Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze marks a return to the old-fashioned maze-ridden pellet chomping of the original arcade game, right down to the same basic level design. Ultimately, it all adds up to a monotonous gaming experience that's difficult to recommend even to those looking for a little nostalgia.   Ms. Pac-Man's new game is a lot like her old one...  Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze offers two basic modes of play--a single-player campaign and a bare-bones hotseat multiplayer mode. In the single-player mode, you'll have to chomp your way through several levels, each of which has three or so sublevels. As in the original Ms. Pac-Man, your only purpose here is to eat all the pellets in a particular level before moving on to the next, all the while avoiding the same persistent group of ghost monsters found in previous Pac-Man games. Of course, you still have access to power pellets, which make ghost monsters temporarily vulnerable to Ms. Pac-Man's chomp, but you also have opportunities to grab special power-ups that can give Ms. Pac-Man more speed or even a magnetic effect that attracts pellets. These power-ups, which are uncovered by eating one of the smaller ghost monsters that roams around the maze, appear fairly often, making the game much less difficult than it probably should be. This is Ms. Pac-Man's most substantial flaw.   While the difficulty of the game is artificially increased by the time it takes to adjust to keyboard controls, there's virtually no challenge in Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze. Both novice and experienced Pac-Man players should be able to waltz through the single-player mode in less than an hour. Even at the hardest difficulty setting, the game lacks any serious challenge because the ghost monsters' artificial intelligence is simply too poor and poses no serious threat to a Pac-Man player who doesn't waste power pellets or power-ups.   The mazes, which traditionally make up for the lack of ghost intelligence, are incredibly uninspired in Quest for the Golden Maze and lack the creativity found in the mazes of Pac-Man: Adventures in Time. All the levels are straightforward maze designs with portals to the left and right, as well as an occasional dead end. In any case, they all start to look the same as you progress through the middle portions of the game, which just adds even more to the tedium. Even the fact that these mazes are modeled in 3D does very little to differentiate them one from another.  ...only it's not nearly as fun.  The multiplayer feature is perhaps Ms. Pac-Man's one saving grace. Two players can compete against each other on a single computer to see who can score the most points before all the pellets are gone. It sounds fairly shallow, but it actually isn't--you have to decide if you want to go straight for the pellets or go after power-ups and attack your opponent instead. Of course, this mode would have been much more fun if there were more than three maps to choose from and if it supported some kind of networking features, but as it stands, it's the only real source of replay value in the entire game.   Overall, Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze is disappointing, especially after last year's rather impressive Pac-Man: Adventures in Time. The mazes are boring, the ghost monster AI is lousy, and the power-ups do very little to change the basic Pac-Man gameplay. There really isn't even much of a nostalgic aspect to the game, except for some awful machinelike opening music and some subdued jazz tunes during actual gameplay. So you're better off steering clear of Ms. Pac-Man's latest.    	  
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527,Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones ,3.7," Certainly, there are worse games sitting on the store shelf. But not many.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/5/9/0/4229-16590.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-wars-episode-ii-attack-of-the-clones/1900-2868972/,neg,"
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones is raking in millions at the box office. Not coincidentally, THQ and David A. Palmer Productions have created an action game for the Game Boy Advance that's based on the movie. It looks and sounds as impressive as you might expect a game based on the special-effects-filled film would. However, the game itself, largely due to control issues, is very, very bad.  Anakin takes plenty of cheap hits. From the screenshots alone, it's easy to get the impression that Attack of the Clones is a top-rate action game. The side-scrolling levels are colorful and highly reminiscent of scenes from the movie, especially the rooftops of Coruscant and the dunes of Tatooine. Scattered between these traditional 2D side-scrolling areas, there are a number of 3D starfighter stages that re-create some of the movie's more fast-paced sequences. The music and sound effects, too, are quite faithful to the motion picture and at times are clear enough to be mistaken for the actual soundtrack.    Unfortunately, the game itself is often unenjoyable and sometimes just downright awful. Many of the game's problems stem from its control--or, rather, the lack of control that you have over the characters you're trying to play as. In the side-scrolling stages, you assume the roles of Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Mace Windu. Theoretically, each Jedi can jump, crouch, swing his lightsaber, block, and execute a force push. In practice, however, the game makes it difficult to execute even the simplest of moves. You can swing your lightsaber while running or crouching, but not while standing still. Conversely, blocking is easy to perform while standing, but nearly impossible while crouching or running. To make matters worse, there is a noticeable delay between when you press a button and when the action is actually performed. In levels where there are many enemies attacking at once, this ensures you'll take plenty of cheap hits, as your character simply can't react fast enough, even if you can.  The 3D starfighter stages are the highlight. Glaring control flaws aside, the level design in Attack of the Clones is terrible. In the side-scrolling stages, your only goal is to reach the far right of the screen. Since each area has approximately 100 droids to destroy, and some of them pop up randomly, this task is easier said than done. Thankfully, extra lives are scattered plentifully throughout each level, and the final upgrade to your force power actually causes health power-ups to drop from vanquished enemies. Rarely do you ever need to jump between ledges or explore for items. In fact, there are just two levels out of 11 that require any backtracking.    The only bright spots in the entire game are the fifth and 10th levels, which let you pilot starfighters against Jango Fett and Darth Tyranus. In these, you can actually shoot back while dodging asteroids and scrapping droid fighters--but without the poor control response found in the side-scrolling stages.    Because it bears the title Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, this game is likely going to sell well. That doesn't mean that it's worth owning, or that you should be subjected to it, even if you're a huge fan of the film. Certainly, there are worse games sitting on the store shelf. But not many.
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528,Europa Universalis IV ,9, Complex and rewarding strategizing makes the fourth game in the Europa Universalis dynasty shine.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2425914-2228896-box_eu4.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/europa-universalis-iv-review/1900-6413174/,pos,"
The Europa Universalis series has always struggled to be approachable to newcomers while offering a deep strategy game experience that accurately depicts the colonial period's social dynamics without becoming too deterministic. Europa Universalis IV succeeds at this balancing act by simplifying the series and making the hundreds of playable countries feel unique without dumbing it down or adding too many special rules. In many ways, EUIV is the pinnacle of the series; however, it is also plagued by numerous bugs that can ruin an otherwise outstanding experience. Some see Constantine XI leading his cavalry in a final battle against the Turks. Others will have no clue what is going on.In keeping with previous incarnations of the series, EUIV plays like a real-time version of a tabletop board game, which is appropriate since the series is based on one. You can pause the game and change its speed at any time, and instead of having you command real-time battles, combat is resolved with dice rolls influenced by modifiers such as terrain, weather, and generals. The series has been referred to as being akin to a real-time version of Risk, but that is a woefully inadequate description. EUIV covers over 400 years of history, from the last days of the Byzantine Empire to the end of the Napoleonic era, all of which takes place on a map consisting of a couple of thousand provinces.As the leader of one of several hundred playable countries, your word is law, and your will drives the state. This is a game about royal marriages, colonization, trade, social and political intrigue, warfare, religious strife, and revolution. While victory is technically score-based, EUIV is most satisfying when you forge your country's path into an alternate history. In other words, EUIV is a game for dreamers who want to create a greater Montenegro that stretches from Germany to Jerusalem, fight off European invaders as the Cherokee, save Constantinople from becoming Istanbul, or simply see what kinds of hijinks Ethiopia can get into.Of course, the same is true of Europa Universalis III, which would make EUIV redundant were it not for the many welcome changes the latter makes to the series. While not the most significant change, the implementation of automation may be the most welcome, because it greatly improves gameplay while reducing your clicking work. Consider the act of improving relations with neighbors: in EUIII, the process involved selecting a country and giving the order to improve relations, sacrificing a diplomat for an incremental improvement in relations, and then repeating the process ad infinitum. Now, diplomats are permanent characters who remain in Vilna for as long as it takes to make the Lithuanians love you before returning home for their next assignment. Greater Montenegro's reign of terror is about to begin.Colonists are treated in the same way: a colonist enters a territory and convinces people to move there until the area is large enough to support itself. If the colonist is run off by angry natives, he returns home. In previous incarnations of the series, you had to send multiple colonists to a territory, one at a time, and wait for the next one to spawn while hoping the natives didn't burn down the settlement in the meantime. Another example of automation making the game more enjoyable is the ability to order an army to seize the initiative and automatically hunt down any rebels that pop up. You'll have more fun when the AI takes care of chasing rebellious Ruthenians across the map.An even more profound and welcome change to gameplay is the addition of administrative, diplomatic, and military power, resources that replace EUIII's bureaucrats. These powers grow based on the administrative, diplomatic, and military stats of your monarch and her advisers. You can use these powers to increase your country's all-important stability rating, research technologies, build province improvements, slowly change the demographics of a province, and repress potential revolutionary movements. This element creates many new and interesting dilemmas. For example, do you pick an adviser based on a beneficial trait or to increase your power level? Do you spend power points to help build structures that will benefit your empire in the long run, or save up power to buy the next level of administrative, diplomatic, or military technology?Administrative, diplomatic, and military power also play a role in the revised ""ideas"" system. Previously, you could pick national ideas that would affect your empire, like tolerance of religious and ethnic minorities. Now, you have the option to unlock up to eight idea trees by increasing your administrative tech level. Each tree has seven ideas that can be unlocked with power points. For instance, there is a religious tree that benefits and enhances missionaries, an exploration tree that enables you to explore hidden areas of the map while also providing more colonists, and other trees focusing on areas like diplomacy, spycraft, and military thought. The huge number of ideas allows you to customize countries in numerous ways.You can now choose whether your military complex emphasizes quantity or quality (or both). Almost every country has a unique national ideas tree, and these bonuses are unlocked automatically as you go through the other trees. For instance, in addition to things like manpower bonuses, Russia's tree includes an idea that provides a free colonist and reveals nearby territory whenever a colony is completed, thus allowing Russia to colonize Siberia without investing in the exploration tree. Ethiopia's tree, meanwhile, makes reference to the beliefs that its royal dynasty is descended from King Solomon and that it has the Ark of the Covenant under lock and key.Additional changes have been made to affect how trade, combat, and balance-of-power politics work. The old trade system involved sending merchants off to peddle their wares at centers of trade. Now, there are trade routes, and merchants are used to direct trade into your country and siphon off some of the profits from global trade. Careful placement of merchants coupled with control over important trade goods can be extremely helpful for your country's economy. In terms of combat improvements, the biggest is that AI armies no longer bounce around like Ping-Pong balls or retreat behind your lines and besiege your provinces when they've been defeated. Instead, retreating armies try to make it to the nearest ""safe"" province, like an allied capital, to lick their wounds. Sometimes an army's morale is utterly shattered, completely immobilizing it for a time as the officers try to restore order. That's an opportune time to strike and achieve a decisive victory.Unfortunately, this otherwise excellent game is marred by some technical problems and bugs.With regard to the balance-of-power system, in previous games, the entire world would seemingly gang up on a would-be Genghis Khan. Now, AI-controlled states form more reasonable military coalitions to keep an aggressor in check. For example, there is no reason for England or France to care if the Russians are beating up the remnants of the old Mongol khanates in Asia. The other khanates, however, form a coalition against Russian imperialism, and Russia's other neighbors, like Poland and Lithuania, might join in. A major difference between coalitions and the normal alliances in EUIV is that members of a coalition may not make a separate peace treaty with the targeted country. Thankfully, coalition members are public knowledge, and you can make them break up with skillful diplomacy.EUIV is built around a modified version of Crusader Kings II's new graphics engine and is the most attractive game that Paradox has developed. Of particular note is the terrain map, which looks fantastic and is filled with details. This map features lakes that slowly freeze over during winter. You can catch what appear to be trade caravans passing through your provinces, birds flying overhead, and whales the size of Taiwan. The units also look much better than in previous iterations of the series and are more diverse, with different appearances based on military technology, culture group, and whether the army is mostly composed of infantry, artillery, or cavalry.The most important graphical element in EUIV is its user interface. There are tons of tooltips that help explain why your missionary takes decades to convert a province, what the dice rolls during combat mean, and how many levels of military research you need to unlock before you can build more powerful units. These tooltips are desperately needed, because EUIV is a complex game, and its tutorial does little to prepare you for the challenges to come.Veni, vidi, vici…and then continue a Crusader Kings II game in EUIV.Unfortunately, this otherwise excellent game is marred by some technical problems and bugs. A particularly irksome and possibly game-ending bug involves coalitions. Members of a coalition may not make a separate peace and neither can vassals. However, a vassal can become the leader of a coalition. As a result, you might get stuck in a war with multiple countries that simply never ends because you cannot negotiate with the coalition's leader, causing increasing unrest at home from war weariness even if you control every enemy province.A recent patch doesn't help EUIV's performance, sadly. While the game is very stable, it tends to lag a lot. To be fair, there is a lot of number crunching going on as the game takes into account the daily situation of hundreds of countries, computing how many troops China is building, whether Prussia is going to take a loan to finance a war, and what Suleiman the Magnificent ate for breakfast. Still, the lag and the bugs detract from what would otherwise be a solid gaming experience. These issues aren't deal breakers, but they are certainly disappointing. Think globally; act locally.Europa Universalis IV is every bit as epic as its predecessors, and the changes that it has made are overwhelmingly positive. For instance, the diplomatic, administrative, and military power aspect is more fun than the older system of bureaucrats and sliders restricting your actions. Also, the automation of mechanics like rebel repression and colonization wipes away the most tedious aspects of the series. The technical issues and bugs are a major disappointment, but they pale in comparison to the depth and diversity of the gameplay. It's a game where you can bribe cardinals to become the pope's true master, turn the Holy Roman Empire into a unified state, become shogun of Japan, prevent Poland from being partitioned, convert Eurasia to Buddhism by force, or turn Oman into a superpower. Europa Universalis IV easily provides hundreds of hours of gameplay for those who develop a taste for it. There are very few games remotely like this out there, making it a must-get game for people who want to ""fix"" history.
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529,Puppeteer ,9," Wildly imaginative and brimming with style, Puppeteer is a fantastic platformer that's heaps of fun for kids and adults alike.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/2/6/2228926-box_puppeteer.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/puppeteer-review/1900-6414077/,pos,"
Puppeteer is one of those rare experiences that can lift the weight of the world from your shoulders, draw you into its world, and make you feel like a kid again--and if you're lucky enough to have kids, watch them be amazed. This is a game that fills every frame with something new, something beautiful, and something so wonderfully imaginative that you can practically hear your childhood self squealing with glee as you play.At its heart, Puppeteer is a platformer. But it toys with genre conventions and styles in a way that makes it far more unique than the average side-scroller: think Mario meets Shadow of the Colossus by way of Monty Python, and you're on the right track. The story, for instance, is classic fairy-tale fare, full of witches and princesses, and evil villains for you to vanquish. But it's got a deliciously dark, Ghibli-esque twist to it, expertly sidestepping any slushy guff.It tells the tale of Kutaro, a boy whose soul is whisked away to the dark side of the moon by the maleficent Moon Bear King and placed inside the body of a puppet to serve as a slave. Even worse for poor Kutaro, in a fit of rage, the Moon Bear King tears off his head and throws his headless body into the castle dungeon. What follows is a grand adventure that takes you to the darkest depths of the ocean, to snowman-filled mountaintops, and through the dusty plains of the Old West, to name but a few settings.But it's the way that it's told and presented that really grabs you, mixing as it does the colourful world of Japanese puppet theatre, plays, and musicals to fantastic effect. Everything is viewed as if you were in a theatre, each level preceded by the opening of a red curtain and rapturous applause from the viewing audience. Sets are deftly dropped into place, spotlights shine down on the lead characters, and there are cheers, boos, and sympathetic cries from the audience as they react to a well-timed jump or a nasty fall, all of which is set to the sounds of a majestic musical score.It's all so charming and so vividly realised that it creates a sense of atmosphere that's hard not to fall in love with. The characters, too, are just as loveable, thanks to some stellar writing and even better voice work, with actors who deliver their lines with a delightfully over-the-top gusto. Naturally, there's plenty of comedy to go along with it.Puppeteer's charms are more than skin deep, and it's just as inventive with its sharp platforming as it is with its presentation.Sometimes it's just simple slapstick as the White Witch slaps Kutaro around with a magical fork. Other times it's the narrator who brings the laughs as he goes off on a tangent about the perils of dating or suddenly breaks into melodramatic announcer mode. Journey into the ocean, and you find a familiar-looking sea king, along with some mermaid daughters who are all too happy to burst into a suitably cheesy Disney-style song, much to the dismay of the feisty pixie Picarina.But Puppeteer's charms are more than skin deep, and it's just as inventive with its sharp platforming as it is with its presentation. Because Kutaro has lost his head, you need to find new ones pronto, each of which is imbued with a special, often completely bonkers, power. Grab the hamburger head, and you can turn a simple sandwich into a bouncy burger that lets you reach an impossibly high platform.Put on the dinosaur head, and you can transform a single stegosaurus into a whole herd of the beasts, which creates a shortcut through the level as they trample over enemies. Better yet, slap on the spider head and watch as a giant arachnid whisks you off to a bonus stage where you bounce off abdomens to collect extra shards of gold.You can hold only three heads at a time, though, so managing which ones to keep and which ones to discard is important, particularly if you don't want to miss out on the opportune moment to unleash their special powers. Helping you to hunt down more heads is a cheerful sidekick, initially in the form of the flying cat YinYang, whom you move independently of Kutaro using the right analogue stick to uncover secrets. You can also enlist the help of a second player, which is particularly valuable during fast-paced sections or for the less dextrous among you, although you'll both end up fighting over control of the lead character.You can have as much fun hunting down heads as you can finishing a level, and since some bonus stages require heads from completely different areas, they do a great job of encouraging you to revisit older levels. Heads also act as life points for Kutaro, which can make it tricky to hang onto them for too long: get struck by an enemy or fall on a set of spikes, and your head flies off into the air, giving you just a few seconds to grab it before losing it for good.Things get really interesting when Kutaro finds Calibrus, a magical pair of scissors that serve both as a means to kill enemies and as a mode of transportation. At first you're given simple tasks such as having to cut through a piece of cloth to access a new area, or slice across a web to free an object trapped within. Soon, though, you're using Calibrus to traverse huge chasms by chopping through floating streams of paper leaves, deftly guiding Kutaro along their squiggly path through the air to make it to safety. Miss a chop, and Kutaro falls back to earth with an almighty thud, to a round of unsympathetic boos from the audience.Cut through stitches in the environment and you zip along at breakneck speeds across the likes of old highways, the back of a mighty dragon, or even the constellations of outer space. There are objects to avoid along the way too, requiring some deftly timed jumps. Other powers include a knight's shield that lets you deflect enemy attacks; a luchador mask that gives you the ability to stomp and to push and pull objects, which is used to great effect in the Wild West levels as you move whole buildings to solve simple puzzles; a hook discovered on board a pirate boat that lets you undo screws and pull bolts from objects like cannons to fire them; and a ninja mask that lets you throw bombs at hapless enemies and blow up bits of scenery to uncover new areas.Taken separately, these abilities are already a lot of fun, but combined, they're absolutely wonderful. You might have to pull the hook on a cannon to release a puff of paper smoke, which you climb using Calibrus in order to drop a bomb into the open mouth of an unsuspecting enemy. Or you might have to zip along a seam, cut along some fluffy clouds, and then perform a dizzying dive back to earth using a superpowered stomp attack to unlock a new area. It's all brilliantly put together, with the excellent level design ensuring that you're always using your abilities to their fullest, and constantly kept on your toes.That excellence continues into the boss battles against the Moon Bear King's deputy generals, which are some of the most enjoyable to be found in a platformer. No two bosses are the same, and while there's a certain amount of pattern learning to be done, battles are far more involved than the standard three-stomps-to-victory routine. They're also far bigger than you might be used to in platformers, with a grand sense of scale more akin to God of War than Mario.Take the battle against General Snake, for instance. His gargantuan size means you have to traverse along his wiggly back and skim through his stomach acid on the back of a rat before chopping him apart at the seams and indulging in a ludicrously over-the-top quick-time event across the desert sands that would be worthy of any great action game. Later battles see you using the knight's shield to deflect enemy attacks, cutting through vast swaths of cloth and unleashing your luchador stomp, and using your hook to grab incoming rockets from a pair of scurvy pirates and launch them straight back. There's even an appearance from a certain giant crustacean later on that makes for a very humorous battle.Puppeteer is a little quirky, perhaps even a little insane in places, but unashamedly so. And you know what? It works brilliantly.And if that all sounds a little out there to you, then yes, Puppeteer is a little quirky, perhaps even a little insane in places, but unashamedly so. And you know what? It works brilliantly. There's just so much to see and do, and so much joy to be had doing it. You can see the love that has gone into making this game in the gorgeous artwork, admire the attention to detail that ensures every level offers up something new for you to explore, and marvel at the imagination that has gone into crafting such a loveable set of characters and such a delightful story. Start to finish, this is a dazzling game.


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530,Kerbal Space Program ,9," Kerbal Space Program is a monumental, exhilarating, and frustrating gaming achievement worthy of admiration.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/1/6/2227416-logo.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kerbal-space-program-review/1900-6416128/,pos,"
Update: We've updated our review to reflect the changes made to the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Kerbal Space Program. Please scroll to the bottom of the story to find the updated content. - PB, 7/26/2016, 12:42 PM PDTTwo astronauts are dead. And they represent one of my greatest achievements in a video game.Of course it's terrible that the two Kerbals--an entire species of little green alien men who feel like an unholy combination of the Minions from Despicable Me and the Irken race from Invader Zim--are dead. I managed to keep them alive through disaster after disaster, spending hours ensuring to their survival in the cold black of space. Test missions were flown; probes collected scientific data; rockets would refuse to leave the ground and would explode or launch and then immediately tip over because the balance was wrong. These two died based on the collective knowledge of a thousand failures. And it was beautiful because they died crashing into the Moon. Sorry, the Mun. It doesn't really cover it to say that Kerbal Space Program is a space sim. For one thing, no matter how serious things get, you're still playing in a world of little green cartoons, which the game never really reconciles with its overwhelming physical realism the further along you go. But for all the things that feel brain-bending and sciencey, there's still a mild sense of approachability, like the fact that trying to plot a flight path that puts you in orbit with a different planet is essentially a really touchy and precise game of Bop It. The game surpasses that categorization because of that sense of constant discovery and innovation. Making a mistake never felt like a punishment, as if the game had placed an insurmountable obstacle in front of me and laughed as I flailed wildly at it. It felt like growth. Failure is a teacher here, one that challenges you and doesn't compromise by handing you all the answers. But it is most certainly a teacher that wants nothing more than for you to find enlightenment.As such, trying to nutshell Kerbal Space Program isn't a matter of straightforward ""You win if you get here"" goals. As far as I can tell, the game never stops, and an entire solar system waits out there to be explored. What KSP values above all is perseverance. Although all your scientists and pilots are little green men, the game is intrinsically human. You advance simply by being bold enough to try reaching a little higher, making your species' sphere of influence just a little larger with every attempt. If you manage to break the world's speed record, you're ready to try reaching the upper atmosphere and recording how the air is up there. If you get there, then maybe we can put a satellite even further. If the satellite can get up there, maybe an astronaut can. If we can reach space, we can reach our closest planetary neighbor. All that matters is that the experience is never wasted. Whether you transmit the knowledge using an antenna you attached to your spacecraft or you manage to land safely and the data can be recovered manually, Mission Control receives the experience, shown under a blanket stat of ""Science"" in-game. If the mission crashes and burns horribly, it is worthwhile as long as you recognize why.Sitting in a tin can, far above the world.Unsurprisingly, most of your time in-game is spent in the spaceport on a constant trial-and-error mode trying to build a craft that can do exactly what's required for the mission at hand. The game isn't going to blow your mind visually or aurally--land, sea, space are all relatively textureless and sparse, even with all the specs cranked up, and the sounds are about the same, with the soundtrack topping out at ""playfully quirky"" instead of awe-inspiring. All the horsepower has gone into making the fine kinetic details almost terrifyingly intricate. Virtually every aspect of a spaceship's design is accounted for here, with literally hundreds of design options and moving parts to assemble--from fuel tanks and rockets to the heat shields for re-entry and the decoupling devices for boosters. And you’d better take all of it into consideration or sure as you're born, it will crash and burn before you even see the stars. It's daunting, but starting small and adding new tech onto successful structures is where joy is found. The actual crafting process is dirt simple, however, because every part is basically attached to your craft like Legos. There's a slew of fine-tuning tools available for the more meticulous player, but it takes a long time before they become necessary evils.Kerbal Space Program offers straightforward Easy-to-Hard difficulty settings, but in reality, the real difficulty setting is almost allegorical. The Sandbox mode opens up every available part in the game so you can just fool around and make the most elaborate, insane designs imaginable. The Science mode allows you to earn points for every new milestone achievement; you can spend those points on the Research and Development skill tree, which is where you earn bigger and better parts to use. The Career mode is a full-blown space program experience where money is, in fact, an object and good public opinion, public donations, government contracts, and farmed-out tech are required to before you can even afford to send astronauts on a flight. This is the most ""gamey"" it gets, with contracts representing clearly defined missions you can perform to get the most out of every flight. It's slow going, but it’s possibly the most satisfying because every new advancement is earned.You think if you spin the camera, there's a little green Michael Bay sitting behind it?Both the Science and Sandbox modes feature pre-made spacecraft you can take out into the final frontier, but while it is a huge relief to not have to put in the clearly elaborate wrench time to build anything this complex, there's something a little hollow about just having these accomplishments tossed at you instead of reaching them yourself. The game almost makes up for this because even with a few extensive tutorials tossed in, getting a ship to the Mun involves a hundred tiny decisions you won't realize you’re making because you don’t have to make them time and time again. The stages of every launch have to be programmed in, sufficient fuel has to be stocked to make it where you're going and back, and ship stability has to be minded (even with the SAS feature, which is there for the express purpose of keeping your ship in balance). The blue navigation ball at the bottom of your screen is your best friend in the world, and ignoring it is a fool's act. Career mode is harder yet infinitely more satisfying when you find success. Even when you forge the most ridiculous-looking rocket, it’s a wonder of engineering as long as it breaches Kerbal's atmosphere and doesn't explode. True human achievement, in life as in this game, works at a snail's pace. It can't be given.Once you have your spacecraft, the real struggle begins. And your opponent is gravity.Gravity keeps your craft from lifting off when you've loaded it down with too much rocket fuel. It tilts your ship as it takes off if the thrust is even a tiny angle off-kilter. You fight it in the upper atmosphere as you try to put spacecraft in orbit instead of watching them fall helplessly back to the ground. You will charge against it as you try to create a new orbital path to get to a new planet, and all the tutorials do is teach you the basic principles. They don't tell you what parts you need to make these things any easier in practice (in case you haven't figured it out, the tutorials are kinda useless).You advance simply by being bold enough to try reaching a little higher, making your species' sphere of influence just a little larger with every attempt.But this is simply nature in action. Unlike, say, Surgeon Simulator or one of the new breed of indie titles with sloppy, inebriate physics, KSP's natural laws feel like a natural part of the universe’s uncaring nature instead of the developer’s attempt to stymie progress. It's up to you to use the tech at your disposal to break nature's shackles and crack the science necessary. This is often an arduous, aggravating process, where hours slip away as you try to find the one flaw in an insanely elaborate series of maneuvers that’s causing your missions to fail. The tiny moments when something clicks into place and one more of those chains breaks are the most breathtaking and gratifying of all. Once again, there's still even further you can go.Kerbal Space Program was a beta release for years before this, its ""final"" version. Funny enough, even after all that time, bugs are still scattered throughout, such as ships that are no longer visible, orbital paths turning twitchy and changing randomly even as your ship follows the one you set, and button presses not registering as you float out of your ship . But these are small compared to what feels like the mass achievements of thousands of minds bringing their expertise to the table through the hundreds of tweaks done over the years to the clearly passionate, lovingly crafted mods, which are easily accessible and promoted in-game. Even NASA's gotten in on it with a few of their own hypothetical scenarios pre-loaded in the game from the get-go. On the micro and macro levels, Kerbal Space Program's greatest magic trick is giving the player a feeling of togetherness, that we all have the same curiosity required to transcend our limitations and that regardless of how Herculean the stakes, the constant idea is always ""it can be done.""Liar. Nothing in this game is child's play.Instead of altering the layout of Kerbal's UI for consoles, Squad attempted to impart of all relevant keyboard and mouse functionality onto controllers. As a result, text and icons are microscopic on a big-screen TV, and though the UI can be scaled up in size, you sacrifice valuable screen real estate in the process. If ever there has been a perfect excuse to implement second screen capabilities, this would have been it. Most of the hard work in Kerbal Space Program—building craft, moving parts around, turning flight controls on or off--requires more precision than either the Dual Shock 4 or Xbox One controller offer.A mouse arrow can be turned on and off with a click of the left analog stick, and in use, it excels at inputting large sweeping motions, but not fine movements--at least PS4 players have the option to use motion controls for marginally better cursor control. Surgical procedures like plotting orbits can be done, with time, effort, and trial-and-error, but a game that already has a Sisyphean learning curve certainly didn't need anything to create more work for the player.You will fail at this game. It will demoralize you and it will stress you out, but, more often than not, it will soothe, quiet, and inspire you. Innovative muscles will be stretched here that aren't stretched very often by games, and more complex moments require a sort of zen beyond being simply twitch-ready for a surprise attack. Even failure imparts a lesson. No matter how big or small the achievement, anything else that can be done is limited only by your imagination. Even with its cartoonish humor and quirks, Kerbal Space Program has an almost sacred respect for the tiny miracles involved in space travel, and even at its most difficult, it deserves that respect in return.


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531,The Walking Dead: 400 Days ,9, 400 Days is a wonderfully written adventure and the high point of the Walking Dead game franchise.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2321659-81t-lqagnsl._sl1500_.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-walking-dead-400-days-review/1900-6411105/,pos,"
  It's probably natural to assume you'd be disappointed with The Walking Dead: 400 Days. After all, this is a tide-you-over adventure intended mainly to fill in the long summer months between seasons one and two of Telltale Games' spellbinding take on Robert Kirkman's award-winning comics about the zombie apocalypse. Fortunately, that's an assumption 400 Days quickly proves wrong. While this game may be brief, zipping along so fast that you can't get to know any of the characters as well as you'd like, the writing and voice acting are both absolutely brilliant, and the soul-wrenching moral choices come so fast and furious that you feel emotionally exhausted by the time you're done.   Hopping into a car with a lunatic might not be the best of the choices you can make in 400 Days.   The structure is different from that of the first season of Telltale's Walking Dead episodes, more akin to a collection of linked short stories than the novel-length saga of Lee and Clementine. The story pivots around a highway truck stop and restaurant somewhere down in Georgia. Vignettes recount the travails of five different characters over the first 400 days since the dead got up for a snack. These mini-episodes can be played in any order you choose, so you bounce back and forth chronologically between moments like witnessing the beginning of the end in a prison bus and being terrorized in a truck by a man driven crazy by 184 days of zombie fun.    All of these stories stand on their own as particularly horrific snapshots of what it is to have survived the end of the world. Every episode centers on one or more impossible choices that are even more unforgiving than those in the first season episodes. The whole game is loaded with heart-wrenching choices, and the short-story structure and brief running time--90 minutes at most--also means that the game works you over like a speed bag, rabbiting you with one gut-check after another. By the time that the game ends, you're worn out.     All of the individual stories come together in the end, too, recounting how a group of survivors got together. The characters here are given real depth, so you come to care about the entire cast even though you're spending no more than 20 minutes with the leading actors in each story. Dialogue is never forced, to the point where you often feel like you're eavesdropping on the lives of real people.   There are a couple of gun-happy scenes in 400 Days, but the real fireworks come when you're forced to make wrenching life-or-death decisions.   The lover's triangle story with Bonnie, Leland, and Dee is fantastic, and it's all built up through simple and direct dialogue. The chemistry between Bonnie and Leland is crafted through teasing conversation and a game of ""Would You Rather?"" that seems so natural that if it were in a movie, you would assume that the actors were ad-libbing lines and had been getting up close and personal off-set. The same goes for Wyatt and his buddy Eddie. A conversation in a little hatchback veers all over the map, from the crazy murder that just went down, to past girlfriends, to weed and flatulence; you can tell that these guys have a history together. Truck-driving Nate offers up a multifaceted and disturbing depiction of insanity. He's scarily unpredictable, one moment pleasantly friendly, the next a sadistic lunatic ready to execute an elderly pair for their belongings.    Even the good guys aren't entirely good in this zombie-infested world where morality is barely existent, and the writing brings this out in strong fashion. Two victims of a crazed killer, for instance, can't be seen as totally sympathetic, as they reveal themselves as abhorrent racists right before meeting their end. In earlier Walking Dead episodes, you were faced with questions like whether or not to loot a running station wagon of food. Here, the dilemmas are darker, and some of the bleakest and most pragmatic choices make sense in this grim reality. Killing a friend for a betrayal, and cutting off someone's leg and leaving him for zombie fodder, seem like prudent choices.    About the only drawback here is time, as you simply don't have enough of it to bond with any of these characters as strongly you did with Lee, Clem, Kenny, and the gang in season one of The Walking Dead. The writers have made as much of their limited minutes as possible, however. Instead of loading up the dialogue with dull exposition, a lot is left unsaid and unexplained. This makes for realistic characterizations and conversations; the ""less is more"" philosophy is pulled off brilliantly.   That nearsighted zombie wants Wyatt for his glasses.   Gameplay takes a backseat to the stories. There isn't much action at all:  Most of the time you just pick dialogue choices or make life-and-death calls that move the plot in one direction or another. Yet it's all gripping, in large part due to different settings. One moment you're alone on a foggy road looking for a guy you just ran over. Then you're in a truck late at night with a nut who might shoot you at any moment. Then you're in a pitch-dark cornfield fleeing from unknown goons with flashlights and guns. Still, there is virtually none of the quick-trigger zombie shooting or stomping that characterized Telltale's earlier Walking Dead episodes. The only way you could get killed here is if you accidentally drop your gamepad at an inopportune moment. This fits in with the story, really, which is much more about the threat posed by fellow human survivors than the threat posed by the zombies. But it's a change from what has gone on before.    Clementine may be nowhere to be found here, but 400 Days is nonetheless a strong entry in the Walking Dead series. It's short, but it packs a lot into every single minute of gameplay. While the game might seem like a cursory attempt to keep fans tided over until season two debuts later in 2013, it is actually one of the most imaginative, gripping, brutal, and best-written stories that you will experience all year.  
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532,The Walking Dead: 400 Days ,9, 400 Days is a wonderfully written adventure and the high point of the Walking Dead game franchise.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2321659-81t-lqagnsl._sl1500_.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-walking-dead-400-days-review/1900-6411106/,pos,"
  It's probably natural to assume you'd be disappointed with The Walking Dead: 400 Days. After all, this is a tide-you-over adventure intended mainly to fill in the long summer months between seasons one and two of Telltale Games' spellbinding take on Robert Kirkman's award-winning comics about the zombie apocalypse. Fortunately, that's an assumption 400 Days quickly proves wrong. While this game may be brief, zipping along so fast that you can't get to know any of the characters as well as you'd like, the writing and voice acting are both absolutely brilliant, and the soul-wrenching moral choices come so fast and furious that you feel emotionally exhausted by the time you're done.   Hopping into a car with a lunatic might not be the best of the choices you can make in 400 Days.   The structure is different from that of the first season of Telltale's Walking Dead episodes, more akin to a collection of linked short stories than the novel-length saga of Lee and Clementine. The story pivots around a highway truck stop and restaurant somewhere down in Georgia. Vignettes recount the travails of five different characters over the first 400 days since the dead got up for a snack. These mini-episodes can be played in any order you choose, so you bounce back and forth chronologically between moments like witnessing the beginning of the end in a prison bus and being terrorized in a truck by a man driven crazy by 184 days of zombie fun.    All of these stories stand on their own as particularly horrific snapshots of what it is to have survived the end of the world. Every episode centers on one or more impossible choices that are even more unforgiving than those in the first season episodes. The whole game is loaded with heart-wrenching choices, and the short-story structure and brief running time--90 minutes at most--also means that the game works you over like a speed bag, rabbiting you with one gut-check after another. By the time that the game ends, you're worn out.     All of the individual stories come together in the end, too, recounting how a group of survivors got together. The characters here are given real depth, so you come to care about the entire cast even though you're spending no more than 20 minutes with the leading actors in each story. Dialogue is never forced, to the point where you often feel like you're eavesdropping on the lives of real people.   There are a couple of gun-happy scenes in 400 Days, but the real fireworks come when you're forced to make wrenching life-or-death decisions.   The lover's triangle story with Bonnie, Leland, and Dee is fantastic, and it's all built up through simple and direct dialogue. The chemistry between Bonnie and Leland is crafted through teasing conversation and a game of ""Would You Rather?"" that seems so natural that if it were in a movie, you would assume that the actors were ad-libbing lines and had been getting up close and personal off-set. The same goes for Wyatt and his buddy Eddie. A conversation in a little hatchback veers all over the map, from the crazy murder that just went down, to past girlfriends, to weed and flatulence; you can tell that these guys have a history together. Truck-driving Nate offers up a multifaceted and disturbing depiction of insanity. He's scarily unpredictable, one moment pleasantly friendly, the next a sadistic lunatic ready to execute an elderly pair for their belongings.    Even the good guys aren't entirely good in this zombie-infested world where morality is barely existent, and the writing brings this out in strong fashion. Two victims of a crazed killer, for instance, can't be seen as totally sympathetic, as they reveal themselves as abhorrent racists right before meeting their end. In earlier Walking Dead episodes, you were faced with questions like whether or not to loot a running station wagon of food. Here, the dilemmas are darker, and some of the bleakest and most pragmatic choices make sense in this grim reality. Killing a friend for a betrayal, and cutting off someone's leg and leaving him for zombie fodder, seem like prudent choices.    About the only drawback here is time, as you simply don't have enough of it to bond with any of these characters as strongly you did with Lee, Clem, Kenny, and the gang in season one of The Walking Dead. The writers have made as much of their limited minutes as possible, however. Instead of loading up the dialogue with dull exposition, a lot is left unsaid and unexplained. This makes for realistic characterizations and conversations; the ""less is more"" philosophy is pulled off brilliantly.   That nearsighted zombie wants Wyatt for his glasses.   Gameplay takes a backseat to the stories. There isn't much action at all:  Most of the time you just pick dialogue choices or make life-and-death calls that move the plot in one direction or another. Yet it's all gripping, in large part due to different settings. One moment you're alone on a foggy road looking for a guy you just ran over. Then you're in a truck late at night with a nut who might shoot you at any moment. Then you're in a pitch-dark cornfield fleeing from unknown goons with flashlights and guns. Still, there is virtually none of the quick-trigger zombie shooting or stomping that characterized Telltale's earlier Walking Dead episodes. The only way you could get killed here is if you accidentally drop your gamepad at an inopportune moment. This fits in with the story, really, which is much more about the threat posed by fellow human survivors than the threat posed by the zombies. But it's a change from what has gone on before.    Clementine may be nowhere to be found here, but 400 Days is nonetheless a strong entry in the Walking Dead series. It's short, but it packs a lot into every single minute of gameplay. While the game might seem like a cursory attempt to keep fans tided over until season two debuts later in 2013, it is actually one of the most imaginative, gripping, brutal, and best-written stories that you will experience all year.  
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533,The Walking Dead: 400 Days ,9, 400 Days is a wonderfully written adventure and a strong entry in the Walking Dead game franchise.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2321659-81t-lqagnsl._sl1500_.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-walking-dead-400-days-review/1900-6411107/,pos,"
  It's probably natural to assume you'd be disappointed with The Walking Dead: 400 Days. After all, this is a tide-you-over adventure intended mainly to fill in the long summer months between seasons one and two of Telltale Games' spellbinding take on Robert Kirkman's award-winning comics about the zombie apocalypse. Fortunately, that's an assumption 400 Days quickly proves wrong. While this game may be brief, zipping along so fast that you can't get to know any of the characters as well as you'd like, the writing and voice acting are both absolutely brilliant, and the soul-wrenching moral choices come so fast and furious that you feel emotionally exhausted by the time you're done.   Hopping into a car with a lunatic might not be the best of the choices you can make in 400 Days.   The structure is different from that of the first season of Telltale's Walking Dead episodes, more akin to a collection of linked short stories than the novel-length saga of Lee and Clementine. The story pivots around a highway truck stop and restaurant somewhere down in Georgia. Vignettes recount the travails of five different characters over the first 400 days since the dead got up for a snack. These mini-episodes can be played in any order you choose, so you bounce back and forth chronologically between moments like witnessing the beginning of the end in a prison bus and being terrorized in a truck by a man driven crazy by 184 days of zombie fun.    All of these stories stand on their own as particularly horrific snapshots of what it is to have survived the end of the world. Every episode centers on one or more impossible choices that are even more unforgiving than those in the first season episodes. The whole game is loaded with heart-wrenching choices, and the short-story structure and brief running time--90 minutes at most--also means that the game works you over like a speed bag, rabbiting you with one gut-check after another. By the time that the game ends, you're worn out.     All of the individual stories come together in the end, too, recounting how a group of survivors got together. The characters here are given real depth, so you come to care about the entire cast even though you're spending no more than 20 minutes with the leading actors in each story. Dialogue is never forced, to the point where you often feel like you're eavesdropping on the lives of real people.   There are a couple of gun-happy scenes in 400 Days, but the real fireworks come when you're forced to make wrenching life-or-death decisions.   The lover's triangle story with Bonnie, Leland, and Dee is fantastic, and it's all built up through simple and direct dialogue. The chemistry between Bonnie and Leland is crafted through teasing conversation and a game of ""Would You Rather?"" that seems so natural that if it were in a movie, you would assume that the actors were ad-libbing lines and had been getting up close and personal off-set. The same goes for Wyatt and his buddy Eddie. A conversation in a little hatchback veers all over the map, from the crazy murder that just went down, to past girlfriends, to weed and flatulence; you can tell that these guys have a history together. Truck-driving Nate offers up a multifaceted and disturbing depiction of insanity. He's scarily unpredictable, one moment pleasantly friendly, the next a sadistic lunatic ready to execute an elderly pair for their belongings.    Even the good guys aren't entirely good in this zombie-infested world where morality is barely existent, and the writing brings this out in strong fashion. Two victims of a crazed killer, for instance, can't be seen as totally sympathetic, as they reveal themselves as abhorrent racists right before meeting their end. In earlier Walking Dead episodes, you were faced with questions like whether or not to loot a running station wagon of food. Here, the dilemmas are darker, and some of the bleakest and most pragmatic choices make sense in this grim reality. Killing a friend for a betrayal, and cutting off someone's leg and leaving him for zombie fodder, seem like prudent choices.    About the only drawback here is time, as you simply don't have enough of it to bond with any of these characters as strongly you did with Lee, Clem, Kenny, and the gang in season one of The Walking Dead. The writers have made as much of their limited minutes as possible, however. Instead of loading up the dialogue with dull exposition, a lot is left unsaid and unexplained. This makes for realistic characterizations and conversations; the ""less is more"" philosophy is pulled off brilliantly.   That nearsighted zombie wants Wyatt for his glasses.   Gameplay takes a backseat to the stories. There isn't much action at all:  Most of the time you just pick dialogue choices or make life-and-death calls that move the plot in one direction or another. Yet it's all gripping, in large part due to different settings. One moment you're alone on a foggy road looking for a guy you just ran over. Then you're in a truck late at night with a nut who might shoot you at any moment. Then you're in a pitch-dark cornfield fleeing from unknown goons with flashlights and guns. Still, there is virtually none of the quick-trigger zombie shooting or stomping that characterized Telltale's earlier Walking Dead episodes. The only way you could get killed here is if you accidentally drop your gamepad at an inopportune moment. This fits in with the story, really, which is much more about the threat posed by fellow human survivors than the threat posed by the zombies. But it's a change from what has gone on before.    Clementine may be nowhere to be found here, but 400 Days is nonetheless a strong entry in the Walking Dead series. It's short, but it packs a lot into every single minute of gameplay. While the game might seem like a cursory attempt to keep fans tided over until season two debuts later in 2013, it is actually one of the most imaginative, gripping, brutal, and best-written stories that you will experience all year.  
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534,Dark Souls 2 ,9," Dark Souls II is a terrific sequel and an amazing game in its own right, making every peek into the unknown a gut-wrenching thrill.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2841888-2506850-darksouls2.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-souls-2-review/1900-6415691/,pos,"
 If you were disappointed by the less-than-exemplary PC port of the original Dark Souls, you'll be glad to know that Dark Souls II for the PC fares far better, featuring graphical settings and resolution options that befit a proper PC game. Otherwise, Dark Souls II for the PC looks similar to its console counterparts, and its mouse and keyboard controls are comfortable and intuitive enough to make the game a good bet for PC players that don't own gamepads. All told, Dark Souls II is every bit the same superb game that appeared on console last month, and deserves respect for its diverse world and nail-biting challenge. - KV, 4/24/2014 15:00 PDTHow much of your humanity are you willing to give up for even the slightest chance of victory?Dark Souls II asks this question of you at every turn, encouraging you to press onward in spite of imminent death. And with each death, you lose a little of your humanity and become more hollow. Your maximum health slightly diminishes each time as well, eventually sinking to 50 percent of its full value, and yet as each sliver of humanity is sliced away, you heed the call to move onward. Eventually, you overcome the obstacle that stood between you and victory--that quartet of gargoyles swarming you on a rooftop, that arachnoid demon plunging poisonous pincers into your flesh, that disgusting mound of meat that defies description. You have triumphed! But your gain does not come without sacrifice. You have sworn, you have gasped, and you have sweated. You have forfeited your own humanity so you might collect the souls of the damned.Like Dark Souls and Demon's Souls before it, Dark Souls II is not just a fantasy role-playing adventure, but a cloud that hangs heavy over your head whenever you so much as think about it. These modern classics developed by From Software have rightfully earned a reputation for being brutally difficult, but their beauty is derived not solely from difficulty, but also from dread. Dark Souls II is not a survival horror game in the normal sense, but few games can make you this afraid to peer around the corner, while simultaneously curious as to what awaits you there. Death is so very beautiful in this game, for it comes at the hands of amazing beasts and warmongers: hulking armored knights, shimmering otherworldly invaders, and tendrils that rise out of black pools of poison. Sure, each death punctures your heart, but one of Dark Souls II's many gruesome pleasures is discovering new ways to die.Embrace the darkness, lest it consume you.The eerie blackness is front and center as you start up the game and enter the mysterious abode in front of you. Three old crones await you inside and ask you to customize your character and choose a class before venturing into the unknown. Like most of Dark Souls II's characters, these women offer vague advice and refer to events and concepts without filling in the details. The anxiety mounts as you weave in and out of the nearby caverns that fill you in on the basics of movement and combat. This area may teach you the fundamentals, but it also raises a number of questions. What are those odd voices you hear when you stand near the bird's nest that rests on a narrow ledge? What is the significance of the flame sconces scattered about that you are meant to set alight? How do you survive encounters with the monstrous ogres on the beach below that squish you like a measly bug when you draw near?Welcome to Drangleic, a world that is not quick to whisper its secrets to you, in a game that trusts you to find the answers for yourself.Welcome to Davy Jones' locker. This introduction is not as soul crushing as the original Dark Souls' opening, but that's just fine, for Dark Souls II offers you an early taste of hope, a feeling that was quite rare in its predecessors. That hope arrives by way of Majula, a gorgeous oasis that's as close to a home as you will find in the game. My first glimpse of Majula was a revelation. As I emerged from the nearby shadows, the glowing sun blinded me, and I stood in awe of the world opening up before me. Whenever the bleakness of Drangleic at large overwhelmed me, I was glad to return to this hub for an emotional refresh.Majula is more akin to Demon's Souls' Nexus than to Dark Souls' Firelink Shrine. It is your central hub of operations, and while it's mostly devoid of life when you first come upon it, it slowly fills out with the vendors you meet upon your travels, many of whom set up shop there. Your most important contact there, however, is the cloaked woman who allows you to level up in exchange for souls, the game's currency. But even Majula is not immune to mystery. There's an impossibly deep hole in the ground here, one that spells certain death if you fall into it. (Don't let it fool you; the boards that crisscross this passage may look high enough to provide a safe landing, but you will not survive that fall.) What's down there? Surely something valuable must lurk down there. Or something horrifying. You eventually make your way down, but Dark Souls II doesn't tell you when or how that may happen.Death is so very beautiful in this game, for it comes at the hands of amazing beasts and warmongers: hulking armored knights, shimmering otherworldly invaders, and tendrils that rise out of black pools of poison.Instead, Dark Souls II trusts you. As in its predecessors, there are no waypoints, and there is no quest log. Instead, you simply head out into Drangleic seeking to light primal bonfires and thus restore some dignity to this decrepit land. The only way to defeat the defiant creatures that guard the bonfires, however, is to grow stronger by murdering enemies and collecting their souls, which you then spend on new levels, new armor, and other trinkets that strengthen your resolve in battle. If you've played the earlier Souls games, you should take to the combat quickly. You feel each swing of your axe, each stab with your spear, and each fireball you lob. Timing is key: every action leaves you vulnerable, so you must pay close attention to the rhythm of your enemies' attacks and strike at the opportune moment. Managing your stamina is also vital to success. Every attack you launch uses up stamina, as does successfully blocking an attack. You can't simply flail about with abandon; this is not that kind of game, and not taking care during every encounter will get you killed.Watch your step: that undead soldier is not your biggest threat. Not that you shouldn't expect death. Dark Souls II is built around your repeated demise. When that inevitable moment comes, you drop all the souls you were carrying and must retrieve them if you don't want to lose them permanently. You get only one chance to get them back, for dying before you reach them eliminates them from the world forever. Of course, this mechanic is nothing new: it's the same concept that powered both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, after all. But just as Dark Souls represented a structural change over Demon's Souls, so too does Dark Souls II over its predecessor.Some of the differences are noticeable early on, though their benefits aren't always immediately clear. I was not sure how I felt about one such change: the limited enemy respawns. Each time you die or rest at a bonfire, the world is refreshed and the standard defeated foes respawn. Or at least, that's how it used to happen. In Dark Souls II, there comes a point when many local enemies don't respawn anymore, allowing you freedom to progress with fewer obstacles in your way. It's true that infinite respawns encouraged grinding, particularly when the enemies you faced dropped important items. But that repetition also instilled a bizarre connection between player and game. I can still clearly remember, for instance, exactly how to progress through Dark Souls' Undead Parish--where each enemy is, what attacks it will use, and what precarious drop-offs I must keep a lookout for. When I first encountered the limited respawn system, I worried that the sequel had lost a vital element that would keep Dark Souls II from commandeering my waking and sleeping thoughts.How much of your humanity are you willing to give up for even the slightest chance of victory?As it turns out, I shouldn't have worried. The grinding opportunities are still there, and there are in-game items that force enemies in a given region to begin respawning again (and make them more powerful, to boot). Dark Souls II's hook isn't the endless cycle of enemy death and resurrection, however, but the promise of new and exciting places to explore, and new and exciting foes to face. And that hook is supported by any number of subtle changes to the formula. For example, once you activate a bonfire, you can warp to it from any other bonfire without having to pass through perilous places over and over again. Again, I didn't immediately take to this change, but once I discovered just how vast Drangleic was--it's decidedly bigger than Dark Souls' Lordran--I embraced the structural tweaks.Even playing offline doesn't immunize you against invasion.These changes might not have worked had Dark Souls II not made discovery such a thrill, but with each new area comes a new wondrous vista and a new challenge to overcome. The early forests and ruins are very Dark Souls, but the intricate architecture and carefully planned enemy locations make even familiar-looking environments fresh and unique. The more progress you make, however, the more unusual the settings become, and the more you need to consider new methods of approach. Suddenly, undead freaks are flinging themselves to the ground and exploding, and so you must hasten your rhythm. You walk through an archway and into the thickest fog imaginable, where you cannot lock on to the ghostly shimmers that attack you. Poison rains from the sky, bedeviled urns curse you when you linger near, and anthropomorphic tortoises stop, drop, and roll all over your puny body. Dark Souls II wants to kill you, but the cycle of death and rebirth is worth it if it means finding the royal ring that lets you open that giant door and discover what new and wonderful lands lie beyond it.Those lands are incredibly striking. Given reports of Dark Souls II's new engine, I was disappointed by the game's lighting, which was flatter than I had hoped, thus rendering my torch less vital for providing dynamic light than it might have otherwise been. But to fixate for too long on this single visual element sells the fantastic art design short. Make your way past Harvest Valley's poisonous pools--and the fantastic monstrosities that fire orbs of darkness at you--and you can only marvel at all of the windmills that lie before you. Of course, this is Drangleic and not the Netherlands; those windmills are not quaint landmarks, but harbingers of disease and death. Then there's Iron Keep, which takes lava levels to a whole new height of fiery doom. There are very occasional frame rate issues that intrude on the grim elegance, but nothing on par with Dark Souls' Blighttown struggles.Poison rains from the sky, bedeviled urns curse you when you linger near, and walking tortoises stop, drop, and roll all over your puny body.And so Dark Souls II is hard--but is it harder than the original? No. I certainly did my share of shouting while playing through Dark Souls II, pitting my bastard sword against Drangleic's powerful protectors, but nothing caused me controller-flinging frustration the way Dark Souls' Ornstein and Smough did. Nor did I ever snarl and growl the way I did when making my way through the original game's Sen's Fortress, let alone facing Demon's Souls' red dragon. But don't overestimate any rumors that Dark Souls II isn't a great challenge. Trudging my way through shin-deep water while avoiding nearby mages' magical homing missiles was not easy. I yelled when I slipped into a drop-off while focused on the mean wizards, and cursed when sea dwellers swiped me from behind while I blocked oncoming attacks. And then, finally, when I reached the foggy door that led to a new area, I was able to breathe--at least until I realized there was a gross boss monster behind that door.I must give credit to Dark Souls II for making combat feel as fair as it does. The Souls games have always given you the tools to succeed, but while playing the newest entry, I was impressed by how it balanced new challenges with subtle ways to help you succeed. Sometimes, the path to success is relatively obvious, like using a lever to dunk baddies in boiling lava, or luring an armored turtle under a blade and watching the makeshift guillotine slice the half-shelled villain in two. Other possibilities are so subtle as to be obtuse, rewarding thorough investigation with an unexpected boon. Is poison complicating a battle against an evil queen? Is darkness inhibiting your ability to lock on to a pouncing behemoth? There might be some help out there, just hidden from view. Dark Souls II trusts you to find it--or if not, to overcome without it.Burn, baby, burn.Just as before, help comes from other players as well as from the game itself. Every Dark Souls II player is intertwined in a comforting web of ambiguous communication. As before, you see the spirits of other players as they journey through their own copies of the grotesque wilderness. You teach them (or mislead them) by forming messages out of predetermined phrases and leaving them on the ground for others to spot. You even teach them with the mere act of dying, leaving a bloodstain that others might touch to witness your ghost reenact the last precious seconds of your life. And if you feel truly cooperative, you can offer your services to other players, who can then summon you in for assistance with a troublesome boss.Bigger isn't always better. You can also hinder other players by invading their worlds, just as before, though certain additions to online play keep battles more dynamic than ever. The notification that you have been invaded is still a stomach-churning event, as is the first sight of the red phantom that represents the other player. But your invader is not necessarily invulnerable to the undead soldiers that populate Drangleic--not if you use a particular item designed to make monsters turn on your human enemies. Luring an invader into a trap--look out for the creature with the scythe!--is an absolute delight, though you need to make sure you have your wits about you: the only thing scarier than seeing your evil intruder is not seeing him.There's so much more to talk about with Dark Souls II. There is the fantastic stretch near the end of the game that fleshes out the story by involving you in grander battles than you would expect from this series. Then there are the covenants--fellowships that bond you with other players and give you more tools to assist or annihilate each other. Joining one covenant allows other players to come to your aid should you be invaded; joining another lets you battle against characters from the original Dark Souls. How some of these covenants may change the very feel of the game is still unclear at this early stage, but having joined the Bell Keeper covenant, I look forward to being summoned to other worlds and preventing others from reaching the tops of their belfries and sounding out the bell that sways there.Dark Souls II is loaded with secrets and surprises, and even though I have finished the game once, there are so many elements I am still uncovering. I may not have yet unveiled all there is to know about this beastly game, even after 80 hours of play, but I do know this: I will be adventuring through Drangleic for many months to come, sure to be haunted nightly by the disturbing gazes of the faceless titans that tenderize my flesh with their two-ton hammers.


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535,Dark Souls II: Crown of the Ivory King ,9," Dark Souls II, in all its epic designs, fittingly concludes in the harshness of winter.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2841888-2506850-darksouls2.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-souls-ii-crown-of-the-ivory-king-review/1900-6415909/,pos,"
Eleum Loyce, the setting of Dark Souls II: Crown of the Ivory King, is the first location in a Souls game that I would want to visit. Ignoring the cursed creatures who want nothing better than to kill me, the unreachable frozen expanse in the horizon renews my craving for a Nordic vacation or a wintery trek through a frosted New England forest. And as foreign as Eleum Loyce is in relation to Dark Souls II's kingdom of Drangleic, it is the one locale out of all the downloadable environs that is most relatable in real world terms. It involves a centerpiece of a castle that's not much different from the ruins found in the early part of the main game. This callback does not alone make Crown of the Ivory King a fitting bookend to the odyssey that is Dark Souls II, but this third and final DLC is nonetheless an exquisite way to end the journey.Even with the Aztec-inspired temple in Crown of the Sunken King, the oppressively dark and dank look of the first downloadable adventure conveyed environmental continuity with the equally gloomy lands of the main game. Same goes for the Crown of the Old Iron King and its visually thematic connection to Iron Keep. I love the sense of cohesion within these first two episodes, and I adore the sense of detachment within the frigid lands of Crown of the Ivory King.It's cold. It's lonely. It's Eleum Loyce.The sheer hostility of snow culminates by about the third hour of Crown of the Ivory King, where you're practically walking through a blizzard. Eleum Loyce is one of the more dynamic lands in the series, one that makes backtracking worthwhile. Solve the mystery of the Ivory King, and treasures once hidden in the snow are thawed out for the taking. This is not just an ordinary, obligatory ice level; snow and ice create fitting variables and escalate what is an already challenging experience. Changes in movement through the snow are subtle, the differences noticeable but never drastic, and enemies are equally hampered.The game is more than plentiful in enemy variety, though Crown of the Ivory King still features the occasional reskin. Nevertheless, for every familiar Flexile Sentry there's something more unusual, like the Rampart Hedgehog. I'm especially enamored with the Frozen Reindeer, a merciless creature that made me think of an evil version of Yakul, the noble, mystical elk in Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. The boss battles of Crown of the Ivory King exemplify the two dominant encounter types of Dark Souls II: the manageable duels against enemies who are slightly larger than you, and the exploratory puzzle-based battles. The riddle of the Ivory King is an exploratory puzzle, one that introduces a new way to do battle. As with some elements of Dark Souls II, explaining further would ruin the sense of discovery and reward, but let's just say that you are not alone.This is not just an ordinary, obligatory ice level; snow and ice create fitting variables and escalate what is an already challenging experience.As with the Frozen Reindeer, there is imagination at work with the Ivory King and his pets. And he is a cat lover! After the boss rats and overabundance of knights in the main game, the lethal and regal presence of the king's phantomlike tigers makes for a welcome change of pace, adding to the sense of finality to Dark Souls II. These ghostly felines are as otherworldly as any of the exotic Souls bosses that have come before them. However intimidating or unintimidating these pets might be, they can be dealt in the same way you've dealt with other four legged beasts in the series.By conforming to the mold of most Dark Souls II bosses, Crown of the Ivory King offer comfort in providing much of what you expect. As much as continual roll-dodging has come to represent the unintentionally lighthearted side of the Souls games, it's a popular defensive choice for a reason. Still, it's never as gratifying as standing your ground with well-timed fencing-inspired melee attacks, offensive moves that are wholly complemented by satisfying blocks with your shield.Based on the setting alone, Eleum Loyce could have easily been the main area for a conceivable Dark Souls III, not something I could say about the Iron King or Sunken King expansions, as great as they are. And if any one game series effectively encapsulates the cliche of the journey being more important than the destination, it's this one. If you need a reminder, look no further than the fanfare-free ending to Dark Souls II. The finale is not so much a payoff for 100 hours of enduring trials and heartache, but rather an interlude to be enjoyed before entering the fray once more in a new-game-plus. Crown of the Ivory King pulls off something unexpected: it feels like Dark Souls II's true payoff.The lethal and regal presence of the king's phantomlike tigers makes for a welcome change of pace.Crown of the Ivory King is a melancholic victory lap in the only way a Dark Souls game can present a finale. From Software congratulates you on your achievements by giving you even more, even harder goals, specifically, some of the hardest boss fights in all of Dark Souls II. It's not about the spectacle of a drawn out ending cutscene; the spectacle has always been about your own survival in battle, especially those victories when your lifebar cannot withstand one more hit. What could be a better Dark Souls II send-off than more punishment? The answer is ""nothing, fellow masochist.""
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536,Dragon Ball Z: Sagas ,3.8," Dragon Ball Z: Sagas is a short, ugly, slightly buggy, and brain-dead beat-'em-up.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/0/5/1/2216051-box_dbzs.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragon-ball-z-sagas-review/1900-6121809/,neg,"
  And things seemed to be going so well for Goku. Last year's Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 for the PlayStation 2 seemed like it could be the herald of a new era for games bearing the Dragon Ball Z license. No longer would the license carry the weight for shoddy gameplay and slapdash presentation! In fact, the games would be good enough that you wouldn't even have to like Dragon Ball Z to enjoy the games. But alas, Atari has quickly turned around and churned out Dragon Ball Z: Sagas, a short, ugly, slightly buggy, and brain-dead beat-'em-up that all but nullifies the good work of the Budokai games.   Sagas has the look and feel of a quick cash-in.   Hopefully, those same fans are ready for yet another rendition of the same Dragon Ball Z stories, starting with Raditz and ending with the Cell Games. These stories have been done to death, but this particular retelling is especially limp, relying on 30-second montages cut together from the DBZ cartoon to relay a whole season's worth of story. The last episode of Dragon Ball Z was aired in Japan almost a decade ago, and even most American Dragon Ball fans have moved on to Dragon Ball GT. It's time that Atari did the same.    The game couches the story in a series of arrow-straight beat-'em-up levels populated with enemies that even the game itself cannot avoid referring to as mindless. It's really a blessing in disguise that their patterns are so predictable, since your own attacks are pretty limited. You start off with basic punch, kick, and energy attacks, though you can eventually earn more combos and abilities by picking up coins found throughout the game. But, even once you've purchased all of the additional abilities, the gameplay still just feels sloppy and unresponsive, with bad collision detection and animation that regularly forces you to wait several seconds while a futile piece of animation plays out before you can continue fighting. Even the energy wave attack, which is a Dragon Ball Z signature that brings a sense of incredible power to the fights, feels hollow here.    You'll spend the lion's share of your time fighting saibamen, faceless Ginyu thugs, low-rent androids, and other fairly generic enemies before squaring off against characters you might actually recognize, like Vegeta, members of the Ginyu Force, and the Androids. These boss fights are definitely more challenging than the bulk of the game. However, simplistic movement and attack patterns and overly large life bars turn these fights into lengthy, joyless grinds. It's not a matter of if you'll beat the boss, but rather how long you'll have to suffer through the same basic tactics over and over again. Like any classic beat-'em-up worth its salt, Dragon Ball Z: Sagas includes a co-op mode for two players, which is a nice gesture, but one that is completely undercut by the fact that the game itself simply isn't any fun. That the gameplay isn't very engaging actually makes the fact that you can finish the game in just a few hours somewhat of a blessing in disguise.    To its credit, Sagas does a pretty serviceable job of creating environments and enemies that are evocative of the series. But that's as much praise as can be given here. Make no mistake--this is not an attractive-looking game. The levels are small, the character models are simple and rather bland, and the animation is jerky and repetitive. And, even though the graphics are fairly modest in design, the frame rate is completely erratic. The icing on it all is an automated camera that does a poor job of framing the action, and it almost seems intent on obscuring as much as it possibly can. Any differences between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube versions of Dragon Ball Z are purely superficial, with the Xbox version simply looking a little bit cleaner.   It seems like no enthusiasm went into Sagas, and it's unlikely much will come out.   Though the sound design is technically fitting for a Dragon Ball Z game, complete with boastful voice clips and squealing rock guitars, like the rest of the game, there's no excitement behind any of it. The voice acting, while being provided by the American voice cast for the DBZ cartoon, is so unenthusiastic that it sounds like the work of novice understudies. The music, which will fade in and out with the action, also feels flat, and consistently fails to heighten the drama.    If Dragon Ball Z: Sagas weren't so patently ill-conceived, it would probably stand as another piece of evidence that you just can't do beat-'em-ups in this day and age. But it doesn't seem that quality or relevance were high priorities during the game's production, and the fact that it's being sold at full price only makes Sagas that much easier to pass up. Hardcore fans might be able to rationalize the purchase, but they'll still be out $50.  
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537,Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship ,3.8," Stick to the free, online poker wherever you can get it, and leave Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship on the shelf.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/3/3/7/2222337-927434_66289_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/chris-moneymakers-world-poker-championship-review/1900-6124058/,neg,"
  Poker seems like a game that wouldn't be hard to transfer to the video game world, and yet somehow developers find ways to screw it up. Developer ImaginEngine has managed to royally break the game of poker not once, but twice. Admittedly, its latest effort, Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship, is an improvement over its first attempt, but only because it isn't the worst poker game ever produced, which the first effort most certainly was. Apart from the fact that it features the likeness of the one-hit wonder of the poker world, Chris Moneymaker, on the box and in the game, there's really nothing to this package. The offline play is completely dragged down by overly predictable and cheap AI, and there isn't a soul alive playing this game online, all but rendering that feature useless.    ImaginEngine delivers another completely unpleasant poker experience in Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship.   Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship is a Texas hold 'em-focused game that happens to feature a few other games like five-card draw, seven-card stud, and Omaha hold 'em. Those games are almost irrelevant, though, as the AI is so weirdly aggressive in most all of those games that your games will typically be over before they start. Players will just be eliminated in huge groups, leading to a brief, unsatisfying experience. As for Texas hold 'em, the AI is only slightly better. Basically, while the AI opponents seem to have a decent idea of when to fold before the flop, they are utterly incapable of folding postflop. Once any opponents bet into the flop, they're practically trapped. You can raise all day long, and they'll just keep raising on top of you until the hand is over. Likewise, if you check, they'll always bet on top of you, usually in fixed and very predictable amounts. You can basically bully any player to death once you've got a fix on how the AI bets, and it sucks pretty much all the challenge out of the game--that is, except on the higher-ranked tables, where the game seems to up the difficulty by giving your opponents significantly better cards rather than making them smarter.     The game boasts a few different modes, but they're really all the same mode structured differently. You can play in some single-elimination games, tournaments, and a season, which is a series of tournaments where you play head-to-head against Chris Moneymaker at the end. That's the extent of Moneymaker's involvement in the game; well, that and he gives you some fairly hackneyed poker tips with such amazing insight as ""If you have a bad or even mediocre hand before the flop, you should probably fold."" Thanks, Chris! We're glad to see that your World Series of Poker bracelet is based on some real poker expertise instead of a random fluke. It should be mentioned that there is LAN play--you know, for all those poker LAN parties the kids are throwing these days--and online play as well. Good luck finding anyone to play online against, however. We spent around a week trying to find a single online opponent, and we never ran into anybody online.     Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship does, at the very least, feature a decent poker interface that's easy to use and manage. The game itself isn't much to look at, with just a top-down view of an eight-player table that generally looks crusty and pixelated. The players rarely move or emote, and despite the fact that the back of the box boasts ""10 exotic international casinos,"" the only time you see them is when you're choosing your game at the very beginning. There's very little audio, save for some annoying announcer chatter, some awful music, and some generally unassuming shuffling of cards and chips. It's bare-bones stuff that's probably best left turned off.    There's a certain irony to be noted in the fact that Chris Moneymaker, of all people, is the one hocking this half-baked poker game. This is, after all, the same guy who acts as the spokesperson for one of the better free poker sites on the Internet, one that features a ton of people playing online at any given time and costs absolutely nothing. Yet now he wants you to drop $20 on this slightly functional, altogether bad game of poker that features nobody playing online and atrocious computer opponents? Indeed, the choice in this case is quite clear. Stick to the free, online poker wherever you can get it, and leave Chris Moneymaker's World Poker Championship on the shelf. Or you could just, you know, buy a deck of cards.    
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538,SnoCross 2: Featuring Blair Morgan ,3.8, The discount price isn't enough to make SnoCross 2: Featuring Blair Morgan an attractive purchase for even the most price-conscious consumer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/0/0/2225300-sno_xbox.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/snocross-2-featuring-blair-morgan-review/1900-6166267/,neg,"
  SnoCross 2: Featuring Blair Morgan hasn't had the smoothest development cycle. It was originally shown at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo and was slated to appear on both the Xbox and PlayStation 2, with online play to boot. Since then the Xbox version has been scrapped, as has the online functionality. What did finally get released is a budget-priced PlayStation 2 game that's not a whole lot of fun to play. Even if you can get past the atrocious presentation and frustrating gameplay, there's always a new problem waiting to make sure you can't enjoy what little there is good about the game.    The career mode features both races and trick-based events.   Racing options are limited to career, quick race, and split-screen modes, which run surprisingly well considering how poorly the game runs during single-player races. You start your career by picking your rider's gender and then outfitting your racer with some clothes and gear. If nothing tickles your fancy, don't worry--you'll unlock plenty of gear as you progress through your career. Next you get to purchase a snowmobile. There are a handful of unlicensed craft to choose from, each with slightly different attributes. If you have any cash left over, you can upgrade your ride's suspension, engine, tread, and skis. Like with the clothing, more upgrades and items become available as you win races.    Once your rider is all squared away, it's time to go racing. The career mode is divided into multiple series, which in turn feature both racing and trick-based events. The racing is pretty simple. You negotiate the winding courses and try to avoid obstacles while performing tricks to fill your boost so that you can beat three other racers to the finish line. Occasionally this is fun, but the other 80 percent of the time it's not. The races are far too easy, and you can win by 30 seconds even if you've fallen a dozen times. Even if your snowmobile has been upgraded, it controls poorly. Usually the game is rather forgiving, but you'll still have issues turning and landing your craft. The funky controls combined with broken physics make it an adventure every time you catch some air or hit a bump that you think should be a jump but stops you cold in your tracks. SnoCross 2 has some fun moments, such as when you've got a big lead and don't have to worry about every little crash, but these moments are short-lived.    Though the racing is far from good, it's much better than the trick attack events, in which you're still going around a course, but rather than trying to finish first, your goal is to earn the most trick points. Tricks are performed by pressing the circle button in midair and then a direction on the D pad. Some of the tricks are interesting, but you've probably seen them countless times in other games. For some reason madly pressing the circle button doesn't always activate a trick--until it's too late and the trick is activated right as you're about to land. Even if you do pull off a few successful tricks, it's a crapshoot as to whether or not you'll actually land them because you never know when your snowmobile is going to end up on its side, face-first, or upside down. The trick mode wouldn't be so bad if it were as forgiving as the normal races, but the CPU is tough, and you'll have to really practice to win even the amateur events.    The tremendously boring course design doesn't do much to improve either event type. Random piles of boxes, piles of lumber, and tugboats block your path; jumps lead you right into walls or off cliffs; and it's always annoying to think you're taking a shortcut only to find that the underground tunnel is actually a solid wall. Wile E. Coyote would be proud. Thanks to poor level design and the fact that everything looks the same, it's really easy to get turned around the wrong way. You can push the select button to warp back on the course facing the right direction, but it's still sometimes difficult to figure out where to go next. You might think that you can do better with the included create-a-track feature, but save yourself some heartbreak; you won't be creating any masterpieces.   Thank you Blair! But our princess is in another castle!   It probably goes without saying that none of the courses are particularly interesting to look at. They're mostly devoid of scenery, and they're all pretty dreary. Occasionally there's something brown to liven things up, but for the most part everything's white or gray. There's so much fog on some courses that it makes San Francisco look like the Bahamas. Effects are almost nonexistent, with the only exception being some ugly rain and snow. The riders look decent and their trick animation isn't too bad. The snowmobiles look OK, though they don't show any damage and the snow they kick up looks pitiful. Even with mostly empty courses and embarrassing Nintendo 64-quality textures the game doesn't manage to convey any sense of speed. At its best the frame rate is erratic, and that's when you're the only rider onscreen; as soon as another rider gets near, the frame rate falls apart, which makes the game nearly unplayable. Unsurprisingly, the game's audio is terrible. Bland rock music with (thankfully) no vocals plays in the background, and the snowmobiles roar with all the fury of an electric mixer...set on low.     Even at the low price of $14.99 SnoCross 2 isn't worth a purchase. Snowmobile racing fans will be disappointed by the lack of authentic riders and licenses, and everyone will be let down by the poor quality of the racing, the ugly graphics, and basically everything else.   
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539,Cartoon Network Racing ,3.8, This derivative kart racer is no fun for the entire family.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/7/6/2215376-cnr.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/cartoon-network-racing-review/1900-6163357/,neg,"
  Taking characters from a popular game or cartoon series, sticking them in some karts, and releasing a racing game just in time for the holidays is such a frequent occurrence that it's almost becoming a tradition in its own right. Keeping the spirit alive this year is Cartoon Network Racing for the PlayStation 2. The game does absolutely nothing that other kart racers haven't already done, and it doesn't do anything particularly well, either--the controls are complete mess and the action is slow. If there's one thing that kids and adults can both agree on this holiday season, it's that Cartoon Network Racing is a bad game.   Hmm, a kart racer with a pinball machine level... Where have we seen that before?   Despite the game being full of cartoon characters, there's no story here; you're just racing karts and trying to win. There are three basic single-player gameplay modes: quick race, tournament, and cartoon eliminator. Cartoon eliminator is a single race where the person who is in last place after each lap gets dropped, and the last driver standing is the winner. You'll only want to play it to unlock new drivers. Tournament is essentially the same as it is in every other kart racer--you compete in a series of races and accumulate points based on where you finished. The winner is the driver with the most points after all of the races have been completed. This is how you'll unlock cartoons and courses for other modes of play. A super tournament is also unlocked when you finish all of the normal tournaments. It's basically the same thing, just with more races per series slightly more of a challenge. There are 12 cartoons that can be unlocked as well, and though it will take a substantial time commitment to unlock them all, they're a nice bonus. You can subject another person to the game's drudgery in a number of split-screen modes. Quick race lets you race head-to-head; co-op allows one person to drive while the other shoots; kart bullseye is a contest where you see who can stop closest to the center of a target; and then there are a number of combat modes, none of which are very good because they allow only two players to play at once.    Cartoon Network borrows heavily from the GameCube's Mario Kart Double Dash. You start off by picking your racer. The game features 16 playable drivers from the outset, and you can unlock many more as you progress. Pretty much all of the Cartoon Network gang is here: The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter, Dee Dee, Cow, Chicken, Johnny Bravo, I.M. Weasel, I.R. Baboon, Courage, and Muriel, to name a few. Each character has different attributes for top speed, acceleration, handling, and speed. Next you'll select a co-driver who will ride along with you and fire weapons. Each co-driver has two toon powers that can be unleashed when you've drifted enough to fill the toon power meter. These abilities include super speed, flight, invincibility, and destruction. Then it's off to the races, which take place on tracks that are seemingly ripped straight from the Mario Kart series--there are tracks in the snow, mountains, pinball machines, jungles, city streets, around an island, and more. For the most part the courses are simple, and while they won't be challenging for adults, kids might find them very frustrating due to the many hazards around each track.     The controls are pretty basic, which does little to make them enjoyable. You hit the X button to go, use L2 and R2 to unleash toon powers, R1 to drift, and L1 to shoot. There are numerous weapons that can be acquired by driving through floating crates, and again, they're mostly standard fare: rockets, bombs, fake crates, oil slicks, turbo boost stars, and so on. You can get an extra boost by driving over speed pads, and you can activate hazards and certain shortcuts by driving over switches on the course.     None of this is particularly original, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that the gameplay might at least be decent since it uses such an established formula. Unfortunately, it's a mess. Your kart handles like just about anything you can think of other than a kart. There's no sense of speed and everything feels floaty, as if you're not really touching the ground. The kart physics are poor, and you'll frequently spin out or come to a screeching halt when you so much as graze a hazard or bump a wall. Sometimes you don't even hit anything but come to a stop due to some invisible field. It's easy to get stuck on other karts, in walls, and behind objects on the course, too. Turning around is a real chore, which makes these problems even more irritating.    But the biggest problem is the elastic artificial intelligence, which allows less-skilled players to remain competitive but is so poorly implemented that it will ruin the game for everyone. It's quite possible to start a race, put the controller down and then literally go fix yourself a drink, grab a snack, have a brief conversation, and be back in the lead well before the end of the race. This might seem like a good thing for kids, but the CPU controlled racers have the same luxury, so no matter how many times you shoot someone or how many shortcuts you take, the races always come down to the last few seconds. And since the first two and a half laps are essentially worthless, the game gets old very, very quickly.    On your marks! Get set! Go play another game!   Even kids won't find much to enjoy when it comes to Cartoon Network Racing's visuals. The karts look basic and don't feature a whole lot of detail. Neither do many of the tracks they'll be racing on. There's nothing wrong with the basic overall design of any of the courses, but there's hardly any detail to them, and what the developer is trying to pass off as ""cartoon-style"" visuals by using bright colors and then slapping black lines around poorly textured objects just doesn't cut it. There are a few tracks that don't look too bad, though. The busy scene of a pirate ship and a flashy, though wholly unoriginal pinball level are a few of the standouts. What little effects there are are pathetic. If all of this skimping on the visuals paid off with a speedy frame rate that would be one thing, but of course, it doesn't. At its best the frame rate isn't very smooth, and even then it doesn't convey any sense of speed. At its worst the game is almost unplayable and things move as if they're in slow motion. The sound effects aren't great, either. You'll hear a few catchphrases here and there, but most everything is drowned out by the horrible-sounding karts. The cartoon themes that were so catchy on the DS are considerably less so here, because many of the songs have lyrics being sung along with them. Believe it or not, there's a limit to how often you can hear the line ""You don't need pants for the victory dance..."" from I.M. Weasel's theme song.    In the end, Cartoon Network Racing is a bad racing game that won't appeal to anyone of any age. Younger children who are into any of the kid-friendly shows on Cartoon Network may think it's neat to see their favorite characters in action for a few races, but their enthusiasm will quickly dwindle. Anyone with more discerning racing tastes will want to stay far, far away from this licensed drivel.    
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540,Mighty Bomb Jack ,3.8," Mighty Bomb Jack is a repetitive, broken side-scroller that was somehow popular for a few months in 1987.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/5/1/4/2215514-nes_mightybombjack.jpg,NES,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mighty-bomb-jack-review/1900-6171111/,neg,"
  Mighty Bomb Jack is the video game equivalent of Vanilla Ice or pump sneakers. When the game was first released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987, people took note of its jump-heavy design and charming graphics and snapped it up, assuming it would satisfy their craving for a Mario fix. Mighty Bomb Jack was the hottest thing going for a few months, until word got out that it was nothing like Super Mario Bros., and was, in fact, just a crummy side-scroller steeped in goofy charm. Bear in mind, this was in the days before rentals, video game magazines, message boards, and the Internet, so word of mouth was slower to propagate back then.    Contrary to what the title would lead you to believe, bombs are merely another item that you can collect for points.   As with so many 2D action games from the 1980s, the main problem with Mighty Bomb Jack is that it has heart but lacks substance. The backgrounds put together with Mario-style blocks are colorful, and Jack himself is cute as a button clad in his red tights and superhero cape. Jack's enemies are cartoonish renditions of snakes and mummies, and the main bad guy is a demon named Belzebut. The soundtrack is full of circus tunes that genuinely make you want to bob your head. For about two minutes, the game will charm your socks off. Then, you'll notice how repetitive the backgrounds are, and that the developers didn't even bother to animate the flames that occupy so much space in the environment. Around the same time, you'll realize how shallow the action is. The whole game revolves around running and jumping your way through vertical and horizontal passages populated with platforms, treasure chests, and deadly lava beds while monsters randomly appear and chase after you. That's not a bad formula to build upon, but the level layouts are simplistic and every passage contains the same kinds of platforms, chests, and enemies. You can spend the power coins you collect to open up locked chests and to temporarily transform enemies into gold coins. Otherwise, Jack has no abilities apart from jumping.    You can adjust the height and distance of Jack's jumps depending on how long you hold the jump button down and what direction you press. Unfortunately, the controls aren't very precise, because you're just as likely to smash into the ceiling as you are to fall straight down. The game gets all of its difficulty from errant jumps brought about by the sketchy controls and the tendency for monsters to materialize in front of you midflight. As you can imagine, fighting with the controls and interacting with the same chests and enemies gets old fast. Ironically, there are plenty of secret rooms to discover, and figuring out the right route through all of the interconnected passages can take a while.     Adding insult to injury, the game actually punishes you for being too skilled at it. If you collect too many power coins or increase the timer above a certain point by collecting drink items, you'll be sent to a torture room filled with enemies that's almost guaranteed to rob you of one of your three lives. You can escape by jumping a certain number of times, but doing so is practically impossible due to the number of enemies combined with the busted jumping controls.    Based on its initial popularity, the NES version of Mighty Bomb Jack has probably earned its spot in the Wii's Virtual Console. But that historical significance is literally the only reason you should even consider wasting 500 Wii points ($5) to download Mighty Bomb Jack, since 20 years has done nothing to change how mind-numbing and broken the game is.    
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541,Deathtrap Dungeon ,3.7, Deathtrap Dungeon turns out to be at the low end of games for the Sony PlayStation.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/4/1/53-241.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deathtrap-dungeon-review/1900-2547244/,neg,"
It's overwhelmingly sad how clones of Eidos Interactive's unmistakably successful 3D adventure title Tomb Raider are getting churned out for the Sony PlayStation. It seems like it's the new cookie-cutter genre of choice for gaming companies, just like 2D platform games were for the 16-bit console systems (Spawn, for example, is a repeat offender). However, in the midst of this rampant lack of originality, it's quite surprising for a 3D adventure game to arrive that makes you wish it were more like Tomb Raider.  Such is the case with Eidos' Deathtrap Dungeon, a title whose main differences from TR are the number of enemies you have to fight and its 3D camera - the first of which is very refreshing and the second, absolutely maddening. Backing it all up is a storyline that's about as involved as a video game needs to be: Once a year, a powerful wizard offers adventurers a chance to gain riches by surviving his deathtrap-filled dungeon. As either a big-boobed male or female warrior, you rise to the challenge. It's a dungeon hack where you carve your way through scads of enemies (such as goblins, killer clowns, half-naked women with swords, four-armed monsters, and, oh say, maybe a Tyrannosaurus Rex), push levers to open up new areas, and try not to tumble into the occasional spike-filled pit. While the diversions are plenty, it's the game's perspective that keeps the game from being fun. Instead of a continuous behind-the-back view as in Tomb Raider, the camera frenetically moves about high, low, and side to side as you run around. There are even moments when you end up looking at your character's face when you'd rather see what he or she's seeing. It's possible that the designers were trying to do something original and dynamic, but it would've been much more preferable if they would have just stuck to a third-person perspective. If this was an attempt to showcase the graphics better, then it's even more of a failure. They have their nice moments, but there's no denying that the appearance of seams and pop-up is pretty frequent. Graphical problems are one thing if they're purely aesthetic, but once they trickle into gameplay, that's a whole new issue. Whether linked to frustrating cameras or clunky level design, since enemies teleport into the levels, there are times when an enemy appears right around a corner and kills you before you even have a chance to see it, let alone attack. And beyond appearances, you'll die a lot, because ""live and learn,"" or rather ""die and learn,"" seems to be the name of the game. There are many traps that have to first be experienced to be avoided later, health potions are scarce on the early levels, enemies will often swarm upon you in groups, and your character is very slow to turn around if set upon from behind. Luckily, the load function is pretty quick, so you're not left gnashing your teeth for too long while restarting your saved game. If all of these issues were fixed, Deathtrap Dungeon's heavy action element (slicing the goblins into little pieces is great - it's the perspective that really gets in the way) would qualify it as more fun than the Tomb Raider series. However, then the puzzles might fall toward the simple side, since the camera's trickery is quite possibly what makes the puzzles challenging in the first place. In the end, Deathtrap Dungeon turns out to be at the low end of games for the Sony PlayStation. It's not quite as good as Sony's Blasto, which it mirrors in that you can see how it could've turned out to be a good game, but it's not nearly as bad as Sony's Spawn, where you just can't imagine what the developers were thinking.
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542,A Fork in the Tale ,3.7," From the first sequence to the last, it's a constant barrage of fast-paced frustration.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/2/9/8/2212298-forkinthetale.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/a-fork-in-the-tale-review/1900-2537843/,neg,"
Playing A Fork in the Tale is a little like being tied to the railroad tracks with a runaway train approaching at breakneck speed - as you twist and turn trying to escape from the track, the ropes tighten around your wrists. Then seconds before the engine crushes your body, you hope it's just a nightmare. Unfortunately, this agonizing experience is real. From the first sequence to the last, it's a constant barrage of fast-paced frustration.  Featuring the voice of Rob Schneider (Saturday Night Live's ""Richmeister"" and star of Men Behaving Badly), A Fork in the Tale is the story of a guy who blindly stumbles into an accident that transports him to an island located in a parallel world. The goal of the game is to return the hero to his own dimension by battling, evading, and outwitting bad guys and scantily clad warrior women on the island while gathering items and information. While the plot is interesting and many of Schneider's testosterone-laden lines score with the funny bone (although not with the women), playing the game quickly grows into a tedious chore instead of an entertaining experience. The most annoying aspect of the game is the burden placed on the player in almost every episode. This first-person quest demands that countless split-second decisions be made in order to complete a task or objective, and the majority of these decisions are completely illogical. Once is usually never enough - the player is required to complete the same action over and over before moving ahead. In addition, if a certain task isn't completed successfully, the player is sent back several frustrating steps in the story. To AnyRiver's credit, it tried to bring some creativity and innovation to interactive movies by giving players a barrage of non-stop FMV action. For that, it deserves a pat on the back. However, it also deserves a lashing for stifling the same action with taxing gameplay in a five CD-ROM game. What a shame it missed the mark, because it had the makings of a fairly decent game.  Is that a train whistle I hear?
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543,Gekikuukan Pro Baseball: The End of the Century 1999 ,3.7," There's not one single element that stands out in Gekikuukan Pro Baseball: The End of the Century 1999, and the game is one big disappointment from start to finish.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/4/6/9/397-1469.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gekikuukan-pro-baseball-the-end-of-the-century-199/1900-2631084/,neg,"
Through SquareSoft has been busy lately developing games for new consoles, the company isn't exactly known for its non-RPG titles. Following several disappointing Japanese PS2 titles like Driving Emotion Type-S and All-Star Pro Wrestling, Gekikuukan Pro Baseball: The End of the Century 1999 is the latest of Square's subpar PS2 games. Poor AI, ridiculously limited gameplay, and a lackluster performance in just about every area mean that there's absolutely no reason for anyone to import Gekikuukan Pro Baseball.   The game is an official product of Nippon Professional Baseball, Japan's premiere baseball league. While Japanese baseball is generally exciting and full of action, this game could easily convince those not familiar with NPB otherwise. Gekikuukan is slow to the point of being considered sluggish, and it's almost ridiculously simplified. After you watch an intro movie that simply jams with Japanese rock 'n' roll and is filled with action-packed video clips from actual NPB games, you're treated to gameplay that's pale in comparison. The game sports five actual modes. The exhibition mode simply lets you pick two teams, a stadium, and get right into the baseball. The pennant race is set up similarly to a season mode in American baseball games. The game's league mode is actually just a tournament - you pick all the teams participating, and then eliminate one team at a time to win the championship. The Nihon series mode is akin to a World Series mode in American baseball - you pick two teams and the first to win five games wins the series. Additionally, Gekikuukan Pro Baseball allows you to play with all other sorts of odd options, such as whether you want nine or ten players on your team and what sort of handicap you wish to play with. All 12 of the Nippon Professional Baseball league teams are available in the game, so you can play your favorite Japanese baseball team, whether it's the Seibu Lions or the Yomiuri Giants.   Had it not been for the absolutely horrible control scheme, this game could easily pass for mediocre. The game does away with current baseball control standards like guessing the pitch, changing your batting stance, negotiating your batting angle, or even controlling your fielders. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a simple player-control indicator in the whole game - because there isn't one. The game simply guesses what player you'd like to control and assumes you know which player that is. This leads to plenty of confusing moments and frustration, as it's never altogether clear whether your fielder is actually headed anywhere near the ball. Gekikuukan Pro Baseball uses a modified version of the traditional pitching and batting scheme - a box in front of the batter indicates the strike zone, and a small target lets you chose where your pitch is going. When you're in the batters box, a large reticle shows you where you're going to swing your bat. The idea is to line up your reticule with where the pitch is going to be and swing at the right time. Unfortunately, the control is simply too loose, and actually hitting the ball is something of a chore. Like in most baseball games, you use the diamond-spread of buttons of the face of the controller to toss the ball to corresponding bases. Fielding the ball is an absolute joke. Not only do you never actually see your fielders run onscreen while the camera is focusing on the ball, but when they finally do get to the ball, they take forever to actually scoop it up. You can make them dive for the ball, but if they miss they'll get upset and run offscreen before they come strolling back to get it. If they manage to actually get to the ball in some sort of quick fashion, you'll find that all your fielders have arms like 9-year-olds - none of them can actually manage to get the ball to the infield in any sort of timely fashion.    The players on the field generally look good, but the backgrounds and some of the animations are simply horrible. The player models are well detailed, but the faces look nothing like the little photo snapshots that appear in the lower corner when the game is introducing a new player. The player animations are jerky and unrealistic, and they flow from one to another in a very jarring manner. The stadiums don't look good at all, and they're filled with a horrible 2D crowd. Some stadiums feature large screens that display highlights for fans in the nosebleed seats, but since the screens also feature stuff like the batting reticle, it's obvious that the footage is simply recycled. Jagged lines can be found all over the place, and the visual effects are poor. There are almost no lighting effects in the game, and some of the visual bits - like the fireworks that explode when there's a home run - are almost laughable.   The game features running commentary in Japanese and some fairly good sound effects. The bat sounds about right when it hits the ball, and the characters shout odd things in Japanese. The crowd sound effects are pretty poor, and listening to the Japanese commentary peppered with English terms like ""double play"" and ""strike"" is extremely odd.   Japanese baseball is different from American baseball in a number of ways. The stadiums are much smaller, and in some cases there's an extra player. Also, the AI in this game would lead you to believe that there are all sorts of additional oddball rules. In one case, this reviewer saw a runner who was on his way to third suddenly turn around and run all the way back to first base for no apparent reason. The poor AI at least follows suit with the rest of the game's elements.   There's not one single element that stands out in Gekikuukan Pro Baseball: The End of the Century 1999, and the game is one big disappointment from start to finish. Those tempted to import Gekukuukan Pro Baseball should save their money and bide their time.
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544,Super Mario 3D World ,9, Super Mario 3D World is a sublime platformer that's full of wonderful ideas and fabulous level design.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2383207-i_40625.jpg,WIIU,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-mario-3d-world-review/1900-6415544/,pos,"
Super Mario 3D World is a game of exceptional craft, of painstaking focus on the minute details that are integral to making it feel special. The pace at which you're thrown from one ingenious concept to the next as perspectives, tempos, and mechanics change would choke a lesser game, but here it's done with a seamlessness that makes such rapid inventiveness look easy. This is a game where every level is a golden nugget of heavenly platforming joy, where ideas are rarely repeated--and if they are, they're given such a twist as to make them feel new again.Those ideas start with the cat suit. Once you're over the outrageous cutesy appeal of seeing Mario paw around on all fours, the new abilities it offers are intriguing. You can slash at nearby enemies instead of stomping on them, leap through the air with a swift dash attack, and scramble up walls. It's the latter that pushes you to think about new ways of solving puzzles, and to explore the extremities of a level. Bare walls that stretch up into the vertical distance are no longer the barriers they once were, with curious climbs revealing hidden pipes, paths, and glowing green stars at their peak.Elsewhere, you're asked to paw at cogs, revealing tall towers for you to climb that lead to special precision platforming sections atop puffy clouds. Purple boxes transport you to timed zones, where brisk climbing and coin collecting reward you with more green stars, while flagpoles that once required a well-timed jump to earn a gold flag can be scaled with Mario's grippy paws. Some games would build an entire experience out of the cat suit alone, clever as it is, but 3D World steadfastly refuses to dwell on one idea for long.Some games would build an entire experience out of the cat suit alone, clever as it is, but 3D World steadfastly refuses to dwell on one idea for long.One moment you're riding on the back of an aquatic dinosaur, skimming it over the surface of a waterfall to collect coins and bouncing it off the backs of squishy puffer fish to reach stars, and the next you're using cleverly angled shadows and silhouettes to spot hidden power-ups, and blowing on the gamepad's microphone to move platforms. Another new power-up, the double cherry, creates a clone of Mario, with multiple pickups creating up to four of the portly plumbers. Puzzles start simply, requiring you to push two switches at once, but the challenge is in keeping the group alive long enough to activate platforms that need multiple characters, and to do so in the right order to reach the exit.The game flows effortlessly from one ingenious idea to the next, the levels intelligently designed to gently guide you toward their concepts without the need for a heavy-handed tutorial or swathes of help boxes. More importantly, 3D World's levels are some of the most fun a Mario game has dished out in years. No, they don't quite reach the lofty heights of the sublime Super Mario Galaxy games, but the sheer joy of exploring the sharp, vibrant levels, solving puzzles, and simply leaping from one platform to the next, backed by the game's surgical precision, is exuberant.A top-down world map, similar to that of the classic Super Mario Bros. 3, guides you from one level to the next, ensuring that you're never left wondering where to get your next dose of platforming action. The twist is that you can deviate from the set path and explore the wide-open space of the overworld. Bonus slot machines spit out coins, Toadstool huts bombard you with power-ups, and challenging secret levels with yet more green stars to earn are all ripe for discovery.There are some unique and wonderfully designed puzzles in the form of Captain Toad levels too, which challenge you to guide the funny fungus around a rotatable 3D maze, all without the power to jump or stomp on enemies.The fact that these lovely little asides are optional has always been a strength of the Mario series. Defeating Bowser and rescuing the adorable Sprixie fairies is an attainable goal for all but the most ham-fisted of players, and even then, the golden tanooki suit always ensures there's a path forward if you get stuck. But if you want to push the limits of your skills, to explore levels that drop you onto fierce rotating platforms, and in front of fiery, cog-filled paths, the option to try to attain all the stars and collectible stamps and gold flags on every level is there.The most challenging levels in 3D World prove to be some of the most creative and off the wall, effortlessly balancing intricacy and design elegance. The imagination that's on show across the game's level design, its gorgeous visuals, and its wonderful soundtrack is intoxicating, constantly pushing you to discover new ways of playing. Even the boss battles, while adhering to many of the series' tropes, are fresh and exciting as a result of some clever mechanics and some wonderful visual trickery. You can also share the experience with four-player co-op, which is a more compelling proposition than before thanks to individual high scores and the brag-worthy addition of a shiny gold crown for the leader.Sure, co-op play is hardly a game changer, but when so much of 3D World is so successfully built upon a bevy of brilliant ideas, this can be forgiven. Everything that you can see and do within its enchanting levels is so bright, colourful, and full of wonder that it's impossible not to be taken in by its charms. Mario has always had that uncanny ability to cross the boundaries of age and gender, to bring a smile to the face of every player who crosses his path. Super Mario 3D World is no different. This is a dazzlingly inventive game that brings the fun in spades, and will leave you grinning like a loon from start to finish.


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545,Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze  - A Blast From The Past,9," Tropical Freeze is another wonderful Donkey Kong Country game, and it's better than ever on Switch.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2569449-91%2Bxzjhgtsl._sl1500_.jpg,NS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/donkey-kong-country-tropical-freeze-review-a-blast/1900-6416901/,pos,"
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze arrives on Switch in great shape after four years confined to Wii U, and it's a treat to revisit. It's a straightforward platformer packed with delightful moments, but a steady stream of peril ensures that any fun you're having is underscored by ever-present tension. It doesn't have as much added content as other Wii U-to-Switch ports, but even so, Tropical Freeze is an easy game to recommend.Retro Studios' second Donkey Kong Country game doesn't deviate too far from the series' familiar foundation. It presents you with six worlds and a handful of levels in each, as well as a bunch of optional challenges that considerably ramp up the difficulty if you're in the mood. You can attempt to beat stages as Donkey Kong alone, but you can also team up with his fellow Kongs: Dixie, Diddy, and Cranky. Riding on DK's back, each sidekick offers a slight advantage that he wouldn't have on his own; Dixie can extend the length and height of jumps, Diddy can hover in place, and Cranky can bounce off of his cane to attack enemies. There's also the option to play with a friend controlling one of the secondary Kongs independently from you. Surprisingly, the coordination required to find success as a pair can make things more difficult than playing alone, despite the extra set of hands.Regardless of how you play, the Kongs' abilities are dutifully tested by Tropical Freeze's tightly orchestrated gauntlets of obstacles and enemies. There's little room for hesitation, and the emphasis on commitment is one of many factors that makes Tropical Freeze's  charming cartoon world so stressful. More often than you'd expect, platforms and structures transform on the fly, and you more or less have to rely on instincts when making blind jumps. Tropical Freeze thrives on keeping you at the edge, where death-defying performances feel like the norm. There's practically always a twist or gimmick waiting to upend your expectations and test your reflexes.With enough memorization and muscle memory, you shouldn't have too much difficulty clearing the game's main path in less than ten hours. You can, however, dial up the challenge and longevity quite a bit by making it your goal to find the many collectables scattered throughout each level. There are coins that you can collect to purchase single-use items, but the real hidden prizes are the puzzle pieces and K, O, N, and G letters in every stage--one of the consumable items is built explicitly to help you find them, for example. Finding these will help you unlock bonus content, including extra-difficult stages in each world. These items are often situated in difficult-to-reach corners of levels, but they can also be obscured by environmental structures that you have to move, by either obvious or cleverly disguised means.Hunting for hidden items is usually manageable in stages where you control the overall pace. However, Tropical Freeze has many levels that scroll automatically, say, with you outrunning a lava flow, flying on the back of a rocket, or tumbling down bumpy tracks in a rickety mine cart. These can be such exacting challenges that you will most likely be too concerned with staying alive to discern a means of collecting that seemingly out-of-reach item that you so often zoom past. Of course, once you have the confidence and knowledge under your sleeve to replay a level without trepidation, the challenge of pushing yourself further than before (in different ways) makes repeat playthroughs just as exciting as the first time around.The primary addition to Tropical Freeze for Switch is the addition of Funky Kong, a surfer who has a far easier time of things than his relatives. Funky comes with his own mode, and the rule changes therein are significant. Where spikes instantly hurt everyone else, Funky can land on them without taking damage. He can also double jump, swim underwater indefinitely without an air supply, and comes with more than double the health of DK. The only thing he lacks is the ability to team up with others when playing alone, but with all the other advantages, you won't exactly miss them.Playing as Funky Kong is essentially playing Tropical Freeze on easy mode, but it is also a nice treat if you want to revisit the game under a new lens. Funky is fast and can fly through levels without much hesitation on your part. While there's no doubt plenty of opportunity to speedrun the game as DK, for the less talented or ambitious, Funky can give you a taste of the fast life with little fuss or frustration. It's not a game changing addition, but it's one that mixes up the feel of play in an immediately enjoyable way.Finally, it's worth noting that Tropical Freeze looks great and plays smoothly on Switch. Docked, the game is beautiful at 60 frames per second at 1080p (it ran at 720p on Wii U), with the vibrantly colored and expressively animated world looking better than ever. Surprisingly (as reported by Eurogamer) Tropical Freeze runs at a sub-720p resolution when played handheld. Truth be told, the downgrade isn't that apparent, likely an effect of the Switch's relatively small screen. Regardless, playing handheld on Switch is a significant improvement from streaming it to the GamePad's 480p screen from your Wii U, leaving no question that this is the definitive version.Tropical Freeze isn't a heavy-hitter from Nintendo in the same way Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey are, but it's a fantastic platformer that's bursting with creativity and expertly designed challenges. It's tuned just right--always tough but rarely frustrating--to ensure that even the most common moments feel great. If you missed out when the game first debuted back in 2014, give it a shot today. It easily stands the test of time. 


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546,"That Dragon, Cancer ",9," Heartbreaking, painful, and important.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2989822-green_drip.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/that-dragon-cancer-review/1900-6416330/,pos,"
Spoiler warning: This review discusses plot elements that may be considered spoilers.There’s a section of That Dragon Cancer where Amy and Ryan Green, the game’s creators and lead characters, have to tell their two older sons exactly what’s happening to their baby brother Joel. The most straightforward answer to that question is one no child--really no parent--should ever have to hear: Joel is diagnosed at a year old with a merciless form of brain cancer, and given less than a year to live. This is not the story Amy and Ryan tell their other children.The tale they tell is a bedtime story, recorded, and given life in That Dragon, Cancer as a pixelated Ghosts n’ Goblins riff; Joel is a brave knight who shoots enemies with spears. At the start, he's bound to succeed in his quest because of divine grace, the light of God helping him out, eventually forced to do battle with a physical manifestation of the titular dragon, cancer incarnate. The battle stops dead, however, when one of the boys mentions a neighbor who also died of cancer, and asks, in that guileless way only children can, where the neighbor’s grace was when that neighbor died. Amy answers that: sometimes, the grace manifests when the brave knight doesn’t have to fight anymore, and they can rest.More than it is any sort of game with a victory-state, or a satisfying climax, That Dragon, Cancer is Ryan and Amy’s abstract, dream-world document of the continual search for, if not their own grace, then at least respite for themselves and their lost child. As such, it’s hard, bordering on impossible, to judge as a game in the strictest sense, even under looser Gone Home/The Beginner's Guide terms. It has no need or interest to entertain anyone who plays it. The existential terror and disorientation of the experience has no real satisfaction, just the hope that expressing it can let its creators lift the burden. There are no Achievements, no points to be gained. There is only the ability to weave and work abstractly through the pain of its creators as they did, the interactivity of the medium allowing them the freedom to craft often virtual cathedrals to stand in monument of it.Ryan and Amy struggle to help their other children understand Joel's plight.Crucially, every emotional breakthrough, every new revelation, every gut-stab of a memory in That Dragon, Cancer must be discovered, confronted, and processed, as it undoubtedly had to be in the minds of its creators as it happened. The only tools you have to do so are the ability to look around, and a single button to interact. A single button lets you hear recorded family memories, the narrated, desperate thoughts of the parents. A single button keeps Ryan from drowning in the seas of his depression, to view the endless “thank you” cards at their hospital, to experience even the sheer mundaniaty of life with a loved-one's lethal illness staring you in the eyes. In That Dragon, Cancer, coping is a gameplay mechanic. The fact that it’s difficult to do so is deliberate and appropriate. Even as rudimentary as many of the obstacles are in That Dragon, Cancer, there are still moments where the game prevents the player from moving on without struggling with the decrepit, Myst-like point-and-click-to-move control scheme. In that regard, it actually has more in common with early horror games of the medium than it does any of the “walking simulators” that have cropped up in recent years.The miracle isn’t that Joel’s tumor goes away. It’s that, for a brief moment, Joel sleeps. The screaming nightmare is over for a night, with the knowledge that it will return. It is terrifying, and more frighteningly, it happens to millions every day.Joel was expected to not last the year, and lasted four. It’d be so easy to call his defiance of those odds a miracle, but the game has no compunctions of bursting that bubble before it ever inflates. The scene after we hear Amy talk of grace and miracles to her children is a sequence where Joel can’t stop crying because of the pain in his head, to the point of banging his head against the crib to make it end. You have the ability to walk with him around the hospital room, to try and feed him, to give him juice that he promptly vomits up, with Ryan finally resigning to prayer and, ultimately, complete surrender to the fact the crying won’t end. The miracle isn’t that Joel’s tumor goes away. It’s that, for a brief moment, Joel sleeps. The screaming nightmare is over for a night, with the knowledge that it will return. It is terrifying, and more frighteningly, it happens to millions every day. Imagine there’s a disease that causes that level of agony to very real children. There is no physical means of stopping it, and despite Ryan’s constant pleading to God for deliverance, the Lord neither takes Joel away, nor does he give him peace in any sort of timely manner.That Dragon, Cancer effectively conveys real, complex emotions.God plays a huge role in That Dragon, Cancer. This family is in dire need of a savior that won’t come, and it may very well depend on the player’s own relationship with God how one chooses to interpret the fact that, despite that absence, they remain hopeful. That said, there are moments where that faith is questioned, where the dissonance that comes with having faith in something that doesn’t seem to have much faith in you must be sorted out. While Amy’s faith remains true from beginning to end, Ryan’s faith seems to take the biggest hit during the game, particularly during a sequence with the detritus of his tiny life displayed as an inconsequential dot in the middle of a vast ocean, crawling with malignant, throbbing tumors.The game never flinches from the evil of cancer, which ultimately makes the moments of happiness, as simple as they are, mean the world. The game is constructed to let players find the beaming light in less grandiose moments: finding time, even after a hard doctor’s visit, to get excited for dinner, roadtripping to California, watching Joel feed ducks at a lake, letting him ramble about how loud lions can roar, or watching his favorite cartoon on a tablet. Surrounded by immeasurable pain, the tiny details have lingered in Ryan and Amy, enough to pockmark the darkness inherent in this game with a simple, untouchable joy.This family is in dire need of a savior that won’t come, and it may very well depend on the player’s own relationship with God how one chooses to interpret the fact that, despite that absence, they remain hopeful.That Dragon, Cancer ends on a deliberate image; it’s an image that, at first, feels entirely unearned, schmaltzy and cute in ways that, even at its most playful, the rest of the game isn’t. In narrative terms, we see a written ending, showcasing a faith in something beyond all the death and disease that gives us all what we love most in this world. From the side of its creators, it’s a permanent place where a mother and father have distilled everything wonderful about their child. This is the only place where we truly meet Joel. Not his disease, not his limitations. Just the child they got to know, surrounded by everything he loved.It’s virtually impossible to not bring one’s own biases into That Dragon, Cancer, because death and disease are universal. Just as it’s impossible to quantify whether the exploration of those two heavy topics is worth the time and considerable emotional energy, it’s impossible to truly quantify the immeasurable value of being able to not just forever present the best version of a person to the world, but being able to earn his presence in every way his parents did.
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547,Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number ,9," Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is a challenging and stylish game which entertains throughout, and delights in forcing you out of your comfort zone.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2827044-hotline%20miami%202%20key%20art.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hotline-miami-2-wrong-number-review/1900-6416049/,pos,"
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number's action is so loud and intense that upon hitting the pause button, reality feels like it's playing at half speed. It's the type of experience that invites you to sit closer to the screen and crank up the volume higher than usual. One of the lingering memories of the first game was its heart-pounding techno soundtrack, so allow me to get this out of the way: The music in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is absolutely outstanding. But to revel in the game's slick style too much would be a disservice to its ferociously entertaining and challenging top-down action. This is a confident follow-up which improves upon the original in almost every way. Hotline Miami 2 is more varied, paced better, fairer, and more challenging. This is a tremendously stylish game which entertains throughout, and delights in forcing you out of your comfort zone.Hotline Miami 2 is a top-down twitch shooter in which you play as one of many available psychopaths who, for an assortment of reasons, are required to enter various buildings and kill everyone therein. You commit these massacres using a variety of weapons: shotguns, automatic rifles, silenced pistols, knives, pipes, and even your fists. But regardless of the delivery method, death comes quick. Don't expect to soak up damage or pick up health packs. This is a game in which a single bullet can kill you and your foes, and in which on-your-toes tactics and a quick trigger finger mean the difference between completing a level and respawning over and over and over.The intense visuals thumping techno soundtrack, and score multiplier will seduce you into risking it all in one glorious, foolhardy charge.How you choose to clear each area in the game's thirty-or-so levels is largely up to you. You can run and gun with reckless abandon or use a loud shotgun burst to lure nearby enemies into your path. Maybe you'd prefer to use a door to knock-out enemies and finish them off silently. Whichever method of murder you choose, the engagements are exhilarating. Though planning your attack will net the best results, the intense visuals, thumping techno soundtrack, and score multiplier will seduce you into risking it all in one glorious, foolhardy charge. Hotline Miami 2 is a high-saturation feast for the eyes, where points burst out of fallen enemies as the screen tilts and sways to the movement of your character. The game's striking color palette and VCR motif evoke the in-your-face TV style of the late 80s and early 90s. Each level's floors, walls, and furnishings are vibrantly colored, though by the time you've finished any given level, much of it is painted an electric crimson.While the first game was centered around a single mask-swapping protagonist massacring operations run by the Russian Mafia, Hotline Miami 2 darts back and forth between dozens of characters and locations. At one moment, you're a journalist attempting to use non-lethal takedowns in a subway station; At the next, you're a soldier using a flamethrower to incinerate enemy forces in Hawaii. While you spend a lot of time running around buildings, there's far more more variety in terms of level design. Halls and rooms have more interesting angles, extra windows, more open areas, and multiple lanes for enemies to approach from: while better enemy placement creates increased diversity in the types of engagements you'll encounter. The melee-resistant dogs return, as do fat enemies which are impervious to anything other than bullets. But they're joined by bullet-ducking samurai, running enemies who leap to close the distance, and a selection of level-specific mini-bosses. This is a game about planning your engagements and reacting to how the enemies attack. With more diverse levels populated with better placed and more varied foes, Hotline Miami 2 becomes a far more entertaining and challenging experience than its predecessor. Hotline Miami 2 darts back and forth between dozens of characters and locations.This ever-shifting pace and variety allows Hotline Miami 2 to be more restrictive in other ways. While the first game gave you the freedom to select a mask--and thus, a special ability--before each level, the character choices here are a lot more rigid--and this is to the game's credit. Though you can sometimes choose from a small selection of weapons, or select a specific sociopath, the story typically forces you to play a particular character. No longer can you choose the Tony the Tiger mask to silently take down people in every single level.Instead, the game encourages you to get better at shooting by forcing you to play as more run and gun characters. For instance, Mark the Bear uses two machine guns, holding them out at arm's length, John Woo style, when you press the alternate fire button. My personal favorite character, however, is actually a swan-mask-wearing duo--Alex and Ash--who runs with a chainsaw in the front, and guns in the back. While you can always use the lock-on button to cue up shots ahead of time, there's a spectacular joy in chainsawing one group of enemies while popping off reinforcements as they enter the room. These are a but a handful of the dozen-or-so characters you'll play as during Hotline Miami 2's campaign.So what is there to say about the story? There's a lot more of it, for one. The first third of the game has you sitting through long periods of confusing exposition that do little to clarify exactly what's going on. But even when Hotline Miami's story eventually finds its pace, you're probably not going to be taken aback by the narrative. The original game intentionally obfuscated what was going on behind an unreliable narrator and secret endings, and much of that continues here. Callbacks to the first game, shifts in perspective, and furious timeline swapping make the story read better on a second playthrough. The story's main success is in creating a surreal experience that's best enjoyed by letting the specifics wash over you. In almost every way, Hotline Miami 2 is a marked improvement on an already tremendous formula.Hotline Miami 2 is a challenging, often difficult, game, but playing through it's varied levels is so enjoyable that dying rarely feels like punishment. The game's grading system gives you an excuse to return to levels, but its neon-hot style is an even more inviting reason to play again and again. The experience is so audiovisually seductive that you find yourself replaying zones just for the sake of it. Hotline Miami 2's vibrant palette, outlandish early 90s style, and intense music make it difficult to resist. The soundtrack sees returning artists such as Perturbator and Jasper Bryne supply a breadth of synth and techno tracks, alongside a host of new musicians. Smooth post-rock guitar stylings find a home beside heartwarming house beats and a particularly threatening dubstep number. Not only is the music as exceptional as the first game's, but there's also a lot more of it.Actually, there's a lot more of everything: I completed the original Hotline Miami in about three hours, but by the time Hotline Miami 2's credits had rolled, I'd registered almost nine. Of course, this was before I had started over with the unlockable hard mode, which adds enemies and removes the ability to lock on shots--and before I had toyed around with the game's level editor, which is currently in the alpha testing stage.In almost every way, Hotline Miami 2 is a marked improvement on an already tremendous formula. This is a game that had me pumping my fists and laughing with joy throughout my time with it, and I was left despondent by the time it drew to a close. A gutsy, refined game that isn't scared to force you into corners and watch you battle out of them, as well as an audiovisual joy that marries graphics, music, and gameplay so well that even the pause screen is a work of art.


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548,Football Manager 2014 ,9," Football Manager 2014 is the most exhaustive, most approachable entry in the series to date.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2357759-2230676-football-manager-2014.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/football-manager-2014-review/1900-6415508/,pos,"
Football Manager 2013 represented somewhat of an overhaul in focus for the long-running series. With the addition of Classic mode, developer Sports Interactive committed itself to providing a streamlined version of the game in the hope of attracting players not exclusively consisting of sport nerds and statisticians. While a number of worthwhile improvements were made to last year's more exhaustive traditional game, it was clear that Classic mode was the priority.This season, however, things are different. Classic mode has seen a variety of upgrades, but the fully featured side of the game is where the real changes have taken place. Not only do many of the new additions and alterations make for the most absorbing (and time-consuming) entry in the franchise's history, but they also make it the most challenging.Sports nerds rejoice.Getting the tactics right, even against weaker opposition, is vital.In previous years it was possible (with the best teams, at least) to make a few signings, define your tactics, and fly through a season at a rate of eight to 10 games per hour. With minor interaction along the way, you could finish a season top of the league playing in this way. FM14 makes that kind of passive play impossible by forcing you to constantly adapt and stay attuned to the actions of the opposition.That need to focus more closely than ever on the actions of your rival managers is most obviously felt on match day. Your opposite number is now much more likely to make tactical changes (both subtle and major) as the game plays out, meaning the intricate 3-5-2 formation that worked so brilliantly in the first half could suddenly find itself ineffective.Handling players in the wrong way can have an enormous effect on their morale.This has a dramatic effect on gameplay. Not only do you need to be ready to adapt over the course of 90 minutes, but you need to understand the abilities of your players in more detail than ever in order to make those adaptations in a way they can execute and understand. In short: if you don't know how to make the best use of the talent at your disposal, you can bet the opposition will know best how to exploit them.While more difficult than ever, success is still there for the determined.When faced with an evenly matched opponent, the difference between winning and losing can come down to the individual instructions you've given a single player. Giving the right instructions involves not only knowing your own player, but knowing the opposing players he is likely to encounter most frequently on the pitch. Keeping track of this for a squad of 25 or more prima donnas is no easy task, and the manager who spends the most time getting to know his players and figuring out how they can work together will see the greatest success. To do this most effectively, you need to spend more time seeing your team play. It's no wonder, then, that Sports Interactive has spent time putting together a much-improved 3D match engine that actually makes viewing games enjoyable.The added emphasis on team cohesion means new signings are frequently more difficult than ever before to assimilate into your starting lineup. While swapping out Demba Ba for Robert Lewandowski may seem obvious on paper, it can be more difficult than expected to change the way the rest of the team plays in order to make Lewandowski effective. The advice is to think twice before deciding to rebuild your team in the transfer window.However, the added tactical depth means that winning trophies is more satisfying than it has ever been. It's certainly still possible to brush aside weaker teams without delving too much into the nitty-gritty of tactics and individual player instructions, but to win silverware, you eventually have to beat top-quality teams, and that requires a lot of effort on your part. In symmetry with the added depth of elements that impact player performance, backroom interactions are also more wide reaching and diverse. Personalities are much more distinguishable, requiring you to frequently take very different approaches to similar scenarios. The likes of Mario Balotelli and Zlatan Ibrahimovic require a very gentle and ego-massaging approach, while more stable pros such as Steven Gerrard or Vincent Kompany can be relied upon to not get too flustered no matter how dire things may seem.You have the option of conducting transfer negotiations in real time, a genuine time saver.Handling players in the wrong way can have an enormous effect on their morale, which, in turn, can hamper their playing performance and/or disrupt the dressing room. As a last resort, influential members of the squad can even be asked to try to calm down unstable teammates--although it's debatable whether it's worth the risk of looking like you're delegating a problem that you should be taking ownership of. If it comes to the point where a player does need to be sold and a replacement found, you'll be glad to hear that transfer negotiations are significantly improved and feel more realistic. In a similar manner to contract negotiations, transfer deals can be worked out in real time--you propose a fee to a club, and said club immediately replies positively, negatively, or with a figure that it thinks is more realistic.Like the beautiful game itself, and to use a well-worn cliche, FM14 is a game of two halves.During transfer windows, this can save an incredible amount of in-game time since you no longer have to wait days or weeks for a club to respond to your interest. As you can imagine, this is particularly helpful when the transfer window is nearing its end and you're still looking to fill a key position. If a team appears unwilling to part with a specific player, a slew of new clauses and extracurricular incentives can be proposed to convince them to alter their stance.Classic mode's Match Plan option lets you instantly resolve any game.One of the most beneficial features for both parties is the option to immediately loan a player back to the selling club. This works particularly well when signing young players. English midfielder Ross Barkley and Brazilian ace Doria are great young players, but if you're managing Barcelona, it's unlikely they'll get enough game time to enable them to reach their potential. Loaning them back to their previous club as part of the transfer deal allows you to get them onto your books and gets them first-team playing time. It's a win-win.Transfer interactions, along with most other matters of running the club, can now be performed from within your inbox--reducing the number of screens you need to scroll through (and memorise) to perform basic tasks. For purists, the option to open each specific item in its own screen does still exist. Without a doubt, the full Football Manager experience offered this year is the most exhaustive and most difficult to date.Tasks can now be completed without leaving your news item inbox.If you're not the most dedicated Football Manager player, don't worry, you haven't been left out. Classic mode has been improved in a number of key ways that expand on and improve the experience without making it more complex. Last year, Classic mode limited you to three countries per saved game, whereas this time around you can load in as many leagues as you like--the benefit being that with more tournaments to win, it's easier to seek out new challenges as your career progresses. A Match Plan menu has also been added, allowing you to give your team a set of basic instructions prior to kickoff and then simply click an instant resolve to get a result. It works a treat if you're in a hurry but want (read: need) to squeeze in a couple more fixtures before shutting the game down.Like the beautiful game itself, and to use a well-worn cliche, FM14 is a game of two halves. The full game is for those with actual dreams (faded or otherwise) of being a football manager, while Classic mode is aimed at those with a more active social life and a desire for instant gratification. Whereas last year's game was the beginning of this dual-focus outlook, this season it feels fully realised thanks to the further depth and complexity added to the core experience. Not so long ago, Football Manager represented an impenetrable proposition to anyone who didn't know the difference between a False 9 and an Engache. That time is a thing of the past. Kudos to Sports Interactive for delivering a much more inclusive game, but without so much as hinting at compromising the experience for veterans.
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549,The Stanley Parable ,9, The Stanley Parable is simultaneously a brilliant exploration of the nature of choice in games and a wonderfully entertaining game in its own right.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2341638-stanley_parable_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-stanley-parable-review/1900-6415481/,pos,"
I have always been someone who wants to go the ""wrong"" way first in games. When I sense that a game is trying to usher me down a particular path, to get me to run from left to right or maybe to charge straight ahead, I need to satisfy my instinct to go against the grain, to explore, to see what the designers have put back the other way. Sometimes I find a 1-up or a collectible stashed away to reward me for my intrepid behavior. At other times, my explorations are rewarded only by the crushing disappointment of running up against an invisible wall. Whatever I find or don't find, my action is a manifestation of my desire to exert some independence, to make my own choices within a system that severely limits my options and encourages certain, specific behaviors.In The Stanley Parable, you control Stanley, aka employee #427, a cog in a machine, an employee in a system that offers him no options and demands certain, specific behaviors. He sits in his drab, tiny office, waiting for orders to appear on his screen telling him which buttons to push, and then pushing those buttons. Then, one day, the orders stop coming, and he is confronted with freedom, or at least the illusion of it. You take control of Stanley and walk down a hallway as a haughty narrator comments on what Stanley is thinking and feeling about this strange new circumstance in which he finds himself. Then, you come to a room with two open doors.Behold, one of the most exciting choices in the history of games. No, really.""When Stanley came to a set of two open doors,"" the narrator says, ""he entered the door on his left.""It's a choice. A real choice, made all the more fascinating by the fact that the game, via the narrator, explicitly communicates its expectations to you. Do you cooperate with the narrator, letting the story he wants to tell play out? Or do you go the ""wrong"" way, seeing what awaits down the hallway on the right? No matter what you do, here, as in most games, exerting true independence is impossible. You are operating within a severely limiting system that others have created. You can play into its expectations or attempt to defy them, but either way, you are engaging in behavior that the system allows, moving through environments that others have constructed with you, the player, in mind. No matter which way you go in The Stanley Parable, you are confronted with choices again and again. And again and again, the narrator communicates his expectations to you. When the narrator tells you that Stanley walks straight ahead into the room marked Mind Control Facility, do you follow his narrative lead, or branch off to the left, down the hallway marked ""ESCAPE""?It's an experience that makes you reflect on the nature of choice in games, on how games that purport to offer choice almost always offer only an illusion of choice. You might find the narrator commenting that you made a choice that you shouldn't, by design, have been able to make, or you might make your way to an area that the narrator claims you were never meant to see. But of course, the very fact that there's recorded dialogue commenting on these circumstances makes it clear that these are situations that the designers planned for and wanted you to discover.The Stanley Parable feels alive in its responsiveness to your choices and its desire to subvert your expectations and keep you on your toes.But it's not the fact that The Stanley Parable makes you think about the nature of choice in games that makes it extraordinary. It's the fact that it does so while simultaneously managing to be a wildly entertaining, hilarious, and surprising experience that satisfies your yearning to go off the beaten path and to make impactful choices even as it makes you question how much freedom you ever really have in a game.As you make your choices, going along with the narrator's expectations or defying them, his commentary constantly has you in stitches. It's particularly amusing to listen to him as he insults Stanley (or just as often, you, the defiant player) when you don't follow his instructions. Spend a bit of time dawdling in a broom closet that offers you nothing to interact with, for instance, and the narrator eventually becomes so exasperated with your seemingly pointless behavior that he eventually concludes that you, the player, must have died. He then calls out to anyone near your computer, asking for your body to be taken away and a new player to be found, one who (unlike you) understands basic first-person video game mechanics and the history of narrative tropes in games ""so that the irony and insightful commentary of this game is not lost on them.""I'm not very good at The Stanley Parable.It doesn't take long to arrive at any one of The Stanley Parable's many endings, but it's exciting to play again and again, because the choices you make can take you down such wildly different paths, and because the narrator's commentary is so smartly written and its delivery so hilarious that finding ways to trigger new bits of it is as rewarding as discovering a secret area containing precious treasures in a great adventure game. You're simultaneously questioning whether or not any of your choices really mean anything and enjoying the inventive ways in which The Stanley Parable rewards you for the choices you make. And often, just when you think your understanding of The Stanley Parable is nearing completion, it throws you for a loop; the starting area might suddenly be different for no apparent reason, or doing the same thing you've done before might result in a different (and delightful) response from the narrator. The Stanley Parable feels alive in its responsiveness to your choices and its desire to subvert your expectations and keep you on your toes.I think of The Stanley Parable as a sort of video game analogue for Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze's brilliant film Adaptation, which gently mocked the ways in which so many films manipulate audiences with formulaic plot twists and situations in which characters learn huge life lessons, while simultaneously moving me with its formulaic plot twists and situations in which characters learned huge life lessons. The Stanley Parable is both a richly stimulating commentary on the nature of choice in games (and in other systems, too, like our workplaces and our families) and a game that offers some of the most enjoyable, surprising, and rewarding choices I've ever been confronted with in a game. Going the wrong way has never felt so right.
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550,Velocity 2X ,9, Velocity balances platforming and shoot-em-ups as well as modern aesthetics and retro play to create a nearly perfect action experience,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2817014-image.jpeg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/velocity-2x-review/1900-6415859/,pos,"
Velocity 2X is interactive poetry. All of its pieces, all of its movements, all of its systems and mechanics flow seamlessly into and out of one another to create a constant tone of movement and a feeling of endless flow. A mistimed jump, a poorly placed shot, and even death are merely delays; brief hurdles in your pursuit of a perfect run. Velocity's influences are clear from the outset--Metroid, Mario, and countless classic shoot-em-ups. Molding such disparate genres together isn't easy, but Velocity manages to create a tight, focused experience with a stunning level of finesse.At any given point you could be at the helm of a blazing-fast ship equipped with the ability to teleport anywhere, or you could be running around as a not-so-subtle reference to Metroid's Samus Aran--arm cannon and all. Velocity 2X opens with the capture of protagonist, Kai. Shortly thereafter, she undergoes numerous cybernetic experiments, giving her an extraordinary set of abilities. Even without a complex or gritty narrative, Kai's arc as a protagonist is still sympathetic. She regularly flashes between aggressive, sassy, humorous, and even nostalgic. Phenomenal artwork that is crisp and prismatic helps reinforce that broad emotional spectrum. Cel-shading mixed with some clever lighting gives Kai and the world she inhabits a palpable sense of weight and presence. Velocity 2X pulls heavily from its 2D inspirations, but adds distinct visual layers that give the environments depth. That flair effectively communicates both the emotional context for any given scene and helps highlight obstacles to you so that you can keep up your momentum without having to pick through convolution. Velocity offer more than impressive visuals, though. The early stages introduce each gameplay type separately so that you can familiarize yourself with how each works. Later, once you've mastered them, it blends all of these ideas together while doling out unique twists. That's critical, too, because the game is layered and nuanced to such a degree that it takes an entire campaign to move from “comfortable” to “fluent” with all of its mechanics. Velocity 2X uses a novel approach by using the entire game as a tutorial and subsequent runs as the challenge. That only works because there's a steady progression that runs throughout. Each stage feels like an incremental step up in difficulty that loops back around to the beginning areas. Perfectly finishing an early level is substantially harder than merely completing one of the later ones, and that helps you feel like you're still growing and learning the second time. The unfortunate side effect of that approach is that the finale lacks the appropriate thematic climax. Tension is constantly ratcheted higher and higher, but there's no release at the end--just another loop. It's a small issue, but it's also the only thing holding Velocity 2X from utter perfection.The first few areas teach basic ship movement. From there, Velocity 2X folds in its brand of teleportation, which is a lightning fast flick-based affair. It's a novel way to move throughout your environment. Walls fall away and your path through any given level takes on another dimension. It does take some getting used to, however. Initially I felt like I was haphazardly bouncing around. The harsh sound of a warp and the smooth animation make these micro-jumps consistently satisfying, but I didn't realize how beautiful that could be until my second round. Starting a jump requires careful aiming, and when you're racing through a new section it's easy to mess that up and accidentally kill yourself. That doesn't matter though, because death is never a big deal. You respawn quickly, losing little more than a second or two most of the time. On the second, third, or fourth time through, you'll have become familiar enough with the area to plan and calculate warps rapidly that are safe but imprecise. That's supported by a forgiving aiming system that favors snaps of the joystick over meticulous targeting. Latter levels will have you play as Kai on foot, where there are even more environmental dangers. To compensate, teleportation works only at set distances for each of the four cardinal directions, and keeps the action-platforming from becoming unnecessarily lethal. When combined with the dashes and jumps introduced later, movement in Velocity 2X becomes an elegant system for expression. Dashing, shooting, jumping, and more help flesh out the later stages. After the pieces have been introduced and tested in controlled environments, Velocity 2X starts combining them in increasingly complex sequences with longer, sometimes labyrinthine challenges. Telepods allow you to set up long range warp points, and they facilitate puzzles that have you completing some parts before flashing back to the beginning to take an alternate route. It's a brilliant system that creates controlled bursts of backtracking without the monotony that often follows. In one level, literally called “The Labyrinth,” you'll have to set up these points across the map and warp back repeatedly as you unlock new zones. It sounds slow and tedious, but teleportation is integrated so smoothly and completely that it always feels perfect, maintaining that core focus on speed and momentum. That constant pressure to move forward and be faster creates micro risk/reward moments. You can't dash while also using your main arm cannon when on foot. You still have access to a larger rifle that can only fire left or right. That mechanic forces you to sacrifice speed for protection or vice versa, and encourages you to put yourself in danger to move just a bit faster. Similarly, while in the ship, your boost pushes the whole map upwards. Holding that speed can catch you on ledges, killing you as the screen continues to scroll. The trade-off provides depth and enough emergent variety to keep every run on nearly every level fresh. Each of Velocity 2X's ingredients are basic in themselves. Shooting down enemy ships isn't interesting on its own, but when combined with an exceptional system for movement and tied to an omnipresent clock, it feels truly special. A mistimed jump, a poorly placed shot, and even death is merely a delay; a brief hurdle in your pursuit of a perfect run.You feel the running theme of momentum constantly. Velocity builds its play to feel uninterrupted. Death isn't a mark of failure. Shifting between story and play isn't marked by a shift in background music. Fractions of a second separate ship combat and platforming. Sleek animations and consistent frame rates graphically sell the motif. Players can shift seamlessly between the PS4 and the Vita, and Velocity 2X is just as gorgeous and just as fluid on both. There's never a dropped beat, never a moment where you aren't moving, and you can always be faster. 
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551,Everybody's Gone to the Rapture ,9, The studio behind Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs have achieved audiovisual and narrative excellence with their latest adventure.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2919657-everybodygonetorapture.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/everybodys-gone-to-the-rapture-review/1900-6416215/,pos,"
Loss is a thing you cannot fix. Misplacing an object is inconvenient, troubling at best if the thing was of some sentimental value or important use to you. Leaving your iPhone on the train is terrible, money falling out of your pocket sucks, and unless other humans are as benevolent and selfless as we hope them to be, we'll never recover these things. But objects can be replaced. With people, it's harder.Death removes people from the circles of the world. Death means you'll never see them again. But losing a friendship or breaking off a relationship means they will continue to exist without you. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture made me wonder which feeling is worse, which one is the bigger gut-punch of total, utter loss. At least with death comes the idea that maybe, depending on what you believe, there is something bigger than you waiting on the other side.In developer The Chinese's Room's newest game, you move silently through the world, switching radios on and off, opening doors, and passing through ghostly environments like a ghost yourself. A heart-wrenching story and meaningful mechanics guide you through the experience, and the way you're tasked with not only consuming the mystery but also puzzling it all together is a recipe for heartache. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture left me cold and numb but with a sliver of wonder; the way the game weaves hope and hopelessness together is its greatest strength, and makes it one of the best narrative-driven games I have ever played.The events of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture take place in a small town in Shropshire, England. The player character, or force, or whatever you are--there is no indication at any point as to whom or what the entity you are controlling is, you never see feet or hands--is alone. Everyone in the town has vanished. You are left to figure out why, driven only by your own morbid curiosity. There is no scripted quest or set path to follow, and you are left to wander at will to cobble clues together.As you walk through the town, you'll find doors left ajar, cars parked askew on roadsides with doors and windows open, and streets strewn with dead birds and wads of bloody tissues. There are no bodies left, and maybe it's that hope of finding a human being--or at least some sort of human remains--that makes the desire to move forward so irresistible. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture plays like a horror movie stripped of its gore and fear, leaving you with only a simmering feeling of dread. It's that dread that drives you forward rather than terror, as there's nothing more to be afraid of. The damage is already done.Empty roads are all you'll get.It's difficult to describe the game's story, because to detail how you obtain information is a heavy spoiler. The fun in Rapture is poking into every corner of Shropshire, hoping to find a scrap of something that tells you what happened. Many times my own search turned up empty, leaving me standing in an empty house and listening to the sound of wind through empty hallways. Sometimes I stumbled upon a hidden something, something easy to miss if I hadn't noticed the odd distortions in the air around it, and learned to check out a hollow deep in the woods or a cabin on the far side of the lake. And sometimes these things stumbled upon me instead, leaving me breathless and sad. If there's one thread of continuity in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, it's that no one left the world behind without baggage, heartbreak, and something lost.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is ultimately a story about people, and the organic way in which their stories unravel--not with exposition but the presentation of real memories, out of order and completely dependent on how you find them--gives you the room to piece things together yourself. The game doesn't want to tell you anything; it wants to show you.There are very few things you can do in this game. You can operate radios and lights, open and close doors, and walk very, very slowly. There is no menu screen, no directional compass, and no inventory. And there is no way to check your progress, leaving the pace and thoroughness of the exploring up to you.Rapture's main mechanics involves tuning points of light like you would a radio. Every so often, you'll stumble upon a room or area filled with glowing specks of golden light. Approach, and you'll find a denser ball of light at their center. To ""unlock"" these lights, players are prompted to tilt their controller to the left or right, using the gyroscope feature to find the right angle to make the light grow brighter the same way you would tune a radio to find the right station. Within them lies the important stuff, the most impactful clues and poignant moments you'll find in Shropshire.Go into the light.There are five main areas to the game, each with their own mini-story that connect in some way to every area's story thereafter. Discovering what happened to everyone in Shropshire requires you to explore every nook and cranny. The story--a beautiful tale of science and mysticism and love--is nonlinear, and areas can be ""completed"" in any order, and events drop just enough clues to tantalize you. The game never gives you enough to go on, and things always feel one hint out of reach. And just when you think you've solved the mystery, Rapture throws you another curve ball, making the things that were starting to make sense way more complicated and confusing. But then you stumble upon a nugget that suddenly, and painfully, makes it all clear. The way it all unravels is brilliantly designed, and coupling this trail of narrative breadcrumbs with its simmering sense of dread and loss makes Rapture a difficult journey to disengage from.I had a lot of feelings while playing Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. The atmosphere was peaceful, I never felt frightened. But the deeper I walked into Shropshire, the more empty I felt. I've lost people in my lifetime, to death and to differences, and as I rifled through the remains of this tiny village I realized that no one in Shropshire got to leave in peace--and maybe didn't leave me in peace, either. Does anyone ever leave a world behind in peace?Certain moments would make me sad, but not sad in the way you feel for someone after witnessing their misfortune. I felt sad in ways you can only feel when you've caused that pain. I wasn't doing anything, but by digging up these moments, I felt like maybe I was the center of these problems all along. Rapture's narrative will do that to do; you sympathize, you identify, and then you accept despair.Everywhere I turned I found a mess. Houses left wide open with dishes left in the sink, scraps of paper and tissues littering the floor. Cars with open doors and backseats filled with belongings. Overturned crates abandoned on the roadside, their contents strewn everywhere. I found ashtrays filled with cigarette butts that were still leaking smoke. With each unraveling story thread I felt like the litter I found, unpacked and strewn about, left for no one to find. No one would find it. No one would know anything about the sad truths behind these people's lives and disappearances other than me.But then I would leave a house and round a corner, and I would find myself on an empty road under a canopy of trees. Splintered light hit my face as the sun began to set. The leaves would be so green and so brilliant I would be temporarily blinded. I felt like I was in paradise, like nothing was wrong, like nothing could touch me. Maybe there was hope. Maybe this wasn't a futile search after all.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's artfully done visual and audio cues help you navigate without a directional compass or a HUD. The same gold lights that you can ""unlock' will appear and zigzag through the air, guiding you towards things you should check out. The sound of radio static or a beeping phone floating to you will guide you towards hidden secrets. These masterfully wrought cues keep you on track, to let you know when you're missing something. This is how Rapture gets and holds you in its iron grip, and I found myself sitting inches away from my television screen listening raptly, desperate to spot something that would solve the mystery.Not your typical playground companion.When you hear or see something, there's no way to play it back or view it again. This inability to go over information again will make you think harder. You, like Shropshire's doomed inhabitants, only have so much time to react. It adds a sense of urgency to things, making those ""aha"" moments when you decipher meanings all the more poignant and personal.The speed at which you move through the game is frustrating. You walk very slowly, but this causes you to look at everything and pay attention to small details. But sometimes, especially when doubling back through areas following golden light or sound trails, the speed can get tedious. Sometimes those guiding golden lights move so fast you can't keep up, rounding corners and flickering out of sight only to leave you in their dust unsure where to go. But this movement speed isn't enough to deter you from exploring and revisiting areas you've seen before. The sense of wonder, the drive to solve the riddle of the rapture, is powerful enough to overcome this.The road less traveled.Furthermore, with no manual way to save and large swathes of time between checkpoints, Rapture discourages you from walking away with areas half-explored. You will get lost sometimes--but again, some wonderful audiovisual tidbits will pop up to guide you just when you begin to lose hope. Tiny lights will appear on the road in the direction you need to walk. Or the wind will pick up, carrying with it the sound of a beeping radio that holds your next cue. Getting lost happens, but it's never for long, and while I was admittedly frustrated in the beginning of my playtime, by the end the game had conditioned me to look and listen for the signs I needed to continue. And it didn't even have to tell me, it gave me the tools to learn on my own and really invest in the game's focus on exploration.Rapture includes a soundtrack that perfectly augments the game's atmosphere of melancholy and futility. Rapture's ambience always sits you on the edge of sorrow, with the music never quite intruding in an obtrusive way, but pulling you in just close enough to dip your toes into the game world's melancholy. Its sounds make it hard for you to not feel like Shropshire itself: cold, alone, and utterly empty. A lonely, beautiful void.But in the end, the game gives you no real closure. It's a bold, powerful move, and the feelings of hope and helplessness that filled me when the credits rolled are things I am still wrestling with as I try to unpack thoughts into a review. It's rare something can completely choke you up the way experiences like Gone Home and Journey can. This game is definitely a breath-taker.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture uses subtle cues to guide you through its world and then gives you the space to digest what you find. It's a wonderful example of what games can achieve narratively while presenting minimal physical engagement and tasking player imagination with the rest. That sense of futility never leaves you, but whether or not you cling to the story's threads of hope is entirely up to you; no happy ending is forced on you... just an ending. The moral of the story is whatever you think it is, and there's no wrong way to feel as you sift through its bright, empty world. And while I had my moments of frustration in navigation, that didn't stop it from dazzling me. I left Shropshire exhausted, spent, and utterly impressed by The Chinese Room's magnificently crafted journey, both in how it brought me to its conclusion and the conclusion itself.Update (8/11 9:12 a.m. PT): Following the publication of this review, developer The Chinese Room announced that there is a sprint ability when moving, though the game's tutorial never explicitly states you have the option. By pressing and holding R2 for five seconds, the player entity will gradually ramp up to a higher speed. We tested this speed, and while it does cover more ground more quickly than the default walking option, it's not a huge improvement. The faster speed feels more like a power walk or a jog, and does not affect my feelings about the movement speed.
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552,Zoboomafoo: Leapin' Lemurs ,3.8," If Zoboomafoo is successful at doing one thing, it's working as an advertisement for the children's TV show on PBS.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/7/7/0/2220770-zoboomafoo_leapin__lemurs_.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/zoboomafoo-leapin-lemurs-review/1900-2819475/,neg,"
If Zoboomafoo is successful at doing one thing, it's working as an advertisement for the children's TV show on PBS--because as a game it offers very little entertainment. At the beginning of the game, you find out that it's Lemur Day at Animal Junction, and the resident lemur, Zoboo, wants to celebrate with some of his animal friends. However, the Kratt brothers aren't around to help out, so Zoboo must provide food for the party by gathering snacks from different parts of the world. In the process of searching for the party food, you'll learn about the various animals that have visited Animal Junction in the past, as well as the animals found within each level.    It's an easy task, but Zoboo's snack hunt may ultimately prove to be a frustrating experience for its intended audience. Part of the problem is Zoboo's touchy control makes it difficult to avoid bodies of water and native animals, both of which can deplete the amount of snacks you've collected. Conversely, when using Zoboo's leaping (or running) ability, the control becomes sluggish, making it even more difficult to perform basic actions, such as jumping or climbing. The overhead perspective seems to compound the control problems, as it's difficult to tell where Zoboo is capable of jumping to. This is especially problematic when Zoboo is trapped in a river and there's no obvious piece of land for him to jump on to.    Any problems in the control scheme are overshadowed by the fundamental flaws in Zoboo's snack hunt. Whenever you make contact with one of the native animals--which you learn about as you progress through the stage--or fall into water, one snack piece is taken from your inventory. Fortunately, it reappears wherever you collected the last snack. But if you lose more than one snack at a time, it's nearly impossible to retrieve them in timely manner, because it's so easy to lose track of where you collected the last few snacks. You often have to go back to the beginning of the level and retrace your steps over and over, especially when you've reached the exit but haven't collected enough snacks. Granted, you only have to collect 25 of the 50 snacks in each level to complete it successfully, so you can take the easy way out, but by doing so, you dramatically reduce the replay value of the game--though, there really isn't any to begin with.   Zoboo does have a sniffing skill that might help you find where the remaining snacks are, but you have to be so close to the snack to begin with that no amount of sniffing will do any good. In addition, there are some special animal friends located in each stage that can help you reach previously unattainable snacks, but because of the touchy controls, some of the special animals in later levels are a chore to use.    While there are plenty of spotty moments, Zoboomafoo: Leapin' Lemurs isn't a complete loss. The graphics don't suffer from any particular problems. Most of the animals are easily identifiable, and the environments are accurate representations of their different types of habitats. With the exception of in the arctic stage, the music is subtle and serves as a complement to the different stages, but it's nothing that will make you take notice.    Zoboomafoo: Leapin' Lemurs' inconsistent control and frustrating gameplay make it difficult to recommend, even for a younger audience. Its only redeeming quality is that it provides information on the animals that visit Animal Junction and the animals that Zoboo encounters on his journey, which can range from butterflies to arctic foxes. But in the end, you're probably better off just watching the television show--you'll get the same kind of facts with much less frustration.
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553,Grom: Terror in Tibet ,3.8," Grom has a number of frustrating elements, and it doesn't offer much of anything to make up for them.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/4/8/2214048-grom.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grom-terror-in-tibet-review/1900-6023663/,neg,"
 Grom is billed as an action role-playing game, but it's hardly either. Its only similarity to action games is the fact that you have to repeatedly click on the enemy to attack, and its only connection to role-playing games is its use of dialogue trees. In reality, Grom is more of a real-time strategy game, albeit one with frustrating controls and terrible artificial intelligence.  You can't leave an area until every enemy is dead.  Those who have studied the history of the world according to computer games already know that the Nazis invested a great deal of time and manpower combing the globe for doomsday devices from the ancient world. To these erudite game players, the plot of Grom will seem like one-upmanship. Or, more precisely, ""eleven-upmanship."" According to Grom's story, there are not one, but 12 of these Armageddon artifacts located in Tibet, which seems like little more than overzealous contingency planning.    You control the thick-mustached Colonel Grom and his various cohorts as they try to put a stop to the Nazi plan. Or rather, you try to control him in spite of the game's relentlessly frustrating mechanics. The basic premise of Grom's gameplay--which resembles the gameplay featured in the action RPG Diablo, but with guns--isn't a bad one, but you know a game is in trouble when you find yourself forced to repeatedly play through your battles.    Most of the trouble seems to arise from the fact that the game's interface is totally inadequate. For instance, you can pause and issue orders to your units, but you can only issue movement orders or change their weapons, even though it'd be most useful if you could issue attack orders while paused. In another example, you use the left mouse button to issue an attack order, but you also use that button to move, which means that your units are often running around when you want them to be firing. Enemies have the annoying habit of running around willy-nilly once they're hurt, so when you try to click on them to target them you instead end up running in their footsteps all over the map. This wouldn't have been a problem if your selected units did anything on their own. Units that you have not selected have default behaviors and will attack or defend on their own, but the instant you select a unit, it won't budge without your say-so. This may not sound like much of a problem, but you'll probably find it ridiculous that selecting a moving unit causes him to stop dead in his tracks or simply stand still while the enemy merrily pummels him into oblivion.    Luckily, it's pretty difficult to actually die in Grom. More often than not, when a member of your team gets low on health, he simply falls unconscious, waking up after a short amount of time passes. When your entire team falls unconscious, enemy units will just wander away, apparently satisfied with the idea that the men they were just trying to kill are quietly napping. Not that they could finish you off even if they wanted to, because in Grom, unconsciousness is the same as invulnerability. A grenade can go off next to an unconscious unit and he won't even get a bruise.   Your units will fall unconscious fairly often, because the game's combat is difficult. Not only must you struggle against the game's interface, but you are also usually outnumbered and outgunned. And because there are no real tactics or strategy involved, the combat isn't very satisfying. You can't use environmental objects to your advantage, so those gas tanks in the Nazi camps will just sit there undisturbed throughout a heavy firefight. And while Grom has all the appearances of a tactical game, including the ability to lie prone and crouch, you mostly just run around and exchange fire with the enemy until one of you is dead.   One of the game's more frustrating elements is the fact that you cannot leave a map until the enemy is eliminated. An early mission requires you to sneak into a Nazi camp and steal some documents, but while you can sneak around to your heart's content, you can't actually leave the camp until you've killed everyone. This is also frustrating when you enter a map, only to find yourself outnumbered and without a means of escape. What's worse, you can't actually have your party stop and rest as you would in a traditional role-playing game, so your units recover from damage only through the use of healing items, which are costly and somewhat rare.   Stealth isn't an option, either.  Other than combat, the game consists of lengthy dialogue sequences that are poorly translated and therefore largely nonsensical. Frequently, you'll be presented with a two-option response tree where it's impossible to tell what the responses mean, let alone make a guess at what effect they'll have. There is also a bargaining game that's entirely optional and equally frustrating. Your characters have bargaining cards that represent reactions to the other participant's cards. You must choose your cards, which represent attitudes like ""angry"" or ""insulted,"" and then enter the bargaining round, where you play cards in response to your opponent. It's a guessing game, because you don't know what cards he'll play and, even if you did, it's unclear how each card affects the others. Usually, it's best just to take the default price for whatever it is you're bargaining for and move on.   Grom has a number of frustrating elements, and it doesn't offer much of anything to make up for them. In the end,  the game's problematic interface makes it too complicated to be mindless fun, and the combat itself is too mindless to have any strategic depth. 
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554,Lilo and Stitch ,3.8," While Lilo & Stitch was clearly designed as one for the kiddies, they likely will not be able to surmount its technical limitations.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/1/4/9/2210149-dlas.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lilo-and-stitch-review/1900-2873461/,neg,"
You can play as both of the main characters from the movie. A joint development by Blitz Games, SCEA, and Disney Interactive, Lilo & Stitch comes off as a low-budget attempt to cash in on the still-lucrative and swollen PSOne market. The game is based on the recently released Disney movie, though it's unlikely that even its most devoted fans will get much out of this one. Lilo & Stitch isn't subtle in the way it emulates the gameplay conventions of better-known platformers, and due to some sloppy implementation, it isn't very successful in its copying attempts either. It was clearly developed with a younger audience in mind, but it is precisely this demographic that will be the most put off by its often-punishing difficulty levels and extremely touchy controls.      Lilo & Stitch is basically a low-rent carbon copy of Crash Bandicoot. The game's designers used the classic PlayStation platformer's linear 3D level designs quite heavily, and likewise with all the requisite variations: the side-scrolling stages and the running-into-the-camera-toward-the-player stages. You'll get to play as both Lilo and Stitch, and both of them control basically the same, save for one key point: Lilo doesn't have nearly as many moves as Stitch does. Lilo--the little girl who finds and adopts the bizarre, ferocious alien Stitch--is able to jump and attack enemies with short-ranged motes of ""voodoo."" She's also able to pick up oil canisters that are scattered through the world and then put them in her pocket for detonation later. Stitch, on the other hand, is able to jump, attack enemies with a short-ranged breath weapon (with much the same properties as Lilo's voodoo), and execute a Crash-style spin attack. Also, by fueling himself with soft-drink power-ups scattered throughout the levels, he's able to execute a high-speed roll attack. He's easily the more compelling of the two characters, and the fact that you'll have to endure playing as the functionally challenged Lilo half of the time isn't anything but frustrating.    But even Stitch's relatively amusing ability set is sapped of any sort of enjoyment by the sloppier aspects of the game's technical implementation. Primarily, all aspects of the game's collision detection feel broken and inconsistent. This applies to the platform jumping (which factors heavily into many of the levels), as well as to fighting with enemies, and as a result, the game's primary action seems frustratingly broken. Landing on platforms is much harder than it should be, due to the fact that you'll slide off them if you land close enough to the edge. This is even worse with moving platforms, as you can imagine. In regard to enemies, you'll be injured for coming into contact with them from trajectories that were harmless only seconds ago. Take into account that most of the characters' attacks are primarily short-ranged, and you'll be able to  see just why this won't do.    Largely, the game's action revolves around traversing all the linear 3D levels while having to collect various pickups. The stages seem like little more than empty obstacle courses most of the time, filled only with dull, unimaginative enemies and lame design gimmicks. The ones meant as diversions sadly make up the most enjoyable parts that the game has to offer--these being the chase scenes and the side-scrolling stages. Even these, though, are undermined most of the time by the technical problems.  Unfortunately, it's a bad game either way. Given how late Lilo & Stitch is coming out in the platform's life cycle, it's surprising that it doesn't look better. There is a good deal of noticeable meshing in the game's environments, and many of the textures look jarringly low-res, even for the standards of the dated system. The main characters themselves, though, look decent enough, and they're also fairly expressive. The sound, on the other hand, is weak and either overmixed or undermixed. You'll hear lots of different music, ranging from classic pop music to surf music, and when it stands out, it isn't due to its own merits--rather, it's because the rest of the experience has faded into the background, where the music probably should be instead.    While Lilo & Stitch was clearly designed as one for the kiddies, they likely will not be able to surmount its technical limitations for long enough to enjoy playing as either character. No one, regardless of his or her age, should even bother.
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555,Dark Angel ,3.8, The development of Dark Angel probably should have been canceled at the same time as the television series on which it is based.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/3/1/1/4616-18311.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-angel-review/1900-2907906/,neg,"
When Radical Entertainment began work on a PlayStation 2 adaptation of the sci-fi television series Dark Angel last year, the show was a hot property. The allure of sultry leading lady Jessica Alba and the presence of James Cameron as producer and cocreator turned it into a pop-culture phenomenon. But it didn't last. The show flared out in record time, vanishing from the airwaves for good last spring after just two seasons in production. Alba moved on to a movie career, and Cameron went back to polishing the Oscars he won for Titanic.  This third-person action adventure plays like it was cranked out to fulfill a contract.  Radical, however, was stuck creating a game for a defunct TV show. And it shows. Although it's impossible to say whether or not the developers' morale was affected by the cancellation of the series, this third-person action adventure plays like it was cranked out to fulfill a contract. Gameplay is a mix of elements from the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Splinter Cell, although Dark Angel lacks the enthusiasm of the former and the exacting challenge of the latter. The unfulfilling combat system and poorly implemented stealth mode turn up the frustration factor to a level where even the most die-hard Alba fan will turn back to reruns rather than finish this game.   About the only aspects of Dark Angel that might hold a fan's interest are the story and setting, which seem to have been lifted from the series in their entirety. You play as Alba's Max, a genetically engineered supersoldier looking to find her siblings and carve out a new life in postapocalyptic Seattle. Helping her in these tasks is Logan Cale, an ""underground cyber-journalist"" looking to expose corruption. The corruption that you're taking on here is the -I- Corporation, a company trying to speed along its research into genetic engineering by capturing Max, a prime specimen of such science.   However, the plot is meaningless once you start playing. Max is voiced by Alba, and series regular Michael Weatherly returns as Logan, but the story is so generic that the identities of the actors don't matter. Almost every level sees Max stranded in a run-down city district, with only occasional communiqués from Logan to assist her in getting to safety. Level design consists of little more than ruined streets, gates that can be opened with keycards, and barrels that must be blown up with a lighter to expose an exit. You always know exactly where to go and what to do. The developers practically lead you by the hand from one plot point to the next, going so far as to highlight the object you need to use whenever you get close to the location where you need to use it.  The development of this game probably should have been cancelled at the same time as the television series upon which it was based.  Also along for the ride is the usual assortment of bad guys ready to beat you into submission. Your best bet is of course to beat them up first, which is possible thanks to the initially intriguing combat system. As a supersoldier, Max can pull off a lot of comic-book moves. Along with basic punches and kicks, she can do flying backflips off walls, spinning uppercuts, roundhouse right crosses, and grappling maneuvers like a pro wrestler. Attacks are emphasized by the use of a Max Payne-like camera that freezes Max in midstride as she delivers a devastating flurry and then returns to regular speed as the victim is hurtled in the opposite direction.   But as engaging and as attractive as combat in Dark Angel can be in isolated instances, it never changes. Repetition is a big problem, and there is little challenge in fighting here. You can slap around virtually any enemy in the game in a one-on-one scrap, so most battles are wild melees where you're engaged with around half a dozen foes. Yet even these fights aren't much of a challenge. Combination moves are ridiculously easy to activate, as most involve nothing more elaborate than pressing the punch or kick button numerous times in succession. Employing the powerful spin uppercut, for example, takes just four quick presses of the punch button, while using the killer spin kick takes just four quick presses of the kick button. Although there are more elaborate combos available, especially when you whip Max into a fighting fury by maxing out the rage bar, you just don't need them to hammer the challengers into submission. Simply engaging in unthinking button mashing does just as good a job of taking out the bad guys as does executing planned moves. You get the feeling that Radical dumbed down the combat system for the benefit of those drawn to playing this game solely because of the Dark Angel license. Sneaking around involves more pure chance than skill. Still, that doesn't explain away all of Radical's questionable design decisions. Cozying up to casual gamers certainly doesn't clarify the reasoning behind the stealth mode. Many levels feature sections where you have to use the L2 button to slink up behind guards and knock them out before reinforcements arrive. This is a noble idea that would have gone a long way toward livening up the dull action mode, but it wasn't well thought out. Most importantly, the interface doesn't support sneaking around. You have a danger bar that changes color when you're in danger of being spotted, although it goes so quickly from green to red that there is no chance to get back under cover after the enemies have gotten a glimpse of you. Once you're seen, you're attacked immediately. And you might as well restart the level as soon as you're noticed, because at this point a timer begins to count down the few moments until overwhelming reinforcements arrive to take you into custody. If you haven't defeated all of the foes on the map before the timer hits zero, you automatically lose. Expect to lose a lot unless you're near the end of the level when first attacked, as you always face the near-impossible task of taking out five or six enemies in little more than a minute.   Other problems with stealth mode are caused by the graphical engine. Although you can swivel the camera around with the right analog stick, it has an aversion to walls. Whenever you're trying to sneak by patrolling guards along a wall, it's impossible to tell where they are and whether or not they're looking in your direction, because the camera won't fully angle outward. Climbing ladders presents you with another blind spot. Ascend to one of the landings where power-ups are generally deposited, and you are prevented from moving the camera at all. So if you climb up from an area that's being patrolled, you have to just cross your fingers and hope that a guard isn't looking your way when you decide to climb down. Overall, sneaking around involves more pure chance than skill. The only mark in your favor here is dumb AI that frequently allows you to take out soldiers in plain view of their comrades.  Combination moves are ridiculously easy to activate.  Presentation values mirror the basement-level production of the Dark Angel television series. Virtually every level depicts what looks to be the same desolate Seattle street scene, with identical burning police cars and garbage blocking intersections. A lot of art and objects have been reused, such as the dumpster that you can close with a kick and the ubiquitous video game crates. Max herself looks reasonably good and is suitably animated, although her opposition is formed from just five or six character models. Most are soldiers, although as the game wears on you encounter different tough guys and some genetically altered humans. Also, load times are extremely long. Expect to wait nearly a minute to load a save, which is inexcusable in this case because much of the exact same art is loaded in each and every level. Audio hasn't been handled any better. Alba and Weatherly deliver their lines with the emotional impact of an automated voice-mail system. Most of Alba's contributions are stock action-movie one-liners or double entendres geared toward her adolescent male fans, and frankly, they're embarrassing.   Finally--not that this is really a complaint considering the quality of the game--Dark Angel can be finished at the default difficulty setting in just an evening of play. All in all, the development of this game probably should have been canceled at the same time as the television series upon which it is based. Questionable design decisions, terrible implementation, and the apparent lack of faith in a project doomed long before its completion make for a game that is more frustration than fun. 
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556,Dark Angel ,3.8, The development of Dark Angel probably should have been cancelled at the same time as the television series on which it is based.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/3/1/1/4616-18311.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-angel-review/1900-2907908/,neg,"
When Radical Entertainment began work on an Xbox adaptation of the sci-fi television series Dark Angel last year, the show was a hot property. The allure of sultry leading lady Jessica Alba and the presence of James Cameron as producer and cocreator turned it into a pop-culture phenomenon. But it didn't last. The show flared out in record time, vanishing from the airwaves for good last spring after just two seasons in production. Alba moved on to a movie career, and Cameron went back to polishing the Oscars he won for Titanic.  Don't expect to see any use of the Xbox's powerful video and audio hardware here.  Radical, however, was stuck creating a game for a defunct TV show. And it shows. Although it's impossible to say whether or not the developers' morale was affected by the cancellation of the series, this third-person action adventure plays like it was cranked out to fulfill a contract. Gameplay is a mix of elements from the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Splinter Cell, although Dark Angel lacks the enthusiasm of the former and the exacting challenge of the latter. The unfulfilling combat system and poorly implemented stealth mode turn up the frustration factor to a level where even the most die-hard Alba fan will turn back to reruns rather than finish this game.   About the only aspects of Dark Angel that might hold a fan's interest are the story and setting, which seem to have been lifted from the series in their entirety. You play as Alba's Max, a genetically engineered supersoldier looking to find her siblings and carve out a new life in postapocalyptic Seattle. Helping her in these tasks is Logan Cale, an ""underground cyber-journalist"" looking to expose corruption. The corruption that you're taking on here is the -I- Corporation, a company trying to speed along its research into genetic engineering by capturing Max, a prime specimen of such science.   However, the plot is meaningless once you start playing. Max is voiced by Alba, and series regular Michael Weatherly returns as Logan, but the story is so generic that the identities of the actors don't matter. Almost every level sees Max stranded in a run-down city district, with only occasional communiqués from Logan to assist her in getting to safety. Level design consists of little more than ruined streets, gates that can be opened with keycards, and barrels that must be blown up with a lighter to expose an exit. You always know exactly where to go and what to do. The developers practically lead you by the hand from one plot point to the next, going so far as to highlight the object you need to use whenever you get close to the location where you need to use it.  The development of this game probably should have been cancelled at the same time as the television series upon which it was based.  Also along for the ride is the usual assortment of bad guys ready to beat you into submission. Your best bet is of course to beat them up first, which is possible thanks to the initially intriguing combat system. As a supersoldier, Max can pull off a lot of comic-book moves. Along with basic punches and kicks, she can do flying backflips off walls, spinning uppercuts, roundhouse right crosses, and grappling maneuvers like a pro wrestler. Attacks are emphasized by the use of a Max Payne-like camera that freezes Max in midstride as she delivers a devastating flurry and then returns to regular speed as the victim is hurtled in the opposite direction.   But as engaging and as attractive as combat in Dark Angel can be in isolated instances, it never changes. Repetition is a big problem, and there is little challenge in fighting here. You can slap around virtually any enemy in the game in a one-on-one scrap, so most battles are wild melees where you're engaged with around half a dozen foes. Yet even these fights aren't much of a challenge. Combination moves are ridiculously easy to activate, as most involve nothing more elaborate than pressing the punch or kick button numerous times in succession. Employing the powerful spin uppercut, for example, takes just four quick presses of the punch button, while using the killer spin kick takes just four quick presses of the kick button. Although there are more elaborate combos available, especially when you whip Max into a fighting fury by maxing out the rage bar, you just don't need them to hammer the challengers into submission. Simply engaging in unthinking button mashing does just as good a job of taking out the bad guys as does executing planned moves. You get the feeling that Radical dumbed down the combat system for the benefit of those drawn to playing this game solely because of the Dark Angel license. Sneaking around involves more pure chance than skill. Still, that doesn't explain away all of Radical's questionable design decisions. Cozying up to casual gamers certainly doesn't clarify the reasoning behind the stealth mode. Many levels feature sections where you have to use the left trigger to slink up behind guards and knock them out before reinforcements arrive. This is a noble idea that would have gone a long way towards livening up the dull action mode, but it wasn't well thought out. Most importantly, the interface doesn't support sneaking around. You have a danger bar that changes color when in danger of being spotted, although it goes so quickly from green to red that there is no chance to get back under cover after an initial glimpse. Once you're seen, you're attacked immediately. And you might as well restart the level as soon as you're noticed, because at this point a timer begins to count down the few moments until overwhelming reinforcements arrive to take you into custody. If you haven't defeated all of the foes on the map before the timer hits zero, you automatically lose. Expect to lose a lot unless you're near the end of the level when first attacked, as you always face the near-impossible task of taking out five or six enemies in little more than a minute.   Other problems with stealth mode are caused by the graphical engine. Although you can swivel the camera around with the right thumbstick, it has an aversion to walls. Whenever you're trying to sneak by patrolling guards along a wall, it's impossible to tell where they are and whether or not they're looking in your direction because the camera won't fully angle outward. Climbing ladders presents you with another blind spot. Ascend to one of the landings where power-ups are generally deposited and you are prevented from moving the camera at all. So if you climb up from an area that's being patrolled, you have to just cross your fingers that a guard isn't looking your way when you decide to climb down. Overall, sneaking around involves more pure chance than skill. The only mark in your favor here is dumb AI that frequently allows you to take out soldiers in plain view of their comrades.  Combination moves are ridiculously easy to activate.  Presentation values mirror the basement-level production of the Dark Angel television series. Virtually every level depicts what looks to be the same desolate Seattle street scene, with identical burning police cars and garbage blocking intersections. A lot of art and objects have been reused, such as the dumpster that you can close with a kick and the ubiquitous videogame crates. Max herself looks reasonably good and is suitably animated, although her opposition is formed from just five or six character models. Most are soldiers, although as the game wears on you encounter different tough guys and some genetically altered humans. Audio hasn't been handled any better. Alba and Weatherly deliver their lines with the emotional impact of an automated voicemail system. Most of Alba's contributions are stock action movie one-liners or double entendres geared for her adolescent male fans, and frankly, they're embarrassing. Overall, don't expect to see any use of the Xbox's powerful video and audio hardware here. Aside from the significantly better loading times (which shouldn't be undervalued, considering the number of times you have to reload saves while struggling through the stealth missions), the game appears to be a straight port of the PlayStation 2 edition.   Finally--not that this is really a complaint considering the quality of the game--Dark Angel can be finished at the default difficulty setting in just an evening of play. All in all, the development of this game probably should have been cancelled at the same time as the television series upon which it was based. Questionable design decisions, terrible implementation, and the apparent lack of faith in a project doomed long before its completion make for a game that is more frustration than fun. 
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557,DRIV3R ,3.8, Don't waste your time with Driver 3.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/1/3/4/2216134-box_driver3.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/driv3r-review/1900-6121167/,neg,"
  Nine months separate the PC release of Driver 3 from the release of its console counterparts. A sane, logical type of person might assume that the large gap between the borderline-broken console versions and the newly released PC edition was used to fix the game's serious problems. But those people would be mistaken. Driver 3 for the PC is just about as broken as it was on the Xbox and PlayStation 2 last year, and thanks to the ill-conceived introduction of a mouse and keyboard into the mix, it manages to be even worse, overall.   Driver 3's cutscenes are one of its few strengths.   The Driver series is helmed by an undercover cop named Tanner. This time around, Tanner is trying to infiltrate a Miami-based car thief ring, which is working to steal 40 exotic cars and ship them out of Miami. Part of the game's story involves finding out who the thieves in the car ring are working for, where the cars are going, and who's double-crossing whom. You'll start out in Miami, eventually make your way to Nice for some French car chases, and you'll also spend some time in Istanbul. The story is mostly told via prerendered cutscenes that fall somewhere between a music video and a movie in terms of style and inspiration. Generally speaking, the cutscenes look pretty good. In fact, the cutscenes are probably the best part about Driver 3.    Despite featuring three large cities to drive in, Driver 3's main mode is a linear, mission-based game that sends you on mission after mission until you've unraveled the game's story. Each mission has clear-cut objectives, like chasing after a guy who double-crossed your gang, stealing three cars and driving them into the back of a moving truck before the truck gets to its destination, or driving around on an enemy's turf and busting up the place by crashing through exploding barrels and other objects. At the end of every mission, you're given the option to save and then you can continue on to the next mission. The missions tend to vary from city to city, but the lackluster gameplay really prevents many of the missions from being much fun.    For a game called ""Driver,"" you may be surprised to find yourself spending quite a lot of time out of your car, and that's where the first significant gameplay problem comes to light: The on-foot action is awful. Your control over Tanner is stiff, at best. You can fire weapons, you can halfheartedly jump, and you can duck to perform some pretty lame rolls. While you probably wouldn't expect much more from a gruff undercover guy like Tanner, all of his movements look stilted and jittery, and the gunplay--despite giving you access to a number of different pistols, submachine guns, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a grenade launcher--is decidedly underwhelming. The combat in the game isn't tense at all, and it mostly consists of running up to enemies and blasting them...before they blast back, if possible. However, the game is pretty liberal with the health packs, so you can certainly trade shots with most of your foes without worrying too much. Since most of the game's artificial intelligence is incompetent, you can usually get the drop on the bad guys.   Driver's technical issues really get in the way of the rest of the game.   The game's driving portions are better than the on-foot stuff, but not all that much better. You're given a map of the city with a pretty clear indication of where to go, and you're usually in a hurry, so there isn't much time to explore the game's cities in the story mode. The physics behind the driving appear to be designed to give you that '70s-cop-show-car-chase feel, in that everything has been exaggerated. Even the slightest turn around a corner is a tire-screeching, sliding-out affair. Getting slammed hard by a cop car might send you flying into the air, causing you to barrel-roll a half-dozen times before crashing back to Earth.     The problem is that the driving isn't especially fun, as you constantly feel more like you're fighting to stay in control of the car than skillfully outmaneuvering your pursuers. Sometimes you'll hit a ramp and land just fine; and sometimes you'll land differently and roll your car, forcing you to retry a mission. There are also some discrepancies between what you can and can't drive through. Some objects will let you drive right through them, while others will stop all of your forward progress with a loud, damaging crash. What's more, it's even occasionally possible to crash into objects like streetlights or trees, essentially making it look like the streetlight or other object is growing out of the middle of your car. This causes your car to become completely stuck.  The AI routines make the game's cops look like complete idiots.  The driving AI isn't much better than the on-foot AI, either. Police chases--which happen more often in the game's additional modes than they do in the main story--are especially ridiculous. Cops basically aren't smart enough to get out of their cars and shoot at you unless they can get close enough to you. So, for example, if you were to jump over a guardrail and swim out into the water surrounding Miami, a cop that's pursuing you would simply drive his car into that guardrail, back up, and then drive into that guardrail over and over again. If you can get the cops to get out of their cars, they aren't much smarter.  A big part of the problem with Driver 3 lies in its control. Both on foot and in a car, your control over the action is limited, at best. The game supports analog gamepads as well as a mouse and keyboard. If you spend some time configuring the controls, you can get a dual analog controller to function much like it would in the console versions of the game, but your ability to turn with an analog controller is severely limited. Tanner turns very slowly, then suddenly accelerates his turning. This makes drawing a bead on anything nearly impossible. The mouse and keyboard might not have that problem, but they have plenty of others. Steering with keys on the keyboard simply isn't refined enough to deal with the game's sloppy car physics, making even the most rudimentary car chase a real chore. Also, if there were an award for ""worst default control scheme,"" Driver 3 would win it, hands down. Why, exactly, would anyone make the 5 key on the keypad the ""fire weapon"" button and leave the mouse buttons unmapped? The default control scheme is clearly an exercise in insanity. After some trial-and-error, it's possible to reconfigure the keys to make the game playable. Well, as playable as this game's going to get, anyway.  Aside from the main story mode, the game also has a few secondary modes, though they really don't add much to the experience. You can opt to simply drive around a city in the ""take a ride"" mode. There are also some driving games to play, such as checkpoint races, a survival mode that forces you to last as long as possible against the game's dopey, crash-happy police AI, and so on. You can also save replays and edit them by inserting different camera angles, slow-motion effects, and so forth.   A big part of what makes Driver 3 so bad is a series of technical, graphical glitches that make the game look like an absolute mess. You can run it in a wide variety of video resolutions, and you can fiddle with the draw distance and antialiasing, as well. When you get it all turned on, Driver 3 actually starts to look pretty good...provided you're standing still. In motion, Driver 3 is a flickery mess. After testing the game out on a few different video cards, it seems that the lighting has been programmed to flicker on and off everything. At times, Tanner's whole head is lit up like the sun is hitting it directly, while the rest of him stays dark. As you drive around the city, objects like trees and buildings flicker like crazy. And when you run the game in higher resolutions, the textures start to really look like trash.  Driver 3's voice cast carries some Hollywood-caliber names, but no Hollywood-caliber performances.  The sound side of things is pretty underwhelming. Car engines and the like sound appropriately throaty. But the game is missing a lot of the little touches that would help it sound more alive. When a car takes too much damage to continue on, the engine merely stops making noise and the car rolls to a stop. A more prevalent sputtering noise, or something to that effect, would have helped. Most of the gunfire is rather subdued and unimpressive--this only serves to make the on-foot combat seem even more ineffectual. Additionally, the game's voice work is quite stiff. Michael Madsen voices Tanner, and while his gruff, gravelly voice fits the character, the delivery is a little too flat and uninterested. Similar criticisms can be said about most of the voice cast, including Michelle Rodriguez, whose performance as Calita is phoned-in and wooden. Other voices on the cast include Mickey Rourke, Iggy Pop, and Ving Rhames, who plays your partner in the game and narrates most of the cutscenes. The game's music is most prevalent during the cutscenes, and it works with the action quite well, giving the game's noninteractive sequences a slightly more cinematic feel.  Driver 3 is full of the sorts of glitches and problems that final retail products shouldn't have. On top of that, a recently released patch for the game doesn't fix many of its showstopping problems. The control is terrible, the visuals are buggy, and the AI is straight-up broken. Short of being threatened at gunpoint, there's no acceptable reason to play this game. 
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558,Buffy the Vampire Slayer ,3.8," Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the GBA has little in common with the popular TV series it's based on, and it's a bad game to boot.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/9/0/2211590-835141-561971_23045_front.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-review/1900-6071904/,neg,"
 It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that THQ has brought Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Game Boy Advance as a side-scrolling action game. The fact is, many of the TV and movie licenses that come to the GBA do so as two-dimensional beat-'em-ups. While this sort of design is as old as electronic gaming itself, there's still significant demand for well-made action games that capture the abilities and personalities of characters we're all familiar with. In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, THQ missed the mark entirely. The design is as generic as could be, many of the puzzles and jumping tasks are frustrating or downright unfair, and the only aspects linking the game to the show are the weapons you have access to and the still-frame cutscenes that appear in between each level.  After you knock down a vampire, you have the option of staking him or her.  The story centers on Buffy's efforts to stop a group of demons from freeing a creature known as the Darkhul King from his imprisonment inside an old temple. If released, the Darkhul King will have the power to resurrect all the demons and monsters that Buffy has defeated in the past. The events in the game take place during the fourth season of the television show, so you'll encounter fan-favorite villains specific to that time period, in addition to the stock set of demons and vampires that form the heart of the Darkhul King's forces. The gang of voice stealers known as the Gentlemen makes an appearance, as does the mischievous behemoth Adam.  You play throughout the game as Buffy. Even though Giles, Willow, Xander, and the rest of the gang appear during cutscenes, you won't see any of them during the actual gameplay. Willow's spellcasting abilities would have been nice to have had at your disposal, but Buffy's arsenal is more than sufficient for what THQ has set in front of her. Using the GBA's two face buttons, you can execute punches, kicks, and throws. The shoulder buttons allow you to block and jump. Every enemy behaves the same. When a monster sees Buffy, it will run up and try to execute an attack--usually a punch or a head butt. Nine times out of 10, you can defeat an enemy by first kicking it in the shins and then finishing it off with a few more punches or kicks. Sometimes, an enemy will punch through your attack while recovering from a previous hit. You can't do anything about this other than block, so it's just something else to deal with.  You can use weapons, such as torches and holy water, to do away with certain enemies more quickly.  Since many of the creatures in the game are vampires, not all the enemies you defeat disappear when you knock them down. In these instances, you can either jump over the enemy and keep going, or bring up the weapons menu and drive a stake through the enemy's heart. This adds a hint of Buffy flavoring to the game, but it becomes quite boring after you drive a stake into an unconscious monster for the umpteenth time. The developers also tried to add a twist to the gameplay by giving you the opportunity to avoid combat altogether by using Buffy's double-jump ability to leap over enemies, but this backfires, since there are so few cases where you need to retrace your steps through previously visited areas. There's no incentive to duke it out with every one of the game's enemies, so most levels are just a boring trek past a few spike pits and enemies on your way to the exit.  In addition to the standard set of attacks, there are weapons hidden within each level that you can collect and use. Many of these weapons--such as stakes, crosses, and holy water--fit in perfectly with the underlying theme of the show. Some of them, namely the throwing axe and flamethrower, are just plain fun to use. In all, there are 16 different weapons, some of which can be combined together to form other weapons. For example, if you put together the torch with the dagger, you can create a flaming dagger. While these weapons are supposed to add variety and excitement to the game, they really don't, for the reasons explained in the previous paragraph--there are few instances where you actually need to use them. At the same time, each weapon has a very limited number of uses or shots, limiting your ability to just cut loose and enjoy yourself.   With combat pretty much cut out of the equation, what's left over is a fairly standard platform jumping adventure fraught with a litany of bad design decisions. When you come to a ledge that you need to leap off, you're usually forced to guess just how far you need to jump in order to land safely. There are a number of landings and hazards located outside of your field of vision, so it's pretty common to miss a landing entirely or bump into an enemy just because you couldn't see him or her until it was too late. The ability to pan the screen a little to the left or right would have been a significant improvement. At the same time, many of the spike pits and traps that you can see are made doubly frustrating by the game's controls. In order to clear some of these obstacles, you need to perform a double jump while running. This means that you need to double-tap the control pad and then push the right shoulder button twice in quick succession. There is no margin for error, so if the system doesn't register one of your commands, you've lost a life and have to start the entire level all over again.  Buffy can occasionally rappel down ropes or swim in pools of water.  Despite the poorly placed traps, the frustrating controls, and the dull layout of most of the levels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a game that you can play through rather quickly. On the normal difficulty setting, you can breeze through all 16 levels in just over an hour. The hard mode switches around a few cave entrances and changes most of the puzzle solutions, but it can be completed in an afternoon. Once you've beaten the game, there's nothing else to do. There aren't any additional modes or extras to unlock, and there certainly isn't much reason to replay the game a second time.  Although the graphics and audio don't help the game's cause, they don't necessarily harm it. The backgrounds are colorful and feature a fair amount of detail, even if some earlier locations are repeated later in the game. The Buffy character sprite is on the small side, but you can at least see that she's wearing clothing taken directly from the TV show. The animation is fairly smooth as well. As for the audio, the music is the highlight, with tunes that are eerily similar to those found in Konami's Castlevania series. The sound effects are nothing special, but they get the job done.  These stills taken from the TV show are the only significant link between the game and the popular TV series it's based on.  All in all, THQ dropped the ball with Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the Game Boy Advance. The game itself is a generic and frustrating side scroller that could have been much better had it spent a few more weeks in development. Likewise, more work should have gone into tying the game into the television show. There's nothing uniquely Buffy about the game, and that makes playing it that much more painful.   
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559,HyperSonic.Xtreme ,3.8," The low, low price point and the relative wealth of positive attributes almost make some of HyperSonic.Xtreme's dire problems forgivable. Almost.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/3/0/0/4879-19300.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hypersonicxtreme-review/1900-2910957/,neg,"
HyperSonic.Xtreme, a new futuristic racing game from Majesco, is a game that would never have existed had Wipeout not come before it. The game's overall sense of style, from the track designs, to the ship designs, to the choice of spacey electronic music that plays while you race, is highly derivative of Psygnosis' enjoyable racer. If you liked Wipeout, this could have been a good thing. It could have, but because of the inconsistent graphics and horrible, horrible physics in HSX, the game is virtually unplayable by anybody.  The root of most of the choppiness in HSX seems to come from the game's occasionally excessive use of special effects.  The gameplay options are kind of lean, but what's there is the stuff you would care about. You can choose between time trial and cup races, and within these modes you can go on either the arcade circuit or the slalom circuit. The key difference between these circuits is that the arcade circuit puts you on a not-so-circular track for three laps, while the slalom circuit tracks simply have a beginning and an end and no laps. All told, there are around 30 different tracks to race on in HSX, though you'll need to place high in the cup races in order to unlock a good majority of them.   One of the most highly touted features in HSX is its track editor, and it's actually surprisingly robust and easy to use. In fact, it's entirely possible to re-create the premade tracks in HSX using the in-game editor. The tracks themselves are pretty consistently well designed and make good use of the antigravity nature of the craft you're piloting. Tracks will loop, twist, and turn, and you'll often find yourself clinging to the underside of the track, with terra firma right over your head. One of the less-endearing track-design features in HSX is the inclusion of jumps. These jumps usually require you to clear a pretty huge gap, and if you don't launch just right or don't have enough turbo boost, it's easy to fall short and watch your ship wreck into a mountainside. What makes these jumps really punishing is that after you wreck, the game forces you to go at the same jump all over again.   But this is just one symptom of the most damaging overall problem with HSX, which is a seemingly unfinished physics engine. While you're on the straight and narrow, the ships generally handle like they should, gliding from side to side like a rocket-powered vehicle should. But when you start dealing with hard turns, and sometimes just at random, the gliding stops, and your ship starts turning on its axis, which leaves you at the whim of wherever your momentum was taking you before you lost control. Occasionally, while attempting to hug a hard outside turn, your ship will lose its grip on the track, and you'll simply fly off the track until you make contact with something hard--usually, the ground. These problems are supremely frustrating and make the game nigh unplayable.   The game also suffers from some pretty bad frame rate problems. Curiously, the root of most of the choppiness in HSX seems to come from the game's occasionally excessive use of special effects. The game sports some rain and snow effects, and the rain will do that thing where it's supposed to look like it's beading up on the camera lens, but the beads then disappear, and the effect just comes off as looking cheap. When your craft sustains a certain level of damage, it will start belching out clouds of black smoke, partially obscuring your view and turning the game into a choppy mess. The real irony here is that if these not-so-impressive effects had been completely stripped from the game, the game, on a whole, would have looked better. The tracks look clean and sharp, paying much homage to Wipeout with lots of safety-yellow arrows on top of various types of gray steel, or space-age polymers, or whatever it is that these futuristic racing tracks are made of. The ships also look pretty slick, albeit derivative, and each is relatively unique in its design. Not much attention is paid to the surrounding environments, and you'll usually just be racing across fairly nondescript expanses covered in differently themed textures.   Not much attention is paid to the surrounding environments, and you'll usually just be racing across fairly nondescript expanses covered in differently themed textures.  The music in HyperSonic.Xtreme is a pure tribute to the very first Wipeout game. All of the songs capture the same sort of dreamy grooves that populated that soundtrack, and in a few of the tracks you'll hear sound almost identical to some of the Wipeout music. The rest of the sound is pretty bare-bones, with no announcer and only the occasional fanfare when you run through the grandstands and with the constant blare of rocket engines.   There are two things that make HyperSonic.Xtreme kind of tragic, instead of just plain bad. First, there's the fact that Majesco is publishing HSX as a value title and debuting it on store shelves for a mere $10. Second, there's a lot that could have been liked in this game. The tracks are generally well designed, the music is a good fit for the setting, and the track editor is highly functional. The low, low price point and the relative wealth of positive attributes almost make some of HyperSonic.Xtreme's dire problems forgivable. Almost. Instead of spending your $10 on a copy of HSX, you'd be better off digging up a copy of Wipeout, Wipeout XL, or Wipeout 3 for the PlayStation.
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560,Darkest Dungeon ,9, A richly satisfying and wonderfully executed masterpiece.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2550307-darkestdungeon_001.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/darkest-dungeon-review/1900-6416354/,pos,"
A werewolf, a paladin, a bandit, and a cleric walk into the abyss. The werewolf's transformations startle and stress the psyche of the party. The paladin's heart gives out. Our thief begins behaving irrationally. He compulsively opens suspicious chests and rifles through dead bodies. He falls gravely ill. Our cleric, pushed to the brink, finds resolve in faith. She fights back wave after wave of evil abominations far longer than she should. In time, she finds herself overwhelmed. Knowing that his friends broke down and died because of his monstrosity, the werewolf heads back into town, distraught, to self-flagellate and exchange his grief for blood.That's the kind of moribund humor Darkest Dungeon works with. Everything here is a little weird, and it'd be easy to pass it off as yet another game inspired by Lovecraftian horror, but Darkest Dungeon's gameplay makes it so much more.Darkest Dungeon sits in the roguelike genre--a game type often associated with randomly arranged rooms, permanent death, and the fear of what mysterious challenges lie ahead. Darkest Dungeon breaks from that tradition in that it lets you stock an entire roster of heroes, only a handful of which will be at risk on any given mission. Your goal is as much about managing all the resources at your disposal as it is protecting a given warrior from death or disease.Each week (in the game) you send your quartet of champions out to one of four main areas in order to gather coin, accouterments, and experience required to tackle the eponymous Darkest Dungeon. These areas all have different enemy types and challenges that require specific strategies. Some need big, heavy-hitting brutes, while others require poison to get the job done, and the trick is to balance your adventuring party's classes and tactics appropriately. That, however, is complicated by the fact that with each subsequent adventure, your soldiers inch closer to stress-induced heart attacks or debilitating diseases, to name a few possible downfalls.Darkest Dungeon never looks particularly inviting.While the death of one of your party members seems bad enough, it gets worse. Darkest Dungeon's combat revolves around careful formations. Certain character classes are only useful in one or two of the four possible positions. Heavily armed warriors sit up front to protect the assortment of healers, occultists, and archers you can employ. As battles progress, however, your teams can be shuffled, and if anyone dies--on your side or your enemies'--you'll have to form new strategies on the fly to keep up an effective force. It's an excellent system that keeps players from ever settling in or feeling completely comfortable. It's a complex system that gives you room to figure out your own ideal methods, but also forces you to manage your estate and the sanity of your band of mercenaries.Stress too, takes its toll on everyone, and there are numerous events that can trigger it, including darkness, the untimely death of a comrade, or an unknowable eldritch horror.After each adventure your troupe will return to your burgeoning hamlet. There, you can recruit, equip, and ease your legions of dungeon divers. Equipped with medical facilities, an abbey, a tavern, guilds, a blacksmith, and a stagecoach which constantly supplies you with new recruits, the hamlet serves as your headquarters in the war with the demons and devils found in the wilds. Here, you can upgrade your mercenaries' weapons and train them in new abilities that can dramatically affect their usefulness in future expeditions. You also need to take great care to keep their minds intact as the game wears on.Your team's humanity becomes a persistent and pernicious obstacle of its own. Looting corpses can net an unwary adventurer a case of rabies. Stress too, takes its toll on everyone, and there are numerous events that can trigger it, including darkness, the untimely death of a comrade, or an unknowable horror. Successive expeditions are as sure to kill your favorite mercenary as anything else. So you have to commit them to a night of drinking or meditation to keep their mind and body in fighting condition. Diseases too can afflict your warriors, and you have to treat them at the sanitarium or deal with a hefty stat penalty. Before each expedition, you'll pick out your party, supply them and prepare for a harrowingadventure.But, these things take time. And while your cleric is relaxing in the brothel, she obviously can't journey to ancient ruins and fell skeletal armies. Keeping solid party composition by matching classes, skills, specialties, and respective levels of experience is vital, but it's complicated by the fact that everyone needs a break to heal mind and body. Brutal though that penance may seem, fool-hardy strategists quickly learn their lesson. Darkest Dungeon teaches its audience how to navigate unforgiving challenges, but the result is an immensely rewarding journey.In building itself around the struggle of your hamlet and its people against the evil of the wilderness, Darkest Dungeon shifts its focus towards a set of tools for telling your own stories. It's about more than your favorite squad and their journey, but about the people who had their own share of successful runs before quietly falling in an abandoned tomb. There is no one hero here: instead you find a sea of stories crafted jointly by you and the game.Every mistake, every death, is on you. You didn't prepare well enough, you pushed someone too hard, or you didn't train them. Every mercenary who dies on your watch was your responsibility.Darkest Dungeon is held together by a brilliant web of causality. Small pieces, like whether a sword lands a critical hit, are random, but all the choices that led you to that point are not. In some ways Darkest Dungeon plays a lot like poker: countless parts are random on their own, but when guided by the skillful handle of a master, are anything but. This game is hard, but not unfairly so. Every mistake, every death, is on you. You didn't prepare well enough, you pushed someone too hard, or you didn't train them. Every mercenary who dies on your watch was your responsibility.With all this darkness, all this death, all this despair, it might sound strange to say that Darkest Dungeon is also hopeful. Like other games in its genre, successes are hard-fought, and while they might be scarce, they assure you that while the odds against you are staggering, they aren't insurmountable. Where this game shines is in creating a world that is at once ominous and encouraging. At every step, the visual design and atmospheric soundtrack, as well as an apprehensive narrator, push you to victory against the evils that surround you.Even when a character's HP has hit 0, you're not necessarily out of the fight.For every party wipe you encounter a moment of wondrous luck, and this becomes part of Darkest Dungeon's cycle. As you trek you learn and grow. You adapt new tactics as you discover the faults in older ones. Comparisons to Dark Souls these days are so common that they're almost cliché, but Darkest Dungeon is one that genuinely deserves the nod. Dark Souls' brilliance comes not from its extreme difficulty nor in its obtuse and horrific enemies. Similarly, Darkest Dungeon may be hard, but its gameplay isn't really about difficulty.The struggle serves as a test of your strategies, your team and base management. If you're not up to snuff, then your parties will die, and you'll have to rebuild. You almost never find yourself starting over truly from square one, however. The upgrades to your town are permanent, as are some of the trinkets and gold you find. So even the total loss of your roster isn't the death knell for your hamlet. And that too, sets the game apart from other roguelikes, for instance, where each new game is a new attempt at a distant goal.In this world, you're more a middle manager or a high-level accountant than, than anything else. Darkest Dungeon has you weighing probabilities and costs and sorting out which resources you can afford to toss at which runs. In the move to the PS4 and Vita, that process has become a tough more tedious. You can imagine, after all, that it'd be a bit more obnoxious to maneuver an excel spreadsheet with a controller than the precision of a mouse. It’s not too troubling, but it does delay things somewhat, especially when you're in town, sending your troops to get their various psychiatric treatments. At times, you'll need to use the shoulder buttons to sift through menus, and that's a bit counter-intuitive (why can't I use the control stick or D-pad?). All of the information you need is, mercifully, still quite accessible, but sorting your mercenaries into their various bins is more tedious (if only slightly).Darkest Dungeon plays the long game. It builds you up for a grand bout that will test everything you've learned, as well as your ability to plan several in-game weeks out. The pay-off for this constant offensive comes in short bursts--just enough to keep you going, just enough to keep you hopeful for the next excursion. It's an extraordinary cycle that bears a special teacher--rewarding your cleverness and punishing your foolishness. It transfixes and binds you to this grand journey, dotted with failures and successes. And because you endured, because you thought your way through it, the final victory against the unimaginable evil you face at the bottom of the Darkest Dungeon is personally valuable. 
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561,Ori and the Blind Forest ,9, Ori and the Blind Forest is a rapturous platformer that is as fun as it is beautiful.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2828816-2568947-2562467-ori-cover-rendering-imerged.jpg,XONE,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ori-and-the-blind-forest-review/1900-6416053/,pos,"
The first ten minutes of Ori and the Blind Forest depict a beautiful and soul-crushing story of friendship, selflessness, and loss. They recall the opening minutes of Pixar's Up! in their melancholy, and like in Up!, the introduction provides an emotional foundation for the life-affirming journey that follows. It is a phenomenal opening--a short and wordless tale, playacted by two expressive characters who move with purpose and demonstrate pure affection towards each other.There's a certain elegance to the game's initial sorrow, and it translates to the way you move through this exquisite 2D platformer. Ori and The Blind Forest is, on a fundamental level, structured as so many other platformers are; It springs from the Metroid and Castlevania tradition, gating your progress behind doors that can only be opened once you have learned a particular skill. As the nimble, lemurlike Ori, you leap and flit about with fantastic grace, and as Ori's abilities improve, so do the joys of navigating his world. When you learn how to climb walls, Ori responds wonderfully to subtle movements of the analog stick, allowing you to finesse him into exactly the right place, such as a sliver of stone embedded within a sea of lava. When you earn your double-jump, Ori somersaults like an acrobat and reacts in mid-air to your aftertouch. What a delight to have such fine control over a character this agile.Don't be too distracted by the beauty: The sequence that follows is deadly enough. One by one, you learn new skills, and new challenges arrive with them. Ori can fire energy orbs at nearby foes when he isn't avoiding them completely, and those creatures can be difficult to overcome. The blobs that stick to walls and ceilings? They aren't much of a hassle, at least until they coat the surfaces you need to cross and spit acid onto the ground. They won't let you stay still: You must take advantage of Ori's dexterity, by leaping over acidic pustules, jumping from wall to wall, or putting the other abilities you have to good use. For instance, you ultimately learn how to deflect projectiles, aiming them back at your foes while propelling yourself in the opposite direction. Turning an oncoming ball of fire back towards its owner is fun, but if you don't pay attention, you could thrust Ori into a wall of spikes, or into a crow hovering nearby.Propelling yourself through the sky in this manner becomes one of Ori and the Blind Forest's most vital maneuvers. When you first learn it, you typically use the glowing lanterns that dangle from overhangs. Soon, however, you must fire Ori through treacherous areas replete with fiery spheres and those pesky crows, which hurl towards you as if launched from a slingshot. Timing is crucial, as is quickly determining the safest trajectory that still delivers you to your destination. That mid-air fling is at the heart of one of the game's most thrilling scenes: a difficult escape from roaring tides that swallow you whole should you make a single grievous error.Ancient contraptions provide an air of mystery and wonder. The trial and error this scene and others require can prove frustrating if you prefer to move on to the next area rather than discover, learn, and adapt. I admit to shouting a few expletives when unforeseen circumstances cut my attempts short, falling boulders with crystalline spikes covering their undersides and perilous geysers that spurted from the walls among them. But what a feeling it is to overcome these challenges. The tightly timed retreats that close each chapter are among the finest joys in any platformer--or any game at all--released in recent years. If Ori were clumsy, or if these sequences weren't timed so precisely, these moments would be simply annoying. But in Ori and the Blind Forest, each element harmonizes with every other. If you run into trouble, the game's save system eases the pain. You gather crystals as you play that function as checkpoints, allowing you to determine where you will respawn if you succumb to a bile-spewing frog. You must take care, however, not to drop these crystals everywhere you go, since you can only carry so many.Those pulse-pounding escapes are complemented by moments of quiet bliss. In time, Ori can break his fall with a leafy parachute, gliding across the screen like a flower petal on the wind. During these moments, it's easy to appreciate the game's visual artistry. Multiple layers give each environment a lovely sense of depth. As you cross a log that bridges one tunnel to the next, thick trees rise in the background. Embers and fire crackle behind you, giving your trek across the troubled world a sense of urgency and purpose. Luminescent blue plants alternately close and unfurl with each jump, shining and glittering even as they become your next cause of death. It is a fairy tale come to life, a description that has rightfully earned ""cliche"" status--yet rarely is the description so apt as it is in Ori and the Blind Forest.This is one of many sequences that combine the glee of motion with a tricky mechanic. It isn't just the vibrant art and lush orchestral soundtrack that furnish a storybook mood. It's also the story, which is infrequently told to you via subtitles, accompanied by a narrator who chants along in an unknown language, in the style of Okami, or Panzer Dragoon Orta. It is a simple fable about the renewal of a ravaged land; It is in the details that you find the delights worth prizing. A critter that absconds with an important artifact gains importance you don't initially expect, revealing loneliness, fear, and tenderness not with words, but with exaggerated bows and nods. If there is any blight on this atmospheric transcendence, it is the frame rate, which occasionally falters, ever so slightly, in the final hours.It's important, however, not to mistake Ori and the Blind Forest for being simply beautiful. It certainly is--but it is also unceasingly clever. It consistently surprises you with new tricks: gravitational divergences, new ways to move through its spaces, and carefully designed levels that require you to think quickly and respond. It is not as snappy as, say, a typical Mario platformer, seeking instead a broader gameplay arc stretching across a single, interconnected world. It's a superb and thematically consistent approach that allows Ori and the Blind Forest to build joy on a bed of heartache, adding a new layer of mechanical complexity with each ray of hope.


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562,Rise of the Tomb Raider ,9, Lara Croft's new adventure blends gameplay and story into a seamless experience in a dangerous world.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2877418-91gpiw1qtnl._sl1500_.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rise-of-the-tomb-raider-review/1900-6416305/,pos,"
This review has been updated to reflect Rise of the Tomb Raider's release on PS4.Rise of the Tomb Raider unfolds in a valley haunted by echoes of older times. Abandoned Soviet structures dot the landscape, while bygone kingdoms lie dormant beneath the ground. Even the current inhabitants, long sheltered from the outside world, still hunt and gather as their ancestors did. For Lara Croft, a person intent on escaping the past, this is not a comforting place.But in her pursuit of supernatural artifacts, go here she must. So begins the next adventure for the iconic archaeologist.In 2013's Tomb Raider reboot, developer Crystal Dynamics thrust Lara into danger against her will, marooning her on a strange island with even stranger secrets. But she's since gained agency. In Rise of the Tomb Raider, she's running headlong into the fray at her own pace, seeking the key to eternal life.If that premise sounds trite, that's understandable. The Holy Grail grants the same power in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Nathan Drake, a more apt and recent counterpart, spent Uncharted 2 hunting for the Tree of Life.Lara has changed since the events of 2013's Tomb Raider.Yet Rise of the Tomb Raider anchors Lara's story with its own believable characters and emotional weight. Lara refuses to acknowledge her father's death, opting instead to seek the Divine Source, the object that could stave off death--and grief--for good. Even the villains have compelling reasons for pursuing the otherworldly power. Crystal Dynamics doesn't use magic as a storytelling crutch, though; it injects mystical elements in a way that makes sense within the world they occupy. From the outset, the game prepares you for this, and maintains a subtle undercurrent throughout.And as a third-person adventure game, Rise of the Tomb Raider excels. Rather than collide, gameplay and story share the space, supplementing each other and emerging as a cohesive whole.Like its predecessor, Rise of the Tomb Raider places you in an expansive world filled with enemy soldiers. This isn't a sandbox, though--subsequent areas are gated by ability unlocks. New items open new zones in the valley, but also let you explore previous areas more thoroughly. By going back to older environments, you can venture off the beaten path in search of useful abilities, a la Castlevania or Metroid. Now more than ever, you have territory worth exploring.Hub zones are filled with secret areas.Several of Rise of the Tomb Raider's areas are open hub zones, replete with resources, NPC side missions, and secret passageways. I spent four hours in a remote mountainside village, searching every cave and scaling every cliff in the hopes of finding my next upgrade. There isn't much filler here. It's more of a waterfall structure, where every action leads to more possibilities, which lead to even more, and so on.Backtracking to old areas is rewarding, too. It highlights how much Lara has improved since last she set foot there. It also gives a sense of ownership over the environment--by the end, I knew exactly where that cave was I couldn't enter without the rope arrows. By fast travelling to the nearest campfire, I gained access, acquired the next piece to the full auto shotgun, and was one step closer to building a new weapon for my inventory.In the interest of building Lara to fit your unique playstyle, Rise of the Tomb Raider incorporates three skill trees: hunting, brawling, and survival. Each contribute to their respective fields in disparate ways, by making certain aspects of the game less challenging or more rewarding. One allows Lara to shoot two arrows at a time, for instance. Another grants her more ammo when looting enemy corpses. The wide array of skills works well because each feels worthwhile. Pursuing them adds another layer in an already nuanced system.There are also more actual tombs than in 2013's reboot. These optional catacombs are well worth your time, too, both for their rewards, and the Rube Goldberg puzzles they present. You alter water levels, operate pulleys, and shatter icy barriers, all the while working toward improving Lara's climbing, hunting, and fighting skills. They're the kind of puzzles that make you feel smart, as if you thwarted developer Crystal Dynamics in the process.Environments span deserts, mountains, and subterranean kingdoms.And when stranded in the wilderness with few supplies and little on her back, Lara relies on nature for survival. Unfortunately, this aspect becomes tedious after a short time. It devolves into a constant process of pressing the same button on identical trees and bushes and dead rabbits over and over again. Rise of the Tomb Raider's world is stunning, but I was too often distracted by the repetitive abundance of resources strewn about the otherwise beautiful canvas.But gathering is part of the overall improvement process, and it makes sense in the harsh landscape Lara treks through. And this is where Rise of the Tomb Raider shines. Crystal Dynamics erases barriers between gameplay and story, making an almost seamless experience in the process.Throughout the game, cutscenes are succinct, but not without substance. They don't belabor the narrative with monologues and grandiose asides, but still manage to build character and establish tone. The villains, despite their megalomaniacal beliefs, have personal intentions. Lara, with clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, is somewhat broken, and it shows in her words: ""I haven't slowed down enough to ask whether any of this is real.""There's enough exposition to provide context, but not enough to get in the way of having fun.There is a tragic, harrowing, uplifting story at play here, and Rise of the Tomb Raider tells it through details. It's the way a character's eyes fall to the floor. It's how Lara's fingers choke her pistol grip. She warms her hands over fires, shivers when the wind picks up, and slides her feet through taller piles of snow. If details bring a story to life, Rise of the Tomb Raider is as vital as they come. There's enough exposition to provide meaningful context, but not enough to get in the way of, well, having fun.Lara on the precipice.And when it comes to combat, Rise of the The Tomb Raider is superb. The variety of options available in any given firefight is staggering. In fact, these encounters often feel more like puzzles. At one point, Rise of the Tomb Raider stages a battle on a frozen pond. Eight guards with heavy armor present a serious challenge, but by using the water, several holes in the ice, and the weapons at my disposal, I could even the odds. It was such an engaging encounter, I reloaded my checkpoint just to play it again. This game is filled with chances to experiment.I opted for stealth when I could, waiting for a lone soldier to stray from the pack before finishing him, or sending arrows into snipers from a distance. Environmental objects aided me all the while, as Lara's crafting skills let her fashion molotovs and cans of shrapnel at a moment's notice. It's just another way Rise of the Tomb Raider paints Lara as resourceful. She's a survivor.There are slight difficulty spikes late in the game, but if you've explored enough, and spent your hard-earned resources on new tools, the fight will be challenging, but not overly so. As in the rest of the game, there is balance in the combat as well. Crystal Dynamics has found equilibrium in almost every way.Rise of the Tomb Raider's first shot pans over the vast, foreboding landscape we'll soon come to know. In many ways, it functions as a promise on the part of Crystal Dynamics: there are big things ahead of us. And at the end of Lara's journey, after we've seen her through this adventure, and experienced everything the world has to offer, it's clear that promise was kept.Although Rise of the Tomb Raider began its life span on Xbox One last November, it now has a home on PC as well. And after spending several hours with Crystal Dynamics' title on its new platform, only minor differences were apparent. The lighting is better, especially in dark environments, where shadows play across the walls and Lara crawls through glacial caves.Textures are slightly more detailed, from the footprints in Siberia's snow, to the leaves in its ancient valley. And while the framerate did stutter several times during cutscene explosions and quick camera cuts, they weren't frequent enough to mire the cinematic experience.Rise of the Tomb Raider is also now available on PlayStation 4 in the form of the 20 Year Celebration edition. Even now, playing through it one year after I originally beat it, it's hard to put down. The Siberian wilderness is just as detailed and gorgeous as it is on Xbox One, and I didn't notice many differences in the character nuances, either. The 20 Year Celebration also grants access to Rise of the Tomb Raider's DLC, including the Croft Manor section and Endurance mode, additions that flesh out Lara's backstory and drop you into the wild to fend for your life, respectively. One year after it released on Xbox One, Rise of the Tomb Raider is still a journey well worth taking.


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563,Bloodborne ,9," Bloodborne's excellent action, beautiful artistry, and religious melodrama make it another must-play in the Demon's Souls tradition.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2682350-image%20%281%29.jpeg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bloodborne-review/1900-6416078/,pos,"
The beast appears, though you didn't expect it. You've never seen anything like this creature, a giant komondor dog with horns--and a former vicar of the church, apparently, evangelizing her faith by holding her paws together in prayer, then slamming them onto the ground and knocking you clear. The vicar is a microcosm of Bloodborne itself, a wondrous monstrosity that attacks you with vicious horror and religious overtones until you submit to it. Even should you rise above its terrors, Bloodborne answers to no master. Instead, you come to an agreement with it: You allow it to invade your brain and demand your concentration, and it allows you to wake from inevitable death, reminding you with each resurrection that life is a gift.I know: such hyperbole! Yet this is the language of Bloodborne, a Dark Souls game in all but name, and one that introduces new themes and story motifs that cannot be overlooked. Dark Souls and its direct sequel allowed their sights, sounds, and swordplay to tell the most vital tales, relegating backstory to atmospheric tapestries that revealed their details only if you looked closely enough. Bloodborne is not short of mysteries, but its narrative beats are inescapable, and its Christian themes are undeniable. The Souls games led you through parishes and cathedrals, but never have they made such grandiose statements with their subject matter. Now, developer From Software has crafted an extravagant religious parable that mirrors its game's death-and-resurrection mechanics.The allegory isn't subtle: This is a third-person action role-playing game (or role-playing action game, depending on your view) featuring a cleric and a vicar among its bosses. Outside of this clear theming, the developing saga comes to life through the sights and sounds of its world. One of Bloodborne's many striking images is that of a massive crucified figure surrounded by single-minded worshipers which poison you when they attack. The low, grumbling hum of their chant is as terrifying as their unwavering focus on their deity. Once I discovered a surreptitious way to view their worship from above, I would sneak in just to bathe in the bizarre beauty of the scene. Bloodborne sucks the faith, hope, and charity from religious devotion, populating its world with grotesque disciples and forcing the meek into their homes, from where they hope for the church to cleanse the world of its woes.This isn't a high-minded reading of Bloodborne's story, which is none too nuanced. In fact, the lack of thematic nuance is what makes From Software's newly introduced storytelling spotlight as successful as it is. Bloodborne is unafraid to go big, to the extent that you may find yourself questioning if what you think is happening is really what's happening. The answer to that is, unequivocally, ""yes."" As Bloodborne introduces new sights and events, your suspicions become digital reality, and then the game asks you to suspend disbelief once again, rising to ridiculous heights of absurdity. That its malformed majesty works so well is Bloodborne's greatest feat. I wouldn't call its key events story twists, but rather, story detonations; Your expectations aren't subverted but heightened, by many orders of magnitude.Priests have more fun.Oh, how I wish I could share with you the details, or at least put some dots on the page and let you connect them. These are discoveries you should make on your own in this excellent game. I offer reassurances, however, that Bloodborne has not taken From Software's template into Elder Scrolls territory. You will not find reams of short stories to read on the game's bookshelves, and you will not be flitting from one non-player character to the next looking for quests. But there are NPCs to chat with, most of whom stay hidden behind doors and respond to your knocks with whimpers for help, maniacal laughter, or tearful pledges to stay true to the church. For that matter, there are scattered pages to find and read, most of which have a simple expository message written on them, or a smidgen of history. With Bloodborne, From Software makes a few nods to modern game design tropes, but the additions are coated with a veneer of poetic surreality.As with the Souls games, Bloodborne doesn't typically tell you where to go and what to do when you get there. You are given a few vague, overarching goals, but the intricately interconnected regions and pathways, along with nebulous visual cues, lead you to your destination. If you get stuck, it means you are applying video game logic to a game in which that logic doesn't apply. Those scarce lines of dialogue, and those few cutscenes, are not just for atmosphere: They're nuggets of information you should file away in your head and refer to later. And if the signs point to an action that you think violates the rules of video games, you should probably follow them, even when that action previously failed. Bloodborne speaks; It is your responsibility to listen. If an enemy descends upon you from the rafters above, it only stands to reason it must have found a way up there--and it means you can find one, too. It's contextual communication at its most sophisticated.This scythe-wielder is not a boss, but he is still one of a kind.Thankfully, this world is one worth knowing, and knowing well. You spend the early hours in the city of Yharnam and its surrounding regions, which resemble 19th-century London more than they do the Souls games' dark medieval locales. The ""werewolves in Victorian England"" setting has been done, but as any Souls player might tell you, you must move deeper into the kingdom before you you can expose its true form. It's difficult not to admire Bloodborne's artistry: the baroque carvings on its stone archways and pillars, the statues depicting the locals' grief and suffering, and the gradual visual evolution of the game's hub area, which is known as Hunter's Dream.After Bloodborne soaks you in its initial ironworks, it introduces greater graphical diversity. Dark Souls II varied its looks more often, but its regions didn't share an overarching theme: There was the lava area, and the poisonous woods, and so forth. The different places were connected by pathways, but not by a clear visual arc. Bloodborne, on the other hand, tells a story with its environments as you press onward, echoing its plot within its architecture and its enemies. You return to earlier areas to find they aren't as they once were, and the boundary between reality and nightmare becomes fuzzier with each slain boss. The way these areas join together enhance the joys of exploration. You discover a path leading from a swampy cave, which in turn guides you to a series of ladders. At the top of the final ladder, you realize where this path has taken you, and can only marvel at the brilliant way these two places, so seemingly distant from each other, are united.An image that speaks for itself. There is a blight on this town in the form of seriously long load times and occasional frame rate foibles, both of which are a shame, given that this is the first Souls-esque game to appear on a current-generation console--and given how performance issues are one of many commonalities these games share. The frame rate jitters aren't common when you play on your own, but become more apparent when others join you for some jolly cooperation. The loading times could have been mitigated by a system that allows you to directly move between lamps you have activated, a la Dark Souls II. Lamps are Bloodborne's save points, which stand in for the Souls games' bonfires, and allow you to transport to Hunter's Dream. You cannot directly teleport from one lamp to another, however: You must always travel to the Dream first, meaning that quick travel requires you to endure not one, but two 30-second loading screens.Your patience is a price worth paying. Bloodborne is rewarding to play, impressive both in how it cribs from the Souls games as well as in how it deviates from them. Your Souls combat skills apply to Bloodborne, but only to a certain extent. If you relied on a shield to defend you in the past, you won't find the paltry plank you find to be of much use to you. The game demands mobility, not hardiness. Your first steps into the streets of Yharnam lead you to roaming squads of ravaged dogs and torch-bearing cultists, some of whom wield firearms, and whose shots not only damage you, but stagger you as well. Avoidance is imperative, lest a quartet of mutts tear your flesh apart while leaving you powerless to slash your way out of danger.Yet slashing away is a compelling response, due to Bloodborne's health regain system. Should you take damage, you have a limited time to gain some of that lost vitality by landing hits of your own. This system may strike you as incompatible with the rhythms of typical Souls combat, but it's a wonderful fit in Bloodborne for the way it complements not just your own mobility, but that of your enemies. You see, your foes are just as agile--even the hulking gluttons that descend upon you in Boodborne's boss battles. Boss arenas are typically large, affording you plenty of room to escape the wrath of the indescribable horror staring you down--and affording that horror the same luxury. Circle-strafing can no longer be your default strategy when a massive colossus proves more limber than you.Avoidance is imperative, lest a quartet of mutts tear your flesh apart while leaving you powerless to slash your way out of danger.These might seem like small adjustments to the formula, but they change the way you apply fundamental skills. For instance, my former lock-on habits no longer led to consistent success--not when a trio of lithe hunters zipped about the boneyard, or when a slobbering monster impossibly leaped through the air and slid across the ground like a chimerical ice dancer. Not only does an energetic enemy make it difficult to keep control of the camera when locked on, but you do not tumble when you are locked onto your target--you only sidestep or backstep. That brute covers more ground in one step than you do in several, so you unlock the camera and rush away, putting the necessary space between you and your quarry.Other gameplay elements further complement the athleticism. You can carry a firearm in your left hand, for starters, though it makes for a poor offensive tool, not just because it is tuned more for staggering enemies than for damaging them, but because ammunition is a finite resource--you can only carry 20 bullets with you as a rule, and some weapons fire more than one projectile at a time. There is no spell-spamming equivalent in Bloodborne, though a rifle or blunderbuss makes a fine accompaniment to whatever blade you wield in your right hand. That melee weapon, by the way, is transformable. A cleaver is great for doing close, rapid damage, but its secondary mode extends its reach at the cost of speed--and transforming during active battle delivers a third type of attack as the weapon morphs from one state to the other.Boss fights are better with company!There is great flexibility among the available weapons, and when I purchased a new sword from the ghoulish vendor station in Hunter's Dream, I found myself switching between the initial cleaver and the larger alternative, upgrading them both with the bloodstones I looted from certain downed enemies, and further enhancing them with blood gems, another valuable resource. In time, I disregarded firearms and relied on my sword in its two-handed form, transforming when gunmen on ledges and slithering snakes required a different approach. As expected, Bloodborne can be brutal--not as hard as Dark Souls or Demon's Souls, but a step above Dark Souls II in its level of difficulty. Mastery requires properly reacting to enemy behavior, understanding how much space you must put between you and your prey, and knowing when--and when not--to exploit health regeneration.Bloodborne also takes the survival horror aspects of its close cousins to new heights. Some enemies aren't terrifying just because of their size or their power, but because of the hideous sounds they make, and the shocking entrances that jolt you out of your trance. Crows lurk in corners in groups of four or five, covering the ground with their black wings, and emitting heinous squawks as they thrash about. A deranged disciple breaks through a boarded doorway with a repulsive scream--and what was that figure that just dashed past the doorway ahead? For that matter, what is that monstrosity clinging to the chapel walls whose immense head follows you as you jog past? Bloodborne seeks to disturb you, a goal it succeeds at the first time you cleave a wheelchair-bound gunner.You find quiet and calm in Hunter's Dream, where you stock up on supplies and speak to a living doll who assists you in leveling up while lulling you with her dulcet tones. As in the Souls games, you earn Bloodborne's primary resource by slaying enemies, though instead of gathering souls, you gather blood echoes. In exchange for echoes, the sweet-voiced doll allows you to improve basic attributes. There are fewer such attributes here than there are in Dark Souls, though each one's purpose isn't entirely clear when you begin your adventure. (Don't worry: with time comes understanding.) You can also spend blood echoes on practical items, with blood vials topping the list of necessities. These are your healing draughts, of which you can usually hold 20 at a time, and store 99 others in your stash for safekeeping. Some enemies drop vials when you slaughter them, but Hunter's Dream holds an infinite supply for purchase, so you can go farming for blood if you like, though it isn't strictly necessary.Some enemies aren't just just terrifying because of their size or their power, but because of the hideous sounds they make, and the shocking entrances that jolt you out of your trance.Nevertheless, repetition is on the Bloodborne menu, along with the blood of your sworn enemies. (How appropriate, given the game's Biblical subject matter: you drink their blood in remembrance of their sacrifice.) From Software continues to break the rules of video game adventuring to fantastic effect, killing you again and again, and inspiring you to venture into the same territory in hope of regaining the blood echoes that stain the ground where you lost them. You cannot always retrieve them through a stain, however: Sometimes, you must defeat the creature that previously bested you if you want your precious blood echoes returned to you. Otherwise, those echoes are lost to the digital ether--and so the story goes, forcing you to choose whether to press onward and risk losing your souls so you can see the next imposing vista, or to settle for the ones you have and return to Hunter's Dream, and allowing the game to gain the upper hand in your precarious partnership.There are other partnerships to make. You see other Bloodborne players as spirits roaming in your own world, and can activate grave markers that play back the last few seconds of other adventurers' final moments. In both life and death, other players provide cues to upcoming dangers. Do you notice ghostly figures swinging their weapons with abandon, even when there is no apparent danger? You should reexamine your assumptions: Those apparitions are warning you of imminent attack. You can also drop spectral messages on the ground, alerting other players to traps--and how I wish someone had done so when I stepped on a pressure plate and a sturdy log swung into my face. These aspects of Bloodborne are less novel than they were when they appeared in Demon's Souls, but they are still a vital component of Bloodborne's success, giving rise to a sense of community even when you don't directly interact with other players. You are part of an expansive web of worlds, each one shining a spot of sun into the others.What kind of death awaits on the other side of this archway?There are direct interactions in the form of direct cooperation: Ringing the right bell in your inventory either summons a helper into your world, or signals your availability to others. Now that I have finished Bloodborne, this is how I am conquering the new-game-plus: My partner distracts the dreadful Cleric Beast so that I may bury my sword into the creature's flesh. Joining up this way also makes you vulnerable to invasion from other players, a heart-rending twist that has you glancing in multiple directions, looking for signs of the real-life hunter that joins the AI-controlled creatures that hope to end you.These multiplayer components are also available in Bloodborne's Chalice Dungeons, which are adventuring areas--many of which are procedurally generated--that you enter by performing a ritual at one of Hunter's Dream's available headstones. Standalone dungeons are a neat idea, but you can't enjoy them without caveats. There are specific bosses in there to defeat, such as a humongous flaming watchdog, but if you don't periodically perform new chalice rituals, you can outlevel the ones available to you and breeze through them in a matter of minutes--not much fun in a game whose primary draw is the tension it creates through challenge. I also encountered numerous bugs within, getting stuck in place twice when approaching a glowing orb representing loot to pillage, and running into an issue with boss behavior.The Old Lords need a watchdog? Do they live in the Hamptons?The finest treasures are found within the city of Yharnam and the forests, lakes, and purgatories beyond it. Only Bloodborne would be so bold as to bury an entire factional player-versus-player mechanic within an optional region, which is in turn buried within a series of oblique steps you might miss if you aren't exploring every nook and cranny, or ignore the game's enigmatic hints. I finished Bloodborne in less time than I did Dark Souls II, yet I treasure it more in spite of its few missteps. In death there is life, and in blood, there is redemption. More hyperbole, yes, but for a game this theatrical, only hyperbole will do.


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564,Bloodborne: The Old Hunters ,9," The presumptive first and last expansion to one of the best games of 2015 is worth every death, every item discovery, and every visceral attack.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2682350-image%20%281%29.jpeg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bloodborne-the-old-hunters-review/1900-6416316/,pos,"
The remaining humans in Bloodborne’s dead city of Yharnam think you’re making a mistake to even consider this new adventure. When you talk to them, they say that there’s nothing here for you, that it’s a nightmare. They’re incorrect on both counts. As an expansion that is a couple of areas and one boss fight short of being robust by add-on standards, The Old Hunters still has a good deal of tests for hardened Bloodborne and Souls enthusiasts. And no, the re-imagining of this Gothic urban landscape isn’t a nightmare--it’s a hellscape.The Old Hunters is replete with difficult encounters, especially against hunters and fearsome bosses. The enemies that lurk along Yharnam's dark pathways are as ruthless as any you would find in the main game. Many approach you with heightened bloodlust and fearless aggression, driving the point home that you are unwelcome.Conversely, the return of Bloodborne’s sublime combat makes The Old Hunters immensely inviting. Every encounter demands thoughtfulness and dexterity, an experience all the more satisfying when you learn how to be swift and efficient with your actions. It means waiting for chances to attack and using patience through defensive dodge maneuvers. There’s added depth in the Rally system that was also available in the main game, where lost health can be regained through assertive offense, which encourages many thrilling close quarter duels.The new bosses here are a great complement to those from the main game, and they're more imaginative than what you can find in the chalice dungeons, too. They bring unexpected tactics to fights, making it hard to rely on your existing strategies. A couple of foes, such as the grossly deformed Ludwig, fight back against tried-and-true tactics such as rolling towards your opponent, so don't be surprised if they body slam you when you least expect it. Despite the somewhat familiar world and rules, The Old Hunters isn't short on surprises, even beyond boss fights. There are more than enough jump scares to make you yell at your TV and environmental traps that will make you feel like a complete imbecile if you have a propensity for leaping before looking.The new roster of bosses are full of surprises.Equally engrossing are the mysteries borne from the myriad riddles hidden in conversations and cutscenes. Even after vanquishing every foe at least once, there’s very little one can deduce regarding the history of the hunters, let alone the reasons why some cooperate with you while others simply want you dead. The many new items included in The Old Hunters add to the overall lore with cryptic inscriptions, too. If you love the backstory, there’s value in reading the history of an item as unassuming as the Constable’s Trousers. Then there’s the Beasthunter Saif, a predecessor of the Saw Cleaver that affirms the events in The Old Hunters preceded those in Bloodborne proper, adding another unexpected layer to Yharnam's mysterious past.Despite the somewhat familiar world and rules, The Old Hunters isn't short on surprises.Like many of the other weapons in this expansion, the Saif’s base stats don't deviate far from the arms in the main game. Same goes for the Fist of Gratia, a crude hunk of iron that effectively functions as a brass knuckle in the ranged weapon slot. While the Saif essentially functions like the Saw Cleaver, you’ll find nuance in the speed of the combos, with your hunter’s arm stretching a bit further with each swing compared to the immediacy of the attack from the Saw Cleaver. Alternatively, you can now wield the Whirligig Saw, a deadly pizza cutter that attaches to an almost equally lethal bent staff. Simon’s Bowblade, a sword that transforms into a bow, is an inspired piece of work even if its concept is more impressive than its application in battle, as it’s one of the tougher weapons to master.. Bloodborne reaches peak From Software fan service with the Holy Moonlight Sword, a large blade that has seen action in the studio's other titles from Otogi to Armored Core. Aside from being viable alternatives to the flagship weapons, it’s intriguing to see these new tools work in action even if some do not cater to your specific play style.The much hated crows return, hiding in plain sight. For as disturbing and depressing as Yharnam is in Bloodborne, it felt like the dark city still had a chance at redemption. The version of this city in The Old Hunters is beyond salvation. All the familiar paths are now covered in what appears to be hardened dough, with fingerprint-like lines and ridges. Countless gallons of blood drench the lower areas, leaving you to wonder how in this city managed to rid itself of these bulbous mounds and red pools before the events of the main game. This alien landscape makes this expansion feel fresh, despite the familiarity of the towering landmarks that make up Yharnam’s skyline.The Old Hunters is Bloodborne from another time and place, and with more difficult bosses and confounding stories to unravel.Knowledge of the full game’s maps and shortcuts are of no value here and that’s okay. Figuring out a new locale is one of Bloodborne’s many pleasures. To find the opposite side of a locked gate, thereby revealing a shortcut to a previously visited area is also immensely gratifying. It’s a fitting reward for vanquishing the last few dozen foes that hindered your journey to that gate. These exploration-driven rewards are certainly present in The Old Hunters.Choosing between familiar blade types and more imaginative weapons is a fun problem to have. With optional companions, this unfriendly world becomes slightly less hostile. An NPC hunter is an adequate contributor in battle, distracting bosses and taking off small chunks off the enemy’s health in the process. You can return the favor by getting the opponent’s attention, thereby giving your companion a chance to heal. The AI can be an asset but given their inconsistent behavior and the inability to give them directions, there’s more profit to be found in allying with players. Speaking of co-op, the League serves as a substantial addition to Bloodborne’s Oath factions. Compared to passive incentives to joining the Executioners or the Vilebloods in the original game, the League is more goal-oriented, encouraging co-op play while also bringing a performance-based leaderboard into Bloodborne.There’s beauty in both success and failure in Bloodborne. A one-second lapse in concentration can place you at the receiving end of a fatal combo but if you can maintain a persistent presence of mind, a triple-digit killstreak is not unheard of. Being tested by new foes in these new lands is an unquestionable joy, as is the ability to bring these newfound armaments and treasures into the main game. The Old Hunters is Bloodborne from another time and place, and with more difficult bosses and confounding stories to unravel, it's a fitting complement to the original, gruesome adventure. 


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565,The Talos Principle ,9," Excellent puzzles are only the tip of the iceberg for The Talos Principle, an existential journey about what it is to be human.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2835018-talos_principle.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-talos-principle-review/1900-6415993/,pos,"
There comes a point in single-player games where we can feel utterly alone with ourselves. It's not just that no one else is around in the game, but everything is obscured from our perception. The finite levels begin to close in as you feel their limitations stop you from doing what you really want to do. We even feel trapped within the very mysteries we're meant to solve as we question what the point of it all is. This only really affects us because it mirrors how life treats us a lot of times. Why are we doing what we're doing? Is there a point to living, some grand design that makes our work worth it? This exact sense of isolation is explored in The Talos Principle, a contemplative meditation on the nature of humanity wrapped in an excellent first-person puzzle game.Not that you're human to begin with. You awaken in a Grecian garden with no memory of what came before, armed with only the sophisticated communication skills that an adult might possess. You then hear what claims to be the voice of God, who commands you to gather the multitude of tetrominoes scattered throughout. You have free rein to enter and unlock every area within your sight, but the voice forbids you from ascending the tower at the center. Collect all the pieces, and you earn life eternal. And yet you're not entirely blind to the circumstances around you. Your form is robotic in nature, so you immediately deduce that you're not a biological human being. Sometimes the details of the world around you turn blurry and fuzzy, as if the world itself is glitching, so it's not hard to figure out you're inside some kind of computer simulation.The jammers deactivate laser barriers and turn off mounted machine guns.The tetrominoes themselves are cleverly placed behind gauntlets of puzzles you have to solve using several implements and switches that have been provided for you. Levels typically involve finding your way from one point to the next while bypassing the obstacles along the way. The most basic of these is the barrier of light, which you can dissipate by pressing a switch, aligning a colored beam of light into a matching hole, or disrupting it by using a special jammer you sometimes find nearby. Other obstacles, like mines, machine guns, or even the level itself, require similar strategies, but also involve timing and light reflexes. One element remains consistent: most puzzles task you with bypassing whatever is in your way through logic, often to the point where the game becomes a door-holding simulator. It's not uncommon to hold a barrier open from both sides so that you can get the tools you need to progress further.Nevertheless, the combination of tools and level design keep the puzzles consistently fresh. Jammers and light-refracting rods let you manipulate any number of devices. Boxes can depress switches and serve as platforms to reach higher places. Fans blow whatever you put on them into whatever direction they point. You even use a recorder to record your own actions for a short time, and then play back the recording so that you may work alongside your clone in tandem, which is particularly useful once you gain the ability to have your recording carry objects above its head (including the real you). The Talos Principle forces you to broaden your mind and master the multitude of interlocking devices each room holds. Some puzzles even require you to move, align, and adjust them into a sprawling, interlocking system of mechanical relationships, an act that makes you feel particularly clever. Developer Croteam makes the most of a familiar conceit, challenging you to look at angles, sequencing, and timing in new, complex ways.Some of the details of the world around you sometimes turn blurry and fuzzy, as if the world itself is glitching.When you're not busy whittling away at the main task at hand, you're free to explore the strange simulation, which you soon find is something of a mix between the Garden of Eden and the Library of Alexandria. Aside from the forbidden tower, you're free to wander within the bounds of each area. You won't find much of interest aside from scenery, but you run into strange terminals scattered throughout the place. Each screen you find houses several pieces of information, some of which seem laughably irrelevant. Sometimes you find clues as to the nature of the place you find yourself, but sometimes you come across a history of the myth of Osiris, a passage from German philosopher Immanuel Kant, or a set of lyrics to an insipid modern-day pop song. But they are all musings trying to define what it means to be human.And then there's the library assistant, which starts out as a plain speak program meant to assist you in a more conversational tone. Before you know it, however, it starts asking you questions about your nature, what a person is, what morals are, and many other heady topics in an increasingly passive-aggressive manner. You eventually get into full-on philosophy debates with it, and, much like real philosophy debates, you hardly ever feel victorious (though the jerk of an assistant will certainly try to claim as much), but you get to stretch your ideas until they either break or strengthen. Where most games are content to make you feel physically powerful, The Talos Principle dares to put you in the shoes of Socrates.The simulation mimics real locales like Greece and Egypt.The puzzle rooms, while often brain-bending, are short enough that you might blaze through them with an almost mechanical glee, which almost seems to undermine the existential theme of the game. But we're talking about The Talos Principle here, so named for the bronze man of Greek myth that suggests that, if a machine can be like a human, then a human is like a machine. We are, after all, consciousness attached to working parts. You quickly learn the basics of how to manipulate the divine tools you're given, and your knowledge and expertise grow as your ability to apply logic as you move through the levels increases. But then, so can a machine. Artificial Intelligence can learn, too.But as you get better at your given “vocation,” you're going to wander inevitably over to the terminals and pore over every work, absorbing what the ages' finest thinkers have to say about the human condition, what history and mythology tell us about our mortality and our immortality, and how the human race is advancing on the back of what came before. You listen to the audio logs of the simulation creator's musings on life and science and civilization. You read the QR codes of the AIs that came before and hear about what conclusions they came to. You even enter the tower you've been forbidden to climb because you just can't help yourself. The game doesn't require you to do any of this, but you do because you're inherently curious and eager to learn, another pesky human trait.The puzzle rooms, while often brain-bending, are short enough that you might blaze through them with an almost mechanical glee.After hunting down every last bit of information that the world has to offer, you don't come to any neat conclusions, but quite the opposite. Most of the knowledge that you accrue during your lengthy journey is quite contradictory. Clearly, humanity hasn't figured itself out yet. But you trudge on anyway, gathering tetrominoes as you use the knowledge of the past to build a future for yourself. The hints that the QR codes give build on your past experiences to help you solve the harder puzzles. The vast repository of knowledge at your fingertips help you form ideas about humanity and morality, which you arm yourself with when talking to that smug assistant. Every idea, every thought you come across, helps shape your belief system, ultimately informing whether you accept eternal life, ascend the tower, or stay behind and help the next generation reach new metaphorical heights. Your success is truly built from the whole of everyone's past triumphs and failures.The Talos Principle is an absolute joy to play, packed to the gills with expertly designed puzzles and enough ancillary content to make any history of philosophy buff salivate. But all of that is almost beside the point in the face of the game's thematic ambitions. It may seem like you're alone in this world, but you're really not, and that's the greatest triumph of The Talos Principle: It serves as a fantastic representation of the human condition, complete with curiosity, speculation, wonder, fear, and a yearning to know the unknowable. But most importantly, it nails the role that isolation plays in the human condition. Because of all we don't know, because of how seemingly out of control we all are in the cosmic sense, we feel alone. But, in reality, we're alone together.
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566,Abzu ,9," Abzu is deeply, transcendentally beautiful--not just visually splendid, but emotionally evocative. Without question, it is this year's Journey.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2890765-untitled-1.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/abzu-review/1900-6416489/,pos,"
When I die, I hope whatever happens next is even half as beautiful as Abzu. Its mesmerizing soundtrack and Wind Waker-esque visuals are among the most enrapturing in recent memory, yet the game's true beauty stems not from its bittersweet score and inviting undersea environments but from its unfailing ability to imbue every moment with childlike wonder. Abzu is serene and meditative, calming and cathartic, moving and timeless, its simple components assembled so elegantly as to become something altogether richer.There's a striking sort of purity about Abzu that invites comparison to another, equally powerful game: Journey. As in Journey, Abzu's characters are nameless, its story wordless, its campaign brief. It also eschews many mechanics we might consider standard for a modern adventure/exploration game, including combat, character progression, and fail states. It even lacks the ambient multiplayer that made Journey such a profound experience for many players. But Abzu finds meaning in other places and, like Journey, evokes a vast array of emotions with grace and ease.When you ping your robot buddies, they playfully respond with little flips and chirping noises. Just imagine if WALL-E could swim.Though the campaign follows a linear path, you're typically free to explore areas at your own pace, following subtle environmental cues toward hidden details or grasping on to massive creatures like orcas and manta rays as they glide effortlessly through the blazing blue water. You can even pause to ""meditate"" at certain statues, allowing you to experience the world from the perspective of the animals around you. Doing so doesn't earn you anything; it's simply an opportunity to observe and enjoy the thriving ecosystems layered into every environment.With lush kelp forests, pink coral reefs, and murky black trenches, Abzu captures the otherworldly beauty of the ocean and populates each breathtaking backdrop with its own unique fauna. You'll find all manner of fish, sharks, eels, whales, crustaceans, and more, all of which behave believably. And yet, somehow, I never felt threatened--curious, awestruck, even intimidated, but never threatened. There's something profoundly peaceful about drifting through that world with no score or objectives or heads-up display to break the spell.That's not to say, however, that Abzu abandons gameplay completely. In fact, the swimming itself feels surprisingly satisfying, thanks in part to the game's novel control scheme. You swim straight ahead by simply squeezing the right trigger, leaving you to look around with the right stick and change direction with the left. Regardless of how you twist and maneuver, your character fluidly adapts to your every input.Meanwhile, tapping X with the proper rhythm builds up your boost, allowing you to flit gracefully through obstacles and breach into the air if you speed toward the surface. Silly as that may sound, it's actually pretty exhilarating, especially when you can entice a school of fish to swim alongside you or get dolphins to flip and squeak almost as if they're playing with you.Abzu is also more than a simple ocean-life simulator. As you push forward, you'll encounter several straight-forward exploration puzzles and even a few tense moments of action, but more importantly, you'll begin to dive deeper and deeper into the game's unspoken narrative. You'll uncover some strange yet adorable robots almost immediately and start to notice scattered ruins of an ancient civilization shortly thereafter.The further you progress, the more exquisite the ruins grow, with gilded paintings, intricate tile work, and ornate, Moroccan-style windows hinting at some tragic past. Suffice it to say the game grows in some truly unexpected and borderline mind-blowing ways. Later areas and gameplay evolutions, though simple, prove remarkably affecting within the context of the experience, cleverly subverting expectations established by the game's earlier portions.Of course, Abzu isn't perfect. The camera occasionally clips through larger objects, for example, and the mechanics walk a very fine line between minimalist and just straight-up simplistic. But these shortcoming are utterly inconsequential in the face of Abzu's countless artistic triumphs--like the music. The soundtrack shifts dynamically as you progress through the environments, stitching together various compositions on the fly to create a mood that matches your surroundings without explicitly calling attention to itself.And that's not all. At certain moments, the camera slowly pulls back to communicate the overwhelming scale of certain creatures and environments. I swam eye to eye with a blue whale and have never felt more awestruck or insignificant in a video game. On another occasion, I emerged from a tight cavern and was suddenly enveloped by a vast, empty chasm with an endless darkness beneath me. Again, the deft camerawork turned an already memorable moment into something truly incredible.Art exists to bridge a gap, to communicate emotions or ideas that would otherwise be impossible to articulate. Abzu does this--courageously, confidently, sincerely. Its stirring soundtrack, vivid colors, subtle storytelling, living world, and thoughtful execution combine to create a singularly moving, transcendent experience. In a word: Abzu is beautiful.


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567,Super Mario Maker ,9, The ultimate 2D Mario experience puts the creative reigns in your hands with a simple and satisfying level-building experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2888073-wiiu_supermariomaker_illustration_01.jpg,WIIU,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-mario-maker-review/1900-6416236/,pos,"
I am not a good game designer, but I knew that before playing Super Mario Maker. In other games with a built-in ""creator"" mode, like LittleBigPlanet, I would just ignore the creation aspect and focus on playing. Mod and level design tools for most RPGs require too much dedicated study and practice to draw me in. But with Mario Maker, it's incredibly simple to design a hideous torture chamber. Or indeed any product of intentionally horrible, unfair game design. I'm still not very good at it, but I'm beginning to love creating.Super Mario Maker is essentially two games: A design tool and a traditional 2D platformer. The tool aspect lets you crib elements from several Mario games and toss them together into a level of your own making, which you can then upload online for everyone else to play. You choose the overall graphical skin from among Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, or New Super Mario Bros. U. This affects the way everything looks and sounds, and how some items are used (for example, Mario World allows access to Cape Mario while New Super Mario Bros. U swaps that with Propellor Mario). And the background that you choose (airship, underwater, castle, etc.), determines the stage and musical themes.The mix-and-match nature allows for exciting and anachronistic additions to familiar scenarios, like dropping a version of Bowser Jr. into an 8-bit style underwater Mario level. And some items can be combined for interesting new effects--placing a POW block in a pipe creates a pipe the distributes POW blocks, and putting a mushroom on pretty much any item, or enemy, makes it significantly larger.It's a simple system that involves dragging and dropping different items from the menu bar into the environment. Copying, deleting, and drawing platforms is as easy as swiping and drawing across the Wii U tablet. As you place your level's obstacles and platforms, little background elements pop up adding color and variety to the scenery. And with an undo ""dog"" button and a restart ""rocket"" icon, the menu aesthetic is an obvious nod to the quirky, experimental SNES title Mario Paint. You'll even get flies swarming around your screen if you let the game idle for too long.Building off of Mario Paint's eclectic sense of humor, you can also add pre-recorded sound and visual effects to your stage that would have never been used in a more traditional Mario game. Whether that's as simple as a friendly ""ding"" when you hit the correct box, or a ""beating heart"" sound when you want to add some tension to an ominous dungeon hallway, the effects use the same intuitive drag-and-drop system as the game's other items.""The first time I discovered that not only could I make a giant, flame-spewing piranha plant, but I could also make it fly, I cackled with horrible glee at the possibilities.""Everything is incredibly easy to understand, implement, and experiment with, which makes creating levels, even for a complete novice, fun and effortless.Unlike other games where the creation aspect is secondary to playing through a story or mission mode, crafting a level in Mario Maker is the focus. And also unlike with those games, creating a level is just as fun as playing one. Swapping between building and testing a stage is immediate and seamless, so it's easy to try new ideas. This lends the game a sense of discovery and adventure, even after you've been creating for hours.While it rarely feels like there aren't enough tools create with, the longer you spend with Mario Maker, the more you might notice things you can't do. There's no way to add a mid-stage checkpoint. The dimensional limits of the levels are set in stone, so if you want to build something focused on a long, vertical freefall, rather than a horizontal jaunt, you're out of luck. Enemy AI is fixed--you can't create Goombas or Turtles that will try to actively seek out and attack Mario (though there are Mario-seeking Bullet Bills already included). And while you're allowed to place and use the game's creations in almost any way you like, the broader details, whether that's changing the color palette of an enemy or composing your own music, are outside your control. The restrictions doubtless keep the creation aspect more focused on interesting gameplay moments, but--especially with Mario Maker's other nods to Mario Paint--it's hard not to want just a little bit more freedom to expand past the bounds of a normal Mario game.And, as both a positive and a negative, you don't have complete access to all of the game's creation tools when you first turn it on. You start off with a very limited palette of items and themes to experiment with, and more of the game's options unlock the longer you spend creating. That unlock time isn't measured in hours, however; it's measured in days. After playing with the tools you have available for about five minutes, you'll get an on-screen message saying the next unlock is queued up for delivery...the next day. Come back the next day, play for five more minutes with your new toys, and the next set of items will queue up for another next-day delivery.It's a simple albeit tedious system to bypass: backing out of the game and changing your system's clock lets you hack your way to quicker access. But even though that week-long process of unlocking all the game's available items is a bit too long, it does serve a purpose: it makes sure you get out of the creator and play more levels.Experimenting with the creation tools and playing around with the maker aspect is fun on its own, but the way you really learn to use those tools is through trying other peoples' creations. Just like reading makes you a better writer and listening to music makes you a better musician, playing through stages, both good and bad, lets you experience first-hand what works and doesn't work in a level. Mario Maker comes with a suite of pre-built stages, so there's something to try out even if you never go online and try user-created content.But the user-created levels are where the real sparks of both genius and maddening difficulty come in. With a mix of hundreds of stages from around the world, I survived gauntlets of impossible-looking spinning fire traps; crossed massive gaps that required precise, last-second jumps; and solved levels that were more about using shells and other items in creative ways rather than reflexes and timing. In one particularly devious stage, I was forced to avoid mushrooms entirely, normally a highly sought-after power-up, in order to squeeze through tiny gaps at certain points in the level. The catch: the level was filled with hundreds of mushrooms.The game makes it easy to find and sort user-created levels by popularity, difficulty, and creator. And the force that keeps driving you through these player-created levels, no matter how crazy, is knowing that someone had to beat them to upload them. They might seem hard. They might be put together with unbelievable unfairness. And maybe its creator only got through using luck and sheer force of will. But someone beat that level at least once, and that means you can too.Super Mario Maker is a game of joyous creation and fun surprises. And that's without mentioning things like the music, a highlight in every Mario game. From the familiar and joyous themes of the main worlds to the altered riffs you get when tinkering around in Make mode, the soundtrack captures that same essence of wonder and surprise as the rest of the game. Even the in-game instruction manual is incredibly useful and entertaining; it's graphically animated, written with a great sense of humor, and, for no particular reason, throws in some thoughts about brussel sprouts.The first time I discovered that not only could I make a giant, flame-spewing piranha plant, but I could also make it fly, I cackled with horrible glee at the possibilities. And for the first time in a creation-focused experience, I look forward to returning again and again for more than just the amazing levels I know other people will create. I want to keep making my own levels better. The game won't necessarily turn you into the next Shigeru Miyamoto, but you can almost feel a little bit of that magic rubbing off every time you upload a new creation. 


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568,Sports Car GT ,3.8, Sports Car GT is an unpolished racing game that doesn't have anything new to offer in any department.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/2/5/2218625-sportscargt5.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sports-car-gt-review/1900-2549455/,neg,"
While Sports Car GT offers a fair road-racing experience, the thought that Need for Speed: High Stakes and Gran Turismo are better by leaps and bounds never leaves your mind. With a limited array of options and modes, Sports Car GT really misses the mark. The game features nine real cars, including the BMW M3, Porsche 911, Saleen Mustang, Callaway C7 and C12, and the Mosler Raptor. The cars are all decked out with authentic racing colors and spoilers just like the real road-racing rigs. There are ten tracks in all, each of them modeled after its real life counterpart. Some of the tracks include Road Atlanta, Laguna Seca Raceway, Lime Rock, and North Point. The game can be played from three different camera views: a standard chase view, a closer chase view, and a first-person bumper view. The game only has three single-player modes to choose from. In season mode, you compete for money and season standings. The more you win, the more upgrades you can buy for better performance. In arcade mode you can jump right in and pick any car and track. Time trial mode, of course, lets you try to better your time for a particular track that you've already completed. There are a couple of two-player split-screen modes that let you and a friend compete. One is the standard head-to-head that has you and a second player on a track racing each other. The second is pace car mode, which throws one computer car into the mix. The final two-player option is pink-slip mode, which is done up in the same way as the high stakes mode in NFS: High Stakes. It lets you and a friend race against each other using the customized cars you built up from the one-player game. The catch is that the winner of the race wins the loser's car. The game controls well when you use the analog controller, but the power slide is a little tricky at first. It doesn't feel as responsive as Gran Turismo, but it does have that simulation feel to its gameplay. The AI of the computer-controlled drone cars on the track is pretty weak. All of the cars seem to follow the same racing line except for the two that are always way ahead of the pack. This setup is nice when you are trying to learn how to play, since one of the cars is bound to be going about your speed. But once you get the hang of the controls it justturns into a battle for first, second, or third. This racing tale gets old, since you know how it's going to end even before it begins.   In the graphics department the game has some pretty major problems. The first problem is the game's overall drab appearance. It's almost as if every single race is done on an overcast day. Some of the lighting effects used in the game look nice, although the constant camera flare effect that shows up when you are racing some courses at night is just plain annoying. The barrier walls that are designed to keep you on track for some of the courses look nearly identical, in texture and color, to the road. Needless to say, this makes racing some courses extremely frustrating, because unless you're keeping a close eye on the map, you'll plow right into one of walls without ever seeing it. When this happens, or when you get all haywire and spin around and go head-on with one of computer-controlled cars, you'll notice the game's major factual inaccuracy. The cars don't flip, roll, or do anything other than come to a complete stop when you smash into something. These minor flaws take away from the game's realism and make it less fun to play.    The sound and music are also really poor. The race car's sound is more like a jet's turbine engine than a high-performance racing engine. This combined with the lame techno music makes the audio portion of Sports Car GT quite a flop.  In the end, Sports Car GT is an unpolished racing game that doesn't have anything new to offer in any department. So unless you're fiending for any new racing game you can get your hot little hands on, leave this one on the shelf.
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569,Beatdown ,3.8," It's plagued with a crummy interface, frustrating controls, and no real strategic depth.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/5/2/520-1852.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/beatdown-review/1900-2538162/,neg,"
Beatdown: Welcome to the 'Hood is an ugly little game brimming with cheesy cliches and suburban fantasies of urban violence. Touted as the first in a new genre of urban action/strategy, it's plagued with a crummy interface, frustrating controls, and no real strategic depth. But mostly it's just so darn silly. This mission-driven action/real-time-strategy crossover places you in control of a band of modern street thugs, varying from mission to mission in size and lineup. These units are cleanly rendered sprites that predictably differ in appearance, offensive and defensive strength, maximum health, and attack style. Among the more conceptually dubious are Illinator, who ""uses his empty '40's' to make Molotov cocktails,"" and Shredda, ""a lethal combination of skateboarder, pyromaniac, and graffiti artist."" Ouch. Some, Gunman for example, have ranged attacks; others, like Thug, just use their fists. The missions are pretty straightforward. Though some are more interesting - for example, ""Deliver package to the Chemist"" - mostly you're out to kill the boss and/or everyone else. Along the way you can mug wandering pedestrians and hookers, buy ammo, and buy drugs (power-ups) from the Chemist, like health bonuses, Crazz, which boosts offensive power, and Nopain, for higher defenses. If you are spotted by the cops while purchasing drugs or mugging someone, a siren sounds, and the guilty party member is penalized with 30 seconds of paralysis and a cute little handcuffs icon. I suppose it's the game's sardonic sense of street smarts that leaves the authorities looking the other way during the real crimes: the intergang gun battles that make up most of the game. Actually, I'm sure no one even thought of it, or anything else. This game is a dog. An amusing footnote: If the Don - a powerful leader type and a ""man of style"" - is positioned outside of ""the hotel,"" he receives a cut from the hookers. Welcome to the 'hood indeed. Yikes! There is a cloud of ineptitude hanging over Beatdown. From a general play-mechanics standpoint, there is plenty of reason to believe that its characters were actually modeled after Chase, Belushi, and Aykroyd rather than Cube, T, and Moore. Highlight some units, click a location on the map, and off they go. Often as not, they go the wrong way or not at all. The pathing is atrocious. You're in a building and want to take everyone outside and to the left, but the only door is on the right? Plan on clicking the door, then a spot next to the door, then another and another, as confused thugs run in strange hieroglyphic patterns inside the place. Similar accidental slapstick always seems to leave your gunmen on the wrong side of fences or just plain abandoned after some skirmish. Just for fun, try saving the game right before getting attacked by a whole bunch of dudes (though this does require second sight). All characters are deselected whenever you save, leaving them completely vulnerable upon reentering the game proper. Poor interface precludes any sort of tactical invention. You control a maximum of eight characters at a time. You cannot create multiple, switchable groups, which might not seem that important, since most of Beatdown's missions involve fewer than ten units. However, two of the more interesting units have explosive attacks that affect larger areas but can be dangerous to the units themselves and their allies. Units in the game are immune to the bullets of their own side but not the fire-based attacks - thus making these explosive attackers essentially unusable when traveling with a group. This is exacerbated by the combat controls, which require that you hold the control key and repeatedly push the left mouse button throughout the duration of a fight. If only you could just give an attack command so your units would keep fighting until one side was eliminated, then you could separate the more hazardous units from the rest, and let them enact their violence with your other units fighting safely outside of their range. That way, even if you couldn't create groups to send multiple sorties to perform separate, simultaneous tasks, you could at least use the more dangerous units. The bottom line is that switchable groups, or a greater number of simultaneously selectable characters, would have made the game more tactically viable. Later levels offer increasing numbers of hoodlums at your command, but any number greater than your allotted eight are more of a liability than an asset, since you really have no way to control them. As a cold-hearted kingpin out there on the tough streets of gangland, your best bet is to stash the extra guys in a building until somebody dies. Even if the grouping, pathing, and essential play mechanics were better, there would still be little room for strategy. The world of Beatdown has essentially three variables: money, health, and ammo. And you can purchase the latter two with the first. Thus, nearly every mission can be accomplished with the following formula: wait around, mug pedestrian, buy ammo/health/drugs; repeat until all characters are at full health, with full ammo and both drug enhancements; go kill boss/have showdown/invade enemy turf. That's it. Yet for all its foolishness, Beatdown is not totally unenjoyable. Somehow, some invisible silent element inside the game provides some sort of stimulation. Maybe it's the spooky hip-hop soundtrack. Maybe it's just a matter of seeing to what strange lengths the game will go - like the mission where the enemy gang is just hanging out, completely unmoving, on a playground clear on the other side of town, waiting for you to pick its members off one at a time. Don't get me wrong. This is not a good game. It requires little thought and little in the way of reflexes. Most of its challenge comes from grappling with an interface that feels broken. And the language and trappings of the game are foolish to the point of embarrassing the player. I'm just saying that if you were forced to play it, it wouldn't make you cry.
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570,Brain Dead 13 ,3.8, Brain Dead 13 makes no improvement in a decade-old genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/4/0/2209040-3do_braindead.jpg,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/brain-dead-13-review/1900-2533830/,neg,"
Brain Dead 13 follows in the footsteps of such laser disc genre games as Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Even with Don Bluth-style animation, and a quick decision-making interface, Brain Dead 13 makes no improvement in a decade-old genre that never managed to bring its interactive excitement up to the level of its visuals. As Fritz, the player runs around the castle, usually chased by some sort of beastie, making between one and three directional decisions per screen. Dragon's Lair, the first laser disc game (so named because the arcade versions ran off of laser discs installed inside the machine), warned the player when a decision had to be made - be it an item to manipulate or a direction to travel. Brain Dead 13, however, has no such warning: As a result, there's simply no chance for a player to succeed. Occasionally, a player might guess the correct move, but more often than not the player is forced to retry the move and make his or her way by trial and error. Players have as many lives as they need, but it won't take long for them to curse this fountain of immortality. The visuals in Brain Dead 13 leave much to be desired. In fact this Saturn game doesn't even look as good as the original Dragon's Lair - a game that's a decade old. Brain Dead's animation is somewhat jumpy, and the lines aren't smooth - the characters move in very clear pixels. Even worse, the sound sometimes jumps - providing a bumpy effect that's reminiscent of a computer desperately trying to keep up with fullmotion video it just can't handle. The PC edition of Dragon's Lair is a more fluid, more enjoyable laser disc translation. It's the game fans of this genre should grab. Consider taking Brain Dead 13 for a spin only if you've already memorized the classics, or want to play this type of game on the consoles.
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571,Castrol Honda Superbike ,3.8," It isn't a horrible game, but other than offering a strong simulation aspect, there's not much there.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/3/0/4/633-2304.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/castrol-honda-superbike-review/1900-2546969/,neg,"
Electronic Arts has proven with the Moto Racer series that it knows what a good motorcycle racing game is. That's why it is so disappointing to see that Castrol Honda Superbike is so noticeably inferior. It isn't a horrible game, but other than offering a strong simulation aspect, there's not much there. Castrol Honda Superbike, as the name implies, is a racing game that exclusively features real Honda RC45 racing bikes that you can race on 14 real tracks from around the world. The game has several different settings that let you customize your bike. Most notable are the different sprocket settings that let you change your bike's gear-ratio settings. Each gear can be adjusted so that you can tailor and maximize your motorcycle's performance for each track.  The control of the bikes is actually quite good, especially when using the Dual Shock controller - one stick steers the bike while the other adjusts your speed. The bike reacts as it would in real life, which means that when you're going around a tight turn you must take it at a reasonable speed so your bike doesn't go slamming into a wall. If this is a problem for you, the game does offer six different difficulty settings, some of which have options that help steer your bike for you while you turn, as well as reduce your bike's speed so that you can make the turn.  The AI of the track's seven computer-controlled bikers isn't anything special. The bikers just race along the course in a standard staggered style so that at just about any point in the race you have someone to directly compete against. If you do decide to race this other player, the game features a two-player head-to-head split-screen mode.  Visually, the game isn't that impressive, especially when compared with Moto Racer 2, Electronic Arts' Motorcycle racer that was released last year. The riders look a little too polygonal, and their motions aren't all that realistic. Take for instance the animation of your rider falling off the bike when you crash into a wall or when he's laying the bike down on it's side when going too quickly into a turn. The rider comes off the bike as if the hand of God reached down and plucked him off the bike without letting him move a muscle. Most of the rider's basic animations look more than a little awkward as well. The tracks themselves look decent, and the game doesn't suffer from too much pop-up.  In the audio department, the game is nondescript, especially since there isn't any music during the races. The effects and engine sounds are fairly authentic but don't really keep you company during the races.   The only players this game would really appeal to are bike-racing fanatics, who are really into the sport. Players who aren't won't appreciate the extremely real-world bike physics that make you take corners at very low speeds. The rest of us, who just think motorcycle-racing games are fairly neat to play from time to time, should just stick with Moto Racer 2.
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572,"City of Lost Children, The ",3.8," Players do not want to control helpless, whining characters.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/3/7/2210037-city_of_lost_children_front.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/city-of-lost-children-the-review/1900-2547032/,neg,"
In Psygnosis' adaptation of the film The City of Lost Children you play Miette, a young orphan girl forced to prowl the crusty and desolate streets of Paris in a dystopic near-future where children are stolen by a mad scientist and made to play bad film adaptations for the PlayStation. OK, not really. But it's tough to imagine a fate worse for tomorrow's children than to be struck powerless in the midst of as many tedious and arbitrary puzzles as this. The gameplay is of the Myst meets Alone in the Dark, 3-D, third-person adventure variety. Walk around. Slowly. Click on stuff. See if anything happens. It usually doesn't, though each futile effort is rewarded with the irritating comment, ""I can't do anything,"" from Miette. The end result is that you get to stand in every possible spot in the city, hoping that useful items will appear in your ""useful item"" window so that you can seek out the right place to be while holding the correct item when you push the action button. Immersive? No.  Control of Miette is awkward at best. Rotation is slippery and inaccurate, causing you to run into countless snags when you're simply trying to walk down the street. In addition, each time you run into another barrel, box, or other meaningless impediment to progress, Miette lets out a whine, and control is temporarily suspended while she pauses with a two-second animation of her dismay. Now that's entertainment. The game's puzzles are arbitrary and not particularly intuitive. Trade the marbles for a sleeping potion? Go figure. Put a bone in a cash register to short out the security system on a safe? Come on. The lack of deduction required by the game encourages the kind of random gameplay that can only be described as frustrating. Solutions to puzzles rarely yield a sense of accomplishment since more often then not they are solved through happenstance, not reasoning. It would be an extreme feat of good fortune to complete this game without a walk-through, as its puzzles are just so counterintuitive. Compounding this problem are the graphics. They are stunning. They are gorgeous. Beautiful, dark backgrounds set an eerie, foreboding mood for Miette's (pointless, irritating) solitary wanderings. Unfortunately, they only impede gameplay. Crazy, Dr. Caligari-esque camera angles often make navigating Miette through the third dimension all but impossible. How much will you cherish the pregnant gloom of a cybergothic sky? Little, when it means you can't find the stupid bag of marbles. Many of the most important inventory items are completely invisible until you are literally standing on top of them - in fact, some never appear on screen at all, except in your useful item pop-up window. Why design a game that requires players to spend 20 minutes of their lives standing on boxes by a pier in the glorious, gloomy night, looking for an invisible metal pipe? The music, like the background graphics, is stunning, haunting, and perfectly suited to the ominous vibe of the game's sad future. Unfortunately, the remainder of the sound in the game is dominated by the protagonist's incessant whining. Players do not want to control helpless, whining characters. While they may not need to assume the identity of a hyper-macho Duke Nukem who dishes out enough fireworks to, uh... start a fireworks store. They want to go out with a blaze of glory, not a whimper of self-doubt.
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573,Crypt Killer ,3.8, There is nothing remotely scary about Crypt Killer - except the thought of spending money on this abomination.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/4/1/2208941-crypt_killer_cover.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crypt-killer-review/1900-2547192/,neg,"
If we look back at that horrible mess called the Sega CD, it seems that only one title managed to rise above all the crap and stand on its own as a first-rate effort: Konami's Lethal Enforcers. The game's flat yet photo-realistic graphics proved it the best-looking title on this ill-fated platform. And with the addition of Konami's ""Justifier"" light gun, playing the game became a truly unique thrill in an era of side-scrolling Sonic knockoffs. With all of the technology available today (not to mention the Konami's arcade heritage and history), it seemed reasonable to assume that Konami's newest title would put all others, including the excellent Lethal Enforcers, to shame. Unfortunately, with its latest game Crypt Killer (the home translation of the coin-op), Konami has done an about-face, producing a game unfit to shine Lethal Enforcer's shotgun. Aside from the ridiculous storyline (something about ancient ruins and lost mythical jewels), Crypt Killer's basic premise is this: Move (on rails, of course) through a series of catacombs, tombs, tunnels, rivers, and outdoor areas while shooting the enemies (skeletons, ghouls, piranha, zombies, etc.) that appear before you. There are six stages in all, with multiple sub-areas in each. Once you find the ""Eye of Guidance"" crystal, it's off to the next level. When you get right down to it, there's nothing fun about this game - the levels are boring, the enemies are cliched, and the weapons are standard. The graphics, you ask? Words cannot describe how wretched this game looks (but I'm going to try anyway). The monsters are flat, the sprites are grainy (certainly not the ""high-resolution polygons"" the Konami press release touts), and the frame rate is horrifically low. To top it off, using just about any gun peripheral results in frustrating inaccuracy. Despite its ghoulish overtones and enemies straight from ""Clash of the Titans,"" there is nothing remotely scary about Crypt Killer - except the thought of spending money on this abomination. Steer clear.
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574,CyberTiger ,3.8," If you are a novice or a serious N64 gamer who wants a fun, fantasy-style title that still plays like an earnest game of golf, check out Mario Golf or ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/6/8/6/737-2686.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/cybertiger-review/1900-2545299/,neg,"
Mario Golf showed gamers that golf could be a fun, colorful, lively, and even silly experience. But most of all it showed us that the sport, even in its fantasy renditions, could be done well on the N64. Now comes CyberTiger - a game with undoubtedly the same mission but, unfortunately, with a different result. Not only does the game tap into the fantasy-golf market a bit late on the line, but its composition and technical merits are subpar at best.  There are several play modes in CyberTiger: stroke, skins, tournament, battle, Tiger challenge, match play, and driving range. When you first start the game, you can dive into a quick-play sequence with a player, a ball, and a course, or you can hop into the various modes. Most of these play modes don't really introduce many new concepts to the golf game arena. The stroke match is exactly that, the tournament mode is exactly that, the skins... and so on. What the game delivers is the concept of power-ups (and not just extending your stroke), the battle modes, the Tiger challenge mode, and the driving-range target practice.  In the driving range, you line up shots to hit the targets placed around the course. If you hit them, you'll earn up to nine power-ups such as a spinner (puts spin control on ball), a saw blade the ball goes through inanimate objects on course), a skipper (the ball goes through water traps), a no bounce (the ball sticks to the ground when it lands), a rocket (adds distance to your shots), a wind cutter (the ball cuts through heavy winds), accuracy (helps send ball to where you aim), and a mystery power up (acts as any of the other eight). These little treats would be amusing additions to a good golf game, but without a solid golf title in place, they do little to season the playing field.  The battle mode, besides being scarred by a horribly presented split screen, is a moderately amusing competition in which you attempt to ""bomb"" your opponents by aiming your ball right at the platform or green they are putting from - while they simultaneously do the same to you. The last player standing wins. Additionally, Tiger challenge is sort of like strip poker with your clubs.  The game features five true PGA courses in which you play the various modes. In addition, you'll unlock fantasy courses and open hidden players. If the game has one thing going for it, it is its speed. In fact, you can shut the system off entirely and be back into a round inside of a minute, at most. The game speed is pretty decent within play modes as well, provided you don't accidentally hit the replay button after every stroke.But a fast game doesn't make a pretty game. In fact, for a game with a name as purportedly high-tech as CyberTiger, the graphical offerings are anything but. In truth, CyberTiger on the N64 just might be one of the worst-looking N64 games we've seen in a while. The game looks worse than many of the first-generation titles the system broke its teeth on. The characters are blocky; the courses are sloppy and downright bizarre-looking; the fog is unbearable and unavoidable (Scotland is the home of golf, alas, but it's not excusable); and the golf balls (when viewed up close) look like Matisse cutouts, not orbs. CyberTiger' graphics vaguely attempt to ape the Mario Golf/Hot Shots Golf style, with less originality, and, frankly, much less beauty. The interface is unintuitive, featuring cryptic icons and animated goofy images in place of the concise and easy-to-understand meters typically found in golf video games. While the game has been positioned by EA Sports to appeal to novices, it's highly unlikely that most novices will have the encryption skills or the patience to wait out the learning curve in this game.  The audio is another CyberTiger breakdown. It's neither catchy nor interesting, but rather it's bland and nondescript. In fact, what there is of it is annoying. In CyberTiger for the N64, a large aural void compensates for the cheering and jeering found in other such ""fast-paced, easy-to-play"" golf games. At times the course seems downright lonely.  The CyberTiger controls are easy enough to grasp but difficult to master. Once you manage to get the hang of swinging by using the analog stick (pull back and then push forward), you'll quickly realize that the freedom of movement counts for little when you can't exactly control the power of your swing beyond what seems like an arbitrary range of 20 percent.  We had hoped to see more from CyberTiger on the N64, as the PlayStation version had arrived earlier this year and turned out just average. However, the tables have turned, and the N64 version fared poorly in all categories under the PlayStation version. Overall, CyberTiger just doesn't feel like a fun, escape-for-a-day-on-the-green kind of golf game. It's a chore to play and not even fun to look at. If you are a novice or a serious N64 gamer who wants a fun, fantasy-style title that still plays like an earnest game of golf, check out Mario Golf or hold off for Mario Golf 2 instead.
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575,Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas ,3.8," One profoundly awful game, one regular-awful game, and one just slightly awful game for the price of one decent product shouldn't appeal to anyone.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/3/2/2/2213322-box_dhtril2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/die-hard-trilogy-2-viva-las-vegas-review/1900-2538615/,neg,"
Released in 1996 for the PlayStation and later ported to the PC, Die Hard Trilogy was a movie-licensed game that was unusual in that it wasn't completely awful. Not satisfied to leave well enough alone, Fox Interactive decided to create a sequel. And let it be a lesson about not tempting fate, because Die Hard Trilogy 2 is really, really bad. Like the first installment, Die Hard Trilogy 2 consists of three separate styles of play: a third-person corridor crawl, a driving game, and a first-person shooting rampage reminiscent of Virtua Cop. The developers created an all-original plot for the sequel, probably because the first game took the plots of all three existing Die Hard movies. The new story drops a wearily surprised John McClane into the middle of a prison break and a hostage situation and leaves him as the only thing standing between a suave Teutonic madman and the fiery destruction of Las Vegas. The plot is presented as a series of plain cutscenes that take place between each level. The rendered performers don't have mouths or eyes, and they all look as if they're wearing stockings over their heads. McClane is voiced by an actor who sounds about as much like Bruce Willis as Dr. Stephen Hawking. Fortunately, Fox Interactive has provided you with two different ways to skip the plot: You can simply press escape anytime the full-motion video kicks in, or you can choose to play any one of the three modes without any interruption. The driving mode, referred to in the game as ""extreme driving,"" is easily the worst of the three subgames. The vehicles chug along at significantly less than the sort of breakneck speed you'd associate with the adjective ""extreme,"" and the car physics manage to be both unrealistic and unenjoyable. You'll begin to wonder why the game is set in Las Vegas at all, since absolutely no attempt was made to portray the city's vibrant colors and bright lights. Die Hard Trilogy 2 contains quite possibly the most lifeless depiction of Las Vegas ever committed to any visual medium. Slow-moving vehicles, blocky and unrealistic architecture, muted colors, pedestrians that stand around like cardboard cutouts, and a plane of black fog that starts about 50 feet in front of you all conspire to make ""extreme driving"" an enervating antigame that should be avoided at all costs. The third-person action-adventure mode fares slightly better, though it could hardly fare worse. The environments are uniformly drab, and the gameplay is uninspired - you just shoot, move forward, flip a switch, then fight a boss. The controls are too loose, and the enemy characters seem to do nothing but stride forward while shooting. Most of the levels have a cramped, institutional ambiance, and the claustrophobic feeling is unfortunately exacerbated by a reappearance of ""extreme driving's"" black fog curtain. Any possibility of using the close quarters to generate some in-game tension is ruined by the inexplicable way in which John McClane can see through solid rock. Perhaps in an effort to solve some camera-positioning issues, walls become transparent as you approach them. This grants you a clear view of what's behind or around any obstacle and generally makes the mode a total bore that lacks any suspense. The gun game is the best of the three modes. Though it's merely competent on its own merits, compared with the other two options, it's a triumph of moon-landing proportions. Although it has a few positive elements - for instance, the controls work well, even when using a joystick or mouse - dwelling on them might actually persuade you to purchase Die Hard Trilogy 2, which isn't the intent of this review. Instead, consider how the gun game perverts the idea of ""power up"": You start the shooting game with a pistol and can pick up other weapons by first exposing them and then shooting them, at which point they become equipped. It's a standard gameplay device to which Die Hard Trilogy 2 adds one nonsensical twist: None of the other weapons are as good as the pistol, and most of them are much worse! So if you accidentally pick one up, you have to quickly cycle through your weapons to get the pistol back. It's an original idea, but not in a good way. The promise of three games for the price of one is appealing. Yet the notion of getting one profoundly awful game, one regular-awful game, and one just slightly awful game for the price of one decent product shouldn't appeal to anyone. Each of Die Hard Trilogy's subgames has been done better in stand-alone products that are currently available at bargain-bin prices, making your choice clear: Avoid Die Hard Trilogy 2 with a vengeance.
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576,Tales from the Borderlands: Episode Three — Catch a Ride ,9," Tales from the Borderlands' third episode is its best yet, a shining example of Telltale's branching narratives and a gut-busting, heart-pounding thrill ride.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2882126-untitled-3.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tales-from-the-borderlands-episode-three-catch-a-r/1900-6416174/,pos,"
Tales from the Borderlands' third episode, Catch a Ride, is its best yet. Its cold open--a frantic action sequence that kicks off seconds after the previous episode's ending--sets the bar for drama high and never falls from it during its two-hour run.The best thing about Episode Three is that it is essentially two vastly different games. The final choice you made in Episode Two, Atlas Mugged, has a profound effect on what happens throughout the entirety of Episode Three. Your narrative path is determined by a decision made in desperation as all enemies closed in on Fiona and Rhys in Atlas Mugged's last minute, and that choice will set you on a path that follows either Fiona or Rhys more closely. Other characters caught in the crossfire will undergo significantly different changes as well--it's hard to discuss this without spoilers, so pardon the vague terms--which in turn also affect just how screwed you are as you go about your mission.After making your last decision in Episode Two, you can play through the entirety of Episode Three without seeing half of what the episode has to offer. So if you want to see both narrative paths and experience every possible outcome, you'll have to play the episode twice following two distinctly different decisions. It's a little confusing, and a lot of time to invest, but it's time well spent; Catch a Ride's two versions offer their own memorable moments and bits of hilarity, so it's worth the second playthrough.An unlikely pairing.Catch a Ride calls back to previous episodes in meaningful ways, deepening the story and giving players headspace for some serious theory crafting. Remember Felix, Fiona and Sasha's wheeling and dealing adopted father? His story comes into play in a big way in Episode Three, turning everything the two girls thought they knew upside down and making their trials in Vault hunting more emotional than physical. As the sisters struggle to come to terms with this new information and babysit the boys (because let's be honest, they are in charge here), Rhys is grappling with his own ever-growing problem--the literal voice is his head.Again, depending on your choices, the ghost of Handsome Jack is either chomping at the bit for more control of Rhys' body or has completely convinced the guy to trust his guidance. Both of these tracks present some incredibly tense scenes between the two, and the growing idea of Jack's ghost as a legit threat adds more anxiety to an already thrilling narrative.This isn't the first time Telltale's versatility in presenting varied narrative options has really shone through in Tales from the Borderlands, but it is perhaps the ultimate example of what they can do. Tales' branching story fully handed you the reigns for Episode One, and the challenge back then was maintaining that surrender to players for four more episodes. Episode Three is a strong example of how much control you actually have on this story, which is a lot; it's surprising and delightful to navigate certain social situations and be reminded that this is, at the end of the day, your story. Fiona and Rhys may misremember or exaggerate what happened, but it's you who gets to decide what is truth. And when the credits roll, going back to try the episode again with different choices results is such a different entertaining experience, it's hard not to want things both ways.He's definitely the beta.Narrative variety aside, notable elements of Episode Three include the addition of new characters and expanding roles of existing ones. Vault Hunter Athena steps into a much larger role, and her presence feels completely natural among Telltale's new heroes. My favorite moment in the episode is a conversation between her and Fiona about what it means to be a Vault Hunter, with Fiona doubting her own abilities and Athena insisting it's not about power--it's about being able to think on your feet. This brief moment of real talk is a humanizing moment for Athena and a wake-up call for Fiona. It's the sweetest moment in the series so far, and one that reaches out to not just Fiona, but you as the player and consumer of the Borderlands universe.Ashley Johnson's character also makes her debut in Catch a Ride as what is perhaps the world's cutest robot. Her performance is astounding, adding another layer to the headache Rhys and Fiona are dealing with and another mouth to spout hilarious dialogue. Johnson's character has the best one-liners of the episode, and I definitely snort-laughed a few times during her scenes.Tales of the Borderlands shines in the little things, its moment-to-moment drama and humor consistently on point. Every exploration sequence is populated with curiosities to examine and conversations that shape the world in big ways. Action sequences move quickly and keep your heart pounding; like in the original Borderlands games, you need to catch up and run with the big boys or die gruesomely. Each second spent in its world teaches you something about the characters you're shepherding and the Borderlands universe at large. Episode Three is definitely the best we've seen of this series so far.  
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577,Tales from the Borderlands: Episode Five — The Vault of the Traveler ,9," Tales from the Borderlands' finale wraps up a masterful story in an equally masterful package, ending its poignant and witty story on a high note.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2882126-untitled-3.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tales-from-the-borderlands-episode-five-the-vault-/1900-6416283/,pos,"
Tales from the Borderlands' writing is smart, thoughtful, and laugh-out-loud hilarious in places, but it's also highly effective--through both gameplay and story--at making you, the player, genuinely care about a bunch of jerks. It's reminiscent of developer Telltale Games' inaugural season of The Walking Dead, which emotionally loaded you up only to take it all away suddenly, sadly, and horribly. But Tales from the Borderlands doesn't end on the same somber notes. Rather, its conclusion offers a deep retrospective on what it means to be a hero and the dangers of power, along with hopeful notes about life, love, friendship, and having cool stuff. This final episode, The Vault of the Traveler, ticks all the right boxes for an episodic game's conclusion: powerful personal moments between characters, options that carry weight and change the episode's course, and confirmation that the choices you made three, four episodes prior have made genuine impact.This last part is a particularly big one. Explaining in detail is spoiler territory, but the specfic circumstances of The Vault of the Traveler's epic conclusion are entirely dependent on which characters you helped in previous episodes. Did you help Athena and Springs' relationship? Did you impress Zer0 way back in episode one? Have you been saving your cash? Whether or not you succeeded or failed in the eyes of certain people deeply affects your options as you head towards your final confrontation. When I arrived at this portion of the episode, I literally leapt out of my seat. The setup, the situation, the meaningful callback to your previous decisions--seeing it all spread before me was an absolute delight. In particular, if you are a huge Borderlands fan, this episode's climax alone is worth playing the entire series.Previous episodes have included exploration or puzzle segments that felt a little too ""gamey,"" pieces of non-dialogue-driven gameplay that were out of place. The Vault of the Traveler has none of those. Running down a hallway searching for an exit is exhilarating and a little terrifying. Exploring wreckage for signs of life feels tense, and in the context of the situation, it's hard not to feel sad as the implications of your surroundings dawn on you. I know that all sounds vague, but it's difficult to get into the nitty-gritty without spoiling the finale's most poignant, powerful moments. And there are quite a few of them.Who's that masked man?The most unsettling of these moments involves everyone's favorite sociopath, Handsome Jack. The big ""gotcha"" moment regarding his involvement in this series came at the end of Episode Four. It was here that Rhys made a capital B Big decision, which has a huge impact on how things start in Episode Five. The entire first half of this episode is all about Jack, culminating in perhaps the most eerie, heartbreaking, and mildly terrifying scene in the entire series. Telltale's writing is at its best when it just lets characters talk. Giving Jack space to talk about all you've been through is a gut punch. But it's only minutes later you're laughing again. In addition to its satisfying emotional arcs, dark humor and semi-insulting banter are the other major hallmarks of Tales from the Borderlands. This final , written in collaboration with longtime Borderlands writer Anthony Burch, is the funniest episode in the series. One minute you're on the verge of tears as the characters spiral into despair, and the next a character speaks a line or an event occurs that brings you right back up to a side-splitting high. In my time with the episode, I alternated between wildly upset and laughing hard enough to choke.Nothing solves problems like a kick to the face.The Vault of the Traveler also has something we haven't seen in a Telltale game yet: an arcade-style action sequence in which you're inputting button combos to attack. Providing context is another major spoiler, but take my word for it: it's the most gunplay--the most fun gunplay--we've seen since the crazy Psycho race in Episode One. There's also another gruesome sequence involving removing body parts, and in context, it's physically painful to push buttons and watch it happen. Tales from the Borderlands' is a triumphant piece of narrative, a thrilling romp through an already rich game world piled high with both reverential and tongue-in-cheek nods to its source material. It asks you what it means to be a hero, but on a deeper level explores themes of greed, family, friendship, and forgiveness. It has its cataclysmic, epic moments, plot twists that were impossible to see coming, gut-wringing sad bits, and an embarrassing wealth of humor. The choices you've made throughout the series matter and ripple outward to the finale, and with a cast as irritatingly loveable as this one, it's impossible not to care about where they're going next.
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578,Titanfall 2 ,9," Titanfall 2 is more measured and intelligent than its predecessor, but just as fluid and kinetic.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1365/13658182/3077168-titanfall2icon.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/titanfall-2-review/1900-6416561/,pos,"
Titanfall 2 is a game about momentum. It knows when to rush forward at a breakneck pace. It knows when to give us time to breathe. Both in its single player campaign and its multiplayer modes, Titanfall 2 has a more measured pace than its predecessor, making the build-up to its climactic battles just as enticing as the events themselves. It's every bit as kinetic and fluid as the first Titanfall--but in many respects, it's a much better shooter.As with the first game from Respawn Entertainment, Titanfall 2 revolves around two layers of combat: conventional firefights between human combatants, and clashes between massive bipedal mechs. As a boots-on-the-ground pilot, Titanfall 2 feels more like a traditional shooter--albeit one with pristine controls and a fluid traversal system. The first Titanfall sparked the trend of shooters focused on movement, and with its sequel, the series reestablishes its place at the head of the pack. The loop of sliding, double jumping, vaulting a ledge, and running along a wall to flank an enemy feels invigorating and intuitive.Then it comes time to call in your mechanical ally from orbit, and everything changes when it hits the ground. Because it's when these two layers engage in a tug-of-war that Titanfall 2 reveals its true brilliance. What was once an even fight becomes a David versus Goliath scenario: a pilot rushes to cover, fires off a rocket, glides along a nearby wall, avoids a missile salvo from her robotic opponent, activates her cloaking device, and enters a nearby ravine to order a Titan of her own.This sequence is intense, but in Titanfall 2, it's commonplace. Momentum often shifts as one team gains control of the battlefield, only to lose ground when the other notices a weak spot, and attacks it.Multiplayer maps are wider, and more open, resulting in a more methodical pacing to matches.This is crucial in Titanfall 2. Now more than ever, combat requires forethought and intelligence. Humans may be careening across the map with grapple hooks, while phase-warping ninja mechs cut through laser-powered robot warriors--but beneath all of this is a hidden nuance. Despite the bombast and spectacle, Titanfall 2 is a thinking person's shooter.The sequel's new Titans embody this sentiment. In place of the basic light, medium, and heavy variants from the first game, Titanfall 2 employs six distinct walking battle tanks with arsenals of their own. They're almost like superheroes: one attacks with a thermite launcher and flame attacks, while another fires a chest-mounted laser cannon at unlucky opponents.Each of the Titans' abilities are easy to learn, but difficult to master, as the saying goes. Their loadouts immediately make sense, and it's easy to see that Northstar's low armor and long-range railgun make her an ideal sniper--but new layers reveal themselves the more you play. Take Scorch, for example. His flame shield dissolves incoming projectiles, providing extra protection while he tries to back away from close-quarter engagements. But the flame shield has other uses: at one point, an enemy pilot came flying at me on a grappling hook. By igniting my fiery barrier, I melted him just as he came close to my cockpit.There are elements of fighting games or MOBAs here--each Titan has a tell, and a way to counter it.Learning the intricacies of each Titan is paramount not just for offense, but defense, too. Each mech has a distinct aesthetic, so as you round a corner and see a Ronin approaching you, you know to put distance between your Titan and the shotgun-toting enemy. There are elements of fighting games or MOBAs here--each Titan has a tell, and you only have a few brief moments to counter it to your advantage.The new Titans lend a very different pace to multiplayer matches. While the first Titanfall was always turned up to 11, so to speak, with smaller maps and cookie-cutter Titans focused on dealing damage, Titanfall 2 understands the value of breathing room. It doesn't burn you out with an onslaught of firefights--its maps are focused on exterior environments, and are often on the larger side, giving you time to plan out your attack with the intricate Titan loadouts. The plan may go awry, but it lends more weight to each enemy encounter. There's a sense of build-up as you approach a capture point, knowing full well which Titans occupy the area, and thinking through each step in your head.Each multiplayer mode is tailored to facilitate Titanfall 2's interwoven combat systems, but also to twist the formula in creative ways. Bounty Hunt is my favorite--you gain currency by killing the enemy team and AI grunts that litter the map, and at the end of each wave, you're given the option to deposit your loot in one of several banks. But here's the wrinkle: you have to leave your Titan in order to do so. What's more, clever players will camp near banks to pick off unsuspecting Pilots as they approach their goal. It's a frantic game of cat and mouse that increases in tension as the banks open and each team knows exactly what the other is doing, or trying to do.The campaign follows Jack Cooper and his Vanguard-class Titan, BT-7274.Then there's Last Titan Standing, a match that ends when the last mech is destroyed. It's the most methodical mode, as team members assess the enemy team composition and approach firefights carefully, considering there are no respawns. Pilot vs. Pilot eschews the titular robots, opting instead to focus on the fluid human against human combat--but even without its hulking behemoths, Titanfall 2 is frantic and exhilarating.That expert attention to pacing and momentum carries over into Titanfall 2's single-player mode as well. While the first Titanfall consigned its story to a specific story driven multiplayer playlist, the sequel places you in a discrete campaign with its own plot, characters, and set pieces. It follows Jack Cooper, a Militia rifleman-turned-pilot, and his sentient Titan BT-7274, as they battle the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation and the Apex Predator mercenary group.Unfortunately, the writing here is lacking. Your main enemies are outlandish villains, and the plot ends abruptly, before it feels like it should. And while there is often humor and sentiment to be found between Cooper and BT, the jokes become rote when they focus too much on the Titan's inability to understand human sayings and turns of phrase. There are moments where I felt a real connection to my Titan, and there is heart to be found throughout this story. But those moments are few and far betweenThe single-player campaign gradually increases in velocity and scope, coalescing in mid-air ship battles and frantic Titan charges.Yet in terms of design and pacing, the five-hour campaign is fantastic. It begins with a botched mission on the planet Typhon, and although it takes a little too much time to do anything out of the ordinary, the missions then increase in velocity and scope, coalescing in mid-air ship battles, frantic Titan charges, and old-school boss fights.These boss fights pit you against the other Titan variants, and as you progress through the missions, you'll unlock all of Titanfall 2's Titan loadouts, gaining the ability to swap between them on the fly. This grants the campaign a dynamism not entirely present in multiplayer. You can enter a battlefield, discern the situation, and choose a different Titan based on the scenario, all in the span of several seconds. Coupled with the quality of Titanfall 2's missions--my favorite plays with time in a way I won't spoil here--the ability to change Titans on the fly gives the campaign a pacing of its own.Titanfall 2 accomplishes several things. It introduces seemingly minor changes to its multiplayer sphere, but results in more fluid pacing and an intelligent gameplay loop. It adds a single-player campaign that builds in momentum with each mission, culminating in a grandiose battles that makes use of both Pilot and Titan combat.And lastly, Titanfall 2 demonstrates a vitality that its predecessor couldn't. Whereas the first Titanfall kept up its breakneck pace throughout the entirety of every match, Titanfall 2 understands that sometimes, dialing things back for a few moments can make the long run much more enjoyable. In many ways, Titanfall 2 feels like the game Respawn should have made in 2013. It's a fantastic sequel. It's a fluid shooter. It's a spectacular game. 


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579,Total War: Warhammer ,9, The Warhammer universe blends with the tactical gameplay of Total War to create one of the best real-time strategy games ever.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3026823-kg8iudx.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/total-war-warhammer-review/1900-6416434/,pos,"
Screeching gears, rhythmic boot steps, and the soft crunch of fresh snow. These were the first notes of my invasion. I sought the Dwarfen capital of Karak Varn. The Dwarfs, hardy and resilient though they may be, were a thorn for my new allies, the green-skinned Orcs and goblins. I held my siege for weeks, and while my foes’ numbers dwindled, mine grew. After each clash, I wrenched the newly dead from the earth and added them to my fiendish, Vampire hordes. Siege engines ready, and carried yon by fresh Dwarfen zombies, I steeled my undead warriors for the final assault.When the battle started, I surrounded my enemy's commander with Vargheists--monstrous, man-eating bats--and sent battering rams for the gates. But that wasn't enough, not nearly. Dwarfs are hardy. They rarely break ranks or flee in terror no matter how ferocious their opponent. I needed more. When the gates broke, I rushed in with ethereal cavalry, immune to normal weapons and equipped with scythes that bypassed even the sturdiest armor. In minutes, my ghastly corps had torn through Karak Varn's defenders. This was Warhammer, and this was Total War.The Total War series has, until now, balanced historical realism with strategic play. During campaigns (which you can play either alone or with others) you’ll refine your statecraft, research technology, and manage your economy to keep your armies well-supplied. All this takes place on a continent scaling political map detailing borders, important landmarks and troop detachments. Should two opposing forces meet, the game will pull in to show the skirmish. Here, you’ll micromanage movement and use battlefield tactics to out maneuver foes. Your decisions and political position throughout the game would have major effects on the sorts of troops and supplies you could field for any given battle. Warhammer, however, has always been about tactics, and for more than 30 years, it's been one of the most popular fantasy settings around, with a rich lore and vibrant tournament scene for its tabletop miniature game. Mixing the two raised a lot of questions about how Creative Assembly's attentiveness to historical detail would work with vampires, demons, and magic. But, the result is a sight to behold. Not only is it one of the most faithful adaptations of Warhammer's mythos, it is also far and away the best Total War has ever been.That is, in no small part, due to the natural marriage of Warhammer as a setting and Total War's gameplay as a foundation. While troop movements and formations have always been an essential part of Total War, you were always playing with human beings as your pawns. That foundation in real-world history kept the series somewhat limited. Yes, it was a joy to see elite Celtic warriors square off against Caesar's legions, but there are only so many ways those fights can go.Warhammer shakes that up in a big way. With the addition of irresponsibly large cannons, apparitions, gyrocopters, and powerful spells, the amount of time you need to spend learning what you and your foes can bring to bear on the battlefield is staggering. But it's worth it. Skirmishes are an artful dictation with two (or more) minds jockeying for control, prodding weak points, breaking lines, and exploiting new fronts of attack. These fights don't get old.Total War: Warhammer is an interlocking network of smart decisions. Integrating the Warhammer universe with Total War's systems was the first of these.Part of that comes from how distinct all of the main factions are. The Empire is a Roman-esque monolithic force. They're organized, effective generalists. Bretonnians, an Arthurian band of humans, use pegasi and holy lances to cleanse evil. The Greenskins pull from Warhammer's own brand of classic fantasy orcs and goblins. Silly, obnoxious, and blood-thirsty, they come with complex internal politics. If you're not waging enough war, measured by a stat called ""fightiness,"" other factions will sprout and make with the killing that you haven't.Vampire Counts are a genuine undead faction. They bolster their lines by draining life from others and reviving the dead from massive battles. They can swarm the field with countless warriors and can even raise more midway through a bout. In exchange, their units usually fall apart. They will never run in fear, though; instead, they crumble as their will to press on after death fades. Dwarfs are their opposite, with heavily armored and armed troops. They pull in staunch defenders that will hold a battle line long enough for their enemies to be ripped to shreds with machine guns and cannon fire.Like its tabletop namesake, Total War: Warhammer balances these disparate forces well. Each faction has a bevy of gameplay options that mesh, but there is no one right way to play--leaning into their strengths and mixing it up with the occasional oddball tactic works here. That's supported with magic, which can turn the tide of all kinds of fights. From chasing down an opposing lord and sapping his life with a Vampiric curse to causing an enemy unit to chafe and itch, magic augments formations and movements and only ever broadens your scope of tactical choices.Because most magic users are lords and heroes, this also means your leaders play a critical role in battle. They can often handle entire battalions on their own, and when you lose one, it's much more akin to losing a queen in chess than a beefed-up soldier. While protecting a lord was important in prior games, now it's vital, and maneuvers tend to reflect that. Because of their strength, it's advantageous to have them at or very near the front lines. So you're faced with a choice in how you protect the lord and maximize his potential without risking a loss.That, in turn, influences your other choices. As the Vampires, do you want to take ethereal cavalry and press against enemy lines thereby leaving your often less-than-mobile lord undefended? Or, based on the spells you've taken to battle, will you charge in with your leader, summon a few squadrons of zombies to hold your foe, and sweep with your support units? Your choices are augmented and modified by everything else at play--such as the terrain, which you can use for surprise attacks--as well as the minutiae of your foe's plans. Everything matters, and every choice has an impact.Click to view in galleryCampaigns throw even more variables into that mix. Like previous Total War games, you can take command of a country and balance your strategies (economic, cultural, etc.) and your tactics (individual battles). Here things go from beautifully intricate to elaborate master stroke.Each of the four major factions (that is Empire, Vampires, Greenskins, and Dwarfs) have their own campaigns with major battles, quests, and goals. Unlike previous Total War games where you'd have a smattering of small distinctions to separate each group, these races are distinct. Vampires are reviled by the living (for good reason) and have a hard time with diplomacy. To survive and remain stable, they have to poison and corrupt the land. Dwarfs and Greenskins can travel underground, and have constructed settlements that only they can capture.The Empire is all about forming tight diplomatic bonds and working together with the other nations of men. Collectively, each of these groups is preparing for the coming Chaos--an absolute evil corrupting force that marches from the north. The Warriors of Chaos have some of the most powerful and devastating units. They also spread their own corrupting force, which can, on its own, cause rebellion and terror in living and unliving empires alike.Again, each of these pieces works together and helps texture the overarching narrative. At first, these races push their own petty agenda. But as the Game of Thrones-y threat grows in the north, you can try to band together with the others and hold off the impending invasion. At the same time, you'll have proximal, race-dependent goals for victory, which strain how you'll manage these larger threats. Vampires, for example, not only have to help stop the Chaotic onslaught, but also conquer the Empire and spread their vampirism. And holding off one monstrous, powerful foe while chipping away at your so-called allies is no easy task. As the campaign progresses, you'll have to manage multiple conflicts on many fronts, putting your skills to the test.Taken together, the campaign is brilliant insofar as it forces your hand and pushes you to take bigger risks, which, in turn, taxes your abilities as a tactician. As with many similar games, armies require upkeep, but in Total War: Warhammer, many of these are expensive. It's often more advantageous to build up rather than out. You can fortify and hold, but after a while, you'll need to start pushing back. Doing that means pulling soldiers away from your main settlements, opening up holes in your defenses that other races will be quick to exploit. Managing that conflict becomes a core concern in the late game, and it's a stellar way to test your mastery of your race's key traits.The campaign is brilliant ... it forces your hand and pushes you to take bigger risks, which, in turn, taxes your abilities as a tacticianTotal War: Warhammer is an interlocking network of smart decisions. Integrating the Warhammer universe with Total War's systems was the first. Massive battles are more challenging because of the addition of magic and flying units, which can flank and break battle lines if you're not attentive. New brands of artillery and different types of units are engaging and keep you changing up your approach. Total War: Warhammer has also seen a massive upgrade to its AI. Where before you might see a AI opponent rush you when you had strong defensive position, now the CPU will employ advanced flanking maneuvers, or use cavalry to pull away key defenders.Audio design too has picked up an interesting overhaul. The Total War series has always had excellent sound effects that help sell the scope of its battles--especially with a base heavy system and a camera zoomed down to the troop level. But here it’s even more noteworthy because of the fantasy elements at play. We know what a Roman gladius striking a rawhide shield sounds like. We can create that sound here in the real-world. But what about Dwarfen organ guns? What about the off-kilter shuffle of Orcish armor? There’s no proper equivalent, and that goes for the Vampire Count's monstrosities and the demons that form the ranks of the Warriors of Chaos. In every case, these combatants sound glorious.Everything here hasn't just been improved, it's been damn near mastered. Total War has always been about balance--between strategy and tactics, realism and engaging play. Warhammer's characters, its history, and its creativity is a shot in the arm for a series. My complaints from a few years ago with Total War II's camera still hold. When pulling the camera out to get a better view, you can’t go very far before the game switches to a full overhead view. That be somewhat troublesome and limit how much of any give battle you can see at once, but it’s a minor frustration.When you're in the middle of a siege and you're coordinating an assault with a friend, Total War: Warhammer approaches perfection. You’ll be tested on all fronts and asked to manage complex battles with broad, nuanced outcomes. Every system and piece feeds into others, and your choices make all the difference. It's a triumph of real-time strategy design, and the best the Total War series has ever been. 


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580,FIFA 16 ,9, The biggest gameplay changes in years leave FIFA feeling fresh for the new season.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2908229-fifa-16-u.s.-cover--alex-morgan.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-16-review/1900-6416251/,pos,"
Football!With that note of excitement hanging in the air, allow me a moment of clarity. FIFA is a tough game to review. It's an aggregation of several years’ worth of features and modes, all of which are changed and updated to varying degrees with each iteration. Anyone who’s played FIFA, or PES, or any sports game will know, it’s impossible to really know how you feel about that game until you’ve played it for months; Loved it, hated it, loved it again, and then decided it’s, you know, alright for a game you’ve played for 300 hours.With that in mind I intend to limit this review to a look at two crucial things that have changed in FIFA 16, which are: the addition of a new Draft mode within the extraordinarily successful FIFA Ultimate Team; and, well, everything.We should probably start with ‘everything’, as there’s a lot to get through. What I mean by ‘everything’ is that the heart of the game, the way in which FIFA plays football, has for the first time in a few years made a jump big enough to feel like a distinct break rather than an iterative polish. Last year’s slants and foibles--pace, over-the-top through-balls, maddening defender behaviour--have been taken sternly in hand, to the extent that playing FIFA 16 feels like learning a new game. It’s hard, and the first few games are a mixture of frustration and promise.The stated objective was to remove player speed as the pivotal factor in deciding games, to make the midfield meaningful, and to enable different styles of play, rather than FIFA 15’s dominating tactic of high balls out to the wing where fast man will get behind the defence. EA Sports' latest soccer sim wants players to compete on a level footing. And while, realistically, we’ll have to wait until the online population has stress-tested the new system for millions of hours and reported back before we’ll really know, this is how the changes currently feel.FIFA 16's Ultimate Team now also comes with a compelling new Draft Mode Defending is easier. Or at least, defenders are now better equipped to win the ball and compete against attacking players. Slide tackles have regained some of the old potency; players really do slide again, meaning it’s possible to win the ball from unexpected distance. Well-timed toe-pokes, meanwhile, can satisfyingly break up play, while desperate moments give players more options to deliberately foul players just before they break into space (this is usually harshly punished, but so much fun). I’ve been caught by defenders when I thought I was out of range, I’ve won the ball with crunching block-tackles at fullback, and I’ve used the slide to channel runners by blocking off their path. This new, stronger, more flexible slide tackling is a success.Other noticeable additions to defending include a tackle feint, for counter-baiting tricksy opponents during one-on-one battles. No longer does the protect-the-ball crab pose offer an impenetrable defence; it’s easier to slip around players in possession of the ball and then get a foot to it. Perhaps most significantly of all, defender AI has been fine-tuned to make more interceptions and to track runners with more doggedness.These last points are the ones that really contribute to FIFA 16’s most obvious shift; the fact that the midfield is now a battlefield. Working the ball through the middle of the park feels attritional and muddy, full of physicality and friction. More than ever, it’s a game of inches and interceptions, with defenders urging themselves towards the ball wherever possible, pressing and lunging and reaching out feet. It can get scrappy, with miscontrols and turnovers spilling messily around for a few seconds at a time, but it feels like an organic sort of mess, a footballing mess.Click on the thumbnails below to view in full screenIn response to all this there are offensive tools to make the midfield an even fight, if an asymmetrical one. No-touch dribbling adds another layer to the game’s skill system, enabling players to duck and feint over the ball, looking to send defenders the wrong way. This is pretty but so far, for me, not hugely effective; I rarely had enough space in-field to dance over the ball, and on the wings I went for reliable old step-overs. But more integral is the new precision passing system, which effectively introduces a hard, pinged pass that can be pulled off by holding R1 (RB). It’s clearly been designed as a foil to the stickier, interception-prone midfield, and it comes with an element of risk and skill. Lesser players are more likely to fumble these stinging passes, and judging angles, ability and distance adds a new dimension to the basics of FIFA’s play.The result of all of this is that FIFA 16 is full of scrappy back and forth, the ability to play patient possession football, and a greater range of passing than ever. The dominance of pace in last year's game is over, although sometimes it does seem as though it has been offed through foul means, with through-balls, for instance, feeling conspicuously limited, unwilling to put players in the clear either up the lines or over the top of defences. But for the most part the new style of play--slower, grittier, but still skilled--seems like it’s been achieved through nurturing rather than nerfing.And so that is everything, in terms of its gameplay pillars, which no doubt is the area on which I place the most importance when judging FIFA. But FIFA’s success during the last few years has been as much to do with the collecting and trading compulsions of Ultimate Team as it’s been about actual (pretend) football. So the arrival of Draft mode, a significant addition to Ultimate Team, is also worth a good look.For the first time, FIFA 16 features women's international teams. Draft mode sits aside from the main business of buying packs, building teams, and playing them against opposition online. It’s like a paid-entry one-off Ultimate Team tournament, in which players build a temporary team position by position, opening a pack for every slot and deciding which player inside best fits the side under construction. The finished team is then played against other Draft players, with bigger than usual coin rewards for a winning run (the maximum streak is four wins).Putting aside the longstanding misgivings about how Ultimate Team commodifies the magic of football, and how it sort of encourages kids to gamble, it’s great. Draft takes the pleasure of building a team--piecing together strong chemistry, the thrill of opening packs--and gives it to you without the need to pull your main team apart. It costs 15,000 coins (or 300 microtransaction FIFA points) to enter, and of course Draft mode is, in the end, about making more money. But that’s OK if it’s something worth paying for, and Draft offers something more substantial than the chance to simply reveal a randomised selection of players. Building a new team is a complex puzzle that’s different with each Draft, and winning a few games delivers substantial rewards (my first four-game winning streak gave me a total return of around 60,000 coins, which is a fine start to the season).FIFA needed a year like this. Without serious competition from Konami’s PES in the past few years (until now), and with Ultimate Team keeping players playing and paying all year round, there’s been no pressing motivation to ring the changes. Annual titles will always evolve gradually, but recent progress has felt glacial. FIFA 16 can be stubborn and stifling, but it feels gloriously new, and having to learn fresh strategies and nuances in a game series like this is an almost-forgotten pleasure.


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581,XCOM 2 ,9, Firaxis' turn-based strategy sequel brings major improvements to the multilayered XCOM formula.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3172605-xcom2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/xcom-2-review/1900-6416347/,pos,"
This review has been updated to reflect XCOM 2's re-release on PS4 and Xbox One, which released on September 27, 2016:Time is always fading in XCOM 2, and it's never on our side. As we train our next soldier, drop them into battle, and fight for humanity's survival, we can only make the best of the minutes we have left. We'll probably fail. But we'll move on anyway.Following in the footsteps of 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown, its sequel is a brutal, unforgiving turn-based strategy title played on a strategic world map and isometric battlefields. XCOM 2 places us in command of the human Resistance as they rise up against the Advent, an alien regime that has governed Earth for 20 years. As opposed to the soldiers of Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2's rebellion is on the offensive. We're no longer staunch defenders--we're a desperate guerilla force.This new script supports numerous tweaks to the XCOM formula, all for the better. We're still building an army, researching new technologies, and putting them to use in squad-based strategy missions. But these missions are less about repelling the aliens, and more about sabotaging their global operations whenever we can. We loot supply trains and intercept communications signals to halt the Advent's plan for human eradication. XCOM 2 ties its narrative and gameplay together in such a way that every mission feels critical, and every shot carries weight.The mission objectives have changed, but so have the ways we approach them. XCOM 2 implements a new concealment mechanic, in which your soldiers drop into most missions unnoticed, allowing you to sneak past enemies or coordinate attacks on unsuspecting patrols.The Viper is one of several new enemy types. Fighting them is terrifying.This further elevates the idea of guerilla warfare, but also allows for exhilarating ambushes, as you lob grenades into groups, fire machine gun rounds as enemies scatter, and pick off stragglers before they have a chance to react. Initiating firefights takes just as much consideration as finishing them.XCOM 2 also uses procedural map and objective generation to ensure a different mission each time your squad leaves the dropship. You'll defend new rooftops and sneak through different alleyways in each campaign. This dynamism, coupled with the aforementioned stealth mechanics, extend XCOM 2's longevity far past that of Enemy Unknown, in which missions grew boring several campaigns in.In fact, the entirety of XCOM 2 unfolds in original ways each time you play. It's a multilayered experience wherein each level displays nuance, but also contributes to an amorphous, ever-changing whole.XCOM 2's strategy layer imparts the same urgency as the tactical battles on the ground.The squad firefights lay the foundation: there are tactical considerations, from the elevation of the battlefield to the sightlines of the map's structures. Then there are the character classes, each with a world of possibilities to consider: the specialist can hack Advent security towers and buff your squad in the field. The grenadier's carrying capacity makes him the pack mule of the group. The ranger's blade makes her a lethal close-quarters force. The psi operative, on the other hand, uses the alien mind control powers against the Advent, turning firefights into psychological battlegrounds.Character customization lets you control everything from your soldiers' loadouts to their nationality.The sheer amount of factors affecting any firefight is staggering, raising numerous questions as I move across the map: how many aliens are there? Does my specialist have any medkits left? Who has the highest armor rating in my squad? Should I leave my sniper in overwatch, or move her forward with the rest of her crew? And how can I flank that Sectoid before it uses its mind control abilities to turn my ranger against me?More often than not, there's a timer pushing you forward, counting the turns until your target escapes, or the aliens extract their secret data. There's always something to worry about, something to consider, some way things could go wrong as you fight to keep your squad alive. In many cases, I opted for retreat: by throwing down flares I could extract my remaining soldiers back to base. If objectives became impossible to reach, saving my valuable fighters became paramount in the grand scheme of things.XCOM 2's overarching strategy layer imparts the same sense of urgency, and a similar bevy of obstacles. As we move the humans' mobile Avenger base across the globe, establishing links with other rebel cells, we also fight the aliens' plan to erase humanity, indicated by a crimson progress bar at the top of the world map. A real sense of tension forces us to maintain a constant state of motion, whether by freeing a waylaid country, researching new alien weaponry, or rushing production on a crucial new structure.The strategy aspect is almost as important, as you make contact with rebel cells, and build your overall economy.Underlying all of this is a more personal current. We grow attached to individual soldiers as they perform spectacular feats and rise in the ranks. We get to know their loadouts and what equipment they carry. We rely on our best leaders to stay composed, and root for rookies to prove themselves. XCOM 2 may be a war game, but it doesn't ignore the boots on the ground--strategy plans are only as good as the soldiers putting them into action.Take Lieutenant Micky Taylor, for instance. He died in the snow at 6:53 p.m. outside of my disabled helibase, just outside of Kansas City. The mission was to destroy an EMP device that was preventing us from taking off, while also keeping the Advent away from our landing pad. With enemy Vipers poisoning my rangers, hulking Mutons wounding my grenadiers, and mechanical Sectopod mechs bombarding my medics, I balanced offense and defense, accounting for every eventuality as the mission unfolded. Things went well. But then I sent Taylor into cover as the rest of his squad rushed to the evac zone. He was the only one who didn't make it. It was his 23rd mission.I remember that scenario because of its clever design, but also because it's where I lost my best soldier. In the end, XCOM 2 is fantastic not just because of its refined individual layers, but how seamlessly they interact. We think on different levels during playthroughs, bouncing between the commander's chair, the scientist's lab, and the sergeant's eyes. If Enemy Unknown was a chess game, the sequel adds more pieces--and more spaces--to the board.We think on multiple levels in XCOM 2, bouncing between the commander's chair, the scientist's lab, and the sergeant's eyes.Every once in a while, however, XCOM 2's difficulty surpasses challenging, and becomes unfair. For the most part, enemies abide by the same restrictions we do. But sometimes, they shoot through walls and dodge point-blank shotgun bursts. The cards are already stacked against us in most campaigns, and part of the fun is overcoming those odds--but when the enemy AI ignores the rules, the game loses its appeal. Furthermore, XCOM suffers from certain technical glitches: the action halted during action-camera sequences, and in certain cases, I felt as if the game was overwhelmed. My soldiers' reaction shots didn't trigger when they should have, and enemies' attacks happened all at once, or weren't shown at all.But the vast majority of the time XCOM 2 performs well and the difficulty is fair. We will make mistakes--but that's the point. Failure is not just a possibility in XCOM 2, it's a necessary presence. This is the rare game that's less about choices, and more about the consequences thereafter: we play, we learn, we strive to get better. The entire process is a stunning display of meaningful failure.So time keeps ticking in XCOM 2, and the best we can do is make the right choices when we have the chance. XCOM 2 imparts the weight of those decisions, and that's what makes it extraordinary. It's mathematical, emotional, and thoughtful all at once. It's exhilarating, even in the face of failure. It's compelling, even though we often lose. Victory is the goal, but that's just an afterthought here--it's the complex journey that counts.Now that XCOM 2 has made its way to consoles, these sentiments remain the same. Some technical issues have migrated from this year’s PC release: characters sometimes freeze in place while the turn progresses; soldiers can take almost 10 seconds to execute commands; and cutscenes have a tendency to drop frame rates throughout campaigns. But the layered tactics, impactful meta-game, and deep character-building are all intact on PS4 and Xbox One. XCOM 2 remains a superb strategy title.


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582,XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen ,9," Building upon the sturdy foundation laid out by XCOM 2, War of the Chosen sets a high mark for an already exceptional sci-fi strategy series.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3172605-xcom2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-review/1900-6416748/,pos,"
XCOM games are about staring down the impossible and choosing to fight on anyway. The premise of the franchise is that Earth is under siege by immeasurably more advanced alien swarms. XCOM 2 posits that we, as players, can't be victorious. Where its predecessor had you marshal your best defense to repel the invasion, XCOM 2 opens on a occupied, defeated Earth. Twenty years after their defeat, the governments of the world have all but given up, opting to negotiate with their tormentors instead of fighting back. Instead, you take the reins and gather up what resistance you can to keep the war--and hope--alive, and try to liberate Terra from the three-toed grasp of hyper-advanced psychic space monsters.The new XCOM 2 expansion, War of the Chosen, expounds upon that foundation in every way. The baddies are tougher and your own troops have more strategic and tactical counters, but they're also more human and, in some ways, more fragile. Together, these feed into not just the complexity of XCOM's already robust chess-like play but the human edge as well.XCOM has always found its grounding in its characters. You, as a player, are encouraged to name the members of your resistance after your friends and family. After some time on the battlefield, they grow more experienced and versatile, developing new skills and finding their own, ad-hoc narrative slices.During my first run, I remember one of my high-school friends, Ben, grew to become my top soldier. A pinpoint sniper, Ben could deadeye any foe from 100 yards--easy. But the long slog of the war with the aliens left him traumatized. And, over time, he became a glass cannon. His mind was rattled by intimidation, and his frail body ached. On his 60th mission, he was brainwashed and slaughtered by his captors.These sorts of vignettes flow organically in XCOM 2, but War of the Chosen explores them more fully. First, soldiers that spend lots of time together form close relationships, conferring battlefield stat bonuses as well as fodder for whatever backstory you choose to conjure. War of the Chosen encourages you to create inspirational posters for your warriors, too, to post around your base. Between missions, you'll see the beaming faces of your finest dole out propagandic slogans. It doesn't affect anything outside of aesthetics, but it's a tacit acknowledgement that your team and their connections matter, and it's a simple way to reinforce the desperation at play. Each of these soldiers, though they march into battle, often without ever questioning their commander, are still human. They need faith, and they need symbols of victory that encourage them to press on.Of course, this is something of a red herring. War of the Chosen wants you to use these features--kindling relationships with characters like Ben and leaning on them for your own sort of moral support--so that it can bludgeon you with hopelessness down the line.For every fun little addition War of the Chosen slots into XCOM 2, it also adds something more sinister. The eponymous ""Chosen,"" for example, are an elite trio of champions that are hell-bent on capturing and torturing your soldiers, picking their minds clean so they can take aim at you.That places a grim and sobering filter over everything else. You send these people out to fight and die, and you have to carry the knowledge that if they suffer, it's because you failed. And, what's worse, if they're captured, they'll face far more pain and anguish not because of anything they did, but because your resistance continues to frustrate your presumed overlords.To balance the scales a little, you'll also be able to tap three new factions for your burgeoning Squad. The Templars, for example, are powerful mind-wizards who loosely counter the Warlock, one of the Chosen and a psychic warrior whose mind has been twisted by obscene power. The Reapers and Skirmishers round out your ranks with stealthy-snipers and gruff, short-range assault troops, respectively. Each of them comes with special skills so as not to overlap with your more basic, rank-and-file soldiers.Each of these add-ons might be a solid inclusion on their own (who wouldn't want cadres of super-soldiers to shore up the ranks?), but War of the Chosen wouldn't work without all of them.The new factions are introduced early, so players who finished the base game have some new meat to sink their teeth into. Everyone else? They get a straightforward introduction and continue on as normal. The key, though, is that a Reaper can help you expand your tactical options early on, where stages--bereft of the reverse-engineered laser cannons that show up dozens of hours later--could use a little more excitement.This makes the first few hours a bit easier than the rest, but this affords you room to experiment before the truly punishing moments appear. After all, characters who aren't watched have a tendency to be ripped apart or shot to bits. Having a souped-up fighter in the field affords you some flexibility: As with a queen in chess, you can adjust your plans on the fly, leveraging that additional power at key moments--either for offense or defense. But, as with the queen, losing such a valuable soldier can hurt doubly so.The Chosen play a similar role, dropping into missions and harassing your teams whenever possible. They learn and grow from battle to battle, too. It's not quite as robust as the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor, but they will adapt to your tactics, covering their weaknesses over time. That makes them exceptional foes down the line. In essence, they become bosses that dog you and wear you down, an omnipresent threat that could hit at any time.As the game marches on, you are beset on all sides by powerful foes that force you to adapt. Your own soldiers might grow as well, but when your elite squads are picked off, or they've grown weary and fatigued, or when they lose their best friend or lover, that loss is palpable.War of the Chosen packs in appreciable new layers of tactical and strategic depth that breathe new life into what was already one of the genre's best. But it is, once again, the humanity of the fight that binds it all together. New factions wouldn't work without new challenges, and new bonds are strained by foes that seek to quash opposition not with overwhelming force, but by cracking your will. If one mission goes particularly south, you may be forced to bury far more well-trained fighters than you can replace. And when you can't quite field the strength you once did, you might not have the drive to keep going. You share not only in new powers, but in the pervasive defeat felt when they are taken from you.Everything that Chosen brings--from the elite soldiers to the deeper connections between your squads--feels like a living part of the XCOM universe. If you like your deep strategy and brutal turn-based tactics alongside brilliant interplay between camp and emergent drama, there is none better. 
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583,Fallout 4 ,9, Fallout 4 rewards your curiosity with excellent storytelling and hearty doses of tense combat in a wasteland full of possibilities.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2877406-51jvrx5gq1l.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fallout-4-review/1900-6416306/,pos,"
 Fallout 4 is an engrossing game that lures you in with mystery and the promise of adventure. Its wretched wasteland can be captivating, and you never know what odd person or settlement lies around the next bend. Fallout 4 uses its dark world as a canvas for exciting combat and gripping stories, and when you dig deeper into its post-nuclear-apocalypse version of Boston--defending yourself from violent scavengers and using your wits to climb social ladders--you become attached to the new you, and ultimately invested in the fate of your new world.You transform into an influential wasteland warrior over the course of a multitude of dangerous quests, but this is difficult to imagine at the start when you're a well-to-do citizen of 1950s-esque Boston. The game begins on a peaceful morning at home with your spouse and child; a robot butler provides upbeat banter and a glimpse at what America might have become if the World's Fair era of invention and optimism from the 1930s persisted into the 21st century. Life is pleasant, until a distressful television broadcast. Your family is quickly rushed underground. It's within Vault 111 that you spend the next 200 years, frozen in cryogenic-stasis until your eventual rude awakening in the year 2277.Boston, 200 years after nuclear war.When your hibernation is over, you first realize that your son has been kidnapped, but you also discover a world still reeling from nuclear warfare, centuries after the bombs fell. Two-headed deer drink from irradiated streams, and your home, the once great city of Boston, lies in ruin. Fenway Park has become a shanty town that plays host to underground crime rings. The historic Freedom Trail lies broken and nigh untraceable, more likely to take you into the maw of a drooling mutant than to the foot of an important monument. Your desperate need to find your son draws you into this hell-on-earth, but you eventually become an important player in its political and social landscape. Your decisions have real impact on your journey, but perhaps more importantly, on the fate of others.Fallout 4's story regularly challenges you to make compromises. Nuclear war further complicated life in Boston; everyone wants to survive, but nobody wants to work together. The weight of this horrible reality caused some people to go mad, but for others, it's the radiation that turned them into seething abominations.The instability within Boston seems permanent, but if one company--The Institute--has its way, life could be better; life could be controlled. The Institute is a twisted homage to Cambridge's famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it's the source of Fallout 4's bioengineered androids, known as Synths. Some Synths look like animated mannequins, but The Institute recently began producing ultra-realistic models, and people are concerned with the presence of secret, robotic agents. The conflict between synths and humans is Fallout 4's defining plotline. Taking a page out of sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner, Fallout 4 tests your moral compass by challenging you to define the meaning of life. When the line between organic and synthetic is blurred, what does it mean to be ""human?""Nuclear war further complicated life in Boston; everyone wants to survive, but nobody wants to work together.Fallout 4 is the story of the ""perfect"" vs the ""imperfect,” where your decisions influence the victories and tragedies of not just the two overarching groups, but all of the smaller ones that get caught in the middle. Picking sides and doing favors is, at first, about finding your son, but it becomes more complicated as time passes. It's not as simple as choosing between the right and wrong thing; you are almost always sacrificing something, and the decisions get harder over time.Though many of the secondary quests amount to dungeon raids or fetch quests, these challenges thrust you into combat, which is a dynamic and thrilling mix of shooting in real-time and carefully selecting your targets in an RPG-rooted command system known as V.A.T.S.. While in this mode, you aim for specific body parts and get to see how likely you are to hit your mark, and how much damage you will inflict if you do. It lacks the immediacy of straight shooting, but it helps you be a more resourceful and effective warrior. It's an extension of the same mechanic from Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, but activating V.A.T.S. in those games paused the action completely. Now, it merely slows down time, and you're more vulnerable as a result. The mix of utility and strategy that it presents is gratifying, unlike the real-time shooting, which is functional but lacks the finesse found in dedicated shooter games. V.A.T.S. also frames your actions with cinematic flair--far more so than any other aspect of the game.I've got a 46% chance of landing a headshot on this idiot.V.A.T.S. makes combat thoughtful, but the nature of survival makes conflict exciting. It's not unusual to find yourself hunted by oafish mutants while you struggle with wounded limbs, radiation poisoning, or an unfortunate lack of ammo. You can flee, but then you may miss the opportunity to take potentially valuable items from your fallen opponents. Sticking it out may require heavy doses of stimulants that will leave you addled, but ultimately give you the strength to fight another day. You're constantly weighing the pros and cons of your actions, and there's rarely a right answer. This creates great tension, pulling you into the experience at hand, and highlighting the joy of every victory.Each time you level up, you can invest a stat point in one of seven attributes--Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, and Luck--that determine how effective you are when dealing with others, using either words or your weapons. Your proficiency in these stats allows you to invest in perks--enhancements that boost or augment your abilities. You spend the same points on attributes and perks, making the process of upgrading your character a balancing act. This system allows you to opt for a specialist approach, be it as a combatant or a charmer, but you aren't locked into a specific path. You always have access to the entire chart of perks, and without a level cap, you ultimately have the ability to master everything. The freedom is welcome, allowing you to sample a wide skill range.Who wore it best?You'll also be able to bolster your abilities by acquiring new gear. Looking for loot is a constant pursuit, in part because it grants you much- needed resources, but also because everyday items--housewares, gadgets, and other pre-war conveniences--can be scrapped for their constituent parts and repurposed to build mods for your equipment. You can trade in scrap to extend the usefulness of basic items using workbenches that you find throughout Boston, but it's not until you've levelled up enough to meet the best mods' requirements that it becomes truly valuable. More often than not, weapons and armor taken from bosses and legendary-class monsters provide all the stopping-power you need.Ammunition and health items are key to your survival, so you check the pockets of every corpse, pick locks in hopes of riches, and hack computers to access hidden rooms. These activities are puzzling and challenging at first, but because they become only slightly more complex over time, this cleverness fades.Junk is also necessary for another of Fallout 4's features. You can erect homes, establish small vegetable gardens, and fortify defense systems to provide a new lease on life for lost souls. There's a lot you can build and the process is easy, but unless you love to be creative, you may not find this pursuit very worthwhile. There's something to be said for the contrast between killing monsters and providing aid to the down and out, but the main quest only asks you to construct an object or two, and never incentivises you to build a proper settlement.As you look for signs of your son, you exchange services and information with established societies of survivors. You grow sympathetic to their problems over time, and once trust is established, individuals may choose to join you on the battlefield. Having a capable partner who's spent his or her entire life in the wasteland should make your adventure easier, and sometimes it does. Depending on who your travel partner is, they can provide cover-fire during skirmishes, or locate hidden items or enemies for you.An unlikely partnership opens your eyes to the struggles of others.Your likely first companion is a German Shepherd, affectionately known as Dogmeat. With a wagging tail, an infectious bark, and a subtle, toothy grin, I grew fond of his presence. He lightens the mood, but he and other companions can be a hindrance at times, too. Issuing commands is an involved process that requires you to move the camera toward your partner and navigate a menu; these tasks are cumbersome and difficult to consider in the middle of a fight. The lack of streamlined companion controls is a disappointment, but it's also tough to count on a companion who fails to keep up with you because they've become stuck in the game's scenery. They're most useful when you employ them to carry heavy items that would otherwise slow your character down, and when all of their systems occasionally click in just the right way.In order to truly enjoy Fallout's vast world and dynamic gameplay, you need to accept that it has obvious flaws. Navigating the wasteland is made easy thanks to the ability to fast-travel between locations that you've discovered, but surveying the world map can be a chore due to Fallout 4's woefully limited map functionality. A compass on the bottom of your screen shows you the direction of your next goal, but when you try to gauge how far distant locations are from one another, you have to slowly scroll through the map as you're unable to get a complete bird's eye view. Local maps prove even less useful, as they present vague x-ray like blueprints with almost indecipherable details.You're constantly weighing the pros and cons of your actions, and there's rarely a right answer.Similar frustrations afflict your inventory, which allows you to sort by item category, and a handful of other attributes, but not all. This is most troublesome when choosing a weapon loadout. If you want to look for the best weapon that uses a certain type of ammo, you need to scroll through lists and manually recall details to draw comparisons. Because ammo is often limited, this becomes a regular step as you plan your next strategy, and thus a regular annoyance.Beyond the aforementioned disappointments, plainly framed scenes and basic animations lend a roughness to the finish product, as do its frequent glitches. Lines of spoken dialogue will sometimes stop mid sentence, forcing you to turn on subtitles as a precautionary measure. Characters walk through objects now and then, or stand in thin air. It's nostalgic in that sense because these qualities recall the quirks of other great Bethesda RPGs, such as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Fallout 3. Fallout 4 may cause you to recall the past on occasion, but given its timeless story and many wonderful new experiences, this is hardly a problem.""Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery.""In the grand scheme of things, Fallout 4's minor issues pale in comparison to its successes. When you put the controller down, you think about the friend you betrayed to benefit another, the shifting tide of an incredible battle, or the moment you opened a drawer and found someone's discarded effects, making you wonder how they felt before the bombs fell. In moments like these, Fallout 4 can be an intoxicating experience. You're often forced to sacrifice something--a relationship, a lucrative opportunity, or your health--to make gains elsewhere. And the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more you wonder: what if I chose a different path? You second guess yourself, not just because you had other options, but because you aren't sure if you did the right thing. The fact that your decisions stick with you after walking away from the game is a testament to the great storytelling on hand. Fallout 4 is an argument for substance over style, and an excellent addition to the revered open-world series.


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584,The Simpsons Skateboarding ,3.9, Only the most casual of gamers or the most hard-core of The Simpsons fans will be able to enjoy The Simpsons Skateboarding.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/8/9/2209189-box_tss.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-simpsons-skateboarding/1900-2898697/,neg,"
Save for Konami's original arcade beat-'em-up, the lineage of games based on The Simpsons has been less than stellar. The last two games to feature Matt Groening's maladjusted family unit, The Simpsons Wrestling and The Simpsons Road Rage, threw together the colorful characters of Springfield with gameplay that was remarkably similar to that of certain other popular game franchises. Now that pro wrestling and a Crazy Taxi clone have both been checked off the list for Simpsons game concepts, EA and The Code Monkeys have sought to mimic the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater formula to produce The Simpsons Skateboarding. The concept isn't exactly inspired to begin with, but the game itself is executed poorly enough that neither fans of the cartoon nor fans of action sports games will want to have anything to do with it.  As unenjoyable as the gameplay is, the single biggest offender in The Simpsons Skateboarding is its graphical presentation. When you begin play, you'll initially have access to only one level, as well as Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Bart as playable characters, though fulfilling objectives in the first level will unlock the subsequent level, and finishing the game will net you other playable characters like Nelson Muntz, Krusty the Klown, Otto the Bus Driver, and others. The levels you'll go through are all broad approximations of Springfield locations designed as skate parks. You'll start off in the area surrounding Springfield Elementary and move on to downtown Springfield, also visiting Itchy and Scratchy Land, the nuclear power plant, and the Springfield Gorge.    In each of the 10 levels in The Simpsons Skateboarding, you'll have to complete a set of goals before you can move on, and the goals remain largely identical from level to level. You'll start off with six quick lesson objectives in ""skillz school,"" where the game essentially forces you to master a few key maneuvers before you can move on. Once you've completed skillz school, you'll move on to the regular level objectives, none of which should surprise action sports aficionados. In each level, there's basic item collection (like grabbing three donuts), three high-score score objectives, a destruction objective (like knocking the head off the statue of Jebediah Springfield), and a letter-collection objective, which changes from level to level and includes spelling ""skinner"" or ""squishee"" or the like. Finally, each level also has a competition component where you have to earn a certain point score on a specific area on the map before the time runs out. There are also two perfunctory multiplayer games, which include a basic score-based competition and a game of horse. There's nothing in The Simpsons Skateboarding we haven't seen in a dozen other action sports games. The game will occasionally get rather devious with the item placement on some of the collection goals, but that edge is dulled by the big arrow at the top of the screen that directs you to your next objective. This simple, linear format might be more forgivable if the gameplay was solid, but such is not the case.     The gameplay is just a stripped-down Tony Hawk, with a handful of basic kickflips, grinds, aerial grabs, inverts, and manuals and a special trick or two. The limited number of tricks isn't really so bad, but the boards handle lousily, turning wide, moving rather slowly, being needlessly difficult to bring to a stop. Rotating your skater while pulling a vert trick is theoretically done with the shoulder buttons, but either the timing is incredibly specific or this mechanic is just broken, because half the time the skaters simply ignore the spin command. Grinding, on the other hand, is stupid easy, as the balance meter will stay at dead center as long as you don't move to the left or right while you're actually on the rail. The game is full of these kinds of gameplay quirks that make it unexciting to play.    As unenjoyable as the gameplay is, the single biggest offender in The Simpsons Skateboarding is its graphical presentation, which is just bad. The township of Springfield has been rendered in a flat, blocky fashion, with lots of four-sided buildings and six-sided trees, and the textures range from passable to downright awful, exhibiting lots of blur and occasionally some really nasty color banding. The actual character models do kind of resemble their animated counterparts, but their proportions don't look quite right, and joints between the distinct head, torso, and limbs portions of the models are all very visible. Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer and Bart fall into a weird three-dimensional world and are rendered with polygonal models? Those models are head and shoulders above anything that The Simpsons Skateboarding is even remotely capable of. Topping it all off is some really vicious and sporadic slowdown, which brings the game to its knees. The only positive thing to say about this game's graphics is that the levels are large and the draw distance is unnoticeable, but these merits hardly make up for the rest of the visual deficiencies in The Simpsons Skateboarding.  The game sounds only slightly better, featuring a blasé soundtrack of reinterpreted Simpsons themes and lots of voice samples. The game sounds only slightly better, featuring a blasé soundtrack of reinterpreted Simpsons themes and lots of voice samples. Actually, there's just lots of voice, but you'll hear bystanders like Apu, Barney Gumble, and Ralph Wiggum say the same few phrases whenever you get near them. Springfield Action News anchor Kent Brockman serves as commentator for the game, and he'll call out every single trick as you pull them off. With only two different inflections for each phrase, this becomes preternaturally annoying within the first level.    With so many other quality action sports games on the market at the moment, the only possible reason you might be attracted to The Simpsons Skateboarding is the Simpsons themselves. But unfortunately the game makes such ham-fisted use of the license that only the most casual of gamers or the most hard-core of The Simpsons fans will be able to enjoy The Simpsons Skateboarding. Everyone else truly has no excuse for playing The Simpsons Skateboarding and should steer clear of this tired excuse for an action sports game. 
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585,Xevious ,3.9," Xevious broke new ground back in the day, but it hasn't withstood the test of time.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/3/7/2209437-xevious_box.png,NES,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/xevious-review/1900-6166363/,neg,"
  Xevious holds the distinction of being one of the first vertical-scrolling aircraft shoot-'em-ups. Namco released the original arcade cabinet in 1982 and subsequently published numerous versions for the various home consoles of the day. Without Xevious, superlative shoot-'em-ups like 1942, Raiden, and Ikaruga may never have seen the light of day. For that reason alone, Xevious deserves respect. However, that respect doesn't mean you should pay 500 Wii points ($5) to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Xevious on your Wii's Virtual Console. The game was already behind the times when it finally hit the NES in 1984. Today, Xevious seems totally ancient with its overly repetitious design and ugly 8-bit visuals.   Xevious was one of the first vertical-scrolling ship shoot-'em-ups.   As shooters go, it doesn't get much simpler than Xevious. You pilot a ship, called the Solvalou, over a scrolling landscape and blast enemies using an endless supply of bullets and bombs. Enemy tanks and planes swoop into view, fire off some bullets, and retreat. Occasionally, a large mothership will appear, and you can try to shoot it down or wait until it leaves. If you get hit by a single bullet, you'll lose a ship and start from a predetermined point. There are no power-ups to collect. The game simply loops the same 10 brief areas indefinitely until you run out of ships. While it's not a bad design, you don't see anything new after the first 30 seconds or so. As such, the game becomes tiresome pretty quickly. Graphics and audio are rather basic, as well. The brown and green backgrounds look vaguely like terrain, while the gray enemy ships more closely resemble geometric shapes than aircraft. Throughout it all, you'll hear the same sirenlike music and ""plink, plink, plink"" laser fire constantly.    Those that are intent on downloading and playing the NES version of Xevious on their Wiis can at least rest easy that the Virtual Console emulates the game perfectly. The 8-bit graphics are crisp, the scrolling is smooth, and all of the old Easter eggs are in there. Playing with the Wii Remote gives the experience that authentic NES feel, although the GameCube controller and Classic Controller are more comfortable for lengthier sessions.    Unless you're absolutely sure you like Xevious, you should pass on downloading it to your Virtual Console. The design is too simplistic and repetitive to be much fun, and the graphics and audio don't have any charm whatsoever. This is one classic that hasn't aged well.  
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586,Humvee Assault ,3.9," Humvee Assault is simple, short, slightly buggy, and generally not very good.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/8/1/2208681-front_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/humvee-assault-review/1900-6025886/,neg,"
 Humvee Assault is a straightforward third-person car combat game with one surprising feature: Whenever you feel like it, you can hop out of your Humvee and run around assaulting things on foot; you just won't cover ground as quickly as a vehicle. Humvee Assault is also a budget game. And as you might expect from a budget-priced game, it's simple, short, slightly buggy, and generally not very good.  This screenshot makes Humvee Assault look more exciting than it actually is.  According to the description on the game's box, you play as a soldier performing ""anti-terror missions in global hotspots like Iraq, Cambodia, and Afghanistan."" (Your missions also include two other global hotspots, steamy Colombia and snowy Bosnia, which evidently weren't ""hot"" enough to warrant a mention on the box.) These antiterror missions--all five of them--involve picking one of four different Humvees and then driving it all over the place looking for the level's key targets while shooting at a handful of different types of enemies.  This isn't necessarily a recipe for disaster. Humvee Assault's levels are huge and generally wide open, leaving you plenty of room to drive and shoot. The problem is that the vehicle physics are neither realistic enough to provide much of a challenge nor wildly unrealistic enough to deliver any thrills. In fact, there barely seems to be any vehicle physics at all. You'll never catch air, flip over, powerslide into a turn, or feel any real sense of speed. Virtually every detail that games traditionally use to separate driving from walking is missing. It often seems as if you're simply controlling a person shaped like a Humvee.   The game's vehicular enemies include four-wheelers, tanks, and pickup trucks. Generally speaking, they have one tactic: to drive toward you and then drive in circles around you. The game's lack of interesting physics extends to interactions with other cars. Collisions have essentially no effect on either vehicle. Some missions require you to hop out of the Humvee and then either retrieve or destroy a target inside a building. This is where the game goes from mediocre to dismal. The buildings are stocked with a bunch of on-foot opponents. Inexplicably, these soldiers have absolutely no AI whatsoever. They simply stand in place while shooting at you. It's almost as though the static crowds that sit in the stands in racing and sports games have finally made their starring debut in their own game...as a bunch of sitting ducks. You've only got two weapons--a machine gun and grenades--so there isn't even any variety in your choice of how to dispatch these bullet-spewing statues.  At least Humvee Assault's graphics aren't nearly as bad as the game that takes place inside them. The game's custom rendering engine does a nice job of displaying big, open spaces. The jungle levels are believably dense with foliage, and one mission takes place through the streets of a hilly, detailed, and convincingly decrepit Colombian town. To compensate for this one positive feature, the game's animations are uniformly bad. Enemy soldiers generally stand in one place, and they have absolutely no reaction to being shot other than eventually tipping over.   The game's sound effects aren't so much bad as they are missing. The game has adequate gunfire and explosion effects, as well as engine noises, but that's about it. Other than some music (which we had to turn off because it stuttered on two different systems), the game has no ambient sounds. As you'd probably expect at this point, the immobile, unanimated soldiers are also completely mute.  For some reason, your enemies don't actually move.  We experienced hard lockups three or four times during the three or four hours it took to finish the game. These crashes are especially aggravating since you can save the game only after you've completed a mission goal. The developer has acknowledged the lockup problem and is evidently working on a patch.  At 20 bucks, Humvee Assault is pretty expensive considering all the things you don't get, such as enemy AI. For just 10 dollars more, you could buy Bandits: Phoenix Rising, a recently released and much, much better third-person car combat game. No matter what it says on the box, Humvee Assault is no bargain. 
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587,The Shield ,3.9," Neither quality fan service nor a good action game on its own merits, The Shield fails miserably to live up to its license's pedigree.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/0/2/6/2216026-919960_55474_front.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-shield-review/1900-6164473/,neg,"
  The Shield should probably have never been released. That might sound like an overly harsh statement for a game that isn't abysmally broken, but take this fact into account: Six months ago, The Shield was sitting comfortably on the shelf of game development purgatory, seemingly canned after original publisher Sammy decided to stop publishing games. For some reason, Aspyr then swooped in and rescued this beleaguered licensed action game and put it out for all to buy. Unless Aspyr picked up the rights to this game for less than a dollar and a dream, then the investment was for naught. The Shield is a completely uninteresting brawler/shooter that tries desperately to grasp at the kinds of brutal straws that just about every other mean-spirited action game of the last five years has already used up and spit out. Of course, the main draw here is that the game is based on the popular FX cops-with-bad-attitudes show The Shield, but apart from some competent voice talent and a script full of swears, this game has barely an inkling of what makes the show so much fun to watch.   Did the Commish seriously just beat that guy's face in with the butt of his gun?   Much the way that games like 24: The Game and Alias tried to squeeze themselves into the lexicon of the shows they were based on by providing a storyline that took place in between certain episodes or seasons of the show, The Shield plants itself firmly post-third season, but pre-Glenn Close and Forrest Whittaker. The fallout from the money train robbery has already taken place, and Detective Vic Mackey (played by Michael ""Commish"" Chiklis) and his strike team of dirty cops are on the verge of disbanding. The brass wants them reassigned, members of the team are unhappy with the way things are going, and the captain tells them it's going to take a major bust to salvage any hope of keeping the team alive. The big bust in question turns out to be an arms race between the Byz-Lat and One-Niner gangs. Mackey is tasked with breaking up the battle, finding the guns, and arresting as many of the thugs in charge as possible.    To the game's credit, certain aspects do play a bit like an episode of the show, but they play too much like an episode that has been hopelessly stretched well beyond reason. The case involving the gangbangers and their caches of weaponry is pretty dull after a short while--so dull, in fact, that the scriptwriters went out of their way to have the strike-team guys constantly remind the audience of why what they're doing matters. Variations of the line ""We crack this case, and the team is saved!"" appear so often that you have to wonder if the writers started forgetting what they'd written previously and were too lazy to go back and read through the script. While you get a few nice bits of foul-mouthed banter between the strike-team members and some of the criminal elements throughout the script, too much of the story is geared toward forcing the characters into situations that border on parody of the types of gritty scenarios you'd see on the show. It's as though someone at the developer felt the need to take every single possible opportunity to have Vic and crew do something dirty, even if it was completely inconsequential to the main story arc. And the dirty stuff hardly seems all that dirty.   The Shield is known for its brazen violence and unheroic characters, yet somehow the video game version of The Shield is oddly tame. It's not as though the game doesn't go out of its way to give you opportunities to rough up suspects, inflicting severe pain on them as you grill them for info. The trouble is that these interrogation bits seem like also-ran knockoffs of things you've already seen in games like The Punisher. Dragging a suspect over to a toilet to submerge his head or over to a hot stove to burn his face sounds like an amusing prospect, but these interrogation sequences are handled so dryly and joylessly that you quickly become bored with them. All you do to interrogate a suspect is press a series of buttons on the controller as quickly as possible, and all the action is handled onscreen for you. There's no sense that you're affecting the interrogation at all. On top of that, you often have to engage in some exceedingly clunky hand-to-hand combat before you can start interrogating a suspect. The fistfights in this game are asinine to the point of uselessness, due to some really unresponsive controls.    Another area where the game tries to ape the show is with your ability to acquire contraband. Anytime you're inside a house or a hideout, you can search various places for drugs, money, or weapons lying about. This is played out through a minigame where you have to move a circle around a badge icon to try to hit the sweet spot before time runs out. It's an arcane system, and the circle moves more slowly than it ought to for the short amount of time you're given. Once you do find contraband, you can either use it to feed Vic's ""retirement fund"" or turn it in at the station's evidence locker to reduce your heat rating. Heat comes from shooting unarmed suspects, wantonly beating people, and generally being a proper villain. You can also take a bit of that heat off by planting the guns you pick up on the unarmed folk you gun down, though you rarely have to do this.    Outside of the illicit deeds and savage beatings, all you're left with is a series of short shooter and sneaking levels. The stealth missions are some of the most annoying stealth sequences you'll ever play (guards with X-ray vision, nothing for you to do while sneaking around except...sneak around), so it's perhaps a godsend that you can opt to shirk stealth in most cases and start gunning down gangbangers instead--though even that strategy comes with a caveat, in that the game seems to not quite know what to do when you choose this strategy. Several times we ran into bugs where missions would fail halfway through a level, even though we weren't dead. Sometimes we'd get all the way through, guns blazing, and sometimes we'd get messages that the target character we were after escaped before the level timer even ran out. Other times we'd find out he was dead, for some inexplicable reason.    Being able to shoot like an action hero doesn't make the game good, since the shooting happens to be pretty lousy. There's no weapon variety to speak of (there are only three guns you can use), and until you get to the heavy machinery, you'll find yourself having to pump way too many rounds into enemies than is realistic. Seriously, should it really take six bullets to the chest and head to kill a Kevlar-less gangster? Vic can use a couple of basic cover mechanics, which are great because they're placed so you'll never have to get out from a cover position to kill bad guys. Your enemies always stay just within your sight range, so all you have to do is peer out real quick, unload a couple of rounds, and repeat until they're dead. There are also some sequences that involve working with an artificially intelligent partner. These guys evidently weren't programmed with cover mechanics in mind, so they like to go running out into the field of gunfire and get shot to death very quickly, which ends the mission. Your best bet is to keep running ahead of them, shooting all the while and hoping you don't die.    One of the weirdest things about The Shield is its presentation. You can tell that developer Point of View desperately wanted to ape the show's sense of style, but its imitations of the show's scattered camera angles, brutal violence, and gritty environments aren't very impressive. If anything, the camera makes the cutscenes feel kind of vomit-inducing, and as mentioned earlier, most of the violence is off-kilter and not all that extreme. One particularly weird sequence is the opening level, which intersperses title cards with the actors' names at oddly-timed intervals that break up the pacing of the stage badly. The environments and levels do feel appropriately dingy, but dingy levels can take you only so far. The technical graphics aren't very impressive by themselves, either. Vic and the principal character models look kind of grody and misshapen, and some of the skin and facial textures are laughably bad. Animation is stiff, world textures are blurry, and there are some occasional glitches and ugly spots.   The Shield tries to provide opportunities for moral decision making, but most times it's just easier and less frustrating to play it shady.   The lone bright spot is the voice acting. Nearly all the actors from the show reprise their roles (though CCH Pounder appears to have turned down the opportunity to be in this game--smart lady), and though you can definitely grasp a lack of enthusiasm by the actors, they don't totally dead-read everything. Chiklis chews the scenery as per usual, and other actors, such as Benito Martinez, Walton Goggins, and Jay Karnes, turn in decent performances, despite the shoddy dialogue. The rest of the audio is less enjoyable, however. The main theme song is in full effect in the game, and, in fact, the developer decided to cut the opening riff from it into every search sequence that you fail. So every time you fail to pick up contraband from a search, this same three-second-long, very loud guitar riff pops in to drive you bonkers. Speaking of repetitive audio work, the background dialogue is mind-numbingly repetitious. Characters repeat the same lines with insane frequency. This same problem plagued one of Point of View's last games, Narc. The problem here is that the lines that are being repeated aren't even unintentionally funny, so the repetition becomes obnoxious very quickly.    It is perhaps understandable that a publisher might pick up a game like The Shield dirt cheap from the cancellation pile simply on the strength of its license, but it ultimately would have been better for all of us if The Shield had stayed away from retail shelves. It's a conceptually flawed and poorly executed action game that has only the most base-level details in common with the license it's based on. The action isn't fun, the extreme violence isn't all that extreme, and the storyline is a dull, hacked-together snoozefest. The Shield is perfunctory in every imaginable way, and everyone, fan of the show or not, should avoid it.  
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588,The Shield ,3.9," Neither quality fan service nor a good action game on its own merits, The Shield fails miserably to live up to its license's pedigree.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/0/2/6/2216026-919960_55474_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-shield-review/1900-6165182/,neg,"
  The Shield should probably have never been released. That might sound like an overly harsh statement for a game that isn't abysmally broken, but take this fact into account: Six months ago, The Shield was sitting comfortably on the shelf of game development purgatory, seemingly canned after original publisher Sammy decided to stop publishing games. For some reason, Aspyr then swooped in and rescued this beleaguered licensed action game and put it out for all to buy. Unless Aspyr picked up the rights to this game for less than a dollar and a dream, then the investment was for naught. The Shield is a completely uninteresting brawler/shooter that tries desperately to grasp at the kinds of brutal straws that just about every other mean-spirited action game of the last five years has already used up and spit out. Of course, the main draw here is that the game is based on the popular FX cops-with-bad-attitudes show The Shield, but apart from some competent voice talent and a script full of swears, this game has barely an inkling of what makes the show so much fun to watch.   Did the Commish seriously just beat that guy's face in with the butt of his gun?   Much the way that games like 24: The Game and Alias tried to squeeze themselves into the lexicon of the shows they were based on by providing a storyline that took place in between certain episodes or seasons of the show, The Shield plants itself firmly post-third season, but pre-Glenn Close and Forrest Whittaker. The fallout from the money train robbery has already taken place, and Detective Vic Mackey (played by Michael ""Commish"" Chiklis) and his strike team of dirty cops are on the verge of disbanding. The brass wants them reassigned, members of the team are unhappy with the way things are going, and the captain tells them it's going to take a major bust to salvage any hope of keeping the team alive. The big bust in question turns out to be an arms race between the Byz-Lat and One-Niner gangs. Mackey is tasked with breaking up the battle, finding the guns, and arresting as many of the thugs in charge as possible.    To the game's credit, certain aspects do play a bit like an episode of the show, but they play too much like an episode that has been hopelessly stretched well beyond reason. The case involving the gangbangers and their caches of weaponry is pretty dull after a short while--so dull, in fact, that the scriptwriters went out of their way to have the strike-team guys constantly remind the audience of why what they're doing matters. Variations of the line ""We crack this case, and the team is saved!"" appear so often that you have to wonder if the writers started forgetting what they'd written previously and were too lazy to go back and read through the script. While you get a few nice bits of foul-mouthed banter between the strike-team members and some of the criminal elements throughout the script, too much of the story is geared toward forcing the characters into situations that border on parody of the types of gritty scenarios you'd see on the show. It's as though someone at the developer felt the need to take every single possible opportunity to have Vic and crew do something dirty, even if it was completely inconsequential to the main story arc. And the dirty stuff hardly seems all that dirty.   The Shield is known for its brazen violence and unheroic characters, yet somehow the video game version of The Shield is oddly tame. It's not as though the game doesn't go out of its way to give you opportunities to rough up suspects, inflicting severe pain on them as you grill them for info. The trouble is that these interrogation bits seem like also-ran knockoffs of things you've already seen in games like The Punisher. Dragging a suspect over to a toilet to submerge his head or over to a hot stove to burn his face sounds like an amusing prospect, but these interrogation sequences are handled so dryly and joylessly that you quickly become bored with them. All you do to interrogate a suspect is press a series of buttons on the controller as quickly as possible, and all the action is handled onscreen for you. There's no sense that you're affecting the interrogation at all. On top of that, you often have to engage in some exceedingly clunky hand-to-hand combat before you can start interrogating a suspect. The fistfights in this game are asinine to the point of uselessness, due to some really unresponsive controls.    Another area where the game tries to ape the show is with your ability to acquire contraband. Anytime you're inside a house or a hideout, you can search various places for drugs, money, or weapons lying about. This is played out through a minigame where you have to move a circle around a badge icon to try to hit the sweet spot before time runs out. It's an arcane system, but at least on the PC, the circle icon moves fast enough to let you succeed in most situations (not the case on the PS2). Once you do find contraband, you can either use it to feed Vic's ""retirement fund"" or turn it in at the station's evidence locker to reduce your heat rating. Heat comes from shooting unarmed suspects, wantonly beating people, and generally being a proper villain. You can also take a bit of that heat off by planting the guns you pick up on the unarmed folk you gun down, though you rarely have to do this.    Outside of the illicit deeds and savage beatings, all you're left with is a series of short shooter and sneaking levels. The stealth missions are some of the most annoying stealth sequences you'll ever play (guards with X-ray vision, nothing for you to do while sneaking around except...sneak around), so it's perhaps a godsend that you can opt to shirk stealth in most cases and start gunning down gangbangers instead--though even that strategy comes with a caveat, in that the game seems to not quite know what to do when you choose this strategy. Several times we ran into bugs where missions would fail halfway through a level, even though we weren't dead. Sometimes we'd get all the way through, guns blazing, and sometimes we'd get messages that the target character we were after escaped before the level timer even ran out. Other times we'd find out he was dead, for some inexplicable reason.    Being able to shoot like an action hero doesn't make the game good, since the shooting happens to be pretty lousy. There's no weapon variety to speak of (there are only three guns you can use), and until you get to the heavy machinery, you'll find yourself having to pump way too many rounds into enemies than is realistic. Seriously, should it really take six bullets to the chest and head to kill a Kevlar-less gangster? Vic can use a couple of basic cover mechanics, which are great because they're placed so you'll never have to get out from a cover position to kill bad guys. Your enemies always stay just within your sight range, so all you have to do is peer out real quick, unload a couple of rounds, and repeat until they're dead. There are also some sequences that involve working with an artificially intelligent partner. These guys evidently weren't programmed with cover mechanics in mind, so they like to go running out into the field of gunfire and get shot to death very quickly, which ends the mission. Your best bet is to keep running ahead of them, shooting all the while and hoping you don't die.    One of the weirdest things about The Shield is its presentation. You can tell that developer Point of View desperately wanted to ape the show's sense of style, but its imitations of the show's scattered camera angles, brutal violence, and gritty environments aren't very impressive. If anything, the camera makes the cutscenes feel kind of vomit-inducing, and as mentioned earlier, most of the violence is off-kilter and not all that extreme. One particularly weird sequence is the opening level, which intersperses title cards with the actors' names at oddly-timed intervals that break up the pacing of the stage badly. The environments and levels do feel appropriately dingy, but dingy levels can take you only so far. The technical graphics aren't very impressive by themselves, either. Vic and the principal character models look kind of grody and misshapen, and some of the skin and facial textures are laughably bad. Animation is stiff, world textures are blurry, and there are some occasional glitches and ugly spots. The PC version is arguably a bit crisper than the PS2 version, but not by a particularly wide margin.   The Shield tries to provide vague opportunities for moral decision making, but most times it's just easier and less frustrating to play it shady.   The lone bright spot is the voice acting. Nearly all the actors from the show reprise their roles (though CCH Pounder appears to have turned down the opportunity to be in this game--smart lady), and though you can definitely grasp a lack of enthusiasm by the actors, they don't totally dead-read everything. Chiklis chews the scenery as per usual, and other actors, such as Benito Martinez, Walton Goggins, and Jay Karnes, turn in decent performances, despite the shoddy dialogue. The rest of the audio is less enjoyable, however. The main theme song is in full effect in the game, and, in fact, the developer decided to cut the opening riff from it into every search sequence that you fail. So every time you fail to pick up contraband from a search, this same three-second-long, very loud guitar riff pops in to drive you bonkers. Speaking of repetitive audio work, the background dialogue is mind-numbingly repetitious. Characters repeat the same lines with insane frequency. This same problem plagued one of Point of View's last games, Narc. The problem here is that the lines that are being repeated aren't even unintentionally funny, so the repetition becomes obnoxious very quickly.    It is perhaps understandable that a publisher might pick up a game like The Shield dirt cheap from the cancellation pile simply on the strength of its license, but it ultimately would have been better for all of us if The Shield had stayed away from retail shelves. It's a conceptually flawed and poorly executed action game that has only the most base-level details in common with the license it's based on. The action isn't fun, the extreme violence isn't all that extreme, and the storyline is a dull, hacked-together snoozefest. The Shield is perfunctory in every imaginable way, and everyone, fan of the show or not, should avoid it.  
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589,Happy Feet ,3.9, Even kids who loved the animated film won't find Happy Feet to be worth their time.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/6/6/5/2210665-box_hfeet.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/happy-feet-review/1900-6163375/,neg,"
  Games based on kid-friendly properties don't need to be inferior. It's a shocking sentiment, but games like Cars and Barnyard prove that an animated film can produce more than a cheap cash-in. It's too bad that Midway and Warner Brothers missed the memo and churned out another lame movie game that sucks the happiness right out of Happy Feet. As a licensed product, it's mediocre, with enough charming moments to rescue it from the immediate bargain-basement abyss. But as a game, it's an absolute insult and more likely to put kids to sleep than it is to entertain them.    The most important lesson in Happy Feet is that people still make licensed garbage.   In Happy Feet, you guide film hero Mumble through a pared-down version of his animated adventure. The emperor penguins value the ""heartsong"" over all other art forms and ostracize Mumble for his total lack of vocal prowess but considerable dancing skills. Even worse, they blame him for the disappearing fish population. Eventually, he finds a new family in a small flock of Hispanic penguins, but he later returns to find his home endangered by human ""aliens."" You'll meet a number of enchanting characters along the way: Ramon, the Taco Bell Chihuahua of the penguin world; Lovelace, an avian spiritual leader with a plastic six-pack ring wrapped around his neck; and Mumble's father Memphis, whose accent is more than a little inspired by Elvis Presley. Part Bambi, part The Lion King, and part Footloose, the game is noticeably lighter in mood than the movie. That's not bad, considering how serious and dark the film often gets. However, aside from the tone, Happy Feet retells the same basic story with a few clichéd additions that provide an excuse for the gameplay.    But there is barely anything there to justify using the license for a game, as opposed to, say, a pop-up book or a karaoke CD. Every level features only one of three basic minigames. Dancing mode is the usual Dance Dance Revolution-type level, with three difficulty settings ranging from easy to complete cakewalk. The songs aren't all featured on the film soundtrack, though, so fans may be stymied by the appearance of artists like KC & The Sunshine Band and Dee-Lite. There are also some weird design choices in these segments. In the ""Somebody to Love"" level, the player is required to tap out rhythms of two, even though the song beat is in three. In the same level, the minigame ends and you exit the scene before the song is done, which is a letdown.     Both the swimming and belly-sledding levels take place on rails. Belly sledding is a tad superior thanks to its sense of speed. In these stages, you maneuver Mumble through slippery courses of ice and snow, sometimes collecting level-specific items or aiming for speed boosts that send you hurtling through the air. Other games like last year's The Chronicles of Narnia feature similar and superior scenes, but it's still mildly amusing in Happy Feet when soaring through the air after a particularly strong boost. Things slow down to a dead halt in the swimming levels, where you may be tasked with collecting ""lovestones,"" chasing fish, or escaping sharks. The objectives differ slightly every time, but the core gameplay is exactly the same: The level pulls Mumble along, and you steer him to and fro. On the console version (and the PC, if you use a gamepad instead of the arrow keys), you maneuver with the analog stick. On the Wii, you tilt the remote. Any way you slice it, it's far too simple to be any fun.    And sadly, that is all there is to it. 2004's Shark Tale featured many of the same modes but mixed them up nicely with a series of objectives that made the levels interesting. The difference between collecting hearts and collecting fish is negligible, though, which means that once you've played for 10 minutes, you've seen everything Happy Feet has to offer, even if you play through all of the game's three grueling hours. Granted, you earn medals in each level based on performance and getting gold medals unlocks the supposed ""extras."" But the unlockables are the same scenes you already saw in the dance levels, just without any gameplay. In other words, they're useless and an affront to the intelligence of players of any age, which completely eliminates any reason to collect gold medals in the first place.     But that's not the only insult Happy Feet has to offer. Including character Ramon and his heavy Mexican accent is one thing, but phonetically spelling out the stereotypical speech in the subtitles isn't amusing--it's offensive. For example, ""you"" is sometimes spelled as ""joo,"" and the fact that it isn't consistent just draws more attention to it when the lines are presented in that manner.     In the unlikely event that these three minigames are your cup of tea and you want to involve a friend--or abuse an enemy--you can ask another player to join you. In dance mode, this involves competing for the best score. In belly sledding, one player steers Mumble while the other presses button combinations (or flicks the Wii Remote) to smash obstacles in the way. Swimming involves collecting more items than your opponent. It's an amazing display of design failure: including a buddy doesn't make Happy Feet any more fun.    The film was pretty good. Too bad about the game.   Happy Feet isn't exactly ugly, but it's got numerous graphical flaws that stand out. Some of the snowy environments are nice and feature falling icicles and destructible objects. But there are obvious seams where some polygons meet, as well as a ton of blurry textures to contend with. For a game based on an animated film, the models move stiffly and the speech is poorly synced with the beak movements. The lack of transition between the end of a level and the following cutscene is jarring--it just cuts immediately without so much as a fade. The PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions look identical to each other, while the PC version features an ""enhanced"" engine, which adds bloom lighting but looks otherwise unremarkable. The Wii version looks a little crisper than the other console versions, but not enough to make it worth another $20 bucks. Thankfully, the sound surpasses the visuals, due to a strong voice cast and John Powell's lovely orchestral score.     There's no reason to play Happy Feet. If you liked the film, buy another ticket and watch it again. If you still can't get enough, buy a licensed mug or something. And if you're looking for a gift to get your kids this holiday season, it's better to slip a lump of coal into their stockings than to offend them with this kind of branded rubbish.   
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590,Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire ,3.9," Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire is a lazy attempt to bring the Gundam license to the PlayStation 3, and it's a disappointment in almost every way.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/3/5/2/2220352-box_msgc.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mobile-suit-gundam-crossfire-review/1900-6161990/,neg,"
  It would seem that Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire has the makings of a good game. After all, what more do you need than a couple dozen towering mechs strapped with machine guns, rocket launchers, and beam sabers? How about a frame rate that occasionally approaches the double digits? How about online multiplayer? How about some semblance of thoughtful, intelligent game design? Crossfire has none of these things. Instead, it offers a couple dozen good-looking mechs, but that's about it. In fact, aside from its packaging and price, Crossfire gives very little indication of being a PlayStation 3 game. The graphics are poor, the frame rate is ridiculously slow, the gameplay is primitive, there's no online play, and simply no reason to play this game.   There's very little story in this game, so you just shoot enemy mechs, helicopters, and tanks until you've had enough--which should take only about 10 minutes.   In the world of Gundam, there are two forces locked in an ongoing struggle for dominance: The Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon. The game doesn't go into detail about why the two forces are fighting, so if you're looking for some context, you'll have to look to the plethora of Gundam anime, manga, and fan-created Web sites for more information. All you need to know is that both factions have some awesome weaponry in the form of massive mechanized ""suits"" at their disposal, which meet on the barren, fog-laden battlefields of futuristic Earth, where they trade blows until one side emerges the victor.     There are two modes of play in Crossfire. The single-player campaign is where you'll spend most of your time because the multiplayer is a joke. The only way to play this game multiplayer is two-player split-screen battles. There is no online play, which seems ridiculous because the majority of other PlayStation 3 launch titles have at least some sort of online support. The split-screen multiplayer that you get instead is completely shallow and almost unplayable because of a busted frame rate. You each choose a mobile suit (all of which have to first be unlocked in the single-player game) and battle until one mech is left standing. It's the kind of multiplayer experience that has been tacked on to second-rate licensed games for years, and it will do nothing to extend your time with this game.     The single-player campaign in Crossfire is much more involved, but that isn't saying very much. You can play as either the Earth Federation force or the Zeon force. Each side has its own selection of mobile suits, but regardless of which force you're fighting for, you'll encounter many of the same battles. Even though you'll be playing the same battles, you'll be doing so from different sides, which makes each mission feel unique to each faction. The campaign structure is based on a daily cycle, and you can accept or ignore missions as you see fit. Missions have a time limit, so you have to complete each one before a certain date or else it will be unavailable for the rest of the game. As days pass, your pilots heal from battle and your mobile suits are repaired. It also takes a set number of days to modify your mobile suits, have new ones delivered, and so on. You have to manage your time to an extent, but it's not such a constraint that you'll ever feel rushed to meet the mission deadlines. The campaign ends when you reach December 31 or finish the final battle. The campaign progression isn't exactly open-ended because you'll end up in the same place no matter what you do, but the structure works well if only because it gives you some freedom to pick and choose your missions.     Skipping a few of the optional missions won't have much of an effect on your overall campaign, but there is some incentive for completing as many missions as possible. At the end of each mission, you're given a rank that is based on your time, remaining health, and enemies destroyed. You're also awarded points based on how you perform, which can be redeemed to purchase new mobile suits, hire new pilots, and upgrade your current fleet of mobile suits. The upgrade system is very shallow and not especially fulfilling. You can upgrade each mobile suit in one of three areas: attack, which will increase the damage inflicted on enemies; weapons, which gives you access to new weapons and lets you carry more ammunition; and defense, which increases the amount of damage you can take. You'll also see an appreciable performance boost as you level up your mechs, but if you're looking for a level of customization that is typical of other mech combat games, you won't find it in Crossfire.       Most of the mobile suits are humanoid in design, with two legs, two arms, a head, and a torso. They run around and behave much like humans, but because the suits are several stories tall and weigh hundreds of tons, they tend to be slow and clumsy. Wisely, the mech engineers have equipped each suit with rocket boosters, which are essential because they let you move fast enough to evade most attacks. Without the rocket boosters, the mobile suits move so unbearably slow that you're better off waiting the few seconds for them to cool off so you can use them again than trying to move around unaided. You move your mobile suit with the left analog stick and adjust the camera with the right analog stick. Oddly, the motion-sensor feature of the Sixaxis controller goes completely unused.    At least the mobile suits look cool.   Each mobile suit can be equipped with a melee weapon, which is assigned to the triangle button. These melee weapons can be extremely powerful but, of course, are only effective at close range. Not only does getting in close put you directly in harm's way, but poor collision detection makes melee fighting very frustrating. You'll often whiff pathetically when you take a swing, even if you're right next to your target.    Most of the time, you'll rely on ranged weapons, such as machine guns, beam cannons, and missile launchers that can be equipped to your mobile suit. These weapons are assigned to the square and R1 buttons. You can press the R2 button to activate sniper mode to pick off enemies from afar, but it's easier to use the lock-on targeting feature. By pressing the L1 button, you'll lock on to a target, and the camera will stay focused on it. This lets you circle strafe and fill your enemy full of lead until it dies or you run out of ammo. In each level, there is also a supply depot that you can visit to replenish your ammo, but doing so will put you out of commission for about 10 seconds and leave you completely vulnerable to attack.   The controls take some getting used to, and there's no tutorial to ease you into your new role as a mobile suit pilot. There are a few training missions that let you practice your mech combat without running the risk of failing a mission, but these training missions don't provide any detail about how the controls work. However, if you've played any of the many Gundam games for the PlayStation 2, the control scheme will feel very familiar here.  There are PlayStation 2 games with a lot more detail and character than this game.  Depending on the battle, you can have up to two other mobile suits accompany you. You can't directly control these other suits, but you can issue commands using the D pad. However, you can issue commands only to pilots who are subordinate to you in rank. Even with backup, you'll end up doing the vast majority of the work yourself because your teammates aren't very responsive (or apparently coherent) most of the time. You'll often see your allies running into walls, doing nothing, walking around aimlessly, or just taking all kinds of enemy fire.   Most of the missions in the game require you to destroy all of the enemies in a certain area. There are also escort missions and defend-the-base missions, but even then, the action always boils down to killing all of the enemies before they kill you. The battlefields are all confined within an invisible force field that is passable to your enemies but not to you. It's extremely annoying and awkward looking to chase down an enemy only to reach an invisible wall and not be able to move. Adding to the sense of confinement is a very short draw distance that blankets every level in dense fog, so you can never see very far. As a result, you often won't even be able to see enemies until they magically appear within your firing range.   There are about 25 missions for each faction that take place on unspecified battlefields in and around Australia and Southeast Asia. There's a desert area, a mountain area, a canyon area, a naval base, a military base, crumbling city ruins, a mighty river, and a few others. The locations are all about as exciting as they sound, with bland backgrounds, undefined topography, unnatural-looking water, paper-thin trees that don't initially react when you walk through them, and a very light smattering of destructible structures, such as antenna towers, fuel storage tanks, and military buildings. But these things do nothing to make the levels more interesting, and the biggest disparity between levels is usually the color of the ground textures.  The only part of the game that looks good is the mobile suit models. There are more than 30 different suits in the game, and when standing still, they each look detailed and appropriately imposing. One especially nice touch is the way that the mobile suits get dismembered in the midst of combat but keep on fighting. As long as you have one good leg and a torso, you can keep fighting. If you lose both of your arms, you'll have to kick to attack; if you lose your head, you won't have any radar; if you bust a leg, you'll end up moving very slowly, and so on. You can also hack enemy mobile suits to bits, but it's difficult to target a specific area of the enemy's suit. So when you do end up chopping off an arm, it's usually just a matter of luck.   Unfortunately, the cool, mutilated mechs are overshadowed by the technical problems with this game, the most glaring of which is that once these large, detailed models start moving, the frame rate staggers. Even before the action starts, when you're just walking around an empty level, the game moves so slowly that it's like watching stop-motion animation. When you add a few more mechs to the mix, the game slows to the point that you can just about count each frame of animation as it goes by. The disappointment is compounded by the lackluster special effects that make things like firing rockets, swinging beam sabers, and blowing up huge mechs sadly unsatisfying. The explosion effects are also weak and subdued, and when you destroy an enemy mobile suit, it simply falls over and disappears in a puff of smoke. You'd expect these hulking masses of metal to have appropriately hulking weapons, but instead, you get a floppy pink sword and cannons that feel like pea shooters. Of course, everything looks best on a high-definition display. Running the game in 720p gives an enhanced level of detail and widescreen aspect ratio, but even with those improvements, the game pales in comparison to other PlayStation 3 games. If you're playing this game on a standard definition television, you'll have a hard time making out the text in the menus, and the in-game graphics could easily be mistaken for those of a PlayStation 2 game.   You can play through the campaign in about six hours, and then your only option is to play through it again because the multiplayer sure isn't worth playing.  The sound effects are just as lame as the visuals in Crossfire. The weapons don't sound the least bit loud or forceful, and the explosions are muted. Even the clunky noise of the mobile suits walking sounds weak and repetitive. Although there are no characters to speak of in the game, you will get to hear voice clips in battle. You'll usually hear the same few phrases from your enemies, along the lines of, ""Die you bastard!"" You'll also have a tinny, toneless female voice to tell you of updated mission objectives, which is at least helpful even if it doesn't sound good. The music is dramatic and a bit overdone, but it's one of the few elements of this game that doesn't feel lazily thrown together at the last minute. That said, it's not award-winning music by any means, and you'll likely forget it as soon as you quit playing the game.   Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire feels like a mediocre budget PlayStation 2 game that was ported to the PlayStation 3 and slapped with a $60 price tag. Diehard Gundam fans with a lot of cash to burn might enjoy looking at the mobile suits, but other than that, this game has nothing going for it. Even if you could get past the horrid frame rate problems, lackluster presentation, and lack of online multiplayer, the gameplay in Crossfire is practically identical to the half-dozen or more Gundam games that appeared on the PlayStation 2. If you're looking for a game to show off what your PlayStation 3 is capable of, Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire should be your last choice of all the launch titles.   


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591,Blades of Thunder II ,3.9," There's nothing fun or exciting about flying helicopters in Blades of Thunder II. And considering that's all you do in the game, that's really sad.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/5/5/0/2223550-928415_67482_front.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/blades-of-thunder-ii-review/1900-6151422/,neg,"
  Either the original Blades of Thunder was a smash hit that nobody knows about, or the sequel was so cheap to make that it bore no foreseeable risk for publisher Summitsoft. Whatever the reason, Blades of Thunder II is here, and it has the distinction of being the first helicopter combat game to grace the Nintendo DS. Aside from that there's absolutely nothing notable about Blades of Thunder II. It's a generic, shallow, and boring shooter that starts getting old the moment you start it up.    Terrorists are everywhere, but your special fog-piercing ammo will take them down.   It's certainly not on par with even the worst episode of Airwolf, but Blades of Thunder II does have a story of sorts. The game is about a fictional group of peace-loving helicopter pilots known as the World Anti-Terrorist Coalition, who are in charge of protecting freedom and eliminating the terrorist group known as the Solar Martyrs. One day you're sent on a standard mission to blow up a bunch of terrorist training camps in South America (which is extra great, since the back of the box says the game takes place in the Middle East), but as soon as you take off, the WATC headquarters is destroyed...by terrorists, of course. There's no time to ponder the irony, though, as the attack leaves you all alone to eliminate the terrorist threat by hovering around and pecking at indiscernible enemies from afar with a machine gun.     There are more than 15 missions in the single-player campaign, which range from blowing up enemy communication towers to blowing up enemy communication satellite dishes. It all amounts to flying around a large, open map moving from one radar blip to the next until you've eliminated all the blips. It's not quite that easy, though, because the maps are crawling with terrorist helicopters, battleships, missile turrets, and tanks. Luckily, all of those terrorists can easily be taken out with a few rounds from your handy infinite chaingun. You can also use heat-seeking missiles and unguided missiles, but they are in limited supply and aren't any more effective than the chaingun.     Flying into enemy territory will get you killed in a hurry, but since the machine gun has unlimited range (and can even shoot through mountains it seems), you can just hover out of range of your enemies and pick them off one by one. Since the draw distance in the game is short, you'll often just be shooting into the fog and listening for the sound that indicates when you're hitting a target. You know where to shoot because there's a little yellow targeting reticle that snaps on to enemies regardless of whether they're visible or not. Needless to say, shooting at fog gets old pretty quickly.     The controls in Blades of Thunder II are fairly flexible and easy to use. You move the helicopter forward and backward with the D pad and shoot with the L button. You can aim and rotate your helicopter using the four face buttons or by using the touch screen. The touch screen control works fairly well and allows for quicker, more precise aiming than the buttons. No matter which control scheme you use, you'll be frustrated by the lack of altitude control. There's no way to manually adjust your altitude in the game, which is a problem because there are a lot of mountains and valleys to negotiate on the maps. It's best to just avoid flying over mountains altogether, but if you have to, you can inch up against a spot of raised terrain and after a few seconds and a bit of coaxing, your helicopter will rise up over the new level of the land. More often than not, when you do try to go over a mountain, you'll end up running into it and crashing before the game figures out what you're trying to do. As a result, the stages tend to feel confined, which takes all of the fun out of flying.    There are three different helicopters in the game, the main difference being maneuverability and ammo capacity. You can also pick up and purchase upgrades for your helicopters to increase the power of your machine gun, add more missiles, or bolster your armor. However, the upgrade system is limited, and the helicopters in this game are nothing to get excited about.   This game somehow makes flying attack helicopters seem about as exciting as folding laundry.   If the single-player campaign isn't your thing, you can choose to play in freeflight mode. You can choose a helicopter, a map, and a time limit and then just fly around and blow stuff up until you get bored, which won't take long. If somehow you still haven't had enough of this game after that, you can play with up to three other players (who must each have a copy of the game) in a multiplayer deathmatch mode.    Even if you have a profound affinity for helicopters, you'll get bored with this game rather quickly. The combat is repetitive and boring, and even the simple act of flying around an open map is completely bereft of enjoyment. There's nothing fun about shooting fog and stiffly flying over pixelated terrain, and that's about all there is to do in Blades of Thunder II.     
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592,Shin Megami Tensei 4: Apocalypse ,9, This all-new adventure in the Shin Megami Tensei IV universe ranks among the best games for the 3DS.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3055255-shing.jpg,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shin-megami-tensei-4-apocalypse-review/1900-6416515/,pos,"
At first blush, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse may look like a reconfigured version of 2013's Shin Megami Tensei IV, but that belies its complexities. It’s practically an entirely new adventure that comes with a host of enhancements to core gameplay and character progression. The result? An incredible RPG that surpasses its lofty predecessor in almost every way.Nanashi and Asahi might not be related by blood, but they’ve formed a familial bond as two young would-be Hunters in post-apocalyptic Tokyo. Hunters help the populace by battling and taming demonic hordes that exist above ground in the city’s now-eternal night. They also serve as a lifeline for humanity, helping people forage and survive in the midst of a supernatural conflict between the hellish forces of Lucifer and the almighty angels of Merkabah.Since Apocalypse’s story runs concurrent to Shin Megami Tensei IV’s Neutral Path storyline, folks who have played the original will see events and characters from a different perspective--that of the people living in what remains of Tokyo. While it helps to have some familiarity with the original, the game’s starting events ramp up so quickly that you're immediately engaged with the story at hand. While Shin Megami Tensei IV makes you slog through the dull-as-dirt setting of Mikado before you get to see the far more interesting demonic Tokyo, Apocalypse puts you right in the middle of the perpetually dark megacity, where all the interesting events and plot development take place.Apocalypse’s amazing sense of visual design manages to create a terrifying-yet-beautiful vision of a ruined metropolis. You explore fallen structures and landmarks, forage through rotten train stations, high-end shopping centers, and parks to find scraps of the old world to pawn for cash. The demons that roam and attack passersby are a mix of iconic Shin Megami Tensei designs and all-new art, some of which is particularly awe-inspiring--you know you're in trouble when you encounter a giant, makeup-smeared donkey-headed creature with a ripped torso and a peacock tail.Beyond the story and setting, however, Apocalypse makes a host of improvements to its core gameplay that immensely improves the experience of demon hunting and exploration--save for the map, which is still as difficult to discern as it was in Shin Megami Tensei IV. For starters, the simple act of receiving new quests is now mostly automated. Instead of having to report back to a hub, quests are automatically delivered to Nanashi’s cell phone, and registered as complete when he accomplishes their goal; an elegant way to streamline the questing process. In addition, all of the game’s difficulty settings are unlocked from the get-go, and you can freely switch between them instead of forcing your way through a demoralizing cycle of deaths to access the easy difficulty setting.Beyond the story and setting, however, Apocalypse makes a host of improvements to its core gameplay that immensely improves the experience of demon hunting and exploration--save for the map, which is still as difficult to discern as it was in Shin Megami Tensei IV.Demon recruiting and fusion, a crucial component to the core Shin Megami Tensei games, also sees an interesting overhaul. Certain demon types that were once impossible to recruit through normal means can now be invited to join via the in-battle Scout command, and they have new conversation trees to explore. There’s also a brand-new element introduced where demons receive additional, innate buffs or debuffs to particular skill types, which needs to be taken into account when fusing demons to create new variations. For example, a primarily magic-damage-focused demon may have innate penalties on physical skills, but they get a bonus damage or MP reduction effect on electric and healing techniques. This is something you need to take into consideration when picking which skills to pass on to demons that result from fusions. Sure, you can make a Jack Frost with fire skills, but when it’s got an innate damage-dealt penalty on fire skills, wouldn’t that skill slot be better used for something it’s actually good at?Combat itself benefits from improvements, too. While the engine is the same turn-based Press Turn system seen across several SMT games, two additions make a big difference in Apocalypse. The first seems minor at first: an overhaul to the Smirk status. By scoring critical hits and/or hitting an opponent’s weakness, a character or demon can score an extra turn in battle and potentially trigger the Smirk status, which negates that character’s own weakness while guaranteeing a critical hit on the next turn. In Apocalypse, however, Smirk can also grant normal skills a guaranteed additional effect, such as status debuffs or instant kills. Smirk was already crucial in Shin Megami Tensei IV, but intelligent use of it in Apocalypse makes battling a lot more efficient in the long run.Everything about Apocalypse looks, feels, and sounds great; the excellent soundtrack works to enhance the feelings of exploration in a darkened, destroyed world. All of the gameplay additions improve elements where the original Shin Megami Tensei IV was lacking.The other (more visibly important) addition is the partner system. A bevy of partners join you over the course of the game, including your friend Asahi, a kid from the Yakuza, a woman with the powers of a fairy queen, and the reincarnation of SMT4's obnoxious heel, Navarre. One character can be assigned as a partner, and they’ll join you in combat, attacking and providing backup under AI control. Partners can be targeted and damaged by enemies just like a normal party member, but since they’re not on the front lines, they can’t be targeted by several skills--a reality that's both detrimental and beneficial. Each partner specializes in different skills, such as buffs, healing, or direct damage, so picking the right partner for the right battles is crucial. After they’ve fought for a certain amount of turns, your team comes together for an all-out attack, using their combined skills while teaming up to deliver big damage and cancel an enemy’s turn entirely, making them invaluable for extensive boss fights.Everything about Apocalypse looks, feels, and sounds great; the excellent soundtrack works to enhance the feelings of exploration in a darkened, destroyed world. Your demonic servants roar, cry, and yell in the heat of battle, making combat feel more lively and risky than ever before. All of the gameplay additions improve elements where the original Shin Megami Tensei IV was lacking. Meanwhile, the story’s eagerness to get into the heat of the new conflict makes it quick and easy for you to become caught up in this bewildering, dangerous world where humans, gods, and demons coexist. Apocalypse is a fantastic RPG that goes above and beyond the original Shin Megami Tensei IV to become one of the shining gems of the 3DS library.


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593,Death Stranding  - Postal Service,9," Death Stranding is dense, complex, and powerful, steadfast in its belief in the power of love and hope when faced with overwhelming adversity.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3079176-deathstrandings.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/death-stranding-review-postal-service/1900-6417358/,pos,"
America is broken, and it's up to you to put it back together again. It's a tall order. A lot of people believe in it, but you're not sure you do. It'll take a lot of lonely, dangerous walks and exceptionally heavy lifting, and it's not really clear what America means in the first place. For some reason, you set out anyway, trudging through wetlands and rocky hills on foot, not fully knowing or understanding where you're going. Other than the monsters you can't quite see, there's not really anyone else around most of the time--just you and your thoughts, one foot in front of the other.On one level, Death Stranding is about America. But your actual goal in setting out across the country is to help people, bring them together, and forge connections, not for the vague concept of America but for the sake of helping the people within it. Death Stranding is unrelenting in its earnestness and optimism--certainly not without its critiques of America, nor without its challenges and setbacks, but inherently hopeful nonetheless. It is a dense, complex, slow game with a plot that really goes places, but at its core, it never stops being about the sheer power and purpose we can find in human connection, and that is its most remarkable achievement.Hands Across AmericaRebuilding the country is as simple as getting every far-flung city, outpost, and individual onto one network, the bones of which were laid down by a pseudo-government organization called Bridges. As Sam Porter Bridges (played by Norman Reedus), all you have to do to win people over is bring them packages; most people never go outside due to mysterious monsters called BTs, but unlike most people, Sam can sense them enough to sneak past them and get important cargo to its destination.Deliveries can be arduous. You're evaluated on your deliveries across a few categories, but the condition of the cargo can make or break a run, and there are a lot of factors working against you. The landscape can be extremely punishing, from expanses of exhaustingly rocky hills to rivers that are too deep and wide to cross unaided. On top of BTs, you also have to contend with Timefall, a kind of rain that rapidly accelerates aging and deterioration for most of the things it touches. Extended exposure to Timefall can damage or completely ruin your cargo, as can slipping and falling, getting hit by an enemy, or, in some cases, just being a little too rough with it. Even the smallest rocks can trip you up, too. In order to keep your footing, you need to pay close attention to where you're stepping, keeping your balance with the triggers while on rough terrain or when carrying a lot of stuff.Once you reach your destination, though, you're showered with praise. The recipient will likely thank you to your face (albeit as a hologram), and then they'll give you a series of social media-style likes. You're inundated with a multi-page results screen itemizing all the likes you received for the delivery and in which categories, plus an overall rating for the delivery itself, no matter how small--it's positive reinforcement turned up to 11. These likes then funnel into each of the delivery categories like experience points, and as you level up, you can carry more weight or better maintain your balance, among other benefits. Deliveries also feed into a connection rating with each city, outpost, or person, and as that increases, you acquire better gear and sometimes gifts to reward your efforts further.In short, you give a lot and get a lot in return. There is a relatively small number of mandatory deliveries to advance the story, but there's a seemingly unlimited number of optional deliveries, and I often found myself picking up orders destined for any place that was on my way. It's a cycle that's easy to get swept up in; no matter how difficult a delivery or how far the distance, you will at least be met with gratitude, likely feel fulfilled from having completed a tough delivery, and often given a tool to make future deliveries a bit easier. Most importantly, though, increasing your bonds with people is how you get them on the network, and the network is what elevates this core loop beyond the simple satisfaction of completing tasks and getting rewards.The chiral network is a kind of souped-up internet that allows you to 3D print objects, which is incredibly useful and a strong incentive in itself. When at a terminal connected to the chiral network, you can print ladders and ropes for traversal, new boots as yours wear out, repair spray for damaged containers, and basically anything else you need to safely deliver cargo so long as you have a blueprint for it. You can also print a portable printer that builds structures for you out in open areas covered by the network--things like bridges, watchtowers, and generators, the latter of which are critical as you start to use battery-powered exoskeletons and vehicles.The chiral network also grants you access to the online component of the game, which is absolutely essential. You never see other players in the flesh, but their impact is all around you; once an area is on the network, you can see structures and objects left behind by other players in the course of their own journeys, plus helpful signs they've put down just for those who come after them. You can pick up someone else's lost cargo and deliver it for them, too, knowing that someone else may find yours at some point and do you the same kindness.In Death Stranding's best moments, the relief and gratitude you can feel toward someone you don't even know is an unrivaled multiplayer experience. At one point in my playthrough, I was being chased by MULEs, human enemies who love to steal cargo. I was on a bike, tasked with a time-sensitive delivery, almost out of battery and totally unequipped to deal with external threats. In my panic, I drove my bike into a ravine. As I slowly made my way up and out of it, I watched as my bike's battery dipped into the red, and I dreaded getting stuck with all my cargo and no vehicle, still quite a ways away from my destination. I rounded a corner and found myself in the charging area of a generator placed by another player, as if they'd known I'd need it in that exact spot at that exact moment. They probably just put it there because they needed a quick charge, but to me, it was a lifeline.You can give and receive likes for these player-to-player structures, and just like with standard deliveries, it's a strong incentive to do something helpful for someone else. In the earlier sections of the game, I was using other people's structures far more than I was leaving behind help for others. But I wanted to pay it forward and know that my help was appreciated, so I started going out of my way to build structures I myself didn't really need; the map shows the online structures in your instance, making it easier to spot areas you could fill in for others. At first, the likes system seems like a pretty obvious commentary on social media and our dependence on external validation. But it's not so much a critique as it is a positive spin on a very human need for acceptance, and the system does a remarkable job of urging you to do your best for those around you, NPCs and real people alike. Feeling truly appreciated can be a rare occurrence in life, and it's powerful in its simplicity here.The Super BB MethodThe first few hours of the game are the slowest, and a large part of that is because you don't have access to the online component right away. It's an incredibly lonely stretch of time during which you mostly just walk; the work you do early on is especially laborious in the absence of advanced gear, and it serves to give you an appreciation for other players and better gear as you move forward.Even as the gameplay opens up, you continue to get a lot of story exposition with almost no explanation. It can all seem kind of goofy at first, and you can get lost in the metaphors; every city you need to add to the chiral network has ""knot"" in its name, for example, and they are all referred to as ""knots"" on a strand that connects the country. There's bizarre and unwarranted product placement in the form of Monster Energy drinks and the show Ride with Norman Reedus. Guillermo del Toro's likeness is used for a kind of dorky character called Deadman, and there's a woman named Fragile in a game about delivering packages.But the story really does go deeper than that. In keeping with the theme of human connection, each of the core characters you meet and work with has their own story to tell. They all have a unique perspective on death that lends them an equally unique perspective on life, and unravelling their characters, down to the true origins of their often literal names, contributes to the overall tapestry of Death Stranding's take on the human experience. As they open up to Sam, Sam opens up to them in turn, developing into a distinct character in his own right out of the reserved, emotionless man he appears to be at the start. I grew to love Sam, Fragile, and Heartman especially, and even the characters I didn't like as much add to the game's overall message about hope and love in the face of adversity.By far my favorite character--and the most important one--is BB. BBs are infants in pods that can detect the presence of BTs, and they're issued to porters like Sam to help them navigate dangerous territory. You're told to treat BBs like equipment, not real babies, but it's impossible to think of your BB that way. It's full of personality, giggling when happy and crying when stressed out; it even gives you likes from time to time. There aren't many children left in Death Stranding's isolated, fearful world, but BB is your reminder that the future is counting on you, regardless of how you feel about America itself. The love that grows between Sam and BB is nothing short of heartwarming.Connecting with this story, just as with connecting with NPCs and other players, can take work. It's not a story that immediately clicks on a surface level, and the dramatic mystery and off-the-wall science don't make too much sense at first blush. But it's an emotional story first and foremost, and making sense of things--while entirely possible, particularly if you read the letters and interviews that detail small bits of lore as you go--is not as important as reflecting on how it makes you feel.You have plenty of opportunities to do that, too. In the quiet moments of travel, usually as you near your destination, music might start to play. The soundtrack, which is largely composed of one band--Low Roar--is phenomenal, the kind of contemplative folk-ish music that suits a trip alone through a meadow or down a mountain. Because the act of walking is so involved, it's not a time to detach completely and zone out; it's a time to feel your feelings or at least consider what's next in your travels.Fight, But Not To The DeathYou can just as soon be ripped out of that headspace, though, by a shift to the haunting music that signals BT territory. The otherworldly growls of BTs as they close in on you can be terrifying, and early on, your best bet is to freeze in your tracks and hold your breath for as long as you can so you can quietly sneak by them. But there are times when you have to fight a BT in its true form, and for that, you have specialized weapons to take them down. These BTs aren't the ethereal humanoid shapes that float above the ground but huge eldritch horrors that screech under clouds of blood. The combat is mechanically simple--you mostly have to move around a bit and hit them before they hit you--but the sequences are visually and aurally arresting.You don't get a gun that works on live enemies until 25 or so hours in, but even then, it's non-lethal. You are actively guided away from killing in Death Stranding, because when people die, their bodies basically go nuclear and level cities, leaving nothing but craters and BTs in their wake. On top of that, the main human enemies are MULEs, former porters just like Sam that have been corrupted by an automated world--they've essentially become addicted to snatching cargo in their desperation to have a job and a purpose as more and more people become replaced by machines. They're not evil, and killing them seems like, well, overkill; it's easy enough to knock them out with the nonlethal methods you continue to unlock as the game progresses. I didn't kill a single one in my playthrough, though punching them is satisfying.While BTs and MULEs are a concern when delivering cargo, there's also Mads Mikkelsen's character, a man who's introduced through memories Sam sees when he connects to BB's pod. He gets his own dedicated segments that punctuate hours of simple deliveries, and these highly contained, much shorter sections are striking in their art direction and juxtaposition to the rest of the game. It's not immediately clear what he is, whether it's an enemy, potential friend, or something else entirely, but he's captivating in his ambiguity.The most cartoonish enemy is Troy Baker's Higgs, a terrorist whose depravity seems to know no bounds. Of all the characters, Higgs is the weakest, with far less nuance to him than anyone else in the cast. He's really just there as a Big Bad to motivate you in a more traditional video game sense than delivering packages and helping people, but he and his band of faceless terrorists are more a means to an end than full-fledged villains. He's the catalyst for some of the major BT fights, and in the end, perhaps an extreme reminder that it's possible to stay hopeful even when things are darkest.Death Stranding argues in both its story and its gameplay that adversity itself is what makes things worth doing and life worth living.Death Stranding is a hard game to absorb. There are many intertwining threads to its plot, and silly names, corny moments, and heavy exposition belie an otherwise very simple message. That comes through much more clearly in the game's more mundane moments, when you find a desperately-needed ladder left behind by another player or receive a letter from an NPC thanking you for your efforts. It's positive without ignoring pain; in fact, it argues in both its story and its gameplay that adversity itself is what makes things worth doing and life worth living. It's a game that requires patience, compassion, and love, and it's also one we really need right now.


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594,Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak ,9," Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is a prequel to the famed Homeworld Strategy series. It follows its inspirations closely, but adds its own touches to create something new and wonderful.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2980877-untitled-2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/homeworld-deserts-of-kharak-review/1900-6416335/,pos,"
We cling to the Kapisi. Battered and fragile, it is our home now. It is a massive aircraft carrier crawling through the endless shifting sands that stretch across our planet, Kharak. Thousands of miles from home, on a fool's errand to find some MacGuffin that might save us from the expanding deserts, we are alone. When we launched this expedition, traitors and zealots destroyed everything we left behind; our only choice is to press on.Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, despite its otherworldly setting, creates believable drama through stellar writing. With emotive subtlety, layered characters, and a pervasive, all-consuming dread, it cinches the heart and holds you in duress. You are alone and the Kapisi is all you have. Kharak excels in generating hopelessness, and much of that comes through in the muted desperation of its battle-worn characters. They've all fought for as long as they can remember, and you can hear that in their speech. A sly comment on the radio is met with a warm rigidity. It's strange, but affecting to hear the essence of humanity underneath characters' military-forged demeanor.Your ship is your mobile base of operations in this fleet-based strategy game. Like others of its sort, you gather resources, conduct research, and build out units, turrets, and weapons of mass destruction to field against your opponents in battle. The campaign follows the Kapisi on its journey to find a powerful artifact. At first, the ship is something to protect. It is slow, almost painfully so, but it grows with you. As you push on through the campaign, you earn and unlock more abilities for your benevolent monster. Much like the progression of the StarCraft 2 sub-series, it's beautiful and satisfying to watch the machine you spend so long guarding and protecting mature into a weapon of terrifying power.Kharak chisels the genre down to its bare essentials and iterates upon them with tenacious precision, making for a real-time strategy masterpiece. Anyone familiar with the strategy genre understands the broad rock-paper-scissors planning that forms its backbone. While games like Starcraft are expansive and use 20 or more unit types, Kharak cuts these down to only seven fundamentals--resource gatherers, fast-assault vehicles, tanks, artillery, cruisers, aircraft, and your carrier. Each is identifiable with a simple quadrilateral, which distills a chic language to communicate only what you need. ""These diamonds are flashing red, I should send my squares to help."" It sounds silly, but it helps you stay informed and constantly engaged.The strategic map shows the sensor ranges of your fleet and perfectly summarizes the complexity of a warzone.That's important, because your opponents are fast and vicious. You have to develop your strategies on multiple fronts all at once. It's a tough task to get everything up-and-running by the five minute mark, but it's critical. Without clear and concise communication between player and game, that sort of rapid expansion and management is all but impossible, but Kharak nails it.Even if you're not following the battlefield's visuals, constant radio chatter will help you stay informed, too. And once again, sharp writing and shrewd acting both sell the world and help you play better. Whether it's a commander calmly-yet-emphatically telling you that you've lost Control Group One, or that scanners have identified incoming enemy tanks, every snippet works to break down the walls between you and the game. Certain clips are repeated too, organically highlighting their import. These touches, while insignificant keep your mind where it needs to be--planning and strategizing.There aren’t any massive research or technology trees here. Unit and carrier upgrades are still important, but the focus of minute-to-minute management falls onto balancing unit types and their position. Each unit has a clear advantage and clear strength, and only the mighty carrier is a jack-of-all-trades. The catch there is that it resembles a fusion of the King and Queen in chess. Spearheading an assault with your carrier is a powerful tactic that can turn the tide of almost any battle, but once you lose it, you're done.When you’re not directing the carrier’s production or resource-gathering, battles revolve around the light-heavy-ranged trio of basic units. You have to push each front and keep several squads around to guard explorers as you seek more resources to build up your forces. From there, you'll jump to light aircraft and small land-cruisers, and that's it. These developments are important, but the speed with which you can hit the technological cap means that balancing your approach and grabbing resources is more crucial than ever.Cutscenes are sharp and communicate the story of Kharak beautifully. Refined simplicity does have its shortcomings though. And Kharak is somewhat bare-bones. The campaign, while the most compelling story I've seen in a strategy title in years, is only about ten hours long. Multiplayer and skirmish modes only have a handful of playable maps too. With only two factions and no integrated modding support, some players may soon exhaust all that Kharak has to offer. Though, if that's the price of such an ingenious game, then I'll pay it.Homeworld was always about loneliness. It was always about clarity and focus. Kharak isn't new in that regard, but it is special. It shows us that when you get things right -- and excel -- that formula isn't easy to exhaust. Kharak does its part to add to that, though. Its use of voice acting and efficient visuals is a brilliant addition that's far from superficial. It helps narrow the scope of what you need to manage, so that it can load you up with as much as your brain can handle. It’s a fast, daunting experience that's tough to shake, making Kharak as intoxicating as Homeworld has ever been.
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595,NBA2K17 ,9, NBA 2K17's gameplay and presentation are on a whole other level when it comes to representing sports in video games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3047882-nba2k17.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba2k17-review/1900-6416524/,pos,"
NBA 2K17 feels like it was made by a team of people who live and breathe basketball. Everything from the meticulous presentation to MyCareer mode's practice drills exhibits the care and attention that only come from people who get whisked away in midday dreams of playing in the NBA--and that makes it doubly easy for you to do the same. This is the first time I've delved past an NBA 2K game's Play Now and Blacktop modes, and in witnessing how great this game is, I’m beginning to wonder why I never did so in the first place.2K's NBA games are known for smooth, fluid play, and true to form, 2K17 allows you to move the ball around the court, mixing in advanced ball maneuvers and fancy footwork with ease. Employing the right stick's ability to juke is when you'll really feel the satisfaction of faking out an opponent on your way to the net. It's empowering to know that you outsmarted the opposition, and it's a credit to the game's controls that complex moves are accessible and feel natural. Once you grow accustomed to the potential at your fingertips--a fast process--NBA 2K17 feels like a game of instincts, rather than a calculated series of inputs.Of course, victory wouldn't feel as sweet if the AI didn't put up a good fight, and given its prowess, you need to employ smart positioning and playmaking to get to the hoop. Experimenting with the tools at hand is as essential as it is satisfying when you put a winning strategy into action--and humbling when you're stuffed by a clever opponent. The AI isn't going to fall for the same trick every time, so mixing up your strategies is required--passing the ball to your best player in an attempt to score three points every time isn't going work. Finding out the best way to tackle each shift on the court is continually rewarding and engages you wholeheartedly in the excellent on-court action.To get your bearings, you can jump into the 2KU mode, which has you participate in scrimmage games, and feeds you tutorial tips as you play. Gameplay pauses as instructions and narration pop up to let you know how to pass, shoot, and retrieve the ball on defense. This can be helpful for learning the basics, but it would be a lot more effective if the game reacted to your performance and coached you appropriately rather than merely providing static direction. For example, it doesn't let you know why you lost a jump ball or why you got a foul for trying to knock a ball loose. Without a responsive, real-time feedback system, NBA 2K17's training mode feels more like a primer than a full-fledged tutorial.When it's game time, NBA 2K17's commentators, camera angles, and mid-game events--such as mascot antics and halftime dunk shows--demonstrate incredible realism and attention to detail. Fans get excited at the right moments, with intercepted passes and turnovers riling them up the most. The only downside to the whole broadcast setup is the pre-game and half-time shows; they sound good, but the virtual hosts are stiff. It often looks like someone’s pulling the strings of realistic Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kenny Smith puppets. Thankfully, they're a relatively small part of the package, and the rest of the presentation, particularly the commentary and fans, makes every game feel like you're playing in the NBA.Shaq, Ernie, and Kenny don't echo the authenticity found elsewhere in NBA 2K17.Playing with authentic teams and players scratches the NBA itch, but MyCareer offers a different kind of game, where you create a player and master a single position as you make your way through college and into the pros. Cutscenes are infrequent, but they add some nice background to you and your life through moments of playing video games with a friend or talking to your excited, caring mom over the phone. They're not super impactful, but the way everyone in your life reacts to you and your playing makes you want to do better on the court.Playing as a single athlete can feel restrictive in some sports games, but playing your part on a team in 2K17 is thoroughly rewarding. Setting up a teammate for an alley-oop or having someone pass to you so you can make that key three-point shot fosters an awesome sensation that feels like real teamwork, where you have total ownership over your role. Sure, you can call for the ball every second and hog it like Kobe, but you'd be robbing yourself of the satisfaction that comes with skillful cooperation.Playing as a single athlete can feel restrictive in some sports games, but playing your part on a team in 2K17's MyCareer mode is thoroughly rewarding.You can actually improve your game by participating in practices--various types of mini games. They might challenge you to sink as many alternating three-point shots as possible, shoot the ball from a specific spot, or play a game of one-on-one. Most of these challenges are fun, making the choice to go to the gym before a game a lot easier.Outside of playing basketball, MyCareer encourages you to take part in life off the court. You can attend promotional and fan events to get a little extra currency to spend on attributes and upgrades. These amount to nothing more than selecting a menu item, watching your player walk out the door, and then getting a message saying you completed the event. The lack of interactivity with these events is fine, but the amount of time it takes for this process to finish feels a bit excessive. Additionally, you get text messages from friends, players, and coaches, and the way you respond will change the way certain people react to you. These moments of texting are often funny and add a bit of life in between games and practices that's much appreciated.2K17 offers a number of modes to play online against other players, and for the most part, the connection holds up well. In my several hours of online testing, I came across a few games where the connection was fairly bad, resulting in a match that was nearly unplayable. Thankfully, these encounters were few and far between.You can compete against other players in the basic Play Now mode or take a team you assemble through card packs and face off against others in MyTeam. In this mode, you kick things off with a starter pack that gives you a small bounty of cards to help you build a lineup of players. In addition to paying real money for these packs, you can earn them by racking up in-game currency. This process takes much longer, and you aren't guaranteed to get any useful cards in a pack. This can be frustrating, especially when you pay real money toward the purchase of card packs. You're better off buying the players you want from the auction house. Doing what essentially amounts to gambling is a risk that just isn't worth it.Despite its few drawbacks, NBA 2K17's excitement for basketball is contagious, and it's hard not to get wrapped up in it. Apart from the lacking 2KU mode and stiff recreations of commentators, the rest of the game looks great and plays even better. After finally devoting a significant amount of time to one of these games, I now see why it's such a well-regarded series, and it makes me wish that every sport got the same treatment that basketball does in NBA 2K17. 


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596,Pyre ,9," Pyre's wit and whimsy effortlessly usher you into a captivating world of punishment, sacrifice, and competition.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3050481-untitled-2.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pyre-review/1900-6416717/,pos,"
Editor's note: Pyre was designed and written by former GameSpot editor in chief, Greg Kasavin.Competitors strive to win. Criminals yearn for freedom. These pursuits go hand in hand in Pyre, the latest game from Bastion and Transistor developer Supergiant Games. And like those games, Pyre enchants your eyes and ears with beauty at every turn. But this time around, its greatest feat is the unrelenting pull of its characters, a mix of passionate beings that fight for salvation, revenge, and revolution.That isn't to take away from Pyre's unlikely mix of fantasy RPG elements and--of all things--sport. You are one of many exiles unjustly trapped in the purgatory-like Downside for crimes against the Commonwealth, but exiles that manage to win enough competitions known as ""rites""--3v3 matches that incorporate elements of football and basketball--have a chance at redemption. Your journey to build a team of champions takes you across the Downside and back in search of challengers and new skills, with each match bringing you closer to understanding your allies' and enemies' motivations.Your basic objective during a rite is to maintain possession of an orb while sprinting, dodging, and leaping towards your opponent's goal on the opposite end of the court. Run it in, throw it in, or jump overhead into the goal to douse the opposing team's pyre and reduce its energy. If a team's pyre is depleted, they've lost the match. You only control one character at a time, and will frequently switch control among your triumvirate to jockey for position on the field, or to take advantage of the nine classes' unique offensive and defensive maneuvers. When Pyre hits its stride, rites become fast-paced mind games that call upon your ability to turn on a dime and come up with new strategies under tense circumstances.One rule in particular pushes you to consider all of your options when it comes to scoring against the other team. Should you physically carry the orb into their goal, the character who scores will have to sit out until the next goal. This can be negated, however: you need only throw the orb into the goal instead. Shooting the orb rather than carrying it comes with its own risks, as the shooter must charge up an arc according to the distance to the goal. In process, that player is vulnerable to attack from the other team. The penalty for being attacked is a temporary banishment from the court for a few seconds, which can leave your own goal open to attack. Weighing the pros and cons of shooting versus rushing is one of many negotiations you must make, often with little more than a second to make up your mind.Pyre is worth playing for its exciting matches alone, but what makes it worthy of renown is how it leverages the tension of competition to tell a captivating story. Like Roman gladiators, the characters you bring into battle are ultimately competing for freedom. Lose these pivotal liberation rites, however, and kiss that chance goodbye. With a fixed number of liberation rites throughout the story, you have limited chances to help your friends. And while it can be heartbreaking to watch your opponent ascend rather than one of your party members, there are bigger stakes at play that weigh heavier as time goes on.Your team operates under the tutelage of a revolutionary figure with plans to overthrow the corrupt Commonwealth--it will only work if you effectively liberate enough characters in your party to fight the good fight at the end of campaign. It behooves the cause, then, to put your best characters forward, but sending off champions is bittersweet as you have to say goodbye and carry on with less experienced characters. And no matter what, when the final rite passes, those who remain must relinquish hope and live out their remaining days in the Downside. Having control over who stays and who leaves (and when) allows you to shape the relationships and interactions that define your journey, and your outlook on the conflict at large.Were it not for Pyre's elegantly written characters, the consequences of your decisions wouldn't carry nearly as much weight as they do. Every exile you meet bears a unique backstory and personality, and the nine that join your cause stir up emotions both in you and among each other. Hedwyn's unrelenting optimism, for example, becomes all the more meaningful when you understand that it's a coping mechanism for constant heartbreak. Pamitha, a cold and fearsome Harpy, seems less imposing and more fragile by the time you realize that her family ties complicate her position on your team. You feel proud when a rite is won and you've guided a dear friend to freedom, but failure and guilt are only a few mistakes away--a very real threat in the latter half of the game.But win or lose, your journey continues. There are no game over screens, only bad endings if you rack up enough losses. Regardless of the outcome of an individual rite, your exiles earn experience towards enlightenment and get to choose between a small selection of special abilities as they level up. You can also acquire talismans to benefit individual characters or the team at large. Beyond who you take into rites, and who you converse with during your limited downtime, character progression and customization is yet another way that Pyre allows you to personalize your journey.Although Pyre is designed to be replayed and supports that quite well through the power of choice, you thankfully aren't required to restart the game in order to jump back into competition. A local versus mode gives you the chance to compete outside of the campaign, which is appreciated given that there are less than 30 matches throughout the story. With every character (including your various opponents) and item unlocked, versus mode also allows you to explore the full potential of the Pyre's roster in ways the campaign doesn't. The only catch to PvP is that rites are at their best when you're on even footing with your opponent, and it only takes a few matches with less experienced players to highlight the conspicuous absence of online play.Pyre's competitive side is a wonderful surprise, both for how it introduces a brand new sport and for how it seamlessly connects to a narrative filled with heartfelt characters and tragic circumstances. But it's all held aloft by relentlessly beautiful artwork and a masterful soundtrack packed with a diverse selection of genres and instrumentation. Every inch of the lush Downside, and every second of your journey, is a delight for the senses.And thus it's all too easy to fall in love with Pyre. It's immediately attractive. Its songs dance in your head long after they debut. And before you know it, you find yourself driven to get better at rites and perform at the top of your game. Likewise, you can't help but reflect on your partners in the Downside--those you trained, as well as those you neglected. Supergiant Games has created something special that lives on in your heart. And against great odds, it's invented a sport that could have stood on its own without the story it's attached to--but it's so much better because it is. 


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597,Battlefield 1 ,9, EA’s shooter franchise goes back in time to the end of the imperial age with spectacular results in both its single and multiplayer experiences.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3058949-untitled-2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battlefield-1-review/1900-6416555/,pos,"
Battlefield 1 wastes little time in conveying the savagery of World War 1. The inevitability of death is the focus of the bleak story prologue. A burning man’s screams can be heard at the start of every multiplayer match in the Argonne Forest. It’s ruination on a multi-continental scale, a conflict so large that its location menus showcase a large portion of the Earth. EA DICE splendidly interprets the early 20th century as a world in technological transition while humanizing the war's participants through well crafted, albeit fictional, narrative vignettes. Combined with an enthralling multiplayer component, the overall result is the studio’s best work since Battlefield: Bad Company 2.The horrors and heroism of The Great War are well told in War Stories, Battlefield 1’s campaign. It’s a more focused experience compared to prior Battlefield story modes of globetrotting and one-note powderkeg narratives. These new tales are organized in a non-linear anthology format that doesn’t need to be played in any particular order. You are exposed to a variety of perspectives from the characters you play, each with their own motivations, from altruistic to self-serving. And each tale is presented with distinct narrative flavor. The exploits of the mostly unlikeable Clyde Blackburn, for example, represent the stories that get mixed up in the chaos of war. This gambler and swindler leaves the events of his alleged adventure open to interpretation. His tale is an effective contrast to the somber post-war account of Luca Vincenzo Cocchiola, an armored Italian soldier tasked with protecting his twin brother from everything from bombers, shock troopers, flamethrowers, and more.The beauty of nature in the background, instruments of death in the foreground.Beyond these heartfelt tales of brotherhood and solemn reflection, War Stories gracefully complements the multiplayer scenarios as a glorified yet effective training mode. Along with practice time commanding vehicles and heavy artillery, it provides an opportunity to learn melee combat, as well as how to survive against high concentrations of enemy forces. It also presents scenarios that you wouldn't find online, such as valuable lessons in the ways of stalking enemies and how best to move wounded allies to the safety of cover.The vehicular sections of War Stories introduce you to the first generation of tanks and fighter aircraft that were the advanced warfare of their time. In “Through the Mud and Blood,” a Mark V tank is its own character, endearingly nicknamed Bess by its crew. Short on space though tanks may be, a carrier pigeon joins you for the ride, and proves to be a valuable passenger during one of the campaign’s most touching scenes.Battlefield 1’s multiplayer stays faithful to the series’ roots of open-space combat, now marvelously tailored with World War 1’s weapons, vehicles, and terrain. Its centerpiece, Operations, finds one side pushing forward while the other holds them back in conflicts that can last an hour. It’s not an emotionally draining endurance match, however; the changes in environments as the battle progresses keeps the fight fresh. A match can move across up to five areas across the same region, which is analogous to playing five different small maps. As a cavalry-inspired twist, the losing side gets two last ditch opportunities to win with the help of an airship, attack train, or a dreadnought.EA DICE’s interpretation of T.E. Lawrence isn’t quite Peter O’Toole and that’s okay. Operations also offers a surprising amount of historical context thanks to informative pre- and post-match voice over. For instance, the Kaiserschlacht operation not only broadly educates players on the 1918 Spring Offensive, it also hypothesizes what could have happened had the Germans won.Like a band of brothers reuniting, the reprise of Conquest, Domination, Rush, and Team Deathmatch delivers the goods for the Battlefield devotee. Beyond amassing the highest kill count or earning the best kill/death ratio, there’s a thrill in adapting to changing circumstances mid-battle. This is especially true for team players, who must constantly try to figure out how to be the best contributor. That could mean protecting a capture point or stopping an enemy charge by assaulting them from an airship. Lastly, War Pigeon--which has the hallmarks of a throwaway novelty mode--shares some fundamentals with Capture The Flag, where the bird serves as the flag. The challenge comes in finding a safe place to write a message for the bird to deliver, releasing the pigeon outdoors, and ensuring it doesn’t get shot down.A mode is only as good as the map it's based in and Battlefield 1's maps are all smart and interesting in their own ways. Peronne, with its mix of small town in ruins and untended fields, requires bit more time to memorize its layouts and strategically advantageous points. From the vacant French palace in Ballroom Blitz to the labyrinthine streets of Amiens, every locale has its own sense of character. This is aided by the inclusion of armed gargantuan machines like the airship and train. The Argonne Forest in particular--with its light mist, detailed vegetation, and man-made ruins--is one of the most gorgeous multiplayer maps ever conceived. Compared to the many near-symmetrical maps in Battlefield: Hardline, these new fields of operations feel natural and, more importantly, inviting.With Battlefield 1, EA and DICE have proven the viability of World War 1 as a time period worth revisiting.The series’ best maps are those that encourage you to play outside your comfort zone, to spend time with things you typically ignore and to play around with the available vehicles. The FAO Fortress in Mesopotamia and Monte Grappa in the Alps, for instance, are ideal maps to acquaint yourself with the exhilaration of sniping. The outstanding expansiveness of the maps and the abundance of routes in a given area create myriad opportunities to circumvent bottlenecks and camping spots.Challenges in navigation are found in the multiplayer menus. Getting into a match isn’t a problem, but the online UI isn’t very intuitive, particularly in defining some of the categories of unlockables. Furthermore, it’s disappointing that it’s not possible to leave the multiplayer mode in between matches; you actually have to wait until the next match starts before you can exit. But these minor issues do not dampen the overall experience.A scene from ‘The Runner,’ which is set during the Gallipoli Campaign. The robust and satisfying progression system is how you customize your online experience, where much of your arsenal is built on whatever you spend your level upgrade rewards on. Growing a collection of firearms is rewarding for veterans while the simplicity of most of the antiquated weapons makes the conflicts accessible to newcomers. It’s meat-and-potatoes 20th century combat; no drones or heat seeking bullets to concern yourself with. Every meaningful action is recognized--even dealing a flesh wound earns you experience points. You’ll have more armaments to choose from than your average World War I soldier, though, which is indicative of the creative liberties Battlefield 1 takes.However accurate or inaccurate Battlefield 1 is--lite J.J. Abrams lens effects notwithstanding--the immersive production values superbly amplify the sights and sounds that have previously existed in other war shooters. Examples include the distinct clatter of empty shells dropping on the metal floor of a tank and the delayed sound of an exploding balloon from far away. The brushed metal on a specific part of a revolver is the kind of eye-catching distraction that can get you killed. Beyond the usual cacophony of a 64-player match, salvos from tanks and artillery guns add bombast and bass to the large map match. And many vistas are accentuated with weather-affected lighting with dramatic results, like the blinding white sunlight that reflects off a lake after a rainstorm.With Battlefield 1, EA and DICE have proven the viability of World War 1 as a time period worth revisiting in first-person shooters. It brings into focus countries and nationalities that do not exist today while also shedding light on how the outcome of that war has shaped our lives. As World War II shooters proved many years ago, no game can truly capture the entirety of a global conflict. This is why the focused structure of the War Stories anthology works well. Moreover, Operations succeeds as an effective educational primer on the battles that this gripping adversarial mode are based on. Battlefield 1 is just an introduction to one of the deadliest world events in history, but it is an outstanding, feature-rich package in both its emotional stories and strong multiplayer. 


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598,Civilization 6 ,9, The series that cemented the 4X strategy formula continues to stand the test of time with a stellar entry that adds richness and depth in unexpected places.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3068140-81sa5ayrfel._sl1419_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/civilization-6-review/1900-6416562/,pos,"
The original Civilization came out in 1991. I was five years old at the time. I didn't fully grasp the game's historical underpinnings or strategic subtleties, but I do remember playing with my dad and racing to build catapults before other leaders had a chance to expand their empires too far. Because even though the first game laid the groundwork not just for future Civ titles but for the strategy genre as a whole, it was, essentially, a glorified arms race.Yes, you could found cities, build world wonders, and unlock new options through technological research, but inevitably, combat played a central role. Just like a real civilization, however, the franchise evolved over time, gradually grafting new ideas onto its classic framework--a process that’s now culminated in Civilization VI: the deepest, most well-rounded base game the series has ever seen.Regardless of how you feel about the ""cartoony"" art style, its detailed animations make busy areas easier to parse.More than ever, every win condition feels equally rich and equally viable, whether you’re pursuing culture, religion, science, or domination. You can build arts districts that allow you to more quickly accrue culture points and attract great artists. You can create new religious units like apostles to more efficiently spread your gospel to world. You can use the builder unit in new ways to better capitalize on the resources that surround your cities, accelerating humanity’s ascent into space.And of course, you can still amass a formidable army, but even warfare presents new considerations that force you to lean on other systems beyond battle tactics. Maintaining military units, for example, is expensive, but picking trade routes with a high gold yield helps mitigate the financial impact. War weariness will eventually lead your population to revolt, but using diplomacy to squeeze luxury resources out of your allies can quell rebellion. And espionage, now deeper than ever, lets you not only place spies but pick specific missions for them to carry out.Civ 6 is packed with added nuances that enrich existing systems, but it also makes some major changes, the biggest of which is “unstacking” cities. Rather than occupy a single tile on the world map, cities now sprawl outward, allowing you to capitalize on each city’s specific surroundings--assuming you exercise some serious foresight. Certain structures, for example, function more efficiently on specific types of land, while others can only be built if certain typographical demands are met. Not only does this change the way you consider the board, it also adds a new strategic layer that fills a gap and creates greater variety in the types of thinking Civ demands.Barbarians were less of an issue than I initially feared, but it's still frustrating they can instantly spawn advanced units anywhere hidden by the fog of war.Along with planning each city’s long-term development, you must also manage its housing and amenity needs. These replace the global food and happiness levels of previous Civilizations and make individual turns more engaging in the process. Where previously you could mentally check out for a few turns while waiting for your big picture decisions to pan out, you must now actively monitor and improve each city’s condition. It can be a little exasperating and tedious, but ultimately, I realized each and every city contributed to my overall success and, consequently, provided unique opportunities for strategic gain.You’ll find a host of slightly smaller but equally smart changes as well. You can now tailor your government to your specific playstyle by earning various policy cards that impact everything from war weariness to cultural output. Civics replace social policies and now function identically to technologies: pick one from an expansive tree, spend a few turns researching it, and unlock new cultural possibilities like theocracy or globalization. And with the addition of active research, you can cut research time in half by meeting specific, logical conditions tied to individual Techs and Civics--settling next to a coast will boost your research in sailing, for instance. This practice ensures an advantage for vigilant players.Smart though these changes may be, they are accompanied by several notable imperfections. Tourism, for example, is the metric by which Cultural Victories are measured, yet the math behind it is esoteric at best. Missionaries and other religious units are similarly opaque. Though I did manage a Cultural Victory during one match, it required some frustrating trial-and-error guesswork, and Religious Victories seem slightly too easy to achieve once you uncover the ideal method for maximizing your output. And while you could argue that commerce and diplomacy facilitate every win condition, it’s a shame neither serves as a win condition itself.The UI could also use a few refinements. There's absolutely no rhyme or reason to ""Unit needs orders"" notification, for example. Rather than directing your attention to units already on screen, it arbitrarily whips around the map, seeming highlighting units at random. I experienced a few performance hitches as well, like noticable delays between selecting the Civics menu and the menu actually appearing on screen. Nothing I experienced ever became intolerable, thankfully; my frustrations generally topped out at ""annoyed."" And other aspects of the presentation--most notably the instrumental score and Sean Bean's excellent voice work--definitely won me over.Perhaps most crucially, though, opponent AI proved to be a bit of a mix. Catherine Medici was clever enough to preemptively declare war against me when she saw my troops massing at her border, and even brought anti-cavalry units to take down my tanks. Cleopatra, on the other hand, seemed to capriciously switch strategies--from religion to domination and back again--and just floundered uselessly as a result.If nothing else, the new agenda system does imbue each leader with a discernable playstyle, and when one denounced me, the game explicitly told me why, making diplomacy a more straightforward affair. And even on higher difficulties, none of opponents broke a treaty or attacked me arbitrarily. In fact, I spent an entire match trading with Norway without issue.You can now link support units like Medics with most military units, allowing them to occupy the same tile. And while you can't rename cities, you can rename units.Of course, you can avoid the AI altogether by playing online--just one of Civ 6’s many options. There’s a tight, well-executed tutorial for newcomers that briskly runs through the game’s major mechanics, as well as a “New to Civ 6” tips option that focuses specifically on everything that's changed since Civ 5, which should soften the learning curve for veterans looking to jump straight into the deep end. There's a lot to account for, but the fact that every new system slots logically into Civ's established structure makes the game relatively accessible despite of its depth.Adjustable match parameters return as well, allowing you to adjust not only the difficulty but also the number of opponents, the presence of barbarians, and the overall map size. That last one is especially crucial since the ""standard"" size has decreased, most likely to force more interaction. Playing on larger maps with fewer opponents seems to work just fine, though. International trade takes longer and territorial expansion is far easier, but the game still plays largely the same.Civ 6 has a few rough edges, but they’re pushed far into the periphery by spectacular strategic depth and intricate interlocking nuances. Any frustrations I experienced were immediately eclipsed by my desire to continue playing. Just one more turn, every turn, forever.


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599,Civilization 6: Gathering Storm  - Weather The Storm,9," With embellished diplomatic options and climate change bringing new strategic choices, Gathering Storm is a whole new way to play Civ VI.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3068140-81sa5ayrfel._sl1419_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/civilization-6-gathering-storm-review-weather-the-/1900-6417085/,pos,"
Civilization VI told a straightforward story of the consequences of your actions. Fail to keep your people happy and they would put down their hammers and raise pitchforks. Be rude to the other leaders and they would soon refuse to deal with you. Beyond that, however, you could go about building your empire mostly unconcerned with any repercussions to your decisions. Last year's Rise and Fall expansion added some complexity to the tale with the introduction of its Loyalty mechanic. Operating in isolation was no longer possible. Settlements on the fringes of an empire could, if they liked what they saw across the border, decide to rebel. Players who took their citizens' loyalty for granted would find themselves leading no one.This kind of accountability is extended in multiple directions with Gathering Storm, the second major expansion for Civ VI. Through the institution of a World Congress, Gathering Storm lets leaders reward and punish each other for certain actions, allow them to pass sweeping resolutions that affect every civilization, and ultimately secure their diplomatic favor. And with its new World Climate system, Gathering Storm makes you accountable to the world itself by hitting you--sometimes painfully hard--with the calamitous consequences of exploiting the map's rich resources.Your path to victory in Civ VI was predictable once you'd established the foundation of your empire by the Modern Era, but the new World Congress and World Climate systems add enough dynamism to keep you working right up to the new Future Era. Gathering Storm encourages you to “play the map,"" taking advantage of the surrounding resources, and then adapt the repercussions of your decisions reflected on that map. As an expansion focused on consequences, however, it can take some time for the new stuff to make its presence felt.The World Climate system is the most meaningful change, but it doesn't really kick in until you've started extracting strategic resources like coal and oil. Early on you'll encounter floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and endure the odd drought or volcanic eruption. These weather events pass in a couple of turns, potentially reducing your population, injuring units and pillaging improvements, but they can also fertilize tiles to reward you with greater yields in future.But weather is not climate. Once you start burning coal and oil to fuel both the power plants in your industrial districts and the battleships and tanks that comprise your military force, you start pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As those emissions rise, tallied by the new World Climate report that tracks the cumulative contributions of each civ and resource, the world will progress through up to seven phases of climate change. Sea levels will rise, at first flooding coastal tiles and eventually leaving many of them completely underwater. Weather events will increase in both frequency and severity, simultaneously desiccating your farmlands through drought and ravaging your cities with tornadoes.The choices you're forced to make here are difficult and meaningful. Resources like coal and oil are powerful and refusing to exploit them will cede an immediate advantage to any rival. Through the Industrial and Modern Eras they fuel the most effective units in your navy and army. Do you really want to rely on defending your homeland with frigates while the enemy has ironclads? Further, consumable fuel resources are the first ways you're able to power your cities. A concept debuting in Gathering Storm, powering a city--say, via a coal power plant--boosts the yields of various districts and buildings. Can you really afford to let your research labs and stock exchanges sit idle while your coal-guzzling neighbor is sprinting ahead in the science race?Later you're able to develop methods of harvesting renewable energy resources such as wind and solar farms, but by the time you're able to deploy them, you may find yourself lagging too far behind a less eco-friendly rival or, worse, suffering the consequences of irreversible damage to the planet. Helping to mitigate such destruction and preserving the natural environment will slow down the effects of climate change. This forces new, perplexing early game decisions. Chopping down that nearby rainforest will give a quick boost to producing a settler, but leaving it untouched may mean future settlers will live to see a world that still has air to breathe. Before Gathering Storm, this wasn't a choice--you chopped for the short-term gain because there were no long-term consequences. Now, every decision is purposeful. Now, every tile in your empire is asking: ""Are you sure you want to do that?""The World Congress is slightly less successful at providing new and meaningful choices than the World Climate system. What it does, though, is make you far more aware of what other leaders are up to. Once the congress convenes, from the Medieval Era onwards, you'll find yourself voting on various resolutions every 30 turns. You might be asked to vote on boosting or banning certain types of great people, or whether trade routes to particular civs or city-states should receive bonuses. You don't just get one vote; instead, you can spend a new form of currency called Diplomatic Favor to vote as many times as you can afford. Favors can also be traded with other leaders, just like any resource, meaning diplomatic players will need to give away valuable luxuries or strategic resources in order to fully exert their influence on the World Congress.In theory, these resolutions should enable the diplomatic player to tip the scales in their favor. In practice, though, their effects aren't transformative. You might get an extra trade route here, a slightly slower Great Engineer there, but nothing that feels game-changing. The randomness doesn't help--if you could propose a resolution rather than merely voting on the ones that pop up that would provide a better return on the investment.More compelling are the choices to be made around actually pursuing the new Diplomatic Victory, awarded to the leader who first reaches 10 Diplomatic Victory points. You're still essentially voting your way to the top, but you're also competing with other leaders to send the most aid to another civ recently devastated by floods, for instance, or to generate the most great people points to win the Nobel Prize. Diplomatic Favor is also earned via alliances with other civs and becoming the suzerain of a city-state, so the Diplomatic Victory is genuinely a case of demonstrating you can lead the world.These are the two biggest new features in this add-on, but Gathering Storm also includes countless smaller tweaks that in combination with the above make it an essential purchase for Civ VI fans. There are new World Wonders to build, such as the Great Bath or the University Sankore. There are new Natural Wonders, new military units to fill in the gaps between eras, and nine new leaders, including the series' first-ever dual-nationality leader (Eleanor of Aquitaine can represent either England or France).Thoughtfully, the new leaders are balanced between those that are clearly geared towards Gathering Storm's prominent additions--Kristina of Sweden is all about winning diplomatic favor while the unique abilities of Kupe, the Maori leader, incentivize leaving untouched as much of the natural world as possible--and those who embrace some previously overlooked facet of the game. In the latter camp, Matthias Corvinus heads a Hungarian empire whose military force is best composed of units levied from allied city-states, while in the Inca, lead by Pachacuti, we finally have a civ that wants lots of mountain tiles throughout its lands.Gathering Storm is overall a great expansion, ushering in two significant new systems that work hand in hand to deepen the experience. The embellished diplomatic options extend the range of interactions with other leaders, allowing you to work cooperatively towards common goals or pull the strings to your advantage behind the scenes. While the introduction of climate change delivers new strategic choices whose consequences resonate ever-more-loudly as you advance throughout the eras. It isn't simply more Civ, it's a whole new way to play Civ.
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600,Monster Truck Madness 64 ,3.9, Gamers itchin' for a monster-truck fix should save their cash until the real thing rolls into town.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/1/7/2222517-197980_50355_front.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/monster-truck-madness-64-review/1900-2543693/,neg,"
Playing Monster Truck Madness 64 is like driving a lemon: You really want to get somewhere with it, but something's sure to break down along the way. After checking under this game's hood, it's easy to pinpoint the problems: frustrating control, questionable gameplay, and subpar graphics and features. Despite some fairly creative extras, this title screams for six more months in the tune-up shop before hitting the streets. Monster Truck Madness is essentially an arcade off-road racing game. However, instead of rally cars, the game employs 20 huge trucks with balloon tires. The trucks compete on fictional tracks littered with weapons to pick up, such as oil slicks and missiles. Placing first on a track unlocks additional tracks (up to ten total, depending on the difficulty level). The tracks are designed with plenty of jumps and hills, which makes for some fairly rough-and-tumble racing. At least, that's what you would expect - until you pick up the controller. For those who've enjoyed off-road arcade racers such as Sega Rally Championship, this game hardly measures up to those standards. A key factor in off-road games is the ability to powerslide: After braking into a turn to point sideways, you can feather the acceleration button to keep your speed as you slide through. One would figure that with heavier trucks and bigger tires, this would be possible to some extent. Sadly, the game's control can't mimic that ""feel"" accurately. When you brake into a turn to initiate a powerslide, the truck stops abruptly rather than sliding in the mud - it won't carry your momentum. However, if you merely try to turn early and feather the acceleration through a turn, the truck becomes an ice skate and you overshoot the turn. The physics between the two scenarios don't match up - stop on mud one way, but slide the other - which makes powersliding difficult. Instead, you wind up driving slowly through turns, which lets computer trucks catch up. Compounding that control problem is questionable gameplay. When trucks jostle for position, it's easy to get caught sideways. That's the kiss of death, because a broadside collision can send you literally flying off the track. However, the same doesn't apply to computer trucks: They merely block you from moving ahead. In addition, when collisions cause your truck to tip over, the animation occurs in excruciatingly slow motion, which gives extra time for computer trucks to rush ahead. The same goes if you run down a slope, as the truck tips over at the same slow-motion speed whether you hit it at five or 50 miles per hour. The game doesn't even have the decency to face you forward again after a flip - you have to do it yourself. Plus, the computer seems to relish nudging you into obstacles that stop trucks dead in their tracks, such as pillars or checkpoints, which can easily knock you out of contention.Presumably, the power-ups are the key to even the odds stacked against you. Problem is, half the power-ups help opponents more than they hurt them. Turbos and superjump power-ups often send you off track or force you to flip over. A force-field power-up, intended to knock players off track, often sends them flying ahead of you rather than off to the side. Since you must race flawlessly to finish first (at the normal difficulty), one mistake means you're better off restarting the race than trying to finish - that gets lame very quickly. Graphically, the game sports first-generation textures and graphics, which look drab and plain by today's standards - at least the game adds nice touches when it comes to weather effects, such as fog or snow. What hurts the game's looks more than the graphics is the game's speed. The speedometer may read 100-plus miles per hour, but the trucks move as if grannies are behind the wheels, so there's no ""rush"" because the trucks seem to move so slow. As for the sound, a grating announcer serves up inane, smart-ass comments that make you glad he can be turned off - and wish he could be run over by a truck. The background rock music and effects aren't anything special, either. The laundry list of complaints continues with one sorely missing feature: no memory card support. Instead, you must type out tedious 8- to 17-character sequences that must be reentered every time you quit a game. To its credit, the game sports some decent innovations. First off, the tracks are free roaming, so a truck can go off course any time to find a shortcut or a power-up. Second, the trucks in the game are based on famous real-life vehicles, such as Big Foot and Grave Digger - but despite this variety, all trucks seem to handle the same for the most part. Finally, the game has some fairly interesting multiplayer minigames, such as hockey, soccer, and a monster-truck variant of king of the hill. Unfortunately, one has to accept the game's control and gameplay flaws to enjoy them. When one adds it all up, Monster Truck Madness winds up as barely playable and hardly fun. Gamers itchin' for a monster-truck fix should save their cash until the real thing rolls into town.
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601,NFL Xtreme 2 ,3.9," If you're thinking about buying NFL Xtreme 2, the answer is really quite simple. Don't.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/5/1/2220551-box_nflx2.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nfl-xtreme-2-review/1900-2546023/,neg,"
The original NFL Xtreme was a confusing mess - half NFL Blitz rip-off, half NFL Gameday, and all horrible. The arcade-style gameplay just didn't mesh with some of the more simulation-style aspects of the game. People who wanted fast-action football just bought Blitz, while people who enjoyed ""real"" football gravitated towards Gameday or Madden. NFL Xtreme 2 is just as confusing of a package as its predecessor was, but the resulting game at least approaches competency this time around. The game is still a five-on-five affair, and it still has a deep playbook - so deep, in fact, that it will easily scare away players who aren't proficient in other football games. The defense is the largest offender here. What exactly does the Man Up defense do that Bail doesn't? Which plays work well against the run? If you couldn't figure this out in other sim-style football games, there aren't any clues to be had here. The offense is a bit more clear-cut, and thanks to its simplistic ""hit any button and we'll throw to an open receiver automatically"" option, anyone can pick it up and complete a few passes against the CPU player. Set the difficulty up, and you'll have to get slightly more creative with your play selection, but finding an open man still isn't much of a challenge, considering the game does that for you. You can still hit X and bring up an icon-based passing system if you want more control over your passing game. Once you've got the ball, and you're running up-field with it, there's a few snazzy moves you can pull off, but other than the forward flip, which you can use to hop over defenders, these moves don't bring much to the game. The game has depth in its options, which include season play, playoffs, tournaments, and a roster-building system. You can run an NFL draft, create players, release players, or trade them to other teams. You also have slight control over the game speed and player size. Graphically, the game has improved, though it still just looks odd. The player models look a bit misshapen, and the animation is pretty choppy. The game's frame rate fluctuates quite a bit at times, running really smoothly during close-up, lower poly scenes like kickoffs, but once it zooms out, the frame rate becomes noticeably lower. This makes it much, much harder to get into any sort of rhythm with the game, since you're never quite sure how fast or how smooth it's going to run on any given play. The sounds include ""real"" taunts from 23 NFL players. These taunts are played after seemingly random plays that the game deems worthy of such snappy ribbings as ""This is a man's game,"" or the ever popular ""This is my house!"" The announcer occasionally pipes up during plays with exclamations like ""zips it"" during passes, but he is usually limited to reporting the down and yardage gains. If you're thinking about buying NFL Xtreme 2, the answer is really quite simple. Don't. Fans of Blitz won't dig Xtreme 2's needless roster and playbook depth, and sim-style-football fans will quickly tire of the simple AI and simpler gameplay style. If you're looking for a game that successfully mixes both schools of thought, keep on looking. That game simply hasn't been made yet - and perhaps it should stay that way.
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602,Shadow Tower ,3.9, The game looks extremely outdated when compared with current PlayStation games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/6/3/2220563-box_stower.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shadow-tower-review/1900-2549258/,neg,"
Shadow Tower is From Software's fourth attempt in the first-person action-RPG genre, following the King's Field trilogy (only two of which were released in North America). For those who don't know the King's Field series, it was a relatively popular first-generation, first-person action-RPG in Japan. You roamed dungeons, fought monsters using different weapons and magic, gain experience, and leveled up. The controls took a little getting used to, plus the game ran at 15 frames per second, causing frustration among some gamers. The game also didn't give you much direction; you had to piece everything together yourself. Shadow Tower is pretty similar, save for a few exceptions.The story takes place on the continent of Eclipse, where the holy land of Zepter lies. In this land is a sealed tower guarded by the kings of surrounding nations, keeping to traditions passed down from their ancestors. A long time ago a tragedy descended upon the kingdom of Eclipse. There was a crown with a single eye, and its terrible gaze snuffed out the kingdom in one night, leaving nothing but a gargantuan hole. That single-eyed crown that once glowed so ominously is now closed and quietly sealed within a tower. Ages have passed, and darkness has once again consumed the peaceful land. You will take the role of Ruus Hardy and go into the darkness to fight against evil creatures and monsters in search of the crown with the single eye.Shadow Tower introduces new features and changes from King's Field. Pressing different combinations of buttons on your PlayStation controller lets you switch weapons, shields, and magic from your primary to secondary and vice versa. This is very helpful, because one thing that's a real nuisance about this game is that accessing the menu screen requires loading (a Now Loading screen even pops up!). The game also eliminates the element of gaining experience and leveling up. Instead, it is replaced with soul points (SP), which can be used to enhance physical and magical attributes, such as hit points (HP) and magic points (MP). SPs are gained by defeating monsters or through special items.The game has also brought along a few elements from the game Diablo, mostly in its use of inventory. Weapons and armor deteriorate as you use them and will eventually break without repair. You can spend your HP to repair worn-out or broken items. This brings a lack of balance to the gameplay because you have a limited number of potions to regain HP. You can only find HP potions in dungeons, by killing monsters, or by trading in items. Surviving the different layers of dungeons is one thing, but trying to keep your HP and weapons at their best is something that can't be done easily. Also, you rarely earn money from killing monsters, so you are limited as to what you can buy in stores. The polygonal models of creatures and monsters show that the graphics have certainly improved over King's Field, but the frame rate still remains an issue. Although 15 frames per second in King's Field seemed bad at that time, looking at Shadow Tower in 20 frames per second still just doesn't cut it in these days of 30-60fps games. Even the pilot demo of King's Field II (which was only available a few years ago at the Tokyo Game Show in Japan) ran at 30 frames per second. So the technology is there, just not implemented. It's too bad.The dark, gloomy overture that plays across the main title might get you excited about the game's soundtrack, but the game only contains heavy footsteps and growling, and no music whatsoever. One can respect the developers' attempt to keep the dark mood and atmosphere by not putting any music in the game, but it just isn't effective. Sure, there are certain parts where you are startled at the sudden appearances of evil creatures from dead corpses, but the absence of music is still disappointing. In place of a soundtrack are character voice-overs. But while many of the game's characters speak, the voice acting is totally lifeless. You come across a shop and pause. There is silence, and then the store clerk speaks, ""I don't care if you're human, as long as you're a customer."" And then silence again. Very boring stuff.There are other features in the game where you can try to fill an encyclopedia with a complete list of all the creatures in the game. You can also collect rare weapons and armor and place them as bets in a two-player arena mode, but this will likely only attract hard-core players of the game.  Shadow Tower is a blend of King's Field and more actioney RPGs like Diablo - a mix that only ends up bringing frustration rather than a sense of adventure. The game was released over a year ago in Japan, and it shows; it looks extremely outdated when compared with current PlayStation games. If you are a hard-core fan of the King's Field series, you may want to give this one a try. But others will just be wasting their time.
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603,South Park: Chef's Luv Shack ,3.9," The repeating questions, repeating speech, and dull minigames keep it from being a game you'd want to pop in whenever you need a simple party-style game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/8/1/2209781-box_sparkcls.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/south-park-chefs-luv-shack-review/1900-2540057/,neg,"
The Luv Shack is a little old place where we can get together. OK, now that the token B-52's reference is out of the way, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack is a loose combination of You Don't Know Jack-style trivia and Mario Party-style minigames. The result is a game that manages to amuse with its questions, but the lame minigames, lack of varied speech, and general slow pace of the game make it short-lived fun at best. The game is set up like a game show hosted by everyone's favorite chef, Chef. Chef offers the player in control a choice in three trivia categories. The categories manage to be pretty funny, with topics like Sucks or Canadian, Giant Japanese Monster Bad, The 1991 Denver Broncos, and West Siyeeeeede Story. The questions are occasionally funny (for instance: The rock band Loverboy: Sucks, or Canadian? The correct answer is, of course, both), but after two or three days you'll start to see some questions repeated. Speaking of repeating, the game's speech gets old pretty fast. It uses all the real voices, but there isn't enough variation. The game's intro is the same every time, the announcer says the same things, etc. A few different intros and quick jokes would have gone a long way here. The load times are brief, but they really break up what should be a fast-paced trivia game. Having to wait between questions and minigame rounds really has a noticeable effect on the overall flow of the game. The minigames are extremely basic, some taking on elements of classic arcade games like Asteroids, Warlords, Super Sprint, Tapper, and Kickman. Others are oriented toward button mashing. After seeing each of the minigames once, you'll probably wish there were a way to disable them altogether. The trivia and the game's warped sense of humor are the main draws here, and the minigames really take away from the overall presentation. Graphically, the game looks just as you would expect it to. The simple style of the South Park characters is well represented, and the animation closely mirrors the show, as well, even in the minigame rounds. This is a game that you may want to rent, but the repeating questions, repeating speech, and dull minigames keep it from being a game you'd want to pop in whenever you need a simple party-style game.
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604,South Park: Chef's Luv Shack ,3.9," The repeating questions, repeating speech, and dull minigames keep it from being a game you'd want to pop in whenever you need a simple party-style game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/8/1/2209781-box_sparkcls.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/south-park-chefs-luv-shack-review/1900-2543680/,neg,"
The Luv Shack is a little old place where we can get together. OK, now that the token B-52's reference is out of the way, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack is a loose combination of You Don't Know Jack-style trivia and Mario Party-style minigames. The result is a game that manages to amuse with its questions, but the lame minigames, lack of varied speech, and general slow pace of the game make it short-lived fun at best. The game is set up like a game show hosted by everyone's favorite chef, Chef. Chef offers the player in control a choice in three trivia categories. The categories manage to be pretty funny, with topics like Sucks or Canadian, Giant Japanese Monster Bad, The 1991 Denver Broncos, and West Siyeeeeede Story. The questions are occasionally funny (for instance: The rock band Loverboy: Sucks, or Canadian? The correct answer is, of course, both), but after two or three days you'll start to see some questions repeated. Speaking of repeating, the game's speech gets old pretty fast. It uses all the real voices, but there isn't enough variation. The game's intro is the same every time, the announcer says the same things, etc. A few different intros and quick jokes would have gone a long way here. Thankfully, the game moves at a pretty brisk pace, though I really could have done without the minigames. They break up the game's flow. The minigames are extremely basic, some taking on elements of classic arcade games like Asteroids, Warlords, Super Sprint, Tapper, and Kickman. Others are oriented toward button mashing. After seeing each of the minigames once, you'll probably wish there were a way to disable them altogether. The trivia and the game's warped sense of humor are the main draws here, and the minigames really take away from the overall presentation. Graphically, the game looks just as you would expect it to. The simple style of the South Park characters is well represented, and the animation closely mirrors the show, as well, even in the minigame rounds. This is a game that you may want to rent, but the repeating questions, repeating speech, and dull minigames keep it from being a game you'd want to pop in whenever you need a simple party-style game.
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605,South Park: Chef's Luv Shack ,3.9," The lame minigames, lack of varied speech, and generally slow pace of the game make it short-lived fun at best.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/8/1/2209781-box_sparkcls.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/south-park-chefs-luv-shack-review/1900-2545993/,neg,"
The Luv Shack is a little old place where we can get together. OK, now that the token B-52's reference is out of the way, South Park: Chef's Luv Shack is a loose combination of You Don't Know Jack-style trivia and Mario Party-style minigames. The result is a game that manages to amuse with its questions, but the lame minigames, lack of varied speech, and generally slow pace of the game make it short-lived fun at best. The game is set up like a game show hosted by everyone's favorite chef, Chef. Chef offers the player in control a choice in three trivia categories. The categories manage to be pretty funny, with topics like Sucks or Canadian, Giant Japanese Monster Bad, The 1991 Denver Broncos, and West Siyeeeeede Story. The questions are occasionally funny (for instance: The rock band Loverboy: Sucks, or Canadian? The correct answer is, of course, both), but after two or three days you'll start to see some questions repeated. Speaking of repeating, the game's speech gets old pretty fast. It uses all the real voices, but there isn't enough variation. The game's intro is the same every time, the announcer says the same things, etc. A few different intros and quick jokes would have gone a long way here. The load times are brief, but they really break up what should be a fast-paced trivia game. Having to wait between questions and minigame rounds really has a noticeable effect on the overall flow of the game. The minigames are extremely basic, some taking on elements of classic arcade games like Asteroids, Warlords, Super Sprint, Tapper, and Kickman. Others are oriented toward button mashing. After seeing each of the minigames once, you'll probably wish there were a way to disable them altogether. The trivia and the game's warped sense of humor are the main draws here, and the minigames really take away from the overall presentation. Graphically, the game looks just as you would expect it to. The simple style of the South Park characters is well represented, albeit a little on the pixilated side, and the animation closely mirrors the show, even in the minigame rounds. This is a game that you may want to rent, but the repeating questions, repeating speech, and dull minigames keep it from being a game you'd want to pop in whenever you need a simple party-style game.
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606,Sumo Battle (Import) ,3.9, Sumo Battle is an action/sports simulation that tries to depict every aspect of what a sumo wrestler must go through.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/7/8/3/2004-7783.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sumo-battle-import-review/1900-2545264/,neg,"
Sumo wrestling fans finally have a game to call their own on the Nintendo 64, although unless you can read Japanese you might want to skip this import. Sumo Battle is an action/sports simulation that tries to depict every aspect of what a sumo wrestler must go through.  You can choose from several different modes of play such as tournament, exhibition, and story mode. Tournament and exhibition are the usual ""jump into the ring and rumble"" modes. But in the story mode you have to deal with life outside of the ring as well - everything from choosing a daily diet that will give your sumo wrestler a perfect silhouette to dealing with getting kicked out of your house when you lose a match. You can even fish your own sushi out of the river! The actual gameplay is pretty weird: You frantically press the analog stick and buttons in the direction you want your wrestler to move and the direction you want to move your opponent - the object being that of sumo wrestling, to push your opponent out of the ring. The matches are incredibly short and usually only last a few seconds. Of course, there are a ton of different sumo wrestlers to choose from, each differing in style and performance.  Unfortunately, the graphics are mediocre at best. With 3D wrestlers that move choppily and have faces that look painted on, the game is definitely not going to win any awards. The backgrounds and arenas that you can wrestle in range from your ordinary sumo rings in Japan to a ring on the moon. The sound and music are rather maddening, from the intro music that seems more suited for a Godzilla game than a sumo wrestling game to the announcer calling out the action during the matches. It's actually all quite funny and for some reason brings the phrase ""meat bomb"" to mind. In the end, Sumo Battle seems like a game that someone who really likes sumo wrestling made. Die-hard sumo fans will probably like it. If you don't know anything about the sumo business or don't read Japanese, Sumo Battle is one import game that you never need play.
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607,Tokyo Highway Battle ,3.9, Tokyo Highway Battle offers up mediocre fare all around.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/8/1/2223081-thb_pal_psx_cover.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tokyo-highway-battle-review/1900-2549841/,neg,"
In the great video game war between the next generation platform giants, it is Sony that likes to boast about the enormous number of games available for its system. Indeed, if you walk into any software store, it's obvious that Playstation titles outnumber Saturn and Nintendo games by a huge margin. What Sony isn't so quick to point out is that most of those Playstation games are real dogs. And Tokyo Highway Battle is right at home in the kennel. Tokyo Highway Battle is a Frankenstein's monster of a racing game: It's as though someone took used parts from other racers and haphazardly stitched them together. They started with a few cars, added some ho-hum tracks, tossed in an ineffective ""drift"" control for tight turns, and then threw in a ""speed shop"" where you can purchase parts for your car. Unfortunately, none of these elements alone is up to par with what's available from other racers, and together the parts add up to a failure of a racing game. The speed shop is a good example of Tokyo Highway Battle's poor design. In the shop you are able to purchase parts to improve the performance of your car. It sounds like a nice feature, right? Well, knock yourself out navigating through over 60 parts, a number of which aren't compatible with any given car. And the parts you purchase don't seem to make a difference anyway. In short, Tokyo Highway Battle offers up mediocre fare all around. Graphics are lackluster (there's a major pop-up problem), control feels like an American luxury car from the '70s, and there is only one view available. Tokyo Highway Battle is part of larger Playstation problem: quantity versus quality. If Sony faces any danger of failure, the biggest threat will come not from Nintendo or Sega, but from its own sprawling lineup of mediocre games. Let's hope Sony fixes this problem before its too late.
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608,Wipeout Omega Collection ,9, This remastered trio splendidly captures Studio Liverpool's turn-of-the-decade hover racing renaissance.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/1/4/0/460239-620140.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wipeout-omega-collection-review/1900-6416695/,pos,"
Wipeout Omega Collection is not a history lesson. It most certainly doesn't remind players of Wipeout's significance during PlayStation's early years. It isn't a greatest hits package either--given the absence of Wipeout XL and 3--although this gorgeous remastered trio of games represents a hefty helping of the series' most recent outings. In other words, it's sensory-overloading anti-gravity racing that sublimely blends often-chaotic vehicular combat.This collection feels like a thoughtful bundle when you consider that Sony could have easily released an untampered standalone PS4 port of Wipeout HD. Instead, the 2008 PS3 classic--which was considered a return to form--got a minor visual makeover while being sandwiched by its excellent Fury expansion and a much-improved version of Wipeout 2048, previously a PS Vita exclusive. While these games are strengthened by their frenzied racing commonalities, their differences are equally compelling, enough that you can find yourself jumping from installment to installment in one play session in pursuit of variety. The Detonator and Eliminator modes exclusive to Fury, for instance, offer an engrossing combat experience, even more so than your typical Wipeout race. 2048 stands out with its courses' unusual natural landscaping, indicative of the game's place as the first in the timeline, before tracks were completely man-made. No matter the mode or game you choose to play in the Omega Collection, there's consistency in how the myriad ships control, from drift cornering to speed-boosting barrel rolls. You keep one eye on the track for acceleration pads and incoming corners while the other maintains awareness of your nearby competitors. And as you pass over weapon pads, you quickly assess the value of each pick-up based on your current race situation. For series vets, such appraisals take less than a second, and having to constantly make these decisions underscores Wipeout's involving gameplay. Do you fire the high-damage Plasma or would it be best served by converting it into energy (i.e. health)? Do you hold on to the Turbo for the next straightaway even though you'll miss out on the next five weapon pads? If you've played Mario Kart, you can relate to these split-second value judgments, only that in Wipeout, you're piloting ships that are the equivalent of 300cc karts.One of the draws of the Wipeout series is how AI competition changes and evolves as you unlock tougher (and therefore faster) competitions. In the first couple speed levels, it's easy to focus on the closest racer in front of you, systematically passing competitors one by one until you (hopefully) reach first place. The more feverish, pupil-dilating races later on produce a totally different beast of collective aggression among all the racers. You, along with all the AI, are perpetually in a forward-moving swarm where no one is out of contention until the home stretch, barring a significant crash. It's during these races that certain weapons can change fortunes for everyone in an instant. For example, the Quake--which sends a wave over the track--can slingshot someone from last to first in seconds, making it the bizarro Blue Shell of combat racing games. Such dramatic outcomes in the higher speed classes are the reason why these races captivate time and time again. And that's not even taking into account online play, which is appropriately unpredictable and riveting against an array of veterans.Experiencing Wipeout in its prettiest form to date only adds to Omega's already enticing gameplay. It's a tall order given that Wipeout HD and Fury already looked gorgeous to begin with. While many of the improved details can only be appreciated with side-by-side screen comparisons, enhancements like the ships' flaming exhausts and contrails prove that it's not a straight PS3 port, to say nothing of Omega's 4K support. Driving the point home is 2048, which visually bursts out of the small-screen confines of the Vita with an eye-pleasing presentation that stands up to the rest of the compilation. One can imagine how transcendent these races would be if Wipeout Omega Collection had PSVR support.These games already benefitted from an established universe where racing teams are brands unto themselves and anti-gravity racing is a global sport with a 100-plus year history. It's a near utopian vision of the future, one that has always been fittingly paired with electronic dance music. Tracks by DJ Kentaro and James Talk represent the best of Omega's tunes, though the playlist as a whole can't compete with the greatness of Wipeout XL or even Wipeout 3's soundtrack. Should you feel nostalgic for Underworld's or Fluke's contributions to the series, using the PS4's Spotify app while you play this collection will take you back to 1996 in a pinch.By focusing on this specific era of the series, Wipeout Omega Collection maintains a level of cohesion you wouldn't get if this compilation included, say, Wipeout Pure or Fusion. While each of the three games exude style and stimulation in their own distinct ways, they collectively showcase the best elements of franchise's engrossing racing and silky smooth visuals. And even though it doesn't completely scratch the itch that only a completely new PS4 sequel can offer, this collection is easily the next best thing. 
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',', 'quickly', 'assess', 'value', 'pick-up', 'based', 'current', 'race', 'situation', '.', 'For', 'series', 'vets', ',', 'appraisals', 'take', 'less', 'second', ',', 'constantly', 'make', 'decisions', 'underscores', 'Wipeout', ""'s"", 'involving', 'gameplay', '.', 'Do', 'fire', 'high-damage', 'Plasma', 'would', 'best', 'served', 'converting', 'energy', '(', 'i.e', '.', 'health', ')', '?', 'Do', 'hold', 'Turbo', 'next', 'straightaway', 'even', 'though', ""'ll"", 'miss', 'next', 'five', 'weapon', 'pads', '?', 'If', ""'ve"", 'played', 'Mario', 'Kart', ',', 'relate', 'split-second', 'value', 'judgments', ',', 'Wipeout', ',', ""'re"", 'piloting', 'ships', 'equivalent', '300cc', 'karts.One', 'draws', 'Wipeout', 'series', 'AI', 'competition', 'changes', 'evolves', 'unlock', 'tougher', '(', 'therefore', 'faster', ')', 'competitions', '.', 'In', 'first', 'couple', 'speed', 'levels', ',', ""'s"", 'easy', 'focus', 'closest', 'racer', 'front', ',', 'systematically', 'passing', 'competitors', 'one', 'one', '(', 'hopefully', ')', 'reach', 'first', 'place', '.', 'The', 'feverish', ',', 'pupil-dilating', 'races', 'later', 'produce', 'totally', 'different', 'beast', 'collective', 'aggression', 'among', 'racers', '.', 'You', ',', 'along', 'AI', ',', 'perpetually', 'forward-moving', 'swarm', 'one', 'contention', 'home', 'stretch', ',', 'barring', 'significant', 'crash', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'races', 'certain', 'weapons', 'change', 'fortunes', 'everyone', 'instant', '.', 'For', 'example', ',', 'Quake', '--', 'sends', 'wave', 'track', '--', 'slingshot', 'someone', 'last', 'first', 'seconds', ',', 'making', 'bizarro', 'Blue', 'Shell', 'combat', 'racing', 'games', '.', 'Such', 'dramatic', 'outcomes', 'higher', 'speed', 'classes', 'reason', 'races', 'captivate', 'time', 'time', '.', 'And', ""'s"", 'even', 'taking', 'account', 'online', 'play', ',', 'appropriately', 'unpredictable', 'riveting', 'array', 'veterans.Experiencing', 'Wipeout', 'prettiest', 'form', 'date', 'adds', 'Omega', ""'s"", 'already', 'enticing', 'gameplay', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'tall', 'order', 'given', 'Wipeout', 'HD', 'Fury', 'already', 'looked', 'gorgeous', 'begin', '.', 'While', 'many', 'improved', 'details', 'appreciated', 'side-by-side', 'screen', 'comparisons', ',', 'enhancements', 'like', 'ships', ""'"", 'flaming', 'exhausts', 'contrails', 'prove', ""'s"", 'straight', 'PS3', 'port', ',', 'say', 'nothing', 'Omega', ""'s"", '4K', 'support', '.', 'Driving', 'point', 'home', '2048', ',', 'visually', 'bursts', 'small-screen', 'confines', 'Vita', 'eye-pleasing', 'presentation', 'stands', 'rest', 'compilation', '.', 'One', 'imagine', 'transcendent', 'races', 'would', 'Wipeout', 'Omega', 'Collection', 'PSVR', 'support.These', 'games', 'already', 'benefitted', 'established', 'universe', 'racing', 'teams', 'brands', 'unto', 'anti-gravity', 'racing', 'global', 'sport', '100-plus', 'year', 'history', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'near', 'utopian', 'vision', 'future', ',', 'one', 'always', 'fittingly', 'paired', 'electronic', 'dance', 'music', '.', 'Tracks', 'DJ', 'Kentaro', 'James', 'Talk', 'represent', 'best', 'Omega', ""'s"", 'tunes', ',', 'though', 'playlist', 'whole', 'ca', ""n't"", 'compete', 'greatness', 'Wipeout', 'XL', 'even', 'Wipeout', '3', ""'s"", 'soundtrack', '.', 'Should', 'feel', 'nostalgic', 'Underworld', ""'s"", 'Fluke', ""'s"", 'contributions', 'series', ',', 'using', 'PS4', ""'s"", 'Spotify', 'app', 'play', 'collection', 'take', 'back', '1996', 'pinch.By', 'focusing', 'specific', 'era', 'series', ',', 'Wipeout', 'Omega', 'Collection', 'maintains', 'level', 'cohesion', 'would', ""n't"", 'get', 'compilation', 'included', ',', 'say', ',', 'Wipeout', 'Pure', 'Fusion', '.', 'While', 'three', 'games', 'exude', 'style', 'stimulation', 'distinct', 'ways', ',', 'collectively', 'showcase', 'best', 'elements', 'franchise', ""'s"", 'engrossing', 'racing', 'silky', 'smooth', 'visuals', '.', 'And', 'even', 'though', ""n't"", 'completely', 'scratch', 'itch', 'completely', 'new', 'PS4', 'sequel', 'offer', ',', 'collection', 'easily', 'next', 'best', 'thing', '.']",0.19375064419707272,0.46137780869923717
609,Celeste : More Than Just A Great Platformer,9," Celeste is a difficult, powerful, rewarding adventure.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/2/5/2/460241-629252.jpg,NS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/celeste-review-more-than-just-a-great-platformer/1900-6416843/,pos,"
Spoilers for Celeste are contained in this review. While no specific plot details are mentioned, overall themes and mechanics that you may not be aware of are discussed. Celeste is a wonderful, surprising game, and I think it's best experienced without prior knowledge of its themes. Hence, if you want to go in completely fresh, go and play Celeste before reading this review. Otherwise, carry on to find out why this game is worth your time.Despite appearances, Celeste is much more than a game about climbing a mountain. Celeste is a game framed around a challenging platformer but containing a powerful tale of recognizing, dealing with, and attempting to overcome mental illness. Parts of Celeste are challenging to play--in both its gameplay difficulty and its subject matter--but it is a memorable experience worth seeing through.Playing as a nervous young explorer named Madeline, you're on a self-imposed mission centered around climbing the titular mountain, Celeste. You're warned from the outset that the mountain is a strange place, that you might see things you're not ready to see, but that it will show you who you really are. While the adventure starts relatively simply--jump this gap, grab this ledge, gather this collectible--the mountain soon lives up to its otherworldly billing by realizing Madeline's mental health issues.Her anxiety and depression are personified into an alternate version of her, simply named Part of Me, that exists purely to place doubt in her mind, to confuse her, and to tell her she cannot succeed. This occurs both in dialogue and in gameplay, where Part of Me often acts as the primary antagonist. However, Part of Me isn't doing this out of spite; she argues she's trying to save Madeline from what she perceives as certain death--Madeline is not a mountain climber, after all.Madeline meets other characters along the way whose own issues manifest themselves in-game as physical prisons from which you must escape or enemies you must defeat. Rarely do games tie themes and mechanics together so well; combined with a sometimes crippling difficulty level, they accentuate the feeling that you, the player, are on a struggle of your own, as well as enhancing your level of empathy towards Madeline. Seeing her suffer is difficult to handle, and it's impossible to watch it happen without thinking of your own problems, but that--plus the brilliant merging of gameplay and narrative--is what makes Celeste so emotionally powerful.Parts of Celeste are challenging to play--in both its gameplay difficulty and its subject matter--but it is a memorable experience worth seeing through.The only disappointing aspect of this translation of mental struggle into play is a clumsy addition of a new movement mechanic towards the story's end. The new mechanic itself is utilized intelligently for the remainder of the campaign, but the way in which it's added--at a key moment in the plot--somewhat weakens one of the story's most powerful elements. The finale itself, however, is a wonderfully understated and fitting conclusion that I won't spoil here.Save for that heavy-handed development, Celeste grows graciously over the course of the roughly seven-hour campaign. It starts off as a slow, traditional platformer, but as new mechanics are added and as your own skills develop, it becomes an intricate, breakneck dance. You might have to jump around one set of spikes, dash over a pit, bounce off the back wall, leap through a warp panel, and fly to the next platform, all without a safe spot to land. But even though each step is tricky, checkpoints are frequent enough (and restarts instant enough) that failure never becomes too frustrating, all while the difficulty is sufficiently high to make success satisfying. I died 975 times, but none of those casualties felt unfair, and almost every one taught me something new. Even though Celeste doesn't introduce any mechanics that haven't been seen in other games, its platforming is wonderfully refined and inventive--often leaving me puzzled as to how I'll ever succeed, only for the solution to suddenly enter my head--and it's all contained within a campaign unlike anything else.After the credits roll, Celeste offers more for those who want to relive the journey. Aside from the usual collectibles scattered in various hidden or hard-to-reach locations, there are also a set of unlockable reworked levels, dubbed B-Sides. Be warned, however: these offer some of the most difficult sequences in the game, and like an unfathomable post-game that offers a locked door with seemingly no way in, they lie unfinished on my level select screen.Finally, Celeste's sheer beauty is worth mentioning. Its colorful 8-bit style will be familiar to those who played developer Matt Makes Games' previous platforming title, TowerFall: Ascension, but in Celeste that is joined by a cleaner, more modern look that elegantly adorns the game's menus, overworld, and end-of-chapter artwork. In-game, as Madeline's world becomes more twisted and horrific, so do the game's art style and environments: bright blue ice and golden skies turn to blood-red monsters and greying surroundings. The piano and chiptune-heavy soundtrack adapts in a similar fashion, moving from the serene to the spooky at the perfect moment, all while remaining forever catchy.It's a testament to convincing writing and ingenious design that after playing Celeste I felt like I'd been on the same journey as Madeline. Her struggle is one made easy to empathize with, her low points painful to watch, and her high notes exhilarating to experience. Her tale is delicately told and beautifully illustrated, confidently coalescing with the satisfying, empowering game it lies within. Not bad for a game about climbing a mountain.
 ","['Spoilers', 'Celeste', 'contained', 'review', '.', 'While', 'specific', 'plot', 'details', 'mentioned', ',', 'overall', 'themes', 'mechanics', 'may', 'aware', 'discussed', '.', 'Celeste', 'wonderful', ',', 'surprising', 'game', ',', 'I', 'think', ""'s"", 'best', 'experienced', 'without', 'prior', 'knowledge', 'themes', '.', 'Hence', ',', 'want', 'go', 'completely', 'fresh', ',', 'go', 'play', 'Celeste', 'reading', 'review', '.', 'Otherwise', ',', 'carry', 'find', 'game', 'worth', 'time.Despite', 'appearances', ',', 'Celeste', 'much', 'game', 'climbing', 'mountain', '.', 'Celeste', 'game', 'framed', 'around', 'challenging', 'platformer', 'containing', 'powerful', 'tale', 'recognizing', ',', 'dealing', ',', 'attempting', 'overcome', 'mental', 'illness', '.', 'Parts', 'Celeste', 'challenging', 'play', '--', 'gameplay', 'difficulty', 'subject', 'matter', '--', 'memorable', 'experience', 'worth', 'seeing', 'through.Playing', 'nervous', 'young', 'explorer', 'named', 'Madeline', ',', 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'climber', ',', 'all.Madeline', 'meets', 'characters', 'along', 'way', 'whose', 'issues', 'manifest', 'in-game', 'physical', 'prisons', 'must', 'escape', 'enemies', 'must', 'defeat', '.', 'Rarely', 'games', 'tie', 'themes', 'mechanics', 'together', 'well', ';', 'combined', 'sometimes', 'crippling', 'difficulty', 'level', ',', 'accentuate', 'feeling', ',', 'player', ',', 'struggle', ',', 'well', 'enhancing', 'level', 'empathy', 'towards', 'Madeline', '.', 'Seeing', 'suffer', 'difficult', 'handle', ',', ""'s"", 'impossible', 'watch', 'happen', 'without', 'thinking', 'problems', ',', '--', 'plus', 'brilliant', 'merging', 'gameplay', 'narrative', '--', 'makes', 'Celeste', 'emotionally', 'powerful.Parts', 'Celeste', 'challenging', 'play', '--', 'gameplay', 'difficulty', 'subject', 'matter', '--', 'memorable', 'experience', 'worth', 'seeing', 'through.The', 'disappointing', 'aspect', 'translation', 'mental', 'struggle', 'play', 'clumsy', 'addition', 'new', 'movement', 'mechanic', 'towards', 'story', ""'s"", 'end', '.', 'The', 'new', 'mechanic', 'utilized', 'intelligently', 'remainder', 'campaign', ',', 'way', ""'s"", 'added', '--', 'key', 'moment', 'plot', '--', 'somewhat', 'weakens', 'one', 'story', ""'s"", 'powerful', 'elements', '.', 'The', 'finale', ',', 'however', ',', 'wonderfully', 'understated', 'fitting', 'conclusion', 'I', 'wo', ""n't"", 'spoil', 'here.Save', 'heavy-handed', 'development', ',', 'Celeste', 'grows', 'graciously', 'course', 'roughly', 'seven-hour', 'campaign', '.', 'It', 'starts', 'slow', ',', 'traditional', 'platformer', ',', 'new', 'mechanics', 'added', 'skills', 'develop', ',', 'becomes', 'intricate', ',', 'breakneck', 'dance', '.', 'You', 'might', 'jump', 'around', 'one', 'set', 'spikes', ',', 'dash', 'pit', ',', 'bounce', 'back', 'wall', ',', 'leap', 'warp', 'panel', ',', 'fly', 'next', 'platform', ',', 'without', 'safe', 'spot', 'land', '.', 'But', 'even', 'though', 'step', 'tricky', ',', 'checkpoints', 'frequent', 'enough', '(', 'restarts', 'instant', 'enough', ')', 'failure', 'never', 'becomes', 'frustrating', ',', 'difficulty', 'sufficiently', 'high', 'make', 'success', 'satisfying', '.', 'I', 'died', '975', 'times', ',', 'none', 'casualties', 'felt', 'unfair', ',', 'almost', 'every', 'one', 'taught', 'something', 'new', '.', 'Even', 'though', 'Celeste', ""n't"", 'introduce', 'mechanics', ""n't"", 'seen', 'games', ',', 'platforming', 'wonderfully', 'refined', 'inventive', '--', 'often', 'leaving', 'puzzled', 'I', ""'ll"", 'ever', 'succeed', ',', 'solution', 'suddenly', 'enter', 'head', '--', ""'s"", 'contained', 'within', 'campaign', 'unlike', 'anything', 'else.After', 'credits', 'roll', ',', 'Celeste', 'offers', 'want', 'relive', 'journey', '.', 'Aside', 'usual', 'collectibles', 'scattered', 'various', 'hidden', 'hard-to-reach', 'locations', ',', 'also', 'set', 'unlockable', 'reworked', 'levels', ',', 'dubbed', 'B-Sides', '.', 'Be', 'warned', ',', 'however', ':', 'offer', 'difficult', 'sequences', 'game', ',', 'like', 'unfathomable', 'post-game', 'offers', 'locked', 'door', 'seemingly', 'way', ',', 'lie', 'unfinished', 'level', 'select', 'screen.Finally', ',', 'Celeste', ""'s"", 'sheer', 'beauty', 'worth', 'mentioning', '.', 'Its', 'colorful', '8-bit', 'style', 'familiar', 'played', 'developer', 'Matt', 'Makes', 'Games', ""'"", 'previous', 'platforming', 'title', ',', 'TowerFall', ':', 'Ascension', ',', 'Celeste', 'joined', 'cleaner', ',', 'modern', 'look', 'elegantly', 'adorns', 'game', ""'s"", 'menus', ',', 'overworld', ',', 'end-of-chapter', 'artwork', '.', 'In-game', ',', 'Madeline', ""'s"", 'world', 'becomes', 'twisted', 'horrific', ',', 'game', ""'s"", 'art', 'style', 'environments', ':', 'bright', 'blue', 'ice', 'golden', 'skies', 'turn', 'blood-red', 'monsters', 'greying', 'surroundings', '.', 'The', 'piano', 'chiptune-heavy', 'soundtrack', 'adapts', 'similar', 'fashion', ',', 'moving', 'serene', 'spooky', 'perfect', 'moment', ',', 'remaining', 'forever', 'catchy.It', ""'s"", 'testament', 'convincing', 'writing', 'ingenious', 'design', 'playing', 'Celeste', 'I', 'felt', 'like', 'I', ""'d"", 'journey', 'Madeline', '.', 'Her', 'struggle', 'one', 'made', 'easy', 'empathize', ',', 'low', 'points', 'painful', 'watch', ',', 'high', 'notes', 'exhilarating', 'experience', '.', 'Her', 'tale', 'delicately', 'told', 'beautifully', 'illustrated', ',', 'confidently', 'coalescing', 'satisfying', ',', 'empowering', 'game', 'lies', 'within', '.', 'Not', 'bad', 'game', 'climbing', 'mountain', '.']",0.14724094688380407,0.5558434687006114
610,Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia ,9, Fire Emblem Echoes' combat and exploration work so well that you won't lament the absence of the series' recent dating-sim whims.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3249321-untitled-1.jpg,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fire-emblem-echoes-shadows-of-valentia-review/1900-6416681/,pos,"
Fire Emblem is a series with a storied history and has transformed dramatically over its nearly 25-year existence. Fire Emblem Echoes, a remake of a very early game in the series--Fire Emblem Gaiden--remains a departure of sorts from what most veteran players might expect. Rather than emphasizing character relationships and story dialogue, Fire Emblem Echoes puts its focus on long- and short-term strategy and strength-building. The end result is a fresh take on Fire Emblem's strategy-RPG formula, and one that ranks among the best of the 3DS library.Echoes follows the dual leads of Alm and Celica, a pair of youths that bear a strange crest upon their hands. They bond together as children in a tiny farming village, only to be torn apart by a sudden dramatic event. Many years after the fact, you're in control of both characters--and their respective armies--in search of a reunion amongst a conflict-ridden yarn spun of large-scale wars, hidden pasts, and shocking truths.While the story is classic Fire Emblem fare, the emphasis here is centered firmly on the saga of Alm and Celica, with only a few brief interludes that shift focus to other army members. The characters you welcome into your ranks and interact with are a charming and likable bunch with fun, well-written dialogue. Almost all in-game character text is voiced as well, which adds appreciable personality. Players more accustomed to recent Fire Emblem games like Awakening and Fates, however, may feel a bit disappointed in the lack of side character interactions. You don't ""pair off"" characters in Echoes as you would in those games--while character-to-character support conversations do still exist here, they're much shorter and happen strictly during combat. While this may be a disappointment to some, overall, it helps cement the story focus on the two leads and the various warring factions of FE Echoes' world.While most of Echoes takes place on grid-based, turn-driven battlefields, you'll also spend a lot of time navigating an overworld map with two armies: one led by Alm and the other by Celica, each with a different group of soldiers under their lead. Interactions between the two sets of troops are limited, meaning you'll have to manage resources, weaponry, and stat-building across two teams. The two take mostly separate paths in their respective campaigns, stopping at towns and dungeons to gather intel, find new recruits, take on side-quests, and discover hidden treasure. Explorable towns, castles, shrines, forts, and dungeons are unique to Echoes, and while interactions with most of areas are somewhat limited--basically restricted to examining environments with a cursor as you would in a point-and-click adventure game--dungeons offer a far more interesting twist for the series.Dungeons are explored on foot from a third-person perspective. You scout for secret passages and smash pots and crates for loot while avoiding (or seeking out) battles against roaming enemies. Touching a foe takes you to a traditional FE battle, but once you've felled your opponents, it's back to exploring. These areas serve as a great addition that offer variety beyond simply stringing a series of battles together while still keeping the narrative focus on the core story.Echoes has some crucial differences from other Fire Emblem games that add interesting layers to army management and combat as well. Characters can only carry one item at a time, forcing you to carefully consider if a special weapon, a restorative item, or armaments like a shield or ring would be ideal. Weapon degradation isn't an issue (similar to Fates), and magic is learned through leveling rather than buying tomes--and uses character HP to cast, making high-powered spells a potentially risky proposition.These are all serious deviations from other Fire Emblem installments, and they might take a bit of time to get used to, but they result in a Fire Emblem game that's both distinct and refreshing.Combat skills are learned by keeping specific items equipped in battle for long periods of time and are tied to individual pieces of gear, meaning you can't just learn a skill from a specific shield, then equip a sword and keep using the skill. Stamina wears down as characters fight and take damage, degrading their stats and combat capabilities unless they replenish them with food, medicine, or offerings to the goddess Mila. Finally, the rock-paper-scissors style weapon triangle of modern FE games is gone entirely--swords can now clash with spears on equal footing.These are all serious deviations from other Fire Emblem installments, and they might take a bit of time to get used to, but they result in a Fire Emblem game that's both distinct and refreshing. You can't simply go in with strategies you may have devised in other Fire Emblem titles and expect them to work here; you'll need to really stop and think about weapon distribution and upgrades, consider how to effectively use certain classes, when to take time with optional fights to build additional character levels, and so on.The game's difficulty is high overall, which makes conquering the toughest battles relatively unscathed feel like a real accomplishment. While the difficulty level makes formulating a sound strategy highly rewarding, it can also lead to some cases where you might feel stuck unless you grind out a few more levels or backtrack to the shrine to change classes, especially if you're playing with permadeath on. But it always feels worth it; when you face a huge armada on a molten lava-covered battlefield, enduring assaults from constantly respawning foes while trying to keep your army's stamina and health above critical levels, and you somehow manage to pull off a victory with a lucky arrow planted in a wizard's cranium, pride and elation come in equal measure.Helping you to secure those feelings is a brilliant new addition to gameplay called Mila's Turnwheel. Each battle grants you a limited number of uses of the Turnwheel, which effectively acts as a rewind button. Missed several attacks in a row? You can opt to spin back time to a few attacks earlier and attempt them all again, hopefully with better luck. Realize that your brilliant ""divide and conquer” strategy is actually going to leave your best soldiers dead? Go back several turns and take a totally new approach--you can rewind time as much or as little as you'd like, provided you still have enough cogs in reserve for that battle. This wonderful system allows players to take back critical combat mistakes without having to reset a long and arduous battle and is a tremendous boon whether you are playing with or without permadeath enabled. Once you run out of cogs, though, you'll have to restart the level to take back mistakes, adding yet another nice layer of strategy--is it really worth a cog to reroll for a critical hit, or should you save it for when you plan your final assault on the tough-as-nails enemy commander? Only you can make the call.Fire Emblem Echoes is a fantastic remake and a striking departure from modern Fire Emblem staples. What it lacks in interpersonal character relationships and user-controlled ""shipping,"" it makes up for in meaty, challenging strategy gameplay, engaging exploration sequences, and a tighter overall narrative. Taken both on its own and as part of the larger Fire Emblem franchise, Echoes's unique elements help it stand out from its contemporaries. If you feel like you're up to a lengthy, engaging challenge, then Echoes will satisfy in spades.


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611,Fire Emblem: Three Houses  - The Good Fight,9," Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a game that is mechanically complex, consistently rewarding, and very hard to put down.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3499787-sq_nswitch_fireemblemthreehouses.jpg,NS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fire-emblem-three-houses-review-the-good-fight/1900-6417254/,pos,"
Fire Emblem: Three Houses asks a lot of you. Every piece, from battle to friendships to training your units, must be managed both individually and as part of a whole. It can be intimidating, but when it all clicks together, it really clicks. Mastering the art of thoughtful lesson planning as a professor improves your performance on the battlefield, where success relies on calculated teamwork and deft execution. Cultivating relationships during battle in turn draws you closer to each of the characters, who you then want to invest even more time into in the classroom. Every piece feeds into the next in a rewarding, engrossing loop where you get lost in the whole experience, not just in the minutiae.Three Houses casts you as a mercenary who, while out on a mission with their father, runs into a group of teens under attack. After a brief introduction and battle tutorial--which you shouldn't need, since you're apparently already an established mercenary, but we'll go with it--you learn that they are students at Garreg Mach monastery. Each of them leads one of the school's three houses: Black Eagles, Blue Lions, or Golden Deer. At the behest of the church's archbishop, who definitely gives off nefarious vibes but is also a gentle mom figure, you end up becoming a professor and must choose which of the houses to lead. There is a lot of mystery to the setup, with consistent hints that something is not quite right, and it's easy to get absorbed in trying to figure out what the archbishop and various other shady figures are up to.Your main role as professor is to instruct your students in matters of combat and prepare them for story battles at the end of each month. Battles in Three Houses feature the same turn-based, tactical combat at the heart of the series, albeit with some changes. The classic weapon triangle is downplayed quite a bit in favor of Combat Arts, which have been altered somewhat from their introduction in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Combat Arts are attacks tied to a weapon type and can boost a unit's attack power at the expense of weapon durability; some are effective against specific enemy types, like armored units. You can also unlock skills outside of Combat Arts that grant you better stats with certain weapons, like a heftier boost for using an axe against a lance user, similar to the old weapon triangle. It's the same complexity the series is known for but less abstracted, making it a bit easier to strategize without sacrificing depth.One of the big combat additions is battalions, mini armies you can equip that provide various benefits to a unit during battle. They also give you a new type of attack called a Gambit, which varies based on the type of battalion--magic-focused, brute force, and so on--and stuns the enemies it hits. Gambits are limited-use and can be incredibly powerful against the right enemies. You can increase a Gambit's effectiveness even further if one or more of your other units are within attack range of the target, a tried-and-true Fire Emblem concept that applies to all kinds of attacks. There's also an anime-style splash screen as you attack that shows each character involved in the Gambit looking fierce, which adds a nice bit of drama.How much you use Combat Arts and Gambits depends on what difficulty you're on. On Normal difficulty, well-trained units will likely be able to dispatch most enemies in one or two hits without the help of Combat Arts or Gambits. On Hard, however, enemies hit harder and withstand your attacks better. You have to think much more carefully about unit placement, the best time to use a Gambit and take advantage of its stun effect, and how many Combat Arts you can fire off before your weapon breaks. This is where things get exciting; after a few turns of cautious setup, you (hopefully) get to knock out tons of enemies as your plans fall into place.Some of the early-game and optional battle maps are open spaces that don't require you to think too hard, especially on Normal. But the story battles throughout feature a variety of map layouts--from pirate ships to what appears to be a lava-filled cavern--that challenge you to consider where your units need to be, both in the next turn and several turns down the line. Many of them have different routes, enemies coming at you from multiple angles, optional treasure to chase, and other quirks that require you to split your party up or change their equipped classes to suit the situation. Thieves, for instance, can open chests and doors without a key, while flying units don't take damage from ground that's on fire.The depth of strategy in these elements really shines on Hard difficulty, but especially so when coupled with Divine Pulse, another limited-use ability. Divine Pulse allows you to rewind time in order to redo all or part of the battle, usually if one of your units dies. Rewinding with Divine Pulse shows just how important unit placement and attack choice can be, as even a slight change can make or break the encounter. It's also just a nice quality-of-life feature if you play on Classic mode, in which units who die in battle are lost forever and can't fight or train anymore. You might still soft reset from time to time, but it's great to be able to rectify a mistake right away and get a shot of instant gratification for a job well re-done.Battling, of course, is only one part of life at the monastery. The backbone of Three Houses is the monthly school calendar, and if you like organizing things, planning ahead, or school in general, this can be the most engrossing part. On Sundays, you have free time you can spend in one of four ways: exploring the monastery, participating in side battles, holding a seminar to improve your students' skills, or simply taking the day off. Mondays are for instruction, which consists of selecting students from a list and choosing a few of their skills to boost. The rest of the week goes by automatically, with a sprite of the professor running along the calendar and stopping occasionally for random events or story cutscenes. It sounds a bit hands-off, but there's a lot to think about as it is, and the week-by-week rather than day-by-day structure keeps things moving and ensures you never have to wait too long to progress in any area.The predictable structure of each month--and the fact that you can see the full month's schedule with events listed ahead of time--gives you the foundation to make effective plans. All that time management can definitely be overwhelming, at least at first. You have to keep tabs on your students' skills and study goals, your own skills, everyone's inventory, and various other meters and menus while planning for the lessons and battles to come. But you're treated to a near-constant stream of positive reinforcement as those meters fill up week by week and your students improve their skills. You're always moving toward the next thing: the next level up, the next skill you need to develop, the next month and what may unfold.To complement this, your activities when exploring the monastery (as well as how many battles you can participate in, if you choose to battle on your day off) are limited by activity points. You get more as your ""professor level"" increases, which means you have to balance activities that boost your professor level with ones that help your students grow. Activity points also ensure that the month continues at a healthy pace, preventing you from lingering on any one Sunday for too long. Seminars and rest days just eat up the whole day without consideration for activity points, which can break up the more involved weeks and provide their own benefits.How you choose to spend your time also comes down to how motivated your students are to learn. Each of your students has a motivation gauge that's drained when you instruct them, and they can't be instructed again until you interact with them and get their motivation back up. You can do this most effectively when exploring the monastery--where you get to talk to different characters, give them gifts, and share bonding time with them--whereas battle only rarely increases motivation levels. While you can skip a lot of the school life bits and even automate instruction, you won't get the best results. You're directly at a disadvantage in combat if you don't make time for your students, which is by design.Like all recent Fire Emblem games, keeping you invested in your units and their relationships is the glue that binds the whole experience together. It's incredibly effective in Three Houses, where your direct involvement in nearly all aspects of a unit's growth trajectory gives you a special stake in their success. After spending time and effort to help a character achieve their full potential, you're not just satisfied when they win a fight--you're proud. And the more you invest in someone--both emotionally and through months of lesson plans and instruction--the more cautious you'll be about putting them in harm's way, and the more you'll work to come up with a solid battle strategy.Considering you're a teacher, it's good rather than disappointing that there's almost no romance to speak of. Some students are flirty, but mainly, you're fostering camaraderie rather than playing matchmaker or romancing them yourself. As you unlock new support levels with different characters--both by interacting with them at the monastery and by using teamwork in battles--you get cutscenes that flesh them out more. Some are charming, lighthearted conversations between two friends, while many of them give you insight into more serious matters--a father forcing his daughter into marriage, discrimination within the monastery, the dark reason behind someone's lofty ambitions. For the most part, each support conversation is just a piece of who a character is, and as you slowly build support levels over time, you begin to uncover the full picture of each person. As a result, learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.Every NPC is fully voiced in both English and Japanese, which brings a lot of life to the brief support conversations. Disappointingly, though, the professor is silent. They do have a voice--they'll occasionally say a line when leveling up or improving a skill--but in cutscenes and when talking to students and faculty, they just nod or shake their head flatly. There are brief dialogue options during conversations, but where they could give way to a full, subtitled sentence or two from the professor, you're just left with the other character's reaction. Characters do, however, refer to the professor's personality and how they come across throughout the game, which is odd considering they mostly nod at things. This puts distance between you and the characters you're bonding with, and it's a missed opportunity in a game where the protagonist has an otherwise set look, personality, and backstory.It's not hard to like a lot of the characters, though. They draw you in with anime archetypes--the ladies' man, the bratty prince, the clumsy but well-meaning girl--and surprise you with much more nuance under the surface. Some of the funniest scenes early on involve Bernadetta, a shut-in with extreme reactions to normal social situations, but her inner life is a lot darker and more complicated than those early conversations let on. You might discover a character you thought was a jerk is actually one of your favorites or slowly stop using a less-than-favorite character in battle. You also have the option of having tea with someone, during which you have to choose conversation topics according to what you know about them, dating sim-style. Knowing what topics they'll like is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and successfully talking to a favorite character--even if the tea setup can be a little awkward in practice--is a small victory.Each house's campaign feels distinct but not so different that one seems way better than the other. Every house has a mix of personalities and skills, and they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Students from different houses can form friendships with each other, too, and you can eventually recruit students from other houses to join yours. Rather than being repetitive, on a second playthrough, recruiting gives you access to different relationship combinations; you can see a different side to a character through a different set of support conversations. And while the overall setup of the game is largely the same across the three houses, each has its own web of B plots, and the second half of the game will look very different depending on who you're with and the choices you've made.The first half concerns the church, its secrets, and the fact that the professor knows very little about their own identity. As the basic loop of each month pulls you forward, so too does the promise of learning the truth about something, whether it's why the archbishop wanted you to be a teacher in the first place or who a suspicious masked individual is. These threads remain pretty open, though, at least after one and a quarter playthroughs. You get different details in each route, and so far it's been a long process to piece everything together.Learning more about each of the characters and their place in the monastery is as much a reward for progress as the level bars that tick forever upward as you go.After a five-year time skip, you enter the ""war phase"" of the game. While the structure of the game is the same--you even instruct your units, since you still need to train for battle--the focus shifts to the house-specific stories. They involve a lot of hard decisions, with old friends becoming enemies, people you wish you didn't have to kill, and students who've changed either in spite or because of your guidance. Late-game battles are especially challenging, with higher stakes and multi-lane layouts that require a lot of forethought. Success in these battles is incredibly rewarding, as you're seeing dozens of hours of investment in your students reach a crescendo, but they're bittersweet in context.When all was said and done, all I could think about was starting another playthrough. I was curious about the mysteries left unsolved, of course, but I also hoped to undo my mistakes. There were characters I didn't talk to enough, students I didn't recruit, and far more effective ways to train my units. A second playthrough treads familiar ground in the beginning, but after learning and growing so much in the first, it feels fresh, too. That speaks to Three Houses' mechanical complexity and depth as well as the connections it fosters with its characters--and whether you're managing inventories or battlefields, it's the kind of game that's hard to put down, even when it's over.


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612,Into The Breach : A Mechanized Masterpiece,9," Subset Games' FTL follow-up is a pristine and pragmatic tactical gem with dynamic conflicts that will inspire you to jump Into the Breach again, and again, and again.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/172/1720905/3356843-icon.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/into-the-breach-review-a-mechanized-masterpiece/1900-6416865/,pos,"
In 2012, Subset Games released FTL--a strategy roguelite whose best moments were when everything worked like a well-oiled machine, but also when you were frantically trying to adapt to dangerous, unexpected situations in the spur of the moment. Into The Breach, Subset's sophomore effort, again has you enacting carefully planned strategies. The difference is that when the going gets tough, Into The Breach's turn-based mechanics and tactical tools allow you to improvise precisely, and respond purposefully, with perfectly choreographed counters in an aggressive ballet that feels amazing to conduct again and again.In a world where giant monsters called Vek threaten the earth, humanity has devised equally giant, human-operated mechs to combat them. Humanity has also invented time-travel technology to give pilots the opportunity to go back in time and start the whole conflict over, should the worst happen. You command a squad of three mech pilots whose purpose is to deter the advances of the Vek, one region at a time, through four different island stages with the ultimate goal of destroying their hive.In each region, your primary objective is to stop Vek from causing collateral damage--each civilian building destroyed depletes part of the game's overall power grid meter, and if it hits zero, your game is over. However, Vek almost always outnumber your squad, with even more continually spawning in, which makes wiping them out entirely a difficult task. Into The Breach is a tactics game with an emphasis on deterrence and creatively mitigating damage with the limited tools at your disposal.It's a daunting task, but there is one central feature that makes this process enjoyable and manageable: Every action the enemy will make in their next attack phase is clearly telegraphed through the UI during your turn. You can see which tile a particular Vek will hit and how much damage it will do, meaning you can assess your priorities and the response options you have available, then take direct steps to address the fated outcome. In the critical moments, just before a Vek flattens a hospital, you might dash in and tackle it out of range, and into the firing line of another Vek. Or, if your mech lacks close-combat abilities, you might move into harm's way to prevent the building from destruction. You might notice that more Vek will be spawning from the ground, and decide to throw a boulder on the tile to stop them from emerging, or shoot an off-the-mark missile, letting the explosion push another Vek on top of it.Knowing the exact outcome of each action means that Into The Breach feels like a game of violent chess, in the best way possible. Each turn will have you pondering over possible moves and outcomes, threats you can feasibly attend to, and pieces you can afford to sacrifice--common characteristics found in any good turn-based tactics game. But because the possibility spaces of Into The Breach skirmishes are so confined (every battle takes place on an 8x8 grid, just like a chessboard, filled with impassable squares) decisions can be reached quickly, and momentum rarely comes to a standstill for long.What also makes these decisions so entertaining to consider is not just the novelty of the way different components can interact in delightful ways, it's the certainty of how they will interact. Into The Breach is a tactical game that features a relative lack of probability, uncertainty, and risk. Attacks will always connect and do a distinct amount of damage, the grid-based scenarios mean units move and take actions in exact distances, and nothing ever occurs without at least some warning. The transparency and amount of information communicated provide great peace of mind, since every action you take will go as planned.The only exception is that when a Vek attacks a building, there is a tiny chance that the building will withstand damage. The probability of this happening is related to your overall grid power and can be increased, but the percentage value is always so low that this rare occurrence feels more like a miracle when it happens, rather than a coin toss you can take a chance on.The game's time-travel conceit also has a part to play here--you have the ability to undo unit movement, and each battle gives you a single opportunity to completely rewind and re-perform a turn. It's possible to execute your most optimal plan for each scenario every time, and the result is that turns in battle can feel like choreographed moves in an action movie, a confidently flawless dance of wind-ups, feints, counters, and turnabouts.You can unlock up to eight different premade squads, each comprised of three unique units, which focus on entirely different styles of combat. The diversity here is significant enough that each team calls for distinct strategic approaches. The default squad, Rift Walkers, focuses on straightforward, head-first, push-pull techniques. The Blitzkrieg crew works best when corralling Vek together in order to execute a lightning attack that courses through multiple enemies. The Flame Walkers focus on setting everything ablaze and knocking Vek into fire for damage-over-time en masse. Each different combination of mechs can completely change how you perceive a battlefield; things that are obstacles for one squad could be advantageous strategic assets for another.But where the possibilities of Into The Breach really open up is in its custom and random squad options, and the imaginative experimentation that comes from putting together unique all-star teams with individual mechs from different squads, along with your choice of starting pilot--whom all possess an exclusive trait. You might have a team composed of a mech who shields buildings and units, one that freezes anything on the map into a massive block of ice, one whose sole ability is to push everything surrounding it away, and a pilot that can perform one additional action each turn if they don't move. Can you complete a run of the game with that custom squad of pacifists? The game's structure makes these unorthodox options enjoyable challenges that are legitimately interesting to explore.Into The Breach maintains a roguelike structure of procedurally generated trials and permadeath, but when a campaign goes south not all is lost. If a mech is destroyed during a battle, it will return in the next, only without its pilot and their unique trait. Too much collateral damage is game over but means you have the chance to send one of your living pilots--experience points and bonus traits intact--back in time to captain a new squad, in a new campaign. The game is difficult, but starting over isn't tiresome because your actions so directly determine outcomes, and you always feel you can improve. And individual battles are so swift and satisfying that they become a craving that you'll want to keep feeding over and over.The clean and understated surface elements of Into The Breach complement the precise nature of its mechanics. The simple presentation, as well as the sharp UI layout, is attractively utilitarian and serves as a crucial component of the game's readability. There is no explicit plot outside of the time-traveling conceit, but the flavor text--small snippets of dialogue for each mech pilot and island leader, whom you'll encounter again and again throughout multiple playthroughs--adds a modest but pleasant facet of character to contextualize the world and round out the overall tone.Into The Breach also shines on Nintendo Switch, where all of the content from the PC version remains intact. The game's UI and miniature battlefields, both of which scale incredibly well on different monitor resolutions, unsurprisingly make the transition to the Switch's handheld mode flawlessly. The visuals are sharp and readable, the loading times are instantaneous and on-par with the PC version, and the addition of controller rumble to accompany on-screen action serves as an enjoyable touch.For seasoned players who have experience with Into The Breach on PC, there will be a short teething period as you become accustomed to the gamepad-centric controls--no touchscreen controls are available. The left analog stick serves as a mouse cursor replacement, but thankfully, there's a very capable and adjustable snapping behavior that comes into play during battles, which instantly centres your cursor to the middle of a grid tile and allows you to sweep across maps quickly. The face and shoulder buttons are dedicated to discrete commands, and the D-pad behaviour is also adjustable--you can either use it to instantly cycle between units (up and down) or enemies (left and right), or change it to use as a sequential tile selector.The smart control design in the Switch version means that commands and turns can still be performed very quickly. It only took me about five islands' worth of battles before they became second nature, and I was able to come close to the speed I'm used to with a mouse and keyboard shortcuts. As a whole, the performance of Into The Breach on Nintendo Switch is very capable, which is a blessing, because the game's stellar, irresistible game design perfectly suits a device that lets you play it everywhere.There is so much strategic joy in seeing the potential destruction a swarm of giant monsters is about to unleash on a city, then quickly staging and executing elaborate counter maneuvers to ruin the party. Into The Breach's focus on foresight makes its turn-based encounters an action-packed, risk-free puzzle, and the remarkable diversity of playstyles afforded by unique units keeps each new run interesting. It's a pleasure to see what kind of life-threatening predicaments await for you to creatively resolve in every new turn, every new battle, and every new campaign. Into The Breach is a pristine and pragmatic tactical gem with dynamic conflicts that will inspire you to jump back in again, and again, and again.Editor's note: This review has been updated to include our experience with the Nintendo Switch version of Into The Breach -- August 30, 2018 
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613,Dead Cells : Rise From Your Grave,9, Dead Cells is an incredibly satisfying mishmash of genres that's more than the sum of its parts.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/4/9/9/462377-625499.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dead-cells-review-rise-from-your-grave/1900-6416953/,pos,"
Tucked away in a long-forgotten prison lies a corpse. From time to time, a sticky mass of green goo slips into the cell and gives the body a burst of life. Stomping forward, the armored mass of carrion charges through zombies and hordes of undead on a vain quest to find the way out. Fans of Dark Souls will notice… more than a few similarities, for sure, but this particular outing isn't what it appears to be.Dead Cells is a fascinating amalgam of several of today's most popular indie genres. It juggles elements of tough-as-nails action games and Metroid-inspired exploration platformers, with the procedurally generated levels and random item allotments found in roguelikes. It's impressive how it all comes together without a hitch, especially given that the persistent character growth found in games like Dark Souls or Metroid squarely conflicts with the randomized resets emblematic of Rogue-inspired games.The balance struck here is one of unlocked opportunities. Each time your avatar stirs back to life, you're given a fresh chance to press through the stages. You encounter them sequentially, so you have an idea of what to expect, but your choices in each will determine your ultimate path. So, for example, while the first stage is always the Prisoner's Quarters, your next hop could be the Promenade of the Condemned or the Toxic Sewers. At first, only the former will be available. But, in time, you'll earn runes that confer permanent changes and open up new routes.So, while some roguelikes and even Dark Souls could, in theory, be completed in one run without dying, that (so far as we've found) can't happen here. You must progress, die, and then restart to worm your way through the different routes, collecting critical upgrades that give you even more options.Along the way, of course, you'll have a shuffling inventory with new weapons and skills found in chests or shops. You can also pick up stat upgrades that you lose upon death as well as ""cells,"" which, if you survive your current stage, can be banked for unlocking rare items that will be added to your potential gear lottery pool and permanent bonuses like additional healing items.Besides the inventory and stage shuffling, combat and platforming are the most critical aspects for you to master. And while Dead Cells executes on all of its mechanics, these two shine brightest. For starters, traversing levels is a smooth, quick process once you've got the basic feel for it. Your movement is precise, with just enough forgiveness to make exacting jumps feel demanding, yet achievable. And this meshes seamlessly with the action.Enemies will respond to your presence in different ways. Some are unable to see you or react unless you're on their platform and in their direct line of sight, while others will lob grenades at you from across a gap or through platforms, but can't attack directly. Your goal is to read the screen and understand the different abilities of each enemy type, and to use that information to strategize and execute your optimal approach.Countless other variables such as the presence of doors (which can be opened slowly for a stealth attack or kicked in for a stunning blow) work together to mix things up. Toxic pools, spiked floors, etc. all come together to give the right mix of obstacles and challenging foes. This also plays well with Dead Cells' overall look and tone. Each enemy glows a bit and has a different color scheme and silhouette. The same is true for the stages themselves. Together, these easily identifiable coding systems make it intuitive to read the room and remain focused on the ludicrously quick combat without losing sight of your next target.That's especially critical because of the zippy pace of bouts, too. Most of the time, you'll have two weapons or a weapon and a shield. This, combined with jumping and dodging, forms the core of your skill set. Once you get the hang of it all, you can effortlessly combine attacks and dodges, and, for instance, freeze an enemy with a spell before rolling behind them and unloading with a quick set of slashes. All of this seems like a chaotic mess at first. And it is--to a degree. Each piece of the combat puzzle is introduced gradually, so you very naturally learn how it fits into the larger picture.Your nascent exploration through the Prisoner's Quarters and other early-game maps may take around 10 minutes during your first few trips. It feels agonizing, too. You are vulnerable, largely powerless, and unfamiliar with your very dangerous surroundings. So much is left unexplained at the outset that the choice to just go and worry about the rest later comes as second-nature. Still, the going isn't easy and you'll struggle. At least at first.But each round gives you a different set of toys to play with. The stage will change each time. One route comes and goes, perhaps a new treasure or den of foes takes its place. But that doesn't really matter. The Prisoner's Quarters, while unique with every run, keeps to a certain, persistent theme. The wistful music and basic ideas are the same. Through repetition, you earn not rote memorization of layouts, but the ability to take whatever weapons you get for that run and utilize them to their fullest. In short order, what took 10 minutes at the start takes 30 seconds once you've found your bearings.What doesn't always quite workout the same way, though, are the latter areas. Fewer opportunities to practice with tougher enemies means that they never quite develop the same level of familiarity. It keeps every attempt feeling tense and exciting, but it can also lead to some frustration. Spending a whole run trying to make it to one spot only to die and have to restart a 15-minute stretch of play again can be grating, but the backstop there is the permanent upgrades.Even if you can't make it all that far, Prisoner's Quarters is simple enough that you'll have plenty of opportunities to ""bank"" cells for the aforementioned upgrades. That gives you a sense of constant progress, even when you bomb a run. In fact, the only real issue with the adventure is that some of the better upgrades can take substantially longer than they should. It stalls progress in the mid-game a bit and can lead to a feeling of grinding your wheels. Besides that, though, Dead Cells is a phenomenal effort to blend together some very disparate genres into a tight, cohesive whole. It's one of the better examples of how to remix ideas without losing their individual strengths.


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614,Yoku’s Island Express : A Breath of Fresh Air,9, The unique blend of Metroid and pinball makes Yoku’s Island Express as entertaining as it is charming.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/6/6/2/462428-625662.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/yokus-island-express-review-a-breath-of-fresh-air/1900-6416923/,pos,"
Metroid-style platformers have become more common recently, which makes standing out from the pack a daunting task for new games in that style. Yoku’s Island Express overcomes this hurdle by creatively combining both Metroid-style exploration and pinball mechanics into one unique product. This combination sounds unusual at first, but the final result is a charming, delightful, and wonderfully satisfying hybrid.You play as Yoku, a cute little beetle who has a ball attached to his hip with a string, and it's his first day as postmaster on Mokumana Island. The story is cute and straightforward, and there’s a large amount of backstory sprinkled throughout the game, but it doesn’t take long for the rest of Yoku’s Island Express’ beautiful game design to quickly take the spotlight.The world of Mokumana Island is gorgeous, and the delightful painterly art style realizes each of the game's different stages with vibrancy--lush jungles and dark labyrinths blend in seamlessly with stunning snow-covered mountains and underground caves, and the background scenery is just as beautifully detailed as the foreground. Every environment is perfectly accompanied by sound design which gives everything a cheery and quirky atmosphere, and the charming background music keeps things light and breezy throughout. The roster of supporting characters is also a delight to meet. Ranging from animals and plants to imaginary creatures, the large cast of NPCs are all amusing in their own ways. Some give you side quests, some give you exposition regarding the main story or island lore, and some are simply there for a quick quip or two.Yoku can only move left and right, and can't jump. However, flippers and platforms can be found all over Mokumana Island, which can be operated by using just two buttons, much like in pinball. These devices are all used to fling Yoku and his ball (which doubles as a pinball) in helpful directions to help you find and explore new paths of game’s cleverly branching world.If Yoku is the pinball, then Mokumana Island is a giant pinball table. One minute you could be strolling through the jungle, the next you might find yourself seamlessly dropped into a literal pinball puzzle carved out of the environment. Familiar pinball mechanics, like lanes and bumpers, are all there and completing these challenges will reward you with fruit (the game’s currency) and unlock additional paths around the island. Though the puzzles require precise timing demands, and there are many moments when your skills and reactions feel tested, no puzzle feels impossible. Most can be completed in only a handful of minutes, but there's a lot of variety to the boards which help keep the game incredibly engaging.Mokumana Island is surprisingly large, and filled with secrets and collectible items. A sprawling story quest and numerous side quests constantly push you in different directions, and there’s a lot of traveling and pinballing to be done. It’s also easy to get sidetracked from your tasks in favor of searching for the game's many secrets hiding within the beautiful island stages.Exploring becomes even more exciting as Yoku learns new, goofy abilities, which are used to overcome hurdles in a lighthearted fashion, like removing boulders using an exploding slug vacuum cleaner. These fun and practical abilities add extra layers of cheery personality to an already joyful game, and as common in the genre, they make you feel excited to backtrack and unlock previously inaccessible paths.Traveling back and forth from one end of Mokumana Island to the other can sometimes become tedious, however. A fast-travel system isn’t unlocked until later in the game, but even that is quite limited in regards to where you can and can’t travel. Some areas require you to complete a pinball puzzle in order to get from point A to B, which makes retreading quite repetitive and occasionally frustrating, particularly when the pinball puzzle is a complex one.Yoku’s Island Express takes two unlikely genres and combines them into one playful, natural experience. The game’s audio and visual design is simply joyous and the large game world seamlessly combines its pinball puzzles with some brilliant level designs. While traversing the large map does get frustrating at times, Yoku’s Island Express’ main quest never drags, and with its slate of fun abilities, quirky supporting characters and a generous amount of optional content, Yoku’s Island Express is a unique journey that’s refreshing and just straight up fun.
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615,SteamWorld Dig 2 ,9," SteamWorld Dig 2 is a brilliant evolution of the first that not only expands upon its hybrid formula, but presents it in its best light.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/2/0/5/462662-626205.jpg,NS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/steamworld-dig-2-review/1900-6416767/,pos,"
The first SteamWorld Dig was most notable for its unique blend of mining mechanics and Metroid-style exploration, but it ended right as it began to come into its own. Its sequel is twice as long and puts that added runtime to good use, as both the story and mechanics are given room to flourish. The result is a brilliant and varied evolution of the first game that not only expands upon its hybrid formula, but presents it in its best light.SteamWorld Dig 2 takes place in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world where Earth has become a desert wasteland; its remaining inhabitants are small populations of steam-driven robots and irradiated humans. You control a steambot named Dorothy searching for her missing friend, Rusty--the protagonist of the first game. When Dorothy hears that he has been sighted entering the mines of an old trading town, El Machino, she embarks on a journey to find him.The story is more focused than its predecessor. Events unfold at a brisk pace, occasionally hitting you with unexpected twists and tonal shifts that keep the adventure compelling throughout. Also impactful is the way the story contributes to the overarching SteamWorld universe as a whole (it serves as a bridge between Dig 1 and SteamWorld Heist). By its conclusion, past narrative threads that were once disparate and unclear are finally expounded upon, elevating your attachment to the characters and the world.Even if you aren't invested in the series' lore, Dig 2 gives you more than enough to latch onto with its eclectic cast. Dorothy makes for a likable lead and the characters who surround her are humorous and well-written. In particular, Dorothy's Navi-like sidekick, FEN, is one of the game's standout personalities. His sassy, oftentimes snarky, remarks are amusing, but as you progress, he grows into a far more sincere and endearing ally whose presence is irreplaceable.Also worth noting is the presentation; both visuals and music are charming and stylish. From the moodily lit underground caverns you explore to the airy and upbeat hip-hop inspired tracks that permeate the various locales, there's an endearing atmosphere that constantly pulls you in.Dig 2 encourages you to be methodical, but unlike the original, it gives you more time to be creative, and rewards your cravings to diligently explore and discover new secrets.Like the first game, you spend time exploring various underground mines. With your trusty pickaxe, you smash through blocks of dirt to reveal passageways, while along the way acquiring precious gems and minerals. You also obtain tools and power-ups that help you burrow even deeper. Once your pockets are filled with treasure, you return to town to sell your materials and upgrade your tools, and then you return to the mine anew.While the digging process seems repetitive in nature, it never becomes tedious. Exploration feels like longform puzzle solving. You're always strategizing how to take advantage of a mine's terrain and the enemies within to clear tunnels and acquire more treasure. And with the more varied tools you have access to this time around, the methods you employ grow increasingly complex.One moment you're using your pressure bomb launcher to create a pathway that you can't reach with your pickaxe, the next you're using your grappling hook to strategically detonate a TNT barrel to kill a group of enemies. These instances are when the game is at its most fulfilling, as you have a great deal of flexibility in choosing how to approach a given area. Dig 2 encourages you to be methodical, but unlike the original, it gives you more time to be creative, and rewards your cravings to diligently explore and discover new secrets.Caves provide satisfying opportunities to exercise your reflexes and intellect. New to Dig 2 is the addition of collectables called Cogs, which you can use to enhance your tools with mods. These upgrades are varied and unique, each improving your abilities in different ways. For instance, you can equip a mod that increases your chances of getting two precious materials from one resource block, or you might equip one that occasionally prevents instant death from falling rocks. As you obtain more Cogs, your ability to tailor mods to better suit your playstyle grows, which becomes invaluable when facing difficult obstacles in later areas. And with the varied terrain and hazards you encounter, you always feel an initiative to experiment to better your mining efficiency and chances of survival.When you're not spending time digging, you're exploring caves, which are special rooms scattered across the map containing either platforming challenges or puzzles to solve. These brief, well-crafted trials test your mastery of the game's base mechanics: a spike-covered room demands quick execution of your mobility options; a block-stacking puzzle challenges your knowledge of the pressure launcher's limitations; and a room with collapsing boulders has you timing your sprints in different spurts to avoid being crushed. On top of rewarding you with much-needed Cogs, caves provide satisfying opportunities to exercise your reflexes and intellect. You often look forward to discovering them, as their distinct challenges are also entertaining proving grounds to test your upgrades.Alongside the mechanical improvements, it helps that there's a greater variety in level and objective design. From an ancient temple surrounded by lava to an ethereal jungle, each location you explore goes beyond the standard underground mine you might expect. Not only are levels thematically different, they're also structured in distinct ways from each other. At one point, you're tasked to dig horizontally instead of vertically, only to be led to an area that has you completing a gauntlet of caves in order to open a gate with multiple locks. These changes in design frame the mechanics in captivating ways, challenging you to do more than just strategically carve out tunnels. Dig 2 meticulously uses its assets to great effect, continually changing up the pace from beginning to end.Every advancement Dig 2 makes to its story and mechanics strengthens your initiative to progress. There's an overwhelming sense of momentum that runs through the adventure; as if developer Image & Form sifted the original in a pan, removing its redundancies while expanding upon what made it so fun to persistently play. In your quest to acquire every upgrade and explore every nook and cranny, there's no shortage of hidden collectables to discover. And with post-game content that unlocks after you unearth every secret, the desire to keep digging intensifies. Dig 2 manages to not only be an exceptional successor, but a great adventure in its own right. Where the first game was a diamond in the rough, Dig 2 is a polished jewel. 
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616,Darksiders 3  - Soils-Like,4, Darksiders return is marred by bland environments and an unfocused design that can't help but frustrate and underwhelm.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/7/6/3/464500-630763.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/darksiders-3-review-soils-like/1900-6417043/,neg,"
Darksiders 3 has an identity crisis. On the one hand, the stylish, effect-laden combos at your disposal point to a game with combat encounters reminiscent of Devil May Cry's kinetic action. Yet your fragility and the tough challenge enemies present actively discourage you from approaching combat on the front foot, instead favouring a more methodical approach with an emphasis on tact and evasion. The Darksiders series has always worn its inspirations on its sleeve, but at least there was a sense of focus and consistent design omnipresent in all of its moving parts. Those first two games may have been derivative, but they took concepts and built on them in fun and engaging ways that elevated their strong points. Darksiders 3 is the antithesis of this approach, feeling muddled and unfocused, with an uneven design that trickles down and negatively affects each of its disparate systems.After both War and Death had their fun in Darksiders 3's predecessors, it's now the turn of the perpetually angry Fury, as you take the reins of the third horseman of the apocalypse. Fury wields a bladed whip known as the Barbs of Scorn, which offers both decent range and a satisfying feedback of meaty hits once you're up close and personal in some demonic entity's face. Throughout the game you'll acquire Hollows that grant unique secondary weapons--like a lumbering mallet and rapid-fire chains--and open up your traversal options with different elemental effects. Combos are relatively easy to execute, with one button dedicated to primary attacks and another for those aforementioned secondary strikes. Button mashing is enough to get you through most encounters, but mixing in slight delays between button presses will allow you to pull off air combos and other similarly stylish moves. It certainly looks the part of a flamboyant action game, but these flashy combos are only really feasible against weaker enemies.Darksiders 3 has taken some clear inspiration from Dark Souls, so Fury's low survivability forces you to approach combat in a way that belies its exuberant combos. Enemies are fast and hit hard, and are regularly found in groups. With no stamina meter to speak of, there's an emphasis on dodging and keeping out of danger that does deviate from Dark Souls' stringent use of energy management. Each perfectly timed dodge is rewarded with a slow-motion flourish and the chance to counter with a powerful arcane attack, and most clashes are built around Fury's ability to weave out of the way of incoming sword slashes and ravenous claws. There's a good variety of enemy types, too; reading their attack patterns and knowing when to evade is paramount to defeating almost every enemy you can't simply banish with a single combo.This all sounds well and good on paper, and taken at face value there's nothing inherently wrong with a more considered approach to combat. But Darksiders 3 never leans into this method heavily enough, and out-of-place vestiges of its flashy counterpoint regularly cause frustration as it seems to split between wanting to be two very different types of game.You may have air juggles and various strings of deadly moves at your disposal, but you're often forced to settle for safe combos because anything else will leave you wide open to a devastating attack. Then there's the way you lock on to enemies. This has remained relatively unchanged from Darksiders 2, opting for a 3D targeting system similar to the one used in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This was clearly designed with one-on-one battles in mind and certainly doesn't fit in a game as challenging as this. While there are undoubtedly some tough enemies in Darksiders 3, the real difficulty comes from facing more than one enemy at a time rather than a singular threat. This works twofold: groups of enemies are intrinsically tougher due to their numbers, and the unwieldy lock-on and a terrible camera make these fights a lot more challenging than they would otherwise be. The camera has a tendency to block your view with walls and any objects in the vicinity, which is only exacerbated by the claustrophobic environments that dominate the majority of the game. Dying because you can't see, or because switching targets is too fiddly, are constant annoyances. Not to mention the number of times you're hit by attacks from off-screen. There's an indicator for incoming attacks, but it's incredibly difficult to discern in the thick of the action, and no such warning exists for projectiles.Dying because you can't see, or because switching targets is too fiddly, are constant annoyances. Not to mention the number of times you're hit by attacks from off-screen.Darksiders 3 also strips out a lot of the RPG elements from its immediate predecessor. Killing enemies rewards you with souls which can also be found throughout the game world in consumable clusters. Each time you reach a checkpoint you can trade them to a demonic merchant in order to level up three attributes: health, strength, and arcane. It's a very simplistic progression system, and while you can lose souls by dying and must then retrieve them again, there's never any tension borne from the threat of perishing and losing them all because you can bank souls even if you don't have enough to level up.Weapons can be upgraded to increase their damage output, and enhancements will augment your arsenal with buffs that might give you 4% health back for each successful hit, or add more invincibility frames to your dodge. But there's no sense of individuality here, and combat never evolves because all you're doing is boosting your damage output. It doesn't take too long before repetition settles in.This is a problem when combat is all-encompassing. There are some rudimentary puzzles sprinkled throughout, but they're few and far between and generally revolve around hitting a large jellyfish creature into position so you can use its head to reach higher platforms, moving blocks, and using explosive insects to access different areas. None of this is particularly engaging, and that goes for the rare instances of platforming as well. Grabbing onto ledges is too temperamental, and Darksiders 3 lacks a cohesive visual language that makes some platforming sections more convoluted than they should be.The apocalyptic wasteland of Earth just isn't that interesting to traverse either. The interconnected world is made up of dilapidated office buildings, grimy subways, and flooded industrial areas. Each of these locales is enveloped in muted colours dominated by beige and grey, with only a couple of areas deviating from this bland design. Your quest might revolve around tracking down and killing The Seven Deadly Sins, but the environments you're in rarely reflect their diverse personalities, which feels like a squandered opportunity. Sloth is a large grotesque bug, so it makes sense that you'll find eggs cascading around the walls of his subway lair, and face off against arachnids and four-legged creatures. Yet, bafflingly enough, Gluttony--a vulgar plant-like creature with multiple mouths--also resides in a subway littered with eggs and insectoids to fight.Verticality plays a substantial role in these environments, but there's no sense of scale when you're regularly confined to dank corridors in subways and caves. It's a shame, too, because while the bulky, comic book art style of Joe Madureira is still reflected in the excellent character designs--even if he's not directly involved in Darksiders 3--the backdrop for these larger-than-life beings is this generic, insipid world. And while it underwhelms in the visual department, Darksiders 3 is still rife with constant framerate issues--even on a PS4 Pro--on top of crashes, sound glitches, and other technical misgivings.There are other elements worth mentioning, like the way the game length is padded out by the exclusion of an vague in-game map that makes fast travel worthless since you never know where exactly you're going, or the counter-intuitive way letting an enemy kill you is the best option when it comes to replenishing your healing items. But saying any more at this point is just too disheartening. Darksiders 3 retrogrades on its predecessors with an unfocused approach that constantly clashes with itself. There are remnants of a good game here, buried within the vivacious combos of a combat style this game doesn't want to embrace. Unfortunately, it's buried far too deep to ever salvage. 


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617,Aegis Defenders ,4, Platforming and tower defense do not mix well in Aegis Defenders.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/0/5/5/464616-631055.jpg,NS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aegis-defenders-review/1900-6416856/,neg,"
In combining a tower defense game with a platformer, Aegis Defenders carries an ingenious idea at its core. The problem is, that idea is never fully reallized: the game's surface-layer tower defense is serviceable but unbalanced, while the platformer underneath is unimaginative and frustrating, leaving very little to actually enjoy.Each level is separated into two sections: you'll explore and puzzle-solve your way through a linear side-scrolling section for 10-20 minutes, before stumbling upon a MacGuffin that, for a number of contrived reasons, needs to be defended. You must then place various items around the enclosed area of the level to fight off enemies during a series of waves, each preceded by a preparation phase. Those enemies are varied enough in design and appearance to keep things interesting; importantly, they come in four colors, each corresponding to one of your squad.Your team is comprised of main protagonist Clu, her grandfather Bart, a traveler named Kaiim, and his old flame Zula, and each character's attacks are most powerful against enemies of the same color. Placing one character's item on top of another's can create combination towers that have more powerful effects, and doing so makes the tower defense half of the game more active than the genre's standard. For example, place one of Clu's bombs in the same position as one of Bart's defense blocks, and you'll make a trishot turret that's powerful against both blue and yellow critters.The idea is to create an extra layer of strategy--not only do you have to think about where you place your items, you must also consider which additional items you place in combination with your original. However, the discrepancy between damage dealt to an enemy by the corresponding color hero and an opposite-color hero is barely noticeable: Clu's bow is almost always the most effective weapon, so I ended up using her the majority of the time regardless of what color enemy I was faced with, rendering the color-matching and combination mechanic inconsequential. That said, combining items and seeing more powerful combinations taking down enemies quicker is satisfying--as is dealing damage with your active weapon--even if most waves just end as a scramble to deploy as many towers as possible, regardless of color.Most frustrating is that playing by yourself, rather than using the game's local co-op option, becomes nigh-on impossible around the game's middle third; the number and strength of your opposition increases, and the teammate AI fails to keep pace, meaning you eventually find yourself doing all four fighters' jobs yourself. Bart is capable of repairing broken defenses, for example, but he'll only do so if positioned directly next to one. You can have him follow your active character, but then he won't attempt to fix or fight anything. So, inevitably, you must manually position every character in the exact spot you want at the start of a round before coming back and taking them out of harm's way when necessary. But doing so means you leave your other fighters in the incompetent hands of the AI, meaning they'll each deal far less damage than if you were controlling them. Micromanaging your squad becomes essential to progress, and regardless of whether this was the developer's intention, doing so is a frustrating experience, especially when I always felt disadvantaged by not having a human partner to help.Most frustrating is that playing by yourself, rather than using the game's local co-op option, becomes nigh-on impossible around the game's middle third...Exploration sections forego the tower defense in favor of basic platforming. There are switch-activated doors, warp panels, and yet more technicolor enemies. But the platforming within is trite: we've seen all this before, with more precise controls and more imaginative puzzles. There are a handful of standout puzzles in the late game--one memorable example sees all four characters spread out across the area, needing to cooperate in order to move a critter through some laser beams and utilize its own power to melt a barrier--but most are simplistic cases of merely unlocking a door or blowing up a cracked wall. More interesting mechanics, such as the warp panels and air bubbles you can use to move across gaps, are introduced far too late and rarely used in compelling ways, while even the basic concept of a moving platform doesn't crop up until halfway through. Worse still, while the sensation of jumping is fine, the art style makes it difficult to see exactly where a platform ends, resulting in far too many failed jumps that feel like they weren't your fault.At least in these sections checkpoints are frequent enough that death isn't too much of a hindrance. However, this is not the case in the tower defense areas, where death rarely teaches you anything and always sends you back to the very first wave. Death will be frequent, too: enemies are powerful and plentiful, and many are bigger and possess greater agility than any playable character. The difficulty curve is all over the place, with the campaign remaining relatively easy before a sudden spike during a ridiculously tough third quarter, later tapering off again as it approaches its conclusion. Finishing the game took me around 20 hours, despite the in-game clock--which doesn't appear to track failed attempts--saying I only played for two and a half.During each mission, the game's narrative is told through dialogue scenes--some of which you can choose responses within, though I never felt like my decisions affected anything of note--while cutscenes at each stage's opening serve you exposition pertaining to a disaster that struck humanity thousands of years ago. I struggled to stay invested in that exposition, however, since it remains irrelevant to what's happening in the present-day plot until the story's conclusion, so I simply got bored. You're bombarded with so many gobbledygook names and phrases--The Clarent, The Deathless, Manasa, Hozai, Shem, Sen, Ichor, Vaara, and Aegis itself, to name a few--that I was confused about who was who and what their motivations were from the very outset, and this robs the story of any emotional impact it attempts to have. Why would I care that Shreya has been captured when I'm not really sure who she is and why she matters?It's marred by a plethora of tiny issues: repetitive voice samples, inaccurate hitboxes, inconsistent framerate, poor AI, and overuse of music, among others bugs and glitches. And these all amount to an experience that is not enjoyable.It doesn't help that your camp--a base where you can buy upgrades and talk to other characters between levels--will suddenly be inhabited by never-before-seen characters at seemingly random points in the story. Why is there a strange man hanging out near my home, and why are none of the other characters acknowledging him? One character, named Nick, appears about one-third of the way in and is the subject of an intriguing romance subplot--but that subplot never amounts to anything before Nick disappears as suddenly as he turns up. Some interesting character interactions and story revelations happen towards the end, but by this point I'd long since given up caring about any of the characters involved.Defenders does at least offer a comforting sense of rhythm: you go off and explore, defend a base, come back to camp to acquire upgrades, then go and do it all again. However, even at this surface level, the game has too many small issues to ever really enjoy. It's marred by a plethora of tiny issues: repetitive voice samples, inaccurate hitboxes, inconsistent framerate, poor AI, and overuse of music, among others bugs and glitches. And these all amount to an experience that is not enjoyable.Aegis Defenders is disappointing because it had potential, and I still think that potential exists. There is satisfaction to be found in setting up its towers and combining them in interesting ways to make bigger and better turrets. And its loop of exploring, defending, and upgrading is alluring. But the game never meets your expectations. Whether it's the nonsensical narrative, the frustrating combat, the numerous bugs, or the simplistic platforming, Aegis Defenders stumbles more often than it excels. 
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618,Extinction  - A Giant Mess,4, Extinction is a clumsy and frustrating game that struggles to put its potential to good use.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/0/3/1/465278-633031.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/extinction-review-a-giant-mess/1900-6416892/,neg,"
Don't let the AAA price tag fool you into thinking Extinction is a high-end product. It ain't, and there's nothing in the game--not even cutscenes--that come close to approaching the level of quality seen in its lavish, pre-launch cinematic trailer.Discovering Extinction's sub-standard quality is frustrating because its premise is very enticing, and there are moments early on when it feels like it's primed to deliver. As a warrior who's capable of sprinting up walls, soaring through the air, and channeling sacred energy to tap into supernatural strength, you go toe-to-toe against incredibly tall and powerful giants. Taking them down requires you to lop off limbs and dismantle armor, building up enough energy to deliver a killing blow: a whirlwind slice through the back of their neck. Yes, it's obviously inspired by Attack on Titan--you even have a whip that can be used to latch onto hook points and pull yourself through the air.Zipping across a city to reach a faraway objective, with your character effortlessly scaling walls and bouncing off treetops and canopies to avoid touching the ground altogether, can be enjoyable. And the early battles against the first few giants definitely strike a chord, with their impressive scale and intricately textured body parts giving their artificial bodies a dash of realism. It's all well and good while you're learning the ropes, but these initial thrills fade fast. Extinction quickly transitions into an incredibly repetitive game that fails to build upon its promising foundation.The excitement of battling giants--easily the game's most admirable piece--wanes quickly. Despite the variations that appear over time, their behavior barely deviates from the standards set early on. Most often, you're merely challenged to target different types of vulnerable objects that bind their armor together, but as you pour points into the upgrade tree to unlock things like extended slow-motion attacks, your character's abilities scale quickly enough that these added steps are no more than inconvenient speed bumps in practice.In order to get to the back of a giant's neck to take it out for good, you will most often need to cut off one of its legs to make it fall to the ground. Alternatively, some giants have bits and pieces that you can latch onto with your whip, though this system is largely too cumbersome to rely upon. It's very easy for the game to misinterpret its auto targeting and send you flying in the opposite-than-intended direction. Rather than a fun and reliable mainstay, your grapple ability is relegated to Plan-B status.Nine times out of ten, a hit from a giant means instant death. Your only defensive options are to keep your distance--not always easy, given how close you need to be to cut off their limbs off--or to dodge out of harm's way before an incoming strike. Giants are so big that these attacks often come without warning, save for small red icons that appear near your character's head that are easy to miss while scrambling to simultaneously attack and stay alive.Should you die, you respawn back into the stage with all your progress intact, but being brought back to life in this way sometimes puts you at an unreasonable disadvantage. Each stage is filled with buildings that giants will gradually destroy until interrupted; when the city is totally leveled, you fail the mission. Many times you respawn at the entry point of a location, which forces you to sprint back all the way back to the fight while a giant whittles away at the remaining buildings in your absence. In light of the great potential for one-hit deaths, being sent back to the beginning of the stage doesn't make a whole lot of sense.Extinction is made by Iron Galaxy, a studio with experience making fighting games. There are reminders of fighting game mechanics within but any depth hinted at by the presence of super-armor and invincibility frames is shot down when you get a glimpse at the three combo lists. Practically every combo is executed with a single button and is only mixed up depending on when you decide to hold it down or delay the next input. Not that you need to master these skills in the first place. You can't damage giants with basic attacks, and smaller enemies are too dumb to put up a good fight.And if you thought your sword, which is capable of slicing a giant's arm off, would be able to make quick work of an enemy 10 times smaller, you'd be wrong. The same attack you use to slice through bone a meter thick will only kill the most basic type of enemy, leaving others with plenty of health left over to keep fighting.During missions where your only goal is to rescue citizens, the game arbitrarily changes the rules of engagement, but even then, not consistently. Most stages allow you to activate rescue towers at a normal rate regardless of the number of low-level enemies in the area. But in some rescue missions, suddenly it's ""too dangerous"" to attempt to activate a tower with nearby monsters, a proclamation from your partner that causes the charge rate to drop to unreasonably slow levels. But in later instances this is no longer the case, and rescue missions can be completed in two minutes or less as a result. Whether by design or by accident, there's a fundamental lack of consistency; some stages change the primary objective after you complete the task presented to you at the start, which, given the destructibility of cities, can put you in an unexpectedly frustrating position.Perhaps the game's most damning quality is the fact that its story missions are often set in procedurally generated environments. That isn't bad in theory, but Extinction's random stages are typically flat and incredibly similar, and they aren't even in predetermined locations, which completely nullifies any chance of connecting with the story at hand. If giants level a city in one mission, how is it suddenly rebuilt in the next? Your guess is as good as mine. Likewise, the random generation of locations and giants (and their arrangement) can change the difficulty of a particular level from one playthrough to the next. You never quite know if you should press on during a challenging run, or just re-roll and try out a different permutation from scratch.The story driving you through all of this is told primarily through conversations at the start and the end of a mission. In both cases, the in-game world freezes and static portraits pop up, along with a frustratingly small text box that can only fit two lines of text at a time, even when far more is usually said. While you watch text scroll through this box, dialogue is read aloud at a snail's pace by decent voice actors trapped behind hackneyed writing. The skip button quickly becomes your best friend.You do get 2D cutscenes between missions on very rare occasions, but the hand drawn art is rough. The fact that only some cutscenes are properly animated while others are storyboard-grade stop-motion is guaranteed to cause concern. Even the game's ending, arguably a pivotal moment deserving of some investment in cinematic flair, is of the stop-motion variety, no more impressive than dressed-up placeholder art.Extinction shoots itself in the foot time and time again. It's so frustrating to see its good ideas buried under repetitive missions, a forgettable story, and embarrassing production values for its AAA price. Play one hour of it and you've basically done a bit of everything it has to offer; then it's rinse and repeat for as long as you can bear to stick with it. It's a frail and monotonous game destined for the bargain bin. 


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619,Bravo Team : Back To Basics,4," Though VR co-op is a nice touch, Bravo Team brings nothing else new to the table.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/1/2/9/465586-634129.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bravo-team-review-back-to-basics/1900-6416876/,neg,"
Well into 2018, we are past the point where VR is a new and novel experiment. Had Supermassive Games' Bravo Team released when the PSVR launched, we could at least excuse the game's milquetoast nature as a first, uncertain step; an experiment in trying to bring arcadey, cover-based shooting to a new format. Released two years into the PSVR's lifespan, however, Bravo Team already comes off as archaic, a game that's been outclassed several times over in the system's first year.Bravo Team's banality is obvious during its opening minutes. You and your online co-op partner or A.I. brother-in-arms are charged with escorting the president of a made-up eastern European country back home to deliver a unifying speech that will hopefully bring peace to her nation. Of course it goes wrong; the president's envoy gets blown to bits, and a deposed military leader kickstarts a bloody coup d'etat that you and your partner must shoot your way through in order to get home. The mission plays out with stone-faced seriousness, with the monotony of our two masked heroes broken up only by the determined British timbre of your commanding officer. There isn't even a musical score to accentuate the action, so even the most dramatic moments happen in an uncaring void.Bravo Team's presentation leaves a lot to be desiredThe set up might be indistinguishable from Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, or any number of grim, washed-out shooters, but, really, Bravo Team's gameplay has more in common with games like Time Crisis. Most of your time is spent hiding behind cover, popping out to line up your shots and fire. You can play with the DualShock 4 or the Move controllers (and this is even one of the few times where movement feels natural with the latter). However, the PS Aim gun controller is where it's at in that regard, and what thrills do exist in the game come from the inherent thrill of the Aim lending a dose of immersion.You also get a little bit more freedom to move than in a game like Time Crisis. You can point your gun or just tilt the PSVR headset at a certain area and you'll get a visual prompt telling you whether you can move there or not. The flaw here being that actual movement takes the game out of first person into a third-person view that rips that immersion away every single time.The presentation, with its dull, anemic color schemes straight out of 2007 and a rampant, unfathomable problem with pop-in and blurry textures, is the most prominent flaw. The same three classes of enemies you encounter in the first stage--generic grunt, armored grunt, armored grunt with chaingun--are the same ones you see every step of the way. The last half hour or so introduces two sections with melee soldiers and snipers, but they're gone almost as soon as they enter the scene. There's only four guns--a pistol, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle--and you only see two of those in the last 30 minutes as well.Playing co-op is probably the best way to experience what little Bravo Team has to offer.Seemingly in an effort to break up the straightforward gunplay, stealth kills are possible. But outside of the tutorial, it's impossible to maintain stealth for more than two or three enemies before, without fail, another enemy stands at an angle where he can't be stealth killed. It doesn't help that your supposedly silenced pistol gives away your position 75% of the time. The most fun in Bravo Team comes from its online co-op, where at least you have a partner to bounce dialogue off of, give directions to, or request recovery when you've fallen. It's a salve, albeit a temporary one.Instead, Bravo Team slogs on, stranding you in huge spaces, throwing wave after wave of cannon fodder your way, making its short play time feel hours longer that it actually is. Bravo Team is a game that feels unsure and tentative about ideas that have been tried and tested for years now, even in VR. 
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620,The Mage's Tale ,4," The Mage's Tale attempts to bring classic PC dungeon crawling into virtual reality, but disappoints at nearly every turn.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/7/7/8/465804-634778.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-mages-tale-review/1900-6416711/,neg,"
Virtual reality is in a bit of a tough spot. While the medium has enjoyed a lot of mainstream visibility of late, few VR games have actually found broad success. The Mage's Tale is meant to be Oculus' new tentpole--a robust virtual-reality adventure that will sell us all on the magic of the technology and the ever-elusive sense of ""presence."" Unfortunately, The Mage's Tale is a fractured adventure packed with minor technical oddities, poor voice work, and shallow dungeon crawling.The tale opens with the kidnapping of your master at the hands of an evil sorcerer, and you, the lowly apprentice, must embark on a rescue mission. It’s every bit as hackneyed as it sounds. Making the opening even less appealing, the mage's familiar--an obnoxious magical creature that's along for the ride--immediately berates you for your incompetence. Unfortunately, he's your teacher, carrying you down the path of learning the skills and spells you'll need to exact vengeance.That's the core appeal here, too: crafting spells and using them within a virtual space. That portion, at least, works well. The Oculus Touch controllers temporarily create the sensation that you're in control of magic, momentarily fulfilling dream of being whisked away to star in your own mythical adventure. Thanks to solid motion controls in VR, actions are intuitive: you grab potions and knock away obstacles with your hands, you look around as you would in the real world, and there's even a nifty menu system based on the positions of your hands that sells the illusion that you're a real wizarding student.As you explore dungeons, you find various items to boost or augment your spells (one mod causes your fireballs to bounce around the room) to add some variety. It's meant to create the sense that you're learning magic and genuinely exploring and crafting new ideas or techniques on your own instead of simply following the rote, by-the-book rules you've learned up to that point. Some mods, like one that lets you guide spells remotely, change some functionality. But even then, their application doesn't meaningfully alter gameplay. A fireball is a fireball, essentially. It doesn’t help that many are cosmetic too, adding little more than confetti and flair to your casting. By the end of an 11-hour run, the rudimentary spell variety more than takes its toll.Even worse, movement during combat is a drag. Dodging is one-note--you'll be bouncing between two or three positions as you evade incoming spells and arrows from fantastical goblins and the like--and each time you do, you suddenly appear in a new spot. Immediately. This avoids the common VR problem with motion sickness--due to artificial locomotion via a joystick--but only for a time. Whenever combat really gets going (which, in this case, could be two or three enemies in the room all attacking at once), you're like a walking glitch, stuttering through the world. It trades the immediate discomfort of gradual movement for the more disorientating and equally unsettling feeling of constantly appearing in and out of existence in different places.The actual dungeons don't fare much better. There are ten different environments, yet they never feel distinct despite unique layouts and enemy types. Puzzles are remarkably similar, for example. Often you'll enter a room, and you'll need to kill some enemies and find a switch. Flip the switch, and the door opens. That's not all of it, certainly; one puzzle tasks you to align symbols around the room to match those found on a wall that revealed with a magical MacGuffin, but that's also not too far removed from Skyrim's ""rotate these columns to match the door, then pull the lever""--just in virtual reality. That novelty works a few times, but it wears painfully thin by the end.If there's one element of The Mage's Tale that shines, it's (occasionally) the dialogue. But even that comes with qualifications. You'll bump into some silly situations that play with the absurdity of the world from time to time. Talking walls are a staple, and they usually have weird problems. One wall seemed perplexed by the very existence of humans, and was annoyed by my zipping about (walls don’t tend to move much, after all). Another was drowning due to a flood, and tried to drink enough water to save himself, but ultimately needed my magic to drain the water. They (alongside your master's familiar) form the bulk of the characters you'll meet.The walls are delightful and cute, serving as a solid underpinning for the game's absurdist humor. The familiar, however, isn't--and, unfortunately, he's far more omnipresent. He follows you and complains about absolutely everything. And not just in the normal plucky sidekick way--his vitriol is crafted to get under your skin and goes well beyond excessive. He ruins almost every puzzle by explaining it and then calling you an idiot for not understanding. It is the worst kind of artificial humor: a dry cynicism that masquerades as cleverness and wit.Neither a groundbreaking VR experience nor a strong dungeon crawler, The Mage's Tale ultimately squanders its potential. It offers a couple of high points--some jokes do hit their marks from time to time--but there are so many problems, and there’s so little of substance to drive the experience forward, that The Mage's Tale feels more like a shallow experiment than a reason to get excited about VR. 
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621,Bridge Constructor Portal ,4, Bridge Constructor Portal lacks the charm and cleverness that made the original Portal games so enthralling.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/5/7/0/475981-657570.jpg,NS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bridge-constructor-portal-review/1900-6416868/,neg,"
Bridge Constructor Portal leans heavily upon its iconic forebears. GlaDOS, an uncaring-though-humorous AI, greets you at the beginning of many levels, setting the stage for the plentiful puzzles that lay before you. It sounds like the setup for another delicious brain-teaser that will tickle your funny bone while pushing your logic muscles. But neither the story nor the puzzles capture your imagination, resulting in a predictable slog that grows more tedious the deeper you get into the adventure. Even worse: I encountered a game-breaking bug that completely halted my progress at the home stretch.The story in Bridge Constructor Portal is little more than a collection of references to the previous Portal games. GlaDOS is back to make light of your shortcomings, but her insults feel like diluted copies of familiar quips, lacking the clever tongue-lashings that she used to so easily dish out. She's there to greet you with an insult at the beginning of some stages, and then you're left on your own in a bleak and bland test chamber. Periodic cutscenes borrow familiar artifacts from previous games, but do little with these props other than make you fondly remember happier days. During one such segment, a picture of Portal's famous cake appears on a computer screen while an instrumental version of ""Still Alive"" plays over the loudspeakers. This scene means nothing if you aren't familiar with that game...and it's just a quick nostalgia jab for those who are.As the name implies, Bridge Constructor Portal has you building a series of bridges in the facility made famous in Portal. The goal is to guide a self-driving forklift full of cute little stick figures from the entry point to a faraway exit--all while avoiding turrets, leaping over acidic lakes, and triggering switches. Building a bridge is no easy task, though; physics are a constant and punishing presence, forcing you to consider the impact of gravity as you build rickety structures. With only metal planks and guy-wires to hold your contraptions in place, you have to make smart use of your materials to ensure that the entire structure doesn't topple as soon as you begin.A handy ""best practices"" tutorial teaches you the fundamentals of architecture. Build a series of triangles, for instance, to hold a bridge in place, or affix an arch to add even more support for your road. Bolts in the ceilings and walls can bear a lot of weight if you hook guy-wires up to connecting points, but make sure you balance the bridge properly, or it's still going to cause your forklift to crash and burn as soon as it lays its wheel upon the road.All of the techniques you need are doled out slowly, so it's easy to get a handle on what the game is demanding of you. While you start out building simple ramps and roadways, you're soon sculpting hundred-piece structures that dangle impossibly high in the air. The early going is tense: I would hold my breath as the forklift sauntered across my swaying bridge, hoping that the guy-wires were strong enough to carry the weight. My forklift would often land on a bridge from too high a distance, and I would watch helplessly as it all toppled to the ground. Then it was a matter of going back to work, adding a few more supports and tweaking the angle of ramps, before once again testing my creation.It doesn't take long, though, before you've seen all of the obstacles Bridge Constructor Portal can dish out. Once you've mastered suspension bridges, oscillating bridges, and angles of incidence, the stages force you to go through the motions to show--once more--the tricks you already learned. The game tries to keep things fresh by injecting obstacles and items from the original Portal game into this one; you'll encounter talking turrets, companion cubes, speed goo, death lasers, bounce pads, flying balls, and (of course) portals. Later levels throw all of these into a single stage, but that only makes the experience more tedious, not more interesting.The game often confuses complexity with fun, as throwing in more moving pieces doesn't mean you're going to have to think harder.Bridge Constructor Portal is at its best when it focuses on one or two key ideas. Figuring out how to use a companion cube as a shield to block the laser attacks from a turret took enough clever construction that I was satisfied when my forklift glided gracefully through the exit. But the game often confuses complexity with fun, as throwing in more moving pieces doesn't mean you're going to have to think harder. Rather, it means you're going to spend most of your time making small adjustments, wallowing in small details instead of appreciating the greater whole that surrounds you.The best part of puzzle games is figuring out how to overcome a tricky obstacle. That's the easiest and shortest aspect of Bridge Constructor Portal, though. Long after you've devised a way through the portals, off the bouncing pads, and past the lasers, you're fiddling around with one small part of the contraption that is close, but oh so far, from the necessary perfection.A lot of the tedium comes from how editing works. In test chamber 49, for instance, I had to guide my forklift through a series of portals on the right side of the screen while crashing into turrets from behind, and hitting a button that would release a companion cube on the left side. The cube is supposed to knock down three more turrets and hit a switch that opens the exit. The problem is that I couldn't quite get the angle needed to guide the cube to its destination. So I would tweak a ramp, start the level up, and then wait 30 or so seconds until the forklift hit that switch to release the companion cube. Then, I would watch the cube fall, see where my mistake was, and move a ramp a few more pixels to try to get it in the right spot. And then... I'd start the whole process again. Tweak, wait 30 seconds, tweak, wait 30 seconds, tweak. There's no way to start a run from a certain point to iterate on the one problem area, so I went back and forth with this project for a half hour until I finally got it right.And then the game crashed.From beginning to end, it took me about an hour to pass test chamber 49. Most of the later stages take 30 minutes or longer to get right, and some took even more than an hour. Losing my progress after spending so much time constructing the perfect series of ramps and bridges was maddening. But I had no time to pout: I jumped right back into test chamber 49, moving quicker than my first time through, and got my trusty companion cube to knock down the turrets and trigger the exit door in about 20 minutes.And then I ran into an even bigger problem.Test chamber 50 is much easier than the previous stage, but I experienced a bug every time I reached the exit that forced the game to crash to the Switch OS. I tried to save my work before exiting, crossing my fingers that I wouldn't have to start from the beginning if the game crashed again--but the save function failed consistently, too. So I never got beyond test chamber 50, and never saw the last 10 challenges.Obviously, a game-breaking bug is a serious problem, but I was tired of Bridge Constructor Portal long before my progress was abruptly halted. This game falls short in just about every area; an amusing story or eye-catching visual design could have at least distracted from the dull puzzles, but you get no reprieve here. The game doesn't even feature any music while you're building the many bridges. Long after you've figured out how to pass a stage, you're still left tinkering with minute portions, adjusting ramps by mere pixels at a time, crossing your fingers that you landed on the exact angle needed to guide a companion cube or bounce a ball of light toward the wall trigger. Instead of testing your puzzle-solving ability, Bridge Constructor Portal just sees how long you can withstand tedium before you want to walk away from the whole endeavor.Editor's note: GameSpot was informed by the developer that the game-breaking bug mentioned in the review has now been patched. Our original review will remain as is, as a reflection of the game at the time it was released. - Peter Brown, March 27, 2018, 7:30 AM PT
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622,Fallout 76  - No Humans Allowed,4, Fallout's mutation into an online multiplayer hybrid leaves it weak and soulless.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/8/2/2/482770-673822.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fallout-76-review-no-humans-allowed/1900-6417040/,neg,"
Well, war has certainly changed. Fallout, the RPG series with a 20-year legacy, finds its latest entry taking another chance at braving a new direction. It puts a major focus on cooperating with other people in a world with perpetual activities that seek to sustain your engagement indefinitely. But Fallout 76 is a game without a strong focus. It introduces significant changes to the set structure of Fallout 4 to make it function as both a single-player and multiplayer experience. In doing so, both styles of play suffer from major compromises that exist only to serve the other, and as a result, both are weak. Fallout 76 can look and feel like its illustrious predecessors at times, but it's a soulless husk of an experience.Fallout 76 has no artificial human characters to interact with. The justification is that, because the dwellers of Vault 76 are tasked to be the first to re-enter and reclaim this post-apocalyptic America, there are very few coherent beings. Many of the folks who did survive nuclear annihilation conveniently died shortly before your arrival. Without established characters to populate the world, the vibe of 76 is an eerie one, and it often amplifies one of the series strengths: creating the feeling of desolation and otherness. There's a curiosity about the familiar but unknown environment that drives you to veer off the beaten path, visit places that once were, attempt to imagine what life might have been like before everything went to hell, and wonder what the hell has happened there since. Exploring a new wasteland and stumbling upon new settings, scenery, and oddities is one of Fallout's most enjoyable aspects, and it's 76's best trait.However, the lack of inhabitants is also Fallout 76's biggest problem. The game goes to great efforts to paint a picture that includes towns and cities with different populations and cultures, survivors who have banded together to form factions, and stories of people who managed to survive against all odds. But without having any of those people present to tell their stories personally, 76's world is limited to being little more than just an environmental exhibit with things to kill. It means the art of conversation is disappointingly absent, but more critically, it means there are no strong emotional anchors to help you become truly invested in the world, a complication that diminishes the game's other core activities.The biggest victim is the quest system. Without actually having people with needs and desires, initiating and undertaking quests frequently involves the use of explicit found-object storytelling tools--listening to audio logs, reading notes, and browsing through computer terminals for key information. A quest will often explore the stories of certain characters, but they're characters that have long since passed, and all you get are long monologues and one-way directives from a person who no longer exists and you can't interact with. Your actions ultimately won't affect anyone, or the rest of the world for that matter--every location you visit will be reset with items and enemies regularly--so it's difficult to stay motivated....there are no strong emotional anchors to help you become truly invested in the world...Some of these stories are intriguing to be sure, and when you come across a tale about a character who piques your interest, you get excited to discover more about their last living moments. But there's such an over-reliance on listening to disembodied voices and digging through pages of text in every aspect of the game that these standouts are easily lost. The lack of a more relatable and personal connection between your actions, the world, and its inhabitants--combined with your lack of influence--means quests begin to dissolve into wild goose chases around the world to check things off a list, and feel meaningless. It makes the idea of continuing to progress the story--listening to more audio logs, running across the country to search for more doohickeys, reading through more diary entries--feel exhausting.The reliance on things like audio logs and written notes also proves to be the biggest deterrent to playing Fallout 76 in multiplayer. By teaming up, you can explore the world together, get help in taking down difficult enemies, and complete any quest, but certain things are kept distinct to each individual player's experience. Containers that hold items, for example, will have unique loot for each person who opens them. But quest objective completion also isn't shared, and every member in your squad needs to activate things personally to have them count toward their progression.This is a great idea on paper, as it makes sure everyone sees each piece of a story themselves. But in playing with both good friends and strangers, I found that each person's individual need to advance quests severely hinders the flow of progress. Because of the need to wait for your squad to catch up, have each member take their own time to listen to important audio logs (which is impossible when you've got voice chat going), and search terminals for pertinent information, questing in multiplayer requires a lot of patience and courtesy. Add to that the fact that Fallout is already a game that encourages constant, time-consuming gear management (which penalizes your movement speed for being over-encumbered), as well as a rudimentary, occasionally tedious survival system (which asks you to maintain meters representing hunger and thirst), and the idea of having another squad member just feels like an additional burden.If you have a squad that is happy to skip the narrative content things will go much more smoothly, but then you're denying yourself the one vector that gives these quests flavor. Multiplayer is more enjoyable when you and your squad are just content to leisurely explore the world and get into scrapes, at least once the logistics of preparation are behind you. But the capacity for arbitrary fun is an unremarkable trait. The advantage of questing solo and not needing to wait around is definitely a big advantage, but it has its own obstacles too--packs of enemies will often have a handful of foes that are 10 or 20 levels above you, and having someone to watch your back is definitely a factor that needs consideration, warts and all.Fighting enemies also doesn't feel that meaningful in 76, a more morbid consequence of the lack of in-universe characters. The new region of Appalachia is filled with an assortment of delightfully mutated creatures both new and old, including humanoid enemies like the Scorched and Mole Miners who can wield firearms. But it isn't as entertaining to take on enemies that haven't wronged you or anyone you know. Without sadistic raiders and their despicable actions to be appalled by, interesting gang factions to get on the wrong side of, or lucid ghouls and super mutants to make you think twice about raising your weapon, every living being you encounter in 76 just feels like cannon fodder.The combat mechanics don't deal well with a lot of cannon fodder, either. Appalachia is filled with a large variety of multiplayer-focused public events that invite everyone on the server to gather and participate in a unique task tied to a particular location. But these mostly boil down to escort and defense missions that ask you to hold back multiple waves of enemies and perform basic objectives. The real-time shooting of Fallout 76 is mostly unchanged from Fallout 4 and is serviceable enough to make small skirmishes with either firearms or melee weapons feel fine, despite occasional technical hiccups. But the system is not good enough to make shooting hordes of enemies for 20 minutes in an event feel like anything other than a chore--the gunplay and movement are not satisfyingly responsive or kinetic enough to make them enjoyable for long periods.That's also partially due to the changes to V.A.T.S. What was once a strategic pause-style ability that allowed you to take time to assess your surroundings, target specific body parts, and make the most of your combat strengths, is now a primarily an opt-in real-time auto-aim system, a change presumably made for the purposes of multiplayer. If you decide to upgrade the skill, it serves its purpose in being able to make precision hits on limbs when the action is manageable, but in more intense situations this version of V.A.T.S. does little to bridge the limitations of the real-time combat system as it once did.Fallout 76 also has fewer opportunities to complete quests in your own unique ways, which exacerbates the sense that you don't really have a huge part to play in this wasteland. Traditional charisma skills are gone, but lockpicking, hacking, and stealth abilities remain and provide a little bit of variety. But the overwhelming majority of quests have clear linear throughlines to their respective goals, all of which involve shooting a lot of things.Some of the decisions in Fallout 76 are positive, though. The flexibility of the new perk system (which is now card-based) allows you to change your abilities at will, which has encouraged me to use Fallout's weirder skills, depending on my situation. In my experience, the game's unique take on player-versus-player competition is effective at deterring unprovoked attacks when exploring the world--killing another person is a lot of work for little reward if your target doesn't retaliate. Base-building carries over from Fallout 4 and comes with a few quality-of-life changes. You have the ability to move your base camp for a trivial fee, and you can save blueprints of entire arrangements for easy placement elsewhere. It's straightforward and pleasant, but like the rest of 76, it lacks the feeling of permanence and importance of building settlements in Fallout 4.Most disappointingly, when you do begin to find some small joy in exploring Fallout 76's world, you're often not far from falling victim to the series' now characteristic penchant for technical oddities. Whether caused by the game engine or the online server-based nature of the game, I've run into countless issues in the PC version, even after the game received a major patch within its first week of release. Problems like clipping through the world, frozen animations, entire buildings failing to load, enemies getting stuck in walls or just not moving, audio logs not playing, enemies spawning out of mid-air, delayed damage detection and world effects, server disconnections, and being unable to complete a quest because someone else in the world killed your target, requiring you to log on and off again until it respawns. These are just some examples, and experiences will vary, of course. But in my time with the game, Fallout 76 did not feel like it ran smoothly for extended periods, technical issues were severe and often frustrating, and they overshadowed any fondness that was, at that point, starting to grow.Fallout 76 attempts to execute on some significantly new ideas for the series, but with few exceptions, they notably limit the major facets of the game. The novelty of multiplayer can be mildly entertaining, but it's not an ideal way to enjoy mainline progression, and the shooting mechanics aren't strong enough to make the focus on combat-heavy activities genuinely enjoyable. Things feel better as a solo player, and the Appalachian landscape certainly has interesting things to see. But the absence of in-universe characters and your inability to make a meaningful impact on the world means becoming invested in the whole journey is incredibly difficult.Bethesda has stated it intends to continue supporting the game for a long time, but at launch, Fallout 76 is a poor experience. There are echoes of the series' admirable qualities, but look past that facade, past the cute Vault Boy animations, past the familiar radio tracks, and you'll find no heart--just an inconsequential wasteland doomed to be nuked over and over again.  


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623,Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot  - Falling Short,4, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot is an unsatisfying VR shooter that wastes the potential of piloting some of the series' most iconic enemies.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/8/7/5/483374-675875.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wolfenstein-cyberpilot-review-falling-short/1900-6417264/,neg,"
With MachineGames at the helm, Wolfenstein has enjoyed a resurgence during the last couple of years. Wolfenstein has managed to captivate with its strong characters and intriguing world-building, giving you a glimpse into an alternate future where the rules are rewritten and whole new terrifying possibilities are waiting to be explored. None of this is present in the series' first venture into VR, however. Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot isn't just lacking the elements that make its universe intriguing, but it's also dated by recent VR standards, with flat, unexciting action and little reason to return after one short playthrough.Set in 1980s, Cyberpilot puts you in the shoes of a pilot working for the French Resistance at the same time as the events in Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Your piloting skills are alluring to two French hackers who have managed to smuggle away a few Nazi war machines, giving you the chance to aim these monstrosities back at their creators. If you've ever cursed at being mauled by a Panzerhund, Cyberpilot initially seems like a great opportunity to flip the script.It doesn't take long for that feeling to fade, though. Three of Cyberpilot's four missions give you control of a new machine to pilot. The Panzerhund lets you dash towards enemies before melting them down with a mouth-mounted flamethrower, a small airborne drone makes sneaking around a Nazi bunker simple, and the more straightforward Zitadelle arms you with a high-powered machine gun and rocket launchers. Despite these varied abilities, Cyberpilot doesn't provide interesting challenges for you to test them against. Each mission is linear and frustratingly one-note. You keep moving forward through cramped and visually bland spaces, mowing down enemies in your way and occasionally taking a breather to heal up before the next encounter. The drone mission at least tries to shake things up by pivoting from all-out action to stealthy engagements, but the unresponsive AI and cramped level design don't allow you the satisfaction of a well-planned stealth kill.Since you're using machines armed with flamethrowers and unlimited rockets, combat should presumably be explosive and adrenaline-pumping. But Cyperpilot gives so little feedback to your actions that it's difficult to feel their impact at all. Enemies, for example, make no sounds when engulfed in flames or blown back by nearby explosions, and they almost always use the same animations when dying before disappearing from sight. The devastating weapons at your disposal offer no satisfying animations and subsequent sound effects that give them a real kick, which makes action feel limp and uninteresting.In between each mission, you can explore a multi-floored resistance bunker, using a lift to transition from a spacious loading bay to a dimly lit reception area adorned in abandoned Nazi regalia. These spaces look great and do a good job of reminding you of the imposing grip your enemies still have on European soil. Although this bleeds into the handful of missions you're sent on, Cyberpilot doesn't offer anything new or interesting to say about this alternative perspective on the resistance. The only other characters are your resistance handlers, who occasionally engage in some quirky banter between each other, but outside of that you're nothing but a tool to them, and you disappointingly get no new insights into Wolfenstein's world as a result.These brief interludes between missions also introduce you to each new pilotable machine in intimate fashion. Before being able to remotely control them, you need to hack your way past their security, which Cyberpilot makes out to be far more complicated than it really is. While you're being fed descriptions of intricate wiring and defensive subroutines, all you are doing is using motion controls to remove a chip from the machine in question, plugging it into a nearby monitor, and then replacing it after a brief pause. Getting to see the details of each chillingly monstrous Nazi machine up close, in VR, without fearing death is surprisingly fascinating, but there's not much else to do during these sequences. That makes each of these forced interludes feel drawn out and unnecessary.Cyberpilot can be played with either the PlayStation Move controllers or a DualShock 4, and neither is great. With a DualShock 4, combat feels more familiar. You use the thumbsticks to freely move around and rotate (either smoothly or in adjustable segments) while using motion control to aim. In this configuration, your two hands move as one, which makes activities outside of combat a chore. The PlayStation camera can only track the front-facing light from the DualShock 4, so reaching for objects on either side of you is borderline impossible in some cases.Using the Move controllers changes that immediately, and also gives you more freedom in combat. Moving your arms independently from one another lets you bash on your special attack button and heal at the same time, which is impossible to do when you're tethered together by a seemingly invisible set of handcuffs. As a tradeoff, movement is trickier using the Move controllers. Rotation is mapped to face buttons while lateral movement is controlled using the big, mushy PlayStation button on the face of the controller. It's far less ideal than the DualShock 4, leaving you with a decision to make between the lesser of two evils.There's no reason to jump into Cyberpilot if you're looking for another avenue to explore more of Wolfenstein's world. You won't have too much time to adjust, either, given that Cyberpilot's four missions can easily be finished in less than 90 minutes. Beyond reaching its flat ending, there's nothing else to do to make what time you do have more engaging. There are no collectibles to find, alternative mission routes to explore, or exciting mission set pieces to replay for the thrill of it. It gives Cyberpilot a distinct tech demo feeling; since VR games have become increasingly more adept at using the hardware in unique ways, Cyberpilot feels outdated by comparison.There's no reason to jump into Cyberpilot if you're looking for another avenue to explore more of Wolfenstein's world. This straightforward shooter lacks the punch to make its action exhilarating and breaks up combat with even more repetitive and slower-paced interludes where you'll do the bare minimum with motion controls to achieve simple and mundane repair tasks. Beyond looking striking for a VR game in some places, there's nothing about Cyberpilot that warrants your time.
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624,Batman: The Enemy Within Episode 5  - No More Joking Around,9, Telltale finishes strong with an introspective look at the relationship between Batman and Joker.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/2/3/5/466895-637235.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/batman-the-enemy-within-episode-5-review-no-more-j/1900-6416886/,pos,"
In the season finale for The Enemy Within, an exhausted, bloody, and beaten Joker asks Batman a question: ""Did you ever think of me as your friend?"" It's a spark of vulnerability in a character that is typically sowing discontent and wreaking havoc. Unlike many of the other decision-making points, there's no timer pressuring you to respond, and in that moment I reflected on the choices I had made up until then. I asked myself whether I feigned friendship with him in the pursuit of justice, or if it was genuine.Telltale's Batman: The Enemy Within convincingly presented me with the idea that I could find salvation for the Joker. That I could use the Dark Knight's unwavering sense of justice as a guiding hand, hopefully to shape him into something other than the maniacal Clown Prince of Crime. I was wrong, and I failed.Click image to view in full screen galleryIn the end, events played out as they always do: A cackling clown and a man dressed as a bat standing on different sides of the law. This is a disappointing bait and switch, but only because I let myself think things could be different--I saw hope where there was none. The fact that I bought into the idea speaks to the strength of the writing and performances throughout the series. Despite this letdown, Episode 5 remains a compelling end to a story in which Batman becomes a participant in the creation his greatest adversary.While that's not a unique concept, 'Same Stitch' takes the idea that Joker exists because of Batman and explores it more directly. Where comics allow subtlety and subtext to suggest the symbiotic nature between the two characters, Telltale's take is more overt, and makes a stronger, clearer statement because of it: Maybe Batman is the reason villains exist in Gotham, and maybe his crusade is doing as much harm as it is good.In possession of a deadly virus and being hunted by an out-of-control Amanda Waller, John Doe comes out of hiding as a vigilante calling himself Joker. That's the person I shaped though my actions as Batman. Wherever possible, I put my faith in him, trusted him to do the right thing, and gave him the benefit of the doubt, hoping it would have a positive impact. In response Doe modeled himself after Batman, complete with Jokerangs, a grapnel gun with chattering teeth, and the overwhelming compulsion to see justice served.But, despite my intentions, I had unwittingly placed Joker on the path to realising his villainous destiny, albeit with a short detour through vigilantism. The episode begins with Batman trying to recover the deadly virus in Doe's possession and stop him from doing harm. Amanda Waller, meanwhile, wants to capture Doe and Batman, and resorts to using villains to get the job done, putting together a Suicide Squad of sorts.Events quickly spiral out of control. Having been blamed for killing The Riddler, Joker becomes focused on proving that Waller is the real villain in Gotham. His morality becomes black and white, and Telltale does a great job of forcing Batman to admit there are shades of grey. As Waller argues her case, it's hard not agree with her that Batman has taken similar measures in his crusade. This showing of sympathy, and Batman's insistence that she face trial instead of suffering a more immediate fate frustrates Joker, making him lash out.[Joker's] morality becomes black and white, and Telltale does a great job of forcing Batman to admit there are shades of greyBatman's rigid code of conduct and unwavering morality erodes Joker's sense of what it means to be a hero and conflicts with his need for reparations. The result is is a mentally unstable figure that acts on violent impulses and lives by a twisted sense of self-serving principles. Instead of dropping John Doe into a vat of green chemicals to create Joker, Episode 5 presents your influence as Batman to be one of the reasons Joker is born.Same Stitch manages to be introspective and thoughtful, while also providing plenty of levity. Joker's stint as Batman's sidekick is incredibly memorable, thanks to excellent voice acting and more than a few funny lines. Joker behaves as you'd imagine any Batman fanboy would if given the opportunity to go on a mission with the Dark Knight, revelling in going back to back with his idol, running through the ridiculous superhero names he considered before arriving at Joker, joyfully riding in the Batmobile, and taking pleasure in being mended by Alfred. Sadly, the fun and games are short-lived, as before long he's on the warpath.Episode 5 also gives Alfred a more prominent and meaningful role. Having been there for every step of Bruce's journey, from orphaned child to vigilante superhero, he's begins to realise that perhaps he's also been a negative influence, enabling Bruce's destructive lifestyle and failing in his job as a surrogate father. Telltale takes some bold steps to change the dynamic between the two characters, and it will be interesting to see how this carries over into future seasons, if they happen.Click image to view in full screenOverall, Episode 5 of Telltale's Batman: The Enemy Within provides plenty of thrills and is a satisfying conclusion to the story. Although there are a few set-piece fights that are dynamic to watch, much of the actual gameplay remains focused on walking around environments and interacting with points of interest. It's a shame that the series as a whole didn't offer more opportunities to solve puzzles, as it did in the earlier in the series, but given the satisfying story payoff that's easy to forgive.Over the course of five episodes, the Batman: The Enemy Within has delicately developed John Doe and pulled strings to position Batman as a key player in his transition into Joker. While Telltale's first Batman season stuck a bit too close to established mythos and delivered an underwhelming ending, the second is a memorable Joker origin story that Bat-fans should make a point of playing.
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625,The Walking Dead: The Final Season Episode 4 ,9," With Take Us Back, Telltale's Walking Dead meets its true ending with the grace it deserves.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/2/4/2/466896-637242.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-walking-dead-the-final-season-episode-4-review/1900-6417112/,pos,"
(Editor's note: This review contains spoilers for Episode 3.) About 20 minutes into Take Us Back, the finality of it all truly starts to sink in. This is the last chance we get to ensure Clementine is going to be okay. These are the last lessons we teach A.J. This is the last ever episode of The Walking Dead. So, it's rather appropriate that Take Us Back is very much about legacy, about taking everything Clementine's learned--and you along with her--and wrapping it all up in a bow.It's not nearly as clean cut as that; it is The Walking Dead, of course, and the night gets plenty dark before the dawn. After Clem gets her bearings, and you get to decide what to do with Lilly, it's a rather breathless race to keep ahead of the horde of walkers the Ericson kids have brought down on the immediate area. They're everywhere, and in a particularly hostile mood after Lilly's trigger-happy goons draw their attention. On top of that, weaponry is in short supply, which means there's much more avoidance than shooting this time around. For what it's worth, the shooting is simplified in this episode, with bow-and-arrow moments made much more forgiving and impactful than before.That said, the episode starts out as another rowdy QTE festival. But the real meat of it begins about a third of the way in, when Clementine makes the fateful decision of whether or not to trust A.J. as his own person, able to make tough decisions on his own. Here, more than Walking Dead has ever done, the decisions of the entire season bear fruit. A.J. will automatically make two of the biggest choices of the season--arguably, the series--based on your teachings. It's a fascinating narrative decision. Much of the climax here is out of your hands in all but the most basic mechanical sense, but in its own way, you've been deciding how this will play out for the entire series. No matter what, you're going to have to live with the fact that these are the logical consequences of your actions. This is your legacy, and even if A.J. makes what you might consider the right choices, in true Walking Dead fashion, none of them are pretty.The one notable issue with letting the episode play out this way is that the weight of A.J.'s decisions overshadow quite a few of the smaller threads set up by previous episodes. Arguably, Episode 3's party was meant to cement Ericson and the kids therein as a legitimate home and family. But while getting back to Ericson is ultimately the end goal of the episode, Episode 4 is too breathless and urgent to slow down and explore the particulars of what home will look like until it's all said and done.It's possible that's the point, though. As mentioned before, there is a finality to this episode, and without delving too far into spoilers, the ending is far less about the home of the present than about painting a detailed portrait of its future and what kind of people will be shaping it going forward. That portrait is one of contrasts, of things we've never seen before in this series up to this point--really, in any moving version of The Walking Dead--and yet are so simple we've taken them for granted. It's an understated ending, for sure, until you consider just how much chaos and distrust and dysfunction have defined this series. There is nothing more impactful than understatement as far as this universe is concerned.We know what kind of legacy Clementine and you, the player, leave on A.J., but if there's any comment on what Telltale's legacy looks like, it's in the finale as well, in a stretch where you have control of A.J. instead of Clementine. Here, the trademark Telltale UI has changed, no longer that distinctive up-down-left-right grid of responses, but a floating collection of potential thoughts or emotions to have. It looks a little like the crucial time-stopping decision clouds of Life Is Strange. It acts a little like the emotion-based response system of Mass Effect Andromeda. It feels like a statement by a group of developers whose legacy is now safe and sound. It's rare that a shuttered studio gets to dictate the final grace notes of their body of work, but that's the opportunity Telltale had with these final episodes, and it's one that was not wasted in any way. The Walking Dead ends not with a bang, but an accomplished sigh.
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626,Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight  - A Spotlight In The Dark Hour,9," Even though the original RPG had a somber tone, the wonderful personalities and music of Persona 3 shine bright in this fun, heartfelt, and vibrant rhythm game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/3360000-p3dmn.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/persona-3-dancing-in-moonlight-review-a-spotlight-/1900-6417045/,pos,"
""Wherever you are, we'll meet again,"" artist Yumi Kawamura sings at the closing of the theme song ""Our Moment."" It's a track that beautifully captures both the joy of seeing old friends again and bittersweet memories left by Persona 3. It's a sentiment that rings throughout Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight, a wonderful rhythm game that celebrates the great RPG by reuniting its charming cast of characters and putting its incredible, unique soundtrack in the spotlight.The rhythm gameplay system first established in Persona 4: Dancing All Night returns; six button inputs border the screen and notes flow from the center out to the corresponding input. Double notes, holds, and DJ scratches (with the flick of the analog stick or with L1/R1) keep note patterns varied, and makes things delightfully hectic on the highest difficulty. There are plenty of beginner-friendly options as well with four difficulty settings and several modifiers for assistance. It's a fun rhythm system that's supported by note patterns that flow seamlessly with the fantastic tracklist--there's an undeniable satisfaction to nailing perfect combos as the audible claps, tambourines, and scratches sync with the beat of the song.Yukari's on her way to a perfect combo and dance routine in front of the Paulownia Mall fountain.I'll be the first to admit that there's a thematic dissonance between dancing in flashy outfits and Persona 3's darker tone, which might be off-putting for some die-hard fans of that game. Still, it's an absolute delight to be with the SEES crew again, reincarnated in 3D models in the same vein as Persona 5's art style. It's a reimagining of Yukari's cheerful demeanor, Mitsuru's stern attitude, and Junpei's goofiness. Everyone goes all out and dances with impressive fluidity, especially with how partner/group dances are choreographed with natural imperfections. I do wish we had the fearless squad member Shinji from the start, but he's available in a DLC track. And sadly, the ferocious, adorable Shiba Inu Koromaru and the Persona 3 Portable female protagonist are missing. Regardless, there's an overwhelming sense of joy in seeing these characters together again. And the fact that old locations are renovated with modern visuals makes them feel new--the Iwatodai Dorms, Port Island Station, Paulownia Mall, Gekkoukan High School, Tartarus, it's all here.The remixes and remasters evoke not just a sense of nostalgia, but have a striking quality that breathes new life into the series.Most of all, Dancing In Moonlight stands out with a tracklist that spans the course of Persona 3's history, which includes songs from Persona 3 FES, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, and Persona 3 Portable. It gives a musical variety that's attached to so many great memories but that's also exciting to play. The remixes and remasters evoke not just a sense of nostalgia, but have a striking quality that breathes new life into the series. ""Heartful Cry"" has an unrelenting melodic-punk twist, and ""Memories Of You"" gets an electro-pop remix that remains heartfelt. ""When The Moon Reaches For The Stars"" and ""Light the Fire Up In the Night"" are have their full-length versions that slap harder than ever. The ending montage for ""Brand New Days"" and video for ""Burn My Dread: Last Battle""--two songs on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum--capture their vibes perfectly. Even the Persona Super Live 2017 performance of the Persona Q boss theme ""Laser Beam"" made it into the tracklist. It may not be playable, but the song that fills the background during conversations, which samples the melody of ""Our Moment"" and the backing vocals of ""Want To Be Close"", is a soothing track that beautifully blends the old and new. Dancing In Moonlight carries the lasting impact of Persona 3's soundtrack.Unlike Persona 4: Dancing All Night, there is no traditional story mode; outside of dancing, there are Social Events. The overarching premise is that SEES gets stuck in a dream state where Elizabeth from the Velvet Room asks the crew to dance their hearts out. It's silly, but it's enough to provide the context necessary for Social Events; a series of jovial scenes where characters simply banter. There isn't much in terms of new character development, though they do have a newfound determination to dance. Social Events play off of what you already know about the cast; Akihiko is still obsessed with getting stronger and counting calories, Aigis is still working her way around typical human mannerisms, and Fuuka continues to embrace her supportive role. It's wonderful to hang out with them again and watch conversations play out, especially since most of the original voice cast has returned--you also have the option for the original Japanese voice acting.Still, it's an absolute delight to be with the SEES crew again, reincarnated in 3D models in the same vein as Persona 5's art style. It's a reimagining of Yukari's cheerful demeanor, Mitsuru's stern attitude, and Junpei's goofiness.Unlocking outfits and accessories for your squad is also tied to viewing Social Events, so if you're into customizing their getups, it's further incentive to hang out. Outfits range from modest to utterly ridiculous; the Gekkoukan tracksuit and casual winter clothes look great, but putting Junpei into a snowman costume and Ken in a reindeer suit is hilarious. Social Events also provide motivation for playing in different ways since each character has specific conditions for unlocking their scenes, like passing songs using certain modifiers or wearing several outfits or accessories. It's well worth it, especially for the room visits. Even if it's just the team's dorm rooms, visiting these places in first-person brings to life characters you've known for years.Compliments from Mitsuru are hard to come by, great work Fuuka.Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight puts the spotlight on one of the strongest parts of the entire series: the music. Its fusion of pop, rock, hip-hop, electronica showcases some of the incredible work of series composer Shoji Meguro and company. Dancing In Moonlight is particularly special because of the strong remixes and remasters of familiar songs, recreations of places we've been, and reimagination of characters we've long known. You may find the overall premise a little strange, but if you let loose--just as the SEES crew has done--you'll find a brilliant rhythm game weaved into an amazing, evocative soundtrack.


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627,Football Manager 2018 ,9," With a significant new addition and impactful overhauls built atop its already-solid foundations, Football Manager 2018 is every bit the compelling time sink as its predecessors.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/9/4/8/468427-640948.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/football-manager-2018-review/1900-6416818/,pos,"
With each passing year, Sports Interactive iterates on the long-standing fundamentals of its Football Manager series. A slight tweak here and there: applying some ease of use adjustments, or tinkering with the 3D match engine--like a manager moving pieces around a whiteboard. Some of these tweaks might not become evident until you've spent hundreds of hours entrenched in the virtual dugout, while others may only affect those eccentric enough to deploy a tactic featuring a Raumdeuter. In Football Manager 2018, minor refinements are similarly sprinkled throughout; but, crucially, there's also a significant new addition, and other impactful overhauls, that are palpable from the get-go, profoundly changing the way you manage and interact with your team on a daily basis.The first of these is a new module called Dynamics that focuses on the topsy-turvy world of player morale. The concept of squad happiness has existed in Football Manager since the early days, but the cause and effect of your actions was previously hidden behind an algorithm we weren't privy to, which made managing your player's mood a case of pure guesswork and gradually learning through repetition. That all changes in FM 2018, as each interaction with your squad now has a clear, defined outcome that helps keep your chosen group of expensive primadonnas in check. A detailed hierarchy displaying your team leaders and most influential players advises you on who not to annoy; social groups determine which individuals sit around the breakfast table with each other based on parameters like their shared nationality and how long they've been at the club; and myriad other menus track your player's individual mood, their confidence in you, and the consequences all of these variables has on team chemistry.Click image to view in full screenA harmonious squad generally leads to better results on the pitch, with the team's collective mental state contributing to the quality of their positioning, vision, and reactions during the course of a match--making it imperative for you to maintain your team's high spirits if you have any notions of success. Football is a results-based business after all, and player power is definitely a factor in FM 2018. If the squad is displeased with how you're doing on match days, or how you're handling their various personalities off the pitch, you're liable to find yourself unemployed. Thankfully, with the addition of a hierarchy and social groups, there's a surfeit of valuable information guiding your decision making that helps you understand how to handle different types of player.If a rugged team leader comes into your office complaining about a lack of playing time, you're going to have to weigh up the risks of introducing him to the starting line-up when he might be off form, or face incurring a potential player revolt if you turn him down and piss him off. Conversely, if a player on the lower rungs of the hierarchy comes to see you with the same issue, telling him he'll have to remain patient is less likely to upset even a small portion of the dressing room, and may not bother anyone at all. Admittedly, conversing with players in FM still lacks the subtlety of believable human interactions, but with all of this new information on hand, player reactions appear more logical than ever, and keeping influential players onside will ensure there are fewer unhappy players knocking on your door. It's a fun, personable new module to toy with, and it emboldens Football Manager's recent focus on the human side of the beautiful game.Meanwhile, an overhauled medical centre places an increased emphasis on Sports Scientists, with each one providing you with crucial information on how and why your players are suffering from injuries, and how you can counteract their pulled hamstrings and twisted ankles from occurring too frequently. If there's a busy period coming up where you've got, say, three matches in seven days, you'll be advised on which players are most at risk of sustaining injuries from the wear and tear of successive action. It forces you to be more proactive with your training schedules and player selection, as you're encouraged to adjust the intensity of training sessions on a week-by-week basis, and intelligently rotate your team in an attempt to keep your squad healthy without sacrificing results, (which also ties into Dynamics and how you can maintain squad harmony through frugal management of your team's playing time).The 3D match engine does continue its steady progression after a poor showing in FM 2016--and the same can be said of this series as a whole.Dynamics also factors into FM 2018's improved scouting system. When it comes to finding new players, you're now able to set a scouting budget: spend more and you'll cast your net wider; spend less and you can rely purely on the existing knowledge of your scouts. However much you spend, the process of unearthing new talent is slow. Your scouts will gradually build a picture of the type of player you're looking at, represented by a rating out of 100 that covers their attributes and also the type of personality they are. A player might be good enough from the statistical side of things, but will they gel with your squad? Maybe they don't fit into any social groups, or maybe they carry too much influence and will risk upsetting the balance of your dressing room. These are the types of things you have to consider when signing a new player, and it makes each transfer window much more engaging.AI logic has been modified, too, ensuring other teams are smarter at handing their transfer business. You're unlikely to see the likes of PSG spending ludicrous amounts of money to stockpile talent they're only going to leave rotting on the bench--as has been the case in previous years. Transfer fees and budgets have also skyrocketed to reflect these astronomical times, with teams (particularly in the Premier League) holding out for more money for even the most marginal of talents.When it comes to assembling your team on the pitch, the tactical interface is relatively unchanged. There are new player roles like the Carrilero and Mezzala, and more player instructions--such as the opportunity to direct your central midfielders into wider areas--that give you more options when it comes to establishing your team's playing style. But it's disappointing that this aspect of Football Manager hasn't seen any substantial developments. Building your tactical plan is still far too rigid and restrictive, and would benefit from giving you more control over how your team functions, particularly during specific phases of play. The current tactical interface is serviceable, and there's now a plethora of useful analysis that pinpoints the strengths and weaknesses of your setup, but a more robust system would elevate this aspect of the series in a crucial way.Once you emerge out of the tunnel, the 3D match engine is at least better at demonstrating how each team follows your tactical setup. Any adjustments you make mid-match are immediately tangible, and players have enhanced intelligence all over the pitch. You'll see strikers timing their runs behind the defensive line, players opening up their bodies to curl Thierry Henry-esque finishes into the bottom corner, and midfielders will generally play a more expansive brand of football--if you let them. There are still baffling moments where players will inexplicably stop dead in their tracks, which is particularly troublesome in defence. And goalkeepers are still inconsistent--one moment they're saving everything that's thrown at them, the next they're palming a daisycutter into their own net. It's certainly not perfect, then, but the 3D match engine does continue its steady progression after a poor showing in FM 2016--and the same can be said of this series as a whole.For a game that's so consuming you might not even realise the sun's gone down, it feels almost irresponsible to proclaim that giving you more things to do is a resounding positive. Yet the way these new and overhauled systems coalesce with Football Manager's deep and emotional fundamentals is fantastic. The series' propensity for telling emergent stories has only increased with this emphasis on player personalities and morale, and it bleeds into every other facet of Football Manager 2018's design, from transfers and injuries, to team selection and tactical considerations. These are changes that tilt the simulation closer to reality with captivating aplomb, and ensure that the armchair managers among us are kept busy for another whirlwind 12 months of 40-yard screamers and cup final heartbreak. 
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628,Phantom Doctrine : Tactical Espionage Action,9, Phantom Doctrine blends several complex mechanics and a well-realized Cold War setting into one brilliantly engaging experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/7/6/7/469307-642767.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/phantom-doctrine-review-tactical-espionage-action/1900-6416958/,pos,"
It's 1983. The Cold War is underway and there's a global conspiracy being perpetrated by a mysterious organization called Beholder. Fighting against Beholder are you and your rival organization, The Cabal. In Phantom Doctrine, you have the choice of playing as either an American CIA or a Russian KGB agent in charge of their own group of spies, but regardless of your alliance, every move you make needs to be carefully considered or there will be world-ending consequences. This feeling of high stakes strategic decision-making and a constant sense of urgency will become second nature as you progress through this engrossing campaign.Tension and suspicion are ingrained throughout Phantom Doctrine to great effect. Its isometric turn-based combat system is rewardingly complex, steeped with the feeling of paranoia, where every variable decision and tactic needs to be carefully considered--even before a mission begins. The sprawling narrative is full of intriguing characters and plot twists befitting of a spy epic, with a distinct sense of distrust in voice performances (both Russian and English), and a noir soundtrack to perpetuate the overall atmosphere.The isometric turn-based tactical combat system may look outwardly similar to other games in the same genre--action points, cover, and overwatch will be familiar concepts--but there are also many unique intricacies to internalize, and it will take some time to learn due to a large number of options available when it comes to completing objectives. Going in loud and hard is a viable option, and Phantom Doctrine even features an exciting room-breaching mechanic. But it is far more rewarding to use stealth tactics due to the wealth of strategies available. You can send in a couple of disguised spies and do everything underneath the enemy's nose; you can use your supports to help scout out an optimal path, snipe troublesome minions, or send in a smoke grenade as a distraction; you can silently eliminate everyone and hide the bodies before anyone notices; you can even send in sleeper agents to do your dirty work for you.You can also choose to sacrifice some of your mission time to conduct a reconnaissance run, which will place you in a much better position during the subsequent mission since it opens up the options of strategically placed support agents and disguises. But if you find yourself in a time-sensitive position, then no support options will be available and the margins of error are much narrower. While you can still complete missions in whatever manner you see fit, a single false move can carry greater consequences to your campaign, compared to the relatively leniency that proper preparation and contingencies can give you. Should a mission go sideways, hard decisions must be made, such as whether to leave an agent behind and risk them getting captured, or trying to evacuate everyone at the risk of no one surviving. These field missions are exciting because Phantom Doctrine manages to balance many complex, variable mechanics with a welcome flexibility in tactical decision-making, making it satisfying to play, characteristically distinct, and thematically appropriate.The base- and character-building elements of Phantom Doctrine are just as well realized as the combat systems. These utilize a familiar ant farm-style perspective that splits your base into distinct areas, such as a workshop and analytics department and interrogation rooms, all of which are available to upgrade through the course of the campaign. The most noteworthy room, however, is the intelligence boardroom. Here, Phantom Doctrine takes the well-known investigative trope of ""corkboard covered with photos and strings” and turns it into an enjoyable minigame.As your agents uncover intelligence and find secret files from missions and informants, everything will be collected and pinned to a corkboard, requiring you to decipher the procedurally-generated clues in order to unlock bonuses or progress the narrative. It's the perfect mechanical expression to amplify Phantom Doctrine's espionage themes, and figuring out how a collection of clues relate to one another by linking them all together with yarn is immensely satisfying.However, don't think that your corkboards and HQ are entirely safe from harm. Enemy spies are constantly looking for you during more macro-oriented strategy sections, and if you send your spies to participate in more attention-grabbing activities, you risk your location being discovered. If found out, you'll be forced to relocate your entire base of operations and be set back in your campaign, or be hit with an ambush. It's a compelling consideration that keeps you cautious and thinking twice about every move you make.As a senior agent, you're also in charge of hiring, training, and assigning jobs around the globe to your fellow spies. The character-leveling system is deep, and it requires careful strategic planning to build and grow a team of agents while making sure you have access to a wide range of skills and abilities that can be applied across various mission types. You will also occasionally need to make executive decisions that can affect a fellow agent's relationship with you, for better or worse. They may be caught in a tough situation abroad and you're given the choice to leave them, dedicate some resources to help them, or launch an all-out rescue. Depending on your choice, the agent may become more loyal to you, go AWOL, or even defect.But the game will also sometimes throw unexpected events at you that occur beyond your control, such as a spy that you've employed for a majority of your campaign game revealing themselves to be a double agent the whole time. More shockingly, there's the potential to discover that one of your best spies is a brainwashed sleeper agent in the midst of battle, and have them turn against your team. Traitorous surprises can happen procedurally in addition to being part of the plot, and they brutally emphasize the Cold War paranoia that Phantom Doctrine conveys, creating genuinely upsetting, but incredibly effective, moments.While all-encompassing paranoia is perfectly encapsulated in Phantom Doctrine's mechanics, writing, and voice acting, the visual presentation leaves much to be desired. Cutscenes are sparse, and still images are the primary narrative delivery device, but neither is particularly easy on the eyes. The cutscenes are drab, and while the still images fare a little better, most are unimaginative. The most egregiously noticeable elements are the character models, which all look unnatural and outdated, and the monotonous location design which makes most places look unremarkable and virtually identical.In spite of the lackluster visuals, Phantom Doctrine succeeds in making an incredible impression with its intricate and engaging mechanics. There is a lot to admire, with a single-player campaign taking about 40 hours to complete, full of varied and interesting mainline missions and procedurally-generated side content. The ability to play as either a CIA, KGB, or Mossad agent (the latter unlocked after one complete playthrough) also offers the tantalizing prospect of different narrative perspectives. Phantom Doctrine takes the familiar framework of isometric turn-based strategy and confidently repurposes it into a unique and satisfying experience. It wholly embodies the paranoia and tension of the 1980's Cold War setting in every aspect of its numerous gameplay systems, and completely immerses you in that all-encompassing state of mind. 


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629,Guacamelee 2  - Ready For A Challenge,9, Guacamelee 2 doubles down on what worked in the original and presents the most formidable challenges yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/2/5/3/474575-668253.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/guacamelee-2-review-ready-for-a-challenge/1900-6416962/,pos,"
The mighty luchador Juan already had a devil of a time in the first Guacamelee, but that's nothing compared to his second round. Guacamelee 2 is the best kind of sequel, doubling down on everything that worked in the original. Though it's diabolically challenging, it always feels fair, letting its meticulously crafted level design and self-aware humor shine through.It begins a few years after the original, with Juan, now married to Lupita (El Presidente's daughter), raising two precocious kids in a tiny house on the outskirts of Pueblucho. At least, that's what's happening in the good timeline. In the Darkest Timeline, one of dozens of parallel dimensions in--ahem--the Mexiverse, Juan actually dies trying to defeat the previous big boss, Carlos Calaca. A hulking meatslab of a lucha named Salvador is the one who finishes the job, and he hopes to use a sacred, arcane guacamole recipe meant only for the gods to merge the land of the dead with the realm of the living. That has dire consequences, of course, and Juan once again must mask up and trek all across Mexico for the power to defeat Salvador and his minions.Though there are some new additions, the fundamentals of Guacamelee haven't undergone any sweeping changes. The clean look of the first game has been upgraded with some beautiful, evocative lighting effects, and the score has more variety, weaving hooks and catchy breakbeats with a wider range of Latin melodies, but that's about it, aesthetically. The atmosphere is still firmly in the realm of eye-catching and dazzling cartoon aesthetics, but even just those minor tweaks add just the right touch of looming dread to fit Guacamelee 2's intensity.Structurally, Guacamelee 2 maintains a balance between Metroidvania and side-scrolling beat-'em-up, and it doesn't feel like either genre is being lost in the mix. Just strolling into a room to lay the smackdown on skeletons still feels big and brutal, the way a wrestler slamming an opponent into the pavement absolutely should. A split-second fiesta in the upper right-hand corner that rewards you for big combos is the chuckle-worthy cherry on top of a savage job well done. Hours upon hours later, it never gets old watching the numbers rack up.The magic lies in how the deadly physicality of your moveset directly feeds into where and how you can explore. Every new move--a frog slam, a flying uppercut--is more than just a way to lay waste to the undead menace, but the keys to mastering your environment. Taking care of a stone barrier between you and the next room, where the solution isn't some key you picked up clear across the map but the overkill of a big, booming punch or a massive headbutt, is satisfying like little else--especially coupled with the innate Metroidvania joy of being able to backtrack into an area and open up a route you couldn't take before with extreme, gratifying prejudice.Guacamelee 2 retains the physicality of the original, but it focuses more on letting you use your physical moveset as a means of traversal and staying off the ground. Along with Juan's punches, kicks, and grab-and-slam maneuvers, a new magical grappling mechanic can shoot Juan off into different directions, which, until you earn the ability to fly, is the primary way you get through vertical sections of the map or areas where the ground is a hazard. Juan is once again able to turn into a chicken, but what was a cute, occasional gimmick is now integral to gameplay and the touchstone of all of the most delightfully absurd elements of the plot. Chicken Juan now has a high-powered moveset of his own, including firing himself diagonally into enemies and obstacles, sliding through tight spaces, and floating through the air.As it turns out, staying off the ground is a job requiring more finesse than fight, and finesse is a trait for far more lithe and wiry wrestlers than Juan. The challenges of traversal you face are demanding, but it can absolutely be done, and the greatest challenge of Guacamelee 2 is looking at every obstacle and determining how to execute each of Juan's abilities--only some of which were designed specifically for traversal purposes--to get to a very precise target. Later challenges even require you to change from lucha to chicken Juan and back again for the same obstacle. Guacamelee 2 will frustrate those who don't cultivate the skills, but the exhilaration of succeeding and opening up a giant chunk of the map as a result is a wonderful motivator.While you can now access upgrades at any time--rather than only at checkpoints--obtaining upgrades isn't just a matter of having enough gold but also performing feats in-game. Want to upgrade your health? You'll need to have found and opened a certain number of chests. Want more power out of a certain move? You'll need to have killed enough enemies with the basic version first. The side effect is that you're given further motivation to explore your environment and engage with even the easiest fights. Gold is still needed to make the purchase, however, and things do get mildly unbalanced there as the game goes on--after a few key upgrades, you'll be able to earn more gold than you can spend just from getting into one fight with a low-level goon.Straightforward hand-to-hand fights usually aren't terribly difficult. Every enemy has a weakness, and once you figure out what attack leaves them wide open, it's just a matter of you learning how best to capitalize. The danger comes from the placement. To the game’s great credit, no gauntlet of enemies in the game is unfair or unbeatable, they just require a keen eye for picking up the numerous, sly visual cues that tell you exactly what’s possible in a given area.There is, however, another way to earn the enhancements you'll need to take the fight to Salvador: Challenge Rooms. These tricky, self-contained obstacle courses with a treasure at the end are numerous in Guacamelee 2. The challenges themselves are wickedly conceived and executed, often designed to get you bouncing off walls, flying across rooms, and barrelling towards the ground at maximum speed, just barely missing a fatal hazard. Typically, you'll need to use every single available move in your repertoire to emerge victorious--anything less than surgical precision and command over the physics and minutiae of everything Juan can do will get you instantly killed.The issue with the Challenge Rooms is that the reward at the end can vary. When you survive a rough room, and you're rewarded with a heart piece that extends Juan's life, you can walk away knowing it was all worth it. Getting through a difficult room but only receiving 400 gold, can feel like a slap in the face, especially when money is no object.Thankfully, with infinite lives and the game's generous checkpoints, you're never too far from where you started should you fail. You will scream and curse at the screen often, but there's no luck, glitches, or happy accidents involved in conquering Guacamelee 2's most stringent tasks; there's only deft, acquired, well-practiced skill.But there's more than just steel-hearted challenges waiting in the dark corners of Guacamelee 2's world, and many of its secret areas hide the best jokes in the game. There's an RPG dimension where all of Juan's fights are turn-based and, probably the best of the bunch, a hilariously spiteful take on lootboxes where Juan must spend enormous amounts of gold to simply open a closet door in a poor family's home to get his reward for saving their lives. Choozo statues--calling back to Metroid's Chozo statues--are still where Juan gets his main powers, and the script consistently has fun with the idea that smashing each statue is smashing up Uay Chivo's private and precious property.Everything about Guacamelee 2 comes off as smarter and more thoughtful than the first game, even while indulging in its self-aware shenanigans and Rick & Morty-esque dimensional hijinks. The game never stops finding new ways to hook you in, to the point that even the most painstaking and intensive playthroughs feel like they just fly by. Saving the numerous timelines in Guacamelee 2 is just as much about partaking in a marvel of devious, meticulous game design as it is about saving Juan and his family from peril.
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630,Onrush : Push It To The Limit,9, Onrush's unique blend of influences results in an innovative and refreshing racing game that replaces the finish line with objectives and teamwork.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/1/8/9/474590-654189.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/onrush-review-push-it-to-the-limit/1900-6416927/,pos,"
Calling Onrush a racing game is a tad reductive and maybe even a little disingenuous. Sure, there are two- and four-wheeled vehicles careening around a track with reckless abandon. But with no finishing lines in sight, achieving victory in Onrush is about much more than simply seeing who can reach a chequered flag first. This bold idea for an arcade racing game comes from a new studio formed out of the remnants of Evolution Studios. It's a curious transmogrification of various genres and styles, taking elements from the high-octane takedowns of Burnout, the multi-vehicle chaos of Evolution's MotorStorm, and the class-based competitive action of a hero shooter like Overwatch. These influences might be unmistakable, but developer Codemasters has crafted a wholly original and innovative racing game that's quite unlike anything you've ever played before.Describing how this off-kilter mixture functions is best achieved by explaining Onrush's Overdrive mode, which dilutes the anomalous experience down to its purest form. Here, two teams of six go head-to-head in up to eight diverse vehicle classes, with victory achieved by chaining together boost multipliers in order to rack up points. Earning boost is done by hitting jumps, wrecking opponents and weak fodder vehicles, performing bike tricks, and other actions that are tied to specific vehicle classes. Once you've depleted enough boost you can unleash the cathartic Rush Ultimate, which propels you forward at lightning speed and provides a bonus ability that is, once again, tied to your vehicle class. Overdrive is relatively simple and doesn't have the same depth as some of Onrush's other modes, but as an introduction to this brazen new style of game, it's a clear signal of intent: this is not a traditional racer by any stretch of the imagination.Click image to view in galleryPart of Onrush's ingenuity comes from its rubber banding, which sounds absurd until you see it in motion. Both teams are congregated together with the AI fodder vehicles in a pack known as The Stampede. Fall too far behind and you'll be teleported straight back into the maelstrom of crunching metal for a sustained period of high adrenaline driving. Not only does this keep everyone in the thick of the action at all times, but it tears down the divide between newcomers and veterans alike. You don't have to be amazing at racing games, or even have previous experience in the genre to feel like you're contributing to each match because you're always in amongst the histrionics. And this attention to inclusion is reflected in Onrush's other game modes, vehicle classes, and its driving model, too.The bar to entry is quite low with the kind of straightforward driving mechanics you would expect from a thrills-and-spills arcade racer like this, so it's relatively easy to get to grips with the basic framework. But the skill ceiling is high enough for those looking to improve their play and delve into the intricacies of how to successfully line up pulverising takedowns and maneuver out of harm's way. There's a discernible sense of weight to each vehicle, too, that translates into a tangible heft that dismisses any thoughts of floaty handling. You're also afforded a degree of aerial control that allows you to exert downforce and crush any opponents unfortunate enough to find themselves beneath your tyres, representing the most satisfying of all of Onrush's myriad takedowns. Despite this subtle depth, however, Onrush's primary challenge still derives from your vehicle choice, and how you manipulate it to cater to the current game mode and your team's makeup.During Overdrive, for example, you might want to play more of a support role, using Dynamo's special ability to drop boost pick-ups for your team to collect, and utilising its Rush Ultimate to supply any nearby teammates with a dollop of sustained boost that will extend their multipliers. Or perhaps you're in a game of Countdown, the mode that most closely resembles a traditional racing game, as both teams battle it out to drive through checkpoints to add incremental time to an ever-depleting clock. The speed and agility of the Blade motorcycle might come in handy here, especially with the whole Stampede moving in the same direction, as Blade's Rush Ultimate leaves a destructive trail of fire behind its two-wheeled fury. On top of this there are other classes that grant you improved magnetism on in-air attacks, ones that drain your opponent's boost, and others that deploy shields for teammates. The latter comes in particularly useful during Lockdown, which is essentially King of the Hill on wheels, as both teams fight for space in order to capture a moving zone.You don't have to be amazing at racing games, or even have previous experience in the genre to feel like you're contributing to each match because you're always in amongst the histrionicsThere's a robust single player mode that does an excellent job of teaching you the ins-and-outs of each vehicle class and game mode, with challenges that encourage you to focus on particular areas--whether it's using the hulking 4x4 Enforcer to blind opponents, or taking down vehicles in the Lockdown zone, and so on. It's a good primer for what's to come, as Onrush really comes alive once you hop online and start tearing it up with other players.If you have like-minded friends, there are tactical opportunities to work together to wreck opposition vehicles with coordinated attacks, and use your class abilities in tandem to get the most out of each one. If you're only playing alone, however, the experience isn't impaired in any way. With every driver in close vicinity and a plethora of useful visual cues, it's relatively easy to aid your teammates despite having no direct communication. The only negative arises in Lockdown, where a recurring glitch captures the zone when nobody's in it. Wrecks can also be a bit finicky at times; on some occasions you'll total your car after scraping a wall, while at other times a head-on crash will have no effect.There are also loot boxes, although they’re not the heinous kind likely to incite an angry furore. By completing matches you’ll earn XP that goes towards an overall level. Each successive level unlocks a loot box containing three random items of varying rarity. These can be things like new bodies and paint jobs for your vehicles, tombstone emojis that are left behind after you wreck, and different clothes for the largely inconsequential avatars. You can also buy any of these items using in-game money that's also earned simply by completing events. There are no microtransactions in sight, this is just a way to gradually dole out cosmetic items that give your whole style a sense of ownership.Click image to view in galleryVisually, Onrush is a beautiful showcase for electrifying particle effects, dynamic lighting, and increment weather, with each of its 12 tracks catching the eye due to their diversity and multi-faceted aesthetics. The sun-kissed Whitewater Canyon, for instance, uses a vibrant, almost otherworldly, colour palette to illuminates its red rocks, while Glory Dam propels you through a winding forest before spitting you out into a dam that's adorned in vivid street art, and Big Dune Beach offers a glimpse of the Northern Lights in its night sky. Each crash and exertion of boost is also complemented by a curated concoction of popular, licensed music, usually remixed to be more up-tempo and chaotic, in case trading paint wasn't hectic enough.When it comes to crumpling metal and high speed thrills, not all of Onrush's game modes are on equal footing in terms of consistent excitement. Yet its foundations are so strong, and so unique, that it's easy to lose hours upon hours barreling around these disparate tracks. The question of longevity will, of course, depend on post-release support, with new classes, game modes, and tracks potentially on the horizon. Considering you need 12 players to fill a full room, it would be a shame if Onrush doesn't find the kind of audience that will give it the lifespan it deserves. Part of this will depend on how Codemasters iterates on the game from here on out, but they've shown a proficiency in knowing how arcade racing games click, and Onrush is such a bold, refreshing twist on the genre that there should be little hesitation in putting your faith in them to succeed.


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631,The Red Strings Club ,9, The Red Strings Club is a deeply gratifying cyberpunk adventure whose strong writing and exciting scenarios enhance its themes about the manipulation of human emotion.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/4/7/474614-654247.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-red-strings-club-review/1900-6416838/,pos,"
Truly charismatic characters are a rare thing to encounter in games. A distinct feeling of connection to fictional people depends on key elements like good writing, laser-sharp timing, and unique perspectives. With all these concepts in place, you're more likely to be drawn into a story or relate to a character's motives, and subsequently, remember those characters for a long time to come. This is the main reason The Red Strings Club is so strong.With an animation style that recalls classic LucasArts adventure games, The Red Strings Club begins in the titular basement bar owned and operated by information broker Donovan. Along with his partner, the street-smart hacker Brandeis, Donovan values secrets more than money and as such, he is well-known throughout his community as the man who can get answers. Late one night, the pair get a visit from a malfunctioning android who is desperate for help. When Brandeis is able to access the android's memory banks, an extraordinary journey begins, where you play as all three characters in a tale filled with unexpected emotional depth and individuality.While the majority of the game involves speaking to different people, the tense and poignant dialogue choices give even the smallest exchanges a surprising amount of weight. Trust and deduction play big roles in your choices when learning who these people are and what they want from you. Each question or answer seemingly branches off into an enticingly different part of the story, and it's exciting to consistently wonder if you've made the right choice.You quickly learn that Donovan is famous for matching drinks to customer's specific needs and desires. Throughout certain conversations, the game shifts to a cocktail-mixing mini-game where you must pour the exact amount of certain alcohol types to gain access to different parts of a person's emotions. Setting off a character's depression, pride, fear, lust, and so on can expand dialogue choices and give you additional clues on how to solve the greater mystery involving corporate greed, the ethics of technology, and a violent conspiracy.Another large share of your involvement also features the aforementioned android, Akara-184. Akara is skilled at creating internal modules which can artificially manipulate the emotions of human customers upon request. These can potentially reduce anxiety, boost confidence, or dull fears. In creating the modules, a pottery lathe (along with a choice of soothing music) is presented, and it's up to you to not only carefully shape the module to suit the customer but decide which components to install. For example, someone wants to boost their ego for an upcoming meeting, but it's up to you to judge what is best for them based on the limited information provided to you. Would they be better off suppressing their selfish desires? You can experiment and witness the outcomes, although things might not go as you planned.This is where the heart of The Red Strings Club lies: exploring the limits and depths of human emotion. Donovan, Brandeis, and Akara-184 all begin to question their motivations and their purposes as they inhabit the dreary end of this rainy, atmospheric metropolis. Their internal dilemmas are where some of the game's best moments are born. Do our emotions, especially the most horrible ones, make us who we are? If possible, would we keep our sadness but remove our depression? Are we shaped by our suffering?More than a few times, you are faced with decisions based on ideas that you might not usually consider. Uncomfortable concepts laid out in front of you present a can of worms that, when opened, can either be fascinating or downright terrifying. Weighty decisions are heightened by the game's exceptional writing. Whether it's friendly conversations at the bar, a dangerous argument on a rooftop, or a compelling series of investigative phone calls, you find yourself hanging on every word, becoming sympathetic to conflicting opinions and building a strong connection to characters. Every piece of narrative is more fascinating than the last and before you know it, all that matters is discovering what happens next. From managing a hostile but vulnerable whistleblower to exploiting the affection of a friend to get vital information, paying attention to every action is key to uncovering these fascinating plot threads. As the layers of mystery peel back, you'll begin to realize the ramifications your decisions have in this world. While you might regret some answers and be confident in others, the delayed cause and effect of some of the game's choices can have you questioning how you could have possibly formed those opinions in the first place, which makes this adventure an extremely personal one. The cast of characters that populate the story each have their own history, motives, and personality conveyed in a direct and intelligent way. Gost the mysterious smuggler, Larissa the extroverted marketing director, and self-obsessed rock star scientist Edgar lead you through an exploration in relationship manipulation. Can you trust this person? Do you want them to trust you? These fantastic, varied characters make you want to settle in and chat, rather than rush through the dialog.Supporting these moments is the detailed environments; The bar itself is a major location and thanks to the gorgeous 2D art design, it is a space that's enjoyable to spend time in. Subtle details like Brandeis lighting his cigarette, the lonely ceiling fan, the hint of the city when a customer enters, and the sparkling, electronic soundtrack is a haunting combination which forms a tangible sense of atmosphere.From the far-reaching implications of ethics and artificial intelligence to the heart-wrenching relationship between Donovan and Brandeis, the moment-to-moment storytelling in The Red Strings Club is the kind that can have a strong, personally resonant impact. It puts you in circumstances that make you pause for thought, beyond simply contemplating the motives of the character. There is inventive design in its locations and scenarios which makes you not only want to revel in them, but revisit them with a different purpose once the credits roll.From the game's opening piano chords, The Red String Club's futuristic exploration of themes regarding human emotion, strong writing, and exciting situations create an experience that is deeply gratifying. The cast of relatable, three-dimensional characters elevate the stakes of every bullet fired, secret divulged and cocktail poured. They are flawed and dangerous, but also convey admirable human characteristics that feel inspirational. The Red Strings Club is a tense adventure about a cast of characters that endanger themselves for goals that aren't necessarily guaranteed, a rewarding journey into the human soul, and a game that pushes the limits of what a point-and-click adventure can do.
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632,Sid Meier's Starships ,4, Sid Meier's Starships stretches a thin premise over barebones gameplay systems.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2825038-game-starships-large-00.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sid-meier-s-starships-review/1900-6416082/,neg,"
""This would be good as a mobile game"" was, historically, some pretty faint praise. A sort of euphemism for alleging that a game was baser somehow, that in exchange for a shallow, compulsive high it asked little of a player save the odd microtransaction. Drag a distracted finger across a screen a few times, and kill, conquer, level up…all between stops on the train. I don't cotton to those implications, not anymore: Mobile games have achieved too much, broken too many molds. But in some circles you can still hear the old backhanded compliment being leveled at games like Sid Meier's Starships.Starships happens to actually be a mobile game--the kind that harks to those days of yore, when ""mobile"" equated to ""simplistic."" It released simultaneously on PC, Mac, and iPad, and in more-or-less the same form to boot. And the first things you notice about it are the various ways it seems visually bottlenecked by its tablet version. On PC, it unfurls in a tablet's compacted, low resolution window, and there are no graphical settings to massage. Its sci-fi galaxy is mostly abstracted, and its unit models are simple and blocky. It's not those issues that really put me off of Starships, but rather the way it seems to aspire to that narrow, dated idea of what makes a ""good"" mobile game. I can turn aside the quick and obvious assaults on PC sensibilities--the rough graphics, the lack of options--but it's the cynical design that guts me, in the end.The abstracted galaxy doesn't try very hard to sell the sci-fi setting.The titular starships form a single roving fleet on the game's galactic map, and act as the lone controllable unit. From your home base, the fleet can be moved over to any adjacent planet with the press of a button, which triggers combat missions that award points towards bringing the planet into the fold of your empire. Planets under your control confer resources each turn (food, industrial production, science, and energy) that can be spent on upgrades for your starships, or used towards buildings and world wonders that improve your production or military capabilities. The salient goal is to have a majority of the galaxy under your thumb--51%, and no less.Where Meier's Civilization series accommodates pacifism, there isn't much to do with your Starships fleet on the galactic map except pick fights. There are victory conditions outside of conquering your opponents, sure--controlling X amount of world wonders or researching Y amount of technologies--but these goals take resources to complete, and the only way to fill your storehouses is to perform combat missions and claim planets. The different victories have different names, but they all boil down to exercising military might, which in turn requires trudging through watered down and grossly exploitable battles.Combat missions set your ships down on a honeycomb game space surrounding a planet. You might be asked to escort a unit (that, mercifully, you also control), or hunt down an escorted one yourself. Or you navigate a maze of asteroids to reach an escape gate, or defeat an enemy boss. The asteroids strewn about the playing field block fire, and black holes teleport ships to other black holes on the map. It's simplistic board game strategy propped up by only the barest of fiction, and eminently exploitable. Every one of your ships can be upgraded to deploy zippy, surprisingly powerful fighters, meaning that in a single turn it's possible to effectively double the size of your fleet. The fighters are fragile, but they're so strong and can quickly cover so much distance that they throw the balance of any fight. Even forgoing them, I found I was able to comfortably win almost every engagement on any difficulty level by committing to longer range lasers and picking off enemies as they tried to approach, one at a time. It's a strategy game without strategy, enabling you to sleepwalk your way to triumph.Combat plays by bland, tired, grid-based formulas.Starships ostensibly picks things up where Civilization: Beyond Earth left off, but practically speaking, all that means is that the preceding game's cardboard cutout leaders have been stood in front of Starship's backgrounds. Each has a unique stat bonus in place of an actual personality, and their speech is characteristically mechanistic. ""Our computer calculations indicate that you have but a 19% chance of dominating this galaxy"" is what passes for a greeting in the game's stripped-down version of diplomacy. If you're thinking about declaring war after that (and I wouldn't blame you if you were), it's trivially easy to gauge your odds. Your opponents themselves provide an itemized list of their military assets on request--Starships is wanting for any other, more suitable screen to house the information. There are no ceremonial trappings, here. Two deadpan leaders simply meet, compare spreadsheets, and arrange peace or war accordingly.You're presented with a similar rundown at the end of missions, tabulating all the ships destroyed and lost, and divvying out bonuses multiplied by various modifiers. Starships throws these figures and calculations at you, but there's nothing useful to be done with the information, as though the game just wants to make sure you know that it did the work. Numbers are always going up a thousand at a time in the game--you get lost in all that effortless forward momentum, and it becomes impossible to care about a few lost hundred here or there.Beyond Earth's Affinities also make the jump, representing a choice between one of three broad societal values: Purity, Supremacy, or Harmony. But like everything in Starships, they've come unmoored from any cultural tie-downs, and now simply denote which of three arbitrary stat bonuses you feel like beginning the game with. Constructing a wonder means pressing a button when you've got enough of the requisite resource. There's no actual sense of building--a variable has simply shifted somewhere behind the scenes. It's an issue exacerbated by the fact that your ships are functionally immortal--though they appear to blow apart when destroyed in battle, you can still simply repair them afterward for a nominal cost. Even the loss of an entire fleet in a mission simply means being sent back to the planet you arrived from, down a few of the action points you expend to move around on the map on a turn. The stakes of this intragalactic war are at mechanical remove--any one defeat amounts only to an obscure amount of wasted man-hours.Just buy fighter upgrades. Guaranteed win on every difficulty. As mobile games find new heights, Starships takes its sci-fi premise and uses it to trawl the primordial pools they ascended from. Its planets are suspended in a two dimensional plane, and when your turn is up, enemy fleets dart back and forth among them in seemingly random directions. They look less like interstellar armadas, and more like single celled organisms responding to simple stimuli. They flit about from planet to planet, hex cell to cell, as though guided by the basest biological compulsions, consuming and growing. And you're right alongside them--with a few disinterested clicks or swipes across the screen, killing, conquering, and leveling up.   
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633,Aaru's Awakening ,4, Aaru's Awakening is gorgeous to behold and a chore to play.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2825075-aaru_001.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aaru-s-awakening-review/1900-6416036/,neg,"
Some say that there is no such thing as love at first sight--that initial attraction and infatuation appeal only to our aesthetic pleasures, and that true love only rises when passion no longer clouds our judgment. Romantics and idealists may dismiss the notion, but the deep-rooted frustrations of Aaru's Awakening may drive them to reconsider their sentiment. This unusual game craves your affection, each of its radiant hand-drawn environments singing love songs until you're entranced. You may initially fall for this superficial beauty, but the game soon reveals its true form as a vindictive suitor, grossly untrustworthy in its controls and devoid of the fundamental assets of any good platformer. I am sorry, Aaru's Awakening, but I must cut this relationship short, and I am afraid it's not me: it's you.I offer no insight into Aaru Awakening's actual development process, but it's easy to assume that visuals were prized over all other elements. Even the hub from which you access the game's levels is ravishing. It exquisitely represents the passage of time from dawn to night, each quadrant of a central orb depicting an abstract landscape that looks drawn by colored pencil. Within the side-scrolling stages, cross-hatching and asymmetrical markings provide texture and depth, while moving elements like lava floes and falling rocks are drawn frame by frame. It is through these techniques that Aaru's world comes to life underneath its unnatural magenta skies.What a phenemonal-looking boss. What a tedious level. The playable hero is Dawn's champion Aaru, a bearlike creature with a mane that stretches from head to tail, and he, too, moves with a charming hand-drawn inelegance that befits his illustrated world. Alas, the gracelessness of movement that makes Aaru initially joyous to watch in action becomes the game's most prominent failing. When a platformer requires finesse and quick response, as Aaru's Awakening frequently does, fluid animations and controls are vital. Aaru is anything but fluid, however, changing positions mid-air with all the precision of a sloth that has been dropped from a fourth-floor window. Aaru would be a delightful hero in a meandering adventure, but Super Meat Boy he is most certainly not.As if to make up for his lack of leaping prowess, Aaru can rush ahead in a single whoosh, and can also propel an orb from his body that he can teleport to--and it is around these two mechanics that most of Aaru's Awakening's maddening puzzles are formulated. Navigating the game's spaces is a trial in and of itself, due to a wholesale absence of genre basics--the kind of basics we take for granted in the best platformers because of their ubiquity and necessity. We expect to be able to quickly identify what objects are collidable and which are background art, for instance, particularly when we need to make snap mid-air decisions. Here, the foreground and background blend with the gameplay layer. Is that branch sticking outwards a platform, or just a visual detail? Will I pass in front of that barrier, or will I collide? That Aaru's Awakening requires you to even ask such a question rather than for you to immediately know is a colossal problem.The writing is lovely, but the narrator slurs her words in odd ways. Without the fundamentals in place, any cleverness apparent in Aaru's Awakening's platforming challenges dissipate. What the challenges may even be is often a secret until you are dropping from a great height when the platform beneath you crumbles, or when a ramp has propelled you forward. You may not be able to tell whether you will fall to safety, or impale yourself on a bed of spiked rocks, until gravity makes the decision for you and the spikes rise into view, too late for you to do anything but succumb to death. Now you know for the next time--but when you bear the burden of this game's inconsistent movement and clumsy animations, it's difficult to build enthusiasm for a next time. And that's an issue: Aaru's Awakening is, by design, a trial-and-error platformer in which you shave off as many seconds from your completion time as possible. Your reward for success is the chance to show off your skill on the game's online leaderboards. I might have enjoyed chasing the competition had the challenge been to overcome tricky puzzles and perform perilous leaps, rather than to wrestle with my controller.Putting down the controller is an option, though it's natural to reach for a gamepad when playing a platformer. Aaru's Awakening's controller support is not ideal, however, assigning the default jump move to an analog stick rather than a button. You must also activate the controller in the menus before you can use it, and should you unplug it during play, the game may stop responding to any input, even if you plug the controller back in. Regardless of your control method, the maddening levels may drive you to smash your hardware. The Dusk boss fight, for instance, requires that you rush across a series of platforms, some of which crumble, and some of which drop and then rise towards the spiked ceiling. You must teleport into the globes that float in this stage as well as avoid the poisonous river that waits for you at the bottom of the screen. Aaru's awkwardness turns what might have been an exciting sequence into a mess, during which you must perfectly execute your dashes and perfectly aim your teleport orbs at the proper angle within unimaginably narrow time gaps. There's no fun in the trying, and thus no fun in the succeeding.Those are the kinds of goo-falls that don't hurt you. Yet Aaru's Awakening hints at fun. You fire your teleport orb past a beam of scorching light, teleport again by angling your orb into a thin, winding passage, and an arcing ramp flings you into the sky. What a rush this moment is--a rush then halted when you land in the pool of lava that didn't appear until you were six inches above it. You destroy a hideous colossal housefly by teleporting inside of it--what a fantastic idea!--only to drown moments later because you must blindly teleport, not knowing what you might find until you've closed the deal. Aaru's Awakening is a dreamy display of artistic imagination that yanks you back to waking life with every awkward leap and every ill-conceived level. 
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634,Ashes of the Singularity ,4," Ashes of the Singularity is a big and bold 4X strategy game, but if you’re looking for much beyond scale, you’ll be sorely disappointed.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2823008-1610888_933688266663742_4630286652363244763_n.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ashes-of-the-singularity-review/1900-6416414/,neg,"
At times, I can't help but marvel at Ashes of the Singularity. Watching a battlefield gradually pack in thousands of hover-tanks and carriers as supply lines stretch and groan to support massive war efforts is intoxicating. There's a wonderment here that begs you to grasp at what commanding a continent-spanning conflict might feel like. At that scale, the subtle movements of fighter squadrons and the flashes of canon fire yield to larger vistas, and you can feel the game's pulse as wave after wave of enemies cascade across your screen. Impressive though it may be, peeling away the lustrous exterior reveals that Ashes of the Singularity is a surprisingly hollow game, with few novel ideas to support its scale.It plays like many of its peers: you build out a base, collect resources, and engage in combat. It's a basic framework that underpins everything from Starcraft to Rise of Nations. The core problem is there is little to appreciate beyond how busy Ashes of the Singularity's battles become. When it comes to forming a strategy, there are few opportunities to develop nuanced tactics.You have three main resources to manage--metal, radiactives, and turinium. The first two are for constructing ships, but if you collect enough turinium you win the game. Because turinium is necessary for victory, Ashes of the Singularity encourages hapless and aggressive rushing. Your starting area will only have a couple resource nodes, and you can't stockpile resources as you can in most other strategy games. So, playing cautiously isn't an option. You have to expand--and fast.This exacerbates some of Ashes of the Singularity's other problems. As I churned out endless streams of robotic warriors, I noticed that they all looked similar, especially when I pulled the camera all the way out and the battlefield melted together in the mélange of war machines. Pressing to gain more and more ground kept me from developing any familiarity with my units, which is unfortunate given you only have about a dozen unique types to work with. Each frigate looks indistinguishable from the last, making it hard to keep track of which units you have and which ones you still need.With the exception of modest changes in elevation, there aren't many features that lend themselves to strategic use.Maps are consistently dry and lack character. With the exception of modest changes in elevation, there aren't many features that lend themselves to strategic use. There are no towering mountains to hide your forces during an ambush, no rare or unique resources to exploit, nor any obstacles to slow down foes. Every unit and building works the same regardless of placement on the map, and as you build out a network of resource nodes, you'll see the same desolate brown textures again and again.Ashes of the Singularity does a great job of communicating the massive scale of its conflicts.The early game doesn't have a lot for you to do or manage.You have the ability to organize your legions into ""armies,"" which are supposed to be super-charged control groups. And this works, but only to a point. Forming armies reduced the need to constantly micromanage units, allowing me to focus on the larger plan: pinching off enemy supplies, flanking with the brutality of my dreadnoughts, and dropping strategic weapons of mass destruction. But Ashes of the Singularity still left me with scant few options to conduct my campaign.It's hard not to draw comparisons to earlier massive-scope strategy games, namely Supreme Commander. The parallels between the two run deep and cover everything from their approach to resource collection to their emphasis on massive battles. But, despite being a decade old, Supreme Commander still wears the crown. Rather than rest on the spectacle of massive battles alone, it crucially wove finer pieces into its formula to make those bouts interesting.There is one-note to this song, and, while beautiful in its own right, Ashes of the singularity is ultimately shallow.Ashes of the Singularity doesn't have these flourishes; what you see is what you get. There is one-note to this song, and, while beautiful in its own right, is ultimately shallow. It's a wonder to see in action, but tedious to play. Scale should be a canvas for battles, not a replacement for a deep set of tools. Instead of providing an intricate network of systems to work with, Ashes of the Singularity cuts itself down, leaving only the most basic elements of the genre intact. You have a handful of units, three resources, and a basic goal. At no point can you leverage anything beyond those basic pieces in a meaningful way. Without more resources, nuanced mechanics, or a charming aesthetic to help carry the experience, Ashes of the Singularity struggles to hold your attention.As it stands, Ashes of the Singularity feels like little more than a tech demo of Stardock's new Oxide engine. At best, it demonstrates the power of multicore optimization and DirectX 12, being the latest game to push the limits of computing to render a massive number of moving parts in a burgeoning war machine. Even so, the game comes off as half-finished. There is a decent foundation, but Ashes fails to build on it in a satisfying way. 
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635,Cabal 2 ,4," If you've played a free-to-play MMOG in the past 5 years, then you've played Cabal 2.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2898040-screen-shot-2015-07-02-at-9.51.29-am.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/cabal-2-review/1900-6416202/,neg,"
When Cabal 2 was first released in South Korea in 2012, it might have been something a little more original, and it certainly would have looked better to our eyes than it does now. But three years is a lifetime for a massively multiplayer role-playing game, and the time it’s taken to localize this game has not done it any favors.If you follow the betas and launches of various MMORPGs coming out of South Korea in particular, there's a feeling here that you're probably very familiar with. You'll see bits and pieces of a game that looks more stunning than most MMORPGs you've seen, with the additional promise of a variety of intriguing mechanics. You may spend years pining after it, following every scrap of information you can as it slowly makes its way through the pipeline to the west. But by the time it's localized, whatever glimmer of charm it once held almost always fades with age. Cutting-edge graphics are now three-year-old graphics, and many of the fresh twists you were looking forward to have probably been disseminated among other games you've played in the interim.It's a really severe problem...Cabal 2 does a lot of little things that would have impressed me once. For example, the combo system is a clever way to add a more action-oriented element to otherwise-standard combat, while the astral weapons players get about mid-way through the game are undeniably cool looking and change up players’ routines. Finishing moves reward quick reflexes and give boss fights extra oomph, and character creation is robust, and loads of little usability features go a long way to make the game easy to play. Players who don't want to fuss with stats can have the game auto-distribute their points, for instance. Party-finding tools are easy to use, and corpses emit colored smoke corresponding to the value of the loot inside, which means players don't have to waste time and inventory space looting junk they don’t want. The game will also give a warning chime whenever a player or a party member aggros a nearby foe. These are all great features, but they're not unique to Cabal 2.This lack of uniqueness is a recurring theme because at its heart, Cabal 2 looks, feels, and plays like an endless list of other games. All the little things it does differently simply get buried under the avalanche of everything else you know and expect, such as fetch quests and the need to endlessly grind. Playing this was one of the most boring things I've done in recent memory, to the point that I caught myself thinking wistfully about other MMOGs I'd dismissed as bland in the past. “Maybe I should give Scarlet Blade another chance,” I thought as I yet again made the run from “Area Full of Wolves” to “Area Full of People Asking Me One at a Time to Kill More Wolves.” When you spend an entire weekend jogging back and forth between the same three points on the map, it's easy to grow bored and tumble into a well of mental distractions.Early dungeons require little strategy beyond a well-balanced party to complete.Cabal 2 doesn't respect the player's time. You're sent back and forth, over and over, between the same areas and the same people killing the same targets for slightly different purposes. Sometimes those purposes are clear, and sometimes you’re killing animals for vengeance and picking herbs because you need them to time travel and look, do you want to level up or not? This is such a common trope, but many free MMOGs have been trying to move away from it for awhile. Cabal 2, on the other hand, leans into it and leans into it hard.Progress grinds to a screeching halt after level 20, to the point that it takes days to attain a new level. A big part of the reason this is a problem is that Cabal 2 doesn’t provide an ample amount of story quests, so you’re left to make up the difference by taking on simple and uninteresting side quests. Even if you don't mind going through the same dungeons over and over again, you’re limited to a certain number of playthroughs of each side quest per day. Many quests are disabled once you reach a certain level, too, meaning that as time goes on, your options become even more limited. Reaching Cabal 2’s endgame requires an unreasonable amount of patience as its designed to extend your time with the game while offering almost nothing new in return.While Cabal 2's localization is competent, it still veers toward the bizarre. It's a case study in the importance of editing, because while you can understand each individual word in a piece of quest dialogue, strung together, the end result often sounds broken and unnatural. It's just off enough that I found myself going over sections again to be sure I hadn't misread anything.The charm of the world wears thin when you spend five hours running around the same little corner of it.I can't say that I hated everything about Cabal 2. The way my wizard extended her hand back to form a spear of ice, then snapped it deftly forward as she prepared to throw it? Lovely. The way she flicks her sleeve back down once combat ends? Flawless. The cast of diverse NPCs scattered across the landscape? Honestly among the most interesting I've seen in any game. Is that enough? Absolutely not.The thing is, I've played this game before, and if you're reading this review looking for the next free MMOG you can dip your toes into, chances are that you have too. We played Cabal 2 before we'd even heard of Cabal 2 because its is almost interchangeable with countless other free-to-play games we've had access to for years. Maybe that wouldn't have been the case three years ago, but it is today.
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636,WWE 2K16 ,4," Devoid of the character and personality that makes wrestling fun, WWE 2K16 continues to fail to deliver the spectacle of pro wrestling while further muddling the game's core mechanical experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2900634-2899622-3615574438-cjo-m.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwe-2k16-review/1900-6416307/,neg,"
After WWE 2K15 failed to bring the series into the current generation of consoles smoothly, developer Yuke's has attempted a course correction that sets backwards the strides the franchise had made with combat while failing to address the jarring lack of personality in any mode of the game that wasn't last year's rivalries focused 2K Showcase. Though this year's massively expanded roster is a step up from the paltry offerings of last year, the return of most of the creation suites that were missing come back in gutted forms. And the series' attempt to have the Career mode ape similar modes in traditional sports games manages to entirely miss the point of what makes pro wrestling special.It isn't entirely doom and gloom for 'rassling fans, though. The 2K Showcase mode remains the primary reason to come back. While last year's 2K Showcase focused on rivalries (particularly CM Punk vs. John Cena and Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels), this year features a single performer: Stone Cold Steve Austin. As a retrospective of the Texas Rattlesnake's career, 2K Showcase is a nostalgic, beer-drinking, ass-whooping blast from the Attitude Era past. Whether you grew up during Austin's reign on top of the WWE or came to the fold years later, the mode includes a bevy of video packages that provide ample reason to care about this man and his feuds with the McMahons, Bret Hart, the Rock, and more. However, the best part of the whole mode is the return of Jim Ross, who records original commentary for your matches. As one of the best commentators in all of pro-wrestling, it makes you wish you could hear his voice during the rest of the game.Little else in the game makes much of a positive impression. WWE 2K15, while having its own issues, still featured some of the best combat in the series, and introduced a stamina meter which added a measured pace to matches. This year, Yuke's has attempted to solve a problem that existed in the series for years now: an overabundance of reversals and counters. At first sight, Yuke's solution--finite-but-recharging reversal meters--seems elegant. However, you have too few counters for reversal use to be tactical. Plus, in matches where you're fighting multiple opponents, the inability to counter at will means you're open to repeated attacks until you have a charge, which you use… usually before being subjected to further attacks again. Considering that the previous games' counter system carried its own flaws, a new approach is most welcome, yet in this instance the changes have only made matters worse.The wonky hit detection and collision issues from WWE 2K15 are also not addressed. The space in which you can and cannot pull off certain moves is as vague and seemingly arbitrary as ever. You can jam the button to grab an opponent repeatedly, and your player will just stand over your opponent as they slowly get back up. Even when you have reversal charges left, the space in which those counters do and don't work is often a mystery. Plus, your list of moves to perform has been shortened, leading to a simplified combat system.Just like last year, the MyCareer mode starts out promising, with fully voiced cutscenes from NXT head trainer Jason Albert. After you create a superstar, you make decisions that align you as a face or a heel. However, after that new car smell dissipates, you realize that the only ""scripted"" story moments you get are through cutscenes with WWE backstage personality Renee Young asking you the same five or six questions over and over again, or having your rivals interfere in your matches.Watching a WWE Superstar rise from NXT to the main roster and potentially become the WWE champion (à la Seth Rollins) isn't just about seeing them improve in the ring or get wins and secure belts. It's also about watching them grow as characters and performers. It's about the memorable twists and turns their feuds and rivalries provide (which the 2K Showcase highlights well). Earlier WWE games understood this and provided tightly scripted career modes. Yuke's treats it like a legitimate sports simulation--which wrestling isn't and will never be--and provides few hooks to the experience once you realize how slowly your character's stats advance.The highly touted expansion of the roster also isn't as impressive as it first appears. Although the inclusion of all the men and women on the main roster, a healthy number of NXT performers, and a bevy of classic stars is welcome, there are still some unfortunate absences, namely the WWE's Four Horsewomen: Charlotte, Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, and Bayley. In a game that features names that even hardcore wrestling fans have likely forgotten (Haku, Mikey Whipwreck, Savio Vega, and more), the exclusion of some of the most exciting performers in the entire company today is a glaring omission. Although the Create-A-Diva mode has returned, you can't have a female performer rise through the ranks in MyCareer mode.Other problems from last year's entry remain. The visuals range from impressive--Triple H and Randy Orton are two of the more realistic-looking members of the cast here--to unsightly. In some superstars, hair hangs in thick clumps. Eyes bulge out at creepy angles. Faces are shockingly blocky at times. It's terribly uneven.Worse than the technical shortcomings, off-the-mark combat, and terrible omissions from the roster, Yuke's failure to capture the heart of WWE makes WWE 2K16 such a disappointment. The modern WWE is overflowing with talent. The series’ inability to deliver on the magic of WWE's characters and athletes, beyond number crunching and subpar combat, indicates that this series is still far from being able to relive the magic of the squared circle inside your living room.
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637,Chibi-Robo Zip Lash ,4," Chibi-Robo Zip Lash has charming moments, but it's a mostly-bland adventure defined by disappointing design choices.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2887952-untitled-1.jpg,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/chibi-robo-zip-lash-review/1900-6416271/,neg,"
Chibi-Robo Zip Lash has the building blocks of a great game, but like a haphazard Jenga tower, it was just a matter of time before it toppled over. It's a competent platforming adventure featuring a cute robot who uses its power cord as a grappling-hook to attack enemies, swing from ceilings, and lasso objects. By picking up certain items, its cord can grow longer, opening the door for complex puzzles that require you to bounce your cable off walls to hit far-off targets. It's not all cord action, though; sometimes Chibi-Robo is dashing on a skateboard, leaping off ramps and dodging obstacles at the last second.Despite being a key part of completing some levels, seeking out extensions for your grappling-hook ultimately feels pointless. It's great at the end of the level when you can toss it into a hallway and watch it bounce here and there, grabbing coins and other collectibles, but it's deflating when it's back to square one at the start of the next level. It would have made for a much more meaningful experience if your tools and abilities progressed over the course of the entire game, and it could have paved the way for more complex levels, too. Unfortunately, it's handled on a level-by-level basis, thus any joy you derive from making progress is short-lived, and you begin every level tackling the most basic of challenges.Chibi-Robo is charming, but he has the unenviable task of cleaning up your garbage.For most of its adventure, Chibi-Robo is the definition of mundane; you kill slow moving enemies and overcome basic platforming scenarios, collecting items, including literal garbage, such as a discarded coffee cup. Other times, it's candy--real-world candy. While there's nothing inherently awful about seeing brands like Pocky or Dots in a game, Zip Lash fetishizes these products, with NPCs who yearn for specific treats. Upon receipt, they repeat marketing catch-phrases, their favorite commercials, and lists of flavors, just in case you had any doubt that Tootsie-Rolls are the snack for you. There are dozens of these snacks to collect, but by the time you've seen the tenth ""commercial,"" it becomes a non-priority as you search for more worthwhile goals.These garish displays could be forgiven if the rest of Zip Lash offered meaningful substance, but it's a game that's far too easy, with very little in the way of interesting level design. You play through six worlds, set in different locations such as North Africa, the South Pole, and Europe. These window dressings rarely amount to anything of note, with few standout elements. There's some variation in the enemies you face as you travel the world, but not enough to make each location standout in a meaningful way. North America's world does contain some lively and challenging stages, with lots of moving parts and chaotic sequences that effectively communicate the nature of factories during the industrial revolution. It can be fun to move about with your grappling-hook and search for hidden areas, but these joys are fleeting. It doesn't help that Chibi-Robo is a slow-moving character whose actions are sluggish and few. Unlike other Nintendo platformers that thrive on variety, Chibi-Robo's adventure is monotonous.Things pick up when your cord grows, but it's a process you have to restart in every level.To be fair, Chibi-Robo tries to offer a mix of experiences, but beyond status-quo platforming and grappling, you only find variety in boss fights and vehicle-based levels. The aforementioned skateboarding is fun, but I wish there were more stages that offered the same level of reflex-based challenges. When you're plopped into a submarine that moves achingly slow, or a similarly-paced inflatable balloon, you groan out of frustration the same way you do when driving behind someone going 5 MPH in a 35 MPH zone. Sure, you're doing something different than jumping and swinging, but that doesn't mean much when the activity is aggravating.Boss fights provide some of the best moments in the game, offering a real challenge as you're required to use your grappling-hook in fresh ways in the face of new behaviors and obstacles. The bosses themselves are ornate, exhibiting a level of detail that's rarely seen elsewhere in Zip Lash. These encounters are a breath of fresh air that only magnify the mediocrity of the rest of the game.Chibi-Robo loves to collect, but there's more in the world to find than just candy and trash. Coins, Chibi-Robo children, and medallions await the intrepid explorer, though you won't have to dig deep. Most ""hidden"" items lie near the beaten path and are easy to locate if you look around with the slightest of care. The game toys with the idea of returning to completed levels to seek out collectibles you might have missed, but earning high-marks for finding everything isn't motivation enough to return to unremarkable levels.To make matters worse, Zip Lash features a convoluted world map designed around a mechanic that wastes your time. Rather than moving in a straight path from level to level, you're forced to spin a wheel that determines how many steps you will move along the world's path. This mechanic would make sense if you could hit a high number, end up on the final stage, and quickly complete a world. Zip Lash doesn't work that way--you have to beat all six levels in a world before you can move on to the next, so there's no incentive to aim for anything other than a panel with the number one--the most prevalent panel there is.Chibi-Robo would have benefited from more fast-paced moments like the skateboarding and jet-skiing sections.While you could argue that the spinning wheel makes it tough to revisit levels exactly in the order you wish, you can freely move about the map once you've completed all six levels and beaten the world's boss. Even if you're clumsy, you collect so much currency in the game through casual play that you can always purchase specifically-numbered panels for the wheel to increase your chances of landing on the number you wish. When the wheel disappears after you beat the boss, or you fix the odds to your advantage, you wonder why it ever existed to begin with.These frustrations don't make Zip Lash a bad game, but they prevent it from rising above adequacy. For every promising moment--which are few and far between--there's a commercial for candy, or a series of mini-tasks and menus that drag you back down. Chibi-Robo is a sleepy trip through a forgettable world. Plead with it to go faster, beg it to surprise you with new experiences, but don't be surprised when it answers back with the merits of biting into the center of a Tootsie Pop. 
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638,The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep  - Lament,4," You'll need a lot of patience to make it through InXile Entertainment's nostalgic RPG, The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/1/5/0/434735-566150.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-bards-tale-iv-barrows-deep-review-lament/1900-6417002/,neg,"
InXile Entertainment's resurrection of this long-lost series from the age of Ronald Reagan and Max Headroom takes the role-playing genre back in time for better and worse. The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep's visuals are a charmingly nostalgic reminder of the origins of 3D role-playing games, but most of the game's features are too outdated to hold up to today's standards.Actually, the first challenge here is remembering what the Bard's Tale franchise is all about. The plot is supposed to follow 1988's The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate, although most of us will have to take their word for it given the 30 years between major franchise installments. Skara Brae and a rogues' gallery of familiar villains from the original Bard's Tale trilogy are the main hallmarks here, along with new live-action cutscenes that brings to life the iconic cover art from those '80s RPG classics. They are beyond cheesy, but these clips provide plenty of old-school atmosphere.Other shout-outs to RPG history are evident in the core design, which is minimalistic by comparison to modern role-players. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the straightforward character development and combat systems are easy to learn. Your group is depicted via portraits in the ""party bar"" along the bottom eight slots (for the six party-member maximum plus two for summoned allies) on the screen. Movement is handled fluidly with the party being directed as one in real time while exploring. Encountering enemies switches the game over to turn-based combat where you give orders to attack, cast spells, and so forth based on objective and spell points. Overall, it's a tried-and-true system for a retro RPG experience, especially if you want something basic.But with that said, Bard's Tale IV is too simplistic. Characters come with just four core stats (strength, constitution, armor class, and intelligence) that can basically only be adjusted with equipment and skills earned when leveling up. If you want to raise your constitution (which functions here as hit points, unlike a more traditional D&D system), for example, you need to put on armor, wield a bonus-granting weapon, or take a skill that gives a corresponding buff.Serious customization is hard to come by. There aren't a lot of character choices provided beyond standard fantasy races like humans, elves, dwarves, and the goblin-like trow, and classes like fighters, practitioners (mages), rogues, and bards. Bards do feel somewhat unique due to their ability to power skills and magic in battle by chugging booze. Leveling up provides some ability to tweak your heroes, but choice is limited because you're allocated just a single point with each advancement to distribute among the four skill treesCombat has a narrow focus. A handful of objective and spell points are given to the party to use collectively each turn, and you have to spend them on just four selected skill masteries from your overall pool of abilities. Attacks always hit, so strategizing involves looking through each hero's masteries, choosing what does the most damage, and deciding on the best enemy target. You can deal physical damage via melee and ranged attacks or mental damage via spells.Masteries deal with one type of damage or the other, which causes problems as there is no way to switch them up once a battle has begun. As a result, readied masteries regularly don't match up with what enemies bring to the table. For example, heavily armored foes are vulnerable to mental damage, but if your ready-to-go masteries don't have enough mental attacks, you're out of luck. You can try to build a balanced party, but many masteries aren't shared across classes, so there's not a great range of options if you want a group that's prepared for everything. Because of that, combat feels gimmicky, with you failing at times through no fault other than not guessing what the game is about to throw your way.The one positive aspect of combat--and it's a positive with definite drawbacks--is that every region is populated with the same four or fives types of enemy. So once you take on the first mob of goblin fire archers, cultist sorcerers, skeletons, assassins, or whatever in a particular location, you know what to expect in that entire area and can go on autopilot when it comes to battle strategizing. Enemies help out by not being very bright, either. They waste their own objective points on moving around unnecessarily, do nothing in the back row, ignore wounded heroes and threats like spellcasters, and so on.Surprises still happen, though. Difficulty jumps around. You can be steamrolling all comers for ages and walk into a brutal fight against an all-new creature with a never-before-seen ability like regeneration, or undead that revive unless you send them all back to the afterlife in one turn. You learn how to fight different creatures as they appear, but because there's no save-on-demand feature--you instead save at totems strewn around the landscape--this can lead to frustrating trial and error.Making matters worse is the inaccuracy of the enemy warning system. Look at a mob of foes and they highlight green, yellow, or red. To try to make matters even clearer, party members chime in by assessing the potential bout as a cakewalk, a challenge, or suicide. None of this is very accurate, though. While green scraps always seem easy, some yellow are murderous, and some red are a lot more painless than expected. As a result, you can get a nasty shocker and get killed in a fight that looks like no problem--which is a major pain if you haven't been able to save in a while.Stability is a also problem. Crashes are a frequent occurrence, especially at the end of battles. Usually the game went down with an error message, but a few times it froze up at the end of a fight while looking at the loot that dead foes left behind. Because of these crashes, it's wise to save constantly--even when you have to run back significant distances to find a save totem after a tough battle.More serious issues arise due to problems with the level design and structure of the game's locales. The maps are huge and labyrinthine and that's befitting the history of dungeon crawlers, of course, but the game is too loaded with narrow corridors with minimal incentives. Despite the maze-like appearance, you are led in a linear fashion from Point A to Point B in the dungeon ruins of Skara Brae, the forest of Inshriach, or the tundra of Stronsea. There is little room for creativity, as both plot and maps run on rails from start to finish. Inaccessible areas are crudely blocked off with rubble or piles of crates, as well, reinforcing the feeling that you're playing a game of connect-the-dots with extra steps.While there is a good variety of brainteasers in the game, ranging from switching gears to moving blocks to shoving faeries around an obstacle course to routing blood into connected streams, there are far, far too many of them. Puzzles are used to pad out levels too often. Instead of having to face one or two of these innovative enigmas at a time, you get five or more in a row, almost always of the same type, which gets very monotonous, very fast.Aspects of the map design appear unfinished. While loads of NPCs are ready to chat, these encounters generally lead to dead ends. Some wayward monk or lovelorn peasant will tell you a story of woe that seems to be leading somewhere, as their conversations tend to revolve around boilerplate RPG quests like hunting for an artifact or finding a lost girlfriend. But then these talks either come to an abrupt halt or the guy or gal turns into a merchant. Your only response to somebody pouring their heart a lot of the time is to ask if they've got any stuff to sell.Most areas offer little beyond solving puzzles and fighting. Loot drops are limited. You collect the same swords, helmets, and armor constantly from defeated enemies and the crates and barrels scattered across the landscape, along with various types of food and drink that both recover hit points and can be used in crafting. There is little sense of reward. For every cool sword you discover, you smash open 50 barrels and chests filled with vegetables and bottles of water. There's nothing like taking 10 minutes to solve a puzzle leading to a chest…and then finding nothing in it but three carrots and a potato.The visuals aren't technically impressive and cause even the best systems to chug and stutter when moving the camera on all graphics settings. Character faces have an oddly disturbing appearance in the middle ground between a mannequin and a melted candle, and animations are stiff and jerky, both in real-time dungeon delving and in turn-based battles. Still, the look of the game remains charming. Everything is given a Celtic/Scottish look that could have been taken from Braveheart, and a bright color palette evokes an '80s RPG mood recalling the vivid hues of classic D&D art.Audio is hit and miss. Well-acted dialogue perfectly handles the Scottish brogue of most characters. Enemies repeat cheesy taunts in combat, though, and party chatter consists of juvenile insults. Some audio effects don't fit with what's taking place on-screen. Gulping down water triggers the same crunching and lip-smacking that accompanies eating a cabbage or apple. At least the music has a beautiful Celtic flavor with plucked strings, fiddles, and choral odes that make the game sound like Enya outtakes.Other quirks add aggravation. Load times are long and frequent; it takes over a minute to transition between areas, even when leaving a tavern to hit the streets. Level maps can be misleading. Key items like save totems aren't included, and you can't make notes. There is no way to sort character inventories, leading to tedious item management.Common wisdom and clichés aside, The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep proves you can go home again. But why would anyone want to? While the game re-creates what we played in the 1990s, misty water-colored memories of hours spent with Eye of the Beholder are not enough to fix numerous design miscues, performance problems, and bugs. This is a tough sell to all but the most dedicated and patient retro fan. 
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639,The Mean Greens - Plastic Warfare ,4, Great level design can't save this boring multiplayer shooter.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/0/3/2/438510-590032.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-mean-greens-plastic-warfare-review/1900-6416350/,neg,"
Little green army men were a staple in many kids' toy boxes, including my own. They were iconic and fun, and they came to life in two hugely popular ways in the '90s: Pixar's Toy Story and video games. Developer Virtual Basement tries to feed off this nostalgia in The Mean Greens - Plastic Warfare. It works at first, with green army men coming to life and running into battle on a cluttered arts and crafts table. However, The Mean Greens fails to offer an experience that lives up to the rose-tinted memories of imaginary battles with the toys that inspired it.Plastic Warfare is a multiplayer third-person shooter set during a war between tan and green army men. Being a tiny toy in a big world makes for a lot of visually interesting scenarios: you weather treacherous kitchen counters, fjord a bathtub, and grit your teeth during battles on top of cake. I love when video games give you the perspective of something small, causing everyday objects to appear huge and daunting, and this concept is used to great effect in Plastic Warfare. While the charming world lends itself to some interesting moments, your appreciation for Plastic Warfare's detailed world will wane when you realize how often the tan army, specifically, blends into its surroundings. When fighting near a tan-colored cake, it was next to impossible to track my enemies, and unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident.Bath time has never been more menacing.Most modes prioritize completing objectives--capturing your opponent's flag or conquering their base, for example--over shooting enemies, though your gun remains a useful means of slowing them down. Given the fact that shooting to kill isn't your highest priority, you could forgive Plastic Warfare's static and anemic equipment selection. However, your weapons are neither varied nor empowering. They all feel the same: lacking in impact and without recoil. It was hard to tell if my shotgun was actually firing at times, let alone connecting with my intended target. Likewise, it was common to die without knowing why; a visual marker shows that you're taking damage, but it's too subtle and easy to overlook.A number of modes trip and fall over their own objectives, too. For example, Deep Freeze tasks teams with melting their respectively colored frozen dinosaurs--whoever melts the ice around their T-Rex first wins. Before both teams can get to the area that holds their iced-out dinos, there's a big chunk of ice blocking the only way in. Since killing other players doesn't help you win this mode or unlock new gear, it makes no sense for anyone to shoot each other when this obstacle is in the way--that would only make melting the block take longer. The most beneficial solution for both teams would be to work together--this would help get to the actually competitive part of the mode faster. But then, a bunch of players would just be standing around, holding down the left mouse button, and watching ice melt. Of course, everyone shoots each other anyway, making a needless part of the mode take a lot longer than necessary.To make matters worse, each mode has a dedicated map, and the monotony this creates wears on you over time. If you happen to find a mode you do enjoy, it's very likely that you'll still grow tired of playing on the same map and long for a change of scenery.If you look closely, you can see enemy soldiers blending in with the environment.The potential for creative audio design is huge for a game like Plastic Warfare, given the small-guys-in-a-big-world perspective, but so many of these opportunities go unrealized. Most of what you hear is gunfire and a mediocre soundtrack; I had to turn off the music to see if there were any sound effects. The only effect that I remember standing out occurred when I ran up a xylophone. Appropriately, it sounded like it should when someone runs a mallet across the multi-colored keys. It's a seemingly tiny detail that makes a big difference in the grand scheme of immersion, and it's disappointing that the rest of the world isn't as responsive to your presence.When there are much better multiplayer shooters on the market, a lot of which are completely free to play, it's impossible to recommend The Mean Greens - Plastic Warfare. If you want to play with army men badly enough, I recommend looking for the ones you had as a kid or making a trip to the dollar store. 
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640,Life Is Strange 2: Episode 1  - What Doesn't Kill Us,9," Life Is Strange 2 kicks off with a diverse cast of strongly-defined characters, a narrative shaped by real-world sociopolitical issues, and the love between two brothers at the root of ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/2/9/5/483748-677295.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/life-is-strange-2-episode-1-review-what-doesnt-kil/1900-6416995/,pos,"
Politics ebbs and flows through Life Is Strange 2, whether or not the characters are always aware of it. Unforeseen circumstances upturn the lives of the Diaz brothers, and in typical Life Is Strange fashion, while the supernatural lingers around the edges, it's ordinary humanity that displays the ugliest sides of this heart-wrenching story. With a narrative that is unashamed to present a mirror to the most uncomfortable realities of the US in 2016, a diverse cast of characters who are fleshed out lovingly and respectfully, and mechanics that reinforce relationships between characters, the first episode of Life Is Strange 2 tells a story that deserves to be heard.The plot begins a week after the final presidential debate between Trump and Clinton--and before tragedy strikes the Diaz family. You adopt the role of Sean, an artistic, sporty teenager with a tight-knit family supported by his single dad, Esteban. Sean's life at the beginning of the game is punctuated by his efforts to be a track star, begrudgingly taking care of his nine-year-old brother Daniel, and figuring out whether he should pack condoms for the party he's attending that evening.Dontnod continues the pinpoint depiction of the teenage experience that it first displayed in the original Life Is Strange. Occasional unironic uses of words like ""emo"" and ""BFF"" rarely dampen the startlingly familiar conversations and texts between the game's primary characters. The messaging system which appeared previously in the series is back, and it's a delight to take the time to read each and every one of the dozens of texts in your backlog when the game starts. It informs the relationships between the characters and how they each see their place in the world; Sean's conversation with his best friend Lyla evolves from entirely believable teenage banter into a grim exchange over watching the final presidential debate, foreshadowing the sociopolitical climate that defines the events to come.Conversations never occur in a vacuum, devoid of pre-existing relationships between the characters. Whether it's Sean commentating on how his Dad hates sushi but buys it for them anyway, or Lyla lamenting the price of therapists, Dontnod's writing makes almost every one of its characters feel like a fully realized person with their own fears, motivations, and intricate web of relationships. It's this writing, alongside the game's fierce attention to detail, which supports the strength of its overarching narrative and character development.Interactions are also more dynamic and free-flowing than before. Changes in the world elicit a reaction from both Sean and those around him, which feels far more realistic and aids in grounding the characters in the world. If Sean switches on his music player he'll sing along to the cued up track from The Streets, and Lyla will comment on the music playing during their Skype call. Some conversations will even start automatically when you enter the range of a person who has something to say to you.Small changes to the series' standard gameplay mechanics and their effects on the story deepen your immersion further. When the journey grows arduous, it's wonderful that the game lets you join in the boys' small moments of joy. While the brothers bounce on a motel room bed to Banquet by Bloc Party, the game ties your left mouse button to a camera zoom and mouse motion to bopping the camera up and down so you can jump along with them. The game's licensed tracks and original score by Syd Matters, who also scored the original, underpin the tone of the game and the internal states of the characters to great effect. There's a mix of teenage adrenaline, curiosity, and uncertainty in the score during Sean and Daniel's first foray onto the open road that does a good job of putting you inside Sean's headspace.Sean can also observe and draw certain scenes in his sketchbook, an initially charming idea which unfortunately doesn't work in practice. While the ""flick the left joystick about wildly"" instruction is somewhat effective with a controller, these sections are almost unplayable with a mouse due to a lack of helpful feedback. There are a few other occasions where the presentation of the game and character reactions don't quite gel, such as Daniel asking Sean what kind of animals are in the woods after reading a sign that very clearly depicts a bear on it. Fortunately, these moments of disconnect are rare, and more often your interactions with the world are not only sensible but change what unravels later on in the game.Much like the original game, the decisions you make will impact you and the people around you. This time around, your companion isn't a pot-smoking, blue-haired rebel, but your little brother, and he is impressionable. At one point you're given the option to purchase much-needed supplies from a general store. Your choices up to that point will have determined how much money you have and what supplies you already have with you. You can either buy what you can afford or opt to steal, but doing so will change the way your brother perceives you and his actions later in the game. His demeanor and actions will also change based on how you take care of him, how much respect you pay him, and the way you speak to others when he's in earshot. Scaring Daniel too much in the forest will give him nightmares later, while teaching him to skip rocks and bonding with him over being wolves brings you closer. This adds another layer to the care you put in when making choices. The most striking and positive difference in Life Is Strange 2 is the diversity of its cast of characters and voice actors and the decision to tell stories from those perspectives. To Sean, who has lived in Seattle all his life, his ethnicity doesn't define the way he lives. Though, he and Daniel do giggle at a gas station flyer that claims to offer Spanish lessons and occasionally slip into Spanish, particularly when referring to each other. Sean's voicework, performed by Gonzalo Martin, doubles down on his characterization as a Latino teenager brought up in America. His accent is mostly American but with an occasional Mexican inflection, which is a lovely touch that grounds the character in his ancestry.It's Sean's next-door neighbor that kicks off Sean's first major confrontation with racism at his doorstep. Esteban explains to Sean early on that ""things are scary in this country right now."" Sean's neighbor tells him to go back to his country, multiple characters say Sean is the reason they need to ""build that wall,"" and one even threatens to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The tensest moments are heightened further by Martin's voicework, which shifts dramatically to a desperate, frightened delivery that brought me to tears more than once. It's wildly uncomfortable and heartbreaking being on the receiving end of confrontations which depict racism and witnessing police brutality.While going into any more detail would be spoiling the story, Dontnod's deft and delicate storytelling style lends itself to depicting these important but rarely told perspectives with care, particularly in the face of highly charged and controversial issues. The commentary on a fragile and volatile modern-day America and how it impacts the people within it is a hefty, albeit admirable, undertaking. It will be telling how these issues are handled as the series develops through the episodes ahead. There were also some repercussions to my actions in the first chapter of Life Is Strange 2, but nothing that made me feel as if I couldn't recover from a bad choice; it remains to be seen what consequences may arise over the four episodes still to come.As the first episode of Life Is Strange 2 concludes, Sean finds himself driving south, away from Arcadia Bay, the setting of the first game. The references to that town and all that happened within it are few and far between in the sequel, but the excellence in character and worldbuilding remain. Dontnod retains its expertise in depicting a teenager's unique struggles with their identity, relationships, and the way they fit into their world, while adding new gameplay mechanics that lend a stronger emotional investment to your decision-making. Life Is Strange 2: Episode 1 is a triumphant first chapter, featuring a narrative that fearlessly reflects the lives of two Latino brothers living in our politically-charged climate.
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'tell', 'stories', 'perspectives', '.', 'To', 'Sean', ',', 'lived', 'Seattle', 'life', ',', 'ethnicity', ""n't"", 'define', 'way', 'lives', '.', 'Though', ',', 'Daniel', 'giggle', 'gas', 'station', 'flyer', 'claims', 'offer', 'Spanish', 'lessons', 'occasionally', 'slip', 'Spanish', ',', 'particularly', 'referring', '.', 'Sean', ""'s"", 'voicework', ',', 'performed', 'Gonzalo', 'Martin', ',', 'doubles', 'characterization', 'Latino', 'teenager', 'brought', 'America', '.', 'His', 'accent', 'mostly', 'American', 'occasional', 'Mexican', 'inflection', ',', 'lovely', 'touch', 'grounds', 'character', 'ancestry.It', ""'s"", 'Sean', ""'s"", 'next-door', 'neighbor', 'kicks', 'Sean', ""'s"", 'first', 'major', 'confrontation', 'racism', 'doorstep', '.', 'Esteban', 'explains', 'Sean', 'early', '``', 'things', 'scary', 'country', 'right', '.', ""''"", 'Sean', ""'s"", 'neighbor', 'tells', 'go', 'back', 'country', ',', 'multiple', 'characters', 'say', 'Sean', 'reason', 'need', '``', 'build', 'wall', 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641,Devotion  - House Of Horrors,9," Set within the modest confines of a Taiwanese apartment in the 1980s, Devotion paints a terrifying picture of family life with nuanced storytelling and an insidious atmosphere.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/2/7/4/484095-699274.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/devotion-review-house-of-horrors/1900-6417096/,pos,"
The most effective horror can seep its way into the mundanity of our everyday lives, ruminating beneath the surface before wrapping its malevolent tendrils around our sense of comfort and familiarity. Years after it was removed from sale, the bite-sized slice of P.T. we were privy to still manages to evoke those trembling feelings of unease more potently than almost any other horror game since--making each trip around that unremarkable L-shaped corridor an intimidating test of nerves. Devotion, a new psychological horror game from Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games, evokes P.T.'s terrifying spirit to paint an inventive, thought-provoking, and insidious portrait of family life within the claustrophobic confines of a small Taiwanese apartment.Set throughout the 1980s, Devotion focuses on a strained family of three: struggling screenwriter Du Feng Yu, retired singer and movie star Li Fang, and their sickly young daughter Mei Shin, who aspires to be like her mother. The game predominantly takes place within the five rooms of their modest apartment, with a narrative that takes you on a distressing tour through the years and various configurations of this intimate space. The attention to detail in each facet of the apartment is striking, as every nook and cranny is thoughtfully assembled to replicate an authentic, lived-in home. There are old newspapers being used as makeshift tablecloths, pencils and discarded scripts messily strewn across desks, a corridor that's extravagantly decorated with the haphazard art of Meh Shin and her litany of crayons, and a calendar hung above the CRT TV that notates significant dates in the family's lives. Each detail, no matter how meaningful or insignificant, establishes and effectively reinforces Devotion's disconcerting sense of familiarity. This nuanced sense of place ensures that whenever your eyes are averted elsewhere and the apartment begins to shift and transcend its limitations--sometimes dramatically, other times subtly--it's all the more unnerving when you turn around and come face-to-face with a surreal distortion.Click image to view in full screenAll of these details, from the apartment's transforming arrangement of rooms, its varying lighting, the tempestuous weather rattling away at the windows outside, and the way the building mutates around you, are all in service of Red Candle's profound storytelling. The central tale is intimately focused on the family of three, but Devotion manages to weave a tangled web that deftly examines the impact that mental illness, societal pressure and expectations, and religious fanaticism can have on a beleaguered family. For as much as Devotion is about its characters and the fantastic way their development coalesces with that of the ever-changing apartment--with the increasingly dishevelled rooms acting as a poignant metaphor for the family--it's also about a specific time and place; delving into the role of women in 1980's Taiwan, feminine beauty standards, the infancy of mental health research and the stigmas attached to it, and the sometimes dangerous faith desperate people will place in religion. Explorations of Taoism and Buddhism might not completely resonate with a Western audience, but the story is told in such a way that it's relatively easy to read through the lines and understand the awful, heartbreaking extremes people are willing to go to for those they love.Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games, evokes P.T.'s terrifying spirit to paint an inventive, thought-provoking, and insidious portrait of family lifeImpassioned voice acting brings Devotion's limited number of cutscenes to life, but most of the story is told through the myriad items you gather, read, and manipulate as you traverse through different variations of the family home during 1980, 1985, and 1986. Puzzle solving is relatively straightforward, with any items you find inevitably being used to solve a particular conundrum. All of your interactions are geared towards unravelling the mystery of exactly what happened within the unassuming walls of this family home. A note you found earlier might inform a scene later on, while coming to understand the family's relationship with one another will gradually evolve the context and meaning of certain trinkets aside from the revelations discovered in its most gut-punching moments. Devotion might be mechanically simple--knowing to put a camera on a tripod isn't going to wrack your brain, for example--but its strengths come from simply immersing you in a place with an engaging story you'll want to see through to its conclusion. There are a couple of jump scares, but they feel earned within the oppressive atmosphere achieved through ominous music, sounds, and unsettling imagery, with striking motifs tracing everything back to the family's shattered lives.Unlike a lot of contemporary horror games, Devotion also resists the temptation to dabble in frustrating trial-and-error stealth sections or monotonous conflicts with monsters in an attempt to heighten any perceived sense of excitement. There is one regrettable chase scene late in the game, which is undeniably Devotion's lowest point, but it's also brief and easy enough that it doesn't overstay its welcome. At three hours in length it's feasible to reach the end credits in one sitting, and that might be the ideal way to experience it. The pacing is almost immaculate aside from a plodding stroll towards the game's final act, but even this is easy to push to the back of your mind once you've reached its stunning conclusion.Devotion doesn't quite match the anxiety-inducing frights that permeate each cautious step forward in games like P.T. and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but its domestic terror burrows deep inside your psyche long after the final credits have rolled. The sorrowful story it tells meshes malice with tenderness, metaphor with stark truths, and achieves it all with the nuanced kind of environmental storytelling other games can only strive for. There are moments when it jumps out of the genre completely, surprising you with a sudden tonal shift, and others where the oftentimes clichéd presence of a children's doll is used to signal a character's poignant detachment. Everything Devotion does is in service of this story and its character development; you learn about these people's lives, empathize with their plight, and come to understand their actions, even if you don't agree with them. Home is where the heart is, and Devotion is a shining example of what the horror genre is capable of.Editor's note: At the time of publishing Devotion is not available to purchase on Steam. The game was pulled by Red Candle Games, which stated this was due to ""technical issues that cause unexpected crashes and among other reasons."" The game was also caught up in a controversy surrounding art in the game which looked to be based on a meme of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Addressing this, Red Candle Games said ""our team would also review our game material once again making sure no other unintended materials was inserted."" The game is expected to be made available again in the future.
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642,Gris  - Seeing In Color,9, Gris is a beautiful and tranquil platformer that relishes in the simple pleasure of exploring its enchanting world.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/4/7/4/485665-682474.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gris-review-seeing-in-color/1900-6417057/,pos,"
Painting Gris as a beautiful adventure is almost too obvious. Even amid the crumbling ruins that hint at better days, every element of this platformer emphasizes its undeniable loveliness. From the wide-angle shots and the ethereal music to the delicate way in which you glide gracefully to a far-off platform, Gris is enrapturing in ways that make it hard to walk away from. Though it takes a mere four hours to reach the ending credits, the time spent with Gris is so captivating that it would have felt greedy to stay with it any longer.In Gris, a young woman finds herself alone in a desolate world. Ruined buildings and broken pillars dominate the landscape, remnants from a lost civilization. Without saying a word, the woman exudes loneliness, moving forward only to fulfill the aching sense of longing that is now her only companion. The feeling of loss is palpable. You wander through a palace that could tumble with one strong gust of wind. Cracked statues lay before you, all of women. Some stand in poses of power, others of thoughtfulness, but all are only relics of what used to be. Savor the sight because the statues, the buildings, the pillars could all be turned to dust when you return.Your goal is to obtain fragments of light that complete constellations, allowing you to reach other areas. But the dreamy flow through locations is so subtle that it rarely feels as if you’re completing specific tasks. Rather, you guide the young woman down slopes, across balconies, and through ruins because the call to see what wonders await is impossible to resist. For much of the game, I felt lost as I glided across the serene landscapes, unaware of where I was going but curious to see what lay just outside of my vision. Being lost in Gris is different from other games, though. Whenever I wondered if I was going in the right direction, I wandered into a new location just as beautiful as where I had been, and I set off to wherever it felt like I was being led.As I drifted through Gris’ world, I collected the odd light fragment, but it never felt like the point of my movement--I just wanted to see where the path led me, and I solved puzzles to reach the fragments along the way. These puzzles are not mind-teasers that demand careful concentration or daring trial-and-error obstacles. Rather, you need only figure out how your given abilities work in a specific area to continue onward undeterred. In the beginning, for instance, I had to learn that I could walk up staircases I thought were only in the background. A little puzzle, yes, but one that brings joy when you realize how simple and delightful the solution is.Later sections have blocks that appear when a light shines upon them or a wintery wind that casts statues of ice in your image, but none of the puzzles are presented in such a way as to stymie a player. Gris is a game in which its lack of challenge is a positive quality because any frustrating section would have derailed the feeling of peace and serenity that it builds so wondrously as you progress. There’s no combat or death to break you from this trance, just pure pleasure throughout. I wanted to explore this world, to see breathtaking sights and soak in the melancholic score, and Gris welcomed this feeling instead of hiding its charms behind tests of skill.Despite the ease of the puzzles, there are genuine surprises in how you navigate the world. I gasped when I realized a rippling block wasn’t as solid as I had assumed and there’s a perspective-flipping section that made me laugh with joy. The magic of Gris is that it encompasses the varied move set you’d expect in a more demanding platformer, without expecting impressive feats of dexterity to progress. Instead, it introduces all those navigational twists to draw you ever deeper into this fascinating world. Because of its many surprises, it’s the rare game where I wish I could have my memory erased, to play it once more from the beginning, because few games contain surprises that were so affected.Gris is joyful and sad, a beautiful ruin, contradictions that make these experiences so exciting. The surprises that lay hidden are not plot twists or unlockable goodies but rather moments when the mechanics perfectly complement the aesthetics. Every element is used to engage your sense of awe. Gris is beautiful, yes, but it uses that beauty like a surgical knife. As you climb to the top of a pyramid, with the sun growing ever brighter and the stars beckoning, it knows to pull back the camera, to show how small you stand against the majesty of the universe.Don’t dismiss Gris as a game so caught up in its artistic splendor that it forgets what medium it's a part of, though. Strip away the resplendent visual design and enchanting score and Gris would still be enticing because of its sense of movement. The young woman moves with graceful purpose. She’s light on her feet but sure-headed, giving her a weightiness that makes it feel like you’re trying to break free of gravity but can never quite do so. There were sections when I would purposely repeat a series of jumps because it felt so good to skirt against the dreamy sky. New powers are unlocked as you get deeper into the adventure, and all of them add another layer of interactivity that not only expands your horizons but feels good to enact.Gris understands intrinsically how magical video games can be and continually pushes your imagination until you’re almost bursting with joy. The ways in which it reinvents itself as you gain powers and dive ever deeper into this world is truly special, and just as it knows exactly when to pull back the camera or introduce a new song, it’s keenly aware of when it's time to say goodbye. Like a comet streaking across the sky, Gris is full of wonder and beauty and leaves you with a warm glow in your heart.
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'time', 'say', 'goodbye', '.', 'Like', 'comet', 'streaking', 'across', 'sky', ',', 'Gris', 'full', 'wonder', 'beauty', 'leaves', 'warm', 'glow', 'heart', '.']",0.17075122504810006,0.5642770713083213
643,Return Of The Obra Dinn : The Good Ship,9," Return of the Obra Dinn is a startlingly original detective adventure full of murder, mutiny, and monsters.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/4/9/8/487169-686498.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/return-of-the-obra-dinn-review-the-good-ship/1900-6417017/,pos,"
Like Lucas Pope's previous game, Papers, Please, Return of the Obra Dinn is primarily concerned with processing information. In the latter, you play as an insurance clerk assessing claims on a mysteriously abandoned ship rather than a customs agent assessing documents at the border of a totalitarian country, but in both games, you are presented with fragments of data and asked to check their veracity through cross-reference and deductive logic. Both games are also grim in their own ways, but while Papers, Please forces you to consider your personal moral compass and where you're willing to see it compromised, Return of the Obra Dinn leaves you in a more detached role as the time-traveling observer of a naval journey gone horribly wrong.In 1802 the ""good ship"" Obra Dinn set sail from London to ""the Orient"" but never reached its destination. Five years later it is found drifting into the port of Falmouth in southwest England with no one left alive on board. As a clerk at the East India Company it's your job to explore the ship and find out what happened. You're given a nifty book--which includes a full crew and passenger manifest, annotated deck maps, a glossary of basic sailing terms, and a group sketch of the people on board drawn by one of the passengers--into which you are expected to record all the relevant details.Like most insurance clerks, one suspects, you are also equipped with a magical pocket watch that, when opened and activated in the presence of a corpse, allows you to travel back in time to the moment of the person's death. It's almost literally a single moment, too, as the screen fades to black and you hear but a few seconds of speech or other sounds leading up to the fatal incident before you find yourself inside a scene that's been frozen in time, and the investigation begins.In this space (which, like the entire game is explored in first-person) you can walk around a confined section of the ship but you cannot interact with anything. You can only zoom in for a closer look at any object, and beyond the immediate surroundings, the background just fades out into nothingness. The entire game is presented in a starkly beautiful monochromatic color scheme, a graphical style described by the developer as ""1-bit"". When still, it resembles something from an early '80s PC, albeit displaying at a much higher resolution. But in motion, when you're walking around the decks, it looks quite unlike anything seen before--a startling retro throwback that is as alien as it is familiar, and that inherent strangeness works only to enhance the sense of mystery.Once inside an investigation space--or memory, as the game refers to them--the first thing you're compelled to do is examine the now-deceased body in front of you, matching their face to the artist's sketch in your book to commence the process of identification. You still don't know their name, but perhaps there was something you heard just before they died that could be a clue? Maybe there's something about what they were doing or wearing or where they were on the ship or who they were with? You also need to determine their fate--were they shot or stabbed or poisoned or crushed or worse? And, if they were murdered, then by whom? Which likely means having to identify someone else through another series of clues. Or maybe you'll need to find the answers in another memory instead?At first, you won't have enough information to draw any firm conclusions about the fate of the ship. However, as you explore the ship and find more bodies, which in turn open up new areas of the ship and reveal yet more bodies, the gaps in your knowledge will start to close. Soon you'll have access to a series of memories that, by the time you're done identifying everyone and discovering their fates, come together to tell the story of the Obra Dinn and the sixty people on board. It's at this point, as you stand over an unknown corpse with your trusty notebook in hand, that Return of the Obra Dinn solidifies into an exceptionally compelling representation of detective work.Unlocking a person's identity requires you to pay attention to every last detail across multiple memories. To narrow your search you can bookmark a specific person and revisit only the memories in which they appear, letting you focus on their individual story in an attempt to clarify their actions and link them to a particular role on the ship. Further, the Obra Dinn had a fairly multicultural crew so you'll do well to note the different languages spoken and the varying accents of the English-speaking majority, as well as the details of each person's physical appearance.At any point, you can pull out your book to pencil in a detail. Perhaps you think this chap is the First Mate or this fellow with the beard got shot by the ship's surgeon. Correctly identify three people and their fates and the game will let you know by properly typesetting your penciled notes. Some will be obvious, most will not, and many will require keeping track of multiple scenes and threading together numerous what-at-first-seemed-inconsequential pieces of information. When a clutch of clues fall into place and you crack the case, as it were, it feels immensely satisfying.Plenty of games promise to make you feel like a detective only to have you checking boxes, but here it's different. Return of the Obra Dinn gives you all the tools you'll need to solve its puzzles--the book interface is a masterpiece of connected design--and then trusts that you'll be capable of arriving at the correct answers by yourself.But it's more than that. Your magical pocket watch and its time-traveling, corpse-identifying mechanic offers far more than just an exceptionally clever puzzle game--as if that wasn't already enough. It also delivers a wonderfully evocative method of storytelling as you gain glimpses into the lives of each person on board at vital moments along the Obra Dinn's journey and piece together who they were, what they had to deal, what motivated them, and how they responded when tragedy struck. You may only see them in scratchy monochrome stills and hear them in brief snatches of urgent conversation, if at all, but if you're paying attention then you should feel like you know (almost) every one of these sixty people intimately by the end of the game. 
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644,Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales  - Queen Of Hearts,9, Thronebreaker's compelling characters accent a strong re-imagining of Gwent and a gripping single-player story.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/7/6/1/487270-686761.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/thronebreaker-the-witcher-tales-review-queen-of-he/1900-6417014/,pos,"
Editor's note: We've updated this review to reflect our time with the PS4 version of Thronebreaker, which rarely differs from the previously released PC version. The frame-rate is drastically reduced when inspecting cards and their descriptions during battles but remains smooth and consistent outside of this. Controls are translated well to traditional controllers, although it feels odd having to control a cursor like a mouse when navigating your camp. Otherwise Thronebreaker remains the exceptional role-playing adventure it was when it launched. Playing Gwent is not impacted by the control scheme changes, and it is still the methodical collectible card game that it has been for months on PC. The original review follows.With the Witcher trilogy, developer CD Projekt Red established that it's capable of making compelling role-playing games with tough decisions, hearty combat, and engrossing lore. In Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, all but one of these aspects has persisted. This prequel is as captivating narratively as some of the Witcher series' best tales, filled with gut-wrenching decisions that have far-reaching consequences. The only difference is that instead of fighting with a sword, you battle with cards. Thronebreaker is an intelligent spin on the collectible card game Gwent and manages to transform its simple premise into an enthralling tale of family, loyalty, and hardship.You play as Queen Meve, ruler of the lands known as Lyria and Rivia, on the eve of the great Nilfgaardian invasion. These ruthless imperials sweep across the land like a plague, decimating villages and their citizens and using underhanded tactics to wrestle control of kingdoms away from their rulers. Meve and her forces, returning home after another lengthy war, get caught in the middle of the invasion. With traitors around every corner and spies lurking in the shadows, you'll have to make difficult decisions about who to let into your party and who to cut ties with permanently as you rally together a guerrilla army to snuff out the Nilfgaardian invasion and rally support for a full-blown counterattack.Thronebreaker's tale involves an entirely new cast of characters (with some notable cameos here and there) which is fully voiced throughout the 25-hour campaign. The interplay between Queen Meve and her trusted subjects is notably strong, with exceptional writing bringing each character's motivations and principles to life. Meve isn't as blank a slate for you to project upon as Geralt is, but Thronebreaker gives you room to work in her decision-making. The choices you make are painted with the same grey brush that The Witcher is known for, with no one choice promising a better outcome than the rest. Leading a dwindling army into battles with impossible odds puts an incredible amount of responsibly on your shoulders, and choosing when to be empathetic and when to be ruthless has some fascinating repercussions--both immediately and far further into the story.You command Meve through multiple large open areas, each bearing a distinctive visual aesthetic and characters to interact with. These areas look like pages ripped from a concept art book, with stunning watercolors and brush strokes bringing sun-kissed pastures and bubbling swamps to life with impressive detail. The cel-shading on Meve and supporting characters helps define them against the background while giving them all distinctive appearances, but it can be slightly jarring when brought into focus during serious conversations. Thronebreaker is a tour around some of The Witcher's most engrossing landscapes, and it's a treat to see them from a different view.Each area plays host to the many story battles you'll need to undertake to progress, but also numerous side missions and collectible content. Side quests can be as simple as making decisions to solve petty quarrels or as involved as hunting down dragons in dark caverns at the request of terrified villagers. Each quest has a story to tell, which can either affect the mood of your troops, bestow you with important rewards such as gold and wood, or introduce new special characters into your ranks. Skipping them can have consequences too, with characters reacting to the people you help and the bounties you choose to take. It makes Thronebreaker's world feel incredibly reactive to your choices, compelling you to take care with how you handle each of them.Thronebreaker interweaves Gwent into its story in smart ways that keep it from feeling like an intrusive method for resolving combat situations, helping you learn its intricate systems while engaging in unique quests and rulesets.You'll also need to gather resources in the vein of gold, wood, and requisitioned troops to better establish your fighting force. Constructing new attachments for your base camp can help you grow your deck of Gwent cards with new characters and abilities, ranging from simple Lyrian forces to noble dwarves and stealthy elves. Thronebreaker doesn't make you feel the need to scour each corner of the map for resources, instead giving you more than enough on the critical path alone. But seeing your small army grow with each passing area is rewarding, as are the effects it has on your abilities to fight with your chosen cards.Units have a variety of abilities that can be triggered in a number of ways, many of which can be chained up with other units to create devastating combos during a single turn. Since Gwent isn't just about dolling out damage and more about field control, striking a balance between cards that damage your opponent and ones more adept at raising your personal score is paramount. Thronebreaker's shifting priorities in combat prevent the flurry of battles from wearing thin, with only a few resting on the basic rules of Gwent alone. Some standout fights had me chipping away at individual cards that made up the body of a dragon, with each piece having its own attributes that either damaged my cards or healed others. Thronebreaker contextualizes the rules of each of its encounters to fit the purpose of the story in clever ways. This makes playing Gwent consistently rewarding and helps avoid the potentially deflating transition from a rousing ride into battle to a simple game of cards on a table.Playing Gwent in Thronebreaker can often feel like a reintroduction to the game with its new rules and stipulations, and that comes with the cost of some quests that feel too easy. On the default difficulty, most core quests won't trouble you enough to make meaningful decisions about the composition of your deck, which saps some life out of the overarching metagame of having to use resources to acquire better cards. Optional puzzle encounters make up for this though, giving you a specific deck to work with in uniquely tailored challenges. These encounters are the best learning tools Thronebreaker has to offer, exposing you to complex card combinations as a requirement to win. Often these challenges lead to card unlocks for Gwent's online component, so you're encouraged to take them up as often as they present themselves.Don't be tricked into thinking Thronebreaker is simply a lengthy tutorial for what is to come when Gwent opens its multiplayer. Its tale is mandatory if you're looking for more Witcher lore to chew on and manages to engage you with a strong cast of well-written characters and a suitably dark plot that challenges your morals every chance it can. Thronebreaker interweaves Gwent into its story in smart ways that keep it from feeling like an intrusive method for resolving combat situations, helping you learn its intricate systems while engaging in unique quests and rulesets. Gwent was a side attraction in The Witcher 3, but through Thronebreaker, it's blossomed into something new that stands on its own as a proud member of the Witcher family. 


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645,MLB The Show 19  - Bases Loaded,9, PS4's MLB The Show 19 continues the series' upward trajectory with significant improvements to fielding and plenty of enjoyable new modes.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/2/3/4/489009-691234.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-the-show-19-review-bases-loaded/1900-6417114/,pos,"
MLB The Show 19 begins with an ode to spring: the opening cutscene waxes lyrical about the world blooming into color with bright blue skies and beaming sun rays amid the chirping of birds, before moving onto the hope, optimism, and excitement that accompanies a new season of Major League Baseball. America's favorite pastime is synonymous with the transition from winter's gloomy doldrums to the warmer weather of spring, and Sony San Diego's long-running baseball series has become a complementary part of that equation. This is due in no small part to the high level of quality The Show has maintained throughout its lifespan, and MLB 19 is no different, implementing smart new tweaks and significant refinements to its on-field action, while introducing entertaining new modes to its authentic flavor of baseball excellence.Fielding has received the most substantial improvements out on the diamond, with the Defensive Runs Saved metric coming to the forefront. Now any player wearing a leather-clad glove is more responsive than before, hustling to field weakly hit balls, recovering quickly from botched catches, and utilizing a plethora of new animations to give you added control over the defensive side of the game. There's also a clear distinction between each fielder's individual stats, so if you've got a Gold Glove player like Matt Chapman manning the hot corner, you'll notice how adept he is at reaching balls lesser fielders will have trouble getting to. An outfielder's reaction to the ball jumping off the bat varies depending on their attributes, too, while a new interface makes it easier or harder to read balls that careen off the outfield wall depending on the defending player's skill set. There's an intuitive fielding ability indicator under the feet of each player to give you a quick reference point for how likely they are to pull off a spectacular play versus an embarrassing one, and that means substituting that beefy power hitter you've lodged into left field is now a tactical switch worth considering in the later innings. Each of these changes contributes to a greater sense of control over how your team prevents runs, removing a lot of the frustration that plagued previous games when fielders were often too lackadaisical.At the plate, batting feels slightly more forgiving this year. There's now a greater distinction between the types of contact you can make with the ball, and a larger variety of hits makes batting more enjoyable. Not to mention pitchers are now actually concerned with self-preservation, so you won't encounter quite as many stolen hits because the pitcher's face was in the way. These changes coalesce to make a strong aspect of the game even stronger, and few feelings can match the elation that arises when you square up a ball and hear the crack of the bat as it flies into a gap in center field.In terms of modes, the most notable new addition is March to October, which essentially acts as a truncated and more streamlined version of the time-consuming Franchise Mode. In the past, Sony San Diego has made strides in contriving various ways to make Franchise less of a time sink. Being able to expedite a 162-game baseball season by alternating between playing full games or using quick manage and player lock was a welcome change, but it's still a lengthy endeavor that most will still want to simulate through at times. However, there's always an inherent degree of detachment that comes from simming your way through blocks of the season. March to October alleviates this issue by making your performances impact your team's form, even if you're only playing for two or three innings at a time.At the outset, March to October asks you to pick a team, categorizing all 30 MLB teams based on their expectations as either favorites, contenders, underdogs, or longshots. It doesn't matter whether you pick a team like the Yankees or the Orioles, your ultimate goal is to reach the postseason and win the World Series. The majority of the season is automatically simulated, but during critical moments you'll be dropped into games in a variety of situations to try and earn a positive outcome. These can range from taking over a game in the eighth inning of a blowout with the simple aim of maintaining a shutout, joining in the sixth to break open a tied game, or stepping into the batter's box with two outs in the ninth and a man on second when your team is down by a single run. Your performance in these situations earns you either positive or negative momentum, and this affects your team's results during those simulated games. Obviously, there's a little more leeway here if you're using one of the powerhouse teams as opposed to a relative minnow, but momentum ensures your performance has a palpable effect on how well your team does even when you're not directly involved. Maintain positive momentum and you'll see your team go on a winning run, while the opposite is true if you fail to meet your objectives. You'll also occasionally have the opportunity to use player lock in certain games, with that player earning a season-long bonus if you, say, drive in three runs or crush a game-winning homer.Completing a full season takes roughly 10 to 15 hours, and winning the World Series at the conclusion of March to October nets you rewards for MLB 19's card-collecting mode, Diamond Dynasty. This won't be a mouth-watering incentive for everyone, and March to October still consumes enough time that there's little replay value involved. Nevertheless, it's an engaging new mode that consistently puts you in situations tailor-made for some thrilling topsy-turvy baseball. It may lack depth due to an absence of roster moves, with a single deadline day trade the only chance to augment your team, but for those who don't have time to commit to Franchise Mode, it's a fantastic alternative.Moments is another new addition that also drops you into crucial situations, with the key difference here being their historical significance. Playing as the likes of Babe Ruth, Nolan Ryan, Willie Mays, and other icons of the sport, Moments lets you relive the classic plays, at-bats, pitching performances, and playoff series of these legendary players' Hall of Fame careers--complete with authentic stadiums and a black and white filter. It's not a perfect recreation of baseball's past, with plenty of default players on top of contemporary commentary and graphic overlays. There's also little fanfare when you pull off a historic feat, with not even so much as a single line of dialogue. Yet despite these missteps, it's still exciting to call your homerun with The Bambino, mash your way to a .400 average with Tony Gywnn, or win the Chicago Cubs' first World Series in 108 years. Moments also provides another avenue to earn rewards for Diamond Dynasty, beyond giving you the opportunity to play as historic players before unlocking their playing cards.This is a common through line in MLB 19: Almost everything you do contributes to Diamond Dynasty in some way. This makes it relatively easy to assemble a competitive team without having to spend a dime of real-world money, and there are still multiple ways to engage with Diamond Dynasty in both single and multiplayer capacities, depending on your preference, from playing against others online to conquering maps in Conquest Mode, drafting a team in Battle Royale to ascend a ladder, and completing various challenges. The variety of options mixed with the frequent stream of rewards makes Diamond Dynasty one of the most enjoyable card-collecting modes in the genre.Elsewhere, Road to the Show introduces a few more RPG elements this year to give dialogue options some much-needed impact. During the creation of your player, you have to choose between reworked archetypes, with each one acting as a physical blueprint for the type of player you want to be. There isn't a level cap anymore, so you can feasibly increase each of your player's stats to 99 overall, but your chosen archetype governs how easy or difficult it is to improve specific attributes. For instance, pick a Small Ball hitter and you'll find it easier to train your speed, fielding, and stealing, while it will be much harder to improve power and plate discipline, with contact and arm strength falling somewhere in the middle. Enhancing these stats still relates to your on-field performance, with a base hit correlating to an increase in contact, and so on. There are new minigames based around weightlifting and other exercise drills, too, allowing you to progress certain attributes if you want to put in the extra work off the field.During the character creation process you're also asked to choose between four personality types: lightning rod, captain, heart and soul, and maverick. Each dialogue option in Road to the Show relates to one of these personalities, so picking the captain option to give a teammate some encouragement when he's in the midst of a slump will upgrade your captain attributes, which in turn allows you to unlock various perks within a modest skill tree. Reach tier two in heart and soul, for example, and you can activate a perk that improves your hitting ability when in 2-0, 2-1, 3-0, and 3-1 counts, ensuring your dialogue choices manifest in meaningful bonuses when at the plate. Forming a relationship with teammates or an antagonistic rivalry with another team's players will make these perks more powerful as well. Occasionally you'll also be asked to pick between three challenges during particular moments in games, whether it's simply getting on base or striking out the next batter. Each challenge has a boost to stats related to it, with harder challenges providing a more substantial boost if you're successful. This is only a small touch, but it gives you an extra opportunity to improve your player by balancing the risk and reward of picking a harder challenge over a simpler one. There's no doubt smashing a home run over the left field wall is more exhilarating than usual when a 175% boost is active.As for Franchise Mode, there's not really a lot to say. Contracts now more closely mirror their real-life counterparts, both in terms of years and money, and you can finally re-sign players before they reach the end of their current deal. This adds authenticity to the business side of Franchise Mode, but otherwise it's the same as it has been for a few years now. There's still no team relocation, stadium building, or online Franchise Mode, which is disappointing considering these are staples in other sports games. On the plus side, at least you can now use two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani as a designated hitter on days he's not pitching without having to waste a substitution.Despite the lack of innovation in Franchise Mode, MLB The Show 19 excels when it comes to the sheer variety of single-player content on offer, while significant improvements to fielding round out the on-field package, making this one of the best baseball games ever. That's not a particularly bold statement considering the series' consistent quality throughout the years, but MLB 19 continues that upward trajectory with its most robust offering yet, guaranteeing another year's worth of excellent baseball.   


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646,The Outer Worlds  - To Infinity And Beyond,9," Classic RPG sensibilities enhance wonderful characters, punchy combat, and consistently excellent writing in this sharp space Western.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/2/9/490219-694229.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-outer-worlds-review-to-infinity-and-beyond/1900-6417345/,pos,"
The Outer Worlds plays just like a Fallout game. That's a pretty tepid description and an obvious comparison. It's easy to take one look at the game, which strongly echoes the mechanical form of the Bethesda RPGs, and think you know what to expect. The developer, Obsidian Entertainment, was responsible for the cult-favorite Fallout: New Vegas after all. But The Outer Worlds doesn't just play like a Fallout game. It is, surprisingly, the best possible version of a Fallout game--a potent distillation of what made that series so beloved in the first place.The Outer Worlds adopts the most compelling innovations of modern Fallout games, emphasising immersive exploration and impactful, action-oriented combat in a game engine (Unreal Engine) that actually makes those things feel good by contemporary standards. It shares Fallout's satirical but incredibly bleak look at the future, but is free of its tired tropes. Critically, The Outer Worlds exhibits the same depth of soul as the early Interplay and Black Isle Fallout games (as well as other games in the '90s PC RPG genre) with a genuinely complex, interconnected narrative web of relationships and events that feel like they can change in a seemingly infinite number of ways based on the character you want to be, the variety of choices you can make, and the actions you take.Given the studio and the key people responsible (original Fallout creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky), that last trait isn't surprising. But it's not the only element that makes The Outer Worlds an excellent space Western adventure--that's just the incredibly sound foundation that elevates the game's great world-building, wonderful characters, and multi-layered quest design, on top of punchy combat and consistently sharp writing.In The Outer Worlds, you are just one of the thousands of people left in hibernation on an abandoned colony ship, when a scientist of possibly ill repute frees you and enlists your help in saving the rest of your frozen peers. After a rigorous character creation process--involving a slew of variable attributes, perks, and aesthetic customization--you crash-land on a planet, alone, and from there, how you make your mark on the Halcyon system is up to you.The crux of this sci-fi setup is that, among other things, the Halcyon system is owned and run entirely by a board of corporations, and their presence is a big deal. Whole planets are owned by corps looking to use their ecosystems as part of a larger supply chain, and numerous vending machines from different companies populate towns, trying to attract you with their bright logos and jingles. In fact, The Outer Worlds is saturated with strikingly colourful locales; the planets you'll visit are impressively varied and sometimes beautiful, flaunting an H.G. Wells-like retro-futuristic aesthetic, the antithesis of grimdark cyberpunk.On the first impression, corporations appear as a mostly aesthetic layer folded into the world. A number of the companies mentioned seem to mostly just exist as manufacturers of weapons and consumables--a piece of flair to keep the tone light in the same way that the Circus of Values exists in BioShock, but it's far more ingrained than that. Corporate capitalism so deeply affects everything in The Outer Worlds, and explorations into how it can affect society on a variety of levels is a surprisingly well-considered constant, despite the semblance of parody. You'll meet sympathetic workers whose livelihoods are only made possible by offering themselves to exploitation and indentured servitude, white-collared outlaws who are more bureaucrats than pirates, and well-meaning middle-managers who are trying to change the corporate machine from the inside. You'll find moderates, idealists, extremists, and most things in between and around the fringes, all of which have their own feasible ideas about how to best serve the colony or themselves. By the time the climax hits, it's clear that The Outer Worlds has its own stance on this bleak future, but that doesn't stop the world it creates, the sojourns you take, and characters you meet along the way from being any less fascinating.There are plenty of characters in The Outer Worlds who I didn't like. Reed Tobson, for example, is a snivelling factory chief in the early hours of the game who I didn't have to think twice about undermining, and Felix, one of your potential companion characters, had such an annoyingly naive personality I avoided talking to him as much as possible. The Outer Worlds allows you to kill any character in the game (bar one), and the world will reshape and move on without them, but there's something to be said for game's depiction of its unappealing people, whose portrayal I admired despite my distaste. You'll talk to a lot of people in The Outer Worlds. How much you do is up to you--you're allowed to cut straight to get to the point or dive deeper--but chatting to the game's entire supporting cast of non-player characters is something that never gets tiring, even if you don't care for them, purely because of how strong the game's writing and vocal performances are.I never felt like I had to endure stretches of pointless or overly dramatic exchanges, both because of how focussed and subtle the script seemed to be, as well as the variety of response options for my player character which kept conversations flowing in largely natural ways. Numerous considerations for the world state let conversations take into account things you may or may not already have done throughout your campaign; brief and subtle injections of worldbuilding and lore stop conversation from being too matter of fact without losing the game's identity, and some exceptional low-key wit works very well in sparking a periodic laugh without humour feeling like a sticking point. Solid, consistent voice direction helps keep the tone firmly measured, meaning the hours you spend absorbing the world through its people are always engaging.Nowhere does the strength of the game's characters shine more strongly than in your companions, however (except for Felix; that guy is a weenie). You have the option to recruit six predetermined characters to accompany and assist you in your adventures, though the game does have tools to bolster a lone wolf character too. But having companions along for the ride is a delight, and that's, again, because of the strength of the character writing. Companions instantly feel like fleshed-out characters of their own accord, not like they simply exist to revolve around you. They'll converse privately with each other and chime in on conversations you have with other characters in the world, acting as sounding boards during key moments. They can, in extreme situations, leave you of their own accord if they strongly disagree with a course of action. It's all mechanically conditional, of course, but the illusion the game builds is so endearing--spending time with these folks feels just as valuable as your pursuing the overarching goal.Companions have their own customisable skill trees, equipment loadouts, combat tactics, and special abilities you can command them to use, which, with their cinematic camera angles, inspired battle cries, and useful status effects, never become unsatisfying to initiate. The other major tool at your disposal in combat, provided your character's weapon skills are high enough to use it, is Tactical Time Dilation (TTD)--a time-bending mechanic that slows the action to a crawl, allowing you to give yourself some breathing room in order to analyse enemies and take the time to execute precision attacks. Hitting certain locations on enemies will let you do things like cripple or maim them, or inflict weapon-specific effects like bleed damage or knocking them unconscious. Using TTD tactically to take out key targets and attempt to control the flow of battle makes it an entertaining and useful tool, but its availability is limited and not something you can rely on entirely until you get to meaningfully upgrade it much later in the game.Despite having strong RPG foundations, the combat in The Outer Worlds is very much focussed on first-person action, incorporating things like parries, blocks, and dodges on top of an array of melee weapons and firearms. There's a hectic and fast-paced fluidity to combat that feels very good, however. That's aided by some enthusiastic sound design, which does most of the heavy lifting in giving all weapons some satisfying feedback. A range of ""Science weapons"" bring some creative diversity in your arsenal, and features guns that have unique, entertaining properties like shrinking enemies or turning them against each other.The only problem with combat is that on the game's recommended Regular difficulty, it eventually turns into a cakewalk. This is satisfying in a way, of course--all the points I pumped into maxing out my handgun skills, thus becoming best gunslinger in the galaxy, did actually make me feel utterly invincible. But, it also meant I didn't feel pushed to explore the game's slew of combat-adjacent mechanics nearly as deeply as I would have hoped. Things like elemental damage, equipment modding, companion synergies, and the special effects allowed by consumables (which, by the way, are incredibly difficult to parse in the game's icon-heavy menu), could all be safely ignored. The Outer Worlds has a ""flaws"" system that lets you purposefully shoulder restrictive debuffs in certain situations in exchange for an extra perk point, but it's completely optional and rarely worth the tradeoff. Jumping into the ""Supernova"" difficulty level in a subsequent playthrough changes all that, however--combat danger increases, your ability to save your game becomes restricted, and survival mechanics like hunger and thirst are introduced, making all of the game's mechanical considerations feel far more vital. The game is more challenging and interesting because of it, but its demanding nature definitely makes it more of a second-run option.Toe-to-toe combat is not the only solution to your problems. The Outer Worlds allows for a variety of avenues for alternative and passive solutions--stealth, hacking, and speech-related options are available throughout the game, provided you pass the skill checks. It's nigh impossible to complete the game without getting into at least some combat, unfortunately, but to the game's credit, virtually every quest in the game, big or small, features branching options in terms of their paths to success and how you deal with the big, final choices you have to make to resolve disputes, which are often deliciously grey. It's at the level where you'll always be considering the additional ways you could have achieved something, whether that be taking a different route, finding more information out in the world, or killing the quest giver and everyone else in the town. When you hit the end, the game runs through a whole slew of epilogues that describe how you resolved the game's numerous major variables and what became of them, and being shown all your exploits after some 30 hours makes the whole journey and your unique path through it really feel quite meaningful. It's difficult to know the full extent of just how many directions something can go, and the end result of many quests can likely only ever differ in a small handful of ways, but this perception of freedom and possibilities on your first run is inspiring.I finished The Outer Worlds wanting more, eager to jump back into the world to see extra things. It's not a short game, but it's one packed with such a steady stream of wonderful characters to meet, interesting places to explore, and meaningful, multi-layered quests to solve, that it didn't feel like there was any room to get tired of it. I wanted to rewind the clock and do everything in a completely different way. The Outer Worlds is consistently compelling throughout, and it's a superb example of how to promote traditional RPG sensibilities in a sharp, modern experience. 


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647,Mortal Kombat 11  - The Right Fight,9," Mortal Kombat 11 hits where it counts, with smart refinements to a deep and exciting fighting system, entertaining story mode, and rewarding persistent content.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1593/15930215/3534443-727ed6a54171f02633681c050867c6b1.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mortal-kombat-11-review-the-right-fight/1900-6417127/,pos,"
The new big bad in Mortal Kombat is named Kronika, and she's causing a ruckus by messing with time and rewriting history. Characters are getting erased or colliding with their past selves, while alliances are reverting and new ones are being made--it's the kind of chaos that's ripe for conflict. Nothing that happened with Mortal Kombat before really matters anymore; the series is giving itself a clean slate, and not just with the lore in the story. NetherRealm's multifaceted fighting system has been streamlined, and comprehensive tutorials and practice functions are focussed on making sure no matter where you're coming from, you're well-equipped to dive deep into Mortal Kombat 11.It's hard not to get excited about the story mode in a NetherRealm game given the studio's history of crafting involved narratives, and Mortal Kombat 11 unsurprisingly delivers an entertaining and polished blockbuster-style cinematic experience with its tale of Kronika's time-bending antics. Combat is woven in with a number of cutscenes, though you'll probably spend more time watching well-choreographed action rather than participating. But the story is a great primer for some of the series' more popular characters nonetheless, and the joys of Kronika's time manipulation means that even if you're a passing fan and aren't up-to-date with all of the wacky stuff that's happened in the universe lately, you can still get a kick out of seeing classic versions of familiar faces, who are just as baffled as you about what's happened to their future selves since.Watching the character interactions between young and old selves are a highlight, and with the exception of a somewhat flat Sonya Blade, the solid performances are endearingly sincere with some unexpected moments of introspection. By the time it ended I was eager for more--more of Johnny Cage being embarrassed by his younger self, more of the bromance between Liu Kang and Kung Lao, the sappy dynamic between parents and children. But the story mode hits that perfect balance of being just enough and not overstaying its welcome. The plot conceits are regularly ridiculous, especially when family members and lovers get into fatal tiffs, but it's a delightfully bombastic and outlandish visual spectacle if nothing else.Mortal Kombat 11's eclectic roster includes a solid selection of the series' iconic fighters, along with some of the great additions from Mortal Kombat X, like gunslinger Erron Black and the grotesque insectoid D'Vorah. Three brand new characters do their best to help the lineup branch out--Geras is an imposing heavy with the ability to rewind and manipulate time, Cetrion is an elder god with flashy elemental projectiles, the Kollector has a wonderfully unsettling and bamboozling six-armed demonic design--and they all add an inspired diversity to the familiar roster of magical ninjas and military hard-asses. Character variations also help to keep things diverse. A returning concept from Mortal Kombat X, each character can select between different sets of special moves that alter their playstyle. You can now customize these loadouts in MK11, but only two predetermined movesets are acceptable for serious competitive play. Even so, it means there are a few things to consider when picking which fighter to use.Some key changes streamline the mechanics of MK11, resulting in a fighting system that feels more active and aggressive than its predecessors. The special meter system has been simplified, allowing for amplified maneuvers to be used at almost any time--gone is the idea of needing to hold back and save up two or three bars of a meter to perform a particular kind of technique. Separate meters for offensive and defensive techniques, along with rapid recharge rates, mean they can be used more liberally, too. ""Fatal Blows"" replace MKX's X-Ray techniques, serving as a last-ditch comeback mechanic that can be activated once per match when your health is nearly depleted, adding a heightened tension when things get down to the wire. Significant block damage discourages you from being overly defensive, while learning the perfect-timing demands of the ""flawless block"" system is encouraged to mitigate some damage and open up turnabout opportunities. Running and stamina meters have been removed and dash distances feel shorter, honing MK11's focus on always being within striking distance of your opponent. All of these tweaks mean there is rarely a low moment in a Mortal Kombat 11 fight.If you're new to the series, learning all those intricacies of the fighting system, special moves, and combo strings for characters can be intimidating. Fortunately, Mortal Kombat 11 does a lot to help onboard you to almost all of its concepts. Following the good work seen in Injustice 2, Mortal Kombat 11 features a comprehensive series of fantastic practical tutorials, with everything from teaching you basic attacks to more advanced lessons on managing the ebb and flow of a match, strategies on how to change or maintain the dynamic of a fight (like dealing with corners or projectile spam), and how to approach building your own combos. What's more, there are also a series of tutorials that succinctly break down expert-level concepts, such as one that shows you what frame data is and how it works in clear, visual terms. Not only that, there are lessons on how to interpret that information and use it in a practical scenario--it'll teach you what makes a move ""safe"" or ""unsafe,"" how to create pressure in a fight, and even how to perform frame traps. It's an impressive resource that doesn't just give you a better understanding of Mortal Kombat 11's systems, but a deeper understanding of fighting game mechanics in general--knowledge that you can take to any other title.Character-specific tutorials exist, too, and are more than just a simple rundown of all available techniques. These helpful lessons focus on the most useful and practical abilities and combos for a particular character and give you suggestions on when to use them, the pros and cons of doing so, and what you could follow up with. Furthermore, the in-game move lists are incredibly comprehensive, providing all sorts of helpful data for each move's properties, so you can easily discern something like which of your character's moves has the quickest startup. It's valuable information and knowledge that NetherRealm has been building upon in its last few games and is presented at its best in MK11. Of course, if you're the kind of player that couldn't care less about the advanced stuff and just wants to jump in and see blood spilled, Mortal Kombat 11 can certainly be just as entertaining. Predetermined combo strings, flashy special moves, and humorously over-the-top barbarity means that the game is a joy to watch and participate in, whether the players are just messing around or taking it seriously.In addition to the game's story mode, MK11 sees the return of Klassic Towers, a more straightforward single-player mode where you fight a series of opponents before eventually facing big boss Kronika. But the real meat of the single-player offering is the Towers Of Time, MK11's version of the limited-time ladders seen in other NetherRealm games, which feature unique modifiers that can affect the playing field, combatants, and mechanics.When our review-in-progress was first published, the balance of difficulty seen in the Towers Of Time was in such a state that the odds were always stacked against you--negative environmental modifiers only affected you and not your opponent, AI difficulty was relentlessly high, opponents were more robust, and as a result the challenges often felt horribly cruel and unbalanced. The mode's focus on using ""Konsumables,"" a variety of limited-use items that you can equip and activate during the fight, did little to even the playing field, and their method of attainment was too dependent on luck to even make them a reliable strategy in the first place. In fact, the drip-feed of rewards you received from completing towers were overall too meager (and random) at the game's release to justify the amount of effort they demanded.One week later, NetherRealm released a major patch (1.03) that acknowledged and adjusted a large number of variables related to the Towers of Time, reducing (and in some cases, eliminating) a number of unbalanced modifiers, normalizing the resilience and difficulty of AI opponents, and increasing the amount of rewards for completing activities across the board. That's fortunate, because the modifiers in the Towers of Time add genuinely interesting dynamics to MK11's already enjoyable fighting flow. One tower might pit you against a series of fighters who can poison you if they get a string of hits in, another might place a totem in the middle of the stages that electrocute whoever is standing closest. Other towers might team you up with two or three other online players to take down a particularly hardy ""boss"" fighter, letting you tag each other in, or perhaps assist the active fighter with Konsumables.These kinds of challenges are a welcome exercise that push you to consider different ways to approach a MK11 fight, forcing you to, say, become extra defensive or keep a closer eye on your positioning. The variety of Konsumables--which have abilities that range from letting you call in another character to perform an assist attack, rain missiles down from the sky, or simply replenish your health--can give you extra tools to help keep a handle on the situation. But, in my experience after the 1.03 patch, using Konsumables isn't strictly necessary, so long as you're playing diligently.As they stand at the time of writing, the Towers of Time succeed in providing an endless, compelling palette of single-player content to tackle once you've completed the story mode. The difficulty curve and number of challenges you need to tackle are reasonable enough that achieving the prizes at the end of a tower, and the end of a whole island of towers, always feels within reach. What was previously a frustrating experience at launch is a compulsive one a week later. Even the demanding boss fight-style challenges only ask you to endure one round before showering you with the payouts on offer. They're enticing pools of goods, too--the aforementioned Konsumables, character cosmetics, and large denominations of the various currencies needed to open chests in the Krypt, MK11's third-person quasi-puzzle-adventure mode designed for unlocking even more collectibles.The Krypt in Mortal Kombat 11 is a completely reimagined recreation of Shang Tsung's island, the location of the very first Mortal Kombat game from 1992. Exploring the location, which involves finding items to open up paths to new areas, is an exciting experience in itself--there's a basic joy in simply taking in the visual splendor of certain locations, especially if you retain any memories of Mortal Kombat's stages (although it should be noted that the Nintendo Switch version is noticeably less visually splendorous). A mess of treasure chests litter the island, requiring one of three different currencies to open them, but the catch is that aside from chests that require ""Hearts,"" the rewards you get seem to be completely randomized. Regardless of their asking price, chests have the capacity to furnish you with something exciting, like new costumes or brutality finishers for a specific character, or something as basic as a piece of concept art. It can be a bummer to come away from a Krypt session with nothing of value for your favourite fighter, but it's at least heartening to know that the game doesn't have any avenues to let you spend real-world money to open more chests, and that your pool of currencies will continue to grow at a steady, reasonable rate by simply playing the game.Now, it's pertinent to mention that Mortal Kombat 11 relies on a persistent online connection to keep track of progression in every single mode. Naturally, being offline means that you can't access the game's rotating Towers of Time, but it also means you won't get rewarded for playing the story mode or tutorials until you reconnect. In most cases, given the ever-connected nature of PCs, PS4s, and Xbox Ones, this aspect should rarely present any major issues, but it certainly can. There was one instance where game servers went down on all platforms, and I lost my progress on a Tower of Time. Losing progress can also be an issue if, for example, you duck out to your console's dashboard to share a video clip of a close victory, which will suspend your game and disconnect you from its servers. The always-online nature of the game can pose a much larger concern on Nintendo Switch, however, especially if you're looking to play the game in handheld mode away from a wireless connection. Even if you're content to simply hang out in practice mode or play a standard tower on the train, you'll be hounded by network error messages every step of the way.There are a range of online multiplayer modes, of course, including ranked and casual matchmaking, a king-of-the-hill mode, and forthcoming ranked seasons, as well as private options like lobbies and the ability to use practice mode with a friend. MK11 also features tools that help you have some control over your experience--in casual matches, you have the ability to see your opponent's win/loss ratio, your estimated chance of success, and information about each player's internet connection--and the game thankfully allows you to decline a match if you think you're going to have a bad time. I encountered no major issues with online play during the game's first week, and found matchups to be fairly even in most cases, meaning fights were often heart-poundingly close. The robust online options make it a worthwhile avenue to pick a fight without the modifiers of the Towers Of Time.MK11 isn't just a sequel for series fans and NetherRealm devotees, it's a gateway into the realm of fighting games for anyone who has a passing interest in watching ruthless warriors beat each other silly. Streamlined mechanics keep the act of fighting furiously exciting no matter what your skill level, and comprehensive tutorials encourage you to dig into the nitty-gritty. There's a diverse roster of interesting characters and playstyles, and the story mode is an entertaining romp. The randomization of Krypt rewards and the odd issue with the game's always-online nature can occasionally chip away at your patience, but Mortal Kombat 11 absolutely hits where it matters. 


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648,Sym ,4," Awkward platformer Sym speaks to a vulnerable issue, but it's difficult to figure out what exactly it's trying to say.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2861352-unnamed%20%281%29.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sym-review/1900-6416164/,neg,"
Metaphor serves not only as one of the most used concepts in just about every medium imaginable, but also as the basis for entire works of art. Whole paintings are often metaphors for the artist's feelings or background, and movies can link chains of symbolism together to represent some more abstract concepts. Games can go further by inviting the player into the metaphor itself through interactivity, conveying difficult real-world problems like illness and societal inequalities. The trick to creating an effective metaphor as a game is to be subtle enough with your themes so they don't overwhelm the playing experience itself while simultaneously ensuring that the game still communicates the themes clearly. Sym, a platformer inspired by social anxiety, fails on both counts, leaving us with a clumsy, confusing experience whose bright spots are muted by rough design and heavy-handed themes.Boiling down what Sym is about is simple: You play as a person trying to escape the prying eyes of other people by escaping into a world where they can't follow you, one where you can be alone. This is reflected in your experiences by your ability to sink into the floor and emerge upside-down on the other side. Suddenly, what were once solid platforms become empty space to move through, and vice-versa. Occasionally, you run into switches that cause blocks to appear and disappear in patterns marked with arrows, and, of course, you have to avoid enemies and hazards. However, most of the game's identity lies in its dual nature, forcing you to think about how far you need to progress before you have to switch orientation. Mapping out the correct path to the end is the most engrossing part of the game.The words and phrases that litter levels can be a bit much. Sym's mechanics falter when they're put to the test, however. The floaty jumping mechanics don't match up well with the frequent pinpoint platforming you're required to do. It's pretty difficult to land on a patch of safe ground only as wide as you are with the amount of control the jump physics allow, and not in a good way. Compounding matters is your character's hitbox, which extends past your actual body ever so slightly. You'll die by drawing too near a saw blade without ever actually touching it. And then there are narrow shafts you have to fall into at just the right angle or else get stuck awkwardly along the edge. The levels themselves are interesting thanks to good use of the orientation switching mechanic, but that's the only bit that works as advertised. These issues are small, but they add up, sucking away the promising potential Sym initially displays.But its biggest failing is in how it fails to convey anything meaningful about its inspiration from social anxiety. You can see the obvious starting point for the extended metaphor in the central mechanic. Sinking into the floor is synonymous with hiding from the world's prying eyes as they try to drag you out into the light and consume you. What developer Atrax Games is going for here is pretty clear because of the game's very literal interpretation of these platitudes. The first set of levels features giant eyeballs that stare at you without trying to hurt you. In these levels, only environmental hazards, like sawblades and pitfalls, can harm you. Later stages have actual enemies that will kill you, like carnivorous plants that spontaneously grow out of seeds you see on the ground or hungry beasts that pace back and forth looking for a meal. Even the people you meet later on prove to be foes, pulling you out of your hiding place in the ground as you dissolve in a fit of social paralysis. It's all very on-the-nose, but you can see a vague character progression as fears intensify and you careen towards either finding friends amidst your anxiety or hiding away forever. Arrows sometimes serve as a loose guide, but also indicates where moving platforms appear.Though the game practically screams its inspiration at you, it has nothing coherent to say about social anxiety. The levels feature the aforementioned allusions to a hazardous world you must hide from, but everything else is muddled. The levels themselves rarely tell any sort of story on their own. Instead, anguished phrases are used to fill in the gaps where the game's thematic design drops the ball. But these also confuse any thematic ties the game manages to establish by reading like a moody high school student's musings scrawled in the margins of a notebook. That in itself is a cool idea, and it goes with the pencil-inspired graphics. But they don't reveal anything or lead the themes anywhere except to depict anguish for anguish's sake. Until the game splits off briefly into two different sets of final levels, the messages convey the same depth of pain and panic throughout. In fact, they sometimes border on incoherent ramblings not dissimilar to the stereotypically exaggerated dialogue you'd hear from a schizophrenic person on an episode of Law and Order, which matches poorly with the meager thematic progression the levels suggest. It's confusing, distracting, and occasionally insulting to those who suffer from social anxiety.The few themes that do come through loud and clear--hiding from social situations, the fear and consequences of being caught in one, and the eventual message that finding and sharing the connections and burdens between people is the beginning of the answer--all would make a fine foundation for a game like Sym if they were handled with more subtlety. Likewise, the erratic writing plastered everywhere contributes very little, actively obscuring any sense of progression the themes try to develop. Even when divorced from its themes, Sym manages to be mildly entertaining but just shy of a competent game thanks to the many small yet significant design flaws you have to work through. Most disappointing, though, is that Sym manages to successfully convey nothing enlightening, moving, informative, or even coherent about social anxiety. Hiding may be a central mechanic in Sym, but obscuring your meaning to this baffling degree is never the answer.
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649,VoidExpanse ,4, VoidExpanse's boring rendition of space exploration makes staying on Earth the more appealing option.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/2497043-ve_coverart2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/voidexpanse-review/1900-6416112/,neg,"
My faction's commander gave me a special weapon for destroying alien hives in a single shot, but it wouldn't fit in my ship. I left it in my inventory for later use, but at some point in my travels, it disappeared (perhaps I sold it by mistake?), and I could not find a way to retrieve a new one. The contact that had given it to me had nothing more to say, and none of the stations I visited sold such a weapon. So I was left to my own devices, slowly whittling down hives while accompanied by a useless companion that could fend off attacking aliens and space pirates, but could do no damage to the hive itself. I spent a half-dozen hours hammering away at these things, laboriously zooming back and forth between alien systems and bases where I could refuel and refill ammunition. After a while, I could finally afford a better hull, and I presumed my path to victory--a path without the disappearing superweapon--would be clearer.Instead, my new fighter made things worse by allowing me to only equip weapon types with limited ammo reserves. I wasted precious minutes flying to a base seven systems away so that I could reload, only to return to the alien system and find the hive had gained back all of its health. It was here that VoidExpanse and I parted ways after 25 hours of spacefaring tedium and shallow questing, and I can't say I'll miss repeating the same four side missions over and over again.Well, there's one bounty earned. It didn't have to be this way; it never does. VoidExpanse is built from a proven foundation, recalling every space sim in which you crisscross the galaxy, buying low and selling high. In VoidExpanse's case, this all occurs on a 2D plane upon which you zoom from one space station to another, mining minerals from asteroids and shooting down space pirates along the way. With each accomplishment, you earn not only money but experience, which you then apply to skills that improve your flight agility, open access to new weapons, and enhance your financial standing.2D plane aside, this is Freelancer, or DarkStar One, or X3: Reunion, a game that encourages you to find your inner Han Solo, gaining funds by performing odd jobs, aligning yourself with a faction, and destroying whatever enemies stand in your way. Those games built adventures around these basic systems; VoidExpanse, on the other hand, rarely expounds upon the fundamentals. You do odd jobs for your chosen faction so that you can join its ranks, and at least those tasks mix things up a little. You even get choices to make, potentially befriending or alienating a contact depending on how successful you are at hacking a terminal, or convincing a pesky pirate to leave his enemy alone instead of firing on him at first glance.Here's a space station. There's not really more to say.The rare story-based diversion is not enough to brighten up the dreary pace that soon develops, however. VoidExpanse recycles the same few missions over and over again: Mine some minerals, deliver this package, kill this pirate, rescue these survivors. This is the steady diet of quests you feast upon if you have any hope for forward progress, unless you prefer to ferry supplies and the spoils of random enemy encounters from one system to another, seeking the highest possible prices. Trading is a common activity in space exploration games, but the lack of visual variety squashes exploration flat. Backdrops are generically pretty displays of green and purple nebulae stretching across starfields, and space vessels lack the drama of pop culture's most iconic craft; They are built for function, apparently, and not for form. But it is form that such a repetitive game needs to thrive, and what starts as a fun but formulaic adventure grows tiresome.Combat is functional, at least, and supports two different control schemes, one of which allows you to drive the ship with the mouse, and the other of which separates aiming and movement. It is the latter scheme that affords finer control, and there is inherent appeal at hovering your targeting reticule over a pirate or an alien pod, launching missiles at it, and watching it explode. Alien ships are particularly mobile, so while most encounters aren't demanding unless you wander into systems you shouldn't be exploring yet, some battles keep you circling and reward precise aiming.The skill tree is easy to understand. The main reason to press forward is to earn more currency and more experience, leaving behind your paltry vessel and starter gadgets for a more powerful and roomy ship. There are slots for weapons, shields, engines, and so forth, along with places to equip consumables (good for a resupply of hull strength, for instance) and boosters (good for, say, improving your defenses or supporting your energy supply). But all the incremental improvements represented by ship advancement and skill choices are at the service of repetitive sights, repetitive travel, and repetitive actions. In time, the few spots of joy are overwhelmed by the annoyances, such as the suicidal way the companion you later earn keeps ramming into alien hives until he explodes, and an autopilot that sometimes steers around obstacles, and other times bounces your ship against asteroids and space stations.Galaxies are procedurally generated--and you can join other players' galaxies in online play--but those options bring little diversity to VoidExpanse. In the case of galaxies, the variables have too little effect on the pace of exploration to be meaningful; In the case of online play, the community is too small to make multiplayer worth investigating. Going online means following the same path you would if you played on your own, except you might encounter another player to shoot or ignore. In fact, VoidExpanse is toothless in general, lacking the mystery and suspense that could have propelled it through the universe. 
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'bring', 'little', 'diversity', 'VoidExpanse', '.', 'In', 'case', 'galaxies', ',', 'variables', 'little', 'effect', 'pace', 'exploration', 'meaningful', ';', 'In', 'case', 'online', 'play', ',', 'community', 'small', 'make', 'multiplayer', 'worth', 'investigating', '.', 'Going', 'online', 'means', 'following', 'path', 'would', 'played', ',', 'except', 'might', 'encounter', 'another', 'player', 'shoot', 'ignore', '.', 'In', 'fact', ',', 'VoidExpanse', 'toothless', 'general', ',', 'lacking', 'mystery', 'suspense', 'could', 'propelled', 'universe', '.']",0.028082738411685775,0.4393419786840841
650,Pandora: First Contact ,4," Pandora: First Contact looks to the stars, but it can't even achieve escape velocity.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2431296-pandora_first_contact_alternate_cover_by_soheil-d5qrxp5.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pandora-first-contact-review/1900-6415642/,neg,"
There's a special kind of fear that aliens can tap into. They are often unknown, unreasonable, and unrelenting. Many 4X strategy games are strongly tied to real events, people, and cultures in human history, but some of the best games in the genre are set in space against powerful and hostile alien races. Pandora: First Contact is one such game, and it takes heavy cues from games like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. While it is meant to be a respectful tribute, Pandora is laden with awful design choices and a confusing mishmash of old and new mechanics. The pieces that stand up are pulled directly from other, better games, and the original ideas aren't developed well enough to carry the experience.Pandora: First Contact opens with a smattering of people desperate to find a new Earth after decades of environmental destruction. The most prosperous societies have each launched their own expeditions, loosely representative of several modern-day nations and ideologies. These groups form the different factions and have their own vaguely defined play styles ranging from brutal, polluting industry to hyper-religious zealotry. Unfortunately, while they are thematically distinct, none of the factions stand out. Besides how the diplomatic options are phrased, and a few starting bonuses, they are all more or less the same. In my games, playing as the super-scientific faction wasn't terribly different from playing as the environmentalists. All of the units are the same, and the victory conditions are far too limited for any of your decisions to have much of an effect. There really is only one correct play style: extreme aggression.Pandora borrows heavily from the works of Sid Meier, but it's missing too many pieces.Civilization has often been lauded for allowing you to seek scientific, cultural, military, or even diplomatic victory, and each of these routes is supported by an entire system of mechanics that help support that path. These systems connect with one another and can be attached or separated, giving you an enormous amount of freedom in how you play. Those choices are meaningful because they are symbolic; they represent different and distinct ideologies. Pandora, too, has ""different"" victory conditions, but none of them are well developed. There is a scientific victory that amounts to having 75 percent of all possible research items complete. To achieve military victory, you have to take control of over 75 percent of the planet's populace. Unfortunately, the mechanisms by which you accomplish these conditions are nearly identical, and there's virtually no way to stop a player who's nearing victory. The element of choice and the ability to consistently have any efficacy or agency in the game is totally subverted by this design.The planet of Pandora is crawling with aliens when you first touch down, and it takes only a few turns for those forces to turn aggressive; unlike the barbarians from Civilization, these creatures are absolutely everywhere and are much, much stronger than any of your starting units. For example, a unit of marines has a starting combat strength of 2, while aliens range from 1 to 18, with 2 and 8 being the most common. How well you handle these early foes determines how much land and resources you have to work with in the mid to late game.While it is meant to be a respectful tribute, Pandora is laden with awful design choices and a confusing mishmash of old and new mechanics.Sadly, ignoring them isn't an option. Even if you never attack the aliens or show any sign of aggression, at a certain point they begin attacking you. Expanding and fortifying your armies, and then raiding alien hives for their massive cash reserves is the only way to play. Any land you don't grab for yourself is land a future opponent will use against you, and any aliens you don't kill feed the resources and experience of your rivals. This design choice forces the game into a two-stage system. The first stage is rapid expansion and extreme brutality against the indigenous aliens, and the second stage is focused more on developing the land you've claimed and steadily pushing back against enemies. While the first stage might be frustratingly limited, the second is fundamentally broken.In better-designed 4X games, much of the mid- to late-game conflict stems from resource scarcity. You need a specific plot of land that an opponent has; this causes conflict, which then buttresses the final stages of a match. In Pandora, land is certainly important, but expansion is agonizingly slow. Even on the fastest setting, with the exception of a handful of rare tiles, there's absolutely no scarcity. Aside from mountains, just about every tile can be converted into every other kind, and they don't carry the bottlenecking effect that's common in other games. Without scarcity, there's very little to fight over, and the monotony of expansion across hundreds of same-y tiles wears down to tedium very quickly.Classic sci-fi homage.In place of a varied and interesting landscape, Pandora has a fairly robust unit upgrade and operations system. As you progress technologically, you have access to a wider variety of weapons and equipment for your various units. For example, initially your legions of marines only have access to their basic machine guns, but once you develop the flamethrower, you can bring marines back to a city to refit them with the latest gadgets. This is typically done for a significant cost, though, and can become overwhelmingly expensive when upgrading masses of units. Additionally, at each new stage of technological development, you also gain access to advanced versions of every unit. The colonial marine, your bread and butter, later becomes the assault trooper. After you've unlocked the next stage, it's often more practical to simply send your old units to their death at the hands of a foe and just start production on the next batch of souped-up soldiersTo cut down on some of the banality of this cycle of production-upgrade-sacrifice, you can set your cities to crank out new units with the upgraded tech. This costs extra production time, but typically that's much easier to manage than trying to purchase all of the upgrades outright. Unfortunately, there's no system or mechanic allowing for the retrofitting of old units with new gear via production capacity, nor is there any way to take an old unit and make it into one of the newer variety. This is probably intended to be balanced by the experience system, which can dramatically enhance the combat effectiveness of older troops, but that loses relevance in the mid to late game because of operations.Without scarcity, there's very little to fight over.Operations can range from nuclear strikes and satellite scans to field training missions. They are produced much like standard units but are immediately consumed upon use. These field training missions are ridiculously cheap, particularly in the late game, and I often had one city of mine constantly producing them. After I finished a new batch of troops, I'd march them all to my most forward base, dump 10 field training missions on them to max out their level, and then let them heal up for two or three turns before marching out my legions of tanks, airplanes, and marines to conquer whatever stood in their way. It's much faster and less risky than trying to naturally level up fresh recruits, and it always ensured that my warriors would be at the top of their game.At the end of the day, unit management is bogged down by a plethora of underutilized mechanics. Instead of adding to the gameplay, they simply encourage you to abuse other systems to circumvent the poorly designed interface. That seems to be par for the course for Pandora. There are a lot of neat ideas here, but none of them pan out. The game's creators clearly adore 4X strategy games in general, and Alpha Centauri specifically, is clear here, but Pandora: First Contact is not a proper tribute. I want to love Pandora, I really do, but nostalgia can't fix a game that doesn't work even at the most basic level.
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'system', ',', 'dramatically', 'enhance', 'combat', 'effectiveness', 'older', 'troops', ',', 'loses', 'relevance', 'mid', 'late', 'game', 'operations.Without', 'scarcity', ',', ""'s"", 'little', 'fight', 'over.Operations', 'range', 'nuclear', 'strikes', 'satellite', 'scans', 'field', 'training', 'missions', '.', 'They', 'produced', 'much', 'like', 'standard', 'units', 'immediately', 'consumed', 'upon', 'use', '.', 'These', 'field', 'training', 'missions', 'ridiculously', 'cheap', ',', 'particularly', 'late', 'game', ',', 'I', 'often', 'one', 'city', 'mine', 'constantly', 'producing', '.', 'After', 'I', 'finished', 'new', 'batch', 'troops', ',', 'I', ""'d"", 'march', 'forward', 'base', ',', 'dump', '10', 'field', 'training', 'missions', 'max', 'level', ',', 'let', 'heal', 'two', 'three', 'turns', 'marching', 'legions', 'tanks', ',', 'airplanes', ',', 'marines', 'conquer', 'whatever', 'stood', 'way', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'much', 'faster', 'less', 'risky', 'trying', 'naturally', 'level', 'fresh', 'recruits', ',', 'always', 'ensured', 'warriors', 'would', 'top', 'game.At', 'end', 'day', ',', 'unit', 'management', 'bogged', 'plethora', 'underutilized', 'mechanics', '.', 'Instead', 'adding', 'gameplay', ',', 'simply', 'encourage', 'abuse', 'systems', 'circumvent', 'poorly', 'designed', 'interface', '.', 'That', 'seems', 'par', 'course', 'Pandora', '.', 'There', 'lot', 'neat', 'ideas', ',', 'none', 'pan', '.', 'The', 'game', ""'s"", 'creators', 'clearly', 'adore', '4X', 'strategy', 'games', 'general', ',', 'Alpha', 'Centauri', 'specifically', ',', 'clear', ',', 'Pandora', ':', 'First', 'Contact', 'proper', 'tribute', '.', 'I', 'want', 'love', 'Pandora', ',', 'I', 'really', ',', 'nostalgia', 'ca', ""n't"", 'fix', 'game', ""n't"", 'work', 'even', 'basic', 'level', '.']",0.03580509918825136,0.45235214664562506
651,Monochroma ,4, Monochroma wastes its gripping premise and eye-catching visual design by having clunky controls and a wealth of inconsistencies.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2452110-screen%20shot%202014-03-10%20at%202.19.36%20pm.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/monochroma-review/1900-6415772/,neg,"
The term ""corporate overlord"" is usually used in jest. We recognize how much power these inhuman entities have over us, but we've yet to reach the point where our waking hours are dictated by their whims. In Monochroma, we see a vision of a city in which this term has reached its terrifying potential. The fear of losing your freedom is palpable, communicated through the emptiness of the cityscape, the bleakness of the visual design, and the unceasing rain washing away any semblance of hope. It's unfortunate, then, that the plight of one boy striving to break free of this citywide prison--filled with puzzling barriers--is overshadowed by something as mundane as technical failings. Monochroma conjures frustration instead of empathy, undermining the intriguing premise set in the early going.There are no words in Monochroma, no dialogue to explain what has happened to your home. Rather, the story is told through 2D imagery, so questions are left dangling in the air, and you must decide what caused such unrest. During the early hours, I scoured the backdrop looking for pieces to explain what had happened. There are robots stationed in people's homes. Though originally intended as consumer companions, they may have risen in revolt as robots so often do. But I found no such violence when I encountered one. So I could only wonder why the people had left, or if they had been killed by the corporation performing experiments in their factories. Who knows the answer? As the game progressed, my interest waned as supernatural elements were introduced. What was once a gripping allegory of our own society became a fantastical leap to something I couldn't relate to.Monochroma's emotional weight should come from the relationship between the young protagonist and his helpless brother. You must carry your sibling on your back, braving the many obstacles that stand before you both as you search for freedom. Normally, such a partnership would have captured my heart, as evidenced by Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. But there's a logical problem here that only caused me to question what was going on. In the very beginning, you see your younger brother flying a kite, running freely through wheat fields. However, he ceases to use his legs after the first few minutes, which just made me wonder why he had become such a useless lug. Having to carry him adds to the puzzle dynamic, because your movement is restricted by his weight, and you can only put him down in spotlights, but that added consideration feels forced. Why couldn't he help me?Monochroma conjures frustration instead of empathy, undermining the intriguing premise set in the early going.I wasn't bothered by my brother's ineptitude at first. Nor was I hung up on the clumsy controls. Sure, climbing up boxes took longer than I expected, and I often had to retry jumps because my character wouldn't respond quickly enough, but I was so taken in by the enticing premise and stark visual design that such issues seemed minor. I even marveled at how clever certain situations were. Though I could only push boxes, pull switches, and perform a modest leap, the puzzles offered plenty of diversity, forcing me to take time to formulate a plan. Figuring out that I could quench the flame erupting from a barrel by pushing it into the rain gave me a satisfying ""Eureka!"" moment, as did clearing a difficult jump by catching a rope midswing. This was a world I wanted to exist in, and the action was good enough to warrant that investment.The last time your brother will move on his own accord.Things began to change as I got deeper into the adventure. The controls became such a hindrance that I would be stuck on puzzles long after I knew what to do, only because I couldn't get my character to respond. In one section, I had to push a box before the rising water swallowed me alive. The box had to be in an exact place or my character wouldn't be able to grab it, yet the finicky controls didn't allow for such precision. While the two boys were riding atop the box as the water rose, the box would shift awkwardly, defying expected physics, often tossing them into the deep without giving me a chance to react. In a maddening boss sequence, the collision detection was so off that I would die when his strike was far from my body. And the sluggish movement meant I couldn't accurately dodge his attacks even when they were blatantly telegraphed.Even when you do coax your character to perform his rightful duties, Monochroma is never satisfying. Instead, you feel relief that you were allowed to move onward, knowing how tricky it would be to replicate your success. But shoddy controls aren't Monochroma's only issue. The game struggles to properly communicate what's going on. In one puzzle, I had to move a flaming barrel through a rain storm. It appeared that I had to use pallets moving along a conveyor belt as a roof, but I could clearly see rain falling across the entire screen--even beneath that shelter--so I had no idea if my plan was at fault or if it was my execution that was lacking.The bleakness is all encompassing.And then there are the small problems that ensure you're continually hounded throughout the journey. Monochroma has abrupt loading screens between sections that break the flow of the action, and has sound issues where music fails to play. Knowing how far you can safely fall is a crapshoot; I would often perish even when I plummeted only a modest distance. When you die, your character falls stiffly to the ground, in an almost comedic pratfall. Death is even sillier when it involves your brother. In one puzzle, I mistakenly dropped a barge on his head a dozen or so times, and there was no impact, no ceremony, so I never felt any sadness at what I had done. There were so many times that I groaned from annoyance or laughed from amusement that I couldn't stay invested in the boy's struggles. It's a shame how often Monochroma undermines its own strengths through technical problems.Monochroma is a game that I wanted to enjoy, and I thought it would be worthwhile even halfway through the adventure. But things really go off the rails as you push onward, with most of the later puzzles demanding precision that's just not possible. Even though the artistic design is eye-catching, and the music deftly builds on the feeling of oppression, there are too many problems heaping frustration upon you. The youthful protagonist of Monochroma is incredibly brave and filled with awe-inspiring love and patience, but all of those good characteristics are overshadowed by his insane clumsiness and the problematic world he exists in.


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652,Randal's Monday ,4, Randal's Monday's strict adherence to bad design and unpleasant humor makes this one Monday you don't want to relive.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2428110-poster_mortimer.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/randal-s-monday-review/1900-6415957/,neg,"
We love point-and-click adventure games because of their uncanny ability to subvert both the written word and the interactivity inherent in games. They can tell stories using stimuli that books just don’t have, be they tragedy or comedy. And they can tickle our brains even as they spin a narrative featuring hilarious, strong, memorable characters that stick with us for years. But we also hate these games because of how obtuse progressing through them can be, causing us to spend hours wandering around and using every last item we have on every last interactive element on every last screen. We give ourselves migraines as we attempt to decipher the broken logic of the developers. Yet even with all these fatal flaws, we still hold a rosy view of classic adventure games. Nexus Game Studio loves them, too. In fact, their latest game, Randal's Monday, oozes with love for this genre. Too bad that actually playing it will make you hate not only the genre but also games in general.Oh, the game seems appealing enough at first. The world of Randal's Monday is a nice-looking cartoony world that's still grounded in reality, something akin to any number of adult cartoons you see on late-night TV. And when you're set loose in this world, it doesn't take long for it to open up, giving you access to a city of respectable size to explore. It helps that all kinds of geek references litter the game. It's kind of neat to see references to Portal, The Twilight Zone, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and Fraggle Rock all in the same game. Running around from place to place (made easier thanks to subway-based fast travel) makes for a downright pleasant experience … at least at first.Randal certainly knows how to talk to women.Its love for the heyday of adventure games is immediately apparent from the get-go. The different-colored lines of dialogue and emphasis on humor feel like classic Lucasarts games out of SCUMM VM, and the way you progress through the game using a pile of seemingly random items is a direct analogue to King's Quest and its ilk. But for all its affection for this bygone era, Randal's Monday lacks the perspective to realize the deep flaws in this style of game, instead mindlessly charging ahead and aping their formulas wholesale while fixing hardly any of them.A great number of the solutions in the game make no logical sense unless you happen to be in the developers' heads. For instance, to bypass a certain lock, you don't have to find a key or even a lockpick. You need to take a small spring out of a broken radio and use a hammer on it to squash it lengthwise. Then, you need to take a clothes hanger and put it into a blender to cut the hanger to a bit of wire, which you can then combine with the squashed spring to make a lockpick to unlock the lock. Convoluted nonsense like this permeates the game even in its simplest solutions, like when you're supposed to use a baseball you just found to throw against the wall for ""hours"" to finally wear it down to reveal a pipe, something you wouldn't think of unless you tried using the ball on everything in the room, which seems to be what the game expects of its player: Try everything until it works. It's no wonder that the ""hint system"" in this game is just an explicit walkthrough.For all its affection for this bygone era, Randal's Monday lacks the perspective to realize the deep flaws in this style of game, instead mindlessly charging ahead and aping their formulas wholesale while fixing hardly any of them.At least the concept behind the game is somewhat original. The titular character comes into contact with a cursed ring that causes him to live the same Monday over and over again, much like Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day. Here, though, the things that Randal does each Monday persist, and reality bends to make the timeline make sense every new day. This makes for some bizarre situations, like a city infested with koala bears, but the game fails to make much interesting use of this conceit except as a framing device for wacky situations.The influence of Groundhog Day goes beyond the game's premise, though. Randal is a cynical, borderline sociopathic delivery man who has an arsenal of sarcastic comments ready to hurl at people laced with insults and geek references aplenty. In other words, he's an edgier Phil Connors for the gamer generation. But that's all there is to the character, which gives you very little to laugh at when each conversation he wanders into becomes abuse after abuse. And he barely grows as a person by the end, staying exactly as unlikable as he started. Worse, the supporting characters in this story are just like him, giving him cynical lip right back with a low hum of misanthropy. Watching everyone in the game be the same brand of terrible to each other isn't even remotely entertaining.The subway map makes getting around easier.As we know by now, adventure games are not doomed to be mere fossils. Telltale and many other devs have reimagined the genre in many new and exciting directions that honor the legacy of those that came before but without the design baggage that so plagued them in the first place. Randal's Monday is blind hero worship that ignores decades of design theory and leaves an unpleasant aftertaste thanks to its thoroughly unlikable, homogenous cast.
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653,Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark ,4," Offering no more than meets the eye, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark is just a shallow, frustrating, and incoherent third-person shooter.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2506855-wiiu_transrotds.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/transformers-rise-of-the-dark-spark-review/1900-6415809/,neg,"
When I was a kid, Optimus Prime seemed to me like everything a leader should be: intelligent, compassionate, and, of course, capable of turning into a truck. It's been frustrating in recent years to see the Transformers become defined in this generation not by the charm and personality of the original cartoon but by the cacophonous stupidity and visual chaos of the Michael Bay films. I always hope that video games might be the one area where the Transformers can be redeemed. Alas, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark is not the game that redeems them.Though it's developed by Edge of Reality, Rise of the Dark Spark's action is closely modeled on developer High Moon's games War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron. Narratively, however, where this game falls is completely unclear. In some ways, it seems to exist in the same universe as the cartoons, but on the other hand, the robot designs sometimes resemble those from the films, and there are plot details that refer to Michael Bay's latest opus, Transformers: Age of Extinction. The result is an incoherent story that feels like it was cobbled together from the spare parts of other stories.The gameplay doesn't fare much better. High Moon's Cybertron games were mostly enjoyable shooting galleries, and there are times when Rise of the Dark Spark seems like it might manage to be the same. Playing as a variety of Autobots and Decepticons over the course of the game, you unleash hot robot death on countless enemy grunts. At its best moments, Rise of the Dark Spark is fun in the generic and familiar way that so many blandly competent shooters are fun--a pleasant enough way to pass the time if you have nothing else to do. There are a good variety of weapons for you to use, and although you rarely have much incentive to transform, it's nice to have the freedom to drive or fly away from enemies when the action heats up.Unfortunately, although you move around with a feeling of appropriate heft for a sentient being constructed of strong and heavy metals, when you get swarmed by enemies, you go down so fast that you might as well be made of aluminum cans. It drains all the joy from being Optimus Prime to see him crumple almost immediately in response to enemy fire, and these poorly designed combat encounters make victory not a matter of playing defensively and using smart tactics but of just trying again and again and hoping this time it works out for you. Some sections go on for much too long, keeping you stuck in one spot fighting off waves of identical enemies when all you want to do is advance, and the game's maddening checkpoints regularly require you to replay lengthy sections of frustrating action when you fall in battle.Nobody told Cliffjumper that he's supposed to fall over when his health meter runs out.In fact, Rise of the Dark Spark's entire campaign goes on for too long. By the time you come to the end of its 14 chapters, you'll have had enough of shooting robots to last you at least until the next three Transformers movies have been released. It doesn't help that the game is so unpleasant to look at and to listen to. The urban environments on Earth are so drab and simple that they look like the miniature set of a low-budget monster movie rather than a real city, and the sound design may drive you insane. In one level, I heard the Decepticons shout the line ""Let's see what we got!"" so many times that I decided it had to be part of a psychological warfare campaign meant to undermine the Autobots' morale.Your progress is also hindered by the occasional bug, and I don't mean those pesky Insecticons. During one boss battle, I fully depleted my foe's health bar, but nothing happened. I had to let him kill me and restart the fight to advance. During another boss fight, I became completely stuck on the geometry and was helpless to defend myself against my enemy's attacks.There are a few merciful moments of reprieve from the standard action, like one sequence in which, as Jetfire, you must fly your way out of a structure before a weapon goes off, and another in which you play as the massive dinobot Grimlock, who can unleash a constant stream of flame from his robotic jaws. This power trip feels like a reward for slogging through so much tedious and frustrating action, but it's too little, too late.No game with robot dinosaurs in it can be all bad, but Rise of the Dark Spark comes close.There's also Escalation, a cooperative multiplayer mode in which you and up to three other players fight off waves of invading enemies, but one wave feels very much like another. There isn't enough variety to it to keep it interesting for long. The game tries to keep you hooked by doling out a constant stream of rewards for your progress in the form of weapon upgrades, experience point boosts, and other doodads, but the action is too shallow to make any of these rewards meaningful. The Transformers are a great property, one that seems like it should lend itself to the creation of great games, but Rise of the Dark Spark is so sloppy and incoherent that it feels more like a cheap knockoff than a proper Transformers game. Optimus Prime deserves better, and so do you.


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654,Moebius: Empire Rising ,4, Moebius: Empire Rising is a short adventure bogged down by dull characters and tedious puzzle solving.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2506342-moebius_empire_rising_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/moebius-empire-rising-review/1900-6415730/,neg,"
It is said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The axiom is often used by politicians and history professors as a warning, but the story behind Moebius: Empire Rising suggests we may not have a choice. The game presents a theory that space and time are connected in a twisted loop, and at any given moment, important figures from the past reemerge, sparking an event that may change the world for good or ill. At first blush,the story seems intriguing. But the brief moments of exuberance are hampered by mundane puzzle solving and uninteresting characters, making this 10-hour adventure not worth the time spent.The plot, crafted by game design veteran Jane Jensen, has all the fluff and dramatic flair of a Dan Brown novel. Malachi Rector, the protagonist in this point-and-click adventure, is a brilliant man of considerable ego and antipathy. His coveted skills in art appraisal have him traveling the globe to evaluate ancient artifacts and search them for signs of authenticity or fraud. His abilities earn him the attention of a secret branch of the government, which hands him the task of identifying and attaining special persons of interest who resemble particular people in history pivotal in changing the course of the world. The organization believes that these individuals are destined to re-create a certain past event, bringing about a second Golden Age. Malachi soon finds himself paired with ex-soldier David Walker, whom he hires as a bodyguard. Together, they find themselves in a race against time hunting down their targets before a shadow group discovers them first.Searching environments yields clues to be used in your investigations.The story moves at a brisk pace, with the two protagonists traveling the world in search of their quarry, all the while being targeted by mysterious men in masks who always seem to be one step ahead of them. They travel through the cities of New York and Boston, walk the sandy streets of Cairo, and explore the dank recesses of ancient catacombs under Paris. Puzzle solving and exploration adhere to the traditional point-and-click formula, where mouse clicks allow for movement and interacting with objects. The in-game menu lets you briefly highlight points of interest, removing the need to blindly click around the environment. Items that you pick up are stored in your inventory and, when necessary, are used or combined to solve puzzles.Acquiring items isn't as typical as in other adventure games. Malachi often refuses to pocket every loose item, which falls in line with his stoic personality. After all, it's normal in games in the genre for characters to pick up anything lying around, from paper clips to wads of chewed gum, and then rub them against objects to progress, but to Malachi, it's unnecessary. He sometimes lets items be until the use for them becomes apparent.Gather evidence to link characters to famous historical figures.The limitation makes narrative sense, but it causes issues later in the game. In one instance, I had to travel across Manhattan from Central Park to Malachi's apartment to grab an MP3 player, and then travel back, because he wouldn't let me get the device earlier. In another sequence, I had to leave a conversation and travel from Washington, DC, by plane to New York to pick up a pair of earrings and a bottle of alcohol before flying back to continue said conversation. Moments like this make progress tedious and contrived without providing any clear gameplay advantage.Difficult puzzles are rare; there were few occasions when I was stumped. Many of the puzzles are conventional to the genre, such as looking for hidden keys and passcodes, or moving objects into a certain order. Most puzzles lack any sort of complexity, and the absence of challenge gives way to boredom long before the halfway point of the game. If you do find yourself at a loss, though, the game includes a hint system that nudges you in the right direction. During your investigations, you are given the option to use applied psychology on certain characters before talking to them, opening up more conversation options. Evaluating a person opens a menu screen where you examine a point of interest, such as a facial expression or body language, and pick from a list of choices, giving you a clearer picture of the person's personality.The brief moments of exuberance are hampered by mundane puzzle solving and uninteresting characters.Breaking up exploration and puzzle solving are the moments when you must analyze a person and match him or her up with a figure in history. This is done through investigation, where you discover clues through exploration and conversation. After you gather enough evidence, you open up a menu and scroll through a list of historical figures. You match the person's data points with possible candidates, removing those who don't stack up. When only several remain, you then choose the person who matches your subject the most. It's an interesting concept, but it wears thin rather quickly. Differences between candidates become more precise, and staring at the screen for too long tests your patience.Malachi and David have a Sherlock and Watson type of relationship. Malachi is antisocial and has little concern for the troubles of those around him, and is motivated only by his chosen profession, which allows him to use impressive observational skills to evaluate people and objects. His partner, David, left the military disillusioned, wandering aimlessly without much purpose. He becomes Malachi's friend and moral compass, and eventually moves into Malachi's apartment. The two travel to various locations solving mysteries.Speak to various characters to gather evidence. But unlike the friendships between other detectives of fiction, the friendship between Malachi and David feels forced. There is little to suggest that the two have chemistry, mostly because of their flat personalities. David is a two-dimensional military man, ending many sentences with ""sir."" He shows little depth other than his penchant for lame jokes, which manage to draw a dry chuckle from Malachi. And then there is Malachi, whose nature is more abrasive than charming.Character models are not high quality and stand out against the colorful hand-painted backdrops of the environment. Many of the characters, Malachi especially, frequently spasm during their walking animations. Conversations sometimes take an interesting turn as arms occasionally clip into torsos. Other animations are equally peculiar, such as low-quality lip-syncing, which ranges from silly to downright creepy. In one of my early cases, I spoke with a woman who would pick up a cup of espresso, put it back down, and then repeat the motion while rarely taking sips. An investigator would normally see such a movement as nervousness on the subject's part, betraying a feeling of guilt. In Moebius, however, such exaggerated animations, ranging from waving hands to slouching shoulders, are meaningless, and are more distracting then helpful.David is a two-dimensional military man, ending many sentences with ""sir."" He shows little depth other than his penchant for lame jokes.The most enjoyable moments come when you have to use Malachi's keen intellect and vast historical knowledge to appraise ancient artifacts from across cultures and nations. Though it boils down to clicking through sliding images and choosing one that matches the object, it's still exciting to confirm whether the owner of the item in question is granted the satisfaction of claiming a piece of history or a prison sentence for fraud. These moments are sadly too few, because the game typically sets your deductive gaze upon characters, which isn't nearly as gratifying.Moebius: Empire Rising starts with an interesting idea, but the plot never takes off. Some moments may briefly grab your interest, but disappointing puzzles, shallow characters, and tedious methods behind investigations keep the game feeling lethargic all the way to its uninspiring climax. Instantly forgettable, this game is better off lost to time.
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'purpose', '.', 'He', 'becomes', 'Malachi', ""'s"", 'friend', 'moral', 'compass', ',', 'eventually', 'moves', 'Malachi', ""'s"", 'apartment', '.', 'The', 'two', 'travel', 'various', 'locations', 'solving', 'mysteries.Speak', 'various', 'characters', 'gather', 'evidence', '.', 'But', 'unlike', 'friendships', 'detectives', 'fiction', ',', 'friendship', 'Malachi', 'David', 'feels', 'forced', '.', 'There', 'little', 'suggest', 'two', 'chemistry', ',', 'mostly', 'flat', 'personalities', '.', 'David', 'two-dimensional', 'military', 'man', ',', 'ending', 'many', 'sentences', '``', 'sir', '.', ""''"", 'He', 'shows', 'little', 'depth', 'penchant', 'lame', 'jokes', ',', 'manage', 'draw', 'dry', 'chuckle', 'Malachi', '.', 'And', 'Malachi', ',', 'whose', 'nature', 'abrasive', 'charming.Character', 'models', 'high', 'quality', 'stand', 'colorful', 'hand-painted', 'backdrops', 'environment', '.', 'Many', 'characters', ',', 'Malachi', 'especially', ',', 'frequently', 'spasm', 'walking', 'animations', 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655,Nutjitsu ,4," If the foxes in Nutjitsu want those mystic acorns so much, they can keep them.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2454089-nutjitsu_001.jpg,XONE,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nutjitsu-review/1900-6415761/,neg,"
Your goal in Nutjitsu is nuts. More specifically, it's acorns. Because you are a squirrel, and that's what you crave. So you run around, like Pac-Man avoiding ghosts, and you steal as many mystical acorns as you can from the foxes that guard them. Sometimes you might also pick up scrolls, but mostly your interests aren't so diverse, and mostly the game isn't, either.Stages are composed of a single screen apiece. Environments appear hand-drawn, with attractive color palettes and nice attention to detail. You can easily see your foes wandering around each mazelike field, and you must occupy that same general space because that's where the all-important acorns appear. Over time, additional foxes arrive on the scene. Their presence makes life less pleasant. Brushing up against an enemy is fatal, unless you have a smoke bomb or similar item activated.In the game's standard mode, you are offered a stage and an objective. You can either accept that combination or click on an icon to randomly shuffle the stage and objective and cycle through the list until you are presented with a setup that suits your tastes. You might be asked to grab a certain number of acorns. Sometimes, only those of a certain hue suffice, and you must deliver them to a sack that is positioned somewhere on the map. Alternatively, you may need to gather scrolls, or occupy a glowing portion of the stage for a set number of seconds. It's nice to see an attempt at variety, but the differences don't significantly impact how you must play the game. A survival mode, where you simply last as long as you can to secure a high score for the leaderboards, does little to improve matters.Another problem is that there are only three enemy varieties. One type of fox walks around and is a general nuisance. A second type leaves behind a slimy green trail that slowly evaporates; pass over that goop too quickly, and you're poisoned, which slows your movement for a time. Finally, a third type of fox makes short charges with an extended spear. It's the most dangerous of the foxes, but still not a serious threat. None of the enemies individually pose a real hazard, and they aren't inclined to work as a team. They patrol without any particular sense of urgency, while you stroll around the area. The challenge comes not from ambitious, energetic, or interesting foes, but from their swelling numbers in cramped spaces.The effects of the smoke bomb look more like a squirrel just joined the Blue Man Group.Initially, there are only a handful of stages available, and you grow familiar with them quickly because you have to return to them frequently. They tend to offer a variety of linked pathways, but there are always choke points that put you in greater danger. You learn to avoid those points on each map. Once you do that, the game becomes fairly easy until numbers finally overwhelm you or you run out of supplies or complete the mission at hand.After you finish a stage, you gain experience that eventually allows you to gain ranks. You also keep 20 percent of any loot you gathered, which you can spend at the in-game store. Your options are limited, however, until your rank climbs high enough to unlock additional abilities, acorn types, and inventory slots. Additional maps are unlocked in the same manner, but they're doled out sparingly. It's a long while before you have a wide variety of arenas available. Even then, it feels like you've unlocked new skins rather than proper new experiences. Games such as Pac-Man made the most of just a few maps; each one was simple, precise, and unique, allowing you to develop a new internal rhythm with. Here, the maps are visually complex, but are nonetheless indistinct in the practical sense. They’re not dynamic, nor do they expand like the stages memorably did in the Pac-Man Championship games. They’re just scenery. You don't even get to enjoy new music when unlocking a new stage, the game thus avoiding another chance to distinguish one level from another. Instead, the same boring song repeats on a loop the entire time you play.The challenge comes not from ambitious, energetic, or interesting foes, but from their swelling numbers in cramped spaces.Have speed potion, will travel. Quickly.You can increase or lower the difficulty level between missions. Doing the former produces greater experience point rewards for each victory, but also adds to the work you have to perform. You need to grab five scrolls to complete some missions on the easiest setting, for example, but on the higher settings, that number climbs as high as 25, and you have to avoid a greater number of foxes all the while. Foxes also become more effective, with the poisoned trails lingering longer and dashes occurring more frequently. You're likely to go through your supply of items more quickly, and that's a problem, because those items are expensive. A smoke bomb costs 2,000 acorns, while a pack of three costs 5,500. It's not unusual to activate three or four in a given mission, only to find in the end that you've earned a paltry 3,000 acorns as your reward. Imagine if Pac-Man charged you for each power pellet, and you could use them whenever you like provided you don’t mind spending all of the normal pellets you've hoarded.The solution to that particular problem is obviously to not use items so often, but the foxes are numerous enough that eventually you find yourself herded into a corner unless you put one of your defensive measures to use and effortlessly escape. Besides, the game is structured in a way that encourages you to expend items regularly. Not only do you receive experience points that help you rank up more quickly, but achievements are awarded once you use the most expensive abilities a set number of times. The dynamic resembles grinding sessions in old Japanese role-playing games, except in this case, you don't get to explore a new region or visit an exotic town and talk to gossipy villagers. Your only reward is that you get to grind some more. Everyone eventually reaches the same point after playing long enough. The practiced player merely has to endure slightly less repetition along the way. As motivation goes, that's not terrific.With a proactive and broader range of enemies and more distinct environments, along with a more balanced system that didn't penalize you for playing in the manner that appears to have been intended, Nutjitsu might have offered a simple but enjoyable time. Instead, it has settled for a tedious stroll from Rank 1 through 25, rather than the engaging romp that was called for. Nuts to that!
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656,Bushido Blade ,8.9, Bushido Blade totally redefines the genre.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/2/2/2212022-bushidoblade.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bushido-blade-review/1900-2546913/,pos,"
Forget life meters, combos, and all that three-round rot. Here comes Bushido Blade, a straightforward fighting game that totally redefines the genre. Bushido Blade is a bold undertaking, but a remarkably successful one - it's fresh, unique, and could never have happened without today's technology. Bushido Blade opens with a stunning sword demonstration, and the game's visual integrity becomes obvious within seconds. The game's graphics, while not the sharpest or fastest, are the most detailed ever seen in a polygonal fighter, and, at a consistent 30 frames per second, rank among the smoothest in existence. The soundtrack, which combines traditional Japanese instrumentation with a fast-paced, modern rhythm section, is also striking. While the in-game speech is somewhat limited, the sounds of each battle are dazzling in their variety. The game's most remarkable feature, however, is each stage's continuous fighting environment. For instance, you can race through the snow (leaving tracks in your wake) past a garden and over a wooden bridge to the village beyond, then leap into a mud hole and race your way to the train station, where you can escape into an underground river and clean yourself off. Did I mention you're battling all this time? A brief load time separates the different areas of town, but it hardly detracts from the experience. Of course, running around isn't what Bushido Blade's all about. You choose from six honorable samurai warriors and select from the following eight classical weapons: katana, rapier, naginata (Japanese polearm), broadsword, war hammer, short sword, nodachi (Japanese long sword), and saber. Each battle-hardened fighter is proficient with at least one weapon, though you can use any. Once armed, you can switch among high, middle, and low combat stances at will and attack in at least three different fashions. Different weapons demand different strategies; the lightweight katana is ideal for midlevel slashes, while the hammer is best for crushing overhead blows. You can parry the opponent's attack, attempt to counter it, or swing right through it, but defending will only take you so far; the moment a clean hit connects, it's all over. This is Bushido Blade's most exciting and preposterous feature, destined to earn it just as many fans as detractors - each match consists of one round, and if you survive an enemy's attack, consider yourself lucky. Of course, you needn't go straight for the kill every time - consider laming your opponent (the legs make easy targets) or slashing his arm (he will continue fighting one-handed). The story mode reflects damage from match to match, with bloody bandages on your character and more. But as good as Bushido Blade is, there's still some room for improvement. For instance, the fighter will never drop his weapon. Likewise, though the swordsman's arm or leg may be injured, it is impossible to damage both. Not to mention that grappling of any kind is conspicuously absent. Bushido Blade also features a number of very cool gameplay options. These include a terrifyingly well-done first-person battle mode (complete with two-player linkup) and the option to toggle between winter and spring settings for various backdrops. Each fight also has a number of dramatic outcomes, namely the different death throes that change with each killing blow, which are nothing short of awesome. Combined with the selection of stylish fighters and weapons, the replay value in this title is vast. Hard-core fighting-game fans should consider Bushido Blade a welcome breath of fresh air; it's a vastly different combat experience that makes for one of the classiest, most serious fighting games ever.
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657,Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ,8.9, Quite possibly the best 2D action side scroller ever.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/0/0/8/2216008-cvsotn_box.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/castlevania-symphony-of-the-night-review/1900-2546968/,pos,"
Since its US debut in 1987 on the NES, Konami's Castlevania series has gone on to become one of the most popular franchises in video-game history, with releases on nearly every major platform (including the Super NES, Genesis, and GameBoy). The latest installment - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PlayStation - is quite possibly the best 2D action side scroller ever. Symphony takes place four years after Dracula X, a PC Engine title in Japan that never saw a US release. Unlike most previous Castlevania games, Symphony features a main character who isn't one of the whip-cracking Belmonts. Stranger still, it turns out that our hero, Adrian Fahrenheit (aka Alucard), is actually a son of Dracula. Your task is to explore Dracula's castle (rumored to only appear once a century) and find out why Richter Belmont, the hero of the first game (and descendant of the original Castlevania hero, Simon), has mysteriously vanished. Oh, and you've also got to kill quite a few monsters along the way…. Since the main character doesn't carry a whip, gameplay has obviously changed quite a bit from past Castlevanias. Now you can use several different weapons and items, each of which is kept in an RPG-like inventory subscreen. But Symphony mimics an RPG in more ways than one. Experience is gained from killing enemies; attributes are raised whenever Alucard levels-up, which is good incentive not to pass up enemies when trying to get from one area to the next; special skills are learned by performing different control-pad movements that subsequently save to a move list in the subscreen; and you can find and use numerous magic items during your quest. Even with the new trappings, though, the basics of the game are true to previous installments - break candles, collect hearts and money (which you can now actually spend in a shop), and fight ghoulish enemies. Perhaps the most important new feature added to Castlevania is its map system. Extremely similar to the one in Super Metroid, the map (which can be viewed at any time by pressing the Select button) opens up room by room as you travel through the castle. You can buy an extended map that shows you some of the areas you have yet to visit, but as you might imagine, it's limited and doesn't show you any of the castle's hidden portions. Even if it did, it wouldn't much matter; like any good adventure game, many areas can't be accessed until later in the journey. Specifically, you can't visit certain places until you've found the three souls that Alucard can transform into - Wolf, Bat, and Mist, each of which can be used at any time for a small amount of magic power. Needless to say, the graphics and musical score are great, which is what you'd expect from Konami. The anime-style look of Dracula X has been replaced with a more Roman approach that adds a surprising amount of depth to the game's wonderful atmosphere. Each area comes to life with vividly animated enemies, gorgeous backgrounds with multiple levels of parallax scrolling, and stellar special effects (particularly of note are the lighting and fog effects used in certain levels). The voice acting is also good, and the storyline is awesome. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is easily one of the best games ever released and a true testament to the fact that 2D gaming is not dead by any stretch of the imagination. The game is very large and will keep you entertained for a long time.
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658,Crash Bandicoot 3: WARPED ,8.9," This time the game takes place across a great expanse of time and space, making for greatly diverse level designs, which in turn keep the game fresh.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/5/8/1/708-2581.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crash-bandicoot-3-warped-review/1900-2545936/,pos,"
Crash Bandicoot started life as Sony's attempt at a mascot. He did reasonably well but never quite caught on like Mario or Sonic. But regardless of his status as a mascot, Crash has always managed to make a good game. In Crash Bandicoot 3, the evil Dr. Cortex is up to no good yet again with a new band of henchmen for you to defeat. This time the game takes place across a great expanse of time and space, making for greatly diverse level designs, which in turn keep the game fresh. The 30 different levels are mostly composed of the same 3D platform-jumping obstacle-evading Crash levels that we're used to. Some levels, however, allow you to take control of vehicles such as a biplane, motorcycle, or Jet Ski. These levels are almost like little minigames that spice up the action and break up the monotony. As before, when you go through the levels you are rewarded with crystals and gems. In Crash 3, you can also collect a relic for beating a level within a certain amount of time. Also new to the third game is the ability to learn new moves upon defeating a boss. Abilities like the super belly flop, double jump, super spin, and super run definitely help you to get through the levels faster. These moves will also help you unlock secret levels.  Visually, Crash 3 is flawless. The smooth character animations and bright, colorful landscapes make the game look like a cartoon. Amazing attention to detail and gorgeous lighting effects give torches, lasers, and other illuminating objects in the world a life of their own. All of this along with a refreshingly fast and steady frame rate easily makes Crash 3 one of the most beautiful PlayStation games ever. Crash 3 even delivers in the audio department. It has outstanding music, sound effects, and character voice-overs that are not only extremely well done, but the onscreen lip-synching is almost perfectly matched to the voice. In the end, Crash Bandicoot 3 is easily the best Crash yet. Every aspect of the game is better: new moves, levels, bosses, graphics, sound, and gameplay. It's the most fun I've had with a 3D platform game in a long, long time. It's a must-have for fans of platformers.
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659,Crusader: No Regret ,8.9, Everything that was good about the first game is great in the second.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/1/8/2211818-crusader.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crusader-no-regret-review/1900-2538478/,pos,"
There's no point in opening here with a witty anecdote or high-brow setup: Crusader: No Regret is simply the best action/adventure game in its class. A sequel to its equally impressive predecessor, Crusader: No Remorse, No Regret is a game that is at once gorgeous and gruesome in its execution and attention to detail. The game's sci-fi storyline picks up where the original left off: Having destroyed The World Economic Consortium (W.E.C.)'s Vigilance Platform, you, the Silencer, wind up aboard a salvage ship en route to the W.E.C.'s moon-based Lunar Mining Cartel. Once again, it's time for some serious breaking, entering, and assassinating. While some of the original's 15 levels meandered on perhaps a bit too long, No Regret cuts the game down to 10 levels that are more complex and challenging to work your way though (yet which Origin says should take as long to complete). Everything that was good about the first game is great in the second. Crusader: No Regret's top-down, three-quarter perspective graphics run smoother than before, particularly when things blow up. Like real flames, No Regret's explosions flare bright and change color, then eventually fade - without distorting or slowing down whatever other animations are happening on the screen at the same time. As the returned Silencer, you move more convincingly - especially while running, which in the original sometimes felt jerky. Your weapons arsenal has been improved, with several new, highly evolved firearms and explosives to put to no-good use. Two notable additions are the ""Crystalizer,"" which freezes your unlucky target into an ice statue that, when hit with a bullet, bursts into a hundred twinkling, resonating bits; and the ""Broiler,"" whose microwave pulse liquefies the flesh of any hapless souls it encounters. Talk about agonizing deaths. Victims caught aflame take their last failing breaths and flailing steps with arms a-wheeling, windpipes uttering hoarsely their unrestrained agony. Without a doubt, Crusader: No Regret's savage last hurrahs are the most horrific and drawn-out demises ever to unfold on a computer screen. All of this breathtakingly morbid attention to detail would be merely gratuitous if the game lacked its own redeeming value - and values, for as the Silencer, it is your job to overthrow a government bent on controlling and exploiting its underclass. Clever plot twists advance the game forward like a suspense film. For instance, one level finds you hacking into a not-so-secure computer to upload a virulent code that brings down the level's security system. Video cut scenes play between levels to update you on what the other side thinks of, and is doing to contend with, your revolutionary ways (however, the caliber of acting here barely rises above the daytime soap level). Settings range from the heavily guarded and staffed laboratories and staging areas that made up so much of the first game, to new, sumptuously appointed executive suites occupied by unarmed business-suited men and women who, the moment you storm in on them, throw up their hands and cry ""Don't shoot."" As the Silencer, your hardest rule is take no prisoners, and these personnel, like their protectors, must be eliminated - quickly, decisively, and, most important of all, before they can alert others to your arrival. In the end, what makes Crusader: No Regret a winning a game is its ability to utterly move you out of your own headspace and into the Silencer's. For the few hours a day that you let yourself escape into it, your vocation as the Silencer becomes a high-minded obsession, a fervent crusade, a battle of wits and reflexes that takes an ample measure of control to not only command, but also to walk away from, back into your own life, with no regret.
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660,Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore ,8.9," The pretty graphics make DOA2: Hardcore a good showpiece, and the game has enough options to make it a worthwhile purchase for fight-hungry PS2 owners.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/8/1/1/766-2811.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dead-or-alive-2-hardcore-review/1900-2649208/,pos,"
Not content with the wide acclaim that the Dreamcast version received when it was released earlier this year, Tecmo has added even more new features to its flagship fighting game, Dead or Alive 2. The game, now titled Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore, adds new costumes, stages, and voices to the mix, and for the most part the game has retained its extremely smooth look.   The original Dead or Alive was powered by Sega's Model 2 arcade hardware, and it played quite a bit like Virtua Fighter 2 with the addition of special danger zones that delivered various new effects. DOA2 breaks out of the Virtua Fighter mold: It has full 3D movement, a rather necessary countering system, and overall it's a more interesting game.   DOA2 offers a variety of mostly standard modes, from the regular story mode, to versus, tag-team-battle, training, and survival. The tag-team-battle mode is pretty exciting, because DOA2's tags occur almost instantaneously. This makes it easy to start a juggle combo and keep the juggle going. Unlike Tekken Tag Tournament, DOA2's tag-team battles are down to the last man, so one-on-two fights can and do occur. The story mode consists of one-round fights and hilariously meaningless prefight exchanges between characters. The horrific English voice work only amplifies the humor.   While DOA2's fighting leans toward the button-mashing side of things, there's plenty of depth to be found, thanks in part to the countering system, which makes countering moves as easy as hitting back, and to the ""free"" button, which lets you walk around the stage in full 3D. This occasionally leads to counter syndrome, where both players run at each other and immediately counter over and over again, hoping to catch the other player off guard. It looks incredibly silly. Still, regardless of your methods, DOA2 is a fun multiplayer game, and the four-player option in tag-team-battle mode is especially exciting.   DOA2: Hardcore looks simply amazing. The animation is smooth, but the character models are what really stand out. The fighters all look extremely smooth. Little things like clothes, hair, and tassels move appropriately, almost never clipping into the characters' bodies. And, of course, the series' trademark gimmick - large, bouncing breasts - is as prevalent as ever. The soundtrack is a little annoying. While the fighting sounds are great, the music - mostly a collection of fairly generic and slightly annoying guitar tracks - fails to impress. The other piece of audio, newly added for this ""hardcore"" edition, is English speech. While you can reset the speech to Japanese and turn on subtitles, the game defaults to some of the worst voice work in recent memory. The delivery is off, the script is absolutely lame, and overall it makes the game laughable.   Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore is a pretty good fighting game. The fighting system is fast and fun, though not the deepest system in town. Still, the pretty graphics make it a good showpiece (though, to be honest, it doesn't look that much different from the Dreamcast release), and the game has enough options to make it a worthwhile purchase for fight-hungry PS2 owners.
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661,Descent: Freespace - The Great War ,8.9, It's a noble effort to both cannibalize the best elements of classics of the genre and also provide a number of refreshing innovations.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/5/2/2214052-freespace1box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/descent-freespace-the-great-war-review/1900-2538607/,pos,"
Over the years a variety of space-combat simulations have been released, but none of them has been as polished or even remotely as interesting as LucasArts' X-Wing series or Origin Systems' Wing Commander series, both of which are still going strong. With the enticing capabilities of 3D graphics hardware support and a general resurgence in science fiction themes, it was only a matter of time before gaming companies would, once again, try to break LucasArts' and Origin Systems' collective stranglehold over the genre. At last a worthy challenger has arrived. Descent: Freespace is one of a number of recently released or announced space-sim titles from developers who are better known for creating successful gaming series in other genres. But while MicroProse's X-COM Interceptor is a fading memory, and little anticipation has developed for Accolade's Star Con (formerly Star Control 4), Volition has carefully crafted Descent: Freespace to provide a welcome mix of compelling graphics, plot, and gameplay.  When the plot of Descent: Freespace begins, the ever-warmongering Terrans are in the midst of a 14-year misunderstanding with the Vasudans. While the Vasudans and the Terrans are fairly evenly matched, they quickly put aside their differences when a third race appears, the technologically superior Shivans. Although a rebel Vasudan faction continues to harass the new Vasudan-Terran alliance, the main threat comes from the Shivans and their monstrous capital ship, the Lucifer. From the opening animated cutscene, Descent: Freespace does an excellent job at maintaining the aura of the Shivans as a mysterious, unstoppable force. When you first encounter the Shivans, you won't even be able to target their jet-black ships, and the weapons that seemed so impressive against the Vasudans will barely make an impression on the Shivans and their seemingly invulnerable shields. At first you have to avoid direct conflicts with the superior Shivans and instead embark on missions to steal their technology in order to improve the capabilities of your ships. In fact, there's a real X-COM feel to the game, as you uncover the mysteries of the Shivans and constantly improve the technology of your ships and weaponry.  Very little about Descent: Freespace is entirely original, but the developers did an admirable job at extracting the best features from previous spaces sims. Everything from the ""sink the behemoth"" branching plot to the stylish interface, mission briefings, and graphics appears to be plucked from other games of the genre, but improved. In many ways, the graphics closely resemble those used in Wing Commander Prophecy and make especially good use of colored lighting, shielding, lens flare, and engine blast effects. The graphics are particularly impressive in later missions, when immense capital ships patrol through colored nebulas and asteroid fields, swarmed by hordes of attacking fighters and bombers until they are wracked by massive explosions. You won't have time to stand around and admire the fireworks, however, as the shock waves from exploding capital ships are particularly deadly in this game. It's a nod to realism that increases the immersiveness of the game, especially if you're using a force-feedback joystick. Combat in Descent: Freespace also more closely resembles the fast-paced, missile-blasting, afterburner sliding frag fests of the Wing Commander series than the World War II style of combat favored by the Star Wars sims. Descent: Freespace is probably the most missile-intensive game yet seen in the genre, but fortunately single missile hits aren't usually too destructive to your ship. Afterburners can only be utilized in short bursts, requiring you to tactically reserve them for when they are most useful. You can adjust the power levels of your shields, engines, and weapons, but unlike games such as X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, which constantly require you to juggle those settings, the ships in Descent: Freespace appear to be admirably powered, and you'll rarely feel the need to adjust settings to boost power in a particular area. Wingmen AI is excellent in some respects but poor in others. You have unprecedented control over your wingmen, and they'll capably respond to an order to take out the weapons system or engine of a capital ship, but they also won't hesitate to mow you down if you happen to fly in between them and your target. One handy feature is that you'll get a communications warning whenever an enemy ship is attacking you from behind. It's a shame you don't get a similar warning when one of your maniacal wingmen decides to gleefully launch a spread of missiles at a target inches in front of your ship. The customizable interface of Descent: Freespace is outstanding - easily the best yet seen in the genre. The interface was clearly designed to make useful information, such as the status of escorted ships, the direction and the distance of approaching missiles, mission objectives, and the condition of your wingmen, constantly available on your screen. Find some of that information unnecessary or obstructive? Then remove it from the interface entirely, or set it to only appear when there is a change in its status. You can also change the color of the interface and control its relative brightness. Descent: Freespace's interface is among the best I've seen in any game. The plot of Descent: Freespace advances through animated cutscenes, periodic ""news"" updates on the status of the war, as well as through mission briefings and the occasional scripted mission event. Overall, these methods combine to provide a compelling, if somewhat disjointed, storyline. But it's lacking in depth. Your wingmen lack names or distinguishing identities, and you never get to see the leaders or other personalities composing the various factions in the game. Aside from an effective animated introduction and some obligatory ending scenes, there is only a handful of animated scenes in the game, most of which appear fairly early on in the storyline. The remainder of the cutscenes consist solely of panning skylines, while a female narrator provides some additional background mythology on the history of the Shivans and their possible role in the universe. It seems as if the developers didn't quite have the time to finish an otherwise very polished single-player game.  There are approximately 30 single-player missions in the branching campaign and 20 multiplayer missions. The mission objectives are nicely varied and include ""kill 'em all"" missions, stealthy inspection missions, a mission that resembles a giant game of Asteroids, and some epic capital ship confrontations near the end of the game. Descent: Freespace automatically saves after each campaign mission, and you can't independently save the game, which is a bit disappointing, since it prevents you from exploring the various campaign ""branches"" without restarting the entire campaign. While the developers may have opted for such a system in order to encourage gamers to replay the campaign, I suspect that most gamers are reluctant to accept unsuccessful mission results and tend to play space sims through in a fairly linear fashion. There's just something inherently unsatisfying about tanking a mission just so you can see a different plot thread. The list of additional features Descent: Freespace purports to support is unsurpassed, but unfortunately they don't all work very well. A free mission editor is included, allowing you to create your own missions and trade them with other players, which may significantly extend the replayability of the game. Support for force-feedback joysticks is implemented extremely well - the controller will effectively shake when you apply an afterburner burst, each type of weapon has a different feel, and directional hits leave you with no question as to the location of your attacker. You can personalize the picture of your pilot and can communicate with other human players in real time over microphones - provided you have sufficient bandwidth.  Multiplayer support for up to 12 players is included either through a TCP/IP network or the Internet through the free Parallax Online servers. Parallax Online keeps detailed pilot statistics and is an extremely streamlined service, with an intuitive interface and seamless integration with the multiplayer interface of Descent: Freespace. Unfortunately, even after two patches, most gamers will find a multiplayer game of Descent: Freespace over the Internet to be completely unplayable due to lag. Unlike first-person shooter games, where an environment's walls and a player's line of sight will naturally limit the number of objects that a client has to keep track of at any one time, the open areas of space-combat simulations have historically proven very difficult to use as online multiplayer arenas. Multiplayer support was eventually removed from Wing Commander Prophecy because Origin wasn't satisfied that it would work well, and even earlier in that game's development Internet multiplayer support was removed. Even X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter limits multiplayer support to four players over Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone. In that context, it's astonishing that Interplay and Volition were, almost until the game was released, advertising Descent: Freespace as capable of supporting 16 players online, when in fact the retail version of the game is currently incapable of even adequately supporting two players each using 56K modems. While the development team continues to work on patches to improve the game's online performance (a third was released as this review goes to print), the advertised multiplayer features may have been overly ambitious, and seriously misleading, given the current state of the game. Still, unless you are only looking for a multiplayer dogfighting area (in which case you'll be doubly disappointed, since deathmatch support was removed late in development entirely, in favor of cooperative and team vs. team missions) there's a lot to like about Descent: Freespace. It's a noble effort to both cannibalize the best elements of classics of the genre and also provide a number of refreshing innovations. While Descent: Freespace isn't quite the standout game it could have been, it's a welcome step in the right direction for the genre. Highly recommended.
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'best', 'I', ""'ve"", 'seen', 'game', '.', 'The', 'plot', 'Descent', ':', 'Freespace', 'advances', 'animated', 'cutscenes', ',', 'periodic', '``', 'news', ""''"", 'updates', 'status', 'war', ',', 'well', 'mission', 'briefings', 'occasional', 'scripted', 'mission', 'event', '.', 'Overall', ',', 'methods', 'combine', 'provide', 'compelling', ',', 'somewhat', 'disjointed', ',', 'storyline', '.', 'But', ""'s"", 'lacking', 'depth', '.', 'Your', 'wingmen', 'lack', 'names', 'distinguishing', 'identities', ',', 'never', 'get', 'see', 'leaders', 'personalities', 'composing', 'various', 'factions', 'game', '.', 'Aside', 'effective', 'animated', 'introduction', 'obligatory', 'ending', 'scenes', ',', 'handful', 'animated', 'scenes', 'game', ',', 'appear', 'fairly', 'early', 'storyline', '.', 'The', 'remainder', 'cutscenes', 'consist', 'solely', 'panning', 'skylines', ',', 'female', 'narrator', 'provides', 'additional', 'background', 'mythology', 'history', 'Shivans', 'possible', 'role', 'universe', '.', 'It', 'seems', 'developers', ""n't"", 'quite', 'time', 'finish', 'otherwise', 'polished', 'single-player', 'game', '.', 'There', 'approximately', '30', 'single-player', 'missions', 'branching', 'campaign', '20', 'multiplayer', 'missions', '.', 'The', 'mission', 'objectives', 'nicely', 'varied', 'include', '``', 'kill', ""'em"", ""''"", 'missions', ',', 'stealthy', 'inspection', 'missions', ',', 'mission', 'resembles', 'giant', 'game', 'Asteroids', ',', 'epic', 'capital', 'ship', 'confrontations', 'near', 'end', 'game', '.', 'Descent', ':', 'Freespace', 'automatically', 'saves', 'campaign', 'mission', ',', 'ca', ""n't"", 'independently', 'save', 'game', ',', 'bit', 'disappointing', ',', 'since', 'prevents', 'exploring', 'various', 'campaign', '``', 'branches', ""''"", 'without', 'restarting', 'entire', 'campaign', '.', 'While', 'developers', 'may', 'opted', 'system', 'order', 'encourage', 'gamers', 'replay', 'campaign', ',', 'I', 'suspect', 'gamers', 'reluctant', 'accept', 'unsuccessful', 'mission', 'results', 'tend', 'play', 'space', 'sims', 'fairly', 'linear', 'fashion', '.', 'There', ""'s"", 'something', 'inherently', 'unsatisfying', 'tanking', 'mission', 'see', 'different', 'plot', 'thread', '.', 'The', 'list', 'additional', 'features', 'Descent', ':', 'Freespace', 'purports', 'support', 'unsurpassed', ',', 'unfortunately', ""n't"", 'work', 'well', '.', 'A', 'free', 'mission', 'editor', 'included', ',', 'allowing', 'create', 'missions', 'trade', 'players', ',', 'may', 'significantly', 'extend', 'replayability', 'game', '.', 'Support', 'force-feedback', 'joysticks', 'implemented', 'extremely', 'well', '-', 'controller', 'effectively', 'shake', 'apply', 'afterburner', 'burst', ',', 'type', 'weapon', 'different', 'feel', ',', 'directional', 'hits', 'leave', 'question', 'location', 'attacker', '.', 'You', 'personalize', 'picture', 'pilot', 'communicate', 'human', 'players', 'real', 'time', 'microphones', '-', 'provided', 'sufficient', 'bandwidth', '.', 'Multiplayer', 'support', '12', 'players', 'included', 'either', 'TCP/IP', 'network', 'Internet', 'free', 'Parallax', 'Online', 'servers', '.', 'Parallax', 'Online', 'keeps', 'detailed', 'pilot', 'statistics', 'extremely', 'streamlined', 'service', ',', 'intuitive', 'interface', 'seamless', 'integration', 'multiplayer', 'interface', 'Descent', ':', 'Freespace', '.', 'Unfortunately', ',', 'even', 'two', 'patches', ',', 'gamers', 'find', 'multiplayer', 'game', 'Descent', ':', 'Freespace', 'Internet', 'completely', 'unplayable', 'due', 'lag', '.', 'Unlike', 'first-person', 'shooter', 'games', ',', 'environment', ""'s"", 'walls', 'player', ""'s"", 'line', 'sight', 'naturally', 'limit', 'number', 'objects', 'client', 'keep', 'track', 'one', 'time', ',', 'open', 'areas', 'space-combat', 'simulations', 'historically', 'proven', 'difficult', 'use', 'online', 'multiplayer', 'arenas', '.', 'Multiplayer', 'support', 'eventually', 'removed', 'Wing', 'Commander', 'Prophecy', 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662,Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition ,8.9, Duke Nukem Atomic is a heck of a fun addition to the original episodes.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/2/1/2/844-3212.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/duke-nukem-3d-atomic-edition-review/1900-2540096/,pos,"
Duke Nukem 3D's popularity really mushroomed after its release earlier this year. Wowing gamers with smooth graphics, innovative weaponry, and its crass-talking, alien-squishing first-person hero, GT Interactive's blockbuster title offered an alternative to 3D staples such as Doom. Gamers can't get enough of Duke, the computerized, testosterone-enhanced Bruce Campbell who - and we may catch some flak for this - slightly resembles Vanilla Ice. Sure, he doesn't come close to being a wanna-be rap artist, but ""icing"" is still his game in a brand new episode (entitled ""The Birth"") featured in 3D Realms' latest Duke patch, Duke Nukem 3D Plutonium Pak. This episode features eleven new levels, a new weapon, a couple of fresh-faced cretins, and plenty of new offhand quips.  So, you're dying to hear about the new items in this edition, right? Okay, first off, there's a weapon called an ""expander,"" which you get automatically when you pick up the trusty ""shrinker"" weapon. When you pump enough rounds of the expander into an enemy, he'll inflate and burst, Dig-Dug-style. The new enemies, however, are no Pookas. One of the LAPD pig-cops from the previous game now treads around in a miniature tank and fires multiple rounds of ammo at you. The other new kid on the block is this lanky alien guy who pummels you and has the ability to shrink you down to squashable size. Both of these characters are damn tough to kill and will probably have you high-tailing it in the opposite direction most of the time. But the real enjoyment from this add-on comes from exploring the new levels and discovering the wealth of  humorous pop-culture references. In ""Duke Burger,"" Duke has to stomp aliens loitering around a fast-food restaurant - which, given the oversized revolving Duke Big Boy, is presumably his own franchise. In ""Shop-N-Bag"" you get to smoke your enemies in a grocery store, the aisles of which resound with dippy Tijuana Brass Muzak (let's see - a quart of milk, three frozen dinners and…hey, who's that scaly guy over there with the cannon?!). In a later episode, you can take a ride on ""Babes of the Caribbean"" in an amusement park overrun by the familiar porno-obsessed extra-terrestrials. (You may not find Walt's cryogenically suspended body here, but you may want to use the ""freezer"" gun to conduct some of your own preservative experiments on those ""alien bastards."") Finally, in ""It's Impossible,"" Duke encounters a scenario which should be familiar to most of you who saw a blockbuster Tom Cruise movie which featured a lot of missions. If any object in the game feels destruction-worthy, you can blast it to shards. I took particular joy in decimating a few dairy freezers, some expensive computer equipment, and an innocent amusement-park mascot. Continuing in the tradition of the original Duke levels, each level in ""The Birth"" is completely interactive and has its own unique personality.  It's generally accepted that, while Duke Nukem 3D is a challenging and addictive first-person game, it contains characters and situations which some people might find morally questionable. The developers of this latest Duke installment definitely sought to cash in once more on the controversial raciness that runs rampant in the previous game. So be warned: If private S&M parties and animatronic, bikini-clad sword fighters offend you, you may not want to wander around the wrong corner in this game.  But controversial stuff aside, Duke Nukem Atomic is a heck of a fun addition to the original episodes. My only real complaint is that the levels are fairly expansive, and you'll feel like you're roaming around a ghost town if you play over the network with fewer than four players. Still, any Duke fan hungry for a little more ""unnecessary roughness"" will want to shell out for this one.
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663,Final Fantasy Tactics ,8.9, Role-playing games don't get a whole lot better than Final Fantasy Tactics.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/6/9/2218769-box_fft.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/final-fantasy-tactics-review/1900-2547526/,pos,"
The skeptic may suspect Square of milking its big franchise for all it's worth with Final Fantasy Tactics, a game quite different from the other titles in the popular series. He couldn't be more wrong - Final Fantasy Tactics proudly bears the Final Fantasy name and proves to be yet another astonishing success in Square's PlayStation lineup. This is a work of the highest quality in every respect: From the impressive 3D terrain, to the expertly animated characters, to the gorgeous soundtrack, to the sheer volume of available gameplay options, Final Fantasy Tactics is a masterpiece. This complex and challenging game is geared toward a more advanced audience than Final Fantasy VII. You play a young noble involved in a worldwide war, and your first duty is to assemble a team from a limited pool of amateurs. The members of your squad gain experience and job points with each successful task in battle (whether it be slashing a sword or tossing a potion to an ailing friend), and those job points can later be used to learn hundreds of new techniques including spells, defenses, and counterattacks. What's more, your troops can change occupation at your command, provided they've attained the experience to take on the new position. Soon enough, your squires and chemists will evolve into archers, monks, sorcerers, knights, and thieves. Later you'll gain access to more advanced classes like summoners, lancers, and samurai. The character classes and their properties are vintage Final Fantasy, and fans will immediately recognize such trademarks as the destructive king dragon Bahamut and the mysterious sombrero-and-blue-cloak garb of the wizard. Final Fantasy Tactics boasts tremendous replay value for an RPG with its 20 available occupations to pick and choose from, each with dozens of specialized techniques. The alarmingly cute-looking characters belie the serious nature of Final Fantasy Tactics' thoughtful, exciting plot - you'll witness treachery upon treachery, social struggle, lost love, murder, and moral dilemma along the way, and you'll even see your character grow older and wiser over the course of the game. Unfortunately, the English translation of the original Japanese script does its worst to detain you from enjoying Final Fantasy Tactics' storyline with poor grammar and the consistently awkward use of ""quotation marks,"" but thankfully the story itself is retained intact.Combat tends to hamper most Japanese RPGs, which thrust countless boring encounters upon you and your party as a means of padding play life and adding an interactive element to an otherwise linear plot. But in Final Fantasy Tactics, the battles are the meat and potatoes of the game - with so many kinds of characters and so many different locales in which to fight (prairies, swamps, towns, castles, ruins, deserts, and anything else you can think of), the combat in Final Fantasy Tactics just gets better and better. Often even the plot sequences in Tactics unfold as interludes during the warfare. The fights, many of which are very challenging, are presented through beautiful isometric 3D playing fields, and you can rotate the terrain 90 degrees at a time and even tilt the view and zoom out to gain an ideal vantage point on the situation. Each fighter on the battleground can move and perform one action each turn from his primary or secondary occupation. As a general rule, the more powerful attacks take some time to charge up, allowing the opponent an opportunity to either disable the assailant or to get out of his way. The combat in Final Fantasy Tactics requires much more strategy than the typical RPG, both in terms of preparation (which soldiers to send in and in what formation) and in execution (using a fast unit as a decoy, flanking the opponent, and anticipating the counterattack). Everything fits into place perfectly. The pacing of Final Fantasy Tactics ensures that there's never a dull moment, and building experience is a real treat - whereas doing so is a chore in most other RPGs. Its outstanding symphonic score delivers an epic feel, while the stylized character designs add charm and personality. The challenging nature of this game allows for a much more serious story than most other RPGs, and the ability to customize each soldier to the extreme ensures superior play life. Role-playing games don't get a whole lot better than Final Fantasy Tactics.
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664,Eador: Masters of the Broken World ,4, Game-crushing bugs overshadow the turn-based tactical goodness Eador: Masters of the Broken World offers.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/7/0/2229570-steamworkshop_collection_1346742285_collection_branding.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/eador-masters-of-the-broken-world-review/1900-6408293/,neg,"
  Eador: Masters of the Broken World is too difficult to enjoy. Even on the easiest setting, it does everything it can to keep you from making progress. Whereas some games lay honest challenges and let you learn your way through them, Masters of the Broken World offers false information that's difficult to plan around. It gives you the option to tinker with systems you can't understand until the game offers a half-baked explanation. To make it worse, it's so unstable that bugs and hard crashes frequently cut your adventures short, as if the game weren't already oppressive enough.   Combat can go very wrong in a hurry.   The first thing you notice about Masters of the Broken World is the overwhelming number of buttons, as colorful and varied as a candy shop. This is a hardcore turn-based role-playing game with base management, provinces to capture, stats to improve, and a slew of things to always be concerned with. It's overwhelming in an intense, classic PC game sort of way, and at its best it's a gripping brain twister with high stakes and high rewards. The various worlds you must conquer are called ""shards,"" and each offers unique benefits that help you as you attack the next one. You are a god who manipulates mortal heroes to do your bidding and claim lands, which is a neat way for a game to justify its genre through fiction.    Combat takes place on a grid of hexagonal spaces. Various infantry units join your hero, who belongs to a powerful fantasy-standard class like a warrior or a mage. Before combat, you see how many and what type of foes to expect, and the game offers a battle prediction. This pre-combat assessment couldn't feel less accurate, which is a huge problem because it's often the deciding factor for whether you initiate a fight, negotiate, or retreat. Not only can the enemy outnumber your party, but nearly all of its soldiers might outlevel yours by five times. Yet the game might predict that ""the enemy will be destroyed,"" displayed in reassuring green type. This is bad information. Lost troops are gone forever once a battle is over, so the cost of a party wipe is staggering. New fighters must be purchased and trained again, which takes time and feels like a grind.    When forces are evenly matched, combat is a wonderful game of resource and land management. Moving a character forward to a hill offers range benefits, but it might be more useful to send weak units into a forest patch for defensive bonuses. Magic isn't based on mana, but on a limited number of uses. This means you can't just nuke everything in sight to win. You need to move units out of hit zones. You need to be concerned with draining enemy stamina. It feels like a deep board game, but with particle effects.   Every shard world offers advantages to your heroes.   Sadly, the game frequently stops working. A few hiccups could be tolerated in a game with so many systems running simultaneously, but Masters of the Broken World is, well, utterly broken. Everything from combat to movement to construction happens as part of a chain of actions. When you finish queuing tasks, you hit the execute button, and the game jumps into motion… sometimes. More times than you would want, the execute button, as well as the entire bottom row, simply fails to work. When this happens in combat, the only options are to quit the game and lose progress or activate auto-battle mode, which rarely ends in your favor. Sometimes the weapon switch command doesn't work. Sometimes your hero gets stuck in one province on the overworld map. And all too often, Masters of the Broken World just crashes completely.    There is satisfaction to be found in the game's vast and deep strategy elements. Building up your city's defenses and resource production rate helps you conquer other provinces and strongholds more quickly. Stationing guards can be an exciting gamble because the units can grow corrupt, stealing income or terrorizing townspeople. The problem is that you're given access to features that you can't understand because the game hasn't yet taken the time to teach you. Granaries can be built in provinces, for example, and they give each sector a population boost. However, overpopulation can lead to unrest, which can lead to a rebellion. The game's suggested counter is to build a guard outpost, which doesn't work at all. Provinces inevitably fall, and you're forced to battle and recapture areas you used to own. This isn't fun, and doing work you've already done just to rectify something you don't know how to fix is aggravating in all the wrong ways.    A system of karma and random events breaks up the typical bribe/fight/conquer gameplay. Sometimes a horde of enemies might attack one of your provinces, and you have to decide whether it's worth your time and resources to help defend it. If you leave your people to die, you naturally lose karma. You might be the kind of person to never accept bribes, but if someone is offering a lot of gold and you have your eye on an expensive new structure for your base, maybe you'll accept. Unfortunately, karma doesn't seem to have a substantial effect on anything you do. You'll appreciate the distraction from the core game mechanics, but a distraction is really all it is.   The stronghold. You'll spend a lot of time here repurchasing lost units.   Masters of the Broken World has a Hot Seat mode, which has two players taking turns in the chair in front of the computer as they battle each other. It's a great idea, and it's fun when it works, but it's not immune to the bug problems found in the single-player campaign. There’s also an online mode, but finding a reliable match is a miracle. You might wait half an hour to play a single skirmish, only to have the connection fail before a game starts. When you could cook dinner in the time it takes to find an opponent, something is very wrong.    Any enjoyment derived from Eador: Masters of the Broken World is buried beneath a landslide of inexcusable technical issues. Building up a home base and expanding into the world should be rewarding, but frequent and unfair bugs make any progress feel less like victory and more like a stroke of good luck. Some serious patches could uncover the game buried beneath the flaws, but as of right now, playing Masters of the Broken World not worth the headache. In this high-fantasy world of trolls, archers, and the undead, it's a shame that your most dreadful enemy is the game itself.    
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665,Project Temporality ,4, Glitches and a dire lack of puzzle variation keep Project Temporality from being time well spent.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/project-temporality-review/1900-6415779/,neg,"
Project Temporality candidly sets you on familiar territory. It heavily borrows themes and mechanics from some of the top games in its genre, but not enough to recapture the spark of life found in such classics. As subject 87, you pass through the rooms and hallways of a futuristic space station, manipulating time to solve puzzles--typically involving large buttons and doors. You are overseen by a man whose relentless pursuit of a successful experiment has left the station a nearly abandoned wreck, and subject 87 is seemingly the last among many subjects who failed to live up to expectations.Project Temporality makes some clear nods to Valve's Portal, but mentioning it in the same breath gives the game far too much credit. The game isn't nearly as clever, and its attempts at humor come off as juvenile and awkward, which gets worse as you near its end. The head of the operation is Admiral Melville, and like GLaDOS, he is an apparently calm tutor, familiarizing you with puzzle-solving mechanics, but he goes completely wacky over the course of the game. But unlike those of his sharp and often sarcastic robotic counterpart, Melville's speeches devolve into didactic rambling and bizarre insults. The laughter I experienced was more a response to the baffling spectacle than to any genuine comedy. It was because of this that I felt exceedingly relieved that the game doesn't include any vocal work. I would feel nothing but pity for the poor soul who had to strain through gritted teeth, ""I will eat your children and make a sock puppet out of your face!"" with any sort of sincerity.Create time clones to help you solve puzzles.You would believe the actions of subject 87 to be the catalyst that sparks the change needed to finally end the madness and set things right. Instead, the story spins around you at a distance, occasionally brushing by to remind you that it still exists. Subject 87's actions do nothing for plot progression; any and all attempts to advance the story are performed by other characters as they speak to you via covert messages. The perpetually silent 87 gets pushed along for the ride as the story struggles in vain to try to make the hapless character a significant part of the narrative.You are likely to find more enjoyment if you just ignore the story and focus on the main reason you would delve into Project Temporality: the puzzle solving. An experimental brain implant grants you the ability to clear challenges by spawning time clones that act out a few moments of your last action. This should sound familiar if you played Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, where Clank completed puzzles by creating colored time clones. The simplest challenges have you open a door by holding down a button some distance away. The button may need to be held down to keep the door open, or pressing it could begin a countdown that reaches zero just as you encounter the door.Project Temporality makes some clear nods to Valve's Portal, but mentioning it in the same breath gives the game far too much credit.No, I haven't lost the remote again. I'm just stuck in the couch.In short, you must be in two places at once. To solve this riddle, you start at or near the door you must pass through and walk toward the button that opens it. When you reach it, you hit rewind and until you're where you need to be, and then create a time clone that follows the exact path to the button and presses it down, allowing you to enter the door. The mechanic excited me when I first saw it executed. I loved watching my past self follow the same path, perhaps smacking against the same barrel I did by mistake, and ending up on the button across a room just as planned. I wanted to wave, jump up, and shout ""Thanks for the hand, me!"" before moving to the next room, leaving my clone to stand guard, perhaps for an eternity. Naturally, the puzzles get far more complicated than the example I presented. Throughout the game, you face burning lasers, roving platforms, pitfalls, and motion sensors, and passing through them unscathed can take many clones at once.Solving puzzles requires nonlinear planning, combined with a bit of imagination. Success means knowing exactly where you must be at all times--in the present, the past, and also the future. In one challenge, you must cross a chasm on a floating platform, while also having to move a large wall in order to block a laser placed in such a way as to knock you clear into the abyss. In another, you hold down a button for a door and set up a clone to press a second button, leaving you to pick up a key needed to bypass a room, all within seconds. Both challenges have you using your imagination to place yourself somewhere in the future, whether that means standing on the platform that passes by a laser-blocking wall just in the nick of time, or grabbing a key and escaping by using your ability to create clones.Many puzzles require several time clones performing different tasks.Unfortunately, once you grasp the fundamentals of the puzzles, the fun in solving them withers. Puzzles don't vary much throughout the 14 levels, and never require more than precise timing and pressing a seemingly endless supply of large glowing buttons. The game isn't wholly devoid of challenge, mind. Project Temporality's difficulty progression is organic, and the game provides a few real head-scratchers. The problem is that it gets to the point where you can enter a room and discern exactly how to complete the puzzle just by glancing at the components. This does not originate from a sudden burst of intuition; you've just danced these steps so many times they've started to wear holes in the station's reinforced metal floors. And without those satisfying ""Aha!"" moments that make puzzle games so engrossing, Project Temporality ends up being a tedious trek from one room to the next, where the only relief comes when you happen upon the portal out of the level.Project Temporality is also hindered by technical shortcomings that range from repetitive environments to frustrating glitches. The frame rate is noticeably sluggish, a problem exacerbated by floaty mouse aiming. The game recycles objects and set pieces to the point where levels begin to look too similar to one another. You see many of the same signs, workstations, and stasis pods copied and pasted without restraint. Hallways especially feel repetitive after a while. I didn't even want to count how many times I passed the exact same sparking cables and splashes of grime.Not only buttons, but keys are often used to pass through doors.Worst of all are collision glitches, which are evident through the entire game. Any object has the potential to lock you in place with some invisible barrier, or drop you into the floor while you flop about. Granted, you can reverse time by a second or so to remove yourself from the perilous grip of random couches or guardrails, but that's not the point. When you crash to a halt while your attention is locked on a countdown timer, it breaks the pacing. And when the culprit is a half-inch-high bump, it's maddening.Project Temporality wears its influences on its shiny metal space sleeves. Its effort to imitate is tepid, however, and the stuff of its own concoction that fills the gaps isn't particularly good either. Without the constant glitches, the game would be a mediocre six-hour distraction allowing you to toy with an enjoyable time-bending mechanic. The shallow story and the general awkwardness of its delivery, not to mention Project Temporality's inability to lead the protagonist without a leash, however, prevent the game from being worth the time.
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666,Knack ,4, Dull combat with little diversity banishes Knack to a dark realm normally reserved for the likes of foul goblins.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2349960-81tmswdefql._sl1252_.jpg,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/knack-review/1900-6415530/,neg,"
Mercy is not part of Knack's vocabulary. He happily uppercuts a defeated enemy into a steaming lake of molten lava and flings an aircraft by its tail into the unforgiving ground. And don't believe for a second that he sheds a single tear for the pilot engulfed in the flaming wreckage; Knack doesn't let sentimentality distract him from a good fight. The only thing he desires more than brutal destruction is finding creative ways to exterminate his many foes. At least that's how the cutscenes play out. When you're given control, Knack mindlessly punches his way through corridor after corridor of enemies, and you're left wondering why Knack gets to have so much more fun than you do.Oppression is the theme that binds Knack's overarching narrative together. Goblins have been forced from their lands by the imperialistic humans, and after surviving in the wastelands for generations, they finally have the power to mount a rebellion. Goblins aren't the only creatures who have to deal with oppression. Knack was created by a benevolent doctor who has found a way to turn ancient relics into a sentient being. The philosophical implications of this discovery flip the very notion of life on its head. As Knack muses about the nature of love during a quiet cutscene, you realize that, like Frankenstein's monster, he is capable of self-reflection and poignant observations. And yet, he is treated like a weapon. Does he deserve to be viewed as an equal even though he was birthed through alchemical experimentation? Such ruminations are glossed over. Instead of realizing his humanity, Knack usually acts like a meathead, cracking his knuckles while he waits for his next fight.Even Knack can appreciate fine art. Instead of realizing his humanity, Knack usually acts like a meathead, cracking his knuckles while he waits for his next fight.Relying exclusively on combat isn't inherently bad. There are plenty of games that slowly build on their fighting mechanics and provide enough twists and detours to keep you riveted. However, Knack's combat lacks the necessary depth to captivate your senses. The core problems stem from your meager repertoire. Knack has only five ways to attack the many enemies who confront him, and you learn every one of these moves in the opening tutorial. Three of these attacks--a whirlwind, a projectile blast, and a shock wave--serve as special powers that can be activated only when you collect enough sunstones. Another, your jump attack, propels you toward your enemy as a wrecking ball. But because both you and your enemy recoil when contact is made, you can't use this as the setup for your combos. Which leaves you with the standard punch. So you punch, and punch, and punch some more, for that is how victory is achieved in Knack.There is weight behind your attacks that makes you understand the pain you're causing, and slow-motion finishers hammer home just how strong Knack is. But solid mechanics mean nothing alone. Because there is such little variance between fights, you're quickly lulled into the bored stupor of predictability. Knack absorbs relics into his body, which allows him to grow from a pint-size pet into a hulking monstrosity. Remember when a mere goblin took three hits to kill? Well laugh at those miniscule fools as you plow through them without breaking a sweat. Behold Knack, destroyer of goblins, devourer of worlds! Sounds pretty amazing, no? No is right. As you get bigger, so too do your enemies, so there's no difference in how fights play out. You still just punch your way to success and perform the weakest double jump known to games, only now you're fighting tanks instead of men.There may be a red carpet, but this is hardly an event. During a moment of enlightenment, Knack realizes that his ever-changing body can be composed of more diverse parts than just relics. Ice, wood, and other materials automatically get pulled into the vacuum of your body in certain levels, shifting your appearance from runic golem to elemental beast. But said changes are only skin deep. Sure, a flaming arrow may melt your icy heart, so you can lose your outer shell that serves as a shield, but there's no mechanical difference between normal Knack and his earthy counterpart. Still, Knack does occassionally introduce ideas that hint at a real evolution. For instance, in some levels, you have a crystalline body, which initializes Stealth Knack. It's finally time for some real variety, right? Not quite. With the tap of a button, Knack can walk through the laser beams that serve as a high-tech security system. But enemies can still see you, even though you're invisible. It's hard to stifle a laugh when the doctor says, ""No more sneaking around"" after an enemy shoots at you, as if sneaking was ever an option.So you punch, and punch, and punch some more, for that is how victory is achieved in Knack.There are 13 chapters in Knack, and every one of them plays out in the same tired manner. You start out small, gradually build your size until you're huge, and then arbitrarily shrink back down when the chapter wraps up. There's always a convenient excuse for this transformation. How else could Knack fit in a biplane if he doesn't lose his precious relics? And then you start the whole cycle all over again. In the beginning of the eighth chapter, the doctor plainly states that you must grow as large as possible, as if we somehow missed the pattern that has been cemented from the onset.If you're craving exploration, there are opportunities to veer slightly off the main path if you have sharp eyes. Weak walls can be knocked down to find extra relics and sunstones, along with collectible treasures that imbue Knack with new abilities. There are tons of collectibles strewn throughout Knack's expansive worlds, but these pieces are worthless on their own. If you're lucky enough to complete a set, you get a perk that gives you a passive ability. It wasn't until I reached the ninth chapter that I completed my first gadget, more than eight hours into my adventure. And what did I receive after all that effort? Enemies released a small amount of sunstone power when defeated. Don't expect these collectibles to inject the diversity Knack so desperately needs.Just look at that Knack punch. It's hard to stifle a laugh when the doctor says, ""No more sneaking around"" after an enemy shoots at you, as if sneaking was ever an option.The most baffling part of Knack is its surprisingly high difficulty. Considering the cartoony artistic design and simple mechanics, you might assume that this game would be a cakewalk. But after you die a half-dozen times in the tutorial, that belief will be banished from your mind. When Knack is in his smallest form, he dies from just one or two attacks, and can stand only a couple more when he's bigger. So death comes frequently. If you're vigilant, you can avoid enemy advances by performing well-timed rolls, but even these should be used with caution. You're not invincible when rolling, so you can't abuse this maneuver. Now I love a good challenge, but dying is an annoyance in Knack because the combat sequences aren't interesting enough to play through once, let alone multiple times. There is a cooperative mode if you need a helping hand or want to offer one. Knack is as vulnerable as ever, but the second player controls Robo Knack who respawns after dying. Sadly, the action isn't any more fun when you're dragging a friend along for the ride.Knack's downfall is that it focuses entirely on combat, but doesn't offer enough variety or depth within its system to compel you onward. Any early thoughts you may have that there must be more to the punch-punch-repeat action than meets the eye are banished once you plow through hours of the same basic sequences. And even Knack's few attempts at diversity are merely competent. The occasional platforming scenario lacks the joy of movement so necessary for jumping to be engaging, and the platform placement doesn't require any cleverness to surpass. There's not one element of Knack to rally around, to excite you. And without that special something, Knack crumbles just like its piecemeal protagonist.


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667,Bound By Flame ,4, Bound by Flame is a rickety role-playing game that bites off far more than it can chew.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2503708-81ycxxgrhzl._sl1500_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bound-by-flame-review/1900-6415751/,neg,"
When you first start playing Bound by Flame, you're asked to enter a name for your character--a name that is then summarily ignored by the game's supporting cast, which always refers to your hero by his or her known name: Vulcan. Given Bound by Flame's shallow similarities to The Witcher, it's hard not to wonder what the latter game might have been like if you were asked to name the protagonist, only for everyone to call you Geralt anyway. This identity crisis may seem a minor detail, but it is a head-scratcher of an issue in a role-playing game full of head-scratchers, each one more stymieing than the last. Bound by Flame is the kind of game you might hear people describe as having ""a lot of heart,"" and the game it tries to be is certainly one worth celebrating. Yet by the time this frustrating adventure comes to a close, it's clear that there's a wide gulf between the game you just played and the vision that inspired it.I can't accuse developer Spiders of not trying. Bound by Flame is an action-heavy role-playing game about choice, and it liberally borrows from the BioWare book of conversation tropes, presenting you with narrative decisions now and again that affect allegiances and spawn conflicts, most of which can be solved only through swordplay. Vulcan is an apt name for the game's central character. He (or she, if you choose a female avatar) is a member of a mercenary group called the Freeborn Blades, but in the midst of fighting to stave off an invasion of undead creatures called deadwalkers, he finds himself sharing his brain with a growling demon. Vulcan's mind becomes rather overcrowded as a result, but at least the demon grants him the ability to conjure fire, bringing sense to his mythology-inspired moniker.Companions are so good at playing dead that it's a wonder they were included in the game at all. Bound by Flame's most intriguing choices are those that see Vulcan deciding whether to bend to the demon's whim or assert his individuality, and the more you side with the demon's advice, the more you take on stereotypical demonic traits. The Fable series allows for a similar metamorphosis, but the changes are even more ferocious in Bound by Flame's grim fantasy world. As I faced the final battle, a scrawl of reddish runes had been etched into my blackened chest, from which flames poured out; I had not one, but three sets of curled horns growing from my head; and my voice had taken on a diabolical rumble as the two competing identities became further intertwined.The consequences of your decisions aren't just cosmetic: growing horns means you can't wear helmets and thus reap their defensive benefits, but you do gain enhanced magic power regeneration by way of compensation. There are other trade-offs, as well, but mutating into a fiery fiend was such a delectable experience that I never regretted taking that path in spite of my usual goody-two-shoes proclivities. To be sure, there are choices to make in Bound by Flame's story that have nothing to do with the demon within, but narrative choices are most effective when you're invested in the potential consequences, and the game's poor dialogue and characterizations aren't apt to make you care about anyone's fate but your own.Sybil--you're down for the count too?Take, for instance, the scholar called Sybil, who might need to cope with great loss depending on a decision you make early in the game. The inexpressive writing and voice acting keep Sybil's story from tugging at your emotions, and when you take her to collect three books later on, her ability to relate information immediately, without having to actually read those books, is dumb. Characters are introduced one after another, and many of them are available as battle companions, though you can only invite one to your adventure at any given time. The roster includes a sharp-tongued mage, a prim-and-proper zombie type, and a suicidal knight. They have tales to tell if you ask them, but hearing their stories is like hearing someone recite CliffsNotes: your companions become lecturers, and you wonder if you need to grab a notepad in case there's a test later.Over time, the narrative problems compound so greatly that you can no longer take any occurrence seriously. Transitions from gameplay to cutscenes are jarring, with characters repositioned instantly, and often performing wholly different actions in one moment than they were in the last. Other times, your companion simply disappears once a battle is finished, and the story takes over, an occurrence that proves highly distracting when the lack of witnesses to a particular event is a plot point. (I had a witness--she was with me the whole time!) The tone seesaws wildly, with your conversation partners cracking jokes at the oddest moments, and Vulcan suddenly acting like a jerk or dropping an f-bomb for no apparent reason. When the final hours asked me to make a sacrifice, I made the decision arbitrarily because none of it mattered to me. I simply had no interest in the barely there companions that fell in battle in mere seconds as if they were made of papier-mache.Bound by Flame's most intriguing choices are those that see Vulcan deciding whether to bend to the demon's whim or assert his individuality.Your companions' ultimate uselessness in combat is only one of Bound by Flame's curse-inducing flaws, almost all of them centered on the game's battle system. Yet the combat is initially pleasing, allowing you to switch between a ranger stance, which opens up speedy dagger attacks, and a warrior stance, which has you swinging overbearing two-handed melee weapons such as axes and swords. You can also sneak up on foes if you're so inclined, though the demon's pyromancy skill set, which allows you to toss fireballs and infuse your weapon with glowing flames, is an even greater boon than the stealthy option. Vulcan's muscular swings and acrobatic windups give the swordplay a nice sense of heft, and each school of battle--warrior, ranger, and pyromancer--comes with its own skill tree, a system that inspires you to make thoughtful customization choices that fit your preferred combat style.Bound by Flame then proceeds to ruin its promising combat with a series of mind-boggling choices that suck out all the fun and turn battles into an aggravation. Small areas are populated with archers, ultra-hardened duelists, and frost spirits with all manner of icy spells they like to bombard you with. Throw into the mix an ineffective companion, an unreliable target lock that abides by no comprehensible rules, and a camera that can't always frame the close-quarters action, and you rarely have the proper tools to form a strategy. To make matters worse, every successful attack serves as an interruption, at best disrupting you mid-swing, and at worse knocking you on your derriere.No, this battle does not occur underwater. Bound by Flame's just kind of buggy. A sample battle: You and your magician companion Edwen enter a small combat arena to face numerous deadwalkers. You immediately rush to the opposite end of the arena, because you enter battle at a narrow choke point guaranteed to serve as your coffin should you choose to remain there. Meanwhile, Edwen succumbs to her attackers within 60 seconds, unable to hold her own even while you whale on the golems, specters, and spirits surrounding her. You manage to get in a few successful swipes before you get caught up in a series of attacks that trap you in a string of recovery animations. Once you regain control, you run down a connecting corridor hoping to lure an ice spirit away from the crowd, but in doing so, pull her too far away from the confined territory she is leashed to. The spirit returns to her home and regains full health, and your fallen companion comes to her senses, which is at least some comfort, since leaving the scene of battle (or finishing the battle) is the only way to revive her.Combat then becomes a matter of exploiting defects, not one of finding a proper rhythm. Is a boss fight getting you down? Strafe around your foe, leading him in circles until you have regained enough health or mana, and then unleash another round of attacks. That's not very fun, but it's effective. Eventually, you learn a few helpful techniques, and the combat at least becomes bearable: you learn to lay the explosive traps whenever possible, you learn the best timing for blocking and parrying, you learn when to kick an enemy and interrupt his attack, and you learn how far away you can lead enemies before their invisible leashes pull them back. (And that leash radius is frustratingly small in most cases.) But even after you grow accustomed to the game's pitfalls, battles remain a drag, not because they are challenging, but because they are cheap. The combat areas were not created with enemy behavior in mind, and the enemy behavior wasn't created with player combat timings in mind. There is no shame in playing Bound by Flame on the lowest difficulty--and there is no fun in playing on the higher ones.Bound by Flame ruins its promising combat with a series of mind-boggling choices that suck out all the fun and turn battles into an aggravation.In between battles you might head back to camp to grab one of only a few side quests, all of which send you back into the same bland corridors in which the main quests occur. You may also check out the game's crafting system, which is its most robust element. All of the loot you grab on your travels is useful, either directly (""Hey look, I found a new pair of greaves!"") or indirectly (""I can use this tainted blood to make potions!""). Raw elements can be combined to make other elements, which in turn can be combined to make useful items like traps or to bolster your equipment so that (for instance) you take less cold damage or increase your chances of a critical hit. Refreshingly, you can stop to craft at any time--even in the middle of the excruciating final boss battle.By RPG standards, Bound by Flame isn't a very long or expansive game. If you don't consider the battles you must repeat, the adventure is around a dozen hours long, and there is no world to explore, unless you consider a few medium-size levels made up of twisting hallways to be a world. Bound by Flame shoves too many ideas into its cramped boundaries, thus giving none of them the room they deserved to blossom, and thereby allowing the flames to burn the joy away.


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668,Mind Zero ,4," Mind Zero's attempts to mimic a proven success are foiled by a dull story and plodding, aggravating gameplay.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/536/5360430/3012628-untitled-1-recovered.jpg,VITA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mind-zero-review/1900-6415784/,neg,"
There's a notorious production company called The Asylum. It's not involved with gaming (at least, not yet), but you might know the company as the folks behind such films as Transmorphers, The Day the Earth Stopped, Atlantic Rim, and Android Cop. Its modus operandi is making half-baked films--mockbusters--that clearly want to ride on the themes and popularity of much more visible properties, while trying to remain different enough that they aren't completely wholesale rip-offs of a source.Why do I mention this? Because Mind Zero feels like The Asylum's version of the Persona series. The similarity of the setting, story concepts, and overall design is undeniable. And like the inept mockbuster trying desperately to re-create the spectacle of its bigger inspiration, Mind Zero fails at anything beyond being occasionally mediocre.Leo's standards are remarkably low.The premise behind Mind Zero sounds familiar: in modern-day Saitama, Japan, mysterious happenings are afoot, with random people going on violent rampages due to a force called MIND. While the police are investigating these freak occurrences, a group of high school kids stumble into a portal to a strange alternate world where they are given weapons and told the secrets of MINDs: they are parallel beings from another world. Some MINDs are leaking out into the world we know and are preying on people with negative emotions, and it's up to a scrappy team of kids (plus a grizzled supernatural detective) to investigate and stop the MINDs from opening doors from their world to ours, all while keeping their special powers a secret from the police.Sound a bit familiar? It might, because it's basically the plot of all of the various Persona games stitched together like some sort of Frankenstein's monster. And much like said creature, Mind Zero's plot trudges along with the speed of molasses for a good chunk of the game. Even in the most cinematic-heavy Japanese role-playing games, there are usually things developing in the story when you're not dungeon-crawling. Mind Zero takes its sweet time just getting past the basic ""MINDs are bad; let's find and fight them"" conceit into something more substantial.But while other RPGs might emphasize interactions between characters to help make up for a weak main plot, Mind Zero gives you a cast of teenagers whose personalities fall into one of two categories: incredibly irritating all the time or about as well defined and interesting as a brick. The lead character, Kei, is so aloof and angsty that he may as well have been a mass-produced unit purchased straight from JRPG Hero Stereotype Industries Inc. It wasn't long after my introduction to him that I was wishing I could have a silent lead this time.Mind Zero's plot trudges along with the speed of molasses for a good chunk of the game.Other characters have one-note traits and are easily summed up in single sentences: ""He won't shut up ever about buying dumb crap,"" ""She's kind of stupid in a way that's supposed to be endearing but isn't,"" ""She has no discernible personality to speak of, but she fights stuff, so she's OK,"" and so on. The game's most interesting characters end up being Ogata, the grizzled detective and sole adult on your team, and the antagonists that emerge later on. The sheer dullness or unlikability of everyone makes the game's attempts to present short vignettes of interaction between characters (akin to Persona's social-link sequences) laughable.The combat and exploration are better than the story, though that's not really saying much. Dungeons are presented as first-person-view mazes, and a map fills out as you explore, making things much easier for you--especially since the dungeons become quite expansive, quite fast. What they never really become, however, is attractive. The visuals for these settings are bland and uninspired (the fact that setting assets are recycled by the third major dungeon is seriously off-putting), and the layout of the mazes is sprawling and confusing, with only a few uninteresting gimmicks to break up the monotony.Combat, however, has a few interesting elements. Up to three characters can participate in combat, and they have three separate meters each: life points, mind points, and technical points. Life points are pretty easy to grasp: lose them all, and the character is out of commission. Mind points determine the health of a character's MIND; these points recover over time unless the MIND is on-field. Finally, technical points are used to activate skills of MINDs. They also recover over the course of combat.Combat is initially a high point, but becomes a real slog. These gauges are all very important to keep track of, because they all affect the most crucial element of combat in Mind Zero: the usage of the MINDs, which are summoned with the R trigger. Characters have differing sets of commands depending on whether or not their MINDs are active on the field: defense, item, and escape commands can only be used sans a MIND, while skills are only available with MINDs summoned. MINDs alter other elements as well. Normally, whenever characters are attacked by enemies, they lose LP. However, if their MINDs are active when characters are hit, they lose MP instead of LP, thus rendering MINDs as something of a protective shield. If all MP is lost to attacks, however, characters' MINDs are broken, and the characters are stunned and unable to summon their MINDs again for a few turns. This adds an element of risk to simply putting one's MIND out as a meatshield against enemies.Active MINDs improve standard attack power slightly and give access to skills, which consume TP and sometimes LP when used. The number of skills that can be equipped is determined by a character's level, and skill-granting cards can be equipped, enhanced, and shuffled about from character to character outside of combat. Assembling a solid skill set is crucial to success, though the skills' interchangeability robs characters of individual combat importance, so you'll tend to focus on leveling up a few characters, which may come back to bite you at certain story points. Finally, there's the burst command, which can be used with MINDs turned on or off. Burst allows for a command to be executed instantaneously at a significant TP cost--it's an expensive godsend when emergency healing, absolute escape, or immediate fatal damage on a foe is needed.That pretty much says it all.All of these aspects to fighting seem as if they should be great, and there are boss battles where the combat elements get a chance to shine. The problem comes from the sheer tedium of the regular enemy encounters, and the constant difficulty spikes that accompany them. There's really no such thing as a quick battle in Mind Zero: enemies not only soak up and deal a lot of damage (even on the lowest difficulty), but they also have elemental and anti-MIND affiliations that you must pay attention to.It's one thing for random RPG battles to require you to at least pay attention to not suffer an embarrassing death, but the amount of command shuffling, MIND toggling, and bursting just to kill some cannon-fodder is downright annoying, especially when you just want to explore and get somewhere. Making it all worse is the massive difficulty spike that arrives with each new dungeon; you'll be finishing many fights by the skin of your teeth until you can eke out a couple of extra levels for your crew each time there's a new location introduced. After just a few hours in, you grow to loathe the random encounters (and the irritating music that accompanies them), but at least you'll be thankful for the R button fast-forward feature to make them slightly less of a pain.There are a few high points beyond good combat ideas: the artwork for the MINDs and characters is nice, and the localization gives conversations a natural flow, but the snoozefest of a story and monotonous encounters make playing Mind Zero feel like work. To top it all off, the finale is atrocious, failing to deliver any answers to the questions the story poses (and, in fact, creating new ones), all while suggesting a follow-up that may or may not ever happen. After the utterly laborious process of completing the game, the unsatisfying finale is a slap in the face. But hey, at least you get a post-game dungeon to slog through!The Vita isn't hurting for JRPGs, but even if you've already played and finished Demon Gaze, Ys: Memories of Celceta, and Persona 4 Golden, it's best to skip Mind Zero. Like The Asylum's film oeuvre, Mind Zero is capable, at times, of at least holding your attention, but it's rarely entertaining, and when you're done, you'll be wondering why you didn't invest your time in a superior alternative instead.
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'finale', 'atrocious', ',', 'failing', 'deliver', 'answers', 'questions', 'story', 'poses', '(', ',', 'fact', ',', 'creating', 'new', 'ones', ')', ',', 'suggesting', 'follow-up', 'may', 'may', 'ever', 'happen', '.', 'After', 'utterly', 'laborious', 'process', 'completing', 'game', ',', 'unsatisfying', 'finale', 'slap', 'face', '.', 'But', 'hey', ',', 'least', 'get', 'post-game', 'dungeon', 'slog', '!', 'The', 'Vita', ""n't"", 'hurting', 'JRPGs', ',', 'even', ""'ve"", 'already', 'played', 'finished', 'Demon', 'Gaze', ',', 'Ys', ':', 'Memories', 'Celceta', ',', 'Persona', '4', 'Golden', ',', ""'s"", 'best', 'skip', 'Mind', 'Zero', '.', 'Like', 'The', 'Asylum', ""'s"", 'film', 'oeuvre', ',', 'Mind', 'Zero', 'capable', ',', 'times', ',', 'least', 'holding', 'attention', ',', ""'s"", 'rarely', 'entertaining', ',', ""'re"", 'done', ',', ""'ll"", 'wondering', ""n't"", 'invest', 'time', 'superior', 'alternative', 'instead', '.']",0.02301195181629964,0.49306322042346895
669,Flashback ,4," Flashback is a great-looking remake of a classic game, but playing it is an exercise in confusion and frustration.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/2/9/2230429-fb.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/flashback-review/1900-6413453/,neg,"
Lost within gaming's undying need to relive the earliest days of Mario and Zelda are countless games that, while popular in their own time, haven't seen the same kind of modern-day revival afforded to better-known classics. Flashback HD, in attempting to modernize a classic, serves as a reminder of why some things are best left in the past. Clunky platforming, dated level design, and frustrations abound, and the graphical upgrade and solid sound effects simply aren't enough to save this game.Flashback's biggest strength was its attempt to tell an interesting story back when games had just begun to experiment with having any narrative beyond ""go here, rescue princess."" It had a complicated plot built around some of the more interesting tropes of 1980s and '90s science fiction, including exploration of the solar system, lost and stored memories, and, of course, aliens. The story was respectable for its time, but in attempting to tell it with more modern means, Flashback HD has spoiled it. The voice work is terrible, and many of the cutscenes are so loaded down with camp and awkwardness that it's impossible to take anything the game says or does seriously. Narrative presentation aside, the core game is fairly standard for action platformers. You move through rooms methodically collecting power-ups, solving basic puzzles, and shooting various enemies, all the while traversing a wholly unfriendly environment. Most combat scenarios are straightforward, eschewing complex combos in favor of movement, positioning, and well-timed attacks. In that sense, both the original game and the HD remake pull heavily from genre trendsetters like Metroid.That said, the 1992 release of Flashback was much more focused on steady pacing and the creation of atmosphere. In the HD version, the action has been ramped up, and the puzzles have been cut back a bit. Rarely do you have to do anything more complicated than stand in a certain place at a certain time to open a door. In addition, a new piece of equipment lets you see almost every important object. It's reminiscent of both Metroid Prime's visor mode and the detective mode from the Batman: Arkham series. The difference here is that the goggles work much too well in a 2D space, and eliminate any sense of ambiguity; it's usually plainly obvious what you need to do to proceed. Don't be fooled by appearances! This is not the great Blade Runner game you've been waiting for.Flashback strips down the platforming challenges that formed the heart and soul of the original's gameplay, while keeping backtracking-heavy level layouts reminiscent of those from the original game. In their stead are more enemy encounters. With that, the game sacrifices the sense of flow and cohesion that once kept it from feeling too jumbled.One innovation Flashback shared with its fellow 1990s French platformer, Prince of Persia, was the use of rotoscoping to include cutting-edge animations in a game meant to run on a platform with very limited power. The HD version aims to have a modern look while using retro-looking animations, and that causes more than its share of problems. Characters onscreen are rarely animated cleanly, and whether or not they are recoiling from attack or, in the case of your avatar, are ready to make another jump, is rarely clear. Where the player character is and what he's doing can be very difficult to make out since the differences between coming to a full stop after running and ducking in preparation for a vertical jump are tough to discern. So, depending on how you interpret your character's movements, you could be long-jumping into a trap or vaulting straight into a flying enemy.If there's one nice thing that can be said about the visuals, it's that the new team has faithfully updated Flashback's look while keeping much of the original design aesthetic. Certain areas will likely remind you of some of the more visually stunning scenes from Tron and Blade Runner, and all of that is beautifully reworked for modern systems. Gunplay is another highlight. The audio design gives weapons a solid, powerful oomph, and the ease with which you can pull out a weapon and take out some baddies reflects the altered focus of the design team. Mom always said not to trust anyone named CB021.Flashback is a tremendous disappointment, and a reminder that fond memories are often better left as just that: memories. The original game is included in emulated form with each copy of HD, but it's easier to appreciate for its influence on future games than it is to enjoy the act of playing it. Just skip this particular excursion into the past.
 ","['Lost', 'within', 'gaming', ""'s"", 'undying', 'need', 'relive', 'earliest', 'days', 'Mario', 'Zelda', 'countless', 'games', ',', 'popular', 'time', ',', ""n't"", 'seen', 'kind', 'modern-day', 'revival', 'afforded', 'better-known', 'classics', '.', 'Flashback', 'HD', ',', 'attempting', 'modernize', 'classic', ',', 'serves', 'reminder', 'things', 'best', 'left', 'past', '.', 'Clunky', 'platforming', ',', 'dated', 'level', 'design', ',', 'frustrations', 'abound', ',', 'graphical', 'upgrade', 'solid', 'sound', 'effects', 'simply', ""n't"", 'enough', 'save', 'game.Flashback', ""'s"", 'biggest', 'strength', 'attempt', 'tell', 'interesting', 'story', 'back', 'games', 'begun', 'experiment', 'narrative', 'beyond', '``', 'go', ',', 'rescue', 'princess', '.', ""''"", 'It', 'complicated', 'plot', 'built', 'around', 'interesting', 'tropes', '1980s', ""'90s"", 'science', 'fiction', ',', 'including', 'exploration', 'solar', 'system', ',', 'lost', 'stored', 'memories', ',', ',', 'course', ',', 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'enemy', 'encounters', '.', 'With', ',', 'game', 'sacrifices', 'sense', 'flow', 'cohesion', 'kept', 'feeling', 'jumbled.One', 'innovation', 'Flashback', 'shared', 'fellow', '1990s', 'French', 'platformer', ',', 'Prince', 'Persia', ',', 'use', 'rotoscoping', 'include', 'cutting-edge', 'animations', 'game', 'meant', 'run', 'platform', 'limited', 'power', '.', 'The', 'HD', 'version', 'aims', 'modern', 'look', 'using', 'retro-looking', 'animations', ',', 'causes', 'share', 'problems', '.', 'Characters', 'onscreen', 'rarely', 'animated', 'cleanly', ',', 'whether', 'recoiling', 'attack', ',', 'case', 'avatar', ',', 'ready', 'make', 'another', 'jump', ',', 'rarely', 'clear', '.', 'Where', 'player', 'character', ""'s"", 'difficult', 'make', 'since', 'differences', 'coming', 'full', 'stop', 'running', 'ducking', 'preparation', 'vertical', 'jump', 'tough', 'discern', '.', 'So', ',', 'depending', 'interpret', 'character', ""'s"", 'movements', ',', 'could', 'long-jumping', 'trap', 'vaulting', 'straight', 'flying', 'enemy.If', ""'s"", 'one', 'nice', 'thing', 'said', 'visuals', ',', ""'s"", 'new', 'team', 'faithfully', 'updated', 'Flashback', ""'s"", 'look', 'keeping', 'much', 'original', 'design', 'aesthetic', '.', 'Certain', 'areas', 'likely', 'remind', 'visually', 'stunning', 'scenes', 'Tron', 'Blade', 'Runner', ',', 'beautifully', 'reworked', 'modern', 'systems', '.', 'Gunplay', 'another', 'highlight', '.', 'The', 'audio', 'design', 'gives', 'weapons', 'solid', ',', 'powerful', 'oomph', ',', 'ease', 'pull', 'weapon', 'take', 'baddies', 'reflects', 'altered', 'focus', 'design', 'team', '.', 'Mom', 'always', 'said', 'trust', 'anyone', 'named', 'CB021.Flashback', 'tremendous', 'disappointment', ',', 'reminder', 'fond', 'memories', 'often', 'better', 'left', ':', 'memories', '.', 'The', 'original', 'game', 'included', 'emulated', 'form', 'copy', 'HD', ',', ""'s"", 'easier', 'appreciate', 'influence', 'future', 'games', 'enjoy', 'act', 'playing', '.', 'Just', 'skip', 'particular', 'excursion', 'past', '.']",0.11672914714151827,0.500281905952009
670,Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition ,4, The PS4 port of the hilariously macabre PC game could do with a few operations of its own.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/4/4/2229844-ss2_1.png,PS4,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/surgeon-simulator-anniversary-edition-review/1900-6415847/,neg,"
Playing Surgeon Simulator Anniversary Edition is akin to participating in a joke where you are the punch line. It's a game that is deliberately designed to feel unwieldy as you perform operations that require dexterity and finesse. Neither are to be found here; instead, you move your hand around the operating table and manipulate individual fingers to grab instruments and pray you don't accidentally drop them in the patient's exposed chest cavity. This is as much a ""simulator"" as Mario Kart is a driving test.Surgeon Simulator has been available on PC and tablets for over a year now, and each version has seen gradual content additions since its first release. On the PlayStation 4, the Anniversary Edition packages everything into a single download. The full range of surgeries is ready and waiting--heart transplants, kidney transplants, brain surgery, eye surgery, and teeth pulling. Each of these operations can be performed in different environments: an operating theatre, on a wheelie bed while running down a corridor, in the back of a bumpy ambulance, and in zero gravity. Just like the surgical instruments, bones and organs conform to a rudimentary physics system, and the different environments function as difficulty modifiers.It boggles the mind to understand how one could possibly perform these operations in zero-G given how fiendishly difficult their terrestrial versions are themselves. This is all part of the joke: you're expected to fail spectacularly and kill your patient multiple times. What ensues is a unique approach to interactive slapstick comedy that sees you attempting to open a ribcage but instead accidentally dropping a live buzz saw among the patient's exposed internal organs.In motion control mode, you rotate the arm and tilt the wrist by waving the gamepad in a similar fashion.The thing is, this joke is far funnier on PC than it is on PS4 because of the way the gamepad controls the surgeon's hand. With a mouse and keyboard, you have a far greater degree of accuracy and finesse available to you that, with practice, feels like it can be used constructively. Each individual finger of the surgeon's hand can be opened or closed with a separate key on the keyboard. Positioning the hand with the mouse allows for more precise, minute movements, which are necessary to complete the surgeries.On the PS4, the gamepad tells a different story. In motion control mode, you rotate the arm and tilt the wrist by waving the gamepad in a similar fashion. The interesting thing is that this actually feels more intuitive than the same motions on the mouse do. With the mouse, it feels like you are controlling a piece of machinery, making individual adjustments to the wrist's angle, the elevation of the hand, and the rotation of the arm, whilst stopping in between each step. That is where the PC's accuracy comes from. With the gamepad, you are making all of these motions at once. It feels far more fluid, but it's also impossible to achieve the same level of accuracy as in the PC version.Compounding this is the analogue nature in which the gamepad's triggers are used. You do not have fine control over the surgeon's fingers; instead, the harder you press the right trigger, the more fingers that close in a gripping motion. It's just plain frustrating attempting to be accurate this way. The elevation of the arm is also controlled in a similarly analogue fashion with the left trigger, and it too suffers from imprecision. An alternative control method which involves using the right thumbstick to replace the motion control components is less intuitive than the motion control itself, and still suffers from a lack of accuracy due to the analogue nature of the stick.But here's the thing: lack of accuracy in the controls is the whole point of Surgeon Simulator. That is the joke. However, when it comes to the difference between fun and frustrating, it's a matter of degrees. Playing Surgeon Simulator on PS4 is like listening to someone stumble through the telling of what could have been a hilarious wisecrack. The addition of achievements, some cheeky unlockable secrets, and a slight graphical upgrade over its original PC release doesn't make it funnier.
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671,"Sir, You Are Being Hunted ",4," Sir, You Are Being Hunted doesn't execute on the premise in its own name.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2530808-syabh_box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sir-you-are-being-hunted-review/1900-6415762/,neg,"
The English literary critic Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch posited that there are only seven basic conflicts in fiction when you get down to it: man against man, man against nature, man against himself...and so on and so forth in that fashion. Call them the kindred spirits of well-worn video game terms like player versus player and player versus environment. They're a little anthropocentric, sure, but all that man versus this and man versus that does get across one thing: man has a tendency to pick fights with pretty much anything. Still, Sir Quiller-Couch never quite made it to man against robot. That's an archetype left to be explored by more contemporary Brits, like the development team of Big Robot, maker of Sir, You Are Being Hunted.The protagonist is trapped on a randomly generated archipelago that's one half British moor, one half otherworldly hellscape. He might be an aristocrat, or perhaps a cook or inventor, with a scant few survival resources to his name. Whatever his profession of choice, he has managed to run afoul of some dandified local robots intent on mounting his head on their cigar room wall. In order to escape, he needs to track down 17 remnants of the device that transported him there, and return them to a centrally located set of standing stones.Robots can be picked out easily at a distance by their telltale red gaze.How to best categorize the experience? If we were to follow Quiller-Couch's lead, breaking the video game medium into its essential permutations, our lowest common denominators might be those games that cast their players as predators, and the narrower swath that casts them as prey. Sir, You Are Being Hunted is nominally one of the latter. Its ""tweedpunk"" robots wear top hats and sport double-barreled shotguns, and by all outward impressions are ready to pursue ""the most dangerous game."" So you'd be forgiven for any visions of baying robo-hounds on your scent or Cylon-eyed trackers inspecting the footprints you've strewn across the English moor. But in Big Robot's take on the manhunt, the hunted becomes the hunter faster than you can say ""They drew first blood.""On some level, that sort of shifting power dynamic is to be expected. Stories about hunts are often stories about comeuppance, whether that means Charles Remington getting mauled by lions in The Ghost and the Darkness, or whatever happens to Jurassic Park's Robert Muldoon after he says ""Clever girl."" But it doesn't take much to flip that switch in Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Just a chance discovery of a weapon (or the selection of the officer class, which comes with its own firepower), and then you're the predator, stalking your prey and waiting for an opportune moment to cave in a straggler's metal skull. That's not to suggest that there's much punch to Sir's combat, though. There are only a couple of same-ish weapons on hand, all unwieldy. And the idea that these robots deem you beneath them on the food chain belies the fact that their artificial intelligence isn't anything to write home about, either. They're easily baited away with a thrown bottle or lured into a bear trap by the ringing of an alarm clock--the long and short of the stealth systems on offer.No textures stand up to close scrutiny, but that's how you usually see them.You could avoid them almost entirely--most of the robotic hunters seem content to simply wander the islands at random, rather than actively search for you--except for the little matter of your exit strategy. That is, the 17 fragments of your transporter that have been cast to the four corners of your procedurally generated world. You can carry only so many at a time (even more than one is a risky venture when death sets you back to before you pocketed them), so you're stuck perpetually circling back to the center of the map to offload them. It's an objective that throws the natural vectors of the chase into disarray; what might otherwise be a more direct flight from danger becomes the looping, meandering path of one of the kids in a Family Circus comic, to and from the standing stones, trip by agonizing trip. Compounding the matter is that the fragments are typically guarded by bots that have to be dispatched by hook or by crook. When you're crouched in the tall grass, weighing the unsavory options of Sir's stealth and combat systems on either hand, you don't feel much like prey.If only the grass looked a little nicer, perhaps all the time spent staring at it up close wouldn't wear on your patience. Sir, You Are Being Hunted's procedural island generator doesn't seed the landscape with much meaningful variety--even for English swamplands--and the foliage you spend most of your time huddled in is terribly rudimentary. Buildings, for their part, function only as crates, to be clicked for a pop-up menu displaying their contents. Strangely, the underbaked aesthetics often lend the islands an uncanny, haunting appearance, especially at night when shadows change their cast in bizarre shifts, and the moonlight shines on blocky textures that look like they were run through a randomized Photoshop filter.Once in a while, the world procedurally generates something haunting.Of course, with all the random asset generating that's going on underneath Sir's hood, it's only natural that the stars do occasionally align. The subdued British humor of the items you find usually paints by the numbers, but once in a while you happen upon a playable trombone or something equally irreverent, and all's well for a while. The robots, for their part, are delightful contradictions that intone Anglicisms and serve commendably as both cold, calculating sentinels and prancing, mustachioed fops. When you err enough to have to wait out a few passing groups, and their patrols veer toward your hiding place, the tension certainly ramps up.But those rare moments aside, the essential elements of Sir, You Are Being Hunted--the conflicts between man and machine, between hunter and hunted--aren't getting their due. Here is a game that wants to tell a basic story, but that's left too much space between its opposing forces to make them duel.
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672,Test Drive V-Rally ,8.9," It's an inviting, fast-paced, technical rally game that offers enough replay value and features to satiate any racing audience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/4/0/2226540-test_drive_v_rally_dreamcast.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/test-drive-v-rally-review/1900-2632799/,pos,"
Many moons ago, V-Rally 2: Need for Speed appeared on Sony's PlayStation console. It featured 84 tracks, 27 cars, a track editor, four-player simultaneous action, and some of the best-looking visuals of any PlayStation racing title. In tandem with excellent rally-style gameplay, V-Rally 2 was the best contender for top honors next to Sony's Gran Turismo and Namco's Ridge Racer series of games. Though released by Electronic Arts, V-Rally 2 was actually developed by Infogrames. Now that Infogrames is a powerhouse in its own right, it has chosen to revamp V-Rally 2 for the Dreamcast, dubbing it Test Drive V-Rally.   On the surface, Test Drive V-Rally appears to be a duplicate of the PlayStation release, offering the same cars, the same tracks, and the same basic gameplay. There are 17 initial cars and ten bonus cars, separated into the four categories of World Rally, 2L kit cars, 1.6L kit cars, and bonus cars. V-Rally 2's original selection of 84 tracks returns, spread across three racing modes: arcade, trophy, and championship. Arcade resembles Sega Rally in execution, offering floaty gameplay and forgiving physics. The trophy mode bumps up the difficulty, adding in copious U-turns and a variety of weather conditions. It then follows that the championship mode takes things even further, enrolling you in a multistage series of races, with midstage repairs and brutal driving conditions playing major roles in your success. A time trial rounds out the list of racing modes, a track editor is available for when you tire of the game's stock tracks, and four-player support remains. This also happens to be where Test Drive V-Rally's duplication of V-Rally 2 ends.   Although the tracks and vehicles remain unchanged from the PlayStation release, Infogrames has beefed up the game's control, gameplay, and visual repertoire. Test Drive V-Rally offers responsive controls, slippery driving, and plenty of mind-altering crashes. Thanks to the Dreamcast's analog triggers, the game now sports analog acceleration, offering a great amount of acceleration adjustment for the game's sharp twists and turns. Admittedly, after you choose a car and set out on the initial arcade tracks, you may find the game easy. The computer opponents rarely fight, the turns aren't overly sharp, the weather is pleasant, and your copilot gives you ample warning before you reach upcoming corners. Things become more interesting as you progress, however - opponents become smarter, weather turns inclement, your copilot turns into a babbling idiot, and tracks evolve into a bizarre mess of heinous U-turns. You needn't concern yourself with vehicular damage in the arcade or trophy modes, though, and if you defeat each of their three levels, you'll even earn six new cars to your credit.    To acquire the game's final four vehicles, you'll need to complete each of the time trials and conquer the championship mode. In this mode, CPU opponents are smarter and vehicular damage is a greater factor. Between each segment, of which there are usually two or three, you'll need to spend precious time repairing your car. Waste too much time and you'll end up behind in the next segment. Thankfully, from the Citroen Xsara and Mitsubishi Lancer to the Ford Focus and Lancia Stratos, each of the game's 27 vehicles offers its own unique blend of speed and handling characteristics. For tweak fans, you can also alter a car's suspension, tire type, gearbox ratio, shocks type, brake distribution, and steering responsiveness. Think of it as Sega Rally with a smidgen of Gran Turismo thrown in. The gameplay is dead on, the control is adjustable via vehicle modification, the car variety is excellent, and the track design is clever without being aggravating - all signs of racing game greatness.Whereas Test Drive V-Rally received only minor adjustments in the gameplay department, Infogrames has supercharged its visuals. It has doubled the resolution, increased the frame rate, included two new racing views, and remodeled the game's formerly low-res vehicle designs. The game still exhibits some signs of draw-in and clipping, and some of the background objects are noticeably flat, but the majority of visual problems present in the PlayStation release are absent. The car models are crisp and defined, sporting sponsorship and manufacturer logos, as well as in-game damage effects. The track design, although not representing real-world courses, succeeds at being beautiful as well as intricate. Each course, whether in England, Australia, Corsica, or any of the game's nine other countries, gives off a noticeably regional feel without losing anything the way of trickiness. Detail fans may rejoice, as the game also features scurrying bystanders, realistic weather effects, aerial traffic, kicked up dust, and a variety of other environmental distractions. If you never played the PlayStation release, you won't mistake Test Drive V-Rally's for Tokyo Extreme Racer, but you won't call it garbage either. If you played Sega Rally 2 and were disappointed by its lackluster visuals, Test Drive V-Rally is the answer to your silent prayers.   After building upon the game's gameplay and visual offerings, though, Infogrames has left the game's sound experience unaltered. A hard-core thrash metal soundtrack backs up realistic engine noises, dirty turf effects, and bone-crunching crashes. There are two copilot voices to choose from, male and female, and although both are sampled to mimic an in-car radio, their notation of oncoming turns and hazards comes across perfectly. The game's sound quality is solid, fitting the medium and perfectly supporting the game's fast-paced, technical rally experience. Oddly enough, that also sums up Test Drive V-Rally. It's an inviting, fast-paced, technical rally game that offers enough replay value and features to satiate any racing audience.
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'fast-paced', ',', 'technical', 'rally', 'experience', '.', 'Oddly', 'enough', ',', 'also', 'sums', 'Test', 'Drive', 'V-Rally', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'inviting', ',', 'fast-paced', ',', 'technical', 'rally', 'game', 'offers', 'enough', 'replay', 'value', 'features', 'satiate', 'racing', 'audience', '.']",0.059192237501061014,0.41792292674645604
673,WarBirds ,8.9," In exchange for your money, you're getting a quality flight simulation with continued support and some of the most experienced opponents to ever play online.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/4/8/2210248-s_warbirds_11.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warbirds-review/1900-2531806/,pos,"
For several years now WarBirds (originally known as Confirmed Kill) has graced the unfriendly skies of the Internet, billed as one of the most intense and realistic World War II flight simulators ever attempted for the computer. In WarBirds you don't fly against computer opponents; instead, you face hundreds of other human pilots connected to the same server. Over time, the game has been improved, more historical aircraft have been introduced, and the graphics have undergone tremendous improvement. Until now, interested parties have had to download the entire game. Now, you have the option of buying a boxed version in the store. WarBirds can be played on iMagic Online with hundreds of other human opponents, or offline with several generic missions and practice missions. WarBirds also supports head-to-head for those who want to play with other humans but don't want to pay the monthly online charges. Playing WarBirds online costs $10 a month and $2 an hour after four hours. Expensive, especially compared with other games of a similar nature? You bet, but in exchange you're getting a quality flight simulation with continued support and some of the most experienced opponents to ever play online. Now Warbirds features a 3D graphics engine using Microsoft's Direct3D, and the results are pretty spectacular. Aircraft are gorgeously modeled, the terrain flows smoothly, smoke from ground fires wavers, and aircraft flame and explode in the skies. While computer-assisted art with many individually modeled gauges is still used in the cockpit, the rest of the plane is drawn internally as it is seen externally - as a 3D model. This way you can visibly see damage to your aircraft when you glance out of the canopy. System requirements aren't as stiff as other 3D-accelerated games, but a Pentium 90 is required. A separate, non-Direct3D version is also included, and WarBirds is also available on the Macintosh. Getting into the air is a pretty simple affair, but learning how to fly your aircraft is a completely different matter. There are over 50 aircraft airframes and models to choose from, each with unique flight characteristics and modeling. Learning the advantages, disadvantages, and quirks of an aircraft can literally take tens of hours, and much of that learning cannot be done shooting at dummy drones offline. Choosing a plane and learning its nuances is probably the hardest aspect of WarBirds. Expert pilots know how to fly a variety of aircraft equally well and know how they perform in the game. Aircraft may even have some physical limitations that prove detrimental to your health when you fly. Those who want to skip the complex learning curve of flying altogether can jump in the gunner's seat of a bomber and let someone else fly. Online there are four countries that battle each other for supremacy in the air and on the ground, each attempting to conquer the others by disabling and capturing all of their airfields. It's a rather simplistic strategic system to give the players something to do; a much more detailed system is in the works. Typical arenas usually house between 40 and 200 pilots and over 20 airfields of various sizes, which can result in some extremely hairy dogfights. Because this is an Internet game, you will run into another frustration: lag, which is especially prominent in these large dogfights. Despite all of the prediction and anti-congestion technology built into the game, Internet lag, bad ping times, and packet loss can quickly kill the enjoyment of a dogfight. WarBirds promotes a huge virtual pilot community, which stretches into all professions and people. There are over a hundred ""squadrons"" or groups of pilots that team up whenever they can online, conventions are held every year in Texas, and Interactive Magic Online's technical support is some of the best in the industry. The boxed version includes everything needed on a CD-ROM as well as a 72-page manual, a reference card, and $30 of free online time. When you're flying against hundreds of human opponents, it's the best kind of action there is. Try it out and see if you agree.
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674,Wario Land II DX ,8.9, Wario Land II DX is one of the best 2D platformers to come out of Nintendo in years.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/7/4/9/2215749-box_wl2.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wario-land-ii-dx-review/1900-2537206/,pos,"
Mario's evil nemesis may not be the most popular video game character in the world, but he sure is one of the wealthiest. Wario's ill-gotten gains grew so large he needed a specially built castle to hold it all. Everything was going smoothly until the even nastier Captain Syrup and her Black Sugar Gang sneaked inside last night and took every single piece of treasure that could be found. Not only that, but the gang left the tap on, and now all Wario's castle is soaking wet. This is how Wario Land II starts.  The object of Wario Land II is to come in and help Wario recover his stolen loot. After clearing the castle of all the water, his search will take you through the wilderness, a giant boat, and through the wrong side of town before venturing into Captain Syrup's domain. Each platform-filled level is fraught with danger. But, there's the twist - it's impossible for Wario to be hurt, meaning that even video game novices have a chance to complete the game. Just because you're immortal doesn't mean Wario Land II is easy, however - every time you get hit, you lose valuable coins, and some enemies have the power to flatten you or even turn you into a zombie.  The fact that it's impossible to die may make you think that Wario Land II will get boring after you inevitably finish it, but thankfully that's not the case. Each level is full of hidden areas, switches, seemingly inaccessible doorways, and bonus games. After defeating Captain Syrup and her henchmen for the first time, you're shown that you've only played through half of the levels available, and you must find hidden map pieces and every one of Wario's treasures to get to the game's true ending. Even once that's done, a new challenge awaits....  Back when this game was released last year as a monochrome game, Wario Land II still managed to turn heads. Now that the entire game has been colored, it looks even better than the best NES platformers of the day. Wario himself is huge, bold, and humorously animated, and the levels are packed full of detail. The cute creatures you encounter are likewise polished, but beware - just because they look good doesn't mean they're on your side.  Backward compatibility ensures that the game will play on any Game Boy model, but while the gameplay is exactly the same in monochrome, Super Game Boy (which looks quite nice, actually), or Game Boy Color modes, you can't start a game in one mode and continue play on another. It's a small point, but annoying for people who like loaning games to their friends.  Value for money? Certainly. This game is a great way to show off the Game Boy Color's abilities? Definitely. Is it the best 2D platformer to come out of Nintendo in years? Far and away, yes. Get this game.
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675,Warlords III: Darklords Rising ,8.9, SSG has done a great job of giving fantasy wargame fans a game worthy of the Warlords name.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/2/7/0/2212270-warlords.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warlords-iii-darklords-rising-review/1900-2531830/,pos,"
Last year, Red Orb Entertainment released Warlords III: Reign of Heroes, the much-anticipated sequel to Warlords II. And although Warlords III was a great game, some of the best features of its predecessor, such as the excellent army editor, weren't included. With Darklords Rising, Red Orb has filled in some of the gaps, and reaffirmed the Warlords franchise as one of the best strategy series around in the process. In Warlords III, you're positioned as the commander of a fantasy army at war. You gain power by capturing cities, which provide you with both the income and the ability to produce more armies. Along the way, you command heroes that seek out quests to uncover magic items or beastly allies to aid you in the conflict. There are even mercenary armies and heroes who can join your cause, as long as you have enough gold to pay for their services. Veteran Warlords enthusiasts will find almost all of the features that made the deluxe edition of Warlords II such an enjoyable game. Included in Darklords Rising are 31 new armies, five new hero types, a scenario editor, a campaign designer, new skills and spells for heroes, new options before and during gameplay, nine new game types, new victory conditions, new scenarios, new campaigns, and new terrain types. This horde of features gives Darklords Rising almost endless replayability. Strategy gamers who have yet to check out the Warlords series will find themselves occupied for hours upon hours just experimenting with all that this gem has to offer. The story follows Reign of Heroes, but this time you play your foe from the previous game, Lord Bane, who has come to reconquer the lands of Siria. Throughout the campaign, you'll have to deal with old allies and enemies in almost a reverse plot of Reign of Heroes in which you led the knights of Siria. While this story isn't explicitly original, the chance to play with evil armies and watch them gain experience more than makes up for it. In addition, the other campaigns give you the chance to play the armies of other races besides the ghastly undead or honorable knights. Although they're considerably shorter than the main one, the orc and dwarven campaigns allow for some variety. As for the graphics, they're pretty much the same as in Reign of Heroes, giving you the overhead view of the landscape with realistic terrain. The land features (trees, mountains, hills) don't have the cartoonish quality of Heroes of Might and Magic II, with the exception of water and lava, which are brighter than is to be expected. The realistic terrain in Darklords Rising makes for more believable battlegrounds than are found in its competitors. The new scenarios and game styles in this version are also a great asset. Common game types such as ""king of the hill"" and ""capture the flag"" are included, along with others that highlight some of the unique features of the Warlords playing style. Heirs to Ancient Power and Battle of the Titans will appeal to those who enjoy Heroes of Might and Magic, where controlling individual heroes and their armies is the key. In Heirs, you're provided with a powerful magical artifact, and in Battle, you're given a highly advanced level-ten hero. In this manner, the focus of the game is directed more towards building armies around your hero. Darklords Rising gives you both a scenario editor and a random map generator, and the amount of detail you can put in your custom scenarios is truly amazing. As long as you stay within the standard Warlords rules, you have complete control of the major elements of the game. The only drawback is the lack of an army editor. The Warlords II Deluxe Edition featured such an editor, which allowed you to create any type of army, including sci-fi and World War II ones. They gave you premade armies ranging from the realistic, such as the Civil War set, to the fantastic, such as the elemental beings set. This great feature made Warlords more than just a fantasy wargame, promoting it to the realm of a ""wargame creation program."" Sadly, this feature has not been included in Darklords Rising due to the difficulty of allowing you to animate your custom armies. If you're looking for something to tide you over until the holiday rush, Warlords III: Darklords Rising is highly recommended. In fact, you might even forget about the games you've been waiting for. In this update of Reign of Heroes, SSG has done a great job of giving fantasy wargame fans a game worthy of the Warlords name.
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676,NBA Live 2001 ,8.9, NBA Live 2001 follows the fine tradition established by previous versions while adding just about every conceivable gameplay option.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/5/1/2213051-box_nbal01.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-live-2001-review/1900-2644193/,pos,"
It's no secret that EA's Live series has long been regarded as the deepest roundball simulation going. Year after year, EA Sports brings new features to the mix while finely honing those that are already established. NBA Live 2001 is no different. While there isn't much left to add to the Live series at this point, somehow EA has managed to bump up the realism even further. NBA Live 2001 is not only the PlayStation's best basketball game, but it's also the best playing b-ball sim on any system.    NBA Live's usual gameplay staples have returned. You may play through an entire season with full stat tracking while leading your team all the way to the championship. You can also square off in exhibition games against up to seven of your friends using the PlayStation Multitap, play one-on-one with Michael Jordan, or participate in a three-point shootout against any opponent in the NBA. The season mode is overflowing with options and customizable features. You begin by drafting teams, and then the schedule is set up based upon your preferences for game length, season length, and gameplay options. Creating your own players is also a snap, and they may be drafted onto a team for seasonal or exhibition play. For better or worse, the arcade mode - complete with flaming basketballs and high-flying dunks - has also returned. If you're looking for the ceiling on options in a basketball video game, Live 2001 may have reached it. There just isn't much more left that can be included, but EA has still tried. This year, the NBA Live challenge mode has been added, in which you must perform objectives - such as scoring a triple-double - for points. The points can then be used to purchase increased attributes for created players or open new courts to play on. As you might expect, Live 2001 has updated rosters for all 31 teams and the ability to select some of the dynasties from days since passed.    NBA Live 2001 truly comes into its own in one area especially: control. It's really hard to find one single move innate to the NBA game that isn't included. You can get your feet wet with just the shoot, pass, turbo, and jump commands, but after a few hours you'll be looking for more control, and Live 2001 delivers. Spinning, juking, crossing over your dribble, faking, and calling for picks are all at your fingertips, just waiting to be used. You may even post up and choose from four separate moves to go hard to the rack or use icon passing to hit your man at the back door. On defense, you can face up on your man and challenge him to drive to the hoop, call for a double team, or swat the ball away with either the steal or jump commands.    No other basketball video game captures the force and speed of the NBA like Live 2001. When Shaq throws one down, the whole backboard shakes (and the rim doesn't bend upon impact like in most other video game b-ball excursions). After a big play, players celebrate by pumping their fists or ""pushing up"" the crowd. Each move is intricately captured so that it's never difficult to tell whether your player is performing a crossover or a behind-the-back dribble. There are some nice details in Live 2001 as well. The players' faces are well animated - after a big play they scream with excitement, and after making a foul shot players congratulate the shooter. When the camera zooms in for a close-up, the crowd looks awful and the players appear very blocky, but while playing, these problems are barely noticeable.One obvious improvement over previous installments of Live is the artificial intelligence. You won't have to worry about walking through a season, as the computer controls the other team more accurately than any b-ball video game before it. If you try to double-team, the CPU will dump it to the low post for the easy dunk. If you play too far off, it will pull up for a quick J. If the computer is leading late in the game, it will methodically bring the ball up court at a slow pace to burn the seconds off the clock. Conversely, if you're giving the computer a beating, it'll call timeouts in the last couple of minutes to inbound the ball at half court or intentionally foul, forcing you to win the game at the charity stripe. All this culminates in a game that is nearly as fun to play against the computer as it is against human opponents.   NBA Live 2001 follows the fine tradition established by previous versions while adding just about every conceivable gameplay option. The graphics may not be overly pretty, but the smooth animations and excellent gameplay help you to quickly forget. NBA Live 2001 is a great basketball game with incredible depth and engrossing gameplay. Live 2001 is the PlayStation's best basketball game, and it's good to see that EA Sports has not forsaken its current generation of PlayStation software to wow consumers with its PlayStation 2 offerings. It's only fitting that the last NBA Live on PlayStation is also the best.
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677,Independence War 2: The Edge of Chaos ,8.9, Particle Systems has successfully created the type of game that fans of the space sim genre have been waiting for years to play.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/4/2/2214942-r_cktz67t44rjsjzku1kbc.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/independence-war-2-the-edge-of-chaos-review/1900-2807830/,pos,"
When the first Independence War game was released in 1998, it was lauded for its original design and innovative gameplay. Independence War's distinctive style justly garnered attention, despite competition from then-recently released games in each of the Wing Commander, X-Wing, and FreeSpace space-combat series. Yet while Independence War's novelty was refreshing, it wasn't infectious enough to prevent space sims from declining so significantly in popularity over the past couple of years that most major publishers have now abandoned the genre. So, like its predecessor, the new Independence War 2 faces a battle for attention--except this time it's a struggle to generate enthusiasm for its forsaken genre. Fortunately, Particle Systems has once again crafted an impressive game that deserves recognition.   Independence War 2 features impressive, high-resolution graphics...  Independence War 2 is naturally similar to its predecessor in many ways, but the developer also made some significant changes to the original's design. Instead of limiting gameplay to a linear series of scripted missions, Independence War lets you take the role of a pirate who can freely explore an expansive star system, looting merchants and destroying enemy factions. For years, space sim fans have been looking for another free-form game like Elite or Privateer, and the only game that's come close was X: Beyond the Frontier. Even that game's potential wasn't truly realized until it was supplemented by an expansion pack, which was never released in North America, and even then the game lacked an involving overall storyline. Independence War 2 provides both an elaborate, open-ended environment and a meaty plot to unfold.   The game is set long after the war for independence that formed the basis for the plot of the original game. The central government has lost much of its influence to large corporations that leveraged their discovery of new technology to gain power. Independent settlements are being overrun by the evil corporations, which are effectively turning most of the population into slave laborers. Your character's desire to confront the corporations is primarily motivated by revenge, not altruism, as one of the corporate leaders ruthlessly slaughtered his father. To avenge your father's death, you'll have to gain a reputation through pirating and align yourself with various factions that will request your aid. There are plenty of well-produced cinematics that advance the plot, including an introduction that rivals the original game's opening in length, if not quality. The AI construct of Jefferson Clay, a famous starship captain who also served as a mentor in the original game, makes a welcome return, and your small group of companions has a lot of character. You can both control how rapidly you advance the plot and the order in which you embark on a number of missions, but the plot is occasionally cartoonish when compared to the civil war backdrop of the original game. The main villain, in particular, is so unrelentingly malevolent in such an over-the-top manner that he's dull. Still, the story is constantly engaging, especially near the end of the game when all of your enemies are unveiled.  ...and an intuitive, effective onscreen interface.  The original Independence War was renowned both for having more realistic physics than most space sims and for allowing you to pilot a larger craft than a fighter. Independence War 2 retains the realistic feel of its predecessor's physics system, although the effects of inertia have been made more manageable, and there aren't any annoying missions requiring you to overcome physics-based puzzles. In Independence War, you were given control of a medium-sized corvette, and you frequently had to switch perspectives between four different control stations. In the sequel, you still get to fly some sizeable ships, but you'll initially be limited to steering less intimidating craft than the original game's corvette. Ships also generally no longer have crews, as most ships are now flown by a single pilot. All of the flyable ships have a streamlined, consistent interface that lets you access the functions previously provided by the four different systems stations (command, navigation, engineering, and weapons) from a single perspective. While it's still useful to switch your view to an external perspective in certain situations, it's no longer mandatory to do so since the third-person perspective of the original game's weapons station has been abandoned. The streamlined controls are less effective at conveying the sense that you're in control of a sizeable vessel, but they are much easier to manage.In fact, the interface is much more polished than it was in the original game. There are still some strange quirks, such as the fact that the default control bindings allocate three key joystick buttons to energy and missile weapons and yet you still can't fire them concurrently, but the new control system is generally both effective and unique. While combat in most space sims frequently devolves into turning battles with combatants frantically circling to focus guns on similarly thrashing opponents, battles in Independence War 2 play out differently. The controls borrow elements more commonly found in first-person shooters. Adept players will commonly use side strafing, since one of the best ways to maneuver to avoid missiles is to use side thrusters, and disable inertial-dampening thrusters so that they can attack in one direction while they are traveling on a different course. Battles can also occur at tremendous speeds, since you can constantly accelerate your velocity, although exceeding the limits imposed by nearby stations invites additional grief from nearby patrols. Fleeing to a less vulnerable position is also a constant tactical maneuver.  An encyclopedia feature informs you of all the dozens of ships in the game.  Independence War 2 is perhaps the only space sim that effectively conveys the immense distances involved in intra- and interstellar travel. The only manageable way to travel sizeable distances is through engaging an LDS (or, linear-displacement drive system), which lets you travel exponentially faster. At high LDS speeds, your craft will speed by beautifully rendered planets and suns. If you effectively use your LDS drive, you'll be almost unbeatable, since you can rapidly, completely repair even hull damage--but enemies frequently use missiles that will prevent you from engaging your LDS drive, and all installations will also generate their own anti-LDS fields. You can also travel even faster to certain destinations using jump gates called Lagrange points, provided that your ship is equipped with a capsule engine drive. Stealth is also often important in certain situations--there are a number of ways you can adjust your power settings or otherwise configure your ship to minimize the ability of other vessels to detect you.   While the heads-up display in the original game was relatively clunky, it's been significantly streamlined and improved in Independence War 2. Whenever your ship is moving, grid lines will appear on the screen to ensure that you can easily determine your ship's course. Your HUD also causes nearby ships to produce contrails, allowing you to instantly establish where the vessels are traveling. The grid lines and contrails displayed on the HUD work efficiently and don't obscure your view as much as they did in the original game. Other than the predominately useless radar orb, the HUD displays a great deal of information well and lets you focus on making tactical decisions.  You can dock at base to save your progress during missions.  While music was largely omitted in the original game, Independence War 2 makes extensive use of its high-quality soundtrack. The graphics are crisp and colorful, and capable of being rendered in very high resolutions--although the HUD doesn't also scale, so it's less readable at sharper resolutions. You'll get ample opportunity to enjoy the graphics as well, since you'll constantly travel by different interstellar phenomena, and external views are useful in a number of situations. The game also automatically changes to a third-person perspective ""director mode"" whenever your ship docks, or otherwise interacts, with another object. The individual ships aren't quite as large as some of the capital ships in other recent space sims such as FreeSpace 2, or at least they seem less imposing because your ship is frequently traveling at tremendous speeds. But the ships are rendered in great detail, so much so that you can actually zoom in to get a clear view of your pilot. There are lots of other excellent graphical touches, such as the game's detailed explosions and the stone chips that splinter off from asteroids just before they're blasted to rubble.    The trading aspects of the game are simplistic, and you can only acquire a small fleet of wingmen, but it's still addictive to raid transports for items that let you improve your ships. Each item you acquire can be recycled, used to better equip your own small fleet of vessels, or traded for more useful items. There are dozens of different weapons, pieces of equipment, and other cargo items that you can acquire or manufacture, and the more effective you are as a privateer, the easier you'll find the scripted missions. It's worthwhile spending a significant amount of time acquiring better equipment, since some of the scripted missions are very difficult.While it's generally pretty easy for even neophyte players to master the rudimentary skills necessary to play a space sim, Independence War 2 has a steeper learning curve, in spite of its good interface. The developer has done a good job at making the game more accessible than its predecessor, but Independence War 2 can still be a frustrating experience. For one thing, dogfighting can be very difficult--for instance, instead of having completely encompassing shields as in most space sims, your ships have individual shield deflectors that are only effective against one opponent at a time. Since ships are also fairly fragile, it's very easy to quickly be overwhelmed even when you previously were doing well in a battle. You'll find the game trying if you don't quickly acquire the abilities to assess potential threats and remain constantly aware of your opponents' actions.  LDS technology lets you travel at exceptionally fast speeds.  An even more significant cause of frustration is the mission scripting. While the mission goals are varied and interesting, the missions are too frequently puzzle-based. The original game occasionally required you to complete tasks in a precise order or manner, but Independence War 2's missions can be even more aggravating in this regard. Too often, the solutions to objectives are unintuitive. For example, in an early mission you'll be commissioned to steal some cargo from an enemy port. When you finally arrive at the port, you'll be given a cryptic clue suggesting that you should gain control of a remote drone, which you're able to pilot through your command menu. The manner in which you use the drone isn't apparent unless you grasp the significance of the clue, and even once you're aware of the solution it's very easy to inadvertently carry out the required procedure incorrectly unless you resort to using an external view of your vessel. Later missions contain objectives that are even more clearly intended to be puzzles. The inclusion of such puzzles seems misplaced, since they throw off the pacing of the otherwise enjoyable missions.   Those puzzles quickly become even more annoying once you realize how long it takes to travel back to where you previously were in a mission prior to being squashed. The expansion pack to the original game added mission save points to lengthier missions, to let you avoid constantly replaying parts of missions you'd already completed. That convenient feature wasn't included in Independence War 2, although you can sidetrack to your base during the course of a mission to save the game. Even then, however, it can take close to five minutes just to travel to a destination on the starmap to attempt to complete a mission that's consistently stumped you. While most of the time traveling around the map is enjoyable, the traveling won't be welcome when you're constantly required to retrace your steps just to try a different approach to solving a scripted puzzle.  The game's open-ended design is robust and enjoyable.  There are a few other ways in which the game could have been improved. It's not convenient to reprogram control keys, although you can do so by editing a text file. The actual pirating aspects of the game are simplistic and primarily just consist of camping out near a Lagrange point and stalking randomly encountered ships. While the central storyline is involving and contains at least one highly entertaining twist, it too frequently resorts to clichés, and the tone is generally less mature than that of the original game. All of those points are relatively trivial, however. The only significant concern is that the game can be frustrating, both because of its steep learning curve and its overreliance on mission puzzles, and even that concern is negligible when put in perspective to the achievements of the game.   The fact is, Independence War 2 is one of the most complex space sims ever, and almost every included feature works extremely well. It lets you stage multiplayer battles, which was a feature commonly requested by fans of the original game. The graphics are at least as good as any previously seen in the genre and are available at considerably higher resolutions than any previous space sims offered. You can easily play for days just exploring different solar systems and stealing or building enhancements to your ships. When you finally decide to advance the main plot, the varied mission goals and tactical challenges make the game constantly engaging. Independence War 2 is easily the best space sim since FreeSpace 2, and in several ways it exceeds that game. Particle Systems has successfully created the type of game that fans of the genre have been waiting for years to play.
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678,Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix ,8.9," Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix is a game that successfully blends the action, survival-horror, and role-playing genres into a single outstanding product.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/4/7/2217347-box_fe2rh.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fear-effect-2-retro-helix-review/1900-2687897/,pos,"
Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix is the prequel to last year's acclaimed hit Fear Effect. Clocking in with more than 40 hours of first-run gameplay across four discs, this chapter delves into the histories of Hana, Glas, and Deke, while simultaneously presenting a story of espionage and supernatural villainy that ultimately surpasses the original game in terms of both shock value and excellence. As it is a prequel, Fear Effect 2 retains many of the traits that defined its predecessor, such as Resident Evil-style gameplay, full-motion animated backgrounds, and a Hollywood-inspired presentation. In tandem with this solid foundation, though, the game stands firm in its own right thanks to a plethora of control, weaponry, character, and setting improvements. Like the original, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix is an experience many people will either truly love or deeply loathe. For those in the first category, Eidos has just released your PlayStation game of the year. However, because of the recurring violence and sexual themes, this is definitely not a game for young children.   Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix is set in Hong Kong, circa 2048. In the aftermath of the onset of a terrible genetic malady, biological theft and terrorism are big business. Beginning with Hana's mission to liberate a DNA sequence from a renowned doctor, you'll act out and experience multiple roles throughout the game. You'll play as Hana Tsu-Vachel, a beautiful assassin who is equally as trained in the art of seduction as she is warfare; Rain Qin, a close companion to Hana whose flair for technology hides a dark secret; Royce Glas, a burnt-out mercenary-for-hire; and Jakob ""Deke"" Decourt, a greedy thug who just so happens to be afflicted with the same genetic disease that is slowly wiping out the population. Unlike similar games where you switch perspectives midway through the game, Fear Effect 2 keeps things fresh by constantly transporting you from one character to another. As in the original Fear Effect, the prequel starts out grounded in reality but soon becomes a one-way ticket to weirdness. Corporate conspiracy gives way to supernatural meddling, while Rain and Hana's relationship ultimately proves itself to be the game's tearful legacy. If you like action-oriented survival-horror that's story driven, Fear Effect 2 is the right game for you.    Because its roots are in survival-horror, Fear Effect 2 embodies what is best about the genre, while also incorporating a few much-needed changes to make the game attractive to a wider audience. Spanning the game's four discs, the game's eight distinct environments require that you crawl, run, shoot, and think your way out of a variety of tough situations. Deadly robots, thugs, and monsters leap from the floors and ceilings with little notice, while numerous onrushing catastrophes force you to acclimate to the game's sneak, run, and roll gameplay features. There are a variety of weapons at your disposal, ranging from handguns and small arms to genre staples such as rocket launchers and flamethrowers. The number of weapons is triple that of the original Fear Effect, and this includes a few humorous additions, such as a long-range tazer, a 40-foot-tall mech, and a portable EMP generator. Along the way, you'll also have to solve numerous mathematical, spatial, and odds-based puzzles, as well as gather items that gain you access to later areas. Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix plays like a comfortable merger of Parasite Eve and Metal Gear Solid, with a cinematic presentation that's on an even keel with Resident Evil: Code Veronica in terms of quality. Although the difficulty level is high due to the game's trial-and-error nature, there are few times when a situation requires more than two or three attempts. Thankfully, there are also plenty of save points along the way.Although the first Fear Effect was an excellent effort, there were many criticisms raised against it for a variety of reasons. To make the prequel more palatable to a larger audience, Kronos Digital has made some improvements to the game. A 3D-oriented control option joins the default survival-horror interface, postdeath load times have been eliminated, and replay value has been improved through the inclusion of special weapons and hidden secrets. The addition of Rain also provides a much-needed fourth character and love interest for Hana, as well as a reason to kick the game's maturity level into the stratosphere. Fear Effect 2 is also longer and less linear than the first attempt. In all, there are eight environments to explore this time, including the aqueducts, a formal party, a biomedical laboratory, the haunted city of Xi'An, the tomb of the first Chinese emperor, a monster-filled island garden, a towering pagoda, and finally hell itself. While the story is obviously geared toward a single plot point, there are many situations where you'll get to make choices that take the story in a new direction. Similar to the original, the prequel also features multiple final boss characters and endings based upon the choices you make near the end of the game. Between completing the game, playing out each ending, and revisiting it again for secrets you've missed, Fear Effect 2 has a good 60 to 80 hours of gameplay.   The prequel may be an improvement, but Fear Effect 2 isn't without its flaws. Foremost of these is the game's inventory system, which while speedier than that of the original, still lumps all weapons and items together in a cyclical list. This wouldn't be so bad, except you have to manage it all in real time. If you're transplanted into the thick of battle with only a sonar weapon and you need to switch to an assault rifle ASAP, you'll have to cycle through five or six items before finally being allowed to equip the necessary weapon. Additionally, while Kronos Digital has done an excellent job of creating eight unique environments, the game's first stage, the aqueducts, is a pathetically lengthy rip-off of the tunnels from any Parasite Eve or Resident Evil game. Not only is it one of the more difficult areas in the game, it's also the least engaging and least important to the storyline. Some of you may also find the constant exploration and puzzle aspects of the game to be overwhelmingly tedious, but this is a complaint more in line with general tastes than it is against the game itself. If you like the genre and can see past the touchy inventory system and lackluster first area, you'll likely find Fear Effect 2 to be a satisfyingly suspenseful hands-on experience.   Of course, survival-horror is a genre that relies heavily on graphical presentation. In this respect too, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix is a stellar example. In keeping with the first game, the prequel superimposes polygonal texture-mapped characters onto full-motion video backgrounds to convey a sense of realism and mood. While the execution is a bit grainy and dark, the overall effect is superb. Environments are colorful, highly animated, and detailed, although the FMV looping is noticeable at times. The game's characters and enemies are once again rendered in an anime style reminiscent of those in Sega's Jet Grind Radio, but movement is much more fluid this time around since Kronos has done away with the stiltedness of motion capture in favor of hand-tweaked animation. As you progress through the game, you'll don a variety of costumes, see blood spurt from half-dead monsters, and even witness a few rather sexually charged situations. Wrapping it all up, more than two hours of full-motion video cinematics are seamlessly woven into the game to provide both plot development and brief relief from its lengthy quest.Fear Effect 2's audio and voice acting are impressive. The game's soundtrack is hauntingly effective, while a number of timed musical cues give the experience a distinctly Hollywood edge. Sound effects, while taken from the same generic array that all survival-horror games seem to draw from, are loud, crisp, and fitting. Since the game relies on its story and characters to keep you interested, the quality of voice acting is important to its overall success. Fear Effect 2 does not disappoint. Wendee Lee voices the role of Hana and does a much better job this time around, while the voices of Anthony Marcott and Lex Lang do an A-plus job of bringing out the personalities of Glas and Deke. Professional voice actors are used for every speaking character in the game, including generic enemies and bosses, and it's an extravagance that pays big dividends.    If the previous seven paragraphs didn't make the point clear, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix is a game that successfully blends the action, survival-horror, and role-playing genres into a single outstanding product. It does have its flaws, but if you're even mildly interested in games like Resident Evil, Parasite Eve, or Metal Gear Solid, you'll probably love Fear Effect 2. 
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679,Knockout Kings 2001 ,8.9," Knockout Kings 2001 is easily the best iteration of the series thus far, thanks to improved AI, cleaner graphics, and tighter controls.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/8/7/2209987-box_kk2001.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/knockout-kings-2001-review/1900-2654537/,pos,"
Boxing, known to its fans as the sweet science, has proven to be a hard sport for video game developers to re-create in a manner that is both true-to-life and fun. The Knockout Kings series has been fairly successful in its past attempts, yet it has always given off the feeling that there is room for dramatic improvement. Knockout Kings 2001 makes dramatic improvements, sporting better graphics, improved controls, and a much better balance between fun and realism. Fans of the series will undoubtedly agree that this year's KO Kings is the best of the series.    This year, the game has an amazingly huge roster, including all the top-name fighters from all weight classes, both male and female, and fighters from the past and present. Lennox Lewis, David Tua, Fernando Vargas, Evander Holyfield, Muhammad Ali, Christi Martin, and Butterbean are just a few of the fighters featured in the game. You can play as or against any of these great fighters, either against the computer or a second player. The game features several modes of play, such as career, exhibition, slugfest, and classic fights. The game's career mode is a bit more in-depth and allows you to pick trainers and cut men that actually affect your fighter's ability, as well as the gym you want to hail from.   The gameplay and control of Knockout Kings 2001 is similar to that of past incarnations of the title, but it features some noticeable differences. The most obvious is the sense of freedom you now feel as you move around the ring. The boxers move faster and behave more realistically in terms of evading and slipping punches. You can now attack from different angles, meaning that instead of just walking forward and attacking an opponent head-on, you can come in at an angle and make him or her miss. The game's new and improved mobility opens up the defensive side of the game, giving the game a good deal of depth. You can make your fighters bob and weave realistically - rolling to the left to duck a jab and then countering with a left hook to the body is actually possible. The auto combo system has been tweaked a bit from the last version, but it hasn't changed much in function or execution - it lets you land several punches in quick succession with minimal skill. This auto combo system's effectiveness has thankfully been reduced in favor of rewarding those who take the time to learn how to execute what the game calls ""real combos."" The real combos are real-life punch combinations that the game teaches you in its training mode. These combos make playing the game a much more rewarding experience, since you actually have to look for openings and think about the punches you're throwing.   Visually, the game looks spectacular. The polygonal models used for the boxers are incredibly sharp, as are the textures used to define the fighters' muscle definition and faces. You can tell by the game's sharp graphics and wonderful frame rate that the designers really wanted to realistically portray the way the boxers look and move in the ring. You can instantly recognize the fighters by their faces and body types as they enter the ring. The animation of the boxers throwing punches is extremely fluid and looks very realistic. The only negative thing you could say about the game's animations is the lack of variation - Lennox Lewis' straight right looks like Shane Mosely's straight right. Overall, though, the game looks very sharp.In the audio department, the commentary provided by Al Bernstein, Teddy Atlas, and Max Kellerman really adds authenticity and drama to the matches. The commentary is insightful and is almost always dead on with the action in the ring, although you will catch a weird phrase every once in awhile that doesn't fit. The presence and voice work of referees Mills Lane and Richard Steele add to the game's realism, as does the voice talents of real-life announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr.    In the end, Knockout Kings 2001 is easily the best iteration of the series thus far, thanks to improved AI, cleaner graphics, and tighter controls. Fans of the series and the sport of boxing will find that the game is a lot more balanced than last year's title, which makes the matchups between fighters like Lennox Lewis and David Tua in the game more realistic. So if you've been waiting for a realistic PlayStation boxing game, this is about as good as you're going to get.  
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680,Deadliest Warrior: Legends ,4," Deadliest Warrior: Legends may make you laugh for a little while, but its sloppy fighting is dead on arrival.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/0/6/2/2227062-box_dwl.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deadliest-warrior-legends-review/1900-6325908/,neg,"
  If, through some fluke of space and time, Genghis Khan and William Wallace had clashed on the battlefield, who would have won? Deadliest Warrior: Legends doesn't provide a definitive answer to this question, but it does suggest that the battle would have been bloody and possibly absurd. Khan might have broken Wallace's leg and chopped off his arm before twisting his neck with his bare hands. Or perhaps the two warriors would have slashed at each other for a few seconds before Wallace's sword miraculously passed right through Khan's body, instantly making Khan go as limp as a rag doll. Legends is a brutal and goofy game that's good for some guffaws. But the short and silly battles and technical problems of this fighter give it about as much longevity as Attila the Hun has after you've cut off a few of his limbs.      Legends lets you choose one of nine historic leaders to take into one-on-one battles with other such personages. Those nine characters are broken down into three categories. Guerrillas like Sun Tzu and Shaka Zulu lack armor but move quickly; champions like Hannibal and Alexander the Great are heavily armored and relatively slow; and berserkers like Hernan Cortes and William Wallace are powerful offensive fighters. Battles occur in three-dimensional space, and you're free to run in any direction. With the three attack buttons, you can perform strikes that target your foe's head, body, or legs. Strikes to the limbs can leave your opponent crippled, making him hobble on his feet or preventing him from wielding heavy, two-handed weapons. And a blow to the head is likely to kill your opponent instantly.    Each warrior can wield quick short-range weapons, slower medium-range weapons, and ranged weapons. There are no health meters in this fighting game; characters collapse when they've suffered a blow the game deems fatal, or when they bleed out from a severed limb. Matches often end within just a few seconds of starting, perhaps with an arrow through a warrior's eye or a sword strike to the head that sends a helmet flying off at a trajectory that makes no sense. You can also attempt to grab your opponent. If you succeed, both combatants must then hit the low, medium, or high attack button, and unless the defender makes the same input as the attacker, he suffers a broken leg, a broken arm, or death, depending on the area the attacker targeted. The finishing moves that play out when a warrior successfully performs a high attack in a grapple (or a medium or low attack to an already disabled area) are sometimes shockingly brutal. Vlad the Impaler's finisher, for instance, demonstrates how he earned his grisly nickname.    Because a single blow can bring the match to an end, there's none of the tension here that can evolve over the course of a battle in a traditional fighting game as combatants feel each other out and whittle each other down. A different kind of tension could have emerged from battles in which any hit could prove fatal, but Legends is too sloppy to generate much excitement. The game's instructional screens have information about different types of damage--slashing, piercing, and crushing--and the varying effectiveness of armor against these types of attacks. But the actual gameplay doesn't support the depth that this suggests. It's hard to see how such details could matter much when, during battles, weapons regularly clip right through people and combatants sometimes collapse dead from attacks that didn't even appear to make contact. There's often no clear rhyme or reason to why one fighter falls while his opponent is left standing, and this makes it nigh impossible to become invested in the action. Visual problems, including swords and shields that disappear from warriors' hands when they try to grab their opponents, and some severe screen tearing, make the experience even more off-putting.    In his book The Art of War, Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of upside-down jump kicks.   So a realistic fighting game this is not. Your best bet for getting any enjoyment out of Legends is to approach it not as a simulation, but as the video game equivalent of a schlocky martial arts movie, complete with lousy fight choreography; cheap, bloody special effects; and hilariously bad dubbing. Before each battle, the warriors speak a few words or emit a fierce battle cry, and both the mouth movements and the timing of those movements are so mismatched to the sounds you hear that you may wonder if the game isn't intentionally evoking the stereotypical image of poorly synced dubbing from low-budget kung-fu flicks. It's funny at first, but, like nearly everything else about the game, it looks cheap and hastily slapped together, and the initial amusement wears off quickly.     Whether or not the poor lip-syncing is intended as a joke, Legends certainly has a sense of humor, and it shines most brightly when you turn on what the game calls Zombie mode in multiplayer combat. With this option in effect, fighters don't go down until every last limb has been hacked. A pair of legs, no longer attached to its upper body, might continue to speedily run around the arena, forcing the opposing player to give chase. These battles are a great source of physical comedy, reminiscent of the famous encounter with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But the underlying gameplay remains too chaotic and shallow to stay compelling once you've had your fill of laughter at this mode's sheer absurdity.     Legends has an Arcade mode in which you choose a warrior and progress through nine battles, and because fights can be so brief, you may spend nearly as much time on the between-match loading screens as you spend playing. You can also fight one-off battles against CPU opponents, or practice against dummy opponents. After you've completed the Arcade mode with each character, you unlock Challenge mode, where you can fight to survive against waves of opponents, engage in battles in which every hit severs a limb, or try to hack down a number of hanging pig carcasses before a timer runs out. The most interesting mode is the one with the least fighting in it. Generals mode is a simple war game inspired by Risk. You start out with a single territory and a home castle, and on a map, you assign armies to territories you control and direct them to other territories. When you target a neutral or enemy territory, a percentage indicates the likelihood of your victory, and as you claim more territories and entire zones, the number of bonus armies you receive each turn increases. The object is to conquer the enemy leader's castle, and when you attack it, you enter a one-on-one duel with that leader, which you must win to be victorious. Each general has attributes that affect his armies' chances in battle, such as bonuses to attack in mountain territories or bonuses to defense in the desert. But there's little actual nuance or strategy to this minigame. Brute force rules the day; build up a larger army, and an enemy's bonuses aren't likely to do him much good as you steamroll his forces.   Legends lets you determine once and for all who is the undeadliest warrior.   Legends supports ranked and unranked online multiplayer, but scant few are taking advantage of this functionality. Even if you do find opponents, the opportunity to compete with other players (which you can also do locally) can't redeem Legends' basic, ugly combat. Last year's Deadliest Warrior: The Game was too unrefined to be entirely successful, but there was something promising about its attempts to simulate realistic, bloody combat. This sequel not only fails to build on that promise; it stabs a knife right through its heart.  
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681,Legends of Pegasus ,4," Legends of Pegasus borrows liberally from other 4X games, but little of the good stuff survives the transfer.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/4/1/2227541-legends_of_pegasus_pc_boxart.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legends-of-pegasus-review/1900-6392217/,neg,"
  You know how pizza places offer ""meat lovers"" or ""veggie lovers"" pizzas, where they just cram every single ingredient of a certain type that they have in the refrigerator onto a pie? Legends of Pegasus is kind of like that: it features a lot of elements that 4X aficionados might enjoy in the right context, but they're all just kind of slapped together in a way that doesn't allow them to complement each other. It's pizza that requires a fork and a knife to eat when you ought to be able to just pick up a slice and easily slide it into your mouth.    Legends of Pegasus tries hard to replicate the famous GUI from Sins of a Solar Empire, but limiting factors prevent it from even coming close.   Legends of Pegasus' storyline relies heavily on tried-and-true sci-fi tropes, particularly a Battlestar Galactica-esque survival/flight theme. At the beginning of the game, you are informed that Earth has been conquered in a surprise attack by an unknown alien force, and a small flotilla of ships has managed to escape through a wormhole. You command that flotilla, and, as luck would have it, you've got a colony ship with you. You need to colonize habitable planets, research new technologies, build bigger and better ships, and fight off constant attacks from aliens seemingly bent on hostility. It's all very hackneyed, including the few plot ""twists"" that you see coming from light years away.    All that said, the storyline is admittedly secondary to the gameplay, but Legends of Pegasus doesn't score many points for itself there, either. Played on large maps of fictional solar systems, Legends of Pegasus tries to replicate the feel of Sins of a Solar Empire's GUI, but because Legends of Pegasus is primarily turn-based (only battles take place in real time) and because its menus and controls are terribly arcane and unintuitive, it fails to give you much more than a general inkling of Sins' brilliant interface. Zooming, for example, a virtually limitless function in Sins, is strictly limited in Legends of Pegasus. This makes finding items of interest (such as waypoints or resource fields) a laborious, scrolling process. For some things, like your ships or asteroid fields, you can use predesignated icons to jump directly to them, but then you're likely to lose sight of whatever it is you want to be focused on at the same time, also resulting in needless scrolling and clicking.   The game is overloaded with graphical options.   There's the planet management interface too, wherein you designate what you want your colonies to build and what kinds of resource allocation you want them to have, and you can see what exactly they're generating for you in terms of revenue, science, and ships. This interface is lifted almost pixel for pixel from Galactic Civilizations, but unlike that game, Legends of Pegasus fails to provide you with meaningful information about what your colony-based choices mean for the future. Sure, the game has rollover tips with what each building does, but with limited space to build and an extremely limited budget, it's never clear why you'd choose X over Y.     Speaking of limited budgets, Legends of Pegasus operates in a strange ecosystem whereby the survivors of Earth's demise, desperately escaping from an alien threat, completely dependent upon the shreds of the navy they have left to protect them, are nevertheless apparently charging that navy money for everything from ship building to production of shelters for their own use. Citizens pay taxes to the interim government, but if you raise taxes too high, their morale drops, which has some unexplained further negative effect. This is your only way to make money--without which you cannot build more structures and you cannot build any ships.      Inexplicably, there is no limit to the amount of debt you can go into if you don't collect enough taxes, and Legends of Pegasus gives you no warnings about your debt level. Unless you're paying attention to your finances at all times (hard to do when you're scouring for waypoints and fighting battles), it's possible to ""rimrock"" yourself: that is, put yourself in a situation where you're too in debt to buy the buildings that you need to get yourself out of debt. And then you have to restart the mission from square one.  To battle! Everyone just sort of shoot all the stuff at the red guys!  Most of the main campaign's missions are straightforward: defend yourself from randomly timed alien invasions, seek out some critical resource, build up your forces, counterattack, and so on. Nothing is particularly taxing on your brain (apart from how to make enough money from the ingrates you're protecting without offending them), but eventually you encounter Legends of Pegasus' combat engine, like it or not. And the truth is probably going to be ""not."" Combat in Legends of Pegasus is a chaotic affair in which your ships, from what was otherwise a stationary, turn-based game, suddenly spring to life and engage enemy ships in real time. Giving orders to your ships is very difficult, because selecting ships and targets often fails to register with the AI, and individual buttons for ships' commands are tiny and hard to use effectively. If your ships outnumber and/or out-tech the enemy, you're going to win. None of the skills from other real-time strategy games, such as crowd control, division of labor (aka rock-paper-scissors), actions per minute, or other such staples, seem to matter in the slightest.   That's Legends of Pegasus: lots of quantity, little quality. While it borrows liberally from just about every major 4X sci-fi game up until now, it does so in a haphazard fashion, losing all, or nearly all, of the things that made those games so great. It doesn't help that Legends of Pegasus is buggy, with an annoying DRM login that frequently blocks you from getting to the game and plenty of graphical glitches.   Don't worry about formations or special abilities; just group your ships next to each other and pound away. It won't matter.  The AI leaves much to be desired as well, since ships never do anything on their own initiative besides run straight at the enemy and fire every weapon. Sometimes you order them to do something and they don't do anything at all. If you want to escape the AI woes to some degree, you can try Legends of Pegasus' multiplayer, but good luck finding anyone to match up with via the game's matchmaking system--its lobbies are emptier than a college student's bank account. Even if you do a direct IP connection to a friend, multiplayer is laggy, tends to boot you, and suffers from many of the same problems as the single-player.   Bottom line: Legends of Pegasus had a grand plan, but developer Novacore didn't come close to pulling off what it set out to do. Like storied Bellerophon, its hubris has proved its ultimate undoing.    
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682,Gas Guzzlers Combat Carnage ,4, Poor design decisions and lots of annoying little things mar this otherwise decent racer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/5/0/3/113854-202503.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gas-guzzlers-combat-carnage-review/1900-6378980/,neg,"
  The first time you start a race in Gas Guzzlers, you'll be in a crappy car, behind AI opponents in much better cars, and you'll lose. Boy oh boy, will you lose. But it's OK, because even when you lose, you still earn money to be able to slowly upgrade your car and take on the big boys, right? Wrong. You don't earn a dime, except by picking up money bonuses scattered at points on the racetracks. But even if you do that, every single upgrade in the garage is locked to you, making it frustratingly difficult to make any progress through the game. You play the same race over, and over, and over--never finishing above fourth or fifth and never getting anywhere near being able to even move on to the next track in the campaign, much less a different game mode.       This is lousy design. Slow progression isn't necessarily a bad thing, particular in a realistic racing simulation like Gran Turismo (though even that series allows you to earn money and buy new cars at the beginning). But for a game that bills itself as a fun, arcade-ish, combat racing title, it's unacceptable. Unlocking the combat portion, which is billed in the title, is infuriatingly difficult. Gas Guzzlers' problems are compounded by the lack of clear explanation as to what does what when you play. There’s a button, for example, to ignite your car’s turbo booster, but no explanation as to what charges the booster (turns out that crashing into things does it). You also have two weapons buttons, although it's never made clear which weapons fire forward and which fire backward, or what the specific effect on the other cars is. Trial and error doesn't help much, because AI opponents can recover almost instantaneously from land mine hits, explosions, and even head-on collisions. You, of course, don't get any such molly coddling.    If you'd like to try to level the playing field a bit by going online, good luck to you. The few servers you'll find are always empty or nearly so, and never have anyone in them who want to start a race. Other game modes, too, offer no respite, as they remain locked to you until you manage to struggle past a gauntlet of necessary unlocks. This unlocking process is grind-y and frustrating, and takes all the fun out of what’s otherwise a fairly good racing mechanic.    See, in spite of all its shortcomings, Gas Guzzlers' races do a good job of balancing a semblance of realism with plenty of over-the-top drifting, spins, gunplay, and general insanity. Although the game doesn't give you much help with anything like a rubberbanding mechanic (players falling behind the pack aren't artificially sped up to stay competitive), you use an assortment of guns and missiles to temporarily knock out people ahead of you and gain ground. While these moments are rare and difficult to achieve, combat and other little things do spice up the gameplay.   Damage shows up on your car, but it's not tied realistically to how you get hit.   That’s the real tragedy here: Gas Guzzlers has plenty of content and personality. It has tons of car customization options, weapon loadouts, and a decent number of vehicles and tracks. But like an acquaintance who suffers from terrible social anxiety, the game does everything in its power to keep you from getting to what's underneath. When things are going right for you, Gas Guzzlers offers edge-of-your-seat excitement, because you don't want to suffer the frustration of starting all over again. Getting knocked into a wall or getting hit by a weapon even once can be unrecoverable in a race, so you are always putting your best foot forward. And, once you've got them mapped right, controls are responsive, tracks feel realistic (you slide around a lot more in dirt than in asphalt, for example), and blowing stuff up is satisfying.    Still, some obvious features of an arcade racer game are clearly missing. Since the tracks are both short and linear, you'd think there'd be multiple pathways, shortcuts or secret areas, but you'd be wronger than ketchup on a hot dog. While Gas Guzzlers' tracks do have some branches, taking them has little effect on your position in a race. Games like Split/Second and Need for Speed: Shift offer tracks that reward you for taking risks or using your imagination. No such luck here.     Indeed, taking turns properly, drifting around corners, or even ramming small obstacles like palmetto trees and barrels have little effect on your position in a race. The primary influencers appear to be luck (you have to hope that the leaders take each other out), and constantly keeping the accelerator depressed to maximum no matter what. This may prove more difficult than you think, however, because Gas Guzzlers has a habit of resetting your controls to the defaults despite your painstaking re-mapping of them. The game doesn't recognize an Xbox 360 controller or a PlayStation 3 controller by default, even if you’ve got the proper drivers installed on your PC. This means you’ve got to map the controller buttons yourself, which leads to some jury rigging to get things working properly.    You earn roadkill bonuses for hitting chickens. Take that, chickens!   Gas Guzzlers does some things right, but the whole deal ends up feeling decidedly under par. Graphics are only fair, music is canned and looped, and the voice samples are poor. But beyond its mediocre production values is a wobbly foundation, and that's ultimately Gas Guzzlers' insurmountable flaw. The extreme difficulty in unlocking new content is a fatal failing, because it keeps the game frustrating and fails to reward players for hard work. That ain't how the West was won, partner, no matter how much gas you might be able to drink.  
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683,One Piece: Pirate Warriors ,4," Zany flair puts a bit of wind in its sails, but One Piece: Pirate Warriors is still a shallow, tedious game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/0/9/2227309-box_oppw.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/one-piece-pirate-warriors-review/1900-6397581/,neg,"
  Monkey D. Luffy and his crew of Straw Hat Pirates have used their zany personalities and unusual powers to sail to manga domination. But the inventiveness that has helped One Piece stand out from its manga and anime brethren is barely evident in One Piece: Pirate Warriors. This shallow game spends most of its time doing a fair imitation of the tired combat of Dynasty Warriors games, occasionally changing things up with rote puzzles and with grappling sequences that you don't have much control over. Wacky animations lend Pirate Warriors a bit of superficial personality, but underneath the surface, this is a dull knockoff of an uninspired series.      Main Log mode recounts the adventures of the Straw Hat Pirates across the One Piece storyline. It doesn't capture much of the excitement of that storyline, though. The plot is largely advanced through scenes in which characters talk about their adventures while a static image of them enjoying a picnic is displayed. The Japanese-language voices are overflowing with energy, but the accompanying, unmoving visuals make the story fall flat. If you come to Pirate Warriors not already knowing the tale of Luffy's adventures, the storytelling here certainly won't reveal what all the fuss is about.    And the gameplay doesn't make up for the excitement that's missing from the story. You spend most of your time playing as Luffy, running around battlefields to complete objectives. You're frequently swarmed by enemies, but these foes pose no challenge whatsoever. They exist simply to be clobbered by you. So you push some buttons, pull off some wild-looking attacks, and defeat them by the dozens. Different button combinations make Luffy use his rubbery limbs in different ways. He can charge forward in a flurry of fists, swing his legs around like a whip, or slingshot himself forward into enemy crowds. And by holding a button down, you can make him charge up certain attacks. But most enemies demand so little from you that there's little incentive to use one attack over another. And the constant barrage of powerful-looking attacks with elaborate animations that Luffy deals out quickly dilutes their visual impact down to nothing.    From time to time, more powerful enemies appear who require a bit more effort to defeat. You might need to evade some of their techniques, and rely on your own devastating special attacks to defeat them. These special attacks have even more elaborate animations, but they take no skill to perform. As long as your special attack meter has charges in it, you just hold down a button, and the attack takes care of itself. Watching Luffy's bizarre, stretchy attacks is fun for a short while, but they don't disguise how dull the underlying mechanics are.     You can use Luffy's Gum Gum Balloon ability to reflect cannonballs.   Frustratingly, challenge sometimes comes not from combat or other things you have direct control over, but from failure conditions that require you to keep other members of your crew in fighting shape. It's difficult to simultaneously protect allies who are in one spot and run all over the place completing mission objectives that are scattered across the map, and when clueless allies get themselves pummeled in your absence, you'll wish you could just issue commands telling them to keep themselves out of trouble.     Main Log mode occasionally puts you in control of some of these allies, and their special attacks differ significantly from Luffy's. Nico Robin can create arms that rise up out of the ground and pummel enemies, for instance, and Nami can summon lightning bolts and whirlwinds to aid her in battle. But this diversity of abilities doesn't bring a feeling of variety to the gameplay. Mashing buttons is still enough to deal with onslaughts of enemies, and even bosses don't require you to change up your approach.    When you're not fighting, you're often grappling and swinging around levels, using Luffy's rubbery limbs to reach areas that no ordinary pirate could. However, all this movement is anything but a pleasant change of pace from combat. You don't directly control Luffy as he does all of this fun-looking stuff, swinging through the air or grabbing onto a soaring cannonball that carries him over the water. Rather, you just respond to displayed button prompts and watch Luffy do all the rest. This makes you feel alienated from the action, and has you longing for the relative immediacy of battle. Other variations from the core combat also fail to inject any life into the game. Dull puzzles have you doing things like rotating statues, and one stage slows you down by making you carry an injured Nami around and find places to set her down before you can jump into the thick of it.   That looks enjoyable. Too bad you have so little control over it.   As you progress through Main Log, you unlock more characters you can use in Another Log mode, which puts the focus on characters other than Luffy. And online support lets you join forces with another player to complete chapters. But no matter how you play it, One Piece: Pirate Warriors is a tedious game; the energy of its characters and animations contrasts sharply with the tiresome gameplay. This 50-dollar, 11-gigabyte game isn't worth the cost or the significant amount of time it takes to download. If you're looking to spend some quality time with Luffy and his pirate crew, you're better off sticking to the pages of a manga or the scenes of an anime.  


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684,Mugen Souls ,4," Complex but repetitive and grating, Mugen Souls is overwhelming for all the wrong reasons.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/8/6/2228086-box_msouls.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mugen-souls-review/1900-6398611/,neg,"
  There's a lot to appreciate about the anime-style trappings seen in many Japanese role-playing games. The influence of Japan's rich history of cartoon and comic art can translate to colorful environments, outlandish characters, and even some offbeat humor. Mugen Souls is one such RPG. But while it wholeheartedly embraces the anime-loving, game-marathoning otaku culture that inspired it, Mugen Souls seems to have completely forgotten to be a good game first and foremost.   That…sure is a lot of stuff in the HUD.   The premise of Mugen Souls is novel: rather than saving the world from imminent destruction, antiheroine Chou-Chou wants to turn every being in the seven corners of the universe into her loyal servant. She has a knack for getting people to surrender to her will, thanks to her unique ability to pander exactly to anyone's taste in character stereotypes. She also has a commandeered spaceship and an ever-growing army of subservient lackeys under her rule.    The character designs are cute and appealing (if a little uncomfortable at times--some of the characters look quite young), and the theme of conquering the universe with your egotistical charm is inherently appealing. But the problems with Mugen Souls emerge from the get-go. Chou-Chou's one-note appeal fades quickly as she and the supporting cast fail to undergo any satisfying character development, even after Chou-Chou displays her ability to assume seven different personality types.     The one-dimensional characters might be forgiven if their interactions were as funny as the game seems to think they are. Alas, attempts at humorous exchanges between the characters fall flat with resounding thuds, save for a few cute digs at video gaming conventions. There's little to the story besides the supposed humor, so when the funny fails, every lengthy dialogue exchange turns into an excruciating experience.    Solid gameplay can rescue an RPG with a weak story, but the gameplay of Mugen Souls is a superficially complex mess of disparate mechanics that fail to gel into anything cohesive. Chou-Chou, her seven personalities, and her servants traverse small, sloppily designed, uninteresting overworld areas, which chug along at incomprehensibly low frame rates, despite their simplistic visuals and object models, unless you lower your display resolution to 720p. There are mobs of endlessly respawning enemies on each map, and though you can see them before you fight, they tend to move so quickly that avoiding them (or slashing Chou-Chou's weapon fast enough to enter battle with an advantage) is extremely difficult once they notice your presence.   A speedy enemy could be lying in wait just offscreen.   When you enter a fight, there are lots of options available to you, all of which are explained only one time through poorly presented tutorials--which then become completely inaccessible should you want to review anything you've learned. You've got a fairly standard RPG array of basic attacks, special skills, and items to use, as well as a positioning-based combat system that lets your party and the enemies run around the field. Characters can also perform team-up attacks that have some amusing animations, but they become so drawn out that you are quickly tempted to turn off the ""battle animations"" option.    Chou-Chou has access to some unique skills, however. She can shift into one of her seven personalities mid-combat, which changes her affinities toward special attacks; rather than being based on traditional RPG elements like fire, wind, and water, skill and character affiliations are based on personality traits like bipolar, graceful, and sadist. Chou-Chou also has an ability called the ""moé kill"": by pandering to enemies' particular tastes, she can transform them into willing peons, who then power up her spaceship. This is accomplished by trying to match a series of three action selections to an enemy's taste and current mood. Make the enemy happy, and you are rewarded; pick the wrong choices, and you get an agitated, more powerful foe to contend with.    As novel as they may sound, moé kills turn into an exercise in tedium. Since the moods of enemies are constantly changing--as are your choices for moé kill actions--it's hard to get any sort of consistent reaction from them, even when you've matched their type perfectly. Choices that might seem logical given a foe's current mood can inexplicably make them upset. It also takes a very long time to complete moé kills on certain foes, and since Chou-Chou is the only one who can initiate them, you waste time having everyone else onfield defend while you hope you're making the right choices to win a foe over. If you fail, prepare for an even longer fight.   Intense pandering action!   Other elements are thrown into the combat system with little regard as to how they interact with each other or add anything meaningful to the gameplay. Special attacks can be imbued with a ""blast off"" effect that sends enemies ricocheting off each other and onfield objects, which looks pretty cool but never does the sort of damage you'd expect. Hovering crystals offer various ranged effects and rewards when broken, but can be targeted only by the aforementioned blast off attacks and moé kills. An object called the ""peon ball"" amasses power as the battle drags on and can be summoned to deal damage to every foe onscreen, but its potential to backfire goes up in proportion to the health of your party, making it dangerous in the sort of last-ditch situations where you'd logically want to use it most.     You can play through battles trying to follow a list of specific orders for more potential winnings, which are rarely substantial. Ultimately, even when you try to use all the crazy options the game gives you for fighting, you usually wind up feeling like your effort didn't yield adequate reward. It's easier to try to ignore enemies on the field (or mash fight through the battles) and instead build up levels and collect rewards in the optional Mugen Field, a series of random battles with handicaps that can deliver bigger experience point yields and rewards than normal.    Conquering the territories you need to proceed is yet another ill-conceived gameplay element. Chou-Chou needs to go to specific places on the field (which are only vaguely hinted at) and assert her dominance in one of three ways: by paying a certain amount of money, by beating a certain number of enemies, or by performing a successful moé kill. All of these involve guesswork: it's never stated exactly how much money or how many defeated foes you need to proceed, so if you don't have enough, you have to grind until you think you do and try again. Failing these attempts sends you into combat, which only adds to the annoyance.   That's one way to conquer the world.   Finally, there are the spaceship battles, which pit Chou-Chou's warship against that of a single foe. These battles play out like an augmented form of a rock-paper-scissors fight, with certain choices overpowering others (for example, pierce attacks beat defensive barriers but lose out to fast missile strikes). As Chou-Chou recruits peons, the ship grows stronger, and more attack and defensive options open. But these options are almost unnecessary, because most of these battles are easy. There is always a hint displayed as to what action the opponent will take, and after you figure out exactly which attacks the hints correlate to, space dogfights become a breeze…which further defeats the point of putting a lot of effort into standard combat.     There are a lot of character-building and gear customization options--all of which seem to involve a separate point currency--but it's just more empty complexity layered on a game that's weak at its core. ""Overwhelming"" is a word seen often in Mugen Souls' vocabulary, and it's presented in a positive light. Ironically, the game is blissfully unaware that its faux depth is overwhelming in bad ways: the gameplay is ill-explained, none of the systems supplement each other, and the game is shrill and unrewarding. Compared to many other Japanese RPGs for the PlayStation 3, Mugen Souls is underwhelming.  
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'.', 'Compared', 'many', 'Japanese', 'RPGs', 'PlayStation', '3', ',', 'Mugen', 'Souls', 'underwhelming', '.']",0.06698718995888804,0.5416590432628168
685,Zack Zero ,4, Problematic platforming and awkward action add up to crummy adventures for Zack Zero.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/8/1/0/2227810-6239341430-ZackZ.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/zack-zero-review/1900-6349217/,neg,"
  You may not have heard of Zack Zero, but you know the type: a hard-working space ranger who defends his planet against hostile aliens using his powerful supersuit and likes to take his lady on vacation. After an unusually bad voice actor describes the abduction of said lady by said aliens, our typical hero embarks on a bland adventure packed with clunky platforming action. Zack's herky-jerky jumps make it a chore to navigate the perilous levels where legitimate hazards and design flaws are equally threatening. His suite of elemental abilities fuel some flashy combat and light puzzles, but both are burdened by problems that keep either from being entertaining. While the environmental design makes some levels pleasant to explore, Zack Zero is too fraught with shortcomings to make it worth the trip.       After thwarting an alien conquest attempt and causing the untimely death of the alien leader's brother, Zack Zero and his beloved Marlene have made themselves a target. Zulrog wants to time travel and regain his lost sibling, which involves kidnapping Marlene for some reason. So Zack sets off to rescue her and, as a secondary objective, save the universe. Zack's progress is depicted in minimally animated cartoon cutscenes that are narrated in storybook fashion. Unfortunately, the drawings are simplistic and the voice actor is awful, so what might have been a nice treat between missions comes off as a hackneyed mess.     With the aesthetic bar set low, you embark on your travels through alien landscapes. Colorful flora and some good environmental detail make the outdoor areas appealing, though the same can't be said for the stock sci-fi interiors, which are full of shiny metal and neon lights. Some areas benefit from a nice sense of depth, and the two-dimensional path you walk occasionally winds into the foreground or background, further enriching the environment.     Unfortunately, Zack Zero takes this effect one step too far. In some areas, you can jump into the background to traverse platforms, as you can in Little Big Planet 2. Yet that game had a distinct sense of switching between two planes, whereas Zack Zero's maneuvering is much more muddled. You might fail to shift position sufficiently despite inclining the analog stick properly, turning your jump to a recessed platform into a fall to your doom. The visual cues that signal such jumps are inconsistent and the separation between planes is not clean, so you may think a hazard has moved safely into the foreground when in fact it can still damage you. Though it sometimes looks pretty, visual depth fails to translate into a coherent gameplay mechanic, and the action suffers for it.    Don't let those flying drones stop you from your crucial mission of collecting green gems.   Not that the action does well on its own. Zack can jump and double-jump, but he is a graceless fellow. He shoots into the air abruptly, but his trajectory plunges sharply about three-quarters of the way through, which can cause some frustrating deaths until you get the hang of it. Furthermore, the double-jump timing is inconsistent; sometimes you can initiate his second jump at or after the apex of his leap, sometimes not. This makes negotiating hazards more difficult than it should be, a problem that is exacerbated by intermittent visual bugs (strong updrafts that shoot you into the air may not appear but can still fling you sky-high).    In addition to environmental hazards, Zack must fight his way through various enemies using the powers of his suit. The four states of his suit (normal, fire, ice, stone) each offer different abilities that can be used to destroy enemies and better navigate environments. Fireballs and heavy stone punches are good for destroying enemies, while the freezing tornado and blinding explosion can help you manage crowds. Fire-surfing through the air and slowing down time with your ice power are essential navigational tools, but almost every elemental action drains power from your suit. You have to watch your automatically regenerating bar to make sure you don't run out of juice at an inopportune moment, though the normal attack ensures you are never without a weapon.     Though you can always attack, you are likely to wish for more defensive options. Zack is not a very durable hero, and a few hits from your enemies are enough to send you back to a previous checkpoint. There is no way to block or deflect enemy attacks, so evasion and attack are your only tools. You have to be extra diligent about dodging, though, because the hit detection is such that even if there is a visible distance between you and your enemy's weapon, you can still take damage. The visual-depth confusion also becomes an issue in combat because enemies coming in from the foreground or background can target you. Zack will sometimes automatically target them, sometimes not. Additionally, attacks that deal area damage may kill enemies on one plane but not the others that are adjacent on another plane. Inconsistent mechanics put an extra strain on Zack's fragility, making combat doubly frustrating.   It's just you, the monster, and lady eira's high score.   Assiduous use of your varying abilities is the best way to survive in a fight, and you can combine certain effects, like blowing up a frozen soldier with a fireball. These attacks still have the same basic effect, and it's a shame that they aren't used more cleverly, but combo attacks will net you a neat little point bonus. Online leaderboards offer an outlet for competition, but Zack Zero implements them in a glaringly intrusive way. While playing, pop-up messages frequently notify you of the score leader on your current level, as well as the overall score leader. These messages pop up roughly once every 60 seconds. When you add in separate notifications for your friends list, not a minute goes by without some kind of score popping up onscreen. The only way to disable these constant intrusions is to sign out of the PlayStation Network.     There are other problems that plague Zack Zero, such as invisible walls and a level-up screen that interrupts whatever is going on onscreen, regardless of the danger you might encounter. There are precious few elements in the game that are not hindered by flaws, which make it more difficult to play and enjoy. Yet even without these problems, Zack Zero lacks the appeal and ingenuity found in many other downloadable platformers. At $12.99, Zack Zero is overpriced, underdeveloped, and outclassed.     
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686,Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit ,4," An emphasis on style over substance defines Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit, though unfortunately even the stylish aspects have serious problems.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/1/2/2228012-box_hellyeah.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hell-yeah-wrath-of-the-dead-rabbit/1900-6397146/,neg,"
  Revenge has never been so tedious. After salacious photos of Ash, the prince of hell, make their rounds in the underworld, the fiery rabbit goes on a quest to kill 100 creatures that are reveling in his embarrassment. Excessive violence follows you through the twisted worlds that make up this lengthy adventure. Enemies erupt in fountains of bubbling blood, and Ash has a crass witticism at the ready to make light of their torment. It's a preposterous setup, and Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit doesn't hold back from objectionable situations. But once you become numb to the juvenile antics, shallow gameplay derails your blood-splattering fun. Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Undead Rabbit relies on its immaturity to reel you in, but the poorly developed action makes your time spent in hell miserable.      Hell Yeah doesn't shy away from long story sequences. Ash trades insults with the various critters he meets during this 2D adventure, but the dialogue is so cringe-worthy that even trying to enjoy it on an ironic level is asking too much. References to outdated memes and dusty catchphrases populate every exchange, making you wonder if there's going to be an original utterance in the interminably long conversations. When Ash says, ""Talk to the paw"" (get it, because he's a rabbit!) or when one of the countless minigames commands you to ""Om nom nom!"" you can only shake your head. Hell Yeah tries to be humorous but relies on such tired material that you'll skip past the trite lines so you can get back to the action.    And, at least initially, the action holds its own. Hell Yeah is an expansive platformer in which you travel through a variety of off-the-wall locales connected by teleportation gates. Locked doors and impenetrable walls keep you from exploring the entire world from the get-go, so you have to hunt down the nasty creatures enjoying your humiliation to gain access to more of the map. Ash has a powerful repertoire of destructive tools from the beginning that become even more dangerous as you claw deeper into this nightmarish world. A handy saw circles your body at all times, allowing you to cleave through certain walls and weaker enemies without breaking a sweat. When a formidable baddie stands in your path, an arsenal of pain-dealing guns can make short work of him. A flamethrower, Gatling gun, missile launcher, and more are used to turn enemies into bloody piles of goop, and using your prodigious power to slay your oppressors carries with it some feral joy.   See, in Mortal Kombat, a little head popped up saying ""Toasty!""   It's a foundation for a savage adventure, but it's not long before the puerile antics become dull. The moment-to-moment action in Hell Yeah encompasses the basics needed in a platformer without any extra flair to make it special. Ash has a floaty jump that makes avoiding enemy projectiles or leaping to higher ground a cinch, and dual-stick aiming makes gunning down enemies while dancing about the playing field second nature. But the ease with which you traverse the worlds makes the various encounters feel like mindless busywork. The majority of enemies are little more than bugs splattering against your fast-moving windshield, and the jumping challenges don't demand the precision or immediacy that could have made them compelling.    Instead of being made up of enjoyable traversal and exploration, the majority of Hell Yeah features by-rote stretches that pad the overall length until you face the next of your many antagonists. It's when you square off against your 100 most hated enemies that Hell Yeah reveals its true colors, and, sadly, it's also when this adventure is at its weakest. Each of these creatures has a name and a backstory, and you frequently trade barbs before a fight. But don't think that all of that buildup translates to an engrossing fight. Instead, you can dodge and counterattack against most of these enemies and come out on top in about five seconds. Your impressive arsenal is laughably large, considering how rarely you have to switch to a different gun.     When your foe's life is drained, a quick-time event is queued up, and your own sadness grows exponentially. A smattering of these minigames crop up throughout this adventure, but they're so shallow and slight that even spending a few seconds completing them becomes a drain. Rapidly mashing a button or trying to stop a moving meter at the right time is not fun, and the fact that these same situations surface repeatedly turns the simple act of dispatching enemies into a painful ordeal. When you murder your enemy, a brief cutscene plays out showing the horrible way in which you disposed of them. These pull you away from the action, forcing you to watch a few ho-hum evisceration sequences that repeat far too often.  Normally, you can breeze through these QTEs, but a few of them are tricky enough that you might fail them a couple times. Trying to quickly find a target through a sniper scope relies more on luck than skill, and failing any of these activities damages Ash and makes you fight the enemy again until you whittle down their life once more.       Die and you get sent back to the last checkpoint. These respawn points are sprinkled liberally throughout the maps so you rarely have to trudge too far over the same ground, but there is one hiccup in this system. You frequently come back to life with only a small fraction of your health bar, and because energy recharge stations are often located far away and one hit can spell your doom, you have to gingerly traverse obstacles. Frustrations abound in Hell Yeah. From enemies that have to be juggled (and yet you can't see where they're going to fall), to wonky collision detection and annoying knockback attacks, Hell Yeah is constantly trying to stifle any enjoyment you could muster from this aggravating adventure.     The one element in which Hell Yeah shines is its puzzles. Most of the time, enemies can be defeated by blasting them a few times with a gun. But there are occasions when your brain is more important than your brawn, and figuring out how to progress takes a pinch of cunning. You may have to zoom out the screen to show a love-starved creature that he's all alone in the universe, or push a fireball-flinging pyramid through teleporters, and these moments of contemplation are a happy respite from the tediousness that encompasses the rest of your travels.     Defeated enemies land in The Island, a place of quiet servitude where you assign tasks for your own gain to the creatures that dared stand against you. If you want more treasures to purchase at the gift shop or energy if your life is getting drained too quickly, then make sure you have a monster working in a section that doles out the rewards you most desire. It's a neat idea, and seeing your demoralized foes doing busywork on your behalf is a clever way to reintroduce vanquished baddies, but the presents you receive don't have much impact on your adventure. Plus, you can assign only 80 monsters at a time to do your work, and because there are 100 in the game, one fifth of them might sit around doing nothing.    Don't shoot the shell! The darn thing is clearly made of metal.   Hell Yeah is a convoluted mess that throws many different elements together in the hope that something worthwhile emerges, and in no place is that more apparent than in the visual design. Colorful, cartoonish worlds and creatures give this adventure a unique look, but all too often, the confluence of colors and special effects makes it tricky to see what you're doing. Every inch of the screen is populated by shiny, sparkly, eye-catching distractions, and just understanding where you are and what dangers lie before you is an exercise in frustration. The most important aspect of artistic design is to quickly and efficiently communicate what's going on, and Hell Yeah is an utter failure in that regard.    The most egregious problem with Hell Yeah is that it's not fun to play. A slew of shallow ideas thrown into one game do not make for a worthwhile experience. Whether you're completing simple quick-time events, defeating brain-dead monsters, slowly jumping between easy-to-reach platforms, or reading the meme-ridden text, it's clear that Hell Yeah is trying to hide its lack of depth through variety and style. With a greater emphasis on puzzle solving, Hell Yeah could have been entertaining. But because few of the elements are enjoyable, you shuffle from one tedious activity to another, waiting for a satisfying moment that rarely comes. Sinner or saint, you are transported to the underworld in Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit and it doesn't even apologize for making you suffer.  
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687,Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit ,4," An emphasis on style over substance defines Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit, though unfortunately even the stylish aspects have serious problems.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/1/2/2228012-box_hellyeah.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hell-yeah-wrath-of-the-dead-rabbit-review/1900-6397186/,neg,"
  Revenge has never been so tedious. After salacious photos of Ash, the prince of hell, make their rounds in the underworld, the fiery rabbit goes on a quest to kill 100 creatures that are reveling in his embarrassment. Excessive violence follows you through the twisted worlds that make up this lengthy adventure. Enemies erupt in fountains of bubbling blood, and Ash has a crass witticism at the ready to make light of their torment. It's a preposterous setup, and Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit doesn't hold back from objectionable situations. But once you become numb to the juvenile antics, shallow gameplay derails your blood-splattering fun. Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Undead Rabbit relies on its immaturity to reel you in, but the poorly developed action makes your time spent in hell miserable.        Hell Yeah doesn't shy away from long story sequences. Ash trades insults with the various critters he meets during this 2D adventure, but the dialogue is so cringe-worthy that even trying to enjoy it on an ironic level is asking too much. References to outdated memes and dusty catchphrases populate every exchange, making you wonder if there's going to be an original utterance in the interminably long conversations. When Ash says, ""Talk to the paw"" (get it, because he's a rabbit!) or when one of the countless minigames commands you to ""Om nom nom!"" you can only shake your head. Hell Yeah tries to be humorous but relies on such tired material that you'll skip past the trite lines so you can get back to the action.    And, at least initially, the action holds its own. Hell Yeah is an expansive platformer in which you travel through a variety of off-the-wall locales connected by teleportation gates. Locked doors and impenetrable walls keep you from exploring the entire world from the get-go, so you have to hunt down the nasty creatures enjoying your humiliation to gain access to more of the map. Ash has a powerful repertoire of destructive tools from the beginning that become even more dangerous as you claw deeper into this nightmarish world. A handy saw circles your body at all times, allowing you to cleave through certain walls and weaker enemies without breaking a sweat. When a formidable baddie stands in your path, an arsenal of pain-dealing guns can make short work of him. A flamethrower, Gatling gun, missile launcher, and more are used to turn enemies into bloody piles of goop, and using your prodigious power to slay your oppressors carries with it some feral joy.    See, in Mortal Kombat, a little head popped up saying ""Toasty!""    It's a foundation for a savage adventure, but it's not long before the puerile antics become dull. The moment-to-moment action in Hell Yeah encompasses the basics needed in a platformer without any extra flair to make it special. Ash has a floaty jump that makes avoiding enemy projectiles or leaping to higher ground a cinch, and dual-stick aiming makes gunning down enemies while dancing about the playing field second nature. But the ease with which you traverse the worlds makes the various encounters feel like mindless busywork. The majority of enemies are little more than bugs splattering against your fast-moving windshield, and the jumping challenges don't demand the precision or immediacy that could have made them compelling.    Instead of being made up of enjoyable traversal and exploration, the majority of Hell Yeah features by-rote stretches that pad the overall length until you face the next of your many antagonists. It's when you square off against your 100 most hated enemies that Hell Yeah reveals its true colors, and, sadly, it's also when this adventure is at its weakest. Each of these creatures has a name and a backstory, and you frequently trade barbs before a fight. But don't think that all of that buildup translates to an engrossing fight. Instead, you can dodge and counterattack against most of these enemies and come out on top in about five seconds. Your impressive arsenal is laughably large, considering how rarely you have to switch to a different gun.    When your foe's life is drained, a quick-time event is queued up, and your own sadness grows exponentially. A smattering of these minigames crop up throughout this adventure, but they're so shallow and slight that even spending a few seconds completing them becomes a drain. Rapidly mashing a button or trying to stop a moving meter at the right time is not fun, and the fact that these same situations surface repeatedly turns the simple act of dispatching enemies into a painful ordeal. When you murder your enemy, a brief cutscene plays out showing the horrible way in which you disposed of them. These pull you away from the action, forcing you to watch a few ho-hum evisceration sequences that repeat far too often. Normally, you can breeze through these QTEs, but a few of them are tricky enough that you might fail them a couple times. Trying to quickly find a target through a sniper scope relies more on luck than skill, and failing any of these activities damages Ash and makes you fight the enemy again until you whittle down their life once more.      Die and you get sent back to the last checkpoint. These respawn points are sprinkled liberally throughout the maps so you rarely have to trudge too far over the same ground, but there is one hiccup in this system. You frequently come back to life with only a small fraction of your health bar, and because energy recharge stations are often located far away and one hit can spell your doom, you have to gingerly traverse obstacles. Frustrations abound in Hell Yeah. From enemies that have to be juggled (and yet you can't see where they're going to fall), to wonky collision detection and annoying knockback attacks, Hell Yeah is constantly trying to stifle any enjoyment you could muster from this aggravating adventure.  The one element in which Hell Yeah shines is its puzzles. Most of the time, enemies can be defeated by blasting them a few times with a gun. But there are occasions when your brain is more important than your brawn, and figuring out how to progress takes a pinch of cunning. You may have to zoom out the screen to show a love-starved creature that he's all alone in the universe, or push a fireball-flinging pyramid through teleporters, and these moments of contemplation are a happy respite from the tediousness that encompasses the rest of your travels.  Defeated enemies land in The Island, a place of quiet servitude where you assign tasks for your own gain to the creatures that dared stand against you. If you want more treasures to purchase at the gift shop or energy if your life is getting drained too quickly, then make sure you have a monster working in a section that doles out the rewards you most desire. It's a neat idea, and seeing your demoralized foes doing busywork on your behalf is a clever way to reintroduce vanquished baddies, but the presents you receive don't have much impact on your adventure. Plus, you can assign only 80 monsters at a time to do your work, and because there are 100 in the game, one fifth of them might sit around doing nothing.   Don't shoot the shell! The darn thing is clearly made of metal.   Hell Yeah is a convoluted mess that throws many different elements together in the hope that something worthwhile emerges, and in no place is that more apparent than in the visual design. Colorful, cartoonish worlds and creatures give this adventure a unique look, but all too often, the confluence of colors and special effects makes it tricky to see what you're doing. Every inch of the screen is populated by shiny, sparkly, eye-catching distractions, and just understanding where you are and what dangers lie before you is an exercise in frustration. The most important aspect of artistic design is to quickly and efficiently communicate what's going on, and Hell Yeah is an utter failure in that regard.  The most egregious problem with Hell Yeah is that it's not fun to play. A slew of shallow ideas thrown into one game do not make for a worthwhile experience. Whether you're completing simple quick-time events, defeating brain-dead monsters, slowly jumping between easy-to-reach platforms, or reading the meme-ridden text, it's clear that Hell Yeah is trying to hide its lack of depth through variety and style. With a greater emphasis on puzzle solving, Hell Yeah could have been entertaining. But because few of the elements are enjoyable, you shuffle from one tedious activity to another, waiting for a satisfying moment that rarely comes. Sinner or saint, you are transported to the underworld in Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit and it doesn't even apologize for making you suffer.    
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688,NHL 2002 ,8.9," NHL 2002 is the deepest, most realistic 3D NHL game on the market.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/0/9/2218109-box_nhl02.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nhl-2002-review/1900-2814702/,pos,"
If there's one sport Electronic Arts has had little to no competition emulating, it's NHL hockey. EA's NHL series has served as the benchmark for hockey video games for almost a decade. Many developers have tried to top it, and many have failed. The series' rookie effort on the PlayStation 2 established a solid foundation to build upon last year, but a lack of adequate AI and bothersome frame rates limited the game's long-term appeal. But with NHL 2002, EA Sports has listened to the critics and produced a 3D version of the series that finally rivals NHL's two-dimensional glory days on the Genesis and SNES. If you like a lot of meat to your hockey games, the NHL series has always been the filet mignon of digitized pucks. However, the NHL series' first iteration for the PlayStation 2 was the exception. With no franchise mode and few frills in general, it succeeded in becoming a solid multiplayer experience, but those looking for depth from single-player modes were forced to retreat back to the PlayStation version of the game. NHL 2002 has an incredibly deep franchise mode that can be played for 10 consecutive seasons. Player statistics are tracked in 18 and 21 different player and team categories, respectively. Career statistics accumulate over 10 years, but many are lost once a player retires. In the season mode, you may draft, surf the free agent wire, manage a budget, and attempt to compensate for veteran players who retire. The only problem with the franchise mode is that some things are performed for you by the CPU, like which players are interested in joining your team. It can be frustrating to offer more than a player is truly worth in a trade, only to be turned down. In addition to the deep season mode, there's exhibition play for up to four players, a tournament mode for up to 16 teams, and a shootout mode to help hone your breakaway skills. Another new addition to the series this year is an extensive card system similar to the one used in the recent Madden football games. You are awarded points for performing specific tasks while playing, like scoring a hat trick or winning all your team's road playoff games. The points can then be used to purchase some of the game's 189 cards, which unlock new features within the game. NHL 2002 also includes the ability to create players and then sign them to a team or track the developments in a game via the EA game story. While the franchise mode could use some more interactivity, on the whole, NHL 2002 provides more than enough gameplay modes to keep the most die-hard hockey fan content. Like the gameplay modes in NHL 2002, the amount of control you have over your players has also been greatly improved. You may now perform saucer passes to lift the biscuit over a defender's stick, and the deke controls have been improved so that a player may now compose himself before taking a shot and shift the puck from the forehand to the backhand in an attempt at fooling the goalie. A new variable puck control feature has also been added--one that makes it difficult to knock skilled players off the puck. Players also are designated as snipers, heroes, big hitters, and big shooters. When you use a player at the end of the game and he's rated as a hero, this can often make the difference between mounting a comeback and getting spanked. You may even map different animations to three of the Dual Shock 2's face buttons for customized after-goal celebrations. EA Sports has included adaptive goalie AI that is supposed to adjust the goalie's strategy depending upon the in-game situation, but it's almost impossible to notice. Last year's game has some serious AI issues that made games against the computer a cakewalk. For this year's game, EA has gone in the complete opposite direction where AI is concerned. There are four different difficulty settings, and winning games on anything but the beginner and easy settings is nearly impossible. You can build a three-goal lead going into the third period, only to have it wiped away by three seemingly harmless slapshots by the computer. This is made more confounding by the emotion meter. Once a team has achieved full emotion, almost every shot it takes ends up stretching the twine. It's especially frustrating to be dominating play and not gain any team emotion. Goalies will often misjudge soft, fluttering shots--allowing them to slip over a shoulder into the net. Yet all but the best breakaway shots are stopped without a rebound. This results in games turning into a barrage of slapshots and depletes NHL 2002 of a great deal of the one-on-one elements that have made past installments in the franchise so much fun to play. Fighting has again returned, but the button-mashing skirmishes end so quickly that it's almost laughable. NHL 2002's saving grace is that most of the problems associated with the game in its default state may be remedied by adjusting 10 different gameplay sliders.NHL 2001 looked great last year, and the same game engine is being used in NHL 2002. The most obvious improvement is in the animation. Players will now kick errant passes to their sticks or readjust their bodies to accept less-than-perfect passes. Player models have been slightly improved so that they're a bit more rounded, and their faces no longer appear lifeless. There are 700 faces included in the game, and while some of the less-popular players look eerily similar to their real-world counterparts, some of the more-popular players, like Mario Lemieux, look nothing like their real selves. Like last year's game, NHL 2002 includes all the visual niceties that immerse you into the game. Clipboard-toting coaches bark instructions from the bench, the first few rows of fans are constructed of polygons, and players will talk trash to one another while waiting for the face-off. This year, a breakaway cam has been instituted--it switches the screen into letterboxed mode when you break in alone on the goalie. The transition from full-screen to letterbox takes some adjusting, but it's easy to get a handle on the mechanic after practicing in the shootout mode. Once the breakaway camera has been mastered, it adds a great deal of drama to the game. The sound becomes muted so that the only audible effects are the players' heartbeats and the sound of their skates cutting into the ice. Similar to the breakaway cam, big save and big hit cameras have also been instituted. Unlike the breakaway cam, however, these cams are almost impossible to come to grips with. They both freeze the action to show goalies performing kick saves or players being checked to the ice from a variety of angles--however, it's difficult to judge when the game will return to live play, resulting in many awkward moments. As with the gameplay modes, you can turn off most of the graphical features that interfere with enjoyment of NHL 2002. The biggest improvement to NHL 2002's graphics is the frame rate. Last year's game would regularly slow down when more than 10 players were onscreen at once, but this isn't the case with NHL 2002. It plays with a nice fluidity no matter how much action is taking place onscreen--creating an increased sensation of speed. NHL 2002 is the prettiest hockey game ever made, but it isn't a drastic improvement upon last year's game in most visual respects. Even in the 16-bit days, the NHL series was no slouch where audio was concerned, and NHL 2002 falls directly in line with this tradition. The overly dramatic Jim Hughson has returned to deliver the play-by-play commentary, and EA Sports has brought in the popular Canadian announcer Don Taylor to handle the color commentary. Taylor constantly cracks jokes, making fun of the players, or even makes comments regarding the game itself, like ""Look at those animation routines."" Even the public address announcer attempts to be humorous between periods. Repetitive statements from both announcers have been greatly toned down in this year's game, but after a week, most players will be ready to turn off the commentary altogether. Sound effects are right on par with what you've come to expect from the series, with the exception of sound effects used for big hits and shots. When a player is checked especially hard, you hear an explosion, and when firing lethal slapshots, you can hear a rocket blasting off. Team-specific chants have again returned, and you can hear players taunting one another while waiting for the drop of the puck. Hockey purists will likely be annoyed by NHL 2002's humorous color commentary, but as with most other features in the game, you can turn it off. Without commentary, NHL 2002 is as close as it comes to sitting in a real arena for an NHL game. NHL 2002 is the deepest, most realistic 3D NHL game on the market. Its graphics are impressive, its depth of gameplay modes is staggering, and the gameplay is predominantly tight. Aside from quirky goalie AI and some default settings that must be adjusted, it will be difficult to find a more realistic game of hockey on any system for the next year. If you're a PlayStation 2-owning hockey fan, NHL 2002 is a must-buy. Fans of sports video games in general would also do well to give it a strong look.



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689,FIFA 2002 ,8.9," As the first and only soccer game available for the GameCube, FIFA 2002 is an excellent start.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/0/1/8/3798-15018.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-2002-review/1900-2838081/,pos,"
With World Cup competition right around the corner, EA Sports has chosen the perfect time to release the next installment in its seminal soccer franchise for the GameCube. By this time next year, there will be a handful of soccer games available for Nintendo's new console, which makes the early appearance of EA's game all the more calculated. Soccer purists have preferred Konami's International Superstar Soccer series over the past half-decade due to its depth of play and realism, but FIFA 2002 has taken a step in the right direction toward lessening the gap between the two franchises and stands as the series' best outing yet. As the precursor to next year's World Cup installment, FIFA 2002 includes all the necessary gameplay modes to mimic a club's march toward the world's biggest soccer tournament. You can warm up against up to three friends in the friendly mode, try to join the World Cup field in the qualification mode, battle it out against other teams in your league in the season mode or enter special tournaments that unlock hidden Easter eggs. You may even create your own tournaments for when you have a large group of friends over to play, but sadly it's impossible to choose which teams you wish to compete with and against. Multiplayer matches in FIFA 2002 are a great deal of fun, but if you don't have any friends around, the computer AI will challenge the most skilled players. If you're unhappy with the 400-plus teams from 16 leagues that are included in the game, you can always create your own players and teams. You can adjust a player's hairstyle, body size, and skin tone before setting his eight different player attributes to your liking. The higher the player's rating, the more he will have to be paid to be signed to a club. Out on the pitch, FIFA's gameplay has undergone some refinements. The automatic passing of old has given way to a much more refined system for FIFA 2002. Passing is now much more skill-based and takes some time to get used to, but it makes playing FIFA far more realistic. Passing is now controlled by two variables--strength and accuracy. The longer you hold the pass button, the farther the pass will go, which lets you pass through players on your own team to reach streaking strikers further on down the pitch. If a player has an open lane toward the goal, small dots will begin to appear in front of him on the pitch. If you lead the player just right, he will sprint to the ball and prepare for an open run on the net. Give-and-go's have been mapped to the C stick so that all you must do is flick it toward a player, who will lead you with a nice return pass. This is handy for shaking pesky defenders, but it also can leave your player out of position if it's read by the defense. A variety of special dribbles have been included in FIFA 2002, but they are predominantly worthless. If you attempt to pull one off in traffic, the chances are high that you will be dispossessed of the ball. Another slight issue with FIFA 2002's gameplay is the lack of an ability to adjust team strategies on the fly. This option has been included in previous installments of the franchise, so it's puzzling as to why it didn't make the cut this time around. Strategies may still be adjusted from a menu, but it tips off the competition and slows down the game. Just about any aspect of the game can be adjusted to suit your needs, including the amount of assistance that is provided by the computer. FIFA games have always played a great game of soccer, but with its improved passing mechanics, this year's game provides the most realistic experience yet.Despite being a port of the PlayStation 2 version of the game, FIFA 2002 for the GameCube is the best-looking soccer game on any platform. The attention to detail that has been given to the player models is impressive. Despite the inclusion of more than 400 clubs, it's very easy to pick out your favorite players even when the camera is zoomed way out. Player faces are fully animated and are capable of a variety of facial animations. This is one aspect of FIFA 2002 that EA Sports' Madden team should take notice of. Animation is smooth, and the head tracking is so accurate that it's easy to follow the ball regardless of how fast or erratic its movements are. The crowd is constructed of FMV clips and is the best yet seen in any of EA Sports' games. Gone are the pixelated sprites of old--they are replaced by a flowing, throbbing mass of people that mimics the real thing with startling accuracy. Frame rates are important in any sports game, and FIFA 2002 runs with only an occasional hitch when the ball sails high above the field, and all the players and the entire stadium must be drawn by the computer at once. Another slight issue is that the players are covered with a sheen that makes them appear to be made of plastic. But with all things considered, this is a minor complaint. The pitch will gradually deteriorate as rainy games wear on, and other small touches--like player animations depicting emotion after especially exciting plays--wrap up the entire package rather nicely. While it can be argued that FIFA 2002 fails to take advantage of the GameCube's graphical capabilities, you currently won't find a prettier game of football.   The play-by-play team composed of John Motson and Andy Gray has again returned for FIFA 2002. The pair can come off with some fairly in-depth commentary, but some statements have a tendency to repeat quite often. More analysis would be a nice addition to next year's game, along with more team-specific information to educate players who may not be familiar with soccer. As in past installments of the FIFA franchise, the soundtrack is laced with some of the best electronic music around. But perhaps most importantly, the ambient stadium sounds plant you firmly into a seat at the stadium. Team-specific chants and songs can be heard throughout the match, and the throngs of people react quickly and accurately to the action on the field.  As the first and only soccer game available for the GameCube, FIFA 2002 is an excellent start. The gameplay is tight, the graphics are impressive, and there are plenty of gameplay modes to explore. If it weren't for the lack of an ability to adjust team strategy on the fly, pick your own teams for tournament play, or perform special dribbles with any sort of effectiveness, FIFA 2002 would be approaching perfection. If you're a fan of soccer and own a GameCube, you can't go wrong with picking up FIFA 2002.
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690,Command & Conquer: Generals ,8.9, Generals is easily one of the best Command & Conquer games yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/3/6/5/2214365-556767_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/command-and-conquer-generals-review/1900-2910715/,pos,"
Though it wasn't the first game of its type, Command & Conquer became synonymous with real-time strategy gaming when the very first game in the series was released in 1995. Along with Blizzard's Warcraft II, Command & Conquer helped build the foundation for one of PC gaming's most beloved genres, defining many of the real-time strategy conventions that are used today. And though Command & Conquer has seen its highs and lows over the years, the series' quirky, politically incorrect, comic-book-like take on modern warfare has remained intact all throughout, and it is upheld in the latest entry in the series, Command & Conquer: Generals. More importantly, Generals is easily one of the best Command & Conquer games yet, with the impressive visuals and highly refined and accessible gameplay that have come to characterize the best entries in this genre. Die-hard fans of Command & Conquer may lament a few of the departures Generals makes from the series' roots, and the game does have a few rough edges, but Generals is still one of the best real-time strategy games around.  The USA owns the sky with its gunships, fighters, and stealth bombers.  Generals' fictional premise puts the USA, China, and a terrorist group called the Global Liberation Army (GLA) at odds sometime in the near future. You can play as any one of these factions in its own brief single-player campaign, in skirmishes with computer opponents, or against other players over a LAN or using the game's online player-matching service. Those who played the previous two Command & Conquer RTS games, Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack, Yuri's Revenge, will note that Generals is highly reminiscent of those games, despite its much improved appearance and its seemingly more conventional array of infantry, tanks, and aircraft. Like in Red Alert 2, battles in Generals are often quick and decisive, largely due to the immense power of many of the game's units, the presence of devastating super weapons on each side, and the generally fast pace. Also, while each faction has a good variety of units at its disposal, you'll likely get the impression that the number of unit types per faction was limited so that each unit type could play an important role in most any fight--and also to leave room for an expansion pack. The lack of seafaring units in the game is a disappointing omission, given the importance of ships in most previous Command & Conquer games (not to mention in actual modern warfare), but the designers have still done an excellent job of imaginatively differentiating the game's three sides.   Despite the fact that the game's central conflict involves the USA and an obviously Middle Eastern terrorist group, the action in Generals is either over-the-top enough or abstract enough that, for better or worse, it shouldn't offend anyone's sensibilities. In fact, as if to drive home the sense that ""Hey, it's just a game,"" there's really no story at all to Generals. The motivations of the respective factions aren't made clear, and their arsenals are far enough removed from reality that Generals seems much less inspired by current events and much more so by the current fascination with war in our popular culture. Movies like The Rock and Black Hawk Down certainly played a bigger part in inspiring the game's look and style than anything on the nightly news. It bears mentioning that almost all the mainstays of the Command & Conquer milieu can nevertheless be found in Generals--fans will be glad to see huge, double-barreled tanks, crack-shot commandos, nuclear missile silos, flamethrower tanks, and other such C&C mainstays back and looking better than ever. Many of the twists added to Red Alert 2 remain intact as well, such as the ability to garrison infantry in civilian buildings and the ability of units to gain experience levels by defeating foes.  Even a small squad of Chinese forces can be dangerous. In large groups, they're deadly.  Other aspects of this new Command & Conquer are decidedly different. C&C fans may not notice right away, but Generals lacks a few of the series' signature elements. For instance, Command & Conquer games always did a nice job with their installation programs, many of which put you in the mood of the games even before you could begin playing. But Generals has a boring install program, just like every other game. Also, previous Command & Conquer games made prodigious use of full-motion video cutscenes to move their stories along. Featuring recognizable actors, hammy performances, and surprisingly good production values, the full-motion video sequences of Command & Conquer have always been a distinguishing feature of the series--but the FMV is out of the picture now, too. These complaints hardly bear mentioning, but considering Generals' heritage, they're not irrelevant.What the GLA lacks in technology it makes up for with sheer tenacity. Its buildings are the hardest to destroy. Not all the game's departures are cosmetic. Debates used to rage on the Internet as to whether Command & Conquer or Warcraft II had the better interface, and as if to settle the score once and for all, Generals retreats away from some of the C&C standards in favor of the Blizzard school of thought. The signature right-hand interface from previous C&C games is replaced by the signature Blizzard-style interface situated at the bottom of the screen. The signature C&C fog of war, which provides you with unlimited line of sight as soon as you explore the map, has been replaced by the signature Blizzard fog of war, which limits your ability to see enemy positions outside of your forces' field of view. The signature C&C base building, which allows you to erect new structures almost instantly but forces you to place them adjacent to your other structures, has been replaced by the signature Blizzard base building, which allows your worker unit to build new structures pretty much anywhere. These are all sensible decisions that make Command & Conquer: Generals more strategic and ultimately more entertaining, but it's still odd to see the series have a change of heart after all this time. One aspect of Command & Conquer's traditional control scheme that does remain intact is that mouse controls revolve entirely around the left mouse button, which is used both to select units and to issue attack orders. The right mouse button is only for de-selecting things, and those accustomed to recent games that use the right mouse button for move and attack orders may find that this scheme takes a bit of getting used to.   The gameplay itself is what you'd expect from a Command & Conquer game--it's fast, responsive, and filled with lots of great explosions. There's no dillydallying about, just a quick-and-dirty setup process where you slap down a few key structures and then move on to cranking out a good, mixed group of forces. Numerous, unique upgrades are also available to each faction, competing for your resources. Resource gathering, while slightly different for each faction, is fully automated like in Red Alert 2. The US helicopters, Chinese supply trucks, and GLA workers will all make a beeline for the closest batch of ""supply,"" which is basically a big stockpile of valuables just sitting there and waiting to be collected. As in all Command & Conquer games, a viable strategy in Generals is to attack the enemy's all-important gatherers, though the buildings in the game can't withstand much damage, either. You can't build walls, base defenses are pretty flimsy, and a lot of the buildings are quite large and vulnerable--so the game definitely favors an aggressive style of play. Overly defensive play will merely land you front-row seats to the fiery destruction of your own base.  You can see visible damage on units. This Raptor won't make it, but its pilot will eject in time.  Regardless, a few interface issues may get in the way of your efforts. While you can manually set formations for your forces, unit formations aren't handled nearly as well here as in some other recent real-time strategy games, resulting in battles that are often very chaotic. Your forces may frequently drift away from each other, so you'll often have trouble focusing your fire on individual targets. The pathfinding for your units is generally good--they'll conveniently move out of each other's way, but sometimes you'll see a unit of yours sustaining damage without returning fire, or maneuvering weirdly around buildings or other obstacles. The game's menu screens look rushed when compared with the polished in-game graphics. None of these are major problems, but they're noticeable, and they might give you the sense that they could have been fixed with just a bit more time.   One of the game's new features is the ""generals"" ability system, which is basically an experience system that lets you unlock new units, technologies, and powers as you rack up kills. Much like the experience system used for heroes in Warcraft III, the experience element featured in Generals lets you spend points earned in successive victories on new abilities for your faction. It's a good system that adds to the number of viable strategic options in the game, letting you concentrate on some of your faction's key strengths or gain an ace up your sleeve in the form of an artillery attack or bombing run. The three factions themselves are about as different as can be. The USA has the costliest but most technologically advanced units, plus the most diverse and powerful air force. China has strength in numbers, and the nation's relatively slow but powerful forces gain additional bonuses when attacking in hordes. The GLA has no air force at all, and its ramshackle units seem worse than those of the other two factions, but these units can upgrade themselves using the scrap left behind by their fallen foes, and the GLA's units are also the quickest and stealthiest of the three factions, able to swarm around the battlefield using tunnel networks. Each faction has some really interesting options. The USA's ground vehicles can build support drones for scouting or combat, and its rangers have flash-bang grenades that can devastate enemy troops. China's overlord tanks are so enormous that you can build defensive structures on their topsides, and its hackers can steal additional funds or dismantle enemy structures. The GLA's terrorists can capture civilian vehicles and use them to swiftly deliver deadly explosive charges, and their tanks can be outfitted with radioactive shells to better deal with enemy infantry. There are many more such examples for each side. You could easily make a case for any of the game's factions as the strongest, the coolest, or both.  These infantry units may look weak, but they can be surprisingly effective.  The three campaigns in Generals are short and disjointed, though the game's single-player missions are all quite good on their own terms. Rarely is the goal merely to wipe out the opposing forces, at least not without performing some other interesting tasks first. Most real-time strategy fans will find Generals to be a cakewalk at the default ""normal"" difficulty setting. The ""hard"" and ""brutal"" settings will provide more of a challenge, though even at these higher levels of difficulty, you may still find the computer mindlessly sending its forces into your kill zones. It should still make for a worthy opponent, however, due to its ability to quickly muster its forces and its tendency to occasionally surprise you. Of course, online play is really where the action is, and Generals lets you easily get into an online match and start racking up wins. A quick-play feature lets you jump into a match against similarly ranked opponents, though the game unfortunately forces you to play in 800x600 resolution to use this option. You can still set up or join a custom match, and the game includes a good number of maps for two to eight players that are suitable both for skirmish and multiplayer. Plus, there's a ""world builder"" utility available for making your own maps, though it's undocumented and allegedly still in beta.   Generals looks really, really good, though you'll need a system that meets or exceeds the game's recommended requirements to get it to run smoothly. White-hot pyrotechnics and outstanding particle effects make for what are probably the best explosions of any real-time strategy game to date, and you'll see no shortage of explosions during the typical Generals match. The other effects and animations are also great, such as when a pack of unlucky infantry is sent flying like so many rag dolls by a nearby blast. The game's terrain graphics are superb, and all in all, it's easy to forget that this is the first-ever fully 3D Command & Conquer RTS, since it looks so good. Those without recent systems will probably have to tone down the graphics options to keep the frame rate from chugging, but even so, they'll be treated to the best-looking C&C game yet.  The GLA needs to use hit-and-run tactics against the brute strength of the Chinese.  Meanwhile, the game's audio is a suitably remarkable counterpart to its graphics. In another departure for C&C, Generals is the first game in the series to feature musical themes exclusive to the playable factions. Previous C&C games have used a catchy techno score regardless of who was doing the fighting. In Generals, the USA's campaign is accompanied by a number of triumphant military marches, while China and the GLA have musical themes that establish their respective Eastern and Middle Eastern origins, yet also come off sounding grand and cinematic. Otherwise, you'll mostly just hear countless types of booming explosions while playing the game. The three factions' units all speak in English, though the Chinese and GLA units have stereotypical accents that fit well with the game's less-than-serious sensibility.   It may not take itself seriously, but Command & Conquer: Generals is still a very well-designed real-time strategy game, and it's unquestionably one of the strongest entries in the series yet. It's totally first-rate from a technical standpoint, and it's an all-around fun game to play on top of that, with excellent pacing, great explosions, clever strategic twists, a variety of units, and a fair amount of humor. It takes a few liberties with some of the franchise's conventions, but the core gameplay of Generals is still very much in the spirit of Command & Conquer, and that's truly the best thing about it.


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691,Mario Power Tennis ,8.9," This is hands down the single best GameCube tennis offering, and it's also one of the most enjoyable tennis video games around.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/8/2/2216582-box_mpt.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mario-power-tennis-review/1900-6112827/,pos,"
 Mario Power Tennis is a fantastic example of Nintendo in top form. Here's an offering with brightly colored visuals and cheery music. It is, in a word, adorable. But under this gingerbread exterior lies a deep and challenging game of tennis. It certainly takes some liberties with the sport--because the last time we checked, you weren't allowed to bring giant hammers or jetpacks onto the court--but these twists definitely keep things interesting and are intrinsic to the goofy, character-driven style of the Mario name. No matter how you look at it, though, this is hands down the single best GameCube tennis offering, and it's also one of the most enjoyable tennis video games around.  The intuitive yet deep controls of Mario Power Tennis are what truly make it great.  The game is incredibly easy to pick up and play, especially if you've already been playing Top Spin, Virtua Tennis, or the original Mario Tennis for the N64. It's pretty much self-explanatory. You move your character around with the stick, and then you hit the big green button when you want to take a swing at the ball. There is, of course, a lot more to the action, and just a few minutes with the game begins to reveal how nuanced and deep the gameplay can get. You can influence the direction of your shot by leaning the stick in that direction just before you swing, and you can increase the power of your shot by double-tapping the button. Hitting the A button gives you a standard topspin shot, while the B button produces a lower-flying slice shot. You can also execute high-flying lobs and short-stopping drop shots by hitting A and then B, or B and then A, respectively, in quick succession. In the event that your opponent knocks a weak, high shot on to your side of the court, a star outline will appear. If you can position yourself inside the star and hit A and B at the same time quickly enough, you'll perform a smash shot that is very, very difficult to return.  Because of the wild visuals and some of the insane mechanics the game adds to the mix, the great lengths Mario Power Tennis goes to in making its fundamental tennis mechanics incredibly realistic are not immediately obvious. The power of your shots is affected by your position relative to the ball, the ball's height, and the direction in which you're going when you strike the ball. Each character also has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses, which makes who you choose to play with almost as important as how you play.  And on top of this core gameplay, developer Camelot has added some really wild mechanics that let the game earn its Mario name. Each character is outfitted with a pair of unique supermoves, one offensive and one defensive. Though the actual animation routine each character goes through is different, the defensive move always serves the purpose of saving a shot that you're too far removed from to hit. The offensive supermoves, however, offer a bit more variety. Some characters just put a lot of power behind their swings, making their shots very difficult to return. However, even if you do happen to be at the right place at the right time and can effectively make contact with the ball, its momentum will knock you back, hard, and leave you slightly stunned for a bit. Other characters can impart wicked spins on their shots, making their struck balls' trajectories arc dramatically, in addition to making it incredibly difficult to predict where these struck balls will land and how they will subsequently bounce.  These supermoves add an extra level of strategy to the gameplay, and they add a ton of personality to it as well. However, each time you activate one, you're forced to watch a little canned animation sequence. They're all bizarre and funny the first few times through, but eventually you become aware of how dramatically these minicutscenes affect the pacing of the game. If you're looking for more cut-and-dried tennis, you can choose to turn off these moves altogether, but it would have been nice if you could just skip past the animations and keep the wild moves.  The gimmick courts do an impressive job of turning the game of tennis on its head.  As if these supermoves weren't enough, the game also contains a collection of ""gimmick courts,"" each of which adds its own unique spin to the gameplay. Take the Luigi's Mansion court, for instance. As you play, ghosts will begin to haunt the court, tripping up players by placing banana peels under their feet. To keep the ghosts at bay, you'll have to hit the ball to a specific area of your opponent's side of the court, which will turn on the lights on your side and scare away the ghosts. There's also the Wario Factory court, where a set of directional arrows sit atop the net. Any time you knock the ball through one of the arrows, it causes the mesh of conveyor belts that make up the court surface to start moving. The gimmick court we found to be the most technically challenging was the Gooper Blooper court. Built right over a body of water, the Gooper Blooper court surface is constructed of panels with arrows on them, and when the ball lands on a panel, it causes that panel to move in the direction of the arrow, which either expands the size of your opponent's court or shrinks it, thus exposing the water beneath it. This doesn't limit your opponent's ability to move about, but rather, it limits the area that you can legally hit the ball to.  Tennis video game players may already be used to having to account for playing surfaces, such as those made of clay, grass, hard court material, and indoor turf, but the gimmick courts in Mario Power Tennis raise the stakes substantially with regard to the impact of playing surfaces on overall gameplay. Occasionally, the gimmick courts can get a little too busy, like on Luigi's Mansion court, but in general, they're fantastic at keeping the action fresh and fun. So are the game's various modes of play.   Mario Power Tennis is broken up into a few different modes. Like all exhibition modes, the exhibition mode here lets you choose your player, your opponent, and your court for one match. The tournament mode is split between matches on regular surfaces and matches on gimmick courts, and both feature a standard ladder-style advancement system. Winning tournaments can unlock new characters, new courts, and new gameplay styles for the exhibition mode. If even the gimmick courts are too much like straight tennis for you, Mario Power Tennis also includes a suite of tennis-themed minigames, some of which will probably feel pretty familiar if you've played any of the Virtua Tennis offerings before. ""Artist on the Court"" lobs special paintballs at you and challenges you to knock them onto the appropriate areas of an uncolored picture that's sitting where the net would usually be. ""Terror Tennis"" presents you with a wall of ghostly portraits on the opposite end of the court that you have to keep in line by lobbing balls at any of the ghosts that start moving around. There are only five of these minigames to begin with, but tournament wins can unlock several more.  The controls and the difficulty of the AI scales nicely for a wide range of player skill levels.  Mario Power Tennis includes several different control types that are tuned to different skill levels, which deliberately ensures that no player is left behind. The beginner control scheme automatically handles everything other than movement and swinging at the ball, while the intermediate difficulty requires you to hit a button to activate your supermove. However, it will automatically choose the appropriate one depending on your distance from the ball. Finally, the most advanced mode makes you do everything by hand. Similarly, the artificial intelligence in the exhibition mode can be adjusted pretty extensively. If you've played a lot of tennis games, you may find the AI in the standard tournament to be a bit too forgiving for most of the matches. Our experience was that, though the AI was getting marginally better as we progressed, it was still barely able to score a single point on us. Then, at the end of the third tournament, the computer suddenly became an overpowered tennis savant that shut us out round after round. This sudden and significant shift in difficulty can be jarring, but it's not insurmountable. So if you find it too frustrating, you've got a good reason to check out the included collection of skill-honing minigames.  One of the most attractive points of Mario Power Tennis is that just about every mode can be played with four players. Whether it's a full doubles match or one of the crazy minigame challenges, Mario Power Tennis is an incredibly attractive package for those looking to kill some time with friends. The quick pacing and variety of gameplay styles mean that a group of four can play for five minutes or an hour and still come away with a great experience either way.  The game backs up its rock-solid gameplay with great visuals that are crisp, colorful, and technically sharp. Most importantly, though, the entire experience is absolutely brimming with personality. Even the basic grass and clay courts are set in massive, colorful stadiums that brim with piantas and koopas, all while a lakitu plays the role of chair umpire. But it's the gimmick courts that really stand out, because they do a fantastic job of recalling other Mario-related games. The Luigi's Mansion court has the same eerie green glow and strangely translucent ghosts, and the mansion itself sits ominously in the background. Piranha plants spit that nasty brown sludge (which is the stuff you had to clean up in Super Mario Sunshine) all over the otherwise sunny Delfino Plaza court. As for the character models, we don't feel bold in saying that these are some of the most detailed, sharpest-looking, and most well-animated versions of many of these characters to date. You might not always be able to tell when the camera is pulled way back, but when the camera zooms in for instant replays, it's downright impressive to look at them.  Mario Power Tennis is a great-looking tennis game with a lot of personality.  Nintendo has always kept the characters within the Mario universe from getting too chatty, which is why all the speech in Mario Power Tennis is a bit surprising. Don't expect any actual dialogue, but everyone has a nice set of suitable grunts and shouts that he or she will emit when on the court. Additionally, everyone has a few nice little lines he or she will spit out when a match is won or lost. The music is otherwise what you would expect, with lots of nice interpolations of Mario standards, though the game doesn't fall back on some of the basic Mario themes as often as you might anticipate. In all, though, the whole sound design backs up the generally fun and cheery feel of the action.  If you think that you're too cool for brightly colored visuals and cheery music, get over yourself. Yes, Nintendo may be making a concerted effort to appeal to a younger audience with its aesthetics, but it hasn't forgotten about adults, either. Mario Power Tennis is a shining example of Nintendo's ""family gaming"" philosophy. It's such an expertly crafted, well-rounded package that it goes well beyond appealing to just Nintendo fans or to just tennis fans. Instead, it's a suitable game for players of all shapes and sizes. 


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692,Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge ,8.9, The awesome online mode and strong single-player segment combine to make Crimson Skies an easy game to recommend.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/3/5/5/2215355-box_cskieshrtr.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crimson-skies-high-road-to-revenge-review/1900-6077239/,pos,"
 While Xbox Live launched alongside several solid online games, the one that really stood out as a winner, almost immediately, was Microsoft's giant robot shooter, MechAssault. The hot action, combined with some nice mode selections (which were only enhanced over time as downloadable content was released) made the game a smash hit. Now, nearly one year later, Microsoft is in the position of doing what it can to keep the service's initial subscribers onboard for another year of Xbox Live. So what better way to do it than with another great online shooter? Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge takes the hot action to the skies for some furious dogfighting, and it does so with the same brand of pick-up-and-play as MechAssault. However, Crimson Skies does it at an even faster, more exciting pace, and does so without sacrificing the quality of the single-player game.  The game is the same sort of mission-based flight simulator that you'd expect from a Wing Commander or Star Wars Rogue Squadron game.  While playing the game online almost makes the single-player seem insignificant by comparison, the game's single-player campaign is very well done. The game is the same sort of mission-based flight simulator that you'd expect from a Wing Commander or Star Wars Rogue Squadron, but its structure and design is a bit different--and better. When it comes to this sort of mission-driven simulator, one level-type almost always brings the game to a halt: the defense/escort mission. Let's face the facts. Defending a large, sitting duck of a capital ship simply isn't as much fun as raiding enemy encampments or dogfighting with smaller targets. Crimson Skies has its fair share of defense missions, where you'll be protecting zeppelins or encampments from incoming attackers, but the game handles these missions pretty well. Rather than requiring you to baby-sit your zeppelin to prevent it from exploding, the targets you're defending tend to be fairly tough. Therefore they can stand up to some punishment, allowing you to go off and dogfight against enemy planes without having to always keep both eyes on your prize. Though these missions still aren't quite as fun as, say, the level where you man the gun turret on a moving truck and blow planes out of the sky while also destroying several airplane hangars, this slightly easier take on the formula really makes all the difference in the world, and it prevents you from having to meticulously play the game's escort missions to proceed.  The campaign is broken up into areas, and you'll often have more than one mission at your disposal, though only one path of missions takes you to the game's next plot point; the rest are just for show, letting you collect money that can be used for repairs or upgrades to your planes. The game's story takes place in an alternate version of the 1930s that saw the nation's railroads torn apart by wars between fiefdoms that run what's left of North America. With no railways to transport goods, society turns to the air, and large zeppelins are now used to move things from one place to another. This opens up the world to air piracy, and you play a pilot named Nathan Zachary, a smooth-talking Indiana Jones-type who leads a ragtag group of freelancers known as the ""Fortune Hunters."" After an opening cutscene in which Nathan steals back the plane he lost in a drunken poker game the previous evening, the game gets under way. The single-player campaign is of average length, clocking in at around 10 hours, but the game's optional missions and plane upgrades keep it interesting and fun.  Regardless of what mode you're playing, flying planes is already fun. The control is pretty streamlined, making it easy to learn, but there's definitely some depth to its gameplay. You can control your speed, to a certain extent, and you can also perform evasive maneuvers, like rolls and Immelman turns, with the right analog stick. Boosting your speed and performing stunts both drain your special meter, but it recharges quickly when it's not in use. You have a primary gun, with unlimited ammo, and a secondary weapon, with limited ammo, at your disposal, and some of the game's machines give you the ability to zoom in for a better shot. The game has a good collection of different planes. You can pick from them right off the bat in multiplayer, while in single-player you'll only be given the option to fly a plane, at will, once you've discovered it in one of the levels. You start out in a pretty strong plane, known as the devastator, but you'll earn the ability to fly plenty of other planes with a variety of machine guns, rockets, and railgun-style sniper shots. You'll even gain access to a gyrocopter that can stop completely in midair, which makes lining up those sniper shots a bit easier--at the expense of making you an extremely easy target.  As cool as the game's single-player section is, the online mode is where the real action is at. Up to 16 players can compete in six different games on five different multiplayer maps. Dogfight and team dogfight are simple shoot-'em-ups. Keep away is also available as a solo or team affair, and it works as a king of the hill game, where one player or team must collect and hold an item for a specified amount of time. Flag heist is your basic game of capture the flag, while wild chicken has the players chasing down a flying chicken for bonus points--in addition to trying to shoot each other out of the sky. Though standard free-for-alls are exciting, the capture-the-flag mode is the one that feels like it has the most depth. The game also has support for downloadable content. Though nothing is available at this time, it's pretty safe to assume that we'll eventually see more maps and/or modes added to the game.  The game works very well online, and though you may notice a slight lag between the time you touch an item and the time the game registers you as having picked that item up, this doesn't happen on every server and doesn't get in the way of the action at all. Crimson Skies contains all of the player-matching features you've come to expect from an Xbox Live game. It also lets you play along with one guest on your system in a split-screen, and it keeps a good ranking list that lets you know where you stand against the rest of the world's flyboys and girls. If online action isn't your bag, the game also has system link support and four-player split-screen capabilities, though, this form of multiplayer isn't necessarily as exciting or convenient.  Backing up all this great action is a fantastic graphical presentation. The game gives you a good, long draw distance, allowing you to see incoming planes from pretty far away. Additionally, the game gives you a good look at the lay of the land. The texture work is well done, and the plane models are just plain cool. This is especially true of the devastator, which looks like a biplane but has its propeller in the rear. The weapons look nice, particularly as bullets are flying through the air, but it's the damage they do to their targets that makes them so impressive. The planes break up very nicely, as they're shot to pieces and set ablaze, and the explosions that finally send them down look really great. Smoke pours off of damaged planes, giving you an easy path to follow when you're tracking down an enemy. All the while, the game runs at a slick frame rate that keeps the action moving at a speedy pace. Owners of high-end TVs will find 480p support waiting for them.  As cool as the game's single-player section is, the online mode is where the real action is at.  The game's great music, along with Nathan Zachary's confident, lady-killing charm, gives the game a nice atmosphere that flies in the same airspace as the Indiana Jones series. That atmosphere is compounded and enhanced by the game's strong voice acting, which benefits from a well-written script. The game's sound, which supports Dolby Digital 5.1, really adds to the experience. The combat sounds great, and the planes all have individual engine sounds, but the little touches, like the way you hear air rushing past as you swoop around at regular speed, are what really drive the point home.  The awesome online mode and strong single-player segment combine to make Crimson Skies an easy game to recommend to Xbox Live subscribers, and the enclosed two-month free trial lets nonsubscribers give it a shot--free of charge. While it would certainly have been nice to see more multiplayer maps--right off the bat--the five levels and different modes included provide hours of excitement. If you needed to find a reason to stay connected to Xbox Live for another 12 months, look no further.  


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693,Gran Turismo 4 ,8.9," When GT4 works to its strengths, it delivers like few games of this console generation.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/7/2/9/2217729-box_gt4.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gran-turismo-4-review/1900-6118988/,pos,"
  Not many game series can be referred to as genre-defining, but in the world of console racing games, Gran Turismo fits the bill. Since 1998, the GT series has aimed to bring the vivid world of auto enthusiasm to your PlayStation and PlayStation 2 through a combination of realistic driving physics, massive car rosters aimed at pleasing the obsessive collectors in all of us, and courses from around the world, all topped off with state-of-the-art graphics and sound presentation that's redefined the technical capabilities of the console each title has appeared on. With the fourth installment in the series, the aptly named Gran Turismo 4, we find the franchise at the peak of its quantitative powers in a game that makes superlatives such as ""big"" and ""sprawling"" seem somehow inadequate. Yet beneath all the considerable content, Gran Turismo 4 remains remarkably similar to previous iterations in the series, which, depending on your point of view, may or may not be a good thing.   If you can't find your car here, chances are it's because your car sucks.   Gran Turismo 4 features more than 700 cars from more than 80 manufacturers. As you might expect, the lineup leans heavily toward American, Japanese, British, and German makes, though you'll also have access to cars from Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Korea, among other countries. This variety is not simply limited to country of origin, however. The cars found in GT 4 range not only in their power and prestige, but also in their ages. The game features cars from every major era of auto manufacturing: from 1960s muscle cars, to powerful Japanese turbo machines of the mid '90s, to one-off concept cars that won't see city asphalt for 10 years or more, to examples from the very dawn of the auto era (such as the Ford Model T and the Daimler Motor Carriage from 1886).    While the game's roster is impressive both in its size and scope, it must be said that a good portion of the cars, such as the aforementioned Daimler, won't be of much use to you in terms of progressing in the game. Indeed, as you move through the career mode, known as Gran Turismo mode, you'll quickly find your garage piling up with cars from race and series wins; their only value to you will be as resells. On the plus side, a dramatically improved garage interface will let you quickly and easily sort through your car collection, no matter how large that collection becomes. Sorting through criteria such as country of origin, drivetrain, manufacturer, or power-to-weight ratio is a huge improvement from scrolling down an ever-elongating list while hoping to spot your car of choice based on model alone, as was the case in previous GTs.    The available cars, of course, are only part of the attraction of GT4. The game also features more than 50 courses to drive, including a tantalizing mix of real-life racetracks such as Fuji Speedway, Suzuka, and Laguna Seca; a cosmopolitan array of city courses from metropolises such as Hong Kong, Seoul, and the Big Apple; rally courses on dirt and (new for this installment) snow and ice; and old fictional friends such as Grand Valley Speedway, Deep Forest Raceway, and Trial Mountain. Two particularly notable additions to the GT4 track roster are El Capitan, a three-mile behemoth designed around the imposing granite centerpiece of Yosemite National Park, and the Nürburgring Nordschliefe, which, at nearly 13 miles long, is imposing in its own right. The Circuit de la Sarthe, the annual site of the 24 Hour of LeMans race, makes an appearance in two flavors: the current track and the old configuration, which is thankfully free of the chicanes that currently mar the four-mile back straight.   Detailed car models, gorgeous lighting, and an intense sense of speed... GT4 is the new PS2 standard-bearer for graphics.   Beyond these impressive stats, the first thing any casual fan of the GT series notices are the graphics. The earlier GT games defined the technical reach of the PlayStation across two consoles, and this reach extends here. Car models look fantastic, and though only six cars are on-track at any time, the game suffers zero slowdown, even when things pile up in the corners or during drastic elevation changes. Lighting effects that were impressive in Gran Turismo 3 are stunning in GT4, both in terms of technical achievement (such as in the real-time reflections on car doors) and artistic aesthetic (the luminous George Paris street track or the neon-drenched section of the Hong Kong city course). The game only features three points of view when driving--and there is no cockpit view--but a tangible sense of speed is conveyed by all three angles.     Small graphical touches this time around include 3D crowd models, which are most noticeable during the rally stages. Spectators will run out on the course to take pictures of your oncoming vehicle. Then they'll scurry out of the way at the last moment. Meanwhile, throngs of spectators will back up en masse as you speed by them on the dirt tracks. Though you can't hit these pedestrians, their collective presence on the courses adds a nice feeling of danger and claustrophobia to the rally stages. On the downside, an invisible barrier pervades the perimeter of many of the courses, which detracts from an overall feeling of immersion. As a result, it's impossible to careen off a cliff at the Grand Canyon, for example. In the absence of a damage model, GT4 now incorporates a blur effect when smacking into opponents or stationary objects. It's similar to the effect found in Colin McRae Rally 2005, but it doesn't last as long. Also, while the game supports both 480p and even 1080i resolution, its implementation does not prevent a few jaggies or blurring effects from appearing during replays.      The two main modes in GT4 are arcade (where you can enter single races, time trials, two-player battles, or LAN races for up to five other competitors) and the aforementioned Gran Turismo mode (where you'll spend your time earning credits, buying, selling, and upgrading your stable of cars, as well as participating in series races from locales all over the world). The career mode is built around a map that will be familiar to anyone who's played the series in the past. New car manufacturers are organized by country of origin, though with the measly 10,000 credits you start out with, a new car capable of winning a race may be a bit out of your price range. Players with a save file from Gran Turismo 3 A-spec will be in luck, however, as GT4 gives you the option to transfer up to 100,000 credits to your GT4 career, as well as your A and B racing licenses. If you don't have access to this kind of cash, however, you'll be stuck hitting one of the two used-car showrooms, where you'll be able to find a variety of cars from throughout the 1990s. If you're looking to go back further in time, a historic showroom will give you access to ""classics"" from the '70s and '80s.   Take a break from the stressful license tests by knocking down cones arranged to look like the Dreamcast logo.   While a handful of races have no license restrictions, if you wish to move beyond used cars and an empty bank account, you'll need to earn a real racing license. Love them or hate them, the license tests return, and in GT4, the tests encompass many of the new features found in the game. There are five licenses to earn, and the tests include things like simple acceleration and braking, tackling complex sequences of corners, and hot laps on courses from throughout the game. The license tests also include a couple of new wrinkles. For one, you'll be racing behind a pace car on some of the hot-lap challenges, during which you are not allowed to pass or hit the pace car. While passing the pace car is a difficult task, it's by no means impossible, especially when heavily braking in approaches to hairpin corners.     The other new facet to the license test is the coffee break, a lighthearted romp that usually involves either knocking down or avoiding orange traffic cones (mercifully, there is not a time limit) to earn a bronze medal (though silver and gold will require some speed). The ante is upped considerably in GT4's ""super license"" tests, because one simple mistake resulting in going off-track will lead to a failure, which is a harrowing thought when tackling a single lap at the Nürburgring, a track that comprises more than 170 turns. Lastly, because snow and ice racing is now part of the Gran Turismo track equation, you'll encounter several snowy, slippery license test courses, including a supremely challenging super license test that will evaluate either the upper limits of your driving skills or your patience.     Once you've earned all your licenses, you'll want to begin earning real money. The easiest way to do so is by winning races. Race series are organized in individual halls on the main map (such as the beginners hall, the professional hall, and more) or by country of origin (the Japanese hall, European hall, or American hall). Each hall comprises a number of different series that further comprise a number of individual races. Each race has a set of requirements that must be met to gain entry. These can range from country of origin restrictions to drivetrain requirements to specifications on horsepower or car length. If you're new to the GT series or new to cars in general, this might be a bit overwhelming. Luckily, each race spells out in detail what specifications are required for it, sometimes going so far as to list the types of cars that are eligible. Enter a screen where you aren't eligible, and the relevant requirements will flash red, alerting you to go back and change cars.   Most of GT4's menus have been dramatically improved and reorganized.   Before lining up for the starting grid, you'll be able to make adjustments to your car's setup through an interface that, much like the home garage, has received a much-needed makeover. Parts are organized by relevant sections of the car, and pulldown menus let you quickly and easily switch out parts on the fly. If you're looking to do some fine-tuning of your car's setup, you can click on the wrench icon next to selected parts to tweak to your heart's content, though it should be noted that on most stock cars, you won't be able to adjust things like ride height, gear ratios, and brake balance without first purchasing the customizable parts at your local car shop. The availability of these components depends on the make and model of your car, so you won't be able to fit turbo upgrades on every car in the game, for example.    Once your car is configured to your liking, it's time to hit the track. Here--where the rubber meets the road--is where Gran Turismo's brilliant strengths and most glaring flaws lie. On the positive side, the fourth iteration of GT captures the feel of tires gripping pavement like no other game in the business. Every in-car aspect of sensory input is carefully designed to provide the illusion that you are actually screaming down the streets of Paris or perilously teetering over the edge of a Grand Canyon cliff. From a driving standpoint, Gran Turismo 4 is in a class by itself, with rollicking, rocking physics that accurately convey a sense of weight and shifting balance on all four points of the driving surface. So convincing, in fact, is the sense of realism that you'll find yourself cocking your head in enthusiastic sympathy as you barrel your way around corners or up blind hills. There are too many highlights to list them all, but notable physics high points are the corkscrew at Laguna Seca, which wrenches your car from an uphill struggle immediately into a dramatic downhill drop-off combined with a dramatic left-right swing; the back straight at Circuit de la Sarthe, where, as your car approaches top speed, it loses adhesion to the tarmac and begins literally skipping horizontally across the width of the road; and, of course, the maddeningly accurate snow and ice courses, which require entirely new approaches to driving to succeed.    Naturally, there's more to the illusion of a great driving model than a car that simply rocks back and forth on its springs. Your ears need to be convinced as well. While GT4's musical soundtrack leaves something to be desired, the masterful score of tire squeals and engine whinnies makes up for it. Tire noise, in particular, is more prevalent than ever before in GT4, especially on high-performance machines. As an early warning system for adhesion loss, the squeal of rubber is nearly as important a driving input as the motion of the car itself. Sure, you drive with your hands and eyes, but the driver who gets his ears into the mix as well will benefit. The set of individual car engine noises, individually recorded from the cars themselves, have always been a highlight of the GT series for auto enthusiasts, and the same is true here in GT4. The menacing guttural roar of a 1970 Plymouth Super Bird is in stark contrast to the two-toned midrange groan of a Mini Cooper S, yet both sound utterly distinct and convincing. You'll also be keenly aware of any draft you pick up from a car ahead of you, as the violent whip of wind across the body of your car will diminish to utter silence as you enter your opponent's wake. Perhaps the only room for meaningful improvement here would be in the use of more transmission sounds, especially in high-performance cars, as well as in the sounds of underside scraping during particularly violent landings off jumps.   GT4's car roster reaches all the way back to the dawn of the automobile industry.   Controlling your car in GT4 is a pleasure, whether using the Dual Shock controller or a racing wheel. The cars are instantly responsive to even the slightest input from the controller, and if you're lucky enough to have a great racing wheel--such as the designed-for-GT Logitech Force Pro--you'll experience some of the greatest and most immersive driving thrills to be found on the PS2. Force feedback on the Logitech Force Pro is effective at conveying every imperfection and undulation on the asphalt, but the vibration support for the Dual Shock controller is surprisingly sensitive as well.     Though the driving model in GT4 is exceptionally executed, as it should be in a game that bills itself as ""The Real Driving Simulator,"" that same level of detail and excellence doesn't always apply to the racing portions. While it is true that the further you progress, the tougher the races become, the simple fact is there are several shady methods to winning races, and not all of them involve being the best driver on the track. Techniques such as cutting across chicanes on Fuji Speedway or diving through the corkscrew at Laguna Seca are natural and obvious examples. After all, there's no time penalty for going off-course, and no damage is done if you misjudge the 'screw and slam into a wall. So what's the harm?    Bumper car racing, so called because you use the artificially intelligent opponent cars as ""bumpers"" to scrub off speed and help position your car around tight turns, is alive and well in GT4. Heading too fast into right-hand turn one at Tokyo Route 246? Simply dive to the inside of the car in front of you, and watch in amazement as you not only make it around the curve unscathed, but also likely gain a position doing so.     Unlike real competitors, your opponents in GT4 won't get upset at your underhanded style; in fact, they may just pull a few dirty tricks of their own as they make their ways around the track. For one thing, the opponents in GT4 are practically oblivious to your presence on the track, routinely ramming you from behind without making the slightest attempt to get around you cleanly. And while opponent cars don't seem preset to specific racing lines--we've seen them go wide on turns, misjudge braking distances, and even spin off-track completely--they are ruthlessly determined to holding whatever lines they currently possess, much to the detriment of everyone else on the road.   If you want the maximum from your car, be prepared to spend the maximum amount of cash.   If you want to make money, you've got to spend money...or so the old axiom goes. That is no truer than in GT4, where you'll be spending loads of credits to improve your cars with the latest and greatest upgrades. While many of the races have minimum restrictions to meet for entry, very few have maximum restrictions for things like horsepower. What this means in practical purposes is that if you want to win a good portion of the early races in GT4, all you have to do is build a car powerful enough to leave the competition in your dust. By using this ""might makes right"" approach, you'll be winning with ease practically from the outset, but you, perhaps, won't have much fun while doing so. In later championship series races, the difficulty level ramps up considerably, but not in the form of improved driving AI. Rather, the motorized playing field is leveled off because most of the cars are at the upper limits of performance.    If you're tired of running laps, or just have achy thumbs, the inclusion of GT4's B-spec mode might be an interesting diversion. B-spec mode puts you in the role of a race manager, radioing instructions to your driver on the course. As a manager, you'll be able to give instructions on pace (speed up or slow down), when to attempt an overtaking maneuver, and when to come in for a pit stop. And that's pretty much it. Sure, you're also able to change the point of view from first to third person, and you can check out a handy race management screen that gives you sector times, distance between each opponent, and a track map, but the simple fact is you won't feel very engaged in B-spec mode, especially when compared to the thrilling sense of speed and ""place"" GT4's A-spec mode provides. As anything other than a hands-off approach to GT4's longer races (or an easy way to make some quick credits while keeping the television off), B-spec mode doesn't have what it takes, and by taking you out of the car, it's more akin to a pacifist mode in a fighting game or a flight sim during which you only get to play as a flight attendant.      Fans of the GT series are probably not all that surprised at news of a sublime driving engine and a less-than-sporting racing model. The best racing found in GT4 is dependent on two things: a grid full of similarly powered cars and continual diligence, on your part, to maintain a clean race. The game lets you take advantage of both during a race, but it also suffers because of it. When you consider how long the series has been around and how much time Polyphony Digital takes between entries in the GT series, it's amazing how far the game has come from graphical and presentational standpoints, but it's simultaneously amazing how little the series has evolved in areas such as racing, damage modeling, and online support.    Speaking of online support, it's a well-known fact that Gran Turismo 4 does not include the kind of online racing capabilities that most console racing games boast. It's disappointing, to be sure, but GT4 tries to make up for that omission with the inclusion of multiplayer support for up to six players via LAN. But that doesn't quite fill the gap. If you're going to attempt to play over a LAN, you should know that the LAN setup menu is not very user-friendly, and the manual is of absolutely zero help. Most modern racing games have online modes these days, and the absence of one here really sticks out.   The photo mode will foster your artistic side with photo-realistic backgrounds from around the world.   Beyond the scintillating driving model, one of the very best aspects of GT4 is the sheer amount of stuff to do in the game. In addition to driving scores of realistic cars in hundreds of races across any number of thrilling environments and conditions, GT4 is packed to the bits with a host of surrounding minimodes and features that go a long way toward creating a sense of GT lifestyle in the career mode. The photo travel mode, for example, is a fun, flexible feature that lets you place the ride of your choice in a number of photo-realistic locales, from Boston's Beacon Hill to the Las Vegas strip. You can also snap a picture or two and then save your best pictures to your PS2 memory card. While there are a lot of options for lens types, camera angles, and picture quality, you're only allowed to move the camera or car within a predetermined area. It can be a bit stifling at first, working within these constraints, but with a bit of practice, you can snap some truly impressive-looking photos. If you've got an Epson USB printer handy, you can even print your photos out and mail them to friends, who may wonder just how and when you were able to buy a Mercedes SLR McLaren and photograph it from Nanzenji Temple in Japan.     The game also features a driving mission mode where you'll need to meet specific challenges, such as passing an opponent in a particular section of track, mastering the drafting feature, or tackling three-lap races against a full field of opponents. To further customize your ride, you can travel over to the GT auto shop, where you can choose from a plethora of custom wheels and wings and then give your car an oil change or car wash before your next big race.    The Gran Turismo series is famous for its replay modes, which (even back in the PlayStation days) are visually impressive. GT4's replay mode has two modes on offer: standard, which features a variety of camera angles and cool background music, and dive, which packs on the filters and MTV-style cuts to add a truly dramatic flair. There's also a photo drive mode, which lets you take action shots of your car on any track in the game using the replay feature. Another cool use of the replay mode is the lap analyzer feature, which lets you compare car performance attributes, such as speed, braking, and acceleration, over multiple laps on a single course. If you're looking to directly compare the merits of two cars on the same track, you can load another lap time from a saved ghost replay in this mode to analyze the results.     Despite the plethora of GT features, or perhaps because of them, it's worth mentioning the load times, which can be ugly and plentiful. Be prepared to spend a large chunk of your GT4 time staring at a mostly blank, black screen while waiting for menus, analysis windows, and replays to appear...or for races to begin. Another annoying aspect is the long prerace animations that run during rolling starts. These could easily be trimmed by five seconds or more to get you to the racing action right away.   A sweet new car demands some sweet new wheels.   The soundtrack in GT4 is sort of all over the place, as it always has been. There are moments of brilliance, such as the Bootsy Collins' ""Let's Roll"" or Joe Satriani's ""Summer Song,"" alongside less effective tunes, such as Judas Priest's ""Free Wheel Burning,"" which almost rocks too hard for its own good. The crown jewel in this soundtrack has to be Van Halen's ""Panama,"" a tune used to brilliant effect in the opening movie and one that remains a thrill to hear each time it appears in-game. A nice customization feature in GT4 gives you the ability to add or remove songs from your playlist, so if the Priest is rocking you too hard during another lap at Motegi, you can remove it for your next go-around. The menu music in GT4 is the standard up-tempo piano-tinged smooth jazz that has become a standard of the series. It's neither annoying enough to turn off when the game is on in the background nor catchy enough to be remembered after you've ended your play session.    Gran Turismo 4 arrives as a game operating under heavy expectations, if only because each installment in the series has been such an epic event. Despite its numerous delays and some notable feature omissions, GT4 is a game that will keep enthusiasts busy for months. And due to its upgraded presentation, it will likely win some new fans as well. Though it suffers from a curious lack of evolution in terms of some of its central aspects, most notably its racing AI, when GT4 works to its strengths, it delivers like few games of this console generation.  


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694,WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth ,8.9," If you're even a casual fan of the WWE, you can't go wrong with SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/1/3/2212613-box_wwesdsym.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwe-smackdown-shut-your-mouth-review/1900-2897046/,pos,"
Nearly every aspect of the SmackDown! series has been improved in its latest iteration, WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth. The revamped season mode lets you take an untested wrestler through the ranks of the WWE while reliving key events that have transpired over the past year, such as the co-ownership storyline between Vince McMahon and Ric Flair and the reintroduction of the NWO. Moreover, the series' gameplay has also been drastically improved for Shut Your Mouth, with a reversal system that requires precise timing and some guesswork and smoother overall wrestling mechanics that place more emphasis on grappling than any previous game in the series. To make the overall package even more enticing for wrestling fans, the game's developer, Yuke's, has added an incredibly robust create-a-wrestler mode that allows you to customize nearly every physical aspect of a created wrestler, on down to his or her animation.  Shut Your Mouth includes dozens of options to choose from.  Of course, SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth continues the tradition of offering numerous different match types. The exhibition mode features the basic single and tag team matches, as well as the six man tag, handicap, royal rumble, king of the ring, hardcore, special, and survival options. The hardcore matches are particularly entertaining, as they can take place in a variety of different locations around the arena, such as the locker room, the VIP room, the parking lot, the rotunda, or the sidewalks outside, where traffic steadily flows by as you pummel your opponent. But if you're feeling even more adventurous than that, you can also bring the fight into a subway station complete with operating trains, inside the WWE restaurant known as The World, or into the streets of Times Square. You can choose to start a hardcore match in any of these locations, but what makes this mode especially entertaining is the fact that all these areas are connected, so you can travel between them over the course of the match. Almost all these areas contain plenty of weapons to use on your opponent, including steel chairs, foam hands, rattan canes, and even functional fire extinguishers. It's also worth noting that the royal rumble in SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth comes closer to resembling the actual event by starting it with only two wrestlers and then having an additional wrestler come in every 15 seconds or so (to keep the action brisk), although the game can only support up to six wrestlers in the ring at once.   In any case, each of these match types can be configured in a number of ways. For example, you can choose to add a tornado tag, tornado six-man tag, triple threat, fatal four way, or time limit dimension to any hardcore match. Likewise, if you select the survival match, you can change it into a four-, five-, or six-man battle royal. Some of the other match types have more basic secondary options, such as the single match, which only allows you to decide if you want to walk out with a manger or not. Most of these matches will keep you busy, but those looking for some of the more bizarre WWE match types won't be disappointed to find that there are plenty of those as well.   The exhibition mode's special option features matches that are essentially based on gimmicks. You can test your wrestling skills in steel cage, elimination, hell in a cell, I quit, ironman, ladder, last man standing, lumberjack, slobber knocker, special referee, street fight, submission, table, three stages of hell, and TLC (tables, ladders, and chairs) matches. The ladder and TLC matches are perhaps the most entertaining of all the options in the special match menu, simply because they can be so chaotic and tense. The object of these matches is to grab a belt that has been suspended from the ceiling. When you see an opponent climbing the ladder and reaching for the belt, you can either try to knock the ladder down or meet that wrestler at the top of the ladder to prevent him or her from snatching it. In Shut your Mouth, wrestlers can now grab onto and swing from the belt if they have the ladder knocked out from under them, which adds even more excitement to the proceedings. All these special matches have a different gameplay experience to offer, but some will certainly be entertained with the idea of re-creating some fondly remembered matches from the WWE days of old.   There are several regular and special matches to participate in.  Most of the matches you see in the exhibition option are blended into SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth's season mode, which loosely follows the last year of WWE programming, starting with the splitting of Raw and SmackDown! between Ric Flair and Vince McMahon and continuing past The Rock and Hulk Hogan's legendary showdown at WrestleMania X8. Upon starting the season mode, you have to select one of the preexisting male WWE superstars or a wrestler you've created. If you select a wrestler with a high number of superstar points, such The Rock or Chris Jericho, you'll immediately start wrestling on the main TV shows and participating in pay-per-view events. Conversely, if you start off with a created wrestler, you'll have a low number of superstar points, which means that you'll have to toil with other relatively unpopular wrestlers on Heat, and you won't be able wrestle in any of the pay-per-view events or get a title shot right off the bat. All that changes, though, as you continue to win matches and gain the respect of either Vince McMahon or Ric Flair.You can monitor how many superstar points you have, or even demand a title shot, by talking to either owner in the VIP room located in the room known as the rotunda. This room is also where you can view whatever create-a-wrestler moves, alternate wrestler outfits, special movies, and arenas you've unlocked--which is accomplished by winning matches at pay-per-view events--and briefly interact with other wrestlers. You can also just wander around from a first-person perspective and explore some of the different venues in the game.  The season mode lets you relive the last year of WWE programming.  But before you can do any of that, you have to complete the Raw and SmackDown! draft. Linda McMahon opens the draft with a brief explanation of the current situation and why certain wrestlers like the undisputed champion, Undertaker, and Stone Cold Steve Austin can't participate in the draft. When she's done, you can choose to manage the draft for either SmackDown! or Raw, or you can skip the formalities and simply edit both rosters manually. It can be fun to go through the draft and see who the computer picks and adjust your choices accordingly, but most fans will probably choose to edit them manually so they'll be faithful to the WWE programming--though, the same can probably said for stables. Several of the wrestlers on both Raw and SmackDown! will be in a stable with other wrestlers, which basically means that they're aligned with each other and will occasionally interfere in matches to help their teammates out. You'll find that most of the stables, such as Goldust and Booker T, as well as the Un-Americans, are already in place, but you can choose to edit them or even add new ones that can include up to three wrestlers. You can add new stables at any time over the course of the season, but you can't edit any of the stables that were established before the season started.   The season is broken down so you usually participate in four matches every month, but if your wrestler has enough superstar points, you'll also wrestle in a pay-per-view match every month. Moreover, if you happen to win the undisputed championship, you'll have to jump in between SmackDown! and Raw, so you'll have to wrestle up to nine matches per month (including the pay-per-view matches). In some cases, you won't have to wrestle during a particular week. Instead, you might be doing an interview with Michael Cole and Tazz or just visiting the fans in The World, but even The World isn't a safe haven, as you can still be ambushed by wrestlers who are feuding with you. As previously mentioned, the season unfolds differently depending on where your wrestler is in the rankings, but it can also change depending on the responses you select when speaking with other wrestlers, announcers, or the owners.   It's incredibly cool to see events unfold in the game just as they did in the show. Watching Vince McMahon launch into a soliloquy on ""killing his creation"" and then turn around in his chair to reveal the NWO logo or get teary-eyed as Hulk Hogan makes his triumphant return to the Hulkamaniacs in a post-WrestleMania X8 match pose-down with The Rock will put a smile on the faces of devout WWE fans. It's also very satisfying to bring an unknown wrestler up through the ranks, but that's not to say there aren't a few very minor issues. Wrestlers you're feuding with won't always act as such when you confront them in the rotunda or the locker room. There are also some minor inconsistencies in the story line, particularly during the ""search for a traitor"" portion, but the biggest problem with the season mode is the fact that you'll often wrestle against the same opponents over and over, which can get somewhat tiresome. It's also disappointing to see that none of the female WWE wrestlers can be used in the season mode.  You can even bring a created wrestler up through the ranks.  Like its predecessors, Shut Your Mouth features a high-speed style of gameplay, but the game makes quite a few changes to the series' formula. Grappling, which involves picking an opponent up off the ground and then locking up with him or her, is much more useful, as it helps slow down the pace of a match, giving you a chance to think about your next move. It's also a safer opener than punches or kicks, as those attacks can be easily countered. Speaking of the counter system, it's also been revamped since Just Bring It, and it now depends on timing and guessing the direction of your opponent's move. For example, if you press the reversal button at the right time and your opponent throws a punch, your wrestler will more than likely counter it. However, if you press the reversal button and your opponent executes some sort of maneuver, then the counter has no chance of working because you also need to guess the direction that your opponent used to execute that move and press it along with the reversal button. It's a tough system to use, and it penalizes you for guessing incorrectly, but it also prevents participants from abusing the counters.   Other changes to the gameplay are a little more subtle, like the increased fluidity of the moves. Numerous wrestling maneuvers in Shut Your Mouth have been designed so you can smoothly transition from one to another, and some of them are more specialized than others. For example, a basic kick to the gut can be used as an opener for just about any other move, while some wrestlers have specific transitions, such as The Rock, who uses a special punch to knock a wrestler down and then flies in for an easy arm drag, body slam, or some other move as soon as his opponent gets up. This results in many more canned animations than in previous SmackDown! games, but the trade-off appears to be well worth it.Yuke's went to great lengths to make each wrestler perform like his or her real-life counterpart. For example, wrestlers like Rob Van Dam and Hurricane have their unique stances, and they both move much as they would on WWE programming. Hulk Hogan uses slow, deliberate techniques, while someone like Jeff Hardy speeds around the ring, performing high-flying maneuvers. Of course, this has been done in previous wrestling games, but it feels much more convincing in Shut Your Mouth.  The draft decides which wrestlers appear on SmackDown! and Raw...  Submission holds are another aspect of gameplay that's a little more effectively implemented in Shut Your Mouth than in other wrestling games. In order to put a submission hold on an opponent, you first have to go to work on a specific area of the body by executing moves that damage that area. You'll be able to see the results of your work, and you'll know it's time to go for a submission hold (if your wrestler has one) when the opponent starts to limp around in a daze for a few seconds after getting up. It's not as in-depth as No Mercy's location-specific damage modeling, but it's certainly a step in that direction.   The last significant feature in Shut Your Mouth is the incredible create-a-wrestler mode. This mode allows you to both create wrestlers and create animation that you can later select from while creating wrestlers. When creating a wrestler, you can edit a number of his or her physical characteristics, including skin tone, face, facial hair, clothes, and more. You can also create crowd signs for your wrestler, choose a weight classification (heavyweight or cruiserweight), and decide whether he or she is a ""face"" or ""heel."" In addition, it's possible to manually edit individual attributes such as power and speed by distributing a limited number of points across the appropriate categories. Or, if you prefer, you can choose from one four predetermined attribute sets. You can then choose a generic move set for your wrestler or edit all the individual moves yourself. You shouldn't have any problem creating popular wrestlers who aren't featured in the game, like Rey Mysterio, whose mask conveniently appears in that section of the mode.   The create-an-animation mode is pretty robust, and it lets you create some completely insane animations for your wrestlers. You can edit fighting, running, taunting, walking, and winning animations, and within each of these categories there are a number of preset animations to choose from and edit. For example, if you select the robot stance when editing fighting animations, you can then add other preset animations on top of that, like the wrestler's facial animation, the direction that his or her neck is moving, and the movement of his or her body, arms, and hands. You can create something that looks entirely crazy or something that looks entirely realistic, but this mode gives you plenty of different options and a surprising amount of freedom.    Not that you'll really need to edit any of the animation in the game, as it's already excellent. The wrestler models are incredibly well done, and in some cases they look so close to their real-life counterparts it's almost spooky to see them staring you in the face. Hulk Hogan, who is probably the most accurate of the bunch, actually looks like a withering old man with plenty of wrinkles on his face and a deteriorating muscle structure. The wrestler introductions are especially impressive, as they're not only accurate, but they also feature good facial animation. The environments outside of the ring are equally detailed, and they're filled with plenty of interactive objects. Items are thrown from shelves, glass shatters, and cars rumble when wrestlers collide with them. Even traffic will come to a halt when a fight spills into the street, and surprisingly, even with all this detail (and six wrestlers onscreen at once) the game maintains its brisk frame rate.  ...but you can edit the rosters manually before the start of the season.  The play-by-play commentary in Just Bring It has been removed and instead replaced with occasional comments from Jim Ross or Jerry ""The King"" Lawler. That's not to say that's it's any better, though, since both will occasionally deliver comments that seem out of place, but it succeeds in conveying a sense that there are indeed commentators calling the match. All the wrestlers, with the exception of Tough Enough champion Maven, have the correct ring entrance music, and there's a generic rock soundtrack that complements the in-ring action.   Shut Your Mouth offers just about everything that a wrestling fan could ever want. The create-a-wrestler mode gives you plenty of freedom to create your own WWE superstar, and the season mode does an excellent job of conveying the sense that you're a part of WWE programming. Of course, the gameplay still might be a little too fast-paced for some, but Shut Your Mouth tries to balance it with a more useful grappling, submission, and counter system. If you're even a casual fan of the WWE, you can't go wrong with SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth.


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695,World Series Baseball 2K3 ,8.9, World Series Baseball 2K3 is simply the best and most addictive baseball game available this year.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/4/0/2217440-box_mlb2k3.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-series-baseball-2k3-review/1900-6023905/,pos,"
 While some games claim to duplicate the ballpark atmosphere, Sega's World Series Baseball 2K3 goes a step further. As you play it, you get the impression that you're sitting on your couch watching Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN. The presence of genuine ESPN logos, graphics, and background music gives the game a style that most sports fans can easily recognize and appreciate. Moreover, it's simply the best and most addictive baseball game available this year.    Last year, World Series Baseball was exclusive to Microsoft's Xbox console. This year, it's also available for the PlayStation 2. No matter which version you play, World Series Baseball 2K3 is a definite improvement on its predecessor. Basic features that were notoriously absent from last year's game--such as drag bunts, extended leadoffs, vertical jumping catches, and bullpen warm-ups--are at hand in 2K3. Along with being able to make players perform diving catches, you now have the option to make players scale the outfield wall in an effort to rob home runs. It's not an easy feat to accomplish, but it's much more realistic than the vertical leap you'll see in other baseball games. Other new features include the ability to save games in progress, sliders that allow you to adjust the skill of CPU batters and pitchers independently of one another, and the option to store your own user file, which the computer can use to track your personal strengths and weaknesses in numerous areas.   WSB 2K3 has many new features, such as diving catches, bullpen warm-ups, and the option to save in the middle of a game.  The overall selection of play modes and extras is just right to satisfy the needs of both casual players and fantasy enthusiasts. It takes only a minute or so to dive into an exhibition game, start a season, or participate in a playoff bracket. The home run derby mode is based upon the actual Big League Home Run Challenge that occurs every year at Cashman Field in Las Vegas. The event is basically an All-Star Game without fielders, where National League and American League hitters compete to see which team can smash the most home runs. Although you can't play against your friends online, the Sega Sports challenge lets you submit codes to the Sega Sports Web site in order to compare your skills with those of other players around the world.    All 30 MLB teams and their stadiums are available, and rosters are current as of January 2003. The included player editor lets you create an almost unlimited number of custom players. In addition to the 30 standard teams and venues, the game includes a legends team and five classic ballparks. A handful of throwback and alternate jerseys are available from the game setup menu.    Devoted baseball buffs will love the franchise mode, where you control a team throughout a span of multiple seasons. World Series Baseball 2K3 has the deepest franchise mode of any baseball game. You're in charge of every aspect of your team. This includes drafting players, setting lineups, and making trades, as well as managing the disabled list, performing minor league call-ups, and deciding when to give your players some rest. Tired players don't perform as well in the field, so it's necessary to provide a day off once in a while. You have the option to specify the percentage of time off given to each member of your team, which the CPU can use to automatically adjust your lineup whenever a fatigued player takes a day off.    The franchise mode also captures the spirit of baseball as a business. During the season, your team's success will influence the number of spectators that come to see your team play. This in turn gives you a bigger budget to spend on free agents and to retain veterans who are in the final year of their contracts. In the off-season, you have a 10-day period within which to negotiate with free agents throughout the league. You can make multiple offers per day, but you won't know if a player has accepted or rejected your offer until the following day. In this fashion, you can negotiate with players, but the limited time frame challenges you to sign players before the deadline arrives.    Player loyalty is another new feature of World Series Baseball 2K3. If you make it to the playoffs, give your players plenty of time off, and tend to pay well, you'll have a better shot at signing a star player to an extension or getting an aging veteran to sign a cheaper contract. If your team does poorly, however, or you work your players to death, a star player may opt to test the free-agent market instead.   Each team has one or two throwback uniform styles.   In addition to paying the players you sign, you have to spend money on the managers, coaches, and scouts that support your team. It costs more to hire a top-notch support staff, but their skill ratings play a considerable role in the quality of prospects you develop, as well as in the strength and stamina of your everyday players. Throughout the season, you have the option of modifying the areas that your staff members focus on. For example, if your pitchers are tiring out by the fifth inning, you can have your pitching coach spend less time working on velocity and more time on building up the stamina of your pitching staff. If a member of your staff doesn't do his or her job, you have the option of firing that person and trying to hire a replacement.    Even though the franchise mode in World Series Baseball 2K3 is more comprehensive than the franchise modes offered by other baseball games, it does have a few omissions that are worth noting. The minor league system has only one level, as opposed to the multitiered farm club system you'll find in 3DO's High Heat Major League Baseball 2004. The ability to participate in spring training games is also absent, which is disappointing since every other game currently available has this feature. Everything else you could want is here though: fictional rookies, retirements, weekly and postseason awards, Hall of Fame inductions, minor league development, historical statistics, statistical tracking in more than 88 categories, and so on. The franchise mode is truly a micromanager's dream come true.   On the field, World Series Baseball 2K3 is fun to play and generally faithful to the nuances of the sport. Pitchers will shake off pitches they don't like, and you can have them take a look toward runners on base before leading into their windups. As is true in an actual game, balls hit low in the strike zone result in grounders more often than those hit high, and breaking pitches such as curveballs and sliders are more apt to result in weak hits than fastballs and change-ups. Baserunning is one of the game's strongest aspects. You can have your runners take a lead, break for a steal, or hold position on the line while the ball is in play. When you're up to bat, you can call for an immediate steal, or you can queue up the steal such that the runner will take off when the pitcher starts his delivery. This leaves you free to concentrate on taking a swing.   You use a batting cursor to aim your swing, but you also have the option to swing for contact or for power.   The default batting interface uses an oval-shaped cursor to portray the contact zone. As the pitch comes in, you have to move the cursor toward the general direction of the ball and decide whether or not to swing. Balls hit in the center of the cursor tend to land in the gaps more often than those hit along the diameter. You also have the option to swing for contact or for power depending on the button you press. If you want more control over the strength of your swing, you can enable an option that allows you to charge power into your swing during the pitcher's windup. Conversely, there's also a setting to take away the cursor altogether so that all you have to do is focus on the timing of your swing.    Pitching is relatively straightforward as well. An overall selection of nine pitches is shown on the screen in a three-by-three grid. To select a pitch, you press the control stick in the direction represented by the pitch's box on the grid and then tap the action button. Some pitches are blacked out, which means that your pitcher doesn't have that particular pitch in his repertoire. After you select the pitch, you use a cursor that's shaped like a ball to choose the location. Pressing the action button will cause the pitcher to step into his windup motion, but you still have time to change the location of the pitch up until the moment the ball is released. In this manner, it's possible to play against human opponents without telegraphing your pitches.    Visible hot and cold zones add an additional element of strategy to the pitching process. The strike zone is separated into nine rectangular areas. These areas represent the hot and cold tendencies of the hitter at the plate. Pitches thrown into the red areas are more likely to be lofted for base hits and home runs, while pitches aimed at the blue areas are more apt to bounce toward an infielder or fly out. This gives you some idea of where to locate a pitch if you're going to throw into the zone, but it's possible for a batter's tendencies to change if you continually toss pitches into the same spot.    Defense is similar to what you'll find in other baseball games. Once the ball flies off the bat, you have control over the fielder located nearest to the ball. If you're close to the ball, you'll automatically catch it. The setup menu lets you enable assisted fielding, which moves your player under the ball once you near the landing area, and automatic fielding, where the CPU controls the fielding for your team. Relay throws from the outfield incorporate the use of a cutoff man, which gives you a great deal of leeway if you change your mind about where you'd like a throw to go. All you have to do is press the button for a different base, and the second baseman or shortstop will intercept and redirect the throw. A good aspect of the defense is that fielders don't always make accurate throws. Your players may need to step off base or jump in order to catch the ball, which means that quick runners may leg out a base hit from time to time.   You can make use of hot and cold zones, as well as a pitch location chart, to figure out your pitching strategy.  Vertical jump plays are another feature new to World Series Baseball 2K3, and they're designed with realism in mind. When you're going after a home run ball in the outfield, you have to push the button a few seconds before the ball reaches the wall in order to give the fielder time to wind up into a leap. Even though regular diving catches were a part of the game last year, the inclusion of vertical leaps provides you with the opportunity to rob line drives and home runs, as well as field a routine assortment of ground balls and infield liners.   When it comes to play mechanics, World Series Baseball 2K3 is just shy of perfect. The only areas that need improvement relate to the pitching interface: intentional walks and pitch selection. There isn't an option to signal an intentional walk, so you have to sit through four straight outside pitches before the batter takes his base. Other games allow you to select a distinct intentional walk command and only subject you to the final pitch. As for pitch selection, the game is missing a number of advanced pitches that many superstar pitchers have in their repertoires. The fosh, knuckle curve, forkball, and biting curve are just a few that come to mind. Unless you're intensely fussy, neither of these gripes should diminish your enjoyment of the game.  Although the game plays well, most people are likely to point out its rich, broadcast-style presentation as the factor that sets it apart from other baseball video games. Sega teamed with ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports, to give World Series Baseball 2K3 an authentic look. This means that you'll see familiar ESPN overlays and transitions while you play the game. The postgame recaps and menus are identical to the score summaries shown on SportsCenter, and the score display in the batting view is reminiscent of the graphics that overlay the screen during a live telecast on ESPN. The default audio settings also mimic the tone of a television broadcast. There are separate volume levels for the crowd, PA announcer, music, sound effects, umpires, and commentators, and they're initially set up such that the ballpark atmosphere is subdued compared with the commentary and music that originate in the broadcast booth. A particularly nice touch is that the musical selections are actually the same ditties you can hear while tuning in to the various sports wrap-ups on ESPN. This includes the themes to Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter.   TV-style camera angles and the presence of official ESPN overlays help WSB 2K3 mimic an actual baseball telecast.  ESPN influences notwithstanding, the graphics and audio in World Series Baseball 2K3 are exceptional. The game's visuals are extremely sharp, which means that you can actually read the small print on signs in the outfield or notice patterns mowed into the grass on the field. The amount of detail is astonishing. Cars drive along the freeways outside Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, and you can actually see the spectator boxes sitting atop the sports bars outside Wrigley Field in Chicago. Inside ballparks with an open-air design, birds often make impromptu flights onto the field. For the most part, the faces of the players and their uniforms are right on. The lighting in the ballpark is especially impressive. You've probably come to expect player shadows and overcast shade in baseball video games, but World Series Baseball 2K3 goes so far as to dynamically shade the wrinkles on players' uniforms.    Player movements are also more realistic this year. There are many new animations for actions such as snap throws, reaching grabs, and somersault double plays, all of which come together to deliver a more lively impression. Some actions are still a little too robotic, however. For instance, when players walk up to the plate, their batting stances loop so quickly that they appear to be stirring the air. In the field, base runners flail their arms like robots whenever they reach base, rather than displaying the smooth side-to-side motion you'd expect from. None of these oddities influences the game's overall look, but they're too eerie to ignore.    The primary thing Sega needs to do next year to improve the game's production values is to pep up the audio. Even though the volume level of the commentary is meant to drown out the noise of the crowd and the public-address music, the atmosphere within the stadium doesn't change much in response to rallies, close games, or blowouts. If you've ever watched a baseball game on television, you know how loud the stadium music and the spectators can get during a late-inning rally.    Aside from the lack of vigor, the audio in World Series Baseball 2K3 conveys everything necessary to create a realistic ballpark setting. Fans in the seats respond to balls, strikes, walks, and fly balls with varying degrees of excitement. If you're playing the home team, for example, and you pop up to the infield, the spectators will boo, knowing that the opposing team is going to catch the ball for an out. When the situation is reversed, however, and you're on the visiting team, they'll cheer instead. World Series Baseball 2K3 is also one of the few games that feature player-specific catcalls. Fans behind the plate express their fair share of positive and negative comments about the batter currently up to bat, and they have specific phrases reserved for individual players as well. It isn't uncommon, for example, for someone in the stands to make fun of Derek Jeter's proclivity for dating supermodels. In addition to the fans, you'll also hear the PA announcer introduce players during their at-bats, vendors hawking food in the stands, and musical snippets prior to the at bats of home-team players.    It's too bad that Sega didn't enlist any familiar ESPN personalities to provide the play-by-play and color commentary. Nonetheless, the in-game commentary does a nice job of keeping pace with the events displayed on the screen. Ted Robinson, a broadcaster who covers the Mets organization, has the play-calling duties. His voice is the auditory equivalent of sleeping pills, but the vocabulary he uses to describe the various teams and the plays that occur is satisfying due to its diversity. Rex Hudler provides the color commentary, giving anecdotes and historical background whenever an interesting player comes to the plate. Hudler is a former player himself and is currently a broadcaster for the Anaheim Angels. He has a gruff voice and speaks in a blue-collar style that's quite a contrast to Robinson's clean-cut mannerisms.   WSB 2K3 may have sharper graphics on the Xbox, but it still looks great on the PS2.  Since World Series Baseball 2K3 is also available for Microsoft's Xbox console, you're probably wondering how the PlayStation 2 version compares with its Xbox counterpart. In terms of play mechanics and overall selection of features, they're identical. The main difference is that the graphics are sharper on the Xbox. Certain transitions are also jumpier in the PS2 version. For example, whenever you hit a foul ball into the seats, the viewpoint switches away from the batter's view before the player follows through on his swing. In the Xbox game, you can see the follow-through.   Compared with the other baseball games currently available for the PlayStation 2, World Series Baseball 2K3 is at the top of the curve. It's easy to play and deep enough to lose yourself in. The ESPN branding may seem like a gimmick at first, but it's really just one part of a thoroughly enjoyable product. 
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696,Tank! Tank! Tank! ,4," Though it can be fun with friends in short bursts, Tank! Tank! Tank! doesn't have nearly enough depth or content to remain enjoyable for long.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/6/7/7/2224677-box_ttt.png,WIIU,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tank-tank-tank-review/1900-6400617/,neg,"
  Translating an arcade experience into a satisfying home console release is rarely an easy task, and some games would be better off without the attempt. Tank! Tank! Tank! is, unfortunately, one of those games. An enjoyable experience in very small doses with friends, Tank! Tank! Tank! on the Wii U attempts to turn a minuscule amount of content into a full-fledged retail release, and the result is hours of boredom spent playing a game that was never intended to be stretched out for so long.   So many enemies! Why isn't it more fun to destroy them?   You do two things in Tank! Tank! Tank!: You move and you shoot. The controls are straightforward, which makes it easy for even tank novices to jump into the cockpit. Since every button functions the same way, there's never any fumbling for what weapon you want to fire, but that accessibility has a drawback as well. All aiming is automatic, meaning you don't have to manually aim up at enemies above you--the game does it for you.    There is something to be said about the fact that Tank! Tank! Tank! is easy to pick up and understand, but the simplicity comes at the cost of compelling gameplay. The actions you perform quickly become monotonous, which is never a word you should have to use when describing a battle between a tank and a giant robotic building.     Furthermore, the lack of manual aiming can be frustrating when the wrong enemies are targeted or your weapons don't hit where you intended. This won't be much of an issue for new or young players who only want to shoot things, but it can be a detriment to anyone who cares about getting faster clear times and higher mission scores.    Multiplayer was the primary focus, and the game fares better there than it does on your own. Getting together with three friends to blast away at waves of enemies or each other, or to participate in a three-vs.-one My Kong mode match against the player with the GamePad (who plays as a giant robot monkey with his or her face plastered on the head), can be good fun. That last mode feels the most unique, but there's not enough to it to bring your group back after a few matches. The other modes are as basic as they could be,  leaving you wanting more after you try them a few times.   Buildings crumble nicely enough, but that often leaves you with a big flat playing field.   There's also a story mode that pits you and another tank (either an AI or a local friend, armed with a Wii Remote or Pro Controller) against level after level of robot enemies, from spiders to bees to giant robot buildings. Missions are short, usually sporting a time limit of about three minutes at most, and you clear them simply by destroying the required number of enemies. So you move, and you shoot until things explode. That, in a nutshell, describes the gameplay. You can occasionally pick up limited ammo for weapons that are more powerful than your standard, unlimited rocket (such as a minigun or more nuke-like firepower), but that's the extent of variety in the mid-level action.    But most damning to the one- and two-player experience is the way the story mode progresses. When you complete a mission, you earn a medal for the tank you used to finish the mission. You unlock tanks with medals, and replaying missions with different tanks earns more medals. That in itself wouldn't be horrible if the game didn't force you to go back and replay missions with different tanks to earn medals in order to progress through the story. So it's not always enough to complete a series of missions, which are often already too similar to each other (recycling the same handful of enemies and environments time and time again), but you're also required to replay the same boring missions over and over again just to see the unsatisfying story through.    To unlock the penultimate 35th mission of the game, you are required to have 100 medals. Do the math on how many times that requires you to revisit tired content, and it doesn't paint a pretty picture. Different tanks do play slightly differently from one another, but not nearly enough to make the levels feel fresh again and again. New tanks also have the downside of being available only to the first player, with the second player or AI being restricted to a basic ""support"" tank.   Playing as a giant robot in the My Kong multiplayer mode and crushing your friends can be fun for a short while.   You can play the game entirely on the GamePad screen and take pictures of players with the controller's camera. You can also turn your tank by tilting the GamePad left and right, but it's more of a curse than a blessing. Turning this way is too slow to be effective, and you might find yourself turning unwillingly if you accidentally tilt the GamePad.     Tank! Tank! Tank! feels like a game that was designed for short bursts of gameplay, back in the arcade where it probably deserved to stay. It would have been at least a little more acceptable as a budget-priced game. As it is, this isn't a game to even consider if you're only interested in playing alone, and it's priced too high for its sparse multiplayer offering. At the end of the day, Tank! Tank! Tank! isn't really broken; it's just boring.  
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697,NASCAR 2011: The Game ,4, Pushover opponents and a stripped feature list are just two of NASCAR 2011's unfortunate flaws.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/6/3/8/2225638-box_ncar2011.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nascar-2011-the-game-review/1900-6315424/,neg,"
  Unless you count 2009's NASCAR Kart Racing (and why would you?), NASCAR 2011 is the first NASCAR game for the Wii. That doesn't mean, however, that it is a worthy one. This is circuit racing stripped to its bare essentials, held up only by a functional driving model that struggles to capture the tension of the real thing. Even on hard difficulty, you'll rarely feel challenged by the other 42 drivers on the track. Beginning a race in pole position is essentially a guarantee that you'll finish in first unless you crank the difficulty up to very hard. Off the track, Wii owners get few of the frills Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners enjoyed. There is no paint booth, no way to save races for sharing or later viewing, and no detailed vehicle customization. Invitational events give this sparse package some much-needed variety, but this halfhearted effort is a mere shadow of the great NASCAR games of years past.   Don't like the look of your vehicle? Oh well--you can't customize it.   Career mode drops you into the shoes of a known NASCAR driver or one of your own making and puts you through the paces, from Daytona to Homestead-Miami. You take to the circuits one at a time and make your way through a 36-race season, including the road course races on Watkins-Glen International and Infineon Raceway. The mode is functional, but it's also dry and straightforward--no substitute for the impressive and extensive Fight to the Top modes in older NASCAR games. Even victory celebrations are subdued. Your driver dances about and breaks out the champagne while surrounded by fist-pumping fans, but this canned display gets old, and the roar of the crowd sounds more like a mild sigh. The blandness of the visuals further emphasizes the lack of excitement. The frame rate holds up nicely on the track, but jagged edges, fuzzy crowds, and drab vehicles suck the life out of crash replays.     Outside of the career mode, you can take any car to any track for a one-off race, or compete in eliminator events in which you set the number of challengers. These modes hold no surprises, so it's up to NASCAR 2011's invitational events to provide some diversity, and they do a decent job of it. You unlock these as you progress through your career, and they come in a few varieties. Perhaps the most interesting are legends challenges, in which you must draft other drivers to unlock collectible coins. A satisfying whoosh makes it enjoyable to draft, so an event focused on this mechanic is a good addition. Time trials, elimination events, and two-part gauntlet races round out the invitationals.   Elimination events provide some of the only occasions in which you see drivers in front of you.   NASCAR 2011 makes it easy for newcomers to jump right in, and there are a number of driving assists to help you smoothly navigate the curves. Unfortunately, you can't tweak vehicle handling any further. While the other versions let you customize minutiae like brake bias and differential ratio, NASCAR 2011 on the Wii offers no such features. In fact, Wii owners don't get any number of features other iterations boasted--and those versions were lacking in content to begin with. There is no paint booth, so you can't modify your car with flags, flames, and fonts of your own choosing. There is no replay feature, so you can't save races for viewing at various camera angles, let alone share your favorite moments online. Nor is their any online racing, though you can join a friend in two-player split-screen races.    Any goodwill NASCAR 2011 earns quickly wears off when you discover that AI drivers are simply incapable of challenging you. You can smash into walls multiple times during qualification and still have no trouble taking pole, even on hard difficulty. And should you start the race in first place, you will almost always finish in first, often by an enormous margin should you play on medium difficulty. Perhaps this pitiful challenge is meant to compensate for the digital controls: if you use a classic controller or stick with a Wii Remote and Nunchuk, accelerating and braking are either/or actions. You either slam on the brake, or you stay off of it; you either accelerate at full speed, or you don't accelerate at all. A GameCube controller's analog triggers allow for more subtlety, though they're still too rigid to feel totally comfortable. As a result, NASCAR 2011 feels clunky, particularly on road courses. That's a real shame, given that steering is smooth and responsive regardless of your preferred control method.   Whoop. De. Doo.   On the hardest difficulty level and with assists at a minimum, races can still provide a modicum of excitement, rewarding you for sticking close to a proper racing line and requiring you to draft and pick up speed so that you might slingshot ahead. The game assigns you a rival in each race, and beating him (or her) gives you a little extra incentive to drive well, though this is a far cry from NASCAR Thunder 2004's involved rivalry/alliance system. In NASCAR 2011, the track is your greatest rival; scraping the wall might throw you out of your rhythm, while a misconceived attempt to slide into an opening might lead to disaster. Assuming you're racing more than a few laps and have turned on tire wear and damage, you also need to pay mind to your fuel gauge and vehicle condition. This affects your efficacy on the course, and in long races, you need to make a pit stop when necessary to replace tires and fuel up.    NASCAR 2011 is a gutted version of a game that was short on value to begin with, yet shockingly it sells at full price. This may be the only authentic NASCAR game in town, but Wii owners needing a Sprint Cup fix should avoid temptation and leave this problematic bare-bones racer on store shelves.     
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698,X-Men: Destiny ,4," In X-Men: Destiny, mindless combat and meaningless choices combine to create a new mutation of boredom.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/6/6/0/2225660-box_xmendes.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-men-destiny-review/1900-6337532/,neg,"
  What good are mutant superpowers without exciting reasons to use them? As X-Men: Destiny proves, they're no good at all. In this superhero beat-'em-up, clobbering swarms of stupid bad guys with your newfound abilities is tedious, and although a constant supply of choices tries to convince you that your actions have real impact on this tumultuous world, they don't have much impact at all. Destiny does the incredible: it makes being a genetic marvel a generic bore.      It's a grim new era for the mutants. Professor X is dead, and anti-mutant sentiment is running high. You choose one of three characters, each with his or her own backstory. Whomever you choose, your mutant powers awaken when a mutant-human peace rally in San Francisco is attacked by anti-mutant thugs called purifiers. As you come to terms with your powers, you're given many choices that let you align yourself more with Cyclops and the X-Men or with Magneto and the Brotherhood. But these choices have almost no impact on the course of the game. You can make Brotherhood choices straight down the line and still end up fighting Magneto and Juggernaut in a boss battle. Aligning yourself with the X-Men from the get-go won't get you out of fighting Wolverine at one point. You go through the same levels, fighting the same bosses, with the same mutants often lending you assistance. Some games give you real choice. Some create a convincing illusion of choice. X-Men: Destiny just drops a bunch of meaningless choices in your path. The whole story feels sloppily thrown together, and unskippable dialogue sequences with spoken language that often doesn't match the subtitles only contribute to that feeling.    You choose what type of power you want from three options: energy projection, shadow matter, and density control. But like the story choices you make, this decision has little real impact. You spend most of your time fighting swarms of mindless purifier thugs, and mashing the buttons is all it takes to clobber these buffoons regardless of which power you choose. Combat doesn't get much more dull and shallow than this. You also battle the occasional machine-gunning robot or goon with a rocket launcher, but their predictable behavior makes it easy to defeat them as well. As you progress, you're presented with the occasional choice between one of two new powers to unlock. You might have to choose, for instance, between the ability to erect a barricade of obsidian or to cause an earthquake by slamming the ground. Acquiring these new abilities makes dealing with the purifiers even easier, and there's some fun in unleashing your powers and laying waste to several bad guys at once. But the combat never rises above monotony.    Boss fights aren't much better. You might expect Gambit to fight with grace and skill, for instance, but here, he is an idiot, attacking the empty air and giving you plenty of time to approach him from behind and safely attack him. The bosses adhere to simple patterns, and once you have these figured out, there's no excitement in fighting them, or sense of triumph in defeating them. You frequently fight alongside famous mutants as well as against them, but your AI partners often embarrass themselves, running up against walls or getting themselves stuck in the geometry. This is indeed one of the darkest hours the mutants have ever faced.   Thank goodness, there's only one enemy left! Wait, you mean I have to fight more of them after this?! NOOO!   You can customize your character by equipping various suits and offensive, defensive, and utility genes that you collect. Equip Pyro's offensive gene, and your attacks do burn damage. Equip Iceman's defensive gene, and your body can turn to solid ice. If you collect and equip the same character's suit, offensive, defensive, and utility genes, you gain access to an X-Mode. Wolverine's X-Mode increases your attack speed and regenerates health; Colossus' turns your body to steel, protecting you from attacks and granting you super strength. This concept of swapping genes in and out at will actually works against the game. Instead of your character having a strong sense of identity, he or she just seems like an amorphous combination of the attributes of other mutants.    When you're not fighting, you make your way through the ruins of San Francisco. Traversing this environment as a superhero should be fun, but there's no joy in movement in X-Men: Destiny. The levels are restrictive areas that direct you from one location to the next, with piles of rubble and other unconvincing obstacles blocking your attempts at exploration. Shiny railings indicate things you need to climb on to progress, and the complete lack of freedom makes you feel less like a powerful mutant and more like a rat in a maze, being shuffled from one dull battle to another.   Obsidian arms: great for beating up bad guys; not so good for meeting girls.   On top of it all, Destiny is an ugly game. The simple character models and muddy textures make it look like it was made several years ago, and the unattractive effects that accompany your powers make them feel underwhelming. You can breeze through this adventure in under six hours, but the gameplay is so shallow that you won't be left wanting more, and because your choices have so little impact, there's no compelling reason to revisit the game once you're done. In fact, it's not even absorbing the first time through. If mindless combat is all super mutants have to look forward to, you're better off letting your mutant powers remain dormant.  


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699,X-Men: Destiny ,4," In X-Men: Destiny, mindless combat and meaningless choices combine to create a new mutation of boredom.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/6/6/0/2225660-box_xmendes.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-men-destiny-review/1900-6337548/,neg,"
  What good are mutant superpowers without exciting reasons to use them? As X-Men: Destiny proves, they're no good at all. In this superhero beat-'em-up, clobbering swarms of stupid bad guys with your newfound abilities is tedious, and although a constant supply of choices tries to convince you that your actions have real impact on this tumultuous world, they don't have much impact at all. Destiny does the incredible: it makes being a genetic marvel a generic bore.      It's a grim new era for the mutants. Professor X is dead, and anti-mutant sentiment is running high. You choose one of three characters, each with his or her own backstory. Whomever you choose, your mutant powers awaken when a mutant-human peace rally in San Francisco is attacked by anti-mutant thugs called purifiers. As you come to terms with your powers, you're given many choices that let you align yourself more with Cyclops and the X-Men or with Magneto and the Brotherhood. But these choices have almost no impact on the course of the game. You can make Brotherhood choices straight down the line and still end up fighting Magneto and Juggernaut in a boss battle. Aligning yourself with the X-Men from the get-go won't get you out of fighting Wolverine at one point. You go through the same levels, fighting the same bosses, with the same mutants often lending you assistance. Some games give you real choice. Some create a convincing illusion of choice. X-Men: Destiny just drops a bunch of meaningless choices in your path. The whole story feels sloppily thrown together, and unskippable dialogue sequences with spoken language that often doesn't match the subtitles only contribute to that feeling.    You choose what type of power you want from three options: energy projection, shadow matter, and density control. But like the story choices you make, this decision has little real impact. You spend most of your time fighting swarms of mindless purifier thugs, and mashing the buttons is all it takes to clobber these buffoons regardless of which power you choose. Combat doesn't get much more dull and shallow than this. You also battle the occasional machine-gunning robot or goon with a rocket launcher, but their predictable behavior makes it easy to defeat them as well. As you progress, you're presented with the occasional choice between one of two new powers to unlock. You might have to choose, for instance, between the ability to erect a barricade of obsidian or to cause an earthquake by slamming the ground. Acquiring these new abilities makes dealing with the purifiers even easier, and there's some fun in unleashing your powers and laying waste to several bad guys at once. But the combat never rises above monotony.    Boss fights aren't much better. You might expect Gambit to fight with grace and skill, for instance, but here, he is an idiot, attacking the empty air and giving you plenty of time to approach him from behind and safely attack him. The bosses adhere to simple patterns, and once you have these figured out, there's no excitement in fighting them, or sense of triumph in defeating them. You frequently fight alongside famous mutants as well as against them, but your AI partners often embarrass themselves, running up against walls or getting themselves stuck in the geometry. This is indeed one of the darkest hours the mutants have ever faced.   Thank goodness, there's only one enemy left! Wait, you mean I have to fight more of them after this?! NOOO!   You can customize your character by equipping various suits and offensive, defensive, and utility genes that you collect. Equip Pyro's offensive gene, and your attacks do burn damage. Equip Iceman's defensive gene, and your body can turn to solid ice. If you collect and equip the same character's suit, offensive, defensive, and utility genes, you gain access to an X-Mode. Wolverine's X-Mode increases your attack speed and regenerates health; Colossus' turns your body to steel, protecting you from attacks and granting you super strength. This concept of swapping genes in and out at will actually works against the game. Instead of your character having a strong sense of identity, he or she just seems like an amorphous combination of the attributes of other mutants.    When you're not fighting, you make your way through the ruins of San Francisco. Traversing this environment as a superhero should be fun, but there's no joy in movement in X-Men: Destiny. The levels are restrictive areas that direct you from one location to the next, with piles of rubble and other unconvincing obstacles blocking your attempts at exploration. Shiny railings indicate things you need to climb on to progress, and the complete lack of freedom makes you feel less like a powerful mutant and more like a rat in a maze, being shuffled from one dull battle to another.   You can borrow Wolverine's tights. He won't mind.   On top of it all, Destiny is an ugly game. The simple character models and muddy textures make it look like it was made several years ago, and the unattractive effects that accompany your powers make them feel underwhelming. You can breeze through this adventure in under six hours, but the gameplay is so shallow that you won't be left wanting more, and because your choices have so little impact, there's no compelling reason to revisit the game once you're done. In fact, it's not even absorbing the first time through. If mindless combat is all super mutants have to look forward to, you're better off letting your mutant powers remain dormant.  


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700,Madden NFL Football ,4, Madden NFL Football offers up a bare-bones experience that fails to satisfy on any level.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/8/6/2222786-maddenstdcab.jpg,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-football-review/1900-6307618/,neg,"
  Madden NFL Football is a woefully incomplete game. The list of features not included in this 3DS launch game is almost longer than what's on the cart, which makes this game practically worthless for casual and hardcore football fans alike. The most glaring omission is multiplayer; there's absolutely no way to challenge a friend to a match. The Madden franchise is built on competition, showing off your virtual might and letting the trash-talking fly. Stripping out that key element demeans your actions. What good is showing off if no one is watching? But even if you fancy yourself a single-player footballer, this game still won't leave you satisfied. There's no Franchise mode included, the Season mode is devoid of context, and the only statistics that have been kept are for wins and losses. Once you do hoist the Lombardi Trophy, you're merely greeted with a perfunctory congratulations screen and the option to start the season over from the beginning, following the same schedule. The on-the-field action is adequate, but it hardly matters. There's little reason to play this disgraceful attempt at America's most popular sport.   It's nice to see Roethlisberger is keeping himself busy in the off season.   Like other versions of Madden, you have the option to take to the practice field to get a handle of the basics, though even newcomers should be able to jump into a game with nary a hiccup. The responsive controls are easy to come to grips with, and the smooth circle pad makes juking away from foes a breeze. In fact, it might be a little too easy to evade your opponents. The artificial intelligence on the default setting is laughable, which means you spend more time perfecting your end zone trot than devising come-from-behind strategies. The special teams are particularly awful. Returning kickoffs for touchdowns becomes so commonplace that it's actually rather boring. And the opposing coach is so confident in his kicker that he'll frequently send him out for 60-yard attempts, which invariably land 10 yards away from their target. Swing passes go for long gains all too often, and there are wide receivers open down the field every other snap. Matches become more competitive once you ratchet up the difficulty, but the propensity for big plays never abates.    Once you've gotten the hang of things, it's time to graduate beyond one-and-done games. Sadly, there's no Franchise mode included, which is the main draw in most Madden games. Usually, you can build your team from pretender to contender by drafting well, signing the right free agents, and pulling off blockbuster trades. The joy of running a team for multiple seasons gives you a taste of being a real-life general manager, but you won't find any of that long-term dedication in Madden NFL Football. Instead, you have to settle for a cursory season mode. Here, you choose your favorite team and take part in the 2010 NFL season. There's no draft, no preseason, and no way to make trades, which is a very poor representation of the real thing. The game doesn't keep track of your individual or team statistics (aside from win/loss record), and there aren't any season awards, such as Most Valuable Player or Rookie of the Year. If you do make it to the Super Bowl, you aren't even treated to an elaborate celebration for your accomplishments. There's no pregame hype to get you excited about reaching the big game, the announcers don't make reference to the Super Bowl, and there's no victory celebration at the end.     The only other way to play this embarrassing game is in 5-on-5 mode. You can do this in one-off games or in a season, and it's even worse than the standard 11-on-11 fare. The rules are different from standard games. You have four downs to get in the end zone. You can't get any first downs, and there aren't special teams to bail you out of a jam. Despite these differences, it plays a lot like the main action. One of the most effective stratagies is to stand in the pocket until a receiver breaks free and then throw as hard and as far as you can. It's not much fun, and it's made even worse by the awful audio choices. During normal games, enthusiastic Gus Johnson is joined by judgmental Cris Collinsworth, and though they repeat themselves too often, they do add some authenticity to the action. But in 5-on-5 mode, you have to suffer through an EA Trax soundtrack instead. The music is a collection of bland pop hits, and it doesn't exactly mesh with the on-field action. It would have been vastly preferable to have the option of real commentators rather than incongruous background music.    Even a Bill knows to get far away from the Bengals.   One element that could have made Madden NFL Football noteworthy would have been its novel ability to showcase the action in 3D. Sadly, that visual effect is handled with the delicacy of a rampaging linebacker. The third dimension turns this pleasant-looking game into a digital syrup of ipecac. The biggest problem is that your eyes have to constantly scan the entire field. In most games, you can stare at your main character and let the other elements drift into your periphery. But in Madden NFL Football, you have to constantly keep your eyes on the quarterback, the receivers, and the rushing defenders, which makes it hard to keep track of the action. It moves too fast to take in everything at once, and it's quite a feat to make it through an entire game with the effect turned on. And even if you can stomach the added dimension, there's no benefit for your suffering. It's not any easier to judge player position or line up a long field goal, so it's really not worth the eye strain.     Madden NFL Football is a disappointment on every level. The game can't even get the implementation of gameflow right. This was the attention-grabbing addition to Madden NFL 11 that auto-selected plays for you and let you focus on the action rather than get bogged down in menus. But there's a sizable pause that takes place when one play ends and the next begins, with a warning of ""simulating gameflow"" plastered on the bottom of the screen. It's ultimately a small problem, but it's indicative of the quality of the entire package. With no multiplayer, no Franchise mode, and no stat-keeping, there's little reason you should play Madden NFL Football.  
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701,Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime ,4," Recycled environments, mediocre gameplay and the absence of online play cripple this disappointing top-down adventure.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/8/7/1/2225871-1986gbsos_generic_box_copy.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ghostbusters-sanctum-of-slime-review/1900-6306531/,neg,"
  The first rule of Ghostbusters is that you don't cross the streams. The second rule of Ghostbusters should be that any respectable game based on the franchise must always let you play the lovable quartet of Egon, Ray, Peter, and Winston. Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime manages to break both of these rules, all while forsaking the little touches that make similar top-down, twin-stick games so entertaining. It's possible to find some fun in Sanctum's four-player cooperative mode, but the combined frights of lackluster gameplay, recycled environments, and obtuse AI may scare away even the most devoted aspiring Ghostbusters.    The story, such as it is, centers on four rookie Ghostbusters who got their jobs only because the ""senior team"" overextended itself after a recent spike in paranormal activity. A series of cringe-worthy comic-book-style cinematics in the offline mode explain the reasons for the increase (if you've seen both of the movies, then you can probably already guess), and longtime fans might enjoy learning that the mad curator Janosz Poha still has a world-rending crush on Dana Barrett after 22 years. Yet, far from being memorable, the new recruits take so heavily after their employers that they seem like substandard carbon copies. For instance, the bespectacled brainiac Egon finds his spiritual clone in the like-minded Gabriel, and Ray Stantz's wide-eyed wonder finds its counterpart in the musings of the towheaded Samuel. The parallels are always painfully obvious, and they inevitably make you wonder why these guys are in the game in place of the real crew.   The rush hour commute in New York can be beastly.   The gameplay doesn't help matters much, and the game quickly settles into a mind-numbing routine after a brief flash of promise. You prod your rookie about with your controller's left stick, and you maintain a constant stream of attack by holding down the right. If you're playing on a PC, then you simply drag your mouse in the direction of your foes. In a nod to variety, you're supplied with three different types of weapons designed for enemies of particular colors. You have, of course, your trusty proton blaster, which is best used on red enemies, but you also pack a scattershot weapon for blasting yellow ghosts and a blue-based attack that gains power if you bounce the projectile off the wall. And, yes, you can cross the streams.    Most of the game's fun comes from shifting between the three weapons during a battle, but the gimmick's meager novelty wears thin by the fourth of the game's 12 levels. Aside from boss battles and a periodic on-rails segment where you zap ghosts from the roof of the Ecto-4WD vehicle, Sanctum's battles unfailingly involve the rookies walking into an area, having a gate or door lock behind them, and then needing to defeat all of the ghosts that appear in order to open an exit. This in itself wouldn't be too bad if all of the maps didn't repeat themselves later in the campaign with the simple addition of harder enemies. And when you consider that your three weapons occasionally seem to have no effect on an enemy even when you use the proper color, jumping into these recycled encounters can seem unfairly challenging.    Convince up to three friends to play in place of the AI, however, and Sanctum becomes relatively enjoyable. On consoles, you can play cooperatively either locally or online, but on the PC only local play is supported. Since most enemies can knock you out of battle with only a couple of hits, though, you might spend a good deal of time rushing over to your fallen comrades and tapping buttons to pull them back into combat. It's not always as easy as it sounds: The PlayStation 3 and PC games are responsive enough, but the Xbox version occasionally fails to give you the revive prompt no matter how you position yourself.   In later levels, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the endless waves of ghosts.   Sadly, given the lack of online play, Sanctum's AI stands as one of the game's great weaknesses. While AI companions are much faster than real players when it comes to reviving fallen comrades, they exhibit an infuriating habit of running around in circles at the worst of times and often fail to use the proper weapons against ghosts of a particular color. Should you fall, they rush to your aid even when doing so means obvious death for them as well, and occasionally some streak of buggy pacifism keeps them from firing at all. This is particularly exasperating during boss battles while playing in single-player. Since most of these require keeping away from the boss and whittling down its hit points with a steady stream of proton juice, the process can take eons if the AI players aren't pulling their weight.    Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime imparts very little of the charm that the franchise is known for. There are no comical voice-overs; instead, little snippets of pop-up text with forced jokes suffice for character interaction. There are no puzzles to break the monotony of combat; the only break stems from the collection of Stay Puft Marshmallow Man dolls scattered throughout most levels. The music is appropriately eerie though a little repetitive, but thankfully the famous theme song plays while you visit the title screen. Perhaps including the real Ghostbusters could have made up for these shortcomings a bit, but on the whole, the thought of spending too much time with Sanctum of Slime is far more haunting than any ghost it throws at you.   
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702,One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP ,4," One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP is a dull, time-consuming collect-a-thon that fails to do the license justice.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/0/4/7/2227047-615921_191461_front.jpg,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/one-piece-unlimited-cruise-sp-review/1900-6349796/,neg,"
  UK REVIEW--Collectibles have long been a staple of video games. Traipsing around picking up coins, notes, and rings--we've all done it. Normally, these jaunts into collect-'em-up territory are designed to complement the game, grant additional bonuses, or improve your chances. In One Piece: Unlimited Cruise, most of the time they are the game. Sure, the game has combat and exploration and bosses, but unless you collect every rock, grass, mineral, lizard, or insect you can get your hands on, you won't get far. It's kind of difficult to base an entire game on a side activity, and much like the original Wii version, this 3DS port does little to keep things interesting. Plagued by tedious to-ing and fro-ing, this plodding trek has very little to offer even the most diehard One Piece fan.    Pirates love treasure, and Luffy is no exception.   Despite what the game's title suggests, this isn't the entire Unlimited Cruise saga. It was split in half for its original Wii incarnation, but the Japanese 3DS release of Unlimited Cruise rectified things by including Treasure Beneath the Waves and Awakening of a Hero on one cart. That isn't the case here. Instead, this European release contains just the first episode, along with a boss-rush Survival mode and Marineford Episodes, which are a series of arena fights based on the anime's Marineford plot arc.     The good news for One Piece fans is that Unlimited Cruise really nails the characters and the vibe. The main mode offers nine playable characters, including series protagonist Monkey D. Luffy, the daring swordsman Zoro, the skeletal Brook, and Chopper the reindeer. All the characters are nicely modeled, and the dialogue, albeit rather sparse, is spot-on, being charming, lighthearted, and funny. It's a shame, then, that Unlimited Cruise's overall story is utterly forgettable, with Luffy and crew exploring islands and overcoming ordeals (read: bosses styled on classic One Piece enemies) with the promise of ""a present"" at the end of it. They're accompanied by Gabri, an unusual creature who exists to eat items and convert them into points, which are required to unlock routes and progress between bosses.    Filling your inventory with meaningless junk soon gets tiring.   The plot exists as a flimsy device that has the main characters trekking around, collecting hundreds of different bits of junk, and then feeding them to Gabri or using them to make a variety of arbitrary things. The game has no qualms about frequently asking you to traipse around the same bit of land, collecting pickups. In fact, it positively revels in it. Items are needed to create bridges, cannons, ladders, explosives, and plenty more. They're needed for feeding to Gabri to accrue GP, which then has to be spent on construction. They're needed to make healing items, and they're needed to make items that are required to collect more items. Sometimes you find yourself at an impasse, with a character's item-creation level too low to develop the thing you need. Then, you're required to create other things to level up, whether you need those things or not.     The islands you explore are largely bland, unimaginative places. There's the beach/forest area, the desert island complete with the odd dinosaur bone, the frozen ice island, and the island with the obligatory volcano. They're often confusing and mazelike, with the unhelpful map frequently failing to point out that many of the paths are one-way. Shortcuts can be unlocked by, predictably, gathering a ton of items to create more items. The problem is, for a game that focuses so heavily on exploration, the areas aren't fun to explore. They're filled with awkward, fiddly jumps, which frequently see your character bouncing off a cliff edge. There's a general feeling that the environments haven't been designed with character movement in mind, and while the game doesn't punish you for plunging headfirst into chasms, such falls are still an annoyance when there's such a reliance on trekking about looking for things.    Combat is basic but fun, with Break Rush adding a tiny bit of depth.   Getting in between you and the collectibles are a bunch of mud monsters, pirates, zombies, navy officers, and the occasional venomous plant. Most of the enemy types require the same approach to defeat them, although some fun can be had with the combat--when the camera is behaving itself, at least. The nine playable characters, for the most part, have noticeably different styles, and you unlock more moves for each character simply by using them in combat. Luffy uses his rubber limbs to perform fast, far-reaching kicks and punches, Robin attacks with magical hands from below, and Usopp is a ranged fighter, using a slingshot to dispatch foes. Messing around with the different characters is fun for a while, although some of the attacks (dash + regular attack, for example) can be fiddly to perform, or the combo simply doesn't register.     Perhaps the neatest aspect of Unlimited Cruise's combat is the Break Rush ability. Whenever you enter combat, lists of button commands appear on the bottom screen. Performing all of these without being knocked down rewards you with a Break Rush. This lets you attack with more power and causes each enemy defeated with a Break Rush attack to drop an item, health, and stamina pickups. While collecting items is pretty much par for the course by now, building up your combo to reach Break Rush adds a little bit of variation to the combat, which is otherwise quite basic. The downside to Break Rush is that it can often cause a severe drop in the game's frame rate if too many enemies are present, and while the frame rate drops are short-lived, they can still be annoying. Further, the lock-on function doesn't come in handy often and is rather erratic, being prone to snapping out of lock-on even a short distance away from the enemy.    With all the collecting, they should call this Thousand Piece.   As well as the hordes of regular enemies, there are a bunch of boss battles. They're generally your reward for accessing an area by way of items, and defeating them rewards you with orbs that let you feed more items to Gabri. There's a neat range of One Piece enemies here. They're presented as simulated challenges the pirates have to overcome, rather than involving the actual characters, and therefore the game features appearances from across the One Piece plot arcs. The boss battles aren't fun and usually become a war of attrition as you chip away at each boss's massive health bar, while your characters take the brunt of the attacks since the dodge command rarely works properly. The fight against Gekko Moriah, for example, is infuriating because you're assailed by bats every time you get too far from him, and he spends the entire fight clumsily walking against the arena wall. To make matters worse, only some of the characters' attacks connect with him, making this one of the more frustrating fights.     The main story mode is a slog, and the Marineford Episodes mode doesn't fare much better. It has you entering into a series of arena fights and completing different routes through the plot, each focusing on a different set of characters. Some of these fights consist of inoffensive battles against either a single boss or waves of enemies. These are fine at first, but they can become frustrating later on, when the combat system can't keep up with the increased difficulty. The other type of mission sees you having to survive within a time limit; you must run in a circle around the outside of the arena, avoiding attacks. They're pretty easy to pass, but they're not much fun. Often, these missions put you in control of an excessively slow character and involve nothing more than holding a direction for a minute or more, narrowly avoiding attacks as you gently plod around.    Big sword for big eyes.   At least there's something of a story to keep you entertained here, although it's a bit patchy in its delivery, told through brief dialogue exchanges. There's the occasional rolling cutscene, and these can be quite problematic. The game is fully voice-acted, but the voice acting is only in Japanese, and the subtitles are tiny, blurry, and difficult to read. Coupled with the 3D effects, which are otherwise excellent, this can be a bit of an eye strain, and a lot more thought could have gone into the presentation, especially given that unless you're a Japanese speaker, reading the subtitles is mandatory to follow the plot.     There's also a Survival mode. This offers perhaps the best level of One Piece fan service, with 45 different One Piece characters available to play as. Here, you can tackle either 200 regular enemies that appear in waves, or a boss rush of 50 consecutive fights. It's a lengthy mode, but one that favours quantity over quality. The novelty of playing as some of the more unusual One Piece characters soon wears off, since the mode is so repetitive and long-winded. Some shorter, more-enclosed combat trials could have mixed things up a little, but in the spirit of the entire game, such quick-fire fun is absent.   This is one staring contest you can never win.   This entire package is a shame, because a One Piece explore-'em-up adventure could easily work well. The character charm and endearment is here, but the rest of the game lets that aspect down. It's a good-looking game, sharp and crisp in both 2D and 3D, but it's one that's centered around repetition and monotony rather than fun. Given just how tedious the first half is, it's hard to lament the absence of the second half, and also very hard to look forward to its inevitable release. While One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP may initially provide brief entertainment for longtime fans of the license, it's a voyage best avoided.     
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703,Death Rally ,4, This racing revival lacks all of the intensity and mayhem that made the original Death Rally such a great game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/2/5/8/95249-178258.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/death-rally-review/1900-6391167/,neg,"
  Revisit those thrilling days of yesteryear in Remedy Entertainment's Death Rally, a remake of the company's fondly remembered top-down arcade racer from 1996. Unfortunately, it takes less time than you can think ""Wow, that's from way back when we still played PC games in DOS!"" before you realize that this reboot--which first arrived on iOS and Android platforms last year--is a reject. Simplistic controls, grinding gameplay, and a dull career mode make for a sleepy racer that isn't worth even the $10 price tag.   Pictures don't tell the whole story here, as Death Rally actually looks kind of exciting in most screenshots.   Basic gameplay is in the same ballpark as the original Death Rally. You drive a car through murderous races set in various vaguely postapocalyptic wastelands, shooting boxes that contain various power-ups like nitro speed boosts, extra ammo, and cash, all while blasting away at enemies. The goal is to either beat the baddies to the finish line in races, killing them in the process or simply roaring past them, or to blow them all up early and often in deathmatches. Solo play and multiplayer are supported, although there doesn't seem to be a big audience playing online at present. And that's pretty much it. Virtually everything beyond these core elements of the game has only been roughed in, as if you're playing a test concept demo.    Career mode is weak. You start off abruptly in a deathmatch-style race where you're told to escape from the cops, which leads you to believe that you can win this race. But you can't. That's confusing enough, but then Tex--a George Lucas doppelganger--steps out of the lead cop car and immediately orders you to compete in an underground Death Rally circuit. There you must beat and kill bad guys in races and face off against some Speed Racer-looking dude called the Adversary when he shows up.    Competition was fierce for the last spot in the RV park.   It's all baffling. Why exactly the evil cops are going after this guy is a complete mystery, and there is no set progression through the campaign from race to race. There is a whole roster of bad guys, too, although none are given any personality beyond goofy names like Randy Wreck and less-than-inventive catchphrases such as ""You drive like a maniac!"" and the always entertaining ""Shut up!"" (Depressingly, these lines are the most memorable sound effects in the entire game, and that's solely because they are so aggravating.)    At first, this Southern-sheriff punishment sounds better than breaking rocks in the hot sun down Georgia way. It soon turns out that you might want to swap places with Cool Hand Luke, though. Vehicle controls are sloppy and uninvolving. The game is just about unplayable with the default keyboard setup; it's tough to handle cars through corners. Even using a gamepad feels mushy and distant. It doesn't help matters that acceleration is handled with the left stick instead of buttons or the triggers. Racing feels removed, more like you're riding shotgun than sitting behind the wheel. Even firing your default main gun is automatic whenever an enemy or a power-up-containing box is lined up in your sights.       Variety is sorely lacking. Races are quick, uninteresting loops around boring urban and rural terrain. You get the odd spicy moment when a mysterious stranger offers to sabotage enemies for half of your winnings, when you get to drive one of the high-powered cars for a single race for some cash, or when one of the villains challenges you to a race. But these little things just lead to running the same old regular race that you normally would. Visuals are fairly good but are lacking in fine detail and are plagued by problems such as the ""name"" rival in every race always getting his photo onscreen beside his car, which blocks out part of the track.    Decisions, decision.   The camera work isn't great, either. The default view is just high enough to obscure corners in some circuits, while the lower chase camera swivels around so much that you just might be getting a second look at that omelet you had for breakfast before you cross the finish line. The big highlights are dirt and ice, which make your car spin out more than normal on turns. Even with these thrilling additions to the repertoire, there is nothing memorable about any of the tracks featured here. Unlike in better arcade racers, tracks don't have defining features--you never remember a desert loop as ""the one with that killer curve"" or an arctic one with ""that crazy ice cliff."" All of the tracks are as forgettable as porridge, aside from maybe the jungle one where you race over crashed aircraft.    Tracks also feel jammed together. Turns are so close that you don't have much chance to get up a good head of steam. As a result, the sense of speed so necessary to a good arcade racer is almost completely MIA. You can get a bit of a rush with smart applications of the nitro boost, but that's it. Carnage is also hard to find. While a game where you mount cannons atop your hood should offer lots of bloody excitement, blowing up opponents can be quite frustrating. Most enemy cars are incredibly resistant to damage from your wimpy default gun, and your special, more powerful weapons come with small amounts of ammunition. You get maybe a half-dozen blasts with your shotgun or Gatling gun, for instance, before coming up with empty clicks whenever you hit the fire button.    Progression through the game when playing either career mode or single races is nothing more than a big grind. You spend a ton of time racing over and over again on the same handful of sleep-inducing tracks, slowly building your fame and taking forever to unlock something new like a track or a car or even a weapon. There is a thin layer of role-playing-lite career progression in that you collect parts during races to unlock new rides and new weapons. They are either scattered randomly or earned through kills. But it takes forever to get anywhere. Cars and weapons have to be built one part at a time, and you generally collect no more than one or two parts per race toward some piece of hardware that needs 15 or 25 or more parts to be fully assembled. You'll be racing a good long while before you're driving the souped-up Wraith or Interceptor, for instance.   Annoyingly, your rival's portrait can obscure part of the track.   Even worse, you have to blow all of your winnings right after each race. You either dump every cent into immediate car repairs and buffs to key components like speed, armor, handling, and weapons, or lose it. No trips to the local ATM for you. The game actually rubs it in with a vacuum-like sound effect that plays when your cash is sucked up for absolutely nothing if you've maxed out the available upgrades and can't spend any more. Cash lost this way winds up boosting your fame score, which apparently helps move the story along in some fashion as you level up and earn ranks. Still, having to wrap every race penniless kills any chance to strategize, since you can't save up to buy the Gatling gun of your dreams or a killer new car.    Arcade racers generally need to have an on-the-edge atmosphere where death can come at any moment via bullet or screwing up a turn. This new take on Death Rally, however, is more like riding with Miss Daisy, a genteel, distant driver as intense as a late-night cup of chamomile tea. There are just too many flaws here, with the flimsy controls, dreary tracks, and eternal grinding, for even the most desperate arcade gearhead to get anything out of this game.    
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704,FIFA Soccer 2005 ,8.9," This is EA Sports' best soccer game to date on the pitch, but it's really unfortunate that the career mode isn't more user-friendly.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/2/9/2218129-box_fifa05.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-soccer-2005-review/1900-6111907/,pos,"
 In the world of soccer games, there are really only two serious contenders for the championship title at this point: Konami's Winning Eleven games (Pro Evolution Soccer in Europe) and EA Sports' FIFA Soccer series. Like rival soccer teams eager to show off their newly acquired players at the start of a new season, these two series show up with a host of new features every 12 months in the hope that each will finally score a convincing victory over the other. Traditionally, Konami's offerings have boasted more-realistic gameplay but have faltered in the areas concerned with presentation, specifically due to the lack of licensed team and player names. EA Sports' offerings, on the other hand, have generally felt a little more arcadelike than realistic, but the games have always looked extremely sharp, and they let you take control of real teams comprising real players that wear real uniforms. The line separating the two series has become increasingly blurred in recent years, and this year is no exception, as both games are still seemingly seeking to emulate the other's strengths. But to set aside the competition for a moment, FIFA Soccer 2005 is definitely the best FIFA game to date.  This year's biggest improvement is the introduction of first-touch controls.  Every year, EA Sports makes a point of improving one key aspect of its soccer games. FIFA Soccer 2004 focused on off-the-ball player movement, for example. FIFA Soccer 2005 retains all the off-the-ball functionality of last year's offering and adds convincing ball physics (the ball doesn't stick to players' feet anymore) and some excellent first-touch gameplay mechanics to the mix. The ability to determine how your players control the ball at the exact moment it reaches them might not sound like a big deal, but its ramifications are extraordinary, because playing realistic passing-style soccer is now more feasible and satisfying. As a result, skilled strikers can create scoring opportunities out of thin air by embarrassing their markers with a single touch. Furthermore, the satisfaction you'll get from humiliating an opponent with just one tap of the right analog stick (we really don't recommend trying to play with the keyboard, because, oddly, the shift key is used to toggle the arrow keys between left and right analog stick functions) is almost akin to scoring a goal against him or her.  Like the on-the-ball skill moves that allow you to beat opponents when you're en route to their goalmouths with the ball in your possession, first-touch controls are all performed by tapping the right analog stick in the direction that you'd like your player to take the ball. The actual animation that transpires when the ball arrives at your player's feet (as well as whether or not the move succeeds) is determined by the player's position in relation to the ball, as well as his skill level. Some players are able to flick the ball over their heads, while some can turn defenders without even thinking about it or without ever letting the ball move more than a few inches from their bodies. Others will struggle to perform even simple turns without letting the ball stray far enough away from them so that opponents have a shot at stealing it. Also, like the on-the-ball moves, EA Sports has gotten the balancing of the first-touch controls nigh perfect. They're effective enough that you'll want to use them all the time, but the odds of your fancy footwork failing you are also significant enough that you'll still have to work pretty hard to create scoring opportunities for your team. There will be occasions, of course, when you're able to run a single player through your opponent's entire midfield and defense en route to a spectacular goal, but these moments of individual genius are few and far between--just as they are in real life.  Passing the ball around is invariably the best way to play.  For the most part, the only way you'll be able to beat opponents of similar ability in FIFA Soccer 2005 is to pass the ball around and successfully pick out players that are making good runs off the ball. If you've played FIFA Soccer 2004, you'll know that many of the best runs made by your players are going to be those that you trigger yourself. Sending other players on runs is as easy as tapping a single button while you're in possession of the ball, and the system is as effective at beating defenders as it is easy to employ. If you prefer to play an even more active role in the movement of your players, you can actually assume control of a second player using the right analog stick. It's not a system that we've ever really felt the need to use a great deal (and our online opponents have invariably had the same attitude), but it can certainly make it easier to pick out your strikers with crosses into the box--provided you can retain possession of the ball while you're using the right analog stick for your second player rather than using it to perform tricks and turns with your first. While we're on the subject of controlling additional players, it's also worth mentioning that the goalkeepers in FIFA Soccer 2005 are often very slow to come off their lines, which, since you can make them charge at the ball manually, is definitely a good thing. There are few things more frustrating in a soccer game than conceding a goal because your overly active CPU keeper was on a walkabout.  The other surprisingly significant improvement made to FIFA's gameplay this year concerns throw-ins, which in many previous soccer titles, including FIFA 2004, have made it far more difficult for the team awarded the throw to retain possession of the ball. EA Sports has effectively resolved the problem by allowing you to use the same off-the-ball controls during throw-ins that you can when in open play. When you're awarded a throw, you'll be able to control any of three players, and you can move them around however you see fit while your opponent attempts to mark you with three of his players. The system is different from the jostling mechanic that has you battling for position before corner kicks (there's still no way to play short corners, incidentally), but it feels quite similar, and it affords you the opportunity to come up with some creative ways of gaining advantages during the game's various corner set pieces.  As you'll no doubt have gathered from reading the previous information, FIFA Soccer 2005 plays an enjoyable and realistic game of soccer. The game isn't without its problems, though, and what's disappointing is that many of them really shouldn't have been difficult to avoid. The advantage rule (which Konami did a great job of implementing in Winning Eleven 7 International and has subsequently improved), for example, does not exist in FIFA Soccer 2005. So if one of your players is fouled after releasing a pass that puts one of your strikers clean through on goal, there's a good chance that the play will be stopped before you unleash your shot so that you can take a free kick. Playing against CPU teams can also be a baffling experience on occasion, because no matter which of the four difficulty settings you've opted for, your opponents will often appear to pass the ball around just for the hell of it. There's nothing wrong with keeping the ball moving, of course, but when your defense is all but beaten and the opposing striker knocks the ball back to one of his colleagues, who is in a less than favorable position, rather than going one-on-one with the keeper, it just feels wrong.  The career mode is far less user-friendly than it could have been.  Perhaps the most disappointing feature of FIFA Soccer 2005 is its 15-season career mode. It's actually quite an engaging gameplay option, but every aspect of it has seemingly been designed with the impending arrival of Total Club Manager 2005 (which will feature ""Football Fusion"" compatibility with FIFA 2005, allowing you to enjoy the features of both games simultaneously) in mind. It's a terribly cynical thing to say, but the management aspect of FIFA 2005's career mode is so cumbersome and unnecessarily time-consuming that it's as much an advertisement for the upcoming management title as the billboards that appear in the game's stadiums. What are we basing this on? Here comes the list:  1. When you start a career in FIFA Soccer 2005, you'll only be able to take control of certain teams, most of which play in their countries' lower divisions, and some of which you'll almost certainly not even have heard of. It's not necessarily a bad thing that the game forces you to start your career at the bottom of the pile and work your way up, but if your dream is to one day manage a glamorous team like Manchester United or Arsenal, the only way you'll realize it in FIFA 2005 is to first string together some successful seasons with another team and then wait for a job offer. Will this be the case with Total Club Manager 2005? Perhaps, but we doubt it very much.  2. When you decide that you want to augment your team via the transfer market, FIFA Soccer 2005 makes it about as difficult as possible for you to search its player database. If you have a specific player in mind, then it's not too difficult to locate him, provided he's still with the same team he plays for in real life. However, if you're simply interested in a type of player or one with certain abilities, then the only way for you to find that player is to check out the team rosters one at a time, click on that specific player's name, and then scroll through that player's attributes--none of which can be done quickly.  Free kicks at goal are an incredibly satisfying way to score.  3. If and when you manage to find a player that you're interested in adding to your squad, you'll notice a figure next to his name that represents his value in career points. You earn career points by stringing together wins, keeping clean sheets, scoring goals, and basically playing well. To make an offer, you'll hit the negotiate button, at which point you'll have no opportunity whatsoever to participate in any kind of negotiation. You'll instead be presented with a screen that tells you whether or not you've succeeded in signing that player, in addition to a short explanation of the decision made. Should you be crazy enough to try and submit an offer for a player whose list price you can't quite afford--perhaps thinking that the negotiate button will deliver on its promise--you'll simply be told that you don't have enough points.  Despite its numerous and significant flaws, the career mode in FIFA Soccer 2005 is still where you're likely to spend most of your time when you're playing the game solo. There's something very satisfying about taking charge of a team that's languishing in the lower divisions and turning its players into champions. There are also a few management features in the game that are far less painful than those listed above. Well, there's one, anyway. When you assume control of your team, you'll be handed 100 management points to spend on backroom staff. The people working under you include coaches that specialize in fitness, goalkeeping, defensive play, midfield play, and attacking play. There is also a finance department; there are scouts; and there's a medical staff. As you progress through the game, you'll be awarded additional management points to spend, and, as you spend them, you'll find that the benefits of having a good staff are actually quite significant. A good fitness coach, for example, will improve the recovery rates of your players in between matches, while good scouts will be able to give you additional information on any players that you're interested in signing. We should also mention that the career mode features an option that lets you simulate matches rather than play them, which gives you the opportunity to jump into the action if you feel it necessary to intervene at any point. The only reason we could imagine you wanting to make use of this, though, is if you were looking to get through your first season or two as quickly as possible in hopes of receiving a job offer from your favorite club.  Like its PlayStation 2 and Xbox counterparts, the PC version of FIFA Soccer 2005 boasts online support for two players. If you're playing the PC game on a LAN, you'll be able to play with up to three of your friends simultaneously, which is great given that two-on-two is arguably the best way to play any soccer game, because one of you can control runs off the ball while the other is in possession of the ball.  All of the world's top players are instantly recognizable.  The online options in FIFA Soccer 2005 include playing friendly matches or participating in tournaments with up to seven other players. The presentation of the EA Sports Online service menus and suchlike is impressive, and we never had any problems locating and joining up with other players with good connection speeds. There have been occasions when the game's quick-match option has spent a few minutes scouring the globe for opponents and come back with a negative response for us, but spending a few moments creating our own matchup game would invariably result in our being joined by another player within seconds. The amount of lag we experienced playing online varied from match to match, and while the game never became unplayable, we'd definitely recommend looking for opponents with decent ping times next to their names.  One thing that we have noticed about the online play in FIFA 2005, incidentally, is that most players are so concerned with improving their EA Sports Online rankings that they're happy to drop their favorite teams in favor of the likes of Brazil, France, Real Madrid, Arsenal, or Manchester United to improve their chances of winning. There's nothing wrong with wanting to play with a great team, of course, but it's a shame that those of you who want to compete with a less glamorous team (like the one you support in real life) will almost certainly end up falling into the same trap to make your online career record look respectable.  Whether playing online or offline, you'll be able to earn FIFA 2005 points for achieving certain milestones, such as winning a game by five or more goals, scoring a hat trick, or even just for accessing certain menu options. These points can be subsequently spent on unlocking additional content for the game, which is always a good thing. Although on this occasion, the 80 bonus items up for grabs were less impressive than you might expect from an EA Sports title. The majority of the unlockable items are alternate third uniforms for major teams, while others include: official balls, training pitches, nighttime versions of stadiums, music tracks from INXS and New Order, and the famous Italian referee Pierluigi Collina.  Speaking of music, the game's soundtrack contains almost 40 different tracks from all over the world. The EA Trax selection in FIFA 2005 is about as eclectic as they come. You'll find artists such as The Streets, Scissor Sisters, and Morrissey playing alongside the likes of Debi Nova, Ivete Sangalo, and Los Amigos Invisibles. Predictably, with such a varied jukebox at your disposal, you'll most likely come across a few tracks that you'll want to switch off. The flip side, though, is that you'll inevitably like at least a handful of the tracks on offer. The English-language commentary in the game again comes courtesy of the BBC's John Motson and Ally McCoist, who, for the most part, both do excellent jobs of talking about matches in accurate and timely fashions. There are rare occasions, though, when one of the two will randomly spout something wildly inaccurate, such as ""That could've been 2-2!"" when a shot that might have leveled a game at 1-1 narrowly misses the target. You also might hear ""No! The ref has waved play on!"" as the referee stops play to award a penalty.  This year's player animations are FIFA's most impressive to date.  Like all its predecessors, FIFA Soccer 2005 is a great-looking game, and if you're a fan of the sport, you'll find that many of the stadiums and players (and specific team uniforms) are instantly recognizable. This year's player animations are the best to grace the series to date, and, thanks largely to the introduction of the first-touch control system, there are far more of them than ever before. It's unfortunate that the impressive stadiums in the game are packed full of cardboard-cutout crowds, but the only time you'll notice just how bad the supporters look is during certain set pieces and in specific action replays.  So as the final whistle approaches, how do we feel FIFA Soccer 2005 has performed? Well, there's no doubt that this is EA Sports' best soccer game to date on the pitch. However, it's really unfortunate that the career mode isn't more user-friendly. Total Club Manager 2005's compatibility with the game is a mouthwatering prospect, but even without that, it's hard to imagine that anyone with an interest in soccer would find EA Sports' best soccer game ever disappointing. 
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705,Tournament Dreams College Basketball ,8.9, Tournament Dreams College Basketball comes as a blast of much-needed fresh air to the somewhat predictable pro-sim scene.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/5/5/8/20270-58558.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tournament-dreams-college-basketball-review/1900-6093211/,pos,"
 Sports management simulations have become so prolific of late that lines are beginning to blur. Since everybody is working off the same stellar Championship Manager template, all sports are beginning to feel the same. If not for a few graphics and different stat categories, it would be hard to tell the difference between a football game and a hockey game, since you're fulfilling the same management tasks no matter if you're dealing with pigskin or pucks.  The in-game menu is colorful and informative, and it features a full range of coaching controls.  So Tournament Dreams College Basketball comes as a blast of much-needed fresh air to the somewhat predictable pro-sim scene. The .400 Software Studios title stands apart from most of its rivals by focusing on the college game. Instead of simply adding some routine recruiting and program-building options to an NBA sim, the developers have turned the design philosophy on its ear by building around the unique nature of college basketball. Basketball almost takes second chair to the yearly recruitment drives that are vital to developing a Division I powerhouse. This gives the game both an impressive (almost unparalleled) authenticity and a very different (somehow friendlier) atmosphere from the usual text-based sim dealing with professional leagues.  The basics of the game are about what you would expect. You take over the basketball program at one of 320 Division I colleges spread across the country and gain complete control over everything from calling up potential recruits to scheduling games to setting a starting five. You can play solo or go online to take on friends in multiplayer leagues. Game difficulty is dependent on the school you choose, since each program has different strengths and goals. So, for instance, running Syracuse--with its powerhouse freshman class, solid reputation, and big bucks--is a lot easier than running a traditionally weak sister school, like Maine. Of course, with bigger schools come bigger expectations. Where the powers-that-be at Stanford aren't happy with anything less than a conference championship and a subsequent strong showing in the national tournament, the folks running things at Baylor are a lot more tolerant of a losing season.  As with real college basketball programs, a good recruiting program is vital for success. You need to spend a lot of time working the phones and setting up campus visits.  The best way to avoid offending your boss is, of course, to win a lot of games. And the best way to do that is to recruit top talent each year to make sure you're always able to send a contending club onto the hardwood. To reflect the importance of recruiting, .400 Software Studios has made it the heart of Tournament Dreams. For starters, it runs concurrently with the season, which means that you have to simultaneously keep an eye on playing games with the current squad while also recruiting players for next year's squad. This gives play an organic feel. You can go from offering a scholarship to a budding superstar in a local high school one moment to that big showdown with a divisional rival the next. Everything dovetails together in a way that you don't see in pro-sports sims, largely because you can make up for poor drafts in those games by signing free agents. Here, the draft and free agent markets are one and the same, so mistakes can cripple your program.  Another plus with the game's recruiting is its realism. While you do hire a scouting service to provide player ratings and numbers in a long list of categories, like offensive awareness and inside scoring, convincing a player to commit to your school involves hard selling. You typically start off with a phone call to gauge the interests of the players that your scouting service has identified as possibilities. Then you proceed to mount an aggressive, moderate, or light recruiting campaign. Finally, you offer campus visits and scholarships. Everything you do takes a chunk out of your weekly recruiting budget. In fact, even your phone calls are restricted to $300 a week--and remember that it costs more to call cross-country than it does to call within your home state--so economizing is a must.   Dedicating your efforts solely to those players you have a chance to sign is crucial. Incessant recruitment efforts stand the most chance of convincing a player to commit to your school. You need to go back to a few key targets week after week, and you mustn't spread your efforts around. Of course, this can be heartbreaking. Players take many weeks to commit, and in the meantime, they can run into trouble at school, be downgraded by scouts, declare their eligibility for the pro draft, or simply decide that another school is a better bet. Sometimes the sure things bail on you at the last minute. Sometimes an underdog has a change of heart and chooses you over rivals when you least expect it.  Track your team through the season on a variety of polls. The ratings are somewhat arbitrary, as in real life, although big wins and disappointing losses are always reflected here.  The whole process is remarkably true to life. A big reason for this is varied phone dialogue. There seem to be dozens, if not hundreds, of different player responses available. There are enough so that repetition is never an issue. It seems like you're talking to real people, too, since their conversations are so wide-ranging. Instead of canned ""not interested"" phrases, a player might blow you off with comments like ""I feel Jar Jar Binks is misunderstood."" or ""You think I'm good? You should see my little brother."" The same goes for positive responses, where players talk about their strengths on the court or how they've always dreamed of playing for your school. Late recruits even add a touch of desperation. One low-ranked potential we spoke to was only concerned about how many tickets to the Big East Tournament he could score and if it was OK to sell them. Others talk about getting kicked out of school for fights. The developers obviously took a lot of time with this dialogue, and the result is the inclusion of players who act like real individuals with identifiable personalities.  .400 Software Studios also spent a lot of time on refining other aspects of the simulation. Team control is as fully featured as the recruiting engine. For simmed contests, you set up a depth chart, choose primary and supporting offensive and defensive strategies, and even establish substitution patterns and player roles. Games can also be manually played, thus giving you on-the-fly access to all of the strategic options, time-outs, and last-minute shot instructions. There is a lot of depth here, but you don't have to be a basketball expert to appreciate everything. The program walks you through every step of each season via an e-mail interface, and more-intricate features, like the offensive and defensive strategies, are described both with text and with moving diagrams. While Tournament Dreams might not make you a basketball coach, it will give you enough information to fake it.  Have no worries! The interface walks you through all of the game's features and even includes descriptions and diagrams of all of its coaching strategies.  Friendly and attractive graphics go along with the personable presentation. Every screen is colorful and easy to read, and many boast visuals that give the game a lot of life. Every player is represented by a picture; the recruitment screen features graphics of all the options; and even the player ratings are represented by big, red boxes. This is the most attractive sports sim we've ever seen. The emphasis on production values extends to sound as well. The background music consists of a varied original soundtrack that mixes hip-hop with school-marching-band tunes. It's very catchy. All menu functions come with unobtrusive sound effects. Crowd noises and auditorium sounds accompany the manual simming of games, and these aren't just generic noises. The crowd actually reacts to events on the court with boos and cheers, and the stadium announcer calls out ""Going to the line. Shooting two."" every time a player goes to the charity stripe. Frills like these are almost unheard of in the bargain-basement world of the typical text-based sports management simulation.  Any way you look at it, Tournament Dreams is an outstanding achievement. College basketball has never been so thoroughly, enjoyably re-created. Sports management sims are rarely so captivating, no matter what real-life pastime they represent. Add to this solid developer support and regular updates that are still being released, and you have an absolute must for college basketball fans who need a fix now that March Madness 2004 has come to a close. 
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'accompany', 'manual', 'simming', 'games', ',', ""n't"", 'generic', 'noises', '.', 'The', 'crowd', 'actually', 'reacts', 'events', 'court', 'boos', 'cheers', ',', 'stadium', 'announcer', 'calls', '``', 'Going', 'line', '.', 'Shooting', 'two', '.', ""''"", 'every', 'time', 'player', 'goes', 'charity', 'stripe', '.', 'Frills', 'like', 'almost', 'unheard', 'bargain-basement', 'world', 'typical', 'text-based', 'sports', 'management', 'simulation', '.', 'Any', 'way', 'look', ',', 'Tournament', 'Dreams', 'outstanding', 'achievement', '.', 'College', 'basketball', 'never', 'thoroughly', ',', 'enjoyably', 're-created', '.', 'Sports', 'management', 'sims', 'rarely', 'captivating', ',', 'matter', 'real-life', 'pastime', 'represent', '.', 'Add', 'solid', 'developer', 'support', 'regular', 'updates', 'still', 'released', ',', 'absolute', 'must', 'college', 'basketball', 'fans', 'need', 'fix', 'March', 'Madness', '2004', 'come', 'close', '.']",0.1267545515949771,0.45759819770458066
706,Jamdat Bowling 2 ,8.9," Even though it's a clone of the original, Jamdat Bowling 2 adds a ton of interesting new features and is a very worthwhile download.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/5/0/8/20549-59508.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jamdat-bowling-2-review/1900-6094660/,pos,"
 Jamdat Bowling 2 offers all the enjoyment of bowling without the ugly shoes, awful food, and sore muscles. And even if ""enjoyment"" and ""bowling"" are two words you'd never use in the same sentence, Bowling 2's deceptively simple gameplay and multiplayer options make it a 300-score sequel to the best-selling mobile game of all time.  You probably already know the basic aspects of the great sport of bowling. Basically, you roll an oversized (roughly) 10-pound ball at a set of pins while trying to knock over as many as possible. This could have been reduced to a simple exercise that revolved around just pointing the virtual ball at the digital pins and then letting it fly, but Jamdat wisely kept the multidimensional bowling engine from the original Bowling intact for the sequel. The setup's simple enough. You control a ball at one end of the alley, while a flotilla of pins awaits at the far end. To send the ball hurtling accurately down the lane, however, you have to deal with four different challenges. First, you must position the ball for your roll by shifting it to the right or left of the alley. Next, a sliding meter allows you to select your shot's power. Once you've chosen your power level, you must aim the ball with an arrow that slides back and forth across the alley. Finally, you can choose to place spin on the ball, which allows it to tail to the right or left as it navigates toward its intended target.  On the most basic button-twitch level, all of the settings--save for positioning the ball--require good reflexes. A hiccup up here or a thumb-stutter there, and you've aimed your shot straight for the gutter. More importantly, your shot's power determines the ease of aiming and the effects of spin. A high-power shot yields an aiming arrow that flitters across the screen like a hyperactive jitterbug. A soft one is easier to aim, but your shot is less likely to send pins careening into one another for a strike. Spin serves as a corrective measure, so if your aim is off, you can use it to nudge the ball back on course. Spin has a smaller effect on stronger shots, thus compounding the difficulties of landing an accurate, powerful attempt. The gameplay is essentially identical to Jamdat Bowling, but its fun factor is still going strong.  The improvements to Bowling 2 reflect several years of progress in audiovisual and online development. The in-game graphics are brighter and more realistic-looking, replacing the monotone scheme of the original alley with a detailed, cartoony mock-up. The menu system has been completely reworked and is customizable using downloadable skins. Bowling 2 benefits greatly from the addition of sound effects, too, so you'll find yourself taking a mental bow when you hear the crowd roar after a turkey. The online-enabled features are multifarious and are generally pretty awesome. You can download news, look at your world rankings, and even test your skills against others using multiplayer! Before agreeing to a matchup, Bowling 2 allows you to look at a prospective opponent's stats to avoid total mismatches. Unfortunately, the online system lacks the ability to pair you with players whose stats match your own, which means that you'll face a lot of blowouts until you master the game. Unlike in real bowling, you never have to wait for your turn, so each player completes a game and compares scores at the end of it. This online play seems to work well, aside from cowardly opponents who lose their connections before you have a chance to take them to school. Bowling 2 also adds a pass-and-play mode, which is great for settling any number of petty disputes.  Even though it's a clone of the original--gameplay-wise--Jamdat Bowling 2 adds a ton of interesting new features and is a very worthwhile download. It's highly recommended to league-night enthusiasts and inept bumper-bowlers alike. 
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707,Gundam Space Assault ,8.9," It's tough, it's fast, and it's really fun.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/5/1/7/20557-59517.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gundam-space-assault-review/1900-6094171/,pos,"
 Bandai's Gundam Space Assault is a revelatory mobile shooter. Chock-full of deadly mechanized enemies, explosive power-ups, and gorgeous graphics, Gundam's gameplay will leave you gasping for breath--and your cell phone out of batteries.   There's as much going on during a pitched battle here as in most GBA games. Yes, the game slows down a tiny bit when asteroids are hurling at you, enemy infantry is flying in, the scariest boss in mobile gaming is firing full bore, and you call in your laser-blasting reinforcements. But it's a first-generation US Java game, and it's worth every penny you paid. Actually, much more.   Gundam Space Assault is my current favorite on the Sprint deck. It's tough, it's fast (play it with the power cord plugged in for best effect), and it's really fun. The only real problem here is that it may cause you to wear out the keys on your phone. Get Space Assault and look forward to the next Gundam--Atlantic Battle.  
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708,EverQuest: Hero's Call ,8.9, Hero's Call lacks the multiplayer experience of the PC version but not the depth. It will give mobile players a lot to be happy about.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/5/7/6/20586-59576.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/everquest-heros-call-review/1900-6094168/,pos,"
 EverQuest hit the PC shelves on March 16, 1999. With the game's release, Sony Online Entertainment hoped to add three letters to the acronym RPG (role-playing game) by creating one of the first truly massively multiplayer online experiences--now called an MMORPG. Gamers gave EverQuest success beyond anyone's predictions by spawning an incredibly successful online community of gamers who role-played and interacted in new ways. In fact, there were even in-game (and real-life) marriages.  A sequel and several expansions later, EverQuest has finally made its debut on mobile. While the wireless version is not an MMORPG, it is a terrific, traditional role-playing experience that spans dozens of hours of gameplay.  Before you begin EverQuest: A Hero's Call, you get to name your character, as well as choose the character's class and specialty. You can choose to play with either a mage or a warrior. In either case, your specialty can be attack, mysticism, or defense. While this level of customization doesn't even begin to approach that of the game's PC counterpart, in which you can change your character's clothing and appearance, it sets a new benchmark for the mobile RPG by adding depth to the game before the adventure even starts.  You start the game, humbly, with a rusty knife and a torn shirt. You are scoffed at by the owner of the local tavern, who advises you to develop your skills in a nearby dungeon--Bitters Tomb--before attempting any real quests. So, equipped with some torn fabric and the ability to give your opponents tetanus, you make your foray into the first of 32 (!) dungeons. Inside, you are met by a host of enemies to kill and a wealth of chests to open. After clearing Bitters Tomb, you emerge a little better equipped and a little more experienced. As you amass experience points, your character statistics (which consist of five attributes) slowly increase.  The game proceeds in a manner consistent with the formula of the traditional action RPG. After clearing a dungeon, you buy and sell items in the town shop and then head to the tavern to get further quests. In some missions, you are called upon to kill a specific creature or group of creatures. Occasionally, you must find a specific item within one of the dungeons. As you would expect, the dungeons become increasingly difficult as you progress through the game.   Although pared down from its PC heritage, EQ:HC includes a number of features not generally seen in a mobile game. For example, there is a matching function that serves to alert you about the challenges you can undertake. Pay attention to the Dungeon Ratings before entering a cave. When my character was level one, Grimfang Den was rated as ""Insane,"" and venturing in proved rather quickly fatal. After advancing to level two, the dungeon's difficulty was reduced to a rating of a mere ""Heroic."" The same mechanism is in place for individual monster encounters, so you can know what kind of trouble you are about to get into.  EverQuest: Hero's Call offers hours and hours of gameplay due to its series of long, involving quests. Unlike most mobile games, it can't possibly be beaten in a single sitting. The graphics for the release version are significantly improved over the demo version we first tested, and the addition of a fairly intricate plot adds to the game's atmosphere. EverQuest for mobile lacks the multiplayer experience of the PC version but not the depth. Hero's Call will give mobile players a lot to be happy about. 
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709,Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 ,8.9," It is still computer golf's de facto standard, worthy of consideration even by those who previously purchased last year's model.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/3/1/2212831-box_twpgat05.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tiger-woods-pga-tour-2005-review/1900-6109338/,pos,"
 Arm outstretched, Tiger Woods points defiantly toward the camera on the front panel of his latest namesake PC golfing game, thus stealing a page from the legendary Uncle Sam ""I want you!"" pose. But what is he really saying? ""I want you...to buy this game?"" or ""I want you...to stop hero-worshipping Vijay?"" Whatever the case, Mr. Woods remains the big box office draw despite the ageless Singh's incredible year and deserved new world number one ranking. Whether we'll one day have a Vijay Singh PGA Tour 2006 is somehow doubtful, but one thing is clear: EA Sports' Tiger Woods PGA Tour remains the uncontested champion of virtual golf, even if the man himself currently is not.  Bathed in the warm glow of a gorgeous sunset, this golfer tries to put one close to the pin.  Sporting a bevy of upgrades and alterations--including a revamped Game Face utility that may have you spending more time conceiving digital players than putting them into action, the new ""legends tour"" mode, wherein you climb a competitive ladder to square off against such luminaries as Ben Hogan and Gary Player, and a nifty course-warping tool that custom converts even relatively sedate venues into supreme tests of skill--Tiger 2005 is more sophisticated and engaging than anything prior. Though the game doesn't introduce any serious gameplay mechanic advancements and though it remains weighed down by several quirks that become only more annoying with time, it is still computer golf's de facto standard, worthy of consideration even by those who previously purchased last year's model.  Indeed, one of the most newsworthy developments over the course of the last year is the ongoing absence of a Tiger rival. Microsoft's once-vaunted Links series hasn't seen an update since 2003 and it does not appear to be reappearing anytime soon. As for other alternatives, the horizon looks as bleak as a rainy morning at Troon. Yet even if one or more Tiger alternatives did currently exist, chances are they'd simply be too inferior to effectively battle the genre leader.  Tiger developer Headgate Studios has been designing golf games since Sierra Entertainment's 1997 release, Front Page Sports Golf. In Sierra's subsequent long-running PGA Championship Golf series, Headgate really came to life, fashioning revolutionary advancements such as the mouse-movement swing and fully animated golfers, thus proving just how entertaining and fully interactive computer golf could be. Its technical aptitude wasn't yet on par with that of the generally acknowledged top gun of the time, Access Software's otherwise comparatively staid and traditional Links, but together they lay waste to other competitors. The fact that just one of the two is currently active at least partially verifies which tactic proved to be superior.  Today, Tiger is an unparalleled smorgasbord of golfing delights that packs no less than 11 courses into its three-CD 2005 format. Granted, that's seven fewer than last year's 18-course edition, though Tiger 2005 features a total of eight brand-new courses to Tiger 2004's five. For the fantasy fans, the game features the Australian outback-inspired Red Mountain Creek and the gorgeous Asian masterpiece, Emerald Dragon. Word to the wise--venture to the latter only if you dare. It may well be one of the most difficult courses to ever emerge from Headgate. New real-life, licensed courses include California's Sherwood Country Club, South Africa's diverse Links at Fancourt, and Arizona's red rock paradise Troon North Monument course. Returning favorites include Pebble Beach, St. Andrews, and TPC at Sawgrass. It almost goes without saying that Tiger 2005 delivers virtually every form of golfing environment on the planet--and even a few that aren't.  The roster of available competitors is better than ever, though it still lacks some of pro golf's most notable standouts. Though you will find Woods, Singh, John Daly, Colin Montgomerie, and the curiously fashionable Jesper Parnevik, you won't see top-rung players such as Phil Mickelson or Ernie Els. The LPGA is also poorly represented by any stretch of the imagination, with last year's holdover Nancy Gulbis being the only participant.  Yet it's in its depiction of fantasy players that the game truly excels. Not only has Headgate supplied 14 prebuilt imaginary characters--including several that look like they should be anywhere but a golf course--but also it has provided a godlike control over the design of new personas. Deemed Game Face II, this highly addictive, in-game player-creation utility is quite possibly the finest to grace any sport game to date. The question isn't whether you want a long or a short nose or beady versus large eyes, but instead how incredibly detailed you want them to be. A nose design, for instance, will include the following parameters: nose length, width, slope, and depth; nostril height and width; the presence or lack of left and right nose moles; and the choice of four types of nostril and bridge piercings. Impressively, each alteration is displayed incrementally in real time. When you factor all the minute parameters and adjustments available in the Game Face utility--including such trivial elements as jewelry, tattoos, and even freckle or age spot density--you have literally millions of different possibilities. And that's not even counting the game's wide range of player-skill attributes.  Rich, detailed, and animated, the Tiger 2005 world is really something to behold.  Indeed, it's not just the stunning exactitude through which a player can be created that sells the whole routine, but the amazing humanness of each new character once he or she is on the course. Never has a golf game featured such a massive roster of believable player animations and expressive faces. That each character looks so good to begin with and so smoothly transitions from one action to another, is yet one more precedent for this already standard-setting series.  As for the world that surrounds each of your golfers, the news on this issue is both encouraging and slightly disappointing. On the upside, each environment is wonderfully ""alive."" Trees, foliage, and flags move with the wind. Flocks of birds soar through the sky, clouds and translucent low fog roll across the screen, and ocean waves pound against the shoreline at locations such as Pebble Beach. Lakes, meandering streams, and water hazards look lustrous and liquid, veritably glistening in the sunlight and accepting errant shots with a kerplunk and a splash. Elegant lens-flare effects materialize at the most opportune moments, framing your golfer's silhouette in the glow of the late afternoon or early morning sunshine. And, as usual, painstaking graphic detail is evident throughout.  Yet perhaps the most striking visual aspect of the Tiger series is its sense of drama. Heightened by free-roving cameras that alternate between TV-type coverage and dynamic follow-the-ball shots that could only exist in the digital world, the game delivers a consistent buzz of excitement from the first hole to the 18th. If you want to set up your own camera positions, you can do that too, choosing from an array of preset orientations or designing your own by moving, zooming, and rotating the default cam to any spot your heart desires. Dramatic sound effects and upgraded visuals accompany truly spectacular shots, and full-motion video sequences highlight key achievements.   World number one Vijay Singh blasts one out of the sand at the frighteningly difficult Emerald Dragon course.   It's generally a superb presentation, marred only by a few glitches. By far the most aggravating of these is the mysterious ""warping hole,"" wherein the hole suddenly disappears from the screen, only to mysteriously reappear several feet away. Granted, holes transmogrified only twice during our long testing procedure, but twice is two times too many for such a perilous occurrence. It should also be noted that it was only the image of the hole that moved--the actual GPS position remained where it was, even though we could no longer see it. Very strange indeed.  Only slightly less annoying is the game's penchant for displaying inappropriate or wrongly placed shot reactions. On several occasions, we've witnessed a cheering gallery or a celebratory golfer when the shot in question was clearly a terrible effort. The opposite is also true--a gathered throng falling into stunned silence or letting loose with a perceptible groan over a near-perfect result. Furthermore, galleries generally react much too early, far before the final resting position of the ball has been established.  The same is true for the game's announcers, David Feherty and Gary McCord. The fact is that both are ideal for a computerized version of golf, given their real-life reputations and mutual senses of humor. And, certainly, the developer has armed each with a ton of phraseology to ensure minimal repetition. But both McCord and Feherty deliver many of their lines too early, before anyone in the real world would have a chance to know the result. And that, of course, makes the actual spotting of the ball anticlimactic. Almost as irritating is the dynamic duo's incredible number of errors. Conservatively, McCord and Feherty proved to be seriously mistaken at least four or five times per round, which is of course particularly vexing when you've just adhered to Feherty's erroneous advice and missed a birdie putt because of it.   Playing Tiger 2005 is an exercise in unparalleled versatility. This is a humongous game, with oodles of possibilities for rookies and veterans alike. Newcomers will likely want to avail themselves of the ""new player walk-through,"" a text-and-graphics guide to what makes the game click. Veterans will undoubtedly gravitate to the new legend tour, where they'll move up a ladder to eventually combat icons such as Gary Payer or Ben Hogan. But the cream of the crop will certainly want to check out a little something called ""tiger proofing,"" where they're able to transform even the tamest course into a fire-breathing monster. If you want a true postage-stamp green or ribbon-thin fairway, or perhaps a sand trap wider than a football field, this is the place to come. The eventual goal is to assemble your ""Dream 18,"" your own personal venue constructed from your favorite--and most challenging--holes taken from all the courses.  This lengthy but involving procedure exemplifies the thinking that makes the new Tiger so compelling. In simple terms, the game grows with you. In more complex terms, virtually every Tiger element is somehow interconnected. By partaking in a tournament, you'll win money, which you can then use to buy lessons and learn new shots, enter other tourneys, buy a dream matchup in the legend tour, and much, much more. The Dream 18 is connected to tiger proofing. Good results in the game's highly structured tournament mode catch the attention of sponsors. Your stature affects your prestige, which earns you the respect of legendary golfers and attracts them to your custom-built monster course, and so on.    Curiously, the game's lessons component is not yet structured to reward truly skilled usage of your club (which could be your mouse or your keyboard, depending on whether you prefer Headgate's true-swing mode or more conventional three-click mode). One might think that in this stage of Tiger's evolution, Headgate would have developed some nifty method by which you could successfully perform a specialized shot only by enacting a deft series of motions or operations in a perfectly staged and timed sequence. But that is not yet the case. Instead, Tiger asks that you merely pay for a lesson and complete it (an easy task in anyone's book). You'll then have that given shot added to the menu bar at the bottom of the gameplay interface. Though you may need to slow your stroke a bit and position a slider before you actually attempt a tricky bump and run or flop or punch, you'll find they are generally not too far removed from a normal shot.  Of course, if you merely want a quick skins, shootout, or stroke game--or one of another dozen custom one-off game types--you can do that too. You can also opt to play against a superstar such as Woods himself, though you may want to rearrange his ability level beforehand in any of eight key skill areas so he's not quite as threatening as he otherwise might be. But the greatest threat of all may be the players you'll meet online.  With Tiger 2005's impressively sophisticated Game Face II technology, designing the perfect male and female golfing specimens is far from dull.  Tiger 2005 sports a robust and sophisticated online multiplayer component that allows you to do just about anything you can do when you're playing against virtual competition. We were somewhat disappointed when our initial foray met with a server alert, but our subsequent experience was very positive indeed. Here you'll find no shortage of willing participants to engage you in any form of play mode you wish. And for serious players, EA Sports maintains a full stat-tracking system that includes critical information, such as money lists and league leaders. A quick warning to newbies--some dishonest players use a process called ""edging"" to enhance their swings. In essence, edging allows them to swing arrow-straight even at higher difficulty levels. It's cheating, pure and simple.  In the end, you really don't have much choice. If you want to play golf on your PC, there's currently just one place to turn. Fortunately, it's a great place. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 is the culmination of Headgate's decade of PC golfing experience, and, with the exception of several notable quibbles and a dearth of significant gameplay mechanic innovations, it's a snappy culmination. Tiger 2005 is certainly more straight-up fun than any version of Links, and it is more involving than last year's Tiger 2004. EA and Headgate didn't exactly pull out all the stops for this edition, but they didn't rest completely on their laurels either, and that's a good thing for fans of the pastime. 
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710,Fight Night Round 2 ,8.9," The second version in the Fight Night series is here, and it does what it has to do: improves on an already winning formula.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/2/4/1/2216241-box_fnr2.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fight-night-round-2-review/1900-6119496/,pos,"
  Last year's Fight Night 2004 reinvigorated boxing video games, as boxing had become a sports genre that many people had written off years ago. After a sequence of mixed results in the Knockout Kings series, EA Sports' Fight Night came along and introduced entirely new mechanics to the boxing genre, creating a fast-moving and free-flowing style that better reflected the pugilistic arts seen on TV. A year later, the second version in the Fight Night series is here, and it does what it has to do: improves on an already winning formula.   Strap on your headgear, chump. The punches fly fast and hard in Fight Night Round 2.   The plodding pace and an overly complex fighting system are what have hurt boxing games. When you enter the virtual ring, the last thing you want to feel is that your boxer has glue on the soles of his shoes, or that you won't be able to execute a simple three-punch combo without memorizing long strings of button sequences. Fight Night Round 2 directly addresses both of these concerns with controls that are responsive, subtle, and effective, giving you a real feeling of mastery over your boxer, even if you're picking the game up for the first time.    First of all, the boxers move across the length of the ring at a nice pace--neither lumbering across the canvas, nor moving too quickly at an unrealistic pace. You can close on an opponent quickly yet backing away from punches is just a tad too slow for comfort, which seems exactly right. On the downside, a fighter's movement doesn't seem to slow down even when fatigued, though punch speed and effectiveness do drop.    Movement, however, is only half of the formula. A great boxing game hinges on the effectiveness of both the offensive and defensive controls, and it's here where Fight Night Round 2 shines. Nearly everything is controlled with a combination of the right analog stick and the trigger buttons. Simple punches--jabs, hooks, and uppercuts--are at your fingertips with a simple flick of the right stick. The design of each control is even set to resemble the punch you throw, so that a quick stinging jab is executed with a single flick of the right stick diagonally left or right; a hook is accomplished by moving the stick to the right and then arcing up; and a devastating uppercut starts out diagonally down and moves up and around, much like the way your boxer's arm moves along the path of the punch.    If you're looking to deal some heavy blows to your foe, you'll need to wind up your punch a little and toss some haymakers into the mix. Controlling haymakers is simple and feels just as natural as regular punches. A haymaker hook, for example, starts out as a normal punch--moving the right analog stick directly left or right--but instead of letting the punch fly immediately, you'll need to wind up the power by pressing down and then up along the arc of the controller. Punches can only be fully wound up when a boxer is standing still, though power punches can still be thrown when the boxer moves. The most powerful punches are best reserved for those times when you have your opponent backed up against the ropes or, better yet, in the corner.    Body shots are executed by combining punches with the left trigger, and it's easy to quickly and effectively mix up your punch types between body blows and head shots. In fact, most combinations are easy to pull off with Fight Night Round 2's control scheme, provided you stay disciplined with your right stick movements. In the heat of the moment, it's easy to forget to let that hook you've wound up continue through its arc, as it's equally easy to simply switch to an opposite side jab. In fact, you'll often feel like your flailing punches at random. But with a little practice, you'll be stringing together one-two-three combos in no time. In fact, the controls in Round 2 are so subtle that slight movement of the right stick will let you pull off shoulder feints to fool your opponent into getting his guard up on one side while you pile on a flurry of damaging punches to the opposite side.   Shoring up cuts and reducing swelling will keep you busy between rounds.   As flexible as the offensive mechanics are, Round 2's defensive controls are just as much so. New for Round 2 is the clinch, a last-ditch effort to regain some stamina just before you get hit with a knockout blow. It's nice to see an effective clinch control enter the mix, and it's even better that clinches can be shrugged off or avoided altogether, preventing the move from being an automatic fail-safe.    Other defensive options include blocks and parries, and these are executed with the right analog stick and right trigger. Parries are especially effective in the game because they leave your foe wide open for counterpunches, which, as you progress up the ranks, become one of the essential keys to victory. Like punches, blocks and parries can be executed both high and low. If you want to block a low hook on the right side, you'll need to make sure that your parry is set up to catch the punch when it lands. Because of this, effective parrying requires a lot of observation of your opponent's tendencies and animations, as well as a lot of practice to get the timing right. Once you do, however, you'll find parries one of the most effective weapons in your arsenal. Finally, the easiest way to make your opponent miss is by dodging, which is pulled off by using the left analog stick and the left trigger in tandem.    This control scheme, which is simple to pick up yet tough to master, makes for a huge variety of matches in Round 2. We've seen all-out slugfests where both competitors basically stand in the middle of the ring and pound each other senseless. We've been chased around the ring by head-hunting maniacs looking for first-round blood, only to outlast them later in the fight. We've introduced opponents to the canvas with the very first punch of the fight. About the only thing we didn't see in our time with Round 2 are fights that go the distance. Whether this is because of our preference for going with power fighters and looking for big-punch knockouts, or because of some other reason, is unclear. Certainly fights go longer the deeper you get into the game, but we have yet to see a fight go the distance and, because of this, we haven't won or lost by decision.   Though throwing punches in Round 2 is fun, watching and hearing them land is twice as nice. The game's graphics and sound effectively convey the force of each successful punch. Even on stinging jabs, your opponent's head will twist back, conveying the force of the blow. With stronger shots, your rival's head will literally rock to the side and his hands will drop down, leaving you to execute a successive flurry of blows. As you land your punishing punches, your opponent's health meter will gradually decrease. When it empties completely, the camera switches to a closer viewpoint, the sound drops out save for the desperate screaming of your opponent's corner man, and you'll be primed to take your rival out with a knockout punch. Desperate to avoid this, your foe will be blocking and parrying madly, so you'll need to prime your punches carefully. Land just the right punch and your opponent will take a dive onto the canvas, often bouncing off the ropes in the process.  The power of a good haymaker.  It's here, in the KO moment, in which the full might of your punch is revealed. A series of slow-motion replays show the sheer force of impact of your clout landing, complete with flying sweat and, sometimes, spewing blood. The sound of your opponent's grunt slows down to a barely audible guttural moan as his head rocks, his chin flays out with the force of the punch, and his eyes roll back in his head. And then you get a different angle of the same punch. And then another. Each KO punch is a brutal, visceral experience that will have you cackling out loud each time it happens. These KO moments are the primary way of achieving knockdowns, but if you execute the right punch at the right time you will send your opponent diving onto the canvas no matter how much health he has remaining.  Round 2 includes several game modes: quick fight for pick-up-and-play matches, online play (on the Xbox and PlayStation 2), and a career mode, where you can take your boxer up from the amateur ranks all the way to the pinnacle of your chosen weight division. In the pickup bouts, you can use fighters from the game's roster of current and all-time greats, and you can even mix and match weight divisions. Want to know how Bernard Hopkins would fare against Muhammad Ali? You can find out in Round 2 (the answer: not too well). You also have the option to create a boxer of your own by using the game's in-depth and entertaining create-a-champ mode. This is one of the more in-depth create-a-player features we've seen recently, rivaling that of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 in both depth and flexibility.  Online play with Round 2 tends to be hit or miss. While the idea of taking your created fighter online and duking it out with strangers (or friends) is attractive, in execution, however, the mode tended to fall flat in our test sessions. Unfortunately, the controls are not as responsive online as they are in the single-player game. When you're fighting through the career mode, you get used to the snappy pace of your boxer and his instant reactions to any move you make in the game. This isn't the case online, as there seems to be a pause, however brief, in between the movement on the controller and your virtual fighter's response. Though the lag tends to be minimal, in a sport as dependent on timing as boxing, these pauses can be detrimental to the game experience.  Round 2's career mode is the deepest mode found in the game. You'll have two options in this mode: creating a new player from scratch or rebuilding the legend of one of the real boxers found in the game. You can even change the real fighter's fighting style and stance--remake Roberto Duran as a southpaw, or Joe Frazier as a speedster, for example. If you choose to create a boxer from scratch, you'll only have a certain number of points to distribute among attributes, such as power, speed, agility, heart, and cut recovery. Once created to your liking, your greenhorn boxer will start out in the amateur ranks, picking up fights as he can and earning a small purse for each win. The amateur ranks are essentially used to introduce the game's sparring/training mode, but you have the option to skip the amateurs and go straight to the pros if you desire.  Training in Round 2 involves the heavy bag, combo dummy, and slinging iron.  The game's training mode is perhaps its weakest feature. You start off with the basics by landing several punch types in a row. As you progress, you'll be asked to practice dodging, parrying, and blocking blows. Unfortunately, the game doesn't describe how to pull these moves off in the training mode. Those new to the Fight Night series might find this confusing, because unless you consult the game's manual or get lucky with a loading screen that describes the controls for a particular move, you won't have any idea how to progress, except through trial and error. Furthermore, the career mode lacks a sparring feature. If you want to practice your parrying techniques in an unranked situation, you'll have to back out of the career mode altogether.  This doesn't mean that training can't be found in the pro ranks. In fact, you will be focusing your skills in a number of different areas, including heavy bag, combo dummy, and weight lifting (essentially minigames that concentrate on timing and pattern recognition). Each training sessions focuses on specific attributes, such as power or agility, and you'll need to spread your training time out to ensure you consistently improve all your boxer's stats. A nice graphical touch is the very obvious strides your boxer's physique will make in the early training sessions. Start your virtual boxer out as a flabby fatty and he'll quickly evolve into a carved-out-of-wood paragon of fighting fitness after only a few sessions.  Early in your pro career, you're able to leap up the ranks if you so choose, easily besting boxers that are three or more ranks ahead of you. Because your attributes improve after each prefight training session, however, it's probably smarter to take things slow in order to maximize your stats. You'll need every attribute maxed out as you approach the upper echelon of your weight class.  There's plenty of gear to spend your hard-earned money on.  For each win you'll earn cash that can be spent in a number of different areas--from improved trainers and cut men to entrance music and effects and, yes, ring girls. You can also gear up in the fight store, choosing from a large selection of gloves, shoes, trunks, mouthpieces, and foul protectors. Noticeably missing from the gear assortment are robes, which don't play a part in your ring entrances. In fact, ring entrances in general don't have the same kind of flair found in the game's create-a-boxer feature. A more flexible ring entrance design tool--preferably one that supports custom soundtracks and selectable camera angles--would have been a welcome addition.  The further up you move on the rankings ladder, the less wiggle room you'll have for scheduling fights,  because the difference between a fighter ranked three spots higher than you is noticeably different from the chump just ahead of you. As such, once you break the top 20, you'll find that your progress toward championship gold slows dramatically. Your opponents are generally stronger and quicker than you, and the artificial intelligence is much more doggedly aggressive and has the tendency not to back off, even if you land multiple combos. As such, if you don't have your defensive game well in hand--the blocking and parrying techniques in particular--you may quickly find yourself out of your league. This is our other gripe with Fight Night Round 2's gameplay. Early on, you focus so much on your offensive game, and you can easily overwhelm opponents (especially if you focus on power shots). You can also skate through the bottom half of the pro ladder, barely ducking or blocking a single punch. Defensive skills aren't needed early on, so what's the point in practicing them? By the time you start fighting opponents who refuse to back off even under heavy pressure, your lack of defense will come back to bite you. While we understand the point of ""upping your game"" as you reach the top of the pro ranks, we think that an addition of a ""free spar"" feature, used to avoid punches early in the game, for example, would have made for an easier transition.  Graphically, Round 2 features some of the most impressive player models found in sports gaming. Skin textures are amazingly lifelike and the models animate beautifully. The aforementioned punch animations are vicious and well executed, which is something you never tire of seeing and which never fails to elicit a grimace from passersby. Sweat flies with each landed punch and, in the case of power shots, you might see a spray of blood from your opponent's mouth. Because the boxers are the star of the Fight Night show, the player models of your entourage and ring card girls don't look nearly as intricately detailed. Plus, all of this quality modeling on the boxers means that the game's backgrounds will suffer. While there are a good variety of arenas in which to fight--Staples Center, the grungy 65 Lower Flushing, and the glamorous Hisako Ballroom among them--most seem poorly lit and lacking in detail. The same is true for the ringside crowd, which is barely noticeable most of the time.  From a sound standpoint, Round 2 is solid, if unremarkable. Some noticeable improvements have been made, including a new ringside announcer, ESPN and Fox boxing analyst Joe Tessitore, who is a marked improvement over the horrible Big Tigger from the previous game. While Tessitore's commentary is enthusiastic and more professional sounding, his calls can be vague, especially when describing missed punches. While your ringside trainer will give you advice in between rounds--while you're busy healing cuts and reducing swelling using the game's new cutman feature--his commentary is pretty limited and sometimes directly contradicts itself. One second you just had a ""great round"" and the next you're going to need to ""get it together"" if you hope to have a chance in the fight. EA Trax rears its ugly head again with a mix of hip-hop tunes that, though limited in scope, certainly fit the boxing vibe. But perhaps more so than any other EA Sports title, the Fight Night series begs for custom soundtracks.  What would a boxing game be without ring card girls?  Beyond some important feature distinctions, there is little difference between the three console versions of Round 2. Graphically, the PlayStation 2 version of the game holds its own against both the Xbox and GameCube versions, and all three console controllers work fine with the game. The small C-stick on the GameCube controller, combined with its eight-point articulation, might require some practice to use, especially if you've played Fight Night 2004 on a different console (but it's generally not a big deal). Load times are prevalent on all three versions, but it's only ugly on the PS2 version of the game. As you might expect, online play is only enabled for the Xbox and PS2 versions, but GameCube owners should not feel slighted, as they've got the benefit of the full SNES version of Super Punch-Out!! to play when realistic boxing action just doesn't cut it anymore. Little Mac, star of Super Punch-Out!!, is also an unlockable character in the GameCube version of Round 2.  There's a lot to like about Fight Night Round 2, most obviously a deep and involving boxing mechanic that allows you to be creative in your approach to the fistic arts. As a sequel to the well-received Fight Night 2004, the game improves on many aspects of its predecessor and ends up as one that will continually challenge your skills the longer you play it. Even though online play should be more responsive, you can still attract anyone looking to mix it up on the Internet. There's still room for improvement to the Fight Night series, but it only leaves us eager to see what comes next. 


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711,Fight Night Round 2 ,8.9," The second version in the Fight Night series is here, and it does what it has to do: improves on an already winning formula.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/2/4/1/2216241-box_fnr2.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fight-night-round-2-review/1900-6119497/,pos,"
  Last year's Fight Night 2004 reinvigorated boxing video games, as boxing had become a sports genre that many people had written off years ago. After a sequence of mixed results in the Knockout Kings series, EA Sports' Fight Night came along and introduced entirely new mechanics to the boxing genre, creating a fast-moving and free-flowing style that better reflected the pugilistic arts seen on TV. A year later, the second version in the Fight Night series is here, and it does what it has to do: improves on an already winning formula.   Strap on your headgear, chump. The punches fly fast and hard in Fight Night Round 2.   The plodding pace and an overly complex fighting system are what have hurt boxing games. When you enter the virtual ring, the last thing you want to feel is that your boxer has glue on the soles of his shoes, or that you won't be able to execute a simple three-punch combo without memorizing long strings of button sequences. Fight Night Round 2 directly addresses both of these concerns with controls that are responsive, subtle, and effective, giving you a real feeling of mastery over your boxer, even if you're picking the game up for the first time.    First of all, the boxers move across the length of the ring at a nice pace--neither lumbering across the canvas, nor moving too quickly at an unrealistic pace. You can close on an opponent quickly yet backing away from punches is just a tad too slow for comfort, which seems exactly right. On the downside, a fighter's movement doesn't seem to slow down even when fatigued, though punch speed and effectiveness do drop.    Movement, however, is only half of the formula. A great boxing game hinges on the effectiveness of both the offensive and defensive controls, and it's here where Fight Night Round 2 shines. Nearly everything is controlled with a combination of the right analog stick and the trigger buttons. Simple punches--jabs, hooks, and uppercuts--are at your fingertips with a simple flick of the right stick. The design of each control is even set to resemble the punch you throw, so that a quick stinging jab is executed with a single flick of the right stick diagonally left or right; a hook is accomplished by moving the stick to the right and then arcing up; and a devastating uppercut starts out diagonally down and moves up and around, much like the way your boxer's arm moves along the path of the punch.    If you're looking to deal some heavy blows to your foe, you'll need to wind up your punch a little and toss some haymakers into the mix. Controlling haymakers is simple and feels just as natural as regular punches. A haymaker hook, for example, starts out as a normal punch--moving the right analog stick directly left or right--but instead of letting the punch fly immediately, you'll need to wind up the power by pressing down and then up along the arc of the controller. Punches can only be fully wound up when a boxer is standing still, though power punches can still be thrown when the boxer moves. The most powerful punches are best reserved for those times when you have your opponent backed up against the ropes or, better yet, in the corner.    Body shots are executed by combining punches with the left trigger, and it's easy to quickly and effectively mix up your punch types between body blows and head shots. In fact, most combinations are easy to pull off with Fight Night Round 2's control scheme, provided you stay disciplined with your right stick movements. In the heat of the moment, it's easy to forget to let that hook you've wound up continue through its arc, as it's equally easy to simply switch to an opposite side jab. In fact, you'll often feel like your flailing punches at random. But with a little practice, you'll be stringing together one-two-three combos in no time. In fact, the controls in Round 2 are so subtle that slight movement of the right stick will let you pull off shoulder feints to fool your opponent into getting his guard up on one side while you pile on a flurry of damaging punches to the opposite side.   Shoring up cuts and reducing swelling will keep you busy between rounds.   As flexible as the offensive mechanics are, Round 2's defensive controls are just as much so. New for Round 2 is the clinch, a last-ditch effort to regain some stamina just before you get hit with a knockout blow. It's nice to see an effective clinch control enter the mix, and it's even better that clinches can be shrugged off or avoided altogether, preventing the move from being an automatic fail-safe.    Other defensive options include blocks and parries, and these are executed with the right analog stick and right trigger. Parries are especially effective in the game because they leave your foe wide open for counterpunches, which, as you progress up the ranks, become one of the essential keys to victory. Like punches, blocks and parries can be executed both high and low. If you want to block a low hook on the right side, you'll need to make sure that your parry is set up to catch the punch when it lands. Because of this, effective parrying requires a lot of observation of your opponent's tendencies and animations, as well as a lot of practice to get the timing right. Once you do, however, you'll find parries one of the most effective weapons in your arsenal. Finally, the easiest way to make your opponent miss is by dodging, which is pulled off by using the left analog stick and the left trigger in tandem.    This control scheme, which is simple to pick up yet tough to master, makes for a huge variety of matches in Round 2. We've seen all-out slugfests where both competitors basically stand in the middle of the ring and pound each other senseless. We've been chased around the ring by head-hunting maniacs looking for first-round blood, only to outlast them later in the fight. We've introduced opponents to the canvas with the very first punch of the fight. About the only thing we didn't see in our time with Round 2 are fights that go the distance. Whether this is because of our preference for going with power fighters and looking for big-punch knockouts, or because of some other reason, is unclear. Certainly fights go longer the deeper you get into the game, but we have yet to see a fight go the distance and, because of this, we haven't won or lost by decision.   Though throwing punches in Round 2 is fun, watching and hearing them land is twice as nice. The game's graphics and sound effectively convey the force of each successful punch. Even on stinging jabs, your opponent's head will twist back, conveying the force of the blow. With stronger shots, your rival's head will literally rock to the side and his hands will drop down, leaving you to execute a successive flurry of blows. As you land your punishing punches, your opponent's health meter will gradually decrease. When it empties completely, the camera switches to a closer viewpoint, the sound drops out save for the desperate screaming of your opponent's corner man, and you'll be primed to take your rival out with a knockout punch. Desperate to avoid this, your foe will be blocking and parrying madly, so you'll need to prime your punches carefully. Land just the right punch and your opponent will take a dive onto the canvas, often bouncing off the ropes in the process.  The power of a good haymaker.  It's here, in the KO moment, in which the full might of your punch is revealed. A series of slow-motion replays show the sheer force of impact of your clout landing, complete with flying sweat and, sometimes, spewing blood. The sound of your opponent's grunt slows down to a barely audible guttural moan as his head rocks, his chin flays out with the force of the punch, and his eyes roll back in his head. And then you get a different angle of the same punch. And then another. Each KO punch is a brutal, visceral experience that will have you cackling out loud each time it happens. These KO moments are the primary way of achieving knockdowns, but if you execute the right punch at the right time you will send your opponent diving onto the canvas no matter how much health he has remaining.  Round 2 includes several game modes: quick fight for pick-up-and-play matches, online play (on the Xbox and PlayStation 2), and a career mode, where you can take your boxer up from the amateur ranks all the way to the pinnacle of your chosen weight division. In the pickup bouts, you can use fighters from the game's roster of current and all-time greats, and you can even mix and match weight divisions. Want to know how Bernard Hopkins would fare against Muhammad Ali? You can find out in Round 2 (the answer: not too well). You also have the option to create a boxer of your own by using the game's in-depth and entertaining create-a-champ mode. This is one of the more in-depth create-a-player features we've seen recently, rivaling that of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 in both depth and flexibility.  Online play with Round 2 tends to be hit or miss. While the idea of taking your created fighter online and duking it out with strangers (or friends) is attractive, in execution, however, the mode tended to fall flat in our test sessions. Unfortunately, the controls are not as responsive online as they are in the single-player game. When you're fighting through the career mode, you get used to the snappy pace of your boxer and his instant reactions to any move you make in the game. This isn't the case online, as there seems to be a pause, however brief, in between the movement on the controller and your virtual fighter's response. Though the lag tends to be minimal, in a sport as dependent on timing as boxing, these pauses can be detrimental to the game experience.  Round 2's career mode is the deepest mode found in the game. You'll have two options in this mode: creating a new player from scratch or rebuilding the legend of one of the real boxers found in the game. You can even change the real fighter's fighting style and stance--remake Roberto Duran as a southpaw, or Joe Frazier as a speedster, for example. If you choose to create a boxer from scratch, you'll only have a certain number of points to distribute among attributes, such as power, speed, agility, heart, and cut recovery. Once created to your liking, your greenhorn boxer will start out in the amateur ranks, picking up fights as he can and earning a small purse for each win. The amateur ranks are essentially used to introduce the game's sparring/training mode, but you have the option to skip the amateurs and go straight to the pros if you desire.  Training in Round 2 involves the heavy bag, combo dummy, and slinging iron.  The game's training mode is perhaps its weakest feature. You start off with the basics by landing several punch types in a row. As you progress, you'll be asked to practice dodging, parrying, and blocking blows. Unfortunately, the game doesn't describe how to pull these moves off in the training mode. Those new to the Fight Night series might find this confusing, because unless you consult the game's manual or get lucky with a loading screen that describes the controls for a particular move, you won't have any idea how to progress, except through trial and error. Furthermore, the career mode lacks a sparring feature. If you want to practice your parrying techniques in an unranked situation, you'll have to back out of the career mode altogether.  This doesn't mean that training can't be found in the pro ranks. In fact, you will be focusing your skills in a number of different areas, including heavy bag, combo dummy, and weight lifting (essentially minigames that concentrate on timing and pattern recognition). Each training sessions focuses on specific attributes, such as power or agility, and you'll need to spread your training time out to ensure you consistently improve all your boxer's stats. A nice graphical touch is the very obvious strides your boxer's physique will make in the early training sessions. Start your virtual boxer out as a flabby fatty and he'll quickly evolve into a carved-out-of-wood paragon of fighting fitness after only a few sessions.  Early in your pro career, you're able to leap up the ranks if you so choose, easily besting boxers that are three or more ranks ahead of you. Because your attributes improve after each prefight training session, however, it's probably smarter to take things slow in order to maximize your stats. You'll need every attribute maxed out as you approach the upper echelon of your weight class.  There's plenty of gear to spend your hard-earned money on.  For each win you'll earn cash that can be spent in a number of different areas--from improved trainers and cut men to entrance music and effects and, yes, ring girls. You can also gear up in the fight store, choosing from a large selection of gloves, shoes, trunks, mouthpieces, and foul protectors. Noticeably missing from the gear assortment are robes, which don't play a part in your ring entrances. In fact, ring entrances in general don't have the same kind of flair found in the game's create-a-boxer feature. A more flexible ring entrance design tool--preferably one that supports custom soundtracks and selectable camera angles--would have been a welcome addition.  The further up you move on the rankings ladder, the less wiggle room you'll have for scheduling fights,  because the difference between a fighter ranked three spots higher than you is noticeably different from the chump just ahead of you. As such, once you break the top 20, you'll find that your progress toward championship gold slows dramatically. Your opponents are generally stronger and quicker than you, and the artificial intelligence is much more doggedly aggressive and has the tendency not to back off, even if you land multiple combos. As such, if you don't have your defensive game well in hand--the blocking and parrying techniques in particular--you may quickly find yourself out of your league. This is our other gripe with Fight Night Round 2's gameplay. Early on, you focus so much on your offensive game, and you can easily overwhelm opponents (especially if you focus on power shots). You can also skate through the bottom half of the pro ladder, barely ducking or blocking a single punch. Defensive skills aren't needed early on, so what's the point in practicing them? By the time you start fighting opponents who refuse to back off even under heavy pressure, your lack of defense will come back to bite you. While we understand the point of ""upping your game"" as you reach the top of the pro ranks, we think that an addition of a ""free spar"" feature, used to avoid punches early in the game, for example, would have made for an easier transition.  Graphically, Round 2 features some of the most impressive player models found in sports gaming. Skin textures are amazingly lifelike and the models animate beautifully. The aforementioned punch animations are vicious and well executed, which is something you never tire of seeing and which never fails to elicit a grimace from passersby. Sweat flies with each landed punch and, in the case of power shots, you might see a spray of blood from your opponent's mouth. Because the boxers are the star of the Fight Night show, the player models of your entourage and ring card girls don't look nearly as intricately detailed. Plus, all of this quality modeling on the boxers means that the game's backgrounds will suffer. While there are a good variety of arenas in which to fight--Staples Center, the grungy 65 Lower Flushing, and the glamorous Hisako Ballroom among them--most seem poorly lit and lacking in detail. The same is true for the ringside crowd, which is barely noticeable most of the time.  From a sound standpoint, Round 2 is solid, if unremarkable. Some noticeable improvements have been made, including a new ringside announcer, ESPN and Fox boxing analyst Joe Tessitore, who is a marked improvement over the horrible Big Tigger from the previous game. While Tessitore's commentary is enthusiastic and more professional sounding, his calls can be vague, especially when describing missed punches. While your ringside trainer will give you advice in between rounds--while you're busy healing cuts and reducing swelling using the game's new cutman feature--his commentary is pretty limited and sometimes directly contradicts itself. One second you just had a ""great round"" and the next you're going to need to ""get it together"" if you hope to have a chance in the fight. EA Trax rears its ugly head again with a mix of hip-hop tunes that, though limited in scope, certainly fit the boxing vibe. But perhaps more so than any other EA Sports title, the Fight Night series begs for custom soundtracks.  What would a boxing game be without ring card girls?  Beyond some important feature distinctions, there is little difference between the three console versions of Round 2. Graphically, the PlayStation 2 version of the game holds its own against both the Xbox and GameCube versions, and all three console controllers work fine with the game. The small C-stick on the GameCube controller, combined with its eight-point articulation, might require some practice to use, especially if you've played Fight Night 2004 on a different console (but it's generally not a big deal). Load times are prevalent on all three versions, but it's only ugly on the PS2 version of the game. As you might expect, online play is only enabled for the Xbox and PS2 versions, but GameCube owners should not feel slighted, as they've got the benefit of the full SNES version of Super Punch-Out!! to play when realistic boxing action just doesn't cut it anymore. Little Mac, star of Super Punch-Out!!, is also an unlockable character in the GameCube version of Round 2.  There's a lot to like about Fight Night Round 2, most obviously a deep and involving boxing mechanic that allows you to be creative in your approach to the fistic arts. As a sequel to the well-received Fight Night 2004, the game improves on many aspects of its predecessor and ends up as one that will continually challenge your skills the longer you play it. Even though online play should be more responsive, you can still attract anyone looking to mix it up on the Internet. There's still room for improvement to the Fight Night series, but it only leaves us eager to see what comes next.   


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712,Racquet Sports ,4, Imprecise motion controls ruin all five of the sports featured in this disappointing collection.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/4/1/2224141-652314_zoom.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/racquet-sports-review/1900-6276286/,neg,"
  Sports like tennis, squash, and badminton seem like they should be a great fit for Sony's new PlayStation Move hardware. Holding the motion controller isn't wholly unlike holding a racket, and the act of swinging said controller could hardly be more straightforward. Sports Champions uses the Move motion controller really well in its table tennis game, but Racquet Sports, sadly, does not. Rather than afford you complete control by having onscreen players' movements exactly correspond to your own, this collection of five very similar sports relies on gestures that trigger canned animations after a brief but noticeable delay. Racquet Sports isn't unplayable by any means, but it's also not much fun, and it completely misses the point where Move is concerned.      All five of the sports featured (badminton, beach tennis, table tennis, squash, and tennis) play in much the same way. There are different rules, of course, but aside from a couple of different actions that are mapped to the Move button, the controls barely change from one sport to the next. Both basic and advanced control options are available for each sport, but although the latter is more challenging and adds some powerful shots to your repertoire, neither works well. Racquet Sports doesn't have any problem differentiating forehand and backhand swings, but it's hit and miss when it comes to the strength of your shots, and directing your shots isn't nearly as easy or as intuitive as it should be. As a result, overly long rallies of predictable shots are commonplace, and because players run around on their own (how you hold your controller has some impact on their speed when using advanced controls, but that's it), they're almost never out of position. It's not even possible to hit the ball out during a game of tennis or badminton unless you hold down the trigger button to try a risky shot in advanced mode.    Racquet Sports' training options are limited to text instructions and a minigame that challenges you to return serves to highlighted areas of the court or table that you're playing on. The minigame does a decent job of familiarizing you with the controls, but it also highlights how imprecise they are. Even returning five accurate shots in a row--which is all that's required to add an extra character to the starting roster of 10--can be tricky depending on where your targets appear. Characters differ in appearance only and can be customized with a modest selection of unlockable outfits, hairstyles, and rackets that you earn quickly regardless of which mode you're playing.    If you're playing alone, you can compete against the AI in exhibition matches or, if you're looking for a longer-lasting challenge, in the Career mode that pits you against increasingly tough opponents as you move from amateur to professional leagues. You can also play Party mode solo with three AI opponents, though this mode in which the sport, some of its rules (invisible tennis balls, anyone?), and your doubles partner change for every match is definitely more tolerable if you can convince some friends to join you. Locally, you can also set up tournaments and championships, and then once your friends have decided that they don't want to play (or perhaps even be friends) with you anymore, you can look for someone to play with online. Both friendly and ranked matches are available, and you can bring a friend with you if you're looking to play doubles. The online play works well enough with no discernible lag, but it's not much fun because it suffers from all of the same problems that regular play does.   If you want to play table tennis in your living room, you're better off with Sports Champions. Or a table.   Racquet Sports' presentation fares a little better than its gameplay, at least visually. The cartoony characters look decent enough, and some of the varied environments that they play in are quite picturesque. The audio is underwhelming though, and the noise that the crowd makes anytime it starts chanting your name is especially grating. The crowd noise would be even more annoying if this were a game that you wanted to spend hours at a time with, but Racquet Sports definitely isn't that. It fails to take advantage of the Move hardware and offers only frustrating imitations of sports that you might know and love. Even if you're playing on your own, you're better off investing in a racket and a ball.  


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713,Wumpus ,4, Those who played the original computer game might get some nostalgia value out of Wumpus; everyone else should skip it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/6/8/2/62418-136682.jpg,WOS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wumpus-review/1900-6268174/,neg,"
  What is a wumpus? A scary purple monster that lives in a cave, of course. Unfortunately, as the chief field worker of the zoological society, it's your task to explore a dark cavern to learn more about the monster's ecological needs. So, armed with a single tranquilizer dart (due to lack of funding), into the cave you go.    You explore a cave while trying to find the legendary wumpus.   The Palm Pre version of Wumpus is a remake of the original text-based game Hunt the Wumpus, which was released on the early personal computers of the 1970s and 1980s. Several iterations of Hunt the Wumpus have come and gone in the meantime, but it was never released on a major system, so this will be most people's first encounter with the game.     Unfortunately, Wumpus on the Palm Pre doesn't make a great first impression. The game is 40 years old, and it's up against modern games that offer slick graphics and tons of extras. The Palm Pre version of Wumpus has extremely basic graphics and tired gameplay…and it just can't compete.     Your goal in the game is to deduce the location of the beast in the cavern and zap it with the tranquilizer dart. This is easier said than done. First off, it's dark, so you can see only the rooms you've been in. Progressing to new rooms is perilous because the cavern is full of danger--encountering poisonous gas, running out of lamp oil, and stumbling upon the wumpus will all kill you. Entering a room with a stream in it causes noise that wakes the wumpus, and it'll move to a different room. And giant bats wait in hordes to pick you up and drop you off elsewhere in the cave if you bump into them.     To help you survive, you'll find hints indicating that nearby rooms are dangerous. A dead canary lies in each room connected to one filled with poisonous gas. A single bat waits outside rooms with a colony of the flying rodents inside. The foul stench of the wumpus carries from a distance of two rooms, letting you know that your quarry is nearby. The basic gameplay consists of skirting your way around the danger, using the hints to stay alive while you figure out which room the wumpus is in.     Once you think you know where the wumpus resides, you can't just barge in on it unless you want to be eviscerated. Instead, you stand in an adjoining room and shoot your tranquilizer dart into the room in question. If it's in there, you win, and the game starts over. If it's elsewhere, you lose, and the game starts over.    When you know where the wumpus is, you have to shoot it with a tranquilizer dart.   And that's Wumpus. There's no music, no multiplayer, no online leaderboards or achievements, and, most detrimentally, no sense of progression. The graphics are bland and the gameplay is repetitive. The whole experience starts fast, ends fast, and doesn't offer much fun in between.     In theory, it's a great idea to keep the classics alive. But in practice, remakes of old games need to be updated for new generations of hardware--and new generations of players. Sadly, this version of Wumpus falls flat in both areas.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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714,MorphX ,4, MorphX buries its few good ideas under a pile of annoyances like incredibly tough difficulty and ancient graphics.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/4/2/2220542-box_morphx.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/morphx-review/1900-6281371/,neg,"
  If you were to cross a third-person shooter with the movie District 9, you might get MorphX. Russian developer Buka Entertainment's shoot-'em-up makes some good use of this interesting blend of sources, but the whole thing falls apart due to a ton of design flaws and visual shortcomings that make the game look like something from the PlayStation 2 era. All of the intriguing ideas are buried under huge problems with things like spectacularly hard difficulty in the early going, confusing level design, and spread-out save points. So what starts out as an interesting twist on the standard console shooter soon turns into an annoying experience.   One tiny spoiler--you don't look like this when the game begins.   You know you're in trouble right at the opening cutscene, which is a dated piece of work loaded with some of the worst acting this side of a Mexican soap opera. That clip sets the stage for the single-player campaign (the only mode of play available), which deals with the apocalyptic aftereffects of nasty aliens destroying the planet. All that's left is a smoking ruin--even good old Moscow--where you and other people are being infected with some sort of virus that morphs people into insectoid ETs. As the game begins, you're on the run from this treatment and trying to escape some kind of alien base in the ruins of the city.    One of the most interesting aspects of MorphX is that the tough, tattooed protagonist is slowly transforming into an alien (arm first.) Nothing is explained very well, though. ""Huh?"" moments are dotted throughout the story. One moment, you're being coddled by human soldiers battling the aliens; the next, you're fighting both the humans and the aliens. Then, you're all buddy-buddy with the humans against the aliens. There might be an interesting story in here somewhere, but poor dialogue translation from the original Russian and cheesy dialogue (you'll hear ""Damn aliens!"" and comments about being a ""freak"" every couple of minutes during combat) make it hard to follow the plot.    It's even harder to follow the action, due to some serious issues with how MorphX is presented. The game sure doesn't make a good first impression. While the design is structured as a straightforward third-person shooter, with an over-the-shoulder camera perspective and basic controls for firing guns, punching enemies, and jumping, some of the game's more innovative aspects aren't explained well. As a transforming alien, you can make use of dead ETs and biomass power-up ports to acquire genes and DNA strings that give you on-the-fly boosts. These can also be strung together to give you special skills like health regeneration and shields. Whenever you kill an alien or spot one of these access ports, you just have to slam your arm into it to acquire the goodies.    But none of this icky stuff is properly explained. Red and green genes are connected with the DNA strings in a power-up screen that functions as a puzzle minigame, which you're left to pretty much figure out for yourself. Text help is available, but it's vague, and the text itself is presented in such small fonts that you can barely read it--even on a high-def 50-inch screen. After you figure it all out, it's actually kind of cool being able to work out how to best link things together and customize special abilities. In the early stages, though, you're completely in the dark about what you should be doing and are left to just experiment and hope for the best.   Constantly respawning enemies show up out of nowhere, even from rooms you just cleared.   At the same time, extra frustration on the combat side of things is doled out by intense difficulty. In particular, the early stages of MorphX are ridiculously hard. Levels are packed with enemy soldiers who shoot you from behind walls and nail you with unerring accuracy over long distances. You're constantly sniped by unseen foes--either making impossible shots from behind cover or from far away--who are cloaked by the haze of the PS2-era graphics that make the surroundings a fuzzy, muddy mess. You aren't given any real options to fight these enemy gangs, either. There are no cover mechanics, and there is no way to even duck down behind crates (not that it would matter much because enemies can somehow shoot you through the edges of walls and objects, anyway).     Enemy troops respawn constantly, even popping into existence directly behind you in rooms that you just cleared. You regenerate health automatically and can pick up health packs and biomass boosts for extra assistance, but these respawning baddies always push you onward, which leaves virtually no time for you to heal up between firefights. Making matters even worse, ammo is in short supply. So even if you do decide to hunker down and take a break to regenerate, you soon run out of ammunition and get blasted to bits by the never-ending stream of soldiers coming up behind you. And as a final insult, save points are spread far apart, forcing you to replay huge swaths of these aggravating battles every time you get killed.    Confusion is another problem. Levels have been constructed like rat warrens, with lots of corridors and chambers in the ruined city. There are even puzzles where you have to power up generators in one area to be able to throw switches that open doors in other areas. The graphics are dated, too, at least seven or eight years behind the times; they more closely resemble what you would expect to see on the original Xbox or PS2 than a current-generation console. Almost everything is brown or gray and so gloomy that you can't see enemies who are more than a few feet away. It's far too easy to get turned around in the darkness and wind up backtracking or wandering around trying to get your bearings, which of course exposes you to additional attacks from respawning enemies.    After experiencing MorphX, you almost wish that you could give Buka Entertainment a mulligan so it could try again. There are enough innovative ideas here with the alien metamorphosis mechanics that could have made this an inventive, captivating shooter. But the design screwups are so blatant that they get in the way of enjoying the weird stuff with alien genes and mutant powers. Every time you start having a little bit of fun, some huge annoyance pops up to rub your face in the game's many flaws. This might be an interesting experiment, but it's not a game that you want to actually play.  
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715,Kick-Ass ,4," Shallow and repetitive gameplay, dull visuals, and overused poor-quality film assets put this game in the failed-superhero category.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/5/0/3/2224503-kick_ass.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kick-ass-review/1900-6261594/,neg,"
  While Kick-Ass helps praise the value of the modern day vigilante, it provides its own best example for why you should leave the heavy lifting to the professionals. Shallow brawler gameplay, bland presentation, and technical foibles plague this downloadable game, providing plenty of reasons why you should keep your underwear on the insides of your pants.       You take control of one of the film's three pseudo-super characters: Kick-Ass, Hit Girl, and Big Daddy as you punch, stab, and shoot your way through the game's short eight-level story mode. All three characters handle similarly and use a mixture of light and heavy attacks to plough through wave after wave of dumb enemy clones that attack you. Holding the R2 button and hitting the square, triangle, or circle buttons allows you to spend a portion of your auto-replenishing energy bar to dole out three character specific specialty attacks. These include such things as tossing out stun grenades, temporarily increasing the damage of your melee strikes, and twirling aerial pistol assaults. There's no combo system in Kick-Ass, so these special abilities are the most effective way to handle opponents and become all too easy to overuse to get the job done.     You seldom fight foes one-on-one and can hold your own against groups, but clipping errors, enemy pathfinding, and atrociously stupid AI means it's easier to exploit ranged attacks to take down assembled enemies that are milling around waiting for you to approach. Enemies in your line of sight stand by idly as you destroy a room or butcher their buddies. Ranged damage is as much a foe as a friend, however, and it's not uncommon to be shot at from offscreen by enemies who chip away at your life bar until you can get close enough to retaliate. Environmental objects allow gruesome kills like impaling targets on a forklift or electrocuting them against power boxes, but the physics are unintentionally laughable, so it's not unusual to see your target fly across the screen as the result of a simple punch or gunshot wound.    Completing mandatory missions and killing bad guys earns you experience points, which can be spent to upgrade your existing defence, attack, and special abilities--no new skills are unlocked. There's little strategy to point allocation, and because expenditure isn't permanent, you can niftily redistribute it on the fly to stay alive a little longer or dish out more damage if you encounter a particularly nasty situation.    The electricity isn't the only shocking element of this game.   The story assumes that you have knowledge of the movie or comic book upon which this brawler is based, although it does take liberties with how things play out. Each level includes a boss character lifted from the film, culminating in the game's final whimpering crescendo of an on-rails shooter and a cutscene--not the showdown you've been working toward. These battles play out like the rest of the mindless brawling, only with more hitpoints. Once you've completed the game, extreme difficulty and Arena mode are unlocked--though only the characters you've already completed the story mode with are available for both. Extreme difficulty makes the AI slightly tougher (but not smarter), while Arena is an escalating survival mode in which your health can only be restored at the end of each wave by smashing crates.     Local two-player cooperative play is available and is limited to the campaign mode. There are no online competitive or co-op modes, and when playing on the same console, only one character retains the ability to control the freely rotatable camera. The same quirks found in the single-player mode (slow rotation and players standing near walls are obscured) rears their ugly head again. Worse still, there is a finite distance two players can be separated by, so it’s all too easy to be pummeled by an enemy just outside of your attack range or have an important power-up dangle tauntingly in front of you.    The small number of levels in Kick-Ass is equaled by its miniscule set of drab environments, which include the streets of New York, a lumber warehouse, a junkyard, an apartment, and a penthouse. Character likenesses are reasonable, and animations showcase the acrobatic abilities of the cast well. The game is prone to slowdown even during less intensive fights, and while the frame rate never stutters, at times, response from the characters slows to a crawl.    A quick coat of gasoline gives this warehouse a whole new look.   Audio is particularly disappointing and cobbles together Kick-Ass and Hit Girl audio snippets from the film to repeat them ad nauseam. Big Daddy's lines have been recorded by an impersonator and are way off the mark. One particularly filthy Hit Girl sample gets bandied about so often that it loses all impact long before you finish the game. Part of the soundtrack from the movie has made the transition to the game, but sound effects frequently cut out during combat when using some abilities. Chunks of video from the film are used to bridge story gaps as cutscenes, but the amount of compression used makes them look cheap and nasty.     This brawler is as basic as they come, and unless you're interested in endlessly building up your characters to the maximum level in Arena mode, there's very little incentive to come back for more once you've completed the short story. Kick-Ass is a disappointing and all-too-brief experience for its $14.99 (AU$16.85) price tag.  
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716,Pure Football ,4," Pure Football may be an arcade take on the sport, but that doesn't excuse its repetitive gameplay and general lack of game modes.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/3/6/1/2224361-1315584_pf_360.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pure-football-review/1900-6268268/,neg,"
  UK REVIEW--While FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer have the simulation football market pretty much sewn up, the retirement of the FIFA Street series has left space for a new challenger in the arcade end of the genre. Sadly, Pure Football (or Pure Futbol, as it's known in North America) isn't up to the challenge of filling that gap. The game may be accessible and fun in short bursts, but it soon becomes frustrating and repetitive, with little in the way of depth. Though there is an online mode and a well-structured Campaign mode, the lack of Tournament or Cup mode affect the game's longevity, particularly for offline players.    At least no spectators were subjected to this lame brand of football.   Pure Football portrays an alternate universe where the world's best players get together to play jumpers-for-goalposts style football. These are unofficial, unmediated matches free of the constraints of the stadium--22 players are reduced to 10, there's no referee to halt the pace of the game, and there are no linesmen to call offside. The matches also take place in novel locations, including the port of Marseilles, the canals of Amsterdam, and even a factory in Milan. Because of this concept, the game adopts an exaggerated, cartoon look for its players and locations, but there are still a limited number of 17 international teams with real-world players, as well as three classic teams to unlock in the Campaign mode.    The control system is broadly similar to other football games. The face buttons perform passes, through balls, crosses, and shots on goal, and you hold the latter three buttons down to increase the power of the shot. However, Pure Football is based around various power bars and meters, which are key to performing well. When taking a shot, for example, you have to let go of the button as the arrow underneath your player hits the white area of the bar, which is approximately three-quarters of the way along. If you let go of the button any time before this, you'll land in the green area, which will still result in an accurate shot. However, if hold on for too long, you'll enter the red section of the bar, at which point the shot is pretty much guaranteed to go off target.    Sadly, this system doesn't feel responsive enough. There's a small but annoying lag between pressing the button and seeing the bar onscreen, and while you get used to it after a while, you're still frequently intercepted before you pull off the intended shot. The game pushes you into trying to score by crossing the ball into the box and then finishing up with a striker--the idea being to hit the pure zone on both the cross and the shot to score the goal. However, it's difficult to get both right, meaning that straight shots on goal provide a much greater chance of actually scoring, especially given the frequency with which keepers spill the ball. This results in repetitive end-to-end play, as each team goes back and forth making a few passes before taking a shot just outside the box.   The centre of London is just one of the many quirky locales.   There are a lot of different bars and gauges in general, with a couple also adorning the top of the screen that relate to your team. Your ""pure"" bar is filled by making good plays, like taking shots on goal or kicking accurate crosses. If you get the meter full, you can unleash a perfect shot without having to worry about the white bar--your striker will hit the ball perfectly regardless of how long you hold the button. There's also a foul system--if  you perform a mistimed sliding tackle, this bar will start to fill up. If you land more than two particularly offensive tackles, a penalty will be awarded to the other team.    These power bars and meters mean that Pure Football plays a novel game of football, but it soon becomes rather repetitive. Matches are closer to the end-to-end nature of basketball rather than football, which suits the arcade nature of the game, but there's little room for nuanced build-up play. The pace of the game is fast--you're given five seconds for throw-ins, corners, and goal kicks, and while the matches are usually less than five minutes, they're nearly always high scoring. The high-score lines have more to do with the tricky defending and the inept goalkeepers though. It's often frustrating to get the ball from your opponent--you can hold the left trigger to strafe the attacker and attempt to take the ball cleanly, but it's difficult to time just right, while sliding tackles usually end up adding to your foul meter. The goalkeepers also fail to save shots even from way outside the box and often deflect the ball even if they do, resulting in easy follow-up shots.     Despite these gameplay issues, the Campaign mode is structured in a way that keeps you coming back. You start by making your own player, including his name, look, and playing position. Then you make a team, including its title and kit design. The customisation options are plentiful, allowing you to change the size and placement of major facial details and re-create your favourite team shirt, for example. You then get a selection of low-level players to add to your squad and unlock better players as you progress. Each match has its own set of winning criteria that you need to meet to progress, such as beating a team within a certain time frame or scoring a certain number of goals. There are also separate tasks to perform that will unlock new players--if you  make a certain number of passes or make sure that the opponent only gets a limited number of shots on goal, he'll be made available to you at the end of the match. Individual pure points can also be earned throughout the campaign, which can then be spent on upgrading your created player. The myriad of challenges means there's some replay value to the campaign, especially because you can unlock classic players, like Zinadine Zidane and Gary Lineker.   Goal celebrations take the form of stylised animations accompanied by laughably cliched text.   Along with the Exhibition and Training modes, Pure Football has an online mode. The online progression is separate from your single-player game--you rank up in the online divisions by beating other people, and there are separate online challenges, such as winning with each of the national teams or winning a match by a certain number of goals. The online game can be laggy, you have to sign up for Ubisoft's Uplay service, and it suffers the same problem as other football games in that players frequently quit matches. Thankfully, if that happens, you automatically win the game. The ability to share custom created players online and buy up to 10 using pure points is also a nice touch. That said, the option to set up your own leagues and tournaments--a well-established feature of every other game in the genre--is sorely lacking.     The game's presentation may be basic, but it possesses some style, with well-realised stadiums and real-world players that are exaggerated but still recognisable. The animation system is also capable of providing some spectacular goals, from volleys to overhead kicks, and scoring with an athletic finish is one of the best aspects of the game. However, the PS3 version suffers from noticeable slowdown when the action gets intense. On the audio side, the single piece of menu music tires quickly, but the real problem is the lack of match commentary, which is replaced with embarrassing banter from the players, such as ""Nice hands keeps!""    Pure Football is a disappointing attempt at an arcade football game, with its main downfall being the frustrating and repetitive gameplay. The campaign may be nicely structured and even quite addictive despite the slog of the gameplay, but even if you can overlook this basic flaw, the lack of game modes, including Tournaments and Cups, is a real problem. There's some potential in the ""no rules"" premise of the game, and it can be fun in short bursts, but a complete lack of depth means that Pure Football is far from entering the premier league of football games.  
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717,Dance on Broadway ,4, Good songs can't save this poor attempt at a rhythm party game from being a dull and repetitive experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/0/0/5/2225005-box_jddob.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dance-on-broadway-review/1900-6270137/,neg,"
  If ever there was a game that's a blatant cash-in on a successful franchise, Dance on Broadway is it. With just a single game mode, no way to download new songs, and low-rent visuals, its content is even sparser than that of its progenitor Just Dance. And with its boring choreography and difficult-to-follow dance instructions, it manages to be a lot less fun too. That's not to mention the complete lack of rewards for your performances or the erratic motion controls, which fail to consistently register your movements. While the quality of the show tunes on offer is of a high standard, the game's many flaws don't allow them to shine, making for a dull and often frustrating experience.      There is a single game mode available in Dance on Broadway, which is the equivalent of the Quickplay mode in other rhythm games. You pick a song from a selection of 20 Broadway hits--which are all unlocked from the start--hold the Wii Remote in your right hand, and then dance along with the onscreen dancers. Up to four players can dance at once, each competing for points, which are awarded based on movements tracked by the Wii Remote. Each move is scored as bad, OK, or great, and at the end of each song, you're given an overall score and can see how it compares to the scores of your friends. If you're bad, you don't have to worry about failing; you just carry on with a low score.    Rather than having all players follow a single dancer, players have to keep track of four dancers. Each of them is colour coded and corresponds to matching dance commands that scroll along the bottom of the screen. These are intended to help you anticipate what moves are coming up and highlight which character is about to perform them. However, they're more confusing than helpful because of their vague instructions, which often don't match up with what your character is doing. It's much easier to simply follow the dancer, though this, too, is not without its problems. Unlike the stylised video footage used for routines in Just Dance, Dance on Broadway uses 3D animated models. This means the routines take on a slightly robotic look, making them stiff and less fun to play along with--even with friends. This is exacerbated by the boring choreography, which lacks the outlandish and often embarrassing moves that made Just Dance fun.   The blocky dancers are often difficult to follow.   No matter how well you try to follow the routines, your moves are tracked with very little accuracy. Even the most gracious dancers will have trouble scoring highly, which is made all the more frustrating by the fact that randomly flailing the Wii Remote in the air will often net you more points. At least it won't affect your progress; you can't fail, and there isn't even a Career mode. There are no rewards or unlockables for performing well, making Dance on Broadway a complete bore for solo players.     The one saving grace is the track selection, which spans many Broadway hits. Highlights include older songs such as ""Cabaret,"" ""Luck Be a Lady,"" and ""All That Jazz,"" while more recent hits include ""I Just Can't Wait to Be King"" and ""Good Morning Baltimore."" Though they aren't the original songs from the films or musicals, the included cover versions are well produced, with singers that sound very similar to the original artists. The visuals once again let the game down, though, with badly rendered backgrounds, ugly song artwork, and pixelated score bars and menus. The 3D models used for the dancers are very blocky, with stage backgrounds suffering from low-resolution textures and jaggy lines.   Life is a cabaret old chum; except when you're playing Dance on Broadway.   Even taken as a party game, Dance on Broadway fails to be any fun. The mediocre choreography, poorly animated dancers, and terrible motion tracking make playing with friends a dull and repetitive experience. The lack of a simple Career mode or rewards also means there isn't any incentive to keep dancing in single-player, and with no way to download new songs, you'll quickly tire of the game's repertoire. Despite the well-produced music, even the biggest fans of Broadway show tunes will find it difficult to overlook its many flaws. No matter how much you feel like acting out your dreams of Broadway stardom, it's best to simply let Dance on Broadway die a box-office death.  
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718,Kung-Fu Live ,4, Flawed motion controls and baffling design choices sap all the fun from this goofy martial-arts-themed brawler.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/1/4/2/76792-154142.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kung-fu-live-review/1900-6285353/,neg,"
  Who among us hasn't imagined jump-kicking and karate-chopping our way through hordes of thugs with the grace and power of Bruce Lee? Kung-Fu Live plays on this fantasy, seeking to make you feel like a martial arts star no matter how little fighting skill you might actually possess. Unfortunately, while it displays a bit of promise early on and provides a few fleeting moments of shallow but silly fun, it quickly loses sight of what makes these moments enjoyable and becomes as painful as trying to chop a huge stack of cinder blocks in half with your forehead.      Kung-Fu Live transports you into its martial arts action via the magic of the PlayStation Eye camera, so before you can start playing, you need to spend some time setting things up. Kung-Fu Live requires more room than many other motion control games; you need several feet of clear space in front of you and to either side. You also need to get the camera situated just so, to ensure that you appear the right size on the screen. Even after all that is done, unless you are playing in an evenly lit environment against a solid background, you can expect some significant flaws with the way you appear in the game. Aspects of the background may be interpreted as part of your body and regularly appear in the game, or the game may fail to pick up certain parts of your body, leaving you with a big hole in your chest or some other strange anomaly.    Despite these issues, Kung-Fu Live initially seems poised to deliver some cheeky chopsocky fun. Attractive animated comic book art sets the stage: You play the part of a new employee at Madame Wei's Comic Emporium. During your first day on the job, you are sucked into one of the dusty old books lining the shelves of her shop and find yourself transported to a moonlit temple where you must fight off a series of attackers using martial arts moves of your own devising. The freedom to punch, kick, flail, grab and swing nearby objects, and basically do whatever you want in a game that interprets these silly actions as powerful kung fu attacks is humorous and enjoyable. This silliness makes you feel like the star of an ultra-low-budget martial arts movie in which some of the entertainment comes from the laughable fight choreography, and the deliberately goofy story supports this lighthearted vibe. And although the game's ability to detect your movements is very flawed--you might unleash a flurry of quick punches only to have one of them read as an attack, for instance--such issues matter little in the easy early stages. You may find yourself sweaty and short of breath, but when you're knocking enemies out like a martial arts master, it's worth it. The battles take place in colorful comic book panels, which also helps to make Kung-Fu Live an initially enticing experience.    The limited view of the camera often makes moving from side to side effectively difficult.   But the charms of this silly, anything-goes gameplay last only a short while. Soon your biggest struggle is not against thugs, giants and evil monsters, but against Kung-Fu Live's deeply flawed controls. For starters, your control of side-to-side movement is limited. You can run left or right to move in that direction, but you will often come to the edge of the camera's range and still be some distance from the opponents you want to attack. You can try scurrying back and forth to inch yourself forward, or you can use a special move you acquire early on called the power punch, which moves you forward a great distance. But this move is the only reliable way of covering a lot of ground, and on top of that, it's the only special attack you have at your disposal for the first several stages. This means you need to rely on it so much early on, for both moving and attacking, that the action quickly falls into a repetitive lull.     Additionally, your enemies soon start to block a huge number of your attacks. Kung-Fu Live wants you to employ tactics in your fighting, but the controls aren't nearly precise enough to consistently detect when you strike low or strike high, so trying to get past your enemies' guard becomes frustrating. You're expending lots of actual energy punching and kicking the empty air and are often left with little to show for your efforts. The controls can't support the sorts of movements the game requires or the sorts of challenges it introduces, so these elements only succeed in moving the game away from the shallow but silly fun of its earliest moments. Eventually, you acquire three other special moves--one that slows time, one that shakes the ground and throws your enemies off their feet, and one that lets you zap your foes with lightning--but by this point, the combat is too irritating to make using these moves much fun.     As you progress, the game's frequently flawed interpretation of your inputs becomes increasingly problematic. For instance, you can escape tight spots you're in by performing a flying somersault, which is done by jumping and bending back in the air. However, the game's ability to interpret this move is spotty, and if it doesn't correctly read the move when you're cornered by a massive bruiser or in some other situation where your defeat is imminent, you may taste the particularly bitter brand of frustration that comes when poor controls contribute significantly to your failure. Defeat is made all the more maddening when it comes a few rounds into a level, because continuing means having to repeat the earlier, easier rounds just to get back to facing the baddies who finished you off previously.     Somersault through the air like a martial arts master!   To make matters worse, the level design and enemy behavior eventually conspire to make your experience with the game even more unpleasant. At one point, you must defeat an enemy who enjoys teleporting from one side of the stage to the other and standing on platforms. Not only must you race across the stage to attack her, which is troublesome because of the extremely unreliable controls for side-to-side movement, but you must also leap your way up onto the platforms where the foe is standing. You might leap with all your might, only to see your in-game self hop slightly into the air and not come anywhere near the platform where your waiting foe stands. Once again, the fact that you're expending actual energy in these fruitless pursuits rather than just pushing buttons on a controller makes such moments a great deal more infuriating.    There's a local multiplayer option in which friends can take control of various enemies with controllers while you try to fight them off. While this can elicit some laughs, your friends are as likely to laugh at how poorly the game interprets your movements as at your improvised martial arts skills. There's a kernel of goofy fun buried in Kung-Fu Live, but the game requires you to do way too many things that the poor controls don't reliably let you do, spoiling the chopsocky spirit and making this a game even black belts are better off avoiding.  
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719,"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 ",4," The Harry Potter film tie-ins end on a low note with this short, tedious, and conceptually vapid cover shooter.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/3/1/3/77721-155313.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-part-2-review/1900-6323026/,neg,"
  Question: When is a wand no longer wand? Answer: When it's a gun. And that's the biggest problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2: It's conceptually ludicrous. As with last year's installment, developer EA Bright Light has envisioned the wands of Harry and his friends as guns--but instead of switching between weapons, you switch between spells. Stupefy isn't a stunning spell in this game: It's a pistol. Expulso isn't an exploding spell: It's a rapid-fire machine gun. Confringo isn't a blasting curse: It's a grenade launcher. And forget everything you know about apparating, which you probably never imagined as a short-range teleport. Perhaps this disrespectful take on the beloved Harry Potter license wouldn't be so disastrous if the resulting game were fun, but for the most part, it just isn't. Switching between spells provides some welcome variety in the second half of this unusually short cover-based shooter. Otherwise, Deathly Hallows Part 2 is tedious and dumb, failing both as a game and as a licensed product.       Deathly Hallows Part 2 takes events from the final Harry Potter film (and the second half of the book that spawned it) and shoehorns shooter tropes into them that make the proceedings as nonsensical as Luna Lovegood's ramblings. One such trope: the defend mission. In various levels, you must protect Hermione from enemies while she casts alohomora, the lock-opening spell. And each time, you'll be appalled at the ridiculousness of the entire idea. Since when does alohomora take five minutes to cast? What is Hermione doing all that time? How is it that doors within the super-secure Gringott's Bank can be opened with such an elementary spell? Another trope: the explosive-planting mission. In a particular chapter, you take control of Seamus Finnigan and plant charges of some sort around covered bridge in Hogwarts. What are these, magical C4 charges? This silly task is followed by an incongruous sniping mission that will make you wonder how far away you are from equipping an ACOG scope and having to reload your wand.    These issues constantly invade your mind as you move from one mission to the next, given how inappropriate these third-person shooter standards are in this magical universe. The game plays like a typical cover shooter: You take cover behind rubble and other objects neatly arranged in helpful patterns and then peek above or lean out to fire. You begin with stupefy, but you gradually unlock new spells, none of which function as they do in the novels. An authentic expelliarmus spell should knock a wand out of an opponent's hand, for example, but here, it's used to break an opponent's protego shield. Impedimenta is an immobilizing jinx in the novels, but in the game, it's a homing missile launcher. These may seem like nerdy nitpicks, but they raise the question: Who was this game made for? Certainly not for Harry Potter fans, who will cringe at such preposterousness. Fans will at least encounter a few saving graces, however. Considering the novel's Harry-specific point of view, it's nice to embody characters like Ginny Weasley and Professor McGonagall and see events like the Battle of Hogwarts from their points of view.    Playing as Seamus is no different than playing as Harry. Or as Ron. Or as any other character in the game.   So Deathly Hallows Part 2 isn't for Harry Potter fans--but it isn't for shooter fans, either. You shoot the same nameless generic enemies time and again, and then you move down a narrow path so you can take some cover and shoot more clones. You occasionally break free of this predictability, only to find yourself having even less fun than before. Perhaps the aforementioned sniping section might have provided a brief spot of variety, but once you finish sniping one set of baddies, you're directed to another group--and then another. Even more boring is your trek into the chamber of secrets where, as Hermione, you shoot spiders while Ron takes his sweet time opening more doors. Most of this level doesn't involve shooting, however; you just follow Ron through dark caverns. The bright eyes peering through the darkness are a nice touch, but while this level might have been meant to create tension, the only emotion it generates is boredom. There's an early moment in which the trio rescues a fire-breathing beast, and you might get momentarily excited by the possibility of taking to the skies. But no. The most interesting possibilities are confined to cutscenes, while you carry out all the drudgery with your gun-wand.     Amid the tedium are some bright sparks worth celebrating. One is a battle between McGonagall and a hulking giant, in which you use your impedimenta homing missiles to knock the big guy off balance while fending off teleporting death eaters. You can't cast the same spell too many times in a row because doing so leads to inaccurate aiming. Thus, you must stave off these meanies by switching between spells. The giant battle is fun because it demands such switching, and it even requires you to use the protego shield to protect yourself from boulders the giant flings. A few sequences have you sprinting toward the camera as you fend off an oncoming apparition or destroying flaming debris as it hurdles toward you. These sequences are done well because they convey something the rest of the game lacks: a sense of urgency. Even on its hardest difficulty (unlocked after you finish the game), Deathly Hallows Part 2 isn't challenging, though you could suffer one or two cheap deaths when, for example, Ron stands between you and the only available cover spot and refuses to budge. Or you may perhaps find yourself in a poorly designed sequence in which a narrow doorway into a room loaded with enemies acts as a frustrating chokepoint.    A rare moment of excitement.   Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is over in three and a half hours or so, which is a mercifully short playing time for a game that sells at a too-high $50 price. You can replay story missions on their own or as timed challenges that might earn you a place on the game's online leaderboards. But these missions don't make for very good challenges, in part because you still have to wait around for your AI companions to open gates or to trigger scripted events. The features that gave the previous Deathly Hallows game a bit of replay value--Kinect support and cooperative challenges--have been wiped away, making this last of the Potter movie games the worst value of them all. After you finish, you're treated to a montage of gameplay moments from the prior Harry Potter games, which serves not to inspire fond memories, but only to remind you just how much potential was squandered in a series of games that never lived up to their inspirations.    


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720,WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 ,8.9, Yuke's delivers one of the best wrestling games ever released on the PlayStation 2 in its latest SmackDown! vs. RAW installment.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/0/6/3/2214063-box_wwesdraw06.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwe-smackdown-vs-raw-2006-review/1900-6139963/,pos,"
  It might only begin to sink in when you start playing, but the distinct possibility exists that WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 will be the last Yuke's-developed wrestler for the PlayStation 2. With the PlayStation 3 somewhere on the horizon and the PlayStation 2's life expectancy dwindling, it probably would have been easy for longtime wrestling game developer Yuke's to ease off the gas pedal when working on SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006. However, this latest and possibly last PS2 game in the series turns out to be much, much more than just a typical yearly update. Rather, SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 cobbles together a veritable smorgasbord of new features and concepts for wrestling fans to smack their collective lips at. Without a doubt, this is the deepest that a SmackDown! game has ever been, and while not every single thing that this game tries works completely, the sheer breadth of content makes it an easy choice for any wrestling enthusiast, and quite possibly the best wrestling game available for the system.   THQ and Yuke's rebound from last year's somewhat disappointing outing with the thoroughly enjoyable WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006.   WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 is very much a Yuke's PlayStation 2 wrestling game. That is to say, if you played any of the developer's earlier games, this one isn't going to throw you for a loop. What it will do is show you a number of key refinements to the gameplay that help it emulate real-life wrestling (we use the term loosely, of course) better than any game before. For one thing, SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 introduces a measure of ring psychology to the proceedings. Don't worry; you don't have to plan your spots or your finishes or anything. What's been introduced here is a pair of systems that track your wrestler's stamina, as well as his or her momentum, in the match. Stamina drains a number of ways, though mostly through pulling off and being on the butt end of big moves. Momentum is built by playing a more interesting match, one that will get the crowd thoroughly behind your wrestler.    The combination of these two systems leads to more logical and slightly more methodical matches. You can't get away with just pulling off lengthy strings of weak moves to survive, but you also can't just toss power move after power move at your opponent without draining your stamina. Therefore, you have to be smart, switching up between weaker and stronger moves, taking occasional breaks to regain stamina (which is done simply by holding down the select button) and playing to the crowd as much as you can. Both factors are visible throughout a match. When your wrestler's stamina is drained, he or she will double over in exhaustion. Likewise, if your momentum's low and the crowd isn't behind you, you might find yourself getting booed; you'll even hear chants of ""Booo-ring!"" from the audience. Your ability to pull off a finishing move is also directly tied in to the momentum meter. Building it up to its peak will let you pull one off or even store one for later--though finishers delivered at any momentum level other than the peak one won't do as much damage.    SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 also manages to differentiate the unique styles (or lack thereof, in some cases) of the many WWE superstars. Whereas in the past, grappling attacks were relegated to the same four categories for every single wrestler, now each wrestler is assigned four of seven available categories. From within the game's move editor, you can assign them power, speed, technical, luchadore, brawler, martial arts, and old school categories. The one constant for all wrestlers is submission grapples, which is always assigned no matter what. But the remaining three categories can be divvied up however you like. There's also a fifth grapple category that determines what kind of wrestler you are, a heel or a face (in lay terms, a bad guy or a good guy). The moves are appropriately different, with the heel moves involving a lot of cheating and cheap shots, and the heroic moves staying well within the rules. Apart from the categorical changes though, this is very much the same type of grapple system the series has used over the last couple of games--so while things like trying to figure out who has what types of moves might take a bit of getting used to, fundamentally it should be familiar to you.    Momentum and stamina tracking throughout a match add an excellent degree of strategy.     Believe it or not, the list of crazy additions to the gameplay engine does not end there. There are lots of little ancillary additions too, similar to some of the stuff Yuke's added last year, such as the prematch minigame. A couple of wrinkles have been tossed into the specials system. For instance, you can now steal an opponent's taunt by pressing the special button and hitting a taunt at the same time. Doing so completely drains your opponent's momentum. There's also an ability to play possum by countering a ground attack in combination with pressing the special attack button. This rolls your opponent up into a particularly sneaky pin.     SmackDown! vs. RAW even includes a deeper array of match types to keep you busy, on top of everything else. All the usual suspects are front and center once again, including cage matches, hell-in-a-cell matches, table matches, TLC matches, elimination chamber matches, first blood matches, and all the rest. New to the roster are fulfill-your-fantasy and buried alive matches. Fulfill your fantasy is the effective replacement to the always-lame yet always-included bra-and-panties matches, featuring exclusively the WWE divas. This one is equally silly, letting you choose outfits for the ladies to wear and asking you to pull off these goofy fantasy moves (most of which involve pillow fights, spanking, and other forms of titillation).      The buried alive match is an interesting addition; the whole strategy of the match is to drag your opponent out of the ring, down the aisle, and to a mound of dirt near the stage area, where a coffin is set up. Any wrestling fan worth his salt will know where this goes from here, and the mechanics of getting your opponent into that coffin and the lid shut aren't half bad (though somewhat frustrating at times). Ultimately, the buried alive match is a worthwhile addition, though the fulfill your fantasy match probably could have been bypassed altogether. But more interesting than these are the improvements to existing matches, like the cage match, for example, which now features an exit door and a much better method for emulating the struggle of climbing out of that cage. Ladder matches are better too, with multiple ladders available and a new brawling system that lets you duke it out with your opponent while both of you are on the ladder. Great stuff.   Submissions are a lot more fun to use and break out of this time around.   While all these fantastic additions might make SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006's gameplay sound like the most mind-blowing thing ever, it's ultimately what hasn't changed about the game that keeps it from perfection. For starters, the hit detection is still spotty. It's a far cry from the days when strikes would inexplicably miss and aerial moves would hit from bizarre distances, but it's still not quite right. You'll sometimes whiff on ground strikes while a guy is in transition between his getting-up animation and actually standing up, and it's not overly hard to miss a running strike if you don't have your opponent lined up just perfect. Aerial moves sometimes register oddly, too, missing at random times and, occasionally, hitting when it looks like you've missed. Again, the frequency of these hiccups is far less than it's been in the past, but when it happens, it definitely comes off as a problem.    The artificial intelligence of your opponents also has its flaws. There are four difficulty levels in the game, and the balance between them all is generally imperfect, with the easiest turning opposing wrestlers into brain-dead idiots who stand around for half a match without a clue of what to do, and the hardest turning the game into a festival of reversals that leaves you on the losing side far more often than not. The middle two levels are the most enjoyable, with the second-highest difficulty likely to be your eventual sweet spot once you master the game's mechanics. Still, on this level you'll run into a lot of reversals of your attacks. The fortunate thing is that it's easier this year for you to reverse attacks yourself, because the window for hitting a reversal button has been extended. It's not a guarantee, mind you, but you always feel like you at least have a decent shot of reversing attacks as much as your opponents do.    Of course, it wouldn't be much of a wrestling game if SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 didn't offer up plenty of things to do other than just wrestling. As in past years, you'll likely spend much of your initial time with the game playing through the season mode. The season mode is a lot like last year's game, with a more structured storyline that doesn't involve many branching paths or choices, but features the voice talent of the WWE superstars. The good news is that unlike last year's game, the voice talent isn't completely horrible. The recording quality of the dialogue sounds right, and the vast majority of the wrestlers pull off their lines just as well as they would on TV. Sure, there are a few dead reads among the bunch, but this year they're in the vast minority. The writing is also really solid, with angles that play out as you'd expect a TV storyline to.    What's also cool about the season mode is that there are multiple unique storylines to play through. There's one for RAW superstars, one for SmackDown! superstars, and a third storyline that we only managed to get once, while playing as John Cena. So unlike in past years, there's good reason to go back and play through the season mode multiple times, other than just to earn more cash for unlockables. Another great thing is that every single wrestler in the game is voice acted, including the one you play as. You can use any wrestler from a specific show (save for a couple of omissions, like Eugene) as well as your created wrestlers (you can choose from five different voices in the create-a-wrestler mode), and the dialogue will change to match the wrestler you're playing with. Text menus be damned--this is the way to go. Sure, it would be nice if there were more branching paths that the story could take, but if it's between that and fully voice-acted storylines that are actually pretty good, then we'll take the latter.   GM mode is an interesting concept that doesn't quite have all the pieces to make it a resounding success.   After you're done with the season mode, there's an all-new mode to play around with called the GM mode. Because general managers have played an increasingly key role in the way the WWE presents its storylines, it's not altogether surprising that a mode in which you yourself play that role would find its way into a wrestling game. The GM mode is basically the equivalent of a franchise mode in a sports game. You begin by drafting from the roster of available WWE superstars (or just sticking with whatever your chosen show's current roster is), and signing them each to contracts of varying length. You're working with a budget, so you can't just sign all the top guys to expensive long-term deals; so you'll find yourself trying to space out your deals as much as possible, and sometimes working with more rookies than perhaps you'd like.    The whole crux of the mode is that you're competing with the other WWE brand. You're judged by how many fans your show has, and whichever brand has the most fans at the end of the yearlong period in which the mode takes place is the winner. You earn fans by putting on good shows. Good shows have good matches. Good matches are measured by star ratings, awarded by the fans themselves. The fans like big names, and matches featuring wrestlers with higher popularity levels naturally get higher ratings. It also helps when the wrestlers involved in a match have an ongoing feud. You can check to see who has a feud going via a menu in the mode, and basically, to keep a feud going, you have to involve your wrestler in a match every week, or at least in a promo. Promos can be inserted for advertising purposes, resting popular wrestlers, building hype for pay-per-views and main events, and even raiding the opposing show.     All of this sounds great, but it's not all put together quite as well as it could have been. Again, this is a purely menu-based mode, so it can be tough to really get a handle on how well your shows are going. You certainly have the option to play through any of the matches you have on a card, but it's tough to gauge whether doing so actually has any bearing on the rating at the end. You also don't ever get to watch any promos happen, so they're purely transparent. Another problem is that it's exceedingly tough to build up rookie wrestlers to an acceptable popularity level. There's no farm system or B-grade show like Velocity to send them down to for seasoning purposes. So you'll have at least a few one-star matches on every card, simply because you have wrestlers that just can't get over with the crowd. Popularity seems to come from wins, but putting rookies in against popular wrestlers for the purposes of getting them some wins just takes too long, and ultimately this drops the popularity of your already-popular wrestlers.    If you say you can find better-looking character models than these in a wrestling game, you're a liar.   But even with all that said, the GM mode is a fun distraction, and it seems like it could be the groundwork for far more spectacular things in the future. The concept of being able to manage shows from the GM level and book your own cards is great. If that can be built upon, giving players more control over feuds and angles, making promos visible, and so on and so forth, that could be something really special. We'll just have to wait and see where Yuke's goes with this in the future.    Perhaps the biggest and simultaneously most disappointing part of last year's game was the debut of online play. Last year's online mode was barren, slightly laggy, and altogether dull. In this year's game, the online is a different animal. Up to four players can wrestle at once in a host of different match types, including practically every type of gimmick match, and even title matches. The titles you'll be vying for are the ones you create, and you can even make wagers with money you've won offline. On top of the match variety, there's also a feature that lets you trade created wrestlers between players. It's just a separate lobby section you can jump into, and it's pretty easy to do. Wins, losses, title defenses, and the like are tracked via the online scoreboards, too. Disappointingly, there's no real friends list to speak of, and the online community has already found obnoxious things to do to one another--things that the system probably could have prevented with a little more forethought. The game does track the number of disconnections an opponent might have, so you can at least try to avoid irritating players that way. Also, the online performance can vary wildly depending on connection speed. We had matches that were badly bogged down with lag, where actions were well behind button presses, and others that were practically lag-free. Just be aware that your mileage may vary.     There's also the usual array of creation modes to play with. The create-a-wrestler is pretty much as good as it's ever been, as is the create-a-belt mode from last year. The one major addition to the pack is the create-an-entrance mode, letting you specifically design the crazy pyrotechnics and camera angles that come with a superstar's entrance. It's the same concept that the Day of Reckoning franchise has used on the GameCube over the last couple of years, though it's not as good. There's no easy way to see exactly where each labeled camera angle is set up, nor what each pyro type looks like, so you'll have to go through each and every one, viewing the complete entrance preview each time, which can be time consuming. This is one case in which Yuke's probably would have been better served just making a carbon copy of what they'd already created, rather than trying to toss something new in.    Graphically, SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 features easily the most refined and attractive-looking character models ever put into a wrestling game. The detail in each and every character is phenomenal. Facial animations look realistic, skins and costumes are supremely detailed, and the various cutscenes presented throughout the game, be they during the season mode or simply a quick cut of a particularly devastating move during a match, are wonderful. Amazingly enough, the frame rate holds up extremely well, even during matches with the maximum number of wrestlers in the ring, and the only time you might notice a bit of slowdown is during some entrance sequences with particularly elaborate pyrotechnics. Even the created wrestlers look just about on par with the models that Yuke's itself designed, making their inclusion in a match all the more seamless. Were it not for the collision issues, this would be graphical perfection for a wrestling game on the PS2.   Eddie, you will be missed.   The audio is also much improved from last year. Apart from the mostly great voice acting, commentary is better this year. Both the teams of Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole and Tazz are on hand for their respective shows, and while the lines of commentary are mostly innocuous and don't get into much depth within the matches themselves, the lines are somewhat less repetitive than they've been in previous years. The season mode also makes good use of the commentators during cutscenes to set the stage for the storyline. More licensed music is on hand for soundtrack purposes, though it's a weird list of artists, ranging from the Dillinger Escape Plan to Bumpy Knuckles. There's even a remix of Megadeth's ""Symphony of Destruction"" for some reason. Sadly, none of John Cena's album is used for the soundtrack for some reason.    Not every single thing that WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006 tries to do completely works, but the sheer amount of crazy new stuff in this game more than makes it worth the while of any wrestling fan. The gameplay is the best it's ever been, the presentation is top-notch, and the plethora of available modes is more than enough to keep any WWE enthusiast busy for hours and hours. Maybe Yuke's will surprise everyone and put together another SmackDown! vs. RAW game for the PlayStation 2 next year; but if this does turn out to be the last one for the system, then it will have gone out with a bang.    


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721,Guitar Hero II ,8.9," A fantastic debut for the series on the Xbox 360, Guitar Hero II adds great new content and even tweaks a few small problems from the PS2 version.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/3/4/7/2216347-box_ghero2.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/guitar-hero-ii-review/1900-6168531/,pos,"
  If you're an Xbox 360 owner, a lover of rock music, and someone with close to $100 burning a hole in your pocket, your day has finally come. RedOctane's once PlayStation 2-exclusive Guitar Hero series has come to the 360 in Guitar Hero II. As you would expect, this is primarily a port of the PS2 version released last year, with all the same hard-rocking tracks and play modes. But the 360 version adds a significant chunk of content, with additional songs, online leaderboards, and the promise of downloadable content. Longtime Guitar Hero fans might be a bit wary of spending another big chunk of change for a new guitar and an updated version of a game they probably already own, and that's fully understandable. But for 360 owners that haven't already invested heavily in this series and have the unquenchable desire to get their rock on, Guitar Hero II is absolutely a must-own.   Xbox 360 owners get their first shot at guitar heroism in Guitar Hero II.   For those who aren't intimately familiar with the Guitar Hero series, here's a quick primer on how it plays. The guitar controller features a strumming button, as well as five color-coded fret buttons on the neck of the guitar. Onscreen, notes color coded the same way as the fret buttons travel down the screen, and you need get your fingers on the correct fret buttons while strumming in time with the notes. Each hit note scores you points, and creating lengthy combos ups a score multiplier. Your progress is tracked by a ""rock meter,"" and if you miss too many notes, you'll eventually hit the red and fail the song. Furthermore, every now and again you'll gain ""star power"" by perfectly hitting a section of notes. This star power feeds into a meter, and by tilting the guitar at an opportune time, star power will deploy, giving you twice as many points per note as you'd normally get. Oh, and there's a whammy bar.    That's a fairly technical explanation of what basically boils down to hitting the notes and making with the rock. In the case of the Xbox 360 version, you'll be doing this using a different tool than the PS2 version. The guitar controller is fashioned after the Gibson X-Plorer brand of guitar, which features a more striking body design than the standard SG model the PS2 game used. Longtime Guitar Hero fans might not love the change to the way the guitar strap sits. It hooks into the back of the neck, as opposed to the body of the guitar, which occasionally leads to the strap getting twisted, making it uncomfortable to play. This one quibble aside, the X-Plorer is a much more solid-feeling controller than the SG model. The buttons are raised slightly higher off the neck, and they, as well as the strummer, don't clack as much or as loudly as the PS2-model controller. You might also run into some awkwardness if you like to hit the select button to deploy star power. But frankly, you should be tilting the guitar anyway. It's all about showmanship, after all.    As mechanically excellent as the Guitar Hero series has been up to this point, the truth is that much of its appeal comes from the song selection. The first Guitar Hero nailed the song list almost perfectly, primarily focusing on memorable rock riffs that any armchair shredder would be stoked to play. Guitar Hero II went a bit more obscure with its soundtrack, changing the focus from classic riffs to insane solos and reckless acts of guitar wankery. Not a bad choice, mind you--just a different one. Of course, there are plenty of major artists to be found in this game. Just to name a few, songs by Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, the Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Guns 'N Roses, Rage Against the Machine, The Police, Megadeth, and Lynyrd Skynyrd all make an appearance. But wait, there's more! The 360 version adds 10 new songs to the mix, including tracks like Iron Maiden's ""The Trooper,"" Rancid's ""Salvation,"" Pearl Jam's ""Life Wasted,"" and, in the most inspired of selections, Rick Derringer's ""Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo."" This brings the overall song total to 74, with 48 of those being licensed tracks from major artists and the remainder coming from smaller independent bands.     While the song list might be bigger, there are definitely a number of included tracks that aren't necessarily stand-outs. There are some legitimate classics here to be sure, like every metal head's favorite love song, ""Sweet Child O' Mine,"" or the Southern rock anthem ""Free Bird."" But if you're going to get Aerosmith in your game, why would you pick a song like ""Last Child"" over any of their numerous bigger, just as solo-heavy hits? And is ""You Really Got Me"" really the best Van Halen song that could be dug up? Of course, even the oddball choices are usually still quite fun to play, and there are a number of fantastically fun songs that you probably never would have thought of on your own, like The Pretenders' ""Tattooed Love Boys"" or The Police's ""Message in a Bottle."" You also probably won't be able to shake the feeling that you'd rather be playing just about any other Van Halen song, though.   Weird as it is to say, online leaderboards totally make the 360 version of Guitar Hero II the best one. Downloadable songs don't hurt, either.   Save for a couple of original master tracks (Primus' ""John the Fisherman"" and Jane's Addiction's ""Stop"" from the original crop, as well as My Chemical Romance's ""Dead!"" and Toadies' ""Possum Kingdom"" of the 360-exclusive tracks), all the major licensed tracks are covers, played by studio musicians. Some of the covers in the game are legitimately tough to pick out, such as the fantastically produced ""Carry on Wayward Son"" by Kansas and ""Woman"" by Wolfmother. Others are a bit more scattershot in quality. Some of the vocalists in particular don't come off much like the real-life singers. The fake Ozzy Osbourne and Dave Mustaine in GH II aren't quite spot-on (which is odd, since the first Guitar Hero game had near-perfect soundalikes for both vocalists), and the guy portraying Zach De La Rocha in Rage Against the Machine's ""Killing in the Name"" comes off like an awful rap-rock karaoke performance. Still, these less-than-stellar examples are more aberrations than the norm, and the vast bulk of the songs are excellent renditions, especially in the guitar parts; and in a game about playing the guitar, ultimately that matters most.     Apart from the added songs and new controller, other 360-exclusive additions to the game include online leaderboards and downloadable content. The leaderboards are pretty self-explanatory, and they track your high scores across every single song in the game, and there's also an overall career score that combines all your scores into one gigantic number. You can filter the career score to include only the career mode or factor in high scores from other modes as well. Considering that Guitar Hero is, by nature, a highly competitive game, the addition of leaderboards is a huge boon to the game. Now you can finally show all your online buddies just how much you stink at ""Psychobilly Freakout."" The downloadable content isn't currently up for download, but we do know that the bulk of the new content is going to be added songs. Pricing isn't set at this moment, so things could potentially get expensive. Still, having the option to add even more songs over time is pretty awesome.    The holdover modes from Guitar Hero II have gone mostly unchanged, but are still excellent in their own right. The PS2 version of Guitar Hero II saw the debut of the practice mode, which was a highly welcome addition, especially considering the occasionally overwrought difficulty level of the harder tracks. Since you aren't able to play through songs in quickplay or the career mode without being tied to the rock meter (and potentially failing before you get to the end), the new practice mode lets you play through any of the songs without fear of failure. What's more, you can play any specific section of a song you want, at the speed you want. Songs are broken down piece by piece, and you can pick any starting and stopping section you please. When you complete songs in the quickplay or career modes, you can access detailed stats that depict exactly how well you did on each individual section, so it's not tough to figure out where you need to improve. Three slower speeds are included, letting you slow a solo to a crawl so you can identify just how crazy that solo is.    Go ahead, use the practice mode all you want. Five stars on 'Jordan' will forever escape you.   It's an incredibly useful tool for figuring out ways to best some of the game's peskier parts, and it's very easy to use. There's even an option to jump right into practice mode from the options menu that pops up when you fail a song in one of the other modes. Unfortunately, this mode doesn't show star-power sections, nor does it give any indication of how close you might be to failing a song. Not letting you fail is good, but some kind of indication to see just how badly you're screwing up would have been nice. And being able to figure out where best to use star power would also have been good, since often you can only survive some of these crazy solos with well-placed star-power usage. The mode also lacks any sort of loop feature, meaning each time you complete a section, you'll have to reload it to play again.    Career mode is where you'll spend much of your time initially as you work to unlock the game's many songs. The career progression works much the same as it always has, with four sections broken up by difficulty. One thing that has changed in the 360 version is the track order. While having a different order to the set list might not sound like a huge deal, it improves the flow of the career mode significantly, as the difficulty balance is much, much better. In the PS2 version, there were some songs that felt totally out of whack where they were, and here the tweaks pretty much eliminate that feeling, save for a few rare instances (""YYZ"" is still way too easy to come as late as it does). As you play through the career, you'll unlock a bunch of new songs, as well as earn cash to spend in the game's store. New characters, costumes, guitars, guitar finishes, and yes, even songs can be purchased here. There are some truly fantastic axes to be unlocked, most of which are licensed Gibson guitars, but a few of which are so comically bizarre that you can't help but love them. Viking guitar, anyone?    Multiplayer includes two forms of competitive play. One has you and a friend trading off sections of a song, and the other has the two of you playing through a whole song the whole time. The other option is cooperative play, and in this mode, only one of you can play lead guitar. The other player gets to pick up the rhythm guitar, or bass, depending on the song. When playing lead and rhythm guitar together, the game splits up the guitar parts you've been playing in the single-player in such a way that you realize you've often been playing two guitar pieces mashed into one all along. There are times when rhythm sections are actually more challenging than the lead sections, though they're also decidedly lacking in solo action, for the most part. The split between guitar and bass is more pronounced. Bass is, after all, a more repetitive instrument, and some of the bass parts in the game are flat-out boring. But a good number of them are also extremely fun, especially in any song where the bass is a more pronounced instrument within a band, such as Primus or Rush. Perhaps the scattered level of quality of the secondary parts is why these aren't available for play anywhere else in the game besides here and practice mode. Still, you could easily argue that in a band like Primus, the bass is practically the lead instrument, and not being able to play the bass in even quickplay is a bit disappointing.    What's weird about the cooperative mode itself is that you don't always get the sense that you're playing with someone, so much as playing next to another person. Obviously, the different instruments play into each other within the song, but there's something slightly mechanical about the way the two instruments play together in this mode. This is less a problem with rhythm guitar tracks and mostly an issue in bass songs that aren't crazy in the way that the Rush or Primus songs are. Basically, it's frequently hard to hear the bass guitar, even with the bass audio cranked up as much as it is, so it's tough to gauge how much effect you're really having on the song when playing bass. Seemingly, the developers realized this and tried to give the mode a bit more oomph by tying both players into a single rock meter and combo multiplier. So if your friend is really tanking on their part, you'll both lose your combo buildup and potentially fail the song. You even engage star power by both tilting your guitars. While that could be potentially disastrous if you're playing with a less-experienced player, the game mercifully lets you select individual difficulty levels for each part in this mode.    As you would expect from any 360 game, Guitar Hero II on the 360 tosses achievements into the mix. There are 50 achievements, and the difficulty of them covers both ends of the spectrum. There are some jokingly easy achievements, such as the points you earn for failing a song on easy or refusing to do an encore in the career mode. Then there are such gems as the ""Yngwie Malmsteen"" achievement for getting a 1,000-note streak on a single song (if you don't know who that is, look him up, and you'll get the association), or the achievement for getting 500,000 points in a single song. You'll get a bunch of achievements quickly and then have to work hard to get the rest. It's a nicely balanced list. The only bummer is that the game still doesn't support online multiplayer, meaning you'll need to drag another expert-player friend over to get all the cooperative multiplayer achievements.    If your buddy starts screwing up your note streaks, punch them in the face until they get it right. It worked for the Brian Jonestown Massacre!   Guitar Hero II's graphics aren't exactly the most impressive out there, but the game has an explicitly goofy and decidedly rock-and-roll in-joke visual style to it that just works. From guitarists like Lars Umlaut, a hulking Norwegian death metal guitarist with a fancy for elaborate costumes and breathing fire, to the insanely elaborate stage sets, with tons of flashing lights, pyrotechnics, and big cutouts of the grim ripper fighting a giant octopus monster, among other things, you can't be a rock fan and not chuckle at how totally bananas the game's look is. Granted, most times your eyes will be squarely focused on the fret board and the notes flying at you, but even if you're just catching it in the periphery, it's great to see. The 360 version of Guitar Hero II doesn't do a ton to improve the overall look of the game. It runs in HD now, so some of the details of the guitarists and sets are more discernable. Everything also looks crisper and brighter than it ever did on the PS2, even if you're running in SD. You can't quite call it a great-looking 360 game, but the graphics more than get the job done.    That 360 owners can now see what PS2 owners have been enjoying so much over the last couple of years with the Guitar Hero series, and do it with even more added content, is a fantastic thing. The track list is gigantic, the multiplayer is a great deal of fun, the practice mode is a godsend, and the downloadable content is sure to give this game a long shelf life. If you've never had the opportunity to try Guitar Hero before, this is the definitive way to do it. PS2 owners might be reluctant to drop nearly another $100 on a game they've already played a bunch, but there's an investment-like quality to this game. Guitar Hero isn't going to be coming to the PS2 forever, and with the series starting off with such a bang on the Xbox 360, it might just make investing in Guitar Hero II again worth your while.    


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722,Elite Beat Agents ,8.9, You won't find a stranger and more addictive rhythm game on a handheld system than Elite Beat Agents.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/8/1/2214881-box_eba.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/elite-beat-agents-review/1900-6161140/,pos,"
  Some of the diehard Nintendo DS owners out there might remember a little game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! that was released last year. A ridiculously addictive and completely bizarre rhythm game that had a group of superhero cheerleaders solving the world's problems through dance, it featured some of the tightest and most challenging gameplay you could find on the DS. Trouble is, it never came out in America. But fret not, because a reenvisioning in the form of Elite Beat Agents has now arrived. This isn't the same Japanese game translated into English. Elite Beat Agents is pretty much an all-new game that Americanizes the formula a bit, adding in covers of American pop songs from a wide variety of eras in lieu of the indecipherably Japanese soundtrack of old. Otherwise though, this is an incredibly faithful follow-up to the original game, and the awesome rhythm-based gameplay and spastic presentation are fully intact.   How do you rescue a couple of snobby blondes from the perils of a desert island? By dancing! Dancing, you fool! Dancing like you've never danced before!   The titular Elite Beat Agents are a group of black-suit-wearing secret agents that apparently work for an old military general and travel around the world solving people's problems. How do they accomplish these feats of heroism, you might ask? These guys get together and do some of the most tightly choreographed dance numbers this side of an '80s-era Michael Jackson video, and through the power of dance, cure the world's ills. Their routines are set to a weird variety of major pop tunes that often fit strangely well to the situation at hand. Think of the whole experience as a cross between Charlie's Angels, Saturday morning anime, and Mama Mia!-esque musical theater. In short, it's completely mind blowing.    A big part of the appeal comes from the presentation and cutscenes that set up each of the game's stages. All these are told through excellent-looking manga-styled sequences that set up each situation with the most extreme imagery possible. People are either incredibly happy or incredibly freaked out at all times. The problems you'll be solving are, of course, not quite what you might expect. You'll be helping babysitters fend off whiny children while they try to ask their jock boyfriends to go steady, 15th-century artists woo would-be models, and auto executives with mild ninjitsu skills take back stolen car designs from a rival company. The scenes are excellently drawn, and it's hard not to laugh at the ridiculousness of what's going on.     All the hyperactive cutscenes are a good setup for the gameplay, which is incredibly fast-paced and challenging. This is a rhythm game through and through. The whole game is controlled via the touch screen. As a stage begins and the music plays, small circles will appear onscreen with numbers on them. These indicate the beats that you must tap in time with the music. A larger circle surrounds each of these numbers, and it quickly caves in. When the outer circle meets up with the numbered circle, that's when you must tap. As complicated as it sounds, the gameplay is really just about finding the groove of the music. If you're not gifted with a good sense of timing, the precision with which you must make your hits might be a little off-putting.    You'll have to do more than just tap, too. Other mechanics include a ball that must be dragged from one end of the screen to another, in time with the music. Sometimes that ball goes back and forth a few times. Often you'll have to alternate taps with drags back and forth in a seriously frantic fashion. There's also a spinning-wheel mechanic that pops up randomly and forces you to spin your stylus around the touch screen so furiously that you might start fearing for your touch screen's safety. The context for all of this is that your taps and movements correspond to the movements of the 3D models of the agents that appear on the touch screen behind all these numbered balls. It can be tough to pay much attention to what the agents are doing while you're playing, but the game smartly includes a replay save option, so you can go back and watch the frenetic dance moves in action, as well as all the crazy manga sequences that play on the top screen, afterward.     If the game sounds challenging, that's because it is--extremely so. Even on the default difficulty, some of the game's stages will likely take a lot of practice to get through. You basically have to learn the individual rhythms of each part of a song, and the game's margin for error isn't very high. As you play, a meter at the top of the touch screen depicts how well you're doing, and a couple of missed hits will drop you into the red quickly. You get varying point scores depending on how exact your taps and movements are to the beat, but a string of imperfect scores also has a tendency to drop your meter down a good bit. However, as tough as the game can be, it's rarely frustrating. A few of the last stages can get vexing after your umpteenth failure, but even still, you'll want to keep going back over and over to finally best them. It's the right balance of difficulty for the most part--at least until you unlock the two harder difficulty levels. The hard mode is noticeably tougher, though once you've beaten the toughest stages on medium, you'll be well prepared for what hard puts in front of you. The hardest level, on the other hand, is just crazy.     Apart from unlocking multiple difficulty modes, you'll also unlock a few bonus stages as you play through the single-player mode. There are 19 stages in all, and it'll likely take you at least a couple of hours with each difficulty level to complete them. Once you're done with single-player, there's a multiplayer mode for both competitive and co-op play for up to four players. Co-op splits songs up amongst two teams of agents, with each taking about half of the beats. In competitive mode, the two teams compete by playing all the same beats and trying to fill their ""elite-o-meter"" higher than the other team. The game has both multicart and download play, though the download play offers only a limited number of songs. The multiplayer works pretty well, though it also seemed a bit laggy in spots. Download play matches also tend to take an exceedingly long time to load up.   The game's manga-styled presentation is quite easy on the eyes, if a bit insane.   One of the strangest things about Elite Beat Agents is its soundtrack. The grouping of songs that Nintendo has assembled here is equivalent to someone taking the individual music libraries of a teeny-bopper kid and his or her parents, tossing it all into a jar, shaking vigorously, and then scooping out a random handful of songs. '70s classics like the Village People's ""YMCA"" and Earth, Wind and Fire's ""September"" are joined by modern pop rock songs like Avril Lavigne's ""Sk8er Boi"" and Ashlee Simpson's ""La La."" What's good is that most of these songs line right up with the situations featured in the game. Madonna's ""Material Girl"" plays while you rescue a pair of ditzy blondes (with rather striking resemblances to Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie) from being stranded on a desert island, while the Stray Cats' ""Rock This Town"" takes place during a casino robbery in Las Vegas. The only real flaw with the soundtrack is that a few of the more recent tracks feel seriously tacked on. ""Sk8er Boi"" plays while a taxi driver races to get a pregnant woman to a hospital, for example. What? Wouldn't just about any other song in the world have made more sense than that one? It seems like these few out-of-place tracks are there to provide something familiar to those who weren't alive to experience the joys of the Village People or David Bowie back in the day. Still, that makes them stick out like no less of a sore thumb.    Though there isn't much competition, Elite Beat Agents is easily the best rhythm game available for the Nintendo DS, and for that matter, it's easily one of the most randomly addictive experiences on the platform. The idea of just tapping circles in time with music while dudes in suits dance doesn't sound like much on paper, but the insane presentational components and enjoyable challenge the game puts forth do a lot to bring the whole experience together into something extremely playable. Those without a penchant for the unabashedly bizarre might find Elite Beat Agents to be a bit too much, but just about anyone else with a DS would do well to try this one out.    
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723,You Don't Know Jack Movies ,8.8," In addition to creating a plethora of wacky questions pertaining to film, the producers have also given this version a movie motif.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/0/5/2209005-170890656_tp.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/you-dont-know-jack-movies-review/1900-2535559/,pos,"
Once again, Jellyvision - the spin doctors of trivia - has produced another entertaining game show ""where high culture and pop culture collide."" Buy the popcorn and Milk Duds and find your seat because the latest addition to the Jack family is taking you to the theater. This time you return to the studio to test your knowledge of meaningless cinema facts in the hopes of winning cash. Don't worry: Answering a question incorrectly still results in the loss of cash and a verbal spanking from the show's obnoxious but entertaining host, Cookie.  And while this topic is a diversion from the classic YDKJ fare, players will find the same creatively wordsmithed questions they've grown to expect from a YDKJ game - except the topic du jour is movies, movies, movies. Because the questions cover such a broad range of film facts - from knowing which silent screen star was nicknamed ""Great Stone Face"" to correctly identifying which films had good aliens and which had bad ones (surprisingly Gerard Depardieu wasn't included on either list) - this game will appeal to both hard-core film buffs looking to justify the hours they've spent alone in the dark, as well as less-experienced movie watchers.  In addition to creating a plethora of wacky questions pertaining to film, the producers have also given this version a movie motif. Modifications include a film reel on every screen, playing projector sounds when the black-and-white category screens appear along with movie music, and casting the questions in movie themes, from a HAL-laciously soothing, ""It's question one, Dave,"" to a vicious, stomping green nineteen. And like actors, the numbers can appear as more than one character. For example, while question four is the question that still cares, it can also turn up as a screen-surfing menacing shark. All of this adds up to a refreshing take on a tried-and-true formula.  Jack aficionados will find the types of questions they've grown to expect, like Flickerpiss Nosescums (gibberish questions), multiple choice, and the Jack Attack, as well as those introduced in You Don't Know Jack Volume 2 - Fill in the Blanks, Dis or Dats, Whatitsname, and Picture QuestionsThe only variation of categories is the replacement of the Celebrity Calls with Fiber Optic Trips, which involves Cookie phoning up strangers and having the unsuspecting caller ask the contestants questions. It's a bit quirky, but a great way to learn area codes. One especially nifty feature is the High Scoreboard, which appears at the end of each game and lists the 10 highest scores with name and date. Finally, a way to keep an accurate record of who the real trivia masters are.  However, aside from introducing a new topic and a few minor enhancements, YDKJ Movies merely delivers the same level of entertainment found in the other YDKJ games. But that's not something to scoff at - it's a tribute to the creative people at Jellyvision. So, if you're eager to test your knowledge of movies, YDKJ Movies definitely delivers a two-thumbs-up performance.
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724,Flight Unlimited II ,8.8," It doesn't have the globe-spanning sweep of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but it renders its own little corner of the world with admirable fidelity.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/6/8/1/2213681-fu2_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/flight-unlimited-ii-review/1900-2536063/,pos,"
Flight Unlimited is a tough act to follow. A detailed physical model, lavish graphics, and a selection of high-performance planes set a new standard for aviation sims. After most of the original team responsible for FU departed, Looking Glass needed to start over and reconceive its product line. It did this by moving away from the aerobatic emphasis of the original FU in order to create a thorough and exacting simulation of civil aviation in one region, with results that are as impressive as they are innovative. Unlike the thousands of international airports offered by MS Flight Sim (the other major civil-aviation sim), Flight Unlimited II concentrates on 46major airports (and many minor ones) within the confined area of the San Francisco Bay area. This decision cuts two ways. Microsoft Flight Sim folk will undoubtedly be disappointed to find only one region mapped, since they are used to cross-country jaunts. But by narrowing the range, Looking Glass has been able to re-create its little spot of terra firma in exacting detail.  Graphically, it is probably one of the most complex representations of a single region available in any sim. With its 3D-accelerated graphics, terrain and objects flow smoothly on even the higher resolutions, though things do begin to bog down once you go much over 800x600. Software acceleration is also available, providing a good show even without the hardware. The result of all this detail is to provide the pilot with true visual flight rules and terrain following. Navigation with the Mark 1 eyeball is rarely this well implemented. A full complement of locations (Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz) and beautiful scenery makes it all the more enjoyable.  Graphics are only one part of the equation that creates the quite realistic feeling of FU II. Looking Glass has spent a great deal of time perfecting the physics, the instrumentation, and, most importantly, the traffic and tower AI. Instead of the high-performance stunt planes of the original, FU II models some staples of civilian flight: the Beechcraft Baron twin-engine, Piper Arrow single, de Havilland Beaver float plane, P51-D Mustang, and the ""Trainer 172"" (which looks like a Cessna to me). The performance and handling are top-notch across the board, right down to the weather effects and the unique handling of the Beaver during water takeoffs and landings. These are tight, effective flight models that truly capture the feel of these planes, two of which I've actually flown. Each has a full complement of instruments for true cross-country instrument flying, unlike the simpler cockpits of the original FU. Adding to the sense of realism is a complex re-creation of air traffic, radio messages, and tower controls. Flight II is as much a radio and air-traffic sim as it is a flight sim, with detailed, smoothly edited cockpit chatter. Dealing with the ATCs at various airports adds greatly to the feeling of airspace restrictions, takeoff, landing, and other aspects of flight control. There are also allegedly some provisions made for restricted military airspace, but no matter how many times I buzzed Travis, I couldn't stir the hornets out of their nests. Gameplay is pretty open-ended, as one would expect from a pure sim. You can set up flight plans and save them, then fly point-to-point. A couple dozen special missions are also included, and they run the gamut from dropping chickens on Candlestick Park to breaking some prisoners out of Alcatraz. Creating a custom flight in any condition and at any location is very simple with the planner, and the variety of weather conditions (with the best weather effects in any sim, bar none) can make for some harrowing flights. The interface that ties all this together is easy and intuitive. There were some problems with the initial release that have been largely hammered out and some that are due to be. Tower AI goes daffy now and then, and the aforementioned lack of a proper response in restricted airspace comes to mind. A problem with the center trim on the elevator has been fixed (this was very annoying). The Mustang has several bugs in it that have been mostly fixed. Control and joystick routines are overall pretty clean, and while there were some instances of graphical glitches, there were no hard crashes. Flight Unlimited II is a very different experience from the original. For fans of civil aviation, it offers a whole new way to look at flight without the fight. It doesn't have the globe-spanning sweep of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but it renders its own little corner of the world with admirable fidelity.
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725,Half-Life ,8.8," Half-Life for the PS2 is a gripping combination of superb story design, sly artificial intelligence, taut combat sequences, and logical puzzles.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/3/8/2210238-box_hl1.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/half-life-review/1900-2824623/,pos,"
It's rare to read a review of a first-person shooter on any platform that doesn't reference Valve Software's groundbreaking Half-Life. First released on the PC in the fall of 1998, Half-Life has since spawned several single-player and multiplayer expansions on the PC but failed to break through on other platforms--Macintosh and Dreamcast ports were cancelled in mid-development. Half-Life finally makes its cross-platform debut with Gearbox and Valve Software's faithful, yet enhanced, version of Half-Life on the PlayStation 2. Featuring the classic single-player game, a head-to-head deathmatch mode, and a new cooperative multiplayer expansion called Decay, Half-Life for the PS2 is a gripping combination of superb story design, sly artificial intelligence, taut combat sequences, and logical puzzles.  Half-Life's storyline slowly builds in intensity, much like a finely crafted action sequence or an engrossing novel that you simply can't put down. In fact, the less you know about the surprises that await, the better. The setup is simple and revealed in Half-Life's unique tram-ride opening sequence. You assume the role Gordon Freeman, a research associate working in the anomalous materials laboratory at the Black Mesa research facility. From that moment on, details are discovered little by little--if at all--and a great deal of the game's background information is left to your imagination. Even the action unfolds with impressive precision. Instead of throwing all its enemies at you at once, Half-Life showcases each creature with its own introduction. Each encounter with a new creature provides both danger and a sense of wonder rarely offered by first-person shooters. In addition, brilliant scripted sequences enhance Half-Life's harrowing suspense, but the sequences are fixed and don't differ from game to game.  Half-Life's gameplay sticks close to typical first-person run-and-shoot standards. You'll still face most hostiles with a varied weapon arsenal, including a crowbar, pistols, a shotgun, an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, grenades, and laser trip mines, and you'll locate health from medical stations scattered around Black Mesa to mend Gordon's wounds and energy-charging stations to repair Gordon's environmental suit. Gordon has no trouble carrying all weapons at once--Half-Life forgoes strategic weapon decisions for the ability to blast your nearest foe with any available hardware. Veterans of Volition's Red Faction should find Half-Life's control scheme familiar and comfortable, while a PC game player can opt for the supported USB mouse and keyboard setup. The PS2 controller's circle button defaults to lock-on targeting that's used to lock focus on a hostile target. It's a welcome addition and especially handy against the enemy creatures that are small and quick.  Enemy artificial intelligence--specifically for human adversaries--transforms what could be standard first-person shooter combat into tense battle events. Described in the manual as an efficient clean-up crew, these enemy military soldiers provide tough, extended one-on-one battles. The soldiers can take cover behind crates, lob grenades at your feet, and retreat to more fortified positions. A great deal of care must be taken when entering new areas. In Half-Life, running into a new room with guns blazing is usually a first-class ticket to the reload screen. Gordon can also seek assistance from various scientists and security guards around Black Mesa. Scientists usually supply first aid or the means to open locked doors, and security guards provide armed backup as long as you can keep them alive. Although there's plenty of visceral combat, Half-Life adds a liberal dose of puzzles throughout. Many involve discovering the best way to traverse a particularly dangerous area or locate the next unexplored path. The inclusion of some jumping puzzles may turn off the game player seeking non-stop action. Fortunately, it's possible to save your game to a memory card at any point or use quick saves stored in the PS2's memory, both of which prove invaluable when faced with Half-Life's many precarious situations.You might expect a three-year-old PC game utilizing an amalgamation of id Software's Quake and Quake II engines to look somewhat dated by today's graphical standards. While Half-Life's environments and special effects aren't on par with some of the PlayStation 2's finest visual feasts, the addition of hires textures, character, and weapon models (introduced in the PC's Blue Shift expansion) improves the game's crispness considerably. But think of Half-Life like a classic automobile. Even without the latest bells and whistles, the car still grants a fantastic, memorable ride--Half-Life's gripping gameplay transcends its dated graphics. The sound effects are also stellar. From the piercing noise of each new mysterious creature to the thunderous explosions and distinctive weapon blasts, Half-Life's sound effects work well in conjunction with the detailed atmosphere and scripted sequences to envelop the player in an absorbing ambience.  Along with the complete and faithful port of the single-player game, Half-Life on the PlayStation 2 includes two multiplayer modes. The most impressive of these is Decay, a cooperative split-screen two-player mode boasting a new storyline that runs parallel to Gordon Freeman's single-player adventure. In Decay, you assume the role of Dr. Gina Cross or Dr. Colette Green and must traverse the bowels of Black Mesa solving puzzles and combating enemies much like their solo-play alter ego. The main difference is that Decay's puzzles often require both players to solve. For example, one player must keep a timed security override active while the other scampers past temporarily deactivated turrets. To add competition, both players are rated on kills, damage sustained, and gun accuracy upon the completion of each mission. Decay is a superb addition to the Half-Life universe, and cooperative play offers a unique multiplayer thrill that can even surpass the excitement of a head-to-head deathmatch mode. Though it's possible to play Decay solo, it's a bit awkward and certainly less rewarding. You can switch between the two characters using the ""select"" button. As you move and battle using one character, the other remains stationary awaiting your control. The immobile character will automatically defend herself against threats, but switching frantically between characters to minimize combat damage can be cumbersome. Plus, solving the cooperative puzzles as one player lacks the satisfaction of discovering and implementing the solution as a two-player team. It's also worth noting that the save and quick save options are disabled during Decay and only active between each mission--should either character die, the mission ends in failure and must be replayed from the beginning. Half-Life also features a straightforward two-player split-screen deathmatch mode if you'd rather battle a friend than work together. You can wage war on 10 different maps (which should look familiar to PC Half-Life veterans), but the lack of options limits variation.  It's impossible to argue against Half-Life's place among the most influential games of all time, and its transition to the PlayStation 2 is a successful one. If you've already experienced Half-Life on the PC, the addition of Decay may not be enough to warrant venturing back to Black Mesa. But those unfortunate enough to have missed out on the perennial king of first-person shooters should start packing their bags as soon as possible.
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726,688 (I) Hunter/Killer ,8.8," At last, the long wait for a worthy nuclear submarine simulation is over.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/6/75-316.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/688-i-hunter-killer-review/1900-2542329/,pos,"
SSN didn't do it. Fast Attack and Seawolf didn't do it. But Jane's 688(I) Hunter/Killer does it with a vengeance. At last, the long wait for a worthy nuclear submarine simulation is over. Since MicroProse published Red Storm Rising umpteen years ago, sub-heads have been waiting for a realistic game that put them at the helm of a modern attack submarine. And though there are still some minor issues to be worked out, there is no denying that 688 is the best submarine game yet. 688 is the work of the submarine veterans at Sonalysts, the military contractor that created subsystems and training programs for the Navy. This is a complex, detailed simulation of the Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine - so complex that the manual runs to 280-plus pages. Sonar stations, target tracking and recognition, and complex undersea warfare tactics are all modeled in depth. Missions take a long time and require careful planning and attention to protocol. The sonar, target motion analysis, and fire control sections can all be turned over to AI crew members, but that still leaves a lot to do. The interface for 688 is similar to most Jane's games: a simple front end with access to single missions, a custom mission builder, campaigns, and tons of online information. Gameplay comes in the form of 18 individual scenarios and tutorials or a set of 15 scenarios linked together to form a canned campaign spanning the globe. As a commander, your tasks cover the entire spectrum of sub ops: sub hunting, anti-surface warfare, cruise missiles strikes, SEAL team insertions, and search and rescue. In campaign mode, you also need to manage sub repairs and the installation of new equipment, which you can ""buy"" with points earned on successful missions. 688 is played from a series of stations: ship control (for steering and depth), radar, Target Motion Analysis (TMA, for developing fire solutions from information provided by various sensors), periscope, sonar, radio, fire control, sound speed profile (SSP, to determine the thermal layers), the CO's stateroom, and a set of reference materials on friendly and enemy weapons and targets. Since passive information gathering is the key to undersea warfare, the heart of the game is its ultra-realistic sonar suite, including active intercept, DEMON, broadband, and narrowband stations to help find, track, and identify every ship in the water. This information is fed to fire control, where you actually launch Tomahawks, ADCAP torpedoes, and harpoon anti-shipping missiles. The systems work together flawlessly, and with a bit of practice you'll be jumping between stations and sinking ships in no time. The sharp attention to detail makes you feel like you're actually running each station, and an effective 3-D viewing mode even ensures that you get to see the fireworks.  Just about everything you could possibly want in a submarine game is in 688. The globe is accurately mapped with varying water temperatures, equipment looks and responds realistically, enemy and friendly vessels respond intelligently, and missions are complex, tough, and challenging. There's even network, modem, and TCP/IP play for head-to-head sub hunting, and online ""fleets"" have been formed for competition and ranking. There are some things that don't feel right, however. Torpedo reload times and turning speed both seem too fast to be right, but I can't be sure of this since I've never driven a nuclear submarine. (Apparently, Sonalysts thought so too: a ""realism"" patch has already been issued to correct turn rates and reload times.)  For the wish-list: Navigational waypoints, more platforms (where are the Typhoons?), naming contacts on the nav map, and better post-launch control and feedback for weapons. Some missions gave me funky results: I know I flattened a target, but never got points for it. These are small items and easily fixed, however. Considering all that 688(I) offers, it is required gaming for naval warfare enthusiasts.
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727,Worms 2 ,8.8, The simple rules and basic control structure make it a game that anyone can learn to play in about five minutes.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/9/4/3/2213943-worms_2_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/worms-2-review/1900-2531877/,pos,"
Every now and then a game comes along that is addictive, challenging, and entertaining all at the same time and yet can't really be explained as such to someone who hasn't played the game. Worms 2 is such a game. I have started this review seven times now, and each time I've been thwarted by the difficulty of explaining exactly why blowing the crap out of armless, legless cartoon characters with ridiculously overpowered weaponry is as much fun as it is. But that's my job, so here goes. First, the somewhat empirical description of the game: Worms 2 is a 2D turn-based strategy game that puts you in command of a team of worms armed with predetermined amounts of arms and ammunition and sets you out on a fully destructible battleground to kill one or more similarly armed enemy teams. Every so often a care package will fall from the sky and can be collected by your soldiers. These packages contain health, new weaponry, or a bomb (these you don't want). On each turn, you select one of your worms, move it around on the screen with your arrow keys, select a weapon or tool, aim, and determine the amount of force you want to put into the shot. Some of the weapons included - like the bazooka or shotgun - have an immediate effect, and others - like the grenade - have a timer that will tick off before detonation. That's it, there's nothing more you need to know to play this game. Pretty simple, eh? So why is Worms 2 so much fun to play? That answer comes in several parts. First off, the simple rules and basic control structure make it a game that anyone can learn to play in about five minutes (now that you've read this review it won't even take you that long). Even so, the well-designed physics model ensures that the longer you practice, the better you'll get (if you think you're going to be able to hit a target across screen by lobbing a three-second grenade on your first try, you're dreaming). This minute-to-learn-lifetime-to-master kind of setup is the most basic component of making a game that people will want to play again and again. The second great thing about Worms 2 is that it appeals to the destructive side in all of us. Everything in the game can be destroyed: ground, girders, houses... whatever. This not only opens up a whole new world of strategic play options (why waste a lot of time shooting someone over and over when you can just destroy the ground underneath him?), it's also pleasing to your inner child who has secretly missed shooting his Star Wars figures with a BB gun for years. The battlefield's changing nature gives you a feeling of control over your surroundings, another great feature to be included in the game design primer. Thirdly, Worms 2 is funny. From the artwork and animation that feature these bloodthirsty little critters shooting, punching, and blasting one another to kingdom come, to the brilliant sound effects that let you customize the voices of your worms to everything from a 007 wanna-be to a Scottish killer, the game does everything in its power to keep you laughing as you play. When done correctly, this too is another feature of great games. Finally, Worms 2 is a great multiplayer game. Whether you're playing at home with some of your friends (and with up to 18 players by hot seat, you're a lot more likely to run out of friends than you are to run out of game slots) or playing over the Internet (up to six players here), the game is designed to let as many players as possible get into some competition that's impossible not to love. Since the game also allows you to change screens, weapon options, and about a billion other things (a slight exaggeration, but let's just say more than I want to count) about the way the game plays, you can always set up a game that's different enough from the last time you played to be interesting. Reading about Worms 2 is no comparison to playing it. This is one of those games that, even if it doesn't sound that great on paper (or onscreen... whatever), is still worth purchasing on faith alone. If you're interested in action or strategy games, and you're looking for a title that you'll still be gathering friends around to play well into the next year, Worms 2 is the game for you.
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728,Unbound Saga ,4, Unbound Saga is one brutally boring brawler.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/3/4/2221834-usaga_box.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unbound-saga-review/1900-6213969/,neg,"
  Tough guy Rick Ajax is a comic-book character forced to fight for the entertainment of readers at the whim of his creator, the Maker; Can you imagine such a cursed existence? Yet while Rick knows that he’s a pawn in the Maker’s cruel game, he remains blissfully unaware that he’s also the star of the feeble new PSP brawler Unbound Saga. You'd be better off remaining unfamiliar with this thoroughly dull game, too.    Unbound Saga doesn't try very hard to convince you it takes place in the pages of a comic book.   In Unbound Saga, it's your interminable task to guide the lumbering Rick through 10 stages of boring, mindless side-scrolling beat-'em-up combat as he journeys to give the Maker a piece of his mind. Eventually, Rick is joined by former professional damsel-in-distress Lori Machete who he suspects of being tossed into his life as part of a crossover with another comic book. This core concept of self-aware comic-book heroes has potential, but Unbound Saga doesn't do anything interesting with it. The story is unfocused and features characters that appear and disappear for no apparent reason, as well as levels that end abruptly without any sense of pacing or climax. The action ostensibly takes place on the pages of a comic book, but the game doesn't try very hard to sell this concept.  There's never any expository text at the top of a panel, speech bubbles appear only alongside pop-up character portraits, and there's very little that's distinctly comic-book-like about the visuals.     As Rick, you can kick and punch your enemies into submission, as well as whack them with items you pick up, such as bottles and benches. However, Rick is so slow and his enemies so stupid that there's no enjoyment to be gleaned from any of this combat. Once Lori shows up, you can switch between the two characters at almost any time, and while she looks more agile, the action is so fundamentally weak that it isn't any more fun to play as Lori. Often, just when you think you've finished a panel and are ready to move one merciful step closer to completion, the Maker's hand will pop into the frame and quickly sketch a new group of mindless thugs for you to clobber. So, by the time you reach the end of this excruciating journey, you'll be longing to clobber the Maker yourself for putting you through this tedium. Unfortunately, the final confrontation is as anticlimactic and unsatisfying as everything else about Unbound Saga.    Along the way, you'll be confronted by punks, werewolves, hobos, and commandos, but there's no variety whatsoever to the way your enemies fight despite the differences in their outward appearance. Lori actually refers to the constant stream of goons and thugs as the Mindless Ones, and they sure do live up to their name. Even the occasional boss is only differentiated from the other fist fodder by an energy bar at the top of the screen. Fighting is a drag, with no sense of style to the combat. In addition to being simple and repetitive, the brawling lacks any sense of impact. Despite the visual representation of such big comic-book sound effects as WHAM, BLAM, and SMACK every time you hit an enemy, there's nothing hard-hitting or satisfying about the combat. And the absurd way that your foes collapse into a twisted heap of ragdoll limbs that can then be kicked around the stage as if they weighed nothing at all contributes to the sense that nothing about this game is quite right. As you progress, you earn skill points that let you unlock new combos and abilities for Rick and Lori, but the addition of a few new moves to your repertoire isn't nearly enough to make this clunky combat compelling. Unbound Saga tries to give you an incentive to play through the campaign multiple times by letting you carry over moves you've unlocked from one game to the next, but it's hard to imagine you feeling compelled to finish the game even once.   The ever-popular comic-book onomatopoeia THWAD makes an appearance.   The visuals in Unbound Saga are ordinary and inconsistent. Some of the background environments are interesting, especially those in the dingy, run-down city of Toxopolis, but the angular character models and objects in the foreground lack the detail to match and look out of place as a result. The cutscenes are the game's high point and feature gorgeous comic-book artwork. The voice actors do a fine job, but otherwise, the sound is disappointing. The harsh, grating music might suit the ruined urban landscape of Toxopolis, but it repeats too often, and the sounds of combat are too subdued to match the comic-book onomatopoeias on the screen.    No matter what you're looking for, there's a game that does it much better than Unbound Saga. The 1995 Genesis game Comix Zone made compelling use of its setting in a comic book while such hard-hitting classics as Final Fight and Streets of Rage 2 had enemies that attacked with variety and personality. As a beat-'em-up, Unbound Saga isn't in the same league. With these games and more like them readily available for download, there's no reason for anyone to waste time with this boring brawler.  
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729,Unbound Saga ,4, Unbound Saga is one brutally boring brawler.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/3/4/2221834-usaga_box.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unbound-saga-review/1900-6285045/,neg,"
  Rick Ajax is a comic-book tough guy who is constantly forced to fight for the entertainment of readers at the whim of his creator, the Maker. He's pretty sick and tired of it, and if you play Unbound Saga, you'll understand why. Originally released on the PSP last year, this shallow and tiresome fighting game has now made its way onto Xbox Live, giving you a great opportunity to ignore it all over again.      In Unbound Saga, you have the interminable task of guiding the lumbering Rick through 10 stages of boring, mindless, side-scrolling beat-'em-up combat as he journeys to give the Maker a piece of his mind and break free of his pencil-and-ink chains. Eventually, Rick is joined by former professional damsel-in-distress Lori Machete whom he suspects of being tossed into his life as part of a crossover with another comic book. This core concept of self-aware comic-book heroes has potential, but Unbound Saga doesn't do anything interesting with it. The story is unfocused and features characters that appear and disappear for no apparent reason, as well as levels that end abruptly without any sense of pacing or climax. The action ostensibly takes place on the pages of a comic book; you progress from one panel to the next and, when the camera pulls way out, you can see the edges of surrounding panels. But the visuals only make a halfhearted attempt to sell this concept; there's never any expository text at the top of a panel, and speech bubbles appear only alongside pop-up character portraits.    As Rick, you can kick and punch your enemies into submission, as well as whack them with items you pick up, such as bottles and benches. However, Rick is so slow and his enemies so stupid that there's no enjoyment to be gleaned from any of this combat. Once Lori shows up, you can switch between the two characters at any time. She's faster and more agile than Rick, but the action is so fundamentally weak that it isn't much more enjoyable to play as Lori. Often, just when you think you've finished a panel and are ready to move one merciful step closer to completion, the Maker's hand will pop into the frame and quickly sketch a new group of mindless thugs for you to clobber. So, by the time you reach the end of this excruciating journey, you'll be longing to clobber the Maker yourself for putting you through this tedium. Unfortunately, the final confrontation is as anticlimactic and unsatisfying as everything else about Unbound Saga. Along the way, you'll be confronted by punks, werewolves, hobos, and commandos, but despite the differences in their outward appearances, there's no real variety to the way your enemies fight. Lori actually refers to the constant stream of goons and thugs as the ""Mindless Ones,"" and they sure do live up to their name. Even bosses are only differentiated from the other fist fodder by an energy bar at the bottom of the screen.    Fighting is a drag; it looks clumsy and feels clunky. And in addition to being simple and repetitive, the brawling lacks any sense of impact. Despite the visual representation of such big comic-book sound effects as WHAM, BLAM, and SMACK every time you hit an enemy, nothing about your attacks feels hard hitting or satisfying. As you progress, you earn skill points that let you unlock new combos and abilities for Rick and Lori, but the addition of a few new moves to your repertoire isn't nearly enough to make this clunky combat compelling. Unbound Saga tries to give you an incentive to play through the campaign multiple times by letting you carry over moves you've unlocked from one game to the next, but it's hard to imagine feeling compelled to finish the game even once.     The visuals in Unbound Saga are ordinary and inconsistent. Some of the background environments are interesting, especially those in the dingy, run-down city of Toxopolis, but the character models and objects in the foreground lack the detail to match and look out of place as a result. The cutscenes are the game's high point and feature gorgeous comic-book artwork. The voice actors do a fine job, but otherwise, the sound is disappointing. The harsh, grating music might suit the ruined urban landscape of Toxopolis, but it repeats too often, and the sounds of combat lack the necessary oomph to match the comic-book onomatopoeias onscreen.   Great, more mindless clones to fight. Gee, thanks, Maker!   This release of Unbound Saga adds local and online multiplayer, but while sharing the experience with a friend makes the drudgery a bit more tolerable, it doesn't make it fun. No matter what you're looking for, there's a game available on XBLA that does it much better than Unbound Saga. Comic Jumper makes much smarter, funnier use of a comic-book setting, and such hard-hitting classics as Final Fight and Streets of Rage 2 have satisfying combat and enemies that attack with variety and personality. Unbound Saga isn't in the same league. With these much better games and more like them readily available for download, there's no reason for anyone to waste time with this boring brawler.   
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730,G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra ,4, This action game teaches a valuable lesson: Avoid poor film tie-ins.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/4/5/2221845-gb.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gi-joe-the-rise-of-cobra-review/1900-6214695/,neg,"
  The 1980's animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero famously featured a series of good-natured public service announcements. These PSAs taught youngsters safety lessons, like not to play with electrical wires and to be careful with campfires. They did not, however, tell you not to play G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so if you need an official warning, let this be it: Don't do it! Even in the realm of licensed tie-ins, this monotonous third-person action game is particularly poor, managing not only to screw up the mechanics it rips off from other games, but also failing to get even the basics right. An awful camera, atrocious vehicle sequences, and dreadful storytelling are just a few of the inhumanities you'll face on this mission to spoil the latest scheme from the terrorist group Cobra. Local co-op play eases the tedium and frustrations, but even the closest of friends can't rescue you from this snake's venomous fangs. So now you know--and knowing is half the battle.         G.I. Joe borrows liberally from Contra and Gears of War. You and another Joe (controlled either by another player or the AI) run through a series of 3D environments, blasting everything in sight to earn points and occasionally taking cover and popping out to fire at the more resilient nasties. Bringing enemies down consists mostly of holding down a trigger to shoot and hitting a button to tumble or hide behind conspicuously placed barriers. There should have been fun here. With more than a dozen different characters to unlock and play, G.I. Joe could have delivered action enthusiasts some fast-paced gunplay, or amused franchise fans with a fun and entertaining story. Instead, you get ugly cutscenes, bad dialogue, and deadpan voice acting that expresses all the excitement of a long yawn. And the gameplay itself is not only sloppy and boring, but it fails to get a number of essentials right.     G.I. Joe's fixed camera is the first example of a simple ingredient gone sour. You get absolutely no camera control. As you traverse the environments, approach downward slopes, and turn corners, the camera will swoop around to give you what is apparently intended to be a proper view of the proceedings. But it leads to disaster. You'll be shot at from offscreen enemies, or have to run toward the camera, unable to see where you are going. When the camera view suddenly flips while you are moving, the controls often won't adjust properly, so your Joe may go running off in some direction other than the one you intended. Plenty of games with fixed or semifixed cameras (think Devil May Cry) have managed these camera shifts properly; there's no excuse for the issues here. Things become even more disastrous when you jump into any of the game's slippery vehicles. You always push the stick forward to move the vehicle forward, but your view of the action may be from the side, from slightly above, or even from in front. And the camera will move about as you drive, forcing you to constantly rethink which direction you need to push the stick in to make the tank move in the direction you want it to go.    Yo Joe!   Another standard component done poorly: the targeting system. The Rise of Cobra selects a target for you automatically. You can switch targets using the right stick, but if you take cover and select any enemy other than the default target, the game will automatically switch your target back to the default if you don't fire for a few seconds. Why? Who knows. The fact that you can fire at certain power-ups to reap their benefits only complicates matters. The game doesn't distinguish among foes that can hurt you, buildings that cannot, and these score-enhancing cubes. Thus, you'll be surrounded by Cobra grunts but firing at some offscreen power-up because the game can't prioritize a dude with a gun over a harmless cube hovering in the air. When an enemy does fall, the targeting may not lock on to nearby foes because they are behind you--which happens often, given the rotten camera. If you play on the middle or upper difficulty level, you may die once or twice, almost always because of the awful camera or the awful targeting.      The bits stolen from--er, inspired by--Gears of War don't fare much better because they don't feel right in this context. For example, a single button sticks you behind cover, but it also makes you tumble. Given that the action is generally quick and the camera view is constantly changing, the one-button-does-all approach might cause you to take cover when you want to roll and roll when you want to take cover. Or you'll take cover on the opposite side of an obstacle, thereby turning your back to the enemy and proving that cover systems like this only work when the player is always viewing his or her character from behind. These oddities make battles feel loose and messy, though the game still manages to scatter in a few moments of fun anyway. When you get room to move about and don't need to worry about cover all that much, the simple action isn't notable, but it's decent in small doses. The action kicks up a notch for boss fights, but the rampant invisible walls and predictable mechanics knock it back down a few pegs.    In addition to a basic melee attack and a basic ranged attack, each character can perform a special attack or skill, and some of these are amusing to unleash. Unfortunately, some of these abilities are also imbalanced. Ripcord's turret-laying ability, for example, will make mincemeat of standard enemies and minibosses. And speaking of imbalances, if you are playing with AI teammates, you'll want to take Gung-Ho along. The friendly AI is invincible but does very little damage, no matter whom you take along. However, Gung-Ho's missiles will knock enemies down, which is a lot more helpful than an AI-controlled Joe that just soaks up damage. Things pick up a bit when you replace the AI with another player. Your AI teammate doesn't really take cover in competent ways or try to avoid fire, but it doesn't matter because he can't die anyway. At least with another player, you can coordinate attacks and try to steal power-ups from each other in hopes of getting the higher score. You'll want to stick close together, though, because the camera may get hung up if you veer too far apart.    You'll fight in a number of boring environments. Here's a desert.   The most enjoyable moments Rise of the Cobra offers are those that involve the accelerator suit. Every so often, you can temporarily activate this parka of power, which makes you invincible and lets you move about with blazing speed and do lots of damage. More single-button double duty may cause you to activate the suit by accident (the same button opens doors and activates computer terminals). But assuming you mean to use the suit, you'll probably get a bit of glee from the results, if not from the great power you wield, then from the tacky, awesome music that you trigger. That vigorous short theme is the one aspect of the game that gets the G.I Joe vibe right; it's too bad that the rest of the sound design doesn't follow suit. The soundtrack is fine; the sound effects, however, range from mediocre to outright terrible. The tinny din of the weapons is enough to make you reach for something spongy to shove in your ears, and other sound effects don't sound right at all. For example, when you break open crates, the flying debris sounds more like the whirring of a computer in a bad 1960's sci-fi movie than ricocheting rubbish.     G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is full of things that make you go ""hmm."" Why do midlevel checkpoints update your score but not save your game, forcing you to restart from the beginning if both characters die? If you're going to steal from Gears of War, why steal the slow-walking, earpiece-cradling mission updates? The game isn't all bad; there are a few moments of fun to be had with the simple combat system. But G.I. Joe doesn't do much beyond the fundamentals, and sadly, it gets very few of them right.    


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731,G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra ,4, This action game teaches a valuable lesson: Avoid poor film tie-ins.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/4/5/2221845-gb.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gi-joe-the-rise-of-cobra-review/1900-6214746/,neg,"
  The 1980's animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero famously featured a series of good-natured public service announcements. These PSAs taught youngsters safety lessons, like not to play with electrical wires and to be careful with campfires. They did not, however, tell you not to play G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so if you need an official warning, let this be it: Don't do it! Even in the realm of licensed tie-ins, this monotonous third-person action game is particularly poor, managing not only to screw up the mechanics it rips off from other games, but also failing to get even the basics right. An awful camera, atrocious vehicle sequences, and dreadful storytelling are just a few of the inhumanities you'll face on this mission to spoil the latest scheme from the terrorist group Cobra. Local co-op play eases the tedium and frustrations, but even the closest of friends can't rescue you from this snake's venomous fangs. So now you know--and knowing is half the battle.         G.I. Joe borrows liberally from Contra and Gears of War. You and another Joe (controlled either by another player or the AI) run through a series of 3D environments, blasting everything in sight to earn points and occasionally taking cover and popping out to fire at the more resilient nasties. Bringing enemies down consists mostly of holding down a trigger to shoot and hitting a button to tumble or hide behind conspicuously placed barriers. There should have been fun here. With more than a dozen different characters to unlock and play, G.I. Joe could have delivered action enthusiasts some fast-paced gunplay, or amused franchise fans with a fun and entertaining story. Instead, you get ugly cutscenes, bad dialogue, and deadpan voice acting that expresses all the excitement of a long yawn. And the gameplay itself is not only sloppy and boring, but it fails to get a number of essentials right.     G.I. Joe's fixed camera is the first example of a simple ingredient gone sour. You get absolutely no camera control. As you traverse the environments, approach downward slopes, and turn corners, the camera will swoop around to give you what is apparently intended to be a proper view of the proceedings. But it leads to disaster. You'll be shot at from offscreen enemies, or have to run toward the camera, unable to see where you are going. When the camera view suddenly flips while you are moving, the controls often won't adjust properly, so your Joe may go running off in some direction other than the one you intended. Plenty of games with fixed or semifixed cameras (think Devil May Cry) have managed these camera shifts properly; there's no excuse for the issues here. Things become even more disastrous when you jump into any of the game's slippery vehicles. You always push the stick forward to move the vehicle forward, but your view of the action may be from the side, from slightly above, or even from in front. And the camera will move about as you drive, forcing you to constantly rethink which direction you need to push the stick in to make the tank move in the direction you want it to go.    Cobra operative always have a witty quip to share.   Another standard component done poorly: the targeting system. The Rise of Cobra selects a target for you automatically. You can switch targets using the right stick, but if you take cover and select any enemy other than the default target, the game will automatically switch your target back to the default if you don't fire for a few seconds. Why? Who knows. The fact that you can fire at certain power-ups to reap their benefits only complicates matters. The game doesn't distinguish among foes that can hurt you, buildings that cannot, and these score-enhancing cubes. Thus, you'll be surrounded by Cobra grunts but firing at some offscreen power-up because the game can't prioritize a dude with a gun over a harmless cube hovering in the air. When an enemy does fall, the targeting may not lock on to nearby foes because they are behind you--which happens often, given the rotten camera. If you play on the middle or upper difficulty level, you may die once or twice, almost always because of the awful camera or the awful targeting.      The bits stolen from--er, inspired by--Gears of War don't fare much better because they don't feel right in this context. For example, a single button sticks you behind cover, but it also makes you tumble. Given that the action is generally quick and the camera view is constantly changing, the one-button-does-all approach might cause you to take cover when you want to roll and roll when you want to take cover. Or you'll take cover on the opposite side of an obstacle, thereby turning your back to the enemy and proving that cover systems like this only work when the player is always viewing his or her character from behind. These oddities make battles feel loose and messy, though the game still manages to scatter in a few moments of fun anyway. When you get room to move about and don't need to worry about cover all that much, the simple action isn't notable, but it's decent in small doses. The action kicks up a notch for boss fights, but the rampant invisible walls and predictable mechanics knock it back down a few pegs.    In addition to a basic melee attack and a basic ranged attack, each character can perform a special attack or skill, and some of these are amusing to unleash. Unfortunately, some of these abilities are also imbalanced. Ripcord's turret-laying ability, for example, will make mincemeat of standard enemies and minibosses. And speaking of imbalances, if you are playing with AI teammates, you'll want to take Gung-Ho along. The friendly AI is invincible but does very little damage, no matter whom you take along. However, Gung-Ho's missiles will knock enemies down, which is a lot more helpful than an AI-controlled Joe that just soaks up damage. Things pick up a bit when you replace the AI with another player. Your AI teammate doesn't really take cover in competent ways or try to avoid fire, but it doesn't matter because he can't die anyway. At least with another player, you can coordinate attacks and try to steal power-ups from each other in hopes of getting the higher score. You'll want to stick close together, though, because the camera may get hung up if you veer too far apart.    Actually, so do the Joes.   The most enjoyable moments Rise of the Cobra offers are those that involve the accelerator suit. Every so often, you can temporarily activate this parka of power, which makes you invincible and lets you move about with blazing speed and do lots of damage. More single-button double duty may cause you to activate the suit by accident (the same button opens doors and activates computer terminals). But assuming you mean to use the suit, you'll probably get a bit of glee from the results, if not from the great power you wield, then from the tacky, awesome music that you trigger. That vigorous short theme is the one aspect of the game that gets the G.I Joe vibe right; it's too bad that the rest of the sound design doesn't follow suit. The soundtrack is fine; the sound effects, however, range from mediocre to outright terrible. The tinny din of the weapons is enough to make you reach for something spongy to shove in your ears, and other sound effects don't sound right at all. For example, when you break open crates, the flying debris sounds more like the whirring of a computer in a bad 1960's sci-fi movie than ricocheting rubbish.     G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is full of things that make you go ""hmm."" Why do midlevel checkpoints update your score but not save your game, forcing you to restart from the beginning if both characters die? If you're going to steal from Gears of War, why steal the slow-walking, earpiece-cradling mission updates? The game isn't all bad; there are a few moments of fun to be had with the simple combat system. But G.I. Joe doesn't do much beyond the fundamentals, and sadly, it gets very few of them right.    


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732,G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra ,4, This action game teaches a valuable lesson: Avoid poor film tie-ins.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/4/5/2221845-gb.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gi-joe-the-rise-of-cobra-review/1900-6214806/,neg,"
  The 1980's animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero famously featured a series of good-natured public service announcements. These PSAs taught youngsters safety lessons, like not to play with electrical wires and to be careful with campfires. They did not, however, tell you not to play G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so if you need an official warning, let this be it: Don't do it! Even in the realm of licensed tie-ins, this monotonous third-person action game is particularly poor, managing not only to screw up the mechanics it rips off from other games, but also failing to get even the basics right. An awful camera, atrocious vehicle sequences, and dreadful storytelling are just a few of the inhumanities you'll face on this mission to spoil the latest scheme from the terrorist group Cobra. Local co-op play eases the tedium and frustrations, but even the closest of friends can't rescue you from this snake's venomous fangs. So now you know--and knowing is half the battle.       G.I. Joe borrows liberally from Contra and Gears of War. You and another Joe (controlled either by another player or the AI) run through a series of 3D environments, blasting everything in sight to earn points and occasionally taking cover and popping out to fire at the more resilient nasties. Bringing enemies down consists mostly of holding down a button to shoot and hitting another one to tumble or hide behind conspicuously placed barriers. There should have been fun here. With more than a dozen different characters to unlock and play, G.I. Joe could have delivered action enthusiasts some fast-paced gunplay, or amused franchise fans with a fun and entertaining story. Instead, you get ugly cutscenes, bad dialogue, and deadpan voice acting that expresses all the excitement of a long yawn. And the gameplay itself is not only sloppy and boring, but it fails to get a number of essentials right.     G.I. Joe's fixed camera is the first example of a simple ingredient gone sour. You get absolutely no camera control. As you traverse the environments, approach downward slopes, and turn corners, the camera will swoop around to give you what is apparently intended to be a proper view of the proceedings. But it leads to disaster. You'll be shot at from offscreen enemies, or have to run toward the camera, unable to see where you are going. When the camera view suddenly flips while you are moving, the controls often won't adjust properly, so your Joe may go running off in some direction other than the one you intended. Plenty of games with fixed or semifixed cameras have managed these camera shifts properly; there's no excuse for the issues here. Things become even more disastrous when you jump into any of the game's slippery vehicles. You always push an analog stick forward to move the vehicle forward, but your view of the action may be from the side, from slightly above, or even from in front. And the camera will move about as you drive, forcing you to constantly rethink which direction you need to push the stick in to make the tank move in the direction you want it to go.    Take that, evil turret!   Another standard component done poorly: the targeting system. The Rise of Cobra selects a target for you automatically. If you are using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk (the Classic Controller is also supported; motion controls are not), you can switch targets using the d-pad, but this is clumsy and uncomfortable. To make matters worse, if you take cover and select any enemy other than the default target, the game will automatically switch your target back to the default if you don't fire for a few seconds. Why? Who knows. The fact that you can fire at certain power-ups to reap their benefits only complicates matters. The game doesn't distinguish among foes that can hurt you, buildings that cannot, and these score-enhancing cubes. Thus, you'll be surrounded by Cobra grunts but firing at some offscreen power-up because the game can't prioritize a dude with a gun over a harmless cube hovering in the air. When an enemy does fall, the targeting may not lock on to nearby foes because they are behind you--which happens often, given the rotten camera. If you play on the middle or upper difficulty level, you may die once or twice, almost always because of the awful camera or the awful targeting.      The bits stolen from--er, inspired by--Gears of War don't fare much better because they don't feel right in this context. For example, a single button sticks you behind cover, but it also makes you tumble. Given that the action is generally quick and the camera view is constantly changing, the one-button-does-all approach might cause you to take cover when you want to roll and roll when you want to take cover. Or you'll take cover on the opposite side of an obstacle, thereby turning your back to the enemy and proving that cover systems like this only work when the player is always viewing his or her character from behind. These oddities make battles feel loose and messy, though the game still manages to scatter in a few moments of fun anyway. When you get room to move about and don't need to worry about cover all that much, the simple action isn't notable, but it's decent in small doses. The action kicks up a notch for boss fights, but the rampant invisible walls and predictable mechanics knock it back down a few pegs.    In addition to a basic melee attack and a basic ranged attack, each character can perform a special attack or skill, and some of these are amusing to unleash. Unfortunately, some of these abilities are also imbalanced. Ripcord's turret-laying ability, for example, will make mincemeat of standard enemies and minibosses. And speaking of imbalances, if you are playing with AI teammates, you'll want to take Gung-Ho along. The friendly AI is invincible but does very little damage, no matter whom you take along. However, Gung-Ho's missiles will knock enemies down, which is a lot more helpful than an AI-controlled Joe that just soaks up damage. Things pick up a bit when you replace the AI with another player. Your AI teammate doesn't really take cover in competent ways or try to avoid fire, but it doesn't matter because he can't die anyway. At least with another player, you can coordinate attacks and try to steal power-ups from each other in hopes of getting the higher score. You'll want to stick close together, though, because the camera may get hung up if you veer too far apart.    Trying to ride a unicycle for the first time is more comfortable than controlling G.I. Joe's bad vehicles.   The most enjoyable moments Rise of the Cobra offers are those that involve the accelerator suit. Every so often, you can temporarily activate this parka of power, which makes you invincible and lets you move about with blazing speed and do lots of damage. You'll probably get a bit of glee from the results, if not from the great power you wield, then from the tacky, awesome music that you trigger. That vigorous short theme is the one aspect of the game that gets the G.I Joe vibe right; it's too bad that the rest of the sound design doesn't follow suit. The soundtrack is fine; the sound effects, however, range from mediocre to outright terrible. The tinny din of the weapons is enough to make you reach for something spongy to shove in your ears, and other sound effects don't sound right at all. For example, when you break open crates, the flying debris sounds more like the whirring of a computer in a bad 1960's sci-fi movie than ricocheting rubbish.     G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is full of things that make you go ""hmm."" Why do midlevel checkpoints update your score but not save your game, forcing you to restart from the beginning if both characters die? If you're going to steal from Gears of War, why steal the slow-walking, earpiece-cradling mission updates? The game isn't all bad; there are a few moments of fun to be had with the simple combat system. But G.I. Joe doesn't do much beyond the fundamentals, and sadly, it gets very few of them right.    
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733,Zombie Infection ,4," On a Blackberry Storm2, Zombie Infection is just too much game for the struggling system to handle.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,BB,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/zombie-infection-review/1900-6268193/,neg,"
  When a game is made for mobile platforms, it often gets ported onto a number of different systems, and sometimes there's no telling how it will play on your handset. For instance, Zombie Infection is a deep, interesting game with nice graphics and a unique story. However, played on a Blackberry Storm2, it devolves into an unplayable mess.   You control three survivors as they struggle to uncover the truth about a pandemic.   The problem stems from having too many zombies on the screen at once. In some of the game's more-populated levels, like a television studio, the action slows to a crawl, and the frame rate becomes so choppy that the game will barely respond to your input.    It's especially frustrating because the game seems like a lot of fun otherwise. Zombie Infection tells a clever story about three survivors who work for a television show that documents current events. Through a complex series of missions, you take control of these characters, one of whom forgoes firearms to deal death with a katana and throwing knives instead. You can even save up your points from killing zombies and spend them on more weapons, ammo, or health at save stations around the city.    In addition to solving puzzles by locating and combining items, you'll blast away as part of the game's clever timing-based fighting system. When you point your gun at a zombie, a targeting reticle will dance over the monster. You have to press the action button right when the reticle is hanging over your enemy's head for a one-shot kill. Ammo is limited and expensive to buy, so you have to make every shot count.   The game's frame rate drops significantly whenever there are more than a few zombies onscreen.   Zombie Infection has some interesting ideas, but the final execution on a Storm2 is painful to play. A few great boss battles against a giant spider and a lizard monster are not enough to make up for the fact that this game barely runs at all, let alone at an enjoyable pace.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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734,Making History II: The War of the World ,4," This turn-based strategy game brings baffling geopolitics, disappointing combat, and a multitude of bugs and crashes to the World War II setting.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/1/5/2223015-mhii_box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/making-history-ii-the-war-of-the-world-review/1900-6268046/,neg,"
  There is a time and a place for fanciful alternative histories, but not in a detailed game that limits its scope to one decade of human history, and not when they emerge seemingly at random. Making History II: The War of the World, a turn-based strategy game, tries to simulate the political, economic, and military challenges of the Second World War but instead dumps you into a wacky grand-strategy sandbox where everything seems to go horribly wrong. While its detailed world and involved economics are tempting, they cannot redeem its ludicrous international politics, its dull and unsatisfying combat, or the crashes that permeate the MHII experience.    In real life only two T-100 tanks were ever built, but don't let that stop you from building hundreds of the things and overrunning Berlin.   Grandiose strategy games require a lot of commitment, so be forewarned that Making History II is so bug-ridden you may never be able to complete it. First off, it crashes far too frequently, especially once you get a year or two into the war. It can crash when you order airplanes to attack naval units, when you move carrier task forces out of their ports, when you fill the countryside with collective farms, or just about anytime, regardless of your actions. Even when it's not crashing, a number of strange bugs remain to vex you. One particularly baffling bug pauses the date and resource stockpiles forever. Cut off from the space-time continuum, yet still able to take turns, your armies will mysteriously vanish upon sacking a foreign territory, presumably because they were eaten by the Langoliers. In addition to the bugs, MHII always feels laggy and unresponsive. For example, one moment you might be scrolling through a list of techs to research, and the next you're staring at census information for Qatar, with no earthly clue how you wound up there.     One of the most disappointing divergences between our world and Making History II is the simplistic and unsatisfying combat in this so-called wargame. While in real life you have to consider factors like combined arms, air superiority, weather, and terrain, in MHII these concerns are basically irrelevant. In fact, all you need to win a battle is for your units' combined attack values to be greater than the defenders' combined defense. As a result, fielding a homogeneous horde of super-heavy tanks is preferable to diversifying your forces. Not even the Alps can stop your tank stack of doom, because geography doesn't noticeably affect combat (though it does affect movement speed). Likewise, weather is a nonissue, so General Winter never takes the field. Furthermore, the AI never attempts to contest you for control of the skies, and since your tanks don't require any assistance, there's no compelling reason to use air power, especially since moving aircraft and aircraft carriers around seems to crash the game.     Most of Making History II's gameplay is spent staring at the city management window while waiting for MHII to register that you've hit the end-turn button.   Likewise, the economic side of Making History II, while compelling, is only tenuously tied to the realities of the era. Strangely, coal, which is needed for every unit and building in the game, is more important than oil or metal, a situation more appropriate for the 1840s than the 1940s. For example, in real life the Germans suffered from fuel shortages, but in MHII the Nazis are self-sufficient in oil but always lack coal. The solution to the coal shortage is to place a huge order on the world market during the first turn. You'll wind up deeply in debt, but you can pay that off while other countries beg for coal.    Balancing the needs of industry, research, and the military can be tricky, and you constantly face dilemmas such as whether to focus on improving a city's industrial production or increasing its research output. Since maximizing industrial output, improving the countryside, and investing in science all deplete your finite supply of manpower and resources, you have to make your plans carefully. As a result, it can be immensely satisfying to gaze upon the fruits of your labors, especially when these fruits are industrial metropolises capable of pumping out super-heavy tanks every turn.       Meanwhile, the statesmen of the era have apparently been replaced by kindergartners playing a game of realpolitik, and therefore nothing resembling the international politics of the era will occur in your games. While it is true that the series is called Making History instead of Repeating History, this sandbox would be more appealing if geopolitics were at least remotely reasonable. For instance, the Germans could subsidize Italy for years with generous aid, and Mussolini still wouldn't hesitate to declare war on them for no discernible reason. It's equally likely that Stalin will take advantage of the German-Italian war by invading Brazil. Even when things start to get quasi-historical, the artificial intelligence will do something to make things crazy again. Don't be surprised if you see the Allies respond to a German invasion of Poland by embargoing the Poles and invading China.   When these titans meet, the whole world will hold its breath!   The insane politics are surprising in light of the fine attention to historical detail elsewhere in the game. For example, you encounter detailed demographic information for every region, so, thanks to Making History II, you might learn which regions of Bolivia are majority Quechua, Aymara, or mestizo, but unfortunately this information, however illuminating, has no meaningful effect on the gameplay. It could theoretically increase the odds of a provincial uprising, but you never actually see partisans appear, making you wonder what the point is in accurately depicting the territories of, say, the Baluch people when they never fight for a free Baluchistan?    While Making History II's visuals are tolerable, it is as unpleasant to listen to as it is to play. For example, only a handful of musical tracks are included, and these get old really fast, a serious flaw for a game that requires countless hours of dedication. In addition, the sound effects are too loud and overwhelming, bringing to mind the obnoxious whine of a power saw or the whirring hiss of some sort of mechanical cat. On the plus side, the map accurately depicts the world's geography, and many nations have unique-looking units. For instance, German super-heavy tanks look like the Maus, the Russians field T-100s, and the Americans sport T-28s. The units may not be particularly pretty, but at least they look distinct and are historically accurate enough to make you feel like you are playing a game set during WWII, if only for a few fleeting moments before the next crash to desktop.     A multitude of peoples will work together in perfect harmony under Stalin's benevolent rule.   You'll be even more put off by Making History II's awful multiplayer experience. First off, you're unlikely to find a random Internet game, so you will probably have to arrange one with friends. Once inside the game, you can look forward to each turn shooting by in under five seconds, no matter what time limit you set, as well as frequent crashes. Matches with untimed turns are equally crash-prone, making the multiplayer experience a bust.     In retrospect, the most disappointing thing about Making History II is that it seems like Muzzy Lane put a lot of effort into making all of those unique units and depicting the ethnic makeup of the world as it was 70 years ago. Unfortunately, the game is plagued by performance issues, uninspiring combat, and an insane depiction of international relations. On the bright side, numerous updates for the game have been released in the past few weeks that have improved performance and crushed numerous bugs, so Making History II might one day be a functional game. As it currently stands, however, it's not worth either your time or your money.     
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735,WarioWare: Snapped! ,4, These microgames are so brief that you spend more time wrestling with the camera than you do actually playing.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/0/8/2221308-wws_logo.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warioware-snapped-review/1900-6207295/,neg,"
  AU REVIEW--WarioWare: Snapped is one of the first DSiWare games to use the new handheld's built-in camera, and it will have you striking many strange poses to complete its various microgame challenges. But while it may be a good way to show off the DSi's unique capabilities, it's also sorely lacking in variety, resulting in a game that probably won't hold your interest past the 20 minutes it'll take to play through it the first time.    Something vaguely resembling your silhouette will appear on the DSi's top screen.   Of course, shallow has historically been an apt way to describe the WarioWare series and its weird microgames. But where previous games at least had dozens of different microgame challenges to keep you interested, Snapped brings only about 20 to the table. You'll breeze through these in no time, and with no ramping difficulty, there's no reason to go back to them again. To play Snapped, you'll have to place the DSi on a flat surface (like a table or chair) in front of you, with the top half of the handheld opened to about a 120-degree angle. The different microgames will require you to move your head, wave your hands, blow at the screen, and more, so this is definitely not a game you'll be able to play whilst on some sort of public transport.    The microgames themselves range from the cute (placing your hands in front of your face and playing peekaboo with a baby) to the gross (sticking your two fingers up a large nose), and all exhibit the same simple graphics and wacky charm of previous WarioWare games. The top DSi screen will show your silhouette, giving you an indication of where your hands and head should be for any particular game. Most of the 20 games involve just one player, but five of them require you to play alongside a partner. The microgames are grouped into sets of five, and upon completing each set, you're treated to a slide show of stills and shorts the DSi has taken of you while playing. Sadly, you can't save these candid shots, which is a pity, because some of the images caught while you're pulling faces and contorting can be really funny.    You have only a short time in which to complete the required movements, but Snapped isn't particularly tough in this regard. In fact, Snapped isn't tough at all because most of the microgames are easy to beat. What will probably trouble you more is the game's camera calibration. Snapped plays well under most bright lighting conditions, but it works poorly in low-lit rooms. It can also flake out occasionally even in bright areas, at which point it becomes necessary to reposition either the DSi or yourself so the camera can get a better reading.    The microgames don't last long. And neither does Snapped.   WarioWare: Snapped has plenty of the undeniable charm and goofiness the series is known for. But it simply doesn't last long enough for its asking price, and apart from making your friends play it for cheap laughs, there's no replayability here. You can get much better value from your 500 Nintendo points than spending them on Snapped.  
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736,Jet Force Gemini ,8.8, Nintendo 64 fans should pick up this title without delay and hope that Rareware's team of top-notch talent will continue to churn out even more games like this one for ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/2/4/6/2215246-jetforcegemini_na.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jet-force-gemini-review/1900-2544594/,pos,"
Like the Chicago Bulls of the early 1990s or the San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s, some teams just keep finding ways to win time and time again. It's no different for video-game developers, especially if the developer's name is Rareware Its latest endeavor, the 3D space adventure Jet Force Gemini, has such a wide variety of awesome gameplay that it could be broken up into four separate games - and still get strong reviews. That said, Jet Force Gemini easily joins Rareware's already impressive stable of hits, which includes GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie. At first glance, Jet Force Gemini seems like a chemical compound that incorporates the best elements from several successful franchises: Take Turok's enemies, add in Banjo-Kazooie's gameplay, include GoldenEye's sniping action, then throw in a Star Wars-like theme complete with sidekick droids and furry Ewok-like creatures known as Tribals - and mix. The game's basic goal is to search for and rescue the Tribals, who've been attacked and enslaved by alien insects. To do this, you assume the role of three main characters (unlocked eventually as the game progresses): the fraternal twins Juno and Vela, plus their canine mascot, Lupus. Once they are unlocked, you can play any of those characters' unique, moderately sized quests in whatever order you please. There's also a wealth of multiplayer modes (more on that later). Since finding Tribals is the name of the game, its multipart levels offer plenty of exploration. However, it's possible to go an entire level without finding a single one, since many levels have branching paths and optional locations to visit. You may also find multiple exits in a level that lead to optional secret levels. The game's free-flowing nature gives virtually no hints, so you must figure things out on your own (a prospect that may frustrate novices; it's easy to get ""stuck"" in a few levels). Many of the levels offer simple puzzles that you can solve to save Tribals, such as one in which you move color-coded platforms to get across a room. However, most of the fun is reserved for killing baddies. In terms of AI, enemies have basic common sense: They can run for cover, dodge, weave, and they have weak points and defenses. Some enemies use different attacks, depending on whether they've spotted you or not. Others are mindless drones who use sheer numbers to overwhelm. This AI lets you develop your own playing style in response, which is highly rewarding for a game of this nature. You might prefer to snipe from afar and use available cover (such as boxes and walls) to avoid return fire. Or you might just want to pull a Rambo and go in guns a-blazin'. Each strategy has its drawbacks (losing time vs. losing life). You can also play from a third-person perspective, which is harder but necessary for jumping. You can always revert to first-person view on the fly, which makes targeting enemies much easier. The game's control scheme actually flip-flops between two views, depending on how the game's being played. In the default third-person view, the player uses the analog joystick to move around, the C buttons to strafe, jump and crawl, and the A, B and Z buttons to select weapons and fire. In this view, it's rather difficult to shoot enemies (especially at close range), which may prove frustrating to some gamers. To help alleviate this problem, the game uses the R button to switch to a first-person view more akin to Turok's. The C buttons become movement buttons, while the joystick becomes the crosshair target. Mastering this mode becomes essential, since you must aim directly at certain weak points to kill tougher enemies and bosses. This flip-flop in control can get confusing - and the confusion is only compounded by the lack of a jump button in first-person view. Those who've played Turok-type games may prefer to play most of the game in first-person view, which is OK except for the chore of keeping the R button down throughout the entire game. Overall, the control remains responsive at all times - but the awkwardness in using two very different control styles in the same game might prove distasteful to some. What makes Jet Force Gemini work is a philosophy that is prevalent throughout Rareware's games: Make it easy to beat, but difficult (and rewarding) to complete 100 percent. Since you'll find new power-ups along the way (such as robot droids, keys, weapons and jet packs), you'll want to backtrack through the levels to explore previously unreachable areas and find secrets - this boosts the game's replay value immensely. It's in this area of the game that Jet Force Gemini really shines. One of the best secrets is a robot named Floyd; after you've found all his hidden parts and put him together, he'll becomes your sidekick. What makes Floyd so innovative is that a second player can take control of Floyd's targeting scope and turn the one-player game into a two-player co-op mode. Plus, Floyd acts as a special ""key"" to areas that lead to special mini-missions (yet another new type of game), in which the robot must fly through courses within a certain time limit. Plus, there's always the reward for rescuing every single Tribal (and yes, you Ewok-clone haters will have the ability to kill every single one, as well). You can also find secrets to unlock hidden characters and modes for the multiplayer games. Plus, with tons of hidden areas in each level, where you can find weapons and weapon upgrades, there's seemingly no end to things to look out for. The four-player multiplayer mode, for the most part, follows the conventions of GoldenEye, Turok, and other similar titles. You can set weapons parameters, enable radar, and choose from a variety of levels. It's certainly fun and plays well, mainly because multiplayer games where killing is involved seem inherently fun. However, this game adds even more to the mix by offering a target-shooting game, and even a racing game (which can be unlocked by finding the corresponding secret in the adventure mode). In any case, the the variety of multiplayer modes alone makes the game worth your money. Of course, the great gameplay in the multiplayer and adventure modes looks and sounds highly impressive, no doubt due to the developers' knack for knowing the ins and outs of the Nintendo 64 hardware. Smooth animation and slick, sharp graphics reign throughout, with never any slowdown or choppiness. There isn't enough bandwidth online to catalog every example of stellar graphics (even without the expansion memory pak, it looks great), but here are a few highlights. As in Turok, enemies splatter with great gusto and die differently depending on how they're killed. The immense full-screen bosses and their massive attacks let players put their first-person targeting skills to the test. The explosions for grenades and missiles give off a radial glow that seems wholly convincing coupled with a Rumble Pak shake.  Furthermore, each of the sprawling levels has a unique theme and colorful landscapes, accentuating the feeling that you are traveling from planet to planet - not just from level to level. In addition, the music and sound effects really inject the proper mood for each level: foreboding music in dark, rainy levels, or bleeps and bloops for those high-tech missions. Rare even added many great visual touches (such as flies over an enemy's carcass), and impressive effects in night-vision levels (where everything turns shades of green) and in levels where you're swimming. Ranting and raving aside, the game is not without its minor flaws. As with almost any 3D adventure game, certain areas play havoc on the third-person camera angles. This becomes a slight problem when you are negotiating jumps - especially those that fall short, resulting in death or tedious backtracking. In isolated instances, enemies glitch up by running into boxes and sticking to them, making them easy targets. The other problems seem more a fault of system limitations than of the game itself. First, some of the backgrounds and textures look a little flat, such as in the forest stages. Second, it would've been nice in cinema scenes to have voices for the characters rather than sound effects coupled with text boxes. However, these nitpicky complaints do little to spoil Jet Force Gemini's bottom line: It's chock-full of gameplay variety. Nintendo 64 fans should pick up this title without delay and hope that Rareware's team of top-notch talent will continue to churn out even more games like this one for years to come. 
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737,Madden NFL 98 ,8.8," Although it doesn't have flashy 3D graphics, Madden 98 is still the most realistic and complete football game on the market.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/0/4/2213204-madden_nfl_98_coverart.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-98-review/1900-2548189/,pos,"
For the last few years, each new edition of the Madden franchise has stepped forward in some areas, but stepped back in others. Football fans will be happy to know that Madden NFL 98 has finally broken the trend by containing nothing but improvements across the board. The biggest improvements in Madden 98 are its gameplay and AI. EA spent more of Madden's development cycle than ever on its AI. The results are obvious: This Madden is by far the smartest of the series - and of any football game ever made. The days of running up the score with your eyes closed are now over, as the computer defense now accurately reacts to offensive plays. If you pick the correct defense, you'll be in a position to make the play (assuming your players are not outclassed). Although the offensive AI could use more work, Madden 98 best represents the chess game behind the high-paid muscle on the field. Beginners need not be scared by this realism, as Madden offers plenty of difficulty levels to ease any player into the game. Madden 98's NFL atmosphere is outstanding. Pat Summerall's signature play-by-play and Madden's blustery comments are a given, but it's the extra things that set it apart from the rest of the field. For example, each stadium is identical to its real-life counterpart, right down to the sandy remnants of baseball diamonds found during early season NFL games. Suspense is felt as the ""chain gang"" measures for a first down (Summerall: ""It's gonna be close""), sometimes followed by relief as former NFL referee Red Cashan points and proclaims ""First down!"" in his southern drawl. Like last year's game, Madden uses 2D player sprites in 3D stadium environments. Although some might scoff at Madden 98 not using polygons like its chief competitor GameDay 98, these player sprites are well animated and detailed. Each player has his real number on the back of his jersey, and his figure is given depth by shading and pseudo light sourcing. If the field turns into a mud bowl because of rain, the players suffer by having dirty, brown jerseys. These well-drawn players also move realistically during gameplay. One-handed grabs, goal-line dives, and players crumbling when hit are well dramatized on the field. And speaking of drama, Madden fans will be glad that the ambulance is back. Madden 98 presents a total package of features and options. You can create a custom schedule for a team during the season mode, and oodles of statistics will satisfy the most anal of football statisticians. ""Player of the Game"" awards are given out shortly before the game finishes, and ""Player of the Week"" accolades are chosen at the conclusion of every season week. At the end of each season, Pro Bowl players are announced, then placed into the Pro Bowl game (which follows the Super Bowl). Although it doesn't have flashy 3D graphics, Madden 98 is still the most realistic and complete football game on the market. Football fans yearning for a challenging football game should buy this outstanding title.
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738,Madden NFL 99 ,8.8," This is unquestionably the best edition ever, with significant and welcome improvements in every conceivable category.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/8/9/7/2215897-gb.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-99-review/1900-2542413/,pos,"
Ever since Electronic Arts' Madden NFL games were ported to the PC in 1996, thousands of football fans wait almost as eagerly for the arrival of the newest edition of the megahit series as they do for the start of the football season. But even as gamers line up at software outlets to buy the newest version, they're wondering two things: how much better it is than the previous installment, and whether or not it's got the stuff to become the undisputed champ of PC football sims. In the case of Madden NFL 99, the answer to the first question is simple: This is unquestionably the best edition ever, with significant and welcome improvements in every conceivable category. Gamers with good 3D cards (Direct3D and Glide versions are both available) and plenty of computing muscle (EA Sports recommends a 300MHz Pentium) will be treated to graphics and animations that are head and shoulders above anything else I've seen in a PC football sim. The level of detail here is mind-boggling - you can see the ripples in thigh pads, steam emerging from players' helmets as they breathe in cold weather, torsos expanding as winded players gulp for air, dead-on-the-money renderings of every NFL stadium, and uniforms that are picture-perfect both in color (something some games seem to have a problem with) and textures. Running at 1024x768 on a high-end system, Madden NFL 99 offers the sort of visuals that make it worth loading up just to show your friends how good a sports game can look - especially if you check out the incredibly detailed animations in the instant replay mode. (Note: some players have reported major slowdowns over the course of a game when playing on grass fields, and EA has apparently acknowledged the problem and said it would be fixed with a patch - but I never saw any major degradation in performance.) The motion-captured animations are stunningly smooth, and while some fans might say that the players don't move with enough speed, the truth is that most of us wouldn't be able to control a video-game player that's hauling butt as fast as a real-life NFL running back or receiver. Tackle and running animations when playing in the game's traditional mode are slightly lackluster compared with the exaggerated hits and slippery jitterbug moves found in the arcade mode, but the reason for that is probably because the arcade game features (or should I say is handicapped by?) a mere handful of offensive and defensive plays to choose from, and is therefore much less AI-intensive for the computer-controlled players.  Another area where Madden NFL 99 shows vast improvement is in its control options. I was disappointed that Madden NFL '98 featured support for only four buttons, but thankfully EA Sports took note and vastly increased the number of moves at your fingertips in the '99 edition. In addition to supporting ten-button controllers like the Gravis Gamepad Pro and Microsoft's SideWinder Gamepad, there's also a one-button mode that automatically selects receivers, makes tackles, and chooses special moves like jukes, spins, and hurdles on offense and swim moves and power moves on defense. Mouse control works pretty much the same way, except you guide players by moving the mouse and click a mouse button to perform an action. But EA Sports really dropped the ball in configuration for the SideWinder gamepad by not taking time to alter the layout of buttons for play calling and selecting receivers; the ""X"" button rather than the ""A"" is the Number 1 button, and while you can switch which actions a button performs (snap the ball, juke, etc.), there's absolutely no way to alter which buttons select specific plays and receivers. The result is an unnecessarily confusing setup that serves only to prove that developers are getting more and more lackadaisical about tweaking PC versions of cross-platform games.  But how does Madden perform once it gets out on the field? Well, one thing's for sure: You won't be waltzing your way to one Super Bowl ring after another unless you play on the lowest difficulty setting. This is far and away the most challenging computer opponent ever in a Madden game for the PC, leading some gamers to think their sudden inability to score as easily or as regularly as in past titles is because the computer is cheating - understandable, given how quickly defensive backs can converge on receivers while the ball's in the air and how quickly holes close at the line of scrimmage. But the more time I spend with Madden NFL 99 (and I've already invested quite a bit), the more I become convinced that it's simply a lot more realistic than previous versions. Racking up 100 yards rushing or 300 yards passing is a real achievement in the NFL, and it's just as much a prize in Madden NFL 99. I'll be the first to admit that Madden '99 can be frustrating at first, but once you start playing with some guile by making appropriate substitutions and working all areas of the field, you'll start seeing enough success that frustration turns to challenge.  And there are some quirks out on the gridiron that will have even experienced players scratching their helmets. Interception rates seem to be overly high; when I controlled the Vikings against Green Bay in the NFC Championship, for instance, I threw six in the first half alone. While it's admirable that Madden '99 has a slew of camera angles, it's silly that EA Sports got rid of the standard view mode - one that I've always said was one of the best in a football game and crucial to successful execution of passing plays - that was zoomed out just enough so you could see the receivers before the snap of the ball. Maybe they did it so you wouldn't see computer-controlled defenders getting away with pass interference and illegal contact beyond five yards - offenses you'll often get flagged for if you breathe too hard on the receiver. Then there's what I call the ""ball magnet"" that envelops players at skill positions: Watch a tricky catch or interception on instant replay, and you can actually see the ball stop and then zoom on a straight line to the player. And while weather effects like rain and snow are achingly beautiful to behold, they don't seem to have any effect on footing - I've never seen anyone slide and fall because of mud or ice. Still, Madden NFL 99 is a big leap forward for the franchise - but is it enough to catapult it to the top of the genre? Personally, I've always rated it the best all-around football game for the PC; I loved the simulation and strategy of Sierra's FPS:FB Pro series, but out on the field it was a sloppy mess for gamers like me who want to control the action as well as call the shots from the front office. For fans who care more about coaching and general manager duties than arcade-style antics on the field, FPS: FB Pro has always been the game of choice - which undoubtedly explains the addition of a franchise mode in Madden NFL 99, as well as a play editor and a fantasy draft option. Unfortunately, we might have to wait for the next edition before these modes reach the level of excellence of the on-field play. Take the franchise mode, for example. Only one team can be controlled by a human during franchise play, which eliminates any chance of proving your managerial and coaching mettle in a head-to-head battle with friends. Even against the computer, though, you're not able to really prove your stuff. At the start of the season there are absolutely zero injuries - handy for players who want to take the low road to success, but highly unrealistic when you consider the losses teams incur during training camp and preseason. When a season ends, you see some players retire before you're taken to a screen to re-sign free agents - but you have to negotiate and sign contracts with these veterans without having any idea what other free agents or hot rookie prospects will be available to take their place! Given the fact that a lot of big-name free agents don't re-sign with their team until well into training camp (and sometimes afterwards), forcing you to make those important big-money decisions as soon as the regular season ends (and before the draft) is out-and-out ridiculous. The entire interface for contract negotiations and trades is the same as in the console versions, and it's difficult to use efficiently because it doesn't take advantage of standard conventions like sizable windows or the ability to print out the information - you're constantly switching back and forth to see who's available for the roster spots you need filled. And while it's a given that a game like this will have an option to create players, I couldn't find an option anywhere to edit existing players' stats (or name, number, or anything else). That's a drag, because it means the only way to re-create how good a player is in real life is to delete the old one and create a new guy with the same name but more accurate stats (Randy Moss is the perfect example). Speaking of names, the rosters that came with the game are woefully out of date - this in spite of the fact that the game hit retail shelves a good three weeks into the NFL season. There's an option included to download the latest rosters, but with six weeks behind us those rosters still weren't up at EA's Madden web site. At least it's easy to assign the appropriate players to positions and formations, something that NFL GameDay '99 bungled beyond belief. This is the first version of Madden with a play editor - and it too is hampered by being identical to its video-game brethren. Compared with the wonderfully simple yet powerfully flexible play editor in ABC Monday Night Football or the mind-boggling array of commands at your disposal in FBS: FB Pro, the play editor in Madden NFL 99 is so limited in scope and is so clumsy to use that it's hardly worth the effort. The one thing that almost every PC football fan wanted to see in the latest Madden game, though, was better multiplayer support - and while I've heard rumors of people having success with Internet games, I certainly can't confirm them. When I tried to start an Internet game, I received a message that said ""TCP/IP not available"" even though I was logged on to the Net and could see my IP address. So I checked with tech support, who said I shouldn't be connected to the Internet, that Madden '99 would find my dial-up adapter and launch the connection process - but when I tried that I got the same message. Modem play was much less of a hassle, a lot better in fact than in past EA games where just getting the modem to dial was a major achievement. But even if I had gotten the game to recognize my TCP/IP connection, there's still no good spot to meet and find opponents; as big as EA is, I think it's only reasonable that at the very least it should host a matching service and chat room where players can arrange games and exchange IP addresses. Luckily, making management decisions and designing new plays has never been my pigskin forte, so the limitations of the franchise mode and play editor are things I can deal with - but they do keep Madden NFL 99 from being the be-all and end-all of football sims. Then again, I'm not sure that any single game will ever lay claim to that title: It's basically a question of pleasing all the people all the time, and we all know how tough that is. But at least EA's taking steps in the right direction with Madden NFL 99 - and the rest of the game delivers so much action and challenge that I'm more than happy to stick with it while the kinks get ironed out.
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739,NBA 2K ,8.8, NBA 2K almost does for basketball what NFL 2K did for football.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/2/4/0/2212240-box_nba2k.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-2k-review/1900-2540432/,pos,"
Whether you're a fan of other basketball games or not, once you've played NBA 2K you can never go back to those other games. NBA 2K is an officially licensed NBA game from Visual Concepts, the developer of NFL 2K. It features all the real players, teams, and arenas, as well as the usual basketball modes, like exhibition, season, and playoffs. The game also has an extensive create-a-player option, and it lets you tweak just about anything. So those of you still living in the past will be able to create a pretty good facsimile of Michael Jordan. Visually, NBA 2K is the most dazzling and realistic-looking basketball game ever. The game moves at 60fps and features more than 1,500 motion-captured animations and more than 400 individually modeled players. Almost everyone looks just like their real-life counterpart. When Kobe Bryant, Latrell Sprewell, Patrick Ewing, or any of the other big names walk onto the court you can instantly recognize them. Eye movements and facial expressions add to the frighteningly real look. Players open their mouths when going up for a dunk, smile after sinking a shot, and so on. While these are nice touches are truly amazing, the only time the camera is ever close enough to appreciate these small touches is during the player introductions and instant replays. Even the detail of the crowd in the stands is amazing. You can see individual people in the stands turn their heads, clap, and pump their fists in the air. The benched players on your team jump up and clap and do all kinds of stuff when you put some points on the board. The coaches and the players watching and reacting to the action along with the animated crowd not only make the game look incredible, but it actually makes the game so much more of a realistic and fun basketball experience. NBA 2K also does an amazing job of delivering an authentic re-creation of the sounds of an NBA game, as well. With two men in the announcing booth, a PA announcer, on-the-court chatter, crowd cheers, chants, boos, and a little music thrown in, there's never a dull moment. The play-by-play calls and commentary are right on the mark. It's quite impressive when you have a situation where you must sink a three, and you shake and roll a defender off you, post up at the line and drain the three. The announcers not only call the play out as it's happening but also comment on it after the fact with the appropriate enthusiasm.But for all its graphical and aural touches, any good sports game has to truly deliver in the gameplay department. NBA 2K does just that. The control setting and overall feel of NBA 2K is extremely responsive and intuitive. The control lets you do a variety of moves with relative ease. The analog stick gives you extremely precise control of your player's movement and speed. The ability to pass the ball, either by using the traditional direction-passing method or icon passing is excellent - having both methods available gives you the ability to really work the ball around the court quickly and accurately.  The list of options and rules that can be turned on and off is quite extensive. One great feature in NBA 2K is an option it gives you to set up the game so you're not always the ball handler. The computer will take the helm, leaving you with the sole responsibility of setting up for a shot. The AI is fairly intelligent, and as in NFL 2K you'll have close games and blowouts depending on what the matchups are. Your computer-controlled opponents and teammates do a lot of things just as they would in the NBA. For instance, when the game's almost over, and a team is down by a few points and out of time outs, one of its players will intentionally foul to stop the clock.  The three levels of difficulty really let you set up the kind of game you want to play. The rookie setting, as the name implies, lets you familiarize yourself with the control without the computer stomping you at every turn. The pro setting is the medium setting, and it's really well balanced. All-Star is pretty harsh. To succeed you must really use the plays, know which ones to call, what situations to call them in, and what player matchups you have the advantage of. The one thing that may aggravate players who aren't die-hard basketball-simulation fans is NBA 2K's realistic representation of the number of fouls that are incurred during play and the number of passes that miss their mark and find their way out of bounds. If you are trying to heave a pass way down court, it's considered a high-risk pass, and it will sometimes not get to your man. In the end, NBA 2K's dazzling graphics, superb control, and strong AI make it the most dynamic basketball video game ever. However, Visual Concepts fell just short of delivering the same seamless gameplay of NFL 2K. The game's visuals and control, while both outstanding, just don't have the same cohesion that made NFL 2K so flawless. But even with these few problems, playing NBA 2K will just about ruin you for all other basketball games.
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740,NHL Rock the Rink ,8.8," Hockey fans may find that the game strays a bit too far from their favorite sport, but the game is amazingly exciting and makes a worthwhile purchase for anyone looking ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/9/6/2214196-box_nhlrtr.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nhl-rock-the-rink-review/1900-2549139/,pos,"
When it comes to sports games, there are two types of people in the world. Some people get it, and some people don't. Some people want a grandiose simulation-based experience, while others want to randomly tap buttons and watch the magic. The first group, those who want realistic sports games, may have a hard time warming up to EA's fast-paced, no-rules ice hockey game, NHL Rock the Rink. But the game delivers a solid, exciting brand of gameplay that harkens back to a simpler time, when EA was making incredible Sega Genesis hockey games that were light on sim and hard on checks. The game serves as the spiritual successor to EA's Mutant League Hockey, and it demands attention from anyone even remotely interested in the ""sports lite"" genre. Let's start with the rules. Rock the Rink removes two players from each team, making it a four-on-four game, if you include the goalies. There's no time clock. Instead, you play to a certain score, which defaults to five. The game also institutes a basketball-like shot clock, which forces you to constantly work your way up the ice. If the clock expires, your player falls over, and the puck gets loose. There are no rules like icing or offsides - the only times play stops is when the puck flies out of play, a fight breaks out, or a goal is scored. So, since penalties are a thing of the past, you can fly around the rink, checking as hard as you possibly can. There are even special checks and shots, like body slams and tornado shots, as well as check-dodging special moves, such as the air deke. Like Nintendo's classic NES game, Ice Hockey, the players in Rock the Rink are broken down into two groups - small guys and big guys. The small players (termed finesse players in the game) are better shooters, and they can execute special shots. Of course, being smaller players makes them easy to crush, and they can't fight too well either. The big (power) players check much harder, and they can take a little more of a beating before giving up the puck. But they can't maneuver on the ice as nimbly as the small guys. The game starts you off with a collection of make-believe teams, such as the Cabbies and the Sting. As you progress through the game's NHL challenge mode, you'll unlock NHL teams, complete with actual players. The NHL challenge is also the portion of the game that lets you earn upgrades for your teams. You'll earn three levels of upgrades for your speed, power, and shooting. Other game modes include a jump-right-in arcade mode and a tournament mode that lets you crown the King of the Rink. The game has an extensive collection of unlockable options, including different pucks, rinks, and, of course, big-head mode.The gameplay is really something. The game runs at a blazing speed, but the analog control is tight enough to let you weave between players and make your way to the net with ease, once you've spent some time with the game. The control is easy to pick up, and the games are usually short enough to make it an excellent group experience. The only real black mark on the gameplay is a minor one. The fighting is absolutely lame. While you really can't expect a fighting engine worthy of a Tekken or a Street Fighter, the fighting in Rock the Rink consists of four buttons, three different hits, and one block. You and your opponent simply time button presses in hopes of squeezing a hit between blocks. Very boring. Luckily, the game practically asks you if you want to fight (a bell rings and you must hit R2 to actually enter the fight), so you can skip out on the lame fighting 90 percent of the time. Graphically, Rock the Rink looks pretty sharp. The characters aren't the most detailed player models in the world, but the game's frenetic pace more than makes up for the title's simple look. The models animate pretty well, especially the goalie, who executes stick and glove saves extremely well. The game's soundtrack is made up of a bunch of songs about hockey, but the music only plays when one team is in bonus mode, which pumps up the stats of your entire team for a few seconds. Celebrity Skin by the band Hole plays over the game's prerendered intro movie. The commentary takes on the ESPN style of sports announcing, full of catch phrases and witty pop-culture references. Since the game runs so quickly, the announcer is always talking, calling out big hits, passes, and shots. The announcer remains interesting for about a week, then the repetition starts to become a bit of an issue. NHL Rock the Rink is a pleasantly surprising ""extreme"" sports game. It doesn't get muddled down with too much stat tracking or too many gameplay options. It's a basic, bare-bones game that lets you jump right in and score some goals. Hockey fans may find that the game strays a bit too far from their favorite sport, but the game is amazingly exciting and makes a worthwhile purchase for anyone looking for a fast-paced competitive game.
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741,People's General ,8.8, People's General represents the natural evolution of Panzer General II and the Living Battlefield series.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/0/4/2213104-movie_02.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/peoples-general-review/1900-2545815/,pos,"
It was bound to happen. SSI's tremendously successful General series of games, first with the Five-Star series and then with the Living Battlefield series, has made the transition from World War II to the modern era (ignoring for the moment Star General and Fantasy General, neither of which warrant any more mention) with People's General. The game is set in the early 21st century, and the United Nations is at war with an aggressive China for control of most of Eastern Asia. People's General represents the natural evolution of Panzer General II and the Living Battlefield series, including many new refinements, ideas, weapon systems, and a game engine that has made a fairly successful transference to the modern era of warfare. People's General and the previous games are typically labeled as ""beer and pretzels"" wargames; they do not require a thorough knowledge base of military history and hardware, they are relatively easy to play, and are typically pleasing to the eye. People's General is no different. Requiring only a rudimentary knowledge of modern weapon systems (tanks, infantry, missile batteries, helicopters, air strikes, and the like), it can be played by basically anyone willing to give it a try. While the maps are hex-based, they are hand-painted beautifully in 16-bit color. 3D models of various vehicles and infantry depict individual units. Moving and attacking is a simple job of selecting a unit, pointing to a hex within range, and clicking to move. When attacking, estimated battle casualties, based the situation, are given, so you can somewhat accurately gauge if an attack will yield decent results or not.  Players have a number of different options when running People's General: There are nine campaigns, 34 scenarios, two- to four-player LAN/Internet scenarios, and play-by-e-mail (PBEM) scenarios. While four of the campaigns are actually different-length versions (with varying difficulty) of the Eastern and Western theater campaigns, there are three other independent campaigns. You are treated to a short video as the campaign starts and various status reports as the campaign continues. As a plus, a scenario-creation editor is also included, though you'll have to use one of the pre-drawn hand-painted maps to work with it.  If you've played the series before, you'll want to know what's new and different. Basically the engine is the same but has been neatly tuned to the modern era. Helicopters now behave like aircraft did earlier in the series (though they're much more powerful), and you now have the option of using air points to purchase air strikes, wild weasel and recon missions, defense air support, or the ability to airlift troops. With increased air capacity comes air defense units, which can severely hamper any air operation. Most units have the ability to attack across a number of hexes, and a range of six to eight hexes for missile batteries is not uncommon. Units can remain completely hidden from view or may be visible but labeled ""unknown.""  Also, you can assign particular capabilities to units instead of having to buy completely new units for a certain job. For instance, you can purchase a river-ferrying kit for your M1A3 unit, via the time-honored prestige points system (which is used to purchase, reequip, and resupply units in the game), instead of having to pick up a specific bridge-laying unit.  Of course there are a few problems. People's General requires DirectX 6.0, and there are some associated video compatibility issues with some cards. The most notable crops up when accessing the strategic overview map, showing only the upper left-hand corner of the map while turning the rest of it into a scrambled mess. While the strategic map doesn't need to be consulted to play well, it sure helps a lot (and saves time scrolling around). The scenario and campaign briefings don't have voice-overs anymore (unlike Panzer General II), a bit of chrome that some may find disappointing. While People's General may be considered a ""light"" wargame, it is by no means easy or bereft of details. Units are rated for a dozen different capabilities as well as somewhat random special abilities and leadership characteristics. Some of the campaigns are downright hard and nasty and take a full understanding of the game system to do even moderately well. However, a tutorial and numerous easier scenarios and campaigns ease you into the game without smacking you in the face with a learning curve that looks like the north face of Mt. Everest. Fans of the series will not be disappointed, and if the new and fairly unique subject material breathes new life into wargames - even beer and pretzel ones - then that can't be half bad either.
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742,Pokemon Gold/Silver ,8.8," You really can't go wrong with 251 monsters, two main adventures, countless side quests, and a baseline of 60 hours of gameplay.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/1/6/2/1628-6162.jpg,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pokemon-gold-silver-review/1900-2536200/,pos,"
It has been three years since Ash Ketchum completed his quest to become a Pokémon master. Since that time, the world of Pokémon has changed considerably. New gyms have sprouted up in countless lands, the number of would-be trainers has increased, and new species of Pokémon are being discovered daily. As such, Professor Oak's Pokédex is out of date. A new trainer must step up to the plate, one willing to serve the world of research while pursuing his or her own dream of becoming a Pokémon master. In Pokémon Gold/Silver, the true Game Boy Color sequel to Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, you will heed the call. You'll want to set aside a good chunk of time though, because 251 Pokémon, 16 badges, more than 500 trainers, 100 new moves, and over 60 hours of gaming awaits.   In Pokémon GS, you assume the role of an up-and-coming trainer. From your mother's house in the peaceful village of New Bark Town, your adventure begins with a short visit to the laboratory of Professor Elm. You're given a single Pokémon to start out with and are asked to complete the Pokédex, a creation of Elm's peer, the venerable Professor Oak. Across the land of Johto, you'll battle, capture, and train Pokémon, topple the resurgence of Team Rocket, and defeat eight gym leaders for the right to challenge the Elite Four in the Pokémon League. Your journey will not end there, however, as the continuation of your quest will reunite you with your old pals Ash, Brock, and Misty, as well as yield a few new surprises. Completing the Pokédex isn't going to be easy.   At its heart, Pokémon GS is just your standard strategy RPG with a number of collecting elements thrown in. You follow a circular route through nine main locations, acquiring eight gym badges while participating in a number of side ventures. You'll level up your Pokémon through a series of random battles and eventually end up back in your hometown of New Bark Town before heading off to the Pokémon League. It may seem contrived to tack on an additional quest after you've defeated the Elite Four; however, the joy of the game lies not in its underlying design, but with the details. Every plot and subplot is well explained and translated, giving the game a variety of intricate stories that get your brain working. The battle system itself encompasses all that is great about turn-based RPGs and features a decent mix of attacks, items, and strategy options. You can carry up to six Pokémon with you at a time, and each may possess up to four attacks. A computer network within the game lets you swap out items and Pokémon at your leisure, providing unlimited storage for anything you may need. Nintendo has made a few necessary gameplay tweaks as well. Pokémon can now carry items into battle and use them when the situation requires. Some items even yield new evolutions when the Pokémon carrying them are traded. Formerly useless moves, such as metronome, have been greatly improved, while unfair moves such as earthquake don't overly bludgeon the competition. The addition of new Pokémon also fills out previously lackluster evolution chains. If you thought Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan were cool, just wait until you snag a Hitmontop. Supporting these refinements, a plethora of new HM and TM moves gives you more control over what moves your Pokémon learn, while an in-game move eraser allows you to unlearn moves should the need arise.   Besides solid gameplay, a big part of Pokémon is the collecting aspect, especially the monsters themselves. Pokémon GS adds 100 new Pokémon to the ever-growing menagerie of pocket-sized battle beasts, bringing the grand total to 251. At the beginning of the game, you're once again presented with a trio of Pokémon to choose from: the fiery aardvark, Cyndaquil; the wily alligator, Totodile; and the bizarre plant Pokémon, Chikorita. As you progress, you'll encounter a whole smorgasbord of new Pokémon. Some are cute, such as the aquatic mouse, Maril, while some are downright bizarre, such as the dark-type teddy bear Pokémon, Teddiursa. There's even a subtle homage to Blade Runner in the form of the electric sheep Pokémon, Mareep. In addition to the previous 15 types of Pokémon, two new types have been added to the mix in Gold and Silver - dark and steel. Dark-type Pokémon are strong against psychic Pokémon, while steel-type Pokémon give plants a run for their money. Once again, since neither Gold nor Silver contains all 251 Pokémon, you'll need to trade with a friend to acquire the ones you're missing. You can also use the link-cable stations in Pokémon Centers to import Pokémon from previous versions of the game or to battle friends in the cable club coliseum.Although a sequel, Pokémon GS isn't just about beefing up preexisting elements. Sure, the full-color environments and restyled Pokémon portraits are great to look at, and yes, the remixed music and battle cries make the game fun to hear. For that matter, no one's going to scoff at the game's dynamic attack animations or onscreen experience meter either. However, the game also features a number of new, groundbreaking features, most of which have never been seen in handheld RPGs.   The first major addition to Pokémon GS is the presence of a time element. When you first activate the game, it will prompt you to enter the current time and day of the week. Once set, the clock tracks the real time in hours, minutes, and days, even if the Game Boy is off. Although it may sound like a gimmick, the addition of a clock adds quite a bit of variety to the game. Nocturnal Pokémon only come out at night, while day-roaming Pokémon sleep during this time. Furthermore, many items or events must be triggered or acquired on specific days. Good examples of this include the S.S. Aqua, which you can only sail upon on Tuesday and Saturday, and a Pokémon-catching contest that occurs every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Admittedly, the decreased selection of Pokémon and darker locales makes nighttime playing a bit boring, but the game more than makes up for it with all of the goodies you can acquire, thanks to the inclusion of a real clock.   The next greatest improvement in Pokémon GS is one you'll only come to appreciate after a few hours of playing: the new and improved item system, dubbed Pokégear. The Pokégear, a combination backpack and personal data assistant, contains multiple pockets for items and communications options. There are four pockets: one for status items, one for Pokéballs, another for TMs/HMs, and one for key items such as bicycles and fishing rods. The increased level of organization is nice, but a pleasant side effect is that you can now carry more items. Instead of the 20-item limit from Red/Blue/Yellow, the Pokégear has spots for 20 status item types, 20 key items, 20 Pokéball types, and an unlimited number of TMs and HMs. In addition, the Pokégear also gives you access to a comprehensive world map, a radio for entertainment purposes, and a cellular phone for keeping in touch with the game's many characters. The cell phone is especially nice, in that it not only allows you to beg Professor Elm or Oak for hints but also lets you routinely challenge any of the game's trainers to rematches.   The final major change in Pokémon GS is the inclusion of Pokémon gender and breeding. Despite a few notable exceptions, such as Mew and Mewtwo, every Pokémon comes in male and female varieties. In the beginning, gender isn't that important to the outcome of the game, but this will change later in the game when you reach the Pokémon daycare. By leaving compatible male and female Pokémon with the proprietors, you may later return to find a Pokémon egg. The egg will then hatch into a Pokémon. In most cases, it will be a normal level-5 Pokémon. However, some combinations may yield pre-evolved forms of standard Pokémon, such as the cute pre-Pikachu Pokémon, Pichu. If you're intent on catching all 251 Pokémon, you're going to need to breed for at least six of them.In addition to the major features and changes noted above, Pokémon GS also boasts a number of minor refinements and gimmicks that further boost the game's comfort and variety. A revamped Pokédex allows you to sort Pokémon by either type or number and also includes a search-by-type feature. If you have a Game Boy printer, you can use the Pokédex to print pictures of the Pokémon you've encountered, or you can visit the GB printer house later in the game to take candid photos. Pokémon GS also sports interactivity with the upcoming Pokémon Pikachu 2 GS, a colorized update to the original black-and-white Pokémon Pikachu virtual pet. The Pokémon Pikachu 2 GS has an infrared port, and by accruing watts with it, you can send mystery gifts to your Pokémon GS game, usually in the form of strong potions or status enhancers.    The only prevailing question is whether or not Pokémon GS is the right game for you. If you've never played Pokémon, you really ought to go out right now and pick up a copy of either Pokémon Gold or Pokémon Silver. If you're a fan of Pokémon, the same goes for you. If you're displeased with the Pokémon phenomenon in general or were only a mild fan of the first games, a cautious look is still highly advised. You really can't go wrong with 251 monsters, two main adventures, countless side quests, and a baseline of 60 hours of gameplay.
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743,Pokemon Silver ,8.8," You really can't go wrong with 251 monsters, two main adventures, countless side quests, and a baseline of 60 hours of gameplay.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/1/6/2/1628-6162.jpg,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pokemon-silver-review/1900-2689347/,pos,"
It has been three years since Ash Ketchum completed his quest to become a Pokémon master. Since that time, the world of Pokémon has changed considerably. New gyms have sprouted up in countless lands, the number of would-be trainers has increased, and new species of Pokémon are being discovered daily. As such, Professor Oak's Pokédex is out of date. A new trainer must step up to the plate, one willing to serve the world of research while pursuing his or her own dream of becoming a Pokémon master. In Pokémon Gold/Silver, the true Game Boy Color sequel to Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, you will heed the call. You'll want to set aside a good chunk of time though, because 251 Pokémon, 16 badges, more than 500 trainers, 100 new moves, and over 60 hours of gaming awaits.    In Pokémon GS, you assume the role of an up-and-coming trainer. From your mother's house in the peaceful village of New Bark Town, your adventure begins with a short visit to the laboratory of Professor Elm. You're given a single Pokémon to start out with and are asked to complete the Pokédex, a creation of Elm's peer, the venerable Professor Oak. Across the land of Johto, you'll battle, capture, and train Pokémon, topple the resurgence of Team Rocket, and defeat eight gym leaders for the right to challenge the Elite Four in the Pokémon League. Your journey will not end there, however, as the continuation of your quest will reunite you with your old pals Ash, Brock, and Misty, as well as yield a few new surprises. Completing the Pokédex isn't going to be easy.    At its heart, Pokémon GS is just your standard strategy RPG with a number of collecting elements thrown in. You follow a circular route through nine main locations, acquiring eight gym badges while participating in a number of side ventures. You'll level up your Pokémon through a series of random battles and eventually end up back in your hometown of New Bark Town before heading off to the Pokémon League. It may seem contrived to tack on an additional quest after you've defeated the Elite Four; however, the joy of the game lies not in its underlying design, but with the details. Every plot and subplot is well explained and translated, giving the game a variety of intricate stories that get your brain working. The battle system itself encompasses all that is great about turn-based RPGs and features a decent mix of attacks, items, and strategy options. You can carry up to six Pokémon with you at a time, and each may possess up to four attacks. A computer network within the game lets you swap out items and Pokémon at your leisure, providing unlimited storage for anything you may need. Nintendo has made a few necessary gameplay tweaks as well. Pokémon can now carry items into battle and use them when the situation requires. Some items even yield new evolutions when the Pokémon carrying them are traded. Formerly useless moves, such as metronome, have been greatly improved, while unfair moves such as earthquake don't overly bludgeon the competition. The addition of new Pokémon also fills out previously lackluster evolution chains. If you thought Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan were cool, just wait until you snag a Hitmontop. Supporting these refinements, a plethora of new HM and TM moves gives you more control over what moves your Pokémon learn, while an in-game move eraser allows you to unlearn moves should the need arise.    Besides solid gameplay, a big part of Pokémon is the collecting aspect, especially the monsters themselves. Pokémon GS adds 100 new Pokémon to the ever-growing menagerie of pocket-sized battle beasts, bringing the grand total to 251. At the beginning of the game, you're once again presented with a trio of Pokémon to choose from: the fiery aardvark, Cyndaquil; the wily alligator, Totodile; and the bizarre plant Pokémon, Chikorita. As you progress, you'll encounter a whole smorgasbord of new Pokémon. Some are cute, such as the aquatic mouse, Maril, while some are downright bizarre, such as the dark-type teddy bear Pokémon, Teddiursa. There's even a subtle homage to Blade Runner in the form of the electric sheep Pokémon, Mareep. In addition to the previous 15 types of Pokémon, two new types have been added to the mix in Gold and Silver - dark and steel. Dark-type Pokémon are strong against psychic Pokémon, while steel-type Pokémon give plants a run for their money. Once again, since neither Gold nor Silver contains all 251 Pokémon, you'll need to trade with a friend to acquire the ones you're missing. You can also use the link-cable stations in Pokémon Centers to import Pokémon from previous versions of the game or to battle friends in the cable club coliseum.Although a sequel, Pokémon GS isn't just about beefing up preexisting elements. Sure, the full-color environments and restyled Pokémon portraits are great to look at, and yes, the remixed music and battle cries make the game fun to hear. For that matter, no one's going to scoff at the game's dynamic attack animations or onscreen experience meter either. However, the game also features a number of new, groundbreaking features, most of which have never been seen in handheld RPGs.    The first major addition to Pokémon GS is the presence of a time element. When you first activate the game, it will prompt you to enter the current time and day of the week. Once set, the clock tracks the real time in hours, minutes, and days, even if the Game Boy is off. Although it may sound like a gimmick, the addition of a clock adds quite a bit of variety to the game. Nocturnal Pokémon only come out at night, while day-roaming Pokémon sleep during this time. Furthermore, many items or events must be triggered or acquired on specific days. Good examples of this include the S.S. Aqua, which you can only sail upon on Tuesday and Saturday, and a Pokémon-catching contest that occurs every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Admittedly, the decreased selection of Pokémon and darker locales makes nighttime playing a bit boring, but the game more than makes up for it with all of the goodies you can acquire, thanks to the inclusion of a real clock.    The next greatest improvement in Pokémon GS is one you'll only come to appreciate after a few hours of playing: the new and improved item system, dubbed Pokégear. The Pokégear, a combination backpack and personal data assistant, contains multiple pockets for items and communications options. There are four pockets: one for status items, one for Pokéballs, another for TMs/HMs, and one for key items such as bicycles and fishing rods. The increased level of organization is nice, but a pleasant side effect is that you can now carry more items. Instead of the 20-item limit from Red/Blue/Yellow, the Pokégear has spots for 20 status item types, 20 key items, 20 Pokéball types, and an unlimited number of TMs and HMs. In addition, the Pokégear also gives you access to a comprehensive world map, a radio for entertainment purposes, and a cellular phone for keeping in touch with the game's many characters. The cell phone is especially nice, in that it not only allows you to beg Professor Elm or Oak for hints but also lets you routinely challenge any of the game's trainers to rematches.    The final major change in Pokémon GS is the inclusion of Pokémon gender and breeding. Despite a few notable exceptions, such as Mew and Mewtwo, every Pokémon comes in male and female varieties. In the beginning, gender isn't that important to the outcome of the game, but this will change later in the game when you reach the Pokémon daycare. By leaving compatible male and female Pokémon with the proprietors, you may later return to find a Pokémon egg. The egg will then hatch into a Pokémon. In most cases, it will be a normal level-5 Pokémon. However, some combinations may yield pre-evolved forms of standard Pokémon, such as the cute pre-Pikachu Pokémon, Pichu. If you're intent on catching all 251 Pokémon, you're going to need to breed for at least six of them.In addition to the major features and changes noted above, Pokémon GS also boasts a number of minor refinements and gimmicks that further boost the game's comfort and variety. A revamped Pokédex allows you to sort Pokémon by either type or number and also includes a search-by-type feature. If you have a Game Boy printer, you can use the Pokédex to print pictures of the Pokémon you've encountered, or you can visit the GB printer house later in the game to take candid photos. Pokémon GS also sports interactivity with the upcoming Pokémon Pikachu 2 GS, a colorized update to the original black-and-white Pokémon Pikachu virtual pet. The Pokémon Pikachu 2 GS has an infrared port, and by accruing watts with it, you can send mystery gifts to your Pokémon GS game, usually in the form of strong potions or status enhancers.    The only prevailing question is whether or not Pokémon GS is the right game for you. If you've never played Pokémon, you really ought to go out right now and pick up a copy of either Pokémon Gold or Pokémon Silver. If you're a fan of Pokémon, the same goes for you. If you're displeased with the Pokémon phenomenon in general or were only a mild fan of the first games, a cautious look is still highly advised. You really can't go wrong with 251 monsters, two main adventures, countless side quests, and a baseline of 60 hours of gameplay.
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'pre-Pikachu', 'Pokémon', ',', 'Pichu', '.', 'If', ""'re"", 'intent', 'catching', '251', 'Pokémon', ',', ""'re"", 'going', 'need', 'breed', 'least', 'six', 'them.In', 'addition', 'major', 'features', 'changes', 'noted', ',', 'Pokémon', 'GS', 'also', 'boasts', 'number', 'minor', 'refinements', 'gimmicks', 'boost', 'game', ""'s"", 'comfort', 'variety', '.', 'A', 'revamped', 'Pokédex', 'allows', 'sort', 'Pokémon', 'either', 'type', 'number', 'also', 'includes', 'search-by-type', 'feature', '.', 'If', 'Game', 'Boy', 'printer', ',', 'use', 'Pokédex', 'print', 'pictures', 'Pokémon', ""'ve"", 'encountered', ',', 'visit', 'GB', 'printer', 'house', 'later', 'game', 'take', 'candid', 'photos', '.', 'Pokémon', 'GS', 'also', 'sports', 'interactivity', 'upcoming', 'Pokémon', 'Pikachu', '2', 'GS', ',', 'colorized', 'update', 'original', 'black-and-white', 'Pokémon', 'Pikachu', 'virtual', 'pet', '.', 'The', 'Pokémon', 'Pikachu', '2', 'GS', 'infrared', 'port', ',', 'accruing', 'watts', ',', 'send', 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744,Shellshock 2: Blood Trails ,4," ShellShock 2: Blood Trails spices up Vietnam with a liberal application of zombies, but the controls and the generic shooter gameplay leave a lot to be desired.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/7/6/8/2220768-box_ss2bt.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shellshock-2-blood-trails-review/1900-6206019/,neg,"
  Vietnam shooters apparently need more than just Charlie creeping through the jungle these days. ShellShock 2: Blood Trails takes a sharp left turn away from its gritty, realistic 2004 predecessor, ShellShock: Nam '67, and throws zombie hordes into the expected mix of AK-47s and rice paddies. Combining horror with stereotypical first-person shooter combat does little to make the game stand apart from the crowd, however. While there are a few thrills and chills here, this is too much of a shooter-by-numbers to be engaging to anyone but the least discriminating twitch gamer, and both the 360 and PS3 versions are hampered with horrible controls.    The plot introduces ravenous zombies into what is otherwise a standard Vietnam War movie storyline about a kid experiencing the horrors of war for the first time. If you tossed Platoon and 28 Days Later into a blender, this is pretty much what you would pour out. You play as Nate Walker, a raw recruit who touches down in country and is immediately shipped off to a border base under siege by the Vietcong (cue the usual angst about war being hell). But then the game shifts suddenly from one stereotype into another, with Walker being introduced to his zombie brother, Cal. As you might expect, this isn't much of a family reunion. Just as you're coming to terms with a brain-chomping bro who won't be interested in eating turkey on Thanksgiving anymore, the VC crash the party. Your brother escapes, and soon you're running through the jungle to battle the zombie plague and figure out what the mysterious Whiteknight is before the godless Commies do.    You wouldn't think that the combination of the Vietnam War and zombies could be a loser, but, well, here we are.   Sound like a decent basis for a shooter? It is, and the Source-engine-based visuals are reasonably good, though a long way from something modern like Crysis. The look of the game is pretty much identical on both the 360 and the PS3, although the latter seems to be a fair bit murkier in corners. While you can crank up the gamma to sort of address this issue, it never completely works on the Sony console and you wind up flailing about in the dark too often. The level design is attractive too, even if it seems like you're running from one Vietnam movie set to another. One moment you're racing through a misty jungle, then you're dealing with booby-trapped VC tunnels, and then you're in a run-down village. You get the picture.     At least much of the scenery is chilling. Bloody trails are everywhere, and it seems like you can't walk two feet without encountering a beheaded soldier mounted on a wall, a buddy with his legs blown off, or some poor guy impaled on a bunch of bamboo spikes. The audio doesn't have anywhere near the same impact, though. M-16 and AK-47 fire can barely be heard at times, and there isn't any thump to the rat-a-tat-tat or explosions. There might be some bugs in the sound, because some effects like the swing of a machete cannot be heard at all on either console. Most of the voice acting is well done, however, at least by B-movie standards. The actor playing Walker sounds a lot like a young James Woods, which adds a bit of Hollywood class to the proceedings.    But there isn't much game here. ShellShock 2: Blood Trails is very short. The solo campaign can be blasted through in four or five hours, and there are no multiplayer modes, so when you're done, you're done. Replay value is nonexistent due to the simplistic nature of the level design. Actually, ""design"" is probably too strong a word for how these levels have been slapped together. There isn't any artistry here. Every level is a straight run from point A to point B, with pauses along the way at choke points where you have to hunker down for a few minutes and gun down respawning enemies. Basically, you run along until you meet up with a bunch of fellow Yanks, then you stand still and help them shoot the horde of VC and/or zombie wannabes that start spawning from nearby rooftops, jungle pathways, and the like. Enemies never give any thought to what they're doing and typically just run out of their spawn locations like clowns out of a funny car.   Can one thousand throats really be cut in one night by a running man? Let's find out.   Yet even these suicidal bad guys aren't enough to compensate for the awful gamepad aiming controls that afflict both the 360 and PS 3 versions of the game. Although there is an assist option to help when you aim with the right analog stick, it doesn't seem to kick in until you have your sights almost perfectly lined up already. It's so ineffectual that it can be hard to tell if you have the assist on or off. Either way, you generally wind up wildly flailing about trying to nail enemies with enough shots to put them down before they send you back home to Uncle Sam in a flag-covered box. Since those aforementioned choke points are typically loaded with a dozen or more baddies coming at you from all directions, expect the latter to happen a lot more than the former.    About the only intriguing aspect of combat is a minigame that pops up whenever you get into close combat or you trigger something like a VC booby trap. If you encounter one of these situations, the game surprises you with a quickie challenge where you need to react immediately to avoid certain death. This feature is best realized on the PC and 360, as on those platforms you use simple keyboard and gamepad button combos to stave off doom. On the PS 3, however, close-up reactions are initially handled by wiggling the Sixaxis controller to trigger the motion sensor. Interesting idea, although the Sixaxis doesn't seem up to the task. You have to shake the controller so hard to get a reaction that you have to be careful you don't accidentally let the thing go and boomerang it across the living room. Thankfully, you can turn off the motion-sensing option and go back to the simple button presses exactly the same as on the 360.    Chances are good that you won't hate ShellShock 2: Blood Trails. But odds are also high that you won't particularly enjoy it, either, due to the frustrating controls and the forgettable game design. Even if you're interested in the Vietnam War and have a zombie fetish, you can likely find a better use for your money.  
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745,Shellshock 2: Blood Trails ,4," ShellShock 2: Blood Trails spices up Vietnam with a liberal application of zombies, but the controls and the generic shooter gameplay leave a lot to be desired.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/7/6/8/2220768-box_ss2bt.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shellshock-2-blood-trails-review/1900-6206020/,neg,"
  Vietnam shooters apparently need more than just Charlie creeping through the jungle these days. ShellShock 2: Blood Trails takes a sharp left turn away from its gritty, realistic 2004 predecessor, ShellShock: Nam '67, and throws zombie hordes into the expected mix of AK-47s and rice paddies. Combining horror with stereotypical first-person shooter combat does little to make the game stand apart from the crowd, however. While there are a few thrills and chills here, this is too much of a shooter-by-numbers to be engaging to anyone but the least discriminating twitch gamer, and both the 360 and PS3 versions are hampered with horrible controls.    The plot introduces ravenous zombies into what is otherwise a standard Vietnam War movie storyline about a kid experiencing the horrors of war for the first time. If you tossed Platoon and 28 Days Later into a blender, this is pretty much what you would pour out. You play as Nate Walker, a raw recruit who touches down in country and is immediately shipped off to a border base under siege by the Vietcong (cue the usual angst about war being hell). But then the game shifts suddenly from one stereotype into another, with Walker being introduced to his zombie brother, Cal. As you might expect, this isn't much of a family reunion. Just as you're coming to terms with a brain-chomping bro who won't be interested in eating turkey on Thanksgiving anymore, the VC crash the party. Your brother escapes, and soon you're running through the jungle to battle the zombie plague and figure out what the mysterious Whiteknight is before the godless Commies do.    You wouldn't think that the combination of the Vietnam War and zombies could be a loser, but, well, here we are.   Sound like a decent basis for a shooter? It is, and the Source-engine-based visuals are reasonably good, though a long way from something modern like Crysis. The look of the game is pretty much identical on both the 360 and the PS3, although the latter seems to be a fair bit murkier in corners. While you can crank up the gamma to sort of address this issue, it never completely works on the Sony console and you wind up flailing about in the dark too often. The level design is attractive too, even if it seems like you're running from one Vietnam movie set to another. One moment you're racing through a misty jungle, then you're dealing with booby-trapped VC tunnels, and then you're in a run-down village. You get the picture.     At least much of the scenery is chilling. Bloody trails are everywhere, and it seems like you can't walk two feet without encountering a beheaded soldier mounted on a wall, a buddy with his legs blown off, or some poor guy impaled on a bunch of bamboo spikes. The audio doesn't have anywhere near the same impact, though. M-16 and AK-47 fire can barely be heard at times, and there isn't any thump to the rat-a-tat-tat or explosions. There might be some bugs in the sound, because some effects like the swing of a machete cannot be heard at all on either console. Most of the voice acting is well done, however, at least by B-movie standards. The actor playing Walker sounds a lot like a young James Woods, which adds a bit of Hollywood class to the proceedings.    But there isn't much game here. ShellShock 2: Blood Trails is very short. The solo campaign can be blasted through in four or five hours, and there are no multiplayer modes, so when you're done, you're done. Replay value is nonexistent due to the simplistic nature of the level design. Actually, ""design"" is probably too strong a word for how these levels have been slapped together. There isn't any artistry here. Every level is a straight run from point A to point B, with pauses along the way at choke points where you have to hunker down for a few minutes and gun down respawning enemies. Basically, you run along until you meet up with a bunch of fellow Yanks, then you stand still and help them shoot the horde of VC and/or zombie wannabes that start spawning from nearby rooftops, jungle pathways, and the like. Enemies never give any thought to what they're doing and typically just run out of their spawn locations like clowns out of a funny car.   Can one thousand throats really be cut in one night by a running man? Let's find out.   Yet even these suicidal bad guys aren't enough to compensate for the awful gamepad aiming controls that afflict both the 360 and PS 3 versions of the game. Although there is an assist option to help when you aim with the right analog stick, it doesn't seem to kick in until you have your sights almost perfectly lined up already. It's so ineffectual that it can be hard to tell if you have the assist on or off. Either way, you generally wind up wildly flailing about trying to nail enemies with enough shots to put them down before they send you back home to Uncle Sam in a flag-covered box. Since those aforementioned choke points are typically loaded with a dozen or more baddies coming at you from all directions, expect the latter to happen a lot more than the former.    About the only intriguing aspect of combat is a minigame that pops up whenever you get into close combat or you trigger something like a VC booby trap. If you encounter one of these situations, the game surprises you with a quickie challenge where you need to react immediately to avoid certain death. This feature is best realized on the PC and 360, as on those platforms you use simple keyboard and gamepad button combos to stave off doom. On the PS 3, however, close-up reactions are initially handled by wiggling the Sixaxis controller to trigger the motion sensor. Interesting idea, although the Sixaxis doesn't seem up to the task. You have to shake the controller so hard to get a reaction that you have to be careful you don't accidentally let the thing go and boomerang it across the living room. Thankfully, you can turn off the motion-sensing option and go back to the simple button presses exactly the same as on the 360.    Chances are good that you won't hate ShellShock 2: Blood Trails. But odds are also high that you won't particularly enjoy it, either, due to the frustrating controls and the forgettable game design. Even if you're interested in the Vietnam War and have a zombie fetish, you can likely find a better use for your money.  
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746,Rocky and Bullwinkle ,4, What do you get when you mix a 50-year-old animated franchise with 21st-century downloadable games? A poor microgame collection.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/4/4/6/34476-95446.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rocky-and-bullwinkle-review/1900-6189652/,neg,"
  Rocky and Bullwinkle first had their antics aired across American airwaves back in 1959. Since then, their slapstick sensibilities and doofy encounters with odd antagonists have been captured in movies, books, video games, and all manner of cross-media connections. Few, if any, of these crossovers have lived up to the once-rich experience many adults had watching the moose and squirrel's adventures in their younger days.   Collecting cake in outer space is rational compared to other challenges.   This attempt at interactive Rocky and Bullwinkle absurdity borrows heavily from Nintendo's Mario Party and WarioWare franchises. Various minigames and microgames are spooled up one after another for players to complete. One minute you could be flying a cake collecting craft through space, and the next you could be jumping out of carts while careening over perilous precipices. The tasks are not consistent, intuitive, or fun, but they are all timed. Each challenge has a timer. If you complete the task within the allotted time, then you win. If you fail to complete it, then you lose that round and one of four hearts. Those heart containers represent all the losses you can have before you fail out of the game. Failing out just means you have to start from the beginning and work your way up the difficulty beanstalk for better rewards, as well as greater challenges.    There are seven collections of games, each corresponding to a Rocky and Bullwinkle character. As you make your way through the first collections, the rest will become unlocked. You'll also gain access to some goodies and currency that can be spent on power-ups, but sadly none of this is much fun. You can burn through everything the game has to offer in about three hours. Local multiplayer provides the only opportunity to share the experience with a friend. While leaderboards are available for every story, true online multiplayer is not supported. An editing room lets you create custom game compilations (known as reruns). Reruns offer little value other than an achievement for putting together and completing a particular group of challenges.     An intriguing feature of this uninspired minigame collection is the support of motion sensing via the Xbox Live Vision Camera. However, the camera's responsiveness is inconsistent even after precise calibration, which can result in some frustrating failures as the controls prove more challenging than the minigames themselves. Waving your arms around would add very little to Rocky and Bullwinkle even if it worked, and it doesn't    The more time you spend with the game, the more the presentation may wear on you. The minigames are not sorted well. Frequently, you will play the same boss fight five times in one show, with the other games coming up just as often. With 15 to 16 games per show, more variation in how frequently the games appear would have been desirable. The character animations are stiff and robotic. The design detail is low, and the art is stuck in the 1960s. Actual efforts to update character and game designs don't pan out well. Also, the extreme button mashing, lackluster directions, and uninspired game design do little to make the experience more pleasant with time.   Some of the challenges are so bad, the characters can't even get excited about them.     Besides children who may not know better, the game has little appeal to would-be players. Even though the achievements are fairly easy to obtain, few people will likely find anything worthwhile in the game's dated presentation and slipshod gameplay. Without any lasting value or promise of providing positive reruns, most players would do well to skip Rocky and Bullwinkle, saving 800 Microsoft Points in the process.    
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747,The Guild 2: Venice ,4, This stand-alone Venetian expansion adds practically nothing to the gameplay of The Guild 2.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/5/8/4/34513-95584.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-guild-2-venice-review/1900-6199673/,neg,"
  The Guild 2: Venice is a stand-alone expansion that purports to be all about the legendary sinking city best known for its canals and singing gondoliers, but it's actually just a third-rate face-lift of its predecessors. The only noteworthy additions to this economic simulation are a couple of new professions, four new scenarios depicting Venice and its neighbors on the Adriatic Sea, and some horrific bugs. So even if you're hungry for more merchant-on-merchant action after the original game and its Pirates of the High Seas add-on, you don't need to take this Venetian holiday.    If you played any prior Guild 2 games, you'll find the gameplay here very familiar. You once more sign on as one of four medieval classes and work at making money, building RPG-like skills, and going forth and procreating to establish a multigenerational dynasty. That description makes the game sound a little more far-ranging than it actually is, however. Instead of a role-playing medieval adventure, you're actually playing a merchant in a humdrum real-time economic sim. The patron, craftsman, scholar, and rogue classes may allow you to take on a wide range of occupations that stretch all the way from priest to highwayman, but each deals with nearly identical buy-and-sell busywork. As a priest, for instance, you set up a church and make your daily bread by selling holy water and the sacrament. On the other end of the moral spectrum as a rogue, you do pretty much the same thing, although you take a shortcut to wealth by stealing items that you later sell. All of the lines of work here seem just about identical, with similar goals that mainly revolve around buying raw materials and turning them into finished goods dished out for a profit. Basically, you're playing a medieval workshop boss, with all of the thrills and chills that such a job entails.   Serfs slave away in the new glazier buildings just like they did in the other craftsman jobs available in previous Guild 2 games.   About the only difference between this expansion pack and the previous Guild 2 games is that you're now plying your trade in Venice instead of northern Europe. Changes are so superficial that it can be hard to even notice them. About the only difference between this expansion pack and the previous Guild 2 games is that you're now plying your trade in Venice instead of northern Europe. The lagoon-based city and its neighbors such as Trieste and Ravenna are depicted as being waterlogged, which generates a lot of atmosphere in comparison with the blah northern European maps in the original Guild 2. The canals in Venice really set this backdrop apart from those in the earlier games, although the way that city neighborhoods are spread across tiny islands connected by narrow bridges makes the map layouts feel almost puzzlelike. A lot of tedious scrolling around is required to find specific buildings. Trieste is even more of a pain to navigate, due to it being scattered over even dinkier islands connected by narrow, half-submerged roads. This city looks more like it could be found in the Florida Keys, not along the coast of the Adriatic.    Pathfinding is awful, too, and the number of roads so limited that you can never guide a character directly from one place to another. You need to head west a lot of the time to go north, east to go south, and so forth. Even worse, your characters move so slowly that they might as well be running underwater, while NPCs race around. Even people that you're in the process of successfully wooing tend to just take off and run away from you at a moment's notice. This forces you to either break it off and pick up with someone less fleet-footed, or run after your intended and hope he or she takes a breather at some point before you lap the entire town.    The constricted map design also restricts building possibilities, especially in Trieste. Lots are so tightly packed that it can be tough to find enough space for the game's generally large structures. You typically have to do a fair bit of scrolling across the landscape in order to find a spot big enough to accommodate something like a cathedral or even a smuggler's den. Perhaps this is a realistic concession to the watery landscape of Venice and the surrounding region, although these building restrictions just seem annoying from a gameplay perspective. Bugs cause even more problems with building placement. The tutorial mission on building purchase and setup cannot be completed because there is no place big enough to put the foundry that it requires. Since you have to finish each tutorial to keep going, this little problem nicely locks you out of the remaining primer missions (which is kind of a big deal since the game ships without a paper manual). Also, the ghost building outline routinely vanishes when you try to place structures, making it even harder to properly drop them onto the map. We have to wonder if anybody play-tested these maps before booting the game out the door.   Nothing quite says courtly love like beating the hell out of the thug trying to rob your fiancee.   And even though the general map terrain is vaguely Venice-like when it comes to the ""water, water everywhere"" shtick, the city itself looks very little like its canal-laden counterpart in real life. Most buildings appear to have been reskinned with new textures, but in a quickie fashion that leaves everything looking unfinished. Cheap homes now look like shotgun shacks thrown up with a few two-by-fours and some corrugated metal. Adding to this rough look is a lot of clipping. Characters routinely run through buildings and carts, and also tend to hang out half their bodies sticking into a wall or door. This at least makes the awful pathfinding a touch easier to deal with, but it gives the game a real shoddy look, especially when you're inside a building with lots of people, like a tavern, or have zoomed in to get a close-up look at city streets and see unemployed serfs loafing around with their legs buried in benches up to their knees. The camera doesn't seem to know where solid objects are, either, as it frequently gets jammed behind walls when it switches over to the letterboxed sequences depicting conversations, such as when you're courting a potential spouse. Just a few new iconic structures have been added to give Venice a distinct appearance, such as the Council Palace and the University of Venice, but most of these are inaccessible, and those that can be entered seem to reuse interiors from the earlier games. At any rate, the landscape here is nothing like the exciting domain of canals and carnivals promised on the box.    While we did experience a few crashes to desktop, always during political events like voting, we haven't experienced the hard crashes and corrupted saved games that have apparently plagued other users. Yet it's hard to really credit the game here, since these issues have been reported on many online message boards and have caused the publisher to hurry a patch into private beta development. So despite our dumb luck in at least partially dodging the bug bullet here, the game seems unstable enough in other areas that you should be sure to download a patch as soon as one shows up.    Any way you look at it, The Guild 2: Venice is pointless. It provides almost nothing new, includes none of the content in the original game or the first expansion, and even omits the multiplayer mode of play included in both of its predecessors. Instead of taking you for a ride on a gondola, all this expansion does is take you for a ride.    
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748,Jam With the Band ,4, This dull rhythm game is a prime example of how to sap all the fun out of playing and creating music.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/0/1/2219701-getpicviw.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jam-with-the-band-review/1900-6265271/,neg,"
  UK REVIEW--Jam With the Band aims to be a one-stop-shop for music fans, combining traditional rhythm action with a music creation tool. Sadly it doesn't live up to its lofty goals and ultimately fails to make either an enjoyable experience. A simple one-button beginner mode lets newcomers get on board, but it soon becomes monotonous, requiring you to tackle  frustrating difficulty levels, which keep it from being fun.  The less musically inclined will find it difficult to get their head around the note layouts and studio tool, while the poor presentation gives it a dated look. If you have musical experience and a group of friends to play with, you may be able to squeeze some fun out of it, but there are far better rhythm games available for the DS.   The confusing note chart makes playing along a chore.   You're introduced to Jam With the Band by the voluptuous Barbara the Bat, the owner of a low-rent rock club and shop. Since she's the owner, you have to impress her with your virtual playing skills when you take to the stage. Unfortunately, impressing her is either very dull or immensely difficult. The premise is simple enough: a marker scrolls from the left to the right of the screen in time with the music and passes over prompts corresponding to any of eight face buttons and triggers. You push the marked button at the correct time and are awarded a good, OK, bad, or miss rating, depending on how accurate your timing is. There are several difficulty levels to choose from, which vary the number of buttons you have to press. In beginner mode you have to push only a single button and keep rhythm. Its simplicity makes it accessible for beginners, but also very dull. After just a few songs you begin to suffer from the monotony of pushing a solitary button along to the music, and will want to move up to a higher difficulty level to keep things interesting. This means moving  up to amateur, where you use  four buttons; pro where you use eight; or master where you use all 10. However, changing the difficulty does not affect the speed of the note charts, which move far too fast. This makes it difficult to memorise the various button positions and match them up with the on-screen indicators, which whiz by at lightning speed, leaving your fingers to play catch up.    While it’s possible to become relatively comfortable with the A, B, Y, and Left button combination of amateur mode, in order to rack up some real points and progress through the career mode you need to move up to pro. The jump from four to eight buttons is massive, and co-ordinating them with the overly zealous note chart is a real challenge, particularly when multiple notes are played using the d-pad. Often multiple d-pad hits are placed in quick succession and interspersed with the face buttons, which combined with the speed at which the chart moves, makes it an exercise in frustration. This is exacerbated by the strange layout of the note chart, which is organised into one-bar sections. The marker moves from left to right across the bar and then jumps down the next one below. This means that longer notes that require you to hold a button down are cut across multiple bars, making it a real challenge to know when to let go and press the next button. There is a basic practice mode, which lets you slow down tracks by 50 percent. However, you still have the issue of notes cutting off across multiple bars, making even half-speed songs a chore.    There are 50 songs, and more are available to download for free via Wi-Fi. Strangely, once you've downloaded a song, you cannot remove it. You're limited to 50 slots, so you have to make sure you really want that copy of ""Uptown Girl"" before you fill the last one. The songs themselves are about as far removed from master tracks as you can get. Each one is played in general MIDI, with the vocals replaced by an instrument. This makes them sound incredibly cheesy and is akin to playing along to elevator Muzak. Worse still, the song lineup appears to have mixed the record collection of a teenybopper with that of her granddad. One moment you're playing along to Britney's ""Slave 4 U,"" the next it's followed by a rousing rendition of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in MIDI strings. Not helping matters is the fact that the game often changes the ""theme"" of the song. For example, you may hear Blink 182's ""All the Small Things"" played with traditional Japanese instruments. However, nothing can prepare you for the painful aural onslaught that is a swing jazz version of ""Smoke on the Water,"" complete with recorders and saxophones. The themed versions of songs are awful, which makes the game's constant use of them incredibly irritating.   The song selector lets you choose from a range of terrible general MIDI Muzak.   You have two options for playing songs: quick play and the career mode dubbed Today's Gig. The career mode is sparse, serving as nothing more than a glorified mixtape. You play gigs for Barbara the Bat in her basement venue. Playing well boosts your performance rank, rated in stars. The first two stars allow you to play the songs in beginner mode, and if you do well you advance to amateur mode once you reach three. In order to progress you must continue the process all the way up to 10 stars, where you are subjected to playing songs in the nigh-on-impossible master mode. Unfortunately you can't select your own difficulty level to player through the career mode, so the only way to advance is to tackle the harder difficulties. Each time you jump into the career mode, Barbara selects a theme for the day. If you're lucky, this could mean playing piano versions of songs, but if you're unlucky, you might be subjected to the aforementioned musical horror that is the jazz theme. After playing each song, you're given a score. A score of 85 or above increases your performance rank, 70 to 84 means it stays the same, and anything below 70 decreases it. If you perform well, you're given the chance to do an encore, where you have to play a song with a different theme. If you receive a low score, or if you quit during it, your performance rank decreases. Aside from receiving compliments from Barbara, there are no real incentives to play through the encores, or indeed any of the career mode. There are no rewards or unlockables to keep your interest.      It's much easier to simply choose the song you want to perform in quick play. In career mode, you play only the vocal melody part. Quick play lets you choose from a selection of eight instruments for each song, including drums, guitars, and bass. The high difficulty level on the higher modes saps much of the fun out of playing the instruments, while beginner mode relegates you to the dullness of tapping along with one button. You also have the option of singing along to songs in Barbara's karaoke club, using the DS's built-in microphone. Lyrics scroll across the screen in traditional karaoke fashion, and you're awarded points based on how well you sing. However, there's no visual feedback as to how well you're singing, making it difficult to know if you’re racking up any points. The lack of feedback makes this option dull, though a group of friends may get a kick out of it if they sing together. On your own, there's little incentive to play it, because like the other modes, you're not rewarded for a good performance.   Even if you can read music, the studio is very limited.   Fortunately, there is some fun to be had in multiplayer, where up to eight people can get together for a jam session using a single cartridge via download play. The leader of the group picks a song, while the other band members choose an instrument to play. Rather than simply hearing a quieter version of an instrument when someone messes up, you hear an incorrect note or drum hit. Although this is realistic, it isn't very fun. The lack of a quiet backing track makes it more difficult to keep in time, particularly if you have an especially bad rhythm section. However, this does make you feel like you're really playing an instrument, rather than merely playing along, so when you do nail a song with friends, you get a great feeling of accomplishment. This is helped by the fact you can't fail out, regardless of difficulty level, so no matter how bad you're playing you can keep ploughing on till you're making sweet music together.    If you want a break from the rhythm game, then you can jump into the music creation suite, where you can create your own MIDI masterpieces using the basic or advanced studio. As its name implies, the basic studio is a very simple way to make songs. You can input notes by humming them into the microphone or by playing them on the keyboard. A click track lets you keep time, while a scrolling musical score keeps track of the notes. Neither method is great for making songs. Humming your tune in results in some awful creations because the game isn't accurate at identifying what notes you're singing. The keyboard input fares a little better but is restricted by the DS touch screen. Because it can sense only one touch at a time, you can't play in chords. You can also see only one octave at a time, and changing it requires you to push an onscreen button away from the keyboard, which interferes with your playing. Once you've played your notes, you can select from a range of premade backing tracks to set to it. The game automatically matches the backing track to what key your notes are in and changes it accordingly. Like all the other songs, the track is played in MIDI, so it doesn't sound great, but the game does a good job of matching your playing to the correct backing track key.    The advanced studio lets you program in notes directly using a musical score. You can pick up to eight instruments to play on each track and choose their sound from anything in the general MIDI library. The editing features are limited, but can be useful for jotting down ideas when out and about. To create a song you drag a note value from the top of the screen onto the score, building up your composition. You can copy and paste sections, and there is one stage of undo should you make a mistake. However, there is no way to loop a section and listen to it, so you constantly have to hit rewind and play while you're testing new ideas. You're also restricted to 120 bars of music, and there is no indication as to how long your song is in minutes on the editing screen. You can solo a track while you're listening to it, but only one track at time, so you can't see how well your bass line is mixing with the drums without listening to all the instruments at once. The final problem is that there is no way to change the volume of individual instruments, so you can't layer your instruments in the mix. As a simple tool for getting your spur-of-the-moment ideas down, the studio works. However, advanced users looking for more flexibility will be disappointed with the lack of features, while beginners will be perplexed by the musical score input. Sharing options for your music are also limited. You can upload your track to the central list of downloadable songs, but only if it is a cover of an existing composition, which must be matched up in the Compact Disc Database for identification. If you upload an original creation, it will not be approved.   Watch out for Barbara's membership contract; all is not as it seems.   Jam With the Band is a poor rhythm game. It's confusing and overly fast note chart layout makes it difficult to play, while the massive jump in difficulty between the amateur and pro modes means you'll have a hard time advancing through the lacklustre career mode.  The basic studio is too restrictive, the advanced studio lacks the power to make it anything more than a notepad, and the perplexing restrictions placed on music downloads and uploads only serve to annoy. The presentation also leaves a lot to be desired, with blocky graphics, poor animation, and garish colours plastered over every screen. While you can have fun playing the game with some friends, the dull single-button beginner mode and the dedication required to learn the complex controls on higher difficulty levels makes the boring single-player not worth the effort. Though it held promise, Jam With the Band is a prime example of how to make an inaccessible and boring game. There are plenty of good games in the rhythm genre on the DS, but this certainly isn't one of them.   
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749,Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm ,4, This disappointing strategy game isn't nearly as engaging as the Discovery Channel show it's based on.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/9/3/2219293-box_dcatchas.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deadliest-catch-alaskan-storm-review/1900-6193322/,neg,"
 Deadliest Catch, the fourth season of which is currently airing on the Discovery Channel, is an exciting documentary-style reality show in which crews fishing for crab in the Bering Sea do battle with nature and risk their lives on an almost-daily basis to get their jobs done. By contrast, Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm is a slow-paced strategy game of sorts, in which you captain one of the aforementioned crews and do battle with choppy frame rates, console-freezing bugs, and dangerous levels of boredom while scouring the sea for something resembling fun.   Don't let the pretty screenshot fool you, the water looks far better than anything else in the game.   Your first port of call in Deadliest Catch will be the Missions mode, because you have to beat the first four of its 20-plus challenges to unlock Career mode. Those four challenges are interactive tutorials in which the star of the show, Captain Sig of the Northwestern, talks you through the basic controls necessary for navigating and maintaining your chosen boat while fishing for crabs and managing your crew.      After choosing one of five boats to captain, your first job in Career mode is to hire a crew. There are plenty of potentials to choose from, and while all of them are capable of getting the job done, the guys demanding a larger slice of the season's profits are invariably worth the money. You need a deck boss, three deckhands, and a bait boy to start fishing, and somewhere in that mix you need guys who can double as engineers, cooks, and medics. Before leaving the harbor you can also stock up on fuel, crab pots, and bait, as well as carry out any necessary repairs and upgrades. All of these chores are dealt with via a menu system that's functionally sound but not even remotely interesting. The controls are easy to pick up, but that's mainly because, in Career mode, you simply don't have to do very much.    As a captain in Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm you never leave the wheelhouse of your chosen boat, and you spend the majority of your time performing mundane, repetitive tasks. You check the crab survey information on your map to locate good fishing spots, you mark your intended fishing locations using a plotter, and then you control your boat's speed and course as you travel between them, making sure to slow down when your crew is attempting to retrieve pots that you left to soak earlier. Controlling your speed and course is occasionally made challenging by bad weather, but if you turn your autopilot on and take advantage of the option to speed up time, you can bypass the worst of it before you encounter anything resembling gameplay.     It's the other members of your crew that get to do all of the ""fun"" stuff, though they won't lift a finger--not even to save an overboard colleague from drowning--unless you tell them to. With the push of a single button you can set your crew to one of four modes: drop pots, retrieve pots, chip ice, or rest. That last one is especially important, because tired crew members are more likely to have accidents and potentially put themselves out of action for the remainder of your season. More specific orders can be given by using a rudimentary conversation system to interact with your crew one-on-one, but these are rarely necessary unless you're experiencing mechanical problems that your engineer hasn't noticed or need to coordinate the rescue of a man overboard.   You're the only member of the crew who never gets to set foot on this deck.   Each season lasts as long as it takes for the fleet of boats you're fishing alongside to meet its quota, and your goal is simply to make as much money as you can. Catching a lot of crabs is obviously a good start, but there's certainly more to a winning strategy than that. For example, because keeping crabs in your hold for too long will ultimately kill them and make them worthless, you have to time your visits to port in such a way that you maximize your profits without losing too much time that could be spent fishing. Some of the ports get really busy, especially toward the end of a season, so you also need to carefully choose where you dock to avoid having your cargo die while it's waiting in line. The strategy portion of Deadliest Catch can be engaging enough to suck you in for hours at times; it's just unfortunate that it's hidden beneath a thick layer of poor production values and repetitive gameplay.    If you feel the need to put your crab-fishing prowess to the test online, you can do so in a multiplayer mode that supports up to eight players and replicates the structure of the career mode almost exactly. The main difference when you play online is that while you can still fast-forward your boat to move around the map more quickly, doing so doesn't actually advance time. This is a problem for all kinds of reasons, one being that every hour in the game takes around two minutes of real time. Pots are normally left to soak for at least 24 hours (48 is ideal according to one of Sig's tutorial videos), so even games that are scheduled to last for just two days take a long time to get through--a lot of it spent doing nothing. Incidentally, searching for a quick match unsuccessfully will cause your screen to go black indefinitely, so you'll need to restart your console before you can try again.    Some much-needed variety comes in the form of unlockable missions that test your skills far more than the Career mode does. Not all of them are fun (parallel parking a crab boat in a crowded harbor springs to mind), but chasing whale poachers through rocky waters in a Coast Guard cutter makes for a welcome change of pace, and the five slalom courses that you race through in a skiff are arguably the most fun that the game has to offer. Other unlockables include a hook-throwing minigame that's fun for about two minutes, and a seemingly endless supply of low-resolution videos in which you can meet characters from the show and check out different areas of the featured boats. Most of the videos are short and disappointing, and lack any of the action that makes the Deadliest Catch TV show so compelling.    The poor quality of the videos is very much in keeping with the rest of the game's presentation. The frame rate is never anything but horrible, and the visuals are inconsistent to the point that the impressive water looks like it's from a completely different game than the clumsily textured land masses it surrounds. Default audio levels are all over the place as well, and while you can customize them, doing so shouldn't be a requisite for being able to hear one thing without risking being deafened by another.    Skiff slalom missions offer a welcome diversion from the plodding pace of Career mode.   Rounding out this disappointing package are bugs that can bring your play session to a premature end without warning. The most frequent of these simply cause your console to lock up, but occasionally the problems get a little more creative--by forcing your crew members into looping animations that prevent them from doing their jobs, for example.     Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm absolutely reeks of unrealized potential. There's fun to be had here, but you have to work harder than all of the Northwestern's crew combined to find it, and the haul won't even come close to meeting your quota.  


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750,Double D Dodgeball ,4, Getting pounded in the face with a real dodgeball might be more fun than this postmodern rendition of the schoolyard sport.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/8/2/2219282-box_ddd.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/double-d-dodgeball-review/1900-6194922/,neg,"
  Ah, the good old days of recess, good-natured play, and competitive schoolyard matches of dodgeball. Given how glamorous recent film, game, and other media portrayals have made the sport seem, Double D Dodgeball doesn't measure up in presentation or entertainment value to its multimedia cousins. Instead, it is a woefully underdeveloped title that pales in comparison to more attractive Xbox Live Arcade games.   A gorillas versus lizards match in space should look way better than this.     The setup of dodgeball is simple: You and your teammates take to a court to face off against another team on the opposite side. On the half-court line is a set of three balls. Your team must race to the center, grab a ball, then hurl it at an opponent using the right trigger. When faced with an oncoming projectile, you can grip the right trigger to catch the ball. Doing so not only saves you from being obliterated to the sidelines, but also grants you a power bonus to release a super shot.    Battles play out in any of eight arenas, each with its own configuration. Some have obstacles (either destructible or impenetrable), others allow knocked out players to attack opponents from the periphery of enemy territory. Either way, the playing surfaces are made of space, ice, or plasma. The three materials offer little visual flair, but ice adds a slickness to movement and plasma slows character travel.    Your dodgeball squad can contain anywhere from two to six members. You control one character, while the AI controls the remaining members when human players aren't present. To call the geometric shapes you control ""characters"" is a bit of a stretch. They better resemble adversaries found in Space Invaders than anything remotely human. They are categorized according to class: the speedy Runner, the blandly named Normal, the deadly Shooter, the clingy Catcher, and the oddly shaped Glass. Names are not this game's strong suit. Unfortunately, neither is anything else.    The game tries to put on a good show of variety, but the shallow gameplay will limit your enjoyment. The developer included a modest variety of ball types (fast, heavy, and glass) and the ability to electrify lines (to render those who touch them immobile for a time). Unfortunately, these additions do little to enhance the experience and seem to be more of an afterthought than a sound strategy for fun. The sound effects are uninspired, especially with near-unintelligible voice work that barely achieves mediocrity. Cumbersome menus needlessly delay getting into and out of the gameplay. The online suffers from up to two full seconds of delay. If it weren't for a mix of ridiculously easy achievements, there would be no reason to venture online when the gameplay is even more painful than the offline experience. While the number of players online during review was scant, the overall experience leaves little hope of a burgeoning fan base.    Different arenas and playing surfaces add little in the way of meaningful variety.   Sure, there are bright colors and crisp particle effects, but charging 800 Microsoft points for a game this shallow and this technically deficient is asking a lot from players without giving much in return.  
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751,A Witch's Tale ,4," This Japanese role-playing game is made of equal parts dull combat and insipid story, A Witch's Tale isn't worth the time it takes to play.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/0/9/2220509-box_awt.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/a-witchs-tale-review/1900-6241889/,neg,"
  Packed with allusions to Alice in Wonderland and defined by a gothic art style, A Witch's Tale is a role-playing game with tons of promise. Unfortunately, that promise goes almost totally unfulfilled. A Witch's Tale's style cannot overcome the realities of its tepid combat and dull story. Even if the combat and the storyline weren't such bores, the main character is one of the most repellant and unlikable protagonists you'll ever encounter. There are too many excellent RPGs on the DS to be subjected to this one.   The well-executed art style is the high point of a low-end game.   You play as a young witch named Liddell who attends a magical academy. She begins the game by deliberately unlocking an ancient evil for no reason other than a desire to see harm done. She's warned by another student not to, and she's warned by a guardian vampire not to, but she just goes ahead while proclaiming a general desire to see some damage. That's not actually the problem with Liddell, though. There's a place for awful wretches as protagonists. Particularly in RPGs and strategy games, playing a bad guy or girl is as easy as making the invading enemy paladins instead of orcs.     The problem with Liddell is that she suddenly flip-flops after she releases this 1,000-year old evil, the Eld Witch, allowing herself to be guilt-tripped into venturing out and taking care of this problem she's created. She spends the entire game undoing the damage done to a half-dozen magical kingdoms, despite the fact that Liddell opened the game with a positive thirst for bloodshed. And while Liddell is out doing good work, she still shoots her mouth off about her desire to trash things. This storytelling attempts to show us a young, powerful witch growing up, but what's delivered is a young brat whose motivations are impossible to sympathize with, let alone understand. The eventual reveal of Liddell's tragic youth doesn't do anything but make her a brat with a sob story.    The magical kingdoms could have pulled the story out of this nosedive if it were actually worth caring about them. You explore each of these six magical kingdoms (and a few special levels) in a linear order, freeing them from the Eld Witch's magic and becoming more powerful as you go. All the world maps display the map itself on the top screen and the play area on the bottom, with each one is designed around one element. Desert, winter, and ocean worlds are in there, as per RPG/adventure game design requirements, but there are a few more interesting choices. The game opens with Candyland, which is where gingerbread men live and chocolate lakes are major terrain elements. Your home base is a plane of shadows, the literal shadows of the Eld Witch's victims a millennium ago. The whole setting is rife with Through the Looking Glass character cameos and style. But despite a few neat concepts, each world is really just a tedious dungeon.   The map occupies the top screen, while you navigate the bottom screen.   To free a world from the Eld Witch's curse, you have to get into its castle and free its ruler, which entails gathering a few items from across that world and forge a key. The ensuing travel sends you across repetitive terrain tiles to fight a paltry few enemy types. Even ""world"" is a misnomer, but there's no good word for ""collection of uninspired and linear map sections."" A sparse assortment of characters occupy each world, but they're little more than signposts to point you to the key items. Once you've heard which direction you have to go, there's no more incentive to talk. The characters certainly don't have anything interesting to say.     Once you're in the world's castle, you fight a boss monster. It's usually a powerful servant of the world's ruler but under the control of the Eld Witch. Once you defeat the boss, the ruler is freed from its unique variant of Eld Witch-inflicted-paralysis. As thanks, the ruler gives you the means to reach the next world. It's not much more interesting than being told ""your princess is in another castle!"" A climactic boss fight could have been worth looking forward to, but the poor game mechanics keep these encounters from being any fun.     Combat pits one to three enemies against Liddell and her (up to two) party members. Her party members are gothic-styled puppets that you find throughout the worlds. However, they do not have storylines to follow or lines to speak, which keeps the story dull as rocks and centered on the awful Liddell. In combat, each puppet has its own hit point pool and a limited selection of abilities. But Liddell's magic point pool is shared through the entire party, and combat is only lost if Liddell dies. So really, Liddell doesn't have party members--she has equipment that grants extra actions and hit points.    Enemy encounters aren't any more stressful than spamming your best attacks.   Combat encounters are random. You can attack physically, attack with magic, use items, or run away. Liddell is specialized in magical attacks, with a wide array of attack spells at her disposal. Each puppet specializes in a specific function, such as physical attacks, healing, or fire magic. Some enemies have specific weaknesses, but combat isn't challenging enough to make that worth consideration. If you simply throw your most powerful attacks and spells every round you'll have earned enough experience to level up by the time you get low on hit points or magic. When you level up, you get all your magic and hit points back. Functionally, you have infinite health and magic pools. It's too simplistic and too easy to be at all rewarding.     Puppets that aren't in your party gain experience as they sit in the background, but this isn't a game where you need to worry about experience levels. Because combat is balanced toward a zero-death play-through, enemies do very little damage and die quickly. The biggest threat most enemies pose is to your patience, with tons of random encounters against enemies who should know better. How many monsters have to die before they all talk as a group to realize that they're one-shot kills and should leave you alone? The boss fights in each castle are simply longer versions of the rest of the game's combat. The boss has no chance of victory, you have no chance of defeat, and the whole affair is just awkward.     A Witch's Tale also features a touch-pad-only control scheme, with no option for traditional D pad and face button controls. Unfortunately, it would be substantially easier to move your character through the game's 2D maps with the D pad. The pedestrian combat of attack, run, item, and magic could be easily handled by the face buttons. Instead, you have to tap your choice of action (and your subchoice for magic and item use) and then drag the selection to your target's icon. You have to do this for every character in every round of every combat, which quickly becomes physically and emotionally tiresome. The touch-screen controls are also imprecise, making it difficult to reliably move from area to area or activate items on the map (by tapping on them, of course). As a bit of insult to injury, there's no need for the touch-pad-only controls because the face buttons and D pad are unused throughout the game.    Each world repeats the same few environments over and over.   The one high point to A Witch's Tale is the game's style, which is a gothic 2D delight. Liddell is a dark-clad heroine of gothic-cosplay hopes and dreams. She has a clear style and a charming habit of whirling her umbrella when you leave her idle. The interpretations of the key cast members of Through the Looking Glass delight, as does a hut-less Baba Yaga (if you're into Russian folklore). Thanks to sticking to 2D for the individual world maps and combat, A Witch's Tale is a crisp look at some reinterpreted fables. Sadly, solid art isn't anywhere near enough to salvage this game, and besides, there's not quite enough art to go around. You'll see plenty of ""new"" enemies who are just old enemies with new color schemes and stat blocks, as well as map elements that are used over again within each world. It's an interesting design that's been dully done.    A Witch's Tale is a disappointing attempt at an RPG. Combat never challenges you, worlds are drearily executed even when they have interesting ideas at heart, and your main character is loathsome. Why waste your time on a deeply flawed RPG when there are so many excellent ones available on the same platform?  
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752,Commandos 2: Men of Courage ,8.8," It can be a difficult game, especially at first, but Commandos 2 truly evokes the intensity of World War II that you've probably seen in film or on television.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/8/9/2218689-box_c2moc.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/commandos-2-men-of-courage-review/1900-2815457/,pos,"
The direct approach isn't always the best approach--this concept lies at the heart of Commandos 2 just as it did with its predecessor, the innovative 1998 real-time tactical combat game that mixed elements of stealth, action, and even puzzle-solving in a World War II setting. Spanish developer Pyro Studios' visually stunning sequel takes the core gameplay of the original, adds some of the features from the 1999 stand-alone expansion pack along with plenty of great new ideas, and ultimately provides a highly challenging, sophisticated experience that's even better than the first. But be warned--Commandos 2 can be as intimidating as its premise makes it sound: You'll command a small group of elite Allied operatives deep behind enemy lines to perform a series of important clandestine missions. At every turn, your commandos will be avoiding the patrols of German or Japanese forces. It can be a difficult game, especially at first, but Commandos 2 truly evokes the intensity of the harrowing depictions of World War II that you've probably seen in film or on television.  Your commandos will engage in multiple high-priority missions.  Actually, the game clearly alludes to the movies that inspired it--even the manual admits that the game has more in common with fictional accounts of the war than with factual ones. If you're familiar with classic World War II movies such as The Guns of Navarone, Bridge on the River Kwai, or even the more recent Saving Private Ryan, then you'll easily catch the references to these films in the game's various missions. As in these and other epic World War II movies, in Commandos 2 you'll have to do such things as rescue Allied soldiers, sabotage powerful sea vessels, assassinate key enemy officials, get your hands on important documents, and much more. The objectives are plentiful and varied and the game will take you to a wide variety of real-world settings, but the overall number of missions in Commandos 2 seems small: There are only 10 main missions in the game. You must play through them all sequentially, even though they aren't necessarily related to one another. In fact, the relative length and difficulty of each mission doesn't necessarily increase from one mission to the next, either.   Make no mistake, though--by any standards, all these missions are huge, and you'll typically spend many hours trying to accomplish the laundry list of objectives in each one. There's also good incentive to replay each mission, since a number of smaller bonus levels can be unlocked if you thoroughly explore the main missions. And the game's two higher difficulty settings noticeably affect the way enemy guards react, requiring you to take different paths to success. But before you can get into the main missions, you must first get through two ""tutorial"" levels, which have to be the most difficult tutorials ever put into a game. These smaller missions provide very little actual tutorial--instead, they take a sink-or-swim approach by dropping you straight into enemy territory, leaving you to learn the hard way about the intricacies of the complex gameplay of Commandos 2. This can make the first hours of play unnecessarily frustrating, so much so that some players may be quickly turned off to the game. That's too bad, because Commandos 2 is well worth the effort it takes to learn.  Each mission area is rendered in exceptional detail.   The colorful, memorable cast of characters at your disposal comes mostly from the previous Commandos games and includes a powerful Green Beret; a deadly marine; a spy capable of disguising himself as the enemy; a sapper, your demolitions expert; a mechanic who can commandeer enemy vehicles; a master sniper; and even a seductive secret agent. New additions to the roster include a fleet-footed thief and an unlikely bull terrier whose barking can distract your foes. You'll also join forces with Allied troops whom you can control in many of the missions.   In the original Commandos game, each character had a limited, very specific set of skills--for example, only the Green Beret and the spy could actually move enemy victims' bodies so that other guards wouldn't see them, which made these two the key players in most missions. In Commandos 2, for the most part, each character has a wider variety of skills and is much more versatile--for example, most everyone can now move bodies out of sight. This gives you many more strategic options during play and, for better or worse, eliminates much of the puzzlelike feel of the original game's missions. The game's sole remaining puzzle element lies in the fact that you can't choose which commandos to bring into a mission and can't choose their starting equipment--you'll just have to make do with what you get.Though Commandos 2 has fewer situations requiring very specific solutions compared with the first game, the gameplay itself is basically similar. As you approach each mission objective, you'll have to take note of all the enemy guards standing between you and victory. There's no fog of war--you can spend lots of time just examining every square inch of the map from your godlike isometric vantage point, observing enemy patrols and looking for openings or weaknesses. Mission objectives generally aren't time sensitive, so you can afford to strategize at your leisure. And though you can take missions at your own pace, the situations always get very tense whenever you're preparing to strike. This constant buildup and release of tension is superbly maintained throughout the game, making it addictive and often exhilarating to play.  Much of the action takes place in closed, fully 3D interiors.  The key to finishing the missions lies in staying hidden while secretly eliminating guards that bar your passage. You'll see enemy guards' line of sight represented with a sweeping colored cone--using the Tab key, you can either check the line of sight of one guard at a time or place a marker anywhere on the map that will show you whether or not that point is visible to any guards. When possible, you can run, walk, and crawl about, as well as swim and drive vehicles. You can climb ladders and ledges. The thief can scale walls, the marine can remain underwater indefinitely, the sniper can take aim from telephone poles, and the Green Beret can climb hand over hand across wires. All characters can hug walls, which makes them less noticeable. You can eliminate guards in a variety of ways--the Green Beret's still adept at knifing them up close, while the marine has perfected throwing his blade, making him perhaps the most lethal of his comrades. Most characters can now punch out guards, who'll come to their senses later--good thing you can tie them up, too. This more-humane approach is rewarded at the end of each mission, where you'll be ranked in various categories based on your performance.   You can't always just maneuver behind unassuming guards and whack them. Characters like the spy come into play when there are far too many guards to handle. The spy and the seductress can divert guards by making conversation--but high-ranking officials may see through their disguises. All characters can use any cigarette packs or wine bottles they find to bait their enemies into sheepishly leaving their posts. Anyone can relieve an incapacitated guard of his firearm and any other goods he might have on him, including the shirt off his back. You'll have even more tricks at your disposal. For example, the sapper uses a wide variety of explosives, along with handy tools such as a wire cutter and a mine detector. The marine has a grappling hook and his trusty portable boat aside from his diving gear. The Green Beret still has his noise-making decoy device from Commandos and can still dig himself underground, out of sight. The thief has some lock picks and an amazing pet rat. All these characters can transfer their equipment amongst themselves, but some equipment--for instance, explosives--can be used only by a particular specialist. Still, a character like the thief might have a much easier time getting his hands on some so that the sapper can put it to good use. All of this means you'll usually have a lot of options on how to proceed, although some courses of action will be easier or more suitable than others.  The scenarios in Commandos 2 hearken to classic war movies.  Sneaking around isn't easy--expect to be detected often. Since one wrong move or one loud noise can mean you've blown your cover, loading saved games thus becomes a regular occurrence. Fortunately, loading times are pretty fast--probably in exchange for the program's whopping 2GB minimum install size. Also, it's important to note that Commandos 2, at least on the normal difficulty level, is more forgiving than the original game. For example, if one of your commandos loses all his health, one of his friends can revive him with a medical kit. And enemies usually won't recognize you as their foe right away if they happen to spot you from far off. You'll see them draw a bead on you and you'll have a few moments to duck out of sight, which makes the game considerably less frustrating and reduces how often you'll have to load saved games.   If you're identified as a foe, the alarm will usually sound and guards will swarm in, making success virtually impossible. Perhaps not entirely impossible, though--a brute-force approach can be fun and even effective, as the enemies' own weapons are even deadlier in your commandos' hands. It's a bit disappointing that guards won't fight back very intelligently and will walk straight into kill zones in droves--but the sheer number of guards you'll typically be up against means fighting head-on simply isn't viable most of the time. Even when they're not shooting at you, the guards can be fairly predictable and not altogether intelligent. This isn't really an issue--being able to roughly anticipate the outcome of your actions and the enemy's response is what makes Commandos 2 a strategy game rather than a crapshoot.The overall difficulty of Commandos 2 is welcome--the missions are as daunting as they should be--but unfortunately, the game's learning curve is very steep, thanks to the sadistic tutorial and the sometimes awkward controls. Seemingly every keyboard key corresponds to a different action in the game. The mouse cursor is conveniently context sensitive, and there are helpful options for highlighting all enemies and objects of interest onscreen, but you'll still need to learn to use different keys for searching bodies vs. picking them up or equipping one type of gun instead of another. Exchanging items between characters is also cumbersome, although thankfully, the game pauses when you access your inventory, at least in the single-player mode.  Nighttime and other special effects all look great.  These interface issues aren't too serious--it just takes a while to come to grips with them. The game does offer clearly labeled clickable icons so that you can alternately use the mouse to choose your actions, but the keyboard is necessary if you're to be efficient. Fortunately, moving your commandos is simple--double-clicking makes them run somewhere instead of walk, and the space bar makes them lie prone. Pathfinding is pretty much perfect--they'll move where you tell them to, though you can't set waypoints, a missing feature that might have let you coordinate simultaneous actions. As it is, you'll find yourself micromanaging one character at a time, though you can move your team all at once.   As you traverse each area, you'll notice one of Commandos 2's impressive features--you can view the main mission area from four different angles, 90 degrees apart. Transitions between angles are instant, and having a choice of perspective is generally convenient but sometimes necessary, as tall buildings and other such objects can obstruct your view. But unfortunately, since there's no compass or any indicator that lets you reorient yourself, switching view angles can be very jarring, and this really takes a while to get used to. Another part of the reason it can be hard to play Commandos 2 is that the mission briefings can be pretty obtuse. Objectives are quickly mentioned in dialogue between the characters, and once the conversation's over, you can only recap by looking at a checklist that gives you a terse description of each objective and that objective's relative location on the map. Again, you'll eventually get used to this system--it's just not as straightforward or clear as it could have been, and the checklists are often convoluted and don't always register your accomplishments correctly. The game would also crash to desktop from time to time, especially while loading saved games.  Notice the Green Beret climbing hand over hand along the wire.  One thing's for sure: Commandos 2 looks incredible. The fully 3D characters are animated beautifully--everything they do looks great, and it's striking how realistically they move about. The huge prerendered mission maps are incredibly detailed. Everything is to scale--gigantic Japanese bombers, incredible aircraft carriers, impressive Allied submarines, and foreboding castles are just some of the many fascinating things you'll get to see. You can even enter into pretty much any building or other large space, where the game switches to a fully 3D depiction of the interior area. Here, you can rotate smoothly to get the perfect angle on the action, and your characters can even peek into and out of windows and doorways to find out what's ahead. The only problem with the graphics is in the zoom feature--you can get a closer look at the action if you like, but then everything becomes horribly pixelated, so the feature's not worth using. The sound in Commandos 2 is nearly as good as the visuals, except for the fact that your characters' very limited responses will quickly grow old. Otherwise, the game's ambient effects are excellent, and its musical score is simply outstanding--it sounds like it's straight out of an action film. It's intense at times and suspenseful at times, and it helps set the tone for each individual mission.   Commandos 2's multiplayer mode lets you attempt all the missions cooperatively, though the host player has to have beaten them in single-player mode first. This option lends even more replay value to a game that will take you many dozens of hours to finish on your own--thus, the GameSpy Arcade program is provided to let you easily find allies to play with.   Like its predecessor, Commandos 2 is a distinctive game with a great design and a lot of impressive features. Yet Commandos 2 is even better than the first--its design is much more focused, the missions are more involved, and the expanded options for your commandos are all excellent. As a result, the game will certainly appeal to most anyone who likes a challenge for both the mind and the reflexes. And what a challenge--you'll feel a real sense of reward and relief after finishing each of the epic missions in Commandos 2.
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753,Soul Reaver 2 ,8.8," Soul Reaver 2, as the saying goes, burns bright, but not as long as you'd like.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/7/1/7/2546-9717.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/soul-reaver-2-review/1900-2821295/,pos,"
The story behind the Soul Reaver series was convoluted before it even began. Set several thousand years after the PlayStation role-playing game Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, the original Soul Reaver put you in the role of Raziel, a vampiric lieutenant in a medieval fantasy world ruled by the vampire protagonist and namesake of the previous game. With us so far? Good. There's more. After being cast into an abyss and mutilated beyond repair by Kain, Raziel awoke many years later to find himself transformed into a being that now survived on soul energy instead of blood, and he was quickly set after his former master and cohorts by a creature called The Elder God who claimed to have rescued and restored him.  Still with us? We're almost done. At Soul Reaver's climax (or anticlimax, as many would call it), Kain eluded your grasp by escaping into the time stream and traveling into the past. In Soul Reaver 2, you travel back in time, as Raziel, to find Kain and discover the answers to all the unanswered questions from the first game. If matters weren't complicated enough already, you now find yourself interacting with characters and plotlines from the original Blood Omen, itself already awash in mysteries, manipulations, and time paradoxes.  Luckily, you don't need to fully understand the complete back story of the series at the outset of Soul Reaver 2 to enjoy it. Throughout the game, the narrative alludes to past events, strings you along with partial answers to its long-standing questions, or provides you with new mysteries to try to uncover. If its lush CG cinemas and in-game story sequences don't fully set the stage for the current events, its text-based timeline fills in the necessary gaps. Obviously, the story is a very important element of Soul Reaver 2. In fact, it's your main motivation to progress in the game. With every new environment that you gain access to and with every puzzle that you solve, you're rewarded with a sequence that either moves the story along or gives you a clear understanding of where you need to go next. As complicated as the storyline might sound, it's very compelling and inspires you to push on through much more than the storylines of games such as Eidos' Tomb Raider series.  The gameplay in Soul Reaver 2 is similar to that of Tomb Raider, but it's much more interesting. You move columns and blocks, line up mirrors, jump, and climb, much like you would with Lara Croft.  But unlike that series' heroine, Raziel has a number of magical and vampiric abilities, such as gliding through the air with his tattered wings and shifting into the spectral realm, a distorted dimension where spirits dwell. The game sends you to the spectral realm automatically if your body incurs too much damage, or you can choose to go there to surmount obstacles found in the material plane. Often, the two realms differ slightly, and a ledge that's too high to jump to in the material realm will be manageable once you shift to the spectral. You're also able to pass through certain barriers such as gates in the spectral realm, a handy trick that you learned back in the original Soul Reaver.    This time, your goals are centered on gaining new powers for your magical energy blade, the Soul Reaver, instead of yourself. This is accomplished by powering up one of four elemental forges, a multiple-step process in each case that can only be carried out by someone possessing your unique abilities. To light the dark forge, for instance, you must gain access to areas where you can open apertures and move mirrors to allow sunlight to come in, and then affix a special mirror directly in front of the forge. Once that's done, your reaver is imbued with dark energy, which you use to power devices that let you access new areas. Each of the reaver's forge powers lasts until you either light up another one or shift into the spectral realm. Since some areas require you to shift into the spectral realm to pass through a gate, solving certain puzzles requires you to figure out a way to relight your forge power (which can be done in certain spots once you've gained it) where you need to use it.  As you might imagine, there's much more variety in the puzzles in Soul Reaver 2 than in the original, which focused primarily on moving blocks around. Anyone who grew weary of those puzzles will find these to be far more interesting, as they should be, since games such as ICO have recently raised the bar for what we expect from them.The combat in Soul Reaver 2 is different from the original as well. You're now able to summon the Soul Reaver at any time, instead of only when you're at full health. The reaver now also devours all the soul energy from fallen foes, and if you use it too much, it will begin to suck soul energy from you. This makes it a powerful weapon that you'll only use when you absolutely need to, opting for hand-to-hand combat or traditional weapons otherwise. Additionally, you're no longer able to sneak up on enemies and destroy them unawares, which makes encounters less cheap but eliminates the stealth aspect of the series entirely. The combat itself is also generally more involved than in the original. Your enemies are much smarter than before and possess special attacks that you must sidestep. While the foes that you come across early in the game are an annoyance that you can avoid, the creatures that you encounter farther in are challenging and fun to fight.    Since story is such an important part of the game, it should come as no surprise that sound plays a large role as well--and Soul Reaver 2 is one of the best sounding games ever made. Its story sequences are voiced by notable voice talents such as Michael Bell, Tony Jay, and Simon Templeman (who reprise their roles of Raziel, the Elder God, and Kain), and they're joined by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Rene Auberjonis, who plays a character who is both new and old to the series. The game's soundtrack and sound effects are equally impressive, with music that's of the same caliber as a Danny Elfman film score and sound effects that noticeably differ depending on the dimensions of the room you're in at the time.  Soul Reaver 2 is also great to look at. At first, it might simply appear to be a high-resolution version of the original, but as you progress into it, you'll notice many effects that stand out. For instance, each new environment looks distinctly different from the last and is populated by different creatures (such as frogs and fireflies in the swamp and rats in the temple), which helps bring the surroundings to life. The story sequences look fantastic, the lighting and water effects are often stunning, and the elaborate architecture of the first game appears here as well. It's true that the game doesn't look quite as impressive on the PlayStation 2 as Soul Reaver did on the PlayStation, and it doesn't take advantage of the PlayStation 2's hardware as some other games have. But, like the original, it has a near-perfect game camera, and that counts for a lot.   Soul Reaver 2 is shorter than the original, and you can beat it in roughly 12 to 14 hours, compared with Soul Reaver's 18 to 20. Attribute some of that to the fact that the game no longer requires you to do as much backtracking. While the original started you in the same place every time you loaded your saved game and required you to teleport to where you were last, much like Banjo-Kazooie, Soul Reaver 2 has save points and checkpoints. The game also lacks any real boss fights, which were a big part of the first Soul Reaver and in some cases took serious time to complete. There are some boss-like final battles in Soul Reaver 2, but, without giving too much away, they don't require any great skill to beat and are, as such, decidedly lackluster. Even beyond those changes, the game is simply shorter. It feels as if the developers had originally planned to have at least one more forge for you to power your reaver with. Whether or not that was actually the case is irrelevant, because its length begs for one more. Soul Reaver 2's DVD-style extra features, which explore the making of the game and even include outtakes from the voice acting sessions, provide some added value, but they don't make up for the game's shorter length entirely.   If there were one main criticism of the first Soul Reaver, it was that it left so many questions unanswered in the end. Soul Reaver 2 answers nearly all the questions from the original Soul Reaver, but it raises as many or more. Those who were hoping to find a resolution to the game's storyline will be disappointed to find another cliffhanger ending in this one.  Soul Reaver 2, as the saying goes, burns bright, but not as long as you'd like. It's an excellent sequel in that its puzzles and combat have evolved to the next level, and it provides a compelling, if not wholly satisfying, storyline. Unfortunately, if it were only a little longer, it could've counted among the best games available on the system.


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754,MechWarrior 4: Vengeance ,8.8," It's a fantastic introduction to the MechWarrior series for those who haven't yet discovered it, and should have enough depth to keep veterans involved for a long time.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/4/5/4/2216454-61ngwt9bm2l._sl500_ss500_.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mechwarrior-4-vengeance-review/1900-2659638/,pos,"
The MechWarrior series is probably one of the most recognizable in computer gaming. Based on the Battletech pen-and-paper tabletop game, the series has become more popular on the computer than the original game ever was. The Battletech license has bounced between developers over the years, but with the fourth game in the series, it has finally come home. MechWarrior 4: Vengeance was developed by designers from FASA, the company that originated the board game and developed the Battletech virtual reality centers, where you could actually sit in a large capsule and play a multiplayer computer game with other similarly outfitted combatants. While MechWarrior 4 has returned to its roots in this sense, the latest action-packed addition to the venerable series is actually a departure from the previous games. It can be dangerous to meddle with a successful franchise, but in the case of MechWarrior 4, the changes are for the better.   The MechWarrior series focuses on combat between mechs, which are giant mechanized robots with human pilots. You control one of these mechs from a first-person (or third-person) perspective. Mechs come in different sizes and are armed with a variety of weapons, but the point is always the same: to blow things up. MechWarrior games are more complicated to play than shooters because of the skill required in piloting the mechs, but they aren't as technically involved as some pure military simulations are. In this respect, MechWarrior 4 does a good job of emphasizing action without compromising the basic military simulation feel. It's a difficult balance, but MechWarrior 4 pulls it off.   The graphics in the game are absolutely superb. A configuration utility lets you choose the exact options that will maximize the frame rate on a given machine, and those with a decent processor and a fast video card can enjoy beautiful terrain, detailed mechs, and spectacular explosions and weapon effects. It's been less than two years since the last game in the series was released, but MechWarrior 4 is still a significant step forward, graphically. The visual impact of the game is heightened by the fact that the mission maps are varied and appropriately decorated with trees, buildings, and the like. This sort of terrain looks much better than the relatively desolate maps of MechWarrior 3. Also, because of the addition of smaller vehicles such as tanks and missile launchers, MechWarrior 4 effectively conveys the sense that you're piloting something really enormous. In short, the graphics really enhance the game.   MechWarrior 4's audio effectively supports the game's stunning visuals with appropriate sounds of missiles launching, lasers, and a range of other effects that sound believably like futuristic weapons. You'll also notice the different sounds made by the mechs as they walk over different terrain like snow, desert, or swamp. If the game's audio has a weakness, it's that your lancemates who accompany you in battle aren't very active on the comm frequencies, and the lack of radio chatter makes the single-player campaign sound somewhat sterile. There are scripted broadcasts during the missions, but they only partially solve this problem. Of course, this isn't an issue in the game's multiplayer mode.   MechWarrior 4's predecessor was criticized because its single-player campaign was limited to about 20 missions, so the campaign was short and forgettable. This new installment has an expanded campaign that contains more than 30 missions in a variety of environments. You play as the sole heir of the House Dresari, and you are tasked with restoring Davion rule in your homeworld of Kentares IV. Starting from a secret base on a moon orbiting the planet, the campaign takes you through arctic, alpine, desert, and swamp environments before ending in a series of titanic clashes in an urban jungle. The cutscenes between missions are acted out fairly well and move the story along nicely, while the various lancemates available to choose from have well-developed personalities and notable strengths and weaknesses in combat. The key to the campaign is salvaging destroyed enemy hardware as you go along so that little by little you get to design new mechs for use in subsequent missions. The pace of salvage ensures that you won't have the really big mechs available to you until you need them. There is a good mix of offensive, defensive, and recon missions during the campaign, all with varied objectives, but none of them are particularly difficult. Experienced MechWarriors might be somewhat disappointed at the ease of the campaign, even on the highest difficulty level.One of the biggest attractions of MechWarrior and the Battletech universe is being able to design your own mech and to test it against those designed by others in the proving ground of multiplayer combat. In MechWarrior 4, those who step into the mech lab to design their own mechs will find one significant change from the previous MechWarrior games: A mech chassis is not quite the blank canvas it was before. Instead, MechWarrior 4 restricts you to choosing from certain weapons on particular mechs by differentiating between types of weapon hard points. For example, lasers can now be placed only on laser hard points, and these hard points are restricted by size as well. A mech may have plenty of space overall but not have the correct type of hard point big enough to mount a gauss cannon.   This is a significant departure from previous MechWarrior games, which essentially let you equip a mech however you wanted as long as you didn't exceed the chassis' maximum weight allowance. Any weapons would fit on your chassis, and the balance was dependent on other players being able to design their own mechs to counter yours. MechWarrior 4's system imposes a certain level of balance from the outset, so some mech designs that worked in previous games won't be available in this installment. This is somewhat similar to FASA's approach in its virtual reality Battletech game, where mech selection was limited to a specified set of designs. But the game still comes down to building a better mech, and there is plenty of room to experiment. Bad mech designs will still be punished by skillful players.   Players who accept this conceptual change will find MechWarrior 4 to be a superlative multiplayer game. Even players using a relatively slow 56k dial-up connection will find themselves able to participate in massive 16-player battles without much noticeable lag. The game's multiplayer support is excellent, and joining a game is as simple as finding a server with a low-enough ping and connecting to it. There are many game types to choose from, with one of the most popular being team attrition, where two teams of mechs score points for killing each other and inflicting damage within a given time limit. Another is team destruction, where the focus is on kills only. There are other popular multiplayer games such as capture the flag and king of the hill, and jumping into a game is easy as long as there are openings in the game session. The multiplayer mode is definitely the high point of MechWarrior 4.   Besides the changes in the way the mechs are constructed, MechWarrior 4's mechs seem somewhat easier to pilot than those in the previous MechWarrior game. While there is definitely a learning curve to MechWarrior 4, new players will find that it's easy to get used to the controls. Nevertheless, combat in MechWarrior 4 is anything but a mindless shootout - it strikes a virtually perfect blend of pure action and simulation. Combat is fast, furious, and intense, but shrewd tactics and skillful piloting will greatly increase your longevity on the battlefield. And even inexperienced players can enjoy the team games, since having support from friendly mechs makes it easier to avoid being picked on - and even the greenest mech pilot can score the occasional kill by hunting down someone who's already been crippled by the opposing team. Regardless of your skill level, since destroyed mechs immediately respawn at full strength, you'll always see plenty of action.   The MechWarrior games have advanced far beyond their roots in the pen-and-paper game to carve out a large following among computer gamers. MechWarrior 4 makes it easier for new players to get involved but still preserves the essential elements that make fighting in these giant robots so intense and so much fun. It's a fantastic introduction to the MechWarrior series for those who haven't yet discovered it, and it should have enough depth to keep veterans involved for a long time.
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755,WWF SmackDown! 2: Know Your Role ,8.8," While it isn't that much different from the last SmackDown!, SmackDown! 2 makes enough incremental changes and upgrades to be significant in its own right.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/7/4/5/2217745-box_wwfsd2.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwf-smackdown-2-know-your-role-review/1900-2655483/,pos,"
It's been less than a year since the original WWF SmackDown! debuted on the PlayStation, and already its sequel, subtitled Know Your Role, is upon us. While it isn't that much different from the last SmackDown!, SmackDown! 2 makes enough incremental changes and upgrades to be significant in its own right.   The list of modes present in SmackDown! 2 is impressive. Outside of the standard one-on-one and tag matches, you can also set up all kinds of different match criteria, such as special referee (where the referee can take sides and really get involved in the match), iron man, ladder match, hardcore (which has a ton of options on its own, such as handicap matches), slobberknocker (an endurance match of sorts that puts you up against several opponents), anywhere fall, King of the Ring, Royal Rumble, survivor, casket match, cage and hell in a cell matches, and table match. There are also a few different ring environments, based on SmackDown!, Raw, and the WWF's various pay-per-view events. There are also several different backstage areas, including locker rooms and the like. Neither the game nor the manual does a good job of explaining some of the more esoteric match types, but a little bit of experimentation quickly clears up the confusion.   The game has a deep roster, and it's up to date with most of the WWF's recent costume and character changes. The Undertaker has his biker motif, and he even appears on a motorcycle in his intro. However, THQ must not have wanted to spend the extra cash to license the Kid Rock song that the Undertaker has been walking out to lately, because he enters the ring to the standard WWF theme song.   The game's main draw is once again its season mode, and THQ has made a few improvements to this mode. The between-match segues aren't perfect, but they're a lot more varied. Now, you'll see things like wrestlers getting jumped by unknown assailants, wrestlers using construction equipment to destroy trucks, and Vince McMahon coming out right before a match and changing the rules. Season mode is still the way to unlock wrestlers, but instead of the new superstars merely appearing at the end of a season, they're introduced in the season's storyline, usually by appearing as a special referee in one of your matches. Gone from the season mode is the ability to turn certain wrestlers on or off as you progress from year to year - the game simply chooses from the entire list of active participants, and it may even create a mystery wrestler from time to time. However, the season mode is not without its flaws. For starters, the game has some fairly horrendous loading times from the menu screens to the game engine, and having to sit through the load time just to watch a two second clip of a wrestler walking back and forth in the ring is a little tedious. Also, instead of being able to quickly skip matches that your wrestler isn't involved in, you now have to sit through a brief match simulation screen, which determines the winner via a system of life bars. One match isn't a big deal, but having to navigate through eight matches and a smattering of cutscenes just to get to the one bout you actually care about gets very old, very fast.   Smackdown! 2 uses the original Smackdown! engine, and its basic gameplay hasn't changed a bit. The game has a very arcade feel to it, with an emphasis on timing and ring movement rather than relying on external factors, such as crowd response or a momentum meter. At times, this gives the game an almost fighting game-like feel.SmackDown! 2's graphics are roughly the same as those of the last game - so they still look pretty fantastic. The wrestler models are realistic in shape and motion, with excellent, lifelike animation. Squint during an intro, and you might be fooled into thinking you were watching an actual human being walk to the ring. The crowd is well animated and sports different signs depending on who is in the ring.   The game almost comes across as a nice complete look at the WWF, but one factor really ruins the mood: the sound. The game's sound is, for the most part, pathetic. Sure, the wrestlers' themes are played during the intro videos and season mode cutscenes, and the in-match sound effects are solid, but the lack of commentary is a glaring oversight that makes the matches not quite as exciting as they should be. When you take into account the fact that inferior wrestling games such as WCW Backstage Assault can deliver quite nicely in the commentary department, the lack of speech in SmackDown! 2 simply comes across as laziness on the part of the developers. Instead of commentary, you're stuck listening to a handful of annoyingly bad guitar tracks while you wrestle. Also, some grunts, screams, and vocal taunts from the actual wrestlers would have gone a long way to make the game sound better.   The create-a-wrestler mode in SmackDown! has given birth to a few different creation modes for SmackDown! 2. You can create your own taunts by selecting from a list of different character motions and piecing them together in a fashion not unlike Agetec's Fighter Maker. Also, managers and stables can be created. The create a pay-per-view mode has returned, and the create-a-wrestler mode from the first game has gotten a lot more interesting. You can keep it simple and select from preassembled parts, or you can really get into it and specify things like eye color, nose shape, tattoos, sleeve length, shirt color, and all the other little bits and pieces you'd expect to find. More and more parts for your created wrestlers are unlocked as you progress through season mode.   WWF SmackDown! 2 presents an excellent package, but you can't help but feel that any real innovations were sacrificed in an attempt to get the game on shelves before consumers started leaving the PlayStation behind in favor of newer platforms. The solid gameplay from the first game is there, and the game has more than enough modes to keep you entertained, but overall, WWF SmackDown! 2 is simply more of the same.
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756,Steel Beasts ,8.8, Steel Beasts combines both simulation and wargaming elements to produce a superb gaming experience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/1/6/8/2215168-steel_beasts.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/steel-beasts-review/1900-2636457/,pos,"
Hard-core military simulations and wargames are generally shunned by large game publishers, who prefer to release games with broader appeal now that computer gaming has evolved from a niche hobby into mainstream entertainment. As a result, the burden of maintaining these genres has fallen on smaller, independent publishers, such as Shrapnel Games. Fortunately, these genres are apparently in good hands if Shrapnel's recently released tank sim, Steel Beasts, is any indication. It combines both simulation and wargaming elements to produce a superb gaming experience.   Steel Beasts is a modern tank simulator that focuses on the US M1A1 Abrams and German Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks. Both of these machines are fully drivable and are reproduced in painstaking detail in the game. In addition to these tanks, Steel Beasts models a number of modern armored vehicles such as the Russian T-80, the German Marder, and a variety of armored personnel carriers. Steel Beasts lets you assume the tank commander's or gunner's seat in the Abrams and Leopard 2, as well as move to an external camera view in each vehicle. The variety of units in the game (including infantry) allows for a wide range of different scenarios. You can't assume the driver's position per se, but as the tank commander you can issue directional orders to your driver, as well as indicate speed.   The level of detail in Steel Beasts is simply amazing and is a result of the fact that while the game was essentially programmed single-handedly by Al Delaney, he received the input and advice of a team of experienced tankers. The end product re-creates the different aspects of modern tank warfare like thermal imaging, laser rangefinding, varied ammunition loads, and gun stabilization in such detail that playing the game is almost as if you've joined the armed forces. Steel Beasts can be controlled with the keyboard and mouse or with a joystick, and although neither one of these completely re-creates the controls in a tank, the overall experience is still impressive. It also illustrates how difficult tank gunnery actually is. Like your real-life counterparts, you'll spend a lot of time on the gunnery range (almost a game in itself) honing your skills.   Steel Beasts is a perfect chance for anyone who claims to be willing to sacrifice visual appeal in exchange for exceptional gameplay to put his money where his mouth is. Steel Beasts is practically a textbook example of the strengths and weaknesses of independently developed and published games: Specifically, the graphics are not 3D accelerated, and they may seem rather drab and uninspired for those accustomed to the latest in hardware-pushing technology. Yet while Steel Beasts looks a bit like a throwback to several years ago, it is by no means ugly, and it actually does well in creating a believable environment. While the effects vary, for the most part Steel Beasts succeeds in presenting a visual environment that complements and enhances gameplay and never detracts from the superb atmosphere.   Steel Beasts isn't just a simulation. It's also a wargame, thanks to its detailed planning phase where you, as the mission commander, choose routes and waypoints for your units and issue contingency orders. Because it's impossible (and undesirable in a sim) to be in control of every tank at all times, the orders you give to your units at the beginning of the battle can have a huge effect on your chances of success. You can order a tank platoon to hold a certain position until it takes a certain number of losses and then to retreat to a holding position that you specify. The dynamics of battle in Steel Beasts are both complex and easy to manage. Sometimes menu selection can be a bit fidgety in the heat of battle when you're trying to attach a unit to your platoon, but for the most part the administrative part of combat isn't a burden.One element in which Steel Beasts excels despite its small production budget is its manual. While many games from independent publishers resort to electronic manuals that you have to print yourself, Steel Beasts comes with a comprehensive 80-page printed booklet that carefully explains not only how the game functions, but why. The descriptions of how various instruments work in an actual tank, and how that has been transferred to the game, make for fascinating reading and provide tremendous insight for those simulation fans hungry for details about their favorite real-world weapons.   Because the game tries to simulate the gunnery functions in the Abrams and Leopard as closely as possible, Steel Beasts is not an easy sim to get into. The learning curve is quite steep, and it consists of far more than just jumping into a tank and cranking up that big gun. Although a tank simulation has to model less technical detail than a flight simulation, staying alive on a modern armor battlefield takes just as much skill as keeping a plane in action. For this reason, newcomers are advised to take advantage of the plentiful tutorials that go step-by-step through the tanks' weapons systems. Even simulation veterans will find themselves cursing their poor gunnery skills until they've had a good bit of practice with Steel Beasts. Getting really good at Steel Beasts takes time, and it is a measure of how rich the gameplay is. Gunnery mechanics, command decisions, and mission planning are all skills that need to be mastered, and that mastery won't come easily. Expect to see your tanks go up in flames a lot.   Steel Beasts would be a failure if all this detail didn't translate into an engaging experience that reflected some of the intensity of battle. The best thing about Steel Beasts is that while all the attention to detail and simplicity of the interface are welcome, it's the thrilling gameplay that you'll remember above all else. Searching for a target in the trees while hoping no one is lining you up in his crosshairs, or getting into a gun duel with a platoon of enemy tanks while hull-down in the open, is so nerve-wracking that it's like very few other simulation experiences available today. You can still fight if your laser rangefinder has been knocked out, and this is where those hours of practice on the gunnery range come in handy. Steel Beasts can get so intense that sometimes you'll want to just sit back and let your battle plan unfold while you jump from vehicle to vehicle in the external camera view and simply watch the outcome of the battle. Because of the power and flexibility of the map screen and mission planner, you can do just that.   Besides the mediocre graphics, Steel Beasts does have a few other drawbacks. Most notably, the game doesn't have any kind of dynamic campaign. While the individual missions do have a fair amount of replay value, thanks to the fact that enemy placement and behavior vary between playings, it's frustrating to have so much tactical control over the battlefield in the planning phase and not be able to extend this to some sort of ongoing battle. Another drawback is the lack of aircraft (either fixed-wing or helicopter), which does detract somewhat from the sense of being on a real modern battlefield, where these weapons are so important and powerful. But the absence of these elements just goes to show how effective the rest of the game is, because Steel Beasts still succeeds at drawing you into the experience.   Steel Beasts also excels as a multiplayer game - when you're facing a human opponent, the combination of advance planning, tactical coordination, and gunnery skill is put to the ultimate test. While the computer's artificial intelligence is very good, nothing quite compares to a head-to-head duel where both your forces and those of the enemy are controlled by live players. This sort of competitive play, which is so effective in flight sims, translates just as well to Steel Beasts' world of ground-hugging metal monsters.   Steel Beasts is only available online through Shrapnel Games and is packaged as a CD and a manual with no box or fancy extras. However, despite its simple appearance, you'll soon discover the game's high quality.
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757,Motocross Madness 2 ,8.8," Motocross Madness 2 isn't the most realistic motorcycle simulation you can buy, but it's definitely one of the most enjoyable.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/4/4/0/2218440-mcm2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/motocross-madness-2-review/1900-2579201/,pos,"
When Motocross Madness hit shelves almost two years ago, gamers and critics alike were taken aback at just how much fun the first racing simulation from Rainbow Studios turned out to be. ""Simulation"" might not be the right word to describe a dirt-bike game with bare-bones setup options and a physics model that lets you pull off jumps and stunts that would leave real-life riders and their bikes piled up in a broken heap - but no matter how you define it, the fact remains that Motocross Madness was one of the most exciting and addictive games of 1998.   The original set a high standard, but for the sequel, Rainbow and Microsoft have managed to deliver a game that's even bigger, badder, bolder, and better in just about every way imaginable. From its eye-popping scenery graphics and breathtaking crash and stunt animations to its impressive array of indoor courses and fully realized outdoor environments, Motocross Madness 2 almost never ceases to impress. Whether you opt for a hair-raising 15-minute session of stunts or a marathon session of online racing against fellow Motocross maniacs, the game always leaves you eager to give it one more go-round.   Some Motocross Madness 2 owners might feel slighted that the game doesn't ship with a course editor, but there should be plenty of courses to keep them happy until Microsoft makes the utility available for download: The game features more than 70 venues, from noisy indoor arenas to snow-capped mountains, sun-scorched deserts, hilly forests, working farms, and more. Cyber-cyclists can choose from more than 20 models of dirt bikes, starting with nimble, quick 125s and moving all the way up to 600cc monsters that can easily prove to be too much to handle for beginners.   It's a bit disappointing that the game only has 12 models of bikes from three real-life manufacturers (Honda, Yamaha, and KTM), but it's probably just as well since you'd be hard-pressed to spot any significant handling differences between comparably sized cycles. The game's garage feature is equally slim: You can adjust front and rear suspension settings and tweak the power curve to deliver more horsepower at various RPM settings, but at the end of the day most gamers will happily use one of the preset configurations for each of the bikes. Besides, most of us would rather spend our time designing custom rider skins (which can be uploaded for all to admire in a multiplayer match), rather than getting greasy in the garage.   The 70 tracks are divided among six single-player events, including the original game's Baja, Freestyle Stunts, Nationals, and Supercross modes, in addition to Enduro (similar to Baja) and a career-based Pro Circuit where your performance determines how soon you'll move up to new bikes and courses. Both Baja and Enduro events are set in the great outdoors on tracks that consist of a series of waypoints - but the path you take from gate to gate is entirely up to you. To finish at the front of the pack, you'll need to log more than a few practice sessions to explore the area in search of shortcuts, but even this is a blast because of all the goodies the developers have packed into each area.   As you burn through the countryside, you'll marvel at low-flying planes, jump over speeding trains, scream past (or slam into) cars and trucks, and dodge slow-moving farm machinery. Add lushly detailed terrain and vegetation, and it's easy to see why you can spend hours just feeding your wanderlust.Freestyle Stunts are incredibly fun whether you pull off a mind-blowing combo of moves or just kick back and relish the spectacular crash animations. Watching your character fly through the air with arms akimbo as the bike hurtles just behind him is a guilty but very satisfying pleasure. There's definitely a bit of a learning curve involved if you want to start racking up big-time scores with multiplier bonuses, but the feeling of satisfaction you get after ripping off two or even three moves while airborne makes it more than worth the effort. The only shortcoming with the Freestyle mode is the game's VCR feature: Although you can switch the view between all the riders and manipulate a user-defined perspective, the lack of rewind or fast-forward capabilities means you can only watch it from start to finish. But at least you can pause.   Probably the most challenging events are the Nationals and Supercross. The 17 Supercross tracks, which are set inside huge coliseums, are just like the ones you see on ESPN or Speedvision - as well they should be, since they were co-designed by professional motocross rider Stephane ""Ron Ron"" Roncada. These M.C. Escher-like circuits will tax all your skills, from the use of suspension spring (using the spring of the rear suspension to gain height and airtime) to the fine art of feathering the brakes and gas through brutally tight curves. Nationals are set in expansive outdoor environments, so there are more opportunities for jaw-dropping jumps and crowd-pleasing stunts.   The original Motocross Madness was one of the most popular games on Microsoft's Gaming Zone, so it's no surprise the sequel is garnering the same enthusiasm. Finding opponents is no problem - hundreds were playing within a day or two of the game's release - and for the most part the game delivers smooth action without anomalies like disappearing or frozen drivers. Those things can still happen occasionally, but the good news is that an opponent's poor connection has no bearing on your performance. About the only time you can expect less-than-stellar multiplayer results is when someone with a midrange system or mediocre Internet connection tries hosting an eight-player game.   Motocross Madness 2 isn't without a few of its own problems. Some will find the sound effects for the bikes - which, along with the smell of those two-stroke engines, is one of the most easily identifiable aspects of real-life dirt-biking - aren't quite as loud and powerful as they were in the first game. The game's first-person view is practically worthless because there's no graphic for the front wheels or handlebars; without them, it's too difficult to correctly position the bike for a smooth landing. And the penalty for going off the track in National and Supercross events is definitely on the harsh side: If you don't turn around and reenter the course at the appropriate spot within five seconds - which is considerably more troublesome than it sounds - you're thrown back on the track where you left for a standing start. While there has to be some sort of penalty for leaving the course, especially if you're trying to gain an unfair advantage, there also has to be a better way of handling ticky-tack miscues.   In addition, more than one user has reported problems with video-card compatibility in Motocross Madness 2, but the majority can be corrected with updated drivers. I experienced no graphic glitches at all when playing with either a TNT2 or Voodoo2, but I did encounter one or two desktop crashes after particularly long sessions in the Stunt Quarry. But on the whole, the game seems relatively bug-free and stable.   Motocross Madness 2 isn't the most realistic motorcycle simulation you can buy, but it's definitely one of the most enjoyable. The game's got a little something for everyone - and with a modest sticker price of around $35, it's also one that just about anyone can afford. If your system can run it, you'd do well to head out to grab a copy. You won't be sorry you did.
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758,Red Faction ,8.8," Although Red Faction rarely outstrips the games it draws inspiration from, the fact that there are times when it shows them up at all is pretty impressive.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/0/9/2216609-box_rfaction.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/red-faction-review/1900-2764152/,pos,"
Welcome to Mars, where violence has erupted at a corporate mining colony outside the jurisdiction of the Earth government. This lawless environment is the setting of Volition's Red Faction, a first-person shooter from a company known most recently for Summoner, an innovative 3D role-playing game for the PlayStation 2 and PC. In Red Faction, Volition attempts to combine the best elements from notable first-person shooters such as Valve's Half-Life, Rare's Perfect Dark and GoldenEye 007, and Raven's Soldier of Fortune into one game. It's heavy on story, has a wide variety of tasks for you to accomplish, and involves combat that's visceral and strategic at the same time. Although Red Faction rarely outstrips the games it draws inspiration from, the fact that there are times when it shows them up at all is pretty impressive.   In a story reminiscent of films like Total Recall, Outland, and Blade Runner and books such as Greg Bear's Moving Mars, you play as Parker, a young man who came to Mars to find himself, only to find himself beaten down. You and the others who've come to the planet to become  miners for the Ultor Corporation--either for the promised riches or just an escape from Earth--are forced to work 10-hour days in harsh underground conditions under armed guard. During your off hours, you're crammed into a room with eight other workers, and you have to time-share bunks with those on the other shift. If that weren't enough, a mysterious plague is causing miners to die on their feet, and Ultor doesn't seem to be too worried. Finally, angers flare and a group of your co-workers rebel against the oppressive guards. You quickly find yourself a notorious fugitive, hunted by the corporation that wants to destroy you and by a rebel underground movement known as the Red Faction, who wants you to join their ranks.    You'll soon get to know members of both groups through in-game story sequences, scripted events, and communication through your headset. Much like in Half-Life (the game to which Red Faction bears closest resemblance), the action doesn't always totally revolve around your character. You'll come in during the midst of battles between rebel and company forces, intercept messages meant for others, and overhear conversations that hint at deeper mysteries behind the plague. Also similar to Half-Life, Red Faction lacks defined levels. Instead, new sections load once you progress far enough.   Espionage and stealth elements pioneered in first-person shooters like GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark are found here as well. In one section, you need to sneak into an enemy complex, disguised but still careful not to let anyone see your face (at this point, emblazoned on a thousand wanted posters). Your only weapon is a concealed and silenced 12mm pistol, which has to be used, if the occasion arises, away from the watchful eye of company security cameras and outside of the course of security personnel making their rounds. There are even a few times when you'll need to drag the bodies of dispatched foes out of sight in order to keep them from being discovered by fellow guards, as in Looking Glass Studios' Thief series.   There are also instances when you commandeer special vehicles, such as submarines, tanks, and gunships, but most of the time the gameplay revolves around straightforward battles with the game's extremely intelligent enemies. You'll gather weapons such as remote mines, automatic shotguns, flamethrowers, riot shields, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and machine guns to help you fight them. Many weapons have auxiliary functions as well. As such, you can dislodge the fuel tank from your flame thrower and toss it like a napalm grenade. Meanwhile, the rail launcher's primary function is much like the railgun from id's Quake series, while its secondary function allows you to see and shoot through walls similar to the Farsight laser rifle in Rare's Perfect Dark.You'll find that the powerful weapons at your disposal make for a respectable arsenal, and they're all quite necessary to defeat the enemies you'll encounter in Red Faction. The game's artificial intelligence even rivals that of Monolith's PC first-person shooter No One Lives Forever. Soldiers duck behind objects, dive into craters recently created by rocket blasts, provide cover fire for each other, and cautiously come after you if you've been hiding out too long. And if the environment lacks objects for your enemies to conceal themselves behind when their clips run out of bullets, they'll often run away yelling, ""Don't shoot! I'm unarmed!"" only to come back once they've reloaded. You'll need to think your attacks through, though--while the combat is as primal as in Raven's Soldier of Fortune, the only thing that running into a room and blasting away like John McClane will get you is a quick trip back to the ""reload your last saved game"" screen. The enemies are that smart.   Though Red Faction has traits similar to many other first-person shooters, it can boast of one fairly significant innovation for the genre. Its Geo-Mod technology lets you destroy a good number of the objects in the game's environments. In fact, many of the environments themselves are destructible. Shoot a rocket at a cave floor and a crater appears. Blast a pipe and hot, damaging steam spills out. Not every area in the game supports this feature (in fact, fewer than you'd like), but when you can take advantage of it, it's fantastic. Early in the game, caverns and tunnels fill the mines, and many walls can be demolished to reach other areas. Sometimes you'll discover a secret area, or your mayhem might unveil a shortcut or a way around a jammed door. The damage you've done to the game's environment after a major battle is a wonder to behold. At times when catwalks or stairs have been accidentally destroyed in a firefight, you can often create stone steps by repeatedly blasting chunks out of the floor or wall. This provides one of those great Metal Gear Solid-type moments when you say to yourself, ""I wish I could do this,"" only find out that, yes, you can.   Your prospects for exploration are enhanced by the destructible environments, but they're not reliant upon them. There are also many different areas and rooms to discover off the main path. For example, you could finish the first section of the game in five minutes or spend half an hour checking out every side path and room in detail. In the barracks level, you'll miss an incredible battle where you use a rocket launcher turret to defend a location against more than a dozen enemies if you don't investigate every room thoroughly.    Red Faction's graphics aren't as clean and crisp as those of other console first-person shooters like Quake III Arena on the Dreamcast, or even those of other games on the PlayStation 2, but they're often quite impressive. The game's excellent textures give a ""grimy construction equipment"" look to the numerous metallic surfaces found in the mines. Many graphical elements of Perfect Dark are present here, but they've been much improved, such as the first-rate shattering glass effects, breakable hanging light bulbs, blast marks, and bullet damage. The developers also managed to keep various sections of the game stylistically unique. Rooms are rarely laid out in the same way or populated by the same objects. Different propaganda posters are displayed throughout game, sporting slogans such as ""Horseplay equals death."" Perhaps most importantly, the game's frame rate is consistently fast, save for a few rare chugs.   The game's soundtrack builds to appropriately cinematic heights during key moments, dropping back down to provide an atmospheric feel at other times. The voice work is well done (save for the nasally Midwestern-toned Red Faction leader, Eos) and adds greatly to the game. In some cases, the voice-overs give you direction by way of instructions from your informant within Ultor. At other times, such as when a corporate announcer commands miners to drop their weapons and proceed to the nearest security center, it simply adds to the reality of your surroundings. The only real problem with Red Faction's music and voice work is an occasional lack of variety. The soundtrack has some excellent songs, but not enough of them for a game this big. Similarly, you hear many of the same voice actors speaking different parts. The sound effects, however, are spot on, from the swoosh of a rocket as it flies past your head to the rumble of falling debris that follows soon afterward.   The game's controls utilize both sticks on the PlayStation 2 Dual Shock 2 controller--the left for movement and the right to look around. The shoulder buttons handle primary and secondary weapon fire, jumping, and ducking, while the triangle reloads, square and circle select weapons, and X opens doors. It's an elegant setup once you get used to it, and it makes for the first shooter since Perfect Dark that you're not going to wish you had a keyboard and mouse for. The interface is very instinctive, and the save and load times are even short.    Though the game's single-player mode is its main focus, Red Faction does have respectable multiplayer options as well. You can either play alone or with a friend against up to six computer-controlled opponents in nine multiplayer-specific arenas. Many of the levels are well designed, and some even hide health power-ups and high-powered weapons behind destructible walls, but none of the maps really stands out within the genre. While the multiplayer mode may lack the configurable bells and whistles found in similar shooters, it's fun and definitely extends the life of the game.   It's tempting not to judge Red Faction solely against other console first-person shooters, since it's brought Half-Life-style gameplay to video game platforms before the ports of Half-Life have arrived for either the Dreamcast or PlayStation 2. Red Faction might suffer the comparison once those games ship, but right now the only similar style of shooter on the market is Acclaim's Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion for the Nintendo 64, which it beats hands-down. And while GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark aren't the same kind of shooters Red Faction is, it's safe to say that fans of those games will find plenty to like here.   Red Faction may draw inspiration from a handful of distinctive first-person shooters, but unlike games that appear to do the same, such as Turok 3, it feels less like it's copying from them and more like the developers are just ""keeping up with the Joneses."" It has its share of drawbacks--an anticlimactic ending that leaves much of the plot unresolved, a dull stretch of gameplay roughly halfway through, and a few moments that are less challenging than they are just painfully hard--yet in the end, it's a great big game with much to explore and enemies tough enough to make it worth playing through more than once. PlayStation 2 owners will be happy to know, in the very least, that there's a great game for their system that they won't be able to finish in a weekend.
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759,Pokemon Blue ,8.8, Pokemon Blue is an excellent RPG for players of all experience levels.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/0/8/7/2849-11087.jpg,GB,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pokemon-blue-review/1900-2537190/,pos,"
A unique mixture of Final Fantasy, Tamagotchi, and rock-paper-scissors gameplay with the collectible edge of Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon is an excellent RPG for players of all experience levels.  You lead a lone adventurer out on his Pokemon journey, a quest to become the champion of the Pokemon League. Before our hero can even enter the Pokemon League, he must win eight badges from the Pokemon gyms scattered around the world. Things are never quite that easy, however, as you will come toe-to-toe with the evil Team Rocket, in addition to a number of other predicaments, on your way to reach the gyms.  An RPG at heart, you scour the globe for Pokemon and capture them with Pokeballs. Once caught, Pokemon can then be added to your party and trained a la standard RPG characters. As they develop, the Pokemon will become stronger and learn new abilities. Many will evolve into a different Pokemon once they reach a certain level or if you use a special item on them. The game's variety and customization is virtually unlimited, making no two run-throughs of the game the same.  You can carry up to six Pokemon with you at a time. In battle, only one of the beasts may be deployed, but monsters can be swapped at any time. The strategy lies in selecting the right types of Pokemon for each battle - every Pokemon is classified as one of 15 different types of Pokemon, adding the rock-paper-scissors aspect: Fire Pokemon are weak against water attacks, flying Pokemon are strong against bug Pokemon, etc.  One of Pokemon's most unique and endearing aspects is its multiplayer nature. Pokemon can be traded or battled with friends via the link cable, adding tons of long-term play incentive. Additionally, those who buy only the Red or Blue versions of the game can't capture all 150 Pokemon without trading - each cart contains 139 Pokemon. As extra incentives, some Pokemon don't evolve unless traded, and traded Pokemon gain experience 50 percent faster than normal.  Under its cuddly exterior, Pokemon is a serious and unique RPG with lots of depth and excellent multiplayer extensions. As an RPG, the game is accessible enough for newcomers to the genre to enjoy, but it will entertain hard-core fans as well. It's easily one of the best Game Boy games to date.
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760,Warriors Orochi ,4, Three Kingdoms China meets Sengoku Japan in this fan-service-powered snooze fest.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/7/3/2211573-box_worochi.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warriors-orochi-review/1900-6188819/,neg,"
  If the Dynasty Warriors franchise is to be commended for anything, it should be for its utter unwillingness to evolve--it has absolutely perfected the art of remaining static in a landscape of constant flux. Warriors Orochi continues this long and dubious practice by melding the worlds of Dynasty Warriors with its Japanese offshoot Samurai Warriors, and the result is a game that the faithful it caters to time and time again will surely enjoy immensely. If, on the other hand, you do not enjoy brainless button mashing, laughably one-dimensional gameplay, and a severely aged combat system, you're better off running for the hills.   This is what the entire game looks like.   In case you've somehow managed to avoid the Warriors games, the Dynasty series takes historical characters from China's Warring States period, dresses them up colorfully, gives them comically oversized weapons, and makes them kinda-sorta-not-really re-create famous battles. Samurai Warriors has the same premise, only it takes place in Japan's Sengoku period instead. In Warriors Orochi, the evil, time- and space-warping serpent-sorcerer Orochi takes the heroes and locales from both series and brings them together, making the classic blunder of getting involved in a land war in Asia. Why? He's bored and wants to ""test himself"" in battle against these legendary warriors, because, presumably, playing with their action figures wasn't satisfying enough.      Thus begins the biggest, most unapologetic fan service crossover since Kingdom Hearts. There are four story campaigns to play through, each of which starts you off with a different group of characters that have a different ultimate goal, but unless you're well versed in the interpersonal relationships between the various characters as previously established (or to a much lesser extent, the actual history behind them), these stories will likely be incomprehensible to you. But that's OK, because they're all simply excuses to justify sending you wading hip-deep through hundreds upon hundreds of useless, nameless goons anyway.    At its heart, this is what Warriors Orochi is all about: the wanton destruction of thousands of hopelessly outgunned and outclassed lives. You're so much more powerful and well defended than the average soldier with a shelf life of zero that combat is an experience akin to shooting deer in a barrel. From beginning to end, battles are nothing more than thumb-tiring button mashers with little to no variation. Your running kill count at the end of a mission will usually float around the 500 mark, and though initially this is a fun power trip, once you realize how shallow and repetitive it is, the affair will quickly sour.    To its credit, Warriors Orochi tries to mix things up just a tiny bit. First off, it employs a three-person team system that lets you mix and match  the game's 77 unlockable characters into a party of three, but this feature is ultimately unsatisfying and ill-implemented. You control only one of your warriors at a given time, and when you change one out for another, they magically swap places. The others don't otherwise assist you or even appear on the battlefield, and there aren't any combo attacks or tag-team moves. The other small difference between Orochi and its predecessors is the pre-battle setup, which lets you distribute bonus experience among your characters or spend it upgrading your weapons through a simple fusion system. Simply pick two weapons, and with their powers combined you form a new one.    Outside of the story campaigns, there is the obsessive-compulsive catch-'em-all aspect of recruiting all the warriors and unlocking all their gallery art and weapons, and there's also a Free mode that lets you play through any of the game's missions with any team of warriors you choose. You can also play two-player co-op with a friend via ad hoc Wi-Fi should you find a willing participant.   Comic-book cutscenes like this are equal parts silly and creepy.   Warriors Orochi's graphics are uneven. The main characters are reasonably well detailed and animated, especially in their overly dramatic attacks, but the peons that make up the overwhelming majority of your enemies are not--the fact that there are only about five different types of enemies throughout the game is also a bit disconcerting. The environments are similarly drab and overused, and every swamp, grassland, and building looks nearly identical to every other swamp, grassland, and building. The few cutscenes that do appear are nicely animated, but the comic-book-style scenes peppered throughout are hilariously awful and goofy. Voice acting is as terrible as you might expect, and the game is accompanied by a ridiculous techno soundtrack.    When it's all said and done, if the thought of battling both Lu Bu and Keiji Maeda in the same game makes you squeal with delight, Warriors Orochi was definitely made for you. But everyone else is well advised to keep their distance from this pointless and frequently unfun button masher.     
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761,Wing Commander Arena ,4," Wing Commander Arena has the right idea, but the gameplay and presentation come together to form an extremely dull experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/9/3/5/2212935-box_wca.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wing-commander-arena-review/1900-6175758/,neg,"
  Wing Commander Arena is another one of those new games with an old name that's different enough from the older games to anger the old fans, while being so underwhelming that new players will probably think that the whole series was just as lame. So it's starting out in sort of a no-win position, but the game's lackluster gameplay and generic presentation certainly don't do it any favors, either.    Arena is a stripped-down, multiplayer-focused shooter that puts you at the controls of one of several ships, each with differences in weaponry and statistics. The game is played from a third-person, behind-the-back view of your ship, and you can fly around with the left stick, make evasive maneuvers with the right, and fire weapons using the shoulder buttons and triggers. Despite looking like space, the game actually takes place on a flat plane. This basic action is broken out into a few different modes, both online and off. The main and most obvious of the bunch is a basic free-for-all deathmatch-style mode, where you attempt to blast any ship in sight while avoiding the same fate. The other modes have you pairing off for duels, teaming up with other players to take out enemy capital ships, and so on. There are plenty of power-up items sprinkled around each level, giving you opportunities to replenish your missiles, regenerate shield energy, or temporarily boost your ship's abilities.   Wing Commander Arena will have you stifling yawns within the first 15 minutes of play.   Beyond the differentiation between team and nonteam games, the different modes all feel sort of the same. Each mode is played on its own level, which is sort of weird, and in the end means that there aren't enough different arenas in the game to hold your interest. The simple gameplay allows for a little bit of strategy, but again, not enough to keep you coming back for very long, especially in the offline modes, which are particularly boring.    The presentation is marred by a bad piece of music that plays whenever you're in game. It's repetitive, and on top of that, it doesn't even loop properly, making each restart of the tune noticeable. The sound effects are pretty standard and the graphics are plain and, in a few spots, pretty dull.    While the concept of a 16-player arcadelike space shooter is definitely a good one, the various aspects of Wing Commander Arena come together in a very jejune way, leaving behind a husk of a game that doesn't have enough variety or thrills to keep you excited for more than one or two matches. Give the demo a spin if you're innately curious, but you're probably better off not wasting your money on this one.  
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762,The Golden Compass ,4, The Golden Compass is just another family-friendly film cash-in with few redeeming qualities.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/1/4/2209614-box_tgc.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-golden-compass-review/1900-6184006/,neg,"
  The Golden Compass owes a lot to 2005's The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Narnia, it is a game based on a film based on a fantasy novel, and it even goes so far as to summarily lift hunks of gameplay directly from the older title. Yet for some reason, the designers picked all of the bad stuff while leaving behind the good. The result is a muddled mishmash of gameplay ideas that lacks focus and certainly lacks any sense of fun.   Hmm. They must be talking about a different story.   If you aren't familiar with the accompanying film, or the Philip Pullman novel on which it's based, you will probably be rather confused by the game. As Lyra Belacqua, you seek to save your friend Roger from the grasp of evil folkloric kidnappers known as Gobblers. Lyra is accompanied by her daemon Pantalaimon (or Pan, for short), who is the physical embodiment of Lyra's soul, and she is occasionally joined by a hulking armored polar bear named Iorek. Lyra also possesses an instrument called an alethiometer--the golden compass of the title--which can answer any question that she asks it. You'll figure out what's going on in bits and pieces and with the help of short clips from the Golden Compass film. Yet you'll likely never care about Lyra or her companions, and important chunks of exposition are completely glossed over, leaving you wondering what's going on or why you should care.    Gameplay is a mess. There are a lot of ideas at work here, but none of them pan out all that well. First up: exploration. You spend a lot of time roaming about doing busywork, particularly in an insanely long and boring sequence on the Gyptian vessel. The highlight during this level is--get ready for it--mopping the deck. In other levels, these tasks may have you hiding under furniture or throwing snowballs, but none of them are interesting, and they are generally sliced up by cutscenes and other gameplay mechanics.    Platforming ushers in more mediocrity. Granted, there are some nice ideas here. Lyra can use Pan as a grappling hook and latch on to poles for simplified Prince of Persia-inspired swinging, and the duo can glide for short distances. There are also beams to keep your balance on as you cross, though these moments seem to take forever, since Lyra walks across them so slowly. The controls are super-loose, which is deadly on the dock level--one of the dumbest platforming sequences ever dreamed up. Not only do the slippery controls make Lyra a pain to maneuver, but you can't manually control the camera, which makes it impossible to judge distance. Even worse, the camera has a tendency to move on its own in the middle of jumps and balancing acts. Expect to reload this level countless times, while cursing the designer who created it.    The Golden Compass relies heavily on timed button sequences, already one of the most overused mechanics in modern-day games. Attacked by a giant bee? Press some buttons (or jerk the Wii Remote in the appropriate directions, if you'd rather) in the right order. Need to push over an ice bridge? Press or jerk some more. Even some boss fights are won in this manner. There is some action buried in here, though it's found mostly in the game's first and final levels. Playing as Iorek, you'll paw through three types of enemies: witches, Tartars, and wolves. Once you build up enough rage by using standard melee attacks, you can pound the ground to do extra damage. You can also grab an enemy and fling it around, but for the most part, you can defeat this tiny assortment of foes by mashing a single button or haphazardly swinging the Wii Remote around. Some levels are capped by boss fights, which aren't hard, but thanks to the lack of player camera control and the shoddy hit detection, they're plenty annoying.    There are still more elements at play. Sometimes Lyra will try to deceive other characters, which requires you to perform a set of minigames. Some of these games function properly, at least, such as one where you push the Nunchuk's analog stick in a whack-a-mole variant. Others are simply terrible and are so poorly explained that you may have no clue how the minigames even work the first few times they appear. There's also the matter of the golden compass itself. Lyra can ask it questions, and the accompanying minigame consists of keeping a reticle centered on the compass with the analog stick while executing (you guessed it!) another timed button-pressing sequence. It certainly doesn't help that developer Shiny wasted a good number of opportunities to use the Wii's motion-sensing capabilities in these games. A few tasks, such as rock throwing and other quick sequences that require aiming, put the remote to brief use. Yet for the most part, minigames are performed using buttons and the analog stick, leaving the platform's unique potential woefully unused.    Roughly translated, this means 'don't play this game.'   Even the visuals can't capture the fantasy magic of the film or novels. Animations and environments are crude, textures are muddy, and there is absolutely no imagination to be found in the bland art design. There are also some weird graphical bugs, such as blinking polygons and pixelated seams. Additionally, the Wii version suffers from frame-rate slowdown when there is a lot of onscreen activity, and the game pauses from time to time when the machine accesses the disc. Sound fares no better. The musical score is fine, if unmemorable, but most sound effects are either embarrassingly clunky or missing entirely. The voice acting is serviceable, but there are times when the same character will talk over his or her own dialogue.    Initially, the wide variety of gameplay elements make it seem like there's going to be a lot to do in The Golden Compass. Unfortunately, most of these facets are too repetitive, too frustrating, or too boring to keep anyone's interest, young or old. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the game is just the latest in a string of movie tie-ins that sacrifice good gameplay for the sake of a quick buck.    
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763,Boogie ,4, Boogie's transition from the Wii to the PlayStation 2 makes an already mediocre game even worse.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/6/1/3/2210613-938735_85830_front.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/boogie-review/1900-6183219/,neg,"
  Boogie was EA's first game built from the ground up for the Wii. It wasn't very good on the Wii and now it's on the PlayStation 2 where, once again, it's not good. The game's premise, which has you sing, dance, and even create your own music videos is an interesting one. However, an interesting premise does not necessarily make for a great game. Such is the case with Boogie. Now that motion controls are out of the picture, dancing is even less interesting than before, the karaoke still doesn't work very well, and the tracklist isn't likely to appeal to the younger audience the game is geared toward.   Don't try to understand what's going on, it will just make your head hurt.   There are five playable characters in Boogie, each with five playable chapters and a nonsensical storyline. While the characters may look interesting, their stories certainly aren't, thanks in no small part to the cutscenes, which aren't animated and have no voice acting. Some chapters will have you sing, but most of them are dance only. If for whatever reason you don't want to sing, you can play without a microphone and the karaoke chapters will have you dancing instead. Other than earning credits to unlock a few songs and some new clothing accessories, there's no point in playing the story mode. Once you've unlocked the songs, you can choose to either sing or dance to them from the main menu. With the game's music video feature, you can record a singing or dancing performance, as well as spice it up with camera cuts and a limited number of effects. The editing tools are simple and easy to use, but you can still get some nice results with minimal effort.    Boogie starts off with a tutorial that gives you the basics on getting down. You move your character around the level with the right analog stick. All you have to do to dance is tap the square, circle, or X button in time to the music. What happens onscreen loosely correlates to the movement of the left analog stick, so if you move it down, your character will usually do a move that involves crouching or spinning on the floor. If you press to the right, your character will perform a move to the right of the screen. You'll want to avoid repeating the same moves too many times in a row because if you do, your score will go down. But this isn't much of a problem because you can string together combos with ease by performing consecutive moves on the beat. There's also a visual indicator on the screen to help you stay in time to the music. The more moves you time properly in a row, the higher your score, and as your score increases, so does your boost meter. Once you've obtained a bit of boost, you can hold down the L1 button to trigger a series of arrows at the bottom of the screen. If you follow the pattern correctly with both analog sticks at the same time, your character will perform a special dance move that will net you big points. The boost meter will also let you perform poses. All you've got to do to strike a pose is hold down the R1 button and move the left analog stick to line up the onscreen cursor with the target.    That long explanation can be boiled down to this: Tap some buttons, flick the analog stick around, and you'll win. On the Wii, it was possible to have at least a little bit of fun if you got out of your chair and really danced while you moved the controller, but that doesn't work here. Even on the hardest difficulty setting, the game is absurdly easy and requires minimal skill or rhythm. There's a party mode where you can have a dance-off with a friend, but the addition of freezing and reversing icons doesn't do much to make it any better than the single-player game.    Dancing is only half of Boogie's gameplay because you'll also get to show off your pipes in karaoke mode. It's quite similar to the Karaoke Revolution and Singstar games. The lyrics run across the bottom of the screen and the pitch is represented by horizontal bars. A cursor shows the pitch of your voice relative to the actual song, and all you have to do is hit the right notes to earn points. Actually, that's not true at all because the karaoke part of the game is essentially broken. Like other karaoke games, you don't have to sing the proper words--that's nothing new. What is new, however, is that you don't even have to sing. You can whistle bird calls, tap the microphone, blow into it, rub it on your shirt--anything you can think of--and still pass. Basically, if you're alive and breathing, the game thinks you're the next Frank Sinatra.    Nearly every song in Boogie could be considered a karaoke staple. But it's an odd, mostly older mix of songs for a game that's seemingly geared toward the younger crowd. Only a handful of songs, such as ""Fergalicious,"" ""SOS (Rescue Me),"" ""Let's Get it Started,"" ""Don't Cha,"" a few Britney Spears songs, and a couple of other tunes are from the past 10 years. The rest of the songs are much older, and there's an emphasis on '70s hits, such as ""ABC,"" ""Brick House,"" Celebration,"" ""Le Freak,"" or ""Love Rollercoaster."" All of the songs sound like they're covers and slightly remixed (and censored) versions of the original, so if you're looking for the real songs, you'll want to look elsewhere. Many of the songs sound like they've been shortened a bit, which is understandable if parts with no singing are cut out. But some songs, such as ""Dancing Machine,"" still have extended sections with nothing to do. You can use the controller to dance while you sing, but you're not awarded any points for it, so there's little point.   If you're breathing, you're a karaoke star--at least from Boogie's point of view.   At least Boogie is a nice-looking game, though it's not as nice-looking on the PS2 as it was on the Wii thanks to the omission of progressive scan and the addition of some washed-out colors. The character designs are well done and fit the personality of each character. Individual dance moves are animated nicely, but they don't always flow well from one move to the next, and it would be nice if there were more variety. The levels aren't particularly original, but their settings go along with the story, while their bright colors and cartoonlike style fit right in with the rest of the game.    Boogie managed to hide some of its flaws on the Wii because the singing and dancing could be fun if you really got into it. Because there are no motion controls on the PlayStation 2, there's nowhere for the game's lousy controls and bevy of other flaws to hide. Thus, most people will likely see Boogie as a missed opportunity. It's far too easy, the tracklist isn't very good, karaoke is straight-up busted, and the dancing just isn't much fun. That's not what people are looking for when they spend $50 on a game.  
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764,Napoleon Dynamite ,4," It's unlikely that many were begging for a Napoleon Dynamite-themed minigame collection, and those few who were will be disappointed by this shabby effort.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/2/9/2220429-box_ndtg.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/napoleon-dynamite-review/1900-6184310/,neg,"
  It's difficult to imagine a less needed game than Napoleon Dynamite: The Game, and yet, here it is. This handheld collection assembles a series of less-than-stellar minigames and builds them around a number of wacky characters and situations from the 2004 oddball cult-classic comedy film. This is the sort of game you'd see quickly churned out to coincide with a film's release or at least some kind of DVD release. That's not the case here. The developers at 7 Studios and publisher Crave decided that more than three years past the film's height of popularity was the right time to strike with a game adaptation of Napoleon Dynamite. That error in timing might have been forgivable if the games were even halfway amusing, but sadly, no such luck.   In the parlance of our hero, gosh this game is flippin' stupid.   For Napoleon Dynamite, the developers cobbled together a collection of minigames that seem like they were cribbed from the most mediocre cell-phone games imaginable. There's the ""toss the object farther than someone else"" game, the half-baked target shooting game, the idiot-simple bowling game, the occasional attempt at a scrolling shooter, and, of course, the requisite dancing game with PaRappa the Rapper-style mechanics.     The games occasionally break out of the realm of pure mobile-phone-download mediocrity, but these attempts tend to be aggressively unpleasant as opposed to merely boring. The few bouts where Napoleon takes on the role of a Rex-kwan-do master, fighting a lot of hapless ninjas and such, are so bereft of coherency that all you need to do is mash random buttons and most likely you'll end up a winner without even realizing it--though ""winner"" in this case is definitely relative. Then there are the occasional awful sports games, like the hopelessly dull tetherball game and the world's most awkward dodgeball game not to feature Stephen Root in bondage gear. Dodgeball is especially bad. You're partnered up with your best pal, Pedro, but you can control only one player at a time, and the CPU player is terrible at dodging enemy attacks. The good news is that you can use the same dashing jump attack and hit an opponent square in the face 19 out of 20 times.     Dodgeball is hardly the only game to suffer from problems like these. The PSP version of Napoleon Dynamite offers about 30 minigames, and the DS version includes around 25. Out of these, maybe two or three are enjoyable. That's not exactly a great ratio. It's worth noting that the PSP and DS versions of the game offer essentially identical minigames, though the mechanics tend to differ slightly based on each system's control mechanics. However, the differences are slight, and the problems are almost always the same across the board.     The game tries to tie all these minigames in to a storyline, which involves Napoleon's grandmother's beloved llama, Tina, escaping her pen, Napoleon's uncle Rico and brother Kip going into business selling anti-aging vitamins, and Pedro's sister having her quinceanera. A bunch of memorable gags and lines from the film are brought into the proceedings, but none of it works, largely because there's barely any audio in the game. Seeing a text bubble of Napoleon saying ""Gosh!"" or, really, any of Pedro's deadpan dialogue is roughly one-eighth as funny as hearing the actors say the lines out loud. There are a few assorted sound samples chucked into the PSP version (with markedly fewer available in the DS version), but they're just lines randomly uttered during competition, and they get repeated way too often.   Never before has dodgeball been so dull.   The PSP and DS games look relatively similar to one another, with a similar style of cut-and-paste animation for the minigames and story sequences. It's not unlike what the Nacho Libre DS game did back in 2006, with photos of the actors cut into pieces and reassembled to create exaggerated cartoon versions of the characters. The PSP version actually looks pretty neat at times, though the DS version lacks a lot of the PSP version's animations, mostly during the story bits, so you tend to get stuck with a lot of still frame shots. The DS version also lacks multiplayer of any kind, whereas the PSP version does have ad hoc and download multiplayer options for up to two players--not that you'd want to play any of these games with a friend, but hey, at least the option's there. The PSP version has its own problems to balance things out a bit--the sheer number of load times in the game is overwhelming. None of the loads on their own are especially long, but those short loads pop up in between every single screen, from a still-framed dialogue bit to an actual game, so you find yourself sitting around waiting a great deal.    Napoleon Dynamite: The Game is, in a word, irrelevant. Hardcore fans of the movie won't find much content here that hasn't been recycled from the film (and in less funny fashion, at that), and the gameplay isn't anywhere near fun enough to hold anyone's attention for long. If you were to ask the eponymous hero what he thought of this game, he'd probably say something along the lines of, ""This is pretty much the worst game ever made."" Maybe it's not quite that bad, but it's a poor effort all the same.  
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765,Napoleon Dynamite ,4," It's unlikely that many were begging for a Napoleon Dynamite-themed minigame collection, and those few who were will be disappointed by this shabby effort.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/2/9/2220429-box_ndtg.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/napoleon-dynamite-review/1900-6184311/,neg,"
  It's difficult to imagine a less needed game than Napoleon Dynamite: The Game, and yet, here it is. This handheld collection assembles a series of less-than-stellar minigames and builds them around a number of wacky characters and situations from the 2004 oddball cult-classic comedy film. This is the sort of game you'd see quickly churned out to coincide with a film's release or at least some kind of DVD release. That's not the case here. The developers at 7 Studios and publisher Crave decided that more than three years past the film's height of popularity was the right time to strike with a game adaptation of Napoleon Dynamite. That error in timing might have been forgivable if the games were even halfway amusing, but sadly, no such luck.   In the parlance of our hero, gosh this game is flippin' stupid.   For Napoleon Dynamite, the developers cobbled together a collection of minigames that seem like they were cribbed from the most mediocre cell-phone games imaginable. There's the ""toss the object farther than someone else"" game, the half-baked target shooting game, the idiot-simple bowling game, the occasional attempt at a scrolling shooter, and, of course, the requisite dancing game with PaRappa the Rapper-style mechanics.     The games occasionally break out of the realm of pure mobile-phone-download mediocrity, but these attempts tend to be aggressively unpleasant as opposed to merely boring. The few bouts where Napoleon takes on the role of a Rex-kwan-do master, fighting a lot of hapless ninjas and such, are so bereft of coherency that all you need to do is mash random buttons and most likely you'll end up a winner without even realizing it--though ""winner"" in this case is definitely relative. Then there are the occasional awful sports games, like the hopelessly dull tetherball game and the world's most awkward dodgeball game not to feature Stephen Root in bondage gear. Dodgeball is especially bad. You're partnered up with your best pal, Pedro, but you can control only one player at a time, and the CPU player is terrible at dodging enemy attacks. The good news is that you can use the same dashing jump attack and hit an opponent square in the face 19 out of 20 times.     Dodgeball is hardly the only game to suffer from problems like these. The PSP version of Napoleon Dynamite offers about 30 minigames, and the DS version includes around 25. Out of these, maybe two or three are enjoyable. That's not exactly a great ratio. It's worth noting that the PSP and DS versions of the game offer essentially identical minigames, though the mechanics tend to differ slightly based on each system's control mechanics. However, the differences are slight, and the problems are almost always the same across the board.     The game tries to tie all these minigames in to a storyline, which involves Napoleon's grandmother's beloved llama, Tina, escaping her pen, Napoleon's uncle Rico and brother Kip going into business selling anti-aging vitamins, and Pedro's sister having her quinceanera. A bunch of memorable gags and lines from the film are brought into the proceedings, but none of it works, largely because there's barely any audio in the game. Seeing a text bubble of Napoleon saying ""Gosh!"" or, really, any of Pedro's deadpan dialogue is roughly one-eighth as funny as hearing the actors say the lines out loud. There are a few assorted sound samples chucked into the PSP version (with markedly fewer available in the DS version), but they're just lines randomly uttered during competition, and they get repeated way too often.   Never before has dodgeball been so dull.   The PSP and DS games look relatively similar to one another, with a similar style of cut-and-paste animation for the minigames and story sequences. It's not unlike what the Nacho Libre DS game did back in 2006, with photos of the actors cut into pieces and reassembled to create exaggerated cartoon versions of the characters. The PSP version actually looks pretty neat at times, though the DS version lacks a lot of the PSP version's animations, mostly during the story bits, so you tend to get stuck with a lot of still frame shots. The DS version also lacks multiplayer of any kind, whereas the PSP version does have ad hoc and download multiplayer options for up to two players--not that you'd want to play any of these games with a friend, but hey, at least the option's there. The PSP version has its own problems to balance things out a bit--the sheer number of load times in the game is overwhelming. None of the loads on their own are especially long, but those short loads pop up in between every single screen, from a still-framed dialogue bit to an actual game, so you find yourself sitting around waiting a great deal.    Napoleon Dynamite: The Game is, in a word, irrelevant. Hardcore fans of the movie won't find much content here that hasn't been recycled from the film (and in less funny fashion, at that), and the gameplay isn't anywhere near fun enough to hold anyone's attention for long. If you were to ask the eponymous hero what he thought of this game, he'd probably say something along the lines of, ""This is pretty much the worst game ever made."" Maybe it's not quite that bad, but it's a poor effort all the same.  
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766,Need for Speed ProStreet ,4, The Need for Speed series takes a giant step backward with ProStreet for the PSP.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/4/8/6/30734-86486.jpg,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/need-for-speed-prostreet-review/1900-6186523/,neg,"
  It has been a little over three months since Need for Speed ProStreet hit consoles, and now it has finally made its way to the PlayStation Portable. Sort of. The only thing the two versions have in common is their name. The PSP incarnation, unfortunately, is an uninteresting mishmash of stale events, dodgy controls, and bland presentation.    How the driving aids are supposed to help you when they make it harder to see the road is anyone's guess.   For starters, ProStreet is light on game modes. You can play a quick race, start a career, or play wirelessly via ad hoc or online. We were never able to find more than three people online at a time, and none of them ever wanted to play. Career mode contains the bulk of what little value the game has.     In career mode your goal is to go from a relatively small fish in street racing to the best driver in the scene. Career mode's structure is about as unoriginal as you can get. From one of the blandest menu screens possible, you select one of the 13 or so tracks you've unlocked and then choose from a handful of race types, all of which are Need for Speed staples: knockout, speed trap, circuit, and time attack. There's very little variety, no drag racing, and nothing new to hold your attention. As is always the case in Need for Speed games, you can use your winnings to buy new cars or upgrade existing cars' equipment. There aren't many ways to upgrade your ride, but there are 32 cars available, which is a solid number.    Where the PSP differs from the console versions is that you can choose a persona, which is just fancy marketing speak for choosing a difficulty level. The lower difficulties have a number of driving assists enabled, while the highest difficulty has no assists but earns you more money per event you complete. You're free to adjust the difficulty setting before each race, and you can redo races on harder difficulties to earn more cash. Another PSP-specific feature is driver intuition--yet another fancy term for something that has been around in racing games for years. It's an onscreen display that tells you when you're going too fast for a turn and the best line to take through it.    You may be confused as to why an arcade racing game would have so many driving aids. The reason is simple: The controls stink. The first group of vehicles handle more like boats than cars. You can try to feather the analog stick to gently navigate turns, but it's of little use when your car steers like an out-of-control aircraft carrier. Your vehicle can sustain damage that you'll have to pay cash to repair after each race. This is a real treat, given how easy it is to run into a wall. The rides you can purchase later in the game control a bit better--as do many of the cars once they've been fully upgraded. But you're not likely to want to spend the time necessary to unlock them, especially because in most of the events you earn money only for finishing first. To top things off, races are generally rather boring since you're racing against only three other cars, each of which is driven by the brain-dead CPU.    ProStreet's presentation is just as uninteresting as the rest of the game. The tracks and cars look OK, but they're not especially detailed and there's a lot of aliasing on both. Given there are only four cars on the track at a time, it's reasonable to expect them to look better than they do. It seems the developer's plan was to skimp on visual details and focus on delivering a great sense of speed. One problem: They forgot the whole ""great sense of speed"" part. Even a lousy blurring effect can't make these cars look like they're driving fast enough to get a ticket in a school zone. The music and sound effects are as dull as everything else and aren't worth mentioning further.    This car is nearly as big a wreck as the game itself.   Need for Speed ProStreet for the PSP is chock-full of mediocrity. There's not one particular thing it does well, and it feels like nothing more than an egregious attempt to cash in on the Need for Speed name. There are so many other, better racing games available for the system that there's no reason at all to pick it up.   
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767,Shattered Suns ,4, Shattered Suns wastes its promise with terrible presentation values and poor implementation of its 3D combat system.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/6/0/3/30786-86603.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shattered-suns-review/1900-6197023/,neg,"
  Fully 3D real-time strategy games set in space are a rare breed. Adding the third dimension seems to scare off both developers and gamers, so many games simply ignore the oft-confusing vertical plane and stick to 2D stellar battlefields. Shattered Suns is a good example of why so many people shy away. The Clear Crown Studios game is certainly adventurous enough, due to the ostensibly more realistic depiction of outer space, the mix of RTS and 4X space sim traits, and a few innovative touches when it comes to custom ship design; but the production values are bottom-drawer, and your galactic adventures are highlighted by boring resource management and simplistic combat that doesn't really utilize those three dimensions. These issues, along with some serious problems with the in-game camera, all but ruin the reasonably original game design.   This planet's ready for its close-up.   Originality doesn't extend to the plot, however. In the single-player campaign, you play Captain Max, a former starship commander in the Statian military who's drafted back into active duty during an invasion by the evil Qalan and Trexon Empires. So the story deals with the standard one-man-against-the-alien-hordes shtick, albeit with the rather interesting addition of a love story. At the same time as Max is trying to save Statia, he's also searching star systems for his missing fiancee, a fellow officer with the much more exotic name of Seeng-Si. A fair bit of the game is spent with the hero dithering over his duty and chucking it all to search for his woman, which gives the game a bit of teen-love cheese, as nobody over 17 actually thinks like Captain Max.    Still, much of this tale is fairly well told, regardless of the lapses into 90210 melodrama. The one huge flaw is that every plot point is described through text, as though you're playing the game via instant messenger. As the budget apparently didn't allow for any cutscene production, a single screen filled with a drab starfield map and a huge block of tiny, hard-to-read green-on-black text conveys all of the story and dialogue. Even some full missions take place here and are resolved entirely through answering questions. Many of the lines are well written, although apparently the designers realized this and allowed the writer free rein to ramble on to absurd lengths. Scenes meander for many, many minutes, and you're stuck waiting for every single line to slowly pop up onscreen because you can't skip ahead. All of this dialogue goes beyond sci-fi boilerplate to help develop realistic characters with depth and personality (like your snarky computer assistant, Citron), although it's hard to appreciate any of it when you're screaming ""Get on with it!"" at your monitor. More appeal is lost due to the text scaling in lower-resolution displays. Letters are shrunk to what looks like an 8-point height and scrunched so tightly together that you soon squint your way into serious eyestrain or a king-size headache. Keep eyedrops and ibuprofen on hand.    Shattered Suns isn't particularly easy on the eyes during missions, either. Ship design is generic, textures are plain, and the lighting and shadow effects are so primitive that there is no depth to any of the models. Star systems are just as rough and ready, with basic planet types like Earth look-alikes and lava worlds. The background is really odd looking, too, due to the inclusion of so much green nebulae gas that it overwhelms what should be a very black outer space. At times, this backdrop is so green and lush that it seems more like you're waging war in front of an English country garden than the inky darkness of space. Ship movements and explosions are nothing short of embarrassing. Vessels avoid colliding with planets by simply jerking to one side or the other, and the usual pyrotechnics of ships going ka-boom have been replaced with wimpy puffs of smoke and chunks of debris flying in all directions. And despite the game's low-rent appearance, loading times can be onerous. Initially loading the game up takes so long that you can not only safely duck out of the room to make a sandwich, you just might have time to bake the bread, too.    Of course, really ugly games sometime boast some really stellar gameplay. But that isn't the case here, as Shattered Suns is just as unappealing within as it is without. The game sort of blends typical RTS gaming with 4X space sims, with campaign missions that are split among building fleets for combat, focusing on space-station base building, and fulfilling economic duties such as setting up a trade route or gathering resources. You generally accept an order at the beginning of the assignment to do something like juggle the game's three resources of crystals, ore, and credits in an effort to repair ships, set up a mining operation on a moon, or simply crank out ships and blast into a system to annihilate the enemy. Everything is pretty straightforward. Most resource management can be done with a couple of clicks. To mine a planet for ore, for example, all you need to do is load up a ship with miners and send it on its way. Combat is equally simplistic, with the only complication provided by the ability to rig up different ship production lines on space stations to crank out vessels for different purposes. So you can build one line of ships with huge storage capacity to serve as cargo carries, another line with serious weaponry and armor for front-line combat, and so on.   There's a battle going on here, but you wouldn't know it to look.   None of these actions are particularly interesting. Resource management is a dull production-line affair where you shuffle goods from one space station to another to boost ship production. Combat, in both the campaign and the skirmish mode--which happens to be the only other way to play the game, as there is no multiplayer option--mainly involves band-selecting fleets and then right-clicking on enemies to start lasers blasting in scraps that are just as ridiculously drawn out (20 minutes to take out a few pirates? Really?) as the interminable between-mission dialogue. Most of the challenge comes from trying to figure out exactly what you're supposed to be doing when missions start, as there are few instructions given out after the initial orders are passed along on the main map/text screen. Combat missions often dump you blind into a system and leave you aimlessly flying around until you discover the ship you're supposed to escort, the enemies you need to exterminate, or whatever else. The only serious drama during battles is provided by the drum-thumping score. Even then, the pounding is so relentless that you'll soon want to turn off the music and enjoy the silent vacuum of space.    Worst of all, the 3D engine for space battles is just about meaningless. It doesn't add serious tactical considerations; you can essentially ignore the extra plane and click directly on enemies, space stations, and planets just as you would in a typical 2D RTS. If anything, it just gets in the way due to some annoying camera issues. For starters, everything moves all the time. Ships float randomly through space the moment that they leave space stations, which makes it tough to keep them in view. Locking the camera by left-clicking on an object like a planet or a moon helps somewhat when it comes to keeping an eye on an entire region of space, but even then every interstellar body is orbiting something else, so you still experience a lot of irritating ""Stop the world, I want to get off!"" moments. You can scroll way back to view an entire system at long range, but this turns ships into tiny dots and makes the game just as unmanageable as it is when you're looking at a close-up whirl of soaring vessels and rotating planets.    If you're in the mood for a 3D RTS in space, you might be better off heading to the mall and going spelunking in the bargain bin for an old copy of Homeworld. That almost decade-old classic remains a better bet than Shattered Suns.    
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768,Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic ,8.8, A number of technical issues in the out-of-the-box product mar what otherwise is the best version of one of the year's best games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/1/1/2218211-kotor_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic-review/1900-6084514/,pos,"
 Canadian developer BioWare is well known for producing high quality role-playing games, thanks to its successful Baldur's Gate series, and offers up what is, in many ways, its finest such game to date in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. LucasArts wisely delegated the task of producing a deep and involving Star Wars-themed RPG to BioWare, which has done a remarkable job of making Knights live up to the Star Wars name. In fact, Knights arguably lives up to the Star Wars name better than any other Star Wars property in years, including the last two theatrical releases. The game's greatest accomplishment is its focused-yet-open-ended plot progression, which gives you the freedom to play as either a morally good or evil character--or shades in between. The struggle between good and evil is, of course, central to Star Wars and manifests itself extremely well throughout this outstanding game, which debuted on the Xbox earlier this year. For good measure, Knights features hours and hours of top-notch voice-over (all the dialogue is spoken), so you'll certainly be impressed by how different characters respond differently to you, and you'll also be impressed by the sheer size of the game. Sadly, a number of bugs and technical issues in the out-of-the-box product mar what otherwise is the best version of one of the year's best games.  Knights takes place thousands of years before the Star Wars films, but you'll recognize a lot of the technology.  Those who've played BioWare's computer RPGs--either the Baldur's Gate series or last year's Neverwinter Nights--will recognize the influence of these games on Knights of the Old Republic. In fact, the main difference between the gameplay of Knights and BioWare's previous games is superficial. This one is played from a third-person perspective and thus resembles a 3D action adventure game rather than one of BioWare's older isometric RPGs. Other than that, gameplay is similar. You create a main character and then explore many different areas, interact with many different characters, settle many different disputes, solve many different puzzles, and engage in plenty of combat. Combat appears to be in real time but actually uses a turn-based system ""under the hood"" just like Neverwinter Nights, which means that your character's statistics and attributes (and your strategy) make all the difference, and your personal reflexes and hand-eye coordination have no bearing on the outcome. Most importantly, Knights is very different from your average RPG in that you'll always be an active participant in the storyline, rather than a passive observer. You don't just read, watch, and listen to a lot of text, cutscenes, and dialogue; instead, your character is constantly invited and required to make difficult decisions, and that's ultimately the most entertaining, impressive, and rewarding aspect of the game. The interface has been completely overhauled for the PC release of the game, and it works exceptionally well by taking full advantage of the familiar mouse-and-keyboard controls you're used to from other games. Additionally, it gives you easy access to all your options, as well as your inventory, map, and quest log, at all times.  Knights of the Old Republic actually takes place thousands of years before Star Wars Episode I, though you'll still see many of the same sorts of alien creatures and technology in the game that you probably associate with Star Wars. The story begins in the midst of a power struggle between the Republic and the Sith, an evil Imperial power that's encroaching on Republic space. Your character seems to be just another Republic trooper, and, at the beginning of the game, you manage to avoid certain death as your spaceship is attacked and destroyed. Your escape pod lands on a world that's been put under quarantine by the Sith, so your first order of business is to find a means of escape. You also need to find out what happened to Bastila, a gifted young Jedi who is key to the Republic's war efforts and who also managed to flee your doomed ship. Later, you'll be charged with uncovering the secrets of an ancient relic, called the star forge, apparently the key to the Sith's seemingly limitless supply of weaponry.  You'll meet a wide variety of interesting characters in the game, a number of whom will join you in your journey.  You'll end up visiting a number of key Star Wars locations, including the wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk and the desert planet Tatooine, in what's, by all means, an adventure of epic proportions. The game's main storyline isn't remarkable and eventually boils down to squaring off against your standard bad guy, and the main plot twists along the way don't really seem plausible. You'll encounter so many great little subplots and characters as you go along that this really won't matter. You'll investigate murders, become a bounty hunter, resolve cultural disputes, find a cure for a deadly disease, take sides or play both sides against each other in various ambiguous conflicts, and find out how life really treats citizens of the Republic and followers of the Sith. There's just a lot to see and do in this game, and it'll last you a good 40 hours or so from start to finish. You'll never see all that the game has to offer if you finish it only once. Actually, the PC version of the game adds a good amount of new content that wasn't in the original Xbox release, and it mostly comes in the form of some powerful new items.  It may seem strange, but Knights of the Old Republic actually uses a slightly simplified version of 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules for both combat and character generation. So, despite the obviously different setting, fans of BioWare's D&D-themed games will be in relatively familiar territory here. Your main character starts off as a male or female soldier, scout, or scoundrel. These three basic classes roughly correspond to D&D's fighter, ranger, and rogue. The soldier is straightforward but very strong, and he or she begins with proficiencies in various types of weapons and armor and gains the most vitality points per experience level. The scout is slightly less tough than the soldier but gains more skill points per level, thus allowing him or her to do such things as repair droids, pick locks, and disarm land mines. The scoundrel is physically the weakest class but can disappear from sight by using special cloaking devices; after ""cloaking"" he or she can inflict great damage to a foe if that foe is caught unaware of the impending attack. The scoundrel is also best suited to talking his or her way out of situations where the other character classes might have to resort to violence. Your choice of gender also has a bearing on the outcomes of some situations.  It's not spoiling anything to point out that you eventually gain access to Jedi powers. In turn, there are three different Jedi classes available, which emphasize either the Jedi's prowess with a lightsaber, his or her Force powers, or a balance of the two. Force powers are basically like magic spells, allowing you to do such things as stun opponents, knock them down, and choke them. In addition, you can heal yourself and use the Force to persuade characters to see things your way (the option will come up at times during dialogue). Some powers are inherently light-inclined, while others are dark-inclined, and though Jedi characters may gain access to any Force power as they gain experience levels, powers that match a Jedi's moral alignment can be used at a lower cost in Force points (which steadily recharge, thus allowing you to use your powers continuously).  Will you choose the light or the dark side?  The game does a fine job of letting you customize your character and his or her companions. Nine main different characters may join you over the course of the adventure, and you'll be able to travel with up to two of them at a time. They mostly do a good job keeping pace, but in some of the more mazelike environments, they're liable to lag behind, which can be slightly annoying. Most every character has an interesting story to tell that unfolds as you converse with him, her, or it over the course of the game, though some are developed better than others. The most entertaining of the bunch is probably HK-47, who's like a homicidal and slightly insubordinate C-3PO. As you and the others gain levels, you develop your abilities by choosing from a wide variety of skills (repair, stealth, persuasion, and so on) and combat feats (critical strike, two-weapon fighting, toughness, and so on).  Ultimately, the 3rd Edition rule system works quite well for the game and makes for an experience that seems consistent with the Star Wars mythos. Namely, the game presents Jedi as extremely powerful beings against whom conventional weapons are practically useless when opposed to the Jedi's lightsabers and Force powers. However, a few things don't quite make sense, such as how your strength statistic (rather than your dexterity) is tied to your proficiency with a lightsaber and how ranged weapons generally seem too weak, thus offering no substantial advantages over melee weapons since it's easy to close the distance between you and a gun-toting opponent. Also, much like in 3rd Edition D&D, fighter-type characters in Knights of the Old Republic can become overpowered to the point where they're virtually unstoppable. If you focus on building up such a character, you'll find that most of the combat in the game will be rather easy at the default difficulty setting, though you can crank it up to make your enemies stronger.  Combat looks dynamic, and, at a glance, you could mistake Knights of the Old Republic for an action game. You'll see characters firing away with their blasters, while those armed with melee weapons, like lightsabers, will perform a variety of close-combat moves. Characters dueling with such weapons will block and feint while looking for openings in their opponents' defenses. It's all clearly inspired by the dramatic lightsaber battle at the end of Episode I and also resembles the outstanding lightsaber battles in the recent Jedi Academy and last year's Jedi Knight II.  Blasters, grenades, and melee weapons are available, but nothing beats a good ole double-bladed lightsaber.  Despite appearances, though, the combat is really just a series of statistical checks, just like D&D. Your character's ""to hit"" rating, determined by his or her class, level, and weapon, is added to a random 1-20 dice roll and is then compared against the opponent's defense rating. If the to-hit roll is greater, you connect and deal damage. Your characters will automatically attack any foes nearby until either you or they are all dead, so, in some cases, you end up simply watching the fight as it unfolds. You'll only need to intervene to use healing kits, stimulants that boost your combat abilities, Force powers, and the like. You may also intervene, if necessary, to prioritize targets. You can pause the action at any time and can easily queue up specific orders for all your characters, but you can usually get away with just looking after your main character and will rarely need to micromanage things (your party members will lag behind once in a while, as you're running around, but it's not a big deal). Generally, the combat is exciting to watch and is paced nice and fast. You needn't worry if one of your characters falls in battle, as he or she will simply get up once the fighting is over--though you're tossed back to the title screen if your entire party goes down.  The combat and the dialogue are the two main elements of Knights of the Old Republic. Other than these activities, you'll find yourself running from place to place, but you'll have little interaction with the environment other than being able to open footlockers and other objects that contain goodies. You can sometimes hack into certain computer systems, but this is all done in text and isn't very interesting. Loading times between areas can feel a little disruptive, especially when you have to backtrack. Fortunately, there's an option to instantly return to your hideout or ship if you're not in a dangerous area. Some of the environments are pretty big but most aren't, and a mapping system clearly shows where you can and can't go and what the points of interest are in each area. There's also a very clear record of all the quests you have pending (and all the quests you've completed). As such, you'll probably never get lost in the game, though, at the same time, you might feel a bit confined by where you can and can't go. Fortunately, the game opens up later on, thus allowing you to freely travel between planets to accomplish numerous tasks in whichever order you please.  Knights of the Old Republic also contains several minigames. You can gamble by playing a fairly entertaining card game that's similar to poker, you can compete in simple drag races on swoop bikes, and you can man the turrets of a spaceship to shoot down enemy fighters from a first-person perspective. These are all simple diversions, however.  Hours of expertly done voice-over help make character interaction incredibly engaging throughout Knights of the Old Republic.  As mentioned, character interaction really is the best thing about Knights of the Old Republic. There's a lot of dialogue in the game--all in full speech--and if you listen to all of it rather than read it (you can turn subtitles off), the game will probably last hours longer than it could otherwise. The dialogue is well done, and many of the game's characters are well defined. Most all of the numerous subquests in the game are suitably justified and present you with more than one viable solution. You'll constantly be able to choose between good and not-so-good solutions. Early on, for instance, you can rescue a man who's being hassled by bounty hunters. Do you then offer to pay the dues he owes so that the poor man may live without fear, or do you threaten to mug him for his last remaining credits?  Knights lets you play as a really nasty character if you so choose, and that's certainly part of the fun. It's also an interesting aspect of gameplay when you consider that a big part of the theme is how Jedi constantly run the risk of falling to the dark side. Indeed, you'll probably often be tempted to see what happens if you pick the evil dialogue options rather than the good ones, if only because most RPGs simply don't let you make these types of decisions. Certain key points in the game will play out very differently depending on the decisions you make, thus creating lots of replay value.  The graphics in Knights of the Old Republic are clearly a cut above BioWare's past RPGs. The PC version of the game looks mostly identical to the Xbox original but, provided you have a top-of-the line system and don't experience the sorts of technical issues we observed, it is capable of smoother frame rates at significantly higher resolutions, providing a significantly better visual experience overall. Some important aspects of the visuals are handled particularly well. Specifically, the lightsaber combat looks dead-on, though you won't see any forearms getting chopped off or anything. Effective use of bump mapping and environment mapping can be seen on some of the aliens and their shiny armor or slick, oily skins. Many of the environments also look quite good, though some of the others are plain and lacking in detail. Character models are relatively simple, and their lip-synching and facial expressions don't always look quite right. You'll also notice that some character models will repeat often throughout the game. You'll encounter a number of different characters who all share the same face. The frame rate of Knights of the Old Republic also doesn't hold up (even on systems well in excess of the game's recommended requirements), and it can frequently bog down in combat or whenever a lot of characters are around. Furthermore, the occasional cutscenes using the game's 3D engine tend to look downright crude, which is disappointing. Knights is a great-looking game overall, but it's easy to find fault in its visuals when the other aspects of the game are so well done.  It's also easy to become extremely disappointed with the game's technical issues. Your mileage may vary, but we experienced problems with the game on four different test systems, each with a different processor and graphics card. One system simply could not load the game at all after it had successfully been installed. Another system experienced graphical issues and sluggish frame rates, though it greatly exceeded the game's recommended system requirements. The third system encountered sporadic frame rate issues as well as some unavoidable crash bugs, which prevented us from progressing further into the game. A fourth system ran the game beautifully--though with occasional, spontaneous crashes to desktop later on in the game. A look at the official technical support forums for Knights of the Old Republic revealed that none of these issues seemed to be unique to our test systems, but no clear solutions to the problems were available either. It seems likely, then, that the PC version of Knights of the Old Republic wasn't thoroughly tested on many of today's standard PC configurations before it was shipped. It also seems likely that these problems will be addressed in a patch at some point (a beta patch that addressed certain specific problems was already available a few short days after the game's release), but it's still a shame that some players' experience with this otherwise outstanding game will be worsened or even cut short because of these embarrassing problems.  Knights is both an outstanding RPG in its own right and an excellent tribute to the Star Wars source material.  Technical issues aside, some of the audio is what you'd expect from a Star Wars game, though Knights deserves credit for featuring a mostly original (yet very subdued) soundtrack, which is a nice change of pace from the ubiquitous John Williams' score. The high quality and sheer quantity of the voice acting are exceptional. Alien characters even speak in convincing alien languages, though you'll pick up on the fact that the alien voice-over actually repeats often. Overall, though, the professional voice cast does an excellent job with the material by delivering believable performances, and this really enriches the gameplay experience. Not only does Knights of the Old Republic have some of the most voice-over of any game to date, but it also has some of the best.  Assuming the bugs don't deter you, it's apparent from playing Knights of the Old Republic that a remarkable amount of effort, work, and talent went into this game. It's one of the only Star Wars games that truly makes you feel, at times, as though you're a key player in and a part of this unique and beloved sci-fi setting. You'll get to do all the sorts of stuff that you've seen and enjoyed in the Star Wars movies, and you'll get to emulate any of your favorite characters' personalities and actions over the course of the game. You'll also experience a much more morally complex version of Star Wars than what you get from the movies. Along the way, you'll find a few aspects of the game that you'll wish were better, but that's mostly because the vast majority of Knights of the Old Republic is so exceptionally good. You don't need to be a fan of Star Wars or of RPGs to appreciate all the impressive qualities of this game--but if you are, all the better. 
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769,The Sims: Hot Date ,8.8," Hot Date's real additions are its expanded social options and its new downtown area, both of which make an already-interesting game even more fun to play.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/4/8/2214248-526195_44458_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-sims-hot-date-review/1900-2825792/,pos,"
You've probably already heard of The Sims--it's the life-simulator strategy game that lets you create a household of miniature people, or ""sims,"" then conduct their virtual lives, including feeding them, sending them to work, and having them meet and interact with other computer-controlled sims from the neighborhood. The Sims: Hot Date is the third expansion pack for The Sims and is easily the most interesting of the three. It's also the best expansion pack for The Sims yet. That's because Hot Date doesn't just do what the previous expansions did--that is, add more household items and a few new ways to use them. It also features the new downtown area, which lets you finally take your sims out of the house and into the exciting and turbulent world of dating.  Hot Date adds even more items with funny descriptions.  The previous two expansion packs for The Sims, Livin' Large and House Party, both added lots of new household items for you to buy for your sims' homes, which helped keep their domestic lives interesting. And as you might expect, Hot Date also adds plenty of new items that you can furnish your home with, and as in the previous games, you buy each of these using the game's easy-to-use shopping and building interface. Also as in the previous games, each of the new additions you can make to your virtual home is accompanied by an extremely funny description. What's more, Hot Date actually lets you use some items--ones that your sims either buy or make by hand--as gifts to give to other sims.   But Hot Date isn't just about items; it also features a number of real improvements to The Sims' already-interesting social system. As in the original game, sims communicate with each other in ""simlish,"" an expressive but almost completely unintelligible gibberish language, but Hot Date features new simlish phrases and new character voices. More importantly, Hot Date features an expanded set of social options; instead of just greeting a new sim, you can choose to wave at it from a distance or walk up to it and shake hands. Instead of just giving your neighbor a hug, you can choose whether or not you want your hug to be a friendly gesture or a more romantic embrace. Making this sort of decision is especially important for your sim if it's on a date, since choosing an inappropriate thing to say or do can make your sim's date get up and walk out.  You can become more interesting...with the right magazine.  To help your sims be more compatible with their dream dates, Hot Date features an entirely new attribute for your sims: interests. Your sims can read magazines to increase their knowledge in areas like money, the weather, technology, and the '60s; the more your sim knows about a topic that its date is interested in, the better they'll get along. If your sim gets along well enough with its date, the two can get married, and your sim's fiancé (or fiancée) will move into your house and become a regular sim under your control. But getting far enough into a relationship to get married takes time, and Hot Date includes a new two-part relationship meter to help indicate how well your courtship is coming along: a ""current"" relationship meter and a long-term meter. You'll need to keep your date happy in both the short and long term to get that far. If you've played House Party, you'll know that it was difficult to fit a relationship with a neighbor into a schedule that already included a career and a sim's own basic needs of eating, resting, and entertainment. Managing all of those things together with a steady dating schedule would have been impossible to do if it weren't for Hot Date's new downtown feature.The new downtown area is Hot Date's most significant new addition to The Sims and is probably the most significant addition that's ever been made to the game. Sims can now use their telephones to call a taxi that takes them to downtown SimCity, which is composed of lots that can be shopping centers, recreation areas, restaurants, or nightclubs. While your sim is on a date, you can control your sim, but you can't actually give orders to its date; you've got to make your sim be as nice, considerate, and charming as possible and hope that the date goes well. Fortunately, downtown features lots of brand-new, downtown-only items, like food vendors, clothing stores, picnic areas, and duck ponds that your couples can use to keep themselves busy, and a few new items, like the restaurant booth seat, that'll let them get to know each other better. And all the time you spend downtown takes place independent of time at home; in other words, your sims will get hungry, tired, and bored as usual during the time they spend downtown, but once they get home, the clock will actually reset to the time when they left. This makes having both a relationship and a job (which still typically takes about six hours out of a sim's day) not only possible, but a lot easier than before.  Hot Date features expanded social options...  And even if you aren't interested in dating or shopping, you can actually build your own custom lot downtown, in much the same way you build and design a sim's house. Hot Date already comes with a mostly full downtown that's packed with different places to bring your date, but it does have a single empty lot that you can turn into almost anything. You can also bulldoze any existing lot and either start another new one from scratch or download a custom lot from the game's official Web site. Considering that the game lets you build multiple neighborhoods, it seems a bit limiting to have access to only one downtown area, but since most of the downtown lots are so big, filling each one up tends to be more time-consuming than building a normal house. Between building your own custom shopping malls and bars and downloading custom-built lots, you'll probably find that Hot Date's single downtown area provides you with enough areas to build and customize, at least for some time.   Despite its additions, Hot Date doesn't do much to improve on The Sims' fundamental but admittedly minor flaws. Sims still have pathfinding problems and can have trouble navigating crowded areas. They'll also still sometimes stop and pause between actions for no good reason and ""forget"" all the orders you've queued up for them. In addition, Hot Date doesn't improve on The Sims' sluggish camera; in fact, most fans of the game have given up on scrolling the screen up or down or to the side, since the camera moves so slowly. You can still center your view on a particular sim or right-click on an area to scroll quickly to it, though if you do this, you may still end up accidentally giving a sim an order. And, as before, you'll find that to exercise any kind of real control over your sims' activities, you'll have to play in a decidedly unrealistic manner: abruptly pausing the game to queue up commands, then speeding up the game to skip through mundane activities like eating and bathing.  ...And creative new ways to impress your date.  But if you're a fan of The Sims, you'll probably be able to overlook these problems, just as you'll probably know what to expect from Hot Date in terms of its sound and graphics. Hot Date uses the same sort of isometric 2D graphics for its scenery and the same 3D models to represent sims. Though Hot Date features a few new animations and several new faces and outfits, sims still look more or less exactly the same as they did in the original game, which was released nearly two years ago. Hot Date doesn't really look any better than The Sims did--that's not to say that it looks bad, but it hasn't changed much at all, either. However, Hot Date's sound is a different story--the expansion not only features new simlish phrases, but it also features an excellent jazzy, all-new musical score for the downtown area. The downtown area also has a brand-new cast of sims, like cashiers and janitors, which have new simlish voices as well. All of the new voices are appropriate, and some, like the voice of the ice cream store clerk (who bears a suspicious resemblance to the pimple-faced teenager from The Simpsons), are quite funny.   The Sims: Hot Date does an extremely good job of making The Sims a more interesting game. Like the previous two expansion packs, Livin' Large and House Party, it adds a lot of new items and furnishings for your sims' houses and actually complements each of the two other expansions well, even though neither is required to play Hot Date. Hot Date's real additions are its expanded social options and its new downtown area, both of which make an already-interesting game even more fun to play.
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770,Rallisport Challenge ,8.8," Rallisport Challenge is an excellent game, and it can be wholeheartedly recommended to anyone interested in driving games.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/3/2/4/2213324-box_rsc.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rallisport-challenge-review/1900-2897048/,pos,"
Originally released for Microsoft's Xbox video game console in March, Rallisport Challenge was one of the best driving games on the system by virtue of its gorgeous graphics, well-designed tracks, and great variety of cars. The game was developed by Battlefield 1942 creator Digital Illusions, and its publisher Microsoft has since opted to release the game on the PC. And racing fans who don't own an Xbox will be pleased to know that nothing was lost in the translation. In fact, Rallisport Challenge for the PC even has a few key bonuses that weren't in the Xbox version, including noticeably sharper graphics and the ability to play online.  Rallisport Challenge has a total of 41 tracks spread across 12 different environments.  Rallisport Challenge is actually like four different rally games in one. There are a total of 41 tracks spread across 12 different environments, and each environment is the setting for one of four unique rally types.  There are the traditional rally races, wherein you race against the clock throughout a series of checkpoints; ice racing, which involves competing against three other opponents on icy, slippery roads; hill climbs, which are similar to rally races except that your overall objective is to scale a mountain as fast as possible; and rally cross events, which are circuit-based races against other drivers on tracks that have several different types of terrain, like mud, gravel, or asphalt. To be precise, the tracks in the game consist of one of six different terrain types, and each one has a dramatic effect on the way your car handles. Tarmac, for example, provides for extraordinary grip but makes it somewhat difficult for you to turn a corner with a powerslide--a technique that's a staple of rally racing. Gravel and mud, on the other hand, will affect how fast you accelerate in a straight line, but the relative lack of traction makes it easier to push your car around turns. Before every race, you're given the option of choosing a tire compound that's best suited to the current track conditions, but things such as changing weather conditions (a light drizzle at the start of a race might clear up by the time you cross the finish line) and multiple surface types (some tracks consist of mud and gravel or tarmac and sand) add a bit of challenge to this selection process.   As you'd probably expect from a racing game, Rallisport Challenge is split up between a persistent career mode and a quick race mode designed to get you in and out of a race as fast as possible. A third option, a time attack mode, is also available. Time attack is similar to quick race, but in it, you compete against the clock, not other cars. Obviously, the game's core lies in the career mode, in which you create a persona and compete in a series of 19 events that are split up across four difficulty levels. Each of these events is made up of anywhere from three to nine individual rally, hill climb, rally cross, or ice races, and you'll get points for driving each course faster than the posted times for first, second, and third place.  If you aren't careful, your car can end up with broken taillights, shattered windows, and bent fenders.  Initially, only the easiest series of races is available to you, but as you rack up enough points, you'll unlock subsequent events.  If you didn't think you gave a certain series of races your best shot, you can go back and try it again, though you'll lose all the points that you gained in your last run, so there's a bit of risk involved in reattempting old races. Interestingly enough, you also get points for completing each race with as little damage to your car as possible. If you aren't careful, your car can end up with broken taillights, shattered windows, and bent fenders, and the more scrapes and bruises that your car accrues, the fewer points you'll get at the end of each race. However, no matter how much you bang up your cars, damage has no effect on their handling or performance.     As you unlock tracks in the career mode, they'll be made available to you in the time attack and quick race modes. You'll also unlock a new batch of cars after qualifying for a new difficulty level. In all, there are 25 real-world cars from manufacturers such as Audi, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Lancia, Opel, and others, and each handles differently. The front-wheel-drive Citroen cars, for example, will understeer dramatically while cornering if you're on the gas--lift your foot off the throttle (or your finger off the keyboard), and the car's rear will snap to the outside. The all-wheel-drive cars in the game have noticeably different handling and are decidedly more balanced in turns, even though some of the more powerful vehicles do tend to oversteer a bit. While some cars are more suited to certain environments than others, you'll probably choose a favorite and stick with it for the majority of your career. You can't buy any upgrades for your cars in Rallisport Challenge, though you can tweak several of their handling characteristics, such as the steering speed, gear ratio, suspension stiffness, and brake balance. All these changes have a significant effect on your car's performance--an effect that you'll easily be able to feel while driving.After a few minutes behind the wheel in Rallisport Challenge, you'll quickly realize that it's not really an orthodox rally simulator like Rally Trophy or Master Rallye. Its slightly exaggerated sense of speed is designed to give the game a little excitement, and certainly, you'll feel a rush as you blast down winding mountain roads at 90mph, with a solid wall of trees and boulders on one side and a sharp cliff on the other.   You'll learn an important lesson very quickly: speed kills.  The physics model is also somewhat forgiving, since it lets you do things like get a little more hang time off jumps than would have been possible in real life or power through a turn using nothing more than your hand brake. Still, Rallisport Challenge isn't easy. At first, you'll often find yourself sliding off the road after applying a little too much pressure on the brakes or flipping end over end after colliding with a tree. the game doesn't feature a tutorial, but you'll learn an important lesson very quickly: speed kills. Staying on the gas, braking too late, and not turning early enough are sure ways of crashing. And while the spectacular accidents in the game are a sight to behold, it takes only a couple of crashes in any given race to put you out of contention. Still, the game's well-balanced mix of slightly lenient physics and the realistic handling properties of the cars make for a driving experience that few racing games can match. You'll have a blast driving each course, and you'll find that there's no better feeling than finally nailing every turn of a course you've been trying to master for a while.   Adding to this driving experience are the game's amazing graphics. Nothing brings a game to life quite like great visuals, and Rallisport Challenge definitely delivers in this respect. This game looked great on the Xbox, and it looks even better on the PC because of its ability to run at resolutions of 1024x768 and above. The environments are spectacularly detailed, and a subtle amount of bump mapping on the terrain adds a three-dimensional texture to the different driving surfaces. The icy roads, for example, have a slick sheen of water that's visible in the sunlight, and you can easily make out the individual indentations in the gravel. Level design is usually an important consideration for first-person shooters, not driving games--but not so with Rallisport. Every turn, every tree, and every rock is deliberately placed to keep you challenged. Many of the blind corners in the game, for example, will dump you smack into the trunk of a solitary tree--or off a cliff! Many open turns have a rock or two hidden underneath a thick patch of grass, so cutting corners can sometimes be a risky proposition.   Rallisport Challenge is easily the best-looking driving game currently available on the PC--the game has no clipping plane to speak of, the lighting is subtle, and the vegetation is incredibly realistic. The cars themselves are also modeled with an eye for detail, and they reflect the sun and their environments realistically without looking like they're made of chrome. What's more, the more you drive your car, the dirtier it gets. By the end of each race, the bottom half of your car will be caked with a nice layer of dirt, mud, or dust, depending on the kind of track you were driving on. You'll be hard-pressed to find any clipping problems between the cars and the terrain, and the collision detection is exact--you'll never wonder in frustration why one of your wheels clipped a rock. These graphics do come at a slight price, however. You can't turn on all the visual bells and whistles if you don't own a high-end machine, and even then, at its highest settings, Rallisport Challenge may stutter a bit.    The cars themselves are modeled with an eye for detail.  For the most part, the game's sound components are on par with its visual prowess. Each of the 25 cars has a distinct engine noise that varies realistically as you change gears, as well as a unique exhaust note that changes depending on your perspective to the car. You can even make out the whine of the blow-off valve when you ease off the throttle in some of the turbo cars. Likewise, each of the different terrain types sounds different. Driving over mud really sounds like driving over piles of soft, wet dirt. Your navigator, who constantly feeds you information about the distance and severity of every turn on the track, never gets repetitive or annoying. The game's music is composed mostly of electronic tunes from the likes of Dub Pistols, Soundmine, and Fear Factory, and for the most part, it sounds just fine. Unfortunately, you can't import MP3s to create your own soundtrack like you could on the Xbox. However, the PC version of Rallisport Challenge features the ability to play online or over a LAN. When you choose to play a multiplayer game, you'll actually be taken back to your Windows desktop, where a separate server browser will open. From here, you can create or join a game with up to four players and choose any of the game's numerous tracks. Rallisport Challenge will then revert back to the game and put you into the actual race. It's not as glamorous as an in-game browser, but it's certainly better than the alternative: split-screen racing.    Even though there were four different rally games released for the PC last year, Rallisport Challenge is the only such game to come out this year. That reason alone is probably enough to recommend this game to fans of the sport, but Rallisport Challenge is an excellent game in its own right, and it can be wholeheartedly recommended to anyone interested in driving games.
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771,Aggressive Inline ,8.8, It takes the gameplay and design concepts that have worked well in past alternative sports games and gives them enough of a face-lift to make the game feel new.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/2/3/2210023-box_ainline.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aggressive-inline/1900-2868354/,pos,"
More often than not, only one developer is associated with the recent alternative sports boom. But back when all this skateboarding and biking business started in earnest, there were two. Neversoft had teamed up with Activision to deliver Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which eschewed skateboarding realism for fast, well-defined gameplay. And California-based Z-Axis had teamed up with Rockstar Games to develop a skateboarding game of their own, called Thrasher: Skate and Destroy. Thrasher had a similar goal-based, time-limited structure, but the gameplay and control were far more rooted in reality. Needless to say, the Tony Hawk series blew up and spawned an entire line of similar products for Activision. Z-Axis blossomed on its own, moving from Rockstar to Acclaim and moving from skateboarding to BMX biking by developing the deeper-than-most Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series. Now, after a few years of moderate success, Z-Axis and Acclaim have branched out to inline skating with Aggressive Inline, an excellent game that both borrows from previous alternative sports games and sets out in a new direction that will more than likely be copied by future games.  Aggressive Inline may look like other alternative sports games... Controlling the skater in Aggressive Inline should be familiar to anyone who has played any recent Tony Hawk game. Rather than going with the ultradeep trick system from the Dave Mirra series, Inline goes for a simpler scheme, requiring only one button to perform air tricks. But that doesn't mean that there aren't many tricks in the game. There are lots of different D-pad combinations that add up to a hefty number of grabs and flips. The circle button is used as a general action button. It starts goals if you're near a goal trigger, and it performs Airblade-like grabs onto horizontal and vertical poles positioned throughout the game's levels. The triangle button performs grind tricks, and like in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, you can combo from one grind trick to the next without leaving the rail. Tony Hawk 3's revert, which lets you continue combos after landing a vert trick, is seen here as the cess slide, though the timing on the cess slide to manual is a bit trickier when you're first getting started.    Aggressive Inline's levels are really quite huge. As a result, the old two-minute timer that just about every single previous game in the genre has used is history. You can skate around the levels at your own pace. The only time you'll have a time limit is when you start a time-based goal. The other thing you have to watch is your juice meter, which acts as both a countdown timer and your special meter. As you land tricks, the meter fills up. Wrecking or just standing around causes it to slowly drain. If it drains completely, the game ends, but keeping it filled is never difficult, so the meter seems more like a formality than something you actually need to be careful of.    The rigid goal structure of previous games is gone here as well. Each level has a long list of goals, including the standard points and time-based goals, but more of the game's goals are focused on doing tricks on specific parts of the level, like grinding three traffic lights or transferring between two distant quarterpipes. Like some of the goals in Dave Mirra 2, most of the goals in Aggressive Inline are discovered by talking to people in the level. Completing goals unlocks more levels. At first, completing goals is a breeze. But there are always one or two goals per level that seem to be far more difficult than the rest. These goals usually just require you to spend some time eyeballing the surrounding area to discover a line that will reach your objective. Also, each skater starts out fairly weak in almost every category. You improve your stats by doing moves that require the stat you want to increase. So skating superfast improves your speed rating. Doing trick combos while riding backward raises your fakie stat. Grinding, wall riding, and a few other categories can be raised in the same manner.  ...but it actually pulls off a number of interesting, new tricks. The models and animation in Aggressive Inline look pretty good. Likewise, the game's environments are large, and they use bright, colorful textures. The level geometry isn't the smoothest in the world, but the level size more than makes up for this trade-off. The game also sounds good, with great representations of the sounds of skating, grinding, and hitting the pavement. Aggressive Inline also features a licensed soundtrack that includes tracks from Sublime, Rakim, P.O.D., and more.    Aggressive Inline is a success on several levels. The large number of goals in the game range in difficulty, giving newer players something to do while not skimping on the difficulty. It also manages to take the gameplay and design concepts that have worked well in past games and give them enough of a face-lift to make the game feel new. Finally, its innovations with regard to timed-run and in-level goal designs are sure to become trends used in the next generation of alternative sports games. For all those reasons, fans of Tony Hawk or Dave Mirra will surely find a lot to like in Aggressive Inline.


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772,Aggressive Inline ,8.8, Fans of the Tony Hawk or Dave Mirra games will surely find a lot to like in Aggressive Inline.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/2/3/2210023-box_ainline.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aggressive-inline-review/1900-2875818/,pos,"
 More often than not, only one developer is associated with the recent alternative sports boom. But back when all this skateboarding and biking business started in earnest, there were two. Neversoft had teamed up with Activision to deliver Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which eschewed skateboarding realism for fast, well-defined gameplay. And California-based Z-Axis had teamed up with Rockstar Games to develop a skateboarding game of their own, called Thrasher: Skate and Destroy. Thrasher had a similar goal-based, time-limited structure, but the gameplay and control were far more rooted in reality. Needless to say, the Tony Hawk series blew up and spawned an entire line of similar products for Activision. Z-Axis blossomed on its own, moving from Rockstar to Acclaim and moving from skateboarding to BMX biking by developing the deeper-than-most Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series. Now, after a few years of moderate success, Z-Axis and Acclaim have branched out to inline skating with Aggressive Inline, an excellent game that both borrows from previous alternative sports games and sets out in a new direction that will more than likely be copied by future games.  Aggressive Inline ranks up there with the best alternative sports games available. Controlling the skater in Aggressive Inline should be familiar to anyone who has played any recent Tony Hawk game. Rather than going with the ultradeep trick system from the Dave Mirra series, Inline goes for a simpler scheme, requiring only one button to perform air tricks. But that doesn't mean that there aren't many tricks in the game. There are lots of different D-pad combinations that add up to a hefty number of grabs and flips, and you'll uncover special tricks as you go. The B button is used as a general action button. It starts goals if you're near a goal trigger, and it performs Airblade-like grabs onto horizontal and vertical poles positioned throughout the game's levels. The Y button performs grind tricks, and like in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, you can combo from one grind trick to the next without leaving the rail. Tony Hawk 3's revert, which lets you continue combos after landing a vert trick, is seen here as the cess slide, though the timing on the cess slide to manual is a bit trickier when you're first getting started. The cess slide is performed by hitting either the white or black button, and their relatively distant positioning on both of the standard Microsoft controllers makes working the cess slide into your combos a bit more difficult than it is in the PlayStation 2 version.    Aggressive Inline's levels are really quite huge. As a result, the old two-minute timer that just about every single previous game in the genre has used is history. You can skate around the levels at your own pace. The only time you'll have a time limit is when you start a time-based goal. The other thing you have to watch is your juice meter, which acts as both a countdown timer and your special meter. As you land tricks, the meter fills up. Wrecking or just standing around causes it to slowly drain. If it drains completely, the game ends, but keeping it filled is never difficult, so the meter seems more like a formality than something you actually need to be careful of.    The rigid goal structure of previous games is gone here as well. Each level has a long list of goals, including the standard points and time-based goals, but more of the game's goals are focused on doing tricks on specific parts of the level, like grinding on three traffic lights or transferring between two distant quarter-pipes. Like some of the goals in Dave Mirra 2, most of the goals in Aggressive Inline are discovered by talking to people in the level. Others force you to use the game's level editor to build a quick course in an empty room and then skate it for points. Completing goals unlocks more levels. At first, completing goals is a breeze. Points are easy to come by, as the game doesn't penalize you much for using the same tricks over and over again, and keeping your balance on rails is easy enough to let you rack up huge grind combos on any circular edge. But there are always one or two goals per level that seem to be far more difficult than the rest. These goals usually just require you to spend some time eyeballing the surrounding area to discover a line that will reach your objective. Also, each skater starts out fairly weak in almost every category. You improve your stats by performing moves that require the stat you want to increase. So skating superfast improves your speed rating. Doing trick combos while riding backward raises your fakie stat. Grinding, wall riding, and a few other categories can be raised in the same manner.  Some of the goals are very tough, but the game is a lot of fun all around. The models and animation in Aggressive Inline look great. Likewise, the game's environments are large, and they use bright, colorful textures. The level geometry isn't the smoothest in the world, but the level size more than makes up for this trade-off. The game also sounds good, with great representations of the sounds of skating, grinding, and hitting the pavement. Aggressive Inline also features a licensed soundtrack that includes tracks from Sublime, Rakim, P.O.D., and more. You can also add your own tracks to the playlist and subtract tracks that you don't like.    Aggressive Inline is a success on several levels. The large number of goals in the game vary in difficulty, giving newer players something to do while not skimping on the difficulty. It also manages to take the gameplay and design concepts that have worked well in past games and give them enough of a face-lift to make the game feel new. Finally, its innovations with regard to timed-run and in-level goal designs are sure to become trends used in the next generation of alternative sports games. For all those reasons, fans of Tony Hawk or Dave Mirra will surely find a lot to like in Aggressive Inline.
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773,Aggressive Inline ,8.8, Fans of the Tony Hawk or Dave Mirra games will surely find a lot to like in Aggressive Inline.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/2/3/2210023-box_ainline.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aggressive-inline-review/1900-2878824/,pos,"
More often than not, only one developer is associated with the recent alternative sports boom. But back when all this skateboarding and biking business started in earnest, there were two. Neversoft had teamed up with Activision to deliver Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which eschewed skateboarding realism for fast, well-defined gameplay. And California-based Z-Axis had teamed up with Rockstar Games to develop a skateboarding game of their own, called Thrasher: Skate and Destroy. Thrasher had a similar goal-based, time-limited structure, but the gameplay and control were far more rooted in reality. Needless to say, the Tony Hawk series blew up and spawned an entire line of similar products for Activision. Z-Axis blossomed on its own, moving from Rockstar to Acclaim and moving from skateboarding to BMX biking by developing the deeper-than-most Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series. Now, after a few years of moderate success, Z-Axis and Acclaim have branched out to inline skating with Aggressive Inline, an excellent game that both borrows from previous alternative sports games and sets out in a new direction that will more than likely be copied by future games.  Aggressive Inline ranks up there with the best alternative sports games available.  Controlling the skater in Aggressive Inline should be familiar to anyone who has played any recent Tony Hawk game. Rather than going with the ultradeep trick system from the Dave Mirra series, Inline goes for a simpler scheme, requiring only one button to perform air tricks. But that doesn't mean there aren't many tricks in the game. There are lots of different D-pad combinations that add up to a hefty number of grabs and flips, and you'll uncover special tricks as you go. The B button is used as a general action button. It starts goals if you're near a goal trigger, and it performs Airblade-like grabs onto horizontal and vertical poles positioned throughout the game's levels. The Y button performs grind tricks, and like in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, you can combo from one grind trick to the next without leaving the rail. Tony Hawk 3's revert, which lets you continue combos after landing a vert trick, is seen here as the cess slide, though the timing on the cess slide to manual is a bit trickier when you're first getting started.   Aggressive Inline's levels are really quite huge. As a result, the old two-minute timer that just about every single previous game in the genre has used is history. You can skate around the levels at your own pace. The only time you'll have a time limit is when you start a time-based goal. The other thing you have to watch is your juice meter, which acts as both a countdown timer and your special meter. As you land tricks, the meter fills up. Wrecking or just standing around causes it to slowly drain. If it drains completely, the game ends, but keeping it filled is never difficult, so the meter seems more like a formality than something you actually need to be careful of.   The rigid goal structure of previous games is gone here as well. Each level has a long list of goals, including the standard points- and time-based goals, but more of the game's goals are focused on doing tricks on specific parts of the level, like grinding on three traffic lights or transferring between two distant quarter-pipes. Like some of the goals in Dave Mirra 2, most of the goals in Aggressive Inline are discovered by talking to people in the level. Others force you to use the game's level editor to build a quick course in an empty room and then skate it for points. Completing goals unlocks more levels. At first, completing goals is a breeze. Points are easy to come by, as the game doesn't penalize you much for using the same tricks over and over again, and keeping your balance on rails is easy enough to let you rack up huge grind combos on any circular edge. But there are always one or two goals per level that seem to be far more difficult than the rest. These goals usually just require you to spend some time eyeballing the surrounding area to discover a line that will reach your objective. Also, each skater starts out fairly weak in almost every category. You improve your stats by performing moves that require the stat you want to increase. So skating superfast improves your speed rating. Doing trick combos while riding backward raises your fakie stat. Grinding, wall riding, and a few other categories can be raised in the same manner.  Some of the goals are very tough, but the game is a lot of fun all around.  The models and animation in Aggressive Inline look great. Likewise, the game's environments are large, and they use bright, colorful textures. The level geometry isn't the smoothest in the world, but the level size more than makes up for this trade-off. The game also sounds good, with great representations of the sounds of skating, grinding, and hitting the pavement. Aggressive Inline also features a licensed soundtrack that includes tracks from Sublime, Rakim, P.O.D., and more.   Aggressive Inline is a success on several levels. The large number of goals in the game vary in difficulty, giving newer players something to do while not skimping on the difficulty. It also manages to take the gameplay and design concepts that have worked well in past games and give them enough of a face-lift to make the game feel new. Finally, its innovations with regard to timed-run and in-level goal designs are sure to become trends used in the next generation of alternative sports games. For all those reasons, fans of Tony Hawk or Dave Mirra will surely find a lot to like in Aggressive Inline. 
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774,Sega Soccer Slam ,8.8," Sega Soccer Slam was a highly entertaining game when it first appeared on the GameCube, and the extras in the Xbox version make it even better.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/8/9/2217489-box_sss.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sega-soccer-slam/1900-2879228/,pos,"
First released for the GameCube a few months ago, Sega Soccer Slam was a surprisingly great action-packed arcadelike sports game. The new Xbox version features a number of additions to its GameCube counterpart, including several new characters who add to an already creative lineup of professional wrestlers, surfers, and angry Scotsmen. Indeed, the characters in the game are a good indication of the nature of Sega Soccer Slam--it's a fast-paced game of three-on-three soccer with a variety of over-the-top moves and special abilities that make for an incredibly fun experience, especially when playing against human opponents.  The Xbox version of Sega Soccer Slam has some great new features.  Even if you're not a fan of soccer or you don't know the sport well enough to be familiar with some of the basics, Sega Soccer Slam should be plenty enjoyable for you. It has a practice mode that will give you a step-by-step rundown of the simple maneuvers such as passing, shooting, volleys, dekes, and steals, as well as some of the more complicated combinations of moves like the give-and-go and the quick shot. Soccer veterans would also do well to take a look at this mode to learn how to perform some of the more-unique maneuvers like the killer kick and the spotlight shot. But really, no matter what your level of soccer knowledge is, it's easy to jump right into one of the other gameplay modes in Sega Soccer Slam and start playing right away.   The Xbox version of Sega Soccer Slam includes an arcade mode, which consists of the exhibition and quick start options and two minigames. The exhibition option functions like any other sports game exhibition mode, allowing you to select a team, an opponent, and a stadium for a quick match. Quick start automatically selects two teams, so you can start a game even faster. The two minigames are hot potato and brawl, both of which place you in an arena against three opponents. The objective in hot potato is to get rid of the ball before it explodes by kicking it into an opponent and scoring points, whereas brawl is just a straight-up fight in which each player has a life meter that can be depleted by socking it to him. The challenge mode is also exclusive to the Xbox version of the game. In this mode, you can put together a team of any three players in the game. If you successfully win four games in a row, you'll unlock one of several hidden characters in the game, but you can only unlock two new characters using the same team members, so you'll have to change your lineup pretty often while playing through the challenge mode.  The quest mode will undoubtedly keep you busy for hours.  While these modes can be fun, the crux of the Sega Soccer Slam experience is the quest mode, in which you select from one of five teams and then compete in a series of 10 games. As you start to win games, you'll start to earn money that you can use to unlock character artwork or items that function as power-ups for your players. For example, you can buy a necklace that gives a specific player additional speed, or purchase a jetpack to enhance his speed even further. In a nice touch, the character art and items shown in the soccer store are specific to the team you've selected. In addition, if you successfully complete all 10 matches, as well as the playoff matches that follow, you'll unlock one of several new stadiums, depending on the team you're using. Needless to say, the quest mode adds a significant amount of replay value to the game, as you'll likely want to see all the items and extras that you can unlock.In actuality, even if the excellent quest mode weren't in the game, Soccer Slam could have just as easily gotten away with only an exhibition mode and a basic tournament mode, simply because the gameplay is executed so well. Despite its over-the-top arcadelike appearance, Soccer Slam demands a surprising amount of strategy when competing against computer- or human-controlled opponents. As previously mentioned, the game features most of the maneuvers that you would normally find in a regular soccer simulation. The give-and-go, volleys, one-timer shots--you'll have to use all these techniques to succeed, particularly in the later stages of the quest mode, when opponents become much more difficult. When you execute these basic moves, you'll charge a meter located at the bottom of the screen, and the energy in this meter can be used to give individual players a brief boost in speed and shot power or to launch a kill shot--a move that causes the ball handler to launch into the air in slow motion and perform an incredibly powerful kick.  Sega Soccer Slam doesn't exactly push a lot of polygons...  However, executing a killer kick or a spotlight kick--which is similar to the killer kick, except it's a little less powerful and it doesn't require energy from the meter--doesn't automatically mean you'll score a goal. In fact, the keeper will still block the majority of these shots, but you'll actually almost want the keeper to block the more powerful shots. Every time you take a shot on goal and the keeper manages to block it, you'll knock off a piece of his armor, which makes him tire. The more powerful the shot, the more armor it will knock off, so it's worthwhile to hold down the shot button to execute a stronger basic shot. Of course, there are times when you'll be able to completely dominate the opposing team, so it won't really matter, but in tough matches, it pays to take a few solid shots right at the keeper.   In keeping with its over-the-top theme, Sega Soccer Slam's graphics are highly stylized and almost comic-book-like in presentation. From the British rocker Half Pint to the luchador El Diablo, the character designs are incredibly well done, and they give each player in the game plenty of personality. The hidden characters (which include robots!) are equally appealing and also fit in quite well with the game. Likewise, the players' facial expressions and animations are a pleasure to see. There are also plenty of small details that add to the overall visual quality of the game. For example, the field becomes worn and will turn brown as players continually trample over particular sections. Also, when you execute the speed and shot boost, you'll notice that each team has a distinct effect to signify the boost. The members of team Tsunami will turn into water and small splashes will fly off the ball as you dribble down the field. Similarly, players on team Spirit will turn purple and cause small skulls made out of mist to appear while moving with the ball.   While the characters look great, the three default stadiums really aren't much to look at. While it's worth noting that portions of the stadiums have a polygonal crowd, the three default stadiums are still pretty bland. However, the unlockable stadiums look much better, and they generally fall more in line with the theme of the game. In any case, the Xbox version looks identical to its GameCube counterpart, so while you won't see a huge amount of polygons being pushed around on the screen, the artistic style more then makes up for that.  ...but its artistic style is quite unique for a game of this type.  Soccer Slam's sound functions as effectively as the graphics do in providing the characters with lots of personality. Each character has a unique theme to accompany his individual goal celebration--Angus from team Volta has a unique bagpipe theme, while Dante from the same team has more of an Italian operatic theme. The trash talking between players is also done well, with plenty of different one-liners, and the commentary does an effective job of calling the basic onscreen action.   Sega Soccer Slam was a highly entertaining game when it first appeared on the GameCube, and the extras that Sega has added to the Xbox version make it even better. The expanded lineup of characters and the few additional modes of play unquestionably help prolong the life of the game. Xbox owners interested in a fast-paced, funny sports game with plenty of personality and deceptively deep gameplay shouldn't think twice about picking up Soccer Slam. 
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775,NASCAR Racing 2002 Season ,8.8, NASCAR Racing 2002 Season proves once again that Papyrus is one of the most faithful and knowledgeable purveyors of racing games on the planet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/2/9/2219929-2225.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nascar-racing-2002-season-review/1900-2848234/,pos,"
It wasn't so very long ago that the only truly realistic PC racing games were Papyrus racing games. Times have changed, of course, and now several development houses and publishers have access to the concepts and programming know-how that turn run-of-the-mill arcade racers into deep and authentic portrayals of motor sports. Still, with just a single product, Papyrus Design Group continues to hold its own. The latest in its revered NASCAR series, NASCAR Racing 2002 Season, proves once again that Papyrus is one of the most faithful and knowledgeable purveyors of racing games on the planet. It also proves through a wide variety of new drivers' aids and tutorials that the hard-core Papyrus team has finally made the series more accessible to the many rookie and arcade-schooled drivers who once found the series prohibitively difficult. NASCAR 2002 is not the quantum leap ahead some might have expected, nor is it free of flaws, yet it is another winning installment of what clearly can be considered the standard-bearer of all racing simulations.  NASCAR 2002's Coca-Cola fantasy track is pure speed. As expected, NASCAR 2002 is licensed to the hilt and is consequently equipped with all the venues, drivers, cars, paint schemes, and sponsors of the 2002 Winston Cup season. Perennial top finisher Dale Jarrett is here, as are Bobby Labonte and Jeff Burton. Sizzling newcomer Tony Stewart brings his #20 Home Depot Pontiac, and four-time Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon pilots his #24 DuPont Chevrolet. All the circuits from NASCAR 4 return for another go, including the high-speed monster known as Talladega and the confining accident scene that is Bristol.   Whereas NASCAR 4 offered 21 circuits, NASCAR 2002 delivers three more for an impressively grand total of 24. Included in the trio are the latest real-life Winston Cup additions of Chicagoland Speedway and Kansas Speedway, both of which are near-identical 1.5-mile low-banked tri-ovals that feel substantially more exciting during a race than they outwardly appear. Though Papyrus seemingly hasn't endowed either with more than just a basic allotment of peripheral scenery, it has once again managed to highlight the subtle track surface and banking variations that make these two new NASCAR circuits as different as they can possibly be.   Conversely, the third and final new track is pure fantasy. Presumably named after a certain soda pop of some renown, the Coca-Cola Superspeedway is undoubtedly where you'll want to head to determine just how fast your virtual car can go. Featuring two monstrous 36-degree banked corners and two massive straightaways, this imaginary and perfectly symmetrical facility asks only that you leave your accelerator matted, the brake pedal untouched, and remain aware of how weightless you're going to feel at such tremendous speeds. At Coca-Cola, a 240mph-plus top speed is not uncommon, nor is three-abreast racing, and there's a very real likelihood that if you do crash, your momentum will probably carry you for a half-mile or so until you eventually lurch to a stop. Certainly fans of reverse-track racing and head-on multiple-car collisions now have a new marquee venue in which to hone their craft and run up their destructive totals.   Yet it is the rookie driver, not the crash-happy renegade, who stands the most to gain from the latest NASCAR. Apart from the usual collection of drivers' aids such as automatic clutches, antilock brakes, traction control, simplified ""arcade"" mode, and unbreakable cars, NASCAR 2002 offers several important and helpful new perks. The most significant addition is undoubtedly the game's driving school component, a 10-lesson tutorial where newcomers will familiarize themselves with the essentials. Addressing such issues as rules, pitting, car tuning, general driving skills, and even graphics-performance maximization, the two-hour-plus driving school is a wonderful primer that is clearly not a last-minute throw-in. Unfortunately, though all the lessons are fully narrated and definitely informative, they are not interactive like those that accompany Electronic Arts' slick F1 series.  The paint shop lets you dress your car up any way you see fit. NASCAR 2002 is also the very first NASCAR sim to offer complete tours of each and every facility. Narrated by stock-car legend Darrell Waltrip, this is a particularly interesting place to turn for both a general indoctrination and for guidance when certain circuits or sections of circuits seem troubling. Rookie drivers will also appreciate NASCAR's new optimum-driving-line graphical overlay, a colored on-track display that changes color to reflect braking and cautionary zones and is positioned to indicate the ideal car placement. And certainly anyone who drives with a keyboard will immediately take advantage of NASCAR's new digital steering-assistance function, which graduates and tempers the usually violent responses that typically accompany non-analog keyboard control.   Veteran NASCAR aficionados may not be so easily impressed. Though the game does sport several interesting new wrinkles that will impress the hard-core driver and enhance what was already an exceptional experience, it is far from an entirely revamped product, nor does it totally clear up the few trouble spots of past editions. Frame rate, for example, continues to be a problem. On the test system, which includes normally capable components such as an Athlon XP 1600+ processor, a GeForce2 GTS 64MB video card, and 512MB RAM, we were hard pressed to maintain a smooth-flowing display in traffic unless we first reduced several detail levels and dropped the resolution from the preferable 1024x768 to 800x600. It is disappointing that NASCAR once again forces you to choose between performance and appearance.The game's artificially intelligent competitors also continue to exhibit several of the quirks they've displayed in the past. When running under a yellow flag, they appear disorganized and more than willing to add to the mayhem by perpetrating low-speed crashes not only into each other but also into their human peer. During un-flagged conditions, they absolutely refuse to crash on the game's large, wide ovals, yet knock the stuffing out of one another again and again at short bullrings such as Bristol. They'll maintain a robotic behavior for the first few laps of a race and, unless interrupted by a crash, continue to motor along as a single entity within mere inches of each other's bumper even after a half hour of hard racing. This sort of conduct is a bit too tight for even the normally close-knit world of real-life NASCAR.  When things don't go according to plan, the results can be downright frightening. However, it is important to remember that such criticisms are valid only because Papyrus has failed to iron out such relatively trivial foibles since the last edition of the game. In the big picture and especially when compared to most other racing simulations, the NASCAR AI and in fact the entire NASCAR driving experience are nothing less than superb. As is typical for the series, NASCAR 2002 generally portrays weight, momentum, and grip concerns and the ebb and flow of the surrounding pack in an impeccable and highly realistic fashion unmatched anywhere in PC racing. Papyrus has also emphasized the effects of drafting this time around so that drivers absolutely must moderate their actions in relation to the proximity of nearby cars or find themselves out of the draft and falling helplessly to the back of the field. And now, if and when you do happen to make your way to the point, you'd best be prepared to fight off the constant advances of the cars tucked in behind that are in turn taking advantage of the higher top speed a draft creates. Unless you pit a screaming demon against low-grade competition, there will be no running away and hiding in this game.   There will, however, be loads of glorious sound effects. Though recent versions of NASCAR have made vast audio strides, none have approached this level of quality and variety. Now, instead of the familiar NASCAR Racing low-level roar, the engine sounds guttural and tortured and very, very complex. The transmission delivers a symphony of audible burps and grinds. And the tires have never, ever been this informative. Apart from the usual squeals and chirps you'll hear when you overdrive a turn, they'll emit a low-level whirr as they carve through virtually any corner. The tighter the turn, the more noticeably the tires complain.   NASCAR 2002 is also the prettiest NASCAR to date, but only by the slimmest of margins. The cars do seem a bit cleaner and more capable of bent and warped body parts. The pavement looks grittier and more detailed. Light sourcing seems slightly more realistic. Yet whatever on-track graphics alterations have been enacted are perceptible only when conducting painstaking back-to-back tests with NASCAR 4. Otherwise, Papyrus has definitely redesigned the game's off-track interfaces to look more polished and professional. It has also added an option with which new drivers can remove some of the more sophisticated menu items and thereby simplify their prerace setup process. Certainly one of the game's most advantageous perks is the oh-so-welcome return of the instant race restart, a function that's sadly been absent from the series since its earliest iterations. Now, drivers are no longer forced to endure the entire race-reloading process should they make a grievous on-track error. Instead, they'll merely click a button and immediately be placed back on the starting line in a fresh, undamaged automobile.   Whether you opt to restart the race or soldier on, the NASCAR 2002 replay feature is more than ready to accommodate the viewing of any number of laps or accidents. The NASCAR series has always offered one of the finest replay suites in the business, giving you access to such amenities as variable speed control, cutting and editing functions, and more camera perspectives than anyone could ever fully explore. Yet the latest game raises the bar even further by letting drivers insert sound files and still images to construct their own bizarre creation. Papyrus suggests placing a dunce cap on your buddy's car after he's committed a serious boo-boo, a concept that will undoubtedly be taken to heart by many in the NASCAR fraternity.  The snaking course at Sears Point is always a serious test of your abilities. Multiplayer NASCAR continues to support up to 42 human drivers via a network or Internet connection. Dozens of races are seemingly available at any time of the day or night via Sierra's no-charge online service, and most of them inevitably feature numerous talented and aggressive car jockeys. As in NASCAR 4, drivers will be compelled to reduce graphics detail to a minimum or suffer through a ton of warping, yet multiplayer NASCAR sports some of the most enjoyable human-vs.-human competition currently available when played through a fast Internet connection and computer.   As has been the case since its 1994 introduction, NASCAR Racing remains one of the very finest racing games on the market. Its latest version offers plenty of incentive for those who may have been intimidated in the past, and its innovations should be enough to encourage many veterans to come back for another go. However, if you're one of the many owners of NASCAR Racing 4, paying $49.95 for what is in essence an elaborate revision may not be suitable when the next true upgrade is undoubtedly already in the garage being prepped.
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776,Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ,4, This factory comes off more like a real industrial complex than the fantastic playground of a fop who makes candy with magical midgets.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/0/6/2209106-box_catcf.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory-review/1900-6129964/,neg,"
  Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie has a lot going for it. It's got Johnny Depp doing an eccentric yet endearing riff on Michael Jackson as the crazy chocolatier Willy Wonka. It's got a bunch of nifty Oompa-Loompa musical numbers. And it's got surreal and colorful set designs that make you think somebody's been spiking the Everlasting Gobstoppers with LSD.   Wait a second--why are we even bothering to save Augustus Gloop? He's an obnoxious slob!   The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game has none of these delights. There's no Depp to alternately creep us out and enchant us, there are no Oompa-Loompa odes to obnoxious children getting their just desserts, and there are no interesting visual elements. It does feature an interesting new angle on the original story that's sure to be of interest to the three or four people who dream of commanding an army of Oompa-Loompa repairmen. But other than that, this is a short, disappointing misuse of a great movie that clearly had the potential to inspire an outstanding kid's game.    Unlike the movie and the almost completely different PC edition of the game, by developer ImaginEngine (only some cutscenes and voice-overs are shared), the console versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by High Voltage, don't really follow the plot of Roald Dahl's classic children's novel. While you do play Charlie Bucket, that impoverished young lad with the grandparents who all sleep in the same bed, you don't really guide him on a tour of the reclusive Willy Wonka's psychedelic factory. Instead, you follow fellow golden-ticket winners Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee, enlisting the aid of a crew of Oompa-Loompas to clean up the mess that the obnoxious kiddies leave behind.    So when Augustus Gloop is punished for his gluttony by getting sucked into the pipe that drains the chocolate river, you help clear the machinery by grabbing a couple of Wonka's miniature indentured servants and putting them to work. After Veruca Salt goes down the garbage chute, the only thing standing between her and the incinerator is you and your tiny workmen. And so on. The little guys come in different varieties, so you need to recruit specific Oompa-Loompas for specific jobs. Welders, for example, are needed to repair leaky pipes, while gatherers are required to collect candy, and electricians are mandatory if you have to get power flowing again.    But while this is an interesting concept on paper--although, wouldn't the appeal of touring a chocolate factory be lessened by having to fix it along the way?--High Voltage doesn't do enough with it in pixels. Oompa-Loompa tasks are basic and repetitive. To get Gloop out of the chocolate pipe, for example, you order one worker to get power going by jumping up and down on a bellows, while another has to operate a machine that's creating Wonkabots. Then you turn the robots into vine balls with a magic candy power and throw the balls into a trio of vent shafts to increase the air pressure in the pipe needed to pop the fat kid free. Sound like pointless busywork? It is. And it's repeated four times before Gloop is finally out of the goop.    Unresponsive controls don't help matters any. You typically need to hit buttons three or four times for the simple work. Then you follow and wait for orders to be recognized, slowly growing more annoyed as the Oompa-Loompas shrug their shoulders over and over again. Even after your creepy mini-minions understand what they're supposed to be doing, their pathfinding is so terrible that they stumble over and get stuck on every magical mushroom and piece of candy-making machinery in sight. And since the controls are so simplistic, you can't even move these clods around via micromanagement; all you can do is sit back and wait while they stagger to their assignments.    Faulty controls also hinder the game's arcade sequences, which generally consist of standard platform-jumping. Just as with Oompa-Loompa management, one press generally isn't enough to register a command. You regularly need to hit buttons more than once to get Charlie to jump, use a candy power, throw an Everlasting Gobstopper, and more. Since this is essentially a kid's game, these control issues don't cause you to die or suffer anything really grievous. Still, you do wind up falling down and retracing your steps far more often than necessary, which cranks up the frustration factor in short order.    Added frustration is caused by sloppy design. As with the Gloop example above, most tasks are unnecessarily troublesome due to poor instructions and issues within the game that make it tough to complete objectives. Whether you're trying to gather candy ingredients, lifting Oompa-Loompas into the air with Wonka's fizzy drink, launching candies into bins with catapults, or simply trying to take out one of Wonka's robots with a Gobstopper, chances are good that you'll get stuck somewhere. And it's usually the worst kind of stuck, too, where you know exactly what you have to do and can even see the objective...but the controls aren't cooperating, and the terrain is so convoluted that you can't get there from here (arrows pointing to objectives would have been a huge help in spots). While Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may be aimed at kids, it's hard to imagine many of the under-13 set actually finishing it.    The look and feel of the game is virtually identical across all three console platforms, although the Xbox version features slightly sharper graphics. It also has Dolby Digital and boasts 720p support for high-definition TVs. So that's the version to buy if you have a choice. Otherwise, though, there's little to separate the three editions, as all are equally bad. Visuals are afflicted with a case of the jaggies, the candy comes in either generic bar form or as glowing Pac-Man-style power dots, and the camera often veers drunkenly (motion sickness and chocolate probably aren't a good mix) and gets trapped behind walls. Colors are suitably gaudy, but most areas are so barren of detail that the factory comes off more like a real industrial complex than the fantastic playground of a fop who makes candy with magical midgets.   Veruca Salt, the little brute, has just gone down the garbage chute.   The music and audio effects, however, are outstanding. Virtually the entire cast--all of the principals are here, save Depp, who's voiced by a great imitator named James Taylor (presumably not the ""Fire and Rain"" folksinger)--reprises its roles admirably. All the kids do a great job of bringing their characters to life with a fair number of extra lines not heard in the movie, especially Julia Winter as the so-bratty-you've-gotta-love-her Veruca Salt. The one audio drawback is the bizarre absence of the Oompa-Loompa musical numbers that are the high points of the movie.     Still, great audio doesn't go very far when coupled with such poor gameplay. Games based on hot movie properties are rarely good, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory doesn't break this trend. The console releases are better than the truly execrable PC game of the same name, but there's still no reason for it to exist, beyond an attempt to line pockets at the expense of movie fans.  
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777,Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy ,4," A lousy conversion of the anime's story, as well as some equally poor beat-'em-up action, keeps the golden shine out of Fullmetal Alchemist on the DS.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/9/8/2211898-box_fmads.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fullmetal-alchemist-dual-sympathy-review/1900-6165400/,neg,"
  Alchemy isn't without irony, it would seem. Fullmetal Alchemist is one of the most popular and well-liked anime series worldwide, but somehow its conversion to the Nintendo DS diminishes the series from gold to lead. This short adventure that skews toward the macabre tries to cram the entire running length of the anime into a short beat-'em-up. In doing so, it completely saps the anime's story of its personality, and it offers a pretty unsatisfying beat-'em-up to boot. However, it does act as a shining example of why the anime's vaunted law of equivalent exchange is a fallacy, if only because you'll feel gypped after sinking your time and money into this game.   I eat homunculi like you for breakfast.   Typically, when a developer tries to cram, oh, say, 51 full-length anime episodes into a four-hour game (including gameplay), a few of the details, itty-bitty or otherwise, get pragmatically sidelined. And wouldn't you know it, such is the case with Fullmetal Alchemist. What seems to have been left out is the humanizing portion that counterbalances the stark, Machiavellian world in which the story takes place. So instead of the inspirational heroes' journey of Ed and Al to reconcile their hopes and aspirations with the realities of the world, you get a story that harps on Nazi-esque human experimentation, mass genocide, and the futility of our own existence from the perspective of a few kids who seem to have no problem aligning themselves with the group most likely capable of helping them reach their own ends, regardless of whether that force is the physical incarnation of evil. There's also some matricide and religious doom and gloom thrown into the mix, presented with equal moral ambiguity. The storyline as it is presented here in many ways misrepresents what the series is actually about, because in its haste to get through the story it leaves several downright abhorrent faults in logic unresolved--so the game really might not be suitable for those who lack a proper perspective on the world. And aside from the heavy delivery, the game makes ample use of the ever-helpful ""... ..."" response, as well as several sequences where characters are essentially just yelling other characters' names, accompanied by ambiguous visuals on the top screen, which makes digesting the story even more of a task.    With the story being in such shambles, it's problematic that the gameplay plays second fiddle to it. Between the prolonged cutscenes, you work your way through a series of stages and boss fights. Defying the traditional beat-'em-up style of play, the action here is for the most part extremely easy. On your first play-through, only the normal mode will be available, and in this mode it is simply a matter of jamming on your attack button as you stroll from one side of the screen to the other. Making things easier is the one wrinkle that Fullmetal Alchemist introduces to the formula, that being the alchemy powers. By tapping on the touch screen with your thumb (the stylus isn't practical), you can activate an alchemy attack or erect a wall. Both of these have three power levels, where the first level is free to use and the others require a certain amount of transmutation icons, which float around on the touch screen to indicate how many you've got. These powers trivialize all regular encounters, because the free attack is enough to one-shot kill most enemies and the artificial intelligence isn't smart enough to go around the walls, which, incidentally, you are able to shoot through. Occasionally, one of the enemies will have a gun, but your gun is much, much larger, so it rarely ends well for them. The several bosses are able to arbitrarily dodge most of your alchemy attacks, so you'll need to figure out the usually obvious opening when they are vulnerable. Also, the game is stingy with health pickups, but dying has no real penalty, as you simply restart the current area you're in, not the stage, with a full health bar.     Once you make it through the story mode on normal, you'll unlock a hard story mode as well as a character mode. Character mode lets you go through mostly the same adventure you just went on, except you'll be able to play through it with a character other than Edward. It also gets rid of all the cutscenes and most of the terrible minigames, so it's in many ways far more enjoyable than the story mode. You'd be hard pressed to extend each run-through here to longer than 45 minutes, but at least you do unlock a number of character-specific assets once you complete the mode. These include screens from the show, character profiles, and voice clips, among others. It's all nice, but there's really nothing here that you can't find a better version of on the Internet...for free. Other bonus features include a truly puzzling fortune-telling mode and an alarm-clock mode, presumably for when you fall asleep playing this game.    There's a heavy bovine presence, which is par for the course in an anime such as this.   The look of Fullmetal Alchemist is better than the sound, but neither shines through in any way. There is a lot of the same hand-drawn artwork you'd expect from a game based on an anime, and most of the dialogue is delivered with a still shot on the top screen and a face shot of the speaker with some text on the bottom. Several typos and grammatical errors appear in the dialogue text, which is bordering on inexcusable in this day and age. During the brief fighting periods, the game recycles the same few enemy sprites throughout, but at least the main characters' sprites are distinct and recognizable. Occasionally accompanying the text, the actors from the anime will chime in to voice the dialogue. However, they do so rarely and the sound quality is extremely poor, sounding as if it were recorded at a lousy studio. Also, many of the sound effects are quite archaic, including a Super Mario Bros. fireball sound when you hit A to advance the dialogue. The music sounds as if it's taken straight from the anime, so if you like it there, you'll probably like it here.    As benign as most beat-'em-ups are, the ESRB wasn't kidding around with the T it slapped on the cover of this box. Because the story has been stripped down to its bare-bones essentials, a lot of the charm of the anime falls by the wayside and is replaced by a disturbing storyline that lacks redeeming qualities. Plus, the lousy beat-'em-up action and undistinguished bonus media do little to salvage the package, so it's probably best to just avoid this one altogether, even if you're a fan of the anime.  
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778,Herbie Fully Loaded ,4, Herbie: Fully Loaded is nothing more than a hastily delivered cash-in on the popularity of a summer film.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/1/8/2223218-herbie.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/herbie-fully-loaded-review/1900-6130279/,neg,"
  Mobile publishers view their market the way their console colleagues did in 1982. Now, as then, the customer is given very little information about a game at the point of purchase. Branding--at least in the eyes of publishers--is therefore the single most important component of a mobile game. Herbie: Fully Loaded features the vehicular movie star, along with the freckled visage of Lindsay Lohan. What it doesn't feature is gameplay, creativity, or audiovisual fidelity.    Apparently, Lindsay Lohan recently uninvited Jessica Simpson from her birthday party. As a Hollywood starlet, you can remain in middle school forever!   As Herbie, it's your job to wreck much larger cars, while avoiding taking too much damage yourself. To do this, you must contend with horrible control. For whatever reason--perhaps in an effort to make Herbie more intuitive for nongamers--Disney Mobile decided not to make Herbie's control context-sensitive. To move left, you must press left. This also makes every directional key serve double duty as an acceleration button, which prevents you from driving at anything but top speed.     It's probably just as well, then, that you won't have to do much driving at all, as many of your objectives can be completed by exploiting the game's horrid artificial intelligence. If you cache Herbie away in the corner of one of the game's cordoned-off destruction rings, the bots will be unable to find him. Instead, they'll simply destroy one another.     At no point do you get to steal the show at a NASCAR race track, or cozy up to young and fresh Volkswagon bug models. The most exciting thing you can expect is to pick up a power-up, which might repair your car, give you a speed boost, or freeze opposing vehicles for a short period.    Don't buy this game.   Herbie is hardly a technological showcase for the Sony Ericsson S710. The vehicle sprites are tiny, and are shown through an overhead perspective in one of several nigh-identical rings. The game's frame rate is consistent, but you'll never be imparted with a real sense of speed or danger. Herbie's sound is as forgettable as the rest of the game and isn't worth enabling.    Herbie: Fully Loaded is nothing more than a hastily delivered cash-in on the popularity of a summer film. It is a piece of adverware, for which you will be charged several dollars a month. When staring at a list of names on a carrier's download deck, it's tempting to go for a familiar brand. Resist the urge here.  
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779,Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey ,4," An inferior copy of a classic, Swashbucklers isn't worth your time.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/2/6/3/24332-68263.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/swashbucklers-blue-vs-grey-review/1900-6184117/,neg,"
  Mix the Wild West with the high seas and you get Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey, an action adventure game about pirates during the Civil War. However, the gameplay isn't as innovative as this offbeat premise, considering that Russian developer TM Studios has simply duplicated Sid Meier's take on buccaneering from his Pirates! games, right down to the arcade minigames. There isn't any amusement to be found in the derivative, go-through-the-motions gameplay that mimics a vastly superior predecessor. The PlayStation 2 production values (the game was apparently designed for Sony's last-generation console), which boast nonstop loading screens and outdated graphics, really hammer home the bottom-drawer philosophy behind this second-rate rip-off.   Like the rest of Swashbucklers, the boxing minigame is tedious and dull.   Nevertheless, there are enough interesting aspects to the story to make you wish that Swashbucklers had been more ambitious with its gameplay. You take the role of Abraham Gray, a pirate plying his trade in the Caribbean and along the southeastern seaboard of the United States during the Civil War. Dropping the usual 16th-17th century piratical escapades for a more modern era is a great idea, especially given how the game dresses up the period with cowboy touches. Gray dresses more like a Texas Ranger than a buccaneer from Havana, what with his beat-up cowboy hat and twirling six-guns. City ports look like refugees from an old oat opera as well, with dirt streets, sheriffs' offices, and taverns. Another nifty touch is Gray's mental state. He's a schizophrenic who hears voices, which comes in handy when this hallucinatory alter ego provides tips on how to play the game. Not much is made of this during play, although the concept is at least an interesting way to handle the pop-up instructions provided during game tutorials.    Depressingly, that's about it for the positives. For starters, everything about Swashbucklers screams bargain bin. The visuals are all washed-out, as if they've been put through the photocopier one too many times. The graphical quality isn't much better than that offered in the PS2 version of the game, although everything is sharper on the PC and it at least offers widescreen support for modern monitors. Visual elements of the game are often repeated, too, which means that ports feature the same dirt streets, the same taverns, and the same sheriff's departments. Every section of the game needs to be loaded, too, despite the dated look. Loads are nearly instantaneous, but they still break up the flow with continual screen fade-outs and transition screens. A comic-book vibe to the visual flair makes the dated stuff a bit more tolerable, but you're still playing a game that looks as if it came out five years ago. Furthermore, the interface is one of those big ""designed for a TV set"" affairs, which makes it a chore to simply use your inventory.    Audio is an even bigger advertisement for yesteryear. Presumably to avoid the costs involved with recording dialogue and then translating it for different markets, characters in Swashbucklers grunt conversations like angry, drunken versions of the adults in Peanuts cartoons. Unfortunately, this half-baked attempt at simlish doesn't work here, given that you're trying to make sense of a storyline, not groove on the cutesiness of virtual dolls expressing emotions without uttering any intelligible words. You can't get much out of this grunting, either, because it all sounds like a cross between a snore and a belch. Thankfully, there are captions for all of this snorted dialogue, so you can ignore these annoying noises and just read your way through conversations while listening to the pretty good Wild West-style musical score.    It's a pity that you can't similarly disregard the gameplay. This is a clone of Pirates! in every imaginable way, but without the depth and sense of fun that permeated that 2005 remake. Character development has some role-playing game aspects, although they're pretty rudimentary. You level up fairly quickly, but can apply the points gained to only three skills: fencing, shooting, and defense. Perks that provide special melee attacks, defense bonuses, and the like can also be chosen, which gives you at least a little more freedom to build a character. Regardless, there isn't enough choice here to let you really customize Gray. The arcade-style combat is equally straightforward on both terra firma and on the high seas. You move around with the WASD keys and fight with clicks of the left mouse button. Both ways of doing battle are fast-paced; Gray is an expert swordsman, and the vessels at his command are able to rip off cannon fire at Gatling-gun speeds. It's only when dueling enemy captains at the conclusion of boarding sequences that you're required to do any thinking, and this really just requires you to pace yourself by taking breathers every now and again as you run out of energy.   Bloody sword-fighting sequences on the decks of boarded ships at least let you work out some frustrations with the game.   Quests are generally pretty basic delivery runs where you drop off supplies, hand over prisoners, sink vessels, and so on. There is little interaction with non-player characters, and no need to fuss around with loading ships or dumping off cargo. Consequently, in the many Fed Ex quests you simply land in a port, talk to someone to accept a job, sail to another port, and talk to someone about taking your delivery. Wash, rinse, repeat. You can make cash on the side by auctioning off captured vessels, or by running goods from one port to another and doing the old buy-low, sell-high thing. But there isn't any strategy here because the auctions are conducted automatically, and the prices for cargo remain static even when you're buying up tons of stock. You know you've got a pretty simplified market system when it doesn't even recognize basic supply and demand.     Earning money from ship-selling and trading isn't really necessary, either, given that you can make just about all of the cash that you want by taking on all comers in the boxing minigame on offer in various ports' bars. This is a bare-fisted version of the captain duel described above that is incredibly easy to win. All you have to do is pound away for a few rounds and occasionally pepper your opponent with a roundhouse special attack to walk away with as much as a thousand bucks.    If you're looking to recreate the Pirates! experience, just replay that fantastic game. Don't bother with this dull copy unless you've got a fetish for mentally ill buccaneers.    
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780,Ghost Rider ,4," Ghost Rider steals liberally from several major action games, yet somehow avoids stealing the parts that made those games fun.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/3/7/4/2214374-box_grider.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ghost-rider-review/1900-6166020/,neg,"
  Just call it ""Devil May Ghost Rider of War."" Based ever-so-loosely on the same-named upcoming Nic Cage movie (which, in turn, is based on the popular Marvel comic book), Ghost Rider isn't just inspired by such great action franchises as God of War and Devil May Cry, it practically robs those games blind of every gameplay mechanic it can get its grubby, demonic hands on. And yet, somehow, some way, despite the incredible pedigrees the developers were lifting from, Ghost Rider is completely bereft of the elements that made those games so much fun. It is a hollow, monotonous shell of those games, completely soulless in its execution and devoid of any unique or interesting qualities, much less any fun. Suffice it to say, no matter how much of an affinity you have for the titular hero, this game is not for you.   How in the heck do you make a game about a dude with a flaming skull for a head so incredibly boring?!?   Ghost Rider purportedly features a storyline penned by Marvel writers Garth Ennis and Jimmy Palmiotti, but the story feels less like a fully fleshed-out piece of comic fiction and more like leftover table scraps. The story doesn't even do a good job of tying in to the movie. It's told through some comic-paned cutscenes that feature just-different-enough-to-not- quite-look-like-real-actors drawings of all the major characters from the movie. A soundalike of Sam Elliott (apparently channeling his Big Lebowski character, with a spookier edge) narrates a few opening sequences just to get you up to speed, and eventually you figure out that the demon Mephisto needs Ghost Rider to head up to earth to stop his son, Blackheart, and his army of demons from getting their apocalypse on. It's a middling tale that's disjointed in its delivery and does a weak job of shoving in some familiar Marvel personalities (like Blade) just because it can. It also doesn't help that the audio mix on the cutscenes is so awful that you'll have to turn the volume on your TV way, way up just to hear what's going on, only to be brutally assaulted with the screechy in-game sound effects and soundtrack at much-too-high volume seconds later.    Once you settle into the gameplay, you'll find an unholy combination of God of War's whip-heavy combat and Devil May Cry's ranking system. The game is all about you killing Blackheart's demonic forces with as much style and variety as possible, and to its credit, it does provide a decent number of combos to work with. You start out with almost none, but then, through a direct rip of God of War's upgrade system (right down to the sound effect it uses to fill up your various upgradeable meters), you can use souls you've collected to buy new combos and up your abilities.     The problem, though, is that very few of the combos are actually worth using, and you get the most useful ones very early in the game. In fact, one combo in particular is so powerful, it kills just about any enemy in roughly three hits. All the other combos in the game tend to take much longer to fell any one foe, so there's not much incentive to ever use the other combos--except when the game forces you to. There are a couple of instances where enemies will pop up with shields that can only be broken by reaching a certain ranking on the combo meter. You can't build up your combo meter unless you throw in as much attack variety as possible, so you're arbitrarily forced to use as many different attacks as you can to eventually crack this shield. Trouble is, the meter fully resets any time you're hit, and enemies are just good enough at coming at you from offscreen and nailing you when you're not expecting it to make this whole process intensely frustrating.     Apart from this one particularly stupid element, very little of the remaining components of Ghost Rider are frustrating, mainly because the game's really easy. You fight the same onslaughts of the same generic demons over and over again, and they never change up their attack patterns in the slightest. Not to mention the one-size-fits-all combo that eliminates practically any bad guy in just a few hits. You'll blow through the game in just a few hours, but it'll take some fortitude to not become desperately bored an hour into the whole thing. The combat goes absolutely nowhere, and the enemies are so dull to look at and fight that you can't help but wish the developer had gone the extra mile and just lifted enemies right out of DMC or GOW, since at least they'd put up a more interesting fight. Level designs add to the sense of monotony, not just through their constantly drab and grainy graphics, but also because the game frequently forces you to backtrack through the same territory again and again.    Interspersed between the boring beat-'em-up levels are a number of motorcycle-riding sequences. These are pretty straightforward, sticking you on the Rider's flaming bike and tasking you with making it from point A to point B, all the while shooting away at bad guys that randomly pop up in your path. Periodically you'll need to get all Road Rash on them and swipe at some enemy bikers with your chains, or hop or slide your bike over or under some obstacle, but that's about it. The controls in these sequences are pretty loose, and there's even less variety to them than to the beat-'em-up portions of the game. And just like in the other levels, these sequences force you to backtrack frequently.    Ghost Rider is out for both the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable, and while the core gameplay is identical between the two, other details are quite different. The main story mode is structured differently between the two. You play in a much smaller area in the PSP levels, and each time you clear a section of enemies, you walk into a checkpoint, which then spawns another crop of bad guys. In the PS2 version, you travel from stage to stage, just as you would in a typical action adventure game. The PSP version also has quite a bit more bonus content, including a challenge mode and a multiplayer mode. The challenge mode includes a few different race modes, some of which include rule variations like elimination races and a survival mode, where all the racers have a quickly diminishing life bar and must get to the checkpoints to replenish themselves. Of course, the races suffer from the same bad controls as the story mode driving sequences, and the few weapons you can use to mess with your opponents don't help matters. Still, you can play these same modes in multiplayer, both with multiple copies of the game or with game sharing. Clearly someone went to a lot of trouble to make the PSP version's features more interesting--too bad the underlying gameplay of these features wasn't made better.   The driving sequences would be pathetically easy if it weren't for the bad bike-handling controls.   The PSP and PS2 games look practically identical, too--so much so that you'd actually have to say the PSP version is more impressive looking, just because so little seems to have been lost in translation. Of course, that's less a compliment to the PSP game and more an extreme knock against the PS2 game, as neither could be considered good looking by any stretch of the imagination. The graphics are terribly grainy and the level designs so blurry and ugly that they just become hard to look at after a while. Ghost Rider's been given a few stylish attack animations here and there, but none of it's all that impressive. The enemy designs are particularly lame; these generic bad guys could have been plucked from any bargain-basement action game, and couldn't be any less intimidating looking if they wore white sheets, rattled bike chains, and said ""boo"" a lot. On top of everything else, the camera and frame rate can't even hold up their end of the bargain. The frame rate chunks up badly in a number of seemingly random spots, and the camera tries to go for the whole God of War, fixed-angle thing, but it frequently kills your ability to properly see where enemies reside. The only control you have over it is to snap it behind you.    Though it's hard to be shocked these days when a movie-licensed game isn't quite up to snuff, Ghost Rider is legitimately surprising in just how poor a game it is. That it goes so far out of its way to usurp qualities from multiple major action adventure franchises, then proceeds to trot out the dullest, blandest beat-'em-up possible with those lifted mechanics is mind-boggling. Fans of the comic will be depressed with how poorly their favorite hero is utilized here, and fans of action adventure games won't be able to shake the feeling that they're playing a bad bootleg of games they've already played before. Indeed, Ghost Rider is ultimately just another flaming corpse to toss on the pile of failed licensed action games.  
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781,Mass Effect: Pinnacle Station ,4, Mass Effect's latest add-on is an insult to fans clamoring for new content.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2448234-2217301-mass_effect.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mass-effect-pinnacle-station-review/1900-6216484/,neg,"
  Like a diseased steak thrown to the wolves, so this travesty of a downloadable add-on has been tossed to hungry Mass Effect fans. Contrary to its high-reaching title, Pinnacle Station is a creative nadir in an otherwise excellent sci-fi universe. By downloading it, you get a simulated battle arena (one of video gaming's most arthritic cliches) and--a gun. There is hardly a smidgen of storytelling or role-playing, and the battle types and maps feel tossed together due to poor level design and problematic combat scenarios. Even at 400 Microsoft points ($5), Pinnacle Station is a condescending insult, the digital equivalent of scraps fed under the table to the family pooch.      To visit the simulation, you travel to the Arghos Rho system from the Normandy's galactic map. Once on the station, Admiral Ahern introduces you to Tech Officer Ochren, a disapproving Salarian who serves as the station's know-it-all computer geek. Ochren is the highlight of the expedition; he's superbly voiced with a patronizing sneer that gives him a touch of goofy charm. Unfortunately, his only function is to activate the simulator. He is one of only three characters with whom you interact; otherwise, there is little role-playing or storytelling aside from a few conversations and a basic narrative structure. The content is confined to a series of simulated combat scenarios that remind you that Mass Effect is a merely adequate third-person shooter. In the context of a far-reaching role-playing game, the combat was an entertaining extension of traditional BioWare battle mechanics (attack, pause and consider, and attack again). In the framework of a battle arena, it is enjoyable but awkward, and this awkwardness is magnified by flawed battle modes and numerous bugs.    There are four modes total: Survival, Time Trial, Capture, and Hunt. Survival is a typical battle mode in which you and your squad fend off attackers as long as possible, while in Time Trial, you take down a set number of enemies as quickly as you can. These modes are simple, but they're conceptually solid. We did run into a few bugs, however. In our very first Time Trial battle, for example, an enemy got stuck in the middle of some crates and couldn't be damaged, which forced us to restart the battle. Capture and Hunt are more problematic. In Hunt, a timer counts down to zero, and you add to your available time by defeating enemies. What the game doesn't tell you is that once you kill a certain number of enemies enemies, you can no longer add time to the clock, for reasons that are never clarified. In Capture scenarios, you run to a predesignated point and hold your position for a short while until the capture is complete, and then you move to the next. This mode is the least fun, given that it involves running to a node, standing in place while shooting a few foes, and running again. The three simple, uninspired maps culled from the main game don't help matters; they're very small and funnel you down narrow paths, so there are no real tactical considerations in any of these modes. You just run and shoot, or simply exploit the pause-and-aim nature of the combat to easily beat the target time.    The Turians are coming? Quick, look busy!   Your goal in every case is to reach first place on virtual leaderboards; you won't be able to compare your results with those of other players. Once you rise to the top of the initial set, your primary challenger gives you your choice of a few different weapons as a reward, and you unlock a few final scenarios. But the unlocked battles are a joke: you're really just unlocking the ability to play every mode on every map (before these battles are unlocked, each mode is playable on only two of the maps). The only worthwhile unlockable is a final combat simulation assigned by the Admiral himself, which is at least more challenging than the easy battles that precede it. It's just as buggy, though: On two different attempts, enemies stopped spawning into the map, and the countdown timer disappeared, again forcing restarts. Assuming that bugs don't force you to give up, Ahern gives you the keys to an apartment in the sector, where you can stock up on medi-gel and grenades. A couple of hours after you start, you're done, with no reason to return and with no better understanding of the universe or its characters.    To add insult to injury, if you purchased the Greatest Hits edition of Mass Effect, Pinnacle Station won't function unless you employ a work-around that involves deleting the packed-in Bring Down the Sky content and then purchasing it from the Xbox Live Marketplace--essentially doubling Pinnacle Station's price. A future fix may remedy that problem, but even when in perfect working order, the latest Mass Effect add-on is shameful. It's unimaginative and soulless, and considering that it has been almost two years since the original game was released, it's too little, too late.      Editor's Note: The Mass Effect: Pinnacle Station review originally stated that there are four simulation maps, rather than three. GameSpot regrets the error. 
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782,Monster 4x4: World Circuit ,4, New driving controls add barely a smidgen of excitement to this Wii port of a thoroughly boring monster truck racer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/9/9/1/2213991-box_m4x4wc.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/monster-4x4-world-circuit-review/1900-6162402/,neg,"
  As any child of the '80s will tell you, monster trucks are awesome. There's no disputing it. It's science, an irrefutable fact. However, just because monster trucks are awesome doesn't mean that every form of entertainment based on monster trucks is awesome. Take Ubisoft's Monster 4x4: World Circuit, for example. Originally released earlier this year on the Xbox and now available for the Wii, World Circuit completely misses the point of what makes monster trucks excellent. Sure, it's got the big trucks, but it also has exactly zero of the excitement. It somehow makes the act of driving these trucks over rows of parked cars, through various sheds and other breakable bric-a-brac, and off of carefully placed stunt ramps, completely and utterly dull. Not to mention that it can't even do you the service of actually including some actual monster truck events. To its credit, World Circuit for the Wii does include some new driving controls that make the game just a hair more enjoyable, but these controls aren't nearly enough to make what was only recently a lousy budget game worth a full retail price tag.   The monster trucks might be goofy, but that's about the only thing this dull and shallow racer has going for it.   So what, exactly, does Monster 4x4 do differently on the Wii? Much the way Ubisoft did with GT Pro Series, its other driving game available at the Wii's launch, this game turns the Wii Remote into a steering wheel. The game comes with a cheap-looking plastic steering wheel attachment that you can plunk the remote into the middle of. By turning and steering the wheel, you'll control your truck onscreen. The only buttons you really need to mess with are the 1 and 2 buttons, which brake and accelerate respectively. The handling of the trucks via this new control method is a little touchy at first, but once you get a handle on it, it works well enough. The slightly more unpredictable nature of this control scheme does occasionally make the game more frustrating, but it also makes it a bit more exciting, since you feel as though you have more direct control over what's happening onscreen.    It's too bad, then, that the actual racing is completely uninteresting. World Circuit includes a few different race types. The normal races include things like stunt ramps, destructible set pieces, pitfalls, shortcuts, and the like. Racing monster trucks, as you might imagine, isn't always a speedy affair. These are big, honking driving machines, so the relative speed of each one isn't great. The game tries to make up for this by letting you create some chaos on the track. You are rewarded for breaking various pieces of scenery set about the track, and by performing stunts. You are given points for doing these things, and you can eventually use the points to upgrade your trucks in a few different stat categories. However, that's really your only reward, and it's a dubious one at best. The actual destruction you cause looks cheap and doesn't hold much satisfaction on its own. As for the upgrade points, the truck upgrades are barely noticeable. You really won't become aware of any serious differences in how your truck performs, so it's a waste of time to even bother.    Stunts are no less dull. To perform a stunt, you simply spin the steering wheel in some kind of random circular motion. Your truck will do some form of ridiculous barrel roll, and that's about it. We'll certainly concede that monster trucks doing stunts like this is crazy, but it's not interesting when it's the same basic stunt done in a few different directions over and over and over again. The only reason to do stunts is to build up your nitro-boost meter, but even that is a fool's errand, since nitro boosts rarely seem to do much to actually boost you past the competition.     What is there besides the normal races? Just basic split-screen multiplayer races and a few multiplayer minigames for up to four players. These minigames include such gems as monster truck soccer, which is precisely what it sounds like, and monster combat, which has you driving around, trying to launch as many flaming barrels at other drivers as possible. But even with their wacky nature, there's just nothing interesting or engaging about these games. Driving the trucks is still just as boring in the minigames as it is in the races, so these games aren't useful for more than just a menial distraction.   This really seems like it ought to be fun, but it's not.   Monster 4x4 used to be a budget game, and nowhere is that more apparent than in its presentation. The graphics look about on par with a PS2 game from a couple of years ago, just with a steadier frame rate. The trucks are blandly designed, the various destruction effects look cheap, and the environments are just a muddled mess. Apart from ugly textures, it's just impossible to tell where you are or what's going on half the time. All the tracks are supposed to be set in various historical locales, like the Egyptian pyramids, Mount Rushmore, and such, but apart from very occasional glances at something like the Sphinx, you might as well be racing through some anonymous dirt track somewhere outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. The game does occasionally feature some nice lighting effects, but that's the extent of its graphical pluses. There's not even much of a sense of speed on display here. You constantly feel as though your truck is chugging along at a snail's pace, and the boost effect just adds a bunch of cheesy motion blur. There's not much audio beyond the revving of overly grimy-sounding truck engines and an insane amount of wailing guitar solos--enough to where you'll question your love of electric guitar by the time you're done playing.     So, to recap: Monster trucks are awesome, but Monster 4x4: World Circuit is not. The racing is bland, the destruction is minimal, the excitement is nonexistent, the presentation is poor, the content is lacking, and last, but certainly not least, Ubisoft is now charging $50 for what was a budget game less than a year ago. There's no excuse to charge full price for a driving game this hollow and boring, and there's no reason for you to bother playing it.  
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783,Transformers: The Game ,4," Envision the dullest possible game about giant robots beating one another up, and then find a way to make it even duller. That's Transformers in a nutshell.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/1/7/0/2217170-box_tftg.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/transformers-the-game-review/1900-6175638/,neg,"
  The new Transformers games haven't exactly been a picnic up to this point, but none of them can hold a candle to the level of sheer drudgery that Transformers: The Game for the PSP offers. It's not that the game is devoid of a winning formula or anything. You get to play as any number of the various Autobots or Decepticons, stomping through a bunch of different environments while shooting and punching opposing robots. You also get to shoot some tanks, helicopters, and whatnot. Giant robots blowing stuff up should and almost always is awesome. In Transformers, it's anything but.   Apparently giant robot battles make a good sleep aid. Who knew?   Blame it on the controls, the level designs, or the graphics--anything you want. There's plenty to be spread around. Ultimately, the controls probably are the biggest culprit. It makes sense that a giant robot would be a bit unwieldy to move, but here, they're not only clunky but also achingly slow. There's little to no ability to properly maneuver yourself around the game's cramped environments, and the slogging pace at which the robots run is enough to put you to sleep before you even get to your first boss fight.    If you do manage to get into a few battles before nodding off, you'll find the combat to be a total chore. Aiming is just as sluggish and imprecise as the robot movements. You use the triangle and X buttons to move the targeting reticle up or down. You also have to be pretty careful about where you aim to hit anything. The second an enemy robot moves slightly out of the way, you've got to readjust your aim because there's no targeting lock of any sort. That's pretty annoying when you're trying to run and shoot at the same time. It's a good thing enemies have an innate tendency to get hung up on walls, pillars, and other pieces of the environment because it makes killing them a heck of a lot easier.    At some point, it just becomes easier to run up to a bad guy and punch him a bunch of times instead of trying to line up your lasers, machine guns, rocket launchers, or whatever else. Melee combat is more effective, but it's also kind of pathetic. You just run up to an enemy robot and start punching away, but the enemy never, ever reacts. The enemy robot just stands there, sometimes punching back, and eventually, it explodes. That speaks to a larger problem with the game, which is an apparent lack of animation. Transforming into your vehicular form is a joke. You get about a third of a transformation animation then your robot pops directly into vehicle form and vice versa. Considering the overall lack of quality in the graphics, perhaps that's not overly surprising. Every environment is gray, brown, or a combination of the two. Thick fog covers everything a few feet above your head, and the frame rate still struggles in spots. It's not pretty.    There are a few very mild positives at least. Mission design is varied, if not overly so. You get a variety of goals to take care of, whether it's taking out one specific Transformer, an entire military convoy, or some manner of escort mission. It's still mindless, clunky shooting for the most part, but the game does try to dress up the missions. Plot wise, the game ties itself loosely to the film, though it also aims to expand a bit upon the film's plot. Unfortunately, its concept of expansion is to toss some rather dull cutscenes before and after each level of mindless shooting. The story goes a bit beyond the storyline found in the other game versions of Transformers, as well as the film, and it even includes some older Transformers from the franchise's past. While it's cool to see some old, familiar faces, there's still not much of a plot here--at least not one worth caring about.   In this environment, the developers have liberally mixed both brown and gray into something…brown-grayish...   Lastly, Transformers actually includes a multiplayer mode for up to four players via ad-hoc play. The standard multiplayer variants are all on hand, such as death match, capture the flag, and king of the hill. The game uses the same basic environments from the single-player for the multiplayer action, so you're still wandering around these ugly places, though now they're a lot more vacant. Combat and control are as awful in multiplayer as they are in single-player, so it's unlikely anyone's going to have much fun with this mode either.    If you are on the hunt for a playable companion piece to the Transformers film, you would do better to pick up literally any other version of this game. None of the other versions are exactly good, but at least they aren't as tediously boring as the PSP game.    
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784,Star Chamber ,8.8," Star Chamber combines elegance, interesting gameplay choices, and the attraction of card-collecting in what has to be one of the very best pure game designs of the year.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/0/8/8/17991-52088.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-chamber-review/1900-6085947/,pos,"
 Let's get this out of the way up front: Star Chamber is great. What's more, it's great because it combines elegance, interesting gameplay choices, and the attraction of card-collecting in what has to be one of the very best pure game designs of the year.  The combination of board game and card game is so well done that the two are completely inseparable but are utterly engrossing.  Star Chamber isn't flashy, but its presentation works well. It's essentially a board game with a heavy collectible card game component. However, whereas some such games use the game board simply as a tool to provide opportunities for duels between players who are using the cards, Star Chamber makes the board game the focus of the design and integrates the collectible cardplay in such a way that you can't separate them. The cards have no meaning without the context of the game board, yet without them, the board game aspect would be sterile and much less interesting. It's a testament to how well designed the game is that when combined, these two aspects make for a game that is much better than the sum of the parts.  The game is played out on a stylized board that consists of different types of planets, which are connected by jump lanes of variable length. There are artifact planets that generate something called ""destiny,"" industrial worlds that generate production, and barren worlds that are just waiting for cards to be played on them, which can transform them into producers of valuable resources, such as technology. Asteroid fields and nebulae act as locations with special properties. Because everything is visible, players can see an opponent's position (but not his or her hand) and thus Star Chamber plays very much like a board game.  There are three separate ways to win the game, and this contributes to the game's incredible depth. You can achieve a military victory by conquering your opponent's homeworld; a cultural victory by amassing 30 more destiny points than your foe; or a political victory by winning three ""power play"" votes in the Star Chamber. This name refers to the political body represented in the game by a central location on the map, where no combat is allowed between opposing fleets and where players vie for influence to win votes that may bring them closer to political victory, closer to amassing destiny, or closer to gaining control of additional starships. Because winning these votes gains advantages that are not limited to single methods of victory, the Star Chamber mechanism is extremely flexible. This wealth of choices, all of which relate to every other part of the game, makes Star Chamber one of the year's outstanding strategy games.  The unit types and production rules are simple: planets can produce ships and citizens. Citizens control planets and confer voting privileges in the Star Chamber, while ships transport citizens, fight other ships, and blockade planets. Because there is no way (outside of a few specialized cards) to destroy citizens on a planet unless you go to a state of war, which allows you to produce bombers but costs you destiny, the tension between space power and planet control/voting strength is one of the game's central dilemmas, and it's yet another example of the outstanding design.  Ship combat is--like the rest of the game--very straightforward and not very luck-dependent. There are basically two classes of ships available to build (scouts and cruisers, although bombers appear once war has been declared) with slightly different characteristics for each race, as well as larger ships (dreadnoughts) than can be acquired via cardplay. Ships are rated for beam, missile, and cannon attack, and combat proceeds through a number of rounds where different types of weapons are fired in turn, so you can always tell how much damage a ship will do in a given round. The only luck factor is in targeting, because this is done randomly based on the relative strength of opposing ships and their damage state. Otherwise, it's clear how much damage a ship can inflict--and how much damage it is likely to sustain--in a given combat, and thus gaining advantages in combat relies on the skill of each player.  Starship combat is not visually arresting, but it has some interesting nuances to it.  The fact that we haven't described how the card system works until now demonstrates just how important the board game aspect is. However, the card portion is crucial, and it's what makes the game appealing, both in terms of strategy and in the attraction of collecting and trading the cards necessary to build better decks. There are five different colors (""techs"") in the game, and each of the nine available races uses two techs. However, capturing artifact planets allows you to choose from any of the five techs, which that planet will then produce for you as long as you control it, and there are cards that allow you to produce non-native techs on some planets. Consequently, it is possible to create multicolor decks that incorporate some interesting combinations, and you're not limited to your race's techs unless you choose to be. The different races each have a unique characteristic (like cheaper citizens for humans in certain cases, or one free destiny each turn for the omior) that further affects strategy.  Describing the variety of cards in detail would be both impossible and pointless. Let it suffice to say that the cards serve to enhance and develop the underlying board game mechanics so that ships may have their shields, hull points, or jump factors increased; citizens may increase their influence; heroes can be created to lead fleets in battle; and any number of tricks and traps can be introduced. To defend a system, you can use cards to build new ships, or you can, perhaps, use a tractor beam to keep a powerful ship in an enemy fleet from making the jump to hyperspace. You can give personae more influence (to control planets or give more votes in the Star Chamber), cause planets to generate more destiny, or any number of other things. Almost all of the game mechanics can be affected by cardplay, which makes the game playable in many different styles since the victory objectives are so different. The fact that the game mechanics are anchored in the boardplay helps keep the cardplay unambiguous, since everything is laid out on the board, and there is no need to generate new types of units, card classes, or abstract relationships between cards.  The balance between combat, diplomacy, planet control, and tech generation is what makes Star Chamber such a superlative design and not just a collection of good ideas. Even a good strategy has possible counterstrategies, and the fact that the board game has some fixed characteristics in terms of objectives means that deficiencies in deck makeup can sometimes be made up for by skilled manipulation of the units of the board. The boards themselves are quite varied, and a good deck on one board may have limitations on another. This is where the ability to master the deck-building, cardplay, and board game aspects of Star Chamber comes into play, although due to the brilliance of the design, these elements are really inseparable.  The deck management interface allows you to build decks and lets you filter available cards based on color, cost, and rarity.  If the game's implementation has any weaknesses, it's that it demands the accessibility to information available in a board game, but the game interface doesn't always provide this. It's hard to get information at a glance. For example, an opponent may have several ships and personae in a stack, which you can't examine without clicking on them, and then they may have multiple modifications (cards) played on them that require further clicking. The game is not very visually clear in this way, unlike a good board game where you can assimilate a position at a glance. This is due to a combination of the game's complexity and the slightly cramped interface. With timed turns that are short, this can lead to a lot of quick clicking. The turn timer can be disabled, and since turns are processed simultaneously, you're not always forced to wait for the other person to play his turn, but it is still possible to end up waiting a while for an opponent to move. Fortunately, the game community, so far, is uniformly polite and helpful, and it's very supportive of new players.  The game is available as a small, free download from the official Star Chamber Web site. The download gives you access to the game (everything takes place online), including sample decks for a limited number of races, as well as the ability to play all comers in head-to-head play, which is in addition to solo games against a very limited AI opponent. The AI isn't really competitive, and a newbie should be able to win handily against the easy (balanced) setting every time. The medium and hard settings are more difficult, but this is solely due to the fact that the opening board position on these settings is stacked against you; the AI plays no better. Thus, the solo mode is really only useful (once you've learned the rules) for testing card draws in new decks that you've built and not much more.  So you can play for free for as long as you want, but the only way to become competitive is--like with any collectible card game--to buy new cards. Nayantara Studios provides several ways to get into the game. First, there is the card store, where you can buy booster packs in various quantities. These packs contains 15 cards each and cost anywhere from $5.99 for three packs (about $2 per pack) to $49.99 for 36 packs plus six event tickets. Alternately, there is a subscription available, which costs $5.99 per month and gets you two booster packs, two event tickets, and two special promo cards each month. A subscription also gives you the ability to play in regular ""pro circuit"" tournaments. If you just want to make a one-time investment at a reasonable price, for $29.99 you can buy a ""pack attack"" of 21 boosters and three tickets, which makes you competitive and gives you enough cards to build many different decks using all of the available nine races.  Event tickets can be used to enter the weekly sealed-deck tournaments, which are probably the best way to experience Star Chamber. For a single ticket ($1 cost) you get the temporary use of the cards from seven booster packs, and you get the right to compete in a Swiss-format tournament where you'll be guaranteed three games and the opportunity to win prizes. The contents of seven packs are generally not enough to build a straight two-color deck, so skill in deck-building and gameplay are paramount here.  The voting at the Star Chamber is part of a well-conceived and implemented game design.  Currently, the biggest downside to Star Chamber is simply that few people are playing it. Finding a player of similar level is a hit-or-miss proposition, and it's not unusual to log on at peak times and find only two or three players available for a game, one or both of whom might be ex-play testers with large collections or high skill (or both). The best way to enjoy the game right now is to convince a friend to join with you so that you learn together and can share tips and trade cards. Games rarely take longer than 30 minutes, so it's an excellent way to enjoy quality online gaming with friends when you both have busy schedules.  This critical mass--regarding a lack of Star Chamber players--is the only thing that is of enough concern to keep us from making an unqualified recommendation of this fine game. As it currently stands, a one-time investment of $29.99 gets you dozens of hours of gameplay. Twenty-one packs can generate multiple competitive decks over the various races, and as you learn the game, you'll be able to hone your decks over and over. Additionally, you'll add further colors, and you'll generate new decks as you become more familiar and more comfortable with both multicolor play and some of the more challenging races. For $50, which is the price of many new retail games, you get 35 packs and enough gameplay to last for months--which is more than you can expect from most games these days. Star Chamber may be a low-profile release from a small developer, but in providing high quality gaming entertainment at an attractive price, it has few peers in the industry. 
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785,Amplitude ,8.8," If there were a game that could bring mainstream appeal to the niche genre of rhythm games, this would be it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/0/9/2209409-box_amplitude.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/amplitude-review/1900-6023980/,pos,"
 When it comes to sequels, there are certain things you expect. You want improved gameplay, but nothing drastically different from the original. The graphics should, of course, be cranked up at least a notch or two. Basically, you want more of what you liked about the original, and less of what you didn't. Amplitude, the follow-up to Harmonix's excellent rhythm game Frequency, handles all its obligations as a sequel with aplomb. Like its predecessor, it features highly addictive rhythm-based gameplay set to some excellent songs. Amplitude also boasts a great online multiplayer mode, as well as new power-ups and improved visuals. It isn't so radically different as to woo players unimpressed by Frequency, but fans of the original, and fans of rhythm games in general, should be very pleased indeed.    The most significant enhancement to the multiplayer game--and, really, to Amplitude in general--is the addition of online play. The first thing Frequency freaks will notice about Amplitude is the very different-looking playfield. The octagonal tunnel has been replaced with a flat plane divided into rows. It looks significantly different, but the difference is largely aesthetic, and the core gameplay is basically the same. Each row is dotted with left, right, and middle markers and represents a different element of the song that's playing--drums, bass, guitar, vocals, synth, and so on. As the markers reach the bottom of the screen, you have to tap the corresponding button in time with the music. Miss the beat too often, and it's game over. If you can complete a section of a row without missing a marker, that row will clear out and start playing on its own for a while, leaving you to move to another row. If you can clear one row and move to another without skipping a beat, the points you'll score on that row will be doubled. And if you can keep moving from row to row without skipping a beat, your point scores will rack up even higher, though the multipliers do top out at eight. The scoring system is well designed, and will encourage you to keep trying to outperform yourself.    You'll occasionally see sections of rows with different-looking markers, which, if cleared, will net you a power-up that can be used at your discretion. The autoblaster will clear out a row, which is helpful for dealing with patterns beyond your skill level. The score doubler will, as the name infers, briefly double your score for clearing a row. The freestyler power-up works a bit differently than it did in Frequency, and for the better. In Frequency, the freestyler would unlock a pair of rows where you could do some turntable-style scratching and/or some synthesizer noodling, depending on the song. In Amplitude, the freestyler pulls the camera view above the rows, giving you a beneficial third dimension to work with. It's certainly much more visually appealing, with the scratching represented by zigzagging lines and the synth represented by a pulsating ball of particle effects, and the scratching also sounds significantly more authentic. There's one brand-new power-up in Amplitude, the slo mo, which reduces the speed of the song, making more complex patterns more manageable. All these power-ups help keep things interesting.    Amplitude is about as bewildering to first-timers as Frequency was, though it does take several steps to alleviate the confusion. First off, Amplitude has a comprehensive tutorial, something that Frequency lacked. Also, Amplitude provides a lot more visual cues to help you keep track of what's going on. Each row is color-coded to a specific instrument--red rows are always percussion, green rows are always vocals, and so on. As you gain multipliers, you'll see arrows pointing to any of the rows where you can potentially continue your combo. Rows containing power-ups are lit up with towering beams of light, making them easier to identify from afar. Also, the difficulty curve in Amplitude is much more gradual than in Frequency, making the game a more accessible to the casual rhythm gamer. This has the unfortunate side effect of making the most difficult tracks in Amplitude slightly less challenging than the most difficult tracks in Frequency. The game will definitely challenge your rhythm skills, just not to such an extreme.    Amplitude's multiplayer is generally better, partially because of the new track design, which allows all the players to see the action without resorting to a split screen. But the most significant enhancement to the multiplayer game--and, really, to Amplitude in general--is the addition of online play. With the help of the PlayStation 2 Network Adapter, players can go online and compete against up to three other players simultaneously. Harmonix didn't half-step with the online mode, which features a ranking system and downloadable content and works well over both narrowband and broadband connections. You can only play through a song by yourself so many times, but when there's some real competition to go up against, the replay value is increased considerably.    Another returning feature from Frequency is the remix mode, where players can reconstruct the songs in the game to their liking, using an interface that is similar to the actual game. Though the nuts and bolts of the remix mode remain largely unchanged, this mode is way more intriguing this time around, due to Amplitude's online support. Once you've completed your remix, you can upload it to the Harmonix servers, where it will be evaluated--and if it's up to snuff, posted online for other players to download and play. Whether the online component of the remix mode will catch on remains to be seen, but it's an ambitious effort on the part of the developer, regardless.    The visual presentation on a whole is markedly better in Amplitude than in its predecessor. While Frequency sported a kind of Tempest-like abstract minimalist look, Amplitude piles on the eye candy. The playfield itself is much more colorful, featuring lots of bright textures, particle effects, and neon highlights, and the area surrounding the playfield is beyond psychedelic. You'll travel across bizarre quasi-futuristic landscapes and through spinning, pulsating tunnels of varying colors and patterns, all of it peppered with vaguely mechanical-looking scenery objects and small video clips of the bands. Your freQ, a customizable avatar that hangs out in the corner of the screen, has gone from being a static 2D image to a fully animated 3D character. The whole experience can have a truly hypnotic effect on onlookers, though you'll probably be too focused on the action to pay much attention. There are times, though, when it can all be a bit overwhelming, and all the flashing lights and particle effects may actually interfere with the gameplay.    The first thing Frequency freaks will notice about Amplitude is the very different-looking playfield. Of course, without any music, Amplitude wouldn't even have gameplay. Thankfully, the game is stocked with 26 different songs. That's roughly the same number as was found in Frequency, though the range of the music is much broader here. Considering the highly subjective nature of music, whether or not less techno and more variety is a good thing will depend on your taste. A few acts return from Frequency, including BT, Akrobatik, Komputer Kontroller, Symbion Project, and Freezepop. There are also some significantly higher-profile tracks in Amplitude, including, but not limited to, tracks from blink-182, Pink, and Papa Roach and a remix of P.O.D.'s ""Boom"" by The Crystal Method. Whether you like them or not, the songs in Amplitude maintain a consistent level of quality, with only a few missteps.     While the developers of other rhythm game franchises, most notably PaRappa and Dance Dance Revolution, are perfectly happy with releasing the same game over and over again with minimal improvements, Harmonix has upped the ante for the genre with Amplitude. It's an engaging, addictive experience that outstrips its predecessor and brings innovation to the genre. If there were a game that could bring mainstream appeal to the niche genre of rhythm games, this would be it. 
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786,Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight ,8.8," You could say that Flight Simulator 2004 is still a straightforward simulation, but if you have even a passing interest in flying, you'll definitely get your money's worth from it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/2/8/1/2217281-2fs5.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/microsoft-flight-simulator-2004-a-century-of-fligh/1900-6072062/,pos,"
 For more than a century, human beings have used engines to pull, push, or lift themselves into the air, and for the past two decades, Microsoft Flight Simulator has let armchair pilots explore the exciting world of aviation on their PCs. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight commemorates this double anniversary by offering more planes, better graphics, and more options than ever before right out of the box, but the game will likely reach its full potential only if it receives great support from its player community.   These clouds aren't just for show. A violent thunderstorm brews within.  Fans of the previous games in the series will be up and running in no time thanks to the new game's familiar interface, but Flight Simulator 2004 also happens to be the most beginner-friendly game in the series. It's easier to access game options, and each option is actually explained by the game. There's also an excellent interactive flight school hosted by aviation veteran Rod Machado that serves as a surprisingly deep training tool.  There is enough written material included about the planes, the history of flight, and flying tips to fill an encyclopedia. As such, Flight Simulator 2004 represents one of the rare instances in which online documentation is wholly superior to a printed manual. The documentation includes articles that are supplemented with Web-page-style hyperlinks, which lead to more detailed information about a particular topic. Some even whisk you directly into the cockpit so you can actually re-create the particular flight (or series of flights) discussed in the article. While the fascinating historical articles by Flying magazine's Lane Wallace were commissioned by Microsoft, many of the other articles included are reprints from magazines like AOPA Pilot, and it is amazing to see how the real-world tips provided in these stories can be directly applied in the simulator.  And you'll need all the information you can get, because most of the new planes in Flight Simulator 2004 are cranky old antiques that require your undivided attention. The entire history of civilian flight is represented in the game, from the original Wright Flyer that can't even struggle its way out of ground effect to a Boeing 747-400 that can haul hundreds of people higher than 40,000 feet at Mach .85. You can retrace Lindbergh's steps across the Atlantic in a re-creation of the Ryan NYP ""Spirit of St. Louis,"" see what Amelia Earhart's trip across that same ocean was like in a Lockheed Vega, and haul freight over the mountains in a Douglas DC-3, among other things. The Sopwith Camel was not brought over from the previous game into the new game--this is strictly a civilian flight simulator, without any military prop planes or jets, but it still offers plenty of different aircraft to fly.   If you plan to fly any of the vintage aircraft, be sure to invest in some good controller peripherals, specifically rudder pedals or a joystick with a twist handle. It's impossible to take off and land in taildraggers like the Piper J3 Cub and Curtiss Jenny without a lot of dancing on the rudders. And once they're airborne, ponderous antiques like the Vickers Vimy biplane can barely turn unless you stomp on the pedals. Rudder controls also are a must for flying the two helicopters modeled in the game, which include the familiar Bell JetRanger and the new Robison R22 Beta. The Beta is a skittish little chopper that is hypersensitive to controller input and offers a wholly different flying experience from that of the heavier and more stable JetRanger.  The overall flight model feels very similar to that of Flight Simulator 2002 and is well suited to capturing the nuances of the game's slow and underpowered historical planes. For example, when landing a taildragger, you should be able to float in slowly at a steep angle for a traditional three-point landing or come in more quickly at a shallow angle to land on the main wheels, keeping forward pressure on the stick until the tail gradually loses lift and the tailwheel gently settles on the runway. The latter option is essential for landing a small plane like the Piper Cub in high crosswinds, and the new game models it perfectly.  Flight Simulator 2004's virtual cockpits are interactive, so most of these switches can be adjusted with your mouse.  Aside from the historical aircraft, Flight Simulator 2004's big news this time around is its weather effects. You can set up in-flight weather any way you like or go for the ultimate in realism by having the game automatically download real-world weather reports from the Jeppesen database every 15 minutes. We tested this feature in a variety of weather conditions flying out of a hometown airport, and sure enough, the conditions depicted onscreen corresponded with what we saw from the window, for the most part.  Even if you don't choose to use the real-world weather option, the game can dynamically change its weather conditions so that a flight that begins in clear blue skies might end up in pure instrument conditions as you try to feel your way down to the runway in a violent thunderstorm. The addition of true 3D clouds that drift through the sky and merge into one another as weather conditions change adds a realistic touch to the game that static screenshots simply can't convey.   Flight Simulator 2004's graphics are improved over those in the previous game, but they're not exactly photo-realistic just yet. Buildings still use low-resolution textures, and the ground looks much better from a high altitude than it does when you're flying low and slow. The game's interactive virtual cockpits are a great new feature, since the ability to control most switches, knobs, and dials with the mouse when the 3D cockpit is enabled adds some much-needed functionality to that view. Unfortunately, the textures used in the virtual cockpits are low resolution and very ugly--hopefully this is something that inventive computer artists among the Flight Simulator fan community will address. On the outside, the planes look beautiful, with vastly more-complex models adorned with gorgeous high-res textures that sparkle in the sun, and the game also sounds impressively realistic, since the developer recorded engine noises from actual planes for use in the game.   The planes might not look great on the inside, but they're beautiful on the outside.  Of course, whether you can enable all of these fancy new effects and maintain a reasonably smooth frame rate depends entirely on your computer. At 1600x1200 resolution with all the graphics settings cranked at their highest, our 2.66GHz test system with a Radeon 9700 Pro video card and 1GB RAM tended to slow down in thick cloud cover. Things smoothed out considerably as the fluff cleared from the sky and the buildings in dense cities faded into the background, but if you've got a computer that just barely meets the game's minimum system requirements, don't expect to run the game smoothly with all the graphical settings turned all the way up, unless you actually prefer to watch a slideshow.  Almost a thousand new airports have been added to the game's world database, providing more than 24,000 places to land ranging from quaint grass strips to bustling international airports complete with signage. The game also features an improved air traffic control (ATC) that works well for the most part. At controlled airports, ground control provides taxi clearances and instructions, and it is possible to follow the taxiway signs to your destination or turn on a handy overlay that visually displays your assigned route.   Once in position, you can tune the tower frequency with a single keystroke to ask for clearance for takeoff, and the air traffic controllers then answer air space transition requests, provide directions to the airport, and provide other information when you are airborne. It's also possible to request clearance to land, and the air traffic controllers respond with instructions for entering the landing pattern or simply tell you to come straight in to a specified runway. If you screw up, the controller will tell you to go around for another try. The system works well thanks to an improved ATC menu, but it's still far from perfect. For instance, when we tried landing a small Cessna at a large international airport in exact accordance with the provided instructions, an AI-controlled DC-10 jumbo jet thundered overhead with only a few feet of separation since it was landing on the same runway. Still, ATC works much better than it did in the past, and casual players can just as easily ignore it completely.   Another new feature in the game is the use of modeled Garmin GPS products--these can be helpful when interacting with ATC and planning approaches. They aren't easy for beginners to grasp, because they use the same buttons and knobs as their real-world counterparts, but a training video is included, and once you get the hang of it, the GPS becomes an indispensable tool for finding your way around Flight Simulator's vast world.  Historical markers are included for the Wright brothers' historic first powered flight.  Despite the addition of all the new planes and the excellent library of information in Flight Simulator 2004, longtime fans of the series will find it to be a rather conservative addition to the series. The core flight model and terrain graphics engine remain more or less untouched, and on the whole, the new game seems very similar to its predecessor. The new game's multiplayer is still rudimentary and allows only for basic formation flights and air races, though you can't expect much more from a noncombat sim.  Still, longtime Flight Simulator fans should definitely upgrade to the latest version. And the new game's flight school and interface changes may be just what's needed to bring in newcomers--especially those who were intimidated by the series' traditionally steep learning curve. You could say that Flight Simulator 2004 is still a straightforward simulation, but if you have even a passing interest in flying, you'll definitely get your money's worth from it.  
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787,Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 ,8.8," Even if EA Sports had left every other aspect of the game identical to Tiger Woods 2003, the staggering number of new, playable courses alone makes 2004 worthwhile.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/2/6/2214926-box_twpgat04.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tiger-woods-pga-tour-2004-review/1900-6075638/,pos,"
 EA Sports has spent the past four years slowly improving the quality of its Tiger Woods PGA Tour series of golf games, and it arguably hit its stride last year with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003. That game all but perfected the series' dramatic visual style and tactile analog swing mechanic, while piling on loads and loads of courses and gameplay options. In fact, the 2003 edition was so well made, it could have made a halfhearted Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 irrelevant. Fortunately, EA Sports clearly hasn't been resting on its laurels and has poured enough great new features and courses into Tiger Woods 2004 to make it a worthwhile purchase for any and all golf fans.  Tiger Woods 2004 outclasses its predecessor in several important ways.  Functionally, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is not that much different from last year's Tiger. The analog swing is unchanged, letting you control the power and direction of your shot with a back-and-forward motion on the analog stick. The game also offers all kinds of assistance to sloppy duffers, letting you alter the spin of the ball in the air, providing slope grids, and offering shot advice while you're putting. All of this assistance helps keep the game from becoming exceedingly frustrating, and all of it is optional for those who take the game more seriously.   There are nearly 30 different golfers from which to choose, pretty evenly split between real-life pros and EA's homegrown characters. (There's even a guest appearance from Cedric the Entertainer.) One of the big new additions to Tiger Woods 2004 is the ""game face"" feature that allows you to create your own pro golfer with a rather painstaking level of detail. This player creation mode lets you define virtually every aspect of your player's appearance. For some idea as to how extensive it is, there are 18 different attributes that can be modified in terms of facial structure alone, not including facial hair, eye color, skin tone, and what your golfer's teeth might look like. Truly, the level of character customization offered by the game face feature is unparalleled.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 contains all of the gameplay modes found in last year's version, plus a few extra. You can still take part in the esteemed PGA Tour, as well as one-off rounds of stroke, match, and skins games. You can also take part in team-based games, like best ball and fourball. For more fast-and-loose golf, there's speed golf, battle golf (where two players can go head-to-head to try to win each other's clubs), and the long drive shootout. The skillzone returns and still stands as a great set of drills to help you hone the different abilities you need on the fairway. The scenarios are a great way to test your skills, throwing you into a series of bad situations and leaving it up to you to work your way out. Most of the modes in the game can be played with up to four players, and the variety of play offered makes it a great multiplayer game.  New this year are the real-time events that synchronize with the console's system clock to offer special competitions on specific days of the year. Winning these competitions nets you exclusive gear and apparel that you can't get any other way. It's not a make-or-break feature, but adding it to Tiger Woods 2004's already impressive stable of gameplay modes only makes the game that much stronger.   And then there are the courses... While last year there were 12 18-hole courses--many of which were inaccessible when you first started--Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 offers a whopping 19 different courses to play, and 14 of them are playable right off the bat. That's so many courses that the GameCube version of Tiger Woods 2004 had to be spread across two discs! Even if EA Sports had simply left every other aspect of the game identical to Tiger Woods 2003, the staggering number of new, playable courses alone makes 2004 a worthwhile purchase.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 looks fundamentally identical to Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003, which is to say, it's a really good-looking golf game. The courses faithfully represent their real-life counterparts, featuring consistently clean, realistic-looking textures. The scope of what the camera sees has been increased a bit, occasionally giving you a glimpse of the next hole. This gives you a better sense of actually playing a course rather than presenting a series of disconnected holes. The player models appear slightly cleaner, with better facial detail and small touches, like the way breezes cause a player's clothes to flutter. Most of the player animations are recycled from Tiger Woods 2003, but they still look really smooth and natural, adding extra emotional weight to both great and horrible shots. The striking visual effects that really helped Tiger Woods 2003 stand out return this year, with a handful of new shots to help make really strong tee-offs and achingly close shots that much more intense. All told, it's not a significantly better looking game, but it's still arguably the best-looking golf game out there.  The 'game face' player creation feature really helps put you in the game.  The only nagging issue with the Tiger Woods games that EA has yet to address seriously is the game's soundtrack. For the past two years, EA has been assembling seemingly random collections of contemporary licensed songs and calling them soundtracks. Again, the soundtrack in Tiger Woods 2004 tries to be all things to all people, oscillating between indie rock and hip-hop beats. The way the soundtrack goes immediately from Rooney to DMX is just jarring. You have the option of selecting your own playlist as well as which gameplay modes the music will actually come up in, though. Much like last year, the ambient environmental effects are done well enough so that turning off the music entirely is a perfectly viable option. These effects, combined with the casual, contextual tone of the commentary, really help make you feel like you're out there on the course.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 offers such a complete package, it almost seems like EA is painting itself into a corner. With the sheer number of courses available, the variety of gameplay modes offered, and the overall polish of the presentation, there just doesn't seem like a lot of room for improvement for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005. 
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788,Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 ,8.8," Even if EA Sports had left every other aspect of the game identical to Tiger Woods 2003, the staggering number of new, playable courses alone makes 2004 worthwhile.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/2/6/2214926-box_twpgat04.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tiger-woods-pga-tour-2004-review/1900-6075639/,pos,"
 EA Sports has spent the past four years slowly improving the quality of its Tiger Woods PGA Tour series of golf games, and it arguably hit its stride last year with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003. That game all but perfected the series' dramatic visual style and tactile analog swing mechanic, while piling on loads and loads of courses and gameplay options. In fact, the 2003 edition was so well made, it could have made a halfhearted Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 irrelevant. Fortunately, EA Sports clearly hasn't been resting on its laurels and has poured enough great new features and courses into Tiger Woods 2004 to make it a worthwhile purchase for any and all golf fans.  Tiger Woods 2004 outclasses its predecessor in several important ways.  Functionally, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is not that much different from last year's Tiger. The analog swing is unchanged, letting you control the power and direction of your shot with a back-and-forward motion on the analog stick. The game also offers all kinds of assistance to sloppy duffers, letting you alter the spin of the ball in the air, providing slope grids, and offering shot advice while you're putting. All of this assistance helps keep the game from becoming exceedingly frustrating, and all of it is optional for those who take the game more seriously.   There are nearly 30 different golfers from which to choose, pretty evenly split between real-life pros and EA's homegrown characters. (There's even a guest appearance from Cedric the Entertainer.) One of the big new additions to Tiger Woods 2004 is the ""game face"" feature that allows you to create your own pro golfer with a rather painstaking level of detail. This player creation mode lets you define virtually every aspect of your player's appearance. For some idea as to how extensive it is, there are 18 different attributes that can be modified in terms of facial structure alone, not including facial hair, eye color, skin tone, and what your golfer's teeth might look like. Truly, the level of character customization offered by the game face feature is unparalleled.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 contains all of the gameplay modes found in last year's version, plus a few extra. You can still take part in the esteemed PGA Tour, as well as one-off rounds of stroke, match, and skins games. You can also take part in team-based games, like best ball and fourball. For more fast-and-loose golf, there's speed golf, battle golf (where two players can go head-to-head to try to win each other's clubs), and the long drive shootout. The skillzone returns and still stands as a great set of drills to help you hone the different abilities you need on the fairway. The scenarios are a great way to test your skills, throwing you into a series of bad situations and leaving it up to you to work your way out. Most of the modes in the game can be played with up to four players, and the variety of play offered makes it a great multiplayer game.  New this year are the real-time events that synchronize with the console's system clock to offer special competitions on specific days of the year. Winning these competitions nets you exclusive gear and apparel that you can't get any other way. It's not a make-or-break feature, but adding it to Tiger Woods 2004's already impressive stable of gameplay modes only makes the game that much stronger.  And then there are the courses... While last year there were 12 18-hole courses--many of which were inaccessible when you first started--Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 offers a whopping 19 different courses to play, and 14 of them are playable right off the bat. That's so many courses that the GameCube version of Tiger Woods 2004 had to be spread across two discs! Even if EA Sports had simply left every other aspect of the game identical to Tiger Woods 2003, the staggering number of new, playable courses alone makes 2004 a worthwhile purchase.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 looks fundamentally identical to Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003, which is to say, it's a really good-looking golf game. The courses faithfully represent their real-life counterparts, featuring consistently clean, realistic-looking textures. The scope of what the camera sees has been increased a bit, occasionally giving you a glimpse of the next hole. This gives you a better sense of actually playing a course rather than presenting a series of disconnected holes. The player models appear slightly cleaner, with better facial detail and small touches, like the way breezes cause a player's clothes to flutter. Most of the player animations are recycled from Tiger Woods 2003, but they still look really smooth and natural, adding extra emotional weight to both great and horrible shots. The striking visual effects that really helped Tiger Woods 2003 stand out return this year, with a handful of new shots to help make really strong tee-offs and achingly close shots that much more intense. All told, it's not a significantly better looking game, but it's still arguably the best-looking golf game out there.  The 'game face' player creation feature really helps put you in the game.  The only nagging issue with the Tiger Woods games that EA has yet to address seriously is the game's soundtrack. For the past two years, EA has been assembling seemingly random collections of contemporary licensed songs and calling them soundtracks. Again, the soundtrack in Tiger Woods 2004 tries to be all things to all people, oscillating between indie rock and hip-hop beats. The way the soundtrack goes immediately from Rooney to DMX is just jarring. You have the option of selecting your own playlist as well as which gameplay modes the music will actually come up in, though. Much like last year, the ambient environmental effects are done well enough so that turning off the music entirely is a perfectly viable option. These effects, combined with the casual, contextual tone of the commentary, really help make you feel like you're out there on the course.  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 offers such a complete package, it almost seems like EA is painting itself into a corner. With the sheer number of courses available, the variety of gameplay modes offered, and the overall polish of the presentation, there just doesn't seem like a lot of room for improvement for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005.  
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789,Madden NFL 2004 ,8.8," Madden NFL 2004 covers nearly every facet of professional football, but what makes this year's entry in the series so special is that it ties all its components together seamlessly.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/4/4/2214844-box_madden04.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2004-review/1900-6073368/,pos,"
 It's not an easy task for a development team to make enough improvements to a yearly sports game series to warrant a purchase every year. However, EA Sports has not only managed to add enough features and gameplay tweaks to make Madden NFL 2004 a more than worthy purchase for those who bought last year's game, but it has also created one of best football games to date. Madden NFL 2004 covers nearly every facet of professional football, but what makes this year's entry in the series so special is that it ties all its components together seamlessly. Even the new gameplay features have been integrated incredibly well, and the result is a game that models the sport of professional football much more intricately than any other game before it.  Madden NFL 2004 boasts a number of new features.  A perfect example of this is the playmaker control feature, though a gamepad with a dual-analog stick setup is required to actually use it. While it initially seems like nothing more than a quick audible option, playmaker control is actually much more than that. Before the snap of the ball, if you don't like what you're seeing on the defensive side of the ball, you can adjust the offensive play to compensate without calling an audible. For example, if a linebacker appears to be blitzing on the side you're about to run a halfback toss to, you can change the direction of the run on the fly by simply pressing the right analog stick in the opposite direction.   Similarly, after the ball's been snapped, you can direct teammates on the field to block opposing players in front of the ballcarrier by pressing the right analog stick in the appropriate direction. There's a little bit of risk involved in doing this, since its effectiveness depends on the speed of the teammate running over to block. In fact, when calling for a block in this fashion, you may be tempted to head for the teammate once you've told him to throw a block in an attempt to put him in between you and the defensive player more quickly. But you'll quickly discover this rarely ever works and almost always results in an appreciable loss of yards. In any case, the playmaker controls for directing your blockers prove to be quite valuable when used in the correct situation.   Running isn't the only facet of the gameplay in which playmaker control can be used. When using it on a passing play before the snap, playmaker control can quickly change the route of a receiver if there appears to be a gap in the secondary. When the ball is snapped, playmaker control can then be used to have a designated receiver break off his route and go in a variety of directions--even back toward the line of scrimmage. Again, there's a fair amount of risk involved, since the defensive line and linebackers are constantly gunning for the quarterback, but if it looks like you have enough time and it appears that you can get a receiver open by having him change direction, you can use this technique to pick up a few extra yards.   Defensively, the playmaker mechanic isn't quite as prominent. Essentially, if you see a key receiver lining up one-on-one with a cornerback that you don't have too much confidence in, then playmaker can be used to shift your coverage over to that side, making it a little more difficult for the receiver to get open. If the ball has already been snapped, then playmaker control can be used to shift your overall coverage to run or pass. It's these subtle nuances created by the playmaker control scheme that make Madden NFL 2004 that much more strategic and fun to play than its predecessors.   Of course, there are plenty of other ways to modify plays on the defensive and offensive sides of the ball. On defense, you can shift the defensive line and the linebackers to compensate for any possible gaps that may appear in the line or to cover the outside better in the event of a toss. Offensively, audibles are still incredibly useful, and you can modify them in the coach's area in the menu.   Playmaker controls are an integral part of the gameplay.  The fundamental gameplay mechanics in Madden NFL 2004 have also been slightly tweaked. Like in NCAA Football 2004 for the consoles, play-action passing plays are much more effective against opponents, especially those controlled by human players, since the camera briefly follows the running back--making it seem as though it's actually a running play--before panning back to the quarterback. The running game in general feels much better, especially when you're running the ball up the middle, since the offensive lines tend to be a little more adept at opening holes when linebackers and safeties aren't shooting the gaps--in other words, getting stuck behind the ample posterior of an offensive lineman is much less of a problem than it was in the previous game. Running to the outside is also executed quite well and requires you to determine the best angle to take after your fullback has blocked a linebacker or a lineman has pulled from the opposite side of the line to make a block downfield.   Having a successful passing game in Madden NFL 2004 requires much more thought than you might initially suspect, especially since the defensive backs are much more adept at stepping into zones and going after balls. Setting aside the playmaker controls for a moment, if you see a receiver in relatively tight zone coverage, then the chances for a successful completion are relatively low--even when running a quick out route, something that would usually guarantee a few yards. Conversely, if you see a receiver in tight man-to-man coverage running a streak, then you can try to lob the pass and hope for the best. But for the most part, a successful passing game requires you to identify the defensive coverage in the secondary, as well as that split second in the receiver's route when he'll be open.   With all these slight refinements and changes, even blitzing seems to have much greater risks and rewards. Audibles and the playmaker control can negate the effects of a blitz, but the playmaker control also requires the offensive player to think just a little bit more than he or she normally would, giving the defense one or two more precious seconds to hit the ballcarrier behind the line of scrimmage. This is especially true for human opponents, though the AI for computer-controlled opponents is pretty good about not cheating when it comes to reading a blitz.   You have to be able to read the defense to have a successful passing game.  All these changes are great, but perhaps one of the biggest single reasons to buy Madden NFL 2004 is the owner mode, which is directly tied to the game's franchise mode. The owner mode gives you an entirely new perspective on the sport by portraying it as a business where you have to do everything in your power to ensure not only that the fans are happy, but also that you're making enough money to support the team and the stadium. If your team is doing well, then it won't be necessary to constantly adjust the prices of tickets (which are broken down according to the different sections in the stadium), merchandise (programs, hats, jerseys, bobble heads, and foam fingers), snacks (such as beer, soda, and popcorn), and parking. You can also decide how much money you want to spend on promoting the team through advertising, but that depletes your overall budget, which may make it difficult to go for a high-profile free agent in the off-season. If your team is performing poorly, compiling a losing record or missing the playoffs a number of years in a row, then fan support will wane, forcing you to constantly adjust prices in an effort to get the fans to come back.   Fortunately, you'll have plenty of information and advice at your fingertips to figure out what's wrong with your team from a business perspective. Not only will you have advisers who give you basic information on what you can do to quickly improve fan support, but you'll also have access to graphs and charts that will show you how the team has done over the course of the season financially. In addition, at any time during the season, you can access a balance sheet to see how much income you have and what your major expenses are. You can use this information to determine if you want to hire a new, higher-profile coach (though it's also possible to promote offensive and defensive coordinators if you don't particularly care for your current head coach), go after a talented free agent, trade for an additional draft pick, or save your money and lower prices for the next season. The owner mode offers a surprising amount of freedom to do what you want--you can even rebuild your stadium or move the team to a completely different city--but if you're careless with your money or in your decisions, your team's chances of being successful will be quite low.   If you don't feel like dealing with the business side of the NFL, you can simply turn the owner mode off, and the game will automatically change to a more standard franchise mode. However, there are some slight differences from last year's franchise mode. The training camp mode has been integrated into the franchise mode, and it now has a direct effect on players. For example, in the passing drills, you can select any quarterback on your roster, and if that quarterback happens to perform well in the drills, you'll receive a certain number of points to upgrade that player's attributes. All the other modes in Madden NFL 2004 are pretty much the same as in last year's game. You can create players, teams, and playbooks. There are also tournament, minicamp, two-minute drill, practice, and situation options.   The graphics haven't been changed all that much from last year either. Some minor enhancements were made to the player models, but they still have the somewhat generic look that the series has been known for the past couple of years. The sideline detail has been improved slightly, and the stadiums are incredibly accurate. Some cool minor details from last year's game have also returned--if you're playing on a grass field, for example, the quality of the field will degrade over the course of the game. Likewise, players' jerseys will get progressively dirtier if they're constantly being slammed into the ground. The already great animation also looks like it's been improved with more tackling animations and general bumps and shoves. However, the lighting in the PC version looks a little odd and occasionally tends to give the game a washed-out look.  As for sound, the commentary in Madden NFL 2004 has been slightly improved--at least for Al Michaels, who has plenty to say on just about every single type of play. Unfortunately, Madden continues to be a weak spot. John just repeats himself far too often, and his comments can often be a little too generic. However, the interaction between the two sounds much more natural and less like a bunch of lines that were simply pasted together. The soundtrack is bolstered by licensed music from a variety of artists. The soundtrack covers a handful of genres, and most players will probably enjoy the wide range of music that's been selected for the game.  The online mode in the PC version offers much more than any console version of the game.  What ultimately sets the PC version apart from the console versions of the game is its online play, which is simply far more robust than anything the PlayStation 2 version of the game has to offer. Not only can you set up tournaments, but you can also create leagues (and schedule games for participants in that league) and clubs. Though there's plenty to do in Madden NFL 2004's online mode, online league play may be too enticing for some fans to pass up.   In any case, it's obvious that this year's Madden was designed primarily for consoles, and as such, some features, such as playmaker control, were designed with dual-analog-stick-equipped gamepads in mind. In fact, one of our dual-analog gamepads didn't even work properly with the game, and other users have reported similar issues. There's also an added fee for the online mode if you want to play past the trial period, but if you're a football fan willing to make such an investment, you'll find that all the new features have been integrated so well into the preexisting framework that it seems like they've always been there. Indeed, you might wonder how you even played previous games in the series without the playmaker controls. The console route may be a better one to take for those who want all that Madden NFL 2004 has to offer, including online play, but if the PC version is your only alternative, then you certainly won't be disappointed. 



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790,Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando ,8.8, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando is a great game that will please both fans of the series and newcomers alike.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/0/7/9/2211079-box_racgc.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ratchet-and-clank-going-commando-review/1900-6081895/,pos,"
 The first Ratchet & Clank was released almost exactly one year ago. The game stood out because it rewrote a lot of the rules that typically governed--and held back--the platform genre. It stepped away from the large amounts of item collection and backtracking that had become standards for the genre since it was taken into 3D. It also gave you a large catalog of weapons to choose from and a generally longer adventure than you'd expect from the genre. Now Sony and developer Insomniac have released a follow-up that once again capitalizes on these same strengths while adding a host of new features that make Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando just as great as its predecessor, but inherently less surprising.  The 'sheepinator' lets you transform enemies into sheep. Upgrading it lets you turn them into... explosive sheep!  This time out, Ratchet and Clank are friends from the get-go. The game picks up not long after the conclusion of the first game, and so the two are heroes in their home galaxy. When the call to action comes in, it's from an entirely different galaxy. An experimental creature has been stolen from MegaCorp, and the company's president, a bumbling old man named Fizzwidget, hires our heroes to retrieve the creature. Over the course of the game, it becomes apparent that these cute little experiments have a slightly more evil side to them, and the story spins out from there with the typical ""world in peril"" ramifications you'd expect from most action games. Overall, the story is well told, and it maintains the same sense of humor found in the first game.  The gameplay in Going Commando really hasn't changed much over the past year. You'll still make your way from planet to planet, completing objectives and viewing more of the story, which is conveyed via well-animated cutscenes. The game still does a great job of avoiding typical platformer gameplay by focusing on the proper use of your weapons and gadgets against a variety of enemies and obstacles instead of just testing your ability to jump from one ledge to the next. You'll be able to get ahold of a few of your older weapons and gadgets, but this is a new galaxy, serviced by a different weapon manufacturer, so you'll be finding and purchasing new weapons. Ratchet still packs his giant wrench, which can be used to hit enemies up close or thrown from a distance. You are also able to acquire weapons, like a blaster, an energy shotgun, a sniper rifle, various sorts of explosive devices, a rocket launcher, homing missiles, and many more.  The first game didn't really give you too much reason to use your weapons. If you were skilled with the wrench, you could get by without expending too much weapon ammo. Aside from this game's enemies being tougher, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando gives you plenty of reasons to fire away. The main addition is that most of your weapons gain experience as you use them, and once you cross a certain usage threshold, you'll receive the upgraded ""gold"" version of that weapon. This turns your gravity bombs into mushroom cloud-laying mini-nukes, it lets you fire off three seeker rockets instead of one, and it gives you various other similar increases. Ratchet also gains experience, so, as you eliminate enemies, you'll level up and add additional segments to your life meter. You'll also find damage-reducing armor and stronger wrenches as you make your way through the game. On top of that, you'll find hidden platinum bolts throughout the game. These bolts can be taken to specific shops and traded for even more weapon upgrades, letting you add shock, acid, or lock-on effects to some of your firearms. These upgrades are cool additions, though they don't make dramatic changes to the game.  While the majority of your quest is spent in the standard on-foot setting, you'll also encounter a few vehicle-driven sections that act as minigames. Additionally, the game features some hoverbike racing, some desert mining, and some space combat. Adding to the upgrade-driven enhancements, you'll eventually find a shop that sells ship upgrades, giving you stronger shields and more weapons to use in the space combat sequences. While a few of these sequences are required--they give you weapons or other necessary items as prizes--there are also additional challenges in each area that award varying amounts of money as prizes.  Going Commando is longer than your average platform game, clocking in somewhere between the 15- and 20-hour mark, and the varied look of the different levels breaks up the action pretty nicely. You'll run into a few boss battles over the course of the game, and they're somewhat exciting, though most of them aren't terribly difficult either. The game's difficulty also increases steadily as you move through it. At the beginning, Ratchet is relatively weak, and so are the monsters you're facing. As you gain experience and fill out your life meter, you'll also be visiting the homes of more difficult monsters. The difficulty doesn't just come from more damaging attacks, either. You'll encounter more fearsome creatures as you move on, and you'll have to constantly vary your tactics to take on your enemies. This puts a nice spotlight on the different weapons, as there are a lot of different strategies you can employ with the game's varied arsenal.  Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando uses a lightly updated version of the engine used for the first game, and, as a result, it looks roughly identical to the original. Of course, the first game looked really fantastic, and it's only a year old, so this isn't exactly a bad thing. Some changes and enhancements have been made, and this is most clearly manifested in the game's cool, new weapon effects. The game's explosions, implosions, and fire effects are all great. The entire game still looks pretty good, usually maintaining a smooth frame rate while offering up large, colorful environments. However, given advancements in PlayStation 2 graphics over the last 12 months, the game doesn't look quite as impressive. Also, the game's reliance on a lot of recycled elements from the first game, such as the menus and mission screens, seems a little lazy.  The great sense of humor found in the original game can be found here as well.  In tems of the game's audio, Going Commando follows in the footsteps of its predecessor. Stylistically, the game's music is very similar, providing the same sort of upbeat, frantic music as the first game. The sound is also largely unchanged, which, as with the graphics, isn't necessarily a bad thing because the game sounds pretty great. The weapon effects are the stars of the show here. Additionally, the game contains a good deal of voice, and the voices fit the characters very well. The game has a good script as well, which gives the voice-overs meaning.  All in all, Going Commando is as great a game as Ratchet & Clank was, but, considering that Going Commando is largely the same as the original, at times it feels like more of a mission pack than an entirely new game. The new weapon upgrades and other additions are nice touches, but they don't exactly reinvent the game. Still, the main point is that Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando is a great game that will please both fans of the series and newcomers alike, so it's definitely worth your while. 

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791,NCAA Football 2004 ,8.8," If you're a hard-core fan, you'll certainly enjoy the ability to play online, and all the other new features that help make an enjoyable game even better.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/0/0/3/2217003-box_ncaafb04.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ncaa-football-2004-review/1900-6071778/,pos,"
 NCAA Football 2004 marks the return of EA Sports' widely praised college football franchise, and while a number of new features have been added to this year's game, these differences--with the exception of the ability to play against others online--probably aren't drastic or substantial enough to make the casual football fan rush out and buy it. That being said, any hard-core fan of college football will undoubtedly eat up these new features, such as the new Sports Illustrated feature that gives a weekly look at key teams and players as well as events that happen over the course of a season. The college classics mode gives you an opportunity to relive college football's best moments, including the 1982 Cal and Stanford matchup that was decided by what came to be known as ""The Play."" In addition, the new gameplay enhancements--which include better play action, new tackling animations, and more-realistic zone defense--give the game a much more strategic college football feel.   New animations give the game a much more realistic look overall.  Of course, last year's excellent dynasty mode makes a return in NCAA Football 2004. This mode essentially gives you full control over a college football program, from the type of plays called to potential recruits. When you start a dynasty season, you can get a quick idea of where your team ranks by looking at the Sports Illustrated option, which features a dynamic cover story that will highlight key players and games as the season progresses. You'll get an overall look at the rankings, the Heisman Trophy watch, and conference breakdowns. Once you start playing through the first season, you can start using the stat book to track how individual players are doing and whether or not they need to be replaced due to their poor performance. The coach options can be used to set overall strategy for the team such as how often the team uses run plays or passing plays and if these plays are aggressive or conservative. This particular feature also has a general report card that basically keeps track of your performance as a coach. The report card also gives you a rating for job security as well as an indication of how popular the team is when a game is broadcast on national TV or through satellite. All of these things will work as incentives for improving your team during the season.   Obviously, you won't have to pay close attention to these things if you select one of the top-tier teams. Indeed, you won't even have to worry as much about recruiting players, since a good number of the top prospects will already be interested in attending your school. But if you've chosen a lower-tier team and your season wasn't exactly the most memorable, then it not only pays to be attentive to scouting reports on other teams during the regular season so that you have at least some hope of winning a game against a high-profile opponent, but it also helps to have an eagle eye during the off-season so that you can recruit players that will help strengthen the weaker parts of your team.   Recruiting is handled similarly to how it was handled in last year's game. At the start of the process, you'll have a list of seniors that are graduating from your school, which may include some key players such as a quarterback or a halfback, which in turn creates additional problems for your school. In any case, when the seniors are removed from your team, you'll be presented with a list of all the players looking to play college football.   The college classics mode gives you an opportunity to relive college football's best moments.  This list can be sorted in a variety of different ways, but the most useful option is to sort players based on interest in your school. This way you can get an idea of how easy it will be to fill certain positions almost immediately. You can also sort the list based on the home state of a particular player, which may increase your chances of recruiting that specific player, since it seems that most of them like to play close to home. If you're feeling a little adventurous, it's even possible to sort the list of potential recruits by how skilled they are, but keep in mind that if you have a lower-tier team, your chances of being able to successfully recruit that player are nearly nonexistent. Of course, you can try persuading the player by having the head coach and assistant coach visit him and then follow up those visits with phone calls. It's even possible to recruit players by using different methods of persuasion--tell them that they'll get plenty of playing time by coming to your school, or tout your school's location or prestige. Regardless, the dynasty mode will offer plenty to the college football fan, but keep in mind that the teams at the lower end of the spectrum will have to work much harder to even get to one of the numerous bowl games.   If you're not particularly interested in building a program or going through the tribulations of recruiting new players, NCAA Football 2004 offers several different options that will let you jump right into a game. The college classics option is probably one of the more entertaining features, but it's also one of the most frustrating. There are a dozen or so games in college classics that are basically re-creations of the best endings in college football history, such as Doug Flute's Hail Mary against Miami in 1984. As entertaining as these re-creations are, they can be pretty difficult to execute properly. The rivalry game option from NCAA Football 2003 returns in 2004, and again, you can select from a list of games with college football's best rivalries such as Army and Navy, Cal and Stanford, or Florida State and Miami. Lastly, there's a mascot game option where you can head out onto the field with a team of nothing but your college's mascot as the players. EA Sports has actually added more mascots this year, so there's probably a much better chance that your favorite team (or mascot) is faithfully represented in the game.   The PlayStation 2 version is the only version of the game that offers online play, and it works quite well online, with very few signs of lag. You can choose to play a game immediately--the game will automatically search for an opponent--or you can enter the lobby, where players are separated according to region and skill level. There's also an EA messenger chat feature that lets you track and chat with friends online. As for stats, you'll get to see a player's win-loss record, points per game, total offense (which is then broken down into running and passing), total defense, average game score, and more. There are lots of statistics to keep track of, and they help make the online mode a little more interesting. In addition, the online mode supports the SOCOM headset if you feel like chatting with your opponent.   Those who purchased last year's game will find that a series of relatively minor changes have been made, and they ultimately help to improve an already great game.  As for the actual gameplay in NCAA Football 2004, those who purchased last year's game will find that a series of relatively minor changes have been made, and they ultimately help to improve an already great game. On the offensive side of the ball, the most prominent change is in the play-action mechanics, which now does a much more convincing job of pretending that the quarterback is handing the ball off to the running back. In fact, the camera will quickly pan over to the running back and make it seem as though he actually has the ball before panning back out so that you can see receivers running down the field. Run blocking has also been slightly tweaked, and it seems as though offensive linemen are generally better at pulling blocks than in the previous game. However, the passing game in NCAA 2004 can be a little suspect at times--you can complete some fairly ridiculous 12- or 14-yard passes in double coverage with some consistency, but throwing a quick 5-yard pass to a tight end or a fullback seems to be almost as difficult as throwing a 30-yard bomb. It makes sense that a fullback or a tight end wouldn't have the same catching abilities as a receiver, but at times the passing game gets a little ridiculous.   Defensively, the changes are a little less noticeable. Zone defenses seem to have been improved, with defensive backs and linebackers being more adept and staying within their zones and then moving around when a receiver or running back comes into that area on the field. More importantly, defensive backs react much more realistically to passes when in zone coverage and will often try to jump up and intercept the ball or knock it down when the ball comes flying through the zone. Tackling has also been improved, and there are now more animations, such as high shoulder tackles that take a while to bring a player down.   A few visual enhancements have also been made in NCAA Football 2004.  A few visual enhancements have also been made in NCAA Football 2004. The player models look a little more detailed, and the added animations give the game a much more realistic look overall. The detail in the stadiums and on the sidelines has also been increased. The Xbox version is probably the best looking of the three versions--some of the special effects, such as the reflections coming off the helmets, are a little more prominent--but otherwise the visual differences between the three versions are negligible.   Surprisingly, the commentary and the overall sound have been improved as well. The commentary sounds a little more natural this time around, and it seems as though more lines have been dedicated for specific game-time events that the commentators wouldn't normally reference during every game. However, there are times where they tend to repeat themselves a little often over the course of a game, particularly when a big play is made. There's also much more stadium noise in the form of chants, though they sound somewhat artificial.   As with most sports games, the decision to buy NCAA Football 2004 comes down to whether or not you think some of the new features and upgrades are worth paying full price for. If you're a casual college football fan and you already own last year's game, then there really isn't a huge reason for you to buy the Xbox or GameCube versions of the game, especially since neither features online play. The PS2 version, on the other hand, is very enticing. If you're a hard-core fan, then you will certainly enjoy all of the new features--whether they're huge or small--that EA Sports has added to make an enjoyable game even better.  



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792,Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded ,4," Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded brings things back with an HD touch-up and a new girl, but it could have benefited from some additional refinement.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/8/6/8/6516-25868.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/leisure-suit-larry-reloaded-review/1900-6410868/,neg,"
  It's difficult to imagine any woman genuinely falling for Larry Laffer. His hair is thinning, his breath is bad in a way that defies description, he perpetually looks to be a few hours from giving birth to a basketball, and when he talks, he sounds almost exactly like Maxwell Smart, the bumbling secret agent from the '60s television series. Those personality flaws are part of the joke, though, and that joke was enough to turn the unappealing antihero into a cash cow for prolific adventure game publisher Sierra On-Line during the late '80s and early '90s.   Getting condoms from a convenience store is no simple matter for Larry Laffer!   Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded is an apparent attempt to offer a fond look back at that dubious era. Series creator Al Lowe asked the Internet for the money he needed in order to revisit the earliest title in the long-running series, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and his wish was granted. Larry Laffer is back for a triumphant second run, only now women are rejecting him in high-definition, and his quest for true love requires additional effort. The problem is that even with improvements, Larry is a relic.    Reloaded makes concessions to the modern era, but its roots show quite clearly. Larry appears on mostly static backdrops, and you click onscreen icons to encourage interaction. Each screen contains several points of interest, and each poke and prod is narrated with gusto. The actor clearly relished his role, and he manages to make the rampant sexual innuendo come off every bit as sleazily as possible. There's lots of material to work with, too, which means you hear numerous jokes about sex and the male and female anatomy even though the artists didn't bother to illustrate the bulk of it (which is just as well, in some cases). The dialogue is also fond of breaking the fourth wall, sometimes even for genuine laughs.    Larry finds himself exploring the city of Lost Wages, which is a transparent parody of Las Vegas if that city featured only five proper buildings and a looping road to connect them. Attractions include Lefty's Bar, a mini-mart, a love chapel, a multi-floor casino, and a disco club. Sidewalks line those buildings, and it's possible to interact with a few pedestrians who appear there mostly at random, but the game takes place in a very confined space overall. You need to hail a cab if you want to safely explore the city, because wandering along the sidewalks usually leads to an alley where a thug will beat Larry to death.   Spot the hilarious joke hidden in the license plate!   Even with so many restrictions in place, it's easy to run into temporary dead ends as you try to coach Larry to coital bliss. Reloaded plays out as a more perverted version of the more monotonous games of its original era, so that whenever you find a new location, you need to run around licking, groping, examining, and talking to everything, just to make sure you're not missing something. Your alternative is to potentially overlook an important clue, then spend a half hour or more making a circuit of the city, trying to discover what you missed. Sometimes this process becomes ridiculous. For instance, the casino has eight floors. Most of those floors have doors you can tap on to interrupt people who are having sex on the other side, but you can't assume that's always true, because what if you then miss something important? You have no choice but to hear every silly joke at least once, and perhaps many times if you find yourself truly flummoxed.    Moments when you're wandering around because you've missed a clue--perhaps even one that you've been holding in your inventory the whole time--only serve to highlight the game's most regrettable flaw: its interface. The new setup may have been improved compared to the old standard, but it still has a long way to go. If you are wandering a street and interacting with objects outside, that requires the hand icon to be active. Passing through the door to enter some buildings may (or may not) then require you to switch to the foot icon. Once inside, you need to switch back…except when you don't. Riding a taxi from one location to another is also inconvenient, not to mention expensive. You can earn additional money to pay for fare only by playing games of chance, so you're essentially encouraged to save a file after each win and to reload one after you lose, lest you exhaust your funds and find yourself forced to accept charity from a wandering bum.    There are completely new scenes involving a new potential love of Larry's life, a girl named Jasmine. Even finding a way to talk to her can prove difficult, though, and then gaining her affections requires a fetch quest and quite a bit of inventory diving. It's nice that new content has been added to give returning fans something new to experience, but the quality of that new content is hardly exceptional. It also doesn't add much depth to the adventure once you know what is expected of you. If you've lived the Laffer life before, this adventure isn't likely to outlast a half-hour sitcom episode.   I would not put my hand on that toilet if I were you!   One piece of good news, though, is that no setback has to be a big deal. When Larry meets an untimely end, the game presents you with a comical screen that you can click through quickly if you're in a hurry, and then Larry appears a short distance from the source of his previous demise. There's no real penalty, which means that you don't have to feel that you're punished for experimenting as you play the game. Some of the potential deaths are also quite cute, so it's worth seeing them happen at least once just for the sake of comedy. The artists clearly had a lot of fun with some of the animations, and for that matter, all of the game assets are sufficiently sharp and clear to convincingly capture the characters and the seedy environments they occupy.    Ultimately, Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded is most likely to appeal to those who played and enjoyed his old games, back when they were a big deal. The remake is packed with clever dialogue, and the HD artwork looks very nice, but there's not enough new gameplay to hide the fact that the original Leisure Suit Larry game was every bit as shallow as its sexually frustrated protagonist. Mr. Laffer makes a terrific jester, but he's not good for a whole lot more.  
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793,World Class Baseball ,4, Unpredictable controls and a lack of features make this one baseball game you'll want to avoid.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/6/3/2219463-world_class_baseball__u_.jpg,TG16,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-class-baseball-review/1900-6179405/,neg,"
  Time hasn't been kind to World Class Baseball. When it was originally published for the TurboGrafx-16 console way back in 1988, people overlooked the game's pathetic list of features and its unpredictable controls because the graphics were years ahead of the curve. Now that nearly 20 years have passed and World Class Baseball is available again, this time for the Wii's Virtual Console, the leaping players and moonshot hits don't look as impressive as they once did. As a result, the game's shortcomings are tougher to ignore.    You can pick from 12 fictional teams, adjust their lineups, and play games in three different modes. There's the usual exhibition mode, a playoffs mode, and a versus mode that lets you play against a friend by hooking up a second controller. A fourth mode lets you watch two CPU teams play against one another, if you're the voyeuristic sort. Although the lack of a season mode is a shame, the playoffs will tide you over for at least 13 full games, and more than that if you count all the times you lose the password that you need to continue after your last win. The lineup editor is pretty much worthless. You can shuffle the benches, but you can't trade players, edit their names, or create your own custom teams.   World Class? This game's got no class!   The controls and play mechanics have a simple, arcade-like design. When you're batting, you can move the hitter around in the box and press the button to swing. When you're pitching, you can move the pitcher left and right on the pitching rubber, and you can also adjust the break of the pitch by holding a direction on the control pad after the ball is released. If the ball is put into play when you're pitching, you can control the fielder that's closest to the ball by using the directional pad and, if need be, make him dive after the ball.     The arcade-like atmosphere is further reinforced by the circus-style music, acrobatic dives, and moonshot hits that seem to accompany every swing of the bat. Indeed, those tiny little players hoof it and make Superman catches with plenty of grace. The way the ball changes in size as it rises into the air and then falls back toward the field is also pretty sweet, especially when you remember that World Class Baseball originally came out in 1988, a full two years before similar scaling effects would be put to use in other 16-bit baseball video games.    So what's the big problem, apart from the simplistic design? The controls are unpredictable. More accurately, the players don't always do what they're supposed to. On one play, you'll have your fielder throw to a base, at which point he'll get rid of the ball quickly. The next time, he'll delay a couple of seconds, and the lazy toss will let the runner reach safety. Likewise, when a ball is put into play, you'll find that you can't always move your fielder around after the ball is caught. That's only a minor inconvenience in the outfield, where you can make a relay throw, but it makes infield put-outs impossible. Occasionally, you'll pick up a bouncer and watch helplessly as the runner advances because you can't move two steps to touch the bag. Hudson should've fixed these issues for the Virtual Console release. Unfortunately, they didn't, which means you're better off spending your 600 Wii points on something else.  
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794,NES Play Action Football ,4," NES Play Action Football doesn't deliver much content, and the friendly controls don't make up for the sluggish players or crude visuals.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/3/1/2209631-nes_nesplayactionfootball_2.jpg,NES,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nes-play-action-football-review/1900-6183754/,neg,"
  Sports games are typically rendered obsolete six months to a year after their initial release. However, there are exceptions: Those rare instances when a game is so scrumptiously good that it begs to be played despite the roster being outdated or the graphics going out of style. Sadly, NES Play Action Football is not one of those exceptions. It was weak when it was originally published for the Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1990 and seems even more ridiculous now that it's available for the Wii's Virtual Console.    Tecmo Bowl, which came out a year before NES Play Action Football, offered players the entire slate of real NFL teams, a season mode, and a playbook containing dozens of authentic NFL plays. By contrast, NES Play Action Football serves up eight fictional teams, an abbreviated playoffs mode, and 24 offensive plays. That lack of content isn't so bad when you realize that Nintendo was clearly aiming to court people looking for a more easygoing, arcade-style take on the gridiron. Every pass looks like a Hail Mary and running plays usually result in 20-yard gains if you get past the defensive line. The basic controls make it easy to run, pass, and tackle as needed. You can tap the run button to give your receiver a burst of speed, but beware: It'll tire him out quicker and force you to make a substitution sooner. There aren't any audibles or defensive jukes to worry about. Instead, you simply have to avoid the defenders that try to get close when you're on offense and press the tackle button when you're on defense.    The unique viewpoint shows a bird's-eye view of the field with the field running diagonally.   There's nothing inherently wrong with a sports game that combines easygoing controls with an over-the-top approach. It certainly worked for NBA Jam and NFL Blitz, but the problem with NES Play Action Football is that the on-field action doesn't convey the necessary bursts of excitement. Playing against the CPU is no fun because it repeats the same lines and plays on offense. It also doesn't bother to challenge you on defense until you reach the 30-yard-line, when the computer instantly transforms into an unstoppable super-team like the 1985 Chicago Bears. Even if you manage to get a game going with one, two, or three of your friends, you'll still have to contend with how slowly the players move. They're like turtles out there. Waiting for receivers to get into position and watching them gradually move the ball up the field is excruciating. Tapping the run button also doesn't speed them up very much.    As for the graphics and audio, they're pretty lifeless too. The field has no detail apart from the necessary lines and boundary markings. The players, viewed from above, all look like the same amorphous blob with a round head and a larger rounded body. There isn't much animation to speak of because running consists of two jerky frames, while a passer simply holds his arm out straight when throwing the ball. Dives, kneel downs, and tackles all employ the same arms-out-Superman-flying animation. The only graphical highlight is that you're treated to a cutscene whenever you sack the QB or score a touchdown. Audio consists primarily of crude ticks and tones. The digitized referee speech clips are impressive for a NES game, but even then, you have to turn the volume up pretty high to hear them clearly.     Basically, there's absolutely no compelling reason for you to waste 500 Wii points ($5) on NES Play Action Football. When it first came out, it was already behind Tecmo Bowl in every aspect (depth, fun, graphics, audio), and the dumb CPU along with the sluggish players didn't help matters any. Playing the game today, it comes across like a museum piece that's only meant to remind us just how good Tecmo Bowl and the early John Madden games were years ago.    
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795,Drop Off ,4, Drop Off is a challenging Breakout knockoff that's ruined by a slow-moving paddle.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/0/0/2219400-drop_off__u_.jpg,TG16,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/drop-off-review/1900-6178082/,neg,"
  The main thing you need to know about Drop Off is that it's a lame Breakout or Arkanoid rip-off that's not worth the 600 Wii points it costs to download the TurboGrafx-16 version from the Virtual Console shop. Much like you would in Breakout or Arkanoid, the basic design involves moving a circular disc around the play field to continually rebound a tiny ball, so that you destroy the objects above you and keep the ball from falling through the bottom of the screen. However, unlike typical Breakout clones, the treelike stacks of objects are constantly descending toward the bottom of the screen and many of the objects you hit will dislodge from the stack to smash your disc.   In Drop Off, you use a round disc to bounce a tiny ball into objects, which then explode or fall to the bottom of the screen.   The controls aren't overly intricate. Mainly, you just need use the D pad to move your disc around. One button lets you change whether the ball rebounds at a vertical or horizontal angle. The other button activates one of your ""arrow"" items, which yanks the stacks upward by a full screen and gives you some temporary breathing room. Some levels also incorporate power-up objects that you can hit to slow the descent of the stacks or make it so that the ball pierces through objects instead of bouncing off of them. Of course, the simple 2D objects and repetitive music aren't elaborate either, but they're sufficient.     There are only 16 stages to beat, but don't let that fool you into thinking you'll finish the game in an hour or so. Drop Off is one of the most challenging puzzle games out there. Each stack of objects extends upward at least four screens tall, and a level doesn't end until the branches holding stacks reach the bottom of the screen. The lower the stacks, the less room you have to maneuver your disc. Also, because you have to keep the disc away from falling objects, you can't always safely rebound the ball. The bricks at the bottom of the screen will reflect the ball a limited number of times before disappearing, but they won't keep you alive for long.     While some people will no doubt find the intense challenge refreshing, the game is, unfortunately, all but ruined by one very simple cork-up on the part of the programmers. The ball is tiny and quick, yet the disc, which isn't much bigger than the ball, is dreadfully slow. As a result, you have to move the rebounding disc into position long before the ball bounces off of something. If the ball takes a surprising bounce, even halfway up the screen, you don't stand a chance of catching up to it. That's a big problem because the downward progression of the stacks guarantees that the ball will reflect at odd angles.    If you like puzzle games or Breakout clones, avoid Drop Off and wait for something better to come to the Virtual Console. Dealing with the cramped spaces and falling hazards is tough enough as it is, without having to cope with a sluggish paddle too.  
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796,Traitors Gate 2 ,4, Traitors Gate 2 is a mess of a game that feels more like punishment than fun.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/2/1/9/18247-53219.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/traitors-gate-2-review/1900-6083512/,neg,"
 The best adventure games let you explore diverse and exotic locales; they let you meet fascinating characters; they let you take part in a gripping story; and they let you solve puzzles that are challenging, but not frustrating, and reward you for solving them. Traitors Gate 2: Cypher does almost none of these things. There's a neat idea buried somewhere in the game of taking an old-school adventure game and throwing in a tiny dash of Tomb Raider and Splinter Cell. Unfortunately, Traitors Gate 2 is almost--literally--unplayable. The puzzles are arbitrary and too hard, the pace is boring, the gameplay is tedious, and the story is forgettable. If that weren't enough, major bugs and general sloppiness also mar the proceedings. In many ways, Traitors Gate 2 is a perfect example of how not to design an adventure game.  This colorful intro raises false hopes.  In the original Traitors Gate, you had to foil a jewel heist. In Traitors Gate 2, you again play as a mysterious operative named Raven, but this time around, the stakes are much higher: Global security is at risk. Terrorists from an unnamed Middle Eastern country are working with an American defector to develop a computer virus that can re-encrypt secret communications codes, thus crippling militaries and causing mass chaos. Your goal is to sneak into the lab where the virus is being developed. You must then copy the virus and destroy the lab. Conveniently enough, for an adventure game, you'll have to access the lab via an ancient Babylonian temple complex. This sort of old-fashioned pyramid crawl hearkens back to the earliest adventure games, like Scott Adams's Pyramid of Doom (1981).  Now, though, instead of a simple text adventure, you get the benefit of today's 3D technology. You control Raven as you would in a typical third-person action game, by moving him with the arrow keys and looking around with the mouse. Sadly, he can't jump or climb over even the tiniest of obstacles, and you can't remap the keys. Worse still, he frequently gets snagged on objects and sometimes spins about wildly. This is, at best, annoying and, at worst, is a contributor to your character's death as he gets caught up while trying to evade moving traps. The fact that you have to line Raven up perfectly with an object to pick it up or to operate it is equally problematic and can cause you to ignore a useable object that you, at first, might mistake as part of the immovable scenery. Still, getting to freely control a character's movement in a 3D environment at least, theoretically, makes Traitors Gate more immersive than your typical graphical adventure.  There's precious little in the way of interesting story or characters in Traitors Gate 2 to immerse you, though. For almost the entire game, the only character you see is Raven. You just watch the back of his head the whole while, and every great once in a while he'll make a stupid observation, like when he spots a serpent statue and says, ""Whoa! Sir Hiss, I presume."" So, the game is really all about the puzzles. During the great majority of the game, the puzzles revolve around lame ""find the secret button to open the secret passage in the pyramid"" dilemmas. Near the end of the game, you get to use a few high-tech gadgets to retrieve the terrorists' virus.  To help you progress through the mazelike temple complex, you use some clues from an archaeologist's old diary and sometimes use hints found on ancient paintings or carvings. Oftentimes, these clues aren't enough, and they can even confuse the matter. Almost-comically-gratuitous Rube Goldberg puzzles abound in numbing succession, often involving a whole bunch of levers and buttons and wheels and too little feedback about whether you're on the right track. Between the confusing clues and confusing puzzles, you can easily spend way too long stumbling about in this game, getting nowhere and growing utterly sick of the proceedings.  Even if you know what you're doing, some of the puzzles are so elaborate that they can take an eternity to finish, making this a painfully boring game. Just as bad, you rarely feel like you're making any progress. Good adventure games reward you for solving puzzles. They, of course, offer the simple satisfaction of having figured out a problem, but they also let you learn more of the story, explore neat new locales, and meet interesting new characters. In Traitors Gate 2, you miss all these things. It just feels like you're on a treadmill, facing one arbitrary puzzle after another and never earning anything for it. Just to make sure all your fun is squashed, the game suffers from some major bugs. For instance, you can sometimes fall through walkways, you can permanently freeze when you pull a lever, and you can suffer from other such similar things that may prevent you from completing the game.  You get a few high-tech gadgets, but the game is mostly old-school adventure.  Traitors Gate 2's presentation is a bit better than its gameplay, though it's still only mediocre. There are some believable ambient sounds, but sometimes the 3D audio makes them come from the wrong position. The soundtrack adds a little ambience but contains no memorable themes and doesn't add any real drama. Visually, the game looks dated and sputters and chugs as it loads new rooms on the fly. The endless, look-alike hallways aren't merely monotonous but can make navigation a chore. (Why isn't there an automapping feature?) On the bright side, the Babylonian temple setting is refreshingly unusual, and the developers clearly had fun with all the ancient Middle Eastern motifs and luxurious colors.  Traitors Gate 2 has a neat concept but totally fails to deliver on it. You never feel like some elite counterterrorist adventurer, but, rather, you feel like some poor schmuck who got suckered into wandering around a sprawling temple filled with one gratuitous, tedious, and frustrating puzzle after another. Couple that with major bugs, sloppy typos, and a painfully slow pace, and you get a mess of a game that feels more like punishment than fun.  
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797,Corvette ,4," When you get right down to it, Corvette is a difficult title to recommend to even the most devout Corvette enthusiast.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/7/1/2/2213712-box_corvette.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/corvette-review/1900-6102076/,neg,"
 It certainly stands to reason that a racing game built around one of the most timeless domestic racing machines would be a great idea. Watch a Corvette roll down a busy street, and you'll see a lot of heads turn to follow it. The tight handling, powerful engine, and delicate precision in its design are all hallmarks of its long racing lineage. Corvette, which was originally brought out on the Xbox by TDK, is now available on the PS2 as well. However, the game once again falls flat in just about every way a Corvette or racing fan enthusiast could hope it would succeed.   Corvette features--you guessed it--a whole bunch of licensed Corvettes to drive.  Corvette features a number of modes for you to play in, ranging from career mode to arcade mode, with multiplayer, quick race, and special event races mixed in. In career mode, you compete in a number of races in a linear fashion, starting with the first generation of Corvette and eventually ending in the last. Most of these races are held as wheel-to-wheel competitions of speed with five other hopefuls on a closed track. However, the last race for each generation is a one-on-one race held on the open road, along with regular road traffic and police enforcement. As you progress, you'll receive minor upgrades for your car, but for the most part, these don't make your car particularly distinguishable from its stock form. In the arcade mode, you'll go through the same progression of track and road races, this time being rewarded with cars and tracks that are unlocked for use in the game's quick race mode. The special events mode will allow you to compete in time trials, or endurance races, which are just longer versions of the races you already competed in.  Repetitive gameplay aside, what holds Corvette back the farthest from its goals is its control. With every car there is a noticeable lag between when you input a steering command in the controller and when the actual steering takes place in the car. This lag is enough to make accurate handling a problem in the Generation 5 Corvettes and gets progressively worse the older the car is. Controlling the traction of the car, even on regular pavement, is a very delicate balancing act: Either you have it or you don't, and there is very little leeway between having a planted feeling on the ground and spinning wildly out of control. With the PlayStation 2's controller, the accuracy of the handling is hindered even further. Coming through a corner at full throttle will almost always result in spinning your car, and dialing in just the right amount of gas with the controller's short-throw analog buttons proves challenging. Collisions with both fixed objects and other cars are frustrating, and colliding with other cars happens frequently, since the computer-controlled cars pay little regard to your being in their chosen path. To top it off, the game has a poorly conceived sense of speed, making it very difficult to judge just how much to slow down for an upcoming corner.   The game's graphics are its best feature...but that isn't saying much.  The game's graphics are probably its best feature, though in comparison with what you can see in other racing games for the platform, they're not that good. Textures are rough and repetitive, and the environments are very blocky. The game tries to soften its presentation with heavy use of a hazy filter, similar to the one used in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. But oftentimes this proves to be too much for the hardware, and the frame rate will often hitch up when the action moves too fast. Surprisingly, the frame rate stays consistent in the two-player split-screen mode, though this is managed by locking both players into the first-person view, which removes the car models from the polygon count. The audio palette is limited to the screeching of tires, the roar of the engine, and the sounds of collisions, but when you get right down to it, there's only a small selection of sounds to represent each. Every crash sounds the same, every tire squeal sounds the same, and although each generation of Corvette sounds unique, the sound is more reminiscent of a heavy propeller-driven aircraft than of a highly tuned sports car.  There are seemingly a lot of options in Corvette, but since it all comes down to racing your Corvette against other Corvettes, the action is pretty repetitive. The game's poor control make the action more frustrating than rewarding. All in all, Corvette is an overly simplistic racer with too many problems, and it's difficult to recommend it to even the most devout Corvette enthusiasts. 
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798,Room Zoom ,4," Where Room Zoom really goes off track is its paucity of content. There's barely enough that's of interest to make you want to play once, let alone twice.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/2/6/7/18976-55267.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/room-zoom-review/1900-6106504/,neg,"
 Room Zoom: Race for Impact is fast and frenetic, but frustrating, too. Akin to 1999's Re-Volt, Room Zoom lets you race tiny cars through supersized environments, barreling through a bathroom, a mad scientist's lab, and a kitchen, among other locales. You'll grab power-ups, dodge power tools, blast opponents, and find shortcuts to make it to the checkered flag first. Room Zoom is simple to pick up and play and it offers plenty of action, yet the chaotic gameplay and wildly cluttered tracks can sap the fun out of things as quickly as they create it.  Small cars zip through supersized environments.  Room Zoom lacks any multiplayer modes, instead pitting you against artificial intelligence-controlled cars with three ability levels. You can drive in single races of one to seven laps, though most of the tracks and cars are initially locked. To unlock them, you'll need to finish in at least third place on each track as you battle through the game's championship mode.  In the championship mode, you progress through three groups of four races, with each race taking place on a different track. You can't save your progress during each four-race group--you can only save between races--so once you get started, be prepared to keep playing for a while. It's a shame the developer ignored the fact that not every gamer has the time or inclination to play for long stretches. On top of that problem, you'll find that the tracks don't smoothly ramp-up in difficulty. Instead, the game randomly mixes easy tracks with a few that will have you yanking your hair out.  At least the racing is fast and furious, with nary a dull patch. Thanks to the game's interactive environments, alternate routes, and simple power-ups (fireballs, shields, and the like), you can go from first position to sixth and back again before you know what happened. In fact, things usually get too hectic or confusing. With so many power-ups and obstacles scattered about, races often end up feeling like chaotic free-for-alls where luck, not skill, determine the winner. You'll be driving along, and suddenly all you see are blinding flashes of light and a bunch of cars--including your own--flying every which way. You can only guess why. The race circuits themselves can be a bit confusing, too. Sometimes zipping off the beaten path is allowed as a valid shortcut, but other times the game forbids it for no apparent reason and automatically plops you back on the main track.  Odd physics can detract from the fun, too. The various cars you unlock all handle uniquely, which is certainly a welcome feature, yet sometimes they bounce off giant tools or juice cartons in dubious ways. Once in a while, you might even find yourself riding sideways on a wall as if your tires magically turned to flypaper.   Two cars vie for the lead in a vent shaft.  Room Zoom's circuits sound neat on paper. After all, it's not many racing games that let you zip between the tines of a pitchfork, weave among cereal boxes, and perform other surreal stunts. And in fact, the basic track layouts are pretty well-designed, with plenty of ramps, tunnels, sudden hairpin turns, and movable and fixed obstacles. On the other hand, many of the tracks are too similar. Also, the environments all blur by so quickly that you rarely have time to notice any of their thematic details. The fact that the graphics are very brightly colored but are ultimately pedestrian, without any unique flair or memorability, doesn't help. Sound effects, likewise, leave no impression beyond that they merely meet the basic requirements: some generic engine sounds and some generic techno tunes.  Room Zoom suffers from further failings like odd interface bugs. Yet where Room Zoom really goes off track is its paucity of content. The game lacks multiplayer and any sort of track editor, and the entire championship mode can be played in just a couple of hours. Room Zoom might keep young kids happily occupied for a while, but adult gamers will wonder why they ever bothered. There's barely enough of interest to make you want to play once, let alone twice. 
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799,Battlebots: Design & Destroy ,4, Battlebots: Design & Destroy takes one step forward and 10 steps back from its predecessor.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/2/6/2212626-918795_48994_front.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battlebots-design-and-destroy-review/1900-6076660/,neg,"
 Fans of the BattleBots TV show aren't likely to swoon over Battlebots: Design & Destroy. For roughly $15, what you get is a so-so arena combat game that barely meets 2001 standards for graphics, audio, and miscellaneous features. If you bought last year's Battlebots: Beyond the BattleBox, you also need to ask yourself if you're willing to pay for the same game twice. With the exception of a few AI tweaks, and the transition to a cumbersome password save system, Battlebots: Design & Destroy is a total carbon copy of its predecessor.   Are robot battles as exciting when the graphics are this stale?  Just as the contestants on the weekly TV show, your job is to build a remote-controlled robot, from scratch, and send it into an arena to compete against another home-built robot. You can build your bot from dozens of parts, including weapons, armor, motors, wheels, and more, but weight restrictions prevent you from creating an all-out war machine. There are four weight classes in which to compete. As you move up through them, the weight limit increases, allowing you to make nastier and nastier robots. The controls are fairly straightforward. You use the D pad to move around the arena, while the various buttons control whatever weapons you've mounted to your bot. Combat isn't very complex either. Ramming into the back of your opponent is always the best strategy, and the various saws, sledgehammers, and spike traps scattered around the arena are more annoying than they are destructive. Even so, the game does a decent job, overall, of portraying the essence of the TV show. Robots flip over or roll under the pulverizers fairly often, and both contestants are usually billowing smoke in the final seconds of a match.  In addition to the standard tournament and exhibition modes, Battlebots: Design & Destroy also supports four-player multiplayer matches. Each player can choose from any of the 16 stock bots, or he or she can use an individual creation. There are power-up items that appear at regular intervals to add a little spice to each match. The power-up items actually bring a bit more depth to the game, so it's rather unfortunate that they're not available in any of the single-player modes.  In most respects, Battlebots: Design & Destroy is identical to Battlebots: Beyond the BattleBox. It features the same four arenas, the same set of 16 bots, and the same selection of parts as last year's game. Even the graphics and audio are indistinguishable between the two. The difference is that the programming isn't as shoddy in this year's game. The CPU doesn't sit still in corners anymore, and weapons actually do damage and wear out based on their armor and power ratings. All of the silly glitches in the garage interface have been fixed as well. Parts no longer disappear after you purchase them, and you no longer lose money when you exchange an expensive part for a cheaper one.  Another difference between the two games--and this one's an odd one--is that Battlebots: Design & Destroy uses a password system to keep track of robots and prize winnings. Beyond the BattleBox had a battery-based save that could store up to 12 custom bots. Technically, the password system in this year's game lets you create an infinite number of custom robots, but that's probably little consolation when you consider that it's necessary to write down 22 characters for each bot that you create. That's likely too cumbersome for most people, and it highlights why password systems aren't all that common in GBA games these days.  This time around, you won't lose parts because of programming glitches.  Even though the developers fixed the AI and ironed out a few bugs from last year's game, they didn't do anything to improve its graphics or audio. The level of quality for GBA games, in general, has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year. Unfortunately, the level of quality for the GBA wasn't at the top of the heap to begin with. The four included arenas barely make use of the GBA's color palette, and the animation for all the hazards and weapons is extremely choppy. If you watch the show, you'll recognize some of your favorite bots, like Diesector, Tazbot, and El Diablo, just from their appearances. They may not move gracefully, but the various body and paint details are there. As for the audio, it's OK. The rock soundtrack is nothing to write home about, but the digitized sound effects for collisions and the various weapons are sufficiently resonant.  Most sequels tend to improve upon the original in some way, whether by featuring better graphics, more play modes, remixed audio, richer gameplay, or a combination of the four. Bug fixes and programming tweaks just come as part of the package. They're expected, but they're never thought of as defining features. Battlebots: Design & Destroy doesn't improve upon Battlebots: Beyond the BattleBox in any meaningful way, and it's disturbing that Majesco is trying to pass off this collection of bug fixes as a brand-new game.  
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800,"Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Dark Crusade ",8.8, This terrific update to one of the best sci-fi real-time strategy games in years packs in a great strategic campaign and a grand total of seven different armies.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/7/5/2209775-dawn_of_war_box_art.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warhammer-40000-dawn-of-war-dark-crusade-review/1900-6159609/,pos,"
  Hot on the heels of its outstanding new real-time strategy game Company of Heroes, experienced developer Relic is back with the second expansion to its excellent 2004 game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and it's a great update. Dark Crusade introduces two interesting and powerful new factions to Dawn of War, raising the total number of different playable armies to a whopping seven. It also features a new strategic campaign structure that lets you direct any of these seven sides in a massive war for planetary supremacy, with shades of the classic board game Risk. Some new units for the returning factions and plenty of new skirmish maps are also included, and you don't even need to own Dawn of War or its first expansion pack to enjoy most of this (you only need the previous games to unlock the older factions specifically for use in multiplayer matches; you have access to every race when playing solo). What with all that it has to offer, Dark Crusade comes across as much more than your typical real-time strategy expansion pack. It's one of the best RTS games around strictly on its own merits.   Two new factions, the Tau Empire and the Necrons, join a cast of five others, adding even more depth and intrigue to Dawn of War's futuristic battlefields.   For the uninitiated, Dark Crusade's gameplay does a great job of putting the focus on vicious front-line combat by forcing you to quickly send out squads of powerful soldiers to claim strategic points spread across each map. Relatively little time is spent building up a base, so you'll wind up focusing your energy and attention on managing the game's exciting, gory battles. You'll command mighty infantry squads as well as deadly vehicles, and though most units do a good job of acting autonomously when engaged, you'll need to carefully use special abilities and keep an eye on your soldiers' morale as they fight. The design concepts introduced in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War later found their way into Company of Heroes in improved form, but don't expect all those changes in Dark Crusade. For the most part, though, the gameplay still holds up extremely well, as do the game's detailed, imaginative visuals.    Dark Crusade takes place on the planet Kronus, a mysterious world that's drawn out all these different unfriendly factions to set up camp all at the same time. This stroke of fortune promises many brutal battles to come. None of the factions intend to share the planet, not even the imperial guard and the space marines, who've arrived with their own separate missions. As relatively implausible as it may seem for seven different alien races to all be fighting over the same one backwater planet, Dark Crusade does a surprisingly good job of putting its new strategic campaign in context.    You initially choose to command the forces of any of the game's seven factions, as represented by a specific leader character marshaling each of these armies on Kronus. Among the choices are the new additions to Dark Crusade: the Empire of Tau, a high-tech conglomerate of races fighting for what they call the Greater Good; and the Necrons, an ancient and genocidal breed of what can best be described as undead robots. An enthusiastic narrator then explains what your selected race is trying to accomplish on Kronus and what your force's military leader is all about. Also, each time you manage to take out one of the opposing faction's strongholds, you'll get a narrated epilogue that's unique to that combination of races. Then there's an ending sequence for each faction for whenever you finally defeat all six of your opponents, a process that can take a good 10 hours or more, though it'll depend on the difficulty setting you choose. The stories are entertaining and faithful to the spirit of Games Workshop's influential Warhammer 40,000 sci-fi universe, and they make for a compelling reason to play through the campaign multiple times.   The concept of a strategic campaign isn't new to real-time strategy games, but it's a great, well-designed addition to Dawn of War.   The campaign's turn-based layer is very simple, since you have only one army to manage and you normally just take one turn either to move to a friendly province or attack an adjacent enemy province. However, there are a lot of interesting strategic choices packed into this system, in that each province offers some sort of unique tactical reward for when you take it over. Many provinces will grant your faction's leader an honor guard, a military unit that will be ready for action as soon as you begin the next battle--as long as you have enough planetary requisition points to afford it. You can also use requisition points, which are earned each turn, to reinforce your provinces with units that can quickly defend your position should one of the enemy commanders attack.    What's more, some provinces confer unique abilities, such as a space port that lets you attack provinces that aren't adjacent to your commander. Probably the most useful of these is a special ability that lets your commander move twice per turn. Since the Necrons and the Imperial Guard start out closest to the territory containing this power, they seem to have an inherent advantage. However, part of the appeal of playing through this campaign multiple times is having to devise different strategies based on your faction's starting point and closest neighbors, not to mention your faction's inherent strengths. While the campaign map starts out the same way each time, the endgame can wind up varying a great deal depending on the choices you make along the way, especially since those enemies you choose to attack later will only be stronger by the time you get to them. Thankfully, any buildings you've constructed in a province will still be there for you if you later have to defend that province; these types of details help make Dark Crusade's strategic mode even further emphasize combat over base-building and resource management.    The best parts of the campaign are those battles in which you take on an opposing faction's stronghold. These set piece battles can be very tough even at the default difficulty setting, as you can expect heavy resistance just moments into the fight, followed by a bitter struggle against a cornered, deeply entrenched foe. The specializations and unique personalities of each of the different races are made readily apparent through these battles, and chances are you'll emerge from each one of them with newfound admiration for the opposing faction. By contrast, the standard missions in the campaign play out like skirmishes, which end abruptly when you destroy the enemy headquarters. Too bad you can never get into situations in which more than two factions are fighting over the same territory at the same time, though some of the stronghold missions do include enemies from more than one side.   In the campaign, you'll get to outfit your military's leader with unique war gear that you'll earn from vanquishing opponents.   As you win battles, you'll also earn unique war gear for your commander, which bolsters his strength and defenses or grants him new abilities. It's up to you to choose which war gear to take first, and while you won't win or lose whole battles based solely on this special equipment, it's a good addition to the game that makes you grow more attached to your increasingly powerful warlord. Incidentally, if your faction's leader falls in battle, you can predictably just build a new one in most cases, same as any other unit. It's a contrivance that encourages you to send your leader into battle rather than hide him in a corner of the map. Overall, the new campaign mode is well made and a big improvement on the linear campaigns offered by Dawn of War and its first expansion. It breathes new life into the single-player part of the game, thanks in part to a challenging computer opponent that effectively controls each faction and isn't easy to predict.    There's a lot to be said for the new strategic campaign, but the highlight of Dawn of War is probably the two new factions, the Tau Empire and the Necrons. One of the best-known Warhammer 40,000 species, the voracious Tyranids, are still nowhere to be found, but the relatively new Tau and Necron factions are each interesting and likable in their own right. The Necrons use a different resource model than all the other sides, in that they don't need requisition points to build new units--creating new warriors and upgrading abilities is only a matter of time, and the more strategic points you have, the less time you need to build up your army. Also, the Necrons' headquarters may slowly be upgraded to become an extremely powerful, though extremely slow, flying fortress. As for Necron units, they're slow, relentless, and hard to permanently destroy. Their vehicles aren't as imposing as some of the other races, but their lumbering infantry squads can overwhelm the opposition.    The forces of the Tau Empire seem like a cross between the Eldar and the Space Marines, with their sleek battle suits and long-range energy rifles, and the look of their units is reminiscent of anime mechs. The Tau demand you to use mixed forces more so than most of the other sides, because their troops tend to be highly specialized either for ranged combat or close combat, but not both. Once you've mustered some of the Tau's strongest weapons, it can be a real thrill to lay into the enemy with all their concentrated energy bursts. Notably, the Tau can also deploy invisible units that can safely attack while cloaked. It's something that's been done before in other RTS games, and Dark Crusade handles it about as well by making you be mindful of units or special abilities that can detect cloaked assailants. Meanwhile, returning factions in Dark Crusade each have some sort of powerful new unit and some means to detect invisible foes. The new units, like the Imperial Guard's heavy weapons teams and the Orks' flash gitz, seem powerful and useful.   It's hard to decide which of the game's seven factions is the strongest or the coolest, and that's a good thing.   As mentioned, if you don't have the original Dawn of War or the Winter Assault expansion, then you'll only be able to use the Tau and the Necrons in multiplayer matches, though you can still take on opponents playing as the other factions. Even just these two factions offer a lot of depth and intricacy, and they enhance the complexity of the game as a whole when you consider all the different match-ups possible, especially in team-based games. Though Dark Crusade doesn't use Company of Heroes' slick Relic Online service for multiplayer sessions, it's still easy enough to get into an online multiplayer match, and since there are so many different maps, factions, and victory conditions for battles, as well as an army-painter mode if you want to customize the look of your forces, there's an awful lot of lasting value in here.    Dawn of War was a fantastic real-time strategy game to begin with, but it takes an expansion pack like Dark Crusade to make the original game feel as fresh and interesting as ever two years later. It helps that the game's presentation has held up so well, between the spectacular graphics and all the thunderous weapon effects and lively unit voices, but it's all been built on a foundation of great underlying tactical gameplay. So if you like Dawn of War, best conserve your cognitive ability for the battlefield, because this one's a no-brainer. And even if you haven't played Dawn of War before, this is a great way to get into it, as well as the Warhammer 40,000 universe.  


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801,Fight Night 2004 ,8.8," Fight Night 2004 offers the most realistic control, gameplay, and graphics ever seen in a boxing game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/7/9/2211479-box_fn2004.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fight-night-2004-review/1900-6092967/,pos,"
 Over the years, the boxing genre has been trying to get more and more realistic, but most attempts to date have fallen flat in one category or another. Electronic Arts has made several good attempts with its Knockout Kings series, but even here some aspects of the games weren't as real as they could have been--and perhaps should have been. This year, EA Sports did to its boxing game what it did last year to its baseball games--it started over. The end result is Fight Night 2004, an all-new game with an all-new name. And much how MVP Baseball made improvements to EA's then-stagnant baseball series, Fight Night 2004 reinvigorates the boxing genre. It also offers the most realistic control, gameplay, and graphics that the genre has ever seen.  Fight Night 2004 is the most realistic boxing game to come out in years.  Fight Night 2004 comes in three different flavors: exhibition, career, and (exclusively on the PlayStation 2) online. Exhibition allows you to quickly pick a fighter to go up against a computer-controlled opponent or a second player. Career mode starts you out with a fighter at the beginning of his career. Therefore, he has no wins, no losses, and no talent. Your fighter's physical attributes in career mode are set to zero, whether he's a boxer you created by using the game's create-a-boxer utility or he's one of the licensed boxers included in the game. To get started, you're given a set amount of physical attribute points to distribute across eight categories, such as punching power and agility. As you might expect, each of the attribute categories directly corresponds to your boxer's performance in the ring. To increase your fighter's ability, you're given an opportunity before every bout to train your fighter.  The training sessions are represented by four different minigames that are based on actual boxing exercises, like punching hand mitts, working the heavy bag, punching a combo dummy, and sparring with a computer-controlled opponent. The minigames test your memory, timing, and reflexes, but more importantly, they teach you how to play the game. Doing well in the minigames earns you 15 attribute points, while doing poorly results in fewer attribute points. Whatever you earn can be applied to two specific performance categories. Since each training session is tied to two specific categories, the game forces you to become proficient at each one to build a fighter who has good ratings in each performance category. While forcing you to do anything doesn't necessarily sound like a good way to design a game, in this case, the repetition brought on by constantly training ensures that you're making the most of the opportunity. Furthermore, it teaches you how to play the game properly, thus making the actual boxing more enjoyable.  Aside from training and fighting, the career mode also includes other duties, like picking your next opponent, checking out the awards your fighter has earned, and purchasing goods, like new trunks. While picking your next opponent may sound like a trivial menu selection, there is a bit of strategy involved. First, you'll want to figure out who you have to choose from, which typically ranges from two to six fighters. Second, you'll want to check out their stats to see what they're ranked and how their attributes stack up against your fighter's attributes. Once you've scouted your options, the decision usually comes down to whether you're willing to risk a loss against a more skilled fighter for a shot at his higher rank versus whether or not you're willing to fight an easier opponent to build up your fighter's attribute points before trying to climb the ranks any further. Making the right choice when choosing an opponent can honestly mean the difference between a win and a loss.  The only real negative aspect of Fight Night 2004's career mode is that it forces you to retire at the age of 40, which is really quite anticlimactic. This, along with the fact that the training becomes a moot point once you've maxed out you're fighter's abilities, seems to be a bit of a waste, since it would have been interesting to see how long you could remain a contender with a fighter whose abilities faltered with time. While the career mode has some nice touches to it, the abrupt ending robs it of attaining the level of strategy that, say, a great franchise mode in a football game might have. Ultimately, it's only a little bit more than just a string of fights with a running total of your wins and losses.  On the PlayStation 2, you also have the ability to play online to box against others to see who the real world champion is. The game's online mode is straightforward and offers you the ability to choose from different divisions based on weight classes. The online play works well and gives the game the replay value you'd expect from a competitive online offering. It'll keep you busy long after you've grown bored of fighting the game's computer-controlled opponents.  The roster of 32 licensed boxers included in the game spans six weight divisions that range from featherweight to heavyweight. The impressive lineup of fighters mostly consists of recent champions, such as Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales, Felix Trinidad, Roy Jones Jr., Bernard Hopkins, Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield, and Arturo Gatti. While the majority of the licensed boxers included come from today's era, the game also features a handful of fighters from the past, such as legends Roberto Duran, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ray Robinson, Ray Leonard, and Rocky Marciano. While you'll notice some holes in the lineup--for instance, big names like Mike Tyson and George Foreman are nowhere to be found--Fight Night 2004 includes a very easy-to-use and in-depth create-a-fighter mode that can turn out very accurate creations for just about any boxer you could want to put in the game.  The career mode unceremoniously kicks you to the curb when you hit 40 years of age.  While the various modes and options are all well and good, boxing games live and die by their gameplay mechanics. In this respect, Fight Night 2004 has an entirely unique setup. If you want to throw a straight left jab, you press the right analog stick up and slightly to the left. If you want to throw a straight right, you push the right analog stick forward and just to the right. For hooks, you mimic the motion of your fighter's arms with the right analog stick, which is the equivalent of a quarter-circle rotation, left or right. You can also throw uppercuts by moving the right analog stick in a half-circle motion, starting from down to up in either direction for a left- or a right-handed punch. Depressing the right shoulder button (or right trigger) modifies the action on the right analog stick so that you can block or parry incoming punches, but you have to have your arms in the right position for this to be effective.  Meanwhile, the left analog stick handles moving your fighter around the ring, but it can be modified to control upper body movement by pressing the left shoulder button (or trigger). This setup allows you to naturally move around the ring. Moreover, you can bob and weave, and you can throw punches nearly as freely and as fast as real fighters do. Linking combos together is as simple as understanding what works in real boxing and executing these punches in quick succession. While a bit tricky to get used to at the start, once you get a feel for it, you'll wonder why it took so long for someone to make a boxing game that plays this way. Controller-wise, there's no real difference between the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game, so it all comes down to your own personal preference.  The movement speed of the fighters and the power of their punches have been accurately represented, which delivers great matches--especially since the system implemented for damage and stamina is very realistic. The more punches you throw, the more fatigued your fighter will become, which results in less-powerful punches. This naturally translates into more-realistic fights, since you'll only really want to throw punches when you have an opening. The game does include flash knockdowns (though they happen rarely), which send you to the canvas with one clean punch--no matter how much health your fighter has. These flash knockdowns don't typically upset the balance of the fight too much, but they do make you a bit more cautious and respectful of your opponent's power.  The graphical differences between the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game are quite minimal.  The artificial intelligence of the computer-controlled opponents in the game's normal difficulty setting is just right for newcomers, since it gives you enough of a challenge early on without being too punishing. As you progress through the game's career mode, your opponents naturally become more difficult to fight. Not only do they become faster, punch harder, and block more of your shots, but they actually use ring strategies, like cutting off the ring and moving away when hurt. The depth of the AI in Fight Night 2004 becomes more apparent once you fight your way past the first 40 generic pugilists in career mode to reach the top 10, licensed fighters in the division. You'll see that the fighters actually scrap similarly to the way they do in real life. Chris Byrd moves around the ring more than he throws punches, Felix Trinidad lobs jabs and left hooks from long range, and Muhammad Ali fights, well, like Muhammad Ali. But there is a limit to how good the AI will get, and after becoming completely comfortable with the controls, you'll realize that you just have more options available--like being able to bob out of the way of a punch and being able to come right back in with a straight punch--than the AI will ever use against you.  Fight Night 2004's graphics are pretty outstanding. The models for the fighters are by far the most realistic-looking models used in a boxing game to date. The high-resolution textures and face scans used give the models a lot of detail that you couldn't get otherwise. The work is a bit uneven in spots, though. While Roy Jones Jr. looks spot-on, Evander Holyfield doesn't look quite as photorealistic, for example. The size of the fighters' physical proportions, when compared to one another, is also very accurate. Just pick one of the little guys, like Erik Morales, and stick him in the ring with Lennox Lewis, and you'll see the dramatic differences in size, power, and speed. The animations for the fighters, as they move around the ring and throw punches, are extremely realistic. The knockdowns use a rag-doll physics system that gives the appearance of a fighter who totally loses control of his muscles, which is quite entertaining the first few times you see it. Even after you're well into you're career, you'll have to watch the replays of the good knockdowns (especially if you catch your opponent with a couple of extra punches before he goes down), since they are pretty dramatic-looking.  Whether you're taking damage or dishing it out, the faces of the fighters show the results with bruises, swelling, and cuts. In fact, if a fighter catches a good hard shot to the head while sporting an open cut, you'll see a stream of blood shoot through the air, which is a pretty cool little touch. The collision detection is almost perfect when it comes to the punches, which look as though they are actually connecting with your opponent, even when viewing an up close slow motion replay. You'll see the fighter's face contort, but more importantly, you'll feel the satisfaction and know the difference when you see your opponent's head snap back after you deliver a really good shot. The difference between the graphics of the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of Fight Night 2004 is minimal. The lighting and player models look a bit softer on the Xbox, but overall, both versions look almost indistinguishable.  BET's Big Tigger supplies the commentary for Fight Night 2004  As far as the audio is concerned, the soundtrack included with Fight Night 2004 features a mix of rap and hip-hop artists, including the likes of Puff Daddy, Federation, and David Banner, to name a few. You can create a custom soundtrack and freely pick the songs you want on or off depending on your tastes, but you'll have to unlock them to use during ring entrances. The announcing and ring introductions are handled by BET personality Big Tigger. The announcing is pretty entertaining and is funny at times, but after a few fights, you'll have heard most of what Big Tigger has to say. Some will undoubtedly find Big Tigger's hip-hop-styled delivery to be a bit annoying, but you do have the option to turn the announcing off. The sound effects are also dead-on and sound as authentic as if you were sitting ringside. The sounds of the punches vary depending on the speed and amount of contact they make. This gives you another positive response when landing punches.  In the end, Fight Night 2004 isn't without its flaws, but that doesn't stop it from being the most complete boxing game ever created. Everything the game offers--in terms of gameplay and presentation--all comes together to deliver one cohesive boxing experience that finally cracks the code and stands as a boxing simulation with the level of control and the fast-moving gameplay that makes it as fun to play as any arcade-styled boxing game before it. This is one title that just about every boxing fan should own, and it's one that even fighting game fans might enjoy, since it's deeply rooted in skill-based gameplay that tests your defensive and offensive abilities equally. 


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802,FIFA Soccer 2005 ,8.8," This is EA Sports' best soccer game to date on the pitch, but it's really unfortunate that the career mode isn't more user-friendly.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/2/9/2218129-box_fifa05.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-soccer-2005-review/1900-6110895/,pos,"
 In the world of soccer games there are really only two serious contenders for the championship title at this point: Konami's Winning Eleven games (Pro Evolution Soccer in Europe), and EA Sports' FIFA Soccer series. Like rival soccer teams eager to show off their newly acquired players at the start of a new season, these two series show up with a host of new features every 12 months in the hope that they'll finally score a convincing victory over the other. Traditionally, Konami's offerings have boasted more realistic gameplay, but have faltered in the areas concerned with presentation, specifically the lack of licensed team and player names. EA Sports' offerings, on the other hand, have generally felt a little more arcadelike than realistic, but the games have always looked extremely sharp and they let you take control of real teams comprised of real players wearing real uniforms. The line separating the two series has become increasingly blurred in recent years, and this year is no exception, as both games are still seemingly seeking to emulate the other's strengths. But to set aside the competition for a moment, FIFA Soccer 2005 is definitely the best FIFA game to date.  This year's biggest improvement is the introduction of first-touch controls.  Every year, EA Sports makes a point of improving one key aspect of its soccer games--FIFA Soccer 2004 focused on off-the-ball player movement, for example. FIFA Soccer 2005 retains all of the off-the-ball functionality from last year's game and adds convincing ball physics (the ball doesn't stick to players' feet anymore) and some excellent first-touch gameplay mechanics into the mix. The ability for you to determine how your players control the ball at the exact moment it reaches them might not sound like a big deal, but its ramifications are extraordinary: playing a realistic passing style of soccer is now more feasible and satisfying; skilled strikers can create scoring opportunities out of thin air by embarrassing their markers with a single touch; and the satisfaction you'll get from humiliating an opponent with just one tap of the right analog stick is almost akin to scoring a goal against them.   Like the on-the-ball skill moves that allow you to beat opponents when you're en route to their goalmouth with the ball in your possession, first-touch controls are all performed by tapping the right analog stick in the direction that you'd like your player to take the ball. The actual animation that transpires when the ball arrives at your players' feet (as well as whether or not the move succeeds) is determined by their position in relation to the ball and their skill level. Some players are able to flick a ball back over their head and turn defenders without even thinking about it or ever letting the ball move more than a few inches from their body, while others will struggle to perform even simple turns without letting the ball stray far enough away from them so that opponents have a shot at stealing it. Also, like the on-the-ball moves, EA Sports has got the balancing of the first-touch controls nigh perfect--they're effective enough that you'll want to use them all the time, but the odds of your fancy footwork failing you are also significant enough that you'll still have to work pretty hard to create scoring opportunities for your team. There will be occasions, of course, when you're able to run a single player through your opponent's entire midfield and defense en route to a spectacular goal, but these moments of individual genius are few and far between--just as they are in real life.  Passing the ball around is invariably the best way to play.  For the most part, the only way you'll be able to beat opponents of similar ability in FIFA Soccer 2005 is to pass the ball around and to successfully pick out players that are making good runs off the ball. If you've played FIFA Soccer 2004, you'll know that many of the best runs made by your players are going to be those that you trigger yourself. Sending other players on runs is as easy as tapping the left shoulder button while you're in possession of the ball, and the system is as effective at beating defenders as it is easy to employ. If you prefer to play an even more active role in the movement of your players, you can actually assume control of a second player using the right analog stick. It's not a system that we've ever really felt the need to use a great deal (and our online opponents have invariably had the same attitude), but it can certainly make it easier to pick out your strikers with crosses into the box--provided you can retain possession of the ball while you're using the right analog stick for your second player rather than using it to perform tricks and turns with your first. While we're on the subject of controlling additional players, it's also worth mentioning that the goalkeepers in FIFA Soccer 2005 are often very slow to come off their line, which, since you can make them charge at the ball manually, is definitely a good thing. There are few things more frustrating in a soccer game than conceding a goal because your overly active CPU keeper was on a walkabout.  The other surprisingly significant improvement made to FIFA's gameplay this year concerns throw-ins, which in many previous soccer titles, including FIFA 2004, have made it far more difficult for the team awarded the throw to retain possession of the ball. EA Sports has effectively resolved the problem by allowing you to use the same off-the-ball controls during throw-ins that you can when in open play. When you're awarded a throw, you'll be able to control any of three players and move them around however you see fit while your opponent attempts to mark you with three of his players. The system is different to the jostling mechanic that has you battling for position before corner kicks (there's still no way to play short corners, incidentally), but it feels quite similar, and it affords you the opportunity to come up with some creative ways of gaining an advantage from the set piece.    As you'll no doubt have gathered from reading the previous page, FIFA Soccer 2005 plays an enjoyable and realistic game of soccer. The game isn't without its problems, though, and what's disappointing is that many of them really shouldn't have been difficult to avoid. The advantage rule (which Konami did a great job of implementing in Winning Eleven 7 International and has subsequently improved), for example, does not exist in FIFA Soccer 2005. So, if one of your players is fouled after releasing a pass that puts one of your strikers clean through on goal, there's a good chance that the play will be stopped before you unleash your shot so that you can take a free kick. Playing against CPU teams can also be a baffling experience on occasion as, no matter which of the four difficulty settings you've opted for, your opponents will often appear to pass the ball around just for the hell of it. There's nothing wrong with keeping the ball moving, of course, but when your defense is all but beaten and the opposing striker knocks the ball back to one of his colleagues who is in a less favorable position rather than going one-on-one with the keeper, it just feels wrong.  The career mode is far less user-friendly than it could have been.  Perhaps the most disappointing feature of FIFA Soccer 2005 is its 15-season career mode. It's actually quite an engaging gameplay option, but every aspect of it has seemingly been designed with the impending arrival of Total Club Manager 2005 (which will feature ""Football Fusion"" compatibility with FIFA 2005, allowing you to enjoy the features of both games simultaneously) in mind. It's a terribly cynical thing to say, but the management aspect of the FIFA 2005's career mode is so cumbersome and unnecessarily time consuming that it's as much an advertisement for the upcoming management title as the billboards that appear in the game's stadiums. What are we basing this on? Here comes the list:  1. When you start a career in FIFA Soccer 2005 you'll only be able to take control of certain teams, most of which play in their countries' lower divisions, and some of which you'll almost certainly not even have heard of. It's not necessarily a bad thing that the game forces you to start your career at the bottom of the pile and work your way up, but if your dream is to one day manage a glamorous team like Manchester United or Arsenal, the only way you'll realize it in FIFA 2005 is to first string together some successful seasons with another team and then wait for a job offer. Will this be the case with Total Club Manager 2005? Perhaps, but we doubt it very much.  2. When you decide that you want to augment your team via the transfer market, FIFA Soccer 2005 makes it about as difficult as possible for you to search its player database. If you have a specific player in mind, then it's not too difficult to locate him provided he's still with the same team he plays for in real life. However, if you're simply interested in a type of player or one with certain abilities, then the only way for you to find that player is to check out the team rosters one at a time, click on player names, and then scroll through their attributes--none of which can be done quickly.  Searching for a player to sign is a chore rather than a pleasure.  3. If and when you manage to find a player that you're interested in adding to your squad, you'll notice a figure next to his name that represents his value in career points. You earn career points by stringing together wins, keeping clean sheets, scoring goals, and basically playing well. To make an offer, you'll hit the negotiate button, at which point you'll have no opportunity whatsoever to participate in any kind of negotiation, but you will instead be presented with a screen that tells you whether or not you've succeeded in signing the player as well as a short explanation for his decision. Should you be crazy enough to try and submit an offer for a player whose list price you can't quite afford--perhaps thinking that the negotiate button will deliver on its promise--you'll simply be told that you don't have enough points.  Despite its numerous and significant flaws, the career mode in FIFA Soccer 2005 is still where you're likely to spend most of your time when you're playing the game solo. There's something very satisfying about taking charge of a team that's languishing in the lower divisions and turning them into champions. There are also a few management features in the game that are far less painful than those listed above; well, there's one anyway. When you assume control of your team you'll be handed 100 management points to spend on backroom staff. The people working under you include: coaches specializing in fitness, goalkeeping, defensive play, midfield play, and attacking play; a finance department; scouts; and a medical staff. As you progress through the game you'll be awarded additional management points to spend and, as you spend them, you'll find that the benefits of having a good staff are actually quite significant. A good fitness coach, for example, will improve the recovery rates of your players in between matches, while good scouts will be able to give you additional information on any players that you're interested in signing. We should also mention that the career mode features an option that lets you simulate matches rather than play them, which gives you the opportunity to jump into the action if you feel it necessary to intervene at any point. The only reason we could imagine you wanting to make use of this, though, is if you were looking to get through your first season or two as quickly as possible in the hope that you will receive a job offer from your favorite club.   Depending on your opinion, the most significant addition to this year's FIFA might well be the online play supported by the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game. The online features of the two versions are basically identical, save for the fact that the PS2 game replaces the Xbox game's quickmatch and optimatch buttons with one labeled ""Play Now."" It's also worth noting that the PS2 game can be played using a regular dial-up connection, although you'll only be able to use a headset to talk to your opponents if you're playing with broadband.  The music on offer in FIFA 2005 is eclectic, to say the least.  The online options in FIFA Soccer 2005 include playing friendly matches or participating in tournaments with up to seven other players. The presentation of the menus and suchlike is adequate rather than impressive, and those of you with Xbox Live experience might wonder how it is that a company like Electronic Arts is able to take such an impressive online service and make it so mediocre. None of the menus are as quick to navigate as they should be, many of the options that you take for granted in other Xbox Live games are unavailable (such as checking your friends list to see who is online and what they're playing), and we invariably found that using the game's outdated lobby systems to check players' connection speeds was the only way to avoid matches that verged on being unplayable because the lag was so bad. EA will no doubt be working to rectify the game's connection problems (we were disconnected completely on more than one occasion). We're still looking forward to playing silky smooth games of FIFA Soccer 2005 online rather than being able to say that we've already had the pleasure.  Another thing that we've noticed about the online play in FIFA 2005 is that most players are so concerned with climbing the leaderboard that they're happy to drop their favorite team in favor of the likes of Brazil, France, Real Madrid, Arsenal, or Manchester United to improve their chances of winning. We know this, because your favorite teams are displayed when you challenge an opponent and on the subsequent team-select screen, and you can then watch your opponent scrolling through the game's numerous licensed leagues and teams. What those players don't realize perhaps, is that when you're awarded points after a match, the game's ranking system takes into account not only the previous rankings of the two players, but also their team choices. So, if you're able to beat Brazil using a little-known club, kudos won't be your only reward.  Whether playing online or offline, you'll be able to earn FIFA 2005 points for achieving certain milestones, such as winning a game by five or more goals, scoring a hat trick, or even just for accessing certain menu options. These points can be subsequently spent on unlocking additional content for the game, which is always a good thing. Although, on this occasion, the 80 bonus items up for grabs were less impressive than you might expect from an EA Sports title. The majority of the unlockable items are alternate third uniforms for major teams, while others include: official balls, training pitches, nighttime versions of stadiums, music tracks from INXS and New Order, and the famous Italian referee Pierluigi Collina.  Speaking of music, the game's soundtrack contains almost 40 different tracks from all over the world. The EA Trax selection in FIFA 2005 is about as eclectic as they come. You'll find artists such as The Streets, Scissor Sisters, and Morrissey playing alongside the likes of Debi Nova, Ivete Sangalo, and Los Amigos Invisibles. Predictably, with such a varied jukebox at your disposal, you'll most likely come across a few tracks that you want to switch off. The flip side, though, is that you'll inevitably like at least a handful of the tracks on offer. The English-language commentary in the game again comes courtesy of the BBC's John Motson and Ally McCoist who, for the most part, do an excellent job of talking about matches in an accurate and timely fashion. There are rare occasions, though, when they'll randomly spout something wildly inaccurate, such as ""That could've been 2-2,"" when a shot that would've leveled a game at 1-1 narrowly misses the target, or ""No, the ref has waved play on,"" as the referee stops play to award a penalty.   The game's visuals are, predictably, one of the areas in which all three console versions of FIFA Soccer 2005 differ. All three games feature instantly recognizable stadiums, team uniforms, and players (some of which boast strange-looking translucent hair), but the Xbox looks a lot smoother and is by far the most impressive. The GameCube version also looks more polished than the PS2 game, but we found some of the colors to be so bright that we had to break out the remote control for the TV to tone them down. All three games feature the same excellent player animations, but the stadiums are packed full of cardboard-cutout crowds.  This year's player animations are FIFA's most impressive to date.  Another area in which the three console versions of FIFA 2005 differ is the controls, though only as a result of their respective controllers. The PS2 version is the easiest of the three to get to grips with, thanks to its additional shoulder buttons, while the Xbox game requires you to use the uncomfortable black-and-white buttons for off-the-ball movement, in-game management, and fake shots--none of which are strictly necessary, but are all things you'll want to experiment with at some point. The GameCube controller doesn't really lend itself to FIFA in the same way that the others do, but if you don't know any different, then there's really nothing wrong with it.  So, as the final whistle approaches, how do we feel that FIFA Soccer 2005 has performed? Well, there's no doubt that this is EA Sports' best soccer game to date on the pitch, but it's really unfortunate that the career mode isn't more user-friendly. The game boasts the same level of detail as other EA Sports titles for the most part, but you might notice minor bugs and glitches as you spend time with the game. None of these little snags impact the gameplay or are really worthy of a mention here, but make the game seem a little rushed. Despite that, FIFA 2005 is a great game for fans of the sport.  



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803,Madden NFL 2005 ,8.8," Madden NFL 2005 is still Madden. That is to say, it's another superb game of football that continues Madden's long legacy as one of the best in the business.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/7/5/2210875-box_madden05.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2005-review/1900-6104308/,pos,"
 As the best-selling football franchise on the market for an umpteen number of years, Madden NFL is a name that is known by the masses as representative of some of the best football you can get on a video game console. Last year's Madden NFL 2004, in particular, is revered as one of the best installments EA has ever brought out--which ultimately makes it a tough act to follow. For this year's edition, Madden NFL 2005, defense is the name of the game. Nearly all of the additions and tweaks made to this year's game fall squarely into the realm of defensive football, and they're all great new features. The downside to this high emphasis on one particular area of the game seems to be that the remaining aspects of the game (of which there are many) are generally only slightly improved or altered, if at all. In many ways, Madden 2005 is just a bit too much like last year's Madden for comfort--but it's still a truly excellent game of football all around.  Madden NFL 2005 is finally here, and it absolutely does the Madden name proud.  If you've ever felt that Madden was simply a one-sided piece of pigskin in favor of offensive play, Madden 2005 changes all of that. The additions made to the defensive side of the ball are plentiful and all superb. The first and most entertaining addition is the new ""hit stick."" Essentially, when on defense, tapping the right control stick in the direction of your opponent will lay a nasty hit on him. What the hit stick translates into is context-sensitive tackling that you can control. If you're just running alongside your opponent and tap it without getting much of a head of steam, then you'll just kind of shove him. Get up a good bout of speed, and you will absolutely waylay the poor ball carrier. Using the hit stick properly will also result in more fumbles and dropped passes for the offense. However, you have to be careful, because missing with the stick leads to a supremely missed tackle, which consequently gives your opponent an easy way to dodge past you. While this sounds like it could be a little over-complicated if not done right, in this case it is done right. As a result, using the stick becomes an immensely fun way to play the defensive side of the ball.  Another big-time addition is the new defensive hot route system. Similar to the offensive hot routes, you can now redesign a defensive player's assignment at the touch of a button. Want to push a linebacker into deeper zone coverage or bring a safety in for the blitz? Simply highlight the player, and tap the right analog stick in the desired direction. You can also give better pre-snap assignments to your defensive backs now. Individual presses and pullbacks on receivers can be performed, and you can also lock a corner on to a specific receiver, thus preventing mismatches. Finally, you can now also adjust how a defensive lineman attacks the offensive line without actually having to shift your whole line. What all of this amounts to is a far more user-configurable defense that actually makes playing defense much more enjoyable and strategic. The strategy works beautifully, since the defensive artificial intelligence is generally very, very good, and it performs your changes perfectly. If you're adept at defensive playcalling and are able to make good reads, you should be able to dominate on defense--at least against the CPU.  On the flip side of things, Madden NFL 2005's offensive game isn't really all that different from Madden NFL 2004, save for a few, small changes. For one, you can now make formation shifts on the line. Formation shifts are essentially audibles that don't change the play. You can move your running back out of the backfield and into a better position for the reception, or you can overload one side of the field with receivers. You'll also notice some new option routes for receivers in this year's game. Option routes are typically highlighted on the playcalling screen and feature dotted lines coming off of a curl route, for example. These lines indicate possible directions that a receiver may run, depending on that receiver's assessment of the current coverage scheme. The intelligence of the receivers who are running these routes seems to vary depending on the quality of the player, but, as a whole, the feature seemed to work well.  However, aside from these few offensive changes, which ultimately don't amount to a whole lot more than nice, little touches, the offensive game feels almost exactly the same as last year's Madden. This isn't a bad thing, by any means, but what it does mean is that anyone who played last year's version of the game shouldn't have a lick of trouble simply blowing up the game offensively on the default difficulty. All-pro and All-Madden difficulties are something of another story, but in actuality, experienced Madden fans still shouldn't have a ton of trouble with either of them. Some of the old Madden money plays are still just as effective as ever, and there really isn't a whole lot of new ""stuff"" to get used to this time around. Granted, the AI defense has more tricks up its sleeve now, what with all the new defensive hot routes and shifts and such, so there is that to be taken into consideration.  The changes made to defense, which include the defensive hot routes and the new hit stick, are absolutely phenomenal.  On the features side of things, Madden NFL 2005 is as robust as it has ever been, though not all of the preexisting modes have seen too much in the way of changes. We'll start with the franchise mode, which has easily seen the most work. The big, new presentational change to the mode is the addition of sports radio host Tony Bruno. Billed as EA Sports Radio, the Bruno-hosted show actually plays at the start of each week, and by listening to the show, you'll hear interviews with players and coaches, hear Tony take calls from irate and occasionally idiotic fans, and hear little tidbits about things happening in the NFL. For example, we encountered one scenario where quarterback Mark Brunell was benched early on in the season in favor of Patrick Ramsey. Of course, Brunell was not pleased with the decision, which Tony was quick to report. The dialogue is occasionally a little jittery when Bruno discusses specific stuff related to your league scenarios, but the more generalized bits, like the phone calls, are pretty entertaining.  The Tony Bruno stuff is actually tied in to a larger franchise feature called storyline central. Storyline central is essentially your way of keeping track of media coverage of the NFL and the morale-based grumblings of your players. There's a newspaper feature where you can look at both the national and local papers to see what the big stories are. The local papers are actually licensed after real, big city papers. So, for example, if you're the New England Patriots, you'll be reading the Boston Globe. There is also a new e-mail system that lets you read e-mails from your staff, players, and agents. Players will usually thank you for opportunities or complain when things aren't going their ways. Agents will basically do the same.  Sports radio host Tony Bruno makes an appearance in this year's franchise mode.  Your players' morale is centered primarily around playing time versus rating, it seems. If you've got a good player who is riding the bench, he'll quickly become despondent. Doing things like shifting player positions around can also adversely affect morale if a player doesn't want to be moved from his current position. Furthermore, losses of big-star players will pretty much bring your entire team into a funk if you aren't able to find a suitable replacement. Some players also just seem to have a natural tendency to become problem children, such as the always entertaining Terrell Owens and the periodically whiny Ty Law. Player personalities also play into contract negotiations, because sometimes teams will have certain intangibles that simply appeal more to a certain player, like preferable weather or a level of prestige that is just that much more attractive. All told, the storyline features seem to fairly accurately represent the sort of media hoopla and personality-driven drama that surrounds the NFL year after year, and though not everything it has to offer is super-useful, it's very cool nonetheless.  The draft is another area that has been overhauled. You'll get offers for trades during the draft itself, and you'll be able to scout up to 15 different prospects during the combine, with varying degrees of scouting report quality depending on how much time you spend with each prospect. The one nice thing about the draft is that your players' morale will actually be affected based on who you draft. So if you've got a quarterback who isn't performing wonderfully as a starter, and you draft a top rated QB, his morale will go to the dumps.  Aside from these changes and the addition of a basic practice mode, there really isn't much else new in the franchise mode. Owner mode is back, and, aside from a few, little tweaks--like more graphs and adjustable options--it is largely the same feature it was last year. Trade and free-agent-signing logic throughout the CPU-controlled league is a little better, and player development seems to be about as accurate as it's ever been. All told, this year's franchise mode isn't a gigantic step forward, but it is excellent enough to provide you with hours of team management bliss.  Another mode addition to Madden NFL 2005 is actually sort of an offshoot of the minicamp mode. Essentially, EA Tiburon has added a pair of minigames, one of which is actually a score-based version of the running back minicamp game. This is a competition for one to two players where you will each have a turn at playing offense and defense. The goal on offense is to score as many rushing touchdowns as possible within a certain amount of time, while on defense, you must prevent touchdowns and try to lay down some big hits that force fumbles for bonus points. The team at the end with the most points wins. The other minigame is called two-minute drill. Here, you have two minutes on offense to score as many points as you can. Once that's done, the other team will conversely have two minutes of its own, and it's up to you to stop them on defense. You earn points offensively through big completions, runs, and scores, while on defense, you earn points by dishing out some big hits and by breaking up passes. While these games don't amount to much more than a simple distraction, they're pretty fun.  Player morale is something you'll have to monitor in your franchise, because too many troublemakers can lead to a team-wide plunge in motivation.  The last mode addition made to Madden NFL 2005 is an equally unnecessary, but still cool, little inclusion. This new feature is the create-a-fan mode, where you can create and design fans that will show up during in-game cutscenes. There is a fairly wide variety of options to choose from, so you can create fans that range from the mildly obsessive to the out and out crazy--like those lunatics who don Viking helmets and big, old Legion of Doom spiked shoulder pads. The one downside to the mode is that, aside from the cool design stuff, you can't really do anything else with your fans. They always pretty much just run through the same scant few cutscene animations each time, and you can't do anything to make them particularly stand out beyond their visual appearances. Still, if you're one of those people with a special place in the heart for the truly insane football fans who paint their bare chests the colors of a team and stand out in 20-below-zero weather to support it, this is a nice feature.  In terms of online features, Madden NFL 2005 marks the debut of Madden on Xbox Live. For anyone who has immediate concerns about the online issues found in last month's NCAA Football 2005, we're pleased to report that we ran into none of the same problems while playing Madden. In fact, both the PS2 and Xbox versions performed just fine under normal playing conditions, and we barely even ran into any lag. All stats and records seemed to track perfectly. As far as features go, most of the same stuff you'd expect from online football is front and center here. You can join EA's setup lobbies on both systems (or just do the quick match, optimatch thing on Xbox Live), and you can create and join various matches and tournaments. New to the online mode is the rushing attack minigame, which works just as it does offline, so your point scores make up the leaderboard statistics. You'll also be able to track your online career in your EA profile, which is a little like ESPN NFL 2K5's VIP profile system, except that you can't download other people's profiles.  The other addition to Madden's online component is one that came, quite literally, at the 11th hour. Madden NFL 2005 will support league play. These leagues are tied in to a new Premium Pass service EA is touting, of which members of said service can also take part in specialized tournaments, exclusive leaderboards, and message boards. Additionally, members can actually gain special medals. While Madden's leagues won't have the live rosters that are present in ESPN's football offering for this year, you'll still be able to use up to 32 teams in a league, and you can design your own teams and playoff schedules. Of course, none of this is up and running yet, but if all goes according to plan, it should make an already enjoyable online system a whole lot better.  Madden NFL 2005 is online for both the PS2 and Xbox, and league play will be included on both.  While that's pretty much it for the Xbox and GameCube versions of Madden--as far as features go--the PlayStation 2 version does have a little something extra; that is, it does if you happen to pick up the special Collector's Edition of the game. The PS2-exclusive Collector's Edition of Madden 2005 boasts a number of additional features, including three classic Madden games, a trivia challenge mode, and a few bonus video features. The three classic games consist of a pair of PlayStation-era titles (from different ends of the console's life span) and one 16-bit-era game. We don't identify these games specifically, because the game itself doesn't identify them by name. Rather, they're opaquely titled Madden Vintage, Madden Retro, and Madden Classic, respectively. Each of the games has up-to-date rosters, and the PlayStation games even include the modern commentary.  While the addition of the classic games and the trivia mode are nice and all, they aren't so remarkable that you'll simply have to run out to get the Collector's Edition or anything. The classic games are the sort of thing that you're likely to pick up and play once or twice, enjoy for exactly that amount of time, and then never touch again. The same goes for the trivia, because, while there are more than plenty of different questions, it is, after all, just trivia. None of the video stuff is especially engaging, and unless you're an absolutely diehard Madden enthusiast, you really won't want to watch it. In fact, that last statement really sums up the whole Collector's Edition: If you're a diehard Madden fan, you'll like it. If you aren't, you don't need it.  Graphically, Madden NFL 2005 looks pretty much like, well, Madden. The Madden series hasn't really made any significant leaps forward in visual design in recent years, and 2005 isn't much different. Yes, things are improved. Some of the new tackling animations are especially awesome and give you a pretty incredible sensation of how hard the hit is actually being delivered. Other animations, however, don't really look all that different from last year's game. In fact, a few animation glitches do rear their ugly heads from time to time, such as when some rather nasty clipping presents itself during between-play cutscenes and when runners occasionally get hung up on offensive linemen when trying to hit holes, thus causing themselves to vibrate a bit. The player models have basically the same sort of generic look that they've always had. Little details, like player jerseys and body builds, have been improved quite a bit, but the faces all sort of have the same glassy-eyed look. Some of the more marquee players definitely look like their real-life counterparts, facially, but a lot of other players could have stood for a bit more detail in this area. On a more positive note, the different arenas, playing fields, and such all look fantastic. Each arena is spectacularly detailed, from the many ads and banners that line the walls, right down to the turf or grass.  Madden NFL 2005 also delivers a presentational improvement over last year's game. Everything, in terms of menus and stat screens and so on, all looks great and is extremely easy to navigate. The in-game stuff isn't quite as impressive, because the replays aren't typically all that exciting. Furthermore, there isn't much to the various cutscenes that present themselves from time to time, save for a bit of cheering and gallivanting here and there. The commentary is still a weak spot for the series, because neither John Madden nor Al Michaels is especially enjoyable to listen to. All around, their dialogue is pretty wooden and repetitive. As mentioned before, the Tony Bruno stuff is quite cool, though it isn't quite up to the level of ESPN NFL 2K5's TV-styled presentation. It still holds its own, though.  The remaining portions of Madden NFL 2005's audio are similarly unspectacular. Most of the in-game sound effects are quite solid, though if you were to listen to Madden NFL 2004 and Madden NFL 2005 side by side, it's unlikely you'd take note of any major differences between the two. Once again, EA has trotted out a number of licensed artists as part of its EA Trax service, which includes the likes of Green Day, Franz Ferdinand, Midtown, The Hives, and Faith No More. While the songs themselves are all perfectly fine, they don't always feel quite right within the scope of a football game.  The graphical differences between this year's Madden and last year's are pretty subtle--and there aren't a whole lot of them.  Between the three console versions of Madden NFL 2005, this year's iteration manages to bridge the gap a bit more between the PS2 and Xbox versions, and, subsequently, it also manages to leave the GameCube version a little more out in the cold. Control-wise, the PS2 and Xbox versions are probably the most natural feeling. While the GameCube controller might feel a little strange to anyone who doesn't typically play sports games on the Cube, if you are used to playing sports games on the Cube, you shouldn't have any problem with it. Graphically, the three versions are pretty predictable in that the GameCube version looks a tad better than the PS2 version, and the Xbox version looks a bit better than the GameCube version. With the addition of online play in the Xbox version of the game--coupled with the slightly better graphics than its console counterparts--the Xbox offering is definitely the one to get, unless you're really jonesing for the features included in the PS2 Collector's Edition, in which case you'll need to go with the PS2 version of the game.  When all is said and done, Madden NFL 2005 is still Madden. That is to say, it's another superb game of football that continues Madden's long legacy as one of the best in the business. The defensive changes made to the gameplay are likely going to set the standard for football games in the years to come, and the additions to the franchise mode easily make the mode the best of its kind. It's unfortunate that the other portions of Madden NFL 2005 aren't quite as improved over last year's installment in the series as these key areas are, but that small quibble shouldn't stop any Madden fan from running out to purchase yet another highly accomplished game of football in Madden NFL 2005. 



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804,Madden NFL 2005 ,8.8, Madden 2005 is just a bit too much like last year's Madden for comfort--but it's still a truly excellent game of football all around.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/7/5/2210875-box_madden05.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2005-review/1900-6108311/,pos,"
 As the best-selling football franchise on the market for an umpteen number of years, Madden NFL is a name that is known by the masses as representative of some of the best football you can get on a video game console. Last year's Madden NFL 2004, in particular, is revered as one of the best installments EA has ever brought out--which ultimately makes it a tough act to follow. For this year's edition, Madden NFL 2005, defense is the name of the game. Nearly all the additions and tweaks made to this year's game fall squarely into the realm of defensive football, and they're all great new features. The downside to this high emphasis on one particular area of the game seems to be that the remaining aspects of the game (of which there are many) are generally only slightly improved or altered, if at all. In many ways, Madden 2005 is just a bit too much like last year's Madden for comfort--but it's still a truly excellent game of football all around.  Madden NFL 2005 has finally arrived for the PC, and it definitely does the Madden name proud.  If you've ever felt that Madden was simply a one-sided piece of pigskin in favor of offensive play, Madden 2005 changes all that. The additions made to the defensive side of the ball are plentiful and all superb. The first and most entertaining addition is the new ""hit stick."" This feature, like the addition of playmaker control last year, will require PC owners to own a good dual-analog gamepad. Essentially, when on defense, tapping the right control stick in the direction of your opponent will lay a nasty hit on him. What the hit stick translates into is context-sensitive tackling that you can control. If you're just running alongside your opponent and tap it without getting much of a head of steam, then you'll just kind of shove him. Get up a good bout of speed, and you will absolutely waylay the poor ball carrier. Using the hit stick properly will also result in more fumbles and dropped passes for the offense. However, you have to be careful, because missing with the stick leads to a badly missed tackle, which consequently gives your opponent an easy way to dodge past you. While this sounds like it could be a little overcomplicated if not done right, in this case it is done right. As a result, using the stick becomes an immensely fun way to play the defensive side of the ball.  Another big-time addition is the new defensive hot route system. Similar to the offensive hot routes, you can now redesign a defensive player's assignment at the touch of a button. Want to push a linebacker into deeper zone coverage or bring a safety in for the blitz? Simply highlight the player and tap the right analog stick in the desired direction. You can also give better presnap assignments to your defensive backs now. Individual presses and pullbacks on receivers can be performed, and you can also lock a corner on to a specific receiver, thus preventing mismatches. Finally, you can now also adjust how a defensive lineman attacks the offensive line without actually having to shift your whole line. What all this amounts to is a far more user-configurable defense that actually makes playing defense much more enjoyable and strategic. The strategy works beautifully, since the defensive artificial intelligence is generally very, very good, and it performs your changes perfectly. If you're adept at defensive play calling and are able to make good reads, you should be able to dominate on defense--at least against the CPU.  On the flip side of things, Madden NFL 2005's offensive game isn't really all that different from Madden NFL 2004, save for a few, small changes. For one, you can now make formation shifts on the line. Formation shifts are essentially audibles that don't change the play. You can move your running back out of the backfield and into a better position for the reception, or you can overload one side of the field with receivers. You'll also notice some new option routes for receivers in this year's game. Option routes are typically highlighted on the play calling screen and feature dotted lines coming off a curl route, for example. These lines indicate the possible directions that a receiver may run, depending on that receiver's assessment of the current coverage scheme. The intelligence of the receivers who are running these routes seems to vary depending on the quality of the player, but, as a whole, the feature seems to work well.  However, aside from these few offensive changes, which ultimately don't amount to a whole lot more than nice, little touches, the offensive game feels almost exactly the same as it does in last year's Madden. This isn't a bad thing, by any means, but what it does mean is that anyone who played last year's version of the game shouldn't have a lick of trouble simply blowing up the game offensively on the default difficulty. All-pro and All-Madden difficulties are something of another story, but experienced Madden fans still shouldn't have a ton of trouble with either of them. Some of the old Madden money plays are still just as effective as ever, and there really isn't a whole lot of new ""stuff"" to get used to this time around. Granted, the AI defense has more tricks up its sleeve now, what with all the new defensive hot routes and shifts and such, so there is that to be taken into consideration.  The changes made to the defense, including the new defensive hot routes and the hit stick, are absolutely phenomenal.  On the features side of things, Madden NFL 2005 is as robust as it has ever been, though not all the preexisting modes have seen too much in the way of changes. We'll start with the franchise mode, which has seen the most work. The big change to the mode's presentation is the addition of sports radio host Tony Bruno. Billed as EA Sports Radio, the Bruno-hosted show actually plays at the start of each week, and by listening to the show, you'll hear interviews with players and coaches, hear Tony take calls from irate and occasionally idiotic fans, and hear little tidbits about things happening in the NFL. For example, we encountered one scenario where quarterback Mark Brunell was benched early on in the season in favor of Patrick Ramsey. Of course, Brunell was not pleased with the decision, which Tony was quick to report. The dialogue is occasionally a little jittery when Bruno discusses specific stuff related to your league scenarios, but the more generalized bits, like the phone calls, are pretty entertaining.   The Tony Bruno stuff is actually tied into a larger franchise feature called storyline central. Storyline central is essentially your way of keeping track of the media coverage of the NFL and the morale-based grumblings of your players. There's a newspaper feature where you can look at both the national and local papers to see what the big stories are. The local papers actually feature the licenses of real big-city papers. So, for example, if you're the New England Patriots, you'll be reading The Boston Globe. There is also a new e-mail system that lets you read e-mails from your staff, players, and agents. Players will usually thank you for opportunities or complain when things aren't going their way. Agents will basically do the same.  Sports radio host Tony Bruno makes an appearance in this year's franchise mode.  Your players' morale revolves primarily around playing time versus rating, it seems. If you have a good player who is riding the bench, he'll quickly become despondent. Doing things like shifting player positions around can also adversely affect morale if a player doesn't want to be moved from his current position. Furthermore, losses of big-star players will pretty much send your entire team into a funk if you aren't able to find a suitable replacement. Some players also just seem to have a natural tendency to become problem children, such as the always entertaining Terrell Owens and the periodically whiny Ty Law. Player personalities also play into contract negotiations, because sometimes teams will have certain intangibles that simply appeal more to a certain player, like preferable weather or greater prestige as a franchise. All told, the storyline features seem to fairly accurately represent the sort of media hoopla and personality-driven drama that surrounds the NFL year after year, and though not everything it has to offer is especially useful, it's very cool nonetheless.  The draft is another area that has been overhauled. You'll get offers for trades during the draft itself, and you'll be able to scout up to 15 different prospects during the combine, with varying degrees of scouting-report quality depending on how much time you spend with each prospect. The one nice thing about the draft is that your players' morale will actually be affected based on who you draft. So if you have a quarterback who isn't performing wonderfully as a starter, and you draft a top-rated QB, the incumbent's morale will be negatively affected.  Aside from these changes and the addition of a basic practice mode, there really isn't much else new in the franchise mode. Owner mode is back, and, aside from a few little tweaks--like more graphs and adjustable options--it is largely the same feature it was last year. The trade and free-agent-signing logic throughout the CPU-controlled league is a little better, and player development is about as accurate as it's ever been. On the PC, the franchise mode does feature a completely different interface when compared with the console versions, giving you a much more point-and-click-friendly interface, and much more statistical information on your players. All told, this year's franchise mode isn't a gigantic step forward, but it is excellent enough to provide you with hours of team management bliss.  Another mode addition to Madden NFL 2005 is actually sort of an offshoot of the minicamp mode. Essentially, EA Tiburon has added a pair of minigames, one of which is actually a score-based version of the running-back minicamp game. This is a competition for one to two players where you will each have a turn at playing offense and defense. The goal on offense is to score as many rushing touchdowns as possible within a certain amount of time, while on defense, you must prevent touchdowns and try to lay down some big hits that force fumbles for bonus points. The team with the most points at the end wins. The other minigame is called two-minute drill. Here, you have two minutes on offense to score as many points as you can. Once that's done, the other team will conversely have two minutes of its own, and it's up to you to stop them on defense. You earn points offensively through big completions, runs, and scores, while on defense, you earn points by dishing out some big hits and breaking up passes. While these games don't amount to much more than a simple distraction, they're pretty fun.   Player morale is something you'll have to monitor in your franchise, because too many troublemakers can lead to a team-wide plunge in motivation.  The last mode addition made to Madden NFL 2005 is an equally unnecessary, but still cool, little inclusion. This new feature is the create-a-fan mode, where you can create and design fans who will show up during in-game cutscenes. There is a fairly wide variety of options to choose from, so you can create fans who range from the mildly obsessive to the out-and-out crazy--like those lunatics who don Viking helmets and big, old Legion of Doom spiked shoulder pads. The one downside to the mode is that, aside from the cool design stuff, you can't really do anything else with your fans. They always pretty much just run through the same few cutscene animations each time, and you can't do anything to make them particularly stand out beyond their visual appearances. Still, if you're one of those people with a special place in your heart for the truly insane football fans who paint their bare chests the colors of a team and stand out in 20-below-zero weather to support it, this is a nice feature.  In terms of online features, the PC version of Madden NFL 2005 is set up a lot like last year's PC iteration. Leagues and clubs are once again available for registered users, as are online versions of the minicamp drills (which are played against the CPU, but ranked online), two-minute drill, and the standard head-to-head play. The interface is reasonably intuitive, letting you move between various lobbies to find players. Playing the game on a standard consumer-grade cable connection worked just fine, with only minimal lag. However, we ran into a couple of ""sync errors"" while playing against other users, resulting in a loss for us once we returned to the game lobby. A little investigation into various Madden 2005 online forums dug up a tidbit that attributed this phenomenon to a cheat being used by our opponents, which we were able to verify by testing the reported steps to cause this error. The good news is that the games we played through to completion worked fine, but it seems as though there are still at least a couple of online cheating issues--which can hopefully be addressed.  Once again, the PC version of Madden features a deeper roster of online features than its console brethren.  Graphically, Madden NFL 2005 looks pretty much like, well, Madden. The Madden series hasn't really made any significant leaps forward in visual design in recent years, and 2005 isn't much different. Yes, things are improved. Some of the new tackling animations are especially awesome and give you a pretty incredible sensation of how hard the hit is actually being delivered. Other animations, however, don't really look all that different. In fact, a few animation glitches do rear their ugly heads from time to time, such as when some rather nasty clipping presents itself during between-play cutscenes and when runners occasionally get hung up on offensive linemen when trying to hit holes. The player models have basically the same sort of generic look that they've always had. Little details, like player jerseys and body builds, have been improved quite a bit, but the faces all have the same sort of glassy-eyed look. The faces of some of the more prominent players definitely look like their real-life counterparts, but the other players could have stood for a bit more detail in this area. The player models actually look even worse on the PC, as the high-resolution display of a high-end PC just makes their flaws stick out a lot more. The models are generally very blocky, and the faces look stranger than they do in the console versions of the game. On a more positive note, the different arenas, playing fields, and such all look really great, though a couple of little things, such as the sky textures, look a little low in resolution when inspected closely.   Madden NFL 2005 delivers an improvement on the presentation of last year's game. The menus, stat screens, and so on all look great and are extremely easy to navigate. The in-game stuff isn't quite as impressive, because the replays aren't typically all that exciting. Furthermore, there isn't much to the various cutscenes that present themselves from time to time, save for a bit of cheering and gallivanting here and there. The commentary is still a weak spot for the series, because neither John Madden nor Al Michaels is especially enjoyable to listen to. All around, their dialogue is pretty wooden and repetitive. As mentioned before, the Tony Bruno stuff is quite cool, though it isn't quite up to the level of ESPN NFL 2K5's TV-style presentation. It still holds its own, though.  Graphically, Madden on the PC seems a little uglier up close than it does on consoles.  The remaining portions of Madden NFL 2005's audio are similarly unspectacular. Most of the in-game sound effects are quite solid, though if you were to listen to Madden NFL 2004 and Madden NFL 2005 side by side, it's unlikely you'd notice any major differences between the two. Once again, EA has trotted out a number of licensed artists as part of its EA Trax service, including the likes of Green Day, Franz Ferdinand, Midtown, The Hives, and Faith No More. While the songs themselves are all perfectly fine, they don't always feel quite right within the scope of a football game.  If you passed out on the console versions of Madden NFL 2005, or have specifically been holding out for the PC version, it's unlikely that you'll be disappointed by what this version of Madden has to offer. The roster of online features is still more robust than what's available on consoles, and all the excellent gameplay and features have been translated wonderfully to the PC. It's a shame that the graphics haven't really seen much improvement, and the online cheating issues are certainly a problem, but on the whole, these quibbles shouldn't stop any Madden fan from running out to purchase yet another highly accomplished game of football in Madden NFL 2005. 
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805,Mercenaries ,8.8, Mercenaries is dense with explosive content that satisfies on a fundamental level.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/7/3/7/20330-58737.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mercenaries-review/1900-6116247/,pos,"
 The near future, it seems, is a great place to have a pretend war these days. Mercenaries marks the second imaginary modern military conflict that Pandemic Studios has cooked up over the past six months, though Mercenaries is a much more action-oriented, hands-on experience than last year's Full Spectrum Warrior. It's also a much better game overall, partially because its rather grim premise comes along with a nod and a wink, and also because it provides fiery, visceral thrills at a breakneck pace.  The North Korean government cannot be happy about this game.  Mercenaries looks an awful lot like a Grand Theft Auto knockoff at first blush. While it does share some elements with Rockstar's free-form criminal action series--such as the third-person perspective, the ability to hop in and out of any vehicle you see, and an irrepressible enthusiasm for explosive chaos--Mercenaries is much more linear and mission-based, though it's up to you to decide which missions to accept. Your abilities don't stray too far from the norm for a third-person action game, and the basic controls all feel pretty familiar and responsive. You'll be driving (or flying) a bevy of vehicles over the course of the game, and though there is a world of difference between how a light jeep and a heavy APC handle, most of the ground-based vehicles feel a little too floaty. The trade-off here is that the exaggerated physics that account for the odd handling of the vehicles also make the game's many, many explosions much more thrilling. The contents of the missions are pretty standard, requiring you to fend off enemy forces from tactically important locations, steal or destroy enemy equipment, assassinate enemy officers, level enemy structures, and the like. But the immersive nature of the game's world keeps things interesting, and around the time you find yourself getting comfortable with the game, it'll start cranking up the challenge, bombarding you with enemies and introducing multiple-part missions.   The game takes place in a ripped-from-the-headlines version of North Korea. After North Korean president Kim begins to see the upside of democracy, he's quickly assassinated by his son, General Song, in a coup. General Song then gets busy starting up a bevy of WMD programs and dealing the weapons they produce to terrorists. As soon as this comes to the attention of the rest of the world, North Korea quickly finds itself infested with Allied Nations forces looking to dismantle Song's dictatorship, Chinese forces looking to incorporate the war-torn country into the People's Republic, South Korean forces (under the unofficial guiding hand of the CIA) looking to reunite the halves of the fractured Korean Peninsula, and Russian Mafia forces just interested in getting paid.   You play as one of three mercenaries working for a company called Executive Operations, each of whom has a specialty--the lithe British agent prefers covert ops, the lone-wolf American can sustain more physical damage than the others, and the crazy, gruff Swede has a propensity for using excessive force. These differences can impact the action in a minor way, but a more interesting difference is found in the various languages they are able to speak, as this can affect whose conversations they're able to understand, and what you know can be a big factor in deciding how you'll align yourself with the different factions.   Though you're given the basic ethical guideline of not murdering civilians (it's bad for company PR), you're free to play the field however you see fit, doing jobs for the different factions--sometimes against North Korean forces, sometimes against another faction, and often a little bit of both. Your primary objective is to collect the bounty on General Song, though you'll need to work your way up through the ""Deck of 52,"" a series of North Korean officials, military officers, and businessmen that the Allied Nations forces have assigned playing-card designations to, to get to him. It's amazing how close the game scrapes to reality without actually breaking through, and its use of a slightly fictionalized North Korea as a setting can be a little unsettling at times. But despite the game's commitment to a quasirealistic scenario, the action is fast and loose.  The GTA comparisons are unavoidable, but Mercenaries has a pretty original pastiche of influences.   One of the more unique and interesting aspects of Mercenaries is the nature of your interactions with the different factions. Though you'll often be acting against North Korean forces, which are always hostile toward you, there are missions where you'll have to attack one of the four factions you've been working for. Your working relationship with each faction is represented by a ""mood"" meter that ranges from friendly to hostile, and a hostile faction won't be as interested in offering you assignments as it will be in riddling your body with shrapnel. Who you choose to keep happy will not only affect how you gather your intel on the Deck of 52, but it will also determine which missions will even be presented to you. Luckily, Mercenaries exists in a world of moral flexibility and short memories, and you can always put yourself back into the good graces of a faction that's upset with you with a healthy bribe. There's extra incentive in keeping the Russians happy, since they run the Merchant of Menace Web site from which you can purchase equipment and vehicles and have them air-dropped to you in the field, as well as heavy weapons support from artillery and bombers and the like. If they're mad at you, they'll cut off access. With three different characters to play as, four different factions to piss off, and 52 bounties to capture (many of which are optional), there's a great amount of replay value to be found here, though playing through the game once is a good 20-hour experience in and of itself.  Mercenaries is, generally, pretty forgiving in nature. The auto-aim function allows for a pretty wide margin of error, and you'll often find a convenient crate full of health and ammo when you need it the most. The AI in the game, both friendly and hostile, isn't incredibly cunning, but it's aggressive, and it's smart enough to run away from live grenades and to man nearby vehicles rather than stay on foot. Neither side is an incredible shot with a rifle, but it doesn't really need to be when it's coming at you with a rocket-propelled grenade or a heavily armored tank. When Mercenaries wants to present you with a challenge--and it will--it will simply throw an overwhelming number of enemies at you from a well-fortified position.  Only by taking jobs with multiple factions will you collect the intel you need to capture or kill the Deck of 52.  Though collecting bounties and gathering intel from the various factions are your primary objectives, there are plenty of side jobs you can take at will, and these range from simple checkpoint races to escorting a news reporter to an especially intense firefight. There are also standing offers that can help you curry favor with different factions. For example, the Chinese don't like the ""listening posts"" that the South Koreans have planted all over the place, and will reward you for destroying these surveillance devices. The South Koreans themselves don't much care for the presence of the large, aggrandizing statues of General Song that punctuate the landscape, and are made happier when you blow them up. The pacing of Mercenaries is relentless, and this is largely due to the incredible volume and variety of tasks you can take on.  Mercenaries puts a lot of stock in smoke, fire, and explosive effects, and these elements tend to dominate the screen for most of the game, which is great, because they're executed with incredible aptitude. The sky is almost constantly choked with a smoky haze, and the landscape is fundamental in giving you a sense of this war-torn country, but the game avoids becoming monotonous by providing subtle variations on this theme in different regions of the map. Part of what makes Mercenaries so engaging is the seamlessness of the landscape, and the fact that the game keeps load times to an absolute minimum--basically, the only times you'll see loading screens are before and after assignments, and when you die. But it doesn't sacrifice the quality of the graphics for scope, and all the characters and vehicles have a good look to them that, like the story, aims just to the more dramatic side of realism. There are some awkward pieces, such as the canned animations for when you subdue an enemy and your silly-looking jump animation. They're distractions, but they're usually overwhelmed by the game's grossly over-the-top action.  The visual quality of the game, along with the load times, account for the only significant differences between the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions of Mercenaries. The game pushes the PlayStation 2 hardware pretty hard, and it gets a lot out of Sony's aging platform in the process, but the Xbox simply handles the load better. We noticed shorter load times, a better draw distance (though this is really apparent only when you're in a chopper), cleaner textures, a higher, more stable frame rate, nicer special effects, and slightly better animation. Not to marginalize the PlayStation 2 version, which is still a ton of fun and completely playable, but those with the ability should unquestionably go for the Xbox version.   Outrageous physics plus convincing smoke and fire effects make for some spectacular explosions.  There's virtually no difference in the quality of the sound in the two versions of Mercenaries, which is good. The voice cast of Mercenaries is the backbone of the game's sound design, delivering solid, believable performances that fit snugly into the characters. The best performances, though, come from Peter Stormare (the wood-chipper guy from Fargo and nihilist from The Big Lebowski), who plays the gravelly-voiced Swedish agent to a T, and from Carl Weathers (aka Apollo Creed and Action Jackson), who was born to play the part of the tough-as-nails Army commander that he voices here. The game is good about creating atmosphere with ambient sound, though when it really wants to get your blood up it'll kick in with a powerful, urgent orchestral score, a haunting choir of voices, or the driving sounds of big Asian drums. The quality of the sound isn't this great across the board, though. Some of the weapon reports feel a little flat, many of the engine effects don't sound as throaty as they ought to, and tires will often squeal even when you're rolling across dirt roads.  Mercenaries is dense with explosive content that satisfies on a fundamental level. Of the games that have tried to borrow the Grand Theft Auto style of play, Mercenaries is one of the most successful. This is partially because Pandemic clearly understands the importance of peripheral action to creating a cohesive, believable world, but also because it infuses the structure with its own style, and in the process turns it into something of its own. This is the most accomplished game that Pandemic has created yet, and it's an engaging experience that should appeal to action fans looking for a good, messy thrill. 


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806,Mercenaries ,8.8, Mercenaries is dense with explosive content that satisfies on a fundamental level.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/7/3/7/20330-58737.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mercenaries-review/1900-6116252/,pos,"
 The near future, it seems, is a great place to have a pretend war these days. Mercenaries marks the second imaginary modern military conflict that Pandemic Studios has cooked up over the past six months, though Mercenaries is a much more action-oriented, hands-on experience than last year's Full Spectrum Warrior. It's also a much better game overall, partially because its rather grim premise comes along with a nod and a wink, and also because it provides fiery, visceral thrills at a breakneck pace.  The North Korean government cannot be happy about this game.  Mercenaries looks an awful lot like a Grand Theft Auto knockoff at first blush. While it does share some elements with Rockstar's free-form criminal action series--such as the third-person perspective, the ability to hop in and out of any vehicle you see, and an irrepressible enthusiasm for explosive chaos--Mercenaries is much more linear and mission-based, though it's up to you to decide which missions to accept. Your abilities don't stray too far from the norm for a third-person action game, and the basic controls all feel pretty familiar and responsive. You'll be driving (or flying) a bevy of vehicles over the course of the game, and though there is a world of difference between how a light jeep and a heavy APC handle, most of the ground-based vehicles feel a little too floaty. The trade-off here is that the exaggerated physics that account for the odd handling of the vehicles also make the game's many, many explosions much more thrilling. The contents of the missions are pretty standard, requiring you to fend off enemy forces from tactically important locations, steal or destroy enemy equipment, assassinate enemy officers, level enemy structures, and the like. But the immersive nature of the game's world keeps things interesting, and around the time you find yourself getting comfortable with the game, it'll start cranking up the challenge, bombarding you with enemies and introducing multiple-part missions.   The game takes place in a ripped-from-the-headlines version of North Korea. After North Korean president Kim begins to see the upside of democracy, he's quickly assassinated by his son, General Song, in a coup. General Song then gets busy starting up a bevy of WMD programs and dealing the weapons they produce to terrorists. As soon as this comes to the attention of the rest of the world, North Korea quickly finds itself infested with Allied Nations forces looking to dismantle Song's dictatorship, Chinese forces looking to incorporate the war-torn country into the People's Republic, South Korean forces (under the unofficial guiding hand of the CIA) looking to reunite the halves of the fractured Korean Peninsula, and Russian Mafia forces just interested in getting paid.   You play as one of three mercenaries working for a company called Executive Operations, each of whom has a specialty--the lithe British agent prefers covert ops, the lone-wolf American can sustain more physical damage than the others, and the crazy, gruff Swede has a propensity for using excessive force. These differences can impact the action in a minor way, but a more interesting difference is found in the various languages they are able to speak, as this can affect whose conversations they're able to understand, and what you know can be a big factor in deciding how you'll align yourself with the different factions.   Though you're given the basic ethical guideline of not murdering civilians (it's bad for company PR), you're free to play the field however you see fit, doing jobs for the different factions--sometimes against North Korean forces, sometimes against another faction, and often a little bit of both. Your primary objective is to collect the bounty on General Song, though you'll need to work your way up through the ""Deck of 52,"" a series of North Korean officials, military officers, and businessmen that the Allied Nations forces have assigned playing-card designations to, to get to him. It's amazing how close the game scrapes to reality without actually breaking through, and its use of a slightly fictionalized North Korea as a setting can be a little unsettling at times. But despite the game's commitment to a quasirealistic scenario, the action is fast and loose.  The GTA comparisons are unavoidable, but Mercenaries has a pretty original pastiche of influences.   One of the more unique and interesting aspects of Mercenaries is the nature of your interactions with the different factions. Though you'll often be acting against North Korean forces, which are always hostile toward you, there are missions where you'll have to attack one of the four factions you've been working for. Your working relationship with each faction is represented by a ""mood"" meter that ranges from friendly to hostile, and a hostile faction won't be as interested in offering you assignments as it will be in riddling your body with shrapnel. Who you choose to keep happy will not only affect how you gather your intel on the Deck of 52, but it will also determine which missions will even be presented to you. Luckily, Mercenaries exists in a world of moral flexibility and short memories, and you can always put yourself back into the good graces of a faction that's upset with you with a healthy bribe. There's extra incentive in keeping the Russians happy, since they run the Merchant of Menace Web site from which you can purchase equipment and vehicles and have them air-dropped to you in the field, as well as heavy weapons support from artillery and bombers and the like. If they're mad at you, they'll cut off access. With three different characters to play as, four different factions to piss off, and 52 bounties to capture (many of which are optional), there's a great amount of replay value to be found here, though playing through the game once is a good 20-hour experience in and of itself.  Mercenaries is, generally, pretty forgiving in nature. The auto-aim function allows for a pretty wide margin of error, and you'll often find a convenient crate full of health and ammo when you need it the most. The AI in the game, both friendly and hostile, isn't incredibly cunning, but it's aggressive, and it's smart enough to run away from live grenades and to man nearby vehicles rather than stay on foot. Neither side is an incredible shot with a rifle, but it doesn't really need to be when it's coming at you with a rocket-propelled grenade or a heavily armored tank. When Mercenaries wants to present you with a challenge--and it will--it will simply throw an overwhelming number of enemies at you from a well-fortified position.  Only by taking jobs with multiple factions will you collect the intel you need to capture or kill the Deck of 52.  Though collecting bounties and gathering intel from the various factions are your primary objectives, there are plenty of side jobs you can take at will, and these range from simple checkpoint races to escorting a news reporter to an especially intense firefight. There are also standing offers that can help you curry favor with different factions. For example, the Chinese don't like the ""listening posts"" that the South Koreans have planted all over the place, and will reward you for destroying these surveillance devices. The South Koreans themselves don't much care for the presence of the large, aggrandizing statues of General Song that punctuate the landscape, and are made happier when you blow them up. The pacing of Mercenaries is relentless, and this is largely due to the incredible volume and variety of tasks you can take on.  Mercenaries puts a lot of stock in smoke, fire, and explosive effects, and these elements tend to dominate the screen for most of the game, which is great, because they're executed with incredible aptitude. The sky is almost constantly choked with a smoky haze, and the landscape is fundamental in giving you a sense of this war-torn country, but the game avoids becoming monotonous by providing subtle variations on this theme in different regions of the map. Part of what makes Mercenaries so engaging is the seamlessness of the landscape, and the fact that the game keeps load times to an absolute minimum--basically, the only times you'll see loading screens are before and after assignments, and when you die. But it doesn't sacrifice the quality of the graphics for scope, and all the characters and vehicles have a good look to them that, like the story, aims just to the more dramatic side of realism. There are some awkward pieces, such as the canned animations for when you subdue an enemy and your silly-looking jump animation. They're distractions, but they're usually overwhelmed by the game's grossly over-the-top action.  The visual quality of the game, along with the load times, account for the only significant differences between the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions of Mercenaries. The game pushes the PlayStation 2 hardware pretty hard, and it gets a lot out of Sony's aging platform in the process, but the Xbox simply handles the load better. We noticed shorter load times, a better draw distance (though this is really apparent only when you're in a chopper), cleaner textures, a higher, more stable frame rate, nicer special effects, and slightly better animation. Not to marginalize the PlayStation 2 version, which is still a ton of fun and completely playable, but those with the ability should unquestionably go for the Xbox version.   Outrageous physics plus convincing smoke and fire effects make for some spectacular explosions.  There's virtually no difference in the quality of the sound in the two versions of Mercenaries, which is good. The voice cast of Mercenaries is the backbone of the game's sound design, delivering solid, believable performances that fit snugly into the characters. The best performances, though, come from Peter Stormare (the wood-chipper guy from Fargo and nihilist from The Big Lebowski), who plays the gravelly-voiced Swedish agent to a T, and from Carl Weathers (aka Apollo Creed and Action Jackson), who was born to play the part of the tough-as-nails Army commander that he voices here. The game is good about creating atmosphere with ambient sound, though when it really wants to get your blood up it'll kick in with a powerful, urgent orchestral score, a haunting choir of voices, or the driving sounds of big Asian drums. The quality of the sound isn't this great across the board, though. Some of the weapon reports feel a little flat, many of the engine effects don't sound as throaty as they ought to, and tires will often squeal even when you're rolling across dirt roads.  Mercenaries is dense with explosive content that satisfies on a fundamental level. Of the games that have tried to borrow the Grand Theft Auto style of play, Mercenaries is one of the most successful. This is partially because Pandemic clearly understands the importance of peripheral action to creating a cohesive, believable world, but also because it infuses the structure with its own style, and in the process turns it into something of its own. This is the most accomplished game that Pandemic has created yet, and it's an engaging experience that should appeal to action fans looking for a good, messy thrill. 


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807,Prince of Persia: Warrior Within ,8.8," While Warrior Within's combat and satisfyingly long campaign improve on last year's game, the now darker tone falls somewhat flat compared to the storybook atmosphere in The Sands of Time.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/2/7/2217527-box_popww.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/prince-of-persia-warrior-within-review/1900-6114295/,pos,"
 When Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was released last year, it was a very pleasant surprise. The game was an action adventure offering in the truest sense of the term, featuring beautifully detailed levels, environmental puzzles, and, of course, the acrobatic Prince of Persia himself. It was an amazingly faithful modernization of a beloved classic. With the newest iteration in the series, Warrior Within, developer Ubisoft Montreal appears to have addressed the biggest complaints about its forebear, which specifically involved its repetitive combat and short length. Yet while Warrior Within's new combat and satisfyingly long campaign improve on last year's game, the now darker tone falls somewhat flat compared to the storybook atmosphere in The Sands of Time. In addition, technical issues on the Xbox and PS2 platforms also mar the experience a bit. However, make no mistake: Warrior Within is a still a very worthy sequel.  Warrior Within is every bit as good-looking as its predecessor.  Warrior Within continues the prince's story from last year's game, so, because the prince has unleashed the mystical Sands of Time, he finds himself pursued relentlessly by a menacing time monster called the Dahaka. The Dahaka is a beast that devours everything in its path like a walking black hole, so to escape it for good, the prince decides he must travel to the past to kill the Empress of Time to prevent the creation of the sands entirely. Sound like a conundrum? Well, if you can accept Back to the Future, you shouldn't have any trouble suspending your disbelief for the plot in Warrior Within...although the game is probably meant to be taken more seriously than the Michael J. Fox film. The prince's journey takes him to a ruined fortress on the Island of Time, where you'll find yourself fighting inside the castle, in mysterious caves, and in the outdoor gardens, where some of the game's most attractive level architecture can be found.  Warrior Within borrows a page from the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in that you'll be exploring in the same areas in two different time periods. Special rooms scattered throughout the fortress let you to shift back and forth between the past and the present, and areas of the castle will change accordingly depending on the time period. So, for example, the clockwork tower that had delicate machinery and giant working gears in the past looks run-down and broken in the present day, with tree branches poking through walls and ruined pieces of machinery scattered on the floor. Of course, the path you take to navigate each room also changes depending on the time period you're in.  The new time travel mechanic serves to lengthen the game, but it also adds an element of backtracking that wasn't present in The Sands of Time. This isn't to say that Warrior Within involves as much open-ended wandering as, for example, a Metroid game. For the most part, the game still plays in a very linear way, but in some of the later levels (which feel like they were a bit rushed), it isn't always made clear which direction you should be going in. An in-game map always shows your current location, as well as the time period you should be in, but the lack of detail in the map makes it impossible for you to know exactly how you need to get to your next stop. This can sometimes lead to a bit of frustration as you fumble about, but, for the most part, it isn't a problem...so long as you're paying attention to the clues the game gives you. The good news is that even discounting the time lost from deaths and wandering aimlessly, Warrior Within is a much longer game than The Sands of Time. In fact, it should take the average player around 15 to 20 hours to complete. While the middle of the game feels like it drags a bit, an interesting twist toward the end has a drastic effect on gameplay. This same twist also freshens things up for the home stretch, which ultimately delivers you to the final, rather difficult, boss fight.  Like last year's game, the prince has the ability to rewind time for a few seconds to correct mistakes. This is a clever game conceit that lets you make up a missed jump or a combat blunder without wasting time to reload the game. There are also other time-related abilities, such as speed, which come in handy for both combat and getting through traps. There are additional spell-like abilities that can knock back and damage multiple enemies that surround the prince. All these are limited by sand slots, which can be recharged by defeating enemies in combat or by breaking open jars and other items strewn about various rooms.  Combat is noticeably gory in Warrior Within.  The biggest new addition to the game is a deeper combat mechanic. The prince is now capable of dozens of different weapon combos, and these are context sensitive depending on whether you are holding a single weapon or dual-wielding two weapons. With a single weapon in hand, you can grab enemies and throw them. You can even strangle them. Dual-wielding takes away your throw options, but it lets you perform much more powerful weapon combos. What's interesting is that the effect of your moves changes depending on what type of weapon you have in your left hand, which is the prince's less-dominant hand. With a mace in your right hand, you can knock opponents to the ground, while a sword in your left hand lets you to chop enemies in half with certain combos. The weapon in your left hand also degrades with use, so you'll always need to pick up new ones that are dropped by fallen foes. Otherwise, you can choose to throw your secondary weapon at enemies in attempts to impale or behead them. You can, of course, still vault off of enemies and walls for more-powerful slashing attacks, and a new pole-swinging attack has been added. There's also plenty of blood and gore in Warrior Within to further spice things up. As a result, beheadings and halved bodies are par for the course once you get used to the better fighting moves.  With all these new moves available, you can imagine that there's a lot more combat in Warrior Within than in The Sands of Time. It's also quite a bit more difficult in spots. Enemies will come at you several more at a time, so you'll need to become proficient with your moves to survive. Eventually, though, you'll find that you can get through the game more efficiently when you quickly end battles by throwing opponents off of high ledges rather than laboriously finishing them off with your weapons. There are a few boss fights in the game, but, unfortunately, quite a bit of recycling has been employed, so these confrontations aren't as memorable as they could have been. What's more, most of the high-level weapon combos are all but useless against bosses, because these combos tend to get blocked. You'll end up relying mostly on dodging and the simplest of combos to steadily winnow health away from bosses.  Level design is still the strength of Warrior Within.  Despite the revamped combat, the strength of Warrior Within, as in the last game, lies in its environmental puzzles. As the prince, you'll need to rely on your vast array of acrobatic moves to navigate your way through many cleverly designed rooms and traps. You can still jump, wall run, climb, mantle, swing, and vault your way from ledge to ledge and from branch to branch. You can also now make swashbuckler-style controlled falls by sinking your sword into wall tapestries and then sliding straight down as you slice through them to slow your descents. Completing the game's fiendish puzzles and navigating your way through each room tends to be extremely fun and satisfying, and it's made all the more enjoyable by the well-animated moves of the prince and the beautifully designed levels. For the most part, the rooms you go through look quite natural and do not appear as big Rube Goldberg apparatuses. This natural-looking level architecture contributes greatly toward successfully immersing you in the game's world.  The developer has even found a way to add yet more intensity to the trap-and-hazard-laden rooms of Warrior Within. Several times throughout the game, you'll meet up with the mystical Dahaka. Each of these meetings kicks off an intense chase where you must navigate several sets of hazards quickly and without hesitation, lest the Dahaka catch you. The Dahaka sequences offer a nice change of pace, but our only complaint is that the camera angles used during these scenes seem to have been picked for cinematic effect rather than efficacy of control. Consequently, repeating a chase scene a few extra times due to less-than-ideal camera angles can be frustrating.  The biggest disappointment with Warrior Within, though, actually has nothing to do with its technical gameplay. With the new emphasis on combat, which has been spiced up with added blood and gore (and an M rating), the game has taken on a much darker tone. The new prince in Warrior Within is no longer the dignified, self-deprecating nobleman he was in The Sands of Time. Instead, he comes off as an arrogant brute who yells out conceited taunts during combat, such as ""You should be honored to die by my sword!"" and ""Why do you even bother?"" While the new attitude could be explained away by his desperation, it all serves to make the prince a much-less-likable character. Add in the soundtrack, which has some bass-heavy, heavy metal influences, and the wistful fairy tale style of The Sands of Time has given way to a game that feels like it's trying a little too hard to be edgy.  Some technical flaws in the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions of the game also mar the experience somewhat. The Xbox version is prone to audio glitches. Certain sound effects get stuck, and, at other times, scenes that should have voice in them are cut off completely. This is a shame, because the sound effects in the game, aside from some ham-handed voice acting from the prince, are excellent and impactful. Meanwhile, the PlayStation 2 version's flaws are graphical. As a result, the game has a slightly choppier frame rate than the other versions. While it's not enough to hinder gameplay or combat, it does detract a bit from an otherwise beautiful-looking game. We didn't notice any sound or frame rate issues with the GameCube version of Warrior Within, however.  Warrior Within is ultimately a worthy follow-up to its predecessor.  The Xbox version offers a bit of Xbox Live support, but you won't actually be playing with or against other players in real time. There are two ""online"" game modes, an arena combat option, and another mode that times you as you run through an obstacle course in the game. The highest score is posted online for each mode, but the interface for navigating the leaderboards on each mode leaves something to be desired. Overall, these features don't really add much to what's already a great game.  Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is an excellent sequel to a game that caught many by surprise last year. Those who enjoy navigating through beautifully designed levels, complete with clever puzzles and traps, will definitely get their fill of them here. Moreover, the combat has improved greatly, although it's still not the principle strength of the game. However, those who primarily enjoyed last year's The Sands of Time for its original charm and subtle character development may not find quite what they're looking for in this sequel. But even with this caveat, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is easy to recommend for any action adventure fan, and its lengthier campaign should keep players busy for a lot longer this time around. 

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808,Little Nicky ,4, Unpleasant - that's the best word to describe Little Nicky.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/4/3/2220543-box_lnicky.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/little-nicky-review/1900-2674892/,neg,"
After 10,000 years of evil, Satan decides to appoint a new ruler to the throne of hell. Scratch that, no one's good enough but him - so he's staying put. As a result, two of his loyal acolytes, Adrian and Cassius, set off to the surface to create a new hell, a hell on Earth. Unfortunately, Satan is a busy man, and he lacks the time to bring them back. Instead, he appoints his daft son, Nicky, to apprehend them in his place. Based on the hit film, Ubisoft's Little Nicky lets you assume the role of Satan's son through 24 levels of hellacious action-platforming excitement. In theory, anyway.   Little Nicky is a game with a great deal of promise that is marred by an execution that falls horribly flat. Similar to Super Mario Bros., the game is a side-scrolling action platformer with superpower elements. Run to the left, jump over obstacles, leap over pits, cast a spell, and try not to die too often - that's the basic premise of Little Nicky. Once in a while, you'll even get the chance to fly like a bird, possess a preacher's body, or call upon the spirit of everyone's favorite poultry killer, Ozzy Osbourne. Before you can journey from one level to the next, you must complete each level's goal, which is usually accomplished by collecting items or exorcising demons. It's not a terribly clever idea, but a standard platform game isn't the worst use of the Game Boy Color's limited hardware. Where the game ultimately fails, and does so miserably, is in terms of control. Digital Eclipse exercised good judgment in making Nicky reliant on fire and heat for replenishing his energy stores and sprinting capabilities, but it absolutely ruined the impact of such a concept with lame hit detection and slippery jump mechanics. Each level has hundreds of assorted beasts, hazards, and death traps that you must guide Nicky through, but doing so is nearly impossible thanks to enemies with unseen limbs and platforms coated in invisible oil. Other than a few vertically scrolling levels late in the game, there's never much call to use Nicky's superpowers, either.   Even though it's not remarkably playable, Little Nicky has a few notable innovations. First, there are five minigames, four of which are target-based: Beefy's duck shoot, dart board, pineapple, and gone fishing. These games are nothing like the main quest in that they're solidly playable and worth revisiting. The fifth minigame, Satan head, is a joking nod to the movie's loyal fans. In it, you've got a bag of Satan's body parts, and using a sketch board, you're supposed to assemble his head any way you wish. Once you're finished, you can even print out your creation on a Game Boy Printer. The other thing worth mentioning about Little Nicky is how positively lewd the game is. This is the first Game Boy Color game to incorporate peeping toms, crippled veterans, transvestites, and urinating hooligans as actual gameplay devices. Come to think of it, it's also the first game to use the phrase ""ass canteen"" for plot development. Unfortunately, the above-mentioned minigames and these risqué elements are about the only positive aspects of this game.   Apart from some sprite flicker and a poorly tracking camera, Little Nicky's visuals are pleasing. Large, well-animated character sprites and hilarious earthly backdrops do an excellent job of conveying the film's skewed attitude. At the same time, a number of fully illustrated cartoon-style animations crop up between levels to advance the story. From Nicky's introduction to Beefy to his run-ins with Adrian and his subsequent love affair with Valerie, you'll witness everything in 32-color glory. It's no Rayman, but the formula works. The same doesn't ring true for the game's audio, however. Poorly sampled Adam Sandler voice snippets and gritty heavy-metal tunes simply don't sound altogether pleasant emanating from the Game Boy Color's ten-cent speaker.   Unpleasant - that's the best word to describe Little Nicky. The developers apparently spent more time bending the ESRB's T rating than they did striving for a comfortable and balanced game. It's a shame too, because the raunchy in-jokes, minigames, and animated cutscenes would have lifted the game to greatness if only it were playable.
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809,The Next Tetris: On-Line Edition ,4," The game itself isn't terrible, but unless you are absolutely aching to exercise the online capabilities of your Dreamcast, there is really no reason to pick up this game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/7/1/3024-11871.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-next-tetris-on-line-edition/1900-2676654/,neg,"
Tetris could easily be called the patriarch of all puzzle games. It's safe to say that nearly every puzzle game released since its 1989 debut has, in some way, tried to emulate aspects of the Russian mindbender. Some have been able to take the ""shapes in a pit"" concept pioneered by Tetris in an entirely new direction, sometimes creating a more compelling game. Crave, the current proprietor of the Tetris namesake, has released The Next Tetris On-Line Edition, imbuing the Tetris formula with the current console buzzword - online play.   Next Tetris operates slightly different from traditional Tetris, adding a color-coding mechanic to the mix. Basically, some of the shapes that come down the pipe are made up of different colored squares, and, when the shapes touch down, gravity kicks in; if there is empty space underneath the shapes, the different colored blocks slide down, filling the gap. It's a novel idea, but instead of making players take on new strategies, it tends to encourage a barrage of sloppy bricklaying.    The Next Tetris On-Line Edition presents two flavors of Tetris - Classic Tetris and Next Tetris. Classic Tetris is fairly straightforward, and it lets you jump right into a single-player marathon game of regular old Tetris. The Next Tetris side offers a single-player, a two-player, a marathon, and, of course, an online mode. This smattering of modes offers little variety, as the single- and two-player modes are identical. The offline modes could have been forgiven if there were a strong online component, but this is not the case. In fact, the online play is identical to an offline two-player game with the addition of a global-ranking system - a system that is, for all intents and purposes, useless, since as of this writing it was near impossible to actually find anyone to compete against. This is not to say a community won't form, but with the all-around lackluster nature of the game, it's highly improbable.   The game attempts to add some visual flair to the mix with an animated background, but there is only one background, and watching the same drab gray quasi-mechanical 3D shapes in motion gets old fast. Adding insult to injury, the game suffers from occasional slowdown. The game's sound is stripped down, though what sound it does have is downright offensive: Sound consists of bad techno remixes of the classic Tetris themes with a handful of original grating electronic tracks thrown in for good measure.   Crave is guilty of cashing in with The Next Tetris On-Line Edition in the worst way - they've taken an existing game, The Next Tetris, added a laughable online component, and are peddling it as an entirely new game. The game itself isn't terrible, but unless you are absolutely aching to exercise the online capabilities of your Dreamcast, there is really no reason to pick up this game.
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810,Dragon's Lair ,4," This new port of Dragon's Lair brings Kinect support and leaderboards to the classic game, but its gameplay hasn't aged well.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/9/3/4/3047-11934.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragons-lair-review/1900-6378648/,neg,"
  Considering that the Xbox 360 has been around for over six years, it's a little surprising that we haven't seen a port of the 1983 classic Dragon's Lair until now. Not only is it one of only three games accorded permanent exhibition status at the Smithsonian Institution (along with Pac-Man and Pong), but it has also managed to worm its way onto everything from the Commodore 64 and NES to the iPhone in the intervening 29 years. Most of these were uninspired rehashes that brought almost nothing new to the experience, but this latest incarnation's leaderboards and Kinect support at least mark a step toward variety. Unfortunately, that's still not enough to make it worth your time.   Get used to seeing this shot. A lot.  Dragon's Lair was a colossal hit back in the days when visuals in video games were first evolving from wads of pixels to recognizable and iconic sprites such as Mario. Its appeal lay in its novelty. Harnessing the talents of celebrated animator Don Bluth, Dragon's Lair marked an ambitious attempt to jump over 10 years into the future, chucking the standard digital conventions of the day and being based entirely on animation.     At the time, it worked. In an age when Mario still wasn't ""super,"" arcade goers could laugh at the antics of the goofy knight named Dirk the Daring on his quest to rescue the sultry Princess Daphne from the clutches of the dragon Singe. Instead of deaths that just knocked the hero offscreen, you saw poor Dirk subjected to snake strangulations and rib-cracking impacts. And instead of saving some generic princess, you won the hand of Princess Daphne, whose Playboy-inspired model turns heads as easily now as it did back then.     Even so, its animated focus demands simple gameplay even by the standards of its era. Indeed, little more than an interactive movie at heart, it's best understood in modern terms as the direct ancestor of the quick-time events (or QTEs) sprinkled throughout countless modern action games. Then as now, the entire game revolves around knowing when to press one of the four directions on a D-pad to move Dirk out of the way of danger, and using a button to slash your sword. Miss one of the lightning-fast prompts, and you find that death comes easy and often in Singe's domain. Unfortunately, such a setup means that success relies far more on memorization than true skill. The resulting trail and error is even more disappointing upon the realization that some of Dragon's Lair's 29 scenes repeat throughout Dirk's brief journey.   This sequence is anything but better with Kinect.  In theory, at least, Dragon's Lair seems like a perfect match for the Kinect. Freed of the constraints of a gamepad, you can act out Dirk's simple movements for yourself, jumping left as he dodges a snake to the right, or moving forward as he tries to wiggle through a hole in a rapidly closing wall. When it's time to stab at Singe, you battle him with a slashing motion of your arm. Unfortunately, it's those very moments that give Dragon's Lair so much trouble. Since so much of the game hinges on the speed of your responses, the time it takes to get back into place after a strafe to the left often leaves you in a bad spot when you need to strafe back to the right.    The slashing motions fare even worse because they don't always register. This Kinect mode compensates for such troubles by introducing optional directional indicators and allowing for occasional slips, but all in all it only adds to the frustration of an already unforgiving game. Gameplay gets even more frustrating in the local cooperative mode, which requires you to switch players every time the other player dies. And since Dirk has a nasty habit of dying every 10 seconds or so, the experience is more of a hassle than it's worth.    You might find some additional replay value in the multiple difficulty modes that strip the gameplay of its prompts or limit how many continues Dirk has after dying (in other words, making it closer to the 1983 arcade gameplay), but even then you'll probably master each within an hour. Leaderboards for the Kinect and gamepad modes foster some sense of competition, but Dragon's Lair is not the type of game that you'll set aside days or weeks for in an attempt to dominate the lists.     As a small bonus, this version lets you sit back and watch Dirk's adventures as an animated short if you're tired of tripping over yourself with the Kinect or missing cues on the gamepad. It's a welcome addition, since focusing on the necessary moves often means you can't fully appreciate the animation for itself unless you're watching someone else play. At the very least, it's useful as a walkthrough if you're having trouble on the promptless hard mode. Bluth's animation is as impressive as ever, although seeing it stripped of the gameplay only highlights the limits of the sound design. Aside from Dirk's shrieks of terror and some musical cues signaling a successful execution of a room, the only noteworthy sound file is the ditzy voice of Daphne explaining how to vanquish Singe.    Dirk's expression makes much more sense once you see what Daphne looks like.  Today, Dragon's Lair is little more than a historical curio. It takes barely more than half an hour to complete the game on its hardest modes, and a dedicated player could probably complete each achievement inside of five hours. The Kinect support is novel but ultimately more frustrating than the standard gamepad gameplay. In the end, you're better off finding a modern game with occasional QTEs scattered throughout its levels and smirking at your awareness of where such sequences evolved from.  
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811,Surf Rocket Racers ,4, Surf Rocket Racers is what happens when a game developer takes a stock game formula and simply goes nowhere with it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/6/1/0/2213610-445096_43957_front.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/surf-rocket-racers-review/1900-2691663/,neg,"
In a halfhearted attempt to horn in on Wave Race's Jet Ski monopoly on the console scene, Crave has unleashed Surf Rocket Racers on unsuspecting Dreamcast owners. This is a game that isn't particularly terrible, but the derivative, uninspired gameplay and production certainly don't make this an attractive title. Surf Rocket Racers is a Jet Ski game, but not an especially good one. You're presented with a handful of riders, which allows for handling and speed variations, but the control in the game is uniformly soft, making any differences between the riders a slight variation on the same lackluster theme. The controls are stripped down to NES-like proportions, allowing for simple directional and acceleration control, as well as a back flip, a barrel roll, a bunny hop, and a submersion move. The game has a modicum of gameplay modes that, to their credit, offer a modest amount of variety. The most orthodox mode is the championship mode--here, you race against a pack of computer-controlled riders, as well as a clock, at locations across the globe. This mode suffers from absentminded AI, which has problems with simple tasks like avoiding walls--problems to the point that seeing a racer stuck against a corner is commonplace. The two-player mode operates in a similar fashion, sans the lifeless AI. The hazards and obstacles mode puts you through the same motions, with added point balloons scattered throughout the levels. To score points, you have to pop the balloons. The tricks and techniques mode bears a striking resemblance to the crazy box mode in Crazy Taxi, though without as many different gameplay types. Even so, this mode proves to be the most fun, imbuing the lifeless gameplay system with a variety of puzzlelike challenges, like hitting aerial targets with your Jet Ski and pulling off a set amount of back flips or barrel rolls before the clock runs out. The actual locations at which you're racing have their fair share of problems as well. Some of these locations, such as Niagara Falls and the Amazon River, are good fits, but the inclusion of Rome instead of Venice, as well as a ""phantom ship"" level, are testaments to the lack of thought that went into Surf Rocket Racers. Aside from bad location choices, most of the levels suffer from generally poor level design, with lots of wide-open straightaways mixed in with narrow gauntlets that are full of obstacles--ones that could snag your Jet Ski. Surf Rocket Racers' mediocrity is apparent when it comes to the production value. Graphically, the game is riddled with low-resolution textures and  cardboard backgrounds. CRI obviously spent some time working on the water effects, as most levels have huge swells and different water flow effects, but the water itself looks bad--the lack of spray, or a wake, or any sort of reaction to the Jet Ski's presence on the water's behalf doesn't help things either. The in-game soundtrack and sound effects are hardly worth mentioning, as they consist of blaring Jet Ski engines, the occasional fanfare, and utterly forgettable music. Surf Rocket Racers is what happens when a game developer takes a stock game formula and simply goes nowhere with it. Granted, Jet Ski games are few and far between, but the overall bland experience that Surf Rocket Racers offers hardly even warrants a rental.
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812,Fighting Legends ,4, Fighting Legends could have used at least another year in development.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/2/7/6/3132-12276.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fighting-legends-review/1900-2841756/,neg,"
Massively multiplayer online gaming is inherently unstable. Such games are typically released in an unfinished state as developers take advantage of a public that now expects such games to be works-in-progress. This trend has grown to the point where some online games have been barely functional on arrival. World War II Online showed up on its scheduled release date on June 6 last year but required a huge patch that replaced almost everything on the game CD before you could even begin playing. Even then, the game was bug-ridden and lacked many promised features. Anarchy Online hit stores at the end of that same month with stability issues, major lag, CD key problems, and, to top things off, a credit card registration system that initially wasn't handled on a secure server. It's hard to imagine an online game launch that could go any worse than those two.  Fighting Legends features many diverse character types.  Well, it used to be hard to imagine that. The launch of Fighting Legends, a real-time strategy/role-playing hybrid from independent development house Maximum Charisma Studios, has been even more disastrous. Bugs have been prevalent from the very beginning, and a flawed registration system and continual server problems make it a struggle just to get into the game. When you finally do fight your way inside, a combination of connection drops, bugs and associated anomalies, a half-baked game design, and a frustratingly obtuse world make you quickly decide that the battle isn't worthwhile. This is perhaps the ultimate example of an incomplete online game with more glaring defects than properly working features.   Cracks are evident right in the foundation. Bugs were so prevalent in the initial release that the game was unplayable. Just registering took more than six hours, spread over two days, as the menu system kept running into ""page not found"" dead ends. You would think that the system that allows the company to collect its $9.99 monthly fee would be the first thing to be checked out. Calls to Maximum Charisma's support line did little but run up our long-distance phone bill. Twenty-minute waits on hold were followed with generic advice about getting the most recent video card driver updates and the promise of a promptly e-mailed support guide (which didn't show up until the next day). The system never did work properly, although immoderate use of the refresh and forward buttons in our browser somehow got us through.  Zones are separated by magical gates.  But it didn't get us playing. After completing the sign-up process and creating a character, everything ground to a halt on the opening screen. Our character moved as instructed for a few seconds and then froze. Forward or backward movement was impossible from that point on, although the character could be rotated in place. All other keys functioned normally, and the gameworld continued to turn. Technical support couldn't resolve this problem--nor could more than a week of phone conversations and correspondence with Maximum Charisma's top troubleshooter, consultations with our local ISP, numerous driver changes, and finally reinstalling the Windows 98 operating system. Only switching to a completely new machine and Windows XP finally got the game running. As usual with this sort of thing, there is no way to tell what caused the glitch or even whether it was fixed by the system change or something that Maximum Charisma added to one of its regular updates. Connection problems lingered, though, and the entire system went down numerous times, including a lengthy interruption in service around the holidays. Instability remains a serious concern.   When we were able to play Fighting Legends, it quickly became apparent that the design was intended to give online gamers something new and different. Maximum Charisma certainly delivers in that regard, though the company has gone so far beyond what people expect of a massively multiplayer game that the results are nearly incomprehensible. The setting is the planet Exisle, following the crash of a ""giant robotic entity"" known as Lergan, ""the cosmic seed."" This crash, which was apparently caused by a mechanical spider-janitor that had succumbed to space madness (uh-huh), freed all sorts of creatures from their suspension in ""cryojuice."" Or killed them. The back story isn't very clear on this point, and there's some mention of ghosts. What is clear is that the scriptwriters should switch off the anime.At any rate, the survivors have formed into nine clans split among the Sky Realm, Surface Plain, and Underworld regions of Exisle. The Sky Realm is home to the Rin, Pyron, and M-Clan, while the Surface Plain features the Humans, Bear-Kats, and Bio-Mechs. The Underworld hosts the Bone Clan, Arachin, and Wee. Clan territories are separate entities that can be entered only through magical gates. Characteristics of the clans in each area roughly correspond to role-playing game alignments and the elements. The Rin, for example, are good nature lovers who use ranged weapons, while the evil Pyron are fiery warmongers. The neutral M-Clan is composed of icy magic users. You begin play by creating an avatar from one of these clans and choosing which of five archetypes to represent. Archetypes are similar to role-playing character classes. Melee characters emphasize close-quarters combat skills, MPow focus on magic, Techniq look after healing allies, Missile are best with ranged weapons, and Speed is a catch-all that takes one of the other categories and adds swiftness. Six character statistics track things such as damage ability and hit points. These scores cannot be altered initially, although you do collect experience points and level up in the same fashion as in a typical role-playing game.  Avatars can be resurrected at your base.  The gameplay itself isn't typical. Although you guide a character around a persistent world, the focus of play blends elements of real-time strategy with role-playing. You must deploy a base, gather resources, build huts and defensive structures, and summon squad members. It is the center of all activity, including the resurrection of your avatar when necessary. Quests, treasure, and nonplayer characters exist, but the guiding premise is an ongoing war between the clans in each region of Exisle. Each group has a natural enemy, so the intent of the designers is obviously to provoke rivalries that lead to base building and combat.   It doesn't work out that way. For starters, the real-time strategy aspects are just trappings. Bases are usually deployed temporarily for the specific purpose of recruiting troops for a squad or to resurrect your avatar. Once this is done, you can tuck away the buildings with the click of a button. Base construction is also extremely expensive. You need 400 resource points to build an average structure, yet slaying the typical enemy in the early stages of the game nets you no more than two or three. It takes a very, very long time to get to the point where you can deploy most of the base huts and raise a significant army. The first dozen or so hours see you mainly wandering Exisle in search of monsters to kill for cash and experience points. This quickly gets tedious. Aside from the clunky third-person combat system, the planet is vast and sparsely populated. More time is spent running across North Dakota-sized plains than battling enemies. Other human players are also absent. It's nearly impossible to find another person playing Fighting Legends. The lone saving grace here is that most people won't get far enough into the game for their hermitlike status to become a cause for complaint.  Research tree items are very expensive.  The appearance of this seemingly limitless terrain isn't for everyone. To complement the Japanese pop-culture storyline, Maximum Charisma gave Fighting Legends a distinctive cartoon look. Characters resemble Pokémon monsters in many respects. The lineup includes all manner of cutesy creations that look like toys, from the fluffy Bear-Kats to robot frog Bio-Mechs. The 3D acceleration and use of bright, primary colors give the game a cheerful sheen, though this leans toward the garish, and too many scenes are devoid of features. Shoddy collision detection causes objects to pop up in the middle of walls and characters' feet to sink into the ground on hills. Certain of these troublesome areas can cause you to get stuck. Audio effects are also cartoonlike but vivid and effective. Monster roars and howls are distinctive, as are atmospheric sounds, such as crickets chirping at night and rain pouring down. The musical score is appropriately spacey and lighthearted.   Fighting Legends could have used at least another year in development. While the initial concept was a fascinating one--not to mention a much-needed alternative to the fantasy role-playing online monopoly--Maximum Charisma didn't take enough time to ensure that the design was solid and that the code and the company's servers could handle the operation of a persistent-world game. There remains some promise here, although the absence of a devoted following makes the future of this game cloudy at best.
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813,NASCAR Heat 2002 ,4, The dated graphics and the surprisingly inept gameplay make for a bad combination that dooms the game to mediocrity.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/2/7/2209427-box_nascarh2.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nascar-heat-2002-review/1900-2873450/,neg,"
It takes a special kind of person to appreciate NASCAR racing. Not just anyone can tolerate watching the same cars that you can find on our highways do loops for hours on end. But NASCAR is America's number-one motorsport, and NASCAR games have traditionally been strong performers in the video game sector, so it comes as no surprise that Infogrames would try its hand at a handheld version of the perpetual left-hand turn. Unfortunately, NASCAR Heat 2002 seems to mostly offer the things that people dislike about the sport, rather than the elements that cause thousands of people to pack their coolers every weekend and head off to watch the next big race.    One aspect of NASCAR Heat 2002 that's above reproach is the number of gameplay modes available. The arcade mode allows you to jump straight into a circuit of races using any of the eight real-world drivers included in the game. You can drive as Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick, Dale Jarrett, Sterling Marlin, Ricky Rudd, Rusty Wallace, and Steve Park, though the differences between each of the drivers is practically impossible to discern. The single race mode allows you to choose a driver and track to simply get some practice time in while managing tire wear and other realistic conditions. The beat the heat mode presents you with a series of challenges that increase in difficulty as the mode progresses. There are also a variety of multiplayer modes, including a four-player option using just one cartridge. However, just one track and one car are available. If you choose to play multiplayer with more than one cartridge, you can select from all the game's cars and tracks.  You'll have to memorize each turn just to stay on the course. The heart of the single-player experience is the career mode. You begin by attempting to qualify for a team and then jump into the grueling NASCAR circuit. At the conclusion of each season, your performance is evaluated and the team will decide if they should keep you on or drop you in favor of another driver. If you perform particularly well, you'll receive offers from other teams with faster cars, better pit crews, and better tires. In this way, you can work your way up through the ranks and win the NASCAR cup. There are 18 different teams to drive for, and if you perform poorly, you'll be dropped down into a lower group until you get your career straightened out. For a handheld game, NASCAR Heat 2002 has plenty of options to keep players busy. But they're all nearly ruined when it's time to actually play the game.    NASCAR Heat 2002 plays from an isometric perspective. Because it plays from this awkward angle, pressing left on the directional pad always causes your car to turn left, while pressing right will always cause it to turn right. The control scheme is reminiscent of that from the Resident Evil series and is completely inappropriate for a driving game in this era. Making matters worse, too little of the track is seen at a time, forcing you to memorize each bend and turn to keep from swapping paint with the guardrails. Eventually you'll be able to navigate the tracks fairly well, but getting to that point can be extremely frustrating, and the payoff is not worth the hassle.    While the game makes use of the NASCAR license to deliver real drivers and tracks, their visual representation leaves a great deal to be desired. Other than the basic track layout, it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between racing at Darlington or Michigan International. The cars are so small onscreen that it's difficult to tell one car from another. In the end, the license is used as something to legitimize the game instead of enhance it. With all due respect to NASCAR and its fans, crashes are arguably one of the most exhilarating parts of the sport. Unfortunately, the crashes in NASCAR Heat rarely amount to more than fender benders.    With its varied gameplay options and official NASCAR license, NASCAR Heat 2002 could have been a great game. But the dated graphics and the surprisingly inept gameplay make for a bad combination that really hurts the game. So much more is possible in the racing genre on the Game Boy Advance, and hopefully Infogrames will realize the power of the NASCAR brand and bring a better game to market next year.
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814,Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ,4," No matter how much you care for the idea of flying on a broomstick or weaving fantastic magicks, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is a lesson in boredom.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/2/2/3620-14222.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone-review/1900-2832498/,neg,"
The recently released Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone games are based on the blockbuster movie, which in turn is based on J.K. Rowling's novel starring a young wizard. As the introduction cuts through its series of still images and background text, you will learn that Harry Potter is an orphaned child left in the care of cruel muggle (a nonmagical human) foster parents. Upon receiving an admissions letter, Harry leaves home with a friendly giant and makes his way to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While undergoing magical instruction, Harry will face such challenges as competing in the wizards' sport of quidditch and foiling the plot of the evil wizard Voldemort. The PlayStation version of Harry's quest drops you in a 3D re-creation of Hogwarts that is simply huge and a pleasure to explore. Once it comes time for a challenge, however, the game falls decidedly flat. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone makes a valiant effort to re-create the visual splendor of the recent film on the dated PlayStation hardware. The developers have succeeded in creating an extensive castle that is true to the stories, with plenty of rooms to explore and many secrets to be found. There are a variety of characters to meet, and each looks quite different from the last. Unfortunately, sloppy, underdetailed textures are used in many cases, and the entire game seems to be made up of extremely jagged polygons. While no technical marvel, the gameworld is quite colorful and has a distinct artistic flair. The many cinematic sequences are rendered in real time, but they are so overused that it doesn't take long for their effectiveness to wear off. On the other hand, the bedtime-story-style narration is performed admirably, as is the work of the many voice actors who bring the Hogwarts characters to life. The same team from the PC version of the game provides the many recorded speech segments, and if you haven't seen the movie, then you can enjoy these renditions of the beloved roles without skipping a beat. Sadly, the music in the PlayStation version doesn't come close to comparing to the excellent composition available in the PC version. Most of the time there is no ambient music, and the game feels remarkably silent most of the way through. Playing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is similar to playing a greatly simplified version of Spyro or the latest Legend of Zelda. There are frequent platform elements, as well as creatures that need to be eliminated with the force of your flipendo spell. The game uses a strafe-friendly targeting system that makes the few shooting challenges far too simple, but this doesn't quite compare to the travesty of the platforming sequences. There is no jump command, so in most cases, simply walking to the edge of a platform will get you clear to the opposite side, regardless of distance, which is automatically accounted for. Other games have used the auto-jump effectively, but in this case, what could possibly have been one of the sole challenging aspects of the game has been made so simple that flying through the game in a handful of hours is par for the course. That nothing is unlocked upon the game's completion, like the stand-alone quidditch game from the PC version, is yet another in a series of disappointments. One of the more enjoyable and game-worthy aspects of the Harry Potter stories is the game of quidditch--a combination of soccer and basketball played by wizards on broomsticks. Harry's role in quidditch as seeker is to chase down an evasive little ball called the golden snitch as the game plays on around him. Chasing down the snitch earns your team a victory and in theory makes for an exciting, fast-paced diversion from the otherwise bland fare being provided. Once you've become accustomed to the smooth analog movement in the rest of the game, the choppy, stuttering flight controls while on a broomstick will leave nearly all players extremely disappointed. It's a sad thing indeed when a lackluster minigame of flying through rings eclipses the fun to be had elsewhere in the game. No matter how much you care for the idea of flying on a broomstick or weaving fantastic magicks, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is a lesson in boredom. Without a jump command, the platforming elements are all but wasted, while the spell-flinging portions of the game are equally forgettable. Those of you who have paid close attention to the Harry Potter stories will find that many of the memorable details from the books and movie have been included to make the experience as genuine as possible. Despite this attractive aspect of the game, its overly simple gameplay mechanics and extremely short duration add up to a game that should be avoided by most. Ultimately, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone doesn't have the widespread appeal of its literary namesake and is suitable only for children.
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815,Arctic Thunder ,4," It's noticeably better looking than the lackluster PlayStation 2 version, but it still has its fair share of problems.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/3/7/2211337-box_athunder.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/arctic-thunder-review/1900-2831786/,neg,"
In 1999, Midway struck gold with its arcade-style boat-racing game Hydro Thunder. Though not the deepest of racing games, Hydro Thunder had its merits. The control was tight and responsive, and the graphics really made the then-new Dreamcast shine. Now, Midway has brought its snowmobile version of Hydro Thunder, Arctic Thunder, to the Xbox. It's noticeably better looking than the lackluster PlayStation 2 version, but it still has its fair share of problems. At its core, Arctic Thunder is a simple racing game--get to the finish line first, and you are rewarded. To try and spice things up, the levels have multiple paths and the courses are littered with a variety of defensive and offensive power-ups--such as land mines, heat-seeking missiles, shields, and speed boosts--that you and your competitors will use to gain an advantage. Along with these standard power-ups, you'll find trick power-ups at the end of the ramps scattered throughout the levels that will trigger a trick animation for your rider and scatter more power-ups across the level. The power-ups aren't the most inventive, but they are entirely necessary, as the game would be powerfully dull if the gameplay were left to straight racing. Even as it stands, Arctic Thunder is not terribly engaging, as the races ultimately boil down to either focusing on defensive weapons and avoiding your competitors or staying in the thick of it and dealing out as much damage as you can, depending on which gameplay mode you're in. Though it sports four different gameplay modes, the differences between them are limited. The race mode will reward a gold medal with secret unlock codes, giving you the ability to modify attributes like the game's difficulty or which power-ups will be available in a race. The arcade mode is nearly identical to the race mode, minus the courses and riders that have been added exclusively for the console version of Arctic Thunder. The points mode rewards you with points for picking up power-ups, doing tricks, attacking competitors, and finishing in a high position. These points can be used to unlock new riders, snowmobiles, and courses. The battle mode throws up to four competitors into an icy arena, where the goal is to simply knock the other rider off his or her sled. The race, point, and arcade modes can be played with up to four players as well. The PlayStation 2 version of Arctic Thunder looked simply awful. Midway has made some use of the power of Microsoft's console, as the Xbox version looks significantly better. All the frame rate problems that plagued the PS2 version are gone, and the game generally looks sharper, with cleaner, brighter textures and a heaping helping of lighting and particle effects. Unfortunately, most of the core geometry remains the same, and the game looks pretty dated when compared with most Xbox games. The levels themselves, which range from the Swiss Alps to the Great Wall of China, do a fair job of representing their respective themes, but they're pretty stingy with the polygons and lack any level of finesse. The rider animation is clunky, though the rider and sled models are passable. When you get down to brass tacks, Arctic Thunder is not fun. The gameplay is repetitive, and the graphics, while an improvement on those of the PS2 version, still don't even begin to make use of the Xbox's potential. Unless you're a developer taking notes on how not to make a snowmobile racing game, there's simply no reason to play Arctic Thunder.
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816,Call of Duty 2 ,8.8," On the Xbox 360, this first-rate WWII first-person shooter is every bit as intense and hard-hitting as the PC version of the game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/0/5/2209905-call_of_duty_2.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/call-of-duty-2-review/1900-6139892/,pos,"
  When a game is announced for both the PC and consoles, the question always arises about what's different between the two versions. Did any compromises have to be made on one platform or the other? Did something get lost in translation? As it turns out, the recent release of Call of Duty 2 on the PC turned out to be a very accurate preview of what Xbox 360 owners could expect to get from next-generation shooters. Almost everything that makes the PC version one of the year's best shooters remains intact on the Xbox 360 version of the game, which looks just as good and actually runs smoother than all but the most beastly of gaming PCs. If not for the online multiplayer that's limited to eight players, the Xbox 360 version probably would have been hands-down better overall. But as it is, Call of Duty 2 still sets a high standard for any shooters following in its footsteps on Microsoft's new console, and it's considerably faster, prettier, and more exciting than most any other shooter available on consoles.   Call of Duty 2 sets the bar high for Xbox 360 first-person shooters.   As in the first PC game, Call of Duty 2's campaign will put you in the shoes of a few different soldiers fighting for different Allied factions. You start off as a private in the Russian army, visciously fighting off the invading Germans in Moscow and Stalingrad. The British campaign is unlocked after beating the first Russian mission. For most of these missions you'll be fighting in the sand-swept deserts of North Africa, alongside the Desert Rats, against Field Marshal Rommel's troops. The final mission in the British campaign sends you to the bombed-out houses and hedgerows of Caen, France. After you're done with that, you'll play as an American corporal in Europe. Yes, you will be doing a D-Day landing, but not on Omaha Beach or Utah Beach, which you've probably played several times before. Instead, you'll be scaling the sheer cliffs of Pointe du Hoc as artillery with the Army Rangers. If you already thought rock climbing was an ""extreme"" sport, try doing it with artillery and machine-gun fire raining down on you.    Each of the game's 10 missions is broken up into a few different stages. If you play the game on regular difficulty, you could blow through it in about 10 hours. Ratcheting up the difficulty a notch makes the game much harder and more tactical (this is probably the experience the designers intended). Since you'll be creeping and peeking more carefully through all the encounters, you'll lengthen the campaign significantly, and you'll enjoy it more.     Breaking up the campaign into several different narrative vignettes arguably weakens the impact of the plot as a whole, although that was never the strength of Call of Duty in the first place. What this does is let the designers put you in a lot of different, interesting situations. One memorable moment in the Russian campaign has you crawling through a raised pipeline to sneak behind German lines and into a fortified factory building. As you make your way through the pipeline, you'll spot and snipe small pockets of German infantry through holes in the pipe. When they fire back up at you, you'll notice bullets tearing through the rusted pipe, ripping open holes for shafts of light to poke through. It's a thrilling effect.     You'll also get quite a rush from both participating in and defending against all-out infantry charges across open city squares in Stalingrad. But just as the novelty of these wears off, you're shunted over to the British campaign in North Africa, where you'll do things like participate in night raids of small Tunisian towns, climb up to the top of spires to call in artillery on enemy tanks, and even drive a tank yourself. The American campaign has its own memorable moments, like scaling the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, or sniping at German mortar crews from the top of a grain silo. The game paces itself so that you're always on your toes, and you'll find yourself switching back and forth almost constantly from an offensive position to making a defensive stand against counterattacks on the objective you've just captured. Yes, at the end of the day you're still just shooting a lot of Nazis, but the constantly varying contexts of how and why you're doing it keep the game compelling from start to finish.   Massive amounts of infantry can populate the battlefield.   You won't be participating in these forays alone; far from it. In every setting you'll be surrounded by what seems like dozens of soldiers, both friends and foes, who move and act in a realistic fashion. Lots of your artificially intelligent mates will die by your side, along with the dozens of enemy soldiers you kill, but more will come in from the rear echelons to take their place. The designers often do a good job of reminding you that the war isn't just the infantry skirmish in which you're fighting. From time to time you'll see planes engaged in dogfights flying overhead, or when you complete an objective of capturing a German harbor, you'll call in a naval strike and see enemy merchant ships being sunk at the docks.     In each confrontation, you'll find yourself setting up at logical stopping points to exchange fire with German resistance. You can snipe dozens of enemies out of the windows and from the trenches in front of a house, for example, but reinforcements replace them. It never feels as though the game is cheaply spawning in more fodder for you; it just does a great job of making you feel like there are a realistic number of soldiers holed up in a building. You need to get a feel for the flow of each pitched battle, and this can be done by advancing your line when the enemy ranks look thin enough, and then breaking into the house or bunker. Your allies will follow you in and help you clear out the objective. Of course, if you're too meek at attacking and pressing your advantage, the enemy AI is wily and aggressive enough to take charge. They're not afraid to pour fire on your position and toss tons of grenades at you. Thankfully, a handy grenade danger indicator lets you know when and where you have to scurry away from an impending blast. When you do die, the game reloads very quickly, and you're even treated to a quote about war from various historical figures. One that sticks out in our minds is an ironic one from Solomon Short: ""The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.""       One aspect of gameplay that has changed since the first Call of Duty is that you no longer have a health bar. As you get shot, you'll see the screen growing redder and redder along the borders, and your character will start to grunt and pant. If you continue to take damage in a short span of time, you die. So as you get shot that first or second time, you need to get yourself back to cover to hide for a couple of seconds to recover. Once your vision clears, you're good to go again. Some people may be put off by this Halo-like gameplay conceit, but it actually works very well here, and it really is no more contrived than hunting down and hoarding health packs. In the context of Call of Duty 2, we'd go so far as to say that it's an improvement over the traditional health system, as you never find yourself at a tough spot without enough health or medikits. Ammo's never an issue either, as there's never a shortage of dead bodies to loot for guns, bullets, and grenades. The focus stays squarely on the fight.   Every pitched battle in the game is intense.   Speaking of grenades, the other major new gameplay conceit is the use of smoke grenades. You can pop these in front of machine-gun nests or to obscure the view of enemy snipers, making infantry charges a more viable option. The smoke effect looks outstanding and comes in handy in both the single- and multiplayer aspects to neutralize the effectiveness of fixed machine-gun nests and snipers. There's also nothing quite as exciting as running through a dense smoke cloud and finding yourself face-to-face with the enemy (the view from the opposite side is pretty cool as well).     The interface in Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 is also well-thought-out and designed. You can change your stance from kneeling to standing, or you can go prone to increase your accuracy. You can carry two weapons at a time, and switching between them is just a matter of tapping the Y button. The left and right buttons give you quick access to your smoke grenades and frag grenades, respectively, while the right trigger fires your weapon. The left trigger toggles your aim down the iron sight of your gun (or through the scope, in the case of a sniper rifle) for a slightly zoomed-in view, and for better accuracy. Hold it down to aim, and release it to switch back to a normal view. You can't move as fast while aiming, but the visual transition between moving and aiming is quick and smooth, making it almost second nature for you to want to use the aiming feature. Unfortunately, you can't peek around corners as you can in the PC version of the game.     Multiplayer Call of Duty 2 picks up right where the original left off, offering standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture-the-flag modes, along with the search-and-destroy mode from the original game, where one team has to plant a bomb and destroy one of two objectives while the other team defends. A mode called ""headquarters"" is also available, and it's probably the most enjoyable mode of the five available in COD2. In this mode, two different areas on a map are designated as capture points for either of the two teams. To score points, a team must control and set up a headquarters on one of the two areas. Once that's set up, points begin increasing for the controlling team. The other team must attempt to overrun the position to try to stop the points from ticking up. During the time a headquarters is set up, the defending team members can't respawn (if they're killed) until their headquarters is overrun or the HQ expires. Once one of those two things happens, capture points are changed to different locations, and the teams begin anew to try to set up a base. The nature of capturing and defending--and a constantly shifting HQ location--makes this mode fun, because teams must adapt to different roles quickly and on the fly. As far as weapon balance goes, there's a predictable relationship between bolt-action rifles, semiautomatic rifles, assault rifles, and submachine guns. The smoke grenades can also change battlefield dynamics greatly, as snipers can sometimes find their favorite killing fields obscured. The shotguns are also extremely powerful in close-quarters situations, and they're fun to use.    Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 also adds a four-player split-screen multiplayer mode for playing with friends on a single TV. The hardware never breaks a sweat, maintaining a crisp 60 frames per second even with action going on in so many windows. The problem is that the maps in the game are too large to really lend themselves to just four players. You can play any of the game modes, but playing two-on-two CTF or HQ is kind of silly. What's unfortunate about the online multiplayer action is that it's limited to just eight players on Xbox Live. The maps are definitely more viable with eight players than with just four, but you'll still find, in a lot of cases, that there's a little too much room to roam around. The action can still be fun, and the network code is very smooth, but those who've played the PC version know that the maps and game modes really play out better with more than just eight players. If you have the inclination to move a bunch of Xbox 360s and TVs together, system link brings the number of supported players up to 16.     The presentation in Call of Duty 2 is also topflight. Each mission is introduced with video footage from the Military Channel, as well as documentary-style narration that helps set the historical setting for what you're about to do. The game's graphics are also excellent, whether you play on an HDTV or a regular TV. If you play the game at HD resolutions, you'll find that there's no discernible difference between the Xbox 360 game and the PC one. The levels are just as well appointed, the textures are razor-sharp, and there's a great amount of detail in the character models. The effects from smoke grenades and explosions also look wonderful.   Smoke grenades can help obscure the view of enemy machine gunners and snipers.   Most importantly, though, Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 runs buttery smooth--even smoother than the PC version did for us in a lot of cases. Areas and situations that would cause most PCs to hitch up run perfectly fine on the Xbox 360 version. If you play on a non-HDTV, you do lose some of the sharpness and detail. But the game still looks better than just about any shooter we've played on a regular Xbox, and the frame rate seems even higher than when you play at HD resolutions, making up somewhat for the decline in texture detail. Sound is where Call of Duty 2 excels like no other FPS. From the stirring score that kicks up during key moments, to the top-notch gun and explosion effects, the game sounds fantastic. And if you have a Dolby 5.1 setup, you'll appreciate this aspect of the game even more. The speech is also pretty good, particularly the yelling that your squadmates and enemies do during battle, which plays right in to your excitement and tension as you fight.     Aside from the small-scale online matches, Call of Duty 2 is just about everything you'd hope for and expect from a next-generation first-person shooter. Its varied campaign, excellent sound and gameplay design, and generally good AI make it a worthy successor to the original game on the PC. At the same time, though, it's still a World War II shooter. So if you've decided you've grown weary of them, Call of Duty 2 doesn't do that much new to bring you back in to the fold. What Call of Duty 2 does do well is nail down just about all aspects that define an ideal first-person shooter. If you liked the original and have been thirsting for more, Call of Duty 2 will definitely deliver. And if you haven't experienced a Call of Duty game before, then get ready for an incredible experience in Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360.  


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817,WarioWare: Twisted! ,8.8, WarioWare: Twisted! is a great game that any Nintendo portable owner can enjoy.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/9/9/21374-61899.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warioware-twisted-review/1900-6124308/,pos,"
  That greedy, low-down, lovable knucklehead Wario is back, and he's got a bunch of new weird minigames designed to assail your sanity in the form of WarioWare: Twisted! for the Game Boy Advance. Though this game is out in North America as the third portable installment in the franchise, it was released prior to the Nintendo DS WarioWare game, Touched!. But regardless of the order of release, WarioWare: Twisted! is a great game that any Nintendo portable owner can enjoy.   WarioWare: Twisted! incorporates a spin sensor into its cartridge.   The hook in Twisted! lies in its specialized hardware. The cartridge has a compasslike sensor inside that detects when it's turned. Every game--with the exception of one series that uses only the A button--is played by turning the GBA to make things happen onscreen. The feedback you get, both onscreen and from the cart's built-in rumble feature, feels incredibly natural and really makes the whole thing work.    So the aim of the game is to spin your GBA around and around to make the various minigames go. The variety of minigames is, once again, completely astounding, and though it's true that you're just sort of spinning the handheld around for almost every game, the games are different enough to prevent you from feeling like you're doing the same thing again and again. Some games, like the one where you need to push a toothpick through a set of teeth to remove some stuck food, require a lot of precision, while other games require much more drastic movement. One entire section of games deals with gravity and has you rotating things to change where the center of gravity is. And, of course, there are a series of games based on old Nintendo classics, reworked around the spin sensor. So you'll sink a putt in Golf by rotating the system to line up your shot. And you'll even get to play condensed versions of Super Mario Bros. levels using rotation to make Mario run. All in all, there's a good variety, which makes the game modes that throw all of the game's different styles together pretty exciting.    As you play through the story mode to unlock new tiers of games, you'll also be collecting lots of little side items, which go to a souvenirs menu in the game. Some of these items are simple little doohickeys that you can mess around with, while others are expanded versions of some of the minigames you'll find in the main game. There are a lot of different and interesting items to collect, giving this game some legs. If you get hooked on it--which is likely, given the game's addictive, opiate-like nature--you'll happily spend several more hours bettering your high scores and striving to unlock every last shred of action the game has to offer.   Gimmicky? Perhaps, but it's a gimmick that doesn't get stale.   Graphically, the game isn't exactly a technical masterpiece, but it more than makes up for that by being one of the most charming-looking games around. Each minigame has its own look, varying from polygonal art to hand-drawn characters. The graphical theme is that there is no theme, and this helps add to the game's crazy feel. The sound effects and music are also great, and as you'd expect, the music heightens in pitch and speed as you get further and further in, adding to the frantic nature of the overall game.    While it would have been nice to see some multiplayer modes or other, more-drastic changes implemented, WarioWare: Twisted! is just about everything you could want out of a WarioWare sequel. The spin sensor feels less like a gimmick and more like a tightly integrated feature that makes the entire game feel inventive and unique. Owners of any of Nintendo's GBA-compatible handheld systems are sure to have a great time with WarioWare: Twisted!.    
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818,MVP Baseball 2005 ,8.8," If you're looking for a realistic and feature-rich baseball video game, you can't go wrong with MVP Baseball 2005.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/7/5/2213875-box_mvpb05.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mvp-baseball-2005-review/1900-6119297/,pos,"
  MVP Baseball 2005 doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. EA Sports has simply taken last year's game, improved it in myriad ways, and then tacked on a few new features to make the end result that much more appealing. Some of these upgrades are significant, such as the addition of an ownership-based franchise mode and the inclusion of single-A minor league teams, not to mention the ability to finally be able to set up custom tournaments in the online mode (in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions). Other upgrades are minor, such as the optional hitter's eye, batter's box, and manager tirade features. Meanwhile, some upgrades are downright subtle, like all the graphical tweaks and extra player animations that ultimately add up to help this latest game look and feel even more realistic than last year's.   MVP Baseball 2005 is easy to play, despite the sim-style controls and numerous franchise options.   Like every other baseball video game, MVP Baseball 2005 includes all 30 official Major League Baseball teams and stadiums, as well as the more than 1,000 individual players that populate each team. Last year's game was the first to include authentic minor league teams and actual minor league players by including double-A and triple-A-level farm teams. This year's installment now includes single-A ball clubs as well, giving each MLB team three levels of minor league farm clubs. Two legends teams, 63 legendary players, 15 classic stadiums, five fantasy parks, and more than 100 retro uniforms round out the list of included ""stuff.""  Rosters are current as of January 12, 2005, and the game even includes the Washington Nationals, along with their temporary home, RFK Stadium. New rosters can be downloaded to the Xbox and PS2 versions of the game by accessing their online play menus.    As far as play modes go, MVP Baseball 2005 includes an exhibition mode, a manager's mode, two different franchise modes, a scenario editor, and a handful of baseball-themed practice games. The exhibition mode, of course, lets you quickly set up a game against another team, and it lets you both pick a starting pitcher and adjust your lineup, if need be. Fans of text-based baseball management simulations, which are popular on the PC platform, will appreciate the manager mode, where each at-bat is simulated based on the choices you make before the opening pitch. You don't actually see the players swing or make plays. Instead, you pick from a list of managerial choices, and the outcome of each play is printed onscreen in a running box score. The scenario editor is also fairly interesting. It lets you adjust 20 different variables--such as the teams involved, the inning, the count, who's on base, and so on--so you can set up every possible baseball scenario that has ever occurred in the history of the sport.    This year's game contains not one but two comprehensive franchise modes. The first is called dynasty mode, and it lets players draft and manage a team for up to 120 full seasons, including spring training games. Responsibilities include setting lineups, making trades, and shuffling players up and down through the team's three minor league farm clubs. Team chemistry, rivalries, and player moods are also variables in the dynasty mode that can be strengthened or weakened by win/loss records, player salaries, playing time, and position in the batting order or pitching rotation. The game also makes things interesting by giving you a constantly changing series of one-year and three-year goals to live up to. Meeting these goals boosts your managerial rating and team chemistry. Failing to do so has an opposite effect. Games in the dynasty mode can be played in real time, or entire chunks of the season can be simulated in one fell swoop. The dynasty mode in MVP Baseball 2004 had a nasty bug that made it impossible for computer-generated players to evolve into A-list superstars unless you actually played at least 95 percent of your team's games. That was fixed in the 2005 release. Also, it's now possible to give your players an added stats bonus by playing the batting and pitching minigames during spring training.   You can put together a stadium, buy concessions stalls, and track team finances in the new owner's mode.   The second franchise-style mode in MVP Baseball 2005 is called owner's mode, and, much like the similar mode in EA's Madden NFL games, it tacks ownership and financial responsibilities on to the already feature-rich dynasty mode. Here you can set ticket and concessions prices, hire staff, buy and sell new stadium shops, schedule promotional giveaways, and buy all sorts of stadium upgrades (such as scoreboards, additional seats, home run fireworks, luxury boxes, and so on). The overriding goal is to run the team for 30 years and retire with as much money in the bank as possible. To aid this goal, there are a variety of player, team, and financial reports to look at that show your team's progress on a daily and yearly basis. One of the more interesting aspects of the owner's mode is that it also lets you design a custom ballpark for your team. The ballpark editor isn't very powerful, because it only lets you pick from a set list of various locations, field shapes, and seat colors, as well as specific wall, grass, and dirt designs. However, it does at least let you add on additional seating levels and grandstands throughout the course of your career.    Both the dynasty and owner's modes keep track of all sorts of events and statistics that diehard baseball fans want to see in a video game. Injuries and suspensions occur throughout the season, requiring you to adjust your lineups accordingly. Other teams will offer trades, and some of your own players will ask to be traded. It's up to you whether you choose to act on or ignore their requests. Games are sometimes canceled due to rainouts, which the computer handles by automatically rescheduling the contest at a later date, sometimes as a day/night doubleheader. On the statistics side of things, the game keeps a running tally of current season and previous season statistics in 64 different categories, along with 120 years' worth of league leader statistics.    Once again, where MVP Baseball 2005 really distinguishes itself from other baseball games is in the amount of control it gives you over the specific aspects of pitching, hitting, and fielding. You can control both the speed and accuracy of pitches, where your hitters aim the bat, how hard your fielders throw, and even what kind of slides your base runners use when going for an extra base. The controls use every single button and stick on the controller, but the steep learning curve pays off by making you feel like you're a part of the action.    The pitch meter is back.   The pitching interface in MVP Baseball 2004 was so innovative that other games are using it this year. The process of pitching in MVP Baseball 2005 hasn't changed much. After you press a button to select a pitch, a meter appears above your pitcher's arm and starts to fill up. You want to let go of the button when the indicator inside the meter gets near the red zone at the top, which sets the strength and effectiveness of the pitch. Then you press the button one more time when the indicator passes back through the green zone near the bottom of the meter; this sets the accuracy of the pitch. In this manner, you can control the effectiveness and accuracy of each pitch with two quick button presses. One very welcome improvement to the pitch meter in the 2005 installment is the addition of yellow zones in the accuracy portion of the meter. In last year's game, pressing the button when the indicator was even just a touch outside the green zone could result in a very wild pitch. Now, if your timing is off a little and you push the button when the indicator is in one of the yellow zones, your pitch will still be pretty accurate. The sizes of the different red, yellow, and green zones vary by pitcher, and the zones gradually decrease in size throughout the course of a game as the pitcher's stamina decreases.    The hitting interface is more straightforward, although it too provides a healthy degree of control over a player's actions. There aren't any batting cursors to deal with. Instead, hitting involves timing your swing so that you lay wood on the ball when it's in the strike zone. If you swing too early or too late, or if the ball is outside the zone, there's a good chance you'll miss altogether or induce a weak grounder or pop-up. Hitters are generally pretty good about making accurate swings, but if you want to adjust the swing angle on your own, you can do so using the left thumbstick (up for fly balls, down for grounders, and left or right to aim the hit toward a specific side of the diamond). New to this year's game is the ability to adjust your hitter's position in the batter's box by holding the right shoulder button and pressing left or right on the left thumbstick. The range of adjustment isn't major, so you can execute a step in either direction, but it's nice how the batter's hot and cold zones also move to reflect the hitter's new location in the box. Another feature that was added to the hitting interface is something called ""the hitter's eye."" In a nutshell, the ball flashes red, green, yellow, or white as the pitch leaves the pitcher's hand, which tells you what type of pitch it is. This doesn't tell you where the pitch will cross the plate, but it does give you a hint as to how early or late to time your swing. Owners of last year's game will also be very happy to know that the lefty home run bug has been fixed in MVP Baseball 2005. Lefty's had less power across the board, making it very difficult to hit home runs with them. That's not the case this year.    The fielding and baserunning interfaces use the same diamond-shaped button layout that the majority of baseball video games in the past five years have used, which means you can throw to specific bases or control individual runners with the touch of a button. Runners can be made to steal bases by pressing one of their respective buttons and then tapping the left shoulder button. Stolen base attempts can also be queued up before the pitcher makes his delivery by tapping the appropriate direction on the digital pad. This feature is great because it lets you call for a stolen base attempt without having to fumble with any buttons during the pitcher's windup.     Fielders have a throwing meter that's similar to the one used for pitching, except it solely represents the trade-off between power and accuracy. Optimally, you want to let go of the button once you've put enough power into the throw...but before the indicator drifts in to the red zone. Let go too soon or too late and the ball may take a hop or sail past its intended target. MVP 2005 simulates the effects of off-balanced throws and diving catches by adjusting the size of the red area depending on how your player caught the ball.    You'll notice many new player animations this year, even for things as simple as foul tips.   EA Sports adds an even greater degree of control over fielding and running with what the company calls ""big play control."" The right thumbstick lets you command your fielders to dive after the ball or make a run up the outfield wall. When you're on the base paths, the right stick lets you adjust the length of leadoffs while a runner is on base, as well as lets you select the type of slide your runners perform as they reach subsequent bases. Press right or left on the stick and you'll perform a hooking slide. Press up or down on the stick and you'll dive in head- or feetfirst. This year's game also lets you combine the different slides by pointing the stick in a diagonal direction. For instance, you can perform a diving hook-slide by pressing up and to the right.    It's wonderful MVP offers so much specific control over each aspect of the game, because this helps draw players in and makes them feel like nothing is being left to chance. Once you familiarize yourself with the controls, you can influence how accurate a pitcher's throws are, where the batter hits the ball, how far your base runner's lead off, and when your runners advance. Thankfully, the physics behind the ball, as well as the many thousands of different player animations, work together with the simulation-style controls to put forth a strikingly authentic rendition of baseball. Players transition seamlessly from catching the ball to throwing it, and there seem to be an endless number of different animations for various ways to step on the bag or tag a runner out. It's seeing that attention to detail and observing the players in motion that makes learning the controls so worthwhile.    Other positive aspects of the gameplay include hot and cold zones for hitters, as well as subscreens that can be used to both track pitch location and analyze swings. In addition, there are commands that let you bean and walk batters, warm-up pitchers in the bullpen, calls for mound visits, and instigate bench-clearing brawls. Manager tantrums have also been added to this year's game. When an umpire makes a call on a close play, you can push a button on the controller to send the manager out to argue your case. The more times you push the button, the hotter the manager will get, up to the point that he'll actually kick dirt around and get ejected from the game. Mound visits are particularly useful, because they can boost a pitcher's stamina if used in the right situation. If you send the manager to the mound in late innings or right after the pitcher surrenders a towering home run, the visit could increase the pitcher's stamina by five or 10 percentage points. However, if you go up too early or for no apparent reason, you run the risk of angering the pitcher and having his stamina drop by five or 10 points.    Now you can adjust the hitter's stance in the batter's box, which also adjusts his hot and cold zones as well.   One gameplay-related feature that's worth noting specifically is the tuning options menu, which allows you to individually adjust 46 different game-balance, physics, and AI settings to better reflect your idea of how realistic or challenging the game should be. If you feel that hits don't have enough pop, fielders aren't running as fast as they should be, or pitches are coming in too fast, you can adjust those settings. By default, the game is already configured to turn in a very realistic rendition of hardball, especially since the outfielders this year don't run as slowly or throw as weakly as they did last year.    Along with serving up all the plays and options that people want from a baseball video game, MVP Baseball 2005 also does an excellent job of duplicating the atmosphere that you'd find in an actual major league ballpark. The overall presentation strikes a good balance between broadcast-style flair and in-park realism.    All the sounds of the ballpark are present, so you'll hear little things, like the crack of the bat, the sound of the ball rolling in the turf, and traffic and industrial noise outside. Additionally, you'll hear big things, like players yelling out baserunning or throwing hints to their teammates while the ball is in play, in addition to spectators cheering good plays or catcalling specific players. Ballpark sound systems blast player introductions and belt out music clips for each member of the home team. When an inspirational queue meant to instigate stomping or clapping comes over the public address system, the crowd will clap and stomp along, just like a real crowd would.    Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow provide the running commentary track. Overall, their play calling is accurate and rarely lags behind the action. Krukow has the analyst role, so he primarily chimes in with historical background and snide comments. His pre-game and between-inning monologues provide a wealth of information, assuming you don't push a button to skip past them, and he usually says something different regarding specific players and teams each time you play a new game. Kuiper, meanwhile, contributes the major share of the running play-by-play. His vocabulary is limited in some areas, which means you'll hear him repeat many of the same phrases multiple times per game--especially on balls and strikes. The enthusiasm level behind his delivery syncs up nicely with the pace of the game and the tone of the crowd though, so his lack of word choice isn't as jarring as it potentially could have been.    Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow provide the running commentary track. Overall, their play calling is accurate and rarely lags behind the action. Krukow has the analyst role, so he primarily chimes in with historical background and snide comments. His pre-game and between-inning monologues provide a wealth of information, assuming you don't push a button to skip past them, and he usually says something different regarding specific players and teams each time you play a new game. Kuiper, meanwhile, contributes the major share of the running play-by-play. His vocabulary is limited in some areas, which means you'll hear him repeat many of the same phrases multiple times per game--especially on balls and strikes. The enthusiasm level behind his delivery syncs up nicely with the pace of the game and the tone of the crowd though, so his lack of word choice isn't as jarring as it potentially could have been.    Visually, MVP Baseball 2005 is a real treat. EA Sports broke the bank last year by including hundreds of different animations for not just flashy plays but routine plays as well. The company's further outdone itself this year. If you want to see snap throws, single-motion tosses, and throws from the knees, you'll see a lot of that here. If you prefer to see players lazily grabbing the ball and then stepping on the bag, you'll see plenty of that too. It's impressive how it's possible to play dozens of games and never see a catch or putout happen the same way twice. The graphics, in general, are sharper than they were last year, and the animation is much smoother as well. Player movements are more fluid and less jerky, their body language and facial features, including eye movements, are more realistic, and the transitions between in-game graphics, cutaways, and replays are no longer plagued with jitters and lag. This last improvement is especially obvious on the PS2 version, where the picture-in-picture strikeout replays used to chug their ways on and off the screen. This year, they slide in and out of frame like the professional overlays you'd see on an actual TV broadcast.     The miniature baserunning cameras that were first displayed in MVP Baseball 2003 are back for a third year running, and they haven't changed at all. You can still see what each of your base runners is doing in a tiny window in the upper right of the screen, and you can still take control of each one to initiate leadoffs, steals, or retreats by pressing the button shown next to his image.    Player models are believably authentic. Scrawny players, such as Ichiro Suzuki, look anorexic, while overweight players, such as Sidney Ponson and David Wells, have obvious beer bellies. Meanwhile, muscular players, like Jason Giambi and Manny Ramirez, look chiseled, but not to the point that it looks like they've been taking the video game equivalents of ""the cream"" and ""the clear."" The majority of player faces actually match their portraits. Fan favorites, like Ichiro Suzuki, Kazuo Matsui, and Johnny Damon, look absolutely identical to their real-life counterparts. Each player has one or two different on-deck and batter's-box rituals, as well as a full assortment of reaction shots for close plays and strikeouts. Furthermore, uniforms actually accumulate dirt and grass stains based on the plays that occur on the field. All this stuff adds up to give MVP Baseball 2005 some of the best-looking and most believable player models ever seen in a baseball video game.   Picture-in-picture base-runner cameras show you exactly what your runners are up to while you're at the plate.   The stadiums are fairly detailed. Some are missing a walkway or a set of seats here and there, but you really need to be looking for specifics to notice. All the key landmarks that define each stadium are present, so you'll see the fountain in Anaheim, the apple at Shea, the cola bottle at SBC Park, the brick wall at Petco, and more. The outside of each stadium has been put together using a combination of polygon-based structures and photographic elements. As a result, the majority of skylines look pretty accurate. The banners and advertisements hanging inside the stadiums all feature the actual logos and slogans of real companies, including (specifically) Donruss, EA Sports, Majestic, and New Era. This lends an extra dose of authenticity to the surroundings. One of the nicer graphical aspects of the stadiums in MVP Baseball 2005, and this was true last year also, is that the Jumbotron displays don't just duplicate the batting interface. Instead, they show a good variety of generic field views and home plate camera angles. Some stadiums have outfield scoreboards that update throughout the game, although some do not. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason as to why one park does and one doesn't. Every stadium has fireworks displays for whenever the home team goes yard, and those stadiums that feature specific celebrations in real life, such as Philly's (and its bell) and New York's (and its apple), present those same festivities in the game.   So what's wrong with MVP Baseball 2005? The list of gripes is brief, and it's pretty much identical to the list of complaints that was levied last year. The absence of traditional season and playoff modes means you're stuck playing seasons and playoff games in the dynasty or owner's modes, which both saddle players with loads of extraneous teams, options, and reports that really aren't pertinent to just playing some games or starting the playoffs. The dynasty and owner's modes also don't let you import a new roster once the season has started. This makes it impossible to update the rosters to reflect the current lineup of your favorite team without starting over from scratch. The other area where the game comes up short, at least compared to other baseball video games, is in statistics. Stats are tracked in 64 categories and are split into righty and lefty matchups. However, night-versus-day and domed-versus-outdoor splits aren't included.  In general, the graphics are sharper, and the animation is much smoother compared to last year's game.  For those of you who own all three major consoles, the big question is, which version is the best? Each version essentially controls equally as well with the respective system's stock gamepad. You have to hold down the Z button and press another button on the GameCube controller to access the bullpen and pitch-history screens, whereas those screens are accessible in the PS2 and Xbox versions with a single button press. The GameCube version doesn't require any additional button maneuvers for things like hitting, pitching, baserunning, or fielding, though. The PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions both include online support, which lets you use your Internet connection to play against other players online, as well as download roster updates throughout the season. The GameCube game is strictly offline only, meaning you'd be stuck with preseason rosters if you pick up that version. Graphically, the three versions are quite similar to one another when viewed on standard televisions. The colors in the PlayStation 2 version look muddier than those in the other two, particularly with regard to the way uniforms and outfield walls are shaded, but they're not muddier to such an extent that you'll be distracted while playing the game. All three games have support for 480 progressive-scan displays and Dolby Pro Logic II audio. The Xbox version goes a step farther and supports 720 progressive-scan widescreen displays and Dolby Digital audio systems.   Getting online with MVP Baseball 2005 is pretty straightforward. Once you log in, you'll notice a menu of choices: news, roster updates, quick play, online lobby, online events, and quick tournament. The quick play and online lobby options let you set up an exhibition game against another player. Tournaments have been added to the online mode this year, and they can be selected from the online events and quick tournament menus. The online events menu lets you enter various tourneys, or you can create your own, which can involve anywhere from four to 16 players. Different settings, such as ranked/unranked, number of innings, team type, and roster options, can also be adjusted. The quick tournament mode is a simplified version of the online events mode in that it lets you set up a tournament for four or eight players and includes only a limited array of settings adjustments.   If you don't like a particular call, you can have the manager come out to argue.  The smoothness of online play on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox really depends on how good you and your opponent's connections are. When there isn't much lag, the game moves along at the same pace it does offline. Too much lag can lead to delayed button inputs, however, which causes the graphics to stutter, making it difficult to both use the pitch meter and make a timely swing. It's a good idea to pop into one of the regional lobbies to match up against someone with a green connection-status indicator. Suffice it to say, playing the game using analog dialup on the PlayStation 2 Network Adapter or against someone with a dial-up connection is almost impossible. Stick to broadband and you'll be much happier. One nice thing about the online mode this year, besides the abilities to use custom rosters and set up tourneys, is that you can now pick your starting pitcher and adjust your lineup before a game starts. Last year's iteration didn't allow any changes to be made to the rotation or lineup, so it's nice to see that silly flaw fixed this time around.  It's a shame the GameCube version doesn't include online play. While there's certainly enough value to be had in the offline modes by playing through the different franchise modes and unlocking all the various retro players and jerseys, as well as by hooking up a second controller for couch-based multiplayer, you'd really be better off getting one of the other versions (if possible). This is because they offer multiplayer exhibition games and tournaments, in addition to free roster updates, all using the same Internet connection you're probably using to read this review right now.  The bottom line is that if you're looking for a realistic and feature-rich baseball video game, you can't go wrong with MVP Baseball 2005. 
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819,Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney ,8.8," Though the game is heavily text-driven and there's little replayability, it's a bright, rich, and lengthy adventure that could hardly have been improved upon otherwise.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/5/5/0/2218550-box_pwaa.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/phoenix-wright-ace-attorney-review/1900-6135422/,pos,"
  Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney revitalizes both the adventure genre and the Nintendo DS touch-screen functionality by combining an enthralling story with interesting characters, in addition to providing a unique way of interacting with them, case evidence, and the game's scenery. Though the game is heavily text-driven and there's little replayability, it's a bright, rich, and lengthy adventure that could hardly have been improved upon otherwise. If you're interested in a clever, well-presented murder-mystery adventure game, then you'd be hard-pressed to find anything that suits your needs better than Phoenix Wright.   Phoenix Wright is adorable in his awkwardness.   The game has you controlling Phoenix Wright, a lawyer fresh off the bar who is, initially, more than a little nervous. The first case you take on, a murder trial in defense of Phoenix's dopey best friend, Larry Butz, serves as a tutorial in which law firm chief Mia Fey guides you through the ins and outs of courtroom procedure. Each of the game's five cases begins in the same way, as you're treated to a brief cinematic that shows the events of the murder, during which you'll usually get to view the killer. In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, discovering the killer is not the surprise; instead, it's the way in which you bring him or her to justice. The events surrounding the murder always end up leading to the false accusations of innocent witnesses, and as a defense attorney, it's Phoenix's job to get a verdict of ""not guilty,"" despite the lying witnesses, shady prosecutors, and a judge who sometimes forgets the letter of the law.    The majority of the visuals appear on the top screen. Though the game has little in the way of cutscenes, the story is told through a sequence of still shots and through the different exaggerated animations of the characters. There are small details in every given scene that help to give it life, such as moving mouths and other body parts, but for the majority of the game you're working from frame to frame. This is so well presented that you'll hardly notice the gameplay is barely animated. For most of the gameplay, the lower screen is used to forward the text. You can simply tap it at the end of each line to get to the next one. However, during many sequences you must use the touch screen to accomplish something else, whether it's selecting an answer from multiple choices, navigating through a tree of menus, or, most compellingly, pinpointing locations and evidence. The use of the touch screen in this game is perfectly executed, and the only problem with it is that it leaves you wanting to do more.    Each trial begins with witness testimony, and your objective is to find flaws in it, which, since the judge follows a ""guilty until proven innocent"" mantra, is the only way to get the defendant off the hook. After the witnesses give their testimonies, the cross-examination begins. During the cross-examination, you're free to scroll through witness testimony line by line to better dissect it. There are two ways to reveal problems with testimony. The first is by ""pressing"" the witness on particular statements. You can do this silently on the touch screen or audibly by shouting ""Hold it!"" into the DS microphone. Though you can use the microphone in several different ways--and it certainly is satisfying--there's never a requirement to use it.    The second method of procuring information from witnesses is to find a contradiction between testimony and a piece of evidence held in the court record. Throughout the game and trial, you'll acquire different pieces of evidence necessary for winning cases. You'll never need to decide whether something is important or not, because the game will do that automatically. So there's never any chance of you coming to trial unprepared. Within the court record, there's a brief description and a picture of the item. The description almost always clues you in to the facts surrounding the object's importance, whether it reveals a detail about timing, location, or the method in which the object was used. Once you've scrolled to the line in the testimony where the contradiction lies, you can select the evidence proving the contrary, and you can, again, either object silently or vocally into the microphone. To prevent you from objecting to every statement with every piece of evidence, there's a meter that consists of five exclamation points. When you wrongfully object, the judge will penalize you once. Get all five wrong and you lose the case and must start over. Although, admittedly, this is difficult to do if you simply pay attention to the events of the case--and use a little common sense.   I am the law!   The two methods of procuring information will be your primary tools for breaking down the witnesses and getting them to recant their testimonies. Generally, the witnesses will revise their testimonies a few times before you can push them to confession. The judge, although disdainful of many of the activities that go on in the courtroom (particularly when you falsely object), seems to put up with the witnesses' many cover-ups, which might be frustrating if you try to take the law in Phoenix Wright seriously. In fact, you might as well suspend your disbelief about the whole procedure, since, although it feels fairly close to reality, many things go on during the proceedings that would probably horrify actual members of the legal system. Though slightly agitating, it works well within the context of the story, and you'll just feel compelled to work that much harder for the underdog: Phoenix Wright.   The events of the game are not limited to just courtroom drama, as you'll take your investigation to the scenes of crimes, interviewing witnesses on their home turf and interacting with the defendants and police officers down at the precinct. For each trial other than the first one, you'll begin with the news of the murder and the subsequent arrest. Then you'll meet up with the defendant to take on the case, and after that you'll get the opportunity to explore the scene of the crime. This part of the procedure is critical for procuring evidence and for getting testimonies you'll have to uncover in the courtroom. This gives the game a whole Law and Order vibe, as you play the role of both the detective and the lawyer for each case.  The witnesses are certainly a handful.  At many points during the game, you'll be given the opportunity to choose between multiple options, whether it's to direct a line of questioning a certain way or to reveal new information. Though you'll have a genuine desire to get the correct answer (probably because of the rich reactions of the characters), all choices inevitably lead to the same result. So if you pick ""Give up"" as opposed to ""Press harder,"" your legal partner will stop you and say ""Oh come on, you can't give up now!"" This forces you to object anyway. This makes the gameplay really safe, and if you remember that it's almost impossible to lose the game, you might not be compelled to think out the reasoning fully. Instead, you may guess for a heavy portion of the game. What makes the gameplay significant, though, and what will ultimately drive you to want to come up with the correct answer is the way in which the characters interact with one another...and with the pitiful but adorable Phoenix Wright. It's almost impossible not to find him endearing, and the numerous ways in which other people in the courtroom--including the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and even the witnesses--pick on him will have you searching to come up with any way to get him an edge.  The presentation of the game is really quite unique and outstanding. The graphics are simple but work very well to reveal the personality and mood of the characters. Though they're not taken from an existing anime, they're cohesive enough that you would think this entirely probable. Each one is over-the-top, from the naive Phoenix and the severe but gullible judge, to the sexy, evil, and quirky characters you get on the witness stand.  Very much like any evening drama or soap opera, you'll revisit the same characters in multiple trials, and you'll learn more about them and their relationship to Phoenix as the game progresses. You'll get as much information about the characters in their appearances as you do from what they say to you, as everything is revealed in their mannerisms and in their reactions to the events of the case. And although it's almost always clear what Phoenix is thinking, since he generally grimaces about some new piece of evidence or the action of the other attorney, he frequently makes asides that reveal how he really feels about a person or something that's just happened. Of course, the music and sound effects do an excellent job of keeping you clued in to the drama as well. When things get particularly hectic for Phoenix, the music speeds up appropriately. It gets dour when times are tough, and a tuneful reveal plays when something noteworthy is discovered. There's an aspect of the game's atmosphere, most noticeable within the sound effects, that makes Phoenix Wright almost feel like a fighting game. The cross-examination graphic shows the two attorneys going head-to-head, and the sound of unsheathing swords plays during moments of conflict. It's this facet of the presentation that makes the game feel really unique and much more compelling than your average adventure game, and it gives you the incentive to really want to win each case.   The story has as many plot twists as an episode of Alias.   Phoenix Wright is a unique game that capitalizes on the DS touch screen and its microphone functionality wonderfully. Depending on your murder-mystery skills, you might find the occasional puzzle too difficult, or you might find the occasional puzzle offers you too much help. But despite being a little linear at times, it's completely satisfying. You'll get a kick out of uncovering clues, revealing different aspects of the characters' personalities, and ultimately solving each case. If Phoenix Wright starts any kind of trend, those fearing the demise of the adventure genre need not worry any longer. Adventure games are back and are hipper than ever. And they have Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney to thank for it. 
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'pieces', 'evidence', 'necessary', 'winning', 'cases', '.', 'You', ""'ll"", 'never', 'need', 'decide', 'whether', 'something', 'important', ',', 'game', 'automatically', '.', 'So', ""'s"", 'never', 'chance', 'coming', 'trial', 'unprepared', '.', 'Within', 'court', 'record', ',', ""'s"", 'brief', 'description', 'picture', 'item', '.', 'The', 'description', 'almost', 'always', 'clues', 'facts', 'surrounding', 'object', ""'s"", 'importance', ',', 'whether', 'reveals', 'detail', 'timing', ',', 'location', ',', 'method', 'object', 'used', '.', 'Once', ""'ve"", 'scrolled', 'line', 'testimony', 'contradiction', 'lies', ',', 'select', 'evidence', 'proving', 'contrary', ',', ',', ',', 'either', 'object', 'silently', 'vocally', 'microphone', '.', 'To', 'prevent', 'objecting', 'every', 'statement', 'every', 'piece', 'evidence', ',', ""'s"", 'meter', 'consists', 'five', 'exclamation', 'points', '.', 'When', 'wrongfully', 'object', ',', 'judge', 'penalize', '.', 'Get', 'five', 'wrong', 'lose', 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820,Midnight Pool ,8.8," Featuring a host of likable characters, Midnight Pool is the best game of billiards available on the mobile platform.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/7/8/2221178-ruvlyyd9fhh9eo_3vawlrfnfyp4mmjse.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/midnight-pool-review/1900-6121794/,pos,"
  Midnight Pool is a pool game that uses the same nightclub motif seen in last year's Block Breaker Deluxe. Unsurprisingly, pool is a much better fit for this nightlife theme than Arkanoid. Midnight Pool is reminiscent of Data East's Side Pocket games, both stylistically and qualitatively. Featuring a host of likable characters, Midnight Pool is the best game of billiards available on the mobile platform.   This is one of the best portable games of pool since Side Pocket for the Sega Game Gear.   When you load Midnight Pool, you'll be treated to an impeccable polyphonic MIDI version of ""Sweet Home Alabama."" This is incontrovertibly a sweet track, but it's probably not a great fit thematically. Only one of Midnight Pool's characters really fits Lynrd Skynrd's down-home tune: a bombastic sheriff with a ten-gallon hat. The others range from a Franco-African ladies' man, complete with offset beret, to a compulsive gambler with (presumably) rapidly graying hair. All are drawn in the manga-inspired style for which Gameloft is (in)famous. More importantly, the opponent artificial intelligence scales well and plays fairly realistically. Instead of consistently shooting at the same level, CPU-controlled players may experience hot streaks, and they may even choke. This makes for more exciting play. You can also play against another player by passing the phone back and forth.    In tournament mode, you'll place a bet before playing any of these characters. Should you win a game, you'll also benefit from cash generated by combo shots and by long runs of the table in which you pocket multiple balls consecutively. These incidental bonuses are the source of most of your cash. At the end of each round, your browbeaten opponent will present to you a final challenge: a trick shot. Most of these require the use of ball English, including the elusive massé. This is a conceit lifted directly from Side Pocket, and it's just as fun here. You can later attempt any of these challenges via the main menu.    The table is shown from an overhead perspective, and it's quite good-looking on the LG VX7000. It's possible to change the color of your cue, as well as the table itself. You'll gain new colors by beating opponents in tournament mode. These can be switched in the game's options menu.   The trick shots are invariably inventive and difficult to execute.   A dotted line helps you set up your shots, showing where the cue is aimed and where the cue ball is likely to head after first contact. You'll be on your own for bank shots or anything of that complexity, however. While some might consider the use of this shooting guide to be a kind of cheating, it's really necessary given the cell phone's screen.    Billiards is a great game to play on the go, and Midnight Pool instills the familiar pastime with a slick visual style and some challenging competition. If you're a fan of pool, this is the best representation of the sport ever to grace a wireless phone. It's also the only mobile pool game that's just as fun to play against the computer as against a buddy.  
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821,Airstrike II: Gulf Thunder ,8.8, Airstrike II: Gulf Thunder is a great $20 action game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/7/2/7/2216727-gulf.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/airstrike-ii-gulf-thunder-review/1900-6152108/,pos,"
  Airstrike II: Gulf Thunder is a classic overhead shooter in which you pilot one of three assault helicopters against an entrenched army of terrorists. The game's chock-full of bells and whistles, including many different types of cannons, missiles, and tertiary ordinances, a great variety of enemy craft, and boss fights. Dropping a tactical nuke on an enemy SAM site and then watching a couple of enemy pickups get crushed by the resulting pressure wave is sure to put a smile on your face. Furthermore, the game looks very sharp on its highest graphical settings, thanks to its smooth 3D models and various lighting effects. The sound effects, while generic, are varied enough to enhance the onscreen action. Your punitive military action is also accompanied by a couple of pulsating Euro-dance tracks.    Airstrike 2 boils the shooter genre down to its fundamentals--plenty of weapons, nimble aircraft, and lots of explosions. If you like action games, you'll find at least $20 worth of entertainment here.  
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822,Burnout Revenge ,8.8," The racing in Burnout Revenge is more intense than ever on the Xbox 360, but there's probably not enough new to get you hooked if you've played it elsewhere.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/1/1/2/2217112-box_boutrev.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/burnout-revenge-review/1900-6145478/,pos,"
  Six months ago, EA and Criterion released the fourth game in the Burnout series, Burnout Revenge. The game made some interesting refinements to the Burnout formula and was, generally speaking, totally radical. Now, Burnout Revenge is making an appearance on the Xbox 360 with better graphics, a bevy of new sound effects, and a few minor tweaks and tunings that tighten up the whole game a little bit. If you're late to the Burnout party, this is a great time to get involved and bust up some cars. But if you've spent the last six months playing Burnout Revenge on the Xbox or the PlayStation 2, there probably isn't enough new content here to get you excited all over again.   Burnout Revenge keeps track of your online rivalries, so you know if you have history with another driver.   Before we get into a description of what Burnout Revenge is all about, let's cover the new stuff in the Xbox 360 version. This one brings back full replays of each race. You can scan through the replays using basic, VCR-like controls and even clip and save 30-second snippets of your replays. You can then share these clips over Xbox Live, and there's a whole online clip vault, complete with rankings for the most-watched clips. Unfortunately, your camera control over the action is limited to a few preset viewpoints. A free-roaming camera option probably would have made this feature a little more entertaining.    Back on the Xbox and the PS2, crash mode started out with a golf swing-like meter that required you to hit buttons while the meter was in proper zones to get the best start. It was a neat idea, but it eventually led to you restarting right away anytime you didn't get that best start. On the Xbox 360, you get the best start every time, automatically.    The most obvious overhaul in this version of the game is in its presentation. The graphics have been given a nice bump up to bring them more in line with ""next-generation"" standards. The car models look nice and, most importantly, blast apart into a billion tiny pieces when they crash into stuff. For cars that are constantly crashing and getting dented up, though, they look a little too shiny. That said, the game's Xbox and PS2 roots show a bit, so the game doesn't look quite as impressive as some of the games that were developed from the ground up for Microsoft's new console. Additionally, the game looks overly dark on some display setups. The sound was one of the high points in the older versions of the game, and it's been vastly overhauled, as well. You'll hear every little scrape and bump. The engine noises are loud, and when you kick in the turbo boost, it sounds like afterburners kicking in. Even stuff like the noises that are made when you earn medals or time ticking down has been completely changed. The sound was already awesome, but the changes made to the 360 version make the action sound even more satisfying and dramatic.    The final and most significant change made to this version of Burnout Revenge affects its online play. As the game puts it, the online mode has a ""long memory"" for rivalries between players. As you take out other players in online events, the game starts to keep a tally of how many times you've caused a player to crash. That player then sees you as red on their player list, knowing that there's a score to be settled. But it all works in streaks, so if you bust someone up 20 times, they'll still only need to get revenge on you once to settle the score. This doesn't really make a huge change to how you play the game, since your ultimate focus is still on winning the race, but the way the game calls attention to other players makes the revenge aspect of the game much more interesting.    Like all Xbox 360 games, Burnout Revenge has a series of achievements that trigger the console's gamerpoints system. This game has a lot of separate achievements to get, some of which are as simple as uploading or recommending a replay clip. One achievement asks you to settle the score with one online opponent 100 times. So if you're hoping to get the full 1,000 points out of this one, it'll probably take you some time...or at least some online accomplices willing to let you win.    So if you're already familiar with Burnout Revenge on other systems, that's all you need to know. The changes are interesting, and if you're looking to play more of the game, this is the version to play. An additional race course or two would have been nice, but as it stands, it's probably not different enough to get you hooked on the game all over again. But if you aren't already intimately familiar with Burnout Revenge, there's more you need to know.    Burnout Revenge is the fourth game in a racing series that has put its focus on extremely high speeds and gnarly, car-disintegrating wrecks. You'll spend most of your offline time crashing your way through the world tour mode, which presents the game's different events while you work your way through multiple ranks, unlocking additional events and cars along the way.    The primary split is between crash events and races. Crash levels put you in a very specific spot, with traffic laid out ahead of you. It's your job to figure out where and when the optimal crash spot occurs and then crash your car accordingly, which usually sets off an insane chain reaction, resulting in ridiculous and glorious multivehicle pileups. Your goal varies from level to level, but it's always a dollar amount, so you'll have to cause as much damage as possible to reach those dollar amounts. Helping you to cause as much destruction as possible is the crashbreaker, a cool addition that lets you blow up your car once enough havoc has been wreaked. In some levels, you'll be able to pop off two or three crashbreakers in one attempt, if you're especially good at causing mayhem. The crash mode isn't quite as white-knuckle as the races are, but it's still pretty exciting. The Xbox 360 version has much faster load times than the previous versions of the game in crash mode, which makes retrying each event again and again to cause the most destruction possible more pleasant.   Crash events focus on causing huge pileups, while races have you bashing your opponents into walls for more boost.   Racing is the more visceral, heart-pounding side of Burnout Revenge. You'll get into a few different types of events as you go through the world tour. Standard races pit you against five other cars. Road Rage events tie your progression to how many opposing vehicles you can take out before time expires or before you destroy your car by wrecking too many times to continue. Eliminator races cause the last-place racer to blow up every 30 seconds until only the winner remains. Traffic attack gives you cash and extra time when you bash into traffic that's moving in the same direction as you are. Burning laps and preview events are time trials that put you in some of the game's fastest, most-difficult-to-control cars. Some of the races are offered in a crashbreaker variant a little later on in the world tour. This feature lets you bring the exploding-car action of crash mode into the races, giving you the tools to take out opposing racers if you happen to crash near them. All of the race modes force you to drive in a risky manner. You earn boost faster if you're driving through oncoming traffic, whizzing past trucks, and skidding around corners. This sort of forced danger, combined with the exciting back-and-forth battles with the other racers, is what makes Burnout so thrilling, and it's never been more exciting than it is here.    The world tour front end is more complicated than it needs to be. It starts out with one section for each rank. Each rank has a list of locations, and each location has a list of races. Sounds straightforward, right? But sometimes you'll unlock races in previous ranks while working up in higher ones, especially if you're focusing on crash events over race events, or vice versa. So you won't consistently move up to the higher ranks, as you'll constantly have to dig through the other ranks in search of events that you haven't completed yet. Additionally, the game seems to run out of new tracks and crash environments about halfway through. You'll race every single type of race on every possible track, both forward and backward. After awhile, it starts to get a little repetitive, but with each new rank, you do uncover a few new twists.   This picture can't properly convey how dramatic the game's sound effects are, so go watch a video or two.   Your choice of cars has also been made a little tougher. In Burnout 3, everything was spelled out for you right away. Each race fit into a class, and the most recent car you had in that class was usually the right one to use. Now, each car is rated in its top boost speed, its weight class (which tells you how likely it is to get pushed around the road by other cars, as well as how it handles around corners), and its crashbreaker force. When you unlock a new car, there's no guarantee that it'll be your new best vehicle, so selecting a vehicle takes a little more thought than it probably needs to. More often than not, though, the right-most car on your list is the one you'll want to use for races.    In all the single-player races, you'll go up against artificially intelligent racers that are governed by a very rubber-banded system that's intended to keep races close. This is usually the part that forces racing-game fans to turn away in disgust, but considering that the whole crux of Burnout Revenge is slamming into the other racers and fighting for position, the game absolutely needs this sort of AI system to work at all. As a result, you can expect to always have racers around you, creeping up on your back door when you're in the lead. In later races, the other cars get mean and really start trying to take you down. But on average, they're never too much to deal with.    The game allows for split-screen racing, including crash battle, where two racers play crash mode at the same time on the same track. But really, if you're going to play Burnout Revenge with more than one person, you want to play it online. Here, up to six players can compete in most of the single-player race types. Road rage becomes a team event online, with one team trying to finish a race while the other tries to take down the racing team. Crash battle and other variants of crash are also available online, but without the overview of the junction before you race, you'll have to go out of your way to memorize each pattern from its name alone. The racing and road rage modes are quite exciting online, and the addition of traffic checking really makes a difference.   Burnout Revenge offers a lot, but this version isn't much different than the one that came out six months ago.   It's been said before, but it's worth repeating: One of the most important things a racing game can do is properly convey what it feels like to be driving at ridiculously breakneck speeds. On the graphical side, it's several parts frame rate combined with a dash of great blur effects--perhaps with a little camera shaking thrown in for good measure. As simple as the formula sounds, most racing games fail to get it right. Despite a few spots where the frame rate takes a noticeable drop, Burnout Revenge is still the game to beat when it comes to delivering that feeling of flying around corners and through alleys at speeds north of 200 miles per hour. But this game isn't all speed with no substance. If you manage to stop for a second, take a look at the car models. They're not only incredibly smooth and shiny-looking, but also extremely cool car designs. Burnout might not be able to get licensed cars in the game, but with modern and occasionally flashy car designs like this, you almost wish someone would put them into actual production. Similarly, the environments look sharp, with terrific textures and great effects. Crashes and collisions have, obviously, been given special attention. Cars blast apart in even more dynamic ways this year, and explosions are truly terrifying.    While Burnout Revenge might not have enough new stuff in it to drag you back in if you've been playing it on other platforms, this is definitely the version to get if you're shopping around. It delivers solid, fast action, both online and off, and is easily the fastest, most exciting racing game available on the Xbox 360.  


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823,Project Gotham Racing 3 ,8.8, Project Gotham Racing 3 ushers in the next generation of gaming in high-speed style.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/4/1/2218741-box_pgr3.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/project-gotham-racing-3-review/1900-6140119/,pos,"
  With the launch of every new gaming console, certain titles define the technological capacity of that platform and usher in the next generation in style. For the Nintendo 64, it was Mario 64; for the original Xbox, it was Halo. Just days before the launch of the Xbox 360, we have a new candidate for that honor: Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 3, a gripping and intense racing game that is a welcome addition to the 360's launch lineup.   What could be better than driving the car of your dreams in race locales that look this good?   One of the hallmarks of the PGR series has always been its volume--the large numbers of tracks set in a variety of exotic locales, and a list of drivable cars that, based on sheer numbers alone, set the mouths of car aficionados agape. That number has been pared down considerably in PGR 3, to around 80 vehicles. But what an 80 it is. Instead of starting you out in a modest VW Corrado or Honda CRX, right off the bat in PGR 3 you'll have access to some of the hottest high-performance rides in the world. Models from elite makers such as Ferrari, TVR, RUFs, Mercedes, Lotus, and Shelby are available to you from the get-go--provided you have the credits to pay for them, of course.     Luckily, money comes quick in PGR 3, thanks to the game's centerpiece, the career mode. The mode's been split into two subsections--a solo career that has you take on artificial intelligence-controlled drivers, and an online career mode that pits you against real-life drivers in a number of online events. By completing events over a variety of difficulty levels (like in PGR 2, difficulty is noted by medals ranging from tin to platinum), you earn credits that pile up quickly and let you fill your garages (yes, note the plural) with the coolest collection of performance autos imaginable.    When it comes to mission variety, PGR 3's solo career mode will feel very familiar to anyone who's played the PGR series before. You'll have your straight-ahead street races, of course, which will pit you against one or more other opponents in a fight to the checkered flag, and elimination races--multilap sprints in which the last driver over the finish line is eliminated on each successive lap. There's more to do than simply drive fast--in the PGR world, driving with style is just as important as stomping on the accelerator and pointing your nose at the finish line. So the kudos system is back, serving as a measure of your ability to feather your car around corners, maintain awesome drifts around tight turns, and avoid the ever-present walls and other barriers.    Like the cash in PGR 3, kudos seem to be easier to earn this time around--though that could be a function of the incredible power of the cars in the game, which are at once very agreeable to drift-style driving, and fairly easy to control in the process. If you've got some touch behind the virtual wheel, for example, you can slalom your way down long straights, spinning your back wheels practically the entire time, racking up massive kudos along the way. In some timed runs, earning kudos will temporarily pause the countdown clock that you're running against; thus, these kudos versus time races are challenges that require a fine balance of race speed and skillful touch. As easy as kudos are to earn, however, you won't just breeze your way through the kudo-centric cone challenges. At the hardest difficulty level, these races require not only improvisation on the course, to ensure your combo chain isn't broken, but a sniper's accuracy behind the wheel, to navigate the tough placement of the cones. It can be frustrating or invigorating, depending on your mindset.   Motion blur effects and solid frame rate contributes to the game's thrilling sense of speed.     There's just enough variety to keep things moving forward, and it won't take you much time to get through either solo mode or the online career mode. We wrapped up the solo career mode with all silver medals in approximately eight hours of play. Obviously, there's an incentive to earn even better medals, as well as more credits, achievements, and badges; but with only 23 trophies available in solo career mode, it won't be long before you begin to explore other options in the game.    The other half of your career in PGR 3 will take place online in the appropriately named online career. Unlike playtime matches, racing in your online career is for keeps, as these are ranked matches. A complex system of player matching ensures that you're racing against opponents who not only share an agreeable network connection with you, but also are of like skill on the track. Unlike the solo career mode, your online career never really ends in PGR 3--you are simply on a quest to win as often as possible and improve your online ranking in the process. The challenge of running against unpredictable real life opponents adds value to a game whose single player game ends quicker than you might hope.    And that's as it should be. The real meat of any competitive Xbox 360 game is (or at least, should be) taking on real-life opponents from all over the world and enjoying the sounds of them choking on your exhaust. Just as in PGR 2, Project Gotham Racing 3's long-term appeal comes in its online features, which include the aforementioned online career mode, as well as the kind of quick-race and optimatch features that you've come to expect in online racing games.   The crowds gathered to watch you race will run to get out of your way should you crash into a wall.   When creating matches from scratch, you have three modes to choose from: street race, eliminator, and capture the track (along with team versions of street race and eliminator). Online street races and eliminator modes play exactly as they do in PGR 3's single-player game. In capture the track, your goal is to ""own"" as much of a particular course as you can by posting the fastest sector teams in specific sections of a track. The quicker you are over the course, the more of the track you'll own. Online performance was silky smooth in our test sessions with the game--we didn't notice any sort of lag or warping of vehicles. And, because it's been a while since we've played the last PGR game online, it's nice to see that beating loudmouths on Xbox Live is still as satisfying a simple pleasure as online gaming can provide.     Summing up Project Gotham's feel behind the wheel is best served with one term: forgiving. We've never driven a TVR Cerbera Speed Twelve, but we suspect it's a lot more difficult to nimbly drift the rear end of that 8000-brake horsepower monstrosity around tight corners of London's Trafalgar Tour than it is in the game. And that's a good thing. Project Gotham driving ethos has always straddled the line between realistic driving physics and friendly controls; to the game's credit, this approach is in full effect here. This isn't to say that the cars don't feel authentic in terms of acceleration and raw speed--the rollicking kinetic roller coaster of navigating the Nürburgring in a Ferrari F50 GT is as thrilling an experience as you can have on the Xbox 360. At the same time, though, PGR 3's physics seemed designed to give you as much an opportunity to succeed as possible.    Gotham TV lets you watch your stored replays, or check out the hottest online races happening at any given moment on Xbox Live.   Just as in previous games, there's no real penalty for crashing into walls and obstacles, other than losing momentum. Damage is once again only cosmetic, and not even that is impressively modeled. A high-speed collision will usually only result in a cracked windshield or a busted side-view mirror, and running into an opponent ahead of you will usually do little more than bend their spoiler. Therefore, you don't feel that guilty for driving aggressively and aren't really surprised when the game's AI-controlled cars do the same. They aren't exactly blind to your presence on the road--they just don't care that much.     The game makes no concessions in authenticity, however, in the car models and race environments that populate the game; these are among the most impressive sights we've seen on the 360. Actually, let's qualify that statement. PGR 3's car models, when viewed from the exterior camera angles, are certainly impressive. Bright colors, sleek contours, and striking lighting effects all make for attractive models that will make your right foot twitch in anticipation. That said, the car models, whether from a lack of complex reflections or just relatively simple lighting techniques, also have a vaguely plastic appearance to them, which doesn't always mesh with the striking visuals that comprise the backgrounds. Those environments, modeled on real-life locales such as Tokyo, Las Vegas, and New York City, are impressive both in scope and quality. Hit the Big Apple and you'll rocket down both spans of the Brooklyn Bridge; attack the Shinjuku district of Tokyo at night and you'll run smack-dab into the fireworks display of neon signage lining the streets.     These are merely visual appetizers for the game's graphical main course, though. The in-car camera view is PGR 3's single most impressive aspect. Each of the game's 80 cars features a stunningly authentic interior that places you directly in the driver's seat. Driving in a McLaren F1 LM, for example, will place you in the car's unique center-seat setup, with rearview mirrors at both corners of the cockpit. The F1 style paddle gearshifts you'd find in a real Ferrari 355 GTS are also in the game. Look down at your feet in the McLaren F1 and you'll see your virtual driver's feet working the gas and brake as you drive along. It's great stuff.   The in-car camera view is PGR 3's best, and most impressive, feature.   It's no exaggeration to call the sense of speed and kinetic energy generated by this viewpoint a visceral thrill unlike practically anything we've ever played. Off the line, your car shudders under the forces of its massive acceleration; in high-speed turns, you'll watch as your car struggles under the forces acting upon it, while your ""driver"" viewpoint jostles independently because your virtual head is struck by those same energies. The windshields alone are a wonder--multifaceted reflection effects combine with the grime that gathers on the windows to really put you ""in"" the car. This stunning marriage of obsessive modeling, gorgeous lighting, and attention to detail conveys a sense of immersion that is still rare in gaming today, and it is PGR 3's visual hallmark.    Of course, these gorgeous graphics require an HD setup to get the most out of them, though we were pleasantly surprised to see that even on a normal television, the game still retained a good deal of its visual splendor. If you've got a newer TV set capable of playing in widescreen ratio, be sure to enable it, as this setup greatly enhances the game's visuals.    And as good as it looks, PGR 3's audio package is even better. The soundtrack alone is nearly worth the price of admission--it's an eclectic mixture that mixes bubbly J-Pop with sultry bhangra and elegant classical (along with the requisite electronica, hip-hop, and rock tracks). The soundtrack is a welcome addition to the vanilla playlists of most racing games, and it just might be the cure for what ails on you on the track. Pop Verdi's awesome and ominous ""Requiem, Dies Irae"" in your car's virtual CD changer, for example, and watch your lap times fall. The music isn't the only aural treat, however--the intricately modeled car engines have a sweet melody all their own. The hollow roar of the Ferraris, the whining protest of the Aston Martins, the sheer menace of the McLaren F1 LM--without exception, each entry in PGR 3's car lineup sounds as good as they look, especially when enjoyed through a Dolby 5.1 setup with a nice, beefy subwoofer.   You can't tell from this screen, but PGR 3 sounds even better than it looks.   Project Gotham Racing 3 gets so many other, smaller things right: The Gotham TV feature that lets you access your saved-race replays and pictures of your cars taken in the game's new photo mode, as well as watch the world's best racers run live on the Internet; the seven garages you can earn in the game (complete with two playable versions of Geometry Wars, the arcade shooter that appropriately has you fighting geometry); the custom-route feature that lets you build unique courses on any of PGR 3's racing locales; the Nürburgring, this time featuring a behemoth version of the legendary German course, which combines the full 13-mile Nordschliefe with the modern-day F1 circuit; the insane level of stat tracking in the game, in which total kudos earned by pulling off moves such as braking power overs, power feints, and braking feints are all saved to your profile, as are the total number of times you've pulled off a particular stunt.    Project Gotham Racing 3 isn't the longest game in the world; indeed, the majority of its long-term value will be via Xbox Live play. Still, for pure style, speed, and immersion, grabbing a seat in any of PGR 3's intricately modeled high-speed rigs and tearing through the streets is what the next generation of gaming is all about. All that's missing is the smell of burnt rubber and the feel of the wind whipping through your hair.    


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824,Chameleon Twist 2 ,4, The perspective problems lead to enough cheap deaths as to write off the game almost completely.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/6/7/2216867-us_boxfrunt.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/chameleon-twist-2-review/1900-2544244/,neg,"
The original Chameleon Twist was a first-generation 3D N64 platform game that had its share of problems but also possessed some inventive boss enemies and a certain degree of charm. It wasn't amazing by far, but it wasn't offensive either, and it ended up being called by many a ""good kid's game."" In the first game, you played as a chameleon that used his long-stretching tongue to propel his way around a 3D Mario-esque world. When enemies attacked, you'd either gobble them up outright or snarf up items to spit at them, just like Mario's pal Yoshi. All these things remain true in CT2; however, you've gained a new move (a parachute glide) and lost something vitally important: control of the 3D camera. The innovative boss showdowns still exist in the sequel, and that spark of originality can be seen much more readily in the stages that precede them; for example, having to knock birds off a balloon to end up at the same altitude as a power-up or gobble up and spit enemies at upright platforms to knock them down so you can hop on them. Unfortunately, the perspective problems lead to enough cheap deaths as to write off the game almost completely. This fatal flaw makes one think that developers didn't pay attention to the lessons learned not only from the first Chameleon Twist, but also from every other 3D platform game up to this point. It's a shame because otherwise the game would've turned out as middle-of-the-road charming as before. If you really enjoyed the last CT, then rent this one, knowing full well what you're getting into. Otherwise, avoid it.
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825,Famista 64 ,4, Famista 64 isn't worth the extra expense that imports warrant.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/4/8/4/930-3484.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/famista-64-review/1900-2544405/,neg,"
Now, maybe in Japan baseball games with short pudgy 3D players are the ""in"" thing. The kids dig it. Whatever. Here in the States we want our baseball to be represented as realistically as possible in our video games. That's why Famista 64 will probably never be released here. When we first heard of an N64 baseball game from Namco, the company that made such hits on the PlayStation as Tekken II, Soul Edge, and Ride Racer, we figured that it would want its first game on the N64 to be a solid title that would introduce owners to the same level of quality that PlayStation owners had come to expect from Namco games. So we were obviously excited. Unfortunately, the game turned out to be one of ""those"" import games. It isn't that the game is completely bad or anything, it's just that for the price, importing it just isn't worth it. The gameplay is straightforward - you bat and pitch with one button and use the analog stick to guide the players around the field. The camera buttons make the pitcher and batter do peculiar little animations like calling your shot Babe Ruth-style or knocking the dust off the plate. The graphics are hard to judge because while the players feature some amazing animation and a crisp, clean look uncharacteristic of many N64 games, they are also incredibly simple. So simple, in fact, that the game is actually reminiscent of 3D RBI baseball - with the same short little players that look more cute than real and a crowd that looks like a sea of happy little faces. In the end, Famista 64 isn't worth the extra expense that imports warrant. Even if you are a huge baseball fanatic, and you're tired of waiting for a baseball game for the Nintendo 64, you're better off waiting for Griffey or Acclaim's baseball game, both slated for a May release.
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826,Fighting Force 64 ,4," If you haven't played the PlayStation version, and you are only interested in the game because of your fond memories of playing Final Fight or Streets of Rage, you'd better ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/3/8/3/2216383-fighting_force.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fighting-force-64-review/1900-2543656/,neg,"
Fighting Force 64 is a boring beat-'em-up that doesn't offer anything more than its PlayStation counterpart - unless you count inferior sound and slowdown. If you haven't played the PlayStation version, and you are only interested in the game because of your fond memories of playing Final Fight or Streets of Rage, you'd better rent this one first. You play as one of four characters: Hawk Manson, Ben ""Smasher"" Jackson, Mace Daniels, or Alana McKendrick. The characters have the same basic attacks, but they also have their own attributes and special moves. Playing the game basically consists of entering a new area, beating up all the generic bad guys the game throws at you, then moving on. There are seven different levels composed of 25 different stages. One nifty gameplay element that mixes the game up a bit is that you occasionally get to decide what level you'd like to go to next. The only problem with the game is that once you've gone through a few levels, and you start seeing the same types of enemies and weapons over and over again, the game simply gets boring. You must stay in certain areas of a level until all the enemies in that section have been defeated. But there are a seemingly endless number of enemies for each section of the game, and they attack you in the same manner over and over again. This repetitiveness turns the game into mindless button pressing after a while. The method of attack from the beginning of the game to the end is basically the same: punch, punch, punch, or kick, kick, kick. The only strategy involved is avoiding letting your character get surrounded by multiple enemies.  Visually, Fighting Force 64 is on par with the PlayStation version, though it's not without its differences. The polygonal characters move realistically and look fairly detailed. The 3D environments look a little drab, but they manage to get the job done. The game does, however, suffer from some slowdown when too many objects and characters are on the screen at the same time. The slowdown is extremely noticeable when you are in a two-player game, and it is obvious enough to affect gameplay.  The camera view is, for the most part, always fixed from a diagonal three-quarter view that lets you see most of what's happening around you. The only problem we noticed regarding the camera happened during a two-player game. The view tried to shift from one character to another, causing nothing but confusion. The sound and music was poor and consisted of all the typical cheesy punch-and-hit sound effects that we've heard a million times before.  In the end, Fighting Force 64 is a lackluster game that could have been good  if the designers had created different types of enemies and offered more attacks for both the playable characters and the enemies. But as it is, the game gets too boring, too fast. If you and a friend are looking for a new game to rent that lets you simply pound buttons, you might get a thrill out of Fighting Force for a night - anything beyond that and you're just throwing your money away.
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827,Last Bronx ,4, The game engine is nearly identical to Virtua Fighter 2.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/9/9/1/2217991-lb_cover_us.jpg,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/last-bronx-review/1900-2533965/,neg,"
Last Bronx was a Sega Model 2 fighting game that enjoyed a decent amount of success in Japanese arcades but barely drummed up any business stateside. Only eight characters are available in the game, plus Red Eye, the game's boss. Six of the game's characters look like typical street thugs, but the other two look like they just got finished taping an episode of 90210. The big difference between Last Bronx and the Virtua Fighter series is the inclusion of weapons. The 3D graphics are good - for the Saturn. The polygonal fighters move smoothly and quickly, due in part to the game's 60fps action. And while the game doesn't really need an illusion of speed, the characters' weapons leave trails when you swing them, which gives the game an even faster appearance. The main problem is that Last Bronx suffers from the same disappearing polygons that affected the original Virtua Fighter on the Saturn. Also, background elements occasionally vanish. It's really a very annoying effect, and it mars the otherwise clean graphics. The game's sound and music almost aren't worth mentioning. The only facet of the audio that isn't run-of-the-mill is the somewhat catchy song that plays during the intro. The gameplay of Last Bronx is way too close to all of Sega's other fighting games. It's almost as if Sega figured that by giving the characters weapons and slightly boosting the graphics, no one would notice that the game engine is nearly identical to Virtua Fighter 2. The controls are also exactly the same. Heck, even a lot of the combos remained the same. Although characters jump differently - taking on more of a Mortal Kombat-style flip than the soaring Virtua Fighter jumps - the characters will still float if they're being comboed through the air. Overall, the game is too much like VF2 to be exciting in any way. Just pound on punch, then block. It's a decent game, but the lack of originality really buries it. If you don't already have a Sega fighting game, pick up Fighters' Megamix instead. It still reigns supreme.
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828,NAM ,4, NAM strives to deliver the fun and intensity of a first-person action game and the realism of a simulation - and because of that indecision it ultimately fails on both ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/2/9/2208929-nam_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nam-review/1900-2543679/,neg,"
Here's a puzzler for all you action gamers: Why would someone create a first-person shooter based on a war in which the biggest obstacle was trying to see who was shooting at you? The game in question is NAM, which strives to deliver the fun and intensity of a first-person action game and the realism of a simulation - and because of that indecision it ultimately fails on both counts. GT Interactive has been touting the fact that the game was ""created with the developer of the Doom conversion for the Marine Corps,"" but that only means that if that conversion is like this game, then it's not very fun for us civilians to play. NAM puts you in the boots of Alan ""the Bear"" Westmoreland (couldn't these guys have come up with something more original than the last name of the top US general in Vietnam?), a Marine Corps sergeant who has the handy ability to absorb insane amounts of bullets and recuperate to full strength instantaneously by grabbing little bags with Red Cross emblems on them. The reason for the Bear's Duke Nukem-like powers? The CIA's dosed him up with - and I quote from the manual - ""an experimental serum that is a healing agent, pain killer, and stimulant all rolled into one bad-ass cocktail."" Wow - if they'd given this stuff to every grunt in Vietnam, Hanoi would probably look like Las Vegas by now. The real reason behind the Bear's superhuman abilities, though, is much simpler: NAM was made using the Build engine (as in Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior, Blood, etc.), and about all that's been done for the sake of ""realism"" has been to make the enemies almost invisible in the dense jungle undergrowth and to limit the amount of ammo for heavy weapons like the M72 antitank rocket launcher and the M79 grenade launcher. Even there, the designers add a video game touch: Both weapons have been enhanced so they'll home in on an enemy soldier, which actually is a drawback if you're trying to hit a spot between two foes in order to take them both out with one hit. So what you get is a single guy squaring off against 60 or 70 enemies per level - it's like Rambo starring in Duke Nukem or Redneck Rampage, but with the handicap of limited ammo for his heavy-duty weapons. Because the Build engine does a pretty crappy job of rendering leaves and brush, you wind up staring at a bunch of pixels trying to spot the flash from a gun barrel as you see your life meter gradually shrink to nothingness. That might reflect how tough it was to see VC or NVA soldiers, but it doesn't add up to very much fun. The Build engine was made for running and gunning, not crawling and sniping - but that's what it's being used for here. What's more disappointing is that NAM doesn't even manage to incorporate the few advances that have been made to the Build engine over the years. Feel like driving that tank that's parked beside you at the start of a mission? You could, if NAM were designed by 3D Realms (Shadow Warrior) or Xatrix (Redneck Rampage Rides Again), both of which let you drive vehicles; instead, all you can do is look at it longingly and be thankful for the machine-gun fire it's spitting out. And NAM runs agonizingly slow compared with other games using the Build engine - it's probably because of all the computing muscle required to render the trees and leaves, but that doesn't change the fact that the animation is amazingly choppy at 640x480 even on the recommended system (Pentium 133). NAM strives to re-create the action in NAM by letting you call in artillery and air support, but it bears little resemblance to the real thing. Request an air strike, and before you can say ""Hanoi Hilton"" you'll see napalm bursts dotting the landscape in front of you. You also get to control AI marines on several missions, but by the time you maneuver in front of them and issue an order, it's likely that either you or they will wind up lying face down in the pixelated jungle breathing your last breath.  NAM features the usual multiplayer options of any game using the Build engine, but because it's not officially supported on a gaming network, the only way to find an opponent is to head to the Internet Gaming Zone or HEAT and search for someone who owns the game. Given how little fun is to be had in the game's single-player mode, though, the chances aren't too good that you'll be running into a lot of people eager to play with you. And that's actually something of a shame. Besides CTF and gruntmatch games, NAM allows you to play in fireteam mode (sort of like Team Fortress for Quake), in which each player can choose a different role - sniper, medic, machine gunner, and so on - so that you have to work as a team to win the mission (once your character dies, you're out until the mission's over). There's also an option to play gruntmatch games against AI opponents, but it's little more than a joke: These guys must have been drinking that ""badass cocktail"" that Bear was knocking down, because they're almost impossible to kill - they move at the speed of light and tend to hang out at the spots where you rematerialize after dying (damn campers!). But make no mistake: No matter what the box copy says about ""realistically bringing the true experience of the Vietnam War to life,"" this is a video game trying to pass itself off as an accurate and realistic simulation. Is it a good first-person shoot-em-up? No. Is it a good simulation? No. Should you buy it? No. That is all. Dismissed.
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'.']",0.0027791049530179997,0.43908840756666834
829,ESPN NBA 2Night ,4," NBA 2Night is an admirable first effort, but the game feels unfinished in almost every aspect, particularly on the court.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/7/2/8/2220728-box_nba2n.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/espn-nba-2night-review/1900-2661494/,neg,"
One of the first products to be released as a result of Konami, Disney Interactive, and ESPN's multiyear development and licensing agreement is ESPN NBA 2Night for the Dreamcast. The game offers healthy doses of recognizable ESPN-style presentation, but its familiar look and feel can't hide its glaring graphical and gameplay limitations. The game suffers from jerky animation, frequent instances of mindless AI, bland commentary, and a lack of options such as a franchise mode and online play.   NBA 2Night's most significant problem is in its animation, which is choppier than the waves George Clooney battled in The Perfect Storm. The game flow speeds up and slows down at will, and dribble drives and dunks are glaringly missing frames of animation. For example, the player will go up for a throw-down on the left side of the lane, and as if by magic he'll disappear and finish the dunk on the other side of the rim. Players will initiate dribble drives and finish off layups without ever really reaching the basket - the ball automatically floats to the rim in these situations. However, there are some bright spots. Players move realistically and effectively when they go for rebounds and when they play defense, and the post-dunk celebrations are understated and believable. Animation issues aside, the game's faulty AI compounds the game's flaws further.   Basketball games demand intelligent computer players in both the single- and multiplayer games. Because of the importance of teamwork, the sport inherently emphasizes smart play from all five players on the court. Disappointingly, the AI in NBA 2Night doesn't quite comply with that general theory. On the offensive side of the ball, the computer players are overly eager to get the ball in the hoop. So, instead of setting up even the most simplistic pick-and-roll moves and executing back-cuts, they almost always launch the shot after the first or second pass. On defense, computer players have the overreaction syndrome, where they fall for virtually every pump fake and go for shot blocks at every opportunity, instead of playing position defense. Presumably, to compensate for this lack of defensive skill by the computer-controlled players, the developers severely toned down the effectiveness of the dribble moves on offense - you will hardly ever beat your defender with dribble moves in NBA 2Night, which make them virtually useless in the game. Given the game's on-court flaws, perhaps Konami felt that its ESPN-licensed presentation would compensate for any gameplay flaws.    NBA 2Night is thick in ESPN iconography. From the commentary of the Brent Musburger and Stuart Scott announcing team to the intro video that shares its look and feel with the television show, NBA 2Night's presentation should be recognizable to most sports fans. Unfortunately, all the ESPN-specific bells and whistles do very little to enhance the game's amusement value. In fact, certain aspects, such as the gallingly repetitive color commentary from Stuart Scott, detract from the game's enjoyment. When you've heard essentially every call by the first half of the first game, you know that the virtual Scott isn't working with a broad range of audio samples.   The game is also lacking in its range of options and features. Naturally, it has the standard gameplay modes like exhibition, season, playoffs, and practice, but this year's version is missing a much-needed franchise mode, the ability to create a player, and online options - which is especially noticeable when compared to its direct Dreamcast competitor NBA 2K1. The game does have several customizable options, including three difficulty settings and the ability to turn things like the five-second back-to-the-basket option and three-second violation on or off.    NBA 2Night is an admirable first effort, but the game feels unfinished in almost every aspect, particularly on the court. The animation and game flow is disjointed, and the AI makes glaring mistakes, which if replicated in real life would have the team's coaches lining up at the unemployment line. NBA 2Night serves its purpose in providing an alternative to Sega's own basketball game, but it has a long way to go before it can compete on even ground with NBA 2K1.
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830,Rampage 2: Universal Tour ,4, This game truly makes me wonder if the original was really that much fun or if I was just too young to care.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/5/5/7/2213557-rampage2box.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rampage-2-universal-tour-review/1900-2546058/,neg,"
Do you remember all the fun you had playing the original Rampage? You played as Lizzy, Ralph, or George, three genetically altered monsters who had fun destroying buildings, eating people, and getting shot by the military. Rampage 2: Universal Tour takes that fondly remembered game and does absolutely nothing with it. This time, you play as one of three brand-new monsters: Boris, a super-strong but slow Rhino, Ruby, a giant fish-eating lobster, or Curtis, a huge bucktoothed rat. Your new mission is to survive the drudgery of seemingly endless levels in an attempt to free the cast of the original game - George in New York, Lizzy in Tokyo, and Ralph in London (how fitting). To rescue each monster, you must maintain your sanity through 25 levels as you meander toward the cities where the monsters are kept. Once you free all three, you're rewarded by an alien invasion. Without skipping a beat, you're back to destroying level after level, eating people, and destroying buildings to save the world. The gameplay is frustrating, to say the least. Every city looks similar, has at least one military ground vehicle, and what seems like a slew of randomly generated people, power-ups, and enemies. Helicopters shoot at you, planes drop bombs, people in buildings throw dynamite, and the infantry squeezes rounds in your direction. You climb buildings, eat people, and destroy everything in your path. Gone are some of the best moves from the original: You can't punch a building while you're climbing on the side of the one next to it; you can't punch in a downward direction as you move down a building; and you can't capture the beautiful lady and climb to the peak of your building. In place of these moves, you can now take out entire floors by jumping on them or kicking them, and you can climb to the top of the building and punch downward. You now have a super-bar, that fills up a percentage for every power-up or human you eat. When it's full, you can perform a character-specific super attack. Instead of playing until your health runs out and you turn into your human self, you're simply allotted a certain number of lives, and you go from one to the next without halting the pace. You can save your game every few levels, but this may as well be omitted, as you resume your game exactly as you left it. This means if you were playing with your friend and got to the last level, you'd have to resume that game as a two-player game with exactly the same character, number of lives, and health as when you left off. The graphics are enough to get on your nerves. Everything in the game has a nicely done clay-like look. While your characters and buildings are well rendered, they are easily forgettable, as nothing changes between from level to level. Though the game uses different architectural styling on different continents, you'll see the same buildings used over and over within the 25 levels on that continent. Backgrounds for important cities have landmarks, but, since you can't topple them, they don't make much of an impression. Once you're combating aliens, the buildings don't change much, but the helicopters turn into hovercrafts, and the tanks turn into spider-like things. Between cities, you get to see a lame Indiana Jones-esque ""moving on"" sequence that traces your path around the world. While the opening FMV is nicely done, the few scenes sprinkled throughout the game are horrid. Admittedly, there are some interesting things thrown in if you look hard enough: Some soldiers shoot mortars, some pedestrians juggle, people leaning out windows slip and fall, but the monster-truck is always green, and the semi-truck is always white. Sonically, this game hurts. Cheesy guitar rock played by what sounds like an undiscovered garage band fills the soundtrack, and the noise is broken up only by the screeching screams from your victims. All the buildings make the same sound when you punch them, people make the same satisfying crunch when you eat them, and helicopters make the same machine-gun noise when they shoot at you. Control is nice enough. You can jump, punch, and kick with ease, although you'll find yourself sticking to jumping atop buildings and punching. While it bills itself as Rampage 2, Universal Tour is little else than a clone of Rampage: World Tour with different characters and a plotline. Forcing you to take on 73 levels until you even get to the ""fun"" of kicking alien tail makes the game almost unplayable. Playing this game made me feel as though I had been awake too long, and the level after level of unrefreshing gameplay took me to an almost giddy state in which my only want was to turn off my PlayStation and get as far away from it as possible. While the three-player option is almost enough to make it worth a rental for reminiscing gamers who own a multi-tap, this game truly makes me wonder if the original was really that much fun or if I was just too young to care.
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831,Rascal ,4, Rascal is a visually confusing 3D adventure that is as entertaining as shopping in a crowded grocery store.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/6/2/1/2213621-rascal_coverart.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rascal-review/1900-2546043/,neg,"
Rascal is a visually confusing 3D adventure that is as entertaining as shopping in a crowded grocery store. It is another in a long line of 3D adventure games far below the Mario standard; this game proves dull and inconsistent. Rascal is tasked with wading through six worlds to rescue his father from a bad guy, Chronos. I find it hard to imagine that a boy with a bubble-blowing gun could depose a master of time travel, but such is the premise. As advertised, there are 18 levels to the game (three to a world), but only 12 offer anything more than fighting with said bad guy. In each of those 12 levels you assemble an hourglass of six pieces, which teleports you back home. Each level's standard inventory is what you might expect: puzzles, critters, power-ups - not much left to the imagination. And much of the game is centered on merely picking up this stuff. Once Rascal makes it through all six worlds, the game is over. Anyone that has mastered jumping on mushrooms and shooting while running backwards could easily finish this game.  Jim Henson's Creature Shop was assigned the task of designing Rascal the character. Sadly, it designed something quite similar to Atari's Paperboy. Rascal says little more than ""whoa"" and ""ouch"" as he saunters through many a blandly painted room. The soundtrack in the Old West and Hollywood levels and the random noise in many of the later rooms made me want to die. Luckily, volume is one thing you can control. This game has a few technical problems, too. Seams in between polygons, flickering animation, and pop-up occur regularly. The poor camera angle work makes the game impossible in spots, obscuring what Mario or Lara would see clearly. Objects behind Rascal prevent you from clearly seeing what lies ahead, because the invisible camera can't occupy the same space. In some places Rascal disappears for no reason other than camera malfunction. There are a few levels in the Atlantis and Aztec worlds that are well designed, challenging, and cohesive right down to the music. The Paynal character is the rare visual standout of the ordeal, brightly colored and well animated. The high point of the game was several skateboard-styled half-pipes. They were fast, deadly, and fun. What's odd is the overall thrown-together feel of the game. The few outstanding levels are so good it makes me wonder if the developers cheaped out due to release date economics. Regardless, Rascal is a 3D adventure similar to Mario 64 or Tomb Raider only in ambition.
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832,Dark Reign Expansion: Rise of the Shadowhand ,8.7, Rise of the Shadowhand accomplishes the challenging feat of significantly improving one of last year's best and most complex real-time strategy games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/9/7/107-397.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dark-reign-expansion-rise-of-the-shadowhand-review/1900-2538543/,pos,"
The latest trend with real-time strategy games is to develop a successful product, and then turn it into a money-printing franchise by churning out unimpressive expansion discs. Fortunately, Activision has done just the opposite by making Dark Reign: Rise of the Shadowhand almost as good as an entirely new sequel. So what makes this expansion disc so special? Well, for starters, it raises the amount of playable sides in the game from two to four, effectively doubling the depth of the game with that feature alone. While these new sides (Xenites and Shadowhand) aren't as diverse as the three found in Starcraft, they are different enough to encourage Dark Reign veterans to learn numerous new techniques. The Xenites, for example, are derived from the original game's Freedom Guard while the Shadowhand are similar to the Imperium. Each side has just enough units handed down from its predecessors to make experienced Dark Reign players feel comfortable, but there are plenty of new units that make it fell like an entirely new game. The Shadowhand are a slightly more powerful, less versatile version of the Imperium. They come equipped with the EMP device, a new superweapon that scrambles communications between the opposing player and his units, in addition to scrambling his radar and communications . The new, ""conventional"" units include a transformable Gemini Tank, a fire-spewing Hades Bomber, the powerful Fury robot, and giant infantry called Reapers. The Xenites are a stronger, but less stealthy Freedom Guard. They have enlisted the help of large, alien mutants that include energy-emitting Grendels and Gants that must be micromanaged by keepers. The Xenites also have a devious new superweapon called the Power Striker that can knock out the power of an entire base by simply sabotaging a single energy plant. Both sides are equipped with terrain-sculpting devices called Terraformers. Suffice to say, Rise of the Shadowhand provides a diverse and interesting set of new units to play with. And better yet, after many hours of rigorous multiplayer testing, it seems that all four sides are well balanced. Aside from the new combatants, Rise of the Shadowhand provides 14 new single-player missions, numerous new multiplayer maps, and an entirely new soundtrack to set the mood. Activision even included the best fan-made Dark Reign game ""conversions"" and multiplayer maps. In addition, there are now multiplayer missions where you must achieve certain goals. Technically, the multiplayer engine has been improved by fine-tuning the network code, expanding ActiveLink (Activision's Internet server) multiplayer support to eight players, and adding a new automatic map-transferal system. There is also a rather thoughtful patch that allows non-owners of the expansion disc to play against the new sides in multiplayer games (but not as them).  Clearly, Dark Reign: Rise of the Shadowhand accomplishes the challenging feat of significantly improving one of last year's best and most complex real-time strategy games. It's just unfortunate that Activision's commendable effort may be obscured by the large and ominous shadow cast by Starcraft.
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833,The Wheel of Time ,8.7, It is an extremely solid action game built on an excellent story and dressed up with stunning graphics.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/7/0/229-870.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-wheel-of-time-review/1900-2531896/,pos,"
When The Wheel of Time was first announced, gamers and Robert Jordan fans had reason to be both excited and apprehensive. On the one hand, it would bring to life one of the most detailed and fascinating fantasy worlds ever conceived. Wheel of Time promised a mix of first-person action, role-playing, adventure, and strategy, which is a combination few games have ever effectively managed. On the other hand, because the Wheel of Time novels are so deep, so intricate, and so well-loved by legions of devoted Jordan fans, the game seemed destined to disappoint. But in the end, the game's creators GT Interactive and Legend Entertainment succeeded through a combination of great storytelling, spectacular graphics, and uniquely complex first-person action. Set before the first book in the series, Wheel of Time follows the turbulent adventures of Elayna, an Aes Sedai. Her sect holds a mystical seal, which is one of several seals used to jail the exceptionally evil Dark One in an ethereal prison. After the seal is stolen, Elayna must set out on a quest to recover the seal, thus setting in motion the events of the game. Despite all the prerelease talk about Wheel of Time's incorporating several styles of gameplay in a cohesive package, Wheel of Time is an easy game to categorize: It is a first-person shooter. It is a complex and often extremely challenging shooter with some unique aspects of strategy and a strong story tinged with adventure elements, but it is a shooter first and foremost. In fact, it may be ten times the shooter that Unreal was. Even seasoned shooter veterans will be hard-pressed to make it through some of the game's levels alive without numerous saves and reloads. Much of the difficulty lies in the numerous and very tough creatures blocking your path, but part of the challenge also lies in mastering Elayna's weaponry. Instead of relying on her sisterhood's magical powers, Elayna uses mystical artifacts known as ter'angreal, which are basically spell runes. You'll need all 40 of these ter'angreal to survive, and, luckily for you, they are scattered liberally throughout the maps and levels. The ter'angreal are very similar to the array of artifacts used in Raven's Heretic and Hexen games. However, in this case, the artifacts do not complement a basic set of weapons - instead, the ter'angreal include offensive weapons, defensive shields, a number of power-ups for healing, and more. Managing these items can be quite a chore - especially since many of the hotkeys are used for more than one ter'angreal, which means you must scroll through lists of things even in the heat of battle. Still, many of the artifacts can be used in conjunction with each other, leading to a dizzying array of possibilities during combat. The freeze ter'angreal makes a good precursor for the Balefire attack, for example. You'll often find that some of these objects are placed too deliberately. For example, the water, air, and fire shields are almost always available only near an area where you absolutely must use them. In fact, in one early level, you swim a long distance underwater while picking up additional water shields so you don't go belly-up along the way. The shift, exchange places, and trap-detection ter'angreal are also conveniently placed in this manner.The upshot of this hand-holding is that many of the environmental puzzles and obstacles in Wheel of Time are very easy to figure out. There are few, if any, areas that will leave an experienced gamer frustrated for long. But this is almost a shame, as any excuse to spend more time wandering the spectacular levels would be welcome. Simply put, Wheel of Time features the most staggeringly beautiful levels ever seen in a first-person action game. Areas like the White Tower are exceptionally detailed with vaulted ceilings and realistic architecture highlighted by very elaborate textures. Even the outdoor levels are well designed and realistic, though it's the indoor levels where the game looks best. The Unreal engine has never looked so good. Unfortunately, you'll need a Voodoo3 card to experience this splendor at its fullest. Even on a high-end Nvidia TNT2 Ultra card, the game looked pitifully bad in Direct3D mode. OpenGL was not much better and was far less stable. To make matters worse, the game chugs along painfully on most non-3dfx systems. Granted, a very fast machine with a TNT2 Ultra or GeForce 256 card and the latest GLSetup drivers would be sufficient - but the game will still look and run better with a Voodoo3. Still, if you have the right hardware, it's tough to beat Wheel of Time for sheer graphical beauty. It's also tough to beat the game's story, which is nearly as complex as a Jordan novel. Told through a series of elaborately animated cutscenes, the story very effectively sets up each level in the game. Though the 3D character models leave a lot to be desired, the dialogue is well-written and informative, and the story does an excellent job of absorbing you into the adventure overall. Even the way in which the single-player game builds up to its unique final challenge is intriguing and well-executed. You are led almost directly into the game's multiplayer citadel mode, so by the time you complete the single-player levels, you are almost fully prepared to tackle Wheel of Time in multiplayer mode. Though the play modes are not tightly integrated, it is refreshing to see the two tied together in light of the traditional arms-length distancing of single and multiplayer modes in first-person shooters. Multiplayer support in Wheel of Time is excellent and features two distinct play modes. The first is basically a deathmatch. However, because of the ter'angreal, this deathmatch is more akin to Hexen than to the Quake or Unreal games. The complex artifact inventory system may prove too distracting for some players, while multiplayer Hexen fans will probably not be fazed at all. Citadel, the game's other multiplayer mode, is very similar to capture the flag, except you can fortify your fortress (or citadel) with traps and computer-controlled guards. This is the mode that is likely to win Wheel of Time a sizeable online following. Placing traps and guards is challenging, but it's also a lot of fun and very satisfying when it works properly. You'll get a warm, fuzzy feeling whenever a would-be invader steps on a spear trap just as he's about to reach your seal. Although there are a few glitches and apparent design flaws in Wheel of Time, none of them seriously hurt the game. For example, on one level in which Elayna must defend a dungeon from numerous waves of attack, no enemies showed up even after a 20-minute wait. Restarting the level fixed the problem. Other minor annoyances include enemy archers that fire their arrows at the speed of light and hit you easily even when you move out from behind cover for only a split second. Also, the game could use a better mode for practicing the multiplayer citadel mode, as the existing tutorial rushes you into and out of the action. Of course, you can learn the game through online experience, but there are those who would rather get their bearings straight before venturing onto the servers. None of these small concerns significantly distract from the overall experience. It is an extremely solid action game built on an excellent story and dressed up with stunning graphics. Is it all that the prerelease hype may have led you to believe? No. Because the gameplay is essentially that of a pure shooter, there are certain to be some Robert Jordan fans who aren't completely pleased with the action-packed take on the Wheel of Time universe. But having said that, it is very difficult to dislike a game that delivers such an absorbing and exciting fantasy adventure.
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834,Need For Speed: High Stakes ,8.7," It doesn't really mess with the formula of the last game, but adds enough new features and options to keep its fans excited.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/8/8/7/2208887-nfs_high_stakes_box.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/need-for-speed-high-stakes-review/1900-2546025/,pos,"
Need for Speed: High Stakes is a good example of how to do a sequel. It doesn't really mess with the formula of the last game, but adds enough new features and options to keep its fans excited. For starters, the game is more cohesive than other NFS games. In High Stakes, you must purchase cars before you can drive them in the game's main mode, the tournament mode. There are several different tournaments, each one having different car requirements and track variations. Also, there are special events, which cost money to enter, but frequently have larger payoffs than the tournaments. Some events are geared toward specific cars, while others put you on the open road, complete with traffic. NFS3's knockout mode has been confined to the special events section. Technically, all the tracks are available for one-player play right at the beginning of the game. However, since each tournament requires a different two or three cars, you'll have to own the proper car to see each of the later tracks. Suffice it to say, you'll be springing for new rides pretty frequently. Placing first in a tournament unlocks the final track of the tourney for two-player and hot pursuit mode use. The track design is fairly varied, and each track can be raced backward, in mirror mode, at night, in the rain, or any combination thereof. Hot pursuit mode is roughly the same, except you can now drive the police car, much like in the PC version of NFS3. As the cop, you're given a set amount of time to stop ten speeding cars. The first few pull off the road without much of a fight, but the later cars won't pull over unless you smash them into the side of the track, forcing them to stop. You're also given the option to call occasionally for backup, set up a roadblock, or set up a tack strip, which pops the tires of the speeder if he fails to avoid it. There's also a two-player version of hot pursuit, but when you play cop vs. speeder in two-player, the cop is on his own. And without being able to call for assistance, the cop is put at an extreme disadvantage. All the speeder has to do is, well, not stop moving. As the speeder in a two-player match, you simply must remain on the lam until time runs out, so you can just get ahead of the cop, flip around, and drive back the other way. As long as you can play a decent game of chicken, you'll never, ever get caught. The graphics in High Stakes are better than NFS3's graphics, but the jump isn't terribly dramatic. The lighting effects, including the sparks that fly after most collisions, are the real stars of the visual portion of the game. The tracks do look very, very nice, and there isn't a lot of pop-up, but as time goes on, the blockiness of the game is undeniable. Also, the framerate isn't constant. The game runs very well in the first-person camera angle, and for the most part, it runs fine in the other two angles. But drive through anything more complex than a simple forest road (for instance, a town), and the game starts dropping frames left and right. NFS:HS has really terrific sound. Most of the music fits the game perfectly, and the sounds of driving (engines, tire squeals, scrapes, and crashes) are all done extremely well. The hot pursuit mode has the bulk of the game's sound, with constant police chatter keeping you aware of The Man's constant vigil. The cops will even speak in their native tongue, which, of course, varies depending on where the course you're driving on is located. The game controls quite well with the dual shock controller, and those of you still playing driving games with the digital pad will also be satisfied with the game's digital control. That said, it still would have been nice to see EA support Namco's Jogcon controller. The game starts off at a nice, easy pace, but eventually the difficulty becomes pretty unforgiving. The later races force you to drive nearly perfectly to win, and scraping a wall or opposing vehicle can be the difference between first place and third. The game's main two-player mode is the game's namesake, the high stakes mode. HS is a two-player matchup that pits your cars against the cars of a friend. But you aren't just racing for mere prestige. In HS mode, you'll be racing for pinks. The winner gets the loser's car to race, sell, or just smile at. Some precautions have been taken to deter some cheaters from keeping their cars after losing them (both players' cars are removed from their cards at the beginning of the race), but you can still simply copy your saved game onto another card before putting your garage on the line. All in all, Need for Speed: High Stakes is a great driving game, but a few of the game's smaller problems keep it from being all that it could be. The inability to call for backup in two-player hot pursuit games is completely unforgivable and keeps the gameplay score from being even higher. The framerate problems and generally pixelated appearance of the game simply show the age of the PlayStation. I, for one, hope the next NFS game appears on a system that can handle a complete graphical overhaul.
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835,Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 ,8.7," If you have the hardware to run it, this simulation really stands out.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/8/2/2218782-177076_41580_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/microsoft-flight-simulator-2000-review/1900-2542657/,pos,"
Fifteen years ago, Microsoft ruled the computer skies with Flight Simulator. More recently, the civilian flight simulation market has seen some impressive competition rise to challenge the longstanding champion, including such sims such as Looking Glass' Flight Unlimited 3 and Terminal Reality's Fly. However, in what can only be seen as good news for fans of the civilian flight sim, Microsoft has met its challengers with another superb product in the Flight Simulator line. Excluding Combat Flight Simulator, the last version of Microsoft's sim was Flight Simulator 98 - and what a difference two years can make. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 is available in standard form and in what's called the professional edition. The professional edition includes two additional aircraft (the King Air 350 and Mooney Bravo), six additional cities (plus the six present in the regular edition), and various extra features, including a flight-dynamics editor. Both versions enhance Flight Simulator 98 by adding the Concorde and the Boeing 777-300, as well as updated versions of some old favorites. But the real payoff comes in two disparate aspects of the game: its graphics and documentation. One of the most daunting things about the early versions of the Microsoft Flight Simulator series was the feeling that you had to do a lot of homework on your own before having any fun with the game. However, Flight Simulator 2000 includes tutorial information right in the manual and actually makes it fun. The outstanding tutorials and accompanying text take you all the way from keeping the aircraft aloft to making an ILS (instrument landing system) approach, and many details in between. There are more than 100 pages of text devoted to these tutorials, and they are supplemented by a great deal of additional material within the game itself. The text is written by Ron Machado, a professional flight instructor whose explanations are uniformly clear, informative, and even amusing. There are even tests you can take to prove your progress. The instructional part of Flight Simulator 2000 is exceedingly well done and should assuage the fears of anyone who is interested in flying but is easily daunted by a steep learning curve. The greatest strength of Flight Simulator 2000 is undoubtedly the graphics. The whole series has been known for its detailed and wide-ranging terrain, and Flight Simulator 2000 ups the ante with 12 tremendously detailed cities as well as outlying terrain that also looks good, even far beyond the major urban areas. Weather effects such as clouds and lightning are equally impressive and are modeled accurately during flight. The aircraft look great, and the instrument panels remain the best in the business.Although the graphics in Flight Simulator 2000 might be heaven for the flight sim enthusiast, getting them to look good has a very steep hardware requirement. The box actually says the minimum system for the game is a Pentium 166 with an optional 3D accelerator, but you'd best not even try the game with a machine that slow. In fact, you shouldn't even bother unless you have a high-end Pentium II or Pentium III, or else you'll be too bogged down by poor frame rates to care about much else. If you can get it to run, you'll find that the flight models in Flight Simulator 2000 are superb and seem like improved versions of those included in the previous game, in that they are slightly less forgiving than before. The only problem is that the smaller aircraft ride too smoothly and encounter few of the continuous bumps and jolts that are experienced in such planes even in relatively calm air. One of the key draws of the Flight Simulator series has always been its expandability. Users could always expect a host of third-party commercial and free add-on products in the form of additional aircraft and scenery. However, in this case, such expansions are hardly necessary, as the world of Flight Simulator 2000 is impressively detailed right out of the box. You can even join virtual airlines online and fly specified routes. Its expandability and large user base are a significant advantage that Flight Simulator 2000 has over its competitors. The Flight Simulator series has quite an impressive pedigree, and the latest in the line still shows its good breeding. While its strong competition means that Microsoft's product is no longer the only great simulation out there, the reigning champion isn't yet ready to relinquish its title. If you have the hardware to run it, this simulation really stands out.
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836,Allegiance ,8.7," Its real-time strategy elements and its focus on cooperative piloting tactics are so central to its gameplay that Allegiance can be very challenging to learn, but it's well worth the ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/9/4/2210894-tfscoutlaunches.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/allegiance-review/1900-2558216/,pos,"
Allegiance is an impressive online game that fuses space combat simulation with elements of strategic military planning and command. It's exclusively playable online, and while it has an interesting premise, there's no real context to the actual battles you'll participate in. If anything, its lack of a single-player campaign merely clarifies the distinction between Allegiance and all other space combat sims - its real-time strategy elements and its focus on cooperative piloting tactics are so central to its gameplay that Allegiance can be very challenging to learn, but it's well worth the effort. Allegiance's depth and complexity are veiled by its clean, effective graphics. At most times during play, you'll be looking at your ship's first-person heads-up display, which depicts all pertinent information regarding your ship and your surroundings. Like many aspects of Allegiance's interface, the various readouts on your HUD aren't particularly intuitive - it'll take some time to be able to distinguish all the onscreen indicators. However, after you spend some time flying around in the game, you'll find that the initially overwhelming amount of information on the HUD is actually presented very well. Allegiance's minimal HUD graphics leave plenty of room for all the dozens of different indicators you might see onscreen at any given time, which point to all friendly and enemy ships, as well as miscellaneous space objects, missiles, stations, and more. There's a small space left up top for communications between players, and a floating minimap, which you can toggle off, that shows you where you are relative to the rest of the battle. It's a lot to take in, but Allegiance's graphics do a great job of presenting all the relevant information you need without actually cluttering the screen, which leaves you with a perfect view of the game's impressive 3D space combat. Allegiance's 3D engine is surprisingly good. The various ship designs are attractive and original, and Allegiance's version of outer space is filled with bright-colored gasses, plenty of stars in the distance, lens-flare-casting suns, gigantic tumbling asteroids, and more. The ships are highly detailed and have pulsing warning lights on their wingtips. They leave long, colored contrails in their wake, which provide a useful visual cue in the heat of battle. They burst into big, bright explosions but don't leave a lot of debris behind. In fact there's very little visual excess in Allegiance - the game's weapon effects look fairly simple, while the game's special effects for wormholes and such are attractive but never gaudy. Allegiance can sometimes look a little sterile as a result, especially since all the ships look similar from the inside. But it's all worthwhile when you get dozens of ships flying around all at once with a smooth frame rate and typically without much lag. The game's no-nonsense graphics are complemented by its clear but generally forgettable audio, which provides spoken cues for important events on the battlefield. You're able to issue preset verbal cues yourself with just a couple of keystrokes so that you can quickly request assistance, give orders, or even taunt your opponents. Some of the sound bites are pretty funny and thus inconsistent with the game's generally serious tone, but you can toggle off the speech if it bothers you. In contrast, the game's symphony-and-techno musical score is suitably intense and dramatic. Although Allegiance looks about as good as the latest space combat sims, it doesn't look better, and it really doesn't look all that different. However, the game does have a distinguishing mark: It isn't so much that Allegiance is an online-only simulation of space combat, but rather that it's also a fully realized simulation of strategic space combat. The strategic elements of Allegiance are every bit as complex as those in the latest popular real-time strategy games - your team needs to gather resources in order to expand its territory and improve its technology. You'll need to defend your mining ships as they harvest resources from special asteroids, and you'll need to deploy probes to detect enemy incursion. You'll have scouts to gather reconnaissance, fighters to gain space superiority, interceptors to defend your installations, and bombers to destroy the enemy's base. What's more, the action takes place in a number of large, interconnected sections of space that you can jump between using swirling wormhole-like portals, referred to in-game as alephs. You also have a fairly extensive technology tree that you can research, and it has several viable branching paths that will make all the difference in the long run. You'll need to become familiar with all the game's technology in order to understand how best to breach your enemies' defenses and how to counter his attacks. You can play Allegiance as a plain deathmatch game, but hardly anyone ever does, because the strategic elements lend so many different options to you and so much variety to the game. You can assume any role in an Allegiance battle. Ultimately, someone will need to coordinate the war effort and play commander. The commander sees the action take place on a top-down tactical map, which is actually generated using the game's 3D engine. He can zoom in on individual ships or jump into the fray at any time, but his essential role as commander is to oversee the battle, to issue orders to his pilots, and to make strategic decisions. The commander can easily order ships to defend miners and stations, to mount an attack against an enemy installation, and more; meanwhile, the pilots in those ships need only push a button to toggle the autopilot that takes them to the allocated destination. Pilots can opt to ignore orders, but their teammates probably won't appreciate a loose cannon; at the same time, if the commander's doing a bad job, he can easily be ignored and promptly replaced. For the player in the commander's position, Allegiance plays out much like other real-time strategy games, only with the very notable difference that all his units are being controlled by other human players. As such, a good pilot will do a lot of good for your team, but your chances of actually winning an Allegiance match are slim without a capable commander calling the shots. While one player can choose to become the commander, another player can opt to become the team's investor and to oversee resource allocation for new weapons and technology. But most often, you'll inevitably end up piloting the various combat spacecraft in Allegiance, from lithe scouts all the way up to lumbering capital ships. As if the game's underlying strategic elements weren't sophisticated enough on their own, Allegiance also features a fairly unconventional spaceflight physics model. The game simulates deep space inertia, so any change to your velocity will be more or less gradual, depending on your ship. It feels like you're sliding on ice, but as you get more accustomed to the game, you'll be able to use the inertia to your benefit and learn key strafing maneuvers and evasive tactics. It isn't easy to get used to Allegiance's flight model, and the game's long-winded, semi-interactive tutorials are at least as intimidating as they are beneficial, but you'll gain all the experience and teaching you need out in space flying alongside veteran pilots who'll be happy to lend you a hand. Allegiance is a complicated game that's attractive for its sophistication as well as for its action, which means you'll likely find yourself playing in games with more of an upper-crust kind of crowd than you might be used to in online action games or online role-playing games. On the other hand, you won't find as many people playing Allegiance overall. If you host the game, you can customize an Allegiance match however you choose. You can opt to play with just a few or many dozens of players simultaneously, set the maximum number of lives for participating pilots, set the number of teams, and also restrict the game to players of a particular skill level. You can play Allegiance as a strategic space combat game, but you can also opt for capture-the-flag rules, pure deathmatch, and other variants that encourage you to gather more resources or find more artifacts. The game rules are highly flexible, and there's a lot of variety within each game, from all the different ships you can fly to the different miscellaneous roles you can assume. Allegiance lets you play over a network or the Microsoft Gaming Zone and also lets you join the Allegiance Zone for a nominal monthly fee, which keeps a record of your stats and offers unique game types and scenarios and more. It's an evolving service that's well suited for hard-core Allegiance players but not necessary for all of them. In general, you can jump into an Allegiance game with just a couple of clicks, whether the game has just started or is already in progress. Allegiance is at the forefront of an increasingly popular type of online game that encourages cooperative competitive play. Although the game features all of the excitement of a first-rate space combat sim, thanks to its great graphics and its variety of spacecraft, what really sets the game apart is how it meshes real-time strategy elements and various support roles together with the dogfighting to create an original experience. It takes a while to get the hang of Allegiance, but the payoff for mastering all its nuances and applying those time-honed skills alongside a contingent of likewise seasoned pilots and strategists is suitably rewarding. 
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837,Battleground 5: Antietam ,8.7," It may not be the perfect Civil War game, but it's pretty darn close.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/3/4/4/2214344-579453_20841_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battleground-5-antietam-review/1900-2537980/,pos,"
The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history. Four years of bitter fighting gave us the North and South, heroes and cowards, victories and defeats. Places such as Shiloh and Gettysburg still echo with the ghosts of battles past. Leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant set the standards for future commanders. Talonsoft attempts to capture both the substance and sprit of this period with the fifth entry in the Battleground series. Battleground: Antietam allows you to recreate ""the bloodiest single day in American history"" in amazing detail. Battleground: Antietam reflects the continuing development of the series. The outstanding graphics of the game remain one of its many strengths. Multiple views of the battlefield provide you with the information you need to make informed decisions. Pop-up video footage, while entertaining at first, can be turned off if you have tired of seeing the same artillery barrage for the 100th  time. The limited sound effects do convey the action more than adequately. The historical music, courtesy of Bobby Horton, may explain the low morale among the troops of the time. The multitude of scenarios - ranging from selected engagements to ""what-if"" situations - offer good replay value. New features (available in the v1.10 update) include excellent items such as Extreme Fog of War and Internet play. With Extreme Fog of War enabled, you don't know much about the units you square off against. Battleground: Antietam also provides an option that allows you to adjust the combat odds during the game. The ""advantage"" slider makes it easier to learn the game without growing too frustrated.   The computer AI often makes the game interesting. Questionable moves are frequently followed by brilliant strokes. The computer's unpredictable actions force you to adapt as the battle progresses. If you grow bored with annihilating the computer's forces, the multiplayer mode allows you to test your abilities against another human. You can crush your opponent by e-mail, over a modem, or on the Internet.  Battleground: Antietam is extremely well done. Graphics, sound, and gameplay distinguish this from the numerous others in the category. It may not be the perfect Civil War game, but it's pretty darn close.
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838,BattleTech: Solaris ,8.7, The game is a real blast.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/4/0/513-1840.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battletech-solaris-review/1900-2533099/,pos,"
Let's cut to the chase: This game rocks, and it rocks hard. It's got more than enough firepower to satisfy the run-and-gun crowd, but at the same time it has tactical and strategic aspects that appeal to sim fans, too. One of the great features of Solaris (Solaris is the planet where battles take place) is that it's lean and mean: Log on to a Solaris provider and choose a handle, and you can be in the thick of combat a few minutes later. Just decide on whether you want to practice or fight sanctioned matches (which determine your ranking), then head to the appropriate arena, pick out a mech, and get ready for some major league destruction. Another great quality of Solaris is that you can play it on different levels, depending on your personality. Some players really groove on the role-playing aspect of being a futuristic MechWarrior  - you'll see many players with Clan designations by their names, for instance, and some of these guys take all aspects of the game pretty seriously. Others, more than happy with the white-knuckled thrill of combat itself, don't even try to immerse themselves in the game world. Either way, the game is a real blast. The real beauty of MultiPlayer BattleTech: Solaris is that, like most great games, it's simple to learn but difficult to master. Learning basic navigation and weapons controls takes all of about five minutes, but if you think you'll be racking up kills with just that knowledge, you'd better think again. Each of the 80-plus mechs available has distinct strengths and weaknesses: Choose a mech that's speedy and can jump, for instance, and you'll have to settle for less armor and firepower. Complicating matters is the issue of heat management. Everything you do - walking, firing, jumping - causes the heat levels in your mech to rise, and if the heat becomes too great your mech will shut down, leaving you defenseless and powerless (usually at the worst possible moment). Knowing which weapons to fire at particular ranges - and how often you can fire them without causing a shutdown - keeps Solaris from degenerating into a trigger-finger workout. Though practice matches against computer-controlled drones are always available, they don't provide the pure adrenaline rush of competing against human opponents. The thrill of blasting an arm off a drone mech may be satisfying, but doing it against a fellow MechWarrior is downright exhilarating - it's the sort of adrenaline rush that will have you coming back time and again for more action. Add in some crunchy sound effects and an atmospheric soundtrack that changes to reflect the action onscreen, and you'll almost feel as if you really are inside one of these behemoths. It's addictive, for sure, which brings up Solaris' single weak point: pricing. Depending on where you play, prices can range from around $1.25 per hour to as much as $2.75 per hour. These prices are offset somewhat by the fact that the game software is available via download free of charge - you can almost write off the first 20 or 30 hours of online time against what you would have spent for a retail game. And while most folks can deal with a buck and a quarter for gaming action this intense, things can start getting expensive at $2.75 per hour, especially since there's no option to practice offline.  But enough meandering. Download MPBT: Solaris and pick out a service to play it on. At worst, you'll be out some download time and four or five bucks to try the game - and that's a pretty small price to pay for a game that will probably get its hooks into you before your first battle is over.
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839,Crazy Taxi ,8.7," The game has the same kind of universal appeal and pick-up-and-play mentality that made Tony Hawk's Pro Skater a hit on the PlayStation. As such, it's a must-buy for any ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/6/0/2/710-2602.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crazy-taxi-review/1900-2540233/,pos,"
Many have said that the success of Sega's Dreamcast is tied to the quality of the company's arcade games and, ultimately, the console's ability to render those arcade games as closely as possible. Crazy Taxi is one of those arcade ports, and the Dreamcast version of the game holds up very favorably when compared with its arcade counterpart. The game is very simple. As one of four taxi drivers, you must drive around and pick up fares. Each of your fares will present you with a destination - be it a Tower Records, Kentucky Fried Chicken, FILA store, or Levi's shop - and you'll have to get there as fast as you possibly can. Get there in a real hurry, and you'll get a time bonus. Take too long, and your fares will simply jump out of your cab, robbing you of any points they would have given you for getting them to the destination, as well as any points you might have picked up while they were in the car. Aside racking up your score by merely driving people from area A to location B, you also earn bonuses for performing combos. These combos are simple things, like weaving between cars without scratching up your car, jumping a long distance, or sliding around corners. When playing the game with the arcade rules, you must constantly pick up fares to keep your time from running out. There are also options that simply let you play for three, five, or ten minutes, giving you a slightly more relaxed game. Aside from the arcade city, there is an all-new city in the game. The new city is a nice touch, but it's a little rough when compared with the first city. There's significantly more pop-up and slowdown in the Dreamcast-specific city. The game also has a mode called crazy box, which serves as a sort of mission-battle mode and tutorial all in one. Early missions in the crazy box are simple tasks designed to teach you the game's special moves, but later missions require absolute mastery of these moves, and can be a bit frustrating. Luckily, there's no load time between attempts, so failing isn't quite as troublesome as it would have been had you been forced to sit through a reload. The game is a bit light on options, and it would have been nice to see more modes that make you work toward a higher goal, such as car upgrades. A multiplayer option would have also been a welcome addition.The overall look of Crazy Taxi is what makes it stand out. The cars all look really great, as do the various buildings. What ties it all together is the breakneck speed of the game. The frame rate is usually smooth as silk, but it occasionally bogs down for what seems like no reason at all - independent of how many cars are onscreen or how far into the distance you can see. The game does have a bit of pop-up, but it's rarely noticeable, with the exception of one large hill on the Dreamcast-specific level. The hill has a huge hole that fills in as you approach it. The game's soundtrack is filled with songs by Bad Religion and Offspring, so depending on your personal preference you'll either want to crank the volume up or turn the music all the way down. The rest of the game's sound effects are well executed. There's a lot of speech used in the game, and most of it comes from people on the street and the people you pick up in your cab. Unfortunately, your driver's vocabulary is a little limited. The oddest cabbie phrase has to be ""Shut up and move your butt,"" which BD Joe seems to shout out from time to time for no good reason. While some may argue that Crazy Taxi sticks a little too close to the arcade model to have any real longevity, the replay value comes from the sheer fun of the game. The game has the same kind of universal appeal and pick-up-and-play mentality that made Tony Hawk's Pro Skater a hit on the PlayStation. As such, it's a must-buy for any Dreamcast owner.
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840,Shadowflare: Episode One ,4.1," Unfortunately, Shadowflare is a completely outdated game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/1/0/1/4817-19101.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shadowflare-episode-one-review/1900-2908410/,neg,"
Though Japanese game developers are traditionally known for creating some of the very best console games around, some also develop PC games. Among them is Denyusha, a small developer from Kyoto that created the straightforward fantasy-themed action RPG Shadowflare and released it to the Japanese public in 2001. The game was subsequently brought to the US by publisher Emurasoft in late 2002, and while it retails for only $15, it's still difficult to recommend for a number of reasons.  Shadowflare gives you a dog, but the game is still unmistakably similar to Diablo. Shadowflare is a hack-and-slash action RPG, and it's very, very similar to Blizzard's original Diablo from 1996 in many respects. You play as either a female or male character and hack your way through hordes of monsters in order to complete simple quests, such as defeating a certain monster or retrieving a specific item. The fighting consists of simply left-clicking repeatedly on your enemies, just like in the original Diablo. Unfortunately, Shadowflare doesn't let you click and hold your mouse button on a specific enemy, like Diablo II, and it doesn't have anything like the auto-attack feature from Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege, so you should be prepared to do plenty of clicking. And just like Diablo, Shadowflare has a paper-doll equipment system and an inventory of limited size (three health tablets take up as much room in your backpack as a short sword, for instance).      Shadowflare does have a few unusual features, though they don't add too much to the core game. Rather than play as a specific character class, you start off as a generic adventurer and then later change to a different class depending on which weapons you've been using. In addition, every character class can drop land mines that inflict a great deal of damage upon multiple enemies. Also, Shadowflare gives you a guard dog who fights with you. Your dog, like your weapons and magic spells, can be tuned to a specific elemental power and will cause a specific type of damage. Your dog can be useful to occasionally draw enemy fire and remotely pick up items for you, but generally speaking, you'll be doing most of the work throughout the game, clicking repeatedly on your enemies until they're slain.    Unfortunately, you might have trouble appreciating Shadowflare's gameplay nuances, because the game's sound isn't too great and its visuals are absolutely primitive. Shadowflare's instrumental background music isn't memorable, but it isn't offensive, and the game's sound effects, which generally consist of brief sound samples for your character attacking, monsters getting hit, and your dog barking, are repetitive but otherwise appropriate. On the other hand, Shadowflare looks like a game that might have come from 1996--the game runs at a locked resolution of 640x480, and although some of your character's attack animations are decent, they don't really compensate for the ugly, blurry rendered sprites that represent your character, your dog, and your enemies.  Click repeatedly to hack and slash. Shadowflare isn't really paced well, either. At several points in the game, you'll be tasked with hunting down a specific powerful enemy that will be far too strong for your current character to fight. So the best course of action in these cases is to kill off weaker enemies for experience points, save, quit the game, and then return so you can fight the same weak enemies to gain experience levels and become more powerful--this makes an already repetitive game even more so. Yet this game--the first episode in what will be a four-part series--is very brief, so what little enjoyment you might find in hacking and slashing will eventually be cut rather short. Considering the fact that Shadowflare isn't available as a CD, but only as a 100MB download from Emurasoft's Web site, you may want to think twice before you go to the trouble.    It's commendable that a small Japanese developer would take on the challenge of breaking into the highly competitive field of PC games. Unfortunately, Shadowflare is a completely outdated game. It attempts to improve on the sort of game formula that Blizzard helped establish with Diablo in 1996, but Blizzard itself has since refined and improved this formula with its own sequel, and similar games like Dungeon Siege have made even more improvements and additions to the formula.
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841,Kuma\War ,4.1," The presentation is dated and drab, and the vaguely realistic military trappings can't disguise what is at heart a weak, simplistic shooter.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/1/4/3/19815-57143.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kumawar-review/1900-6103077/,neg,"
 Kuma\War is built around an interesting, if potentially exploitive, idea: offer a shooter based on current military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and then update it over the Internet with new missions inspired by the latest battles. Plenty of other shooters offer relatively realistic looks at modern combat, but Kuma\War is unique in this focus on real, recent battles. Sadly, the actual gameplay is so bad that the high concept becomes almost irrelevant.  This guy gets a little too enthusiastic for the subject matter.  Kuma\War is available only via download from the game's official Web site, which means you better set aside some time if you want to try it; the main client alone weighs in at over 200MB. After that lengthy download, you have to sit through a tediously long auto-update process and then download each of the missions you want. You can play for free for a week, though you have to provide contact and credit card information before you do so. If you like the game, you can then pay a monthly subscription to keep playing and downloading new missions as they're released.  On paper, Kuma\War has some of the essentials for a good military shooter. You control a fire team of four soldiers armed with real-world weapons. You can play from a first- or third-person view and switch between directly controlling any of the soldiers at any time to issuing simple orders, like ""hold fire"" or ""fire at will"" to your team. Via a Web-based front end, you can also follow links to mainstream media reports, images, and videos relating to the real-world missions that have inspired the game's action. You can also download Kuma's own CNN-style broadcasts for each mission. These broadcasts mix real-world footage with in-game images and offer background information, expert analysis, and tips relating to the game's virtual versions of the battles.  That all sounds cool until you find that the analysis usually lacks the sort of nitty-gritty detail that military buffs might like, and the gameplay tips are comically obvious: ""Keep your head down or it might get blown off."" More significantly, Kuma\War's gameplay is sorely lacking and it doesn't succeed at any level. The presentation is dated and drab, and the vaguely realistic military trappings can't disguise what is at heart a weak, simplistic shooter. Those expecting a realistic tactical simulation will be sorely disappointed. For that matter, those expecting a thrilling run-and-gun action game will be disappointed, too. Enemies appear in the same places every time you play a mission, and they will pretty much just stand around and do nothing until you're right in their faces. Also, the enemies will often ignore buddies dying right next to them. Combat feels more like plinking tin cans with a BB gun than blasting wily enemies with high-powered military weapons.   On top of that, you can't climb many obstacles and you can't lean, which results in lots of long marches around low walls and unnecessary deaths as you turn corners. Combat mostly boils down to using your sniper to blast bad guys before they can kill your other three men. Your inept squadmates often fail to return fire effectively--or at all--and frequently get lost or caught on the scenery. Your squadmates will also block you from moving down stairs or through narrow passages--sometimes right as you're taking fire. When you have to rescue hostages, the liberated captives will usually run off on their own in some crazy direction, only to get gunned down. You can play Kuma\War online, but it's a ghost town out there; we could never find any active servers to play on after several days of trying.  Kuma\War's missions are mostly based on real engagements in the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, such as the attack on Saddam Hussein's sons and a fight against anti-Coalition insurgents in Sadr city. For a bit of desperately needed variety, a couple of missions look back to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980. Despite such nods to realism, Kuma\War gives you the comical impression that these battles were each fought by a single four-man (or smaller) fire team. You don't coordinate with other units or even with the rest of your seemingly nonexistent squad, so there's no sense that you're part of any real military operation. Sometimes you will see fellow troops, but they're just distant window dressing. It's frustrating, and frankly pathetic, to see a line of Humvees and troops standing there and doing nothing as your four men are being gunned down by snipers who've been left to casually stand around on nearby rooftops.  Mission goals can be a bit confusing insofar as the in-game map is concerned--it's so poor that it's worthless. Then again, the goals are tediously simple: just keep aimlessly walking around and killing the guys with headdresses and AK-47s until they're all dead. That repetitiveness gets numbingly boring fast. For a little diversity, you'll get to control vehicles, like an M1 tank, from time to time. Actually, that's not quite correct since the M1's ""controls"" are outrageously clumsy and unresponsive, and the tank easily gets caught on everything from sidewalks to small signs to little piles of dirt.  On foot, you'll get to fight with sniper rifles, M4 carbines, M16A2 assault rifles, and other real-world weapons. Outside of the sniper rifle, many of these are woefully inaccurate, and overall they feel more like toys than real weapons. Another departure from reality (but a necessary one, given some of the crackpot enemy snipers lining the rooftops and mountainsides) is the ability to magically heal yourself instantly with health kits. Instead of one-shot-one-kill, Kuma\War is one-shot-one-kill-kinda-sorta.   Welcome back to 1998. Lame graphics are the order of the day.  Kuma\War's presentation is as problematic as its gameplay. One of the video hosts sounds rather too enthusiastic for the subject matter, treating recent real-life combat almost as if it were, well, a video game. The in-game graphics are marred by bland textures (building interiors and tanks look downright awful), clunky animation, major clipping problems, and boring weapon/explosion effects. Sound effects don't give the weapons any sense of power, and the music volume levels can change drastically for no apparent reason. The music is utterly forgettable, anyway.  Between all the tedious downloads, sorry gameplay, and weak audio and visuals, Kuma\War simply can't compete. Games like Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, Joint Operations, and America's Army (produced by the US Army, no less) offer vastly more sophisticated, realistic, or flat-out entertaining looks at modern tactical combat and weaponry. Kuma\War has an interesting idea at its core, but with such weak execution, it really doesn't matter. 
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842,Iron Phoenix ,4.1," Even if it were available at a lower, budget price, Iron Phoenix isn't a game worth playing.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/0/1/2214901-box_iphoenix.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/iron-phoenix-review/1900-6121731/,neg,"
  The fighting genre has typically been about one-on-one contests. Occasionally, you see it try to break out with something a bit bigger than that, though the results have been mixed over the years. Four-player fighters, like Super Smash Bros. and Power Stone, may not have had the complexity of a more traditional fighter, but they provided some fighting game thrills without much of an investment. But once you go over four players, the air gets a little thin. So far, the only game to pull off the concept is One Must Fall: Battlegrounds, a little-known PC game that allows up to 16 players to duke it out online. Iron Phoenix tries to pull off a similar concept--16-player online fighting--but with its surprisingly awful fighting mechanics, busted-up frame rate, and bare-bones gameplay, Iron Phoenix is just a colossal waste of time.   Iron Phoenix's frame rate is a real mess.   Selecting a character in this weapon-based fighting game is a two-step process. First you select a fighter. These fighters range from demonic-looking humanoids to regular ol' men and women, and each is ranked in a few categories that give them slight differences in speed, power, and stamina. After that you'll choose which weapon you want that fighter to wield. This offers you more of a choice, because it's the weapon in your hand that determines your moves, though most moves (such as each character's lethal strike) are done the same way. Each weapon also has an elemental affinity, as well as stats, such as speed.    The game has a handful of arenas to choose from, and two more are available as free Xbox Live downloads. These arenas have somewhat of an impact on the game, since some have walls to hang from, while others offer multitiered environments, and so on. Some of these arenas tie into the game's challenge ring mode, which is a one-on-one battle mode that plays out like a rocket arena battle, where players duke it out in separate fighting zones and wait in spectator mode while other fights finish up.    The game offers a training mode to teach you some of the basic movement techniques, but it's not much more detailed than the manual is. Your only gameplay options are to play online or offline. There's no dedicated single-player component and no story mode to work through. If you play online you play against humans. If you play offline you play against idiotic bots. Ultimately, there's not much difference, though human players seem to be better about not just randomly running away from you or standing still for no good reason.    When you get 16 fighters in one arena, the action becomes nearly impossible to follow. You can lock onto an enemy to focus your attacks in one direction, but when all the fighters come together, it really doesn't matter. The game does have a combo system of sorts, but it's also somewhat viable to mash on buttons. Considering how hectic and choppy things get when the action heats up, it barely matters what you're actually doing.   When more than two or three fighters collide, the action gets confusing.   The frame rate in Iron Phoenix is one of its worst problems. When many fighters get on the same screen, the frame rate goes south fast. If you toss all of those fighters into one of the game's shallow-water backgrounds, it tanks even harder. With fighting games relying on things like timing, having a frame rate this busted makes the game unplayable. The rest of the graphics aren't so hot, either. It supports 480p, but that doesn't save the character designs and backgrounds from looking bad. The game's soundtrack and effects are some of the game's high points, though in this case, high is relative. The sound doesn't really stand out in any way, and the speech in the training mode is weak.    Without a competent fighting system, Iron Phoenix is already a subpar game. But when you slap on all of the game's technical issues and a real lack of variety and content, it goes from bad to worse. Even if it were available at a lower, budget price, Iron Phoenix isn't a game worth playing.  
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843,Crime Stories ,4.1," Rooted in archaic gameplay sensibilities and devoid of engaging characters or plot, Crime Stories won't even appeal to the most vehement of adventure game fans.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/9/4/5/20372-58945.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crime-stories-review/1900-6147683/,neg,"
  Crime Stories is an appropriately generic title for a game as fundamentally uninteresting as the Adventure Company's latest crime solving adventure. Based within the universe of a popular Italian comic book called Martin Mystère, Crime Stories takes the titular comic book hero and thrusts him into a drab and uneventful murder mystery of snooze-worthy proportions. Its adherence to ancient adventure game mechanics doesn't help matters, but the fact that it can't even use these ancient mechanics well enough to qualify as a decent throwback to an olden genre is all the more damning. This game is a pixel hunt of the most redundant and boring kind, and nobody should waste their time with it.   When was the last time you saw a professor of anything driving a car like this?     Crime Stories' hero, Martin Mystère, is a professor of something. What, exactly, is never made entirely clear, but he's definitely of the scholarly ilk. Mystère lives with his wife in a New York City townhouse with a caveman butler (and that's not just a descriptor--he's literally a caveman) named Java. Various pieces of archeological and literary significance litter his house. As for the man himself, he evidently affords his life of luxury by solving mysteries. In Crime Stories, Mystère is called to the scene of a grisly murder at the home of a famous professor named Eulemberg. But before he can get there, he has to find the hidden key to his wardrobe, dig up the phone number for his auto mechanic, and find his cell phone. Yes, the entire first act of this game revolves around one of the great crime-solving minds of the world taking in upward of 45 minutes to get dressed, find a phone number, and dig up his cellular. Priceless.     All along the way, Mystère makes nonsensical quips as you click on every piece of clickable furniture in his house, forcing you to sit through endless strings of text about books, art pieces, and other meaningless bric-a-brac while you try to dig up the necessary items to head to the crime scene. To make matters worse, he does the exact same thing even once you've gotten into the actual crime itself. Upon arrival at Eulemberg's estate, Mystère begins quipping nonsense about every piece of everything he sees. The info is not even relevant most times. If you find a piece of evidence, he won't necessarily tell you why it's evidence or what the significance could be. He'll just talk, endlessly, about nothing. Suffice it to say, Mystère is not an enjoyable protagonist. He's just kind of a self-important windbag with a painfully bad sense of humor and no real personality to speak of. This isn't to say that any of the other characters you'll encounter throughout the adventure are much deeper, but you spend the entirety of the game with Mystère, and by the second or third act, you'll wish someone would just show up to kill him, already.     On top of Mystère's unlikable personality, the story has zero going for it. The first hour or so following the investigation of Eulemberg's body is a bit intriguing, but the evidence you find never seems to take you anywhere of consequence. Sure, there are some exotic locales and a few interesting twists and turns, but you spend entirely too much time putting together clues that aren't so much clues as they are extraneous ways to force you to backtrack over and over again. One sequence requires a ticket to get into a club to pick up an item so that you can get more info from someone you already talked to. To get the ticket, you have to go to a location to talk to a person, go through all the lines of dialogue, then go back to your house to find a book for them, bring it back, get the ticket, go to the club, find out the ticket doesn't work, go back to another location to use a device to make a forgery (that you'll only know exists if you're paying extra close attention), then go back to the club again to use the forged ticket, just to get this one item. And then the payoff for doing so isn't even satisfying or revelatory--you're just sent on even more annoying fetch quests.    It would be considered labyrinthine if the work itself weren't so by the numbers. Like any pixel hunting adventure game, Crime Stories has you eventually finding everything you're supposed to do by being thorough. If the mouse icon reveals a hot spot, click on it. Seventy-five percent of what you click on will be completely inconsequential, but you've got to do it, lest you miss that one obscure piece of evidence that gets you to the next chapter. That's nothing new for adventure games like this one, but none of the ancillary items you click on are interesting. There's no clever commentary about them, and they're not pleasant to look at. Everything's ugly and boring the whole way through.    The biggest and most egregious flaw in Crime Stories, however, is its presentation. The dialogue in particular is atrocious. In part it seems an abhorrent English translation is to blame (the game was originally released in Europe some time ago), but also the editing is simply terrible. When characters speak, if their sentence goes on longer than the dialog box at the bottom of the screen will allow, they will pause midsentence and then start the sentence back up a second later when the next part of the line loads up in the dialogue box. It's as if every character has been taking acting lessons from William Shatner, or something. There are also purposely inserted ""ums,"" ""ers,"" and other conversational stutters that are completely out of place, breaking up the flow of a conversation to the point where people are just speaking syllables and not even saying anything remotely coherent.     Martin can explain, in detail, just about everything on this shelf. And he will, if you let him. Don't let him.     Crime Stories' graphics at least feature 3D character models, but the designs are awful. Mystère looks like a cross between Mickey Rourke as Marv in Sin City and Brian Setzer. Everybody moves in a stiff and jerky fashion, and most times moving a character into position to converse with another doesn't work right. There are sequences where Mystère will be standing with his back to someone he's talking directly to. Also, the characters look muddy. They're highly pixilated and are decidedly light on detail. Environments look similarly ugly. There are a few grandiose locations, but the scale is offset by the blurriness and pixilation of the static backgrounds. It's just not an attractive game by any stretch of the imagination.     You can finish Crime Stories in six or seven hours if you don't click on every single hotspot you see, but you'll be done with it long before the mystery reaches its conclusion. Trying to sit through Crime Stories' painful dialogue, patently uninteresting plot, and dinosaur-like gameplay is simply an exercise in self-punishment. Even with the adventure genre as hard up as it is these days, don't waste your time on a scattered mess like Crime Stories.   
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844,Kung Fu Multiplayer Fudomyo ,4.1," Network frustrations, poor production values, and boring, turn-based gameplay make Fudomyo a prime example of the proverbial failed-hype machine.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/5/7/4/20584-59574.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kung-fu-multiplayer-fudomyo-review/1900-6094029/,neg,"
 After starring in a couple of unsuccessful games during the 16-bit era, Steven Seagal has finally decided to lend his likeness to the mobile world, which was--apparently--clamoring for his presence. Consequently, Fudomyo's splash screen features a picture of a toga-wearing, tribal-tattooed demigod who bears a passing resemblance to the breviloquent star of Hard to Kill. This is probably the game's best feature. With its disjointed, menu-driven, latency-laden gameplay, Fudomyo might as well be a WAP title.  At worst, Fudomyo could be called an expensive game of rock-paper-scissors. At best, it might be hailed as a primitive card battle game. Either way, it certainly does not live up to the extreme hype generated by last year's multiplayer-hungry mobile gaming community.   In Fudomyo, you create a martial artist, choose from one of several fighting styles, and build that character's stats and abilities by winning various online skirmishes. Additionally, you are asked to invent battle cries for your character--one for before a bout and one to follow a victorious one. In both cases, I chose ""Bow before me, you roguish, rump-fed pumpion!""  Each style has an advantage. For example, ""Dragon"" style, which presents a graphical avatar that most closely resembles Mr. Seagal, features stronger kicks than ""Tiger"" style, which emphasizes punches. The basis for these distinctions is shoddy at best, since everyone knows that Tigers rely on judo throws, and not punches, as their principle means of attack.  Combat is turn-based. Before each round, you must select three moves to be performed in succession. Depending on your opponent's choices, these may or may not prove effective. For example, if your opponent punches high and you happen to have selected a high block, his move will be countered. As you progress through the game, you may, supposedly, acquire new, more-powerful moves. However, I was unable to do so, as boss battles, which are necessary steps toward advancement, proved inaccessible. After each of about 30 attempts to connect to some sort of boss-battling mode, I received the message, ""The spirits cannot be reached."" This excuse might have worked a year ago, when Fudomyo was first previewed and mobile multiplayer was still a mystical concept. Now that we've enjoyed online titles like Bejeweled Multiplayer, the magic is gone. It is becoming increasingly apparent that neither spirits nor flying squirrels are involved in most wireless content-handling. This leaves Fudomyo with little excuse.  Fudomyo's bare-bones animations and sound do not serve to elevate the title beyond its lackluster gameplay. Its audio complement is wholly composed of a single, generically-Asian MIDI loop, which lasts about four measures. Reminiscent of the soundtracks of frenetically paced kung fu flicks, Fudomyo's music evokes a level of action and drama that is wholly absent from its gameplay. The title's graphics befit its simplistic, turn-based game mechanics but are in no way representative of the smooth, polished look featured in other Jamdat games.   Network frustrations, poor production values, and boring, turn-based gameplay make Fudomyo a prime example of the proverbial failed-hype machine. Not even Jackie Chan could have saved this one. 
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845,Legacy: Dark Shadows ,4.1," Legacy: Dark Shadows feels cheap and amateurish in every way, and playing it can be a numbing experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/7/4/0/2213740-924256.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legacy-dark-shadows-review/1900-6114694/,neg,"
 Have you been yearning for an adventure game with sharp writing, compelling characters, and interesting puzzles? If so, forget about Legacy: Dark Shadows, which feels cheap and amateurish in every way. Playing the game can be a numbing experience. Antiquated graphics, horrible voice-overs, clumsy storytelling, boring characters, derivative settings, pixel hunts, simplistic puzzles, and severe bugs have a way of doing that. If Legacy can do something wrong, it does.  Welcome to Mars, where boredom is the leading cause of death.  Legacy: Dark Shadows--which, by the way, has nothing to do with the Dark Shadows TV show--stumbles at the start and never recovers. An underdeveloped, barely coherent prologue has you playing for a scant few minutes as a Russian combat journalist (or something to that effect) in Stalingrad in 1941. Apparently a battle is raging even though the real-world battle for Stalingrad began in 1942. You don't really do anything in this prologue except open up a crate ejected from a downed plane. Then the opening credits roll, and this tiny, cryptic episode is essentially forgotten.  The bulk of the game has you playing as Ren Silver, a female private investigator in the 22nd century. You start out vacationing on Mars. The game gives you no clue what you're supposed to do there, so you walk around aimlessly with no motive or explanations until you mysteriously trigger an event that calls you back to detective work on Earth.   An acquaintance named Hacker calls to say Ted is missing. Who's Ted, you might ask? (And why, by the way, shouldn't he get a more evocative name for a futuristic mystery story?) Beyond the fact that he's a journalist, Legacy doesn't really make it clear who he is or why you should care about him. In fact, the game has a hard time making it clear who even Ren is or why you should care about her--or anything in the gameworld, for that matter. If you learn anything about our heroine, it's through her stoic, bored comments on scenery items, or it comes through her stilted, emotionless dialogue with the few cardboard characters you encounter. You can play the entire game and never get a feel for who Ren is, so if you're expecting a strong female protagonist akin to April Ryan or Kate Walker, you'll be sorely disappointed.  Legacy's storytelling fares no better than the character development. If you want to learn what's going on in this clunky, underdeveloped tale of world domination, you'll usually have to stop, open Ren's logbook, and read her comments. This is backward. A player shouldn't have to repeatedly read about events after the fact to learn their significance.   Ridiculous monsters and objects hidden on dark screens are par for the course.  The game unfolds in weird ways, with new areas opening up to exploration for no clear reason. You might find that you can enter a hotel only after reading an advertising leaflet about it. Or that you can't initially go down a hallway that your cursor shows to be a valid route--nothing is blocking you, and no reason is given as to why you can't proceed that way.   The puzzles are mostly inventory-based and offer little challenge except when the game forces you into tedious pixel hunting. There are too many items or hotspots that are tiny and hidden against dark backgrounds, so it's often only sheer luck that you'll stumble across some of them. Some items aren't even marked as hotspots, so near the end of the game, you have to click all over the ground to dig up vital items. On top of that, major bugs can make items (and even Ren) temporarily disappear. How on earth can you solve a puzzle when the items vanish?   In addition to the inventory puzzles, you get four logic puzzles, but any adventure-game veteran will have solved variants of these puzzles many times before and will be able to breeze through them in a heartbeat. In fact, novices should find them easy, too. Legacy offers no difficulty settings or alternate puzzle solutions, and it unfolds in a strictly linear fashion, so not only is the game too easy, but it also has no replay value at all. On the bright side, it's at least reasonably long the first time through.  Reading Legacy's box, you get the impression the interface is something special. In fact, it's pretty bad. Little radial command menus pop up when you click on the characters or items you can interact with, letting you look at, take, or talk to the person or object in question. That part is fine. The problem is that the cursor doesn't always make it clear when you can actually interact with something, rather than merely look at it to hear Ren's thoughts. Between that problem and the hotspots that are far too easy to miss, you'll pretty much have to click everything in sight to avoid missing important items or exits.   The interface can also make movement unclear. You might have two exits at the bottom of the screen, yet the movement cursor stays lit up all along that edge, implying that it's all one exit. The visuals don't clearly show two routes, either, so it's only by chance that you might discover you can actually go either left or right.  The gameworld is a boring thing to explore, anyway. It's a third-rate mishmash of old cyberpunk imagery and Blade Runner's dystopian urban future. This is a gameworld where a metropolis is called ""Big City,"" an arms dealer is named ""Gunman,"" and characters talk with a straight face about the ""conquest of the universe.""   The world isn't merely clichéd and underdeveloped--it's also portrayed with dated, blocky graphics and mostly static backgrounds. The character animations are extremely limited and stilted, too. Ren's walking and running animations don't look remotely realistic, and her lips never move when she speaks. When she interacts with an object, she just vaguely waves her hand in its direction instead of actually holding, turning, or opening it. Ren looks more like a marionette than a person.  Outside of some frustrating pixel hunts, the puzzles are a breeze.  While the graphics are unoriginal and at least six years out of date on a technical level, they still more or less get the job done. The same can't be said for the audio, which is atrocious. The sound effects and music are simplistic and sparse, and the voice-overs range from bad to astonishingly bad. The actors have heavy Slavic accents, so Ren takes a ""wacation"" instead of a ""vacation."" This wouldn't be a problem if all the characters were supposed to be from the developer's native Croatia, but there's no indication that such is the case. In fact, one is apparently supposed to be a Texan. What's worse is the way many actors gratuitously affect strange, cartoony voices that are downright silly and distracting. Mispronunciations, coupled with numerous typos in the subtitles, only add to the game's audio woes and general sloppiness. More than anything, what's striking about the voice-overs is how everyone sounds terminally bored, as if random people were dragged in off the streets and paid a few bucks to read some bad dialogue for an afternoon. Not a single character sounds like a person with real emotions that you can relate to.   It somehow seems fitting that whenever you exit Legacy, it starts to play a cheesy little rap song and then crashes. In fact, Legacy crashes during gameplay, too, so save often. Better yet, save your money for one of the many superior adventure games released this year.  
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846,World Racing 2 ,4.1," World Racing 2 makes a couple of key improvements on its predecessor, but it's still a substandard effort.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/0/3/1/2217031-box_wracing2.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-racing-2-review/1900-6156909/,neg,"
  World Racing 2 is the sequel to the poorly received World Racing (also known as Mercedes-Benz World Racing), which was released in 2003. Bland visuals, run-of-the-mill gameplay, a restrictive car license, and a poor sense of speed were just a few of the original game's many problems. The changes made in World Racing 2 demonstrate that the developers were aware of the criticism that the first game received, but many key issues have gone untouched, and none of the changes make the game more enjoyable.   Maybe if the controls in World Racing 2 weren't so wonky, this wouldn't happen so often.   It's almost as if Synetic actively looked for ways to make the game less fun while World Racing 2 was in development. Right off the bat, you'll find that the menus are unattractive and difficult to navigate. Far and away, the game's biggest problem is that it suffers from an identity crisis. It can't decide whether it's a simulation or a pure arcade racer. The cars feel slow and heavy one minute, but just seconds later, the slightest bump will send the car careening. While you can make a few handling and braking adjustments, they don't make any difference other than making drifting a little easier. All of the race modes employ catch-up artificial intelligence, like an arcade-style racer would, but they're also completely unforgiving, much like a sim is. On the one hand, the catch-up A.I. keeps you close no matter what. On the other hand, just bumping a single object on the side of the road could mean you won't have enough time to finish a race. One unlucky break on the final lap means you're probably going to finish dead last, and unlucky breaks are a common occurrence thanks to the random traffic that has a habit of coming out of nowhere mere feet from the finish line.    Along with the unlucky breaks, the game also has a habit of being late in giving out time-sensitive information. In off-road races, the game uses arrows to guide you from one checkpoint to the next. As you pass through a gate, the arrow is supposed to shift direction to guide you to the next point. Unfortunately, the arrows don't always change directions fast enough. Often, the next gate is a 90-degree turn from your current position and hidden from view. So, by the time you see the arrow and make your turn, it's too late to make it to the next gate. Trial and error, not skill, is the main strategy necessary to win some races.    The game's two main play modes are career and free ride. You'll have to spend most of your time in the career mode, since it's the only way to earn ""speedbucks,"" the in-game currency that is used to unlock cars and tracks in other modes. There are a number of race styles, including standard races, timed events, knockout races, drift, rally, waypoint, and sometimes a combination of events. Aside from the ability to earn speedbucks, nothing about the career mode is compelling. You don't have rivals, you never improve your abilities, and you have no freedom to choose your next race. In fact, if you can't beat a race, due to the unfair way they're often set up, you can't skip it. The free ride mode is easily the highlight of the game, though that's not saying much. You can pick any car you want and drive nearly anywhere you desire, but the payoffs for exploring are limited. For instance, because much of the game's scenery objects don't have solid geometry, you can't drive off the road and land on a submarine, since your car will clip right through it. If, however, you want to run over cows or push jets off of an aircraft carrier, you can do those things.    Ironically, while speedbucks are the only compelling aspect of the career mode, they're also yet another aspect of the game that is unforgiving to the point of cruelty. Speedbucks are awarded in similar fashion to the ""kudos"" in Project Gotham Racing, in that they are awarded for exhibiting skill and fair driving tactics during a race. You earn speedbucks for passing cars, taking shortcuts, driving on two wheels, and for catching air. Conversely, you lose speedbucks if you ram an opponent, cut them off, hit a wall, or press the back button to return your car to the track. The system is unfair because the game is set up such that many snafus are unavoidable. Also, it basically penalizes players twice for making mistakes. In addition to losing time because you just drove off a cliff, you're assessed a financial penalty as well.     Drift races, while not a significant part of the career mode, are so frustrating that they deserve special mention. The game awards and takes away drift points on a seemingly random basis, penalizing you for drifting off the road even if you don't hit anything. These races often require dozens of attempts to master. This frustrating aspect of the game has been well-documented by many different players, who have posted complaints about the game on message boards since the game was released. At the very least, the developer should've included some kind of halfway decent tutorial in the game, though these races probably should have been less infuriating in the first place.    The roster of 90 cars is actually slightly smaller than that of the original World Racing. Whereas the vehicle roster in the first game featured Mercedes-Benz exclusively, World Racing 2 now includes automobiles from a variety of manufacturers, including big names like Volvo, Lotus, and Alfa Romeo, and lesser known outfits, such as Rinspeed, Wiesmonn, and Westfield. The number of vehicles is slightly misleading, however, as many are merely slight variations from one another, differing only in paint scheme and horsepower. The new game offers more courses to race on--a total of 160 across Italy, Egypt, Miami, Hawaii, and two locales in Germany. While these numbers are technically truthful, there's some sketchy math behind the numbers. Many courses vary only slightly from one another. Furthermore, the game counts mirrored tracks as original courses.     Those hoping that the game would at least put forth a strong multiplayer component are going to be disappointed. The game is Xbox Live aware, and there is some downloadable content, but there aren't any online race modes. As of right now, the downloadable content consists of a handful of skins, but the manual mentions new levels, missions, vehicles, and more being available in the future. System link isn't supported, either. The only available multiplayer option is a basic four-player split-screen mode.   There is no online, or even system link multiplayer in World Racing 2. Just split-screen.   The game's graphics and audio also stumble more than they succeed. The action in this new game is certainly faster than the original, but the sluggish frame rate makes it difficult to feel any sense of speed. For a racing game that's presumably intended to compete with the Project Gotham games and Forza Motorsport, World Racing 2 also has some glaring omissions in its presentation: there's no in-cockpit view and no progressive-scan support. The quality of track design varies greatly. Hawaii has an aircraft carrier you can drive on, complete with planes you can knock off the side. The ocean also looks beautiful reflecting the sun and swaying palm trees. Then there are locations like Egypt, which has you driving amid ugly radio towers and gas pipelines. The environments look fine when viewed from the track, but the moment you go off-road and get a close look at the scenery, the low-res textures quickly become apparent. The ground is a blurry mess, often blending into the horizon and making it tough to discern what lies just a few hundred feet ahead. The game's smoke and dirt effects are just as awful. Admittedly, there are some nice visual touches, such as detailed car models, escalating vehicle damage, and the ability to muddy up the car and wash it off by driving through dirt and standing water. But these nicer touches only serve to emphasize how sloppy everything else is.    The soundtrack is also deeply generic, consisting of bland tracks that don't make any kind of audible impression throughout the game. Thankfully the custom soundtrack option is available, making the lousy music the one bad part of the game you can successfully avoid. Dolby Digital is supported, but the engine sound effects aren't particularly robust, nor are any of the other sound effects noteworthy--so you don't gain much when listening in 5.1.     There's no polite way to say it: World Racing 2 is a lousy racing game. Even if you manage to look past all of its problems and find something fun to do, the game will soon quash your short-lived joy. With so many other great racing games already available for the Xbox, this game isn't worth a second thought, even at a reduced price.    
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847,Knights of the Temple II ,4.1," The respectable combat system isn't enough to gloss over hideous bugs, a dull plot, and rotten controls.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/1/3/2211413-box_kott2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/knights-of-the-temple-ii-review/1900-6167488/,neg,"
  After playing Knights of the Temple II, it's hard to believe that the first game in the series could have been popular enough to inspire such a frustrating sequel. Insane bugs, broken missions, and impossibly stupid controls will make you want to bash your head against your keyboard in disgust. Quality assurance went out the window on this game, which is too bad, because there's some fun combat and nifty boss encounters buried underneath the annoyances. Sadly, you have to wade through a lot of muck to get to the enjoyable parts.   These guys look dangerous, but you need to be most careful of the stairways.   Knights is a combat-focused role-playing game, and sure enough, you jump into the plate boots of medieval hero Paul de Raque, who sports a nice wide helmet and mutters about the ""one true God."" You're looking for three objects that will allow you to close a portal that's letting in the usual legions of undead. On the way, you fight a bunch of baddies and complete some half-baked collection quests. The story is barely cohesive and made worse by apparent references within the dialogue to the original Knights of the Temple, which never reached American shores.     But first you'll need to figure out how to get around, and this is where you'll quickly discover the game's console roots. It was released on the Xbox and PlayStation 2 in the UK in late 2005. But it seems that a year wasn't enough time to implement workable third-person controls with a mouse and keyboard. The default control scheme doesn't even use the mouse buttons, nor can you remap important combat controls that are permanently assigned to the numeric keypad. You can try to play this way, but the camera continues to move a little bit beyond where you move the mouse, and the effect is a lot of wobbliness that makes you feel seasick. So you can plug a gamepad in, but you should be prepared to head to the keyboard from time to time because the buttons won't always work the way they're supposed to, particularly in menus and dialogue trees.    Once you finally get moving, you'll find that Knights isn't really an RPG as much as it is a third-person action game with some role-playing trappings, such as improving skill and purchasing different weapons. As you progress, you earn experience points that you then spend to improve your combat expertise, unlock combos, and upgrade other special abilities. The combat, when it's in full gear, is challenging and a lot of fun because you get a good number of different skills and attacks to perform. Battles are deliberate without being slow, and swinging a heavy weapon feels weighty and satisfying. You can switch over to a bow if you like, but it's handy only in boss encounters and in other situations with unhurried enemies. In fact, those boss scenes are the best moments of the game, such as defeating a huge ogre in freefall descent.     Every other aspect of the game requires an inordinate amount of patience, more than any reasonable person possesses. First and foremost among the frustrations is the litany of ludicrous bugs you must endure. In medieval times, climbing stairs was apparently a dangerous activity because doing so at just the wrong angle can cause Paul to jitter madly, take an enormous amount of fall damage, and die. Perhaps the heavy armor is tough on the knees? If you take quests in an order that the game doesn't expect, you will also get stuck in an endless dialogue loop and force a restart. At certain points, the camera zooms in and out uncontrollably, again forcing you to restart. And whatever you do, don't patch. The published patches add StarForce copy protection and consequently require a CD key to play, but Knights of the Temple II doesn't ship with a CD key in the US, so if you patch, you can't start the game.     Then there are the questing and traveling, which are incredibly boring and more linear than the retail box would lead you to believe. You can visit the three main cities and complete quests in any order you desire, but the areas are small and the 18 available side quests never get more exciting than ""find me some food rations,"" ""find me a plant,"" and ""find me some pearls."" But because there isn't always an obvious path, you're stuck hitting the ""talk"" button with every non-player character you pass to see if one of them will help move the main quest along. The dialogue is terrible, and not a single character is remotely interesting. Even during the forced moments of sentiment, Paul is never anything more than a dullard in a big metal suit.    This dude is wishing you peace in Arabic. He must know how much time you spent making the controls work properly.   Like the gameplay, Knights looks and sounds best when you're in combat. Swinging a weapon and using your healing spell fill the screen with vivid sword trails and vibrant particles. The sound also follows suit with appropriately stirring clangs and swooshes. There are some decent environments and set pieces, such as an underground lair where you meet a hulking scorpion. On the other hand, most areas are defined by their bland colors and washed-out textures. Some of the animations are jerky and look incomplete. There isn't a lot of spoken dialogue, but what's there isn't particularly good, and the generic soundtrack gets the job done without being noteworthy.     There's also an online multiplayer component for up to eight players in Knights of the Temple II, but there was never anyone online over the course of several days, nor did anyone ever join the games we created, even after being up for hours. Of course, with such plain game types as deathmatch, team deathmatch, and the hilariously titled capture-the-grail mode, it doesn't seem that anyone is missing much. Once you struggle through the dozen or so hours of single-player gameplay, there's no reason to return, not even for the alternate endings promised on the box. And it's too bad because the combat system is quite good and deserves to be in a better game than this one.    
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848,Ready 2 Rumble Boxing ,8.7, Ready 2 Rumble is one of the must-have launch games on the Dreamcast.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/5/2/2218752-box_r2rb.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ready-2-rumble-boxing-review/1900-2540514/,pos,"
Ready 2 Rumble, the game that everyone has called the Blitz version of boxing, is the real deal. This over-the-top boxing game is good in much the same way that Mike Tyson's Punch-Out was good - both games have a quick, arcade style of play and both feature wild boxers with very distinct styles. But the similarities end there - Ready 2 Rumble's beautiful 3D graphics and incredible gameplay are like nothing anyone has ever seen in a boxing game. The game has two modes of play. Arcade mode is a simple one- or two-player mode in which you simply pick a fighter and fight. Championship mode is a single-player mode that lets you take a boxer from the bottom of the ranks to the top in pursuit of the championship belt. To accomplish this goal, you must improve your fighter's abilities by putting him through five different forms of training: lifting weights, using the sway bag, taking aerobics, and hitting the heavy bag and speed bag. Each of these exercises is represented in a minigame that simulates in a fun way the method of training used by real boxers. For instance, aerobics is represented by a Parappa the Rapper-styled push-the-correct-button-at-just-the-precise-moment type of game. Most of the minigames are fun and challenging, and since your attributes rise the better you do, it's in your best interest to do well. However, after you take a few of the fighters all the way through the championship mode, you'll begin to grow tired of the time it takes to play the minigames. Instead, you can use the auto-train feature, which is faster, though it doesn't give your fighter as much of an ability boost as is possible.  Each minigame costs money, which you earn by betting on yourself in a prizefight. The prizefights are separate from the bouts that you take to climb the ranks in pursuit of the belt, in that they're strictly about the cash. Your opponent will fight harder the more money you wager, but even when you bet the maximum amount possible, the computer opponent is fairly easy to beat.  The computer AI in any single-player mode on any difficulty setting is really easy to beat after spending some time with it. The AI is Ready 2 Rumble's only real weakness - all the computer opponents fail to stop you from sticking and moving. The computer opponent will let you come in, deliver a punch, and get back out again before he has a chance to land. Uppercuts thrown just within range by most fighters will almost always land as well. Each fighter is different, so of course some fighters will be harder to beat, but it takes little time to discover what it takes to beat each guy. Even though the AI is extremely weak, the game is still quite fun to play. Unlocking more boxers by completing the championship mode several times, along with the game's great two-player mode, will keep you playing the game for quite some time.The control of Ready 2 Rumble is elegantly simple. You use the analog stick to move your fighter freely around the ring. The trigger buttons block high and low, but when held and used with the analog stick, they also let you bob, weave, and evade. The four buttons on the face of the controller are left punch high, left punch low, right punch high, and right punch low. It's a very simple, straightforward setup that lets you instantly jump into the game and start landing halfway-realistic combos, like the old one-two. There are different punches - like hooks, uppercuts, and lunging jabs - that you can perform simply by pressing a direction on the analog stick along with the appropriate punch button. Each of the game's 20 fighters have different strengths and weaknesses. Some fighters, like Jet Chin, are fast and wiry, but they lack power and range; other fighters, like Tank Thrasher, have tons of power and range, but they are big and slow. Then you have fighters, like Butcher Brown, who have it all and who can usually destroy all comers. In any event, your control is drastically differently from one fighter to another, and there are unique combos to uncover. If you land a hard punch when your stamina is relatively full, your fighter will earn a letter. If you do this six times before the end of a round without getting knocked down, you spell out the word rumble. This lets you unleash a barrage of punches without losing any stamina for a brief period of time. Probably the single most impressive thing about the control is how well it matches up with the visuals. In games like this - where there is a lot of animation - lag is common; normally you would execute a punch and have to wait for the animation to complete before continuing. But not in Ready 2 Rumble - the game moves so fast and smooth that you have to play it to believe it.  Visually, Ready 2 Rumble is amazing. The animation of the fighters is incredible. Whether they're  collapsing to the mat, delivering a blow to the face, or receiving one, all the fighters move so smoothly and realistically that you really have to see it to believe it. The pugilists themselves look fantastic - their polygonal frames are nearly absent of any straight edge, giving their bodies a naturally round and smooth look. All the boxers blink, and their mouths move when they speak, almost perfectly in synch with what they are saying. Each fighter has around 120 facial expressions ranging from an ecstatic ""I just became heavyweight champion of the world"" look, to a ""I am so hurt I am about to lose consciousness"" look. When fighters takes a punch, you can see the wince of pain on their faces, and after a while you can see bruises form and their skin change color. Even the audience surrounding the ring is animated, and they actually look like a crowd of people, as opposed to the water-colored blur we've seen in most sports games. The crowd stands up and sits down, raises arms and holds up signs. The game runs at a phenomenal 60 frames a second and really has to be seen to be appreciated. The only visual flaws that you'll see are a bit of slow down some clipping problems with some of the fighters' clothing. Other than that, the game is just beautiful.     Besides Ready 2 Rumble's obvious visual qualities, the game's infectious ""Let's get ready to rumble"" intro song and accompanying sound really fit the game well. All the fighters' speeches, in the form of taunts and catchy prefight one liners (minus accents) sound crystal clear. One of the best one-liners in the game is Afro Thunder's ""It's time to dance! It's time to dance! (dramatic pause) Dance, sucker!"" The sound effects for punches landing on the face and body vary, as do the groans and grunts of the pugilist on the receiving end.  This, along with the comical comments from your corner about your performance, crowd cheers and boos, and of course Michael Buffer's trademark ""Let's get ready to rumble"" battle cry, all add up to a game that has outstanding audio.  In the end, Ready 2 Rumble is a fantastic game in almost every sense of the word. If the computer opponents could adapt to your style to stop one dimensional attacks, and force you to use your head to box, this game would be almost perfect. Still, with its incredible control and impressive overall presentation, it's the best boxing game ever. I know I'll be playing the two-player mode for a long time to come and will be looking forward to a sequel. Ready 2 Rumble is one of the must-have launch games on the Dreamcast.
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849,Ridge Racer Type 4 ,8.7," If you've ever cared about any of the games in the Ridge Racer series, then R4 is definitely the racing game for you.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/7/3/9/1740-6739.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ridge-racer-type-4-review/1900-2546048/,pos,"
No matter how great you think Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, or any other driving game is, Ridge Racer has always been the preferred series when it comes to arcade-style driving. Though Rage Racer introduced some simulation aspects off the track, the on-track experience maintained the same powerslide-happy gameplay that PlayStation owners have loved since the system launched. Ridge Racer Type 4 (or R4, for short) makes plenty of improvements while maintaining the same basic feel. The game's main mode is the grand prix, where you pick one of four teams and one of four car manufacturers, then race on eight tracks. Each team has its own little storyline that plays out between races, which is told through conversation with your team liaison. What your team liaison says to you changes depending on how well you do. The first two tracks only require you to place third or higher. The second heat requires you to finish second or higher, while the last four tracks require you to finish first to proceed. You can retry each track up to three times before having to start the entire heat over again. You'll earn a newer, faster car as you complete in each heat and one more before the final race. Which car you get depends on how well you did in the previous races. If you aced the entire heat, and you'll get a faster, better car than you would if you'd finished third in one or more races. These cars can be used in the two-player versus mode or the time-trial mode. Also, an extra trial is unlocked for each car manufacturer as you beat the game with the various cars. There are two basic types of cars in the game. Drift cars are meant for powersliding, while the grip cars use their additional traction to make most turns without needing to lay down any rubber. The drift cars can maneuver the courses more quickly than the grip cars, but the grip cars let you compete, even though you might not have mastered the art of the slide. Also, Namco's Jogcon controller really brings a lot to the game. The addition of the small wheel makes the control a lot more intuitive, as well as providing valuable feedback (start doing thumb exercises now) that helps you know exactly when to power out of a turn. The track design still revolves around making only a few different tracks, and using variations to deliver different courses, but the rehashing of tracks doesn't stand out nearly as much as it did in the previous Ridge Racer games. The graphics are simply great. The game moves at a very high, smooth frame rate, and the tracks are filled with detail. Lighting is also well used, and things like brake lights give off tracers in tunnels. The graphics aren't perfect, though. You can sometimes see the opposing cars through walls, and the brake lights occasionally appear in the road if you're approaching the top of a hill and another car is near the bottom of the hill. The soundtrack is a bit more mellow than the previous games, but it still fits into the game perfectly. Above all, R4 is incredibly fun to play. Unlocking the cars (more than 300 in all, though most are basic variations on a few common themes) quickly becomes an obsession, and the Jogcon adds a ton of depth to the game's control. Sure, you can play with a Dual Shock or even a standard controller, but the Jogcon is definitely the way to play. If you've ever cared about any of the games in the Ridge Racer series, then R4 is definitely the racing game for you.
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850,Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001 ,8.7," Though the latest version of High Heat suffers from a number of minor flaws once again, it's still the early favorite to capture best-of-breed honors in PC baseball sims this ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/1/7/2214817-box_hhb01.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sammy-sosa-high-heat-baseball-2001-review/1900-2537666/,pos,"
As another baseball season approaches, another impressive-but-flawed version of 3DO's High Heat Baseball is upon us. Now sporting a big-time celebrity endorsement, Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001 is a very solid effort that improves upon last year's version with a series of subtle enhancements. Though the latest version of High Heat suffers from a number of minor flaws once again, it's still the early favorite to capture best-of-breed honors in PC baseball sims this year. The game's basic design hasn't changed very much. You can still play exhibition games, full seasons of varying length, play-off tournaments, and a home-run derby. A new batting practice mode lets you step into the box for practice swings against a fully adjustable computer pitcher. For example, if you're having trouble hitting a curve ball, you can set the pitcher to fire nothing but curves while you try to make contact. Additional multiplayer options now let you tackle season and play-off games against fellow High Heat fans, whereas last year's version only supported exhibition games in multiplayer mode. The graphics engine has been tweaked, but only slightly. The most notable improvement is in the additional variety of player models. Now, big guys like Glenallen Hill and Frank Thomas actually look much larger in the game than smaller players like Craig Biggio and Pokey Reese. Yet though the visual variety is a welcome change, the overall quality of the player models is still less than stunning. The players in High Heat 2001 don't look nearly as good as those in previous baseball games like Triple Play 2000 and Microsoft Baseball 2000. Some players in High Heat 2001 have their real faces mapped to their player models, but most of them still have that one same face, and the same enormous eyebrows, from the original High Heat. At least High Heat 2001 now supports night games as well as day games. Fortunately, the game now offers a wealth of new player animations that help liven up the on-field action. Players take extra steps as they make running catches, which introduces the concept of momentum to the game. This can actually affect gameplay, as it now takes longer to throw the ball after making a running catch, and players will even occasionally run into the outfield walls and drop the ball as a result. Other new animations include players pumping their arms after roping a double or triple, umpires who punch out strikeout victims in varied and elaborate fashion, and diving fielders who hold up their gloves to show that they made the catch. Of course, any true High Heat fan knows that graphical quality is a secondary concern. The thing that's always set High Heat apart from its competitors is the realism of the on-field action, and in this important regard, High Heat 2001 maintains the series' sterling reputation. Each individual game played in High Heat 2001 unfolds realistically, as dramatic pitcher-batter confrontations and crafty computer moves will leave you scrambling to find the right pinch hitter and bullpen ace. Just when you think you've figured out the computer's style, it stumps you with a surprise move. Getting caught flat-footed when Mark McGwire bunts for a suicide squeeze in the bottom of the 11th inning should be enough to teach any player how sneaky the High Heat computer opponent can be. But the realism in High Heat 2001 goes beyond good artificial intelligence. For the most part, players in the game perform as they would in real life, as they hit for power when appropriate and even register accurate win-loss records on the mound. Better still, the realism generally carries over to season statistics, where 50-homerun hitters and 20-game winners are as rare as they should be. The game does seem to have a few glitches in the statistics engine, such as during a time when Sammy Sosa himself played in 159 games despite a midseason injury that sidelined him for 34 contests, but the errors seem few and far between.Other bugs and flaws in the game aren't quite as inconsequential. For one thing, High Heat suffers from a serious bull-pen bug once again this year. The game has problems when you try to perform a double switch; it sends your pitcher back to the bull pen, and it also drops his ""warmed up"" rating to zero and leaves a hole in your lineup. Any attempt to put the pitcher back in his rightful spot results in a crash. The bug doesn't crop up every time you attempt a double switch, but it occurs more often than not. In addition, the pitching interface seems downright unfair at times. While the computer pitchers seem to be able to hit their corners regularly, it's almost ludicrously difficult for human players to do so, even when controlling a pitcher with a control rating of 85 or higher. As a result, you often throw a lot of balls when you try to throw strikes. In real life that may not be too unrealistic, but the situation doesn't improve on the game's two easiest difficulty settings, and that's a problem. Also, your pitchers have a nasty habit of throwing fat, juicy home-run balls right down the middle of the plate when you attempt to throw garbage pitches outside or down. Many of these problems seem to stem from the game's erratic or at least imprecise controls. Not only can the pitching be frustrating, but often when fielding you'll find the ball winging its way to third when you thought you threw it to second. This control problem cropped up with more than one player using several different game controllers on multiple systems. Furthermore, the sound in High Heat 2001 really needs an overhaul. The play-by-play vocal tracks seem virtually unchanged since last year's version - and for that matter, since the first version of High Heat. The commentary is lifeless, repetitive, and in desperate need of improvement. Still, it sounds brilliant next to High Heat 2001's horrendous ""ambience"" clips. For some reason, the developers saw fit to include a bunch of celebration/taunt sound bytes that erupt in a variety of game situations. For example, after a strikeout a voice might chime in with a regretful ""Aw, man!"" while a pop-up might elicit an unseen heckler to yell, ""Your shoe's untied!"" at the last minute. All of these clips are poorly recorded and sound like the work of programmers who had too little sleep and too much access to sound equipment. Worst of all, each of these clips plays at a much higher volume than the rest of the game's sound effects, which makes them even more jarring and annoying. The celebrations and taunts aren't necessarily a bad idea, but they should be much more refined for future versions of High Heat. Aside from its occasional flaws, High Heat 2001 is essentially an improved version of High Heat 2000. The latest version offers just enough new features and graphical enhancements to entice fans of the series to upgrade. High Heat 2001 is at least as good as it was last year, and it will certainly contend for the PC baseball crown once again this season.
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'erratic', 'least', 'imprecise', 'controls', '.', 'Not', 'pitching', 'frustrating', ',', 'often', 'fielding', ""'ll"", 'find', 'ball', 'winging', 'way', 'third', 'thought', 'threw', 'second', '.', 'This', 'control', 'problem', 'cropped', 'one', 'player', 'using', 'several', 'different', 'game', 'controllers', 'multiple', 'systems', '.', 'Furthermore', ',', 'sound', 'High', 'Heat', '2001', 'really', 'needs', 'overhaul', '.', 'The', 'play-by-play', 'vocal', 'tracks', 'seem', 'virtually', 'unchanged', 'since', 'last', 'year', ""'s"", 'version', '-', 'matter', ',', 'since', 'first', 'version', 'High', 'Heat', '.', 'The', 'commentary', 'lifeless', ',', 'repetitive', ',', 'desperate', 'need', 'improvement', '.', 'Still', ',', 'sounds', 'brilliant', 'next', 'High', 'Heat', '2001', ""'s"", 'horrendous', '``', 'ambience', ""''"", 'clips', '.', 'For', 'reason', ',', 'developers', 'saw', 'fit', 'include', 'bunch', 'celebration/taunt', 'sound', 'bytes', 'erupt', 'variety', 'game', 'situations', '.', 'For', 'example', ',', 'strikeout', 'voice', 'might', 'chime', 'regretful', '``', 'Aw', ',', 'man', '!', ""''"", 'pop-up', 'might', 'elicit', 'unseen', 'heckler', 'yell', ',', '``', 'Your', 'shoe', ""'s"", 'untied', '!', ""''"", 'last', 'minute', '.', 'All', 'clips', 'poorly', 'recorded', 'sound', 'like', 'work', 'programmers', 'little', 'sleep', 'much', 'access', 'sound', 'equipment', '.', 'Worst', ',', 'clips', 'plays', 'much', 'higher', 'volume', 'rest', 'game', ""'s"", 'sound', 'effects', ',', 'makes', 'even', 'jarring', 'annoying', '.', 'The', 'celebrations', 'taunts', ""n't"", 'necessarily', 'bad', 'idea', ',', 'much', 'refined', 'future', 'versions', 'High', 'Heat', '.', 'Aside', 'occasional', 'flaws', ',', 'High', 'Heat', '2001', 'essentially', 'improved', 'version', 'High', 'Heat', '2000', '.', 'The', 'latest', 'version', 'offers', 'enough', 'new', 'features', 'graphical', 'enhancements', 'entice', 'fans', 'series', 'upgrade', '.', 'High', 'Heat', '2001', 'least', 'good', 'last', 'year', ',', 'certainly', 'contend', 'PC', 'baseball', 'crown', 'season', '.']",0.039985717661156286,0.44397118800627594
851,Shivers II: Harvest of Souls ,8.7, The plot in Shivers II is hauntingly intelligent.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/1/5/4/1852-7154.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shivers-ii-harvest-of-souls-review/1900-2532986/,pos,"
Shivers II incorporates 360-degree navigation for a seamless saunter through an uncanny landscape. On your way to Shivers II's solution, you will notice cutting-edge video imbedding, beautiful morphing and scenery that will make you want to buy a 20-inch monitor. All this technology isn't wasted on a dud, either, as the plot in Shivers II is hauntingly intelligent. Drawing on Native American myths and legends, Harvest of Souls may educate as well as entertain.  People are disappearing in Cyclone, a secluded town at the mouth of Devil's Canyon, and when your friends from the rock band Trip Cyclone fall victim to an ancient Native American curse, you are thrust into a battle against the enemy in hopes of setting them free. In this battle, however, guns and cannons are not the weapons of choice, but rather twelve prayer-sticks: powerful items that must be won through puzzle solving logic, which, unless used properly, will do more harm to you than good. When you possess a prayer-stick, your life essence begins to decrease, and it's a race against time to find the prayer-stick's individual altar. If you lollygag, you can die. And watch out for petroglyphs; they will strike from the walls of Devil's Canyon, draining life force as well. The puzzles in Shivers II engage on different levels. Many are of the classic puzzle mold: rearrange mixed-up balls into a proper order, solve a tangram, reorder sliding tiles to complete a symbol, etc. Clues to these individual puzzles are always close at hand, but they do require concentration, and objects from the inventory won't assist you. These puzzles are also altered for each new game, a nice tip of the hat toward replayability (you can also design your own puzzles to confound your friends who may join in over the Internet). The larger mystery of Shivers II is rather complex, but again, many clues are provided to help you. A sweet-voiced specter, answering machine messages, and the rock videos of Trip Cyclones' songs aid you throughout. And the music isn't all that bad, either. Shivers II is a dark mystery, and one that challenges on many different levels. It is exquisitely designed and wonderfully full of all the right touches.
 ","['Shivers', 'II', 'incorporates', '360-degree', 'navigation', 'seamless', 'saunter', 'uncanny', 'landscape', '.', 'On', 'way', 'Shivers', 'II', ""'s"", 'solution', ',', 'notice', 'cutting-edge', 'video', 'imbedding', ',', 'beautiful', 'morphing', 'scenery', 'make', 'want', 'buy', '20-inch', 'monitor', '.', 'All', 'technology', ""n't"", 'wasted', 'dud', ',', 'either', ',', 'plot', 'Shivers', 'II', 'hauntingly', 'intelligent', '.', 'Drawing', 'Native', 'American', 'myths', 'legends', ',', 'Harvest', 'Souls', 'may', 'educate', 'well', 'entertain', '.', 'People', 'disappearing', 'Cyclone', ',', 'secluded', 'town', 'mouth', 'Devil', ""'s"", 'Canyon', ',', 'friends', 'rock', 'band', 'Trip', 'Cyclone', 'fall', 'victim', 'ancient', 'Native', 'American', 'curse', ',', 'thrust', 'battle', 'enemy', 'hopes', 'setting', 'free', '.', 'In', 'battle', ',', 'however', ',', 'guns', 'cannons', 'weapons', 'choice', ',', 'rather', 'twelve', 'prayer-sticks', ':', 'powerful', 'items', 'must', 'puzzle', 'solving', 'logic', ',', ',', 'unless', 'used', 'properly', ',', 'harm', 'good', '.', 'When', 'possess', 'prayer-stick', ',', 'life', 'essence', 'begins', 'decrease', ',', ""'s"", 'race', 'time', 'find', 'prayer-stick', ""'s"", 'individual', 'altar', '.', 'If', 'lollygag', ',', 'die', '.', 'And', 'watch', 'petroglyphs', ';', 'strike', 'walls', 'Devil', ""'s"", 'Canyon', ',', 'draining', 'life', 'force', 'well', '.', 'The', 'puzzles', 'Shivers', 'II', 'engage', 'different', 'levels', '.', 'Many', 'classic', 'puzzle', 'mold', ':', 'rearrange', 'mixed-up', 'balls', 'proper', 'order', ',', 'solve', 'tangram', ',', 'reorder', 'sliding', 'tiles', 'complete', 'symbol', ',', 'etc', '.', 'Clues', 'individual', 'puzzles', 'always', 'close', 'hand', ',', 'require', 'concentration', ',', 'objects', 'inventory', 'wo', ""n't"", 'assist', '.', 'These', 'puzzles', 'also', 'altered', 'new', 'game', ',', 'nice', 'tip', 'hat', 'toward', 'replayability', '(', 'also', 'design', 'puzzles', 'confound', 'friends', 'may', 'join', 'Internet', ')', '.', 'The', 'larger', 'mystery', 'Shivers', 'II', 'rather', 'complex', ',', ',', 'many', 'clues', 'provided', 'help', '.', 'A', 'sweet-voiced', 'specter', ',', 'answering', 'machine', 'messages', ',', 'rock', 'videos', 'Trip', 'Cyclones', ""'"", 'songs', 'aid', 'throughout', '.', 'And', 'music', ""n't"", 'bad', ',', 'either', '.', 'Shivers', 'II', 'dark', 'mystery', ',', 'one', 'challenges', 'many', 'different', 'levels', '.', 'It', 'exquisitely', 'designed', 'wonderfully', 'full', 'right', 'touches', '.']",0.19890135117407842,0.48859372950282043
852,Superbike 2000 ,8.7, Superbike 2000 is one of the most realistic and accurate motorcycle racing games out there.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/3/0/9/2212309-superbike_2000_pal.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/superbike-2000-review/1900-2533299/,pos,"
EA Sports' Superbike 2000 is one of the most realistic and accurate motorcycle racing games out there. A wide variety of tracks and bikes and gorgeous animations and graphics offset the game's steep learning curve and will keep you coming back for more. Superbike 2000 has gameplay options similar to those in many other PC racing sims. The game's career mode lets you select a factory bike and rider and enter a series of races that span 13 weekends. Each weekend is composed of a number of racing events that include two free practice sessions, two qualifying sessions, a superpole, and two final races. The practice sessions are designed to give you a better feel of the bike and let you make any necessary changes without any consequence to your overall standings. Your performance during the qualifying and superpole events then determines the starting grid of the final races, and you move on to the next track after you successfully complete them. The game has four difficulty settings that you can change anytime during the game. The four levels toggle assists like automatic transmission, automatic rider movement, crash recovery, extra brake power, and automatic braking. Those who don't know a lot about the dynamics of riding a motorcycle would do well to select some of the assists. With the difficulty set to ""real,"" which offers no assists at all, Superbike 2000 becomes a serious challenge. Unlike cars, motorcycles don't have the luxury of turning and stopping on a dime, so you'll need to keep your eyes as far down the track as possible in anticipation of upcoming turns and traffic. A steady hand is necessary when taking turns, as too much braking will cause the bike to slide out from underneath the rider, and too much throttle will result in a spectacular crash. In addition to simply keeping the bike on all two wheels, you also have to contend with constantly adjusting the rider's center of gravity. Moving the rider to a higher position will allow for better cornering and stability through turns, while keeping him low and close to the bike will make for higher top speeds and stability through the straights. The manual rider adjustment and touchy bike controls might seem a burden at first, but die-hard motorcycle racing fans will undoubtedly welcome the game's sense of realism. The bikes in Superbike 2000 include factory rides from Ducati, Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha, Kawasaki, and Aprilia. Each of the six bikes not only looks and sounds different, but has unique handling characteristics as well. For instance, the Ducati 996 SPS and Suzuki Alstare GSX-R750 aren't necessarily the quickest bikes on the field, but their overall stability is attractive to novices, while the brute force of the Honda RC45 and Kawasaki ZX-7RR is better suited for more aggressive racers. Though the difference between one bike and another won't be instantly apparent, you'll gradually settle on a favorite after a few laps with each. Superbike 2000 is built around an advanced version of the Superbike World Championship engine, and features bikes, riders, tracks, and scenery that look markedly improved over the original. The detail found in the bikes is quite impressive, as everything from the grooves in the front cross-drilled rotors to the aluminum-tipped exhaust pipes is clearly depicted and can be easily identified on all the bike models. Even details as minor as the glare coming off of the instrument cluster have been accounted for in Superbike 2000. The tracks and their surrounding environments are also accurately modeled after their real-world counterparts and are some of the best looking that you'll find in any racing game. The rider animations don't look quite as good, but they do include an array of movements that capture the essence of motorcycle racing. For example, computer-controlled riders will constantly twist their heads sideways to take a look at the rest of the pack after each turn or shake their fists in anger after being cut off. In the first-person perspective, your rider's hand will twist progressively downward as you feed the throttle, and his left will work the clutch every time you shift gears. The realistic animations, coupled with the game's crisp graphics, result in replays that are the closest a racing game has ever come to rendering TV-quality visuals on the PC. There's no soundtrack of any kind during races in Superbike 2000, and the sporadic commentary from the game's British announcer comes only during the start of each race and after a crash. However, the engine noises and exhaust notes have all been sampled from real-world bikes and don't ever become overly annoying as is common in some racing games. Both visually and technically, Superbike 2000 is an accurate representation of SBK racing that will appeal to novice and expert racers alike. Once you get past the learning curve, you'll find Superbike 2000 to be one of the most realistic racing games to date.
 ","['EA', 'Sports', ""'"", 'Superbike', '2000', 'one', 'realistic', 'accurate', 'motorcycle', 'racing', 'games', '.', 'A', 'wide', 'variety', 'tracks', 'bikes', 'gorgeous', 'animations', 'graphics', 'offset', 'game', ""'s"", 'steep', 'learning', 'curve', 'keep', 'coming', 'back', '.', 'Superbike', '2000', 'gameplay', 'options', 'similar', 'many', 'PC', 'racing', 'sims', '.', 'The', 'game', ""'s"", 'career', 'mode', 'lets', 'select', 'factory', 'bike', 'rider', 'enter', 'series', 'races', 'span', '13', 'weekends', '.', 'Each', 'weekend', 'composed', 'number', 'racing', 'events', 'include', 'two', 'free', 'practice', 'sessions', ',', 'two', 'qualifying', 'sessions', ',', 'superpole', ',', 'two', 'final', 'races', '.', 'The', 'practice', 'sessions', 'designed', 'give', 'better', 'feel', 'bike', 'let', 'make', 'necessary', 'changes', 'without', 'consequence', 'overall', 'standings', '.', 'Your', 'performance', 'qualifying', 'superpole', 'events', 'determines', 'starting', 'grid', 'final', 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853,The Operational Art of War II: Modern Battles 1956 - 2000 ,8.7," The Operational Art of War II is a continuation and enhancement, not a radical revision, of designer Norm Koger's ambitious operational wargame.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/1/2/7/2103-8127.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-operational-art-of-war-ii-modern-battles-1956-/1900-2543528/,pos,"
Wargames, once a dominant force in computer gaming, are undoubtedly in a slump. You can count on one hand all of the 1999 historical combat games, with a finger left over to salute the narrow-minded publishers who are abandoning the niche markets. So when games as fine as The Operational Art of War Volumes I and II come along, there's considerable reason for rejoicing. Wargames may yet emerge from the desert, and if they do, The Operational Art of War will be an example of how it's done right. The Operational Art of War II is a continuation and enhancement, not a radical revision, of designer Norm Koger's ambitious operational wargame. ""Operations"" is the area between high-level strategy and close-in tactics, and it makes for fascinating large-scale warfare. Koger has taken the original Operational Art of War engine, modified it for the specific contingencies of warfare in the modern age (1956 - 2000), created a 1100-plus unit database of modern weapons and forces, and built 14 huge scenarios that offer well over 100 hours of some of the finest strategy gaming on the market. Some might call this nothing more than a glorified add-on disk, but that would be confusing it with Tomb Raider II and III. The database is so huge, the scenarios so detailed, and the engine revision has such a deep impact on gameplay that it feels like a very different game. It's obvious a lot of research, design, and programming went into this. The result is the creation of 14 massive modern battles, some historical, some hypothetical, with new game mechanics reflecting the rapid pace of modern battles and the overwhelming power of the air force. The scenarios include three Arab-Israeli wars, three Vietnam battles, three hypothetical NATO-Warsaw Pact encounters in Europe, the Second Korean War, Desert Storm, and hypothetical Indian-Pakistani, American-Cuban, and Chinese-Russian wars. Oddly, no Balkan scenarios are included. Almost all of these are large, involved, time-consuming battles. Because of this, users new to the series should probably warm up with the first Operational Art of War rather than jumping in at the deep end with volume II. The largest map is the entire Tet Offensive, which requires an enhanced version of the executable file to run, a couple weeks to finish, and a patient spouse. Along with being an incredible wargame on its own, Operational Art of War II is also a wargame designer. The full editor is included in the game, and new battles are already circulating on the Web. The new editor can handle larger maps and more complex theater-wide event modeling, giving designers even more power to make custom missions. The main changes to the engine reflect two aspects of warfare in the latter half of the 20th century. The first is air power. Air-to-air, air-to-ground, antiair, and air mobility are modeled more deeply. Interdictions are a more potent threat, as the Iraqis learned. The inclusion of advanced weaponry like the B-2 Spirit means the full power of America's Air Force can be brought to bear on pretty much any situation. Another key addition is air mobility, which allows units to rapidly deploy deep into enemy territory. From Vietnam onward this becomes increasingly important, as does helicopter support. Even more important in its effect on gameplay is the radical revision of the damage model. Rather than using a cumulative fire effect model (that is, when five units fire on one target, you add all the units' firepower together and use that figure to calculate the effect on the target), Operational Art of War II resolves each encounter on a shot-by-shot basis. Not only are the units rated, but the shots themselves are rated for things like penetration, shot type, and accuracy. This ups the realism ante significantly and allows accurate representation of the gulf between modern firepower and the ability to survive it, most clearly represented in the M1 tank. The last game I remember that modeled shots was Close Combat, and it was a squad-level game. I found some flaky behavior (weird unit-movement glitches and so forth) while playing the initial release, but this was cleared up in V.02. I also noted an inability to deploy airmobile units later in some games, which is pretty serious. Knowing Norm Koger and TalonSoft, I'm confident any bugs will be rapidly fixed, but they cripple some important scenarios out of the box. Some hard-core gamers are going to nitpick with the damage modeling, but that's an infinitely debatable issue, not to mention a tedious one. The question is, is it fun? Does it play well? Is it historically accurate? With a yes on all three counts, there's really no question that wargamers will want The Operational Art of War II.
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854,Virtua Tennis ,8.7, Virtua Tennis more than lives up to its namesake and does an ample job of compacting Sega's Tennis 2K2 into a portable format.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/3/0/2214230-vtendc0f.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/virtua-tennis-review/1900-2896043/,pos,"
Virtua Tennis is a great handheld sports game. It has all of the necessary tennis fundamentals, such as lobs, drop shots, backhands, and angles, but it also throws in a bit of extra arcade flavor in the spots where a standard game of tennis would quickly prove boring. There are 16 characters to play as and unlock, 14 courts, and three gameplay modes. One of these modes, world tour, is an RPG-style option where you can create your own character, play minigames, purchase upgrades, and participate in more than 20 tournaments.  Four players can enjoy doubles tennis. If you've played a tennis video game within the last decade, you're already familiar with this game's basic mechanics. To serve, you tap a button to initiate the toss and then press it again when the ball is at its apex in order to swing with maximum power. When the opponent makes a return, you can tap the A or B buttons to launch a smash or flat shot, or you can tap both at the same time for a lob. If you tap too soon, your player won't swing instantly, but rather will wind up and anticipate the incoming volley. The longer you press, the stronger the return, and the longer you aim the directional pad, the more you'll aim the shot. When you're playing doubles, you can tap the L or R buttons to set the strategy of your teammate. Generally speaking, the controls are quite friendly. The physics are pretty good as well. Lobs give you plenty of time to get under them for the smash, but drop shots rarely return with anything more than a quick arc. Each of the different court surfaces also influences the overall pace, with clay and concrete practically charging the ball with acceleration.    The computer puts up a challenging offense, at least for a while. Intense volleys and nasty drop shots occur with frequent regularity, but you'll also find that most computer-controlled players have a weakness that's easy to exploit or that they fall into predictable patterns. These patterns and weaknesses aren't foolproof, however, so you'll still have to work for the win even with an advantage. If you play in the world tour mode, the game is even more of a challenge, because you don't initially have the speed or control to perform the majority of dirty tactics.    Although you can participate in an arcade-style tournament, as well as exhibition matches, it is the world tour mode that ultimately gives Virtua Tennis its depth. Here, you can create two custom characters--a male and a female--and improve their tennis abilities through minigames and tournaments. They begin with almost no ability whatsoever, but by playing minigames you can earn points that apply toward a variety of skill upgrades, such as speed, technique, stamina, topspin, and strength. There are a dozen different areas to improve, and each has many levels to achieve before topping out. As you build your player, you can compete in tournaments and purchase better equipment to further your chances of winning.    The minigames in the world tour mode are wickedly fun. There's a competition where you aim serves in order to build the perfect hamburger, complete with a soft drink on the side. In another, you have to lob shots at a group of moving tanks in order to stop them from pelting you with red tennis balls. There's even a minigame where you have to smash returns toward colored eggs in order to hatch the animals inside. It takes place in a barn. There are 10 such minigames, and they become steadily more challenging as your characters improve.    Another wonderful feature is that you can use the GBA's link capability to play singles and doubles with up to four human players. The game never skips a beat even with four players connected, which is good news considering that you'll eventually be able to tear computer opponents to ribbons.  Build a hamburger in this minigame. If you're hung up on good graphics or first-rate audio, Virtua Tennis does not disappoint in either area. The courts look incredibly realistic, and each of the players moves with a high amount of grace thanks to an abundance of sprite animation. Screenshots don't do the game justice, because when you play the game on your GBA under ample light, the characters seem almost photographic. The only real drawback is that there's not much else going on, but that's more a complaint about tennis itself than this video game. Audio is similarly stellar, with all of the appropriate ""thwacks"" and bounces you'd expect, as well as a ton of digitized speech for score announcements, court changes, and results.    Overall, Virtua Tennis more than lives up to its namesake and does an ample job of compacting Sega's Tennis 2K2 into a portable format. THQ has released a game that any tennis fan is sure to enjoy.  
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855,WWF SmackDown! ,8.7," The little things that debut in SmackDown, such as a never-ending season mode and inklings of a plot, really make the game feel fresh and new.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/6/6/2217566-box_wwfsd.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwf-smackdown-review/1900-2549366/,pos,"
It's hard to make a truly accurate wrestling game these days. A lot of the games out there simply take the wrong approach, treating wrestling as an actual sport with strictly defined rules and regulations. Most games overlook the soap-opera-like plot that, along with generous helpings of sex and violence, make wrestling shows some of the highest-rated programs on television today. And many games also leave out or muss up the little things - things that casual fans wouldn't notice or care about but things that could really make or break a game for a hard-core wrestling fan. WWF SmackDown! isn't perfect, but it does a lot of things right and represents the first real step in the right direction the genre has taken in more than two years. The first difference you'll notice between SmackDown and all the other wrestling games out there is the speed. SmackDown plays significantly speedier than any other wrestling game, and this lends a fast and loose feel to the proceedings. To complement the speed, the gameplay has been kept fairly simple. But unlike other games in the genre that try to deliver a simple control scheme, SmackDown never feels oversimplified. It doesn't have the slightly complex fighting-game-style moves of WWF Attitude, nor does it have the oversimplified timing-based attack system of WWF Wrestlemania 2000. SmackDown goes for a more action-packed style, and it manages to pull it off beautifully. The game has a reasonably up-to-date roster, including new wrestlers (well, new to the WWF, anyway) like the Dudley Boys, as well as all the old favorites, including Mankind, Undertaker, Kane, X-Pac, Chyna, Triple H, The Rock, Val Venis, the Hardy Boys, and many more. The game has almost everything you could ask for in the modes department, and unlike in other games, the modes actually offer meaningful differences in the gameplay department. The I Quit match actually forces you to grab a microphone and put it in your opponent's face while asking him if he gives up. Special referee matches actually let you play as the referee. You can either play it straight or count as fast or as slow as you like - or you can just not count at all and start beating the wrestlers up yourself. The hard-core and pin-anywhere matches make it easy to fight your way out of the ring and back into other areas of the arena, including the parking lot, the entryway, and of course, a boiler room. The loading time between areas is impressively short. Cage matches, three-way and four-way dances, tag matches, handicap matches, battle royal, King of the Ring, and survival matches are also available. You can also create a pay-per-view event and your own wrestler, but the create-a-wrestler mode isn't too flexible - it requires that you choose from heads, upper bodies, and lower bodies, rather than letting you customize each body part and piece of clothing individually. Aside from appearance, the mode is nice, letting you set up each move, from punch to taunt to finisher.SmackDown's season mode is the best career-style mode we've ever seen in a wrestling game. It doesn't try to act like a quest for the belt, where the game ends as soon as you win the championship. Instead, it moves on from month to month and event to event, never really coming to an end. You'll see all of the WWF belts change hands quite often, and the game even gives you the option of changing wrestlers every few months, as well as removing a few of the WWF superstars from the lineup entirely. Tired of feuding with Mr. Ass? You can either change to a different wrestler or simply turn Mr. Ass off until you feel like bringing him back. As you progress through the season mode, you'll unlock new wrestlers, such as Ivory and Prince Albert. Unfortunately, they aren't simply added to your roster - their body parts  are just unlocked in the create-a-wrestler section. The season mode also contains the beginnings of some plotlike elements - another first for the genre. It's mostly limited to pre- and post-match cutscenes, which consist of a wrestler walking backstage, a wrestler yelling in the ring, or two wrestlers backstage. Occasionally, one or two wrestlers will attack a third wrestler while he is walking around backstage. All of this has an effect on a wrestler's heart meter, which is displayed before the match begins and serves as a biorhythm-esque indicator. For a PlayStation game, WWF SmackDown! looks pretty amazing. Things may look a bit blocky at times, and the crowd isn't exactly stellar, but the animation and frame rate, which remains rock solid regardless of how many wrestlers are in the ring, really sell the game. The wrestlers move quickly, but the game still looks realistic. Squint and you might think for a split second that you're actually watching the real thing. The game shows a real attention to detail. Wrestlers get bruised up as they get beaten, and each character has a few different facial expressions. The Rock's special move, The People's Elbow, has finally been rendered perfectly in a game, complete with the removal of his elbow pad. Little touches, like the mat bouncing and the ring apron moving after a power bomb, really add a lot to the look of the game. The game has nice collision detection, and multiple-hit animations make the game constantly impressive. The camera moves around when needed, delivering some nice close-up shots of finishers and other big moves. SmackDown's one rough spot is the sound. The game is awfully quiet for a wrestling game, lacking both actual voice work from the wrestlers and commentary of any kind. The in-game music can get a little repetitive, also. The game really would have benefited from some voice, but the sounds of the hits, smacks, and wrestlers hitting the mat are all really nice. The little things that debut in SmackDown, such as a never-ending season mode and inklings of a plot, really make the game feel fresh and new. Hopefully, THQ will expand on these new developments in the future and include some speech as well. It's great to finally see a new wrestling engine that actually brings something new to the table, and all wrestling-game fans (even those who are a little burnt out on other games in the genre) should find something in WWF SmackDown! that makes it worth the purchase price.
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856,NASCAR Revolution ,4.1," NASCAR Revolution isperfect - perfectly wretched, that is.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/4/6/3/1454-5463.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nascar-revolution-review/1900-2543746/,neg,"
For NASCAR fans who found NASCAR Racing's realistic physics just a little too frustrating, NASCAR Revolution would seem to be the perfect game. It's got 17 licensed tracks (no Daytona, though), 31 real-life drivers (37 if you count six ""hidden"" legends like Richard Petty and Benny Parsons), mind-blowing car graphics, and was developed by Stormfront Studios - the same team that made IndyCar competition accessible with the light-on-realism-but-heavy-on-fun Andretti Racing. And NASCAR Revolution is perfect - perfectly wretched, that is. From start to finish, the experience is so unsatisfying - no, make that infuriating - that the only reasonable conclusion you can come away with is that it was booted out of the testing labs and onto store shelves so it'd be available before the Winston Cup season began. Since NASCAR Revolution first appeared on console systems last Thanksgiving it's tempting to call this a sloppy port job, but usually that just means there's no mouse support or that the save-game functions are screwy. This goes far beyond that, however: it is, to put it bluntly, all but unplayable. Looming mightily over NASCAR Revolution's aggravating array of flaws is the game's abysmal performance on even the fastest systems out there. On my rig (a Celeron running at 375MHz with 64MB RAM and a Voodoo 2) NASCAR Revolution ran smooth as silk during practice and qualifying sessions - provided I used the chase view or front-bumper view, that is. But the frame rate fell off noticeably when I switched to a cockpit view (which is a rather dull and ugly one at that) - certainly enough to affect the way I was driving the car.  And things go from bad to worse when you actually get into a race. It's not so much a matter of choppy animation, although that's definitely a problem: The fact is that the action literally slows down. How bad is it? Well, judging from the way the ads on the walls crawl by on straightaways, you'd think you were driving through the infield lake at Daytona. You can switch to the chase or front-bumper views to improve the frame rate, but that robs the game of any claims to realism it might have - and things still move in slow motion. It's absolutely horrible on short tracks like Martinsville and Bristol, but even on super ovals it turns what should be a thrilling ride into a frustrating nightmare. True, I had all the visuals turned on, and the car graphics are admittedly eye-popping - but I was running at only 640 x 480, and my system's got more than enough power to handle all that stuff and still deliver a great frame rate. And even if you can deal with the slow movement, there's another issue involved: There's zero relationship between what you see and feel when you're practicing and qualifying and what you see and feel when you're racing. You might as well skip it and start at the back of the pack - at least then you'd know what to expect as you pass cars that look as if they're going about 45 per. At the heart of this problem is the game's 3D support. In an amazing stroke of programming ineptitude, Stormfront Studios managed to create the first game ever to run faster - much faster - in Direct3D mode than in Glide. All my problems listed above occurred in Direct3D mode. When I tried to play the Glide version, it ran so poorly that I spent a good two or three hours downloading new drivers - and after all that I finally realized that it wasn't my drivers but the game that was causing all the heartache. (In an interesting side note, the requirements say you need Glide 3.02, but there is no version 3.02 for Voodoo 2, Voodoo Banshee, or Voodoo Rush cards.) NASCAR Revolution's console roots shine throughout the game, and they aren't the sort of things to make PC racing fans happy. Cars default to automatic transmission before every race (at least you can save car setups with manual transmission for each track), so at least 17 times you'll have to go into setup and switch it to manual. All track sessions start with a ridiculous external view - and because the computer takes control of your car for the first ten seconds or so, you must fumble around cycling through views when you should be focused on getting off to a good start. Almost as maddening as the game's bad performance is what you have to endure when retiring from a race: staring at the screen for 20 or 25 seconds as your car drives all the way around the track. And yes, that applies during practice runs, when good drivers are constantly heading to the garage to change settings. After all this, I couldn't endure the idea of playing NASCAR Revolution online, but this is one case where I got lucky: The game's multiplayer support is so thin I wouldn't have found an opponent anyway. Support for only IPX networks play pretty much rules out action over the Internet (unless you use Kali, and when I checked I didn't see anybody playing it), and even if you found someone to play modem-to-modem you'd be shocked to learn that the manual recommends a total of a mere four cars in head-to-head games (even with a serial connection). You've really got to hand it to Stormfront for the graphics work they did on the cars - but you've got to lambaste them for not figuring out that pretty pictures aren't worth squat if you can't make 'em move on the screen. As we say down here where NASCAR racing got started, this dog don't hunt - and if you buy it after reading this then I've got some infield tickets for next year's Daytona 500 you might be interested in. 
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857,Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee ,4.1," Munch's Oddysee for the GBA is as mentally challenging as the console Oddworld games, but it's lacking all of the humor and charm that made them so interesting.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/8/1/2210581-box_owmo.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/oddworld-munchs-oddysee-review/1900-6076742/,neg,"
 Just like the previous Oddworld games for the PlayStation and Xbox, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee for the Game Boy Advance is an adventure game that emphasizes problem-solving over the more traditional punch-and-jump play mechanics that are typical of the genre. Each level is a large puzzle that needs to be solved. Players can switch between Abe and Munch, the two main characters, at any time. Both have unique abilities that allow them to access certain areas that are off-limits to the other character. Through trial and error, your job is to figure out the specific combination of levers, transporters, and moving platforms that will lead you to the exit. Although this isn't one of the GBA's better-looking games, the real failure here is that the humor and charm that made the mazelike levels in the console Oddworld games so bearable is missing. It only takes three or four hours to play through Munch's Oddysee, but, due to the uneventful pacing, it feels more like forty.  Abe can enlist a posse to help rough up Glukkons.  The story revolves around the social status of three separate races of aliens: the Glukkons, Mudokons, and Gabbits. The Glukkons are in charge and generally want to devour the planet's resources to become filthy rich. The Mudokons, on the other hand, are a race of mud-creatures who live in harmony with the land. To do their heavy work, the Glukkons employ Mudokons as slaves on their farms and in their mines. Abe is a Mudokon and former slave. He escaped to freedom in the PlayStation game, Oddworld: Abe's Exodus. The last of the alien races are the Gabbits, an aquatic species of which Munch is the only surviving member. The Glukkons hunted the Gabbits to extinction to harvest their eggs for food. Abe and Munch met in the Xbox version of Munch's Oddysee, and they're the characters you'll use to stop the Glukkons in this game.  For the most part, the dual character dynamic works in the game's favor. Abe can run fast, carry objects, and enlist the help of other Mudokons to fight enemies and to help activate switches that require multiple levers to be pulled simultaneously. His chant ability also allows him to take control of enemy Glukkons and to regrow spooce fruit that's already been picked. Like Abe, Munch can enlist the help of friendly creatures, called Fuzzles, to help him attack enemies and unlock switches. He can also take control of moving platforms and pilot remote-controlled robots. Munch's best trait, however, is that he can swim. Abe is a mud-creature, so he can't survive very long in water. Munch's amphibian heritage allows him to go into sewers and tunnels that Abe just can't. Because of this key difference, you'll switch between both characters fairly often throughout each level.  Even though the characters and their abilities are interesting, the levels themselves are dull and tedious, both in terms of design and aesthetics. Abe has to lead other Mudokons and must climb ladders to activate switches on land, but there isn't much to interact with in the meantime. Levels are primarily flat, with a few hills here and there. It's not often that you'll find a set of platforms that you need to jump across, and skirmishes with the Glukkons are rare. Munch's areas are a little livelier, mainly because you have to go back and forth between watery sewers and dry underground tunnels quite a bit. Unfortunately, his ability to control platforms and service robots doesn't come into play often enough. That's too bad because it's one of the game's nicer aspects.  It doesn't help matters any that the graphics are so plain. Each level only has one or two types of terrain--usually dirt and grass or cement and metal--and often the only visible landmarks are the transports, doors, and switches you'll encounter on your way to the exit. The characters themselves show no artistry whatsoever. Abe is gray and brown, Munch is gray, and most other aliens are gray, yellow, or red. At least the character animation is smooth. Abe moves around like a chimpanzee would if it were forced to walk upright, and his lanky arm gestures are goofy to watch.  Munch can control service robots. A few more of these situations, and a little more humor, and this game could've been a contender.  If dull, wide-open levels were the game's only shortcoming, Munch's Oddysee would be the perfect game to give to younger players who are just getting into gaming. Unfortunately, there are other issues at work that make it hard to recommend the game to the under-10 set. Moving your way through all 12 of the game's levels requires the kind of attention span usually reserved for the clergy and mental health practitioners. The near total absence of character development and humor really puts the spotlight on how boring it is to walk from one room to the next, constantly searching for switches and spooce fruits. Abe has a half-dozen speech snippets that he rattles off whenever you enlist the help of other Mudokons. You'll hear phrases like, ""Go get him"" and ""Hey, help me out here."" In the PlayStation and Xbox Oddworld games, by contrast, Abe and Munch frequently have conversations with all sorts of creatures and toss out wisecracking one-liners whenever they encounter a new item or obstacle. In the GBA game, the only real payoff comes every three or four levels, in the form of a brief cinematic sequence composed of still images and some badly written dialogue.  At times, the controls don't respond as well as they should, which makes the game more frustrating than it has to be. You can try three or four times to pick up an object from various spots, only to successfully grab it in the same spot you were in the first time. Because of this, it's not uncommon to accidentally toss a Mudokon into a river while you're mashing the buttons out of frustration. The jump button also conks out from time to time, which is bothersome when you're trying to leap across bottomless pits.  Regardless of the poor graphics and problematic controls, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee for the Game Boy Advance could have been a great game for fans of the series if it had anywhere near the same amount of charm or cleverness as the console Oddworld games. Unfortunately, it doesn't. There are moments where it seems like the game is making strides in the right direction--such as whenever you get to blast Glukkons to smithereens with giant robots--but these isolated situations always give way to more and more aimless wandering and lever-pulling.  
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'whenever', 'get', 'blast', 'Glukkons', 'smithereens', 'giant', 'robots', '--', 'isolated', 'situations', 'always', 'give', 'way', 'aimless', 'wandering', 'lever-pulling', '.']",-0.02730484848484849,0.49060588744588735
858,Populous: The Beginning ,4.1," It's not that Populous: The Beginning is a bad game, it's just a bad PlayStation game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/4/1/2217341-populous_the_beginning__collector__uk_box_art.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/populous-the-beginning-review/1900-2548942/,neg,"
Are you looking for a game that gives you plenty of time to get sandwiches, make phone calls, and go on vacation between levels? How about a game that occasionally crashes in the middle of loading a level? If so, then Populous: The Beginning is the game for you. Populous: The Beginning is the third game in the Populous series, and it has little, if anything, in common with the previous Populous games. Here, instead of merely playing as a god and watching from above, you're cast as a shaman, and you must directly control your followers, mostly to organize them against opposing tribes. You'll also command your tribe to build various structures, including huts where they will live, training facilities where they will learn how to fight, and guard towers, which will help you establish remotes bases of operations. If this all sounds a bit like Command & Conquer or Warcraft, that's because it plays more like those real-time strategy games than like the slower, more cerebral Populous and Populous II. The game takes place on a small planet, which appears in full 3D so you can rotate your view to get a better vantage point. Unfortunately, the graphics are so blocky you can never really get a clear idea of exactly what everything is. The individual troops are so small that you frequently can't even tell exactly what type of unit you're looking at. Is that a brave or a warrior? You may never know....  The game's sound is decent, but the new-agey music quickly becomes tiresome. The rest of the soundtrack is composed of the battle cries and gibberish that make up your tribe's native tongue. There is also a booming voice that speaks before every level, showing you the lay of the land and instructing you how to go about completing your objectives. It's not that Populous: The Beginning is a bad game, it's just a bad PlayStation game. The controller really isn't up to the task of commanding tons of miniscule units with any amount of precision, and the graphics are so muddy you can't discern what's going on a good portion of the time. Also, the game crashed at least once on every PlayStation we tried it on. Get the PC version, instead. It's better in every way.
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859,ReBoot ,4.1," As is no surprise to anyone following the history of video game licenses, the game offers mediocre gameplay whose few innovations are overshadowed by the half-baked quality of the game's ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/1/2/8/2216128-box_reboot.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/reboot-review/1900-2546045/,neg,"
Electronic Arts is responsible for this license of the kid's television show ReBoot, made by the same folks who brought us the Beast Wars Transformers show. Like the show, this 3D shooter is about a team of cyber-people living in a virtual world called Mainframe, who must defend it from one of the silliest- monikered villains in recent memory... the dreaded ""Megabyte."" As is no surprise to anyone following the history of video game licenses, the game offers mediocre gameplay whose few innovations are overshadowed by the half-baked quality of the game's control and graphics. The game's standard-issue 3D over-the-shoulder (and sometimes behind-the-back) shooting engine should feel familiar to most of us by now. The D-pad controls forward and backward motion and left and right rotation. Strafing is accomplished with the L1 and R1 buttons. As Bob, you wander around the 3D world, blasting bad guys and gaining power-ups, new weapons, and health bonuses. In addition, it's your job to repair tears in the cyber-fabric. These are represented by glowing crystalline orbs that are both deadly to the touch and have a nasty habit of sucking you in - as well as shooting off powerful beams of energy. To make matters worse, when one appears, you're given a mere few minutes (complete with onscreen countdown) to get up close and personal and use your special tear repair gun - called a ""glitch"" - to mend the tear. This is a sticky process and usually involves holding the glitch beam on target for several moments while the tear's volatile energies make it difficult for you to stand up, not to mention frequently sending you flying across the room with half your life energy missing. Further complicating matters is your means of transportation. Rather than simply running around the gameworld on foot, you use something called a Zipboard (which looks like a disc attached to each foot, with a cord running between them) to sort of half float and half skate your way around. Unfortunately, control of the Zipboard is sloppy and difficult to master at best, and once you start off in a particular direction, it's not always easy to stop. Over wide-open, flat surfaces it's difficult to get where you want to go by the most direct route, since you're constantly veering off course, reorienting your direction, and backtracking. Throw in a few obstacles and some narrow causeways, and you're bumping into stuff left and right, and falling off ramps, often plummeting back to ground level just when you've almost made it to the top. Luckily, the Zipboard also prevents death by falling, since it's continually emitting an infinitesimal vertical force. It really gets ugly when you're attempting to hold a tear on target and it keeps swatting you around, making you lose the shot, and sending you and your dumb Zipboard spinning off. You can't help but feel that if you just had regular shoes on instead, you could just take care of business and be done with it. Why is it that games and movies about hi-tech cyber-beings living inside computers don't have better graphics? As with everything from its predecessor Tron until now, ReBoot tends to settle for large, brightly colored geometric shapes in lieu of detailed textures or color. ""But, dude, they're inside a computer. It's trippy."" Humph. Perhaps the auspices of techno-kitsch make that excuse work for Tron, but ReBoot just doesn't deal well with the paradox. A low frame rate and ample polygon dropout reveal the game's true low-tech nature. It's plagued with camera troubles, too - all too often the jump you need to make is to a platform that you can't quite see from where you're standing - and the game offers no player-controlled camera tweaks. ReBoot might be interesting to fans of the TV series, but as a stand-alone game left to its own merits, it just doesn't fly. The sketchy graphics don't tell you all you need to know, and from a design standpoint the levels are uninspired - though fans of the show will like the cute animated cutscenes featuring other ReBoot characters. Most importantly though, it's the game's awkward control that sets a new benchmark for frustration and will doubtless cause many players to throw their controllers across the room, turn off the PlayStation, and never reboot this one.
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860,Resident Evil: Survivor ,4.1," There's no real reward to playing Survivor, and the Resident Evil universe would be better off without it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/7/9/2/2216792-box_resurv.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/resident-evil-survivor-review/1900-2545924/,neg,"
Capcom's Resident Evil games are generally acknowledged as the games that defined the survival-horror genre, so it's no wonder that fans of zombies and gun-wielding women got excited when they heard that Capcom was working on another RE game. But this time it's a little different. Capcom's scrapped the third-person perspective found in every other Resident Evil game to make Resident Evil: Survivor (Biohazard: Gun Survivor in Japan) a first-person gun-blasting adventure.    While you may have heard Survivor described as a Resident Evil version of House of the Dead, that description really gives the wrong impression. The major difference from any plot-based shooting game is that Survivor doesn't run on a track - you have the freedom to move about and explore the universe as you see fit. Imagine a Resident Evil game that runs on the Echo Night engine, and you'll get the picture. Survivor tries to be more than just a shooting game - it's got an odd plotline featuring no major characters from any of the past games and some puzzle-solving elements - but at its core it's a bland shooter that limits itself with a poorly designed control scheme.    Survivor suffers from a good number of control issues. Like in most first-person exploration games, there's no strafe, and navigating corners can be taxing. Once you run into a group of enemies, you simply stop moving and start shooting. And the actual shooting is a real disappointment. It doesn't appear that shooting zombies in vital areas such as the head or chest hurts them any more than grazing their elbows does, and the guns that you get are extremely weak. Not only do you usually have to pump six rounds into your average zombie, but those six rounds take forever to fire because Survivor limits how fast you can shoot. Unlike most shooting games, Survivor has a strange rate-of-fire restriction on most of the guns found throughout the game. While the better guns eventually fire faster, no gun fires as fast as you can hit the fire button. This makes shooting extremely boring, as you're forced to level your sights at a target and slowly wait for your gun to catch up with the controller. It's unfortunate that Survivor takes advantage of its own gameplay flaws to make the game unnecessarily difficult. Since turning is such a slow process, you'll find that the most likely place for a zombie once you enter a room is directly to your back, giving the undead an excellent chance of harming you before you can even see him. On top of that, enemies like to crouch or roll under your field of vision, and since you can't control where you're looking, you're incapable of shooting an enemy at your feet. Most of the time you'll simply stand in place and yawn as you slowly plunk bullet after bullet into your enemies. It should be noted that while the Japanese release of Resident Evil: Survivor had light-gun support, this feature is absent from the US release.   While Survivor does deviate from the standard third-person Resident Evil formula, it still feels like a Resident Evil game. All the enemies you've come to love from the series are here. It's not uncommon to run into giant spiders, lickers, zombies, demon dogs, and even a handful of tyrants. Unfortunately, there are really no good puzzles in Survivor. Most tasks involve you finding a key to open a door two rooms away. You'll also find that zombies have gotten extremely good at hiding, as many times you'll enter a room you just left to find even more enemies waiting for you. Interestingly, Survivor does feature multiple paths. At the start of the game you can go one of three different ways, with more alternate paths branching off from there. All the routes ultimately lead to the important places, such as the town's courtyard or Club Paradise, but the different scenarios go a long way toward breaking up the monotony of the game.    You can manage all your items in your inventory screen, just like in all the other Resident Evil games. Unfortunately, you really don't run into all that many items to manage. Your inventory screen usually just holds your different guns and health-recovery items, with the occasional key or box of ammo. But while the inventory screen was a nice touch, basic tasks such as reloading your clip are amazingly tedious because you have to switch to your inventory screen and reload from there. An option to manually reload without having to switch screens would have been nice. Survivor isn't a pretty game. All the backgrounds are rough and pixelated and look even worse once you get close to them. The characters aren't much better. All of the characters in the game look extremely simple, and a definite lack of detail plagues the character models - some enemies simply look ridiculous. There are only three or four different zombies running around, and the game seems to use them with no sense of discretion. On top of that, zombies stumble about in an incredibly unrealistic manner, and the animation is simply terrible. After you shoot them a few times, the zombies start to waver and fall, but if you shoot them again they immediately stand up again, giving you the feeling that some frames of animation are missing. In addition, the engine moves around in a horribly choppy manner and at times suffers from intense slowdown.    The sound is disturbing. Most of the game features dark, brooding music, but several times during the course of the game the music suddenly shifts and a long, high-pitched noise fades in for several minutes before it fades back out. On top of that, the sound seems to be plagued with bugs, and I was constantly hearing ridiculous sound effects, such as a bullet firing when I was walking or the noise from the inventory screen when I was shooting. That combined with the sheer repetition of hearing zombies moaning every few minutes makes this game better without the audio.    Resident Evil: Survivor tries its best to be a fusion of two drastically different genres, and it unfortunately limits itself with difficult control and tedious gameplay. There's no real reward to playing Survivor, and the Resident Evil universe would be better off without it. With a ridiculous side plot that seems to have no real tie-in with the carefully crafted events of the past Resident Evil games, fans of the series who want a first-person perspective should simply forget about this game and pick up Code Veronica.
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861,Star Trek: Borg ,4.1," Borg is infuriating not only because of the lousy gameplay, but also because ofthe potential of this absolutely lame FMV-fest.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/0/8/2217508-borg_pc.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-trek-borg-review/1900-2533217/,neg,"
In Simon & Schuster Interactive's Star Trek:  Borg, you're a green Starfleet Academy cadet, logging training hours aboard a Federation starship... and haunted by the memory of your father's death, at the hands of the Borg at the battle of Wolf 359.  When the dreaded Borg suddenly show up on a beeline course for mother Terra, your ship is selected to join the battlegroup which will engage them, and all trainee personnel are ordered to evacuate. The Borg are a nasty, formidable enemy, and Starfleet Command doesn't need any new fish wet-ends like you panicking at the wrong moment in a battle where every action and second counts. The fact that you have reason to want to stay and fight - the fact that your father was killed at the Wolf 359 massacre, aboard the ill-fated USS Righteous - means jack-all to the high command. You can leave and like it... or you can just leave. As you bitterly pack your meager cadet's belongings, the infamous alien entity known as ""Q"" (played by John DeLancie) appears in your stateroom and offers you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: With his help, you can travel back in time to the bridge of the Righteous, moments before the ship was lost, and wreak a little vengeance. And maybe - just maybe - save him and change the future for yourself  and for everyone else. Borg has it all:  time travel; the smarmy, omnipotent Q; the scariest alien race ever to populate the Star Trek universe; and an angry, orphaned cadet's passionate (and very un-Federation) wish for  brutal retribution. It's a promising broth very difficult to spoil. Simon & Schuster Interactive evidently has many, many cooks at its disposal. Borg is that most dubious of game prospects - an ""interactive movie."" Initially whisked aboard the bridge of the Righteous as a Christmas Carol-esque presence nobody can hear or see, you are witness (via full-screen video) to what may be the final moments of the ship (and your father) all over again - and then you are given the opportunity to directly interact with the past as the Borg invade the ship and attempt to drop the shields of the Righteous. At various times during the continuously playing movie that is 99% of the game, the player is given the option to solve puzzles, attack, or analyze people, objects, or Borg (which are, strictly, neither) with a modified tricorder provided by Q. Virtually every decision point in the game, if not every decision point, is a try-and-die affair, resulting in a short cut-movie with a rawthuh disappointed Q telling you what a moron you are, or giving you a condescendingly patient (and, I must admit, rather insultingly cool) primer on how to use the mouse on your computer.    Borg is infuriating not only because of the lousy (indeed, almost nonexistent) gameplay, but also because of the obvious tremendous expense and potential of this absolutely lame FMV-fest. The talent involved could have gone to good use, somewhere. As the irritating, haughty (and ever-so-slightly swishy) Q, John DeLancie gives a superb performance that's wasted here. (In one spectacular, skin-crawling  death-sequence, he stares at a Defense Systems panel, his eyes wide, shouting, ""THE BORG ARE FIRING, WE'RE GONNA DIE!"" Then - all the mock terror dropping from his face in an instant - he leers knowingly toward the camera and, with a horrible grin, whispers, ""And it's your fault,"" as the ship and your father get blown to bits around him.) Ditto the dialogue and story elements - all fine in themselves, wrapped up in a quick-pick-a-path mess with the budget of a motion picture and the gameplay of... well, a motion picture. (And despite my usual stance on this sort of thing, I don't even feel bad about blowing any plot points or particular surprises.  I figure I'll just end up saving you the trouble of buying this dog.) A few words to Trek enthusiasts:  No matter how many times some game company out there does something like this to you, just close your eyes and keep repeating to yourself:  Interplay's Starfleet Academy is coming.  Starfleet Academy is coming....
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862,Starwinder ,4.1," The combination of repetitive gameplay, mediocre graphics, and no-challenge action adds up to a dismal offering.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/1/2/2212512-starwinder_us_ps_front.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/starwinder-review/1900-2549500/,neg,"
At first glance, Starwinder looks promising despite the fact that it's another space-based racing game. The graphics look better than average and the game appears to possess some unique strategies. But after playing Starwinder, you can't help but conclude, ""been there, done that."" The game is fairly straightforward. You take on the role of Connor Rhodes, Earth's first rail racer. Rhodes races on rails, which are narrow tracks thousands of miles long, composed of hairpin turns, twists, and loops - very similar to a roller coaster. According to the story, aliens have used these rails as race tracks to determine who's the supreme racer in the galaxy. And at long last, Earth has entered the competition. The gameplay in Starwinder could use some rethinking. Whereas Wipeout, Crash and Burn, and others have similar space racing themes, they also have unique levels, weapons, and enemies. Starwinder has none of these elements. The thousand mile rails in reality are repetitive and too short. Connor has to race on 40 different rails, divided among ten quadrants, and ultimately the only difference between one rail and another is color. Big deal. Each of the five ships available to players has its own advantages and disadvantages (acceleration, turning, recovery, and weapons). And though players get to choose their ship, the only real strategy in Starwinder is to stay on the rail to win the race. If a player drifts away from the rail the ship will lose thrust and slow down to a crawl (because power strips are embedded in the rails). And they call this a racing game? There's no doubt Starwinder had potential. However, the combination of repetitive gameplay, mediocre graphics, and no-challenge action adds up to a dismal offering.
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863,Total Knockout ,4.1," If you try playing Total Knockout and you're looking for something beyond an exaggeratedly buxom, watered-down revisit of Punch-Out,  you may decide to hang up your gloves.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/8/3/7/1/2177-8371.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/total-knockout-review/1900-2533909/,neg,"
I'll admit that I have a certain affinity for female protagonists in fighting games. In fact, Kitana (MK2) is perhaps my favorite femme fatale to step into the killing arena. Any character with sex appeal who can also hurl razor-sharp fans at her opponents, sending them into a blood-drenched recoil, receives my vote. Even some of the characters in Virtua Fighter and Toshinden, who can only be described as immanently ""cute,"" ultimately prove that cuteness can be deceiving - deadly deceiving. In contrast, the female boxers in Starhill Production's Total Knockout aren't just unthreatening, they're kind of offensive.  Basically, TKOB is a rehash of  Nintendo's  ""Mike Tyson's Punch Out,"" except that you're dealing with an all-female cast. Before each round, you're treated to irrelevant centerfold-style statistical information about each contender (i.e., bust size, turn-ons, etc…). In the game, you play as Daphne ""the Drill"" D'Marko, and your object is to seize the world title by pummeling the crap out of your international competitors. Like Punch Out, you're rendered as a transparent wire-frame model, enabling you to see through to your opponent. Your character can execute high or low punches, block, and duck to the left or the right. Daphne can also perform two ""special"" moves that cause more damage - a double-uppercut  and a windmill punch - the execution of which require the extremely dexterous coordination of tapping a single key or button. Your opponents, again following in the tradition of Punch Out, hail from locations all over the world, each with different fighting attributes and special moves in their bag of tricks. You begin by duking it out with the Russian boxer Illiyanna ""the Sickle"" Moroskova, who will perform a Russian dance on your head if you're not careful; there's even an Australian boxer who ""BOOM""-erangs around the ring, clobbering you at each pass. You have to knock out these opponents twice to beat them and step up another rung on the ladder to victory.  The main problem with this game, besides its over-attentiveness to the fighters' bodily dimensions, is its failure to capture the simplistic intensity and humor of Punch Out. While the graphics are more robust than Punch Out's, the gameplay leaves something to be desired. It's pretty easy to defeat most of your opponents, and even though a few of them pack more of a punch, the game really isn't engaging enough for you to care to beat them. This game actually ends up being more reminiscent of Catfight than Punch Out - cheapening the valor of the ""female fighting character"" for the sake of a bad gimmick. If you try playing Total Knockout and you're looking for something beyond an exaggeratedly buxom, watered-down revisit of Punch-Out, you may decide to hang up your gloves.
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864,Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis ,8.7," The setting is perfect shooter material, and Operation Flashpoint does justice to it with complex gameplay coupled with a huge and truly memorable gameworld.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/5/4/2211454-ofp.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/operation-flashpoint-cold-war-crisis-review/1900-2810242/,pos,"
1985. The Cold War simmers as NATO and the Warsaw Pact are locked in a grim embrace. Masses of men and weapons stand toe-to-toe, ready to live out the nightmare of World War III. Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis is an ambitious and eagerly anticipated military shooter that turns up the heat on the Cold War, featuring advanced armies and weapon systems doing battle with you in the middle. While the setting may not be entirely relevant anymore, it's still perfect shooter material, and Operation Flashpoint does justice to it with complex gameplay coupled with a huge and truly memorable gameworld.  You'll feel like you're in the middle of a modern battlefield.  Operation Flashpoint puts you on the fictional Malden Islands, an area reminiscent of the Balkans. In the extensive single-player campaign, you learn that fighting has erupted on the islands, and at first it's unclear who's involved and who's to blame. As part of the sole NATO presence in the area, it's your job to help liberate the innocent villages caught in the mayhem and determine just what's going on and who's going to pay. Thanks to lengthy and generally well-directed in-engine cutscenes, you'll start to gather the pieces of the puzzle. You begin the campaign as a US Army private engaged in training exercises in an almost idyllic camp. So far, you and your fellow soldiers haven't seen any action during your tour of duty on the islands. That quickly changes, and you get the opportunity to confront enemies, explore the huge islands, and finally move up the ranks for new responsibilities and challenges.   The numerous campaign missions let you assault villages, run patrols, rescue hostages, and engage in a variety of realistic actions. Usually, you play as part of a computer-controlled squad, but one of the dramatic highpoints of the campaign puts you alone, lost in a forest at dawn, trying desperately to make it through heavy enemy patrols to an evacuation point. Unfortunately, the missions rely heavily on scripted events and triggers, which both reduces replay value somewhat and contributes to bugs. Sometimes an event will fail to register, leaving you and your comrades just sitting there with no way to finish the mission or progress through the linear campaign. Despite plausible enemy artificial intelligence, you'll often encounter enemies near the same spots each time you play a mission. Also, the game inexcusably gives you only one save per mission, though you can choose when to make it. Note to game designers: Let players decide for themselves if they want to play ironman-style, particularly when missions can last 20 or 30 minutes like they do here.   Outside of the campaign, which can be tackled on two difficulty levels, you can also engage in varied single missions that you can play in any order, bringing the mission total to around 50. On top of that, Operation Flashpoint includes a full mission editor, and there's a burgeoning mod scene for the game. Multiplayer offers a number of modes, including capture the flag, deathmatch, city defense, and cooperative. The team-based modes have lots of potential but require an exceptional amount of cooperation and coordination between players, which can of course be hard to find on public servers.   Operation Flashpoint's focus on realistic weapons and vehicles helps create exciting gameplay since it blends realism, diversity, and, frankly, lots of big cool guns. As an infantryman, you'll get to blast the enemy with M16 and AK74 rifles, the M60 machine gun, hand grenades, M21 and Dragunov sniper rifles, satchel charges, rocket launchers, and many others. If you don't like the weapon you're assigned, you can always pick up new ones from fallen soldiers, whether friend or foe. Operation Flashpoint offers one of the biggest selections of vehicles yet found in a shooter. You get to ride in or pilot six helicopters alone, including the Cobra, Apache, Blackhawk, Chinook, and Russian Mi-17 and Hind. Then there are ground attack planes like the A-10 Thunderbolt (aka ""Warthog"") and the SU25 Frogfoot, an assortment of trucks and jeeps, M113 and BMP-1 armored personnel carriers, the M1A1 Abrams tank, Russian T72 and T80 tanks, and more.  Give those feet a rest--you'll get to drive or just ride in a wide variety of vehicles.  You can control the vehicles and your individual soldier from either first- or third-person viewpoints, and movement and firing are controlled through a familiar keyboard-and-mouse shooter layout. You interact with the gameworld through a pop-up menu that offers contextual options like changing your M16 magazine or getting in a jeep as the driver or a passenger. It's an elegant system, but at the same time, it suffers from a lack of hotkeys for all available actions--at least the most important ones like reloading or switching weapons have them. To help you find targets and follow your squad leader's commands, a HUD features optional friend-or-foe and direction indicators, and you also get a compass and a detailed topographical map.   The controls remain largely consistent whether you're on foot or controlling a land or air vehicle, which makes learning the game relatively easy but also reduces the level of detail and realism with the vehicles. Don't expect a hard-core tank or flight sim here. With the exception of jeeps and trucks, vehicles tend to be very twitchy and awkward to control. In some missions, you get to command other troops or vehicle crews, but what should be a high point of the game is hurt by a cumbersome command system that's a chore to use even when you're not taking fire. Also, you can't rely on computer-controlled crews to drive vehicles, thanks to spotty AI when they take the wheel.Whatever its flaws, Operation Flashpoint really envelops you in the chaos of war. The staccato report of gunfire sounds out from all around; fellow soldiers charge past in search of cover; armored vehicles rumble up dirt roads; enemy soldiers dash between village buildings; and above it all, you hear the constant chatter of incoming radio messages from your fellow soldiers. The feeling of chaos is amplified by the large outdoor settings that largely lack the rooms and tunnels found in traditional shooters that serve to funnel players and focus action. You'll typically engage enemies at very long ranges, where they appear like little specks on the horizon. Because of these distances, as well as very quick deaths, you'll rarely get the visceral thrill of close in-your-face combat or the extended dueling found in many shooters. This may be a case where fun suffers at realism's hands. Also, the frequent feeling of a confused, dynamic battlefield can sometimes leave you wondering exactly what's going on, rather than give the action a sense of tension and excitement.  The game accurately models many different real-world weapons...  Still, the world of Operation Flashpoint feels much more alive and immersive than that of most shooters, thanks to unusually high attention to detail. Trucks rattle past military bases where the American flag flaps in the breeze and soldiers do their push-ups. Jeeps kick up dust, leave tire tracks on dirt roads, and feature working speedometers. Missions take place at different times of day with appropriate light levels that actually change during longer missions to reflect the rising or setting of the sun. Your fellow soldiers will chatter with each other, sometimes comically and sometimes just inanely, as your squad is driven to a rendezvous point in a smoke-belching truck or armored personnel carrier.    The emphasis on detail and realism can be almost counterproductive at times, though, since muzzle flashes and falling soldiers usually lack any Hollywood-style exaggeration or melodrama. It feels more realistic, certainly, but you may find that it lacks the sort of cinematic thrill you might want in a game like this. Still, few games have offered such a convincing, consistent, and engaging environment. Operation Flashpoint makes good on the great promise of the shooter genre: the ability to create a virtual world in 3D and then make you feel like you're really part of it.   The game's fine visuals play a major role in making all these details believable. Soldiers cast long, spidery dynamic shadows across hillsides early in the morning when the sun is still low. When an antitank round strikes home, there's a brilliant flash and billow of smoke, leaving only a charred hulk in its wake. The red brake lights on trucks blink on, and headlights cast their beams into the night. Village churches sport the distinctively shaped domes you'd really find in Eastern European or Slavic countries. For perhaps the first time in a 3D game, forests really feel like forests, with expansive, dense stands of trees.   Perhaps more than anything, the detailed faces of other soldiers stand out. It's not merely that they're some of the most realistically rendered ones you'll find in a game but that they're subtly animated. It's intriguing to see a squadmate tilt his head, blink, or move his mouth into a slight frown. Sadly, outside of their faces, the rest of the soldiers aren't rendered in such exacting detail; in fact, they're a little blocky, particularly their fingers. Soldier animations tend to look somewhat jerky, too. That dichotomy holds true for most of the graphics: Highly detailed textures cover 3D models of variable quality. Despite any weaknesses, the graphics still handily complete their mission: They create a believable, entertaining world.  ...though its vehicles are simplified to make the gameplay more accessible.  Operation Flashpoint's music feels like it could have been taken from a Tom Clancy thriller film, and while it's not incredible, it fits the story and adds to the ambience. The game's sound effects also do a fine job without ever reaching greatness. Trucks, helicopters, and other machines of war sound convincing, as do small arms fire and explosions. Chirping crickets, barking dogs, and other ambient sounds help draw you into the game. The many cutscene voice-overs vary widely in quality, though mediocre acting is the order of the day, and the game's European origin shows through in the dialogue and optional subtitles, thanks to occasional (but not unduly distracting) awkward turns of phrase or mistranslations. The most conspicuous sound effect also happens to be the weakest: The radio messages from your squad leader and fellow soldiers are important for tracking the action, but they're also incessant to the point of distraction. Worse still, their clipped, robotic delivery will almost make you laugh.   On the whole, Operation Flashpoint's great strengths more than compensate for its weaknesses. At its best, the game combines some of the most exciting trends of the shooter scene. Like Tribes 2, it features individual and vehicular combat on a massive scale, though those elements aren't as well integrated here. Like SWAT 3 and the Rainbow 6/Rogue Spear series, Operation Flashpoint features sophisticated team tactics that test your brain as much as your trigger finger. At the same time, the game's focus on realistic weaponry should please military buffs and perhaps wargamers since the game is arguably as much a realistic sim as it is a shooter. Best of all, Operation Flashpoint offers one of the most believable and immersive virtual worlds to date. While the mechanics of combat can be a letdown at times, the feeling of being in combat grips you at nearly every turn. With many diverse and entertaining missions, an interesting story, and loads of realistic weapons, Operation Flashpoint aims high and hits its mark.
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865,EA Sports Supercross ,8.7, A mere $40 investment stands between you and one of the best arcade-style motorcycle racing games the PlayStation has to offer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/3/2/5/3147-12325.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ea-sports-supercross-review/1900-2665637/,pos,"
When it comes to video game renditions of motor sports, whether it's automobile racing or motorbike racing, there are usually two main camps that games tend to fall into - arcade and simulation. Last year, EA Sports released Supercross 2000, a simulation-oriented motorcycle racing game. Although a valiant effort, the game was mostly unplayable, featuring a frustrating mixture of touchy control, cruel collision detection, and dodgy steering. Hoping to put the past behind it, Electronic Arts has gone the arcade route with this year's release, dropping the numbering system and creating a much-improved follow-up effort. A few graphical issues aside, EA Sports Supercross is one of the PlayStation's best arcade-style motorcycle racing games.   The first thing EA did to improve this year's Supercross was to expand upon the game's options and give the player a greater variety of activities to participate in. Unlike last year's release, EA Sports Supercross features several gameplay modes, including single race, time trial, freestyle practice, and freestyle competition. The series championship from Supercross 2000 returns intact, albeit with one major change. Instead of just a single circuit of courses, the series championship now consists of nine different championships: the EA Sports Supercross, EA Sports West Supercross, EA Sports East Supercross, the Thor Championship, the Parts Unlimited Championship, the Wrenchead.com Championship, the FMF Championship, the Scott Championship, and the Etnies Freestyle games. In all, there are 55 events to compete in across these nine championships, and, as an added bonus, you won't be stuck racing indoors for the duration of the game. Whereas Supercross 2000 restricted you to indoor arenas, EA Sports Supercross offers a mixture of 22 indoor and outdoor courses. There are 12 enclosed arenas, four open-air stadiums, two outdoor motocross tracks, and four outdoor, trick-oriented freestyle courses. The game also features 30 actual riders from the AMA's Supercross, Motocross, Arenacross, Freestyle, and Women's Motocross circuits. However, should stars such as Jimmy Button, Jeff Emig, Damon Huffman, and Jessica Patterson not float your boat, there's also a create-a-rider editor. If multiplayer gaming is your calling, you'll be happy to know that all of EA Sports Supercross' modes, except the series championship, can be played by either one or two human players.   While it may be said that there is a lot to do in EA Sports Supercross, it is the game's addictive gameplay that ultimately becomes the true measure of its worth. The control is simple, yet it works. On a basic level, all you really need to do is mash the X button for acceleration and use the analog stick or the D-pad to steer. However, if you really want to master the game and brutalize those corners, you'll have to acclimate yourself to the game's more advanced controls. Borrowing a page from Nintendo's Excitebike 64, holding down (back) gives you more air on jumps, while holding up leans your front wheel forward to enable better landings on sloped surfaces. The R1 button gives you the ability to perform tight turns or steer the bike in midair, while the L1 buttons performs the most important action of all - the power clutch speed boost. Similar to the crazy dash from Sega's Crazy Taxi, the power clutch speed boost gives you a temporary speed increase, and it is your most useful tool in your quest for first-place finishes. When put into the context of the game's hill-laden, winding courses, the tight turn and speed boost features also give the game a rhythm that is simultaneously exciting and unique.On the freestyle side of things, the stunt system in EA Sports Supercross bears special mention, simply because it's so perfect. Performing tricks is easy - just hold down the circle button and tap the directional pad. Some tricks, such as the no hander and nac nac, only require single directional presses, while advanced stunts, such as the superman and mulisha air, call for two or three different directional presses. In all, there are 35 different stunts to learn and perform, all of which can be chained together into custom combinations of two, three, or even four different tricks. Practicing your stunt skills isn't just for show, either. Later championships boast freestyle events, meaning that taking what you've learned from racing and applying it to your own innate trick performing abilities is a necessary gameplay requirement. About the only real problem you'll find in playing EA Sports Supercross is its collision detection, but even a few trips through the wall can be forgiven when the rest of the game plays so wonderfully well.   Unfortunately, while EA put a lot of effort into improving the series' gameplay for EA Sports Supercross, it's made only minor strides in fixing the visual and audio problems that plagued last year's release. Compared with last year's attempt, this year's release animates more smoothly, but the riders and scenery are still far too boxy and pixelated when compared with those of other PlayStation motorbike racing titles. Additionally, the frame rate still turns to mush when a pack of racers are onscreen, meaning that you'll have to hold first place or bring up the rear in order to witness a comfortable 30fps. EA Sports Supercross doesn't sound that much different from Supercross 2000, either, but a larger assortment of comments from announcers Art Eckman and David Bailey at least improves upon what was once a quiet romp in the park. An adequate assortment of engine murmurs and skid effects rounds out what is ultimately a game that plays better than its appearance suggests.   EA Sports Supercross is the pure embodiment of the graphics vs. gameplay debate that has gripped the gaming industry since the arrival of this latest generation of consoles. Despite barely making the grade graphically, the game plays like a dream. If you're really tied to perfect visuals, you may find it difficult to enjoy what EA Sports Supercross has to offer. However, if you're on the fence in the debate or value gameplay over graphics, a mere $40 investment stands between you and one of the best arcade-style motorcycle racing games the PlayStation has to offer.
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866,Shenmue II ,8.7," IMPORT: It's a polished game that serves as a showcase for the DC and the evolution of the RPG genre, and fans should definitely find a way to play it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/8/7/2209287-gb.png,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shenmue-ii-review/1900-2829777/,pos,"
If you're reading this, you're more than likely one of the many gamers who had held out hope that the Dreamcast would gracefully ride into the sunset with the US release of Shenmue II, the sequel to one of the best testaments to the system's power and the creativity of developer AM2. Would have been nice, wouldn't it? But, just as the series' lead character, Ryo, discovered when his father was brutally killed before his eyes, life can take some unfair turns. Now that Microsoft has the exclusive North American rights to the game for the Xbox, US DC owners won't ever get the chance to play the game on their console unless they import it. The painful part of the whole mess is the sad fact that Shenmue II is so much better than its predecessor, refining nearly every aspect of the original. It's a polished game that serves as a showcase for the DC and the evolution of the RPG genre, and fans should definitely find a way to play it. Shenmue II opens a short time after the end of the original Shenmue, following Ryo as his ship docks in China. Armed with an address, some yen, his collection of toys, and half of the artifact he collected at the end of Shenmue, the Phoenix Mirror, Ryo sets out to find his father's killer--Lan Di. Ryo's journey will take him to from the docks of Aberdeen, to the street markets of Wan Chai, to the city of Kowloon, to the mountain villages of Guilin. Along the way, he'll interact with a new cast of characters and learn more about the mysteries of the Phoenix Mirror and its counterpart, the Dragon Mirror. Shenmue II is a combination of chapters three through five in the Shenmue story, and producer Yu Suzuki has always said that the story will be told over the course of several games. Shenmue II offers better pacing than the original, and it has an epic feel that suits the story it tells.  If you've played the original Shenmue, you'll know what to expect from Shenmue II's gameplay. You'll go through the various locations you find yourself in, talking to people, solving puzzles, learning new moves, and soaking up the local atmosphere until your watch alarm goes off and you have to call it a day. While the basic control is exactly the same, there have been some refinements that make the gameplay better overall. You'll move Ryo with the D-pad, look with the analog stick, use the right trigger to run, and use the left trigger to look at items in first-person mode. The onscreen HUD now shows the outlines of the DC pad's face buttons, which have their context-sensitive uses, such as opening a door or talking to an NPC, overlaid on them according to the situation. The ""talk"" feature is one of the game's most welcome improvements. Aside from gaining useful clues, if you're lost in one of the game's large environments, talking with an adult NPC will usually result in that NPC guiding you exactly where you need to go, which is incredibly useful. In instances where you'll have to meet someone or go to a location at a specific time, you'll get an option to ""fast-forward"" time and/or warp to a certain location. You'll still be able to roam and pass the time sightseeing if you like, but the new option helps the game's pacing a great deal. Another gameplay tweak can be found in the game's ""quick time events,"" or QTEs. A lightning rod for gamers, who either loved or hated them, the action sequences, which had players following onscreen button inputs, are back with a few tweaks for the better. The original style, which forced you to repeat the entire sequence if you made too many mistakes, is back, but you'll also encounter two variations on it. The first changes on the fly if you make mistakes--allowing you to pick up the action later. For example, in the beginning of the game, you find yourself chasing a boy through the pier area in Aberdeen. The QTE will end if you make too many mistakes, and you'll find yourself back in the normal game. If you explore a bit, you'll find the boy again and continue the QTE. The other variation usually takes place during an action sequence--you'll see the action freeze for a moment while a set of commands flashes onscreen, and you'll have a split second to enter the commands before bad things happen to Ryo.The new tweaks to the gameplay, combined with better pacing in its storytelling, make Shenmue II a better game to play through overall. It's rare that you'll find yourself wandering cluelessly through the streets thanks to the support system in the game--you'll be able to save anywhere, and NPCs are far more useful, as is Ryo's notebook. The only slow spots may come when you work to earn money, which you'll need to progress through certain parts of the game. This time, there's a bit more variety when it comes to earning cash in the game--for those who can't hang with the whole ""nine to five"" thing, you'll find ""alternative"" methods to line your pockets. If stacking boxes on the dock isn't good enough for you, you'll be able to earn cash by gambling, arm wrestling, street fighting, and working pachinko machines. As before, the game will provide you with an assortment of vices to spend your hard-earned cash on: gatcha gatcha machines bearing assorted toys, street vendors with assorted items, and, of course, arcade machines that offer the chance to play emulated Sega classics such as Afterburner. The variety of gameplay in Shenmue II is matched by the game's graphics, which push the DC to its limits by creating great, immersive environments. Using a tweaked version of the original game's graphics engine, Shenmue II coaxes some truly impressive visuals out of the DC hardware. Careful coding and slick polygon clipping allow the game to display larger areas and far more people onscreen than the original game. The texture detail is incredibly high, allowing for such fine detail as weathering on Buddha statues, clothing detail, and textures on a variety of surfaces. The various areas offer up as much, if not more, detail than the most impressive areas in Shenmue, which is quite a feat. The character models are well detailed, with quite a few more featuring facial expressions. The lighting in the game has been tweaked slightly to reflect the time of day a bit more convincingly than before as well. However, the most impressive aspect of the graphics has to be their presentation. Building on the cinematic feel of its predecessor, Shenmue II's visuals are far more polished in terms of camera work. The flythroughs of new locations and when the time of day changes maintain a strong visual style. During cutscenes, the camera is constantly in motion, offering unique angles and fluid movement that keeps the game visually interesting.  The graphics are complemented by an excellent use of sound that brings the environments to life. Every area you'll find yourself in will have its own distinctive set of sounds and music playing. Crowds of people and other ambient noise abound in the game and go a long way toward ""selling"" the game's environments. The game's actual soundtrack alternates between quieter, sparse pieces and suitably grand, sweeping compositions to reflect the action.  While Shenmue II looks fantastic for a Dreamcast game, there are a few flaws to be found. The frame rate in the game does chug a bit, from 30 fps as you move through the streets and crowds, and lack of mip mapping keeps things a bit more shimmery than in Shenmue. Another jarring graphical quirk lies in the way the engine handles the many polygonal characters onscreen. Characters will randomly fade in and out depending on what's being displayed onscreen at a given time. But there's nothing that isn't easily overlooked once you become engrossed in the game's story. It's a shame Shenmue II will never see the light of day on the Dreamcast in the US. Its level of polish, technical prowess, and creativity make it one of the DC's finest titles. Fans of the series owe it to themselves to track it down and play it via Japanese or European import. It's that good. Hopefully it will shine just as brightly when the Xbox version is released.
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867,Gitaroo-Man ,8.7," Gitaroo-Man is arguably the most original and inventive rhythm game since the advent of Dance Dance Revolution or the original Parappa the Rapper, and it's easily one of the best ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/9/3/2212693-box_gman.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gitaroo-man-review/1900-2847915/,pos,"
The rhythm game genre has always been fertile ground for a special brand of eccentric Japanese pop-culture weirdness and a very unique kind of aesthetic. While the style is still fairly fresh, the genre has been allowed to stagnate over the past few years. There have been three Parappa-related releases, though they have admittedly been getting less and less inspired with each release. Koei, a company best known for its historically oriented strategy games, enters into the rhythm game scene as an unlikely player with Gitaroo-Man, which is as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise inert genre. Gitaroo-Man follows the story of a young elementary student named U-1, a lonely loser with no self-confidence and no friends, save for his jelly-bean-headed talking dog, Puma. U-1 comes to learn that he is the heir to the title of the legendary Gitaroo-Man, an intergalactic superhero who uses the power of his gitaroo to defend the universe against evil. An evil alien race known as the Gravillians has been going around, collecting gitaroos in a bid to take over the universe, and it would seem that U-1 and Puma are the keepers of the only gitaroo the Gravillians haven't acquired. So U-1 travels around the universe, fighting a bizarre cast of Gravillian warriors in order to reclaim these magical instruments for the planet Gitaroo. Along the way, he'll learn about believing in himself, falling in love, and the true nature of music. The story is sometimes cheesy and always strange, but it's delivered with the utmost sincerity, and it concludes with an incredibly satisfying climax.  The gameplay in Gitaroo-Man alternates between two different mechanics. At certain points, using the left analog stick--which controls a cone in the center of the screen--you'll follow a line around the screen while pressing and holding the circle button at certain moments to pull off riffs. At others, button commands will move toward a cursor at the center of the screen, at which point you'll have to press the designated face button on your controller. The whole experience is incredibly fun and challenging, as the action gets pretty fast and furious early on in the game. The level of difficulty in Gitaroo-Man has been decreased for US audiences, toning it down from impossible to simply hard. The normal difficulty will no doubt challenge well-seasoned Parappa players, though the easy difficulty is recommended for those just discovering the genre, lest you find yourself quickly frustrated with the game. Each level is broken down into three different stages: charge, battle, and final. During the charge stage, you can fill up your health meter by successfully executing the onscreen commands. The battle stage gives you the chance to diminish your opponent's health meter with your musical stylings, though your health meter will also drop if you flub any of the commands during this stage. Once your opponent's health meter drops to a certain point, you'll enter the final stage, which usually involves a big guitar solo that you use to finish it off. Gitaroo-Man features multiplayer support for up to four players, giving each player the chance to ""play"" a different portion of the music as one of the game's many colorful characters. A few of the single-player songs are unavailable in the multiplayer mode, which is unfortunate, as these are some of the better songs on the soundtrack.  The visual style of Gitaroo-Man is the most immediately striking element of the game, and it rivals the style of the Parappa series in terms of originality. The game is rendered in crisp and colorful 3D, but the characters' facial features are animated with 2D textures, lending the game a kind of cartoonish quality without resorting to the overused cel-shading technique. While it looks nothing like any anime you've ever seen, the whole affair has a decidedly Japanese pop-culture feel to it. This aesthetic is reinforced by the game's environments, which are simple but vivid and create the kind of atmosphere where it would seem appropriate for a television to jump up and start dancing around. The game is teeming with nice visual touches, such as the posters on U-1's bedroom walls the animal-suited backup band that mysteriously follows him throughout the game.  Produced by the Japanese music group COIL, the soundtrack in Gitaroo-Man is second to none. Each song deftly encapsulates a different musical style, representing high-tempo J-pop, drum and bass, dub, acoustic ballads, arena rock, and many others. All the music is solid, and once you've played through the game, you'll undoubtedly want to go back to just to hear certain songs. The voice acting, while perhaps not as impressive as the soundtrack, is generally good and doesn't undermine the experience. Gitaroo-Man is arguably the most original and inventive rhythm game since the advent of Dance Dance Revolution or the original Parappa the Rapper, and it's easily one of the best rhythm games for the PlayStation 2. This is a must-own title for rhythm-game junkies, but the whole package is so compelling that it will also appeal to anyone who isn't a fan of the genre.
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868,Fire Pro Wrestling ,8.7," It shines as an enjoyable, solid wrestling game that will provide hours upon hours of entertainment to fans of the genre.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/3/2/3345-13132.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fire-pro-wrestling-review/1900-2773011/,pos,"
The Japanese Fire Pro series is well known by wrestling fans as one of the longest-running wrestling game franchises available--provided you stay up to date on Japanese releases. While in the United States, developers have tried to capitalize on the strengths of the respective WWF and WCW licenses, but only the Fire Pro series has tried to capture the fun and excitement of wrestling without a federation license, taking it back to the days when Pro Wrestling on the NES was king. With the US debut of Fire Pro Wrestling on the Game Boy Advance, the western hemisphere can now check out what it's been missing since the days of the SNES.    Fire Pro Wrestling features good-looking 2D grapplers fighting in an isometric environment. The venues and crowds are attractive, but by no means mind-blowingly detailed. The fighters themselves look great for 2D sprites, with top-notch animation and each of the moves accurately rendered and easily recognizable by anyone familiar with real-life wrestling moves and holds. Even more impressive is the sheer number of unique fighters and the heated action that takes place when four fighters get it on at once. The different background themes are rock-heavy generic anthems, and the game doesn't suffer much with the sound turned down. You will, however, miss out on the crowd reactions and satisfying pounding noises, as well as the occasional sick squishing sound of a particularly gory move.     The fighters move fluidly, and the control is absolutely flawless. Your fighter tosses light and medium attacks with the A and B buttons and executes heavy moves with both face buttons at once. The R trigger sets your fighter running, while the L trigger lets you take a breather and regain some of your lost stamina. The select button causes your character to taunt, which has a palpable effect on the crowd as well as your own performance. In a welcome departure from the genre, the grappling system in Fire Pro punishes button mashers and rewards precise timing. Two characters will initiate the grapple by making contact with each other--the player to input the move command at the right time is rewarded with completing the maneuver. Matches require a steady progression from light to heavy techniques, as starting off with heavy moves will be met by damaging counterholds. Moves can range from standard body slams and triple German suplexes to submission techniques and even include hard-core techniques like jabbing someone's skull with a fork repeatedly, followed by a look that just screams ""Me? I didn't do nuthin'!"" To further reflect the explosive nature of full-contact fighting, Fire Pro has a critical feature, which allows finishing moves and some techniques the chance to knock out an opponent outright. This goes along with the focus on bloody, brutal matches. If your fighter gets punched or bitten in the face too often, a woman will scream in the background to let you know he's started gushing blood. Too many more hits, and your fighter's face and chest will be visibly coated by a reddish hue. Your fighter will either fight harder or give up easier based on his tolerance for bloodshed.Fans of the US leagues will find a number of wrestlers modeled after the WWF and WCW superstars, albeit altered by palette swaps and some fairly humorous name changes. For example, the WWF's The Rock has been changed to have gray hair and blue tights and is now called the APW's ""The Salesman"" Joe Morici. His moves sets, distinctive taunts, and abilities are otherwise unchanged. Besides the American pro wrestling federations, you'll find athletes modeled after those in the Ultimate Fighting circuit, Pancrase, Pride, New Japan Pro Wrestling, and many more. The level of detail in many of these fighters and in their animations, as well as the accuracy of their moves sets, is amazing. Sakuraba, for example, a famous Japanese Pride competitor and widely renowned as one of the world's greatest fighters, appears in the game, complete with Mongolian chops, a twisting arm lock, and a leaping face stomp, as if his repertoire were lifted directly from a real-life event. In the Japanese version of the game, the fighters appear much more authentic, and a rename function is available to change anything you like, including the names of the federations. If you feel the need to change the colors--from green to the more appropriate red Kane, for example--you'll have to use up one of the game's 77 create-a-wrestler slots.    Fire Pro's create-a-wrestler feature is one of its strongest points, with more than 1,200 techniques to choose from as well as hundreds of faces and body parts--all in an intuitive, easy-to-manipulate system that creates fighters every bit as interesting and detailed as those available within the game. Character AI can be edited to determine fighter movement and actions when controlled by the CPU and can thus be manipulated to create the perfect tag team partner or truly aggressive opponent. Assigning skills, offensive and defensive attributes, and special abilities--like ""one-minute finisher"" or ""submission criticals""--is loads of fun and can be used to re-create just about any fighter from any real-life fighting style imaginable. We had the chance to create a fist-fighting specialist modeled after Tank Abbott and had lots of fun knocking people out with mounted punches, basic striking attacks, and the occasional dirty trick.   Fire Pro Wrestling graces players with a multitude of enjoyable play options. Exhibition matches may take place with up to four wrestlers in the ring at once, in standard or ""gruesome"" (octagonal UFC-style) rings and even electrified cages. You can then participate in tournaments, five-on-five tier matches, and even enter a 64-fighter league. The deepest mode, however, is the intriguing audience match mode, which simulates the crowd-pleasing, entertainment aspect of wrestling. Your fighter competes in a series of matches, advancing from one rank to the next by defeating a predetermined number of opponents and attaining the necessary fan satisfaction rate. The criteria for impressive performances is based on the league you join, which can range from the stoic style--in which defeating your opponent as quickly as possible is the objective--to the Luchador style, in which high-flying, high-risk maneuvers win over the crowd. Completing all four ranks in a style will unlock additional wrestlers and fighters for future matches, as well as mark the victorious wrestler with a star on the character selection screen to denote his champion status. In all the modes, the scalable AI is extremely challenging and can pull off upsets and last-minute criticals with ruthless ability. Fire Pro Wrestling also lets up to four players link together for participating in tournaments, battle royals, or just for trading wrestlers.    Fire Pro Wrestling has made the transition from Japan to the US extremely well. Even though Fire Pro Wrestling doesn't bear any official licenses, when all the superfluous gimmicks and options are tossed aside and the comparisons are made, it shines as an enjoyable, solid wrestling game that will provide hours upon hours of entertainment to fans of the genre.
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869,Lady Sia ,8.7," Thanks to its solid control, clever puzzles, and stellar production values, Lady Sia is easily worth a trip to the local game shop.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/2/4/2/2212242-473916_44216_front.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lady-sia-review/1900-2821882/,pos,"
In this side-scrolling action game from TDK Mediactive, you'll run, jump, crawl, climb, and slash your way through 23 lush levels full of monsters, demons, and assorted perils. Thanks to its solid control, clever puzzles, and stellar production values, Lady Sia is easily worth a trip to the local game shop. The story opens with a cutscene showing Sia being thrown in prison. A veiled figure eventually helps her escape, and that's where you begin the game. Each of the game's four worlds features a different environment, but the gist of the environments is similar. Whether on land, undersea, in caves, or in the air, you need to rescue innocent captives and slay the T'soa commanders. Much like in the beloved Virgin Interactive Disney games of the Sega Genesis era, you'll exercise a combination of climbing, jumping, sneaking, and slashing to make steady progress. Sia carries a trusty sword for attacking, as well as a magical ring capable of energy bursts--both of which come in handy against the 30-some different enemies you'll face.  Environmental interaction is what really gives Lady Sia its flair. Within each level there are plenty of ramps, ropes, ladders, boats, switches, and wells to operate and/or use. Although the majority of these devices unlock another portion of the current level, there are numerous instances where they lead to extra bonus items or secret areas. As such, the game's replay value is through the roof, since the exploration of these multiple routes provides a lifelike and nonlinear vibrancy to the overall setting. Speaking of setting, Lady Sia totally flexes the GBA's muscle in terms of character and background animation. Every level is full of color and life, ranging from little nuances, such as leaves and swaying ropes, to more significant features, such as toppling buildings and rock slides. The inclusion of dark outlines and thought bubbles gives the game a cartoonlike feel, which is cemented further by the oodles of hyperexpressive motion tied to each character. Sia's bobbing ponytail, her comedic reach during attacks, and the lithe leaping of the tigermen are but just a few examples. Tying it all together, the use of screen-filling magic and Sia's sasquatch transformation during boss battles help make for one thrill of a ride. Although the game's audio isn't on par with its visuals, Lady Sia provides a delightful listen. Catchy music with the right amount of bass and wind instruments underlies each level, while a minimal set of exaggerated sound effects cohabitates nicely with the onscreen action. About the only glaring problems with Lady Sia's design center around the use of slash combos and save points. Combos can send you tumbling off ledges and platforms, often to an untimely demise in the water or on the spikes below. Save points, which are normally a blessing, record your exact health and magic status at the time of activation, but don't replenish them when you're made to continue! These middling quirks don't hurt the experience whatsoever, but they are somewhat baffling. Viewed individually, each of the design elements in Lady Sia (backgrounds, character design, bosses, music, sound effects, control, and secrets) isn't necessarily noteworthy in and of itself. However, taken as a whole, they form the recipe for a spectacular action game. The gameplay is inviting, the characters are charming, and the challenge level is just right, while the inclusion of a strong female character directs the game toward all age and gender groups.
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870,Jet Set Radio Future ,8.7," It's an unusual game that offers a serious challenge, as well as gorgeous graphics, a strong soundtrack, plenty of style, and a good replay value.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/4/6/2214946-box_jsrf.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jet-set-radio-future-review/1900-2850394/,pos,"
The original Jet Set Radio, released in 1999 in the US for the Dreamcast under the name Jet Grind Radio, was a rare combination of technical achievement and innovative gameplay. Its unique cel-shaded graphics and excellent soundtrack, coupled with its original play mechanics, combined for a truly distinctive game filled with both style and substance. While the game didn't go on to become a massive commercial hit, critical acclaim and a devoted fan base have led developer Smilebit to create a follow-up, Jet Set Radio Future. The new game is like a reimagining of the Dreamcast's Jet Grind Radio and features a mix of old and new faces and locations. Like its predecessor, Jet Set Radio Future is a visually stunning game that can be a lot of fun. It also plays differently enough from the previous game to satisfy both old and new players. Jet Set Radio Future does have a few problems, some of which carry over from the original, but it still offers a great gaming experience that every Xbox owner should check out. Jet Set Radio Future takes place under circumstances similar to those of Jet Grind Radio. The game follows the same basic premise: Tokyo is being overrun by a malevolent corporation run by a nattily dressed businessman who's taken control of the police force. The mighty DJ Professor K is on hand once again to put out the call to rebel against the establishment via his underground radio show, Jet Set Radio. You assume the role of one of the ""rudies,"" a band of Tokyo youths who have grouped into street gangs to take on ""the man."" To keep Tokyo free from oppression, you'll have to tag and skate your way through a variety of locales throughout the city and take on Gouji's police forces, other rival gangs, and eventually Gouji himself. While the story is similar to Jet Grind's, you'll find enough plot twists to keep things fresh and engaging.  The gameplay in Jet Set Radio Future, much like the story, mixes old and new elements. While the game's core gameplay is unchanged--you'll still get around the streets with magnetically charged skates and collect spray paint cans that you'll use to spray graffiti on your surroundings--some of the mechanics and control have been tweaked. You'll find the same basic control layout as in Jet Grind Radio, but with a few more control options. The left analog stick gives you analog control over your skater's speed. Pressing down on the stick also lets you perform a controlled grind that is useful when tagging. The right analog stick triggers a first-person look mode when you're stationary, and this becomes essential in getting your bearings. The X button lets you perform tricks while skating, while the Y button is also used for tricking but can be used to change your skater's stance and let you skate backward as well. The L trigger is used to recenter the camera behind you and also lets you ""lock on"" to enemies during battles. The R trigger lets you spray graffiti when you're near tag icons and interact with characters when you see a word balloon appear above their heads. You can also jump and use a speed boost, as well as call up a map of your surroundings. If you've played Jet Grind Radio, you'll notice several changes to the way the new game handles. Tagging has been simplified to a single press of the R trigger when you're near tagging icons. Holding down the trigger will automatically tag the larger pieces of graffiti made up of multiple icons. The mechanics for dashing have also changed--the basic dash used in Jet Grind Radio has been replaced by the much more potent ""boost dash."" Essentially a turbo boost that uses up 10 cans of paint, boost dashing can be useful in many situations. Aside from the obvious increase in speed, the boost dash will also serve as an offensive attack that's vital to dealing with Rokkaku forces later in the game. Jet Set Radio Future also includes a complete trick system that is actually integral to gameplay. Performing tricks will increase your speed when grinding, which is essential for making some of the seemingly impossible jumps you'll have to make. Trick combos are also vital to your success in other ways, as they will often let you reach new areas. For example, going from a handplant to an air trick in a half pipe will let you jump much higher than you normally would, which is the only way you'll ever advance through the sewers. Finally, grinding has become both easier to control and also more over-the-top; you'll be able to grind straight up certain poles and structures in the game. You'll be able to manually adjust your grind speed by pulling back on the analog stick to slow down or by performing tricks to speed up.There's a lot to learn about how to play Jet Set Radio Future, and you'll gradually become acquainted with the finer points of the game's controls as you progress. You'll learn new moves when you encounter characters, who will challenge you to pull them off. A character is always available to teach you about the various gameplay elements. The game's difficulty and learning curve ramps up gradually at first, though later parts of the game can be very challenging.  The tweaks to the controls in Jet Set Radio Future make it play quite differently from its predecessor. This time around, the emphasis is on fast tagging, speedy skating, and performing impressive tricks. To accommodate that, you're no longer constrained by time in any of the levels, which lets you go through and explore them at your leisure rather than trying to beat the clock. In terms of the game's actual structure, Jet Set Radio Future is less linear than the previous game is overall, but it unfolds in a slightly more conventional fashion, like a platformer. The single-player game is broken up into eight chapters that offer a few variations to the gameplay. In addition to tagging, you'll be exploring levels to acquire ""graffiti souls,"" golden tapes, and new playable characters. You'll also engage in boss battles against other characters, which range from traditional tagging fights to minigame competitions. You'll also be on the prowl for entrances to new levels in the game. You'll notice that the roster of playable characters has shot through the roof in Jet Set Radio Future. You'll find 12 playable characters in the game, each with different performance attributes. You'll be able to switch between them on the fly at save points throughout the game. This actually ends up adding a strategic element, as certain characters will be best suited for specific activities in the game, and it'll be up to you to decide when to switch. While the game's story unfolds in a linear fashion, the decision to move the story forward or hang back in a level and try to complete all the challenges is largely up to you. Outside of the main single-player game, you'll find a multiplayer mode, supporting up to four players via split-screen. You'll have your choice of five customizable minigames. The multiplayer mode may sound like a good idea, and it can make for a good diversion, but it comes across as much less interesting compared with the rest of the game.  Visually, Jet Set Radio Future stands as one of the Xbox's best-looking games yet, and that's saying a lot. The game's cel-shaded graphics and distinct art style are incredibly beautiful--a definite improvement upon those of the Dreamcast predecessor, which also looked spectacular for its time. The characters are all impressively detailed--as you'd expect, the character roster practically overflows with quirky style. The various skaters also sport smooth animation, which is noticeable when they idle and break into unique dance steps to pass the time. You'll also see speed lines and motion blur around your skater as you tear through the streets, which makes the game seem even more dynamic. Yet your boost dash will show off the flashiest pyrotechnics of all, as your skates literally burst into flame as you shoot forward at incredible speed. You'll find 14 different locations that run the gamut from good-looking to flat-out amazing, showcasing the Xbox's power and Smilebit's excellent visual design. Each level is massive and, more often than not, teeming with activity. You'll see traffic as well as hordes of people in the streets, all of which react to your presence. In addition, little details--such as flocks of birds on the ground that scatter as you skate through them, billowing smoke, and flashing neon and fountains of water--are also on tap to give each level a very strong sense of life. Yet, for all the eye candy and fast-paced gameplay, the game's frame rate generally stays very smooth as 60 frames per second.Jet Set Radio Future's sound is almost as good as its graphics. In keeping with the game's massive size, Smilebit has assembled a truly eclectic mix of music that mingles tunes by JGR Vets Hideki Naganuma and Richard Jacques with pieces from the Latch Brothers and Cibo Matto. The end result doesn't provide quite as cohesive an auditory experience as that found in the original Jet Grind Radio, due to some dissonant and sometimes grating tunes that stick out, but the music still suits the action very well overall, and there's plenty of it. Besides that, the game's sound effects are solid, and the various skater voices are OK. Gouji and his police forces sound a bit shaky, but this doesn't detract much from the experience. Home theater owners will be especially pleased by the game's support of Dolby Digital sound, which offers a sterling audio experience if you're set up for it. Although Jet Set Radio Future is an outstanding Xbox game, it does have a few shortcomings that prevent it from being truly superb. That is, in general, the game seems to lack a layer of polish that more time spent in development might have afforded. Specifically, the camera can cause some major problems. If you've played the original on the Dreamcast, then you'll be very familiar with Jet Grind Radio's frustrating camera system. And if you haven't, then Jet Set Radio Future should bring you up to speed, since for the most part, the game shares many of the same exact camera issues as its predecessor. As you skate around, you'll experience some awkward view angles and skate past objects that will obscure your line of sight. You'll probably learn to deal with these things, although you'll find that sometimes the game seems much harder than it ought to be as a result. Furthermore, the open-ended nature of the game can make it difficult to figure out where you're supposed to go next at certain points. Though it may get a little frustrating sometimes, it's comforting to know that Smilebit has filled Jet Set Radio Future with plenty of replay value. That's fortunate, since you should be able to finish the single-player game within 15 hours. Aside from the 12 characters you'll find during your first time through the game, you should be able to unlock another dozen by revisiting the game once you've finished it. Jet Set Radio Future also contains an in-depth graffiti editor that lets you create your own tags for use in the game. Unfortunately, you won't be sharing any custom creations with other players over the Internet, as the game lacks the online support found in its Dreamcast predecessor. Despite a few rough edges, Jet Set Radio Future manages to shine because of its addictive, original gameplay and its stunning graphics. It's an unusual game that offers a serious challenge, as well as gorgeous graphics, a strong soundtrack, plenty of style, and good replay value. All of that combines to make Jet Set Radio Future one of the better Xbox games to date.


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871,Kameo: Elements of Power ,8.7," Plenty of original, funny, visually stunning, and fun-filled moments await in Kameo: Elements of Power, which is the first Xbox 360 action adventure game, as well as a standard-setter.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/4/6/2/2218462-box_kameoeop.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kameo-elements-of-power-review/1900-6139768/,pos,"
  The next generation of gaming is off to a very good start. As the first Xbox 360 game to be released, Kameo: Elements of Power turns out to be a fitting showcase for Microsoft's powerful new console. For that matter, the game's really no worse for wear despite several production delays during its many long years in development. This colorful, creative action adventure game is one of the most family-friendly titles among the Xbox 360's starting lineup, but it'll provide a great experience for just about any kind of game player. It's packed with clever and entertaining action, not to mention some of the most highly impressive, razor-sharp graphics you've ever seen, along with terrific music and sound. Kameo feels rather disjointed at first, and it's not a particularly long game, but it ultimately provides a rousing, memorable journey that'll be a fine way to excitedly spend some of your first hours with the new Xbox.   Kameo: Elements of Power takes a little time to get warmed up, but it packs in one great adventure once it gets going.   There's not much preamble at first, since the game thrusts you straightaway into a fairly challenging battle without bothering with a proper introduction. You play as Kameo, a slender elf princess with fairy wings and the unique ability to transform into a variety of different, unusual creatures. She's single-handedly assaulting an ominous castle occupied by untold numbers of surly trolls and their ugly, presumably smelly industrial contraptions. It turns out that Kameo's wicked sister, Kalus, is apparently in league with the vile troll king, Thorn. Together they've kidnapped Kameo's family and now threaten the Enchanted Kingdom, Kameo's home. So Kameo does what any young lady would do in her place, assuming that young lady could also transform into a yeti, a plant with boxing gloves, and a roly-poly elephant-mole thing at the drop of a hat.    The opening level of Kameo definitely shows off the game's fantastic visuals and audio (made exponentially better if your Xbox 360 is hooked up to a high-definition display and a 5.1 surround-sound system), as well as its distinctive mechanics. Provided you have some experience with other action adventure games, this one's easy to pick up and play, thanks partly to the responsiveness of the Xbox 360's excellent but familiar gamepad and partly to the onscreen prompts that constantly remind you which buttons perform which functions. Controlling the action from a third-person perspective, you can make Kameo run around (or hover around more quickly) using the left analog stick, and you can freely rotate the camera using the right stick. Kameo's attacks and other moves are mapped to the shoulder buttons, while her transformations are mapped to the face buttons.    For instance, she can morph into the pugilistic plant Pummel Weed at the touch of a button, at which point she can execute left and right jabs using the respective triggers. Pulling both triggers at the same time causes Pummel Weed to burrow into the ground, letting it slip under gates and also setting up a powerful uppercut. Kameo isn't much of a fighter herself, so she must switch between her different forms to overcome various obstacles and defeat all types of different enemies. Yet despite the relatively simple controls, the early going in Kameo may still be rather confusing, since you aren't given a clear sense of what's happening or how to play. Unless you've played a bunch of Metroid Prime, it'll especially take getting used to controlling the elephant mole guy, Major Ruin, who rolls around like a ball. Luckily, the game's got a built-in help system in the form of a self-important (but generally helpful) talking book that's always there to give you advice about your situation. So with a little patience and a few voluntary hints, you should be able to cross this first hurdle without too much trouble.    Suffice it to say you don't manage to take down Kalus and Thorn so soon. Bizarrely enough, once you finish the lengthy introductory mission, you'll find yourself in the Enchanted Kingdom being instructed on the very basics of gameplay--such as how to move around and rotate the camera--as if you hadn't figured all that out already. It's as if somebody decided at the last minute that the original opening of the game was too bland, so the flashy castle level was tacked on in front of it. Whatever the explanation, between the potentially frustrating first level (which forces you to get comfortable with some of the game's most advanced mechanics in what's quite literally a trial by fire) and the unnecessary and late instructional how-to back at the Kingdom, the first hour or two of Kameo may have you shaking your head. But then the game sets you off on a much more satisfyingly coherent sequence of action, exploration, and puzzle-solving sequences. And soon enough, the false start will be forgotten.   Just as you probably hoped, this game looks considerably better than anything available on other consoles these days.   There's a lot of variety in Kameo. When you're in the Enchanted Kingdom, there's no danger. It's just you getting to flit around in a vibrantly detailed storybook world, talking to some goofy characters, finding hidden items, and so forth. The richly detailed gameworld rewards exploration to a certain extent, since you can find helpful items and other little secrets by straying from the beaten path. However, even though the gameworld consists of big, fairly open-ended areas, it isn't difficult to tell where you're supposed to go next thanks to the presence of a minimap, in many cases.    When you're traveling across the Badlands, the biggest area in the game, there's a full-on epic feel as you gallop on horseback amid ranks of literally thousands of warring elf and troll warriors. The Badlands sequences prove to make for some exciting interludes, as it's here that the troll armies are attempting to take down the shields protecting the Enchanted Kingdom. Meanwhile, you'll be called in to aid the defense. Massive troll artillery pieces and the huge scale of the conflict combine to make for a sharp contrast to the solo action adventure sequences that the game mostly consists of.       You'll also find some well designed puzzle-oriented adventure sequences as you search for additional creature forms. Each one is held captive by a shadow troll, a scary-looking creature that resides in a hidden lair of some sort. The shadow troll battles are all pretty much alike. They're progressively more challenging each in turn, but the battles are introduced the same way each time, and you'll use the same tactics to beat every one of these fiends, making for a sense of déjà vu after a while. Nevertheless, these showdowns are exciting if only because you'll always look forward to getting new creature forms in Kameo, since each one is distinctively different and has plenty of personality. As for the shadow trolls, just getting to face off against these guys can be a challenge, since their bat-infested domain tends to be closed off to the casual traveler. You'll need to make careful use of your available creature forms' abilities to find access to the shadow realm--so you can then proceed with the rescue.   Kameo's various elemental warrior allies definitely steal the show. It'll be hard to choose a favorite.   Despite having numerous tricky puzzle sequences in it, Kameo never stoops to the formula's lowest common denominators, which means you don't have to worry about tediously pushing blocks around or hunting for keys. Instead, Kameo's puzzles are more subtly interwoven into the action, and they tend to be combat-oriented, which helps make them fun. And if the going gets tough, you've always got your magic hint book to guide you through. If anything, the book is maybe a little too zealous in offering you assistance, as it will volunteer its aid seemingly the moment you pause to figure out what to do next. It won't give you a hint unless you actually prompt it to, but it's hard not to give in to temptation if the book keeps urging you for a chat. If you've got strong willpower, you can optionally toggle off the book's banter, limiting yourself to using your own devices as you brave the game's challenges.    Of course, Kameo also features some full-on action levels, kind of like the one at the very beginning of the game. These combat-intensive sequences often force you to finish off groups of trolls and troll sympathizers before you can proceed to the next area. And since combat in Kameo is dynamic and fun, that's quite all right. As you gain access to more and more creature forms, the ways in which you can beat up large numbers of trolls becomes decidedly varied. No matter whether you're scorching them with the burning breath of Ash the dragon, impaling them and using them as projectiles thanks to the brawny Chilla, or pelting them with the stony bits comprising Rubble, chances are you'll have a consistently good time battling Kameo's foes.    On top of that, the action sequences tend to culminate in combat against a big, nasty boss opponent of some sort. Beating these is trickier than it is difficult, but the bosses themselves are so neat to see in action, and the music tends to be so frantic, that these fights serve as some of the best parts of the game. In all, the action sequences of Kameo make up more than half the game, but the other types of gameplay surrounding them meld together seamlessly, making for an adventure that feels refreshingly diverse. You're never stuck doing the same type of thing for more than a few minutes at a time before the game pushes you on to the next in a series of entertaining sequences.   The downside of Kameo's well-designed hint system is that you can blow through the game rather quickly.   Sadly, the adventure is over too soon--after maybe just eight-or-so hours of gameplay. There's some more for you to see and do after you've finished the main quest, but the main quest feels like it really could have benefited from at least a couple more action levels, since you really don't get much chance to use all the creature forms to their fullest potentials. By the time you've got all 10 forms, or most of them, the gameplay potential is really tremendous, since you're free to switch forms at any time--and it's easy to do so. The game comes up with some really inventive ways for you to combine the various creatures' abilities, but you'll probably be left wishing for more. On the bright side, Kameo certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, as you'll probably be enjoying playing around with all your various creature forms right up until the end. What helps is that you can pick up special fruit during the course of your journey, which lets you upgrade your forms with new or stronger abilities. Most of these extra powers really aren't vital, but getting to pick and choose from upgrades for all your favorite creature forms helps give the game more depth.       There's a two-player split-screen cooperative mode in Kameo, but it's not substantial. It simply plops two players instead of one into the game's various action sequences, without so much as bothering to distinguish between who's who (you're both Kameo-- same outfit and everything). These levels were clearly designed with the solo adventure primarily in mind, so they don't present any significant challenges suitable for two players. And most of the entertainment they do provide comes from the inherent novelty of playing the game with a friend. Besides, since the co-op missions must first be unlocked in the solo adventure, this means at least one of the two players will already know the given level from top to bottom. If one player lags behind the other, he or she automatically warps farther ahead. So it's easy for the more-experienced player simply to tow the other player along. Still, at least the cooperative option is there to potentially prevent two kids in the same household from fighting over who gets to play the new Xbox 360.   The game keeps throwing you in one new situation after another. The massive battles in the Badlands break up the more-standard action sequences nicely.   Even if you're stuck sitting around watching someone else play, it could be worse, since the game's gorgeous, beautifully detailed visuals really are a pleasure to take in. While Kameo herself looks rather generic, with her anime doe eyes and her plain black tresses, the other characters she'll encounter and the environments she'll explore look marvelous. The environments run the predictable storybook gamut of everything from meadows to ominous caverns to frigid mountains, but all of it's beautifully stylized, filled with lots of little visual flourishes, and just plain great-looking. The characters populating the game are much more inspired, especially Kameo's creature forms, each of which is brimming with weird, cute personality. Rubble, a living pile of rocks, chuckles contentedly whenever he performs his explosive attack, leaving behind just his head. 40 Below, a frozen creature that rides on a snowball as though it were a unicycle, can summon a spiky projectile that can be thrown like a bowling ball. All the while, you can see Kameo's form faintly outlined within each of her elemental warrior comrades.    Overall, the game strikes a fine balance between familiar storybook scenery, with all the sorts of colorful kid-friendly characters you'd expect, along with much-more-unusual imagery that older or more-experienced game players will appreciate. The game is technically outstanding, too. There's a transparent save system, so--provided you have an Xbox 360 hard drive or memory unit--your progress will be saved often, automatically, and without a hitch, relieving you from having to waste time with save menus or save points. Loading times are minimal and the game hums along at a nice, steady frame rate, despite how much seems to be happening onscreen at any given moment. And it all looks markedly impressive on a standard television. But again, as will likely be the case with most any Xbox 360 game, you really need to see Kameo: Elements of Power running on a 720p high-definition display to truly appreciate its visuals.   If you made playing through Kameo your first order of business with your new Xbox 360, that would be a fine choice.   The sound presentation of Kameo is possibly even better. A stirring, fully orchestral musical score (complete with choir vocals to accentuate many of the game's more awe-inspiring sequences) fits the action wonderfully, instilling in Kameo a truly epic, high-adventure feel. It's really an amazing soundtrack, but the rest of the audio lives up to it quite nicely. Good-quality voice-over can be heard throughout the game, and the dialogue is frequently quite amusing thanks to some funny accents used for some of the oddest-looking characters, like this one octopus-headed little thing that talks like a Valley girl. Much of the sound works on subtler levels, too. So if you listen closely, you'll be able to discern the distinctly different noises each of the creature forms makes while walking and things like that. From the squishy pitter-patter of Deep Blue's suction-cupped feet, to the meek whimpers of the dimunitive-but-deadly thermite, these little touches contribute immensely toward giving the game its charm. And if you've got it hooked up to a 5.1 surround-sound system, you'll enjoy listening to it all the more, as the effects naturally come from all directions, immersing you in the experience.    The only disappointing thing about Kameo: Elements of Power is that it doesn't last longer. It doesn't necessarily feel short, since it's jam-packed with things to see and do, and it keeps throwing new experiences at you from start to finish. But since the combat is mostly pretty easy, and since the puzzle solutions are always right there (courtesy of your talking hint book), you should be able to blow through Kameo pretty quickly, at which point the bonus extras and score challenges probably won't keep you busy for too much longer. Nevertheless, Kameo is absolutely a great game for as long as it lasts, and it's made even better thanks to its state-of-the-art presentation, made possible by the Xbox 360's sheer muscle. Straight out of the gate, Kameo: Elements of Power sets a high standard for how stimulating, creative, and entertaining this classic blend of action and exploration can be on the Xbox 360.  


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'warps', 'farther', 'ahead', '.', 'So', ""'s"", 'easy', 'more-experienced', 'player', 'simply', 'tow', 'player', 'along', '.', 'Still', ',', 'least', 'cooperative', 'option', 'potentially', 'prevent', 'two', 'kids', 'household', 'fighting', 'gets', 'play', 'new', 'Xbox', '360', '.', 'The', 'game', 'keeps', 'throwing', 'one', 'new', 'situation', 'another', '.', 'The', 'massive', 'battles', 'Badlands', 'break', 'more-standard', 'action', 'sequences', 'nicely', '.', 'Even', ""'re"", 'stuck', 'sitting', 'around', 'watching', 'someone', 'else', 'play', ',', 'could', 'worse', ',', 'since', 'game', ""'s"", 'gorgeous', ',', 'beautifully', 'detailed', 'visuals', 'really', 'pleasure', 'take', '.', 'While', 'Kameo', 'looks', 'rather', 'generic', ',', 'anime', 'doe', 'eyes', 'plain', 'black', 'tresses', ',', 'characters', ""'ll"", 'encounter', 'environments', ""'ll"", 'explore', 'look', 'marvelous', '.', 'The', 'environments', 'run', 'predictable', 'storybook', 'gamut', 'everything', 'meadows', 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872,Trigger Man ,4.2," Trigger Man is short and clumsy, and not particularly pleasant to look at either.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/6/3/2219863-unreal3.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/trigger-man-review/1900-6111035/,neg,"
 Trigger Man is a game that wears its inspiration on its sleeve--or, more accurately, on the front of its box. The title font alone, which manages to crib from both The Godfather and The Sopranos, pretty much sets the tone for the game's hand-me-down Mafia storyline. Keeping with the borrowed theme, the third-person action that makes up the actual gameplay feels like a secondhand version of Hitman, though even that is a favorable comparison. Trigger Man is short and clumsy, and not particularly pleasant to look at either.  It seems Codename 47 won't return Trigger Man's calls.  As the titular Trigger Man, a grim, square-jawed fellow who another character succinctly refers to as ""Frankenstein,"" you work for the Coladangelo Family in its efforts to prevent a full-scale mob war from erupting with the Montagano Family, which believes Don Coladangelo is responsible for the death of Don Montagano's son. The story plays out kind of like a bad imitation of a second-rate Mafia movie, with dull characters and a hollow, predictable plot.  The Trigger Man's ""peacemaking"" tactics pretty much boil down to entering some sort of archetypal mobster locale--a casino, an opulent villa, an Italian restaurant, and so on--and murdering absolutely everyone he sees. As a fundamental gameplay conceit, this isn't such a bad idea, but Trigger Man compromises it with awkward, basic execution, adding a layer of dullness to the experience. If gunning down mobster thugs as they pop out of doorways or walk aimlessly around parking garages and hallways isn't enough for you, the game also includes some annoying key hunts, some halfhearted stealth sections, and even an escort mission. The enemies are pretty lousy shots, which, when combined with their generally small numbers, keeps them from being too threatening. The weapon balancing feels weird, and the game puts too much of an emphasis on headshots, as most thugs can take an inordinate number of shots to the torso (with or without body armor), but a headshot always nets you an instant kill. The is true even for the sniper rifle, which has its own awkward quirk of automatically going into the scope perspective when you equip it and not letting you move around without switching over to another weapon.   Despite usually being pretty well armed, the enemies never drop any weapons or ammo, leaving you to search for one of the bottomless crates of ammo placed in every section. It's contrived, to be sure, but what really makes it bad is that your carrying capacity is limited--you're able to carry only two or three extra clips per weapon--and with the enemies' insatiable appetite for hot lead, you'll find yourself having to backtrack to the last ammo crate on a regular basis just to have enough ammo to carry on. If you don't stock up on ammo before entering a new section, or you run out before you find the next crate, you'll have to learn how to get handy with a blade. Actually, there are many occasions when switching to your knife is the best option, since the enemies are lousy shots, and if you can get close enough you're guaranteed an instant kill. Above and beyond all this, Trigger Man just doesn't last long--there are only eight missions in total, and with the missions generally ranging from 15 to 30 minutes, one could easily make short work of the game, given a free afternoon.  The game's presentation is as lackluster as its gameplay. All the environments feel uniformly blocky and empty, as though they're waiting for some more people to show up, and none of them are convincing as their purported location. There is some color-banding of textures the likes of which we haven't seen in years, and there is a consistently drab, washed-out look to everything. The characters are also really chunky and generic looking, and their animations are gawky and stilted. Both the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions are uniformly lousy looking, though the color-banding on the Xbox seems a bit more pronounced, and the PlayStation 2 version looks darker and jaggier.   At least Trigger Man is able to maintain a consistent frame rate.  The sound in Trigger Man barely seems worth mentioning, since there's barely any in the game. Environmental sounds are few and far between, and mostly you'll just be hearing the same few muddy gunfire sounds over and over again. There are a few bland electronic tracks that never change for the context of the action, so even when you're wandering up and down hallways looking for that stupid key, the cutoff-knob-happy synth lines and drum machines keep blaring. Thankfully there seems to be a bug in the game where, after looping a few times, the music just stops. The developer couldn't even spring for a few recording sessions of guys doing hackneyed Italian mafioso voices, and instead slaps text boxes over the cutscenes or any point where the Trigger Man requires some internal monologue.  Trigger Man is an uninspired and underdeveloped execution of a boilerplate game design. There are some frustrating portions, and the whole game feels rather drab, though for what it's worth, it's not broken. Even still, this game has been done before, and done much better, so despite its bargain-basement price, there is no reason to pick this one up. 
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873,Trigger Man ,4.2," Trigger Man is short and clumsy, and not particularly pleasant to look at either.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/6/3/2219863-unreal3.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/trigger-man-review/1900-6111037/,neg,"
 Trigger Man is a game that wears its inspiration on its sleeve--or, more accurately, on the front of its box. The title font alone, which manages to crib from both The Godfather and The Sopranos, pretty much sets the tone for the game's hand-me-down Mafia storyline. Keeping with the borrowed theme, the third-person action that makes up the actual gameplay feels like a secondhand version of Hitman, though even that is a favorable comparison. Trigger Man is short and clumsy, and not particularly pleasant to look at either.  It seems Codename 47 won't return Trigger Man's calls.  As the titular Trigger Man, a grim, square-jawed fellow who another character succinctly refers to as ""Frankenstein,"" you work for the Coladangelo Family in its efforts to prevent a full-scale mob war from erupting with the Montagano Family, which believes Don Coladangelo is responsible for the death of Don Montagano's son. The story plays out kind of like a bad imitation of a second-rate Mafia movie, with dull characters and a hollow, predictable plot.  The Trigger Man's ""peacemaking"" tactics pretty much boil down to entering some sort of archetypal mobster locale--a casino, an opulent villa, an Italian restaurant, and so on--and murdering absolutely everyone he sees. As a fundamental gameplay conceit, this isn't such a bad idea, but Trigger Man compromises it with awkward, basic execution, adding a layer of dullness to the experience. If gunning down mobster thugs as they pop out of doorways or walk aimlessly around parking garages and hallways isn't enough for you, the game also includes some annoying key hunts, some halfhearted stealth sections, and even an escort mission. The enemies are pretty lousy shots, which, when combined with their generally small numbers, keeps them from being too threatening. The weapon balancing feels weird, and the game puts too much of an emphasis on headshots, as most thugs can take an inordinate number of shots to the torso (with or without body armor), but a headshot always nets you an instant kill. The is true even for the sniper rifle, which has its own awkward quirk of automatically going into the scope perspective when you equip it and not letting you move around without switching over to another weapon.   Despite usually being pretty well armed, the enemies never drop any weapons or ammo, leaving you to search for one of the bottomless crates of ammo placed in every section. It's contrived, to be sure, but what really makes it bad is that your carrying capacity is limited--you're able to carry only two or three extra clips per weapon--and with the enemies' insatiable appetite for hot lead, you'll find yourself having to backtrack to the last ammo crate on a regular basis just to have enough ammo to carry on. If you don't stock up on ammo before entering a new section, or you run out before you find the next crate, you'll have to learn how to get handy with a blade. Actually, there are many occasions when switching to your knife is the best option, since the enemies are lousy shots, and if you can get close enough you're guaranteed an instant kill. Above and beyond all this, Trigger Man just doesn't last long--there are only eight missions in total, and with the missions generally ranging from 15 to 30 minutes, one could easily make short work of the game, given a free afternoon.  The game's presentation is as lackluster as its gameplay. All the environments feel uniformly blocky and empty, as though they're waiting for some more people to show up, and none of them are convincing as their purported location. There is some color-banding of textures the likes of which we haven't seen in years, and there is a consistently drab, washed-out look to everything. The characters are also really chunky and generic looking, and their animations are gawky and stilted. Both the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions are uniformly lousy looking, though the color-banding on the Xbox seems a bit more pronounced, and the PlayStation 2 version looks darker and jaggier.   At least Trigger Man is able to maintain a consistent frame rate.  The sound in Trigger Man barely seems worth mentioning, since there's barely any in the game. Environmental sounds are few and far between, and mostly you'll just be hearing the same few muddy gunfire sounds over and over again. There are a few bland electronic tracks that never change for the context of the action, so even when you're wandering up and down hallways looking for that stupid key, the cutoff-knob-happy synth lines and drum machines keep blaring. Thankfully there seems to be a bug in the game where, after looping a few times, the music just stops. The developer couldn't even spring for a few recording sessions of guys doing hackneyed Italian mafioso voices, and instead slaps text boxes over the cutscenes or any point where the Trigger Man requires some internal monologue.  Trigger Man is an uninspired and underdeveloped execution of a boilerplate game design. There are some frustrating portions, and the whole game feels rather drab, though for what it's worth, it's not broken. Even still, this game has been done before, and done much better, so despite its bargain-basement price, there is no reason to pick this one up. 
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874,Tron 2.0: Discs of Tron review,4.2," Discs of Tron is colorful, but the gameplay is boring, repetitive, and often unfair.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/9/5/7/1/20581-59571.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tron-20-discs-of-tron-review/1900-6103823/,neg,"
 With its polished graphics and big-name movie license, Tron 2.0: Discs of Tron looks like an interesting, complex effort upon first inspection. After a few games, however, you'll realize that it is actually a repetitive and extremely frustrating experience.  The first-person perspective of Discs of Tron is both a strength and a weakness of the game.  Basically, gameplay involves the player standing on a hovering platform and then throwing a Frisbee-like disc at similarly-armed enemies. Discs of Tron has a first-person perspective, making it more like the PC-based Tron 2.0 than the arcade classic Discs of Tron. Adversaries appear three at a time and reaching them often requires moving the screen horizontally. The 2 key fires your disc and 8 activates a shield.  The Discs of Tron screen setup makes gameplay straightforward. The heads-up display shows energy, enemies left, current level, and score. Losing all 10 energy bars will end the game, while destroying all enemies will move you on to the next level. Two power-ups are available, but rarely do they appear. They are the Super-Disc, which makes the next disc toss lethal, and the self-explanatory health rejuvenator.  There are five levels in total, and each subsequent one features a higher number of enemies. Each level becomes increasingly difficult and concludes with a boss, who is much like other enemies except that he wears a round, marble shield that must be destroyed.  Many factors make playing Discs of Tron an awkward, often-frustrating experience. The most obvious of these factors regards the game's perspective. Accurately hitting an enemy requires that he be within range of your small target cursor. The enemy, as a result of the first-person perspective, can hit you while he is anywhere on the screen. A majority of the game is spent throwing the disc, quickly moving left or right to get the enemy off of the screen, and then repeating the process. A shield move is included, but it is only ""up"" in two-second intervals, thus making it a slow, impractical defense. Another trick is to intercept an enemy disc with your own to cancel out both attacks. However, the computer can recover and fire again much faster than you are able to, which makes you easy pickings for the artificial intelligence.  The enemies in Discs of Tron are aggressive and are often unfair. Getting hit by an enemy disc will usually take away one energy bar, but quite often it will take two. It's not unusual for a disc to fly from a just-disposed-of enemy, which presents a frustrating scenario when you're not sure whether his potshot will take one or two bars away from your life.  The graphics are worthy of Tron, but the gameplay is not.  The level-select interface is not user-friendly, which is a serious issue in such a difficult game. Beating a level will give you a four-digit code that you can use to continue the game from where you left off the next time you play it. The code feature is an interesting twist not often found in cell phone games, allowing you to share level codes with your friends. The problem is that Lavastorm did not create a quick way to replay the same level when you die. As a result, brief, often difficult games of Discs of Tron are punctuated by long, tedious data entry. To add insult to injury, the level-completion screen shows the code for two seconds before starting the next level. Unfortunately, if you miss the code, you're out of luck.  The only outstanding feature of Discs of Tron is its graphics. Majestic purples and blues color grid-mountain backgrounds, portraying the beauty and the coldness of a computer. The large enemies wear bright-red energy suits and wince when hit, coming to life on the cell-phone screen. The hovering vehicles themselves are a combination of deep blue and stark white, blending gradually and giving the game a sense of depth and height.  On the other hand, the sound effects and music in Discs of Tron are problematic. Any in-game action creates a ""Beep!"" that is of such a high pitch that it can induce a headache.  Discs of Tron, perhaps understanding the frustration the game would cause, provides a short, inspirational message after every loss: ""You are terminated, Jet. You are not worthy of the next Tron adventure--Battle Tanks."" Unfortunately, any player who manages to get through the five frustrating levels of play will only be treated to the title screen. This is a bad ending for an equally bad game. 
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875,Get On Da Mic ,4.2," While the concept behind Get On Da Mic is a sound one, a series of design and technical flaws makes the game more frustrating than fun.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/3/4/1/2220341-getondamic2__400x300.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/get-on-da-mic-review/1900-6110242/,neg,"
 With Konami's Karaoke Revolution series ignoring hip-hop completely, it seems like a perfectly natural progression for someone else to try to step in and fill the void. That's what Eidos and developer A2M have done with their new ""rapaoke"" game, Get On Da Mic. While the concept behind Get On Da Mic is a sound one, a series of design and technical flaws makes the game more frustrating than fun.  The performers that provided the soundalike versions of the game's tracks did a pretty poor job.  Get On Da Mic has a collection of 40 songs that span the history of hip-hop, going all the way back to the Sugarhill Gang's pioneering song ""Rapper's Delight"" and then shooting forward in time to include songs like Lil' Flip's ""Game Over"" and J-Kwon's ""Tipsy."" Other hits, such as ""Posse on Broadway,"" ""Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang,"" ""Gin and Juice,"" ""The Humpty Dance,"" ""Push It,"" and ""Hypnotize"" are also included. Of course, in standard karaoke fashion, the songs aren't performed by the original artists. And that's where the game's first problem comes in.  Get On Da Mic judges your performance by how well you can fit your rapping to the rapping recorded in the song. Unfortunately, Get On Da Mic uses the rapping from the game's rerecorded songs, which are oftentimes different from the original recordings--going so far as to actually get some of the songs' words wrong. The game doesn't really judge what you're saying, because it can only detect your cadence. But when a song like NWA's ""Express Yourself"" actually inserts an extra word into one line, it's extremely disappointing, because the game essentially forces you to learn these new versions of its songs to succeed on the higher difficulty settings. On top of that, the decision-making that went into determining which lines were to be said by the player and which would be handled by the in-game backup lyricist is totally random. For example, when performing the ""made famous by DMX"" song, ""X Gon' Give It To Ya,"" you don't get to perform the chorus, which is probably the best part of the entire song. Yet in ""California Love,"" the game expects you to fill in every single ""uh huh"" and ""yeah"" at the end of the song, and you have to do it at the right moment, which is practically impossible if you don't already know when to come in.  Also on the disappointing side are the versions of the songs used as the bases for these new rerecordings. For the most part, censored album versions of the songs were used, but in a few cases--like with ""Wit Dre Day,"" ""X Gon' Give It To Ya, and ""Gin and Juice""--the radio edits were used. Considering the game's lyricists simply don't say any of the objectionable words in the songs, and since the onscreen lyric display obscures curse words with pound signs, there's no real excuse for using any radio edits. Beyond that, it's a little strange to see this game receive a ""T"" rating and then basically ask you to decode obscured curse words such as ""n#####,"" ""motherf#####,"" and ""d###.""  Wait... ""D###""? That's ""dope"" for those of you who couldn't figure it out. The game does its best to obscure any pro-drug references. However, its censorship isn't uniform in the least. It's also often incorrect. NWA's lone radio-friendly single, ""Express Yourself,"" is the most blatant case of this. The line ""Add it on a dope beat"" has its reference to ""dope"" changed to ""d###,"" even though the term in question doesn't have anything to do with drugs whatsoever. Meanwhile, later on in the song, the line ""I don't smoke weed or cess"" comes through loud and clear. In the Dr. Dre hit, ""Next Episode,"" the part at the end of the song where you'd expect a faux Nate Dogg to croon ""smoke weed every day"" is cut entirely. Though some might find it admirable that the game makes a point to get across an antidrug message by blocking out all the pro-drug or pro-violence banter, the game's poor judgment calls and failures to recognize nondrug references--as opposed to urban, hip-hop ""street"" lingo--discredit and devalue Get On Da Mic. Moreover, in a game that requires you to already be very familiar with the subject matter at hand to effectively play, the songs here significantly differ from their originals, which further serves as the game's death knell.  Karaoke Revolution, with its scoring that's based mostly on your ability to sing in key and its easy-to-read scrolling lyrics, is fairly friendly to people who are trying to sing songs that they might not be familiar with. Get On Da Mic only devotes two lines on the screen to displaying lyrics, but it does so in such a way that it's impossible for anyone who isn't already innately familiar with the songs to follow along. A bar, as well as spacing between words, attempts to convey the lyrical flow of each song, and a moving color bar attempts to tell you when you're supposed to say each word. However, this system fails miserably. Words end up sneaking up on you, and if you don't already know how the words are supposed to be said, the moving bars don't help at all. The easiest of the game's three difficulty settings loosens things up a bit, but some sort of bouncing ball or other indicator that could break words down into their syllables would be a much better indication of what you're supposed to be saying--and when you're supposed to be saying it.  Get On Da Mic breaks down into a few different modes. The career mode takes you through several different locations, from rapping in front of a bathroom mirror, to a mixtape recording session, to your own world tour. The Wake Up Show's Sway narrates the career mode, and Shady Records' DJ Green Lantern appears in a few levels, but their contributions are ineffectual. You just need to perform the game's songs well to proceed through its levels. Along the way, you'll earn money that can be used to purchase custom items for your character. Exhibition mode just lets you pick a song to perform. Practice mode is the same thing but without the scoring. Freestyle mode lets you do whatever you want either over the game's 40 songs or over an additional 40 beats. In multiplayer freestyle mode, a player with the controller can judge your freestyle. The game also has EyeToy support, letting you replace the game's graphics with a video image, if you so desire.  The onscreen lyric display does a terrible job of warning you about what's coming next, so you'd better already know how these songs are peformed.  Graphically, Get On Da Mic doesn't look so good. It doesn't seem like much attention was paid to the backgrounds in each different level. You can choose from a handful of different characters, all of whom have their own animation styles that play while they're rapping. The only problem is that the animations aren't synced up with the songs at all. So even in parts with no lyrics at all, you'll see your character wildly gesticulating as if he or she was spitting fire on the microphone. When you start to perform well, a meter will fill up, and a short ""rock the mic"" sequence will take place. There are a few different ones, including one that makes it snow and another one that makes money fall from the sky.  Get On Da Mic is a disappointment from top to bottom. The soundalike song performances are sketchy, the entire gameplay and lyric display systems are deeply flawed, and the decision-making that went into the editing and censoring of the game's songs is totally scattershot. Get On Da Mic is a neat idea that could have potentially filled a gap left by Karaoke Revolution's lack of hip-hop, but the problems that plague this game are too glaring to overlook. Stick to rapping along to these songs in your car.  
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876,Mean Girls Wannabee ,4.2, Mean Girls Wannabe is the worst kind of mobile cash-in.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/2/2/9/21585-62229.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mean-girls-wannabee-review/1900-6123966/,neg,"
 Mean Girls, or 2004's Heathers-lite, was a cute teen comedy that had a great recipe for success: a dark edge and an irresistibly attractive cast.  Unfortunately, Mean Girls Wannabee relives all of the tedium of high school, without retaining any of the redeeming qualities of the movie.  In Mean Girls speak, playing this game is just so not fetch.    In Mean Girls Wannabee, you assume the role of Cady Heron, a winsome high school student.  Your objective in the game is to get along with all the popular kids, alienate as few people as possible, and basically do whatever you have to in order to climb the social ladder.  There are established objectives in each of the game's four environments--home room, gym, cafeteria, and math classroom--that mostly have to do with collecting level-specific items and reaching a certain level of popularity.  If you do well enough, you'll be able to unlock the game's fifth level, the spring fling.   A game about homeschooling might be more fun.   The gameplay is quite a bit like the traditional game of Snake, only with a time limit.  Each level is a large room scattered with people and environmental objects like desks, tables, and chairs.  Forward movement is automatic, so your job is merely to turn left and right, making sure to avoid objects and to run into the popular people at the right time.  When you run into people, they automatically add to your entourage, creating a line of figures behind you.  Not only must you avoid certain obstacles, but you also can't cross back over your line of followers.  Ahh, the price of popularity!    The game is played from a 3D-isometric perspective on the LG VX7000, which means that it's not entirely top-down.  This could have been used to depict the pretty people of the Plastics in all (or at least more) of their glory.  Instead, you can barely recognize Lindsay Lohan's character, given that she's made out of the bare minimum of pixels.  Basically, there's no way to tell that this game is based on the Mean Girls movie just by looking at it.  There are a few stills from the movie through the menu screens, and you get an actual picture of your guide at the beginning of each level, like the helpful Janis and Damian, who tell you what you need to collect in order to pass.  However, within the level it's difficult to separate the nerds from the popular kids at first glance.  This disrupts the game's single strategic element, and it's also totally unrealistic, at least in the Mean Girls' universe.  Equally disappointing is the lack of any aural reference to the movie.  The game's only sound effects consist of a little ring to let you know if you've collected a good object, and a buzzer to indicate a bad one.  Judicious use of a license or brand can really improve a game's aesthetic, but Mean Girls Wannabe makes a complete hash of its potentially interesting source material.    Mean Girls does attempt to provide you with a bit of a challenge.  As you walk through the level collecting the requisite objects, such as the helpful teacher, the protein bar, and the spring fling tiara, you'll realize that different types of people grant you different bonuses.  For example, the Mathletes, while necessary to win, decrease your popularity by one point (which isn't exactly social suicide as advertised).  The best move is to pick up the Mathletes first, when your popularity is 0, so that you have nowhere to go but up.  This strategy makes the game a little more interesting, but it stops well short of becoming an important part of the gameplay.  Once you figure out which little blob is the hunky dude that will add 15 seconds to your overall time, you'll probably stop thinking about it entirely.  The goal of collecting a few objects and enough people to raise your popularity level is rather easily achieved.  In fact, the game is over fast once you figure out how it's supposed to work, which isn't made completely clear from the onset.      Mean Girls Wannabe is the worst kind of mobile cash-in.  It's a lazy, substandard, dumbed-down version of Snake; it wastes its license with its lackluster presentation; and it's dramatically limited in the amount of content it provides--which might actually do you the service of encouraging you to get rid of it as soon as possible, though a better idea would be to just never download the game in the first place.  
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877,Popeye: Rush for Spinach ,4.2, Popeye: Rush for Spinach is an unsuccessful attempt to combine racing and platforming together into a single game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/8/4/2208684-popeye.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/popeye-rush-for-spinach-review/1900-6126531/,neg,"
  Popeye: Rush for Spinach is an unsuccessful attempt to combine two disparate genres--racing and platforming--together into a single game. The graphics are slick enough, to the point that some people may be lulled into buying the game for themselves or their kids just from looking at the back of the box, but beyond that aspect, this game is an absolute disappointment.   The graphics are sharp, but the game isn't any fun.   The easiest way to describe Rush for Spinach is to say that it's a side-scrolling platformer that has been transformed into a racing game. After deciding whether to play as Popeye, Olive Oyl, Wimpy, or Bluto, you're tossed into a level that's not unlike the levels you'd find in a Mario or Sonic game. You have to work your way back and forth to locate the end of the level and deal with obstacles such as spike pits and switches along the way. The difference here is that there are also three other characters on your tail trying to do the same thing. So now, in addition to just finishing the level, you have to finish first to move on to the next one. Power-up items, such as spinach and curses, can give you a boost of speed or slow down your nearest opponent. The chicken curse is particularly amusing. It transforms one of your opponents into a chicken. There are also vehicle-type items, such as pogo sticks, cars, boats, and magical capes, that can help you move faster or bypass hazards more easily.    It all sounds good in theory, but the combination of the genres just doesn't work here. The side-scrolling viewpoint is too cramped to give you a good view of the level. You can see only whatever is half a screen in front of or behind your character at any given moment, which often leads to nasty surprises. This also gives the CPU an unfair advantage right out of the gate, because it already knows where all of the traps and pitfalls are. The game's platforming aspects, meanwhile, are hampered by what its racing aspects bring to the table. CPU opponents are constantly on your tail, which means you never really get a chance to explore levels or scout ahead for traps.    The game's platforming aspects are also woefully underdeveloped. Only a couple of the game's 12 levels require any backtracking at all. Most levels are just long stretches filled with surprise traps that ensure you'll need to attempt each race multiple times before developing the rote memorization necessary to win it. Occasionally, you'll come across a ramp that leads to a shortcut, or you'll smack into a door that will require you to backtrack and activate a switch to open it, but these clever features are rare compared to the constant litany of spike pits and lava pools. Interactions with your opponents are also fairly limited. Besides a grab move, which works only if an opponent is right in front of you, the only way to slow your opponents down is to activate power-up items. That's nice, but they target only the nearest opponent, and the effects are extremely short-lived.     It's really too bad that the game itself is so weak and uninteresting, because there are definitely enough play options to keep a person occupied. There are four characters to pick from and 12 levels in all to play. The adventure mode chains the game's eight main levels together into one long quest, complete with a far-fetched story involving a power-hungry witch and time travel. There are quick rush, challenge, time rush, and team rush modes that let you play individual levels with any number of opponents. The team rush mode is kind of nice. You can pick a partner and try to beat the other team to the finish or pick two partners and gang up on a lonesome competitor. The team rush mode also supports link play for up to four players. Good luck finding other people to play with, however, since no one is going to want to play a game that's this lame, even if it does offer link play.    For sure though, Popeye: Rush for Spinach looks nice. The characters are large, colorful, and loaded with funny animations. Some of the costume changes that the characters undergo when using certain items are priceless. The backgrounds, for the most part, are absolutely stunning. Artistically, the environments have the same exaggerated look that you'd expect to see in a cartoon on TV. One moment, you'll be running through a thick jungle. The next, you'll be riding atop a dinosaur, scaling up volcanoes and leaping across lava pits. The use of multiple scrolling layers gives the game a welcome sense of depth, which is good since the sight distance going from left to right is so limited. You'll sometimes notice events happening way back in the background, such as volcanoes erupting or leaves falling to the ground. At the same time, objects in the foreground, such as trees and light poles, will obscure the characters when they run past them. About the only thing wrong with the graphics is that many of the obstacles and traps are recycled constantly. After seeing the same fire hydrant, open manhole, and spike pit 20 times in a single level, it just gets tedious.    Characters can hop into vehicles to move faster.   Popeye fans will also enjoy the game's audio. The music underpinning each level is active and catchy, and each piece seems to suit the overall look and design of the level. The majority of the sound effects are voice clips that were recorded directly from the cartoon. The clips are crystal clear, and there are lots of them. Every character has a different comment for each individual action, power-up, and pitfall.    Historically, the racing and platforming genres haven't been comfortable bedfellows, except in rare cases like the time-attack levels featured in Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog games. The key there is that Sega simply took an excellent side-scrolling platformer and added a split-screen race mode to it. Popeye: Rush for Spinach is a mediocre platformer, and its racing aspects just make things worse.  
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878,Aqua Teen Hunger Force Destruct-O-Thon ,4.2," This is not a good game, nor a good use of the Aqua Teen brand, and you should not play it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/7/9/4/22982-64794.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/aqua-teen-hunger-force-destruct-o-thon-review/1900-6115398/,neg,"
 Since debuting a few years back on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block, Aqua Teen Hunger Force--an oddball animated series about a trio of fast-food items who have adventures with assorted aliens, monsters, and robots, all in the comfort of their suburban neighborhood--has taken the world by storm. And with such popularity always comes the obligatory licensed cash-in game. In this case, it's Aqua Teen Hunger Force Destruct-O-Thon for mobile phones. This game is the very picture of a lackluster effort, consisting of repetitive, poorly conceived gameplay that relies almost entirely on chance, rather than actual challenge, and an utterly inadequate use of the license itself, as quite literally any characters from any show could have been transplanted into it with a similar level of success.   Fans will see some familiar faces here, but will find little else of what they like about the show.  The setup for Destruct-O-Thon is extremely simple. You pick one of the three members of the Hunger Force--Master Shake, Meatwad, or Frylock--and then choose one of the 16 levels in the game (though, obviously, only unlocked levels will be available to you). You'll then find yourself on the trio's suburban street, with a small meter appearing overhead. This is a momentum meter, and on it, a small bar moves back and forth. Your goal is to rhythmically hit the 5 key on your phone when the bar reaches the middle of the meter to build your momentum. As you do so, your character will start running faster and faster. Then, you'll get to an object sitting in the middle of the road. These objects can range from a piece of dynamite to one of the infamous Mooninites. When you reach the object, an angle meter will appear near the bottom of the screen. This meter determines the angle at which you will send this object flying when you run into it. You'll press the 5 key again to set the angle, your character will smack the object, and the object will take flight. If you're waiting for us to get to the exciting part, you might as well just stop reading now.  Most of the time, you'll just be trying to hit whatever object is in front of you as far as you can, though there are some slight variations. For instance, a couple of levels want you to blow up the car of the trio's neighbor, Carl. To do this, you'll have to hit a piece of dynamite and nail the car, which sits at a specific distance. Additionally, you'll have to hit a patch of fire that sits near the car to light the dynamite. Sounds complicated, right? Well, not so much, actually. In truth, all you really need to do is try it a couple of times, and eventually you'll just inexplicably get it right. You see, strategy is a nonissue in Destruct-O-Thon, and you'll be able to beat every single level mostly on accident. Maybe you'll screw up the angle once or twice, but usually all you have to do is get it within a 10-to-15-degree window, and you'll be fine. Apart from some occasional obstacles that float about each stage, you're unlikely to run into much resistance.  The action gets really old fast.  Destruct-O-Thon just kind of goes on like this until you've unlocked every single level, at which point--well, you could always play again to try to increase your score, but why would you? It's not like there's any skill to actually learn and try to get better at here. Hell, there's not even any difference between the characters, apart from the few catchphrases each one spouts via a text bubble at the end of a stage. In fact, that's really all there is for fans of the show, as the game doesn't do much of anything to really try to cater to them. It's just a few silly catchphrases, a few cameos from characters like the Mooninites (who, incidentally, don't say a word, and aren't properly represented in their five th-thousand dimensions), and not much else. At the very least, the game does capture the look of the show decently enough on the VX7000, but there's also almost no animation, save for when your character hits an object, and the looping background that shoots by while you're running features the same two houses over and over again. Apart from a couple of marginal sound effects, there's also an OK version of the show's theme song that loops in the main menu screen. It doesn't sound quite right, but it's still catchy enough on its own merits.   Aqua Teen Hunger Force Destruct-O-Thon is a perfect example of what happens when you take a popular license, throw something together in as short a time frame as possible, and shove it out onto the market. This is not a good game, nor a good use of the Aqua Teen brand, and you should not play it. 
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879,Sonic the Hedgehog ,4.2," Sonic the Hedgehog may share its name with the Genesis original, but this game is even more broken than most of the other recent Sonic games have been.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/8/4/2/25204-70842.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sonic-the-hedgehog-review/1900-6165288/,neg,"
  In what might be seen as a move to reset and reinvent the series, the latest game to feature Sonic the Hedgehog is merely called Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega's blue critter has been around since the 16-bit days, when his side-scrolling platformers were strong enough to take on Mario, the then-undisputed kingpin of the platforming genre. Sonic's fall from grace has been slow, starting with a promising first stab at 3D with Sonic Adventure, but it's all been downhill since those far-gone days, and games like this new Sonic the Hedgehog are the culprit. With plenty of bad glitches, poor controls, and totally lame gameplay on all fronts, this one's not going to restore any part of the Hedgehog's name to glory.    Sonic and the crew are back with a lackluster adventure that isn't worth your time or money.   While Sonic's name is on the box, you'll actually spend most of your time playing as other characters. The game is broken up into three different stories: one starring Sonic, one starring Shadow, and one starring a new hedgehog called Silver. Each of the stories play differently because of the way each hedgehog controls. Sonic is meant to be the fast-moving one, and he mainly attacks via a homing jump attack that makes most basic fights as simple as timing presses of the A button to bounce from foe to foe. Silver has telekinesis powers that let him pick up large objects and use his mind to fling them at enemies. He's not as fast as Sonic, but he has the ability to float in the air for brief periods of time, letting him cross larger gaps. Shadow the Hedgehog gets his own version of the homing attack, but the big difference is that he can drive around in different armed vehicles. Further watering the game down is a heavy supporting cast, so even when you pick the Sonic episode, you'll still occasionally play as Tails and Knuckles. Other Sonic collaborators, like Amy, Blaze, Rouge, and E-123 Omega also put in guest appearances. While the character variety might initially seem like a good idea, most of them aren't too interesting. Tails moves almost painfully slowly, and his fake ring bombs aren't any fun to use, so when Sonic levels occasionally switch over to him, it's immediately boring. In addition to the single-player levels, you can play the game in a two-player, split-screen tag mode that attempts to force players to cooperate as you progress through the story. In addition, you can go back and play levels you've completed in a battle mode.     While you play as many different characters throughout the main game, the same structure applies across the board. The game's action stages are separated by town portions, where you'll be able to take on dopey side missions to help out the locals or figure out puzzles to proceed. Each of these side missions are bookended by two sets of loading screens, where it first loads up the exact same scene, just with different text dialogue, then it loads up the actual mission. After that, it has to load up some ending text and then load up the out-of-mission version of that part of town. Each load time is fairly long, and when they stack up in this way, it almost makes the game feel broken.     But since the frequent and lengthy load times don't quite do it, it's up to the action stages to make the game actually feel broken. The camera is the most immediate problem, as it doesn't bother to give you a good view of the action on its own, and your control over it is inverted, with no option to change it. In some cases, the game changes angles at the worst possible time and the controls don't automatically compensate for the new angle. In one Sonic level, you're snowboarding down a mountain and must stay pointed in the right direction. When the camera flips around to give you a new view of the action, you immediately grind to a halt, because you're no longer pushing in the proper direction. This makes some sequences of the game a frustrating exercise in trial and error while you attempt to compensate for this mess. This is but one of several cases where the camera causes often-severe gameplay problems, and it gets frustrating to the point of being nearly unplayable. Since none of the hedgehogs can swim and there's plenty of water and endless, life-ending cliffs nearby, jumping or trying to do a homing attack when you're near a ledge is often scary, since you're rarely able to get a good look at the world around you. Death can also be a bit scary, because you have a limited number of lives and you're kicked all the way out to the main menu when you run out. The game doesn't save automatically, and you can't save in the middle of a mission, so special care must be taken to save immediately before you enter a new area, just to make sure you aren't later forced to repeat lengthy sections of the game.    Sonic fans will be disappointed by the game's constant glitches and awful camera.   Graphically, Sonic the Hedgehog is a glitchy mess that usually looks extremely bland. The town that Sonic spends most of his time saving looks like someone dug up some old Dreamcast-era artwork, brushed it up a little bit, and released it onto current consoles. While his animation for running and jumping usually looks OK, there are plenty of awkward moments, too, like spots in the level that cause the camera to freak out or the way Sonic occasionally launches from platform to platform with his head pointed directly at the ground. There are some better-looking levels in the game, though, and Silver's first level at least starts off with a bang, complete with a nice-looking devastated future city and a big fiery boss fight. Unfortunately, the very next level drops the psychic hedgehog into a nondescript forest setting that doesn't look any better than Sonic's ugly town, and it goes on from there. Compounding the issue is a very sketchy frame rate that slows the entire game down at seemingly random intervals. Considering the main appeal of Sonic is that he's supposed to be able to run fast, all the sluggishness really takes away from the game's already ugly presentation. The characters are voiced in cutscenes with plenty of bad anime enthusiasm, but it's neither good enough to work on its own or bad enough to be funny. The rest of the game's dialogue is delivered through text. The music varies from fast-moving action themes to random ska-influenced tunes. It's passable, but aside from the main screen's title theme, none of it really stands out at all.     Only the most blindly reverent Sonic the Hedgehog fan could possibly squeeze any enjoyment out of Sega's latest adventure. This platformer is a mess from top to bottom, and any of the occasional moments that don't feel somehow broken only serve to make the game's other flaws appear that much bigger.  
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880,Trainz ,8.7," If you've ever been captivated by the romance of the rails or have perhaps thought of dabbling in model railroading, Trainz could easily make an enthusiastic convert of you.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/8/6/5/4030-15865.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/trainz-review/1900-2853872/,pos,"
It's a strange, postmodern world. First, there were railroads. Then there were model railroads that simulated them. Now with Trainz, we have a simulation of a simulation. Trainz actually models model railroading. As odd as that may sound at first, it really makes good sense. As any model railroader will tell you, some of the biggest challenges of the hobby are finding the time, money, and space to build a big model railroad layout. Unlike creating model cars or planes, model railroading usually entails building big, minutely detailed, fully functioning models. With Trainz, you can create the virtual model railroad of your dreams, easily expressing your creativity and indulging your imagination.  It's fun and easy to build your own model railroad using Trainz.  Trainz is a modular system that ships with three components: My Collection, Surveyor, and Driver. These modules let you examine your collected engines and rolling stock (railroad cars), create railroad layouts, and drive trains across them. Trainz developer Auran (the Australian developer responsible for the great 1997 real-time strategy game Dark Reign) plans to release expansion modules that will let you simulate complex switching and dispatching operations or handle the financial end of running your railroad. Auran also plans to release various locomotive and rolling stock packs to add to your collection. You can already download a number of free engines and structures created by either Auran or fans using 3D modeling programs, one of which is included with Trainz.   Regardless of what Auran might deliver in the future, the core Trainz package offers loads of features that will have any rail fan or model railroader really excited. The My Collection module lets you view all your engines and rolling stock, and the game ships with dozens of them. You can sort them by country of origin or railroad company, as well as view real-world background information on each engine or car. For rolling stock, you'll get boxcars, refrigerator cars, hoppers, a variety of passenger cars, and more. Engines include the F7 and SD40-2 diesels of North America, the Class 340 of Spain's Renfe line, and Sweden's Rc4 electric, among others. Sadly, you don't get any steam engines, which will surely disappoint the countless rail fans who love the ""golden age of steam.""  There's a wide variety of authentic train types available.  When you're done admiring your collection, you can head out onto the rails in the Driver module. First, you'll assemble your train by simply dragging and dropping engines and cars from a list to a little window at the bottom of the screen in the order you like. Then you choose the weather (cloudy, rainy, snowy, and so on) and how often it can change. You can also set the time of day and choose a time compression factor, if any. You can also decide whether or not trains can derail. Then you choose starting positions for your trains from a number of preset locations on the game's three sample layouts set in North America, Britain, and Australia. All the layouts are interesting, but it would have been better if the game had included more.   When you're ready to go, you can drive your trains using a model-railroad-style DCC controller with a knob to control direction and speed, or you can use realistic engine controls and physics, more like a simulator. Navigating the layouts is fairly trouble-free thanks to a track map and easily changed track switches. Coupling and uncoupling cars is a simple point-and-click affair, but since the game doesn't offer any scenarios, you'll have to rely wholly on your imagination in planning your operations.You can watch the action from multiple camera views, including one inside the engine cab. The camera is very easy to zoom and pan, though it's unfortunate that you can't position it anywhere you want--you have to rely on preset layout-specific positions or follow the train directly. It would have been nice to get a truly free bird's-eye view.   You can operate your train from the inside or from the outside.  Unlike in Microsoft's Train Simulator, which realistically re-creates huge stretches of track to scale, the distances between points of interest tend to be compressed in Trainz, much like in a real model railroad. Just as soon as you leave a town, you're likely to pass a towering grain elevator or cross a bridge over a rocky gorge with a stream winding far below. In Trainz, there's always something engaging to see.   Trainz's graphics beautifully bring the layouts to life. The engines are nicely detailed, with working headlights and exhaust billowing in the breeze, though not all of the cab interiors properly match the exteriors. The trackside scenery is also impressive, with varied buildings, working track signals, and moving automobiles. (If you look closely, you'll see one that looks suspiciously like the A-Team's van.) The dynamic weather is impressive, too, with lightning flickering across dark, distant clouds during a storm. It's odd, though, that while selecting ""heavy snow"" will indeed make snowflakes float down, the ground and rooftops will remain clear.    To complement the graphics, the game wisely features realistic sound effects, as opposed to those based on little model trains. Again, there are lots of neat details to discover, like a banjo playing inside a little rustic cabin.   When creating your own model railroading scenes, you'll turn to the superb Surveyor module. Thanks to a wonderfully clear and intuitive interface, you can start creating a layout in no time. You'll hardly even need the manual, though it's a fairly good one. You can quickly morph terrain before your eyes, alter ground textures, and preview the layout with different weather and lighting. You can set down office blocks, bakeries, roundhouses with turntables, groups of people, horses, trackside signs, and just about anything else you can think of.   The scenery is rich with visual and aural detail.  Laying track is equally simple, though you're currently limited to standard gauge track. Between that and the lack of steam engines, there's presently no way to create, say, a classic Colorado or Maine narrow-gauge line out of the box. You're also currently limited to textures and objects geared toward layouts set in Australia, Britain, and North America. To re-create other regions realistically, you might have to wait until more appropriate textures and objects are released or create your own. Another problem with the Surveyor module is that the default choice in the ""quit"" dialogue box is to exit without saving your layout, which makes it too easy to lose an hour's worth of work.   That's really a fairly minor quibble, considering Trainz's many great strengths. By letting you so easily create so much, Trainz is one of those programs you can return to again and again. Since it's currently more a construction program than a simulator or game, imagination is required, but that's a good thing. If you're already an ardent model railroader or rail fan, you owe it to yourself to give Trainz a try. If you've ever been at least slightly captivated by the romance of the rails or have perhaps thought of dabbling in model railroading, Trainz could easily make an enthusiastic convert of you.
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881,Medieval: Total War ,8.7," Medieval: Total War achieves that rare quality of having something for nearly all strategy gamers, and most will find a lot to like in it, for a very long time.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/6/2/2218662-box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/medieval-total-war-review/1900-2878535/,pos,"
Medieval: Total War, like its predecessor, Shogun, is both a turn-based strategy game and a real-time tactical combat game featuring massive armies containing hundreds or even thousands of troops. Released in 2000, Shogun might not have pioneered this style of gaming, but it was definitely one of the best strategy games to come around in a while. Now, two years later, developer Creative Assembly has returned with a follow-up set in the Middle Ages of Europe. It's another outstanding strategy game that's highly complex but richly rewarding.  Better castle sieges, with real siege engines, are new to Medieval.  Like feudal Japan, Europe in the Middle Ages was rife with political intrigue and open warfare. However, because of the more diverse range of peoples and histories, Europe and the surrounding areas of the Middle East and Mediterranean were prone to even more vehement hostility. Add to this fire the historic influence of the Church and the major role of religion in the development of the Middle Ages and you have a powder keg of possibilities that is more exciting even than the Senroku Jidai period depicted in Shogun. In Medieval, there is a lot more going on, and the game reflects that, providing a richer experience than the first Total War game.   Those unfamiliar with the Total War series will find a rewarding and very complex experience awaiting them in Medieval. Those who played Shogun would undoubtedly expect no less. Either way, you'll definitely need to play the tutorial before getting started in earnest, as the game at first seems overwhelming. There is a turn-based strategic portion to the game that plays like Risk, where you manage your empire and resources while marshaling your armies for eventual battle with your neighbors. In this mode, you see Europe as a 2D map and move various game pieces representing your emissaries, spies, and armies across brightly colored provinces and empires. And while you build units and construct buildings, you'll need to carefully watch your province's loyalty, maintain relations with neighboring empires, and nurture your economy. You'll also expand your empire by moving units to adjacent territories, increasing your holdings but also increasing the amount of necessary empire management. Any time your army pieces meet an enemy army piece in a contested province, the game switches to its real-time tactical mode. Here, the battle is played out in full 3D, as you control the actual armies on the battlefield. Medieval features literally a hundred different types of units, encompassing such things as artillery, including mangonels and cannons; foot archers; horse archers; infantry, such as halberdiers and spearmen; cavalry; conscripted peasants; gunpowder units; and much more.   In Shogun, the two halves of turn-based and real-time gameplay were playable and enjoyable, but the tactical portion was definitely the highlight--the strategic portion of the game was much less refined and developed. In Medieval, the designers have paid a lot more attention to delivering a more complete experience, and you won't feel like the quality in one portion was sacrificed for the other.   The strategic portion now has a lot more options, mainly because there are now 12 different factions to play, each with a few unique units and different strengths and weaknesses. In addition, there are now more buildings to construct and a lot more units overall, increasing the number of strategic possibilities for developing your provinces and armies. The game's setting lends itself to a lot more political intrigue than Shogun, and in addition to forging alliances through diplomacy, you can also marry off your daughters to create lasting ties with rival rulers. During the actual 400-year period covered in Medieval, religion played an enormous role in shaping history, and so it is in the game. Many of the different factions are aligned by religion--such as Catholicism and Islam--as are many of the provinces you can control. Matching your faction's religion with the religion of conquered provinces is a tricky business in Medieval, as Muslim provinces are more apt to rebel against Christian rulers, and vice versa. You'll have to monitor the zeal rating of your provinces, which measures how religious the province is and thus how much you'll need to appease the local populace with tax breaks or by appointing a general with the same religion to rule the region in your name.   Since the game is played in the Middle Ages, where lords often gave titles to their loyal generals, you can likewise gift land and titles to your loyal servants, who will then in turn govern the province in your name. You can actually use this system to your advantage, for example by making a pious Muslim general the leader of a Muslim province to increase its loyalty or by turning over control of a mineral-rich province to a shrewd general to increase revenues. Of course, if you do this, you have to give careful consideration to your general's loyalty (you don't want him to take the province away from you), his piety, his dread (which indicates whether he can cow the populace into submission), and his acumen (which determines how good of a money manager he is: The better he is, the more revenue he will generate for you).  The strategy portion is much improved over Shogun.  You can begin the game without understanding all its nuances and complexity, but if you do, the computer or a smarter human opponent will tear you apart. There are so many subtle factors that govern how things work in Medieval that to ignore them is to invite disaster. In battle, for example, you can just march your army toward the enemy because you'll get there faster and engage quicker, but you might not realize that if you do so too early, your soldiers will be fatigued faster. In the strategy portion, you might just start gifting land to your generals right and left because you know doing so will make them happy. But if you don't realize how a low dread rating can lead to more open revolts, you could lose those territories you cede to incompetent generals.   One problem with the enhanced strategy portion of the game is the lack of information. Once your empire gets truly gigantic, you'll have a tough time keeping track of all the goings-on in your provinces. The current information lists are much too minimal. A more informative interface and easy access to listed information that could be sorted by different attributes (such as organizing generals by highest dread, piety, or acumen ratings or showing the unit and building queues for all provinces) would have made the game much easier to handle. Currently, the massive amounts of information to digest will strain the brains of even the most hard-core wargamers. Still, the strategy portion of the game is very rewarding to play, even if it's a bit too complex for some, and many fans of Risk and Civilization will simply want to play this mode alone.As was the case in Shogun, though, the sexy draw of this game is still the epic real-time battles. In this regard, Medieval is at first glance surprisingly similar to the previous game. Small, pixelated 2D units can be seen rummaging around simple rolling 3D terrain. There's a good view distance and some weather effects, but not many frills. You might expect more from the game visually, considering it spent two years in development and especially considering how the genre has seen its share of visually stunning games lately, such as Battle Realms and Warcraft III. After all this time, the engine should have been completely rewritten to take advantage of current technology, or even the video cards of last year. Instead, Creative Assembly opted to use the same engine, albeit with a few enhancements, and the overall visual effect is underwhelming as a result. Yet, as you play the game, you'll find the same gratifying experience of massive hordes of fighters and realistic warfare. In this regard, Medieval still delivers.  The graphics aren't Medieval's strongest suit.  While many recent real-time strategy games focus on smaller-scale battles between powerful units, Medieval goes in the opposite direction and promotes huge battles and gritty realism. In Medieval, you can command thousands of men. In fact, you can have up to 10,000 soldiers duking it out at a time. It's actually amazing to see that many troops onscreen at once, but this feat also accounts for the intermittent sluggish performance. When you do have 10,000 soldiers running around at once, the game starts to crawl, even on a high-end machine with plenty of RAM. If your system is slower, you'll need to turn off all sorts of visual features to get the game to run smoothly.   Medieval is a very realistic game that models real-world battlefield considerations like fatigue, ammunition, facing, and morale, elements that are usually omitted in other strategy games. It's a welcome change for those gamers who yearn for something more substantial. In Medieval, it pays to apply logic and forethought to your battle plans. Those who manage these subtle aspects of warfare with skill and intelligence will win many times more than those who don't. This also means gamers used to Command & Conquer and Warcraft will have to work their brains a little harder and put up with less instant gratification. That's because things don't happen instantaneously in Medieval. Most of the strategizing and thinking--most of the action--is done before any fighting actually takes place. In fact, most of your mental effort is spent on determining what sorts of troops to bring to battle in the first place, where to position your troops in regard to each other, scouting out the area to determine how best to use high ground and terrain to your advantage, and then maneuvering your men to battle without pushing them too hard or wearing down their morale.   Often, once battle is joined, it's much harder to maneuver and regroup than in other games. If your planning and setup aren't good enough to win the battle at first engagement, it takes supreme leadership and tactics to regain your advantage. Moving away from enemy units to reposition yourself often leaves your flanks exposed, which in Medieval's realistic warfare results in disaster. Thus, if you want to secure advantageous terrain and positioning, you often want to do it before you engage the enemy. You don't micromanage your units in Medieval as much as you do in other games, and even when you do, orders aren't carried out right away when you issue them. This will undoubtedly frustrate gamers used to immediate response from units in other games.   The most annoying aspect of the battles, though, is that they get very confusing very quickly, as armies in combat tend to devolve into messy blobs of mismatched color. The problem is compounded because the battles get so big that you need to zoom out to get a good view of all your forces. But when you do that, it becomes very hard to see the different unit groups. While you can click on a unit group's tab at the bottom of the screen to select it, if you have multiple unit groups of the same type, you won't know which one you clicked on. That's because although the unit group's banner will bounce up and down if selected, you'll be so far away that this effect will be almost unnoticeable. The inability to clearly discern units at far distances is definitely a problem, especially when battles get really big and with lots of different units. You will eventually have to use the camera a lot, and while it is fairly intuitive, it adds another level of complexity that could turn into a headache for some gamers.  The intense real-time battles can get really messy.  Get used to it, and you'll find that Medieval offers great lasting value. The campaign game is open-ended, so you can play through in any number of ways and with infinite outcomes, especially considering the dozen playable factions and the challenging artificial intelligence. The historical campaigns, where you can replay events like the Hundred Years' War or King Richard Lionheart's Crusade, as well as the inclusion of a map editor, also add still more to the replay value.    Ultimately, Medieval is a very enjoyable game, but it isn't well suited for the casual gamer. The real-time tactical gameplay is light on spectacular unit abilities and heavy on realism, which might be too detail-oriented for some. Those who did not like Shogun's real-time battles won't like Medieval, although those wishing for more meat in the strategic portion will be pleased with this game's enhanced strategy element. Medieval has a lot of deep gameplay, but what's great is that you control how much of the complexity you digest. If you just want the strategic gameplay, you can always opt to let the computer automatically resolve battles so you don't have to control the real-time combat. If you just want to command armies and play out Braveheart-scale skirmishes, you can just jump into quick battles or play the campaign mode but have the computer manage many of the details. If you don't want to learn or master all the game's intricacies, you don't have to. The game will still be rewarding, although you might start wondering why you keep losing fights and provinces. Best of all, if you do want to master the game, there is a lot to learn, and as you play the game over and over again, you will find new ways to better manage your empire and better command your armies. Medieval: Total War achieves that rare quality of having something for nearly all strategy gamers, and most will find a lot to like in it, for a very long time.


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882,Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield ,8.7," Despite its minor flaws, Raven Shield is still a very impressive addition to the series and a very worthy heir to the Rainbow Six name.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/9/1/6/2216916-rvsbox.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-rainbow-six-3-raven-shield-review/1900-6023492/,pos,"
 Since its debut in 1998, the Rainbow Six series has been an outstanding example of how exciting sophisticated tactical shooters can be, thanks to its challenging ""one-shot kill"" gameplay and complex mission planning. And even though the tactical shooter subgenre has become even better thanks to great games like SWAT 3 and Operation Flashpoint, fans still eagerly look to each new Rainbow Six installment to see what the series has in store next. While Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield does little to push the tactical shooter genre forward, it's still an exciting entry in the series.  Raven Shield lets you outfit your operatives with the latest gear and firearms.  Just like the previous Rainbow Six games, Raven Shield lets you lead a group of elite international counterterrorists known as Rainbow. These guys are equipped with high-tech gear and high-powered firearms and are itching for an opportunity to shout, ""Tango down!"" In Raven Shield, you'll help the Rainbow operatives on a mission with a rather forgettable plot that involves a James Bond-style madman and Nazi loot from World War II. In fact, as you play the rather short single-player campaign, you'll find that storytelling isn't one of Raven Shield's strong suits. You'll receive clear text and audio mission briefings and see a few well-directed but brief cutscenes, but these sequences don't quite create a strong sense of drama or immersion. Rather, the storytelling feels like merely a flimsy framework to hang the tactical combat on.    Also, the mission goals sometimes tend to blur together into a repetitive string of ""Kill the terrorists and rescue the hostages."" This sometimes makes the Rainbow team seem like a regular SWAT team instead of a truly elite international organization. And unlike the classic SWAT 3, Raven Shield rarely creates any real emotional connection with the hostages. In many cases, they'll essentially be a mission goal, similar to the hostages in the extremely popular Counter-Strike--you won't even see them until the very end of a mission.   Still, whatever their flaws, Raven Shield's missions provide lots of intense tactical action. Each map is filled with lots of cover and sniping spots, as well as a seemingly endless number of places where you could be ambushed or caught in a brutal crossfire. In the first mission, for instance, you make your way through a Venezuelan oil refinery at night, creeping around railroad cars outside and then wending your way through a maze of heavy machinery and catwalks inside. Later, you'll shoot your way through an airport in the Cayman Islands, battle in the streets of Brazil, and cleanse a London bank of terrorists. Overall, the missions provide really diverse and interesting settings, though a few missions reuse the same maps, merely changing the basic goals or switching from daylight to a night setting.   With so much happening tactically in each mission, preparation and planning are vital. After a mission briefing, you select up to eight operatives to take part in the coming mission. You'll get to fill out up to three sub-teams, choosing from specialists in assault, sniping, demolition, and so forth. Each operative is also rated in observation, leadership, and other general skills, and these stats will rise over the course of the game, particularly if an operative takes part in and survives a mission.   A contextual menu lets you issue basic orders to your team during a mission.  After you've chosen your team, you get to equip your operatives individually. Real-world weapon buffs will love this part of Raven Shield, as the game's extensive arsenal includes assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and more. Experimenting with all the different weapon capabilities, ammo types, and optional attachments is almost like a minigame in itself. Along with the firearms, you can equip your troops with breaching charges, flash-bang grenades, tear-gas grenades, and other special weapons and tools. In addition, you can choose from a wide variety of different uniform camouflage schemes and body armor types.   Once you've outfitted the operatives, you head to Raven Shield's planning room. This is the trademark feature that helped put the Rainbow Six series on the map, but it's also the one that's caused players a lot of grief because of its complexity. Here you'll see a schematic map of the mission area, along with a 3D view window of the area currently selected on the map. During a mission, you can only directly control one operative at a time and only give simple orders to your currently selected team. So, you'll need to set up a complex string of waypoints for each team on the planning map to ensure that all your operatives know what to do on their own. You'll choose from available insertion points, set rules of engagement, and assign special actions for particular junctures, like throwing a smoke grenade to cover an assault.  As in the previous games, mission planning can be very rewarding in Raven Shield, but it's nevertheless laborious and might seem a bit confusing at first. Trying to make heads or tails of the game's convoluted maps and determine how best to coordinate up to three groups of operatives is no easy task, especially for a beginner. Plus, the planning screen isn't as user-friendly or as sophisticated as it should be.  Mission planning can rewarding but cumbersome.  If mission planning isn't your thing, you can always load a preset plan for each mission, and these usually work well enough. You can also just forget planning altogether and jump into the action with one four-person team. Of course, this means you'll be skipping the intellectually rewarding side of the game.   Whatever plan you end up using, you'll find most of the in-game action to be thrilling. Raven Shield's focus on stealth and one-shot-kill realism helps build enormous tension. You might slowly sneak through a luxurious mansion, with only the gentle ticking of a grandfather clock to break the tense silence. As you round a corner, a fierce firefight will suddenly erupt, leaving a pile of bodies and shattered glass on the floor when the smoke clears. This repeated shifting between methodical, tense sneaking and lightning-fast gun battles keeps the game exciting almost all the time, though it also makes it unusually difficult. In fact, since Raven Shield doesn't actually let you save your game in the middle of the mission, beginners may find this difficulty truly daunting--if you slip up and lose half your team to an ambush, you may have to start over from the beginning. Then again, tactical shooter veterans may very well relish that sort of challenge; a better compromise might have been to include lower difficulty settings that offered you the choice of being able to save within a mission.   Unfortunately, one of the long-standing problems of the Rainbow Six series sometimes rears its ugly head in Raven Shield: friendly and enemy AI can range from extremely smart to extremely stupid. Enemies will sometimes flank you or run for better cover if they feel too threatened, but other times they'll simply stand around in the open, ignore nearby gunplay, or just walk casually into your line of fire. For the most part, the Rainbow operatives cover each other well and react to threats fairly quickly. But sometimes, they'll blow themselves up with grenades or overlook obvious threats. You'll also run into occasional bugs and pathfinding problems that can cause your teammates to get lost or refuse to follow you as they should.   If the teammate AI gets on your nerves, you can always go back and play the missions in the lone wolf mode, which sends you in without any support. This and a few other ""custom"" modes, which use the single-player maps, extend the game's replay value slightly, though not as much as they should. You can also head online for a variety of straightforward cooperative and competitive modes. While none of these are innovative, they can be a lot of fun because of their sheer intensity.   Like the gameplay, the production values in Raven Shield aren't perfect, but they're clearly above average. The terrorists all conveniently (and unrealistically) speak English, even when shouting for help, but the game's voice-overs are otherwise mostly well done, and the music lives up to the high standards of the various Tom Clancy games. The weapon sound effects are quite possibly the best ever featured in a realistic shooter. Get the game running on a computer with a good audio setup, and you might be shocked at how the assault rifle fire in an enclosed area will be so intense that it almost knocks you out of your chair. Thanks to Raven Shield's stunning implementation of EAX sound support, even the sound of other operatives shooting it out with terrorists in adjacent rooms or buildings is also remarkably convincing.  These terrorists were no match for the Rainbow operatives.  Raven Shield usually excels visually, too. The game is powered by Unreal technology, and has minutely detailed textures, generally convincing animations, and great special effects like bullets kicking up snow or chipping concrete off walls. Also, Raven Shield gives you the option to see your weapons in the first-person view, which is a welcome change. Little artistic touches and careful attention to detail help bring the levels to life, too. You'll see the northern lights in the sky above a Norwegian shipyard and gumball machines and a tire promo display in the waiting room of an auto dealership. The only really significant issue with the game's visual presentation is the way dead bodies often slump in bizarrely contorted postures.   In a way, this minor problem exemplifies Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The game suffers from a number of small flaws (and sometimes bigger ones, where the AI is concerned), yet it still does many things exceptionally well. It's a shame that Raven Shield doesn't help redefine the tactical shooter genre the way SWAT 3 did, but despite its minor flaws, it's still a very impressive addition to the series and a worthy heir to the Rainbow Six name. 


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883,XIII ,8.7," Even though it barely resembles the console version, it's one of the best side-scrolling action games available for the cell.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/2/0/2210220-box_xiii.png,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/xiii-review/1900-6094081/,pos,"
 The fine folks at Gameloft are indomitably can-do when it comes to porting console titles to mobile, and they've done their usual stellar job with Ubisoft's cel-shaded smash hit. Thanks to Gameloft's porting chops, XIII has made the transition from first-person shooter to mobile side-scroller with little degradation in entertainment value.  Just in case you have somehow missed the media blitz that has accompanied XIII's console release like a biblical plague, I will summarize quickly. Your character is the eponymous XIII, a latter-day Manchurian (or perhaps Francophone) Candidate who wakes up on a beach with a raging case of amnesia and a burning desire to figure out why he's been accused of killing the president. Enough backstory; on to the side-scrolling and goon-plugging!  Even if it could never hope to match its console relative's visual chops, XIII looks great. The animation is detailed and fluid, and the backgrounds are vivid, if considerably less than inventive--the FBI level looks like it was lifted straight out of NARC's office building and redecorated by Pitfall Harry. The sound is utilitarian and stodgy; the only aural feature of note is the strangely funky bass riff attached to the title screen, which momentarily made me think that Flea had finally called me back about those songs I sent him. Dang.  XIII shines in terms of gameplay. It's easy to move XIII around; the jumping feels spot-on, and his Mega Man-like sliding move is truly a boon once you encounter hopping villains in the later levels. Weapons and power-ups are strewn about the levels at a perfect frequency, and you can never run out of ammo for your pistol, which is a very good thing when baddies are popping out of helicopters like demented Eggo waffles. Electric gates and mines spice matters up considerably--especially since it only takes a single mine explosion to fade you. Later in the game, timed mines and gates make things even more interesting, and by interesting I mean maddeningly frustrating. Luckily, a few practice runs at any difficult sequence is usually enough, thus the game is never so hard as to prompt hand-washing. The in-game dialogue is kind of dumb, as it mostly consists of Jones telling you to cover her or some malefactor threatening you. XIII's console papa is largely story-driven--but there was no room to translate this verbal aspect to cell, so you'll have to content yourself with breaking out of places you never entered and rescuing people you've never heard of. Nevertheless, I kind of like the death screen, which advises you not to ""get yourself killed!"" I personally could have used a standing reminder.   Download XIII ASAP. Even though it barely resembles the console version, it's one of the best side-scrolling action games available for the cell. It's a fairly quick play, but you can always lose your memory and start it over. 
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884,Deathrow ,8.7," Deathrow's graphic violence and excessive swearing mean it's not exactly the game to get your kid brother, but most Xbox owners should find in it a highly gratifying experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/0/9/2210409-box_deathrow.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/deathrow-review/1900-2895952/,pos,"
Let's get the obligatory reference to the 1975 film Rollerball out of the way right off the bat in describing Ubi Soft and Swedish developer SouthEnd Interactive's Deathrow. Clearly inspired by that film's grim vision of a violent, futuristic, no-holds-barred spectator sport, Deathrow is one part sports game, one part fighting game, and one part first-person shooter. Deathrow also features some impressive visuals, excellent audio (albeit filled with more foul language than you've probably ever heard in a game), and intense, action-packed gameplay with a good amount of depth. Deathrow's graphic violence and excessive swearing mean it's not exactly the game to get your kid brother, but most Xbox owners should find in it a highly gratifying experience that's equally well suited for single-player or multiplayer mayhem.  Deathrow is part sport, part shooter, and part fighting game.  Deathrow has no relation to Suge Knight's mid-'90s rap music label of (nearly) the same name, and you may be surprised to know that the game's title isn't actually the name of the futuristic sport that the game features, either. Instead, the sport is called blitz, and it's sort of a full-contact cross between hockey and basketball, in which two teams of four players try to outscore each other by throwing an energized disc through the small loop that is the opposing team's goal. To relieve the opposing team of the disc, players are encouraged to act as aggressively as possible, using punches, kicks, tackles, throws, and more. The game's title refers to a technique whereby players charge up the disc and then use it as a powerful projectile attack that is useful for knocking out enemy goaltenders. By default, blitz matches consist of four two-minute quarters, and the resulting game is as brutal as it is intense. Though goals in blitz are worth a point each, with a good offense, it's possible to keep the disc in play on the opposing team's side and rack up many points quickly.    According to the game, blitz started as an illegal underground sport in the late 22nd century, but some decades later, it's become one of the most widely watched entertainment events around. Now the toughest, meanest blitz teams from all around the galaxy are convening to participate in the Blitz Disc Association's biggest tournament yet. Initially, you can play as one of four of these teams, though more than 10 can be unlocked as you progress. Each team is ranked differently in categories like strength, speed, toughness, aggression, and passing and shooting. Furthermore, each individual player is unique, with his or her own stats and appearance, and there are well over 100 different players in all. Aside from their different looks and colorful expressions, however, the various teams aren't so different. Most basically play exactly the same in action, and they don't have unique special moves or other such techniques to set them apart. Powerful teams will want to rely on pummeling their foes, while fast teams will want to rush the goal, but other than that, the same core strategies apply to all blitz competitors.   For a game that seems completely lacking in subtlety, Deathrow actually has a fair amount of depth. Each of the different teams in the game has its own home arena, and these attractive venues have an significant impact on the sort of match that's going to take place. This isn't obvious at first--most Deathrow arenas initially look like big rectangles with goalposts at opposing ends. You might expect that various hazards or environmental obstacles would be present to get in your way as you compete, but there's nothing of the sort. Nevertheless, the variations in size and layout of each arena do make a big difference in practice. Sometimes the goal area is tucked away in a little nook that lets the opposing team easily retrieve the disc and keep scoring. In an interesting touch, you can often score by throwing the disc either through the front or the back of the goal ring. Sometimes there's a significant distance between the opposing goals, giving fast teams the advantage. Sometimes floor fans enable players to jump very high in the air in some spots. Learning the ins and outs of each of the game's arenas proves to be quite rewarding.  This action is not for the faint of heart.  The gameplay itself, while accessible, has a bit of a learning curve. The adjustable control scheme defaults to a setup similar to what you'd find in a first-person shooter. You can run, pass, and shoot. You can punch, kick, and throw. You can jump, slide tackle, or dive tackle. You can taunt, throw fake passes, and use evasive rolls. You can even pound on an opponent whom you've already knocked down, savagely punching and stomping the poor fool. Almost all these techniques are useful, and knowing when and how to use each of them to their fullest potential will take practice. One issue with the gameplay is that the slide tackle also gives the player a burst of speed, so you might as well use it more often than not. But you'll still need a variety of techniques to succeed. The controls are highly responsive, and the collision detection is convincing and consistent. The game also does a good job of keeping you oriented toward the disc at all times, and a color-coded indicator constantly informs you of which team is in possession.    Deathrow's main mode of play is called conquest, and it's basically similar to a season mode in a sports game, though it's structured more like a fighting game--you challenge tougher and tougher teams one after another until you reach the finals. In between matches, you'll be able to train your team members, hire new ones, or compete in some optional matches, but in reality, the conquest mode is very straightforward. But that's not that big of a problem, since the arena is where you'll want to be spending your time anyway.During matches, you'll find that the opposing team presents a significant challenge and that the members of your team do a good job of helping you out. Luckily, you'll get to do most of the work yourself--your mates will usually pass you the disc instead of taking a shot themselves, and if you pass the disc to one of them, you'll instantly switch control to the receiver. Meanwhile, the rest of the team will do its best to keep your foes off your back and defend the goal. Also, using the D pad, you can cycle through a number of team strategies, ranging from all-out defensive to all-out offensive. These options can help make a difference in a close match, but switching between them isn't essential to success, since your teammates are smart enough to go where the action is no matter what.  More a dozen teams and more than 30 arenas are featured.  Meanwhile, opposing players act noticeably differently depending on their aggression ratings, and they may be quick to fight or may concentrate on trying to score. Deathrow matches are often pitched, but you won't get the sense that the closeness of the scores is orchestrated--you'll just feel like you're taking on some very tough competitors. Inevitably, you'll be on the edge of your seat for the entirety of each match, since letting down your guard for a moment or two may easily cost you a victory.   The game offers two different perspectives of the action, an ""action view"" and a ""sports view."" The former is a behind-the-back, third-person perspective that is reminiscent of what you'd find in many 3D action games these days. The latter is more of a top-down, isometric perspective that's farther removed from the action. The action view is therefore a lot more fun. However, the main disadvantage of it is the fact that there's no good way to tell if an opposing team member is coming up behind you--not until he or she crushes you into the pavement, anyway. Strangely enough, you select a view option when you begin the conquest mode and then can't change your setting unless you restart.   Additionally, Deathrow has a number of tweakable parameters that can be used to adjust the length and style of each match. Notably, one option is to penalize players who attack opponents who have already been knocked down. The game also includes a large number of unlockable extras that must be ""purchased"" using points that are earned by winning matches against the computer. Most of these are teams, players, and arenas, though there are also some gameplay options and concept art waiting to be unlocked.   If you'd rather play with friends than with the computer, you'll be pleased to know that Deathrow allows for cooperative play for up to four players in a split-screen view, though competitive multiplayer options are available as well. It's even possible to link up multiple consoles with multiple copies of Deathrow for network play. Regrettably, though, no Xbox Live support is included. This could have been a really great game to play online.   Deathrow sports some great visuals, the likes of which you couldn't find on any console other than the Xbox. Effective use of the system's proprietary visual effects gives all the arenas a highly believable look, with various surfaces--from steel to wood to glass--that all seem to have real texture to them. Liberal use of motion blur and other flashy effects can make the presentation seem rather gaudy at times, but it's still pretty slick. The game's character models look good but are animated even better, and they boast a variety of brutal-looking motion-captured moves that will make you wince whenever you see them. While the whole ""violent futuristic sport"" theme isn't terribly original, and while Deathrow's many different teams run the predictable gamut from convicts to aliens to robots to military types, the game's look and style are maintained consistently to excellent effect.  Deathrow provides lots of fast, high-adrenaline fun in single-player or multiplayer mode.  Deathrow sounds even better than it looks. It features a roaring crowd that responds to the ebb and flow of the action of every match and a number bone-crushing effects to accompany the high-powered punches and kicks. So if you've got a 5.1 surround-sound system, this is a fine way to put it to good use. A fittingly enthusiastic announcer merely informs you of the beginning and end of each round, though there's plenty of colorful commentary by the players themselves. Each team sounds completely different, but most teams--for better or worse--are incredibly crass. There are more obscenities in your average Deathrow match than in an episode of Jerry Springer, but they aren't bleeped out in the game. It's actually a bit unfortunate that no option exists to turn the cussing off, since it's bound to offend some prospective players who, for whatever reason, are more averse to swearing than to graphic violence. Even still, the quality of the voice work in Deathrow is undeniably impressive. Despite the large number of different teams in the game, matches begin with slanderous exchanges that are specific to the two teams competing against each other. And, for what it's worth, all the foul language does seem appropriate in the context of the game. A pulsing, energetic techno soundtrack complements the action effectively all the while, but if you want to rip your own music to replace it, you can.   Knowing that the game is chock-full of four-letter words, you might expect that Deathrow is trying to get by on its edgy material. But make no mistake--this is a great game because it's so very intense to play, and the violent animations and unbridled dialogue just add to the effect. Deathrow offers significant challenge and great lasting value even for those not looking to play it with others, since the AI is challenging by default, and even tougher difficulty settings are available. And if you do plan on playing Deathrow with others, you can spend your time concentrating on learning the intricacies of the game and leave the smack talking to your team members.     
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885,The King of Fighters 2001 ,8.7," Spend some time with it and you'll eventually realize that it's one of the deepest, most technical 2D fighting games ever made.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/8/8/3/2208883-kof01_ng_jp.jpg,NEO,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-king-of-fighters-2001-review/1900-2859377/,pos,"
Arcade-game developer SNK officially went out of business in 2001, but that hasn't seemed to slow down what is apparently a new generation of games for the company's NeoGeo arcade hardware. One of the last projects the company was working on was The King of Fighters 2001, the latest edition in SNK's annual fighting game series, along with a new developer, Eolith. And while certain aspects of KOF 2001 may seem very different from previous games, spend some time with it and you'll eventually realize that it's one of the deepest, most technical 2D fighting games ever made.   It's no secret that SNK's NeoGeo hardware is old. Over 10 years old. That's why its games still use low-resolution, hand-drawn sprites for its characters, rather than switching to a 3D engine or at least using high-frame-rate, high-resolution graphics. The age of the NeoGeo hardware seems painfully obvious when you look at KOF 2001's shoddy background stages, which look generic at best and ugly and pixelated at worst. But over the years, SNK's artists have perfected a bunch of visual tricks to help add detail to their characters and give them lots of personality. And KOF 2001's characters have lots of personality--as much as you'd expect from SNK, a company with a history of making some of the most distinctive and memorable 2D fighting game characters ever. You'll see it in your character's win poses and taunts and in other extra animations. It's true (and unfortunate) that KOF 2001 reuses a lot of old character animation from previous games, so that some characters--especially the newest ones--look better than others. But most characters have at least some new animations, win poses, and special attacks--more than enough to make each one more interesting than they were in the previous game, KOF 2000.   Another KOF tradition is good voice acting; KOF 2001's voice work is about as good as it was in 2000. Sullen, moody characters like Iori and Kyo snarl and sneer appropriately, while upbeat, smart-mouthed characters like Ramon and Joe hurl insults at their opponents and laugh in their faces. KOF 2001's sound effects are pretty much adequate; they resemble those from previous years, which is just fine. Quick jabs sound like quick jabs, strong punches sound like strong punches, and KOF's infamous suite of flashy explosions and fiery bursts of flame sound just like you'd expect them to. Unfortunately, KOF 2001's music isn't as good. From the series' beginning in 1994, its soundtracks were eclectic mixes of funk, jazz, '80s-style guitar rock, and heavy metal, though in later years, the soundtracks have degenerated into generic techno music. KOF's music is at an all-time low in 2001. Though it tries to hold to a theme of mostly bass and percussion, it all ends up being the same kind of bland, forgettable techno music you've heard about a zillion times in every other video game with a techno soundtrack.   Fortunately, if you play KOF 2001, you'll probably ignore the game's awful background stages and mediocre music, because you'll be too busy fighting it out to notice anything else. KOF 2001 has a roster of 40 different playable characters, but they're all remarkably well balanced; you can pit just about any of them against any other and have a fair fight. And every character has enough special attacks and strategies to be interesting--unlike in KOF 2000 and KOF '99, which simply dumbed down a lot of characters to favor the new striker system. Strikers--extra characters that you call in from offscreen to do a single attack or two--are still in KOF 2001, but they're much more balanced than in previous games and are actually completely optional in 2001. Basically, the game gives you four character slots, and you can choose as many playable characters as you want--four playable characters with no strikers, two playable characters and two strikers, and so on. If you don't pick any strikers, you characters will do less damage and won't be able to perform their most powerful super attacks; if you pick one or more strikers, you'll be able to do more damage and access super attacks, but you'll have fewer playable characters on your team. It's a system that resembles Capcom vs. SNK 2's ratio system, but it's much more balanced.   But that isn't all. KOF 2001 also has super cancel attacks, which let you quickly cancel a special attack and turn it into a super attack, as in Street Fighter EX and Street Fighter III. 2001 also has ""wire attacks,"" which bounce your opponent off the corner of the screen and let you quickly hit your opponent with a follow-up attack, like the wall juggles in Guilty Gear X. You'll find plenty of skills to master in KOF 2001 without getting into the specifics of each of your favorite characters, though you'll definitely want to do that too, especially with some of the new characters in the game. For instance, the newcomer Mei Lee is a martial artist with two completely distinct fighting stances that you can switch between in an instant, while another newcomer, Angel, is a completely original and completely bizarre character with a huge set of special attacks that are keyed off of a single kick. And if you're playing the game at your arcade, you should actually be able to play some decent practice rounds in a single-player game, since the computer opponents generally aren't too tough, at least until you get to the end. The final battle with KOF 2001's boss character is probably the most insanely difficult and frustrating fight in the entire series. But if you're lucky enough to play KOF 2001 at an arcade with some actual competition, you'll find that the game holds up extremely well in head-to-head play.    Most King of Fighters diehards will tell you that '98 was the best game in the series because of its excellent character balance and its huge character roster (38 characters, plus 12 ""alternate"" versions of some characters) of very deep, interesting characters. KOF 2001 doesn't have the sort of flat-out character-against-character matchups that '98 did, because of its strikers and its varying team sizes, but it's still a great game in its own right. Its different options, striker and wire attacks, and sizeable character roster will let you play KOF 2001 for a good long time before you tire of it--and they also help make KOF 2001 one of the deepest 2D fighting games ever.
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886,Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell ,8.7," One of the most popular, most successful, and best looking games for Microsoft's Xbox is now on the PC, and in some ways it's even better than the original version.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/8/8/2211788-box_scell.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-splinter-cell-review/1900-2911182/,pos,"
One of the most popular, most successful, and best looking games for Microsoft's Xbox is now on the PC, and in some ways it's even better than the original version. In most ways, though, it's exactly the same. And that's great news on both counts. Reminiscent of games like Thief: The Dark Project and last year's Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is a stealth-driven action adventure that sends you, as operative Sam Fisher, around the globe on numerous highly secretive and very dangerous assignments. It all goes down like something straight out of a Hollywood action thriller, replete with an intro set to alternative music and big-budget special effects featuring quite possibly the best lighting effects seen on the PC to date. The game isn't above reproach: Just like its Xbox counterpart, Splinter Cell for the PC is a relatively short single-player-only game consisting of heavily scripted missions that can sometimes turn into exercises in trial and error that undermine the game's otherwise pervasive sense of suspense. On the other hand, the improved save system and the unique and effective mouse-and-keyboard control scheme make Splinter Cell for the PC far more than just a straight port of the console version. At its core, it's a truly great action game, one that's already met with tremendous acclaim on the Xbox and promises to be very well received on the PC.   Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher is as cool as they come.   Sam Fisher is the splinter cell--an ultrasecret commando working on highly classified assignments.   The title of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell refers to the unusual role of its main character, a highly trained and experienced soldier working for a top-secret military organization, Third Echelon, that's attempting to rid the world of a high-tech terrorist threat. If he's caught, the US government will disavow its affiliation with his mission. Worse yet, one false move and Fisher may inadvertently instigate World War III. So the pressure's on, but Fisher's as cool as they come. Though he's skilled as a fighter, stealth is his only real option, and the fate of the free world hangs in the balance as he undertakes a number of high-stakes covert operations. The game's plot, which is set in the near future, is straight out of a Clancy thriller and involves Fisher taking on Clancy's favorite tag team: the Russians and the Chinese.      Despite being Third Echelon's right hand, Fisher is on a need-to-know basis and is largely kept in the dark about the exact nature of his objectives. Fortunately, he's extremely resourceful, armed or unarmed. A preliminary training scenario will familiarize you with the basics of being Sam Fisher, though you'll nevertheless need a lot of practice to become truly proficient in the role. At any rate, you'd never guess that these controls were adapted from a console game, since they work extremely well on the PC. For the most part, Splinter Cell plays like a typical first-person or third-person shooter, but it makes innovative use of the mouse wheel, allowing you to fine-tune Fisher's movement speed from a slow, silent crawl all the way up to a brisk run. This works great, though it arguably diminishes some of the challenge found in the Xbox version of the game, where you needed to gently move the analog joystick in order to make Fisher tiptoe. The other controls, such as for drawing your weapons and using the context-sensitive menu, take some getting used to but work effectively, enabling you to perform an array of maneuvers that collectively make Splinter Cell feel like a pretty believable super-spy simulation.    Fisher's night-vision and thermal-vision scopes let him get the drop on his enemies.   In fact, aside from the pretty lighting effects, the variety of moves at Fisher's disposal is probably the highlight of Splinter Cell. Sam has something for every occasion: He can move quite quickly from a crouched position, and if you tread carefully while crouching, you'll be almost invisible and almost silent. He can climb ladders, chain-link fences, and more. He can rappel down walls (and kick through glass windows while doing so), climb hand over hand (or using all four limbs) across horizontal pipes, and zip across downward-slanted ropes or wires. He can put his back against a wall and lean or shoot around corners, he can peek behind doors that are slightly ajar, and he can make soft landings or perform evasive rolls. Fisher can also kick off a wall in mid jump, and his coolest move (though it isn't very practical) allows him to stand in the splits atop a narrow passageway and then either shoot unsuspecting opponents or drop down to deliver a stunning blow.      Sneaking up behind an opponent allows Fisher to either knock the foe unconscious with an elbow strike or a pistol whip or grab the enemy and take him hostage. Fisher can then use the opponent as a human shield against other enemies, or in some cases interrogate him or force him to do such things as activate retinal scanners that otherwise prevent passage. He'll eventually have to dispatch his hostage one way or another, and then he can pick up and move the prone body out of the sight of enemy patrols. Fortunately for you, unconscious foes will awaken only if discovered by their allies.  You can't just run in, guns blazing. You'll need to find stealthier ways of infiltrating objective areas. In Splinter Cell, the use of deadly force is more of a convenience than a necessity. Toward this end, Fisher's arsenal is fairly limited but nonetheless effective. To start with, he has a trusty silenced pistol that can kill with a shot to the head and can also be used to shoot out certain lights to make for a more-favorable situation for Fisher and his night-vision goggles. Later on, he'll find a high-tech experimental assault rifle that becomes his mainstay. Featuring both single-shot and fully automatic firing modes, the SC-20K also sports a silencer and a muzzle-flash suppressor, making it perfect for Fisher's purposes. This modular rifle even has a magnifying scope, allowing for precision shooting--in a great touch, Fisher can hold his breath while looking through the scope to temporarily steady his aim. The SC-20K also supports a number of alternative types of ammunition, such as special rounds that can be used to incapacitate foes rather than kill them. In a number of Splinter Cell's missions, casualties are strictly prohibited, so this feature isn't just for sympathy's sake.   More interestingly, the SC-20K can be used to fire remote camera probes, nauseating smoke bombs, or a distraction camera that can be used to lure guards away from their posts and then give them a mouthful of knockout gas. Such funky devices aren't always strictly necessary for finishing a mission, but they're fun to use and can help you avoid getting into a tight spot. Fisher can also get his hands on frag grenades, though high explosives aren't really his style. Throwing cans or bottles to distract foes is more up his alley.   Picking locks is definitely his style, too, and he can use his trusty lock picks to bypass any locked doors. Here the game presents a clever rendition of lock-picking in which you must tap the proper directional keys on the keyboard to nudge loose as many pins as there are in the lock. Some of Fisher's other neat gadgets include an optic cable that can be slid under doorways to give you a gander at what's on the other side, camera jammers that disrupt security cameras, and emergency flares that can draw the fire of automated heat-sensitive gun turrets. Fisher is basically a high-tech government ninja, what with all this stuff, and what with his all-black body suit and night-vision and heat-vision goggles. The odds are always against him, but he has a big-time element of surprise. His moves and gadgets aren't just for show, either, as Splinter Cell will require you to make use of almost all of Fisher's various abilities in most every mission.  Splinter Cell boasts some of the best graphical effects on the PC to date.  Fisher's missions may all be different--one takes place on a seemingly unassuming oil rig in the middle of the ocean, while another takes place within the headquarters of the CIA--but they're all pretty similar in how you must proceed in them: Stay out of sight, stay out of harm's way, and engage hostiles only when necessary. This is easier said than done, and despite Fisher's impressive list of moves and exceptional skill, you'll invariably draw your enemies' attention in every mission you attempt. If caught in a firefight, Fisher can be killed with just a few shots, though his foes tend to go down much more quickly. Nevertheless, ammunition is limited, and Fisher's aim strays wildly if he tries to shoot while moving or tries to shoot in rapid succession. More importantly, being discovered will often cause a guard to raise the general alarm, which in several missions makes for automatic failure.   In other missions, the alarm can go off several times before Third Echelon pulls the plug on you, and sometimes there's no alarm to worry about at all. In what's possibly the most frustrating aspect of Splinter Cell, sometimes the alarm will go off at scripted moments if you've killed or knocked out too many guards leading up to that point and failed to completely hide their bodies. This can force you into a perpetual mission-failure cycle, ultimately forcing you to restart a mission from scratch and then try to avoid contact with rather than dispatch foes, or at least do a better job of cleaning up.   You won't always end up restarting missions from scratch, but you'll invariably be screwing up and restarting different sequences constantly, perhaps dozens of times per mission. The abilities to quickly save your progress anytime, anywhere and to quickly load your saved game if caught in a pinch--features that aren't in the Xbox version of Splinter Cell--do much to alleviate the potential frustration factor of the game's lengthy missions, though they may take away from some of the challenge if relied upon too heavily. In any event, you'll eventually discover that the game's missions are heavily scripted and play out exactly the same way each time. The suspense is almost nonexistent by the time you reach your fifth attempt at sneaking through that heavily guarded alley, and any sense of urgency is undermined when you realize that the truck you're desperately trying to catch up to or the assassination you're desperately trying to prevent are events that won't be triggered until you cross certain thresholds. Enemy patrols are also triggered at specific points. You can wait forever for that guard to come around the corner, but you won't see him do it until you step forward those last few inches. Still, as long as you don't get too hung up at any given point in the game (and the unlimited save system should see to that), the mission scripting won't seem so transparent.The guards in Splinter Cell are believable enough, but they all move in predictable fashions and don't exhibit any complex behavior. They'll investigate noises and shoot on sight, but in hostile situations, they'll blunder headlong into kill zones and will sometimes see you even when the onscreen stealth meter is telling you you're completely invisible. Yet though the guards aren't smart and aren't particularly difficult to dispose of, Splinter Cell can still be a tough game, since sneaking past enemies (rather than taking them out) is usually the order of the day, and that's a tall order to fill. Fortunately, most missions take place in the dark, where your night vision gives you a huge advantage. But just as you'll start getting comfortable in your sneakiness, you'll find yourself up against guards with flashlights, which don't just reveal you lurking about but can also temporarily blind you if your night vision is enabled.  The lighting adds a lot to the atmosphere, but it figures into the gameplay as well.  Splinter Cell looks incredibly good on a fast system with a high-end graphics card, though its visual presentation isn't perfect. The prerendered cutscenes don't look nearly as good as the in-game graphics. The game's frame rate can noticeably start to chug in areas that are particularly heavy on lighting effects, and you'll notice some collision detection and clipping issues, such as when a felled opponent's feet can be seen sticking straight through a door. We also experienced some texture glitches on two different test systems. All this is enough to slightly mar an otherwise incredible visual presentation, the highlights of which are the lighting effects and Fisher's animation. The game's real-time lighting isn't just for show, since making use of the light and shadows in each area is a critical part of the gameplay. But still, it's real eye candy when you see things like warm sunlight seeping through venetian blinds, or a floodlight beaming through a chain-link fence, looking for you. The rest of the game's visuals are also very impressive. Fisher's movements are extremely lifelike and highly articulate, and they almost seem as if they were motion captured, even though they weren't. The game's modern environments aren't exactly scenic, but they're still beautiful in their size, complexity, and detail. In what may be the strongest testament to the quality of Splinter Cell's graphics, even those levels that take place in seemingly boring officelike areas somehow manage to look interesting.   Splinter Cell also sounds terrific, and as with any self-respecting stealth game, the audio is integral to the experience. You'll actually hear Fisher making a bit more noise the faster he moves, so you'll learn to be your own worst critic as you try to move about silently. All his subtle actions, from lock-picking to drawing his different weapons and gadgets, have a suitably soft sound to go with them, creating the sense that Fisher is extremely skilled at being silent, but still runs the danger of making too much noise. Also, Splinter Cell's bass-heavy ambient music is excellent, and it grows louder and faster when you're spotted or caught. But much like in some other stealth-based games, the way the music picks up or quiets down depending on the circumstances has some unintentional side effects that almost feel like cheating: You'll learn to trust the music for knowing whether or not any enemies remain in your vicinity. The coast is clear when the music says so.   Of further note, Splinter Cell has a good amount of speech in it, though disappointingly, the Russians and Chinese speak in English using lame, stereotypical accents rather than in their native tongues. It's implied that Fisher is multilingual, so it would have been great if he'd simply translated for you in the context of the dialogue--especially since you'll really like hearing him speak. He's voiced by Michael Ironside (Starship Troopers, Top Gun), who's absolutely perfect for the role, with his naturally gravelly, gruff manner of speaking. Ironside got a good script to work with for Splinter Cell, and he brings Fisher's character to life with a suitably no-nonsense attitude and plenty of dry humor to round it out.  Splinter Cell is a challenging game that's loaded with great moments.  Splinter Cell consists of only nine missions, though each of these is long and involved. Disappointingly, the locations of the missions are all revealed from the very beginning--it's like looking at the chapters on the DVD of a movie you've never seen before--though only the first training level is unlocked. You should be able to finish the game in about 10 to 15 hours, and beyond that, Splinter Cell's replay value is limited due to its missions' scripted, linear nature. Still, there's a hard difficulty mode available that really stresses the game's stealth aspect and should be a fun for those who master the default setting. Unfortunately, the PC version of Splinter Cell lacks the Xbox version's extensive DVD-style ""making of"" footage, and it offers no content that wasn't in the Xbox version already. However, Ubi Soft has stated that a bonus mission will be made available for download for the Xbox version of the game via the Xbox Live service, and the PC version may possibly get something as well. The promise of more Splinter Cell is pretty tempting, but what's important is that you get your money's worth out of the box.   Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is undoubtedly one the best examples of a stealth game to date, and it will surely appeal to those who've enjoyed similar games in the past. Or, if you like the idea or even just the look of Splinter Cell but haven't played a stealth game before, then this is a perfectly good place to start. Either way, chances are you'll really enjoy the experience for as long as it lasts. You'll have a great time experimenting with and effectively using Sam Fisher's variety of moves and gadgets, and the game's lengthy missions should provide a significant challenge. Overall, Splinter Cell easily ranks in the highest echelon of single-player action gaming on the PC, and considering the numerous other extremely good games in that category, that's a remarkable feat. 


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887,NBA Live 2003 ,8.7," There aren't too many other basketball games on the PC to choose from, but any fan of the sport should give NBA Live 2003 a try.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/5/6/3/2215563-box_nbal03.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-live-2003-review/1900-2899023/,pos,"
It was probably for the best that NBA Live 2002 was never released on the PC, because the gameplay mechanics in last year's game were in serious need of fine-tuning. Fortunately, EA Sports has almost completely reworked the NBA Live series for 2003 by quickening the pace of the game, adding a new ""freestyle"" control system, and generally making NBA Live 2003 play more like the classic 16-bit console games that helped start the series. The result is an incredibly fun, albeit unrealistic, game of basketball that anyone can pick up and immediately start to enjoy. In addition, the PC version unquestionably has the best online features of any of the game's versions, since it lets you create clubs and track various stats online.  The latest game in the Live series is quite different from the last few games. Live 2003 still offers many of the same modes found in previous games in the series. The franchise mode returns in 2003, and while it's not quite as in-depth as the one featured in Sega's console game NBA 2K3, you still get to perform all the basic functions of an NBA general manager. At the beginning of a season, you can adjust your roster by trading and releasing players and signing free agents. The trading system is similar the one found in previous games in that players are given point values. In putting together a trade proposal, the point value of the players you want to trade for has to be within a certain range, otherwise the computer will reject it. You'll also get to pore over different sets of statistics, including overall team stats, individual player stats, your personal user stats, and the league leaders in different statistical categories. Also included in the franchise mode is a GM's desk option that lets you go behind the scenes to the business side of the NBA. You'll see information on player contracts, injury reports, MVP candidates, player progression, and a list of upcoming free agents.    At the end of a season, the game will hand out awards such as League MVP, Sixth Man, Rookie of the Year, and Defensive Player of the Year. The game will also name its All-NBA team, All-Defensive team, and All-Rookie team. While the off-season may be celebration time for some teams, for others, it marks one of the few opportunities to make significant changes. First, you'll see a list of retiring players, so you'll know what holes, if any, you will need to fill via the draft, free agency, or trades. You'll also have to take care of re-signing players if any of them are coming to the end of their contracts and you want to keep them on the team for a few more years. Unfortunately, when you make it to the rookie draft, there really doesn't seem to be enough information to make an educated choice. After completing the draft, you can sign any remaining free agents, make last-minute trades, and then begin a new season. Again, it's not quite as in-depth as the franchise mode in Sega's console game NBA 2K3, but it also won't be as intimidating for some, and it seems to fit well with the new gameplay style.    There are a variety of modes to choose from, including a franchise mode. The other modes in NBA Live 2003 aren't nearly as involved as the franchise mode. the game features straightforward exhibition, season, and playoff modes, as well as a practice mode that lets you move around the court with a single player. Live 2003 also features a one-on-one mode in which you can select any two players in the league and pit them against each other to see who's better.    Whichever mode you select, you'll undoubtedly notice how much faster NBA Live 2003 plays than the games that came before it--or, for that matter, any other five-on-five basketball games currently available. Though there are differences between them, every player on the court is relatively quick even when you're not using the turbo button, making it much easier to execute fast breaks or create a path to the basket.The shooting percentages seem a little out of whack out of times, but not necessarily in the bad sense. With the default settings of the game, it's not unusual to have two or three players on your team hit at least four three-pointers over the span of a single game, and you'll rarely ever miss shots that are within five or so feet of the basket. When you increase the difficulty, the computer will score on almost every trip down the court if you don't keep a defender on each of its players. The freestyle control scheme works incredibly well if you have a dual analog gamepad.  The passing is surprisingly precise for such a quick game, and like in the older games in the series, it quickly becomes an integral element of play--not only for the purposes of having fun and showing off, but also because it's one of the many methods you can use to break down the defense. Yet, the one thing that truly makes NBA Live 2003 play differently from most other basketball games is the freestyle control. The game is surprisingly playable using a keyboard, but it's best with a good gamepad. Instead of just going for the basic one-button juke move--or any sort of button-activated juke moves, for that matter--you control the ball with the analog stick of your gamepad, or by holding down a button and moving the D pad, if you don't have an analog controller. If you want to dribble in between your legs behind the three-point line, you simply lightly tap the right analog stick from left to right. Likewise, if you want to perform a sharp crossover when driving up the court, press lightly in one direction on the analog stick then quickly press it back in the opposite direction. This system makes it feel as though you have more control over the player, since the guesswork of context-sensitive juke moves has essentially been removed. Plus, you can create some really spectacular-looking plays that will actually be worth looking at in replays over and over. However, you can be penalized for using these moves, especially when executing them in a crowd of defenders, which often results in a steal. In addition, the freestyle ability really makes the better point guards in the league overpowered, and you'll probably find yourself relying on them more than any other player. Though, since it's obvious this game wasn't meant to play like a true simulation, it's really not that big of a problem. It's worth mentioning that the freestyle control system works best with an analog controller, and it can be slightly more difficult to execute these moves if you only have access to a standard D pad controller or keyboard.    The post-up game still comes in handy when going up against irritating zone defenses, but generally, it really seems to be useful only as a ""last resort"" strategy, which is unfortunate. The post-up game in Live 2003 is quite fun to use, as it lets you back down a defender until he starts to hold his ground and then either put up a jump shot or roll off and drive to the basket. It functions similarly to the system in NBA 2K3, only everything happens much faster.   You might think it would be difficult to play defense in a game in which all the players are so quick, but it really isn't. As long as you stay up on an opposing player, or generally stay in his way, cutting off lanes to the basket, you'll be fine. Likewise, defending a man down on the block is equally straightforward as long as you play right up on his back. Shots can frequently be blocked, but doing so usually sends the ball flying out of bounds. Steals are also relatively frequent, since playing the passing lanes usually results in a turnover. So, the defense has been adequately equipped to handle the high-speed offense in the game.   The PC version of NBA Live 2003 has much more robust online features than the PlayStation 2 version of the game. Not only can you just go online to play against other people and tracks several kinds of statistics for your online persona (such as field goal percentage, three point percentage, points per game), but you can also form clubs made up of other players. Clubs are then ranked based on performance of individual players, and acting as a general manager for one of these clubs is quite similar to working as a general manager in the single-player game--you'll try to recruit the players with the best statistics.   NBA Live 2003 looks great, but that doesn't necessarily mean it looks realistic. You can see all the trademark details for individual players, like headbands, tattoos, or certain facial features, but the players have a somewhat cartoonlike look to them. All of the arenas in the game look nearly identical to their real-life counterparts, but the crowds, which look like a series of cardboard cutouts, could use a little more work.  The PC version of NBA Live 2003 has one of the most in-depth online play modes in any basketball game to date. NBA Live 2003's audio is probably its weakest point, at least in terms of the commentary. The two-man commentary team gives makes nice comments on the game and repetition is kept to a minimum, but the commentary doesn't really flow throughout the game. There is some good crowd noise, particularly when you're shooting a three--you'll actually hear the crowd yell ""threeee,"" much as they do for the home team in real life. It's too bad that there aren't more sound effects like that in the game. Like in other EA Sports games, the soundtrack consists of licensed music from various artists such as Busta Rhymes and Snoop Dogg, which may or may not interest you.   The gameplay in NBA Live 2003 is fast-paced and fun, but it still retains enough simulation elements to prevent it from being a completely arcade-style basketball game. In addition, the online component for the PC version is excellent and lets you create clubs and track several different statistics, so it should provide ample motivation for playing the game long after you've purchased it. However, if you plan to play the game online for any amount of time, you should be aware that you'll need to subscribe to EA Sports Online, an online service that offers a free 60-day trial period but charges monthly fees thereafter. EA Sports has also done a great job of integrating the freestyle control scheme so that you really feel as though you have more control over the ball. It's true that there aren't too many other basketball games on the PC to choose from, but any fan of the sport should give NBA Live 2003 a try, keeping in mind that the game is best enjoyed with a dual analog gamepad.
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888,X-Files ,4.2," If you find that the game's storyline hooks you, and you don't mind the interface, keep it for a couple of extra days and beat it, since the game only ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/7/8/3/2224783-xff.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-files-review/1900-2546114/,neg,"
X-Files is a pretty direct port of the PC version, though a few of the game's more annoying puzzles have been removed. The series creator, Chris Carter, wrote an original story for the game and shot original footage exclusive for the game with some of the show's cast, namely David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Mitch Pileggi, and a few other regulars, as well. For fans of the series, the story will seem quite typical of an X-Files episode. Players who aren't fans of the series will find the constant references to the series trivial and unnecessary. The game starts off with the typical X-Files opening, where it shows something mysterious happening and then leads into the show's standard introduction. The game then starts you out as agent Craig Willmore, who gets a case involving two missing FBI agents - who, of course, happen to be Dana Scully and Fox Mulder. From there, you hook up with assistant director Walter Skinner and visit various locations, like the last place the missing agents were seen, their hotel, and so on. Along the way, you find clues and information that lead you to other locations, with other clues, and other people to interact with. The interaction is limited to asking them various questions that you select from a topic window. While the characters certainly respond with appropriate answers, it's not really an interactive conversation, since, in most cases, you simply ask them about everything that's listed on the topic window. The same is true when searching environments for clues, you basically check everything you possibly can, take everything you can, and go everywhere the game lets you go.  The only skill, other than finding everything and asking all of the questions, that's involved while playing is during the game's ""action"" sequences. These sections mostly involve you placing crosshairs over FMV bad guys and shooting them before they shoot you. Very reminiscent in look and style to the old Sega CD classics, the shooting sequences involve a bad guy who steps out from behind a suspicious-looking pile of boxes. You shoot him, and then another bad guy steps out from behind a pole. You also shoot him. Other action sequences aren't as obvious - for some you must you use your head and your inventory at the appropriate time, like taking a picture of a fleeing car to get its license plate number.The game can be rather fun when you're playing through these action sequences, figuring out what to do next, and moving the story along. Unfortunately, it's horribly frustrating when you're not moving along briskly, mostly because you know exactly what you need to do but can't find a way to do it. The constant problem that X-Files suffers from is the way it hides objects. For instance, you'll be standing in a bedroom, looking at the bed. If you look to the right, you'll see the dresser. If you look to the left, you'll see the nightstand. If you spin around in a circle, all you can see are those three screens. But if you walk forward while looking at the bed and then turn around, you can see there is something on the dresser behind you. Why couldn't you see that when you turned around before? This happens throughout the game. Even with the game's sixth sense help icon turned on (which gives you visual clues about where you're supposed to go next), it's occasionally very frustrating.  One other major problem occurs toward the end. During most of the action sequences, you can put the crosshairs anywhere on the bad guy's body and shoot him. But there's one generic guard near the end of the game whom you must shoot - before he shoots you. We tried to accomplish this simple task ten times. We tried shooting the guard in the face, the legs, torso, everywhere. It just simply wouldn't work. Then, finally, we shot right at the center of the guard's chest, a place we all swore we had attempted to shoot several times before. This time, for whatever magical reason, he went down. It's this kind of random behavior that really cripples the game. Visually, the game looks very sharp. Half of the game is composed of FMV sequences that look surprisingly nice, and the other half of the game is Myst-style stills of the environments you are in. The camera angles and lighting give the game a striking resemblance to the series. The game also does a nice job of recreating the atmosphere of the series with ominous music and sound effects. The quality of the voices and music is also very good.   In the end, if you're a fan of the series, the game's worth renting. If you find that the game's storyline hooks you, and you don't mind the interface, keep it for a couple of extra days and beat it, since the game only takes about ten hours to complete. However, if you're not a fan of the series, you shouldn't even really bother.
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889,Sydney 2000 ,4.2, Competing in the game's events is time-consuming and often frustrating.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/8/4/0/2215840-sydney_2000_pal.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sydney-2000-review/1900-2628153/,neg,"
Back in 1984, the now-defunct developer Epyx released Summer Games, a superb Olympics game for the Apple II and the Commodore 64. This simple but addicting and enjoyable game offered eight events and hot-seat support for up to eight players. Anyone who's played the game should fondly remember the synthesized national anthems and the challenging but logical control schemes used for each of the various events. If you can get your hands on a copy of this 16-year-old game today, it'll be a lot more fun to play than Eidos Interactive's new Sydney 2000. Eidos' game has flashy graphics, but its gameplay is tedious and completely unenjoyable.   Sydney 2000's 12 events include the 100-meter sprint, 110-meter hurdles, 10-meter platform diving, the javelin throw, and skeet shooting. For each event, you can either compete in an arcade mode, an Olympic mode, or a head-to-head mode against up to three other players. Multiplayer games are unfortunately limited to four players on a single computer, in which one person must use the keyboard while three can use daisy-chained Sidewinder gamepads.   Competing in the game's events is time consuming and often frustrating. The game relies heavily on the back-and-forth motion made famous by the Konami arcade classic Track & Field: You just push two designated keys as quickly as possible without overlapping the keystrokes. This in itself would not be so bad, but because the game forces you to work through three pre-Olympic stages before even letting you compete for a medal, your arms - and especially your fingertips - will probably grow quite tired long before you get to the serious events.   To make matters worse, the computer-controlled athletes get better at each stage of competition, so your best chance of winning a medal comes from having your character train between stages. Each event has three training exercises, and each exercise has three difficulty levels. Completing each of these exercises relies on the same frenetic key-mashing scheme. And when you have successfully accomplished one of these virtual exercises, you still have to run a qualifying heat in the event to earn the improvements in your athlete's abilities that the exercise provides. The exercises themselves include activities such as sit-ups and stretching, which don't make for a particularly exciting simulation. Thankfully, the game includes a save feature that lets you record your progress between stages and events. Otherwise, only real-world Olympic athletes would be able to complete an event and all of its accompanying exercises in top form from start to finish.   Even if you don't mind all the key pressing, you'll probably get tired of the game once you find that the athlete you control doesn't always react the way he or she is supposed to. Even when you're absolutely sure you've gyrated the controls at the proper pace and in the proper sequence, the 3D Olympian on your screen will occasionally do something you don't want or expect. Don't bother turning to the manual for help - all that you'll find there is a skeletal framework of instructions for each event. An in-game coaching mode helps train you to some extent, but even this isn't helpful for all of the events in the game.   But the worst part about Sydney 2000 is that it was apparently developed for video game consoles and was not translated properly for the PC. The 3D graphics do look better on the PC than they do on the PlayStation, but the game has multiple interface problems such as the way it forces you to choose three-letter initials to represent your player by scrolling through the alphabet and choosing the letters one by one. Even Summer Games lets you type in your name. These sorts of problems wouldn't be a big deal if Sydney 2000 were fun to begin with, but since the gameplay is so poor, the game's evident design for use with game consoles instead of PCs becomes more noticeable and more annoying.   Overall, Sydney 2000 just seems like a mediocre console game that comes across as even less impressive on the PC. Though the 3D graphics are quite fluid and detailed, and a handful of the events such as the 10-meter platform diving are somewhat interesting compared to the rest, Sydney 2000 can't even compete against the equivalent Commodore 64 game that's well over a decade old.
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890,Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Second Edition ,4.2," Who Wants to Be a Millionaire doesn't have a terribly large bank of questions to choose from, and you'll probably start to recognize a few questions after only three or ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/2/0/8/2644-10208.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire-second-edition-revie/1900-2591876/,neg,"
In the '70s, it was Match Game. In the '80s, Wheel of Fortune was king. Now, the biggest game show in town is Who Wants to be a Millionaire, a basic trivia game made more interesting by the lure of big money. This simplistic trivia game has influenced everything from the current pop-culture lexicon to men's fashions, and attempts to cash in on the game's success are everywhere. Millionaire clones are popping up all over the dial. Regis Philbin, the show's host, has his own line of ties. And numerous home versions of the game are available, ranging from simple board games to the PC game, which topped sales charts for weeks after its release. Now the PlayStation is getting into the act, with a port of the second edition of the PC game.     The game is excruciatingly simple: You're asked a series of multiple choice questions. As long as you keep answering correctly, your potential winnings grow. Miss one answer, and you lose. You'll be able to ""keep"" some of your winnings, depending on how far you get. If you're unsure of a correct answer, you're given three helpers, called lifelines. Each lifeline can be used only once per game. One lifeline polls the audience for the correct answer, and you're given percentages that show how an actual group of 100 people voted on that particular question. The 50/50 lifeline removes two of the incorrect answers, though it usually tends to remove the ones that are obviously incorrect. On the television show, the third lifeline lets you call one of your friends for the answer. Since that's sort of difficult on a PlayStation, Regis calls one of his friends, and a short, canned conversation between Regis and his friend ensues - usually resulting in a weak attempt at comedy. It's amazing that one of these conversations had to be produced for every question, but the execution is still a little stiff. And it's usually pretty easy to tell whether Regis' friend is giving you the correct answer. Throughout the game, Regis pipes up, letting you know what letter you chose, informing you of things like ""you are so right,"" and of course, asking if your answer is a final one. Personally, I found Regis to be grating, annoying, and extremely repetitive. Plus, there's a real lack of energy in his lines. Also making the game more tedious are the extremely slow load times between questions, breaking up any sort of flow the game might achieve. This is one case where having a PlayStation 2 with the fast-load option enabled would come in handy.     The game has a multiplayer mode that emulates the fastest-finger round on the TV show. Here, you and a friend are asked to sort four items into the proper order, such as the order in which four TV shows debuted, Star Trek characters rank, or items simply are alphabetized. As soon as either of you has gotten it right (if you both get it right, the person to answer the fastest wins), it launches into the single-player game. While this properly acts like the TV show, it hardly qualifies as a two-player game.     In the end, all computerized trivia games come down to one thing: the number of questions. Who Wants to be A Millionaire doesn't have a terribly large bank of questions to choose from, and you'll probably start to recognize a few questions after only three or four sessions. If you're a fan of the show, you might get some enjoyment out of this, but trivia fans would be better served by Jellyvision's other PlayStation trivia game, You Don't Know Jack.
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891,Timeline ,4.2," The game is far too short, and the puzzles would be easy for even the most novice gamers.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/6/4/2212664-timeline_box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/timeline-review/1900-2657283/,neg,"
Timeline is based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name and was developed by Timeline Computer Entertainment. This cozy relationship doesn't bode well for the game. In fact, it's hard to understand what Timeline is supposed to be. It borrows good ideas from many different action games, but it isn't very fun. It's based on a lengthy page-turner; yet, it manages to include very little story of its own. And it is so short and easy that it seems like little more than a tutorial for a better game.   As Timeline begins, you are being trained in the protocols and procedures for time travel. You are Chris Hughes, a graduate student who must travel to 14th-century France to rescue his professor. The game skips much of the buildup in the book, including the pseudoscience that explains the theory of time travel, the suspense that leads up to the disappearance of the professor, and any explanation of just who these characters are. You are simply thrust into a world where time travel is possible, and you are about to do it.   Once you reach 14th-century France, a major setback threatens to cause problems with your mission plan. In any other game, this would be the event that triggers a whole series of events. But in Timeline, it seems to have little impact at all on your mission. Much of the game is like this: Some significant event occurs, which would seem to be the start of a clever new twist, only to be resolved within a few moments. For instance, at one point in the game, your character is shrunk down in size to a mere three inches tall. It's an interesting development, but it's over within minutes of occurring.   Timeline's structure doesn't lend itself to player involvement. It plays like a first-person shooter, though the actual action is more reminiscent of platform games like Rayman 2. The game is broken into chapters: Each chapter is short, and each consists of one easily accomplished task. When you first get to France, you'll need to slide down a hill, all the while avoiding rocks. Later, you'll need to joust in a tournament. Still later, you'll need to climb across rafters to a window. There aren't many chapters, and the whole game actually won't take more than an hour or two to finish. Each task is short and easy, and it's hard to imagine anyone needing more than a couple of attempts at any of them. The fact that the chapters are so distinct is somewhat jarring, so that at times it seems as if Timeline is just a collection of scenes from different action games.   The combat sequences in Timeline are poor. Timeline borrows a bit from Looking Glass Studios' Thief: The Dark Project; you are warned early in the game that you aren't allowed to kill anyone. You are given weapons that are meant to stun, not kill. But you'll learn quickly that avoiding fatal conflict isn't really an issue. Instead of having to sneak past potentially violent encounters, you'll find that it's simply impossible to kill anyone. Even in swordplay against the main villains (who, again, are never really introduced or established), your opponent simply surrenders if you win the fight. And why there are ""stun arrows"" lying around in 14th-century France is never explained.   Yet perhaps the most disheartening thing about Timeline is its almost complete lack of story. There's a bit of setup and a few small twists along the way - but unless you've read the novel, which is included with the game, it's doubtful you'll have any idea why anything is happening, who any of these people are, or, most importantly, why you should care. The game does have a tour mode, which doesn't develop the story, but it does reveal a little about the time period. Crichton himself narrates and explains the customs of 14th-century France as you walk around the game's locales. It's an interesting history lesson, but it adds little to the game.   The graphics in Timeline are fairly good though somewhat bland, and the engine renders outdoor environments particularly well. The voice acting is good, though your sidekick's habit of explaining exactly what you should be doing makes the game even easier than it already is.   Even if it's meant to be an action game for nongamers, Timeline isn't very successful. The game is far too short, and the puzzles would be easy for even the most novice gamers. There are some interesting ideas that crop up occasionally, but they, like everything in Timeline, aren't given enough time to develop. When the game is over, which is very quickly, you'll hardly remember a thing about it.
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892,Breed ,4.2, Breed makes a horrible first impression and then keeps making more bad impressions as you play.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/6/5/2/2217652-breed_pc_game_free_891.jpeg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/breed-review/1900-6093794/,neg,"
 Breed makes a horrible first impression. This single-player sci-fi shooter takes so outrageously long to load that it should ship with an alarm clock to wake you up when it's finally ready. Breed then makes many more bad impressions once you actually get to play it. You quickly see that it takes a lot of its ideas from the hit game Halo (and in turn from films like Starship Troopers and Aliens), and that it suffers from flimsy writing, atrocious voice acting, generic enemies and settings, frame rate hits, poor mission design, lagging multiplayer, and severe bugs. All isn't totally lost, though. For all that Breed does wrong, it at least lets you control some neat vehicles in expansive environments. Still, even in its good moments--which are uncommon--Breed is a poor game. During its many bad moments, you'll want to avoid it altogether.  Some of the many vehicles you'll control.  Breed sends you to the twenty-seventh century, where a horde of alien creatures known as the Breed have lured most of Earth's military away to a distant colony to launch a sneak attack on Earth. You play as the few remaining GRUNT (Genetically Revived Universal Tactical Sentient) soldiers, basically clones, who return home to find Earth overrun with little purple and red aliens armed with glowing guns. You'd think a tale of a last-ditch effort to liberate Earth from alien hordes would be gripping. Not in Breed; it totally lacks emotional resonance. The scenarios, settings, and alien invaders feel generic, with no discernible character, let alone real style or imagination. The cutscenes are plodding and clumsy, and the writing leaves even more to be desired: ""A tear falls into my handkerchief,"" your silly and gabby leader solemnly intones. A character duly notes that her ""head hurts"" when she's blown up by artillery fire, and a soldier calls the Breed ""dumb heads"" as an insult. Some lines are oddly phrased: ""permission given"" instead of ""permission granted."" There are localization problems also, like a few words spelled in German in the subtitles.  Assuming you don't uninstall the game in frustration, you'll progress through eighteen missions, sometimes alone, but often with a small squad of GRUNTs. You play from either a first- or third-person view and assume direct control of any GRUNT in your squad at will. As in Halo, you'll zip around outdoors in futuristic dune buggies and tanks and fly in nimble fighters. You take over enemy turrets to blast hordes of hapless Breed, who often move, fight, and even do little sideways acrobatic dodges just like the aliens in Halo. Occasionally you'll fight indoors, too, but those settings are sparse and boring.  There's little fun to be had fighting on foot in Breed, in part because your squad mates are monstrously inept. They're far more of a hindrance than a help, since they barely return fire yet always manage to end up right in the line of fire--that is, when they're not falling off cliffs. (Things get even worse in some of the airborne missions, where your wingmen literally do nothing to help out.) Since the artificial intelligence allies in Breed always seem to be in need of rescuing, most of your ""tactics"" revolve around keeping them out of harm's way instead of using them as combat assets. It seems utterly superfluous that you can order them to spread out, close in, assume different formations, and so on. You'll mostly be ordering them to halt behind what little cover you can find or telling them to hand you a medikit when you're in dire straits.   GRUNTs are divided into a few different classes that determine what two weapons they initially carry (the two-weapon limit again recalling Halo). The weapons in Breed are all standard shooter fare: slightly futuristic assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and the like. Breed ignores one of the basic necessities of any shooter: The guns should look so cool and feel so powerful that the mere act of firing them is fun. Here, they're all pretty dull. As in Halo, you can pick up alien energy weapons, but these are also bland, not to mention inaccurate.  Breed takes a turn for the better with its vehicles. The ground vehicles, including tanks, buggies, jeeps, and APCs are easy to control (think Halo or Battlefield 1942) and boast physics that are just realistic enough without becoming cumbersome. Some of them bristle with multiple weapons, like the neatest GRUNT vehicle, the tank. You both steer it and aim the main turret, which lets you switch between a minigun, plasma cannon, guided missiles, and rockets. Meanwhile, other GRUNTs man smaller machine-gun turrets. It's overkill in the best sense. Cruising around and blasting towers and trees to dust can be fun while it lasts. (Fun never lasts long in Breed.) Air vehicles, like fighters and dropships, are a bear to control at first and can fall into irrecoverable stalls too easily, but once you get the hang of them you'll appreciate their high maneuverability.  Unfortunately, Breed's missions can be so numbingly repetitive, predictable, or downright confusing that it probably won't matter to you whether you're driving a snazzy vehicle or merely jogging about on foot. Superficially, the missions are well varied: You fight outdoors and in, on the ground and in the air (sometimes in the same mission). Sometimes there are timed segments to light a fire under you. Beneath that exterior diversity, you quickly see that the missions often follow the same basic patterns. Every time you turn a bend or crest a hill, out pops a horde of enemies, usually with a couple more firing nearby turrets or firing down from nearby hilltops. It's way too easy to guess exactly what will happen next.   Scripting problems, bugs, and confusing goals also mar missions. You're told a wingman is in trouble and that you need to help him, yet there are no enemies left that can hurt him. As you try to escort him to safety, he just mysteriously blows up for no reason, and there goes the mission.   On top of that, the aliens in Breed are about as smart as stones: Other than the occasional dodge, they mostly just charge you until they're all wiped out, or they stand around waiting to be sniped en masse. When they win, it's through sheer strength in numbers, and the game loves to overwhelm you with enemies. Airborne battles are similar in that they usually send one wave of fighters after another toward you with a clockwork precision.   Breed's presentation suffers from the same lack of imagination and polish that hurts the whole game. It's literally hard to remember what the aliens look like (other than their vague resemblance to Halo's enemies), and the same applies to the GRUNT armor, enemy bases, and most of the vehicles. The game's settings usually bear little resemblance to any real place on Earth, but rather feel like some generic fantasy planet. Technically, the graphics are reasonably impressive, rendering all kinds of flashy weapon fire and sprawling outdoor environments, but at the cost of stuttering frame rates--particularly during battles. Even with a high-end rig, you may have to crank the resolution or details down. The game is also annoying in that it requires you to re-specify your preferred refresh rate every time you play.   Blasting a bridge with a tank.  While the graphics have their good and bad points, the audio is often so bad you'll want to turn it off. Prepare yourself for audio stuttering and drop-outs, forgettable music, wimpy-sounding weapons and explosions, and horrid voice ""acting"" (by the game's developers instead of professional actors) replete with cheesy accents and mispronounced words (""stealth"" comes out as ""steelth"").  Along with the poor single-player campaign, Breed includes unimaginative multiplayer: just deathmatch variants. It can still be mildly fun to fly above the battlefield and bomb unsuspecting soldiers into oblivion, though we found multiplayer barely playable most of the time, even with the latest patch installed. Various bugs, some ill-conceived maps, and frequent--and often severe--lag, warping, and hit detection issues mean you can snipe someone in the head five times without it registering. Vehicles and characters often seem to teleport around the map, move through each other, or sink into the ground, even when you play over a broadband connection. Really, the only thing Breed has going for it is its wide variety of vehicles. But in a game with so many serious problems, it's hard to enjoy them for long. 
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893,Conflict Zone ,4.2, Spend five minutes playing Conflict Zone and you''ll understand why it should have stayed on the computer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/0/6/2210506-468716_50813_front.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/conflict-zone-review/1900-2838375/,neg,"
It's been almost a year since Sega announced it was abandoning its failing Dreamcast in favor of development on competing hardware. Now the poor system is almost dead and buried, and the very few remaining Dreamcast games trickling into stores are to be looked at with a critical eye. Such is the attitude you should take if you're interested in playing Conflict Zone, a port of last year's real-time strategy (RTS) game for the PC whose only real selling point is its bargain-bin price. There is a fairly clear division between game genres that work best on consoles and those that are more appropriate on the PC. Platformers, shooters, Japanese-style RPGs--these games belong on a console. Likewise, first-person shooters and real-time strategy games both originated on the PC, and both are generally better suited to that platform. Chalk up these facts to the great difference between the controls available on each side. First-person shooters and real-time strategies are more at home on the PC because they require a mouse and keyboard to be enjoyed to their fullest extent, and Conflict Zone on the Dreamcast is a prime example of why this is the case. Spend five minutes playing Conflict Zone and you'll understand why it should have stayed on the computer. The most basic part of an RTS game is the cursor, which you use to select units, navigate menus, and perform any number of other essential game functions. In Conflict Zone on the Dreamcast, the cursor is locked to the center of the screen; instead of controlling it, you control the position of the entire camera and line up the arrow in the center with the unit or building you want to select. Although this gets easier with time, it's not even in the same realm of precision as a mouse-based control scheme, and anyone used to playing RTS games will likely be frustrated with this feature of the design. The rest of the control setup is equally awkward. All manner of button combinations are required to activate certain commands, and though an onscreen guide is provided to help you out, in the heat of battle it's still a cumbersome process. This isn't really MASA's fault--the number of functions you can realistically achieve on a keyboard far outstrips that of a console's controller. In fact, it's generally too hard to select a specific number of troops for combat; you're better off hitting the provided Select All button instead. If you're used to the precision of a mouse, be warned that Conflict Zone doesn't play as smoothly as your typical game of Starcraft or Command & Conquer.  Conflict Zone is set in the year 2011, at a time when the political state of the world has destabilized considerably. In typical RTS style, the main conflict occurs between two factions. The ICP, or International Corps for Peace, is a NATO organization charged with liberating subjugated peoples and restoring order in war-torn countries. The ICP's rival is the GHOST, a multicorporate, multinational consortium that militarily steers world affairs toward its own ends. Each side has a preset campaign against the other, and the story advances between missions via poorly acted briefings and television newscasts. Structurally, it's all pretty formulaic stuff and doesn't really inspire much excitement. The resource and building model in Conflict Zone is fairly standard as RTS games go, as well. When you have enough resources amassed, you can build new buildings, establish your technology tree, and create new units. The resources themselves are a bit different, however. Aside from the requisite cash money, you have command points, which are an arbitrary rating that determines your ability to build structures and equip troops. The energy rating is controlled by the number of generators you've built in relation to the size of your base. Finally, and most interestingly, you have a percentage that rates your popularity--if your actions are inappropriate, this rating will go down, disallowing the use of buildings and troops. In the end, though, these resources differ from the norm in name only, and the gameplay ends up being average at best. Conflict Zone has a few other issues working against it. The frame rate suffers when a lot of units are on the screen, and the game loads from the disc far too often during combat, causing the flow of action to stutter annoyingly. Combined with the awkward controls and bland gameplay, these problems add up to make Conflict Zone a tedious game experience that even its low price won't save. The only people who might enjoy Conflict Zone are gamers who exclusively own a Dreamcast and are into real-time strategy games, but even they should get with the times and look elsewhere.
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894,Death Crimson OX ,4.2, It's hard to recommend Death Crimson OX to anyone but the truly desperate light-gun fanatic.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/7/2/5/2220725-0i.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/death-crimson-ox-review/1900-2809552/,neg,"
Death Crimson OX, from Ecole and Sammy, is the latest and perhaps last light-gun game for the flagging Dreamcast. Sega's own House of the Dead series has leapt to newer systems in the form of spiritual sequel Vampire Night on the PlayStation 2 and actual sequel House of the Dead 3 on the Xbox. Thus Death Crimson is left to pick up the slack for Dreamcast-owning fans of arcade shooting games, but unfortunately, it will surely leave these poor souls wanting for more. Let's not mince words: Death Crimson OX is a House of the Dead clone. It shamelessly resembles Sega's classic shooter series in nearly every way you can think of. The once-picturesque town ravaged by a horde of monsters, the kidnapped female, the sort-of-hard rockin' soundtrack--it's all here. The problem is, it's not nearly as good. True, House of the Dead had camp value thanks to shoddy voice acting and a goofy storyline, but Death Crimson OX is so cheesy it can't be taken seriously. The game focuses on the SMO organization and its leader, Admiral Zaza, who has kidnapped a freedom fighter named Lily. Her daughter Yuri and troubled friend Kou set out with the bafflingly ancient and mythical pistol Crimson to kill lots of monsters and eventually stop SMO. Anyone who's played a light-gun game in the last five years will know exactly what to expect from Death Crimson OX. One or two players blast their way through a linear progression of levels, wasting enemies with abandon, sparing civilians who get in the way, and nabbing the occasional power-up item. Of course, defeating the big bad monster with the requisite weak point at the end of a level takes you through a short story sequence and on to the next kill-fest. Despite indications on the packaging, the game is playable with a light gun or the standard Dreamcast controller. Indeed, using a gun is the preferred method, as in the later stages, the game becomes obscenely difficult when using a controller for aiming. Death Crimson OX contains three gameplay modes: story, mission, and bullet. The story mode simply sends you through all the levels from beginning to end, revealing the story as you go. Mission mode lets you select any level to play and omits all story details. Finally, bullet mode has you play the game with a finite amount of ammo--you have to finish each stage with the allotted number of bullets. Extra modes are always a nice gesture, but after the main game is played through a couple of times, these don't really add enough meat to keep the replay value high. It's hard to recommend Death Crimson OX to anyone but the truly desperate light-gun fanatic. It offers nothing new to the genre, and frankly, it's surpassed by older light-gun games. Perhaps Death Crimson's only saving grace is its sub-$20 price tag, but House of the Dead 2 also retails for that price--the choice is easy. If you've already beaten that game and really, really want more, you might give Death Crimson OX a rental, but that's a big if.
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895,Street Hoops ,4.2," Anyone looking for basketball, arcade-style or otherwise, would be better served by NBA Street, NBA 2K3, or just about any other GameCube basketball game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/7/6/1/2210761-box_shoops.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/street-hoops-review/1900-2901893/,neg,"
Street Hoops is an attempt by Activision and developer Black Ops Entertainment to make a fast-paced basketball game with a whole lot of hip-hop flavor. Or, to put it another way, Street Hoops is an attempt to duplicate the success of EA's similarly themed NBA Street while delivering a more authentic street ball experience. However, unlike EA's game, Street Hoops is shallow and incredibly dull.  Playing the game with another person avoids most of the stupidity found when playing against the computer. There are a handful of different modes to choose from, beginning with the standard five-on-five full-court action. You can also play down to three-on-three full court or anywhere from three-on-three to one-on-one in half-court modes. The world championship mode is the main mode here, letting you pick a team and travel to the game's different locales to play the other teams in the league, earning money along the way. That money can be used to change the appearance of your players. There's an apparel store that lets you choose from a large collection of clothing lines, including Ecko, Pure Playaz, Rocawear, and many, many more. The pawnshop is used as a jewelry store, and here you can buy fat rope chains with platinum pieces for your team. The barbershop lets you configure your players' hair for a small fee, the most expensive, of course, being the $50 Afro. At times, it seems like customizing your players is deeper and more interesting than the basketball itself. The game also has a gambling feature that lets you bet on your team in several different categories.   The gameplay in Street Hoops is forgettable and almost seems like an afterthought thrown in after Activision had acquired a ton of different music and clothing licenses. There's very little depth to be found here, and the game has the simplicity of a 16-bit-era NBA game with none of the challenge. On most difficulty settings, the computer can't put up a decent fight on defense, leaving you open to fast-break the ball up court with nothing in your way. In the event that you do have to get around a defender, you can simply pound on the juke button repeatedly, which will almost always cause the defender to fall over, clearing your path. On defense, stripping the ball from computer players is, again, a matter of button mashing and positioning your player properly. The game gives you a finer level of control by letting you select which move set you want each player to have, and it gives you a toggle button on offense that, when pressed, makes the face buttons trigger different fancy moves. However, the standard fancy move you get without holding down any buttons works just fine. Like NBA Street, Street Hoops attempts to award you for flashy play. A momentum meter builds and catches on fire when one side is completely full, giving players improved stats and unlimited turbo for a short period of time. Playing the game with another person avoids most of the stupidity found when playing against the computer, but the lack of useful strategy (beyond the obvious ""pass the ball across the court and dunk it before the defense has time to set up"") still makes the game a little too straightforward.  Street Hoops is, quite simply, poor. The GameCube version of Street Hoops is a bit cleaner than previous versions of the game. It still has a basic, low-poly look, but the texture quality isn't as blurry. The players move well but look quite bad, and given the game's heavy focus on emulating real-life clothing lines, you'd think a little more care would have been used when putting those clothes and logos into the game. The court textures look reasonably clean. The game's soundtrack is packed with tracks from artists like Cypress Hill, Xzibit, Smut Peddlers, and many more. Commentary is handled by a Los Angeles radio personality named Big Boy, who tosses in so much rap and street slang that it all sounds forced and phony. Thankfully, the game lets you adjust several different sound levels, so you can turn the announcing off.   Street Hoops is, quite simply, poor. The simplistic and boring gameplay makes it seem like the developer spent more time making sure the licensed clothing fit into the game than making sure that the basketball gameplay had any merit to it. If you were a fan of Strawberry Shortcake Musical Match-Ups for the Atari 2600, or any other game where the main function is dressing people up in various clothes, then Street Hoops is nonstop excitement. But anyone looking for basketball, arcade-style or otherwise, would be better served by NBA Street, NBA 2K3, or just about any other GameCube basketball game. 
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896,Star Wars Republic Commando ,8.7," A well-paced, albeit brief, single-player campaign will keep adrenaline junkies thrilled from the first dropship landing to the final dust-off.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/7/1/4/18335-53714.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-wars-republic-commando-review/1900-6119250/,pos,"
  When you think of Star Wars, the first two things that likely come to mind are probably Jedi and space combat in X-Wings and TIE fighters. So logically, a Star Wars game that features neither element would feel like it's missing something. Right? As it turns out, Star Wars Republic Commando's laserlike focus on squad-based, military-style combat makes it a refreshing change of pace for Star Wars games. Its well-paced, albeit brief, single-player campaign will keep adrenaline junkies thrilled from the first dropship landing to the final dust-off. A pedestrian and unimaginative multiplayer mode is the only notable flaw in a game that otherwise plays, looks, and sounds fantastic.   You lead an elite squad of commandos on a variety of covert-ops missions.   Star Wars Republic Commando, as the title suggests, puts you in the shoes of an elite trooper during the height of the Clone Wars. You don't have a proper name, aside from ""Three-Eight,"" but nonetheless, you're tasked with commanding Delta squad on tough covert ops stretched across three different campaigns. The three other commandos of Delta are also numbered. They are: 07, 40, and 62. Despite the impersonal monikers, each member of your squad has a very unique and likable personality, and this comes across through the entertaining chatter each will dispense over the course of the game.    While you're a clone, like the millions of other republic soldiers, you and your squadmates have been trained to be a little better than the other photocopies of Jango Fett. This means you'll also be outfitted with better weapons and armor than the regular soldiers you'll be fighting with periodically through the campaign. You'll start out with a standard assault rifle, but over the course of the game, you'll be introduced to special attachments that turn this same weapon into a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher. You'll also be able to pick up weapons from fallen enemies, ranging from heavy repeating blasters to submachine guns to rocket launchers. Should you run low on ammo, there's a laser handgun that recharges and never runs out of shots. But what's more fun than this is getting up close and personal with melee attacks. Melee strikes are powerful, and they count as one-hit kills on most standard opponents. So even if you do have plentiful ammo, you'll find yourself frequently stabbing Geonosian bugs and Trandoshan mercenaries in the face, mainly because it's both fun and extremely effective. Rounding out your armament is an array of grenades, like thermal detonators for soft targets and electrostatic grenades for mechanical enemies.    The interface and gameplay conventions in Republic Commando borrow some of the best elements from excellent games like Metroid Prime, Halo, and Freedom Fighters. There a visor overlay onscreen, for example. This gives you useful information, such as the position and condition of your squadmates, instructions on your next objective, and the obligatory ammo counts and health meters. You can also switch to low-light mode to enhance dark areas. The helmet conceit isn't just an excuse to have all these meters onscreen, however. You'll get some nice graphical effects to remind you that your character does have a bit of glass in front of his face. So you'll see blood spatter on the visor when you engage in close combat. There are also situations where droids or jammers will cause static to appear on your screen, reducing visibility.    Like Halo, you and your squadmates are protected by personal shields that will deflect a certain amount of incoming damage. This lets you step into the line of fire for a while before forcing you to duck back into cover to wait for a recharge. Should you take any real damage, however, there are plentiful bacta stations scattered along your campaign routes that you and your squadmates can use to restore health. Their placement can feel contrived at times, such as on a separatist droid ship (Why, exactly, would droids need a substance designed to restore health to organic life-forms?), but the game even manages to poke fun at itself there. From time to time, your teammates will remark, ""Whoever left that bacta station there deserves a medal!"" In the event that one of your squadmates goes down, he or she's never dead...just incapacitated. You or one of your other squad members can revive your fallen comrade with a device that acts much like a defibrillator, shocking the person up off the ground and returning the person's health status to half. What's great is that the game doesn't end if your own character gets incapacitated. Your screen goes blurry and red--and you can't move--but as long as at least one of your teammates is still up, you can command him to revive you.    Blood spatter on the visor is a great effect in close combat.   Despite that creative aspect to the game, Republic Commando's most important design conceit is your ability to command your squad. There's a single command button to keep things simple, and it can be used on contextually sensitive areas on the battlefield. These include rock piles or debris that can be used as protected sniping positions. Or you may direct a teammate to hack a computer console to open a door or shut off automated defenses. Turrets can be manned by you or your squadmates, and you can also have your team breach doors or blow holes in walls with explosives. You'll also command your teammates to make use of bacta stations or revive fallen comrades on the field. There are also other commands that let you both direct your squad to concentrate fire on a single enemy or form up. The squad command controls work great on either platform, with the PC version getting some commands mapped to function keys for easy access.    It's comforting to note that the inclusion of these squad commands doesn't mean your teammates act like idiots without you ordering them around. On the contrary, they are fairly intelligent about following you around, finding their own cover, and, most importantly, killing the enemy as you encounter him. Certainly, taking advantage of your squad commands and asking your teammates to man turrets or sniping positions makes every encounter easier. But in many cases, you can get by without doing so, at least on the medium difficultly level.    The single-player aspect of Republic Commando takes you on three distinct campaigns during the Clone Wars-era of Star Wars. You'll invade Geonosis, along with the rest of the Republic army, investigate a derelict starship, and assist the wookiees in fending off Trandoshan slavers on the planet of Kashyyyk. The campaigns are paced extremely well throughout the game, offering up new and interesting challenges at just the right junctures. Whether it's hunting down and assassinating a Geonosian lieutenant, fending off endless hordes of super battle droids and droideka, or escorting a highly ranked wookiee, there's never a dull moment in Republic Commando.    The excellent campaign throws a number of different challenges at you.   The missions are heavily scripted to provide exciting pitched battles, some of which will see you as the aggressor and others of which will require you to defend areas from attack. This also means the game is fairly linear. So it's obvious which paths you'll need to be going down, and you won't be doing a whole lot of backtracking. But at the same time, nary a minute goes by without the blasters and rockets firing back and forth at full tilt. The only downer is that the fun doesn't last long, as most players should be able to tear through the campaign in fewer than 10 hours. It sure is an exciting ride while it lasts, though.    The game does include a multiplayer aspect on both the PC and Xbox platforms. Unfortunately, the multiplayer isn't nearly as creative or exciting as the campaign. There are standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag modes, along with an assault mode that's basically the same as one-flag CTF, with one team attempting to carry a special item in to a capture area in the other team's base before the timer runs out. There are eight maps total, which are designed for four to 16 players. Many of these maps, however, are just derived from specific parts of the single-player levels, although there is one special level that includes some zero-gravity areas that provide extra amusement. Those who've played a lot of shooters won't find much in Republic Commando they haven't seen before. So if you were looking at this game specifically hoping for a great new multiplayer experience, you're probably better off sticking with other alternatives.     Fortunately, the presentational values don't disappoint like the multiplayer aspects do. Star Wars Republic Commando looks fantastic on both the PC and Xbox, with excellent character models. The armor on each commando is extremely detailed, so you'll see the dents and dings that you'd expect of battle-worn gear. The game also animates extremely well, with the commando models exhibiting a lot of the same mannerisms (like the way they hold their weapons and breach doorways) you'd expect from highly trained operatives. The location-based damage on all enemies allows for a lot of variety in how they die, and the animators took full advantage of this. You can blow limbs off droids or Geonosian bugs. You can take the head off a droid, and you'll see it fire wildly in a circle before falling over. Hit a Trandoshan in its fuel backpack and he'll rocket wildly into walls and ceilings. Toss an electrostatic grenade at droids and they'll shudder with a blue electric glow before exploding into scrap. The varying environments also look great, whether you're in the forests of Kashyyyk or deep inside the guts of a techno-union ship on Geonosis.   Character models exhibit great detail.   The sound effects are extremely vibrant in Republic Commando. The various weapons all have great, punchy sound effects, and there's constant chatter between your squadmates and your adviser, which is both entertaining and useful to the mission at hand. Most of the time, you'll be so engrossed in the sounds of battle that you'll hardly take notice of the music, which borrows from traditional Star Wars themes but also includes some original tracks, ranging from pounding rock to choral pieces that fit the game's militaristic scope.    If you're a fan of Star Wars or action games, Republic Commando is easy to recommend. The single-player aspect combines the elements of this generation's best action games with an added flavor that's all its own. The campaign offers nonstop action from start to finish, making the game easily one of the most enjoyable and memorable Star Wars experiences in recent memory. Our only caveats are that the campaign won't last you long, and the multiplayer is merely competent, which doesn't make the game stand out in a crowded market of first-person shooters. Even with that in mind, the quality single-player experience of Republic Commando should not be missed by anyone who fancies him- or herself an action game aficionado.  


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897,Star Wars Republic Commando ,8.7," A well-paced, albeit brief, single-player campaign will keep adrenaline junkies thrilled from the first dropship landing to the final dust-off.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/7/1/4/18335-53714.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-wars-republic-commando-review/1900-6119261/,pos,"
  When you think of Star Wars, the first two things that likely come to mind are probably Jedi and space combat in X-Wings and TIE fighters. So logically, a Star Wars game that features neither element would feel like it's missing something. Right? As it turns out, Star Wars Republic Commando's laserlike focus on squad-based, military-style combat makes it a refreshing change of pace for Star Wars games. Its well-paced, albeit brief, single-player campaign will keep adrenaline junkies thrilled from the first dropship landing to the final dust-off. A pedestrian and unimaginative multiplayer mode is the only notable flaw in a game that otherwise plays, looks, and sounds fantastic.   You lead an elite squad of commandos on a variety of covert-ops missions.   Star Wars Republic Commando, as the title suggests, puts you in the shoes of an elite trooper during the height of the Clone Wars. You don't have a proper name, aside from ""Three-Eight,"" but nonetheless, you're tasked with commanding Delta squad on tough covert ops stretched across three different campaigns. The three other commandos of Delta are also numbered. They are: 07, 40, and 62. Despite the impersonal monikers, each member of your squad has a very unique and likable personality, and this comes across through the entertaining chatter each will dispense over the course of the game.    While you're a clone, like the millions of other republic soldiers, you and your squadmates have been trained to be a little better than the other photocopies of Jango Fett. This means you'll also be outfitted with better weapons and armor than the regular soldiers you'll be fighting with periodically through the campaign. You'll start out with a standard assault rifle, but over the course of the game, you'll be introduced to special attachments that turn this same weapon into a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher. You'll also be able to pick up weapons from fallen enemies, ranging from heavy repeating blasters to submachine guns to rocket launchers. Should you run low on ammo, there's a laser handgun that recharges and never runs out of shots. But what's more fun than this is getting up close and personal with melee attacks. Melee strikes are powerful, and they count as one-hit kills on most standard opponents. So even if you do have plentiful ammo, you'll find yourself frequently stabbing Geonosian bugs and Trandoshan mercenaries in the face, mainly because it's both fun and extremely effective. Rounding out your armament is an array of grenades, like thermal detonators for soft targets and electrostatic grenades for mechanical enemies.    The interface and gameplay conventions in Republic Commando borrow some of the best elements from excellent games like Metroid Prime, Halo, and Freedom Fighters. There a visor overlay onscreen, for example. This gives you useful information, such as the position and condition of your squadmates, instructions on your next objective, and the obligatory ammo counts and health meters. You can also switch to low-light mode to enhance dark areas. The helmet conceit isn't just an excuse to have all these meters onscreen, however. You'll get some nice graphical effects to remind you that your character does have a bit of glass in front of his face. So you'll see blood spatter on the visor when you engage in close combat. There are also situations where droids or jammers will cause static to appear on your screen, reducing visibility.    Like Halo, you and your squadmates are protected by personal shields that will deflect a certain amount of incoming damage. This lets you step into the line of fire for a while before forcing you to duck back into cover to wait for a recharge. Should you take any real damage, however, there are plentiful bacta stations scattered along your campaign routes that you and your squadmates can use to restore health. Their placement can feel contrived at times, such as on a separatist droid ship (Why, exactly, would droids need a substance designed to restore health to organic life-forms?), but the game even manages to poke fun at itself there. From time to time, your teammates will remark, ""Whoever left that bacta station there deserves a medal!"" In the event that one of your squadmates goes down, he or she's never dead...just incapacitated. You or one of your other squad members can revive your fallen comrade with a device that acts much like a defibrillator, shocking the person up off the ground and returning the person's health status to half. What's great is that the game doesn't end if your own character gets incapacitated. Your screen goes blurry and red--and you can't move--but as long as at least one of your teammates is still up, you can command him to revive you.    Blood spatter on the visor is a great effect in close combat.   Despite that creative aspect to the game, Republic Commando's most important design conceit is your ability to command your squad. There's a single command button to keep things simple, and it can be used on contextually sensitive areas on the battlefield. These include rock piles or debris that can be used as protected sniping positions. Or you may direct a teammate to hack a computer console to open a door or shut off automated defenses. Turrets can be manned by you or your squadmates, and you can also have your team breach doors or blow holes in walls with explosives. You'll also command your teammates to make use of bacta stations or revive fallen comrades on the field. There are also other commands that let you both direct your squad to concentrate fire on a single enemy or form up. The squad command controls work great on either platform, with the PC version getting some commands mapped to function keys for easy access.    It's comforting to note that the inclusion of these squad commands doesn't mean your teammates act like idiots without you ordering them around. On the contrary, they are fairly intelligent about following you around, finding their own cover, and, most importantly, killing the enemy as you encounter him. Certainly, taking advantage of your squad commands and asking your teammates to man turrets or sniping positions makes every encounter easier. But in many cases, you can get by without doing so, at least on the medium difficultly level.   The single-player aspect of Republic Commando takes you on three distinct campaigns during the Clone Wars-era of Star Wars. You'll invade Geonosis, along with the rest of the Republic army, investigate a derelict starship, and assist the wookiees in fending off Trandoshan slavers on the planet of Kashyyyk. The campaigns are paced extremely well throughout the game, offering up new and interesting challenges at just the right junctures. Whether it's hunting down and assassinating a Geonosian lieutenant, fending off endless hordes of super battle droids and droideka, or escorting a highly ranked wookiee, there's never a dull moment in Republic Commando.   The excellent campaign throws a number of different challenges at you.  The missions are heavily scripted to provide exciting pitched battles, some of which will see you as the aggressor and others of which will require you to defend areas from attack. This also means the game is fairly linear. So it's obvious which paths you'll need to be going down, and you won't be doing a whole lot of backtracking. But at the same time, nary a minute goes by without the blasters and rockets firing back and forth at full tilt. The only downer is that the fun doesn't last long, as most players should be able to tear through the campaign in fewer than 10 hours. It sure is an exciting ride while it lasts, though.  The game does include a multiplayer aspect on both the PC and Xbox platforms. Unfortunately, the multiplayer isn't nearly as creative or exciting as the campaign. There are standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag modes, along with an assault mode that's basically the same as one-flag CTF, with one team attempting to carry a special item in to a capture area in the other team's base before the timer runs out. There are eight maps total, which are designed for four to 16 players. Many of these maps, however, are just derived from specific parts of the single-player levels, although there is one special level that includes some zero-gravity areas that provide extra amusement. Those who've played a lot of shooters won't find much in Republic Commando they haven't seen before. So if you were looking at this game specifically hoping for a great new multiplayer experience, you're probably better off sticking with other alternatives.   Fortunately, the presentational values don't disappoint like the multiplayer aspects do. Star Wars Republic Commando looks fantastic on both the PC and Xbox, with excellent character models. The armor on each commando is extremely detailed, so you'll see the dents and dings that you'd expect of battle-worn gear. The game also animates extremely well, with the commando models exhibiting a lot of the same mannerisms (like the way they hold their weapons and breach doorways) you'd expect from highly trained operatives. The location-based damage on all enemies allows for a lot of variety in how they die, and the animators took full advantage of this. You can blow limbs off droids or Geonosian bugs. You can take the head off a droid, and you'll see it fire wildly in a circle before falling over. Hit a Trandoshan in its fuel backpack and he'll rocket wildly into walls and ceilings. Toss an electrostatic grenade at droids and they'll shudder with a blue electric glow before exploding into scrap. The varying environments also look great, whether you're in the forests of Kashyyyk or deep inside the guts of a techno-union ship on Geonosis.  Character models exhibit great detail.  The sound effects are extremely vibrant in Republic Commando. The various weapons all have great, punchy sound effects, and there's constant chatter between your squadmates and your adviser, which is both entertaining and useful to the mission at hand. Most of the time, you'll be so engrossed in the sounds of battle that you'll hardly take notice of the music, which borrows from traditional Star Wars themes but also includes some original tracks, ranging from pounding rock to choral pieces that fit the game's militaristic scope.  If you're a fan of Star Wars or action games, Republic Commando is easy to recommend. The single-player aspect combines the elements of this generation's best action games with an added flavor that's all its own. The campaign offers nonstop action from start to finish, making the game easily one of the most enjoyable and memorable Star Wars experiences in recent memory. Our only caveats are that the campaign won't last you long, and the multiplayer is merely competent, which doesn't make the game stand out in a crowded market of first-person shooters. Even with that in mind, the quality single-player experience of Republic Commando should not be missed by anyone who fancies him- or herself an action game aficionado.   


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898,Tony Hawk's Underground ,8.7," While the classic Tony Hawk gameplay is still fantastic after all this time, the new story mode doesn't make as dramatic of a change as it probably could have.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/9/4/7/18377-53947.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-underground-review/1900-6077493/,pos,"
 When it comes to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, there are some standards that have remained constant throughout the entire series. In the game's career mode, you picked a professional skater and went from level to level, completing goals that really didn't have much to do with being a professional skater. Year after year, the career mode got bigger and bigger, piling on more and more goals and slowly tying them into the pro skater's real-life career. Sure, starting with the second game in the series, you could create your own skater, but that was more of a secondary bonus than anything else, and the focus from year to year was on a series of new moves that kept the gameplay fresh and made the next installment in the series just as addictive as the last. This year, rather than focus on replacing the levels and adding new layers of depth to the gameplay, Activision and Neversoft have tried to turn the entire series upside down, taking the focus off of the skaters who are already professionals and instead putting the spotlight on an unknown skater and his quest for fame, which takes him from the mean streets of New Jersey to the heights of skateboarding stardom. While the classic Tony Hawk gameplay is present, and still fantastic after all this time, the new story mode doesn't make as dramatic of a change as it probably could have.  For the first time in the Tony Hawk universe, the game has difficulty settings.  So the career mode from the Pro Skater games has been morphed into a story mode in Underground. Since the story relies on you being an unknown, it requires you to use a created skater. The first order of business, when starting the game, is to create a skater, though you can go back and change your skater's look at any time. The options for your skater are pretty good, with a lot of different parts to resize and texture, and accessories to place, like shorts, shirts, hats, glasses, and so on. The PlayStation 2 version of the game takes the personalization one step further by letting you map a photo of your face onto your skater. Once you've created a skater, the game puts you on the streets of New Jersey as just some skater kid without a lot of money to his name. Chad Muska comes to town to skate a demo, and one of your goals is to impress Chad. He recommends that you get sponsored by your local shop, and your quest for fame and glory sets off from there. As you proceed, you'll get into wacky hijinks and travel the world, but you'll mostly learn to hate your ""good buddy"" Eric, who tags along for the ride, annoying voice work and all.  The story mode is where we encounter Tony Hawk's Underground's first real problem. The game has been redesigned to be all about you, as this customizable skater rising to fame. It's been redesigned to tell a story, but the story it tells isn't written particularly well. It has its ups and downs, but most of the game's goals don't tie into the story at all, and the game doesn't really make effective use of the long list of professional skaters in the game, which has expanded to include Arto Saari and Paul Rodriguez. Mike Vallely, who appeared in Tony Hawk 4 as a hidden skater, now appears on the regular roster as well. The pro skaters pop up rarely in the story, so in most cases they're merely found skating around in levels, offering extra special trick slots if you can complete their challenges.  Skaters are upgraded by satisfactorily executing stat-specific challenges rather than by being awarded stat points for completing goals.  In between each of the game's 27 chapters, you'll advance the story a bit, but the story doesn't have very many interesting twists and turns, and it doesn't end in a particularly satisfying fashion, either. While the concept of following a skater from the bottom to the top is a great idea, the dialogue here could have been better, and the game's objectives should have been integrated a little tighter with that story. As it stands, the game essentially has you attempting to accomplish the typical sorts of goals that the Pro Skater series is known for--like collecting a lot of items and doing a lot of specific tricks. You'll collect scraps of sheet meter, Hawaiian leis, doughnuts, stickers, and lots of other little trinkets along the way. You'll also have to perform specific tricks in certain situations, reach specific score plateaus, and achieve other typical Tony Hawk-style goals. As you become a sponsored amateur and, eventually, a bona fide pro skater, you'll partake in judged competitions. These are two-out-of-three timed runs, and they work roughly identically to the competition levels that have been in the series since the beginning.  There are also goals that don't really require much skating. For example, you'll be asked to drive a car on numerous occasions, and you'll even hop off your board and do some light, Tomb Raider-styler platforming by climbing up onto buildings, shimmying power lines, and so on. While hopping off the board has value as a combo expanding gameplay element, the driving in the game is ill-conceived. The cars look and control pretty poorly, and the goals involving vehicles seem like filler, much like some of the minigames--like hitting baseballs with your skateboard--found in Tony Hawk 4.   For the first time in the Tony Hawk universe, the new game has difficulty settings. Four, to be exact, and each setting does different things to the game's goals. Time and score limits are the most obvious changes, as the easy setting practically takes away most of the game's goal timers, while the ""difficult"" setting forces you to act fast. There's even a supereasy setting that simplifies the game's physics a bit in an attempt to make it extrasimple for new players to get into the game. On the game's normal setting, an experienced Tony Hawk player should be able to bust through the entire story in well under 10 hours. The hardest difficulty setting does make the game a little rougher, so anyone who has played the heck out of Tony Hawk 4 should simply start right at the top to ensure a decent challenge. Different things are unlocked at the end depending on which difficulty you're playing.  Like the last two Tony Hawk games, Underground has support for online games on the PlayStation 2.  Each installment in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series has added new gameplay elements that expand the system's overall potential by allowing you to use more and more tricks and items in combos. Tony Hawk's Underground picks up where the Pro Skater series left off by adding the aforementioned ability to get off of your board. This is mostly used for a few on-foot goals, but you can also use it in combos. Hopping off your board midcombo causes a small meter to appear and slowly drain. This is your run meter, and you need to get back on your board and back into a traditional combo before it expires to keep your combo going. This is a cool addition because it allows you to hop off and completely change direction, which is helpful. You can also execute wall plants and wall pushes, which also add new ways to use the game's terrain for combos.  Aside from these additions, the game plays roughly the same as Tony Hawk 4. The spine transfer, manual, and revert have all made it over intact, and the combo structure for moving from one grind, lip trick, or manual to another of the same type works just as it did in Tony Hawk 4. Some new tricks have also been added, though most of these are wackier-looking specials. The gameplay additions are pretty cool, and even though the changes might not be as revolutionary as the manual or revert were in their respective days, they freshen up the game, and it continues to have great open-ended, combo-based gameplay. Skater stats are handled differently in Underground. Instead of giving you points as you complete goals, the game has little extra challenges in the stats menu. Completing these challenges--like grinding for 20 seconds or executing three cavemans in one combo--will add a point to the appropriate statistic. This makes improving your skater feel more natural, though it also has the side effect of removing one of the key rewards you'd get for completing goals in the previous games.  The level design is quite different in Tony Hawk's Underground. Not only are the levels bigger, but they're also designed in a slightly more realistic fashion. The basic philosophy appears to be that each level has a series of really great skate spots, but they don't tend to overlap. Parts of the level that aren't filled with ramps, bowls, and other such items tend to be very grind-friendly, and the rails seem like they were designed to carry you from one skate spot to the next. The urban environments also contain a lot of hidden spots to skate on. Many rooftops will contain bowls, and you can even go inside some of the buildings to find even more skate-worthy material.  The level design is quite different in Tony Hawk's Underground.  To go with the increased focus on create-a-skater, the game also lets you create plenty of other things. The level creator has been expanded in size and scope, giving you far more control over the design and complexity of your levels. You can even create goals and custom goal text for your levels. The game also lets you create your own tricks. Though you're limited to existing animations, you can tweak them quite a bit, adding flips, rolls, and the ability to use different trick animations together to create new-looking tricks. The tricks are scored automatically based on their complexity. Additionally, you eventually earn the ability to create your own skateboard by slapping on a few layers of existing graphics. The PlayStation 2 version's online support comes with the ability to upload and download this custom content, giving you the ability to try out other players' levels and goals.  Obviously, creating a skater is the most important custom feature, especially on the PlayStation 2 version, thanks to its support for custom face textures. The process to put your face on one of the game's skaters is a simple one. You must take a clean, straight-on, shadowless photo of your face. Then you send that shot in via e-mail or by using a cell phone camera. Shortly after sending in the shot, you'll receive an e-mail reply with an eight-character code. You then take that code to the game and enter it. The game then gets online and downloads the shot. From there, you need to line up the face's points to match those of the polygonal model, and you should ensure that the skin tone of the face texture matches the rest of the body. Then you can adjust the face's shape and size to get a more realistic look. Though this feature is a gimmicky one, it's very cool and actually does its job of making the game a little more personal.   Overall, Tony Hawk's Underground is a great-looking game. The levels are large and colorful, and the trick animation is as good as it's ever been. The game runs at a high speed, and, depending on which version you're playing, the frame rate is either completely smooth or mostly smooth. That said, it does have its rough spots. The skater models look fantastic from a distance, but up close they really don't look so hot. This is the same problem the series has had for the past two years, really, as the people you encounter for goals still look a little weird. Only now, you're seeing most of these models--or slightly enhanced versions of them--in the story mode cutscenes, so you get to see a whole lot more of them.  No Tony Hawk game would be complete without unlockable items.  Most of the same gameplay sounds from previous entries in the Pro Skater series return in Underground, but since they perfectly fit the action, that's not much of a complaint. The game also has new sound effects, mostly for grinding different types of surfaces. You'll hear the trucks of your board clinking off of rails differently, and grinding power lines causes an electrical zapping sound. The game has a lot more speech than previous Tony Hawk games, and most of it is done pretty well. Your friend Eric gets a little annoying over time, but that's about it. Even the pro skaters do a decent job with their few lines.  The soundtrack in Underground is large and broken up by genre. This allows you to turn off specific genres of music if you're so inclined. You can also enable or disable any specific track. While the quality of the music is something best left up to your own likes and dislikes, the game covers a lot of ground, and includes acts like KISS, Deltron 3030, Murs, RA the Rugged Man, Bracket, NOFX, The Clash, and Sublime. More than 70 songs are included in all.  When it comes to comparing the three versions of the game, the Xbox may look the best, but the PlayStation 2 version wins due to its inclusion of online play and face mapping. The PlayStation 2 also takes the lead in the control department, as the timing-based moves of the Tony Hawk series simply work better on the PlayStation 2 controller, though the Xbox version isn't far behind. The stock GameCube controller's small D pad makes it a bit tougher to use than the other two, but the game remains playable on all three consoles. Graphically, the Xbox version is the best, as it contains the smoothest textures and frame rate. The PlayStation 2 version looks great for a PS2 game, but the frame rate tends to get a little jumpy here and there, and you'll see some slight tearing when you turn quickly in heavily populated environments. The GameCube version may have a slightly cleaner look than the PS2 version, but the frame rate is even more random here, which sort of gets in the way of the gameplay. On the sound side, the Xbox version sounds a little crisper than the other two, and it also has custom soundtrack support.  No Tony Hawk game would be complete without unlockable items, and Underground fulfills its hidden-item obligation by offering at least three hidden skaters and four unlockable levels, three of which are from a previous version of the game. While in the past, the hidden skaters have felt like a cool bonus tribute, one of the hidden skaters, the new hidden level, and the video that plays when you unlock that level feels more like a marketing tie-in for a recently released concert DVD than like a cool extra. Given the game's increased use of product placement--you're given the ability to put logos for several nonskateboarding company sponsors on your clothes, and a few goals take place directly in front of prominently placed logos for a fast-food chain--this isn't really all that surprising. That said, fans of the band that provides a good chunk of the unlockable content probably won't mind one bit, though it certainly isn't as universally interesting for its time as, say, Darth Maul was from Tony Hawk 3.  The new story mode isn't that great, but the gameplay itself definitely is.  Like the last two Tony Hawk games, Underground has support for online games on the PlayStation 2. The modes found in Tony Hawk 4 all return here, including score competitions, best combo battles, graffiti, goal attack, and more. The new mode is called fireball, and it attempts to turn your eight-player matches into a deathmatch of sorts by giving you the ability to fire projectiles at the other players. You're given a health meter, and the last player standing wins. The online option in Underground has been expanded, a bit, extending the profile option found in Tony Hawk 4 to include stat tracking. The game also tracks high scores for all of the game's levels, which is a good way to see how you stack up against other players. Overall, the online support in the PS2 version is a nice, fun addition that brings a lot of replay value to the game. All versions of the game also have a two-player split-screen mode, and the Xbox version of the game has support for LAN play via system link.  In some ways, Tony Hawk's Underground is a bit of a disappointment. The way the game attempts to focus on the story, yet can't deliver a particularly interesting story, really holds the game back, and the game doesn't feel as different from the previous Tony Hawk games as it could. Even with that problem, fans of the series will certainly find a lot to like here, and the different difficulty levels make the game more accessible to a wider range of players. Most importantly, the core gameplay is still extremely entertaining, and some of the new additions, like being able to get off your board and execute wall plants, do make for some interesting, new possibilities. PlayStation 2 owners will get an extra kick out of the cool face-mapping feature and online play as well. All things considered, Tony Hawk's Underground is another great installment in the franchise. 

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'.']",0.07103728855750426,0.4430225247947626
899,Tony Hawk's Underground ,8.7," While the classic Tony Hawk gameplay is still fantastic after all this time, the new story mode doesn't make as dramatic of a change as it probably could have.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/9/4/7/18377-53947.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-underground-review/1900-6077497/,pos,"
 When it comes to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, there are some standards that have remained constant throughout the entire series. In the game's career mode, you picked a professional skater and went from level to level, completing goals that really didn't have much to do with being a professional skater. Year after year, the career mode got bigger and bigger, piling on more and more goals and slowly tying them into the pro skater's real-life career. Sure, starting with the second game in the series, you could create your own skater, but that was more of a secondary bonus than anything else, and the focus from year to year was on a series of new moves that kept the gameplay fresh and made the next installment in the series just as addictive as the last. This year, rather than focus on replacing the levels and adding new layers of depth to the gameplay, Activision and Neversoft have tried to turn the entire series upside down, taking the focus off of the skaters who are already professionals and instead putting the spotlight on an unknown skater and his quest for fame, which takes him from the mean streets of New Jersey to the heights of skateboarding stardom. While the classic Tony Hawk gameplay is present, and still fantastic after all this time, the new story mode doesn't make as dramatic of a change as it probably could have.  For the first time in the Tony Hawk universe, the game has difficulty settings.  So the career mode from the Pro Skater games has been morphed into a story mode in Underground. Since the story relies on you being an unknown, it requires you to use a created skater. The first order of business, when starting the game, is to create a skater, though you can go back and change your skater's look at any time. The options for your skater are pretty good, with a lot of different parts to resize and texture, and accessories to place, like shorts, shirts, hats, glasses, and so on. The PlayStation 2 version of the game takes the personalization one step further by letting you map a photo of your face onto your skater. Once you've created a skater, the game puts you on the streets of New Jersey as just some skater kid without a lot of money to his name. Chad Muska comes to town to skate a demo, and one of your goals is to impress Chad. He recommends that you get sponsored by your local shop, and your quest for fame and glory sets off from there. As you proceed, you'll get into wacky hijinks and travel the world, but you'll mostly learn to hate your ""good buddy"" Eric, who tags along for the ride, annoying voice work and all.  The story mode is where we encounter Tony Hawk's Underground's first real problem. The game has been redesigned to be all about you, as this customizable skater rising to fame. It's been redesigned to tell a story, but the story it tells isn't written particularly well. It has its ups and downs, but most of the game's goals don't tie into the story at all, and the game doesn't really make effective use of the long list of professional skaters in the game, which has expanded to include Arto Saari and Paul Rodriguez. Mike Vallely, who appeared in Tony Hawk 4 as a hidden skater, now appears on the regular roster as well. The pro skaters pop up rarely in the story, so in most cases they're merely found skating around in levels, offering extra special trick slots if you can complete their challenges.  Skaters are upgraded by satisfactorily executing stat-specific challenges rather than by being awarded stat points for completing goals.  In between each of the game's 27 chapters, you'll advance the story a bit, but the story doesn't have very many interesting twists and turns, and it doesn't end in a particularly satisfying fashion, either. While the concept of following a skater from the bottom to the top is a great idea, the dialogue here could have been better, and the game's objectives should have been integrated a little tighter with that story. As it stands, the game essentially has you attempting to accomplish the typical sorts of goals that the Pro Skater series is known for--like collecting a lot of items and doing a lot of specific tricks. You'll collect scraps of sheet meter, Hawaiian leis, doughnuts, stickers, and lots of other little trinkets along the way. You'll also have to perform specific tricks in certain situations, reach specific score plateaus, and achieve other typical Tony Hawk-style goals. As you become a sponsored amateur and, eventually, a bona fide pro skater, you'll partake in judged competitions. These are two-out-of-three timed runs, and they work roughly identically to the competition levels that have been in the series since the beginning.  There are also goals that don't really require much skating. For example, you'll be asked to drive a car on numerous occasions, and you'll even hop off your board and do some light, Tomb Raider-styler platforming by climbing up onto buildings, shimmying power lines, and so on. While hopping off the board has value as a combo expanding gameplay element, the driving in the game is ill-conceived. The cars look and control pretty poorly, and the goals involving vehicles seem like filler, much like some of the minigames--like hitting baseballs with your skateboard--found in Tony Hawk 4.   For the first time in the Tony Hawk universe, the new game has difficulty settings. Four, to be exact, and each setting does different things to the game's goals. Time and score limits are the most obvious changes, as the easy setting practically takes away most of the game's goal timers, while the ""difficult"" setting forces you to act fast. There's even a supereasy setting that simplifies the game's physics a bit in an attempt to make it extrasimple for new players to get into the game. On the game's normal setting, an experienced Tony Hawk player should be able to bust through the entire story in well under 10 hours. The hardest difficulty setting does make the game a little rougher, so anyone who has played the heck out of Tony Hawk 4 should simply start right at the top to ensure a decent challenge. Different things are unlocked at the end depending on which difficulty you're playing.  Like the last two Tony Hawk games, Underground has support for online games on the PlayStation 2.  Each installment in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series has added new gameplay elements that expand the system's overall potential by allowing you to use more and more tricks and items in combos. Tony Hawk's Underground picks up where the Pro Skater series left off by adding the aforementioned ability to get off of your board. This is mostly used for a few on-foot goals, but you can also use it in combos. Hopping off your board midcombo causes a small meter to appear and slowly drain. This is your run meter, and you need to get back on your board and back into a traditional combo before it expires to keep your combo going. This is a cool addition because it allows you to hop off and completely change direction, which is helpful. You can also execute wall plants and wall pushes, which also add new ways to use the game's terrain for combos.  Aside from these additions, the game plays roughly the same as Tony Hawk 4. The spine transfer, manual, and revert have all made it over intact, and the combo structure for moving from one grind, lip trick, or manual to another of the same type works just as it did in Tony Hawk 4. Some new tricks have also been added, though most of these are wackier-looking specials. The gameplay additions are pretty cool, and even though the changes might not be as revolutionary as the manual or revert were in their respective days, they freshen up the game, and it continues to have great open-ended, combo-based gameplay. Skater stats are handled differently in Underground. Instead of giving you points as you complete goals, the game has little extra challenges in the stats menu. Completing these challenges--like grinding for 20 seconds or executing three cavemans in one combo--will add a point to the appropriate statistic. This makes improving your skater feel more natural, though it also has the side effect of removing one of the key rewards you'd get for completing goals in the previous games.  The level design is quite different in Tony Hawk's Underground. Not only are the levels bigger, but they're also designed in a slightly more realistic fashion. The basic philosophy appears to be that each level has a series of really great skate spots, but they don't tend to overlap. Parts of the level that aren't filled with ramps, bowls, and other such items tend to be very grind-friendly, and the rails seem like they were designed to carry you from one skate spot to the next. The urban environments also contain a lot of hidden spots to skate on. Many rooftops will contain bowls, and you can even go inside some of the buildings to find even more skate-worthy material.  The level design is quite different in Tony Hawk's Underground.  To go with the increased focus on create-a-skater, the game also lets you create plenty of other things. The level creator has been expanded in size and scope, giving you far more control over the design and complexity of your levels. You can even create goals and custom goal text for your levels. The game also lets you create your own tricks. Though you're limited to existing animations, you can tweak them quite a bit, adding flips, rolls, and the ability to use different trick animations together to create new-looking tricks. The tricks are scored automatically based on their complexity. Additionally, you eventually earn the ability to create your own skateboard by slapping on a few layers of existing graphics. The PlayStation 2 version's online support comes with the ability to upload and download this custom content, giving you the ability to try out other players' levels and goals.  Obviously, creating a skater is the most important custom feature, especially on the PlayStation 2 version, thanks to its support for custom face textures. The process to put your face on one of the game's skaters is a simple one. You must take a clean, straight-on, shadowless photo of your face. Then you send that shot in via e-mail or by using a cell phone camera. Shortly after sending in the shot, you'll receive an e-mail reply with an eight-character code. You then take that code to the game and enter it. The game then gets online and downloads the shot. From there, you need to line up the face's points to match those of the polygonal model, and you should ensure that the skin tone of the face texture matches the rest of the body. Then you can adjust the face's shape and size to get a more realistic look. Though this feature is a gimmicky one, it's very cool and actually does its job of making the game a little more personal.   Overall, Tony Hawk's Underground is a great-looking game. The levels are large and colorful, and the trick animation is as good as it's ever been. The game runs at a high speed, and, depending on which version you're playing, the frame rate is either completely smooth or mostly smooth. That said, it does have its rough spots. The skater models look fantastic from a distance, but up close they really don't look so hot. This is the same problem the series has had for the past two years, really, as the people you encounter for goals still look a little weird. Only now, you're seeing most of these models--or slightly enhanced versions of them--in the story mode cutscenes, so you get to see a whole lot more of them.  No Tony Hawk game would be complete without unlockable items.  Most of the same gameplay sounds from previous entries in the Pro Skater series return in Underground, but since they perfectly fit the action, that's not much of a complaint. The game also has new sound effects, mostly for grinding different types of surfaces. You'll hear the trucks of your board clinking off of rails differently, and grinding power lines causes an electrical zapping sound. The game has a lot more speech than previous Tony Hawk games, and most of it is done pretty well. Your friend Eric gets a little annoying over time, but that's about it. Even the pro skaters do a decent job with their few lines.  The soundtrack in Underground is large and broken up by genre. This allows you to turn off specific genres of music if you're so inclined. You can also enable or disable any specific track. While the quality of the music is something best left up to your own likes and dislikes, the game covers a lot of ground, and includes acts like KISS, Deltron 3030, Murs, RA the Rugged Man, Bracket, NOFX, The Clash, and Sublime. More than 70 songs are included in all.  When it comes to comparing the three versions of the game, the Xbox may look the best, but the PlayStation 2 version wins due to its inclusion of online play and face mapping. The PlayStation 2 also takes the lead in the control department, as the timing-based moves of the Tony Hawk series simply work better on the PlayStation 2 controller, though the Xbox version isn't far behind. The stock GameCube controller's small D pad makes it a bit tougher to use than the other two, but the game remains playable on all three consoles. Graphically, the Xbox version is the best, as it contains the smoothest textures and frame rate. The PlayStation 2 version looks great for a PS2 game, but the frame rate tends to get a little jumpy here and there, and you'll see some slight tearing when you turn quickly in heavily populated environments. The GameCube version may have a slightly cleaner look than the PS2 version, but the frame rate is even more random here, which sort of gets in the way of the gameplay. On the sound side, the Xbox version sounds a little crisper than the other two, and it also has custom soundtrack support.  No Tony Hawk game would be complete without unlockable items, and Underground fulfills its hidden-item obligation by offering at least three hidden skaters and four unlockable levels, three of which are from a previous version of the game. While in the past, the hidden skaters have felt like a cool bonus tribute, one of the hidden skaters, the new hidden level, and the video that plays when you unlock that level feels more like a marketing tie-in for a recently released concert DVD than like a cool extra. Given the game's increased use of product placement--you're given the ability to put logos for several nonskateboarding company sponsors on your clothes, and a few goals take place directly in front of prominently placed logos for a fast-food chain--this isn't really all that surprising. That said, fans of the band that provides a good chunk of the unlockable content probably won't mind one bit, though it certainly isn't as universally interesting for its time as, say, Darth Maul was from Tony Hawk 3.  The new story mode isn't that great, but the gameplay itself definitely is.  Like the last two Tony Hawk games, Underground has support for online games on the PlayStation 2. The modes found in Tony Hawk 4 all return here, including score competitions, best combo battles, graffiti, goal attack, and more. The new mode is called fireball, and it attempts to turn your eight-player matches into a deathmatch of sorts by giving you the ability to fire projectiles at the other players. You're given a health meter, and the last player standing wins. The online option in Underground has been expanded, a bit, extending the profile option found in Tony Hawk 4 to include stat tracking. The game also tracks high scores for all of the game's levels, which is a good way to see how you stack up against other players. Overall, the online support in the PS2 version is a nice, fun addition that brings a lot of replay value to the game. All versions of the game also have a two-player split-screen mode, and the Xbox version of the game has support for LAN play via system link.  In some ways, Tony Hawk's Underground is a bit of a disappointment. The way the game attempts to focus on the story, yet can't deliver a particularly interesting story, really holds the game back, and the game doesn't feel as different from the previous Tony Hawk games as it could. Even with that problem, fans of the series will certainly find a lot to like here, and the different difficulty levels make the game more accessible to a wider range of players. Most importantly, the core gameplay is still extremely entertaining, and some of the new additions, like being able to get off your board and execute wall plants, do make for some interesting, new possibilities. PlayStation 2 owners will get an extra kick out of the cool face-mapping feature and online play as well. All things considered, Tony Hawk's Underground is another great installment in the franchise. 

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900,Kingdom Hearts II ,8.7," Kingdom Hearts II is a long, cameo-infused joyride that improves upon the original and manages to be quite entertaining in spite of a few gameplay flaws.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/5/7/2211157-box_kh2.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kingdom-hearts-ii-review/1900-6146742/,pos,"
  Kingdom Hearts II is the long-awaited sequel to the 2002 Disney/Square collaboration Kingdom Hearts. Picking up the story where the former game--and the interim Game Boy Advance release, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories--left off, Kingdom Hearts II guides you through a series of Disney-themed worlds as you encounter a cast of characters that reads straight off the credits of some of the most popular Square games and Disney movies. Though the formula in KHII is quite familiar, much of the gameplay has changed, and it's safe to say that it's been for the better. Fans of the original game and of Disney/Square properties in general will fall in love with this game quite easily, though a few problems with the basic gameplay prevent Kingdom Hearts II from being whole-heartedly recommendable to everyone else.   Goofy is actually quite the sage in this game.   In KHII you reprise the role of Sora, a young boy who happens to have just the right mojo for wielding the keyblade. The keyblade is a weapon that is, aptly, useful both as a key to unlock other worlds and as a method for destroying the heartless, a species of monster that is taking over the otherwise peaceful Disney lands at the behest of Sleeping Beauty's very evil Maleficent. The crux of the game has you, Sora, traveling from one land to another with companions Donald Duck and Goofy to dispel the heartless and to rescue friends of yours that are missing. Along the way, you'll join forces with the heroes and heroines of Square, Disney, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. For people enthused with these properties, Kingdom Hearts II is a wonderful experience in which every character interaction gives you the opportunity to live through some of the magic moments of these movies and games.    As an action role-playing game, Kingdom Hearts II gives you a certain amount of freedom, both in determining your characters' attributes and in resigning yourself to standard combat. You'll be able to do a little bit of both or a lot of one or the other, depending on your preferences. Seasoned role-playing gamers will be able to spend plenty of time perfecting the allocation of their attributes (or abilities), synthesizing new items, and grinding to level up, while those less interested in the role-playing aspects can breeze through the main gameplay without paying much attention to statistics.     While the ease of gameplay customization is one of the game's greatest strengths, the ease of the game in general is surely its largest weakness. The main quest, which clocks in at over 40 hours of gameplay, is never difficult. You can get through almost the entire game without dying, save for a few challenging boss battles at the end of the game. This is an improvement upon the original Kingdom Hearts, in which the difficulty occurred in moments of backtracking, tediousness, and confusion. But because there's no difficulty of any kind (at the default difficulty setting), getting through the gameplay in Kingdom Hearts II never gives you a satisfying sense of accomplishment. The rhythm minigames found in various levels, presumably included to offer gameplay variation, are mind-numbingly easy, often requiring only one button press over and over (when prompted, no less) to get through.     The game's length and its devotion to character exposition are its saving grace. The lack of satisfaction from beating a particularly challenging gameplay segment is made up for in spades by the continually changing cast of characters and the monumental time you spend interacting with them. You don't have to be familiar with everything related to Disney, Square, or even the previous games in the series to enjoy Kingdom Hearts II, but familiarity will make the experience more enjoyable.    Haley Joel Osment and Sora have both matured for the sequel.   To that end, Square and Disney have brought on board a tremendous voice-acting cast, including the now pubescent Haley Joel Osment to reprise the role of (now pubescent) Sora, the commanding voice actor Christopher Lee, and many of the actors responsible for voicing their Disney movie counterparts, including Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean, Ming Na as the voice of Mulan, James Woods as Hades, and the list goes on and on. When the actor responsible for the original Disney voice isn't used, then the actor who voiced that character in other iterations (like the television series or straight-to-video sequels) is used, and in the absence of both, the voice is still almost indiscernible from the ones you're likely familiar with. There are one or two bad apples among the bunch (like the screechy Princess Jasmine), and the Square characters didn't get quite the same treatment as the Disney characters did, but for a game with as many voices as Kingdom Hearts II, the overall quality is still excellent. Further enhancing the aural experience is the game's superb soundtrack, which consists of a fair share of original music and remixes of movie themes. Large portions of Disney songs--from The Little Mermaid, for example--make their way into the rhythm games on the Atlantica level and are in fact the minigames' redeeming quality. If you're familiar with the songs from these franchises, you'll no doubt be humming along to them in this game, a tribute to how well the music was adapted and integrated into the gameplay.    Most of the Disney worlds take you through the plot of the corresponding movies, so the immersion is enhanced by dialogue that is often taken directly from the source material. In one scene, Captain Barbossa declares to Elizabeth Swann, ""You best start believin' in ghost stories. You're in one!"" and then takes a swig from a bottle of wine, which you can see go all the way down his zombie-pirate chest--it's a scene that should be more than a little familiar to anyone who has even seen a trailer of Pirates of the Caribbean. The Square characters, which don't have the luxury of being a part of an established movie plot, are appropriately aloof as a result. And in one moment, formerly intimidating Final Fantasy VIII antagonist Seifer declares, ""We totally owned you lamers!"" which is just about as horrible as it sounds. Fortunately, there's much more Disney influence than Square, and for most of the game you'll feel like you're there participating in the plotlines of your favorite Disney movies.       Where the Square influence lies is in the Final Fantasy-style gameplay mechanics, which consist of not only melee and magic attacks, but limit breaks and summons as well. The basic combat button lets you hash out combos with the keyblade, with the occasional time-sensitive action button interspersed. As you play through the game, naturally leveling up your characters, you'll be able to allocate ability points to a number of different actions and support activities that you unlock along the way. An action might impact the way your combat works, and a support activity might make it easier for you to collect the orbs and munny (the game's currency) that spill forth from the enemies. For Sora, at least, you'll almost always have more possible abilities than points to facilitate them all, so careful selection of your abilities will allow you to create a character that is predominantly melee, magic-based, or supporting, for example. You can also change these on a whim (unless you're in combat), so you can play around with your abilities until you find the winning combination.    The cameos are one of the best things about Kingdom Hearts II, keeping every moment quite exciting.   Limit breaks are moves made in conjunction with your other partymates, and it's the unique limits of the guest characters you team up with that make the combat diverse and interesting. The limit drains your magic power, along with your other magic spells, including cure, which uses up the entire bar, so you must carefully manage your magic among your party. Since melee combat is almost always the most effective, you'll probably just concentrate on that and throw in a limit or a cure whenever your magic bar has filled up again. As you play through the game, you'll also be able to discover summon entities. Since the summons from the previous game (Mushu and Simba) now have their own levels, you'll be working with new (and mostly useless, with the exception of the ever-adorable Stitch) summons for this game.     Also new is the concept of drives, which offer another dynamic to the gameplay and which share a meter with the summon spells so that your resources aren't spread too thin. A drive move will combine you with another character (like Voltron) so that you become a more-powerful creation with a unique move set. It's definitely neat, but it isn't enough. Despite all the cool new spells and their usefulness against some of the more-imposing enemies, you will spend the majority of the game hammering on the main attack button, not because it's the only thing you can do, but because it's the most efficient. The game's bosses, of which there are many, are all interesting and well conceived, but they rarely require a different approach than the normal enemies. This is a shame, because the latter half of the game, which consists of a great number of boss fights, would have been more interesting if the bosses had been much different from the regular gameplay.    When you're not fighting, you're traveling from one area to another. The worlds you explore are all extremely linear, much more so than those in the last Kingdom Hearts game, and you'll find it almost impossible to get lost. The levels aren't that large--most of them consist of no more than 10 different locations--but the frequency of cinematics and timed fights makes each level take a couple of hours. Plus, there's always plenty of hidden stuff to collect from the many chests peppered throughout the game, so you can keep busy within those small environments. To travel between the worlds, you must make use of the gummi ship, which was one of the weakest gameplay components in the original Kingdom Hearts. The gummi ship levels have greatly improved, but they still consist of the same on-rails flight shooting. There's a reason to replay the gummi ship areas--either to collect treasure or to just play around with the rich create-a-ship builder--but as with the first game, there's something distinctly unimpressive about the gummi ship levels, and it's likely that after you play through each level once, thereby unlocking it, you won't find reason to go through again.   The world environments are beautiful and extraordinarily well detailed.   The regular worlds that you travel to are much more compelling than the gummi ship worlds, both in features and in appearance. Each one is perfectly themed to its source movie, all the way down to the heads-up display that you see on the screen. Though the graphics might not be the best seen to date on the PlayStation 2, their variety, and the exactness with which each one is executed, makes the game visually impressive all the same. Considering that you're often going from tightly knit environments to sprawling boss battles against giant foes, there's a great range to the game's appearance, making it, at the very least, always interesting to look at.    Kingdom Hearts II has made some big steps in the four years since the original Kingdom Hearts game was released. Significant changes to both the camera system and the basic combat allow you to play through the game without being frustrated by either, and the gameplay is, for the most part, either enjoyable or inconsequential. The game offers an extremely long gameplay experience that takes you through an absolute whirlwind of Disney and Square franchises, letting you interact with virtually every character you could conceive of joining up forces with or fighting against. This is effectively an ode to its source material, and to that end, Kingdom Hearts II does not disappoint. Yet there's still something about Kingdom Hearts II that doesn't make it universally appealing. The mechanics are secondary to the story and the experience, and you'll find yourself often mashing your way through the easy gameplay in an effort to witness more of the game. Though the fusion of Square and Disney--which at one time might have been thought a surprising combination--has once again been successful in Kingdom Hearts II, the fusion of the concept and the gameplay falls a tiny bit short of being everything you'd hope for in a Kingdom Hearts sequel. Nevertheless, there's enough to the game both in depth and in story to make it entertaining for a long time.  


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901,Katamari Damacy ,8.7," Katamari Damacy is far and away one of the strangest, most original games to come along in years.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/2/3/2214823-box_katamarid.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/katamari-damacy-review/1900-6107946/,pos,"
 Katamari Damacy is far and away one of the strangest, most original games to come along in years. The gameplay concept, the visual style, the soundtrack, even the backstory are all conceived and executed with such a unique flavor that, when presented as a whole, it's difficult not to be drawn in by all the weird little idiosyncrasies. It's not a complex game, nor is it especially challenging, or long. It is, however, unapologetically surreal, which can make it tough to look away from, and its toylike gameplay model makes for a surprisingly satisfying experience.  In the Japanese version, the King of All Cosmos was a drunk; here, he's just deeply eccentric.  There have been many a puzzle game that has laid down a flimsy backstory for the sake of context, but none have had a flimsy concept as totally strange as Katamari Damacy. It seems that the King of All Cosmos, a colossal celestial being who is equal parts Hunter S. Thompson and the King of Spain, and who diligently speaks using the royal We, got a little ""crazy"" one night and woke up the next morning with a headache and the realization that he had lost all the stars. Now, the King of All Cosmos is a real think-outside-the-box kind of monarch, so he sends you, the Prince of All Cosmos (we can only assume this is his full name--the King only ever refers to him as Prince), to Earth to collect enough stuff to create a whole new set of stars by rolling up anything you can find into a big ball. Though the game takes a few liberties with the translation, the localization is really solid, and the writing for the King of All Cosmos is consistently weird and funny, and you definitely get a keen sense of him as a character.  While the King of All Cosmos is incomprehensibly large, the Prince is only a few inches high, and when you start the game, you are given a katamari (which roughly translates to ""clump"" in Japanese) not much bigger than yourself. You're ordered to roll it around the world, collecting anything you can to increase its size. Basically, you stick stuff to your katamari just by rolling over it, and almost everything in the world around you is fair game--the catch is that your katamari has to be big enough to take all these items on.  Using the analog sticks exclusively, you'll roll the katamari around with tanklike controls. Pushing both sticks up moves the katamari forward, pushing both sticks down moves it backward, and pushing one stick up and one stick down will cause it to turn. There are a few other tricks, such as moving both sticks up and down really fast to gain a quick boost, or pushing in on both sticks to hop on the other side of the katamari and quickly change directions--but this is basically all you'll need to know in order to control it. However, controlling it well is a more nuanced thing. The shapes of the things you collect will affect the overall shape of your katamari, thus affecting how it actually rolls. So, if you roll over a bunch of pencils or a ladder or some carrots, it can make your going a bit more challenging.  First, the living room. Now, the world!  Most of the levels in Katamari Damacy are simple races against the clock--you have to make a katamari of a specific size before the clock runs out. However, there are certain constellations that require a katamari to be built out of specific stuff that corresponds to the shape of the constellation. For example, Pisces requires you to collect a number of fish, while you'll need to find the biggest bear that you can to create Ursa Major. As you progress, the scope of what you're rolling up gets bigger and bigger. The game starts you off inside a Japanese home, then moves you out into the yard, then into town, and it just keeps going from there.  Once you complete the final level, which takes the game's steadily increasing scale to a gratifying extreme, there are a few formal pieces that can keep you coming back. Many of the levels contain a royal present for the Prince, which, if collected, can be worn by the Prince. The presents include odd random bric-a-brac like scarves, headphones, and championship wrestling belts, though sadly, you can't adorn him with more than one of the gifts at a time. There is also a split-screen versus mode, where two players race against time and each other to build a bigger katamari. This mode isn't nearly as engaging as the single-player game because it takes place in the same small arena, effectively removing the grand sense of scale that makes the game so cool in the first place.  Katamari Damacy has a formidable amount of replay value, though, simply because the whole experience is so much fun, and each level is so crammed with tiny details that you don't feel like you've seen it all just by playing through it once. Finishing the single-player game can take five or six hours, but it's not hard to imagine playing it for much, much longer. In some ways, Katamari Damacy is almost more of a toy than it is a proper game. Yes, there are specific goals, and it occasionally requires a modicum of strategy to meet these goals, but hitting these marks can almost become secondary to the goals you end up setting for yourself. As you try to roll up anything and everything into a big ball, you'll inevitably happen upon an item that you want to add to your katamari, but you just aren't quite big enough to roll over it yet. It immediately becomes your short-term goal to roll up whatever you can in order to get big enough so you can add the item.   You have, quite literally, never seen anything quite like Katamari Damacy.  Nothing in the game is just ""junk,"" and the game makes a point of identifying every single item so that you can actually go to a menu screen and browse through a catalog of every type of item you've collected so far. The breadth of stuff in the game is simply ridiculous.  The gameplay conceit behind Katamari Damacy is fairly unique, but the game launches off into strange, uncharted territory when it comes to the presentation. The game has a real cubist look going on, with lots of hard edges and right angles, which is a nice contrast to the rolling. All of the environments generally feel pretty mundane and plausible, but the way items are placed and the way they will move around the world on their own accord creates a dreamlike experience. For example, you can't explain why the backyard is covered in u-shaped magnets and eggs, but there's an obvious pattern to their configuration, though it doesn't matter either way. The game also does a great job of conveying a sense of scale by making faraway landscapes look fuzzy, but without making your ever-increasing size too jarring. One minute you'll be rolling up erasers and lipstick off the living room floor, and the next thing you know you're rolling through the market district, picking up shoppers of all shapes and sizes. Most importantly, Katamari Damacy has a look that is highly specific and completely unified. It's really weird, but within the context of itself, it works.  The music in Katamari Damacy is insidiously infectious, and will have you humming for days.  As you listen to the sounds of Katamari Damacy, you'll find it hard not to be reminded of Samba de Amigo and Space Channel 5 (if you've played them), two games that were built on the foundation of a single, high-energy, retro-sounding song. Katamari Damacy also has a singular, extremely catchy theme, which comes up in the game in a variety of different forms. Sometimes you'll just hear a single voice humming it, other times it will manifest in a full-bodied dance-pop song, and it is key in establishing the fun, enthusiastic vibe of the game. There's plenty of other music in the game too, and though it plays the field from synthesized J-pop songs to jazzy swing numbers, it stays consistent enough in tone to keep any of the transitions from being too harsh. Katamari Damacy offers plenty of strange sounds outside the music, too. All of the dialogue for the King of All Space is written out, though he'll vocalize everything to sound like turntable scratches. The game will regularly focus on a family living on Earth that is being affected by the loss of the stars, and their odd, slightly monotonous delivery of dialogue, while not ""good"" in the technical sense, adds to the already surreal pitch. Everything makes a noise when you add it to your katamari, and people tend to make the most racket, usually screaming in terror and occasionally giggling.  Even though it's a pretty small contingency, Katamari Damacy comes to the US with a built-in market of players who appreciate things uniquely Japanese in nature, and this game most certainly qualifies as that. But unlike so much other otaku-bait, Katamari Damacy is not overly esoteric, and the mechanics are simple and enjoyable enough that people of virtually all shapes and sizes should be able to pick it up and start having fun in minutes. That the game is being released at a budget price certainly makes it a lot more tempting to try something a little weird and a little different. 


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902,Marcel Desailly Pro Soccer ,8.7, Marcel Desailly Pro Soccer is easily one of the best soccer games available on handheld.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/4/1/2218141-918790_48992_front.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/marcel-desailly-pro-soccer-review/1900-6094665/,pos,"
 You have to sympathize with soccer game designers. With the exception of hockey, there probably isn't a tougher mainstream sport to turn into a fun, accessible game. Fortunately, Gameloft's Marcel Desailly Pro Soccer manages to keep the gameplay tight while providing a entertaining, arcadelike experience.  Pro Soccer has 32 international teams, all with individual player stats, including name, power, speed, and react(ion). Despite all the nerdy details, Pro Soccer, at heart, is an arcade game. The pace is fast, and the overhead view and colorful graphics make it easy to see what's happening at any time.  The biggest strength of Pro Soccer is the innovative control scheme. Soccer players, like crabs, tend to go sideways instead of straight ahead. So, in turn, you use 6 and 4 to turn your character clockwise and counterclockwise, and you use 1 to stop/start running. The 5 key passes or steals, 8 gives you a long manual pass, and 2 shoots the ball toward the goal. That's it. Even better, the game provides a nice tutorial--à la JAMDAT's Tony Hawk series--that will get you in shape. It takes about five minutes to feel comfortable with the controls.  However, tutorial mastery won't guarantee a winning record by any stretch. Marcel's artificial intelligence is smart, quick, and aggressive. It's not uncommon for a chased opponent to stop midrun to throw you off or to pass, lightning-fast, through his team to set up for a goal. Gameloft has kept the opponents ruthless but fair, and the difficulty level is adjustable (from one to five) and exhibits significant differences. On level one, I whipped the other teams, while at level two, I was able to win by sweating through a few matches. At press time, I had yet to score more than once on a level three opponent.  There are a ton of options in Pro Soccer, adding much to the already addictive gameplay. Games can be three-, five-, or 10-minutes long. Players can participate in an exhibition (a stand-alone match), a penalty kick practice (which provides a fun 3D perspective), or the Gameloft Cup championship series. Tips can also be turned on, which provides helpful tutorial hints during match breaks.   The Gameloft Cup adds weight to the title. You could easily make a day of playing through a title championship, with 32 teams to choose from and 10-minute games. MDPS is a title that will take a while to master, so, like all good sports games, even winning the championship won't end the replay value.  Gameloft has done a good job on the sound side of things as well. There isn't much music, but the sound effects, like the match-ending whistle, are realistic and well placed. Confirming sounds also make navigating the multilayered menus a breeze.  Marcel Desailly Pro Soccer is easily one of the best soccer games available on handheld. Sports aficionados would do well to add this one to their trophy cases.  
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903,Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich ,8.7," A great story and a wonderful cast of characters are the highlights of this game, which anyone with an appreciation for comic books would probably love.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/3/0/2/2213302-919085_50055_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/freedom-force-vs-the-third-reich-review/1900-6120073/,pos,"
  The original Freedom Force succeeded against all odds when it was released three years ago. For years prior, the possibility of a superhero-themed computer role-playing game was nothing more than a popular pipe dream. But Freedom Force made good on the promising concept. It delivered great tactical combat to rival most any other RPG available of the time, and it captured the style and spirit of classic silver-age comic books remarkably well. A surprisingly endearing cast of characters and an altogether excellent story rounded out a memorable, satisfying game. And now, at long last, Freedom Force has a follow-up in the amazingly titled Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. The new game is a direct continuation of its predecessor and really isn't much different in terms of the presentation or the nuts and bolts of the action. So it serves as a testament to the quality of the original that the new Freedom Force, despite being so similar to a three-year-old game, is just about as fresh and as fun as the first. A great story and a wonderful cast of characters are once again the highlights of this game, which anyone with an appreciation for comic books would probably love.   Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich is a great encore to one of the most memorable games of 2002.   Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich features a good-sized story-driven campaign consisting of a linear series of missions, and this single-player experience is definitely the highlight. It opens with a brief animated summary of what happened in the original storyline, which serves as a good reminder for returning fans and a suitable primer for new Freedom Force players (who'd ideally be better off playing through the first game before going into this one). The whole campaign is structured like a comic book series, complete with authentic-looking comic book covers for each ""issue"" of the story. The game never breaks tone, which is an important accomplishment. From the opening cutscene to the final roll of the credits, you'll be immersed in the game's playfully mind-boggling storyline, which features the cast of the original Freedom Force in addition to some likable new heroes and villains. On top of that, the large cast of characters to choose from, the open-ended combat system, and multiple difficulty settings give the campaign solid replay value. It's not very difficult to fight through at the default setting, though this is partly because of how well Freedom Force pulls off the superhero thing. These characters are and should be powerful and difficult to knock out.     Besides the campaign, there's a single-player skirmish mode in which you can take on waves of different foes in a variety of different environments. There's also a four-player multiplayer mode (playable both on a LAN and online), featuring several different game types, each allowing you to pit your small squads of superheroes against those of opposing players. It's possible to play relatively balanced matches to test your skills, or you can have at it in a complete free-for-all. Either way, the skirmish and multiplayer portions of Freedom Force help add some lasting value, though the context given by the story in the game's campaign makes the action there inherently more appealing. Still, the possibility to fielding your own superhero creations against live opponents can be pretty appealing as well.    One of the most touted features of the original Freedom Force was the ability to create your own superheroes (and their various superpowers), and of course this is present in the new game. But since there are so many great premade heroes already available to choose from, there's no need to pad their ranks with your own creations unless you're compelled to for some reason. The possibility of bringing your own custom-made superheroes into the campaign is a theoretically exciting idea here much like it was in the original. However, you'd be hard pressed to come up with characters better than what developer Irrational Games has already provided for you.   Freedom Force fans can look forward to seeing all their old favorite characters plus some interesting new ones.   The incredible thing about Freedom Force is that this cast of characters is so good that it in some ways rivals the classics to which the game pays homage. Though the game superficially resembles a parody of old comic books, it exhibits the same fun-loving, anything-goes spirit and sincere, serious storytelling that was the hallmark of the classics. Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich's new story and characters tie in nicely with what's already been established, and the new golden age-style characters (more human than superhuman) make for a nice, subtle contrast both in terms of story and gameplay. Ultimately, the new campaign provides an experience that's similar to the first, above and beyond superficial resemblances. Fans will once again probably wish that the game could have spent even more time elaborating on some of the relationships between the different characters or going into a lot more detail about the many characters that make only brief appearances in the story.    The gameplay of Freedom Force is simple and fun. The first few missions explain all the basics of what's going on and give you plenty of practice with the controls and using your characters' different powers. Since you'll control no more than four superheroes per mission, the action never gets overwhelming; instead you're able to focus on micromanaging your mighty squad's abilities. Some enhancements to the mouse-driven interface and friendly artificial intelligence help make this sequel somewhat more intuitive to play than its predecessor, but there was already a very strong interface and combat system in place. It's still as exciting as ever to do such things as pick up and throw cars at your foes, knock down entire buildings as you fight, and smack thugs around far and wide. The game lets you pause the action (or slow it down, alternatively) whenever you want. But you'll definitely spend more time executing different attacks and watching as they pan out instead of just sitting there staring at a static screen and wondering how to proceed. Overall, the combat system is easy to get into, but it's quite deep, meaning that characters can have dramatically different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses.   The tactical combat at the heart of the game is easy to get into and a lot of fun.   You'll face a variety of different, new enemies. Goose-stepping, semi-incompetent Nazi stormtroopers, floating brain things, and killer gorilla experiments are just some of the fodder you can look forward to beating up on. These aren't necessarily intended to be the shrewdest of foes, but their AI is still noticeably lacking in some cases, as you'll sometimes be able to mosey right on up to your enemies without them so much as noticing. Nevertheless, once triggered, your foes will use a variety of different attacks to try to stop you. Managing your forces' powers and positioning while keeping a sharp eye out for health power-ups tends to be the order of the day.    Apart from the action RPG-style gameplay, the only real role-playing elements come in the form of the character-customization system. Characters gain experience points between missions and you can buy new abilities or upgrade existing ones with these points. It's a good system that lets you make meaningful decisions without miring you down in too much minutia. You can also slightly influence the story depending on which characters you bring into a mission. But, in the spirit of telling you a good story, the game doesn't ever prompt you to make decisions or otherwise take part in an open-ended gaming experience like you'd get from a more-traditional computer RPG.    Though Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich recycles a lot of the same graphics from the first game, it includes a whole bunch of new environments for you to explore, fight in, and accidentally (accidentally!) destroy. From communist-controlled Cuba to the heart of the German war machine in World War II, you'll get to see plenty of larger-than-life locations that can be torn down piece by piece if you so choose. A number of the game's missions are races against time or other such endurance tests, which help break up the action while adding some suspense. The game doesn't get frustrating, though, thanks partly to the ability to quickly save your progress at any time.    Freedom Force's visuals have held up surprisingly well for this installment, thanks largely to the game's cohesive art style and a variety of new bells and whistles. It's too bad that the close-ups of the characters talking aren't lip-synched during the game's numerous dialogue sequences, though. It also would have been nice if the 3D characters you'll see during missions better resembled the hand-drawn counterparts you'll see during the game's entertaining storyboard-style cutscenes. However, the animation, realistic physics, and colorful look still shine through, making for a great-looking game overall. The cutscenes and other little presentational frills enrich the entire experience.   A great presentation helps draw you into the game's unique world.   The audio contributes even more heavily to establishing the game's mood and tone. The same talented voice actors who gave their characters so much personality in the first Freedom Force reprise their roles here, and they once again deliver their lines with the sort of unfaltering conviction you'd hope for. As well, the dialogue itself is sharply written, packing in plenty of amusing one-liners and witty banter, while almost never stooping to using irony to poke fun at what's going on. Meanwhile, a rousing musical score blares during many of the missions, and the sound effects, which are unchanged, still complement the action and fit perfectly. Some of the characters' speech repeats a bit too often during gameplay, but overall, it's difficult to fault Freedom Force's audio on any level since it's so key to what makes the game as likable as it is.    Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich is absolutely worth playing if only for the story. Fortunately, the action itself is plenty entertaining, too, and there's lots of it. And while the game's technical aspects haven't been radically revised since the original, they've aged almost as gracefully as the comic books that inspired it. This is all great news for Freedom Force fans, whose ranks probably consist of the vast majority of people who played that game. Yet, possibly the best news of all is that the satisfying conclusion of this second Freedom Force installment suggests that there will still be more where this came from.  


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904,Assault: Retribution ,4.2," While the basics may sound playable enough, Assault's problems are almost too many to list in this review.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/7/1/5/2224715-assaultretribution_cover.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/assault-retribution-review/1900-2546629/,neg,"
What does one have to do to get a good game of Contra around here? Midway's Assault: Retribution is a poor excuse for an action game, falling into innumerable design pitfalls that were supposed to have been filled long ago. Konami's taken a lot of flak for the two Contra rip-offs its American office licensed to Hungarian developer Appaloosa. Assault: Retribution is just as miserable, if not more so, and doesn't even have the ""Hey, this isn't Contra!"" disappointment factor to amplify the game's flaws. You select one of two characters at the beginning of the game, each of which has four different guns at his disposal, gained by picking up the weapon power-up icons in the game. You have 100 hit points and a bank of energy to power your weapons. In addition to weapon power-ups, you can collect up to three orbiting weapon upgrades for each of your guns, weapon batteries, medical kits, and some kind of electric-spasm smart bomb equivalent. If your weapon battery or life bars are full, you can actually store a battery or medical kit for later use, an uncharacteristic bit of innovation. The gameplay is virtually identical to the two Contra games on the PlayStation: You blast everything from a mostly overhead point of view in a full 3D world. You can also angle your gun up or down using the controller's right shoulder buttons, but this is rarely required and more trouble than it's worth the rest of the time. A la Crash Bandicoot, Assault has a few forced-scroll levels in it, among them a Chain Reaction-inspired ""outrun the nuclear blast on foot"" scene and a generic hoverbike scenario. Unlike the PlayStation's Contra games, Assault includes two-player simultaneous play, an effort that could have been laudable had it been executed better. While the basics may sound playable enough, Assault's problems are almost too many to list in this review. Like virtually every other 3D game that's tried to accomplish this sort of thing, shooting and judging distances in Assault are more difficult than they should be. A number of bosses seem to rely on this flaw, annoyingly hiding their weak spots from you. Due to the game's problems with aiming and the like, the developers have made it virtually impossible to die at the hands of the game's enemies on the default difficulty level. Regardless of how many enemies are on the screen, you shouldn't need to use any kind of strategy at all - running into the enemies while holding the fire button seems to work fine a majority of the time. As a result, annoying artifacts of the game's poor design manifest as the game's difficulty level increases- annoying jumps and poor control or camera issues will represent a majority of the players' deaths. Without these, just about anyone could complete Assault: Retribution in his first sitting. While cool-sounding on paper, the game's weapon system is flawed and annoying. After depleting a battery, you automatically switch to your primary weapon. While this saves one of the better weapons from certain death should you die, the lack of energy to power the weapon cripples you. The only way to rectify this situation is to run around and dodge enemies as best the current camera angle will allow while you wait for the battery to recharge. Finally, Assault gets a few brownie points for its two-player simultaneous gameplay. However, the game's technology seriously gets in the way in this case - the game can't handle two players without massive frame rate loss. A single player is likely to get farther than the team, as aiming and movement are much easier when the game's running at normal speed. Remember all of those places in Contra where you'd kill your friends, accidentally or otherwise, because the screen wouldn't scroll without you? They're back, and more annoying than ever - to prevent this from happening, the players need to be close to each other at all times. Aesthetically, Assault is a mess. While the game's locales are constantly changing in style and appearance, they still fail to look good most of the time. The game's textures and geometry are chunky and unappealing, all while operating under a less-than-acceptable frame rate for this type of game. From the color palette to the models themselves, Assault looks like a first-generation PlayStation game. The game's music is over-synthed Euro-popish techno drivel, with the one redeeming factor of decently masking the game's extremely repetitive grunts and alien shrieks. Lots of bad games are made every year, but not all of them get inexplicably picked up by generally well-respected publishers. Midway obviously dropped the ball when negotiating for this title - here's to hoping it learns from its mistake.
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905,Baseball ,4.2," Like so many of the early NES sports games, Baseball hasn't withstood the test of time.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/7/3/6/484-1736.jpg,NES,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/baseball-review/1900-6163754/,neg,"
  Following Soccer, Tennis, and Ice Hockey, Baseball is the fourth NES sports game from Nintendo to hit the Wii's Virtual Console. While even after all these years Ice Hockey is still a blast to play, time wasn't so kind to Soccer and Tennis. And now time has claimed another victim: Baseball.    Like the other early first-party sports games for the NES, Baseball is a bare-bones re-creation of the sport. You can play single-player against the CPU (there's no difficulty option) or take on a friend in two-player mode. There are six teams to choose from--you may know their names from a little thing called ""the alphabet."" Yes, the teams are simply named A, C, D, P, R, and Y. Other than having different-colored uniforms, there doesn't appear to be any difference between the teams; there are no player names, nor are there any statistics to speak of.    It's just like real baseball, without all of the pesky fielding.   The action on the field is simple. You can throw different pitches, such as a curve or fastball, by pressing a direction on the D pad before the pitch is thrown, and while the pitch is headed toward the plate you can move it left and right. Fielding is handled by the computer, but you do have to throw the ball once the fielder has picked it up. Hitting is just as easy. You can move the hitter around the batter's box, swing with the press of a button, and lay down a bunt by letting off of the swing button before you've completed your swing.     This may sound all well and good, but there are a number of issues that make Baseball not much fun. It's pretty boring watching the computer field for you; every player is exactly the same, so there's not much strategy involved; and base runners are very slow--it's not uncommon to get thrown out at first base on a ground ball hit deep into the outfield. As the graphics are about what you'd expect from a NES game circa 1985, there's not a whole lot to get excited about from a visual standpoint. But there are a few nice touches, such as large player models and umpires signaling home runs. You'll hear the familiar tune that played during the title screen of many early first-party NES games, and there are a handful of simple sound effects. But that's about it.    If you spent hours of your youth playing Baseball it may be worth $5 as a piece of nostalgia, but anyone looking for an enjoyable game will likely be disappointed, as Baseball is just too simplistic.     
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906,Blasto ,4.2, There's a good game here - it's simply hidden under many layers of frustration.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/9/7/2216897-41qgct7cmol._sl500_aa280_.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/blasto-review/1900-2545925/,neg,"
Sony's Blasto is the latest in a long line of games that attempt to distill the best that the 2D platform games of the past had to offer into 3D. With large, roaming environments that stream from the disc, Blasto does this in a different way than titles such as Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, and Pitfall 3D, and the originality is certainly nice. The only problem is that it just doesn't make the leap into 3D as well as it could have. Well all right, that's not the only problem. To take a few steps backward, the game is set in a universe obviously inspired largely by Warner Bros.' Marvin the Martian cartoons. It's full of walkways that float inexplicably, suspended in space, machinery complete with ""Don't touch this button!"" buttons, and all the other signature gags and pratfalls, and it is inhabited by spindly aliens and top-heavy monsters the likes of whom could very well be related to Marvin and his friends. To stop them all is Blasto, who's pretty top-heavy himself and comes across like a mix of cartoon stars The Tick and Space Ghost, both in look and personality. To drop another name into the pot, his quips are done by Phil Hartman (former Saturday Night Live cast member and the voice of The Simpsons' Troy McClure). Thankfully, he doesn't rattle on too much. Unlike video game characters like Mario and Crash, Blasto is equipped with a ray gun to blast his foes. Holding the shoot button down for a few seconds charges the gun for a more intense blast, and a number of various power-ups are scattered throughout the game, which can provide him with limited time upgrades such as heat-seeking missiles, flamethrowers, and rapid shots. He stalks the floating platforms of space, sandy dunes, the watery depths of Uranus (yes, the obvious joke comes up repeatedly), and sewers and halls of an alien city, turning switches to open doors so that he can proceed on to new areas and firing on anything that pops up along the way. That's the start of the trouble with Blasto. Instead of manning guard posts or doing rounds, the enemies in the game (there are two basic varieties - skinny walking aliens and flying saucers - and they both have guns) have a nasty habit of materializing in front of or, worse yet, behind you. If this were an infrequent occurrence, it wouldn't be worth mentioning, but since it happens all the time, it's fairly maddening.  However, there are times when you might come across an alien walking off, say, on his way to the john, and you follow him in, cap him, and collect a number of items you wouldn't have normally had access to. This is a nice effect and shows how if the foes had been built into the environment - instead of suddenly appearing, most often with an idea already in their little pointy heads of where you are - it could've been an experience much more like playing an immersive cartoon. But these instances are very rare. Add to that the fact that a seemingly unending supply of foes appears whenever you have a crucial series of jumps, and you have a game that's very frustrating at times. Still, the first few levels of Blasto are pretty enjoyable and fairly addictive. They entail climbing boxes, moving boxes around to climb onto other boxes, making your way through and then on top of rotating patchwork tubes, saving ""babes"" (who provide extra lives), and of course shooting lots of aliens. The levels are fairly small, so once a switch is flipped, you don't have to hunt around too long to find out what you've opened up. It's after the third level that it all starts to fall apart. The fourth stage, the Uranian Dunes, is a huge environment that serves as a hub for the fifth and sixth levels. It's so large, in fact, that it's hard to tell where you're supposed to go once you've accomplished something, and there are enough enemies around that you'll probably die several times before you figure it out.This is also the point at which crumbling, moving, and geyser-propelled platforms first appear in the game, which are pretty common constructs for 2D platformers, but don't work here at all. A typical maneuver might have you jump to a platform that moves forward and backward from one that will fall apart after a few seconds. This is fine in 2D where everything is clearly lined up, but in Blasto the depth is very hard to judge, so you'll die a lot before your luck kicks in. You also often have to contend with the unforgiving timing of the game and, as mentioned earlier, that seemingly unending supply of enemies. It would appear that this sort of platform-jumping mechanic just doesn't work in 3D games, but games like Pitfall 3D, for example, accomplished it well by clearly lining up where you had to leap to, offering excellent timing, and not including too many instances where you had to carry off advanced jumps while under attack, so obviously it can be done. In short, it's around this time that the game picks up a level of difficulty that precludes entertainment. Other headaches in the game include the fact that enemies can shoot through obstacles that block your own shots, you can only save one game on the first of the two memory card slots, and that there's no in-game load feature, so if you're doing very badly you have to quit and wait several minutes to load back up again. On the bright side, the graphics can look pretty nice at times, but the frequent pop-up and showing of seams drags the visuals down. There's a good game here - that can be seen from the first three levels - it's simply hidden under many layers of frustration. With some tweaks to the timing, perspective, graphics, gameplay mechanics, and level design, it's obvious that Blasto could've been everything it was meant to be. It reaches to be entertaining, but really falls short.
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907,Caesars Palace ,4.2, Caesars Palace is an adequate adaptation of casino gambling.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/2/1/8/613-2218.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/caesars-palace-review/1900-2546940/,neg,"
Interplay's Caesars Palace does a fair job representing a handful of casino games, with accurate play and statistics that certainly feel about right - plan on steadily losing a fortune, just like in the real thing. Baccarat, blackjack, craps, roulette, and slot machines, as well as tutorials for each, are all part of the package. For the most part, the look and feel of real casino gambling is there, from the slot machines' quarter slots, fruits, and bars, to the expansive and detailed felt of the craps table. Unfortunately, roulette and slots are such simple, straightforward games in the real world that no video game adaptation could possibly hold player interest for very long. The other games are flawed in key areas that dramatically stunt the game's replay value. In any case, most players won't stay at the tables long enough to parley their $1000 into a cool million. Baccarat features standard even money bets, 8-to-1 tie bets, 5 percent tip to the house when winning a banker hand, and astronomical stakes just like in the movies - the minimum bet is $1000. Since that's also the amount of cash Caesars Palace starts you out with, plan on raising money at some other game before coming to the baccarat table. Blackjack is standard Reno rules, with 2-to-1 insurance, splitting any pair, and the dealer always hitting 16 and standing on soft 17. Unfortunately, both of these games are plagued with cards that are all but unreadable. The white card faces are so bright, and the cards are so small - with suits and numbers printed smaller, in turn - that even after adjusting the screen's brightness and sharpness, the games are extremely frustrating to play since only the face cards are readily discernible.  Craps has one of the worst voice-overs in gaming, which is too bad, since that's one of the best parts of the real game. Instead of calling nines ""field goals,"" recommending C&E's, reminding us that ""seven come eleven come again,"" and having a gravelly voice that must have spent some time in the joint, Caesars Palace's craps table features a voice-over actor that sounds like a mild-mannered Alan Alda that says things like ""Bet changing time!"" and calls numbers with a slow deliberation that makes you think he's having trouble with the math: ""…the result…is…five."" More importantly, though, is the counterintuitive nature of control. The fact is, it took me half an hour of moving around the table pushing the help button to figure out how to make a simple odds bet on the pass line. The tutorial explained only the basics of craps betting, not specific bets as they are made in the video game version. The booklet was almost useless. I eventually did figure it out - it looked like placing a second pass line bet for another player, whereas in most PC casino games it either looks like setting chips on your original bet (go figure) or like placing chips behind the pass line itself, like you would in real life. Sure, all games have a learning curve, but it shouldn't take that long to uncover one of the most commonly placed - and best returning - bets on the table.  The game offers tutorials for each game except the slot machines. (If you can't figure those out, you shouldn't even be in a casino, even one that doesn't use real money.) They're great as introductions to the games for first-timers, but they don't offer any insight into the video game adaptations. The craps tutorial will explain to you what a hardways bet is, but it won't tell you what it pays or how to use the controller to place one. If you can't figure out how to place a $5 ""Yo"" while you're playing the game, neither the tutorial nor the manual will be of much help. Caesars Palace is an adequate adaptation of casino gambling. It's a safe way to learn the basics of several games. It's a shame that a few marginal errors make the fun so short-lived. If you are new to gambling, this game is a pretty good way to get started, but you may need a book or a gambling FAQ for more complex games like craps. If you are a gambling enthusiast, certainly rent this one before you pick it up.
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908,Echo Night ,4.2," The main evil character in the game is extremely creepy looking - unfortunately, so is everybody else.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/4/3/5/2226435-box_enight.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/echo-night-review/1900-2547388/,neg,"
What would you do if you learned that your father was not just an average Joe, but instead he was a relentless sleuth hot on the trail of a demonic murderer? That's the premise of Echo Night, a first-person puzzle-solving adventure that puts you into the middle of a time-traveling quest to find out what has happened to your father. Your life is turned upside down with the delivery of the mail. You receive a letter from your missing dad that contains a key to unlock a time-traveling adventure. With the aid of time-warping books and paintings, you learn that your father is chasing a sadistic murderer possessed by a demonic red knife. Your task is to aid your pop's quest while releasing the trapped souls of people murdered by the evil man's evil knife. To do this, you'll hop about to various locations at different points in time, all intertwined with your father's manhunt. You'll solve puzzles and appease souls with items you picked up along the way. Once you've completed the game, the nonlinear storyline will make sense, and you'll able to reconstruct the proper plot from the shuffled scenes you've seen.  The main evil character in the game is extremely creepy looking - unfortunately, so is everybody else. All the characters you encounter suffer from a polygon deficiency - they all have pointy chins or blocky faces. What's even worse is that most of the characters also suffer from a lack of textures. Conveniently, most of the game's NPCs are spirits, which appear in the form of wireframes with light gray textures. This makes almost every ghost uninteresting and doesn't help motivate you to free the spirit. The backgrounds all retain the proper style for the time period you happen to be in and are delightfully mediocre. Not much can be said about the sound except that there's very little of it. You spend most of the game in musical silence until something disturbing happens. The sound effects are all very drab and unappealing.  Still, the most frustrating aspect of this game is the game engine. Even with the speed turned up all the way your movements still seem too sluggish, and waiting for the cutscenes attached to every warping sequence becomes irritating rather quickly. Almost as annoying is the maddening use of time warping - it would appear that cabinets, paintings, dolls, and clocks are all capable of transporting you to different time periods. Although this is mainly a puzzle-solving mystery, your character can still take damage. It's not uncommon to run into a few different evil spirits. Unfortunately, there are no cool weapons for you to use; instead, you'll dispose of evil spirits with a light switch. Flipping on the lights isn't what I'd consider an adventure. At Echo Night's heart there are some great puzzles. Unfortunately, they're few and far between, and most of the game revolves around sticking the object you had found two rooms earlier into something in the room you're currently in. The plot becomes too muddled,  and it's easy to mistake one bland spirit for another. The game is also extremely short - about six to eight hours for the average player, and the offer of multiple endings isn't really compelling enough for you to want to put up with the game's flaws all over again. The only thing this game does exceedingly well is give you an excellent example of how not to do a first-person puzzle-solving game.
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909,ECW Hardcore Revolution ,4.2," None of the ""extreme"" elements that made ECW as popular as it is are present.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/8/5/2213185-ecw_hardcore_revolution.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ecw-hardcore-revolution-review/1900-2543653/,neg,"
Extreme Championship Wrestling is an east-coast-based wrestling organization that uses ""extreme"" wrestling matches as a way to distinguish itself from the slightly more kid-friendly WWF and WCW. Good ECW matches contain all sorts of mayhem that you'd never see on a more straitlaced wrestling program, from people being tossed through mountains of tables, to barbed-wire matches. Any rules you might be used to from watching safer wrestling shows have been thrown out the window. ECW may not have the big names or the big budgets of a WWF or a WCW, but it's got many talented wrestlers and a unique and interesting product. Acclaim's ECW Hardcore Revolution, however, contains none of this. Remember Acclaim's last wrestling game, WWF Attitude? ECW Hardcore Revolution is, at its core, Attitude with different wrestlers and different sound effects, with a couple of new modes and moves (mostly finishers) tossed in to help make you forget that you've already played this game. But with the game playing nearly identically to Attitude, it's impossible to shake the feeling that you've played this game before. None of the ""extreme"" elements that made ECW as popular as it is are present. Any finisher that requires an object of any kind (Rob Van Dam's Vamdaminator, for instance) isn't in the game. You won't see anyone flying off the top rope out into the crowd area here. The only ""extreme"" differences between this game and Attitude is that this game plays slightly faster, it's easier to toss someone out of the ring, the language is a slightly dirtier, and there's a barbed wire match, which turns the ring ropes into some horrible-looking barbed wire. Trying to bounce off the wire makes you fall over in pain. For those of you unfamiliar with WWF Attitude, it uses a balanced gameplay system of grappling and reversals that keep players from relying on the same easy moves over and over again. Basically, you want to pull off a few easy moves, like punches, kicks, and other simple moves to swing the match's advantage in your favor. Once your advantage light is fully lit, it's significantly easier to execute grapple moves. If you don't have the advantage, harder moves will usually be blocked. As you wear your opponent's health bar down, you'll eventually be able to perform your wrestler's finishing move. ECW works in the exact same way, right down to identical life bars. Graphically, the game has been bumped a notch over Attitude. The characters are more colorful, as are the arenas. The sound is also good, though it's still chock-full of lame phrases from the crowd. The announcing seems more accurate, mostly because Joey Styles, the voice of ECW, works alone, so there's less speech to match up with the action. ECW Hardcore Revolution isn't a bad game, by itself. But it in no way represents the style of wrestling that the ECW uses, it has absolutely zero points going for it in the originality department, and the game comes off as a real slap in the face to the federation's hard-core fans. ECW and its fans deserve better than this. ECW's wrestling style isn't the same as the WWF's, and ECW's game shouldn't be like the WWF's, either. Plus, this is the third year that Acclaim has trotted out the same wrestling engine with a few slight tweaks. It's getting very old. Fans of ECW would be better served by waiting for Acclaim's next ECW game, which will use a new (and hopefully more accurate) engine.
 ","['Extreme', 'Championship', 'Wrestling', 'east-coast-based', 'wrestling', 'organization', 'uses', '``', 'extreme', ""''"", 'wrestling', 'matches', 'way', 'distinguish', 'slightly', 'kid-friendly', 'WWF', 'WCW', '.', 'Good', 'ECW', 'matches', 'contain', 'sorts', 'mayhem', ""'d"", 'never', 'see', 'straitlaced', 'wrestling', 'program', ',', 'people', 'tossed', 'mountains', 'tables', ',', 'barbed-wire', 'matches', '.', 'Any', 'rules', 'might', 'used', 'watching', 'safer', 'wrestling', 'shows', 'thrown', 'window', '.', 'ECW', 'may', 'big', 'names', 'big', 'budgets', 'WWF', 'WCW', ',', ""'s"", 'got', 'many', 'talented', 'wrestlers', 'unique', 'interesting', 'product', '.', 'Acclaim', ""'s"", 'ECW', 'Hardcore', 'Revolution', ',', 'however', ',', 'contains', 'none', '.', 'Remember', 'Acclaim', ""'s"", 'last', 'wrestling', 'game', ',', 'WWF', 'Attitude', '?', 'ECW', 'Hardcore', 'Revolution', ',', 'core', ',', 'Attitude', 'different', 'wrestlers', 'different', 'sound', 'effects', ',', 'couple', 'new', 'modes', 'moves', '(', 'mostly', 'finishers', ')', 'tossed', 'help', 'make', 'forget', ""'ve"", 'already', 'played', 'game', '.', 'But', 'game', 'playing', 'nearly', 'identically', 'Attitude', ',', ""'s"", 'impossible', 'shake', 'feeling', ""'ve"", 'played', 'game', '.', 'None', '``', 'extreme', ""''"", 'elements', 'made', 'ECW', 'popular', 'present', '.', 'Any', 'finisher', 'requires', 'object', 'kind', '(', 'Rob', 'Van', 'Dam', ""'s"", 'Vamdaminator', ',', 'instance', ')', ""n't"", 'game', '.', 'You', 'wo', ""n't"", 'see', 'anyone', 'flying', 'top', 'rope', 'crowd', 'area', '.', 'The', '``', 'extreme', ""''"", 'differences', 'game', 'Attitude', 'game', 'plays', 'slightly', 'faster', ',', ""'s"", 'easier', 'toss', 'someone', 'ring', ',', 'language', 'slightly', 'dirtier', ',', ""'s"", 'barbed', 'wire', 'match', ',', 'turns', 'ring', 'ropes', 'horrible-looking', 'barbed', 'wire', '.', 'Trying', 'bounce', 'wire', 'makes', 'fall', 'pain', '.', 'For', 'unfamiliar', 'WWF', 'Attitude', ',', 'uses', 'balanced', 'gameplay', 'system', 'grappling', 'reversals', 'keep', 'players', 'relying', 'easy', 'moves', '.', 'Basically', ',', 'want', 'pull', 'easy', 'moves', ',', 'like', 'punches', ',', 'kicks', ',', 'simple', 'moves', 'swing', 'match', ""'s"", 'advantage', 'favor', '.', 'Once', 'advantage', 'light', 'fully', 'lit', ',', ""'s"", 'significantly', 'easier', 'execute', 'grapple', 'moves', '.', 'If', ""n't"", 'advantage', ',', 'harder', 'moves', 'usually', 'blocked', '.', 'As', 'wear', 'opponent', ""'s"", 'health', 'bar', ',', ""'ll"", 'eventually', 'able', 'perform', 'wrestler', ""'s"", 'finishing', 'move', '.', 'ECW', 'works', 'exact', 'way', ',', 'right', 'identical', 'life', 'bars', '.', 'Graphically', ',', 'game', 'bumped', 'notch', 'Attitude', '.', 'The', 'characters', 'colorful', ',', 'arenas', '.', 'The', 'sound', 'also', 'good', ',', 'though', ""'s"", 'still', 'chock-full', 'lame', 'phrases', 'crowd', '.', 'The', 'announcing', 'seems', 'accurate', ',', 'mostly', 'Joey', 'Styles', ',', 'voice', 'ECW', ',', 'works', 'alone', ',', ""'s"", 'less', 'speech', 'match', 'action', '.', 'ECW', 'Hardcore', 'Revolution', ""n't"", 'bad', 'game', ',', '.', 'But', 'way', 'represents', 'style', 'wrestling', 'ECW', 'uses', ',', 'absolutely', 'zero', 'points', 'going', 'originality', 'department', ',', 'game', 'comes', 'real', 'slap', 'face', 'federation', ""'s"", 'hard-core', 'fans', '.', 'ECW', 'fans', 'deserve', 'better', '.', 'ECW', ""'s"", 'wrestling', 'style', ""n't"", 'WWF', ""'s"", ',', 'ECW', ""'s"", 'game', ""n't"", 'like', 'WWF', ""'s"", ',', 'either', '.', 'Plus', ',', 'third', 'year', 'Acclaim', 'trotted', 'wrestling', 'engine', 'slight', 'tweaks', '.', 'It', ""'s"", 'getting', 'old', '.', 'Fans', 'ECW', 'would', 'better', 'served', 'waiting', 'Acclaim', ""'s"", 'next', 'ECW', 'game', ',', 'use', 'new', '(', 'hopefully', 'accurate', ')', 'engine', '.']",0.07698350346498495,0.4617044341118413
910,ECW Hardcore Revolution ,4.2, ECW and its fans deserve better than this.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/8/5/2213185-ecw_hardcore_revolution.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ecw-hardcore-revolution-review/1900-2545948/,neg,"
Extreme Championship Wrestling is an east-coast-based wrestling organization that uses ""extreme"" wrestling matches as a way to distinguish itself from the slightly more kid-friendly WWF and WCW. Good ECW matches contain all sorts of mayhem that you'd never see on a more straitlaced wrestling program, from people being tossed through mountains of tables, to barbed-wire matches. Any rules you might be used to from watching safer wrestling shows have been thrown out the window. ECW may not have the big names or the big budgets of a WWF or a WCW, but it's got many talented wrestlers and a unique and interesting product. Acclaim's ECW Hardcore Revolution, however, contains none of this. Remember Acclaim's last wrestling game, WWF Attitude? ECW Hardcore Revolution is, at its core, Attitude with different wrestlers and different sound effects, with a couple of new modes and moves (mostly finishers) tossed in to help make you forget that you've already played this game. But with the game playing nearly identically to Attitude, it's impossible to shake the feeling that you've played this game before. None of the ""extreme"" elements that made ECW as popular as it is are present. Any finisher that requires an object of any kind (Rob Van Dam's Vamdaminator, for instance) isn't in the game. You won't see anyone flying off the top rope out into the crowd area here. The only ""extreme"" differences between this game and Attitude is that this game plays slightly faster, it's easier to toss someone out of the ring, the language is a slightly dirtier, and there's a barbed wire match, which turns the ring ropes into some horrible-looking barbed wire. Trying to bounce off the wire makes you fall over in pain. For those of you unfamiliar with WWF Attitude, it uses a balanced gameplay system of grappling and reversals that keep players from relying on the same easy moves over and over again. Basically, you want to pull off a few easy moves, like punches, kicks, and other simple moves to swing the match's advantage in your favor. Once your advantage light is fully lit, it's significantly easier to execute grapple moves. If you don't have the advantage, harder moves will usually be blocked. As you wear your opponent's health bar down, you'll eventually be able to perform your wrestler's finishing move. ECW works in the exact same way, right down to identical life bars. Graphically, the game has been bumped a notch over Attitude. The characters are more colorful, as are the arenas. The sound is also good, though it's still chock-full of lame phrases from the crowd. The announcing seems more accurate, mostly because Joey Styles, the voice of ECW, works alone, so there's less speech to match up with the action. ECW Hardcore Revolution isn't a bad game, by itself. But it in no way represents the style of wrestling that the ECW uses, it has absolutely zero points going for it in the originality department, and the game comes off as a real slap in the face to the federation's hard-core fans. ECW and its fans deserve better than this. ECW's wrestling style isn't the same as the WWF's, and ECW's game shouldn't be like the WWF's, either. Plus, this is the third year that Acclaim has trotted out the same wrestling engine with a few slight tweaks. It's getting very old. Fans of ECW would be better served by waiting for Acclaim's next ECW game, which will use a new (and hopefully more accurate) engine.
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911,Eliminator ,4.2, The game simply doesn't provide a compelling reason to keep on playing.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/6/4/5/2210645-eliminad.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/eliminator-review/1900-2547432/,neg,"
Psygnosis' Eliminator takes place in a future we all know very well at this point: a dark one, where enemies of the state compete to give viewing pleasure to the masses. The masses are starved for entertainment, you know, as you will be if you pick up or rent this game. Eliminator is sort of a mutt. It takes a lot of elements of traditional 2D shooters and brings them into an environment that appears to be much like the tracks of Interplay's Red Asphalt. You view your ship - four of which are available to choose from at the game's start - from a third-person perspective and roam around the evil futuristic environments blowing away turrets, other flying ships, and mech-like vehicles; gathering weapon power-ups and time bonuses; and figuring out basic puzzles (such as shooting a group of targets in the correct order before the walls close in on you). Your control over your ship is responsive and pretty good overall, save for when you must raise your target sites to fire at flying enemies - it makes you feel as if you're twisting your hands into a pretzel. The graphics and sound get average and decent scores, respectively, for showing up and not being too much of an embarrassment. The multiplayer mode has some nice random elements to it, but since you're limited to two players, it remains a split-screen game of tag. The main problem with Eliminator is that it's just dull. The game simply doesn't provide a compelling reason to keep on playing, not even out of pure stubbornness. Mixing genres sometimes works very well, but in this case, neither the traditional shooter nor the vehicular combat game is well represented. There's just not much here, folks. Let's hope the future will keep evolving.
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912,Inspector Parker ,8.7, Inspector Parker's logic puzzle will have you stuck in front of your computer for hours at a time.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/inspector-parker-review/1900-6158767/,pos,"
  Inspector Parker is a logic puzzle that asks you to use a series of clues to figure out which rooms in a house contain a variety of items and people. Items or people that a room could potentially contain are shown in each room, which is presented as a large onscreen matrix. Clues point you to the placement of certain items, but you're pointed in a very indirect way because most clues only tell you about the relationship between two objects. So a clue will tell you that the knife is directly above the room that contains the axe. But since you don't know exactly where the axe is yet, you can only narrow it down. As you narrow down all of your clues, you eventually start getting down to business and figuring out, by process of elimination, where each piece must be.    The game has a sort of story mode that has you working through puzzles of increasing complexity, but there's also a mode that lets you choose the difficulty and go on from there. The more difficult levels give you larger houses and more confusing clues to work with. The larger houses essentially force you to play in full-screen mode, as the various icons for each room get a bit too small when you're playing in a fixed-size window. The interface is easy to understand, and the logic puzzles are fun to decipher. Ultimately, this is a nice-looking and extremely addictive game that puzzle fans should have a great time with.  
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913,Shadow of the Colossus ,8.7," With a little patience and a taste for high-concept adventure, you'll find an experience in Shadow of the Colossus that's unlike any other.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/7/7/2212077-box_sotc.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shadow-of-the-colossus-review/1900-6135831/,pos,"
  Towering mythical giants walk the earth, and it's your job to kill them in Shadow of the Colossus, the long-awaited PlayStation 2 adventure from the team that created 2001's sublimely rendered ICO. Shadow shares a prevailing aesthetic and subtle attention to detail with ICO, but where the latter focused on the intimately protective relationship between an outcast boy and his fragile feminine charge, this new game pits you in epic combat against some of the largest foes ever to grace a television screen. The game's fighting and pacing are in stark contrast to those of typical action games, but with a little patience and a taste for high-concept adventure, you'll find an experience here that's unlike any other.   You'll do battle against some of the largest foes in video game history in your quest to save your fallen love.   There's only a bare pretense of story at the outset. From the introduction, you know that you'll play the role of a young warrior who has brought his fallen love to a faraway temple in the hopes of restoring her to health. According to a mysterious presence that dwells within the sanctuary walls, the only way to save this girl is to hunt down and destroy the 16 colossal beasts that roam the varied lands surrounding the temple. This is all you know as you set out on your quest, and it's all you need to know. Is the girl your wife, or perhaps your sister? Is she dead or merely injured? What is it about the colossi, exactly, that will confer upon you the power to bring her back?    The answers don't really matter. Your focus and sole occupation is the defeat of the colossi themselves, and these striking, larger-than-life beings are the real stars of this show. Shadow's gameplay consists of two parts. You leave the temple in search of the next colossus (under instruction from that disembodied voice), and when you find the beast, you engage it and kill it. Once you've slain and absorbed the essence of that colossus, you return to the temple in a dreamlike haze so you can repeat the process all over again. There's no quantifiable leveling up, and no menial combat to get in the way of each encounter. You'll fight each colossus in quick succession, and you'll finish the game in essentially the same state as you began it.    If all this sounds like a series of massive boss fights that make up an entire game, it's more or less what it is. The designers could have doubled or even tripled the length of the adventure by placing hundreds of lesser foes between you and your ultimate objectives. But that would have only diluted the experience of fighting these beasts that tower hundreds of feet above you and shake the very earth with their footsteps. In other words, don't mistake Shadow of the Colossus' purity of focus for a thin or potentially unsatisfying adventure. Indeed, it's one of the game's most commendable traits.    In the spirit of that singular design, your tools of battle are basic and unchanging. You embark on your trusty steed armed only with a simple sword and a bow and arrow, which you'll keep with you till you've seen your quest through to the end. The sword acts as a compass of sorts. When you hold it aloft in the sunlight, the sword produces a beam of light that becomes more focused as you point it closer to the location of the next battle. Once you've pinpointed your destination, it's a relatively simple matter to navigate the environment until you reach the area in which the colossus makes its home. On occasion, you'll have to circumvent such obstacles as canyons or mountains to get where you're going, and you'll sometimes be faced with light, Prince of Persia-style platforming elements that require you to climb moss-covered walls or hoist yourself over a few ledges. Just as often, though, reaching a colossus is as simple as pointing your horse in the right direction and just running there.    The real challenge of the game is figuring out how to defeat the colossi, each of which is unique in its own way. Your sword and bow are indispensable tools in the appropriate situations, but your most important weapon against the great beasts is your wits, which you'll need to use in full to puzzle out the right way to defeat each colossus without being ground under one massive heel after another. In fact, Shadow of the Colossus feels almost as much like a puzzle game as it does an action game, or an adventure, since you'll frequently have to make creative use of both the environment and your weapons just to reach a monster's weak points, much less strike at these points effectively to bring it down.   The battles with each great beast are exceptionally hectic and thrilling. Climbing up the back of a thrashing enemy the size of a skyscraper is quite the experience.   Simply put, the battles with the colossi are among the most frantic and exciting action sequences in gaming. Your smaller foes are only comparable to, say, a house, but the largest ones are the size of skyscrapers, reaching heights hundreds of feet high and sundering the ground with every footstep. Some of them take flight, soaring high into the air, while others dive deep below the surface of a lake. Some are fast, and some are slow. Each of your foes exhibits unique and thoughtful design on the part of the game's creators. No two battles proceed in nearly the same manner.    The only commonality between all of the colossi is their weak points, which are always located up high and require you to literally climb right up the great beasts themselves. Understandably, none of the colossi are happy when you plunge your sword into their most tender regions. They'll thrash and buck around wildly in an attempt to remove you, and you'll spend more time clinging desperately to a given monster than you will actually attacking it. There's a grip mechanic at work here, whereby holding R1 will cause you to grab onto any surface that provides purchase, whether it's coarse fur or hard armor plating. Oddly, if you're thrown to the ground even from a hundred feet up, you'll usually only take a small amount of damage and then be required to climb all the way back up again.     The constant threat of being thrown off creates a palpable sense of tension that endures until the moment you send the colossus plummeting to the ground. The game's controls aren't as responsive and precise as in, say, a game like God of War, and it does take time to get used to the climbing and jumping mechanics (not to mention the horseback riding). But no matter what you're doing, whether it's clutching the back of a soaring winged beast, running from the danger of a giant's crushing hammer, or firing arrows from the back of your speeding mount, the battles in the game are uniformly exhilarating and must be seen (and played) to be fully appreciated.   The game's aesthetic presentation is unparalleled, by any standard.   These epic battles even engender a sense of moral ambiguity. With a few exceptions, the colossi aren't aggressive. The ones who attack you on sight are in the minority; most of them regard you with curiosity or even indifference when you arrive on the scene. What's more, the game makes you feel sympathy for the great beasts as they crash to the ground, victims of your burning drive to complete an arguably selfish quest. Though the storyline isn't heavily developed until the end of the game, you'll eventually come to wonder exactly who the bad guy is in this adventure.    Veterans of ICO will remember that while the game was not the most technically accomplished on the PS2, it was an artistic tour de force. That dichotomy holds true for Shadow of the Colossus as well, not least of all because the visual similarities to ICO are so prevalent. The resemblances in the architecture, character artwork, soft focus, and unsaturated color palette are both unmistakable and eminently pleasing. You'll experience some breathtaking moments as you explore the lonely, immaculately detailed world, which stretches across plains, deserts, forests, lakes, underground caverns, and more. The game streams all these environments from the game disc, so you won't even encounter any loading as you move from one lavishly designed area to the next.    The character animation is also top-notch. Your own hapless warrior is a little clumsy and a little unsure of himself--he'll stumble a bit after a long leap, and clamber awkwardly up the side of a foe, flailing his legs all the way. When you mount your horse, it moves around like, well, a real horse. Then there's the colossi themselves, the designs of which stem from a common template but branch into diverse territory. Some foes are humanoid in nature, while others draw on specific animal influences, but they are all unmistakably of the same origin. They also move with a plodding expressiveness that's utterly appropriate to their great and terrible forms.    The game makes such an exceptional visual effort, in fact, that it's a disappointment that the technical execution is less than perfect. This is primarily due to an uneven frame rate, which is reasonably smooth while you're exploring the land but can dip dangerously low when a battle heats up--the worst time for it to happen. The camera can also be a bit erratic while you're climbing around the back of a colossus, though you can hold down L1 to center the camera on the monster, which helps to mitigate this problem. The low frame rate is actually countered somewhat by a motion blur effect, which makes everything appear a little smoother and adds a superb cinematic quality to boot. The game also supports 480p and widescreen modes on HDTVs, which enhances the visual presentation all the more. In any event, this is still one of the best-looking games on the PlayStation 2, and these minor visual flaws absolutely shouldn't keep you from playing it.   This is as much a puzzle game as an action game, since the process of defeating each colossus is highly cerebral.   Though Shadow is similar to ICO in visual terms, it features a more cohesive orchestral score than its predecessor. You'll explore the world itself with only the subtle sounds of wind and water as a soundtrack. But once you've encountered a colossus, you'll hear music that effectively conveys the mood of the situation, whether your foe is more interested in destroying you or is simply existing in peace. Without exception, the moment you climb upon or anger any of the beasts, you'll hear a great swell in the score that perfectly enhances the tension and excitement of the battle. It's also worth noting that Shadow makes use of a fictional language in its few instances of dialogue, which seems appropriate to the otherworldly atmosphere that's so prevalent throughout all aspects of the game.    It's inherent and unavoidable, given the design of Shadow of the Colossus, that the game is fairly brief and lacking in substantive replay value. You can finish the main story in roughly 10 to 12 hours, and once you know how to defeat each colossus, much of the challenge is removed. But none of the wonder is. The game makes a great showpiece--you'll be able to go back and fight individual colossi time and again and experience that same thrill as you battle with these beings, some of which are hundreds of times your own size. Shadow of the Colossus deserves a look by anyone with an interest in cerebral, slightly offbeat action adventures. There's never really been anything like it, on the PlayStation 2 or on any other platform.  


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914,Star Wars: Empire at War ,8.7, Star Wars fans finally get to play a strategy game worthy of the license.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/0/7/5/2211075-eaw_keyart.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-wars-empire-at-war-review/1900-6144457/,pos,"
  The Star Wars franchise has seen its share of great action games, role-playing games, and space-combat simulators, but the strategy genre is something that, for some reason, has proved elusive for LucasArts to truly capture. The efforts to date, including Rebellion, Force Commander, and Galactic Battlegrounds, have ranged from poor to pretty good. Petroglyph's Empire at War is the game that's finally gotten the formula down just right. In Empire at War, the action takes place both in outer space and on the surface of planets, but the interconnection of the two is one of many important strategic aspects that you'll consider as you make your way through the campaign and galactic conquest scenarios. Logical differences in the optimal playing style between the Empire and Rebellion, as well as an epic presentation befitting of the license, contribute to a fantastic overall package that any strategy-game player can appreciate, whether you have a stormtrooper outfit in your closet or you just have a passing familiarity with the films.    Strategy-game fans won't be disappointed with Empire at War.   The real-time action in Empire at War takes place on two different layers--a strategic layer, and a tactical aspect, which are the battles you fight in space and on land. The strategic layer takes place on a 2D galactic map, which shows all the planets in the galaxy. If you're playing the campaign, you'll worry about more than 40 different planets, while some of the galactic-conquest scenarios have as few as eight or 10 planets arrayed. Most planets can support space stations and land buildings such as barracks, mining facilities, factories, or even planetary defense systems like turbo-laser towers or massive ion cannons that shoot up into space. You can get more detailed information on a planet by zooming in on it, which gives you something of a Civ-lite view, listing all the units and structures there, as well as the things you can build on that planet. The Rebel side see all Empire-controlled planets on the galactic map, while the Empire must deploy probe droids to seek out the Rebels. The important thing to remember is that the action takes place in real time, even on the galactic map. So if you spend too much time considering what to build or where to send a fleet, you may invite the computer to attack one of your systems.    Some of the planets have unique bonuses, such as letting you build units more cheaply, or making all of one type of unit more powerful. The biggest ships like Mon Calamari cruisers and Imperial Star Destroyers can be built on only a few different planets, so as you'd expect, there are relative values for the different planets in the galaxy. All planets you control, however, add to your daily credit income, which allows you to purchase improvements for your planets and, of course, the soldiers and war machines that make up your military-industrial complex. There are a lot of demands on how you spend your credits--if you go all troops and no improvements, you risk falling behind in the technology race, or not having a stout defense in place if a raiding fleet arrives at one of your planets. One of the main differences between the Empire and the Rebellion is that the Empire usually generates a lot more money. Over the course of a campaign you can eventually build an economy so powerful that you build up massive forces to overwhelm Rebel defenses. The Rebellion doesn't have the luxury of limitless resources, so you'll find that they're more difficult to play and learn, but you can still steal technology and money from the Empire to weaken them and advance your cause. They also have the unique ability to make small raiding parties that can land on a planet and bypass any space defenses the Empire may have in place.   The galactic map gives you an overview of the entire galaxy, so you can plan your next attack.   The tactical-combat layer comes into play when the two factions meet on a planet. If two space fleets meet up, a space battle ensues. The game gives the defender some advantage in that any existing space station in orbit over a planet, as well as planetary defenses like ion cannons or hypervelocity cannons, can contribute to the battle, along with whatever fleet happens to be around. The higher-level space stations are fearsome indeed, with multiple laser and torpedo batteries, as well as its own small navy to harass attacking capital ships. The space-combat battles look great--the sense of scale between the huge Imperial capital ships and the smaller Rebel gunships and corvettes is plainly obvious. Fighters like TIEs and X-Wings buzz around the larger ships like gnats on an elephant. If you've got the graphics options turned up, the explosions look fabulous, with electrical fields shimmering around a ship disabled by ion cannons, and downed capital ships breaking apart into large pieces while falling slowly out of space. You'll also see distortion effects around exploding hardpoints, which brings up another interesting aspect of space combat in Empire at War. The space stations and capital ships all have hardpoints pertaining to different systems, such as shield generators and weapon systems. You can target individual systems to cripple larger ships in specific ways. Getting rid of the hangar on Imperial capital ships will thin out the fighter cover, while targeting engines can slow down ships. In most cases, the order in which you want to take out hardpoints is obvious, but ships that have special features, like the gravity well on the Interdictor cruiser, add even more tactical considerations. If you don't remove that gravity-well generator, for example, you can't retreat out of a system and save some of your fleet.    Land battles in Empire at War probably aren't quite as fun to play or look at as the space battles, but they offer their own unique nuances. The number of units you can control at once in land battles is limited by the number of reinforcement points you control. The attacking side is usually under a good amount of pressure to find and control more reinforcement points so they can call down more help, which is important if the defending team has a large number of units or emplaced defenses like shield generators. There are elevation and line-of-sight considerations, as well as weather effects such as snow or heavy rain that hamper visibility and accuracy of weapons. Special hardpoints on a map can also be controlled by either side for building small turrets or healing and repair stations for troops. If you control a fleet in orbit over the planet you can call down periodic bombing strikes that are powerful enough to take out major structures like factories or barracks. What's odd is that the defending team can't produce additional units directly out of the structures on the planet. Building units puts them into your reinforcement queue, but you still have to call them down on specific, controlled reinforcement landing zones in order to bring them to bear.          The primary reason that the land battles don't seem as fun as the space battles, though, is that the maps are all kind of bland and feel very similar, whether you're fighting in an urban area, a rainy swamp planet, or on snowy tundra. The enemy artificial intelligence is also not very devious on land maps, aside from its use of long-range artillery units. It will generally send waves of troops headlong at you, and there isn't much you need to fight them off. Contrast this with the space AI, where the computer will hide squadrons of bombers in asteroid fields or nebulae and spring them on the flanks of your destroyers, behind your front line of corvettes. You'll also see the computer execute some hit-and-run action with smaller gunships trying to bait your fighters out of the protection of the capital ships. There just isn't as much clever tactical play from the computer in the land battles. At least from a strategic sense, the computer knows well enough to strike at where you're weakest, but once you get a handle on where all the activity is, you can still easily rein it in by positioning defenses and fleets on the front lines.    Empire at War looks fabulous on land...   Hero units are also worth noting in Empire at War, as they're generally very powerful and can easily swing the tide of any battle they participate in. Each side has quite an array at their disposal, all with their unique traits. Palpatine and Mon Mothma, for example, can reduce production costs on any planet that they're stationed on. Boba Fett can crush concentrations of fighters by dropping a seismic charge in space maps. C3PO and R2D2 can hack into turrets and turn them against their owners in land battles. All the heroes are very difficult to kill, but they're not completely invincible, so you do have to keep an eye on them. Losing one can hamper your war effort; at least until the hero is automatically replaced over time.     After you get a handle on all the activity going on across the galaxy, Empire at War boils down to amassing raid fleets and invasion parties and knocking over one planet after another while trying to hold on to the ones you've gained control over. The larger and more sprawling your sphere of influence becomes, the more difficult it is to keep tabs on everything, and you'll probably find yourself swearing under your breath when your opponent raids a lightly defended planet that you forgot about. Thankfully, the game includes an ""auto-resolve battle"" button that lets the computer determine the outcome of battles for you, in order to save time. Still, the fun is in the details, and playing a campaign of Empire at War will definitely keep your mind busy as planets change hands back and forth.     The game ships with a story mode campaign for the Rebellion and the Empire, as well as a handful of ""galactic conquest"" scenarios. These play out quite similarly to the story campaigns, except with varying numbers of planets available, as well as variation in the technology level. The objectives don't change up that much, but you can tweak the amount of money each side starts with, as well as the starting tech level. There's also skirmish mode, which allows you to play single tactical battles against the computer on land or in space. Acquiring credits for units requires you to capture and control structures or areas of the map that generate money. Most multiplayer battles will be skirmishes, and you can play up to eight players online or over LAN. Thus far, the online performance has been pretty good, and it's been easy to find matches through LucasArts' matchmaking system. It's also possible to play a multiplayer head-to-head campaign match against a friend--obviously these can take a while, so you have the ability to save the match and reload it to continue later.    The graphics and sound in Empire at War are uniformly breathtaking. We already mentioned the epic nature of space battles and the sense of scale imparted by the different ships. The land battles are also impressive, as you'll see huge AT-STs and AT-ATs lumbering around while dozens of infantry scurry about underneath their feet. The weather effects look great, and there's a good variety of different tilesets. There's even a neat cinematic camera that you can switch to in order to give you a more movielike view of the battlefield. You lose control of the game in this mode, so it's not something you're going to be using a lot, but when you do steal a peek, it can show some great perspectives of the battlefield, even if the texturing up close doesn't look so hot. The camera's not perfect--a lot of times it'll show you a view of nothing in particular, but you can cycle through different angles using the space bar. The only graphical caveat is that the game can chug at times, even on a moderately-outfitted computer. On our 2.53GHz Pentium 4 rig with a GeForce 6800 card, we'd experience some slowdown with all the settings turned up at 1600x1200, but nothing that made the game unplayable. The sharp-looking explosions and shadow effects were well worth it.    ...or in space.   The weapons all look and sound as you'd expect them to. By now, the noise of a laser gun firing in Star Wars is ingrained into the psyche of just about everyone in the world as the way a laser ""should"" sound, and Empire at War doesn't disappoint in the weapon-effects department. The voice acting in the game is also quite impressive--Petroglyph did a great job at bringing in soundalikes to handle all the major roles in the game, like Darth Vader. The game's soundtrack is suitably epic but not overbearing, lending great support to the overall ambience of Empire at War.    As a strategy game, Empire at War delivers a true Star Wars experience. If you're into AT-ATs stomping around battlefields, Darth Vader knocking over 20 soldiers with Force push, or space battles thick with dozens of fighters swarming in between gargantuan capital ships, Empire at War will deliver all that in a fun, compelling package. You can't really lose in any game in which you can blow up a planet with the Death Star, can you? Combined with a presentation that is as epic as the films that inspired the game and a slick, dual-layered strategy design, Empire at War is easily recommendable to any strategy fan, especially those who are fond of George Lucas' space classic.  


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915,MVP Baseball 2005 ,8.7, EA Sports has finally hit one out of the park with MVP Baseball 2005.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/7/5/2213875-box_mvpb05.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mvp-baseball-2005-review/1900-6119464/,pos,"
  After the glory days of 3DO's High Heat Major League Baseball franchise at the beginning of the decade, things got rough for PC baseball gamers. Most development shifted to consoles, and 3DO's bankruptcy killed one of the best series in sports gaming last spring. But the drought is finally over. Following years of abuse from hardcore hardball fanatics over its unrealistic Triple Play series, EA Sports has finally hit one out of the park with MVP Baseball 2005. Impressive strides have been made over last year's sophomore edition of the series through the incorporation of enhanced realism, gorgeous graphics, habit-forming minigames, and a new career mode of play.   Owner mode lets you build New Yankee Stadium, but the tiny facility looks more like a triple A park than a successor to 'the House That Ruth Built.'   Play on the field sparkles. The pitcher-batter confrontation at the heart of baseball is as authentic as that depicted in High Heat 2001, the high-water mark of that series. Computer pitchers work with real intelligence that governs ball selection and location. They move the ball around, change speeds, keep the ball away when ahead in the count, and throw junk. MLB aces, like Eric Gagne and Kevin Brown, paint corners and put serious snap on breaking pitches. Pedro Martinez's slider, for instance, cuts across the plate like a runaway train. Taking the mound yourself is a tough assignment, too, because of a tightened-up pitching meter with a smaller sweet spot.    Computer hitters approach their duties with patience and have no trouble waiting for you to serve something up. At the same time, they're not invincible. Vary your pitch type, location, and speed and you can collect Ks with the right hurler on the mound. Stepping into the box against computer pitching isn't easy on the MVP and difficulty settings, although the new hitter's eye feature colors some balls at the moment of release (white for fastball, red for breaking ball, and so on) to let you know what's coming. All in all, everything holds together extremely well. And if you do see plays that you don't like, you can tweak sliders that control such factors as throwing speed, injury frequency, and pitcher fatigue.    That said, there are some quirks. More foul balls and walks add texture to games, although there still isn't enough of either. Play remains a touch on the fast side, making it hard to manually field sharply hit grounders and hot liners in the outfield. Couple this with the tiny size of the ball in the default camera, and singles can turn into roll-to-the-wall triples. Fielding assistance helps, though it seems like a cheat. Fielding is also the cause of an apparent bug that causes balls clearly caught in the outfield to be occasionally scored as singles. Fortunately, we only encountered this problem a few times in the two dozen or so games we played, but an issue like this needs to be addressed in a patch.    Of course, you need a little glitz to keep people playing. MVP Baseball 2005 delivers in that department with loads of features. Gamers with short attention spans can get instant gratification from exhibition play, manager mode, online multiplayer (which, incidentally, seems lag-free and now features 32-player tournaments, in addition to exhibition games), the home run showdown, and a pair of minigames. In fact, it's hard to stop playing the fiendishly addictive minigames, which hook you with simple gameplay and the allure of honing your skills for real games. The pitching challenge is an ingenious baseball version of Tetris where you score points by throwing the ball into colored blocks in the strike zone. Hitting is no slouch, either. There you take batting practice, where you must hit called shots, ramps, and even moving lawn mowers in the outfield, as well as wrecked cars and buses outside the fences.   Earn that triple with a hard slide past A-Rod.   And as usual with EA Sports games these days, almost every accomplishment earns points to unlock bonus content. Whether you pitch a perfect game, reach sixth level in the hitting minigame, or smoke Frank Thomas in the home run challenge, you accumulate points toward the purchase of classic players (from Ruth to Ryan), classic Cooperstown stadiums (like Griffith Park and the Polo Grounds...where games are seen through a sepia filter that makes it seem like you're watching 80-year-old newsreels), and classic old-time uniforms (such as the woolen togs worn by the 1915 Red Sox and the Day-Glo monstrosities that adorned the 1986 Astros).    If you're not into exhibitions and gimmicks, MVP Baseball 2005 includes a pair of career options. Dynasty mode adds the class A minor league circuit but is otherwise a holdover from last year, complete with similar features and the 120-year career limitation. The new owner mode is similar in many ways, although it's a dynasty mode that pumps up career play with reams of management tasks. Not only are you running a Major League franchise on the field, but also you're looking after farm clubs in all three minor leagues, setting ticket prices, building a ballpark for your inaugural season, purchasing concession stands and souvenir shops to sell overpriced soft drinks and T-shirts to the masses, and, of course, keeping the books in the black.   Broadcast-style camera positioning provides great angles on hits, including hard slappers down the third-base line.   That's easier said than done. While overseeing the operations of your favorite franchise is addictive, owner mode has some problems. The principal issue is being forced to create a new stadium at the beginning of each new game, as customization is mostly limited to cosmetics. Other than choosing padding, brick, or ivy for the walls, in addition to picking seat color and selecting fence style and distance from a few choices, there aren't many options. Anything that would give homebrewed stadiums real personality, such as domes, retractable roofs, or unique attractions (like the train in Houston's Minute Maid Park), has been ignored. Also, for a game that is an ode to the Boston Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series--it features cover boy Manny Ramirez, an opening video about the history-making Fall Classic of 2004, and a title song dedicated to the Beantowners--it's bizarre that the only option for the placement of a Green Monster-styled outfield wall is in right field.    Money is another stadium problem. Clubs start with a paltry few million dollars, and those funds don't go far when outfitting a stadium. You can build a restaurant and maybe a couple of ice cream and pizza stands in year one, but that's it. Additions to improve the bottom line, like extra tiers of seating for more customers and upgraded restaurants, are far beyond your meager opening-day budget. This means you're stuck with both a 20,000-seat facility that bleeds cash for at least five years and a much-needed salary dump in your first season to remain solvent. It's impossible to make ends meet in the first years of running a rich club, too. Go into the 2005 season with the $200 million payroll of the New York Yankees and your first objective is dumping megabuck stars like Jason Giambi, Kevin Brown, and (gulp!) even Derek Jeter. So while you can call the Bronx Bombers' freshly built digs New Yankee Stadium, the actual park would be a better fit for the Toledo Mud Hens.    Play-by-play and color commentary is similarly minor-league. Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow are awful. Not only do the broadcasters regurgitate lines from MVP Baseball 2004, but also their comments are entirely random musings based on the moment. So whenever Randy Johnson has a couple of tough innings, you'll hear something like, ""This pitcher isn't going to strike out many batters."" Uh-huh. The folks in Cooperstown are likely to disagree. Also, these lines don't mention specific players. Every observation is about ""this hitter,"" ""this righty,"" or even ""this dude."" The lone saving grace here is that Kuiper and Krukow confine their dimwitticisms to staccato sentences and don't ramble on between pitches.    High-quality visuals and in-game sound effects minimize the negative impact of the play-by-play. Both elements combine to give you the impression that you're in a big-league ballpark. Player animations are dead-on, with authentic batting stances and pitching motions of many Major League stars. Uniforms are attractive and brightly colored, although they also get pretty filthy after a slide or two. Vendors yell out the stadium treats they offer, like hot dogs and Philly cheesesteak sandwiches. Broadcast-style presentation now includes picture-in-picture displays from the top or side, showing fouls and whether you were in front of or behind the last pitch. In one area, however, this attention to detail goes too far. Player faces are so closely drawn that some have cheeks that resemble the surface of the moon. You can only see this sort of detail in the close-ups, such as when players step into the batter's box, but too many players look like they've got either serious acne or the measles (and poor Matt Stairs appears positively syphilitic).   A new minigame mode includes a pitching challenge that plays like a hardball version of Tetris.   With MVP Baseball 2005, EA Sports puts to rest the ghost of Triple Play once and for all. You won't quite get that just-ripped-the-cover-off-the-ball satisfaction earned once upon a time in High Heat, but you will get a sense of much-needed Major League authenticity that PC baseball fans have been missing over the past few years.  
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916,Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood ,8.7," Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood offers a rather similar experience to its excellent predecessor, with improved enemy artificial intelligence and additional multiplayer options. The novelty has worn off just ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/4/5/2210545-box_biaeib.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/brothers-in-arms-earned-in-blood-review/1900-6135236/,pos,"
  When Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was released earlier this year, it was lauded for its nearly seamless integration between first-person-shooter control and squad command mechanics. While clearly not as twitchy as most shooters, Brothers in Arms focused on the tactical aspect of small-squad infantry combat in World War II and packaged it with a cinema-quality presentation reminiscent of HBO's Band of Brothers. Fewer than seven months later, Gearbox has churned out a sequel. And as you'd expect from a sequel turned around so quickly, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood offers a rather similar experience to its excellent predecessor, with improved enemy artificial intelligence and additional multiplayer options. The novelty has worn off just a bit, though.   If you loved the first game, Earned in Blood offers a lot more of the same great gameplay.   For those who aren't familiar with the first game, Earned in Blood puts you in the shoes of an American corporal in World War II named Joe ""Red"" Hartsock. Hartsock was one of the thousands of US Airborne troopers who dropped in behind enemy lines the night before the Normandy landing in France. The story and the campaign are based on the real-life stories of Hartsock and his mates as they fought across the French countryside in those critical first two weeks after the invasion. For those of you who did play Road to Hill 30, Hartsock's name might ring a bell. That's because he was a character in the first game. The storyline in Earned in Blood overlaps that of Road to Hill 30, so you'll get to see Hartsock's point of view, as well as his experiences during the same time frame. As you'd imagine, much of the game is played from a flashback perspective as Hartsock is debriefed on his experiences by a superior officer. The in-engine cutscenes used to advance the story before and after missions are as heartfelt and impactful as they were in the first game, with the voice actor depicting Hartsock doing a fantastic job of conveying the emotion you'd expect from a war-weary soldier.    The interface of Earned in Blood is pretty much the same as it was in Road to Hill 30. You play as Hartsock from a first-person perspective and have the ability to walk, kneel, fire, aim down the iron sight of your gun, and throw grenades. You'll also have up to two different fireteams, or one fireteam and a tank, at your command. You can direct each team to follow you, move to an area, open fire on enemies, or charge enemies in an all-out assault. In general, your teammates are intelligent about contextually evaluating their surroundings and finding the proper cover in a given situation. If you direct them near a low wall or log, for example, they'll take up cover behind it. Move them to the side of a building with windows and they'll sidle up between the openings and peer through the windows so they don't leave themselves vulnerable. Once in a while they'll do something stupid, like take themselves out of cover or set up in a bad place. Usually this happens if you plant yourself in the spot you told them to move to.    The enemy will actually maneuver and retreat in response to your movement.   The primary gameplay conceit in Earned in Blood, as in the first game, is to ""find, fix, flank, and finish"" the enemy. The enemy soldiers you encounter in the game also move in small fireteams. But unlike most other shooters, the enemies in Earned in Blood can be suppressed by firing at their position. Their level of suppression is measured by a red-and-white circle above the enemy position, but these indicators can be shut off for a more realistic experience. Enemies that are suppressed won't fire back as often, and when they do, they're less accurate. The general idea is that you or one of your teams first engages the enemy with a hail of suppressing fire. Then you direct your other squad element (or yourself) around to the side, where you can get a clean shot at the suppressed enemy and can possibly kill him.     What's new about the enemy artificial intelligence in Earned in Blood is that it's more likely to retreat to another position if it spots you flanking, even if it's suppressed. Enemies in the previous game were more likely to sit tight. At the higher difficulty levels, the enemy may even act aggressively, moving to flank you and putting pressure on your squad. It also seems as though you have a smaller opportunity to kill off suppressed enemies that you attack from a flanking position in this game. The return fire you get comes faster and more accurately than before. This all makes Earned in Blood somewhat more difficult than the last game, but overall, veterans of Road to Hill 30 should find that this game is remarkably similar. Enemies behind cover are still not invincible to enemy fire. If you're a very careful shot with a rifle, it's possible to pick off enemy soldiers who are poking their heads up from behind cover. But in general, flanking maneuvers still work better when the situation allows for it.     As in the last game, the more than 10 missions in Earned in Blood are called ""chapters."" These will take you across various parts of France--from farms and forests, to towns and cities--and they should keep you busy for around 10 hours, counting restarts. The levels feel about the same size as last time, and you're generally compelled to move along a linear path, although there's sometimes more than one angle at which you can approach an enemy or make your way to an objective. Though the novelty of the gameplay mechanics masked the linear nature of the levels in the last game, we found ourselves somewhat disappointed to run into contrived obstacles that kept us from maneuvering as freely as we wanted to in Earned in Blood. The fact that enemies are more apt to retreat or to move exacerbates the problem somewhat more this time around, as you'll often run into situations where flanking is all but impossible. With an enemy backed into a corner, you may find yourself relying on risky assaults by your fireteam elements, which can cost you men, even when the enemy is suppressed. Grenades are another option, but it's somewhat difficult to aim your tosses in Brothers in Arms, making grenade attacks a trial-and-error affair. Thankfully, the game still offers a number of checkpoints throughout each level, and if you find yourself reloading at the same checkpoint a few times, you'll be offered an opportunity (at lower difficulty levels) to revive your health and the health of your squad members at that point.    WWII: It's the war we love to keep fighting.   There are a couple of new multiplayer options available in Earned in Blood. A skirmish mode lets you play any of the single-player missions cooperatively. Skirmish is available in split-screen mode on a single Xbox, or online over Xbox Live, or on the PC. Other skirmish modes are available as well, including defense, which requires you to defend wave after wave of enemy troops. Timed assault is another mode that requires you to kill all enemies on a map in a given amount of time. Bonus time is awarded for each enemy you take out, and you're scored based on remaining time. Finally, for the hardcore battlefield tacticians, a very difficult tour-of-duty mode is available that requires you to complete five consecutive missions with a single squad and a single life. (Good luck.)    Rounding out the multiplayer options is the same objective-based multiplayer mode for two to four players that was available in the last game. There are 20 maps to choose from this time around, and it's pretty much a tactical game of cat and mouse, as each player controls his or her squad and tries to outmaneuver the other team. This mode is as fun and challenging as it was the last time, and the new skirmish modes are pretty fun to play with a friend. Again, since more people seem to be using headsets on Xbox Live than on the PC, and since communication is at such a premium in this game, it's probably a little more fun getting online with the Xbox, assuming you can find a mature playing partner.    The presentation in Earned in Blood is excellent, just as it was in Road to Hill 30. The character and vehicle models are quite detailed, and your soldiers animate well, both individually and moving in groups. The lighting and particle effects seem a little better than in the last game, and the sound effects of the different weapons are as sharp and vibrant as ever. The PC version is, of course, sharper than the Xbox version, but both tend to suffer from a bit of slowdown when the action gets really hot and heavy. There's a lot of voice acting in the game, both during battles (as your squadmates shout out to you and to one another) and during cutscenes. While the stuff your squad yells in combat can get a bit repetitive, the voice acting in general is excellent, and Hartsock's is especially noteworthy.    Hartsock's heartfelt voice acting is one of many highlights in the presentation.   Though improvements have been made to the AI, and you've got additional multiplayer modes available, it's somewhat difficult to call Earned in Blood a true sequel. In the end, it delivers a pretty similar experience to the first game, even going so far as to tell an overlapping story. Of course, if you enjoyed Road to Hill 30, then Earned in Blood is definitely worth picking up, both for the tactical gameplay and for the high-class presentation of the story. All told, Earned in Blood is an excellent shooter that offers a unique gameplay experience you won't get with any other shooter franchise.   
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917,Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood ,8.7," Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood offers a rather similar experience to its excellent predecessor, with improved enemy artificial intelligence and additional multiplayer options. The novelty has worn off just ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/4/5/2210545-box_biaeib.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/brothers-in-arms-earned-in-blood-review/1900-6135237/,pos,"
  When Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was released earlier this year, it was lauded for its nearly seamless integration between first-person-shooter control and squad command mechanics. While clearly not as twitchy as most shooters, Brothers in Arms focused on the tactical aspect of small-squad infantry combat in World War II and packaged it with a cinema-quality presentation reminiscent of HBO's Band of Brothers. Fewer than seven months later, Gearbox has churned out a sequel. And as you'd expect from a sequel turned around so quickly, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood offers a rather similar experience to its excellent predecessor, with improved enemy artificial intelligence and additional multiplayer options. The novelty has worn off just a bit, though.   If you loved the first game, Earned in Blood offers a lot more of the same great gameplay.   For those who aren't familiar with the first game, Earned in Blood puts you in the shoes of an American corporal in World War II named Joe ""Red"" Hartsock. Hartsock was one of the thousands of US Airborne troopers who dropped in behind enemy lines the night before the Normandy landing in France. The story and the campaign are based on the real-life stories of Hartsock and his mates as they fought across the French countryside in those critical first two weeks after the invasion. For those of you who did play Road to Hill 30, Hartsock's name might ring a bell. That's because he was a character in the first game. The storyline in Earned in Blood overlaps that of Road to Hill 30, so you'll get to see Hartsock's point of view, as well as his experiences during the same time frame. As you'd imagine, much of the game is played from a flashback perspective as Hartsock is debriefed on his experiences by a superior officer. The in-engine cutscenes used to advance the story before and after missions are as heartfelt and impactful as they were in the first game, with the voice actor depicting Hartsock doing a fantastic job of conveying the emotion you'd expect from a war-weary soldier.    The interface of Earned in Blood is pretty much the same as it was in Road to Hill 30. You play as Hartsock from a first-person perspective and have the ability to walk, kneel, fire, aim down the iron sight of your gun, and throw grenades. You'll also have up to two different fireteams, or one fireteam and a tank, at your command. You can direct each team to follow you, move to an area, open fire on enemies, or charge enemies in an all-out assault. In general, your teammates are intelligent about contextually evaluating their surroundings and finding the proper cover in a given situation. If you direct them near a low wall or log, for example, they'll take up cover behind it. Move them to the side of a building with windows and they'll sidle up between the openings and peer through the windows so they don't leave themselves vulnerable. Once in a while they'll do something stupid, like take themselves out of cover or set up in a bad place. Usually this happens if you plant yourself in the spot you told them to move to.    The enemy will actually maneuver and retreat in response to your movement.   The primary gameplay conceit in Earned in Blood, as in the first game, is to ""find, fix, flank, and finish"" the enemy. The enemy soldiers you encounter in the game also move in small fireteams. But unlike most other shooters, the enemies in Earned in Blood can be suppressed by firing at their position. Their level of suppression is measured by a red-and-white circle above the enemy position, but these indicators can be shut off for a more realistic experience. Enemies that are suppressed won't fire back as often, and when they do, they're less accurate. The general idea is that you or one of your teams first engages the enemy with a hail of suppressing fire. Then you direct your other squad element (or yourself) around to the side, where you can get a clean shot at the suppressed enemy and can possibly kill him.     What's new about the enemy artificial intelligence in Earned in Blood is that it's more likely to retreat to another position if it spots you flanking, even if it's suppressed. Enemies in the previous game were more likely to sit tight. At the higher difficulty levels, the enemy may even act aggressively, moving to flank you and putting pressure on your squad. It also seems as though you have a smaller opportunity to kill off suppressed enemies that you attack from a flanking position in this game. The return fire you get comes faster and more accurately than before. This all makes Earned in Blood somewhat more difficult than the last game, but overall, veterans of Road to Hill 30 should find that this game is remarkably similar. Enemies behind cover are still not invincible to enemy fire. If you're a very careful shot with a rifle, it's possible to pick off enemy soldiers who are poking their heads up from behind cover. But in general, flanking maneuvers still work better when the situation allows for it.     As in the last game, the more than 10 missions in Earned in Blood are called ""chapters."" These will take you across various parts of France--from farms and forests, to towns and cities--and they should keep you busy for around 10 hours, counting restarts. The levels feel about the same size as last time, and you're generally compelled to move along a linear path, although there's sometimes more than one angle at which you can approach an enemy or make your way to an objective. Though the novelty of the gameplay mechanics masked the linear nature of the levels in the last game, we found ourselves somewhat disappointed to run into contrived obstacles that kept us from maneuvering as freely as we wanted to in Earned in Blood. The fact that enemies are more apt to retreat or to move exacerbates the problem somewhat more this time around, as you'll often run into situations where flanking is all but impossible. With an enemy backed into a corner, you may find yourself relying on risky assaults by your fireteam elements, which can cost you men, even when the enemy is suppressed. Grenades are another option, but it's somewhat difficult to aim your tosses in Brothers in Arms, making grenade attacks a trial-and-error affair. Thankfully, the game still offers a number of checkpoints throughout each level, and if you find yourself reloading at the same checkpoint a few times, you'll be offered an opportunity (at lower difficulty levels) to revive your health and the health of your squad members at that point.    WWII: It's the war we love to keep fighting.   There are a couple of new multiplayer options available in Earned in Blood. A skirmish mode lets you play any of the single-player missions cooperatively. Skirmish is available in split-screen mode on a single Xbox, or online over Xbox Live, or on the PC. Other skirmish modes are available as well, including defense, which requires you to defend wave after wave of enemy troops. Timed assault is another mode that requires you to kill all enemies on a map in a given amount of time. Bonus time is awarded for each enemy you take out, and you're scored based on remaining time. Finally, for the hardcore battlefield tacticians, a very difficult tour-of-duty mode is available that requires you to complete five consecutive missions with a single squad and a single life. (Good luck.)    Rounding out the multiplayer options is the same objective-based multiplayer mode for two to four players that was available in the last game. There are 20 maps to choose from this time around, and it's pretty much a tactical game of cat and mouse, as each player controls his or her squad and tries to outmaneuver the other team. This mode is as fun and challenging as it was the last time, and the new skirmish modes are pretty fun to play with a friend. Again, since more people seem to be using headsets on Xbox Live than on the PC, and since communication is at such a premium in this game, it's probably a little more fun getting online with the Xbox, assuming you can find a mature playing partner.    The presentation in Earned in Blood is excellent, just as it was in Road to Hill 30. The character and vehicle models are quite detailed, and your soldiers animate well, both individually and moving in groups. The lighting and particle effects seem a little better than in the last game, and the sound effects of the different weapons are as sharp and vibrant as ever. The PC version is, of course, sharper than the Xbox version, but both tend to suffer from a bit of slowdown when the action gets really hot and heavy. There's a lot of voice acting in the game, both during battles (as your squadmates shout out to you and to one another) and during cutscenes. While the stuff your squad yells in combat can get a bit repetitive, the voice acting in general is excellent, and Hartsock's is especially noteworthy.    Hartsock's heartfelt voice acting is one of many highlights in the presentation.   Though improvements have been made to the AI, and you've got additional multiplayer modes available, it's somewhat difficult to call Earned in Blood a true sequel. In the end, it delivers a pretty similar experience to the first game, even going so far as to tell an overlapping story. Of course, if you enjoyed Road to Hill 30, then Earned in Blood is definitely worth picking up, both for the tactical gameplay and for the high-class presentation of the story. All told, Earned in Blood is an excellent shooter that offers a unique gameplay experience you won't get with any other shooter franchise.   
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918,Derek Jeter Pro Baseball ,8.7, Derek Jeter Pro Baseball is so far beyond its competition as to render it largely irrelevant.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/9/2/1/23773-66921.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/derek-jeter-pro-baseball-review/1900-6128148/,pos,"
  Given the preponderance of baseball games on carrier download decks, especially in these summer months, it might surprise you to hear that Gameloft's Derek Jeter Pro Baseball 2005 has no real competition. The simple reason is that whatever you might think of Derek Jeter the man, his wireless digitization is heavenly. In almost every conceivable way, this game is superior to its competition. Indeed, it is in a different ballpark entirely--one with plush seating and hot dogs fortified with nutritious vitamins and minerals. Although it lacks the MLBPAA license, this is the baseball game you want to play on mobile.    This is hands down the baseball game to buy on mobile.   Previous mobile baseball games have been impressionistic at best. They've tended to focus on specific aspects of play, usually the batter-pitcher confrontation, glossing over the rest. Gameloft has instead taken a holistic approach, providing useful innovations in batting, baserunning, and fielding. The most immediately noticeable of these is the batting system, which gives you six ways to hit the ball.     This batting solution is an expansion of previously existing systems, which offered maybe two or three types of hits. The 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 buttons correspond to locations in your batting zone. When a pitch is forthcoming, you'll have to press the right button at the right moment. If you under- or over-cut a ball, it will affect the fate of that hit. For example, if a pitch is thrown high, but you press the 5 key instead of the 2, you'll likely hit a pop fly that will be easily caught by an outfielder. Of course, you can also bunt.     Derek Jeter's pitching system takes a page out of CBS SportsLine Baseball, in which you select a pitch, then simply choose where you want it thrown. By throwing sliders or curveballs on the edge of a strike zone, you can fake out batters pretty effectively. The game's impressive AI will thwart your efforts much of the time, however, particularly on the higher difficulty levels.     Baserunning is a part of baseball that has hitherto been mostly automated on mobile. Derek Jeter fleshes out this aspect of the game, allowing you to tell any of your base runners to steal at any time. When you're in the field, a part of your heads-up display lets you know when the CPU is attempting to pull one over on you. A quick button press will stop that runner cold. What's more, pickle situations sometimes arise, in which a ball is tossed between two basemen, and a runner is stuck between the base he was attempting to steal and the base at which he formerly resided. As the unfortunate runner, you can attempt to run or dive past your persecutors. Pickles are invariably exciting, and it's great to see them included for the first time in a mobile game.     Derek Jeter gives you more control over fielding than any other mobile game. It's your responsibility to guide your fielder into place, catch or scoop up the ball, and throw it toward the desired base. The length of time for which you hold the appropriate button determines the strength of the throw. If you're racing to beat a runner, you'll have to choose between strength and speed. Of course, if you prefer a more casual experience, you can opt to automate much of the fielding.    You can play Derek Jeter in exhibition, season, or playoff modes. In each of these, you can choose your team, manage your lineup, and tweak play settings. In the latter two modes, you can choose to simulate a game based on statistical strengths, rather than play it yourself. Unfortunately, while Pro Baseball includes teams from all 30 of the MLB cities, the teams and players haven't been licensed. The only Yankee you'll recognize is Derek Jeter himself. The rest have been given pseudonyms that will remind you of the days when Michael Jordon was named ""Player."" Baseball purists now writhing in agony should be aware that the lack of an MLBPAA license is Pro Baseball's only real shortcoming.    The game employs carefully shaded sprites that really add depth to the players and field. In the hands of a less scrupulous publisher, Derek Jeter Pro Baseball might have been branded with the ""3D"" designation, bringing no shortage of shame to everyone involved. Fortunately, the game doesn't deny its form, and it looks great on the Nokia 6620. The animations are smooth, and the player models are absolutely enormous. The game's single, fictitious park is modern and picturesque and is set in some city whose skyscrapers turn a gorgeous shade of lavender at dusk. Here's the kicker: You can choose to play in the afternoon, in the evening, at night, or in real time. This last mode bases its atmospheric ambience on the actual time of day and will change along with the outside world. It's safe to say that Derek Jeter's visuals trump those of any other mobile baseball game on the market.    The uniforms may be generic, but they're close to the right colors.   The sound is even more phenomenal. Whereas most games include a hitting sound effect and call it a day, Derek Jeter Pro Baseball boasts a half-dozen familiar baseball tunes, as well as great sound effects and vocal clips. You'll hear classics from the Gameloft park's organist, as well as some more modern tunes, such as the infectious ""Zombie Nation,"" over the PA. An umpire will yell things like ""Steeerike!"" and ""Safe!"" at the appropriate junctures. Most mobile games can't be bothered to include both sound effects and music. Derek Jeter Pro Baseball features tons of both, and its audio is therefore some of the best you can find in any Series 60 game. Furthermore, you can adjust the volume levels of both sound and music by intervals, meaning you won't embarrass yourself on the subway. Series 60 games are notorious for their unbearably loud volumes, so this is excellent news.    If you're looking for a baseball game on your phone and aren't dead set on seeing accurate player names, you're set. There isn't any one feature that propels this game above the pack, but there's an overall feeling of excellence that's present in every layer of the game's design. This isn't a piece of baseball adverware; it's a full-featured game capable of sustaining your interest over the long haul.  
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919,Half-Life 2: Episode One ,8.7, Episode One is even better than Half-Life 2. The only problem is that it's over before you know it.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/0/6/5/2216065-box_hl2e1.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/half-life-2-episode-one-review/1900-6152188/,pos,"
  Few companies tease its customers as well as Valve. 1998's Half-Life ended on an intriguing note, with series hero Gordon Freeman basically being ""recruited"" by the mysterious G-Man to work for him as a dimension-hopping commando. But fans were really caught off guard by the ending of 2004's Half-Life 2, as Gordon and ally Alyx Vance were caught in a massive explosion. Rather than have us wait years and years for the outcome of that cliff-hanger, Valve has taken the series into episodic territory to get us answers more quickly. Half-Life 2: Episode One is the first in a new trilogy of episodes that are scheduled to be released over the course of the next year. (You don't need to own Half-Life 2 to play Episode One, as it's a stand-alone product, though it would definitely help if you did.) And Episode One is a memorable romp through the Half-Life universe, with gameplay that's even more satisfying than that of Half-Life 2. The only downside is that, due to its episodic nature, it's over far too soon.   Gordon Freeman is back in action, with Alyx by his side, in Episode One, the first of a trio of episodes that continue the Half-Life story.   Unfortunately, Valve's storytelling remains about as cryptic as ever. The episode starts off on a wrong note, as there's an incredible cop-out to explain how Gordon and Alyx survive the explosion and how the G-Man gets knocked out of the picture, but it gets a lot better after that. Rest assured, answers are finally given, but keep in mind that new questions are raised, as well. Episode One is about the escape from City 17. Though the quisling Dr. Breen was defeated in Half-Life 2, the Combine remain on Earth, cut off from their alien dimension. Now, with the Citadel reactor on overload, it's a battle to escape the ruins of the gutted Citadel and the city itself. Of course, that's easier said than done, and you'll once again be plunged along a tightly controlled and highly scripted ride filled with a fair share of ups and downs.    Half-Life has always been a mix of combat and puzzle-solving, but the formula feels honed to a razor's edge in Episode One, as Valve seems to have designed content that's geared toward Half-Life veterans. The puzzles and battles seem even more complex and challenging. In fact, the best encounters in the game require a mix of puzzle-solving and combat as you desperately fight to stay alive long enough to figure out what you need to do next.    There's a wonderful new team dynamic at work in Episode One, thanks to the fact that Alyx battles alongside you throughout most of the episode. After playing on your own throughout Half-Life and Half-Life 2, it's refreshing to have a companion by your side, and Valve takes advantage of this by throwing you into situations where you must rely on teamwork to survive. Alyx is a capable assistant (perhaps almost too capable, since it's pretty tough to kill her off, and she seemingly has unlimited ammo), and she's often the difference between victory and defeat in many encounters, as she'll cover your back while you're busy trying to sort out the puzzle.   Alyx introduces a new team dynamic for Half-Life, such as when you have to illuminate her targets for her in the dark.   Spending so much time with Alyx has other upsides, as well. The flirtation between Alyx and Gordon continues even further, and while it's a bit strange that it's such a one-sided relationship (thanks to Gordon, again, never uttering a single word), you still get a feeling of warmth and affection. There's lots of humor, as well, as Episode One features some sharp and witty dialogue uttered by Alyx and other familiar faces. Barney and Alyx's robotic Dog are back, as well as Eli Vance (Alyx's father) and the ever-hilarious Dr. Kleiner. Valve's impressive facial animation is still incredible, and you really get the sense that you're interacting with believable characters in the game. Of course, it also helps that the voice acting remains top-notch. Robert Guillaume, Michelle Forbes, Merle Dandridge (Alyx), and the original voice cast remain the same.    This sense of familiarity has its downsides, as well. For instance, though extremely well done, the environments of the Citadel and City 17 were already explored in Half-Life 2, so you may find yourself encountering moments of deja vu as you battle through the episode. Your arsenal of weapons also remains unchanged. The versatile gravity gun gets heavy use through the episode, and it's invaluable to solving the many environmental puzzles in the game, but other than that, you're packing the same assortment of pistols, rifles, and grenades as before. It's also worth noting that there are no vehicle sequences in Episode One. That's not exactly a bad thing, though, as the vehicle sequences in Half-Life 2 felt fairly linear and dragged on for too long.     In terms of opponents, you do get glimpses of challenging new foes that are coming up in future episodes, but for the most part, the enemies remain the same from Half-Life 2, including the head crabs, zombies, Combine soldiers, striders, and so on. The Combine troops do seem to have some new abilities, such as the ability to rappel down buildings right in front of you. They're also a bit smarter, as they seemed to utilize cover better than they did in Half-Life 2, but you don't really get the sense of squad coordination that was seen in the original Half-Life. The only memorable new opponent is the zombine, a Combine zombie, and these guys quickly become your first target when they appear on the scene, thanks to the fact that their favored tactic is to charge you with a live grenade in hand.   Battles can get crazy, but with Alyx covering your back, there's nothing that you can't do.   Visually, Episode One introduces a lot of subtle improvements and enhancements in the Source engine, keeping it in line with video-card developments over the past couple of years. The new high-dynamic range lighting technology (seen only if your video card supports it) makes a big difference, as the outdoor scenes look a lot better, while indoor scenes feature impressive shadowing and atmosphere at times. Some of the textures in the game have been increased considerably, notably on Alyx and the other main characters, and the game looks incredibly sharp.     When you get down to it, the only major complaint about Episode One is that it's over so quickly. There are only four to six hours of gameplay, and veteran first-person shooter fans will definitely find themselves at the lower end of that range. Episode One does ship with the two existing Half-Life 2 multiplayer modes, but if you own Half-Life 2 already, you already have those. Finally, the game does include a developer commentary system of sorts, similar to the one used in the PC version of The Chronicles of Riddick, and that does provide some interesting insight into the development of the game (though the rehearsed nature of the developer dialogue makes it sound more like a lecture than a proper commentary track). But apart from that one unique feature, the only thing truly new in Episode One is the single-player story. Before you know it, you've escaped from City 17, the credits are rolling, and you're left wanting more. So in a way, Valve has teased us once again, though the bright side is that we don't have to wait long for the next set of answers to be found in Episode Two, which is due out around the end of the year.    


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920,Flushed Away ,4.3, Flushed Away is a generic run-and-jump game that's hampered by technical problems.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/3/9/2219239-box_faway.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/flushed-away-review/1900-6161027/,neg,"
  Loosely based on the animated movie of the same name, Flushed Away is a 3D adventure that follows a mouse named Roddy St. James as he makes his way through the sewers and back to his cushy life in someone's condo. To help Roddy find his way home, you have to guide Roddy and his newfound friend, Rita, through roughly a dozen multilevel missions that involve platform jumping, sneaking, and a few skirmishes with angry insects, rodents, and amphibians. If it sounds like the developers put together a generic run-and-jump game and stuck the movie's characters into it, that's because that's exactly what they did. The design is derivative of countless other games, while the lukewarm presentation relies primarily on recorded video scenes to convey an association with the movie. On top of all that, the game is hampered by technical problems that make it impossible to get through any level without ""dying"" and respawning multiple times.   You spend most of the game jumping from one platform to the next in nondescript sewer environments.   Like many movie-based games, Flushed Away shoehorns the main characters and the underpinnings of the story into a sequence of generic run-and-jump levels and then tacks on a bunch of additional levels that concern characters and story tangents that aren't in the movie. Unlike the majority of other movie-based games, however, Flushed Away doesn't try very hard to copy the atmosphere of the movie it's based on. The characters have a rounded, clay-formed appearance that's only mildly reminiscent of the character designs produced by Aardman for the movie. Furthermore, they lack detail, and their animations are stiff and boring. Key environments, such as the underworld metropolis and Toad's mansion, look vaguely like the ones in the movie, but the rest are nondescript sewers and rooms. By and large, the game recycles the same plain floors, boxes, pipes, and platforms over and over again. As it is, the overall quality of the graphics is on the weaker end of the spectrum. The polygon count is low, the textures are blurry, and it's often hard to see what's in front of you because everything is so dark and murky. With regard to the audio, the various jump and punch sound effects are appropriate, and the rock- and swing-style music is fitting, but there's nothing overtly identifiable from the movie aside from a few brief voice comments.    The closest the game comes to resembling the movie is during the many prerecorded cinematic scenes that play after each level. These scenes weren't put together using actual movie footage. Instead, they're computer-generated look-alikes that employ slapstick situations and spoken dialogue that's similar in tone to what Aardman and Dreamworks produced for the movie. As noninteractive clips go, these scenes are generally enjoyable. The characters have a lot to say, their dialogue feels natural, and the overall visual quality is 10 times better than what's churned out by the in-game graphics engine.     Gameplay also doesn't draw much inspiration from the movie. For the most part, Flushed Away follows the blueprint that every generic 3D adventure game follows. Missions are split up so that you control Roddy during some missions, Rita in others, and Rita's boat, the Jammy Dodger, in the rest. Despite their looks, Roddy and Rita are functionally identical. They can both run at varying speeds, jump, double jump, and grab onto things, as well as smack enemies with their weapon of choice. The only distinguishing factor is that Roddy's weapon is an umbrella that also allows him to float across short distances, whereas Rita's preferred implement is a bungee hook that can also be used to latch onto faraway grapple spots. The levels featuring Rita and Roddy are set up like overwrought obstacle courses, and they mainly involve the  repetition of simple tasks like jumping between platforms, swinging across ropes, and climbing up ladders. Once in a while, you'll have to drag a box, tiptoe past an enemy, or swat a bug or animal with your weapon, but these diversions from the boring obstacle-course format are uncommon. The missions where you have to gather salvage with the Jammy Dodger are slightly more enjoyable, if only because you spend as much time shooting enemies with golf balls and bottle rockets as you do steering the boat around floating hazards.   Thanks to the unpredictable camera and slippery surfaces, surprise deaths are a frequent occurrence.   That sort of formulaic gameplay might be fine for younger players, but the game is also fraught with technical problems that will likely cause even the calmest of players to throw their controllers at the wall. In a nutshell, the camera tends to change positions at the worst moments, and the characters don't always land on ledges or grab onto ropes like they're supposed to. Roughly half the time, things will happen like they should, although you'll have to fight the controls and camera a little. The other half of the time, you'll end up jumping blindly and watching in horror as your character bounces off the rope you were trying to grab or slides right off the ledge you thought you landed on. You don't lose much progress from these mishaps, since you can respawn as often as you like from the previous checkpoint, but they basically eliminate any possibility of enjoying the game. After all, it's tough to have fun when you can't see what you're jumping toward and are constantly falling off of greased platforms.    Outside of the main single-player mode, there are some minigames to waste time with. They're just simple puzzle and shoot-'em-up games, but the ones that let two players compete are somewhat entertaining. The minigames also don't suffer from a broken camera and slippery surfaces like the levels in the main game do. Not that it matters much, since a few decent minigames hardly make up for such a crummy main quest.    Flushed Away is one movie-based game you should probably avoid. It doesn't do a good job of copying the look and feel of the movie it's based on, it's not all that interesting, and the technical problems are maddening.  
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921,Hummer Badlands ,4.3, Racing Hummers is just about as exciting as it sounds in this thoroughly uninteresting racer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/1/7/9/25641-72179.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hummer-badlands-review/1900-6148423/,neg,"
  When you think of performance racing vehicles, the Hummer would probably be pretty far from mind. But, video game logic dictates that anything with wheels can and should be raced, be it a finely tuned Ferrari or a lumbering monstrosity of a vehicle such as the bright-yellow H1 Hummer. And so it is in Hummer Badlands, the latest budget racer from Global Star and Eutechnyx. Oddity of the license aside, this just isn't a good racing game. The racing is boring and way too easy, the physics are bouncy and unrealistic, the rubber-band artificial intelligence is ridiculous, and you can easily beat every race in the game in a couple hours. Put simply, even a Hummer driven by Rainier Wolfcastle and copiloted by John Matrix from Commando couldn't drag this game out of the mud.   It smells like a steak and seats 35--it is the obscenely yellow H1 Hummer.   Hummer Badlands lets you race a couple dozen different Hummers, but since there are only three different models in the company line, variety is limited to different paint jobs, wheels, and light kits. All of the vehicles look accurate enough to their real-world counterparts, but they all drive pretty much the same. Sure, the bulky H1 is a bit slower than the comparatively demure H3, but the difference is negligible. The vehicles do deform slightly as you race, although the damage is limited to cracked windshields and slightly malformed bumpers. You can drive headlong into a rock, tree, or even a row of grape vines, and you'll hear a crunch and see some colored particles fly off your vehicle before you bounce right back on track and continue unabated. Hummers are tough vehicles and all, but hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour and just bouncing off seems a bit strange, and it makes the game extremely easy because you can just mash the accelerator and let the track guide you along.      There are a handful of different event types, but none of them are any fun. The best of the bunch is the Extreme Off-road mode, where instead of racing, you get to take your Hummer off the beaten path and drive over fallen trees, across rushing rivers, and up steep inclines. There are five challenges of increasing difficulty, but none of them will take you more than a few attempts to complete. There are only two courses available in this mode, though, so you'll be able to finish all of the whopping 10 challenges in half an hour or so. For completing the off-road challenges, you'll unlock new Hummers to drive, including an H2 Bling with flame detail and snazzy rims and the majestic H1 Patriot, which features a stars-and-stripes paint job and a giant eagle head on each side.     Other modes include the requisite time trial and quick race, as well as a beat-the-clock mode where you have to hit checkpoints before the clock runs out. There is also a championship mode, where you can participate in a series of five races in which points are awarded for each race, and the person with the most points at the end of the series is the winner. The first four races of each series are three laps apiece, and the last race is five laps. Since some of the courses are rather short, you can finish a series in half an hour or less. There are five different tracks: California, Arizona, New York, Peru, and Colorado. Each track has five variations, for a total of 25 different courses. But, since all those courses take place on the same five tracks, there isn't much variety at all to the scenery. You'll see the same trees, fences, and roads in each series, and none of it looks very good at all. There are some shortcuts in each track, but they are so glaringly obvious that there's no challenge at all in finding or navigating them. In fact, all of the tracks are laughably easy. The snowy Colorado track can provide a slight challenge as you tend to slide around, but it's still easy to take first in each series on your very first play through.     Making things even easier is the rubber-band artificial intelligence in the game. No matter how many short cuts you take or how well you race, the other three racers will always be right on your tail. You can run an opponent off the road or spin him around backward, and he'll somehow magically catch up within a few seconds. Conversely, you can fall behind by a considerable distance and easily catch up, as if your opponents decided to stop and wait for you.     The physics in the game are way off, too. Your Hummer bounces off of even the smallest bumps in the track, and instead of simulating the sway of the suspension on your vehicle, your tires simply melt into the ground as you drive over uneven terrain. There's also no collision detection on a lot of objects in the environment, so as you drive through some dense foliage or across a river, you'll see the branches, leaves, and water clip right through your vehicle.    The understated elegance of the H1 Patriot is, quite simply, frickin' awesome.   If you want to inflict this game upon a friend, you can play two-player split-screen in three different modes. You can have a head-to-head race, a pursuit race, or a tug-of-war match. In a pursuit race, you both start on opposite points in the track and try to catch up to your opponent. In tug of war, you basically hold the reverse button and try to drag your opponent across a line. In pursuit race and tug of war, both players have to use the same Hummer, which makes the competition even less exciting than it would be otherwise.     Hummer Badlands isn't worth your time, regardless of your affinity for the vehicles. The racing is easy and simplistic, and the off-road mode is too brief to be worthwhile. With so many great racing games on both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, this one might as well not even exist.     
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922,Hummer Badlands ,4.3, Racing Hummers is just about as exciting as it sounds in this thoroughly uninteresting racer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/1/7/9/25641-72179.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hummer-badlands-review/1900-6148424/,neg,"
  When you think of performance racing vehicles, the Hummer would probably be pretty far from mind. But, video game logic dictates that anything with wheels can and should be raced, be it a finely tuned Ferrari or a lumbering monstrosity of a vehicle such as the bright-yellow H1 Hummer. And so it is in Hummer Badlands, the latest budget racer from Global Star and Eutechnyx. Oddity of the license aside, this just isn't a good racing game. The racing is boring and way too easy, the physics are bouncy and unrealistic, the rubber-band artificial intelligence is ridiculous, and you can easily beat every race in the game in a couple hours. Put simply, even a Hummer driven by Rainier Wolfcastle and copiloted by John Matrix from Commando couldn't drag this game out of the mud.   It smells like a steak and seats 35--it is the obscenely yellow H1 Hummer.   Hummer Badlands lets you race a couple dozen different Hummers, but since there are only three different models in the company line, variety is limited to different paint jobs, wheels, and light kits. All of the vehicles look accurate enough to their real-world counterparts, but they all drive pretty much the same. Sure, the bulky H1 is a bit slower than the comparatively demure H3, but the difference is negligible. The vehicles do deform slightly as you race, although the damage is limited to cracked windshields and slightly malformed bumpers. You can drive headlong into a rock, tree, or even a row of grape vines, and you'll hear a crunch and see some colored particles fly off your vehicle before you bounce right back on track and continue unabated. Hummers are tough vehicles and all, but hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour and just bouncing off seems a bit strange, and it makes the game extremely easy because you can just mash the accelerator and let the track guide you along.      There are a handful of different event types, but none of them are any fun. The best of the bunch is the Extreme Off-road mode, where instead of racing, you get to take your Hummer off the beaten path and drive over fallen trees, across rushing rivers, and up steep inclines. There are five challenges of increasing difficulty, but none of them will take you more than a few attempts to complete. There are only two courses available in this mode, though, so you'll be able to finish all of the whopping 10 challenges in half an hour or so. For completing the off-road challenges, you'll unlock new Hummers to drive, including an H2 Bling with flame detail and snazzy rims and the majestic H1 Patriot, which features a stars-and-stripes paint job and a giant eagle head on each side.     Other modes include the requisite time trial and quick race, as well as a beat-the-clock mode where you have to hit checkpoints before the clock runs out. There is also a championship mode, where you can participate in a series of five races in which points are awarded for each race, and the person with the most points at the end of the series is the winner. The first four races of each series are three laps apiece, and the last race is five laps. Since some of the courses are rather short, you can finish a series in half an hour or less. There are five different tracks: California, Arizona, New York, Peru, and Colorado. Each track has five variations, for a total of 25 different courses. But, since all those courses take place on the same five tracks, there isn't much variety at all to the scenery. You'll see the same trees, fences, and roads in each series, and none of it looks very good at all. There are some shortcuts in each track, but they are so glaringly obvious that there's no challenge at all in finding or navigating them. In fact, all of the tracks are laughably easy. The snowy Colorado track can provide a slight challenge as you tend to slide around, but it's still easy to take first in each series on your very first play through.     Making things even easier is the rubber-band artificial intelligence in the game. No matter how many short cuts you take or how well you race, the other three racers will always be right on your tail. You can run an opponent off the road or spin him around backward, and he'll somehow magically catch up within a few seconds. Conversely, you can fall behind by a considerable distance and easily catch up, as if your opponents decided to stop and wait for you.     The physics in the game are way off, too. Your Hummer bounces off of even the smallest bumps in the track, and instead of simulating the sway of the suspension on your vehicle, your tires simply melt into the ground as you drive over uneven terrain. There's also no collision detection on a lot of objects in the environment, so as you drive through some dense foliage or across a river, you'll see the branches, leaves, and water clip right through your vehicle.    The understated elegance of the H1 Patriot is, quite simply, frickin' awesome.   If you want to inflict this game upon a friend, you can play two-player split-screen in three different modes. You can have a head-to-head race, a pursuit race, or a tug-of-war match. In a pursuit race, you both start on opposite points in the track and try to catch up to your opponent. In tug of war, you basically hold the reverse button and try to drag your opponent across a line. In pursuit race and tug of war, both players have to use the same Hummer, which makes the competition even less exciting than it would be otherwise.     Hummer Badlands isn't worth your time, regardless of your affinity for the vehicles. The racing is easy and simplistic, and the off-road mode is too brief to be worthwhile. With so many great racing games on both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, this one might as well not even exist.     
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923,Dance Factory ,4.3, Dance Factory's main feature is the ability to generate dance steps to your own music CDs. There's just one problem: It doesn't really work.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/4/1/2219041-dance_factory.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dance-factory-review/1900-6157356/,neg,"
  Dance Factory is a Dance Dance Revolution-like dancing game from Codemasters that puts you in control of the song list. Considering that, most of the time, you probably only ever like a handful of songs in any DDR release, adding support for music CDs seems smart. But Dance Factory's bad interface and poor beat-detection capabilities get in the way almost immediately.   Dance Factory is a good idea, but the execution is bad.   There are only five songs that come on the Dance Factory disc, but the game relies on you inserting your own music CDs and dancing to those. The game's main feature is that it will ""listen"" to your CD and automatically generate dance steps. But the automatic generation relies on too many of the same step patterns over and over again. On top of that, the game has a hard time when it comes to figuring out the timing of those steps. While the steps might fall right on beat at the beginning of a song, over time they always seem to fall out of sync. You can get around this by making up your own steps for a song, but the entry method for the steps is to simply freestyle dance to the song. The steps you lay down are recorded and can be saved, but not edited. Some sort of graph-based step-creation mode that lets you plot out where each step should go would have made more sense.    In addition to creating steps to dance to, the game lets you create creatures that are based on the data scraped from CDs you put into the PlayStation 2, sort of like Monster Rancher, though these creatures don't look nearly as good as the ones found in Tecmo's monster raising series. You can buy accessories, like baseball caps and bracelets, for your creatures using money earned from dancing, and you can battle another player's creature in a dance-off. In creature mode, your creature will dance onscreen while you dance to the steps, but the animation is awfully basic.    The rest of the graphics aren't much better. You have a few backgrounds to choose from when you dance, but all of them are very plain. It's understandable, since the whole game has to be kept in memory because you'll be swapping out CDs all the time, but it's still very basic. The game's EyeToy support lets you toss your own ugly mug up on the screen, too, if that's your thing.    This game's sole selling point is the ability to generate steps for your music CDs, and that part of the package doesn't work very well at all. Beyond that, there's very little here. Unless you're willing to use your feet to manually plot out dance steps, Dance Factory isn't worth your time.  
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924,X-Men: The Official Game ,4.3," The DS version of X-Men misuses its characters, controls poorly, and is otherwise utterly generic.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/8/9/2208789-box_xmentog.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-men-the-official-game-review/1900-6152131/,neg,"
  Like so many other movie tie-ins, X-Men: The Official Game for the Nintendo DS is a formulaic action game that is, mercifully, short-lived. Fans will barely recognize their favorite characters--partly because they're tiny and nigh unrecognizable, but mainly because Wolverine, Iceman, Nightcrawler, and Magneto have had their superpowers scaled back significantly in order to jibe with the character-swap mechanic that is central to the game's design. Ironically, the character-swapping gimmick and the stylus-oriented controls, which were no doubt meant to make the game more interesting, don't make the game any more enjoyable or playable than it would be if it were oriented around a single character and a standard button-oriented control scheme. In fact, very often, these nuances make the game more frustrating.   The DS version of X-Men makes rather poor use of its characters.   The game picks up right after the second movie left off, with Wolverine in pursuit of Lady Deathstrike and seeking information behind his origins and those of the Weapon-X program. While that's going on, the government kicks its anti-mutant campaign into high gear. Eventually, the two plot points come together, and the three X-Men are reunited, along with Magneto, who, just for the heck of it, has decided to help the heroes out. You alternate control of the characters while going through 40 short top-down levels filled with cookie-cutter thugs and the occasional boss. Levels can be replayed at any time to attempt to earn health and mutant power upgrades, and once you've completed the story mode, you'll be able to access additional survival and boss rush modes.    Generally speaking, the game is a ""by the numbers"" beat-'em-up, where you battle waves of enemy soldiers and dodge their gunfire while collecting health items and unlocking doors here and there. The interesting wrinkle is that every action is performed by tapping or dragging the stylus on the touch screen. This has good and bad implications. On the one hand, it feels very intuitive to tap on enemies to direct attacks and to send objects sailing across the screen using Magneto's magnetic powers. On the other hand, the touch screen isn't always quick to respond.     Central to the game's design is the ability, or rather, the requirement, to swap between characters on the fly. Nightcrawler has his own levels designed specifically around his ability to manipulate time and space, but most levels require the use of all three of the other mutants. Each character has had his superhero repertoire reduced to one or two actions, meaning that there are some enemies and obstacles that one character can handle and the others can't. Wolverine can slash enemies on the ground, but he can't touch flying drones. Iceman can hurl frozen projectiles, but he can't damage anything with heat-oriented shielding around it. Magneto can't attack human opponents directly, but he can use his magnetic powers to hurl objects in the environment at them. He can also shatter heavy metal doors that the other heroes can't get past. Routinely, you'll find yourself in situations where you have to switch between the characters multiple times to deal with a single room filled with a variety of enemies and obstacles.    These arbitrary restrictions, while appropriate for a video game, are idiotic considering what we've seen the characters do in the comic books and movies. They also make the game more frustrating than it ought to be. First, managing the shoulder buttons and touch screen to swap characters and select enemies requires ridiculous levels of dexterity and stamina. Second, the tiny character graphics make it tough to quickly differentiate one character from another, which means, just to bring up one example, that you'll sometimes find yourself trying to attack human enemies unsuccessfully with Magneto when you meant to use Wolverine and his adamantium claws.    Character models are tiny and often indiscernable from other random characters on screen.   On the whole, the graphics and audio are weak and uninspired. Level layouts, in addition to being generic, resemble the sort of thing you'd see in a Game Boy Advance game. There's not much in the way of decoration or color in the environment. Character animation is fine, but the characters are tiny and distorted. The majority of bosses are the same size as the heroes, and the larger ones are never completely shown and don't display much in the way of moving parts or coloration. On the upside, the animated comic-panel cutaways that appear between some levels are pretty snazzy. Meanwhile, the audio consists of some generic action-style music and a bunch of cookie-cutter explosions. They're not particularly bad, but they're a far cry from some of the highly orchestral and voice-accentuated stuff we've been getting from numerous recent DS games. There's nothing about the graphics or audio here that couldn't have been done on the Game Boy Advance.    In the end, the best thing that can be said about the Nintendo DS rendition of X-Men: The Official Game is that, indeed, there are X-Men in it. Apart from that, this is just another generic action game, hampered by poor design choices and dodgy controls, and it doesn't do much to capture the abilities or the personalities of the characters it portrays.    
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925,Stronghold Legends ,4.3," Say good-bye to the historical authenticity of Strongholds past and hello to one generic, seriously flawed fantasy RTS.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/2/2/2212522-932119_73762_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/stronghold-legends-review/1900-6161495/,neg,"
  It's gotten to the point that you don't know what you're going to get when you open the box of a new Stronghold game. The castle-building franchise from Hartford's Firefly Studios has gone through some significant changes over the past two years, but the latest version throws the whole formula out the window. Stronghold Legends moves the series out of the history books and into D&D-styled real-time strategy territory with mythical heroes, dragons, and dwarves. Yet while this is admittedly a nifty idea, the switch from reality to fantasy kills the historical authenticity that has long been a trademark of the Stronghold line. Even worse, everything seems to have been crowbarred into the aged Stronghold 2 engine, resulting in a generic RTS that has more than a few serious technical and design issues.   Giant-sized opponents and giant-sized problems.   The actual gameplay in Stronghold has little to do with the earlier games in the franchise. Here, instead of building a castle and getting knee-deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to live during the Middle Ages, you sign up for three campaigns out of medieval mythology. In the opener, you take on the role of King Arthur, battling against the Saxons for control of Britain. In the others, you play as Siegfried, the German dragon slayer and star of a Wagnerian opera, and Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian Turk-killer best known today as the bloody inspiration for Dracula.    But nothing of interest has been done to develop these storylines or settings. Buildings follow the RTS template and feature barracks, armories, granaries, and so forth. Resource gathering goes beyond the usual food, wood, and stone, but it does so by adding an annoying level of micromanagement to what should be a straightforward grind of building armies and attacking the bad guys. A game this simplistic probably shouldn't demand the collection and processing of any resources, as mission objectives always involve straightforward building armies and killing enemies.    All of the soldiers featured in each faction are virtually identical. There is little difference here whether you're fighting on behalf of the evil forces of Dracula or the noble knights of King Arthur. Also, since the units themselves are generic, the gee-whiz factor of getting to play Count Blah and his evil minions in an RTS fades quickly. You get little aside from the same old pikemen, archers, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. There is only so much that a developer can do with a medieval setting, of course, but no effort was made to provide significantly different troops to represent the nationalities and time periods represented. A millennium passed between the King Arthur campaign of the mid-400s and the Vlad campaign of the mid-15th century. You would think that more than the color of the shirts would have changed during that time.    At least the three sides vary quite a bit when it comes to the menageries of mythological beasties that they can throw into battle. Heroes like Arthur, Merlin, Siegfried, and Vlad have special powers that give them the ability to pull off feats like casting spells, knocking down walls, and summoning magical creatures. In the Arthur scenarios, you have access to heroic knights and wizards straight out of Malory; in the Siegfried ones, you deal with figures out of Norse legend such as frost giants; and in the Dracula missions, you get to play with Halloween refugees like creepers and werewolves. All of the units fit perfectly into their settings and make the game feel like a collection of folktales come to life.    Yet while these beasties add color to Stronghold Legends, and some cool moments like giants stomping pesky soldiers with their feet and Merlin blasting archers with lightning bolts, they don't do much for gameplay. For starters, most are underpowered. Dragons, for instance, are second-rate compared to Tolkien's Smaug and can be taken out by well-placed archers. Giants can be ganged up on by regular infantry grunts like pikemen and felled quicker than you can say fee-fi-fo-fum. And just breathing on the frail Merlin seems to kill him.  More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, ""Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!"" right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.      It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.    Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, ""The enemy's ladders are on the walls!"" even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.   Misty morning, clouds in the sky. Without warning, a wizard walks by. And blasts a bunch of Saxons to bits.   And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.    There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.    The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.      More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, ""Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!"" right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.   Misty morning, clouds in the sky. Without warning, a wizard walks by. And blasts a bunch of Saxons to bits.   It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.    Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, ""The enemy's ladders are on the walls!"" even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.    And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.    There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.    The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.    
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926,2006 FIFA World Cup ,4.3," 2006 FIFA World Cup offers a faithful World Cup set-up, but little in the way of faithful gameplay.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/9/7/2209597-box_fifawcg06.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/2006-fifa-world-cup-review/1900-6152105/,neg,"
  Football fans wrapped up in World Cup fever should steer clear of EA's 2006 FIFA World Cup on the Game Boy Advance. It may well offer you the chance to take your favourite team through the qualifying stages and into the World Cup finals, but the game's poor animation and simple tactics make it a completely lackluster experience.     2006 FIFA World Cup for the GBA may have a slick menu presentation...   As an officially licensed FIFA product, all team and player data is correct and up to date, which goes a long way in re-creating the atmosphere of the tournament. The limitations of the GBA mean that some concessions have been made, though, such as a lack of the official World Cup venues seen on the other platforms. However, EA's famously polished presentation goes some way to alleviate this--hearing a Black Eyed Peas song blaring out of your GBA makes a strong impression, and compares favourably to other games on the console.    There are three single-player modes in this version of 2006 FIFA World Cup. Kick off is a single match where you can turn wind effects on or off, change the pitch type, and adjust the length of each half. You can also set up a number of scenarios if you become bored of the basic game, such as giving yourself a 10-goal head start--or, if you're feeling generous, giving it to your opposition instead. It's even possible to cut straight to the end of the game if you wish, and it's likely that this option will be particularly popular with people wanting to re-create scenarios that arise from the real World Cup. Even though matches don't feature commentary, the crowd reacts to what's happening on the pitch and all menus have musical accompaniments.    But the main thrust of the game is the World Cup mode, and you can either play out the main tournament or take a team through the qualifying stages to the World Cup itself. This mode is a nice option for fans of teams that didn't make it through to the finals, who can instead play out the tournament as if their team had actually qualified. If you don't like your group you can swap with another team, or you can ask the game to draw seeded groups so that the best teams are all separated. Your progress will be saved during the World Cup stages, so you can return to a tournament at any time; and if you don't fancy playing a particular match, you can ask the game to simulate it. However, simulating a game rarely brings accurate results (we're not convinced that an Australia 4, Brazil 0 score line is all that likely in the real tournament), and your team seems to have a much higher chance of losing a game than if you were playing it yourself. It would have been more helpful be able to watch a game being played from the manager's perspective, and then dip in and take control if things aren't going well.     The game also has two challenge modes. One is a simple penalty shootout, and the other is a global challenge. The latter lets you choose a team and play out a number of different scenarios, such as playing the last half of a game already 2-0 up, with the aim not to concede more than two goals. Playing through challenges and using teams from different continents in the World Cup will unlock posters in the 'rewards' section of the option menu. On the multiplayer side, you can use a link-up cable between two GBA consoles, both of which require a copy of the game.    Unfortunately, though, actually playing 2006 FIFA World Cup isn't a particularly rewarding experience. The animation of the players could be forgiven for being rudimentary on the GBA, but they move so erratically, the result is similar to bad 'stop-motion' animation. The poor player likenesses also means that you won't be able to recognise individuals on the pitch, and you certainly won't be able to spot Beckham or Ronaldo from the way they move. Players feature a strange grey-brown skin tone to cover all nationalities and are differentiated only by either light or dark hair.    The feeling of inaccuracy stretches to other basic football movements, too, something which isn't helped by the limited number of buttons on the GBA. Players tend to crowd around the ball, meaning that there's little point in making short, intricate passes, as you're usually punished with an interception. Conversely, if you go it alone and take one man down the pitch to score, you're usually rewarded with huge score lines. When defending, you can hold both shoulder buttons to bring two players to the ball, but tackling is very imprecise. Pressing A is a soft tackle that rarely gets the ball (instead sending it off the pitch), whereas pressing the left shoulder button and A usually results in a foul.    ...But everything on the pitch is completely lackluster.     In-game, there are quite a few options to tweak. The game can be played from only one of three side-on perspectives, but replays can be controlled in three dimensions, with full zoom functionality, and match highlights are shown at the end of each game. You can also dip out of the game and access basic team management and statistics. Player substitutions are included, and it's possible to choose from up to 18 different formations, plus change between five different levels of attack and defence. In the kick off single-match mode you can also toggle elements such as injuries, bookings, and wind conditions. There are no real-life stadia in the game, but you can change from 'normal' ground to 'hard', 'wet', 'soggy', or 'icy' conditions. That said, the chances of an ice patch in Germany in June are pretty remote.    Although 2006 FIFA World Cup is a game full of options, control is lacking just where it's needed the most--on the pitch. Scoring is simply a case of running up the pitch, shimmying past the goalkeeper, and scoring goal after goal without much effort. Although World Cup junkies might be able to look past the basic flaws that this game has, most people will find their memories of the tournament tarnished by this below-par cash-in.    
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927,The Ant Bully ,4.3," This 3D adventure game does expand on the movie's story, but it's also uninteresting and repetitive.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/9/5/2216595-932207_73944_front.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-ant-bully-review/1900-6154967/,neg,"
  Like many movie tie-ins, the video game rendition of The Ant Bully is a far cry from the feature film that it's based on. This 3D action adventure game tries to expand on the movie by putting players through a sequence of missions that delve into what Lucas, the insect-sized boy, went through off camera to learn the ants' ways, but it mostly succeeds at showing why events such as these weren't portrayed in the movie in the first place. Nearly every mission involves fetching items or fighting the same enemies over and over again. Moreover, the noninteractive scenes that accompany each mission spend more time preaching the story's morals than they do developing the characters or building toward an exciting conclusion.    Most missions involve fighting the same badly rendered pill bugs, spiders, and wasps over and over again.   Regarding the story, the game and the movie take place in the same time period. Both center around the exploits of a young boy named Lucas, who is reduced to miniscule proportions by a magic potion. The movie follows Lucas's story from a social perspective, giving the viewer insight into the ants' hierarchy as he works his way up from slaving in the mines to fighting alongside the soldiers to stop various predators. At various points in the movie, we see Lucas use the ants' tools and abilities to outwit his opponents and save the day. The game, meanwhile, takes a hands-on approach to telling Lucas' story. It shows how Lucas acquired those tools and learned all of those tricks. Apparently, the process involved completing 20-odd missions tasked to him by the various leaders of the colony, because those missions are what you have to do in this game.     The play mechanics and controls are about what you'd expect from any game like this. The basic idea here is that you need to explore the environment, find the items you're looking for, and pummel any enemies that cross your path. For exploration's sake, Lucas can run and roll, and he can perform a number of contextual abilities when he's close to specific objects and spots in the environment. When you run off a ledge, Lucas will jump automatically. When you're next to a marked wall, a small rock, or a rose petal, you can push the action button, and Lucas will climb the wall, hoist the rock, or use the rose petal like a glider. In some spots, he can call together nearby ants to form useful structures, such as bridges, catapults, or battering rams. To deal with enemies, you can make use of any of Lucas's four weapons. The wooden stick can be used to attack enemies up close, while sticky silk shooters, dart guns, and bombs let you deal with enemies at a distance.    Various flaws become apparent once you get into the habit of fighting multiple enemies. The controls are sometimes slow to respond and the lock-on isn't always reliable, which can make it easy to miss shots and waste ammo. The hit detection is unpredictable, to the point that Lucas's attacks will sometimes pass through an enemy, or an enemy's attack will pass through Lucas, without doling out damage. This is nice when you're the beneficiary but not so nice when you're sandwiched between two ferocious purple spiders. Also, for some bizarre reason, Lucas doesn't jump as high in the PC version of the game, so you really have to line up your leaps in that version. These flaws are unfortunate, but they're not too troublesome, since much of the time you'll have lobbed a seed bomb into a crowd of spiders long before you get up close and personal with them.    What kills the game, ultimately, is how the missions themselves are structured. They all feel the same. Supposedly, by speaking to one of the four caste leaders, you'll be sent on a mission involving rescue, scouting, foraging, or all-out combat. In reality, nearly every mission either involves collecting a bunch of esoteric items or fighting the same cookie-cutter enemies over and over again. A person can only see the same spiders and wasps so often. The game does throw a couple of boss stages into the mix, and you're always free to visit the areas you've previously cleared to hunt for fire crystals at your own pace, but these token nods to adventuring are much too modest to overcome the doldrums brought about by so many lame missions.    They probably could've lessened some of the monotony by making the noninteractive scenes that play between missions at least marginally interesting. Unfortunately, the aftermath of each mission tends to be anticlimactic. The ants cheer, and the spiders or wasps run off. That's pretty much the extent of the game's cinematic aspects. There are a few fleeting bits of humor in the dialogue, but the script generally tends to hammer home the same moral messages of teamwork and honor at every opportunity. While that's nice and all, Bruce Campbell's legendary talents could've been put to better use on dialogue more suited to his comedic range.    Sappy dialogue scenes duplicate and expand the movie's story.   In general, the graphics and audio are weak. The characters are colorful and passably animated, but they're not what you'd call detailed or lifelike. The large shrubs and monster-sized insects in the environment succeed in conveying the larger-than-life scale of the insect world, but again, if you stop and look around, you'll notice that the same plants, insects, and objects are recycled constantly. To add insult to injury, the game is easily three years behind the curve when it comes to technical aspects such as polygon count, draw distance, and overall texture quality. As you'd expect, the PC version pushes more polygons and has better lighting effects than the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions of the game, but the leap in quality isn't as significant as it ought to be. Games such as Jak & Daxter, Super Mario Sunshine, and Beyond Good & Evil all look better than The Ant Bully, and they were released years ago. The audio isn't much better, but at least the generic insect noises, pop-pop sounds, and stereotypical jungle music fit the action without offending the ears.    Unless you're absolutely smitten with what you saw in The Ant Bully movie, you should probably avoid this game. While the game does indeed tell more of the story, it does so in a way that's preachy and uninteresting. Fighting the same half-dozen insects and repeatedly gathering trivial items is no way to spend five or six hours of your life, especially when you can't even rely on the graphics or cinematic scenes to salvage anything from the experience.    
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928,Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 ,8.7," GRAW2 offers up a better, though shorter, single-player game than its predecessor. But the bulk of its gameplay can be found in its impressive multiplayer game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/0/4/8/29174-82048.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-advanced-warfighter-2-revi/1900-6167103/,pos,"
  Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is the game that lent serious legitimacy to the Xbox 360. It was one of the first ""must have"" games for that system, delivering graphics and gameplay that just weren't possible on any previous console. Between the critical acclaim and the impressive sales, it was inevitable that there would be a sequel. What's startling, though, is the speed at which Ubisoft produced Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. Just a few days short of the first anniversary of GRAW, we have the follow-up, and as you'd expect, it's a better game, though it's also a noticeably shorter one.   Welcome back to Mexico in GRAW2. Now take out some more rebels.   GRAW2 puts you right back in the steel-toed combat boots of US Army Captain Scott Mitchell of the fictional 5th Special Forces Group (the Ghosts) for another grueling battle south of the border in Mexico. While you needn't have played the first game to enjoy the second, it certainly helps to understand the overarching plot. A Mexican civil war has erupted between mutinous army units. For various reasons, the elected-civilian government and the US have been drawn into the conflict. In the new game, the fighting threatens to spill over onto US soil along with the threat of nuclear weapons, which gives your superiors even more reasons to scream at you over the radio to defeat the rebels.    What follows is more of the intense infantry combat that was featured in the original GRAW. You will go on both solo and team missions to achieve a varied set of objectives, from rescuing a Mexican journalist who has clues to the insurgency to neutralizing enemy encampments, and more. The action unfolds on both sides of the border this time, and the game ably captures the first-world and second-world settings. The Mexican side of the border faces even more turmoil than in the first game. The visuals in GRAW2 are also more stunning than in the original game, thanks to sumptuous atmospheric lighting and effects. The incredible scale remains; you'll again look out over vast cityscapes consisting of hundreds of buildings as you fly over in your Black Hawk Helicopter. But now, you can also take in the stunning vista of a setting sun over the desert or gaze at gigantic pillars of smoke rising from the fires of a war-torn Mexican city.     GRAW2 features a similar mix of on-foot and in-vehicle action sequences as its predecessor. Most of the time, you'll be on foot, hugging every bit of cover available as you engage a mix of Mexican Army rebels and foreign mercenaries. The cover system remains solid, and you can ""hug"" most cover simply by moving up to it. Once there, you can swing out or up to engage an enemy before dropping back to cover. It's this system that makes the GRAW games feel more authentic than other shooters in which you can only stand in the open. On top of that, the squad system in the game lets you command a small infantry squad, so it's not just yourself that you have to worry about.    Control of your teammates, vehicles, or drones is a lot easier now thanks to the improved communications system. Now you can get a full-screen video feed from any friendly asset on the battlefield, which essentially lets you be in two places at once. You can find some cover, tell your men to move to another position, and then use their video camera to locate and call out targets for them to engage. A cool new battlefield drone called the Mule has many uses, which include battlefield resupply and healing, mobile cover, and remote-controlled scout. You're able to control the Mule directly from the camera view or give it movement orders on the fly. The overhead drone that was cumbersome to use in GRAW is also improved in the sequel because it's far easier to control, and you can view its video feed in full screen rather than in a postage-stamp-sized window.   The action takes place on both sides of the border, and you'll have to defend US soil.   Thankfully, GRAW2 manages to eliminate some of the frustrating gameplay elements that appeared in the first game, such as the annoying rooftop sniper hunts that were more of an exercise in trial and error than actual skill. Those have been replaced with some riveting set piece battles, including a Black Hawk Down scenario, as well as desperate defend-and-hold situations. And while you can go through the game stealthily if you want by using suppressed weapons and sneaking about, it's just as much fun--if not more--to go through guns blazing. The large battles in GRAW2 are pretty awesome because usually vehicles are exploding around you, helicopters are buzzing above, and the situation is going crazy. Perhaps the best moment in the campaign is when you're temporarily deprived of your high-tech gear, so you lose all of that oh-so-helpful targeting information that can make the combat in GRAW2 feel a bit too easy at times. Suddenly having to locate and identify your targets raises the intensity quite a bit.     The artificial intelligence in GRAW2 seems to be on par with the previous game in that it's OK and not brain-dead. Your teammates do a dutiful job of following you around, but you'll still need to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to combat. However, one of the nice new features of the AI is that it does a fantastic job of calling out enemy locations. For instance, if there are two bad guys next to a red car shooting at you, your teammates will yell out that very fact. Their ""awareness"" of the level and ability to describe that to you is a nice touch, which adds an extra bit of authenticity to a firefight. And the rest of the sound in the game is also fantastic. With that said, it's worth noting that the plot feels like it's starting to veer toward a territory of silliness, even for a video game. General Keating, your immediate superior, is more overbearing than ever by constantly telling you what to do and behaving like he can rewrite the intensity of the situation by simply yelling louder. And then there's the moment when the president of the US gives you a personal pep talk in the middle of a huge firefight, which suddenly makes GRAW2 feel like it's emulating the over-the-top histrionics of the television show 24.    The multiplayer suite is incredibly varied and has plenty of content.   The main downside to the campaign is that it's very short, and you can get through it in maybe four or five hours at most. That's probably how Ubisoft Paris managed to get the sequel done in a year (most games require 18 to 24 months), but a short game means that it's over before you know it. The briefness of the campaign is reflected in the distribution of the achievement points because most of them are weighted toward the multiplayer aspect of the game. The good news there is that GRAW2 offers a huge amount of multiplayer goodness, even more than the original. Considering that GRAW remains one of the most popular Xbox 360 games on Xbox Live, this says a lot. There's something in the multiplayer suite for everyone, from a six-mission cooperative campaign that takes place in Panama to an incredibly open-ended competitive suite.    There's not just more multiplayer content in the form of new maps and new weapons, but there's also stronger gameplay. For example, the graphics in multiplayer now match the quality of the single-player game, something that didn't happen in the original GRAW. The new levels are fairly big, large enough to make even 16-player games feel roomy, and their design is inspired. For instance, ""Crash Site"" is set amidst the burning wreckage of a downed US transport aircraft. Maps can come in several variations, reflecting different times of the day and lighting conditions, which is a nice touch that shows off the cool new effects.    The host can set up a wide range of competitive games, from objective-based to simple team deathmatch. With all the variables that can be adjusted, from the amount of respawns, the weapon restrictions, the objectives, and such, there are effectively countless custom modes that can be created. But there can be a lot of silliness in multiplayer as well. For instance, the new helicopter hunt mode has you and your teammates doing nothing but shooting down gunship and transport helicopters out of the sky with rocket launchers. This task isn't too easy because of the speed and maneuverability of the helicopters, as well as the fact that they can strafe you with rockets.     Meanwhile, the six-mission co-op campaign is also a lot of fun because you can romp through a separate storyline along with up to 15 other players. The gist of the co-op story is that a Panamanian strongman is funding the Mexican rebels up north, and a separate team of Ghosts is dispatched to get the job done. Battles rage around the Panama Canal and its outlying areas, with dynamic objectives and other neat new features adding an extra layer of challenge and coordination to the entire affair. Previously, you just had to worry about killing all the bad guys as fast as you could, but with dynamic objectives, your team has to coordinate its actions to accomplish secondary goals. These goals include blowing two radio towers simultaneously or else risking the appearance of enemy reinforcements.   The visuals in multiplayer are as good as the single-player game. In other words, they're awesome.   The teamwork in the game is also enhanced in co-op and competitive modes by the new aid system. If you're shot by something that wouldn't instantly kill you, such as a rocket, your character will drop and roll around on the ground wounded. You can choose to die and instantly respawn, but if there are friendlies around, they have a limited amount of time to patch you up before you die. This adds an extra bit of urgency to the voice channel as players cry for help and others rush in to save them.     There's such a wealth of content in the multiplayer suite that it alone makes GRAW2 an easy purchase for multiplayer fans. If the original game is any indication, there's going to be a large following for GRAW2 for a long time, which makes this a safe investment. The flip side to this is that if you don't have Xbox Live, then GRAW2 is an iffier proposition. The single-player game is fun, but its brevity is certainly an issue. Still, if you're a fan of modern combat, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 makes a compelling case for a game that you have to play.     


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929,Command & Conquer Gold Edition ,8.6, Is it really worth 30 or 40 bucks for the enhancements?,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/6/2/2210962-cncbox.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/command-and-conquer-gold-edition-review/1900-2538455/,pos,"
If you're a strategy fan and don't already own a copy of Command & Conquer, you've got it easy when it comes to deciding whether or not to buy the new Gold Edition of the award-winning classic. Because you haven't already spent $40 or $50 on the original Command & Conquer, you needn't worry whether or you should shell out another $45 or $50 for Windows 95 support, SVGA graphics, head-to-head Internet play, and a Command & Conquer Theme Pack (animated icons, wallpaper, and sound effects); after all, you're buying the game, not the extras. So you'll buy the Gold Edition and love it - case closed.  But what if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of users who already own the DOS version of Command & Conquer? Is it really worth $30 or $40 bucks (owners of the DOS version get a $10 rebate) for the enhancements? For gamers uninterested in multiplayer action, the answer is probably ""no."" The new graphics are a big improvement, but they're not enough to get you excited about fighting the same single-player battles over again. But if you're into multiplayer C&C, it's probably worth the investment. Take the SVGA graphics, for instance. It would be easy to dismiss them as eye candy, but the truth is they allow you to see four times as much of the map as in the DOS version - giving you a decided edge when competing against players using the old C&C. And with the addition of Westwood Chat support, C&C fans have another venue for finding opponents and playing tournaments or ladder games. Setting up a game over Westwood Chat is about as easy as Internet gaming gets, and there are always plenty of opponents looking for action.  The one complaint many will have with the Gold Edition is price. Westwood has made a ton of money (and justifiably so) off the sales of Command & Conquer; to ask Command & Conquer owners to pay almost full price for an SVGA upgrade, Internet play, and Theme Pack is a bit much. New users will find the investment well worth it, but the company could create a lot more goodwill among their loyal fans by upping that rebate by five or ten bucks, or simply creating an upgrade. Especially when you consider that serious C&C players will consider those SVGA graphics essential for staying competitive in their multiplayer matches.
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930,Mission Critical ,8.6," Put simply, Mission Critical was one of the best adventures of 1995.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/7/0/5/2215705-g00770r2t3r.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mission-critical-review/1900-2542603/,pos,"
MIT begat Zork, which begat Infocom, the king of text adventure games, which begat an ill-fated attempt at developing business software (!), which begat bankruptcy.  But Infocom also begat a small company called Legend Entertainment, devoted to making text-ish adventures for thinking people.  Legend mated point-and-click interfaces and graphics with well-written adventure prose for a meaty, old-fashioned computer game experience.  But Legend couldn't hold back the tide of graphic adventure games.  So, as if to show just how good they were as game designers, Legend cranked out Mission Critical, a science fiction adventure with heavy graphic flair, set in deep space and starring Patricia Charbonneau and Michael Dorn. In the future, the United States and other nations are fighting another war of independence against a fascist United Nations-run world government.  Mission Critical provides the setup through a well-done video sequence; Michael Dorn plays the captain of the USS Lexington, defeated by a UN starship.  Feigning surrender, he ferries over his crew to the enemy craft–-along with a nuclear warhead, sacrificing himself and his crew just to give you a chance to complete the Lexington's mission–which you'll need to puzzle out from video logs and computer records.    Put simply, Mission Critical was one of the best adventures of 1995.  The halls of a 22nd Century starship are rendered in 7th Guest-like detail, using camera-on-rails animation that delivers an illusion of smooth 3-D movement down hallways or into rooms. Pick up objects, open containers and solve puzzles—all typical adventure fare, but Mission Critical gives you a great deal more. As your adventure moves from the immediate problem of repairing a badly-damaged spacecraft to fighting deep space battles to first contact with aliens, you'll unravel a greater cosmic mystery that could affect the entire human race. A chilling beginning and deep science-fiction premises make Mission Critical an adventure game to savor.
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931,Outlaws ,8.6," From the opening level, you'll know you're in for a movie-worthy experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/3/6/2209536-250px_outlawslucasartsboxcover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/outlaws-review/1900-2543567/,pos,"
Weren't so long ago that the Spirit of Digital Western Gaming roamed these plains, moanin' and cussin' something fierce about getting no respect. Mayhap he didn't rightly deserve much - you might remember Sunset Riders or maybe Mad Dog McCree - mere tinkles in the comprehensive wind of the Western genre - and what else comes to mind? Dust, maybe (a fine game, but a little too Nice, and you can guess what happens to ""Nice"" out these ways). Still, the lack of true Western computer games was a crime, a terrible crime. Now comes Outlaws, and there just ain't room enough in this town for anybody else.  In Outlaws, you don the duds and irons of the archetypal Avenging Loner who rides into town seeking to redress the wrongs committed by a railroad tycoon and his renegade thugs. Using both the 3D engine from the popular Dark Forces and Rebel Assualt II's INSANE engine, Outlaws combines all the elements of classic 1960s Leone-esque Westerns in a first-person shooter that is probably the first point-of-view crawler since Marathon with an actual, articulated plot.  You take the role of ex-marshal James Anderson, whose life is shattered by vicious desperados who murder his wife and kidnap his daughter, leading the determined hero on an avenging, unshaven kill spree through a prairie stronghold, a lethal sun-battered township with the unlikely name of Sanctuary, a clattering, swaying-car passenger train, and more. Inspired by such films as A Fistful of Dollars and other spaghetti westerns, Outlaws is a respectable step forward in the first-person shooter genre; even the gorgeous and gloomy Quake had only the lamest excuse for a plot. Not so with Outlaws, where in the middle of a tense back-room shoot-out the game will suddenly cut to an animated cinematic sequence which moves the story, and the motivations of the player, along.  From the opening level, you'll know you're in for a movie-worthy experience. The Western alone (with the possible exception of the  noir gumshoe film) is a genre which not only embraces cliches but actually seems to improve with them, and they are all, every one of them, here: The greedy, amoral railroad baron makes his debut within the opening movie; the chugging, desolate Western music (which seems at times to have been lifted whole-cloth from Ennio Morricone's soundtracks) gives an unmistakable Leone-esque tang to the wide-open skies, dusty streets and grungy buildings of some skanky desert way station crawling with gunslingers of low moral character; bartop bottles and expensive plate glass windows don't fare well in the vicinity of saloons or anywhere else, and inventory icons take the form of the fanned playing cards one might find in such dens of sin; every counting-house, feed store, and livery stable has a back door, a hidden room, or a secret rifleman's niche, ideally suited for the dirty-dealing desperado who wants a clean view of Main Street in case the hero decides to walk down it (the rifle-scope, a nifty and dirty little piece of coding, affords the player a small, magnified patch of distant, crosshaired scenery through which to deal his brand of frontier justice); even the boiler-plate trick perpetrated by Clint the Great and Squinty-Eyed is here (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, stop reading my review this instant). LucasArts knew that if it didn't make this one multiplayer (some fans still say Dark Forces with an inflection of resentment), it would get fire-bombed. Well, it's multiplayer - up to eight over modem, network, or Internet to be precise. There's something mighty fine, special, and personal about loading your six-shooter two shells at a time with your own fingers, ka-chik ka-chick ka-chik, before gunning down your friends through a barred jail window at two hundred paces.  To reiterate: The buffet at the Badass Western Computer Gaming table is slim pickins 'ceptin one game. Outlaws is it, pardner - the main stick, the top gun, the most complete and faithful Old West shooter in the industry to date. The bad guys in western cliches are always givin' you 'til sundown, but don't be surprised if you find yourself playing this one 'til sunrise.
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932,X-COM: Apocalypse ,8.6, This is almost the X-COM sequel that folks have been hoping for.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/6/6/2211166-apocalypse.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/x-com-apocalypse-review/1900-2531936/,pos,"
X-COM: Apocalypse has some pretty big futuristic combat boots to fill.  stands among the best turn-based strategy games of the past decade. Apocalypse does indeed fill those boots - the problem is, it may fill them with too much. The addition of a real-time combat option, the announcement of which had X-COM purists protesting in horror, does not make X-COM the Command & Conquer clone that everyone feared. In fact, it works quite well, to a certain point. This is almost the X-COM sequel that folks have been hoping for, so close that at times it's impossible to fault the game for a few minor problems.   Unlike previous X-COM entries, Apocalypse does not take place on a global scale. Instead, it is situated within a single city, Mega-Primus, which is being invaded by an alien race unrelated to the Cydonians from the first two games. Instead of being judged by a global committee, your actions are judged by the local businesses, mostly arms and transportation dealers. You must buy the majority of your equipment from these businesses (eventually you will begin manufacturing some of it yourself), and only a limited amount of goods are available each week. If you look past the unrealistic economic model of Mega-Primus (why these companies are charging you for equipment when the whole city is on the verge of being destroyed is never explained), it feels like a real city. Cars drive around, transports bring you your equipment, buildings are damaged as you blast away at UFOs over the skyline, huge aliens wreak havoc in the streets, and minor skirmishes are waged in the streets between corporations. The only minor problem is that Mega-Primus looks bad. In the day, your hometown is a nightmare of bright primary colors, and things only get bearable to look at during the evening, when it gets good and eerie like an X-COM game should be. This is in sharp contrast to the creepy ambient music, which would be terrifying if it didn't jar with the decidedly un-creepy environs. The city model lends an air of innovation to the combat in Apocalypse. The majority of the battles take place indoors: Large warehouses, factories, and apartment buildings (both ritzy and run down) will need to be defended. These settings also include perhaps the best addition to X-COM's combat system - they can be destroyed. Machinery explodes, huge chasms can be created in the floors, and whole levels can come tumbling down on unfortunate combatants standing underneath. The dynamic environments can be used to your benefit, but they will cost you - enough damage and the owner will come looking for some payback, usually of a financial nature, but occasionally he'll just take some potshots at your vehicles or stage a raid on one of your bases. There are a few other notable additions to combat. Units can now crawl and lie prone, and you can set an aggressiveness level that makes them seek cover in dangerous situations or just keep firing until someone falls. The combat engine is really, really good. But it's not great. Turn-based seems to have suffered in Apocalypse. Your agents have far more time-units per turn than in previous games, allowing them to take a few shots, throw a grenade, and then run for cover all in a single turn. And the AI seems geared for the real-time option: During turn-based missions, your agents will take reserved time units to perform all sorts of unassigned actions, and aliens will run back and forth in front of your soldiers without taking a single shot. In UFO Defense, if an agent saw an alien and didn't kill it, chances are that agent would be dead, or well on his way, before the next turn.  The real time, on the other hand, is much better than expected. Since it's not true ""real time,"" you can pause or slow down the action to assign orders, then watch them play out simultaneously with the opposing side. Your agents, with experience, act more intelligently, taking cover and firing from a safe position. As an added bonus, it makes the missions extremely short affairs, sometimes on the order of two or three minutes, as opposed to the two or three hours needed to complete longer missions in turn-based play. But the real-time lacks the suspense of previous X-COMs, and it's hard to have that same sense of familiarity with your agents when you don't spend several minutes mulling over their every move. Both the real-time and the turn-based have their drawbacks and their merits, and you will undoubtedly spend your time alternating between the two. The alien race you're up against is by far the most interesting thing about Apocalypse, and brings back that spark of excitement each time there's some new species to research (and there are many more alien types this time out). Research is split into two areas, Bioengineering and Quantum Physics. The latter researches new equipment and technology, while the former researches the prisoners and corpses you bring back from combat, as well as a great deal of the alien technology, which, it turns out, is almost entirely organic (leading to some terrifying weaponry you must face, including an enzyme-based firearm that dissolves your agents' armor and sets off any explosives on his person). The end game is more elaborate than in previous chapters as well. Instead of a single attack on a distant base, you must infiltrate the alien home world, turning the tables as you raid their buildings one by one. For all of the aliens' interesting technology and biology, however, you can't escape one disappointing fact: They look silly. You'll feel as if you're waging war on the set of The Muppet Show.  Apart from the graphics, the only major failing of X-COM: Apocalypse is that it tries to do too much. Instead of the amazing turn-based game that could have been, what we have is a really good turn-based game and a slightly better real-time game. But when you get used to the quirks, everything that made X-COM great is still there, from the surprise at meeting a new alien species to the joy of researching a technology.  It may be ugly, but it sure is a lot of fun.
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933,Hexen II Mission Pack: Portal of Praevus ,8.6," This is clearly a must-have for Hexen II fans, and even critics of the original game should find the new features, creatures, levels, and weapons suitably impressive.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/9/6/2216696-63.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hexen-ii-mission-pack-portal-of-praevus-review/1900-2537640/,pos,"
When Hexen II hit the streets, it was generally hailed as the best-looking first-person action game ever to see the light of day. When it came to gameplay, however, most gamers fell into one of two groups: While some loved the new, pseudo-RPG title, others criticized the confusing hub-based level design and the many arcane puzzles. Hexen II Mission Pack: Portal of Praevus represents good news for both groups. Not only does this game offer better graphics than its predecessor, but it also provides better level design, more comprehensible puzzles, and much-improved gameplay. In Portal of Praevus, the four heroes from Hexen II return to Eidolon's castle to investigate an unnatural winter that has fallen across the land. A fifth character - the Demoness, Eidolon's former minion - also comes to investigate this ill-omened phenomenon. You choose one of these five characters and the game begins with you leaping into a huge fissure to investigate the fortress that lies beneath Eidolon's castle. The game features 15 new levels, split between two hubs: Blackmarsh (the subterranean castle) and Tibet. In general, the levels are very well designed and seem to be a tiny bit smaller (and more manageable) than their predecessors. The architecture and texture quality are quite spectacular, and you'll often find yourself gaping at the amazing detail of the rooms while archers pelt you with arrows. Raven indeed has a flair for intricate room design, and it has never been more apparent than in Portal of Praevus. Eerie crypts, majestic throne rooms, meditation chambers, and snow-covered courtyards highlight an impressive list of settings in this game.  What sets this game apart is not just the level design, but also the extra touches that accent each map. When you run down the corridor of a Tibetan temple - under the curving wood supports and past numerous candles - you really get the sense that you're immersed in the setting. Similarly, Raven has gone to great lengths to create intricate decorations for most maps, including a number of impressive statues, furniture, banners, and windows. One room near the end of the game has an amazing, highly polished reflective floor. While the Jedi Knight team may still have the edge in overall quality of level design, Raven has no equal when it comes to dressing up a scene and creating exquisitely detailed texture maps. Raven also creates some amazing polygon creatures, as the new Yakmen illustrate. These Minotaur-like creatures are some of the best-looking first-person shooter enemies yet seen. They huff and puff and shoot little icicle shards at you. They also move like lighting and like to head-butt you into oblivion. When you kill them, they dramatically fall to their knees before giving up the ghost. The other creatures in the game include multitudinous archers, imps, golems, skull wizards, spiders (which are still a bit too powerful), and other familiar faces. The new Were-Tigers are much like their Jaguar cousins, only more powerful and harder to kill. Unlike Hexen II, which used a confusing web of hubs and interconnecting levels, Praevus uses a much more easily navigable hub system. You'll never feel like you are miles from where you need to be, and you won't be constantly running back over previously covered ground (both of which were major problems in Hexen II). Doors to new levels are clearly marked, and doorways you aren't yet supposed to enter are clearly locked or inaccessible. This cleaned-up hub system helps keep the action moving in Praevus and helps eliminate the old nuisance of running through empty levels looking for that last hidden puzzle piece. Even the puzzles themselves are a bit easier to handle in Praevus. For one thing, you'll actually find clues located throughout the levels. Plaques typically serve to point you in the right direction, but books and tablets also offer advice from time to time. Also, those items that do provide clues are easily recognizable, so you don't have to bash up every bookcase and crumbling wall just to solve a single puzzle. Even better, Praevus also includes an Objectives Menu, which maintains a running list of the quests you are currently trying to complete. What also helps with the puzzle-solving is that Praevus switches to a ""cinematic"" view when you complete certain tasks so that you can see what it is you've done, such as which door just opened. As far as the Demoness goes, she is a welcome addition to the core group of heroes. Like the other character classes, this red-skinned creature has two special abilities that develop as you move through the game. First, she can land safely when falling from a great height, which can be useful in several areas of the game. Second, she has the ability to convert energy attacks against her into mana that she can use for her own offensive tendencies. Also, the Demoness has some impressive weapons at her disposal, including the Acid Rune, Firestorm, and the mighty Tempest's Staff. One slightly disappointing area of Praevus is the lack of new multiplayer maps. You can now add the Demoness to the mix on existing maps, but there aren't any new ones. Raven has stated, however, that several new Hexen II maps have been developed and indicated that they may simply be made available as free downloads from HexenWorld. The game does have a few other quirks, which are relatively minor. For starters, Praevus still uses a few too many artifacts in its puzzles. The Objectives Menu helps you keep things organized, but when you start running into unique item after unique item (the bell of this, the incense of that, the staff of what's-his-name), the game starts to feel a bit ludicrous. It would have been a bit better to give the lesser artifacts generic names, which would have made them seem more like the mundane items they are and would have also kept the focus on the more crucial, plot-driving artifacts. Also, there is one truly annoying new monster that simply throws off the game balance. These little, bloblike creatures appear in caverns, hop around like jumping beans, and spit fire at you. They are difficult to see, difficult to hit, and do an inordinate amount of damage when they attack. The game would have been better if these things were made either less powerful or easier to hit. Finally, some strange system slowdowns were encountered when using the new Firestorm weapon. It seemed clear that this was the result of texture-swapping, but the fact that it happened repeatedly seemed odd, especially on a Pentium II/300 with 64MB RAM and a Diamond Monster 3D II card. However, after trying to isolate the problem, it seems as if the Voodoo2 card may have been at the heart of the problem, because the problem could not be duplicated on a slower machine equipped with an older Orchid Righteous 3D card. With its many gameplay improvements and its impressive level design, Portal of Praevus glides easily into the upper echelon of first-person action games. This is clearly a must-have for Hexen II fans, and even critics of the original game should find the new features, creatures, levels, and weapons suitably impressive.
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934,Wing Commander: Prophecy ,8.6," The new design team has shifted the emphasis from screenplay to gameplay, and the result is an engaging, but somewhat different, Wing Commander experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/1/8/2210218-wingcommanderprophecy.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wing-commander-prophecy-review/1900-2545907/,pos,"
For the fifth chapter in Origin's space-combat series, the designers have abandoned the game's recent tendency toward the cinematic. The last two Wing Commander chapters have seen gameplay give way to lengthy expository film sequences, with missions often seeming like no more than a way to kill time until the next big plot point. Not any more. With original series creator Chris Roberts gone to head up Digital Anvil (and reportedly direct the Wing Commander film), the new design team has shifted the emphasis from screenplay to gameplay, and the result is an engaging, but somewhat different, Wing Commander experience. Why different? Primarily because the shift away from FMV has been accompanied by a shift away from plot in general, a significant departure for a series that has been associated with some of the most intricate and gripping storylines in recent gaming memory. It's true that the game introduces a new crew of characters, and some old favorites - such as Blair and Maniac, played by Mark Hamill and Tom Wilson, respectively - are still around. And there's a new alien species invading Confederation territory, wreaking havoc on the crippled Kilrathi (who were all but annihilated over the course of the first three games) and bent on destroying everything in its path. The modest attempts to develop these characters aren't very interesting, and the plot is largely devoid of the types of intrigue and surprise we've come to expect from the Wing Commander series. The game also lacks significant dialogue choices to make, and hence, storyline branches. Prophecy is almost totally linear, with only one or two minor exceptions based on mission performance. All this means that Wing Commander: Prophecy stands or falls based on its gameplay. Fortunately it stands up quite well. As rookie Confed pilot Lance Casey, your role is simple and straightforward: Work your way up the ranks of Confed pilots by taking out as many alien targets as you humanly can. Encounters with the aliens are the most fascinating aspect of the game - thanks in large measure to designer Syd Mead, whose previous work includes production design for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Mead has crafted a menacing, insect-like alien race, piloting ships that look like, behave like, and are even named after sea-creatures. Even better, the invaders dart and dodge through space, with a distinctly different flare than opponents from earlier chapters in the series. Most of the missions center around simply destroying as many of these aquatic-like craft as possible. There's a heavy emphasis on patrol missions, in which you fly from one Nav point to the next fighting any enemies encountered along the way, but there are a few really brilliant missions strewn throughout the game. You'll take out massive cruisers and transports, and you'll encounter immense battleships armed with devastating weapons. The last mission is particularly notable - it makes the rest of the game worthwhile, truly creating a sense of suspense as you desperately try to achieve your final objectives against overwhelming odds. It's also possible to fail many of the missions and still continue - though your next sortie will be made a little more difficult as a result.  Undoubtedly, some will find a few of the mission conventions a little frustrating. Except in rare cases, you no longer get to choose your ship, and you never get to choose your wingmen or your weapons loadout. But this adds a welcome challenge, as you can't always rely upon the best combination. It should also be mentioned that many of the missions are quite lengthy and there's no way to incrementally save your game. While that fact alone isn't too much of a problem, it is a problem when the designers string two of these missions together without giving you a chance to save in between. It may heighten the drama, but it occasionally escalates the frustration. But even with these quirks, this game is difficult to stop playing, and for one simple reason: Wing Commander: Prophecy is one of the finest looking games ever created. Along with Quake II, it may be the only reason you need to justify purchasing a 3D accelerator. While the nonaccelerated version is quite nice, the accelerated version is downright awe-inspiring. The bleak black space of previous chapters has been replaced by a more visually dazzling backdrop, filled with colorful gasses and treacherous asteroids. The ships contain an amazing amount of detail and the explosions - not your basic fireballs mind you, but huge rings of light and hurtling debris - are incredible. The flight engine, while still very familiar, has been improved, especially in terms of raw speed. The only real problem with Wing Commander: Prophecy is that it ends too soon. And as a result of the linear storyline and lack of multiplayer support, this is not a game you'll be returning to over and over. You'll long for a little more substance once you've finished, but the engaging gameplay, solid mission design, and mesmerizing visuals make Wing Commander: Prophecy a blast while it lasts.
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935,Chessmaster 6000 ,8.6, Chessmaster is still the only way to go if you're looking for a chess program.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/4/2/8/2216428-1.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/chessmaster-6000-review/1900-2538403/,pos,"
There was a time a few years back when Mindscape's Chessmaster series actually had some competition, but about the only serious rival on the market nowadays is Sierra's Power Chess line. Even with its incredibly strong chess engine it, though, Power Chess just can't match the incredible array of teaching tools found in the Chessmaster games. So the decision as to which chess program to buy is a no-brainer, right? Actually, the answer is a definite maybe. Chessmaster 6000 is unquestionably the most feature-packed installment in this classic series, and chess fans deciding on their first chess program should rush right out and grab it. But if you already own Chessmaster 5500 or even Chessmaster 5000, you might want to consider whether you've exhausted the features of those games before buying the new version. And what are the new features? Mindscape has significantly expanded an already impressive chess tutorial, adding considerably more topics that progress in a logical and easy-to-follow order from general chess concepts through the first crucial moves in a game and on to endgame strategies. Better yet, all the tutorials now feature voice commentary, and while that might seem like a small addition, it truly goes a long way in helping you stay focused on each lesson. Josh Waitzkin, subject of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, is back again as the ""host"" of the program, and the number of his voice-annotated games has been boosted to 14. These are a real treat for beginning and intermediate players, and even advanced players can glean new perspectives from the 21-year-old Waitzkin's commentary. Another addition is the inclusion of nearly 100 ""personalities"" - computer-controlled players that range in skill level from sheer novices to grandmasters. There's also a gallery of world-famous grandmasters to compete against, as well as the Chessmaster program itself; if you can beat the Chessmaster, you probably don't have much need for this program except for storing and annotating your own games. Of course, all the other powerful tools of the Chessmaster series are back in full force. There's the wonderful natural-language advice option, which analyzes your position and suggests the appropriate moves (and tells you why the moves are good); auto-annotate, which constructs a complete analysis of any game or position; an Opening Book with over 2200 opening lines; a database coach that identifies openings and shows how the game can progress from that point on; and much, much more. But there is one small disappointment here, and while it was probably unavoidable on Mindscape's part, it still makes Chessmaster not quite as enjoyable as it has been in the past. Chessmaster Live, which was hosted for the last couple of years by Mindscape, provided a way for Chessmaster owners to log on directly to the Internet and challenge other Chessmaster owners. There was an option to play for free, as well as subscribe to The Chessmaster Network for $19.95 a year and take part in classes, tourneys, and ranked games, and best of all the interface was a breeze, and the network performed relatively well in terms of bandwidth and latency. But with the release of Chessmaster 6000, Mindscape has moved Chessmaster Live onto Mplayer - and the results don't exactly have me jumping for joy. With Chessmaster 5500 and Chessmaster Live, you could be up and playing in a matter of minutes; going through Mplayer, you might spend a good five or six minutes just logging on and waiting for advertisements to be downloaded before you can actually get to a screen where you can find a game.  This happened three times in all, and by the time I finally got on Mplayer (which seems to be running slower than I ever remember it), I was cranky and bored - not exactly the mood you want to be in when starting a chess game. To be fair, Mindscape probably had to take Chessmaster to Mplayer because it couldn't afford to keep the network going, even if everyone had ponied up and paid the $19.95 membership fee. And at least Mplayer and Mindscape have created a patch that makes it possible for Chessmaster 5500 players to compete online as well. But it's unfortunate that Chessmaster 6000 doesn't have support for any other type of multiplayer mode.  If that bothers you, you can always pick up Sierra's Power Chess and play on the World Opponent Network - but that means giving up all the wonderful features exclusive to Chessmaster 6000. In the end, I still have to say that the Chessmaster line is the only way to go if you're looking for a chess program - but I'll also take this chance to say that Mindscape should make the effort to provide some other type of multiplayer support for Chessmaster 6000 and all future Chessmaster games. It's the least they can for the millions of customers who've made it the best-selling chess program of all time, don't you think?
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936,Whiteout ,4.3, Whiteout's technical and creative deficiencies keep it from being recommendable to anyone.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/5/6/3/2218563-box_wout.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/whiteout-review/1900-2902097/,neg,"
Vicarious Visions has, over time, proven itself to be a fairly consistent producer of respectable video games. The real pinnacle for this New York development house has unquestionably been its uncanny interpretations of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games for the Game Boy Advance. Unfortunately, the latest offering from Vicarious Visions is certainly not the company's best work. Whiteout, a snowmobile racing game published by Konami, is a poorly conceived game that attempts to rely on the same merits that made EA Sports Big's SSX games so enjoyable, but without actually having those merits.  Whiteout is clearly derivative of SSX. Whiteout is actually remarkably similar to Vicarious Visions' Polaris SnoCross for the original PlayStation. The core difference between Vicarious Visions' two snowmobile racing games is that Whiteout cribs shamelessly and often from SSX in terms of both aesthetics and gameplay. You have a basic trick system at your disposal, and using L1 or R1 in conjunction with the left analog stick will produce can-cans, supermans, and the like, though there's no real discernable difference between the tricks other than the animation. There's also the great equalizer, the turbo boost, which can be charged by pulling stunts and picking up boost power-ups on the track, though the game's blatant rubber-band AI will occasionally nullify any advantage this mechanic might provide.    Though there are five different modes of play in Whiteout, the action remains essentially the same throughout, with the basic objective of crossing the finish line first usually taking precedent. The career mode awards high placement in the race and tricks with cash, which can in turn be used to upgrade your snowmobile or buy an entirely new snowmobile. Of all the modes available, the career mode is the most firmly grounded in reality, though you'll still find that the track is littered with glowing, spinning power-ups. The arcade mode lacks the upgradeable snowmobiles but adds point bonuses to the power-ups available on the track, rings of fire that you'll have to clear, and secondary objectives like reaching point goals, clearing gaps, finding shortcuts, and so on. The two-player, time trial, and quick race modes pretty much explain themselves.    The gameplay modes are fairly standard, but the gameplay itself is slightly substandard. The AI exhibits two of the most abhorrent of racing AI traits: The aforementioned rubber-band effect, where racers will miraculously catch up to the leader regardless of the situation, and pack AI, where there's not enough variety between AI routines and everyone ends up going about the same speed along the same path, making the same mistakes. The handling of your own snowmobile feels imprecise and choppy, and your control over it is tenuous at best. The track designs are decent enough, though it can occasionally be unclear which direction you're supposed to be going, and all the tracks are modest in scope. So you'll find nothing here that stands up to the complex, sweeping track design of Whiteout's most obvious inspiration, SSX.   The transparent computer AI makes racing through the tracks all the more cumbersome. And even though the original SSX was one of the US launch titles for the PlayStation 2 over two years ago, every aspect of that game's presentation is far superior to Whiteout's presentation, which is just bad. The textures are unattractive, and while the rider models are passable, the animation is incredibly choppy. The special effects look cheap and cheesy, and some of them, like the blizzard effect, make for some simply staggering slowdown. The audio is dominated by the game's pair of commentators, who will call out every trick you pull off and comment on bails and changes in your race position. It's actually pretty spot-on in syncing up with the actual action, but the amount of speech is limited, and the color commentary is usually cringingly bad. There's also the licensed soundtrack--now a prerequisite for any action sports game--but there are only seven tracks in total, and they're all punk or metal.    Since Vicarious Visions has quality titles like the console ports of Jedi Knight II and the Game Boy Advance ports of the Tony Hawk games under its belt, it's sort of sad to see the developer's name attached to this poor excuse for a snowmobile game. Between Whiteout and Arctic Thunder, the options on modern consoles for fans of this little niche of racing are pretty grim indeed, and Whiteout's technical and creative deficiencies keep it from being recommendable to anyone. 
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937,Big Air Freestyle ,4.3," With games like MX Superfly and Freekstyle already on the market, there's simply no reason to give Big Air Freestyle a second look.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/0/9/2209009-561931_front.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/big-air-freestyle-review/1900-2897510/,neg,"
There isn't a whole lot of freestyle motocross action to be found on the GameCube, though there are a couple of solid entries: THQ's MX Superfly and EA's Freekstyle each offer their own brand of high-speed, high-flying entertainment involving dirt bikes. Big Air Freestyle arrives not long after these games, yet both comparatively or purely on its own merits, it fails to deliver an enjoyable gaming experience.   You'll be getting some pretty big air in this game.  Big Air Freestyle is a very lopsided game. Its unique physics system lets you pull off wild, impossible tricks--yet the game's most robust mode isn't its freestyle mode, but rather its season-based racing mode, where pulling tricks isn't necessary. In the season mode, you'll start with enough money to purchase a 125cc motorcycle and enter the first race. You'll earn money for completing races, and you'll use it repair your bike, enter the next race, and upgrade to a new race circuit at the end of the season.   The problem with the game's focus on the season mode is that it stands in complete opposition to the game's main draw--big air. The entire physics system feels like you're on the moon. Jumps will give you several seconds away from the ground, providing you with plenty of time to execute a number of tricks, backflips, barrel rolls, and the like. Of course, Big Air Freestyle rewards successful tricks with turbo boost, theoretically encouraging you to perform tricks during the races. But what the races really come down to is speed, meaning the more time you spend in the air after a jump, the less time you'll spend in control of your bike. It turns out that the best way to win races is to keep the bike on the ground as much as possible and race as consistently as possible, leaving the trick system alone entirely, which really isn't much fun at all.   The game fares a bit better in its freestyle mode. Unfortunately, there's just not much to do here. Each freestyle arena comes with a time limit and a score goal. If you reach the goal within the time limit, you'll unlock a new arena and a new ""fantasy trick,"" but after you've completed all six arenas, there's nothing more to do. The trick system itself may be original, but it comes across as inaccessible and sloppy. Tricks are performed by holding the left trigger and executing button combinations. You can also hold the left analog stick left, right, or back to multiply the tricks with backflips or barrel rolls and maximize or minimize your airtime by shifting your weight backward or forward. As you progress through the different arenas, they get more challenging but no more rewarding. They are filled with obstacles like pitfalls and electrical traps, but you'll reap no greater satisfaction from completing one of the more difficult arenas--you'll merely be relieved that you won't need to play there again.   The game ends up feeling about as unfinished as it does unplanned, as it's also quite buggy. You'll occasionally fall out of levels, and on one particular occasion, lapping the last-place rider switched our race position from first to tenth. The split-screen multiplayer support is just a multiplayer adaptation of the game's basic gameplay, only with some pretty noticeable slowdown. The game's boundaries are pretty poorly executed as well. If you get caught executing a trick when you encounter one of the game's invisible walls, you will end up crashing and very slowly slide down the invisible wall before regaining control of your bike. Unfortunately, with all the time that you will be spending in the air with this game, you will be encountering these problems often.  The season mode is the primary mode of play, but the trick system just doesn't work well with it.  Graphically, Big Air Freestyle doesn't bring much to the table. On the surface, it looks more like something you'd see on the PlayStation 2 than on the GameCube. All the rider models are the same, excluding some of the hidden characters, and all the bike models are the same too, even across the various classes. The animation of the tricks is really stiff and mechanical, which further reduces whatever satisfaction you might get from performing them. The audio is decent at best--most of what you will hear is the sound of the bike's engines. They sound pretty good, from the whiny 125s to the throaty 500s, but all in all, it's a fairly limited sound palette. The soundtrack will take good care of you if you're into modern pop-punk. It features a lot of bands like Sugarcult, MXPX, and 311, though it doesn't deviate far from that path.   In the end, Big Air Freestyle doesn't offer much that can be recommended. It's buggy, the gameplay modes are shallow, and the graphics don't save it. With games like MX Superfly and Freekstyle already on the market, there's simply no reason to give Big Air Freestyle a second look.
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938,Unlimited SaGa ,4.3," In the end, Unlimited SaGa is simply the flawed sum of its disparate parts.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/0/6/8/2212068-box_usaga.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unlimited-saga-review/1900-6030183/,neg,"
 Square is definitely a sequel-driven company. The RPG magnate has flourished for years primarily on the strength of its longest running and most popular series, Final Fantasy. Of course, Square's stable of big names also includes hits like the Chrono and Mana games, all of which have proven to be quite popular. And then there's SaGa. The offbeat RPG series has always been a bit of an enigma in Square's lineup--while most of the company's other big games adhere to tried-and-true formulas, the typical SaGa game is in fact anything but typical. Series fans will be glad to hear this trend of unusual design and production continues with the newest installment, Unlimited SaGa. They won't be so glad, though, when they find out how poorly the game's elements actually work together as a whole.  Unlimited SaGa's art is nicely done, but the static characters and backgrounds get old quickly.  Like the previous games in the series, Unlimited SaGa presents you with a sizeable and diverse cast of playable characters (seven, in this case). The group includes Laura, a tough former pirate; Mythe, an inventor and playboy; Kurt, a wayward knight; Judy, a 10-year-old witch; Ventus, a goofball mail carrier; Ruby, a teenage fortune-teller; and Armic, a squirrel-like chapa tribesman. You can begin a new game with any of the seven characters, and each one has his or her own back story that propels him or her onward into the game. For example, Ventus starts out seeking the killer of his famous older brother, Briza, while Kurt's quest begins as he searches the world for the meaning of a mysterious ancient gauntlet he wears. Each character's storyline is entirely unique, although they sometimes become intertwined--you'll occasionally run into one of the other playable characters during your questing, and you'll often travel with other characters aside from the core group of seven. The storylines range from vaguely interesting to utterly bland, and given the way the game advances the plot (more on that later), they're often more confusing than anything.   If you're a fan of more-traditional RPGs like Final Fantasy and Chrono Cross, the presentation and gameplay of Unlimited SaGa will likely come as quite a shock. The flow of the game, from interactions in towns to moving around dungeons and the world map, is very different from typical RPG fare. For one, all town scenes are represented simply by static backgrounds, and you move to a building by highlighting it with a cursor. Interactions with townspeople, and indeed all the dialogue sequences in the game, play out with mere static character portraits and comic-book-style text bubbles. When you're tired of moving a cursor around the town background, you can head to the inn and see what adventures can be undertaken. Sometimes these adventures tie into your character's storyline, but other times they serve no apparent purpose, and after embarking on one you often have to wonder exactly why you're doing what you're doing. The whole process, which is meant to advance the game's plot, ends up being incredibly nonsensical.  The oddities don't stop once you reach one of Unlimited SaGa's fields or dungeons. If you thought you'd be granted some freedom of control and movement outside of the towns, you can think again--the game's field scenes play out like some bizarre RPG board game. Your character is represented by a tiny static sprite, and you move in hops along preset paths that are presented to you. Each movement may present some form of obstacle or curiosity--you can be attacked, encounter a pitfall, or discover a treasure chest, for instance. None of these are visible on the board, however, so you'll end up stumbling blindly into things quite a bit. This system of exploration, which doesn't actually let you explore much at all, comes off as stilted and constraining. It's also horribly plodding and makes the movement portion of the game feel like a chore.  Unlimited SaGa's combat system doesn't do much to alleviate the irksomeness of the rest of the game. In a strange twist on the RPG formula, you have both hit points and life points keeping you alive, with the HP simply serving as a buffer between enemy attacks and your LP. Once your HP is gone, attacks will start to cut into your LP, and only when your LP reaches zero will you die. Since your HP can be freely replenished between battles, surviving is simply a matter of making it out of a battle alive so you can ""rest"" and get back up to full health. You can queue up your characters' attacks during a battle, and when each attack comes up, you're presented with one of the game's new features: the ""reel."" This is a slot-machine-like wheel with a variety of icons on it, and you'll have to stop the wheel with a timed button press to determine the strength of your attack. Having to depend partially on timing and luck to win battles can get pretty annoying. The game does feature a degree of character customization, but it's all incredibly obscure and just makes one long for the simplicity of a Final Fantasy game.  The reel system is interesting in theory, but in practice it's just an annoyance.  Visually, your mileage with Unlimited SaGa will vary depending on your opinion of its method of presentation. On one hand, the hand-painted character portraits and backgrounds in the game are quite well done. On the other, they aren't animated--everything is entirely static. The only place you get anything resembling modern graphics is in the battle sequences, which feature sprite-based characters and rudimentary 3D backgrounds. So if you like the game's art style, you'll probably enjoy looking at it for a little while, but if you're looking for flashier or more-modern graphical fare, Unlimited SaGa won't be the slightest bit exciting. The game's catalog of sound effects is understandably limited, since little of it plays out in anything like an action scene, and the voice acting ranges from decent to really bad. Unlimited SaGa's soundtrack, however, is stupendous. Composed by Final Fantasy X alumnus Masashi Hamauzu, the music far outshines the game itself. Fans of previous Square musical efforts would do well to seek out the Unlimited SaGa soundtrack even if they pass on the game, which is advisable.  In the end, Unlimited SaGa is simply the flawed sum of its disparate parts. Every aspect of the game, from the combat mechanics to the movement to the technical execution of the graphics, is lacking in some regard, and when you add these elements together, you get a game that's simply unpleasant to play. 
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939,Samurai Shodown ,4.3," Samurai Shodown looks and sounds lovely, but it ultimately fails the playability test due to slipshod control and boring, depthless gameplay.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/6/4/9/2211649-samsho.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/samurai-shodown-review/1900-6103000/,neg,"
 There's no question that Digital Bridges took a risk in acquiring the Samurai Shodown license for use in mobile games. Fighting games rely on fast gameplay and cutting-edge control--attributes that are very difficult to execute on cell phones with any degree of success. Furthermore, SNK's 2D fighting extravaganza could never have fit on mobile in arcade-perfect condition, so Digital Bridges has taken some liberties with its version of Samurai Shodown, shrinking its scope and simplifying its control scheme to preserve the audiovisual feel of the original. Unfortunately, no matter how nice the resulting game may look, it plays like it has been through an edit too many.  Unfortunately, Samurai Shodown doesn't play as smooth as it looks.  This version of Samurai Shodown encompasses two gameplay modes: story mode and survival mode. In story mode, you must play through each of the four included characters from the arcade version: Haohmaru, Nakoruru, Gen-An, and Charlotte. You duel each of the other three characters in turn, before taking on your evil alter ego in a final battle and moving on to the next warrior. In survival mode, you pick your favorite of the four and wade through as many duels as you can handle on a single life--and the small amount of healing you receive between rounds for besting a foe. Samurai Shodown also includes a quick tutorial called the temple, which gives you the rundown on each character's attacks and special moves.   The ability to access several gameplay modes is appreciated, but Samurai Shodown's real strength has always been centered on its stellar fighting mechanics, which the mobile version simply doesn't deliver. The controls are laid out well for the handset, but they are very unresponsive. The lag time between pressing a button and having your character respond onscreen is sluggish and quite disruptive. In addition, Samurai Shodown's hit detection feels extremely buggy. Your attacks sometimes seem to travel right through your target to no effect, especially if you are standing close to your enemy. These problems are exacerbated by Samurai Shodown's lack of combat animation: For instance, it's difficult to tell if your enemies are successfully blocking an attack or if the lax hit detection is giving them an unwarranted assist.  Each character in Samurai Shodown is outfitted with a weapon attack, a kick, and two special attacks. It's not surprising that the mobile version's range of attacks would have to be pared down from the arcade, but this thin assortment of moves leaves the game feeling repetitive and bereft of any tactical depth. There are no jumping or crouching attacks for defensive or evasive purposes, so the winning strategy is usually to get up into your opponent's grill and outstab him or her with your basic and power attacks. The special moves are mapped to a few specific button combinations, but they are difficult to pull off on a consistent basis; due to Samurai Shodown's poor control response time, you will often find yourself erroneously stringing together basic moves rather than entering in special attacks. When you do successfully use your special techniques, you will notice that they are considerably more powerful than regular attacks. This is especially apparent with projectile moves like Gen-An's slow-moving poison cloud, which can damage its opponents up to three times. If you wait for your special meter to fill up and then nail an enemy with one of these maneuvers, you can take away well over a third of your enemy's stamina. If you can't beat your opponent in the race to pull off as many power moves as possible as fast as possible, odds are you won't win many matches.  This version of Samurai Shodown offers four playable characters.  It's a shame that Samurai Shodown is so difficult to play, because the game's graphics and sound have made an excellent transition to mobile, at least on Series 60 Java handsets. The background graphics are incredibly vivid and detailed, and the character art has been faithfully reproduced from the arcade. On the other hand, the game runs at a slow pace, with only a small fraction of the original's flowing animation--although you can still disarm your enemy, which is a nice touch. Samurai Shodown's music and sound effects are both excellent on the Series 60, featuring several sonorous tunes for the title screen and beginning of the levels, as well as loud, varied combat punctuations. Haohmaru's guttural screams come through as sharp as a knife, and special moves produce a vibrating, magical shimmer that will strike fear into the hearts of passersby. The game's usage of sound adds a lot to an otherwise lackluster combat experience.  Overall, Samurai Shodown looks and sounds lovely, but it ultimately fails the playability test due to slipshod control and boring, depthless gameplay. Since the fighting genre has always been all about gameplay, the development resources would have been better spent optimizing Shodown's gameplay for mobile rather than focusing on its audiovisual presentation. No matter how nice this game looks, you won't want to play it. 
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940,Digimon World 4 ,4.3," Digimon World 4 is a dull and largely forgettable experience, which, considering the quality of the previous three Digimon World games, really shouldn't be too big of a surprise to ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/7/6/2219876-box_dw4.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/digimon-world-4-review/1900-6129089/,neg,"
  After a three-year hiatus, Bandai has returned with a new installment in the constantly metamorphosing Digimon World series. Just as Digimon World 3 made the genre jump from monster-raising simulation to a fairly traditional Japanese role-playing game, Digimon World 4 tweaks the formula once again, turning it into a real-time action RPG. This may please whatever contingency there is of fans who still keep up with Bandai's answer to Pokémon, but for everyone else this is just a slapdash action RPG that seems more intent on punishing players with clumsy, tedious gameplay than actually engaging, or maybe even entertaining, them.   It's up to you to save the digital world, but do you really want to?   Upon choosing one of four low-level Digimon, you venture into the Digimon World as a member of the Digital Security Guard, and you are sent off to investigate the appearance of a mysterious new server and the disappearance of a team of Digimon explorers. The story is a pretty thin excuse to dump you into environments brimming with enemies eager to pummel you into an incoherent pile of ones and zeroes.     Rather than fighting by proxy as you did in Digimon World 3, you are given direct, real-time control over a single Digimon here. Your Digimon can run, jump, block, and attack, though for the most part you'll likely just be impatiently tapping on the X button to jab away at your enemies. The controls are pretty basic and intuitive, but for a game that, at least theoretically, is aimed at younger players, Digimon World 4 is extremely punishing right from the start. The game gets easier as you pick up new weapons and armor and your Digimon gains levels and periodically ""digivolves"" into a more powerful form. At the beginning, though, virtually each and every enemy you face is able to both deal and take much more punishment than you can, and the game isn't shy about throwing a good half-dozen enemies at you at once. Combine this with a block system with such specific timing that you almost need to be psychic, and only the truly dedicated Digimon fans will be willing to soldier on. The game features four-player cooperative support, though why you would want to subject three people you might call friends to this experience is a bit of a mystery.   Digimon World 4 should make even the most diehard digimaniacs question their loyalties.   And it's not like the game offers up a stunning audiovisual feast to make up for the alternately boring and sadistic gameplay. First off, there's the camera. Since there's no kind of map for you to rely on, what you see is the only point of reference you have for where you are and where you need to go, and even when the camera is zoomed out to the maximum, it's nearly impossible to get your bearings. Additionally, the camera moves entirely on its own, and the movement usually seems arbitrary and often obscures what you actually want to see. The visuals are pretty colorful, with the whole ""base"" area using a Tron-inspired combination of glowing lights and weird polygonal grids. The dungeons you'll travel to still retain a little bit of this neon flair, though they tend to look more like dungeons and suffer from bland, blurry textures. Regardless of style, though, everything in the game looks simple and chunky, and at points it barely qualifies as a current-generation game. The game's sound design isn't so much bad as it is repetitive and unremarkable. Everyone makes roughly the same muddy, indistinct noises when poked, and there's not really much music to speak of.    Digimon World 4 is a dull and largely forgettable experience, which, considering the quality of the previous three Digimon World games, really shouldn't be too big of a surprise to anyone. Those who are blissfully unaware of the world of Digimon likely wouldn't have played Digimon World 4 in the first place, even by accident. However, fans who are thinking about picking this up might want to consider why the creators of Digimon would punish their fans with a game as categorically unenjoyable as this.  
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941,Digimon World 4 ,4.3," Digimon World 4 is a dull and largely forgettable experience, which, considering the quality of the previous three Digimon World games, really shouldn't be too big of a surprise to ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/7/6/2219876-box_dw4.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/digimon-world-4-review/1900-6129099/,neg,"
  After a three-year hiatus, Bandai has returned with a new installment in the constantly metamorphosing Digimon World series. Just as Digimon World 3 made the genre jump from monster-raising simulation to a fairly traditional Japanese role-playing game, Digimon World 4 tweaks the formula once again, turning it into a real-time action RPG. This may please whatever contingency there is of fans who still keep up with Bandai's answer to Pokémon, but for everyone else this is just a slapdash action RPG that seems more intent on punishing players with clumsy, tedious gameplay than actually engaging, or maybe even entertaining, them.   It's up to you to save the digital world, but do you really want to?   Upon choosing one of four low-level Digimon, you venture into the Digimon World as a member of the Digital Security Guard, and you are sent off to investigate the appearance of a mysterious new server and the disappearance of a team of Digimon explorers. The story is a pretty thin excuse to dump you into environments brimming with enemies eager to pummel you into an incoherent pile of ones and zeroes.     Rather than fighting by proxy as you did in Digimon World 3, you are given direct, real-time control over a single Digimon here. Your Digimon can run, jump, block, and attack, though for the most part you'll likely just be impatiently tapping on the X button to jab away at your enemies. The controls are pretty basic and intuitive, but for a game that, at least theoretically, is aimed at younger players, Digimon World 4 is extremely punishing right from the start. The game gets easier as you pick up new weapons and armor and your Digimon gains levels and periodically ""digivolves"" into a more powerful form. At the beginning, though, virtually each and every enemy you face is able to both deal and take much more punishment than you can, and the game isn't shy about throwing a good half-dozen enemies at you at once. Combine this with a block system with such specific timing that you almost need to be psychic, and only the truly dedicated Digimon fans will be willing to soldier on. The game features four-player cooperative support, though why you would want to subject three people you might call friends to this experience is a bit of a mystery.   Digimon World 4 should make even the most diehard digimaniacs question their loyalties.   And it's not like the game offers up a stunning audiovisual feast to make up for the alternately boring and sadistic gameplay. First off, there's the camera. Since there's no kind of map for you to rely on, what you see is the only point of reference you have for where you are and where you need to go, and even when the camera is zoomed out to the maximum, it's nearly impossible to get your bearings. Additionally, the camera moves entirely on its own, and the movement usually seems arbitrary and often obscures what you actually want to see. The visuals are pretty colorful, with the whole ""base"" area using a Tron-inspired combination of glowing lights and weird polygonal grids. The dungeons you'll travel to still retain a little bit of this neon flair, though they tend to look more like dungeons and suffer from bland, blurry textures. Regardless of style, though, everything in the game looks simple and chunky, and at points it barely qualifies as a current-generation game. The game's sound design isn't so much bad as it is repetitive and unremarkable. Everyone makes roughly the same muddy, indistinct noises when poked, and there's not really much music to speak of.    Digimon World 4 is a dull and largely forgettable experience, which, considering the quality of the previous three Digimon World games, really shouldn't be too big of a surprise to anyone. Those who are blissfully unaware of the world of Digimon likely wouldn't have played Digimon World 4 in the first place, even by accident. However, fans who are thinking about picking this up might want to consider why the creators of Digimon would punish their fans with a game as categorically unenjoyable as this.  
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942,Digimon World 4 ,4.3," Digimon World 4 is a dull and largely forgettable experience, which, considering the quality of the previous three Digimon World games, really shouldn't be too big of a surprise to ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/7/6/2219876-box_dw4.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/digimon-world-4-review/1900-6129121/,neg,"
  After a three-year hiatus, Bandai has returned with a new installment in the constantly metamorphosing Digimon World series. Just as Digimon World 3 made the genre jump from monster-raising simulation to a fairly traditional Japanese role-playing game, Digimon World 4 tweaks the formula once again, turning it into a real-time action RPG. This may please whatever contingency there is of fans who still keep up with Bandai's answer to Pokémon, but for everyone else this is just a slapdash action RPG that seems more intent on punishing players with clumsy, tedious gameplay than actually engaging, or maybe even entertaining, them.   It's up to you to save the digital world, but do you really want to?   Upon choosing one of four low-level Digimon, you venture into the Digimon World as a member of the Digital Security Guard, and you are sent off to investigate the appearance of a mysterious new server and the disappearance of a team of Digimon explorers. The story is a pretty thin excuse to dump you into environments brimming with enemies eager to pummel you into an incoherent pile of ones and zeroes.     Rather than fighting by proxy as you did in Digimon World 3, you are given direct, real-time control over a single Digimon here. Your Digimon can run, jump, block, and attack, though for the most part you'll likely just be impatiently tapping on the X button to jab away at your enemies. The controls are pretty basic and intuitive, but for a game that, at least theoretically, is aimed at younger players, Digimon World 4 is extremely punishing right from the start. The game gets easier as you pick up new weapons and armor and your Digimon gains levels and periodically ""digivolves"" into a more powerful form. At the beginning, though, virtually each and every enemy you face is able to both deal and take much more punishment than you can, and the game isn't shy about throwing a good half-dozen enemies at you at once. Combine this with a block system with such specific timing that you almost need to be psychic, and only the truly dedicated Digimon fans will be willing to soldier on. The game features four-player cooperative support, though why you would want to subject three people you might call friends to this experience is a bit of a mystery.   Digimon World 4 should make even the most diehard digimaniacs question their loyalties.   And it's not like the game offers up a stunning audiovisual feast to make up for the alternately boring and sadistic gameplay. First off, there's the camera. Since there's no kind of map for you to rely on, what you see is the only point of reference you have for where you are and where you need to go, and even when the camera is zoomed out to the maximum, it's nearly impossible to get your bearings. Additionally, the camera moves entirely on its own, and the movement usually seems arbitrary and often obscures what you actually want to see. The visuals are pretty colorful, with the whole ""base"" area using a Tron-inspired combination of glowing lights and weird polygonal grids. The dungeons you'll travel to still retain a little bit of this neon flair, though they tend to look more like dungeons and suffer from bland, blurry textures. Regardless of style, though, everything in the game looks simple and chunky, and at points it barely qualifies as a current-generation game. The game's sound design isn't so much bad as it is repetitive and unremarkable. Everyone makes roughly the same muddy, indistinct noises when poked, and there's not really much music to speak of.    Digimon World 4 is a dull and largely forgettable experience, which, considering the quality of the previous three Digimon World games, really shouldn't be too big of a surprise to anyone. Those who are blissfully unaware of the world of Digimon likely wouldn't have played Digimon World 4 in the first place, even by accident. However, fans who are thinking about picking this up might want to consider why the creators of Digimon would punish their fans with a game as categorically unenjoyable as this.  
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943,NBA ShootOut 2004 ,4.3," A host of problems can be found in almost all facets of the game, so there simply aren't any good reasons to buy it, especially with better alternatives already available.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/0/7/0/2215070-box_nbaso04.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-shootout-2004-review/1900-6077961/,neg,"
 Tracy McGrady, shooting guard for the Orlando Magic, was last year's NBA scoring champion and is widely considered to be one of the top five basketball players in the world. Clearly, an athlete of McGrady's caliber deserves better than to be relegated to coverboy for a poor product like 989 Sports' NBA ShootOut 2004. A host of problems can be found in almost all facets of the game, so there simply aren't any good reasons to buy it, especially with better alternatives already available.  The problems begin with the game's graphics. Poor frame rate is the first thing you'll notice when you start a game of ShootOut. Instead of capturing the fluid grace and beauty of professional basketball, the game stutters constantly, especially when the camera shifts viewpoint after a change in possession. The problem is so bad, you'll frequently wonder exactly how a turnover occurred, with your only clue being that the camera has swapped sides. The animations look stilted, and your players often appear to skate and slide over the ground rather than run. There isn't much detail put into any of the arenas, and the crowds are completely flat and unconvincing.  This doesn't look much like T-Mac to us.  Most disturbingly, players tend to have their heads tilted upward at an unnatural, almost macabre angle. Heads swivel from side to side as players play defense, and, more often than not, the faces on these heads bear little resemblance to the players they're supposed to represent. Even McGrady's face isn't done very well, and he's the cover athlete for ShootOut 2004. You can extrapolate from there how poorly the faces of less marquee players were done. The overall player models aren't much better. Many appear disproportional, and some tattoos on players are included while some are mysteriously omitted.  ShootOut 2004 doesn't do so well in the sound department either. The crowd noise is dull and indistinct, and you hear no chatter at all between players or coaches. The announcing is done by Ian Eagle and the incomparable (some might say ""infamous"") Bill Walton. Unfortunately, it gets repetitive and annoying in a hurry. The duo seems to have very few lines, with Eagle getting overly excited at the most mundane of plays. Walton is his usual self, full of ridiculous comments and metaphors. After about the 100th time you hear him talk about the defense ""parting like the Red Sea,"" you'll wish Walton had never read the story of Moses and the Israelites.  Unfortunately, you won't find any salvation in ShootOut 2004's gameplay. The post game is almost nonexistent. Even if you control a potent post player, like Shaq or Yao Ming, and back your man down to within five or ten feet from the basket, you'll find it almost impossible to hit a jump-hook or fadeaway. In fact, the game makes it difficult to hit any kind of shot, aside from a layup or a dunk. Even if the defender isn't jumping at you or otherwise challenging your jumper, they'll seldom fall unless you are wide open. Good luck getting those open looks, as the computer appears to cheat on its rotations out of the double team. Throw a pass to the open man and you'll see defenders racing to cover the pass recipient, seemingly before the ball leaves the passer's hands.  This isn't to say that it's difficult to score in ShootOut 2004. As a matter of fact, it's embarrassingly easy to get a dunk or layup almost every time down the court. Take control of almost any player, jam on the turbo, and start running back and forth across the lane until you can get your defender caught up on another player. That gives you the opportunity to drive straight to the hole so you can dunk or lay the ball in. If it doesn't work, you can usually go baseline and get to the basket that way, as the computer doesn't seem to understand the importance of sealing that driving lane. Master this method, and your shooting percentage will skyrocket. ShootOut 2004 does include some juke moves mapped to the right analog stick, but the implementation and variety pales in comparison to NBA Live's freestyle or ESPN NBA's isomotion. Besides, who needs to use juke moves when you can get cheesy dunks by just running back and forth across the lane until your defender gets lost?  Ratcheting up the difficulty level doesn't help matters much either. At Hall of Fame difficulty the computer simply sends a constant double or triple team at the ballhandler and cranks up the shot blocking to the point where any and every contested shot of yours gets swatted. You can still score using the cheese-method, but it's just a little more difficult to shake two or three defenders instead of just one.  Dunks are easy to come by.  Defense isn't much more rewarding than playing offense. It's very easy to rack up a ton of steals in the game simply by running up to the ballhandler and pounding on the steal button. You won't get whistled for fouls very often, and you'll frequently knock the ball away for an easy turnover. For the times you do give up a shot, you'll find that it's also rather easy to block them. Rebounding is hit or miss. Sometimes it seems as though you have good control over the players in the low block, while jumping for the boards, but at other times it seems like the ball will simply clip through your players and find its way into the hands of the computer.  Strange bugs plague the gameplay as well. Play long enough and you'll see the computer exhibit some bizarre behavior, like throwing the ball out of bounds off of an inbound pass play or passing to a teammate behind the half-court line for an over-and-back turnover. Sometimes you'll hear the announcer say the wrong name on a play. You'll also see the slow-motion highlight camera engage even though your player was actually stripped of the ball as he went up for a dunk. Perhaps most frustrating is that the camera will often focus for a couple of seconds on the computer players running back to play defense after they've made a basket. You can't skip that bit of animation, making it impossible to try to fast-break after a made basket.  You, too, can be a summer league scrub in ShootOut 2004.  While you can play single exhibition games or one full season, unlike other basketball games on the market, ShootOut 2004 doesn't include a traditional franchise mode where you take the role of a general manager of a team. Instead, the game's career mode focuses on your created character as he tries to make his way up from the ranks of the summer leagues and the NBDL to ""the big show"" in the NBA. Every game you play while in the summer league or NBDL includes a list of goals, such as scoring a certain number of points, getting a steal or a block, and/or holding one of the opposing players under a certain number of points. If you consistently achieve most of your goals, an NBA team will offer you a contract, and you can attempt to prove yourself at that level. If you are good enough to stick around the NBA and win a few championships, scoring titles, and other accolades, you can eventually earn enough points to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.  While ShootOut 2004's career mode is an interesting idea, its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, the game doesn't give a clear enough idea of how to improve your attributes like speed, ballhandling, shooting ability, etc. This seems like a strange omission, given that the whole idea of career mode is to improve your character enough to get a spot in the NBA. Also, the computer seems to have no regard at all for the existing players in the NBA when you're given your chance. To exemplify this point, one of our created characters, a shooting guard who tried out for the Lakers, immediately replaced Kobe Bryant in the starting lineup after being offered a contract! Needless to say, this idea is preposterous. Finally, it's a little odd that the game includes all the real NBDL teams, but it doesn't include any real-life players who actually do play in the ""D-League."" The NBDL rosters in ShootOut 2004 are, interestingly, comprised of fictional players.  The game does include a couple of other features, like the inclusion of the NBA's 50 Greatest Players and voice activated commands. Each of the 50 greatest players are unlocked by accomplishing certain challenges in the exhibition games, like scoring a certain number of points and assists using the point guard of a certain team or racking up the most points and rebounds in a game with the center of another team. The voice commands are another feature that allows players with USB headsets to issue specific plays on offense or defense. While the feature seems to work reasonably well, ShootOut 2004's core gameplay mechanics aren't solid enough to necessitate or benefit much from such a gimmick. You'll find yourself falling back on the cheesy game exploits more often than not.  The online aspect of ShootOut 2004 is surprisingly feature-rich, with working leaderboards, message boards, polls, news, and tournaments. The gameplay is also pretty smooth, in general, with few latency or lag issues. It's just too bad such a nice network infrastructure is wasted on a game that plays as poorly as ShootOut.  Player models can sometimes have rather odd-looking proportions in ShootOut 2004.  At one point in time, 989 Sports was a leading contender among sports game developers, but in recent years they've clearly been overtaken. With a myriad of problems across the board, NBA ShootOut 2004 brings 989 Sports no closer to its competitors. Unless you're a basketball nut who must own a copy of every single basketball game on the market, or you're one of the world's few NBDL fans, there are much better alternatives than NBA ShootOut 2004.  
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944,Ballblazer Champions ,8.6, Ballblazer Champions has everything that a remake could want.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/7/1/1/477-1711.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ballblazer-champions-review/1900-2546730/,pos,"
Ahhhhh… Sweet Ballblazer, how I've missed you. Now that you've returned to me I will be able to conquer the world… Er, sorry. It's hard not to be excited by LucasArts' triumphant remake of the Commodore 64 classic Ballblazer. Filled with everything that made the original great, along with better graphics, sound, and control than the Commodore ever could have delivered (yes, I know it's sacrilege, but it's true…), Ballblazer Champions has everything that a remake could want. For those of you new to the video game world, or for those whose parents forced the gaming impaired Apple II unit on them (and yes, I know the game was available for the Apple, but let's face it folks, an internal speaker the size of a Wacky Wafer and a monochrome monitor do not a game system make), let me bring you up to speed. Ballblazer Champions is a high-speed, futuristic sports title that looks a little like a cross between Speedball 2 and Cybersled. The rules are simple. You pick out one of eight basic rotofoils, jump into one of over a dozen arenas, and attempt to put a glowing ball into a goal. Simple eh? The tricky bit is that you have an opponent who's trying to do the same thing, and you're both armed to the teeth with an assortment of futuristic gizmos designed to crush, fry, or confuse. If you don't master the controls quickly you'll find yourself shoved into a corner by a hailstorm of bullets and missiles as your opponent casually launches ball after ball into your goal. Fortunately the game looks fantastic, so while you wait for your competition to set a new high score, you'll have a lot to look at. From first glance it's obvious that LucasArts has devoted some serious time to making a conversion title that takes full advantage of the PlayStation high-speed graphics engine. Although relatively simple, Ballblazer's graphics are pleasing to the eye and never seem to suffer from slowdown. Unfortunately, it's obvious that the company was forced to make a few decisions between graphics and game speed, so every now and then you'll find yourself confronted by some large, ugly pixels. It's not really all that big a deal, and it only happens occasionally. The game's sounds are much like its graphics: solid, but never really inspired. In addition to being a great game on its own, Ballblazer also comes through with the all important head-to-head play – greatly adding to the game's long term play value. If you've been looking for a game that you can use to get a tourney started, or you're just into solid action games, Ballblazer is just what the doctor ordered.
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945,Comanche 3 ,8.6, NovaLogic is back with a sequel worthy of giving Longbow a spin.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/5/9/6/2217596-comanche3_box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/comanche-3-review/1900-2538450/,pos,"
There's some pretty stiff competition among the many helicopter sims that surfaced over the past year, but most have been silenced by the recent release of EA/Jane's Longbow Gold collection. Just when it looked there was a clear-cut rotary wing winner, NovaLogic is back with a sequel worthy of giving Longbow a spin. Comanche 3 is a based on America's most technologically advanced helicopter - the RAH-66 Comanche - developed by Boeing Sikorsky for the US Army. The first prototype became airborne only two months ago, and implementation of this 21st century combat chopper won't be until the year 2006. Fortunately, air combat enthusiasts can test-drive the next best thing to this 12 million-dollar aircraft, but don't expect this game to be just the original Comanche with new missions - both graphics and gameplay are leaps and bounds ahead of the simple shooter released almost three years ago. The first NovaLogic game built around its patented Voxel Space 2 rendering technology, Comanche 3 features photo-realistic terrain and sky effects, creating some of the most stunning graphics and light-sourcing ever seen in a simulation. Flying over snow-capped mountains, moving trains, jungles, deserts, lakes, and crop fields over the Ukraine, Jordan, Siberia, Cuba, and Iraq, reveals unparalleled detail - even at close range. All of the 100-plus objects in the game are composed of texture-mapped polygons and are unbelievably lifelike, from trees and buildings to tanks and support vehicles. With the right camera angle, you can even witness the Comache's weapon bay doors open and the landing gear retract.   The original Comanche also played more as an arcade game than an authentic helicopter simulation. This time around, however, NovaLogic has worked with military consultants and Army test pilots to incorporate accurate helicopter physics, and you have the option of an easy or advanced flight model. The advanced model faithfully recreates the Comanche's high-tech features and forces you to consider the stresses put on the engine, and the option to use a vertical stabilizer, HoverHold feature, or altitude lock. . Take note, even the advanced model is not as difficult to master as the steep learning curve in Jane's AH-64D Longbow. Comanche 3 is perfect for the beginner to intermediate player. Although both Comanche and Longbow games come equipped with a handy keyboard reference card, the controls are much easier to learn and use than they are in Longbow, plus the digital HMD (head mounted display) is laid out more effectively and is less obtrusive. You and your wingmen are armed with ample stingers, cannons, hellfires, and rockets, as you set out on recon missions, hard-hitting strike attacks, vehicle escorts, and defensive objectives. Other features in Comanche 3 include 20 different camera angle views (great during recorded playback!), support for a wide variety of peripherals, and 16-bit stereo 3-D Dolby Surround sound. Gamers will be treated to actual pilot chatter and digitized sounds of a real Comanche in flight.  Comanche 3 is not without fault. Gamers with a Pentium-100 or under should hold off on picking up Comanche 3 until your next inevitable upgrade. Even on a P-133, with 32 MB RAM, the frame rate is slow and motion proves choppy, even with most of the detail turned down. Game manufacturers usually attempt to balance speed vs. graphic detail, and NovaLogic has obviously opted for the latter. In its defense, NovaLogic has allowed for multiple resolution settings (six options ranging from 320 x 200 VGA up to 640 x 480 SVGA), but choosing any of the lower resolutions is simply cheating yourself of the game's best asset.  NovaLogic may have also overlooked two of the most important trends in PC gaming - custom-built scenarios and Web-based playing. Comanche 3 only comes equipped with four operations containing 32 levels, plus optional training exercises. Compare this to the 400-plus missions in Longbow Gold (which also contains the Flash Point Korea expansion CD) and the lack of a map generator to customize the game. This unfortunately takes away from the replayability of Comanche 3. Multiplayer gaming seemed more of an afterthought as well. Although the game is playable over a modem (two players) and LAN (up to eight players), there is no Internet play besides using the Kali service (the CD does contain the Kali starter kit).  While these imperfections cannot be ignored, Comanche 3 is still one of the most fun and addictive games of the year. After playing Comanche 3 for hours on end (you know, that ""one more mission"" phenomena), you'll see that NovaLogic's latest is far more than just eye-candy, and the striking scenery and excellent helicopter detail make this futuristic helicopter combat sim a must-have for budding pilots.
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946,Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back ,8.6, Crash Bandicoot 2 is a topnotch platform game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/9/1/2213191-box_crashb2.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crash-bandicoot-2-cortex-strikes-back-review/1900-2547121/,pos,"
Let me go on record and say that I was never a fan of the original Crash Bandicoot. Even though Crash was disarmingly cute and fuzzy, and even though the game's graphics were just about as good as they got in those days, the frustrating design of the game made playing it such a painful experience that I still have flashbacks when I see small marsupials on the Discovery Channel. But just one short year after his debut, Crash is back in a sequel that is so far superior to the original that I'm willing to forget the mistakes of the past. The new storyline is simple: A very gullible Crash is corralled into collecting crystals for the evil Dr. Cortex and gems for the terrible N. Brio. There are 25 levels in all; each level contains an easy-to-find crystal and hard-to-earn gems. Instead of being forced to approach the game in a strictly linear fashion, you progress through a series of five warp rooms. Each warp room contains five levels, which you are free to tackle in any order. After you have found the crystals in each level, you can progress to the next warp room. This system of warp rooms is a great innovation; it's clear how to progress in the game, and yet you have the option of moving to a different level if you're hopelessly frustrated with one area. Best of all, you can save your game in the warp room at any time (a big improvement over the original game's horrific save system). A lot of variety is packed inside this game. You'll navigate through simple run-and-jump areas, try to outrun a very mad polar bear, work your way through sewer systems, and even fly around with a jet pack. Within each level, the basic gameplay is similar to the original Crash: Running, jumping, and spinning are still the order of the day. Even though most levels are set in a semi-3D environment, Crash Bandicoot 2 is a platform game, plain and simple. The graphics are in a league of their own among PlayStation games, and the music couldn't be better. Unlike the original, Crash 2 is rarely frustrating enough to make you want to throw your controller at the TV. In fact, some expert gamers might find Crash to be a little on the easy side. There are only two real problems with Crash Bandicoot 2. First, the semi-3D setup is sometimes hard to navigate, and you'll find yourself missing jumps because you're unable to judge distances properly. Secondly, the game is just plain cheap at times; in some areas you must sacrifice many lives until you memorize a level's layout. In any event, these problems are balanced out by the game's excellent gameplay and intelligent design. Crash Bandicoot 2 is a topnotch platform game. If you're a fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to check this title out.
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947,Fighters Megamix ,8.6, Fighters Megamix is the only fighting game a Saturn owner needs.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/3/6/9/2218369-fighters_megamix_coverart.png,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fighters-megamix-review/1900-2533925/,pos,"
Forget about Virtua Fighter 3. Throw away the pretenders and wanna-bes. Fighters Megamix is the only fighting game a Saturn owner needs. At its heart, Fighters Megamix is a character-driven game. That is to say, it combines all the fighters from Virtua Fighter 2, every one of the fighters from Fighting Vipers, a couple of worthies from Virtua Fighter Kids, and a mess of characters from other Sega titles, including Janet from Virtua Cop 2, and Siba, a character rumored to have been cut from the original Virtua Fighter. One of the more bizarre characters is - believe it or not - the Hornet from Daytona USA that grabs opponents with one tire and uses another to lay a patch on the victim's face. Smokin'. Gameplay is of the standard Virtua Fighter variety, meaning that pounding on buttons will probably lead to a combo of some kind. There are skills to be learned, but even those who have only a tenuous grasp of the basics should do just fine. Since the computer opponent is incredibly easy to defeat, two-player battles will no doubt quickly become the preferred mode of choice for most players. The dodge button from Virtua Fighter 3 appears in Fighters Megamix, adding another (but uninteresting) angle to the game. While the graphics in Megamix aren't quite up to the level of VF2 on the Saturn, they still look very good. The game sports a few minor problems with collision detection, but when you consider the sheer number of strangely shaped characters (not the least of which is a huge piece of meat with arms and legs), this is a forgivable quality.  The music in Fighters Megamix is a collection of tunes culled from VF2 and Fighting Vipers. Some additional tracks from Daytona USA and the Sega classic, Afterburner, round out the score. Effects are also nice, but the speech is a bit muffled. Thankfully, the sounds of people being badly beaten more than make up for the muttered speech. The US release of Fighters Megamix is all but identical to last December's Japanese release of the game. The only difference is that a few of the end-game pictures have been removed, as they were deemed a bit too racy for the younger US audience.  Megamix is a milestone in that, along with Mortal Kombat Trilogy, realizes console gamers deserve more than arcade rehashes. Even if you already own VF2 and Fighting Vipers, FMM is the ultimate Saturn fighting game. If you don't own a Saturn and have even a passing interest in the VF series, this is probably the game you could use to justify purchasing the system.
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948,Frame Gride (Import) ,8.6, Who would have thought that the publisher responsible for some of the slowest games on the planet would come up with a game that leaves its own classic mech series ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/7/2/9/2223729-frame_gride_jap_front.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/frame-gride-import-review/1900-2540297/,pos,"
From Software, the creator of the Armored Core, King's Field and, err, Echo Night series', has released its first Dreamcast title, Frame Gride (rhymes with ""glide""). Frame Gride is a mech-combat game, similar to Armored Core, except that there are no objective-based missions. At its core (no pun intended) Frame Gride is most closely related to Sega's own mech-combat arcade game, Virtual On. Frame Gride distances itself from Sega's title by adding loads of customization options, the very same options that gave the Armored Core series its fanatical following. From the outset, you are put through a series of questions (in Japanese, unfortunately), the answers to which will determine which giant robot you'll start out with. You are also given two ""skeletons"" to work with at the beginning, but you won't be able to do anything with them just yet. After getting used to the controls in the training center, you'll find that beyond their simple functions, proximity to your enemy also results in different attacks. Holding down both shoulder buttons and pressing the sword slash and gunfire buttons will offer, respectively, more powerful long-range attacks. The analog pad changes your view, much in the way that the exterior camera works in Ace Combat 3, allowing you to look left and right, which is necessary since your enemy will swarm around you. The D-pad is used for the actual mech movement, which works fine. As you begin your campaign, you will find yourself transported to various locations on a map, where you will do battle with a different opponent each time. During actual battle, you may feel slightly overwhelmed when you discover that the enemy can unleash intelligent satellites of incredibly varying nature. These satellites range from simple crab-like droids that follow you around and shoot at you, to small orb-like pods that act like landmines, to full-sized foot soldiers that attack with as much intelligence as the host opponent itself. Fortunately, you will eventually be able to command this sort of help yourself, once you've acquired the appropriate amount of crystals. These crystals are what you are rewarded with upon destroying the enemy and his satellites. While you don't have to destroy the satellites to win the levels, you will gain more crystals by doing so and therefore obtain more accessories. After any battle is over, you will have won a certain amount of crystals, usually at least three for beating your enemy alone, more for each satellite you kill. After each match, you can go into the crystal exchange room, where you can cash in your crystals for items and upgrades. There is a wide variety of crystals you can get, and the myriad combinations you create will result in a lot of different accessories you can buy. Once you start buying parts to upgrade your mech, you can also use these parts to outfit your skeletons - one of which is a light, speedy model, the other a more sturdily built one for hand-to-hand combat. Everything on these mechs can be customized: head shell, arms, rocket boosters, chassis, legs, sword, shield, rifle, and much, much more. As anyone familiar with Armored Core will know, a broad palette of color options is also available.Graphically speaking, Frame Gride is absolutely beautiful, boasting not only highly detailed textures and excellent light-sourcing effects, but an immaculate design sense reminiscent of the manga classic, The Five Star Stories. The incentive to play this game is high since you'll definitely want to unlock the more exotic parts hidden in the game. The backgrounds are not only nice to look at but dictate what sort of strategy you'll need as well. Some arenas are wide-open spaces, well suited for long-range attacks, others are underwater (slowing your movement somewhat), and some take place in a forest that gives you plenty of cover but also limits your attack options. Other settings include a castle courtyard, with bridges and multitiered landscaping, giving you all kinds of strategic possibilities as to how you combat your opponent. Frame Gride basically takes the Virtual On premise to its next logical evolution. Sound effects are superb and give off the clanking, metallic sounds you would expect from eight-ton robots stomping around. The soundtrack is tech-medieval and suits the game well.  A feature that will hopefully remain when the game is finally published here is the Internet play. Yes indeed, right now the kids in Japan can take it to the 'Net and duke it out with their own creations, courtesy of the Dreamcast's built-in modem. This is the sort of game that will sell the system to people interested in the modem support. Web surfing and all that is fine, but when you can take your customized mech-man online and battle your best friend across the country, who could resist? While hands-on experimentation with this option was not possible, one would imagine it could only get better with the American release, due to the faster modem packed with the US Dreamcast.  As it is, even without the benefits of Internet play, the one-player game is as rewarding as an arcade-style game could be. The game is filled with great graphics, tight gameplay, and high replay value. As an import purchase, it is surely recommended. As a domestic release, it will become a must-buy. Who would have thought that the publisher responsible for some of the slowest games on the planet would come up with a game that leaves its own classic mech series in the dust? A top-tier title for the Dreamcast, Frame Gride is topnotch stuff.
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949,Front Mission Second (Import) ,8.6," A serious, stylish strategy game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/8/0/5/1000-3805.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/front-mission-second-import-review/1900-2547633/,pos,"
All is not right in the People's Republic of Alordesh. The tiny region on the Asian border of Australia, tired of being oppressed under the Oceana Community Union, rebels against its ruling government with intent for independence. You're caught in the middle of this volatile 22nd century war, a mercenary in command of a handful of mighty walking war machines called Wanzers, and you stand to sway the revolution in one direction or the other. This political problem makes for a king of a strategy game: Front Mission Second (officially titled Front Mission Second), the PlayStation sequel to an excellent but little-seen 1995 Super Famicom title, offers the unprecedented quality across the board that fans have paradoxically come to expect from Square. The same technology that lent Final Fantasy VII its stunning 3D battle graphics is back in Front Mission Second. The turn-based battles play out on isometric polygonal battlefields that look great but become uncomfortably cluttered when many little bitmapped units pack in close. Suddenly, once shots are fired, the action switches to an extreme close-up of the Wanzers duking it out in real time. Here, the Wanzers look like the 50-ton steel monstrosities they're meant to be. They move gracefully but with tremendous momentum, dwarfing cars and trees and rivaling the skyscrapers that sprinkle the detailed 3D background scenery. Front Mission Second's Wanzers look superior to even the best-looking mecha games out there, such as From Software's Armored Core. Its audio is equally top-of-the-line, with a stirring, dramatic soundtrack highlighting every moment of action and suspense, even during the game's cleverly concealed load times. Meanwhile, booming sound effects do justice to the Wanzers' terrifying weapon systems. Most of your time with Front Mission Second will be spent engaged in dozens of different large-scale battles where your team of Wanzer pilots fend off scores of powerful enemies to succeed. You and your opponent take turns ordering your respective troops around the field in a manner not unlike Square's more familiar Final Fantasy Tactics. Everything here is on a greater scale than in Tactics; you're in charge of around a half-dozen units and are dealing with over twice that many foes on a huge tactical map in almost every encounter. Despite the scale of each fight, you must micromanage each troop, taking heed of its pilot and his proficiencies as well as overseeing his Wanzer's maintenance piece by piece. Some of your troops will be armed with powerful, though somewhat inaccurate, long-range weapons including missile arrays, grenade launchers, and high-impact cannons that they can use to whittle down the enemy forces before they get into range. Inevitably, the combat gets down and dirty, with the various mecha tearing into one another with huge firearms and melee weapons. Here is where you must make some tough calls: Will you attack the opponent with your machine gun with the intent of inflicting widespread damage to his vehicle? Or take the fight up close, bearing the opponent's preemptive attack to land a decisive blow to his body with your Wanzer's armored fists? Point-blank melee attacks are extremely powerful but also rather easy to avoid, so maybe your best bet is to start by taking out the enemy's legs. Of course, you can't shoot the legs off a jet or a helicopter - you won't just fight other Wanzers in Front Mission Second, as your opponent will attack with all manner of military vehicles, demanding that you modify your plan accordingly. Each successful hit earns your pilots experience toward increased proficiency in either close-in fighting, short-range weapons, or long-range artillery. When they gain an experience level in one of these areas, the pilots may acquire special abilities including feints, critical hits, and priority strikes. You must specialize your Wanzers and their pilots alike to succeed, with hand-to-hand and long-range experts supporting your more balanced troops. Likewise, you must think hard about each and every move, both when attacking and on the defense where you select which weapon or defensive measure a pilot will employ in countering the enemy. The combat in Front Mission Second is not overwhelmingly complicated, but rather finely balanced so as to be exciting yet by no means simplistic. Because you're dealing with so many troops and each round of 3D combat takes close to 30 seconds to play itself out, battles in Front Mission Second last much longer than you may be used to. On the one hand, winning these grueling firefights is definitely rewarding; on the other, the more casual gamer will be hard-pressed to set aside a couple of hours to tackle just one fight, let alone to lose it. Front Mission Second is exclusively for serious strategy gamers, as it pits you against superior numbers controlled by a powerful computer opponent who will capitalize on your every mistake. Luckily, a valuable tutorial exists to teach you life-saving tactics and strategies - though it's presented entirely in Japanese. On those rare occasions when you're not blasting apart the countryside, you'll witness the plot unfold through mostly linear discourse between all the different and interesting characters in the game. The dialogue is all in Japanese, delivered alongside beautifully hand-drawn, remarkably expressive character portraits. You can only save your progress during these scarce peaceful moments, and you must also take these opportunities to soup up your squad with your mercenary earnings. Dozens of different Wanzer parts and weapons are available both through legal venues and the black market, and you can even customize your machines down to the camouflage paint. Fortunately, Front Mission Second's menu systems are entirely in English, so you can get into it even with a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese. Unfortunately, Square has no plans as of yet to bring Front Mission Second directly to its growing American audience despite the game's well-deserved popularity in Japan. Front Mission Second is a difficult, complex strategy game that's every bit as good as Square's other superlative PlayStation releases. For Square to pass it up for translation only because it doesn't have the words ""Final Fantasy"" in its title would be a real shame for those longing for a serious, stylish strategy game.
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950,Gran Turismo ,8.6," No matter what flavor of racer you favor, Gran Turismo will take you for a ride you won't soon forget.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/4/3/2209943-box_gt.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gran-turismo-review/1900-2547786/,pos,"
Racing games generally come in two forms - arcade-style or sim - and so do racing fans. Some players enjoy the raw excitement and unfettered control of an action-oriented contest, while others go gaga over the realistic physics and heavy-duty customization features of a sim-style game. Rare indeed, almost nonexistent, is a racer that has a legitimate appeal to both camps, a game that blends the elements of action and sim in such a subtle manner that something altogether new is the result.  Enter Gran Turismo. Sony's foray into the auto-racing category is the equivalent of a ""mighty blow"" that should snap its competitors to attention, lest they risk being knocked out altogether. Gran Turismo presents you with the most realistic, most challenging, and most in-depth racing game currently available for the home market. Let's start with the basics: The game includes some 150 vehicles, from manufacturers such as Toyota, Honda, Dodge, Aston Martin, and Chevrolet. What's interesting about this isn't the sheer number of options available, but the level of variety those options represent. Sure, you can hop into supercars such as the Acura-NSX, Aston Martin DB-7, or Dodge Viper - that's par for the course in a console racer. But you can also drive more ""real world"" cars such as the Mitsubishi Eclipse, Subaru Legacy, or Honda Accord (in Sedan or Wagon, no less!). There's even a selection of classic cars - old Supras, Corvettes, RX-7s, etc. - available, along with a number of ultra-high performance machines that are generally restricted to theJapanese market. Why is all this so important? Mainly because each of these cars handles realistically, which is to say, differently; each car's unique mix of grip, power, weight, and balance directly influences the way it responds and performs on the track. And as a result, you have an almost-unlimited challenge before you: gaining competence with (let alone mastering) all of the cars could take months, if not longer. But most players won't go that route. Instead, they'll pick their favorite car (or more likely, cars) and then begin to modify them. As you gain experience and money in the game, you gain access to an ever-increasing array of parts, add-ons, and performance-enhancing accessories that you can apply however you see fit. At first, it's tempting to go straight for the horsepower - bigger engines, turbo chargers, etc. - but over time you realize the best way to spend your money is to use it to offset your own weaknesses as a driver. If you tend to be late and ineffectual with the brakes, beef 'em up. If you're constantly spinning out, get stickier tires. By the time you're finished, you'll have a machine that fits you like a glove - a car that takes advantage of your strengths and hides your shortcomings. You can even save your creation to a memory card and take it with you wherever you go. And where will you put this car to use? On the track, of course. Gran Turismo offers a great number of racing modes for you to try. If you choose the arcade mode, you can begin racing right away, alone or with another player. The arcade mode is a lot of fun, especially as a quick two-player race or as a way to get comfortable with the game. But the sim mode is where the real action is. Here's where you'll take part in a number of racing circuits and special events, everything from the introductory Sunday Cup all the way to the ultimate event - the GT World Cup. Again, the number and variety of venues and events are a pleasure to behold.  One important note: Before you can enter a given circuit, you must obtain certification in the form of a license. If you don't pass, you can't race. This is certainly the most controversial aspect of the game and the reason that Gran Turismo scores only an 8 in gameplay. The license tests can be very, very difficult, so much so, in fact, that some players might quit the game in frustration. And needlessly so, because  skilled racers will succeed in the later events even if they lack the ability to pass the licensing tests. Next time around, let's hope the developers either make this section optional or provide more balanced, more instructive licensing tests. When all the qualifying, prepping, and tweaking is over, it's on to the race itself. And here is where Gran Turismo really shines. The experience of racing is simply awesome - the controls are precise (especially with the analog controller), the physics are realistic, and the sense of pure speed is palpable. It's easy enough to get good at the game, but as with all classic games, becoming a true master at Gran Turismo is a long and arduous task, with your progress being measured in fractions of a second. As for the look and sound of Gran Turismo, well, they're both excellent. In fact, the graphics are among the best ever seen on a PlayStation racer; everything looks positively real, and there's little in the way of distracting pop-up. The sound is also quite good, with authentic in-game effects and a pulsating soundtrack. In fact, the only thing better than the racing itself are the replays - hi-res, multicamera affairs that visually are darn near indistinguishable from a television broadcast. So there you have it. Gran Turismo is racing game with superior depth, variety, gameplay, and audiovisual effects. No matter what flavor of racer you favor, Gran Turismo will take you for a ride you won't soon forget. 
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'superior', 'depth', ',', 'variety', ',', 'gameplay', ',', 'audiovisual', 'effects', '.', 'No', 'matter', 'flavor', 'racer', 'favor', ',', 'Gran', 'Turismo', 'take', 'ride', 'wo', ""n't"", 'soon', 'forget', '.']",0.19847552139218802,0.534415533026644
951,M.A.X. ,8.6," Command & Conquer,  move over.  M.A.X. does it better.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/8/5/8/1297-4858.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/max-review/1900-2542474/,pos,"
Real-time strategy games are the hot item among computer game players these days. The success of games such as Command & Conquer, Warcraft II, and Close Combat reveal the potential for similar offerings. M.A.X., courtesy of Interplay, does all of these one better by giving players the choice of real-time or turn-based gameplay. If you like the idea behind C&C, you'll love what this game has to offer. M.A.X. presents excellent visuals, excellent gameplay, and nearly infinite replay value in a package that's hard to resist. At its core, M.A.X. is a military conquest/resource management game. It opens with a cinematic sequence that blows away the efforts of most other games. Following this, you're ready to jump into the options. Options? We've got options: training missions, scenarios, random scenarios, campaigns…all available for your entertainment pleasure. The difficulty settings available for each mission include opponent quality, turn limits, and real-time vs. turn-based. Once you've made your choices, the game begins. M.A.X. presents the game in a top-down SVGA view. Your task is to discover and mine resources on the planet. As surveyors crawl over the landscape, you must continue to build your colony. Numerous buildings are available for construction, from storage tanks to habitats for the colonists. The large number of military units allows you to pursue the military strategy of your choice. In addition, you can produce upgraded units from your vehicle factories. All of these aspects lead to a fairly steep learning curve. Luckily, M.A.X. includes 14 training missions to bring you up to speed. Let's not forget your opponents. Up to three other human (or computer) opponents are fighting over the same planet. Expect your opponents to attack early and often. Learning the best way to stay alive can be a trying task. Even when your opponents are clueless, they can still put up a good fight. Combat involves the usual explosions and debris - nothing unique here. The sound effects, especially the female computer voice, are excellent. Command & Conquer,  move over.  M.A.X. does it better, albeit with players spending much more time learning the game. With numerous missions, a campaign mode, and multiplayer support, do not expect this game to get old anytime soon. M.A.X. raises the standard for strategy games to a new level.
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952,Meat Puppet ,4.3, Meat Puppet's execution leaves boundless room for improvement.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/5/8/2210258-meat_puppet_box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/meat-puppet-review/1900-2542501/,neg,"
Most of the ingredients for a good action game are present in Meat Puppet, but they've been thrown together in such a hurry that the end result is just short of unplayable. Those familiar with Origin's  games will immediately recognize Meat Puppet as a very derivative product: an isometric, futuristic, fast-action shooter. In this case, you control a lanky, foul-mouthed heroine around a bleak-looking futuristic cityscape, firing nervously at anything that moves. While such a setting needn't necessarily make for a bad game, Meat Puppet's execution leaves boundless room for improvement. You play the role of said long-legged gunslinger, Lotos. She's been kidnapped and forced to do some dirty work involving the assassination of several haughty city ambassadors. Her cyberpunk sidekick Dumaine offers e-mail advice along the way, sometimes transmitting a pop-up message right in the middle of some key action sequence. The neo-gothic scenery looks pretty sometimes, but Lotos won't be able to admire it for long because an invisible timer is ticking away for each mission. There's nothing quite like wrestling irritating controls while worrying about the clock. You control Lotos by pointing the mouse where you want to go and holding the right button. You'll want to run the whole time (remember that timer?), so you can dedicate one hand to holding down the CTRL key. You shoot a weapon by pointing and clicking. It worked for , but in Meat Puppet, if that mouse isn't right on top of the bad guy, you'll miss the shot. There is no concept of line of fire, so if the mouse is just beyond the enemy then you're wasting your time and ammo. And since enemies stumble about unpredictably, you'll be grinding your teeth trying to gun them down. Lotos' fancy futuristic machine gun is so stylish that it's not even automatic; you need to click like a madman just to get the job done. Her other weapons, including a rocket launcher and a flamethrower, are equally exciting. And just watch what happens should the enemy step behind some foreground object like a pillar. Even if he's in Lotos' plain sight, she won't be able to shoot him since the mouse pointer will be on the pillar and not the enemy. Similar inconsistencies plague Lotos' walking and jumping abilities. Chances are some bad guy's always blasting away with some astonishing firearm. As Lotos' health saps to nothing, she deadpans ""Great,"" and better still, she shrugs. Can't say she doesn't keep cool under fire. If you guessed by now that Meat Puppet boasts a thumping techno soundtrack, you're absolutely right. But you cannot have realized just how grating the sound effects in Meat Puppet really are - the enemies' verbal repertoires consist of one to two sound bytes that all mash together in the heat of battle, thus changing your benign computer speakers into mind-numbing torture devices. From the moment Lotos announces her first four-letter word in the game's boring introduction, it's clear that Meat Puppet's attitude is all talk and no real action. When you shoot one of the little cleaver-wielding children and he erupts into blood and gore, the results aren't grisly so much as they are comical - he turns into a little pile of what looks like strawberry jam. Though Lotos herself is animated nicely, most everyone else in Meat Puppet looks mediocre. Unpredictable enemy AI, mouse-driven control, and nonlinear level design seem like good areas to focus on in constructing an action game. Kronos tried to do all these things, and failed at each in turn. Meat Puppet looks awkward, sounds bad, and plays worse, leaving the game player feeling frustrated and exhausted.
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953,Men in Black: The Series ,4.3," The Men In Black franchise had such an opportunity to be a good video game - wild alien characters, cool weapons, stylish black suits - but what we have here ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/7/5/2220575-box_mibts.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/men-in-black-the-series-review/1900-2536192/,neg,"
The Men In Black movie was a surprise holiday hit when it made the transition from comic book to silver screen a few years ago. The adventures of Mr. K. and Mr. J. have since continued in a Saturday morning cartoon. Now, the alien-busting duo has hit the Game Boy. We're here to tell you to avoid it at all costs.  The Men In Black franchise had such an opportunity to be a good video game - wild alien characters, cool weapons, stylish black suits - but what we have here is a complete waste of potential.  Players control a generic Man In Black as he moves through a series of side-scrolling levels, avoiding contact with energy draining sludge and shooting any aliens that come along. And that's it. Once you finish one level, you're treated to a short cartoon-style FMV sequence before moving onto the next, almost identical, stage. Aliens take the form of misshapen, barely recognizable sprites, hardly worthy of fear or even base acknowledgement. Backgrounds are drab and unimaginative. They repeat far too often, making us wonder if the graphics were put together in a day using old Commodore 64 games. Heck, even the humble C64 had better use of colors. As far as in-game graphics go, only the slick animation of the game's main character is worthy of redemption.  MIB's graphical highlights come in the form of the animated intros and cutscenes that pepper this cart. The intro scene is particularly good, although it would have been nice if these visual niceties didn't come at the expense of actual gameplay.  Your mosquito gun seems a lot weaker than it did in the movie, and even if it wasn't, you're never given enough time to react to attack. This sloppy game design also lets your energy bar be sapped by a never-ending stream of aliens that will continue to pop out of previously cleared areas.  So. there you have it folks - plenty of compelling reasons why Men In Black is not worthy of your attention. Now, just stare into this tube....
 ","['The', 'Men', 'In', 'Black', 'movie', 'surprise', 'holiday', 'hit', 'made', 'transition', 'comic', 'book', 'silver', 'screen', 'years', 'ago', '.', 'The', 'adventures', 'Mr.', 'K.', 'Mr.', 'J.', 'since', 'continued', 'Saturday', 'morning', 'cartoon', '.', 'Now', ',', 'alien-busting', 'duo', 'hit', 'Game', 'Boy', '.', 'We', ""'re"", 'tell', 'avoid', 'costs', '.', 'The', 'Men', 'In', 'Black', 'franchise', 'opportunity', 'good', 'video', 'game', '-', 'wild', 'alien', 'characters', ',', 'cool', 'weapons', ',', 'stylish', 'black', 'suits', '-', 'complete', 'waste', 'potential', '.', 'Players', 'control', 'generic', 'Man', 'In', 'Black', 'moves', 'series', 'side-scrolling', 'levels', ',', 'avoiding', 'contact', 'energy', 'draining', 'sludge', 'shooting', 'aliens', 'come', 'along', '.', 'And', ""'s"", '.', 'Once', 'finish', 'one', 'level', ',', ""'re"", 'treated', 'short', 'cartoon-style', 'FMV', 'sequence', 'moving', 'onto', 'next', ',', 'almost', 'identical', ',', 'stage', '.', 'Aliens', 'take', 'form', 'misshapen', ',', 'barely', 'recognizable', 'sprites', ',', 'hardly', 'worthy', 'fear', 'even', 'base', 'acknowledgement', '.', 'Backgrounds', 'drab', 'unimaginative', '.', 'They', 'repeat', 'far', 'often', ',', 'making', 'us', 'wonder', 'graphics', 'put', 'together', 'day', 'using', 'old', 'Commodore', '64', 'games', '.', 'Heck', ',', 'even', 'humble', 'C64', 'better', 'use', 'colors', '.', 'As', 'far', 'in-game', 'graphics', 'go', ',', 'slick', 'animation', 'game', ""'s"", 'main', 'character', 'worthy', 'redemption', '.', 'MIB', ""'s"", 'graphical', 'highlights', 'come', 'form', 'animated', 'intros', 'cutscenes', 'pepper', 'cart', '.', 'The', 'intro', 'scene', 'particularly', 'good', ',', 'although', 'would', 'nice', 'visual', 'niceties', ""n't"", 'come', 'expense', 'actual', 'gameplay', '.', 'Your', 'mosquito', 'gun', 'seems', 'lot', 'weaker', 'movie', ',', 'even', ""n't"", ',', ""'re"", 'never', 'given', 'enough', 'time', 'react', 'attack', '.', 'This', 'sloppy', 'game', 'design', 'also', 'lets', 'energy', 'bar', 'sapped', 'never-ending', 'stream', 'aliens', 'continue', 'pop', 'previously', 'cleared', 'areas', '.', 'So', '.', 'folks', '-', 'plenty', 'compelling', 'reasons', 'Men', 'In', 'Black', 'worthy', 'attention', '.', 'Now', ',', 'stare', 'tube', '...', '.']",0.009090909090909089,0.5168560606060608
954,Midway Presents Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 2 ,4.3, You're still better off tracking down the arcade versions of these games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/2/0/8/1383-5208.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/midway-presents-arcades-greatest-hits-the-atari-co/1900-2546522/,neg,"
The classic gaming bandwagon just keeps getting bigger and bigger. This time around, Midway has packaged up a bunch of mid-'80s Atari games. Atari Collection 2 contains Paperboy, Roadblasters, Crystal Castles, Marble Madness, Millipede, and Gauntlet. While many of the games are identical emulations, meaning they use the same code as the original arcade versions, Gauntlet and Paperboy are ports, meaning the original coin-op code was converted over. The ports are pretty good, although there are a few spots where you can notice the difference. Gauntlet supports the multitap, so four players can play. Analog control is supported in Paperboy, Roadblasters, Crystal Castles, and Marble Madness. It works reasonably well, but is a bit too touchy at times. Crystal Castles and Marble Madness simply demand a trackball - no other controller will do. The graphics are what you'd expect from games of that era, but everything looks more than a little fuzzy. Paperboy is the fuzziest of the bunch, and also has some weird contrast problems going on. The sound is about the same, but there is some weirdness here, too. Gauntlet occasionally forgets to make the key pickup noise, and the character-specific speech, ""Warrior...now has...extra shot power,"" is even slower than normal. Without trackballs, Marble Madness and Crystal Castles aren't much fun. Without a steering wheel, Roadblasters suffers. Without the crazy handlebars, Paperboy isn't nearly as good. Gauntlet and Millipede control reasonably well, but Gauntlet just seems strange and doesn't hold up as well as I thought it would. And that's perhaps the largest problem with this collection. The games just don't hold up as well to the tests of time as the previous collections. There's just something eerily wrong with the games, like all the fun got sucked out, and blurry, poor-controlling husks were all that remained. Get it for Gauntlet, if you're a fan. Otherwise, you're still better off tracking down the arcade versions of these games.
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955,PGA European Tour ,4.3," Dated graphics, gameplay flaws, and meager extras all conspire to bring down an otherwise average golf game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/2/1/2209021-genesis_pgaeuropeantour.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pga-european-tour-review/1900-2595450/,neg,"
Some elements of popular European culture just don't pique the interest of Americans. As evidence, consider soccer mania or David Hasselhoff as a rock star.   This discrepancy probably applies to PGA golf as well. Most Americans would be hard pressed to know the latest news regarding the PGA European Tour. And, without marquee last names such as Woods or Duval, most would probably care less. So when a company hopes to sell a Nintendo 64 golf game focused on the PGA European Tour, it better have something else to offer gamers, such as jaw-dropping gameplay.   Well, your jaw indeed will drop when you play the game - but more likely from dismay and disappointment rather than excitement. Dated graphics, gameplay flaws, and meager extras all conspire to bring down an otherwise average golf game.   PGA European Tour covers the standard ""golf game"" bases: one-to-four-player strokeplay (best score wins), matchplay (most holes wins), skins (play for money), and practice mode. You can also simulate the PGA European Tour, which features big names such as Nick Faldo and Colin Montgomerie. In this mode, you hone your skills by starting your players off as amateurs, then improving their handicaps to eventually qualify for the tour. The game boasts four real-life courses - Quinta do Lago in Portugal, The 'K' Club in Scotland, Kungsängen in Sweden, and Druid's Glen in Ireland - which offer a good variety of holes to play. (Suffice it to say, this reviewer has never actually played any of those courses in real life, so it's difficult to judge how accurate they are.)   Aside from the four golf courses, the game's biggest plus is its versatile control. Although the game uses the standard circular power meter found in virtually all golf titles, you can choose whether to control it with buttons or with a combination of the analog stick and buttons (the latter being a much tougher task). This lets you experiment until you find a style that best suits you.   Unfortunately, the rest of the game slips downhill from there. Graphically, the game (which doesn't support the high-resolution Expansion Pak) looks like it could've shipped several years ago. While the greens and weather/lighting effects look passable, the lack of crowds and visual variety cheapens the game's overall atmosphere. On hole flybys, the bit-mapped tree shapes flicker and change size and shape as the camera moves through. The golfers employ the same motion-capture movements, and they all look the same, aside from palette swaps. The generic announcer phrases sometimes don't match the gameplay, and they are best turned off. On the plus side, the game uses sound mapping - so water noises get louder when you stand closer to a stream, for instance.   If presentation were the game's only issue, it probably would've passed muster. However, the gameplay merely adds insult to injury. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that in tour mode, you must play along with a computer golfer. Since there's no way to turn off the other golfer's animations, you must watch and jam on buttons to speed the process along. Second, the inflexible camera control prevents you from zooming in close to target the pin precisely, so shots on the green sometimes become a guessing game. Finally, it doesn't seem to make any difference whether a ball lands in the rough, fairway, or sand - the difficulty for each shot remains the same regardless of surface.    The game also had some frustrating glitches that needed fixing. On some really short putts, the aiming arrow wigs out, which makes it impossible to gauge the power meter accurately. In isolated instances, the announcer would call a ball out of bounds even though it was clearly in play based on the screen view.   Much of the game revolves around choosing the right club and putting backspin on a shot when necessary, so in terms of fundamental gameplay, this title has some merit. With patience and dedication, a die-hard golf gamer can accept the game's flaws and grow to enjoy the nuances of the European courses. Still, PGA European Tour lacks the needed bells and whistles to get a good rating, while the game's tired, sparse graphics and gameplay glitches prevent it from breaking even. Only golf addicts craving for new courses to master - and money to burn - should consider hitting this less-than-spectacular tour.
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956,Puzzle Pits ,4.3," What starts out as a challenge turns quickly into the almost impossible as Puzzle Pits goes from being a nice, friendly, mental exercise to an excruciating and mundane mental torture ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/3/8/1/1677-6381.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/puzzle-pits-review/1900-2546119/,neg,"
Puzzle Pits, designed to provide hours of mind bending enjoyment, is actually a frustrating experience.What starts out as a challenge turns quickly into the almost impossible as Puzzle Pits goes from being a nice, friendly, mental exercise  to an excruciating and mundane mental torture session.  In Puzzle Pits you solve each level by pushing barrels and other objects around into certain configurations while avoiding hazardous areas and using magic gems. And while the early levels are challenging but solvable, you'll hit the proverbial wall all too soon. I was privy to the passwords for all the levels, so my progress wasn't too inhibited, but those unfortunate enough to purchase this game may not be so lucky. Although Plasma Works, publishers of this mind boggling creation, promise to provide clues on their website for each level and provide instructions for figuring out the passwords to every 10th level, this probably won't be enough to keep you interested in Puzzle Pits.  This is the journey of a young apprentice (that's you) on a mental training journey. Remember the old Kung Fu series where the impatient, overconfident young boy learns the ways of life from the wise, soft-spoken elder? Well, in this case, your teacher isn't Kwai Chang Caine, but Master Flosh, and his trusty cane Blackie. Through a second person dialogue with Flosh at the beginning of each level, you learn what you must do to master the level and move on. If you're able to understand his accent, bear the dialogue's tiresome tone, and overlook the witless humor, the knowledge he provides is usually helpful. Set at a three-quarter perspective, the graphics are unattractive and blocky, reminiscent of the games of yesteryear. The lack of any way to adjust the level's viewpoint is also frustrating and dated. A topical view of the level would at least give you some assistance in developing a strategic plan and possibly figuring out the solutions. And if all of this isn't bad enough, as you begin moving around using either the keyboard or mouse, you'll notice something else amiss: the silence. Even Kung Fu had theme music. But in Puzzle Pits, aside from the scraping, crackling, and dripping sounds from various elements in the game, you're practically playing in a library. Even the Jeopardy theme would have livened up the atmosphere. Perhaps the most important element missing from this game is fun: It's simply not a pleasurable experience. And although Puzzle Pits is obviously designed to test your mental ability, I wouldn't count on your brain sticking around very long to play it.
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957,Rex Blade: The Battle Begins ,4.3, The tantalizing question is whether Simon & Schuster Interactive actually thought this was a good title.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/7/2/4/1736-6724.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rex-blade-the-battle-begins-review/1900-2532806/,neg,"
When it comes to Rex Blade: The Battle Begins, the new first-person 3-D shooter from Simon & Schuster Interactive, the issue isn't whether it's a good game or not: It only takes a few minutes of play to see that it's woefully outdated in terms of graphics and gameplay. No, the tantalizing question is whether Simon & Schuster Interactive actually thought this was a good title, or if they picked it up for a song and figured they could muscle enough copies through retail to make a profit. Set in the 36th century, the game puts you in the boots of Rex Blade, a cyborg originally developed hundreds of years ago to stop a revolt by all the other cyborgs who'd figured out they didn't need humans around anymore. Rex crushed the cyborg forces almost singlehandedly back then, and now he's been called up for duty once again, this time to stop a renewed cyborg invasion before it can be launched. It's not Hugo-award material, but it's more than enough of an excuse to shoot everything that moves. Once the action starts, though, you'll probably decide to let the cyborgs win this battle by default. I'll be the first to admit that gameplay always takes precedence over looks, but the block-o-rama graphics in Rex Blade are so weak that you'll have trouble concentrating on anything else. It doesn't help that the game only runs in 320x200x256, but you can't lay all the blame on the low resolution; several other, much older first-person shooters running at that res - Dark Forces, Doom, Descent - look far superior to this. The enemies you encounter are more laughable than frightening, and the scenery isn't much better. Aggravating the poor graphics are steep system requirements; I'd like someone to explain to me why a game that looks and plays like this requires a 100MHz Pentium for optimal performance. Poor graphics are one thing, but the game lacks other features, too. There's no option to customize the keyboard commands, the very first thing I do when loading any first-person 3D shooter (I hate using CTRL as the fire button). Come on, Simon & Schuster - this is a de facto feature of any self-respecting PC action title! While you can jump up and crouch down, you're not able to look up or down, nor does the game support the mouse as a control device - the method of choice for many fans of 3-D shooters. Joysticks and gamepads are supported, but there are no instructions on which buttons do what, and there's no way to assign actions to buttons. You can strafe by holding down the Alt key and using a directional arrow, but there's no way to strafe Right/Left with a single button as in Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, or SkyNET. The sound effects do more to grate on your nerves than create any sense of apprehension or drama - you have to hear them to appreciate how annoying they can become. And the manual is little more than an afterthought, devoid of illustrations or any type of explanations of the weapons and objects you'll find in the game. As you explore the cyborg installation, you're able to ""hack"" into the computer system to access log files and libraries, play video games (the only one I tried was an Asteroids clone called StarBlazer), and even write real programs using REX++, a ""fully functional cyborg programming language"" according to the box. I never found the password to use REX++, but that's okay - I don't play these kinds of games for a chance to do programming in BASIC, and I'll bet not many other action hounds do, either. (Note: I don't know for sure that it's BASIC, but it looked and smelled like it to me.) In the end, about the only thing Rex Blade has going for it is its price - a relatively low $29.99 direct from Simon & Schuster Interactive, around half the price of big-name titles. But as the old saw goes, you get what you pay for - and for a game with such dated graphics, spartan gameplay options, and no support for any type of multiplayer game, $29.99 is actually a little on the high side. That should change in a few months, though, when copies of this game start piling up in the bargain bins of software retailers all around the country.
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958,Shadow Madness ,4.3," Whoever said ""Graphics don't matter"" never played Shadow Madness.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/3/4/2210534-box_smadness.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shadow-madness-review/1900-2549260/,neg,"
It's difficult to find a game genre these days that isn't inhabited with both Japanese- and American-developed games. For whatever reason, however, the console RPG has been a Japanese mainstay for as long as many can remember - most US-developed console RPGs were simply PC ports or adaptations, not original content. Let it be said that Craveyard isn't the US's best ambassador in the realm of RPG development, and let's hope it isn't the last. Considering how long this game was in development, one would have hoped that Craveyard would have come up with something better than this. Welcome to the land of Arkose, a typically fantastic RPG world that's recently been plagued by self-destructing cities, a mind-scrambling disease, and a variety of other social maladies. Narrowly avoiding death in the blast that destroyed his hometown, the roguish good-guy Stinger seeks revenge against the mysterious force that tore his life to shreds. On his journey, Stinger meets Windleaf - a waifish elfin girl with mystical powers, and Harv-5 - a literally barrel-chested farm robot. Shadow Madness' story is fairly dark, although it has its fair share of humorous dialog and situations. The long, two CD-spanning adventure's story develops nicely, even if it is a little cliche or contrived at times. Due to the fact that it was written for American audiences, Shadow Madness' text is of generally high quality and blends humor and drama with a mostly favorable effect. Supplementing the nice text is an abundance of Arkosian historical texts, simply available should players want to know more about the land they're saving. Chances are they won't, however, as getting to the story is a chore - Shadow Madness is a boring, poorly executed game, filled with an abundance of just plain stupid design flaws. The game's general look and feel are remarkably similar to that of the recent Final Fantasy games, sporting polygonal characters roaming around prerendered backdrops. Battles occur, as in many console RPGs, randomly. The key to any console RPG is a competent battle engine and interface, and Shadow Madness generally lacks both. Battles are built around a poorly conceived menu system that requires you to sort through four submenus with the left and right shoulder buttons. While this can speed access menu navigation with practice, it never becomes truly intuitive. As Shadow Madness mimics Final Fantasy's active battle system, the thinking behind this implementation is understood, but the execution ultimately fails. While boss battles are a different story, battles generally boil down to simply attacking monsters until they're dead, with little emphasis on the use of magic or other strategic devices. Random encounters generally require little strategy and take just a little too long to be tolerable. Fortunately, many random encounters can be avoided before they begin, but overusing this innovative feature can be detrimental to your long-term health and result in wasted hours of supplementary character building. Many of the game's other problems stem from an annoying lack of design economy, resulting in a game that can be summed up as sloppy. Arkose is a world littered with innumerable useless items - for every useful item you find, you'll likely find five completely worthless ones that you'll quickly discarded to make room for other useful items in the annoyingly small backpack. Inventory management like this is a complete waste of the your time, and Shadow Madness is rife with it. When you go up levels, spells are generally handed out in groups of three, resulting in an extremely long list of spells in a small battle window, wasting valuable time in the pseudo-real-time battles. To top it off, a majority of these spells have almost meaningless names and only slightly varied effects when cast. Innovations such as double-damage with a carefully timed button press. Avoiding random encounters are nice to see in Shadow Madness, but this hardly begin to make up for the game's problems.Whoever said ""Graphics don't matter"" never played Shadow Madness. Shadow Madness is truly hideous to behold in its own right - even worse when compared with the RPG masterpieces it seeks to emulate. To start, the game features the most heinous character art in an RPG. Stinger is a, er... ""colorful"" caricature of FF7's Cloud, sporting a natty ponytail, a cute little red vest and a big sword. Harv-5 is a barrel adorned with a tin cappuccino cup, googly eyes, and a straw hat. And Windleaf... well, she just has to be seen to be believed. Other character designs include an old man's head atop a floating dinner plate, and a fat woman with cheesy cyberpunk-like sunglasses. As if their core concepts weren't terrible enough, Shadow Madness' artists spared just about all efforts to bring them to life. Monsters and characters alike are decidedly low on polygons, textures, and animation. If the frame rate were decent, this kind of problem could be overlooked - maybe. The spell ""effects"" generally consist of expanding spheres with different textures, or sloppily rendered FMV summon sequences that look far less impressive than the real-time summon spells of Final Fantasy VII. Attempting to stray from the current trend of polygonal world maps, Shadow Madness instead uses a truly bleak, crayon-drawn series of 2D maps with no detail or visual appeal whatsoever. In what could have been a nice touch, Craveyard added character portraits to all dialog boxes - unfortunately, the crude, cartoonish nature of the portraits is as bad as the rest of the game's art and takes any impact from the accompanying text. The rendered backgrounds range from extremely drab to average, doing nothing to improve the overwhelmingly terrible visual experience that is Shadow Madness. To re-create an eyesore of this caliber would truly take effort. Surprisingly enough, amidst all of this, Shadow Madness somehow manages to pull an above-average musical score. Sporting a large variety of tunes for every situation, the music subtly and attractively evokes the game's darker nature and avoids the over-the-top orchestrations most RPGs tend to employ. Shadow Madness is a decent story shrouded by years of bad decisions. As painful as it is to say so, seeing Craveyard disband after threats of a Shadow Madness sequel almost seems like a good thing. Shadow Madness is a curiosity and a cautionary tale of development for the ages, and should remain little more than that.
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959,Spy vs. Spy ,4.3," Fans of the original Spy vs. Spy games won't find anything worth playing in this Xbox update. But even if you don't know what the series is about, you aren't ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/8/4/2216684-nes_spyvsspy.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/spy-vs-spy-review/1900-6122292/,neg,"
 MAD magazine's Spy vs. Spy is a long-running comic strip about two pointy-nosed spies that are constantly fighting. What are they fighting for? That's not important. The eternal struggle between Black Spy and White Spy is legendary, and that's really all you need to know. Their adventures have been captured in game form before, starting back in 1984, when First Star Software released a Spy vs. Spy game for home computers. Now, Spy vs. Spy is making its way to the Xbox, trying to recapture the classic characters and the classic gameplay of the old games, but ultimately failing on both counts.   These classic characters have been in better games.   There's a single-player adventure available, but playing though the game's levels against the weak artificial intellgence and navigating your way through the simple traps that block your path isn't an interesting task. Additionally, the game is horrible at telling you what you're supposed to do next, and the mission objective screen usually doesn't clear things up. Thoughout most of the game's modes, you'll run around, opening safes, setting traps for other spies, buying extra weapons, and trying to collect a batch of items and escape before any of the other spies can do the same. But if that's too much for you to handle, there's classic mode, which strips the already-thin concept down even further in an attempt to make it more like the original Spy vs. Spy game. If you want to do away with all of the item collecting, you can just opt for deathmatch or last man standing, but the combat in the game isn't sharp enough to make this any fun. This is a shallow game, regardless of which mode you play. The multiplayer supports up to four players on a split-screen, system link, or via Xbox Live, but not even the competitive nature of the multiplayer can light a fire under this dud.    Stylistically, Spy vs. Spy doesn't really live up to the source material. The cool line art that Antonio Prohias used to first draw the characters has been replaced here by your typical polygonal models, right down to overly shiny surfaces on the spies' hats and all the other generic graphical tricks you'd expect from a budget game. The sound effects and music attempt to lend a wacky, madcap feel, but the lack of variety makes the music fall flat fast.    Fans of the original Spy vs. Spy games won't find anything worth playing in this Xbox update. But even if you don't know what the series is about, you aren't really missing anything. It would have been cool to maybe hear a remix of the classic music from the first Spy vs. Spy, and unlockable versions of the old games might have given this one some value to the nostalgist. But as an attempt at a modern third-person action game, Spy vs. Spy has nearly nothing to offer.  
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960,Wacky Races ,8.6," In every category, be it gameplay, sound, visuals, or replay, Infogrames' Wacky Races turns in a solid performance.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/8/3/2219683-box_wraces.png,GBC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wacky-races-review/1900-2594442/,pos,"
All right, stop what you're doing, because I'm about to ruin the image and the style that you're used to. Are you sick of Pole Position knockoffs on the Game Boy Color? Don't you hate it when arcade-style racers smell like feet? You're not alone. Thankfully, Infogrames has the solution to this dilemma: Wacky Races. Based on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, Wacky Races is a Mario Kart-style racing game that packs quirky gameplay and playful looks into the Game Boy's 160-pixel screen.   Unlike similar titles, Wacky Races attacks from all directions with tons of options. There are four game modes: arcade, endurance, championship, and time trial. The arcade mode features three progressively difficult cup stages of three courses each. The fun cup features Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi; the super cup highlights Nevada, Alaska, and New York; and the crazy cup features Oregon, Michigan, and Hawaii. The endurance, championship, and time-trial modes offer other longer, more taxing variations on the above themes. Initially, there are four characters: The Slag Brothers, Rufus Ruffcut, the Ant-Hill Mob, and Penelope Pitstop. If you manage to beat the crazy cup, you can unlock other characters, such as Dick Dastardly and Muttley, Peter Perfect, Sergeant Blast, and Red Max. Of note, a password save feature is available to safeguard your new character and vehicle acquisitions.   If you've played any GBC racing titles, be it Top Gear Pocket or V-Rally, you're no doubt used to Pole Position-style gameplay. You know the kind: car in the middle, course weaving around it, and the background staying put. While Wacky Races is guilty of these traits to an extent, a great number of enhancements lift it above the usual fare. Instead of just swinging from left to right, courses undulate and tilt as if they were real terrain. This really helps put a person right in the middle of the action, as speed, braking, cornering, and other real-world physics nuances come into play.    Another facet that Wacky Races excels in is car handling. Each vehicle has different speed, weight, and composition characteristics. Penelope Pitstop's Compact Pussycat is fast, but it has poor collision recovery. On the other hand, Sergeant Blast's Army-Surplus Special can roll through opponents like butter, at the cost of speed. Wacky Races also fixes another common GBC racing-game flaw: stupid collisions. Usually, if your car collides with another car, you go spinning off to the side while your opponent speeds off into the distance. Thankfully, Wacky Races ditches such elementary-school coding efforts for a more realistic ""rubbin' is racin'"" feel. If you're in a heavy car and you bump a lighter one, it will fly off to the side. If you happen to be the lighter car, you'll bounce away and lose control for a brief second or two.   Since this is Wacky Races, you don't just have to rely on skill and speed to win races. One of the more endearing traits of the Wacky Races cartoon show is the tricks and traps that Dastardly and gang execute to win a race. In the game itself, each track has a number of W symbols scattered about the course. By picking one up, you'll be given one of ten random power-ups, such as turbo, ghost, ice missile, and lightning. With a tap of the B button, you can unleash these weapons on unsuspecting foes. Forget about ""drat and double drat,"" Wacky Races' gameplay is spectacular.   If Wacky Races' gameplay is excellent, then its visuals are off the charts. The developers took the Test Drive Le Mans engine and stretched it fifty ways from Sunday. Backgrounds are lush and colorful, with grassy hills, snowy mountains, and lava-dripping calderas. Roadside visuals, such as cacti, houses, and signage zoom by at a rapid pace. Some of these hazards actually come out to get you! While you're driving, be on the lookout for bumbling tumbleweeds, rolling boulders, and oncoming traffic. As stated previously, there are eight characters, each with his or her own vehicle. There are no two-tone Hondas here, folks. Each car looks just as it would in the cartoon, right down to crooked wheels and dented fenders. As if this tasty sundae needed a cherry on top, Muttley and crew bear out the series' plot with numerous cutscenes.   It's rare when a licensed racing title turns out good, and even more rare when that game is on the Game Boy Color. In every category, be it gameplay, sound, visuals, or replay, Infogrames' Wacky Races turns in a solid performance. The lack of a two-player mode is unfortunate, and password saves are a bit tiresome, but the hilarious gameplay and wacky antics more than make up for these minor quibbles. Now, if only Infogrames would make a Stop the Pigeon game. As Muttley would say, ""Hee hee hee!""
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961,Warlords III: Reign of Heroes ,8.6, Warlords III is the kind of game that drives you to play through the night to the break of dawn and leaves you feeling good about it the next day.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/2/5/2209725-box.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warlords-iii-reign-of-heroes-review/1900-2531831/,pos,"
The third chapter in the acclaimed Warlords fantasy strategy series is a textbook case of superb design and implementation. This is the sort of game you won't just play for mere weeks, but one which contains months, possibly years, of grueling strategy and tactics. It's that good. Aesthetically, Warlords III is nothing out of the ordinary though it is a dramatic improvement over its predecessors. The high-resolution bird's-eye-view world maps look realistic and attractive enough, while each of the dozens of military units are imaginative and readily distinguishable. Dispersed throughout the game are beautifully hand-painted scenes depicting each troop type, castle, character, place, and special event. These contribute immensely to the feel of Warlords III, offering that extra sense of detail and involvement, which is nonexistent in most strategy games. Sound effects are sparse but effective, while the music score (composed by Steven Fawkner who designed the game) adds just the right touch of symphonic grandeur. And Warlords III is grand indeed - you will wage war across massive countrysides, with dozens of keeps and castles marking the territories of up to eight separate armies. A friendly tutorial explains the basics of the game in minutes though only time and practice will reveal its nuances. You and your opponents take turns moving your armies, grouping as many as eight units into a single stack. Claiming castles allows you to rally more units, with stronger ones requiring several more turns to produce and demanding more gold for their services. While your instinct may be to produce as many high-level troops as possible, only the proper balance between lesser and greater units will allow you to effectively assault the enemy while adequately defending your perimeter from possible counterattack. An intricate but easy-to-use diplomacy system lets you join forces against a common foe, or find yourself battling against multiple enemies united to do you in. If Warlords III is to be faulted, one would have to cite the abusive unit vectoring system which allows troops to move between friendly castles in exactly two turns. This transfer is invisible, an inexplicable teleport that transcends mountains, water, everything. Though vectoring speeds up gameplay, it downplays factors like positional advantage. The key players in your wars are the hero units who will offer their assistance from time to time for a steep price. These specialized soldiers are stronger and faster than the rest, and can benefit other units with their adept leadership skills. Heroes also gain experience, allowing you to augment their outstanding abilities even further. Some heroes wield magic, which doesn't play a critical role in the game but can sway a battle at that decisive moment. Combat is completely non-interactive, and resolves itself in seconds through a series of hidden number crunches. While those accustomed to real-time strategy games will yearn for more control over their battles, the emphasis in Warlords III is not so much on the execution of a fight as on the preparation. The combat system may seem alarming in its simplicity, but with so many factors at work that determine the odds of success, it is, in reality, not simple at all: Everything, from individual unit strength to agility and morale, plays a role in the outcome. There are countless ways to engage in Warlords III. An epic story-driven campaign as well as stand-alone and randomly-generated scenarios will challenge the solo player, who will encounter a calculating and vicious computer opponent fully prepared to win at any cost. And if you're looking to clash wits with your friends, you may do so via modem or network or even over e-mail. Best of all, you can wage war against strangers from around the world on Red Orb's specialized Internet server. Warlords III is well geared to multiplayer competition, as you can set turn time limits and even resolve turns simultaneously with the opponent - requiring you to work quickly when in close quarters. The options and variables go on and on, as you can construct a custom army, define specific victory conditions, and much more. Warlords III is an intelligent, exciting game - the kind that drives you to play through the night to the break of dawn and leaves you feeling good about it the next day. Its timeless design is easy to learn though robust and sophisticated enough to offer immense depth, limited only perhaps by your cunning. Even its visuals, though not at once striking, are destined to withstand the years. If you long for an intelligent strategy game that offers endless hours of nail-biting tension and terrific warfare, then you cannot go wrong with Warlords III.
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962,Wave Race 64 ,8.6," The graphics are better than what you'll find in 95 percent of games, and the analog stick makes play control a breeze.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/7/2/2214872-box_waverace64.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wave-race-64-review/1900-2545435/,pos,"
Wave Race has both the honor and the unfortunate position of being one of the first N64 games released. While the floodgates have yet to open, one could say a hole has been drilled in the dam and Wave Race is the first thing to trickle out. And if that's the analogy, it's one hell of a water drop. The scenario for Wave Race is fairly simple - jet ski racing through a variety of water courses. The game offers three different modes: time challenge, championship circuit, and stunt mode. Each has its own merits, but the championship circuit is the game's bread and butter. A two-player, split screen mode also makes for fairly good competition, but the smaller play area detracts from the drama. When it comes to graphics, Wave Race shines. The water looks clean, clear, and smooth, and the animation is quite fluid (no pun intended). Players move in a very human fashion, and the physics of the game are realistic (although most of us have nothing to compare them to). And while Wave Race fully showcases the Silicon Graphics technology used in the system, it doesn't overdo it. If anything, the graphics are a practical application of textured polygons. In terms of gameplay, Wave Race makes the best use yet of Nintendo's analog stick. It's exhilarating to feel the water under the jet ski, as it slaloms through beacons on the way to the finish line, with jumps providing truly visceral landings. Most games only dream of the advanced play control of Wave Race. Once players fully explore the nine courses, they'll really come to appreciate their intricacies. Wave Race may not have the long-term challenge that Mario does, but gamers will find themselves itching to play it for some time. This is a very solid game, in many ways the best racing game ever seen on a home system. Wave Race 64 is the first in what is sure to be a series of superior N64 titles. The graphics are better than what you'll find in 95 percent of games, and the analog stick makes play control a breeze. With the release of the N64, gamers everywhere are salivating in anticipation of getting their hands on each succulent title as it hits the shelves. Delays are causing a number of titles to be pushed back, and gamers may be frustrated that so few titles are coming out. To combat that hunger, buy Wave Race - it will satisfy your appetite nicely.
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963,Wild Arms ,8.6, Every fan of RPG games should at least take a peek at this title.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/2/5/2209825-wild_arms.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wild-arms-review/1900-2550197/,pos,"
It's getting pretty hard to make an RPG that really shines in today's market. After over ten years of playing Zelda or Dragon Warrior clones, the average gamer requires something more than the standard wander, kill, wander, solve puzzle, wander game. Final Fantasy VII had its stunning graphics, Dragon Force had its multiple play options, and Suikoden had its monumental cast - that's why they stood out against the backdrop of similar titles, and that's why they were great. Sony's latest US RPG, Wild Arms, takes a different approach. And although none of its component parts could be considered breathtaking, the game does EVERYTHING really well. The result is a fantastically entertaining and well-rounded product well worth the price of admission. Like most Japanese RPGs, Wild Arms features a remarkably complex storyline full of demons, goddesses, and huge, overpowered weaponry. This time around a group called the Metal Demons is looking to destroy the entire planet and it's up to you to stop them. Here's where the game distinguishes itself from the status quo. Instead of merely reading a description of each of the players assigned to your party, you actually play through three separate mini-adventures in order to bring them together. The wanderer, armed with a mystic gun weapon, must save a child from deadly monsters (he also starts all of the trouble); the treasure hunter must free himself from an ancient trap; and the princess must finish her schooling and claim her birthright in order for each of three to find each other and begin their journey together. This method of storytelling proves very effective and really pulls you into the storyline without that trapped-in-a-rail feeling. Perhaps this best thing about Wild Arms is its dedication to using many different types of gameplay. More than just a hack and slash adventure, Wild Arms puts you in several different situations in which you'll run, push and pull rocks, throw switches, and use a swarm of different items. Since all of these options are available to you at all times, the role-playing element never feels constraining. Although it's no Final Fantasy VII, Wild Arms looks great. The standard top-down adventure format is improved by the use of fantastic special effects, 3-D monster battles with a moving camera, and smooth scrolling. Sound is also solid, with a really strange soundtrack that can best be described as techno-synth-country (as I said, it's weird). Wild Arms is not without its problems. Several of the tasks that are put before you are extremely action oriented, which may be frustrating to RPG fans who don't have the quickest of reflexes (no offense folks, I'm just saying…). Still, the game's brilliant storyline, amazingly long play time (well over 50 hours for this reviewer), and multitude of character options make it very easy to overlook the game's weak points. Every fan of RPG games should at least take a peek at this title.
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964,World Cup 98 ,8.6, Die-hard soccer fanatics will find that the added tactical possibilities of World Cup 98 are worth the ticket price.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/2/8/8/2215288-box_wc98.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-cup-98-review/1900-2545525/,pos,"
Just what the heck is going on with World Cup 98? Is it a new game? Is it FIFA 99? Or is it just a rehash of the old version and an attempt to remind everyone, six months after FIFA 98 came out, that EA splurged and bought the license to the actual tournament itself this year? One thing for sure, it has a lot fewer teams on the roster. Thankfully it also has some new tactical elements and in-game management options that add a lot to the game's already awesome gameplay. But is it worth it? Well, that's sort of a personal question. Like FIFA 98, World Cup 98 is chock-full of moves. There's plenty for the novice to learn, including flick-passes, long volleys, and diving headers on goal. For the adept, there's an easy to use passback system, to make the most of those ample corners and get the opposition's defense sweating a little. Football illuminati will find a fistful of special moves that are a cinch to pull off, and after an hour or so, you'll be bicycle-kicking like Pele and performing a bizarre array of MC Hammer-inspired footwork to mesmerize and confuse the opposition. The beauty of both FIFA 98 and World Cup 98 is that, despite the volume of control possibilities, you can still play a pretty competitive game without any of the fancy stuff. Just run, pass, and shoot. And pick up the rest on your own time. World Cup 98 has a wealth of new in-game management and strategic control options. Before the game, you can set up three different custom formations (labeled IGM 1, 2, and 3) that can be switched during play at the touch of a button, er... OK, three buttons. In addition, the new version offers plays you can run, including an offsides trap, to (guess what?) draw the enemy offsides, a through ball run, to set up breakaway passes, and more. These simple plays provide an easy and powerful means to control non-ballcarriers, allowing more advanced players to pick apart the opposition. It's funny how things like a play book are taken for granted with a football title, yet we're so refreshingly surprised when a rudimentary one shows up in a soccer game. All cynicism aside, it's a great addition to gameplay. While there are dozens of new real-time management options out on the pitch, there's really nothing new behind the scenes. Granted, FIFA 98's plethora of management features remain. You can still go berserk and set your team's strategy to its offensive maximum, and set each player's individual attacking bias and aggression level to full, and then watch the rabid zealots swarm around the ball like angry bees (and lose the game with one good enemy through-pass). You can still create a bizarre race of puffy-haired redhead clones, and you can make your front line supersonic at the expense of all ball-carrying skill by tweaking their stats. Versatile, but nothing new. Like its predecessor, World Cup 98 has terrific AI, which means more than just the confidence that when you pass the ball blindly downfield, there'll be someone there to pick it up. The CPU defense is tough on hotdoggers. You won't get past the amateur difficulty setting by just holding down the sprint button and sending your center striker downfield on a solo mission. Thankfully, a smart AI encourages you to find creative ways to move the ball around the field and exploit enemy weaknesses. The default settings for player aggression leave your CPU-controlled teammates a little lackluster, especially on defense. However, with a couple of tweaks in the team management screens, they'll start going for it. You'll also find that the AI takes team ratings very seriously, and switching teams feels like playing a different game entirely. After missing pass after pass with Jamaica, it's refreshing to really kick some ass with Italy. That said, the AI feels essentially the same this time around. Graphically, both the original FIFA 98 and this version are loaded with amazingly lifelike polygonal animations of dozens of moves. There is no denying the realism of the short flick-pass or the sheer joy of sadistically slide-tackling the enemy goalie after he denies you your glory. Red card, shmed card, it's just so darn fun, and it looks so good you won't be able to resist. EA promised that the new version would offer a significantly higher frame rate and smoother screen scrolling, but if anything, World Cup 98 feels choppier than its predecessor. The frame rate seems lower and the anti-aliasing is less smooth on the players. Although, the entire screen seems a little less foggy, and more in focus, so perhaps they've just removed a layer of the N64's patented soft-focus visual trickery. The most noticeable visual improvements seem to have occurred in miscellaneous graphical trivia. The jerseys look better. The various option screens have all been given a face-lift. Plus, post-goal grandstanding (and reciprocal goalie pouting) has been expanded to include a number of new animations. Some of these goalies get pissed. Unfortunately, product placement has gone from cute (Fuji ads on the sidelines) to irritating (the score is now brought to you by Snickers - right on the score panel - every time). Argh. Fantastic commentary and an unlockable set of eight historically brilliant World Cup-winning teams from the past round out the game. Is it worth it? Well, downsizing from nearly 200 teams to only 48 is pretty drastic, but only the die-hard real-life soccer enthusiast would probably even care. Most of us are content to duke it out with Italy or Brazil and probably won't miss Antigua. However, it somehow irks me that the perfectly rendered stadiums are all in France. Yeah, yeah, I know. That's where the World Cup is happening this year - France. Francophile or not, die-hard soccer fanatics will find that the added tactical possibilities of World Cup 98 are worth the ticket price. The rest of us may want to just wait for the next FIFA game.
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965,World Cup 98 ,8.6," On the basis of AI improvements alone, World Cup 98 is highly recommended.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/2/8/8/2215288-box_wc98.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-cup-98-review/1900-2550228/,pos,"
Soccer fans, scratch your heads a little. What is World Cup 98? Has EA Sports given birth to FIFA 99 nine months early? Or perhaps it's simply delivered us to the very end of the Road to the World Cup and created a bizarre FMV-driven game taking place entirely at the awards ceremony, perhaps a who-stole-the-trophy-themed cinematic RPG/mystery. No, World Cup 98 is neither of these things - although developers interested in licensing my concept for the latter can contact me through videogames.com. Basically, EA has stripped down the 400+ teams from FIFA 98, leaving only the 32 that made it, plus an extra eight that it wishes had. EA's also revamped the AI, revised player and team stats for the season, and expanded management - as well as given face-lifts to various option screens, jerseys, and grandstanding animations. Is it worth the price of an entire new game? Well, that's sort of a philosophical question. World Cup 98 has left FIFA 98's awesome controls intact. It's both rich with control options and very easy to pick up. Sound impossible? Well, there is a ton of stuff to learn: slide tackles, flicks, lobs, header passes, header shots, volleys, plus special moves to get you out of trouble and aggressive ones to get you into it. The beauty of both versions of the game is that you can learn all those things gradually. All you need to know how to do to play is just run, pass, and shoot. One of the only real flaws of FIFA 98 was in its all-too-forgiving AI. A corner kick to a star player almost invariably resulted in a header goal. This was true of CPU-controlled teammates as well. Whenever you indiscriminately lobbed the ball downfield, someone from your team was there to grab it. Unless you were really unevenly matched - and thankfully you could be, since the AI was good at incorporating stats into play - you could usually take the ball downfield and deposit it into the enemy goal with a minimum of mess. This time around, things are a lot more interesting. The CPU teams aren't just more aggressive, they're craftier as well, especially on defense. Variety of play is much wider as a result.  Adding to this wider variety of gameplay is World Cup 98's versatile new set of team and individual attitude and strategy settings. These affect play enormously. If you really want to see management in action, set your team's strategy to its offensive maximum, which positions all players closer to the enemy goal. Then set the individual players' attacking bias, which ranges from ""conservative"" to ""attacking"" to ""the max."" Then do the same with the aggression meter, which ranges from ""calm"" to (get this) ""nutter."" Then watch as the whole squad blows its cool and play bogs down completely, with half a dozen zealots swarming around the ball, all trying to be heroes. One enemy lob into your territory and suddenly there's no one there to defend it. It's great.  Graphically, both the original FIFA 98 and the follow-up are loaded with amazingly lifelike polygonal animations of dozens of moves. There is no denying the realism of the short flick pass or the sheer joy of sadistically slide-tackling the enemy goalie after he denies you your glory. Red card, shmed card, it's just so darn fun, and it looks so good you won't be able to resist. EA promised that the new version would offer a significantly higher frame rate and smoother screen scrolling, but there's really no significant improvement to either. The most noticeable visual improvements seem to have occurred in miscellaneous graphical trivia. The jerseys look better. Squad customization is now diagram-driven rather than menu-driven. Plus, post-goal grandstanding (and reciprocal goalie pouting) has been expanded to include a number of new animations. Some of these goalies get pissed. Unfortunately, product placement has gone from cute (Fuji ads on the sidelines) to irritating (the score is now brought to you by Snickers - right on the score panel - every time). Argh.  On the basis of AI improvements alone, World Cup 98 is highly recommended. There are so many more ways to play the game, from a tactical standpoint, now that the CPU is really going for it, ranging from finesse-style play for the passback-friendly, to straight-up bruiser techniques that will leave you with a very small squad by the end of the game. Unfortunately, it does lack FIFA 98's capacity to take one team through multiple round-robins on route to the World Cup, not to mention the charm of taking on the mighty French with righteous underdog teams like Antigua and Kazakhstan. Given the choice between the two, however, go with World Cup 98.
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966,WWF War Zone ,8.6," While WWF War Zone plays similarly to its predecessors, it presents a package that is completely unmatched in both gameplay and in atmosphere.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/4/2/2218242-box_wwfwz.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwf-war-zone-review/1900-2546112/,pos,"
Professional wrestling is huge. People who cut their teeth on the Rock and Wrestling era of the WWF are returning in droves, and the industry is doing better than it ever has before. Games based on wrestling have progressed through the years, and while WWF War Zone plays similarly to its predecessors, it presents a package that is completely unmatched in both gameplay and in atmosphere. Most of the WWF's biggest stars are represented, including Steve Austin, the Undertaker, Kane, Mankind, the Rock, Triple H, and Ken Shamrock. Since the beginning of the game's development, Bret Hart, Ahmed Johnson, and the British Bulldog have left the WWF, but they remain in the game. A few hidden wrestlers are also in the game, most notably Mankind's other personalities, Dude Love and Cactus Jack. There are several different modes in War Zone. The challenge mode is the game's main mode, putting your wrestler in a quest to win the championship belt. Along the way you'll be challenged to grudge matches by the wrestlers you've wronged during your career. These grudge matches come in the form of the game's two other modes. Weapons matches are falls-anywhere, no-rules kinds of matches, where smacking your opponent with a two-by-four and suplexing him onto a table are the order of the day. The cage match forces you to beat your opponent, then climb out of the cage while he's too dazed to do anything about it. Once you've won the belt in challenge mode, the game continues with you defending the belt against various challengers. There is also a really good tag-team mode that contains most of the four-man action from the real thing. Multiplayer modes include a free-for-all, cooperative cage matches, and tornado mode. There is also a comprehensive training mode, but it isn't as useful as the manual would have you believe. War Zone plays, essentially, like every other wrestling game out there. But the control has been refined to a point of perfection, and a complicated tie-up system keeps people from doing cheap, low-damage moves over and over again. The game controls very tightly, and while you will do some button mashing to break holds and pins, it is kept to a minimum. The graphics in War Zone are better than any other PlayStation wrestling game. Some of the characters (the Undertaker, for instance) look eerily like their real-life counterparts, although a few of the faces look a little weird. The sound effects are really good - all the grunts and screams were recorded by the real wrestlers. Also, all of the entrance music is in the game, although you only get to hear a few seconds of it during the game's lackluster ring introduction sequence. You can, however, head to the biography section if you feel the need to hear any of the music in its entirety. The two-man announce team of Vince McMahon and Jim Ross is good, but it sometimes gets a little bit behind the action. Also, there are only a couple of different sayings for the signature moves, meaning that you'll be hearing Jim Ross shout ""Stone Cold Stunner! Stone Cold Stunner!"" quite a lot during the course of the game. WWF War Zone is long on gameplay and has a lot of atmosphere. However, it really could have used a little more atmosphere. The ring introductions are extremely short, and the cutscenes in challenge mode (all of which feature a really bad-looking polygonal woman and a limousine) are just plain stupid. The grudge match challenge clips are decent, but their lack of specific taunts makes them seem a little flat. Still, this is best wrestling package ever released and shouldn't be missed by anyone with even a passing interest in wrestling.
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967,Tech Romancer ,8.6," A game that carries the level of polish, playability, and fun that Tech Romancer does deserves to see a handful of sequels, each building on the mythos established here.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/1/9/2212619-front_cover.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tech-romancer-review/1900-2540707/,pos,"
A few years back, Capcom circumvented convention, or at least the company's own convention, and released a little niche game in the arcades called Cyberbots. Cyberbots was a game that went largely unheralded outside of Japan and, for one reason or another, it was only released for the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation in its native country. More recently, Capcom circumvented convention again and released a little niche game in the Japanese arcades called Kikaioh: Tech Romancer. Built on the PlayStation-based System 12 board, it is Capcom's second major attempt at bringing a giant-robot-fighting game to the masses. This time, however, it's in 3D, and the cast is entirely new.  Much more of a port to the high-powered Dreamcast than Capcom's other 3D fighter, Star Gladiator 2, ever was, Tech Romancer is a combination of great graphics and solid fighting fun. If you've ever gotten a kick out of watching giant-monster films, or you have had the fortune to see any number of Japanese children's shows (for example, Ultraman, Go Go Ranger, Kikiader, Mazinger Z, etc.), then you'll most likely dig Tech Romancer. While all the robots are Capcom ""originals,"" they obviously borrow from some of the most famous giant robots Japan ever offered. Evangelion, Gundam, the aforementioned Mazinger Z, Macross, and even Giant Robo have a neo-representative in attendance. If you have a favorite brand of ""real-life"" robot, chances are you'll find something to like here. Initially available are nine robots, with Kikaioh being the lead robot and others like Diana 17, Bolon, Twinzen V, and Wise Duck being some of the other bots. Of course, your first job is to pick one, but depending on which robot you pick, you may also have to select a pilot, who will determine special attacks and configurations. Once past the initial obligations, you'll discover a fighting game that feels like a traditional Capcom fighter but also plays like a 3D game. The main controls offer a block button, a jump button, and two attack buttons. Although this seems rather sparse at first, you'll soon discover the variations that make this one of the most enjoyable fighters in the last few years.  Unlike Capcom's usual six-button layout, Tech Romancer uses all four Dreamcast buttons, as well as the shoulder triggers. You have a jump and a block button, as well as two attack buttons. The left and right shoulder buttons control, respectively, supermove selection and a side-step/attack move. The backgrounds are 3D, and they feature 3D polygonal buildings, which crumble under heavy fire. Power-ups can be found inside said structures, and when you pick them up (by simply walking over them), you can choose which enhancement to use by pulling the left trigger. Among the items you can pick up are repair boxes, offense up, defense up, hero mode, and power-ups that enable character-specific moves. The Y button performs most of your hand-to-hand moves, while the B button usually results in a long-distance attack, although some robots will launch an additional close-range attack. Various combinations of these buttons (for example, both attack buttons, block plus both attack buttons, both attack buttons plus jump, and others) will launch superdestructive supermoves that fill the screen with all sorts of special effects. Tech Romancer may be the first 3D fighter to have as many over-the-top superattacks as it does normal moves. While the full list of attacks and superattacks is both impressive and large enough to keep even the nimblest FAQ writer busy for weeks, it's the final attacks that offer the wildest visuals. After you've drained an opponent of half his damage bar, you can execute a final attack - a move that, if successfully executed, will end the round in no uncertain terms. The downside is that the move is completely blockable or cancelable, and it must be timed right lest you leave yourself open to a counterattack. This can be useful for a comeback if you are close to dying, but you have managed to reduce your opponent's health enough to try a final attack.Bolon, the hodgepodge ball-shaped robot whose child-pilot is prone to bratty temper tantrums, can serve as a good example to describe a final attack. When you trigger her final attack, a large red curtain falls down and Pollin basically brings her opponent to a tea party. The antagonist always manages to insult Bolon/Pollin, who subsequently blows up the house of cards around them. Likewise, another of her lesser attacks shows Bolon throwing a minitrain and train track down to the ground. These items get underfoot and cause significant damage to the enemy. The attacks are wild and varied, and don't be surprised if your robot transforms, Veritech-fighter style. Other strategic moves - such as the power-break, which exposes turtlers to further attacks, and the steel-dash, which will also open up an opponent to a beating - are necessary to your survival. All of the robot designs are impressive, and they are considerably more memorable than Star Gladiator 2's palette swaps While playing Tech Romancer, you have two main options aside from the versus mode. Hero-challenge mode is a no-frills arcade mode that runs you through the gauntlet of robots, plus three bosses. The meat of the game is found in the story mode, which adds between-fight cinemas, multicharacter conversations, and even small animations. Each character also has his or her own individualized motif, designed to mirror different television shows. The character and robot you choose will determine which robots you encounter and, occasionally, which paths you choose between stages. Beating the game will also reward you in other ways, specifically in unlocking various hidden items. The graphics, originally modeled on the System 12 board, have been significantly improved. While not quite at the same level of Soul Calibur, they're certainly pumped up higher than the graphics in Star Gladiator 2. You'd be hard-pressed to find a glitch or a moment of polygon seaming anywhere, even during dramatic close-ups or screen-filling superattacks. While most people won't have seen the original arcade version of Tech Romancer, it's no overstatement to say that these stellar robot designs benefit from the move to the Dreamcast hardware. Other sundry effects also give Tech Romancer that extra level of detail that separates the good from the great. Great lighting effects are present, as are subtle 3D elements such as a starfleet hovering close by in one stage. Craters are also left behind when grenades and rockets scorch the earth. Sadly, the backdrops are little more than flat 2D bitmaps, which aren't as detailed or high in resolution as they could have been, thus lending a dioramic feel to the game.  The sounds in Tech Romancer are all crystal clear and full of punch, ranging from explosions to laser cannons to robot hydraulics to the voice actors' quotes. Likewise, swords clashing, rocket-fists firing, and buildings crumbling all get the appropriate audio treatment. The music is classic Capcom, and if that's your thing, then you'll definitely enjoy the epic, yet cheesy, melodramatic Japanese action-show-style themes presented here. Unlike some of Capcom's recent Dreamcast releases, Tech Romancer contains more replay value than Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Street Fighter III, and Star Gladiator 2 combined. While those games are not much more than direct arcade ports, with a couple token extras contained therein, Kikaioh: TR has an entire library, called the Techno Dome, which is filled with bonuses like CG movies, downloadable VMU games (which, when played, accumulates points to unlock further Techno Dome options), secret characters (including Jin/Blodia II from Cyberbots), character artwork, and more. To unlock the first few options in the Techno Dome, you must play through with all the characters in the story mode, but considering the thrill of scrapping with giant robots, this is a welcome chore. If you didn't like Power Stone, Capcom's first major 3D Dreamcast game, then this might suit your needs.  Sadly, like all cheap-ass bosses in Capcom fighting games, Tech Romancer's are no different. Similar in style to Valgas from Power Stone, Tech Romancer's final boss takes on two forms - each with two  full-damage bars, while you only have one set. You meet your last boss in what is essentially a survival mode for four rounds, requiring you to use all your skills to beat him, while keeping your own damage to a minimum. Perhaps the only downside to any of Capcom's formidable fighting games, the company has not yet created a boss that is just a challenging yet fair fight. Instead of meeting a relatively balanced character like Akuma at the end of a game, Capcom usually throws a Magneto, Gill, or Apocalypse at you. Unfortunately, this trend will probably continue for some time.  Although fundamentally similar to traditional 2D Capcom fighting games, Tech Romancer expands on the over-the-top gameplay style of Rival Schools. This time, however, Capcom has enlisted the aid of a giant fleet of robots to do the scrapping, and it works out great. While these guys aren't as nimble as the Street Fighter cast, Kikaioh injects a lot more fun into the gameplay than games like Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram. While that game is good fun in its own right, the all-consuming atmosphere Tech Romancer provides more than makes up any of its shortcomings. Hopefully, Capcom won't let this one slip away into a one-shot, as it did with Cyberbots. A game that carries the level of polish, playability, and fun that Tech Romancer does deserves to see a handful of sequels, each building on the mythos established here. 
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968,Burning Skies ,4.4, The one thing that seems to be seriously missing from Burning Skies is good gameplay.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/0/8/59208-927307_66107.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/burning-skies-review/1900-6122189/,neg,"
  Burning Skies puts you in control of a fighter plane in a straightforward, top-down-scrolling shooter. While all the basic elements for a shooter are present in Burning Skies, they're not put together in such a way that makes the game fun to play. You navigate through hazardous environments, dodging enemy fire and taking down enemy planes and hot-air balloons. But Burning Skies doesn't even let you shoot your main weapon, and it has tedious pacing. The one thing that seems to be seriously missing from Burning Skies is good gameplay.   Don't bother with this flawed top-down shooter.   There's a story, although it has little bearing on the game itself. Your job as the Goldhawk, one of the best fighter planes of the fictional nation of Slovostrania, is to defend your country against an enemy territory. This means that both airplanes and ground troops are up for grabs and that you don't have to feel bad taking down buildings instead of dodging them. Being able to destroy anything without a care is a luxury, one that is nullified by the fact that your free-fire isn't really free at all. One of the great weaknesses of the game is that you do not control the main weapons in any way. This wouldn't be quite as bad if they were constantly on, but they turn on only when enemy pilots are on the screen. This means that you can't shoot preemptively or use the main guns for anything other than opposing airplanes. While having the ability to use the guns at any point isn't necessary, this lack of interactivity makes the game instantly less engaging.    You can control only your secondary fire, which consists of bombs that drop from your plane down to the ground. They can land on tanks and buildings (some of which you would otherwise crash into), but you're often better off dodging enemy fire than trying to position yourself to drop a bomb on the tank creating it. Enemy fire comes in the form of red and blue pellets, which spread out across the screen from enemy vehicles. For the majority of the game, you must use the directional keys to maneuver around these bullets, since you can't otherwise destroy them or thwart them. While this is the most compelling aspect of the gameplay, the bullets don't always seem to come at you in a patterned fashion, and sometimes there's no choice but for you to get hit by them. This is ultimately OK, though, because it takes many bullets to lose one of the few lives that you start off with. Dying brings you back to the start of each level, but you'll find the levels short and easy enough that you can make it through the game without any trouble. Hard mode is a little more difficult, but compared to some truly challenging shooters that have existed over the years, Burning Skies is relatively easy.    The game's sound is truly horrible on the Nokia N-Gage QD we used for testing. Sound effects play intermittently, such as when a plane is blown up or when the level ends, and they're so obvious and grating that they detract more from the experience than if there had been no sound effects at all. The graphics fare a bit better. The vehicles are all well rendered, and the pickups that enhance your defenses and weapons are both obvious and descriptive. Likewise, enemy fire is easy to see, except when it's intentionally supposed to be deceptive (such as when it passes through clouds).    One of the stranger aspects of Burning Skies is the pause function. Typically one press of the left softkey will pause a game, and another press will resume it. In Burning Skies, pressing pause brings you to a pause screen from which you can select the word ""pause,"" which returns you to a paused version of the gameplay. You must press the key two more times to select the word ""resume"" and return to the game screen. So it takes four button presses to pause the game and return to it, which is just plain odd. This is not a big deal by any means but is merely reflective of how Burning Skies isn't supplied with gameplay elements that seem standard by now.    Despite having all of the fundamentals for a shooter, Burning Skies manages to miss its target. There's simply no reason to opt to play this game over most any of the other shooters in the mobile genre.    
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969,Spider-Man 2 3D: New York Subway ,4.4," Even if you're a passionate fan of the film or comic, you still won't enjoy this joyless hodgepodge of minigames. At $10, NY Subway is a horrible value, as well ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/3/7/0/23943-67370.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/spider-man-2-3d-new-york-subway-review/1900-6122818/,neg,"
  After delivering a poor game with Spider-Man 2 3D: New York Rooftops, Sony decided to release a follow-up to capitalize on that nonexistent momentum. Spider-Man 2 3D: NY Subway is like its predecessor in every way, only it takes place on an outdoor railroad. Even if you're a passionate fan of the film or comic, you still won't enjoy this joyless hodgepodge of minigames. Purchasing the LG VX 8000 version of NY Subway for $10 is a horrible value, especially since it's such a poor game.   It might look like action, but this is really more of a rhythm game.   NY Subway consists of five minigames, each of which must be beaten three times to advance to the next. These are loosely based on the scene in the Spider-Man 2 film in which Spidey must chase Doc Ock on a moving train. At no point do NY Subway's rhythm-based games make you feel like Spider-Man. The only combat sequence consists of the pressing of random buttons in time with their onscreen representations.    It's as yet unknown whether the joy of webslinging could be conveyed through a mobile phone's keypad. Spider-Man 2: NY Subway's simple timing games can't represent the medium's pinnacle, however. Pressing the up and down keys alternately to dodge thrown beams feels like a chore. Testing a player's reflexes is one thing, but Spidey's got more powers than just a spider sense.     Graphically, this game looks a bit better than its predecessor. The 3D models have undergone some work, and they more closely resemble the characters they are meant to represent. These models are set, though, in supremely unimpressive environments without much detail. For example: you're on a moving train, but you could be anywhere in the world, because there's no background at all--just a bright, white overlay, indicating outdoor ambient light. The sound isn't particularly worth enabling, and it certainly isn't what you'd hope for from the purportedly multimedia-rich V Cast service.    Playing Spider-Man 2: New York Subway is a poor use of your time. Its gameplay is identical to that of its predecessor, and it isn't any more compelling a second time around. The graphics are supposed to be the main draw here, but they're not nearly impressive enough to warrant V Cast's $10 price tag. NY Subway can be completed in about half an hour, and there's no reason you'd want to play for longer, save to justify your unwise purchase.    
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970,Hard Truck: Apocalypse ,4.4," Hard Truck: Apocalypse takes an interesting premise and strips away all but the most mundane elements, leaving you to drive down a long and unexciting road to nowhere.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/8/0/2220580-hard_truck_apocalypse.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hard-truck-apocalypse-review/1900-6153535/,neg,"
  Hard Truck: Apocalypse proves that a fantastic name can only take a game so far, and without compelling content a game just isn't worth playing. It's an appealing concept: a role-playing game set in a postapocalyptic future where you have to drive heavily armored (and armed) trucks across a vast wasteland, delivering supplies, scavenging loot, and blasting gangs of bandits off the road. In execution though, Hard Truck: Apocalypse is about as exciting as counting the grains of sand in a postapocalyptic desert.    For a postapocalyptic wasteland this place sure has a lot of trees.   The game opens with a brief explanation of a cataclysmic event that led to the poisoning of the air, which killed off most of the planet's inhabitants. The prologue is by far the most interesting part of the story in the entire game, and it quickly degrades after the opening cinematic. You play the game as a young driver who just celebrated a birthday and is now officially a man. As such, you get a pep talk from your father, the keys to the family delivery truck, and your first mission to deliver some supplies to a nearby town. You head on down the road to get accustomed to life behind the wheel, and after a few scrapes with some local outlaws and some chance encounters with some mysterious characters, the adventure begins.    The gameplay in Hard Truck consists of driving from town to town across a large map and talking to people to accept missions and to get paid. The missions are mostly simplistic delivery tasks, escort missions, or extermination runs. Sometimes you'll have to deliver supplies to a distant town, blow up as many enemies as possible, or just travel from one town to the next and talk to the right person. There are a few mysteries to investigate and solve, but the majority of the missions are exceedingly dull.     There is no experience system in the game, so instead of leveling up your character, you simply get money that you can use to buy new and better parts for your truck. You can purchase new guns, new cargo boxes capable of holding more loot, more heavily armored cabs, or entirely new trucks. However, the upgrade system feels limited because there are only five different truck types, and they're all fairly similar save for slightly different stats for speed, armor, and fuel capacity. Most of the items are expensive too, so you'll have to complete dozens of dull missions before you can pick up that machine gun you've had your eye on.     You start off with a basic truck that isn't especially intimidating, but is certainly capable of getting from one point to another and blowing up a few enemies here and there. As you explore the vast, empty world you'll run into small packs of outlaws who will drive up to you and start shooting. The battles consist of driving around in circles using the WASD keys, and aiming your turret weapon with the mouse. Since the camera follows the turret, you'll just have to hope that you aren't driving off a cliff or into a tree as you're shooting your enemies. Of course, you can just stop and shoot, but you'll make yourself an easy target, and you'll miss out on all of the underwhelming action of vehicular combat.     Some of the enemies in the game are pretty tough, but only in the sense that they can take a lot of damage. The poison has apparently corroded the intelligence of people in this world, because you'll often see enemies run into trees and get stuck because they apparently don't know how to back up. Other times you'll get to see enemies drive right off of cliffs. It's not just the enemies that are stupid, as the allies are extremely dim as well. In some missions you'll have to escort allies from one town to another, and you can watch them drive right through fences, into trees, or just stop and wait while enemies open fire on them.     When you kill your enemies they'll usually drop some cargo, which you can pick up and use, or sell for more money. The money is important not only because it's required to upgrade your truck, but also because you'll often need to fork out a lot of cash for repairs and fuel for your rig. Fortunately there are enough gas stations and towns throughout the world that fuel and repairs are easy to come by, as long as you have enough money.     The world of Hard Truck: Apocalypse is actually fairly nice for being a supposed wasteland and all. There are green fields, smatterings of trees, large rivers, and quaint little farms. There are some areas that do look more appropriately barren, such as vacant, crumbling cities that you can check out. For the most part, though, the world is just a huge empty space that doesn't do much to encourage exploration. It doesn't help that your truck moves slowly, and with natural barriers like mountains and rivers to impede your progress, you'll often have to take lengthy detours to get where you want to go. Most of the towns look the same, and you don't even get to actually explore them because while you're in a town all of your interactions take place on menu screens.    With its simplistic mission design this game would be better named, Delivery Boy: Apocalypse.   The sound in Hard Truck is acceptable except for the voice acting. The conversations all sound awkward and unnatural, and there's not a single bit of enthusiasm or emotional inflection in any of the spoken dialogue. Even worse are the inane phrases that your driver will utter when enemies approach, like such catchy one-liners as, ""The roof is on fire!"" The music is actually decent, although it's still not good enough to make the experience of crawling across the country in a beat-up truck any more interesting.    Hard Truck: Apocalypse is a lifeless and boring game that lacks any sort of depth or excitement. If you're expecting an action-packed, Road Warrior-esque romp through a lawless desert wasteland, you won't find it here. Instead, you'll find yourself taking a trip down a long road that will have you asleep at the wheel.  
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971,Mage Knight Apocalypse ,4.4, Mage Knight Apocalypse is a sloppy attempt to adapt the collectible tabletop miniatures game to a dungeon-crawler format.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/9/7/4/24257-67974.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mage-knight-apocalypse-review/1900-6159842/,neg,"
  Mage Knight Apocalypse is a hack-and-slash action role-playing game set in the fantasy world of the Mage Knight collectible miniatures game from WizKids games. You don't have to be familiar with the tabletop game to understand Mage Knight Apocalypse, though. It's a very basic dungeon crawler with all of the essentials you've come to expect from games like Diablo and Dungeon Siege: multiple character classes, a variety of ugly monsters to kill, dungeons to clear, and lots and lots of loot to collect. There are some interesting design concepts in this game, but unfortunately the execution wavers between aggravatingly sloppy and painfully bland.   There are five characters to choose from, but it would be nice to have the option to create your own hero.   The story in Mage Knight Apocalypse is taken straight from the tabletop game. It takes place in a world known as The Land, where fantasy races like dwarves, elves, vampires, dragons, and orcs are locked in constant war. A group of powerful spirit masters known as the Solonavi have kept an eye on things, and they are convinced that if they don't eliminate the evil force that is driving the inhabitants of The Land to war, the world will come to an end. So the Solonavi call a group of five heroes to form a fellowship known as the Oathsworn, whose job it is to find and destroy the source of the evil before the world is destroyed. It's a workable setup for a game, but the story just never gets off the ground. The characters are uninteresting and lifeless, and the story is so riddled with clichés that it feels completely generic. It doesn't help that the dialogue is all stilted and awkward, and the voices for the characters are completely devoid of emotion and personality. All of this makes it very difficult to get wrapped up in the story. Of course, this is an action-focused game, so a dull story can be forgivable if the gameplay is compelling enough to stand on its own.     When you begin the game you're given a choice of five heroes to play as, and each has three separate skill paths to follow. Eventually you'll have a party of all five heroes, although you'll only ever actually control the hero that you choose at the beginning of the game. The Nightblade can be an assassin, a necromancer, or a vampire. The Draconum is a mage who can specialize in earth, fire, or wind magic. The Elf is a paladin who can become a strong fighter, a healer, or a ranged attacker who uses a combination of lightning and arrows. The Amazon huntress has three fighting styles modeled after various animals. The bear style gives her strength as a melee fighter, the eagle style allows for effective ranged attacks, and the jaguar style allows the huntress to avoid attacks and inflict damage with well-timed counters. Finally, the dwarf marksman can be a tough melee fighter, a gunner, or an expert with explosives. Aside from choosing which skills to use, there's very little character customization in this game. You can choose a hair color or style, and one of half a dozen faces, but that's it. It feels limited since you have to work within a few dull character templates, and most of the heroes seem exactly like the ones you've seen in countless other role-playing games.     It's not quite as simple as choosing a character and then picking a skill set. Rather, your character develops depending on how you use him or her. You can create a hybrid character if you want to pick and choose skills from each of the various paths, but if you do that it will take much longer to unlock the higher-level skills of each type. That's because instead of developing your character, you're essentially developing his or her skills. There are no experience points in Mage Knight Apocalypse, and there are no levels. Instead, your individual skills and attributes gain experience and increase in level as you use them. If you constantly use your melee attack it will increase in level and become more powerful. At the same time, your strength will increase from all that attacking, and that will further increase the power of your blows. As you level up your skills you'll unlock new skills, so if you're playing as a mage and you primarily use a fire attack, you'll eventually gain access to stronger fire spells. This leveling system is an interesting departure from the usual experience-point grind that many role-playing games fall into, and it's about the only thing that Mage Knight Apocalypse does well. Even then, it's nothing drastically different--it just requires you to be slightly more aware of your actions rather than just bludgeoning your way through mobs of enemies to earn experience points.     The game takes you through six chapters. In each chapter you'll work your way from the beginning of a dungeon to the end, killing hundreds of monsters along the way. The dungeons are all very linear, and it's easy to find your way through. The same can't be said for your computer-controlled allies, though. In each chapter you'll get a new hero to join your party, and you can issue basic commands like follow and attack. However, the artificial intelligence is so terrible that you'll hardly ever see your fellow heroes. More often than not they'll get stuck behind a wall or won't be able to figure out how to turn a corner to follow you, so they'll just stand there leaving you to deal with half a dozen or more monsters at a time.   Your companions will usually stand around admiring the scenery rather than helping you fight the overwhelming mobs of nasty monsters.   Because of your unhelpful companions as well as the high volume of enemies in the game, you'll die a lot. When you die you simply resurrect at the nearest save point. Since the save points are all over the place, you'll usually only have to take a few steps to pick up the fight right where you left off. You'll quickly fall into a very repetitive and annoying cycle of death where you resurrect, fight, and die over and over again. You'll slowly pick away at the mob of monsters until finally they're all dead, then you can move on to do it all again. It removes any sort of challenge or sense of attrition from the game, since the only penalty for dying is coming back to life a few steps away with half of your mana and life back. When you have a sliver of health left why bother wasting a potion or a healing spell when you can just die and regain half your life? Not only does it make absolutely no sense, it just isn't fun.      Your reward for dying a dozen times to kill off that mob of a dozen monsters is, of course, loot. Monsters will drop everything from rings and armor to magic stones and potions. You can collect it all and sell it, or equip it to make your character stronger. The problem is that there's a ton of loot in the game, and not much space in your inventory. Later in the game you'll end up throwing away the majority of what you collect, which makes collecting treasure more tedious than it is rewarding. It's also frustrating because the interface is poorly designed, so you'll have to open separate menus for your character and your inventory if you want to equip anything.     There's also a crafting system in the game, so you can forge weapons with magical stones, or use recipes and herbs to create potions. It's a fine idea, but the implementation is poor. There are tons of herbs all over the place, and there's just no room to store them in your inventory, so it's easier to buy the potions from a vendor or just die and resurrect instead. Again, the interface for these crafting systems is less than ideal. You have to open up a menu for each one, and then open up your inventory menu and drag the items you want to use to the proper slots. The whole process is more trouble than it's worth.    Likewise, the multiplayer in Mage Knight Apocalypse is a pain. You can play the game with up to four other players online. You can choose to play through the entire campaign cooperatively from start to finish, or you can choose your favorite chapter and just play it over and over again. You can chat with the other players or trade items with them, but that's about the extent of it. That is, if you can even make it that far. When trying to play online you'll often get messages saying that the game is unable to connect to the server, even after you've tried a dozen different servers. Once you do manage to connect to a server it usually won't last long, and you'll be disconnected and tossed back out to the server browser in the middle of your game. There also aren't very many people playing online, so unless you have friends you know you can get a game on with, you might as well forget multiplayer even exists in this game.     The presentation in Mage Knight Apocalypse is appealing at times, but for the most part it just feels sloppy. The characters and monsters look fairly detailed, and there are some nice touches in the world of The Land. The different areas all look distinct, from the crumbling temples of the overgrown jungle to the fire and machinery of the underground dwarf stronghold. That's where the appeal ends, though. One of the most endlessly annoying features of the game is the free camera. You can rotate the camera around your character by holding the mouse wheel or space bar and moving the mouse. It sounds simple enough, but it's extremely awkward to reposition the camera while moving. Also, the way the levels are designed you'll constantly need to adjust the camera to see where you're going or who you're attacking. If you leave the camera alone you'll either be running around blind or the camera will get stuck on something and just twitch randomly for a while.     There are also graphical glitches that make the game look much worse than it should. Characters clip through one another and through walls and objects in the environment, and there are some minor graphical bugs that frequently appear. On several occasions one of our companions died, and then remained a corpse even after being revived. The clipping isn't just ugly, it affects the gameplay as well. Enemy archers will shoot you through walls, pillars, and stone, and if you try to retaliate you'll get a message that your attack failed because you didn't have a line of sight.   You can collect all kinds of herbs to make into potions, as long as you have room in your backpack.   The audio isn't any better than the visuals. As mentioned, the voice acting is terrible. The sound effects are annoying as well, with the same few grunts, squeals, and screams coming from the characters and enemies. There's no music whatsoever for the majority of the game. Occasionally some bland orchestrated tunes will pick up for a few seconds during story sequences and such, but that's it.     Mage Knight Apocalypse is a poorly executed take on a tried-and-true formula. The game has everything you'd expect from an action RPG, but none of it is handled well. The multiplayer is a hassle, the single-player is riddled with bugs and frustrating design flaws, and the presentation is sloppy. If you can somehow overlook all of these flaws, you could spend a lot of time going through all six chapters of the game with each of the five characters. But when you consider how many similar games of better quality are already available, you're left with very little reason to play this one.  
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972,Sonic the Hedgehog ,4.4," Sonic the Hedgehog may share its name with the Genesis original, but this game is even more broken than most of the other recent Sonic games have been.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/8/4/2/25204-70842.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sonic-the-hedgehog-review/1900-6162205/,neg,"
  In what might be seen as a move to reset and reinvent the series, the latest game to feature Sonic the Hedgehog is merely called Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega's blue critter has been around since the 16-bit days, when his side-scrolling platformers were strong enough to take on Mario, the then-undisputed kingpin of the platforming genre. Sonic's fall from grace has been slow, starting with a promising first stab at 3D with Sonic Adventure, but it's all been downhill since those far-gone days, and games like this new Sonic the Hedgehog are the culprit. With plenty of bad glitches, poor controls, and totally lame gameplay on all fronts, this one's not going to restore any part of the Hedgehog's name to glory.   Sonic and the crew are back with a lackluster adventure that isn't worth your time or money.   While Sonic's name is on the box, you'll actually spend most of your time playing as other characters. The game is broken up into three different stories: one starring Sonic, one starring Shadow, and one starring a new hedgehog called Silver. Each of the stories play differently because of the way each hedgehog controls. Sonic is meant to be the fast-moving one, and he mainly attacks via a homing jump attack that makes most basic fights as simple as timing presses of the A button to bounce from foe to foe. Silver has telekinesis powers that let him pick up large objects and use his mind to fling them at enemies. He's not as fast as Sonic, but he has the ability to float in the air for brief periods of time, letting him cross larger gaps. Shadow the Hedgehog gets his own version of the homing attack, but the big difference is that he can drive around in different armed vehicles. Further watering the game down is a heavy supporting cast, so even when you pick the Sonic episode, you'll still occasionally play as Tails and Knuckles. Other Sonic collaborators, like Amy, Blaze, Rouge, and E-123 Omega also put in guest appearances. While the character variety might initially seem like a good idea, most of them aren't too interesting. Tails moves almost painfully slowly, and his fake ring bombs aren't any fun to use, so when Sonic levels occasionally switch over to him, it's immediately boring. In addition to the single-player levels, you can play the game in a two-player, split-screen tag mode that attempts to force players to cooperate as you progress through the story. In addition, you can go back and play levels you've completed in a battle mode.    While you play as many different characters throughout the main game, the same structure applies across the board. The game's action stages are separated by town portions, where you'll be able to take on dopey side missions to help out the locals or figure out puzzles to proceed. Each of these side missions are bookended by two sets of loading screens, where it first loads up the exact same scene, just with different text dialogue, then it loads up the actual mission. After that, it has to load up some ending text and then load up the out-of-mission version of that part of town. Each load time is fairly long, and when they stack up in this way, it almost makes the game feel broken.    But since the frequent and lengthy load times don't quite do it, it's up to the action stages to make the game actually feel broken. The camera is the most immediate problem, as it doesn't bother to give you a good view of the action on its own, and your control over it is inverted, with no option to change it. In some cases, the game changes angles at the worst possible time and the controls don't automatically compensate for the new angle. In one Sonic level, you're snowboarding down a mountain and must stay pointed in the right direction. When the camera flips around to give you a new view of the action, you immediately grind to a halt, because you're no longer pushing in the proper direction. This makes some sequences of the game a frustrating exercise in trial and error while you attempt to compensate for this mess. This is but one of several cases where the camera causes often-severe gameplay problems, and it gets frustrating to the point of being nearly unplayable. Since none of the hedgehogs can swim and there's plenty of water and endless, life-ending cliffs nearby, jumping or trying to do a homing attack when you're near a ledge is often scary, since you're rarely able to get a good look at the world around you. Death can also be a bit scary, because you have a limited number of lives and you're kicked all the way out to the main menu when you run out. The game doesn't save automatically, and you can't save in the middle of a mission, so special care must be taken to save immediately before you enter a new area, just to make sure you aren't later forced to repeat lengthy sections of the game.   Sonic fans will be disappointed by the game's constant glitches and awful camera.   Graphically, Sonic the Hedgehog is a glitchy mess that usually looks extremely bland. The town that Sonic spends most of his time saving looks like someone dug up some old Dreamcast-era artwork, brushed it up a little bit, and released it onto current consoles. While his animation for running and jumping usually looks OK, there are plenty of awkward moments, too, like spots in the level that cause the camera to freak out or the way Sonic occasionally launches from platform to platform with his head pointed directly at the ground. There are some better-looking levels in the game, though, and Silver's first level at least starts off with a bang, complete with a nice-looking devastated future city and a big fiery boss fight. Unfortunately, the very next level drops the psychic hedgehog into a nondescript forest setting that doesn't look any better than Sonic's ugly town, and it goes on from there. The characters are voiced in cutscenes with plenty of bad anime enthusiasm, but it's neither good enough to work on its own or bad enough to be funny. The rest of the game's dialogue is delivered through text. The music varies from fast-moving action themes to random ska-influenced tunes. It's passable, but aside from the main screen's title theme, none of it really stands out at all.    Only the most blindly reverent Sonic the Hedgehog fan could possibly squeeze any enjoyment out of Sega's latest adventure. This platformer is a mess from top to bottom, and any of the occasional moments that don't feel somehow broken only serve to make the game's other flaws appear that much bigger.  
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973,Superman Returns: The Videogame ,4.4," After the thrill of flying around Metropolis wears off, Superman Returns is nothing more than a below-average, repetitive movie tie-in.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/0/9/2214409-box_smr.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/superman-returns-the-videogame-review/1900-6162293/,neg,"
  Superman's great at saving the world, but he sure hasn't had much success when it comes to video games. The disastrous Superman 64 was no doubt the low point in the Man of Steel's video game history, but even his highs haven't been all that high. Superman Returns: The Videogame was originally slated to release alongside the movie in June (which had its own tumultuous production saga), but it wasn't ready in time and the release date was pushed back to coincide with the DVD of the movie going on sale. Despite the delay, the game still doesn't seem to be ready, but that hasn't stopped it from being released. It's certainly not as bad as Superman 64, but it's still plenty bad. Superman Returns does do a few things well, and it does manage to be entertaining for the first hour or so, but it's all downhill from there.     Poor Superman--nobody understands him.   For a game that's supposed to be a movie tie-in, Superman Returns sure doesn't have a whole lot in common with the film. After fighting off a rogue meteor shower and learning how to use his super abilities, Superman zooms off to outer space to find that his home planet has indeed been destroyed. On the way home he runs across Mongrul, does a bit of fighting, and then it's back to Earth. Here he'll battle Metallo, Bizarro, and, eventually, someone who was actually in the film, Lex Luthor. People who saw the movie and those who didn't will be equally frustrated with the storytelling. If you saw the movie, you'll be puzzled as to what the heck any of this has to do with the film, and if you didn't see Superman Returns, there's little chance that any of the short cutscenes will explain exactly what the heck Lex is doing with the crystals, much less why Mister Mxyzptlk wants Superman to race around the city.    Superman Returns takes place in Superman's adopted home city, Metropolis. The city consists of several large islands that lie in the middle of a lake surrounded by mountains. The city is largest on the Xbox 360, as the PlayStation 2 and Xbox are missing one of the smaller islands. You're free to go almost anywhere, from street level to thousands of feet above even the tallest building. The view from high up in the sky is breathtaking at first, and it's fun to zoom down through the clouds and wind through city streets and in between the skyscrapers at breakneck speeds. However, the fun quickly wears off when you realize that short of endlessly touring the city, there's little else to do. You can fly around and rescue kittens that are hidden around Metropolis, and that's about it. You can't fly underwater, and you can't walk in buildings.    So, other than rescuing kittens, what is there to do? Not a whole heck of a lot. The game is divided into chapters comprised of a series of objectives that only appear by flying around aimlessly until you get close enough to one to trigger it. As is evident by the way the game drags on and on, there are certainly plenty of objectives--there's just not much variety to them. Early in the game most of your time will be spent fighting robots--robots that walk, robots that roll around, and robots that fly. Later you'll be fighting evil monsters and even dragons. (If you're wondering why on Earth there are dragons in the game, you're not alone.) This monotony is occasionally broken up when you are charged with putting out building fires. And if you play long enough, you'll get to fight bad guys and put out fires. The segments where you race Mister Mxyzptlk or play as Bizarro help break up the monotony a tiny bit, but they don't count as progress toward completing the game, so there's little point in wasting time on them.    Being that Superman is mostly invincible, he doesn't have a health bar; however, the city of Metropolis does. The bad guys will torch trees, throw cars, and pummel civilians. Any damage to the city diminishes the health bar, and when it's empty, it's game over. This is a novel approach to indirectly making Superman vulnerable, but it also restricts the game's ""sandbox"" feel. Anytime you decide to smash something or set a car ablaze, you're just hurting yourself. Imagine a first-person shooter where you could shoot yourself in the head or a racing game where you could pour sugar in your own gas tank--that's kind of what it's like here. It sure might sound like fun to take the giant globe off of the Daily Planet and toss it into a group of cars, but the pesky thought of ""What would Superman do?"" and the negative effect your action will have on the city is always in the back of your mind. You can play as Bizarro and wreak some havoc, but causing trouble's just not that much fun when you're being forced to do it.    The combo-based fighting system lets you string together a fairly impressive number of moves, and after you complete a series of objectives, you'll earn new combos. Unfortunately, you don't really need many of these new moves, and you'll quickly find yourself either using the same combos over and over or just resorting to mashing buttons and hoping for the best. Superman also has his trusty heat vision, super breath, and of course his freeze breath, all of which can be powered up by finishing objectives. Some enemies are weak against a particular power, though a few are impervious to them, and there's even a creature that grows stronger should you try to use one of your powers on it. Freezing and burning enemies is actually pretty fun, but unless you like blowing enemies a half mile away and then chasing them down to pummel them, Superman's super breath is almost totally worthless--you only need use it a couple of times.     Awesome! You beat the objective! Now do the same thing another 50 times!   The combat sounds entertaining, and at first it is, but a number of problems quickly render it frustrating and uninteresting. Because you're fighting the same handful of enemies hundreds of times, the real challenge comes not from the enemies themselves, but from trying to stay interested in what's going on. The controls aren't overly complex, but it's still tough to get them to respond. Using the D pad to toggle between powers on the fly is frustrating, and it's tough to aim your attacks, too. You can lock on to enemies, but short of removing the target lock adjusting your position and hoping to lock on to another enemy, there's no way to change your focus during a battle. This is particularly problematic when you're in the air and getting attacked by a dragon that's just offscreen, or when you're fighting in a crowd, trying to punch a robot but wailing on an innocent civilian instead. Collision detection is dreadful, so sometimes you'll be hitting a bad guy (or getting hit by one) even though no punches are actually landing. For some unknown reason Superman can't jump. It's a pain to land, and Superman's inability to jump makes it tough to easily get to any enemy that's on top of a car or standing on the other side of a bush. When Superman can't get around a bit of shrubbery, you know things aren't going too well. An awful camera doesn't help matters much, either.     Despite the game's declaration that the camera is smart (it says so in the game options), it does a terrible job of following the action. You're frequently obscured by enemies, cars, and buildings. If you can see yourself, then chances are pretty good that you won't be able to find whatever you're fighting. Enemy icons will appear on one side of a building when the actual enemy is on the other side, and sometimes the camera gets so low to the ground that you can't see your target through all the traffic and pedestrians on the screen. A handy radar system helps alleviate this problem somewhat, but it's still a problem. Racing against Mister Mxyzptlk wasn't all that fun to start with, but it's also hindered by the camera, which works just fine for cruising the skies looking for trouble, but is considerably less friendly when moving at high speeds.    And then there are the boss battles, which are so bad they deserve special mention. If you were excited by the game's trailer, in which Superman took on a giant version of Metallo, you're in for a disappointment. Sure, you still get to fight him, but it's considerably less interesting than in the trailer. But that's not the real problem. The lengthy fight ends with Superman having to divert a missile--but the game never tells you how. After chasing it and getting close, you can shoot your heat vision at it, but that doesn't work, so it explodes, and then you get to do the entire fight again. Let's say on the next attempt you try to fly past the missile and hope that it locks on. Nope, you're dead. Try again. It turns out that all you have to do is get right next to it, which triggers a cutscene. Who knew that all you had to do to stop a missile was trigger a cutscene? Another boss fight sees you trying to save three blimps, that apparently are filled with hydrogen and highly explosive, from a group of flying dragons. After trying and failing to save each blimp, it turns out that you just need to save one, and the sequence suddenly ends for no discernable reason. Last but not least, you get to take on tornados. Yes, you'll be fighting tornados. You've got to blow them out over the water, freeze them, and put out fires caused by lighting. That's not so bad, but the game also implores you to save three injured citizens during all this madness. After wasting your time rescuing the injured, your reward is...nothing. You'll find that you can skip that part entirely. If you're not insane yet, the next sequence should do it for you. You're suddenly inside the tornado and you've got to ""stabilize the atmosphere"" by alternately shooting your heat and freeze breath while being sure to dodge all the garbage flying around inside. Once again, if you fail you have to do the entire tornado sequence over again. Only something like this could have you longing for the realistic scenarios from the movie Twister.    Meteors, giant robots, killer tornados, and...dragons? It's all here.   There's little reason to see the game through to its conclusion, much less ever play it again if you manage to finish it once. At least you can get some points out of the whole dreadful experience if you're playing the 360 version. Points are awarded for beating noteworthy bosses, and you can earn a couple of hundred points during the normal course of play. A few achievements, such as flying 10,000 miles or playing for 12 hours, will only be earned by those with a high tolerance for pain. To add insult to injury, the game tells you that you're 25 percent complete in less than an hour, but it ends up going on for a solid 10 mind-numbing hours.     Superman Returns isn't a particularly good-looking game, especially on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Sure, it's impressive to see such a large city on the older systems, but so much detail had to be sacrificed to make it happen that you've got to wonder if it was worth it. The city's slightly smaller, there's very little variety to the buildings, and each structure looks hideous up close. The Xbox 360 version looks quite a bit nicer, but along with the larger city and the more varied and detailed buildings come technical problems. Everything looks cool from high above the city, but as you zoom downward the texture pop-in and the drawn-in are very noticeable and distracting. The frame rate also regularly stutters and stammers. Even the FMV cutscenes are choppy.     All versions of the game have plain, ugly citizens, boring-looking cars, and a lack of destructible objects. You can randomly break up the bricks and glass on a few buildings (with damage effects that look too similar), and you can smash up cars and grab light poles, but not much else. The fire effects look pretty good, but when things like cars explode, you'll actually see them disappear for a second while the damaged model loads. One thing that won't disappear, at least some of the time, is the onscreen text that shows you what you're supposed to be doing. You'll be racing against the clock, and the whole time, ""GO!"" is emblazoned across the screen.     Uh-oh, it looks like your nemesis got ahold of an ugly stick and beat the game senseless.   The best thing the game has going for it is the excellent orchestrated soundtrack that plays in the background. It doesn't sound like the movie's score, but it's still quite good, and given the quality of the rest of the game's audio, it should have been more prominently featured. Kevin Spacey, Brandon Routh, and Kate Bosworth all reprise their roles from the film, but their participation in the game is so minimal that you hardly even notice. Routh's performance is hampered by a horrendous script that has him admonishing his enemies with cheesy one-liners as he fights them--his dialogue during the Bizarro encounters is downright embarrassing. The rest of the sound effects sound OK, but they're repeated ad nauseam.    It's hard to shake the feeling that EA viewed the movie's DVD release as the last chance to capitalize on the movie license and was going to ship this game finished or unfinished, good or bad. It looks as though they finally settled on unfinished and bad. Superman Returns doesn't have much to do with the movie of the same name; the plot is a bunch of nonsense; and the game just doesn't capture the essence of what has made Superman such an enduring icon. If you're an Xbox 360 owner who has played the Superman Returns demo, you've already played the best part of this game. It's fun to fly above the city and then zoom down at the speed of sound to zigzag among the buildings, and it's even fun to pound on robots for a short time. But the fun quickly ends courtesy of the bland graphics, lousy controls, boring combat, and repetitive objectives.    
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974,Superman Returns: The Videogame ,4.4," After the thrill of flying around Metropolis wears off, Superman Returns is nothing more than a below-average, repetitive movie tie-in.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/4/0/9/2214409-box_smr.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/superman-returns-the-videogame-review/1900-6162295/,neg,"
  Superman's great at saving the world, but he sure hasn't had much success when it comes to video games. The disastrous Superman 64 was no doubt the low point in the Man of Steel's video game history, but even his highs haven't been all that high. Superman Returns: The Videogame was originally slated to release alongside the movie in June (which had its own tumultuous production saga), but it wasn't ready in time and the release date was pushed back to coincide with the DVD of the movie going on sale. Despite the delay, the game still doesn't seem to be ready, but that hasn't stopped it from being released. It's certainly not as bad as Superman 64, but it's still plenty bad. Superman Returns does do a few things well, and it does manage to be entertaining for the first hour or so, but it's all downhill from there.     Poor Superman--nobody understands him.   For a game that's supposed to be a movie tie-in, Superman Returns sure doesn't have a whole lot in common with the film. After fighting off a rogue meteor shower and learning how to use his super abilities, Superman zooms off to outer space to find that his home planet has indeed been destroyed. On the way home he runs across Mongrul, does a bit of fighting, and then it's back to Earth. Here he'll battle Metallo, Bizarro, and, eventually, someone who was actually in the film, Lex Luthor. People who saw the movie and those who didn't will be equally frustrated with the storytelling. If you saw the movie, you'll be puzzled as to what the heck any of this has to do with the film, and if you didn't see Superman Returns, there's little chance that any of the short cutscenes will explain exactly what the heck Lex is doing with the crystals, much less why Mister Mxyzptlk wants Superman to race around the city.    Superman Returns takes place in Superman's adopted home city, Metropolis. The city consists of several large islands that lie in the middle of a lake surrounded by mountains. The city is largest on the Xbox 360, as the PlayStation 2 and Xbox are missing one of the smaller islands. You're free to go almost anywhere, from street level to thousands of feet above even the tallest building. The view from high up in the sky is breathtaking at first, and it's fun to zoom down through the clouds and wind through city streets and in between the skyscrapers at breakneck speeds. However, the fun quickly wears off when you realize that short of endlessly touring the city, there's little else to do. You can fly around and rescue kittens that are hidden around Metropolis, and that's about it. You can't fly underwater, and you can't walk in buildings.    So, other than rescuing kittens, what is there to do? Not a whole heck of a lot. The game is divided into chapters comprised of a series of objectives that only appear by flying around aimlessly until you get close enough to one to trigger it. As is evident by the way the game drags on and on, there are certainly plenty of objectives--there's just not much variety to them. Early in the game most of your time will be spent fighting robots--robots that walk, robots that roll around, and robots that fly. Later you'll be fighting evil monsters and even dragons. (If you're wondering why on Earth there are dragons in the game, you're not alone.) This monotony is occasionally broken up when you are charged with putting out building fires. And if you play long enough, you'll get to fight bad guys and put out fires. The segments where you race Mister Mxyzptlk or play as Bizarro help break up the monotony a tiny bit, but they don't count as progress toward completing the game, so there's little point in wasting time on them.    Being that Superman is mostly invincible, he doesn't have a health bar; however, the city of Metropolis does. The bad guys will torch trees, throw cars, and pummel civilians. Any damage to the city diminishes the health bar, and when it's empty, it's game over. This is a novel approach to indirectly making Superman vulnerable, but it also restricts the game's ""sandbox"" feel. Anytime you decide to smash something or set a car ablaze, you're just hurting yourself. Imagine a first-person shooter where you could shoot yourself in the head or a racing game where you could pour sugar in your own gas tank--that's kind of what it's like here. It sure might sound like fun to take the giant globe off of the Daily Planet and toss it into a group of cars, but the pesky thought of ""What would Superman do?"" and the negative effect your action will have on the city is always in the back of your mind. You can play as Bizarro and wreak some havoc, but causing trouble's just not that much fun when you're being forced to do it.    The combo-based fighting system lets you string together a fairly impressive number of moves, and after you complete a series of objectives, you'll earn new combos. Unfortunately, you don't really need many of these new moves, and you'll quickly find yourself either using the same combos over and over or just resorting to mashing buttons and hoping for the best. Superman also has his trusty heat vision, super breath, and of course his freeze breath, all of which can be powered up by finishing objectives. Some enemies are weak against a particular power, though a few are impervious to them, and there's even a creature that grows stronger should you try to use one of your powers on it. Freezing and burning enemies is actually pretty fun, but unless you like blowing enemies a half mile away and then chasing them down to pummel them, Superman's super breath is almost totally worthless--you only need use it a couple of times.     Awesome! You beat the objective! Now do the same thing another 50 times!   The combat sounds entertaining, and at first it is, but a number of problems quickly render it frustrating and uninteresting. Because you're fighting the same handful of enemies hundreds of times, the real challenge comes not from the enemies themselves, but from trying to stay interested in what's going on. The controls aren't overly complex, but it's still tough to get them to respond. Using the D pad to toggle between powers on the fly is frustrating, and it's tough to aim your attacks, too. You can lock on to enemies, but short of removing the target lock adjusting your position and hoping to lock on to another enemy, there's no way to change your focus during a battle. This is particularly problematic when you're in the air and getting attacked by a dragon that's just offscreen, or when you're fighting in a crowd, trying to punch a robot but wailing on an innocent civilian instead. Collision detection is dreadful, so sometimes you'll be hitting a bad guy (or getting hit by one) even though no punches are actually landing. For some unknown reason Superman can't jump. It's a pain to land, and Superman's inability to jump makes it tough to easily get to any enemy that's on top of a car or standing on the other side of a bush. When Superman can't get around a bit of shrubbery, you know things aren't going too well. An awful camera doesn't help matters much, either.     Despite the game's declaration that the camera is smart (it says so in the game options), it does a terrible job of following the action. You're frequently obscured by enemies, cars, and buildings. If you can see yourself, then chances are pretty good that you won't be able to find whatever you're fighting. Enemy icons will appear on one side of a building when the actual enemy is on the other side, and sometimes the camera gets so low to the ground that you can't see your target through all the traffic and pedestrians on the screen. A handy radar system helps alleviate this problem somewhat, but it's still a problem. Racing against Mister Mxyzptlk wasn't all that fun to start with, but it's also hindered by the camera, which works just fine for cruising the skies looking for trouble, but is considerably less friendly when moving at high speeds.     And then there are the boss battles, which are so bad they deserve special mention. If you were excited by the game's trailer, in which Superman took on a giant version of Metallo, you're in for a disappointment. Sure, you still get to fight him, but it's considerably less interesting than in the trailer. But that's not the real problem. The lengthy fight ends with Superman having to divert a missile--but the game never tells you how. After chasing it and getting close, you can shoot your heat vision at it, but that doesn't work, so it explodes, and then you get to do the entire fight again. Let's say on the next attempt you try to fly past the missile and hope that it locks on. Nope, you're dead. Try again. It turns out that all you have to do is get right next to it, which triggers a cutscene. Who knew that all you had to do to stop a missile was trigger a cutscene? Another boss fight sees you trying to save three blimps, that apparently are filled with hydrogen and highly explosive, from a group of flying dragons. After trying and failing to save each blimp, it turns out that you just need to save one, and the sequence suddenly ends for no discernable reason. Last but not least, you get to take on tornados. Yes, you'll be fighting tornados. You've got to blow them out over the water, freeze them, and put out fires caused by lighting. That's not so bad, but the game also implores you to save three injured citizens during all this madness. After wasting your time rescuing the injured, your reward is...nothing. You'll find that you can skip that part entirely. If you're not insane yet, the next sequence should do it for you. You're suddenly inside the tornado and you've got to ""stabilize the atmosphere"" by alternately shooting your heat and freeze breath while being sure to dodge all the garbage flying around inside. Once again, if you fail you have to do the entire tornado sequence over again. Only something like this could have you longing for the realistic scenarios from the movie Twister.    Meteors, giant robots, killer tornados, and...dragons? It's all here.   There's little reason to see the game through to its conclusion, much less ever play it again if you manage to finish it once. At least you can get some points out of the whole dreadful experience if you're playing the 360 version. Points are awarded for beating noteworthy bosses, and you can earn a couple of hundred points during the normal course of play. A few achievements, such as flying 10,000 miles or playing for 12 hours, will only be earned by those with a high tolerance for pain. To add insult to injury, the game tells you that you're 25 percent complete in less than an hour, but it ends up going on for a solid 10 mind-numbing hours.    Superman Returns isn't a particularly good-looking game, especially on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Sure, it's impressive to see such a large city on the older systems, but so much detail had to be sacrificed to make it happen that you've got to wonder if it was worth it. The city's slightly smaller, there's very little variety to the buildings, and each structure looks hideous up close. The Xbox 360 version looks quite a bit nicer, but along with the larger city and the more varied and detailed buildings come technical problems. Everything looks cool from high above the city, but as you zoom downward the texture pop-in and the drawn-in are very noticeable and distracting. The frame rate also regularly stutters and stammers. Even the FMV cutscenes are choppy.     All versions of the game have plain, ugly citizens, boring-looking cars, and a lack of destructible objects. You can randomly break up the bricks and glass on a few buildings (with damage effects that look too similar), and you can smash up cars and grab light poles, but not much else. The fire effects look pretty good, but when things like cars explode, you'll actually see them disappear for a second while the damaged model loads. One thing that won't disappear, at least some of the time, is the onscreen text that shows you what you're supposed to be doing. You'll be racing against the clock, and the whole time, ""GO!"" is emblazoned across the screen.     Uh-oh, it looks like your nemesis got ahold of an ugly stick and beat the game senseless.   The best thing the game has going for it is the excellent orchestrated soundtrack that plays in the background. It doesn't sound like the movie's score, but it's still quite good, and given the quality of the rest of the game's audio, it should have been more prominently featured. Kevin Spacey, Brandon Routh, and Kate Bosworth all reprise their roles from the film, but their participation in the game is so minimal that you hardly even notice. Routh's performance is hampered by a horrendous script that has him admonishing his enemies with cheesy one-liners as he fights them--his dialogue during the Bizarro encounters is downright embarrassing. The rest of the sound effects sound OK, but they're repeated ad nauseam.    It's hard to shake the feeling that EA viewed the movie's DVD release as the last chance to capitalize on the movie license and was going to ship this game finished or unfinished, good or bad. It looks as though they finally settled on unfinished and bad. Superman Returns doesn't have much to do with the movie of the same name; the plot is a bunch of nonsense; and the game just doesn't capture the essence of what has made Superman such an enduring icon. If you're an Xbox 360 owner who has played the Superman Returns demo, you've already played the best part of this game. It's fun to fly above the city and then zoom down at the speed of sound to zigzag among the buildings, and it's even fun to pound on robots for a short time. But the fun quickly ends courtesy of the bland graphics, lousy controls, boring combat, and repetitive objectives.    
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975,Eragon ,4.4," Eragon relies entirely on tedious, unenthusiastic gameplay that's way too shallow to sustain interest for more than a few minutes.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/9/8/9/2209989-eragon_ds.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/eragon-review/1900-6163012/,neg,"
  Eragon the video game is based on the movie, which itself is based on the book of the same name. It's a typical fantasy world full of dragons, wizards, and magic, which would seem to lend itself well to a video game adaptation in the vein of the very good series of Lord of the Rings action games that came out alongside those movies. In fact, the Eragon game bears a striking resemblance to those Lord of the Rings games, which only makes sense because the games were all developed by the same company. But while the Lord of the Rings games were well-polished action games, Eragon feels unfinished and lazily thrown together. It's the same basic hack-and-slash principle that's readily accessible to just about any fan of the film, but Eragon feels like a skeleton of a game that's been padded out with some licensed content. There's not nearly enough to make the game interesting or even remotely worth playing, though. The action is mindless and repetitive at best, and buggy and unresponsive at worst. In addition, the presentation ranges from bland to ugly, the game is short, the fixed camera angles are frustrating, and there is no online play. Even for a straightforward action game, Eragon has very little to offer.    Dragons, magic, wizards. How did this go so wrong?   Eragon is a young farm boy in the fantasy world of Alagaesia. One day while out hunting, the boy stumbles upon a glowing blue orb that he thinks is a stone. Come to find out, it's actually a dragon egg. Eventually, a dragon hatches from the egg and Eragon discovers that he shares a magical bond with the creature. Turns out Eragon has been chosen as a legendary dragon rider, which is a warrior with special magic abilities that flies around on dragons and fights the impending evil that's sweeping across the land at the behest of a ruthless tyrant. It's up to Eragon to save the day by hacking through an army of clones in several linear, uninspired, and mercifully short levels.    You control Eragon, and you start out as a relatively feeble farmer. You have a sword and a bow, and you quickly learn to use magic, as well. There are 16 levels in the game, with a couple extra levels if you're playing the Xbox 360 version. You'll spend most of your time on foot, fighting wave after wave of generic enemies. You have a quick strike, a powerful strike, and a block for melee combat. You can string together combos of the two strikes to pull off special moves like grapples or knock downs. But even with those few moves, the action still boils down to mashing buttons until your thumb (or your brain) goes numb.     The enemies are all easy to kill, but they do take quite a few hits. So you can hack away at a foe uninterrupted for several seconds before he finally goes down, only to repeat the process with a dozen more enemies. It doesn't help matters that the hit detection is spotty at best. You'll often find yourself swinging away and watching your blade go right through your foes with no effect whatsoever. You can use a bow in the game to pick off enemies from afar, but since your bow does even less damage than your sword, you'll have to spend a long time slinging arrows at an enemy before it finally dies. There are some platforming sections in each level that require you to shimmy along ledges, climb up buildings or other structures, leap small gaps, and tiptoe across narrow beams. None of it is the least bit interesting or challenging, and it ends up feeling perfunctory and pointless.     As a dragon rider, Eragon is able to use magic, which factors into the combat in the game. The magic does actually make for some enjoyable moments, such as when you light enemies on fire and watch as they run off a cliff in a panic, or when you use magic to pull enemies off a high ledge. But even though you can do some fun things with a couple of the magic spells, it does very little to liven up the combat in the long run. Aside from pushing and pulling enemies and lighting them on fire, you can shoot magic arrows and use your magic to interact with the environment. Certain objects in the environment can be moved or rearranged using your magic. It's not very interesting, though, because you can't choose what you interact with or how you do it. Instead, it's usually along the lines of moving a pile of conveniently placed loose boards to create a makeshift bridge between two platforms.     Being a dragon rider, you do get to fly around on a dragon from time to time, but it's not nearly as fun as it sounds. The few flying levels in the game play like a rail shooter, where you fly around on a predetermined path and shoot enemies with magic arrows or blast them with your dragon's fire breath. The levels are simple loops, so you fly around in circles and kill the same enemies as they respawn endlessly. It's like being on a very tedious treadmill, because you never actually get anywhere. You just kill enemies until you've met the predetermined quota for the level.     You can easily beat Eragon in six hours, and once you've done that there's no reason to go back and play it again. Perhaps the only good news is that if you're playing the Xbox 360 version of the game, you can get some easy achievement points by completing each of the short levels on normal and hard difficulty settings. Other than that, there's not much to do in Eragon. A second player can join in at any moment during the game to play cooperatively, but the co-op suffers because both characters have to move in unison to keep all the action contained within one screen. This means that unless your partner moves with you, you can't go anywhere. It's also frequently possible for one character to get stuck behind an object in the environment if the other character moves too far ahead. One solution for that would be to let you play the game online, where each player has his or her own screen, but that feature is conspicuously absent. It's not a major loss, because this game isn't any more fun cooperatively than it is solo, but it's just one more way in which Eragon comes up short.     Another way that Eragon fails to impress is in its presentation. The game looks best on the Xbox 360, but even then it doesn't look good. The character models are all blocky and undefined, and although it's common in games of this type, the fact that there are only a handful of enemies to face just makes the game look and feel cheap. You'll see the exact same mobs over and over throughout the entire game. The fact that many of the levels look quite similar also makes the game feel repetitive and shallow, as if each level is exactly the same as the one before it. The character animations are no better. The few canned animations look decent, and some of the finishing moves are pretty brutal (and bloody if you're playing the PC or Xbox 360 version), especially for a T-rated game. However, most of the time the animations are stilted and jerky, and you'll often see enemies or ally characters get stuck behind objects and twitch wildly or clip through solid parts of the environment.     Eragon also has an extremely frustrating camera. The game employs fixed camera angles, so you have no control over your perspective on the action. That means that if you're behind an object, you're left to fight blind, which happens much more often than it should. The perspective also sometimes hides the path that you need to take to progress through the level. For instance, you might have to hop up and grab a ledge and pull yourself up to the next area, but with the fixed perspective, you won't even be able to tell that ledge is there.    If you have a friend nearby, you can play cooperatively, but then you might end up with one less friend.   The sound is also disappointing. Some of the music is halfway decent, but the voice acting is stiff and often missing entirely. John Malkovich plays the main enemy in the movie but doesn't have a single speaking line in the game. The actor who plays Eragon provides some voice-over work, but none of it sounds very good, and the dialogue consists almost entirely of terrible one-liners. The sound effects are functional, but there's nothing about the tinny clink of blade against blade to give the combat any weight.    Both as an action adventure game, and a licensed work, Eragon comes across as substandard in just about every way imaginable. It feels like an unfinished game that was rushed through to release in time for the movie to appear in theaters. The combat is repetitive, the presentation is dull and lifeless, and the entire game suffers from an apparent lack of effort.    
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976,Crazy Taxi 2 ,8.6," While it would have been nice to see some slightly more drastic changes to the Crazy Taxi formula, fans of the original will immediately feel right at home with Crazy ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/9/4/8/2217948-crazytaxi2boxart.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/crazy-taxi-2-review/1900-2766530/,pos,"
Crazy Taxi 2 is the console-only sequel to Sega's 1999 arcade driving game, Crazy Taxi. The game sticks close to the winning formula of the original game, delivering new levels, new cabbies, and a new move to the series. The resulting game at times feels more like an add-on than a full-fledged sequel, though there's more than enough new content to satisfy fans of the series.   Like its predecessor, Crazy Taxi 2 is all about picking up fares and delivering them to their destination as quickly as possible. When playing by the arcade rules, you're governed by a short timer, which can be lengthened by delivering passengers quickly. You play until time runs out. You can also elect to play for a set amount of time, either three, five, or ten minutes. At the end, your score is totaled up and you're given a ranking based on your performance.   While the first Crazy Taxi took place in a fictional city based loosely on San Francisco, Crazy Taxi 2 moves the action to New York. Both levels are full of licensed stores, such as Burger King, HMV, and FAO Schwarz. The two levels, Around Apple and Small Apple, are roughly the same size as the original game's maps, though the levels are packed full of shortcuts and more twists, turns, and actual roadway, making them feel absolutely huge by comparison. Most of the shortcuts in Crazy Taxi 2 are dependent on the game's new move, the crazy hop. Unlike the rest of the game's special tricks, which require you to do a little shifting and play around with the gas button, the crazy hop flings your taxi into the air with a simple press of the Y button. This lets you hop over traffic with ease and take shortcuts, such as jumping onto the roof of a building, hopping up a flight of stairs, or hopping off a freeway overpass down to the surface streets below. The hop is so incredibly useful and it changes the game so drastically that it probably should have been a little more difficult to do. As it stands, there's little point in weaving through traffic on straightaways, since you can just hit the Y button and hop over anything in your way. Aside from the hop, the game controls are roughly the same as the first game's, though the timing on the crazy dash seems a little different.   Also mixing things up is the addition of group fares. Group fares put two to four people in your cab at the same time, with one timer. You have to deliver each member of the group to a different location, and you must deliver the entire load successfully to earn any money. The number of people in your cab multiplies any tips you earn during a group fare, so this can be a great way to earn some fast cash, once you know your way around the city. Rounding out the package is the crazy pyramid mode, CT2's version of the first game's crazy box mode. The crazy pyramid is a collection of minigames that are also license test-like in nature. Each one gives you a goal, such as popping a collection of balloons within a certain time limit or jumping a certain distance. As you complete each level of the pyramid, you'll unlock little bonus items, such as maps of both levels.   Graphically, Crazy Taxi 2 looks a bit smoother than the first game, and there's less pop-up and slowdown as well. The sound is also more varied, with significantly more babbling from your various passengers, especially the group fares. The soundtrack contains tracks from the Offspring, among others.   Crazy Taxi 2 is just as much fun as the first game. While it would have been nice to see some slightly more drastic changes to the Crazy Taxi formula, fans of the original will immediately feel right at home with Crazy Taxi 2. Anyone looking for a solid Dreamcast game--and let's face it, good DC games are starting to get a little scarce these days--will find just that in Crazy Taxi 2.
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977,Golden Sun ,8.6, Golden Sun is a throwback to some of the SNES' best.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/8/0/9/2208809-2267406-468548_20183_front.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/golden-sun-review/1900-2824028/,pos,"
Looking back, the Super Nintendo has to be regarded as one of the best showcases for the RPG genre and 2D graphics. Back in the day, the system was home to some of the best games in the genre. You may well be in for a very pleasant sense of déjà vu when you fire up Nintendo's latest RPG offering on the Game Boy Advance, Golden Sun. Featuring some of the best graphics seen on the system, a rich quest, and classic RPG gameplay, Golden Sun is a throwback to some of the SNES' best. The game's story puts you in the role of a young man named Isaac from a remote village called Vale. The elders of the village have been caretakers of an ancient mountain temple, Sol Sanctum, which guards a seal on the science of alchemy. When the seal is broken and a group of strangers, who have kidnapped two of Isaac's friends, attempt to release the powers of alchemy on the world, Isaac must venture out into the world and set things right.  Like its story, Golden Sun's gameplay includes tried-and-true features as well. Developed by Camelot Software Planning, the game should offer Shining Force fans some welcome flashbacks. Golden Sun reflects Camelot's roots, offering a mixture of little touches that harken back to classic RPGs and some new twists on combat and magic. The game plays like most RPGs: You'll travel the world on foot, venturing from town to town and talking with people. Along the way you'll solve puzzles and help those in need who cross your path in your quest to rescue your friends and save the world. While it all sounds fairly standard for an RPG, the game comes together nicely. RPG vets should be satisfied with the game's rich quest, which, while a bit short, compares favorably to those from the 16-bit era--offering optional side quests to supplement the main action. One of Golden Sun's biggest strengths lies in its combat engine. Taking a page almost directly from a Shining Force game, Golden Sun features turn-based combat with an icon-based menu system. Characters will have access to physical attacks, a power called psyenergy that basically works like magic, and elemental creatures called djinn, which can be used to attack enemies or summon spirits in battle. The pace of combat is usually quick and is sometimes challenging as you try to find the best combination of physical and psyenergy attacks to take out enemies in your way. The only blemish on the sterling setup is the inability of members in your party to target another enemy if their intended target has been killed before their turn to attack comes up.  RPG fans should be pleased with Golden Sun's psyenergy system and the djinn. While mostly used for combat, psyenergy powers come to have many uses in the game as you progress. By assigning djinn to the proper character or by picking up special items, you'll find that you can use psyenergy powers in town or in dungeons. The powers can be extremely useful, giving you the ability to read the minds of people you encounter, move stones, or reveal hidden items or paths in dungeons. The djinn are equally important because they'll raise your stats, possibly change your class, and sometimes give you access to other psyenergy. A link-cable battle mode has been tossed in to give the game a bit of replayability. By using a save from your existing single-player game you'll be able to pit your party against a friend's. If you have no friends (or, at least, no friends with GBAs and link cables), you'll be able to play battle mode by yourself and take on monsters you've defeated in the single-player game. While the mode is really just there for fun--you won't be penalized or rewarded for playing it--it's nice to see an RPG with a multiplayer mode. To complement the game's slick gameplay, the developer has coaxed some truly sweet graphics out of the GBA. Featuring detailed sprites and environments that are on par with what's been seen on the SNES, Golden Sun is a looker. But the game offers more eye candy than just sharp 16-bit graphics--its attacks and spells are given an extra layer of gloss thanks to impressive polygonal effects. Unfortunately the GBA's screen can make it difficult to appreciate the game's graphics if you're in less-than-optimal lighting. Fortunately, the engaging gameplay will have you shrugging off poor visibility. Golden Sun holds its own against most full-sized console games. While the quest could be longer, the time spent in it is nearly all quality time--it has less shameless filler than other RPGs. The game offers tight graphics, polished gameplay, and a solid story, which provide a great showcase for the GBA. You'll be left wanting more, and judging by the game's ending, we may see a sequel. Fans of RPGs owe it to themselves to pick up Golden Sun.
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978,Doom 3 ,8.6," A new two-player cooperative mode really helps round out the experience, and those amazing good looks survived the translation to the Xbox well intact--along with pretty much everything else.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/1/5/6/2216156-doom3.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/doom-3-review/1900-6121479/,pos,"
  Extremely impressive from a technical standpoint yet behind the times from a first-person-shooter design standpoint: This is the dichotomy that is Doom 3, the long-awaited sequel from well-known Texas-based developer id Software. Less than a year after it exploded onto the PC in the dead of summer, the game is now available for the Xbox, boasting a new two-player cooperative mode that really helps round out the experience, and which probably should have been in the PC version to begin with. Perhaps more importantly, those amazing good looks survived the translation to the Xbox well intact--along with pretty much everything else. And what that means is when you look past the spectacular appearance, you'll still find a conventional, derivative shooter. Some might interpret this straightforwardness as being deliberately ""old-school,"" especially since Doom 3 is packed with direct references to its classic predecessors. However, Doom 3's old-fashioned gameplay mechanics and level design are very much at odds with its cutting-edge, ultrarealistic looks. Yet the quality of the presentation truly is remarkable--enough so that it overwhelms Doom 3's occasional problems.   There's no debating one thing about Doom 3: It looks absolutely, positively phenomenal.   In Doom 3, you play as a nameless, voiceless 22nd-century space marine called by the Union Aerospace Corporation to its Mars research facility, which is beset with mysterious problems. These ""problems"" are the forces of hell, to be exact. All alone or with an ally in the new co-op mode, you'll end up fighting back legions of hellspawn using weapons like shotguns, machine guns, and rocket launchers. Beware of one thing about co-op mode, though: You can choose to start a co-op session on any of the campaign levels. So if you haven't already played through the campaign solo, you could very easily give in to temptation and spoil it for yourself in co-op.    In terms of content, the co-op campaign is basically similar to the solo campaign, though there are additional enemies and power-ups to give two players their fills. And, in a decidedly caring touch, some of the dialogue is changed to reflect there being two marines trying to thwart evil, instead of just one. You'll notice a few other twists, such as doors that can only be opened when both players are present, and how a lot of the peripheral story stuff is stripped out to keep the game moving along. The gameplay is more fun in co-op than it is in solo (particularly if you toggle on friendly fire), even though it's functionally identical and easy as hell. Whenever you get killed, you just pop right back into the level and can run over to wherever you died and grab a backpack with all your weapons in it. Yet having a friend (or even a stranger) along for the ride will naturally make the journey more interesting, and having to pick off targets in narrow corridors while staying out of your buddy's way--and not mistaking him for a threat in all those dark shadows--adds a much-needed bit of depth to the action, not to mention an appreciable chunk of value to the entire package. Fans of the PC version might not be able to justify paying full price just to play Doom 3 again in co-op, but yes, it would be well worth their while to check this out.    While we're talking money, for an extra $10, the collector's edition of Doom 3 offers faithful ports of 1995's The Ultimate Doom and 1994's Doom II, classic first-person shooters each featuring support for split-screen co-op and deathmatch modes for up to four players. These collectively contain dozens and dozens of hours of old-but-good gameplay...plus better weapon sounds and tougher enemies than the wimpy Doom 3 equivalents, as far as we're concerned. Most collector's editions of games yield minimal benefits, but you won't regret springing for this one.    As in the classic Doom games, your foes in Doom 3 are liable to strike at any time, often just as you round a corner, grab a much-needed power-up, or set foot in a new area. So, while your enemies will materialize without notice and may occasionally startle you as they leap from the darkness, Doom 3 cannot easily be described as scary or suspenseful. On the contrary, it's quite predictable, and it more or less just goes through the same types of paces that you've probably gone through before in any number of other similar games. Of course, the quality of this game's presentation makes the experience unique in its own right. Like some blockbuster big-budget popcorn flick, what the game lacks in substance or originality, it more than makes up for with sheer ""wow"" factor.    Over the course of the game, you'll fight your way through a series of linear levels filled with locked doors, and you'll gradually find new weapons and occasionally meet new types of monsters. Early on, your apparent goal is to meet up with your squad, but as you might expect, you'll never actually get to fight alongside any human forces (unless you're playing in co-op). Despite the game's cinematic trappings, it follows a formula that generally lacks drama and tension. Occasionally, the game presents to you a shocking or surprising scene, such as a hallucination or some hellish, otherworldly image. These moments are effective but are too few and far between in the context of a shooter that's of above-average length, clocking in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. Fortunately, the campaign definitely picks up during the last several hours, once you finally reach (and keep going past) the point where you confront the enemy on its own turf. Getting to that point may be your primary motivation for trudging through some of the repetitive middle portions of the game, though.   The world may never know if the PC version of Doom 3 was truly worth the wait, but the Xbox-exclusive co-op mode was definitely worth a few extra months of patience.   Part of the issue is that Doom 3's storyline and narrative technique are ineffectual. Since the main character has no identity whatsoever (for whatever reason), the game tries to get you interested in everyone else on the base. In the solo campaign, you'll frequently find voice recordings and e-mail from various characters. Not only is a lot of this stuff pretty dry, but also, having to take a few moments to switch to your bulky PDA to read text messages or to listen to a rambling monologue jarringly disrupts the flow of the action. Unfortunately, if you choose to focus on the action by ignoring the seemingly extraneous story elements, you'll find that some of them aren't optional. You'll need to sift through those e-mails and listen to some of those voice recordings to get passcodes for locked doors and storage chests. For what it's worth, the game does a fine job of drawing you in at first, as you explore the UAC base, eavesdropping on various conversations and observing great, little details here and there. But, all hell quickly breaks loose, and from that point onward, you'll encounter scarce few creatures that you won't want to instantly shoot.   Since Doom 3 purports to have a plausible premise, suddenly, aspects of the game that you might not normally question will start to stick out as being annoyingly inconsistent. You'll more than likely find time to wonder about these logic gaps as you fight throughout the UAC base, especially if you've played other recent first-person shooters that do a better job of justifying their plots. Why wouldn't any of a 22nd-century space marine's weapons have light-amplification modules built into them when even today's weapons frequently do? Why, instead, is he stuck carrying around a very weak flashlight with unlimited battery life? Why is he unable to hold a gun and a flashlight at the same time? Why are the UAC's small, spiderlike sentry drones so incredibly powerful? You'll see these helpful little guys rip through droves of hellspawn even faster than you can. If the base's defenses are so tough, then why is everyone so worried, and why is everyone getting killed? Doom 3's central gameplay conceit simply doesn't fit in with the premise of the game, and this is a problem only because Doom 3 chooses to try to make you feel like you're in a believable, fully realized world. But, on the other hand, so what? Once the imps start spawning and the zombies start moaning, it's time to shoot first and ask questions later.  Stifling darkness lends Doom 3 much of its atmosphere, as well as much of its challenge.  As mentioned, Doom 3 is pervasively dark. There's rarely a moment when your entire field of vision isn't predominantly shrouded in thick black shadow. This contributes heavily to Doom 3's creepy, claustrophobic feel, and it does indeed give the gameplay a distinctive quality. However, the constant extremely dark settings conspire with the frequently repetitive level design to contribute to gameplay that can often feel monotonous, especially since the action itself is simple and straightforward. What's more, the game's levels will occasionally require you to backtrack through dark hallways without clear markings. So rather than constantly blasting monsters, you may end up spending an undue amount of time just trying to get your bearings. There's a sizable arsenal of weapons to be found here, but none of the weapons are completely satisfying to use. Pretty much all the guns are direct-fire point-and-shoot weapons with no alternate firing modes and no close-range melee attacks. They do look impressive onscreen, but they all sound surprisingly tinny and subdued, rather than loud and powerful.   Meanwhile, the few melee weapons are mostly useless (though the chain saw is at least fun to use). The grenades and the rocket launcher are liable to damage you just as much as they will damage your foes, since most of the game's battles occur at close range. Most modern shooters now seek to balance their weapons such that different tactical circumstances call for different measures, but Doom 3 takes the old ""bigger is better"" approach, for the most part. The main consideration in deciding which weapon to use at any given moment will be how much ammunition you have remaining, and to its credit, Doom 3 forces you to be pretty conservative with your ammo. So you'll often feel the need to make every shot count. Furthermore, your marine has no special abilities to speak of. He can move about fairly quickly, he can jump about two feet high, he can crouch, and he can carry every weapon at once. But that's it. Don't expect dual wielding or recharging energy shields or anything like that. This isn't that kind of game.   This also isn't the kind of game in which you should expect to be fighting against ruthlessly intelligent foes. Some of the former human marines you'll face will use rudimentary tactics against you, and other foes at least do a fairly good job of giving chase if you try to flee from them. But, in general, your enemies follow the same sorts of predictable patterns that you may remember from previous Doom games. By the halfway point of the game, you'll have little trouble avoiding your enemies' attacks when directly confronting them, so you'll instead be concentrating on predicting the expected ambushes around every corner. Also, one of the drawbacks of Doom 3's richly detailed graphics is that you'll rarely face more than a few foes at a time. And as you kill them, their bodies instantly disintegrate into ash, which is a nice effect but is also the same effect used for just about every foe you kill. It's disappointing that the colorful death animations and seas of monster corpses from past Doom games are nowhere to be found here (though, in exchange, you'll pass through countless corridors chock-full of smeared blood and human remains).   As a result of all the above--the predictable level design and enemies and the simple-but-effective weapons arsenal--Doom 3 does not turn out to be particularly challenging, at least at the normal difficulty setting. Actually, one of the main reasons for this is because you can quicksave your progress at any time--a feature that's common to PC shooters and one that's been lovingly translated to the Xbox, where the ""back"" button on the controller can be used to record your progress at any time. The creepy atmosphere and frequent ambushes will likely cause you to use this option more often than you need it, and as a result, the suspense and tension is further mitigated. Limited save systems in shooters often meet with great resistance from certain players, but Doom 3 probably would have benefited from one. As it stands, shooter veterans shouldn't have any problem blasting their ways through the game at the middle difficulty setting (at least up until near the end, anyway), so they should therefore consider the hardest available setting for their first attempts.  The game's got a fairly big arsenal of weapons, but none of them, except maybe the chain saw, are all that much fun to use.  So what makes Doom 3 special if it's just a basic corridor crawl in which you shoot anything that moves? For one thing, the foes you'll face, while not terribly smart, are a decidedly impressive and wonderfully animated lot. Doom diehards will recognize most all their old nightmarish favorites and will spot a number of vicious-looking new ones. Sometimes your only tip-off to the presence of enemies will be their gleaming orange eyes peering at you through the darkness, which is another great touch. Most enemies have both ranged and melee attacks, and when they hit you, your perspective will often shake violently as blood fills your field of vision, disorienting you and making you feel like, well, some demon from hell just hit you in the face. Interestingly, this effect is more pronounced the less health you have, which makes for some nerve-racking firefights.   Also, the stifling darkness of the game does work to good effect during most of the battles. As you explore with your flashlight in hand, you'll suddenly hear the chilling groans and growls of nearby foes. So you'll switch to your weapon of choice and whirl about trying to find signs of movement. The action unfolds quickly and violently. Enemies will often lurch right at you, giving you a clear shot of (and a clear shot at) their ghastly physiques. That is to say, what Doom 3's battles lack in complexity, they make up for in visceral thrills. Even after you've fought countless imps and other demons, you'll still be impressed by some of your close encounters with them.  Doom 3 has some other great details. You'll frequently be able to manipulate computers and other terminals, and you'll do so just by walking right up to them and using the fire button to click on them. It's a subtle yet impressive touch. The text on these terminals is clearly legible when you're standing near them, whereas other games in the past have required you to switch to a separate screen (and thus get taken from the main experience of the game) to read these types of messages. Doom 3 also sports some realistic physics, though many other action games have already done this in the past year or so. Even so, Doom 3's physics are handled well, resulting in some excellent moments when enemies get sent flying from the blasts of your weapons, simultaneously bursting into ashes. You'll also happen upon some grisly or creepy scenes that are certain to stick in your mind long after you've fought your way past them.   Competitive multiplayer definitely isn't the main attraction of Doom 3, though it makes for a faster change of pace.  In the end, Doom 3's single-player portion is well worth the exertion necessary to get through it from start to finish. There's no clear-cut reason to revisit the single-player campaign, since the action itself will have practically outlived its welcome by the bitter end of your first time through. This leaves you with either the co-op mode or Doom 3's threadbare competitive multiplayer features to consider, which are playable over system link or Xbox Live. As mentioned, co-op mode is definitely a treat, though the competitive modes aren't as special. The game supports only up to four players on a handful of maps and in a small number of different deathmatch-style variants. Doom's biggest fans could probably make a case for how this is a throwback to the good old days, but it's simply not a particularly strong multiplayer offering by current standards. The action at least moves a lot quicker than in the campaign, making for a slight change of pace, if nothing else.  In a word, the deathmatching is OK. You run around and shoot other players that are running around with the same basic weapons you'll find in the single-player game, all while trying to keep your health, armor, and ammo levels optimal by nabbing power-ups. The multiplayer maps themselves are dimly lit, much like the rest of the game, but the lack of lighting isn't really conducive to the relatively faster-paced deathmatch modes. The maps are interesting enough otherwise and are basically well suited to four-player close-quarters bloodbaths. Nevertheless, the multiplayer action generally lacks much of the visceral and even the visual thrills of the single-player mode, since players are limited to choosing from four colors of just one generic marine player model.  Again, though, in spite of its shortcomings, Doom 3 certainly is a beautiful-looking game, so much so that simply running around in the environments becomes a pleasurable experience in and of itself. The environments offer little interactivity. You can knock over certain boxes and use certain computers, but you can't damage most objects you see, and you can't manipulate them in any way. But it's all really, really pretty, and the whole game is textured in such a way that it feels like you could reach out and touch anything you see. The character models look about as outstanding as everything else, though the awesome-looking monsters really outdo the human characters. Doom 3 for the Xbox also features support for progressive-scan displays, and while it doesn't look quite as sharp or as colorful as the original version running on a high-end PC, it's pretty darn close. Damn, even. There actually isn't much genuine creativity to be found in Doom 3's visual design, which resembles any number of other sci-fi-horror-themed games or movies. But the execution of the visuals here is virtually unmatched, and it truly needs to be seen in action to be fully appreciated. Also of note, the loading times are thankfully rather brief.  Doom 3's visuals and atmosphere pick up some of the gameplay's slack, and they ultimately do much to make the experience well worthwhile.  As for Doom 3's audio, it's also quite impressive overall, but not nearly like the graphics. For one thing, Doom 3 has no soundtrack, apart from a heavy metal tune that plays at the title screen and a few rhythmic ambient tracks. This questionable design choice certainly does amplify the game's effective, believable, and often truly creepy ambient sounds, but it also contributes to the game's dearth of true drama and suspense. You can probably think of many games whose musical compositions and actual musical cues contributed heavily to the atmosphere of the experience; but Doom 3 balked at this opportunity. Some of the actual sound effects also aren't that great. Your marine's footsteps sound bland and rather loud, and as mentioned, most of the weapons sound disappointingly underpowered. On the other hand, most of the monsters' shrieks and roars are just as menacing as their looks, and the voice acting that can be heard throughout the game is of generally high quality. For good measure, if you happen to have a 5.1 surround sound speaker system, you'll enjoy the audio that much more while gaining a tactical advantage against all those imps spawning behind you.   Some game players will tell you that graphics aren't everything. And others will tell you that, on the contrary, graphics are truly important for a game. Doom 3 makes a compelling case for both sides of the argument. On one hand, its gameplay has noticeable shortcomings, and its competitive multiplayer mode--which is a focal point of most of today's shooters, thanks in large part to id Software's own contributions in the past--seems like an afterthought. On the other hand, Doom 3 is a spectacular game in the truest sense, and it's therefore by all means worth experiencing by those with an interest in witnessing just how far the technology of gaming has come along. Fortunately, the actual game itself, while not as remarkable as the technology that fuels it, is put together well enough to make Doom 3 legitimately great, all things considered. 


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979,Extreme-G 3 ,8.6, Those who waited for the GameCube version of Extreme-G 3 have been rewarded with a superior version of the game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/0/7/4/3332-13074.jpg,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/extreme-g-3-review/1900-2831458/,pos,"
The original Extreme-G arrived on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, quick and sure on the heels of Psygnosis' similarly styled WipeOut and WipeOut XL for the PlayStation. While the futuristic N64 racer may have been a pretty obvious WipeOut clone, it held its ground, offering fun gameplay and the techno-enhanced high-tech racing theme that was introduced, but not thoroughly exhausted, by its PlayStation counterpart. Exactly one year later, Acclaim offered a second helping on the N64 with XG2, and the magic was gone. The game was fast and furious but possessed a number of significant flaws. Now, nearly three years later, the franchise has reared its head on the GameCube and PlayStation 2 in the form of Extreme-G 3, and the revival has turned out remarkably well.    In Extreme-G 3, the song remains largely the same as before, albeit much better produced: You live deep in the far-flung future, where you have to race high-speed cycles up and down walls and shoot energy blasts at people for kicks. Unlike in the WipeOut series, there aren't numerous power-ups to pick up over the course of the race. Instead, there are two types of energy-recharging fields that you drive over for power: one for weapons and the other for shield energy. Weapon energy powers whatever weapon you currently have selected, and when that energy runs out, none of the items in your arsenal will work. Shield energy is of particular use since it also powers your turbo boost. That means that if you get shot or bump up against a wall, the energy will be partially depleted, and you won't be able to peel out on a straightaway as successfully as you'd like. It also means that if you want to go really fast, you're going to run the risk of your shields completely failing and having your cycle blow up. It's this sort of constant hairsplitting give-and-take that makes Extreme-G 3 so entertaining.    Through the course of the game, you can buy supplementary items for your cycle such as improved engines, better weapons, and larger storage capacity for weapon and shield energy. One item, the leech, is especially effective. If you use it successfully, you can lock on to an enemy from behind and steal some of his or her shield energy to add to your own. This not only lets you turbo-boost more frequently, but it also sabotages your opponent's ability to do the same. The leech can make for some very compelling final stretches.    Extreme G-3's environments are somewhat sparse in comparison with those in the earlier games in the series. However, the game speeds along at an extremely fast and consistent frame rate--unlike its predecessors. A host of impressive graphical effects vie for your attention and attempt to distract you from the race at hand. A couple of the more basic cosmetic effects are the heat wash that exudes from the back of your cycle right before the race starts and the light trails that stream behind all the speeding vehicles once the race begins. Another effect you see early in the game is reminiscent of a visual element from Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Once you leave the confines of the race hangar, raindrops begin hitting your TV screen and cling there momentarily the way raindrops would to a car windshield. If you hit your turbo boost, the raindrops strike your screen even faster and slightly obscure your view of the race.But Extreme G-3 saves its most impressive visual effect until near the end of the game. Once you garner a higher-capacity engine, hitting the turbo-boost button sends you to speeds so fast that the screen ripples and distorts, and the sounds all around you drag and muffle like they're coming at you through an underwater tunnel. After a singularly dramatic momentary pause, everything begins rushing by at intense speeds--your payoff for making it so far, extreme Gs. You can maintain this speed for only a handful of seconds, but you'll want to quickly start hunting for shield energy once you come down so that you can do it again. To the game's credit, it provides an excellent feeling of speed from the start, and once you get to the final few courses, it spoils you with the extreme-G effect. But it's give and take. The feeling of speed is intense, but it's provided at the expense of some of the other graphical niceties. The environments lack some of the visual flair that we've come to expect from the series and that we might anticipate on the GameCube. Extreme G-3's sound effects, though, are excellent. The jet engine whine of the bike's motor builds as you get closer to an opponent, or as one speeds up on you, gaining or losing pitch as you race up or down hills. It's such a gradual and effective sensory feature that you can close your eyes and still know what's going on in the game, save for being aware of the bends in the road. The same words of praise can't be said about the game's soundtrack, however. It's composed of a number of UK techno tracks that are certainly serviceable but somewhat basic and repetitive (""Give me a fat beat! Give me a fat beat!"").    The main differences between the GameCube and PlayStation 2 versions of Extreme G-3 are in the areas of multiplayer and control. The GameCube edition allows up to four players to compete in its multiplayer mode (while the PlayStation 2 only allows two), and it runs at an impressively steady frame rate. Extreme-G 3 also controls better on the GameCube than it does on PlayStation 2. The functions are laid out on the GameCube controller in a way that you can very easily fire your weapons or turbo while holding down on the gas, and the analog control is less touchy. Those who waited for the GameCube version of Extreme-G 3 have been rewarded with a superior version of the game.   The sum of Extreme-G 3's parts is a smart and solid racing game that provides an amazing feeling of true speed. It's only salient drawbacks are that there are some holes in its AI that you can exploit to race through the leagues, that there aren't enough tracks, and that more eye candy isn't possible with frame rates this high. It's an enjoyable racer that should help satiate GameCube owners who might be considering getting a PlayStation 2 in order to play Wipeout Fusion.
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980,UFC: Tapout ,8.6," On its own merits, UFC: Tapout is an excellent, original fighting game that's especially fun for two players.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/0/8/4/2218084-box_ufcto.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ufc-tapout-review/1900-2849948/,pos,"
Crave Entertainment's Ultimate Fighting Championship: Tapout for the Xbox is the latest game bearing the UFC label. The Ultimate Fighting Championship is America's premier mixed martial arts competition, which hosts numerous pay-per-view events and is the venue under which many of the world's top fighters get their moment in the limelight. Based on the Ultimate Fighting Championship game that debuted on the Sega Dreamcast in 2000, UFC: Tapout is an unconventional fighting game that pits real-life no-holds-barred competitors against each other in matches that test their fortitude and fighting prowess. UFC: Tapout presents the same fighting system that appealed to so many players of the Dreamcast version, adds a heavily updated roster, and improves the graphics in such a way as to nearly bring the fighters to life. Though it's essentially similar to the Dreamcast version, and does have a couple of shortcomings as compared with that game, UFC: Tapout is still the best fighting game available for the Xbox. UFC: Tapout features some of the greatest real-life martial artists to ever enter the octagon. Among the most notable are current light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz, former champions Maurice Smith, Mark ""The Hammer"" Coleman, and a number of other savvy veterans such as Bas Rutten and Pat Miletich. Making their video game debuts are fan favorites ""The Titan"" Mark Kerr, current lightweight champion ""Little Evil"" Jens Pulver, and former UFC powerhouse Dan ""The Beast"" Severn. The sizable roster includes 27 fighters from the get-go--that's before you unlock all the hidden characters in the arcade mode. The roster of fighters may be impressive, but unfortunately UFC: Tapout lacks a couple of the modes of play featured in the original Dreamcast game: The career mode and the practice mode are no longer available. The remaining gameplay modes include arcade mode, where you consecutively challenge all of the fighters on the roster; UFC mode, which is a tiered tournament where you need to conserve stamina to make it all the way to the finals; and tournament mode, where you can set up large custom tournaments for many players to compete in or simply create your own dream match pay-per-view event. UFC: Tapout is a great-looking game, featuring superrealistic character models and incredible motion-captured animation. Many games that use characters based on real-world personalities fail to make them look like their living counterparts, due to flat textures, stilted animation, and a variety of other reasons. But for the most part, UFC: Tapout gets it right. Each of the characters is an excellent likeness of its real-life counterpart, down to the facial detail, musculature, skin tone, and tattoos. Characters' clothing also looks fairly authentic. The fighters' dramatic entrances into the octagon are nearly as impressive looking as the fighters themselves are, because UFC: Tapout makes use of an unusual method of reproducing crowds--full-motion video footage of a crowd is blended in with showy lighting effects and the real-time rendered character model. Once the fighters are ready, the camera tightly focuses on the huge characters. The fighters look even better in motion, because the animation is superb. The fighters react to each other realistically while fighting, both on their feet and when grappling on the ground, and their movements rarely look awkward. Even relatively simple moves, such as the straight armbar, are smoothly animated, and more-intricate motions can be seen when, for example, a fighter goes from a sweep to the mounted position in one fluid maneuver. There are a few graphical shortcomings you'll notice, such as the occasional clipping problems, where a character's limbs appear to pass through the opponent's body, or a ground fighter's head pokes through the fence. But for the most part, UFC: Tapout's graphics and animation are of exceptional quality and make it one of the best-looking fighting games available today. It may be a pleasure to watch, but one of the serious problems with the game is how poorly the camera reacts to the constantly shifting action. Since fights so often move from standing to the ground, the camera often moves to an angle meant to provide a good view of in-close grappling action, but instead it often becomes a nuisance. It's not uncommon for the perspective to shift squarely behind the referee or behind one of the posts, with your vision further obscured by the chain-link texture of the fence. Consequently, the camera problems can directly interfere with gameplay. You'll at least learn to expect this. As good as it looks, UFC: Tapout is even more impressive as a gameplay experience. In UFC: Tapout, two fighters square off within the chain-link confines of the eight-sided ring. A single green bar measures each fighter's remaining stamina and health. Portions of the meter turn red as the fighter tires out and can then be replenished with rest, or the meter can diminish entirely while the fighter's receiving damage. Blocking moves will prevent your fighter from taking damage, but the blocked blows may still reduce his stamina. Some moves, such as a spinning backfist or a telegraphed overhand punch, may be damaging enough to stun the opponent, leaving him vulnerable to follow-up attacks, takedown maneuvers, or even a quickly cinched-in choke.While there are a great number of moves available to each of the fighters, pulling them off is simple enough, thanks to the responsive and easy-to-learn controls. The control scheme in UFC: Tapout is deceptively simple--as in the Tekken series, the four face buttons correspond to each of the fighter's striking limbs. Front and back steps can be used for alternate strikes, and each character is capable of a number of varied combinations. When pressed simultaneously, the right and left side buttons will perform counters, which deflect incoming strikes and often result in damaging takedowns. On the other hand, pressing either both punch buttons or both kick buttons will cause your fighter to go for a shoot (a leg takedown) or a bodyslam. Using the counters and takedown moves will result in taking the fight to the ground, where the complexity of the UFC fighting system shines. While on the ground, fighters are immediately placed into one of two positions--the mount or the guard. In the mount, the fighter on top is past the defending fighter's legs and thus in prime position to rear back and rain powerful blows, with great leverage behind his strikes. In the guard, the character on his back keeps his opponent close by keeping his legs hooked around those of the character on top. It's also possible to set the opponent in a highly vulnerable back mount. In a subtle change from the Dreamcast version, fighters are now much more capable of turning the opponent and reversing positions. Players who successfully turn their opponents while in the guard usually end up in the mount, and vice versa. Those fighters with greater grappling abilities are nearly impossible to turn, so ground counters come into play. Just like standing counters, ground counters rely upon the player to react quickly to the striking player's movements, except instead of deflecting a punch or kick, it's the right or left arm. Guessing games can come into play for equally skilled players, but quick reactions and strategy are key. Ground fighters can weaken the opponent with both body blows and bloodying facial strikes and can further mix things up by feinting strikes, hopefully drawing a whiffed counter attempt and opening up a stubborn defense. However, good defensive play can extend a fight greatly, since a blocking player cannot be rendered unconscious when successfully defending. While a fighter's stamina and health bar may be totally diminished, it takes a successful submission or unblocked strike to end the fight, which further emphasizes the importance of strong defensive play. Stopping strikes won't save players all the time, though--submission victories are a constant threat throughout a match, lending every Tapout battle a real sense of tension. When on the ground, and in some cases while standing, fighters are capable of attempting submission maneuvers, which have the effect of instantly depleting the opponent's health bar, which ends the fight. Submissions can range from simple arm and knee bars, to rear naked chokes, and more. Each fighter has his own style of submissions, and learning all of them, and the situations in which they're best suited, is incredibly fun. What's so great about these moves is that they're performed in nearly the same manner for each fighter so that game mechanics don't have to be relearned when switching from one character to another--only the circumstances in which to use them need to be anticipated. In effect, each character's ""special moves"" are intuitively learned, which breaks down the learning curve in such a way as to make experimenting with many different fighters simple and enjoyable. Matches in UFC: Tapout tend to end very quickly when fought between two players who haven't learned all of the intricacies of the game. Flash knockouts and quick submissions lead to exciting, bloody matches, similar to those that sometimes occur in the real-life events. The characters, while having individual strengths and weaknesses, are all very playable and provide for great variety, which can lead to extremely fun two-player sessions. However, there is a lot of room for developing your skills with the game's fighting system, which allows for dedicated players to explore the many different offensive and defensive capabilities of the fighters, leading to thoroughly exhausting and ultimately satisfying fights.Experienced players may find themselves disappointed that the game's computer opponents can no longer keep up with their talents. Aggressive play and well executed defense can lead to continuous win streaks in the arcade mode, even on the higher difficulty settings, although the computer can always win in a moment's notice with a surprise submission maneuver.  UFC: Tapout looks and plays great but falls relatively short in other areas besides its missing gameplay modes. Specifically, both its sound and its create-a-fighter feature could have been better. Many of the fighters do have unique voices, though they merely consist of grunts, and Bruce Buffer provides a capable introduction. But the crowd noises can be grating during matches. As for the create-a-fighter mode, you're able to pick from a good variety of fighting styles for your custom fighter, such as capoeira, sumo, and professional wrestling, but the customization options fall short from there on. There are limited facial options, despite the sizable number available, mainly because many of them look alike. You can also only allocate stat points for your fighter in stamina, health, punching power, and kicking power, so there's no way to make a custom grappler. The create-a-fighter mode is certainly worth playing around with for those who want to get a little more out of the game, but it's hardly one of the best parts of UFC: Tapout. If you're familiar with the fighters and fighting in the UFC, you'll truly appreciate the amount of detail that went in to giving all the characters moves that accurately simulate their real-life repertoires. Yet those who are unfamiliar with mixed martial arts competition can still appreciate the pick-up-and-play appeal of UFC: Tapout and its ability to provide exciting, realistic matches. You can always grab a controller, mash on the buttons, and have a lot of fun your first time with UFC, but continued play reveals more and more depth to the game. Those who've played the Dreamcast version may think that UFC: Tapout isn't very different from its predecessor, and they'd be right. But on its own merits, UFC: Tapout is an excellent, original fighting game that's especially fun for two players.


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981,Bomberman Tournament ,8.6, Bomberman Tournament is easily the best Bomberman to hit these shores since Saturn Bomberman in 1997.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/1/6/2213416-box_bmantour.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/bomberman-tournament-review/1900-2782867/,pos,"
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Bomberman. Every major console and handheld since 1990 has been host to at least one, if not five, of Hudson's wildly addictive Bomberman games. The latest is Bomberman Tournament for the Game Boy Advance, released here in North America by Activision. Although longtime fans will bemoan the absence of costume choices and ""Louie"" partners in the game's multiplayer battle mode, the immensely satisfying premise of ""bomb or be bombed"" remains well intact. Straying from a recent trend in Bomberman games, the Game Boy Advance release of Bomberman Tournament contains a fully realized multiplayer battle mode in addition to its single-player quest. With the aid of a couple of link cables, you and up to three friends can duke it out in any of the game's eight multiplayer battle arenas--each of which has its own unique gameplay twist. Whether you're avoiding buried explosives in the land mine stage, hashing it out with full power in the hi-power stadium, or just keeping it simple in the standard arena, the variety of locations offers something for everyone. The game supports both multi- and single-cartridge multiplayer options, although the load times for single-cartridge hosting are somewhat excessive. The joy of Bomberman lies in its simplicity. Stuck in an arena with three opponents, you need to lay time bombs in order to trap and obliterate the competition. The last person remaining is the winner. As you vanquish foes and clear away obstacles, a variety of power-up tiles appear. Randomly selected from a pool of 10 different items, these tiles can do all sorts of mischief, such as lengthen blast range, increase bomb capacity, boost speed, or even reverse a player's controls. There is a notable lack of match configuration options, such as costume choice and power-up disabling, but these absences really don't impact the overall multiplayer experience. Fans of the series will welcome the return of the familiar Bomberman battle anthem, while newcomers will delight in the crisp, highly animated visuals that are made possible by the GBA's 32-bit horsepower. For years, devotees to the Bomberman series have considered its single-player offerings to be little more than middling diversions from multiplayer competition. Bomberman Tournament's single-player mode may just change this impression, as its quest mode is actually a wonderful role-playing experience rife with all sorts of Zelda- and Pokemon-reminiscent enhancements. When the planet Phantarion comes under attack by the evil Brain Bomber, Doc and Max send Bomberman to investigate. Eight large cities and five puzzle-filled dungeons later, you'll have taken in a decent storyline, defeated six huge bosses, acquired a number of nifty gadgets, and even made a few friends along the way. Fundamental to Bomberman Tournament's quest mode are cute Pokemon-like creatures called karabons. These critters not only lend advice and augment Bomberman's capabilities, but they also add a scavenger-hunt aspect to an otherwise-standard RPG. In all, there are 25 different Karabons to acquire, either through chance meetings or by gene-splicing two lesser breeds together. From time to time, CPU characters will challenge you to Karabon battles, which, much like Pokemon battles, are one-on-one turn-based fights. Unlike Pokemon battles, however, the outcome of a match is determined before it ever begins, as your Karabon's prevailing stats and three-set attack strategies make up the long and short of combat. Perhaps the greatest surprise of all is that Bomberman Tournament's quest mode actually looks and sounds exceptional. The brunt of the action takes place in 2D from top-down vantage point, while Karabon battles and select minigames are presented in a side view. Each of the game's six different environments is vibrantly drawn, possesses only a minimum of rectangular features, and is detailed with all sorts of wacky nuances, such as trees that topple over or an earthen giant collapsed in the middle of a road. Better still, the animation and artistry of Bomberman and the game's other character sprites are easily on par with anything upcoming from either Nintendo or Enix. A sublime, somewhat orchestral soundtrack and rich sound effects lend further polish to an overwhelmingly solid presentation. Although Hudson has left the door wide open for a sequel thanks to the omission of key multiplayer options, Bomberman Tournament is easily the best Bomberman to hit these shores since Saturn Bomberman in 1997. Socialites who have been aching for an excellent multiplayer battle game would be silly to pass this one up. By the same token, 20 hours of fine-tuned single-player gameplay and a jaw-dropping end sequence make this an excellent game for the antisocial among us as well.
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982,Madden NFL 2002 ,8.6," If you're a PS2 owner wondering if you should get the Xbox version of Madden 2002 because it might look better, the answer is no.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/9/8/2214298-box_madden02.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2002-review/1900-2824319/,pos,"
Madden 2002 is the best game of simulation-style football on any platform. For the Xbox, it is slightly better-looking than its PS2 and GameCube counterparts, but that's it. Aside from a few graphical enhancements, the game is a virtual carbon copy of the PS2 and GameCube versions. With that said, Madden 2002 is as good a game of football as any fan of the series could hope for, and while it focuses on technical and simulation elements a bit more than the other pigskin games on the market, the game stays true to the Madden name.   Madden 2002 features two basic difficulty modes. The primary difference between the modes is that easy play starts you off with almost every bit of computer assistance turned on, including features designed to help bring new players up to speed. One such feature is a receiver indicator that lets you know exactly when it's safe to pass the ball. In either mode, you can choose from seven different game options: exhibition, season, franchise, tourney, custom league, practice, and situation. While most of Madden 2002's modes of play are pretty much par for the course, the franchise mode, which allows you to play up to 30 consecutive seasons, is really quite extraordinary. The situation mode is also an impressive addition, allowing you to put your players into just about any foreseeable scenario--be it 10 seconds on the clock, third down, and 30 yards to go or whatever other situation you can dream up. The options are nearly limitless.    With the game's extensive general manager options, you can do everything from creating a player to creating an entire team. The create-a-player feature in Madden 2002 is easily one of the most robust create-a-player modes, in any football game, ever. The height and weight stats are customizable, and there are more than 65 faces and 20 different face shapes to choose from. The create-a-player mode also includes seven other adjustable areas of a player's body such as thighs, arms, and waistlines. Each one of these areas can be customized to have a certain amount of fat and muscle. While visually impressive, these physical traits also directly tie into the player's ability on the field. For instance, a 6-foot-8-inch-380-pound behemoth would obviously make a lousy quarterback, and a 6-foot-4-inch-220-pound player wouldn't be much of a lineman. You can also customize your player's equipment, including shoe size, visor type, and face mask configuration, among other things. The create-a-team option is just as impressive, allowing you to pick the team's logo, customize the uniforms, and even create your own stadium. If you enjoy customizing your own team and players, Madden 2002 certainly has you covered.    In terms of gameplay, Madden 2002 on the Xbox plays a bit slower and feels a little less responsive than NFL Fever, mostly due to the fact that the game features a momentum-based physics system that accounts for the weight and speed of the player when determining how fast he can change direction when running. This system makes Madden 2002 feel a little unresponsive at first, but it can be adjusted to quickly. The AI is very solid, and the inclusion of an AI adjustment scale--which allows you to adjust the AI of certain aspects of the computer's game, such as receiving, running, run blocking, and so on--just makes it that much better. Visually, Madden 2002 for the Xbox looks great. It looks better than the PS2 version, but only marginally so. The game doesn't skip a frame of animation, even when every defensive player on the field gang-tackles a running back trying to make his way up the field. Plus, you'll notice during replays and postplay close-ups that the uniforms and helmets show much more noticeable wear and tear as the game goes on. The faces of the players look cleaner and move a little more smoothly than in the PS2 version. The rest of the game looks just as great as the PS2 and GC versions. Players' eyes move and track the ball, and their facial animations and textures look diverse and realistic. Plus, little extras like seeing the coaches and cheerleaders on the sidelines with ice chests and other players sitting on the bench really help give Madden 2002 a polished feel. The crowds are still made up of 2D bitmaps, but with the focus constantly on the on-field action, they're rarely even noticeable. The game's animation is also top-notch--seeing a player jumping through the air and making a one-handed catch is a very special treat. And the thrill of the moment doesn't stop there, as Madden 2002 has an extensive replay option that you can use to watch replays from virtually any angle.    The sound, music, and commentary in Madden 2002 are all quite good. The short hip-hop cuts that play briefly in between play selections and during the menus fit perfectly. The commentary and play-by-play banter of John Madden and Pat Summerall is fairly interesting. Pat and John have a lot of insightful things to say about the players and teams, and their style is almost conversational, giving the commentary a truly natural feel. The sound effects are very crisp, and sticking somebody with a good tackle will produce an extraordinary punch.    In the end, Madden 2002 is a great game of simulation-style football for the Xbox. If you're trying to decide between Madden and NFL Fever, it really depends on what type of football game you're looking for. If you're looking for a simulation that has incredible depth, Madden 2002 is your game. If you're a PS2 owner wondering if you should get the Xbox version of Madden 2002 because it might look better, the answer is no. The differences between the PS2 and Xbox versions are nominal at best and really don't warrant another purchase.



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983,Madden NFL 2002 ,8.6," If you enjoy simulation-style football games that play well, have incredible depth, and look great, Madden 2002 is your game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/9/8/2214298-box_madden02.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2002-review/1900-2824619/,pos,"
The port of Madden 2002 for the GameCube is yet another terrific version of what is the best simulation-style football game on the market. In comparison with the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game, Madden 2002 for the GameCube is almost identical. The game doesn't have all the graphical enhancements of the Xbox version, but it looks a little cleaner than the PS2 version. With that said, Madden 2002 is as great a game of football as nearly any fan of the series could hope for, and while it focuses on technical and simulation elements a bit more than the other games on the market, the game stays true to the Madden name.   Madden 2002 features two basic modes, easy play and normal. The primary difference between the modes is that easy play starts you off with almost every bit of computer assistance turned on, including features designed to help bring new players up to speed. One such feature is a receiver indicator that lets you know exactly when it's safe to pass the ball. In either mode, you can choose from seven different game options: exhibition, season, franchise, tourney, custom league, practice, and situation. While most of Madden 2002's modes of play are pretty much par for the course, the franchise mode, which allows you to play up to 30 consecutive seasons, is really quite extraordinary. The situation mode is also an impressive addition, allowing you to put your players into just about any foreseeable scenario--be it 10 seconds on the clock, third down, and 30 yards to go or whatever other situation you can dream up. The options are nearly limitless.    With the game's extensive general manager options, you can do everything from creating a player to creating an entire team. The create-a-player feature in Madden 2002 is easily one of the most robust create-a-player modes ever. The height and weight stats are customizable, and there are more than 65 faces and 20 different face shapes to choose from. The create-a-player mode also includes seven other adjustable areas of a player's body such as thighs, arms, and waistlines. Each one of these areas can be customized to have a certain amount of fat and muscle. While visually impressive, these physical traits also directly tie into the player's ability on the field. For instance, a 6-foot-8-inch-380-pound behemoth would obviously make a lousy quarterback. You can also customize your player's equipment, including shoe size, visor type, and face mask configuration, among other things. The create-a-team option is just as impressive, allowing you to pick the team's logo, customize the uniforms, and even create your own stadium. If you enjoy customizing your own team and players, Madden 2002 certainly has you covered.    In the gameplay department, Madden 2002 may play a bit slower and feel a little less responsive than you might think. This is mostly due to the fact that the game features a momentum-based physics system that accounts for the weight and speed of the player when determining how fast he can change direction when running. This system makes Madden 2002 feel a little unresponsive at first, but it can be adjusted to quickly. The GameCube controller also feels a bit awkward at first as well, but after a game or two, it actually works fairly well for the game. The AI is very solid, and the inclusion of an AI adjustment scale--which allows you to adjust the AI of certain aspects of the computer's game, such as receiving, running, run blocking, and so on--just makes it that much better.Visually, Madden 2002 for the GameCube looks very realistic. The game looks about the same as the PS2 version, minus the occasional slowdown, but it doesn't feature all the little visual enhancements of the Xbox version. Even still, you're not really missing out on anything, since you'd have to really scrutinize the the three versions to notice any significant difference. Even still, one has to wonder what a game like Madden 2002 could look like if it took full advantage the power of the GameCube or Xbox instead of being just a port of a PS2 game. Whatever the case, the game still looks really great. The player's eyes move and track the ball, and their facial animations and textures look diverse and realistic. Plus, little extras like seeing the coaches and cheerleaders on the sidelines with ice chests and other players sitting on the bench really help give Madden 2002 a polished feel. The crowds are still made up of 2D bitmaps, but with the focus constantly on the on-field action, they're rarely even noticeable. The game's animation is also top-notch--seeing a player jump through the air to make a one-handed catch is a very special treat. And the thrill of the moment doesn't stop there, as Madden 2002 has an extensive replay option that you can use to watch replays from virtually any angle.    The sound, music, and commentary in Madden 2002 are all quite good. The short rap and hip-hop cuts that play briefly in between play selections and during the menus fit perfectly. The commentary and play-by-play banter of John Madden and Pat Summerall is fairly interesting. Pat and John have a lot of insightful things to say about the players and teams, and their style is almost conversational, giving the commentary a more natural feel. The sound effects are very crisp, and sticking somebody with a good tackle will produce an extraordinary punch.    In the end, Madden 2002 is a great game of simulation-style football for the GameCube. If you're trying to decide whether to pick up Madden with your GameCube at launch, it really depends on what type of football game you want. If you enjoy simulation-style football games that play well, have incredible depth, and look great, Madden 2002 is your game. If you're a PS2 owner wondering if you should get the GameCube version of Madden 2002 because it might look better, the answer is no. The differences between the PS2 and GameCube versions are nominal at best and really don't warrant another purchase.



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984,Seven Games of the Soul ,4.4," The real problem with Seven Games of the Soul is that it's not only nonsensical, but it's also pretentious.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/5/2/1/3195-12521.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/seven-games-of-the-soul-review/1900-2673481/,neg,"
Seven Games of the Soul is the latest in Cryo's series of adventure games, all of which are loosely based on classic tales. In this case, the tale is Faust, and, in fact, the game was originally published in Europe as Faust: The Seven Games of the Soul. Like the other games in the series, including Ring and The New Adventures of the Time Machine, Seven Games of the Soul actually has little to do with its source material. There's a character named Faust and a villain named Mephistopheles. But apart from that, the game has more in common with dark adventure games such as Sanitarium and Bad Day on the Midway. Like these, Seven Games of the Soul is meant to be dark and atmospheric. It's set in a strange amusement park. And when it makes sense, it can be fairly creepy. Unfortunately, it doesn't make sense very often.   You play as Marcellus Faust, an elderly African American described as ""a wise old man from Mississippi."" You find yourself in an abandoned amusement park called Dreamland, and with no idea why you are there. A mysterious man with a bad smoking jacket and a strangely shaped chin appears and says he's Mephistopheles. He and ""the boss"" are arguing over seven souls, and you're meant to arbitrate their cases. This leads to a series of seven chapters, each based loosely on one of the seven deadly sins.   The first starts promisingly enough: A pair of conjoined twins are in love with the same man, and they act as moneylenders for the other residents of the midway. Mephisto offers both of them limitless wealth if they will give up the love of Hannibal. One accepts. This is where the story gets a bit confusing. Mephisto separates them, or something, and then one kills the other. Or something. Once this all plays out, you move on to the second story.   The second chapter deals with a scientist. Mephisto offers him limitless knowledge and immortality. He turns it down. Then you go on a treasure hunt for little rocks around his house. Then you build a homunculus with them. And so your hopes for an intriguing story, or even a comprehensible story, are completely dashed.   The game goes on like this: You'll track the life of a lustful artist and an overweight little girl. It'll get interesting for a brief moment and then degenerate once again into nonsense. The puzzles, for the most part, are a bit better than in previous Cryo adventures. But, as in virtually all of its predecessors, context is in short supply in Seven Games of the Soul. Often, you'll not even realize you needed to solve a puzzle, and exactly what you are supposed to be doing at any given time is also often a mystery.   What's strangest is that you actually don't act as an arbitrator in the cases at all. The game is completely linear, and the stories play out for you like badly acted, poorly translated little movies. At the end, you do have a choice, but it doesn't make much sense.   The game uses the second-generation Myst-clone format. You walk from preset location to preset location, at which point you can look around. The graphics are detailed but a bit bland. There are lots of huge, empty spaces, as well as lots of mysteriously inaccessible paths and walkways. The cutscenes look silly because of the human characters that appear unintentionally grotesque. Their awkwardness is matched by the quality of their voices, which are uniformly mediocre. At least Seven Games of the Soul features a few authentic jazz music tracks.   The real problem with Seven Games of the Soul is that it's not only nonsensical, but it's also pretentious. The title screen tells you, ""Faust: A Game of Soul."" What does this mean? Likewise, the dark nature of the game doesn't actually reveal any insights or interesting observations about human nature. Unlike in better games with similar themes, where the morbid plot and surreal situations actually add up to a larger, interesting picture, the shocking scenes in Seven Games of the Soul serve as little more than disturbing images, and not even very disturbing at that.   It comes closer to having a comprehensible story than Ring's or Time Machine's, and its puzzles are a bit more logical. But those who are looking for a dark adventure game are better off looking for older games like Amber, Sanitarium, or Bad Mojo. Or even strange old Inscape games, like Bad Day on the Midway or The Dark Eye. Maybe they weren't all great, but at least they made sense.
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985,Conflict Zone ,4.4," Conflict Zone isn't a completely terrible real-time strategy game, but there's nothing about it that will scream for you to play it.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/0/6/2210506-468716_50813_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/conflict-zone-review/1900-2825034/,neg,"
Conflict Zone is a modern-day military real-time strategy game that has a unique resource system. It also touts its advanced artificial intelligence. The enemy is supposed to react to your actions in different ways every time, and you can have computer-controlled commanders help you in battles. It all sounds great in theory, but in practice, you'll find the AI only sporadically makes intelligent moves. Conflict Zone has a number of other problems, too. When the first wave of frustration passes, you'll realize that Conflict Zone is a subpar RTS game whose few good ideas just don't add up.  Conflict Zone's very slow pacing makes it tedious.  Conflict Zone is the stage for a war between the International Corps for Peace (ICP), a peacekeeping force like NATO, and GHOST, a secret self-serving group of nations. You can choose to play as either side in both the campaign and skirmish missions. Both sides are presented fairly well in the campaign missions, and the story is told through mildly amusing cutscenes. But while the ICP and GHOST are ideologically different, they are almost identical in terms of units and structures. The ICP scenarios are mostly peacekeeping missions in which you have to rescue civilians and then eliminate GHOST forces. These get so repetitive that, before each mission, you'll start to feel as if you're getting ready to go to work again on Monday morning after the weekend. The GHOST missions are a bit better because less emphasis is placed on rescuing civilians. It sounds boring that both sides have the same units, and it is. When playing a skirmish map, you might as well flip a coin because it basically doesn't matter which side you're on. Actually, that's not entirely true--the ICP and GHOST take slightly different approaches with regard to civilians and the media.   The resource model in Conflict Zone is interesting and unique. One of your resources is ""popularity."" It determines what level of units and technology you possess at any given moment. It's supposed to represent the trust that your leaders have in you, so a higher popularity means that they'll let you have bombers and submarines. The media directly influences your popularity by observing the actions you make in the game.   Popularity is the biggest differentiating factor between the ICP and GHOST. The ICP is able to increase popularity to high levels quickly simply by rescuing civilians and taking them to a refugee camp in their base. The downside to this is that the ICP also loses popularity quite easily. First, people generally don't like long wars, so the ICP's popularity slowly decreases over time. Next, if your forces suffer humiliating losses, the people back home aren't going to like you. Lastly, lots of civilian deaths at your hand will bring down your popularity big-time. A few civilian deaths are acceptable, though. But you're still going to have to avoid many battles near towns, because explosives have area-effect damage that can cause civilian casualties easily. And town buildings resupply civilians, so you don't want those destroyed.   Raising the GHOST's popularity takes more work than raising the ICP's popularity. Instead of a refugee camp, you have an enlistment camp. When you bring civilians there, they are converted to a random infantry unit on your side. This will raise your popularity to 50 percent, but no higher. As a mercenary general, you have to impress the GHOST leaders with favorable footage of successful battles. You can recruit cameramen to follow your troops. But if you're routed in combat, expect popularity to drop.  Problems with unit balance and AI make it difficult to recommend.  The main resources you get are command points. While the popularity resource is interesting, the command point system is frustrating. It seems to take forever to gain enough command points to build a decent-sized force. Granted, some waiting is involved in just about all RTS games, but Conflict Zone takes this to extremes. You can increase the rate of command point acquisition through rescuing civilians, but most of the time, they're behind enemy lines. And there are not many structures in the game, so building your base won't take much time at all. Therefore, you're going to just sit there twiddling your thumbs until you have collected enough command points to build troops. It's perfectly viable to get up and brew a cup of coffee or watch TV for a while and then come back to the game. The computer will rarely attack your base with a threatening force, so you don't have to worry about that. The command point system gets even worse in skirmish mode. All the combatants will get command points at a relatively equal rate, so there's no way to disrupt an opponent's economy. This means that there will be a lot of stalemates unless someone makes a really bad mistake.   The gameplay doesn't make up for the poor resource model. You're supposed to be able to make diversionary strikes at enemy forces, causing the enemy to reinforce that area and leave another area largely undefended. This works only once in a while, so you're back to the basic RTS ideal of winning by squatting in your base until you have enough troops to completely overwhelm the enemy positions. Infantry are largely useless because they die so quickly and move slow compared with vehicles. Since explosions will kill an infantryman instantly and infantry usually clump together, one tank shell or bazooka shot will send bodies flying. It leaves you to wonder why you can build a medic to heal injured troops, since troops never seem to survive more than a single hit.Vehicles are much more useful because they take more of a beating before being destroyed; plus, you can repair them. Your main attack force is almost always going to be tanks and antiair defenses. Initially, the only infantry unit you'll ever want to build is the bazooka because it can fire at enemy aircraft, but even it soon outlives its usefulness since you'll gain antiair vehicles. So you'll learn to ignore infantry altogether. You're told that marines are good for sweeping towns because they won't accidentally kill civilians with splash damage, but in practice, you're better off just using vehicles--not caring if a few civilians die and not caring if you lose some popularity points. As long as you have enough to build tanks, you're fine.  The ICP and GHOST share exactly the same units for the most part.  The unit artificial intelligence is decent at best. Since units can't absorb much damage in Conflict Zone, there's no reason to concentrate fire on a single unit. The game does a good job with having units spread their fire on enemy groups. Your units will also fire while moving, which is a stress reliever in RTS games. On the other hand, unit pathfinding has some issues. Your units will eventually get to any point on the map, but they don't get there efficiently, much to your detriment. The biggest obstacles are bridges and ramps leading to elevation changes. Your groups can't seem to tackle these without getting slaughtered. The scale shows that five infantry and a couple of tanks can easily cross abreast of each other, yet they all insist on going single-file through these locations. Anyone can see the obvious choke points that result. There also aren't any formations to protect weaker units such as artillery and antiair troops. A group won't move at the rate of the slowest member. If your advancing tank column runs ahead and gets taken out, then you're going to have to retreat everything else that lagged behind. This is yet another reason why infantry are more trouble than they're worth. Some skirmish maps also place bases in areas where your army simply refuses to go. It appears to be impossible to win these scenarios with armies, so the last person to quit is the victor.   Conflict Zone includes up to four AI-controlled battle commanders per side that can assist you in combat. You can have them handle a variety of tasks such as improving your base, attacking or defending a position, and concentrating on rescuing civilians. The latter is probably the only option that's really useful. Rescuing civilians is a tedious task, and if someone else is willing to do it for you, more power to them. You can share resources with commanders and give them units to control on their own. But sharing command points means that you'll have to wait even longer to build a force. Now, you can do errands while they build up your base and a bunch of units. But by then, what's the point of playing the game in the first place? The commanders do have their fair share of problems. Sometimes they will refuse to build anything and just sit there collecting money. Perhaps it's a testament to the advanced AI in the game--as in the movie War Games, perhaps the computer is simply realizing that it's a part of a fruitless game.   The games' 3D graphics are utilitarian: They do the job but aren't anything to write home about. Unit models are bland, but they hold up well when you're zoomed in close. Yet another problem with infantry is that they are quite small when you're zoomed out, which is the view that a typical strategy gamer has to use to get a full scope of the battlefield. It's so bad that you can't even tell the difference between a cow and an enemy marine without floating your mouse over it first.  Conflict Zone's distinctive resource model can't save the game.  On the other hand, Conflict Zone's interface is nonobtrusive and works well enough. When you select a group of units, you're told the types and number you have selected on the left-hand side of the screen. You have a minimap in the top right-hand corner that expands when you float your mouse pointer over it. The only other main interface feature is the build menu in the bottom left. It's real easy to cycle through and build anything you want. You don't even have to select a factory-type building to buy units. The camera is done fairly well, but you can only use the mouse at the edge of the screen to adjust the perspective. There are other strategy games that let you hold down the buttons and move the mouse to rotate and elevate the camera--it's too bad that this wasn't implemented.   Conflict Zone isn't a completely terrible game, but there's nothing about it that will scream for you to play it. Most mainstream strategy gamers will most likely find it painful to play. Besides, this is a great time for strategy games, so Conflict Zone's fierce competition makes it even less recommendable. And if Conflict Zone's AI even gives up, then perhaps it's trying to tell you something. Hard-core strategy gamers might find something to like in the game's unusual resource system. But not even that and the game's cheap price of $19.99 justifies a purchase. You can easily pick up older games that look and play better than Conflict Zone.
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986,Army Men Advance ,4.4, Kids will likely enjoy its simplicity but will find it difficult to complete several of the game's goals due to the irritating hit detection and cramped areas.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/2/7/3343-13127.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/army-men-advance-review/1900-2773319/,neg,"
Army Men games were a moderate success when they were first introduced in 1999. After countless installments of the Sarge's Heroes franchise and just as many Air Attack releases, one of 3DO's few lucrative properties is running out of steam. This hasn't deterred the company from developing a new third-person Army Men game for the launch of the Game Boy Advance--the aptly titled Army Men Advance. While the series hasn't been overly impressive in 3D, it was hoped that the GBA's simplistic hardware would allow the company to inject some life into the property with a solid 2D installment.  Army Men Advance follows the same story that the Sarge's Heroes series has been beating into the dirt for three years now. Once again, the vile General Plastro and his army of tan figurines have decided to take over the world and it's up to Sarge and crack reporter Vikki G. to thwart the conquest. Throughout the game you'll be required to rescue team members, infiltrate tan bases, escape from a jail, investigate an extra terrestrial presence, and retrieve communications equipment. You can choose to play as either Sarge or Vikki, but the quests for each are identical and once a character has been chosen it's impossible to switch to the other unless you want to start again from the first mission.  The controls are simple yet unrefined. The A button allows you to fire your selected weapon, the B button tosses grenades, and the directional pad controls movement. Holding the right shoulder button keeps your weapon facing in one direction while you strafe in any direction and switching weapons is accomplished with the left shoulder button. This simplistic control scheme works well for the majority of the missions but in the tighter areas where there are many enemies its inadequacies become apparent. It takes far too long to get turned in the right direction and fire--resulting in constantly running away from enemies in hopes that you'll have time to turn around and shoot. In the areas where you have a small path to traverse, avoiding enemies is nearly impossible. This is made more infuriating due to the lack of a continue option--some of the missions can take some time to complete and if you die you must start again from the beginning. Another point of annoyance is that your character often gets stuck on objects and refuses to move. There are five weapons that you discover and use throughout the course of the game including an M-16, an M-60, a flamethrower, a bazooka, and grenades. The M-16 is the default weapon and it never runs out of ammunition. Using the higher-powered weapons isn't a necessity but they can make certain portions of the levels much easier. Beyond the third-person shooting that players have grown accustomed to with the Army Men franchise, there are several points in the game where you attempt to pilot gunboats and tanks through a gauntlet of enemies and hazards. There are even sections where you must cross rivers using floating logs a la Frogger. Once you rescue fellow soldiers you can take control of them and their special weapons. Considering how dull and predictable the average level can be, any sort of gameplay variety is a welcomed addition. The lack of any sort of multiplayer modes is also disappointing. While a head-to-head mode may be asking a bit much from a third-party launch game, even a cooperative mode would have increased the replay value considerably. Played from an isometric camera angle, Army Men Advance utilizes pseudo 3D graphics built out of 2D sprites. The 17 levels included in the game are similar to those from the other Army Men games. You must navigate bathtubs, bedrooms, garages, and base installations containing everyday objects at twenty times their normal size. Comprised mostly of flatly colored objects, the environments are so barren that the screen is sometimes one solid color. With only a handful of different enemies included in the game, combat also becomes monotonous rather quickly. The relative lack of bosses is also a point of contention. The explosions look passable in a cartoon sort of way but the rest of the graphics look like they could have been done on the Game Boy Color.  The sound included in Army Men Advance includes voice samples for when your character takes damage or for when the enemies die. But they are repeated constantly and quickly lose their allure. The sounds for guns and explosions are nothing special and could have been included as stock sound effects in the GBA development kit. The music consists of the traditional military fare with plenty of snare drums and flutes. The lead track sounds like a rip-off of the Hogan's Heroes theme. Army Men Advance perpetuates the franchise's legacy of mediocrity. Its graphics are at the bottom of the Game Boy Advance totem pole, none of the hardware's interesting features like multiplayer are utilized, and the one-player mode can be finished in one day. Kids will likely enjoy its simplicity but will find it difficult to complete several of the game's goals due to the irritating hit detection and cramped areas. With so many quality games available for the launch of the GBA, Army Men Advance should be near the bottom of your list.
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987,ESPN X Games Skateboarding ,4.4," Shoddy control, random frame rates, and unfocused level design make Konami's skateboarding game a prime target for a three-day rental.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/1/5/7/3356-13157.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/espn-x-games-skateboarding-review/1900-2804370/,neg,"
While the freestyle sports craze popularized by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater has hit just about every platform available, aside from a couple of snowboarding games, the PlayStation 2 has remained fairly ""extreme"" free. Konami has the honor of breaking in the PlayStation 2 as a platform for skateboarding games with its ESPN-licensed game, X Games Skateboarding. Like most modern skateboarding games, X Games borrows enough control and design mechanics from the Tony Hawk series to make it feel similar, but shoddy control, random frame rates, and unfocused level design make Konami's skateboarding game a prime target for a three-day rental.   Like any other skateboarding or BMX game currently on the market, X Games has a goal-based mode that challenges you to complete a set of objectives in each level. Each level has six goals. Two are score based, one is a series of checkpoints, one involves smashing a set of specific objects found throughout the level, one challenges you to do a long combo, and the last involves finding and grabbing a spinning X Games logo hidden somewhere in the level. Each goal earns you a license, and each level is unlocked by earning a certain number of licenses. The levels in this mode range from realistic street-based levels like hilly San Francisco or the suburbs of Los Angeles to more fantasy-based levels like a museum complete with grindable dinosaurs or a boat done up to look like the Titanic. While the levels are decent in theory, in execution, they suffer from boring design. There aren't many good, long trick lines in the levels, and some levels, like the museum, have way too many short sets of steps in them, which can be just enough to totally stop your momentum.   While the game has its goal-based arcade mode, the game's main mode is the X Games mode, which puts you into an authentic X Games skateboarding competition. You can choose between two different levels, vert and street. Each one lets you skate for one minute and then judges your performance. Neither competition is particularly challenging, and anyone who has spent the time it takes to get used to the game's mushy control should be able to get a gold medal in both levels without much effort. Additional modes include a practice mode, a small tutorial, and a few two-player competitions.   From a control standpoint, the game plays roughly the same as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, with a few additions. For example, you must hold up to continue kicking and gaining momentum. Also, there are three different air trick buttons, as opposed to Tony Hawk's two. Square is used for flip tricks, L1 and R1 are used for grabs, and circle is used for air tricks. A few tricks are a little more complicated to do than simply pushing a direction and hitting a button. A McTwist, for example, requires you to spin two full circles on the D-pad and push the circle button. While the game features more trick buttons, that doesn't automatically translate to more tricks, as you use only the four compass directions for tricks, not the diagonals. As a whole, the game feels a little stiff. Turning isn't quite as sharp as you'd want it to be, even when your board is adjusted for better turning. The skaters auto-center themselves on vert tricks, so as long as you let go of the spin and trick buttons with enough time for your skater to auto-correct, you'll land every single trick. The game doesn't really have any clear-cut way to link tricks together for Tony Hawk 2-like endless combos. You land into a manual, but the game doesn't let you ollie out of a manual into another trick. Finally, the game rewards button-mashing on vert tricks, making it easy to put together decent air combos.Like most other skateboarding games, X Games features professional skaters. The roster is crowned by former Tony Hawk skater Bob Burnquist, and he is joined by Colin McKay, Chris Senn, Kerry Getz, Carlos De Andrade, Lincoln Ueda, Chad Fernandez, and Rick McCrank. Each skater has two costumes, and you can unlock extra boards by finding them in the arcade mode levels. However, aside from some slight statistical differences that affect speed, turning, and ollie height, the skaters play identically. Outside of four skater-specific tricks, each skater has the same exact trick set--even the four special tricks are done the same way for each skater. What's more, the developers couldn't even be bothered to name all the tricks--aside from your superspecial trick, which totally empties your special meter, the other three tricks are generically named (for example, ""special grab"").   From a presentation standpoint, Skateboarding puts on a pretty weak show. The character models look OK and animate reasonably well, but their surroundings don't fare quite so well. The environments are a little bland, and the larger outdoor arenas are plagued by extremely noticeable draw-in. As you skate up the street in the suburbs, you'll see houses quickly fade into view at an unacceptably close distance. To make matters worse, the frame rate will occasionally take a major dive, usually when you're doing something as simple as wallriding or wrecking. When you combine the slowdown with the pop-up, the resulting game is one that seems almost unfinished at times. While the game's sound effects are pretty bland, the soundtrack picks up a bit of the slack, featuring tracks by bands such as American Hi-Fi, Linkin Park, New Found Glory, Voodoo Glow Skulls, and Sum 41, which contributes ""Fat Lip,"" the same song that recently appeared in THQ's PS2 motocross game, MX 2002.   In the end, ESPN X Games Skateboarding is a pretty weak game. With poor control, counterintuitive level design, and drab graphics, X Games Skateboarding is best suited for skateboarding fans looking for a quick fix in the form of a rental. Save your money and wait for something better to come along.
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988,The Weakest Link ,4.4, Only those who like collecting anything to do with a show that probably won't last more than a season or two in the States should seriously consider The Weakest Link.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/1/5/7/2215157-477563_22898_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-weakest-link-review/1900-2818779/,neg,"
 What is it about Anne Robinson, host of the British-import quiz show The Weakest Link, that makes her appealing? Her flowing trench coat and constant sneer immediately conjure images of Orwell's 1984, and the wittiness of the insults she directs at losing contestants is dulled by their harshness. While her show is a hit in the UK, it's not doing quite as well here in the States as NBC execs had hoped. The recent rash of celebrity players instead of common contestants is a sure sign that someone at the top knows the show needs a shot in the arm. Activision's PC game adaptation of the show could have also benefited from some more attention. It doesn't take someone with a master's degree in marketing to know that people who don't like the show won't buy the game. But the truth is that so little has been done to jazz up the game's presentation that only those who long to hear more abuse spew from Anne Robinson's curled lips will find enough here to justify spending 20 bucks.Things get off to a shaky start with the introduction, a hiss-filled FMV sequence that concludes with a truly scary image of Robinson's face filling the monitor as she spits out, ""I will tell the world you are...the weakest link!"" This is the first of seemingly dozens of times you'll hear that phrase during a game session. You have the option to tweak a few game parameters: You can assume total responsibility for banking winnings, adjust how often questions from each of the five categories appear, and choose whether or not you want to see an especially abusive video clip from Anne Robinson should you be chosen as the weakest link. Incidentally, all the FMV clips are just as hiss-filled as the intro.Whether you choose a single game or the championship mode (in which you must win four consecutive shows in a bid to ""win"" $50 million), you compete against six computer-controlled opponents out of a pool of two dozen. Each specializes in several of the categories and reacts in accordance with his or her bio, which given in the manual. For instance, the computer programmer says nerdy programmer types of things like, ""His download time appears to be far too long,"" and, ""She must have suffered a system crash during that round."" Such embarrassingly unfunny lines don't do much to help the game.Though the manual says The Weakest Link computer game ""plays exactly as the television show,"" that's simply not possible. Even the harshest critic wouldn't expect Robinson to actually record 100,000 different questions (the game box claims 100,000 questions are included), and of course there's the issue of how the software would recognize the specific answers generated by the user. Instead, each question is displayed onscreen as Robinson repeats several generic lines such as, ""In nature, which one of these is correct?"" or ""Select the correct answer."" You're then given a choice of four answers with only the first letter (sometimes first two letters) of each displayed. Your choices of actions are the same as in the show: You can bank any team winnings to a safe repository before answering, attempt to answer the question correctly and increase the value of the next question, or pass on the question. Pass is a rather worthless option, since it causes any money that hasn't been banked to be lost--the same result as answering incorrectly.While isn't exactly the same as the show, it's awfully close--and there's the rub. Watching a TV show is a passive experience, a quality you don't want in an interactive game. Waiting for your question is boring enough, especially at the start of a game, when there are six other players, but the real kicker is the dead time between the six rounds. Between two and two-and-a-half minutes are spent on voting off the weakest player. These sequences are filled with player remarks and Robinson's barbs, and there's not a thing you can do to speed up the process. You can pound the space bar and jab the Esc key all you like, but if you want to finish that game, you'll have to sit through this stuff between every round. In short, you spend more time watching than playing--never a good quality in a PC game.As for the alleged inclusion of 100,000 different questions, you'll likely find that hard to believe. We not only experienced question repeats within just three games, but we also saw different questions about the same topic during the same round of questions--two King Kong questions within 30 seconds.In all, the single-player game can be interesting for several hours, unless you're an Anne Robinson maniac who doesn't mind hearing the same remarks over and over after that. The multiplayer mode should give the game some replay value, but it's limited because only hot-seat play is supported--there's no way to play online, over a network, or via modem. Multiplayer is also a bit clunky because only programmable gamepads can be used for both selecting and answering questions. You can use the D-pad to select one of the answers and have a friend hit the space bar for you, however.But the biggest drawback to hot-seat multiplayer in The Weakest Link is obvious: This isn't the sort of game you want to play with friends. It's one thing to gang up with others to vote out a weak player on a game show where you could walk out rich (or watch strangers doing that as you relax in your living room), but doing it with friends simply isn't very rewarding. In short, it just doesn't have the same social appeal as more conventional competitive quiz games like Trivial Pursuit or You Don't Know Jack.The Weakest Link's $19.95 retail price could have been tempting if you were able to play the game online, because online play is the only feature that could have made the game more than a novelty. In the end, only those who like collecting anything to do with a show that probably won't last more than a season or two in the States should seriously consider The Weakest Link.  
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989,Star Trek: Shattered Universe ,4.4," Perhaps if it existed in an alternate universe, Star Trek: Shattered Universe might be a game worth playing. Unfortunately, this is not the case.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/4/5/2212745-box_stsu.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-trek-shattered-universe-review/1900-6086947/,neg,"
 Star Trek games, much like the many other facets of the Star Trek franchise, tend to be either very good or very poor, without much of a gray area in between. Star Trek: Shattered Universe, the latest game to bear the Trek name, regrettably falls toward the poorer branch of the Trek universe. Brought to you by TDK Mediactive and developer Starsphere Interactive, Shattered Universe is essentially a lazily designed space shooter that takes place inside an alternate universe depicted in an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series called ""Mirror, Mirror."" In this universe, everything is backward--the Federation is now an evil empire, former foes are now your allies, and everybody either has a scar, a goatee, or something similar to clearly indicate that you are most definitely in some sort of bizarro universe. This concept itself obviously isn't a terribly original one, and Shattered Universe's gameplay mechanics are equally pedestrian in design, hopelessly trying to mirror bigger, better space combat games.   Star Trek: Shattered Universe is about the most boring and unimaginative space combat game you'll ever find.  There isn't a whole lot to Shattered Universe's plot beyond an extremely basic setup. Essentially, you play as a nameless member of the crew of the U.S.S. Excelsior, commanded by George Takei's Captain Sulu. At the beginning of the game, the Excelsior is called to aid the U.S.S. Enterprise, which has become trapped in some sort of space anomaly (and also happens to be captained by Walter Koenig's Commander Chekov). Upon its arrival, the Excelsior is pulled into the anomaly and is spit out into an unfamiliar universe. A battle with an alternate version of the Enterprise--captained by a now-evil Chekov--then ensues, and although you are eventually victorious, the anomaly disappears, leaving you no immediate escape back to your own universe. From there on out, the Excelsior's task is to get home by trying to find this anomaly once again. Along the way, you'll engage in a lot of meaningless combat while meandering around this strange universe, performing one dull task after another.  There are 19 missions in Shattered Universe. Each mission has multiple objectives, some of which you find out at the very beginning of the mission and some of which appear only after you're neck-deep into one. Each mission is prefaced by a somewhat drawn-out and perplexingly, uninformative briefing from Captain Sulu. Missions primarily have you flying around in one of the game's several small fighter ships--which include a couple of Federation-brand fighters, a Klingon Bird of Prey, and a Romulan Shrike--blasting other fighters, collecting random items, and occasionally engaging starships. The problem with the game's missions is that they never really feel like they have much purpose, nor are they particularly well paced.   Several chapters require you to go on ""scout"" missions, where you essentially fly from one navigation point to another, collecting minerals for some unknown reason, and in between, you shoot a lot of fighters. In another mission, you have to protect the Excelsior from an Enterprise attack. Your goal is to damage the Enterprise so that it will retreat. Once you've done that, the Enterprise launches a warhead at the Excelsior. Sulu informs you that the warhead is too heavily shielded to be destroyed, so you need to go destroy the rest of the Enterprise's fighter squadron in three minutes. How does destroying a group of fighters save the Excelsior from a seemingly indestructible warhead, and why does the task need to be completed in three minutes? No satisfactory answers are given for these or any number of other questions that will likely pop into your head while playing the game. Additionally, most of the missions can take anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes to complete, and it is far too easy for you to end up getting smoked right at the end of a mission when some late-mission objective presents itself out of the blue, thus causing you to have to start all over again.  These problems might be forgivable if Shattered Universe's combat were well designed, but unfortunately it isn't. Each fighter ship has three basic weapons: a basic phaser, a bolt weapon (which is like a quick, short phaser burst), and photon torpedoes. When engaging smaller ships, really, the only weapon that is of any use to you is the basic phaser, since the leading targeting reticle for your targeted ship isn't accurate enough for your bolt weapon, and photon torpedoes are completely useless unless you're attacking a starship. Also, despite the fact that the game can be rather trying, the AI of opposing ships isn't especially brilliant. Fighters have some rather rudimentary attack patterns that can be easily avoided with some decent flying skills. As for the starships, the only real challenge comes from the fact that their weapons are pretty adept at taking you out in only a couple of short bursts. However, some missions do require you to destroy starships, so generally, your best bet is to find a spot within tight range of the opposing ship--so that its weapons can't lock onto you--and start hammering the attack buttons for the several minutes it takes to destroy the ship. If this doesn't sound like much fun, well, you're right, it isn't.  As far as Shattered Universe's presentational aspects go, you can't help but think that the developers really didn't put much effort into any of them. The game's graphics definitely aren't anything special--ship designs lack much in the way of detail, and the various effects used for phaser fire, explosions, and the like all look extremely low-rent. The same can be said for the multitude of different space environments in the game. Though there's a decent variety of different background elements, like nebulae, space stations, asteroid fields, and even occasional planets, none of them look in any way impressive. The game also features a number of awful CG cutscenes, with in-game versions of Sulu and Chekov that are laughable at best. Every CG character moves in painfully slow motion, and the actual renderings barely look anything like the actors, especially Sulu, who looks like some kind of decrepit skeleton. The PS2 and Xbox versions of the game look near-identical in every way. For what it's worth, the Xbox version does support 480p, though it doesn't look much better when using it.  Shattered Universe is to Star Trek games what Star Trek V was to Star Trek movies.  Shattered Universe's sound design is equally as unimpressive as the game's visuals. It should have been a simple task for George Takei and Walter Koenig to reprise their longtime roles as Sulu and Chekov in Shattered Universe, and yet, somehow, when you listen to them talk in the game, it sounds more like this is their first experience with the roles. Takei phones in his performance horribly, flatly reading every line as though it were some kind of college dissertation, and as for Koenig, though he tries to emphasize the inherent ""evilness"" of his mirror-universe character, it just comes off more as unintentional parody than anything else. In terms of in-game sound, there's a limited amount of music that plays throughout the game, as well as some rather bland-sounding phaser and explosion sounds, but not much else.  Perhaps if it existed in an alternate universe, Star Trek: Shattered Universe might be a game worth playing. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In our universe, Shattered Universe's dull, unimaginative gameplay, redundant mission structure, and highly unimpressive production values make for a pretty lousy game all around. As an attempt at Star Trek, it wastes every opportunity given to it to do something even mildly interesting or entertaining, and it certainly won't please any fan of the franchise. As for its place among space combat games, it is completely unimpressive in every imaginable way and is easily shown up by practically every game currently available in the genre today. There's just nothing about Shattered Universe worth recommending to Star Trek fans or space shooter fans, and if you fall into either category, you're definitely better off looking elsewhere for your particular needs.  
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990,Star Trek: Shattered Universe ,4.4," Perhaps if it existed in an alternate universe, Star Trek: Shattered Universe might be a game worth playing. Unfortunately, this is not the case.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/4/5/2212745-box_stsu.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-trek-shattered-universe-review/1900-6086948/,neg,"
 Star Trek games, much like the many other facets of the Star Trek franchise, tend to be either very good or very poor, without much of a gray area in between. Star Trek: Shattered Universe, the latest game to bear the Trek name, regrettably falls toward the poorer branch of the Trek universe. Brought to you by TDK Mediactive and developer Starsphere Interactive, Shattered Universe is essentially a lazily designed space shooter that takes place inside an alternate universe depicted in an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series called ""Mirror, Mirror."" In this universe, everything is backward--the Federation is now an evil empire, former foes are now your allies, and everybody either has a scar, a goatee, or something similar to clearly indicate that you are most definitely in some sort of bizarro universe. This concept itself obviously isn't a terribly original one, and Shattered Universe's gameplay mechanics are equally pedestrian in design, hopelessly trying to mirror bigger, better space combat games.   Star Trek: Shattered Universe is about the most boring and unimaginative space combat game you'll ever find.  There isn't a whole lot to Shattered Universe's plot beyond an extremely basic setup. Essentially, you play as a nameless member of the crew of the U.S.S. Excelsior, commanded by George Takei's Captain Sulu. At the beginning of the game, the Excelsior is called to aid the U.S.S. Enterprise, which has become trapped in some sort of space anomaly (and also happens to be captained by Walter Koenig's Commander Chekov). Upon its arrival, the Excelsior is pulled into the anomaly and is spit out into an unfamiliar universe. A battle with an alternate version of the Enterprise--captained by a now-evil Chekov--then ensues, and although you are eventually victorious, the anomaly disappears, leaving you no immediate escape back to your own universe. From there on out, the Excelsior's task is to get home by trying to find this anomaly once again. Along the way, you'll engage in a lot of meaningless combat while meandering around this strange universe, performing one dull task after another.  There are 19 missions in Shattered Universe. Each mission has multiple objectives, some of which you find out at the very beginning of the mission and some of which appear only after you're neck-deep into one. Each mission is prefaced by a somewhat drawn-out and perplexingly, uninformative briefing from Captain Sulu. Missions primarily have you flying around in one of the game's several small fighter ships--which include a couple of Federation-brand fighters, a Klingon Bird of Prey, and a Romulan Shrike--blasting other fighters, collecting random items, and occasionally engaging starships. The problem with the game's missions is that they never really feel like they have much purpose, nor are they particularly well paced.   Several chapters require you to go on ""scout"" missions, where you essentially fly from one navigation point to another, collecting minerals for some unknown reason, and in between, you shoot a lot of fighters. In another mission, you have to protect the Excelsior from an Enterprise attack. Your goal is to damage the Enterprise so that it will retreat. Once you've done that, the Enterprise launches a warhead at the Excelsior. Sulu informs you that the warhead is too heavily shielded to be destroyed, so you need to go destroy the rest of the Enterprise's fighter squadron in three minutes. How does destroying a group of fighters save the Excelsior from a seemingly indestructible warhead, and why does the task need to be completed in three minutes? No satisfactory answers are given for these or any number of other questions that will likely pop into your head while playing the game. Additionally, most of the missions can take anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes to complete, and it is far too easy for you to end up getting smoked right at the end of a mission when some late-mission objective presents itself out of the blue, thus causing you to have to start all over again.  These problems might be forgivable if Shattered Universe's combat were well designed, but unfortunately it isn't. Each fighter ship has three basic weapons: a basic phaser, a bolt weapon (which is like a quick, short phaser burst), and photon torpedoes. When engaging smaller ships, really, the only weapon that is of any use to you is the basic phaser, since the leading targeting reticle for your targeted ship isn't accurate enough for your bolt weapon, and photon torpedoes are completely useless unless you're attacking a starship. Also, despite the fact that the game can be rather trying, the AI of opposing ships isn't especially brilliant. Fighters have some rather rudimentary attack patterns that can be easily avoided with some decent flying skills. As for the starships, the only real challenge comes from the fact that their weapons are pretty adept at taking you out in only a couple of short bursts. However, some missions do require you to destroy starships, so generally, your best bet is to find a spot within tight range of the opposing ship--so that its weapons can't lock onto you--and start hammering the attack buttons for the several minutes it takes to destroy the ship. If this doesn't sound like much fun, well, you're right, it isn't.  As far as Shattered Universe's presentational aspects go, you can't help but think that the developers really didn't put much effort into any of them. The game's graphics definitely aren't anything special--ship designs lack much in the way of detail, and the various effects used for phaser fire, explosions, and the like all look extremely low-rent. The same can be said for the multitude of different space environments in the game. Though there's a decent variety of different background elements, like nebulae, space stations, asteroid fields, and even occasional planets, none of them look in any way impressive. The game also features a number of awful CG cutscenes, with in-game versions of Sulu and Chekov that are laughable at best. Every CG character moves in painfully slow motion, and the actual renderings barely look anything like the actors, especially Sulu, who looks like some kind of decrepit skeleton. The PS2 and Xbox versions of the game look near-identical in every way. For what it's worth, the Xbox version does support 480p, though it doesn't look much better when using it.  Shattered Universe is to Star Trek games what Star Trek V was to Star Trek movies.  Shattered Universe's sound design is equally as unimpressive as the game's visuals. It should have been a simple task for George Takei and Walter Koenig to reprise their longtime roles as Sulu and Chekov in Shattered Universe, and yet, somehow, when you listen to them talk in the game, it sounds more like this is their first experience with the roles. Takei phones in his performance horribly, flatly reading every line as though it were some kind of college dissertation, and as for Koenig, though he tries to emphasize the inherent ""evilness"" of his mirror-universe character, it just comes off more as unintentional parody than anything else. In terms of in-game sound, there's a limited amount of music that plays throughout the game, as well as some rather bland-sounding phaser and explosion sounds, but not much else.  Perhaps if it existed in an alternate universe, Star Trek: Shattered Universe might be a game worth playing. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In our universe, Shattered Universe's dull, unimaginative gameplay, redundant mission structure, and highly unimpressive production values make for a pretty lousy game all around. As an attempt at Star Trek, it wastes every opportunity given to it to do something even mildly interesting or entertaining, and it certainly won't please any fan of the franchise. As for its place among space combat games, it is completely unimpressive in every imaginable way and is easily shown up by practically every game currently available in the genre today. There's just nothing about Shattered Universe worth recommending to Star Trek fans or space shooter fans, and if you fall into either category, you're definitely better off looking elsewhere for your particular needs.  
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991,Loons: The Fight for Fame ,4.4," On top of its technical demerits, the game fails to capture the essence of the vicious slapstick comedy that makes the Looney Tunes cast of characters so endearing.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/0/1/2214201-box_ltfff.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/loons-the-fight-for-fame-review/1900-2894771/,neg,"
Watching old Looney Tunes cartoons, it can be easy to question the validity of all the media scapegoating that the likes of games such as Doom or Grand Theft Auto III have suffered. Anvils, sticks of TNT, big black bulbous bombs, and severe physical trauma are all as central to the Warner Bros. brand of comedy as the characters themselves. Now, Warthog has created an arena-based fighting game on the premise of all this cartoony violence. Really, it's a pretty solid concept that could have potentially made for some absurdly over-the-top action, but unfortunately Loons gets mired in the execution, and virtually every aspect of the gameplay is fumbled.  Rocky and Mugsy haven't thought this plan all the way through.  The story behind Loons is paper-thin. Rocky and Mugsy, the mismatched pair of gangsters that have been bumping heads with Bugs Bunny since the '30s, have cooked up a scheme: They plan on running a film studio into the ground by making terribly expensive terrible movies and then buying up all the worthless studio stock for pennies on the dollar. The game never explains how these two have gotten into a position to spend the studio's money, or how they plan to turn a profit once the studio tanks, but of course, this is of little consequence. After hiring Yosemite Sam as their director, Rocky and Mugsy prepare a series of screen tests designed to single out the worst actor they can find to be the star of their bomb, and the four candidates for the job are Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester the Cat, and the Tasmanian Devil. And so begins Loons: The Fight for Fame.   Bearing a perfunctory resemblance to Capcom's Power Stone series, Loons pits four characters against each other in a multitiered arena. Lying around these arenas you'll find tons of ""gizmos,"" which can be used to attack your opponents to greater effect. Many of the gizmos come straight out of the ACME catalog, including a spring-loaded boxing glove and falling anvils. The obvious objective here is to blow away your opponents, but Loons also puts heavy stock in its star power system. Each character has a star meter, which functions much like a conventional life meter. A round will start with the star meter at half full, and it's up to you to fill it. This can be done by picking up scripts you find lying around the set, as well as by activating props at the director's cue, like a comically tiny motorcycle, a whirligig, or a giant laser.   Once your star meter is full, you can activate a minigame, most of which are crazy takes on familiar games like the arcade classic Space Invaders or Snake--friend to cell phone users everywhere. All of this business with the star meter is necessary only in the single-player fight-for-fame mode, and only because the game will often require you to activate a certain number of props or minigames before you can advance to the next level. The combat system basically comes down to mashing on the A button to attack your opponents, and the enemy AI is so thickheaded, usually it's not even necessary to pick up a gizmo to win in the single-player game. The collision detection is downright lousy, making a simple task like hopping up a series of crates a joyless frustration. The physics system on a whole is just a mess, and it's not uncommon to see characters standing in the middle of thin air or getting snagged on a piece of the environment. In fact, in the very first level it's possible to get stuck behind a door indefinitely. The game also offers multiplayer and arcade modes, where up to four players can fight it out in any arenas or minigames you've unlocked in the single-player game, though you'll probably find that playing them once is enough.  Loons is marred by some serious physics and collision-detection problems.  It would seem most appropriate for Bugs, Daffy, and the other Looney Tunes characters to be fleshed out using the popular cel-shading effect, but the execution of this effect in Loons simply doesn't do them justice. The rough, uncertain lines that define the characters are not only technically unimpressive, but they betray the clean look in which they are usually rendered. The coarse presentation of the characters is made worse by some shoddy self-shadowing. The arenas in which you'll do battle are usually vaguely reminiscent of an old Looney Tunes setup, including an old Western saloon, a moon base, and a rocky desert canyon location that may or may not be Albuquerque. While the quality of the voice work found in Loons would most likely do Mel Blanc proud, the dialogue itself is miles away from funny, and the limited amount of dialogue drives it further from funny and closer to annoying. The music that accompanies the onscreen mayhem is decent cartoony filler, though it's nowhere near the level of the work of classic Merrie Melodies musician Carl Stalling.   Loons: The Fight for Fame essentially falls short on all of its aspirations. The combat is overly simplistic, the cel-shaded presentation is unattractive and unrefined, and the game is brimming with collision-detection and physics bugs. On top of its technical demerits, the game fails to capture the essence of the vicious slapstick comedy that makes the Looney Tunes cast of characters so endearing.    
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992,Madden NFL 2003 ,8.6, There's a lot to like about Madden 2003.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/6/4/2216864-box_madden03.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/madden-nfl-2003-review/1900-2877775/,pos,"
The development team at EA Sports has made a few changes and additions for this year's version of Madden. Most will probably notice that the momentum aspect of gameplay has been toned down, allowing you to perform sharper cuts up the field and generally have a little more control over the players on the field. But the changes to the gameplay are insignificant when compared with the sheer number and depth of the modes that Madden 2003 offers. There's a new minicamp mode that offers dozens of incredibly fun minigames, an in-depth franchise mode, numerous customizable features, and one of the most versatile play editors to date.  There's a new minicamp mode that offers dozens of incredibly fun minigames, an in-depth franchise mode...  If you're relatively knowledgeable about the sport of professional football, then you'll want to check out some of the customizable options, namely the playbook editor, before jumping into a game. Like with most other playbook editors, you can scour the various playbooks of coaches around the league and pick plays that you'd like to add to your own repertoire, but this option also gives you the ability to create your own unique formation and then create an entirely new play using that formation. Basically, you'll be presented with a grid and a series of circles representing the players on the field. You can move the receiver, tight end, and running back circles almost anywhere on the grid, which gives you the opportunity to create some really weird-looking formations, but you can only move the quarterback in a line perpendicular to the center. In addition, you still need to have the proper number of players at the line of scrimmage, so some limitations have been added to accommodate the rules. When you're done setting up the formation, you can go into the create-a-play option and decide whether it will be a running or a passing play. If it's a running play, then you can indicate which direction the running back has to go and indicate blocking assignments for offensive linemen and receivers. Conversely, if you're creating a passing play, you can either use one of the preset routes (such as a post, a streak, or a curl) or create your own route--needless to say, you can create some pretty crazy routes that will undoubtedly make things difficult for the computer- or human-controlled opponent playing zone coverage. Finally, you can test the play and make any final adjustments before integrating it into your playbook. The defensive play editor is almost identical--it lets you make your own formations and place defensive players just about anywhere on the grid. Other editing options include the ability to make your own team and players and adjust rosters before starting the game.   ...numerous customizable features, and one of the most versatile play editors to date.  As with any football game, the heart of Madden NFL 2003 is its franchise mode, in which you can take a team through numerous NFL seasons while trying to get to the Super Bowl every year. After you select your team, you can go through the roster and switch players around or just look at some statistics to see who some of your better players are. You can also make changes to your coaching options by selecting a primary defense type, as well as your preference for offensive and defensive strategies. In addition, there's a league news section where you can find out about all the latest transactions or injuries that have occurred over the course of the season. Making trades, signing free agents, and other such front-office duties are a pretty straightforward affair--you can trade up to three players at once, offer contracts to free agents, release players, or re-sign players and extend their contracts. When you attempt to sign a free agent, you'll receive comments from that player's agent explaining what the player wants, whether it's a long-term contract or money. These agents are pretty staunch individuals, and they tend not to give in unless you meet a player's demands, but of course, you always need to keep the salary cap in mind when making trades or other transactions, otherwise you could end up hurting your franchise down the line.    Naturally, the franchise mode starts with the preseason, which is actually a valuable period in Madden NFL 2003 because it gives you a chance to develop some of your players' skills, particularly those of your rookies. At the end of the preseason, you'll have a chance to see if any of your players have developed and what areas they've developed in, such as speed and strength. You can then go through the full season and attempt to make your way to the Super Bowl.In the off-season, there are several things you'll need to take care of. First, you have to see which players are retiring and then adjust your rookie scouting accordingly so you can fill the position with an adequate player as quickly as possible. The scouting in Madden NFL 2003 is handled pretty well--you'll be given a big list of rookies and a limit on the number of players you can actually scout, so you have to make some wise selections based on the projected round that the player will be drafted in. After you've made your selections, you'll get some basic physical information on the player, such as his 40-yard dash time, and have an opportunity to schedule additional scouting sessions with the players you've selected.  You'll undoubtedly enjoy the numerous modes it has to offer.  Next, you'll have to re-sign players and go after any potential key free agents who might be available before entering the draft. The NFL draft lets you go after any rookies who have the potential to be great players in the NFL, and in Madden 2003, you'll be able to look at a list of all the rookies and a list of the rookies you've scouted, both of which can be sorted by position. After several rounds, the draft will end and you'll then have the option to sign any of the rookies you've drafted, but like with free agency, a player's agent won't necessarily give in to your initial offer, so you might have to negotiate a little before signing that key rookie. When you're done with the signings, you can reorder the roster and start yet another season.    The franchise mode is probably where you'll spend most of your time in Madden NFL 2003, but there are several other gameplay modes to choose from, one of which is the incredibly fun minicamp. This mode is essentially a collection of minigames spread out over different NFL camp facilities across the country. You can participate in a variety of different drills, ranging from pocket presence (in which you have to avoid tennis balls being shot at you while staying in a small circle and complete a pass to a dummy receiver) to linebacker chase and tackle, where you have to tackle a running back as he makes his way up through a line of moving blocking dummies. In addition, upon completing the minigame, you'll be moved into a game situation that mimics the skills taught in the minigame. This mode is incredibly fun and can be quite challenging, but the fact that you can gain points to unlock Madden cards (which can unlock secret teams and options) provides enough incentive.    Another interesting mode in Madden NFL 2003 is football 101. In this mode, you can pick just about any play and have John Madden explain the formation and what coaches typically use it for. In addition, he'll break down the play and show how the defense is supposed to be pulled apart in order to make the play successful, whether it's a pass or a run. Madden shares quite a bit of insight into the sport (so much that it makes his game commentary seem weak by comparison), and casual fans may actually find it interesting to see firsthand what makes football such a strategic sport.   The changes to the gameplay are insignificant when compared with the sheer number and depth of the modes that Madden 2003 offers.  While the running game is pretty solid overall, it does have a few lingering problems, the most apparent of which is line blocking, or the lack thereof. Even with a high-powered offense, it seems like your offensive line is rarely capable of clearing a large enough hole in the defensive line that you can run through and not collide with any of your teammates. It's incredibly frustrating that your running back will get caught behind a lineman or just make enough contact so it slows your momentum to the point where a linebacker can come up and hit you out of your shoes. Speaking of linebackers, on any sort of toss running play, the linebackers seemingly get a ridiculous boost in speed as they charge down the line and tackle you at the line of scrimmage, even though it looked like you could get a 3- or 5-yard run just a few moments before. These sorts of situations don't happen so much that it makes the game significantly less enjoyable, but these areas could have used a little more refinement.For the most part, the passing game is really good. You can throw a lob or a bullet pass to a player depending on whether you press or hold down the passing button, which is actually crucial in timing your passes properly. One of things you'll learn in the football 101 mode is that you need to hit your receivers at a specific point and not just wait around and hope they get open before the defensive line comes crashing down on you. For example, if your receiver is running a post play, you'll learn that you need to throw the ball precisely at the point that he makes his cut toward the sidelines. Likewise, you'll have to learn how zone defenses work and how receivers can be used to pull the defense out so that it's just man-on-man coverage, which significantly increases your chances of getting a complete pass. The only noticeable problem with the passing game is that the out passing route (where a receiver makes a sudden cut to the sideline) is still a little too reliable for getting those 6 or 7 yards in a pinch.  There's a lot to like about Madden 2003.  But the defensive AI has been improved, so it's not quite as bad as in previous Madden games. Cornerbacks are now much more adept at stepping into passing lanes and knocking down passes (particularly on shorter routes), and the zone coverage operates much as it does in real life, with the safety coming over to help if any of the other defensive backs get beat down the field. Blitzes are handled quite well--you won't necessarily get burned by running one, but the offense will gain a significant number of yards if they execute the play in time. Still, it's incredibly satisfying to have a blitz work on a running play, as the linebacker shoots down the line of scrimmage and takes the running back down. Tackling can be a tricky proposition at times since your tackle is dependent on speed and where you make contact with the opposing player, so you can expect to see the computer shake off one or two before you get comfortable with the system. There are also some moments, such as during kickoffs or punt returns, when an AI-controlled opponent will be within a foot of your player and not tackle him, which is somewhat surprising given how good the AI is in other areas of the game.    As far as graphics are concerned, Madden 2003 looks great, but the generic player faces that have been in previous Madden games are still a problem with 2003. It's obvious that the development team tried to make a few faces a little more recognizable than others, but most still have that bland, mannequin look. Otherwise, the player models are properly sized--kickers look like kickers, and quarterbacks look like quarterbacks. The stadiums all look excellent, with plenty of sideline detail and lively crowds.   Enough adjustments and changes have been made to the commentary and the gameplay to warrant a purchase even if you have last year's game.  There's quite a variety of sound in the game. The has been commentary improved, thanks to the introduction of Monday Night Football commentator Al Michaels, who seems much more lively than his predecessor, Pat Summerall. Madden's commentary has also seemingly expanded, and he tends to speak a little more about certain types of plays, but he sometimes goes a few plays without saying anything, and the interaction between the two commentators just isn't there. The soundtrack for the game is very good. It includes music from artists like Andrew WK and even a new track from Bon Jovi--all of which fits pretty well with the theme of the game.    There's a lot to like about Madden 2003. You'll undoubtedly enjoy the numerous modes it has to offer, and enough adjustments and changes have been made to the commentary and the gameplay to warrant a purchase even if you have last year's game. Unfortunately, the few small problems its gameplay does have really prevent from it being the top football game on the GameCube.
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993,All-Star Baseball 2003 ,8.6," All-Star Baseball 2003 has High Heat 2003 licked where graphics are concerned, and the inclusion of the franchise mode makes Acclaim's hardball simulation all the more enticing.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/0/9/2211309-box_asb03.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/all-star-baseball-2003-review/1900-2855158/,pos,"
Since there are a few gaps left to fill in the PlayStation 2's software library, buying games for the console has finally become a matter of choice vs. necessity. This aesthetic holds true when considering baseball games on the console. With EA's Triple Play 2002, 3DO's High Heat 2003, and Acclaim's All-Star Baseball 2003 all being released so close together, it's difficult to find the real winner. Despite the competition, All-Star Baseball 2003 manages to stake its claim as one of the best baseball simulations available for the PlayStation 2. Its on-field action falls short of the realistic experience supplied by 3DO's latest baseball game, but its wealth of gameplay modes makes it easier to forget its sometimes irritating deficiencies.  All-Star Baseball can always be counted on to include a wealth of gameplay modes, and the 2003 version ups the ante with the inclusion of an impressive franchise mode. You can play for 20 consecutive seasons and allow the statistics to pile up while watching players retire, win the Cy Young award, get inducted into the Hall of Fame, and much more. You can also monitor your farm team and bring up prospects when they're ready for the big time, trade and release players, and manage salaries. If you're not happy with the current roster of free agents, you can always create your own with a simplistic player-creation tool. One issue concerning the franchise mode is that the schedule for each season is always the same, so it would have been nice if Acclaim had included a schedule randomizer to avoid this. Even so, the franchise mode in All-Star Baseball 2003 is the most thorough and realistic you'll find in any current baseball game. For those who enjoy a less arduous experience, there are plenty of other gameplay modes. The exhibition mode is available for up to four players if you have a Multitap, and you can choose from any of the 30 MLB teams, both all-star teams, and a legends team composed of all-time favorites such as Willie Stargell, Robin Yount, and Rod Carew. If you like to play with only the best, you can cut to the chase and jump straight to the All-Star game or World Series. The franchise mode may be a bit too much to follow for some, but the single season mode is a nice substitute. It includes all the same features as the franchise mode except statistics, and players do not roll over into the next season; plus, there's no need to scout prospects. As you perform certain objectives in the franchise or season mode, you are awarded points that can be spent to buy collectible cards. These cards can then be used to unlock hidden stadiums and teams. The home run derby may seem like nothing more than a fun diversion, but it really helps in coming to grips with the most difficult part of playing the game: batting. All-Star Baseball 2003 retains the same batting interface as last year's game, and while it's incredibly deep, it's not easy to master. Like in most baseball games, a cursor system is used for pitching and hitting. Pitching is quite easy--you simply choose a pitch from the pitcher's real repertoire, adjust the pitch location with the analog stick, and press the X button to let it fly. The ball can be slightly manipulated while it's in the air, which can help fool the batter. However, batting is a bit more complex and much more difficult. Your batter's cursor is sized in relation to his batting average and his abilities against the particular pitcher on the mound. If you feel like you have a good handle on lining up your cursor, you can press the square button to swing for a home run. This makes the size of the batting cursor significantly smaller, but if you make contact with the ball, it's destined for the outfield fence. If you'd like to tailor your hitting to take advantage of holes in the defense, you can adjust your swing accordingly with the right analog stick or attempt to guess the pitch or location, which increases the size of your batter's sweet spot or cursor respectively. While the options available to you when you're inside the batter's box are impressive, actually hitting the ball is far too difficult. Pitches come in way too fast, and to make contact with the ball, you have to swing a split second after the ball leaves the pitcher's hand. It doesn't leave much time to adjust the batting cursor before swinging, and it often results in balls going past the batter before he's had time to get the lumber off his shoulder. You'll eventually adjust to the speed of the pitches, but it can take several days of playing the game.Much like the pitching and batting interface, the remainder of the gameplay is quite deep. Before each pitch, you can adjust both your infielders and outfielders to nine different settings to accommodate for a hitter's tendencies, and you can attempt to pick off runners leading off the bag either before or during the windup. Running the bases works well unless you attempt to move just one base runner. The mechanics for doing so requires that you hold one button and press another at the same time. The response from the base runner is so lagged that you'll think the command wasn't entered and end up sending your runner back to the same base. Fielding is fairly easy and intuitive, but the dive function is awkward, so your player will often leap the wrong direction or let the ball roll underneath him. Another issue is that there's a slight delay between fielding a ball and throwing it to a base. When you're trying to throw out a fast base runner or turn a tight double play, it can become irritating. Pop flies are no problem to get underneath, and you can even enter commands into a buffer that lets your fielder perform moves in succession without touching a button. This comes in especially handy when you're trying to field a ball off the wall. However, the game is not without its bugs. It sometimes cuts away from the action before the play is even finished and leaves you wondering what happened. The gameplay in All-Star Baseball 2003 still falls short of the excellence attained in the Nintendo 64 versions of the game, but despite the few hiccups, it's strong enough that it can be mastered with some dedication. The PlayStation 2 version of All-Star Baseball 2002 looks quite good, but it fails to eclipse the graphical feats accomplished by EA's Triple Play franchise. Player models are basically the same, other than their height and facial textures, and it's impossible to recognize the body shape of players who would normally stand out in a crowd, like David Wells. It appears that the PlayStation 2 was the lead console for the game's development, because the facial textures are clearer than those found in the Xbox and GameCube versions of the game. Many players come adorned in the special equipment they wear in real life, so you'll see Barry Bonds decked out in his signature arm protector. The stadiums feature some nice details, such as K's that the fans display as the pitcher strikes out batters, as well as mascots that cause mischief on the roofs of the dugouts. The 2D bitmaps used for the backgrounds are pixilated, blurry, and generally inaccurate, and they detract from the overall look of the game. When large portions of the stadium are shown onscreen, most of the textures shimmer. While present in the versions of the game for other consoles, this problem is most noticeable on the PlayStation 2. Other problems include players who run right through each other, balls that amazingly teleport into players' gloves, and a lack of any sort of particle effects to show dirt being kicked up while sliding into base. Real-time shadows chase players around the field, but you won't see the shadow of the top of the stadium gradually creep across the field like in other sports games. Pointing out these issues, however, is really being nitpicky, because there really are some nice touches to the graphics. The dugouts are filled with polygonal players who react to the events on the field, and when you select a pitcher to start warming up in the bullpen, you can actually see him doing so. The animation is also quite good. Base coaches run out of the way of players or smack the ground, telling them to slide into base, and players look natural while turning the double play or diving for a ground ball. The crowd is also done quite well--it features more frames of animation than the average sports game. All-Star Baseball 2003's visuals easily eclipse those of High Heat 2003 but fail to impress in the same way that the graphics from EA's Triple Play franchise do. With that said, it can hold its own against the Xbox and GameCube versions of the game, and it features a crisp, clean look with some nice details. The audio in All-Star Baseball 2003 is one of the game's strongest traits. The play-by-play is excellent. The announcers manage to keep up with the action while supplying historical commentary and anecdotes at the same time. As each player comes to bat, the announcers will remark on his past at-bats and mention the player's stats from the previous year. If you let the game idle for a while, the players begin talking about experiences they've had in particular cities or offer commentary on recent world events. The stadium sound effects are quite good, but you'll constantly hear the same fans making the same comments. The organ kicks in during the seventh inning stretch or during lulls in the action, which provides a great deal of atmosphere to the game. There are no sound effects for the umpire, which gives the presentation a TV flair, but it takes away some of the excitement of close plays and strikeouts. Deciding between All-Star Baseball 2003 and High Heat Baseball 2003 is a matter of preference. Both games are great at what they do, but All-Star Baseball 2003 provides a more hands-on gameplay experience, whereas High Heat 2003 is more realistic but less interactive. But All-Star Baseball 2003 has High Heat 2003 licked where graphics are concerned, and the inclusion of the franchise mode makes Acclaim's hardball simulation all the more enticing--so you can't go wrong buying either one. All-Star Baseball 2003 comes highly recommended for serious fans of America's pastime.
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994,Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour ,8.6," Zero Hour fundamentally improves the core game, and it should ensure that Command & Conquer: Generals continues to be popular well into the next year.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/3/6/5/2214365-556767_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/command-and-conquer-generals-zero-hour-review/1900-6075810/,pos,"
 It's only been eight months since the release of Command & Conquer: Generals, the latest installment in this extremely popular real-time strategy series. Though Generals was the first C&C that did not bear the name of Westwood Studios (the series' original developer), it was still every bit as action-packed and fast-paced as the series has ever been. It represented a great combination of the over-the-top pyrotechnics the series is known for, along with some of the gameplay elements perfected by Blizzard's competing RTS franchises. However, the game clearly left some room for additional content, so, while it's no surprise that Generals went on to get its own expansion pack--as pretty much every Command & Conquer game gets at least one--the newly released Zero Hour was put together surprisingly quickly. You wouldn't know it just from playing this fully featured expansion pack, since it makes plenty of meaningful and interesting changes to the original game. Additionally, it packs in a lot of great tweaks and improvements to those aspects of Generals that could have used more polish. The result is a great expansion that's a must for anyone who enjoyed Generals. It fundamentally improves the core game, it and should ensure that C&C Generals continues to be popular well into the next year.  Zero Hour introduces several interesting new units for each side, as well as nine new specialized sub-factions.  Zero Hour does what any good real-time strategy expansion pack should do: it adds appreciable amounts of content and depth to the original product. It introduces various new units, technologies, and ""generals powers"" to each of the three factions from Generals--the high-tech USA military, the powerful forces of China, and the terrorist conglomerate called the GLA. It also introduces a completely new single-player mode: the generals challenge. Zero Hour also features follow-up campaigns for each of the factions, consisting of five good-sized missions apiece. The core game, too, has undergone a number of little tweaks and enhancements that make it play a bit better overall. These tweaks and enhancements address issues that players may have encountered in the original, either through its interface or its multiplayer. However, perhaps the most interesting addition to Zero Hour is the inclusion of nine new subfactions.  These subfactions are referred to by their respective commanders, lending Zero Hour a refreshing bit of personality that was curiously absent from Generals. These commanders include the likes of General Malcolm ""Ace"" Granger, a specialist with the USA's air force; General ""Anvil"" Shin Fai, a Chinese infantry leader; and Prince Hassad, a GLA master of camouflage. Just as it could be said that C&C Generals was influenced by some of Blizzard Entertainment's real-time strategy games, so too can it be said that Zero Hour is influenced by the real-time strategy games of Ensemble Studios, like last year's Age of Mythology or Age of Empires II. That's because Zero Hour's subfactions, while not completely different from the core factions they're based on, do play quite differently from one another, do have a few unique units and technologies, and do give the game considerably more variety than what the three core factions offer alone. So, as with the different civilizations in Age of Empires II, the new subfactions in Zero Hour differ enough from one other to offer a distinctive playing experience. Furthermore, since these subfactions are inspired by popular playing styles, chances are, at least a couple of these are going to naturally appeal to you.  The generals challenge mode provides an entertaining option. You're at a real disadvantage while trying to fight these chatty, often amusing, characters on their own turf.  Essentially, Zero Hour contains a total of 12 different playable factions, up from just three. In skirmish and multiplayer modes, you may choose to play as either the ""vanilla"" factions from C&C Generals (though with their new units and upgrades), or you may choose to play as one of the specialist general's armies. Since the specialized armies have disadvantages that offset their relative strengths, you intuitively have a sense of what your opponent is going to throw at you in a multiplayer match. This is particularly true if, say, he chooses General Ta Hun Kwai, the Chinese tank commander, rather than just picking the standard Chinese army. Fortunately, in the skirmish and multiplayer modes, if the opponent chooses a random faction, you won't know which of the 12 different armies you're up against until you do some early-game recon.  These character-driven subfactions are also the focus of the new generals challenge mode. Actually, it's structured a lot like Mortal Kombat or other fighting games. You choose your character--one of the nine specialist generals featured in Zero Hour--and then you proceed to fight against each of the other generals on his or her own turf. These can be some pretty tough battles, especially since the default level of difficulty in Zero Hour, thankfully, provides a much more significant challenge than the cakewalk that was Generals' default difficulty. Since you take on these rival generals in environments that specifically benefit their unique abilities, you have a tough time overcoming their defenses. In so doing, you either learn or practice some key strategies that can help make you more competitive online. One very nice touch in the generals challenge is that each general has his or her own voice, and you'll hear these characters gabbing at you during the course of a match. While they do repeat their lines occasionally, they have lots of contextual dialogue. For example, they might chastise you for doing an inadequate job of countering their armies, or they may curse when you knock out one of their key facilities. Not only is this dialogue pretty amusing, but it can provide some helpful hints. The generals' propensities toward giving you fair warnings before attacks tend to be their undoing.  The generals challenge is its own unique single-player campaign. Zero Hour's other campaigns are shorter and more conventional but continue the very loose storylines established in the original. Actually, Zero Hour's campaign missions are more elaborately produced than those of Generals. Like all other Command & Conquer real-time strategy games, other than Generals, Zero Hour sports some full-motion video cutscenes; they feature embedded journalists reporting from each faction's perspective, like some fake CNN newscast. These little videos play during the fairly lengthy loading times between campaign missions. While the videos aren't spectacular, they're nicely done and, for better or worse, confirm that Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour is cashing in on current events. See how many instances of the expression ""weapons of mass destruction"" you can count during the cutscenes! The campaign missions' in-engine cutscenes are quite impressive as well, thanks to the game's outstanding 3D graphics. Unfortunately, as nice as these are, it would have been nicer if they could have been skipped--you need to sit through them again whenever you restart a mission.  Zero Hour makes a number of subtle but useful enhancements to the core gameplay of C&C: Generals.  The campaign missions, in a manner similar to the generals challenge ones, feature contextual dialogue that informs you about some of the new units and abilities available to each side. Specifically, each of the main factions gains three new units, a new type of building, a number of new upgrades, and a couple of new generals powers in Zero Hour. Many of the new units are quite interesting, though they mostly fill supporting roles. The USA's microwave tank can fry enemy infantry garrisoned in buildings, and its beam weapon can also disable structures--including defensive emplacements. China gains the impressive Helix helicopter, a flying fortress that can drop massive bombs. Like the Chinese emperor tank, it is so huge that you can build a Gatling gun, a propaganda tower, or an infantry bunker on it. The GLA gets an incredibly fast-moving combat cycle, which is basically a motocross bike that can be mounted by any GLA infantry unit. It then gains that unit's powers. The new units generally look great and are fun to play with.  The new buildings include the fire base for the USA, a powerful defensive structure; the Internet center for China, from which hackers can quickly gain resources to fund the Chinese war effort; and fake structures to mislead its foes for the GLA. The GLA may optionally upgrade these façades into the real thing if need be. The new generals powers also play to the themes of each respective side. Generals players will recall that generals powers are the special abilities gained by each side as it destroys enemy units and structures. Collectively, these new technologies expand the options available to each side, though they do not necessarily disrupt existing strategies honed by experienced players. After all, Generals is still about very quickly building up a base, marshalling a powerful force, and demolishing the opponent. The heavy-hitting units and superweapons of the original Generals will still be doing most of the damage in Zero Hour.   Those who remember Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack will notice that most of the cool ideas from these games that didn't make it into Generals, have now made it in Zero Hour (though unfortunately there is still no real naval combat to speak of). Again, in addition to the core changes made to each faction, the specialist generals' subfactions have their own unique characteristics. General ""Pinpoint"" Townes, for example, specializes in laser weaponry. He cannot build the USA's tomahawk missile, crusader tank, or paladin tank, but he has unique access to a powerful laser defense turret and a similarly equipped laser tank. He can also build avengers, new antiair units that also increase the rate of fire of other nearby units using a laser targeting system, at a cheaper-than-normal rate. As you might expect, playing as some of the individual specialist characters can start to feel limiting after a while. Yet there are so many cleverly designed and interesting units and so many viable and devious strategies available in Zero Hour, overall, that the game has no shortage of lasting appeal.  The gameplay in Zero Hour has technically improved, though some of these enhancements were introduced in the v1.06 patch released for Generals this past summer. Unit balance has been fine-tuned, ensuring that the core factions and all their units are as competitive as possible. There's an option to use the right mouse button for issuing orders, unlike Generals, which required you to use the left mouse button both for selecting units and for issuing orders. Some players found this frustrating. The interface has changed cosmetically, in some ways, as well. Hot buttons are available for your superweapons and generals powers, letting you better use these important abilities in a pinch. There's also a toggle that causes your units to counterattack any foes, regardless of whether you order them to or not.  Zero Hour's gameplay is still very fast paced, especially if you set it faster than the default (and opt to start with more resources than the default) in a skirmish or multiplayer match. Juggling unit production, sending out and repelling attack waves, and establishing a base defense can be a real handful. A consequence of the Blizzard-style interface in Generals is that your unit-building is not a permanent part of the interface. You must consciously and constantly select your barracks, factories, and airstrips so that they can build more forces as you fight. The lack of formations and some pathfinding issues with larger units still make the combat feel more chaotic than controlled. As such, those who felt overwhelmed by Generals' arcadelike pacing aren't going to find a fundamental change in that regard here--not that pacing presents a problem. Still, the interface enhancements may be just the ticket for players who are ""on the fence"" about their like or dislike of Generals.  Zero Hour's visuals and audio are still very impressive.  Generals looked and sounded superb when it was released, and the same can be said of Zero Hour. The game engine has been optimized, leading to more consistent frame rates and a better look for all of the impressive explosions and special effects that made Generals look so fantastic. New graphics elements, such as some very impressive full-scale ships and other vehicles, add plenty of eye-candy to some of the maps, as if the great-looking, fluidly animated units themselves weren't enough. Vehicles that have been damaged look noticeably in bad shape, which speaks to the game's remarkable visual detail. The game's music remains fantastic, with its hard-hitting bass riffs and Middle Eastern and Oriental motifs, and helps intensify the action a few more notches. Eight months can be a long time in the world of PC gaming, but the graphics and sound of this game just haven't aged a bit and remain some of the most impressive that this style of gaming has ever seen.  One might easily think that Zero Hour is what Command & Conquer: Generals should have been in the first place, since this great expansion pack seemingly arrives on the heels of the original. It makes Generals a deeper, better game overall--and one with more challenge, more variety, and more personality both in its single-player and multiplayer modes. It even sports a manual that offers helpful tips on how to play competitively online and how to use the game's powerful (and enhanced) world builder utility. Fans of Generals must get it, because, once they do, they will never look back. Even those who gave Generals a try, but maybe didn't warm up to it because of the nuts and bolts of the execution, should consider Zero Hour. Clearly, this is the result of a careful analysis of what sorts of things could have made Generals an even better game. 


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995,Phantasy Star Collection ,8.6, The fact that you get three games of great length and quality on one cartridge makes Phantasy Star Collection well worth the price of admission.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/3/1/9/2217319-phantasy_star_collection.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/phantasy-star-collection-review/1900-2901862/,pos,"
For the generation of gamers that grew up with the PlayStation as one of their first consoles, the only Phantasy Star game that will likely be familiar is Phantasy Star Online. Some of these players may be surprised to discover, then, that the series actually dates back to the late '80s and has had four other installments, all very different from their online counterpart. RPG fans, on the other hand, recognize Sega's long-running series as one of the best ever, what with their epic storylines, memorable characters, and impressive graphics and music. While these games have rarely had any solid connection to each other, they all share a common theme that flawlessly combines both fantasy and science-fiction conventions. For those who have never played these fantastic games, or have simply lost touch with them, Phantasy Star Collection for the Game Boy Advance is the ideal way to experience them. This pack contains the first three games in the series in their original form, and for the most part, they've aged surprisingly well.  Alis and friends valiantly return to the console world.  The first Phantasy Star game originally appeared on the Sega Master System, while Phantasy Star II and III made their home on the Sega Genesis. The fourth Phantasy Star game is not included in the pack, which is disappointing, since series fans tend to agree that Phantasy Star IV is an excellent installment, and much better than III. Phantasy Star Collection also doesn't include two games that appeared on Sega's Game Gear portable and were released only in Japan. So while it would be incorrect to call this a complete compilation, the sheer amount of gameplay that you'll be able to get out of the three lengthy RPGs featured here is staggering, to say the least.   To put this compilation together, Developer Digital Eclipse coded two separate emulators specifically for the Game Boy Advance--one for the Master System, and another for the Genesis. Both systems are emulated to near perfection, and the games are virtually identical to the originals. Those familiar with the series may be able to pick out a few minuscule differences in the background music, but aside from that, Phantasy Star Collection successfully brings the engaging experiences of these games to the GBA without sacrificing anything. In some ways, the emulations are actually a bit too faithful to the original versions, as it would have been really helpful if the games had allowed you to save your progress anywhere or switch to sleep mode. As it is, none of the Phantasy Star games are exactly well suited to quick, casual gameplay sessions.   As mentioned above, these three games are all different in terms of story and gameplay. The original Phantasy Star features a young female protagonist named Alis who's on a quest to avenge her brother's death. This game pushed the Sega Master System to its limits with its beautiful hand-drawn and hand-animated sprites and pseudo-3D dungeons, which really set it apart from other similar games of the era. Phantasy Star II takes place after the events of the first game, in the same star system but during a largely different era. The game has a decidedly more futuristic feel to it, and the 3D dungeons are gone. Again, though, you'll play as a young character who eventually must confront an evil force threatening the entire star system. The last game in the collection, Phantasy Star III, was unlike any other game in the series, as it took place over several generations and offered a number of different endings, depending on the paths you chose during the course of the adventure. Of all the games in the series, this game is considered to be the weak link, but it's still a solid game--just not as great as the other two games in the collection.  It will take you quite some time to complete all three games.  Since these games all originally appeared on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, you'd expect the graphics and sound to be slightly behind the times. This is true, as the technical aspects of Phantasy Star Collection aren't really on par with some of the games that are developed specifically for the GBA. Yet when you consider exactly how close these GBA ports actually are to the source material, the feat of cramming these three games into one tiny cartridge comes across as admirable. Longtime fans of the series will definitely be pleased with the results, and it's worth mentioning that all three of these games originally retailed for about $70 each.   You could easily spend dozens of hours with any of the games in this collection, so the fact that you get three games of great length and quality on one cartridge makes Phantasy Star Collection well worth the price of admission--there simply hasn't been a Game Boy Advance game with this much gameplay to date. Aside from the fact that these games aren't necessarily well suited to gaming on the go, and notwithstanding a few small shortcomings in the emulations, this cartridge is perfect for any fan of console role-playing. In fact, fans of RPGs owe it to themselves to add this game to their collection.  
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996,F-Zero GX ,8.6," If you want a light-speed racer that looks and plays sharply while simultaneously offering some dramatic challenges, F-Zero GX is exactly what you're looking for.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/6/4/2219064-box_fzgx.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/f-zero-gx-review/1900-6073623/,pos,"
 In 1990, Nintendo essentially created the futuristic racing genre with the release of its high-speed racing game for the Super Nintendo, F-Zero. Since then, especially once the 3D era of gaming took hold, we've seen a lot of different developers do a lot of different things with the genre. For example, while F-Zero was always about pure speed and racing, with a limited focus on smashing up your opponents, the Wipeout series came up and made a more combat-focused racing game. But regardless of the approach, the one thing that has always been key to making a good futuristic racer is the game's sense of speed. Over the years, the various entries in the F-Zero series have done a nice job with that fast feeling. The latest entry in the series, F-Zero GX, delivers on the promise shown by the last console entry, F-Zero X, by offering an unmatched sense of speed while still keeping the same basic gameplay elements--track memorization and a couple of combat maneuvers--completely intact. The result is a great and challenging racing game that runs perfectly smoothly for up to four players.  If you love a tough challenge in your racing games, F-Zero GX is exactly what you're looking for.  While the game has a handful of customization options and a story mode, F-Zero GX's main mode is the grand prix mode. Here, you'll eventually be able to choose from more than 30 different vehicles, though only four are available at the outset. Each of the game's rides has its own statistics, so each one handles differently than the next. A vehicle's body strength comes into consideration, as do rankings for boost power and grip. The game is broken up into cups, and each F-Zero cup tournament is a five-race event. Points are totaled up as you race, and the points leader at the end of the series is the champion. Three cups are available right away, at three different difficulty levels. But you'll unlock more options as you play. You'll also earn tickets that can be spent in a shop.  Beyond the grand prix, the game also has the standard practice and time trial options that you'd expect from a racing game. You can save your replays to a memory card and race against ghost racers for the fastest time. You can customize your racing machine with unlockable parts and your own decals and emblems. The game also features a nicely done four-player split-screen versus mode that maintains the game's high level of speed pretty well. F-Zero GX also contains a story mode that gives you some unique challenges while taking you through a cutscene-filled romp starring F-Zero poster boy Captain Falcon. The mode gets almost unfairly difficult at a few spots, but the delightfully campy cutscenes keep you wanting more.  The story mode isn't the only spot where the game gets difficult. The AI is a pushover at the easy and normal settings, but it eventually gets pretty tricky. But the real opponents in F-Zero GX are the tracks themselves. The high speeds you'll race at don't give you a lot of time to look ahead to see what turns are coming up, and some of the game's camera views take away even more of your view of the horizon. Because of these things, you essentially have to memorize each track to truly master the game. Considering that some tracks have open sides, and that spilling off the track forces you to forfeit the race and try again, you'll have to be a quick learner. Some players will find the game's difficulty exciting and will happily rise to the challenge, but in the end, it does limit the game's appeal a bit.  The game has support for steering peripherals, such as the Logitech Speed Force. The wheel works reasonably well, but you get more-refined control from the standard GameCube controller. So the steering wheel is fun up to a point, but if you're playing seriously, F-Zero GX is at its best with a regular controller.  The gameplay in F-Zero GX is simple in design, but it gives you a lot of control over your craft. Aside from the obvious ability to turn left and right, you can use the shoulders to bank your craft for sharper turns. Hitting both triggers will enable you to drift around corners, which is key for cornering without losing speed. You can also make your machine jerk over to the side quickly, which is a good attack move for knocking unsuspecting foes off the edge of the track or into the barriers on the sides of most tracks. You also have a spin attack, which is a good option as you approach your foes. Additionally, the game lets you activate turbo boosts once you've cleared the first lap, but you have to use these with caution, as they deplete your energy. This same energy reservoir is used for your shields, but you can replenish your energy reserves at various energy strips found on each track.  With a maximum of 30 racers in each race (except for four-player races, which are limited to the four players), there's a lot going on in F-Zero GX. The game does a fantastic job of showing a lot of action while maintaining its sense of speed and its smooth frame rate. Of course, the trade-off is that the machines and tracks aren't as detailed as they probably could have been, but since you never really have time to see things at a standstill, this isn't a problem. The trackside decor is done well, and you'll notice cool little details in the prerace track intro, such as a large version of ROB, Nintendo's NES robot accessory. Though multiple races take place in each environment, each track has a noticeably different feel. Some of them even let you race inside enclosed tubes or on the outside of a large, twisting cylinder. Owners of upscale television sets will be pleased with the game's widescreen and progressive-scan support.  With a maximum of 30 racers in each race, there's a lot going on in F-Zero GX.  In the sound department, F-Zero GX delivers what you'd expect from a futuristic racing game. You'll hear the whine of your jet propulsion system, the smashes and crashes of the racers bumping around the course, and the whoosh of your turbo boosts kicking in. The soundtrack also does a really great job of enhancing the onscreen action. It brings a fast-paced, upbeat set of tracks to the races, most of them mixing electronic sounds with guitar riffs and solos. On top of all that, the music in the story mode cutscenes and on the racer profile screen is a random mix of theme songs for the different racers. It's not all that noticeable, but it's a great little addition.  Speaking of additions, F-Zero GX ties in with F-Zero AX, the arcade version of the game. There are racers and tracks that are, at first, available only in AX. But by bringing your memory card to the arcade and playing, you can then unlock these additions for purchase in the F-Zero shop. F-Zero AX isn't due to hit wide distribution until next month, and with the sad state of arcades these days, it may be hard to find an AX machine. Thankfully, there appears to be a way to unlock the AX items without going to the arcade, but the barrier for entry looks pretty steep, so only the best of the best will unlock everything GX has to offer.   Bottom line, the extreme increase in difficulty will surely turn some people away before they've seen the 20 tracks and unlocked all the story mode chapters. But if you want a light-speed racer that looks and plays sharply while simultaneously offering some dramatic challenges, F-Zero GX is exactly what you're looking for. 

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997,Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell ,8.6," Splinter Cell is a great game on its own merits, and it offers a slick and rewardingly suspenseful gameplay experience that's sometimes reduced to frustrating bouts of trial and error.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/8/8/2211788-box_scell.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-splinter-cell-review/1900-2897896/,pos,"
It's easy to see why Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is one of the most highly anticipated Xbox games of the season. For one thing, it features some impressive production values, including hands down the best lighting effects seen in any game to date. For another, its main character has a surprising variety of moves and gadgets, all designed to help him stay hidden from his enemies and dispatch them quietly or get by them cleanly. So the game's definitely got a lot to like about it. However, you should know that Splinter Cell is not the genre-redefining game it claims to be (don't believe the ""stealth action redefined"" bit that's written on the box), but rather another in an increasingly long line of stealth games that incorporates all the good and bad traits of this love-it-or-hate-it action subgenre. Splinter Cell's actual gameplay is very similar to that of other stealth games, including 1998's Thief: The Dark Project, which proved that sneaking through the shadows and using clever gadgets to avoid or eliminate powerful enemies could make for a memorable experience, or the recently released and equivalently good Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Comparisons aside, Splinter Cell is a great game on its own merits, and it offers a slick and rewardingly suspenseful gameplay experience that's sometimes reduced to frustrating bouts of trial and error.  Sam Fisher is the splinter cell--an ultra secret commando working on highly classified assignments. The title of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell refers to the unusual role of its main character, Sam Fisher, a highly trained and experienced commando working for a top-secret military organization, Third Echelon, that's attempting to rid the world of a high-tech terrorist threat. If he's caught, the US government will disavow its affiliation with his mission. Worse yet, one false move and Fisher may inadvertently instigate World War III. So the pressure's on, but Fisher's as cool as they come. Though he's skilled as a soldier, stealth is his only real option, and the fate of the free world hangs in the balance as he undertakes a number of highly dangerous, high-stakes covert operations.   The game's plot, which is set in the near future, is straight out of a Clancy thriller and involves Fisher taking on Clancy's favorite tag team: the Russians and the Chinese. The story is rather disjointed (perhaps purposely so), since between missions you'll just see snippets of fake newscasts that supposedly help you understand what's going on. These rather unimpressive cutscenes unfortunately aren't up to par with the game's other visuals, and they aren't nearly as interesting as some of the conversations Fisher will eavesdrop on during the actual gameplay. At any rate, don't go in expecting Splinter Cell to be Tom Clancy's answer to Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid games, as the storytelling and gameplay of Splinter Cell are completely different from the story and gameplay of that series.   Despite being Third Echelon's right hand, Sam Fisher is on a need-to-know basis and is largely kept in the dark about the exact nature of his objectives. Fortunately, he's extremely resourceful, armed or unarmed. A preliminary training scenario will familiarize you with the basics of being Sam Fisher, but you'll nevertheless need a lot of practice to become truly proficient in the role. Throughout the game, the right analog stick lets you freely move the camera, which generally works well to give you a good situational awareness but sometimes gets cramped up in tight spaces. The other controls also take getting used to but work effectively, enabling you to perform an array of maneuvers that collectively make Splinter Cell feel like a pretty believable super-spy simulation.  In true Tom Clancy fashion, your foes will consist of Russians and Chinese. Who says the Cold War's over? In fact, aside from the pretty lighting effects, the variety of moves at Fisher's disposal is probably the highlight of Splinter Cell. Sam has something for every occasion: He can run swiftly or tiptoe carefully depending on how far you tilt the left analog stick forward. He can also move quite quickly from a crouched position, and if you tread carefully while crouching, you'll be almost invisible and almost silent. Fisher can climb ladders, chain-link fences, and more. He can rappel down walls (and kick through glass windows while doing so), climb hand over hand (or using all four limbs) across horizontal pipes, and zip across downward-slanted ropes or wires. He can put his back against a wall and lean or shoot around corners, he can peek around doors that are slightly ajar, and he can make soft landings or perform evasive rolls. Fisher can also kick off a wall in mid jump, and his coolest move (though it isn't very practical) allows him to stand in the splits atop a narrow passageway and then either shoot unsuspecting opponents or drop down to deliver a stunning blow.   Sneaking up behind an opponent allows Fisher to either knock the foe unconscious with an elbow strike or a pistol whip or grab the enemy and take him hostage. Fisher can then use the opponent as a human shield against other enemies, or in some cases interrogate him or force him to do such things as activate retinal scanners that otherwise prevent passage. He'll eventually have to dispatch his hostage one way or another, and then he can pick up and move the prone body out of sight of enemy patrols. Fortunately for you, unconscious foes will awaken only if discovered by their allies. In Splinter Cell, the use of deadly force is more of a convenience than a necessity. Toward this end, Fisher's arsenal is fairly limited but nonetheless effective. To start with, he has a trusty silenced pistol that can kill with a shot to the head and can also be used to shoot out certain lights to make for a more-favorable situation for Fisher and his night-vision goggles. Later on, he'll find a high-tech experimental assault rifle that becomes his mainstay. Featuring both single-shot and fully automatic firing modes, the SC-20K also sports a silencer and a muzzle-flash suppressor, making it perfect for Fisher's purposes. This modular rifle even has a magnifying scope, allowing for precision shooting--in a great touch, Fisher can hold his breath while looking through the scope to temporarily steady his aim. The SC-20K also supports a number of alternative types of ammunition, such as special rounds that can be used to incapacitate foes rather than kill them. In a number of Splinter Cell's missions, casualties are strictly prohibited, so this feature isn't just for sympathy's sake.  Fisher's trusty SC-20K experimental rifle isn't just for killing.  More interestingly, the SC-20K can be used to fire remote camera probes, nauseating smoke bombs, or a distraction camera that can be used to lure guards away from their posts and then give them a mouthful of knockout gas. Such funky devices aren't always strictly necessary for finishing a mission, but they're fun to use and can help you avoid getting into a tight spot. Besides his guns, Fisher can also get his hands on frag grenades, though high explosives aren't really his style. Throwing cans or bottles to distract foes is more up his alley.    Picking locks is definitely his style, too, and he can use his trusty lock picks to bypass any locked doors. The game presents a really great simulation of lock-picking in which you rotate the left analog stick until you find the pin (you'll feel the controller vibrate), wiggle the stick until Fisher nudges the pin loose, and then repeat the process as many times as there are pins in the lock. Some of Fisher's other neat gadgets include an optic cable that can be slid under doorways to give you a gander at what's on the other side, camera jammers that disrupt security cameras, and emergency flares that can draw the fire of automated heat-sensitive gun turrets. Fisher is basically a high-tech government ninja, what with all this stuff, and what with his all-black body suit and night-vision and heat-vision goggles. The odds are always against him, but he's got a big-time element of surprise. His moves and gadgets aren't just for show, either, as Splinter Cell will require you to make use of almost all of Fisher's various abilities in most every mission.    All of Fisher's missions may be different, but all are pretty similar in how you must proceed in them: Stay out of sight, stay out of harm's way, and engage hostiles only when necessary. This is easier said than done, and despite Fisher's impressive list of moves and exceptional skill, you'll invariably draw your enemies' attention in every mission you attempt. If caught in a firefight, Fisher can be killed with just a few shots, though his foes tend to go down much more quickly. Nevertheless, ammunition is limited, and Fisher's aim strays wildly if he tries to shoot while moving or tries to shoot in rapid succession. More importantly, being discovered will often cause a guard to raise the general alarm, which in several missions makes for automatic failure.  Night vision and thermal vision can help you see in places your enemies can't. In other missions, the alarm can go off several times before Third Echelon pulls the plug on you. In what's easily the most frustrating aspect of Splinter Cell, sometimes the alarm will go off at scripted moments if you've killed or knocked out too many guards leading up to that point. This can force you into a perpetual mission-failure cycle, ultimately forcing you to restart a mission from scratch and then try to avoid contact rather than dispatch foes. While it's plausible that Fisher needs to leave behind no evidence of his passing, it's too bad that Splinter Cell so strictly forces you to play a certain way, when the recent Hitman 2 did such a fine job of letting you opt for either stealth or deadly force as you saw fit.    You won't always end up restarting missions from scratch, but you'll invariably be screwing up and restarting different sequences constantly, perhaps dozens of times per mission. Trial and error to some extent goes part and parcel with most gaming experiences, but in Splinter Cell (and other stealth games), sometimes it can get to be a little too much. Part of the problem, as it is with most every stealth game, is that the missions are heavily scripted and play out exactly the same way each time. The suspense is almost nonexistent by the time you reach your fifth attempt at sneaking through that heavily guarded alley, and any sense of urgency is undermined when you realize that the truck you're desperately trying to catch up to or the assassination you're desperately trying to prevent are events that won't be triggered until you cross certain thresholds. Enemy patrols are also triggered at specific points. You can wait forever for that guard to come around the corner, but you won't see him do it until you step forward those last few inches. The guards in Splinter Cell are believable enough, but they all move in predictable fashions and don't exhibit any complex behavior. They'll investigate noises and shoot on sight, but in hostile situations, they'll blunder headlong into kill zones and will sometimes see you even when the onscreen stealth meter is telling you you're completely invisible. Yet though the guards aren't smart and aren't particularly difficult to dispose of, Splinter Cell is still a hard game, since sneaking past enemies (rather than taking them out) is usually the order of the day, and that's a tall order to fill. Fortunately, most missions take place in the dark, where your night vision gives you a huge advantage. But just as you'll start getting comfortable in your sneakiness, you'll find yourself up against guards with flashlights, which don't just reveal you lurking about but can temporarily blind you if your night vision is enabled.  Splinter Cell ain't easy. Get ready to try, try, and try again during most every mission. Splinter Cell looks superb, but its visual presentation isn't perfect. As mentioned, some of the cutscenes stand out as being rather ugly. Also, at times the game's frame rate will noticeably start to chug, and you'll notice some collision detection and clipping issues, such as when a felled opponent's feet can be seen sticking straight through a door. All this is enough to slightly mar an otherwise incredible visual presentation, the highlight of which, of course, is that lighting. The game's real-time lighting isn't just for show, since making use of the light and shadows in each area is a critical part of the gameplay. But still, it's real eye candy when you see things like warm sunlight seeping through Venetian blinds, or a floodlight beaming through a chain-link fence, looking for you. The rest of the game's visuals are also very impressive. Fisher's movements are extremely lifelike and highly articulate, and they almost seem as if they were motion captured, even though they weren't. The game's modern environments aren't exactly scenic, but they're still beautiful in their size, complexity, and detail.    The game also sounds terrific--especially if you have a 5.1 surround sound setup--and as with any self-respecting stealth game, the audio is integral to the experience of Splinter Cell. You'll actually hear Fisher making a bit more noise the faster he moves, so you'll learn to be your own worst critic as you try to move about silently. All his subtle actions, from lock-picking to drawing his different weapons and gadgets, has a suitably soft sound to go with it, creating the sense that Fisher is extremely skilled at being silent, but still runs the danger of making too much noise. Also, Splinter Cell's bass-heavy ambient music is excellent, and it grows louder and faster when you're spotted or caught. But much like in some other stealth-based games, the way the music picks up or quiets down depending on the circumstances has some unintentional side effects that almost feel like cheating: You'll learn to trust the music for knowing whether or not any enemies remain in your vicinity. The coast is clear when the music says so.    Of further note, Splinter Cell has a good amount of speech in it, though disappointingly, the Russians and Chinese speak in English using lame, stereotypical accents rather than in their native tongues. It's implied that Fisher is multilingual, so it would have been great if he'd simply translated for you in the context of the dialogue--especially since you'll really like hearing him speak. He's voiced by Michael Ironside (Starship Troopers, Free Willy), who's absolutely perfect for the role, with his naturally gravelly, gruff manner of speaking. Simply put, Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher makes Metal Gear's Solid Snake sound like a wuss.  Getting through an entire mission without ruffling any feathers can be a real thrill. Though Splinter Cell seemingly has a small number of missions, they'll take you some time to get through. The replay value of the missions is limited due to their scripted, linear nature, but there's a hard difficulty mode that really stresses the game's stealth aspect and should be a fun for those who master the default setting. Additionally, there's some pretty extensive DVD-style ""making of"" footage available for your viewing pleasure, the highlight of which is probably the mock interview with none other than Sam Fisher himself. Splinter Cell is also compatible with Xbox Live, not because the game has online multiplayer features (it has no multiplayer features, online or off), but because the broadband service allows you to download additional content for the game in the form of new missions, though none are available at this time. The promise of more Splinter Cell is pretty tempting, but what's important is that you get your money's worth out of the box, and you do.    If you're easily frustrated by games, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell probably isn't for you. Yet it's undoubtedly one the best examples of a stealth game to date, and it will surely appeal to those who've enjoyed similar games in the past. These players will have a great time with Sam Fisher's variety of moves and gadgets, and the game's lengthy missions should give them a significant challenge. Meanwhile, if you haven't played a stealth game before, then of course Splinter Cell is a perfectly good place to start, especially since its theme is less objectionable than Hitman 2 and its contract killings (it's OK to kill for the country, right?). Just don't expect the life of a secretive commando to be easy.



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998,Golden Sun: The Lost Age ,8.6, Golden Sun: The Lost Age is an excellent follow-up to the original Golden Sun.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/0/6/2210906-2267402-561356_51278_front.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/golden-sun-the-lost-age-review/1900-6025147/,pos,"
 When Golden Sun was released for the Game Boy Advance last year, the game quickly stood out as one of the best titles available for the system. Camelot Software Planning's expertise in the RPG genre, honed on games such as Sega's Shining Force series, resulted in a stellar mix of cutting-edge graphics and gameplay that blended classic RPG elements with some fresh new ideas. One of the few issues that players had with the game was its abrupt ending and relatively short length. Part of the reason for that was the developer's decision to parcel out the game's story in installments, with the first Golden Sun covering the first chapter in the tale. For the next entry in the series, Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Camelot has followed up with an even more polished game that exceeds its predecessor's high level of quality.  The second game in the Golden Sun series is even more polished than the previous game.  For those unfamiliar with the Golden Sun mythos, the game is set in the world of Weyard. The fragile land was almost torn asunder in days past, when men abused a mystical power called alchemy. However, before disaster struck, a small group of wise men sealed alchemy's power into a sanctum hidden in Mount Aleph and charged the inhabitants of Vale with guarding it. Unfortunately, a pair of evildoers named Saturous and Menardi attempted to take the power of alchemy from the sanctum at the start of the original Golden Sun. While their efforts were disrupted by the intervention of two residents of Vale, Isaac and Garret, the elemental stars--key to the power of alchemy--were stolen. The evil duo intends to harness the power of the stars to light four elemental lighthouses spread throughout Weyard, which will break the seal on the ancient power and unleash it.   For those keeping score, the effort to halt Saturous and Menardi hasn't gone terribly well. At the end of the original Golden Sun, the pair have managed to fire up the first lighthouse and was well on its way toward carrying out their evil plans. If you haven't played through the first game, don't fret--Golden Sun: The Lost Age features a lengthy recap of events that covers the key points of the first chapter. The Lost Age actually picks up shortly before the end of Golden Sun. You'll take control of Jenna, a childhood friend of Isaac and Garret who was kidnapped at the beginning of the first game. The game will follow Jenna and her brother Felix as they explore a new continent and take a different approach to dealing with Saturous and Menardi's plans to revive alchemy in the world.  If you've played the original Golden Sun or clocked in time with most any RPG, you'll find Golden Sun: The Lost Age to be a pretty accessible experience. The game plays very much like its predecessor and follows the tried-and-true conventions of the genre. You'll travel the world with your party of three other characters, making your way from town to town and talking to people and solving their problems. Along the way, a fair share of puzzles will test your wits. This time out, the puzzles are considerably more challenging, and in keeping with the game's 16-bit influences, you'll find several classic RPG conventions used in the dungeon puzzles, such as having to go through rooms in specific sequence or change the flow of water or wind currents to open up new areas. You'll also find some puzzle elements pop up when collecting the elemental creatures known as djinn. While collecting the creatures was fairly straightforward in the original Golden Sun, you'll find that capturing them is much more challenging this time around, thanks to their predilection for escape.   Golden Sun: The Lost Age features some nice extras in the form of a multiplayer game and GBA link-cable support.  As you make your way through the game, you'll find a liberal dose of turn-based combat to keep you on your toes. The Lost Age makes use of the same basic combat mechanics as the previous game, with a new twist. The game's turn-based combat is menu-driven and should be familiar to fans of the Shining Force games. Each character will have three types of attacks: standard physical attacks, psyenergy attacks (which take the place of traditional magic), and special moves performed by calling upon your djinn.  While the standard and psyenergy attacks all function the same as in Golden Sun, using the djinn has been tweaked slightly. In the previous game, the element-based djinn, which come in water, fire, earth, and wind varieties, could be assigned to members of your party and provided various stat enhancements that could also affect that character's class. In addition, the creatures provided you with two distinct options in combat: You were able to call on them once in a fight and unleash their abilities, which ranged from powerful attacks on an enemy to status enhancements that would affect you and your party. Once unleashed, the djinn would enter the standby mode, which would allow you to summon unique elemental creatures to fight for you based on the number of standby djinn you had. While those abilities are back in The Lost Age, you'll also be able to summon new creatures using ancient relics that will teach you different combinations of djinn for use in summoning creatures. In addition to looking quite sharp, the new creatures pack quite a punch and are very handy in combat. As before, combat is speedy and user-friendly, with a good amount of strategy thrown into the mix. It's also worth mentioning that The Lost Age doesn't feature intelligent targeting. As a result, members of your party will not target the next available enemy if their intended target is defeated before their turn to attack comes up.   Besides its single-player mode, Golden Sun: The Lost Age features some nice extras in the form of a multiplayer game and GBA link-cable support. Just like its predecessor, The Lost Age features a battle mode that will let you use your party to fight a series of monsters you've encountered in the game. You'll also be able to use your save data from the single-player mode to pit your party against a friend's using a GBA link cable. As before, the mode is mainly included to add a change of pace, as you won't be penalized or rewarded for playing it solo or with a friend. However, the GBA link cable will also come in handy if you have a copy of the original game. You'll be able to transfer party data from the original into Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Although the cable isn't required to bring data over, it certainly beats the gargantuan password you'll have to enter if you don't have a cable.   The Lost Age makes use of the same basic combat mechanics as the previous game, with a new twist.  The graphics in Golden Sun: The Lost Age are on par with those seen in its predecessor and are some of the finest on the Game Boy Advance. The character sprites are impressively detailed and feature surprisingly animated faces for 2D characters. The game's world map features smoother scrolling and slightly better detail than its predecessor. The environments in the game boats excellent artwork and a nice sense of style that gives the various villages and locales you'll be exploring a solid amount of variety. The pseudo-3D look the series uses for combat, complete with polygonal effects for psyenergy and when summoning djinn, is still impressive. The summon effects for higher-level djinn and the new combo creatures are especially slick. Another aspect of the game's graphics that stands out in comparison with the original is the stronger emphasis on a more cinematic presentation of the story. You'll find a number of elaborate cinemas that highlight some memorable sequences in the game and do a fine job of conveying a sense of scale. Overall, the game sports a more assured sense of style that compensates for the lack of any dramatic improvements in the series' visuals.    Golden Sun: The Lost Age is an excellent follow-up to the original Golden Sun.  The game's audio follows suit. The sound effects in the game are decent mix of ambient sound and satisfying effects--like the collision effect during combat--that do a fine job of setting the tone. The strongest element in the game's audio presentation, however, is the excellent soundtrack. While you'll hear a few familiar themes in the game, Golden Sun: The Lost Age features its own unique tunes that are a mix of various music styles and feature impressive little touches like snippets of vocals. The excellent overall package is a strong testament to the Game Boy Advance's sound capabilities.   Ultimately, Golden Sun: The Lost Age is an excellent follow-up to the original Golden Sun. The game makes some solid refinements to the series' gameplay, features a longer quest, and makes some nice tweaks to the series' presentation. Despite the fact that the Game Boy Advance library has seen some notable entries in the RPG genre--such as Breath of Fire and Breath of Fire II, Tactics Ogre, Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, and Lunar Legend--since the original game hit, Golden Sun: The Lost Age still manages to stand tall.  
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999,IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles ,8.6," Forgotten Battles doesn't make the sort of huge impact that the original game did, but it's generally a very worthy successor.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/2/5/5/2216255-il2_fb.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/il-2-sturmovik-forgotten-battles-review/1900-2912526/,pos,"
Released in 2001, IL-2 Sturmovik was a remarkable game, thanks to its unusual focus on WWII's eastern front, its great attention to detail, its gorgeous graphics, and its interesting selection of planes. The game's developer, 1C: Maddox Games, began working on an expansion pack, but along the way the expansion grew to become a full-fledged, full-priced sequel. But Forgotten Battles really is just like an expansion, since it's built around the same basic game engine, covers the same topic, and shares a massive number of features with the original IL-2. While Forgotten Battles isn't the true sequel you might have hoped for, and it suffers from its share of problems, there's a still lot to like about it.  Forgotten Battles is billed as a full-on sequel to the original IL-2 Sturmovik.   Forgotten Battles includes all the planes and maps from the original IL-2, though it jettisons that game's missions and campaigns. Getting to fly all those fascinating planes again is definitely a point in Forgotten Battles' favor. Losing the original campaigns is actually a good thing, too, since IL-2's clunky campaign system was one of the game's few significant weaknesses.   For new challenges, Forgotten Battles offers 20 new single-player missions and 10 multiplayer missions. You'll rise to meet varied challenges, like defending a vital bridge, escorting IL-2 ground-attack planes over the Gulf of Finland, attacking ships with torpedo bombers, and more. This time around, you'll get to fly not only as the Soviets and Germans, but also as the Finns and Hungarians. As a bonus of sorts, you'll even get to fly as the Americans in one mission, in which you attack a Hungarian airfield. Solid enemy AI means you should get a challenge no matter which mission you choose. While the missions are varied, they do suffer from some problems, like extremely long load times and occasional stuttering during a mission when the game tries to load or process even more data.   In addition to these missions, you'll find a full mission editor and a quick mission builder that lets you set up varied air-to-air and air-to-ground engagements. With the quick mission builder, you can choose the types of planes that you and the AI will fly, the skill level of the AI pilots, the starting altitude, the weather, and more. Unfortunately, you'll get to engage in these quick battles over just three maps--the same old ones from the original IL-2, in fact.   Along with the new individual missions, Forgotten Battles has a revamped campaign system that dynamically generates missions. You can choose to fly for the Soviets, Germans, Finns, or Hungarians, and you can choose the year and general region where your campaign starts and what basic type of plane you'll be flying.    Unfortunately, the campaign system suffers some of the same problems found in the original IL-2, as well as some of the problems found in the new single missions. First, you'll have to sit through some ridiculously long load times. Then you'll often find yourself reaching for the time compression and autopilot keys to travel the 100km or more from your airbase to your target without dying of boredom. Your mission objectives and status aren't always as clear as they should be, and the AI wingmen can behave oddly, dropping bombs kilometers away from their intended targets. While the combat engagements themselves are thrilling, you get precious little sense of actually taking part in the epic conflict that played out in the East. All you get are some bland, terse, and poorly written mission briefings with simple messages about losing a couple of planes on the last mission or having Lieutenant So-And-So join the squadron. Missions within a single pilot's career can also play out too similarly, though overall you'll get a lot of variety if you try all the different career tracks available.   A spectacular way to go.   You can also head online to play and in a variety of cooperative and competitive modes. Online play is one of Forgotten Battles' greatest strengths, especially since it features some exciting new maps, including a dramatic mountainous map that provides all sorts of tactical interest. But Forgotten Battles' multiplayer does have its share of problems--specifically, you have to use Ubi Soft's clumsy matchmaking software and deal with occasional lag and disconnects, not to mention the minor bugs that appear throughout the game.    No matter what sort of missions you choose to play, you'll encounter a huge assortment of fascinating planes, most of them flyable. You'll find numerous variants of workhorses like the Soviet IL-2 and German Bf 109 fighter. You'll pilot the famed Stuka dive-bomber, American-made planes like the P-47 Thunderbolt supplied to the Soviets through the Lend-Lease program, and the British-made Hurricane in Finnish service. You'll roar through the skies in the famed German Me 262 jet, preying on lumbering bombers and startling enemy fighters. Overall, the variety of planes you'll fly or fight against is really impressive: the game has everything from early-war biplanes to sea planes to the enormous German Zwilling used to tow huge transport gliders.Air combat on the eastern front mainly focused on tactical support of ground units, but bombers certainly played a part in the conflict too. One of the most interesting new features in Forgotten Battles is the ability to control multistation bombers, specifically the German He 111 and the Soviet TB-3. You'll be able to pilot them, as well as operate the bombsights (no easy task) and control all the different gun turrets, with the AI manning the stations not currently occupied by a human player. Sitting aboard one of these ponderous beasts provides a whole new kind of drama as enemy fighters race toward you. You'll be praying for your fighter escorts to arrive and that you and the other gunners can get in some hits with the puny turret machine guns before your bomber is shredded by enemy fire. It's too bad the game didn't include more flyable bombers, or at least more interesting and powerful ones. The included Soviet TB-3, for example, seems more like a curiosity than a really useful aircraft. In real life, relatively few were produced, and they were outdated by the time the Germans invaded and mainly used in a transport role at that stage.   Damaged planes can actually lose a single wing in flight.   As in the original IL-2, the flight models feel convincing, so you'll get a fun challenge not just from the enemy, but also from trying to master the nuances of all the different planes. For added interest and realism, you'll now find a number of optional advanced engine management features. You'll get to change the supercharger stage, alter the mixture richness, switch between multiple cowl/radiator-flap positions, and more. The skimpy manual doesn't describe all these features as well as it should, and they generally don't add too much to the core of the game--the combat--but they'll likely be welcomed by hard-core aviation fans.   You certainly won't need to be a hard-core fan to appreciate how great Forgotten Battles looks. If there was any glamour among the unremitting ugliness of the eastern front, it was likely in the skies. Many ground troops eagerly followed the exploits of their side's aces and would pause to enjoy the visual spectacle of dogfights overhead. Forgotten Battles' beautiful graphics do a splendid job capturing that aerial drama. Brilliantly colored tracers streak across the sky, and debris flies off planes when they're hit, leaving gaping holes with charred framework exposed. A damaged plane will soar through sky with fire and dense smoke pouring from a gutted engine, only to corkscrew into the earth with a spectacular explosion. When a plane really gets torn apart, you'll sometimes see one wing lazily twirl down into the sea while the rest of the ruined aircraft plummets ahead of it like a rock.    Even outside of combat, the visuals provide plenty to admire. It's true that Forgotten Battles relies on the same basic graphics engine as the original IL-2, but the engine was already excellent, and it was upgraded for the sequel. A lot of the terrain looks marvelous--expect to see rivers meandering through lush farmland and factory smokestacks rising from large cities. The sun reflects off rippling water, contrails snake across the sky when planes fly at high altitudes, and the clouds--particularly around nightfall--are almost photo-realistic at times. The planes are almost universally gorgeous, with highly detailed models and textures both outside and in. In fact, the internal views are pretty amazing, with detailed, animated controls and panels. It's just a shame that the menus are still as plain and uninviting as ever. Also, the game locked up our test system when we tried to run it in OpenGL, which meant we had to rely on Direct3D. Unfortunately, the game lets you select the highest terrain detail levels only under OpenGL.  One of the game's highly detailed cockpits.   Forgotten Battles' audio is almost as captivating as its visuals, though it also suffers from a few faults: The menu theme music sounds more like a tinny circus tune than a patriotic theme, and some of the voice-overs are unclear or exaggerated. Thankfully, Forgotten Battles' sound is great where it counts. The guns sound weighty and fierce, and the engines sound varied and convincing. It's a special treat when you first hop into an Me 262, for example--the sound of the powerful jet engines makes for a striking contrast to all the prop planes and lets you know you're in for an exhilarating flight. Lots of little details help further immerse you in the experience. You'll hear the wind rushing around your head when you sit in the open tail-gunner position of an IL-2, and you'll hear the low thud of a ship's heavy AA guns off in the distance as you fly over the sea.   If you were to think of IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles strictly as a full-priced, full-fledged, full-blown sequel, you might actually be a bit disappointed. The new game has some old problems from the original, and some of the new features aren't quite up to snuff. If you consider Forgotten Battles simply to be a new game in its own right, things look much better--the game features exciting combat, a wealth of fascinating aircraft, careful attention to detail, varied missions and maps, outstanding visuals, and more. Forgotten Battles doesn't make the sort of huge impact that the original game did, but, despite its faults, it's generally a very worthy successor.
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1000,F1 World Grand Prix ,4.4, F1 World Grand Prix's inconsistent frame rate prevents the game from being playable.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/4/3/9/918-3439.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/f1-world-grand-prix-review/1900-2547448/,neg,"
F1 World Grand Prix is the second VideoSystem title to bear the name. The first was released a little over a year ago for the N64 and was a solid simulation of F1 racing. Unfortunately, F1 World Grand Prix on the PlayStation suffers from many problems that its N64 counterpart didn't. The largest offense is an inconsistent frame rate that drops when too many cars appear on the screen at once, lowering the overall experience well past the point of being acceptable. The one plus the game has over its competitors is that it has tons of different options and features, letting you set up everything from the cars' performance to specific situations on the track. The game features real teams and drivers, as well as the actual courses from the 1999 F1 racing season. The number of different settings and racing options is truly staggering.  Controlling the cars takes some time to get a handle on. Since the game's frame rate and overall speed slows down when too many cars appear on the screen at once, it's hard to consistently steer the car with the appropriate force when you are playing the game with an analog controller. Modifying your car's various settings, such as wing angles, tires, and gearbox ratios, drastically changes the vehicle's performance. Fans of F1 games who appreciate the subtleties of F1 tweaking will surely enjoy the vast options that F1 World Grand Prix provides. However, fans who just want a visceral racing experience that doesn't require any knowledge of car physics will find the game's control to be a mystery. Visually, F1 World Grand Prix looks a little washed out. The car models are accurate, as are the tracks. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, the game's frame rate takes a dip when too many cars are on the screen. This slowdown hampers your efforts and often leaves you wondering exactly what happened, especially when a collision occurs and your car is left disabled.  In the audio department, the game does a decent job of representing the sounds of an actual track. The cars' high-pitched engine sounds scream in the key of annoyance, and the tires squeal as you slide off the track and bang into the wall.  In the end, F1 World Grand Prix's inconsistent frame rate prevents the game from being playable. While one certainly can appreciate all of the simulation options that the game has to offer; the gameplay and graphics simply don't back it up, and what results is a total mess.
 ","['F1', 'World', 'Grand', 'Prix', 'second', 'VideoSystem', 'title', 'bear', 'name', '.', 'The', 'first', 'released', 'little', 'year', 'ago', 'N64', 'solid', 'simulation', 'F1', 'racing', '.', 'Unfortunately', ',', 'F1', 'World', 'Grand', 'Prix', 'PlayStation', 'suffers', 'many', 'problems', 'N64', 'counterpart', ""n't"", '.', 'The', 'largest', 'offense', 'inconsistent', 'frame', 'rate', 'drops', 'many', 'cars', 'appear', 'screen', ',', 'lowering', 'overall', 'experience', 'well', 'past', 'point', 'acceptable', '.', 'The', 'one', 'plus', 'game', 'competitors', 'tons', 'different', 'options', 'features', ',', 'letting', 'set', 'everything', 'cars', ""'"", 'performance', 'specific', 'situations', 'track', '.', 'The', 'game', 'features', 'real', 'teams', 'drivers', ',', 'well', 'actual', 'courses', '1999', 'F1', 'racing', 'season', '.', 'The', 'number', 'different', 'settings', 'racing', 'options', 'truly', 'staggering', '.', 'Controlling', 'cars', 'takes', 'time', 'get', 'handle', '.', 'Since', 'game', ""'s"", 'frame', 'rate', 'overall', 'speed', 'slows', 'many', 'cars', 'appear', 'screen', ',', ""'s"", 'hard', 'consistently', 'steer', 'car', 'appropriate', 'force', 'playing', 'game', 'analog', 'controller', '.', 'Modifying', 'car', ""'s"", 'various', 'settings', ',', 'wing', 'angles', ',', 'tires', ',', 'gearbox', 'ratios', ',', 'drastically', 'changes', 'vehicle', ""'s"", 'performance', '.', 'Fans', 'F1', 'games', 'appreciate', 'subtleties', 'F1', 'tweaking', 'surely', 'enjoy', 'vast', 'options', 'F1', 'World', 'Grand', 'Prix', 'provides', '.', 'However', ',', 'fans', 'want', 'visceral', 'racing', 'experience', ""n't"", 'require', 'knowledge', 'car', 'physics', 'find', 'game', ""'s"", 'control', 'mystery', '.', 'Visually', ',', 'F1', 'World', 'Grand', 'Prix', 'looks', 'little', 'washed', '.', 'The', 'car', 'models', 'accurate', ',', 'tracks', '.', 'Unfortunately', ',', 'mentioned', ',', 'game', ""'s"", 'frame', 'rate', 'takes', 'dip', 'many', 'cars', 'screen', '.', 'This', 'slowdown', 'hampers', 'efforts', 'often', 'leaves', 'wondering', 'exactly', 'happened', ',', 'especially', 'collision', 'occurs', 'car', 'left', 'disabled', '.', 'In', 'audio', 'department', ',', 'game', 'decent', 'job', 'representing', 'sounds', 'actual', 'track', '.', 'The', 'cars', ""'"", 'high-pitched', 'engine', 'sounds', 'scream', 'key', 'annoyance', ',', 'tires', 'squeal', 'slide', 'track', 'bang', 'wall', '.', 'In', 'end', ',', 'F1', 'World', 'Grand', 'Prix', ""'s"", 'inconsistent', 'frame', 'rate', 'prevents', 'game', 'playable', '.', 'While', 'one', 'certainly', 'appreciate', 'simulation', 'options', 'game', 'offer', ';', 'gameplay', 'graphics', 'simply', ""n't"", 'back', ',', 'results', 'total', 'mess', '.']",0.008795093795093792,0.477005772005772
1001,Gigawing ,4.4," Gigawing began as a CPS2 arcade game, and the difficulty that stems from these arcade roots is apparent - this game is impossible.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/5/7/2220457-gigawing1.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gigawing-review/1900-2540311/,neg,"
After a painfully long hiatus in production, the shooter has triumphantly returned to the market. Armed with 3D graphics and deeper gameplay, the shooter has once again found its place in the hearts of the masses. Capitalizing on this trend, Capcom has released Gigawing, proving that there's a lot more to a good shooter than a cool design gimmick. Why Capcom USA brought this game to the States is beyond us. One day, the Medallion of Wisdom fell from its shrine in heaven. The power-hungry humans quickly discovered that equipping their planes, trains and other devices with this metal granted them the power of the gods. Naturally, this medal fell into the wrong hands, and it's up to four fighter pilots to wrestle it from those hands and destroy it and all that it begets. To help them, these pilots have a magnificent new power at their beck and call - the Reflect Force. Aptly named, the Reflect Force does just as the name implies - it reflects enemy bullets. While this power can be used as many times as you desire, it takes a short amount of time to recharge between uses. In addition to the Reflect Force, each fighter pilot has his own weapon, ranging in both attack spread and strength, and three screen-clearing bombs. While the Reflect Force is a great concept, the game surrounding it isn't so hot. Gigawing began as a CPS2 arcade game, and the difficulty that stems from these arcade roots is apparent - this game is impossible. That may be a slight overstatement, but mortals should expect to continue a lot. The screen is constantly filled with beams, bullets, and other deadly projectiles. While the whole point of the Reflect Force is to turn this ceaseless barrage to the player's advantage, the Reflect Force's recharge time makes it difficult to use. In fact, you're likely to die many, many times when trying to use it. During the game's latter half you may find yourself dying and continuing only to take advantage of the three bombs that come with every life. This kind of difficulty is not only frustrating but also disheartening. Radiant Silvergun, the de facto standard for quality shooters these days, is the exact opposite: Although that game is difficult, one still felt that the odds weren't impossible, and playing again and again would almost always result in additional progress. When you are dealing with shooters there will always be the question of longevity. Compared with recent offerings, Gigawing is definitely a questionable release. Thanks to the unlimited continues, you may opt to complete the game in your first sitting. A sitting that will last all of 30 minutes. And that's it. Nothing more. Playing with the other three characters adds nothing to the game, really, rather giving players the chance to skip the brief philosophical monologues and play the same levels in a slightly different order. No secrets, no different levels. Not even a worthwhile ending. While Gigawing may have been an impressive feat for the aging CPS2 arcade board, it doesn't stack up on the Dreamcast at all. Sure, the Dreamcast's processing power gives the game silky-smooth dodging mayhem without a hint of slowdown, but that doesn't mean the game is in the least bit attractive. Capcom got where it is today by bringing a high level of polish to the table, something Gigawing developer Takumi can't seem to imitate. The game's graphics are muddy, primitive, and lacking in style. To top it off, the game's effects are nonexistent, animations are brusque, and the color palette is garish and unbalanced. Takumi's audio team is no better than the art team, bringing appropriately mediocre music and sound effects to this entirely stale effort. Why did this game come to the US? If Gigawing were priced to move, the violent lack of quality and longevity could be forgiven to an extent, but it's not. Gigawing was designed with the hardest-core shooter fans in mind, but it's this same audience that's likely to be the most disappointed.
 ","['After', 'painfully', 'long', 'hiatus', 'production', ',', 'shooter', 'triumphantly', 'returned', 'market', '.', 'Armed', '3D', 'graphics', 'deeper', 'gameplay', ',', 'shooter', 'found', 'place', 'hearts', 'masses', '.', 'Capitalizing', 'trend', ',', 'Capcom', 'released', 'Gigawing', ',', 'proving', ""'s"", 'lot', 'good', 'shooter', 'cool', 'design', 'gimmick', '.', 'Why', 'Capcom', 'USA', 'brought', 'game', 'States', 'beyond', 'us', '.', 'One', 'day', ',', 'Medallion', 'Wisdom', 'fell', 'shrine', 'heaven', '.', 'The', 'power-hungry', 'humans', 'quickly', 'discovered', 'equipping', 'planes', ',', 'trains', 'devices', 'metal', 'granted', 'power', 'gods', '.', 'Naturally', ',', 'medal', 'fell', 'wrong', 'hands', ',', ""'s"", 'four', 'fighter', 'pilots', 'wrestle', 'hands', 'destroy', 'begets', '.', 'To', 'help', ',', 'pilots', 'magnificent', 'new', 'power', 'beck', 'call', '-', 'Reflect', 'Force', '.', 'Aptly', 'named', ',', 'Reflect', 'Force', 'name', 'implies', '-', 'reflects', 'enemy', 'bullets', '.', 'While', 'power', 'used', 'many', 'times', 'desire', ',', 'takes', 'short', 'amount', 'time', 'recharge', 'uses', '.', 'In', 'addition', 'Reflect', 'Force', ',', 'fighter', 'pilot', 'weapon', ',', 'ranging', 'attack', 'spread', 'strength', ',', 'three', 'screen-clearing', 'bombs', '.', 'While', 'Reflect', 'Force', 'great', 'concept', ',', 'game', 'surrounding', ""n't"", 'hot', '.', 'Gigawing', 'began', 'CPS2', 'arcade', 'game', ',', 'difficulty', 'stems', 'arcade', 'roots', 'apparent', '-', 'game', 'impossible', '.', 'That', 'may', 'slight', 'overstatement', ',', 'mortals', 'expect', 'continue', 'lot', '.', 'The', 'screen', 'constantly', 'filled', 'beams', ',', 'bullets', ',', 'deadly', 'projectiles', '.', 'While', 'whole', 'point', 'Reflect', 'Force', 'turn', 'ceaseless', 'barrage', 'player', ""'s"", 'advantage', ',', 'Reflect', 'Force', ""'s"", 'recharge', 'time', 'makes', 'difficult', 'use', '.', 'In', 'fact', ',', ""'re"", 'likely', 'die', 'many', ',', 'many', 'times', 'trying', 'use', '.', 'During', 'game', ""'s"", 'latter', 'half', 'may', 'find', 'dying', 'continuing', 'take', 'advantage', 'three', 'bombs', 'come', 'every', 'life', '.', 'This', 'kind', 'difficulty', 'frustrating', 'also', 'disheartening', '.', 'Radiant', 'Silvergun', ',', 'de', 'facto', 'standard', 'quality', 'shooters', 'days', ',', 'exact', 'opposite', ':', 'Although', 'game', 'difficult', ',', 'one', 'still', 'felt', 'odds', ""n't"", 'impossible', ',', 'playing', 'would', 'almost', 'always', 'result', 'additional', 'progress', '.', 'When', 'dealing', 'shooters', 'always', 'question', 'longevity', '.', 'Compared', 'recent', 'offerings', ',', 'Gigawing', 'definitely', 'questionable', 'release', '.', 'Thanks', 'unlimited', 'continues', ',', 'may', 'opt', 'complete', 'game', 'first', 'sitting', '.', 'A', 'sitting', 'last', '30', 'minutes', '.', 'And', ""'s"", '.', 'Nothing', '.', 'Playing', 'three', 'characters', 'adds', 'nothing', 'game', ',', 'really', ',', 'rather', 'giving', 'players', 'chance', 'skip', 'brief', 'philosophical', 'monologues', 'play', 'levels', 'slightly', 'different', 'order', '.', 'No', 'secrets', ',', 'different', 'levels', '.', 'Not', 'even', 'worthwhile', 'ending', '.', 'While', 'Gigawing', 'may', 'impressive', 'feat', 'aging', 'CPS2', 'arcade', 'board', ',', ""n't"", 'stack', 'Dreamcast', '.', 'Sure', ',', 'Dreamcast', ""'s"", 'processing', 'power', 'gives', 'game', 'silky-smooth', 'dodging', 'mayhem', 'without', 'hint', 'slowdown', ',', ""n't"", 'mean', 'game', 'least', 'bit', 'attractive', '.', 'Capcom', 'got', 'today', 'bringing', 'high', 'level', 'polish', 'table', ',', 'something', 'Gigawing', 'developer', 'Takumi', 'ca', ""n't"", 'seem', 'imitate', '.', 'The', 'game', ""'s"", 'graphics', 'muddy', ',', 'primitive', ',', 'lacking', 'style', '.', 'To', 'top', ',', 'game', ""'s"", 'effects', 'nonexistent', ',', 'animations', 'brusque', ',', 'color', 'palette', 'garish', 'unbalanced', '.', 'Takumi', ""'s"", 'audio', 'team', 'better', 'art', 'team', ',', 'bringing', 'appropriately', 'mediocre', 'music', 'sound', 'effects', 'entirely', 'stale', 'effort', '.', 'Why', 'game', 'come', 'US', '?', 'If', 'Gigawing', 'priced', 'move', ',', 'violent', 'lack', 'quality', 'longevity', 'could', 'forgiven', 'extent', ',', ""'s"", '.', 'Gigawing', 'designed', 'hardest-core', 'shooter', 'fans', 'mind', ',', ""'s"", 'audience', ""'s"", 'likely', 'disappointed', '.']",0.004470598845598869,0.5340785834535832
1002,Hardline ,4.4," Unfortunately, reading the box was the only thing mind-blowing about Hardline.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/1/3/2209613-hardlineboxart.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hardline-review/1900-2537428/,neg,"
When I first got my hands on Hardline and read the back of the box, boy was I excited.  It promised action and adventure, an awesome arsenal, a mysterious storyline, and the ability to turn your enemy's brains into Jell-O just by using mysterious psychic abilities. Unfortunately, reading the box was the only thing mind-blowing about Hardline. For starters, the lead character is pretty hokey. As helicopter pilot Ted Irvin, your objective is to rid the city of Detroit of the Sectoids, a deadly cult that worships the Deck. Okay, whatever. Even though years of bad plots have made me immune to the stupid storyline syndrome, they didn't prepare me for ""Ted Irvin,"" which has got to be the stupidest name for a hero yet conceived! But that's the least of Hardline's problems. This is another one of those games where you pay $40 to watch a B-rated movie. The developers even tout the fact that the title offers over two hours of movie footage. Oh, wow...can I please watch Ted open another door?! Holy smokes...look at Ted run down that alley! I think you get my point. If you're into watching film, I do have to admit that the graphics in Hardline are actually pretty good and the game boasts an excellent frame rate. I didn't experience any noticeable slowdown during the lengthy video sequences or when the screen was filled with Sectoids trying to blow my head off. Even so, this won't be enough to convince gamers that they're having a good time. When you get right down to it, Hardline is nothing more than a glorified shooting gallery filled with gun-toting thugs instead of ducks. The sluggish and often tedious gameplay really detracts from an otherwise attractive game. When targeting the Sectoids, it's as though you're moving your mouse through glue. Hardline isn't quite good enough to call cheesy. In the end it's a lot more like Velveeta: a heavily processed cheese product. My final analysis? Hardline is nowhere close to the mind-blowing experience the box suggests - it just blows.
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1003,In-Fisherman Bass Hunter 64 ,4.4, This game falls short of the mark and only makes you wonder how you could have liked fishing in the first place.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/3/8/8/1172-4388.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/in-fisherman-bass-hunter-64-review/1900-2544432/,neg,"
Maybe you don't have any buddies. Maybe you work too much, or live too far from a decent lake, or perhaps you don't own any rods and don't want to invest in fishing gear. Whatever the case, you may be more apt to play a fishing video game than make the trek out to a serene lake to try your luck with the underwater life. If that's the case, then you'll have to make a critical decision before purchasing a fishing game - do you want a true-to-life fishing simulation or an action-packed arcade-style fishing game? While Bass Hunter 64 certainly has elements from both flavors, it doesn't do either style particularly well. Bass Hunter is extremely straightforward in play. You choose one of two characters and then head down to the lake for some fishing. If you want more options, you'll have to play through its tournament mode, which puts you on different lakes, under various conditions, in a race to catch the biggest fish before your time expires. Once you've placed first on that lake, you unlock it for the nontournament mode. Another benefit of winning a tournament is the acquisition of points, which you can spend on upgrading your gear. Bass Hunter contains more than twenty different types of authentic lures, three different rods, and a much better boat, all yours for the buying. Once you're on the lake, you choose one of three different types of casting and go at it. If you don't like your fishing area, you can hop into your boat and troll along to a different spot, using your fish finder to locate the big biters. The game sports a split-screen style of play. The top half focuses on your angler from a third-person perspective, while the lower half centers in on your lure and acts as an underwater cam of sorts. This is a pretty cool idea and lets you focus on what pleases you - your angler, or the fish swimming by your lure. Altogether, though, the graphics aren't all that eye pleasing, and I was unable to make any good use of the underwater cam, since the bass all look the same size until you pull them out of the water. And while milling about in your boat may have been the most amusing part of the game, the insane amount of pop-up makes it almost impossible to locate a decent spot without first flying by it. The sound is best described as mediocre. There's a total lack of music until you hook a fish - at which point a singular upbeat track starts and tries to compel you to reel that bad boy in. The sound effects are generally boring, with an annoying whizzing of the line while you're reeling and hardly any ambient effects at all. Reeling in a fish is divided between two buttons - reel fast or reel slow. And while the game tells you how far away your lure is, it doesn't let you know how deep it is, which prevents you from lurking on the bottom of shallow water with any sort of accuracy. And don't expect to catch any bass larger than four pounds; after playing the game for four days straight I only caught two fish in the four-pound range. You'd be better off actually experiencing fishing in real life than trying to replace it with this game. Walking the thin line between simulation and arcade, this game ends up being neither and ultimately ends up being devoid of any sort of fun. Making you play the lame tournament mode before you can unlock any of the lakes or purchase any of the cool lures is simply tedious, and catching large bass seems to have more to do with luck than any sort of skill. This game falls short of the mark and only makes you wonder how you could have liked fishing in the first place.
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1004,Juggernaut ,4.4, Juggernaut's slow-paced gameplay and bare-bones interactivity make for a lackluster game - one that only patient puzzle fanatics could embrace.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/5/2/8/1219-4528.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/juggernaut-review/1900-2545981/,neg,"
Freeway veterans know the kiss of death: a slow-moving car in the passing lane. When boxed in, speedy drivers are forced to suffer slowly behind these traffic-jam instigators. That frustrating feeling of moving slow and being powerless to do anything about it encapsulates the experience of playing through Juggernaut, a point-and-click puzzle adventure that, to paraphrase Austin Powers, puts the ""ger"" in meager gameplay, baby. This three-CD game starts with a fairly unconventional plot: A girlfriend possessed by an evil spirit needs the player to warp into her twisted soul to save her. However, the gameplay is strictly cookie cutter: Move, gather items, then use intellect and/or items to solve puzzles that will ultimately rid the evil from the player's gal pal. The main problem with this first-person point-and-click game is that there's not much to point and click at. Game screens have only one or two items to select, at most - a drawer or an object - and the rest is eye candy. Gameplay would've been more exciting if players could interact with the game screens and explore them in greater detail. That shortfall in both detail and animation makes players feel as though they're walking from one painted game screen to another, which dulls the excitement level immensely. Compounding the dullness are transition FMV screens that shuttle players from one screen to the next. These slow the game's pace to boredom-inducing levels. That's not the only complaint. Frankly, most puzzles are too easy. A few ask youto memorize and repeat sound or visual patterns - those aren't too bad. Worse are the mindless puzzles that get ""solved"" after you visit different areas randomly. For example, a character will give you a password only after you have visited a nearby area twice. You're only going to solve that puzzle after wandering from screen to screen - hardly the definition of challenging fun. In addition, many of the puzzles are made difficult not by being challenging intellectually, but by the fact that you must backtrack repeatedly to solve them. For instance, in the mansion stage, you must switch between small and large bodies to explore different areas. Every time you have to make a body switch to solve a puzzle, you must run back to the nearest switching station. This task gets tedious after time, especially if the switching stations are far away. Juggernaut lacks the presentation savvy found in other video games. Most conversations are text-only, with sparse audio effects for background music and sound effects - painfully vanilla for a three-disc game. Despite extensive full-motion video sequences, the prerendered screens seem more suited to a first-generation title. This game has a few redeeming qualities that should be noted. The idea of using different ""bodies"" to explore the game's mansion stage is indeed unique for a puzzle game - meaning that you need a certain body type to enter a given area of the mansion. The game's surreal plot, while convoluted and often hard to follow, makes for unique exploration stages, such as one where you surf the Internet in the year 2250, or another where you visit a village where all the murdered residents lack their eyeballs.... now if that's not the definition of a convoluted plot, what is? Finally, the game's storyline does get better once the second disc is popped in, but the puzzles remain woefully unchallenging. Juggernaut's slow-paced gameplay and bare-bones interactivity make for a lackluster game - one that only patient puzzle fanatics could embrace. For the rest, switch lanes and pass this title up.
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1005,Maximum Force ,4.4, Playing Maximum Force is a one-time deal.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/1/6/4/2220164-maximum_force_cover.jpg,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/maximum-force-review/1900-2533985/,neg,"
Maximum Force is Atari Games' follow-up to the alien-infested gun game, Area 51. In this installment, the aliens are gone, and you're part of an antiterrorist group. You (and a friend) must go through three levels, each of which is chock-full of bad guys just waiting to have their caps peeled back. If you've played Area 51, you'll pick up Maximum Force right away. With the exception of the levels themselves, the game is identical, right down to many of the power-ups. Also, a lot more bonus levels have been tossed in. So many, in fact, that they become a real nuisance and interrupt gameplay way too frequently. The Sega Stunner is the best choice here; using the controller to play the game is a futile effort, and playing the game with a gun that has an autofire feature causes so many screen flashes you'll think you're in an '80s dance club. The graphics are fine, but the Saturn's poor FMV abilities really show through here, as the video looks quite blocky, especially when compared with the PlayStation version. The sound effects and music do a nice job of setting the tone, but considering most of the sound effects were lifted directly from Area 51, this isn't much of a surprise. Playing Maximum Force is a one-time deal. Once you've finished it (anyone can do it the first time through), there's no point in continuing to play. Compared with other gun games, Maximum Force simply falls short. Gamers will be better served by picking up Virtua Cop 2 or even Die Hard Trilogy.
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1006,Mission: Impossible ,4.4," Compared with more recent spy games for the PlayStation, Mission: Impossible just doesn't stand up.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/5/1/0/2209510-2362072_nes_missionimpossible.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mission-impossible-review/1900-2548400/,neg,"
The PlayStation version is a direct port of last year's N64 game with minor improvements, such as dramatic lighting effects, speech, and a quick-save feature. While these enhancements certainly make the game better than its N64 counterpart, M:I simply wasn't that great to begin with and it now feels dated in comparison to more recent spy games such as Syphon Filter, Metal Gear Solid, or even Tomorrow Never Dies. The storyline of the game loosely follows that of the original movie. A mole has infiltrated the IMF team and framed you, agent Ethan Hunt. Now you must recover the NOC list (a document that lists all the IMF operatives working undercover around the world) to lure the mole into the open so he can clear his name. To do so, you'll visit various locations that you'll recognize from the movie such as the CIA headquarters in Langley VA, where Tom Cruise hung from a rope to access the world's most secure computer. You get to do this and many other things seen in the movie, as well as embark on completely new missions. Some are fun and challenging, such as the one where you get to use a sniper rifle to take out the bad guys as they try to attack one of your team members. But levels like these are few and far between, and the majority are just plain boring.  The missions are basically broken up into two parts. One portion will have you running around the level collecting and using objects while avoiding enemy detection. The later parts are straightforward action levels where you have to do things like shoot all the bad guys you come across, jump over dangerous toxic goo, and blow up targets. For instance, on the embassy-party level, you must assume the identity of a specific guest. You have to knock him out first, but you can't just walk up and smack him or it will blow your cover. So you have to lure him away by putting nausea powder in his drink, forcing him to run to the restroom where you can knock him out unseen and then use your face maker to assume his identity. Once you've taken his appearance, making it past the guards is a breeze. There are other instances where the interaction between your character and the characters in the game is subtle but smart. For example, when you are in a place where a gun would be inappropriate, like a hospital, the characters in the hospital start screaming that you have a gun, thus causing a big stir, and security is dispatched to come and pick you up.  The visuals and camera angles in Mission Impossible are competent. All of the action is seen from a camera angle behind and above Ethan when you're in open areas. When you're in close quarters, the camera angle changes to a behind-the-back view, and if you need to see something or use the targeting crosshairs to place a careful shot, you can hit your gun button that makes Ethan transparent, letting you see through him. It's hard to miss with the Mission: Impossible theme and accompanying spy tunes, so the soundtrack is good, but the sound effects are only fair. Some sounds are quite familiar and surely have appeared in other games. The inclusion of speech in the PlayStation version of Mission Impossible is a definite plus, although more because it saves you the pain of reading lengthy text bits (as was the case in the original version) than because of its quality of acting. The accents the actors use for the Russian characters in the game are downright comical. One really helpful tool that has been added to the PlayStation version of Mission Impossible is its quick-save feature, which lets you save your progress in a level at any point without the need of a memory card. This makes the game so much easier, because you can start from where you last saved in a level so you don't have to start the whole mission over again. It trims down on a lot of frustration. Overall, Mission Impossible for the PlayStation isn't a bad game, and it's certainly better than its N64 counterpart, but compared with more recent spy games for the PlayStation, it just doesn't stand up. Even if you really enjoy the genre and have already played Syphon Filter, Metal Gear Solid, and Tomorrow Never Dies, you should still consider renting Mission Impossible before buying.
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1007,Mobile Suit Z-Gundam (Import) ,4.4, The Gundam series has spawned yet another game. This time around it's a third-person robot shooter that takes a few pages from Sega's Virtual On.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/2/4/8/1401-5248.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mobile-suit-z-gundam-import-review/1900-2548490/,neg,"
The Gundam series has spawned yet another game. This time around it's a third-person robot shooter that takes a few pages from Sega's Virtual On. Mobile Suit Z-Gundam has four different play modes. The main story mode features cutscenes, all of which are, of course, in Japanese. Battle mode cuts out all the FMV mumbo jumbo and lets you get right to the fighting. Vs. CPU allows you to choose your opponent and just fight. Link mode allows you to hook two PlayStations up and duke it out with a friend. The game comes with two discs (one for each of the main characters), so you'll be able to link up with only one copy of the game. There are 16 characters to choose from, in all modes except story mode, each of which has different speed, armor, and firepower attributes. During a battle, the mobile suits have two weapons available: The gun is used for long-range attacks while the sword is used to deal damage up close. The game allows you to change elevation as well as direction to give the game a 3D feel. The two robots are kept a little too close together, which results in a slightly claustrophobic setting. The controls are quite sluggish, regardless of whether you use the normal or analog setting. In the end, this is the fatal flaw that keeps Mobile Suit Z-Gundam from being a good game. Graphically, the game has a crisp, sharp look. The suits look, well, about as realistic as a 40-foot fighting robot suit can look. The multiple backgrounds give each battle its own look, and the game uses a lot of lighting effects that add a bit of pizzazz. Overall, Mobile Suit Z-Gundam is a fair import title with good graphics and sound but terrible gameplay. Unless you're a big fan of the series, or someone that lives for link cable games, feel free to skip out on this import.
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1008,NHL 2004 ,8.6," Although NHL 2004 does fall just shy of beating out the competition, any previous fan of EA's NHL series will find very little to complain about in this installment.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/1/9/2209619-box_nhl04.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nhl-2004-review/1900-6075585/,pos,"
 These days, if you're a fan of the sport of hockey and video games, you're living the good life. Developers have been upping the ante on their hockey titles far more substantially in the last few years and are really working hard to make their NHL titles better so they can compete with the NFL, NBA, and MLB offerings. One of the main causes for this increase in quality hockey titles is competition--or a sudden appearance thereof. EA's long-running NHL franchise has always been successful, but last year, Sega finally brought out an NHL title worthy of competing with EA's in NHL 2K3. This year, both companies have clearly worked hard at improving their respective games, each trying to get an edge over the other. ESPN NHL Hockey is the latest in Sega's series, and, for all intents and purposes, it is simply one of the best hockey games ever designed. EA's answer to ESPN is NHL 2004, and, in a few fundamental ways, the game actually does manage to beat out the opposition, though ultimately it falls a bit short of being the best overall package. It's still a really great hockey game in its own right, though.  NHL 2004 is an excellent follow-up to last year's NHL 2003, improving a number of key aspects of the gameplay and graphics.  If you've ever played any of the EA NHL games, you'll feel pretty well at home with NHL 2004. Most of the basic controls are the same, but there are a couple of welcome additions. Last year's game introduced the concept of right-analog deking, which lets you dodge and weave between defenders by moving the stick however you may need to. Now, you can use the right stick to check players as well. When on defense, simply skate up to the player you wish to check, and then tap the stick in his direction. Depending on how much momentum you've built up, you can either shove the opposing player off the puck, or you can absolutely crush him into the boards. This checking system does take a bit of getting used to, as you have to be pretty precise in picking your directions for a hit. Overall it works very nicely. Of course, you still have the option of using button-based checking as well.  The other new addition to NHL 2004's control scheme is two-button passing. With two-button passing, you can either use a standard pass, or you can use a saucer pass to get the puck to one of your teammates. Saucer passing is useful for getting the puck past defenders, as you can lift the puck off the ice and over an opponent's stick. It's a little looser than a standard pass, but, ultimately, it should be. It's really a great addition, especially when you consider how hard standard passing can be. You have to be very precise in your choice of directions and in the level of power you put behind passes, as defenders are very quick to intercept even slightly mistimed or misdirected passes. Saucer passes still require pretty precise timing, but, directionally, you have a bit more freedom.  The new dynasty mode lets you perform many of the tasks of a real-life NHL general manager.  Another aspect that EA greatly endeavored to upgrade in this year's title was the overall grittiness of the sport. They have done just that! NHL 2004 is a brutal game of hockey, through and through, with bone crunching checks and a greatly improved fighting system. The right analog checking really helps in terms of making it a little more free-form and not restricting you to hitting whoever happens to be right next to you. There's more to it than this system, however, as the game features a gaggle of new hitting and checking animations that are superbly realistic. In fact, every time you send a player crashing to the ice or when you get sent there yourself, you definitely feel it.  As far as the new fighting system goes, it's easily the best around. Hockey fights are sort of a tough thing to re-create, as most of them usually just involve a couple of wildly thrown punches, teamed with a lot of jersey pulling and falling down. In terms of video game fights, most systems have been a total joke. They usually ape standard fighting games and end up looking like matches between a couple of Rock'em Sock'em Robots. The new fighting system, developed for NHL 2004, emulates realistic hockey fights but without all the falling down.    Essentially, fights occur based on how agitated a player is. If your team is losing, getting knocked around a lot, or is generally in a bad place, eventually one of your tougher players will become enraged to the point of wanting to fight. When that happens, you can either choose to ignore the fight, or you can engage in it by pressing the select button. Once that happens, the two players throw off their gloves and lock in a grappling stance. During the fight you're then able to punch high, punch low, block high, or block low. Keep in mind that a lot of the fighting is timing based. Block at an inopportune time or place, and you'll get walloped. Likewise, try to throw too many punches, and you'll get blocked and immediately nailed upside the head. All told, it's actually a pretty well done system, and the option of engaging in or ignoring fights is really useful if you don't feel like breaking up the flow of the game.  The new Dynasty mode lets you perform many of the tasks of a real-life NHL general manager.  NHL 2004's player AI is also a big improvement over last year's problematic AI, which didn't really have much going on in terms of the defensive game. This is definitely not the case anymore. On either side of the puck, CPU players are a whole lot smarter this year and are especially more adept at breaking up your plays and keeping you from getting a straight line to the net. This does make the game quite a bit more difficult than you'd expect, and, even on the default difficulty, it'll likely take you a while to get accustomed to having to deke past some really tough defenders. On the flip side of the coin, it'll take a while to get accustomed to keeping opposing teams from just blazing right past you and setting up easy one-timers for the score.  You can't hang all of NHL 2004's relative difficulty on its AI though, because, really, a challenging game is always better than an unchallenging one. Ultimately, even if the game's AI were much easier to deal with, you'd still have trouble creating big plays--mainly because it can be very hard to handle the puck. Obviously, since you play hockey on ice, puck control is difficult to begin with. However, in NHL 2004, it's a little too easy to just have the puck slide all over the place. Players periodically skate right by the puck, missing it altogether. As mentioned before, passing is also quite difficult, so the combination of difficult puck control and precise passing makes it a tough task to create any kind of play. Ultimately, it's going to come down to whether or not you want to take the time to really master the system. It still provides great gameplay, but it's definitely not quite as user-friendly as ESPN's game.  Visually, NHL 2004 looks superb, as  the player models, arenas, and in-game animations are excellent all around.  Where NHL 2004 truly succeeds is in terms of depth. Specifically, NHL 2004 includes a multitude of game modes. If you just want to play a quick game, you can simply choose the play now option. However, if you're up for a lengthier gameplay session, you can opt to play through a season, the playoffs, an elimination tournament, or the newly redesigned dynasty mode. This year's dynasty mode is easily the deepest ever designed for an NHL game, and it lets you take on the dual role of both coach and general manager for your chosen NHL franchise. At the beginning of the dynasty mode, you're told that your team's owner has fired most of the coaching staff and has sold off the bulk of the team's facilities. It's up to you as GM to rebuild the franchise--from scratch--and take your team to glory.  All of the usual conventions for a dynasty mode apply in NHL 2004, including player/CPU trading, free agent signing, roster management, and the like. However, duties are now split up between the GM and the coach. Coaching duties basically entail managing your team's lines, assigning jersey numbers, and monitoring the league schedules. The real bulk of the mode's duties lie on the general manager's side. Duties for the GM include signing, releasing and trading players, monitoring less tangible aspects (like team morale), and maintaining the day-to-day finances of the team. As you start your franchise from scratch, your players' morale generally tends to be on the lower side of the league, and, more often than not, they won't be playing to their full potential. To fix this problem, you have to upgrade your staff and facilities by gaining experience points.   Experience points are earned in the dynasty mode by initiating and performing transactions and making various business decisions. Simply winning games earns you a few experience points each time, but to get bigger additions to your GM's experience level, you need to make big trades, sign major free agents, do well in the NHL draft, and, most importantly, win Stanley Cups. Each time you hit a certain number of points, you earn a new upgrade for your team. Upgrades are split into two categories: staff and facilities. Staff upgrades include changes to your scouting, medical, coaching, marketing and legal personnel. On the facilities side, you're able to upgrade your equipment room, travel methods, team gym, practice rink, and locker room. Each category has its own specific advantage. For instance, upgrading your medical staff allows for a one week faster recovery period for injured players, whereas upsizing your practice rink increases your players' attributes for home games. As you go, you're also able to adorn your general manager's office with various rewards, like new furniture, carpets, and other items, to give your office a more personalized feel.  NHL 2004's newly-designed fighting system manages to finally capture the realism of an authentic hockey fight, but without a lot of falling all over the place.  In the dynasty mode, you're also able to do things, like set dates and lengths for team practices, set ticket prices for regular season and playoff games, and sign TV contracts based upon how many superstar players you have on your roster. All in all, there's a whole lot to do in this mode, and it should keep players entertained for a long while as it does go for a full 20 seasons. However, if there's one complaint to mount against this mode, it's that you always start out in the dredges of the league. While it's a lot of fun to try and build a team from the ground floor, sometimes you might just want to leap right in with a team that's already good and just dominate for as long as the mode will allow. Perhaps an option to turn off the experience-building system might have been a nice touch, but, really, this is only a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things. It's still a really great and deep dynasty mode.  Graphically, NHL 2004 looks really spectacular--especially when it comes to animation. Hits are incredibly spectacular--particularly in those instances when someone gets knocked into the bench or gets absolutely leveled to the ice. The animation for skating is also extremely well done, and watching the players move up and down the ice looks amazingly realistic. The player models in NHL 2004 are also really great, with accurate body builds and very well-designed player faces. All of the game's arenas are designed with perfect detail and actually resemble their real-life counterparts. The crowd graphics are quite good--though the frame rate on the crowds is notably lower than the action on the ice, which looks a bit odd in certain camera shots. Additionally, the EA Sports style of presentation is readily apparent throughout the game, complete with all the slick menu designs and overlays that you've come to expect over the years. The Xbox and GameCube versions of the game both look superb, with the Xbox version having the expectedly cleaner and brighter look but only to a very minor degree.  The game's AI is much improved this year, especially in the defensive game, but also on the offensive side of the puck.  NHL 2004's audio presentation is also of excellent quality. Most of the in-game sound effects appear to be holdovers from last year, but, considering how great last year's game sounded, this is not at all a bad thing. Play-by-play commentary is still provided by Jim Hughson, but, this year, former color commentator Don Taylor has been replaced by Craig Simpson, a former NHL player and two-time Stanley Cup winner. While Simpson is definitely a better overall fit for the game, there really isn't enough of him to make an impact. He rarely says much outside of post-period summaries and makes occasional glib remarks about basic hockey strategies. Hughson is competent, though unspectacular. For the most part, he manages to be technically correct, but his constant over-emphasizing of player's names, along with the repetition of his lines, can wear thin pretty quickly. The game's soundtrack consists of a number of licensed artists, like the Deftones, The Ataris, Gob, Adema, and Alien Ant Farm. Though the songs themselves aren't necessarily a perfect fit for the sport of hockey, the soundtrack is consistent for its genre and, overall, works just as well as any of the other EA Sports games to feature licensed music.  To sum up NHL 2004, it's simply a great game of hockey. The new additions to the gameplay, all-new dynasty mode, and upgraded graphics all provide a really excellent experience. Although the game does fall just shy of beating out ESPN NHL Hockey as the current champion of simulation hockey titles, any previous fan of EA's NHL series will find very little to complain about in this installment and should absolutely check it out. 



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1009,Sid Meier's Pirates! ,8.6, Sid Meier's Pirates! packs more adventure in just 30 minutes than most games do in their entirety.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/0/6/2209406-pirates.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sid-meiers-pirates-review/1900-6128864/,pos,"
  The original Sid Meier's Pirates! came out way back in 1987, and it was one of the first big multiplatform games to emerge. Although, in those days, multiplatform meant Commodore, Atari, and the IBM PC. So it wasn't surprising that when Firaxis announced the remake of Pirates last year, it also announced that it was working on both a PC and an Xbox version. The PC remake, which came out late last year, was excellent, and the good news is that, for the most part, the Xbox version is faithful to it, though it does have a fair bit of give and take. The Xbox version has a number of enhancements over the PC version, but on the other hand, it's also missing some of the PC's gameplay elements. Still, that doesn't stop this new Sid Meier's Pirates! from being a wonderfully lighthearted game that boasts an intoxicating blend of strategy and action.    Sid Meier's Pirates! is a colorful, lighthearted game about piracy. It's all about high adventure.   In Sid Meier's Pirates!, you play as a pirate out for revenge against the evil Spanish nobleman who wronged your family. At least, that's your initial reason for going to sea. The beauty of Sid Meier's Pirates! is that this open-ended strategy game lets you live the glorious life of a swashbuckler your own way. You can pursue the career of a privateer, a treasure hunter, an explorer, or a trader. More often than not, you'll dabble in all those fields at the same time. You'll sail the Spanish Main, trade broadsides with other ships, engage in dashing swordfights, search for buried treasure, sneak into hostile towns, and dance with many a governor's daughter along the way. Your character will age over time, so your ultimate goal is to amass as much fame and fortune as possible before you retire, at which point your pirate will go into the hall of fame and you can start all over again.     The game's prologue explains how your wealthy merchant family was imprisoned and how you escaped as a young boy. Now, years later, it's up to you to save your family, vanquish the evildoers, and get rich along the way. The first thing you'll do is choose a name for yourself, as well as a specialty, such as swordfighting (which is useful in duels), navigation (which makes you sail a bit faster), or wit and charm (which help your dancing skills). You also select a nation to align yourself with (this determines which ports are friendly to you), as well as a time period, which affects the starting balance of power in the Caribbean. After choosing these two things, you'll begin in your tiny ship in a great, big sea that's alive with commerce and activity. A nice new addition in the Xbox version includes a very structured, linear path that you can follow, giving the campaign a sense of direction that wasn't in the PC version. Oh, you can still sail around and do your own thing, but it's also easy if you want to get back on the main path of getting revenge on the main bad guy.    Sid Meier's Pirates! is remarkably easy to pick up and play, yet that simplicity belies a considerable amount of strategic depth. Your first stop will be in port, where you can pick up a letter of marque from the local governor, which basically gives you the right to sink any ship that's not flying its own nation's flag. You can also swing by the tavern to get the latest gossip (which can reveal useful info, such as the sailing of a treasure ship), purchase a useful item from the mysterious guy in the corner, or hire a bunch of scurvy knaves for your crew. After you check in with the shipwright, who patches up any damage and can upgrade various components of your ship, you'll visit the local merchant, where you can provision your ship and purchase or sell trade goods.     When sailing around the Caribbean, you can go anywhere, though you're limited by two constraints. The first is food. You can carry only so much food, and the bigger your crew, the faster your food will disappear. While this doesn't sound like much of a problem, it becomes an issue quickly, as you're in an age when sailing voyages took weeks and even months. Thankfully, you can always pull into a friendly port, or hijack a nearby vessel and commandeer its food. The other constraint is the morale of your men. Your salty crew members expect a fair share of the plunder when the voyage is over, and you'll have to keep them happy by bringing in the income--otherwise they'll start to desert you in droves. Firaxis made some subtle changes to the sailing component of Pirates!, mainly to compensate for the displacement between PC monitors and televisions. Since you can't zoom far out to get a good look at the world like you can in the PC version, there's instead a nice map overlay system that lets you display a semitransparent map over the whole game. Think of the airplane sequences in any of the Indiana Jones movies where you see scenes of a plane in flight over a map of the world at the same time...that's what we're talking about here.   Though simple in concept, there's a lot of depth to be found in Pirates!.   What makes Sid Meier's Pirates! so compelling, though, is its exquisite pace. There's just so much for you to do when you're sailing about the Caribbean, and you're never too far from accomplishing some kind of goal, whether it's finding the final part of an important treasure map or chasing down some dastardly nobleman who wronged your family. This pacing makes it easy to get drawn into the game and even harder to stop playing (you may well discover yourself looking up from the game and realizing that you've spent the entire night playing). At the heart of the game is the sense that it's essentially a series of enjoyable, fast-paced minigames stitched together. In the span of half an hour, you can easily wage several ship battles, dance with numerous governors' daughters, sneak into an enemy port, and dig up a stash of buried treasure. Pirates! in general is well suited to these kinds of minigames, thanks to the simple control schemes.      When your ship engages in battle, the game zooms in on that specific patch of ocean (including any nearby landmasses, rocks, and shoals), and you have to maneuver into position and then fire broadsides at the enemy. These battles last only a couple of minutes at the most, but there's a great deal of tactical depth to them, particularly at the harder difficulty levels. The enemy is more cunning at harder levels, plus you have to factor in the constantly shifting wind, which affects your ship's maneuverability. Ideally, if you're upwind of an opponent (which is called ""having the weather gauge""), you can control the battle. And to capture a ship, you must use different ammunition, including a medium-range chain shot to destroy sails and rigging a short-range grape shot to whittle down the opposing ship's crew. That last one is the most important, because if you try to board a ship there's a chance you'll have to fight its captain in a duel, triggering the swordfighting minigame. If you defeat the captain, you can capture the ship and sail it into the nearest port, where you can sell it and its cargo for a profit and then pay a visit to the governor for your reward. You may also have the opportunity to dance with the governor's daughter, and if you charm her, she may reward you with a valuable piece of information. You'll then go out to sea to repeat the cycle all over again.   You can dance if you want to, but be careful of the frame rate stuttering.   Perhaps the most difficult minigames involve swordfighting and dancing, due to the fact that they rely on fast reflexes. To keep things simple, swordfights are highly scripted in that they all unfold the same way. During a bar fight, for instance, if you're winning, you'll always knock your opponent off the balcony; if you're losing, he'll always chase you back up the stairs. Push him back far enough and the barmaid will break a bottle over his head, knocking him out. The only thing you have to worry about is timing the right swing at the right moment, and parrying or dodging your opponent's swings. Meanwhile, during a dance, you have to quickly respond to the dance cues that your partner gives you, or else you'll stumble and mess up. While both swordfighting and dancing can be difficult at first, they get much easier once you learn to recognize the patterns. Plus, you can purchase or acquire special items to make both minigames easier, such as a superbly balanced sword that lets you swing faster, or dancing slippers that give you more time to react to a cue. Unfortunately, the Xbox version suffers from some inexplicable frame rate issues when it comes to dancing, and this can make an already-daunting task even more difficult when you're trying to keep rhythm.    When you need to infiltrate a hostile port, you'll encounter the sneaking minigame, which is sort of Pac-Man in reverse. And the big news for the Xbox version is that the perspective has changed from a top-down, rat-in-a-maze-like experience to a behind-the-back, third-person perspective, which makes it more challenging, as you can only see what's directly in front of you. Your goal is to skulk around the mazelike streets of a town, avoiding the town watch. If captured, you'll be thrown into jail, where you'll rot for a few months before they let you go. At the easier difficultly levels, dodging the guards is incredibly easy. But at the harder levels, it's a lot tougher. Thankfully, you have a few moves at your disposal, such as the ability to scale walls, knock out guards from behind, and duck behind bales of hay to hide. The suspense can be high at times, especially when you narrowly weave between several guards.    Then there are the turn-based land battles that occur when you try to raid an enemy port or face off against the main bad guy at the end of the rescue-your-family storyline. In these, you have three kinds of units at your command: officers, sailors, and buccaneers. Officers and sailors are melee units, while buccaneers are armed with muskets. In battles, you have to maneuver your units to take advantage of the terrain and try to destroy or demoralize the enemy. You can flank enemies or use the jungle as cover. Win the battle, and you will not only plunder the town, but you'll also have the ability to switch its allegiance, thus earning you points with a particular faction. Surprisingly, Firaxis removed the treasure hunt minigame from the Xbox version. In the PC version, when you got a treasure map, you sailed to the area in question, disembarked, and then explored the landscape, trying to match up terrain features to locate the buried stash. However, in the Xbox version, all you need to do is simply make landfall at the general location, and you will automatically recover the treasure if you landed close enough. You'll come up empty, though, if you didn't land in the right spot.    The Caribbean of Sid Meier's Pirates! is a colorful place, and the game approaches the subject matter with a light touch. The pirates are charming rogues who like to sing drinking songs, the stuffy army officers are bombastic buffoons, and the ladies are all lovely. In other words, these are the sorts of characters who would feel at home in an Errol Flynn movie or Pirates of the Caribbean. The game has a beautiful art style that's simple, clean, and packed with all sorts of graphical frills. The cotton sails on your ship softly glow in the warm sun, and beneath the glittery ocean water you can see dolphins and porpoises swimming in your ship's wake. The game's audio effects are also lighthearted and soothing, from the sound of water lapping against wooden hulls to the distant crack of cannons firing. Above it all is the wonderful soundtrack, which mixes historical tunes with memorable original themes. It also helps that the characters in Sid Meier's Pirates! speak in a sort of The Sims-like gibberish, which adds to the game's overall charm.   Swordfighting can be downright tricky at the hardest difficulty levels.   Unlike the PC version, the Xbox version does have some multiplayer in it as well, in the form of up to four-player ship battles that play a lot better than expected. Basically a fast-paced party game, multiplayer lets you and your friends each control a ship as you all battle it out (you can also let the CPU jump into any of the slots). There are only a small number of maps, but in general they're well designed and create the insane type of game in which you're trying to desperately maneuver around a tiny area while dodging cannon fire left and right. You can only play the head-to-head mode on a single Xbox, since the game is only Xbox Live-aware, so the online component is limited to only downloadable content and leaderboards. Nevertheless, this is still a completely engrossing strategy game that will easily consume countless hours. While the average pirate career might last only about 5 to 10 hours, the game offers tons of replay value, as you can play on harder difficulty levels, try out different approaches, and check out different sailing eras. With its engrossing gameplay, impeccable pacing, and charming presentation, Sid Meier's Pirates! has a lot of great things going for it.
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1010,Sid Meier's Pirates! ,8.6, The captivating PSP version of this classic PC strategy game captures all the charming fun of being a pirate of the Caribbean.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/0/6/2209406-pirates.jpg,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sid-meiers-pirates-review/1900-6164936/,pos,"
  After triumphantly making the rounds on the PC and the Xbox over the past couple of years, Sid Meier's Pirates! has finally arrived on the PlayStation Portable. It is quite possibly a perfect fit for the platform because the minigame nature of the gameplay is well suited for the PSP and because it is an addictive strategy game that captures all of the charm of being a pirate, but without any of the pesky downsides, such as scurvy.   The PSP version of Sid Meier's Pirates! captures much of the charm and addictive gameplay of the excellent PC game.   The PSP version is a fairly faithful translation of 2004's hit PC game (which itself was a remake of the classic 1987 original). In Sid Meier's Pirates!, you play as a pirate out for revenge against the evil Spanish nobleman who wronged your family. But the beauty of Sid Meier's Pirates! is that this open-ended strategy game lets you live the glorious life of a swashbuckler your own way. You can pursue the career of a privateer, a treasure hunter, an explorer, or a trader. More often than not, you'll dabble in all those fields at the same time. You'll sail the Spanish Main, trade broadsides with other ships, engage in dashing swordfights, search for buried treasure, sneak into hostile towns, and dance with many a governor's daughter along the way. Your character will age over time, so your ultimate goal is to amass as much fame and fortune as possible before you retire. At that point, your pirate will go into the hall of fame, and you can start all over again.     The game's prologue explains how your wealthy merchant family was imprisoned and how you escaped as a young boy. Now, years later, it's up to you to save your family, vanquish the evildoers, and get rich along the way. The first thing you'll do is choose a name for yourself, as well as a specialty, such as swordfighting (which is useful in duels), navigation (which makes you sail a bit faster), or wit and charm (which help your dancing skills). You also select a nation to align yourself with, which determines the ports that are friendly to you, as well as a time period, which affects the starting balance of power in the Caribbean. After that, you'll begin aboard your tiny ship in a great big sea that's alive with commerce and activity.     Your first stop will be in port, where you can pick up a letter of marquee from the local governor, which basically gives you the right to sink any ship not flying that nation's flag. You can also swing by the tavern to get the latest gossip (which can reveal useful info, such as the sailing of a treasure ship), purchase a useful item from the mysterious guy in the corner, or hire a bunch of scurvy knaves for your crew. After you check in with the shipwright, who patches up any damage and upgrades various components of your ship, you'll visit the local merchant, where you can provision your ship and purchase or sell trade goods.    Living the life of a pirate isn't just sinking ships and digging up treasure. There's also dancing!   What makes Sid Meier's Pirates! so compelling is its exquisite pace. There's just so much for you to do when you're sailing around the Caribbean. You're never too far from accomplishing some kind of goal, whether it's finding the final part of an important treasure map or chasing down some dastardly nobleman who wronged your family. This pacing makes it easy to get drawn into the game and even harder to stop playing it. At the heart of the game is the sense that it's essentially a series of enjoyable, fast-paced minigames stitched together. In the span of half an hour, you can easily wage several ship battles, dance with numerous governors' daughters, sneak into an enemy port, and dig up a stash of buried treasure.    The PSP version turns out to be much more faithful to the excellent PC game than the 2005 Xbox version because the game seems so natural and effortless on the PSP. The action translates well to the PSP's wide screen, and the controls make it remarkably easy to pick up and play. More importantly, the PSP version isn't plagued with the tedious loading times of the Xbox version. Sailing in and out of port is instantaneous, as is accessing most in-town options, such as the shipwright and tavern. You'll encounter load times only when talking to the governor, dueling, dancing, or hunting for treasure, and even then, the load times are reasonable.    When your ship engages in battle, the game zooms in on your immediate patch of ocean (including any nearby landmasses, rocks, and shoals). You have to maneuver into position and then fire broadsides at the enemy. These battles last only a couple of minutes at the most, but there's a great deal of tactical depth to them, particularly at the harder difficulty levels. Not only is the enemy more cunning at harder levels, but you must also factor in the constantly shifting wind, which affects your ship's maneuverability. And to capture a ship, you must use different ammunition, including medium-range chainshot to destroy sails and rigging and short-range grapeshot to whittle down the opposing ship's crew. That last one is the most important because if you try to board a ship, there's a chance you'll have to fight its captain in a duel, triggering the swordfighting minigame. If you defeat the captain, you can capture the ship and sail it into the nearest port, where you can sell it and its cargo for a profit and then pay a visit to the governor for your reward. You may also have the opportunity to dance with his daughter. And if you charm her, she may reward you with a valuable piece of information. You'll then go out to sea to repeat the cycle all over again.     When you need to infiltrate a hostile port, you'll encounter the sneaking minigame, which is sort of Pac-Man in reverse. Your goal is to skulk around the mazelike streets of a town, avoiding the town watch. If captured, you'll be thrown into jail, where you'll rot for a few months before they let you go. At the easier difficultly levels, dodging the guards is incredibly easy, but at the harder levels, it's a lot tougher. Thankfully, you have a few moves at your disposal, such as the ability to scale walls, knock out guards from behind, and duck behind bales of hay to hide. The suspense can be high at times, especially when you narrowly weave between several guards.     Then there are the turn-based land battles that occur when you try to raid an enemy port or face off against the main bad guy at the end of the rescue-your-family storyline. In these, you have three kinds of units at your command: officers, sailors, and buccaneers. Officers and sailors are melee units, while buccaneers are armed with muskets. In battles, you have to maneuver your units to take advantage of the terrain and try to destroy or demoralize the enemy. You can flank enemies or use the jungle as cover. If you win the battle, not only will you plunder the town, but you'll also have the ability to switch its allegiance, thus earning you points with a particular faction.    This is certainly one of the best strategy games that you can get for the PSP, and it'll provide hours of entertainment.   The Caribbean of Sid Meier's Pirates! is a colorful place, and the game approaches the subject matter with a light touch. The pirates are charming rogues who like to sing drinking songs, the stuffy army officers are bombastic buffoons, and the ladies are all lovely. In other words, these are the sorts of characters who would feel at home in an Errol Flynn movie or Pirates of the Caribbean. Visually, the PSP version seems a bit spartan because the art style is minimal to keep the frame rate smooth, but the game still feels warm and inviting. The audio effects stumble a bit in the PSP version; you'll certainly notice when music and sound are absent during large stretches of the game.    The single-player game is so compelling that it'll engross you for days at a time, but there's not much to be said for multiplayer. The PSP version features multiplayer battle support for up to four. This simply pits your sailing skills against others as you maneuver and fight in a handful of arena levels. Nevertheless, this is still a completely engrossing strategy game that will easily consume countless hours. And it's certainly a game that deserves to be in every PSP library.  
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1011,Shadow Hearts: Covenant ,8.6, Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a great game that any fan of the role-playing genre would likely enjoy.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/7/5/7/2210757-box_shc.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shadow-hearts-covenant-review/1900-6108980/,pos,"
 If you're a console role-playing game and you're not Final Fantasy, or you don't burst fully formed from the mind of a Square Enix luminary, it can be tough to garner notice among what some see as a field of also-rans. Shadow Hearts: Covenant takes the traditional turn-based save-the-world formula, tosses out any semblance of pretentiousness, adds its own bizarre style and humor, and then follows an original cast of characters on an enjoyable adventure. While not utterly unique in its execution, the game is a great example of the genre done well.  There may be a world war going on, but never mind that--there's demons about!  The game kicks off about six months after the conclusion of the first Shadow Hearts, with World War I slowly gaining momentum and disturbances flaring up all over Europe. Karin Koenig, an officer in the German army, is sent with her squad to seize control of the sleepy village of Domremy. Shortly after arriving, Karin and her forces are routed in the village chapel by a dark, winged demon. The monster is actually a young man named Yuri Hyuga (the antihero and protagonist of the first Shadow Hearts), who has the power to assume the form of a wide variety of creatures and is safeguarding the village from invasion. Not willing to take defeat lying down, the Germans soon send Karin back in, along with a mysterious cardinal named Nicholai who's armed with a holy artifact. The artifact puts a curse on Yuri, stripping him of all his learned transformation abilities, containing his considerable power, and really ticking him off. As it so happens, the attack on Yuri was part of a scheme by a secret society called Sapientes Gladio, which, like any respectable secret society, is up to no good. When the village is subsequently destroyed, Karin defects to team up with Yuri so they can figure out just what Sapientes Gladio is planning and how to free Yuri from his curse.  This all sounds suitably sinister, and it is--Shadow Hearts: Covenant is full of dark mysticism, ancient rites, demons, and plots for world domination. It's also full of absurdist touches like Joachim, a vampire trained as a pro wrestler, who fights with a giant mailbox when he's not in bat form. At one point in the game, your party gets lured to a lush island villa, where you have to lock horns with a fierce boss monster that happens to be a giant, fluffy, pink kitten. Yuri will at times narrate past events and accompany his grim dialogue with childish stick-figure pictures of the action, demons reduced to globe-headed scrawls with lopsided fangs. This is not to say that the game plays out as a comedy--the various dark events and scattered atrocities are taken quite seriously by the characters involved--but the way is sweetened by a good deal of irreverent humor. While all the jokes, sexual innuendo, and pregnant pauses are sometimes corny, there are plenty of genuinely funny moments that enhance the experience, giving it a charm that many plot-heavy RPGs lack.  Battle dark demons, disciples of evil magic, and kitties!  When random and scripted encounters send your team into battle, you'll be presented with a turn-based system in which your characters will alternate with enemies depending on speed. Whenever you choose an action for any of your four party members, be it launching a melee attack, casting a spell, unleashing a special ability, or even using an item, a disc called the judgment ring will appear. A hand will start to sweep around the disc, and you'll need to time your button presses as the line passes through the colored pie slices that are present. Hit everything correctly, and your action will be successful. Many times, there's an extra red sliver on the trailing edge of a colored zone that will grant you a bonus if you hit it--attacks will cause more damage, items will heal more than usual, and so on. The rub is that these red zones require precision and careful timing to hit, and if you miss them, your move is over prematurely, or sometimes negated altogether. Lining up these criticals and hitting the zones just so is the addictive draw of the judgment ring system, which moves outside the traditional RPG practice of selecting an action and then just sitting back and watching your character carry it out. But there's even more to it.  You can also add items to individual party members' rings to add various effects to them--you can add another strike zone, increase the zones' size, increase the damage output (while decreasing the zones' size), and so on. For the faint of heart and less nimble of thumb, you can even set characters to ""auto ring,"" which will let them make their moves without you doing a blessed thing. (This lessens the amount of damage dealt, however, and also just isn't as fun.) The system can be tricky to get a handle on, but once you grow accustomed to it, there's a certain cadence to the ring presses that almost makes it feel like a rhythm game. Master the timing, and even the slimmest of critical zones will fall to your button presses for a satisfying outcome. It's a great system, and an excellent way to combine a turn-based system's measured pace with an interactive element that requires careful concentration.   You'll live and die by the judgment ring, but you'll have a good time doing it.  Once you have a handle on those basics, you can try your hand at combo attacks, which involve moving characters close to each other and then letting them both move in an attack chain. For each successful link of the chain you complete, you'll get combo bonuses, and if you manage to execute a four-person combo, you'll be able to unleash a powerful combo magic attack as the final move. Each character is linked by one of the four buttons on your controller, and the required button will flash just as you complete one turn for the move, before it continues to another character. If you miss the button to link, or miss any of the ring presses during your move, the combo will break, and anyone left in the chain will lose their turn. It's a gambit to be sure, but one that can pay off big when facing tough boss characters, even if they don't happen to be kittens.  Mastering the ring provides rewards outside of battle as well You can earn discounts at item stores by mastering the judgment ring, or boost the sale value of your items by gaining an extra markup percentage. Such things are optional, but they really provide a good bonus for those adept at handling the ring.  You'll tour the world in Shadow Hearts: Covenant, spending a lot of time bumming around various areas of Old Europe and, later, Japan and areas east. The places you'll visit are rich in character and detail, from baroque palaces with brightly colored, sun-dappled halls and an abundance of plants, to cozy seaside villages, to the dark and cluttered confines of an old prison. The towns tend to be fairly small, with only a few areas to visit, but they're well put together, with lots of crevices for interesting items to hide. Yuri and his companions exude style and fluid motion, from the wizened old puppet master Gepetto, to the sleek white wolf Blanca, to the flamboyant, overenthusiastic Joachim. The game melds still art with in-engine storytelling and some great-looking computer-generated cutscenes to move the narrative forward, and the result is very easy on the eye.  This game occupies a fun little niche all its own.  The game offers some great pieces of music that are at once haunting and inspiring, making good use of eerie vocals and brisk fiddle tunes. It's rare to have a battle theme that's catchy enough that you won't mind hearing it the countless times you'll need to along your journey, but Shadow Hearts manages that, along with a captivating main theme and other light pieces of music that fit the areas you'll visit well. The voice work in the game is all right, especially considering some of the weird dialogue the actors had to work with, but the spoken word in the game really isn't a highlight.  Covenant comprises two discs' worth of lengthy adventure (around 40 hours) that's easily extendable with all the bonus items to collect, special moves to learn, weapons to acquire, and dungeons to visit. Even if you don't explore all the nooks and crannies, Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a great game that any fan of the role-playing genre would likely enjoy; its style, its humor, and its well-crafted battle system set it apart in a world of Final Fantasy clones.  


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1012,Championship Manager: Season 03/04 ,8.6, Who would have thought that one of the best games you could be playing on the PC was a text-based soccer management simulation?,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/1/4/2213414-champ.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/championship-manager-season-03-04-review/1900-6090044/,pos,"
 Who would have thought that one of the best games you could be playing on the PC was a text-based soccer management simulation? It's true. Championship Manager 03/04 offers a rewarding and addictive experience that can ensnare even those who aren't currently soccer fans.  Win...and the fans and media are your best friends.  The Championship Manager franchise has long been the gold standard against which all text sports sims have been measured. And for good reason. No other sports sim of any type offers you the breadth and depth of interactions and decisions that you can experience in CM 03/04. Every facet of life as a sports manager is simulated here--from trying to select the right combination of players who (through some magic of synergy) come together to form a powerful team, to dealing with a board that demands success while holding the purse strings tightly, to having to react to the fickle media and fans. Therein lies the secret of the addictive nature of the game. CM 03/04 is a superior sports sim, but it's also an outstanding role-playing experience.  On the surface, CM 03/04 sounds like any other text-based sports sim. You select a team to manage, evaluate your existing talent, set your roster, establish a training routine, make some tactical decisions on how your team will play, look for new talent to add to the team and decide which existing players to sell, and then you go on to play matches. The unmatched depth of CM 03/04 becomes obvious with your first game decision. Selecting a team allows you to choose from 43 nations, each with several levels of competition from which to choose (sadly, due to licensing issues, Major League Soccer is unavailable).  You can start with a world-class team, with millions of dollars at your disposal, like Manchester United or Real Madrid, or you can start with a poor team that's playing in a lower league. This choice is more than cosmetic because it provides you with significantly different types of games. A world-class club allows you to vie for the top multimillion-dollar-salaried international superstars (as well as their egos), in addition to all of the demands and expectations of soccer at this rarified level. On the other hand, selecting a lower-league team will force you to deal with a tiny budget, poor facilities, and players who either aren't very talented or, if they do blossom, will surely be snapped up by higher-league clubs. Both are extremely enjoyable types of games. Start at the top, and play in the international competitions and cups; perhaps you'll then get selected to manage your national team. Or you can start at the bottom, and see if you can take your team up the ladder by eventually moving your once-weak, poor team into the upper leagues, along with the accompanying higher stature and money. You may even develop a reputation that results in your being offered a management job at a higher-prestige club.  Once you have a team, you'll need to assess your squad's players and staff. Players are described, via numeric scores, by a wide variety of attributes. While this may sound a bit like a spreadsheet, the attributes are numerous enough and varied enough to give you a good feel for a player's style. For example, one player may be an obviously strong, aggressive brute who's slow but skilled, while another player may be incredibly agile and fast--and fully capable of skipping past defenders and making amazing moves--but slow to put the ball in the net. Lest you think that assessing players is simply a matter of choosing the one with the best numbers, be aware that there are many hidden attributes that only become obvious by observing a player's performance. Players also have text descriptors, such as favorite players and coaches, major and minor concerns, and more.  The 2D engine is surprisingly effective at displaying the match action.  All of this comes together in a way that makes each player feel three-dimensional and individualistic. You'll quickly discover players who are the solid backbone of your team. They never complain; they give their all on the pitch; and they're loyal and proud to be playing for you and your team. Others will be highly talented prima donnas who constantly whine and want more money, consequently pouting and playing poorly if they disagree with some decisions that you've made. You'll develop favorite players, and you'll decide that other players aren't worth the maintenance. The highly developed player personalities are one key to what makes CM 03/04 great. You spend much of the game interacting with your players and making decisions that have a major impact on players' attitudes and performances. For example, if a player gets sent off in a game or has a string of subpar performances, you have choices in how to deal with the situation. Should you fine the player? Should you criticize the player in the media? A professional player may respond with a renewed desire to prove himself, while a hothead may decide that he now hates you and will then demand to be sold.  Interestingly, there's no simple formula. For instance, another emotional player may respond to criticism by giving 110 percent, just to prove to you and the media that you're wrong. All of this can result in some complex situations. In one game, we disciplined a key player, and he told the media that he thought the team would never achieve its goals with the current manager. He then demanded to be sold. When we sold him, three other key players on the team--who were his good friends--became unhappy with us. The next thing we knew, we were facing a team revolt. Subsequently, the fans and the media demanded our heads, which the board gladly delivered on a platter as we were fired. That's the type of multidimensional interactions that are at the heart of CM 03/04.  He's young, ambitious, and talented, but he's got personal problems that make him a royal pain. Sell him.  The biggest change in the history of the Championship Manager franchise came with the introduction of a 2D, top-down graphical view of the match, which was introduced in last year's CM4. Previously, all action during a match was displayed in a radio-style text commentary. The good news is that the top-down view worked pretty well in CM4. The great news is that the 2D match display is outstanding in CM 03/04. Screenshots don't do justice in describing how effectively the match display portrays both how and why your team is performing as it is (as well as clearly showing you how each player is performing). Improvements over the CM4 display include various little touches, like visual indications of the pitch condition, offsides flags, and generally smoother and more realistic action. Meanwhile, while sound isn't a significant factor in text-based career sports sims (and, indeed, there is literally no sound at all in most of CM 03/04), the matches are accompanied with all of the jeers, cheers, chants, whistles, and other sounds you'd expect if sitting in the stands at Old Trafford.  CM 03/04 is so full of choices and interactions--all elegantly presented--that it would take volumes to list them all. Every aspect of the game displays the years of development and maturity of this franchise. For example, the simple act of trying to acquire a player from another team is filled with nuances. A team in your league may not want to allow you to have one of their star players, so they may choose instead to take a lower offer from a team in another league. You can make deals that involve partial trades, conditional clauses (that provide you with a percentage of the value of future sales of a specific player), installment payments, timing of moves, and much more. Training is both simple to set up and complex enough to experiment with for hours. Tactical control over your team during matches allows you to dictate every facet of both your team and each individual's instructions.  Ah, the manager's life: a critical match today, three starters are hurt, and one is off on international duty.  As you might expect, CM 03/04 is almost bug-free. The only significant bug is one in which applying for other management jobs doesn't work properly. Luckily, SI has promised a fix for this in the next couple of weeks.  CM 03/04 has that rare ability that only the best games of any genre possess: It makes you always want to push the ""continue"" button one more time, in spite of it being far too late at night (or, rather, early in the morning). You always want to know if that hot, young goalie your scout discovered will accept your contract offer to fill the gap you have in your lineup due to your starting keeper's surprise retirement. You always want to respond to the criticism you've received on the radio sports talk show about your decision to bench a fan favorite. You always want to play one more match because your opponent's leading scorer is a player you dumped four years ago for being an underperforming whiner who was dragging the whole team down. Then, just as you decide you must save and shut down, you get a message that Arsenal has offered you a management job. However, you've just now brought Dag and Red all the way from the conference to the brink of being promoted to the First Division--and the fans love you. OK, just one more turn. There's a reason that this is one of the best-selling games of any genre in the world. Though, it's still not available in North American retail outlets, you'll need to import it if you want to play it stateside. 
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1013,The Warriors ,8.6," The Warriors delivers as a completely stand-alone work, and any fan of beat-'em-up games is certain to enjoy it on some level.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/9/6/8/2216968-box_twarriors.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-warriors-review/1900-6136246/,pos,"
  Despite the fact that it's based on a film more than a quarter-century old, very little about Rockstar's The Warriors feels dated or archaic. This stylish, retro brawler takes Walter Hill's cult-classic film of the same name and delves even deeper into the seedy, ultraviolent world of New York City gangs. Backed up by a more-than-competent gameplay engine and significant attention to detail, The Warriors works because it simply gets the concept of massive gang battles right. Everywhere you look, street toughs are battling it out, smashing each other with bricks, tossing each other through windows, and generally wrecking all manner of shop. It doesn't really matter if you're familiar with the film it's based on; The Warriors delivers as a completely stand-alone work, and any fan of beat-'em-up games is certain to enjoy it on some level. But if you have seen the film, all the better.   You Warriors are good. Real good.   The Warriors documents the trials and tribulations of, well, the Warriors, just one of hundreds of gangs bopping their way around New York City in the late 1970s. The movie from 1979 picked up just as the Warriors were on their way to a huge meeting, held by one of the city's biggest gangs, the Gramercy Riffs, and its enigmatic leader, Cyrus. At this meeting, Cyrus poses a single question to the hundreds of gang representatives in attendance: ""Can you count, suckas?"" Pointing out that between their numbers, the various gangs of the city outnumber the police by a three-to-one margin, Cyrus lays out his plans for a unified gang movement; a single 60,000-member gang that could rule New York. But just when it seems like the crowd is behind him, a lone gunman fires, killing Cyrus and sending the crowd scattering as police surround the area. The opening scene of the game shows this exact sequence of events, but shifts dramatically away from the movie from this point forward. From there, we hop into the wayback machine to a few months before this meeting, a time when the Warriors were still working to up their rep on the streets.    The film didn't spend much time with things like backstory and narrative beyond the gang's flee from the meeting and subsequent danger-filled trek back to their home turf on Coney Island. But the game goes back and gives these characters, as well as the many other assorted gangs that occupy New York, some context. You get to know the nine primary guys--Swan, Ajax, Cleon, Vermin, Cochese, Cowboy, Snow, Fox, and Rembrandt--quite well. Better than you might even expect. Throughout the 20-plus story missions, you'll get to play as each of them at one time or another, and you'll learn how Cleon and Vermin started the gang, how each member came to join, and even learn all about the gang's rivalries, especially against Coney Island's other crew, the Destroyers. What's impressive about this is that it actually feels like you're getting to know more about these characters, rather than just running through some tacked-on motions to stretch a two-hour movie into a 12-hour game. On some level, you start to get attached to these characters, which makes the course of the later game sequences (which are directly tied to the movie) all the more meaningful, as some members are knocked out of the picture, and the Warriors themselves are wrongfully marked for Cyrus's murder.    It helps that the script and storyline are both really well written, and the dialogue, though curse-filled and generally blunt, fits brilliantly with the hard-edged atmosphere The Warriors aims for. However, it bears mention that you shouldn't go into this game expecting to play as a bunch of boy scouts out fighting for justice. All the members of the Warriors are morally bankrupt in one way or another, and though they are the main protagonists and are generally likeable guys, they're still street thugs, just like all the other street thugs out there. They vandalize, rob, and fight for a living, trolling for chicks and throwing down just to up their street cred. Throughout the course of the game, you'll be doing all of the above.    For the most part, The Warriors is a pure beat-'em-up, which of course means that you'll be doing an awful lot of brawling. Each of the Warriors fights roughly the same. You have weak and strong attacks that can be put together into a reasonable number of different combos, as well as a grab move for grab attacks and throws. Jumping and ground attacks are also thrown into the mix. Different types of weaponry will fall at your feet as you knock fools silly and break apart the scenery, and there's a wide variety of items to bop with, from simple bricks and boards to shivs and bottles. No guns, though. This is old-school gang fighting at its finest, and as such, firearms simply don't enter the picture--not for you, anyway.     The basic fighting engine found in The Warriors is mostly pretty simplistic, but because of the unpredictability of the environments, as well as the sheer number of fighters that can appear on screen at once, things can get very hectic, very fast. It's great, because while you do only have a few attacks to choose from, you still have to be somewhat methodical in your attack methods, or you could suddenly find yourself flailing wildly at air, allowing eight enemies to surround you and subsequently beat the hell out of you. During the biggest brawls, you'll sometimes find yourself doing something or seeing something in the periphery that just strikes as awesome. Be it two of your cohorts ganging up with baseball bats on one guy, or you tossing some punk through a window without even trying, there's a lot of possibility for unpredictable mayhem in this game.   Can you count, suckas?   Sometimes the mayhem can be made more purposeful, thanks to some tactical commands you can give to your gang members. Titled warchief commands, these quick, easy instructions will cause your team to do anything from scattering from police to simply breaking everything in sight. If you're in a defensive position, you can command them to come in and get your back. If you've absolutely, positively got to get away, just tell them to follow you. All it takes is you clicking down on the left analog stick (on Xbox) or the R2 button (on the PlayStation 2) and selecting one of the six available orders via the right stick. Your artificial-intelligence-controlled cohorts seem to react to the commands remarkably well. Sometimes they'll get held up by opposing gang members or cops trying to stop them, but they rarely seem to get hung up of their own volition. The only annoying thing about this mechanic is related specifically to the Xbox version. A lot of other quick, sometimes tough actions are mapped to the left analog stick, and it's really easy to accidentally click it in. Fortunately, the commands won't change unless you press the right stick too, but you will hear the same voice command over and over every time you click it in. That does get rather grating after a time.    While many beat-'em-ups tend to get old after a few hours, simply because they rely so heavily on just sending waves and waves of bad guys at you, The Warriors avoids this particular trapping by breaking up the action with plenty of other tasks. Sometimes you'll simply find yourself tasked with collecting protection money from Coney Island businesses, or stealing car stereos and breaking into and looting shops. Other times, you'll find yourself in a heart-pounding chase sequence, running from rival gangs or pursuing some rat who's wronged your crew.     There are plenty of times where you'll have to play things stealthy, lest large swarms of opposing gang members or cops come barreling down on you. Sometimes it's when you're trying to make an escape, or sometimes it's when you're out to make some moves, like getting your tag on in a graffiti-tagging challenge. Admittedly, the stealth portions of the game are probably the weakest, simply because the stealth attacks tend to be more trouble to pull off than they're worth. But the sequences themselves are usually set up quite well, since the level designs often provide plenty of nifty hiding spots and unique paths to check out--plus, it's rarely too difficult to bop your way out of a bad situation, should you find yourself in one.   The chicks are packed! The chicks are packed!   The rival gangs aren't always the most challenging opponents to beat down, but they don't go down without some measure of fight. They've always got numbers on their side, and gang-member AI is usually pretty solid. Cops are another story--they, like gangs, will swarm in numbers, but they're incredibly tough to knock down. They have a nasty habit of arresting your brothers in arms, forcing you to periodically run over and unlock them via a quick button-mashing minigame. Generally speaking, it's best to try to avoid cop fights whenever possible; but sometimes it just isn't, and these brawls can be kind of frustrating. Fortunately, The Warriors employs a good checkpoint-save system, making it so that you rarely have to do any long sequences over and over again.     What The Warriors ultimately does best is tie together film and game. For those of you who have never seen the film, it took an almost parodied look at the gang scene of New York from some 25 years ago, with lots of kooky-themed gangs, like the Hi-Hats, a group of malcontent mimes that run Broadway; the Baseball Furies, a crew of baseball fanatics, complete with uniform, bats, and freaky face paint; and the Gramercy Riffs, a group of martial-arts-loving brothers with a military-like level of discipline and dedication. All of these gangs live and breathe in a bleak, scuzzy, almost postapocalyptic vision of NYC. Every building, tree, and car has a dingy, soiled look to it, and it's picture perfect for the look of the film. The game expands on the gangs, giving groups like the Hi-Hats, Destroyers, and Boppers more screen time. It also takes sequences from the film, like the fight against the Baseball Furies and the ambush by the all-girl crew known as the Lizzies, and turns them into great gameplay bits. Some of the boss fights, in particular, are great fun. A few come off a little haphazardly, but those few are definitely in the minority.     Given the art design, the destructible environments, and the general flurries of mayhem you can cause, you'd think that The Warriors would be a pretty fantastic-looking game. You'd be wrong. Certainly, the aesthetics aren't without merit, but the basic graphics engine the game uses does little to impress. You won't notice it as much with the environments, because everything is supposed to be drab anyway, thus making the generally low-res textures and minimalist lighting seem completely normal. The character models, however, are not good at all. Sure, Rockstar Toronto got all the nifty little character details in there, but the faces, body parts, and costumes are just kind of ugly. This was probably necessary, to get so many characters onscreen at once and keep the frame rate moving along steadily (which it does); but even so, it's hard to just look past what are some pretty clear-cut graphical problems. Speaking of which, the camera also has an innate tendency to get in your way at inopportune times. It's not awful, and for the most part things are framed well, but when you're in a tight space and surrounded by cops, it rarely works to your benefit. You also won't notice much benefit in picking one version over another. The PS2 and Xbox versions are both practically identical, and even the Xbox version's 720p support doesn't seem to improve things much. Thankfully, the aforementioned good qualities do help--but you'll be hard pressed not to notice some of the graphical flaws.     The audio, on the other hand, is on the other side of the scale. Many of the original actors from the film have returned to voice their characters--at least, most of the ones that are still alive. Guys like Michael Beck, James Remar, and Dorsey Wright once again turn in excellent performances (despite sounding quite a bit older than the 20-something characters they play), and the remaining voice cast delivers, too. It helps that the dialogue is well written, but there's hardly a bad voice actor in the bunch. The one weird thing about the voice work, though, is that a lot of it is made up of lines directly from the film. It seems as though, in some situations, Rockstar might have been better off just taking audio directly from the film rather than rerecording it. Obviously, they'd want the voices to match, but there are situations in which they could have easily gotten away with it, and ultimately would've had a better piece of dialogue.    Barry De Vorzon's original score is fully intact here, as are many of the licensed tracks from the original soundtrack, including songs from artists like Joe Walsh, Fear, and Arnold McCuller. All the songs are most definitely of the '70s, helping to give the game that pulpy, retro vibe that it so clearly seeks. The Warriors also boasts some of the best sound effects you'll hear this year. Every hit is delivered with a high level of ferocity, and you really feel each and every one of them. As things get hectic and start breaking apart all over the place, the din of battle can actually get pretty deafening. It's just excellent audio work all around, and it really increases the intensity of battle by quite a margin.   Magic...whole lotta magic.   When all is said and done with the story mode, The Warriors actually provides a good bit of extra content to play around with. There are multiple multiplayer modes, including two-player co-op for any story mission, as well as a few unique minigames such as quick rumbles, a capture-the-flag variation (involving a girl instead of a flag) and king of the hill. The minigames are merely amusing distractions, although one unlockable game in particular stands out as completely awesome. Titled Armies of the Night, it's basically a side-scrolling beat-'em-up in the tradition of something like a Final Fight or Double Dragon, and includes the opening sequence from Double Dragon, verbatim. Again, totally rad. The cooperative play is about what you'd expect, and it doesn't involve a lot of actual cooperation, so much as it does two people standing next to each other, beating up a lot of dudes. In a couple of nice touches, however, the camera will actually split if the two of you get too far away from one another, and a second player can jump into the game at practically any time, making it a lot more accessible.    With its unrelenting obsession with nailing the details of the film's universe, its quality action, and its breadth of content, The Warriors is easily one of the better pure-action games to come out this year. It's a game that clearly goes out of its way to do more than just rehash a previously told story, as many games based on films tend to do. Again, though, this is not a game in which you have to have seen the original movie to understand and enjoy it; but if anything, it'll make you want to go out of your way to see the movie, just to see how it plays out and compares to the game experience. And in the end, isn't that what all games based on movies try to do in the first place? If you've got a thing for mature-themed action games, The Warriors is well worth your while.  


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1014,The Warriors ,8.6," The Warriors delivers as a completely stand-alone work, and any fan of beat-'em-up games is certain to enjoy it on some level.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/9/6/8/2216968-box_twarriors.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-warriors-review/1900-6136247/,pos,"
  Despite the fact that it's based on a film more than a quarter-century old, very little about Rockstar's The Warriors feels dated or archaic. This stylish, retro brawler takes Walter Hill's cult-classic film of the same name and delves even deeper into the seedy, ultraviolent world of New York City gangs. Backed up by a more-than-competent gameplay engine and significant attention to detail, The Warriors works because it simply gets the concept of massive gang battles right. Everywhere you look, street toughs are battling it out, smashing each other with bricks, tossing each other through windows, and generally wrecking all manner of shop. It doesn't really matter if you're familiar with the film it's based on; The Warriors delivers as a completely stand-alone work, and any fan of beat-'em-up games is certain to enjoy it on some level. But if you have seen the film, all the better.   You Warriors are good. Real good.   The Warriors documents the trials and tribulations of, well, the Warriors, just one of hundreds of gangs bopping their way around New York City in the late 1970s. The movie from 1979 picked up just as the Warriors were on their way to a huge meeting, held by one of the city's biggest gangs, the Gramercy Riffs, and its enigmatic leader, Cyrus. At this meeting, Cyrus poses a single question to the hundreds of gang representatives in attendance: ""Can you count, suckas?"" Pointing out that between their numbers, the various gangs of the city outnumber the police by a three-to-one margin, Cyrus lays out his plans for a unified gang movement; a single 60,000-member gang that could rule New York. But just when it seems like the crowd is behind him, a lone gunman fires, killing Cyrus and sending the crowd scattering as police surround the area. The opening scene of the game shows this exact sequence of events, but shifts dramatically away from the movie from this point forward. From there, we hop into the wayback machine to a few months before this meeting, a time when the Warriors were still working to up their rep on the streets.    The film didn't spend much time with things like backstory and narrative beyond the gang's flee from the meeting and subsequent danger-filled trek back to their home turf on Coney Island. But the game goes back and gives these characters, as well as the many other assorted gangs that occupy New York, some context. You get to know the nine primary guys--Swan, Ajax, Cleon, Vermin, Cochese, Cowboy, Snow, Fox, and Rembrandt--quite well. Better than you might even expect. Throughout the 20-plus story missions, you'll get to play as each of them at one time or another, and you'll learn how Cleon and Vermin started the gang, how each member came to join, and even learn all about the gang's rivalries, especially against Coney Island's other crew, the Destroyers. What's impressive about this is that it actually feels like you're getting to know more about these characters, rather than just running through some tacked-on motions to stretch a two-hour movie into a 12-hour game. On some level, you start to get attached to these characters, which makes the course of the later game sequences (which are directly tied to the movie) all the more meaningful, as some members are knocked out of the picture, and the Warriors themselves are wrongfully marked for Cyrus's murder.    It helps that the script and storyline are both really well written, and the dialogue, though curse-filled and generally blunt, fits brilliantly with the hard-edged atmosphere The Warriors aims for. However, it bears mention that you shouldn't go into this game expecting to play as a bunch of boy scouts out fighting for justice. All the members of the Warriors are morally bankrupt in one way or another, and though they are the main protagonists and are generally likeable guys, they're still street thugs, just like all the other street thugs out there. They vandalize, rob, and fight for a living, trolling for chicks and throwing down just to up their street cred. Throughout the course of the game, you'll be doing all of the above.    For the most part, The Warriors is a pure beat-'em-up, which of course means that you'll be doing an awful lot of brawling. Each of the Warriors fights roughly the same. You have weak and strong attacks that can be put together into a reasonable number of different combos, as well as a grab move for grab attacks and throws. Jumping and ground attacks are also thrown into the mix. Different types of weaponry will fall at your feet as you knock fools silly and break apart the scenery, and there's a wide variety of items to bop with, from simple bricks and boards to shivs and bottles. No guns, though. This is old-school gang fighting at its finest, and as such, firearms simply don't enter the picture--not for you, anyway.     The basic fighting engine found in The Warriors is mostly pretty simplistic, but because of the unpredictability of the environments, as well as the sheer number of fighters that can appear on screen at once, things can get very hectic, very fast. It's great, because while you do only have a few attacks to choose from, you still have to be somewhat methodical in your attack methods, or you could suddenly find yourself flailing wildly at air, allowing eight enemies to surround you and subsequently beat the hell out of you. During the biggest brawls, you'll sometimes find yourself doing something or seeing something in the periphery that just strikes as awesome. Be it two of your cohorts ganging up with baseball bats on one guy, or you tossing some punk through a window without even trying, there's a lot of possibility for unpredictable mayhem in this game.   Can you count, suckas?   Sometimes the mayhem can be made more purposeful, thanks to some tactical commands you can give to your gang members. Titled warchief commands, these quick, easy instructions will cause your team to do anything from scattering from police to simply breaking everything in sight. If you're in a defensive position, you can command them to come in and get your back. If you've absolutely, positively got to get away, just tell them to follow you. All it takes is you clicking down on the left analog stick (on Xbox) or the R2 button (on the PlayStation 2) and selecting one of the six available orders via the right stick. Your artificial-intelligence-controlled cohorts seem to react to the commands remarkably well. Sometimes they'll get held up by opposing gang members or cops trying to stop them, but they rarely seem to get hung up of their own volition. The only annoying thing about this mechanic is related specifically to the Xbox version. A lot of other quick, sometimes tough actions are mapped to the left analog stick, and it's really easy to accidentally click it in. Fortunately, the commands won't change unless you press the right stick too, but you will hear the same voice command over and over every time you click it in. That does get rather grating after a time.    While many beat-'em-ups tend to get old after a few hours, simply because they rely so heavily on just sending waves and waves of bad guys at you, The Warriors avoids this particular trapping by breaking up the action with plenty of other tasks. Sometimes you'll simply find yourself tasked with collecting protection money from Coney Island businesses, or stealing car stereos and breaking into and looting shops. Other times, you'll find yourself in a heart-pounding chase sequence, running from rival gangs or pursuing some rat who's wronged your crew.     There are plenty of times where you'll have to play things stealthy, lest large swarms of opposing gang members or cops come barreling down on you. Sometimes it's when you're trying to make an escape, or sometimes it's when you're out to make some moves, like getting your tag on in a graffiti-tagging challenge. Admittedly, the stealth portions of the game are probably the weakest, simply because the stealth attacks tend to be more trouble to pull off than they're worth. But the sequences themselves are usually set up quite well, since the level designs often provide plenty of nifty hiding spots and unique paths to check out--plus, it's rarely too difficult to bop your way out of a bad situation, should you find yourself in one.   The chicks are packed! The chicks are packed!   The rival gangs aren't always the most challenging opponents to beat down, but they don't go down without some measure of fight. They've always got numbers on their side, and gang-member AI is usually pretty solid. Cops are another story--they, like gangs, will swarm in numbers, but they're incredibly tough to knock down. They have a nasty habit of arresting your brothers in arms, forcing you to periodically run over and unlock them via a quick button-mashing minigame. Generally speaking, it's best to try to avoid cop fights whenever possible; but sometimes it just isn't, and these brawls can be kind of frustrating. Fortunately, The Warriors employs a good checkpoint-save system, making it so that you rarely have to do any long sequences over and over again.     What The Warriors ultimately does best is tie together film and game. For those of you who have never seen the film, it took an almost parodied look at the gang scene of New York from some 25 years ago, with lots of kooky-themed gangs, like the Hi-Hats, a group of malcontent mimes that run Broadway; the Baseball Furies, a crew of baseball fanatics, complete with uniform, bats, and freaky face paint; and the Gramercy Riffs, a group of martial-arts-loving brothers with a military-like level of discipline and dedication. All of these gangs live and breathe in a bleak, scuzzy, almost postapocalyptic vision of NYC. Every building, tree, and car has a dingy, soiled look to it, and it's picture perfect for the look of the film. The game expands on the gangs, giving groups like the Hi-Hats, Destroyers, and Boppers more screen time. It also takes sequences from the film, like the fight against the Baseball Furies and the ambush by the all-girl crew known as the Lizzies, and turns them into great gameplay bits. Some of the boss fights, in particular, are great fun. A few come off a little haphazardly, but those few are definitely in the minority.     Given the art design, the destructible environments, and the general flurries of mayhem you can cause, you'd think that The Warriors would be a pretty fantastic-looking game. You'd be wrong. Certainly, the aesthetics aren't without merit, but the basic graphics engine the game uses does little to impress. You won't notice it as much with the environments, because everything is supposed to be drab anyway, thus making the generally low-res textures and minimalist lighting seem completely normal. The character models, however, are not good at all. Sure, Rockstar Toronto got all the nifty little character details in there, but the faces, body parts, and costumes are just kind of ugly. This was probably necessary, to get so many characters onscreen at once and keep the frame rate moving along steadily (which it does); but even so, it's hard to just look past what are some pretty clear-cut graphical problems. Speaking of which, the camera also has an innate tendency to get in your way at inopportune times. It's not awful, and for the most part things are framed well, but when you're in a tight space and surrounded by cops, it rarely works to your benefit. You also won't notice much benefit in picking one version over another. The PS2 and Xbox versions are both practically identical, and even the Xbox version's 720p support doesn't seem to improve things much. Thankfully, the aforementioned good qualities do help--but you'll be hard pressed not to notice some of the graphical flaws.     The audio, on the other hand, is on the other side of the scale. Many of the original actors from the film have returned to voice their characters--at least, most of the ones that are still alive. Guys like Michael Beck, James Remar, and Dorsey Wright once again turn in excellent performances (despite sounding quite a bit older than the 20-something characters they play), and the remaining voice cast delivers, too. It helps that the dialogue is well written, but there's hardly a bad voice actor in the bunch. The one weird thing about the voice work, though, is that a lot of it is made up of lines directly from the film. It seems as though, in some situations, Rockstar might have been better off just taking audio directly from the film rather than rerecording it. Obviously, they'd want the voices to match, but there are situations in which they could have easily gotten away with it, and ultimately would've had a better piece of dialogue.    Barry De Vorzon's original score is fully intact here, as are many of the licensed tracks from the original soundtrack, including songs from artists like Joe Walsh, Fear, and Arnold McCuller. All the songs are most definitely of the '70s, helping to give the game that pulpy, retro vibe that it so clearly seeks. The Warriors also boasts some of the best sound effects you'll hear this year. Every hit is delivered with a high level of ferocity, and you really feel each and every one of them. As things get hectic and start breaking apart all over the place, the din of battle can actually get pretty deafening. It's just excellent audio work all around, and it really increases the intensity of battle by quite a margin.   Magic...whole lotta magic.   When all is said and done with the story mode, The Warriors actually provides a good bit of extra content to play around with. There are multiple multiplayer modes, including two-player co-op for any story mission, as well as a few unique minigames such as quick rumbles, a capture-the-flag variation (involving a girl instead of a flag) and king of the hill. The minigames are merely amusing distractions, although one unlockable game in particular stands out as completely awesome. Titled Armies of the Night, it's basically a side-scrolling beat-'em-up in the tradition of something like a Final Fight or Double Dragon, and includes the opening sequence from Double Dragon, verbatim. Again, totally rad. The cooperative play is about what you'd expect, and it doesn't involve a lot of actual cooperation, so much as it does two people standing next to each other, beating up a lot of dudes. In a couple of nice touches, however, the camera will actually split if the two of you get too far away from one another, and a second player can jump into the game at practically any time, making it a lot more accessible.    With its unrelenting obsession with nailing the details of the film's universe, its quality action, and its breadth of content, The Warriors is easily one of the better pure-action games to come out this year. It's a game that clearly goes out of its way to do more than just rehash a previously told story, as many games based on films tend to do. Again, though, this is not a game in which you have to have seen the original movie to understand and enjoy it; but if anything, it'll make you want to go out of your way to see the movie, just to see how it plays out and compares to the game experience. And in the end, isn't that what all games based on movies try to do in the first place? If you've got a thing for mature-themed action games, The Warriors is well worth your while.  


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1015,Civilization IV: Warlords ,8.6," Warlords adds six new civilizations and other enhancements to Civilization IV, but the cool new scenarios are the real treat in this expansion.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/0/9/9/2217099-box_civ4.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/civilization-iv-warlords-review/1900-6154655/,pos,"
  If you own Civilization IV, then you've probably conquered the world a fair amount of times by now. (You've probably been crushed an equal number of times, as well.) If the usual conquer-the-world-style gameplay that takes you from the Stone Age to the Space Age is beginning to look a bit familiar, then you're in luck. Nearly nine months after Civ IV shipped, we have Civilization IV: Warlords, an expansion pack that adds a lot of excellent content to an already great game.   Warlords introduces new civilizations, new scenarios, and new units, such as, well, warlords in the form of great generals.   Civilization has a long history of expansions. The second and third games in the series each had two expansion packs released for them. Warlords continues the tradition by introducing both improvements and additions to the regular campaign game, as well as introducing a slew of new scenarios that offer a completely different style of play from the epic game. The expansion adds six new civilizations, and while they're introduced to flesh out the individual scenarios, they're all available in the regular campaign game, as well. You can now play as the Carthaginians, the Celts, the Koreans, the Ottomans, the Vikings, and the Zulus. Just like the civilizations in the core game, each of these civilizations has its own unique units, famous leaders from history, and snazzy musical theme.    Warlords takes its name from the new warlord unit in the game, which is sort of like the old great-general unit from previous Civ games. Indeed, in the regular campaign game, warlords appear as great generals, sort of like how the great artists, great engineers, and other great-people units would pop up from time to time in Civ IV. Armed with a variety of powers, great generals can lead your armies in war, and they can bestow experience points on regular units under their command. Or, great generals can speed up your military-unit production in a certain city or make it so that new units start out with extra experience.    While the additions to the core game are nice, they're not exactly ground breaking. The regular campaign feels pretty much the same as before, only there are new leaders and civs to contend with. There are also a number of new wonders of the world, but for the most part they blend into the existing wonder set pretty seamlessly, save for the Great Wall, which has the cool effect of erecting a huge wall around the borders of whichever civilization completes it first. Still, the real meat in this expansion is in the scenarios, which are basically brand-new games in many regards.    These new scenarios are engaging, though they do skew a bit toward ancient-world settings and conflicts. Still, the campaigns here are interesting, and each features a unique challenge. These scenarios are essentially modifications of the core game, and they feature rewritten tech trees and unique units that are appropriate for their settings. So instead of getting a full-fledged tech tree that covers everything from the wheel to fusion power, you might get a more focused tech tree that lets you create upgraded versions of existing units or that unlocks certain upgrades. Many feature a limited number of turns in which to accomplish your objective, something that might not sit well with conservative Civ players that like to sit back and build up their cities. Risk taking is rewarded instead, which will probably sit well with aggressive Civ players, and it may also teach conservative players how to become more opportunistic.   The new scenarios are challenging and can make you rethink how you play Civ. For instance, as the Mongols, your job is to destroy, not to build.   A number of new scenarios are basically retellings of epic conquests from long ago. Alexander's Conquest focuses on Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and your job is to conquer your way eastward across the Persian Empire and into India before you run out of turns. You really have to push aggressively to accomplish everything before time runs out. The Peloponnesian Wars and the Rise of Rome scenarios also cover the ancient Mediterranean world. The former is a challenge thanks to the geography of Greece, as you must master sea power to move armies around the many islands of the archipelago. You can play as either the Spartan or the Delian League (Athens). The Rome scenario, on the other hand, focuses on the Mediterranean at large, and you can play as the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Celts, the Egyptians, or the Grecians to see which civilization is ascendant.    Two of the scenarios are set in the Far East. The Genghis Khan scenario really turns convention on its ear, because the goal isn't to conquer and settle so much as it is to conquer and pillage everything to the ground. The Mongols also have a unique build mechanic, since they're essentially a nomadic society. Rather than build cities, the Mongols bring their camps along with them, and where you set up your camp determines what kind of units are recruited that turn. Grassland means cavalry, while desert means infantry and forests can be catapults, assuming you've recovered the technology from a sacked civilization.    Meanwhile, Chinese unification lets you play as any of the major houses vying for power in the fourth century BC. Your goal is to become the emperor of China, and you can do so by force or through diplomacy by getting enough rivals to vote for you in the council, so this scenario is sort of like the regular campaign game in that regard. However, there are interesting new rules. Basically, religion is replaced with bloodlines, and the way to get other factions to be more agreeable to you is to arrange marriages and ""spread"" your bloodline around. The tech tree has been reworked extensively to allow for the massive armies that were featured during this era, and there are cool and unique little features in this scenario, such as the ability for each faction to build national walls. These are sort of like the Great Wall wonder, except each faction can get one. The new vassalage feature (also available in the campaign game) is useful here, as you can subjugate a foe and make them your devoted ally.    Then there's Omens, perhaps the most interesting and unique of the scenarios. It's set in 18th Century North America, making it the most ""modern"" of the scenarios in the game, but it's not what you expect. You play as either the French or the British as they attempt to colonize the New World and spread Catholicism or Protestantism, respectively. The goal is to convert at least 75 percent of the map by the end of the game. The kicker is that a divine spirit appears at regular intervals and basically unloads on whichever faction is in last place (including Native American factions). This means that there's constant pressure to stay ahead of your opponents, because if you fall behind at the wrong moment, you're in for it. The divine spirit is unstoppable and will easily crush any military unit in its way using fireballs. The only thing that you can do is try and hold out as long as you can, and it goes away after a while.   Omen is a historical scenario, save for the fact that divine fury can come down upon you at any time.   Finally, the Barbarians scenario lets you play as those pesky barbarians that plague the campaign game. In fact, this scenario starts out just like a regular Civ IV game, only the artificial intelligence controls all of the civilizations. The game will begin just like a normal game, and at a certain point your barbarians are introduced. You'll start out with enough gold to purchase different barbarian units and unit upgrades, and then you have to destroy as many civs as possible. You can't capture cities; you can only sack them, as well as pillage terrain improvements. This gives you gold, which can be used to purchase more units at your mobile camp, which must be defended. This can be fun, as after having endured barbarians over the course of four Civilization games, it's satisfying to have the shoe on the other foot for a change.    There's a lot of really cool content to go through in Warlords, and you can easily find yourself lost in any one of the scenarios. They'll most likely appeal to Civ veterans looking for a new challenge or a new gameplay experience, though. Even at their easier difficulty levels, the scenarios might be a bit too much for newcomers, who should stick to the regular campaign game for now. We did notice a few bugs, such as great-wonder movies that didn't play, but overall, this expansion is a lot more polished than Civilization IV was at its launch. Of course, it has the benefit of incorporating all the patches that have been made to the core game over the past year, and it also packages the pit-boss multiplayer client that was released separately, as well. Still, if you liked Civ 4, Warlords is a must-have expansion.  


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1016,Winter Stars ,4.5, There are better ways of spending your time during the cold winter months than playing Winter Stars.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/8/0/2226880-box_wstars.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/winter-stars-review/1900-6347896/,neg,"
  For most of North America and Europe, winter can put people into quite a predicament. Do you go outside, brave the cold weather, and enjoy what this world has to offer, or do you stay inside where it's nice and warm? Well, 49Games is hoping its motion-controlled game Winter Stars gives you the ability to enjoy some of the coolest winter sports around and not have to leave the warmth of your living room. While there are some interesting sports to play around with, the inconsistent controls, the length of some events, and a pretty uninteresting career mode mean Winter Stars won't be the reason you choose to stay inside.      Winter Stars starts you off as Jake, a downhill skier who suffers a very bad spill on the course and is put out of commission. When he returns, he discovers that his team has lost all its sponsors and most of its athletes. Now, he and those who are left must compete in a series of events, recruit other athletes, and try to take the title of the best team around.     The career mode is broken up into two parts: cups and challenges. The 16 cups have you competing in a number of different sporting activities, and the team with the highest score at the end of the events is declared the winner. For challenges, you must meet certain objectives to advance. These range from straightforward timed completion challenges to an abacus challenge where you need to add up the numbers that you pass by and then input the total. In between successfully completed events, you watch short, badly acted rendered cutscenes that move the shallow story forward. While mixing up challenges and cup events is nice in principle, the format of the career mode is poorly implemented. Early on, the first two cups you complete are identical outside of the fact that the second one contains one fewer event than the first. On top of that, the third cup then introduces only one new sport.       With almost a dozen sports available, the slow, gradual introduction of new activities in the career mode is an odd move. There is a wide range of different winter sports available from indoor events like figure skating and curling to outdoor ones like paraskiing and bobsled. The variety of sports is great for those craving more than the usual skiing mode seen in other motion-controlled games, but the unresponsive controls for most events hamper the experience.       The biathlon runs well, especially when you use your arms to mimic the rifle. Aiming is extremely responsive, and in most races, hitting all or most of the targets is possible. The controls in short track speed skating also work well and only require you to move your arms in a striding motion to skate around the arena.    This guy is hoping to paraski his way right into a lady's heart.     On the other hand, three of the four skiing events and the snowmobile race all control extremely poorly. For both downhill and freestyle skiing, moving your torso left or right nearly always results in the character moving too much in that direction. Then in paraskiing, sometimes the skier goes up a mountain rather than down it. However, seeing the jet stream intended to push the character downward and being able to go against it is more comical than frustrating. A similar situation occurs during some snowmobile races where your vehicle changes direction without notice.      To combat some of the control issues, Winter Stars does include a family mode, which requires only the most basic of motions. For most events, performing simple hand gestures, crouching, or running in place are the only movements necessary to participate and do well. While the inclusion of this mode is nice, it takes most of the fun out of playing.     If you so choose, family controls can also be used in the career mode, and this almost always results in a first place finish. Oddly though, while the family mode control scheme is available, all challenges must be played using the standard motion controls. If family controls are meant to give casual people the opportunity to have fun, forcing a person to play a good chunk of the game with regular controls is an odd gameplay choice.     For a compilation sports title, some of sports available in Winter Stars run a lot longer than some may be accustomed to. Bobsled, short track speed skating, and figure skating generally take only a few minutes to complete, but a curling event can last around 15 minutes. Even the length of an average biathlon race can last about 10 minutes. This is a multiplayer-focused game and the activities here should be completed in a short amount of time in order to keep the attention of those playing.   Family mode makes winning a breeze!   There are a few multiplayer modes available, both offline and on. Unfortunately, the online rooms for Winter Stars were completely empty, but if you have people around your living room, setting up a cup is pretty easy. There are a few prepared cups that offer different lengths of events and sports. But if you want to create your own customized cup, that option is available as well. Again, some of these events take a while to finish, so if you plan on playing curling with others, be sure to block out 20 to 30 minutes to complete that single event.    If the inclusion of a career mode was meant to give this more longevity, then a more streamlined path, a better introduction of new sports and a more interesting story could have made it much more enjoyable. While the large number of winter events available is nice, and some work really well, they are overshadowed by the ones that don't.   
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1017,Pokemon Rumble Blast ,4.5," Pokemon Rumble Blast is an overly simplistic, repetitive action game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/3/3/0/107900-195330.jpg,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pokemon-rumble-blast-review/1900-6342886/,neg,"
  Pokemon is a series that comprises a multitude of titles, the majority of which are actually spin-offs. These spin-offs tend to vary wildly in quality--some of them are exceptionally well done, while others are mediocre, and a few of them are just downright bad. Pokemon Rumble Blast is a follow-up to a rather obscure 2009 WiiWare game, and at first, it seems like it might offer up some mindless fun. Unfortunately, the ""fun"" part quickly evaporates after a short amount of play, revealing that a game that should be a ""blast"" is just mindless tedium.   The brief windup before the most boring one-toy massacre you could possibly imagine.   Rumble Blast, like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series before it, is based in a world entirely separate from the central Pokemon setting. In this world, Pokemon are sentient tin windup toys. It's a cute idea, and the squat, angular toy Pokemon have a distinct style and charm while still being recognizable. These toys seem to live for combat and spend most of their existence either fighting or preparing to fight in big battles. There's a flimsy story where some malevolent force is trying to steal the healing glowdrops from the various settlements in the world for nefarious purposes, but it's unlikely to hold your interest.     To move the story along, you recruit strong Pokemon to your cause from various locations and then enter competitions and storm enemy strongholds. After you finish these tasks, you unlock a new area with new recruiting locations and a new arena or enemy base. There are a handful of hub towns where you can heal, buy additional skills, and access collection data and multiplayer features, but the core cycle of the game's progression doesn't change much.    The key to success in Pokemon Rumble Blast is recruiting strong Pokemon for your team. Each area in the game has a few locations (meadow, forest, cave, tower, beach, and so on) where specific Pokemon dwell, and you need to visit as many of these locations as possible--some perhaps more than once--to get a sufficient quality and variety of Pokemon. These locations consist of a series of straightforward overhead-view maps where you take on gaggles of Pokemon at once, attempting to knock out as many as possible without getting KO'd yourself. Defeating these foes rewards you with either money or a new member for your team. Each Pokemon you recruit is distinct in its own way, with differing stats and abilities (which will likely remain unchanged for the majority of the game). Even if you recruit two of the same Pokemon, they are likely to have different attacks and strengths. At the end of these linear levels is a big boss Pokemon with a lot of health and strong attacks. Beating these bosses yields both copious amounts of cash and the potential to recruit a high-powered bruiser to your crew. After amassing a sufficiently strong Pokemon army, you can then move on to special story-progressing arenas with slight combat variations like battle royale and team battle. This probably doesn't sound too bad so far, and to its credit, Pokemon Rumble Blast does a good job of replicating the enjoyable collection element of the core Pokemon games.    Team battles deliver the additional annoyance of the CPU stupidly controlling your partners.   Unfortunately, that's where the fun ends. The central gameplay of Pokemon Rumble Blast is extremely simplistic: the circle pad/D-pad moves your selected Pokemon around the arena, while A and B perform the attacks the Pokemon comes equipped with (many Pokemon have only an A button attack unless taught an additional skill). There are no super-special attacks, no skillful jumping or dodging maneuvers, and no special items to power you up: you just run around and try to evade attacks being lobbed at you while mashing your own attack buttons. While your attacks have different properties (including classic Pokemon skill types that increase effectiveness against certain foes), once you find something that works well, does a lot of damage, and keeps you a good distance from enemies, you really have no reason to stop using it--until your favorite Pokemon either gets low on health points (or KO'd) or is simply too weak to be effective against the foes in that area. In that case, you simply pick another Pokemon with an effective skill that does a lot of damage and keeps you a good distance from enemies. The game presents an illusion of strategy by offering a huge variety of Pokemon and move types, but there is little incentive to change things up because the best skills are consistently effective on everything. You can even forgo attacking entirely and simply run around all the enemies until you reach the boss, but you won't be getting any stronger teammates that way.    The enemies don't offer much variety, either. They typically approach in groups and lob attacks at you like crazy, and you run to the side or behind them and spew attacks back. This description of combat holds true throughout the whole of Pokemon Rumble Blast. The game's idea of upping the challenge level isn't by giving enemies surprising new twists or abilities; it's by increasing the number of them onscreen at once and raising the amount of damage they can inflict. This leads to some bizarre difficulty spikes in a few areas where the enemies can deal out far more damage than you can, but the challenge lasts only until you recruit a Pokemon that's on equal footing. And don't expect any challenge from the bland, oft-recycled environments--levels are simplistic and linear with little in the way of obstacles or creative design.   See that exciting backdrop? Yeah, it never gets any more interesting than that. Ever.   The boss fights are particularly inane, because almost all of them follow the exact same structure and pattern: summon small assistants, charge up for a big attack, and then charge up and gain momentary invincibility for a really big attack. You can take down bosses easily by getting out of the way when they charge up and then attacking from the back (preferably with a skill that does multiple hits); this is not a game that requires fast reflexes and thinking. Even the themed fights are completely uninteresting because they simply tack on a few new rules that do nothing to improve the combat's shallowness. It all adds up to a game that starts out mildly fun but quickly degenerates into a boring, button-mashing slog. Multiplayer doesn't alleviate this at all: you can run through the levels with a second player or recruit a helper Pokemon via StreetPass, but this really only serves to make an already easy and dull game even more of a snoozefest.    There are other frustrations, too. One appealing element of the main Pokemon games is the ability to train and raise your favorite Pokemon over time into a superb fighter. In contrast, the Pokemon in Rumble Blast never gain strength in any way. They are designed to be disposable, forgotten as soon as they can no longer pull their weight in combat. You rarely use a Pokemon for more than half an hour before you find one far better--or are forced by sheer enemy strength to use one that's stronger. Pokemon players who have strong feelings for certain critters are likely to be annoyed when their rare and precious Victini can't survive three seconds in the new forest level before being clobbered. You can spend money to teach Pokemon new skills--which are often quite pricey--but given that the Pokemon will eventually become useless anyway, it feels like a complete waste of time and effort.     Perhaps the most egregious element of Pokemon Rumble Blast is just how little it has changed from its WiiWare predecessor. If you're willing to spend some Wii points, you can get the same sort of monotonous, mindless combat as Pokemon Rumble Blast on the Wii for substantially less money, though you won't be getting the newest Pokemon from Black and White or 3D visuals. It's hard to recommend either Pokemon Rumble game, however, when there are so many far superior Pokemon games already on the market. If you need a Pokemon fix, you may as well just go back to Pokemon Black or Pokemon White and completely avoid this sorry scuffle.  
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1018,Alien Spidy ,4.5, Alien Spidy's cool momentum-based platforming is both unique and uniquely infuriating.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/2/3/2/2228232-2182082-alienspidy.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alien-spidy-review/1900-6406082/,neg,"
                                  '  If at first you don't succeed, try, try again until your eyes roll right out of their sockets and your fingers are raw from the pain of mashing the restart button hundreds of times in a single sitting. That's seemingly Alien Spidy's ill-conceived motto. This cutesy momentum-based platformer has a dark side that doesn't fully manifest until you realize you've just spent several hours replaying the same 60-second stage to the point where you've memorized every obstacle, jump, and danger in your path--yet you've still made no actual progress. At times, it feels like beating your bloodied fists against a brick wall and pouring salt into the wounds before starting over again. But the real kicker is that there are frequent glimmers of fun in the underlying gameplay. Alien Spidy dangles the carrot, and then gives you the spiked bat.      Our titular space arachnid's brutal journey begins when his lady pal rockets into the cosmos and crash-lands on a strange and dangerous planet. The impetuous hero jets off to her rescue, but winds up in the same pickle when his craft goes haywire and dumps him on the planet's surface. That's about where the story winds down and the game's sadomasochistic pummeling kicks in. A few short tutorial stages introduce you to the basic flow of gameplay: run, jump, swing, collect, and avoid death. It's straightforward enough, and fumbling through the first few proper levels gives the sense that there are some cool ideas at play. There's an appealing fluidity to the way you move through each level, and the game's stark artistic style really draws you in. But once the sharp difficulty spikes sink their teeth in, the spell is broken pretty quickly. With close to 70 stages spanning three distinct worlds, there is no short supply of punishment in this fiendish platformer.    Alien Spidy's speed-based running, webswinging, and jumping seem overly simple at first. There's a reason for that: you have to focus intently on every subtle move you make and execute them with precision or face failure. Your mission is to guide Spidy through each obstacle-filled stage to collect glowing orbs, avoid danger, rack up a huge score, and hit the finish line as quickly as possible. Aside from slinging and swinging, special abilities powered by purple orbs eventually let you rocket skyward, swim in underwater bubbles, and pull off other feats of enhanced dexterity.     Creating score chain combos by collecting groups of five blue orbs in rapid succession is just as important as plowing through stages with raw speed. Grabbing every score-boosting item you can, stringing combos together, and avoiding death become obsessive pursuits that eventually spur you to bail on a botched run the second things go bad. Merely getting to the end of each stage can be a real challenge that takes numerous tries to accomplish, but making it to the finish line isn't good enough. You have to replay stages and hit draconian scoring benchmarks that rise constantly, taunting you with even more outrageous targets to fail at hitting.      Speed and accuracy are everything. Every second you delay, your score rolls back slightly, ticking down ominously even as you work to keep it building toward your goal. Dying or retrying a section from the last checkpoint takes a permanent bite out of your score in a given level. You might think you wildly surpassed your goal with a particularly tight run only to make it to the end and find that you actually didn't even come close due to stiff penalties from slipping up one too many times or not moving fast enough. On the first few passes, you won't think twice about getting a paltry one- or two-star rating, but each of the game's three worlds requires you to amass a certain number of stars before it lets you proceed to the next. Pushing toward the three-, four-, and five-star score realms in each stage is often an exercise in futility.    You soon find that your best just doesn't cut it, and while the process of practicing and mastering a bit more of each level offers some satisfaction when you do squeeze another star from its iron grasp, it takes an agonizing amount of time, effort, and repetition to reach the point where you finally make progress. Victory is short-lived, because that's when you have to start the whole process all over again with an even tougher set of levels. Other worlds weave in new ideas and obstacles like underwater stretches and floating cave crystals to expand on the gameplay, though they're equally as treacherous and demanding as the initial stretch of the game.    Inane, lofty score requirements are a big part of Alien Spidy's problem, but they're not the whole of it. Your main ability to shoot strands of sticky web and use them to propel yourself at an increasingly frenetic pace is a neat if somewhat imprecise tool to work with. As you speed through stages, you simultaneously aim and shoot your webbing by flicking the right thumbstick, oftentimes in midair and in situations where the slightest wavering in aim sends you to your doom.       Unfortunately, the finicky aim controls don't always line up to where you're shooting, and it's frustrating when you die over and over again as a result. There are tons of pressure-cooker moments when you have to attach your web to a very specific spot, and a single miss can hamstring the run. Glitches add to the frustration. For example, in some vertically oriented stages, if you fall down backward to a previous checkpoint after collecting certain power-ups, these crucial items needed to proceed won't respawn when you get back to their original location, forcing you to reset the stage and lose your progress.    What's really disappointing is that Alien Spidy is full of promise that's chiseled away as you spend more time with it. The creative level designs are challenging and frequently fun to play when you're not obsessing over trying for that perfect run. It's the harsh scoring system and the absurdly steep goals you have to hit before unlocking subsequent tiers of levels that really kill the experience. A stiff challenge is good to get the blood pumping, but this level of punishment feels arbitrary and not particularly well-thought-out. With tighter controls and a bit more leniency, Alien Spidy would be a much different and much more enjoyable romp.    '
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1019,Wheels of Destruction: World Tour ,4.5, Varied track design isn't enough to save Wheels of Destruction from a trip to the junkyard.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/4/4/6/178446-660035_249211.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wheels-of-destruction-world-tour-review/1900-6370607/,neg,"
  Contrary to popular belief, a car's sole purpose is not just to shuttle its passengers around town. That mundane task makes up only a small portion of a car's potential. Outfit a four-wheeled vehicle with a bevy of ready-to-kill firearms and a sturdy protective shell, and you've got yourself a source of destructive entertainment that would make Henry Ford faint with delight. Sadly, the explosive promise of the automobile doesn't come close to being tapped in the downloadable Wheels of Destruction: World Tour. Through an assortment of problems ranging from minor dents to head-on collisions, Wheels of Destruction makes the joy of blowing up other cars as fun as a drive to the corner market.      Six cars, five maps, four weapons--diversity is not one of Wheels' strong suits. Upon startup, online competition beckons, but if you'd like to get your motor revved offline, you're stuck spinning your tires. Offline competition is sparse and uninviting. There's no tutorial to teach you the ins and outs of vehicular combat, no story to flesh out the motivating force. There's not even a tournament to give battles a proper structure. You play one-off matches against computer-controlled opponents, check out your kill-to-death ratio afterward, and then play another one-off bout until you grow tired of the banality of it all.    If you think going online could solve these problems, there's a grand disappointment waiting for you in that realm as well. There's little difference between online and offline competition save for the incredible lag you suffer when you attempt to challenge other players around the world. Having to put up with severe technical problems when you play Wheels of Destruction online eliminates almost any potential it might have had for being a worthwhile trip down vehicular homicide lane.     There are only two modes of play (Capture the Flag and Deathmatch), unless you consider Team Deathmatch a wholly separate offering. Vehicles are equipped with a boost and can perform a modest jump, but maneuverability is hindered by the slow-to-respond steering mechanics. Tilting the left stick from side to side moves the turret on the back of your car and adjusts the camera. The car eventually responds by positioning itself so its rear is facing the screen, but there's a noticeable delay while this alignment goes into effect. In practice, this makes precise driving tricky, especially in the heat of combat. Once you figure out how to properly drift around turns, the cars become more responsive and enjoyable to control, but driving never captures the uninhibited joy the best vehicular games encompass.    Survive a battle and you could find yourself with one less wheel.   Stages are spread out across the world and are intricately designed to encourage exploration. Secret roads in Tokyo give you various ways to go from your base to your opponent's in Capture the Flag, while Rome rewards anyone skilled enough to manage the plentiful ramps that populate the streets. Level design is one of Wheels' strengths. Through jump-enabled booster pads and tucked-away teleporters, you can escape a pursuer in a pinch or surprise a flag thief with an assault from above. It is easy to get lost in the elaborate worlds because there aren't enough distinct visual cues to clearly separate one area from the next, but over time, you learn how to get from one place to another as quick as a cat, and you feel all the more devious for thwarting your enemy through hard-earned knowledge of the layout.     So once you learn how to manage the steering and commit the maps to memory, it is fun to tool around locales at top speed, performing summersaults off ramps and generally making a nuisance of yourself. However, the core of the game--combat--rarely enters an enjoyable groove. Two basic problems surface in just about every fight you find yourself in. First, the physics are out of whack. When a missile slams into you, your vehicle is hurtled high into the air. Once afloat, you stay there for precious seconds while your opponent peppers you with enough lead to make you cry tears of oil and death. You can use your boost to get out of harm's way, but more likely than not, you'll be dead before you hit the ground. Second, death comes extremely fast. If you aren't catapulted in the air, you're likely to be blown apart with a single hit. These issues discourage you from mixing things up in vehicular fisticuffs, which is downright strange in a game built around unabashed car carnage.    When cars engage in war, property values plummet.   Most of the weapons aren't particularly interesting, either. There's a standard array of guns available that lack the imagination and viciousness to make you take notice. The rocket launcher locks on to would-be victims, so much of the dirty work of carefully lining up shots is eliminated. This works well because fiddling with aiming would be less than ideal while trying to corner hairpin turns, but the hit-and-run nature removes the in-your-face destruction that could have given your kills more immediacy. This issue continues with the railgun and Gatling gun. You simply don't feel the weight of your actions, so you don't become invested in these conquests. This is mitigated somewhat by the flamethrower. You have to be right on your targets to be most effective, and burning them until they're useless metal bricks offers mild satisfaction.    The engine that runs Wheels is sturdy enough to offer some enjoyment. Once you get the hang of the steering, motoring around the expansive maps is entertaining, and it's hard not to appreciate the clever designs of each location. But the other elements only serve to bring the rest of the package down. A scarcity of content is the biggest offender. The single-player battles are a mere training ground against computer-controlled cars, and the online battles are so full of lag that it's not worth putting up with the aggravation. Wheels of Destruction: World Tour is so stripped that it's hard to overlook its myriad problems to uncover the good buried within.   
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1020,Jet Set Radio ,4.5," Jet Set Radio was interesting in the year 2000, but the game needed more than a fresh coat of paint to make its awkward design worth revisiting.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/1/0/5/134083-226105.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jet-set-radio-review/1900-6396616/,neg,"
  When Jet Set Radio debuted on the Dreamcast in North America as Jet Grind Radio back in 2000, it offered a unique experience that no other console game of that era could match. Players stepped into the skates of energetic graffiti artists residing in the fictional city of Tokyo-to. The goal was to tag as much of the landscape as possible with colorful graffiti designs, a task made difficult by the presence of rival gangs that were attempting to do the exact same thing--and by a police force that believed the best punishment for such vandalism was death by guided missile. The only way to stay ahead of the threats was to keep cruising and grinding, leaping from one point to another and pausing only just long enough to spray an intricate tag before resuming the crazy rush.   Graffiti may be artwork, but don’t forget: it’s also a crime!   Jet Set Radio relies heavily on its presentation and it doesn’t always stress the details. Stages end abruptly once you tag all available points (marked by red arrows), not when you achieve a certain score or defeat a challenging boss. The energetic beats looping in the background and the vibrant cel-shaded visuals have always been the primary reasons to keep playing, and those elements are especially effective now that all of the familiar artwork has been upgraded for high-definition televisions. Most of the original music also returns. Players discovering the game in 2012 may wonder what they’re missing, though, because there’s not a lot to savor beyond the funky presentation.    Jet Set Radio's most regrettable issue is its simple but somehow ineffective control setup. As your skater cruises through the various areas, even the simple act of skating in a straight line can sometimes prove difficult if you're not grinding a railing, because you have to hold the analog stick forward to build speed. The tiniest nudge of the analog stick can wreak havoc, since your skating graffiti artist is prone to wide sweeping movements rather than more precise motions. Yet if you need to change direction slightly while flying through the air (usually because your skater launched unexpectedly toward one side or the other rather than pushing forward in the anticipated straight line), fiddling with the analog stick often has almost no effect at all.     The rails you must frequently grind also lack stickiness, which makes landing on them at the end of a leap a tricky proposition. You may overshoot your intended destination, and that often means you must backtrack through hazardous territory so that you can make another attempt. Building up speed so that you can manage the long jumps required to clear gaps is also an issue, since by default your skater moves at a snail's pace. You're forced to pay entirely too much attention to the controls the whole time you play, lest a split second of inattentiveness lead to disaster.   Getting around Tokyo-to can be a bit of a grind.   The inadequate camera does nothing to alleviate such control issues, either. Many of the environments are practically barren until enemies begin appearing in response to your vandalism, but you still stumble across a few unwelcome piles of debris in the most inconvenient of places, or perhaps a series of vehicles parked along a street between you and a wall that you need to tag. The camera gets stuck on objects in confined spaces, jerks crazily if you're following a path through a winding corridor, or spins in such a way that you can't see environmental obstacles that in any other game would be easily spotted. The only way to make crucial runs in some stages is to first memorize their layouts through trial and error.     In some instances, you also must tag objects with precise timing, but since the left trigger serves two functions, it's easy to accidentally start messing with the camera instead of tagging the environment as you may have intended. Such goofs delay your ability to paint for a brief moment, which is time enough that you sometimes miss spraying a target that you should easily have been able to tag on the fly.     Instead of finding ways to alleviate the camera and control issues, the game's original developers at Smilebit used those flaws as a means of providing additional challenge. In one stage, for instance, your chosen skater must race along an arcing passageway, then leap onto a narrow and winding ledge, ride it along an S path, and finally leap over a balcony to land on a narrow bit of piping that when viewed from a distance blends in with the background. This scenario would be fun but not especially challenging in a game with responsive controls and a friendly camera, but in Jet Set Radio it is a chore. Building up speed requires a rush down a corridor with horrible visibility, and the leap from one construction beam to another requires that you guess properly about the precise positioning of a rail that often is off-camera.    The game has no shortage of great tunes, and the kooky DJ is still fun.   In a few other stages, your skater's goal is to tag members of a rival gang with paint. The environments where you must do so are built to slow you down at every turn. In the first such mission, the cowardly goons skate along a sewer pathway that includes stairs, pools of murky water, and an enclosed passage that is littered with piles of immovable barrels and equipped with a trapdoor in the floor. Your job is to direct your skater as he or she races after those foes--who all move with an easy grace that most human players will never reproduce with their skaters--and spray them from behind several times. Until you memorize the stage layout in its entirety (along with the route your rivals follow), you don't stand a chance.    Not every stage is frustrating in the same way, and there are moments when you find yourself having some fun, but each new environment presents an exasperating wrinkle of some sort. The most common stage objective simply asks your skater to roam around and tag key areas while avoiding an ever-increasing police presence. Such levels begin with almost no resistance at all, which gives you time to gather paint cans (since your graffiti-loving skater always starts with none on hand). After you tag a few locations, though, you have to avoid tear gas, dogs, SWAT teams, a trigger-happy captain, helicopters that fire missiles, and other similar hazards. That had the potential to be exciting, but the finicky controls and ineffective camera make it difficult to track the location of your enemies until they're pelting you with bullets, grenades, or missiles.    It’s all downhill from here.   As if the control and camera issues weren't bad enough, sometimes you may also find yourself accidentally exiting stages. The city environments you explore have invisible boundaries, and you receive a warning if you're about to pass one. However, no barrier prevents you from actually doing so. You are simply taken to the level selection menu. So if you're most of the way through a stage, an onscreen arrow indicator might be pointing you toward a point that you need to tag, and it may direct you along a path that leads you near an exit. Then you could get hit by a car or an explosive blast and knocked out of bounds before you have a chance to recover.    Jet Set Radio doesn't feel as much like a game as it does a test of endurance. Entertainment options have come a long way since 2000, and consumers now take smooth controls and a capable camera system for granted. Most gamers will find little joy in the outdated design elements that so thoroughly color this particular experience, even if they are in the mood for something retro. While the game was once an interesting way to pass the time, its value has expired, and a shinier coat of paint doesn't change that.  
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1021,Dragon Ball Z for Kinect ,4.5, Dragon Ball Z for Kinect's repetitive battles and flaky motion controls sap all the fun out of being a Saiyan.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/1/9/4/2228194-box_dbz4k.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragon-ball-z-for-kinect-review/1900-6397896/,neg,"
                                  '  Seeing a plump, ki-filled Kamehameha blast into the face of an evil villain with just a flick of the wrist is a sight etched deeply into the minds of Dragon Ball Z fans. As too are the show's epic airborne battles, earth-shattering explosions, and flame-haired Super Saiyans who perpetually save the universe from certain doom. And while our childhood fantasies of flying through the air and having power levels over 9,000 might not have come to pass, Dragon Ball Z for Kinect has a fair crack at making them happen without any risk of physical harm, or potential YouTube embarrassment. Sadly, Dragon Ball Z for Kinect's erratic motion controls and teeth-grindingly repetitive battles make playing as a Saiyan more of a chore than a dream come true.      A lot of that's also because of the game's rigid structure, which limits your movements and places an emphasis on performing quick-time events during highly choreographed battles from the series. Everything from Raditz's arrival on Earth in the Saiyan Saga through to Majin Buu's emergence in the Babidi Saga is represented, with select scenes from each forming the basis of the game's story mode. Each scene places you at the beginning of a battle where, after a brief but true-to-the-anime cutscene, you're placed in the shoes of one of the famous fighters to do battle against a dastardly villain.     Battles are split into different sections, one that places you in a first-person view where you can perform a range of moves, and another that's little more than a cutscene filled with numerous quick-time events. The first-person sections are where you're given the most freedom, but they still follow a rigid formula that differs little from one fight to the next. You must defeat an enemy by unleashing a range of kicks and punches, which are triggered by kicking and punching in front of you. Land enough hits, and a power bar at the bottom of the screen fills up, after which you have to punch as fast as you can to fill more power bars to perform automated combos that see enemies thrown across the landscape in a manic display of punches and energy blasts.     It's hard, sweaty, and frustratingly repetitive work. The punching process is repeated several times until you've worn down enough of your opponent's energy to trigger another section, where you launch ki energy blasts by thrusting your palms out in front of you; after that you're back to punching. Your opponents don't just sit there and take it, but neither do they put up much of a fight. Their attacks are slow and stumbling, and they hardly conjure up the threatening vibe that all-powerful villains should. Presumably their sluggishness is to give you enough time to react and trigger a defensive move such as dodging by leaning to the left or right, or blocking by holding your arms up in front of your face. But most of the time you can ignore defence completely, and, if you've got the stamina, just punch the air nonstop to win.      Special moves let you win with even more ease, if you can get the game to recognise the stance that triggers them. Charging your ki energy bar launches special moves, such as Goku's Kamehameha or Krillin's Destructo Disk. The stance to do so varies between characters, but a handy icon to the right of the screen lets you know how to stand, which often involves holding your hands by your side or above you. Frustratingly, getting the game to recognise the stance is completely hit-and-miss. Sometimes it works just fine, while other times it requires all manner of weird bodily contortions to be performed. Once you're charged up, a more reliably recognised stance launches the special attack and devastates your opponent's health for an all-too-easy victory.     Interspersed between the first-person sections are numerous cutscenes filled with quick-time events. Often they play out memorable moments from the anime, such as Goku's battle against the giant Oozaru Vegeta, or his battle against the mean-spirited Frieza on planet Namek. Getting through them is simply a case of watching and waiting for the appropriate icon to appear onscreen, which tells you what action to perform. They're largely easy actions, such as running on the spot, leaning backwards or forwards, or holding your arms up to block. A few more-complex moves are thrown in too, but more often than not the game fails to recognise them, which is immensely frustrating if you're on the verge of death.     The whole thing is just a bit half-baked, with neither the motion sensing being as responsive as it should be nor the story mode being anything other than an overly simplistic, disjointed collection of battles from the series. You just don't feel like you're working towards anything of worth, and once the fun novelty of throwing a Kamehameha wears off, there's little else to keep you going. There's no multiplayer at all and no online leaderboards for you to show off any high scores, and the only other mode simply replicates the battles of story mode, albeit minus the cutscenes and with the character of your choice. A card reader lets you obtain more characters via QR codes, but given that there's little difference between how the characters play, it's largely worthless.       At the very least, you're treated to a game that looks the part. Cel-shaded characters and environments capture the look of the anime nicely, even if the facial animations are a bit robotic. The voice acting's good too, despite the cast lacking many of the original actors from the series. And fans will no doubt appreciate the exclusive episode of the Dragon Ball anime included with the game, which is nicely presented in HD. But that's hardly enough to make up for the sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of the game. If you're really desperate to live out those childhood (adult?) dreams of being a Saiyan, then there are a few cheap thrills to be had here--just don't expect to be playing Dragon Ball Z for Kinect again once the novelty has worn off.  '
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1022,Dead Space 3: Awakened ,4.5," With an unsatisfying story and rehashed gameplay, Dead Space 3: Awakened makes a strong case for letting sleeping dogs lie.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/3/5/2/2228352-cleanboxds3.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dead-space-3-awakened-review/1900-6405673/,neg,"
  Dead Space 3 was never a game lacking for content. Between a 15- to 20-hour campaign built around a deep weapon-crafting system and numerous unlockable game modes, there was plenty to keep your attention in Isaac Clarke's most recent adventure. So what's the incentive to drop $10 on Awakened, Dead Space 3's first downloadable add-on? It all comes down to story. Dead Space 3 ended on a serious cliff-hanger, and Awakened appears ready to shed light on the events of its predecessor by picking up right where things left off. Or at least that's what you'd be inclined to think. In actuality, there's no resolution to be found here as this brief, unsatisfying addendum trades one cliff-hanger for another. Add in the fact that most of it feels like a rehashed collection of gameplay scenarios you've experienced several times before and this is one follow-up that feels entirely unnecessary.        Without going into too much detail about the climactic events that capped off Dead Space 3, Awakened sees Isaac Clarke and John Carver waking up a bit worse for the wear. The pair of survivors aren't sure whether they're alive or dead at the beginning of this new chapter. All they know is that they've been stranded on the frozen surface of Tau Volantis and need to come up with a plan for what to do next. But it isn't long before they think of one: find a shuttle to get from this planet to the derelict Terra Nova, and then repair that ravaged spacecraft in order to make it back to Earth.     It's a new goal, but a familiar journey. For the most part, these reluctant partners are doing the exact same things against the exact same enemies in the exact same locations. You blast away at necromorphs on Tau Volantis, climb some ice walls, blast away at necromorphs in zero-gravity sequences, scavenge weapon parts, and blast away at necromorphs on the Terra Nova. It's disappointing just how rehashed all of these situations and locations feel. A new collection of weapon attachments to discover or a few more crazy species of necromorphs would have freshened things up a bit, but those additions are sorely lacking.     Awakened does stand apart from the Dead Space 3 campaign in one regard: it places a much more pronounced focus on Isaac and John's descent into madness. The two men have gone from dipping their toes in the effects of insanity to swimming in the deep end. Throughout the story, they experience sudden, twisted visions, and the frayed nerves that result from these mental breakdowns proceed to drive a wedge between the two partners. That focus on dementia is a neat narrative effect at first, but these twisted visions are about as subtle as a tap-dancing rhinoceros and ultimately feel more jarring than creepy. In the end, the story just sputters about for the two hours it takes to complete this DLC before abruptly ending with another cliff-hanger.    Sometimes you just have to stop and smell the necromorph-scented candles.   Sadly, that's not the only missed opportunity in Awakened. When you make it aboard the Terra Nova, you discover the presence of a cult known as the Circle, a fringe group loosely connected to the Church of Unitology. When you stumble upon the cult's worship service, you're greeted by a terrifying sight: a collection of shirtless maniacs with sacks over their heads and makeshift blades where their hands have been sawed off. But when they inevitably attack, you just sort of shoot them and find yourself done with it. You don't learn much of anything about this cult, or its place in the story. It's just window dressing to add some spice to recycled environments.     The leader of this cult does stick around, however, haunting you at random intervals as well as serving as Awakened's only real boss fight toward the end of the story. Running into him adds some fresh terror to the adventure, largely because he's so creepy to gaze upon. After a while you finally face him in a climactic confrontation, but it's a clumsy boss fight that spams you with too many enemies to really appreciate the impact of the moment. That's especially unfortunate because the area where this boss fight takes place is both a visual treat and one of the few new environments in the DLC, but you're too busy fending off relentless waves of minions to really soak it up.    It's a real shame that these cultists are such throwaway enemies.   It's too bad that Awakened fails to capitalize on its place as a follow-up piece to the main story campaign. Rather than resolving what came before it, Awakened simply shrugs its shoulders for a couple hours before throwing another cliff-hanger ending your way. Sure, it still plays perfectly well, with plenty of intense dismemberment and a pleasingly varied selection of necromorph enemies to fend off. But that's all stuff you can get in Dead Space 3's already lengthy campaign. Viewed in that light, it's hard to see Awakened as anything besides redundant.      
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1023,ZombiU ,4.5," With an uninteresting world and dull combat, the survival horror game ZombiU is a weak link in the Wii U's launch lineup.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/9/3/5/2226935-box_zombiu.png,WIIU,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/zombiu-review/1900-6400225/,neg,"
  The survival horror genre is a balancing act. The player needs to feel fear and helplessness, but also needs satisfying ways to take action and combat those feelings. This harmony is something even the genre greats struggle with, but that hasn't stopped the first-person survival horror game ZombiU, the latest to throw its hat in the ring--and on a new console no less. However, its vision of a zombie-infested London not only fails to create an engaging horror experience, but also falls short of being a good game.      Combat is how you spend most of your time in ZombiU. Many environments are claustrophobic, your ability to run is limited, and the zombies can easily keep pace with your character at walking speed. Attempting to charge past the horde can lead to receiving some painful glancing hits or getting surrounded by the undead. The best course of action is to play it safe and dispatch all the zombies you encounter.    This means luring enemies away one by one and clobbering them with the cricket bat. This melee method can take a long time, since the number of hits needed to fell a foe changes randomly. And no one zombie, even the faster ones or the armored ones, poses an engaging threat individually. You just stand there, hitting and waiting. Tools such as flares and land mines break up the monotony, but their contribution is fleeting.    Firearms are faster and deadlier, but are not as readily available as the cricket bat. A shortage of weapons is not uncommon for the survival horror genre, but ZombiU’s emphasis on fighting makes this scarcity sting. New weapons and ammo are uncommon, and can be lost if your character dies and you cannot recover his or her backpack after respawning. A more cautious strategy is to hoard weapons away and circumvent this risk, relying solely on the cricket bat and pistol that new characters always start with.    A zombie tackle means instant death, unless you have some Virucide.   Whether you choose to conserve your bullets or you use them as soon as you pick them up, most of your time spent fighting will be with the laborious cricket bat. Dispatching enemies this way is as repetitive as it is dull, and does not change throughout the entire campaign.    What does change are the protagonists. ZombiU takes an interesting approach by casting you as a new character every time you die, but struggles to stay consistent. In the beginning, your hero is taken in by the Prepper, a military man well versed in zombie survival (and conspiracy theories). But when that first character dies, the game's logic dies with him. It is not uncommon for the Prepper to yell at newcomers about issues they know nothing about.    Shouts of ""I thought we were partners!"" or ""Why are you betraying me?"" have zero context to a new arrival. Within the game's narrative, this person just got here. And since your hero is mute and disposable, all characters you encounter communicate at you, rather than with you (and they do not talk with each other). Everyone you meet is basically shouting at a very confused brick wall. This is not ideal for maintaining the unease and mystery of a horror story.   Bright lights expose your characters' extremely dirty vision.   The Wii U gamepad functionality doesn't contribute much to the game. The pad’s functions include displaying the map and your inventory, and being the place where you tap to interact with things such as wooden barricades or manhole covers. When tapping on an object, you are treated to a reverse shot showing what’s going on behind your character. Every so often a zombie will shamble into frame, creating slight panic as you tap away.  Other functions are simply better handled through traditional controller inputs. Cycling between weapons via touch screen or constantly dragging items to and from your backpack is not ideal. And scanning the environments for items means you do most of the exploration in a very detached, clinical way.   It's a zombie rave, open your mind and let the music take control!   Sadly, what you do in that world is not very interesting. The vast majority of your missions boil down to simple fetch quests. Go here. Collect this. Return it. Any side quests are self-assigned item runs in case you lose a gun or need some extra supplies. The few puzzles you encounter are follow the same pattern: scan the walls for numbers to input on key pads. In the end, most of your time is spent lazily hitting zombies with cricket bats.     Thankfully, ZombiU's multiplayer works well. This local-only, two-player mode casts one player as the zombie king and the other as the survivor. Both players are trying to capture flags, but have wildly different play styles. The king deploys AI-controlled zombies from a top-down view on the touch screen, while the survivor kills those zombies and tries to survive the onslaught. Both sides earn rewards as the match progresses.    In this mode, the game's design really comes together. Individually, the different zombie classes aren't very interesting to fight. But in a large group their specific roles make for more fun and engaging encounters. The survivor player enjoys the challenge of these dynamic encounters and unloads with a full arsenal, which the zombie king strategizes with different groups of zombies. This high-action mode is the opposite of the rest of the game's design, and is infinitely more enjoyable.    In the assault multiplayer mode both sides fight to control three flags.   ZombiU is a game trapped in the wrong genre. The run-and-gun multiplayer modes emphasize the game's competent shooting mechanics and ability to create interesting enemy encounters. However, these two aspects are discouraged in the single-player campaign for the sake of survival. To compensate, there's the bare minimum of a story and a few simple puzzles. And so much cricket bat. ZombiU could have been an enjoyable action game, but instead it is a poor entry in the survival horror genre.  


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1024,Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory ,8.6," Chaos Theory is one of the N-Gage's standout games, and it belongs in the hands of anyone still sticking by the embattled platform.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/3/8/1/20774-60381.jpg,NGE,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-splinter-cell-chaos-theory-review/1900-6121193/,pos,"
  Most developers for the N-Gage, and for mobile at large, will tell you that it's rarely a good idea to try to re-create a console experience on a phone. The controls and technical specs of modern handsets are simply inadequate. A third-person stealth action game like Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, which is heavily reliant on advanced lighting effects and intricate, context-sensitive controls, would be an example of a poor candidate for porting. That's why it's so surprising that Gameloft has managed to deliver a product with almost all the refinements of its console counterpart. Most of Sam's moves are intact, as is Chaos Theory's cooperative multiplayer mode, which works seamlessly over Bluetooth. The game's graphics engine looks fabulous in all three of Sam's visor settings and makes this latest Splinter Cell all the more immersive. Chaos Theory is one of the N-Gage's standout games, and it belongs in the hands of anyone still sticking by the embattled platform.    This is the best the N-Gage has to offer.   It's ironic that Tom Clancy, a master of counterterrorist intrigue, includes such forgettable plots in his video games. Chaos Theory's lackluster storyline, told through cinematic cutscenes, is no exception. Many of these involve banter between Fisher and his inveterate dispatcher, Irving Lambert. Unfortunately, Michael Ironside hasn't lent his basso profundo to the N-Gage version of Chaos Theory, so you'll have to content yourself with scrolling written dialogue. Chaos Theory makes the common mistake of letterboxing the N-Gage's vertical screen for these sequences, which restricts them to a paltry number of pixels.     Where Chaos Theory shines is in its gameplay. For the first time on a handheld, Sam has a near-complete move set at his disposal. A training mission (that's nearly the length of the entire Pandora Tomorrow 3D mobile game) explains each of Sam's maneuvers in detail, including his wall-jumps and swat-turns. Chaos Theory features a full complement of weapons as well, which can be used much more freely than in previous Splinter Cell games.     In fact, you'll be employing the ""Fifth Freedom"" much more often this time around, which tips Chaos theory slightly more to the ""action"" side of stealth action. You're still encouraged to avoid direct confrontations with the enemy; you can just choose to flout the conventional wisdom on that point.     The N-Gage isn't exactly known for its specular lighting effects, and that's why it's so surprising that Sam's protective chiaroscuro works so well here. Fortunately, terrorists continue to operate in intermittently lit factories, and it's easy to see what nooks and crannies the electricians have neglected. The game looks absolutely gorgeous with any of Sam's three visor filters and runs at a very playable frame rate, both in the single-player campaign and over Bluetooth multiplayer.    This latter mode is actually the most appealing of Chaos Theory's features. You and a buddy can play levels cooperatively. One of you will work as a hacker, specializing in computerized infiltration techniques, while the other is basically a tank and dominates live-fire situations. The game's occasionally labyrinthine levels are much more fun to explore with a buddy. If you can find someone to play with (and even if you can't), Chaos Theory will prove a tremendous value, with lots of longevity.    Chaos Theory also supports N-Gage Arena leaderboards, in which you are scored based on your clear times and by how deftly you complete your objectives. It's possible to download a replay of the top players' sessions, so as to improve your own performance. Finally, the N-Gage's oft-ridiculed shadow racing has a purpose.   Sam gets to spill a fair share of blood in this adventure.   Chaos Theory's audio is as appealing as its top-notch visuals. The game's ambient sound is easily the best on the N-Gage--you'll hear every footstep, every anxious creak of a door being stealthily opened. Bits and pieces of Amon Tobin's brilliant soundtrack have also found their way into the N-Gage version of the game. Suffice it to say, from an audiovisual standpoint, Chaos Theory is the best the N-Gage has to offer.    Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is probably the best game made thus far for the N-Gage. Considering the overall quality of the N-Gage library, that isn't exactly a difficult task, but if you're still out there on the hunt for a great game for the N-Gage, this is one game you can't afford to be without.  



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1025,Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory ,8.6," Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos theory is a modest update to one of the best games of last year, and it is therefore a terrific--if familiar--experience.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/3/8/1/20774-60381.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tom-clancys-splinter-cell-chaos-theory-review/1900-6121743/,pos,"
  The old adage ""if it ain't broke, don't fix it"" likely gets tossed around a lot in mobile development studios. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos theory is a modest update to one of the best games of last year, and it is therefore a terrific--if familiar--experience. While, like its console brethren, Chaos Theory has been tipped a little toward the action side of stealth action, its core gameplay could hardly be called a departure from that of Pandora Tomorrow. If you've played previous Splinter Cell iterations, you'll find Chaos Theory to be an incremental update, with better graphics and a few new toys for Sam Fisher.    Sam's back, and he is (just barely) better than ever.   In Chaos Theory, you reprise the role of Sam Fisher, a hard-boiled special agent--called a Splinter Cell--trained in the infiltration and disruption of terrorist organizations. Like any stealth operative worth his salt, Sam is given instructions through a headset communicator, and he executes these orders with deadly precision. Sam can wield a variety of weapons, including grenades, handguns, and self-propelled explosives, but he'll have to find these on the field, as he begins the game unarmed.    As with previous Splinter Cells, it's possible to complete your objectives without firing a shot. It's likely, however, that you'll want to execute a few of your foes using old-fashioned brute force. Chaos Theory doesn't discourage this approach, apart from docking you a few points for every shot fired. When you alert a foe to your presence, rather than silently executing him, you'll set off an alarm. Fortunately, these alarms are deactivated within seconds. It's still not possible to shoot while moving, though, so it's impossible to run and gun your way through the game.     Chaos Theory is the best-looking 2D Splinter Cell yet, but not by a wide margin. Still, that means this game's graphical quality is almost peerless on the LG VX7000. With each successive game, Gameloft seems to get better at drawing various levels of ambient light. You'll learn to remain enshrouded in chiaroscuro, or risk exposure.   Hide in the shadows or shoot people in the head--it's up to your discretion.   There's nothing wrong with Chaos Theory's sound, either. The music is heart-poundingly percussive and is reminiscent of Danny Elfman's Mission: Impossible score. The tunes cut out as soon as you fire a shot, though, which is perhaps the biggest incentive to take a non-violent approach.    Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is a terrific game in its own right, even if it doesn't stray far from the established formula. Veterans of previous Splinter Cells will be pleased with this game, while series newcomers will find Chaos Theory the most accessible SC title yet, as it allows one to use the ""fifth freedom"" unabated.  
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1026,F.E.A.R. ,8.6, This straightforward translation of last year's hit PC game blends kinetic action with creepy atmosphere to create one of the most intense shooters on the Xbox 360.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/4/7/3/20791-60473.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fear-review/1900-6160869/,pos,"
  When you get down to it, the gun is the heart and soul of a first-person shooter. Even the genre's name alludes to this fact. Yet while shooters have been around for more than a decade, very few of them have captured the visceral experience of firing a gun. It's an intense and violent act. Enter the Xbox 360 translation of F.E.A.R., last year's acclaimed PC action game. F.E.A.R. is a shooter that captures the sensation of being in wild and desperate firefights, and it's an incredible experience from start to finish. More notably, however, it's one of the most atmospheric and creepy games ever made.    F.E.AR. places you on the military's elite paranormal investigation team, so you're kind of like Agent Mulder, only with a lot more firepower.   If you played the PC version, you'll find the Xbox 360 version almost exactly the same in terms of content. If you didn't play the PC game, the challenge in describing F.E.A.R. is trying to avoid any spoilers because this is definitely a game that you want to experience unspoiled. You play as the newest member of the First Encounter Assault Recon, the military's top-secret task force that is assigned to deal with paranormal situations. And the mission in F.E.A.R. certainly counts as above and beyond the regular call of duty. As explained in the opening sequence, a military commander, named Paxton Fettel, goes insane and takes over a secret army of cloned soldiers that are telepathically linked to him. Fettel and the battalion of elite soldiers then go on a rampage in a nondescript American city.     F.E.A.R. works because it elevates first-person-shooter combat to cinematic levels. Playing F.E.A.R. is like battling through a John Woo movie, because when firefights occur in this game, they're downright glorious. Bullets tear chunks out of concrete and wood; blinding clouds of dust and debris fill the air; bodies are torn apart or slump on the ground; and the deathly silence of the aftermath contrasts so sharply with the sheer chaos that erupted only moments before. Gunfights in F.E.A.R. just feel right. This is partly because the weapons you have in the game feel the way weapons should--powerful. You have the standard array of guns to play around with, including a pistol, submachine gun, assault rifle, shotgun, and rocket launcher. There's also a scoped, burst-firing rifle that's a dead ringer for the Master Chief's battle rifle in Halo 2; an incredibly nasty particle weapon that sears the flesh off of opponents; and a few other special toys.     You've also got some special abilities at your disposal. For example, you can kill foes with a swift dropkick or scissors kick, which is such an awesome move that even when you pull it off in desperation (like when you've emptied a clip and don't have time to reload), it still feels incredibly cool. Yet, your most important ability is your ultrafast reflexes, which can be activated in short bursts to create a sort of Matrix-like bullet time. Now, bullet time has been done to death over the past few years, but the execution of bullet time in F.E.A.R. is still well done. When you kick in the reflexes, everything else slows down, and you can see the vortexes in the air created by bullets. You can activate this ability only in short bursts before it runs out. Because it recharges at a decent rate, however, you can generally have it at your disposal in most fights. This slow-motion ability is almost essential for surviving some of the tougher battles; you can use it to whittle down the odds. With that said, we almost wish that it were a bit rarer in the game because F.E.A.R. really comes alive when the firefights are shown in full speed, not slow motion.     Because the controls are a bit clumsy for a game that relies on split-second reactions, all of this complexity comes at a price. Even near the end of the game, we still had problems where we accidentally threw a grenade when we meant to go into bullet time, or we unnecessarily burned through a health pack instead of activating the flashlight. (Unfortunately, F.E.A.R. still relies on the overly hackneyed contrivance of having your elite military trooper equipped with a flashlight that has a 30-second battery life.) Halo 2 veterans will most likely have trouble adapting because the left trigger tosses a grenade in F.E.A.R., whereas most Halo veterans have been conditioned to use the left trigger to fire whatever weapon is being wielded in the left hand.   F.E.A.R. was Black before there was Black because bullets can tear up the environment.   Without a doubt, you've got an extremely formidable arsenal at your disposal. And you're going to need it against the artificial intelligence in F.E.A.R. Put simply, these are the smartest, most aggressive, most tactically oriented AI opponents that we've ever encountered in a shooter. And they're downright impressive. The AI opponents are incredibly sharp and will do things that you don't expect, like pin you down while one of them flanks you. Or they'll pin you down and plop a grenade next to you. These guys move around from cover to cover; they communicate with one another; they'll react to any sound or sight of you. They've got the same weapons as you, and their guns do the same amount of damage to you as yours do to them. So you've got to use cover and lean around corners as much as possible because it doesn't take much to shred your armor and health to zero. This can create situations in which you're pinned down, firing desperately to keep their heads down while trying to figure a way out of your current situation. The AI can also take advantage of the game's physics system and knock over objects to create cover.     You'll take a lot of damage during the game, but thankfully, you can pick up countless health packs and armor kits. You can also collect up to 10 health kits for later use, which you'll use liberally to keep yourself going in the heat of battle. And while there is a way to permanently boost your maximum health level and stamina, sooner or later, you'll fall to the enemy. The 360 version includes only a checkpoint save system, which means that when you die, you'll fall back to the last checkpoint. Although there's no way to manually save the game at any point, the checkpoints are reasonably spaced. So we didn't run into any issues where we had to play lengthy sections over and over again.    F.E.A.R. features excellent combat, but as good as the AI is, it doesn't take too long for you to get used to taking down small groups of soldiers. And these encounters can feel a bit repetitive after a point. Because you're dealing with an army of clones, you're essentially battling the same guy over and over, which also lends an air of familiarity to your opponent. It's not until you run into the huge, set-piece battles against a dozen foes or more that things get tricky. The game does introduce a few new foes to change things up a bit in the middle of the game, but the cloned soldiers represent the opponent you'll battle most of the time. And while they're solid opponents, we'd love to have seen more variety, such as more of the high-tech ninjas that appear midway through the game. These guys can make themselves invisible with a cloak, can climb up walls, and possess the same ultrafast abilities that you do. The first time you encounter them can be a shock, and it's disappointing that they rarely show up again afterward.    You always have a sense that paranormal forces are at work, and if you don't, that creepy little girl who kills people will remind you.   The environments can also feel a bit repetitive after a while. F.E.A.R. takes place in basically three settings: a deserted industrial area, a deserted office complex, or a deserted and run-down urban setting. Notice a pattern? While the levels are designed to allow for wild and wooly gunfights, F.E.A.R. could certainly use more variety when it comes to environments because you'll start to feel as if you've explored the same factory or office complex for the umpteenth time. It would also be nice to have an unpredictable element in the game, such as civilians you need to protect, or at least, not harm.     F.E.A.R. is heavily influenced by Japanese horror movies, most notably The Ring. In fact, the game uses many of the same kinds of visual tricks to scare you that you've probably already seen before in a movie, like the split-second appearance of a ghostly apparition when you least expect it. And while the imagery in F.E.A.R. may not be entirely original, it's exceedingly effective. The designers are smart enough to realize that less is more when it comes to building tension. There are stretches in F.E.A.R. when you don't battle anything. And it's unsettling to search abandoned office buildings only to find pools of blood or the voicemail left by family members who are trying to contact their loved ones. Then there are areas where you expect some kind of gargantuan throw-down, brace yourself for battle, but nothing happens. Because there's always some kind of noise or rattling of objects to greet you, or the fleeting image of someone in the corner of your eye, you certainly feel as if you're being watched the whole time. Admittedly, some of these tricks become a bit too familiar over time, but there are still enough of them to keep you on your toes. And there are a number of jump-out-of-your-seat moments in the game as well.     This omnipresent tension combined with the outstanding combat make F.E.A.R. an immersive game, even if it leaves you a bit emotionally exhausted after a while. And as much as we enjoyed the game's atmosphere, we were a bit disappointed by the plot. Rest assured that F.E.A.R. features a complete story and an ending. The trouble is that it seems as if several plotlines lack some kind of satisfactory payoff for all your trouble, so the game's a bit of a letdown in this aspect. The end level is also disappointing because it's surprisingly easy, especially compared to what you've experienced to get to that point. Thankfully, F.E.A.R. does end on a spectacular note, though we won't spoil it for you.    The single-player story should take you a good 10 hours to get through, which is on par with other shooters. When you're done with it, there's a neat little instant action mode that serves as sort of a time trial, where you have to get through a level as fast as possible. Your score can then be uploaded, and you can see your ranking on the leaderboard. The 360 version also comes with a ""bonus"" mission that lasts all of 10 minutes, if you're lucky. In this mission, you get to play as Holiday, the F.E.A.R. team's leader, where you escort a freed hostage to the roof. Because Holiday doesn't have the same enhanced reflexes as the main character, this means that all of the firefights occur at full speed, and this gives you a taste of what F.E.A.R. would feel like if it were played as a ""regular"" shooter. On a related note, the achievements in the 360 version are fairly disappointing because most of the points are skewed to having you play the game over and over again in incredibly challenging conditions, such as never dying or never using your enhanced reflexes. Most of the other achievements are locked up in having you perform impressive feats with certain weapons or racking up kills in multiplayer mode.    Speaking of which, the multiplayer mode on Xbox Live is as fast-paced and furious as the bullets can fly. F.E.A.R. features all of the standard multiplayer modes that you'd expect, including deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. But it differentiates itself by incorporating many of the cool features found in single-player mode, such as the ability to slow down time. Basically, one player can control the ability at a time, and you can wrest control of it if you kill that player. The downside is that you can only use the slow-motion ability for limited bursts. And because everyone knows your location at all times, this can be used to hunt you down. On the flip side, however, you can also use this to set a trap in a team game because your teammates can set up ambushes to take out players who are out to get you.    The Xbox 360 version looks as good as last year's PC version, and the frame rate holds up even in the most intense firefights.   Throughout F.E.A.R., the graphics, the particle effects, the physics, and the sound effects combine to create the sense that all hell is breaking loose. The 360 version features some enhanced lighting over the PC version, but for the most part, the visuals are equivalent to the PC version running on a high-end system. And the frame rate holds up quite well throughout the game. We noticed only a few moments when it barely stuttered. Obviously, the game looks best in high definition, but even standard definition manages to look pretty sharp. Meanwhile, the audio in F.E.A.R. is outstanding, and the sounds go a long way to establish the mood. In a game that's all about making you afraid of the dark, it's often the little noises that send you spinning around, ready to blast whatever it is that made the sound. Combat also sounds glorious. You can hear almost every single noise in a firefight, such as glass shattering apart, spent brass cartridges hitting the floor, and the thud of explosions. The voice acting is generally good, though we do wish that the mixing was better because it's sometimes hard to hear the dialogue over everything else.    F.E.A.R. is quite easily one of the most intense and atmospheric games on the Xbox 360, and it's an excellent blend of horror and action. F.E.A.R. features some of the best gunplay available in a first-person shooter. This alone makes it an incredibly intense game that must be experienced. The fact that it's also one of the creepiest games ever made is just icing on the cake.   


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1027,Metroid Prime Hunters ,8.6," Precise controls and solid multiplayer are the highlights of Hunters, a Metroid Prime game that feels more like a first-person shooter than the GameCube games.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/2/2/2211922-box_mph.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/metroid-prime-hunters-review/1900-6146423/,pos,"
  Given how long the Nintendo DS has been available, it's hard to believe that Metroid Prime: Hunters was one of the first games shown off when the system was first introduced. Some of you early adopters may remember getting a brief demo level of the first-person shooter as a pack-in with your system. After a long wait, the game is finally out, and for the large part, it hits the nail on the head as far as delivering a faithful Metroid Prime experience in the handheld. It's also got the best multiplayer options we've seen yet in a Metroid game and surprisingly fluid controls.    Everyone's favorite female bounty hunter is back in Metroid Prime: Hunters.   In Hunters, you reprise the role of Samus Aran, everyone's favorite bounty-hunting heroine. You'll search a small batch of planets in an area known as the Alimbic Cluster for a cryptic ""ultimate power"" that's said to be hidden in the system. The key to this power involves finding and unearthing eight different artifacts called octoliths. Why not three? Because then it'd be called the tri-force or something. These octoliths are scattered across a few different planets and space stations. Samus isn't the only one searching out these octoliths, though. You'll come across several other bounty hunters with unique weapons and abilities that will duel you during your trip and attempt to steal your hard-earned octoliths. Lose a battle with one, and they'll steal them--beat the same bounty hunter later, and you'll recover your lost octoliths.     Controlling Samus is one of Hunters' strong points, at least once you get used to the controls. The default scheme has you dragging your stylus on the bottom screen to aim your weapons, while you use the D pad to move forward and backward or strafe left and right. Left-handed input methods also exist, so southpaws needn't fret over the prospect of using their right hand to aim with the stylus. The shoulder button lets you fire your selected weapon, while double tapping the touch screen will let you jump. Unlike the Metroid Prime games on the GameCube, there is no lock-on. You have to do all your own aiming. The stylus method can be a little awkward to learn for some, and it induced cramps in our hands at first; the temptation exists to switch the controls to the more familiar D pad and face buttons for your movement and aiming scheme. But if you stick with the stylus control, you'll find that you have much more precision over your aiming, and you're able to execute circle-strafes and other FPS-style maneuvers with ease. Up the sensitivity and you'll even be able to spin 180s, which can be key in multiplayer. In many ways, Hunters' unique control gives it a precise and speedy feel much closer to the keyboard-and-mouse input of PC shooters than you can get from typical dual-analog stick control schemes on console shooters.   Once you get used to the interface, aiming is speedy and precise--just like an FPS game should feel.   The downside to the interface is that to switch weapons, change into morphball mode, or access your scan visor, there are small touch panels on the touch screen that you need to tap. It's possible to accidentally drag your stylus over these areas and unexpectedly swap to missiles, for example. It's also less than ideal to take your eyes off the main screen to find exactly where you need to press to swap weapons in the midst of battle. These compromises are not all that burdensome though, and the tradeoff for speedy, precision aiming is definitely worthwhile.    Hunters' single-player adventure mode has you exploring several different planet types that run the gamut of typical Metroid settings. You've got your abandoned tech station, an ice world, ancient ruins, and a lava world, among others. The art style of the levels is definitely evocative of previous Metroid Prime games, and the game engine does a pretty good job of rendering rooms. When the action gets hot and heavy, the frame rate can dip noticeably, but it's pretty rare when it happens. The detail put into the boss and bounty-hunter models is great, and everything animates nicely. There are a generous number of cutscenes that sometimes stretch across both screens or use separate camera angles in each screen for cinematic effect. Our only major gripe with the graphics is that they can look grainy at times, particularly when you're engaging in a long-range shooting battle with...something that you can't quite make out. The resolution limitations of the DS may be more to blame for this problem than the game engine, though. On the plus side, Hunters sounds fantastic, both from an effects and a music standpoint. Hunters offers some familiar tunes, which contribute to the authentic Metroid feel and experience, while the weapon sounds and explosions offer great feedback in both single-player and multiplayer.     As you make your way through the campaign, you'll not only find the storied octoliths, but also uncover the lore behind the ultimate power (you are using your scan visor, right?) and unlock a number of different beam weapons, ranging from an ice beam that bounces off walls to a fire gun that does added burn damage on impact to a sniping laser. In typical Metroid fashion, you'll have to backtrack to earlier areas with your new guns to open up doors that were previously inaccessible to you, though you don't have to find and unlock all your abilities--the morphball mode and bombs are available to you at the outset.    Bland level design keeps the single-player from being as good as it could have been.   There are some disappointing aspects to the campaign, though. For one thing, the level design feels more linear and uninspired than in any other Metroid game. Sure there are simple puzzles to solve, maybe a couple branching pathways here and there, and some morphball mazes, but the unified, organic level design that typifies the Metroid franchise is missing. Instead, Hunters offers a cookie-cutter feel to its planets, with sometimes repetitive room architecture. You'll make your way down a mostly obvious path, picking up energy tank and missile upgrades or maybe a new gun. You'll then take out a bounty hunter and a boss (many of which are recycled), grab your octolith, and leave. After picking up an octolith, you'll have to quickly evacuate to your ship as a countdown timer ticks down--this makes no logical sense, though, as nothing happens when you reach your ship. There's no dramatic escape from an exploding planet (you do have to come back later, after all) and nothing that suggests what the urgency to leave was in the first place.    The multiplayer aspect to Metroid Prime: Hunters holds, perhaps surprisingly for a Metroid game, more appeal than its single-player game. You can play with up to four players locally through game sharing or multicard and online for up to four players through Nintendo's Wi-Fi service. Single-card game sharing limits you to playing standard battle (deathmatch) mode, and all players have to play as Samus. However, multicard battles and online play let you use any of the bounty hunters you've defeated in the single-player campaign. Each hunter has a unique alt form (such as Samus' morphball) and special weapon. Weavel, for example, can split himself into two, with his bottom half being an automated turret, while his top half can run around and melee or find more power-ups. Each character has different strengths that can be exploited depending on the arena, though not all can be used with each game mode.    For multicard play, a number of different other game types are available, including one- and two-flag variants of capture the flag (or the octolith, in this case), last man standing, king of the hill, and ""prime hunter."" The latter is a variation of assassin where one player has the prime hunter designation and must hold it for as much time as possible while others attempt to kill that player and take the title. Team play versions are available for the appropriate game types. The game host has the ability to set options for point limits, time limits, and even restrict the use of radar and other options. You can insert bots of varying skill levels to play against to fill out the rest of the field, so you don't necessarily need three friends with the game to enjoy these multiplayer modes. The bots offer a respectable challenge at the higher difficulty levels and are worthwhile to play against if you can't scrounge up some buddies. To help you on that front, a rivals radar is included, which is similar to Nintendogs' bark mode--set this option on, put your DS on sleep, and any other Hunters owners you pass by who have their rivals radar on will be added to your rivals list. Presumably this allows you to build up a nice list of opponents for online play, but its utility is questionable for anyone outside a large concentration of other DS owners, like in a school perhaps.   Seven hunters to choose from makes for good variety in multiplayer.   Online play for four players is also available. Searching for a game is as simple as logging in, and Nintendo's Wi-Fi service will automatically match you up with three other players. Once you're logged in, each player has a few seconds to select their preferred hunter before the game automatically loads up a voting screen for players to vote on the map to play. The online action was smooth and lag free in our experience, and you're likely to find stiff challenges online against other human opponents. The game ranks you based on how many kills you get and matches you play and keeps track of other stats, such as your favorite weapon, how many kills you get in bipedal or alt mode, and others. The strategies are pretty young at this point, but a popular one so far seems to be using a hunter with a melee-attacking alt form to charge in and spam close-range attacks.     Online play is overall quite fun, but it has its quirks. For one thing, the only mode you can just play online right from the get-go is battle mode. The only way to access the other online modes is by playing against those on your friends and rivals list. So while it's all well and good that you do have access to all the multiplayer modes online, the fact that you have to input lengthy friend codes in order to access all of the game modes is annoying. Once you do that, you can see who's online and host a game or join an existing game that's open to you. You can even send voice messages to each other while in the lobby of a friend's (but not a rival's) game, or send text-based messages that you can type in using a keyboard that appears on the touchscreen. Both communication options work pretty well, but once the game starts, you can't message each other anymore, so the trash talking ends.    Despite those caveats, Metroid Prime: Hunters is an excellent multiplayer game and easy to recommend to anyone who enjoys FPS action. The single-player is also well worth a play through, despite its limitations, if only to take in the story and unlock all the hunters for multiplayer action.    Editor's note 03/23/06: Our review originally overlooked specific aspects of the friends/rivals system, which required a reevaluation of these parts of the game and a revision to the text. GameSpot regrets the errors.


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1028,King of Colosseum II ,8.6," If you have the means to import and play Japanese games, and you're a fan of wrestling, King of Colosseum II belongs in your collection.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/0/8/2220208-king_of_colosseum_ii_coverart.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/king-of-colosseum-ii-review/1900-6116996/,pos,"
  IMPORT REVIEW--It was a sad time for wrestling fans everywhere in 2003 when Spike released Fire ProWrestling Z for the PlayStation 2. Not because the game was bad, mind you, but because it was the last in the company's devoutly followed 2D wrestling franchise that spanned multiple decades and console generations. Six months before Fire Pro Z's release, Spike put out King of Colosseum for the PS2, a game that purported to be a 3D realization of the Fire Pro style of gaming. Although King of Colosseum was met with somewhat lukewarm reactions, Spike made it clear that it was going in a 3D direction. Fans could only hope that the eventual sequel would deliver a deeper experience. Boy has it ever. King of Colosseum II for the PlayStation 2 is a near-revelatory experience at times, effectively capturing the same great methodology of wrestling gameplay that the Fire Pro series utilized so well, yet still managing to keep enough 3D wrestling conventions mixed in to balance the overall experience. This is by no means the perfect wrestling game, as the presentational components could certainly have used some additional work, but all told, this is easily among one of the best wrestlers to come out of this console generation.   Spike finally delivers on a worthy 3D successor to the Fire ProWrestling series in King of Colosseum II.   King of Colosseum II doesn't really feature very many wrestlers you're likely to have ever heard of, unless you follow Japanese pro-wrestling, or ""puroresu."" Unlike the Fire Pro games, Spike has actually licensed a host of real Japanese pros from several major promotions, including New Japan, All Japan, Pro Wrestling NOAH, Zero-One, and World Japan. The Fire Pro games featured rosters of entirely fake wrestlers, which happened to be just slightly different than real-life wrestlers (so as to avoid any infringement within the Japanese copyright laws). However, there are nearly 150 real wrestlers available in this game, almost all of which are available from the get-go. On top of all of these, there are 125 unlicensed wrestlers and mixed martial art fighters to unlock, which are just marginally different from real-life competitors, ranging from the likes of Giant Baba to Mike Tyson.     Again, even with this insane number of competitors to choose from, unless you ardently follow Japanese wrestling, you won't see a lot of familiar faces. Most of the American wrestlers in the game are made up of former mid-carders who have made it big in Japan (Scott Norton, John ""Earthquake"" Tenta, Mike Awesome, and so on), but there are also a few unlockable popular American wrestlers, like Hulk Hogan, Chris Benoit, Brock Lesnar, Rick and Scott Steiner, and Andre the Giant. Even if you aren't a big puroresu fan, there are still some notable American wrestling names (or, at least, faces, since the characters have been slightly altered to get around having to actually license these guys) to play around with.    Honestly though, there's no reason why the lack of familiar grapplers should hinder you one bit. For starters, the gameplay is so good that the roster should be practically incidental. The face buttons on the controller represent specific attacks on their own, each of varying degrees of strength. However, if you press each one of these buttons when you lock up into a grapple, it will set up a specific type of grapple attack. The grappling engine actually works differently from the Fire Pro series, in which you'd simply walk up to a wrestler and automatically lock up with him. Here, by pressing the R1 button in conjunction with any of the face buttons, you'll attempt a grapple. Depending on the face button pressed, you'll go into a different animation, which also depends on what types of attacks a wrestler has assigned. So, for instance, pressing the square button with the grapple modifier could either set up a suplex or a strike of varying strength, depending on the wrestler's move setup.     Once you're in a grapple, you'll then have to time a second button press to actually execute your attack. This is where the similarity to the Fire Pro games pops up again, as the timing required to make the attack happen is fairly precise. You'll also need to take into account where you are in a match. If it's early, going for a big move isn't likely to work and it will most likely be reversed. The reversal works on a similarly timing-based system, but it also plays into how much stamina your wrestler has. If you're still in good shape, then you're far more likely to reverse an attack. Conversely, if you've been worn down, it'll be much tougher to reverse your opponent's maneuver. The cool thing is that the game uses Fire Pro's fatigue system, or at least a close approximation of it, so as you go through a match you'll actually see your wrestler start to get winded. This feature ties into how much energy you put forth in a match too, so you'll want to be strategic with your attacks, as throwing a lot of missed strikes and grapples will cause you to get tired more quickly. You can recover stamina by standing still and holding down the L1 button, but it's better to just not waste energy to begin with.    All of the above is enough to make for a deep and enjoyable wrestling game, but there is still more to the gameplay system. The opponent artificial intelligence really stands out, as it works absolutely brilliantly. There are several different difficulty levels in the game. Anything level five and above should start you off with a solid challenge, and the higher you go, the more  brutal they become. Even better than the challenge is the level of realism you'll see in the behaviors of your opponents. The logic for each wrestler, just like in the Fire Pro games, has been finely tuned to mimic the real-life strategies and methodologies for each wrestler, and it shows. High flyers will go for their big spots, submissions wrestlers will typically try to keep you on the mat and make you tap out, and the big men will lumber around the ring, trying to power their way through you. The pacing of the action is so beautifully balanced and really emulates puroresu-style wrestling with amazing accuracy. And while that might not be as flashy as American wrestling games typically are, it's a hell of a lot more competitive and also a lot more fun than most of them tend to be.   The wrestling engine employed here is simply a blast to play, maintaining both realism and playability with an excellent balance.   On the play mode side of things, King of Colosseum II is pretty well stacked. The actual number of available match types isn't huge, but for an exhibition bout, you can still choose from single, single (with manager), tag team, handicap, triple threat, four-man battle royal, and five-versus-five  elimination bouts. You can choose varying rule sets, including everything from American-style matches to mixed martial art bouts, and you can even pick what ring announcer or referee you want working the match. There is also a series mode, which lets you hold various league-style tournaments, as well as a title match mode that lets you compete for or defend any of the 20 different championship belts featured in the game. There are also a few nonstandard play modes in the game, including the survival road and matchmaker modes.    Survival Road is where you'll spend the bulk of your early time with the game, as it is where you can unlock all the hidden goods King of Colosseum II has to offer. The mode itself is much simpler than its Fire Pro equivalents, simply letting you choose one of the five different leagues available, a wrestler, a partner, and then sending you on your way. You'll actually only end up wrestling seven matches during the course of one league's survival road, but you'll have to make each match count. Much of what you can end up unlocking is based upon winning and how well you perform in a match. What this means is that you not only have to worry about winning, but also how good of a performance you put on. You see, if you don't please the fans, then you'll be graded poorly. The fans are finicky too; they hate one-sided drubbings and don't like things like repeated moves or quick finishes. They want long, competitive bouts. So you may actually find yourself purposely getting beaten up from time to time just to try to balance things out. It's a little unwieldy at first, but after a while you'll probably find yourself actually working hard to try to make the best match possible.   Just because the game is Japanese doesn't mean you haven't heard of anybody in it! Look, it's Earthquake! Remember Earthquake?   Once you've beaten a league, you'll unlock some hidden material into the game's ""secret shop."" Here is where you unlock everything from wrestlers to hidden rings and bonus attribute points for the create-a-wrestler mode. The one sort of tricky thing about the secret shop is that many of the wrestlers you unlock won't just become available in the game. These wrestlers are actually templates that you'll use in the create-a-wrestler mode to make the actual wrestler. This is a tad annoying, as it means you'll have to use CAW slots on your memory card for each wrestler you end up creating. However, you can save 100 wrestlers per memory card. So, if you've got a couple of cards handy, it should be no big deal at all.    The matchmaker mode is actually the closest thing to a wrestling management sim you'll find on a console. Again, you'll pick from one of the five leagues. You'll find yourself in an office with one of the heads from each league standing before you, ready to school you on what you need to do to book a successful show. You're given a roster of talent to use and set goals for attendance and an average match-quality grade. However, while all of these things are pretty easy to figure out, the game also requires some specific objectives for each card that won't be readily apparent to you unless you can read the Japanese text menus. Also, even if you rename all your wrestlers to their English translations, this mode inexplicably won't use them, so you'll have to figure out their Japanese names and memorize them in order to book effectively. It's unfortunate that this is the case, as the mode is actually pretty cool once you figure it all out. But, then, those are the breaks when you import foreign games.    Last, but most certainly not least, there is the wrestler-edit mode, also known as the create-a-wrestler mode. Here, you can edit any aspect of a wrestler already in the game, use templates to create new wrestlers, or just create your own guy. The number of options here is Fire Pro-like in scale, with insane numbers of appearance options, moves, skills, attributes, and AI options to program. It can literally take you an hour or more to make an original creation, and it's not because of the Japanese-heavy menus; it's because there are so many options to play around with. This may seem highly insurmountable at first, but there are a few different translation FAQs out there that detail nearly every aspect of this mode, and after a while, creating wrestlers becomes a breeze. The only negatives about the edit mode are mostly small quibbles. For instance, the game still relies on the old Fire Pro facial-editing system in which you can only choose from single, preset heads. You can't edit any specific facial details, or any masks, beyond color schemes. Considering that every major CAW mode in wrestling gaming today lets you edit faces, and even the SmackDown! games have a basic mask editor (despite the fact that the WWE has almost no masked wrestlers to speak of these days), this is fairly disappointing. Then again, there are hundreds of heads to choose from, so you're likely to find at least a few of them to your liking.     While the gameplay and features in King of Colosseum II are wholly impressive, its presentational components unfortunately are not. Graphically, the game just doesn't quite measure up to what other wrestling games have managed to accomplish with the PS2 hardware. Sure, the wrestler models are quite good and the cutscene animations for many of the specialized maneuvers look similarly good, but a lot of the basic match action isn't very appealing. Wrestlers move very stiffly, almost like they have a steel pole taped to their back that is trying to keep them in perfect posture. Also, some transitions between moves and certain counters just don't end up looking right. Either some big clipping problems will show up or the animations will just glitch out. This is especially unfortunate, because it's really the only thing that kind of takes you out of a match. The overall match flow is so realistic that it's really jarring when you see a guy jump from a dropkick animation to lying flat on the ground in a split second with no transition in between.   You can book your own cards via the matchmaker mode--but, you'll need to know a fair amount of Japanese to book effectively.   The game's sound is the most noticeable weakness in King of Colosseum II. This game just does not sound good at all; it actually sounds a lot like a Fire Pro game. The music is about a step above MIDI quality, and the voice samples used for the wrestlers are just about as poorly compressed as you can get. To be fair, there are about a billion (or at least it seems like that many) different voice samples and musical tracks in the game, so it's not totally incomprehensible why the audio quality would be pared down. The one, lone bright spot of all the audio is the in-game commentary. Though you won't have a clue what the commentators are saying if you don't know Japanese, you'll still enjoy it, because the commentators are extremely energetic and will yell out some great exclamations in response to certain animations.    Perhaps the most unfortunate thing of all about King of Colosseum II is that it hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of ever coming out in North America. This is strictly an import title--a fairly pricey one at that--going for around $80 on nearly every import site we researched. Then again, for a game that plays as well and features as much content as King of Colosseum II does, it's hard to really complain too much about the price. To put it in no uncertain terms, this is easily one of the best wrestling games to come out of Japan since AKI's Virtual Pro Wrestling 2, and it finally delivers on Spike's promise of a 3D successor to the Fire Pro franchise. If you have the means to import and play Japanese games, and you're a fan of wrestling, King of Colosseum II belongs in your collection.     
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1029,Neverwinter Nights 2 ,8.6," Neverwinter Nights 2 isn't without some technical issues, but the engaging, dynamic story and proven D & D framework make it an RPG that shouldn't be missed.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/3/8/5/2213385-neverwinter_nights_2_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/neverwinter-nights-2-review/1900-6160878/,pos,"
  To say that the expectations are high for Neverwinter Nights 2 would be a massive understatement. Not only is it the sequel to one of the best role-playing games ever to bear the Dungeons & Dragons license, but it's also been developed by some of the creative talent behind such other revered role-playing games as Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. The good news is that Neverwinter Nights 2 lives up to its pedigree by delivering a captivating story full of exciting twists and characters who you'll grow attached to out of fondness or, perhaps even better, complete loathing. It's not without a few frustrating technical shortcomings, but overall Neverwinter Nights 2 is a great role-playing adventure that just about anyone can enjoy.   Treasure box? Check. Shield? Check. Pointy ears? Check. Neverwinter Nights 2 has all the trappings of a classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure, but it doesn’t come off the least bit hokey or cliché.   As great as the story is in Neverwinter Nights 2, it's difficult to convey without spoiling the plot; but suffice it to say that it will keep your interest throughout the entire campaign--which, at around 50 hours long, is no small feat. You begin the game by creating a character. You can choose a race, subrace, appearance, class, moral alignment, and even a voice for your hero. After you create your character, you are taken on a journey that will see you rise from your beginnings as a humble peasant to become one of the most respected and elite heroes of Neverwinter. It's a long journey that involves the awakening of an arcane and unstable evil power that only a chosen savior (guess who?) can banish. As cliché as it sounds, the story reaches far beyond the usual good-versus-evil plot. You'll get a heavy dose of political treachery; shattered, shifting, and solidified alliances; ethereal mysticism; dark secrets; and much, much more. In addition to the main story, the world is full of side stories that you can explore or ignore as you see fit. It all adds up to make this feel like a real world with real history and very real inhabitants, but beyond even that, the game does a great job of making you feel like an integral part of that world, rather than some insular hero who comes out of nowhere to save the day and then disappears.     A large part of what makes the story so interesting is that you play an active role in the way it unfolds. As you talk to all of the characters in the world, you're given several choices in how to respond, and your responses often have a very apparent effect on the progression of the story. When speaking to someone, you might be given the choice to lie, intimidate, or simply ask questions to get the information or response you're looking for. The choices aren't black-and-white, though, and you'll often come across some difficult moral dilemmas that make your part in the conversation much more interesting. Your responses have both immediate and delayed effects. If you tell a goblin chieftain that you're sick of hearing him talk and would rather paint the walls with his blood, you can expect that you'll have an immediate fight on your hands. But sometimes the effects are more subtle. If you are forced to make a decision and one of your party members tries to convince you to take a certain course of action, you can comply or simply tell her to keep quiet. Either way, your influence over that person will be affected. It isn't much of an issue at first, but repeatedly going against an ally's wishes can eventually turn him or her against you. The interactive dialogue is well written and so engaging that you'll probably want to save your game often, so you can reload and repeat conversations just to see what will happen if you choose your words differently.    Even though you create a character who serves as the central hero for the tale, there's a great and varied cast of supporting characters who will join you along the way. You can have up to three supporting characters in your party, in addition to the occasional non-player or special character who will tag along with you. With a quick click you can take direct control over any of your party members at any time (as long as they're conscious), which adds some welcome variety to the single-player experience because you aren't pigeonholed into playing a single class for the entire game. By creating a well-rounded party of casters, fighters, rogues, and rangers, you'll have access to a huge array of skills and abilities.    For the most part you'll use those skills and abilities to combat all kinds of monsters, people, spirits, and animals that always seem to get in your way. The combat takes place in real time, but you have the option to pause the game and assign up to five successive actions to each of your characters. Then it's just a matter of hitting the space bar to unpause the game and watching your characters go to work. The most frequent battles don't usually require that level of management, though, because you'll almost always come out on top by just rushing into a mob of enemies and letting the artificial intelligence do the work. If you do happen to lose all your health you'll be temporarily knocked out (despite the cobwebbed corpse icon that replaces your character portrait). As long as one of your characters survives the battle your party will revive, and then you can use the rest function to fully replenish your health in just a few seconds.     Unfortunately, the AI in Neverwinter Nights 2 isn't always reliable. If you're in an open area you can usually count on your companions to stick by you and back you up in a fight, but when you're exploring the narrow hallways and labyrinthine corridors of the games' numerous, sprawling dungeons, your characters will sometimes get lost or stuck, or will just freeze up for no apparent reason. Needless to say, it's extremely frustrating when you're in the middle of a heated battle and your supporting characters are just standing there watching you get trounced. At least if that happens you can pause the game and assign actions to spur your lifeless cohorts to action, but when you have to struggle just to get your characters to follow you, you'll find your patience wearing thin.   The artificial intelligence is usually passable, but it can be downright stupid sometimes.   Don't worry, though--all that work fighting mob after mob of nefarious foes does pay off. Primarily you'll be vanquishing evil for the sake of completing quests. There are a ton of quests in the game, most of which you aren't actually required to complete in order to beat the game. The quest design is interesting and usually fits well within the context of the story. There are some quests that just require you to find or deliver a certain item, but the required quests are usually much more involved than that. You'll be asked to do everything from saving damsels in distress to answering riddles and even acting as a trial attorney. By completing quests you earn experience points, and when you have enough experience points your characters will gain a level. By gaining levels you develop basic skills like strength, dexterity, and intelligence, and you also learn new feats and spells. You also gain experience points for defeating enemies, but the vast majority of your experience comes from finishing quests, and all of your characters earn experience simultaneously, whether they're actively in your party or not.    In addition to experience points, you'll collect copious amounts of treasure that you can use or sell for gold. Since your weapons and armor greatly affect your stats and performance in battle, you'll always be on the lookout for new and exotic treasures that will help you squeeze a little bit more damage out of each blow you land on your enemies. There's also an item synthesis system in Neverwinter Nights 2 that lets you collect ingredients and recipes and use them to create new, useful items, as long as your character is at the required skill level to do so. Still, you'll probably end up selling the vast majority of the loot you collect, rather than actually using it.     The joy of looting is slightly diminished by the unnecessarily cumbersome interface. There's no way to sort your items by type, so you'll end up having to sift through four pages of cluttered, often barely distinguishable icons representing all of your items. To examine your items you have to right-click and select the option from a menu, which makes checking the stats on the new bastard sword you just picked up a bit more of a hassle than it should be. Interface issues like these have been addressed in numerous other role-playing games, so it feels a bit dated here.   With the right cast of characters in your party you'll be ready to face just about anything as you stroll through one dungeon after the next.   Neverwinter Nights 2 bears the official Dungeons & Dragons license, which is apparent right from the beginning of the game when you start reading about things like saving throws, will saves, modifiers, armor class, and die rolls. Everything from creatures and items to character classes and abilities are all taken from version 3.5 of Dungeons & Dragons. If you've never rolled a 20-sided die in your life then you might be a bit confused by all the stats and jargon in this game, but if you give it a bit of time you shouldn't have a problem getting a general idea of how everything works. After all, the same principle of ""bigger numbers are better"" that works in just about every role-playing game still applies here. If you're a D&D veteran, though, you'll feel right at home here, and you aren't likely to find a more accurate and faithful adaptation of the Dungeons & Dragons rule set in any other video game.    Like Dungeons & Dragons, Neverwinter Nights 2 emphasizes multiplayer interaction and creative development. You can play the game online or on a local network with up to three other players. The single-player campaign is available to play cooperatively, although you'll need to start from the beginning because you can't add new players into an existing single-player game. You can set options such as a level cap, item restrictions, and whether or not to allow players to damage each other. The in-game server browser makes it easy to find or set up a game, and although you need a BioWare Community account to log in, it's free and easy to set up, and it just requires an e-mail address. We did notice some slight lag when playing multiplayer on a local network, but not enough to cause any real problems.     If you've had enough of the main story campaign, you can create your own and share them online. Included with Neverwinter Nights 2 is an editor program so robust that it's seemingly limited only by your own imagination. It will take a good deal of time and effort to start building your dream campaign, but the possibilities are there if you're determined and moderately savvy with similar software. Given the large and active community of module creators for the original Neverwinter Nights game, the opportunity is there for the sequel to be just as interminable as its predecessor.    Most of the shortcomings of Neverwinter Nights 2 are technical in nature. First off, the game has some fairly steep system requirements, but that horsepower won't get you much. Even on a system that exceeds the recommended specs, with all of the options maxed out, there are some rough spots that make this game look dated. In some of the dialogue sequences the view switches to a zoomed-in, letterbox perspective. It's a nice effect that makes the cutscenes a bit more dramatic than small text windows, but getting in that close also reveals some blurry, low-resolution textures, jerky character animations, and frequent clipping. The game doesn't look bad by any means, and some of the level designs are genuinely interesting and fun to explore, but at the same time it's reasonable to expect the game to be a bit more pleasing on the eyes given its system requirements. When a character's beard is clipping right through his chest, or when he floats across the floor without moving his legs, the game just looks a little sloppy. That said, some of the spell effects are pretty spectacular, and when you're in a large battle with several casters it's like watching a pyrotechnics show.     The most frustrating part of the presentation in Neverwinter Nights 2 is the camera. There are four different camera modes to choose from, but they all require almost constant adjustment to see what's going on. The camera will get stuck on a building or object or will just start tweaking out for no reason, which is incredibly annoying. The best option is to zoom the camera all the way out for a bird's-eye view. Even then you'll feel like you've found a barely workable solution rather than an ideal viewing angle. You'll eventually come to terms with the camera, but it's unnecessarily awkward.   You have to be mindful of your companions' feelings, otherwise they might turn on you.   This game sounds much better than it looks. There's a ton of voiced dialogue in the game, and although some of the voices are annoying, all of the main characters sound great, and their respective voices lend each one a lot of personality. From the sinister-sounding evil wizard to the feisty young demon girl, the voices all sound appropriate and fitting. The music is excellent, with dramatic orchestrated tracks that sound as if they could be taken right from a big-budget Hollywood film. The music does a great job of setting an appropriately grandiose and bombastic backdrop for your adventure, without being overwhelming.    If you're willing to look past a few relatively minor technical issues, you'll have a great time exploring the world of Neverwinter Nights 2. The excellent story, characters, and quests will appeal to your sense of adventure without getting overly convoluted. The many paths you can take through the lengthy single-player campaign are enough to make this game worth your money, but when you factor in the multiplayer and the editing tools you'll find that Neverwinter Nights 2 is a fantastic value and a thoroughly enjoyable game.   


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1030,The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles ,8.6, Shivering Isles adds more than enough new and interesting content to give you a great reason to dive back into the world of Oblivion.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/6/4/2218964-box_oblivion.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-iv-shivering-isles-review/1900-6168184/,pos,"
  As if to answer the decades-old query posed by Iron Maiden in the single ""Can I Play With Madness,"" Bethesda Softworks brings you The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles, an expansion in which you most definitely can play with madness. Shivering Isles is an expansion to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and introduces a new world along with a lengthy major quest. It also includes several minor quests, new spells and items, and dozens of completely insane characters with which to interact. The theme of the new world is madness, which is manifested in the batty characters and the twisted yet beautiful landscape. Aside from the new realm, there isn't anything in this expansion that will significantly alter or enhance your experience with the rest of the game. So if you're content with Oblivion, you won't miss out on any integral updates if you decide to pass on Shivering Isles. However, even though Shivering Isles isn't a must-have expansion, it's an excellent value based on the amount of content alone, and a great excuse to revisit an already excellent game.   The place looks nice, but it's full of dangerous creatures.   Once you've installed the Shivering Isles content, you can access it at any time with any character, regardless of your progress in the rest of the game. Soon after starting, you'll hear a rumor about a mysterious portal that suddenly appeared on an island in Niben Bay. As any adventurer worth his salt knows, the only thing to do with a mysterious portal is throw caution to the wind and dive right into it. You're greeted by an oddly dressed fellow named Haskill who explains that you've entered a portal to the Shivering Isles, which is the realm of the Daedric Prince of Madness, Sheogorath. The world is divided into the colorful, eccentric realm of Mania and the dark, paranoid realm of Dementia. The two different realms and their inhabitants share a less than harmonious, though not overtly hostile, relationship. The ruler of both realms is Sheogorath. It's up to you to act as Sheogorath's servant to carry out his delusional demands and rise in rank in the Court of Madness.     For the most part, serving as the right-hand man of the Prince of Madness is just as fun as it sounds. The prince will send you on a lengthy series of quests, and as you complete them, you'll gain rank, eventually rising all the way up to claim the title of Madgod of the Shivering Isles. Most of the quests involve crawling through huge, complex dungeons to gather artifacts and defeat enemies. Some of the quests are interesting and cleverly designed. In one early quest, you have to activate an ancient dungeon that serves as a trap for wayward adventurers who find their way into the isles. Once the dungeon is activated, you get to watch as a party explores it. You can press buttons to either send monsters to kill the adventurers or play tricks on the adventurers to drive them all insane. It's an entertaining way to indulge your sadistic side, which is heartily encouraged in the realm of Sheogorath.     Later in the story, the game resorts to sending you off on a seemingly endless string of simplistic fetch quests, which do get tiresome. It doesn't help that most of the dungeons you explore look identical, which will give you a strong sense of déjà vu. To help break up the main story quest, there are plenty of side quests you can pick up by talking to people in the two main towns. Many of these quests aren't particularly involved, but they're offbeat and weird enough to provide a nice diversion after hours spent in dungeons. You'll meet one gentleman who is afraid to sleep indoors because he thinks the walls will collapse on him, so he commissions you to find him a suitable place to sleep outside. Another man hates his life but doesn't want to commit suicide, so he hires you to kill him and make it look like an accident. At the very least, these quests lend a bit more character to the world by having you interact with the various interesting people who are each a bit crazy in one way or another.    The Carroll-esque world of the Shivering Isles is an entertaining place for a while, but after immersing yourself in a world of madness, you might start to feel a bit touched yourself. Most of the characters are harmlessly nutty, but some of them are downright annoying. Sheogorath himself is one of the most annoying characters you'll find in any video game. The prince almost always talks by shouting and rarely ever makes any sense. Screaming incoherently in a Scottish accent wasn't funny in Austin Powers, and it's not funny here. The prince's voice is so grating, and his dialogue is so inane, you'll probably want to either turn down your sound or click through the conversation as quickly as possible. On the other hand, Chancellor Haskill is a great character whose subtly sardonic tone and dry wit are often quite funny. The rest of the inhabitants fall somewhere between the two extremes, and most of the characters you meet are entertaining in their own ways.    The world of the Shivering Isles also takes on the physical characteristics of the scrambled psyche of the prince. The landscape looks quite different from anything you'll find in Tamriel or Oblivion, and it's all very pretty. From the starry pink skies to the towering phosphorescent mushrooms, there are plenty of great views to admire. But beneath the psychedelic sheen is a world full of monsters waiting to tear you limb from limb. You'll have to fight giant insects, crawling trees, primitive humanoid amphibian creatures, and an entire army of knights known as The Order. Most of the enemies look good, animate well, and put up a respectable challenge in a fight.     To combat all those enemies, you will get new weapons, armor, and spells. If that's not enough, you can make your own weapons and armor by collecting materials and recipes. You can collect amber or madness ore and take it to the blacksmith in Mania or Dementia, respectively. Using the material, you can have the blacksmith forge powerful weapons and armor. The items might not replace your current gear, but at the very least, these forged items will fetch a high price from any merchant. Of course, in addition to forged items, there are plenty of treasures for you to discover in the Shivering Isles' many dungeons. By the time you're ready to leave the Shivering Isles for the greener fields of Tamriel, you'll likely be a very wealthy hero. In addition to the new items, there are a few new magic spells in the expansion, including an amusing spell that lets you summon Chancellor Haskill to ask him for advice.    You'd think the Prince of Madness would be a cool guy, but instead he's just very, very annoying.   Shivering Isles looks fantastic and runs fairly well most of the time, although the stuttering frame rate problem from Oblivion carries over into the expansion as well. On the PC the game also has some stability issues. The game crashed multiple times on two different systems, and locked up one system several times throughout the course of the game.     It will take you a good 20 hours to complete the major quest line, but there's plenty more to do afterward. With all the side quests to complete and territory to explore, you could easily spend 30 or 40 hours or more losing your mind in Shivering Isles, and you'll find that your time there is well spent. The quests, characters, and world in Shivering Isles are all as creative and intriguing as in the rest of the game. Oblivion was huge before, but now it's bigger and better than ever.  


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1031,The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles ,8.6, Shivering Isles adds more than enough new and interesting content to give you a great reason to dive back into the world of Oblivion.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/6/4/2218964-box_oblivion.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-elder-scrolls-iv-shivering-isles-review/1900-6168223/,pos,"
  As if to answer the decades-old query posed by Iron Maiden in the single ""Can I Play With Madness,"" Bethesda Softworks brings you The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles, an expansion in which you most definitely can play with madness. Shivering Isles is an expansion to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and introduces a new world along with a lengthy major quest. It also includes several minor quests, new spells and items, and dozens of completely insane characters with which to interact. The theme of the new world is madness, which is manifested in the batty characters and the twisted yet beautiful landscape. Aside from the new content, there isn't anything in this expansion that will significantly alter or enhance your experience with the rest of the game. So if you're content with Oblivion, you won't miss out on any integral updates if you decide to pass on Shivering Isles. However, even though Shivering Isles isn't a must-have expansion based on the amount of content alone, it's a great value and a great excuse to revisit an already excellent game.   The place looks nice, but it's full of dangerous creatures.   Once you've downloaded the Shivering Isles content, you can access it at any time with any character, regardless of your progress in the rest of the game. Soon after starting, you'll hear a rumor about a mysterious portal that suddenly appeared on an island in Niben Bay. As any adventurer worth his salt knows, the only thing to do with a mysterious portal is throw caution to the wind and dive right into it. You're greeted by an oddly dressed fellow named Haskill who explains that you've entered a portal to the Shivering Isles, which is the realm of the Daedric Prince of Madness, Sheogorath. The world is divided into the colorful, eccentric realm of Mania and the dark, paranoid realm of Dementia. The two different realms and their inhabitants share a less than harmonious, though not overtly hostile, relationship. The ruler of both realms is Sheogorath. It's up to you to act as Sheogorath's servant to carry out his delusional demands and rise in rank in the Court of Madness.     For the most part, serving as the right-hand man of the Prince of Madness is just as fun as it sounds. The prince will send you on a lengthy series of quests, and as you complete them, you'll gain rank, eventually rising all the way up to claim the title of Madgod of the Shivering Isles. Most of the quests involve crawling through huge, complex dungeons to gather artifacts and defeat enemies. Some of the quests are interesting and cleverly designed. In one early quest, you have to activate an ancient dungeon that serves as a trap for wayward adventurers who find their way into the isles. Once the dungeon is activated, you get to watch as a party explores it. You can press buttons to either send monsters to kill the adventurers or play tricks on the adventurers to drive them all insane. It's an entertaining way to indulge your sadistic side, which is heartily encouraged in the realm of Sheogorath.     Later in the story, the game resorts to sending you off on a seemingly endless string of simplistic fetch quests, which do get tiresome. It doesn't help that most of the dungeons you explore look identical, which will give you a strong sense of déjà vu. To help break up the main story quest, there are plenty of side quests you can pick up by talking to people in the two main towns. Many of these quests aren't particularly involved, but they're offbeat and weird enough to provide a nice diversion after hours spent in dungeons. You'll meet one gentleman who is afraid to sleep indoors because he thinks the walls will collapse on him, so he commissions you to find him a suitable place to sleep outside. Another man hates his life but doesn't want to commit suicide, so he hires you to kill him and make it look like an accident. At the very least, these quests lend a bit more character to the world by having you interact with the various interesting people who are each a bit crazy in one way or another.    The Carroll-esque world of the Shivering Isles is an entertaining place for a while, but after immersing yourself in a world of madness, you might start to feel a bit touched yourself. Most of the characters are harmlessly nutty, but some of them are downright annoying. Sheogorath himself is one of the most annoying characters you'll find in any video game. The prince almost always talks by shouting and rarely ever makes any sense. Screaming incoherently in a Scottish accent wasn't funny in Austin Powers, and it's not funny here. The prince's voice is so grating, and his dialogue is so inane, you'll probably want to either turn down your sound or click through the conversation as quickly as possible. On the other hand, Chancellor Haskill is a great character whose subtly sardonic tone and dry wit are often quite funny. The rest of the inhabitants fall somewhere between the two extremes, and most of the characters you meet are entertaining in their own ways.    The world of the Shivering Isles also takes on the physical characteristics of the scrambled psyche of the prince. The landscape looks quite different from anything you'll find in Tamriel or Oblivion, and it's all very pretty. From the starry pink skies to the towering phosphorescent mushrooms, there are plenty of great views to admire. But beneath the psychedelic sheen is a world full of monsters waiting to tear you limb from limb. You'll have to fight giant insects, crawling trees, primitive humanoid amphibian creatures, and an entire army of knights known as The Order. Most of the enemies look good, animate well, and put up a respectable challenge in a fight.     To combat all those enemies, you will get new weapons, armor, and spells. If that's not enough, you can make your own weapons and armor by collecting materials and recipes. You can collect amber or madness ore and take it to the blacksmith in Mania or Dementia, respectively. Using the material, you can have the blacksmith forge powerful weapons and armor. The items might not replace your current gear, but at the very least, these forged items will fetch a high price from any merchant. Of course, in addition to forged items, there are plenty of treasures for you to discover in the Shivering Isles' many dungeons. By the time you're ready to leave the Shivering Isles for the greener fields of Tamriel, you'll likely be a very wealthy hero. In addition to the new items, there are a few new magic spells in the expansion, including an amusing spell that lets you summon Chancellor Haskill to ask him for advice.    You'd think the Prince of Madness would be a cool guy, but instead he's just very, very annoying.   Shivering Isles looks fantastic and runs fairly well on the Xbox 360, although the stuttering frame rate problems from Oblivion carry over into the expansion as well. The load times are still present but they are fairly short and most of the dungeons have been designed so that the load times are few and far between.  Your efforts in Shivering Isles will be rewarded with 10 new achievements for an additional 250 gamer points. The achievements aren't very creative, and you'll get them all by just completing the main quest. You should also know that because at this time Shivering Isles is available by download only on Xbox Live Marketplace. That means you'll need a copy of Oblivion, an Xbox Live account, 2400 points ($30), and just shy of 1GB of free space on your hard drive in order to play it.      It will take you a good 20 hours to complete the major quest line, but there's plenty more to do afterward. With all the side quests to complete and territory to explore, you could easily spend 30 or 40 hours or more losing your mind in Shivering Isles. You'll find that your time with Shivering Isles is well spent. The quests, characters, and world in Shivering Isles are all as creative and intriguing as in the rest of the game. Oblivion was huge before, but now it's bigger and better than ever.          


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1032,Steel Diver ,4.5, This tedious underwater adventure is as short on content as it is on thrills.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/1/0/9/2225109-box_sdiver.png,3DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/steel-diver-review/1900-6304521/,neg,"
  Steel Diver is a drastic departure from what you'd expect in a game made by Nintendo. The company that created countless franchises with an emphasis on accessibility has taken a sharp turn in the opposite direction, and that shift is not for the better. This side-scrolling submarine adventure teeters between simulation and action, with compromises on both sides leading to a flat experience. Fiddling with the various sliders required to pilot your underwater craft demands the steady hand of an aspiring pilot, and there is momentary satisfaction when you successfully guide your submersible past a particularly nasty stretch. But punishment for making a mistake is so minimal that Steel Diver never taps into the pleasure zone that an actual simulation can call forth. On the other side of the coin, torpedo fights against enemy ships showcase the explosions you'd expect from an action game, but sluggish controls make lining up your shots too taxing to elicit much of a thrill. Steel Diver can't decide what it wants to be, and that ultimately leads to a disappointing launch game for Nintendo's latest handheld.      There's a brief setup about a war taking place in the year 19XX, but the story is mostly ignored for the rest of the game. Instead of focusing on what your motivation is, you need to be concerned with staying alive. The seven missions that make up the bulk of Steel Diver have you guiding your submarine through a series of dangerous undersea realms, with jagged icebergs and erupting volcanoes providing as much danger as the enemy subs trying to sink your modest craft. Action plays out from a 2D perspective, and there are three different submarines available. From small and swift to large and lumbering, each craft has a distinct feel, though they're similar enough that switching between them requires only a minor adjustment.    Controls are mostly handled on the touch screen. A vertical slider adjusts your depth, while a horizontal one determines the direction of your movement. The farther you push the slider in either direction, the faster you move, and it takes a fair bit of concentration to stay on course. Because you're underwater, changing direction isn't as easy as flicking a switch and watching your sub skirt potential dangers. Slowing down your momentum takes time, so you need to keep your eyes peeled for enemies and obstacles to ensure you can get out of the way. It sounds complicated, and it can be tough juggling these two commands during tense situations, but Steel Diver is so forgiving that you don't have to worry about sinking like a stone. Your sub can take a fair bit of damage, so though you may slam into mines and scrape your hull on stalagmites, death is an infrequent occurrence. You regenerate your health by surfacing for a few seconds, and your ship is even equipped with a cloak so you can hide from heat-seeking torpedoes. The foundation for an engaging, though simplified, take on simulations exists, but Steel Diver's slap-on-the-wrist punitive system ensures you make it through intact even if you're a sloppy pilot.    The objective in every mission is the same: Get from the left side of the map to the right as quickly as possible. Land formations create a natural maze for you to navigate, and tweaking your trajectory so you can glide past environmental dangers brings a modicum of satisfaction. There are also foreign ships and subs that fire missiles and torpedoes when you get close, drop depth charges if you venture below  them, and pepper the water with mines to add to your troubles. Each of your subs is equipped with its own torpedoes, and though it can be fun to send these aggressors to Davy Jones's Locker, don't expect much excitement. The slow-reacting controls mean that fights take a while to play out. It takes a bit of fiddling to aim in the right direction, and because you withstand so much damage before you die, there's little fear while you line up your shots.   You're in hot water now.   In addition to the regular missions, three bosses stand between you and survival. These oversized enemies follow a specific pattern that ensures they're only vulnerable during certain moments, and this is where the sluggish controls become downright annoying. For instance, a persistent tanker is your second boss, and though it isn't tough to get past it in your first life, it takes an awfully long time to whittle away its health. You can only hurt it when it opens a hatch to drop charges, mines, and missiles your way, and being in the right position at that moment is not always possible. Its attacks aren't particularly scary because you absorb so many hits before you die, but they can knock you out of the way and ruin your chance to retaliate. The ship also cruises around when it gets bored, and you have to wait for it to return to its attack position before you get a chance to unleash a few more rounds. It's a constant challenge to adjust your sliders so you're in the right position at the precise moment that the ship becomes vulnerable, which becomes tedious as the minutes begin to drag. This could have been exciting if your life were in danger, but that's rarely the case. This is a war of attrition with no real winner.     When you complete any of the missions, you're whisked away to a periscope challenge in which you must sink enemy boats from a first-person perspective. This is the lone moment where the action raises to a thrilling level, and that fun bubbles forth because of the carefree controls and strict time limit. You swing your view by manually moving the 3DS in a circle. When you spin around in real life, the onscreen view will do the same, and whipping around as quickly as possible to find lurking threats provides an immediate rush. You tap a button to unleash your torpedo barrage, and you have to be mindful of the momentum of your enemies if you're going to be successful. If you make sure you lead them appropriately, you can sink them with one shot. There isn't much depth in this mode, but it hardly matters. The whole shebang is done in a mere 30 seconds, so you're constantly engaged without any fear of it overstaying its welcome. You can go directly to this mode at any time from the main menu, but that's a bad idea. In long doses, this becomes as dull as the main game, so it's better to partake in it sparingly to avoid sinking the fun.      The uneven gameplay in Steel Diver carries over to the visuals as well. The side-scrolling missions have striking backgrounds that do a good job of making you feel as if you're underwater. A variety of locales give you a stylish taste of the earth's many climates, and the attention to detail adds to the immersion. Bubbles form and pop realistically, and the fiery burst when you land a solid hit jumps off the screen. When you flip on the 3D display, it's like you're staring into a tiny fish tank, though the depth of field can get nauseating in long stretches. In contrast to the sharp backgrounds are elements that look bland in comparison. Your submarine, for instance, looks like the prize at the bottom of a cereal box, and the enemy ships look just as phony. The periscope perspective is equally mundane. The rhythmic motion of the waves and clouds do little to conjure a longing for the open water.    A single-card two-player mode resembling the popular board game Battleship extends the life of this short game for a little while. Armed with a fleet of five ships, each player takes turns hunting down the other while keeping his or her own boats afloat. Your opponent's ships are invisible to you, so moving with trial-and-error precision to suss out your enemy's location makes up a large portion of the strategic pull. When you land on an occupied space, a fight breaks out to determine who controls that area. If you're manning a submarine, you reenact the periscope challenges, only this time your opponent can move his or her ships out of the way. This mode heavily favors the offensive player because ships take so long to react to your commands, which sucks away much of the excitement of deadly torpedo strikes. When you move one of your ships onto a space containing your opponent's submarine, a different minigame opens. Here, the offensive player chooses among three depths to drop charges, and the defensive player chooses from the same three options for how deep to hide. This is based entirely on luck so it engenders little satisfaction. Because of the constant minigame interludes in this mode, it has a sluggish pace compared to Battleship and becomes tiring before the first match has been decided.   Multiplayer matches give you a detailed look at what you're taking down.   Steel Diver never figures out if it wants to be a submarine simulation or an action romp, and that indecision leads to a yawn-inducing experience. And to make matters worse, even if you do get sucked into this adventure, there isn't much content on offer. You can play through the seven missions in a few hours, and once you're done with that, there are a handful of time-trial missions but little else to occupy your time. The dull two-player mode certainly doesn't add much value, so you're stuck with a middling game that's over before you know it. The novelty of seeing an underwater world through the wonders of 3D is certainly fascinating for a little while, but once that excitement fades away, there's not much here to keep you engaged. Steel Diver sets out from port brimming with confidence, but it sinks to the briny depths before it leaves the harbor.   


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1033,Sorcery ,4.5, Aggravating combat overwhelms the elements that could have made Sorcery enjoyable.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/2/1/2221721-sorcery_01.gif,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sorcery-review/1900-6379807/,neg,"
  When you're a spellcaster in training, every monster in the realm wants a chance to knock you down a peg. But as you learn in Sorcery, a lone goblin is no match for a mighty sorcerer, even one who's still a boy. So hundreds of ill-tempered meanies flood the screen as they attempt to overwhelm you with sheer numbers. And this is where Sorcery stumbles. Tactics have little place in these frustrating encounters because you're too busy frantically flinging spells in order to simply survive. Delightful visual design and in-depth alchemy can't overcome the tedium of sinking hours into waggling at an army of evil beings. Poorly balanced fighting scenarios transform Sorcery from an enchanting adventure into a grueling ordeal.       An apprentice without a master has to grow up in a hurry. You play as Finn, an eager boy who has the ability to shoot spells from his handy wand. You team up with a talking cat named Erline in search of your master, who has mysteriously disappeared. Although the story does little to draw you into this world, the whimsical artistic design does a great job of establishing a happy-go-lucky mood. Idyllic forests give way to treacherous underground caverns as you uncover the secret behind your mentor's fate, and though the locales present typical fairy-tale landscapes, there's a feeling of merriment that stays with you no matter how dark the story becomes.     Things start out nicely enough. Using the Move to control your wand and the Navigation Controller to run around, you seamlessly transform sheep to rats with the flick of your wrist. Spells travel in the direction you snap your wand. Although the precision you would get from a point-and-click interface is absent, it's easy enough to aim high or low, left or right, or even send a curving shot flying toward an ice troll's head.     It's when you enter into fights that things take a turn for the worse. Using strategy is mighty difficult when dozens of nasty buggers are rushing toward you. Aggressive goblins and hounding spiders threaten to smother you in a sea of grotesqueries, and you need to shake your arm as quickly as possible to keep these creatures at bay. You might think that inane waggling is only an option, but sadly that's not the case; it's a necessity. Some enemies have regenerating health, so if you hit them once without following up immediately with another strike, they go back to full strength. This baffling design decision, coupled with the unending mass of monsters constantly pursuing you, leads to tiring encounters that go on long after the entertainment has subsided.    Why does a troll  have so many spiders?   A poor camera adds further obstacles to your enjoyment. Tapping a button centers the view behind Finn, but automatic shifts hinder your ability to see your enemies. Wrestling the camera to get a good look at the action accentuates the already problematic battles. Finishing off a foe before it regenerates health is tricky enough without the beast leaving your line of sight. Auto-targeting should alleviate this issue, but it only makes the problem worse. The game isn't smart enough to know which enemy you want to attack, so your spell automatically tracks tiny spiders swarming around a giant troll's feet instead of letting you freeze the huge beast's head, even when you're aiming as high as possible.     Thankfully, the motion controls at least do what they should most of the time. There are some issues, such as clunky switching between spells, but they're not a big hindrance. What is a problem are the traditional controls. There are separate buttons for using a shield and diving out of the way, but there are times when you tap them during key moments only to have nothing happen onscreen. Other times, you get caught in an inescapable string of knockback attacks in which none of your actions can free you from the misery. Most baffling of all is how healing is implemented. You're not blessed with regenerating health like your enemies. Instead, you have to quaff potions. It's a fine idea, but it doesn't work in practice. Shaking the bottle and then bringing it to your lips while hounding enemies surround you is impractical, and having your drinking animation interrupted whenever you're touched is downright maddening.    All of these problems come to a head in tedious boss encounters. These ordeals stretch on for dozens of minutes, and it takes all of your concentration to come out on top. Despite the peaceful aesthetics, this is a difficult, punishing game that doesn't give you an inch. When a troll tosses a boulder, you'd think that diving out of the way would keep you safe. But that happens only a fraction of the time. Poor collision detection ensures you take damage even when you jumped clear well before contact, and it's incredibly easy to be caught on the environment as you run backward to avoid taking further hits. And if you should die during one of these boss battles, you have to start over at the very beginning of the fight.    Lake Erie has nothing on this flaming pond.   Despite the myriad issues, Sorcery does have some interesting combat elements. As you become a stronger wizard, you learn new spells, and these add layers of complexity to combat. Conjure an electrical cloud to zap your enemies into oblivion, or send a ripple of earth their way with a shimmering ground strike. Mixing spells even gives you opportunities to dispose of your foes creatively. A twister can gobble up a fairy or two in a pinch, but those prancing fools will scream bloody murder if you set that storm on fire. Or freeze a spider in place and shatter it into a million pieces with a concussive blast. These clever combat mechanics add a dose of excitement to the normally monotonous duels.     Most of Sorcery is composed of tedious combat encounters, but there are side activities that provide some enjoyment. Light puzzle solving introduces new ways to use your powers, and it's certainly empowering to fix a broken bridge or toss a giant pillar aside like a sack of grain. Alchemy is an optional though surprisingly in-depth activity. By combining ingredients you find hidden throughout the world, you can concoct all sorts of potions. Some provide a permanent increase to your health or magical might, while others have a temporary negative effect. Mixing and matching to find all the combinations is a nice distraction from the aggravating combat. In some sections, you transform into a rat to slink through tight passages. Although these are mildly fun, the places you change into a bird are noninteractive cutscenes which is a disappointment.     Sorcery's biggest flaw is that it focuses on the tiresome combat. Considering how strong the other elements are, it's disappointing that you spend the vast majority of the game frantically waggling just to stay alive. It's simply not fun to have your view blocked, your attacks interrupted, and your wrist ache as you try to squash an angry crowd of enemies. Sorcery fumbles its impressive potential by favoring mindless combat over the other enjoyable activities a boy wizard can take part in.   


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1034,PlayStation Move Heroes ,4.5," PlayStation Move Heroes pulls you in with its all-star cast, but problematic controls and repetitive gameplay kill that initial excitement.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/0/9/4/2225094-box_psmh.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/playstation-move-heroes-review/1900-6307235/,neg,"
  The concept seems to be lifted from the dreams of everyone who loved platforming during the PlayStation 2 days. Three of Sony's biggest mascots--Ratchet, Jak, and Sly--team up in PlayStation Move Heroes to thwart a band of malevolent aliens. Robots programmed to tear you to shreds close in on all sides, and you make smart use of whips, wrenches, and pistols to blow them to smithereens. If you catch a glimpse of Ratchet gunning down foes in Metropolis or Sly sneaking around with his trusty crook on the streets of Paris, you may even think this is the dream-team collaborative effort you've been waiting for. However, after only a few minutes of messing around with this Move-enabled minigame collection, it's clear that this is much closer to a nightmare. Similar-looking environments and repetitive objectives make it seem as if you're doomed to a Sisyphean fate, while unresponsive melee controls enervate your enthusiasm. Shining flashes of predictable entertainment intermittently pierce through the dull gray sky, but PlayStation Move Heroes is predominantly a boring endeavor unworthy of its fantastic starring cast.       The greatest threat to the known universe is a group of aliens who have too much time on their hands. Ratchet, Jak, and Sly, along with their respective sidekicks, Clank, Daxter, and Bentley, were enjoying their days on their own worlds, when an eerie vortex appeared above their heads, whisking them to a desolate and strange land. The weirdest part of this sinister plan is that pieces of their homeworlds were carried over as well, presumably so that these extraordinary heroes didn't become homesick. It might seem nice to explore the streets of Metropolis, Haven City, and Paris once more, but everything has a muted color scheme that makes these beloved places blend together. The lack of visual variety puts a damper on your adventures from the get-go, though the few story segments do an adequate job of lightening the mood. The good-humored ribbing these franchises are known for is on display, and it's fun to see what mischievous deed Daxter is up to or how the resourceful Clank is going to save everyone from this predicament.     The action is broken up into five distinct parts. Melee, whip-wielding, and shooting make up the combat portions, whereas bowling and disc throwing are akin to intergalactic sporting events. No matter which activity you choose, your goal is to collect a set number of items or destroy the advancing robot army. The action segments are set in small-scale arenas that are unfortunately beset by a number of issues that drain much of the fun. Your locomotion is downright insulting for such prestigious platforming stars. You're free to run around the areas as you wish, but the jumping ability these characters are known for has been unceremoniously removed. It feels strange to gun down enemies as Ratchet without being able to initiate his patented leaping strafes, and your lack of agility becomes a serious problem when you're surrounded by attackers with no way to quickly move away. The melee and whip controls are also maddeningly inconsistent. You need to shake the controller to strike down attackers at close range, and it's troubling how often this simple action doesn't register. The only combat fun comes from the shooting sections. Hunting down evil robots is enjoyable, though don't expect your dumb adversaries to put up much of a fight.     The sporting events fare a bit better than the fighting forays. Bowling goes beyond what you would expect from a typical 10-pin competition. Once you toss the ball, you control its direction by pointing the controller, and you need to slide around obstacles and up ramps to smash the intended targets. Snaking through a treacherous obstacle course is a neat twist to the normal sport, and though the controls don't always respond to your actions, they're reliable enough to get the job done. Plus, it's strangely enjoyable to see the infamous thief Sly slink around with a bowling ball cradled in his arms. Disc throwing is the best of the five included events. This is a version of disc golf in which you control the movement of your Frisbee midflight. By tilting and turning the controller, you cause your disc to cruise through the levels, and narrowly missing a careening rock or ducking under a low archway carries some thrills. Because the disc is slow, it's so easy to control that you can swiftly dash past destructive objects, and though that does sap much of the initial rush, it's still mildly fun to control this flying object.   You can't escape Subway's presence even in a far away galaxy.     You earn medals based on how well you perform, and trying to achieve gold in most events does extend the longevity a bit and provides some satisfaction. You know that with one more rousing effort you can gun down the appropriate number of robots or throw your disc in the perfect place, and there are unlockable levels and outfits to make your hard work worth it. However, even though there are tangible rewards urging you back, imprecise controls make certain events hard to stomach. The melee and whip portions are never entertaining because no matter how hard you try to swing your trusty weapons, the game simply refuses to respond at the most inopportune times. And though the other events provide some fun, they are so repetitive that it's hard to force yourself through another round of the same basic activity. Even if you weed out the bad portions, Move Heroes struggles to hold your attention because the good events quickly overstay their welcome.    There is a two-player mode if you can rope in a friend to join you, but like most of this disappointing minigame collection, it has severe issues. The second player merely controls a hovering reticle and has a finite amount of ammunition with which to pelt foes and strike important objects. To make matters worse, your shots are so slow that what you're targeting often moves out of the way before your blasts can connect, and you spend more time waiting for an ammo refill than having fun gunning down foes. PlayStation Move Heroes is not without merit, but it just doesn't provide a worthwhile platform for its endearing stars. Uneven controls make it a chore to compete in some of the events, and the entire package is hurt by the crushing repetition. It's still fun to control an airborne disc or shoot down idiotic robots, but that mild entertainment is not worth suffering through the rest of this adventure. Ratchet, Sly, and Jak deserve much better than this uninspired collaboration.   
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1035,Lord of Arcana ,4.5," Tedious quests and dull, infuriating combat make this one fantasy adventure whose monsters you won't want to hunt.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/5/3/3/2225533-box_loa.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lord-of-arcana-review/1900-6299225/,neg,"
  Taking on quests, killing monsters, and slowly advancing from a relative weakling into the greatest warrior the realm has ever seen. It's the stuff of legends passed down from generation to generation, and when it's done right, it's the stuff of thrilling video games, too. But alas, though a journey from zero to hero is at the heart of Lord of Arcana, the thrills are absent. Instead, the road to becoming a well-equipped, powerful fighting machine in Lord of Arcana is paved with frustration and tedium.       After you create your character by selecting from a modest assortment of faces, hairstyles, and the like, Lord of Arcana begins by giving you a small taste of life as a powerful warrior. Fighting your way through a dungeon, you cut through goblins with relative ease and summon the devastating magic of the massive beast Bahamut to aid you. This trek culminates in a battle against a ""Dragon of Murderous Rampage."" But no sooner do you earn victory over this monster than you find yourself in a temple, stripped down to level one, without any of the powerful gear or magic you were just wielding. You have sacrificed all your strength and your memories to be transported here, to the seaside village of Porto Carillo, to test your fate and prove yourself to be the worthy successor to the ancient king of the land of Horodyn. A few early cutscenes set the stage for the tale, but for the most part, story takes a distant backseat to the business of embarking on quests, strengthening your character, and acquiring better gear.    To embark on a quest, you speak to the woman at the counter for the Slayers Guild in the village. Once you select a quest from the available options, you're transported to the area where the quest takes place, be it Neumellow Woods, Ahbor Desert, Kamma Wind Cave, or some other region. Then, it's up to you to complete the quest objective within a set time limit. Quests can involve killing a certain number of a specific type of enemy, gathering a certain item, or defeating a boss monster. No matter what the objective of your quest is, however, you can bet that completing it won't be much fun.    Combat with the ordinary monsters who roam each area is dull for a number of reasons. For one, monsters behave according to obvious, repetitive patterns, making each encounter with a given type of monster feel the same as every other. The various types of goblins you encounter frequently on your adventures, for instance, always do a happy little dance that lasts a few seconds before they attack, giving you ample time to guard or dash out of the way. Skeletons have a habit of guarding constantly, so fights against them become a continuous attempt to get behind them and attack where they are vulnerable. The little plantlike creatures called mandrakes have the irritating ability to summon monsters to aid them that may be more powerful than you can handle, but no matter. You can just escape from battle and then attack the mandrake again, hoping that this time you kill it before it calls for help. There are a few stylistic flourishes that liven combat up a bit, like the brutal finishing moves (called coups de grace) that you perform with the push of a button and that result in your foes exploding in a bloody mess. But such moments of gory visual glee can't stave off the boredom that quickly sets in. Lord of Arcana invites obvious comparisons to the Monster Hunter series, but fails to imbue the hunts with any sense of thrill whatsoever.   Welcome to Porto Carillo, land of fierce monsters and fiercer backhanded compliments.   This remains true when tackling boss monsters. Agni, a flaming rock giant, rolls up into a ball, speeds around the arena for a while, and then stands up, woozy and disoriented, giving you an obvious chance to strike. This repeats again and again and again, for far, far too long, until at last he falls to your blows. The storm god Takemikazuchi has the ability to shrink you down to a minuscule size, which makes your attacks ineffectual and tremendously slows the rate at which you can cover ground. As a result of your slow movement, trying to track down the floating keystone you need to strike to return to normal size becomes an exercise in frustration. This trick is doubly frustrating when you encounter it again as you fight the regal horselike creature Kirin, whose speedy charging attacks are just about impossible to avoid when you're tiny. Boss battles culminate in flashy quick-time events called melee duels, but like the coups de grace, these can't redeem the tedium that precedes them. And when a boss finally falls to your attacks, you don't feel victorious so much as just relieved that it's over.      There are five types of weapons to choose from, and at least they feel significantly different from each other. One-handed swords allow for relatively quick attacks and let you wield a shield in battle. Maces are slower and heavier but let you unleash powerful charged strikes. The ludicrously huge two-handed swords take time to swing but do heavy damage. Polearms let you respond to enemy attacks with counterattacks. And firelances are pikes that fire projectiles, which makes fighting some enemies a joke, because you can stand in one place and chip away at their health from a safe distance, and they are seemingly powerless to do anything about it. Regardless of your choice of weapon, none of them can make the combat enjoyable.       Teaming up with a friend or three via local multiplayer on your quests can make the combat less painful, but only because suffering with friends is better than suffering alone. Enemies don't become any more interesting to fight, and boss battles don't become any less tedious and frustrating. The lack of online multiplayer severely limits the amount of use you are likely to get out of this option, and the fact that only the host saves any actual mission completion data and quest progress makes tagging along with others a much less attractive proposition.    A number of other minor issues contribute to the general unpleasantness of questing. For one, each area is divided up into a number of very small sections, and you're treated to a loading time almost every time you exit one section and enter the next. (These can be offset somewhat by installing the game.) For another, locking on to enemies requires that you keep the L button held down, which is an unnecessary design decision, since a toggle would have worked just as well. And as you gather the torn leather, clean water, starch spuds, bog moss, and other items scattered around each area, you must press the button and wait a moment for your character to bend down and pick up each individual unit. There may be three cypress staffs in one spot, but you can't save time and grab all three of them at once. Individually, issues like this aren't terribly significant. But combined, they make the whole experience of playing Lord of Arcana even less enjoyable.   Pushing the button over and over to pick up each cypress staff does not result in a more immersive experience.   There's more to Lord of Arcana than combat. As you quest, your character becomes stronger, learns new weapon strikes, very slowly gains magic attacks, and gathers all kinds of items that let the blacksmith in town forge better equipment for him or her. And seeing your character develop as you sink time into killing monsters, earning experience, and completing quests carries with it a sense of satisfaction like that which you'd expect to find in just about any role-playing game. The problem with Lord of Arcana is that the things you need to do to make that progress are extremely tedious, repetitive, and occasionally infuriating. The whole point of getting stronger and acquiring better gear is to make you more effective on your next quest; rewards along the way can't make up for an unpleasant journey. On top of that, the game's not much to look at. Your attacks look powerful, but your enemies are so lacking in detail that you'd probably never know the skeletons were skeletons if  you weren't told, and the arenas in which you do battle are about as bland as bland can be. With all the frustrations and all the boredom this game dishes out and with so many similar, better games available for the PSP, there's no reason to embark on this quest. Becoming the next lord of Arcana just isn't worth it.  


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1036,Rhythm Zone ,4.5," It might let you import your own music library, but Rhythm Zone is a poor substitute for the games it apes.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/0/6/0/80717-160060.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rhythm-zone-review/1900-6270554/,neg,"
  If you're going to rip off the Guitar Hero series, you should at least get the basics right, and that's where Rhythm Zone falls short. In Rhythm Zone, like in Guitar Hero, blocks of different hues representing musical notes travel toward the bottom of the screen, and you press the proper buttons as the blocks cross the bottom of the note highway. The game's hook is that rather than sticking with a predesignated tracklist, it lets you use your own music in addition to the small set of included songs. It's a great idea, but in practice, it's often a mess. While most songs are at least playable and occasionally enjoyable, few of them result in note structures that properly match the tune, let alone replicates the act of making music. You can plug in a Windows-compatible guitar controller if you want to inch closer to a music-making experience, but lack of strumming support makes this an incomplete option. While developer Sonic Boom deserves credit for letting users personalize their music game experience, Rhythm Zone proves that there's no substitute for a carefully constructed note chart that matches the music it accompanies.       From purely a feature standpoint, Rhythm Zone is a noticeably bare experience. You can either play a random sequence of tracks (think of it as a shuffle option) or manually select a single track from your list. Surprisingly, there is no option to create your own playlist, so you are stuck either with a random playlist, or one tune at a time. The game includes several interesting tracks you can download, but of course, the ability to use your own music is its greatest selling point. Unfortunately, importing your music files is not necessarily the simple process you'd hope it to be. On some occasions, we were able to successfully import the selected file, and the game helpfully identified it using its built-in last.fm integration. On others, the import process just hung indefinitely, though sometimes, such tracks were still successfully imported but could only be played after canceling the import and restarting the game.     Once you get around to playing a tune, you appreciate that the game can create a playable track that stays more or less in rhythm with the chosen music. This assumes that the music has a steady and straightforward beat, however. Rhythm Zone tends to get confused by more complex music, sometimes sending down a succession of notes that has no discernible connection with the tune. It keeps to the beat more often than not--though that isn't to say that you ever get the sense that what you are doing on your keyboard or controller is closely tied to the music. Chords come rolling past at random times, you play rhythms that only seem vaguely related to what you hear, and many tracks come across as messy and uncomfortable. Of course, this is because Rhythm Zone analyzes the file to create its note highways, whereas the highways in games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are specifically designed for each song. Thus, with so much randomness, Rhythm Zone simply isn't as much fun to play as its progenitors, nor does it even remotely re-create the feeling of playing a real instrument, even if you plug in a guitar controller.    Nothing says (insert musical genre of your choice) like colorful flowers!   It's a shame that the basics don't fall into place as they should, given that some of Rhythm Zone's peripheral aspects are competently designed. It's also a shame that the leaderboards aren't better integrated into the game; for example, it would be nice to see how you did after playing a song, rather than having to enter a separate menu to check. Nevertheless, scores are updated immediately, and even if no one else has played a particular song, you can still keep track of your own scores because there is a leaderboard created for every imported song. There are also some nice background visualizations that give your sessions a bit of flair, though in time, you might wish there were more of them. One visual touch that doesn't come across so successfully is the way the note highway occasionally tilts to one side or the other, apparently to add a bit of challenge. It's more annoying than anything else, though, for some reason, it didn't happen when we played in a 4:3 resolution.       Various games have allowed users to import their own tracks with different degrees of success. But unlike games like Audiosurf and Beat Hazard, Rhythm Zone doesn't just use the music to affect the gameplay--it's a wholesale imitation of a series in which the gameplay and the music are inextricably linked. Much of what makes Guitar Hero fun is that it makes you feel as if you're making music. Rhythm Zone's relatively random sequences of notes may generally keep to the beat, but most tracks are clumsy and uneven, certainly nowhere near the quality you'd find in a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game. Being able to use your own music library makes Rhythm Zone sound like an appealing experience, but even at $9.99, it's too buggy and inconsistent to warrant a purchase.   
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1037,Resident Evil 6 ,4.5, Resident Evil 6's messy mix of annoying quick-time events and constant set pieces makes it a poor caricature of modern-day action games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/8/2/8/2227828-box_re6.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/resident-evil-6-review/1900-6397185/,neg,"
  With Resident Evil 6, a once-mighty series makes another stumble. From a production standpoint, this atmospheric third-person shooter (this is no survival horror game, certainly) hits a number of high notes, weaving multiple stories into a single narrative that you untangle from different perspectives. It's unfortunate that actually interacting with Resident Evil 6 is an excruciating chore. This is a wannabe action film that resents your interference, and punishes you by forcing one horrible quick-time event after another upon you.       That Resident Evil 6 wants to be a movie is evident in almost every facet of its gameplay. Plenty of games dramatize their events through extended cutscenes, Metal Gear Solid being an oft-cited example of a series known for long-winded cinematics. Having many cutscenes isn't a problem in and of itself; constantly interrupting the flow of gameplay, on the other hand, is Resident Evil 6's disappointing calling card.     In a typical five-minute stretch, you might watch a cutscene, walk for five seconds, trigger another cutscene, open a door, perform a quick-time event, view another cutscene, shoot some mutated freaks, and then do nothing while you wait for your co-op partner to finish some task or another before you can continue on. All through that stretch, the camera changes position countless times, you're forced to walk really slowly for a while, and an almost-unavoidable scripted ""gotcha"" moment gifts you with a game-over screen (""You Are Dead""), forcing you to replay the sequence while wondering what you could have done to prevent it.     These problems infiltrate all four of Resident Evil 6's campaigns, though each campaign shifts its focus and tone--and all but Ada Wong's puzzle-driven campaign (unlocked when you have finished the other three) feature cooperative play. In Leon Kennedy's campaign, you play as either Leon or newcomer Helena Harper, while your cohort is left to the care of another player, or of the AI. Leon's campaign is the most traditional, recalling the fourth and fifth chapters of the series by way of mysterious locations like an eerie graveyard and creep-strewn city streets. In a campaign that looks to military shooters for inspiration, Chris Redfield joins fellow BSAA operative Piers Nivens in war-torn streets to shoot up infected foes and larger-than-life bosses. Jake Muller and Sherry Birkin's campaign is focused more on scripted events than the others and lacks the thematic cohesion of the other three (unless you count an overload of contextual button prompts as a theme). A short prelude introduces you to the basic mechanics, which are mostly identical across the campaigns. It also functions as a warning of what's to come.    Jiggle the stick as fast as you can if you wish to avoid a kiss from Aunt Mabel.   Right off the bat, you notice what is to be a common theme in Resident Evil 6: quick-time events are prominent to the point of distraction. Keep your thumbs limber and your trigger fingers ready, for you will be hammering buttons and jiggling thumbsticks ad nauseam. Wiggle that stick to get the monster off you! Furiously tap that button to crawl faster! Making matters worse is that the quick-time events aren't even that well implemented. Some of them require superhuman wiggling speeds; others, like those that require alternating trigger presses, don't have a clear rhythm. And succeeding means triggering a sonic zing and a bright circular eruption that distract you from the dramatic animations.     Even ignoring quick-time events, button prompts are the rule rather than the exception. Capcom drops in so many set piece moments that they lose their luster. Good set pieces--that is, large scale events with major visual punch and limited interactivity--punctuate gameplay, rather than replace it. Here, they constantly disrupt the gameplay, and a few types of set pieces emerge as clear developer favorites. One such type is the ""run toward the camera"" bit, in which you hold a button to sprint toward the camera, and press buttons to leap over obstacles or slide under them. It takes a special talent to make such sequences work, but no such talent is demonstrated here; the camera constantly changes position, which destroys the flow of both the controls and the visuals.    That big boss doesn't look so imposing from a distance.   Resident Evil 6 is constantly (and annoyingly) playing with camera angles, even outside of the running sections. The worst moments are those that yank control from you and force you to stare at a growling behemoth's dramatic entrance, or a helicopter's flyover, even when you're in the middle of a quick-time event, or engaged in a shoot-out. Smart games either have you hold a button if you want to witness a major incident, or simply allow the incident to happen. Resident Evil 6 is not a smart game. It doesn't care what you're doing: that monster is big, and the game forces the bigness upon you. (And when the sequence is done, the camera may not be in the position in which it started.) Such occurrences are, every time, detrimental to gameplay, and it's shocking how many of them there are.     Not that your co-op partner is usually harmful to the experience. If you play on your own, the AI does a great job of knowing what to do and where to go. The game does have a few good co-op ideas up its sleeve, such as a sequence in which one player swims from the snapping jaws of a finned fiend, and the other must shoot it. But the good ideas are too often let down by troublesome execution: in that same sequence, your mission objective might contradict what the game actually needs you to do. Other times, one player waits around with nothing to do, while the other slashes up bio-organic weapons (that is, B.O.W.s) and finally opens a door or lowers a ladder. Most cooperative actions simply involve opening a door together. And boy is there a lot of door opening in Resident Evil 6.     In between the frequent set pieces, the quick-time events, and the cooperative door kickings, there is some mutant killing. The core mechanics are similar to those in other third-person shooters, but with the idiosyncrasies that defined Resident Evils 4 and 5. The camera stays close behind your back, movements like leaping and crouching are contextual rather than freely available, and the pace is deliberate. Shooting grotesqueries often results in new mutations: bulbous growths sprout from the necks of advancing fiends, and disgusting diminutive creatures spawn from their hosts and skitter along the floor. You can also kick and pummel your foes, though whether you prefer to keep your distance or get right in there, the lumbering lunatics react properly, knocking over other infected as they lurch from the power of your shotgun blasts. If you find the deliberate action appealing, you can devote some time to the returning Mercenaries mode, in which you and a buddy (or you alone) off as many enemies as you can before the clock ticks down to zero.       It's unfortunate that Resident Evil 6's campaigns want so desperately to take you out of the action. A single bullet from a sniper can knock you to the ground; you can either get to your feet and reposition yourself, or just shoot while you're down until the right time to rise presents itself. In Jake's campaign, getting knocked down on a particularly icy slope means sliding all the way to the bottom, and having to make the climb again. As is typical for Capcom action games, long animations need to finish before you regain control--and that kind of approach could have worked fine in a game that sticks closely to the Resident Evil 4 template.     But Resident Evil 6 is focused less on building tension than any previous game in the main series, and the over-deliberate mechanics don't always mesh well with the action-game sensibilities and highly linear levels. The claustrophobic behind-the-back camera in cramped hallways, the knockback loops, the cumbersome method of combining herbs and healing yourself--these facets once worked well to help instill a sense of terror and make you consider every action and every step. In Resident Evil 6, a game that mostly leaves its survival horror roots behind, the same attributes hinder your enjoyment.    Another set piece event? You don't say!   That isn't to say that Resident Evil 6 is hard. On medium difficulty, you can often run right past the baddies, or just spam a trigger and punch them to death. You needn't worry about ammo all that often; the only time you're likely to run out is when you face a bullet-sponge boss and there's no more ammo to be had in the battle arena. But while you won't often die due to the level of challenge (unless you crank up the difficulty, of course), you might not be able to escape a few of the game's ""gotcha"" deaths. With little warning, a vehicle might crash through a barricade, and if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you're dead. When an avalanche occurs, if you don't know to expect it, you might not have enough room to veer your snowmobile away. (This is one of several mediocre vehicular segments.) That's not challenging: that's cheap, and it's bad game design.    While Resident Evil 6 is no survival horror game, it does have a few memorably tense moments. In Leon's campaign, flashes of lightning in a dark cemetery might have you jumping once or twice, and the appearance of Resident Evil's famous zombie dogs will have you reliving the franchise's good old days. The visit to an old cathedral that follows is similarly evocative, considering its roots in the series' past. Where the game most impresses is in its production values, particularly in sound and narrative. Each campaign tells a different story--but those four stories overlap in interesting ways before they diverge again. You need to play the unlockable campaign to make sense of every mystery, but this is a great way to learn tall tales of the latest global threat.   Leon recovers from a particularly exhausting struggle with the left analog stick.   Grand voice acting gives the melodramatic story plenty of weight. The talented cast makes every sullen regret, every cry for help, and every enthusiastic encouragement ring true, even in the midst of the most fantastical of events. The gross, squishy sound effects are so potent that you might try to wipe imaginary goo from your clothes. The cutscenes deserve special mention. A slow-motion shot of a bus's interior, a character's shocking fall from a great height, and a tense standoff between allies are but a few examples of the excellent cinematics that drive the story onward.     But how far can cinematics get you when the gameplay sandwiched between them is so poorly paced, so utterly misconceived, so reliant on stick wriggles and button tapping? There's a place for contextual prompts and cinematic storytelling in video games, but Resident Evil 6 is a mishmash of elements put together without any sense of care or direction. Series faithful might stumble through for the sake of story, and perhaps to appreciate those few moments that recall when Resident Evil was at its peak glory. But this long, poor sequel is the ultimate test of patience for even the most dedicated.     


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1038,Resident Evil 6 ,4.5, Resident Evil 6's messy mix of annoying quick-time events and constant set pieces makes it a poor caricature of modern-day action games.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/8/2/8/2227828-box_re6.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/resident-evil-6-review/1900-6397338/,neg,"
  With Resident Evil 6, a once-mighty series makes another stumble. From a production standpoint, this atmospheric third-person shooter (this is no survival horror game, certainly) hits a number of high notes, weaving multiple stories into a single narrative that you untangle from different perspectives. It's unfortunate that actually interacting with Resident Evil 6 is an excruciating chore. This is a wannabe action film that resents your interference, and punishes you by forcing one horrible quick-time event after another upon you.       That Resident Evil 6 wants to be a movie is evident in almost every facet of its gameplay. Plenty of games dramatize their events through extended cutscenes, Metal Gear Solid being an oft-cited example of a series known for long-winded cinematics. Having many cutscenes isn't a problem in and of itself; constantly interrupting the flow of gameplay, on the other hand, is Resident Evil 6's disappointing calling card.     In a typical five-minute stretch, you might watch a cutscene, walk for five seconds, trigger another cutscene, open a door, perform a quick-time event, view another cutscene, shoot some mutated freaks, and then do nothing while you wait for your co-op partner to finish some task or another before you can continue on. All through that stretch, the camera changes position countless times, you're forced to walk really slowly for a while, and an almost-unavoidable scripted ""gotcha"" moment gifts you with a game-over screen (""You Are Dead""), forcing you to replay the sequence while wondering what you could have done to prevent it.     These problems infiltrate all four of Resident Evil 6's campaigns, though each campaign shifts its focus and tone--and all but Ada Wong's puzzle-driven campaign (unlocked when you have finished the other three) feature cooperative play. In Leon Kennedy's campaign, you play as either Leon or newcomer Helena Harper, while your cohort is left to the care of another player, or of the AI. Leon's campaign is the most traditional, recalling the fourth and fifth chapters of the series by way of mysterious locations like an eerie graveyard and creep-strewn city streets. In a campaign that looks to military shooters for inspiration, Chris Redfield joins fellow BSAA operative Piers Nivens in war-torn streets to shoot up infected foes and larger-than-life bosses. Jake Muller and Sherry Birkin's campaign is focused more on scripted events than the others and lacks the thematic cohesion of the other three (unless you count an overload of contextual button prompts as a theme). A short prelude introduces you to the basic mechanics, which are mostly identical across the campaigns. It also functions as a warning of what's to come.    At least try to keep your mouth closed so you don't accidentally inhale any of that gunk.   Right off the bat, you notice what is to be a common theme in Resident Evil 6: quick-time events are prominent to the point of distraction. Keep your thumbs limber and your trigger fingers ready, for you will be hammering buttons and jiggling thumbsticks ad nauseam. Wiggle that stick to get the monster off you! Furiously tap that button to crawl faster! Making matters worse is that the quick-time events aren't even that well implemented. Some of them require superhuman wiggling speeds; others, like those that require alternating trigger presses, don't have a clear rhythm. And succeeding means triggering a sonic zing and a bright circular eruption that distract you from the dramatic animations.     Even ignoring quick-time events, button prompts are the rule rather than the exception. Capcom drops in so many set piece moments that they lose their luster. Good set pieces--that is, large scale events with major visual punch and limited interactivity--punctuate gameplay, rather than replace it. Here, they constantly disrupt the gameplay, and a few types of set pieces emerge as clear developer favorites. One such type is the ""run toward the camera"" bit, in which you hold a button to sprint toward the camera, and press buttons to leap over obstacles or slide under them. It takes a special talent to make such sequences work, but no such talent is demonstrated here; the camera constantly changes position, which destroys the flow of both the controls and the visuals.    And here begins yet another poorly executed set piece sequence. Because there weren't enough already.   Resident Evil 6 is constantly (and annoyingly) playing with camera angles, even outside of the running sections. The worst moments are those that yank control from you and force you to stare at a growling behemoth's dramatic entrance, or a helicopter's flyover, even when you're in the middle of a quick-time event, or engaged in a shoot-out. Smart games either have you hold a button if you want to witness a major incident, or simply allow the incident to happen. Resident Evil 6 is not a smart game. It doesn't care what you're doing: that monster is big, and the game forces the bigness upon you. (And when the sequence is done, the camera may not be in the position in which it started.) Such occurrences are, every time, detrimental to gameplay, and it's shocking how many of them there are.     Not that your co-op partner is usually harmful to the experience. If you play on your own, the AI does a great job of knowing what to do and where to go. The game does have a few good co-op ideas up its sleeve, such as a sequence in which one player swims from the snapping jaws of a finned fiend, and the other must shoot it. But the good ideas are too often let down by troublesome execution: in that same sequence, your mission objective might contradict what the game actually needs you to do. Other times, one player waits around with nothing to do, while the other slashes up bio-organic weapons (that is, B.O.W.s) and finally opens a door or lowers a ladder. Most cooperative actions simply involve opening a door together. And boy is there a lot of door opening in Resident Evil 6.     In between the frequent set pieces, the quick-time events, and the cooperative door kickings, there is some mutant killing. The core mechanics are similar to those in other third-person shooters, but with the idiosyncrasies that defined Resident Evils 4 and 5. The camera stays close behind your back, movements like leaping and crouching are contextual rather than freely available, and the pace is deliberate. Shooting grotesqueries often results in new mutations: bulbous growths sprout from the necks of advancing fiends, and disgusting diminutive creatures spawn from their hosts and skitter along the floor. You can also kick and pummel your foes, though whether you prefer to keep your distance or get right in there, the lumbering lunatics react properly, knocking over other infected as they lurch from the power of your shotgun blasts. If you find the deliberate action appealing, you can devote some time to the returning Mercenaries mode, in which you and a buddy (or you alone) off as many enemies as you can before the clock ticks down to zero.       It's unfortunate that Resident Evil 6's campaigns want so desperately to take you out of the action. A single bullet from a sniper can knock you to the ground; you can either get to your feet and reposition yourself, or just shoot while you're down until the right time to rise presents itself. In Jake's campaign, getting knocked down on a particularly icy slope means sliding all the way to the bottom, and having to make the climb again. As is typical for Capcom action games, long animations need to finish before you regain control--and that kind of approach could have worked fine in a game that sticks closely to the Resident Evil 4 template.     But Resident Evil 6 is focused less on building tension than any previous game in the main series, and the over-deliberate mechanics don't always mesh well with the action-game sensibilities and highly linear levels. The claustrophobic behind-the-back camera in cramped hallways, the knockback loops, the cumbersome method of combining herbs and healing yourself--these facets once worked well to help instill a sense of terror and make you consider every action and every step. In Resident Evil 6, a game that mostly leaves its survival horror roots behind, the same attributes hinder your enjoyment.    A reminder of the good old days.   That isn't to say that Resident Evil 6 is hard. On medium difficulty, you can often run right past the baddies, or just spam a trigger and punch them to death. You needn't worry about ammo all that often; the only time you're likely to run out is when you face a bullet-sponge boss and there's no more ammo to be had in the battle arena. But while you won't often die due to the level of challenge (unless you crank up the difficulty, of course), you might not be able to escape a few of the game's ""gotcha"" deaths. With little warning, a vehicle might crash through a barricade, and if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you're dead. When an avalanche occurs, if you don't know to expect it, you might not have enough room to veer your snowmobile away. (This is one of several mediocre vehicular segments.) That's not challenging: that's cheap, and it's bad game design.    While Resident Evil 6 is no survival horror game, it does have a few memorably tense moments. In Leon's campaign, flashes of lightning in a dark cemetery might have you jumping once or twice, and the appearance of Resident Evil's famous zombie dogs will have you reliving the franchise's good old days. The visit to an old cathedral that follows is similarly evocative, considering its roots in the series' past. Where the game most impresses is in its production values, particularly in sound and narrative. Each campaign tells a different story--but those four stories overlap in interesting ways before they diverge again. You need to play the unlockable campaign to make sense of every mystery, but this is a great way to learn tall tales of the latest global threat.   Piers comforts Chris as he laments the lack of a Resident Evil 2 remake.   Grand voice acting gives the melodramatic story plenty of weight. The talented cast makes every sullen regret, every cry for help, and every enthusiastic encouragement ring true, even in the midst of the most fantastical of events. The gross, squishy sound effects are so potent that you might try to wipe imaginary goo from your clothes. The cutscenes deserve special mention. A slow-motion shot of a bus's interior, a character's shocking fall from a great height, and a tense standoff between allies are but a few examples of the excellent cinematics that drive the story onward.     But how far can cinematics get you when the gameplay sandwiched between them is so poorly paced, so utterly misconceived, so reliant on stick wriggles and button tapping? There's a place for contextual prompts and cinematic storytelling in video games, but Resident Evil 6 is a mishmash of elements put together without any sense of care or direction. Series faithful might stumble through for the sake of story, and perhaps to appreciate those few moments that recall when Resident Evil was at its peak glory. But this long, poor sequel is the ultimate test of patience for even the most dedicated.     


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1039,Phantom Breaker ,4.5, Phantom Breaker fights a losing battle to provide you with a reason to play it instead of one of its many qualified peers.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/8/7/9/2226879-box_pbreaker.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/phantom-breaker-review/1900-6372834/,neg,"
  If a fight broke out at an anime convention and only those who had dressed up as nurses, priestesses, ninja warriors, pop idols, businessmen, and French maids participated, the outcome would resemble Phantom Breaker, an Xbox 360 fighting game that dives into waters so shallow that there was never a good chance of anything memorable emerging.   When Cocoa goes up against M, the only thing missing is 'arshmallows.'   Phantom Breaker's many parts combine to form the regrettable result. You have the standard Arcade, Story, Practice, and Versus modes. You can take things online to seek out competition from other players, but games that make button mashing as viable a strategy as skilled play aren't often improved by the addition of a stranger. A network connection doesn't suddenly breathe new life into stale design, either.    The biggest problem with Phantom Breaker is its unsatisfying combat engine, which benefits from accessibility but doesn't provide players with sufficient incentive to improve.  The quarter-circle moves that Street Fighter II perfected are missing in action, replaced here by an approach you might expect from Nintendo's popular Smash Bros. franchise. Moves are executed by pressing one or more of the four face buttons either with or without an accompanying tilt of the analog stick or tap of the d-pad.     Special moves that can only be performed once meters fill do add some complexity, but the ease with which even the most powerful moves and combos are blocked, broken, and countered prevents the game from developing an enjoyable sense of rhythm. You're seldom rewarded for playing cautiously and unleashing a combo when your opponent leaves an opening, because that opening could vanish in an instant and then you'll be drawn into a time-consuming slap fight that has no long-term impact on either combatant's life meter. Unless a fighter frequently screws up big, you may be surprised by just how often the winner of a match is the person who still has the most health remaining when the timer dwindles to nothing, rather than the last person standing.   I'm just going to spin around in a circle with my fists out, so if I hit you, it's your fault.   More practiced players will start breaking combos and performing counter attacks--perhaps with pleasing success--as the result of a few hours of practice, but a newcomer with no prior experience can mash buttons and break out amazing combos at a similar rate. Repeatedly slapping the face buttons a few times often produces a string of pure pain that's capable of ruining even skilled opponents. Rather than punishing players who just hammer the buttons and hope for the best, Phantom Breaker facilitates such strategies by including life meters that gradually refill over time, and by ensuring that even relatively weak combos take much longer to play out than they really should.    The characters move in a languid manner that feels almost disconnected from any controller input.  It's difficult to feel involved when you so frequently have to wait for animations to complete. The slower pace also enables your opponents to step around your attacks, or through them.  Backward dodges and sidesteps are common, and occasionally a computer opponent will back away to the far side of the screen and start spamming projectile moves like an amateur player might in some other fighting game. The difference is that in this case, such cheap strategies might actually work if the battle has made you impatient.  The best strategy is most often a driven offense, but even then the fights drag out longer than they should because of all the broken combos.   Just because you look away from your opponent doesn't mean she won't attack you.   The issues with the combat could have been somewhat alleviated if the rest of the game provided compelling reasons to play, but that's not generally the case. Consider the character roster, which consists of all of the aforementioned stereotypes but not much else. There are a total of ten characters available before you start unlocking the curiosities, and eight of the characters out of that initial set are female. You might suppose that this means there are a lot of lingering panty shots and so forth, but the artists showed admirable restraint. The ladies all look nice, and they're sexualized in only the most inoffensive manner possible. Waka, the most amply endowed of the lot, is dressed in her conservative priestess garb, and there's barely a lady in the group who wouldn't have to dress down considerably to fit in at the beach.    The urban environments where fights take place seem to have been crafted with similar restraint, but with disappointing results. They mostly consist of sharp but very static foreground images with the occasional transparent patch in the background where you'll see a second layer depicting a building or skyline. The roaring crowds, wandering animals, traffic, and other such distractions that work so well in nearly any other fighting game of note are absent here. When fights carry over to second and third rounds, the background palette colors update so that you get the impression that day is turning to twilight and then nightfall. It's a nice touch, but it's not enough.   At least they had the sense to fight in a wide open plaza with no innocent bystanders nearby.   A spectacular soundtrack could have invigorated the experience at least, but the music typically blends into the background like elevator music and the localization is inconsistent. The voice work is all presented in Japanese and even the text in the closing credits hasn't been translated. Furthermore, the text that pads the Story mode is awkwardly phrased and the characters only rarely discuss anything interesting. A few of them fight for a noble cause, but characters mostly throw the word ""duelist"" around a lot and talk in the blandest possible terms about how they're going to beat one another in combat. The story largely revolves around a decidedly untrustworthy fellow named Phantom who looks like he might be Santa's less benevolent twin. He promises to fulfill the wish of whichever fighter emerges victorious from his makeshift tournament, so the subject matter makes sense but does nothing to energize things.    Phantom Breaker fills most of the boxes on the traditional fighting game checklist, but it does so without any sense of style or energy. Worse, the core fighting system is fundamentally flawed. Sluggish animations and easily countered attacks make your assaults feel ineffectual, and the recharging life bars further underscore this sense of impotence. If you're looking for fun fisticuffs, you can pick plenty of better fighters than Phantom Breaker.    
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1040,SSX On Tour ,8.6," The subversive style of SSX On Tour is unlike anything the series has seen before, and it's pretty unique in the overall world of video games.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/1/0/8/2215108-box_ssx4.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ssx-on-tour-review/1900-6135521/,pos,"
  Though it has often found itself lumped in with Tony Hawk and the rest of his action-sports cronies, the SSX series has always been more of a racer, albeit a racer with an affinity for ridiculous airborne stunts. Last seen in 2003 with SSX 3, the series returns with the aesthetically revamped SSX On Tour. This is an incredibly slick package, and not just on the surface, either. On Tour tightens up a lot of the underlying course designs and gameplay mechanics, and it quickens the pace without betraying the fundamentals of SSX.    SSX gets sketchy.   We can't talk about SSX On Tour without first talking about its unique art style, which permeates all of the menus and consistently creeps into the actual gameplay as well. While SSX 3 went for sleek and icy, On Tour's visual style has a real sweaty, wild-haired enthusiasm to it. The game specifically aims to mimic the hand-drawn notebook doodles of a bored, hyperactive heavy-metal high schooler. There's a purposefully crude, monochromatic look to everything, but all of the menus are crammed with details and weird, whimsical animations, adding a real oddball energy to the environment. Pensive-looking donkeys, twin guitar-wielding unicorns, and squat little monster-men with tongues of unsettling length are all common sights throughout the menus. This is not necessarily an original art style (you can look to the finale of Richard Linklater's School of Rock to catch some direct inspirado, and there are occasional Ed ""Big Daddy"" Roth touches), but it's delivered with a liveliness that is downright infectious.    The actual polygonal world of SSX On Tour isn't quite as daring as it was in SSX 3, and more of the technical muscle goes into the lighting engine in this game. The characters somehow seem less detailed than they did in SSX 3, but their animations are still silky smooth, and it can be fascinating just to watch your skier shift its weight from one foot to the other as it navigates some uneven terrain. The environments are absolutely jam-packed with alternate routes, shortcuts, and secret paths, but they all manage to come together quite naturally, and the actual geometry looks great, too. Topping it all off are some great particle effects (the falling snow and fireworks look amazing), and at least in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions, a rock-solid frame rate. The visuals have always been a strength of SSX, and On Tour is able to pull it together on both the artistic and technical fronts with great confidence.    The single-player experience in SSX On Tour revolves around the tour mode, where you create a custom rider, choose whether it's a skier or a snowboarder, and then compete in a lengthy series of class-based challenges. A good number of characters from past SSX games appear in On Tour, and you'll compete against them repeatedly. However, the focus on characters has been toned down significantly since they were all given celebrity voices in SSX Tricky. Now the big idea is to put the spotlight on you as you turn your lowly novice into a full-fledged snow-sportin' rock star. The three main SSX event types--race, trick, and slope-style events (a 50/50 race/trick blend)--are still staples in On Tour, though now there are more-specific challenges for you to face. Some of them start off being pretty mundane (like having to collect a number of special icons before time runs out), but they quickly become more inventive and challenge some very specific skills. You'll have to score a number of points on a limited number of jumps, grind a length of rail before you get to the bottom of the hill, or pull off a number of hand-plants before time runs out--and these are just for starters. One of our favorite recurring challenges is where you have to make it through a course while touching the snow as little as possible. Every time you touch the snow, a countdown clock starts ticking, and if it reaches zero before you reach the finish line, you're disqualified. Events like this add some amazing variety to the action in SSX On Tour.   Having graduated at the top of our class at Rock 'n Roll High School, we're ready to go on tour.   The big sell in SSX 3 was the streaming technology used to create that game's seamless, one-mountain feel and to lay out courses that could last for nearly a full hour. SSX On Tour still takes place on a single mountain, and there are still plenty of lengthy courses, though the navigation is done entirely through a rather authentic-looking snow resort trail map. There are no big leaps in technology in On Tour, but there are plenty of under-the-hood adjustments and additions. Superficially, the biggest addition to SSX On Tour's gameplay is the ability to put your rider on skis as well as snowboards. This opens up a whole new set of aerial maneuvers, but its impact on the actual controls is pretty nominal. More significant is the way that SSX On Tour handles massive aerial stunts. ""Ubertricks"" have turned into ""monster tricks,"" and instead of holding a shoulder button and a face button in tandem to pull off these natural-law-defying maneuvers, you simply hold the right analog stick in a specific direction. You still need to fill up your boost meter by pulling off lesser tricks, such as aerial grabs, rail grinds, and hand-plants in order to access these aforementioned maneuvers. Some might frown on how much easier it is to pull off these monster tricks. Frankly, the trick system has always been mostly for show in SSX, and making it easier to pull off big tricks just makes for a more exciting show.      SSX 3 reveled in its wide-open, uncharted levels, which led to a really cohesive gameworld, but also made for some tedious stretches of track. SSX On Tour is a much meaner machine, dealing out tracks with much more focused, tenacious designs. One of the side effects is the preponderance of lengthy rail-grinding lines for you to pursue, which lead to some of the game's most outrageous moments, such as when you slide your way through a loop, or grind on a helicopter's landing skids while it's in the air.    It's like Burnout on ice…without the mind-boggling property damage.   You'll also notice that SSX On Tour no longer takes place on a closed course, and you can expect to (literally) run into other random skiers, snowboarders, and general winter sports enthusiasts on the mountain. In a rather obvious homage to Criterion's Burnout series, you can get a little bump on your boost meter when you have a close call or you run into a random person, though a direct collision will slow you down significantly. Actually, there are a lot of similarities between SSX and Burnout, not the least of which is a really amazing sense of speed. SSX On Tour definitely moves faster than any of its predecessors, and its sensation of speed is complemented by some great motion blur effects and a sound design that adjusts dynamically to the in-game action.    At slower speeds, you'll hear everything on the mountain--the sound that your board or skis make changes as you cut across ice and snow of different densities, the chatter of other people on the mountain, and the distant sounds of wildlife--but once you start burning up your boost meter, everything kind of tunes out, save for the whistle of the wind rushing past you. Sometimes the sound seems to drop out at moments when you're not really doing anything too death defying, but it's really effective more often than not. The game also features a great soundtrack of licensed music, with a distinct jean-jacketed, horn-throwing bent to it. The blend of indie rock, punk, hip-hop, and dance music is pretty predictable, though the pedigree is better than average, with critical favorites like Bloc Party, Diplo, Queens of the Stone Age, and LCD Soundsystem all contributing tracks. What really stands out, though, are the classic heavy-metal tracks by Def Leppard, Motorhead, Scorpions, Iron Maiden, and the godfather of heavy metal himself, Dio. You might not necessarily expect this throwback metal to work in the context of a snowboarding game, but it's a perfect fit for On Tour's crazy visual aesthetics.    SSX 3 for the PlayStation 2 featured an online multiplayer component that was, well, kind of half-assed. Rather than attempt to make a more fully-realized and entertaining online mode, On Tour ditches the mode entirely, which is sort of disappointing. The game still features a split-screen, two-player mode, though. It's technically proficient, though the level of detail gets bumped down and we noticed occasional frame rate hitches. Multiplayer has never been one of the big draws in SSX, though that doesn't lessen our hopes that EA will get it right one day.    The EA Trax program finally begins to redeem itself with SSX On Tour.   With the online multiplayer out of the picture, the differences between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube versions of SSX On Tour are few. Much like NBA Street 3 for the GameCube, SSX On Tour features Mario, Luigi, and Peach as playable characters in the quick play mode (kind of a throwaway feature, but one that we had a hard time not reveling in anyway). The GameCube version is also unfortunately saddled with a less-stable frame rate and a few other graphical rough edges. There aren't any detectable technical differences between the PS2 and Xbox versions, but using the four shoulder buttons on the Dual Shock 2 is much easier than using the triggers plus the black and white buttons on the s-controller, making PlayStation 2 our preferred platform for SSX On Tour.    But no matter which platform you go with, you're going to end up with a really fun game. The subversive style of SSX On Tour is unlike anything the series has seen before, and it's pretty unique in the overall world of video games. The game expertly balances the fresh and the familiar and creates an engrossing experience that will have fans falling for SSX all over again, while undoubtedly bringing plenty of newcomers into the fold.  


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1041,NBA 2K6 ,8.6," While the tweaks to isomotion and shooting are the most obvious improvements made to an already solid basketball simulation, it's the leaps forward in artificial intelligence that ultimately define NBA ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/9/8/2219698-box_nba2k6.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nba-2k6-review/1900-6134739/,pos,"
  Sports games are often knocked for only being evolutionary from year to year. The really jaded among us dismiss the yearly releases of football, basketball, baseball, and hockey games as nothing more than roster updates. The more reasonable among us know that there are only so many ways we can translate the act of throwing a ball into a hoop or striking a ball with a stick. While not quite a revolutionary step, NBA 2K6 did take a big chance with the modifications made to its isomotion juke system and the shot stick control. And, for the most part, the changes turned out to be fantastic. While the tweaks to isomotion and shooting are the most obvious improvements made to an already solid basketball simulation, it's the leaps forward in artificial intelligence that ultimately define NBA 2K6's quality.   NBA 2K6 is easily the best-looking basketball game so far this year.   As far as presentation goes, NBA 2K6 continues the tradition of fabulous-looking basketball games from Visual Concepts. The accuracy of players' faces is excellent for the most part. Player models are extremely detailed on the Xbox and slightly less so on the PS2. There's little to complain about aside from skin and clothing textures being a little shinier than they need to be. What really makes the game stand out from a visual perspective is the unparalleled wealth of animations used for player movement, collisions, and more. You'll find a ton of flexibility and variety in the way players move and act, whether it's dribbling the ball, defending, rebounding, or even saving a ball from going out of bounds. The animations do pop once in a while, which can be distracting, but overall the fluidity and detail of the player models in NBA 2K6 are fantastic. Unfortunately, on replays the frame rate suffers a lot on both platforms, and the PS2 can get chunky from time to time during regular gameplay. But that's a small price to pay for the overall quality of the game's visuals. The court sounds and crowd noise are as good as ever, and the announcing in the game has improved greatly. Kevin Harlan and Kenny Smith take over for Bill Fitzgerald and Bill Walton from last year's game. Harlan gets overexcited, as he does on TV, but he's still a vast improvement over Fitzgerald. Sure, the soundtrack is forgettable, but getting rid of Walton more than makes up for that. The one thing we're really not sure about is the egregious amount of advertising in the game. Having to see a ""Powerbar replay"" of all major highlights or the Toyota-branded starting lineups is a lot like TV, but do we need it in the game?    Let's move on to the good stuff. The change made to NBA 2K's isomotion system in 2K6 is likely the most dramatic one you'll notice if you're a veteran of the series. First of all, you no longer have a turbo button in the traditional sense. Instead, the right and left triggers serve as ""aggressive modifiers,"" which change how the game interprets your input with the passing and shooting buttons, and most importantly, with the left analog stick. Instead of wiggling the right analog stick to unleash canned and stilted juke animations, the new isomotion combines your movement and your jukes into the left analog stick. Without holding down any trigger buttons you can simply move the left stick to move your player around. Holding down the aggressive modifier and moving your character in one direction will cause him to sprint. Wiggle back and forth and you'll lower your shoulder and do a crossover. Whirl the stick partway in one direction and then the other, and your ball handler will fake a spin and then come back the other way. Similarly, you can use the left stick plus a trigger button to ""emote"" wraparound dribbles, jab steps, and step-back moves. Finally, the 2K series has jukes that are just as natural and logical to pull off and chain together as in EA's NBA Live series--isomotion is no longer the redheaded stepchild to freestyle. It's just as good now, and arguably better. How so? Since your right thumb doesn't have to be used to make your juke moves, it's free to shoot or pass right out of your fake. It's a subtle thing, but advanced players will probably appreciate the added flexibility.   It also plays the best, thanks to advances in the control scheme.   So what's the right analog stick used for now? Believe it or not, it's used for shooting. In the same way that basketball video game players have been emoting ballhandling moves for years in most basketball games, the new shot stick feature in NBA 2K6 lets players do the same with their shots. If you stand still and toggle up on the stick, you'll raise up for a standard jumper. Releasing the stick releases the ball, just as if you pressed a shooting button in any basketball game. Toggle away from the basket and your player will put up a fadeaway J. On the dribble drive, you can use the shot stick to attempt a dunk or layup right over the top of a defender, or you can toggle to either side to lean around for a cleaner look at the basket. Out of the post, the shot stick can be used to attempt turnarounds, hook shots, or even drop steps. It takes some getting used to for sure, and when you start, you may even forget to use it (a standard shooting button is still available for those who don't like this feature). But once you do get used to the shot stick, you'll appreciate the flexibility it brings.    The tweaks made to both isomotion and the introduction of the shot stick in NBA 2K6 represent what is probably the biggest fundamental shift in basketball game control mechanics since freestyle control was introduced in NBA Live 2003. These controls are not necessarily easy for a casual fan to pick up, but hardcore hoopsters will definitely feel rewarded for putting in the time to learn them. These interface changes all mesh well with the existing feel and design of the NBA 2K series. Players still move with a real sense of momentum. Aside from some of the backpedaling animation, there's no sense of ice skating at all in the movement. The presence of two pass buttons, both regular and lead passing (throwing a pass to a teammate heading for the basket), also contributes a lot to the game's authentic feel. Rebounding looks and feels right, with little or no ""vacuuming"" of the ball to the hand. Our only real complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a way to get in a real defensive stance to help stay in front of ball handlers. You really have to pay close attention to keep in front of your man. But if you do, you'll be rewarded with realistic-looking player collisions, and you'll actually be able to steer your man off the direction he wants to move. Defensively, Visual Concepts has added a ""strip and rip"" steal system using the right analog stick, which lets you poke at the ball with either hand, slap down, or punch upward. This is also hard to get used to, but if you have excellent timing then you'll find that you can strip players just as they go up for a dunk or layup, or punch freshly rebounded balls out of the hands of big men.     Beyond the changes to the interface, one of the biggest improvements made to NBA 2K6 is with its artificial intelligence. If you're a big fan of the NBA, you'll appreciate that the teams and players in NBA 2K6 really do seem to play like their real-life counterparts. Remember how badly Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire would light up opponents using the high pick and roll? If you don't keep Nash's movement in check, they'll do it to you in 2K6. You'll see Rip Hamilton run through screens and attack off of curls; Dwayne Wade and Shaq will run their inside/outside two-man game; and you'll see Kobe as he tries to take over games by himself. As far as team play goes, you'll notice real nuances here, too. Teams like the Pistons and Spurs really feel like they crash the boards hard with their guards, while running teams such as the Mavs and Suns will often choose to release their guards and look for transition opportunities. The AI in the game is challenging even at the default difficulty. You can still shoot a high percentage, but you'll really need to work hard to find open shots by breaking down the defense off the dribble or by working the ball around, and possibly even dipping into your team's playbook. Playing defense is also a challenge and requires a good amount of concentration, as the computer will look to exploit mismatches or just sloppy, lazy defense. If you don't get a hand in the face of good jump-shooters on every shot attempt, you can expect to get lit up by the likes of Peja Stojakovic or Mike Miller from the arc. You'll also see the computer often isolate its best ball handler on one side, so if you get beaten off the dribble, you'll need to be extra quick with help coming from weak-side rotation.  Association mode has gotten a face-lift…and more.  Aside from the basic gameplay, 2K6 has also greatly overhauled its franchise mode, called Association. Last year's franchise mode gave some interesting ideas, like having meetings with players, and a card-style minigame to simulate individual games. Unfortunately, a lot of these ideas seemed out of place or just didn't work very well, so they've been scrapped entirely. What we've got instead is year-round scouting of prospects. Much like last year's College Hoops 2K5, you can send scouts to evaluate prospects over the course of the year in preparation for the draft. As you reach the offseason, you can bring in these prospects for individual workouts and actually play with them in games or scrimmages to see how they actually feel. There's also a great new system for developing your existing players. By spending training points, you can run your players through a series of drills that are actually minigames. Succeed in the minigame, and your player will gain in skills based on the drill. Put in enough time on a young player with a lot of potential, and he can blossom into a new superstar. Practices no longer weigh down on your team chemistry. You can schedule these on a daily basis in hopes of giving a temporary boost in skill to your team on an upcoming game. However, these practices can also be detrimental to your team's fatigue. Finally, there's a new system where the game's various owners are modeled. You must attempt to run the franchise to their specifications, whether it's winning a championship, being profitable, or just improving the team. A new nested menu interface also makes navigation easier this year. If there's anything to complain about, it's that there might actually be too much going on with Association. But, thankfully, most of these little details don't need to be handled manually.   The 24/7 mode has also been addressed this year, and it's now tied into the real-life EBC, or Entertainer's Basketball Challenge. At the heart of it, though, it's still a basketball RPG and it still involves a lot of work to create your player and to improve his skill by playing in various challenges against a ladder of real NBA players and celebrities. You'll earn new teammates and points that you can use to buy gear, like Nike shoes and clothes. The ultimate goal is to build up the best possible team to go into the EBC tournament at Rucker Park and win it. In the end, though, the overall feel and design of 24/7 is still the same. Some people are going to be really into putting time in a created baller and leveling him up. Most people will probably pass over this mode and see it as just a distraction from the real meat of NBA 2K6.   It's not for the faint of heart, but if you love hoops, you should get NBA 2K6.  Other features in NBA 2K6 include the usual tournament, season, and street modes, where you can play street-style games like two on two, three on three, or 21 in various real-life and fantasy blacktop courts using NBA players. The crib is also back, and it gives you something semi-interesting to do with all those points you're earning by playing games of NBA 2K6. What's more noteworthy is that the VIP system popularized in the NFL 2K games has made its way into NBA 2K6. As with the NFL VIPs, here you can examine these and learn a wealth of stats about your own playing tendencies and trade them around with your friends. The online functionality of NBA 2K6 is about what you'd expect. You can get online with either the PS2 or Xbox versions and open yourself up to quick matches, tournaments, leaderboards, and leagues. You can also try setting up street mode games. Our testing on prerelease servers was mostly positive, with smooth gameplay and little latency to speak of on good connections.   NBA 2K6 isn't for the casual basketball fan who doesn't know a pick and roll from picking his nose. The difficulty of the game, and new interface nuances, may be a little overwhelming for someone who's more attuned to something like NBA Jam or NBA Street. But for those looking for a quality simulation basketball experience, NBA 2K6 is a resounding slam dunk and is easily recommendable to any fan of the series or to any hardcore basketball fan in general.  
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1042,Resistance: Fall of Man ,8.6, Resistance successfully combines many of the best qualities from other great first-person shooters with spectacular visuals and a few novel twists.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/7/5/2/2213752-box_resfom.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/resistance-fall-of-man-review/1900-6161706/,pos,"
  If you're going to make a first-person shooter, you might as well take aim to deliver the best of what this style of gaming has to offer. That's what Ratchet & Clank developer Insomniac Games must have done with Resistance: Fall of Man. One of the most highly anticipated titles in the PlayStation 3 launch lineup, Resistance is a technically impressive, well-designed, intense action game that unmistakably draws inspiration from some of the finest recent examples of similar games. Resistance doesn't attempt anything wildly different than other first-person shooters out there, but by offering a strong selection of interesting weapons, plenty of ruthless foes to shoot them at, good level design, and an excellent presentation, it accomplishes what most such games fail to do. A fully featured multiplayer mode for up to 40 players rounds out an exciting campaign in what's an all-around great effort and a promising example of what the PlayStation 3 can do.   Nathan Hale's got no time for chitchat. He'll combat the Chimera almost single-handedly in Resistance's action-packed campaign.   Resistance takes place in a grim alternate reality in which World War II never happened, yet something possibly even worse happened instead. As political tensions run high in the middle of the 20th century, a monstrous race of horrifying creatures suddenly shows up and starts killing everyone. Initially presumed to be a Russian biological weapon, this fiendish species is known as the Chimera. It quickly overwhelms Asia and most of Europe before it focuses attention on the United Kingdom. In the game, you play as a no-nonsense American soldier named Nathan Hale, who is sent in to reinforce the UK's defenses. A brush with death early on gives Hale a unique perspective of his foe and, before long, he's lone-wolfing it against the worst that the Chimera has to offer. As Hale, you'll blast your way through the devastated streets of England and also find yourself deep within the enemy's own territory as you struggle to survive and turn the tide of a losing battle.    The story is told from the perspective of a different officer who briefly interacts with Hale during his missions against a seemingly unstoppable enemy. Her solemn narration is easy enough to follow but not particularly engaging because by her own admission, she doesn't really know what's going on in Hale's head or what's going on with the Chimera. Brief but nicely done cinematic cutscenes using the game's 3D engine at least serve to give Nathan Hale a believably concerned look between battles. Still black-and-white images and charts that are made to look as if they could have come from the early '50s also help set the mood and premise of each level in the game's more than 10 main stages. However, the story in Resistance is there mostly to justify a number of fairly conventional, though very well done, first-person shooter battles. You'll learn a bit about the Chimera as you fight, and there's some resolution once you finally finish the campaign after countless grueling shoot-outs. But Hale's character is never developed and he almost never speaks, and the plot has some noticeable gaps. Ultimately, this is a game whose personality mostly comes across when you're shooting something. The Chimera and their ugly spider-like features make them easy to hate straightaway.    Resistance controls just like other first-person shooters on consoles. You use the two analog sticks to move and aim, while the left and right shoulder buttons trigger your weapon's primary and alternate firing modes. The game takes a few small liberties with certain conventions, but none that will substantially change how you'll play it if you're used to playing similar stuff. Some of these tweaks to the formula have to do with how you recover your health between shoot-outs. In Resistance's campaign, your health bar is divided up into four quadrants, which automatically recharges up to the nearest quadrant if you avoid getting hit for a little while. This isn't quite like what's become trendy because of games such as the sequels to Halo or Call of Duty, in which your health recharges completely between firefights. Here, when your health is low, you can still survive the typical encounter but you'll really need to be on your guard. Also, unlike in those games, Resistance lets you pick up and carry each new weapon you find, which may not seem as realistic as having room for only a few guns, but it means you get an increasingly powerful, all-purpose arsenal at your disposal. The game transparently saves your progress as you fight through the campaign and uses a checkpoint system in mid-mission. Checkpoints can be fairly sparse at times, creating tension and the need to replay some tough battles repeatedly. But because the combat is dynamic and exciting, having to do this usually isn't a bad thing. However, the game does get almost punishingly hard near the end at the default difficulty setting, forcing a little too much trial and error. There's an easier and a harder difficulty setting as well.   Conventional shooter controls that are matched with some unconventional weapons and unusually good graphics make Resistance feel familiar but distinct.   It's worth noting that the motion sensor in the PS3's stock Sixaxis controller is put to limited but oddly likable use in this game. For instance, there's this one ghoulish Chimera creature that attempts to sidle up to you and grab you by the throat. Should you let this happen, you can shake the controller to break free from its grip. Because this effect is used sparingly, it's surprising and effective. In multiplayer matches, you might also catch fire if you're torched by an enemy flamethrower. You can't stop, drop, and roll, but by shaking the Sixaxis, you can put the flames out. It's a simple, fairly intuitive way to make you feel a bit more connected to what's happening onscreen.    What helps to distinguish Resistance from other first-person shooters is the quality of its weapon design, its enemy artificial intelligence, and its presentation. While these aspects of the game are not substantially different or vastly superior to what's been done before, they're right up there with the best of what such games have had to offer. Resistance doesn't include any real-world weaponry but lets you brandish an impressive variety of powerful make-believe automatics and energy weapons, many of which have imaginative alternate-firing modes. Your starting weapon, a powerful rapid-firing rifle with a 50-round clip and a mounted grenade launcher, will be a mainstay throughout the campaign. You'll also quickly find the Chimeran equivalent, called the bullseye. This is an energy rifle that has the unique ability to fire homing beacons, which causes all of your bullets to zero in on those beacons. So it's possible for you to tag an enemy, then step behind cover and fire straight into the air as those shots automatically change trajectory to find their mark. Another remarkable weapon is the auger, a massive rifle whose shots burrow straight through solid surfaces, making them very difficult to evade. Better yet, the auger can form an energy barrier to protect the user against incoming fire. You'll gain a real appreciation for this fearsome weapon during the campaign.     Not all of the weapons are noteworthy because the lineup includes your fairly typical shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and so on. Interestingly, when you finish the campaign for the first time, you'll unlock some additional weapons that you can find if you go through it again. You can also find these in the game's multiplayer mode. If there's an issue with the game's guns, it's that you wind up depending on the first two weapons most of the time. Each of these weapons is a fairly standard point-and-shoot affair, so it's perfectly effective to just stick a target in your reticle and go full-auto on it. Resistance definitely has more of a run-and-gun feel to it than a deliberately paced, tactical shooter. However, you still need to inch your way into enemy territory. You'll also need to use grenades to disrupt enemy formations because getting surrounded by your enemies brings swift death and a visit back to the nearest checkpoint. Resistance winds up feeling quite a bit like the Halo games in how it balances a simple, action-packed style of shooting with a basic need to frequently take a defensive position and wait for opportunities against entrenched foes.   The chimera aptly fit the profile of your typically ugly, nasty monstrous menace.   The game presents the Chimera as a virtually unstoppable foe, while Nathan Hale seems uniquely capable of surviving their attacks. In reality, they're not quite as tough as they look--some concentrated gunfire will bring any of them down eventually. You'll also pick up on how heavily injured Chimera troopers tend to stagger to their knees, which is the perfect time for you to finish them off and the wrong time to move on to the next target. You'll face a variety of Chimera during the course of the game, including some very predictable spider-like things that burst forth from egg sacs and rush you mindlessly. The vast majority of the time, however,  you'll be fighting squads of Chimeran hybrids. Typically armed with bullseye rifles, these soldiers are quite effective at using cover, as well as flanking and rushing tactics. They'll also flush you out of hiding with one of their hedgehog grenades, which send deadly needles flying in every direction when they explode. Fighting against the hybrids grows to feel a bit monotonous in spots because they're by far the most common type of foe you'll face. Yet it's a testament to the quality of the game's artificial intelligence and presentation that battling these forces is often quite thrilling.    The nature of the combat against the Chimera changes quite dramatically depending on where you're fighting. Much of the shooting in Resistance occurs at medium and long ranges as you, any fellow soldiers, and the Chimera move from cover to cover, taking potshots. However, you can also look forward to plenty of room-to-room fighting, as well as shoot-outs from within dimly lit, claustrophobic corridors. Even if you don't usually get a good sense of a desperate war being waged, you get a good sense of scale from the different environments in the game. Battles can be particularly fun when you're joined by friendly soldiers and get to intercept enemies focused on taking down these computer-controlled comrades. But there are never more than a handful of humans there to help you out, and they'll probably wind up dead soon anyway. The game does have a few nice moments in which you're able to save another man's life as he's about to be executed by a Chimeran monster. Yet this aspect seems like it could have been more fleshed out because the game does little to make you care for your disposable allies, who run into combat shouting typical ""we're under fire"" platitudes.   A few vehicle-driving sequences are thrown into the campaign for good measure.   For variety, Resistance throws a few vehicle-driving sequences into the mix. And if you squinted your eyes during these parts, you could mistake them for Halo. Piloting a highly destructive tank or driving a jeep with a machine gunner in back does make for a good diversion, though these vehicles are so powerful that they make you wonder how humanity lost so badly to the Chimera in the first place. Then again, the Chimera have a few imposingly large vehicles and creatures of their own. Yet the way that the human vehicles make you feel practically indestructible undermines some of the sense that you're fighting an uphill battle. Even so, these sequences are rare and different enough from the on-foot running and gunning that they're a welcome part of the campaign. While fairly straightforward, the campaign does a great job of never stooping to make you backtrack, solve puzzles, or otherwise waste time doing anything other than fighting against powerful foes. It does this for a good 10 to 12 hours, culminating in a series of difficult showdowns.    There are several good reasons to go back to the campaign multiple times, including the extra weapons that get unlocked after you finish the game once. You can optionally play through the whole campaign cooperatively in a split-screen view, though it's too bad you can't play cooperatively online. Co-op mode naturally invites some new types of tactics, and it's somewhat easier than playing solo because you can revive your partner if he goes down, which is a good way to take the edge off of the hard difficulty mode. The campaign also lets you dig around for unique pieces of military intelligence that are scattered throughout the levels, which give some additional insight into the Chimeran menace and the back story. Finally, the campaign features a series of unlockable challenges that are called skill points, which are achieved by accomplishing certain specific feats. For instance, you can earn one by roasting several bad guys with a single air-fuel grenade. These points are tallied up to unlock some bonus features, such as concept art galleries.    Of course, there's an entire multiplayer mode to keep you busy in addition to the campaign. Multiplayer features a variety of maps (based on areas from the campaign), some of which accommodate smaller eight-player or 16-player matches, while others are intended for full-on 40-player war. There are six different multiplayer variants in all, including your conventional deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture-the-flag types. There's also a last-man-standing-style mode called ""conversion""; and two base assault modes, called ""meltdown"" and ""breach,"" which are reminiscent of Unreal Tournament 2004's onslaught mode in how they're set up to make players fight over specific points on each map. Playing on prerelease servers with a full 40 players, we experienced smooth, lag-free battles in each of these different modes of play, although your mileage may vary. You can also play over a network or try to squeeze some enjoyment out of a split-screen mode for up to four players. Resistance's online multiplayer interface lets you easily find ranked or custom, unranked matches. It also includes support for setting up competitive clans, a ""party"" system for seeking out online matches together with your friends, and a ""buddy"" system for keeping track of which of your friends are online. You'll also rank up and earn special insignias based on your multiplayer accomplishments.   The human and Chimeran sides have some distinct gameplay differences in the multiplayer modes of Resistance.   The most interesting aspect of Resistance's multiplayer mode is that you can play as either the humans or the Chimeran hybrids, and the two sides are quite different. Humans can quickly sprint from point to point and have access to an onscreen radar that points out both friends and foes. Chimerans make bigger targets and don't have a radar but can enter into a rage at the touch of a button, which temporarily makes them faster, stronger, tougher...and capable of seeing through walls. Although either type of character can use any weapon once they pick it up, the respective sides also start off with their standard-issue rifles. Overall, the differences between the two sides are pronounced yet seem nicely balanced. The multiplayer modes typically force you to change sides in between rounds, which also helps break up the pace of these matches. Even if it boils down to the same type of thing that other shooters have been doing for a while, the well-designed weaponry, exciting presentation, and support for a large number of players makes Resistance's multiplayer mode impressive.    Resistance is going to invite a lot of close scrutiny on the most superficial level. And in spite of a few easily dismissed rough edges, it looks fantastic. Much like the rest of the game, the quality of the visuals might not be vastly superior to what other graphically impressive shooters have delivered in the past, but they're at least as good and marginally better in most ways. The Chimeran hybrids are great to see in action, and you'll likely appreciate how errant gunfire tends to puncture the tubing on their strange backpacks. The game features some great-looking flame effects and some strikingly impressive yet underutilized glass-shattering. It also features plenty of excellent lighting and weapon fire, as well as beautifully rendered, realistic environments. Although, some of the visual design, such as for the Chimera's ominous-looking steel barriers that wall off portions of England's cities, evokes a real Half-Life 2 vibe. Resistance doesn't always succeed at clearly defining its own visual style, but the visuals still are terrific and will substantially contribute to your enjoyment of the game as a whole. It helps that the frame rate stays smooth and steady even when the action gets very intense. Bear in mind that Resistance looks much better when viewed on a high-definition display; on a standard television set, the game's visuals seem understated and may be hard to distinguish from those of other sci-fi-themed shooters.   It's good news that Resistance plays about as good as it looks.   The audio doesn't give up much slack either. Powerful weapon effects reverberate loudly throughout the game, though the human rifle's roar is much more dramatic than the bullseye's high-pitched whine. The sound of stray gunfire hitting everything around you will be more than enough to make you look for cover. And the Chimera sound appropriately menacing, if predictable, with their low, guttural growls. Resistance's musical score is fittingly bombastic, symphonic stuff and picks up sparingly during particularly key moments during the campaign. It's not especially memorable, but it works very well to deliver some of the campaign's most exciting sequences. Besides the narration, there's not a lot of speech in the game, either. But what's there is fine, even if the British soldiers you'll be fighting alongside seem just a little too upbeat about the dire circumstances. As for Resistance's other technical merits, loading times between missions are noticeable but not bad in spite of how the game frequently writes to the PS3's hard drive between missions, presumably to help keep loading times to a minimum.    If you consider yourself a fan of first-person shooters, then you really owe it to yourself to give Resistance: Fall of Man a shot. Whether that means taking the plunge for a PlayStation 3, playing one over at your filthy-rich friend's house, or whatever else it's going to take is beside the point. What matters is that developer Insomniac Games took the best aspects of some of the best first-person shooters from the past couple of years, added some great weapons and visual flourishes, and put it all together just in time for the PS3's launch.   


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1043,MLB '06: The Show ,8.6," Despite not having a few of the features that its PS2 counterpart has, MLB '06: The Show for the PSP is a rock-solid baseball sim and a delight to the ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426884-2211641-box_mlb06ts.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-06-the-show-review/1900-6145171/,pos,"
  Not long after the launch of the PlayStation Portable last year, Sony published the plainly titled MLB, which was basically just a quick-and-dirty port of the company's PlayStation 2 baseball game with the graphics dumbed down and some features removed. Those cutbacks notwithstanding, MLB was well received because the gameplay was solid and the presentation was still snazzy overall. Once again, the PSP version of MLB '06: The Show isn't quite a pixel-for-pixel, feature-for-feature duplicate of its PS2 counterpart, but you'd be surprised at how small the gap in quality between the two games is this time around.    Absent last year, but included in this year's game are batter walk-ups, instant replays, and homerun celebrations.   This sophomore outing improves upon its predecessor in nearly every way. The previous game didn't have batter-walk-up animations, TV-style replays, or home run celebrations. This latest installment does. Last year's game offered a modest set of play modes, the most involved of which was a season mode that only allowed one full season of play. This year's game, by pleasant contrast, offers a full boat of play modes. Offline, you can play games in the exhibition, season, and career modes, or boil it down to the batter-versus-pitcher matchup in the home run derby and king of the diamond modes. Best of all, the season and career modes both let you manage your chosen team for multiple seasons. Wi-Fi support allows for local and online multiplayer games. The online mode has been fleshed out this year to include buddy lists and instant messaging functions, as well as a news feed that can be read online or off.    Curiously, the PSP game is still missing a few of the features that the PS2 game has. Some of them are no big loss, such as the rivalry mode or the two legends teams. Also not so bothersome is the lack of a franchise mode, since the season mode does at least let you perform many of the functions that a traditional franchise mode would. You can draft rookies, make trades, sign free agents, negotiate contracts, shuffle players back and forth between the minors, and juggle lineups and injuries. What is bothersome, however, is the outright absence of any player- and roster-editing functions. The PS2 game has a full range of editing functions so that players can keep the game up-to-date. That these functions were left out of the PSP game is absurd.    Brand-spanking new to the PSP game this year is the career mode, which lets you create a rookie player and guide his career from its humble beginnings in the minors up through to retirement from the bigs. The CPU will handle lineups, trades, and substitutions for you, but you can still control the players out in the field, if you want to. Every time your player gets a hit or makes a flashy play, he'll earn training points that you can put toward upgrades in 18 categories, such as speed, durability, and plate discipline. Meanwhile, an interaction menu lets you call team meetings, beg for playing time, complain to the media, and request a trade or call-up. Good performances will earn your player more playing time, better contract offers, and additional promotions, whereas negative performances could see him sitting on the bench or dwelling in double-A limbo.     As for how the game is played on the field, all of the various interfaces offer simple, basic controls for beginners and numerous optional features for experts. Hitting primarily involves pressing a button to swing the bat. On the basepaths, you can advance and retreat runners with the shoulder buttons. For fielding, you simply need to use the analog nub to move the fielder and the main buttons to select which base to throw to. By pressing the button before the fielder catches the ball, you can ""preload"" the throw, which will result in a smoother transition and a faster release. Pitching has the most complicated interface, in that for every pitch you have to go through the steps of selecting a pitch, aiming the throw, and setting break and accuracy using the now-standard release-point meter. Aiming can be a pain since the PSP's analog nub is so sensitive, but there aren't any time constraints placed on the pitching process, so it's not a deal breaker.   Career mode lets you manage all aspects of your player's career, including locker room communication, front office interactions, and training hours.   Experts and quick learners will want to take advantage of the numerous optional features inherent to each interface, which provide pinpoint control over nearly every aspect of play. The hitting interface includes ""guess pitch"" and ""guess location"" functions, which, if you guess them correctly, will improve the quality of contact and outright show you where the pitch will cross the plate. You can also adjust the angle of your swing and specify whether to swing for contact or power, which is a new feature this year. On the bases, you can control runners as a group or individually, and preload stolen base attempts by simply pressing the left shoulder button and the main button that corresponds to the runner's current base. One thing the game doesn't let players do is specify the type of slide a runner makes when approaching the bag. That would be a nitpicky feature to have included, to be sure, but every other baseball video game has it, so why not this one? Fielding, the game's most straightforward interface, only has one optional function, which is the ability to attempt a leaping catch by mashing the right shoulder button. Meanwhile, the already feature-rich pitching interface also lets you perform pitchouts, intentional walks, and pickoff throws, if you so desire.     Budding managerial wannabes will appreciate the different management functions that the game offers. Before the game starts, you can check the disabled list and adjust your lineup and pitching rotation. During the game, the pause menu lets you warm up relief pitchers, substitute players, and make visits to the mound. You can also press and hold the select button to bring up a scouting report that shows the pitcher's pitch count, stamina, and confidence, as well as the batter's confidence rating and personal hitting chart. One of the few aspects left out of the player's control is defensive positioning. That will surely annoy people that like to micromanage the alignment of their infield and outfield, but the CPU does at least seem to be a good judge of when to put on the shift or position infielders at double-play depth.    In addition to the rich controls, MLB '06: The Show also puts forth a remarkably authentic portrayal of what actually happens during live baseball games. The frequencies of pop flies, ground balls, errors, putouts, and double plays seem to be in line with reality. Plays don't seem preordained either. On the mound, the CPU does a wonderful job of mixing up pitches and changing speeds, and it will intentionally throw junk pitches outside the strike zone just to trip you up. Just as they do in real life, pitchers tire out and lose their stuff as the innings go by. Again this year, every player has his own confidence measure, which influences the quality of contact for hitters and the overall effectiveness of pitchers. A player's confidence increases with timely hitting, good plays, and strike pitches, and decreases when strikeouts and errors happen or hits are given up. Unlike last year's game, confidence in MLB '06 can be built up or torn down with merely a few pitches or a single at bat. Its effects also seem more evident this time around, as you can really notice the change in a player's abilities when confidence is at one of the extremes. Another subtle improvement made to MLB '06 is that ace pitchers now get the benefit of the doubt over rookies and scrappers. The video game renditions of Roger Clemens and Bartolo Colon will get strike calls in their favor on pitches that are clearly outside the zone--as they do in real life--whereas the umps typically enforce the zone for everyone else. Four different difficulty settings are available, and they all seem about right. If, however, you're not happy with a specific aspect, such as player contact or CPU arm accuracy, you can adjust 16 individual sliders in the tuning menu.    The stadiums are beautiful and, hey, the line-ups display player portraits now.   Owners of last year's game may recall that it had a few minor, albeit recurring bugs. Fielders would sometimes throw the ball into the stands, catchers would sometimes let pitches sail past them, and, once in a while, the CPU would just let the ball land and do nothing while your base runners rounded the bases. In this latest game, fielders no longer give the fans an impromptu souvenir, although those other two bugs still happen, but with far less regularity.    Online play is also much smoother this year. Buddy lists, multiple game rooms, and an instant messaging function make it easier to find and set up games. Furthermore, the network-related hiccups that often plagued games last year are much less prevalent this time out. If your connection to the other player is poor, the controls will still lag terribly. But when the connection is good, the controls and timing are pretty much identical to how they are in offline games.    Tying everything together is the game's presentation, a combination of crisp graphics and sublime audio that do a great job of conveying the sights and sounds of the ballpark while also somewhat duplicating the look and feel of a television broadcast. Player bodies and stadium layouts are right on the money, for the most part. Miscellaneous details, such as dirty uniforms and animated stadium billboards, also help contribute to the big-league atmosphere. Beyond the outfield, you'll notice that the cloud cover gradually moves by as time passes, and in some stadiums you can even see cars driving by on the highways in the distance. Pretty much the only knock against the visuals is that the baselines and the edges of the field sometimes become jagged or distorted in the replay and walk-up views, probably because the hardware doesn't employ antialiasing. Apart from that, the graphics are generally crisp and clear. With regards to the audio, the crack of the bat and other such cues are fairly authentic. The crowd also adjusts its volume level according to what's happening on the field, although it doesn't chant for specific players like the crowd in the PS2 game does.   Scoreboards update to show the current line score and scores from around the league.   This latest game's broadcast-style nuances are livelier and more dynamic than those of the previous game, mainly because batter walk-ups, instant replays, and home run celebrations have been incorporated into the presentation. During gameplay, there are also many more play animations to see. Not that the previous game was lacking, but it's nice to see a wider variety of circus catches and bonehead bobbles, as well as all of the various things that fielders do while milling around between outs. The play-by-play audio is turned in by a three-man booth consisting of Matt Vasgersian, Dave Campbell, and Rex Hudler, who are all former players and current on-air personalities for various networks. Campbell and Hudler mainly chime in with quips and situational calls here and there, while Vasgersian handles all of the general player introductions and play-calling. Vasgersian is a joy to listen to. His delivery is eloquent and generally accurate, and his transitions are seamless, even when his in-game persona has to rapidly change gears to account for a surprise play or a player substitution. Owners of last year's game will notice that the commentators are more talkative this time around, and that they don't repeat themselves as often.    All told, MLB '06: The Show for the PSP is a rock-solid baseball sim. The absence of any sort of player- and roster-editing functions is really the game's only significant flaw. Otherwise, this portable marvel offers a healthy selection of play modes, has the intricate gameplay that fans crave, and puts forth the same level of audiovisual panache that its counterpart on the PS2 does.  
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1044,Tomb Raider ,8.5, Tomb Raider is the exploratory game you always wished you were playing when you were trying to solve Atari Raiders of the Lost Ark,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/3/4/22-134.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tomb-raider-review/1900-2535089/,pos,"
Lara Croft, the protagonist in Tomb Raider, has become a sort of unwitting spokesperson for Eidos' new computer adventure. As the cover girl for just about every hard copy gaming magazine this year, this globe-trotting, gun-happy lass had become the matron saint of a new revolution in 3D gaming before the title even hit the shelves. But does the game really live up to all the buildup? Well, seeing is believing when it comes to Tomb Raider, and playing the game with the Rendition or 3Dfx chip, which are sure to find a home soon in every serious gamer's computer tower (a supportive patch will be available online for these), should almost be a prerequisite. Featuring several stunningly rendered 3D worlds and many a cliff-hanging moment, Tomb Raider makes gamers pay for the whole seat, even though they only need the edge. As mentioned above, in Tomb Raider you play Lara Croft, a female Doc Savage who, tired of her wealthy English upbringing, has decided that dangerous adventuring is more her cup of tea. So she abandons a life of crustless cucumber sandwiches and piano lessons, eventually meeting a wealthy tycoon who hires her to retrieve a single artifact from a ruined temple in South America. After getting the artifact, you find out that the tycoon has sicked a bunch of her henchmen on you, and that the original piece you were sent in to retrieve is one of three hidden in various unplundered tombs around the world. Your adventures take place in several ""seven wonders"" scenarios, from Egyptian sphinxes, to Greek temples, to Atlantis (what game would be complete without it?), each with distinct puzzles and traps to negotiate.  In each level, you'll have to beware of the different predator animals, unidentifiable creatures, and henchmen lurking around. In many instances, you'll be pounced on unexpectedly by wolves, lions, gorillas, raptors, and gangling ""lava-monsters."" Lara has to execute daring rolls, jumps, and side-leaps to dodge these predators while attacking them. This is no time to join the wildlife preservation society; endangered species or not, you've got to slay these pests. Sometimes, at the end of a level, you'll have to go up against of the ""boss"" monsters, which range from a lumbering Tyranosaur to a huge ""torso-man"" who, if he snatches you with his giant mitts, will slam you around like a rag doll.  So, you're asking, what weapons can I use on these poor crypt-dwellers who are simply trying to sustain themselves in a sealed-up tomb? With a tap of the spacebar, Lara draws out her two revolvers which automatically target any man-eating creature in the vicinity. Other more effective weapons are picked up throughout the game, including a set of magnums, a shotgun, and an Uzi. Rounds for your default weapon are unlimited, but ammo for the other weapons has to be picked up. But killing is only half the fun in Tomb Raider, as Lara can perform a variety of actions to explore each eerie environment. Often you'll have to make Lara swim through convoluted caves to secret rooms (incidentally, this is some of the most realistic swimming movement you'll encounter in any game). Each level has a series of switches that you need to activate, some of which require you to heave huge blocks around and - this is probably the most fun part of the game - execute daredevil leaps to grab onto some faraway platform.  Tomb Raider is the exploratory game you always wished you were playing when you were trying to solve Atari Raiders of the Lost Ark.The variety of jumping and grabbing actions, the huge, sometimes vertigo-inducing worlds, and the smooth 3D graphics found in Tomb Raider are reminiscent of Mario 64, though the game's violent overtones and spooky ambiance definitely set it apart from the older title. On the down side though, some of Tomb Raider's puzzles are tedious, requiring the player to wander around a little bit too long. Graphically, it's a breakthrough game, but to obtain the spellbinding graphics that really make the gameplay a complete experience, you'll need one of the cards mentioned above. The avid 3D game enthusiast will probably shell out the extra bucks for one, especially if Quake is a resident game on her machine.
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1045,Tomb Raider ,8.5," Tomb Raider is simply a smart game, bursting with great touches.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/3/4/22-134.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tomb-raider-review/1900-2549874/,pos,"
Move over, Resident Evil. The new benchmark for 32-bit 3-D gaming is here. Tomb Raider combines slick graphics with a fantastically agile character and an excellent story, offering proof that the 32-bitters can hold their own with the Nintendo 64 and its plumber juggernaut. The most striking thing about Tomb Raider is its 3-D environment. Players will explore immense caverns, often bigger than the worlds in Mario 64 (with fewer polygons, but polygons don't guarantee greatness), and zero delay after the initial load. While Tomb Raider may not be as clean as the 64-bit Mario, it is very impressive nonetheless. What's more, it has a compelling storyline and a great Indiana Jones-style heroine, resulting in a much more interesting atmosphere. Fans of Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, and their gothic ilk may actually prefer Tomb Raider to Super Mario 64. As Lara, players walk, run, jump, dive, swim, roll, hurtle, shoot, and dodge their way through temples of doom, unveiling a mystery that seems to lead to a sunken continent. Gameplay favors puzzle solving and skillful maneuvering (making the right jump, finding the right key, searching every corner of a cave) over shooting and conflict, making Tomb Raider is more like the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark than its finale. Nonetheless, it's completely mesmerizing. Tomb Raider instantly sucks players in with Laura's deft movements and death-defying jumps. (Be sure to bring along a hintbook or FAQ). In addition, by restricting forward movement to 12 o'clock on the gamepad, rather than allowing control to shift with the camera angle, the game lends its protagonist the capacity to actually walk in a straight line. Of course, Tomb Raider is not perfect. The animals seem to be on a polygon fast. Also, some of the problematic camera angles familiar to players of Super Mario 64 occur here as well. They have a smaller impact on gameplay here, however, because of the game's emphasis on puzzles over action.  Tomb Raider is simply a smart game, bursting with great touches. In the training level, Lara takes players through her house, into her gym, and tutors them on the skills they'll need to stay alive. Fortunately, the complicated maneuvers can be learned in moments. This is the first 32-bit game to compete with Nintendo 64's polygon arsenal, and it handles itself very well. If there are more Playstation and Saturn releases like this one, Lara and her followers might very well be uncovering Nintendo 64s along with the other artifacts in Tomb Raider 5.
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1046,F-22 Air Dominance Fighter ,8.5, Digital Image Design has crafted the latest and perhaps the most exacting reproduction of the USAF's all-new air supremacy/strike fighter.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/5/9/6/2216596-f_22_adf_splashscreen.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/f-22-air-dominance-fighter-review/1900-2535905/,pos,"
There was a time, not too long ago, when you could count on one hand all of the civil and combat flight simulations released within any given 12-month period. In fact, ardent flight sim enthusiasts were known to snap up every simulation that cruised down the runway, regardless of its perceived faults. Gaming has certainly changed over the past few years, particularly in the realm of modern air combat sims. Case in point: In the past seven months, no fewer than four F-22 simulations have surfaced, each purportedly marketed as the definitive portrayal of America's latest low-observable, stealth technology-driven aircraft.  In F-22 Air Dominance Fighter, Digital Image Design has crafted the latest and perhaps the most exacting reproduction of the USAF's all-new air supremacy/strike fighter. Incorporating lessons learned from EF2000 - F-22 ADF's critically acclaimed predecessor - data gleaned from various declassified sources, as well as notional depictions of certain next-generation avionics systems and weaponry, F-22 ADF may be, as DID proudly advertises, the most sophisticated yet equally absorbing air combat simulation ever to be conceived.  The F-22 aircraft portrayed in the game seems responsive and accurately modeled, dutifully illustrating every important facet of the actual aircraft. A wide array of internal and external viewing perspectives has been included, not to mention several EMCON levels, which are intended to automatically monitor and adjust the aircraft's in-flight stealth profile. Heck, even a few UFO's manage to put in a cameo appearance, vying for the dubious distinction of being called the preeminent air dominance fighter!  Furthermore, F-22 ADF has an awful lot of enticing features that are sure to make a few heads whip around in awe. For starters, you can slowly immerse yourself within the overall framework, learning all of the intricate aspects and capabilities of the F-22 - as well as its present and future adversaries - thanks to a rich, full-featured simulator; a comprehensive, well-written manual; and an equally impressive World Air Power journal. If you prefer, you can kick the tires and light the fires of the F-22 that much sooner, tearing up the skies over the troubled Middle East in the ""kill-or-be-killed"" quick combat mode. Here, you are initially confronted by a litany of inept enemy ground and air defenses, which become increasingly more adroit - and obviously more lethal - as time wears on, perhaps spanning an incredible five-hour timeframe. For the more adventurous, you may enlist in one of three tours of duty, each depicting a simmering hotbed of tension - ready to explode in the not-too-distant future - in and around the perilous Red Sea region.   Although you assume command of several superstealthy F-22 fighters, there are several missions in which you must hand off your responsibilities as a squadron commander and step aboard a loitering AWACs aircraft operating miles behind the FEBA. On these occasions, you are charged with monitoring air and ground activity within the immediate battle sector, eventually vectoring friendly air, land, and naval assets to troubled areas in the most timely and efficient manner. In addition, you can, for the first time, experience the trials and tribulations of engaging in midair refueling with high-flying KC-35 tankers. Even the Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation (ACMI) is excellent.  Unfortunately, there are several troubling issues that warrant some cause for concern. For instance, although radio chatter is made out to depict English-speaking foreign nationals, the audio seems especially distorted, even during relatively low-intensity moments. If it weren't for the inclusion of accompanying onscreen text, I dare say most players would deem these messages virtually unintelligible and utterly ineffectual. Furthermore, the utilization of canned missions means that you must continually fight and refight the same pre-scripted battles over and over until you somehow manage to meet the mission goals. The omission of a mission planner and the inability to alter an aircraft's weapons loadout prior to mission startup only serves to compound rather than correct these oversights. Lastly, the lack of a customizable mission editor for hypothetical air-to-air combat setups and the exclusion of a mission builder are, at best, inexplicable, especially when one compares and contrasts F-22 ADF with other simulations competing for the same consumer dollar. Undoubtedly, DID's upcoming F-22 Total Air War - the sequel to F-22 ADF - will address most, if not all, of these shortcomings, integrating a host of important upgrades and other ""on-the-drawing-board"" enhancements to this near rock-solid simulation. For now, though, you will just have to smack your lips and remain patient as you strap into the most engrossing F-22 simulation to roll down the war-ravaged tarmac.
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1047,Forsaken 64 ,8.5," Between the various multiplayer options and the great single-player mode, Forsaken 64 comes out a real winner.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/6/8/3/2216683-frsa640f.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/forsaken-64-review/1900-2544449/,pos,"
Remember Descent? You know, the crazy zero-g first-person shooter that put you in the cockpit of a small ship and forced you to reenact the end of Return of the Jedi over and over again? Forsaken is, at its core, a Descent clone. But stunning graphics, a dazzling array of weapons, and above-average level design make the whole thing seem fresh. The game's simple scenario is set on a postapocalyptic Earth. Most of the planet is in ruins, complete with loads of goodies, ripe for the taking. You play a scavenger on a hoverbike, and you'll traverse military installations, nuclear reactors, refineries, temples, and more in search of gold and crystals. This may sound like a cakewalk, but Earth's automated defense systems are still intact, littering your path with all kinds of annoying drone ships, tanks, and turrets. The single-player levels in this version of the game are different from the levels in the PC and PlayStation versions. Some of them require you to simply destroy every enemy on the level, while others pit you against huge boss ships. The weaponry in Forsaken is unique. Each weapon has three levels of power, depending on how many power pods you've found. The Suss gun is a spread-fire weapon that quickly shoots a mess of projectiles in your enemy's direction. The Trojax is a charged weapon that gains power (and sucks ammunition) when you hold down the fire button. Transpulse shots can bounce off walls, making them good for surprise attacks in multiplayer games. The Beam Laser simply emits two monstrous beams of death. It requires pinpoint accuracy, but it does insane amounts of damage. Secondary weapons include the Scatter missile, which causes the victim to drop all of his weaponry. The Multiple-Fire Rocket Launcher quickly spits out tons of small missiles. The Solaris homes in on its target. The Gravgon missile creates a vacuum at its point of impact, sucking enemies into its gravitational field and holding them in place for you to take out at will. The Titan is the most devastating weapon in the entire game and will frequently take you out as well if you aren't careful. There are also three different types of mines that will help you keep enemies off your tail and a nitro boost that will allow you to escape from sticky situations. The control in Forsaken 64 is very well done. The game moves quite fast, but once you've grasped the control scheme, you'll easily be able to keep up with the action. The multiplayer in Forsaken 64 is pretty well done. Even on a four-player split screen, you can still make out what's going on, although long-range rocket shots get pretty hard to make. You can replace any missing players with computer-controlled deathmatchers, so you can just take on three CPU opponents instead of actually having to deal with humans. Between the various multiplayer options and the great single-player mode, Forsaken 64 comes out a real winner. Save for Rare's Goldeneye 007, it easily defeats the other first-person shooters currently available for the N64.
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1048,Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes ,4.5," Shallow, mindless hack-and-slash action makes this a crushingly tedious slog through an anachronistic version of 16th-century Japan.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/9/5/4/2222954-box_sbsh.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sengoku-basara-samurai-heroes-review/1900-6282521/,neg,"
  Capcom's Sengoku Basara series doesn't have quite the same level of name recognition for Western audiences as Koei's Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games, but if you've spent any time with Koei's games, Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes will immediately bring them to mind. Samurai Heroes is all about making you an incredibly powerful warrior and giving you hundreds of enemy soldiers to mow down. Alas, this mindless hack-and-slash action quickly grows tiresome, and you'll find yourself longing for more substantial and rewarding gameplay long before you succeed in uniting or conquering 16th-century Japan.      Following the death of the tyrannical conqueror Hideyoshi at the hands of Ieyasu Tokugawa, Japan is a country divided into numerous warring factions. Ieyasu seeks to use his fists to punch Japan right into a new era of peace and unity, while Mitsunari Ishida is obsessed with avenging the defeat of his former lord. But although historic figures such as Ieyasu Tokugawa and Masamune Date loom large in this tale, this is no historically accurate retelling of Japanese history. Samurai Heroes takes a gleefully anachronistic approach to its subject matter. On these battlefields, you might fight alongside warriors in mechanical suits or clash with enemies wielding chainsaws and miniguns. The characters you can control are larger than life and possessed of incredibly intense emotions, making bold and frequently absurd declarations of heroism and vengeance as they easily chop down enemy soldiers by the hundreds. Each of them also has a strong sense of style, wearing some vivid and outlandish outfits, and many of them have let their hairstylists get a little too creative.    On each large battlefield, you aim to defeat an enemy general. As you make your way to the general's position, you're impeded by hundreds of cookie-cutter soldiers who swarm around you like ants and patiently stand around until you put several of them at a time out of their misery with a few pushes of the attack buttons. There's a certain short-lived satisfaction that comes from effortlessly slaughtering hundreds of enemies as a tremendously overpowered warrior who can pull off one stylish move after another without breaking a sweat. But it's so easy and mindless that any fleeting joy this action might provide evaporates before you finish even one battle. It's hard to feel good about single-handedly defeating squads of riflemen when they often fire at where you were standing 10 seconds ago or for slaughtering soldiers who seem eager to taste the edge of your blade. If you chain together enough hits in a row, the game praises you with words like ""Awesome!!"" and ""Radical!!!"" However, this is hollow praise because earning it requires so little effort.    Yes, you can change things up a bit by stringing together your warrior's two standard attacks to perform different combos or do nifty things like juggle enemies in midair, but while this may help you defeat the opposing hordes even more quickly, it's never necessary. Against the rank-and-file enemy soldiers you spend the overwhelming majority of your time fighting, you can literally just tap the standard attack button over and over again to easily be victorious. You're also sometimes presented with new objectives like destroying incense burners that bring enemy soldiers back to life or opening water gates to reduce enemy morale, but these don't actually make the action any more varied or exciting. You accomplish these goals the same way you do almost everything else in the game: by walking up to someone or something and tapping the attack buttons a number of times. At times, you can also hop on a horse to cover ground more quickly or to race an opposing general to some destination, but this aspect is as disappointing as everything else about the game. You can plow unhindered through rows of shield-wielding soldiers, and enemy horsemen who charge in your general direction frequently miss you by several feet on either side. Truly, your opponents are idiots. After each battle, you're rewarded with spoils with which you can craft accessories to give you bonuses, making you an even more efficient killing machine in future battles.   Using hero time and your Basara art gives you a huge edge in battle, while also bathing you in a soothing golden light.   There are six warriors available from the start, with 10 more that can be unlocked. But while they do employ different techniques to dish out punishment to their enemies, this doesn't translate into tons of variety and replay value. Regardless of whether you punch, crush, shoot, or slice the brain-dead enemies who swarm around you, eagerly awaiting their deaths, the same approach works. And defeating hundreds of soldiers by swinging a ball around on a chain is no more rewarding than defeating them with a sword when they both amount to just tapping a button hundreds of times with no skill or strategy needed whatsoever.    You do have a few more tricks up your sleeve beyond your standard attacks. As you dish out and absorb punishment and conquer enemy camps by defeating the zombielike commanders stationed at each one, you fill up two meters. One allows you to briefly enter a slow-motion mode called hero time, and the other lets you perform your character's Basara art, a devastating technique that unleashes a flurry of hundreds of attacks on nearby enemies. These techniques are particularly useful against some of the many generals and other named enemies you encounter, who can be challenging. That is because, unlike the soldiers who serve them, they make an actual focused effort to defeat you and can absorb a lot of damage before they fall. This challenge isn't nearly enough to make these fights interesting; on the contrary, these prolonged and simple battles only call attention to the shallowness of the combat. Anything that brings them to a close more quickly is welcome, especially because there are no checkpoints within levels. This makes death a potentially infuriating setback, particularly when it comes at the end of 45 minutes or so of tedious combat, which you're then faced with the prospect of having to repeat.     Samurai Heroes tosses an impressive number of characters on the screen, but aside from your striking hero at the center of the action, many of them look exactly alike and none of them have much detail. Your attacks look cool and flashy, with huge, colorful slash lines enhancing the incredible sense of power behind them, but the way groups of enemies respond in the exact same way to those attacks often looks absurd. For instance, Mitsunari's sword attacks often send groups of enemies rolling across the ground in unison, like they're performing some sort of avant-garde dance routine. The sounds of battle have an exaggerated, B-movie silliness to them, and the voice acting is exaggerated to match. The goofy exclamations lend a tongue-in-cheek humor to the game's heightened drama. It's hard to take the action seriously when Ieyasu passionately proclaims, ""May the sun rise in the east with a smile!""   Your attacks look stylish and powerful, but aren’t any fun to pull off.  Both the Wii version and the PlayStation 3 version support offline, split-screen two-player cooperative play. In this mode, you can revive your companion if he or she falls in battle, which makes getting past some of the tougher bosses easier, but it doesn't actually make the shallow action any better. There's also a quick battle option that lets you take any unlocked character into any battle scenario you've reached in the story mode, but these battles aren't even fun the first time you play them. Samurai Heroes has an enjoyably anachronistic take on the Sengoku era of Japanese history, but there's nothing enjoyable about trudging through its battlefields and laying waste to hordes of mindless enemies. This is one trip back in time that's best left untaken.  
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1049,Family Guy Uncensored ,4.5, This weak licensed minigame collection isn't enjoyable for fans of the show...or anyone else.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/6/7/4/55440-127674.jpg,AND,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/family-guy-uncensored-review/1900-6250829/,neg,"
  The TV show Family Guy gets big ratings and has a rabid fanbase. It's built on a foundation of unusual characters, boundary-pushing jokes, and lots of non-sequiturs. But this mobile game is so tedious that you'd be better off leaving it behind and catching some reruns instead.   Some of the minigames, like this flying level, use tilt controls.   Family Guy Uncensored consists of a half-dozen minigames, which star characters from the show and are loosely linked together through a story mode that lasts about a half-hour. In the story, which is as unnecessary as it is forgettable, the power goes out around town and Peter Griffin decides to walk to the bar instead of watching TV. A new minigame launches each time he meets a new character on the way.    The minigames include a tilt-based flying shooter inside of Chris's sketchbook, a vine-swinging platformer from Quagmire's fantasy, and a Mega Man-esque action segment starring Stewie. Most of these minigames are of poor quality, and hindered by sloppy controls that are not well suited to the device. Frame rate slowdown is also an issue, even on a powerful handheld like the Motorola Droid.     In the Mega Man-inspired levels, for example, the controls on the Droid are split between the touchscreen and the keypad for moving, shooting, and jumping. You can't customize the controls to your liking, and playing with one hand on the screen and one on the keyboard is awkward. Since this is the only minigame with any real substance, these clumsy controls are especially disappointing.    If you're a regular viewer of the show you'll spot several Family Guy in-jokes, and these are the only reason to even consider buying the game. You get to control Peter in a fight against a giant chicken, and help Brian escape from Stewie when he's in violent loan shark mode, for example. While you can choose to replay these minigames with increased difficulty, they become even more tedious the second time around.   In the story mode, the town's power goes out and Peter is forced to stop watching TV.   Whether or not you're a Family Guyfan, don't set yourself up for disappointment by buying this game. Family Guy Uncensored plays like a poor-quality cash-in with only a few glimmers of humor and creativity.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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1050,Scene It? Twilight ,4.5, The lack of content and the simplistic presentation prevent even the most diehard Twilight fans from wanting to sink their teeth into this one.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/6/3/5/2223635-twilightwii.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/scene-it-twilight-review/1900-6241345/,neg,"
  It's difficult to ignore the Twilight phenomenon, which has swept through pop culture like wildfire and captured the attention and hearts of women of all ages. The passionate romance between the sparkly 100-year-old vampire Edward Cullen--who looks 17--and the delicate, warm-blooded Bella Swan is now one of the most talked-about love stories. The four-book series by author Stephanie Meyer has garnered a rabid fan following, and Twilight fans everywhere were eager to watch their favorite characters come to life on the big screen. Scene It? Twilight tests even the most devoted of fans with multiple-choice trivia questions that will surely leave everyone who hasn't seen the first movie scratching their heads. It's unfortunate that beneath the attractive allure of a movie-based trivia game, the presentation is incredibly lackluster and there isn't enough content to keep you fixated. Scene It? Twilight will leave you thirsty for more.    Paying attention to details is key; otherwise you can resort to guessing.   Originally a DVD game brand, Scene It? has made the transition to consoles successfully. Up to four players compete for the highest score by answering multiple-choice questions the fastest or coming up with the correct answer first. Scene It? Twilight is limited in terms of substance, because it's based only on a two-hour movie, while other Scene It? games are jam-packed with trivia questions about film or pop culture that span decades. That doesn't mean there aren't random facts or interesting tidbits to discover from the game's 500-plus questions, but it gets old faster than the time it takes for Edward to run to Bella's house.     Only two modes are available, so you can either play through four rounds of puzzles or select to answer 10, 20, or 30 questions for the highest score. The formatting of the questions is random and cycles through 10 types. One question type is Alice's Vision, where you guess the location being drawn, and you can speed up the sketch by shaking the Wii Remote. It's similar to Upon Reflection, in which you try to identify the character who is masked behind a shimmering wall of stars as the image progressively becomes clearer. The first person to shake the remote and press A will get a chance to guess correctly; if that player's answer is incorrect, another player can take a stab at it. Depending on the type, there are also questions where everyone can answer together by pressing a direction on the D pad that corresponds to the correct answer. The point total as well as a time bar that ticks away are at the bottom of the screen to indicate how much time you have left to answer and how many points you'll earn if you chose correctly. Having a quick trigger finger and being lucky at your guesses can bring you into the lead, but guessing can take you only so far, because in the fourth ""Twilightning"" round you are docked points for wrong answers. Other formats include answering a question that follows a movie clip, recognizing the character or object missing from the scene, rearranging movie stills in the order that they appear in the film, and identifying the person who said a particular line in the movie.     It takes several rounds of play before questions start to repeat, but you'll burn through the content far too quickly. Unfortunately, the dull presentation doesn't help spruce things up, either. Movie clips and sketches are two of the more engaging ways the trivia is presented, but a majority of the questions are presented as a line of text with answers along the side of the screen. Without any visual aid or still image of a hunky or beautiful vampire to make it more interesting, all you're left with is a giant box of text to read through as quickly as possible.    Questions based on movie clips are the most interesting, but they don't appear very often.   The bland presentation is only marginally improved with snippets of music from the movie. Peter Facinelli, who plays Dr. Carlisle Cullen in the movie, lends his soothing voice to guide you through the menus, but after a few rounds you realize that he has only a handful of lines. A few gloomy background images from the movie set the stage for the questions, accurately representing the tone and feel of Forks, Washington, where the story takes place. What's more depressing than the dreary weather, is that the bonus material you unlock as you play through the game consists of production stills from the movie, and while nice to look at, they offer very little to Twilight fans hoping for at least some juicy information or new images from the recently released movie, New Moon.    Scene It? Twilight does a decent job of making trivia interactive and allows fans of the first movie to get together and challenge one another to see who's more obsessed, but the game is just too bare. The brazen $50 price tag is very hard to justify, even for those who can't get enough of Bella and Edward exchanging awkward, longing glances. Regardless of whether or not you think vampires should sparkle in the sunlight, the content is limited, and with only two modes of play available, there isn't a reason to answer Twilight-related trivia unless you have several friends who cannot get enough of Edward's dreamy eyes. But even then, the game is so shallow beneath the movie-poster box art that you're better off getting your Twilight fix somewhere else.     
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1051,Clash of the Titans ,4.5, Clash of the Titans is a predictable hack-and-slash adventure that is exactly the type of game that gives movie tie-ins a bad reputation.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/7/1/2221371-box_cott.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/clash-of-the-titans-review/1900-6271295/,neg,"
  Like the miles of mire that play backdrop to Perseus' quest to overthrow the rulers of Olympus, Clash of the Titans is a dull and haggard experience. A rich tapestry of myth is pushed aside to make room for repetitious bloodletting, laborious item collection, and overcomplicated and unrewarding weapon upgrades. The result is a game punished by its own unpruned ideas that quickly devolves into familiar but uninspired hack-and-slash gameplay. This is an uphill slog and another poor game that attempts to ride the leather loincloth coattails of its original source.      There's a lot of content in Clash of the Titans, but the 20 hours it takes to reach the conclusion of this derivative adventure are far too repetitive to hold your attention for very long. The game offers a mostly faithful adaptation of the movie plot and plonks you in the sandals of Perseus, Zeus's mortal son, who is caught in the centre of some nasty infighting between the gods. Baying for blood, you seek revenge for the murder of your adopted family by the lord of the underworld, Hades, who is intent on teaching humanity a lesson in submissiveness.    It isn't all smooth sailing for our Greek Hero, and you progress through the story by cutting up differing types of fiends. Light and heavy attacks are your defensive bread and butter, while a held button press releases special attacks like axe swings or a flurry of blades with your selected weapon. Waves of cloned enemies including skeletons, ethereal beings, giant floating eyeballs, and shambling monstrosities all block your path. Boss fights pit you against centaurs, chimeras, a serpent of the dead, cyclopes, and double-headed demon dogs. These encounters are the highlights of an otherwise unremarkable experience, and help to break up the monotony, but they're often toppled all too quickly. As a result, rather than dragging you into the world they inhabit, the frequency of these simple boss encounters feels like stuffing thrown in to keep the game timer ticking by tossing extra hurdles in your way to the prize.     Fights almost always involve multiple attackers, making the best way to survive to pick one, or if they're weak enough, a few targets, and take them down before switching your attention. Holding the left trigger usually targets the closest enemy (but certainly isn't foolproof) and allows you to monitor the damage being dealt by watching for colour changes to your enemy's character model. Red means they're not ready for you to try to suck out the energy they contain to power your special attacks, while dark and light blue denotes that they are closer to death, and you'll be rewarded with more energy if you zap. This same colour-based status change system is used to initiate the game's plethora of ""sub weapon seize"" quick-time events, which are used for everything from stealing weapons to dealing killing blows during boss fights.     Problems begin once you realise there's no way to switch targets manually in lock mode. Your only option is to release the trigger, rotate the camera to the next foe, and hope you don't snap back to the previous enemy. Knocking them into the air with a swipe of your blade usually maintains your lock on them, but sometimes doing so removes your ability to see their colour status. This then forces you to release and re-target them to determine when you can steal their souls. Damage status is visible only while targeting, and the game camera is prone to freak out when locking on to foes perched above or below eye level. It's also not uncommon for the camera to obscure targets behind environmental objects, leaving you open to attacks from behind as you attempt to wrest back control while framing the action.    What goes up, must come down, but it's not always easy to see if they're ripe for draining.    Killing a target with a quick-time event rewards you with ""gifts,"" such as bones, iron, and gems which can be used to upgrade your weapons. While each weapon has unique abilities that require items of differing rarities to be unlocked, the upgrades don't offer any new gameplay beyond basic slashing. Even once you have maxed-out your armoury, you still endure the same stale light and heavy button dance to mow down monsters.    A veritable buffet of torture devices is available for dispatching your enemies, spanning everything from bone scythes, fiery magical powers, and ornate bows, to freshly plucked scorpion tails. Only four weapons can be equipped at any time, and you use the D pad to switch between them on the fly. Menu navigation is long-winded and needlessly complicated, requiring multiple submenus and scrolls to make changes and equip items. This clumsy handling becomes a major source of pain late in the game when certain enemy objects can be destroyed only with particular weapons. Trial and error is the only way to find the appropriate tool for the job, and often the weapon or item is used only once for its specific need before being returned to your weapons cache. Moments like these drag you out of the action as you're forced to fumble through lists of objects to find the one that destroy an object to stop monsters from endlessly spawning.    You don't ever need to strain your brain, since puzzle-solving is not part of Clash of the Titan's repertoire. Furthermore, the very notion of quest variety is dashed from the outset. Opportunities to expand on the hack-and-slash formula are thrown by the wayside when even quests to find food or locate plant seeds are solely combat focused. Insult is added to injury when Perseus, a fisherman, is presented with the chance to apply his craft to locate food, but instead finds a dead fish at the end of a worn path after another bloody showdown.   Get used to this animation, you'll see it every time you kill one of these ghosties.   Quest text is frequently vague and in places nonexistent, forcing you to bumble around blindly until you work out what it is the game wants you to do. Locked into areas, waves of enemies spawn with no explanation, and you're left to wonder what you need to do to make them stop. Environments are regularly repeated, requiring you to revisit the same swamp, sand, or snow zone several times over to find an item or kill a specific target. While the game stops short of asking you to backtrack to the quest giver in most cases, exploration is more of a by-product of poor instruction than a desire to discover, and you often find yourself face-to-face with dead ends. Since multiple quests in the same area can't be accepted simultaneously, you often return multiple times for the next mission down the chain.    If you're sadistic enough, Clash of the Titans lets you drag a friend along for the ride--but only when it wants you to. Certain quests pair you with an AI companion, and some can be controlled by a second player. Not all team missions support cooperative play, and the ones that do see the two of you fighting alongside each other as you both attempt to control the camera and inevitably bump up against the edge of the screen waving weapons at targets just out of reach.    Challenge mode is comprised of individual missions that you have already completed during the single-player campaign, but these missions aren't any more fun the second time around, even if you add a friend to the mix. A second player can take on the role of one of a handful of minor characters, but they only ever end up playing a support role. Perseus still does the majority of the heavy lifting, and having an extra player on screen brings with it a raft of new problems. For example, when player one uses a bow, it stops player two from being able to move or attack. Likewise, execution animations have been created only for Perseus, meaning that regardless of which player is performing the finishing move, the game will only ever show Perseus dealing the fatal strike.     Inconsistent audio and visuals further add to the laundry list of problems in Clash of the Titans. Voice acting wavers between hammy and wooden, soundtrack audio fits the game's tone, but is repeated far too often, and characters regularly pivot on the spot to turn and walk away like they're guided by rails.   Careful you don't walk off a cliff as you try to get the camera back under control.    If you can bring yourself to trudge on to the end, you're rewarded with challenge missions. These include timed versions of some missions you completed during the story, killing a certain number of monsters before a timer runs out, besting guards in a competition to see who can bag the most skeletons, or thinning the local frog and cockatrice populations. Completing these allows you to replay the boss battles from the story, and if you have the stamina to go on, you can gain access to the Story mode missions a la carte. Ultimately, your only rewards are more gems and resources that can be used to further upgrade the weapons you're probably not using.    Clash of the Titans is a predictable, derivative experience. While the promise of unique and customisable weapon loadouts and a rich story based on mythological lore holds plenty of potential, the lacklustre delivery and tedious campaign contained within certainly won't have you lining up for another tour. Your time, money, and energy would be better spent playing one of the many games Clash of the Titans unsuccessfully tries to ape.  
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1052,Clash of the Titans ,4.5, Clash of the Titans is a predictable hack-and-slash adventure that is exactly the type of game that gives movie tie-ins a bad reputation.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/7/1/2221371-box_cott.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/clash-of-the-titans-review/1900-6271497/,neg,"
  Like the miles of mire that play backdrop to Perseus' quest to overthrow the rulers of Olympus, Clash of the Titans is a dull and haggard experience. A rich tapestry of myth is pushed aside to make room for repetitious bloodletting, laborious item collection, and overcomplicated and unrewarding weapon upgrades. The result is a game punished by its own unpruned ideas that quickly devolves into familiar but uninspired hack-and-slash gameplay. This is an uphill slog and another poor game that attempts to ride the leather loincloth coattails of its original source.      There's a lot of content in Clash of the Titans, but the 20 hours it takes to reach the conclusion of this derivative adventure are far too repetitive to hold your attention for very long. The game offers a mostly faithful adaptation of the movie plot and plonks you in the sandals of Perseus, Zeus's mortal son, who is caught in the centre of some nasty infighting between the gods. Baying for blood, you seek revenge for the murder of your adopted family by the lord of the underworld, Hades, who is intent on teaching humanity a lesson in submissiveness.    It isn't all smooth sailing for our Greek Hero, and you progress through the story by cutting up differing types of fiends. Light and heavy attacks are your defensive bread and butter, while a held button press releases special attacks like axe swings or a flurry of blades with your selected weapon. Waves of cloned enemies including skeletons, ethereal beings, giant floating eyeballs, and shambling monstrosities all block your path. Boss fights pit you against centaurs, chimeras, a serpent of the dead, cyclopes, and double-headed demon dogs. These encounters are the highlights of an otherwise unremarkable experience, and help to break up the monotony, but they're often toppled all too quickly. As a result, rather than dragging you into the world they inhabit, the frequency of these simple boss encounters feels like stuffing thrown in to keep the game timer ticking by tossing extra hurdles in your way to the prize.     Fights almost always involve multiple attackers, making the best way to survive to pick one, or if they're weak enough, a few targets, and take them down before switching your attention. Holding the left trigger usually targets the closest enemy (but certainly isn't foolproof) and allows you to monitor the damage being dealt by watching for colour changes to your enemy's character model. Red means they're not ready for you to try to suck out the energy they contain to power your special attacks, while dark and light blue denotes that they are closer to death, and you'll be rewarded with more energy if you zap. This same colour-based status change system is used to initiate the game's plethora of ""sub weapon seize"" quick-time events, which are used for everything from stealing weapons to dealing killing blows during boss fights.     Problems begin once you realise there's no way to switch targets manually in lock mode. Your only option is to release the trigger, rotate the camera to the next foe, and hope you don't snap back to the previous enemy. Knocking them into the air with a swipe of your blade usually maintains your lock on them, but sometimes doing so removes your ability to see their colour status. This then forces you to release and re-target them to determine when you can steal their souls. Damage status is visible only while targeting, and the game camera is prone to freak out when locking on to foes perched above or below eye level. It's also not uncommon for the camera to obscure targets behind environmental objects, leaving you open to attacks from behind as you attempt to wrest back control while framing the action.    Get away from my beach, lone skeleton. This is my sand castle!    Killing a target with a quick-time event rewards you with ""gifts,"" such as bones, iron, and gems which can be used to upgrade your weapons. While each weapon has unique abilities that require items of differing rarities to be unlocked, the upgrades don't offer any new gameplay beyond basic slashing. Even once you have maxed-out your armoury, you still endure the same stale light and heavy button dance to mow down monsters.    A veritable buffet of torture devices is available for dispatching your enemies, spanning everything from bone scythes, fiery magical powers, and ornate bows, to freshly plucked scorpion tails. Only four weapons can be equipped at any time, and you use the D pad to switch between them on the fly. Menu navigation is long-winded and needlessly complicated, requiring multiple submenus and scrolls to make changes and equip items. This clumsy handling becomes a major source of pain late in the game when certain enemy objects can be destroyed only with particular weapons. Trial and error is the only way to find the appropriate tool for the job, and often the weapon or item is used only once for its specific need before being returned to your weapons cache. Moments like these drag you out of the action as you're forced to fumble through lists of objects to find the one that destroy an object to stop monsters from endlessly spawning.    You don't ever need to strain your brain, since puzzle-solving is not part of Clash of the Titan's repertoire. Furthermore, the very notion of quest variety is dashed from the outset. Opportunities to expand on the hack-and-slash formula are thrown by the wayside when even quests to find food or locate plant seeds are solely combat focused. Insult is added to injury when Perseus, a fisherman, is presented with the chance to apply his craft to locate food, but instead finds a dead fish at the end of a worn path after another bloody showdown.   What?! You saved how much on your car insurance?   Quest text is frequently vague and in places nonexistent, forcing you to bumble around blindly until you work out what it is the game wants you to do. Locked into areas, waves of enemies spawn with no explanation, and you're left to wonder what you need to do to make them stop. Environments are regularly repeated, requiring you to revisit the same swamp, sand, or snow zone several times over to find an item or kill a specific target. While the game stops short of asking you to backtrack to the quest giver in most cases, exploration is more of a by-product of poor instruction than a desire to discover, and you often find yourself face-to-face with dead ends. Since multiple quests in the same area can't be accepted simultaneously, you often return multiple times for the next mission down the chain.    If you're sadistic enough, Clash of the Titans lets you drag a friend along for the ride--but only when it wants you to. Certain quests pair you with an AI companion, and some can be controlled by a second player. Not all team missions support cooperative play, and the ones that do see the two of you fighting alongside each other as you both attempt to control the camera and inevitably bump up against the edge of the screen waving weapons at targets just out of reach.    Challenge mode is comprised of individual missions that you have already completed during the single-player campaign, but these missions aren't any more fun the second time around, even if you add a friend to the mix. A second player can take on the role of one of a handful of minor characters, but they only ever end up playing a support role. Perseus still does the majority of the heavy lifting, and having an extra player on screen brings with it a raft of new problems. For example, when player one uses a bow, it stops player two from being able to move or attack. Likewise, execution animations have been created only for Perseus, meaning that regardless of which player is performing the finishing move, the game will only ever show Perseus dealing the fatal strike.     Inconsistent audio and visuals further add to the laundry list of problems in Clash of the Titans. Voice acting wavers between hammy and wooden, soundtrack audio fits the game's tone, but is repeated far too often, and characters regularly pivot on the spot to turn and walk away like they're guided by rails.   Giant sand creatures: man's mortal enemy throughout the ages.   If you can bring yourself to trudge on to the end, you're rewarded with challenge missions. These include timed versions of some missions you completed during the story, killing a certain number of monsters before a timer runs out, besting guards in a competition to see who can bag the most skeletons, or thinning the local frog and cockatrice populations. Completing these allows you to replay the boss battles from the story, and if you have the stamina to go on, you can gain access to the Story mode missions a la carte. Ultimately, your only rewards are more gems and resources that can be used to further upgrade the weapons you're probably not using.    Clash of the Titans is a predictable, derivative experience. While the promise of unique and customisable weapon loadouts and a rich story based on mythological lore holds plenty of potential, the lacklustre delivery and tedious campaign contained within certainly won't have you lining up for another tour. Your time, money, and energy would be better spent playing one of the many games Clash of the Titans unsuccessfully tries to ape.  
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1053,Naruto Shippuden: Shinobi Rumble ,4.5, This basic brawler fails to capture the unique character or high-speed action of its televised counterpart.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/6/5/2222865-box_narutosr.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/naruto-shippuden-shinobi-rumble/1900-6298156/,neg,"
  The Naruto anime series thrives on creating unique characters armed with outrageous abilities. It is a world where mortal combat is the logical solution to any problem and it has, therefore, found a home in fighting games. At their best, these games unite the wildly diverse cast of the series within a cohesive system. The action is fast, flashy, and absolutely crazy. When they are at their worst, you have Naruto Shippuden: Shinobi Rumble. This four-player brawler's very design bleeds apathy, manifested in a myriad of tiny nuisances that suck out any enjoyment you might derive within the first few hours. What's left is a disjointed mess that is painfully simplistic in concept, deficient in execution, and destined to fall swiftly into obscurity.      Shinobi Rumble offers up no more complexity than a side-scrolling brawler and none of the fun. Two buttons manage your normal attacks; one is a quick-hitting series of jabs while the other is a combination of uppercut, guard break, forward smash, and a character-specific attack depending on its combination with the directional pad. The other two buttons manage your jumping and blocking, while the right shoulder button lets you teleport. These simple controls make it easy for anyone to hop in and play, but the game's tedium makes it just as easy to hop back out. The tactics used when playing Naruto can just as easy be applied to Sakura, or Kakashi, or Sasuke, or so many others. A few characters, such as Shikamaru, who excel at ranged- or projectile-based combat offer some deviation from the norm, but Shinobi Rumble clearly runs dry of ideas long before its characters.    The combat is rife with repetition, with the trusty quick jab and the powerful guard-breaking attacks being the be all, end all of combos. The game tries to distract from this by tossing in items and power-ups, which appear randomly throughout the fight; however, they are no more than a distraction. After dispensing the aforementioned combo, your opponent will eventually be knocked down, at which point he or she will likely teleport away and disengage from the fight. After a few beats, one of you will catch up with the other for another brief skirmish. These cat-and-mouse fights kill any sense of cohesion and, instead, feel like an endless series of proxy battles that last until one side stops getting up. In larger confrontations, your best bet is to simply hang on the sidelines and lob your devastating special techniques randomly into the fray. Soon, it feels like you are fighting at your opponents rather than against them.    These special techniques are the heart of Shinobi Rumble's woes. What should have been the most exciting element of the game is, instead, its biggest detractor. It all starts with the touch screen. Each character has three special techniques assigned to him or her by default and mapped to the touch screen. To execute a technique, you either swipe your thumb over the screen and hopefully hit the right button or remove your hand entirely from the controls to carefully pick out the intended attack. Without the aid of a stylus, the touch screen can be unresponsive or imprecise, especially when selecting the small icons. This issue is especially problematic in a fighting game in which timing and precision are paramount. You have to choose between sacrificing precision or timing--a choice Shinobi Rumble shouldn't force you to make.   Looks like Sasuke needs a hand with this fight.   When you do succeed in executing a special technique, the action stops. You are then treated to a brief image of the character's face and the technique's name before the animation plays. This also occurs when you activate chak-rush, a special state that every character may use to prevent your animations from being interrupted. Alone these may not sound so bad; in fact, most fighting games have a special moment of buildup before a big attack is performed. They add excitement to the round and give the players a chance to catch their breath, assess the situation, and plan their next move. And typically, they are a rarity. In Shinobi Rumble, they are not. Characters can employ these moves or enter chak-rush dozens of times during a match--and they can all overlap each other. This spoils any tension that may build up during a fight because you are constantly subjected to one delay after another, over and over, every single match.    For all their nuisances, the special techniques best define what little diversity there is within the cast. Characters may equip up to three of them and can unlock more by completing special missions in the game's mission mode. These missions represent the game at its most interesting, with such objectives as collecting a certain number of items or fighting with only a limited number of moves. Special stat-boosting scrolls can also be unlocked here. These can be equipped to improve your character's strength, defense, or other traits in the place of a special technique. These light elements of character customization breathe some much-needed variety into the system.    Once you have your favorite character decked out just the way you like, it is time to show him or her off to your friends. Unfortunately, only your immediate posse will get to experience your handiwork due to a regrettable lack of online multiplayer. Thankfully, local wireless play works like a breeze, provided all of your friends have their own copy of the game. In lieu of that, the AI is always there for you; however, its fighting capabilities are sporadic at best. At close range, it is hyperaggressive, with little to no regard of the game's numerous defensive techniques, such as blocking. At a distance, it is comically incapable of navigating its own stages. Standing on a platform sends the computer into a frenzy of jumping up and down in an attempt to surmount a new obstacle, like a puppy begging for scraps. Sometimes, it makes it on the first try, but oftentimes, it takes a lot longer. This sort of boneheaded behavior helps ensure that Naruto Shippuden: Shinobi Rumble won't hold the attention of even the most devoted fans for long.   Your characters can be customized with new moves or stat bonuses.   Fighting games are by nature active experiences. They drive us to think fast and act fast, so the game's underlying mechanics should enhance this tension and drive action forward. Shinobi Rumble works in reverse. What little there is to this game pulls you out of the fight, slows you down, and makes you wait. While it may be fun to explore how Naruto's over-the-top cast has been adapted to fit in this game, once you push past that initial sense of discovery, you're left with a game that is truly barren.  
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1054,Tournament of Legends ,4.5," These legendary fighters may look the part, but unresponsive controls are the first thing you'll notice.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/2/6/2222626-box_tol.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tournament-of-legends-review/1900-6268812/,neg,"
  A bloodthirsty gladiator enters the ring. With eyes narrowed in steely concentration, he eagerly awaits his chance to use his serpentine sword for the purpose for which it was created. Across from him stands a towering monument to death. The stone golem has no soul within him; no human emotions to hold him back from doing the one thing he knows how to do: kill. They slowly walk toward each other. The yells from the expectant crowd dull to a whisper as these two goliaths size each other up. It is only when the epic battle is under way that the secret shame of these supposed warriors is revealed: They are fighters in appearance only. They move with the clumsy grace of a dancing sloth, swing their weapons with the precision of a bag of hammers, and exhibit the tactical ability of a cuddly kitten. When the fight mercifully ends, no one feels like a winner.      Tournament of Legends has enough features to make it appear as if it were an in-depth fighting game. The 10 fighters are based on classic archetypes, such as a Gorgon-like monster and a Minotaur, and have a variety of abilities to appeal to a wide range of fighting preferences. After each fight in the single-player tournament, new weapons are unlocked, each with its own power, speed, and reach attributes. The fighters have four unique special attacks apiece, including buff spells, melee attacks, and long-range blasts. In addition to your standard assortment of horizontal and vertical swings that you can combine into combos, you can imbue your weapon with spells that either harm your opponent, empower you, or both. When you throw all of these different features into a 3D fighter that allows you to freely move around the arena, it seems as if you have a foundation for a solid fighting experience.     But unresponsive controls keep Tournament of Legends from reaching its promising potential. Every fighter is equipped with a weapon--whether it's a sword, axe, or some other implement of death--but a variety of issues mean there is little tactical difference between how they function during the course of a match. There is often a slight delay between when you push the button (or swing the controller, depending on your control setup) and when your onscreen avatar completes the action. This hiccup makes it difficult to string moves together, resulting in choppy confrontations in which the two fighters trade blows instead of smoothly stringing together long combos. Furthermore, because the camera is often situated at an awkward angle, it's tough to tell how far you are away from your opponent to line up a crushing blow. This unpredictability is compounded by questionable collision detection that frequently sees blades pass clean through body parts with no harm being doled out.    The finicky controls make up-close combat a chore, but movement is hindered as well. The fighters range from a lumbering robot to a lithe valkyrie, but even if you select one of the fastest warriors, you still won't be able to dance away from your opponent with poke-and-move tactics. The arenas are so confined that slow opponents can easily saddle up next to their quicker competitors and ensure the battle takes place face-to-face. And there is little tactical recourse because the defensive commands are just as unresponsive as the other actions. Blocking suffers from the same delay as attacking so consistently staving off strikes is troublesome, and the sidestep button often doesn't give you enough distance to avoid the incoming attack. Because all of your actions are so clumsily executed, battles feel clunky and slow. There is no pace to the proceedings, so things often boil down to spamming on buttons and hoping you fell your opponent before he gets the best of you.    Despite the sluggish controls, the fighting does become more interesting as you learn the intricacies of battle. Every character has four unique special attacks that are activated by hitting a button in conjunction with a specific direction on the stick. These are the most powerful and useful moves in the game, but you have to use them sparingly. A special bar on the bottom of the screen dictates what moves are available to you, and filling it up while making sure you use the correct spell are the main focus of battle. There is a good variety in the moves that each fighter has as well. The gladiator can summon a bear trap from the ground to hold his enemy in place or call a lion to knock down his opponent with a jungle leap. A separate gauge determines your elemental power, and once enabled, you can poison, burn, or otherwise harm your foe. These two aspects are more entertaining than the hand-to-hand aspect, and though the shoddy controls are impossible to ignore, these moves at least add some flair to the beatings.   Let sleeping ice dragons lie, or they'll freeze you.   The arenas in which you duel are re-creations of the places these legendary warriors call home, complete with environmental dangers to spice up a fight. You may have to avoid a swooping roc or horde of angry skeletons midfight, and though the simple quick-time event needed to avoid these monsters isn't particularly interesting, it does keep you on your toes. Unfortunately, QTE are so prevalent that they can distract you from the action at times. You have to wiggle the joysticks or shake the controller when you fall down in battle, and you have to go through the same dance between rounds to repair your armor and increase your health. It's a neat gimmick initially, giving you something to toy around with outside of the core fighting, but it just becomes annoying once you get in a rhythm and have these sequences pop up at an inopportune time.     Tournament of Legends has interesting elements that give it a personality, but sluggish controls hinder much of that potential. It's just too difficult to have a satisfying back-and-forth match because neither stringing together blows on the offensive side nor countering your opponent's attacks is reliable. Furthermore, versus matches are offline only, while the story and a limited training mode are the only ways to play the game alone. Tournament of Legends has a solid core, but it gets the fundamentals wrong. If you're new to the genre and just want to see legendary warriors duel, this is fun for a little while. But fighting fanatics should stay far away from this clunky brawler.  
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1055,Blade Kitten ,4.5, Dull platforming and button-mashing action make Blade Kitten a disappointing first game for its cute-as-a-cat heroine.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/7/9/2224279-bk_box.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/blade-kitten-review/1900-6280361/,neg,"
  The adage about cats always landing on their feet doesn't ring true for Blade Kitten. At first glance, the game looks to have plenty of kitty grace, thanks to its spunky protagonist and pretty visuals. But this clumsy action platformer is often far too easy, and the action doesn't generate much excitement. Blade Kitten has some bright spots, but its bland gameplay, narrative shortcomings, and noticeable glitches weigh it down, preventing this particular feline from leaping to any great heights.      Blade Kitten is based off a Web comic of the same name and follows the adventures of bounty hunter and human/cat hybrid Kit Ballard on the planet of Hollow Wish. Kit's job is to track down local baddie Terra-Li, but she quickly gets involved in more sinister events involving the planetoid's various races. For a game that supposedly serves as an introduction to the universe of Blade Kitten (with more downloadable episodes slated for release), the game does a pretty poor job of setting up events. There's no real explanation as to who Kit is, what she can do, or why any of the action she's getting involved in actually matters. This is a pity because the character of Kit Ballard is quite appealing. The pink-haired protagonist sports sass and charm in equal amounts, and it's great to see a new, fun female character in gaming, even if she is bogged down in some narrative muddle.    While the cute Kit may initially draw you into Blade Kitten, the game's basic action platforming offering won't do much to hold you there. While the game's environments are in 3D, Kit navigates them purely in 2D, side-scrolling left or right to traverse the game's large levels. In terms of abilities, Kit has the acrobatic skills to climb almost any wall or ceiling and uses a sword as her main offensive weapon (Kit's sword--the darque blade--floats beside her like an obedient pet). Kit can also double-jump, block attacks, and sprint to quickly get past some obstacles. It can be fun to leap, slide, and climb around Hollow Wish as the acrobatic Kit, but this fun is fleeting for the most part because the platforming in Blade Kitten is quite basic. The majority of the game involves simple jumps from ledge to ledge or climbs up and down walls, so there's little here to really engage or involve you. Kit will occasionally have to ride a Star Wars tauntaun-like creature across environments, but even these are extremely linear events. There are only a few instances where timing or accuracy will matter--such as a level where you have to flee from a gigantic monster destroying a castle or the game's final, platform-destroying boss--but they're stretched out far too thinly throughout the game to offer any meaningful challenge.    The game's action offering is just as basic as its platforming. There are only a handful of different enemies in Blade Kitten, and most are easily defeated with a couple of simple sword swipes. You can get through the majority of the game spamming Kit's basic attack, with only one enemy type requiring any other strategy to defeat. Even the game's various bosses and minibosses are a cinch to overcome. Blade Kitten does offer obsessives plenty of hidden areas and loot to collect in out-of-reach places, but given that there's enough money to be found to buy most of the available upgrades even if you stick to a fairly linear path, there's little incentive to go wandering.    With a poorly told narrative, easy platforming, and dull enemies, there's little to propel you through Blade Kitten's 13 stages, which take about five or six hours to run through. At least Kit herself controls solidly, but there are some occasions when the game frustratingly glitches. Some instances are fleeting (such as when Kit inexplicably starts to move at a snail's pace), while others are more serious (such as Kit getting stuck on walls). The PC version seems to have a greater share of these problems--one recurring issue experienced during testing involved Kit's blade, whose attack arc would stubbornly get stuck in one direction. This was annoying when it occurred, as it meant that even if Kit was attacking an enemy face-to-face, that enemy would not be damaged because Kit's blade was swinging in the wrong direction.   Button mashing is the simplest, most effective way to get past most enemies.   Blade Kitten's strongest area is its visuals: The game's anime-inspired world is rendered brightly in a cel-shaded fashion, and it's great to look at the various environments Kit has to traverse. But even here there are issues. The world looks great, but it's sometimes difficult to differentiate what pieces of the environment are on Kit's plane (as opposed to what's in the foreground or background); thus, figuring out exactly what you can interact with leads to some confusion.    At its best, Blade Kitten is a decent distraction that features some pretty visuals and an appealing protagonist, but its gameplay is too shallow--and its various glitches annoying--to make it an involving or memorable experience. Kit Ballard may be a fun character, but on the strength of Blade Kitten, there's little reason to look forward to what her future adventures have in store.  
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1056,Conquest of the New World ,8.5," Interplay has managed to combine top-notch graphics, sound, and gameplay with a detailed historical framework to create a title that is both addictive and entertaining.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/5/4/1/2218541-dosbox_2009_12_16_00_15_18_93.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/conquest-of-the-new-world-review/1900-2538457/,pos,"
Most historical simulations share a common problem:  their developers, after devoting hours and hours to detailed period research, don't seem to have enough  time left over to create decent game frameworks that use the information properly. The end result? Many gamers think historical sims are boring or dry—when, in fact, if combined with solid gameplay, these games can provide unparalleled realism for adventure and strategy fans. In their latest release, Conquest of the New World, Interplay has managed to combine top-notch graphics, sound, and gameplay with a detailed historical framework to create a title that is both addictive and entertaining from start to finish. Gamers will first notice Conquest's incredible landscape graphics. In the standard strategy tradition, players move their various pieces (including explorers, colonists, and soldiers) through a blacked-out world, uncovering beautiful mountains, plains, and rivers. The first player to discover any landmark gets to name it.  After mapping out some of the local terrain, the next step is to build a colony and make it self-sufficient. To this end, players can build sawmills, metal mines, housing, and farms to generate the resources and space necessary to expand, and eventually, to build more colonies. Then comes the hard part: convincing the natives and other countries of the world that you are a force to be reckoned with. As with any good strategy game, combat is an inevitability in Conquest of the New World, and Interplay has done an excellent job here as well. Combat takes place on a simple three-by-four grid; each competing combatant controls three different unit types (infantry, cavalry, and artillery) and attacks other forces with varying success, depending on the skill of the army's leaders. This abstract warfare system works extremely well, offering players a chance to affect the outcome of their battles through tactical skill, while keeping each individual conflict relatively short (most battles take between three and six minutes). Thanks to its outstanding features—the naming of geographic markers (nothing is as satisfying as mountains and rivers named after gastrointestinal disorders), historical atmosphere, customizable play (you can align yourself with a nationality that matches your particular style), and network options (up to six players can compete)—Conquest of the World manages to take an interesting era and make it into a fantastic strategy game.
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1057,Diablo II ,8.5," While its graphics appear somewhat dated, Diablo II has incredible replay value, and most importantly, it offers a lot of addictive gameplay in either the single-player or the multiplayer mode.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/4/8/2209248-diablo2.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/diablo-ii-review/1900-2600303/,pos,"
After more than three years in the making, Diablo II has finally arrived. The belated sequel is easily one of the most anticipated computer games of all time, so it's not surprising that Blizzard North has managed to produce another highly entertaining and accessible game. But while its hack-and-slash gameplay will seem instantly familiar to those who played its predecessor, Diablo II is a more complex and much larger game, which helps explain its extended production. However, in exchange for the additional complexity and size, you'll have to tolerate low-resolution graphics and a few more gameplay problems than you might have come to expect from Blizzard games.   Although it was hugely successful both commercially and critically, the original Diablo was criticized for its relatively short single-player game and solitary dungeon setting. Diablo II is set in a much larger gaming world, and its action isn't isolated to a single locale. Divided into four distinct acts, each with its own setting, Diablo II now permits outdoor exploration in addition to a predictable series of dungeon crawls, although the outdoor areas aren't terribly interesting in and of themselves. The overall goal of Diablo II is exactly the same as it was in the first game, namely to hack through hordes of monsters to gain items and enhance your abilities so you can confront and speedily dispatch the resident Lord of Terror, Diablo. This time around there's a better story to serve as the framework for the slaughter, as each of the game's acts is linked together with impressively produced and lengthy cinematic cutscenes. The quests you receive are no longer random, as they were in the single-player version of the original game, and collectively the tasks in each act are loosely linked together to make the overall story more cohesive. Diablo II's primary focus is still on action-oriented gameplay, but the more sophisticated presentation of the cutscenes and the additional plot depth give the action context and more relevance than in the original game.   The actual gameplay still consists almost exclusively of killing monsters to gain treasure and experience points. Since your character constantly gains more and more formidable abilities and weaponry, that relatively simple style of play proves to be just as addictive as it was in the original Diablo and in other games that have since exploited the same formula. It's difficult to extract yourself from a game that always keeps you on the verge of being rewarded for another achievement.   Early in the game, that otherwise effective blueprint is overused, since swarms of weak creatures are hurled at you. The game is so easy until the end of act one that it gets tiresome wading through crowds of pathetic beasts, several of which are less fearsome versions of counterparts from the original game. The lack of resulting tension is noticeable, especially since the first Diablo increased its difficulty very quickly by requiring relatively inexperienced characters to battle behemoths such as the Butcher and the Skeleton King. There isn't a similarly difficult showdown in Diablo II until the very end of the first act, although there are plenty of challenging confrontations after that point in the game. Blizzard has always seemed intent on producing games that are extremely intuitive for new players; with Diablo II, the developers may have been concerned that neophytes would find all of the new character skill choices intimidating and accordingly structured the game so that the early stages would give you a less stressful opportunity to get accustomed to the new character development system. In addition, since the graphics for the creatures and areas at the beginning of game were also created quite early in the game's development, they are substantially worse than those that appear further into the game. The first act of the game is generally not representative of the quality and challenge of its remainder.   More experienced players may be bored early in the game because of the lack of difficulty, but they'll certainly appreciate the additional character development options. In addition to there now being five player-character classes instead of just three, the differences between the new classes are more significant than they were in the original game. In Diablo, while each of the classes had different strengths and inherently performed some actions better than the other classes, there were only a couple of unique class skills. In Diablo II the character development system has been overhauled, and almost all skills are unique to a particular class. In addition, you get to select which skills your character acquires or improves, so even characters of the same class can develop completely differently. Similarly, whereas the original game's mana attribute simply determined a character's spell points, it's been redefined into a more broadly useful attribute that all character classes need to keep track of. The increased differentiation between classes and the more expansive selection of skills appreciably enhance the game's replay value, especially since Blizzard did a good job of making each class interesting. While the additional complexity may make Diablo II a little less accessible to casual gamers, it's definitely the game's most significant improvement over Diablo.On the other hand, the graphics in Diablo II are disappointing, especially when compared with those in the original game. When Diablo was released at the end of 1996, its SVGA graphics were amazing. More than three years later, those low-resolution graphics no longer look impressive and barely look adequate, and yet that's all Diablo II offers. There are some notable graphical improvements, such as the game's lighting and translucency effects and the new parallax scrolling that gives a 3D gloss to otherwise flat objects, but the game's 2D graphics are generally disappointing and look pixelated and lack sharpness on larger monitors.    The graphics are also almost constantly obscured by the game's automap function. You can turn the map off or dim its brightness, but the game's outdoor environments make the map even more necessary for navigation than it was previously, so most of the time it'll be blocking your view of the game world. There should have at least been an option to display a smaller version of the automap in a corner of the screen where it wouldn't intrude as noticeably. Fortunately, the developers made some tweaks to the game's design and interface, and the resulting improvements are noticeable, even though they may not go far enough. For one thing, the game has no discernible loading-time transitions between areas - only between acts. In addition, instead of having to constantly mouse-click to initiate attacks, you can now just hold the mouse button down to continuously attack a creature, which limits the amount of tedious mouse-clicking that was required in the original. There are also additional hotkeys available for skills or spells, but there still aren't enough available to give quick access to all of a character's useful abilities. Surprisingly, Westwood's Nox did a better job of granting you quick access to an area map and your character's abilities, spells, and items, even though accessibility was a key strength of the original Diablo.   While Diablo's cooperative multiplayer mode was undeniably addictive and included a variety of difficulty levels unavailable in the single-player game, players still complained about the fact that most of the game's quests were only accessible in the game's single-player mode. In Diablo II, the single-player and multiplayer modes are almost identical, and all of the quests and difficulty levels are available in both versions of the game. Multiplayer Diablo didn't permit you to save the game whenever you wanted, and a character's death resulted in a hazardous and ill-equipped trip back to the same dangerous area to retrieve the character's valuables. The designers of Diablo II apparently believed the resulting tension generated by the multiplayer mode of the original game was worth porting to the single-player mode, because that's the only way to save your game in the sequel. You can no longer save the game whenever you want, and when a game is saved (either automatically or when you exit a session), new monsters are generated to populate the gaming world. There are waypoints that can be activated so you can get back relatively close to where your character was last exploring, but creatures will have respawned in that area, even if it was previously cleared out. Leaving a game without using the ""save and exit"" option in the main menu could result in the loss of recently acquired booty. While the new system does prevent you from constantly reverting to saved games and robbing yourself of the thrill of danger while exploring a new area, it's a design decision that's bound to frustrate some players.   The most significant problem with multiplayer Diablo was that it was too easy for hackers to create powerful magic items and alter character attributes and other data files, since all of the game data was stored locally, on players' hard drives. Within a couple of weeks of Diablo's release, it was virtually impossible to play a non-password-protected game on Blizzard's free Internet Battle.net server without being harassed by players solely intent on ruining other players' games with their unnaturally overpowered characters. Battle.net now has an optional archive to store character data, which should finally cure the hacking problems that plagued the original game, since would-be cheaters won't be able to alter that data anymore.   Blizzard's Battle.net Internet servers, which were initially launched concurrently with the release of the original Diablo, have proven to be unable to cope with the number of players currently trying to play Diablo II online. Gameplay has so far proven to be laggy, which is surprising considering Diablo II played well during beta testing and the original game played smoothly online. Once additional capacity is added, Battle.net should be a more accessible and enjoyable option, which is particularly relevant since features such as worldwide rankings and the game's hard-core mode are only available online. Blizzard does deserve credit for adding the hard-core version of the game, which prevents you from resurrecting slain characters no matter how many hours have been devoted to developing them. This feature makes for a truly tense and exciting gaming experience - it's an option that many won't dare try, but death for a character in Diablo's spiritual predecessors, Nethack and Rogue, could have similarly brutal consequences, and those games proved to have enduring appeal.   The development team for Diablo II clearly made it a priority to respond to all of the perceived problems with the original game, and players will likely appreciate most, if not all, of the resulting design changes. Diablo II offers a larger gaming world, the opportunity to play an open multiplayer game without being intruded upon by cheating players, and a more complex and interesting character development system. While its graphics appear somewhat dated, Diablo II has incredible replay value, and most importantly, it offers a lot of addictive gameplay in either the single-player or the multiplayer mode.
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1058,Dino Crisis ,8.5," So, from the looks of things, it appears as if Capcom has another winner on its hands.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/8/4/8/2214848-box_dinocr.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dino-crisis-review/1900-2547330/,pos,"
When you're Capcom, there's no such thing as too much of a good thing. This is evidenced by the impending deluge of Resident Evil/Biohazard spin-offs; Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Oni-Musha (the RE-style samurai game), and now Dino Crisis. A brand new excursion into the world of survival-horror, Dino Crisis is a fresh experience that abandons that creepy Umbrella laboratory for a taste of Jurassic Park. Not only that, but Dino Crisis is unique in that it so closely borrows from the RE series. But in regards to the storyline, this game is not related to it Resident Evil at all. Conceived and directed by Shinji Mikami, the mastermind behind the RE games, Dino Crisis will be very familiar to anyone who's played the Resident Evil games. The dramatic camera perspectives, the control scheme, and the eerie settings are all classic Mikami. However, instead of slow-moving zombies shuffling after you like drunks staggering home, you're faced with velociraptors and other big lizards with lightning-fast reflexes and huge appetites. ""This isn't a joke, you idiot! We were just attacked by a big-ass lizard!"" says Dino Crisis femme-fatale, Regina, to her computer-expert cohort, Rick, who, at the time, is trying to unlock electronically secured doors throughout the base where you've been searching for the missing Dr. Kirk. Your other teammate, Gail, is missing, and the last you heard from him were some aborted screams and the sound of gunfire. As you might now know, the backgrounds in Dino Crisis are fully polygonal as opposed to prerendered CG stills, like they are in Resident Evil. Perhaps it took Capcom all this time to get up to speed with the PlayStation hardware, but this makes all the difference in the world. Despite being completely 3D, the game still moves at the same speed as its brethren, without any slowdown. The game's graphics are also very sharp and appear to be running in a medium to high resolution. The character models are very well done, with excellent light-sourcing effects, giving Regina and her posse a very solid feel. The use of polygonal backgrounds enhances the feeling of fear even more than Resident Evil. For example, when you're walking down a hallway, viewed from a typical RE-ish perspective, it becomes even more tense when the camera angle suddenly pivots to an overhead perspective or swings to a worm's-eye view. The engine also allows for shifting camera positions rendered on the fly, keeping Dino Crisis moving along at a quicker tempo than Resident Evil's. Thankfully, the camera, with all its flexibility, is not abused or overused by any means. It is used sparingly, and only to enhance rather than to distract. Since the game is completely 3D, it is not as easy to pick out necessary clues as it had been in Resident Evil because everything looks uniform. In Resident Evil you'd be able to tell what to look out for since the polygonal details would stick out from the prerendered backgrounds. In Dino Crisis, you must really be on the lookout for anything and everything. The camera angles are vintage RE, designed to provide the maximum tension possible. If that weren't enough, the soundtrack is designed to provide chills and thrills as well. The simple act of walking down a hallway becomes a terrifying exercise in fear when the violins start playing. If you're not too chicken, this game is best played in the dark with the volume up.As previously stated, the controls in Dino Crisis are virtually identical to Resident Evil's, with a couple of crucial enhancements. Since the basic control configuration works well enough, potential problems arise since velociraptors are a lot quicker and savvier than RE's zombies. As a result, adjustments to the combat system were necessary to avoid an unwanted Regina-burger. When you press the R2 button, your character does a 180-degree turnabout, allowing you to put some space between you and your pursuer before turning around and filling your opponent with lead. The second enhancement is the ability to walk with your gun held out, primed to fire. While you walk slower with your gun outstretched, it sure beats making a sitting duck of yourself each time you want to fire your weapon. With all this meat-eating terror stalking the hallways (and windows and air-vents, etc.) it would get annoying to have to manage the ribbon-saving system found in Resident Evil. Instead, Dino Crisis features save rooms that prompt you to record your data whenever you attempt to leave or pass through one of these rooms. The number of times you save (or continue, should you die) affects your final score/rating and should be used sparingly.  The details in Dino Crisis are excellent too. If she takes a little damage, Regina will hold her side, limping a bit. If she takes a lot of damage, she'll be absolutely stagger around. She'll also drip blood on the floor, adding to the realism in Dino Crisis. Fortunately, there are plenty of power-ups (health kits, weapons, etc.), and an accessory-customization system similar to the one in Parasite Eve. Other things like head tracking, and auto-aiming sort out any additional combat-oriented complaints from the RE series as well. Interestingly, analog support does not seem to be featured, although the Dual Shock action is intact. Loading times between rooms are also severely reduced, due to the polygonal environments that take less space to store in memory.  So, from the looks of things, it appears as if Capcom has another winner on its hands. Dino Crisis is less disturbing than the RE series, but possibly more frightening since each of the creatures in DC hold about the same shock value as the Dobermans did in Resident Evil. While cannibalizing its own library could have backfired with a ""been there, done that"" aftertaste, Dino Crisis walks away under the strength of its own merits. The control improvements and graphic reinvention make DC its own game, with little owed to Resident Evil. The storyline is sound, and the replay value is high, with three different endings to reveal and a multitude of secrets to find (multiple costumes, a timed dinosaur hunt, mini Regina and giant Regina, etc.). With Oni-Musha, Nemesis, and Code Veronica on the horizon, Capcom might have this genre all to itself. While games like Carrier, Blue Stinger, and Alone In the Dark 4 will try and crowd the limelight with similar offerings, for the time being, it looks as if Capcom is king of the survival-horror hill.
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'giant', 'Regina', ',', 'etc.', ')', '.', 'With', 'Oni-Musha', ',', 'Nemesis', ',', 'Code', 'Veronica', 'horizon', ',', 'Capcom', 'might', 'genre', '.', 'While', 'games', 'like', 'Carrier', ',', 'Blue', 'Stinger', ',', 'Alone', 'In', 'Dark', '4', 'try', 'crowd', 'limelight', 'similar', 'offerings', ',', 'time', ',', 'looks', 'Capcom', 'king', 'survival-horror', 'hill', '.']",-0.11678778526000749,0.6058335337502003
1059,Doom II ,8.5," Bigger, badder, and bloodier than the original, this sequel extends the carnage started in Doom.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/0/6/3/817-3063.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/doom-ii-review/1900-2539987/,pos,"
Bigger, badder, and bloodier than the original, this sequel extends the carnage started in Doom. If you like viciously violent, anti-story entertainment (Seagal, anyone?) you'll slaver at the chance to slay new monsters with perfectly robust hardware. Those seeking the ultimate in home demon protection can now protect their plane of existence with a double-barreled, pump-action, combat shotgun that blasts more holes than Mobil Oil. Among the new monsters included, Mancubus and Arch-Vile rank at the top of the “hope there's nothing behind this door” list. Mancubus is a big droning brute of a cement mixer who hurls balls of fire. Arch-Vile, the ragged edge of a dead man's nightmare, conjures up an evil flame of death and revives dead enemies. Even with its darkly entertaining firepower and pleasingly grotesque menagerie, the game has its flaws, like an unrelenting and simplistic soundtrack that gets pretty annoying over time. (Don't worry, though, the game's sound effects are as brilliant as they were in the original, and remain one of its best features.) More bothersome, especially for fans of the first game, is that the repetitious action in this nasty and brutish sequel just isn't as addictive as it was in the original hit. Doom II doesn't build the same visceral or emotional connection because it doesn't enhance the original experience in any original way. Compared to Hexen, for example, which broadens the Heretic legend, Doom II adds little substance and no plot to its predecessor (space marine saves earth by killing monsters isn't a plot). Doom II is a dark, disturbing game. And while it may not bring anything new to the genre, it can create obsession-level loyalty if you tend not to look beyond the barrel of a gun.
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1060,Driver ,8.5, Driver's core game design is so strikingly original and fun that it can be enjoyed without embellishment.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/3/3/1/2212331-box_driver.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/driver-review/1900-2540083/,pos,"
Like many console-to-PC ports, Driver suffers from being translated verbatim and taking little advantage of the more powerful PC platform. However, Driver's core game design is so strikingly original and fun that it can be enjoyed without embellishment. As its name implies, Driver is a game about driving - at dangerous speeds through densely populated city streets. The game was designed by the makers of the Destruction Derby series and casts you as an undercover 1970s policeman motoring your way into the heart of mob territory through the criminal application of your cop-honed driving skills. Rather than focussing on racing as in Microsoft's recent city-cruising game Midtown Madness, Driver is all about the interactive re-creation of classic car-chase movies like Bullitt and Freebie and the Bean. Pursuit, evasion, survival, and the judicious implementation of all-out vehicular mayhem compose the core of the action. Most car games that dispense with racing replace it with predictable hood-mounted gunplay. Not so with Driver: You pilot an array of big bazooka-less American muscle cars that belch exhaust and run great on regular gas - the most dangerous thing shooting out of these wheeled hellhounds is an illegal mix of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon pollutants. To succeed in Driver, you must master the art of driving like a maniac with precision and control. Those skills are developed in Driver's main game, a mission-based trek through the streets of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The missions are presented as job offers left on an answering machine in a three-dimensional rendering of your character's sleazy apartment, which also acts as the in-game option screen. Your car has two basic attributes: damage and felony. Damage is simply a reverse life bar - when it reaches its upper limit, the car is trashed and the mission ends in failure. Felony is a measurement of police interest in your current activities. It increases if any police cruiser witnesses your vehicle operating illegally. As it rises, the cops will begin to actively pursue you, eventually taking such drastic measures as establishing roadblocks and calling in reinforcements. This gauge introduces a rather original play concept: To win, you must sometimes drive within the limits of the law. Crawling through a busy intersection at a soul-deadening speed while making a rare appearance on the correct side of the road and hoping to God the cop stopped at the light doesn't notice the black smoke pouring out of your crumpled hood is an exciting experience unique to Driver. You'll also enjoy discovering the many creative ways in which Reflections has used the relatively simple components of its gameworld to concoct a wide variety of interesting scenarios. The missions range from timed trips across town, aggressive pursuits of other vehicles, and eluding the fuzz, to unusual and surprising tasks such as scaring the hell out of an informant by taking him on a wild ride, and sending a message to another gang by smashing through the plate-glass windows of its legitimate businesses. Saving the game is only permitted between missions, but it's a testament to the game's success that this fact never becomes a liability. Playing Driver is such great fun and the levels are designed with enough common-sense brevity that restarting a mission almost never becomes frustrating. Car physics are definitely more arcade-like than realistic, but they make for a thrilling mix of impossible, hubcap-flinging turns and stomach-dropping jumps, especially when careening through the streets of San Francisco. Once you've completed the game's nearly 50 missions, you can keep yourself occupied with Driver's skills-testing bonus games. Seven are included, the best being survival, in which you must escape a pack of kamikaze police cruisers for as long as possible. Even with an entire city to drive through, the cops are incredibly difficult to elude. But for the average minute, or the extraordinary two minutes, that it takes them to capture you, it's a real blast. Better yet, true to Driver's cinematic roots, a full replay facility is available, complete with a wide variety of camera placement features. Although undeniably enjoyable, Driver isn't without noticeable flaws. The graphics are good but not up to the standard set by Midtown Madness. The cities are somewhat blocky, and the building textures are often blurry and repetitive. The soundtrack is forgettable, generic '70s funk, and the in-game movies are pretty awful. Driver's mission-loading times, though not unbearable, actually seem to be longer than on the console version. Restarting a mission on the PlayStation was an instantaneous process, but on the PC, the level must be reloaded from scratch. Finally, aside from some graphical enhancements, nothing significant has been added to the game since its console debut. Most sorely missing is any kind of multiplayer mode. However, none of these drawbacks should deter you from picking up Driver. It is addictive, intuitive, and fun, which are qualities sometimes overlooked in the industry's myopic pursuit of purely technical innovation. With Driver, Reflections has produced the definitive re-creation of the classic urban car-chase movie and has quite possibly introduced a new genre of driving game.
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1061,Fear Effect ,8.5," There are so many twists and turns in the plot that you want to continually play just a little further and the storyline's mature tone is refreshing, enough so that ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/0/5/2212505-box_fe.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fear-effect-review/1900-2547464/,pos,"
Eidos' latest PlayStation adventure game blends cinematic elements of media like Blade Runner, The Killer, and Aeon Flux, with gameplay devices of titles such as Resident Evil and Heart of Darkness, yet somehow manages to come off as a wholly original experience. In Fear Effect, you play as one of three mercenaries attempting to retrieve the daughter of a powerful Chinese businessman who has disappeared into the mysterious Shan Xi Protectorate. Your intentions are far from heroic; your goal is to reach her before her father's men do, so you can make a bundle of money by providing her safe return. The game's environments are similar to the prerendered scenes of Resident Evil but with FMV footage streaming or looping in the background, giving each scene a bustling urban look. The game also controls much like RE; however, the characters can run and shoot at the same time (and when they hold a gun in each hand, John Woo style, they can fire at multiple targets). You actually play as each of the three characters (covert operative Hana Tsu-Vachel, general all-around mercenary Royce Glas, and Australian toughman/explosives expert Jakob ""Deke"" Decourt) throughout the course of the game, as the story changes to focus on events happening around them. This happens quite often, in fact, and you might find yourself acting as two different people over the course of one save point to the next. The game's title is a reference to its adrenaline meter, which is like a health meter though with a few differences. If you've taken fire or been clawed by a creature, your heart rate will increase and your meter will turn red. If you defeat a horde of enemies in a blazing gunfight, sneak up and take out a guard quietly, or solve a puzzle, you'll gain an adrenaline reward, and the meter will return to normal. It isn't totally clear in a given situation what you should do to bring the ""fear effect"" back down, but the stress provides a nicely heightened sense of anxiety during play. Fear Effect's look is one of its main strong points; it has a distinct visual style that sets it apart from any other game out there, really. It's true that many other titles have used prerendered backgrounds in the past, but the constant pulsing video effects make you feel like you're actually a character in Fear Effect's filmic world. What holds the game's graphics back is that the camera angles, while very cinematic, sometimes make it difficult to judge distance. This can unnecessarily complicate the process of picking up items or opening doors, something that can be deadly if a room full of monsters is attacking you at the time. Also, while some environments look simply stunning, there is the occasional visual that just looks muddy and washed out. Still, the graphical positives far outweigh the negatives and result in a game that is just great to look at. The Fear Effect learning curve is a little steep at first. Though not extraordinarily difficult, the game plays out a bit like the old laser-disc arcade game Dragon's Lair until you master the controls (which are like those of Resident Evil but slightly more complicated). For example, at one point on the first disc, you have to cross a small rooftop without being shot by a nearby helicopter. Until you figure out what you have to do to accomplish this task, you end up watching a short movie sequence in which you're riddled with bullets over and over again. At one point though, you suddenly learn the control setup, and the game ceases to be frustrating and starts becoming remarkably fun. There are many cases where you need to make a split-second decision once you enter a room, as in Amazing Studios' Heart of Darkness, or die. Though these ""puzzles"" are never too obtuse, the lengthy loading times you face when you fail them do detract from the game. Save points are sometimes placed quite a distance from a particularly difficult passage, causing you to go back and cover ground as another character before you're able to confront the tough spot again, much like having to sit through an intro sequence before a boss in an RPG. Another drawback is the lack of additional modes once you beat the game. Basically, once you're done, you're done, and you have little reason to replay it. Fear Effect takes longer to beat than Konami's Metal Gear Solid and clocks in at roughly the same length as a Resident Evil game, but it's missing the extras we've come to expect from both of these genre standards. Like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil though, the overall experience that Fear Effect provides is hugely entertaining. It's one of the few games that creates a story compelling enough to make you want to play through it in a single long sitting. There are so many twists and turns in the plot that you want to continually play just a little further and the storyline's mature tone is refreshing, enough so that it makes you look past the game's few warts, going a long way toward making Fear Effect one of the best PlayStation games to come out in the US so far this year. Here's to a PlayStation2 sequel.
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1062,FIFA Road to World Cup 98 ,8.5," This year's FIFA will keep soccer fans returning to their N64s, season after season.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/5/1/5/941-3515.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fifa-road-to-world-cup-98-review/1900-2543658/,pos,"
Electronic Arts and EA Sports have brought new levels of soccer realism to the N64 with FIFA 98. With smooth animations, clean rendering, dozens of play and control options, brilliant commentary, and a tough AI, this year's FIFA will keep soccer fans returning to their N64s, season after season.  This is one great-looking soccer game. The player rendering and animations are extremely smooth. The dozens of special moves, from flick-passes to slide-tackle-evading hops, are all extremely realistic. The slide tackles, trips, and falls look so good, it's hard to resist the kind of rough play that will earn all your players red cards before the half. The sheer number of available moves is a little daunting at first, but for the most part control is easy to pick up and is certainly extremely versatile. Any given button performs at least three functions while on offense alone, depending on the duration and number of taps. Another set of functions is performed when on defense or when the ball is loose. From header lobs, header shots, and high volleys, to hip checks, hyperaggressive lunges, and slide tackles, the range of movement and playing style is enormous. Unlike other versions of FIFA 98, the N64's has a pretty tough AI, not only as a competitor, but also in its control of nonballcarriers on the player's side. As defenders, your CPU-controlled teammates aren't very aggressive though, which is a little frustrating. You may find yourself always pushing the A-button to switch which player you're controlling so that you always control the one nearest the enemy ballcarrier, since you can't always trust your teammates to be effective. In addition, you can't always expect them to be there for you when you blindly pass the ball offscreen, which of course you're always doing in any soccer game. Perhaps this makes the game more realistic, but it certainly interferes with the game's sense of momentum. As with previous editions of FIFA, this one's loaded with options. In the control department, you can either switch on control of pass receivers and shots on goal or let the CPU handle them. Turn on the skill mode to include special moves like 360s and short jumps to evade tackles. Fieldwide radar and onscreen player names are also available. In the team management department, the list of options seems endless. You can substitute players or create custom ones with 13 adjustable attributes. Play in individual ""friendly"" matches, or play entire seasons on the road to the World Cup. In multiplayer mode, players can play on opposing teams or on the same team against the CPU. FIFA 98's commentary is dynamic and insightful, providing useful analysis of your games. The announcers will even disagree with offsides calls, penalty kicks, or red cards given by the referee. Most importantly, the color never gets repetitive. Nothing makes me reach for my mute button faster than hearing the same three canned comments repeated ad nauseam when playing a sports or driving game. Such is never the case with this one. EA's latest version of FIFA looks fantastic on the N64, taking advantage of the machine's powerful antialiasing hardware to create some of the most solid polygonal athletes in sports gaming. The sheer number of options and wide array of moves and control possibilities make this the soccer game to beat in '98. 
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1063,Final Fantasy IX ,8.5, Final Fantasy IX serves as a coda to the series as you know it - it's a summation of everything that players have enjoyed about the past ten years of ...,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/2/6/6/2213266-box_ff9.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/final-fantasy-ix-review/1900-2605459/,pos,"
Final Fantasy IX has been billed as a return to the series' roots, but this is an oversimplification. The roots of the Final Fantasy series have always been appealing characters, an epic story, engaging battles, and an impressive presentation. Elements such as airships, pointy-hatted mages, and crystals have always just been surface symbols, while an emotional tale of humanity in the face of adversity lies at the core of each installment of the series. That's not to say that the return to the older art style is unimportant or without meaning. Final Fantasy VII boosted the role-playing game market on two new continents, and Final Fantasy VIII sold the most copies of any game in the series. Both games were critically acclaimed. So why tinker with a winning formula? The game itself no doubt holds the answer.   The story begins on the Mist Continent in the Kingdom of Alexandria. The puckish Zidane, a member of a rogue group and theater troupe called Tantalus, reviews the group's plan to capture Princess Garnet Til Alexandros XVII from an upcoming festival. Meanwhile, the young black mage Vivi wants to see a popular romance play (I Want To Be Your Canary), but his ticket turns out to be a fake. With some help from street rat Puck (who's literally a rat), he sneaks into the show. During the performance, Zidane and company attempt to make off with Garnet, rousing the ire of royal bodyguard Adelbert Steiner. Steiner tries to protect Garnet from Zidane's kidnapping and womanizing ways, but to no avail. That's because Garnet actually wants to be kidnapped. After all, her mother, the once peaceful Queen Brahne, has been attacking neighboring kingdoms with her army of black mages. Perhaps the answers Garnet seeks lie outside the walls of Alexandria.   Final Fantasy IX is even more story-driven than previous games in the series. The plot often switches focus between different characters or parties. One particularly exciting sequence on the second disc features two separate parties trying to escape a sticky situation. The game cuts between the two parties and builds an incredible sense of tension. Moreover, changing circumstances force characters to switch from one party to the other, which creates a real sense of dynamic teamwork. Final Fantasy IX is filled with creatively scripted set pieces that ensure that the player gets to know and use every character. However, when the story drags, or when your party seems particularly unbalanced, the scripting can seem overly heavy-handed, and you may find yourself wishing for more freedom. It's not until disc three that you can truly pick and choose your party members at will.   While the art style may have reverted to that of the earlier Final Fantasies, the storytelling - thankfully - has not. The suitably complicated plot explores many ideas and emotions - love, death, hope, fear, and even the nature of existence -and your party members learn about these things and more as they seek answers to the questions that drive them. No matter how bizarre each member of your party might appear, each one is actually a fully realized character whose fantastic appearance belies his or her depth of character. Throughout Final Fantasy IX, even characters like elderly rat women, obese clown chefs, and young moogle girls all have very human feelings. But while the characters may be interesting, the game's main storyline is weak by comparison. A large part of the game simply consists of proceeding from area to area with little or no impetus to continue, and the main villain is almost assuredly the least threatening in the series' history.One welcome addition that Final Fantasy IX brings to the series is a strong sense of humor. More than any other Final Fantasy to date, Final Fantasy IX is filled with moments that are sure to make you laugh. The dialogue and situations are frequently amusing, and almost every character has an amusing personality trait. Some of these are Zidane's instinctive womanizing, Steiner's unflappable obstinacy, Garnet's attempts to ""fit in"" with commoners, Vivi's clumsiness and endless angst, Quina Quen's single-minded search for delicious food, 9-year-old Eiko's take-charge presence, and Amarant's laissez-faire attitude toward everything. Even when it's not trying to make you laugh, the game is still lighthearted - it doesn't just try to impress or overwhelm you.   The gameplay has been tweaked so that Final Fantasy IX has one of the more balanced combat systems of any game in the series. Each character that joins your party has a character class and unique skills. For instance, Zidane is a thief. Garnet is a white mage and summoner, Vivi is a black mage, Steiner is a knight, Freya is a dragoon, Quina learns blue magic (which consists of enemy techniques) by eating opponents, Eiko is also a white mage and summoner (but focuses more on curative magic), and Amarant uses ""flair"" techniques and can throw weapons.   You expand on these basic character types by equipping objects on your characters. The weapons, armor, hats, wrist guards, boots, and accessories you find all contain particular abilities. If a character equips an item with an ability he or she can use, that ability becomes accessible. Different characters can draw out different abilities from the same item, and sometimes an item won't provide an ability at all. Winning battles earns your characters experience and ability points (AP). Earn enough AP while an ability is equipped, and you ""master"" the ability, which allows the character to access the ability even when the item has been removed.   Some abilities, such as spells and special techniques, become innate and can be activated by spending magic points. Other more passive types of abilities, such as auto-potion, counter, and resistances to status ailments, exist only in a potential form. You must assign these skills using ability crystals in order for them to become effective. The number of ability crystals a character has increases with the character's level.   The item-ability system establishes an excellent balance between individual character skills and player customization. Moreover, the addition of ability crystals prevents players from creating invincible, overpowered characters who have mastered every skill in the game. While not as complex as either the materia or junction systems of the previous two Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy IX's system is sure to satisfy players who like to micromanage, as well as those who just want to play the damned game already.   The battle system itself has been re-expanded to permit four simultaneous party members, as opposed to three as in the previous two installments. The larger party size permits more possible interactions with the enemies and with each other, which makes for more interesting battles. Since characters are more specialized in Final Fantasy IX than in recent games in the series, the larger party size goes a long way toward making the battles more tactical. Also, the preordained parties used at many points in the game have let the game designers carefully balance many of the larger boss battles.   Limit breaks return in the form of the trance system. As characters receive damage, their trance meter fills, and once the meter is full, the character enters a trance. Tranced characters have glowing skin, a more powerful appearance, and access to a new set of techniques and skills. The series' trademark summoning spells also return. Called eidolons in Final Fantasy IX, they appear with all the visual flair and over-the-top destruction that series fans, as well as detractors, have come to expect. Fortunately, after a few uses, the eidolons' animations are truncated to a short splash-damage effect.Final Fantasy IX also features a lot more minigames and diverting events than its predecessors. Everyone in the world seems to play Tetra Master, a souped-up version of Final Fantasy VIII's card battle game. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy VIII's enjoyable diversion has been turned into an unplayable nightmare. There's no longer any real reason to play the card game, but worst of all, Tetra Master literally has no rules. The game tells players to ""discover them for yourself,"" though most players may instead opt to not play Tetra Master at all. Otherwise, your party members can take time off to jump rope with schoolchildren, visit a high-stakes auction house, deliver letters for the network of moogles around the world, and generally comb the four corners of the world in search of things to do.   Graphically, Final Fantasy IX is slightly improved over Final Fantasy VIII. The backgrounds are rich, vibrant, and realistic. Many backgrounds are animated, which further increases the amount of visual detail. The in-game character models are slightly less detailed than those found in Chrono Cross - no doubt because there are four player characters onscreen instead of three. The full motion video cutscenes are as detailed as those in Final Fantasy VIII, though of course the characters themselves don't look as real. Square has been pushing the limits of what the PlayStation can reasonably do for quite a while, so it's difficult to see much improvement over previous games. Even so, Final Fantasy IX is one of the most graphically impressive games available on the console.   Unfortunately, Final Fantasy IX is unable to shake the PlayStation Final Fantasy audio curse. As with Final Fantasy VII and VIII, the music arrangements are distinctly synthesized and sound 16-bit. When Square's other teams are producing soundtracks like those in Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears, and Chrono Cross, there's no excuse for the sound quality of the company's marquee title to suffer so much. Even longtime series composer Nobuo Uematsu's compositions seem to be languishing. Save for a few standout tunes on the later discs, most of the songs are forgettable. Also, the sound effects are taken from the same Foley CD Square's been using since Final Fantasy IV.   After playing through four discs of Final Fantasy IX, the reason behind Square's return to the graphical style of old should be very clear: nostalgia. Nearly every element of Final Fantasy IX seems designed to trigger a nostalgic response in series fans. Plot sequences, characterizations, and environments will evoke warm feelings of déjà vu if you've played the older games. Final Fantasy IX's world, like that of every Final Fantasy, is distinct from the rest. Nevertheless, both obscure and specific references abound to everything from the first Nintendo-era Final Fantasy to last year's Final Fantasy VIII. Final Fantasy IX is like a sprawling, gushing love letter from Square to series fans.   Of course it's not enough to say ""I love you"" and expect reciprocation. Every turn of phrase and word choice counts - and it's here that Square's localization has failed its faithful fans. The translation of Final Fantasy IX is technically competent. The dialects are accurate (if sometimes overdone), the dialogue flows naturally and never seems forced or stilted, and the text is grammatically correct and spelled properly. But the devil is in the details, and it's here that Final Fantasy IX is exceedingly sloppy. On many occasions a reference or allusion to a previous Final Fantasy game is localized in a manner that differs from that of the original. Sometimes the astute series aficionado can puzzle out what the game is trying to reference, while other times the original intent of the game designers has been lost entirely. This normally wouldn't be much cause for alarm, but in a game as steeped in nostalgia as Final Fantasy IX, it can completely undermine the designers' intended effect. When the storyline dragged, the Japanese version would depend on nostalgia to carry you forward. Now, English-speaking audiences have been denied even that simple pleasure - ""Rally-ho!"" indeed.The taste of nostalgia is always bittersweet, so you might end up feeling that Final Fantasy IX signals the end of an era. At times, the force of the series' heritage threatens to overwhelm the narrative, and the game teeters dangerously close to becoming some sort of meta-RPG about the Final Fantasy series. Allegedly Square internally debated if Final Fantasy IX should have been released as a main series title or as a side story. The concern seems valid, because at times, the way Final Fantasy IX encompasses all that has come before makes it feel as if it exists outside of the main series.   For fans of traditional role-playing games, the forthcoming Final Fantasy X's drastic design shifts and Final Fantasy XI's online-only focus are the writing on the wall. After the aesthetically revolutionary Final Fantasy VII and the dramatic maturity of Final Fantasy VIII, the complacent Final Fantasy IX may seem like somewhat of a throwback. But some players may not mind one bit, as they prefer a polished if traditional role-playing game over the sometimes awkward consequences of more original play mechanics. Final Fantasy IX serves as a coda to the series as you know it - it's a summation of everything that players have enjoyed about the past ten years of Final Fantasy games. 
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1064,Soul of Darkness ,4.5, This Castlevania-like platformer is very buggy and doesn't work well on the Blackberry platform.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/2/0/4/2225204-darkness.jpg,BB,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/soul-of-darkness-review/1900-6262613/,neg,"
  If you're familiar with the more recent installments of Konami's Castlevania series, you'll feel right at home with Soul of Darkness' presentation. Like in that series, this Blackberry game's protagonist is a cape-wearing, long-haired prince who is both dapper and the perfect gothic athlete who runs, jumps, and eviscerates the undead. Unfortunately, while Soul of Darkness looks the part, it's as vaporous as the midnight fog.   Soul of Darkness has a Castlevania-like look and feel.   You play as Kale, a vampire hunter who seeks to rescue his long-lost love Lydia (who may or may not be a vampire herself) after she disappears one night. In the Blackberry version of Soul of Darkness, you'll travel through a town, a cave, and a castle--all of which play very similarly with only a different color scheme to set them apart.    With the Storm2's touch screen, Kale is not adequately responsive to your input. He can run to the right and turn left as you slide your finger over the virtual D pad, but he can't run left and then turn right. You jump by pressing up, which can cause you to jump prematurely or miss certain ledges as you accidentally start to drift. This is not a positive for a platformer game where running and jumping are so important.    Castlevania-trained players will appreciate some of the details in Soul of Darkness' level design, like rolling fireballs that chase you, chandeliers you can bring crashing down, and lanterns you can light to repel certain creatures. You'll also enjoy leveling up your character's strength and using attack combos with collectible purple gem shards, but your upgrade levels max out very quickly in this brief game. And sadly, the storyline, which seems interesting enough, ends abruptly when a game-crashing bug rears its evil head toward the very end of the game.    You can collect gem shards to power up your attack and combo levels.   Different versions of Soul of Darkness, which are more stable and offer greater length and variety, are available for other mobile devices. However, this Blackberry version is mediocre. Banish this creature of the night from your phone.   This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com. 
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1065,MLB Stickball ,4.5," Proof that simplicity isn't always a good thing, this cutesy baseball download is so vapid you’ll lose interest well before the 7th-inning stretch.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/4/7/2221147-box_mlbsb.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-stickball-review/1900-6199667/,neg,"
  America's favorite pastime is arguably the only sport you could play while simultaneously taking a nap, but when the action ramps up and the bases are loaded, the excitement of each pitch, swing, dive, and steal keeps jersey-donned fans cheering at the top of their lungs. Unfortunately, there are no such moments of adrenaline-fueled exhilaration in MLB Stickball. Indeed, the game manages to tap into childhood nostalgia with the classic rules of the sport, and plunges even deeper into your inner kid with the addictive addition of collectible cards. But despite incorporating a neat feature or two, it's too watered down to keep you wanting to play for any period of time.   Aim for knickknacks around each stage for bonus bases and to earn points.   MLB Stickball consists of pitchers throwing balls to batters who are aiming for the fences, but that's where the gameplay ends. This makes it an easy game for anyone to dabble in, but the limitation to just two actions robs Stickball of depth. Between repetitious innings you'll spend plenty of time on the hill tapping the Xbox 360's four face buttons to toss various pitches down the plate, while batting is less involved with two swings: a standard slug with the A button, and a power hit with B. Various statistics dictate how accurate each fastball, curveball, lob, and bounce pitch is as it crosses through the strike zone, and swingers' hitting/power meters determine how far the ball will launch on impact. As opposed to upgrading these stats with career progression, you'll earn points and extra bases for your team by hitting location-specific landmarks like basketball hoops, water towers, or parked vehicles. These accumulated points act as the in-game currency, which you can spend on packs of Topps-licensed baseball cards.    Each pack contains three randomly selected player cards (of a possible 120) and unlocks the Major Leaguer as a playable character. As an added bonus, you're able to swap three of the same card for one of your choice if you find stacks of the same piling high. Buying bundles of players is the most addictive mechanic of MLB Stickball, and you'll probably find yourself hunting for every last card--a shame considering that the process of earning the coin to buy them is so mind-numbing.     Each inning--whether it's three, six, or nine per game--is an agitating exercise in trying to read the hard-to-gauge pitches. Whether a throw is too low, way up high, or dead center is indiscernible thanks to an imprecise point of view and few useful visual indicators. Swinging for what should assuredly be a home run often leads to balls falling short or clearing the batter entirely. This lack of clarity is frustrating, particularly during online multiplayer games, when it's easy to be deceived by opponents exploiting this perception problem.    Each character boasts different traits--this hideous blond fella is an all-around team player.   Relying on four-player multiplayer to save you from the lifeless single-player or 1v1 online matches will only disappoint. While two players pitch and bat, others will be sitting on their thumbs waiting for their turn at the plate and mound. Not being able to play as a ball-catching fielder dooms the third and fourth additions to the teams to sit and watch the humdrum events unfold in front of them rather than participate. Unforgivable things like characters simply teleporting between bases is annoying, while fielders' clunky movements seem to be missing entire frames of animation, so there isn't even anything to see if you're stuck in the spectator's chair. Making things all the more mind-boggling is that MLB Stickball is so graphically unremarkable. The ""kiddie"" approach to the artistic aesthetic is appropriate, but it reeks of neglect, as every character's grossly disproportionate head looks as if a low-res image has been pasted onto the middle of it, so the plainly textured world is populated with disgusting-looking players. Oh, and you'll want to load up your own tunes so you've got a modicum of audio outside of the menu's bleeps and bloops, forgettable music, and the sound of ball meeting bat.     While stickball is undoubtedly a sport with videogame potential, you're better of heading outdoors than playing on your Xbox 360 on this occasion. With just two single-player game modes and bare-bones multiplayer options, the 800 Microsoft points price tag is criminal.    
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1066,The Punisher: No Mercy ,4.5, This online first-person shooter is too shallow and buggy to entertain for long.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/0/6/4/2221064-punisher_no_mercy.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-punisher-no-mercy-review/1900-6213000/,neg,"
  On paper, The Punisher: No Mercy seems like a decent value. For only $10, you get an online multiplayer shooter with eight unique levels, a bunch of characters from the comic books to play as, and enough unlockable weapons and gadgets to keep you occupied for quite a few hours. But when you discover how shallow and generic this first-person shooter is, any bargain bin thrills you get from shooting up your friends will quickly dissipate. You can blow through the Story mode in less than a half hour; after which, you have only repetitive shootouts to look forward to when you take your guns online. For such a cheap price, No Mercy fills the mindless shooter void in a pinch, but any fun is over before you know it.      The main draw in No Mercy is the online multiplayer mode, but there is a perfunctory campaign thrown in for those who want a little practice shooting up brain-dead bots before they pit their skills against more challenging adversaries in competitive play. The four story levels begin and end with hand-drawn story segments that show Frank Castle's confused reaction to fighting clones of his arch nemeses, but they abruptly end with a nasty ""To be continued"" tease before this seeing-double tale is resolved. The Story mode should provide either a conclusion to the narrative or train you for your online matches, but it does neither. Your bot opponents are devoid of tactical abilities and health, so your time spent shooting up your foes in single-player does a lousy job of preparing you for human-controlled enemies. By the time the story ends, you unlock every playable character, along with a few powerful gadgets and weapons, and a skirmish mode to extend solo sessions, but it's a pretty mundane experience.     Online play is broken up into cooperative and competitive modes, but given the fact that artificial enemies are unnaturally moronic, you have to opt for competitive action if you want opponents who put up a fight. There are a number of different modes to choose from, but all of them offer only slight variations on the classic deathmatch formula. The lack of diverse objectives leads to a monotonous feeling that even the well-designed levels can't overcome. The stages have plenty of hidden passageways and deadly sniper spots, but the intelligent layouts are largely wasted because there isn't a reason to carefully sneak around to seek out the best positions. Each fight is over in the blink of an eye. If you can shoot enemies in the back, they'll most likely die before they can even turn around, which makes for an abrupt and unsatisfying experience.    Because fights are usually over before you can think up a clever trash-talking line, matches are slightly more fun with fewer players. Most maps can accommodate up to eight people but the action is at its best when that number is cut in half. With a few seconds to breathe between encounters, you have a chance to reload your gun and pick up some much-needed health packs, giving you a chance to stay alive for a little while before finally succumbing to an onslaught of bullets. But even when you find the perfect balance of competitors, playing online still has a lot of problems. The matches often lag so much that the only option is to ditch the unreliable automatic weapons, fill the screen with fiery blasts from the rocket launcher, and hope for the best. Worse, still, are the frequent drops. When the host is kicked out, everyone gets booted to the title screen, and this happens so often that it's difficult to get into a shooting rhythm.    Why is he so happy?   The upgrade system is the most interesting aspect of No Mercy, but it messes with the already tenuous balance. By earning kills and picking up power-ups spread across the maps, you can level up your guns, which makes them more accurate and powerful. These upgrades disappear each time you die, but there are permanent rewards you can earn by playing longer. If you chalk up a few hundred kills online, you unlock even more powerful weapons, as well as mods that give your character special abilities. You can only equip two mods at a time (one active and one passive), but they have a significant effect on the action. You can unlock a motion sensor, health regeneration, and even the ability to become invisible. Having upgrades to strive for is a cool idea, but the requirement to unlock the better tools is way too high, forcing players to log in hours upon hours to see the high-end offerings.      Despite a few good features, it's not worth dealing with No Mercy's unsatisfying gunplay, connection issues, and dearth of multiplayer options just to get your hands on a few unlockable items. The grating voice acting doesn't help matters either, with a near-constant stream of vulgar one-liners peppering every match. You'll hear ""May the *expletive* rats eat your meat"" so many times that the words will lose all meaning. There are a few hours of middling entertainment to extract from this comic-themed package, but other than the bargain price, there is little reason to play The Punisher: No Mercy over any other shooter on the PlayStation 3.  
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1067,Samurai Warriors 3 ,4.5, Samurai Warriors 3 is yet another unimaginative entry in a series that became outdated years ago.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/2/2/1/2221221-box_samwar3.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/samurai-warriors-3-review/1900-6280044/,neg,"
  If you've played one game in the Warriors franchise, you've pretty much played them all. Koei's wheelhouse consists of so many hack-and-slash games set in ancient China that it's difficult to distinguish one from the next. Although the settings and strategy vary slightly, and the series has had a couple of memorable titles, all rely on the same underlying combat mechanics. Unless you're a diehard fan of button mashing innumerable faceless enemies into oblivion, there's little reason to pick up the latest iteration. The dearth of new content and an inexplicably stubborn adherence to stale mechanics make Samurai Warriors 3 a tough sell.   Mowing down hordes of enemies takes little to no effort.   The third main entry in the Samurai Warriors franchise takes place during the Warring States period that covers nearly 200 years of conflict beginning in 15th century Japan. For those unfamiliar with the series, Samurai Warriors 3 offers a new Historical mode in which you take a custom character through a series of historical battles told with Koei's fantasy twist. As you progress through each mission, new entries in the timeline are unlocked, giving you a better understanding of what would otherwise be an incomprehensible story to the uninitiated. In addition to the traditional Story mode that takes the game's 35-plus characters through five missions each, the new Murasame Castle mode covers an entirely separate yet equally uninteresting narrative that involves time-traveling demons. Although the story varies across these three game modes, the mission structure and strategy remain largely the same. You can even repeat levels in Free mode, but there is very little reason to do so. Your character's experience, inventory, and move set progress evenly across each game type, calling into question why these modes are even divided in the first place.    Before each mission, you are presented with a map of the area and a rundown of the various objectives you have to complete. You can equip the weapons and armor you've collected, upgrade your equipment at the blacksmith, and choose from a limited set of items to bring to battle. The combat mechanics are similar to every other game in the franchise, and they quickly devolve into mindless button mashing. Though there are countless enemies on the screen, plowing through fields of soldiers is no more complicated than hammering one or two buttons to unleash the same combos over and over again. Adding new moves as you level up simply adds another button press for a string of up to 12 hits on the same button. The AI is laughable, and the only enemies that present any challenge are the occasional named officers you have to kill as part of a mission objective. The ability to ride on horseback could have added an interesting twist to the combat, but it provides no benefit or strategic advantage. Your character is easily knocked off, and the added height makes it more difficult to string combos together. You do move much faster while on horseback, but this only highlights the game's terrible camera system that lags behind as you turn. All too often, you're forced to rely on the corner minimap to orient yourself and decide which direction you should be heading.    A variety of control schemes are available, including the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, the Classic Controller, and the GameCube pad. However, with no support for motion controls and combat emphasis on only two or three buttons, it really makes no difference which you choose. To help ease the monotony, the entire game can be played cooperatively with local split-screen multiplayer, which is a nice addition. You can also play Murasame Castle online with friends or strangers, but you might as well be playing with a computer-controlled ally. The game throws new objectives at you throughout the mission that require you to change your course to defend an ally or take out an optional enemy officer for strategic boosts like increased damage or experience points. The ability to discuss strategy might have been helpful in these situations, but the lack of Wii Speak support prevents effective communication.   Blur effects are about the extent of the visual flair.   If there were anything interesting to look at, it would have been an impressive feat to have so many enemies on the screen. However, the feeling of deja vu that permeates the mechanics in Samurai Warriors extends throughout all aspects of its presentation as well. Your heroes animate well enough and the frequent cutscenes are at least on par with current console standards, but everything else from the blurry textures and stiff, lifeless enemy animations to the overly dramatic voice acting and repetitive clanks of your weapons would feel dated even on the previous generation of consoles. The score is a nice mix of orchestral and modern sounds, but it's nearly drowned out during battle as the same tinny sound effects repeat over and over again. The irony is obvious when a computer-controlled ally repeatedly blurts out the phrase, ""I hope you aren't bored with such pathetic opponents.""     If you've played any of the games in Koei's Warriors franchise, then you'll know exactly what to expect from Samurai Warriors 3. If you've enjoyed any of these games, you may be able to tolerate its stubborn adherence to outdated combat mechanics, uninspired story, and downright ugly visuals. However, if you're new to the series or simply didn't care for the previous iterations, then by all means stay clear of Samurai Warriors 3. Most recent action games, including some entries in the Warriors series itself, make this one seem archaic by comparison.  
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1068,MLB Front Office Manager ,4.5, An obtuse interface makes MLB Front Office Manager bewildering even to baseball-sim veterans.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/9/0/2221190-box_mlbfom.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-front-office-manager-review/1900-6204083/,neg,"
  Sports management simulations have finally hit the big time. After years of indie obscurity, at least in North America, the genre has finally been hauled into the mainstream by EA Sports and 2K Sports. But don't schedule a parade just yet. EA's NFL Head Coach series has gone through some growing pains over the past couple of years, and now 2K Sports' MLB Front Office Manager is off to a shaky start. The biggest problem with this latest attempt at taking management sims to the masses is a gamepad-oriented interface that makes even the most routine tasks about as irritating as trying to throw a curve ball while wearing oven mitts. Clunky controls and a near-total lack of feedback make it hard to feel like you're in control of anything, let alone a $150-million big-league ballclub stocked with equally extravagant egos.   Everything looks good on the surface, but good luck digging into the nitty-gritty of the player database.   The basic approach on display here, however, is time-tested. The game follows in the footsteps of independently developed baseball management sims like Out of the Park Baseball and Baseball Mogul by putting you in the shoes of a Major League general manager. You start off by naming your virtual head honcho, selecting from a few face and clothing options (are you Joe Suit or Johnny Polo Shirt?), and picking a personal background that determines your skill at specific duties. If you set yourself up as an ex-manager, for instance, teams on the field get a leadership boost. If you take the low road and choose the legal profession, you receive a helping hand when it comes to contract negotiations. As time goes by and you chalk up wins in the Majors, you gain experience points that can be spent on bulking up other skills.    There is no option to work your way up to the Show from the minors, so following this brief character creation you simply pick a Major League team and grab the reins. You have pretty much total control over your club from this point on. Budgets, lineups, pitching rotations, allocation of scouting dollars, trades, and so forth are all under your watch, although you can flip over to automatic and let the CPU take care of the more mundane jobs. The team owner sets a player budget that serves as a de facto salary cap, but beyond that you're free to do whatever you want. If you have a bad run, though, you can find yourself bounced to the curb and awaiting job offers from other clubs. Virtually all of the hardcore stuff serious baseball fans expect is present here, including the Rule 5 draft, player arbitration, and bidding on Japanese prospects.    Careers can be played as straight single-player campaigns, as a fantasy variation that employs a rotisserie-style scoring system, or in online leagues with up to 30 players. Just about nobody seems to be playing the game online, however, and we couldn't scrounge up a single open league. It's still only the start of February, but the lack of players isn't good news considering that real pitchers and catchers are reporting to MLB training camps in just a couple of weeks. This is also the first baseball game to hit stores in 2009, so you would expect a little more online excitement around it.   One of the few things that MLB Front Office Manager has going for it is its good-looking manager screen.   At any rate, the foundation of MLB Front Office Manager is solid. It looks very good, as well. Because the game was designed with the Xbox 360 and PS3 in mind, the PC version has larger-than-necessary menus that give the game something of a glitzy arcade sheen. Big, bold letters and numbers splashed on the screen have a strong visual impact. This is a real plus in a genre where most of the competition comes from indie developers and looks more like spreadsheet programs for the office than something you would want to relax with at home. 2K Sports makes great use of its MLB license, loading the game up with a wealth of player photos and an attractive manager's screen where you can watch the action unfold on the diamond and make calls from the dugout.    Implementation is where everything falls apart. A good sports management sim needs to have a database at its heart. This sounds like a dreadfully dull way to present a game, but it is an absolute necessity in this genre since you need to be able to easily sift through stats and sort players by the numbers. Yet here you're working with screens almost entirely taken up by visual chrome and player photos, save for a relatively small area filled with a couple of columns of players and the barest minimum of stats. Player lists are abbreviated so that you can see only eight names on the screen at once, forcing you to tediously scroll through multiple menus. Information is presented in an almost nonsensical manner. The player negotiation screen, for instance, covers just six core stats for batters and pitchers, like AVG and W-L. So you're forced to go rummaging around elsewhere in the rosters to dig up thorough information regarding essential data, like at-bats and hits allowed.      Vital data, such as overall player ratings and potential ratings, is often tucked away in layered information screens, necessitating a ridiculous amount of searching whenever you take on even the most rudimentary task. It's tough just gathering the information needed when setting up pitching rotations. And it gets even worse when it's time to sort through the dozens of players who need the protection of a 40-man roster prior to the Rule 5 draft every winter. The menu screens aren't linked to one another either, meaning that you can't zip from one screen to another. When you're trying to re-sign a player, for instance, and he tells you he wants more years on his contract, you can't move directly from the e-mail telling you about this demand to his negotiation screen. Instead, you have to scroll down the main menu to Transactions, open its submenu list, scroll down to Payroll, open it up, and then scroll down that list to the player's name to pull up his contract offer page. It's the same deal with CPU-offered trades. They are a bit more user-friendly in that you at least have the ability to instantly go to a comparison screen where you can check out the players on the block. But leaving this screen strands you back at the main menu, and you have to access your e-mail again to accept or reject the deal (which, incidentally, cannot be altered). Even the simplest roster-management tasks require five or six steps when they should necessitate just one. You spend more time chasing your tail than making baseball decisions.   What, again?!   A lack of feedback makes MLB Front Office Manager even more confusing. Although you have Oakland A's GM Billy Beane on tap providing tips about contracts, along with memos that keep important dates on the top of the screen so you don't forget about something like the arbitration, much of what you do takes place in a vacuum. This is a particularly huge problem when it comes to handling players. While you're kept well informed about looming deadlines, offers to free agents, to pending free agents, and to other teams during trade talks are dealt with through pretty much absolute silence. There is no back and forth with player agents or rival GMs, or any chance to counter an offer from another team. All you get is a flat acceptance or denial with an occasional personal observation, such as that the money being offered is ""laughable.""    Signings aren't even properly noted in the e-mail screen that covers all league communications. You would think that losing Manny Ramirez to free agency would be enough of a big deal to the Dodgers to warrant more than an e-mail buried among all the other league news of the day. A successful signing never gets much press, either. If you ink somebody like K-Rod, you don't even receive so much as a cheesy ""I'm looking forward to playing for you this year!"" blurb. The only indications that your bid has been accepted are a one-line e-mail, maybe a follow-up note saying that the fans are excited, and notice that the player in question has been added to the Pending Transactions list and must be assigned within 10 days or released.   Most other sports sims would let you click through on all of these players to access their main stat screens.   Finally, some of the decisions made by computer GMs are beyond bizarre. Every team in the game seems to be working under the same management philosophy. Each offseason, everybody appears to go after the same big-name free agents no matter what sort of budgetary restrictions they may be operating under. So this leads to ridiculous scenarios where poorer clubs like the Kansas City Royals waste $16 million a year on a washout like Jason Giambi, or the Cincinnati Reds dish off $21 million a year on Mark Teixeira. Sometimes these single big-name signings fill up nearly a third of a team's overall payroll. Team budgets are also all over the place. The LA Dodgers start off with a budget of $111.6 million, while the cheapskate Toronto Blue Jays begin 2009 with a whopping $139.2 million. Somebody either hasn't checked the lowly value of the Canadian dollar lately or has a hate on for Dodger blue. Some trades come from the dark side of the moon. While most are nondescript affairs shuffling minor leaguers around, the game hits you with a Bizarro World blockbuster on a regular basis, like when the Red Sox trade away Jonathan Papelbon during spring training for some guy named Nate McLouth. There may be some kind of bug in the game with Papelbon though, since the Sox seem to ditch him for a lower-rated nobody in the first spring training every time you start a career.    MLB Front Office Manager needs a lot of work to be ready for the big leagues. The game offers an impressive amount of depth and great support for online leagues, especially for management-sim-deprived consolers. But playing it is such a chore that anyone seriously interested in such simulations will quickly move on to a more serious, if PC-only, effort like Out of the Park Baseball.  
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1069,MLB Front Office Manager ,4.5, An obtuse interface makes MLB Front Office Manager bewildering even to baseball-sim veterans.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/9/0/2221190-box_mlbfom.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-front-office-manager-review/1900-6204142/,neg,"
  Sports management simulations have finally hit the big time. After years of indie obscurity, at least in North America, the genre has finally been hauled into the mainstream by EA Sports and 2K Sports. But don't schedule a parade just yet. EA's NFL Head Coach series has gone through some growing pains over the past couple of years, and now 2K Sports' MLB Front Office Manager is off to a shaky start. The biggest problem with this latest attempt at taking management sims to the masses is a gamepad-oriented interface that makes even the most routine tasks about as irritating as trying to throw a curve ball while wearing oven mitts. Clunky controls and a near-total lack of feedback make it hard to feel like you're in control of anything, let alone a $150-million big-league ballclub stocked with equally extravagant egos.   Everything looks good on the surface, but good luck digging into the nitty-gritty of the player database.   The basic approach on display here, however, is time-tested. The game follows in the footsteps of independently developed baseball management sims like Out of the Park Baseball and Baseball Mogul by putting you in the shoes of a Major League general manager. You start off by naming your virtual head honcho, selecting from a few face and clothing options (are you Joe Suit or Johnny Polo Shirt?), and picking a personal background that determines your skill at specific duties. If you set yourself up as an ex-manager, for instance, teams on the field get a leadership boost. If you take the low road and choose the legal profession, you receive a helping hand when it comes to contract negotiations. As time goes by and you chalk up wins in the Majors, you gain experience points that can be spent on bulking up other skills.    There is no option to work your way up to the Show from the minors, so following this brief character creation you simply pick a Major League team and grab the reins. You have pretty much total control over your club from this point on. Budgets, lineups, pitching rotations, allocation of scouting dollars, trades, and so forth are all under your watch, although you can flip over to automatic and let the CPU take care of the more mundane jobs. The team owner sets a player budget that serves as a de facto salary cap, but beyond that you're free to do whatever you want. If you have a bad run, though, you can find yourself bounced to the curb and awaiting job offers from other clubs. Virtually all of the hardcore stuff serious baseball fans expect is present here, including the Rule 5 draft, player arbitration, and bidding on Japanese prospects.    Careers can be played as straight single-player campaigns, as a fantasy variation that employs a rotisserie-style scoring system, or in online leagues with up to 30 players. Just about nobody seems to be playing the game online, however, so finding an open league for your team is tough. It's still only the start of February, but the lack of players isn't good news considering that real pitchers and catchers are reporting to MLB training camps in just a couple of weeks. This is also the first baseball game to hit stores in 2009, so you would expect a little more online excitement around it.   One of the few things that MLB Front Office Manager has going for it is its good-looking manager screen.   At any rate, the foundation of MLB Front Office Manager is solid. It looks very good, as well. Big, bold letters and numbers splashed on the screen have a strong visual impact. This is a real plus in a genre where, at least on the PC, most of the competition comes from indie developers and looks more like spreadsheet programs for the office than something you would want to relax with at home. 2K Sports makes great use of its MLB license, loading the game up with a wealth of player photos and an attractive manager's screen where you can watch the action unfold on the diamond and make calls from the dugout.    Implementation is where everything falls apart. A good sports management sim needs to have a database at its heart. This sounds like a dreadfully dull way to present a game, but it is an absolute necessity in this genre since you need to be able to easily sift through stats and sort players by the numbers. Yet here you're working with screens almost entirely taken up by visual chrome and player photos, save for a relatively small area filled with a couple of columns of players and the barest minimum of stats. Player lists are abbreviated so that you can see only eight names on the screen at once, forcing you to tediously scroll through multiple menus. Information is presented in an almost nonsensical manner. The player negotiation screen, for instance, covers just six core stats for batters and pitchers, like AVG and W-L. So you're forced to go rummaging around elsewhere in the rosters to dig up thorough information regarding essential data, like at-bats and hits allowed.      Vital data, such as overall player ratings and potential ratings, is often tucked away in layered information screens, necessitating a ridiculous amount of searching whenever you take on even the most rudimentary task. It's tough just gathering the information needed when setting up pitching rotations. And it gets even worse when it's time to sort through the dozens of players who need the protection of a 40-man roster prior to the Rule 5 draft every winter. The menu screens aren't linked to one another either, meaning that you can't zip from one screen to another. When you're trying to re-sign a player, for instance, and he tells you he wants more years on his contract, you can't move directly from the e-mail telling you about this demand to his negotiation screen. Instead, you have to scroll down the main menu to Transactions, open its submenu list, scroll down to Payroll, open it up, and then scroll down that list to the player's name to pull up his contract offer page. It's the same deal with CPU-offered trades. They are a bit more user-friendly in that you at least have the ability to instantly go to a comparison screen where you can check out the players on the block. But leaving this screen strands you back at the main menu, and you have to access your e-mail again to accept or reject the deal (which, incidentally, cannot be altered). Even the simplest roster-management tasks require five or six steps when they should necessitate just one. You spend more time chasing your tail than making baseball decisions.  Menu navigation takes a lot longer than it should.  A lack of feedback makes MLB Front Office Manager even more confusing. Although you have Oakland A's GM Billy Beane on tap providing tips about contracts, along with memos that keep important dates on the top of the screen so you don't forget about something like the arbitration, much of what you do takes place in a vacuum. This is a particularly huge problem when it comes to handling players. While you're kept well informed about looming deadlines, offers to free agents, to pending free agents, and to other teams during trade talks are dealt with through pretty much absolute silence. There is no back and forth with player agents or rival GMs, or any chance to counter an offer from another team. All you get is a flat acceptance or denial with an occasional personal observation, such as that the money being offered is ""laughable.""  Signings aren't even properly noted in the e-mail screen that covers all league communications. You would think that losing Manny Ramirez to free agency would be enough of a big deal to the Dodgers to warrant more than an e-mail buried among all the other league news of the day. A successful signing never gets much press, either. If you ink somebody like K-Rod, you don't even receive so much as a cheesy ""I'm looking forward to playing for you this year!"" blurb. The only indications that your bid has been accepted are a one-line e-mail, maybe a follow-up note saying that the fans are excited, and notice that the player in question has been added to the Pending Transactions list and must be assigned within 10 days or released.  Most other sports sims would offer a lot more player stats for you to base your managerial decisions on.  Finally, some of the decisions made by computer GMs are beyond bizarre. Every team in the game seems to be working under the same management philosophy. Each offseason, everybody appears to go after the same big-name free agents no matter what sort of budgetary restrictions they may be operating under. So this leads to ridiculous scenarios where poorer clubs like the Kansas City Royals waste $16 million a year on a washout like Jason Giambi, or the Cincinnati Reds dish off $21 million a year on Mark Teixeira. Sometimes these single big-name signings fill up nearly a third of a team's overall payroll. Team budgets are also all over the place. The LA Dodgers start off with a budget of $111.6 million, while the cheapskate Toronto Blue Jays begin 2009 with a whopping $139.2 million. Somebody either hasn't checked the lowly value of the Canadian dollar lately or has a hate on for Dodger blue. Some trades come from the dark side of the moon. While most are nondescript affairs shuffling minor leaguers around, the game hits you with a Bizarro World blockbuster on a regular basis, like when the Red Sox trade away Jonathan Papelbon during spring training for some guy named Nate McLouth. There may be some kind of bug in the game with Papelbon though, since the Sox seem to ditch him for a lower-rated nobody in the first spring training every time you start a career.  MLB Front Office Manager needs a lot of work to be ready for the big leagues. The game offers an impressive amount of depth and great support for online leagues, especially for management-sim-deprived consolers. But playing it is such a chore that anyone seriously interested in such simulations will quickly move on to a more serious, if PC-only, effort like Out of the Park Baseball. 
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1070,MLB Front Office Manager ,4.5, An obtuse interface makes MLB Front Office Manager bewildering even to baseball-sim veterans.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/9/0/2221190-box_mlbfom.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-front-office-manager-review/1900-6204145/,neg,"
  Sports management simulations have finally hit the big time. After years of indie obscurity, at least in North America, the genre has finally been hauled into the mainstream by EA Sports and 2K Sports. But don't schedule a parade just yet. EA's NFL Head Coach series has gone through some growing pains over the past couple of years, and now 2K Sports' MLB Front Office Manager is off to a shaky start. The biggest problem with this latest attempt at taking management sims to the masses is a gamepad-oriented interface that makes even the most routine tasks about as irritating as trying to throw a curve ball while wearing oven mitts. Clunky controls and a near-total lack of feedback make it hard to feel like you're in control of anything, let alone a $150-million big-league ballclub stocked with equally extravagant egos.   Everything looks good on the surface, but good luck digging into the nitty-gritty of the player database.   The basic approach on display here, however, is time-tested. The game follows in the footsteps of independently developed baseball management sims like Out of the Park Baseball and Baseball Mogul by putting you in the shoes of a Major League general manager. You start off by naming your virtual head honcho, selecting from a few face and clothing options (are you Joe Suit or Johnny Polo Shirt?), and picking a personal background that determines your skill at specific duties. If you set yourself up as an ex-manager, for instance, teams on the field get a leadership boost. If you take the low road and choose the legal profession, you receive a helping hand when it comes to contract negotiations. As time goes by and you chalk up wins in the Majors, you gain experience points that can be spent on bulking up other skills.    There is no option to work your way up to the Show from the minors, so following this brief character creation you simply pick a Major League team and grab the reins. You have pretty much total control over your club from this point on. Budgets, lineups, pitching rotations, allocation of scouting dollars, trades, and so forth are all under your watch, although you can flip over to automatic and let the CPU take care of the more mundane jobs. The team owner sets a player budget that serves as a de facto salary cap, but beyond that you're free to do whatever you want. If you have a bad run, though, you can find yourself bounced to the curb and awaiting job offers from other clubs. Virtually all of the hardcore stuff serious baseball fans expect is present here, including the Rule 5 draft, player arbitration, and bidding on Japanese prospects.    Careers can be played as straight single-player campaigns, as a fantasy variation that employs a rotisserie-style scoring system, or in online leagues with up to 30 players. Just about nobody seems to be playing the game online, however, so finding an open league for your team is tough. It's still only the start of February, but the lack of players isn't good news considering that real pitchers and catchers are reporting to MLB training camps in just a couple of weeks. This is also the first baseball game to hit stores in 2009, so you would expect a little more online excitement around it.   One of the few things that MLB Front Office Manager has going for it is its good-looking manager screen.   At any rate, the foundation of MLB Front Office Manager is solid. It looks very good, as well. Big, bold letters and numbers splashed on the screen have a strong visual impact. This is a real plus in a genre where, at least on the PC, most of the competition comes from indie developers and looks more like spreadsheet programs for the office than something you would want to relax with at home. 2K Sports makes great use of its MLB license, loading the game up with a wealth of player photos and an attractive manager's screen where you can watch the action unfold on the diamond and make calls from the dugout.    Implementation is where everything falls apart. A good sports management sim needs to have a database at its heart. This sounds like a dreadfully dull way to present a game, but it is an absolute necessity in this genre since you need to be able to easily sift through stats and sort players by the numbers. Yet here you're working with screens almost entirely taken up by visual chrome and player photos, save for a relatively small area filled with a couple of columns of players and the barest minimum of stats. Player lists are abbreviated so that you can see only eight names on the screen at once, forcing you to tediously scroll through multiple menus. Information is presented in an almost nonsensical manner. The player negotiation screen, for instance, covers just six core stats for batters and pitchers, like AVG and W-L. So you're forced to go rummaging around elsewhere in the rosters to dig up thorough information regarding essential data, like at-bats and hits allowed.      Vital data, such as overall player ratings and potential ratings, is often tucked away in layered information screens, necessitating a ridiculous amount of searching whenever you take on even the most rudimentary task. It's tough just gathering the information needed when setting up pitching rotations. And it gets even worse when it's time to sort through the dozens of players who need the protection of a 40-man roster prior to the Rule 5 draft every winter. The menu screens aren't linked to one another either, meaning that you can't zip from one screen to another. When you're trying to re-sign a player, for instance, and he tells you he wants more years on his contract, you can't move directly from the e-mail telling you about this demand to his negotiation screen. Instead, you have to scroll down the main menu to Transactions, open its submenu list, scroll down to Payroll, open it up, and then scroll down that list to the player's name to pull up his contract offer page. It's the same deal with CPU-offered trades. They are a bit more user-friendly in that you at least have the ability to instantly go to a comparison screen where you can check out the players on the block. But leaving this screen strands you back at the main menu, and you have to access your e-mail again to accept or reject the deal (which, incidentally, cannot be altered). Even the simplest roster-management tasks require five or six steps when they should necessitate just one. You spend more time chasing your tail than making baseball decisions.  Menu navigation takes a lot longer than it should.  A lack of feedback makes MLB Front Office Manager even more confusing. Although you have Oakland A's GM Billy Beane on tap providing tips about contracts, along with memos that keep important dates on the top of the screen so you don't forget about something like the arbitration, much of what you do takes place in a vacuum. This is a particularly huge problem when it comes to handling players. While you're kept well informed about looming deadlines, offers to free agents, to pending free agents, and to other teams during trade talks are dealt with through pretty much absolute silence. There is no back and forth with player agents or rival GMs, or any chance to counter an offer from another team. All you get is a flat acceptance or denial with an occasional personal observation, such as that the money being offered is ""laughable.""  Signings aren't even properly noted in the e-mail screen that covers all league communications. You would think that losing Manny Ramirez to free agency would be enough of a big deal to the Dodgers to warrant more than an e-mail buried among all the other league news of the day. A successful signing never gets much press, either. If you ink somebody like K-Rod, you don't even receive so much as a cheesy ""I'm looking forward to playing for you this year!"" blurb. The only indications that your bid has been accepted are a one-line e-mail, maybe a follow-up note saying that the fans are excited, and notice that the player in question has been added to the Pending Transactions list and must be assigned within 10 days or released.  Most other sports sims would offer a lot more player stats for you to base your managerial decisions on.  Finally, some of the decisions made by computer GMs are beyond bizarre. Every team in the game seems to be working under the same management philosophy. Each offseason, everybody appears to go after the same big-name free agents no matter what sort of budgetary restrictions they may be operating under. So this leads to ridiculous scenarios where poorer clubs like the Kansas City Royals waste $16 million a year on a washout like Jason Giambi, or the Cincinnati Reds dish off $21 million a year on Mark Teixeira. Sometimes these single big-name signings fill up nearly a third of a team's overall payroll. Team budgets are also all over the place. The LA Dodgers start off with a budget of $111.6 million, while the cheapskate Toronto Blue Jays begin 2009 with a whopping $139.2 million. Somebody either hasn't checked the lowly value of the Canadian dollar lately or has a hate on for Dodger blue. Some trades come from the dark side of the moon. While most are nondescript affairs shuffling minor leaguers around, the game hits you with a Bizarro World blockbuster on a regular basis, like when the Red Sox trade away Jonathan Papelbon during spring training for some guy named Nate McLouth. There may be some kind of bug in the game with Papelbon though, since the Sox seem to ditch him for a lower-rated nobody in the first spring training every time you start a career.  MLB Front Office Manager needs a lot of work to be ready for the big leagues. The game offers an impressive amount of depth and great support for online leagues, especially for management-sim-deprived consolers. But playing it is such a chore that anyone seriously interested in such simulations will quickly move on to a more serious, if PC-only, effort like Out of the Park Baseball. 
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1071,Major League Baseball 2K9 ,4.5, MLB 2K9 is a deeply flawed funhouse-mirror distortion of baseball.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/3/8/0/2221380-box_mlb2k9.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/major-league-baseball-2k9-review/1900-6205768/,neg,"
  Scientists have long pondered the existence of other universes where the physics are totally different than they are here. In these strange dimensions, up would be down, fast would be slow, and Major League Baseball 2K9 would be a realistic depiction of the national pastime game. In our own mundane reality, however, 2K Sports' latest look at the grand old American game skews baseball so much that you seem to be viewing the diamond action through a funhouse mirror. All of these distortions become more glaring the more time you spend with the game, resulting in a deeply frustrating experience that never feels like the real thing.   Hit the ball and touch 'em all. A lot.   Most features are identical to what they were in MLB 2K8, so you still have the options for single games, franchise play, playoffs, and the home-run derby, as well as multiplayer matches, tournaments, and seasons against buddies on the couch or over the Internet. Living rosters have been added, so you can enable this feature and see your rosters mirror those of the real Majors this summer. If the Twins and Jays pull off a trade in the real world, it happens in your franchise league, too. The interface has been refurbished with the addition of nested menus similar to those on display in NHL 2K9. Everything is a lot easier to find here, however, with all of your GM and manager duties split up into separate lists. Some items aren't where you might expect them to be, but after you spend about five minutes figuring your way around, you can navigate the interface with a gamepad almost as smoothly as if you were using a mouse.    Hitting, pitching, and fielding are carried over largely intact from last year, although everything has been made a little easier. As with most sports games these days, the default controls make just about everything reliant on the right analog stick. Hitting is a straightforward pull back to get set and a shove forward to swing, with the extra option of pushing the left stick around to pull the ball, slap it the other way, keep it on the ground, or get it into the air. Pitching works in a similar fashion, although it is a bit more involved in that you have to move the right stick to sort of mimic the motion of the ball. So for a fastball, you just pull back to fill up a yellow circle and then push forward to release the ball, while change-ups are handled by making the same movements in reverse, and breaking pitches are thrown by twisting the stick in a circular motion. To field balls, you guide players around with the left stick and then throw to the base of your choice by pushing the right stick in the appropriate direction. You hold the stick to fill up a meter and determine how hard your throw will be. Overall, the controls are intuitive and simple to dive right into, but they don't have a good feel and can be extremely imprecise.   Dust clouds didn't look this unrealistic even in old Road Runner cartoons.   Hitting is too easy on all difficulty levels. Games often wind up being slugfests where the teams combine to clock something in the neighborhood of 30 hits. You don't have to be a good twitch gamer, either, because it's a snap to time your swings right and get big-time wood on the ball even if you're going up against a fireballer like Jonathan Papelbon. The left stick makes it easy to call your shot and place the ball wherever you would like, as long as you don't try to do something physically impossible like pull a hard outside pitch. Hit results tend to feel canned. While there are a good variety of flies, fouls, and grounders to cycle through, it seems like you're getting roughly the same results. A single to left is a single to left, in other words. You need to play a couple of dozen games to generate even a handful of ""Huh, I've never seen that before"" moments. And top sluggers get on absurd hot streaks. We hit multiple home runs with players many times, including a spectacular four straight in one match with A-Rod and three in a row in a game with teammate Nick Swisher. Expect these homer explosions to happen consistently. It's so predictable that if you send a ball over the fence in the first or second inning, you can pretty much bank on being able to hit a couple more with the same player before the end of the game.         Stepping onto the rubber has its issues as well. Throwing a circle change, a four-seam fastball, a slider, a curveball, or whatever else is handled with a simple right-stick twirl that's easy to pull off moments after starting your very first game. This makes the game accessible, but also a bit dull in that there is no challenge to pitching. It's not any harder to throw even the most arm-aching breaking balls after pitchers get tired in the later stages of games. An equally irritating problem is presented by catchers. They work with you and call pitch types and locations, but they're dumb and have a limited imagination, to say the least. Catchers call for fastballs a good two-thirds of the time, even if you've got a starter on the mound with highly rated breaking pitches. The result? You get shelled. Thankfully, you can wave off the big lunks wearing the tools of ignorance. But doing so takes so much time that you're better off throwing whatever you feel like at wherever the catcher is holding his glove and risking the odd passed ball.   Yes, there are a few faces that only mothers could love in the real Major Leagues. But some of the characters in MLB 2K9 would fit in at a burn ward.   Fielding is the biggest irritation in MLB 2K9. Controls are amazingly touchy. The throwing meter is so sensitive that you can easily accidentally go into the red and throw the ball away. If the catcher drops a third strike, for example, and you have to throw down to first to record the out, a light touch is needed to avoid chucking the ball down the line into right field. Moving fielders can also be an adventure, especially in the outfield. Just touching the left stick at about the same time that a fly ball arrives seems to cause the ball to be dropped. Also, infielders and outfielders seem to have been switched up by the developers. Infielders never appear to be in a rush to get rid of the ball. Second basemen double-pump for no reason, and shortstops take an eternity to get the ball out of their gloves. The result is a lot of infield singles and a ton of botched double-plays. Conversely, outfielders scoop up every routine ground ball hit for a single and gun it back in like their lives depend on it. Fielding even has the power to irritate you when you're not doing it. Watching the computer-controlled fielders at work is like being poked with a sharp stick. Opposing infielders can somehow throw lasers from their knees from behind third to nail speedy runners at first, while their regular tosses are often rainbow-arc lobs that travel faster than is physically possible.    Slipshod quality control can also be found elsewhere. Animations stutter on a regular basis, mostly between plays after outs have been recorded. Online play with the PlayStation 3 is laggy to the point of being unplayable at times. Xbox 360 multiplayer is considerably better, although there is a slight response delay when hitting that forces you to swing much earlier than you do in solo games. Both the visual quality and the audio are second rate. Players tend to look like Madame Tussaud refugees who've spent too much time in a tanning salon, and runners kick up globby clouds that look more like brown lens flare than infield dust. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game have specific visual quirks, as well. The former has a strange softness that gives everything an indistinct, Vaseline-on-the-lens appearance, while the latter is loaded with jaggies in the stadium architecture.    Play-by-play commentary from newcomers Gary Thorne and Steve Phillips is loaded with absurdities like telling a pitcher throwing a one-hitter that he needs to buckle down to keep things from getting out of control. They also make the same weather observation during every single game--that it's getting a little colder. Music is a truly bizarre kitchen-sink mix of tunes. One moment you're listening to Europe's ""The Final Countdown,"" and the next some Latin hip-hop number, and then you're on to Judas Priest bashing through ""You've Got Another Thing Coming."" We would love to meet the guy who came up with this soundtrack.   Generic scowling relief pitcher or Shaggy a couple of decades after leaving the Mystery Machine?   Stats appear to be unreliable. We hit seven home runs with A-Rod in the first four games of a season, yet the stats credited him with only three. Cutting down the Yankee star's home-run totals probably wouldn't be a bad idea given his recent confessions of steroid abuse, but there are better ways to go about it.    Either MLB 2K9 shipped in a half-finished state or the developers have never seen a baseball, much less thrown one around. You can see that the foundations have been laid for what could be a creditable baseball game, but design screw-ups render playing it an exercise in frustration that grows more bothersome every time you hit the diamond. Like Chicago Cubs fans say at the end of every September: ""Wait till next year."" Maybe 2K Sports will get it right with MLB 2K10.  
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1072,Realms of the Haunting ,8.5, I can't stop playing Realms of the Haunting.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/8/3/2/2211832-roth_box.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/realms-of-the-haunting-review/1900-2532725/,pos,"
Ever since I was a kid, I've loved movies about people trapped inside a house filled with evil spirits; the claustrophobia, the helplessness, and the wild desperation the characters must feel strike a nerve in me that's untouched by other horror flicks. Toss some devil worship, secret societies, and transmigration of souls into the mix, and I'm even more entranced. I guess that's why I can't stop playing Realms of the Haunting, the latest creation from Gremlin Interactive and Interplay Productions. It walks the fine line between action and adventure as elegantly as any game I've seen, blending healthy doses of first-person shooter action with puzzles that are skillfully woven into a plot that unfolds at just the right pace. The game is set in England, present day. You play Adam Randall, a young man who has been plagued by nightmares of an evil house ever since his father passed away some six months before. A few weeks after his father's death, Adam was visited by a priest named Elias Camber, who informed him that his father - who was a pastor - had sent him a series of letters before his death concerning some disturbing events taking place at a house in his parish; he also sent Camber a box containing stone fragments which Adam senses have some sort of power. The mystery intensifies when Adam does a little research and discovers there is no priest named Elias Camber, and when his dreams become even more disturbing he finally decides to journey to the house and try to sort out just what's going on. All this is recounted through the use of some nicely done full motion video, proving that FMV does have a place in games if it's used tastefully and in the right amounts. Video is also used at various points within the game itself  whenever you stumbde across a new piece of the puzzle, and while some of the segments could have been shortened a bit, the overall effect is impressive. As you begin play, you've just entered the house - and because the doors have locked behind you there's no turning back. It may take some players a little practice to get used to the smoothly scrolling, first-person interface because you must ""steer"" with one hand and aim with another (you can move using just the mouse, but I don't recommend it). After you've grabbed a pistol and a few clips of ammo, you're ready to start laying waste to some supernatural baddies - just because they're dead doesn't mean they're immune to lead! But don't think this is merely a shoot-'em-up with an occult twist: You've got to use the objects you find to reveal new areas of the house and uncover new details of the mystery. Before long, you discover the reason you felt compelled to make the journey to the house: Your father's spirit is imprisoned here, and only you have the power to free his soul from torment. But once you begin searching for clues that might shed light on how you can help your father, you slowly begin to suspect that there's a lot more at stake here than the soul of a parish priest. Freemasons, the Knights Templars, secret occult orders, crop circles - all the fave topics of conspiracy/occult fans crop up as the game progresses, keeping you constantly striving to learn more about what terrible evils were committed in the house and why it appears that you're the only one who can set things right. An especially nice touch is adjustable difficulty levels for both the arcade action and adventure portions of the game. Choose hard for puzzles, and you must choose the appropriate item from your inventory to use in a given situation; choose easy, and the object's automatically placed in your hand. And because you can set the arcade sequences - i.e., fighting demons and creatures - on any of four difficulty levels, even someone who can't hold their own at Quake will get to revel in the joy of gunplay. The 3-D-modeled creatures you encounter are a tour de force, brought to life (or should I say ""undeath?"") with motion capture technology so smooth you'll swear some of them will just keep on coming right out of the monitor and into the room with you. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but I will say that my hands got a little sweaty the first time I found myself surrounded by three or four shambling apparitions moving inexorably toward me. The musical score, too, is first-rate, always serving to create atmosphere but never drawing attention to itself.  As much as I've become wrapped up in Realms of the Haunting, there are still a couple of design decisions that bug me. Reading the letters you find scattered about the house is a pain because often you must scroll to see all the text, and in the lower-res video modes the ends of lines are clipped, forcing you to not only scroll up and down but also to shift the page left and right. Maps and parchments are even more troublesome to examine due to their large size; these documents are rendered nicely and give the game a nice air of ""realism,"" but I'd sure like to be able to see the entire map at once. And while the video clips are very good, the voice-overs during gameplay sometimes sound a little... well, tired. I mean, come on - if you saw a bunch of robotic knights backing you into a corner, you wouldn't say  ""This gets better all the time"" in a bemused monotone. Particularly mundane are the lines delivered by Rebecca, a psychic you meet early in the game who joins you in your adventure: She sounds more like a windup occult handbook than a living, breathing character. Then again, you'll probably be so busy blasting said knights with a shotgun that you won't even notice what your character's muttering, and Rebecca's insight is important enough that you won't mind if she sounds bored either. I've already invested quite a few hours in this game, and judging by its size - four CDs, though much of that's undoubtedly used for video clips - this is one that very, very few people will breeze through in a day or two. If you're at all interested in horror-adventures - or if you think you might be - grab a copy of Realms of the Haunting. You won't be disappointed.
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1073,Rising Sun ,8.5," TalonSoft's Rising Sun shows that the company has continued to refine its wargames even more, and the result is very impressive.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/7/9/7/2217797-rising_sun.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/rising-sun-review/1900-2532813/,pos,"
Back in 1998, TalonSoft lined up a host of wargaming heavy hitters like Bob McNamara, Charlie Kibler, John Tiller, and even James F. Dunnigan himself to headline what was to be a blockbuster new game called East Front. Unfortunately, the game released with a completely inadequate manual and a host of bugs that rendered it almost unplayable. But TalonSoft was undaunted by the game's poor reception, and quickly made much additional documentation available for download from its web site, just as it soon issued the first of several patches. This kind of product support and improvement has helped restore a good reputation for TalonSoft and its wargames. TalonSoft's Rising Sun shows that the company has continued to refine its wargames even more, and the result is very impressive. Rising Sun is the third piece of the TalonSoft tactical wargaming trilogy called the Campaign Series. After the release of East Front, the game engine underwent a significant overhaul for the subsequent West Front, and it's the West Front engine that has been improved on for Rising Sun. Because Pacific Theater combat differs so much from that in Europe, there are a lot of additional rules in the game. For instance, since it was common for Pacific Theater combat to occur at night, there are extensive night rules. Rules for caves let players re-create the bitter fighting on islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, while banzai attacks are a fearsome weapon unique to the Japanese arsenal. Pacific Theater terrain, such as dry and flooded rice paddies, jungle, and even kunai (elephant grass), is also well represented in Rising Sun. The game mechanics will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played serious wargames in the past. Rising Sun is a platoon-level game that plays out over a hex grid. Movement and combat are carried out simultaneously, as players alternate turns. Each unit has 100 action points, which can be spent moving, firing, or a combination of the two. The number of action points required to perform a certain action depends on the type of unit involved, the terrain, and sometimes even the weather. Scenarios can combine a wide range of units, as armor, infantry, mortars, artillery, and air support all play a part in the battle. The game's database accurately models the performance of just about every weapons system in use in the Pacific from 1941-45, so if an engagement took place there in that time, it's probably possible to re-create it within the game. Though there's a lot of detail involved in the game mechanics, the user interface is actually very manageable. A combination of simple mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts is enough to perform almost any game function. The map can be viewed from both 2D and 3D perspectives, and the latter can be helpful when you're trying to determine line of sight. Unfortunately, the game doesn't let you view a prospective computer-calculated path before moving a unit more than one hex. A closer 2D view, with combat values displayed directly on the units, would have been helpful as well, but for the most part the game does an excellent job of both displaying information and letting you manipulate units. Traditionally, wargame artificial intelligence has always had the burden of having to handle very complex situations, and thus has tended to come up short against capable human players. Given wargamers' lowered expectations, the Rising Sun AI isn't necessarily excellent, but it does manage to hold its own in most cases, and seems to understand how best it should handle Allied troops (which typically have high firepower) compared with the Japanese troops (which are better suited to close assaults). In fact, if the AI has a specific weakness, it's the computer's reluctance to break from its patterns; the AI ought to actually assault with the Allies when the situation demands it (such as in beach landings), rather than just sit and exchange shots in unfavorable circumstances. Playing against the computer tends to be more challenging if you stick to the suggested side in the solo scenarios. Even with the AI's occasional shortcomings, the first couple of times you play a scenario can be very intense because of the fog-of-war option, which prevents you from seeing more than your troops can see, since you'll only have the vaguest idea of what to expect from the enemy. Reinforcements can show up in unexpected places, and the enemy can appear out of nowhere. Despite the fact that it's a traditional turn-based game, Rising Sun actually exhibits much of the thrill and suspense of real-time games. However, players who have the luxury of a living opponent to compete against will find the game even more enjoyable. Rising Sun can be played using all sorts of connection protocols, as well as by e-mail. The e-mail game lets you view everything that happened during the opponent's turn, which makes the game progress almost as though all the players involved were sitting across from each other at a game table. The game plays fast over a network and supports up to 16 players, who can be divided up between multiple commanders for that extra element of command simulation. Wargames are a very different experience when your forces aren't all under your control. There are plenty of individual scenarios in Rising Sun, and they range from dense jungle encounters in Malaya to beach-busting Marine landings on rocks like Peleliu. If the scenarios are exhausted, the game also has both dynamic and linked (or fixed) campaigns, as well as a scenario editor. Because the game system has such an extensive database, it is relatively easy to design a scenario based on any historical situation after doing a little research. This flexibility has led to a proliferation of user-designed scenarios, most of which are available for free download from various web sites. The open-ended nature of the Campaign Series is a significant selling point, as it means the game has almost infinite replayability. While everything about it may sound too complicated for novices to master, those who take the plunge will actually find in Rising Sun one of the best sets of documentation available in any game. Those new to the series can follow along, step-by-step, through an extensive tutorial, while veteran wargamers will find all of Rising Sun's concepts and mechanics spelled out clearly and comprehensively. The manual is superbly written and indexed, and it even has extensive internal cross-referencing that makes it easy to see how various parts of the game fit together. Most importantly, the game explains clearly how combat calculations are made, which lets you get the most out of your units once you learn the game mechanics. Rising Sun isn't easy to master, as there are many layers of complexity at work that are necessary to portray tactical combat with so much detail. But for those willing to put in the time, the game is eminently accessible. It's very simple: If you're a fan of World War II tactical wargaming, you must own Rising Sun. In addition, if you've ever had any interest in wargaming but were afraid to give it a try because of its reputation for being overly complex, Rising Sun would be the best way to overcome that hurdle. Rising Sun accomplishes something rarely seen in gaming, as it gives the veteran gamer all he could ask for, while it stays accessible to the novice. 
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1074,Shining Force III ,8.5," It's been said before, and it'll have to be said again: Shining Force III is the kind of game that could've given Sega more of a chance had it not ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/1/3/2213013-box_sforce3.png,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shining-force-iii-review/1900-2534093/,pos,"
Shining Wisdom was terrible. Beyond the Beyond was completely pathetic. Shining the Holy Ark was, in my opinion, OK, at best. In the four years since the release of Shining Force II and the demise of the Genesis, Sonic Software Planning has turned out more duds than any self-respecting developer could bear. The first of Shining Force III's three scenarios, however, is a surprising break from the developer's current rut, proving once again that a dying platform can still provide great games. The Destonia Empire and the Aspinian Republic have always been at odds, but peace was finally within reach. Unfortunately, the evil Bulzome monks and their four leaders have other plans. During a peace summit in the floating city of Saraband, the monks impersonate the Aspinian king and kidnap the Destonian emperor, throwing the world into a bloody war. You control a stalwart band of explorers and seek to stop the Bulzome sect's evil plans and avoid war at all costs. Needless to say, that's easier said than done. For those familiar with the series, Shining Force III sports virtually the same turn-based gameplay that popularized the series and provided the starting point for so many other games of its ilk. You command a legion of up to 12 warriors, fitting the usual RPG character descriptions - knights are strong attackers but have no magic, archers can attack from a distance but don't hold up in hand-to-hand combat, and mages deal out powerful magic but, up close, make the archers look like masters of hand-to-hand combat. A handful of other unique character types exist but most are variations on the previously established themes. Each character has its own set of stats, all upped occasionally through experience-gained level-ups. Like previous games in the series, you can promote your characters to better classes after they've reached level 20, not only giving the characters a new look in battle, but also faster stat growth rates and new abilities. At first glance, Shining Force III sounds all too similar to Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics. However, there is one major difference: Shining Force III is infinitely more playable. Gone are the Tactics games' defense positioning, elevation or zodiac-determined damage systems, endless stats, and battle factors. While these extra factors are appropriate in the right doses, Shining Force III pleasantly distills the strategy down to the basic positioning and attacking, making for far-shorter and less-tedious battles. The third game in the series does add a few new features to the mix, but they primarily serve as bonus features for the hard-core gamers. The largest new feature is the friendship system. Should two characters fight against a common foe or provide support for one another in battle, a friendship can develop. When placed next to a friend, characters' stats will temporarily rise based on the characters' respective classes. Knights traditionally lend defense or attack power while a cleric might increase one's chance for critical hits. The more often these advantages are used, the stronger the friendship, and the stat boost grows. Secondly, characters can learn special attacks with their weapons, which can increase their critical-hit damage rating. Finally, many of the game's battlegrounds contain multiple areas to fight in, many of which are secret. For example, finding a map early in the game can give you access to a tomb filled with treasure during a following battle. The tomb will have its own monsters, and you will have to strategically split your party between the two maps in order to win and get the secret items. Shining Force III is a fairly long adventure and, true to the series, is rife with secret characters, weapons, and areas. Graphically, Shining Force III is an impressive addition to the Saturn's library. While obviously suffering from the 3D problems that plague the system, Shining Force III pulls off an anime-inspired 3D polygonal look that typically isn't pulled off quite this well. You can rotate the camera with the Saturn pad's two shoulder buttons, a feature that actually comes into play during battles and exploration. The 3D environments are basic and somewhat chunky compared with Grandia's superb architecture but are, fortunately, never plagued by Grandia's slowdown. Spell effects are fairly dull and pay too much homage to the effects of Shining the Holy Ark but are not as central a role to the game as, say, Final Fantasy's. More impressive is Shining Force III's surprising attention to audio. The game's music is uncharacteristically good for Sonic Software Planning, and the addition of voices, no matter how poorly acted by Sega's janitorial staff, remain a nice and often-excluded touch. Don't let the poor vocal talent fool you, though - Shining Force III's translation is shockingly good in its own right and is only made better when considering the expected effort level for a dead system's game translation. There's a lot of text in the game, perhaps too much at times, but it's good to see Sega respecting the text as... well, it's generally neglected to do in the past.  It's been said before, and it'll have to be said again: Shining Force III is the kind of game that could've given Sega more of a chance had it not come out in the Saturn's beyond-final days. While the game does come to a close, the overall story still has two more games in it, in the form of Shining Force III, Scenarios 2 and 3. It's unlikely that these two games will reach US soil. RPG fans will welcome Shining Force III with open arms and mourn the probable lack of the second and third scenarios in English. For those less well-versed in strategy games and looking for something a little less trying than Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force III is a good bet.
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1075,Shining Force III Scenario 2 (Import) ,8.5," If you like strategy RPGs, do yourself a favor and pick up Shining Force III Part 2.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/4/2/3/2211423-sf32_front.jpg,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shining-force-iii-scenario-2-import-review/1900-2534089/,pos,"
Fans of strategy RPGs have long held Sega's Shining Force series as one of the premier examples of the genre, and it's highly regarded by some as the pinnacle of strategy gaming. RPG fans longed for Sega to create a new episode for the Saturn; nevertheless, it came as quite a shock when Sega of Japan announced last year that it would be releasing not one, but three new Shining Force games over the course of the following year. Shining Force III was to be released as a three-part series, with a new chapter arriving, roughly, every three months. Each one would stand alone as a game, but the full experience would only be gained by playing each chapter in full. Unfortunately for Shining Force fans living right here in the States, the Saturn took an untimely dive in sales and support, just when the Saturn's best games were coming out. It was speculated that they would likely only receive the first installment. The good news, however, is that the rest of the series plays just like the first, enabling fans of the series a fair shot at completing the remaining two games. Of course they won't be translated, but the Shining Force series has always been about the combat, and in Shining Force III Part 2, there is combat aplenty. Taking place in the exact same time frame as the first chapter, Part 2 focuses on the game as viewed through the perspective of a completely different group of warriors. In the beginning of your quest you'll find yourself in situations remarkably similar to the ones experienced in the first chapter. That's because they are the same events that happened in the first chapter. Only this time, your newly formed group takes a different course of action, even though the situations are linked. To make it easy to comprehend, it's like playing the good guys in part one, and then you get to play the role of the bad guys in part two, although the differences in the two chapters aren't that cut and dry. In Shining Force III, there's a civil war brewing, and no one is sure what's going on. Different factions take up arms to try to find out who is at the bottom of all this turmoil, and over the course of the three chapters, the plot will eventually be revealed. Provided you have completed the first part, the memory save and characters you've gained from SFIII-Part 1 will affect the events that transpire in Part 2. So what's the difference aside from the storyline in Part 2? Not very much, and that's a good thing. In Shining Force III, you maneuver your party around a completely 3D world. Towns, battlefields, dungeons, etc. are all rendered in full polygonal detail. Characters are rendered as sprites a la Shining The Holy Ark, which isn't surprising as the designers of that game also did this series. Menus, as well, are almost exactly the same as those found in Shining The Holy Ark, so veterans of that game should have no problem getting adjusted to the Shining Force interface. Once you've done your scouting around and eventually find yourself in a skirmish, that's where the genius of the game engine makes itself apparent. By utilizing theSaturn's powerful Yamaha sound chip to process and funnel additional information simultaneously with the VDP1 and VDP2 processors, Camelot has managed to reduce loading times to practically nothing, which is impressive when you see the battle scenes in motion. Each character is usually represented by a superdeformed little sprite in the world map, but once you engage in combat, the character is then rendered completely in polygons. While they don't look as good as Virtua Fighter 2, they are still stunning tobehold. Fully light-sourced and Gouraud-shaded, these characters come to life complete with flashy spells and powerful attacks. Improvements to the battle engine in Part 2 include better light sourcing, better-looking spell effects, and other little details, such as beams of light surrounding your character as he levels up. As far as the regular game environment is concerned, texture variety has also been increased, giving each town a more convincing look. Far too often in the first chapter, every building looked exactly the same, sometimes making it confusing to make your way to places you hadn't seen yet. Aesthetics aside, there was very little that needed improvement from the first game. After all, this is merely the second chapter in a trilogy, so there wasn't a need for radical changes. Camelot had already achieved a remarkably efficient game engine. The point here was to continue the story. As it is, each chapter provides somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 hours of gameplay, each loaded with increasingly complex strategic dilemmas. For gamers who choose to go the entire distance, you're looking at 75-90 hours of strategy gaming by the time the story's complete - a good amount of gaming at any rate. So if you can get past the fact that you won't be able to follow the storyline (at least those of you who don't read Japanese) there's a great deal of addictive game-playing to be had. Everything is left practically untouched from the first round, making it a snap to jump right in to what is probably the best strategy series to come around in a long time, Vandal Hearts and Final Fantasy Tactics notwithstanding. In addition to the numerous battlefield encounters, Shining Force III Part 2 is far more interactive than the average strategy/RPG. Your characters will need to thoroughly explore each village and talk to all the townspeople in order to progress and find hidden characters. Additionally, you'll also need to buy and equip the necessary weapons and items if you want to be successful on the battlefield. Considering each character has only four inventory slots, item management is key to survival. Unfortunately, with the state of the Saturn as it is, the chances of us seeing the last two chapters stateside grow slimmer by the day. Gamers can only hope the success of Panzer Dragoon Saga might encourage SOA to bring out the last two installments for release here. However, in the event that Sega doesn't, at least there are the import versions to investigate and enjoy. If you like strategy RPGs, do yourself a favor and pick up Shining Force III Part 2. It's not everyday a series like this comes along.
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'.']",0.11988603338809947,0.5178314201867922
1076,Shining Force III Scenario 3 (Import) ,8.5," By now, if you've resigned yourself to the fact that the likeliness of seeing Scenario 2 or 3 in English is rather slim, the import route might be worth considering.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/3/4/0/2210340-shining_force_iii___scenario_3.jpg,SAT,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shining-force-iii-scenario-3-import-review/1900-2534095/,pos,"
Conspicuous by its absence, the Shining Force III series is beginning to look like one of the great 32-bit tragedies. Although American gamers should be glad they got the first installment, in hindsight, the thought of being denied the final two chapters becomes more excruciating by the day. It's like having a carrot dangled in front of your face, knowing full well that you will most likely die hungry. While there are probably greater crimes in the world than being denied a particular video game, none quite come to mind, now that Shining Force III: Scenario 3 is finally here. In this, the third and final piece of the trilogy, you take the role of Justin, the third main character, who up until this point merely played a supporting role. You lead his team of soldiers and sorcerers through a series of strategic battles that will ultimately reveal the outcome of the war between the Empire and the Republic. Like the previous two installments, Scenario 3 is played in a linear fashion, although a certain amount of freedom is given to explore your surroundings. Gamers must interact with townsfolk in order to obtain advice regarding upcoming missions and must thoroughly search the environments for hidden items and secret passages. Furthermore, weapons merchants and supply shops must be visited with regularity to ensure your crew is equipped with the most powerful weapons and healing potions. For those of you familiar with the first game, the third plays exactly the same, with the same exact menu configuration and battle system. The memory-save feature (which affects who is selectable in the second and third scenarios, depending on whom you saved in the first game) works with all three scenarios, meaning that if you choose to import the second two, your game progress from the US version of the first game will still work with the imports. The soundtrack is largely unchanged, perhaps for consistency, but the game certainly would have benefited from new tracks, as the soundtrack is starting to get tiresome. The graphics also remain basically the same, although the spell effects during battle are more impressive from the get-go, most likely due to the fact that your characters start out at level five. By now, if you've resigned yourself to the fact that the likeliness of seeing Scenario 2 or 3 in English is rather slim, the import route might be worth considering. Although you won't be able to follow the storyline so well, the combat is where it's at. The third scenario features nifty little cinematics in between some battles that the original didn't feature, and seeing as how the whole interface is the same, this would be a great game to import. The gameplay is as good as it ever was, and that's the most important thing.
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1077,Shogun: Total War Warlord Edition ,8.5," For the game's existing fans, it's a must-have. And for the uninitiated, it's an ideal opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/5/9/2213059-shogun.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shogun-total-war-warlord-edition/1900-2807734/,pos,"
The Mongol Invasion, Creative Assembly's official expansion to last year's impressive real-time strategy game Shogun: Total War, is just about everything you could want from an expansion pack. The Mongol Invasion sits somewhere in that gap between being more than a mega patch, but not quite a bona fide sequel. It's the mark of a good expansion like this that you can't imagine going back to playing without it. And The Mongol Invasion renders the original Shogun, an excellent game in its own right, almost obsolete.  The Mongols fight their way into Japan from the beach.  Among the most prominent of the additions featured in this expansion is a new era, 250 years before Shogun's 16th-century clan warfare. The Mongol Invasion supposes that Kublai Khan's hordes successfully reached Japan and pushed the then-dominant Hojo clan back far enough to establish a beachhead. You can play this era as a full campaign, single battles, or a new type of game called a ""historical campaign."" This is something of a misnomer, since the historical campaigns are really just a sequence of linked battles without the campaign shell.   However, this new era isn't one of the expansion's strong points. As a full campaign, it plays blunt and fast. The Mongols don't build the structures that make the strategic game compelling. Instead, they just conquer and pillage and wait for random reinforcements that just wash up on shore from time to time. You spend most of your time splitting them up and running them around to put down rebellions. It's all the tedium of army management with none of the payoff of building up an empire or raising custom armies. The Mongol campaign is more interesting when played as the Hojo clan beating back the hordes of cavalry. But even then, it's missing a lot of the original Shogun's nuance.   Most of the expansion's new units occur only during this era. The Mongols rely, of course, on their cavalry, which dramatically change the unit balance by combining speed, melee shock value, and missile attacks--traits that were previously spread among various different units. Also joining the Mongols are Korean mercenaries, including the grenade-throwing thunder bombers, who look like they wandered into Japan straight out of Bungie's Myth series. Some fans might be disappointed to find that Shogun's delicate attention to history goes right out the window in The Mongol Invasion expansion. If you had a problem with geishas rampaging across Japan, wait until you see the black-clad battlefield ninjas hiding in plain sight. Then there are the lone kensai ""sword saints,"" who can wade single-handedly through swarms of enemy soldiers like Jet Li at a rival dojo. At times, The Mongol Invasion feels like it's entered the realm of dramatic license and set up camp.  The Mongol heavy cavalry arrive to the rescue.  A couple of the additions are of questionable value. There's a new building called a drill dojo, which trains units to recover from routs quicker. It's a waste of time and rice that could be spent upgrading a unit's weapons, armor, or honor to prevent them from being routed in the first place. The new naginata cavalry are just an intermediary step between the current yari cavalry and heavy cavalry. The graphics have supposedly been upgraded, but the only apparent difference is the dust armies kick up when they move across the plains.   But then there's everything else The Mongol Invasion does. There are some excellent tweaks that reduce tedium during the strategic games. Army management is much more flexible, allowing you to easily drag and drop units onto each other to bring depleted armies to full strength. Armies can also be given long-range movement orders, which they'll follow from turn to turn so you don't have to move everyone one province at a time. There are new banners that make it easy to keep track of your generals, who also have new markers so they don't get buried when placed in armies with more experienced generals. A loyalty filter lets you tell at a glance which of your provinces are in danger of revolt.One of the most welcome changes is a set of alternate victory conditions that let you bypass the oppressive micromanagement of Shogun's endgame, in which you had to spend hours mopping up every last corner of Japan to reach the victory screen. The addition of three new sets of starting conditions for the various clans is also helpful, allowing you to try alternate setups or jump ahead to later developments like musketeers and Christianity.  You can now check your subjects' loyalty at a glance.  The unaligned ronin on the strategic map are now broken into distinct factions so you're not fighting a horde of unified rebels. In a new twist, a ronin faction can play host to a defeated clan's heir, effectively putting that clan back on the map after you've supposedly vanquished it. Alliances with other clans have more staying power, so it's easier to free up forces by securing one of your fronts through diplomatic means. The expansion also includes a handful of new historical battles and battlefield maps. More importantly, thanks to the included battlefield map editor, there are plenty of third-party maps appearing online. Also, now that reinforcements can come from multiple directions, the flow of action on a map isn't as predictable as it used to be.   There are also some changes that seem minor at first glance, but end up making a significant difference. For instance, you can retrain your units after they've already been created to take advantage of training bonuses. This is also important for maintaining the higher honor level of your experienced units. Before the expansion pack, a constant tension in Shogun was whether to use your experienced units at a depleted level or dilute them with new recruits. But with retraining, you can maintain and upgrade units without sacrificing their hard-earned honor levels. The ability to disband obsolete units to keep a lid on maintenance costs is also newly added. If you have a lot of extra money, you can now use it to bribe enemy armies. These are the sorts of things that make it almost impossible to going back to playing Shogun without The Mongol Invasion.  Korean thunder bomber artillery are among the new units.  As a multiplayer game, The Mongol Invasion breathes new life into Shogun. There are now a variety of objectives for multiplayer battles, such as base capture, assassination, and king of the hill modes. Multiplayer battles used to involve a lot of camping out on hillsides until someone finally decided to attack, but now the action has more purpose and focus. With these various game types, there's also more incentive to play with different army combos. Unfortunately, Creative Assembly still hasn't added multiplayer support to the campaign game. Electronic Arts has also officially announced that there will be no more patches to the original Shogun, so it looks like the enhancements in The Mongol Invasion will only be available by purchasing the expansion.   There are two ways you can get the expansion. It's available in stores for $40 as the Warlord Edition, which includes the full game. If you've already purchased Shogun, you're eligible for a $10 rebate, making it a relatively pricey $30 expansion. But you can also get just the expansion pack itself, which requires the original game, directly from Electronic Arts' online store. This doesn't offer the immediate gratification of plucking the box off a store shelf, but even after you factor in shipping charges, it will only cost you $20. Either way, The Mongol Invasion is easily worth the price. It's one of those indispensable expansion packs in the same league as The Conquerors for Age of Empires II or Brood War for Starcraft. For the game's existing fans, it's a must-have. And for the uninitiated, it's an ideal opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.
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'.', 'And', 'uninitiated', ',', ""'s"", 'ideal', 'opportunity', 'see', 'fuss', '.']",0.13169445968741747,0.4928692102107595
1078,Sid Meier's Antietam! ,8.5," It offers no dramatic graphics overhaul or drastic redesign - just a new setting, new subject matter, and more of the same great Civil War strategy.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/9/0/1/2217901-sid_meier_s_antietam__pc_new.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sid-meiers-antietam-review/1900-2542516/,pos,"
Sid Meier's Gettysburg was a remarkable wargame that managed to balance realism and accuracy with a user-friendly design and stylish visuals. Sid Meier's Antietam is also an impressive game that builds upon the foundation established by the original. Available exclusively from Firaxis' web site, it offers no dramatic graphics overhaul or drastic redesign - just a new setting, new subject matter, and more of the same great Civil War strategy, which is nicely refined through a series of subtle enhancements. Antietam is based on the same game engine as Gettysburg and offers the same easy-to-use commands and menus. Moving troops requires a simple drag of the mouse, while facing and formation commands are marked by large, unmistakable buttons along the bottom of the screen. Icons indicate each unit's name, type, strength, experience, and current morale. You can also see if a unit is currently flanked or backed up by nearby supporting troops with a quick glance at the status bar. Though most of the graphics in Antietam are just as they were in Gettysburg, there are a number of minor improvements that give the game a sleeker overall appearance. The battlefield itself is more dynamic because it has several new types of terrain and other features to liven it up. Antietam Creek itself is one natural obstacle you won't soon forget, as troops can only cross it by using one of the few bridges or finding a ford, neither of which is easy to do. This can definitely cause some headaches for the Union commander, as many of the northern troops enter the battle from the far side of the creek. Also, troops move slower through some areas of the map, such as wooded hills, and units get defensive bonuses in covered terrain, such as forests and cornfields. One other notable enhancement is the inclusion of more uniquely uniformed units. If you look closely during a battle, you will notice units on both sides of the battle wearing decidedly different clothes from their comrades. Some of the most recognizable units include the US Sharpshooters and the flamboyantly dressed Zouaves on both sides of the battle. However, regardless of their dress, units still move, fire, charge, and retreat in exquisite detail. Gameplay during the heat of battle is largely unchanged from Gettysburg, which is a good thing. Before each scenario, you are shown where your objective lies and which of your units are the most reliable. After a battle, you get a rundown of the units that fought most effectively. Each scenario is timed, so you have to reach your objectives quickly and hold them until the clock runs out. When one side loses possession of an objective just before time expires, the game length is extended a bit. After completing a scenario, you even have the option of returning to the action to continue fighting. However, this would be a better feature if you could select the amount of time you wanted to add to the game clock. As it stands, you generally fight for another five minutes before the game declares the scenario is complete again.Most of the noticeable gameplay changes are for the better, such as explanations for the game's ""Can't do that General"" error messages - now you can see why a unit cannot charge when you order it to do so. You can also see how effective your attacks are, as the game indicates how much fire the selected unit is taking and receiving at any given moment. The biggest difference between Antietam and Gettysburg is the subject matter and its effect on the structure of the game. The battle of Gettysburg lasted three days. On the other hand, Antietam ran the course of a single, bloody day. As a result, you don't play through this game in a series of engagements while trying to amass a sufficient total of victory points to win the overall battle. Instead, you fight the entire battle, beginning at 5:50 in the morning and going right through to the early evening. This can be quite a handful, as the entire battle can last up to ten hours of real time (you can save the game at any time). It also forces you to manage your troops wisely, since not all units are available as the battle opens. In fact, some divisions do not become available until very late in the day, so success depends upon your ability to pace your troop movements and attacks. Fortunately, you do not have to play the entire battle each time you load up Antietam. The game also offers chunks of the battle in more than 20 neatly wrapped scenarios, including both historical and hypothetical variants. In addition, the game's random-scenario generator lets you whip up an ""instant action"" battle ranging from a small skirmish to a major engagement. However, the random-scenario generator is not all it could be, as it often locks you in a little too close to the realities of the battle. For example, almost all of the small skirmishes end up being fought in and around the East Woods, which tends to get tiresome after a while. It also would have been good to be able to pick the main objectives and the relative troop sizes. Another slight flaw in the game is the graphics engine. Though Antietam looks good and shows remarkable attention to detail even when the camera's zoomed right in on the action, the game can bog down dramatically during large engagements, even on a well-equipped system. Fighting the entire battle is especially taxing, as the action unfolds in near slow motion when the bulk of both armies is fully involved. Unfortunately there is little that can be done to alleviate this, since the game engine uses straightforward 2D graphics and makes no use of hardware acceleration. Multiplayer support in Antietam is excellent, as it was in Gettysburg. Up to eight players can take part in a battle over a LAN or the Internet, while two players can go head-to-head over modem and direct-connect links. The game is also playable on the MSN Gaming Zone. Each player assumes command of one of the various brigades involved in the scenario, which makes for some very memorable online warfare. Though it lacks the originality of its predecessor, Sid Meier's Antietam more than makes up for this in quality. It is essentially more of the same great, approachable wargaming action that Firaxis gave us in Gettysburg but has been refined and enhanced for better gameplay. Future installments of this series would benefit from a more powerful graphics engine, but Antietam is a strong enough game to overcome that minor setback.
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1079,Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer II ,8.5," Silent Thunder is a wicked, clean, no-B.S. combat sim with enough options and realism to hold the serious gamer's interest.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/7/1/8/5/1861-7185.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/silent-thunder-a-10-tank-killer-ii-review/1900-2533002/,pos,"
                                  It's puzzling that Sierra is known by so many for its cute quest/fantasy titles filled with loads of swords, sorcery, and love stories.  Well, put all of that completely out of your head--Silent Thunder is a wicked, clean, no-B.S. combat sim with enough options and realism to hold the serious gamer's interest, minus all the mind-killing, rudder-twiddling minutiae which is the bane of so many otherwise fine combat simulations.  (Silent Thunder also has one of the shortest, meanest cinematic intros you are likely to see in a Sierra title.)  Employing Dynamix' Terrain and 3DSpace technologies, Silent Thunder sports astoundingly smooth, photo-realistic, texture-mapped terrain and structures which are among the finest I've seen outside of location-based flight sims.  The challenging continuity of campaign games can be found here as well, and the redbook audio soundtrack is well worth the extra install space required.  The brutish, lethal A-10 has captured the attention of the computer war-gaming public in recent years, and if you're part of that public, Silent Thunder is the game you want to check out.
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1080,Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos ,4.5," It's hard to mess up a hidden-object game, but Interpol tries.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/2/8/2209028-box_ipolttodc.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/interpol-the-trail-of-dr-chaos-review/1900-6203636/,neg,"
  Hidden-object games seem to follow a pretty simple formula. Create a scene that is jam-packed with knickknacks and gewgaws, and then challenge you to find a few specific items amid the clutter. Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos does this much, but not particularly well. The images are slightly blurry, and the items that you are charged with finding sometimes appear too often or are indistinguishable from the background. It's lackluster in every way, overpriced at 800 Microsoft points ($10), and over before you know it, but it still scrounges together a few hours' worth of idle, eye-straining entertainment.   Wax museums are creepy enough without you, Cthulhu head.   Don't let the quasi-dramatic title fool you: Interpol is all about locating hidden objects in cluttered scenes. There's an international crime story stuffed in-between scenes, but it's barely worth reading. You'll ""travel"" to various cities around the world, each of which has three or four landmarks that serve as levels, as well as a bit of local flavor to spice things up. In each level, you must find the objects listed at the top of the screen before time runs out. Given that you have an absurdly generous half an hour to find everything, you'll never feel any pressure to hurry up unless you're trying to secure a spot on the leaderboards. If you just can't find a particular item, you can use one of your limited ""hints"" to immediately locate the item in question. There are achievements for not using hints and finishing levels quickly, but Interpol doesn't actually impose any challenge on you. Whether this is boring or relaxing will depend largely on your own disposition.    Relaxing, that is, until your eyes dry out from staring too much. Diligent blinking will take care of that for you, but Interpol doesn't do you any favors visually. The images are all slightly blurry, especially in particularly crowded areas. This can make finding small objects such as pens and batteries nigh impossible. You can tap X to make your cursor into a small magnifying glass, but magnifying blurry images doesn't make them less blurry. Fortunately, you can just tap around these areas randomly until you find something. Tapping too rapidly will result in a time penalty, but you can go at about one tap per second and never be penalized. Most of the items are identifiable, but some are not, leaving you to employ the ""This area looks weird, I'll just go tap it a bunch"" strategy. Some levels also contain more of a specific item than you need to find, so you may see something labeled ""London Map"" that won't actually count as a map. This is irritating, but not as downright annoying as the bonus levels that ask you to find a whole lot of one particular thing. These levels are either very easy or ridiculously hard, and you'll actually be glad to get back to the normal levels.    With only 11 locations around the world, Interpol will last you a few hours at most. Up to four players can play cooperatively either locally or online, but there are no competitive modes, so you're pretty much doing the same thing that you do in single-player mode, only faster. The object lists will change slightly on subsequent play-throughs, but not so much that you won't get repeats. It's a barebones effort that underwhelms throughout, but even Interpol can't completely squash the simple pleasure of finding hidden things.   
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1081,Wits & Wagers ,4.5, The XBLA version of Wits & Wagers is cheaper than the board game but not nearly as easy to recommend.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/3/9/2/34431-95392.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wits-and-wagers-review/1900-6190710/,neg,"
  Based on Northstar Games' board game of the same name, Wits & Wagers is a trivia game that you can win without ever answering a question correctly. That's because betting on answers given by other players is often more lucrative than giving a correct answer yourself, assuming you bet on the right ones. The Xbox Live Arcade version of Wits & Wagers does a reasonable job of bringing the popular party game online, but some odd design choices, a couple of irritating bugs, and a dearth of questions ultimately make it difficult to recommend.   You won't want to dance, but in lieu of having anything better to do...   The Wits & Wagers board game is designed to be played by between three and seven players, but the XBLA version supports either four or six with any empty slots being filled by occasionally erratic AI characters. Everyone answers the same question and reveals their answers simultaneously, at which point the always-numerical answers are arranged in order on a board and you're invited to bet any or all of your points (using casino-style chips) on the answer that you feel is closest to the correct one without exceeding it. The payout odds for each answer vary according to how they relate to the other answers given, with higher odds being paid for correct answers at either end of the scale. The highest possible odds of 6:1 are only paid if you're proved right after betting that every player's answer is higher than the correct one, but this doesn't happen very often.    You're given around 30 seconds to answer each question by scrolling through a huge list of possibilities to the find the number you're looking for. You then get around the same amount of time to place your bets, before the correct answer is revealed and the chips are doled out to all who made the right bet and to the player whose answer was the winning one. While 30 seconds might not sound like a long time, it's long enough to make Wits & Wagers feel painfully slow at times and, if you're so inclined, it's plenty of time for you to cheat by looking up the answers online. Some of the questions are obscure enough or structured in such a way that finding the answers in under a minute will be difficult, but those are the exception rather than the rule, and even if you can't find the information in time for your own answer maybe you'll get it in time for the betting round. With that said, not all of the answers in the game agree with what you'll find online, so either the World Wide Web has it wrong or this games does. We'll let you decide which.    Although additional question packs will inevitably be released for Wits & Wagers at some point in the future, the game boasts only 700 questions at launch. That seems like a good number at first, but repeats will almost certainly start appearing in your games after only an hour or two of play. We should also mention that many of the questions have a distinctly American flavor and, where applicable, rarely reference statistics gathered more recently than 2004.    Finishing with more points than your opponents won't always make you the winner.   When you're not busy attempting to cheat during a game of Wits & Wagers, you might find yourself inexplicably compelled to make your onscreen avatar ""dance"" like a marionette using your controller's right analog stick. Avatar options include dozens of faces belonging to real people as well as a bunch of other, more unusual characters that include a skull, a tiger, a smiley face, a dinosaur, and a female robot. Your chosen face is pasted onto a different, themed body for each of the seven question rounds during a game. During a sports round you might find that you're in control of a hockey player or a football referee, while during a nature round your avatar might be replaced with a fish or a large insect, for example. You have far too much time both during and between rounds to play with these oddly animated figures, and you'll almost certainly bore of it shortly after (or even before) unlocking the ""dance in every round"" achievement. Plugging in an Xbox Live Vision camera gives you the option to make an avatar of whatever it's pointed at instead of using one of the aforementioned options, but the implementation of the camera support is horrible at best since it just replaces the avatar's torso with a television set and then displays whatever you're doing on its screen.     At its best, Wits & Wagers is an accessible trivia game that can be enjoyed by up to four people on a single console or up to six online. At its worst, this is a trivia game that rewards gambling savvy over general knowledge, sometimes declares the wrong player the winner at the end of a session, and occasionally crashes to the extent that the entire console freezes up and even the navigation blades can't be called up to end the game prematurely. Wits & Wagers can be fun if you play it with the right people, if you don't encounter questions that you've memorized from previous games, and if it doesn't crash. Get any one of those three things wrong, though, and you'll be wishing you spent those 800 points on something else instead.     
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1082,Code Lyoko: Fall of X.A.N.A. ,4.5," Deriving pleasure from this dull, monotonous RPG is a challenge that should only be undertaken by the most hardcore Code Lyoko fans.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/7/2/1/34562-95721.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/code-lyoko-fall-of-xana-review/1900-6193660/,neg,"
 Code Lyoko is a cartoon of many colors. It's made in France, looks like an anime, and features traditional 2D art and flashy CGI. The storylines float from planet-endangering digital attacks to preteen relationship drama. You would expect the game to follow a similar path by giving you tons of variety and a captivating, albeit adolescent story. Sadly, every facet of the show has received a giant downgrade in transition to video game form. From lackluster visuals and bland gameplay to an incoherent story, everything about Code Lyoko: Fall of X.A.N.A. is disappointing.     The game centers around five boarding-school students with abnormally large foreheads who live double lives as virtual superheroes in the online world of Lyoko. It's like The Matrix, except instead of agents, there are monsters powered by the evil virus X.A.N.A. This game follows the fourth and final season of the show, picking up right after the previous season ends. There are no primers to introduce you to the characters, and no tutorials to teach you how to play; it's as if the game assumes that the only people who will be playing it are hardcore Code Lyoko fans.   They might look nice, but the 2D portions add nothing at all to the game.   Like the show, Code Lyoko: Fall of X.A.N.A. is split into two different parts: the 2D world, which represents the real world that the kids live in, and the 3D world of Lyoko. Here, the 2D world exists only to let you hear the latest gossip and inside jokes from the show's characters. These sections are completely pointless and can thankfully be skipped without any detriment to the story or gameplay.    All of the real action happens in Lyoko. Once virtualized, you'll guide a superdeformed sprite around a three-dimensional world in search of switches to open doors, while battling random monsters along the way. And that's it; there are no side quests or special dungeons, just switches, doors, and monsters for nine laborious hours.    When a battle starts, the game shifts to a turn-based role-playing game, giving you control of all four Lyoko warriors. The bottom screen shows your menu choices and the top screen displays the action. After an attack has been performed, a recharge meter shows up and prevents you from attacking until it is full. The recharge length depends on the strength of the attack, so special moves will leave you waiting a bit longer. The system works well, but it isn't very challenging. Most enemies will go down within a couple of turns, and if you stagger your attacks correctly, some of your foes won't even have an opportunity to strike. If you do find yourself in danger, you can visit the laboratory to purchase healing items and attack viruses. You can also configure plug-ins, which act as modifiers to different stats. Given that the game doesn't let you spend experience points when you level up, this is as close as you'll get to customizing your characters.    Like everything else in the game, the controls aren't particularly interesting. The stylus acts as nothing more than a computer mouse, so don't expect to slash up monsters Ninja Gaiden-style. There isn't much to do outside of holding it down to guide your warrior, and tapping menus to select attacks. There are a handful of poorly executed minigames that crop up in battle, but they appear only when your character has sustained enough damage, and they do little to make the combat more engaging.     The one high point of the game lies in its multiplayer. If you have a friend who also owns the game, each of you can load up your Lyoko warriors and battle it out using a variety of options. Your warriors will have all of the items and plug-ins from your single-player saved game, so the further along that you are, the more powerful your warriors will be. In the event that your warriors are under- or overpowered compared to those of your friends, you can place various handicaps on the match. In addition to the classic battle mode, there's a challenge mode and a bet mode. The first sets a number of goals such as battling without items or using only two of the four warriors, and the second lets you wager some of your items on the outcome of the battle. Battles against a human opponent are far more intense than anything that the single-player game offers. Having to quickly manage attacks and react to a real person speeds up the combat and adds a touch of excitement not found in the rest of the game.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    You'll spend most of your time in the 3D world staring at an oddly misshapen 2D sprite.   Even if you're a fan of the last Code Lyoko game you'll be disappointed with the underwhelming visuals in Fall of X.A.N.A. The impressive 2D artwork is still there, but it's a waste because most of your time in the game is spent staring at a deformed representation of an already oddly proportioned character as he or she shuffles around a drab environment ripe with texture tearing and fog. The polygonal characters shown in battles fare a bit better, but they suffer from stiff animation. The effects for items and special moves look as if they were taken straight out of an early SNES game. Most of the sounds consist of digital menu bleeps and the shuffling sound of your warrior's feet. Forgettable music loops in the background add to the hypnotic boredom.     Code Lyoko: Fall of X.A.N.A. is a dull game. The absence of any real fun or challenge makes it feel less like a game and more like a chore. If you're dying for some Code Lyoko action, the 9 to 10 hours that you would spend playing this game would probably be better spent watching a marathon of the show.    
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1083,MotoGP ,4.5, Simulation racing fans beware; this racer will test your patience more than your riding skills.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/4/9/2220449-box_mgp08.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/motogp-review/1900-6208021/,neg,"
  Modeled after the real-world MotoGP Championship, MotoGP for the Wii features dozens of real-life racers, bikes, and tracks in a number of exotic locales. Unfortunately, in trying to please both fans of arcade-style racers and of realistic simulations, the game ends up straddling a line between the two and failing at both. As a simulation racer, it lacks the deep customization, realism, and sharp controls that the genre is known for, and as an arcade racer it's just plain boring.    Figuring out the best way to play MotoGP may be the biggest challenge. You're asked to complete a tutorial the first time you play to determine the style that works for you, but it's not much help. Your best bet is to spend time finding a workable handling style and control setup through trial and error. There are three options for handling: Arcade, Advanced, and Simulation. Arcade is accessible for beginners, but because you don't have to worry about front and back brakes, leaning, or wiping out from turning too hard, it's almost completely devoid of any challenge.      Advanced mode offers a decent middle ground and incorporates some of the more demanding elements of motorcycle racing, such as drafting. It still feels like you're riding with training wheels, though, and the racing just isn't very entertaining. And finally, there is Simulation mode, which ditches all computer assistance and leaves the racing up to you. Purists will naturally gravitate to this mode, but even they will have a hard time sticking with it, given that the poor controls don't offer enough precision to excel.    There are four control schemes that you can mix and match with the three handling options, but none of the combinations feel right. There's the obligatory (and worthless) Wii Remote-only scheme that has you tilting the remote in an attempt to keep your biker upright, and then there are three Remote-and-Nunchuk combos. The option that lets you hold the Remote sideways like a throttle and twist it to accelerate sounds like fun, but it's too inconsistent. Getting through tricky turns is a pain when the game can't tell if you're twisting to go faster or to slow down. The more conventional configurations that employ the analog stick and buttons are better, but none are intuitive and, unlike other console versions of MotoGP, there's no option to customize the controls and assign buttons yourself.    After you decide on the control setup that's least uncomfortable for you, there are five modes to test your racing skills and patience: Career, Challenge, Quick Race, Time Attack, and split-screen multiplayer. The Career mode has you burning through the grand-prix events while increasing your stats and building a better racer. It's the main focus of the game and it offers hours of racing on dozens of tracks. However, there's not much fun to be had tuning your bike between events, because the four options available (tires, suspension, gear ratios, and turning speed) have only a negligible effect that varies according to which racing style you've opted for.   Yes, it really is as boring as this looks.   Though it would benefit from more variety, Challenge mode is the most entertaining. The challenges include speed runs, checkpoint races, and variables such as making it through a lap without braking. Completing challenges unlocks more, and as you progress, you gain a better understanding of the ins and outs of motorcycle racing. The upper levels are just more difficult rehashes of the lower levels, so as in other modes, boredom will eventually catch up to you. The other three modes are variants of the Career and Challenge modes and they're just as monotonous. There's some simple split-screen multiplayer available, but it's no better than playing solo, and your friends won't thank you for subjecting them to it.    Visually, MotoGP is bland and grainy. The racers and bikes animate well, but the tracks lack detail. If it weren't for a couple of distinguishing features such as buildings and bleachers, it would be hard to tell the tracks apart. Most of them have the same blurry textures and drab color scheme. The menus are easy to navigate and are accompanied by some nice techno music, but the tunes disappear as soon as you hit the track. The only sound that you'll hear as you race is the monotonous grind of motorcycle engines, which wouldn't be terrible if they didn't sound as if they were ripped straight from the original NES Excitebike.     If you're a simulation racing fan still waiting for the genre to appear on the Wii, keep waiting. If you're a fan of arcade racing games, there are far more exciting and more playable games available for the Wii. Simply put, MotoGP is a disappointment all around.  
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1084,Majesty 2: Battles of Ardania ,4.5," Only masochists need to bother with Majesty 2: Battles of Ardania, an incredibly tough expansion pack.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/5/9/2219759-box_mj2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/majesty-2-battles-of-ardania-review/1900-6285040/,neg,"
  Battles of Ardania, the second expansion for Majesty 2, is a grueling slog that beats you over the head with excessive difficulty from the very start of the single-player campaign that forms the majority of its content. Little else is added to the basic formula, so there isn't much of interest to be found in this add-on aside from the hair-pulling difficulty. While serious devotees of the series might enjoy this sort of extreme challenge, just about everyone else will be crying uncle within the first couple of hours of play.   When at first you don't succeed…   Not much distinguishes Battles of Ardania from the previous Majesty 2 expansion, Kingmaker, or the original game released in early 2009. The premise remains the same. You play the role of a king in a medieval fantasy land called Ardania. The look and feel are very similar to a traditional real-time strategy game in the vein of Age of Empires in that you build, order up units, and do research on various upgrades that give troops better gear and let you whip off the odd lightning bolt. But there is one catch. You can't give direct orders to units. Whenever you want to reveal some of the inky-black map, you need to pin an explore flag to the locale you want checked out and assign a gold reward to the task. Whenever you want to clear out a crypt full of stinky undead, you need to pin an attack flag to the spot. Whenever you want to defend your home turf, you need to pin a defense flag to the spot. And so forth. Pony up enough loot, and your lads hurry over to do your bidding. Cheap out, and they just ignore you.    This hands-off style of unit management can be tough to deal with. Type A personalities can expect a rough ride, since there is a lot of randomness incorporated into the core of the game design. You need a ton of patience and a willingness to let the game go where it wants to at times, because warriors supposedly on the hunt to kill monsters and score loot often wander right past flags loaded up with gold. The extreme difficulty makes everything even more aggravating. Scenarios are absurdly tough. Every mission in the campaign rushes you with waves of enemies from the get-go, which emphasizes your lack of control and cranks up the frustration. You almost certainly won't win missions the first time through, because you're always taken by surprise by some bizarre, impossible-to-foresee element like rampaging bearmen appearing every few minutes from the edge of the screen and turning half of your buildings into rubble. Everything has been rigged so that you have to take part in a lot of annoying trial-and-error experimentation, which extends the length of the game at the cost of sending your blood pressure through the roof.    Nothing compensates for the sheer brutality and simple-minded nature of the difficulty, either. The plot is barely there, with the returning Sean Connery-soundalike narrator the best part of an episodic tale that has the king heading out to war simply because he's bored and should probably go kill bad guys. The Lord of the Rings, this ain't. All the ""story"" does is string together eight basically disconnected fights around the kingdom based on the same general themes and goals that have always been a part of this series. You wind up battling a mage-werewolf, but generally, the expansion holds true to its generic name. Other additions are hardly worth noting. None of the units or buildings have been bolstered or changed in any significant way, aside from a couple of new monsters that are just variants of existing creatures. So you're still constructing the same old bases, cranking out the same old units, and researching the same old spells and equipment upgrades. The visuals and sound effects are identical to those in Majesty 2, right down to the goofball order acknowledgements (which still include the rather appropriate elvish dying line ""Not fun…not at all""). A handful of new multiplayer maps, including two with co-op support, have been tossed into the mix, but that's about it for brand-new features.   …try, try again. Lots of trial and error is the only way to beat the scenarios in Battles of Ardania.   While the Majesty 2 formula of managing a fantasy kingdom at arm's length can be catchy if you're blessed with lots of patience, the combination of this laissez-faire mechanic and endless waves of marauding monsters is maddening. There is some real challenge for series vets in search of a game that tests their skills, albeit in some decidedly unfair ways. But for most players this exasperating expansion offers more frustration than fun.  
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1085,Garfield's Fun Fest ,4.5, Colorful graphics can't make up for this game's shocking brevity.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/6/4/0/34924-96640.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/garfields-fun-fest-review/1900-6196534/,neg,"
  In addition to being a popular comic-strip character, Garfield is a merchandising powerhouse. He has been featured in scads of successful books and DVDs, and, of course, his likeness has been used in suction-cupped plush toys that you can attach to your car window. Now, we have Garfield's Fun Fest, a Nintendo DS game released in association with a DVD of the same name, and like the animated film on which it's based, this game is aimed squarely at the younger set. Although it has colorful, cartoony visuals, there's not nearly enough substance to Garfield's Fun Fest to make it worth anyone's time, regardless of their age or level of interest in Garfield.   Garfield will eat anything, even a chocolate chip cookie floating in midair on a plate suspended by a balloon.   The story is so strange that you expect Garfield to wake up at the end of it. Garfield and his pals head off to the annual Grin City Fun Fest, a performance competition for comic-strip characters. But when they arrive, Garfield's girlfriend, Arlene, is swept off her feet by a grotesquely anthropomorphic cat named Ramone. Suffering from heartbreak, Garfield loses his sense of humor, so he sets out to find Freddy, the famous funny frog, to drink some of his magical funny water before returning to Grin City to win back Arlene and claim the title of Fun Fest champion. Unfortunately, this surreal story isn't told in a compelling way. There's just a series of still images accompanied by lines of text that dryly explain the events of the plot. It's also totally unfocused--characters sometimes show up for one or two panels, serve no real purpose, and then disappear from the story. Worse, there's no humor to it, no jokes or punch lines--nothing funny whatsoever. A few video clips or voice samples from the cartoon on which the game is based would have helped bring Garfield and the other characters to life. Children deserve better storytelling than this from their games.     Garfield loves to eat, and Garfield loves to sleep. The game's platforming levels are designed around these two characteristics, so at least it demonstrates a solid understanding of its license. In the platforming levels, you walk, jump, and climb your way around an area, find a few scattered items, and then seek out your goal. In most cases, Odie, Garfield's canine patsy, tags along behind you automatically, and you can hop on Odie's back for a quick dash that lets you reach otherwise inaccessible areas. As you wander around, Garfield's energy plummets rapidly. To help counter this, there are pieces of food all over the levels, and each food item you scarf up restores some energy. You'll need to munch on something or other frequently, or Garfield will run out of energy altogether. Should that happen, he'll immediately start napping, and you'll take control of Odie, who must then track down one of the alarm clocks in the level and bring it back to Garfield before he himself runs out of energy.     Patrolling the areas are enemies large and small, from spiders to dogs to mail carriers, but a quick swipe or two of Garfield's paw is all it takes to make them disappear in a puff of smoke. The biggest challenge in these areas comes from finding the items you need before you run out of energy, but after you play them a few times, you'll have them memorized, and then there's no challenge at all. The game controls just fine, but there's nothing the least bit interesting about the level design or gameplay. It's all straightforward, serviceable, and thoroughly ordinary. You get the sense that the makers of the game wanted to keep things simple so it would be accessible to children, but they erred too far on the side of caution.    Even more basic than the platforming stages are the other types of levels you encounter in the game. There are a few scrolling levels in which you either ride Odie along the ground or fly through the air on a hang glider. In the hang-gliding stages, you simply press up or down to fly in that direction, collecting food and balloons and avoiding enemies and obstacles, while in the Odie-riding stages, you can jump to collect food items and baubles called dingle balls. There's not much to these stages, but they work as a change of pace from the platforming levels. Lastly, there are a few performance levels, in which you must help Garfield perform a routine by tapping cue cards on the touch screen as stars pass over them. These levels don't have enough rhythm for them to work as a rhythm game. They're just a simple, dull test of how well you respond to visual cues.    It's shocking how little there is to Garfield's Fun Fest. You'll hit the game's conclusion so quickly you may be left staring at your DS in disbelief, thinking that can't possibly be all there is to the game. But it is. There's less than an hour's worth of gameplay here, spread out across the game's 15 levels. Once you've finished the game, you can replay the levels in an effort to earn the game's award trophies, which you win for doing things like eating every piece of food in every level or finding Garfield's teddy bear, Pooky, in every platforming stage. But the gameplay just isn't interesting enough to make playing through the levels again worthwhile. Even at 20 bucks this game is a terrible value.   A performance stage? Wake me up when it's over.   The game looks nice. The character sprites are large and colorful and look just like their comic-strip counterparts. Odie in particular looks hilariously stupid. And the backgrounds have multiple layers, giving each area a sense of depth. Unfortunately there are so few areas in the game that the visuals lose their luster quickly. The music is upbeat but unremarkable. The sound effects are underwhelming, and hearing Garfield meow like an actual cat whenever he's hit seems odd, since he's typically voiced by sullen-sounding men. People expect Garfield to speak, so the lack of any voice acting doesn't make sense.    Children may be captivated by the game's graphics for a short time, and the gameplay, while mediocre, is easy and accessible enough for young kids, but they'll be done with the game faster than you can say ""I hate Mondays."" Parents looking for a good game for their children would be better served by any number of other, more substantial options. Those looking for an authentic Garfield experience would be much better off eating some lasagna and taking a nap than playing this game.  
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1086,Marvel Super Hero Squad ,4.5, This simple superhero game is a super bore.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/4/7/2222647-box_mshs.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/marvel-super-hero-squad-review/1900-6238485/,neg,"
  The lives of superheroes are supposed to be the most exciting imaginable. Imbued with the power of flight, tank-tossing strength, or just an obscene amount of patriotism, these lifesaving do-gooders get their jollies from foiling the plans of evil masterminds, concocting elaborate disguises, or just messing around with their many extraordinary abilities. There is no such fun to be had in Marvel Super Hero Squad. Although you do get to take control of a wide variety of colorfully clothed saviors, ranging from the obscure bird-lover Falcon to the aptly named Iron Man, your exploits fall far short of heroic. You spend so much time punching out nondescript robots in forgettable corridors that your actions lose all meaning. Not that you can even see your actions a lot of the time. The camera pans and swoops around the battlefield with no regard to your needs, making it hard to focus on the dull button-mashing combat for long enough to grow tired of it. This uninspired superhero game is not worth your time.      Amid the broken camera and shallow combat, the story actually manages to provide some entertainment. Molded in the vein of a Saturday morning cartoon, the plot reduces these heroes to their most basic personality traits, making them so petty and immature that they are actually pretty funny. Dr. Doom has a mini hissy fit whenever his plans go even slightly awry; Odin angrily drags Thor and his impish brother Loki by their ears when he catches them fighting; and Silver Surfer sounds like the fifth member of the Ninja Turtles, constantly referring to his companions as ""bro"" like he's a stereotypical Californian surfer. The less-than-reverent portrayal of these beloved icons may ruffle a few feathers, but it's the only part of the game that projects a unique personality. It's hard not to crack a smile when Moduk goes through the trouble of capturing Wolverine in a cage made of adamantium but puts a flimsy wooden roof on it. The story in Marvel Super Hero Squad is so bad that it's good, providing some genuinely funny jokes if you don't take things too seriously.    Sadly, once the goofy cutscenes stop rolling and you're stuck actually playing the adventure, things quickly fall apart. This is a boring game, with combat that is so simple and repetitive you may as well be given a win button so you can quickly move to the next scene of the heroic soap opera. You punch with the A button, perform a long distance attack with the B button, string together combos by mashing these buttons, and end with a motion-controlled flourish. It's easy enough to dispatch the waves of attackers, but it's not even remotely fun. You can mash your way to victory without having to exert any thought or mix up your tactics in the slightest. You are accompanied by another superhero at all times, either AI or human controlled, but that doesn't make things any more interesting. The camera is so poorly designed that it is almost impossible to keep the action onscreen when a second player joins, making it all too easy for one player to fall off a cliff or get beaten to a pulp by a robot just offscreen.     The camera problems carry over in the Battle mode, a free-for-all fight against up to three human- or computer-controlled opponents. This plays very similarly to a 3D version of Super Smash Bros., except it removes any semblance of fun. Your attacks are slightly more fleshed out than in the Adventure mode, giving you a flashy finishing move in addition to your repertoire of punches and more punches. But this move is a pain to pull off, requiring you to hit down on the D pad while you swing your arm, so your tactic is the same mash-a-thon from the mundane Adventure mode. For some reason, the camera swoops and pans with reckless abandon, constantly zooming around the arena but rarely giving you a decent view of all four competitors. This mode is also extremely imbalanced. It's a pain to hit an airborne character if you can’t fly, and characters with projectile attacks can perpetually pepper opponents from far away without fear of retaliation.   Not even a cool dinosaur in the background can make Battle mode fun.   If you do get sucked into the goofy story and quirky characters--somehow tolerating the sterile gameplay--there are worthwhile unlockables to strive for. There are six heroes and seven villains initially, and you can earn many more characters to team up with during the course of the adventure. Marvel staples, such as Wolverine and The Thing, will appease players whose Marvel knowledge begins and ends with blockbuster movies, but there are less obvious inclusions as well, such as Ms. Marvel and Mole Man. Unfortunately, a lot of their personality is wasted because of how inadequate everything looks. The characters are small and poorly defined, making it easy to lose track of who is fighting whom during the heat of battle. When Hulk collides with Abomination, it just looks like two green blobs of putty mashed together.     Marvel Super Hero Squad never comes close to capturing the thrill of superpowered crime fighting. As you walk down nondescript corridors and through unimaginative evil lairs, repeatedly slamming on the punch button as wave after wave of faceless robots attack you, you'll wonder how such an exciting concept could have been squandered so spectacularly. The ridiculous story isn't nearly entertaining enough to compensate for the monotonous combat, and the simple Battle mode is too imbalanced to provide a good outlet for superpowered rage. Stay far away from this superhero snore fest.   
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1087,Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked ,4.5, The pleasures of island life are cast away by constant frustrations in this tedious survival game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/1/0/2219210-box_libsw.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/lost-in-blue-shipwrecked-review/1900-6199346/,neg,"
  From Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe to the contemporary castaways of Lost, stories of island survival have long fired the human imagination. Throughout the course of three DS games, Konami's Lost in Blue series has tried to tap into this primal experience, but the adventurous elements have repeatedly been bogged down by tedious micromanagement. Now, Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked brings the series to the Wii, but rather than representing a fresh start, the larger scale of this iteration only serves to magnify the flaws that have plagued the earlier games.   Exploring the island involves an awful lot of walking up to ledges like this one to see if you can scale them.     You play as Aidan Sanders, a 16-year-old child of privilege who escapes a sinking cruise ship with his pet monkey Hobo and awakes to find himself on a tropical island. There, he must fend for himself, scavenging the island for food and supplies with which he can build the makeshift tools he needs to survive. It's not long before he's able to toss together a raft capable of taking him to another nearby island, where he meets up with Lucy, another survivor of the shipwreck. The two of them team up to explore the island and try to figure out how to get home. There are a few different directions the story can go in, depending on your actions, but in general, there isn't much attention paid to things like plot and character development. The focus here is on survival.      As you would expect, surviving on the islands is not easy. Unfortunately, it's also not much fun. Your characters have food, water, and stamina levels, which are in a constant state of rapid decline. You can rarely go for very long without resting, drinking, or eating, and you'll spend a great deal of your time just catching fish or hunting land animals to prepare your meals rather than exploring the island. And even considering the accelerated rate at which time passes, the amount of food the characters need to consume to sustain themselves seems outrageous. A meal made from four whole fish or from all the meat off a slaughtered wild boar might only fill Aidan or Lucy's stomach roughly halfway. It's fitting that concerns about food, water, and sleep play an important role in a game about life on an island, but Shipwrecked doesn't balance these concerns with the other aspects in an enjoyable way. The unending focus on micromanaging your characters' stats quickly grows tedious and drowns any enjoyment you might have found in the simple pleasures of island life. If you manage to survive and progress, you'll eventually be able to build creature comforts for your base camp, as well as more effective, durable tools that make your existence easier, but it's a long, dreary struggle just to get to that point. Even then, these concerns are never put aside for long.      Even when you are able to focus for a short while on island exploration, a number of frustrations hobble what should be an enjoyable endeavor. You'll constantly need to scale ledges as you make your way across the terrain, but with the camera positioned behind Aidan, it's often impossible to tell if you can make your way down until you walk up to an edge, at which point he'll either climb down or cry out in fear. There's a minimap that shows your immediate surroundings, but if you get lost (which isn't difficult), the map is useless for helping you find your way back to base camp. Although you need to take Lucy with you on your expeditions for practical reasons--you can carry twice as much stuff if she's with you and push rocks with her help that Aidan can't budge on his own--she needs a lot of help. For example, you'll have to help her up or down from nearly every ledge and across every jump, which really slows you down, making her seem like the embodiment of a helpless female stereotype. (Absurdly, she also wears high heels as she hikes across the island.) There should be an intrinsic pleasure to the experience of exploring--of finding out what lies beyond the next ridge--but these issues make it more of a chore.         The one bright spot here is the slew of minigames,  all of which make good use of the Wii's motion controls and provide a much-needed diversion from the tedium of the game's other aspects. You'll use the remote with the Nunchuk to harpoon fish, saw wood, tie logs together, flip cooking meat, fan flames, row a raft, stay atop a stampeding bull, and much more. The games can be fun for a while because their number and variety is impressive. However, these, too, can grow dull through frequent repetition--fishing and cooking in particular you might find yourself doing a lot more than you would like. Some minigames can also be played cooperatively with a second player, which works fine, but considering that the bulk of the game is for one player only, it's doubtful that most players will get much use out of this option.        Visually, Lost in Blue is a total disappointment. The graphics look like something from five years ago, with flat textures, simple character models, and no details or flourishes to help bring the lush island environment to life. The sound is even worse. The music ranges from forgettable to irritatingly repetitive, and the occasional use of voice acting only serves to distract because you'll usually hear a character say only a portion of his or her printed text.    You'll get more than your fill of this cooking minigame.     Your adventure can span across 101 days, each passing at the rate of an hour per minute, so even considering that you can sleep entire days away, Lost in Blue can certainly keep you occupied for quite a while. And once you're done, if you'd like, you can start all over as Lucy or play an unlockable mission-based mode centered on a pair of supporting characters, but neither of these options improve the game in any way. Surviving and making a life for yourself on a tropical island would be hard work, but playing a game about it shouldn't be quite so hard. And while the island has its share of secrets to be discovered, they're just not worth the effort. It's easier to eke out an existence on a tropical island than it is to squeeze much enjoyment out of this game.    
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1088,Persona 2: Eternal Punishment ,8.5," RPG fans looking for something other than the standard ""boy meets girl, boy loses girl in heart-wrenching cutscene, boy avenges girl's death and saves world"" formula should definitely give Persona ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/5/4/5/2211545-persona2ep_us.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/persona-2-eternal-punishment-review/1900-2626754/,pos,"
When it comes to the RPG genre, most games really don't stray too far from the normal conventions that made the genre popular. It almost seems like, outside of twisting the combat and magic system in new ways, RPG developers are designing the rest of their RPGs' systems with a ""one from column A, two from column B"" mentality. Should the game have random encounters, or should the monster be visible from the world map? Should status effects last outside of battle, or should every character be returned to normal status at the completion of the battle? The list of ""either ors"" goes on and on, and the result is a genre that, for better or worse, is packed with games that are extremely similar to one another - yet one key system or concept can either make or break each game in the minds of the genre's fans. For the most part, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment sticks to the conventions of the genre - your party moves from place to place, randomly encountering monsters on a quest to save the city. But in both storyline and in execution, Persona 2 isn't your average RPG, and results are mostly pleasing.   Persona 2: Eternal Punishment is actually the second half of the Persona 2 saga. The first chapter, subtitled Innocent Sin, was released in Japan in 1999. Eternal Punishment takes place in the same setting as the first chapter, but it retells enough of the first chapter's story throughout its first few hours to ensure that you're up to speed with the game's bizarre events. To make a long story short, Sumaru City is plagued by a curse. The Joker's curse turns rumor into fact, causing all sorts of trouble, from mass murder to filling the land with tons of different demons. At the center of all this madness is Maya Amano, a reporter for a popular teen magazine called Coolest. What starts as a simple investigation into the Joker murders becomes a full-fledged adventure once the Joker shows up at Seven Sisters High School and murders the principal. Persona 2 is an interesting mix of mature themes (mass murder, the occult, monsters that ask questions about your character's breasts) and a hint of Japanese pop culture that lends a bit of misguided but welcome humor to the proceedings.   Spreading rumors is a large and interesting part of the game. By getting in touch with various rumormongers, you can plant ideas that will eventually come true, such as the ability to win valuable items, the concept that wearing the Seven Sisters High patch protects you from the Joker's curse, and so on. Also, the ability to speak to monsters rather than fight them has returned from the original game. Rather than giving each character a collection of approaches, Eternal Punishment assigns each character a personality trait. You can combine up to three members of your party for each attempt at conversation, and each combination has a different effect. Anger the monster, and you'll find yourself in a fight. Manage to scare the monster enough, and he'll probably run away. The real object of contacting monsters is to either make them happy or interested. Making a monster happy will net you some items or cash, while interesting a monster will score tarot cards. Tarot cards can be used for summoning new persona, which serve as each character's spell-casting alter ego. If your levels are high enough, you can make a contract with the different monster types, allowing you to collect blank, or free, tarot cards, which can be painted to be any card you like, making them extremely useful in summoning some of the game's rarer personas.Much like your characters, your personas gain experience in battle. Each persona gives the character it's assigned to certain elemental strengths and weaknesses, and each persona can cast different spells, ranging from healing spells to various types of elemental attacks. As their levels increase, your personas will learn new spells, gain enhanced stats, and even mutate into different forms. While your personas are most useful in battle, you'll also be using them to heal your party between fights, a task made extremely easy by the game's otherwise cumbersome menus. Everything, from attaching a new persona to one of your characters to simply assigning tasks before a battle, seems like it takes one or two more steps than it should. However, battles usually go quickly, as once you've chosen actions for each character, the battle will rage on until one side is defeated, unless you stop to change your plan of attack.   While the battle system in Persona 2 is unique and usually reasonably brisk, it's very easy to end up with extremely unbalanced characters. In the beginning of the game, your characters are rather weak, making talking your way out of fights an extremely attractive option. However, talking your way out of every fight means you and your personas aren't getting more powerful and gaining experience, meaning you're in for a harsh lesson in defeat once you reach an inescapable boss fight. If you fight your way through the game, you'll never get enough tarot cards to summon some of the later, higher-level personas. Either way you look at it, you're going to have to spend an occasional hour or two wandering aimlessly to get into enough encounters to ensure that your characters and tarot stocks are nice and solid.   Graphically, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment isn't terribly exciting. The game places your 2D sprite-based characters into polygonal backgrounds, which can be rotated to different positions at will. While the character sprites look decent, and some of the monster animations are unusually entertaining, things like spell effects and the game's environments are fairly drab. Some higher resolution on the sprites definitely wouldn't have hurt, either, as they all look a little blocky, particularly in some of the closer camera angles used in battle. The soundtrack lends a spooky atmosphere to the proceedings, and most of the game's key plot points and battles feature some decent voice work to lend a little more character to the game.   The localization of Persona 2 seems like a very by-the-book affair. While the game is definitely in English, the wording and grammar is rough at best. Also, the game contains a few concepts that would really make sense only to someone with passing knowledge of Japanese pop culture. Add these together and you're left with game that has a high potential to confuse, though some will definitely find humor and perhaps even a bit of additional challenge in the game's mind-bending take on the English language.   Persona 2: Eternal Punishment has its share of flaws. The graphics could have been a little sharper, the translation could have been a little clearer, and the menus could have been easier to navigate. But if you can manage to get over these flaws, you'll find an RPG that dares to be different, but not at the sake of an interesting story and exciting gameplay. RPG fans looking for something other than the standard ""boy meets girl, boy loses girl in heart-wrenching cutscene, boy avenges girl's death and saves world"" formula should definitely give Persona 2 a shot.
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1089,Zeus Official Expansion: Poseidon ,8.5, Poseidon is as enjoyable as Zeus and suggests that Impressions' city-building series will just keep getting better.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/6/3/1/2210631-50_11254_0_zeusmasterofolympus.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/zeus-official-expansion-poseidon-review/1900-2782573/,pos,"
 	Last year's Zeus: Master of Olympus was the best game to date in Impressions' city-building series, as it improved on the ideas of the Roman-themed Caesar games and their Egyptian counterpart, Pharaoh, while adding new tasks and mechanics that made the game's formula more complex and enjoyable. Poseidon, the official expansion for Zeus, doesn't include many new features, but it does include some significant ones. The game is set in Atlantis, and the fantastical setting has allowed the designers to take more creative license with the mission design. The result is as enjoyable as Zeus and suggests that Impressions' city-building series will just keep getting better.  The hippodrome is one of Poseidon's most significant additions. The first city you will build in Poseidon is Atlantis itself, and the landscape is based on Plato's description of the city as a series of concentric rings. Your primary goals are the same as in previous city-building games: Build a prosperous city, establish trade with your neighbors, and perform various tasks to please the gods. Each of these goals has been slightly altered for Poseidon. The most basic change is the most obvious--many of the buildings have been colored in shades of blue. But Poseidon's changes are more than just superficial.   The most significant difference in the early part of the game is the lack of entertainment structures. No longer will you need to build gymnasiums and theaters to keep your people happy. Instead, your population will want to learn, and scientific outposts are needed so the city will grow. You'll need to build bibliothekes, inventor's laboratories, observatories, and museums, as well as workshops and universities to supply them with employees. The scientific structures play the same role as entertainment structures did in Zeus, with one drawback: The yearly competitions have been removed, and nothing has been included to replace them.   Most of the changes in Poseidon are this slight and subtle, and they're mostly just new features that make only slight changes to the game, if any. For instance, there are several new ways to beautify your city, including stone circles, orreries, and water parks. The residents of elite housing need chariots instead of horses. There is a new food type available. And you can gather and trade two new raw materials, black marble and orichalc.   The new raw materials are required for the building of pyramids, one of Poseidon's most significant additions. The idea is from Pharaoh's expansion, Cleopatra, but the implementation is slightly different. To build pyramids, you'll need a good supply of marble, black marble, wood, and orichalc. The pyramids range from small to huge, and even if they aren't required elements of your city, they are great for improving the appeal of neighborhoods. In addition to pyramids, you'll also have to build wondrous structures such as special observatories and museums. These are basically pyramids with another building on top. The new pyramids vary from campaign to campaign, and they help keep things interesting.   The new materials are also used for creating the sanctuary to Poseidon, the only new sanctuary in the game. Unfortunately, the previous sanctuaries haven't been changed to require the new materials. While this makes them easier to build, it would have made for a nice aesthetic change if the sanctuaries from Zeus could be adorned with the new materials. Nothing has been changed in terms of pleasing the gods, and you'll still need to perform quests for them. To this end, two new heroes can be summoned to your city: Bellephron and Atalanta.  You'll build pyramids to honor the gods. The only other significant addition in Poseidon is the hippodrome. The hippodrome is a horse-racing track that brings both money and happiness to your city. It can be as long as you like, though building it is somewhat difficult. You must hold the cursor down and wait while the different track segments cycle through. It's easy to get the wrong piece, and even easier to find that the track won't fit in the area you've planned. This is especially frustrating when you've laid down a huge track already, only to find your entire plan must be scrapped. The hippodrome is a great addition to the city, but creating it is a chore.   Luckily, one of the previous game's biggest chores has been all but removed. Combat plays an almost insignificant role in Poseidon, as for most of the game you'll be prevented from attacking other cities because of a pact with the gods. You'll still need to keep a strong force at home in case of invasion, but otherwise the conquest element of the game is almost entirely gone. This may frustrate those who liked the combat elements of Zeus and its predecessors, but it helps alleviate the problem of Zeus' subpar combat interface.   Even though there aren't very many of them, the additions in Poseidon are enough to revitalize Zeus. You get to trade with cultures like the Maya (perhaps a hint of things to come) and create great new structures. There are plenty of new campaigns and missions, and the new structures and colors make the game look even more cheery than Zeus. It's enough to make you hope that Impressions will pick an even more fantastic setting for the next installment in the series, but for now, Poseidon is satisfying enough to add some life to one of the better strategy games of last year.      	  
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1090,Grand Prix 3 ,8.5," While it may not be everything that Grand Prix II players hoped for, it's still a reason for F1 fans to rejoice.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/8/6/3/2215863-gp3_cover.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/grand-prix-3-review/1900-2620421/,pos,"
NASCAR may reign in the US, but Formula 1 is the worldwide king of auto racing. The F1 season ranks second only to soccer's World Cup and the Olympics in TV sports viewership. Not surprisingly, game companies have been quick to offer F1 racing simulations to fans of the motor sport, including Electronic Arts' recently released F1 2000 and Eidos Interactive's F1 World Grand Prix. These games have their strengths, but they still haven't earned the status of Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix II, which was released in 1996 and is still considered to be one of the few truly superb F1 sims because of its combination of excellent graphics, detailed realism, and great gameplay. Fans still speak of it reverently, which is why its new sequel, Grand Prix 3, was so highly anticipated. It's finally available, and while it may not be everything that Grand Prix II players hoped for, it's still a reason for F1 fans to rejoice.   Installing Grand Prix 3 is simple enough because the full installation is just 320MB, but getting your controller configured is a different matter. You'll need to calibrate it in the game, even if you've already calibrated it in Windows. Oddly, the game doesn't recognize the third axis of your controller; if you use dual-axis pedals or a separate throttle on your joystick, you're out of luck. A patch to fix the problem has been announced. The controller configuration menu itself is a bit convoluted, and the same holds true for the game's menu system in general. There are some annoying oddities in the labeling and layout of the menu items that, at least at first, will have you leaping back and forth to find the options you want. Fortunately, the menu items feature detailed pop-up tooltips.   Grand Prix 3's graphics are amazing one moment and embarrassing the next. When you first boot the game, it will choose the optimal settings for your system, and it does a decent job of configuring itself for reasonable frame rates. Later you can easily switch the resolution and tweak many detail settings to your own preference. The opening video and credits are stylish and effectively help you get into the game, as do the great full-screen background photos that grace the menu pages. These background shots are also appropriate to the individual menus; for example, behind the sound menu, you'll see a picture of McLaren driver Mika Hakkinen plugging his ears.    On the track itself, the graphics quality varies widely. The cockpit is excellent: The steering wheel LCD readout, gearshift warning lights, and other indicators are all carefully detailed. The actual car models are also well detailed, from the individual wheel spokes to the varied sponsor logos. When cars collide or crash, individual pieces will shatter and fly off. But it's the game's weather effects that really steal the show: Rain can start to fall partway through a race, and you'll see dim reflections in the puddles. As cars race ahead of you, they'll spray mist that partially obscures your view. You'll even notice the track start to dry on the common racing line. Sometimes it will rain on one part of the track but not on another, as in the recent German Grand Prix. These weather quirks call for vital tactical decisions: On one occasion, I was leading a race through Spa when it started to pour on just part of the track. With the race nearly done, I didn't want to lose time in the pits switching to wet-weather tires. Not switching tires worked for Rubens Barrichello in the German Grand Prix, but I was no Barrichello: I spun out on a slick curve and ended up in fifth place, which was a frustrating but fun way to lose.   Despite these strengths, the game does have some pretty serious graphics flaws. The trees look pixelated and poorly shaded. The shadows are also too blocky and too dark. Distant objects will sometimes oddly pop in and out of view as you approach, and you can sometimes see through barriers. Spectators in the stands look more like repeated rows of colored dots than like actual individuals. Your pit crew in Grand Prix 3 is also composed of bitmaps that look bad compared with the 3D polygonal graphics in the game. Yet the game's biggest graphics flaw is that without an extremely fast system, you'll have to crank down most of the detail settings to retain any sense of fluidity and speed.Just as the graphics quality varies widely, so too does the sound. The music is effective, particularly the intro movie theme that starts in a minor key and builds to a crescendo when the lights go green. The game's sound effects are generally varied and colorful. Your engine's whine is forceful instead of weak as in many other F1 sims. Shifting gears, locking wheels, skidding into the gravel pits, and crashing into barriers sound realistic and weighty. But oddly enough, when I hit a nearby car, it was silent as it flipped up off the track and tumbled into the wall, spraying wheels and wings as it went. What's worse is that you don't hear cars approaching during passing attempts. Another flaw is the lack of radio traffic between drivers and their pit crews. Unlike in F1 2000, you won't hear your team updating you on the race situation; instead, you'll just get blocky typed messages at the top of the screen.   The graphics and sound can be very frustrating, but the game isn't really about eye candy; it's about gameplay, and that's where it excels. You can select from four different race types: quick race, practice, full race weekend, or full championship season. The 16 tracks, all featured in beautiful overhead previews, can be configured for variable rain or sunshine. Starting grid position, practice time limits, number of laps, and other options are easily changed. Grand Prix 3 is a FIA-licensed product, so you'll get to choose actual drivers, but you're stuck with the 1998 teams. Cars all use the same model, but you can allow for the possibility of different component breakdowns to add to the realism. To suit your skills, you can toggle driver aids like steering assistance and computer-controlled gear shifting. With all the aids selected, the car practically drives itself, which makes the game accessible to novices.   Grand Prix 3's physics are realistically challenging. Snap spins, wheel lockups, and over- and understeer are all simulated. You'll need a lot of practice to handle the car on the hardest difficulty settings: At first, it feels like you're trying to steer a rocket across an ice rink. Rain also has a real effect on handling - it's not just for show. Meanwhile, computer-controlled drivers will protect their lines, outbrake you, and provide aggressive competition. However, the computer's artificial intelligence does have flaws. When I spun through a tight corner on a narrow section of the Monaco circuit, I came to a stop in the middle of the road, blocking other cars. Since there wasn't room for those behind me to pass, all the cars just kept banging into me repeatedly. When a single F1 gearbox alone can cost over $100,000, that just wouldn't happen in real life.   It's that sort of leading-edge technology, coupled with incredibly powerful engines, that lets real F1 cars blast down straights at 200mph. Nevertheless, F1 racing is a very subtle sport where times are measured in thousandths of a second. Highly precise tweaking of the car is a must, and Grand Prix 3 also excels at letting you do this. Before each race, you can change your pit-stop strategy and tire selection based on rain probability. On the car setup page, you can opt for preset optimal car configurations, or you can create your own and save them for future use. Wing angles, brake bias, gear ratios, suspension, and more are all highly configurable. Make no mistake: While it can be fun for beginners, at its heart, Grand Prix 3 is a hard-core simulation.   Multiplayer competition is available over a LAN, serial cable, or direct modem connection. Unfortunately, there's no true Internet play with an in-game server browser. The game wouldn't recognize my cable modem, either. Grand Prix 3 also has an unusual multiplayer mode, where you and your opponent take turns driving different cars on the same computer, while the computer drives for the player who's sitting out.   Grand Prix 3 is hardly perfect; in fact, the menus, graphics, and sound can be really disappointing at times. Nonetheless, the game is definitely more than the sum of its parts. All the small details that add to the realism clearly show that it's a labor of love created by true F1 fans, and the realism and complexity only add to the fun, instead of defeating it. The huge number of options creates great diversity and replay value, although the options can be a bit difficult to deal with for the novice. Grand Prix 3 isn't a masterpiece, but if you can live with some of its shortcomings, it'll prove to be a challenge that you can keep coming back to.
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1091,Combat Flight Simulator 2: WWII Pacific Theater ,8.5," Due to its attention to detail and wide range of features, Combat Flight Simulator 2 has something to offer almost every simulation enthusiast.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/8/0/0/2799-10800.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/combat-flight-simulator-2-wwii-pacific-theater-rev/1900-2640579/,pos,"
Microsoft's Flight Simulator series has been a mainstay of computer gaming for many years, but it was barely two years ago that Microsoft first released a simulation of military planes. And while Combat Flight Simulator was a solid first effort, it didn't manage to dominate the genre in the same way the Flight Simulator series had reigned over civilian flight sims. Combat Flight Simulator 2 is Microsoft's attempt to improve on its predecessor while simultaneously shifting the venue from the skies of Europe to the vast, blue Pacific. It's been several years since the last high-quality WWII Pacific-theater sim, so the combination of an improved Combat Flight Simulator and the travails of carrier takeoffs and landings proves successful in Combat Flight Simulator 2.   Combat Flight Simulator 2 is an improvement over its predecessor in almost every respect, and it particularly shows that the development team was committed to improving the aspects of the original game that were lacking. The most notable of these is the graphics. Both the aircraft and the terrain models have been significantly upgraded, and the result is a very good-looking simulation. Considering the limited variety of terrain in the Pacific - sand, jungle, and water - the terrain graphics ran the risk of being monotonous. But Combat Flight Simulator 2 does an excellent job of making these three recurring types of terrain look realistic and attractive. The overall effect does much to make you actually feel as if you're in the Pacific theater - you'll occasionally spot an island in the middle of the huge expanse of ocean, which conveys the feeling of tremendous space and distance. The good weather effects further enhance the scenery, and the game even supports transform-and-lighting effects with compatible video cards, which improve the graphics even further.   The aircraft models are particularly good in Combat Flight Simulator 2, and they stand in stark contrast to the shiny planes of the original, which looked like flying toys. The aircraft in the sequel look much more like real combat planes, thanks to a combination of detail and improved textures. Furthermore, while the intact aircraft models are impressive enough, the damaged ones are even more so. Unlike in its predecessor, damage in Combat Flight Simulator 2 is accurately reflected in the aircraft models, to the extent that you can even see a plane's infrastructure exposed when you shoot off pieces of the plane such as the tail or a wing. This visible damage corresponds well to changes in the flight models, and effects like smoke not only represent physical damage but also convey the different levels of aircraft damage. That is, if you see streaming black smoke coming from your enemy, you can write him off. But sputtering or intermittent smoke means he's still dangerous. Similarly, if you see black smoke coming from your own plane, get home or get out.   The improvement in the graphics goes beyond the terrain and the aircraft models. The cockpits are tremendously improved since the previous installment, and this is one area where the deficiencies of the original Combat Flight Simulator have been fully addressed. The 3D cockpits in the original game were a real weak point, so much that they were almost useless. However, the cockpits in Combat Flight Simulator 2 are superb in 2D, and the 3D cockpits are also much better than before. The only area in which the graphics fall a bit short is in the campaign screens: The 1940s-comic-book look, while not ugly, is a bit plain and doesn't do enough to create a feeling of participation or immersion. Fortunately, the game seems more authentic when you're actually flying, where the radio chatter is just persistent enough to add to the atmosphere without being distracting.   The flight modeling in Combat Flight Simulator 2 is very good, and at the highest difficulty settings, it will satisfy most experienced pilots. While not as unforgiving, and presumably not as realistic, as the flight model found in some of the more hard-core online-only sims, Combat Flight Simulator 2 does an excellent job of accentuating the differences between aircraft. Factors like the Wildcat's diving advantage and the Zero's superior turn radius and climbing capability are modeled well. These aircraft also depart controlled flight more readily than their counterparts in the first game, which makes skillful flying a tricky business. At lower difficulty settings, Combat Flight Simulator 2 flies a lot like Microsoft's hybrid action-simulation, Crimson Skies, which will allow inexperienced players to get used to air combat without the frustration of constantly going into uncontrolled spins. The manual for Combat Flight Simulator 2 runs almost 300 pages and includes everything from game information to WWII Pacific-theater history, descriptions of fighter combat tactics, and interviews with both Japanese and American aces and provides a great resource for those just getting into computer flight simulations.The centerpiece of Combat Flight Simulator 2 is undoubtedly the carrier operations, and these highlight the differences between a land-based European war simulation and a Pacific war simulation. Landing on a carrier is a completely different experience from landing at an airfield, and for inexperienced pilots, attempting to do so will often end in failure. Combat Flight Simulator 2 conveys orders from your landing signal officer through a window in the corner of your screen, which shows a figure giving flag signals as you approach, as text captions tell you that you're ""too low"" or ""too fast."" A mission isn't a complete success until you're safely back on your carrier deck, and if you're flying a damaged plane, the task becomes much harder. The experience of carrier operations adds a whole new dimension to the game, and one that's immensely enjoyable, even as you learn it.   Fans of hard-core simulations will find that Combat Flight Simulator 2 does have several shortcomings. The first is in the campaign. While Combat Flight Simulator 2 does offer a large, branching campaign, which includes over 120 possible missions and lets you fly either as an American or Japanese pilot, the experience offered by fully featured dynamic campaigns such as those found in Enemy Engaged, MiG Alley, and Falcon 4.0 is absent. While dynamic campaigns were once a novelty that attracted considerable attention simply for what they tried to achieve, the aforementioned games have done much to make this feature something that serious simulation fans expect in a truly complete game. Fortunately, the campaign in Combat Flight Simulator 2 does have a lot of replay value, and the powerful mission editor that's included - the same one the developers used to create the campaign missions - will add a lot more for some players. But there's nothing quite like the sense of a real dynamic campaign in a military flight simulation, and so it's too bad that Combat Flight Simulator 2 had to stick with scripted missions.   The game's multiplayer options are also lacking. You're restricted to deathmatch or team head-to-head play, which means that if you want to create a virtual squadron in order to fly single-player missions cooperatively, you are out of luck - although, with the lack of flyable bombers, such squadrons would be restricted in the types of missions they could fly anyway. This is also a shame, as unique experiences like flying early-war torpedo bombers go unrealized in Combat Flight Simulator 2. In fact, the lack of variety in flyable aircraft is another weak point in the game: seven types of planes (counting the two Zero models as separate planes) is pretty limiting. Flyable Oscars, Warhawks, and Airacobras are nowhere to be found. You'll encounter several of these as enemy or friendly aircraft throughout the game, but it's too bad you can't jump in the cockpits of some of these less common planes. Fortunately, the expandable nature of the Combat Flight Simulator series means that you'll probably see these in an expansion pack some time in the future.   Even with its problems, Combat Flight Simulator 2 still has a lot to recommend it. In fact, the game comes very close to being perfect for casual flight sim enthusiasts: The flight models can be adjusted for difficulty, the graphics are eye-catching, the campaign is varied enough, there are several good training missions, and the manual is always there to offer tips and explanations. Hard-core flight sim fans who are used to detailed dynamic campaigns and robust cooperative multiplayer options will find these aspects of the game to be lacking, but even the most experienced virtual ace should find the carrier operations to be both interesting and challenging. The carrier ops are easily the single most enjoyable aspect of the game, and just practicing traps on these early flattops should keep you busy for a long time. If you somehow get tired of this, you can still import aircraft from the original game (although you'll be stuck with the less attractive aircraft models) and fly as British or German pilots if you choose.   Due to its attention to detail and wide range of features, Combat Flight Simulator 2 has something to offer almost every simulation enthusiast. Besides, it's been too long since the last great Pacific-theater flight sim. Although it's not the definitive WWII flight sim, Combat Flight Simulator 2 was definitely worth the wait.
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1092,Ico ,8.5," At a moment when cheap visual fluff is all too often framed by derivative game mechanics, ICO stands sound and elegant.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/6/9/0/2213690-yande.re_154252_ico_ico__character__landscape_paper_texture_ueda_fumito_yorda.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ico-review/1900-2815038/,pos,"
Under development for a long time, and released with little fanfare, ICO is perhaps the epitome of a sleeper hit. The game was developed by a relatively fresh internal team at Sony, and the original PlayStation was its original target platform. It eventually made its way to the PS2, though, on which it has emerged in an altogether surprising form. At its core a simple, almost classical game, ICO has nonetheless proven to be one of the year's most interesting releases. The game is undoubtedly driven by its smartly crafted aesthetic mood, though its production never compromises the gameplay it provides. At a moment when cheap visual fluff is all too often framed by derivative game mechanics, ICO stands sound and elegant. It's an aesthetically driven game done right.   Though it opens with a relatively heavy video sequence, ICO's flow is seldom intruded upon throughout its course. And those sequences that are present are both tastefully minimal and effectively directed. The narrative is a simple one, which is quite fitting: Ico, a young boy born with a set of bull horns, has recently come of age. According to village practice, this means he must be sacrificed. So he is ushered by horse and by skiff to a remote castle and locked into a standing stone tomb. But due to some seismic fluctuation, he manages to escape. Upon doing so, he notices an almost ethereal girl locked in a giant birdcage. He makes it his business to set her free. All of this is communicated by the game's opening sequence, which ends with Ico standing in the huge chamber, his scrawny form eclipsed by the titan structure.   From that point on, you control Ico, helping him traverse the many hazards and obstacles found throughout the castle. The game is not unlike the classic Prince of Persia; its objectives and control mechanics are self-evident, with the main challenge found in its subtle environmental puzzles. Light physical puzzles are also present, but they're seldom focused upon. You will grasp the game's simple control scheme almost immediately, and very few permutations exist. Combat is similarly understated; you basically encounter one type of monster, which you can attack with one move. As such, the game will likely disappoint those craving sheer mechanical depth. But if you're playing ICO for a hearty twitch experience, you're missing the point entirely.   Early on, you rescue the girl shown in the opening sequence. Her name is Yorda, and a good number of the game's more striking elements are centered on her interactions with Ico. She isn't nearly as mobile as the diminutive hero, so you're going to spend lots of time ""creating"" paths for her to safely traverse where before there were none. Simply put, you'll lower platforms for her to hop onto, create bridges for her to cross, and narrow gaps enough for her to jump across (and land in your arms). Far from being tedious, these simple mechanics spotlight what is perhaps the game's most lovingly crafted element: its deep, emotive animations. When you're in close proximity to Yorda, you can take her by the hand and run with her. Doing so will initiate an animation routine that warmly captures the tug-and-pull dynamic of rough puppy love. When she jumps especially far distances, she'll scurry on the face of the wall before scrambling into your arms. And when you reach a save point (which take the form of wrought-iron couches), Ico and Yorda will slowly nod off on each other's shoulders, hand in hand. ICO will indeed pull your strings, in many ways.The game's environments seal up the visual package and provide a brilliant stage for the activities throughout. Far from the geometrical playgrounds found in most 3D adventure games, ICO's environments feel like they've been hewn from stone or laid out on soft green earth. Rather than compromising a believable world by including gratuitously placed geometry, the developer has managed to imbue the environments' otherwise cosmetic elements with tons of gameplay potential. So instead of shimmying across neat parallel bars, for instance, you'll do so on the edges of balconies and the rails of stairs. While it's easy to understate the effect of this in text, it makes a world of difference when it comes to immersion within the actual game. It's hard to describe the effect of the game's scale; indeed, many games pull it off just as effectively. But the level of detail present in ICO's environments makes them feel ever more grand and imposing, which is something that few, if any, games have achieved.   The environments also look marvelous. Light is masterfully used throughout most sequences, either saturating the environs with its presence or accentuating the ambiance when darkness rules the moment. A soft haze permeates the game, keeping the mood soft yet heavy, even during its brightest moments. Further, a subtle bit of noise has been tastefully added, which does much to distance ICO from the sterile look found in many 3D games. The effect is somewhat reminiscent of the view from a surveillance camera. Soft, well-proportioned shadows contribute to the moody whole, doing much to weave the character models into the world. The characters themselves are relatively simple in terms of poly count, but their brilliant animations truly bring them to life. As they run through the expertly textured and masterfully constructed worlds, you'll be taken aback many times. The game's look is definitely the quality that leaves the strongest impression. Taking into account the game's lush ambient effects and a creeping, minimalist score, the whole of the production is inspired in ways that games seldom are.   Anyone interested in witnessing the cutting edge of art direction and atmospheric design in games will want to check out ICO. Few games are as seamless, and none are more elegantly bold, from a visual standpoint. ICO serves as a strong testament to the potential of video game aesthetics and boldly asserts that a strong production can indeed drive a game, when it's coupled with solid play mechanics.


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1093,MotoGP ,8.5," THQ's MotoGP for the Xbox is the latest game that attempts to re-create the sport of Moto Grand Prix motorcycle racing, and for the most part, it does a very ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/4/3/2212743-box_motogp.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/motogp-review/1900-2866099/,pos,"
THQ's MotoGP for the Xbox is the latest game that attempts to re-create the sport of Moto Grand Prix motorcycle racing, and for the most part, it does a very good job of doing so. Like the pair of similarly titled PlayStation 2 games from Namco, THQ's MotoGP lets you race against the sport's numerous real-world riders on a number of licensed racetracks throughout an entire racing season. It also offers a remarkable amount of replay value for a licensed racing game, and it boasts what's arguably the most precise control of any console driving game to date.  MotoGP not only looks superb... You'll notice two things about MotoGP the moment you fire it up. First, it makes great use of the Xbox's powerful hardware to produce some superb visuals. The bikes and riders are rendered using a high number of polygons, and the attention to detail everywhere is remarkable. You'll easily take notice of minute details like your bike's slotted rotors, the imperfections in your tire compound, the grooves in the asphalt, and streaks of rainwater on your visor. Additionally, your bike and rider's movements are animated beautifully. As you begin to pass other racers, you'll see them crane their heads backward at you. Brake heavily and you'll notice your front forks compress under your bike's weight. You can even see the riders working their left ankles while shifting. MotoGP also makes great use of motion blur to convey a manic sense of speed, and weather effects like rain, wet surfaces, and waves of heat are an impressive sight to behold. As far as driving games go, MotoGP is surpassed only by Rallisport Challenge, and even that is purely a matter of taste.    After taking in the graphics for a while, you'll then notice MotoGP's control scheme. For the uninitiated, the game can be played--and played competitively--using nothing more than a simple gas, brake, and steering setup. Like this, the bikes will handle somewhat like cars with a bad case of understeer, which isn't too far from reality. However, there's also the option of utilizing separate front and rear brakes on the bike, something that nearly all motorcycle games in the past have failed to make use of. The dynamics of using separate brakes has a very real effect on your cornering and braking performance during a race. Braking with the front brakes has a more significant destabilizing effect on your bike's balance than braking with your rear, though conservative use of the front will get you around corners faster than the safer, steadier rear brakes. What's more, using the controller's right or left analog stick, you can not only lean your rider respectively left and right, but pitch his center of gravity forward and backward as well. Leaning forward reduces your bike's drag coefficient, and this translates into improved top speed. Likewise, snapping your rider upright will increase drag, which will let you come to a stop quicker. No other motorcycle game--and few driving games in general--have offered this level of precision.    As with many racing games, MotoGP is split up into several distinct parts. There are five total, and they include the usual time trial, quick race, and career modes, as well as a pair of unique training and arcade modes. The career mode is obviously the heart and soul of MotoGP, but it differs slightly from the way that this option is presented in similar games in that you don't actually assume the role of an established rider. Instead, you have to create your own rider from scratch, and in so doing, you're given several different customization options that include choosing from different bikes, leathers, and paint jobs. You're also given a certain amount of skill points that you can distribute among four different riding attributes: cornering, braking, top speed, and acceleration. You earn attribute points by competing in and finishing races and through constant training. You actually use the same rider in training that you do in the career mode, so any attributes that you earn in one mode will carry over into the other. It's interesting to note that, if you're so inclined, you can skip training altogether, but since you earn skill points in this mode, you'll be more competitive in racing if you stick with it.  ...but its sophisticated controls are also outstanding. You'll compete against a field of nearly 30 experienced riders on 10 of the sport's 16 official racetracks in the career mode. So while you can't actually play as Max Biaggi or Alex Criville, you can test your mettle against them. Before every race, you're given the opportunity to run a few practice laps and then qualify for the grid. The actual race length can be changed in the options menu to be as short as three laps, or as long as the real deal. Even on the hardest difficulty setting, you will likely go through a single racing season in three to four hours. Thankfully, MotoGP offers a lot of incentives to play the game over again. Its arcade mode functions a lot like Project Gotham Racing in that you're awarded points for driving with flair. Do a burnout, and you'll earn some points. Pop a wheelie, and you'll earn some points. Complete a section of the track without hitting anyone or anything, and you'll earn some points. The more points you collect, the more features you can unlock--and there are a lot of features, including an 11th track, as well as several amusing graphics modes that add Photoshop-style filters to the game's graphics. You can also unlock new bikes, riders, and FMV movies in the arcade mode. Additionally, you can race on any of the tracks you've unlocked against three of your buddies on a split-screen or using the Xbox's link-up ability.    The game has an upbeat techno sound track that plays during the menus, interface screens, and movies, though it becomes all but indiscernible during the actual racing. The simultaneous wailing of 30 high-revving, half-liter engines will drown out just about any noise, and while some may find the game's engine sounds to be somewhat overpowering, the game is simply mimicking the rough sounds these bikes emit in real life.     As the popularity of motorcycle racing increases in the United States, so does the accuracy of the video game depictions of this visceral motorsport. THQ's MotoGP for the Xbox is one such game--while it can be easily picked up and played by anyone with a passing knowledge of driving games, its sophisticated control scheme will be appreciated by fans of the sport. It's the only one of its kind currently available for the Xbox, but it also stands tall on its own merits. MotoGP deserves a serious look from anyone who likes motorcycle racing.
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1094,Colin McRae Rally 2.0 ,8.5," If you can work your way around its shortcomings, you'll find that Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is one of the most engrossing racing sims available.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/9/5/8/2215958-box_cmr2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/colin-mcrae-rally-20/1900-2692767/,pos,"
Though it offered its fair share of thrills, last year's Colin McRae Rally simply didn't stand up to Mobil 1 Rally Championship as the game of choice for serious rally racing fans, due largely to its somewhat dated graphics and a physics model that was too forgiving. But Codemasters addressed both those issues when designing Colin McRae Rally 2.0. It's true that the game doesn't meticulously re-create every inch of any of the courses that that make up the World Rally. It's also hampered by a few technical problems that can tax the patience of even the most dedicated racing fan. But if you can work your way around these shortcomings, you'll find that Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is one of the most engrossing racing sims available.  Colin McRae 2.0 boasts highly authentic cockpit views Like its precursor, Colin McRae Rally 2.0 doesn't attempt to simulate the entire 2000 World Rally Championship or even all the stages of a single WRC event. In fact, the brevity of each rally stage makes it clear that these aren't accurate depictions of real courses, but rather fictional layouts designed to capture the spirit of the various locales. In all, you'll race on courses in eight countries (Greece, Finland, Australia, Kenya, France, Sweden, Italy, and the UK), with each rally consisting of nine or 10 stages that are considerably shorter than what you'd find in real life. This stands in stark contrast to the brutal realism of Mobil 1 Rally Championship--a stage in that game might be 15 minutes long, while in Colin McRae Rally 2.0 you'd be hard-pressed to find many that are longer than four minutes. It might not be authentic, but it does mean you'll be able to finish several rallies in one day.   More than 20 cars are available in the game, from manufactures like Ford, Lancia, Mitsubishi, Peugeot, MG, Cooper, Seat, Subaru, and Toyota. Many are unavailable until you unlock them, but it's basically a moot point because only experienced drivers will be able to get the most of the higher-end cars anyway. For instance, after whipping the Subaru Impreza around several courses, I tried my hand with the faster, newly unlocked Mitsubishi Lancer and found the higher top-end speed difficult to handle. Otherwise, both the engine sounds and dash displays are different for each car, and the modeling of inertia (the first-person perspective sways from side to side in turns) gives Colin McRae 2.0 one of the most convincing cockpit views to date in a racing game. The downside is the semitransparent windshield, which gives everything a slightly blurred appearance and knocks the frame rate down a bit to boot. Therefore, though the cockpit view looks great, most players will probably opt for the over-the-hood view, which provides a greater view distance and smoother performance.  You can view the game effectively from over the hood There are two main modes of play in the game: rally and arcade. Arcade racing pits you against up to seven human or computer-controlled opponents on a circuit in each country (or all the circuits in the championship mode), with damage modeling turned off and handling physics quite relaxed. The computer opponents are actually quite tough to beat even on the intermediate difficulty setting; after grabbing several first-place trophies in a rally championship season, I was surprised to find myself struggling to finish in the top three in the arcade races.   Of course, a lot of players will pass on the arcade mode in favor of the more true-to-life rally mode. Whether you opt to run a single stage (all stages in all courses are immediately available), race a single rally, or start a championship season, you'll find the action is intense, authentic, and addicting. Though the damage modeling still isn't close to being lifelike--you can hit a tree at 100mph with only a crumpled hood to show for it, and it's apparently impossible to blow an engine--you'll still find it challenging to balance saving time against repairing your car at various points during rallies.Out on the courses, you'll find the enhanced physics engine results in much more realistic handling than in the original game. None of the terrain is as rugged as the gully-ridden, pothole-infested cart paths found in Mobil 1 Rally Championship, but the spectrum of different driving surfaces gives Colin McRae its own appeal. Codemasters has arrayed the courses in the championship mode in a way that will test even seasoned drivers. For example, after sliding through the gravel of Greece, the next stop in the series is the tarmac-only stages of France, which require an entirely different type of driving style. From France it's on to Sweden, where the snow- and ice-covered courses will force you to once again rethink your tactics--a pattern that's repeated as you move through the two championship levels.  The graphical effects are realistic, but require fast hardware Regardless of the course, if you're not using the hand brake in hairpin turns, you're costing yourself precious seconds. Powerslides are essential if you want to finish at the head of the pack, and to this effect, the hand brake modeling is exceptionally well done. It all adds up to an exhilarating ride that's enhanced by impressive graphics that will strain all but the highest-end systems. Actually, that's one of the few real problems in Colin McRae Rally 2.0: the frame rate. As any racing sim fan would tell you, a consistently smooth frame rate is extremely important in a racing simulation--but trying to get fluid animation out of Colin McRae 2.0 can seem even more stressful than vying for the championship on the game's expert difficulty setting. The big culprit seems to be the force feedback support; turn it on, and you'll see the frame rate drop by at least a third. Things get even worse on courses such as Greece where there's lots of gravel, and driving by complex scenery like rivers can practically slow the game down to a standstill even on systems that meet the recommended specifications.   In short, while the game looks outstanding in high resolution with all the visual effects enabled, you'll need a top-of-the-line system to get it running well that way. Even then, you might encounter a few crash bugs--sometimes the game would lock up and force a reboot, while other times it would unceremoniously crash to the desktop.  Though the stages are short, the action is very intense The multiplayer support in Colin McRae 2.0 also has some flaws. It's bad enough that the help file says that ""whilst Internet play is possible, performance over the Web will be seriously diminished,"" but what's worse is that there's no type of matchmaking service provided with the game. The latest version of Kali does offer support for Colin McRae Rally 2.0, but the lack of an in-game player-finding feature means you may be hard-pressed to find live competition.   Because of the force-feedback problems and steep system requirements, most players will find that Colin McRae Rally 2.0 falls just a bit short of Mobil 1 Rally Championship as the best rally sim to date. However, those players who can get it to run smoothly may well prefer its faster pacing to that of Mobil 1. In the end, it doesn't really matter--the bottom line is, if you like rallying and you have a fast system, then Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is definitely a keeper.
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1095,Team Fortress 2 - Launch ,8.5, Team Fortress 2 sets a brilliant stage for its signature brand of class-based multiplayer mayhem.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2435558-2217932-box_tf2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/team-fortress-2-launch-review/1900-6190347/,pos,"
As one of the first shooters to pioneer team- and class-based gameplay, the first Team Fortress quickly became a favorite among the online community, inspiring devotion and spawning innumerable user-created modifications that many still play today. Team Fortress 2 was announced almost a decade ago as a sequel to the original mod, and went through many transformations and design iterations before its release last October as part of The Orange Box. At heart, TF2 remains true to its roots, pitting two teams against each other in objective-based competition. Players on both teams select one of nine character classes, each with their own unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. TF2's cartoon aesthetic and stripped-down classes belie its complexity, and the dynamic interplay of abilities and strategies is nuanced, hectic, and challenging. The result is a fantastic multiplayer experience that proves itself a worthy successor to its seminal ancestor.As a purely multiplayer game, Team Fortress 2 has no need for a storyline. Instead, it has characters. Each class is a uniquely styled character with his own amusing personality (some of whom have been featured in hilarious ""Meet The..."" video features that are readily available online). These classes come equipped with three weapons, generally classifiable as a primary gun, a secondary weapon, and a melee weapon. For example, the soldier class comes armed with a rocket launcher, a shotgun secondary weapon, and a shovel for close quarters combat. Classes are grouped into offense, defense, and support, though their actual roles in combat are far more fluid. If you think the heavy and medic won't join the soldier on offense, you got another thing comin'.The offensive group includes the scout, the pyro, and the soldier. The scout is lean, fast, and nimble (he can double-jump), but light on health. He can capture points twice as fast as other classes and can quickly gun down less robust classes, but his relatively low health makes him highly susceptible to sentry guns and the Heavy’s minigun. The pyro wears a black flame-retardant suit to protect himself from his flamethrower, which can light opponents on fire. While deadly at close range and in enclosed spaces, the pyro is much less effective in open areas. The soldier wields a powerful rocket launcher that is effective at any range, though its small clip and slow reload rate can be a hindrance.In the defensive group you'll find the demoman, the heavy, and the engineer. Demomen have grenade launchers that can ricochet shots around corners, and remote-detonated sticky bombs that are great for setting traps. Heavies have the most health, but are also the slowest since they carry a giant minigun that can shred nearby opponents in seconds. Engineers have the unique ability to build structures, like sentry guns, ammo/health dispensers, and teleporters. Though they are armed with shotguns as well, their primary concern is building and maintaining their machines in strategic locations.Just as being part of a fluid, coordinated team is truly excellent, so too is being part of a fractured, dysfunctional team truly frustrating.Though different classes clearly lend themselves to different roles on the battlefield, the strategies each can employ are far from limited, and it can be difficult at first to decide which class to play. While certain classes seem more straightforward than others, they all have their nuances that can only be learned over time. Fortunately, you have the option to switch classes every time you respawn, or any time you run back into the spawn point. This gives both teams the flexibility to change strategies on the fly, and it's one of the key elements that make Team Fortress 2 so dynamic.This flexibility can also cause problems, especially for teams that aren't communicating properly. If half the team decides to switch it up while the other half decides to stay the course, the resulting disarray can scuttle your chances of victory. There are useful hotkeys that allow you to send quick messages, and many players use voice chat to stay on point. Still, many a team has fallen to defeat due to dissonant strategy, and as such Team Fortress 2's biggest strength is also its biggest liability. Your success is tied to your team's success and, in part, so is your enjoyment of the game. Just as being part of a fluid, coordinated team is truly excellent, so too is being part of a fractured, dysfunctional team truly frustrating. These are two extremes, to be sure, but such is the inconsistent nature of a game experience that depends so wholly on other players. Without that ammo dispenser, that heavy will run dry in no time. Thanks, engie!Fortunately, most of the TF2 experience falls somewhere between those two extremes. Every game mode demands a cooperative strategy (there are no Deathmatch modes), but the basics aren't hard to grasp. In the Capture the Flag mode, players must grab a briefcase of intelligence from the opposing team's base and return it to their own. In the Control Point mode, teams fight to capture all the control points on the map. The Attack/Defend mode challenges one team to capture the control points while the other team defends, and teams switch roles between rounds. Each of the maps is designed for one or two specific game modes, and all are meticulously designed to create numerous strategic approaches for both teams.Since the game's release last October, Valve has released a few new maps and game modes, slowly expanding the somewhat sparse catalog. They have also recently released three new weapons for the medic that you unlock by completing achievements. These weapons feature slight stat tweaks and new abilities that add a new element of customization to the class, and no doubt herald future weapon deployments for the other classes. While this did cause a (hopefully) temporary imbalance in the number of people playing as medics and a rise in overtly self-interested tactics, it offers new challenges and goals for players. This new content helps extend the replay value of TF2, which makes the high price point a little easier to swallow.Valve has done a fantastic job creating and balancing the maps, classes, and other game elements that are within their control. Still, Team Fortress 2 is a purely multiplayer game and, as such, lives and dies by the team. Most of the time you'll find yourself well matched, but the inherent uncertainty of the game can make for some vexing sessions. Your best move is to seek out friends and servers that are least likely to yield such sessions, and then enjoy the fertile battlegrounds that Team Fortress 2 so expertly cultivates. You'd be remiss not to reap this harvest.
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1096,Soldier of Fortune: Payback ,4.5, This shooter is a painful exercise in pattern memorization plus frustrating trial-and-error gameplay.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/7/8/2213178-box_sofp.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/soldier-of-fortune-payback-review/1900-6183466/,neg,"
  If you've ever wondered what happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, you're not alone. The first two Soldier of Fortune games were popular shooters in their day, blending fun single-player and multiplayer gameplay with the concept of playing as a mercenary. But after 2002's Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, the franchise seemed to fall off the face of the planet. Unfortunately, it should have stayed missing in action because the series has been resurrected with Soldier of Fortune: Payback, a shooter that embraces all the wrong lessons that have been learned over the past decade.   Don't let its looks fool you; Soldier of Fortune Payback is one of the most frustrating shooters of the year.   At first glance, Payback looks like a very pretty game. The visuals aren't cutting-edge, but there's an attractive quality to them, from the lavish depth-of-field blur effects that kick in whenever you reload your weapon to the lush lighting. You no longer play as John Mullins, the hero of the first two games, but rather as a new mercenary caught up in a very cliché and badly told tale of a worldwide terrorist organization that's so clever it brands all of its operatives with the very same tattoo on their necks. It's a wonder they're so difficult to find.    However, it all goes downhill quickly because Payback reveals itself to be a relentlessly linear and highly scripted shooter with a lot of flaws. Perhaps the most frustrating of these deals with the fact that the game relies on a checkpoint save system with no ability to quicksave, which means that if you're killed, you have to restart from the last checkpoint. That wouldn't be so much of an issue if those checkpoints were frequent and numerous, but they're not. Thus, much of the game's six to eight hours of gameplay is spent trying and retrying to get through the many sections of the game. Though there's a regenerating health system, you still die all too easily. It's not uncommon to have to replay a section a dozen times or more before you finally beat it.     The artificial intelligence is bad and consists mainly of two scripted actions. Once triggered, a bad guy will either run straight at you or stand in the open and shoot at you. There's no sense of dynamic behavior in the way the AI reacts to what you do. The weapon modeling is nonexistent; there's practically zero recoil on any of the weapons, even the light machine guns. On the flip side, even though the weapons all feel incredibly lightweight, they do a ridiculous amount of damage. The first Soldier of Fortune games were ""edgy"" in that you could practically dismember opponents with gunfire. The same goes for Payback, though it looks like the developers just copied and pasted the same code from the earlier games because the visual effect is almost exactly the same. Arms, legs, and heads all get shot off with absurd regularity while blood gushes everywhere. (The game does boast a low violence option that tones down this carnage.)   The single-player is six to eight hours of banging your head against a wall.   The music is actually pretty catchy, but the rest of the audio is lacking. The sound effects all seem canned, and the voice acting is terrible. The script certainly doesn't help either because the dialogue would be fitting for a straight-to-VHS action movie. The game also ends in a silly cliffhanger that assumes that gamers are going to want more of this action.    Additionally, Payback's multiplayer is very generic, with such modes as deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. There's a whopping five multiplayer maps total, so there's not a lot of variety there either, which is also disappointing, considering Soldier of Fortune II's popular and fun multiplayer mode.    The PC game is slightly less expensive than major titles, but the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games are full priced. Nevertheless, they're all a terrible value proposition considering the sheer quantity and high quality of shooters this year. Unless you like pain and frustration, there's simply no reason to play Soldier of Fortune: Payback when there are so many other better games on the market.   
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1097,Word Puzzle ,4.5," Despite the descriptive accuracy of its title, Word Puzzle is too shallow to satisfy fans of word puzzles.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/5/1/3/2222513-box_wpuzzle.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/word-puzzle-review/1900-6182666/,neg,"
  Word Puzzle is an Xbox Live Arcade game that, in a very literal way, lives up to its name. This is, in fact, a puzzle involving words, but not one that has much to offer the type of folks who enjoy wordplay enough to want to make a game out of it. To put a finer point on it, Word Puzzle is little more than a gussied-up word search--arguably one of the lowest forms of word puzzles--and it seems that as much effort was put into making the experience interesting as was put into naming the game.    So! How do you turn a basic word search, the type you might find on a kid's place mat at a family restaurant, into a video game you'd pay money for? Word Puzzle makes a few limp attempts, none of which have much staying power. The arcade mode challenges you to find words as quickly as you can by both putting a time limit on each puzzle and rewarding you with combo bonuses for finding words in quick succession. Any challenge this mode might've offered is thoroughly mitigated by the fact that you're provided with a full list of the words you're looking for, and that the game highlights a letter from the beginning or end of one of the words on the list. Survival mode is similar in concept, though it's a little more challenging; the game doesn't constantly highlight letters for you on the grid, and it prioritizes specific words on the list by requiring you to find them before a countdown timer runs out. The free play mode is the most basic of them all, letting you play at your own pace. There's also online multiplayer, where up to four can play on the same grid at once in what is essentially a phonetic scavenger hunt.   Word Puzzle costs 800 points ($10), which is several times what it cost to come up with the name    As you progress through the various modes, the grids you'll play on will start coming at you bigger, in odd shapes, and occasionally in a cube format, essentially giving you four word-search fields at once. An unfortunate side effect of the increased size of these grids is that the window in which the game shows you the grid isn't large enough to show you the whole thing at once. Since the window doesn't come close to filling the screen, this is something that could've been fixed by making the window bigger. Instead, it becomes one of the few sources of challenge in Word Puzzle.    With its plain title and presentation that makes the same dry allusions to the age of antiquity that virtually every other shareware or Flash-based brain teaser leans on, Word Puzzle assumes academic airs but ultimately isn't a very intellectually stimulating game.     
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1098,Guilty Gear 2: Overture ,4.5," Guilty Gear 2 may be an interesting experiment in cross-genre game design, but it's mostly a shallow mess.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/1/6/9/2220169-box_gg2.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/guilty-gear-2-overture-review/1900-6201653/,neg,"
  Good luck making heads or tails out of Guilty Gear 2: Overture. Given the way that the game sews scraps of different genres together to form a patchwork quilt of action and strategy, you have to wonder if even the developers were entirely sure what they were making. Both the revamp of the series' 2D beat-'em-up beatdowns and the introduction of a tactical feature are just skimmed over, leaving the action a jumbled mess of whirling punches and the strategy so shallow that you barely need to pay it any attention. This frenetic experiment in mixing and matching is so all over the place that it spins your head as more than it revs up your adrenaline.    Your head starts to rotate from the moment that the story begins in the single-player campaign. What's happening here might make sense to fans who have previous knowledge of the goings-on in the anime-flavored Guilty Gear universe, but anyone coming in fresh won't have a clue what's happening. You play a hero named Sol Badguy, who is adventuring around on a future Earth with his sidekick, Sin. Something bad apparently happens at the start of the game with mystical Gears that once caused a big war, and you're called on to save the Kingdom of Illyria from evil invaders out to do evil things.   Even with the tactical options, you'll find that commanding armies and the button-mashing combat are awfully simplistic.   Even when you do start to get a handle on the story, the game throws more curveballs to keep you reeling. Although much of the level scenery is laden with gorgeous fields, columned streets, colorful trees, and immense statues, it is all so surreal in such a distinctively Japanese anime way that you never feel like you belong in any of the surroundings. Strange audio adds to the hallucinatory effects. Much of the overly florid dialogue will have you questioning your sanity. One of your allies is insulted for having ""sadistic ears."" Magic is drawn from an alternate universe called ""the Backyard."" Sol curses a problem in combat due to an ""invalid access chord"" and cries ""Shut up!"" every time he delivers a basic sword swipe. The plot here is one great big ""Huh?"" due to either a terrible translation from the original Japanese or an intentional desire to try to break your mind.    On the flipside, the incredibly shallow gameplay greatly contrasts with the impenetrable story. But even though such simplicity may provide a way to get into Guilty Gear 2, it doesn't give you any reasons to stick around. Levels are something of a blend between standard 3D beat-'em-up stuff and a strategic layer that plays like a single-player take on a multiplayer shooter game style. You start from a master-control nodule called a masterghost, which is basically a headquarters. The objective is to create an army through a management screen hilariously called the organ, and then venture forth to conquer the enemy's masterghost on the other side of the map.    Of course, lots of bad guys are in the way, along with other, smaller control nodules called ghosts. The idea is to move across the level step by step, taking control of ghosts on the way to raise the mana needed to unlock unit types and buy more actual units for your army. As you progress through the missions in the solo campaign, you gradually gain access to different types of monsters that you can summon, each with variable attack and defense abilities. Each hero deals in different types of creatures with different specialties. For example, Sol summons robots, whereas Izuna calls up creatures inspired by Japanese folklore. Each creature is also given a classification denoting its abilities. So you can summon melee units, armored units, ranged units, and so forth, to whip up a fairly well-rounded force in most levels.    However, that description probably makes the game seem more involved than it actually is. Ultimately, all you need to do is keep moving forward with your hero, killing enemy units by the bushel, and taking over ghosts until you have built up enough of an army to assault the rival masterghost and end the level. You'll take the odd break to consult the organ and send out troops to the right place--or put this function on automatic and worry only about conquering ghosts with your hero. There isn't much thought required when doing battle, either. Although the game includes a pack of combos that are mercifully easy on the thumbs to pull off, you never need to use them in fights. Simple button mashing slaughters bad guys just as effectively as tossing out combos, so you never have to bother getting fancy. With that said, the game isn't particularly easy. Even though you can plow through dozens of enemy goons without breaking a sweat, you generally have to face more than just dozens, and the mobs are so thick with foes that it's tough to keep track of what's going on. Sheer numbers can take you down if you simply rush forward mindlessly, so you have to take your troops into account and adopt a sort of ""hurry slowly"" philosophy toward taking ghosts.   Giving orders to units adds a tactical layer to all the beating up of bad guys, though it's so flimsy that you can almost ignore it and still win levels.   Things get more challenging when playing multiplayer. Guilty Gear 2 doesn't seem to have a huge fan base playing via Xbox Live right now, but the players it does have are incredibly skilled. It's a huge jump to go from button-mashing solo matches to online matches against experts who have mastered the full range of combos. There really isn't any way to train for this before going online, either. The campaign doesn't hit you with opponents of even close to the average human level of skill, and the training mode is also lacking in killer opposition. All you can do is get into exhibition matches with buddies and build your skills together before heading online to take on expert strangers.    Everything about Guilty Gear 2: Overture says wasted promise. The action is mindless and repetitive. Most of the strategy feels tacked on. And the storyline could have been written by a lunatic. Mashing a beat-'em-up together with tactics is a great idea, but the execution here has obviously gone horribly awry.  
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'solo', 'matches', 'online', 'matches', 'experts', 'mastered', 'full', 'range', 'combos', '.', 'There', 'really', ""n't"", 'way', 'train', 'going', 'online', ',', 'either', '.', 'The', 'campaign', ""n't"", 'hit', 'opponents', 'even', 'close', 'average', 'human', 'level', 'skill', ',', 'training', 'mode', 'also', 'lacking', 'killer', 'opposition', '.', 'All', 'get', 'exhibition', 'matches', 'buddies', 'build', 'skills', 'together', 'heading', 'online', 'take', 'expert', 'strangers', '.', 'Everything', 'Guilty', 'Gear', '2', ':', 'Overture', 'says', 'wasted', 'promise', '.', 'The', 'action', 'mindless', 'repetitive', '.', 'Most', 'strategy', 'feels', 'tacked', '.', 'And', 'storyline', 'could', 'written', 'lunatic', '.', 'Mashing', ""beat-'em-up"", 'together', 'tactics', 'great', 'idea', ',', 'execution', 'obviously', 'gone', 'horribly', 'awry', '.']",0.0026915714415714463,0.5251966251966251
1099,Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity ,4.5, Gravity isn't the only thing this mediocre racer is missing.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/6/7/2219167-box_sonicrzg.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sonic-riders-zero-gravity-review/1900-6184853/,neg,"
  No: In Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, it still doesn't make sense that Sonic the Hedgehog would need to race upon a hoverboard. That's like Cyclops from the X-Men buying a laser gun, or Iceman a snow cone. And even though there are a couple of speedy thrills, with only a two-hour campaign, overbearing plot, and lame course design, you need this hoverboard racer about as much as Wolverine needs a new set of Ginsu knives.    The story is obviously ludicrous. After all, at the core Sonic games have always been about the battle between a talking hedgehog in sneakers and a fat, mad scientist. But Zero Gravity is ludicrous in unexpected ways. The game begins with a rampage ripped straight out of I, Robot, of which Sonic and company are caught in the middle when an ancient artifact they stumble upon turns out to be a prized possession of the robots' mother. The team investigates, and quickly crosses paths with Dr. Robotnik, who swears he has nothing to do with the calamity, to which Sonic says, ""Well I guess for now we'll have to buy that Eggman isn't involved.""    Bumping into things while flying makes you go faster. Figure that out.   Yes, it's that head-slappingly stupid. Even worse, when you finally discover that Eggman is involved, it's revealed that the reason he's trying to gather the artifacts and stop the robots from rampaging is so that he can...cause the robots to rampage. But wait, it gets worse. The artifacts are part of this crazy legend involving the Babylon Rogues (a rival hoverboarding team composed of--what else?--birds), and they eventually lead you to a place referred to as ""The Crimson Tower,"" which is, of course, blue.     Not only are the plot and dialogue bad even by Sonic's standards, you have to sit through huge chunks of this garbage every time you complete a race. Ironically, the story mode itself is very short, and only takes about two hours to beat. You simply jam through a handful of courses, bang your head against whatever hard object is nearby during the cutscenes, and then, suddenly, the credits roll. After that, your only option is to race through survival, time attack, or world grand prix mode, which earns you credits to purchase ""Extreme Gear.""     The racing itself is all over the place. The basic Wii tilt controls are imprecise, and it's easy to find yourself ping-ponging between walls. You can and should use the D pad, although you can't disable the tilt controls. This means that if you're tilting the remote at all, you'll drift as though you were driving a car with bad suspension. As a result, the Wii version is distinctly less fun to play than the PS2 version. Still, there are a couple interesting ideas at work. If you need to make a real sharp turn, you can hold a button, which slows you down but lets you rotate freely. Once you're pointing in the direction you want to go, you release the button and burst off, as if you were fired from a slingshot. This is an interesting mechanic that is put to creative use in only one level, where you must make hairpin turns over a cliff. The only way to pull one off has you actually hanging in space, before dashing back onto the road. It's thrilling when it works, but it only works half the time. You're also likely to shoot yourself down into the abyss, or up into the ceiling, both of which cause your racer to reset.     Slingshot turns are also complicated in that they use energy points. These are accumulated when you make jumps. Jumping is simply a matter of hitting a button as you go off a ramp. The later you hit the button, the more energy points you get. These can be spent on either turns or dashes. If you dash, you move much faster and actually gain additional speed by running into objects (you didn't misread that). However, if you use all your energy on a dash, you'll eventually come to a tight corner, attempt to jump turn, and be stopped dead in your tracks because you were out of juice. Lots of games penalize you for overusing boost, but none this obtusely.    Speaking of obtuse, brace yourself for this next bit about hoverboard power-ups and shortcuts. You see, every board has its own selection of abilities that can be activated in each race if you collect enough rings, which are scattered throughout every course. Take the first board in the game, for instance. If you collect a small number of rings, you'll activate a permanent speed boost. Collect some more, and you'll activate the ability to rail grind. Get 100 on top of that, and you gain a boost to your energy points. By the way, these don't carry over from race to race. Also, there are lots of different types of boards, with lots of different powers.   It certainly looks like a Sonic game.   But rather than catalog them all, we'll focus on three: grind, wheel, and air. Each of these powers correlates to a type of shortcut. If you can grind, the rails are open to you. All you have to do is jump on one, and you're on your way. With wheel, you can crash through obstacle-laden detours. However, the wheel is generally terrible, and its shortcuts are the worst. And if you have the air, you can fly off a ramp, through three rings, and past your competition. While the concept of three different types of shortcuts is interesting, in practice, none of them are much fun, and they sometimes take longer than the normal route.    The graphics are mostly fine, and in a couple of spots, the game manages to convey a real sense of speed. The sounds aren't bad, either. Some of the music is catchy, and it's nice that the characters talk smack every time you pass a rival. Still, the game's overall lack of content makes it one of the last things you'd want to spend 40 bucks on. Even though it manages to capture the occasional burst of Sonic speed, there isn't enough content in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity to keep you entertained for more than two or three laps.  
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'speed', '.', 'The', 'sounds', ""n't"", 'bad', ',', 'either', '.', 'Some', 'music', 'catchy', ',', ""'s"", 'nice', 'characters', 'talk', 'smack', 'every', 'time', 'pass', 'rival', '.', 'Still', ',', 'game', ""'s"", 'overall', 'lack', 'content', 'makes', 'one', 'last', 'things', ""'d"", 'want', 'spend', '40', 'bucks', '.', 'Even', 'though', 'manages', 'capture', 'occasional', 'burst', 'Sonic', 'speed', ',', ""n't"", 'enough', 'content', 'Sonic', 'Riders', ':', 'Zero', 'Gravity', 'keep', 'entertained', 'two', 'three', 'laps', '.']",-0.013241302779346252,0.541327012359621
1100,History Channel: Battle for the Pacific ,4.5," There was potential here, but dreadful graphics and poor artificial intelligence make this a battle best avoided.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/6/5/2219465-box_thcbftp.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/history-channel-battle-for-the-pacific-review/1900-6184735/,neg,"
  Unlike the Xbox 360 version of Battle for the Pacific, the PlayStation 2 release showed some promise. Rather than following around a brain-dead soldier on a series of stand-alone missions, you actually play out a real story in some interesting jungle environments. The problem with Battle for the Pacific isn't in the design, but in the execution. Dumb artificial intelligence, tedious action, and god-awful visuals get in the way of the game's potential and keep this war from being worth fighting.   En garde!   There's a little bit of narrative here to tie things together. As Jonathan Farrell, you'll fight Japanese soldiers across 12 missions, most of which take place in jungle environments. Scrolling text and a competent voice-over fill you in on your objectives, and occasionally, a yawn-inducing History Channel segment will pop up to give you some historical perspective on the proceedings. None of it's very good--for example, there are weird grammar errors in the script, which makes you wonder if the actor playing Farrell ever thought to mention anything--but it glues things together enough to keep you playing through the three-hour campaign.    The first thing you'll notice about Battle for the Pacific is that it's incredibly ugly. The game drowns you in a mess of muddy greens and browns, and textures are so blurry and unsightly that it's hard to make out anything from a distance. Yet for some reason, the game performs horribly (though surprisingly better than on the Wii), with the frame rate dipping noticeably when there is dense foliage on the screen. When the action cuts away for an in-engine cutscene, the whole thing becomes a nausea-inducing slide show. Additionally, like in the other versions, there is an effect that blurs your view when you reload your weapon, though in this case it obscures things to the point that you can make out absolutely nothing in the distance. All of this gets in the way of the gameplay, considering that you'll often be under attack by enemies that you simply can't see.     Like the Wii version, the artificial intelligence is guilty of some obvious cheating. It's noticeable less prevalent here, though; instead you will deal with a lot more enemies at any given time. This makes the PS2 version more entertaining than the others because you can actually see past the flaws in execution and get a feel for the game itself. Battle for the Pacific still can't rise above mediocrity, though; the levels are far too straightforward, and your foes are far too dumb and predictable, which makes the action get monotonous after a while.     It's too bad that these problems are so obvious, because there are moments when you realize that had it been executed better, Battle for the Pacific could have been a much better game. You'll take down camouflaged soldiers hiding in trees, find alternate routes and secret ammo stashes, and hear your foes shout in Japanese. The missions are linear, to be sure, but there's enough freedom of movement to take cover behind rocks, flank your foes, or hide in buildings and take potshots through windows. There are even instances where the music and sound effects can get your blood pumping a bit. Standard stuff to be sure, but there are brief moments of entertainment amid the ugliness.    Can you hold on a second? I'm looking for my contact lens.   Although the game is functionally the same as the Wii version, the shooting mechanics have been improved. The controls are still a bit off, and moving either analog stick usually results in a less subtle action than the one you were planning on, so you shouldn't expect to aim with the kind of precision you're used to in other shooters. Nevertheless, the controls are passable, and you can aim using iron sights quite successfully this time around. This makes the game much more enjoyable, given that you'll be taking on a good number of foes, with tighter (though still imperfect) controls. However, enemy soldiers are just as moronic as in the other version; they often don't react to being shot, and they sometimes run up to you to perform a melee attack for no apparent reason.    There are no multiplayer options, so unless you want to go back and gun for faster mission completion, find more hidden objectives, or earn better shooting accuracy, you're done when the end credits roll. It's too bad that some major issues had to get in the way, because this game could have been an interesting way of brushing up on your World War II history. In reality, you'd be better off taking night classes and leaving this history lesson buried in the bargain bin.  
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1101,Brothers in Arms: Double Time ,4.5, Double Time gives you double the frustration for half the price.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/3/6/2219436-box_biadt.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/brothers-in-arms-double-time-review/1900-6201510/,neg,"
  Despite arriving on shelves the same day, Brothers in Arms: Double Time has nothing to do with the new Brothers in Arms game released on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. It might have a new name, but the games inside the box--Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood--are more than three years old. Though they're dated, being able to pick up two excellent last-generation shooters for the price of one should be great, which is why it's a shame that these ports are terrible.    The terrible frame rate makes running through the war-torn countryside feel like a slideshow.   For those unfamiliar with the series, Brothers in Arms is about two things: historically accurate, emotionally compelling storytelling, and tactical gunplay. The stories in both games are similar in that they follow two men and their squads as they learn the cost of war. In the grand scheme of World War II games, the stories aren't unique. What sets them apart is their realistic and mature take on the brutality of war. Like in the Band of Brothers series of movies, well-acted voice-overs and poignant music give way to hellish depictions of battlefields. Overall, it's a serious and gritty presentation of war, or at least it was in 2005 when it was originally released. Now, a number of frustrating technical problems overshadow the somber plot.    Brothers in Arms takes a tactical approach to gunplay, forcing you to think and strategize before taking on a group of enemies. Using the Wii Remote as your cursor, you can order your squads to move around the map, suppress enemies, or charge with an assault. Though it had its missteps, the AI in the original games usually did what you wanted it to do, making you feel as if you were really commanding intelligent troops. In this port, your squadmates are as reliable as a rusty pistol. If they can manage to navigate the environment and join you in battle, you'll be lucky if they survive, considering that they have a knack for standing in the line of enemy fire. Your incapable allies will be a constant point of frustration against the tenacious enemies, who have a tendency to pop up out of nowhere and flank you at every opportunity.    The controls do little to ease the frustration of being stuck with idiots for teammates. The setup works adequately for shooting, with the remote handling aiming and looking, and the Nunchuk handling movement, but in hectic battles with flanking enemies, they aren't responsive enough. You can turn up the sensitivity and turn speed, but it never quite clicks together like a shooter should. You spend a lot of time thinking about and fussing with the controls, and it really pulls you out of the experience. A few motion-controlled gestures have been added, but most of them--such as grenade throwing and melee attacks--are hard to control and can leave you disoriented.     Visually, Brothers in Arms was at the top of its class in 2005, but you wouldn't know it from this port. Nearly every texture has a blurred, muddy look. If it weren't for the big red circles that appear over their heads, you wouldn't be able to tell a Nazi from a bush. The frame rate isn't good, and the game will frequently freeze for two or three seconds to catch its breath, giving you ample time to soak in the blurry countryside. The plodding frame rate and sluggish controls destroy the pace, making you feel like you're playing in slow motion.   Your squadmates will frequently get stuck on low rock walls and shrubs. Aren't you glad they've got your back?   The sound fares a bit better, though some of the gunfire is a little underwhelming. The voice acting is appropriately grim and laced with expletives. The music isn't showcased often, given that the game prefers to let the jarring sounds of battle take the forefront, but what is there is orchestral and heroic.    If you're looking for a WWII shooter for your Wii, don't be fooled by this ""deal."" Stripped of their multiplayer modes and loaded with technical issues, these two games aren't even worth the asking price of one.   
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1102,Kurupoto: Cool Cool Stars ,4.5, Kurupoto: Cool Cool Stars is a simplistic maze puzzler that you'll probably be done with in a single sitting.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/8/4/0/32840-90840.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kurupoto-cool-cool-stars-review/1900-6181756/,neg,"
  While battling a nasty flu, the moon sneezed and knocked the stars out of the sky. Now, it's up to you to reunite the stars with their haloes so they can fly back into space. That's the story behind Kurupoto: Cool Cool Stars, a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS that's certainly unique but not really all that interesting or time consuming.     Kurupoto is about solving mazes. In each of the game's nearly 200 mazes, you have to guide a rounded star to its halo simply by rotating the entire maze multiple times. For every quarter turn you make, the star and any loose square blocks inside the maze will shift then fall into place. The whole idea is to manipulate the blocks so that they fill gaps, open passages, and generally help you get the star into the goal. Of course, one wrong turn and they may end up blocking your path. That's the long and the short of strategy in Kurupoto: figuring out how to get to the goal in the fewest turns possible.   To everything, there is a season: turn, turn, turn.   The controls are simple enough. You can use the shoulder buttons to rotate the maze, or you can tap icons on the touch screen to do so. Apart from the times when you need to choose modes and puzzles in a menu, you can literally control the game with one finger.    Once you get the hang of it, the majority of puzzles can be solved in less than 30 seconds. Some last upward of 40 turns, but most take 10 turns or less. If you're trying to earn the minimum turn award for a puzzle, you may need to make two or three attempts. After you solve the 27 basic puzzles in the story mode, you'll unlock 30 more puzzles in the normal mode. Completing those puzzles unlocks another group of puzzles. In all, there are approximately 200 different puzzles to solve. That may seem like a large number, but it only takes about two hours to get through all of them because they're short and generally easy. You'd need even less time to finish the game if it actually let you skip the poorly translated conversation scenes that appear after every puzzle in the story mode.    Crudely translated bits of dialogue along the lines of ""Here is close to the cape of Kurupoto island"" suggest that precious little money and effort were put into the presentation. However, the colorful backgrounds and crisp maze objects do at least get the job done. Younger players will probably get a kick out of the facial gestures the blocks and stars in the maze make. They'll also likely enjoy the cute interactions that occur between the bouncy Kurupoto blocks and the mythical creatures you encounter in the story mode's conversation scenes. Happy music and whimsical sound effects further serve to keep the overall mood light.    Kurupoto might be an appropriate game to give a young child if you're going on a long car ride, but that's about it. Otherwise, most people will find the design and puzzles too simplistic. Also, there is too little content overall when you consider the $20 asking price.    
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1103,Brave: A Warrior's Tale ,4.5, A cruelly hijacked story makes this otherwise serviceable game a pale shadow of adventures past.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/4/3/8/2219438-box_braveawt.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/brave-a-warriors-tale-review/1900-6215981/,neg,"
  Brave: A Warrior's Tale is an expanded version of Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer, which came out for the PlayStation 2 in 2007. Though the original was already behind the times, it still proved to be passably entertaining. Brave: A Warrior's Tale takes this aging adventure and crowbars in new content; the result is not pretty. The platforming elements--running, jumping, riding animals--are mostly competent and might provide some fun. That is, until the story is abruptly derailed in the middle of what should be the climactic finale. This callous detour breaks the momentum of hours of adventuring and spoils the story arc, robbing your previous accomplishments of significance and leaving you to plod on unhappily to the finish. Brave's mild adventurous appeal is overshadowed by its shortcomings, and even the bargain price isn't enough incentive to indulge in this tired tale.      At the outset of this adventure, you choose to play as a male or female character and then head off to your village to meet up with Brave, your elderly chief. He proceeds to tell you the story of when he was a young lad and had to vanquish a mighty evil that threatened his village. This story is the adventure that you play for the majority of the game, and you play it as Brave. You start by learning the basics and slowly move on to acquire new skills. There are a few neat activities that reflect the Native American vibe, such as spear fishing and animal mimicry, and though you only perform these actions a handful of times, they offer some nice variety. Most of your time is spent running, jumping, and thwacking enemies with your tomahawk. For the most part, enemies aren't very tough, and vanquishing them is just a matter of running straight at them and mashing the attack button. There are some more formidable foes, but you can easily pick them off with your bow or use spirit energy to temporarily power up and go to town with your axe. Combat is rarely challenging, which makes it well-suited for younger players, but it's not particularly entertaining.    As you make your way through the story, you'll traverse a variety of colorful landscapes. Though the cartoony visuals are decidedly dated, they have a clumsy charm to them (though the same can't be said for the awkward character models). You'll spend a lot of time platforming your way through these landscapes, and for the most part you can maneuver with ease through the generally spacious environments. When you have to execute more precise jumps, things can get tricky. Part of the challenge comes from the timing required to land on moving platforms or the small size of your target area. It can take a few tries to judge your jump correctly. The other part of the challenge comes from some design issues. Environmental textures often make it unclear which part of a platform you can safely land on and which part will send you sliding off the edge. The jumping mechanics don't make it easy to land precisely, and moving the uncooperative camera into a good position seems to be most problematic when you are keenly in need of a better view. Fortunately, you have infinite lives and checkpoints are pretty frequent, so the worst consequence of repeatedly failing a tough section is frustration.     The only way to fly.   Though running and jumping take up most of your time, there are a number of sections that feature different kinds of action. In a few levels, you'll fly on an eagle's back, steering the bird and slowing down or speeding up as necessary. You can pick things up with the eagle's talons, and you'll use this skill to solve puzzles and, more amusingly, grab enemies to drop them to their deaths. There are also sections where you become an animal, so you'll flush out a hidden enemy as a skunk or tear through hordes of evil skeletons as a giant bear. These sections spice up the action and help keep the adventure moving along at a good clip, though there are a few diversions that aren't as enjoyable. Steering your canoe down a river is clumsy, and smashing it on the rocks will make you realize that checkpoints aren't as generously distributed in these sections. There are also a number of occasions when you'll be imbued with the ability to cast a spell that damages enemies within a certain radius. Again, the variety is nice, but having to get close to powerful enemies that can quickly destroy you is not so nice. You need to get pretty close to some giant elemental demons to hit them with your spell, and even the quickest darting maneuvers won't necessarily keep you from harm. Some of these sections are incongruously difficult, and it messes with the otherwise agreeable pace of the adventure.    For the most part, the story moves along at a good clip, and after a good amount of adventuring, you'll face off with the mighty evil in what should be the climactic final fight. You damage the monster, it ratchets up the attack, and things heat up when loading screen. Wait, what? Halfway through this battle, there is a loading screen? Oddly enough, yes. The half-dead monster is left behind, and now, you are back in the village where Brave, again the storytelling chief, has decided he needs you to fetch three items for him before he finishes the story. Fetch three items?! But, I already did fetch quests! I lived that part of the adventure, and now, it's time for the climax! So much for building up to the finale. And what happens after you fetch those items? Fetch four more items. Oh, and you get to jump into an ugly environment and navigate some of the toughest, most finicky jumping puzzles while you're at it. This abrupt derailment is disorienting, and it totally ruins the arc of Brave's story. It's like an epilogue was jammed in before the conclusion; it doesn't make sense and leaves you feeling bewildered and betrayed.     The additional fetch quests may provide a couple more hours of gameplay, but they highlight the aforementioned platforming issues and have none of the colorful charm of the earlier levels. Any enjoyment you may have garnered from playing through the story is soured because the satisfaction of completing the adventure is jerked away from you. Though it offers adequate adventure action, Brave: A Warrior's Tale shoots itself in the foot at the eleventh hour, and you should stay away to avoid becoming collateral damage.  
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1104,Soul Calibur II ,8.5, add a new page to this story,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/7/9/7/2214797-box_scalibur2.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/soul-calibur-ii-review/1900-6073409/,pos,"
 add a new page to this story 

","['add', 'new', 'page', 'story']",0.13636363636363635,0.45454545454545453
1105,Extreme-G 3 ,8.5, The sum of Extreme-G 3's parts is a smart and solid racing game that provides an amazing feeling of true speed.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/0/7/4/3332-13074.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/extreme-g-3-review/1900-2807798/,pos,"
The original Extreme-G arrived on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, quick and sure on the heels of Psygnosis' similarly styled WipeOut and WipeOut XL for the PlayStation. While the futuristic N64 racer may have been a pretty obvious WipeOut clone, it held its ground, offering fun gameplay and a high-tech techno-enhanced racing theme that was introduced, but not thoroughly exhausted, by its PlayStation counterpart. Exactly one year later, Acclaim offered a second helping on the N64 with XG2, and the magic was gone. The game was fast and furious but possessed a number of significant flaws. Now, nearly three years later, the franchise has reared its head on the PlayStation 2 in the form of Extreme-G 3, and the revival has turned out remarkably well.  In Extreme-G 3, the song remains largely the same as before, albeit much better produced: You live deep in the far-flung future where you have to race high-speed cycles up and down walls and shoot energy blasts at people for kicks. Unlike in the WipeOut series, there aren't numerous power-ups to pick up over the course of the race. Instead, there are two types of energy-recharging fields that you drive over for power: one for weapons and the other for shield energy. Weapon energy powers whatever weapon you currently have selected, and when that energy runs out, none of the items in your arsenal will work. Shield energy is of particular use since it also powers your turbo boost. That means that if you get shot or bump up against a wall, the energy will be partially depleted and you won't be able to peel out on a straightaway as successfully as you'd like. It also means that if you want to go really fast, you're going to run the risk of your shields completely failing and having your cycle blow up. It's this sort of constant hairsplitting give and take that makes Extreme-G 3 so entertaining.  In addition to your base bike, you can buy supplementary items such as improved engines, better weapons, and larger storage capacity for weapon and shield energy for your cycle. One item, the leech, is especially effective. If you use it successfully, you can lock on an enemy from behind and steal some of his shield energy to add to your own. This not only lets you turbo-boost more frequently, but it also sabotages your opponent's ability to do the same. The leech can make for some very compelling final stretches. Extreme G-3's environments are somewhat sparse in comparison to those in the earlier games in the series; however, the game speeds along at an extremely fast and consistent frame rate--unlike its predecessors. A host of impressive graphical effects vie for your attention and attempt to distract you from the race at hand. A couple of the more basic cosmetic effects are the heat wash that exudes from the back of your cycle right before the race starts and the light trails that stream behind all of the speeding vehicles once the race begins. Another effect you see early in the game is reminiscent of a visual element from Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Once you leave the confines of the race hangar, raindrops begin hitting your TV screen and cling there momentarily the way raindrops would to a car windshield. If you hit your turbo boost, the raindrops strike your screen even faster and slightly obscure your view of the race.But Extreme G-3 saves its most impressive visual effect until near the end of the game. Once you garner a higher-capacity engine, hitting the turbo boost button sends you to speeds so fast that the screen ripples and distorts, and the sounds all around you drag and muffle like they're coming at you through an underwater tunnel, with everything rushing by at intense speeds after a singularly dramatic, momentary pause--your payoff for making it so far, extreme G's. You can maintain this speed for only a handful of seconds, but you'll want to quickly start hunting for shield energy once you come down so that you can do it again. To the game's credit, it provides an excellent feeling of speed from the start, and once you get to the final few courses, it spoils you with the extreme-G effect. But it's give and take. The feeling of speed is intense, but it's provided at the expense of some of the other graphical niceties. The environments lack some of the visual flair that we've come to expect from the series and that we might anticipate on the PlayStation 2.  Extreme G-3's sound effects, though, are excellent. The jet engine whine of the bike's motor builds as you get closer to an opponent, or as one speeds up on you, gaining or losing pitch as you race up or down hills. It's such a gradual and effective sensory feature that you can close your eyes and still know what's going on in the game, save for being aware of the bends in the road. The same words of praise can't be said about the game's soundtrack, however. It's composed of a number of UK techno tracks that are certainly serviceable but somewhat basic and repetitive (""Give me a fat beat! Give me a fat beat!""). The game's two-player mode is viewed from a vertical split-screen, which lends great visibility to the course ahead since the tracks are thin and vertically ascending with loops and hills. It's fantastic looking and keeps a high and consistent frame rate with barely any noticeable chugs. In a way, the two-player mode looks even better than the single-player because it cuts the backgrounds out of the picture and focuses only on the action.  The sum of Extreme-G 3's parts is a smart and solid racing game that provides an amazing feeling of true speed. It's only salient drawbacks are that there are some holes in its AI that you can exploit to race through the leagues, that there aren't enough tracks, and that more eye candy isn't possible with frame rates this high. It's a racer that should appeal to those who get little out of Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec and to those who've grown tired of waiting for Sony to finally get around to finishing Wipeout Fusion.
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1106,Medal of Honor Frontline ,8.5," The game's level and mission design are extremely well done and provide an ample amount of different activities, keeping the gameplay fresh from start to finish.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/0/8/1/3333-13081.jpg,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/medal-of-honor-frontline-review/1900-2897661/,pos,"
Medal of Honor Frontline, which was originally released this past summer for the PlayStation 2, is a first-person shooter that tries to re-create the feeling of actually being on the battlefield during World War II. The PlayStation 2 version of the game was hailed as a terrific accomplishment that succeeded in doing just that through the use of incredible graphics and sound. The Xbox version actually surpasses the PlayStation 2 release, featuring improved visuals, true Dolby Digital support, and a new multiplayer mode.  The gameplay and controls in Medal of Honor Frontline are elegantly designed.  The game starts you out on the beaches of Normandy for the D-Day invasion, and the opening sequence has been designed to closely resemble to D-Day landing featured in the film Saving Private Ryan. You start out in a Higgins boat as it approaches the shore. You have the ability to look in all directions as you get closer to the shore and can see the armada of other Allied boats behind and alongside yours. Mortar rounds explode in the water all around you, sending huge plumes of water into the air. Eventually, one of the incoming mortar rounds finds its mark and destroys a nearby boat. Moments later, you find yourself in the water, trying to make your way up the beach as a hail of Nazi gunfire rains down on you and your fellow troops. This tension-filled sequence is your first introduction to the game, and it perfectly sets you up for the rest of Medal of Honor Frontline's intense, cinematic action.   You play through the game as Lieutenant James Patterson during the most pivotal point of World War II. As Patterson, you penetrate enemy lines in an attempt to destroy key targets, thereby keeping the troops on the front lines safe. The game features six main missions spread across a total of 20 different levels. Along the way, you'll have to take out a seemingly endless number of Nazi soldiers with a variety of weapons, including sniper rifles, pistols, submachine guns, grenades, and even a rocket launcher. All the weapons, uniforms, and story elements have been carefully crafted to deliver a highly authentic World War II game. New in the Xbox version is a four-player split-screen multiplayer mode. While it's a nice addition, no new maps were created specifically for the multiplayer component. Instead, the multiplayer maps are just chopped-up versions of the maps featured in the single-player campaign.    The gameplay and controls in Medal of Honor Frontline are elegantly designed and offer players a choice of two default settings. One setting allows players to control the character's movement and aiming independent of one another using the analog sticks. The second offering is for players who aren't used to first-person shooter controls, and it allows them to move and aim with just one analog stick. The triggers allow you to zoom in with a weapon and fire, while the buttons on the face of the controller allow you to crouch, jump, reload, and change weapons. The controls are responsive, and they're set up intuitively so anyone can quickly jump into the game.    Visually, Medal of Honor Frontline is very impressive. The character models used for the troops are very detailed and look extremely realistic. The faces of your fellow troops and the enemy soldiers are very well done and come complete with facial animations and terrific lip synching, and these smaller details really go a long way toward making the characters seem incredibly real. The environments are also quite authentic in their look and feel, since a great amount of detail has been put in to make them look like war-torn cities. Craters, scorch marks, and rubble adorn the city environments, as well as realistic fire and smoke that are very convincing thanks to great lighting and particle effects.     In the audio department, Medal of Honor Frontline is simply amazing. The sound effects are extremely realistic. The different effects used for gunshots are outstanding, and the voice work for the characters you interact with is well done--it even matches up with the lips of the characters as they speak. The music included in the game is terrific blend of ambient and aggressive war-themed tracks that perfectly fit the situations you find yourself in and the World War II theme. All the audio in the game has been mixed to support Dolby Digital decoders, which means if you have a home theater set up, you'll actually hear the gunfire, explosions, and voices coming from different directions.   You play through the game as Lieutenant James Patterson during the most pivotal point of World War II.  The only major negative in the game is its save feature. You can save only between levels, and most missions have so many objectives that they can take nearly an hour to complete. A quicksave feature would have made certain sections of the game quite a bit less frustrating, but the levels do contain some strategically placed health power-ups that make the missions more manageable. The game is about 12 hours in length, which is more than sufficient for a single-player first-person shooter.   In the end, Medal of Honor Frontline is a terrific game that will satisfy anyone who is looking for a first-person shooter. The game's level and mission design are extremely well done and provide an ample amount of different activities, keeping the gameplay fresh from start to finish. The game's graphics, audio, and overall presentation are almost flawless in every aspect, which makes it one of those games that you'll want to pull out and show off to people. So if you're a World War II buff who's into first-person shooters, Medal of Honor Frontline is as good as it gets. 
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1107,Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land ,8.5, Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land is easily one of the best PC-style role-playing games to ever grace a console.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/6/6/9/2212669-box_wizardry.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wizardry-tale-of-the-forsaken-land-review/1900-2838089/,pos,"
As one of the progenitors of fantasy role-playing computer games, Sirtech's Wizardry series has had far-reaching influence in the gaming world and enjoys a high degree of popularity in Japan as well as North America. By adopting many of the game conventions of pen-and-paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons--which itself drew heavily on the creativity of Tolkien's works--Wizardry brought the concept of high fantasy to the interactive digital world.    Atlus and developer Racdym have created Tale of the Forsaken Land as a sort of homage to the long-running PC series. By drawing on a rich tradition that incorporates so many classic design elements, while also injecting into their work a certain uniqueness, this separate entity is truly a kindred spirit and a worthy tribute to the original creation.    After taking in a hand-drawn intro accompanied by a haunting melody, you will begin the game with one of the fine traditions of tabletop role-playing: character creation. You can choose from six races, including humans, gnomes, and hobbits, and cast your character in one of four basic classes: warrior, thief, priest, or sorcerer. You'll soon find yourself approaching the ruined town of Duhan, where you'll be greeted by a haggard swordsman.   It is here that the story begins. Where you stand, which was once sacred land, has been reduced to ashes and ruins by a great flash from the heavens. At the outset you'll have no idea why you are even here; however, the old man soon tells you that the goddess of fate has spoken to him in a dream, and he asks if you are the savior of whom she spoke.    Without waiting for a response, he guides you to the tavern, where you find two adventurers who are seeking companions to journey into a labyrinth that has appeared underneath the castle following the great disaster. For no other reason than that you feel you should, you look around town and eventually make your way toward the labyrinth.   While it may seem that your initial lack of direction is due to some oversight or the game's simple nature as a dungeon crawl, this is certainly not the case. When you begin your journey you are simply there--all you know about what befell Duhan are hearsay and legend. You seldom speak, and you advance for no other reason than to see what's next.    However, as the story unfolds you begin to remember people, events, and conversations from your past. Before, you had no way of knowing your character had a history at all. The way in which the game gradually fleshes things out is sublime. Equally impressive and complementary to the smooth flow of the story is the game's simple but highly effective presentation.   As is evidenced by the dialogue and in-game literature, Atlus has done a great job with the translation. Dialogue is strong and articulate, sounds humorous when it intends to be, and is further aided by third-person narration. When characters speak, they are represented by expertly drawn full-screen portraits. While these great-looking stills don't normally change expression, the narration does a masterful job of conveying mood, gestures, intonation, and atmosphere. The effect is humble but effective and comes with a definite charm.   The aural aspect of the presentation also shares this simplicity. There are relatively few tracks composing the musical score, but each carries a lot of feeling and is used in the appropriate situations. Background and battle themes will change every few floors as you descend deeper into the labyrinth, but accompanying sound effects provide audio distinction. As you explore the Old Jail, the unnerving sound of rattling chains joins the solemn chant that accompanied you on the previous floor.At the urge of your comrades and to satisfy your desire to explore, you will continue to descend into the labyrinth. In a way, this is the essence of Wizardry. You'll gain gold and experience while battling hordes of monsters--navigating and fighting in a first-person perspective. After you gain a bit of fame, you'll be able to recruit other adventurers to form a robust six-member party.   Due to the limited field of view, and the fact that you can see a full map only by using a spell or plotting one yourself on graph paper, exploration is much more tense than in your average console RPG. You can look around with the second analog stick, but monsters can easily sneak up to attack you from the side or back if you aren't careful. Additionally, the reaper can appear out of nowhere as a black mass of chattering skulls to possess one of your party members and increase the stakes of your expedition.   Because the entire dungeon is interconnected, you'll have to progress from one floor to another to advance. Shortcuts do exist, but throughout the game you'll delve deeper and deeper into the darkness. Like the overall tension, the fear of the unknown is amplified because you can see only what's directly in front of you. The decision of whether or not to return to town with a transfer potion or to press forward in hopes of finding one more rare treasure can be a difficult one indeed.   Enemies will appear as roaming symbols. The shape of the symbol indicates the sorts of enemies you may face, while the color indicates whether or not the monsters have noticed you. It's possible to gain a first strike by approaching an enemy from behind, but with limited accuracy.    Before the fight officially begins, you'll decide what each character will do during the next turn before you confirm and begin the battle. Different character classes have access to different spells and abilities, such as the priest's holy talent to dispel the undead and the samurai and ninja's ability to stun or kill an enemy with a critical strike. After you've input the commands, you can sit back and see if you made the right choices.   A large factor in battle is related to the level of trust within your party. Based on the personalities and alignments of your party members and your decisions as a leader, each character's level of trust in you will rise or fall. Selfishly turning a deaf ear to someone pleading for help or slaughtering friendly monsters will earn you resentment from good characters but will stimulate those who are evil. Based on your party ranking, you'll have access to coordinated attacks called allied actions.   Allied actions are multicharacter techniques that will give your party the edge in battle. With proper usage, allied actions can let you take on advanced enemies far above your level or bulldoze minor enemies you've long outgrown. There are several categories of allied actions including offensive, defensive, spell, and assisted. Among the many allied actions are double-slash, which is a powerful simultaneous attack by two characters; deploy, which will let your party scatter in case of a powerful breath attack; and spell cancel, which will let two characters in the back row snipe an enemy spellcaster before any damage is done. There are eight levels of trust and many more allied actions. Only the most carefully balanced parties will reach the highest levels, but many of the most useful techniques can be learned at intermediate levels to ensure the game's balance remains intact.   Since you see your enemies only on the battle screen, and all attacks are made from the perspective of your character, the combat in Wizardry doesn't exactly lend itself to flashiness. Many of the special attacks and allied actions feature good camerawork and use effects such as a nice photo-negative flash or motion blur, but the most you'll see is a weapon swinging at the enemy. Spell effects fall noticeably short of breathtaking and can be a bit underwhelming at times, but you do get an idea of how powerful a spell is by how it's represented.Fortunately enemy animation is a strong point. There is a respectable variety in types of enemies, and each has complex animations for footwork, running, attacking, casting, and anything else it can do. Animations include minor demons perpetually performing a diabolical dance, bosses sporting impressive multihit attacks, and death animations, such as a sorcerer's staff rolling out of his lifeless hand as it hits floor--all of which give a bit of spice to the unavoidably repetitive business of slaying monsters.   Visual variety is quite good from floor to floor. Even though each level has a distinct theme, it's relatively easy to discern one spot from another and effectively navigate. The objects and enemies within the levels are unmistakably from the 128-bit era. Orcs, dragons, and flesh golems alike are made up of a sufficient number of polygons and feature nice texture work. The level design itself is also appropriately varied and challenging.    Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land boasts a well-scripted, well-executed story that stays present throughout the game. In the midst of dungeon crawling you will continually find yourself running into fellow adventurers, and each one has something unique and new to say. These chance encounters really help to spur you forward and break up the occasional feeling of tedium that comes from hacking and slashing through endless waves of monsters.   Even upon entering the first of three randomly generated floors, you'll find a rival group of adventurers that challenge you to see who can kill the most monsters before reaching the stairway. Added to this are quests you can undertake at the tavern, which are often intertwined with each other and often relevant to the central plot. You can gain experience, rare items, and even new allies by completing these tasks, but they are completely optional.    While the story basically progresses in a linear fashion as you conquer each successive floor, you are allotted a large degree of freedom. Unlike some RPGs, Wizardry isn't quite as draconian about class changes and alignment. A character can change his alignment or class by releasing the magical power within certain items or purchasing a magic orb. You can also switch out party members anytime as long as you're in town, but be careful, as this can affect teamwork.   Some aspects of the game may seem simple compared to recent installments of Wizardry on the PC, such as the rudimentary formation system, a limited selection of races and classes, and rather primitive means of carrying items and equipment (one item takes up one slot regardless of its size). Nonetheless, the game shows a definite reference to its source material and is quite worthy of bearing the name Wizardry. The allied action system is truly innovative--one of the best-implemented systems of its kind--and, along with the skillfully told story, it gives Tale of the Forsaken Land ample depth to match its presentation.   Despite the general high quality of production, there are a few irks. The somewhat slow and undocumented process of creating magic stones really requires a pen and paper or a photographic memory to keep track of the different combinations of materials. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that although you can create your own characters--and if you like, your entire party--you'll miss out on a lot of interesting dialogue from the original characters tied to the story. One last note: Beware, characters can be permanently lost.   Even considering these minor shortcomings, Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land is easily one of the best PC-style role-playing games to ever grace a console. Sirtech and Atlus fans alike will definitely want to see this interesting take on the series, and those raised on console-style RPGs could find themselves enjoying a different style of gameplay if they give themselves the chance.
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1108,Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace ,8.5, Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace is seven full levels of original gameplay steeped in old-school trickery.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/5/8/3/2218583-box_smanmm.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/spider-man-mysterios-menace-review/1900-2817260/,pos,"
Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace is the latest handheld game to feature Marvel's webslinging hero and the first to land on Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. Thanks to the superior capabilities of the GBA and lessons learned from the two previous Game Boy Color releases, developer Vicarious Visions has fashioned a compelling and challenging action game that isn't merely an evolution from its predecessors--Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace is seven full levels of original gameplay steeped in old-school trickery. As in previous games, Spider-Man's talents include the ability to jump, punch, webswing, and cling to flat surfaces as the need allows, such as walls and ceilings. In a pinch, you can also use webbing against Mysterio's thugs in the form of web bullets and sticky nets--albeit at a cost to overall web capacity. New to the GBA game, each level has a variety of suit upgrades that enhance Spidey's abilities, including thermal, electric, and armor suits, as well as the nifty black symbiote suit that debuted during the Secret Wars 2 comic book series. Since Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace is a deeply challenging game, the acquisition of these upgrades in earlier levels is often the key to passing future obstacles. Indeed, Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace is no cakewalk. As you seek out the key items within each level and get to the bottom of a series of technology thefts, you'll have to deal with hundreds of hired goons and six of Spidey's toughest archvillains. There are hordes of gun-toting, muscle-bound thugs, all of which do their best to punch, kick, and flail Spidey when he's down. Sometimes it's overwhelming to have to sneak around so much and avoid the head-to-head battle, but Spider-Man rewards your patience with the joy of exploration and discovery. Each level has plenty of tunnels, tubes, and shortcuts to uncover, many of which will make your journey a lot easier. The boss battles are challenging as well, as each villain, be it Rhino, Hammerhead, Big Wheel, Scorpion, or Mysterio, has his own specific weakness to exploit--and the weaknesses aren't entirely obvious from the outset, either. What's the reward for biting the bullet and honing your Spider skills? The opportunity to play one of the most beautiful and artful comic-inspired games since the X-Men series on the Super NES. Each of Spider-Man's seven levels is highly detailed and colorful, from the gritty New York City streets and a gambling yacht to the more sinister confines of a working chemical factory and a satanic amusement park. Character sprites, whether Spidey and the bosses or just lowly villains, are fluid and realistic, and they look video-captured in some instances. To top it off, a background of techno-crash music and loud sound effects give the whole experience an urgent and maddening nature. Slight touches, such as the sound of broken glass or swinging webs, also add to the game's overall quality. Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace has a steep learning curve and isn't terribly lengthy, but outside of these main gripes, it is also a solid platform for Marvel's Spider-Man character. There are times when control response seems a bit loose or when the password backup system is an annoyance, but such qualms are minor when you're having so much fun saving the city of New York and witnessing your exploits retold through a bevy of hand-drawn comic-inspired cutscenes.
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1109,Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders ,8.5," Once you climb The Crusaders' steep learning curve and experience the wild frenzy of its massive battles, all the game's complexity pays off in spades.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/8/7/2208787-box_kuftc.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kingdom-under-fire-the-crusaders-review/1900-6110734/,pos,"
 Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders is the new sequel to 2001's lackluster real-time strategy game Kingdom Under Fire: A War of Heroes, which was released exclusively on the PC. This follow-up, developed by Korean series creator Phantagram, has jumped platforms--from the PC to the Xbox--and has changed genres from a by-the-numbers, overhead RTS to a tantalizing mix of strategy and action the likes of which has rarely been accomplished with such grandiosity. There's so much packed into this game that it's almost too complicated for its own good--almost. But once you climb The Crusaders' steep learning curve and experience the wild frenzy of its massive battles, you'll find all that complexity pays off in spades.  Korean developer Phantagram brings its Kingdom Under Fire series into new territory with The Crusaders.  The plot here is a continuation of the story arc begun in A War of Heroes, which recounts the ongoing conflict between the human alliance, consisting of the kingdoms Hironeiden and Ecclesia, and the Dark Legion, a hellish consortium of orcs, ogres, half-vampires, dark elves, and other assorted nasties. The Crusaders picks up about 50 years after the end of the previous game, when the tenuous peace is shattered by a bloody raid on a human village. The strife between the humans and the Dark Legion owes equally to racial hatreds and territorial disputes, with a hotly contested holy ground sometimes coming into play. Oh, and there's a mysterious artifact with awesome powers thrown in for good measure. Much of the game's storyline is exposed by simple talking heads that are set against the world map between missions, although you'll get a good number of dramatically staged cutscenes during battle, too.  The Crusaders' storyline is a little dense. In fact, it's set up by several screens of text (presented when you start the game) that provide little visual or dramatic context. However, the plot does become interesting after you've played a few missions and have gotten to know some of the important characters, and it also provides a fine impetus for all the raging battles that make up the bulk of the gameplay. The game features four campaigns, two for each side and two of which are available for play immediately. Each of the four campaigns has a different playable character who will serve as the commander of your forces, in addition to serving as the warrior you'll get to use during the action component of the game. The remaining two campaigns will become unlocked when you complete the first two, and the storyline progresses in order as you play through all four campaigns (which, in true RTS style, become progressively more difficult as you go).  Anyway, the point of this game is its combat--and what furious combat it is. In short, the gameplay in The Crusaders consists of both real-time strategy, whereby you command regiments of troops to move and attack on the battlefield, and Dynasty Warriors-style hack-and-slash action, in which you take control of your leader and go toe-to-toe, alongside your troops, against (literally) scores of enemies all at once. One of the most impressive things you'll notice right off the bat is that the strategy and the action are mixed together seamlessly. As a result, you'll be commanding your forces one moment, and then you'll be down on the battlefield swinging your sword the next. All the while, the camera never cuts away from one view to another; it merely zooms in closer to the action.  In the strategy parts, you'll command entire groups of soldiers at once, rather than being forced to micromanage individual units (which, let's face it, would be downright impossible using a joystick). The interface for commanding your troops isn't entirely accessible from the get-go, but it gets the job done pretty well, and you'll certainly warm up to it after just a few missions. You cycle through your troop regiments with the shoulder buttons, and the camera will center itself behind whichever group is currently selected. An onscreen cursor allows you to move the troops around, it makes them attack a nearby enemy group, and so on. If you're using this alone, it can be hard to simultaneously get a feel for the events on the battlefield while assigning orders to your troops. Thankfully, you can pull up a minimap that covers up only about a quarter of the screen, and you can move your troops around and assign them to perform all the same actions this way as well. Pretty quickly, it will become second nature for you to pop up the minimap, assign orders to your groups, and then switch back to the action--in seconds--to watch it all go down.  The popup minimap really helps you form and execute tactics more quickly than if you only use the 3D view.  Aside from standard move and attack commands, you can make your units perform all sorts of special abilities, from more-powerful attacks to support techniques to even magic spells (more on that later). There's a wealth of unit types in the game, from basic infantry and archers to specialized, faction-specific troops, like paladins (who can both fight and cast healing magic). Additionally, there are giant scorpions that act as hideously huge, living siege weapons. Some missions require you to bring specific types of units into battle, but often you'll have a couple of slots you can fill with the units of your choice. So perhaps you'll bring sappers, who can set traps to snare enemies, or orc-ghouls, who can self-destruct, causing massive damage to nearby foes.  Though the common troops form the backbone of your war effort, it's the officers who lead them that you'll end up focusing a great deal of your attention on. The unit led by your own character will be with you in every mission, and as soon as it joins battle, the hands-on action starts. You'll immediately be in control of your leader, hacking away at the hordes of enemies all around you while using a variety of melee combos and special moves to tear through, literally, scores of bodies. The action combat in The Crusaders has a good feel to it. You'll really get the feeling that you're engaged in--and are playing a crucial role in--an epically bloody conflict. As you fight, you'll build up skill points that can be used to execute a more powerful attack, summon secondary officers so they can unleash their own powerhouse moves, or initiate some of your troops' aforementioned special abilities.  If all this command-issuing and skull-cleaving sounds like a hell of a lot to keep up with--simultaneously--during a battle...well, it is. At times--mainly early on and before you've gotten a handle on the interface--the game can be too much, especially since it affords you no opportunity to pause the action, formulate your tactics, and issue your commands before moving on. So, initially, players who aren't accustomed to strategy games may find it difficult to get all their troops in the right places, and they may not be able to do the right things fast enough to keep up with the flow of battle. The Crusaders makes you think fast, without a doubt, but once you do get to the point where you can keep up with the action and can start to best the enemy hordes, there's a great feeling of accomplishment waiting for you.  Building out your units with new equipment and abilities is essential to achieving victory.  Did you think that was all there was to The Crusaders' gameplay? Not by a long shot. As you fight, you'll transparently accumulate experience points and gold, and between missions you'll visit towns and castles where you can do all sorts of fancy between-missions stuff, like upgrading skills and equipment, hiring mercenaries, eavesdropping at the local tavern for some extra story tidbits, and so on. Frankly, the degree of customization this game offers for your forces is a little bit nuts. It almost seems like it has too many options for its own good, at first. That is, until you witness the effects, firsthand, that a proper round of upgrades can have on your battle performance.  Here's a breakdown in simple terms: You can upgrade the skills and equipment of your main officers, each of whom is attached to a group of soldiers. Skills, such as melee, ranged, and teamwork, have a broad effect on the fighting ability of the group. Equipment, like new weapons and armor, enhances the individual officers, but it also has residual effects on the group's battle prowess as well. Furthermore, when you have a high enough skill level in the right categories, you can learn powerful, new abilities, such as elemental magic attacks that can be unleashed in battle for doling out extra damage. Finally, if your skills are developed in the proper configurations, you can even change your troops' job classes to something entirely different. Converting regular infantry into knights, for example, makes them far more powerful, and archers can become longbowmen to gain extra range and damage potential. Naturally, using the right kind of troops at the right times is key to victory.  A version of this customization setup is available in Kingdom Under Fire's Xbox Live support, which is, unfortunately, a little less fully featured than we'd hoped for, especially given the impressive single-player missions. You'll pick from one of the four playable characters, and then you'll assemble groups of warriors in a manner that's similar to the way you do so in the main game. And as you fight one-on-one battles against other players online, you'll gain experience points that level up your troops and let you both acquire special abilities and change to new jobs, like in the campaigns. The game will match you up with other players who have armies of strength and ability similar to yours, although we ran into a few problems connecting to other players' games after the matching tool had found them. There's also some noticeable lag as you play (which, admittedly, can be affected by your connection speed). The battles online, with their lack of music or dramatic development, feel a little anticlimactic after you've played the carefully set up single-player missions. Still, the online mode ought to be entertaining enough for people who are really into the core gameplay.  Phantagram has coaxed the Xbox into producing some truly stunning visuals in Kingdom Under Fire. The individual units, both for your major characters and the support troops, are pretty highly detailed as it is. Consequently, you'll see cloth rippling, fur bristling, and blood erupting in a gruesome, fine mist as you slash your foes. These units look good already, so imagine there are literally scores of them onscreen at once, locked in combat all around you while you're right in the thick of it, slashing away. There are some truly huge units that pop up in the midst of the regular foot soldiers, such as the towering giant scorpions or the ogres that stand fully twice the height of a human. If you've played the Dynasty Warriors games, you know the basic concept. Just imagine that there are a lot more guys; they're fighting a lot harder; and they're a lot cooler-looking.  The game has a really appealing Europe-as-seen-through-an-Asian-filter aesthetic that produces knights, orcs, and so on that are basically recognizable but that present enough variation to make them interesting. There are a lot of nice touches that lend the battles even more effect, such as the way your soldiers will raise their swords and then hurtle, while screaming, into battle when approaching the enemy. There's also the way you can see a soldier walking down a line of archers, lighting each of their arrowheads before they unleash a volley of fire arrows. It's hard to appreciate the incredible frenzy of the battles in the game by reading about them or by looking at still screenshots of them. It's an effect that's best absorbed when you see the fighting in action.  The overall presentation, from the heavily populated battlefields to the driving metal soundtrack, really brings the combat to the fore.  Phantagram has really outdone itself with the game's soundtrack, too. The battles are underscored by driving metal tracks that serve to amp you up as you go charging headlong into yet another bloody melee. The music is just as heavy in other areas, even between missions. While you're upgrading your troops or checking out the parameters of the next mission, for instance, you'll often hear the deep crunch of power chords in the background. The music is refreshingly consistent with the visual aesthetics and the gritty sounds of battle that you'll hear in every mission. Unfortunately, the English voice acting is decidedly the weakest aspect of The Crusaders' sound. The main characters are usually passable, but some of the supporting characters are downright awful. But you can change the dialogue over to Korean (while maintaining the English subtitles), which is far more emotive and passionate. It's similar to the contrast you get between a well-acted anime in Japanese and its low-budget, English-dubbed counterpart. Once you learn the game's mechanics enough to get along solely through visual cues, you can safely switch to the Korean voice acting for a much more guttural vocal experience during battle.  Given the Kingdom Under Fire series' inauspicious beginnings, it's really a great surprise to see that The Crusaders has turned out to be such a uniquely entertaining game. Make no mistake, though: This is not a game for everyone. You'll need a strong appreciation for hack-and-slash action, strategic warfare, and some light RPG elements to really enjoy the game. Moreover, the daunting learning curve may turn off all but the most committed tacticians. If you're willing to stick with it, though, The Crusaders offers some amazingly epic battles in the many missions spread across its four campaigns. Ultimately, this is the kind of rewarding gameplay experience that's worth putting in a little work for. 


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1110,Final Fantasy Chronicles ,8.5, Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger represent some of the best that the Square of old had to offer.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/1/2/0/2216120-finalfantasychroniclesboxart.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/final-fantasy-chronicles-review/1900-2783150/,pos,"
For all of Square's explosive growth over the last few years, Final Fantasy Chronicles proves that the company hasn't forgotten its roots. Like 1999's Final Fantasy Anthology, which saw the release of Final Fantasies V and VI, Chronicles is a repackaging of two of Square's greatest triumphs from the golden 16-bit era--here, Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger make their return. But in the 21st century, when games are as often based on polygons as plot, can a couple of good old 2D epics make a new mark? The answer depends largely on your perspective.   Informed gamers will know Final Fantasy IV was originally released in the United States in 1991 as a scaled back and poorly translated Final Fantasy II. In addition to realigning the title of the game with subsequent releases, Square has remade Final Fantasy IV into the game it should have been 10 years ago. To begin with, the game's text has been retranslated; gone is the simplistic and sometimes broken English of the Super NES version. The new translation also gives us vastly deeper insight into the characters and plot than we ever got before--Cecil's struggle with the nature of his dark knighthood is much more fully developed, for instance. This translation has thankfully been applied to the original Japanese edition of Final Fantasy IV instead of the dumbed-down ""Easy Type"" version that was originally released in the States. American gamers finally have a chance to see, in English, all the missing items, battle commands, and other removed features that they missed out on the first time. This is surely the version of FFIV that will endure for years to come.   Final Fantasy IV tells the story of the dark knight Cecil, commander of the kingdom of Baron's elite force of airships, the Red Wings. Something is amiss in Baron, however, whose political aims have exceeded its capacity for peace. Soon, Cecil and his friends are forced to rebel against the tyranny of their ruler, and they discover that Baron's evil is merely a front for a much larger force that threatens their entire world. This is, of course, very typical Final Fantasy stuff, but it hasn't been done better since. Series newcomers will want to note that Final Fantasy IV revolves heavily around the elemental crystals they heard so much about in Final Fantasy IX.Chrono Trigger came later in the Square time line, after the company had begun to solidify its popularity in the United States. The original Super NES game therefore featured a fully developed translation and was generally identical to its Japanese counterpart. As such, the PlayStation release of Chrono Trigger doesn't really bring any new elements to the game itself. It does feature a new anime introduction and ending, as well as several anime clips interspersed Final Fantasy VII-style throughout the gameplay. More interesting among Chrono Trigger's additions is the extras mode. It gives you movie and sound tests, extensive information on the game's monsters and attacks, maps of dungeons and item locations, and an artwork viewer. The catch is that initially, only the movie and sound tests are accessible, and only a few of each can be played. To unlock more features in the extras mode, you'll have to finish the game multiple times, as each of the myriad endings opens up more stuff to play with. Of course, only the hard-core will ever see all the toys in the extras mode, but that's the type of player such features are targeted at, anyway.   Chrono Trigger was certainly an interesting animal when it came out in 1996. It looked like a cross between a Square RPG and Dragon Quest, thanks to the involvement of famous Dragonball artist Akira Toriyama. The game focused on a main character named Crono and his friends Lucca and Marle. When inventor Lucca's teleportation experiment inadvertently sends the friends back in time, they discover an ancient evil that will one day ruin their world, and so they set out to fix it. Chrono Trigger presented an amazing array of fantastic environments throughout its multitude of time periods, and its storyline was suitably twisty for a Square RPG. Chrono Trigger is as classic as any of the Final Fantasy games.   As with Square's previous Super Nintendo-to-PlayStation releases, Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger appear on the Sony machine courtesy of emulation, and as such their technical quality is acceptably lacking. Though they run serviceably, enough minor discrepancies exist between these emulated versions and their cartridge originals to make picky Square stalwarts wince on occasion. Final Fantasy IV was the first game Square released for the PlayStation in Japan, and it has a few slowdown problems, especially in battles, and awfully muffled sound effects. As the last SNES port, Chrono Trigger's emulation issues are ironed out, but its long and frequent loading is somewhat annoying. These flaws aren't really glaring and shouldn't stop you from playing the games, but purists should consider themselves warned.   Of course, it goes without saying that Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger represent some of the best that the Square of old had to offer. Most American gamers will think of Final Fantasy IV as the beginning of the series we know today--it was only the second game in the series that we got to play, and it introduced us to the endearing characters and intricate plotlines that Final Fantasy is now known for. Chrono Trigger is significant in its own right--it was known before release as the ""Dream Project"" because it brought together the best minds of Square and Enix for joint development on one colossal game. Both titles deserve to be played by anyone interested in RPGs, and those who've played them before would do well to sit back and remember their gaming roots by checking them out again. Unfortunately, though the two games were visually stupendous in their respective times, they look quite dated by today's standards, and this will probably turn off those looking for a bigger thrill for their gaming dollar. If you can get over their unglamorous appearance, however, the games of Final Fantasy Chronicles are sure to please. With two solid games in one, how can you go wrong?
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1111,MLB 2002 ,8.5," If you can get past the sluggish pacing and incessant overcomplication, MLB 2002 is a wonderful game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/6/4/3/8/2226438-477562_44278_front.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mlb-2002-review/1900-2717709/,pos,"
Baseball's 2001 season is already a month old, but like a power hitter fresh off the disabled list, Sony's MLB 2002 is already swinging for the PlayStation's fences. At first, this latest installment in the MLB series feels like a carbon copy of last year's release. However, closer inspection reveals many minor enhancements and additions that should prove pleasing to both series veterans and newcomers alike. Graphically, not much has changed. MLB 2002 remains a colorful, crisp, and well animated rendition of 3D baseball. The amount of detail is nowhere near that of EA's Triple Play, but the polygons saved by using simpler field textures allows for greater realism in player movement. If you're familiar with things like Tony Gwynn's cumbersome base running or the cheetahlike throws of Andruw Jones, or you enjoy games where the pitcher ducks when the batter hits a line drive, you'll like what you see here. Minute accoutrements, such as animated diamond-vision displays and updating scoreboards, continue to be the highlight of MLB 2002's non-player eye candy.  Click for full size  image MLB 2002 also sounds just about the same as MLB 2001--with one huge, huge difference. Vin Scully's play-by-play and Dave Campbell's color commentary are both much smoother this year. In particular, Scully's repertoire mixes and mingles a greater diversity of player names and colloquialisms, resulting in such phrases as ""Erstad tripled last time up"" and ""At the plate, Adam Kennedy. He struck out in his last at bat."" Once again, Campbell plays the sidekick to Scully's deadpan, a situation that creates a faked television-style experience--even if Campbell's prattle is just as painfully mind-numbing as it is on real TV. The fact that MLB 2002 isn't much different from last year's release in terms of graphics and sound isn't too terrible. While more detail in the stands would have been nice, baseball is still mainly a game of strategy and statistics. To that end, MLB 2002 is definitely geared toward the ""sim"" crowd of video game baseball fans. The mode screen includes a plethora of fantasy baseball mainstays, including exhibition, season, all-star, playoff, spring training, and home run derby game options. Once again, MLB 2002's spring training mode isn't just a six-game foray into tiny cornfields, but a career-building experience in which you'll hopefully lift a rookie player from the depths of the minors into the glory of ""the show."" Along the way, should you collect enough points that is, you may find yourself voted into the All-Star Game or earning bonuses for a variety of awards, including the Rolaids Relief Man, Player of the Week, and MVP honors. In all, the game includes more than 900 different athletes drawn from all 30 MLB teams and their minor league affiliates.  Click for full size  image Fleshing things out, MLB 2002 also boasts an intense combination of general manager and franchise modes. These range from the usual gamut of player creation, draft, and trading options to such giddy niceties as total league realignment and farm system call-ups. Rosters are only current as of March, unfortunately, but a trip to the GM mode will send Rickey Henderson to the Padres and put the Yankees' Chuck Knoblauch into the outfield where he belongs. Stat heads will definitely adore this year's redesigned player cards screen, which not only gives you the portrait and vital statistics of each player, but also offers statistical breakdowns in more than 90 categories, complete with charts and graphs.  Gameplay is the area where the differences between MLB 2002 and last year's MLB 2001 really become apparent. MLB 2002 still plays a smart, responsive, and mean game of baseball, but CPU opponents are much less infallible than in previous years. However, CPU opponents are even better at the plate and will rarely swing at pitches outside the zone, let alone anything wild. It also seems like the percentage of home runs and fly balls has significantly increased, but the inclusion of the newly updated strike zone offsets this adjustment at least slightly. Although the onscreen pitching frame reflects the traditionally accepted strike zone, pitching high or outside a few times quickly reveals the truth of the matter--the high strike is here and it means business. Subjectively, the CPU AI is still a bit too difficult, but some players will no doubt revel in the resulting challenge.Click for full size  image One of the wildest changes in MLB 2002 has to do with the players themselves. They all have a physical presence on the field, meaning that friend or foe alike can collide with one another. Not only does this make for some fun times in the outfield, but it also makes charging into home plate a brutally enjoyable work of art. If you foresee a close play at the plate, let your player crash into the catcher and you might knock the ball out of his glove, which usually sends it hurtling toward the backstop. As for control, MLB 2002 offers many levels of batting, pitching, and fielding complexity. For arcade lovers, the game's batting and pitching interfaces can be minimized such that pitch choice and swing timing are the only variables you need to worry about during an at bat. 989 Studios has even included an automatic-fielding choice for those who dislike chasing down groundball after groundball. However, if you like your baseball complex, MLB 2002 can bring it with the best of them. The total control interface from MLB 2001 has evolved for MLB 2002. You select your pitches via a menu that provides a choice of four key pitches per player, with location designated by an onscreen cursor. Pitch speed is also an adjustable variable this year. There's still a response delay between the input of the command and the pitcher's wind up, but it's not a huge issue. As far as the defense sitting behind the pitcher, fielding is unchanged from MLB 2001, with one notable exception. You can now just press the L2 button to automatically perform snappy dives and superstar grabs when your player nears the ball.  Click for full size  image Compared with pitching and fielding, batting has gone through an even wider array of tweaks. For better or worse, the overall batting interface looks like the targeting system of an F-16 jet. A large white box shows the area your swing will encompass, while a set of crosshairs in the middle denotes the sweet spot of the bat. When the pitcher releases the ball, a red box will appear in the strike zone based on the pitch's trajectory. Your job is to line up your box with the pitcher's. Within the red box, a little yellow box represents the ball itself as it nears the plate. If your crosshairs are dead center, you'll hit a line drive. If not, you may end up hitting a grounder, a foul tip, a pop up, or a home run, or you may just whiff altogether. ""Total Control"" guessing adds even more flavor to the equation. By pressing L2, you can pause the action and guess where the pitcher will throw the ball and what pitch he'll use. If you're correct, your batting area will increase. You can also toggle between hit-for-power and hit-for-average swing settings with a press of the X button.  Considering the above paragraphs, it's little wonder why people complain that the MLB series overcomplicates baseball video games. However, it's important to note that all the game's simulation options are just that, optional. Depending on the settings you select, you will experience either a wild arcade romp or a die-hard foray into reality. More annoying than the morass of interface options, games in MLB 2002 still take far too long to complete. Although it's possible to bypass mid-inning transitions, home run trots and pre-pitch gestures cannot be skipped. For some, this will create pacing faithful to the cadence of real baseball, but 60 minutes per game is a bit much to ask. If you can get past the sluggish pacing and incessant overcomplication, MLB 2002 is a wonderful game. Veterans may find that the changes and improvements in this latest release don't prevent it from evoking a deep feeling of déjà vu, but the additional gameplay modes, statistics options, and interface changes should be enough to warrant its purchase.
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1112,Zoids Assault ,4.5, This mech strategy RPG is rusty and dull.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/5/4/2219354-box_za.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/zoids-assault-review/1900-6197426/,neg,"
  For the uninitiated, Zoids are a series of snap-together toy robots produced by Japanese toymaker Tomy--and the manga and anime franchises that have been built around them. The toys are brimming with character, featuring shrewd designs and elaborately constructed moving parts. The strategy RPG Zoids Assault, on the other hand, has none of the personality or spark of the models, or of the devotees dedicated to building them. It's lifeless.   You'll control only five units for the entire game, but the story's so bad, you won't even remember the pilots' names.   The game's bland grimness quickly becomes apparent as you try to piece the story together, though you may never make much sense of it. In light of the franchise's colorful anime series, you might expect Zoids Assault to take a similarly animated approach to its narrative. Instead, you'll get a series of poorly drawn static images accompanied by some amateurish voice-over explaining the convoluted political backstory. You also get text updates that appear in front of a drawing of a newspaper. That's the extent of the storytelling, and it's astonishing that developer Takara Tomy would treat such a rich universe so unenthusiastically. The courtroom setting of the scenes and fuzzy, Mass Effect-style visual filter used during missions were perhaps meant to portray a more mature take on the franchise, but the end result is simply meritless. The art style of the drawings doesn't even remotely look like that of the game proper, so the gameplay feels completely disconnected from the story. Perhaps something happens in this tale, but it doesn't matter, because the game won't inspire you to care.     A lot more effort went into crafting the gameplay visuals, which aren't artistically remarkable but showcase some dramatic camera angles and detailed Zoid models. Your five-bot wrecking crew looks good, particularly during attack animations, when the camera zooms in and you get a close view of the mechanical mayhem. It may take a while to get used to the aforementioned grain filter, though. It's applied with a heavy hand, and while it lends some fuzzy sci-fi gravitas to the dull gray color palette, it's overdone to the point of distraction. Sound effects are utilitarian: The noise of cannon fire and trotting robots gets the job done, and the soundtrack is nice and rousing. Nevertheless, like the storytelling, the production values lack both style and substance. Going for a gritty feel is a valid approach, but the overall effect is dreary and weathered.    The most dedicated strategists are more concerned with battle tactics than with looks, and Zoids Assault does at least offer the basics. You command the same squad of five Zoids for the entirety, maneuvering about the battle grid one turn at a time, gunning down enemy bots while accomplishing mission objectives. These objectives are the usual suspects: take out radar dishes within a dozen turns, eliminate all enemy forces, and so on. Yet with only 14 missions and few reasons to return once you've finished, Zoids Assault clocks in at around a dozen or so hours, which is criminally short for a strategy RPG. Publisher Atlus' other full-priced SRPG offerings on the Xbox 360 are much longer and feature more involved gameplay mechanics, making Zoids Assault undercooked and overpriced.    The game's calling card is its support mechanic. Assuming you have Zoids in attack range, a single turn can prompt support fire from up to three additional units. You can also volley return fire when on the defensive in much the same way, so unit placement is the single greatest factor in every battle. There are some challenging missions later in the game, but once you get comfortable with unit positioning and proper flanking, you won't find most maps overly difficult. The road to victory also means smart use of EMP attacks, which aren't always available but do a lot of damage and can't be countered.   The grain filter is so pronounced, it's hard to notice how detailed your Zoids really are.   Outfitting your Zoids is also a strategic factor, of course, since each weapon determines how far the unit can move during a turn, how much damage the attack does, and so on. You also earn points to spend on equipping various special moves, and grab data discs that you enhance weapons and armor, or simply paint your bots different colors. You earn this stuff at a relatively slow pace, and because customization options are relatively thin (and because you only have the same five units from start to finish), this aspect of the game is less fulfilling than in most tactical RPGs. Again, everything is very no-frills, delivering just the basics without offering anything memorable.     It's odd that the best-looking of Atlus' recent trilogy of Xbox 360 games would be the weakest from a gameplay perspective. Zoids Assault has no personality, reduces its story to recited political mumbo jumbo, and is insanely short without offering any reason to return once you're done. It's functional--and that's it.    
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1113,The Golden Compass ,4.5, The Golden Compass is just another family-friendly film cash-in with few redeeming qualities.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/1/4/2209614-box_tgc.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-golden-compass-review/1900-6183906/,neg,"
  The Golden Compass for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owes a lot to 2005's The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Narnia, it is a game based on a film based on a fantasy novel, and it even goes so far as to summarily lift hunks of gameplay directly from the older title. Yet for some reason, the designers picked all of the bad stuff while leaving behind the good. The result is a muddled mishmash of gameplay ideas that lacks focus and certainly lacks any sense of fun.   When playing, be sure to don a warm sweater.   If you aren't familiar with the accompanying film, or the Philip Pullman novel on which it's based, you will probably be rather confused by the game. As Lyra Belacqua, you seek to save your friend Roger from the grasp of evil folkloric kidnappers known as Gobblers. Lyra is accompanied by her daemon Pantalaimon (or Pan, for short), who is the physical embodiment of Lyra's soul, and she is occasionally joined by a hulking armored polar bear named Iorek. Lyra also possesses an instrument called an alethiometer--the golden compass of the title--which can answer any question that she asks it. You'll figure out what's going on in bits and pieces and with the help of short clips from the Golden Compass film. Yet you'll likely never care about Lyra or her companions, and important chunks of exposition are completely glossed over, leaving you wondering what's going on or why you should care.     Gameplay is a mess. There are a lot of ideas at work here, but none of them pan out all that well. First up: exploration. You spend a lot of time roaming about doing busywork, particularly in an insanely long and boring sequence on the Gyptian vessel. The highlight during this level is--get ready for it--mopping the deck. In other levels, these tasks may have you hiding under furniture or throwing snowballs, but none of them are interesting, and they are generally sliced up by cutscenes and other gameplay mechanics.    Platforming ushers in more mediocrity. Granted, there are some nice ideas here. Lyra can use Pan as a grappling hook and latch on to poles for simplified Prince of Persia-inspired swinging, and the duo can glide for short distances. There are also beams to keep your balance on as you cross, though these moments seem to take forever, since Lyra walks across them so slowly. The controls are super-loose, which is deadly on the dock level--one of the dumbest platforming sequences ever dreamed up. Not only do the slippery controls make Lyra a pain to maneuver, but you can't manually control the camera, which makes it impossible to judge distance. Even worse, the camera has a tendency to move on its own in the middle of jumps and balancing acts. Expect to reload this level countless times, while cursing the designer who created it.    The Golden Compass relies heavily on timed button sequences, already one of the most overused mechanics in modern-day games. Attacked by a giant bee? Press some buttons in the right order. Need to push over an ice bridge? Press some more. Even some boss fights are won in this manner. There is some action buried in here, though it's found mostly in the game's first and final levels. Playing as Iorek, you'll paw through three types of enemies: witches, Tartars, and wolves. Once you build up enough rage by using standard melee attacks, you can pound the ground to do extra damage. You can also hold two buttons down to grab an enemy and fling it around, but for the most part, you can defeat this tiny assortment of foes by mashing a single button. Some levels are capped by boss fights, which aren't hard, but thanks to the lack of player camera control and the shoddy hit detection, they're plenty annoying.    There are still more elements at play. Sometimes Lyra will try to deceive other characters, which requires you to perform a set of minigames. Some of these games function properly, at least, such as one where you push the left analog stick in a whack-a-mole variant. Others are simply terrible and are so poorly explained that you may have no clue how the minigames even work the first few times they appear. There's also the matter of the golden compass itself. Lyra can ask it questions, and the accompanying minigame consists of keeping a reticle centered on the compass with the left analog stick while executing (you guessed it!) another timed button-pressing sequence.    Every exercise the game throws at you is pointless.   Even the visuals can't capture the fantasy magic of the film or novels. Animations and environments are crude, textures are muddy, and there is absolutely no imagination to be found in the bland art design. There are also some weird graphical bugs, such as blinking polygons and pixelated seams. Sound fares no better. The musical score is fine, if unmemorable, but most sound effects are either embarrassingly clunky or missing entirely. The voice acting is serviceable, but there are times when the same character will talk over his or her own dialogue.     Initially, the wide variety of gameplay elements make it seem like there's going to be a lot to do in The Golden Compass. Unfortunately, most of these facets are too repetitive, too frustrating, or too boring to keep anyone's interest, young or old. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the game is just the latest in a string of movie tie-ins that sacrifice good gameplay for the sake of a quick buck.     
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1114,The Golden Compass ,4.5, The Golden Compass is just another family-friendly film cash-in with few redeeming qualities.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/1/4/2209614-box_tgc.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-golden-compass-review/1900-6183907/,neg,"
  The Golden Compass for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owes a lot to 2005's The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Narnia, it is a game based on a film based on a fantasy novel, and it even goes so far as to summarily lift hunks of gameplay directly from the earlier title. Yet for some reason, the designers picked all of the bad stuff while leaving behind the good. The result is a muddled mishmash of gameplay ideas that lacks focus and certainly lacks any sense of fun.   When playing, be sure to don a warm sweater.   If you aren't familiar with the accompanying film, or the Philip Pullman novel on which it's based, you will probably be rather confused by the game. As Lyra Belacqua, you seek to save your friend Roger from the grasp of evil folkloric kidnappers known as Gobblers. Lyra is accompanied by her daemon Pantalaimon (or Pan, for short), who is the physical embodiment of Lyra's soul, and she is occasionally joined by a hulking armored polar bear named Iorek. Lyra also possesses an instrument called an alethiometer--the golden compass of the title--which can answer any question that she asks it. You'll figure out what's going on in bits and pieces and with the help of short clips from the Golden Compass film. Yet you'll likely never care about Lyra or her companions, and important chunks of exposition are completely glossed over, leaving you wondering what's going on or why you should care.     Gameplay is a mess. There are a lot of ideas at work here, but none of them pan out all that well. First up: exploration. You spend a lot of time roaming about doing busywork, particularly in an insanely long and boring sequence on the Gyptian vessel. The highlight during this level is--get ready for it--mopping the deck. In other levels, these tasks may have you hiding under furniture or throwing snowballs, but none of them are interesting, and they are generally sliced up by cutscenes and other gameplay mechanics.    Platforming ushers in more mediocrity. Granted, there are some nice ideas here. Lyra can use Pan as a grappling hook and latch on to poles for simplified Prince of Persia-inspired swinging, and the duo can glide for short distances. There are also beams to keep your balance on as you cross, though these moments seem to take forever, since Lyra walks across them so slowly. The controls are super-loose, which is deadly on the dock level--one of the dumbest platforming sequences ever dreamed up. Not only do the slippery controls make Lyra a pain to maneuver, but you can't manually control the camera, which makes it impossible to judge distance. Even worse, the camera has a tendency to move on its own in the middle of jumps and balancing acts. Expect to reload this level countless times, while cursing the designer who created it.    The Golden Compass relies heavily on timed button sequences, already one of the most overused mechanics in modern-day games. Attacked by a giant bee? Press some buttons in the right order. Need to push over an ice bridge? Press some more. Even some boss fights are won in this manner. There is some action buried in here, though it's found mostly in the game's first and final levels. Playing as Iorek, you'll paw through three types of enemies: witches, Tartars, and wolves. Once you build up enough rage by using standard melee attacks, you can pound the ground to do extra damage. You can also hold two buttons down to grab an enemy and fling it around, but for the most part, you can defeat this tiny assortment of foes by mashing a single button. Some levels are capped by boss fights, which aren't hard, but thanks to the lack of player camera control and the shoddy hit detection, they're plenty annoying.    There are still more elements at play. Sometimes Lyra will try to deceive other characters, which requires you to perform a set of minigames. Some of these games function properly, at least, such as one where you push the left analog stick in a whack-a-mole variant. Others are simply terrible and are so poorly explained that you may have no clue how the minigames even work the first few times they appear. There's also the matter of the golden compass itself. Lyra can ask it questions, and the accompanying minigame consists of keeping a reticle centered on the compass with the left analog stick while executing (you guessed it!) another timed button-pressing sequence.    Every exercise the game throws at you is pointless.   Even the visuals can't capture the fantasy magic of the film or novels. Animations and environments are crude, textures are muddy, and there is absolutely no imagination to be found in the bland art design. There are also some weird graphical bugs, such as blinking polygons and pixelated seams. Sound fares no better. The musical score is fine, if unmemorable, but most sound effects are either embarrassingly clunky or missing entirely. The voice acting is serviceable, but there are times when the same character will talk over his or her own dialogue.     Initially, the wide variety of gameplay elements make it seem like there's going to be a lot to do in The Golden Compass. Unfortunately, most of these facets are too repetitive, too frustrating, or too boring to keep anyone's interest, young or old. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the game is just the latest in a string of movie tie-ins that sacrifice good gameplay for the sake of a quick buck.     
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1115,The Golden Compass ,4.5, The Golden Compass is just another family-friendly film cash-in with few redeeming qualities.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/6/1/4/2209614-box_tgc.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-golden-compass-review/1900-6184005/,neg,"
  The Golden Compass owes a lot to 2005's The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Narnia, it is a game based on a film based on a fantasy novel, and it even goes so far as to summarily lift hunks of gameplay directly from the older title. Yet for some reason, the designers picked all of the bad stuff while leaving behind the good. The result is a muddled mishmash of gameplay ideas that lacks focus and certainly lacks any sense of fun.   Lyra completes such exciting tasks as reading paperwork and spitting.   If you aren't familiar with the accompanying film, or the Philip Pullman novel on which it's based, you will probably be rather confused by the game. As Lyra Belacqua, you seek to save your friend Roger from the grasp of evil folkloric kidnappers known as Gobblers. Lyra is accompanied by her daemon Pantalaimon (or Pan, for short), who is the physical embodiment of Lyra's soul, and she is occasionally joined by a hulking armored polar bear named Iorek. Lyra also possesses an instrument called an alethiometer--the golden compass of the title--which can answer any question that she asks it. You'll figure out what's going on in bits and pieces and with the help of short clips from the Golden Compass film. Yet you'll likely never care about Lyra or her companions, and important chunks of exposition are completely glossed over, leaving you wondering what's going on or why you should care.    Gameplay is a mess. There are a lot of ideas at work here, but none of them pan out all that well. First up: exploration. You spend a lot of time roaming about doing busywork, particularly in an insanely long and boring sequence on the Gyptian vessel. The highlight during this level is--get ready for it--mopping the deck. In other levels, these tasks may have you hiding under furniture or throwing snowballs, but none of them are interesting, and they are generally sliced up by cutscenes and other gameplay mechanics.    Platforming ushers in more mediocrity. Granted, there are some nice ideas here. Lyra can use Pan as a grappling hook and latch on to poles for simplified Prince of Persia-inspired swinging, and the duo can glide for short distances. There are also beams to keep your balance on as you cross, though these moments seem to take forever, since Lyra walks across them so slowly. The controls are super-loose, which is deadly on the dock level--one of the dumbest platforming sequences ever dreamed up. Not only do the slippery controls make Lyra a pain to maneuver, but you can't manually control the camera, which makes it impossible to judge distance. Even worse, the camera has a tendency to move on its own in the middle of jumps and balancing acts. Expect to reload this level countless times, while cursing the designer who created it.    The Golden Compass relies heavily on timed button sequences, already one of the most overused mechanics in modern-day games. Attacked by a giant bee? Press some buttons in the right order. Need to push over an ice bridge? Press some more. Even some boss fights are won in this manner. There is some action buried in here, though it's found mostly in the game's first and final levels. Playing as Iorek, you'll paw through three types of enemies: witches, Tartars, and wolves. Once you build up enough rage by using standard melee attacks, you can pound the ground to do extra damage. You can also hold two buttons down to grab an enemy and fling it around, but for the most part, you can defeat this tiny assortment of foes by mashing a single button. Some levels are capped by boss fights, which aren't hard, but thanks to the lack of player camera control and the shoddy hit detection, they're plenty annoying.    There are still more elements at play. Sometimes Lyra will try to deceive other characters, which requires you to perform a set of minigames. Some of these games function properly, at least, such as one where you push the left analog stick in a whack-a-mole variant. Others are simply terrible and are so poorly explained that you may have no clue how the minigames even work the first few times they appear. There's also the matter of the golden compass itself. Lyra can ask it questions, and the accompanying minigame consists of keeping a reticle centered on the compass with the left analog stick while executing (you guessed it!) another timed button-pressing sequence.   If you ask the alethiometer if you should play The Golden Compass, it will respond with a resounding 'NO!'   Even the visuals can't capture the fantasy magic of the film or novels. Animations and environments are crude, textures are muddy, and there is absolutely no imagination to be found in the bland art design. There are also some weird graphical bugs, such as blinking polygons and pixelated seams. Sound fares no better. The musical score is fine, if unmemorable, but most sound effects are either embarrassingly clunky or missing entirely. The voice acting is serviceable, but there are times when the same character will talk over his or her own dialogue.    Initially, the wide variety of gameplay elements make it seem like there's going to be a lot to do in The Golden Compass. Unfortunately, most of these facets are too repetitive, too frustrating, or too boring to keep anyone's interest, young or old. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the game is just the latest in a string of movie tie-ins that sacrifice good gameplay for the sake of a quick buck.    
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1116,WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008 ,4.5," In setting out to make a wrestling game for people who don't like wrestling games, THQ has turned in a game that nobody will like.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwe-smackdown-vs-raw-2008-review/1900-6183353/,neg,"
  Much ado has been made about the Wii's appeal to audiences outside the normal gaming realm, hence why you often find established franchises and genres taking different approaches when developing for the Wii hardware. That isn't an inherently bad thing, but when you futz with a formula too much for the sake of trying to broaden a game's appeal, sometimes you end up stretching things too far and destroying any appeal whatsoever. The case in point is WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008, the first wrestling game for the Wii and a real downer for any wrestling fan. In an attempt to simplify the admittedly overcomplicated SmackDown! game design, the developers ended up with a control scheme that is neither responsive enough nor deep enough to hold anyone's attention for more than a few matches. Couple that with the fact that nearly every hallmark feature of the series has been stripped out, and what you're ultimately left with is a hollow shell of a wrestler.   That was supposed to be a piledriver, dammit.   Just to linger on that last point for a moment, let's run down the list of things that SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008 doesn't have compared with its counterparts on other consoles. The quick and dirty list includes: the fighting-style system implemented this year in the other console versions, 24/7 mode (both the single-player story mode and the general-manager mode), create-a-belt mode, create-a-stable mode, create-an-entrance mode, online play, hall of fame matches, the cage match, hell in a cell, the ECW extreme-rules match, the fatal four-way match, battle royals, backstage brawls, the ironman match, the table match, the ladder match, the tables ladders and chairs match, tables, ladders, and, in fact, any weapon that is not a chair.     Granted, wrestling games have survived with less in the past, but only when the gameplay was any fun. Sadly, SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008 is missing that one key factor as well. There is a good idea in SmackDown!'s gameplay design, but it isn't followed through on with any notable success. Essentially, the basic wrestling system inherent to the series has been simplified so that it relies exclusively on flicks of the Wii Remote that may or may not cause your chosen wrestler to do the move you have in mind. Simply swinging the remote will cause a wrestler to do a striking move, and doing it multiple times engages a series of canned combo strikes. Holding down the A button while flicking the remote will engage a quick-grapple move. Holding B engages a strong grapple, including a rendition of the total-control grapple moves from the other console versions that require you to move the remote up, down, left, or right for each stage of a given move. Flick upward to lift an opponent for a power bomb from the prone position, and then down again to slam him.    Again, this sounds like a neat idea, but almost immediately it becomes clear that there's just nothing at all to this system. Matches tend to go one of two ways. On the one hand, you could come out firing with strike combos, hit the same exact grapple move five or six times throughout the match because the game often can't tell which way you're swinging the remote, and eventually win either by busting out your finisher or just getting a lucky pin. On the other hand, you could come out firing with strike combos, get reversed constantly by the artificial intelligence, and end up getting destroyed by your opponent's finisher rather quickly. That's about it. There's no depth to the fighting at all. You wave the remote, hope you don't get reversed a bunch, wave the remote like crazy when you're getting attacked and hope that your actions magically turn into a reversal of your own, and finally hope the match ends before you dislocate your shoulder from all that waving. If there were even a smidgen more variety to how a match played out, the potential for fun could be there. As it is, this is merely a contest of aggravating repetition.    Furthermore, you'll be able to experience these contests in only a handful of ways. With only single, hardcore, tag, triple threat, and K.O. matches available, you're not going to get much mileage out of playing different match types. There is a single-player mode that kind of, sort of, not really attempts to provide a storyline, but this mode, titled main event, is just an out-and-out bore. You pick a grappler, a brand, and then set forth playing match after match against the same three guys until you earn enough respect from the crowd to increase your rep and take on a new set of three guys, and then another set, and another set, and so on, and so on, and so on. In-between, you can opt to train a bit to raise your stats in the basic strength, speed, and similar statistics, or rest up to lower your fatigue rating. But beyond that noninteractive stuff and a bunch of goofy voicemails from your opponents and eventual partners, there's nothing to tie this mode together. It's just a long string of matches with some lackluster role-playing game elements dangling off of it. We'll grant that the single-player story mode in this year's game on other consoles wasn't very good, but it looks like high entertainment compared to this thing.    The truly sad irony about SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008 on the Wii is that the things about it that most closely resemble all the other console versions of the game aren't necessarily the aspects you'd want at all. For instance, the Wii game is just as terrible in the AI category as the rest of the versions released this year. Opponents rely exclusively on constant reversals to get by, and your tag partners tend to forget to come rescue you when you're being pinned. Any time you put a chair in an opponent's hands, he'll just run at you with it constantly like a bomber on a suicide run, and if you happen to get into a spot where he can't reach you, he'll flail like a crazed fish out of water, swinging wildly at air until you happen to step right into the range needed to get hit. Collision detection is also bad. Wrestlers will periodically swing through one another, and you'll constantly see body parts morph into the ring mat. If you happen to get near the announcer tables, well, let's just say that unintentional comedy often ensues.    Then there's the roster, which is just as out of date as any other version of the game. Notably released wrestlers who are in the game's roster include Sandman, King Booker, Cryme Time, Marcus Cor Von, Chris Masters, and Sabu (who is admittedly in the game as a ""legend"" wrestler for some reason). Couple that with a few names who are currently out with extended injuries, and the roster is looking a little ragged. It might not feel so off if it weren't for the fact that there are less wrestlers overall than last year. It's not Yuke's fault that this is the case, considering the development cycle and how far ahead the rosters have to be locked for this thing before the game is finished. Nevertheless, maybe this speaks to a greater issue about the game's development cycle, given that this problem keeps popping up again and again, and with greater notability each year.     With that said, there are a few positive similarities to be had. For one thing, the create-a-wrestler and create-a-moveset modes are here and mostly intact. The inability to edit entrances is a real bummer, but the basic creation technology is there and works nicely. Secondly, the tournament modes introduced this year are on hand here as well. They let you create different tournaments, do a standard King of the Ring tourney, and also a special beat-the-clock tournament that tasks you with trying to win your tournament match the fastest of all to advance to the finals.   Hopefully you really like using steel chairs, because that's the only weapon you've got.   The in-game graphics directly mimic the PlayStation 2 version of the game, but that's not a slight against the Wii version at all. The SmackDown! games have always been some of the best-looking games on Sony's last-generation hardware, and the Wii version looks just as good. It's a shame that the game doesn't trump PS2-quality graphics in any noticeable way, but at least things look basically sharp. Character models are nicely put together, all the entrance animations look spectacular, and some of the move animations look great, too. Others don't appear quite as nice, but those are the same questionable animations as in all the other iterations of the game. One detail the world could have done without is the abysmal commentary. The commentary is the same recycled nonsense we've been getting from this series for the last few installments. You've heard practically every one of these lines, and you've heard them applied just as inaccurately as they are in this game. Something has seriously got to give at some point, because the commentary ultimately serves more to ruin the presentation of the matches than help it.    Although a certain degree of feature stripping is often a factor in first installments of franchises on new console hardware, the degree to which SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008 on the Wii cuts away at what made the franchise successful on other platforms is utterly ridiculous. It's one thing to put the developmental focus on the new gameplay design, but if that was truly the case, it's all that much sadder that everything else got left on the cutting-room floor for the sake of the gameplay, given what a repetitive slog the gameplay design turned out to be. This game is a failed experiment, and with any luck THQ and Yuke's will learn heaps from it and greatly improve upon next year's inevitable installment. If they don't, Wii-owning wrestling fans are in for a long console generation.    
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1117,Dragoneer's Aria ,4.5," Only grind-loving, masochistic role players need apply.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/3/0/2220030-box_daria.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragoneers-aria-review/1900-6180599/,neg,"
  It's not been a good year for dragons in games. Case in point: Dragoneer's Aria. There are lumbering lizards in it, but the game itself is as dull as a bread knife. And don't expect to find out what arias have to do with anything, either. This turn-based role-playing game tells a nondescript story, features unbearably slow battles, and misses the mark in almost every facet that makes RPGs fun to play. In fact, Dragoneer's Aria is the opposite of fun, and it's a game you'll do best to avoid.    It's OK, Euphe. Someday you'll have a ponytail as beautiful as mine.   You play as Valen, an academy student whose graduation is cut short by the attack of a mean black dragon. Seems the same dragon once hurled the world into chaos centuries before, and now he's back to destroy the friendly dragons that keep the world in balance. So Valen and his ultrafeminine braided pigtail depart from the city of Granadis to save the good dragons, though as is standard for this type of game, he gathers a few friends along the way. The naïve healer Euphe is so sweet she might as well have been dipped in sugar, while Ruslan's sarcastic attitude gives him the typical bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold role. The most interesting character is Mary, a pirate who breathes occasional life into the mundane dialogue but still can't save the plot from mediocrity. Even the twists don't make things interesting, since you can see them coming from a mile away.    Almost every aspect of Dragoneer's Aria, including its title, is pulled from the Standard Book of Japanese RPG Clichés, and then saddled with elements that slow it down to the speed of an adamantoise on downers. Even spell names sound as if developer Hit Maker fed a bunch of violent-sounding nouns and adjectives into a slot machine. Cutting Tornado? Song of Confusion? It doesn't get more generic than this. Then, throw in multiple enemies that share the same ugly character model--except maybe one has green feet and the other has yellow. What else makes them different? Well, in battle, one's called a raven, and one's called an eagle. How does the Granadis Endangered Species Committee tell them apart?    Perhaps they simply take the poor birds into battle. The raven is a weakling compared to the eagle, yet for some reason, the creatures live two feet from each other. As you wander through one drab dungeon after another, you'll bump into enemies that are a cakewalk to beat--one step away from another encounter that will destroy you in no time flat. You can try to escape from battle, but it rarely works. When you are able to escape, the winged eye that represents the encounter will still be floating there, and may very well fly right back into you, forcing you back into the battle you wanted to escape from in the first place. It's insanely imbalanced and forces you to grind, grind, grind until you are sure you can move on without fear of having your foes wipe the floor with you. But as if the standard grind isn't enough, each area features creatures called avatars, and if you earn 10 of them, you can summon the avatar's soul in battle. But avatars only show up every 15 battles or so, so if you want to earn a soul, expect to spend a very, very long time in a single dungeon. The ridiculously low item-drop rate just makes matters worse.     And be sure to grab a book. Battles take forever, because you have to sit through one long, unskippable animation after another. Even the menus take their time, so a single battle might take 10 to 15 minutes, yet requires precious little input. Eventually, you'll be pounding on the X button, wishing you could skip through every plodding animation. But don't bother--trying is as futile as trying to skip past any of the pokey cutscenes. All told, the excruciatingly creeping pace turns what would probably have been a mildly boring 35-hour game into 50 hours of mind-numbing monotony.    There are some decent ideas behind the combat, though even they end up contributing to the imbalanced battles. If you're familiar with Final Fantasy VII's materia system, you'll find it easy to understand Dragoneer's Aria's lusces, which represent spells. Characters can freely switch out lusces, and you can equip as many of them as there are slots in your accessories. Lusces level up separately from characters, so as you use them, you level up the spells associated with them. Then you have the energy bar, which is not a protein-filled snack, but rather a mana gauge that slowly fills as you perform standard attacks. Each spell level uses the equivalent amount of mana, so a level-three spell uses three mana points, which translates to 300 energy. There are also superpowered spells called dragon skills attached to the dragon orbs you collect from the elemental dragons.     These things are fine on their own, but they're not balanced properly, and eventually you'll find that your standard attacks get the job done better than casting spells. If you have a choice between using your sword and doing 1000 damage, and casting a fire spell that does 500 damage and spends a mana point, why would you cast the spell? Furthermore, if a more powerful dragon skill does more damage and costs less mana, why would you use a standard spell? All you can do is level the spell up so that it becomes more effective, which just means more grinding. If you want to balance things out a bit more, you can also earn energy by guarding. Guarding brings up a minigame where you match a spinning icon to blue crystals arranged in a circle. But considering the ridiculous length of the battles, why would you stretch things out even more by guarding, when you can speed things along by attacking? You can try the game's simple crafting system when the battles take their toll on you, but it doesn't help ease the tedium.   Do you think extensions would help?   It also doesn't help that Dragoneer's Aria looks as poor as it plays. The towering cityscapes look impressive, but most of the game simply looks bland, and in some cases, downright ugly. Polygons have noticeable seams between them, textures are flat and unsightly, and the second-rate art direction doesn't help matters. The soundtrack isn't memorable, but it's nice, and the voice acting is uneven, ranging from bad to good, depending on which character is speaking.     The PSP features a number of good RPGs from which to choose, so there's absolutely no reason to waste money on this dud. It certainly can't be saved by its lame ad hoc multiplayer, which earns you some goodies you can't get in the single-player game, but can't make playing it any more enjoyable. In short, save your pennies and spend them on something that you'll get actual pleasure from.    
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1118,Art of Fighting Anthology ,4.5," The Art of Fighting series once featured some of the most innovative fighting games around. But they haven't aged well, and this collection only showcases that fact.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/7/1/4/2212714-box_aofa.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/art-of-fighting-anthology-review/1900-6171986/,neg,"
  It's well known that Capcom's 1991 arcade classic Street Fighter II made one-on-one fighting games the phenomenon they were back in the '90s. But developer and NeoGeo hardware creator SNK also released several sprite-based 2D fighting games of its own, eventually garnering a loyal following by creating fighting games with a unique sense of style. The Art of Fighting series, which arguably stressed innovation over solid gameplay, was among that portfolio of great fighting games--but the games in this series never enjoyed the success and notoriety of SNK's King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown. Unfortunately, time has passed, and many more-evolved, better-balanced fighting games have since been released, so the series doesn't hold up very well in 2007--especially not in the bare-bones Art of Fighting Anthology for the PS2.   Though they have some old-school arcade game appeal, the Art of Fighting games generally haven't aged well.   Sadly, the fact that the Art of Fighting series was one of the real innovators in the world of fighting games is little known. Game features that fighting game enthusiasts have come to expect from their favorite games, such as taunting, character-specific introduction sequences, and yes, even ""super moves,"" first made their debut in the original Art of Fighting from 1992. The first two Art of Fighting games also featured bodily damage on characters as the fight progressed, and all three games featured one of the most infamously misunderstood gameplay systems of all time, the ""spirit meter,"" which at once prevented players from repeatedly abusing powerful ""special"" maneuvers...but also caused these maneuvers to fizzle out once your meter was empty. This effect was later parodied by Capcom in that company's most unwittingly popular fighting game character, Dan Hibiki, a weakling who wasn't able to hurl an energy projectile attack across the entire screen.    History aside, once you pop your Art of Fighting Anthology disc into your PS2, you'll find that these games just haven't held up well. The collection offers the three games in the series (Art of Fighting, Art of Fighting 2, and Art of Fighting 3) as no-frills emulated versions of the original NeoGeo games. The first Art of Fighting game lets you play only as one of the series' two main characters, Ryo Sakazaki or Robert Garcia, in single-player mode, and the control scheme is extremely clunky and unresponsive. It's likely that most discerning fighting game fans might find the first Art of Fighting game to be all but unplayable--and they'll likely have trouble with 1994's Art of Fighting 2 as well. Unlike conventional fighting games, which often emphasize memorized combinations of attacks, Art of Fighting 2 focuses on smart use of normal attacks and carefully managing your spirit meter by charging and taunting. But both the first and the second game feature heavy use of the scrolling and zooming camera effects that were hallmarks of the NeoGeo hardware--yet these effects make both games feel jerky and stilted. Art of Fighting 2's single-player game is also insanely difficult unless you exploit certain patterns in your enemies' behavior, which means that the second game in the anthology is also pretty much a losing proposition for most fighting game enthusiasts.    Like the previous games in the series, Art of Fighting 3 is very different from conventional fighting games, but it also breaks away from the previous two games in the series with a brand-new look and feel. The third game does away with the bodily damage and jerky camera cuts of the previous games and instead offers up a completely new game system based on multiple attacks strung together, as well as on ""juggle"" attacks you perform after launching your opponent in the air. Also, unlike almost any other 2D fighting game ever made, Art of Fighting 3 featured three levels of attacks (high, low, and mid), with mid attacks that can't be defended while crouching. This makes the game much closer to something like the 3D polygonal game Tekken than to any other 2D fighting game. This fighting system, while interesting, definitely carries a learning curve that many players may not find worthwhile, because although Art of Fighting 3 had the best animation quality in the series, the game's fluid, almost slippery animation doesn't pack much of a punch. Also, Art of Fighting 3 was clearly released in an unfinished state back in 1996; only Robert and Ryo have ending sequences, and many characters lack dialogue. If you had played the game 10 years ago on the NeoGeo, you would've gotten the sense that it could've used some more time in the oven; you'll feel the same way playing it on your PS2 now.   Art of Fighting 3 features fluid animation and a great soundtrack, but the game is clearly unfinished.   Despite the gameplay issues with the series, time seems to have been a bit kinder to its presentation. The games all have a bright, colorful look, and the characters in each game are huge onscreen compared to the smaller sprites you may have come to expect from the Street Fighter and King of Fighters games. The first two games also feature upbeat music that may bring back nostalgic memories of any time you might've spent in arcades. The first two games even have simple ""bonus"" minigames between rounds, like those older arcade fighting games of yore. Also, Art of Fighting 2's single-player game, which features prefight dialogue between your character and the opponent, has some of the snappiest patter you could find in a video game from the 1990s (and at that period, many of SNK's games had extremely funny, clever dialogue, so that's saying a lot). However, all three games also have some minor translation issues that you may find either annoying or ironically funny. All three games can be played either with the original arcade soundtrack or the arrange soundtrack that appeared on the CD-based home versions of the games. Art of Fighting 3's arrange soundtrack features an amazing, eclectic combination of straight-ahead jazz, salsa, world music, rock and roll, and blues that fits remarkably well with the game's premise of a side story in which Robert and Ryo take a trip south of the border to Mexico.    Unfortunately, this minimalist collection features only the three games emulated directly from original NeoGeo versions, and barely anything in the way of extras. It does let you switch between the original arcade soundtrack and the arrange soundtrack as mentioned, and it has a throwaway option that lets you edit color palettes for your characters in Art of Fighting 2. That's it. There are no additional play modes for any of the games, such as a survivor mode or training mode, and no extras--SNK Playmore could've included the hilariously campy Japanese TV commercials for each game, for instance--so this collection just offers the bare minimum of content for a series that really could've used some window dressing. As it stands, Art of Fighting Anthology is really only for fighting game historians or loyal SNK fans looking to add to their collection. Despite the game's budget price tag, there are other, better choices for fighting game enthusiasts.   Editor's Note: This review previously contained incorrect information about an in-game reset option, and about Art of Fighting 3's characters. GameSpot regrets the error. 
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1119,Obscure: The Aftermath ,4.5, This survival horror sequel is clumsy and frustrating and not suspenseful in the least.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/2/0/2/30418-85202.jpg,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/obscure-the-aftermath-review/1900-6189006/,neg,"
  In Obscure: The Aftermath, young college students take on demonic monsters while their friends and fraternity fellows get ripped into bloody shreds. Most reasonable people would react with shock or fear, yet this horror adventure game's characters are more interested in clinging to outdated stereotypes. Corey Wilde, for example, isn't concerned about the giant ogres bursting with bulbous tumors that have infiltrated Fallcreek University. Rather, his beloved car's been totaled, and someone must pay. And so it goes with Corey and his chums, who approach the campus's mutant infestation with the same degree of intensity that they would a study session.    An example of some of Obscure: The Aftermath's Shakespearean dialogue.   It's easy to assume that developer Hydravision was trying to deliver a Scream-like parody of teen slasher films. Perhaps that's so, but the tongue-in-cheek irony necessary for such an endeavor is missing, instead replaced with bad sexual innuendo and humorless one-liners. From bad dialogue (""I've seen all of Corey's x-rays; I know him inside out"") to third-rate voice acting, every character is stripped down to a cliche. At least the characters provide something tangible to grasp because the plot is paper thin, though it does offer some veiled commentary on the perils of drugs and sexual debauchery. What the plot lacks are the most important elements of a good survival horror game: scares and suspense. If the main characters can't bother to feel the occasional chill, there's no reason why we should ever get goose bumps of our own.    Nevertheless, there are some atmospheric touches, though many of them are undermined by the general lack of tension. Some scenes are viewed through a grainy black and white filter, an effect that has been used in games countless times but is still utilized with some success in Aftermath. The darkest environments, such as a murky forest, are the most fitting partially because they offer much-needed atmosphere and partially because clearer lighting reveals that Aftermath does not live up to the visual standards of its platform. Character models are stiff and lifeless, textures are rendered in low resolution, and cutscenes are pixelated (though some of them reveal some nice cinematic flourishes). Some areas look properly dingy and degraded, but the game doesn't have a cohesive artistic vision, so elements like these feel practically accidental. The main saving grace is Olivier Deriviere's moody soundtrack, which features some nice string tracks and interesting vocal stylizations.     As in 2005's Obscure, in The Aftermath you'll take control of one student at any given time, though another AI-controlled teammate will tag along. The game's hook is that each character has a given strength and that you will need to alternate between the two of them or use them together to solve various puzzles. For instance, Mei can hack into security devices using her PDA, while Kenny is strong enough to push around heavy objects. Other times, they'll combine forces, such as when Corey pulls Amy onto a fire escape. There are a few interesting puzzles that result from this arrangement, such as one where you shine a spotlight onto your light-fearing foes using one character while the other bashes away at the baddies. Yet for the most part, these tasks are relatively straightforward and unspectacular. To spice things up, you can beg a friend to grab a Wii Remote and join you, at which point he or she will take control of the second character. This might be a refreshing improvement over the game's mediocre AI, but it doesn't make the experience any more engaging.     Aside from the cooperative element, Aftermath is simply an amalgam of Resident Evil and Silent Hill gameplay mechanics, though it does have its bright moments. For example, in one clever mission, you guide one character through a series of hallways from the viewpoint of another, who must keep the security cameras in focus for you to see the action. It's a neat idea, and there are others like it, but most of them are compromised by the terrible implementation of the most basic elements. The most egregious offender is the camera, which can be controlled somewhat using the Wii Remote, though you don't have full control most of the time. This is maddening enough when you're walking through hospital corridors and can't rotate the camera so that it's behind your character's back, but when combat is added to the mix, the game falls apart in the most fundamental ways.     A typical battle scenario may have you taking on several enemies at once, either with a melee weapon or with a firearm. Either way you go, you need to hold the Z button on the Nunchuk to enter combat stance. In the case of a blunt instrument, you simply swing the Wii Remote to swing your weapon, which isn't such a bad mechanic on its own. However, because the levels are so confined and the camera is so difficult to position, you may not be able to see your attacker. This is a big deal because like other games in the genre, Aftermath doesn't keep you well stocked with health packs, though you take quite a bit of damage in most encounters. Because you have so little control of your view, this leads to deaths that are essentially out of your hands. And once you equip a ranged weapon, the game reaches even higher levels of absurdity.    More award-winning, bone-chilling dialogue.   With a gun in your hands, you'll still need to press Z to prepare for combat. This time, you'll hold A to target your enemy and pull the B button to fire. It's a bit muddled, but it's an understandably deliberate element that is consistent with the genre. However, the implementation is all but broken. If an enemy isn't onscreen, you can't target it, and it's very common for the monster to appear between the player view and the onscreen character. The creature can attack, but you can't fire back because you can't move the camera to a workable position. Additionally, entering combat stance may force the character to point his or her weapon away from the camera--which, in this case, is away from the enemy. The targeting is also close to broken. Pressing A may or may not lock on to an enemy, and once you are locked on, the camera may go into convulsions, making it difficult to tell what's going on. Again, this is an unforgiveable gaffe in a challenging game that requires you to be frugal with ammunition and health packs.     If you liked the first game in the series, you'll find plenty of crossover elements, but then again, if you played the original Obscure, you already have an idea of what to expect. There's nothing wrong with exploiting a proven formula, assuming it's done well. Unfortunately, In Obscure: The Aftermath, nothing is done very well.  
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1120,Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 ,8.5, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II is easily one of the best games in the series.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/0/9/8/2215098-box_nfshp2.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/need-for-speed-hot-pursuit-2-review/1900-2884739/,pos,"
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II is the sequel to Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, which was released in 1998 and was the third in Electronic Arts' venerable series of arcade-style driving games. Between then and now, however, EA has released two other Need for Speed games--High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed--which makes Hot Pursuit II the sixth game in the series, if you don't count the two V-Rally games that hit the market in the mid-'90s, that is. Confused? Well, never mind all that. All you need to know is that Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II for the PlayStation 2 is not only one of the best games in this long-running series, but also one of the fastest, most visceral, and most polished racing games currently available for Sony's console.  It's not the next Gran Turismo, nor does it set out to be.  To be sure, Hot Pursuit II is no driving simulator. It's not the next Gran Turismo, nor does it set out to be. This game is all about arcade-style racing, where car-handling properties are wildly exaggerated, and physics are more like loose suggestions than strict laws. Nonetheless, like all of the previous games in this series, Hot Pursuit II has a number of highly coveted licensed cars from American and European manufacturers like Lotus, Lamborghini, Dodge, Chevy, BMW, Mercedes, and the two most prestigious car makers, Ferrari and Porsche. What's more, all of these cars will take damage if you're too careless, though they'll take a good deal of punishment before they show signs of wear and tear, and no matter how badly you treat them, the cars and their performance will never be affected by the damage they absorb. Realism is not this game's forte, and that's what makes it so fun.   As its name implies, Hot Pursuit II largely focuses on the illegal art of outrunning the law. Actually, Hot Pursuit II is two games in one. Unlike other racing games, this one has two equally large championship modes, only one of which involves the police. Called ultimate racer, this career mode is composed of 30 individual racing events that force you to beat a number of opponents, while contending with the police, through a handful of different race types. Ultimate racer is laid out in a branching manner, and you're required to successfully finish one race before unlocking the next. As you'd expect, your opponents will get tougher, your goals harder to achieve, and the police less forgiving as you progress through this tree. Cops will come after you if you break the speed limit, and since you're tasked with crossing the finish line before your opponents do, you'll be breaking that limit constantly. At first, the cops will just send a couple of Crown Victorias after you, but if you refuse to pull over, they'll pull out all the stops to bust you. Much like in Grand Theft Auto III, the number of cops that are thrown at you is measured by the number of stars in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. When this meter is full, the police will place barricades and spike strips on the roads, they'll chase you with faster cars, and they'll even call in a helicopter that drops, of all things, explosive barrels in front of you. If the police manage to pull you over three times in a given race, you'll have to start all over.  Hot Pursuit features about a dozen licensed songs that range from the likes of Bush to Uncle Kracker.  However, that sounds more foreboding than it really is. Hot Pursuit II starts off relatively easy: You'll be driving ""low-end"" cars like the Lotus Elise and Opel Speedster, as will your competition, and the cops will go easy on you for the most part. As you work your way through the 30 missions, the competition will gradually get stiffer, but never to the point of frustration. The other cars are ruthless--they'll take every opportunity to give your rear bumper a not-so-friendly tap--though they're be no means perfect. You'll often see cars ahead of you plow into oncoming traffic or miscalculate a turn and ricochet off a wall or guardrail. You'll do that too, especially with some of the faster cars. While the physics in the game are by no means realistic, the cars' performance still mimics their real-world counterparts, although in a much exaggerated manner. The Ferrari F50, for instance, has a loose back end, making it harder to control around corners than the tamer BMW M5. Still, you can pretty much go through every race without ever taking your thumb off the gas button, though judicious use of your hand brake makes cornering a lot easier. In fact, wild driving is encouraged, since every time you get some air, overtake an opponent, break through a police barricade, or reach your car's top speed, you'll earn ""NFS points."" Hot Pursuit II has 49 cars that can be unlocked, including 10 cop cars and a dozen or so ""NFS cars,"" which are slightly souped-up versions of their licensed counterparts. These cars require that you collect a certain number of NFS points before they become available in the game's challenge mode. It's here that you'll be able to take any car that you've unlocked and race it on any available racetrack, which also unlock as you gain more points. Hot Pursuit II has 15 unique racetracks, though that number doubles if you count the reverse courses. What's more, you can even choose between two weather settings--clear and cloudy--when racing in the challenge mode. In a nice touch, Hot Pursuit II's challenge mode even lets you play as the cops, and you can call in roadblocks and helicopters of your own.The second career mode in Hot Pursuit II is called world championship, and it's structured exactly like ultimate racer in that you have to compete through 30 branching racing events. The difference here is that you won't have to worry about interference from the law--it's just you and the competition. As an ultimate racer, you'll earn NFS points for accomplishing the goals set forth in each race as well as for driving with style within each event. As you accumulate points, new tracks and new cars will automatically become available to you in the challenge mode. Here, as in the ultimate racer mode, you have the option between classic and extreme control modes. With the classic mode selected, the cars all handle in the typical exaggerated form of realism that has come to mark the Need for Speed series. The extreme setting is a new addition to the Need for Speed series, and it exaggerates the cars' already wild physics even further. Even with this setting selected, though, control in Hot Pursuit II remains incredibly tight. Cars stick to pavement like glue in a straight line, but they can be made to powerslide through turns at will. Most cars in the game have a tendency to push through turns, but they'll throw their tail ends out if you hit the gas or hand brake. Everything about the game is precise, and the cars will almost always respond to your input exactly as you'd expect them to.   Each car in the game has different engine noises and exhaust notes.  This game oozes style, and that's largely because of its fine graphics. Hot Pursuit II gives you three different perspectives to play from--two from the third-person and one from the first--and all of these relay an incredible sense of speed. The cars are all modeled with a generous number of polygons, and they boast lighting and reflection that's respectable in its amount but not garish. As they take damage, you'll notice cracked windshields, broken taillights, and bent fenders on your cars. Scrape a wall, and you'll see bright sparks bounce off your car. Lay into the gas pedal, and you'll leave a pair of thick rubber tracks that will remain on the track surface for the duration of the race. Likewise, the courses themselves are rendered very well. While you won't see the glare of the sun off the pavement as you would in racing games like Burnout 2 and Gran Turismo 3, the lighting is impressive nonetheless. Water on the track will reflect its surroundings as well your car's glossy paint job. Hot Pursuit II's graphics engine even allows for localized fog, and this effect is used on several tracks to model morning fog, sand storms, volcanoes, and forest fires. What's more, none of the game's flare taxes its performance. Hot Pursuit II runs at a smooth frame rate with almost no signs of slowdown--it's not quite the 60fps you'll find in Burnout 2, but it's still fast.   Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II is easily one of the best games in the series.  The sound, too, is on par with the rest of the game. Each car in the game has different engine noises and exhaust notes, and these change in volume and direction as you switch through the game's three perspectives. While not overly realistic, these sounds attempt to capture the general cacophony of their real-world counterparts. Ferraris, for example, sound markedly different from the deeper, throatier Viper. The soundtrack is also very well done. Hot Pursuit features about a dozen licensed songs that range from the likes of Bush to Uncle Kracker. As eclectic a collection as this is, the songs in the game all have a hard edge to them, and they complement Hot Pursuit II's fast pace nicely. Interestingly, in races that involve cops, the songs that are played in the background are strictly instrumental versions of the originals, so as not to interfere with the chatter of the cops, who sound like they stepped right out of Smokey & the Bandit.   Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II is easily one of the best games in the series. Its great use of graphics and sound add to the game's tight controls, wide selection of cars and tracks, and numerous racing events. It even marks the return of ""the pack,"" a multiplayer mode that lets you and a buddy race against six other computer-controlled cars and that's easily the favorite among fans of this series. Hot Pursuit II lives up to and exceeds the standards set by previous Need for Speed games, and anyone looking for a really fast, good-looking, and wholly satisfying arcade-style racer should buy this game.



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1121,Capitalism II ,8.5," Once competition picks up against the aggressive AI, Capitalism II shows its colors as a great strategy game. Also, as if to help your own bottom line, the game's a ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/8/9/8/4039-15898.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/capitalism-ii-review/1900-2833883/,pos,"
Since the business world is as cutthroat and lucrative as it is, it's no surprise that it makes for great game material. But while some might think that all such games must have ""Tycoon"" somewhere in the title, Capitalism II sets its sights higher. If you play your cards right in Capitalism II and establish a globe-spanning corporation, it's not about wealth, but megawealth--counted in billions. The scale of this game is much more ambitious than that of other Tycoon games or business sims, providing a world where you can control everything from mining operations and media outlets to the manufacturing and retail of around 60 diverse products. This complexity means the game requires quite some effort to learn, but once competition picks up against the aggressive AI, Capitalism II shows its colors as a great strategy game. Also, as if to help your own bottom line, the game's a real bargain at $20.   Capitalism II is a substantial improvement on its predecessor.  At the heart of Capitalism II is a sophisticated game design that's been expanded and refined since the original version of Capitalism was released in 1995. Both Capitalism games were designed by Trevor Chan, who is also the creator of the Seven Kingdoms games, which innovatively combine real-time strategy combat with Civilization-style empire building. The core of Capitalism is straightforward: The object is to create businesses that buy, produce, or sell products and reinvest the profits to boost revenue and to diversify into new regions and products. Businesses are as customizable as you might hope. You don't need to devote one whole store to aspirin and another to cough syrup--there's a manageable four product slots you can allocate. Each business is made up of nine building blocks, such as crop growing, manufacturing, purchasing, sales, and advertising, but there are hundreds of easily searchable premade templates, so a working furniture factory is only a few clicks away.   Once you have some basic businesses turning a profit, the game really opens up. While there are usually a few decent retail goods available for import from nearby seaports, you'll soon have to move into manufacturing to keep your corporation growing. And to get the raw materials for your factories, you'll often have to get into farming, mining, or lumber. Even though it can take a lot of capital--whether from cash, loans, or a stock offering--to build this sort of infrastructure, there are ways of starting small. Over time, the key to massive success in the game is vertical integration--owning every part of the food chain from oil fields and plastic plants to toy factories, stores, and even the TV stations where you advertise.  The game offers a much broader scope than most other business sims.  Capitalism II adds new depth, as well as a more accessible presentation, to the original game. The first campaign is entirely devoted to tutorial scenarios that progressively walk you through the game's key mechanics and then provide an open-ended testing ground with a relatively simple goal. For those who have completed the tutorial and at least tried an open-ended random game, there's a second group of five scenarios that quickly ramps up the challenge. The game's interface has seen a number of improvements, including a much better menu system for finding products, automatic relinking of products to new suppliers, and more comprehensive automation for businesses that you can hand over to a well-paid chief operating officer. However, the interface is sorely lacking keyboard shortcuts--in fact, it's lacking any useful keyboard control. With so many lists and menus to scroll through, it would have been fast and helpful to be able to at least use the standard arrow and ""page up"" and ""page down"" keys. While the game may look like Quicken at times, it's not as user-friendly as real business applications have become.The game's presentation is simple but effective.  While some of the game's mechanics are repetitive unless you hire a COO to do your dirty work, there's plenty of competitive drama to keep things from just being work. A real-time stock market not only offers additional possibilities for wealth but also allows for hostile takeover bids and other financial shenanigans. A new complex economy option also monitors the temperature of regional economies, which can dynamically swing from boom to bust. With some luck, it's possible to build or buy apartments and commercial office real estate during a downturn and offload them later when the market is hot. However, the game is ultimately about the traditional economic mainstays of retailing and manufacturing, and here it's variably meek or aggressive AI that makes things particularly interesting. In the more challenging scenarios, you'll be constantly looking for profitable niches that aren't already saturated with competition. With more than 60 products in the game, there's more than enough room to explore different options and strategies, but don't be surprised if at the most aggressive settings, the computer doesn't leave you alone in profitable markets for long.   Even at the lower levels of difficulty, there's some challenge to be found just in making businesses profitable. It always takes money to make money, and it can take some tweaking to the selling price or branding strategy to build up sufficient demand for a product. What makes Capitalism II so deep and satisfying over time in its modeling of traditional industries is that no two products are alike, thanks to a few key statistics that fundamentally affect what buyers look for in each category. For example, selling cola is little more than fancy marketing for sugar water, so naturally, brand is everything. But with a product like bread, brand is much less important than the other two considerations: price and quality. This combination of scope and specificity is what distinguishes Capitalism II from The Corporate Machine, another recent game with a much more abstract take on competitive business.  An aggressive computer opponent makes for great competition.  On the technical side, Capitalism II's production values don't match its gameplay. The isometric city graphics convey the sense of a bustling economy, and the amount of traffic on the streets and people on the sidewalks are a meaningful indication of prime locations. Except in the new and rather superfluous in-store views, the overall effect is that of function over form, but you might appreciate that when browsing through the numerous screens of statistics. Capitalism II does add multiplayer capabilities for up to seven players, including a player-matching service through Ubi.com and save-game feature; plus, with limited goals, the game's real-time mechanics are quick enough for competitive play. However, even over a LAN, the interface was noticeably sluggish during multiplayer matches, and it's possible for any player to alter the speed setting at any time, which is a potential point of abuse.   There's a lot of micromanagement to Capitalism II, but, like with good ""Tycoon"" games, that effort earns you addictive hours at the helm of a successful enterprise and vast virtual fortunes. The game has a steep learning curve, but there are real-world lessons to take away from it. The original Capitalism game saw some success among educators for its realistic yet manageable simulation of traditional corporations. If you have a basic idea about what makes businesses work, a thirst for competition, and some patience to learn the ropes, Capitalism II has a lot to offer.
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1122,S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl ,8.5," It's got some quirks, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. delivers a dynamic and impressive first-person gameplay experience you won't soon forget.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/7/4/1/2214741-stalker___pc.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/stalker-shadow-of-chernobyl-review/1900-6167650/,pos,"
  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl has always been an overly ambitious game, which is probably why it has arrived several years later than originally expected. The game's goal is to create a virtual world with an ecology all its own and then place you in the middle of it. That's something that's rarely been attempted, particularly in a first-person game. However, to the credit of THQ and Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an impressive accomplishment. This first-person survival game is at times amazing and engrossing and on par with such classics as Deus Ex and System Shock.    S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has finally arrived, and it delivers an impressively immersive and open-ended first-person experience.   This is another first-person game that features a silent and mysterious protagonist, much like Half-Life's Gordon Freeman. You play as the Marked One, a heavily armed scavenger suffering from amnesia and stuck inside the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Yes, the same nuclear plant that exploded in 1986 and, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s fiction, again in 1989, creating a radioactive hotspot brimming with mutants, heavily armed rival factions, and all sorts of weird, paranormal activity. Your task: Figure out who you are and what's going on at the core of the zone.    At its heart, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a first-person survival game that blends action with role-playing. This isn't a linear game, like Half-Life or Call of Duty, where you basically are restricted to a straight path and are taken for a tightly controlled and scripted ride. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s huge environments and open-ended gameplay make it more like a role-playing game, as you can go where you want and do what you want if you're willing to live with the consequences. However, you don't have to worry about traditional role-playing attributes such as strength or intelligence, or accumulating skills and abilities. Instead, all you have to worry about is your skill with a rifle and scavenging enough weapons, ammunition, and med kits from fallen enemies to keep going.    Slowly but steadily, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. introduces you to the bizarre world of the zone, a place where the fabric of reality is being ripped apart. Strange energy anomalies are everywhere, and wander into one at your own hazard. These anomalies produce rare and valuable artifacts that can be collected and traded, or even equipped, as they can confer special abilities. Perhaps the most useful ones enhance your endurance, letting you run for far longer than normal, which is a particularly valuable ability to have when traversing the huge area of the zone. And, of course, danger lurks everywhere in the form of enemies that are both human and not-quite human, as well as from animals.     To battle them, you'll have a large arsenal of weapons to eventually choose from, mainly in the form of assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. features one of the best ballistics models ever seen in a game, and as a result, firefights feel authentic as you try and hit someone with what can be a wildly inaccurate rifle. The name of the game is using cover effectively and firing short, accurate bursts, particularly at the targets' heads. After a battle, you can loot the dead for weapons and ammunition, and one of the nice touches in the game is that you can't run around with an arsenal of 9 or 10 different weapons. Instead, the inventory system restricts what you can carry mainly by weight, and most weapons use a different type of ammo, which means that you've got to be judicious in selecting what you take with you. There's simply no way you can haul around three or four different weapons, their ammunition, and everything else that you need to survive in the zone. This includes health packs, bandages, radiation medication (vodka will also do in a pinch), and even food. You've got to eat regularly in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and if you go too long without food, hunger warning signs appear.   The inventory system is like that in a role-playing game, and you'll spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to carry with you.   The game's artificial intelligence is impressive, both in and out of combat. In combat, enemies are cunning when given enough room to move around. Human enemies hunt you intelligently, using cover and the terrain to their advantage. Meanwhile, creatures such as packs of mutant dogs behave like you'd expect wild animals to. They attack when they feel they have the advantage but flee if given a painful lesson. It's this kind of behavior that makes the zone feel alive, with these different factions and animals all trying to go about their daily tasks. The AI does take a hit when placed in tight interiors, though, as the lack of maneuvering options makes it turn a bit predictable, but you'll likely appreciate this fact early in the game, as hiding inside a building and picking off the grunts as they come through the doorway is the only way that you'll survive some of the early battles.    There are all sorts of human characters in the game, from lone stalkers out on their own to various factions that you can ally with or battle. Then there are the mutants, from the strange animals that inhabit the zone to the more deadly kind of mutated humanoid, such as the little guy who can mess with your mind to the creepy crawling dudes who lunge at you from out of nowhere. Toss in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s version of zombies and poltergeists, and you've got a more-than-interesting array of potential friends and foes. There are some large-scale battles that will find you fighting alongside teammates, and afterward you'll watch as AI friendlies saunter up to the wounded writhing on the ground, say something nasty in Russian or Ukrainian, and then shoot them in the head.    S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s main storyline will take maybe 10 hours to get through if you just pursue it, but there are also plenty of side quests that can consume hours, as well as sheer hours spent on exploration. The side quests are very optional, though, as they usually end with a cash reward, and cash is the one thing that you'll not face a shortage of. There's just nothing worth buying from the vendors in the zone that you already can't get for free with a little exploration.   The PDA keeps you up to date with all of your quests, though the quest system itself is a bit broken at times.   Much of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s story is a bit hard to figure out, thanks to the fact that it's delivered mainly through short journal entries, cryptic cinematic cutscenes, and hard-to-understand Ukrainian and Russian accents. There are also multiple endings, with some that end in failure depending on the choices that you make in the game, so there's plenty of replayability here. However, the quest system itself is a bit broken, as some side quests can't be resolved or they reset after you've accomplished them. We also encountered issues while running the game under Windows Vista, from quick loads not working to the game becoming unstable and crashing. THQ and GSC Game World are working to deliver a patch for some of these issues, but it's a pity that the game shipped with them. Considering that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was already years overdue, another month or two in testing seems rather paltry, especially to provide support for Windows Vista.    As innovative and revolutionary as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s single-player game is, its multiplayer component is surprisingly old fashioned and standard. Multiplayer features the traditional modes, such as deathmatch, team deathmatch, and artifact hunt (basically capture the flag), and the goal is to run around and get as many kills as possible. The action is fast, brutal, and short, and while the multiplayer features the same impressive ballistics modeling of the single-player game, it still feels way too easy to get picked off over and over again by a distant sniper. Multiplayer does have an economy of sorts, as you gain cash for your kills, which you can use when you respawn to purchase different weapons, ammunition, and equipment, but for the most part, there's nothing particularly new here.    Though already dated by a few years, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. still looks good, and its visuals are on par with Half-Life 2. What the game lacks in modern-day graphical pizzazz, it makes up for with intricate detail and immersive atmosphere. There's something to be said for the game's environments, which are infused with a ton of character and detail. It feels like the postapocalyptic landscape it's supposed to be. The countryside of the zone feels rugged and wild, with abandoned towns and compounds littering the landscape. Each locale has its own particular feel to it, so you never feel like the world was made with cookie-cutter building templates. The sense of exploration is marvelous, and it's the little details that make the difference. While you won't need a high-end system to play the game, the sheer size and scope of the world are such that it really helps the frame rate if you do.    The lighting and particle effects are particularly well done. For instance, battles can occur in raging storms, with flashes of lightning briefly illuminating the battlefield. The game's flashlight system also deserves a heaping of praise. The flashlight in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. cuts through the darkness with a realism that's beautiful to behold. It's your most important friend in the dark, but at the same time, it also betrays you, since enemies can see the light from your beam long before you can actually see them. And the flashlight doesn't suffer from the 30-second-battery-life contrivance found in most shooters. How refreshing.   The graphics engine lack the pizzazz of the latest games, but it still delivers a highly detailed world to explore.   The audio in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. also does an excellent job of immersing you in this world. When you're outside in the zone, the rustling of the wind in the grass, the cry of animals in the distance, and the ominous tick of your Geiger counter are ever present. When you're inside, there's nothing like the howl of a nearby mutant to raise your hackles. Weapon and mechanical sounds are also spot-on, and the crack of assault rifles in the distance lets you know that trouble's ahead. The voice acting is a bit hard to understand, but since the game is set in the Ukraine, that's to be expected. Even the game's broken English (both spoken and written) is a bit charming in this regard.    In spite of its small quirks and bugs, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is definitely a game that deserves to be played. For first-person shooter fans looking for the next big thing in the genre, it's difficult not to be impressed by the game's unique and evolving world. Meanwhile, fans of role-playing games will appreciate the open-ended nature of the gameplay and being able to explore different paths through the zone. This is a bleak game, but in a good way, as it captures its postapocalyptic setting perfectly. It's also an excellent combination of combat, horror, and exploration.   


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1123,Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced ,8.5," The ability to play as Chain, Buchu, Star, Blues, and the rest of the Yie Ar Kung-Fu gang is enough on its own to make this cart a must-have.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/1/5/9/4125-16159.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/konami-collectors-series-arcade-advanced-review/1900-2858992/,pos,"
Konami is following in the footsteps of companies like Midway and Namco with this portable release of old arcade classics. Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced features six games from Konami's '80s lineup: Frogger, Gyruss, Time Pilot, Rush'n Attack, Scramble, and Yie Ar Kung-Fu. The GBA translations of these games are, for the most part, accurate, and all of them play incredibly well. Konami has also taken a few extra steps and added link cable multiplayer to a few of the games--most notably Yie Ar Kung-Fu, which becomes a full-fledged fighting game when linked up, giving you a full roster of characters to choose from instead of forcing you to play as Oolong.   The graphics and sound may be a bit drab by today's standards, but they faithfully duplicate the audio and video of the original games with only a few exceptions. The change that sticks out the most is that almost all the music in Frogger has been changed for some inexplicable reason. Additionally, the speech in Yie Ar Kung-Fu is a little more muffled than that of its arcade counterpart. But regardless of these minor issues, there isn't a weak game in the group, and the addition of single-cart multiplayer makes it an even better value. The ability to play as Chain, Buchu, Star, Blues, and the rest of the Yie Ar Kung-Fu gang is enough on its own to make this cart a must-have.  
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1124,Serious Sam ,8.5," The Xbox version retains the original games' off-the-chart intensity levels, and Serious Sam--which was always an arcade game at heart--feels right at home on Microsoft's powerful console.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/6/9/7/2208697-box_ssxbox.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/serious-sam-review/1900-2897652/,pos,"
Serious Sam is a textbook case of ""don't knock it until you try it."" The original version of Serious Sam was quietly released for the PC last year, and at a budget price to boot. It looked like some mindless, throwaway shooter on first impression, but the game's good-natured humor, distinctive style, and insanely fast-paced, over-the-top, and nonstop action made it stand out from the budget-priced and major first-person shooters on the market. It featured a great cooperative play mode, a surprisingly impressive 3D engine, and by far the biggest battles of any game in its category, thanks to the engine's ability to throw a seemingly limitless number of monsters at you at any given point. It was also a game that anybody could enjoy, and for all these reasons, GameSpot's PC side bestowed on Serious Sam: The First Encounter its highest honor: Game of the Year. A follow-up, the aptly named Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, was released earlier this year, and it somehow managed to be even better, with a greater variety of far more creative levels. Now Xbox owners get to experience both games joined at the hip, and with a new coat of paint and a few other twists for good measure. More importantly, though, the Xbox version retains the original games' off-the-chart intensity levels, and Serious Sam--which was always an arcade game at heart--feels right at home on Microsoft's powerful console.  Serious Sam on the Xbox combines both Serious Sam games for the PC into one package.  Serious Sam plays much like any other recent shooter, but faster. An auto-aim feature in the Xbox version offsets the lack of precision associated with the analog aiming scheme, and if you've played Halo, then you know what that's like. Of course, Serious Sam has a completely different style--there's some real depth lurking just beneath the game's surface, but it's much more lighthearted and frenetic than Halo. Serious Sam expects you to be constantly prepared to face off against dozens of different types of monsters, many of which require different types of tactics to defeat. Fortunately, each weapon in your arsenal of more than a dozen is well balanced and useful, whether against certain types of foes or in certain situations. You'll use a majority of your weapons during each level. Some battles seem to stretch on indefinitely, never letting up, only escalating and never giving you the opportunity to catch your breath. Even if you do know what's in store around the next corner, defeating wave after wave of monsters is never an easy task, as your reflexes, your precision, and your endurance will constantly be put to the test. You'll also need to keep your ears open, as each enemy makes distinctive noises, and you'll often hear your foes before you see them. Time seems to stand still during some of the more hectic battles--it'll seem like you're fighting an endless onslaught of foes, burning up all your ammo for all your weapons in the process. Suddenly it's over, and you'll hear yourself exhale as though you were holding your breath for all those minutes. The action in Serious Sam is the highlight of the game. Calling it mindless is selling it way too short.  It plays like a shooter, but it's much more intense than most.  Serious Sam's proprietary 3D engine renders large, wide-open spaces and indoor environments effectively. Although the level architecture in Serious Sam is fairly basic--you'll quickly lose track of how many wide-open arenas you've fought through--such settings are perfect for the game's large-scale confrontations. In between skirmishes, when you do get a chance to admire your surroundings, you'll notice some of the details in the 3D engine. All the environments in the game are drawn using clear, colorful textures that look good even when you get right up close to them. Some decent lighting effects make the levels more true to life. The engine also has a few unique effects, such as pools of water that reflect shimmering light onto the walls nearby. The sheer size of the levels is pretty impressive. Sam runs very quickly, but you'll still feel like you're moving quite a distance to get from one end of a level to the other. And what with hundreds of bad guys standing between you and the exit, once you finally get to the end of the level, you'll feel a real sense of accomplishment.   The great number of enemies is also possible only because of the engine used to make the game. The monsters in Serious Sam aren't the most detailed in the genre, but they're memorable and they look fairly good and are animated smoothly. It practically goes without saying that they bleed like crazy when you shoot them (though options are available to turn the blood off or change the color to green or ""hippie,"" where monsters bleed flowers and confetti). It's great that the game can throw dozens upon dozens of them at you at a time, though you'll see the frame rate take a hit when the action really heats up. At any rate, since many of these monsters are fast, accurate, and powerful, having to take on so many of them at once is an experience that you won't soon forget. Serious Sam looks good, and its use of sound is effective, though the sounds themselves are fairly terse. Almost all your weapons, from your basic six-shooters on up through double-barreled shotguns, chainguns, and rocket launchers, sound about as mean as they look. You'll almost immediately learn to identify each of your enemies by the distinctive sound it makes. Oftentimes--as with the screaming beheaded kamikazes that blow themselves up when they get close enough to you--you'll need to listen carefully to gauge not just how close your enemies are, but where they're coming from. A 5.1 audio setup helps here. The music in Serious Sam is chock-full of bass riffs that play steadily in the background, and the soundtrack picks up when you're in combat and lets off when you aren't fighting, though the transitions aren't very smooth. There are a good number of different music tracks, and they're actually quite catchy and suitably maintain the fast-paced feel of the game.  Some stages literally have more than a thousand enemies in them.  The Xbox version also includes a number of new noninteractive cutscenes that play between missions, and these are often as silly and funny as the rest of the game. The best part is that Sam is always shown walking really casually, like he's at a shopping mall rather than in middle of a battlefield. For good measure, the game is loaded with unique secrets. There are tons of them in most every level, and discovering them yields absurd, funny, and always rewarding results. You'll see the games' inspired sense of humor not just in the secrets, but also in some of Sam's genuinely funny, amusingly self-conscious one-liners. ""I hate running backwards,"" he exclaims on more than one occasion as you're desperately trying to fend off a tidal wave of monsters while fleeing for dear life.   The levels in Serious Sam are essentially there to let you engage in its countless battles against ridiculous odds. For the most part, you'll always know exactly where to go next, while retreating and other such tactical considerations generally aren't possible, since you usually must kill all your enemies in the area before the next part of the level even opens up. The first series of levels, all of which take place in Egypt, aren't as interesting as the later ones. They're usually balanced such that once you finish off a horde of bad guys, you'll come across an area where you can pick up ammo and health power-ups to replenish your dwindling reserves of either one. The game also uses a certain gimmick over and over in its level design early on: Pretty much whenever you see a bunch of health and ammo lying around, you're going to need it, because grabbing power-ups usually triggers an onslaught of monsters to head your way. Though this can become very predictable in itself, it never gets old thanks to the amount of variety in the encounters and because the fighting is just so much fun.    After you're through with all the Egyptian stuff from The First Encounter, you'll move on to the superior Second Encounter levels, which take place in three distinct environments: Mesoamerica, ancient Babylon, and medieval Eastern Europe. These have a lot of great, unusual sequences in them. In one scene, a bridge crumbles beneath your feet and you start bouncing uncontrollably on an elastic floor. Sure enough, the room fills with monsters, including those ubiquitous beheaded kamikazes. As you're spraying the whole room with your flamethrower, bouncing around on a giant trampoline along with countless monsters, and hearing the cacophony of the kamikazes' screams pitching higher and lower due to the Doppler effect, you'll be downright stupefied. It's a pure sensory overload and pure fun, and every Second Encounter level is rife with such sequences. It's even better on the higher difficulty settings, which somehow manage to make the odds even less favorable and will test the mettle of even the most experienced players. As you play, you'll be struck by the sense that the designers must have really had a lot of fun making the game.  Harder difficulty levels and co-op play give the game's lengthy campaign some replay value.  As if all this weren't enough, Serious Sam also features a solid multiplayer mode. There's support for two-player cooperative play through the game's lengthy 36-mission campaign, either via a split screen or system link. Four-player deathmatch is also available, though Serious Sam really shines in its co-op mode, since it's nice to have a helping hand against all those monsters. The game offers an amusing selection of character models to choose from for multiplayer, many of which are Serious Sam rejects: guys like Pirate Pete, Groovy Gregory, Santa Sam, and so on. A number of female player characters are also available, including Serious Sammy. Yeah, it's his long-lost sister. It's a bit of a shame that Serious Sam doesn't have Xbox Live support, though the available multiplayer options are still good.   Sure, it's not a budget game like its predecessors, but Serious Sam for the Xbox is easily worth its full retail price and will last you longer than most other action games. Despite a misleading M rating, the game's flexible difficulty and gore options and terrific action make it a perfect choice for anyone who likes first-person shooters or appreciates the relentless pace of classic arcade games.
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1125,Flanker 2.5 ,8.5," There is no other contemporary jet sim as complete, polished, and faithful to its subject matter as Flanker 2.5.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/6/7/3/4261-16673.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/flanker-25-review/1900-2863737/,pos,"
The Flanker series of sims has been a darling of the hard-core set since it was first released back in 1995. Renowned for its high-fidelity flight model, uncompromising avionics, and simple, clean graphics, it quickly built up a devoted fan base. Many of these fans soon went to work and made up for its shortcomings, designing missions and even creating a random mission generator. 1999's Flanker 2 upgraded the graphics considerably and added a lot of new features.  A ""Top Gunski"" taking the highway to the danger zone.  Along comes Flanker 2.5, which is actually more of an update from Russian developers Eagle Dynamics than an addition. If you already have Flanker 2, you can download the 43MB patch (or a slightly larger one if you use a Voodoo graphics card). But if you don't have Flanker 2, this is the perfect time to buy it--it's now packaged with the patch as Flanker 2.5, a $10 budget title. The budget title doesn't include any printed documentation, but it does have a PDF file of the Flanker 2 manual and reference cards. Unfortunately, there's no documentation on the new additions to the game, which are mentioned only on a list in the readme file.   Perhaps the most significant addition is a set of new wingman commands. The original Flanker had no wingman interaction, and the sequel added only the most basic commands. But 2.5 adds a substantial menu of wingman orders that let you issue commands and coordinate attacks with your flight. There are broad orders like ""cover my six,"" as well as specific tactics like ""break left."" There are even commands to instruct your flight to turn off radar, allowing you to fly stealthier missions with your wingmen, a feature taken advantage of in some of the new scenarios designed specifically for this latest version. These interactions go a long way in making Flanker play like a game about coordinated modern air combat rather than the adventures of one pilot and his plane.   The patch also adds more robust naval AI, which lets ships move and even fight each other. This is the sort of feature that gives scenario designers more flexibility to create living combat environments, something that Flanker was always good at in the air. The seas coming to life as missiles arc up from ships to defend your carrier, attack an enemy fleet, or shoot down incoming aircraft is surely a sight to see.    Another new addition in Flanker 2.5 is aerial refueling, always a nightmare for simmers who can't quite master the fine art of carefully guiding a plane up to the nozzles dangling behind a tanker. As they'd expect, aerial refueling in Flanker 2.5 is no exception, requiring the steady hand of a surgeon. However, considering that the scenarios all take place in the fairly small arena of the Crimean peninsula, aerial refueling is rarely necessary, given the Flanker's ample fuel tanks. The new MiG-29 Fulcrum, which has been added as a flyable aircraft in Flanker 2.5, has smaller tanks, so it's more likely to avail itself of the new aerial refueling feature. The Fulcrum is a great addition, since it is not as sophisticated as the Flanker and has its own retro charm. Unfortunately, Flanker 2.5 doesn't have many MiG-29 missions. Consider this an open invitation to all Flanker scenario designers.   Another substantial addition is the option to turn down missile effectiveness before beginning a scenario. One of Flanker's most frustrating nods to realism was the ruthless efficiency of antiaircraft missiles. They are as deadly as they are in the real world, and there is no easy way to dodge them. You get a warning when an AA missile is launched, but unlike in many other sims, there's no way to track incoming missiles or tell how long you have before they hit you. While this is certainly realistic in an older Eastern bloc warhorse like the Su-27, the frustration of sudden one-hit kills can be discouraging. Flanker 2.5 still forces you to deal with the Su-27's limitations, but at least it lets you make enemy missiles more fallible.  The MiG-29 is Flanker's new kid on the block.  The game's 3D engine now boasts new explosion and smoke effects, which don't look much better than they used to. The sound effects have been boosted a bit to give them more punch. This is a subtle but nice improvement to Flanker 2's realistically muffled engine noise, which was often drowned out by whatever fans may have been humming away in your computer case. The padlock and external views have been made more powerful and flexible, and the interface has been tweaked, so there's less flipping around between HUD modes. Then there are some truly esoteric changes, like this one from the readme file: ""Aircraft maximum of linear acceleration has been limited, and the calculation of angular velocity by bank has been corrected."" Whatever that is, at least we know it's fixed. Finally, there's a big new campaign, ""The First Three Days,"" which is much more forgiving and dynamic than the original ""Hot Dogs and Borscht"" campaign from Flanker 2's original release.   What's most surprising about Flanker 2.5 is how well it has held up. In fact, there is no other contemporary jet sim as complete, polished, and faithful to its subject matter as Flanker 2.5, which is arguably the best contemporary jet sim, rivaled only by the patchwork fan-modded Falcon 4.0 and the slightly dated Jane's F-15. This is an amazing achievement for a sim going on almost three years old. It's a surprising coincidence that the definitive historical flight sim (1C:Maddox Games' IL-2 Sturmovik) and the definitive contemporary flight sim are named after Russian planes and were developed in Russia. It must be something in the water. But for whatever reason, flight sims aren't dead--as long as we keep getting gifts like these from Russia.
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1126,World Rally Championship ,8.5, Players of all skill levels will enjoy World Rally Championship for what it is: a fun racing game with just the right amount of realism.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/7/2/8/4276-16728.jpg,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/world-rally-championship-review/1900-2859390/,pos,"
The fact that the rally mode in Gran Turismo 3 has been the most compelling rally racing experience on the PlayStation 2 so far says something about the genre's popularity. The simple fact is that this king of extreme sports doesn't have the following in the US that it does elsewhere in the world. To be fair, though, the few rally games that are currently available for Sony's console haven't really done the sport any justice. Evolution Studios' World Rally Championship, however, does. The game believably re-creates the thrill of speeding over impossibly rough terrain, and while an exceptional level of driving talent is required to successfully negotiate the game's many turns, bumps, and dips, players of all skill levels will enjoy World Rally Championship for what it is: a fun racing game with just the right amount of realism.  Like many realistic racing games, World Rally Championship is officially licensed by the FIA, the sport's governing body, which allows the game to boast actual teams, drivers, cars, and racing events from last year's world rally season. The entire game largely revolves around a career mode that re-creates an entire season of rally racing. Here, you'll pick from seven cars from real-world manufacturers like Peugeot, Ford, Subaru, Citroen, and Mitsubishi and race throughout the entire season with that car. You'll play as one of several famous drivers like Mitsubishi's Tommi Makinen or Ford's Carlos Sainz, and you'll be guided through each turn and bump by that driver's real-world navigator, who'll tell you how sharp and how far away the next turn is and warn you of any impending adverse road conditions. While a selection of seven cars might pale in comparison to the number of vehicles in other driving games, every car in the game is one that rally fans will instantly recognize, and any differences in performance between them are included to give the cars character, not handicaps.  This career mode spans 14 individual and completely unique rally events, each of which is split up into five segments, which means that the game has a whopping total of 70 tracks. These events span the globe, including rallies in New Zealand, Cyprus, Corsica, Italy, Finland, Sweden, and other exotic global locales. There are also five hidden bonus tracks that you can unlock by finishing the game on its hardest setting. Just like the real thing, you race against the clock, not other drivers, so you'll never actually see your competitors on the same track as you. Instead, you're timed on each segment, and at the end of each event, the quickest driver is crowned the winner and given 10 points for placing first. The driver with the most points at the end of the 14 rallies walks away with the championship. Interestingly, the game also tracks manufacturer points, so even if you don't end up being the overall winner, other teams from your car's manufacturer might have scored enough points to earn the constructer's cup. Of course, that also means that skillful drivers have the opportunity to post a perfect victory: a personal championship and a manufacturer championship. The sheer number of races in the game's career mode reflects the attention to detail that you'll find in other aspects of World Rally Championship. The game's 70 racing events all take place during different times of day, they'll have varying weather, and they'll consist of courses made of asphalt, gravel, or even snow. What's more, all these courses stay true to the characteristics of their real-world counterparts, and they never get repetitive. Cyprus' many turns, rocky roads, and elevation changes make it a particularly slow race, while Finland's long dirt tracks make for extremely fast (and harrowing) drives. You'll have to employ all your driving skills to navigate some of these areas, as most of the courses require you to take the best driving line throughout every turn in order to finish with the quickest time.  Before entering any race, you're allowed to perform a shakedown to get a better feel for the course. These trial runs become handy once you start fiddling around with your car performance elements. The game lets you modify your gear ratio, brake strength, steering speed, tire compound, and suspension stiffness, and any change you make results in a tangible difference in performance on the track. Some of these changes can be severely detrimental to the way your car behaves, though. For instance, choosing a stiff suspension setup on unpaved roads will slow you down significantly. Likewise, choosing a soft setup on asphalt will hinder your steering ability noticeably.Rally racing can be hell on your car, and it shows in World Rally Championship. At the end of each race, your car will be caked with the dirt, snow, and other types of grime that gradually coat your paintjob throughout each racing segment. You'll also notice busted headlights, bent bumpers, and even a cracked windshield or two if you're too careless. And although most of these damage effects are purely cosmetic, the game does penalize you for being overly rough with your car. Specifically, your car has five different elements--steering column, axle, transmission, radiator, and oil pan--that are susceptible to damage and will affect your car's handling characteristics if damaged. While there are five damage indicator icons that'll light up when you've damaged your vehicle, physical abuse of your car is also denoted by wobbly wheels, small clouds of steam, and even black smoke from your engine compartment. A car that is damaged badly enough will even make horrible grinding noises as it struggles to finish the current race. The game has five different perspectives--two in-car views, two first-person views, and a third-person view--so choosing the one that fits your driving style best should help you keep your car in one piece. The rest of the visuals are on par with what you'd expect from a PlayStation 2 game, though many of the environments look especially good. Almost all the courses' clipping horizon is drawn far off in the distance, and an interesting technique that brings distant objects into focus is used in place of the more traditional fade-in method. Most notable about the courses is how expansive they are. Though you're not allowed to stray beyond the course's main road, you can easily make out how vast your surroundings are. Some of the roads hug the edges of cliffs that fall into the Mediterranean, while others crest mountains, letting you see for miles in every direction. The game's replay angles really give you a good sense of just how open the environments of World Rally Championship are. However, it should be mentioned that one of the rally events--Finland--looks markedly out of place when compared with the other 13 races. The courses in Finland are made up of a road that has a flat tree-textured wall on either side of it, and it looks bad enough to jar you out of the game. It's almost as if that particular rally event wasn't designed for World Rally Championship at all. All the remaining courses look spectacular, however, and the car models look just like the real-world pieces of aluminum and plastic they represent. The game has a two-player multiplayer mode, though it leaves something to be desired. There are only 10 tracks to race on, half of which are circuit-based. What's more, you don't actually race against each other--you technically race against the clock simultaneously. That is, you'll be racing ghost cars. You can't collide with each other, and the cars themselves are just white silhouettes. Still, there is a large enough variety of single-player tracks in the game that you'll never be left wanting--besides, rally racing isn't about bumper-to-bumper driving. The sound effects are somewhat muted, but otherwise perfectly acceptable. Each car's engine noise and exhaust note sounds completely unique, and you can easily tell what kind of surface you're driving on simply by listening to things like the loud squeal of tires on asphalt or the rattle of thousands of pieces of gravel bouncing around the wheel well. For the most part, the music that plays during replays and the options menus is passable, save for an upbeat track from the latest New Order album. It's interesting to note that this game has already been released in Europe, and it almost didn't make it to our shores because of a publishing decision by Sony. Thankfully, Bam Entertainment picked up World Rally Championship's publishing rights in North America, which means that US fans of the sport won't have to miss out on this exceptional rally game--one that has no equal on the PlayStation 2.
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1127,FirePower for Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3 ,8.5," FirePower is what Combat Flight Simulator 3 should have been in the first place, and it is a must-have expansion for current or potential owners of that sim.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/6/7/4/4/4280-16744.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/firepower-for-microsoft-combat-flight-simulator-3-/1900-6096474/,pos,"
 Some add-ons bolt new features onto games, and others make good games better, but the rarest mod is one that transforms a decent title into something truly outstanding. FirePower is what Combat Flight Simulator 3 should have been in the first place, and it is a must-have expansion for current or potential owners of that sim.  Berlin gets a taste of nuclear justice.  FirePower makes so many changes to CFS3 that it's difficult to know where to begin, but the included FirePower Series Certified Aircraft are arguably the best part of the package. The development team interviewed more than two dozen WWII vets who actually flew and fought in the aircraft of the period to get a sense of each plane's unique characteristics that goes way beyond raw stats. The end result is that the ""certified"" planes fly the way they are described in pilot biographies instead of ""by the book,"" and each has a distinct personality. This is most evident in their stall behavior, which is modeled much better than stalls in IL-2.  There is a good mix of new planes to wring out, and the bombers are the best of the bunch. Although they were not used in the European theater, flyable B-29As are included and are great for what-if scenarios. B-17F and B-17Gs also are included, and all of the stations on these new American bombers are modeled in meticulous detail.  Brit aficionados get the Lancaster bomber and English variants of P-40N and P-40F fighters, and there's even a French D.520 that's a hoot to fly, but German pilots get most of the new toys. These include two versions of the Do 217 night fighter, four versions of the versatile Me 410 fighter/bomber, two Ta152 high-altitude interceptors, two Ta154 all-wood fighter/bombers, and that's just the beginning. There are also jet and rocket aircraft like the Ar234-B bomber, the He162A-2 fighter, and the swept-wing Ta183 that was the precursor to fighters from the Korean War era. The oddest additions are the Me 334, which fuses a tailless pusher-prop fuselage with the wings of an Me 163, and the Ho 228 V5, a supersonic version of the Go 229 flying wing jet fighter. All of the new planes look fantastic inside and out, especially when light reflects realistically off the virtual cockpits.  All of the new aircraft are just window dressing unless you have something to do with them, and FirePower doesn't slack off in this regard. A variety of instant-action missions are included that use the new planes, and additional missions are hosted at fan sites throughout the Internet, but the real highlight is a 25-mission re-creation of the B17-F Memphis Belle's tour of duty. You get to participate in all of the daylight bombing raids that this famous real-life aircraft (and her crew) completed, and once you finish the campaign you'll understand how thankful the crew must have been to return to the US after that last mission to participate in a War Bond drive.  Flak bursts illuminate the virtual cockpits to create a dramatic light show at night.  FirePower definitely lives up to its name, as nuclear bombs top the long list of weapons additions and enhancements. These are the real deal--Fat Man and Little Boy are both selectable as payloads, and dropping one results in an enormous mushroom cloud and an absolutely devastated landscape. Unless you're careful with the release, shockwaves reach up to flip your heavy B-29 like it's being rattled around in God's own dice cup. Players who want to get serious about becoming death incarnate without going nuclear can instead load up a specialized Lancaster with a Grand Slam bomb that weighs in at 22,000 pounds--7,000 pounds heavier than the largest ""daisy-cutter"" bunker-busters used today.   The game's graphics--particularly the special effects--are overhauled completely. The first thing any FirePower player should do is load up a night bombing attack over a target that is heavily defended by antiaircraft guns. The fiery bursts of flak that pop in seemingly random patterns around the plane as you approach the target illuminate the interior of the aircraft and make for a harrowing experience. Explosions from dropped bombs are spectacular, and manning a gun turret and watching tracers arc all across the night sky as bright engine fires from stricken wingmen begin to appear all around you is downright eerie. Bombs and other explosives cause their targets to smoke and burn, making it easy to line up for a second pass or just to determine where weapons are hitting. This is important, because the new damage model means smaller munitions must strike several times before destroying armored targets. Air combat is much deadlier than in the standard game, and engines (especially jets and water-cooled inline engines) are particularly vulnerable to damage. Sound effects are pumped up a bit, but the graphical enhancements are definitely more noticeable.  That fire truck has its work cut out for it.  All of these sweeping changes and additions would be more than enough to justify the price of the add-on, but numerous little touches also are included that add much more depth to the sim. G view is a perfect example. One of the main differences between real and simulated flight is that pilots in the real world get constant G feedback to ease seat-of-the-pants flying. Sim pilots have to keep an eye on the amount of speed they are bleeding off, watch for blackout or redout effects, and waste time looking or listening for all sorts of other clues as to how many Gs they are pulling. G view provides at least a little more feedback by shifting the pilot's view slightly to visually depict G forces. If you pull a lot of positive Gs, the virtual cockpit appears to move upward slightly in your view as you sink into your virtual seat. If you relax pressure, your view becomes centered again. The movement is tied directly to Gs and not to speed or any other factor, so it is helpful in dogfights but virtually nonexistent (and therefore completely unobtrusive) during landings.  The appropriately named taxi view helps during takeoffs. Most WWII aircraft were long-snouted tail-draggers that completely obscured the pilot's view of the ground when the plane taxied to the runway, and most WWII sim pilots work around the problem by switching to an external view or making the cockpit invisible. Taxi view solves the dilemma by using the same technique WWII pilots used--opening the canopy and sticking your head out of the side of the cockpit. It's a feature that every other WWI and WWII sim should copy.  Virtual cockpits like this one for the B-17G are modeled in great detail.  The only downside to all this good stuff is the impact it has on the game's frame rate. The stock installation worked smoothly at 1600x1200 resolution on our test system, but we had to bump the resolution down to maintain the same frame rate during most FirePower missions. The improvements are worth it, and sim fans with powerful machines will definitely want to spring for this upgrade. IL-2 may reign as king of the skies, but thanks to FirePower, nothing can touch CFS3 in terms of ground-pounding thrills. 
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1128,Samurai Warriors: Katana ,4.5, Koei's Sengoku-era-inspired Samurai Warriors franchise hits a new low with this on-rails first-person action game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/6/6/2219366-box_samwarkat.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/samurai-warriors-katana-review/1900-6185600/,neg,"
  The Dynasty/Samurai Warriors franchise is about as polarizing as you get. Either you love the series' completely mindless hacking and slashing, or you hate it, not least of all because every entry is essentially the exact same game. This time, Koei decided to mix things up a bit by applying its tried-and-true formula of button-mashing, beat-'em-up action to the first-person on-rails shooter genre. Unfortunately, Samurai Warriors: Katana is as boring as it is uninspired, and includes some of the worst motion controls available on the Wii. Even diehard fans of the series will find it difficult to enjoy; this is a Samurai Warriors game in name only.    Like the other games in the series, Katana takes place in the Sengoku era of Japan's tumultuous history. Against the backdrop of several powerful factions warring to unite the entire nation, you will battle with or against the forces of legendary figures such as Nobunaga Oda, Yukimura Sanada, and Ieyasu Tokugawa. In a bizarre twist that is one of the most disappointing parts of the game, you don't actually get to play as one of these historical giants, but rather must assume the guise of a nameless warrior in their armies. In the rare opportunities that you get to see yourself, you're depicted as one of the random soldiers that you spend the entire game beating up by the hundreds.   As disappointing as this sounds, that is not Shredder.   Each of the less-than-historically canonical stories have overall themes that range from becoming a master ninja to collecting the most attractive women in Japan and then deciding which is the most beautiful (by beating up the ones who are not, of course). The individual missions you participate in include tasks such as breaking into a heavily fortified enemy stronghold by climbing a poorly placed staircase along the outside, or stopping enemy cavalry with your scoped, semiautomatic musket. As you can probably tell, Katana doesn't exactly take itself seriously. In many ways, the bizarre sense of humor that it exhibits--such as the always entertaining way in which bosses rag-doll backward in slow motion upon defeat--works in its favor, but it ultimately proves to be nothing more than a brief aside that tries to take your mind off of the insipid combat system and terrible controls.    As a first-person on-rails action game, combat in Katana is as cut and dry as can be. A targeting reticle appears onscreen wherever your Wii Remote is pointed, and whichever weapon you currently have equipped is poorly mapped to its position. Each of the four types of melee weapons you can use work fundamentally the same, in that you target the enemies you want to kill and mash the A button. However, the weapons do differ in the type and degree of gratuitous controller waggling required to use their charged and Musou attacks; by the time you complete the game, you will have thrust your controller at the screen more times than you would care to admit in polite conversation. Ranged weapons are more varied, in that each operates completely differently, but they suffer from the same motion-control issues as the melee weapons. At best, you'll simply point and hit the B trigger, and at worst, you'll fight to swing your controller horizontally at just the right speed while trying to prevent it from interpreting your motion as a vertical toss.    The most egregious use of motion controls is not in the way that you must engage in combat, but rather in the ridiculous minigames you're forced to participate in during missions. When riding a horse, you'll have to turn your Wii Remote on its side and tilt it left or right to steer while flailing the Nunchuk to gain speed. When dodging spear soldiers and spiked balls on an excruciatingly slow march uphill, you'll have to turn both controllers from side to side. Furthermore, in what is quickly shaping up to be a video-game-related crime against humanity, whenever you need to get anywhere fast you'll run by alternately swinging your controllers forward.    Throughout the game, your normal combat strategy amounts to knowing or guessing when to block. Boss battles are slightly more involving, but in the end amount to nothing more than a matter of memorizing attack patterns through painful trial and error. As if they recognized that these encounters were completely one-dimensional, developers Omega Force mixed things up a bit in select battles by introducing new abilities, such as the power to slow down time to reveal weak spots that wouldn't otherwise be seen. Unfortunately, normal boss fights seem watered-down and frankly incomplete after experiencing some of these skills, and it's unclear why they weren't implemented for the rest of the game, given that it would have gone a long way toward improving the otherwise-stale gameplay.    At the end of each mission, your performance is rated and you're awarded gold, which you can use to purchase role-playing-game-style ability upgrades and helpful disposable items, or to add special powers to your weapons. To earn even more money, you can redo story missions or participate in optional trials that assign you a rapid series of tasks. If you want a break from solo play, Katana offers local multiplayer support. Oddly enough, the multiplayer doesn't include co-op, and instead forces you to compete in a number of different split-screen modes.    For the entire length of Katana, you will battle wave after wave of entirely dispensable soldiers, samurai, and ninja with artificial intelligence so brain-dead that you'll begin to question exactly how it was that their real-life counterparts ever managed to accomplish anything. Despite the number of enemies onscreen at any given time, they will for the most part politely take turns trading blows with their friends, and in the few chances they get to surround you on the missions that are not on rails, they won't so much as raise a hand against you if you're not looking directly at them.   If you enjoy waggling your controller around randomly, this game is for you.   Katana certainly isn't the prettiest game on the block. Enemies are as generic-looking as ever, and after killing a hundred or so identical swordsmen, you begin to wonder where the cloning facilities are. Every castle, dungeon, and village looks similarly mass-produced, and exploring any of these drab locations induces an overt sense of déjà vu. The sound effects aren't much of an improvement. The repetitive sounds of every enemy scream, sword slash, and so on seem to blur into each other endlessly, and the brief amount of voice acting is half-hearted at best. On the other hand, Katana's music is a completely bizarre blend of traditional Japanese instruments and ambient electronica that entirely embraces the kitschy nature of the game--something that you wish that the rest of it did--and somehow seems wholly appropriate.    While Samurai Warriors: Katana is a departure from the assembly line of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, it provides such a vastly different and ultimately inferior experience that it ironically manages to alienate the fan base that made it so popular. Although it does offer a somewhat lengthy single-player campaign, with side missions and multiplayer, the poor motion controls and the complete lack of compelling gameplay make this a game best avoided.  
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1129,Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast ,4.5," If the inconsistent controls aren't enough to steer you away from this fifth-rate Mario Kart clone, the frustrating AI and total lack of personality probably will.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/1/9/2219219-box_dkbb.png,WII,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/donkey-kong-barrel-blast-review/1900-6180833/,neg,"
  Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast is one in a very long line of half-baked Mario Kart wannabes, and it's one that just so happens to be published by the Mario Kart maker itself, Nintendo. It's one thing when some other publisher apes the formula for the sake of cashing in, but Nintendo ought to know better than to release something so shoddy and genuinely unpleasant to play, especially considering Nintendo practically invented this genre. Barrel Blast certainly has a couple of amusing ideas, but the execution of this game is so patently flawed and devoid of personality that it's difficult to imagine anyone enjoying it for long.   Games about rocket-powered monkeys should be awesome. Why is this game not awesome?   In Barrel Blast, DK and his pals are actually riding around on weird rocket harnesses that just happen to be shaped like that bongo controller Nintendo put out for the GameCube a few years back. Shockingly enough, Barrel Blast was originally destined for the Cube, with bongo-flavored controls. Eventually production was moved to the Wii, and the bongo controls were scrapped in favor of a motion-oriented control scheme--and a rather lackluster one at that.    We're all in favor of the idea of rocket monkeys jetting around wacky tracks (and only slightly less in favor of the rocket lizards that make up the other half of the game's roster), but the gameplay pretty much wrecks any amusement one might derive from the game's concept. Essentially, all the characters move around the track on rails. They are always moving forward, and the way you make them accelerate is by drumming the Wii Remote and Nunchuk as fast as you can until you hit max speed. Max speed never feels especially fast, even when you're playing with the fastest characters, though over time you can collect roughly a bajilliondy bananas scattered about the tracks, which feed into a meter that gives you a meteoric speed burst that blows through just about everything in your path for a few seconds. Also, for some reason, busting through barrels rejuvenates your burst, so you can actually string together some combos for lengthier bursts.    Unfortunately, the speed burst is about the only entertaining gameplay element the game has on offer, and it never lasts for more than a few seconds. The rest of the time, you're putting around at this weirdly sluggish pace, periodically launching weapons like swarms of bees and exploding barrels at opponents, and just hoping not to run into anything. You do have a basic attack you can use to bust through some objects, but most simply need to be avoided, and unfortunately, the controls don't often allow you to do that with any precision. Turning is mapped to the remote and Nunchuk, and you turn by swiping either of them downward. Again though, there is no precision whatsoever to this. Trying to navigate tight bunches of obstacles is far more harrowing an experience than it needs to be, and there are times when the game will register you as turning when you're trying to drum to accelerate. There is simply nothing more infuriating than hitting an object, trying to drum up some speed, only to have the game think you're turning and drift you into another object to the right or left of you.    Well, except perhaps for having practically every computer opponent on the track catch up and pass you immediately following this, and that does happen a fair amount. Barrel Blast's artificial intelligence comes from the school of rubber banding. There's no way to get an insurmountable lead against them, and they capitalize on every small mistake. On the opening difficulty level, you can still win races in spite of this, but once you move on to the next difficulty stage, the game just decides that it's time for you to stop winning, and effectively turns you into one of those novelty devices where you press a button, and random expletives come pouring out. Long bouts of practice and track memorization will eventually get you winning again, but the frustration is such that you won't want to waste your time.    If you can give Barrel Blast credit for anything, it's that there's no shortage of things to do. Modes include quick race, time trial, challenge, and Grand Prix modes. Grand Prix offers up several cup challenges over multiple difficulty levels. The challenge mode has you taking on rather specific tasks, like breaking a certain number of objects in a race or coming in ahead of a certain racer after a couple of laps. There's nothing too exciting here, but at least the game isn't left wanting for content. You can also play the game with up to three friends, including the grand prix mode. While adding other folk to the mix does alleviate some of the catch-up AI business, it doesn't make the controls any less flimsy, meaning you'll probably just end up with a few frustrated friends at the end of it.   The part they don't mention is that 'max speed' equates to 10 miles-per-hour.   You can't say much for Barrel Blast's presentation, either. The graphics are about on par with an above-average GameCube game, which is perhaps fitting given the game's roots. The game isn't awful looking by any means, but the animation doesn't stand out, the track environments are painfully generic, and apart from a few neat visual effects here and there, there's not much to please the eye. Audio consists of a bunch of music that sounds like it was recorded for a Japanese game show filmed inside a salsa club, and a bunch of screechy, oft-repeated exclamations from the various characters. Not exactly pleasant stuff.    It's impossible to know whether or not Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast would have been any better with bongo drum controls instead of Wii Remote action, but in truth, it doesn't really matter. The lackluster track designs, inconsistent difficulty level, and no-personality presentation are more than enough to sink the game all by themselves, and when you throw in the wonky motion controls, that just sinks things even deeper. Skip out on Barrel Blast.   
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1130,The Sims 2: Pets ,4.5," The Sims 2: Pets for the DS feels limited and repetitive, and it lacks the heart that any good pet-care sim must have.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/5/1/7/2210517-sims2ppcpftukeng_jpg_jpgcopy.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-sims-2-pets-review/1900-6162087/,neg,"
  Thanks to Nintendogs, pet simulators have entered the mainstream. People love them, probably because they simulate the experience of having a pet without requiring the time and effort that real animals do, and they don't make you clean up nasty accidents either. Electronic Arts' entry into the pet-raising genre is The Sims 2: Pets, which is available for numerous systems, including the Nintendo DS. What's interesting about the DS version of the game is that it casts players into the role of veterinarian and places a greater emphasis on the care and grooming of animals. That's quite a focus shift from the other versions, which incorporate pets and pet-related jobs into the traditional humanoid sim blueprint. You'd think, then, that the DS game would deliver the superior pet-rearing experience, since it lets players spend more time interacting with their animals and less time doing silly tasks like holding a job or hanging out with other sims. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way. While you do get plenty of opportunities to interact with a menagerie of cats and dogs, the number of different options available during those interactions is rather limited. At the same time, the animals themselves don't display much in the way of personality or playfulness in response to your efforts.   In the DS version of The Sims 2: Pets, you have to diagnose, treat, groom, and play with the animals that other sims bring to you.   Everything starts out on the right foot. After you pick out a human sim and select an accompanying pet from a list of cats and dogs, you'll find yourself standing in the middle of a small house that's been converted into a vet's office. Your sim and its pet both have needs that you need to monitor and take care of. You'll have to tell your sim to use the bathroom, to take showers, to sit down, and to cook and eat food. For your sim's pet, you'll have to tell the sim to feed it, give it a bath, groom it, and take it to the park for play and exercise. The controls make use of the touch screen extensively, such that you usually only need to tap an object twice to make your sim do something. Time moves more quickly in the game than it does in reality, but it only takes a minute or two to tend to the needs of your Sim and its pet each day. You'll spend much more time playing the role of veterinarian. Other sims are constantly bringing their cats and dogs to you, and you have to diagnose and treat their illnesses and provide various grooming services. When the owners come back to pick up their pets, they'll pay you money and sing your praises to others. Ultimately, the goal is to become a renowned vet and use the money you earn to expand the house and fill it with the best gadgets and furniture money can buy.    Once you've spent a couple of in-game days keeping your Sim happy and caring for animals, boredom begins to set in as you realize that you're constantly doing the same limited set of actions over and over again. To diagnose an animal, you take it over to the table and rub it, brush it, or look it over with the stethoscope and X-ray until the game tells you what the problem is. To treat an animal, you simply need to feed it the proper medicine, bandage it up, or take it over to the bathing or grooming stations. All of these actions require that you grab and manipulate tools using the touch screen, but the process isn't so interesting when you end up doing the same four or five tasks constantly. As it is, animals in the game only ever come down with one of five unique maladies. Going for a walk or playing with a pet is slightly more enjoyable, since you can pick out a toy to play with or choose a trick to see, but even then you're limited to a small selection of toys and tricks. Basically, none of the game's interactive aspects are as fleshed out as they should be.   The animals act as if they're bored. They certainly don't frolic like the dogs in Nintendogs do.   The incessant repetition wouldn't be so bad if the atmosphere was upbeat or if the animals were fun to watch. The atmosphere, however, isn't upbeat. It's dull, and the cats and dogs are about as lively as a pet that's just woken up from a midday nap. On the technical side, the game puts the system's 3D abilities to work generating the house, the park, and all of the trees and furniture situated within those environments. Nothing really moves in the environment, though, except for the people and animals, and they don't move much to begin with. Sims will throw tantrums if you let one of their needs go for too long. Otherwise, they just walk from one spot to the next and wave occasionally. If you have your sim take a shower, for instance, they'll just get in and step out after a few seconds. There's no elaborate flourish of water and scrubbing like you'd see in one of the regular The Sims games. By the same token, the animals look cute and furry, and have big, expressive eyes, but they hardly do much but wag their tails and wander about halfheartedly. The kitties and pooches in The Sims 2: Pets definitely do not jump and frolic like the dogs in Nintendogs do.     There aren't enough sound effects to go around, either. For all of the 20 different animals, there are only a few different purr, bark, and meow noises, which are heard sparingly. Your human Sim will also speak up and utter some gibberish when they're talking to another Sim or they're annoyed by something. Mostly, though, you're stuck listening to the knockoff elevator music that's always playing in the background.    It's nice that The Sims 2: Pets incorporates some veterinary aspects that we haven't seen in other pet-care games. Beyond that, however, it's limited, it's repetitive, and it lacks the heart that a game in the genre really must have to appeal to the kind of person that's looking for this sort of game.  
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1131,Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Hoth Mission Pack ,4.5, Plain visuals and bland action make this overpriced downloadable add-on The Force Unleashed's least appealing mission yet.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/2/0/3/2219203-swfu_final.jpg,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-wars-the-force-unleashed-hoth-mission-pack-re/1900-6251748/,neg,"
  The latest downloadable add-on for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has a lot in common with the previous ones. Like the prior released content, the Hoth Mission Pack provides an interesting alternate-history take on Star Wars canon by inserting you, as antihero Starkiller, into the iconic locales depicted in George Lucas' beloved films. Unfortunately, like the prior content, it's also too expensive, delivering a measly 45 minutes' worth of content for a whopping $9.99. The price might be forgivable if that content were of high quality, but your short and icy adventure on Hoth is a simple, visually unappealing slog featuring all of the targeting and camera gaffes of the original game, but little of the fun. Even if you're fanatical about Force fan fiction and gaga over Galen, it's best to leave this mission where it belongs: buried in a tauntaun's smelly innards.      As the title so outwardly informs you, the Hoth Mission Pack drops you onto the chilly planet featured in The Empire Strikes Back, where you navigate frozen caves, slice up wampas, and destroy generators on your way to Echo Base and the Millennium Falcon. After a few knockback-heavy wampa battles and a series of jumps across collapsing ice platforms, the level turns into a predictable and claustrophobic corridor crawl that throws in a few mild puzzles to add a smidgen of variety. You move a couple of elevators and force open a few doors, but the first 20 minutes are The Force Unleashed at its most bland and unmemorable.     The second half of the mission throws dozens of rebels and stormtroopers at you to keep you busy, and it gives you a better opportunity to fling enemies around and zap them with lightning. But even with these few brief delights, poor enemy AI keeps the action frigid, and two boss encounters do little to turn up the heat. These battles are characterized not by their challenge, but by the unhelpful and uncontrollable camera angles, which make the always iffy Force Unleashed targeting even more cumbersome. The original's best attributes--the excellent storytelling and the beautiful art design--are conspicuously missing. These ice caverns look even plainer than you'd ever imagine and feature none of the careful, subtly illustrated style that made the full release and the previous add-ons such a joy to look at. The lackluster art makes visual glitches like blinking geometry and disappearing walls all the more distracting, and jerky cutscene transitions and other technical oddities make the production feel clumsy and hurried.   Smash that turret… with The Force!   As excellent as the premise is, the Hoth Mission Pack is a tepid return to a very good game, isolating all of the original's frustrations and disappointments without delivering the thrills and tingles. Given its high price, it's a poor value for even the most devout Lucas loyalists.   
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1132,Pimp My Ride ,4.5, No amount of Xzibit influence or ride pimpage can save Pimp My Ride from its god-awful minigames and lousy driving mechanics.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/7/1/2219371-box_pmr.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pimp-my-ride-review/1900-6163378/,neg,"
  Based on the titular car-customization MTV show starring the self-proclaimed Mr. Black Bruce Willis himself, Xzibit, Pimp My Ride is a failure, primarily because it can't decide what it wants to be: Is it a driving game? Is it a series of awful driving minigames? Is it a car customization sim? Is it an unholy crossbreeding of all of the above? The answer is yes to that last one. It is this complete lack of dedication to making any one of the things it cobbles together fun that sinks it. It's too bad because X-to-the-Z's influence is stamped all over this game, and it does basically grasp what it is that makes such a silly show fun to watch. It's just not fun to play.   Sadly, working over the hoop rides of a bunch of screechy teenagers doesn't make for quite as compelling of a game as you might hope.   Pimp My Ride takes place in the glorious metropolis known as Pimp City. The residents of Pimp City like to drive pimped-out rides. So, what's an up-and-coming car-customization nerd like you to do when tasked with making the unpimped rides of the town's more hapless citizens into full-on works of pimp-flavored art? Why, drive around doing lame ghost riding and cruising minigames to earn cash so you can drive around in the customer's clunker to get new parts and make it into a gaudy monstrosity, of course. And then you do this exact same sequence of events over and over and over again until the game concludes, or you simply can't stomach the lame gameplay any longer. Or maybe you'll just give up once the game crashes on you for the third or fourth time, which is as good a reason as any to stop.    Again, the primary problem with Pimp My Ride is that the progression of events neither makes any sense nor is any fun. When you're driving around trying to earn money, you're limited to a specific section of Pimp City but can take part in specific events around the map for which there are a few icons. When you go to a ghost-riding event, you take part in an idiot-simple rhythm minigame that isn't all that rhythmic. You just press a displayed sequence of buttons as quickly as you can for each stage of the game, and all the while, your dude dances alongside the car like all those horribly awesome Internet videos you and your buddies have been watching over and over for the past six months. There's also a hot steppin' event, but in actuality, that's just a new name for yet another ghost-riding event. You have to press buttons with a different sense of timing--but that's it. The worst part about the ghost-riding games is that they never change. The game slowly and surely tries to ramp up the difficulty, but it does it so slowly that you'll barely even notice. The game can't even be bothered to change the hip-hop beat that plays behind you--it's the same beat every time.    The other minigame, cruising, is almost not worth mentioning. You drive up to a group of gawking hip-hop kids, holding down a button to put your car into 10mph cruise mode. As you drive by, you press a quick series of buttons to send the kids into some kind of spastic frenzy and earn yourself some cash. That's it. It's even less fun in practice than it sounds on paper.    As you keep driving around, you'll also be wrecking into other cars and various billboards, which earns you cash for some weird reason. Eventually, you'll earn enough cash to meet the budget for your next customer. You then drive to the customer and a cutscene pops up that is similar to the sort of sequence you'd see on the TV show: a squealing 19-year-old girl with a horrid car and a heart of gold. Xzibit makes fun of the car for a while, and you're treated to some truly atrocious voice acting from the kids. Finally, you get the keys, and the pimping can begin. Of course, the pimping isn't all it's cracked up to be because the catch is that there's a rival pimper of rides out there competing with you on every job. When you get a car to work on, your rival gets the same car. So you and the other driver drive around the city under a time limit, trying to get to as many part suppliers as possible. The car with the highest rating at the end wins.    It sounds neat and all, but there's almost nothing to it. When you get to a part supplier, you get to choose from several different types of parts, some of which are very expensive and some of which are not. The trouble is that there's no reason not to pick the most expensive parts every single time. The most expensive parts translate into bigger boosts to your meter, and you're never hurting for cash. Sometimes you can choose from multiple types of parts that cost the same, especially when it comes to the crazy custom parts the show is known for (a trunk-mounted anvil for an aspiring metal worker or an in-bed tattoo parlor for the pickup truck of an apprentice tattoo artist), but you never get to use or experience those parts. You can drive around the cars you pimp, but you don't do anything with them except travel from place to place or engage in the occasional bout of ghost riding. There's no reason to put much thought into the ride-pimping aspect of the game, beyond picking the most expensive part and deciding which part shop you can get to most quickly.    You repeat the same series of actions through 16 different customers, and eventually the game ends. There's no multiplayer component, nor is there any reason to want to go back and play any piece of the game again once you're done--not even for the remainder of the Xbox 360 version's 30 achievements (you'll get a pretty good chunk of them on a single play-through anyway). The minigames are bereft of entertainment and driving around the city is more of a hassle than anything else. Cars oversteer constantly, specifically into immovable objects most times. In fact, the driving is the only part of the game that's even remotely challenging. Too often you'll be seconds away from getting to that last part shop, only to hit some weird piece of the scenery you could hardly see was there. It doesn't help that the entrances to most shops are barely visible, and the pointer arrow that's supposed to tell you which way to go is borderline broken. The pointer arrow exists on a flat plane, and it's nearly impossible to see which way it's pointing in most cases. Making Pimp My Ride any form of a driving game seems like kind of a weird idea, and when you factor in how bad the driving mechanics are, that decision seems even more ill-advised.   To all you ghost riders out there, go back to trying to break your neck and your car in real life. This game ain't for you.   Pimp My Ride does at least do a halfway decent job with its presentation, if nothing else. Pimp City is a reasonably nice-looking city, and the frame rate holds up as you drive around it at ridiculous speeds. However, the car physics often leave something to be desired because you get hung up on smallish set pieces far too often. There isn't even any damage modeling in the game, despite the total lack of real licensed vehicles. But then, the cars themselves are designed to be the star of the show, and when you finish up the pimp work, some of the cars do look pretty cool. Again though, the trouble is that beyond the paint job, you never get to see most of the luxuries you've included on the car outside of the one cutscene where Xzibit shows it off to the customer. Speaking of X, he does a good job with the less-than-stellar dialogue that has been written for him. This is less true of other voice actors, but at least X has a bit of fun with what is obviously a pretty silly concept. You can almost hear him snicker as he explains the rules of Pimp City. There's also a decent roster of songs on the soundtrack, many of which are from Xzibit's new album. The soundtrack could have used a bit more variety, but what's there is mostly quality stuff.    Believe it or not, the notion of a Pimp My Ride game isn't an altogether horrible one. If it were purely some kind of car-customization-business sim or even a better collection of minigames, it could have enjoyably translated the show into something playable. But what's here doesn't work in the slightest. Its repetitive nature turns from merely repetitive into completely mind-numbing after just a few rounds of customers, and the way the game makes ghost riding the whip into a completely uninteresting experience borders on offensive. It might nail a few of the presentational elements of the show, but this is a lousy game, and regardless of your affinity for the show, you shouldn't bother with it.    
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1133,Pimp My Ride ,4.5, No amount of Xzibit influence or ride pimpage can save Pimp My Ride from its god-awful minigames and lousy driving mechanics.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/7/1/2219371-box_pmr.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pimp-my-ride-review/1900-6163379/,neg,"
  Based on the titular car-customization MTV show starring the self-proclaimed Mr. Black Bruce Willis himself, Xzibit, Pimp My Ride is a failure, primarily because it can't decide what it wants to be: Is it a driving game? Is it a series of awful driving minigames? Is it a car customization sim? Is it an unholy crossbreeding of all of the above? The answer is yes to that last one. It is this complete lack of dedication to making any one of the things it cobbles together fun that sinks it. It's too bad because X-to-the-Z's influence is stamped all over this game, and it does basically grasp what it is that makes such a silly show fun to watch. It's just not fun to play.   Sadly, working over the hoop rides of a bunch of screechy teenagers doesn't make for quite as compelling of a game as you might hope.   Pimp My Ride takes place in the glorious metropolis known as Pimp City. The residents of Pimp City like to drive pimped-out rides. So, what's an up-and-coming car-customization nerd like you to do when tasked with making the unpimped rides of the town's more hapless citizens into full-on works of pimp-flavored art? Why, drive around doing lame ghost riding and cruising minigames to earn cash so you can drive around in the customer's clunker to get new parts and make it into a gaudy monstrosity, of course. And then you do this exact same sequence of events over and over and over again until the game concludes, or you simply can't stomach the lame gameplay any longer. Or maybe you'll just give up once the game crashes on you for the third or fourth time, which is as good a reason as any to stop.    Again, the primary problem with Pimp My Ride is that the progression of events neither makes any sense nor is any fun. When you're driving around trying to earn money, you're limited to a specific section of Pimp City but can take part in specific events around the map for which there are a few icons. When you go to a ghost-riding event, you take part in an idiot-simple rhythm minigame that isn't all that rhythmic. You just press a displayed sequence of buttons as quickly as you can for each stage of the game, and all the while, your dude dances alongside the car like all those horribly awesome Internet videos you and your buddies have been watching over and over for the past six months. There's also a hot steppin' event, but in actuality, that's just a new name for yet another ghost-riding event. You have to press buttons with a different sense of timing--but that's it. The worst part about the ghost-riding games is that they never change. The game slowly and surely tries to ramp up the difficulty, but it does it so slowly that you'll barely even notice. The game can't even be bothered to change the hip-hop beat that plays behind you--it's the same beat every time.    The other minigame, cruising, is almost not worth mentioning. You drive up to a group of gawking hip-hop kids, holding down a button to put your car into 10mph cruise mode. As you drive by, you press a quick series of buttons to send the kids into some kind of spastic frenzy and earn yourself some cash. That's it. It's even less fun in practice than it sounds on paper.    As you keep driving around, you'll also be wrecking into other cars and various billboards, which earns you cash for some weird reason. Eventually, you'll earn enough cash to meet the budget for your next customer. You then drive to the customer and a cutscene pops up that is similar to the sort of sequence you'd see on the TV show: a squealing 19-year-old girl with a horrid car and a heart of gold. Xzibit makes fun of the car for a while, and you're treated to some truly atrocious voice acting from the kids. Finally, you get the keys, and the pimping can begin. Of course, the pimping isn't all it's cracked up to be because the catch is that there's a rival pimper of rides out there competing with you on every job. When you get a car to work on, your rival gets the same car. So you and the other driver drive around the city under a time limit, trying to get to as many part suppliers as possible. The car with the highest rating at the end wins.    It sounds neat and all, but there's almost nothing to it. When you get to a part supplier, you get to choose from several different types of parts, some of which are very expensive and some of which are not. The trouble is that there's no reason not to pick the most expensive parts every single time. The most expensive parts translate into bigger boosts to your meter, and you're never hurting for cash. Sometimes you can choose from multiple types of parts that cost the same, especially when it comes to the crazy custom parts the show is known for (a trunk-mounted anvil for an aspiring metal worker or an in-bed tattoo parlor for the pickup truck of an apprentice tattoo artist), but you never get to use or experience those parts. You can drive around the cars you pimp, but you don't do anything with them except travel from place to place or engage in the occasional bout of ghost riding. There's no reason to put much thought into the ride-pimping aspect of the game, beyond picking the most expensive part and deciding which part shop you can get to most quickly.    You repeat the same series of actions through 16 different customers, and eventually the game ends. There's no multiplayer component, nor is there any reason to want to go back and play any piece of the game again once you're done--not even for the remainder of the Xbox 360 version's 30 achievements (you'll get a pretty good chunk of them on a single play-through anyway). The minigames are bereft of entertainment, and driving around the city is more of a hassle than anything else. Cars oversteer constantly, specifically into immovable objects most times. In fact, the driving is the only part of the game that's even remotely challenging. Too often you'll be seconds away from getting to that last part shop, only to hit some weird piece of the scenery you could hardly see was there. It doesn't help that the entrances to most shops are barely visible, and the pointer arrow that's supposed to tell you which way to go is borderline broken. The pointer arrow exists on a flat plane, and it's nearly impossible to see which way it's pointing in most cases. Making Pimp My Ride any form of a driving game seems like kind of a weird idea, and when you factor in how bad the driving mechanics are, that decision seems even more ill-advised.   To all you ghost riders out there, go back to trying to break your neck and your car in real life. This game ain't for you.   Pimp My Ride does at least do a halfway decent job with its presentation, if nothing else. Pimp City is a reasonably nice-looking city, and the frame rate holds up as you drive around it at ridiculous speeds. However, the car physics often leave something to be desired because you get hung up on smallish set pieces far too often. There isn't even any damage modeling in the game, despite the total lack of real licensed vehicles. But then, the cars themselves are designed to be the star of the show, and when you finish up the pimp work, some of the cars do look pretty cool. Again though, the trouble is that beyond the paint job, you never get to see most of the luxuries you've included on the car outside of the one cutscene where Xzibit shows it off to the customer. Speaking of X, he does a good job with the less-than-stellar dialogue that has been written for him. This is less true of other voice actors, but at least X has a bit of fun with what is obviously a pretty silly concept. You can almost hear him snicker as he explains the rules of Pimp City. There's also a decent roster of songs on the soundtrack, many of which are from Xzibit's new album. The soundtrack could have used a bit more variety, but what's there is mostly quality stuff.    Believe it or not, the notion of a Pimp My Ride game isn't an altogether horrible one. If it were purely some kind of car-customization-business sim or even a better collection of minigames, it could have enjoyably translated the show into something playable. But what's here doesn't work in the slightest. Its repetitive nature turns from merely repetitive into completely mind-numbing after just a few rounds of customers, and the way the game makes ghost riding the whip into a completely uninteresting experience borders on offensive. It might nail a few of the presentational elements of the show, but this is a lousy game, and regardless of your affinity for the show, you shouldn't bother with it.    
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1134,Legend: Hand of God ,4.5, Legend is just another uninspired action RPG.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/4/3/0/2212430-hand_of_god.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/legend-hand-of-god-review/1900-6196245/,neg,"
  Action RPGs may be a ubiquitous these days, but there is always room for another one...if it brings something new to the table or nails that good old Diablo formula. Unfortunately, developer Master Creating's attempt to both innovate and satisfy tradition has been waylaid by flaws in Legend: Hand of God's design and execution. Repetitive battles, dull maps, no multiplayer, and some serious bugs make Legend a less than optimal choice to kill a couple dozen hours between now and the still depressingly far-off release of Diablo III.   Generic spells are still effective at making goblin flambé.     You might not be able to get the game running in the first place, as Legend has some serious bugs in its implementation of PhysX, Nvidia's separately-installed physics software. It constantly aborted during startup on our test machine, dropping back to the desktop with the error message that PhysX couldn't be initialized. Trying various Nvidia video and PhysX drivers did nothing to solve this problem. Only a last-ditch Google search hit pay dirt, coming up with the advice that you could work around the PhysX error by deleting the PhysXCore.dll file in the game directory. So, lots of fun. It's hard to tell if this is an Nvidia or a Legend issue, but the end result is a lot of unnecessary frustration.    Going through so much hassle isn't exactly worthwhile, either, considering the cliched game design. Everything here is uninspired. You play Targon, a typical studly RPG hero, who's out to rid his medieval fantasy world of Aris of a nasty demon infestation. The key to shutting down a recently established demonic mass transit system is--you guessed it--the Hand of God. This mystical MacGuffin is the only thing that can seal the portal that the demons are using, but, of course, the artifact has been broken into three pieces and hidden throughout the land. Your mission is to track down these shards, reforge the Hand of God, and use it to chase the flaming guys with horns back down to hell. Sound familiar? The storytelling is straightforward, at least. Legend lays out the demon-horde angle from the moment the action begins and gets you started on the hunt for the Hand of God at the end of the first major quest, so at least there isn't any cheap attempt to make this derivative tale seem loftier than it really is.    Gameplay mechanics are equally uncomplicated. Character development is certainly clear-cut, as you choose two skill paths from five total choices presented at the start of the game. This essentially allows you to mold Targon into a dual-class character, blending traits of the warrior, mage, cleric, thief, and ranger. Select the paths of wilderness and the warrior, for instance, and you create a ranger good with bows. Skills are doled out in trees based on these paths, and they can be purchased with points earned every time you level up. So warriors choose from the likes of battle tactics and weapon block, mages pick from abilities such as fireball and ice arrow, villains take feint and deadly blow, and so forth. There aren't a great deal of choices in these trees, though. Each features just 12 options, which leaves you without much ability to seriously customize your character. At any rate, you generally buff your take on Targon with most of the skills on offer, and take one or two special abilities that you'll lean on during combat throughout the entire adventure.    Not that you could do much with a heavily customized character in the dreary levels of Legend. There isn't enough differentiation between character paths and skills to allow you to mix up fighting styles or get into even the rudimentary tactical thinking emphasized by some action-oriented RPGs. Battles are monotonous slogs that always come down to how fast you can click the left mouse button and suck down health potions, so it doesn't much matter whether you're a battlemage or a cleric or a thief. Monster types vary little, as well. You never have to think much about what you're battling, as all creatures in the game fight in pretty much the same fashion no matter what they look like. Altering your battle strategy isn't necessary whether you're taking on thieves or goblins or bears or giants. Random maps underline this monotony. Maps are created on the fly for each game, but this good idea backfires because such randomization breaks the terrain down to collections of anonymous grassy fields and rocks brought to life with a visual engine at least five years out of date. Static maps with interesting architecture would be a lot more compelling than this generic topography, which is so boring that it's impossible to tell one region from another.    The only innovative twist in game design comes courtesy of Luna the Light Elf, a buddy of Targon's who inhabits the cursor. This is actually a nifty idea. Luna's existence explains the cursor's presence in the gameworld, which is certainly innovative. She lights the way ahead without forcing you to equip a cumbersome torch. And she also provides tips about the best weapons and armor to pick up and screams warnings to gulp down a health potion whenever you're in danger of shuffling off this mortal coil. So Luna is pretty helpful--or at least she would've been if she hadn't been brought to life by an actress whose voice will make your ears bleed. Her screeching reminders are a constant presence throughout the game, making her commentary seem more like punishment than assistance. Voice acting in the rest of the game is equally horrific, especially the smarmy frat-boy take on Targon and the one-note monster sound effects such as the ""Hah!"" muttered by thieves, but at least that dialogue isn't as in your face--er, in your ears as much as Luna.   You want generic hacking and slashing, you'll find it here.     As one last kick in the teeth, Legend doesn't even give you the option of skipping out on its lifeless single-player campaign for multiplayer mayhem, because there is no multiplayer option. It's hard to imagine such a perfunctory exercise in action RPG game design being any more enjoyable online than it is offline, although it would have at least been nice to have this as an option. Despite the above litany of complaints, Legend isn't so much an awful game as it is a dreary, cheerless one designed with a paint-by-numbers sense of artistry. Some action RPG fans may find it a reasonable way of passing the time, although more discerning players will quickly grow tired of its lack of imagination.    
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1135,Digimon World: Data Squad ,4.5, Digimon World: Data Squad is a crushingly repetitive and generally joyless role-playing game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/1/3/2221713-box_dwdsq.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/digimon-world-data-squad-review/1900-6180087/,neg,"
  Namco Bandai is at it again with Digimon World: Data Squad, a grinding role-playing game that's content to slap the Digimon name on some of the most tired Japanese RPG conventions and call it a day. But if you love Digimon and have a high tolerance for random encounters, as well as shallow turn-based combat, then boy howdy, you're in luck!   That the inclusion of stickers with the game warrants back-of-the-box mention should tell you a lot.   Digimon World: Data Squad exists predominately as a tie-in for the recent Digimon: Data Squad anime series, so it shouldn't be too surprising that the game spends little time on character introductions and cuts straight to the flimsy plot. There's a great evil in the digital world that's causing Digimon to act all crazy,  threatening to break through to the real world, and it's up to the spiky-haired, androgynous Data Squad to investigate. Making things personal, the younger sister of one of the members of the Data Squad, along with a bunch of other young girls, has gone missing, and they believe there's a connection. Characters will occasionally pop up to shout some awkward dialogue, but once all the pieces are set, the rest of the game is mostly just a long, tedious dungeon crawl.    You'll start off playing as Data Squad member Marcus Damon, whose Digimon is the dinosaur-like Agumon. But before long, you'll be playing as the entire Data Squad, providing you with a small party of Digimon with which to fight. With your party in tow, you'll be sent to various locations to wander around aimlessly and get into random encounters with the same handful of enemies every few steps until you somehow find your way to the end, where you'll usually find a bigger boss Digimon to fight. After that, you'll head back to base to load up on items and head off to your next destination.    The game touts an emotion-based combat system, where your Digimon will be more effective if you choose actions that it likes. The game makes the Digimon's preferences clear when selecting an action by showing duplicate entries for a specific action. The more entries you see, the more your Digimon wants to perform that action. It seems like more often than not, the action that the Digimon wants to perform is the action you should perform, which alleviates what little thought the combat would've required otherwise. This way, you just hit the X button a couple of times when sending your Digimon into battle, allowing you to focus on more important things, such as staring idly into space.    Without a map to guide you, it's easy to get turned around.   Your Digimon will evolve over time, and there's a pretty huge number of different evolutionary paths each Digimon can take. You can influence this process by fulfilling specific conditions, which can include reaching certain experience levels and having an encounter with a specific enemy. The strengths and weaknesses of your party can change dramatically through evolution, which would have been totally interesting, if the game didn't basically play itself.    Perhaps worst of all is the fact that all of this plays out at a snail's pace. The environments are needlessly serpentine, and without a map to refer to, it's nearly impossible to tell one bland screen from the next. The frequency of the random encounters doesn't help, and once you're actually in combat, it seems like a single attack takes forever to play out. This is not because there's so much going on, but because the game pads the encounters out with needless pauses and constant camera angle changes. When you've got three Digimon on each side, it can take several minutes just to make your way through a single round of combat. On top of all that, Digimon World: Data Squad isn't much of a game to look at, with cheap, repetitive environments, enemies, and attack animations.    Digimon World: Data Squad is far less concerned with being a good game than it is with acting as a brand delivery mechanism for hungry Digimon fans. To an extent, the fact that it's a lousy game probably won't matter too much to the target audience. But if your criteria for a good game goes beyond ""must contain Digimon,"" keep looking.  
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1136,Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves ,8.5, It's a port of one of SNK's last great NeoGeo games. It's also one of the last great games for the Dreamcast.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/2/2/9/2214229-garoujap.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fatal-fury-mark-of-the-wolves-review/1900-2822675/,pos,"
Publisher Agetec has made something of a name for itself by publishing ports of the Dreamcast port of The King of Fighters '99 by SNK didn't have this issue and will seem strange if you've played the original NeoGeo version, but it doesn't detract greatly from the game, and you'll get used to it quickly enough.   Mark of the Wolves for the Dreamcast could be described as a doubly nostalgic game--it's a port of one of SNK's last great NeoGeo games and is the last console port that SNK ever did. It's also one of the last great games for the Sega Dreamcast console, since the console itself will be discontinued soon. Considering all the newfangled 3D games that feature advanced graphical technology, it might not seem surprising that 2D games like this seem rarer and rarer these days. But if you own a Dreamcast and have any interest at all in 2D fighting games, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Mark of the Wolves.
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1137,Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix ,8.5, Overhauled visuals and overloaded features makes this redux a top-tier Street Fighter game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/2/5/2209325-box_ssf2t.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-street-fighter-ii-turbo-hd-remix/1900-6201796/,pos,"
  If Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting tickled your quarter-popping nostalgia with its Xbox Live Arcade release in 2006, then Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix will light it on fire with a fierce dragon punch. The arcade classic's fast and fun one-on-one fighting translates brilliantly into HD Remix, seamlessly blending with the beautifully redrawn and wonderfully balanced cast of classic Capcom characters. The challenging single-player story mode and refined online multiplayer are both playable with the classic Super Turbo rules or in the entirely revamped Remixed mode. By tweaking the attack damage and move sets of each character, Remixed makes for a wholly refreshing gameplay addition that changes the way you'll play the timeless 2D fighter.    In motion, HD Remix looks like a gorgeous anime--wicked special effects and all.   The straightforward concept of punching and kicking people on a 2D plane is easy to grasp, but the addition of complex combos, special moves, and devastating super combos brings depth to the satisfying gameplay. Because longtime fans have already known the mechanics of Super Street Fighter II Turbo inside and out since 1994, the alterations to each of the 17 uniquely powered characters' move sets within the Remixed mode gives them a fresh feel almost 15 years later. For example, attack enhancements encourage you to use moves that you might have otherwise ignored: Chun Li's ground spinning bird kick has a new movement arc, allowing her to escape corner traps or fireballs. Similarly, Guile’s flash kick now travels forward rather than straight up. Other notables include E. Honda's ability to dive through energy attacks, as well as Ryu's fake fireball and M. Bison's psyche-out sliding kick, both of which can dupe an opponent into jumping or opening themselves up.     With superior gameplay comes advanced AI, and casual players will be obliterated by the professional-level computer opponents on any of the three difficulties above beginner. You'll have to learn the speed and specials of your favorite fighter if you're going to stand a chance against the brutally tough opposition. The challenge is worsened because the controls simply aren't precise enough with a control pad. Sure, you can use the D pad or analog stick to brawl, but neither--especially the Xbox 360's lousy directional pad--is preferable to an arcade stick. Remix attempts to compensate for this by simplifying many of the attack inputs; some complicated super combos have been reduced from frenetic arcade-stick waggling to painless analog arcs. This accommodation is something you'll appreciate if you're using a controller or are easing yourself into the series for the first time, but veterans will probably be irked by the ease of executing some of the bigger attacks.    But it's this batch of dedicated Street Fighter nuts that will absolutely adore the deeply customizable Dip Switch settings. These allow you to tune the game's minutiae to suit your personal preference by enabling or disabling a seemingly innumerable list of options, in addition to regulating variables. For example, if you don't like the idea of your opponent tossing you again after a throw-induced daze, you can restrict it. The Dip Switch settings even go as deep as letting you adjust the percentage that dictates whether or not the first frame of an attack can be blocked or not. Obviously, these thoroughly thought-out features won't serve you any purpose if you're not rooted in the game's core mechanics, but picky players will love tinkering with the finer points of Street Fighter's foundation.     Even the most hardcore purist can't deny the smoking-hot widescreen, high-definition visuals. Each character sprite has been crisply redrawn by comics publisher UDON, who manages to make them look terrific. The stage backgrounds were also subject to an artistic overhaul; the memorable Brazilian shanty huts, moonlit Japanese dojo, and chicken-choking merchant are all radically repurposed with vibrant colors and wonderfully painted textures. As an added bonus, you can disable the 1080p bliss of the anime-style fighters in favor of their old, pixelated sprites if you're looking for a blast from the past. Adding to the phenomenal visual delight is an energetically enhanced soundtrack. A fusion of heavy metal guitar riffs and groovy electronica will pump you up with retooled versions of classic jams in the menus and during fights. While the clear star of HD Remix is the audiovisual upgrade, the smaller touches give developer Backbone a reason to gloat about its attention to detail--the annoying announcer from Turbo been kindly redubbed; Guile's laughable Turbo voice has been replaced by an older, better version; and the training mode lets you look behind the curtain and scope out the hitboxes that accompany the collision detection.   Online multiplayer runs stupendously, and is packed with players who are ready to wipe the floor with your face.   The three online multiplayer modes--friendly/unranked fights, leaderboard ladder matches, and bracketed tournaments--are packed with potential opponents, so at the time of this review you'll have no problem finding somebody to play with. There's no way to get matched up against similarly skilled opponents online unfortunately, so depending on your skill level you might get destroyed or struggle to find challenging opponents. Mercifully, the lag that plagued Hyper Fighting is practically nonexistent in both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. You'll find yourself totally engaged during your buttery-smooth matches, and completely captivated as the rotating roster of up to eight players puts you in the spectator seat between bouts. In traditional arcade fashion, you'll be booted to the back of the line while the next player tests his or her mettle against the current champ, but you'll never be bored because Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is almost as entertaining to watch as it is to play. The amazing combat makes for quick, entertaining matches that are filled with ecstatic cheering, intense comebacks, and shameful defeats.     It's hard to gauge whether the characters are as meticulously balanced in the Remixed variant as they are in Turbo, simply because there hasn't been enough time to test the tweaks. Still, the overload of edits are welcome additions to an already great game--and since you can drop back into the original Turbo at any time, you aren't forced to relearn your preferred fighter. The extensive alterations are wonderful, giving HD Remix the feel of a straightforward 2D brawler with all the sheen of a brand-new game that's capped off with Street Fighter's venerable depth and lavish presentation. Despite its minor issues, this is one of the finest iterations of Street Fighter to date, and one that any fan of fireballs and fisticuffs shouldn't miss.  
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1138,Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix ,8.5, Overhauled visuals and overloaded features makes this redux a top-tier Street Fighter game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/2/5/2209325-box_ssf2t.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-street-fighter-ii-turbo-hd-remix/1900-6201797/,pos,"
  If Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting tickled your quarter-popping nostalgia with its Xbox Live Arcade release in 2006, then Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix will light it on fire with a fierce dragon punch. The arcade classic's fast and fun one-on-one fighting translates brilliantly into HD Remix, seamlessly blending with the beautifully redrawn and wonderfully balanced cast of classic Capcom characters. The challenging single-player story mode and refined online multiplayer are both playable with the classic Super Turbo rules or in the entirely revamped Remixed mode. By tweaking the attack damage and move sets of each character, Remixed makes for a wholly refreshing gameplay addition that changes the way you'll play the timeless 2D fighter.    In motion, HD Remix looks like a gorgeous anime--wicked special effects and all.   The straightforward concept of punching and kicking people on a 2D plane is easy to grasp, but the addition of complex combos, special moves, and devastating super combos brings depth to the satisfying gameplay. Because longtime fans have already known the mechanics of Super Street Fighter II Turbo inside and out since 1994, the alterations to each of the 17 uniquely powered characters' move sets within the Remixed mode gives them a fresh feel almost 15 years later. For example, attack enhancements encourage you to use moves that you might have otherwise ignored: Chun Li's ground spinning bird kick has a new movement arc, allowing her to escape corner traps or fireballs. Similarly, Guile’s flash kick now travels forward rather than straight up. Other notables include E. Honda's ability to dive through energy attacks, as well as Ryu's fake fireball and M. Bison's psyche-out sliding kick, both of which can dupe an opponent into jumping or opening themselves up.     With superior gameplay comes advanced AI, and casual players will be obliterated by the professional-level computer opponents on any of the three difficulties above beginner. You'll have to learn the speed and specials of your favorite fighter if you're going to stand a chance against the brutally tough opposition. The challenge is worsened because the controls simply aren't precise enough with a control pad. Sure, you can use the D pad or analog stick to brawl, but neither--especially the Xbox 360's lousy directional pad--is preferable to an arcade stick. Remix attempts to compensate for this by simplifying many of the attack inputs; some complicated super combos have been reduced from frenetic arcade-stick waggling to painless analog arcs. This accommodation is something you'll appreciate if you're using a controller or are easing yourself into the series for the first time, but veterans will probably be irked by the ease of executing some of the bigger attacks.    But it's this batch of dedicated Street Fighter nuts that will absolutely adore the deeply customizable Dip Switch settings. These allow you to tune the game's minutiae to suit your personal preference by enabling or disabling a seemingly innumerable list of options, in addition to regulating variables. For example, if you don't like the idea of your opponent tossing you again after a throw-induced daze, you can restrict it. The Dip Switch settings even go as deep as letting you adjust the percentage that dictates whether or not the first frame of an attack can be blocked or not. Obviously, these thoroughly thought-out features won't serve you any purpose if you're not rooted in the game's core mechanics, but picky players will love tinkering with the finer points of Street Fighter's foundation.     Even the most hardcore purist can't deny the smoking-hot widescreen, high-definition visuals. Each character sprite has been crisply redrawn by comics publisher UDON, who manages to make them look terrific. The stage backgrounds were also subject to an artistic overhaul; the memorable Brazilian shanty huts, moonlit Japanese dojo, and chicken-choking merchant are all radically repurposed with vibrant colors and wonderfully painted textures. As an added bonus, you can disable the 1080p bliss of the anime-style fighters in favor of their old, pixelated sprites if you're looking for a blast from the past. Adding to the phenomenal visual delight is an energetically enhanced soundtrack. A fusion of heavy metal guitar riffs and groovy electronica will pump you up with retooled versions of classic jams in the menus and during fights. While the clear star of HD Remix is the audiovisual upgrade, the smaller touches give developer Backbone a reason to gloat about its attention to detail--the annoying announcer from Turbo been kindly redubbed; Guile's laughable Turbo voice has been replaced by an older, better version; and the training mode lets you look behind the curtain and scope out the hitboxes that accompany the collision detection.   Online multiplayer runs stupendously, and is packed with players who are ready to wipe the floor with your face.   The three online multiplayer modes--friendly/unranked fights, leaderboard ladder matches, and bracketed tournaments--are packed with potential opponents, so at the time of this review you'll have no problem finding somebody to play with. There's no way to get matched up against similarly skilled opponents online unfortunately, so depending on your skill level you might get destroyed or struggle to find challenging opponents. Mercifully, the lag that plagued Hyper Fighting is practically nonexistent in both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. You'll find yourself totally engaged during your buttery-smooth matches, and completely captivated as the rotating roster of up to eight players puts you in the spectator seat between bouts. In traditional arcade fashion, you'll be booted to the back of the line while the next player tests his or her mettle against the current champ, but you'll never be bored because Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is almost as entertaining to watch as it is to play. The amazing combat makes for quick, entertaining matches that are filled with ecstatic cheering, intense comebacks, and shameful defeats.     It's hard to gauge whether the characters are as meticulously balanced in the Remixed variant as they are in Turbo, simply because there hasn't been enough time to test the tweaks. Still, the overload of edits are welcome additions to an already great game--and since you can drop back into the original Turbo at any time, you aren't forced to relearn your preferred fighter. The extensive alterations are wonderful, giving HD Remix the feel of a straightforward 2D brawler with all the sheen of a brand-new game that's capped off with Street Fighter's venerable depth and lavish presentation. Despite its minor issues, this is one of the finest iterations of Street Fighter to date, and one that any fan of fireballs and fisticuffs shouldn't miss.  
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1139,Warhawk ,8.5," Whether you do your best work on foot, in a tank, or in the air, you will have plenty of exciting options to choose from in Warhawk.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/4/3/4/2217434-warhawkps1_gh_front.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/warhawk-review/1900-6177868/,pos,"
  Warhawk is a 32-player, multiplayer-only shooter from Sony. It has ties back to another Warhawk, an early game for the original PlayStation that focused on the warhawk itself, a fighter jet that can convert to hover mode and back again. You probably don't remember it, which hardly matters, because the multiplayer focus of the PlayStation 3 Warhawk game leaves it with no real story and no real sense of the war you're fighting. This game has a stripped-down feel, but the exciting gameplay certainly makes up for those feelings. This is blue versus red across multiple modes and maps, in the land or in the air. And it's excellent fun.   You definitely don't need to know anything about the old PlayStation 1 Warhawk game to play this one.   The real story of Warhawk isn't about the epic conflict between two opposing sides. It's about how this game has been made available. If you want it immediately, it's a downloadable purchase from the PlayStation Store for $39.99. If you're desperately in need of more things to put on shelves, or if you want a voice-chat device, you can buy the game in stores for the standard $59.99 in a package that comes with a wireless headset, some behind-the-scenes video, and a full manual. There's no functional difference between the two games, so it really comes down to personal preference. The downloadable version does not come with instructions at all, which is sort of messed up. Other games on the PlayStation 3 have had Web browser links built in to load up offsite manuals and things like that, but Warhawk has none. So the only way you'd know that you need to push the L3 button to talk or find out about the zones mode is to fumble around for yourself or go to Sony's site, where it has a downloadable manual available. But even that manual, which comes in the box with the retail version, doesn't explain everything, such as some of the terms used in the ranking screen.    It's a good thing, then, that most of Warhawk is incredibly straightforward. It's easy to jump right into a game using the game's server browser, and there seem to already be plenty of people playing at all hours. If you've ever played something like Battlefield 2 or Star Wars: Battlefront, you'll probably take to Warhawk's brand of team-based multiplayer shooting quickly, as it's a simplified take on that experience. The maps have bases strewn about that your team can capture. Capturing them gives you a place to spawn, or if you're playing in the zones mode, it'll help you earn points toward winning the game. You spawn on foot, with nothing but a lowly pistol and a couple of grenades. But at bases and spawn points, you can usually find a host of weapons. These include an assault rifle, flamethrower, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and binoculars, some of which you can use to call in air strikes. You'll also find plenty of vehicles, such as jeeps, tanks, and the warhawk itself. And in some fortified areas, you'll find turrets that shoot flak or homing missiles, which are very, very effective against incoming aircraft. All of this balances out nicely because the ground troops can take out vehicles with the homing rockets from the rocket launcher, the turrets can defend base positions against air--but not as well against other vehicles--and the tanks are usually sitting ducks for warhawks to plink away at with swarm missiles or cluster bombs.    One of the major gameplay differences between Warhawk and other similar shooters is that you'll find a ton of aircraft on most of the maps. Sometimes you'll feel as if half of the game's 32-player limit is buzzing around, dogfighting overhead, or attempting to strafe ground targets. This gives it a unique feel, and it's a lot of fun. Warhawk controls well regardless of what you're piloting too. You can play around with controller sensitivity to get things just right, and, if you like, you can fly the warhawk using the tilt sensing of the Sixaxis controller. However, the tilt support never feels responsive enough to be useful in tense situations.    Warhawk comes with five different maps. Before you get all up in arms about how low that number looks, each map can be configured for different game sizes, so there are configurations for small, medium, and large-sized games. Each map also has a dogfight configuration, giving you more warhawks to use. The different configurations make the maps feel totally different, giving you different strategies to work with and so on. This means that playing in an eight-player game can be just as thrilling as a 32-player fracas. There are also multiple modes. Team deathmatch works as you would expect, with control-point captures giving you new places to spawn but no real points benefit. Capture the flag is a standard two-flag CTF mode that puts flags in each team's main base. Zones mode creates colored circles around each base, and the goal is to earn points faster than the other guys by holding more zones than the other team. The zones link together if you hold the right ones and level up your control over them to make the colored circles bigger, which brings in even more points. Lastly, there's a deathmatch mode, which can be fun for dogfights, but this is very much a team-based game, so playing with no team to back you up isn't as much fun. You can also play online with a split-screen, which allows multiple players to play online from the same machine. On top of playing on the Internet, the game has support for LAN games.     Outside of the game, you can chart your progress to look at your rank and medals. You'll earn ribbons for a variety of round-specific accomplishments, such as finishing first on the winning team, getting 10 antiair kills, not shooting your teammates, and so on. Badges and medals also take your global counts into consideration, giving you awards, such as a meritorious service medal. You'll get this award for capturing the flag 100 times, defending 100 zones, capturing 500 zones, and then getting two flag captures in the same game. That's sort of steep, but it certainly gives you something to shoot for as you play. As you rise in rank, you'll unlock additional head, shirt, and pants types for your soldiers, giving you a clear way on the battlefield to see if someone's totally raw or a honed online killing machine.   Warhawks aren't fragile, but a few well-placed shots from a homing rocket launcher will bring one down, so be careful.   Warhawk will run in 480p, 720p, or 1080i, and the game looks really nice overall. Its greatest visual feature is that you have a very long draw distance, giving you a clear view of things that are really far away. For example, on one map, which is made up of a series of high islands, you can sit in your base and see turrets moving in bases far, far in the distance. Armed with a sniper rifle, you can practically reach across the entire map and knock fools out. The equipment looks good, and it also blasts apart really well. Exploding warhawks cause burning hunks of metal to fall out of the sky, and it looks great. The game sound is also effective, with good weapon noises and explosions. Warhawk, unlike most online PlayStation 3 games, has voice chat, which comes in handy.    Regardless of how you get it, Warhawk is a great multiplayer shooter and one of the first of its kind to land on the still-new PlayStation 3. It offers just enough content to justify its price tag, but more importantly, it plays well, with just the right mix of tactical considerations and finger-on-the-trigger action. With hooks in there for additional map downloads, it'll be interesting to see how this one develops from here.  
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1140,Out of the Park Baseball 5 ,8.5, Out of the Park Baseball 5 improves on the series and will no doubt keep would-be baseball managers up late many a night.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/2/8/3/9/14149-42839.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/out-of-the-park-baseball-5/1900-2912710/,pos,"
Out of the Park Baseball has been steadily improving since its inception in 1999. The text-based sports management series has grown from meek beginnings as an amateurish online-sales product to a remarkably complex simulation of running a major league baseball franchise. Last year's Out of the Park Baseball 4 was a big step forward, thanks to innumerable new features that added depth in every area. This year's game is even more of an evolution. Although the game is still only available online from .400 Software Studios, it is as professional as anything you can buy in a retail store. And playing it runs a close second to getting the job of your dreams in the big leagues.  Revamped graphics include colorful interface skins.  Basics of the new game remain rooted in familiar, well-established mechanics. As in previous releases in the series, in Out of the Park 5, you take over the general manager's job with the pro ball club of your choice. Every detail of club operations is under your direction, both on the field and in the boardroom. Players are signed, lineups are set, pitching rotations are tweaked, tickets are priced, and so on. Careers stretch over decades, so you can pursue a dynasty to the end of the 21st century and beyond. You can play against cutthroat computer competition or play multiplayer games against other human general managers, thanks to the game's exhaustive support for online leagues. In any case, Out of the Park 5 simulates each game in great detail.   The new game also has many new features. Every menu has been dressed up to provide the user with more to look at than fonts and columns of numbers. For instance, you can customize your interface with multiple skins. And while every page is wallpapered with words and statistics, the use of different colors makes it a snap to sort through the data. Multicolored bars to indicate pitching, batting, and running ratings and player photo and logo boxes further jazz up what could have been dreary catalogs of facts and figures. Greatly improved audio effects add more elegance. A futuristic whoosh accompanies the opening of every drop-down menu, and you can hear the roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat, and the bellowing of umpires in play-by-play mode.  A new option lets you roleplay a manager persona.  Where the first four editions of Out of the Park 5 were plagued with minor production problems, the new version is much more refined. Even the scouting reports reflect this, as they now feature diverse phrases and come free of the typos and grammar mistakes that were common in the past. Every player comes with a full bio, detailing everything from an outfielder's ""slow as molasses"" speed to a pitcher's ability to ""simply blow batters away."" And there is a greater variety of comments in the internal e-mail system used to notify you of such things as trade offers and player demands.    Out of the Park 5 expands on nearly every aspect of the series. The new game provides much more information than previous versions, so you feel more in control of your club. Stat categories now encompass the invaluable WHIP rating for pitchers, and the opening player info screens provide all of the pertinent ratings and numbers. Players are rated with stars for the first time, making it easier to separate all-stars from duds. Team roster screens contain more factoids than before, encompassing a dozen stat categories showing your numbers and listing where you rank in the league. HTML reports can be generated on the fly in all sorts of areas, letting you pull up one-page overviews of such things as a player's entire career or the contract and salary status of everyone in your organization. Player names are hyperlinked on the majority of screens, so you can access all of this knowledge with a minimum of clicks. Out of the Park 5 is also a better game in other areas. The new game has improved artificial intelligence, so you'll find yourself competing against tougher rival managers for star players. It's also impossible to dump a big contract unless the player is worth every cent. Players are smarter too, particularly when their contracts expire, and now they take advantage of the 30-day free-agency period. Wars are common for even middle-of-the-road talent, and each signing carries with it more consequences than it did last year, as players can now refuse demotions to the minors. Salary arbitration completes the picture.  Play-by-play has been beefed up with better commentary and sound effects.  The game is also more challenging because it has even more randomness; player development has never been a sure thing in the series, but in Out of the Park 5, ratings rise and fall more precipitously than before, often over the course of a single season. Youngsters turn into busts overnight and also-rans develop into major leaguers. This makes signing older players a risky proposition because their skills might collapse months after inking a big-money deal. This is a welcome change, but it can sometimes happen too frequently. Players also break down more than they did before. Injuries are much more common, especially to pitchers, although they aren't so frequent as to be unrealistic.   If all this isn't enough, you can make your own career unpredictable by turning on the new manager mode. Here you sign a contract with a team owner and must perform up to expectations or be handed your walking papers. The option adds tension because you know that your job is on the line with every win or loss, but .400 Software went a bit too far with role-playing elements like diary entries detailing your dating endeavors. Being able to meet and marry women isn't so bad as a frill, although the high-school-girl quality of the text--examples include ""I met this lady, her name is Dabney. I'm going to spend some time with her..."" and ""I broke up with Dabney today. I just didn't like her anymore!""--makes the whole thing laughable.  Menus give you more information in an attractive format.  Unfortunately, Out of the Park 5 does suffer from a few technical issues. For instance, it's slower than its predecessor. Simming games, saving and loading leagues, and just about everything else takes much longer than it did in the previous game. The game also has a few bugs in some of its features, like salary arbitration, that cause Direct3D issues with certain video cards, which forced the release of a comprehensive patch within a week of the game going on sale. And some of the information screens are so crammed with data that you risk eyestrain by playing the game at desktop resolutions above 1024x768. As handy as it is to have so much info on one screen, it's of dubious benefit when you have to squint to see it all.   But these are minor imperfections in an otherwise engrossing game. Anyone who counts down the minutes until opening day would be well advised to make the wait a little less arduous by starting a personal major league circuit with this terrific game. Out of the Park Baseball 5 improves on the series and will no doubt keep would-be baseball managers up late many a night. 
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1141,Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne ,8.5," Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is a refreshing, challenging change of pace.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/2/6/5/2217265-box_smtn.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shin-megami-tensei-nocturne-review/1900-6110006/,pos,"
 The Shin Megami Tensei, or ""MegaTen,"" series has been a popular and fruitful one in Japan, but Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is the first official MegaTen game that's made its way from Japan to North America. The series and its various spin-off properties (like the Persona games for the PlayStation) predominately feature tales of modern-day Tokyo beset by mysterious occult forces that unleash demonic entities to seriously disturb the natural order of things, eschewing traditional fantasy or sci-fi storytelling and simply bringing hell to your front door. This premise sets Nocturne apart in the world of console role-playing games, but the game isn't just unique in that regard--it offers a recruitment system that lets virtually any enemy you meet fight at your side and provides both strategic depth and a stiff challenge. Nocturne ensures that you earn each of your victories, and though some aspects of the game are a bit unforgiving, successfully besting the hordes of demons and punishing bosses you'll come across while unraveling the dark story is in the end a very rewarding experience.  It's time for a group of unassuming teenagers to band together and save Tokyo from total annihilation...Whoops, too late.  So, just what is the story with Tokyo this time around? You start out as an ordinary Japanese high-school student (you'll have to name him yourself) who's on his way to meet up with a couple of his friends and visit a teacher who's been sick in the hospital. As you move through town, you'll happen upon news of two cults violently clashing in one of the city's parks. The park itself has been sealed off, but a sharply dressed man notes your interest and hands you an occult magazine that details a doomsday prophecy for the city. When you arrive at the hospital, you find your friends, but the hospital itself is mysteriously deserted. What happens next is usually what happens at the end of a conventional RPG: You finally locate your teacher, who tells you that she's part of a ceremony that will see all of Tokyo outside the hospital completely destroyed. Shortly after you find this out, she proceeds to destroy the city. So much for saving the world--this game bypasses all that nonsense. Instead, Nocturne poses the following situation to you: ""OK, the world has been destroyed. What do you do now?""  A chance encounter with a young child and his nursemaid puts a further twist on things, as your character gets turned into a demon version of himself, complete with patterned skin and newfound powers. You're in good company, though, as what was Tokyo has turned into a haven for wandering demons and deities, now that all those pesky humans have been obliterated. The city has also collapsed upon itself into a sphere, and in the very center of the sphere is a glowing moon that the demons call Kagutsuchi. Kagutsuchi waxes and wanes much like any moon would, and the phases of this supernatural orb have a direct effect on the demons in the game, including on how they respond to you. Your fellow demons in Nocturne are pretty talkative, actually, and not just outside of battle. And that's a good thing, because as a fledgling demon in this new world, you need to get yourself some allies--and recruiting them during battle is the way to do it.  When you enter one of the game's many random encounters, you have a standard suite of battle options: a melee attack, some magic attacks, and some special abilities. You also have a ""talk"" option, which lets you attempt to start a conversation with, and hopefully recruit, one of your monstrous foes. It's not just a matter of asking, however, as demons tend to be a greedy lot. Many times they will ask you for money, or certain items, or even some of your health before they will agree to join. Some will turn up their nose at you altogether if you're not high enough in level, some don't understand what you're trying to say, and if Kagutsuchi is full, they won't pay any attention to you at all, as they'll be driven to distraction by the moon's energies. Even if you get a conversation going, there's no guarantee the demon will join up with you. Some will milk you for currency and items and then decide they'd rather not go, and others will just give you a choice piece of information or a nice item for your trouble. Occasionally, rather than make material demands, your would-be companion will ask you a philosophical question about power or happiness that you must answer correctly.  Gods and demons are your friends. Tempt them to your side with money, gifts, and your dazzling intellect.  It sounds complicated, but the various outcomes balance well, and cajoling the demons you encounter and trying to sweet-talk them into joining your entourage becomes a compelling pastime and not just a required one. It's not all one-sided either, because every so often a demon will approach you to ask if you might have a spare item, or just to have a chat. Sometimes weakened enemies will beg for their lives, offering you items, money, or even their servitude in exchange for ensuring their safety. While the number of demons you can have as part of your retinue (counting the three you can bring into battle with you) is capped, you can help make the most out of your newfound friends and free up some space by using the game's fusion system.   Demon fusion can happen only at special shrines located throughout the world, and it's simply a matter of taking two of your party members and combining them to create a new monster. If you do this effectively, you'll often get a more-powerful demon of a higher level, and the fusion screen actually shows you what monster and level you'll get before you combine, so there's almost no guesswork to it. (Fusions can go awry, but it's not common.) You can use this technique to create some powerhouse creatures that you might not have seen in the field, and what's more, fusion monsters also get some of the original abilities of their ""parents,"" so you can whip up creatures with some custom abilities. It's a fast and fun way to quickly upgrade the abilities of your party, and you'll need the assistance, because the battles in Nocturne can be tough.  The game's battles are tough, to a large extent, because of character affinities. Each of the demons in the game, including your own character, has certain elemental affinities and susceptibilities. Your main character can equip an item called a magatama that will change his elemental specialty. It's handy to be able to swap these out on the fly, but your friends do not have this ability. An affinity for fire might curtail the effect of an enemy fire attack, nullify it, or even let the demon absorb the attack as health points. Elemental weaknesses mean you and your allies will take extra damage from that particular kind of magic, be it ice, electric, or status ailments. Enter into the mix Nocturne's turn-based battle system, in which you and your enemies move as a team. So, your four characters will all have turns, and then the enemies will all have turns, and it will trade off. However, if you miss an attack, or cast a type of magic that ends up being absorbed by one or more enemies, you lose some of your characters' turns. So what was a four-character attack can suddenly become two. Likewise, if you score critical hits or major magic damage, you can get an extra turn or two.  Nocturne doesn't let you get lazy--you'll have to stay on your toes and constantly adjust your tactics to keep yourself from suffering a brutal defeat.  Fortune shifts both ways, but the result is that if you field a number of characters with the same elemental affinity and you wind up getting hit by monsters you're vulnerable to, the damage piles up fast. Attacks that do critical damage, coupled with extra enemy turns, can make things turn ugly quickly. Bosses are particularly ruthless in this regard, as they often have powerful magic and special attacks, and they love to chain them together for big losses to your party. Not only that, but if your main character dies, it's game over. This isn't a game where you can field whomever you like, level them up, and expect to plow through everything. Nocturne doesn't allow you to be lazy about character selection, it doesn't allow you to be sloppy about attack selection (not when whiffed attacks mean missed turns), and it doesn't allow you to be nonchalant about character death.  Of course, this isn't really a bad thing--the game rewards skill, a good distribution of demons in your group, and strategy. The only issue with it is that you cannot be expected to know, when first entering an area, what kind of enemies you'll be up against and what they'll be throwing at you. So you'll probably have to work through a bit of trial and error (not necessarily involving wholesale death) as you proceed through the game and encounter various types of foes. You will certainly be forced to do this for boss battles, however, as you cannot run from them, and a hole in your defenses can put you out quickly. You can expect to try fighting certain bosses multiple times until you get your tactics and your party members sorted out, and that will inevitably bog down your progress at times. Still, the game isn't terribly unfair about it--the modular nature of your lead character and the wide range of often readily available demons lets you alter your party and play style without too much effort.  This version of the game is actually a special edition of the original, and it features a few additions in the way of side quests, dungeons, and a bonus character whom you'll likely recognize: Dante, from Capcom's Devil May Cry series. As a demon hunter in a world full of demons, Dante isn't too terribly out of place. He'll lock horns with your character on a few occasions, and you can even hire him into your party if you so desire, though it's inconsequential to the main storyline. Depending on the characters you align with and the choices that you make during the game, you can earn one of several endings that determine the ultimate fate of the ruined Tokyo and the lost souls within it. What with the length of the main game, an extra dungeon, the various magatamas you can collect, and all the allies you can meet and create, you can easily spend more than 40 hours on this game. It even has two difficulty settings, and while normal is challenging enough, the difficult setting should prove a hard test for even veterans of console RPGs.  At least there's no shortage of eye candy along the way: Nocturne sports the imaginative gothic-inspired art of Kazuma Kaneko, whose talent for clean and interesting character design comes through very well in 3D. You're always looking at an interesting character, be it your boldly tattooed hero, an animated demon mop, an angel arranged in bondage gear, or a ghostly demon dog with the length and shape of a Chinese dragon. All the characters have a very slick, well-made look to them, as well as a balance that makes them look almost realistic--they may be outrageously designed, but they all fit perfectly into their world. The indoor environments aren't all as nice. The indoor shopping malls and tunnels tend to be far simpler and less detailed, but there are also a number of temples, towers, dungeons, and other areas that feature flows of demonic energy, blood splatters, and other such touches. The outdoor environments are more subtle, interspersing scattered portions of ill-fated Tokyo with vast tracts of desert, huge black crevasses, and misshapen geometry to create a simple but great representation of a shattered world.   Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne really sets itself apart in what can be a cookie-cutter genre.  The game's soundtrack is as eclectic as its visual style, serving up hard rock, light jazz, bass-heavy techno, and traditional Japanese music, and all the tracks establish a great setting for the insane goings-on. The demons also have their own distinct vocalizations they'll make during battle--fairies will coo, small demons will trill, a horselike creature will neigh, a lionlike creature will roar--lending them an extra dose of personality. In a break with recent RPG tradition, there is no voice acting in the game--all the dialogue is conveyed through text--so at least there are no badly acted lines. The written dialogue flows well, considering that it's all demon intrigue and abstract occult happenings.  The role-playing genre has its share of sword-wielding heroes and huge epic adventures set against the dark reaches of space, but it doesn't have nearly enough modern-day demon catastrophes. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is a refreshing, challenging change of pace in a genre that all too often treads the same well-worn, well-loved territory. While the game's unconventional recruitment system and its level of difficulty might be off-putting to those who've been cutting their teeth on simpler fare, the overall experience Nocturne offers rewards the required investment quite well. 
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1142,King of Fighters EX2: Howling Blood ,8.5, King of Fighters EX2 sets a new standard for one-on-one fighting games on the GBA.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/7/3/9/2218739-box_kofex2.png,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/king-of-fighters-ex2-howling-blood-review/1900-6086584/,pos,"
 Regardless of your past experience with one-on-one fighting games--whether you've been performing quarter-circle motions since the days of Street Fighter II or whether you're just now looking for a brawler to take with you on the go--King of Fighters EX2: Howling Blood is the kind of arcade-style beat-'em-up that belongs in your collection.  King of Fighters games are known for their busy environments and interesting characters.  In many ways, EX2 is like Street Fighter Alpha 3, Guilty Gear X, and the majority of other fighting games that are already available for the GBA. Basically, two fighters square off in an urban setting--one on the left-hand side of the screen and one on the right. Somewhere in the middle, punches are thrown, attacks are blocked, and all manner of fanciful flames and fireballs are tossed around, thanks to those aforementioned quarter-circle motions. As the match proceeds, a power gauge at the top of the screen fills up a little bit every time you successfully land an attack. When you fill up a bar on the power gauge, you can perform a character's desperation move, which is a flashy attack that typically unleashes multiple hits on your opponent, thus inflicting a massive amount of damage. The power gauge can store three of these desperation attacks. Ultimately, a poorly timed jump usually results in someone taking the brunt of one of these desperation moves, like Terry's Power Geyser. The winner is the player with the most stamina left at the end of the round.  These kinds of games are fun because they let players act out a supernatural kung fu cartoon right in the palms of their hands. EX2 stands out from the crowd because it has what fans of the genre refer to as the ""SNK style."" This means that the characters look glossier and grittier than those you'll see in other fighting games. Furthermore, this means that moves called taunts, guard-cancels, hop-backs, and desperation specials are all as equally important to winning the match as the basic punches and quarter-circle-forward special moves that you'll find in any fighting game. This sort of variety does add a layer of complexity that you won't typically find in your average 2D beat-'em-up, but the additional learning curve pays off in livelier matchups. It's also worth mentioning that every game in the King of Fighters series was designed with a four-button control layout in mind. The series had its start in the arcades on the Neo Geo MVS hardware, which only has four buttons, as opposed to the six used by Capcom's Street Fighter II games. Because of this, KOF EX2 is perfectly suited to the GBA's button layout and doesn't cut corners with respect to the execution of attacks or special moves. Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha 3--originally a six-button game--suffered in its transition to the GBA because medium attacks had to be performed by pressing two buttons together.  SNK style also refers to the game's teamplay setup. In most fighting games, you pick a single fighter and compete against one opponent after another in matches that consist of a best-of-two-rounds series. In EX2, you choose a team of three characters and go up against other teams. The first character you select takes the leadoff spot and will continue to fight until he or she is knocked out. When one of your fighters is KO'd, the next one in line takes his or her place. The other component of the teamplay setup is called the striker system, which is a set of attacks that allow you to call for backup when you press the B and L buttons simultaneously. You can use these striker attacks to distract the opponent when you're in trouble, or you can chain them together--along with regular moves--to create custom combinations. The previous King of Fighters game for the GBA, KOF EX: Neo Blood, reserved six of the 24 characters on its roster strictly for use as strikers. Not only did this reduce the actual cast to 18 playable characters, but it also meant that you couldn't do anything with popular characters, like Joe Higashi or Yuri Sakazaki, except use them to break into matches with cheap shots. In EX2, the striker system has been fixed so that it doesn't subtract from the list of playable characters. The next teammate in line to fight acts as the striker for the character who's currently fighting. For instance, if you pick Terry, Andy, and Mai to be on a team together, then Andy will back up Terry and Mai will back up Andy. Unfortunately, the last character in the lineup doesn't have a striker to back them up, but that's part of the strategy you'll need to consider when forming a team.  Characters don't leave the screen after they're knocked out. Instead, they rest while the next fighters take turns.  Besides the revamped striker system, King of Fighters EX2 improves upon its predecessor in a number of other ways. The most visible of these fixes includes the fact that fallen characters now appear hunched over or collapsed in the background once the next fighter takes over. This may sound like a frivolous feature, but it has been a part of every KOF game--with the exception of EX: Neo Blood. Attacks also don't glitch out and pass through characters like they used to, and the controls have been made more responsive, which, along with a greatly expanded selection of moves, makes this KOF game feel more like one of its arcade counterparts and less like a ramshackle port. The roster includes 22 different characters who are mainly holdovers from the KOF arcade games, like Terry, Mai, Iori, K', and Kyo, among others. Three new characters, named Jun, Miu, and Reiji, are exclusive to this latest game. Jun and Miu aren't particularly interesting, but Reiji fits right in with the usual cast, thanks to his pretty-boy good looks and the mysterious cameos that his young female companion makes during his prematch warm-ups. Play options include the usual assortment of modes you'd expect to find in a one-on-one fighting game, like story, two-player team, two-player single, and practice.  Bigger is usually better in fighting games, and Chang and Reiji are easily two of the largest characters to appear in a GBA game.  If you've played any of the previous KOF games in the arcade or at home on the Neo Geo AES console, you'll be happy to know that EX2: Howling Blood on the GBA looks, sounds, and feels like a King of Fighters game ought to. The characters are large, the variety of sound effects is superb--and includes speech clips for special moves and round call-outs--and the backgrounds make use of the kinds of daylight and weather-related special effects that you don't often see in a GBA game. As far as the overall presentation is concerned, EX2 is a class act all the way--from the fiery menus and Japanese animation-style character portraits to the conversations that take place between matches and at the end of the game. The only place where the game noticeably comes up short is in its music, which, while upbeat and reminiscent of classic KOF tunes, doesn't quite live up to the standards set by some of the system's more recent games.  King of Fighters EX2: Howling Blood has positioned itself as the standard that subsequent fighting games published for the Game Boy Advance must meet or beat. It compromises nothing in delivering the arcade KOF experience to the palm of your hand.  
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1143,Port Royale ,8.5," Once you get past Port Royale's steep learning curve, you may find yourself enthralled by the game's promise of profiteering and pirating on the high seas.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/4/2/8/5/14944-44285.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/port-royale-review/1900-6030326/,pos,"
 Ascaron's strategy game Port Royale takes place in one of the most exciting seagoing settings for a game: the pirate-infested Caribbean of the 16th and 17th centuries. At the time, huge Spanish galleons loaded with gold carried enough cannons to keep ordinary pirates at bay, but there were still plenty of less-defended trade ships that were easy prey for dastardly pirates and buccaneers looking to amass a quick fortune. Intermittent wars between colonial nations made this frontier even wilder--well-armed traders would often be pressed into duty as privateers with a license to sink or capture enemy ships. Port Royale sets you loose in the middle of this world to make your way as a trader, privateer, pirate, or some combination of the three. Once you get past Port Royale's steep learning curve, you may find yourself enthralled by the game's promise of profiteering and pirating on the high seas.  Port Royale drops you in the beautiful--and dangerous--waters of the Caribbean to trade peaceably or engage in piracy.  Those who played MicroProse's classic game Pirates! will find many of the same basic elements in Port Royale, including real-time ship-to-ship combat, career advancement, treasure maps, and story-based missions involving the search for lost family members. But developer Ascaron's prior work on Patrician II--the 2001 strategy game based on medieval Hanseatic League sea trade--is reflected in Port Royale's sophisticated trading system, and the new game has a similarly dry, detail-oriented style. Still, the game is much better than Patrician II, not only because of its more refined interface and graphics but also simply because there's now plenty to do when you're not in the mood to design the best sea routes for buying low and selling high.   It can be surprisingly difficult to get started as a rookie pirate or trader in a normal game of Port Royale, but fortunately the game features a tutorial that provides a detailed walk-through of the game's basic elements. There are no variable difficulty settings for the overall game, but the normal game mode does present you with a handful of custom settings that shape the way your career will unfold. The first step is to represent one of four nations--Spain, England, France, or Holland--which will determine your hometown and initial reputation among the major powers. The time period option (available in 30-year increments, from 1570 to 1660) determines what the map will look like; in earlier periods, the Spanish will control more colonies than they will in later periods. Finally, you can adjust a series of options that will make you slightly better suited for pirating or for trading.  Once you've made those decisions, you're ready to start adventuring, though you'll begin with only a single, defenseless ship with an empty hold and a stack of gold coins. With such lowly beginnings, your weekly expenses are minimal, so it's possible to sit around in port to buy and sell as prices dynamically rise and dip or to build a basic business like a tobacco, sugar, or cocoa plantation. But the real way to make your way in the world is to fill the ship up with cannons or with goods and get to sea.   The real-time battles can be played quickly for routine pirating, but you'll need to use tactics for larger fleet engagements.  Hunting the high seas isn't easy, but it can be rewarding. Port Royale features an interesting and simple real-time combat system that lets you capture and commandeer enemy ships, and, by recruiting additional crew members, you'll be able to increase the size of your fleet surprisingly quickly. And pirates aren't just general targets--some infamous pirates have prices on their heads that you can collect if you successfully capture them, and in other cases, you'll be able to ransom captured privateers to their sponsor nations.  You can also turn to hunting the armed merchant ships flying national colors. These ships are much more lucrative prey because of the free goods you can seize from their holds, though attacking a nation-sponsored ship damages your reputation. After a few more attacks, ports will start refusing you entry, and after many more attacks, you may find yourself the target of military convoys. But once you can afford to buy a letter of marque and become a deputized privateer, then every bad deed against an enemy nation is repaid with a corresponding increase in reputation with your own. Though you'll find that many settlements close their doors to infamous pirates, Port Royale does give you the option to attack anyone and everyone. It's even possible to play the game as a lawless, bloodthirsty pirate, especially once you discover a map to the pirate hideout (which you can capture for your own use), but this is a somewhat limited path fraught with many additional challenges.    At times, trading can seem like a painstaking minigame that's separate and distinct from Port Royale's pirating and adventuring elements, but you don't need to get extremely involved in the game's dynamic economy if you don't want to. At its best, the trading game is a constantly engaging way to make heaps of money, and the fact that the towns can grow (or shrink) as a result of their needs being met (or not) both underscores the importance of trade and forces you to adjust business strategies and trade routes with the shifts in supply and demand. Enlarging your convoy with purchased or captured ships means more cargo space. And since Port Royale lets your character gain levels, like a role-playing game, each time your character gains a level (as a result of success in business, missions, or combat), you can hire more convoy captains so that you can eventually operate multiple routes, though this does require more effort.   The game's random and story-based missions offer a change of pace.  For what it's worth, the game provides some tools to manage some business tasks automatically, and the trading interface is as clean and clear as you could hope for. For instance, an important step in establishing your business presence is to build storage facilities in other towns. These buildings can buy and sell inventory within very strict guidelines, and if you set these parameters up properly, you can sell products at a good profit simply by dropping off goods from your ships and having your storage facilities sell it all automatically. The game also lets you set up automatic trade routes to specific towns, which can free up your time and attention for other matters, though you'll often want to check these routes for efficiency and any unexpected events. Managing several trade convoys in real time can often require a level of attention that not all players may want to put into the game.  Fortunately, Port Royale offers random and story-based missions as a change of pace from either pirating or trading. At the governor's mansion found in large towns you can find a variety of random missions for profit or an increase in reputation. These missions include simple tasks like taking settlers to an underpopulated town or tracking down a specific pirate. Every town also has an inn, which is a steady source of rather mundane search-and-retrieval missions and of collectible map pieces for the pirate hideout or buried treasure. However, some of the missions are related to a long-running story that involves finding your character's sister, as well as tracking down the pirates that were involved in the deaths of your character's parents. The story is presented simply with a few paragraphs of dense text to read at each step of the way, but it's still rewarding enough the first time through, and the pirate battles that result are big and particularly challenging.  Ship-to-ship combat is an everyday affair in the life of an ambitious privateer. The game's tactical combat may seem simple when compared to the combat in specialized games like the Age of Sail series. However, Port Royale's combat has just enough detail to keep the tactics interesting, and many battles are short enough that they let you get back to the main game in a matter of minutes. You can fire on enemy ships with three types of ammunition--grapeshot, chain shot, and standard cannon balls--to attack different parts of a ship: the hull, crew, or sails. Interesting features like wind direction and speed control help you maneuver your ships into range to fire salvos without getting hit yourself. The unit AI is good for following enemies and aiming cannons, but it's otherwise problematic; your AI-controlled ships will sometimes get in each other's way and collide. The naval AI also has problems when attacking a town's shore batteries, so if you're trying to plunder a town, you'll often find that it's a better idea to assemble a huge crew armed with muskets and try a land-based attack.  With big ships, enough crew, and some luck, you can loot towns to get piles of gold.  The 3D ship battles are the high point of Port Royale's graphics, but the 2D town and world map views are also generally crisp and detailed. And although the game could have benefited from at least some voice work for the combat or story aspects of the game, the sound effects do a good enough job, and though the game's soundtrack is limited, it helps the hours pass unnoticed. Unfortunately, we did run into some occasional stability problems while playing. You may also find some missions to be frustratingly difficult in unexpected ways--sometimes they'll be scripted with unreasonably short time limits or with ships that appear only in special circumstances.   However, if there is an obstacle that prevents you from really enjoying all that Port Royale has to offer, it's the game's learning curve, which you should hopefully be able to get past in the first few hours. Over time, you'll see how the interface works to streamline both naval trading and patrolling the seas with warships. Even though you may find moments of frustration with the game's missions and its challenging economic model, digging deep into Port Royale provides a varied and open-ended experience--along with the simple satisfaction of playing as a pirate.    
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1144,Cratermaze ,4.5, Cratermaze is an uneventful maze crawler.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/3/9/3/2219393-cover_large.jpg,TG16,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/cratermaze-review/1900-6176690/,neg,"
  Cratermaze wasn't a popular game when it was originally published for the TurboGrafx-16 back in 1990, and it isn't likely to gain a following now that it's available for purchase in the Wii's Virtual Console shop. The problem with Hudson's simplistic maze crawler isn't that it's broken or ugly. It's just wholly uninteresting.    According to the psychedelic introductory scene, five time-traveling friends have been captured by the evil Zenzombie and sent to different mazes. You play the part of one of these friends. Your job is to collect the treasure and keys in each maze so that you can access subsequent mazes and eventually free your friends. Thanks to the top-down perspective and squat characters, Cratermaze bears a striking resemblance to Hudson's other maze-combat franchise, Bomberman. The two games also share the same style of vaudevillian organ music and whimsical sound effects. However, instead of laying down bombs to deal with the monsters that chase you around, you use your shovel to dig holes for the monsters to fall into.   Predictable monsters and cookie-cutter weapons make this a dull maze crawler.   If you've played games like this before, you'll find yourself in familiar territory. The mazes incorporate devices such as spring platforms and warp holes that force you to put some thought into moving around, and the layouts become increasingly more intricate as you go through the game. Touching an enemy monster will cost you a life, as will falling into one of your own holes if you play on the hard or expert settings. When you successfully bury enemies, they'll sometimes leave behind items that you can pick up that will stun the maze's monsters for a short time, let you dig more holes at once, or transform your shovel into one of three different weapons. The bubble gun, yo-yo, and freeze gun all ""kill"" a monster in different ways, but they generally accomplish the same thing: getting rid of the monster for a short time.    Like the weapons you pick up, the different monsters all behave similarly despite the variations in their outward appearance. They simply walk around and make a beeline for you when you come near. Later mazes have a greater number of monsters, and they move a bit quicker on higher difficulty settings, but the strategy for dealing with them never changes. As long as you have enough space to dig a hole, you won't have to worry about getting cornered. Because the monsters' movements are utterly predictable, Cratermaze is missing that sense of peril that makes a game like Bomberman so exciting. In Bomberman, the monsters display a variety of behaviors, and they can often fight back with weapons of their own. That's not the case in Cratermaze. In fact, the only time Cratermaze puts forth a decent challenge is during one of the boss stages, where you have to collect all of the treasure chests while fleeing from a fast-moving, invincible demon. Unfortunately, there are only two of those stages mixed among the game's 60 levels.    Hudson has already made Bomberman '93 available in the Wii's Virtual Console shop, so there's really no point to Cratermaze. They're both maze crawlers, but Bomberman '93 delivers the explosiveness that Cratermaze lacks, and it offers a multiplayer mode on top of that.    
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1145,Shrek 2 ,4.5," Shrek 2 for the PC is strictly for kids, though considering its clunky controls and short running time, it's not even a terribly good game for them.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/3/3/2209033-box_shrek2.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/shrek-2-review/1900-6099888/,neg,"
 Since the ushering in of the current generation of consoles, multiplatform ports have become extremely commonplace. Though the level of visual quality may fluctuate, you can pretty much expect the same thing from the PC, Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube versions of most multiplatform releases. This makes it a bit surprising that Activision, when making its games based on Shrek 2, chose to create a unique title for the PC. Granted, the Luxoflux-produced console version of Shrek 2 was a little short and a little simple, but the PC version undercuts that title with poor visuals, rougher, shallower gameplay, and an outrageously short running time.  Shrek 2 may be bad, but fortunately, it's also pretty short.  In keeping with the ""Take that, Brothers Grimm!"" tone of the Shrek movies, the game kicks off with the opening of a leather-bound storybook and an appropriately gentle English narration. This quaint scene is quickly bulldozed by Shrek's wiseacre sidekick, Donkey, who provides us with some fast and dirty exposition concerning the newlywed ogre couple of Shrek and Fiona heading off to Far Far Away to meet Fiona's royal parents. The game goes on to loosely follow the story of the movie, with Shrek, Donkey, and Puss In Boots trying to rescue Fiona from the grasp of the king, the queen, and the fairy godmother. One of the few edges the PC version of Shrek 2 has over its console counterparts is slightly sharper writing. The Shrek films are still funnier, to be sure, but the PC game has a decent ratio of good jokes to bad jokes, with plenty of knowing winks to silly video game practices, as well as a lot of the standard storybook stuff. The problem with irony, though, is that making fun of trite, repetitive gameplay conventions doesn't make them any less trite or repetitive.  And, boy, is Shrek 2 ever rich with trite, repetitive gameplay conventions, and the actual content of the gameplay alternates between incredibly basic platform hopping, some switch flipping, and combat sequences that require you to mash on the attack button until everyone is on their backs. The game controls like a stripped-down third-person action game, complete with the standard WASD-plus-mouse control scheme and standard abilities. You'll alternate between controlling Shrek, Donkey, Puss In Boots, and a gigantic gingerbread man, and for the most part, their controls are identical. Each character can double-jump, perform simple combo attacks, climb ledges, and shimmy along ropes. The simplicity and familiarity of the gameplay formula are made worse by the fact that the game simply doesn't control very well. The timing on the jump and the double jump seems a little awkward; the animation of your character climbing a ledge doesn't always match up with the level geometry; lining up your character with a rope to shimmy along is needlessly fickle; and the combo attacks don't really match up with your button commands, which creates a disconnect between the controls and the onscreen action.   There are also pieces of the game that are, quite simply, useless. You can collect coins from crates and downed enemies and spend them at drive-through-style menus that periodically appear throughout the game on a variety of power-up potions, but at no point does the game become challenging enough to make these coins necessary--in fact, if you simply ignore all the coin collection and stay focused on getting to the end of the game as fast as you can, you'll easily shave a good half hour off your game time. The game actually shows off a little inspiration near the end, such as when you lay siege upon the castle as a gigantic gingerbread man, but there just aren't enough moments like these to carry the game, which is otherwise painfully easy and wickedly short.  One of the things that the console version of Shrek 2 really nailed was the visuals. The levels weren't huge, but they were full of detail, and the characters looked great and animated nicely. Alas, this is not the case with Shrek 2 for the PC. The levels look pretty bland throughout, and a lot of the elements repeat--there's actually a sequence near the end of the game where you play through different parts of a level as three different characters, which leads to some pretty egregious recycling. The main characters are pretty rough approximations of their motion-picture counterparts and act as a fine example of why the details count. It's the small stuff, like the clumsy animation transitions and the somewhat stingy character models, that keeps the characters from looking quite the way they should. The enemies you'll face look decent, and considering the game's length, or lack thereof, there's a decent variety of foes.   It remains a mystery why Activision would develop an entirely unique Shrek 2 game for the PC.  One of the few things that's shared between the console versions and the PC version of Shrek 2 is the voice cast. Some of the stand-ins for the actual celebrity voices heard in Shrek 2 the movie don't quite match up, but the cast is generally pretty adept, and they're given some decent material to work with, too. The voice work shines the most during cutscenes, and there's some good in-game voice work too. However, the characters feel the need to talk a lot, but don't have a lot to say, leaving you to hear the same speech clips over and over again. The soundtrack suits the game for the most part, using lots of lute-and-flute arrangements to give the game a nice storybook feel, though about halfway through the game, the soundtrack veers off into wah-wah-driven funk that would seem more appropriate as the opening theme to a '70s cop show--it's actually pretty good stuff, it just seems wildly out of place. There's not much to say about the in-game sound effects. They're serviceable, in that they don't betray the feel of the environments, but they're not terribly spectacular, either.  What makes the Shrek movies fun for the family is the inclusion of something for everyone--there's plenty of slapstick and scatological humor for the kids as well as some sly pop culture references for the older folks. But Shrek 2 for the PC is strictly for kids, though considering its clunky controls and short running time, it's not even a terribly good game for them.  
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1146,Gundam Battle Assault 3 featuring Gundam Seed ,4.5, Only the most diehard of Gundam fans will find anything at all to like about this game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/3/2/2222832-box_ba3.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/gundam-battle-assault-3-featuring-gundam-seed-revi/1900-6115144/,neg,"
 Like many giant-robot anime franchises, Gundam is a perennial wellspring of licensed video games. This long-lived and well-loved series spawned yet another line of games in 2000 called Gundam Battle Assault, the first of which was literally a traditional 2D giant-robot fighting game...and a mediocre one at that. The clumsily titled third installment, Gundam Battle Assault 3 featuring Gundam Seed, has just arrived on the PlayStation 2, and while it makes enough changes to no longer feel strictly like a fighting game, it still has a ton of problems that combine to make it a poor game.  If you're looking for a quality anime-licensed fighter, keep looking...for maybe Budokai 3!  As the name implies, this newest Battle Assault offering is based on the Gundam Seed TV series, which is available for viewing on the Cartoon Network and on a few recently released DVDs. It's fortunate the show is readily available, because you'll really need to watch it to have an idea of what's going on in the game. Almost no backstory is provided when you start out, and plot development is generally conveyed to you by static talking heads that yell back and forth to one another in poorly pronounced English dialogue. If you're not already familiar with the source material, it's hard to get a sense of why these seemingly pubescent pilots are squabbling with one another and then beating up one another's robots. For a series with such a rich story, and for a game that's supposed to capitalize on its license's strengths, Battle Assault 3 does a lackluster job in getting the average gamer up to speed.  Anyway, the real meat of the game is in its mech combat, which unfortunately isn't much more inspired than its plot. You'll start off in the single-player story mode, which sends you through a series of missions in different locations in which you'll destroy one mobile suit after another, ad nauseam, until you finally get to the end. The missions follow a branching path, sort of. You'll often be able to choose between two missions that each gives you a different mech and that each pits you against different enemies. However, you'll still continue along the same general path regardless of which mission you choose. Despite this small degree of control, the fights all look and feel basically the same, so they start to get repetitive really fast.  The battles themselves play out similarly to the contests you'd see in a traditional fighting game, but the full 3D movement and fairly large stages give them a sort of arena-melee feel that differs a little bit from what's traditionally considered a fighter. You'll play as a variety of mechs throughout the game, and each has a number of basic attacks, both melee and ranged, that you can string into basic combos. You can also employ Street Fighter-style controller motions to execute special moves that inflict considerably more damage on your enemies. Furthermore, you can even pick up and use a few objects in the arenas if you need impromptu extra weapons. You can also jump extremely high and hover for a few moments thanks to built-in thrusters. In addition to your armor and health meters, a secondary meter depletes when you use ranged attacks, hover in the air, and so forth. When this secondary meter is emptied, your mech will ""overheat"" for a short period, thus preventing you from using these extra abilities. You've also got the occasional ultimate ability at your disposal, though these don't add a whole lot to the overall gameplay.  Honestly, the one-on-one combat in Battle Assault 3 isn't terribly challenging, which means you can just assault your opponent with nonstop combos, most of which will inflict damage. The game really only gets hard when it throws two enemies at you at once, which happens frequently. However, this isn't the kind of difficulty that feels like you can overcome with skill. It just feels cheap when you're being double-teamed by two opponents. Additionally, the game gives you a targeting system that keeps you facing the selected enemy so you can properly direct your attacks, which should, theoretically, make it easy to manage two enemies at once. In practice, though, it's incredibly awkward to use because you can't switch between targets when you're in the middle of a move, when you're being attacked, or when you're lying on the ground. In fact, you basically can't switch between targets when you're doing anything but simply moving around. Overall, the fighting system is functional, but it's rather awkward, which really doesn't make it much fun.  The core fighting system is just too weak to make any of the additional features worth using.  The presentation in Battle Assault 3 just isn't up to snuff in this latter stage of the PlayStation 2's life. The mechs look adequate and evoke their anime counterparts fairly well, but there's nothing particularly flashy about them. Worse, the backgrounds are generally quite bland, and you'll see the same ones over and over again for long stretches at a time. At least the static character portraits in the brief prefight dramatic interludes are nicely illustrated. As mentioned, the voices these portraits spit out just aren't any good, and you don't really even get the satisfaction of enjoying them because they're bad. The in-game sound design and music aren't the slightest bit memorable, either, unfortunately.  Gundam Battle Assault 3 has a good amount of extra material in it, from a pile of other unlockable mechs that series fans should be familiar with to peripheral modes like versus, survival, and so on, but since all these extra features depend on the quality of the game's core fighting, they're really not worth much. The game isn't recommendable as a fighter, and outside of the mech designs, it doesn't do a very good job of evoking the Gundam universe either. It's safe to say that only the most diehard of Gundam fans could possibly find anything at all to like about this game. 
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1147,WWE WrestleMania XXI ,4.5," Xbox wrestling fans haven't had it easy this console generation, but even so, there's no reason they should settle for a sloppy mess like Wrestlemania XXI.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/8/9/0/4/2208904-box_wwewm21.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wwe-wrestlemania-xxi-review/1900-6122726/,neg,"
  Up until this point in time, it seemed like WWE games on the Xbox simply couldn't get any worse. After the aggressively unremarkable WWF Raw and WWE Raw 2 came and went, THQ eventually decided to ditch former developer Anchor and start anew. Enter Studio Gigante, and its first foray into the world of professional wrestling, Wrestlemania XXI. Unfortunately, change was not for the better in this case--not even close. Wrestlemania XXI is about as half-baked a wrestling game as you're going to find on any platform. Despite the fact that it boasts a nice-looking graphics engine, a career mode featuring voice work from all the WWE superstars, and online play for every major match type, none of these things can salvage what is ultimately a shallow, clunky, near-broken mess of a game. Not to mention that one of these features (namely, the online play) doesn't even work.    Yes, believe it or not, there is an Xbox wrestling game that's worse than either WWF Raw or WWE Raw 2.   First and foremost, Wrestlemania XXI's gameplay engine is an out-and-out failure. The basic concepts are certainly sound. You've got one strike button and a pair of grappling buttons. Each grappling button performs two different types of grapples, depending on whether or not you simply tap the button or hold it down. For counters, a little icon will appear at the top of the screen near your health bar, indicating whether you should hit the right trigger to counter a strike, or the left trigger to counter a grapple. The timing on these counters is tricky, but after a little practice it actually becomes pretty much a total breeze to counter most any attack that comes your way, unless of course you up the difficulty level from the ridiculously easy default level. If you do this, the icons disappear and counters become an exercise in random frustration. Of course, the game is still pretty easy, even if you don't bother with counters.    This is mostly because the artificial intelligence in the game is just flat-out broken. Once you get away from the pathetic default difficulty, your opponents eventually become competent and occasionally challenging, but there are some behaviors that are just mind-boggling. In a tag match, your odds of winning are very high, mainly because even on the off chance that your opponent's partner decides to run in and break up the tag (which actually is not a guarantee), he'll usually get there too late or just miss the pin breakup altogether. If you're playing any variation of a ladder match, all you have to do is just get up the ladder to the belt, and the match is yours. Sure, it does the age-old thing where you dangle from the belt for a while as you try to yank it down. But rather than actually climb up the ladder and try to stop you from grabbing it, your opponent will just intentionally knock over the ladder and stand there like a dolt while you grab the prize. There are even issues with some of the specific wrestler classes, like high flyers for instance, who will constantly go up top for a high-risk move at the most inopportune times, to the point where you might think they're stuck in some kind of AI loop. There are barely any high-flying moves in the game to begin with, so you'll see a lot of easy-to-dodge double axe handles in this case. We could go on and on with examples like these, but to sum it up quickly, the computer opponents in this game are morons.    In fact, the only thing that makes the game challenging in the slightest is how the grappling engine just sometimes doesn't quite work right. Basically, the hit detection is not good at all (even for a wrestling game). Standing strikes and grapples usually lock up alright (though you'll see some really strange misses from time to time), but ground moves are all but broken for the most part. Trying to actually get your guy to lock in a ground submission is extremely frustrating, as you have to take the time to position him exactly in the right spot and then press a direction on the D pad or control stick, and a grapple button. Of course, this will frequently move your guy out of the way of where he needs to be, thus letting your opponent jump up very quickly.     And therein lies another problem: The game has an altogether peculiar stance on when someone is up and when someone is down. This means that you'll have to be very, very quick about your ground strikes early in a match, because even though you might think your opponent is on the ground, he'll actually be considered up, simply because he's in a sitting up position. So if you try a strike, you'll miss badly, causing your guy to writhe around on the ground for perhaps longer than he needs to. What's even worse is that after a while it will start taking your wrestler or your opponent (depending on who is losing) forever to stand up. This means that you can just lock in submission after submission after submission to your heart's content. The CPU actually is smart enough (or broken enough) to realize this, so you may find yourself in a lot of annoying submission loops where the only chance of escape lies in the hope that your opponent will actually pick you up, at which point you'll recover the moment he strikes you.    What is perhaps most unfortunate about Wrestlemania XXI's gameplay is that it really did have the potential to be something worthwhile. The grappling engine itself, while generally simplistic, could have worked pretty well, but it would have needed a lot more fine-tuning to add some actual depth to the whole experience. As it turned out, it's just way, way too easy to just punch and grapple an opponent to death without any competition whatsoever. There is also a fine roster of match types, ranging from the typical bouts to cage matches, hell in the cell, last man standing, and so on (although many of these gimmicks can only be played in a one-on-one match). But you'll never really want to bother playing any of them, because one AI problem or another will cause the match to be over quickly, or it will drag on endlessly (like the last-man standing match, in which your opponent will refuse to stay down unless you focus all your attacks on his head). Playing against another player alleviates the AI problems, but with so many exploitable holes in the engine, multiplayer isn't any fun, either. There's a framework here for a fun wrestling engine, but that's all it is: a shallow husk with nothing built around it.   Lousy AI and atrocious hit detection pretty much wreck whatever little fun there is to be had with the gameplay.   In terms of play modes, pretty much all the usual suspects are here, including a career mode, create-a-wrestler mode, a WWE shop to purchase unlockables, a create-a-belt mode, and new to WWE games on the Xbox, full Xbox Live support. However, for varying reasons, each and every one of these modes fails to reach the level of any other WWE game from this console generation.     The online play in Wrestlemania XXI is easily the most attractive feature in the game. Too bad you can't play it. Somehow, some way, the retail game that you can buy in stores right now will not connect to Xbox Live at all. It doesn't even try; it just spits out a fat connection error the second you try to sign in. How the game could have shipped with such a significant oversight is unthinkable, though for what it's worth, with gameplay like this, online play wouldn't have helped much. And in case you were wondering, the possibility of an online patch doesn't seem like it's going to be an option, what with the whole inability to even connect to Xbox Live thing.    The career mode is perhaps the best mode in Wrestlemania XXI, though the term ""best"" is relative here. Similar to WWE Day of Reckoning on the GameCube, you'll first have to create a new superstar. The create-a-wrestler mode has a decent, if somewhat limited, list of available customizations for your wrestler. Granted, you'll need to play a fair amount of matches to earn cash to buy a lot of the good stuff for the CAW mode. But even so, the good stuff isn't that spectacular, and you'll find an awful lot of omissions here, including a much shorter list of moves, costumes, facial adjustments, and entrance customizations than even Raw 2 had. The CAW interface is also super clunky, as you can't even view any potential customizations until you've actually selected it from the menu, which means you'll have to go back and forth constantly to try to find the right pieces.    As of right now, this is as far as you're going to get with Wrestlemania's promised online play.   Anyhow, back to the career mode itself. Once you have your wrestler created, you find yourself in SmackDown! general manager Theodore Long's office. Teddy Long gives your wrestler a chance to earn a roster spot on SmackDown! by working a few matches on Velocity. From here, it's 52 matches from Velocity to Wrestlemania, and then your career is over. Much like in the PS2's SmackDown! vs. Raw, any possibility of branching paths in your career has been done away with for the sake of making a more scripted and produced storyline. The mode features dialogue from all the wrestlers in the game; however, unlike in SmackDown! vs. Raw, that's not an altogether bad thing. Save for a few really bad dialogue spots, the voice acting is a whole lot better than that of SmackDown! vs. Raw, and the story itself isn't half bad, either. Your character is even assigned a voice, though in somewhat of a strange choice, the developers decided to make your character initially very unlikable. Essentially, you're a total jackass and you bad-mouth everyone backstage, regardless of their affiliation. After a while, everybody starts trying to screw you over, so eventually your attitude becomes somewhat justifiable. But to begin with, having your character play a total heel doesn't seem like quite the right way to go. Certainly, having him be a total Boy Scout would have been a bit much too, but a more delicate balance would have been preferable.    Once you've finished the career mode (which shouldn't take more than four to five hours), there's not a whole lot of reason to go back to it again, as the storyline never, ever changes. With the online play pretty much broken and the create-a-wrestler mode lacking in depth and a decent interface, you are left with just the create-a-belt mode to play around with. Unfortunately, this mode isn't that great, either. Basically, you can use all the old WWF-style championship belts, as well as logos from all the pay-per-views. Throw in a few unattractive-looking extra plates, and voila, you've got a belt. You can use the belts in exhibition matches (though you can't actually assign the belt to a specific superstar; rather, the game will just give the belt to whoever you're playing as), but the main draw of the mode is that you're supposed to be able to win and lose your created belts online. So much for that idea, eh?    Even outside of the broken online mode, shallow gameplay, and utter lack of other engaging features, Wrestlemania XXI features a lengthy laundry list of obnoxious bugs, rough edges, and interface problems. For starters, the menus and related features of this game transcend clunky to the point of being unusable. Take, for example, the profile system. If you're going to make a game where you have to use a profile to save all your earned cash and other assorted goodies, you'd make that profile automatically load upon start-up, right? Well, apparently Studio Gigante disagrees with this notion. You can start a career, or you can wrestle 100 exhibition matches and never earn a dime because you didn't think to go create a profile, or because you forgot to load your current one. You have to load it yourself every single time. Another big problem with the game is the loading times. They are overly long and they make the game chug badly--to the point where the loading menus become choppy. In fact, whenever the game has to try to load an end-of-match replay, it practically looks like it's going to have a heart attack, as the screen gets crazy choppy and the audio breaks up horribly.     If there is one bright, shining light to be found in Wrestlemania XXI, it's the graphics engine, which can be quite stunning at times. The wrestler models are extremely impressive and highly detailed, and they look especially nice because of the game's lighting system (though they can look a little too shiny at times, as well). The wrestling arenas are similarly well made, and the crowd graphics are easily the best in any wrestling game. Now, with all of that said, there are some problems, too...specifically, animation problems. The basic move animations, when performed properly, look very nice, thanks to the use of motion capturing. However, the motion capturing also makes the movements of the wrestlers seem sluggish at times, too. The biggest animation issue is that sometimes animations will glitch very badly. You'll hit the grapple button when you're like six feet away from your opponent, and then you or he will teleport into the grapple. Executing a finisher will cause your wrestler to skip ahead to the move setup from a completely inopportune stance, which looks awful, and breaking a table causes it to instantly disappear the second you hit the mat. Things like this ultimately drag the visuals down. Then again, considering the level of quality throughout the rest of the game, it's not surprising that the visuals have their blemishes also.   There's no denying that the game looks quite nice, but all the pretty graphics in the world can't salvage this train wreck.   Apart from the solid voice acting, there's really not much to the rest of the audio. Commentary is about on par with SmackDown! vs. Raw, though during the career mode here the commentators will actually talk about specific points of interest regarding the main storyline. Aside from this, the audio is just a bland play-by-play that sometimes is flat-out wrong. Wrestlemania XXI features roughly the same soundtrack found in both WWE Day of Reckoning and WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw, though with a few more tracks of the same basic hard rock genre thrown in for good measure. You can, thankfully, use the Xbox's custom soundtrack feature for entrance themes for your created wrestlers. The sound effects are OK for the most part, but there are at least a few that are pretty off. A lot of the weapon hits aren't really very good, and some of the strike moves just sound odd. There's also the problem with the audio skipping during the loading screens and menu transitions. Granted, that's a side effect of bigger problems, but it still hinders the overall audio experience.    As far as wrestling games are concerned, Wrestlemania is the kind of bad that hasn't existed since THQ was releasing games like WCW/NWO Thunder. This game clearly wasn't ready for prime time for a whole slew of different reasons, not the least of which is the promised online play that doesn't even function. Xbox wrestling fans haven't had it easy this console generation, but even so, there's no reason they should settle for a sloppy mess like Wrestlemania XXI.    


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1148,Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle ,4.5," This multiplayer-focused, handheld distillation of the Dynasty Warriors formula is barely entertaining enough to sustain its two-hour length.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/8/7/9/2220879-box_dwds.png,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dynasty-warriors-ds-fighters-battle-review/1900-6175763/,neg,"
  There's something a little bit ironic about the fact that Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle, a handheld update to Koei's long-running console beat-'em-up franchise, doesn't feel like it's lost much of its gameplay in translation to the DS. Sure, the combos aren't as fancy-looking, there are far fewer warriors to play as, and the game is devoid of any measure of storyline. But speaking strictly to the combat and the methodology behind it, Dynasty Warriors DS really loses very little compared to the console counterparts. However, therein lays the sad comedy of this game: It filters out everything except the worst aspect of the console titles. The mindless sword slashing against hordes of dronelike soldiers, peppered with periodic battles against officers, is practically all you get in this game. With very little in the way of tactical strategy to the proceedings, almost zilch in the way of style, and only a few generic playable characters, you'll be done with Dynasty Warriors DS faster than you can say Cao Cao.   We couldn't have said it better ourselves.   The game starts off by having you pick from one of three characters. There's a big, slow guy with a giant hammer; a fast, little guy with a sword; and then a well-balanced guy with a spear. There are no names, stories, or any other useful info to these characters--just stats. Once you've picked, you're presented with a map of ancient China. You're up against an opponent army headed by one of the characters you didn't choose (played by either a friend via wireless play or the computer), and with each province you select, you take to the battlefield, fighting to overtake all the enemy bases before your opponent. You do that by moving across a map with a series of squares on it.     Each square is a battle scene where you have to take out a certain number of enemies or a certain type of enemy before you can move on to the next square. The game's only real strategic element is trying to figure out the best path to each of the enemy's bases before heading to the enemy's main camp and fighting the big boss waiting inside. All the while, your opponent is doing the exact same thing. If you happen to meet your opponent on one square, you quickly duel, and the loser is sent packing back to a starting square a ways away on the map.    Engaging in combat is anything but. You've got a basic attack, which can be strung together into a four-hit combo, a special attack that does only slightly more damage than a regular combo, and then a musou attack that does a stupid amount of damage but requires a full musou meter to use. There are also some special attacks that come as you collect coins from fallen enemies. Once you get enough coins, a little icon on the bottom right of the screen starts randomizing and eventually settles on one of your available attacks, such as a hail storm of giant stones, a mild earthquake, or a whirlwind that sends your opponent to some other random square on the map. The special attacks you get to use depend on which officers you choose to bring into battle with you. Before battle, you essentially choose from a series of cards that each have an officer on them. Each has a certain number of troops, certain stat ratings, and specific attacks that become available to you. These officers also act as guardians for your bases.    It's too bad that they're basically useless at it. Defeating base officers isn't much more difficult than cutting down grunts, especially if you go into the fight with a full musou meter and lay one of those attacks on them from the get-go. Instead of making the fights remotely challenging or, you know, fun, the designers decided to try to balance out the challenge by making the special attacks insanely cheap. On the normal difficulty level, victory is basically determined by how badly you get screwed by very specific enemy attacks. You will frequently find yourself on the verge of catching up with an opponent's progress, only to get whirlwinded off to some distant corner of the map. The screw jobs even come out of apparent victories. You could win a duel with an opponent and suddenly find that your opponent has been whisked off to a new square that actually puts him in better position to win. It's catch-up artificial intelligence at its worst.   Stare at that map all you like, you're not going to get to the end without the computer screwing you over somehow.   That's the long and short of the whole game...emphasis on short. You go through 12 of these battles, cutting up cheap-looking 2D sprites while wandering around sometimes confusing and always ugly squares of land. Then you periodically fight boss characters (some familiar franchise faces include Cao Cao, Lu Bu, and Zhang Jiao) until you've either conquered enough provinces to win--or not. On average, that should take you just over two hours to finish. Without any unlockables to go back to play for beyond more officer cards or any real difference between the single-player and multiplayer game, that's not a lot of bang for your buck.    Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle is a game that will please neither the hardcore fan of the series nor those just looking for a bit of hack-and-slash on the go. The stump-dumb combat won't keep you interested for long, and the obnoxiously cheap nature of the game structure will probably have you looking for your return receipt if you don't snap the cartridge in half first. It's only what you dislike about Dynasty Warriors, and none of what you like. Take a pass on this one.  
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1149,"I, Robot ",4.5," I, Robot is a passable platformer, but shoddy controls make it a below-average game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/0/5/3/2220053-irobot.png,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/i-robot-review/1900-6105016/,neg,"
 Movie-based games can be spotty, especially since the priority is usually on getting the title out in time to coincide with the theatrical release rather than getting the gameplay right. In its new platform game, I, Robot, Mobile Scope wisely borrows from some of the best platform games instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Unfortunately, shoddy controls and repetitive enemies will only make you long for the games that I, Robot is trying so hard to emulate.  I, Robot has decent graphics, but the animation frames are jerky.  I, Robot takes place in a multistory office building, and it presents a side-view gameplay perspective. Like an update to the Taito classic Elevator Action, the player moves from top to bottom (or reverse, in some levels) by using stairs and elevators. You can sometimes dispatch the main adversaries--who come in the form of generic, alabaster-colored robots--but most of the game is spent running away from them. You can also find energy and bullet power-ups throughout the levels.  There are three levels, each of which is split into two stages and features a different character from the movie. There are two action buttons, action key 1 (button 5) and action key 2 (button 7 or 9), that change actions based on the current character you're using. The first character, Sonny, is a renegade robot that can destroy the other robots with punches and kicks using action key 1. Sonny can guard against other robots' fisticuffs by pressing action key 2. The second character, Dr. Calvin, is a scientist, not a fighter. She can jump by pressing action key 1. In an ode to Atari's Rolling Thunder, she can also hide in doors by pressing action key 2 while waiting for any passing robots to go in the opposite direction. The final character, Will Smith's Detective Spooner, is strong enough to stun robots temporarily by kicking them with action key 1, which usually gives him just enough time to sneak past them. He also has a six-shooter that fires with action key 2, but the bullets are limited, and it often takes more than one bullet to stop a robot.  It's an admirable idea to have three playable characters, but the gameplay never changes much. In the first level, you climb stairs and use elevators to beat up robots. In the second level, you jump on platforms and use doors to avoid robots. In the final level, you climb stairs and stun or kill robots. The same stale robot clones inhabit each level, and they just run back and forth, occasionally engaging in battle. Functionally, the robots could have been replaced by people, aliens, or escaped zoo animals, and it wouldn't have made a difference.  When robots do engage in battle, it often feels unfair, mostly because of the shaky controls. Blocking with Sonny usually takes a second, and enemy robots tend to punch in sets of three, meaning that letting one punch slip by usually leads to half of your energy disappearing. The same applies to using the other characters--except, of course, they can't block, so energy depletion is more of a concern. A robot on both sides of you pretty much guarantees death. The game doesn't handle turning very well, so even action game veterans will have a hard time trying to turn their characters fast enough to battle two robots. The frustration is exacerbated by old NES-style level design common to games like Mega Man, which means that an enemy robot can emerge from a hallway that you just left, even though you know the hallway is a dead end.  The control problems also affect simple things, like using an elevator or going up stairs. The characters tend to take large steps, and taking the elevator requires the player to be right in the middle of the shaft. Even worse, taking the stairs requires the player to be exactly one step away from them. This is an annoying requirement, especially when three robots are running toward you from that dead-end hallway.  I, Robot can be beaten within a half hour, in total. There is no ending, but Mobile Scope has included a handful of minigames that unlock after the game is completed. They range from a collect-the-items game with Detective Spooner (Collector) to a survival game with Sonny (Last Robot Standing). The games truly are minuscule, and all of them can be beaten within a matter of minutes.  There are three playable characters with different strengths and weaknesses.  The display in I, Robot is uncluttered and clean. On the left-hand side is a vertical energy bar. The upper right-hand corner shows the level time limit. During rounds with Detective Spooner, the number of bullets left is shown under the time. I, Robot's graphics are above average, but they're not great. The characters are cartoonish, not unlike the aforementioned Elevator Action, but they are just big enough for you to see some fun details, like Spooner's running shoes or Dr. Calvin's big hair. The graphics would be more impressive if the animation was up to par. Action animations consist, literally, of one frame, so kicking a robot consists of the character standing still, then extending his foot, and then standing still again. I, Robot has a fine tune for the title screen, but sound effects and music are notably absent during the actual game. The only sound effects that are employed come into play when either the player or one of the robots dies. What is heard then is a simple melodramatic tune that makes the game feel empty and cold, not unlike the robots that inhabit it.  I, Robot could have been an average platformer, but its sticky controls and monotonous gameplay get in the way of the fun. There's a big difference between getting the classics right and merely going through the motions, and this game falls a little on the robotic side with regard to getting a good value for your mobile dollar. 
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1150,Retro Atari Classics ,4.5, Retro Atari Classics is the sort of game that's unpleasing to every possible audience.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/7/4/2214174-retro_atari_classics_ds_us.jpg,DS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/retro-atari-classics-review/1900-6120954/,neg,"
  Retro Atari Classics may look like a standard collection of classic Atari arcade games, but in reality, it's not your average compilation. The 10 games featured here have been redesigned in an attempt to take advantage of the Nintendo DS's touch screen. The results are slightly mixed, though the re-creations here still fall squarely into the ""bad idea"" category.   Warlords is a rad game, but the control suffers a bit here.   The games in this collection read like a murderer's row of killer arcade classics. You'll find Warlords, Missile Command, Centipede, Tempest, Pong, Breakout, Sprint, Gravitar, Asteroids, and Lunar Lander here. The default way to play these games is in ""original style,"" which mimics the graphics of the original games. However, the gameplay has changed quite a bit in some cases.    Centipede is probably the biggest change, and it goes a long way to show that these games were reprogrammed, rather than emulated. The spider movement is idiotic, and the centipedes themselves don't behave quite right, either. Warlords doesn't add multiple fireballs to the game when the four castles are destroyed. Missile Command automatically selects which firebase to launch missiles from depending on where you're firing. The list goes on and on, and most of these changes really hurt the nostalgic appeal of the overall package.    Control in these games is spotty at best. Each game has been designed to take advantage of the Nintendo DS touch screen. Considering the analog nature of many of these games, you'll get more refined control from the touch screen than you could with the D pad, but the control never feels quite right. Missile Command makes the most sense, as the arcade trackball was replaced entirely and now ABMs can be launched by touching the screen. In Warlords and Pong, lines are drawn on the touch screen, and you must drag a control icon around on the lines to move your paddles. Tempest puts a box on the screen that will move your crawling shiplike thing around when you drag it past the box. But one full line across the screen isn't enough to make one full rotation in most levels, so you're left repeatedly stabbing the screen like you were playing Pokemon Dash. Asteroids is...a mess. For the most part, the control you get from the touch screen isn't refined enough to give you the same level of control you might be used to from the arcades. This style gives all the games a slightly more frantic feel, but it's also a frustrating way of doing things.   Lunar Lander gets fully iced-out in remix mode.   Once you get bored with ""original style,"" you can click over to remix mode. These versions of the game play and sound identically to the other mode, but all of the graphics have been replaced by art from a few fairly prominent graffiti artists. The result is reminiscent of those bootleg NES ROM hacks. But instead of getting to see a Super Mario Bros. game with an all-naked cast, you get to see an MC Escher-like design behind Asteroids and a square box with a man's face on it that replaces the satellites in Missile Command. It's silly, and the artwork really isn't implemented very well. Both modes are playable by multiple players, up to and including four-player support for Warlords, provided everyone has his or her own copy of the game.    Retro Atari Classics is the sort of game that's unpleasing to every possible audience. The hardcore retro fan base will scoff at the way these games have been shoddily reprogrammed. Fans of the graffiti artists will wonder why all the artwork is so poorly used. And anyone looking for a fun DS game will wonder how they got suckered into picking this one up. Do yourself a favor and don't be the sucker.  
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1151,Heads Up Hold 'Em ,4.5," The lack of multiplayer, along with an AI that is easily exploited, makes the game difficult to recommend.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1440/14409144/2230808-default-art--square.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/heads-up-hold-em-review/1900-6130443/,neg,"
  No limit Texas hold 'em has swept the country as the latest fad--the most popular style of poker played today. Most people are familiar with this type of poker, which is played at a full table with anywhere from 6 to 10 people. The manner in which the game is played becomes markedly different, however, when there are fewer players in the game. Playing one on one, or ""heads up,"" is considered one of the ultimate challenges of wit and skill in the poker world. Heads Up Hold 'Em, from Grind Games, attempts to re-create the experience of playing this style of poker, as it is limited strictly to heads up, no limit play against a single computer opponent. However, the lack of multiplayer, along with an artificial intelligence that is easily exploited, makes the game difficult to recommend.   Watch out! Your computer opponent has horrible cards, and he's going all in!    As the title suggests, there is only one game type available in the game--heads up, no limit hold 'em. You can't play any other type of hold 'em, nor can you set the blind structure to go up at intervals. As a matter of fact, the blinds don't go up at all until you beat your first opponent at the $5-$10 level. There are 10 different opponents in all, ranging from a cheesy-looking cowboy, to a hip-hop wannabe, and even a fellow who bears a good resemblance to ""Baghdad Bob,"" the former Iraqi Information Minister. Not one of these opponents animates, but they do talk trash to you via cartoon speech bubbles (on the LG VX8000, the only sound in the game comes from the clicks as the deck is dealt). Despite that touch, Heads Up Hold 'Em is rather sparse in a graphical sense, with bare-looking backgrounds and a lack of any sort of animation. At least the cards are large and easy to read, though.    From a gameplay sense, Heads Up Hold 'Em is extremely lacking. The computer is predictable and dumb at the same time. It will almost always raise you if you only call the preflop, and it will also always bet out if you check the flop. This makes it easy for you to wait until you hit a top pair or a set on the flop, and then punish the AI's overaggressiveness with a healthy check-raise. At times, you can even abuse the computer when you bet out, as it seems to overvalue middle or low pairs and has a difficult time folding these hands. Even when the computer doesn't hit anything on the flop, it has a tendency to stay in hands all the way to the river, provided you don't overbet on any street. If you think you have the computer beat and want to bleed it out, you can just bet less than half the pot, and it will usually stay with you all the way to the bitter end, even if it's just holding a couple of undercards to the board.     In our very first hour with the game, we managed to get all the way to the eighth opponent, with the blinds reaching up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's still difficult to beat all 10 opponents, but you'll find that it often has more to do with the luck aspect of poker than any sort of skill in the AI. If you're patient and know what you're doing, Heads Up Hold 'Em won't provide you with much challenge. This is where the lack of any sort of multiplayer element really hurts the game.    With the lack of gameplay types, no multiplayer, and a brain-dead AI powering your opponents, any experienced poker player should steer clear of Heads Up Hold 'Em.  
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1152,The Witcher ,8.5," New battle mechanics, a fantastic storyline, and a gritty setting make The Witcher one of the most engrossing, mature RPGs to arrive on the PC in years.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/3/1/2214131-box_witcher.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-witcher-review/1900-6182328/,pos,"
  Don't be afraid of change. Even though The Witcher may scare off some people with inventive combat that replaces comfortable old rapid-fire clicking with rhythmic sword swinging, there is no need to avoid one of the deepest, most adult role-playing games to hit the PC in years. Polish developer CD Projekt has crafted one of those landmark games that moves the goalposts for everybody, a truly grown-up take on swords and sorcery that breaks just about every fantasy tradition in the book. Once you experience a grimy medieval world so realistic that you can practically smell it, quests that reject simplistic good and evil for ambiguous ""decisions and consequences,"" and, yes, newfangled battle mechanics that add welcome twists to left-click scrapping, you'll find it awfully hard to go back to the usual D&D rip-off.    Built on a 2007 edition of the Aurora Engine that powers Neverwinter Nights, The Witcher is something of a cross between action RPGs such as Diablo and more complex plate-mail potboilers such as Neverwinter Nights. Essentially, the developers work both sides of the street. On the one hand, you have exactly one character choice in the form of greasy-haired Geralt of Rivia, the monster-hunting mercenary ""witcher"" of the title, along with other ostensibly dumbed-down features such as big bunches of combat and Gatling-gun-quick leveling up. But on the other hand, you also get a postwar fantasy world called Temeria that feels lived in (if not postapocalyptic), as well as plot points that involve serious moral choices. Story and setting have been borrowed from The Last Wish, a Polish fantasy novel published way back in 1990 by Andrzej Sapkowski, and for once such an adaptation has been pulled off successfully.   Guy with a great big sword. Sinister sorcerers. Creepy, magical lighting effects. Yep, it's an RPG, alright.   Although there is a fair bit of saving-the-world RPG claptrap involving a powerful evil mage and a mysterious group called the Salamanders, you deal with a lot of lowlifes. Woman-hating religious fanatics; merchants who deal in abducted children; slatternly bar wenches who'll bed down with you for a bottle of wine; witches who sell poison and play with voodoo dolls; racists who openly hate nonhumans and threaten to kill elves and dwarves. Make no mistake: Although there are a lot of traditional, Gygaxian monsters on the prowl here--barghests, wargs, ghouls, drowned undead, vampires, wraiths, wyverns, and loads of different demons--the biggest enemy that Geralt faces is always his fellow humans. You're not much of a hero, either. Requests for assistance can be turned down. Money is always a factor, even when you decide to be a good guy and lend a helping hand. And you have no problem taking advantage of just about every woman you encounter, having pre-marital relations with a handful of babes in every act of the game despite apparently being in love with one of your fellow witchers.    It shouldn't be much of a surprise that the line between good and evil here isn't a very thick one. Everything is a murky gray. The first act is simply astonishing in how it plays out. You start off trying to track down the bad guys who raided your witcher fortress and killed one of your pals, but soon get involved in a feud that pits the religious leader and nobles of a hamlet against a witch. However, nobody's hands are clean. One merchant you deal with is in cahoots with the evil cult you're hunting. A guard you help with a ghoul problem turns out to be a rapist. The village priest you're helping cleanse the region of a demonic dog called ""the Beast"" is actually a misogynistic lunatic. And the witch isn't much better, given that she's sold poison used in a suicide and employed a voodoo doll to make one of the local bigwigs kill his brother. By the end of the act, in a showdown complete with burning torches and pitchforks, you're forced to choose between the woman-hating, rape-loving, cult-affiliated mob and the murdering witch. It makes the most sense to side with the witch because the villagers are an awfully sleazy lot, but doing so forces you to slaughter virtually all of them and leave their town burned to the ground.    So no, The Witcher sure isn't all sunshine and lollipops. But even though you might need a few Prozac pills to handle the game's bleak tone, the story becomes incredibly compelling when you have so much riding on your actions. Characters seem like real people, not the good-evil-neutral triad of stereotypes that populate most fantasy games. Only a few aspects of the story and setting remind you that you're just playing a game.     A lot of this is probably due to poor translation from the original Polish. Dialogue seems truncated in many spots, which leaves you in the dark as to character motivations. You know something important has just taken place, and the interface clearly points out what you're supposed to be doing, but the big picture doesn't completely come together.   Bleak, eerie scenes are so common that it often feels as if you've wandered away from a fantasy RPG and into a gothic horror movie.   Swearing and bizarre word choices are another issue. One moment you're cruising along listening to fairly standard RPG conversations, and then you're hit with out-of-the-blue modern slang and ""F"" bombs. It's pretty jarring to hear the leader of your witcher band calling a female team member ""babe,"" let alone to hear Geralt disgustingly grunt ""Abso-f***ing-lutely!"" Voice acting often lacks authority as well, which highlights these strange lines. Fellow adventurers look like grizzled warriors but sound more like high schoolers. The actor who voices Geralt tries too hard, like a kid attempting a deep, gravelly voice so he can fool the counter jockey at the corner store into selling him a six-pack. Likewise, the youngest member of your group has all the gravitas of Potsie Weber (for a reason, it soon turns out).     Interactions between the sexes are also risqué in a corny way that would rev up only Beavis and Butthead. It's ridiculous enough that the side quests in every act let Geralt get horizontal with virtually every woman he meets, but it's just pathetic that each conquest is rewarded with a playing card that depicts the lovely lass in a come-hither pose. There isn't even any real payoff with these pics, either, given that the nudity that appeared in the European version of the game has been censored due to prudish Stateside sensibilities. (Thank you, Hot Coffee controversy.) At any rate, the sex is ludicrous and out of place, and is apparently there only to give game geeks hope that a fellow guy with lanky, unwashed hair and corpse-pale skin can score with hot babes.      The game's mechanics are a little more reserved, although CD Projekt has tried to slightly jazz up everything that fantasy gamers take for granted. Combat mechanics are the biggest change. Instead of the traditional left-click attacks employed by virtually every other real-time RPG this side of the cult-hit Gothic series, melee fighting here is based on give-and-take combos. You click once on an enemy to begin an attack sequence, then click again precisely when the sword-swinging ends to begin a second flourish, and then again and again to string together combos. Miss your moment at any point and it's back to square one.   You want options? You've got them. Geralt can be customized with dozens of different abilities and skills.   This sounds pretty simple, but it doesn't work so well at the beginning. The game starts with few unhelpful tips on how to fight on all three difficulty settings, and on hard there is no obvious visual feedback indicating when to click again to link a second attack to your first. You're supposed to take click cues from a twirling sound and visual indicators like a flaming sword slash, but this information is buried more than 20 pages into the manual. In order to figure things out from a hands-on perspective, you need to play on easy or medium difficulty, which removes all doubt about when to click by turning the combat icon into a flaming sword. Then you pretty quickly pick up on the visual and audio cues provided during Geralt's actual fighting. When you do get used to things and want to try a more challenging difficulty setting, however, as both easy and medium are a little elementary at times (aside from some of the boss battles), you have to restart the game. Still, even with the poor introduction, it's hard not to love the combat system. Battles are only a little more involved than the standard clickfest stuff, yet the mechanics always make you think about what you're doing and provide real satisfaction when you take out tough foes. Attacks also simply look cool, especially when you're jumping around slinging your sword in all directions in the middle of a pack of monsters.    Three different fighting styles as well as a skill system with more listings than the Manhattan yellow pages add to the cerebral workout. You can change your battle stance between fast, strong, and group, each of which makes you better able to handle speedy, muscular, and gangs of enemies, respectively (the last of which lets you make sweeping swings that hit multiple bad guys at once). The one catch is that these styles can be employed only while wielding witcher steel or silver swords, which makes a lot of the other weapons that you find during the course of the game pretty much useless. Each style can also be tweaked with the talent points earned every time that you level up (which happens early and often; expect to cruise beyond level 30 before wrapping Geralt's adventures). All of your other characteristics can also be upgraded, from your attributes to your abilities with both types of witcher sword, as well as your aptitude for the signs that make up the game's spellcasting component.     Every category has five levels, and each sports four different related skills. For example, you get started in strength by taking the basic level-one ability to buff attacks and then move on to specific proficiencies such as Cut at the Jugular, which increases enemy bleeding damage after successful attacks, or Bloody Rage, which boosts damage done by 40 percent whenever your vitality dips below 15 percent. CD Projekt even shows a bit of a sense of humor with some skills. For instance, buzz means that your attacks are improved when drunk. The only negative with the skill system is that it seems to force you into a jack-of-all-trades configuration where you're talented as both a warrior and a spellcaster. Consequently, players who like to hardcore specialize in a class are out of luck here.    At any rate, magic isn't actually as big a deal here as it is in most other fantasy RPGs. The five signs featured are fairly generic takes on the elements and the basic D&D schools of magic that let you blast off fireballs, charm enemies, set up protective globes, and that sort of thing. Basically, the signs just give you alternate attacks with the right mouse button. More mystical depth is provided by alchemy. Witchers are notoriously good with magical concoctions, and as such Geralt can acquire various recipes that let him brew up potions and oils that heal, enhance weapons, and so forth. It actually seems as if you're really cooking something up, too, because you have to meditate before an open fire (you level up and assign talent points in the same fashion). However, as with most of these brew-your-own systems in RPGs, you don't have to get too involved with the creation of your own noxious chemicals, aside from the odd quest that makes doing so a key part of fulfilling an objective.   As in the real world, human morals and motives here fall in the gray area between good and evil.   As you might expect from the grim moments catalogued above, The Witcher is pretty dour when it comes to look and sound. The Aurora Engine has never looked better, and it's hard to believe that this thing dates back to Neverwinter Nights in 2002. Landscapes are generally gorgeous, and the characters are all distinctive (if a bit cartoonish), but the graphics deal in awfully bleak scenery. Many stone buildings in the game are either run-down or falling down. Villages consist of ramshackle huts constructed with wattle and daub and topped with straw roofs. Skies always seem to be a dim steel gray, and rain pours down pretty much every other day. NPCs are filthy, and often come with various scars and minor disfigurements. There are two main camera angles, over-the-shoulder and isometric, although the former is the best choice because it provides the best perspective on everything. The controls are smooth even close-up.     Audio effects and music are perfect counterparts to the look of this shattered world. Little kids skip around while talking about death and playing crude pranks like pissing in the dwarf's bellows. Women can be overheard setting up assignations with their lovers. And all of this is surrounded with subtle, creepy tunes loaded with offbeat tones and sparse organ notes. The superb soundtrack is particularly effective at night; the gothic organ plinking under the moonlight makes you shiver like someone just walked over your grave.    Memorable story, immersive combat, fascinating characters--what's not to like? A few fit-and-finish issues mean that The Witcher isn't quite an all-time classic RPG. Regardless, it's awfully, awfully close, warts and all, and it provides a new benchmark for future developers that are looking to lift their games out of the done-to-death elf-and-orc ghetto.   Editor's Note: The original review text stated that the tutorial did not display visual cues for combat on the normal difficulty level, which is incorrect. GameSpot regrets the error. 
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1153,The Witcher Enhanced Edition ,8.5, The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is what this role-playing game should have been when it made its debut a year ago.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/1/3/1/2214131-box_witcher.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-witcher-enhanced-edition-review/1900-6198321/,pos,"
  The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is a great role-playing game. Developer CD Projekt has corrected almost all of the problems that made the original something of a flawed gem. Butchered English dialogue has been rewritten and expanded upon, removing the nonsensical lines that made the plot something of a guessing game last year. Engine performance has been dramatically improved across the board, so the game runs smoother on moderate systems, and you no longer have time to read a magazine while waiting for levels to load. Character models have been dramatically enhanced, removing a fair number of the unrealistic features that made the original game come off as somewhat cartoonish in spots. A pair of new stand-alone adventures has been added to bulk up gameplay outside of the main storyline. Just about everything seems more solid and stable, from the smooth-as-glass combat mechanics to the speedier interface. And, best of all, these gameplay enhancements are freely available to download for those who purchased the original game last year.   Battles are now smoother and more dramatic, due to slicker combat animations and vivid colors that spark up spell effects.   Core gameplay is more polished than revamped, so in some cases, you have to look pretty closely to tell the difference between old and new. You still play the lank-haired Geralt of Rivia, a monster-killing mercenary known as a witcher who travels a medieval fantasy kingdom in search of jobs. Basically, you're a battlemage who can freely switch between using a pair of great big swords to slay fantasy-game beasties and firing off spells with elemental magic signs. Basic melee attacks are handled through the left mouse button, with you timing your clicks to string sword strokes together into big-damage combos. If you run four such attacks together, Geralt becomes a whirling dervish capable of slicing his foes to ribbons. Each sword can also be wielded in strong, quick, and group styles, allowing you to tailor attacks depending on what sort of opponents you happen to be facing. Spells are cast by mapping elemental signs to the right mouse button. Much of this magic is generic to fantasy RPG gaming. For instance, you'll launch fireballs, you'll throw up a protective shield, and you can charm enemies into doing your bidding. None of the spells are all that involved or time-intensive, so you can readily hack and slash with one button and launch fireballs with the other.    Character development is equally clear-cut and carried over unchanged from the original Witcher. Skills are purchased and buffed with bronze, silver, or gold talent coins earned every time you level up. These abilities allow you to increase Geralt's basic chance to hit, damage done, along with adding special effects, such as stunning opponents or causing them crippling pain. Nobody's reinvented the wheel here, although there is a broad range of abilities to choose from that let you specialize in various areas. You can roll all of your coins into spells and turn into kind of a wannabe sorcerer. You can go for strong sword skills and become a melee brawler. Or you can do the jack-of-all-trades thing and spread your abilities across the spectrum of choices. Geralt remains a sword-twirling fighter first and foremost no matter what you do, although you can at least tweak his talents to favor preferred combat methods.    Where this enhanced Witcher takes a welcome turn is with its story and presentation. Although the plot of the first game was a remarkably mature tale that ditched traditional black-and-white RPG morality for a gray universe, the story was sloppily adapted from its original Polish. In it, you took the lesser-of-two-evils approach and found a common cause with rapists and murderers. A bizarre decision to cut back the English dialogue preserved only chopped-up portions of the full script, leaving plot points hard to understand and cut-off conversations in midstream. All those issues have been corrected here. Thousands of lines of English dialogue have been rerecorded, fully fleshing out the storyline and removing the awkwardness of the original game. The English translation has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb to get rid of some jarring word choices from last year. The game is still a lot more modern sounding than some would probably like, throwing around F-bombs and curse words in ways that just don't seem to fit with swords and sorcery. But at least the script has been smoothed out and given a unified voice. Any way you look at it, this is a huge improvement over the first Witcher, which veered wildly between formal D&D-speak and New Jack City.   This enhanced Witcher may feature more visual detail and pack more punch in its color palette, but Geralt's world is just as grim and gloomy as ever.   Visuals have also been renovated, albeit not as dramatically as the script. The original Witcher looked pretty good in the first place, so there wasn't as much room for improvement here. The big changes come with the color palette, which has been made more vibrant while keeping the game's overall grim and gray atmosphere. Spell effects--particularly the fire-based Igni sign ones--practically flow right off the screen now. Basic background colors for such things as foliage and clothing have also been given more pop. Character art has been given an overhaul, while facial and body features that didn't pass muster last year have been given a once-over with additional details. Although some non-player character faces still appear almost mannequin-like, particularly common village peasants and streetwalkers, major characters now have a more realistic range of expressions. There are also more facial types, so you're not running into the same people over and over again. Geralt was pretty nimble last year, but now he twirls his swords and jumps around like an acrobat. Best of all, these improvements have no effect on game performance. This new Witcher actually runs a lot faster than the old one. Loading times have been slashed, and there are no more combat slowdowns, frame-rate hitches, or pauses to bring up the interface.    That said, the new visuals are not perfect. Clipping is still a minor issue at times. Background scenery, such as shrubs and trees, still acts too much like walls. The game still pauses for a couple of seconds after enemies are killed, making you wait a moment before being able to loot a corpse. The camera now also tends to cut characters out of the frame during conversations, an unintended side effect of having characters move around more while talking to liven up dialogue scenes that were awfully static last year. So you're treated to gabfests where the speaker's head is cut off, completely out of the picture off to the left, blocked by a door, or constantly moving in and out of sight. Thankfully, these camera quirks aren't too common and are limited to talking scenes where you don't need to see everyone's faces.    The Witcher: Enhanced Edition also doesn't get off to a very good start. A common problem with Windows XP systems causes the game to crash on start-up due to conflicts with audio drivers. This issue can generally be fixed in short order by turning down or shutting off sound acceleration or by downloading new audio files to swap out the troublesome ones that came on the game disc. But still, this is no way for a game to reintroduce itself. Technical issues with the initial release of The Witcher led to this redone version being made in the first place, so it's more than a bit disappointing to hit major crashes before you can even get the game up and running.   A painted storyboard conclusion is about the most interesting aspect of The Price of Neutrality, one of two new short adventures included here.   Much of the brand new content also leaves a bit to be desired. The two new stand-alone Geralt adventures purport to give a better look into the witcher's earlier career, but they're too inconsequential to be all that engrossing and too reliant on familiar locations from the main storyline. Even rooms are reused here. The Price of Neutrality gets off to a great start with a story about a princess who may or may not be cursed, but then, it peters out and ends abruptly after about two hours. Side Effects is merely a collection of mundane quests where Geralt has to run all over Vizima doing odd jobs to raise 2,000 orens to pay off a debt owed to his bard pal Dandelion. There are enough choices in the latter adventure to give it some moderate replay value, although you do little aside from play errand boy. Other extra goodies are more worthwhile. The box includes a number of collectible items, such as a game guide; a CD soundtrack of the game's fantastically atmospheric background tunes, plus some ""inspired by"" tracks; a behind-the-scenes DVD; and a paper map, along with the Djinni game editor for modders. Many of these extras are also available to download from the game's official Website if you choose to get the Enhanced Edition digitally.    Barring the initial installation bugs, this is what The Witcher should have been last year. While the original game was an undeniably very good RPG epic with one of the most authentically adult storylines to ever grace the genre, this overhauled edition has turned that near-classic into a near-masterpiece.    
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1154,Battlefield Vietnam ,8.5, Battlefield Vietnam packs more dramatic moments in its gameplay than most any multiplayer-focused action game in the past few years.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/1/4/9/2217149-915255_front.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/battlefield-vietnam-review/1900-6091567/,pos,"
 Battlefield Vietnam is one of the most anticipated games of the year. But the question is, can it emerge from beneath the shadow of its illustrious predecessor, Battlefield 1942, as well as megapopular user-made mods such as Desert Combat? While a jaded gamer might label Battlefield Vietnam nothing more than an elaborate update, that's taking a very cynical and shortsighted view. The truth is that Battlefield Vietnam is more than just a new collection of maps and weapons; it's a superbly designed multiplayer action game that incorporates the lessons learned from 1942 and mates them with better technology. And yet, it must be said that Battlefield Vietnam just doesn't feel as groundbreaking as Battlefield 1942 did for its time, when it successfully combined first-person shooting action with vehicular combat on a relatively large scale. Be that as it may, hardcore Battlefield fans and new players alike will probably agree that Battlefield Vietnam is a great, often thrilling action game.  Welcome to the jungle. It's pretty, as well as deadly.  For those unfamiliar with the basics of the game, Battlefield Vietnam is a multiplayer-focused shooter that allows you to fight the battles of the Vietnam War against computer-controlled bots or up to 63 other players. In the conquest mode, which is the primary mode of play here just as in Battlefield 1942, players divide up into two teams, one for the US and its Vietnamese allies and the other for the North Vietnamese and its Vietcong allies. You're then dropped into a gigantic map and must battle for strategic control points. In addition to running around on foot with a variety of weapons, you can jump into an assortment of vehicles, including jeeps, tanks, helicopters, jets, and more. Often, multiple players can jump into the same vehicle; for example, one player can pilot the helicopter while two players handle the side-mounted machine guns and two others sit back and shoot out the side with their own weapons. It can make for a wildly exciting experience as the two teams slug it out in a tug-of-war struggle, and a team's fortunes can change in a heartbeat depending on the skill and coordination level between players.  The first thing that strikes you about Battlefield Vietnam isn't the graphics; it's the music. From the opening movie to the loading screens, you're immediately exposed to a soundtrack that's packed with the classic Vietnam War protest songs, including Edwin Starr's ""War,"" Creedence Clearwater Revival's ""Fortunate Son,"" The Trashmen's ""Surfin' Bird,"" and others. You may not recognize the names, but you'll definitely recognize the music from countless movies, commercials, and the radio. The soundtrack itself would be worthy of a big-budget Hollywood movie, and it permeates throughout the game.  The 14 different scenarios in Battlefield Vietnam are inspired by some of the most famous battles of the war, including the Ia Drang Valley (depicted in the movie We Were Soldiers), Hue during the Tet Offensive, and the Siege of Khe Sanh. There are also lesser-known battles, such as Operation Hastings (an early Marine Corps battle) and Operation Flaming Dart (Air Force bombing raids). The game itself comes with about 12 different maps, because two urban maps--Hue and Quang Tri--are used twice. There are some variations in the recycled versions of those two maps, but it's disappointing whenever developers reuse levels in the same game. Not only does it feel like we're getting less, but it can make for needless confusion in multiplay.  In general, though, the levels themselves feature a fine variety of terrain and gameplay styles. For example, Operation Flaming Dart is all about aerial combat, as the two forces start separated by a large body of water. Flaming Dart also requires the US force to destroy three NVA radio towers in order to succeed, which is a nice departure from the standard conquest gameplay mode, where the goal is simply to conquer all the control points. Meanwhile, the Ia Drang level is all about helicopter operations, given that it's inspired by the air cavalry's battle in Vietnam's central highlands. On that map, the US forces start with a single control point surrounded by communist control points and come under withering fire almost immediately. But the US forces have a distant base where they can jump in helicopters and jets to provide tremendous amounts of air support and mobility. Vietnam was not just a jungle war; urban combat is represented by the Hue and Quang Tri maps, and they feel very similar in style to the urban levels in Battlefield 1942.  Charlie's trying to seize a control point, but he should have brought some backup.  The maps themselves benefit from a greater level of detail not possible in Battlefield 1942. No longer is the terrain wide open and sparely decorated. There's a lot more character to the land, not just in terms of geography, but in vegetation as well. Now there are steep ravines and valleys, dry riverbeds, and hills and small mountains. All of these help to break up the sight lines, giving a much more natural feel to the game. This also prevents snipers from camping on top of the highest peak and dominating from that vantage point, like they tend to do in Battlefield 1942. The terrain is much more of an obstacle in Battlefield Vietnam, but you can use it to your advantage. You can use the lush vegetation to hide from enemy air units or maneuver in the steep terrain where armor and other vehicles can't follow. On the other hand, the environments are immune to the effects of the battle; tank shells and napalm drops do nothing to affect the lush surroundings, which perhaps is predictable but is still somewhat disappointing given the surface level of realism. Nevertheless, it's clear that the levels and graphics in Battlefield Vietnam are much more advanced than they were in Battlefield 1942.  Sadly, the same can't be said of the computer-controlled bots, which remain as dumb as they ever were. Simply put, the bots are horrible, even at the toughest artificial intelligence level. Bots don't work as a team properly; they'll run around randomly, they'll jump in vehicles and then do nothing, and occasionally they'll just stand idly by as you shoot them. Bots don't know how to fly helicopters properly; when they're not crashing into the ground, they're hovering back and forth over a single spot, as if on a swing. About the only way to milk any kind of a challenge out of the bots is if you select impossible-level bots with impossible-level odds. Under those odds, the bots will still behave stupidly, but there are so many of them that it doesn't matter because they'll overwhelm you with almost-ridiculous numbers. Granted, the vast majority of players aren't interested in the single-player component of Battlefield Vietnam (nor should they be, with bots like these), but the bots remain a problem if you use them in multiplayer to flesh out the empty spots on a team's roster. Since some other multiplayer-focused action games on the market feature superior bots with almost-human cunning, there seems to be little excuse for the bot behavior in Battlefield Vietnam.  The jeep hasn't changed much from Battlefield 1942.  The multiplayer server browser derives directly from Battlefield 1942, which is a good thing. It's extremely easy to use, so finding and jumping into a game online requires just a few mouse clicks. There are a number of different game types in Battlefield Vietnam, including evolution (which takes place on two historically-linked maps and the scores from the first match carry over into the second) and capture the flag. However, conquest is by far the most popular game type.  The gameplay mechanics themselves have been tweaked, for the better. For example, major bases are much harder for a lone infiltrator to seize; it can take 90 seconds to switch control of their control points. This cuts down immensely on situations where a single player can be sneaking around and suddenly seizes a team's vital control point. However, in another nice twist, multiple teammates can seize a control point faster. So now the emphasis is on helicopters to drop a team behind enemy lines. If two or three teammates get to a control point, the seizure process goes two to three times faster.  Like Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam still suffers from some clumsiness when considered strictly as a first-person shooter; it just doesn't look as smooth or feel as crisp as other games of this type do. However, the saving grace for both games is that you can jump into a huge assortment of vehicles, which are generally as fun to drive in Battlefield Vietnam as they were in Battlefield 1942. As expected, the vehicles in Battlefield Vietnam transform the game. The American jeep is back, but this time the passengers can shoot from the shotgun position for drive-by shootings, and the jeep has a powerful missile launcher for a third passenger. The tanks are bigger and more powerful, but they play exactly the same as Battlefield 1942 tanks. There are a few notable additions, including the Vespa scooter, which can zip around the urban levels, and the BTR-60, an armored personnel carrier in which the passengers can look and shoot out of the sides. The US also gets a couple of patrol boats for river operations, and a number of vehicles are also amphibious, which allows them to negotiate water obstacles. But many of the ground vehicles aren't that much different from those in Battlefield 1942.  Much like in historical reality, the addition of helicopters to the battlefield significantly changes the way Battlefield Vietnam is played. In fact, the absence of helicopters on certain levels is sorely noticeable because the game often devolves into a drawn-out slugfest between ground forces. Helicopters combine rapid transport capabilities with a mobile weapons platform capable of devastating air support. Unlike planes, helicopters can loiter close to the ground and hover in place to provide fire support. A couple of Hueys can deliver a squad of infantry deep behind enemy lines to secure control points. The downside to helicopters is that they are extremely tricky to operate, and it takes considerable practice before you can fly one without crashing. And while they're rugged against infantry weapons, helicopters are extremely vulnerable to antiaircraft cannons and missiles, not to mention enemy helicopters and fighters, so they're not unstoppable.  Flying the Cobra can be difficult, especially with an enemy chopper flying right at you.  The jet engine has also had a huge effect on the aircraft in Battlefield Vietnam. The US has the F-4 Phantom and the A-7 Corsair, both of which are capable of devastating ground attacks. The Phantom, in particular, has the dreaded napalm bomb that can carpet a wide area. However, the speed of these jets can often be a detriment because of the amount of fog in the game--the fog and limited draw-in distance means it's very difficult to identify targets on the ground before overshooting them. And though the maps are large, they're not gigantic, and it's very easy to zoom out of bounds, triggering the desertion counter. The communists, meanwhile, get the MiG-17 and the MiG-21. Being smaller, lighter aircraft, they're also much more nimble in the air, and their tight turning radiuses are perfect for dogfights.  It should definitely be noted that on maps with both helicopters and fighters, there is often absolute chaos in the skies. Fighters attempt to shoot down enemy fighters and helicopters, while attack fighters seek out targets to bomb. Meanwhile, helicopters are busy trying to provide ground support, deliver infantry, or shoot down enemy helicopters (or even fighters) with their air-to-air missiles. Ground forces are often shooting rifles, flak cannons, and missiles into the air, trying to shoot down fighters. And to top it all off, Americans can pump music from the helicopters, à la the attack scene in the movie Apocalypse Now. Whether you're involved in the aerial activities or simply watching from the ground, it's almost jaw-dropping to see air combat fleshed out to a degree unimaginable in Battlefield 1942. There's almost a surreal sense of cinematic wonder when you're running around in the jungle and all of a sudden hear Wagner's ""Ride of the Valkyries"" overhead. (If classical music isn't your taste, you can also select any of the songs from the soundtrack.)  The M60 is one of the more fearsome weapons in the game.  The air vehicles provide some of the best cinematic moments in the game. There's nothing quite like standing in the jungle and looking up through the lush canopy and seeing F-4s scream overhead to drop napalm on the enemy, or running toward an enemy base and seeing a helicopter lurch into the air and dip its nose at you like a bird of prey eyeing dinner. At that moment you feel helpless, but that won't stop you from unloading everything you have at the helicopter and watching chunks of metal fly off the bottom as it passes overhead.  The assault rifles and machine guns of the Vietnam era have increased the lethality of infantry considerably in this game relative to its predecessor. The M60, in particular, is almost an overpowering weapon, capable of churning out high rates of fire with a large belt of ammunition and laying down fire over long ranges. The North Vietnamese have a number of cool weapons as well. In addition to Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, they get the SA-7 antiaircraft missile (useful for shooting down American helicopters and jets), as well as caltrops (small, spiked antipersonnel devices that you scatter on the ground as an obstacle). Little things like weapon animations are done particularly well; the parts on your rifle will actually jiggle as you run around. And reloading any of the assault rifles is worth it just for the animation alone; for instance, with the M16, you'll slap in a new magazine and pull back the charging slide with flair.  The sound effects are extremely well done. The background noises almost lull you, what with birds chirping in the air and other such ambient noises. Then the sound of gunfire erupts around you, and you can hear bullets whizzing by the tall blades of grass. Bullets literally sound like they're zinging by your head. Weapon sounds are modeled accurately and have their distinctive sounds, from the short bark of the M16 to the crack of the sniper rifle. There's even radio chatter when you strap into a helicopter or fighter, and a number of vehicles have speakers that can boom out music from the soundtrack. Once again, it's almost surreal to be in the middle of battle and then hear ""Surfin' Bird"" playing in the distance.  All this graphical detail in the terrain, weapons, vehicles, and soldiers comes at a price, though. Battlefield Vietnam will tax the most powerful systems, particularly in terms of memory. Load times are excruciatingly long, especially if you raise the graphical detail to maximum. To illustrate, the game plays one of the tracks from the soundtrack as you load, and you can usually get two-thirds of the way through the song by the time the level finishes loading. And we encountered slow level loads on a machine with the recommended amount of 512MB of RAM and a high-end 128MB video card. Loading times were only marginally faster on a machine with a gigabyte of memory and a 256MB video card.  The ZSU 57/2 is a powerful antiaircraft weapon.  Battlefield Vietnam packs more dramatic moments in its gameplay than most any multiplayer-focused action game in the past few years. Strictly compared against its 2-year-old predecessor, it's a better-designed game, featuring better technology--as you'd probably expect. And it's a better executed game; Battlefield Vietnam doesn't ship with any of the game-breaking bugs and flaws that Battlefield 1942 shipped with, which were fortunately addressed by postrelease patches. Yet, even when Battlefield fans factor in the new vehicles--namely, the helicopters--that still won't change the sense that they've played this game before. Perhaps it's because so many of us have played Battlefield 1942 for countless hours, but the fact remains that the thrill of discovery is gone. Make no mistake, though: Battlefield Vietnam is a great, undeniably fun game. 

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1155,Oddworld Stranger's Wrath ,8.5, Stranger's Wrath is a great game that brings together a few styles of gameplay startlingly well.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/4/1/2219741-box_owsw.png,XBOX,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/oddworld-strangers-wrath-review/1900-6116993/,pos,"
  Oddworld Inhabitants, the creator of the Oddworld universe, has turned out a few fairly different types of games set in the same unique universe. Abe's Oddysee looked like a 2D platformer, but was really more of a puzzle game, constantly forcing you to find the right path through a number of sticky situations. Abe teamed up with a wheelchair-bound fishlike thing named Munch for Munch's Oddysee, which took the puzzle-solving to 3D and played off the two-character team for much of its gameplay. The Oddworld series now sees its most drastic change yet with the release of Oddworld Stranger's Wrath. The new game's emphasis on action and its attempt to combine third-person platforming and first-person shooting means that this new Oddworld has little to do with previous games to bear the name, but regardless of its place in the franchise, Stranger's Wrath is a great game that brings together a few styles of gameplay startlingly well.   Puzzles take a backseat to gunplay in the latest Oddworld game.   Stranger's Wrath may take place in Oddworld, but it also starts out with an Old West theme. You play as Stranger, a bounty hunter of unknown origins. You seem to be the only one of your kind around, and you'll spend most of the game taking on outlaws who are terrorizing various towns full of chicken-men. Why? To pay for your operation, of course. Near the start of the game, you'll discuss a mysterious operation with the local doctor. It seems that you need 20,000 bucks to pay for a procedure, and you'll earn the money the only way you know how: bringing in the bad guys. Along the way, you'll discover more about Stranger's origins and the nature of this secret operation. The game's plot, conveyed through the occasional cutscene, is definitely one of its strong points. It starts slow, but the gradual buildup pays off at the end of the game's roughly 15-hour adventure, which makes up for a lack of extras or alternate modes of play.    Stranger's Wrath combines a few different methods of control for a nice hybridization of multiple styles. The game's third-person perspective is where you'll do most of your jumping and rope climbing. It's also where you'll execute your melee attacks. Stranger can ram foes with a head-butt maneuver or knock them around with a Crash Bandicoot-like spin punch. You can also drop into a first-person view by pushing in the right analog stick. While it's nothing new for third-person games to allow you to get into first-person for a more-controllable view, Stranger's first-person view essentially turns the game into a full-fledged first-person shooter. You can still double-jump while in this view, but you'll move a bit slower, too.    Stranger's goal is to get an operation to--well, you'd better find out for yourself.   Rather than go the standard FPS route of giving you newer and bigger guns along the way, Stranger's Wrath sticks you with one weapon--a crossbow--but gives you a variety of different ammo types. The crazy thing is that your ammo consists of bugs and other small forest creatures. This means you can hunt for more ammo if you need it, though you'll never need to spend a great deal of time doing so--the game usually provides you with good hunting spots right before each major conflict. Your default ammo is a lightning bug that charges up when you let it sit for a second or two. The normal shot is essentially worthless, but when it's charged up, you can use it to power bridges and other things in the environment. It also stuns most normal enemies with one shot. For faster, more effective stunning, you can collect spiders and shoot them at your foes to web the targets up for easy capture. As far as the other ammo types are concerned, skunks produce a gas cloud to incapacitate your enemies, bees come together to create a machine-gun effect, chatty squirrels can be used to lure enemies away from the pack so you can do them in silently, and so on. You'll even get your paws on some explosive bats that do some heavy damage when fired.    While you'll have a variety of ways to take out the opposition, the important thing is what you do with them after they're stunned. As a bounty hunter, it's your goal to bring the bad guys back alive. You capture enemies by running up next to a stunned foe and holding down the X button, which activates a vacuum that will suck the enemy up. Live enemies are worth more than dead ones, so it's in your best interest to stun them, rather than unloading on them with the heavy artillery. As you move through the game, it gets harder and harder to bring 'em back alive, but eventually you won't need to worry as much about purchasing upgrades--like extended clips and faster reloaders--so the money won't be quite as important.    Stranger's well-being is represented by a life meter and a stamina bar. Some moves require a little stamina to use, and standing still or moving slowly lets you regain stamina pretty quickly. There are no health power-ups or any other recovery items in the game. You regain health by merely ""shaking off"" your wounds. This move uses a lot of stamina, but since stamina regenerates, this means that you can go into almost every major confrontation with full health. This may sound like it makes the game easy, but the benefits of ever-flowing health are offset by the fact that enemies' shots do quite a lot of damage to you. You might have enough health to stand in the line of fire to quickly capture a nasty foe, but after that, you'll need to run as fast as possible to safety to recover. This forces a fairly cautious style of play, though since you can save anytime, death isn't a huge punishment. If you get stuck on one particular encounter and die there a few times, the game will give you a hint on how to proceed. The stick-and-move style of gameplay can get to be a little much in some of more enemy-laden areas, but for the most part, the health and stamina bars are good additions that ensure that you're usually making some sort of forward progress instead of getting hung up at every single conflict because you arrived and saved there with very little health.   The game's difficulty can be a little uneven at times.   Most of the game has you going up against a few different types of enemies. These enemies aren't too bright, though they at least understand the concept of hiding behind cover. While you'll run into a ton of standard troops along the way, your real targets are the bosses. The game's boss fights all play out fairly differently, even though the basic tactic of eliminating all the standard enemies from the area before firing everything you have left at the boss still applies. Some of these encounters are deviously tough, since the game throws enemies at you in large numbers. Your ultimate goal in each battle is to try to stun the boss so you can take him back alive for the maximum bounty, but stunning some of these guys is a tough, tough task. The difficulty of the boss battles doesn't scale up all that evenly (some of the mid-game bosses are the toughest you'll face, but the final encounter is a cakewalk), and only a few of them are especially memorable, but they still break up the action nicely.     While the sound effects and music in Stranger's Wrath are strong, the game's voice work really drags the rest of the audio down. Individually, the crazy chicken people you'll be talking with in town are fine. They have a Western twang to their speech that fits the game's theme fairly well. However, there really seems to be only one or two voices for each race. Each chicken-filled town you get to will sound identical to the last, each boss talks in an almost identical artificially deep voice, and the grubbs you encounter in a few places all talk with the same voice. The grating repetition and occasionally poor performances make it difficult to care at all about any of the game's characters other than the Stranger himself, who has a good, deep voice of his own. But to further compound the game's voice problem, all the speech is sampled at a horrendously low bit rate that makes every line of dialogue scratchy, muffled, and occasionally very difficult to make out. Some subtitles would have been a smart inclusion, but sadly, they aren't present. By comparison, the music fits with the themes of the game well, though some of the longer battles have some slightly repetitive music associated with them. The sound effects deliver the standard array of smacks and slaps that you'd expect from melee attacks, but the real stand-out effects come from your crossbow. Each type of ammo sounds different when you load it up, and some of the little creatures even make noise as they sit on the crossbow, waiting to be fired.   An interesting story and exciting gameplay help make Stranger's Wrath a winner.   The look of Stranger's Wrath is really sharp. The game runs at a solid frame rate and basically gets all the technical things down just fine. The textures are clean, there are very few loading screens, and the character models look great. But the style of the game's graphics outshines the technical side. Stranger simply looks cool, and the Old West-style towns and ravines you run through are neat. Later on, you'll venture into very different-looking areas, and these are also well constructed. Owners of widescreen, 480p television sets will get a wider, sharper picture, but the difference between the two modes isn't dramatic.    There are a lot of great things going on in Oddworld Stranger's Wrath. The game manages to combine its third-person and first-person viewpoints extremely well, and the little things, like using bugs and rodents for ammo, really give the game a unique flavor. It's always interesting to see new twists on old action formulas, and it's even better when the new twists pay off and combine to form something that's better than the sum of its parts. While the disappointing voice work gets in the way fairly often, it's still minor in the grand scheme of things. If you're looking for an exciting action game with a unique sense of style, then Oddworld Stranger's Wrath is a perfect fit.  


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1156,Mega Man Battle Network 3 ,8.5," If you've never navigated a Battle Network before, the third installment in the sharp collect-and-battle series is a great place to start.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/5/0/6/5/18859-55065.jpg,GBA,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/mega-man-battle-network-3-review/1900-6072945/,pos,"
 The little blue guy just doesn't quit. For the third year in a row, Capcom's heroic robo-lad Mega Man stars as a virus-busting computer program in the Battle Network series. And with so much practice, he's getting quite good at it. While each game has a great deal in common with the others, the series manages to make respectable improvements each time. If you've never navigated a Battle Network before, the third installment in the sharp collect-and-battle series is a great place to start.  Battles are a mixture of planning, reflex, and luck.  In the not-so-distant future, humankind is living comfortably in an advanced computer age--at least when their world isn't being ravaged by the increasingly prevalent Net crime, that is. Mega Man is a computer program partnered with a boy named Lan, helping him to surf the Internet, check e-mail, and delete hostile viruses with extreme prejudice. You control Lan in the real world and Mega Man in the cyberworld, working together to solve puzzles and progress through the story.  Considering Lan's age (he's in middle school), the game's bright colors, the consistently upbeat soundtrack, and the occasionally silly characters you'll run into (who often have tongue-in-cheek tech names like Mayl or Dex), the game does seem to skew a bit toward a younger audience. But if you give it a chance, you'll realize that the game is pleasing to the senses, and anyone can be humbled in the challenging battles that make up the meat of the game.  The digital scrapping takes place on a rectangular grid divided into player and enemy areas, where you'll use your reflexes to dodge attacks and punish the enemy with Mega Man's arsenal of battle chips. These chips are drawn randomly from a folder, which you'll customize over the course of the game. Each has different attack or defense properties--some are more powerful against certain enemies, and some can be combined with other chips.  You can power up Mega Man as well. HP memory lets him take more damage, and regular memory lets you lock in powerful chips so they'll always be drawn at the start of a fight. You'll eventually be granted an even higher degree of customization. Style changes give you an elemental strength, weakness, and the ability to use programs for that style. These programs are like puzzle pieces that you must rotate so they touch the command line, giving you unique powers that include the Battle Network version of WinZip--allowing you to pass through narrow passageways on the Net.  New to the series are bugs, which happen when programs aren't properly placed or you're otherwise breaking the rules regarding your folder. In fact, there's an entire style for Mega Man based on the exploitation of bugs. Along with the very slick-looking PDA interface, the inclusion of bugs and program manipulation really helps immerse you in the faux high-tech world.  Net navigation is also fairly easy. You'll open up shortcuts and new areas at a rather brisk pace, and the main paths through the central area of the game are marked gold to help keep you from getting lost. In the real world, people will provide you with plenty of clues to keep you moving. Additionally, with a tap of the L button Lan and Mega Man can ask each other for help as to what they should be doing at any time. Aside from the fact that you'll lose your progress if you're deleted by unexpectedly strong enemies, the game flows at a nice pace and also gives you plenty of chances to explore and take odd jobs on the side.  Customizing your Nnavi is one of the most unique and enjoyable aspects of the game.  Trading and battling with a friend over the link cable is also worth a try, and of course since there are two versions of the game, each with slightly different chip catalogs, trading is required should you want to collect each of the nearly 300 chips in the game. Even if you're not worried about hunting down every last hidden item, the game still provides a fairly lengthy run. Conceivably, those who might have grown tired of the series wouldn't find the kind of major changes that would provide a fresh experience in this latest pair of installments--but fans of the series will love them. If you haven't given this particular Mega Man spin-off a spin yet, now would be an excellent time.  
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1157,Champions of Norrath ,8.5," The core components that make up the game all come together to create an experience that is, across the board, better than the original Dark Alliance and better than any ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/5/4/9/1/2215491-box_con.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/champions-of-norrath-review/1900-6089128/,pos,"
 When little-known developer Snowblind released Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance in 2001, it came as a bit of a surprise. Though it essentially took a lot of what Blizzard North did with its Diablo games and transposed it to the Dungeons & Dragons pantheon, the game looked so good and was executed with such skill that any borrowing was easy to forgive. Snowblind has since parted ways with Interplay, the publisher of Dark Alliance, and has gone on to hook up with SOE to create Champions of Norrath, an action RPG set in the world of EverQuest. For all intents and purposes, Champions of Norrath might as well still be set in the Forgotten Realms, but despite the blurry lines that differentiate all these different high-fantasy continuums and despite some of the game's rather evident problems, it's still the best game of its kind to come to consoles in years.  Champions of Norrath is the latest game from the developer of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.  In the opening scenes of Champions of Norrath, you're given basically all of the character motivation you'll need for the remainder of the game. The good guys of Norrath, namely the humans and the elves, are fighting a losing battle against the bad guys of Norrath, namely the orcs and goblins. They desperately need a hero--a champion, if you will--to turn the tides of war. Of course, as you get waist-deep into your quest, you start to learn more about the cloak-and-dagger maneuvering that's occurring behind the scenes. Soon your quest becomes less about hunting down some nasty orc chieftain and more about keeping the very planes of existence from being shattered. Your MO remains largely unchanged, though, so you'll spend almost all of the 20 or so hours it takes to finish the game exploring dungeons, fighting swarms of bad guys, and shopping. Once finished, you can play again on two higher difficulty settings, which gives the game a good amount of replay value.  Champions of Norrath's pattern should seem immediately familiar to anyone who's played a hack-and-slash RPG. First, there's character creation. The game features five different character classes, including the barbarian, ranger, cleric, wizard, and shadow knight, and there are male and female counterparts for each class, though the gender choice is purely aesthetic. The class you choose, however, has a very real impact on what you'll be able to do in the game. It's all pretty predictable stuff, so the barbarian is a pure melee fighter, the wizard's a pure magic user, and the other three classes put varying emphases on magic, melee, and ranged attacks.  Once you've gotten your character set up, you'll work your way through dungeons by slaughtering bad guys, pillaging treasure chests, and snapping up the occasional quest item. The combat basically requires you to hammer on the X button to attack, hammer on the square button to pick up any gear your felled enemies leave behind, and hammer on the R2 and L2 buttons to use potions to replenish your health and mana, respectively. The formula that Snowblind established in Dark Alliance gets tweaked a little with ranged attacks, like spears and bows, as they receive the assistance of a little autotargeting. Additionally, the ability to stun and even knock down characters has been added. There's some light strategy to the combat, so it's important to know when to block and when to retreat. However, the game puts a greater emphasis on statistics rather than on hand-eye coordination.  When you can't carry any more stuff, you can teleport back to town, sell off all the gear that you don't need to the local shop, pick up some new stuff, and head back to the dungeons. Some of the dungeons you'll encounter in Champions of Norrath are randomly generated, as are the names of the weapons and armor you'll acquire, which uses a sort of Mad Libs-style naming formula to determine the attributes of the gear. Almost every piece of weaponry and armor in Champions of Norrath can be upgraded by attaching a special jewel to it, which is another little mechanic that Champions picked up from Diablo II. After adventuring for a while, your character will inevitably earn enough experience to gain a level. Consequently, you'll be given a few points to spend on your character's various attributes, and you'll also be given a few points to spend on specific skills, which are presented in a branching skill tree, not unlike the one found in Diablo II. Admittedly though, Champions' skill tree is not as deep.  You don't need to be familiar with EverQuest to enjoy Champions of Norrath. In fact, it might be better if you're unfamiliar with it.  The numerous quests that you'll be charged with are pretty by-the-numbers affairs, so they either involve killing all the enemies in a certain area or fetching an item. There are a few quests where you'll have to escort nonplayer characters, and, in fact, it was during one of these quests that we discovered a pretty serious bug. About seven or eight hours in, we accidentally broke the game's scripting, thus causing an NPC we were supposed to escort to get stuck in the level geometry, which kept us from progressing any further. We were able to rectify the problem by restarting from an earlier save, but it's pretty serious to find a showstopping bug like this in a retail boxed game, and it's even more disappointing that the game design for this particular section of the game was muddled enough that we were able to break the game without making a dedicated effort. We experienced no other problems like this, so it's entirely possible that you'll play through the whole game without experiencing a bug that's similar to this. However, it's still advisable to save your game early and often, and don't depend entirely on the game's ""soft"" checkpoint saves.  Aside from the single-player game, Champions also features a co-op mode that can be played either on- or offline with up to four players. The offline game works pretty much how you would expect, and the online mode isn't much different, which can prove to be problematic. Since each player has his or her own screen, you're not limited to sharing the same screen space, so each player can wander about a given area as it pleases him or her, which is good. However, if one of the players decides to go to a different area, chat with an NPC, or go in to a shop, all players are dragged along with them--regardless of their locations. The game features voice-chat support for communicating with your fellow adventurers, which is an absolute necessity, as the lack of a dedicated trading system means you'll have to barter it out over your USB headset and hope that the person you're swapping items with is being honest about what they're giving you. Champions of Norrath is a game that you'll want to play with people you know and trust, since the game leaves too many open opportunities for people who only want to make your life miserable, which, if you've ever played an online game, you'll know there are plenty of out there. The mere inclusion of an online co-op mode is definitely to the game's favor, but it's disappointing that its implementation wasn't better thought out, especially when you consider that the game is published by the EverQuest people, who know a thing or two about the pitfalls of online games.  Snowblind has created one of the most visually impressive dungeon crawlers we've ever seen.  One of the most apparently stunning aspects of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was its presentation. For its time, Dark Alliance was easily the most beautifully rendered high-fantasy game anywhere. Champions of Norrath runs on an enhanced version of the Dark Alliance engine, and when it's running right, the game looks absolutely phenomenal. The variety of the places you'll travel to paint a picture of a large, fantastical world, and you get the feeling that you're getting a tour of the most scenic parts of Norrath. From the underwater caves on the Island of Ten Thousand Knives to the mystical, marbled causeways of the Plane of Air, most every environment you see will take a little bit of your breath away the first time you see it. There are a few exceptions, such as some of the later-game levels where the color palette seems to default to earth tones a little too much, but for the most part, the places you'll go look fantastic and are rich with small details. The game uses both static and dynamic lighting effects to enhance the sense of three-dimensional space, and some vivid colored lighting is occasionally thrown in to augment the atmosphere. It seems that Snowblind has somehow tricked the PS2 into rendering bump-mapping effects, or some close approximation, which makes the textures of the decaying stone walls and pebbled floors of many of the dungeons you'll traverse almost tangible.  Dark Alliance's trademark water effect is back, and it puts in considerably more work this time around, as the game includes many more water-bound environments. Additionally, the effect is used to represent molten lava and pools of pure liquid hate. Champions of Norrath makes it a point to present magic as looking truly ""magical,"" so it throws some really grandiose particle effects into the various spells and special moves that your character can cast and make. The creatures that populate the worlds of Norrath, which include high-fantasy staples like orcs, goblins, skeletons, giant spiders, and cyclopes, are all rendered with care, as are the 10 different player character models. Though the game is best played from a faraway camera perspective, you have the option to zoom in close so that you can really appreciate the game's well-crafted characters and razor-sharp textures. It's not too functional, but it's great for admiring just how good the game looks.  But for all of the artistic and technical care that went into the visuals, they're not without some discrepancies, most noteworthy of which is the frame rate. Part of what made Dark Alliance look so great was its unwavering frame rate, so when Champions of Norrath bogs down when the screen is full of enemies and particle effects--or sometimes for no apparent reason at all--it's pretty disappointing. Aside from this, the graphics display some other odd behavior. Fallen enemies will sometimes disappear from the field before they're entirely offscreen, certain lighting effects sometimes won't project correctly across tiles, and, on rare occasion, tile sets won't draw in fast enough, thus making it look as though you're running straight toward the edge of the world. These issues don't really impact the gameplay, but it's boggling that basic stuff like this made it past the QA process.  Despite its bugs and frame rate problems, Champions of Norrath is a superb hack-and-slash RPG.  Visuals are often given unfair credit in creating a game's feel, but Snowblind obviously understands that deliberate, layered sound design is of paramount importance to setting the mood. The voice-acting credits for Champions of Norrath reads like a who's who in the world of video game voice acting. Much of the cast that made Dark Alliance such a pleasure to listen to also pitch in on Champions, including Cam Clarke, Tony Jay, and Michael Bell--the triumvirate of video game voice actors--and they all put in some good work here. And yet, for all the quality voice work that's gone into the game, several of the player characters are inexplicably saddled with chintzy, fake accents of sub-RenFaire quality. The excellence of the music in Champions is far more consistent by featuring an orchestral score that really underlines the grand adventure you're on and by presenting different themes that complement the different locations. For instance, you'll hear the chanting, percussion-heavy theme heard in the orc caves as it cements the culture of conflict oft associated with these beasts. You'll also listen to the unsettled combination of strings and horns that do a superb job of adding tension to gameplay before engaging in a large battle. Ambient sound effects lend further depth to the world, with the cold, echoed dripping of water giving dungeons greater atmosphere. The tortured, twisted screaming of disembodied souls will make a place called the Plane of Hate sound just about how you'd expect it to. The sounds of combat are also expertly executed, as the clash of blades against flesh and armor sound startlingly real. The sound design also has some unfortunate bugs, where the music or the ambient sound effects are mysteriously absent for minutes at a time, though these bugs are admittedly not as glaring as some of the graphical ones. These technical faults aside, the game sounds superb more often than not.  Playing Champions of Norrath can be a little bittersweet. The core components that make up the game experience--the graphics, the sound, the actual gameplay--all come together to create an experience that is, across the board, better than the original Dark Alliance and better than any of Champions' current rivals. The game offers an enjoyable single-player and multiplayer experience, and there's enough to it to keep you entertained for a long, long time. That all of this fun is hampered somewhat by some noticeable bugs, which could have and should have been addressed before the game's release, is a shame. However, Champions of Norrath is still truly great, warts and all, and that speaks to the sheer quality of work that Snowblind has put into its latest game. 


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1158,Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean ,8.5, The lavishly detailed world of Baten Kaitos is a great place to go for a nice fairy tale.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/8/2/5/2212825-box_bk.png,GC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/baten-kaitos-eternal-wings-and-the-lost-ocean/1900-6113590/,pos,"
 Developer Monolith Soft has recently been carving its own notable niche in the world of console role-playing games, and is best known as the creator of the PlayStation 2's Xenosaga series. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is yet another RPG with yet another long and unwieldy title, and it's a beautiful game with a captivating world, a unique art style, and a card-based battle system that draws on the possible combinations of several hundred cards that can change over time. The battle system has a flaw or two, but the lavishly detailed world of Baten Kaitos is a great place to go for a nice fairy tale.  The island nations in the world of Baten Kaitos float in a sea of clouds.  ""Baten kaitos"" translates from Arabic as ""the belly of the whale,"" and it's also the name of a star in the constellation Cetus (the whale). The world of Baten Kaitos is one where humanity is scattered across a handful of islands floating high in the sky, where tales of the lost earth and oceans below are relegated to legend. The people who live here grow a set of wings, called ""wings of the heart,"" that are said to vary in form depending on the spirit and character of each individual. You'll be experiencing this world through the eyes and ears of a blue-haired youth named Kalas, who differs from his brethren in that he has only a single wing--his second wing is a mechanical one crafted by his grandfather. However, unlike in games where you assume the persona of the main character or otherwise just sit back and watch, you play here as a guardian spirit, an otherworldly soul who has bonded to Kalas. It's an interesting twist on things, as your bonded human and other characters in the game will routinely break the fourth wall, turning periodically to speak to you directly or to ask your advice. Your involvement primarily manifests itself in agreeing or disagreeing with Kalas, and the more your responses match his mind-set, the stronger your bond will become, which can have an appreciable effect in battle.   Otherwise, it's traditional RPG fare, as you meet a mysterious girl named Xelha and wind up in opposition to a plot by an evil empire to resurrect a dark god. A variety of characters will fall in with your cause, like a cheerful knight-turned-fisherman, a disaffected exile from the empire, and a powerful masked wizard. The stories of your party members aren't delved into very deeply; the game concentrates more on forwarding the main narrative and less on histories and motivation. Aside from an interesting wrinkle or two, you'll probably be able to mostly predict where the plot is going, but it's still an enjoyable ride, thanks to the well-crafted lands and cultures you'll be visiting, the personality of your party members, and all the ""magnus"" that you'll discover.  Magnus are cards--more precisely, they are the ""magna essence"" of items that can then be magically stored on cards and used. Anything inanimate can be stored in a magnus, from weapons and armor, to elemental spells, to explosives, trees, glasses of beer, fishing poles, clouds, and much, much more. Some magnus can be used only in battle, some can be used only outside of battle, and some are stored and used only as quest items. As if that weren't enough, many magnus will change over time while they're in your possession. Hang on to a tasty fish for too long, and it will rot. Keep milk for long enough and it will turn into cheese. Edible bamboo shoots will change into bamboo spears that can be used as weapons. The grapes that you used as a healing item will change into rotten grapes that can poison you, then into a restorative wine, and then into vinegar. That probably sounds complicated and sometimes inconvenient--and it sometimes is. But usually, battle magnus change only over an extended period of time, and since you're constantly gaining new magnus from monsters and buying them in shops, you can manage your stock pretty easily. It's also interesting (if occasionally frustrating) to see what your magnus will turn into, and many items can be acquired only by manipulating the magnus yourself, like letting wheat turn into tasty beer. But by far the most important thing you'll be doing with your magnus is fighting with them.   ""Pikachu, I choose y..."" Wait, wrong game.  The enemies who dot the islands of Baten Kaitos are all visible onscreen in their respective areas, and you can learn to slip around many of them if you're not inclined to fight. Each character has his or her own ""deck"" of magnus (which you'll have arranged ahead of time) to call on during battle. When it's that character's turn in battle, you'll be dealt a certain number of cards from your deck randomly, and you can play anywhere from zero to nine cards, depending on that person's class level. If it's an offensive turn, you'll be able to use any of your weapons and items on your foe. If it's a defensive turn, you'll be able to use your armor or parry with weapons, if applicable. Playing a card causes a new card to be dealt into your hand automatically. Since you're dealt magnus at random, your ideal deck will be a mixture of weapons, armor, healing items, and spells, allowing you to chain attacks, defensive maneuvers, and healing techniques together in an effective way. Cards don't disappear once they're used, no matter what class of magnus they are, so that doughnut you used to heal in this battle will still be in your deck for the next, and if you use your whole deck during a single fight and reshuffle, it'll still be there. Still, not everything is always doughnuts and happiness.  There are a couple of issues that crop up in battle periodically. Since you're being dealt cards at random, there are times when you can end up getting a glut of a certain type of magnus, like all armor items. If you don't happen to get attacked (and so don't use those cards at all), all those armor cards are still in your hand for your next turn, so you're not getting dealt anything new to attack or heal with. You can only discard a single card per turn if it's not being used for something, which means you can end up in a situation where a character is locked out of acting for a few turns because of the hand he or she has been dealt, while the others are in serious trouble.  Is this an offensive turn, or a defensive turn? Listen for the ding to find out!  Also, there isn't any kind of persistent display in the interface to show your party's hit points--the health meters show up only when you start a turn. This means that in the few seconds you have before you choose your first card in a turn, you'll have to take your eyes off your cards, see if someone needs to be healed, look back at your deck, hit the right trigger button to select a party member instead of an enemy, and move the cursor to select a healing item. The time you have to select cards decreases as you advance, and sometimes you can't even tell immediately whether a given turn has your character on offense or defense. The game uses different sound effects to let you know whether you should be attacking or defending, but at higher levels you'll often fail to defend against the very first hit of an incoming assault because you simply cannot react fast enough. You'll get into the habit of trying to leave your cursor on a defensive card when ending an attack turn so you'll be able to react quickly when the enemy comes for you, but even that can be unreliable. For all its versatility, the interface often requires you to mentally keep track of certain things, since you need to watch the cards in your hand to select moves, and as such it can get a little unwieldy.  There's a good amount of strategy you can use in battle, though. Many cards are imbued with a specific element, like light and dark, or water and fire. Enemies often have weaknesses you can exploit by directing weapons and spells of a certain element at them. If you happen to use two cards of opposite alignment, however, the effects will cancel each other out, so you have to choose your actions carefully. Each character also gains magnus that are essentially ""finishing moves"" that you can use after you've played a certain number of cards in one turn. These moves are very powerful, and you can get the upper hand quickly if you manage to play several of them in a row. In addition, there are powerful special moves that are available only to Kalas that trigger randomly depending on your rapport with him. The closer you're bonded with him, the more often these special cards pop up (they'll appear in your deck at the very end of your turn). When you can keep up with the brisk pace and wealth of information being thrown at you, battle is a satisfying experience.  Interestingly, you won't level up as you gain experience in the field. The only place you can level your characters in the game is at a church that you can reach only through a certain kind of save point that's prevalent in cities and towns. It's an odd mechanic that at best is merely inconvenient, and at worst means that you have to backtrack out of a dungeon area to level and strengthen your party. The game balances this somewhat by making all enemies in a given area roughly equal in strength, so if you can manage the initial foes well, you will likely be able to handle the boss as well. Also, the characters will give audible cues at the beginning of a fight that will let you know if they're strong enough. If someone says, ""Walk in the park, baby,"" at the start of a fight, you'll be mowing through foes. But if someone says, ""This doesn't look good,"" that's a good cue for you to level up before plunging much deeper.  Prerendered environments are known for allowing for greater (if static) detail in scenes, and while many of the towns and cities in Baten Kaitos encompass only a few rooms, they're all positively bursting with some amazing intricacy, color, and quality. And they're not all completely static--one city bubbles at the edges with misty, billowing cloud, another is rich in deeply red tropical flowers that wave in unseen breezes, and yet another is made entirely out of spun sugar, marzipan, and dollops of whipped cream that positively glisten. There's much variety in the places you'll visit, with each island having its own unique character, from a hollowed-out desert mining town to a picture-book village. The dungeons are similarly diverse, and there's even one area that's an ode to Namco's classic Tower of Druaga arcade game. In contrast to the exceedingly rich 2D environments, the 3D character models aren't as impressive, and the game has a bad habit of making some of the environments so grand that the controllable characters are dwarfed to proportions that can make you squint. Still, the character models both look and move well in the field and in battle, and the portraits you'll see while characters speak do a nice job of conveying emotion. As an added bonus, they're not drawn in the traditional anime style. No unreasonably big eyes and mysteriously vanished noses here.  Restore the lost ocean. Save the whales!  The game's soundtrack is perhaps not as varied as its visuals, but the music that is present does a great job of setting mood and tone for the island nations and unfolding events. There's a fair amount of voice work in the game as well, and the delivery tends to be solid on the whole, if a bit slow. The one interesting point about the voice work is that it's actually slightly distorted--all the voices sound as if they're being funneled through a short cardboard tube or being read by someone with blocked sinuses. Ostensibly this is because you, the guardian spirit, hear everything through Kalas' ears and a dimensional shift. While you eventually learn to tune the distortion out (and it's a minor effect), you'll still be wondering why the voices sound a little odd when you can hear everything else just fine.  All in all, the game is a little longer than what is normal for the genre--the two-disc adventure tops out at around 50 hours. Like in many RPGs, there's a wealth of side quests you can choose to engage in that will require some magnus hunting and some leisurely strolling around, among other things. There are far worse things than leisurely strolling around the detailed and mystical lands of Baten Kaitos, and if you're willing to put the time in to wrap your hands and your mind around the card-battle craziness, you'll be rewarded with a unique adventure. 
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1159,Fallout 3 ,8.5," Fallout 3 is a profoundly engrossing role-playing game just waiting to reveal its deep, dark mysteries.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/1/0/8/2219108-box_fallout3.png,PS3,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fallout-3-review/1900-6200091/,pos,"
  A lot of games make a big deal out of player choice, but few in recent memory offer so many intricate, meaningful ways of approaching any given situation. You fulfill or dash the spiritual hopes of an idyllic society, side with slavers or their slaves, and decide the fate of more than one city over the course of your postapocalyptic journey through the Washington, DC wasteland. Your actions have far-reaching consequences that affect not just the world around you but also the way you play, and it's this freedom that makes Fallout 3 worth playing--and replaying. It's deep and mesmerizing, and though not as staggeringly broad as the developer's previous games, it's more focused and vividly realized.   Welcome to the wasteland.   This focus is obvious from the first hour of the game, in which character creation and story exposition are beautifully woven together. It's an introduction best experienced on your own rather than described in detail here, but it does set up Fallout 3's framework: It's the year 2277, and you and your father are residents of Vault 101, one of many such constructs that shelter the earth's population from the dangers of postnuclear destruction. When dad escapes the vault without so much as a goodbye, you go off in search of him, only to find yourself snagged in a political and scientific tug of war that lets you change the course of the future. As you make your way through the decaying remnants of the District and its surrounding areas (you'll visit Arlington, Chevy Chase, and other suburban locales), you encounter passive-aggressive ghouls, a bumbling scientist, and an old Fallout friend named Harold who has, well, a lot on his mind. Another highlight is a diminutive collective of Lord of the Flies-esque refugees who reluctantly welcome you into their society, assuming that you play your cards right.     The city is also one of Fallout 3's stars. It's a somber world out there, in which a crumbling Washington Monument stands watch over murky green puddles and lurching beasts called mirelurks. You'll discover new quests and characters while exploring, of course, but traversing the city is rewarding on its own, whether you decide to explore the back rooms of a cola factory or approach the heavily guarded steps of the Capitol building. In fact, though occasional silly asides and amusing dialogue provide some humorous respite, it's more serious than previous Fallout games. It even occasionally feels a bit stiff and sterile, thus diminishing the sense of emotional connection that would give some late-game decisions more poignancy. Additionally, the franchise's black humor is present but not nearly as prevalent, though Fallout 3 is still keenly aware of its roots. The haughty pseudogovernment called the Enclave and the freedom fighters known as the Brotherhood of Steel are still powerful forces, and the main story centers around concepts and objectives that Fallout purists will be familiar with.     Although some of that trademark Bethesda brittleness hangs in the air, the mature dialogue (it's a bit unnerving but wholly authentic the first time you hear 8-year-olds muttering expletives) and pockets of backstory make for a compelling trek. There are more tidbits than you could possibly discover on a single play-through. For example, a skill perk (more on these later) will enable you to extract information from a lady of the evening, information that in turn sheds new light on a few characters--and lets you complete a story quest in an unexpected way. A mission to find a self-realized android may initiate a fascinating look at a futuristic Underground Railroad but a little side gossiping might let you lie your way to quest completion. There aren't as many quests as you may expect, but their complexity can be astonishing. Just be sure to explore them fully before pushing the story forward: Once it ends, the game is over, which means that you'll need to revert to an earlier saved game if you intend to explore once you finishe the main quest.     Thus choices are ruled only by your own sense of propriety and the impending results. For every ""bad"" decision you make (break into someone's room, sacrifice a soldier to save your own hide), your karma goes down; if you do something ""good"" (find a home for an orphan, give water to a beggar), your karma goes up. These situations trigger more consequences: Dialogue choices open up, others close off, and your reputation will delight some while antagonizing others. For example, a mutant with a heart of gold will join you as a party member, but only if your karma is high enough, whereas a brigand requires you to be on the heartless side. Even in the last moments of the game, you are making important choices that will be recounted to you during the ending scene, similar to the endings in the previous Fallout games. There are loads of different ending sequences depending on how you completed various quests, and the way they are patched together into a cohesive epilogue is pretty clever.     Fallout 3 remains true to the series’ character development system, using a similar system of attributes, skills, and perks, including the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system from previous games for your attributes, such as strength, perception, and endurance. From there, you can specialize in a number of skills, from heavy weapons and lock-picking to item repairing and terminal hacking. You will further invest in these skills each time you level, and you'll also choose an additional perk. Perks offer a number of varied enhancements that can be both incredibly helpful and a bit creepy. You could go for the ladykiller perk, which opens up dialogue options with some women and makes others easier to slay. Or the cannibal perk, which lets you feed off of fallen enemies to regain health at the risk of grossing out anyone who glimpses this particularly nasty habit. Not all of them are so dramatic, but they're important aspects of character development that can create fascinating new options.    The VATS system makes for some awesome-looking battles.   Although you can play from an odd-looking third-person perspective (your avatar looks like he or she is skating over the terrain), Fallout 3 is best played from a first-person view. Where combat is concerned, you will play much of the game as if it is a first-person shooter, though awkwardly slow movement and camera speeds mean that you'll never confuse it for a true FPS. Armed with any number of ranged and melee weapons, you can bash and shoot attacking dogs and random raiders in a traditional manner. Yet even with its slight clunkiness, combat is satisfying. Shotguns (including the awesome sawed-off variant) have a lot of oomph, plasma rifles leave behind a nice pile of goo, and hammering a mutant's head with the giant and cumbersome supersledge feels momentously brutal. Just be prepared to maintain these implements of death: Weapons and armor will gradually lose effectiveness and need repairing. You can take them to a specialist for fixing, but you can also repair them yourself, as long as you have another of the same item. It's heartbreaking to break a favored weapon while fending off supermutants, but it reinforces the notion that everything you do in Fallout 3, even shooting your laser pistol, has consequences.    These aspects keep Fallout 3 from being a run-and-gun affair, and you shouldn't expect to play it as one. This is because the most satisfying and gory moments of battle are products of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or VATS. This system is a throwback to the action-point system of previous Fallout games, in that it lets you pause the action, spend action points by targeting a specific limb on your enemy, and watch the bloody results unfold in slow motion. You aren't guaranteed a hit, though you can see how likely you are to strike any given limb and how much damage your attack might do. But landing a hit in VATS is immensely gratifying: The camera swoops in for a dramatic view, your bullet will zoom toward its target, and your foe's head might burst in a shocking explosion of blood and brains. Or perhaps you will blow his limb completely off, sending an arm flying into the distance--or launch his entire body into oblivion.     This anatomically based damage is implemented well. Shooting an Enclave soldier's arm may cause him to drop his weapon, shooting his leg will cause him to limp, and a headshot will disorient him. But you aren't immune to these effects, either. If your head takes enough damage, you'll need to deal with disorienting aftereffects; crippled arms mean reduced aiming ability. Fortunately, you can apply healing stimpacks locally to heal the injury; likewise, a little sleep will help ease your troubles. You can also temporarily adjust your stats using any number of aids and healing items. Yet these, too, come with consequences. A little scotch or wine sounds delicious and offers temporary stat boosts, but you can become addicted if you drink them enough, which results in its own disorienting visual effects. And, of course, you will need to deal with the occasional effects of radiation, which is a problem when you drink from dirty water sources or eat irradiated food. Radiation poisoning can be cured, but you'll still need to weigh the healing benefits of certain items versus the resultant increase in radiation levels.   Quests are often more than meets the eye.   This all makes for a remarkably complex game that's further deepened by other elements that add some gameplay variety and help the world feel more lived-in. Lock-picking initiates a decent, if odd, minigame that simulates applying torque to the lock with a screwdriver while twisting a bobby pin. The hacking minigame is an interesting word puzzle that requires a little bit of brainpower. Or if you fancy yourself more of a blacksmith than a wordsmith, you can earn and purchase schematics to help you create weapons using the various components scattered around the land. More of an interior decorator? No matter: Should you acquire the deed to an apartment, you can decorate it and even outfit it with a few helpful appliances. The jokester robot comes free.     Although you'll be spending much of your time wandering alone out in the wastes, or perhaps with a companion or two, there are some memorable cinematic sequences. You will join soldiers as they take on a giant boss mutant, spearhead an assault on a famous DC landmark, and escape from a doomed citadel while robots and soldiers fill the air with laser fire. It's a good mix, paying off the atmospheric tension with an occasional explosive release. Your enemies put up a good fight--often too good, considering that enemies that were a challenge early on can still be tough cookies 5 or 10 levels later. This scaling difficulty makes your sense of progression feel a bit more limited than in other role-playing games, but it feels somewhat appropriate, considering the game's open-ended nature and inhospitable world. After all, if skulking mutants weren't a constant threat, you wouldn't be afraid to peek into the dark corners of the Fallout world. It should be noted that unlike previous games in the series, you can’t take a completely peaceful approach to solving your quest. In order to complete the game, you will have to get into combat and kill off some enemies, but since the combat system is generally pretty satisfying, this shouldn’t be a serious problem for most players.    Fallout 3 takes place in a bombed-out, futuristic version of Washington DC, and in the game, the area is bleak but oddly serene. Crumbling overpasses loom overhead and optimistic 1950's-style billboards advertise their products with sunny catchphrases. It looks impressive, and you move around the wide-open wasteland with nary a loading time, though you will encounter loads when entering and exiting buildings or quick-jumping to areas you've already visited. Numerous set-piece landmarks are particularly ominous, such as a giant aircraft carrier that serves as a self-contained city, or the decrepit interiors of the National Air and Space Museum. But the small touches are just as terrific, such as explosions that produce mushroom-like clouds of flame and smoke, evoking the nuclear tragedy at the heart of Fallout 3's concept. Character models are more lifelike than in the developer's prior efforts but still move somewhat stiffly, lacking the expressiveness of the models in games such as Mass Effect.     It's a shame, in light of these impressive design elements, that the PlayStation 3 version is shockingly inferior to the others from a technical perspective. Although the Xbox 360 and PC versions display the occasional visual oddity and bland texture, these nitpicks are easy to overlook. Sadly, the jagged edges, washed-out lighting, and slightly diminished draw distance of the PS3 release aren't so easy to dismiss. We also experienced a number of visual bugs on the PS3. Character faces disappeared several times, leaving only eyeballs and hair; limbs on robots went missing; some character models had an odd outline around them as if they were cel-shaded; and the day-to-night transition may cause odd streaks on the screen as you move the camera around. This version doesn't even offer trophies, whereas the Xbox 360 and PC versions offer Xbox Live/Windows Live achievements.    While there is plenty of somber exploration, you'll still find lots of action.   Aside from a few PS3-specific sound quirks, the audio in every version is marvelous. Most of the voice acting is great, some sleepy-sounding performances notwithstanding. Any game's atmosphere can live or die by its ambient audio, and Fallout 3 rises to the challenge. The whistling of the wind and the far-off sound of a gunshot are likely to give you a chill, and the slow-motion groans and crunch of a baseball bat meeting a ghoul's face sound wonderfully painful. If you get lonely and want some company, you can listen to a couple of radio stations, though the frequent repetition of the songs and announcements grates after a while. The soundtrack is fine, though it's a bit overwrought considering the desolate setting. Luckily, its default volume is very low, so it doesn't get in the way.     No matter what platform you own, you should play Fallout 3, which overcomes its issues by offering a deep and involving journey through a world that's hard to forget. It has more in common with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series than with previous Fallout games, but that is by no means a bad thing. In fact, Fallout 3 is leaner and meaner than Bethesda's previous efforts, less expansive but more intense, while still offering immense replay value and quite a few thrills along the way. Whether you're a newcomer to the universe or a Fallout devotee, untold hours of mutated secrets are lurking in the darkest corners of Washington.    


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1160,Conflict: Desert Storm ,4.5," With games like SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs on the market, there's really no room for something as sloppy as Conflict: Desert Storm.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/7/6/2210276-box_conflictds.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/conflict-desert-storm-review/1900-2884738/,neg,"
Conflict: Desert Storm is a military-themed tactical third-person shooter that is set in the Middle East during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the resulting Operation: Desert Storm. It puts the player in charge of up to four troops at once, and at first glance, it has quite a bit in common with Sony's recent online military shooter SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs. Conflict, however, fails in almost every department, from graphics to gameplay and everything in between.  Everything about Desert Storm's gameplay is really, really clunky. Desert Storm starts out with a brief optional tutorial segment. This training sequence teaches you the intricacies of movement, combat, and commanding your squad. From there, you're given control of one man and sent on your first mission. Halfway through, you'll rescue the second member of your squad. As the game proceeds, you'll work your way up to four troops, each with different specialties. Some are better medics than others, some are better marksmen, and each starts with a different set of weaponry, including an M-16, a sniper rifle, and other real-world weaponry. As you move from mission to mission, your troops gain experience. If one soldier uses a lot of medikits in a mission, he might become more proficient at healing. Other stats will improve, such as marksmanship, which is key considering how awful the game's auto-aim is at taking enemies out quickly.    Each level has a series of objectives that must be accomplished to move to the next level. Almost every mission suggests that you take a stealthy approach to your mission, but the game's definition of stealth is pretty loose. While you might think you've approached an enemy without being spotted, or even fired off a stealthy shot or two with a silenced pistol, most enemies automatically spot you as soon as you're in visual range, even if you're lying prone or ducking. Getting spotted will eventually cause the base you're infiltrating to raise the alarm, bringing more troops and other enemies to your location. Once your squad is at the four-soldier limit, however, dealing with enemy assaults isn't terribly difficult. Most objectives are usually as simple as escorting a diplomat through a dangerous area, destroying targets of military importance, and so on. Once you've completed your objectives, you simply need to get to the landing zone for extraction.    Everything about Desert Storm's gameplay is really, really clunky. The soldiers move in a very jerky way, and their movement speed varies wildly depending on which direction they're headed. While forward motion is, rightfully, the fastest of the lot, the side steps are extremely slow, making strafing pretty useless. The interface used to order your other troops around is weird and unintuitive. You'll get used to it over time, but some sort of onscreen indication of which button is assigned which task would have been helpful. Your entire inventory is accessed from one list of equippable items, and you must equip items in real time. So, if you're taking heavy fire and need to heal immediately, you'll have to hold the inventory button to bring up the list, scroll through the list until you find the medikit, use it, and then scroll back to your weapon. Same goes for planting explosives, using binoculars, or doing just about anything else. Breaking up weapons and other items into different categories or including the ability to set up quick access to important items would have been a much more straightforward way of dealing with the game's inventory. Instead, you'll find yourself fumbling for your detonator, wondering which soldier is holding the antitank rockets, or wasting medikits in the heat of battle.  You'd be better off without it. Desert Storm features a multiplayer option that lets you and a friend make your way through its missions. This mode is nice, in theory. But it does little to make the game more entertaining, and it doesn't solve any of the game's interface and gameplay troubles.    In terms of its presentation, the PlayStation 2 version of Conflict: Desert Storm is a total mess. It commits quite a few graphical offenses, including stuttering frame rates, jagged edges, blurry textures, and poor animation. Also, it's worth noting that even though you'll repeatedly see soldiers getting gunned down, there's no blood to be found anywhere in the game. In fact, your soldiers never really die from gunfire--getting another soldier over to the wounded guy with a medikit will fix up the fallen comrade quickly and easily. The game's sound is also a little crazy, and the stereo effects are occasionally completely wrong, causing gunshots to come only out of the right speaker in one or two odd spots. The game's voice work is all over the place. The in-game stuff is decently done, but the drill sergeants who train you in the beginning of the game are pretty awful. If you're going to spend time basing your drill sergeants on Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, you might as well just go to the source and hire R. Lee Ermey to do it.    Conflict: Desert Storm has a couple of neat ideas, and it's one of the few PlayStation 2 games to attempt to do tactical combat. It even has a multiplayer mode, though it feels like it was tossed in as an afterthought. With games like SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs on the market, there's really no room for something as sloppy as Conflict: Desert Storm, and you'd be better off without it. 
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1161,Batman: Vengeance ,4.5," Unless you happen to like frustration, or you love Batman fanatically, or both, you're better off leaving Batman: Vengeance alone.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/9/6/1/2211961-box_batmanv.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/batman-vengeance-review/1900-2885302/,neg,"
Batman: Vengeance is a port of a console game that was released a full year ago, but the game's general appearance and sound hold up surprisingly well. Unfortunately, if you actually sit down and play the game, you'll find that the game also has horrible problems with its camera perspective and controls, so much so that playing Batman: Vengeance is an exercise in frustration. Unless you happen to like frustration, or you love Batman fanatically, or both, you're better off leaving Batman: Vengeance alone.  Some of Batman: Vengeance's graphics do a good job of staying true to the TV show.  Batman: Vengeance is based on the TV cartoon that ran in the 1990s. Though the show drew inspiration from both Tim Burton's blockbuster motion picture and the official DC comic series, the Batman cartoon distinguished itself with its outstanding voice acting (featuring the likes of Mark Hamill, Roddy McDowall, and David Warner) and its distinctive look. All of the cartoon's scenery and characters looked extremely simple--Batman himself had a literally square jaw and a pair of triangles for eyes, but he always looked great leaping into action against his enemies, thanks to the cartoon's extremely fluid animation. Batman: Vengeance tries to capture the look of the cartoon series, and in some ways, it succeeds. Its characters, especially Batman, look much as they did in the later years of the cartoon show, and many of them, especially Batman, are animated extremely well.   True to the nature of the cartoon series, Batman: Vengeance's character models are simplistic and are also textured simply. So are the game's various background areas; some of these do a good job reproducing the dark, gothic look of the cartoon, but most of them are simply too plain and in many cases too gray or too brown. Take even a brief look at the flat, unadorned walls of Batman: Vengeance's warehouses, train stations, and docks, and you'll probably feel that the game would have looked a lot better if it had featured cartoon-style flat-shaded graphics, like Sega's colorful and innovative console game Jet Grind Radio, which was released two years ago. Fortunately, Batman and his enemies are animated well enough, and Batman himself has a limited but decent-looking arsenal of punches and kicks that he can use to dispatch his enemies at close range. When he's not fighting, leaping, or tossing batarangs at his enemies, Batman and his sidekick Batgirl are uncovering the game's surprisingly complex story, either in real-time, in-engine cutscenes that look about as good as the rest of the game, or in splotchy rendered movies that are so blurry that you'll sometimes have a hard time seeing what's going on.  Thanks to the game's poor camera, the Dark Knight falls to his death. Again.  No matter how much of a Batman fan you might be, you'll be hard pressed not to start pulling your hair out in frustration once you start taking on some of Batman: Vengeance's jumping puzzles. Batman: Vengeance's control scheme is unchanged from the original 2001 console versions--you can use the gamepad or the W, S, A, and D keys on your keyboard, but you'll move in only eight directions (exactly like a gamepad) with a fixed camera that will drastically change positions without warning. To be fair, the game's camera doesn't suffer from some of the common problems that plague third-person action games on consoles--it doesn't get stuck behind the character, and it can be reset by switching to the first-person view (which you use to aim thrown weapons or to use items from Batman's utility belt, like batarangs or the batgrapple, an extending grappling-hook device that Batman used often in the TV show). However, the camera can't be moved manually, so you're generally at its mercy when it decides to make a gut-wrenching 180-degree swivel after you fall from a height or descend a stairway or when you're faced with a challenging jump over a seemingly endless series of bottomless pits. These jumping puzzles might have been manageable if the game had let you rotate the camera around Batman to gauge the distance between jumps, but instead, you're left to guess where the nondescript gray ledge you're standing on ends and where the next nondescript gray ledge begins and to try again and again before you can move on to the next area.   These camera problems are also an issue on terra firma when fighting thugs in hand-to-hand combat. Though Batman can, in theory, immediately immobilize enemies by sneaking up on them with handcuffs and disarm his opponents with a well-placed batarang, you'll generally find yourself blundering headfirst toward all your enemies, even the ones armed with guns, since many of them will be placed around corners and twisting corridors that simply won't let you see around them, thanks to the game's fixed and arbitrary camera angles. You'll basically charge your enemies, hoping that you don't get shot too many times before you get close, then beat them senseless. Though Batman can eventually learn a few fancy special attacks, you can simply beat all of your enemies by alternately blocking and then using Batman's default flurry of punches--the game's fights aren't terribly difficult, but they can become irritating if you're being pummeled by more than one enemy on more than one side.  Thanks to the game's simplistic fighting system, most enemies aren't much of a challenge.  And unfortunately, that's nearly all of Batman: Vengeance's gameplay. The game generally alternates between fighting, jumping puzzles, a fight, a puzzle, then another fight. But it's clear that the game's designers presented some of the game's most frustrating elements as ""challenges"" that would make the game longer, because aside from its frustrating jumping puzzles, Batman: Vengeance is a pretty short game. It's a safe bet that you'll find at least some, if not most, of the game's jumping puzzles to be frustrating, but what makes them even more preposterous is that many of them involve hopping over small distances or clambering up short piles of crates (or in one of the game's most frustrating puzzles, giant mushrooms)--distances that Batman would easily be able to cover if he could actually grab onto that ledge to hoist himself up or use his batgrapple to save himself from falling to his death. Yet you can grab only a few certain, arbitrary ledges and use your batgrapple only in a few certain, arbitrary areas. The rest of the time you'll helplessly watch Batman fall to his death repeatedly and for no other reason than that the game's designers couldn't think of any way to challenge players or lengthen the game otherwise. Though you'll also be able to play through a few very brief levels in which you'll pilot the batplane, ride in the batmobile, or control Batman in freefall as he tries to rescue a falling victim, these are all relatively short and not especially enjoyable, and the batplane and batmobile scenes can be difficult to control because the game inverts your mouse or gamepad while aiming and flying.   Generally speaking, you'll find most of Batman: Vengeance to be un-fun work that you'll need to try and retry repeatedly until you get it right. It's a shame, because the game features good voice over from the actual actors of the TV show, as well as a surprisingly good orchestral soundtrack reminiscent of Danny Elfman's compositions for both the Batman motion picture and TV cartoon--though the music can get repetitive and even annoying when you're repeatedly trying to complete a jumping puzzle. Batman: Vengeance's frustrating puzzles and almost complete lack of secrets and hidden items also ensure that you'll probably never go back and replay the game. Fortunately, if you're just looking for a PC action game that you can use to test your reflexes, you have plenty of better games to choose from this year.
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1162,Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 ,4.5," Every single one of the ports is incredibly poor, resulting in nothing but disappointment for anyone looking to replay any of these classic games.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/5/6/3/3453-13563.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/sega-smash-pack-volume-1-review/1900-2705680/,neg,"
Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 is Sega's latest pack-in software, available only when you purchase a Dreamcast. It contains several classic Sega Genesis games, as well as Virtua Cop 2 and the previously available freebie, Sega Swirl. While this all may sound like a great value, every single one of the ports is incredibly poor, resulting in nothing but disappointment for anyone looking to replay any of these classic games. The disc contains the following Genesis games: Sonic the Hedgehog, Vectorman, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, Streets of Rage 2, Columns, Phantasy Star 2, Shining Force, and Wrestle War. The 16-bit Genesis games are all emulated, which, if done properly, should deliver an almost exact duplicate of the original game's presentation. In terms of graphics and gameplay, the games are mostly correct. Even the games' hidden features are present, such as Revenge of Shinobi's infinite-shuriken mode. However, the sound in all the Genesis games has been horribly butchered. Golden Axe is one of the most clear-cut examples, but all the Genesis games sound more like Sega Master System games at best and Atari 2600 games at worst. The music is horribly rendered. Rich sound effects have been replaced with monotone beeps and boops, and what little speech the original games had is usually played back at the wrong pitch. But the inaccuracy doesn't stop there. Some games, most notably Sonic the Hedgehog, have slowdown that wasn't present in the Genesis original. You'd think a 128-bit powerhouse like the Dreamcast would be able to perfectly duplicate the 16-bit Genesis experience and that Sega would be able to emulate its own system with a little more accuracy, but this is definitely far from the case. Virtua Cop 2 is taken from the early 2000 Japanese Dreamcast release, which is essentially a shoddy port of the PC version of the game. The game plays reasonably well, but it only looks marginally better than the Saturn version and not nearly as good as the arcade release of the game. Sega Swirl is the same game that has been available for free in magazine and in-store demos for quite some time. It's a basic, no-frills puzzle game that you'll either enjoy or despise. Different-colored swirls sit in a well on your screen. Clicking on one swirl eliminates it, as well as any other like-colored swirls that are connected to it. The idea is to get the largest color combos possible while refraining from eliminating only one swirl per click, which subtracts points from your score. There are a few different options in the game, including the ability to play turn-based matches against a PC-based player via e-mail. In the end, the extra $20 you have to pay to get a Dreamcast with the Smash Pack disc included could be better spent on other games, especially when you consider the DC's rich budget lineup. If you're after the classic games on this disc, do yourself a favor and just purchase a Genesis and some used carts.
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1163,Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Third Edition ,4.5," If you're into trivia games like You Don't Know Jack, you may get some mileage out of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but its uninteresting gameplay and methodical pacing ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/3/7/6/8/3507-13768.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire-third-edition/1900-2779453/,neg,"
The third edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire takes the same exact engine that powered the last PlayStation version of the game, drops in a new set of questions, a smattering of new voice work from real-life show host Regis Philbin, and kicks it out the door and onto retail shelves. Like the first game, Third Edition--which is actually the second PlayStation release for the series--sticks to the show fairly faithfully, but extremely limited options, the inability to skip the lengthy between-question animation, and horrendously slow load times suck out any potential fun you might have with this game. The first question that the game asks is how many players will be competing. You can play a two-player game, which sends the game into the fastest-finger round, where the two players must correctly order a list of items. The fastest sorter wins--which ends the other player's game and causes the game to proceed to the single-player game. While this is faithful to the way the show works, it makes the two-player portion of two-player games last about 15 seconds. Support for up to eight players here might have also added a bit of tension. A fastest-finger mode that lets you simply try the sorting challenges one after the next would have breathed a bit of life into the game. For those unfamiliar with the TV show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is a multiple-choice quiz. Each question is worth progressively more and more money until you reach the final question, which is worth 1 million dollars. Of course, the questions get harder as you climb the ladder. To help out on harder questions, you're given three ""lifelines."" One eliminates two of the wrong answers from the list. Another polls the audience for the answer and gives you the results. The third lifeline is the ability to call one of your friends and ask him or her for help. However, this lifeline has changed a bit--instead, you have to call one of Regis' friends for advice. The game looks a lot like the show does and tries to use some of the same sweeping camera movements that make the show stand out. However, the prerendered movies show empty chairs rather than render a polygonal Regis Philbin and a contestant character. Additionally, you can't skip these movies, and they slow the pace of the game down to a grinding halt. There's also a fair bit of loading throughout the game that--even with speed loading enabled on the PlayStation 2--is enough to make you want to simply give up. If you're into trivia games like You Don't Know Jack, you may get some mileage out of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but its uninteresting gameplay and methodical pacing make it practically a chore to play. Only die-hard Regis Philbin fans (and we know you're out there, there's no use denying it) need apply.
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1164,Spec Ops: Ranger Elite ,4.5, The squad premise of the game serves only to throw a few meaningless options into an otherwise thin game.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/4/7/2/2210472-box_sore.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/spec-ops-ranger-elite-review/1900-2715335/,neg,"
Spec Ops: Ranger Elite is a bare-bones squad-based game that feels incredibly stripped down. So stripped down, in fact, that it probably would have fared better had it been developed as a straight action game. The squad premise of the game serves only to throw a few meaningless options into an otherwise thin game. You pick your soldiers from a pool of five different characters, all of which are pretty standard. Each come equipped with weapons that their specialty requires, such as the close-combat fighter who is equipped by default with a shotgun. There is also a sniper-recon soldier, who is obviously equipped with a sniper rifle, and the machine gunner, grenadier, and rifleman, are all equipped with the obvious armaments. You may alter the loadout of each character by changing or adding weapons and by filling their packs with a handful of items such as grenades, medkits, and satchel charges. The control of your main character and your backup soldier is pretty good. You have a good variety of actions to do with each, and the way you use the backup works pretty well. You can control them by switching back and forth between the two, making use of the different weapons and skills yourself, or you can issue simple commands such as ""follow me"" and ""move up."" Having both a main character and a backup soldier is what qualifies this as a squad-based game, but it may have been better off if the one main character had two or more weapons instead of throwing in a backup character that just follows you around--and does little more than that, if you don't specifically command him to do anything. The two-player game uses a split-screen setup, and it makes the game much easier and more entertaining to play. The graphics are pretty rough, and the draw-in distance is downright terrible, which can wreak havoc during the missions. Enemies have a habit of shooting at you from behind cover, and they're difficult to spot before you're right on top of them. Oftentimes they will just pop up, seemingly out of nowhere. You can try to move along using binoculars or scopes to check ahead, but this slows the gameplay down to an agonizingly slow pace.  The camera does pretty well in open areas, but when you get into tight corners or up against a wall, it gets a little confused as to where it should be situated. If you are killed in a mission, the camera pans up and out before dropping into a very shaky spin around your prone body. It's so shaky that it looks like it's catching on invisible corners and breaking free over and over again. The music is decent, but there isn't a whole lot of it, and the repetitiveness that goes hand in hand with that can get to be annoying pretty quickly. The sound effects are good when they chime in, but the problem with the overall sound is the quality. Every sound is washed out, as if everything was recorded at too high a level then down-sampled before it went into the game. Spec Ops: Ranger Elite boils down to a game that makes no attempt to go beyond what its bargain-priced predecessor, Spec Ops: Stealth Patrol, has already done. Instead, it elects to rehash all of the options we've already seen and gives you little more then new levels in which to play. Still, the low price tag makes the game a little attractive and might make a few of the flaws excusable for those who enjoy squad-style gaming.
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1165,Dig Dug: Deeper ,4.5," Dig Dug Deeper's lack of difficulty, levels, and extra features make it difficult to recommend to even the most ardent fan.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/8/0/6/2209806-digdugdeeper.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dig-dug-deeper-review/1900-2837286/,neg,"
 Remakes of classic games usually take one of two routes. One route involves slightly changed gameplay mixed in with revamped graphics, while the other route is just a graphical overhaul of the original. Infogrames chose to take the former route with its remake of Dig Dug named Dig Dug Deeper, which isn't necessarily for fans of the original arcade game. A number of factors, including a lack of difficulty and a relatively small number of levels, should make you think twice before making a purchase. Dig Dug Deeper has only one single-player gameplay mode that's very similar to the original arcade game--there are no multiplayer modes or secondary modes that offer variations on the main game. This single mode contains six worlds, and with the exception of the last level, each is divided into several substages, which are divided even further into individual digging areas. Other than the obvious visual changes, the only substantial difference between the levels in the original game and those in Dig Dug Deeper is that Deeper's stages have a miniscule overland map that essentially serves as a transition point between underground areas and nothing more. So at the beginning of every stage, you'll start at the overland map and wait a second or two before a pooka--one of the game's enemies--erupts from one of several holes visible on the surface. After it leaps out and dives back down into its hole, you give chase and enter the underground digging area where the pooka and the rest of its cohorts are located.In the original Dig Dug, pookas and fygars could be disposed of in a few different ways, and that remains true in Dig Dug Deeper. As you dig through the underground area and encounter enemies, you can either use Dig Dug's trusty drill or use objects found within the environment--rocks, poisonous gas, and lava can all be used to kill the enemies if you use a little strategy in the way you dig. Using any of these objects usually results in more points and different kinds of power-ups that give Dig Dug additional speed or drill power. This creates a little extra incentive to be an inventive digger, but most players will probably plow through the levels using Dig Dug's regular ""pump"" attack. In the end, Dig Dug Deeper's core gameplay is still basically the same as that of the original Dig Dug, which may not be a bad thing for hard-core fans of the original arcade game. But those looking for a game offering a progression in the Dig Dug style of gameplay will probably be disappointed.Even if you're a huge fan of the original game, Dig Dug Deeper's lack of difficulty is still a problem. Most players should be able to get through all six of the game's worlds within a matter of hours on the normal difficulty setting with the default number of lives, but increasing the game's difficulty level to hard only raises the speed at which pookas and fygars run and float through the underground world, so it's not really that much more difficult--especially if you've already played through the game. In fact, Dig Dug Deeper's spotty control is really the only thing that makes the game at all difficult. Unfortunately, Dig Dug is incapable of making sharp or precise turns, so more often than not, you'll run right into fygars, pookas, and natural obstacles and die completely by accident, rather than have your enemies successfully trap you. It's frustrating, especially in the later levels, when you're up against 10 or more enemies.While this new game's graphics have been revamped to take advantage of 3D hardware, Dig Dug Deeper still looks like it was developed sometime around 1997. The soundtrack offers nothing particularly noteworthy, except for one segment in particular that sounds like some sort of demented canary chirping. In addition, Dig Dug Deeper's relative lack of difficulty, levels, and complete lack of extra modes and features make it difficult to recommend to even the most ardent Dig Dug fan.  
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1166,F/A-18 Precision Strike Fighter ,4.5, F/A-18 Precision Strike Fighter is a good flight sim for its time. The problem is that its time is four years past.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/1/9/8/2211198-18.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/f-a-18-precision-strike-fighter-review/1900-2815247/,neg,"
 F/A-18 Precision Strike Fighter is a good flight sim for its time. The problem is that its time is four years past. For all intents and purposes, this is the same exact game that Graphic Simulations released in 1997 as F/A-18 Korea. The publishers at Xicat Interactive have put it in a new box, priced it as a new game, and put it on retail shelves next to the new releases. But there's virtually nothing new about Precision Strike Fighter. What's worse, there's very little indication that you're getting recycled material. It is a rip-off of startling proportion.  The game features a controversial--and chintzy--tactical nuclear bomb.  Precision Strike Fighter models the F/A-18 Hornet, a carrier-based fighter plane with considerable ground attack capability. It's designed to sling lots of advanced ordnance under its wings and still fend for itself if it's jumped by enemy aircraft. It can protect its carrier by intercepting bombers or run interference for ground strike flights by taking out hostile air defenses. It's a good-looking, flexible plane that's gotten good press with appearances in movies like The Rock and Independence Day. Naturally, any self-respecting flight-sim enthusiast would want to fly one.   In 1997, F/A-18 Korea, the original incarnation of Precision Strike Fighter, was the latest in a line of Hornet sims from Graphic Simulations. Although it never enjoyed the publishing muscle of Microprose's Falcon or Electronic Arts' Jane's series, it was a solid sim that was widely appreciated by fans of the genre. It used a fast engine that looked good by 1997 standards, and it struck a nice balance between playability and realism.   Since F/A-18 Korea featured 3D acceleration using Glide only, many contemporary video cards will have problems running it in anything but the intolerably ugly software mode. So the most significant addition to Precision Strike Fighter is its OpenGL support, which lets it run on a wider range of video cards and gives it some sharp 3D-accelerated textures. Oceans ripple, detailed jets gleam in the sun, and dappled green forests cover the terrain like a plush carpet. There are also new volumetric clouds and transparency effects for explosions and smoke. Considering its age, Precision Strike Fighter could have looked a lot worse. It wears its facelift well.   But the rest of this sim is entirely identical to its predecessor, right down to important file sizes and dates. The core of this game is still a low polygon count graphics engine, which was clearly built for slower processors from a time before 3D accelerators. Most objects have a rough-hewn blocky look, as if they were whittled from wood. You get pyramids instead of rolling hills and boxes instead of buildings. The upside to this is that the game plays fast and smooth even on lower-end computers. If frame rate is important to you--and if you're really a flight-sim fanatic--then you know frame rate is king. Precision Strike Fighter is a nostalgic throwback to the days of polygonal simplicity, when sims ran fast and the terrain cut the sky in clear lines.   To its credit, Precision Strike Fighter does a good job of streamlining the jet's advanced capability without dumbing it down too much. The flight model is geared toward realism with only a few noticeable exceptions. The physics of landing and taxiing are right out of a Warner Bros. cartoon, and the rudder jerks the plane around as if it were dangling from a rubber band. But otherwise, there's enough fidelity here to put Precision Strike Fighter in the same category as serious hard-core sims.   The avionics (radar, weapons guidance, navigation, and so on) are downright arcadelike compared with Jane's latest superrealistic F/A-18 sim, but they're easy to use without making you feel superfluous--you still get a sense for having to manage a real pilot's workload. Precision Strike Fighter also does a good job of modeling the various types of weapons available for the Hornet, including a tactical nuclear warhead that goes off with a polygonal whimper. Although the sloppy mushroom cloud graphics might be considered a conscious effort not to glorify something so controversial, it's more likely this is just another lazy shortcut to shoehorn an old game into new clothes.   Considering the flight model and avionics, Precision Strike Fighter is a perfect example of a midlevel sim that treats its audience and its subject matter with respect. Although the learning curve is moderately steep, there's a series of thorough and informative tutorials. These are presented with footage from the game and a narrator who speaks with all the enthusiasm of Ben Stein doing a Visine commercial. The original game's superlative manual is presented in an abridged format, but it's still miles and away better than what you get in most games these days. The playback feature is also an excellent training tool.  New smoke and clouds don't make for a new game.   Finally, there is one more thing new to Precision Strike Fighter, but it's not due to Xicat's efforts. Since F/A-18 and Precision Strike Fighter use the same scenario editor, they can run the same scenarios. So the CD includes dozens of user-made missions that were previously available on the Internet. Some of these are silly and some are sloppy, but most are slickly made and thoughtful, including some strung together in a campaign structure. Playing these scenarios offers a vivid look at the devoted fan base that F/A-18 Korea managed to create. This happens to be the same fan base that will be bitterly disappointed when it finds there's nothing new here.    There's nothing in this box you wouldn't typically find in a patch. OpenGL support and a bunch of user-made missions previously posted to the Internet do not make a new game. Precision Strike Fighter belongs in the bargain bins. But with so few flight sims on the shelves, a lot of gamers might not know any better. So by charging full price for this sorry excuse for a new product, Xicat Interactive is basically attending the funeral for flight sims so that it can pick the mourners' pockets.    	  
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1167,Betty Bad ,4.5," Betty Bad isn't terrible, but you can download the free demo and get pretty much the entire experience of playing the full game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/8/8/9/2213889-8426_full.jpg,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/betty-bad-review/1900-2846278/,neg,"
 WildTangent's new action game, Betty Bad, is essentially a demonstration of the company's Web-based gaming technology. Taken as that, it's pretty effective. Unfortunately, it's also being distributed as a budget-priced stand-alone product. And judged against the higher standard imposed by your potential $20 investment, Betty Bad is seriously lacking in gameplay and quantity of content.  Betty Bad plays like a cross between Tomb Raider and Tempest...  The action takes place in a series of long, twisting tubes that you--as the eponymous heroine--must navigate on foot as waves of attackers approach from ahead. You can walk all along the inside of the cylindrical environments, which appear to rotate around your generally fixed position. It's sort of a cross between Tomb Raider and the classic arcade game Tempest. However, it manages to not capture the exploration and puzzle-solving elements of the former, while simultaneously abandoning white-knuckle action of the latter.   Though you swim through one level and walk along the outside of a cylinder in another level, there's little variety in the game's environments. The placement of the bends change, as do the wall textures, but each mission basically boils down to marching from one end of a tube to the other and shooting everything that gets in your way. Each tube features a single path with no forks, which means you'll never have to decide which way to go. In fact, you don't even have the ability to look around freely, because the generally unchanging dimensions of each tube ensure that your range of forward vision always encompasses everything there is to see.   Swarms of mechanical bugs attempt to impede your progress through each tube. ""Swarms"" is sort of an overstatement, though. Seven or eight at a time is about as swarming as it gets. The roughly eight varieties of bug vary in size, toughness, and attack pattern, and there are occasional environmental hazards that must be destroyed or jumped over, but all the action is pitched at the same somewhat torpid pace. The tension ratchet that characterizes great--or even really good--pure action games is quite simply missing.   Some tension is generated by the fact that you can save only between missions. Most of the levels take about 10 minutes to complete. So if you die in the final 10 seconds, you'll have to replay the first nine minutes again. On the other hand, if not for this restrictive save system, the entire game would take about an hour to solve. There are two short introductory levels, three regular levels that must each be traversed twice, and then a final level. But even with nine levels, it's still incredibly short.  ...but there's not much to it and it's over very quickly.  As befitting its status as a glorified tech demo, the graphics and sound are good. The textures are crisp, the lighting is nice, and the tube effect is neat. The title character, designed by ex-id artist Paul Steed, is well animated and looks suitably swollen in all the right places. But the whole thing feels kind of threadbare. No attempt has been made to imbue Betty Bad--both the character and the game--with any sort of personality whatsoever. It's the kind of simple, short, and totally generic action game that you might get as a bonus for buying a lot of cereal.   Betty Bad isn't terrible, but you can download the free demo and get pretty much the entire experience of playing the full game. Relatively speaking, as budget action titles go, the gulf between 20 bucks' worth of Betty Bad and 20 bucks' worth of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is so vast that it's virtually immeasurable. And Serious Sam even features a more enjoyable fight along the interior wall of a cylinder.    	  
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1168,NCAA Football 2005 ,8.5," NCAA Football 2005 is still a great college football game, but longtime fans will have trouble shaking the feeling that the series isn't quite living up to its awesome potential.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/2/2/3/2212223-box_ncaafb05.png,PS2,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ncaa-football-2005-review/1900-6102778/,pos,"
 Summer has barely gotten into full swing, and Electronic Arts has already released its newest college football game, NCAA Football 2005, out of the gates. The developers at EA's Tiburon studio have added a number of interesting new features to NCAA Football 2005 that help distinguish the game from Madden. Unfortunately, the added effects these new features have are tempered by the fact that the game has failed to evolve in other important areas--namely presentation. The Xbox version in particular is also plagued by some noticeable technical problems. All in all, NCAA Football 2005 is still a great college football game, but longtime fans will have trouble shaking the feeling that the series isn't quite living up to its awesome potential.  NCAA Football 2005 is a great college football game.  The biggest new changes in the game this year revolve around the implementation of home-field advantage. More so than in the pros, the effect of home field in college sports is huge. The developer of NCAA 2005 has made a great first attempt at modeling this effect into its video game. In the game, when you play in a hostile stadium, you'll hear the crowd start roaring as your offense approaches the line of scrimmage. This adds a great deal of ambience to the game, and it even affects the composure of your players on the field. In particularly rowdy venues (the game includes a ranked list of the nation's ""toughest places to play""), your controller will actually rumble, the screen will shake, and your quarterback will have difficulty calling signals and audibles. Move the ball effectively and the road crowd will quiet down somewhat. Falter in your offense and you'll incur the wrath of 100,000 screaming fans. If you're the home team on defense, you can pound on a button to rile up the crowd and incite them to make more noise. If you're controlling a linebacker or a defensive back as you do this, he'll wave his arms in the air to ask for more noise.  NCAA 2005 also attempts to model the composure and poise of players on the field. You can see your current players' composure levels via the ""matchup stick."" Prior to the snap, you can toggle the right analog stick in different directions to see how your men stack up against their opponents on the other side of the line. Hit it to the left and you'll see comparisons between receivers and defensive backs. Push to the right and you'll see offensive versus defensive lines. Pull it down and you'll see how the linebackers fare against the offensive backfield. You'll also see how the composure ratings are affecting each player's relative skill level. In practice, this is most noticeable in the passing game. If you toss a string of incompletions, it becomes all but impossible to complete a long pass. Either the passes will sail far off target, or, more often, the receiver will inexplicably drop an easily catchable ball. Conversely, if you can string together several completions, good quarterbacks can get very hot and will start threading passes into really tight quarters. You'll be tempted to rush eight men at the QB to try to disrupt his rhythm if your opponent goes on a hot streak.  Though the game has some new features, the core gameplay is largely identical to that of last year's entry in the series.  Aside from these new features, the core gameplay feels largely the same as that of last year's NCAA iteration. Veterans will notice a handful of changes, such as new tackling animations that give NCAA 2005 a somewhat more solid feel. On defense, you'll now be able to press a button when tackling to try to apply a big hit, which can force a fumble or cause an incomplete pass. The artificial intelligence of blockers seems to have improved somewhat, thus enhancing the running game. As a result, sweeps and counters feel more viable this season than in last year's game, although running and wide receiver screens still don't seem to work all that well. On the downside, it's more difficult than ever to complete a pass, especially with the composure ratings that affect the game. At times it seems as though defensive backs bat down far too many balls. To be effective, you have to be very precise with your coverage reads and your timing, and you must make certain that your quarterback's feet are set before trying to deliver the ball. Stepping up in the pocket also helps a bit, so those who like to drop back 15 or 20 yards before heaving the ball will have a more difficult time than ever.  One of the biggest strengths of last year's NCAA Football was its excellent dynasty mode. The recruiting process was surprisingly deep and fascinating, at least for college football junkies. EA has evolved its dynasty mode this year, and though you'll still enjoy weekly Sports Illustrated covers, there are now even more options in the offseason portion of the game. You'll set a budget for recruiting, training, and discipline prior to the recruiting season. So put more points into training and your current players stand to gain more skill before the start of the next season. Spend more on recruiting and you'll have added points that can be used to woo incoming freshmen.   The actual recruiting process is fairly similar to last year's, so you'll peruse huge lists of players that are sorted by position, hometown, skill, and level of interest in your program. From these you can pick the players you want to recruit, and you can attempt to pitch them on your school based on a variety of factors, like program prestige, location, and promised playing time. What's new is that you can now choose to scout or give a recruiting pitch. Scouting gives you additional physical and skills information about a player. You also won't choose between phone calls and home visits now. Instead, the amount of effort you put into a player is simply measured in points. Players across the country cost more points to recruit than home-state players. Also new is the ability to recruit ""athletes"" that can slot into a variety of positions. It can be risky to take in such players, because they're usually just jacks-of-all-trades and masters-of-none. But once in a while you can find a diamond in the rough who turns out to be unusually gifted at one position. Before his freshman season, you'll have to pick where to slot him into your roster.  You can use a variety of tactics and techniques to recruit new players.  There was also supposed to be a new discipline feature included in NCAA 2005, where your players would sometimes end up disrupting your program with personal issues, such as missed classes. It would be up to you to apply suspensions or otherwise to maintain order in your program. However, we never actually managed to run into a discipline issue during our play-testing. We tried simulating a few years each with both Cal and Miami, and never once was our simulation stopped to warn us of disciplinary issues. This is particularly surprising, especially given that the real-life University of Miami can't go a few weeks without a problem case, let alone a few years.  Aside from standard games and the dynasty mode, NCAA 2005 includes all of the same modes from last year's game, like the campus challenge (where you use points to earn pennants and other unlockables). You can also play mascot games and college classics, like the end of the 1982 Big Game between Cal and Stanford, where the Bears executed their amazing multi-lateral kickoff return to spoil John Elway's final collegiate game with The Cardinal. You can still create a school and create a player, but this year's version also lets you create custom signs for fans to hold up in the crowd. Additionally, you can create custom playbooks. Both the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions offer online play, which includes leaderboards, instant messaging, quick tournaments, and an ""even teams"" feature that lets you pit any school against another without worrying about one team being unfairly stacked. The new EA Sports ticker also appears to be operational, keeping you informed of real-life sports scores and news while you're in the online lobby.  Unfortunately, the worst aspect of NCAA 2005 is its presentation. Sure, the game animates fairly nicely, the players look reasonably detailed, and grass stains will appear on uniforms over the course of a game. But it doesn't appear as though player models or faces have been updated much at all since last season. The fans in cutscenes who hold up signs look decent, but the crowd behind them in the stands looks flat and primitive. Stadium models don't appear to have been updated either. Worst of all, players and referees blatantly clip through one another in close-up scenes between plays. On the sound front, the voice clips from announcers Brad Nessler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Lee Corso are pretty much the same as last year's, with seemingly nothing new recorded. On its own, the game still looks good on all platforms, and there are no major differences between the three. But when compared to its pro football brethren, ESPN and Madden, NCAA 2005 is falling behind quickly.  The Xbox and GameCube versions of NCAA Football 2005 suffer from some slowdown problems. The PS2 version has a more solid frame rate.  The Xbox version of the game is also plagued with several technical problems, the most serious of which involves gameplay slowdown and online play. We tested the game by using a variety of different combinations, and we even used two different Xbox consoles. However, we still haven't quite determined exactly what combination of factors contributes to gameplay slowdown. Oddly, we've seen it happen to varying degrees with weather effects, online and offline, and in widescreen and normal modes. The point here is that slowdown is present in the game, and it can noticeably affect gameplay from time to time. EA is also having problems with the reliability of its Xbox Live servers at this time. As a result, about half of our attempted matches ended in disconnection. The GameCube version of the game also seems to have a bit of the same slowdown problem, but it only occurs during the close-up views in between plays. The PlayStation 2 version of the game seems to have dodged these issues, because we noticed no noticeable slowdown while in-game. Furthermore, there were minimal lag or disconnection issues during online play on the PS2.  Overall, NCAA Football 2005 offers a fine overall package and should appeal to just about any hardcore college football fan. The new home-field advantage and composure ratings do a lot to give the game a true college sports feel, and the core gameplay has evolved to a satisfactory degree as well. Unfortunately, the series is beginning to lag behind in other areas, and Xbox owners will find that EA's first foray into Xbox Live has been a shaky one. If all you own is an Xbox, you may want to hold off on purchasing this one to see how--and if--the developer can address the game's slowdown and online problems in a future update. If you have the choice, the PlayStation 2 version of the game is the one to get--for now. 



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1169,NASCAR SimRacing ,8.5, NASCAR SimRacing is approachable enough for newcomers and action racers yet challenging and believable enough for ardent sim buffs.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/1/1/2210911-box_nascarsr.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/nascar-simracing-review/1900-6118682/,pos,"
  With the doors at Papyrus Racing Games now firmly shuttered, and now that EA Sports has sewn up exclusive rights to develop and publish NASCAR-branded games until the end of the current decade, there's just one place for PC race fans to get their NASCAR fixes. Luckily for all concerned, that place is none too shabby. In its latest stock car opus, NASCAR SimRacing, EA Sports offers just about everything a racer could want (with the exception of a comprehensive printed manual) and works hard to satiate the thirsts of both the action/arcade crowd and the generally more demanding devotees of realistic/simulation competition. It has, for the most part, succeeded. Despite a few quirks, NASCAR SimRacing is a very workable journey into all corners of the NASCAR world, and the game's a real step forward for the EA Sports NASCAR franchise.   NASCAR SimRacing sports all the perks, colors, and logos of the real-life series.   Like prior EA NASCAR titles, and like most EA titles regardless of the genre, for that matter, NASCAR SimRacing is a big, bold, brash and broad affair. And as expected, it sports full licensing for that ultrarealistic façade that's helped EA become the gaming juggernaut it is today. Certainly, if you want all the external NASCAR trappings, all the team and series sponsors, and all the appropriate team colors and paint schemes, you've come to the right place.    The game features no fewer than 28 tracks, 25 of which are culled from the real-life NASCAR circuit and three of which are pure fantasy. Nearly two dozen of them are ovals, but NASCAR SimRacing quickly dispels the wrongful notion that if you've seen one oval track you've seen them all. Indeed, each ""roundy round"" is a completely unique experience, from its character flaws (such as elevation variations, bumps, and width deviations) to its length, degree of banking, rubber-blackened racing line, and distinctive track surface.    You won't feel short of potential rides, either. More than five dozen vehicles and drivers are offered spanning NASCAR's three most important ""leagues"": the National Series, the Craftsman Truck Series, and the top-rung Nextel Cup Series. And, yes, there is some distinction between classes. Surely you'll find yourself moving much quicker and feeling more exposed to danger in a Nextel car than you would in a truck (which, of course, isn't a truck at all but is simply a slightly less powerful purpose-built racecar with a truck shell). By default, Nextel races are longer than those in the other two classes, and they're sometimes held at different tracks. Indeed, the three enclosed fantasy courses effectively take the place of Craftsman Truck and National tracks the game development team couldn't model due to insufficient data.    Undoubtedly, since EA Sports is now the sole provider of NASCAR PC games and must now answer to not only its already-established action/arcade fan base but also a legion of authenticity-craving Papyrus veterans, the big question is whether NASCAR SimRacing satisfactorily models a realistic stock car racing experience. The answer is yes.    Though it's no Grand Prix Legends in that it doesn't take the whole realism thing to frightening new heights, it does offer an equivalent experience to the vaunted Papyrus physics model as seen in that company's final NASCAR edition. You may not realize this, however, the first time you hit the track, especially since by default the game activates a sweeping collection of aids designed to simplify the experience for newcomers and ""arcade"" drivers. (Things become very different once you start removing these aids, though.)    NASCAR SimRacing does not fall victim to the pitfalls that have so often marred other racing games when they first ventured into the realm of simulation. Cars do not feel too loose, too tight, or too bizarrely magnetized to some preordained driving line. They most definitely ride upon four unique points, and their power-to-weight ratio seems bang on. If you get a little squirrelly, you can usually catch it if you exercise moderation and pay attention. If you don't, or if you keep a death grip on the stick, you're history. Much of your time will be spent preparing for turns, correcting yourself during them, and trying to slowly reel in and hopefully move smoothly past your peers. Fast oval setups pull noticeably to the left, and cold tires must warm sufficiently before you can really start moving around out there.    One complaint likely to rear its head over the course of the next few weeks and months is that the development team perhaps didn't go far enough. Even when all driver's aids are removed and difficulty levels are cranked, hardcore experts will likely wish for just a little more danger, just a bit more skittishness, and just a tad of that ""edge of the envelope"" feeling. But handling physics are just one part of the equation. The racing action must also be up to snuff, and indeed it is. In fact, NASCAR SimRacing delivers some of the best up close bumper-to-bumper dicing to ever grace the PC environment. In this game, drafting is critical...and the closer the better.   The game never leaves you wanting for important information, even in its external views.   It's good then that the artificially intelligent drivers are both talented and skillfully aware of your presence. The truth is that they go out of their ways to avoid bopping you if you've done something stupid. And that's good news, because there's nothing worse than a great race ending suddenly and prematurely because of one microscopic slipup that probably wouldn't have occurred had you been in a real car on a real track.    This keen awareness is perhaps nowhere more evident than during those few milliseconds after you've passed a competitor in a turn and are then trying to gather your own car without grazing your competitor's nose with your tail. In the Papyrus version of NASCAR, this was always an inordinately difficult situation, often resulting in a rear-end nudge and a subsequent spin. In NASCAR SimRacing, a passed car is generally gracious enough to let you slot back into line. Even if you've pumped up the AI aggression, you aren't forced to stare down a bunch of suicidal maniacs. We would have preferred more independent collisions between AI vehicles, but maybe that will come in time.   Furthermore, those who don't occasionally bump and lean against competing cars will soon find themselves languishing behind, at least when the difficulty level is high. Indeed, car-to-car contact is common throughout, but it's an absolutely necessary part of the action if you want to win. More to the point, though, it's fun. It's really, really fun, especially considering the game's physics model permits car-to-car contact without activating a complete loss of adhesion. That's something you didn't find in the Papyrus product.  The view from inside the cockpit is cramped and claustrophobic...just as it should be.  But if successfully competing at 95 or 100 percent difficulty is something you want to do, clean driving and mastery of your car are just the starting points. You'll also need to learn how to set up the darn game. The game offers a trio of default setups for each track, as well as three more ""basic"" adjustments (speed, handling, and response) to help get newbies acclimatized. But it also provides full garage facilities and sophisticated telemetry information for those who really want to get their hands dirty building the cars they'll need to emerge victoriously at the highest levels. And garage skill is an absolute must, as the game both enhances the capabilities of your opponents and makes your own car a bit less perfect as you incrementally dial in higher difficulty levels. Move from 85 to 95 percent difficulty, for example, and your once-smooth machine now redlines halfway down the front straight.             Once you get the hang of things, you'll undoubtedly want to engage in the game's career mode. Here, much of the silliness of past NASCAR Thunder careers has been eliminated in favor of a more subdued, realistic approach. Clearly, you'll quickly understand the meaning of consistency. You can win a ton of races, but if you're interspersing those victories with a fair share of sad-sack back-of-the-pack finishes or wipeouts, then you'll never rise to the top.  Otherwise, the career mode veritably brims with the same elements and situations facing a real-world team. Yet as promising as the concept seems from the outset, further investigation brings up holes. Simply put, the game doesn't go as far as it should. Yes, you'll involve yourself in research and development, thereby creating a much faster car, but it's all too easy. You merely dedicate funds to a given aspect (power, torque, grip, or aerodynamics) and then wait for a given number of races for that research to be completed. Applying more funds decreases the amount of time each new development takes, but there's, unfortunately, nothing deeper underneath. In the end, it all seems repetitious.  The world of sponsor relations is little better. You merely sign up as many sponsors as you can, and then you repeat the process as your contracts expire. There are no interesting asides, personality conflicts, or backroom battles. Moreover, your reputation bounces around like the scenery at a Hooters convention. We handily won three straight races and had top-dollar offers coming in from everywhere. We then experienced a single midpack finish and watched as our suitors, including ""Little Tree Air Fresheners"" for goodness sake, all but evaporated. We were informed that our reputation had taken a real beating. Later, following an event where we purposely demolished virtually every vehicle on the track, we were informed that our reputation had dropped ""just a little."" That's just wrong.  Yet if you can overlook some of the periphery, the career is generally an enjoyable place to be. Certainly it's a strong test of your overall ability. Additionally, several of the components are better and more sensible than those described above, and the nifty magazine headlines that highlight your latest triumphs are extremely cool.  As should be expected, especially given the visual beauty of EA's prior NASCAR efforts and the legacy of great-looking Papyrus products that are now no more (in part due to EA's exclusive NASCAR deal), NASCAR SimRacing is beautiful to behold. When run at its full graphical prowess, the game looks at least as good as the best NASCAR simulations to ever hit the market.  Apart from the true stars of the show--those distinctive tracks, sponsors, and vehicles described above--NASCAR SimRacing is perhaps most graphically notable for its superb depiction of real-time source-sensitive lighting and environmental conditions. Shadows from trackside objects move in accordance with the position of the sun. Even inside your cockpit, objects are bathed in light, then swamped by darkness. The black silhouettes under your opponent's cars swing to the right and left and fore and aft as the herd roars around the track. Indeed, so sophisticated is the play of grayscale variations on every nook and cranny of every vehicle that you'll swear you've been transported to some sort of TV land.  Nothing worse than spilling your Cheerios.  Day evolves smoothly into night, cloudy days become sunny, and all the while you'll witness the myriad subtle nuances that make the whole thing believable, including fighter-jet flyovers, circling helicopters, camera-wielding blimps, animated big-screen monitors, and all the offtrack periphery of a real event. Even the pit area is a lively affair, complete with animated crews flitting around your car, crew members jostling their pit boards, and more.   The game's overlaid display technology is excellent. Before each stint, you can decide if you want a low, medium, or large heads-up display to accompany your exterior perspectives. By toggling the lower F keys, you can summon all the critical facts and figures you need to properly manage your race, as well as signal the crew for your next stop. And, as has always been the case in late-model EA NASCAR titles, numerous other options are available to fine-tune your display and graphical qualities to best suit your own unique preferences. You can even moderate the width of your field of view and the scope of your driver's head movement.   Fans of fire and brimstone will, for the most part, be quite pleased. The game delivers varying levels of tire and engine smoke when the situation dictates it, and the game even goes so far as to both introduce a few flames and maintain the most powerful smoke shows for a half minute or so, which is enough to authentically camouflage most of the immediate area. The fire, conversely, is confined to short, smallish bursts from the engine compartment. Surely it isn't as hellish as it could be. Of potentially more concern are the occasional artifacts we saw during two separate stints. They were limited to the grandstands and therefore had little impact on the racing, but to see an entire section of seats and fans morph into space was weird, to say the least. Of course, your experience may vary.   In NASCAR SimRacing, the environment is dynamic and downright gorgeous.   As for car damage, you've come to the right place. NASCAR SimRacing cars break apart and shed parts as believably as most any driver could demand. Anyone conducting a search-and-destroy mission will soon find him- or herself surrounded by a bevy of cars in varying states of disrepair, so doorless, fenderless, bumperless, and tireless automobiles will be encountered. Walls display the black bruises of recent impacts, and tires and hoods bounce across the track until they magically disappear.      Sadly, the game's replay function is quite cumbersome. All the most desirable speed and editing controls are present and accounted for, but they're scattered oddly about the screen with little explanation, and they're given rudimentary appearances. Actually viewing your latest escapades is a lot of fun, especially considering the wide array of camera perspectives, but it's not as easy as it should be. During an event, you can access only the last lap or two. You can see an infinitely larger chunk after your race has ended, but you can only view it after sitting through a painfully lengthy replay-loading procedure. And this is just one of many spots where the proceedings seem to slow to a crawl.    In a word, NASCAR SimRacing's menu structure and navigation is clunky. If you want to enact even a minor settings or preference modification, you must seemingly wade through a flock of confusingly arranged, slowly transitioning interfaces to do so. If you feel the need to tweak your career or make a few changes prior to an event, the procedure is similarly sluggish. And when you load a track, be prepared to watch your fingernails grow while you wait. And wait.    Furthermore, you can't leap from one series' vehicle to another without unloading and reloading the track and jumping through a couple more hoops along the way. Nor can you quickly move to another track without first undergoing a whole bunch of menu navigation and waiting, once again, for that loading process to complete.       Another word of caution: Don't let those seemingly lightweight minimum system requirements fool you. Even the recommended requirements are a bit too liberal. Consequently, players who don't have high-end processors (2 to 3GHz Pentium 4s) and graphics cards (at least 128MB video RAM) and a minimum of 512MB RAM will be compelled to turn to the built-in graphical adjustment utility to get things flowing smoothly. Fortunately, there are oodles of possible video and audio alterations.     Interestingly, the development team opted to exclude integrated antialiasing. Instead, players must use the antialiasing features of their video cards. We cranked in the max antialiasing (4X) on our Radeon 9800 and were very pleased with the results, immediately saying goodbye to the sparkles and jaggies of the non-antialiased iteration.    Those who prefer trading paint with real, live humans rather than artificially intelligent CPU drivers will appreciate NASCAR SimRacing's impressive multiplayer element. Players already familiar with one another can dice it up via a local area network, but far more will presumably go mano a mano on the Internet. The game lets you do just that with up to 43 of your best friends (and most despised rivals), internally, through its multiplayer command and an active ea.com account.    We were privy to several multiplayer sessions just prior to the game's release and found it behaved quite well, even with a dozen players and a few AI cars simultaneously on the track. Warping was evident, but only minimally so and not too much to make the racing unbearable. As for frame rate, let's just say the game is best played online with its graphical detail level set to medium or below. Anything more and you'll quite probably endure a slide show. Fortunately, the scenery looks quite acceptable, even with reduced detail. EA assures us that multiplayer NASCAR is considered an extremely significant component, and as such, it will continually receive attention and enhancements as time goes on.   What happens when you fit too many cars in too small a space?   Audio aficionados will be happy to learn the game sounds great too. Talkative track announcers, spotters, and crew chiefs are just a small part of a comprehensive audible environment that also includes a very credible and always-informative representation of tire squeal and underbody scraping. And when you smack the wall or another car, there's definitely no question about it. The development team was somehow unable to capture that all-encompassing, echoing reverberation of four dozen monsters in a bullring that Papyrus did so well, but individual motors are convincingly guttural and bellowing. Assorted mechanical sounds and gear shifts are likewise gritty and plausible.    NASCAR SimRacing definitely cries out for a more thorough printed manual or guidebook (though EA will support it online via its Garage 101 component), and it also suffers from a few teething problems. But in the end, the decision to bring in tested personnel, like James Hawkins and several ex-Papyrus staffers, has clearly helped propel EA's NASCAR series to new heights. Approachable for newcomers and action racers yet challenging and believable enough for ardent sim buffs--and certainly pretty enough for all--NASCAR SimRacing looks to be in good hands and should only improve beyond its already praiseworthy state as time goes on.  


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1170,SWAT 4 ,8.5," The newest iteration of the series is the best one yet, offering an intelligent and flexible interface, a highly replayable campaign, and multiplayer modes that include cooperative play.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/2/4/7/0/2212470-box_swat4.png,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/swat-4-review/1900-6121423/,pos,"
  The original SWAT game, released in 1995, was Daryl F. Gates' Police Quest: SWAT. Named after the former Los Angeles Police Chief who formed the world's first SWAT team, the original SWAT and its sequel were actually strategy games. It wasn't until SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle was released in 1999 that the series transitioned into the first-person-shooter genre. Throughout the years, each SWAT game has attempted to simulate what it's like to lead the world's most highly skilled and trained police officers into dangerous confrontations. It's been more than five years since the last SWAT, and the newest iteration of the series is the best one yet, offering an intelligent and flexible interface, a varied and highly replayable campaign, as well as multiplayer modes that include cooperative play.    Your ultimate goal is to arrest suspects, not kill them.   As with the real-life SWAT teams, your job as an element commander in SWAT 4 is to take your five-man team into dangerous situations and defuse them. These situations range from a botched jewelry heist to high-risk arrest warrants to a raid on an illegal casino. In almost every mission, there are innocent civilians mixed in with the bad guys. Those of you who are Rainbow Six and Counter-Strike veterans will need to cool it on your itchy trigger fingers. Even when you do run into armed criminals, you don't have carte blanche to shoot them immediately. You have to follow the same strict rules of engagement as a real police officer and do whatever you can to subdue and arrest suspects without lethal force. Your guns are meant to be a last resort and should only be used if an armed suspect is an immediate threat to your team or civilians. This is the primary detail that separates the SWAT games from the military-style action games. The rules of engagement add a good deal of difficulty to the game, and SWAT 4 pulls this off well. At the end of each mission you're graded on how well you did, and more points are awarded for arresting as opposed to killing suspects. You are assessed big point penalties for improper use of force, and for the most part, these penalties are levied fairly and intuitively.     The 14-mission campaign isn't linked in any way. There's no overarching storyline that connects them all, so the campaign plays out just like a series of stand-alone missions. It starts you off with a training level that does a good job of acquainting you with the basics of using your weapons and commanding your teams. It's here that you're introduced to the game's interface. Your four subordinates are divided into a pair of two-man groups: red and blue. You can issue orders to the entire element or to each pair separately. Switching between the groups is done by tapping a key. The commands you give are done in a context-sensitive manner and are based on what your crosshair is pointing at. Point at a door and hold down the right mouse button, and you're able to access a menu that gives you different options, such as ""Open and Clear,"" which orders your men to open the door and enter, or ""Open, Bang, and Clear,"" which will order your men to open the door, toss in a flashbang grenade, and then run into the room to clear it of threats. Point your crosshair at a civilian and you can order your men to zip cuff him or her for safety. Aim at a locked door and you can order your men to pick the lock or blow it open with a charge or breaching shotgun.     The context-sensitive interface extends to a multipurpose use button as well. Point it at a suspect or hostage, and the use button will cause you to yell at the person to put his hands up and surrender. You'll be doing this a lot in SWAT 4, as you attempt to get suspects to respect your authority before shooting them. Point your cursor at a dropped weapon and you can pick it up to secure it. Aim at a cuffed criminal or civilian and your use key will radio a status report into command.     There are also interface options that allow you to remotely command one of your squad elements. For example, you can order red team to stack up at a door, and then leave them there while you take blue team around the corner to a second door (which leads into the same room). Even though you're out of visual range of red team, you can bring up a picture-in-picture window of what red team is seeing, and through that window you can order them to enter the door they're standing in front of. This is a neat option that allows you to simultaneously enter a room that has two doors. During a given mission there are also picture-in-picture windows you can open that give you a view of what external snipers are seeing, and you can even control your snipers via those windows.    It seems like a lot to take in, and certainly it takes a few mission runs before you become used to all the options available to you. But once you've gotten a few missions under your belt, ordering your squad elements and moving along with them becomes second nature. The structure of the campaign seems to mimic this standard learning curve, as the first few missions are rather simple and easy, but the difficulty ramps up considerably in the later missions, where you'll find complicated building architecture and numerous heavily armed suspects.    The briefing offers valuable information on each mission...because knowing is half the battle.   Before going on each mission you can listen to a quick briefing, and this presentation is done well. The premise of each mission is explained by a radio dispatcher, and further context is given by the element commander. In certain missions you can even listen to a 911 call to glean more information. It's important to study these briefings carefully as they can contain photographs of suspects and hostages, as well as floor plans of the buildings you assault. Some missions have more available information than others. In others, you only have a rough sketch of the building and no clear idea about the number of suspects and hostages. Based on this information, though, you can choose a weapon and equipment loadout for your team.     SWAT 4 includes a good selection of assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, and nonlethal weapons like Taser guns, pepper spray, and a paintball gun modified to shoot pepper balls. You can also choose between ammo types like hollow-point bullets for more stopping power against unarmored suspects, or full metal jacket for better penetration against body armor. The grenades and gadgets are probably the most important selections. You'll need to carry in flashbang and tear gas grenades for assaulting rooms, and you also have special gear like the Optiwand, which is a fiber-optic camera used for peeking around corners and under doors. Door wedges allow you to seal off exits to keep suspects from running away into rooms you've already cleared.   Once you're actually in a mission, you'll find that the game rewards patient and deliberate play. The nature of SWAT 4 as a realistic simulator is that it's very easy for you and your team to get wiped out if you make any kind of mistake. Charging into rooms without first tossing in some kind of grenade to incapacitate or distract suspects inside is a surefire recipe for disaster. As a result, once you get the feel of the game, you'll find that the gameplay in SWAT 4 is fairly methodical, punctuated by a few brief moments of intense action. Stick an Optiwand under a door to check for occupants, open (or blow open) the door, toss in a grenade, then rush in and clear threats. Repeat on the next door.   The Optiwand can warn you of enemies lurking behind doors.  What ends up complicating matters is the varied artificial intelligence of the enemies and hostages you find. Some criminals will give up the moment you yell at them to drop their weapons. Others won't surrender unless you incapacitate them with a flashbang or tear gas, or even a Taser gun shock. Some immediately shoot back, while others will try to run away and escape into other rooms. Bold suspects may even run into the room you're in and unexpectedly attack you. Hostages are equally unpredictable in how they behave. Most hostages comply immediately, but some need to be hit with a nonlethal weapon before they can be restrained.   The fun in SWAT 4 comes in trying to sort out all the mess and bring order to the chaos while remaining within a police officer's rules of engagement. Thankfully, the AI of your squadmates is generally smart enough to handle most situations. They're usually good about engaging suspects and only shooting them when appropriate. They're also extremely accurate when called upon to fire. Your squadmates are even smart about moving up and down stairways and keeping their weapons pointed up or down as appropriate. The main issue is that your AI teammates are sometimes slow on the trigger. Often times, in an attempt to get armed suspects to surrender, they give enemies too much time to fire back, and as a result, it is difficult to get through many of the later missions without sustaining casualties. It can also be annoying in the cases where your squadmates get stuck on level geometry, or are slow to comply with orders because they're too distracted with a suspect spotted through an interior window.   Despite the flaws, SWAT 4 is extremely unique in its gameplay style and premise, and it executes cleanly for the most part. What's more, suspects and hostages spawn randomly in each level every time you play, which adds a great deal of replayability to the game. No matter how many times you've played a mission, you can never be too sure of the whereabouts of suspects, which makes for a consistently intense experience. Replaying levels does make them easier over time, but that's not from memorizing the locations of enemies, it's from gaining a better understanding of the building architecture, which plays a huge role in the game. For further replayability, SWAT 4 even includes a mission-maker interface that lets you customize any of the levels to include variable numbers and types of suspects and hostages, as well as specific mission requirements, like sustaining zero casualties. These missions are saved as pack files, which can be traded with your friends.  Multiplayer modes also contribute to the great overall value of SWAT 4. While the game does include team-based modes that are playable for up to 16 players online, the most attractive option is cooperative mode for up to five players. You can play out any of the game's built-in missions or you can play one of your custom-built missions in cooperative mode. Co-op SWAT 4 is extremely fun, and the interface allows any player to issue orders. Direct your teammates to open a door, for example, and they'll see a red arrow over the doorknob to indicate which door you're talking about. While the other gameplay modes like VIP escort, team-based deathmatch, and a bomb-defusing game are fun in their own right, SWAT 4's co-op mode is easily the best aspect of its multiplayer options, especially considering the dearth of cooperative games available today.  SWAT 4's graphics mirror its gameplay: it's great for the most part, but it has a few noticeable flaws. The character models of your team are fantastic, and they animate beautifully when executing scripted moves like breaching open a door and entering a room. They're modeled in such detail that you can even see the number and type of grenades each of your teammates has left by glancing at their utility belts. The models of the various hostages and suspects, however, don't look quite as good. They're noticeably blockier, and their joints can look and bend a bit strangely while you're cuffing them. The level architectures are very well detailed, and each building's layout looks and feels believable, including the degree to which they're furnished. SWAT 4 also does a good job with lighting, as you'll need to rely on your tactical light a lot in dark rooms and areas. The biggest downside to the game's graphics is that the frame rate can be a big issue. SWAT 4 chugs noticeably on machines with 512MB of RAM. Upgrading to 1GB can make most situations play out a lot smoother, but in intense firefights with tear gas in the air and multiple suspects and squadmates firing, the frame rate still takes a big nosedive.  The level architecture in SWAT 4 is one of the best aspects of the game.  SWAT 4's sound effects are sharp and realistic, particularly the gun shots, which sound quite powerful. What you'll hear most in the game is yelling, both from suspects and hostages, as well as from your own squad who are screaming for everyone to lie down and surrender. There's a good deal of cussing in the game, which reflects the intense, life-or-death scenarios you face. The whimpering from wounded civilians and suspects can get annoying at times, but it can also be funny to hear the grumbling complaints from cuffed criminals. There are other nice sound details in the game, such as the metal detector in one level that goes off every time you walk through it. SWAT 4 doesn't include much in the way of music, but you will hear fast-paced tunes spool up dynamically every time you enter a confrontation or forcefully enter a room with a grenade blast.   As a realistic police simulator, SWAT 4 definitely hits the mark. Though the frame rate gets chunky at times, and there are a couple of irritating bugs and quirks, the AI delivers on most counts in a game that is designed with great replayability. The cooperative mode is also extremely fun and should make this game attractive for those looking for something to play together with friends at a LAN party or online. If you enjoyed SWAT 3, or if you like tactical-style shooters and are looking for something with a twist, you won't go wrong picking up a copy of SWAT 4. 


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1171,Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix ,8.5," This ""remixed"" version of the original delivers almost everything that was great about the console versions, and with the inclusion of four new levels, the single-player experience has gotten even ...",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/0/2/0/5/20750-60205.jpg,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/tony-hawks-underground-2-remix-review/1900-6120572/,pos,"
  Impressive Tony Hawk games that arrive simultaneously with portable hardware launches are nothing new. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 took the series to the Game Boy Advance with winning results. But at the same time, you couldn't help but feel like you were playing a different game entirely. Now, just in time for the PSP launch, Activision is set to offer up a portable version of Tony Hawk's Underground 2, which was released on consoles last year. This ""remixed"" version of the original delivers almost everything that was great about the console versions, and with the inclusion of four new levels, the single-player experience has gotten even better.   The four new levels in Remix are a great addition to an already-great game.   For those unfamiliar with the series, the world of Tony Hawk is all about fast-moving freestyle skateboarding. The game is mostly goal-oriented, with challenges based on scoring, creating long combos of tricks, and some objective-based stuff, like pulling a specific trick on a certain object, which often results in a scene of mass destruction. But while the goals are the main point of the game, the control and gameplay is fun enough that simply skating around and tricking off of objects is a very worthwhile and fufilling activity.    The biggest change made for the PSP remix of THUG2 is the addition of four new levels. Kyoto, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Santa Cruz have been worked into the main story mode, meaning you'll hear some new dialogue in the between-level cutscenes that make these new levels fit. Each of these levels is a fine addition, and each fits right into the lineup of existing levels very well. Other things that fans of the console games will notice is that the graphics, while insanely impressive and very comparable to the PlayStation 2 version, have been scaled back slightly. Also, there's no in-level voice work at all. But the important things, like the ultra-tight control and gameplay the series is known for, are all shockingly intact. At times, you'll wonder how, exactly, Shaba Games managed to fit the PS2 version onto a portable system with so much of it completely unchanged.    While Tony Hawk's name may be on the cover, THUG 2 Remix has a lot to do with professional shopping cart destroyer Bam Margera and his brand of destructive fun, which figures much more heavily into the latest Tony Hawk game. The game's story mode essentially plays out like a Viva La Bam scavenger hunt, with two teams--one led by Tony Hawk and the other by Bam Margera--setting out on the World Destruction Tour. So your goals don't focus so much on becoming a star of the skateboarding world; here, you're just trying to fly around the world to break stuff.    THUG2's story mode is a whirlwind tour that gives you four skaters and a mess of goals to accomplish in each level. You start out each level as your created skater, though you'll also pick a pro skater as a partner. You'll also find two other skaters--or at least people who ride skateboards, since it seems weird to call Ben Franklin, a high-rolling cowboy, or a shrimp vendor ""skaters""--hidden in various spots on each level, and each time you encounter a new skater, you'll unlock another set of goals for that level. Some of these new characters don't even ride boards. You'll run into Steve-O, who rides around on a wheeled mechanical bull, and you'll meet an Australian in a small go-kart.    At the beginning of each level, you're given a list and set off into the world. There aren't any onscreen indicators to point you in the direction of a goal, though if you happen to do a trick off a piece that is part of a combo goal, the rest of the pieces will light up. If you want the skinny on what, exactly, you're supposed to be doing, you have to pause the game and go into your view goals screen, which will give you more details on what you need to do. While this approach frees the game of clutter and onscreen icons, it also means you're going to be spending a lot more time reading text in the pause menu. Each goal is worth a different amount of points. Once you've earned a specific number of goal points, you'll be able to move forward. This also triggers a cutscene, which puts some more backstory in the Bam versus Tony adventure. All in all, the story mode is satisfying in its structure. The PSP version works in four optional levels in the story mode, which is a nice change of pace that gives you some choices to make, unlike the console versions' rigid pace. Despite having three difficulty levels, players should be able to burn through the story mode in around seven to 10 hours. Fortunately, that's not all THUG2 has to offer.    Underground 2 also contains ""classic mode,"" which brings back the two-minute run timer and goal structure of the first three Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games. Many of the levels are the same ones you see in the story mode, but a number of levels from previous entries in the series--all the way back to the school and downhill jam levels from the very first game--appear here. While it's nice to have a separate mode like this, the concept of working to unlock levels that you've either already played in the story mode or remember from earlier entries in the series makes the mode a little underwhelming.     The gameplay in THUG2 starts with THUG, which added the ability to get off your board to run around, and expands from there. Probably the most important addition in THUG2 is the sticker slap, which is an airborne wall plant that shoves you off with a good deal of acceleration, making it perfect for finding your way back onto a rail and continuing a combo by going back the way you came. The rest of the gameplay changes aren't really as useful. You can also execute vertical wall plants while going up some ramps, giving you an extra height boost that you'll rarely need to actually use but will occasionally come in handy. You can now spray graffiti tags when you're off your board, which factors into some goals. When you're special, you can enter ""focus mode"" by flicking the analog disc, though it's little more than a glorified slow-motion effect. A few goals in story mode require it, but beyond that, all focus will do for you is make it slightly easier to land cleanly or to balance on rails, lips, and manuals for longer periods of time. If this is your first experience with the Tony Hawk series, you might find that useful, but anyone with even limited experience with the games won't need the help very often. There is also a new move called the natas spin, which lets you spin in place on top of poles, fire hydrants, trash cans, and other pointy items. It, like most of the other new moves, figures into a couple of goals, but doesn't really seem all that necessary.    The game also has a new ""freak out"" function. After some falls, a freak out meter will appear, and mashing the grind button will cause it to fill up. If you reach a certain point on the meter before your skater stands back up, you'll make him get mad and destroy his board. A new board gets tossed in, and play continues as normal. But your tantrum translates into a couple thousand points of base score. So if you can get a combo going a few seconds after you bail, you'll get some bonus points to throw in there. However, freaking out just means it'll take longer for you to get back on your board and start skating again, and the game has almost completely de-emphasized point scores in its goal-based modes. The score bonus isn't enough to justify the extra time it takes to get back on the board, so you're usually just better off keeping your cool. While not all these changes are all that great, the core gameplay in THUG2 is still very strong. The refined gameplay that comes from six years of tinkering still works, and fans of the series should still enjoy themselves quite a bit.    The PSP version of THUG2 retains most of the features found in the PS2 release, including face mapping for your custom skaters. The face mapping works largely as it did on the PS2, though getting your face onto your PSP is now as simple as taking a photo with a digital camera and placing that JPEG image on your PSP's memory stick. It's easy to use, and it works surprisingly well...once you get the hang of lining up the images and making the skin colors match up. In addition to the robust skater creation, THUG2 Remix also has a handful of different create modes that let you build your own parks and create graphics for stickers, decks, and the like.    THUG2 Remix has wireless networking support that lets up to four local players play in 11 different modes. Most of the standard modes found in the console versions of the game, like trick attack, score challenge, combo mambo, slap, king of the hill, capture the flag, firefight, and graffiti, are present. THUG2's console release introduced new modes, like elimiskate and scavenger hunt. The former works like a knockout race in a driving game, where the player in last place is eliminated at specific intervals until only one player remains. Scavenger hunt has two phases. In the first, each player skates around and drops five coins at different spots in the level. After that, it's up to the players to collect as many coins as possible. The first to collect them all, or the player with the most coins when time expires, is the winner. The multiplayer support works well, and the modes give you a lot of different options to choose from, making this a smart inclusion. But while the four-player support is cool, it's disappointing that actual online multiplayer isn't included.    From a technical standpoint, THUG2 Remix looks very impressive. You'll have to look pretty hard to find areas where it differs from the PS2 version, but after spending several hours with the game, you'll start to see where corners were cut. Some fences and other thin objects have been reduced to flat, 2D textures. And the textures, in general, are a little blurry. But the fact alone that this version compares favorably to the console versions speaks volumes about both the quality of this port, as well as the PSP's overall technical abilities. The frame rate is both rock solid and smooth enough to convey the action very well.    THUG2 has a slightly different look from the previous Tony Hawk games. Specifically, the models used in cutscenes have a slightly more exaggerated appearance to them. While they may not look quite as realistic, this over-the-top look makes the characters--Bam Margera, in particular--seem much more expressive and animated than in the past. This fits well with the off-the-hook nature of the story mode, which has you going all over the place and busting stuff up in an unrealistic but satisfying fashion. In the game, the worlds are colorful and unique-looking. The skater models look good and animate well, which is unsurprising given that much of the animation is recycled from previous entries in the series.   It's hard to believe that a handheld system is capable of running this game so well.   The audio in THUG2 Remix is great. The sounds of actual skating haven't changed much, but they still fit well and sound nice. The soundtrack is as varied as the previous game's, containing a hefty list of really crazy songs. Have you ever skated to Frank Sinatra tunes? You'll get your chance here, as Old Blue Eyes joins artists like Metallica, The DOC, Ween, Less Than Jake, Violent Femmes, Atmosphere, Ultramagnetic MC's, X, Ministry, Brand Nubian, and, yes, Audio Two, a hip-hop duo that contributes its classic track, ""Top Billin'."" Yes, the entire soundtrack from the console version of the game is present here, too. With more than 50 tracks in all, as well as the ability to turn off tracks that don't fit your tastes, you'll probably find a suitable bunch of songs to skate to. The only thing missing is almost all of the speech found in the console versions of the game. It's noticeable, but the characters' personalities still come through in the cutscenes.    Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix is, first and foremost, a great game. But with its ability to successfully mimic the console versions, it's an impressive technical achievement, too. If you played the console versions to death, the PSP's new levels probably won't be enough to warrant another purchase. But if you've stayed away from the Tony Hawk series for a while, this is a great chance to get reacquainted with it.  


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1172,Dragon Age: Origins ,8.5," Incredible storytelling, great characters, and exciting battles are just a few of the things that make this fantasy role-playing game so great.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/1197/11970954/2426736-2219291-box_da1.png,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dragon-age-origins-review/1900-6238631/,pos,"
  When was the last time you felt totally lost in a fantasy gameworld? When was the last time you played a game with such a well-crafted and enjoyable story that you knew you’d remember it for a long, long time? Dragon Age: Origins is that kind of game, so rich and involving that you are powerless to resist its wiles and whims, so touching and triumphant that your mind and heart will be moved. In the fictional land of Ferelden, you meet memorable characters and fight for a cause you believe in, and it's this backdrop that makes developer BioWare's newest role-playing game so extraordinary. Dragon Age is more than a well-crafted story, however: It's a lengthy, intricate, and thoroughly entertaining adventure that's easy to fall in love with.       Dragon Age's plot, which deals with the impending invasion of a horde of demonic creatures called the darkspawn, isn't where the story's biggest surprises lie. The shocks, the joys, and the disappointments spring from the repartee among a number of remarkable characters; they lurk within books of lore and stories of martyrs; and they burst forth during spine-tingling moments when you must choose from a selection of difficult choices that affect the tale's direction--and the way your associates interact with you. Ferelden is a colorful and fascinating kingdom that takes enough cues from well-known fantasy tropes to be familiar, but bends enough conventions to feel original. Dragon Age features dwarves, but their caste-based society and the social paragons that rise above it twist the norms enough to keep you intrigued. Mages remain under the constant watch of templars, a restriction that doesn't sit well with those who view such policing as virtual slavery. The role of religion in human circles is of particular note. Chantries provide refuge to those worshiping the all-powerful Maker, and chanters recite the holy word near their houses of prayer. But lest this world sound too serious, don't despair: One such disciple slides food references into her chant, and a few dwarves warn you not to fall into the sky. Small, humorous touches like this are plentiful. Even if you aren't the literary sort, Dragon Age may inspire you to read every note, every character bio, and every creature description, thanks to the richness of the world and the consistency with which it's presented.     You'll learn even more from the companions who join you, and you'll grow to care about them on your quest for glory. There's Morrigan, the cynical apostate mage bound to your cause for reasons that become clear only late in the journey; Sten, the strong, silent type who isn't so quick to reveal his innermost thoughts; and Zevran, a darkly mischievous would-be assassin with a wild streak and a playful disregard for the law. There are others too, including Alistair, a wisecracking, vaguely insecure member of the Grey Wardens, an elite group of champions that recruits you early on. Great dialogue and fantastic voice acting make these characters leap off the screen as if they were real friends, and the way they interact with one another feels authentic. Morrigan and Alistair banter about the role of templars in the lives of mages, and the sweetly devout Leliana tries to communicate with your trusty canine cohort in some amusing exchanges. You may even develop a romance (or two) before all is said and done. The course of love isn't always a smooth one, though it can be a bit steamy, in a PG-13 sort of way.    Pro tip: Focus on the spellcaster first.   Relationships must be nurtured; in the world of Dragon Age, love doesn't develop at first sight. Rather, you must improve your standings with available party members by giving them gifts and fulfilling quests in ways that please them. Doing so opens more dialogue options and may even reward you with unexpected gifts beyond the private pleasures of your tent. Your personal relationships aren't all you need to worry about when facing a difficult decision, however. On significant quests, you'll encounter complex choices that force you to weigh the risks against the rewards, even as you try to stay true to your own vision of your character. Are werewolves heartless killers, or is there a method to their madness? Should you wholeheartedly embrace a political candidate, or will some unexpected information have you playing double agent--or just killing the opposition? Such open-ended quests have become staples in many similar RPGs, but few make these decisions feel so momentous. The anxiety that results when you encounter important choices is a result of superb writing and character development: When you care about your destiny, decisions have more weight.     Even Dragon Age's initial moments present important decisions that affect how your adventure plays out. You'll customize your own avatar's look from a variety of presets, but more importantly, you'll choose a race and class. The choices may seem initially limited, but your options eventually expand. Later, you can choose up to two subclasses once you reach the necessary level requirements, and there are a few different means of unlocking additional skill trees. Your initial race and class choices don't just determine the kinds of skills and spells you will have access to, however; they influence how the first few hours of the game progress. You will experience one of six different ""origin stories"" that follow the events that lead you to the elite Grey Wardens. Every origin story leads to the same place, but that doesn't mean you leave these events behind for good. Characters you met early on will cross your path again, and crucial moments of your origin story will continue to haunt you. The varied origin stories not only provide plenty of replay value, but allow you to see familiar characters from a different angle. A prisoner you meet within a dank dungeon may not have much impact on you if you are playing as a Dalish elf, but if you play as a human mage, this encounter is a bittersweet reunion.    A cackling old hermit offering an acorn. How will you respond?   You aren't a lone adventurer, however. You can take up to three companions along with you, and eventually you will meet more willing (or unwilling, as the case may be) darkspawn slayers. You can switch out party members back at your camp or in other friendly areas. Party members you don't use will remain at camp, though they thankfully level up even when you don't take them along. Your comrades aren't just AI-controlled henchmen; you can take full control of any party member at any time, though how you do so depends on the platform. PC owners get the most versatile and rewarding experience in this regard. You can zoom the camera in to a close third-person view when exploring and conversing with non-player characters, or pull the camera back to a tactical view, which makes it a breeze to quickly and easily micromanage every spell and attack, in true Baldur's Gate tradition. On consoles, you always view the action from behind a single character, and you use a shoulder button to switch among them. It's a great way of experiencing the buzz of battle, though occasional pathfinding quirks are more apparent in the console versions, simply because you experience the action from a single perspective at a time, rather than while managing four characters simultaneously.    If you've played a BioWare fantasy RPG in the past, you'll feel right at home with the combat system. By clicking on your target or pressing the attack button, you don't just swing a sword, but you approach your target and queue up your attack. Once your party has gained access to a good number of spells, stances, and skills, battlefields explode with bright colors and raucous sound effects, and it's a lot of fun to switch back and forth between party members, managing your abilities and taking advantage of various spell combos to wreak havoc. There are dozens of different types of enemies to slice up, from giant spiders and darkspawn, to ghosts and walking trees, to demons and, of course, dragons. Allies will join you in the biggest battles, and the best of these, particularly those toward the end of the game, are thrilling. On the PC, they're particularly challenging, and many battles benefit from frequent pausing and tactical thinking, so that you can queue up attacks across your entire party. The same battles on consoles are noticeably easier.      Nevertheless, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions have their challenges, and no matter which platform you choose, you can customize your cohorts' AI behavior to be more effective in battle. Using the tactics menu, you can set characters up to drink potions when their health gets low; have Morrigan cast helpful crowd-control spells when enemies are clustered together; and program sturdier characters to draw enemies' ire when more vulnerable party members are under attack. As you level up, you will earn additional tactics slots, allowing you to implement even more intricate actions. You can also apply basic behaviors to your team members, making them more aggressive or defensive, and you can switch them around on the fly if an experimental custom tactic isn't working as you intended. When things come together as you plan--such as when Morrigan freezes a hurlock in place and Alistair smashes it to smithereens--battles are even more rewarding.       All of these elements coalesce wonderfully, making for a memorable and exciting adventure that keeps you on the move. The flow of loot and pace of leveling are both highly satisfying, and because you have four active characters to consider (in addition to others back at the camp), you spend a lot of time poring over armor and weapon choices. The tempo is even quicker than the Dungeons & Dragons games that preceded Dragon Age, thanks to important tweaks that minimize downtime. For example, you do not need to rest between encounters to replenish your health and recharge your spells. Instead, health and stamina are replenished quickly once the skirmish ends, allowing you to string encounters together without unwanted breaks in between. Should a party member fall during battle, he or she will be resuscitated once the battle has ended, albeit with a stat penalty applied (though it can be cured with an injury kit). These factors, and more, give Dragon Age an excellent sense of forward direction.    All the spells, tactics, and skills sound like a lot to organize, but the interface does a great job of helping you keep track of things. The PC interface is brilliant, letting you browse through your inventory and tweak your quickbars quickly and easily. The console versions do a surprisingly great job as well, making it simple to sort through your quests, and to queue up actions while battle is paused. One particularly useful feature is the ability to identify inventory items as trash and sell them all with a single button press once you're back in town. There are some console-specific interface irritations that could have been cleaner, however. For example, identifying new codex (that is, lore) entries can be troublesome, because the list doesn't scroll down until your highlight cursor reaches the bottom of the window. As a result, you can't always distinguish new entries from old ones, which is an issue that doesn't plague the fantastic PC interface. The consoles' radial menu, on the other hand, is an excellent way of letting you access every battle skill, and it works somewhat like the similar interface in Mass Effect--albeit with a few more layers.     The differences between versions aren't limited to the interface. Dragon Age doesn't look amazing on the PC, but it's an attractive game nonetheless. Zooming from an isometric view to a third-person perspective is slick, and while environments don't hold up quite as well when viewed up close, they're consistently lovely when viewed from above. On the flip side, the Xbox 360 version looks positively disappointing. Textures are highly compressed and colors are washed out, though the upside is that this version maintains a smoother frame rate than on the PlayStation 3, where things might get jittery when swiveling the camera around. The PlayStation 3 version features higher-quality textures than those on the Xbox 360, better color saturation, smoother facial animations, and shorter load times. Minor visual hiccups, like corpses that disappear and reappear, are a bit more common on the PS3, however. The PC version is the superior experience, but if you're choosing between the two console releases, the PlayStation 3 has the upper hand. Some minor glitches are shared between the console versions, however, such as rare occasions when the soundtrack or voice-overs disappear. We also ran into a few quest malfunctions that could be replicated on all three platforms, though they were relatively minor and did not interfere with the progress of the main quest.   What Dragon Age lacks in visual prowess, it makes up for in pure fun.   No matter which version you choose, however, there are plenty of audiovisual details to note. In many ways, Dragon Age looks and sounds like other high-fantasy games, but while the towers, forest paths, and underground caverns are what you've seen before, the art style is attractive, and a few sights, such as an underground dwarven city, are particularly eye-catching. Character models don't exhibit Mass Effect-level expressiveness, but they look good and animate smoothly enough. Also of note are the splatters of blood that appear on your party members after battle. It's a nice idea, but the splotches look like they've been splashed across you with a paintbrush. The crimson stains are a cool thematic touch, however, because blood plays an important role in Dragon Age. The sound effects are excellent, console glitches notwithstanding, and the soundtrack, while typical for a fantasy game, swells and murmurs at all the right moments.     Few games are this ambitious, and even fewer can mold these ambitions into such a complete and entertaining experience. You might spend 50 or more hours on your first play-though, but there are so many paths to follow, so many details to uncover, and so many ways to customize your party that you'll want to play again as soon as you finish the first time. PC owners even get an extra dash of depth via the downloadable toolset, which lets you create new levels, spells, skills, and even cutscenes. But any way you slice it, here's the fantasy RPG you've been waiting for, the one that will keep you up late at night, bleary-eyed, because you have to see what happens next. Like the best fiction, Dragon Age will sweep you up in its world, so much so that when you're done, you'll want to experience it all over again.     


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1173,Twisted Metal: Head-On ,8.5," A colorful cast, a great presentation, exciting shooting action, and wireless multiplayer combine to make this one of the safest bets you can place when choosing your first PSP games.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/4/8/7/2213487-box_tmetalho.png,PSP,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/twisted-metal-head-on-review/1900-6120723/,pos,"
  We can't prove it, but we're pretty sure that the Twisted Metal series has had a lot to do with Sony's successes in video gaming. Specifically, the original car combat classic was one of the first great PlayStation games 10 years ago, and 2001's Twisted Metal: Black was one of the first, best showcases for the PlayStation 2. It's true that the series has had its ups and downs during the past decade, but it's back in top form again for the launch of Sony's latest game system. And while Twisted Metal: Head-On might have been shrunk down to fit onto the sleek new PSP, it has lost none of its charm and none of its bite. A colorful cast of characters, a great presentation, exciting shooting action, and support for wireless multiplayer competition over the Internet combine to make this game one of the safest bets you can place when choosing your first PSP games.   Get ready to burn rubber and lots of other substances in Twisted Metal: Head-On, a shooter starring a loveable cast of gnarly cars.   Twisted Metal: Head-On plays just like the classic games in the series. If you're not familiar with the previous installments, you should know that car combat such as this actually has a lot more in common with first-person shooters than it does with other driving games. So don't let the appearance of all the tricked-out roadsters fool you. The name of the game here is blowing stuff up with extreme prejudice, using a combination of machine guns, missiles, bombs, mines, napalm--you name it. You've got more than 15 different vehicles to choose from (some of which are initially locked away), each with its own unique special attack and distinct characteristics for handling, top speed, armor, and so on--plus its own unique driver, who has his or her own reasons for entering the Twisted Metal tournament that's the context for this game's international deathmatches. As in previous Twisted Metal games, finishing the story mode with each of the different drivers is worthwhile if only to see how each of their stories pans out.    A typical Twisted Metal contest requires you to tear your way around a bumpy environment, running over health and weapon power-ups while keeping an eye on your radar for nearby opponents. You've got nitro boosters and an emergency brake in case you need to make a quick getaway or a sharp 180-degree turn, and the numerous available weapons tend to have homing capabilities or a large blast radius, making them effective against fast-moving targets. The exaggerated environments you'll fight in are based on various real-world locations and pack in plenty of secret nooks and crannies to explore, not to mention access points to some pretty cool little bonus missions. Controls are responsive and pretty easy to get used to. Even the larger vehicles handle nicely and are capable of turning even when they're not moving.    The variety is definitely part of the fun, and it's great to see the series' familiar vehicles back with sharp, new designs. You've got everyone from Mr. Slam, a bulldozer that can pick up and smash opposing vehicles, to Thumper, a fresh pink coupe sporting a flamethrower, and many others. Even the speedier vehicles in Twisted Metal: Head-On can take quite a bit of punishment before exploding, but any of them will light up like a Christmas tree if you concentrate all your firepower on them long enough.   A clean interface and responsive controls let you dive right into the action, which is great when playing against either computer-controlled drivers or other players.   Twisted Metal fans know that the best way to demolish an enemy vehicle is to freeze it in place first. Like most Twisted Metal games, Head-On lets you execute a few fighting-game-style special moves with any of the vehicles, by inputting some fairly simple commands on the PSP's D pad. The most useful are the freeze, which is a homing blast that causes the vehicle on the receiving end to become a sitting duck for a few moments, and the shield, which makes you completely invulnerable for a little bit. These abilities are governed by a recharging energy meter, so you can't use them constantly. But they're still critical to your success, especially against the story mode's boss vehicles, which are much bigger and tougher than all the rest. In fact, these energy moves are probably a bit too influential on the outcome of a typical match. Since every vehicle has access to the same energy moves, and since the freeze and the shield will likely be prevalent in any contest among experienced players, your choice of vehicle can eventually start to feel less relevant than it really ought to. It might have been nice if energy attacks varied between vehicles, but as it stands, they're the great equalizer, and they do help add a layer of depth to the action.    The story mode actually isn't that different from the challenge mode and the endurance mode, in terms of gameplay. These are Twisted Metal: Head-On's three single-player modes, and each one basically places your vehicle in a big, destructible arena filled with rival vehicles, who'll blast away at you as well as each other. Blow up an enemy vehicle, and you'll spot a useful upgrade power-up floating above its burning carcass, encouraging you to take an active role in the free-for-all rather than cower and wait for the dust to settle. Your computer-controlled opponents pose a solid threat at the default difficulty setting, though experienced Twisted Metal players won't have too much trouble blasting their way to the finish line--luckily, there's a tougher difficulty mode to offer them more of a challenge. Though there are somewhat lengthy loading times between each battle, the battles themselves feel like they last a good while. Plus, it's possible to instantly restart a level if you run out of lives (or otherwise feel like it), and you can also save your progress in between each level. Twisted Metal wasn't originally designed for portable game systems like the PSP, but this style of gameplay is actually very well suited for those who can't necessarily play for more than a few minutes at a time.   Poor Axel here is one of many recognizable characters/cars who return for more punishment in this installment.   There are also the six-player multiplayer features to consider. Twisted Metal: Head-On is among the first PSP launch titles to include a complete set of Wi-Fi multiplayer options, including an ad-hoc mode for up to six players in the same vicinity and an infrastructure mode, which lets you tap into the Internet through a wireless access point to theoretically take on opponents around the country and beyond. The multiplayer menu system is modeled after player-matching lobbies just like the ones you've probably seen in other multiplayer games...but probably never before in portable games. Being able to play a fast-paced action game such as this wirelessly against opponents around the country is pretty wild, not to mention potentially a lot of fun (there's no lag when playing in ad hoc mode, but your mileage may vary over the Internet). Twisted Metal has always shined as a multiplayer game, for the same reasons that first-person shooters and fighting games have been popular. Head-On features the deathmatch and team deathmatch modes you'd expect, in addition to some other variants, as well as the ability to tweak a game session by giving everyone unlimited ammo, forcing everyone to use a particular vehicle, dropping all the HUD elements (health and so on), and more. All the flexibility is nice to have.   Twisted Metal: Head-On is an all-around great game that's easy to recommend to new PSP owners.   Impressive visuals and sound round out a rock-solid game. The graphics mostly run fast and smooth, though occasional fits of slowdown do get in the way at times. Still, that's in exchange for some impressively detailed 3D, particularly in the various vehicle models, which start to break apart and smolder as they take damage (though this doesn't affect their performance). Some nice-looking flame effects and even some convincing weather effects help all this add up to a great-looking experience. It's not just eye candy, either. The PSP's wide screen gives you ample peripheral vision to help you get your bearings during a hectic fight. Meanwhile, some throaty exhaust noises, the convincing rattle of machine guns and explosions, and the sounds of, well, twisted metal all fit the action well. The musical score consists mostly of rock and metal riffs, though you'll hear some lyrics in part of it, and some of the other tracks help remind you of their respective international settings by hitting all the right stereotypical notes.    Twisted Metal: Head-On doesn't mess with the series' tried-and true formula, though that's not to say that fans of the series won't find anything new to enjoy and appreciate in this installment. More importantly, you don't need to be a card-carrying Twisted Metal aficionado to enjoy this game. Chances are, if you like the premise of a bunch of crazy vehicles trying to blast each other to kingdom come, you'll be more than satisfied with the execution. Better yet, Twisted Metal: Head-On makes for some great gaming on the go, and its multiplayer features should give it a great deal of longevity.  


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1174,Block Breaker Deluxe ,8.5," It may be nothing more than a repackaged Arkanoid, but it plays well and makes for a great mobile game.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/0/8/0/2213080-zmwyno8xujwolofv66yvopmhcczxbbql.jpg,MOBI,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/block-breaker-deluxe-review/1900-6101757/,pos,"
 The block breaking game may have been created when Breakout was released back in 1976, but most modern block breaking games instead take a page from the book of Taito's 1986 arcade game, Arkanoid. Taito's game starts with the same basic concept as Breakout--you control a flat paddle at the bottom of the screen and you must use it to hit a ball up at a series of blocks until you've hit them all. But Arkanoid also adds power-ups to the mix. Items that cause your paddle to get longer, items that split the ball into three balls, and even an item that lets you fire lasers at the bricks are just some of the things that Taito brought to the table. Since that time, most games in the genre tend to follow the Arkanoid formula pretty closely. Gameloft's newest Breakout-style game, Block Breaker Deluxe, delivers a decidedly Arkanoid-like experience while wrapping a story mode around the more traditional block busting proceedings. The resulting game is a great fit for mobile phones.  Block Breaker Deluxe's story mode takes you from night club to night club in search of some brick bustin' action.  Block Breaker Deluxe is broken into areas, each of which is a bustling night club, where Block Breaker is the entertainment of choice. It is the game world's competitive sport, its proving-ground. In order to advance in Block Breaker, you'll have to impress each of the game's attractive club owners by collecting gifts that suit her particular tastes. These gifts are found hidden behind blocks within the game's many levels. For example, one of the club owners is a high-maintenance socialite who happens to bear more than a passing resemblance to Jessica Rabbit. In order to win her support, you'll have to shower her with expensive sundries, such as pearls and mink coats. If you impress these well-connected individuals, they will help you advance to new areas. At one point, you'll have to get one word of a passcode from each club owner, so that you may gain entrance to a highly exclusive Block Breaker tournament.  Though it may take after Breakout and Arkanoid in a few different ways, Block Breaker Deluxe also adds some new levels of complexity. Often, you will have to hit particular blocks to unlock parts of a level. There are power-ups to make your paddle larger, smaller, magnetic, invisible, and to make it capable of shooting laser beams. There are collectibles that make your ball faster, slower, and more powerful. There's even one that makes your ball act like a yo-yo, flying back to your paddle every time you press the 5 key. This adds an interesting strategic element, as balls yo-yoed back are capable of destroying any block, even the nigh-indestructible silver ones that become increasingly prevalent as you progress through the game. The game even features boss battles.  Players will find that particular combinations of power-ups are especially potent, such as the marriage of the multiball generator (which spawns two balls in addition to the regular one) with the magnetic paddle power-up. That combo will let you magnetically store one of the balls on your paddle--almost like an extra life--while you knock around the other two. Speaking of extra lives, you'll start the game with ten of them. If you run out of lives, you can sacrifice $200,000 of your club competition winnings to replenish them. You might find yourself doing this on the same few levels; Block Breaker's difficulty can be somewhat unbalanced. Certain stages, especially some of the boss battles, take forever to clear, while other ones are a breeze. You rarely know what kind of challenge you're in for.  Block Breaker looks great and plays even better.  Block Breaker's presentation is appropriately excellent. Its graphics are colorful and chug along at a healthy clip. The game's anime-inspired club owners are well drawn, and they pack a lot of character. The game's sound, while relatively simple, is on par with that of most Java games, both in fidelity and variety. The opening of each round is marked by a few measures of calypso music. Crisp sound effects accompany the rest of the gameplay. Music during play is woefully absent, however. It would have been nice to hear some of the tunes the club members are apparently enjoying in the background; they're certainly not jumping around to the beeps and bops of Block Breaker.  The bottom line is that Block Breaker Deluxe is a truly excellent game that, as time has proven, packs lasting appeal. It may be nothing more than a repackaged Arkanoid, but it plays well and makes for a great mobile game. The story mode is innovative and the play is wonderfully chaotic. 
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1175,Alien Hominid HD ,8.5, Alien Hominid HD is a charming and challenging arcade-style shooter that everyone should check out.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/box/1/8/5/1/21360-61851.jpg,X360,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alien-hominid-hd-review/1900-6166632/,pos,"
  Commercial-grade digital distribution was made for games like Alien Hominid, which was just ahead of its time. While it started life as a simple little Flash game online, the full game was originally released on the PlayStation 2 and GameCube back in 2004, with a European Xbox release hitting in 2005. The 2D side-scrolling shooter was endlessly charming and notoriously difficult, but it never really broke out of its fairly tiny niche. Now it's back for another go on the Xbox 360 as a $10 purchase. It's a perfect fit for Microsoft's downloadable game service, and it's still an outstanding shooter.   Little. Cutesy. Deadly.   Alien Hominid HD is a side-scrolling shooter that falls in the same folder as such games as Metal Slug, Contra, and Gunstar Heroes. You play as a cute little alien that crash-lands on Earth, sending hordes of earthling authority figures into a frenzy. The FBI steals your crashed ship and hauls it away. You're going to want that ship back, so you give chase, cutting down hundreds of agents as you go. In later levels, you will be up against the evil communists of the KGB and other foes, both human and robot in origin. Your primary weapon against the hordes of enemies you'll face is a blaster that fires small, deadly shots. Against harder targets, you can hold down the fire button to charge up a more powerful, larger shot. You'll also collect weapon power-ups that give you more damaging lasers, fire, ice, spread, a close-range shotgun blast, and so on. You can also toss grenades, and when you're up close, you can pull out a knife and cut men in half, much like in Metal Slug. But the funniest attack is your ability to jump up and grab on to the heads of your foes and eat them. Not only is this satisfying, but it also can act as a warning to other nearby agents, who occasionally freeze in fear at the sight of one of their own getting eaten alive. The variety in your arsenal is very cool, and most of your moves come in handy in specific situations.    If you get hit, you're dead. This gives the game a classic arcade feel, and it also makes it a pretty punishing game on the normal and hard difficulty settings. Easy mode gives you more lives and more ""continues,"" so you should probably start with this mode. Once you've completed the game on easy, move up to normal, and so on. Along the way, you'll encounter bosses both big and small, and some of these can be especially tough. Although every boss fight does follow a pattern, once you've figured out how to play against that pattern, the game gets significantly easier. But until then, you should expect to burn through plenty of lives during some of these larger fights. There are 16 levels in the game that span three different worlds, giving you a good variety of environments to see and enemies to face.    In addition to the main game, which can be played by two players if that second player is sitting right next to you, there are several minigames, some of which have actual online support. These are roughly the same as the single-player game, such as the Urban Challenge, where you just have to stay alive in an endless version of one of the game's levels. But the other minigames get far out there, such as Super Soviet Missile Mastar, which is an Atari 2600-like game where you steer a nuclear missile up, dodging helicopters, jets, and birds, and then attempt to crash the missile into a rough drawing of the US. For whatever reason, Missile Mastar doesn't have any sound in the Xbox 360 version of the game, yet it did have crude but appropriately 4-bit sound effects on other platforms. Some of the other minigames are missing music, as well.    The two online minigames are both great in their own ways. All You Can Eat stars Fat Kid, the chubby child that occasionally shows up in the single-player game. In a fit of Track & Field-like button pounding, you have to hammer on the X and A buttons to eat a bowl of food faster than up to three other players. It's completely dumb and totally ridiculous, and it's really funny that it has full online support, including ranked matches and leaderboards. Unfortunately, it's tough to find other players online, since the game isn't unlocked right from the start. The other online mode is the much more substantial PDA games mode. Here, up to four players play a cool-looking stick-figure platformer, where you must jump on the heads of all the enemies in each level to open the exit to the next stage. Online, all players must reach the exit to move ahead. This is also the mode that will be expanded upon with downloadable content in the future.    Everything in Alien Hominid has a very nice hand-drawn style, and the art is definitely a huge feature in the game. In fact, the game's artist, Dan Paladin, gets a feature credit during the game's introductory credits. Everything in the game has a very cohesive look, and it's all surprisingly well animated. It's similar to a comic strip in spots, but it's never bland, Each building in the background is distinct, some of which also have funny business names on them, such as Steakery Cakery, Hairy Mommy Daycare, or Smiley Smiles in Piles. While the game might not be some huge technical feat of polygon-pushing power, it's an amazing-looking 2D game that is stuffed so full of character that it's bursting at its 50MB limit.      Like other Xbox Live Arcade games, Alien Hominid HD has 200 achievement points for you to earn. The achievements in this game are smart and force you to do a few different things. You'll get points for unlocking every single hat, you'll get points for eating a set number of enemy troops with a large yeti, and you'll earn points for completing the game on each difficulty. There's a good balance between easy points and a few more difficult ones, which is nice.   If you get tired of shooting enemies, try eating their heads for a while.   With a great, tough main game and plenty of additional modes, you get a lot for your $10. Unfortunately, you may also be ""lucky"" enough to get saddled with a bug. The game currently has an issue that isn't affecting every player, but for some, the game doesn't save properly when you quit. This means that your progress in the single-player game, the number of minigames you have unlocked, and the hats you've discovered may get wiped out every time you quit. This is the sort of game that you want to finish in one sitting, but that doesn't make this bug any less annoying. Hopefully it'll get fixed with a patch that also adds the missing music to the minigames in the process.    Even with the possibility of getting the save-wiping bug, Alien Hominid HD is a fantastic game. It's a perfect example of a game that can (and should) flourish under the auspices of a widely used digital-distribution system. And on top of all that, it's available for $10, or 800 points. That's a great value for your dollar, and this is a game you should most definitely check out.  
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'200', 'achievement', 'points', 'earn', '.', 'The', 'achievements', 'game', 'smart', 'force', 'different', 'things', '.', 'You', ""'ll"", 'get', 'points', 'unlocking', 'every', 'single', 'hat', ',', ""'ll"", 'get', 'points', 'eating', 'set', 'number', 'enemy', 'troops', 'large', 'yeti', ',', ""'ll"", 'earn', 'points', 'completing', 'game', 'difficulty', '.', 'There', ""'s"", 'good', 'balance', 'easy', 'points', 'difficult', 'ones', ',', 'nice', '.', 'If', 'get', 'tired', 'shooting', 'enemies', ',', 'try', 'eating', 'heads', '.', 'With', 'great', ',', 'tough', 'main', 'game', 'plenty', 'additional', 'modes', ',', 'get', 'lot', '$', '10', '.', 'Unfortunately', ',', 'may', 'also', '``', 'lucky', ""''"", 'enough', 'get', 'saddled', 'bug', '.', 'The', 'game', 'currently', 'issue', ""n't"", 'affecting', 'every', 'player', ',', ',', 'game', ""n't"", 'save', 'properly', 'quit', '.', 'This', 'means', 'progress', 'single-player', 'game', ',', 'number', 'minigames', 'unlocked', ',', 'hats', 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1176,Interpose ,4.5," Interpose is another side-scrolling shooter in a long line of uninspired Darius rip-offs, totally devoid of originality and flair.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/1/7/5/3/2211753-snap5.gif,PC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/interpose-review/1900-2535526/,neg,"
Get this: You're on a mission of the utmost importance. Armed to the teeth with high-tech, devilish devices of destruction, you must navigate your mighty spaceship into unfriendly territory and face the crimson face of death. And, if that's not crazy enough, you're not even human! You're a feisty feline with a leather jacket! Hold on for a second while I catch my breath. If this scenario sounds really cool to you, then you don't get out enough. Interpose is another side-scrolling shooter in a long line of uninspired Darius rip-offs, totally devoid of originality and flair. To be fair, I will say that Interpose does have some intriguing 3-D graphics as well as an above-par soundtrack and some interesting cinematics, but these facets fall well short of the bells and whistles needed to make this game worth even one look. What's the storyline? It's really not important. Besides, after playing this no-brainer for only a few minutes, you'll be completely zoned out, unable to remember your own name, much less the convoluted plot of  this yawner. What you do need to know is that everything on the screen must be shot. Erase a string of baddies with your cannon, and you'll uncover a coin or a power-up, to be collected. Hold onto your coins so you can pull into the local chop shop and upgrade your ship and weapons. This will also give you a chance to check out the Manx who curates the store - very cute, but not enough to make it worth your purchase price. Try your best to avoid this one. You'd be pretty bitter having paid for this porkchop.
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1177,Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000 ,4.5, Jeremy McGrath is an unfortunate example of what happens when sports games fall into a rut.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/9/1/8/2210918-jeremy_mcgrath_supercross_2000_pal.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/jeremy-mcgrath-supercross-2000-review/1900-2619222/,neg,"
Dirt-bike games compose a decidedly niche genre, but that genre will be growing soon. Mat Hoffman and Dave Mirra will soon receive their own licensed BMX games, but Jeremy McGrath did the same thing back in 1998. Now the 2000 revision of Jeremy McGrath is being released, but unfortunately, not enough has changed for it to really compete with the new guys on the block. Jeremy McGrath's 2000 edition is what you might expect from a 1995 version, had such a thing existed. It features all the standard racing-game trappings: Single race, tournament, and time trial modes are all on hand, as well as a freestyle mode for doing a few Tony Hawk-inspired tricks. You can also create your own tracks through an intuitive, but limited, track editor, and a ""custom rider"" option lets you change the name, number, and uniform of your rider. There's nothing very new or exciting about all of these options - it's just racing with dirt bikes, after all. Of course, those who are into BMX would be thrilled by the prospect of racing a bumpy dirt track on a motorbike. Supercross 2000 doesn't effectively provide that experience, though. There are racing games that provide a gritty, realistic feeling, and there are racing games that gloss over the realities of physics in the interest of smooth gameplay. Supercross 2000 falls squarely into the latter category. All that's really required to place highly in a race is a steady accelerator finger and the ability to steer coherently around the track. Falling off of your bike is all but impossible, even when landing a wild jump at some impossible angle or plowing head-on into a wall at top speed. Though you can select a rider and set various aspects of your bike, like tire grip, such variables have little bearing on the actual outcome of the race. In a nutshell, there's no technique or finesse involved in playing the game. Supercross 2000 isn't anything special in the audio-visual department either. Frankly, it's getting harder and harder to appreciate PlayStation graphics in the age of the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2. Only the rare PlayStation game contains graphical niceties sufficient enough to really catch the eye, and Supercross 2000 isn't one of them. The game would perhaps be visually palatable if not for the substandard frame rate, but alas, it's a little too jerky to really be pleasing. Jeremy McGrath's music and sound aren't anything special, either. The game's pop-punk soundtrack might be annoying if it wasn't covered up by the constant grating buzz of motorbikes. Jeremy McGrath is an unfortunate example of what happens when sports games fall into a rut. Though the yearly update to such a game may make some improvements to the standard formula, no changes have been made to Supercross 2000 that would really validate a purchase by any but the most hard-core fans. Given McGrath's rather unrealistic gameplay, even they might not find a lot to like here.
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1178,KISS: Psycho Circus ,4.5," Instead of fixing any of Psycho Circus' problems, or adding some Dreamcast-only levels, the programmers at Tremor have actually removed some key features of the PC version.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/3/1/4/3/2213143-340136_43536_front.jpg,DC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/kiss-psycho-circus-review/1900-2655154/,neg,"
When it was released for the PC in late July, KISS: Psycho Circus wasn't well received. Tremor Entertainment has now created a Dreamcast port of the game. Instead of fixing any of Psycho Circus' problems, adding some Dreamcast-only levels, or even just making the game an exact port of the original, the programmers at Tremor have actually removed some key features of the PC version. Maybe in some edgy Todd McFarlane alternate circus universe, that plan would have made KISS a better game. Unfortunately, in ours, it didn't.   The press release that came with the review copy of the game states that it's ""based on the KISS: Psycho Circus comic book series developed by Todd McFarlane, best known as the creator of Spawn."" An interesting thing to note here is that Todd McFarlane is not best known as the creator of KISS: Psycho Circus. That should have been a clue to somebody that the game might be better off if it were more about KISS and less about Todd McFarlane's lame comic book. As it is, KISS: Psycho Circus has lots and lots of Psycho Circus and just an itty-bitty bit of KISS. So even though the band's featured prominently on the packaging, members of the KISS army will be disappointed that their heroes are pretty much absent from the game.   The action can best be described as Gauntlet meets Quake. The game takes place in a fully three-dimensional environment like that in Quake. But instead of fighting a handful of opponents, Psycho Circus tosses a huge number of kamikaze circus creatures at you as you march from one side of the game's dark levels to the other. The levels generally contain a set of Gauntlet-like spawners that must be destroyed to staunch the endless flow of monsters.   At first, the novelty of seeing 20 or 30 creatures onscreen at once is enough to sustain your interest. But that wears off long before the game reaches its halfway point. And the fact that you fight swarms of essentially the same creatures from beginning to end only adds to the repetitive feeling.    The enemies don't display any kind of interesting AI. The headless - simple spider creatures whose heads appear to have been removed less for terrifying effect and more for reducing their polygon count - appear in virtually every fight in the game. They don't look good, and their attack plan is drearily consistent: run straight at you. A few of the other creatures fare a little better, for instance a leering fat lady who rips chunks of blubber from her own body and tosses them at you. But for the most part, Psycho Circus' creatures and the environments they occupy are pretty forgettable.   The sound effects are also weak. Weapons sound less like implements of destruction and more like the tinkling ambient soundscape of a Philip Glass concert. It's very classy but not particularly suited to a video game about blowing things up. The game's most egregious flaw, however, is its utter lack of KISS music. Snippets of the band's songs are played a few times during the game, but for the most part the soundtrack consists of dirge-like techno tracks.   Most of Psycho Circus is steadfastly mediocre. What drives it into the ""bad"" category - and turns it into a product you should avoid on general principle - is the developer's complete lack of effort in adding value to the Dreamcast port. For starters, even though it was originally designed for the PC, no support for the Dreamcast mouse or keyboard has been included. Not a giant omission, perhaps, but certainly not the act of a company that wants to work much for your 40 bucks. The removal of any kind of multiplayer feature is not so easily overlooked, however. The game has neither an online component nor even a split-screen mode. Maybe the developers were too busy with Psycho Circus to check out what was going on with Quake III Arena. Don't you make that same mistake.
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1179,Knockout Kings 2000 ,4.5," Playing as the real guys is a kick, but so little technique is required of you that the game quickly falls flat.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/7/9/5/2/2217952-box_kk2000.png,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/knockout-kings-2000-review/1900-2543676/,neg,"
Knockout Kings 2000 might provide die-hard fight fans with a thrill, since they'll be able to play as some of the greatest fighters from the past and present, like Mohammed Ali, Joe Fraizer, Evander Holyfield, Oscar De La Hoya, Roberto Duran, Angel Manfredy, and Sugar Shane Mosely. Unfortunately, that's about as far as it goes. After spending a couple of days with the game, you'll see through the computer's pathetic AI and learn the punches and tactics that work time and time again. The control in Knockout Kings 2000 is limited, to say the least. Sure, you can throw just about all the basic punches, but you can't really put them together in a combination. Instead, you must rely on preset combinations that throw four punches with one button press. These combinations take up a bit of your fighter's own health. Fight fans who enjoy the technique of the sport will quickly tire of the game's one-button combos. Casual players may feel that the easy, arcade-style gameplay is adequate, but if you enjoy the sweet science enough to want to put together your own combinations you will be simply disgusted. The one saving grace that extends the life of the game for a few days is the various weight classes. In the heavyweight class you'll beat the game in less than an hour - even on the hard setting. The damage you can dish out with the game's preset combos, if used correctly, is way more than you lose by using the combos. You can get close to a fighter, hit a combo button that delivers body shots until your super-punch meter is full, wait for him to  throw a punch, and then use the super punch to put him on the canvas. You'll be able to knock out just about everyone within the first couple of rounds. The middle and lightweight divisions are a little different. Here, you'll have to jab and throw some hooks to the body, using the preset combos a little more sparingly since the fighters in the lighter weights don't let you pound away at their midsections as much. Either way, within the first few days of playing the game you'll figure out what works in all three classes. It's these AI problems that make playing the game more about what buttons to hit and when than about outthinking your opponent. Graphically, Knockout Kings 2000 is pretty good. Most of the polygonal boxers in the game look like their real-life counterparts, although since most of the punching and movement animations are shared between the fighters, they all move the same. Unfortunately, the game moves too slowly. The animations of the fighters punching, falling, and moving in general are also too slow. The ring and the attending audience look great: You can actually see individual people and not just the typical blurry crowd found in most sports games. The sound and music in Knockout Kings 2000 are passable at best. While noticeably silent most of the time and limited to a few phrases, Al Albert and Sean O'Grady add commentary to the mix. Referee Mills Lane gives the instructions before the bout and counts during a knockdown. The punches and roar of the crowd and other sound effects in the game get the job done. In the end, Knockout Kings 2000 will give fans of the sport a brief thrill. Playing as the real guys is a kick, but so little technique is required of you that the game quickly falls flat.
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1180,Macross Digital Mission VF-X (Import) ,4.5," Macross VF-X ultimately fails to capture the emotion, the excitement, and the sheer visual splendor of its source material.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/0/2/7/7/2220277-macrossvfx.jpg,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/macross-digital-mission-vf-x-import-review/1900-2548176/,neg,"
The original Macross animated series (known as Robotech: The Macross Saga in the States), with its memorable and complex cast, not to mention its incredible spacecraft designs, remains a classic to animation and science fiction fans. And despite all its failed offshoots and cross-licenses, many Macross fans remain hopeful that the original will eventually see a successor in one form or another. Some of us, for instance, keep waiting for that perfect Macross video game. From the look of the recently released Japanese title Macross Digital Mission VF-X, the wait must continue. Macross VF-X looks elegant at times, but ultimately fails to capture the emotion, the excitement, and the sheer visual splendor of its source material. Digital Mission VF-X is a watered-down flight simulator consisting of a dozen lengthy, boring, and repetitive missions. The PlayStation has a less-than-respectable track record for flight sims and VF-X does nothing to improve it. If you can survive the horrifically poppy opening song and correspondingly awful intro, you'll find yourself strapped into a Veritech fighter wondering how you're supposed to fly it. Macross VF-X's controls are hideous; forget physics, forget precision - just fly around like a madman or don't bother moving at all, because it's not going to make much of a difference in the end. If you can figure out how to get them in your sights, the enemy opponents (huge in number and boundless in their stupidity) merely go ""poof"" when destroyed. VF-X may support Sony's analog joystick, but it's not going to save you from the resounding mediocrity. There are over a half-dozen crafts in Macross VF-X, but they look the same from the inside and all fly like sugar-high ostriches. Each Veritech fighter carries a mind-blowing sum of weaponry and limitless gun munitions, as well as an array of nice-looking but completely noninteractive special maneuvers (just push a button and the VF does the rest). You can also transform your jet to any of three different stages at any time (something fans of the series would expect). These transformations are Macross VF-X's sole appeal: The player's polygonal craft is rendered with painstakingly precise detail, and witnessing it transform as smoothly as it did in the series is pure delight - for a few moments, anyhow. Once you quit gawking at the pretty transformation sequences, you'll quickly notice Macross VF-X's awful sound effects and music. It's no easy task destroying the original Macross' invigorating battle theme, but this game succeeds in turning that wonderful soundtrack into an earache. On top of that, VF-X's sound effects are either boring, irritating, or flat-out wrong: One would think the Veritech fighter's gunfire would at least be coupled with the series' notable buzzing sound, but instead we get an obnoxiously improper clacking. Oh yes, and let's not forget the ""plot."" You're trying to rescue the Milky Dolls, a quintet of teen starlets who'd be much better off as some Zentraedi's after-dinner mint, at least in this reviewer's opinion. And for some insidious reason, you seem to be the only pilot left in the entire navy. So don't expect any help, which means you're on your own through the whole game. No two-player mode, no wingmen; just you, those five big-eyed ditzes, and a massive herd of dumb, blocky bad guys. Luckily, you've got your commanding officer to cheer you up (too bad you have to listen to his drivel while staring at a completely static screen). You'd think this game, based on an animated series, would have animated cutscenes. Maybe you'll like Macross VF-X. Despite its remarkable 50-foot-visibility pop-up problem, terrible control, and stomach-churning audio, there are fans out there so single-mindedly loyal to Macross that they'll automatically like this game regardless of its bastardized plot and myriad gameplay flaws. If you live and breathe Macross, then you'll want to at least see this game for yourself. But if you're a Macross purist like this particular reviewer, and you agree that few things can match the glory of the original, then you'll want to stay as far away from this title as you would a missile salvo.
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1181,Namco Museum Volume 4 ,4.5, Most are little known games that were little known for a reason.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/4/9/8/5/2224985-box_nmv4.png,PS,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/namco-museum-volume-4-review/1900-2548529/,neg,"
The Namco Museum series is just about out of steam. The first two volumes were spectacular; almost every game was worth owning. Volume 3 had about a 50 percent hit ratio. Volume 4 is just plain depressing. It contains five games, and most of them are little known games that were little known for a reason. As always, the emulations on these arcade games are perfect. They have every feature and dip switch setting that the original game had, plus a crazy 3-D museum section that shows off some of the promotional materials for the game. The five games on the pack are pretty rare ones; I hadn't even heard of three of them before I saw this collection. Pac-Land is the most recognizable title on the disc. It's a side-scrolling game that was loosely based (well, graphically speaking) on the Pac-Man cartoon. Pac's mission is to save a Fairy Princess and return her to Fairy Land. He does this by, well, running and jumping. The occasional power pellet allows him to eat ghosts, but it's usually just easier to avoid them. Assault is the gem of the package. You are placed at the Battlezone-style controls of a tank, and are forced to traverse countless levels, blasting away at enemy forces in the process. The tank can also roll over onto its side, which makes avoiding unfriendly fire a breeze. Ordyne is a shooter that plays like a mix of Parodius and Forgotten Worlds. There are shops along the way that allow for weapon upgrades, but these are limited in ammunition and don't last very long at all. The bosses in the game are pretty big, and all in all it's a decent game. The Return of Ishtar is just plain weird. It uses Robotron-style controls to maneuver two separate characters around a dungeon. It's a sequel the Tower of Druaga and incredibly boring. The Genji and the Heike Clans is a joke. Calling this an arcade classic is preposterous. You are cast in the role of a little samurai who runs around hacking stuff up. There is also a separate game mode where the characters are really huge, but they just look goofy. This one is a real loser, and it's probably the worst game on any of the Namco discs. If you're a completist, you'll want to get Namco 4 for your collection, but it'll probably start collecting dust about two days after purchase. If you want a good arcade compilation, check out the first two volumes of the Namco Museum collection. They're packed with arcade goodness.
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1182,Neo Geo Cup '98 Plus Color ,4.5," Soccer games have come a long way over the past 15 years, and its these advancements that make Neo Geo Cup '98 Plus Color seem silly by comparison.",https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/7/4/2/2219742-574764_96783_front.jpg,NGPC,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/neo-geo-cup-98-plus-color-review/1900-2545687/,neg,"
Neo Geo Cup '98 Plus Color is the portable system's soccer game. Like other soccer games, it contains exhibition games for both one and two players. While the gameplay may not stand out, the game's additional mode makes it at least interesting. That additional mode is the story mode. In story mode, you'll choose a team and take it through several tournaments. As you proceed, you'll earn money, which can be used to purchase power-ups and other items. Some items will prevent injuries and red cards, while others will pump up player stats. It goes a long way to making the game interesting, but in the end, the lackluster gameplay really sinks it. Soccer games have come a long way over the past 15 years, and its these advancements that make Neo Geo Cup '98 Plus Color seem silly by comparison. Fans of those old, simple soccer games may get a kick out of the story mode, but most of you would do well to just take a pass on this one.
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1183,Off Road Challenge ,4.5, Anyone who is interested in this game shouldn't be.,https://gamespot1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_tiny/mig/9/0/9/5/2209095-ofc.jpg,N64,https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/off-road-challenge-review/1900-2544938/,neg,"
Off Road Challenge is an N64 racer plagued with problems. The biggest overall flaw is that the game is a poor conversion of a poor arcade title. This is one game that shouldn't have come home. Off Road Challenge, for all intents and purposes, is Cruis'n USA with dirt tracks and off-road vehicles. It even inherited Cruis'n's sluggish control and frame rate. The game has inherited its name from the old three-player arcade game, Ironman Ivan Stweart's Off Road, and it's retained a few basic elements from the old game. Winning races earns you money so you can upgrade your vehicle in five categories: acceleration, shocks, nitro, top speed, and tires. You also find cash, nitros, and other goodies during the race. The most frustrating thing about Off Road Challenge is that you aren't allowed to actually go off the road. You're kept on the track by an invisible barrier. The only fun you'll have while racing is running into all of the wacky stuff that comes across your path like trains, planes, and UFOs.  The graphics in Off Road Challenge are by no means good. The weak frame rate accompanied by the really bad pop-up makes for one of the most visually impaired racing games on the N64. There are three different camera views to change from during the race. A chase view, a closer chase view, and an inside-the-cab view. The sound effects and music are pretty annoying. The sound of the tires sliding out is just bad, and the different music tracks are all kind of weak. All in all, Off Road Challenge is a flawed conversion of an arcade game that just isn't any fun at home. Anyone who is interested in this game shouldn't be.
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